An Interview With Kieran Powell
What ROI should you expect from this channel? No matter the business model or marketing strategy, we all expect fast growth and our efforts to have high ROI. That’s why we need to consider that ROI-positive channels should have higher priority when assigning marketing budgets. But don’t skip the point about scalability.
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 Ivan Burban.
Ivan Burban is a Head of Product Marketing at Coupler.io, a data analysis and reporting platform. He has over 12 years of experience in product marketing and management. Through these years, Ivan has been driven by the mission to help SaaS businesses grow fast and build the proper workflows impacting revenue increase. He firmly believes that marketing is the first driver in business, and he is always open to sharing his knowledge.
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?
My path started in 2008 when I enrolled in a programming course at the university. Almost instantly, I realized that information technologies are a big thing to me. I dove into that. A few years later, I applied for a second diploma in management and economics.
This opened a way for me to take the first steps in my career as a business development specialist in a digital agency and evolve further in project and product management. After two years in the business development position, I shifted to marketing and project management to focus on launching and promoting web apps and online businesses. Then, I started my own website building and SEO agency.
Since 2016, I’ve been serving as a head of marketing in various organizations. I had experience in MarTech SaaS, FinTech, healthcare, ecommerce, retail, and even AI when it wasn’t as powerful and accessible as now.
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 have one well-learned lesson. The lesson isn’t that funny, frankly, but extremely valuable. I started my own business based exclusively on my experience and expertise. I didn’t have proper financial planning, investments, business strategy, and even first clients. Nothing.
Like Jobs said, “it was awful tasting medicine, but the patient needed it.” This case taught me to be more meticulous and focused regarding any kind of launch — a new product, marketing activity, or market.
Since then, I’m sure that every inception must have a clear goal, deadlines, and high-level budgeting and planning. All the processes should lead you to the accomplishment of a goal. Otherwise, you’ll have just a path and failure of high probability.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
I’m leading the marketing team at Coupler.io, and this is a genuinely exciting project. Actually, Coupler.io is a full-scale product with a bunch of interesting projects within.
Coupler.io is a SaaS that turns complex data into simple reports. We help businesses and individuals break the barrier between them and data-driven decisions by showcasing that data is robust and insightful. We moved beyond a typical data integration solution with transformation functionality. Together with the team, we built a product that allows gathering data from over 50 apps, managing it without any coding, and importing it to spreadsheets, databases, or visualization services to create reports.
One of the thrilling projects I’m working on is the creation of a free and ready-to-use dashboard gallery. It includes dozens of dashboards for different needs, from web analytics to tracking revenue. We update the gallery constantly. Besides, we assist people in solving specific analytics challenges through educational content and consultancy services. We believe it inspires users to unleash the power of data analysis and implement any ideas together with us.
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?
We’re driven by several factors when allocating the budget for marketing campaigns. They have been helping us to grow substantially, like having almost a million users in three years. Our fundamental principle is understanding if our marketing activities will lead us closer to our North Star metric. Also, we prioritize campaigns using the RICE methodology and decision-making framework BRIDGeS created by Railsware. Based on these, we understand what channels or campaigns should have more focus and budget.
As an illustration, we agreed to acquire more marketing specialists as users and partners. At the same time, 80% of our users with high activation and retention rates were not marketers but from other fields. Despite this, we allocated around 80% of our marketing budget and efforts to acquire new user segments and expand to new markets. Meanwhile, 20% of our efforts were targeted at attracting those user segments, which we had already learned how to acquire.
On the one hand, such a decision may be irregular. But the results were positively unexpected. In six months, we increased user acquisition of new user segments by 50%. Also, marketing data sources like Facebook Ads or Google Analytics 4 became the most efficient both acquisition and retention-wise.
How do you balance investing in emerging marketing trends versus traditional, proven strategies in your budget decisions? Can you give us an example?
Our product is relatively young, so dynamic growth is critical for us. That’s why we constantly test new approaches and follow trends in marketing. For example, in our advertisement and content production, almost half of the resources are allocated to discovery campaigns and hypothesis testing to find a way for exponential growth. Another half of the budget goes to proven strategies like SEO, content marketing, etc.
With such a balance, I can safely state that our marketing is agile and innovative, focused on finding new ways of growing and scaling those proven strategies that show promising results.
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?
It’s a mission of our product: to give people easy access to data-driven decision-making. We follow this principle in the team as well. In real-time, we know how each marketing channel performs. Tracking and analyzing data shows us how our tests and assumptions influence metrics. So, a marketing budget allocation is a pretty straightforward task for me, since I always have fresh data and insights from each activity.
Here’s an example. We tested the acquisition of affiliates at offline events. In parallel, there were attempts to get more partners in two other channels. After two months of testing and evaluating the gathered data, it became clear that we needed to reallocate the budget from events to other channels with better results.
How do you evaluate the ROI of different marketing channels and decide where to invest more or cut back?
As I mentioned above, while our marketing efforts remain profitable, we focus foremost on achieving a key goal and, only after, on the ROI of channels.
I have a simple illustration of this. PPC definitely has to be ROI-positive, at least for 50%+ of profit. However, to scale this channel, we allocated almost half of the budget to discovery campaigns. This provides insights we can use for other channels and will help us better scale performance marketing campaigns. With such an approach, the ROI of a particular channel may decrease, remaining overall positive, but it impacts other channels and activities.
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?” Please share a story or an example for each.
Through the years, I came up with five questions I ask myself each time such a decision has to be made.
1 . Will this activity lead to your North Star goal? All marketing efforts have direct and indirect influence on businesses. When launching marketing activities, we have to understand what effects they cause and how they impact our primary goal. Let’s imagine, a company wants to get one million in revenue in a year. Having this North Star metric, the business will likely rely on campaigns that bring results and minimize resources for experiments. Respectively, the budget balance should go mainly between performing channels, where ROI and impact are predictable.
2 . Can you scale this activity with time? For any business, scaling is paramount. When investing in a particular marketing channel, it’s critical to understand if we can scale results twice or more times. For instance, a start-up can get its first clients from Product Hunt launch or LTD marketplaces. But can this start-up repeat and scale these activities? Most likely not. The same applies to digital marketing. Paid ads can have high ROI but may be limited since you have already covered your niche. So ask yourself, should you invest more in this strategy, and will it grow exponentially during the next period?
3 . What ROI should you expect from this channel? No matter the business model or marketing strategy, we all expect fast growth and our efforts to have high ROI. That’s why we need to consider that ROI-positive channels should have higher priority when assigning marketing budgets. But don’t skip the point about scalability.
4 . Why do other products and competitors invest in this activity? Insights from your market can be precious, even though sometimes it’s a bad idea to copy your competitor or mature product and wait for great outcomes. But you should track market triggers. For instance, other players actively invest in UGC or free micro-services launches. You realize that you don’t have enough resources to try that. In parallel, you should assess how competitors treat other channels where you can better understand unit economics and spending. By roughly estimating competitors’ spending, you can get a hint if a particular channel is promising.
5 . Do you have specialists who can use the allocated budget in the best way possible? Last but not least, you must realize if you have enough people and expertise to invest in a new channel. Let’s say, you want to assign a budget in SEO since many companies do it. Having a budget isn’t enough here. Other businesses succeed because they have been doing SEO for years and have a team of professionals. So, knowing your team’s expertise should help you estimate the results and properly allocate resources.
Could you discuss a challenging budget decision you faced, how you navigated it, and the impact it had on your overall marketing strategy?
The decision was to stop visiting offline events in favor of initiating digital PR and cold outreach. It led to a team increase and a higher team workload because these activities require more people as well as resources. It was a challenging move, but eventually, successful. We got more media appearances, a boost in brand awareness, collaboration opportunities, and the number of affiliates grew significantly.
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. 🙂
Ceasing all the wars and ongoing conflicts. Instead, focus on the development of international economics and borderless tourism as its part.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can find me on LinkedIn as well as follow Coupler.io’s social media.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Thanks for having me! My pleasure.
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: Ivan Burban Of Coupler.io 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.