An Interview With Kieran Powell
Why it matters: Many marketing strategies focus heavily on the first touchpoint. But not all prospects are ready to buy the moment they discover your brand. Allocating a budget to nurture these leads through retargeting ads to website visitors keeps you top-of-mind and moves prospects closer to conversion over time.
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 Furkat Kasimov.
Furkat Kasimov is an entrepreneur and digital marketing pioneer who scaled LeadsMarket.com to nearly $100 million in annual revenue without outside investment. A respected industry speaker and angel investor in notable companies, Kasimov is known for his innovative approach to global marketing and his expertise in leveraging AI and machine learning to transform digital marketing operations.
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 was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and after fast-tracking through school, I moved to the United States, to attend college.
My journey into digital marketing began in 2000 when I was just 14 years old. Living with a homestay family, I had the unique opportunity to learn website development and search engine optimization from my homestay father, a UCLA professor by day and freelance digital marketer by night.
To further refine my skills, I took a web development course at Los Angeles City College, where I mastered the science and art of creating exceptional digital user experiences.
By 2004, I had started earning money as an affiliate marketer, ranking websites and generating leads.
After graduating, I joined InsuranceLeads.com, where I worked my way up to Vice President of Digital Marketing. In this role, I successfully competed with industry giants like Geico and Progressive.
My websites achieved top Google rankings for highly competitive keywords like “auto insurance” and “home insurance.”
When the company was sold in 2011, I co-founded LeadsMarket.com, marking the beginning of an exciting new chapter in my entrepreneurial journey.
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?
I once organized a party for trade show attendees. I model it after a 1973 Bond masterpiece Live or Let Die. Picture this: a secret soiree in New Orleans, on the second floor of a Bourbon Street hideaway, complete with a balcony overlooking the scene below. Invitations? Custom tarot cards, of course.
I hired an actress to become Solitaire from the film, trained in the mystic art of tarot reading. She read fortunes of guests, draped in a wardrobe that would have made the film’s costume designer proud.
We posted a polite schoolteacher-turned-security-guard at the door, politely declining entry to any competitor who dared approach. One did, and oh, how persistent he was. We initially thought it was funny but realized the mistake and because we are a gracious host decided the game was more intriguing if we let him join. After all, what’s a bit of harmless espionage among rivals?
In the end, everyone, the bold, the curious, even the once-excluded savored the night’s revelry under the Louisiana moon. When you know how to host a party inspired by a legend, you don’t just entertain, you immortalize. Stay interesting, my friends.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
Right now, I’m focusing on developing AI-driven agents specifically designed for marketing activities. By automating some time-consuming but critical elements of marketing, businesses can free up their teams to work on more strategic and creative projects, ultimately increasing efficiency and effectiveness.
Additionally, these AI agents can help smaller companies or individual entrepreneurs level the playing field by giving them access to sophisticated marketing insights and strategies that might previously have required large teams or substantial budgets. In the long run, I hope this technology will empower marketers and business owners alike to reach the right audiences more easily, improve customer experiences through tailored messaging, and enable better decision-making based on data-driven insights.
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?
A few years back, I was managing a paid search campaign that was rolling along steadily, but predictably. It was all about cranking up traffic, driving as many clicks as possible on a shoe-string budget. Sure, the numbers looked fine on the surface, visitors poured in, but underneath that traffic swell, something was off.
The leads were trickling in at a disappointing pace, and the return on our investment felt shaky at best. So I made a risky move that raised more than a few eyebrows: I pulled the plug on the status quo and funneled a full 20% of our precious budget away from raw clicks and into a conversion-centric overhaul. This meant slashing the funds that bought easy wins at the top of the funnel. It was a gamble. Without all those quick hits of traffic, would we plummet into obscurity?
What happened next felt like a bolt of electricity. In just about two months, despite fewer visitors crossing our threshold, I saw a surge in real, qualified leads. Turning my attention to refining landing pages, tightening up call-to-action messaging, and trimming every ounce of friction from the user journey paid off. Suddenly, people weren’t just stopping by, they were committing, engaging, and converting into customers.
How do you balance investing in emerging marketing trends versus traditional, proven strategies in your budget decisions? Can you give us an example?
When it comes to balancing the allure of emerging marketing channels with the reliability of tried-and-true tactics, I approach it as a series of controlled experiments rather than all-or-nothing bets. For example, if I’m intrigued by a new social platform that just hit the scene, I don’t immediately commit thousands of dollars and countless hours. Instead, I might carve out a modest sum, say $500 for a focused, short-term test run. This could involve a handful of well-targeted ads, a small influencer partnership, or a series of limited-time promotions aimed at a niche audience segment.
I closely track the results throughout this initial phase, looking not just for raw engagement numbers, but for signals of real, meaningful impact like conversions. If the initial metrics are promising and I see genuine potential that aligns with broader strategic goals, I double down and gradually increase the budget.
By contrast, if after a few weeks I’m not seeing tangible returns on that initial $500 investment, I’m more than willing to redirect those funds into our proven, bread-and-butter strategies I know drive consistent results, like well-established PPC campaigns or high-performing email funnels.
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?
I view marketing budget allocation much like a quantitative trader views a portfolio of financial instruments. In quant trading, practitioners rely on sophisticated statistical models and algorithmic strategies to sift through oceans of market data, stripping away noise to isolate genuine signals that can produce alpha.
This same philosophy applies to marketing. Rather than relying solely on intuition or broad historical averages, I now treat each marketing channel, whether it’s paid search, social ads, email campaigns, or influencer partnerships as an asset in a diversified portfolio. Just as quants run backtests to verify if a trading strategy can outperform a benchmark, I run controlled experiments to validate whether a new marketing tactic can outperform existing channels in driving measurable outcomes, like qualified leads or incremental revenue.
Time series analysis comes into play when I look at performance metrics over weeks and months. For example, I might examine the trajectory of cost per lead (CPL) or customer lifetime value (LTV) across seasons, campaigns, and audience segments. This helps me understand not only what’s working now but also anticipate how performance might evolve, much like how quant models project asset price movements over time. When we detect a reliable, positive “signal”, a correlation between a particular messaging strategy and sustained lift in conversions, I treat it as the marketing equivalent of a profitable trading signal. Such signals inform a reallocation of budget towards that channel or campaign, effectively increasing my “position” in the strategy that’s showing alpha.
I will give you an example: instead of continuously flooding a single high-traffic ad channel with funds, I began analyzing the data at a granular level. I noticed a pattern: certain audience segments responded better to very specific messaging at predictable times of the week.
By zeroing in on this pattern, I reduced spend during underperforming periods and boosted it strategically when engagement peaked. In doing so, I filtered the true signals from the noise, improving conversion rates and ROI. Just as a quant trader might adjust their exposure to a stock when the predictive model identifies profitable windows, I dynamically rebalanced marketing budget on proven data-driven insight.
In the end, data-driven decision-making has allowed me to abandon a one-size-fits-all budget approach, replacing gut feelings with quantifiable evidence, and finding alpha in marketing efforts much in the same way a quant seeks alpha in the markets.
How do you evaluate the ROI of different marketing channels and decide where to invest more or cut back?
It is important to understand where marketing ends and sales start. You can run a great marketing campaign and deliver high quality leads but if the sales team can’t convert these leads because the product is not priced correctly or there is no product market fit it is not the fault of marketing. I measure what marketing can control. This is why messing ROI is not always the next KPI for marketing.
I look at metrics like conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, and lifetime value by channel. If a particular channel consistently underperforms even after I have tried optimizing messaging and targeting, it’s a candidate for reallocation. On the flip side, when a channel shows strong returns and aligns with long-term brand goals, I will double-down.
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. Market Research:
Why it matters: Understanding the nuances of your audience, their preferences, and their pain points ensures that your budget is going toward tactics and platforms that genuinely resonate with potential customers. Without solid research, it’s easy to waste money on channels that might have broad reach but fail to connect with the right people.
Example: A few years ago, I worked generating leads for senior care facilities. Initially, they planned to target potential residents directly. However, after conducting in-depth market research, I discovered that the target audience is their kids or grandchildren who are helping them with this research. By shifting focus on social media platforms that attract younger demographics I generated qualified leads and established brand credibility in a community that truly mattered.
2. User Experience (UX):
Why it matters: Even the most perfectly targeted ad campaign will fail to convert if the user’s experience after clicking through is lackluster. Investing in UX, clear navigation, responsive design, and compelling content ensures that your budget doesn’t just attract visitors, but guides them smoothly toward meaningful engagement, such as signing up or making a purchase.
Example: I once allocated a portion of a marketing budget to overhaul a high-traffic landing page that consistently drew people in but had an abysmal conversion rate. By investing in better site architecture, faster load times, and more intuitive calls-to-action, I didn’t just improve user experience, I nearly doubled the conversion rate over the following quarter. This UX-focused allocation transformed a page that was leaking potential customers into a steady contributor of qualified leads.
3. Follow-Up Marketing:
Why it matters: Many marketing strategies focus heavily on the first touchpoint. But not all prospects are ready to buy the moment they discover your brand. Allocating a budget to nurture these leads through retargeting ads to website visitors keeps you top-of-mind and moves prospects closer to conversion over time.
Example: I worked with a B2B company that initially sank almost all their budget into lead generation ads. They attracted a ton of initial interest but struggled to convert these leads into actual customers. By taking just 5% of that budget and putting it into retargeting ads for educational content they saw a significant uptick in conversions. Prospects who might have slipped away were gently guided toward a decision, and overall ROI surged in the long term.
4. Remarketing:
Why it matters: It is often cheaper to sell again to past customers than to find new ones. Remarketing allows you to stay in front of warm prospects who have already shown interest, ensuring you remain part of their consideration set. It’s often more cost-effective than constantly seeking fresh leads from scratch.
Example: In an e-commerce campaign, I noticed a pattern: people who purchased in the past frequently browsed the online store but left without buying. By allocating a portion of the budget to dynamic remarketing ads and email marketing campaigns, we showcased the very products they’d viewed earlier. Within a month, we saw a noticeable lift in return visits and subsequent purchases. Those remarketing dollars worked harder by capitalizing on users’ previous interactions, ultimately increasing both conversion rates and overall sales.
5. Eliminate Underperforming Keywords and Placements:
Why it matters: Not every channel, keyword, or placement delivers results. By continuously analyzing campaign data, you can prune out what doesn’t work, cutting unnecessary costs and keeping your spend focused on strategies that drive measurable returns.
Example: In a paid search campaign, I noticed certain keywords consumed a large portion of the budget without generating qualified leads. By monitoring performance closely and removing those underperformers, I freed up funds to invest in top-converting keywords and placements. The result was a leaner, more efficient spend profile, with a higher overall ROI and fewer wasted clicks.
In essence, these five principles shift your marketing from scattershot spending to strategic investment. With informed targeting, user-friendly experiences, nurturing follow-ups, timely remarketing, ongoing optimization, and ruthlessly trimming dead weight, every dollar in your budget works harder. This approach creates a cycle of continuous improvement fueling growth, increasing ROI, and ensuring that your marketing dollars deliver maximum impact.
Could you discuss a challenging budget decision you faced, how you navigated it, and the impact it had on your overall marketing strategy?
Recently I had to choose between sustaining existing paid search campaigns or reallocating some of that budget to a new content marketing initiative. Paid search had historically driven predictable leads, but the cost per acquisition was inching upward. The new content strategy was untested but promised to reduce our dependency on paid search ads over time by building organic traffic. After careful analysis, we decided to split the difference, cutting back slightly on paid search and channeling that freed-up budget into content. Within six months, our content started attracting high-intent organic traffic, reducing our total customer acquisition cost and giving us a more sustainable growth engine. That decision taught us the value of balancing short-term results with long-term 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. 🙂
If service providers get paid for results instead of service, a lot of waste will be eliminated.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I believe in making the spotlight shine on my clients rather than on myself. Much of my work takes place behind the scenes: helping brands refine their messaging, streamline their marketing strategies, and connect more meaningfully with their audiences. Because of this, you won’t often see my name listed on my work.
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: Furkat Kasimov 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.