An Interview With Kieran Powell
Make your Facebook ads stories about people. People go to Facebook to read stories about people. Make the ads match the purpose of people’s engagement on the platform. When we do this, we get very low CPAs with highly qualified leads.
In an age where marketing landscapes are rapidly evolving and consumer behaviors are constantly shifting, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) play a pivotal role in steering their organizations’ marketing strategies towards success. With a plethora of channels, platforms, and techniques at their disposal, the decision on where to allocate the marketing budget is more critical than ever. We’re seeking to explore questions like: What factors influence their decisions? How do they balance between digital and traditional marketing channels? What role does data play in their decision-making process? And importantly, why they choose to invest in certain areas over others? As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Craig Andrews.
Craig Andrews is a U.S. Marine, turned electrical engineer and mobile phone designer, turned marketer and multi best-selling author. He’s driven over a half-billion dollars in revenue during his career. In 2009, Craig launched his own company which became allies4me.
In August 2021, Craig stayed three months in the hospital and six weeks in a coma when he nearly died. During that time, Craig’s team ran allies4me without him. Now Craig shares lessons from the ledge of death and how they apply to both marketing and life.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I knew I wanted to create things, and I thought that’s what engineers did. So, I got an undergraduate and graduate degree in electrical engineering. My first job was a dream job as a design engineer in the early days of mobile phones. Even though I performed well and got promoted, I was miserable. It turns out that engineering is not a field that rewards creativity.
That’s when I moved to marketing. For a decade I marketed semiconductors for mobile phones and loved it. As the margins collapsed, so did the perks. When they asked me to start flying to Asia in coach, I launched out on my own.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
It’s not necessarily funny, but a few times I tried to fix a pain the customer wasn’t feeling. The first time was when I spearheaded an effort to use a lower-cost packaging for a mobile phone chip that also gave them better performance. It turned out that I was more focused on my pains — cost — than the customer’s pain — ease of use — and it was a disaster. The biggest lesson is to leave your pains or what you hope your customer’s pains are out of the decision process. Focus exclusively on the pains the customer is acutely aware of.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
We’ve developed a process for high-ticket, high-trust service providers. We talk about it in my book, Make Sales Magical. It’s a process that builds an irresistible First-Time Offer that leads to the high-ticket core offer. It’s like a coffee date that removes risk and rapidly builds trust that leads the customer to ask you to close them. When it’s done properly, the sales become magical. More importantly, you can put almost anyone in the sales seat and turn them into a master closer with this process.
Thank you for that. Let’s now shift to the central focus of our discussion. Can you share an experience where a unique or unconventional budget allocation led to unexpected success in your marketing campaign?
The one that surprises most people is the amount of value that gets packed into an irresistible First-Time Offer. Usually someone starts objecting by how much we’re giving away for such little money. What they miss is that we’re just pulling money from the customer lifetime value and spending it on customer acquisition. The surprising part comes from the fact that we can almost always raise the price of the core offer by doing this. So, that paves the path for a hidden bonus.
How do you balance investing in emerging marketing trends versus traditional, proven strategies in your budget decisions? Can you give us an example?
I believe it’s important to devote at least 10% of the advertising budget to new and risky things. Consider this your crazy budget to test crazy ideas. Some crazy ideas pay off. Most do not. But the only way to continually improve is to continually test new ideas.
One example is running B2B ads on Facebook. I had always been skeptical about running B2B ads on Facebook. The idea was that people looking at puppies and kittens didn’t want their scroll interrupted by my B2B ad. Someone showed me a framework to write longform ads that tell stories about people and to run those on Facebook. As a result, we’ve gotten high-level B2B decision maker leads on Facebook for $20 per lead.
In what ways has data-driven decision-making influenced your approach to allocating marketing budgets, and can you provide an example of this in action?
There should be a split between branding ads and conversion ads. Most of the time, we’re working with companies who are not mass-market. So, instead of spending money on mass media, we achieve the branding through retargeting ads. Many times, the retargeting ads don’t look like they’re delivering a positive ROI. But when we’ve removed those in the past, we’ve seen the CPAs increase in the direct response ads.
How do you evaluate the ROI of different marketing channels and decide where to invest more or cut back?
This can be a trap. We look at all marketing channels as a system. Then if we do an experiment in one channel, we look at how it impacts the system of channels as opposed to that channel in isolation. Prior to Google Analytics 4, it was easy to demonstrate the multi-touch environment in the ad performance. At least 20% of the conversions came through a conversion path that touched two or more channels prior to conversion. The risk is when you look at channel-by-channel in isolation, you could remove a critical part of the system of channels and negatively impact your overall ad performance.
Based on your experience and success, what are the “5 Things To Keep in Mind When Deciding Where to Assign Your Marketing Budget, and Why?”
1. If you’re not running branding ads, you should start running branding ads. Direct response ads feel good because of their immediate response. But that doesn’t create sustained scalable growth. Direct response ads are transactional. Branding ads are relational. Build stronger bonds of relationship that work continually.
2. If all of your ads are direct response ads, don’t do a hard switch to branding ads. We’ve seen when you do this, revenue drops immediately, and it takes a while for the branding ads to take effect. Do a gradual phasing down of direct response while your branding efforts take hold.
3. Make your Facebook ads stories about people. People go to Facebook to read stories about people. Make the ads match the purpose of people’s engagement on the platform. When we do this, we get very low CPAs with highly qualified leads.
4. People go to LinkedIn for one of four main reasons. They go there to find their next employee, their next job, their next customer, or to network. Align your LinkedIn ads with one of these four purposes. I remember a time years ago where I ran some automation on LinkedIn that looked at multiple profiles. It generated some connection requests and conversations. My mentor asked me if I was the hunter or if I was the hunted. It turned out that I was the hunted (people who were looking for their next customer.)
5. Unless what you’re selling is both illegal and addictive, nobody wants to be in your sales funnel. For high-ticket service businesses, you want to keep this in mind. People aren’t waiting for an ad so you can collect their contact details. Your lead-gen ads must promise to remove pain.
Could you discuss a challenging budget decision you faced, how you navigated it, and the impact it had on your overall marketing strategy?
It’s a common challenge on how to scale up budgets. Some people sprinkle budget across multiple challenges. While I understand the desire to do that, I think you should concentrate enough budget into every area of investment to execute well on that instead of sprinkling it around. As revenue grows, then you can pursue other advertising investments.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I believe high-ticket sales are broken and it’s my mission to fix it. Most high-ticket sales are almost like walking up to a complete stranger in a bar and asking them to marry you. I believe there should be a “coffee date.” For us, that takes the form of irresistible First-Time Offers. I cover that in my book, Make Sales Magical.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Please follow me on LinkedIn or connect on the allies4me website.
Website: https://allies4me.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craig-andrews/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CraigAndrewsMarketing
Twitter: https://twitter.com/allies4me
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
About The Interviewer: Kieran Powell is the EVP of Channel V Media a New York City Public Relations agency with a global network of agency partners in over 30 countries. Kieran has advised more than 150 companies in the Technology, B2B, Retail and Financial sectors. Prior to taking over business operations at Channel V Media, Kieran held roles at Merrill Lynch, PwC and Ernst & Young. Get in touch with Kieran to discuss how marketing and public relations can be leveraged to achieve concrete business goals.
CMO Perspectives: Craig Andrews Of allies4me On Where to Assign Your Marketing Budget and Why was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.