Brendan Bannister, the CEO of Naturalabs.io, is one smart marketer. 

We first met in 2018 when he was the CMO and Creative Director at William Painter. After taking my YouTube/Google course, he scaled ad spend on YouTube from $2k per day to $100k per day! 

We decided to start meeting and swapping ideas, war stories, and things we were testing. We soon realized the value of sharing this knowledge with others and decided to record a session and bring it to the world! 

In this episode, we dive into CRO, creatives, data-driven marketing, R&D for marketing departments, and the golden years for YouTube and Facebook Ads and how they achieved 13x growth for William Painter. 

Here are some highlights: 

• How the famous da Vinci quote, “Simplicity is Ultimate Sophistication” should be a guiding principle for marketers.
• Is media buying dead? If so, what is taking its place?
• How good brands are sort of like algorithms.
• “Design is hack” and what that means for your marketing efforts.
• The role “brand” plays in your ability to scale.
• Why Brendan is now living and working full-time in Dubai.
• Plus more!
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Mentioned In This Episode:

• Brendan Bannister (LinkedIn)
• Naturalabs (LinkedIn)
• Naturalabs (Twitter)
• William Painter
• Use Motion
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)

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Transcript:
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Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today I am delighted because I get to share with you a longtime friend, a guy that I like to talk shop with, a guy that I nerd out with, and we talk about all kinds of marketing topics together, and it's about time we shared that with the world. And so that's what we're doing today. But my guest is Brendan Bannister. We first met when he was the CMO and Creative director of William Painter, where he oversaw 13 x growth, 1500% growth on website visitors and lots of other cool stuff. So we'll unpack that, talk about that. Lots of lessons there. He is now the CEO and founder of Naura Labs, so we'll talk more about that and what they've got going on. They're pretty exciting stuff. And hey, we're going to talk growth. We're going to talk top funnel growth. We're going to talk about creative data driven marketing, and we're going to talk about CRO and other fun stuff as well. So with that, Brendan, how you doing man? Welcome to the show and thanks for coming on.

Brendan:

I'm doing good, man. It's been a long time coming and I'm excited. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Brett:

It has been a long time coming. And what I want to do first, so lot to unpack, talk about William Painter's success, the YouTube of Facebook success, all that was awesome. There we're talk about CRO and some of the data driven stuff you're doing now, but for those watching the video, they're probably looking and saying, dang, Brennan has got an amazing background. So it's a cityscape. You got these big windows behind you you got the microphone, everything looks good. You tell you're a photographer because you've like, you've positioned everything perfectly, but where are you in the world?

Brendan:

I'm in Dubai and well, it's not flashing anymore, but it wor was flashing or it is flashy now. It's the Burge Khalifa out there

Brett:

And that is that the tallest building in the world or second or something.

Brendan:

It's the tallest building in the world for now.

Brett:

Gotcha. Yeah, so Dubai, that is a place I've never visited heard lots of good things. My buddy Nick Shackleford has done some events there. I almost went, but halfway around the world, you are a California guy. And so when you and I met and hung out, it was in San Diego with the William Painter crew. But why, why'd Dubai? Why did you end up landing?

Brendan:

That's an interesting question. That doesn't necessarily have an easy answer, but long story short, my business partner partner and one of my best friends was already living out here. He relocated out here for another e-commerce brand that he was working with. And sometimes life just calls you in a direction and it called me out here and I came out here and it's been mind blowing, to say the least, probably I think the center of innovation in the world right now. And it's a great place to be for marketing life and just to be around the future of everything, in my opinion.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really, really interesting. I've heard stories and talked to a couple other buddies that were there for an event and they were FaceTiming me and showing me the hotel in the surrounding areas. It's a beautiful city. It seems to be a very clean city and just lots of really successful people from all over the world are hanging in Dubai. Right,

Brendan:

Yo, absolutely. It's the cleanest city I've ever been to. There's no trash at all. So that's really nice. And the level of success here

Brett:

Is that's basically downtown San Diego, downtown la No trash.

Brendan:

Yeah, it's pretty much the same.

Brett:

I love San Diego, but I was singing in Airbnb, speaking at an event, and I walked down this road, it was by Petco Park and lots of, it's beautiful, but I walked down the street and I was like, it smells like urine and pot and there's a lot of trash here. So it's like, it's part partially beautiful and partially just like, come on man, somebody's got to clean this place up. Anyway, so none of that.

Brendan:

That's a whole nother story. That's a whole nother podcast.

Brett:

Yeah, it's another podcast for sure. For sure. So that's awesome, man. Well really excited to dive in, love what you guys are doing now with Naura Labs, and we're going to talk about CRO and data driven marketing and some of that fun stuff. But I want to unpack the success that you had at William Painter first because such an awesome story, such a great product. Love the guys at William Painter. And so you were there, were the cmo, the creative director when William Payner really blew up. And also quick shout out to Raindrop and our boy Jacques Spitzer and the crew, they played an instrumental role in some of the creatives there, but really, you guys exploded. So kind of walk us through, what's that story, how did that unfold? Give us a few of the highlights and then we'll dive into some lessons there.

Brendan:

Yeah, we'll cut it down because I guess that was back in the glory days of YouTube. Some might say The Glory

Brett:

Days of

Brendan:

It. Yeah, hero. The Hero Video days. But yeah, long story short that was back in the day when Dollar Shave Club and Dr. Qua was kind of pioneering the YouTube hero video scene. And these agencies were just starting to pop up around. And we got connected with Raindrop Agency down in San Diego and produced that first hero video. And after quite a long time of studying YouTube, watching some of the courses that you taught, you put it on YouTube and it just popped. It just worked. And it scaled aggressively very fast, almost uncontrollably to amount to a period where it was pretty scary to see the level of scale that you would unlock in a matter of one to two weeks. I'm talking campaigns going from 2000 a day to upwards of a hundred thousand dollars a day in a week.

Brett:

That's pretty interesting. Those were the glory days, for sure. Yeah,

Brendan:

It kind of paved the way to, okay, this is working. Let's produce more hero videos. And we ended up producing several full top of Funnel Hero videos along with multiple Thanksgiving sales, black Friday sales, Christmas sales, and so on and so forth.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. And a lot of the world has changed. Cause that was, remind me, what was that, 2019?

Brendan:

Yeah, 2019 when we did the first one. And I think we made Selma 2019 and 2020 as well.

Brett:

Yeah. So a lot of change in the world, obviously, right? Pandemic, yeah, supply chain issues, inflation, all kinds of stuff, just kind of thrown a wrench in everything. So it's a different world and increased competition. And I was 14 and all that, but a, some of the same principles still apply, right? Yeah. Is it absolutely as easy to scale today as it was then? Probably not, but it's still doable with the right scenarios. But let's talk about what was your role in that process? So 13 X growth, 1500% of growth and online shoppers, just amazing growth. What was your role and what part did you play in that?

Brendan:

Yeah I'm sure a lot of people know that have, not massive e-commerce brands, but smaller teams. Everyone wears a lot of hats and plays a lot of role. Yeah. But

Brett:

I was, you got to do whatever's necessary,

Brendan:

Right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I was pretty involved on the creative direction side of things. I did a lot big collaborative process on writing the scripts. James Schrader and I, who was in the videos for William Painter and also Dr. We worked really closely in writing those scripts and then coming up with stories to be funny, different types of backgrounds and opening scenes, hooks. The hook is the biggest one. Breaking sunglasses, jumping through banners and things like that just to grab attention. And then also really trying to learn how to add in direct response marketing. So presenting a problem and then giving the solution and walking the viewer through it in a creative, funny, non-invasive way. And then I was running the Google ad, so I was behind the scenes putting the audiences, running all the YouTube campaigns, doing search and shopping and all that good stuff.

Brett:

Yeah, that's awesome. And that's a really unique skillset, by the way. And I'm sure people that are listening those that have been in the game for a while or tried to hire someone to run marketing or run marketing themselves, they know it's pretty rare to find someone that has both the creative skillset. You can really dive in and help write scripts and help come up with concepts and guide things and direct things. And to be the one in the background, building campaigns, setting bids, setting that account structure, and really managing the media portion and that strategy portion. So how did you balance both? It's super interesting.

Brendan:

I just love it. I love solving problems, and it's a different type of creativity. So being a photographer for the last decade or so, and then coming to the creative direction side of things, art direction, things like that. But then also creatively solving problems to be funny or to direct the actors on screen or to come up with unique ways to market towards people. One of the really cool things that we did is we built a whole full-fledged funnel using these YouTube videos. So we would remarket product page viewers with content that we created specifically for people that were on the product page, viewers. So for example, one of the scripts would start off, they'd already come to our website, looked at a product, and then we'd retarget them and the video would say, Hey, we noticed we were checking out our sunglasses. You look really good in them. You should go back and check 'em out. And I think that was a pretty unique type of remarketing where we're literally talking to the customer and it converted incredibly well. And that was fun because creativity mixed with marketing, mixed with psychology, mixed with just being fun, <laugh>,

Brett:

Dude. It's what I love about the game and it's what I've always loved about marketing, because there's some art and creativity and science and psychology, and why do people respond the way they respond? And you get to plan in all of that and craft a strategy, a playbook to navigate and say, Hey, how can we scale this brand? And how can we attract the right people and take them from interest to engagement to, Hey, I'm willing to shell out 150 bucks for a pair of sunglasses, all sight unseen, all just with online marketing and a great web experience. So yeah, exactly.

Brendan:

You've talked a little bit about demand generation versus demand creation. So that's also a really fun thing where you realize that there's a problem that maybe the organization, the brand you're working with doesn't have demand to capture, but it has to generate it and then capture it. So you have to create desire and then get them to purchase it, which is just another complex problem you have to solve creatively as well.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. And I've kind of played on both sides cause I've always loved Google search and shopping, and that's query based traffic. That's someone searching for a specific solution or a specific product. And so that's more demand capture. That's where you're saying, Hey, I'm looking for this kind of car accessory, or I'm looking for this type of sunglasses to, you're capturing that demand. But in the case of something like William Painter, it's titanium sunglasses. They're basically indestructible. The original one has the hook on it, the little thing that's like a bottle opener that allows you to pop bottles and look like a model. I still remember the majority of your script, by the way. And so no one's searching for that. I want titanium sunglasses that I can open a can of beer with or a bottle of beer. I didn't know that existed because I haven't seen it yet.

So you've got to show that to me and generate that demand and then yes, I'm interested. And so see, the blending of those two is really fun. And I think you can, what I love about the Google adss ecosystem is you can find both right there. There's going to be some opportunities even before you go hard on YouTube, there's going to be some demand capture opportunities. But then absolutely, if you can go big on YouTube and tell the story and say, Hey, this is why you need titanium. Tim Ferris likes it, all these other people like it, you can step on. It's not going to break. And you can wow your friends by opening.

Brendan:

And then the demand capture

Brett:

Gets a lot more, it actually scales that demand and now you're in the money. What's that?

Brendan:

I said the demand capture gets a lot more fun once you do that on YouTube because then you scale.

Brett:

Yes, yes, you're, you're seeding that audience and getting them interested. And then you can close the deal through your demand capture campaigns. And I also love that this idea, cause we see this a lot, and this is something I talk about with prospects and what I'm speaking on stage is, hey, remarketing something we all do. Most people are bad at it, we're lazy at it. We create a one marketing remarketing campaign. We're running all the same creatives that we run in our other campaigns. That's better than nothing. But what if we segmented that a little bit and said, Hey, you've been to a product detail page, you just haven't pulled the trigger yet. So let's talk to you. You've been there, you checked out the product, you maybe didn't like it. And if you can add some humor and some fun elements, all the better. So we actually met, tell the story of how we met, I believe. I can't remember who reached out, but you guys had actually taken my YouTube and Google ads course that I did with Smart Marketer, the original one. The original one. How did we meet after that? I don't even remember now.

Brendan:

I think it was at one of the Blue Ribbon events, to be honest, it must've been one of the first ones. It might've been in Seattle. I think that might've been the first one I went to was in Seattle, but I can't remember.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. So we connected and kind of sparked a friendship where you guys took the course and ran with it and you added to it and your brilliance came out in that. And then we've just stayed in touch ever since, swapping ideas and taught and shop. Yeah. So pretty cool. Pretty cool. Awesome. Well, what are some of the takeaways from the William Painter days that you would say still apply today? Right? So if we're looking at and I like the delineation or the comparison you made there of demand generation versus demand capture. So what are some of the demand generation lessons that you learned through William Painter that still applies it? I know there are probably a few technical nuances that are different in a post iOS 14.5 world, but what are some of the lessons that still apply?

Brendan:

Yeah, that's a really good question actually. I think I'm a big person on branding. One of my biggest things is as being an artist creator is, I think, or actually one of my favorite quotes ever is design as hack. And I think that's true. And I think design goes into a magnitude of things. It's not just the product, it's not just the website, it's not just the creative, but it's all of them into one. And I call it the visual spectrum. And that is every visual touchpoint of your brand from the way you message people on a social media or on your text message to your email, to the colors you choose, to the fonts, to the type of creative, the iPhone creative, the professional creative, all of that creative comes into brand. And I think that is a very, very, very important part because when you're trying to create demand, you have to present yourself as bigger than life and bigger than you actually are.

That way people trust you, especially in this day and age when you're scrolling an Instagram or on YouTube and there's hundreds and hundreds of companies and brands and products being shoved down your throat. You have to stand out above the rest and people have to trust you. And if you have that niche for design and you have attention to detail and make the creative stand out, whether it's high quality or funny or attention grabbing, and the whole experience from point A to point Z is a smooth, cohesive brand experience, the demand capture and demand demand generation just becomes a lot easier because people trust you and they trust your brand.

Brett:

I love that so much. And I want to unpack that just a little bit, but explain that quote just a little bit to me. So design is hack, what does that mean?

Brendan:

So just as it sounds like if you're able to design something to a level that connects with people on a subconscious level, it makes everything easier. If I'm going to sell you a pen and the pen looks clunky or it's an odd color, I don't want that pen, but I want to sleek black pen, that feels good. And it might be the same components might cost the same to produce it, but if it's sleek and it looks good to the eye, it's way easier to sell. And I think just designing something and having the attention to the detail is that hack that makes everything easier.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. And to give a couple of examples, obviously we could look at the examples that are always given. Nike can charge. Now I, I've just bought my, oddly enough, I just bought my first pair of Jordan's. I've always been a Michael Jordan fan. I just bought my first pair. But you can find some of the retro Jordan's for three to $500. You can pay $2,500 for some of these shoes online. So what's the, between that and a $30 pair of shoes you buy at Walmart? Well, it's brand and the materials are better and stuff too, but are they a thousand times better? I don't know. I'm sure not. And so that's all brand, but one example, and I think this ties into both branding and design of the product. I've kind of gotten into tea a little bit lately, still drink more coffee. So I've not abandoned coffee in my Americanos. And I've done a few pour overs, although I just haven't fully mastered that art. But I've got a fellow kettle, and this is a really sleek, elegant, long neck kettle. It's seen, sits on, it's beautiful, beautifully designed, nice wood handle. It's ergonomically correct and it looks amazing sitting on the counter. It's got, do you know fellow, have you seen this?

Brendan:

Oh yeah, I've seen their ads. I've in

Brett:

Their funnel,

Brendan:

Got

Brett:

Deep in their funnel. It's a display where you can choose the exact temperature you want to eat your water up to. So if you want green tea, you can go in the one 70 s. If you're looking at coffee, you can go 2 0 5, 2 0 10, whatever, 2 0 10, 2 10 2000 degrees. So you can heat it to whatever you want. And it's like three or four x the cost of a, I could get just a simple electric kettle for 20 bucks on Amazon or 30 bucks or whatever this is, 300 or 200. And so what is that? It's design, right? It's design, it's branding. It is, yes, functionally great too, but it looks great on the shelf. And so that product design, that design element of your ads that builds the brand, the brand is, can't overstate it, right? And we do a lot on Amazon, how brands grow on Amazon and brand is what can allow you to charge a premium on Amazon and protect your margins on Amazon where there's a lot of pressure to erode those margins. So love that. So design is hacked. So awesome lesson, awesome takeaway. Any other takeaways from the William Painter days that would still apply today?

Brendan:

I would believe that the majority of brands are very similar in nature. The systems of the internal brand is the same. The way the emails operate, the way the text message operate, the way Shopify, Google, Facebook, omnichannel, I think the internal systems are all 95% the same. And it's that 10 is the 10, five or 10% of how you brand it really and connect those pieces together that the entire ecosystem works. And I've found that over the years, consulting for various different brands and seeing under the hoods of very different brands of their entire layout, all the ads, the Shopify, the creative and all that stuff, you really see a lot of the similarities. And you're like, okay, well if all e-commerce is relatively simmer, then we can build a system of equations that allows us to plug and play into different organizations. And that's kind of what we know we'll lead into later. But it's really interesting to see that the channels talk to each other in the same way. And in essence, I believe that <laugh> in a nutshell, an e-commerce brand is basically just an algorithm and it's a plug from, it starts at the ad level, goes up through the website and all the way to the purchase. And as long as you can make it all connect, it works. And it kind of, yeah, it's very applicable across many different brands for a DTC at

Brett:

Least. Yeah, I love that. And one thought that just sparked is that this idea that, hey, everything has changed, but everything is still the same. And I think this applies to maybe whoa, deep philosophical, whatever, but if you look at platform, let's just say Google as an example, mission, Google's mission is still to answer people's questions, to connect advertiser with ideal buyer and make both happy. And it's organizing the world's information, but it's connecting things. It's just that the methods have changed. It's not just search, it's YouTube and the algorithm and YouTube that that's really good at predicting what content do you want to consume next? And based on your behavior, what products would you like to see and what products would you like to shop and see demonstration videos on or see ads on inside of YouTube or inside of Google? And so it's still a lot of the same thing, right?

It's just the way we're guiding campaigns campaign structure is different. Yeah, the way we bid is different. The way we used to bid on shopping and the way we bid used to bid on YouTube, it's shifted some in recent years, the algorithm has gotten better. In some ways it's gotten worse too because of lack of data, but the platforms are figuring that out. So it's like, I think you're right, and 90% whatever is the same. Those little nuances matter and you got to figure those out. But at the core, it's still the same. And people still buy for the same reasons. They've always bought, they brand matters and they want to solve a problem and they want the benefits and they want to see themselves in the product and all these things. It's just the tools and the methods we have to bring that to life are a little bit different. So yeah, I love that perspective. I

Brendan:

Would say it, it's even just going as far as just getting more simple. Instead of everything being so complex and guessing, it's really just about optimizing your brand, optimizing your shopping experience, decreasing friction, increasing quality, creative and A plus B, equal C. It's not that complex, but

Brett:

I love it. I kind of set some intentions and talked about, and we're recording this just right after the new year but setting my intentions for the year and three words I'm going to focus on, one is simplicity one is intentionality, and one is consistency. But let's just talk about simplicity for a minute. Simplicity is not dumbing down. Simplicity is not being just, simplicity is about removing ambiguity, making things crystal clear. Because if a habit is not simple, we're not going to keep it. If the message isn't simple, consumers aren't going to hold onto it and take action. If the message we share with our team isn't simple, no one's going to embrace it. We've got to really embrace simplicity and and I totally agree, and I think that's a big part of landing pages too, right? Not, I mean, you got to have enough elements there to sell the product, but how can we simplify? How can we make things more clear?

Brendan:

No, we actually have

Brett:

Be increasingly important.

Brendan:

We have three principles in Intro Labs and two of 'em the first one, and it's kind of like our three principles to design in life and philosophy, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the first principle is simplicity is the key to brilliance by Da Vinci. The second one is the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and we apply those to all design, all marketing, all theory we do. And it's really just about being more, being simple, being minimal, getting the point across without all the fluff and unnecessary jargon that we often add. We always add complexity because we think it's a complex problem, but it's really just a simple problem.

Brett:

Yeah, and it's one of those things too where if you're trying to communicate something on a landing page or through a video, you want instant understanding where someone reads it and they're like, ah, cool, I totally get it. I get what this practice is going to do for me. I get what you're trying to say. Rather than it's like I read the headline, it's kind of interesting, but I don't really know what you're talking about. Maybe I'll read more, maybe I won't. But you won this instant understanding which is super powerful. Yeah, definitely. Awesome. I want to get into cro, want to get into data driven marketing but let's talk about r and d for a minute. So this is something that you and I talk about a decent amount. I know that's kind of a passion of yours right now, but where does research and development fit into good marketing and how are you at mature labs and you individually? How are you thinking about research and development?

Brendan:

Another great question. So I think research and research and development is actually going to be the future ev e-commerce. I think as media buyers kind of get phased out, we are going to focus more on some building simple websites and being creative and adding the creativity into the ads. But then what we're also going to have to do is either have a whole team of researchers or an independent organization such as ourselves that will identify problems and provide solutions for you. And one of the things we really focus on is being an independent external powerhouse that can work with brands that can spend time focusing on how to solve a problem, whether it's how to decrease our cost acquisition or how to better sell a product or what product to design rather than someone that's at the brand being busy all day focusing on putting out fires. We are on the outside kind of like, okay, our number one job is to find a problem and not just find the problem, but give you a solution. And I think a lot of that comes down to marketing, CPAs, creative, how to stand out, how to be different, how to execute and iterate faster than the competition.

Brett:

Yeah, I really like that. I think we talk about this a decent amount internally to OMG and lots of chatter on LinkedIn and Twitter amongst marketers that, hey, this idea that media buying is dead, and I agree with that traditional where we're just creating a media plan, bidding up, bidding down, that sort of thing, nah, that you don't really need. That alone isn't super valuable. But the strategic use of channels and the strategic combination of different campaign types, I like to think about it almost, I'd like to use a football analogy, like an offensive coordinator. So you're calling the right plays, you're creating this team of campaigns and team of platforms to work together to get the ball in the end zone. And you're reading the defense, you're watching how the defense responds to things, you're calling the next play. But a lot of that I is r and d.

And so to continue on the football analogy, and my apologies if this isn't landing for some people in the audience, they're like, Hey, football, who cares? The best offensive coordinators, the best quarterbacks, the best coaches, they are studying game film all the time, film of their own team, film of their opponents. They're dissecting the data they're researching and then they're applying that, they're applying that and they're game plan. They're not on the field anymore. And that's kind of the way to a good media buyer, good strategies. They're not on in doing some of the stuff anymore. They're directing it and they're calling those plays. So what are some of the elements of research and development that you guys are focused on or the marketer of the future needs to be focused on?

Brendan:

Yeah, I think we're really focused on top of funnel acquisition because as, especially during the holidays, like CPMs are through the roof, CPCs, through the roof, CPAs, a lot of 'em through the roof with all the competition. And I think our main focus is on landing pages because simplicity, instead of sending someone to a product page that might not be optimized for that specific audience, we're focusing on, okay, who is our target audience for this specific product or this specific offer? How can we build a unique customized shopping experience for this person that walks in through the entire point a point Z in a nurtured way? I mean, imagine walking into Target for example, or yeah, Target's a great example. You walk into Target and you're like, where do I need to go? Where's my piece at? Instead of going through the entire store trying to figure out where that thing is you want to buy, you walk in the doors of Target, boom, it's right in front of you. You're like, oh, perfect, I don't have to search for it. I didn't know I needed this, but now I'm going to get this and that. And I think that's where the r and d comes in. It's like, let's create a nurtured, unique shopping experience that you can also connect to the creative. So it can be a creative from an ad level all the way through the entire purchase level, from point A to point Z is a unique, experienced made for that person to solve that person's problem or whatever it may be.

Brett:

I love that. I often find myself, I way prefer to shop online if I do go to a physical store, which I do on occasion, I'm like, man, can I just search for something or is there a search bar? Or I always go grab somebody and just ask because I don't want to, otherwise I'm wandering around the store, I'm worn on and not finding what I need. But I love that curated experience designed exactly for that person, so get what they need and so that they convert. So I think it's a good transition. Let's talk about CRO a little bit. So you guys at Mature Labs, you've got a really unique approach. You're building on Landers and they're both beautiful and highly converting, so you've got to show me a lot of what you're doing. Very impressed. What's your approach to CRO and kind of, so what's your approach? And we'll talk about lessons we can pull from that.

Brendan:

So CROs a pretty broad term, you know, could have CRO homepage, you have CRO on ad level, you can have CRO on the product page, collection page, stuff like that. Our main focus, and this is our third principle on interior labs, a principle called Gals Law. And in a nutshell, it basically states that a working complex system must evolve from a simple working system. You can't start with a complex system. So if you talk about a brand website in the terms of a complex system, you have all these different products, all these different links and stuff, and it's very difficult, it's very complex, very confusing for someone with a simple thought process to navigate. So our theory is, okay, well let's build a landing page that is a simple landing page to solve a specific problem for a specific product, whatever that may be. And we build a modularized.

So our intention is to build the entire landing page with multiple different offers that we can have at the start, multiple different modules that we can swap in towards the middle and bottom of the page. But the goal is to build one simple system, one simple landing page that works. And if it's not working, because sometimes you don't work when you launch 'em, you replace the header, boom, new header, new header, new header, new color, and you just change that starting piece until it starts to convert. And then as it starts to convert, you know, keep doing O to have negative feedback and make iterations. And slowly over time you start building a page that's more powerful and more powerful, more powerful, even by changing button colors, placements, offers and things like that. That

Brett:

I got to ask. I want to dive into that a little bit more, but you've shared now two of your principles or two, three

Brendan:

Was the third one.

Brett:

So I guess simplicity is the key to brilliance. A working system, a working complex system must evolved from a simple system. What was the other one? I

Brendan:

Missed it. Yeah, the second one is the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

Brett:

Oh, of course you did say that. Yeah, so

Brendan:

It's simplicity, same

Brett:

But different. That's awesome, man. I love that. I'm going to writing these down that that's brilliant and love those key principles. So I think one of the things, and you're right, CRO is broad. It's like, hey, what's your marketing philosophy world? That's a pretty big question. But what we experience a lot, and I think what a lot of brands run into is maybe your issue right now isn't traffic. Maybe your issue right now isn't your ads, maybe your issue is your lander, right? The lander is not answering a specific question, it's not solving a specific problem, it's not talking about a specific product and in the right way to that shopper and getting them to convert. Obviously it all works together, but a lot of times people are blaming the ad or the network that they're advertising on the platform. They're blaming Facebook, playing Google, but blaming YouTube when really the lander just got to get better. Oh yeah. So how are you guys analyzing? So you've got a client with a product and if you can use a specific example, great, if not, no talking generalities, but how are you going about, okay, let's create a simple page for this. What are you trying to understand and then what are you trying to distill in that page?

Brendan:

Yeah, so it's so many different things and it's really just about finding what works. And that could be the design, it could be the messaging, it could be the creative. And I mentioned earlier about how I think all brands are an algorithm in a way. So let's just say in this world that we're in this imaginary world, we have a brand that has perfect creative and perfect messaging, and the ads are converting really well. We're driving lots of traffic to the website, but the website's not converting and we're not getting these purchases, but the ads are, we got good metrics at the ad level and that's because we're taking a working algorithm and plugging into an algorithm that's not optimized. The website could be super complex. The messaging's not right on the website, the color's not right on the website. So it's really about, okay, well how can we improve this website to make it convert better by changing the messaging or changing the offer or the colors make a big one.

We ran a really basic research case study for our client and we changed the color of the review stars on the product page. We had three colors. We had the on-brand black versus gold versus silver. And just changing the gold stars drove $5,000 of incremental revenue in one month. Just on one page we tested it, it was a one page isolated test, drove $5,000 of incremental revenue. And if you take that and extrapolate over the course of 12 months, you've got an extra 50 60 grand of incremental revenue there. But the interesting thing is all these ads convert on a metric called perceived conversion rate on the website, which is the algorithm guesses at what the conversion rate's going to be on based on the probability of that user converting. So if you can move that number up a slight incremental number by changing the product page colors or the button colors or anything, you're really making it easier for the ads to convert. And I don't think a lot of people are starting to figure that out in 2023, and I think 2023 is going to be the year of massive CRO at scale because they're like, oh, right, it's two, we've got a ad level b c O level on the website or whatever the lander is.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good. Now I'm going to ask this question at the risk of leading people down the wrong path, and so I'm going to give a caveat and then I'm going to ask the question cause I know it's a question they never went right now is asking in their brain, and that is what color did you change it to? So it was gold. What color did you change as a review stars to?

Brendan:

So were for this specific company is very male dominated automotive industry. The on-brand color was black, that was the color they used. And we actually saw that gold had a 39% increase in conversion rate on desktop. Got it. Wasn't statistically significant on mobile. We didn't run the test for as long as we should have for various reasons but 39% is statistically significant on desktop, 39% increasing conversion rate for new users just for changing the stars to gold.

Brett:

That's awesome. So here, here's the lesson and the takeaway there. The lesson and the takeaway is not gold definitely, although it is in a sense, the sense is you start testing things, you'll get gold, but it's not that gold is now the winner in terms of your star reviews and how you display them. The key is you got to test it and the key is that these little things can make a big difference. I just led a training with our leadership at OMG on Atomic Habits and it's a great book. If you not read it, it's by James Clear talks about these little changes, these small habits, these simple habits, as you stack them, they compound. And one of the stories in the book, and I'll tell this in 20 seconds was about the British cycling team and the British cycling team for a long time, they were really terrible.

They won one tour of France in a hundred years. They were so bad that certain bike manufacturers didn't want to sell them bikes because they thought it would ruin their brand. They were like, Hey, if people see your cyclists riding our bikes, they're not going to buy it. So it was bad. This new coach comes along and he talks about this principle of the aggregation of marginal gains. So the stacking or the adding up of small incremental improvements. So they start doing crazy things like they clean the tires with rubbing alcohol and they test a hundred different suits to see what's got the least amount of drag. And they start testing pillows and mattresses for their racing team to see what leads to the best night's sleep. They start painting the inside of their trailers white so they can spot dust and get it out of there to keep the bikes clean.

They start doing all these crazy little things and you start adding all up all that together and you can see amazing results. They actually went on to it, I don't remember the years now, but they won five out of six tour to France races and then they were the pinnacle of the world. But it wasn't just like a lot of times we look at what's the one thing thing I can do? Give me a silver, silver bullet here. And that usually doesn't exist. It is, you've got to test lots of little things, but you stack a lot of little winds on top of each other and you've got amazing compounding results.

Brendan:

Absolutely. There's no shiny object and there is no one answer. Yes, despite what people think <laugh>.

Brett:

Exactly. We're all looking for it. We all want it but it's not there. And the bad news, it means it's hard. The good news is it's hard and your competitors can't figure it out either. And so it's where if you do, and then I love this idea of brands are an algorithm where it's all these things working together and if you can figure out the algorithm and guide it, you know, can see a big success. Well, I mean any other kind of general takeaways on CRO for brands and the way you guys approach it?

Brendan:

Yeah, I think it's what I've noticed over the last couple of years is that a lot of us marketers and creatives especially, we get too attached to emotion and brand. And I talk a lot about brand, but one of the important things is in the digital age of building a digital brand that's dictated by algorithms that are out of our control is that we have to use something called data driven creative direction or data-driven branding. And that is coming up with ideas that we want to test, but not being opposed to the potential that our theorized idea might not work. And we can't have our emotion attached to a color that we think is on brand. If the data's telling us to go for a different color, for example, the black looked better on this product page, it's more sleek, it just looks

Brett:

Smooth, it fits, it fit. It's more on brand, it fits the eye. Exactly, exactly. It's more plea

Brendan:

Into the eye and gold stands out a little bit more, but because it stands out a little bit more, converts better. And we have to be okay with changing and being fluid in the way our brand evolves, keeping some boundaries there, but being fluid with the way it evolves to work in the digital age to take advantage of the algorithms we have to work with algorithms not against them. And that starts at every level in my personal opinion.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so important mean, I know Gary V talks about you can't be romantic about certain elements in your business when the data changes you need to change. And when you see things that when the data is speaking, we should go in this direction, you need to go in that direction. And that doesn't mean you abandon your brand, right? You're building this brand, you're building brand equity. That's important. But sometimes we begin to think as business owners, as marketers, as CMOs, whatever, we're like, no, no, no. Black is our color. If we abandon black in this one element of our page, we're eroding our brand. Our customers won't like it. We know our customers, we know our brand well, you should probably test it. And so again, that doesn't mean scrap your logo every other month or something crazy like that, stick to your brand. But you got to test things. And being romantic about things that are not important to your customers is going to trip you up and really limit your growth and eventually potentially stifle your overall potential. So really good. Anything else you would unpack there on creative data driven marketing and any other ways you would describe that or unpack that? I love that. I love that term and I love the concept.

Brendan:

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So as I've talked about, I think the creatives being more important as we move on, and we found this really, really cool software called Motion. I think the websites use motion.com, shout out to them. They're actually a really cool organization, small team, but amazing. And they connect to your Facebook and they will give you full on reports. And I'm not endorsed by them full for the record. They'll give you full on reports of all your creative in your Facebook account and your Google account. They're bringing on YouTube soon I believe. And for example, if you, let's say you run ads for a month, right? On Facebook and you see your top three your top three performing videos, what you should do for the following month is take those top three videos, make some iterations on those videos that you think might convert better and test those and keep testing.

So the idea is to over time, test all of your creative, but test the best ones. Make iterations on your best creative. So month one, you start with zero creatives. Month two you have iteration one by month six you have six iterations of those creatives that are getting better every single month. And that is data driven creative direction. And you can take it into applying new creatives, say month four, month five, you say, wow, these are really working. Whatever this combination of testimonial or hook is working, let's go make some new creative using this structure and boom, creative direction right there.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. And you're always looking for that combination of right message, which is a combination of hook product, demo, cta, cta, a few other elements too. Audience in Lander. And so like, hey, are we tweaking that and was we're looking at the data, maybe we're seeing, hey, the conversion rate's really high, but the engagement isn't as high as it could be. So let's test new hooks. Or maybe the engagement's really high and the clickthrough good, but the conversion rate's not good. Let's test the landing page. So we're looking at the data, what is the data telling us? What story is the data telling us? And then let's iterate and make changes based.

Brendan:

Yeah, I do think data's becoming a buzzword in 2022 slash 2023. Cause I think a lot of people throw it around and I think maybe there's not as many people that understand it because it does get pretty complex. But basically just finding what's working, looking at that subset of what's working and making improvements on what's working to then guide your next decisions rather than just kind of guessing or using your emotion. Yeah,

Brett:

And I'm really glad you mentioned that because yeah, the solution is not more data. We need more dashboards, more complex dashboards. We need every data point possible that that's probably going to lead to share, that's going to get stuck in the data. What are the important data points? What are those important data points telling us? And then how can we quickly iterate and test and change to improve? That's all action. Exactly right. Take action. You are talking about data and that just means they're trying to get more of it and they still don't know what they're seeing even with more data.

Brendan:

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Brett:

Yeah. Awesome. Well dude, this has been super fun. I'm all charged up now, actually. I love it when there's certain podcasts where I record it and I've got more energy at the end of the podcast than at the beginning of the podcast. That's always a good sign we could go through. It was fun for me at least. Hopefully people listening enjoy it as well. But Naura Labs, so talk about this just a little bit. If someone's listening and they're like, dude, I need to hang out with Brendan or maybe see if I can work with them or whatnot, what do you guys do? Can people learn more about you?

Brendan:

So we have two major things. We have one's called brand architecture, and that's kind of what it sounds like. We basically just help brands build more efficiently, whether it's landing pages, whether it's coo, whether it's website optimization and we just want to improve your throughput. And then we also take, or we have a fractional CMO program, fractional ceo, CMO program. And it's basically just us looking at your brand, the whole holistic view of the brand. Not just the ads, not just the creative, but helping you come up with products to develop or when you should release those products, what the next step to growth is. Because growth is not just ads, growth is multiple different things, websites, products and all those type of things. And it's just a laboratory where we get to experiment and come up with ideas and test them and research and provide you with ideas to iterate on and to execute on. And our number one thing is identify problems, provide solutions and increase your throughput.

Brett:

Yeah. Love it. Love it. And so it's labs.io and we will link to that in the show notes. We'll share it on social so people can find it. What about on the socials? Can people connect with you on Twitter, LinkedIn, other places or with the company? How can people continue the conversation if they want to?

Brendan:

Yeah, no, we're definitely on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn is my name, Brenda bannister. And then you can also find Interior Labs on LinkedIn and Twitter at Naura Labs underscore io. And we're going to be coming out with a lot of content. We kind of created the studio here and we're going to be a content driven research and development firm. So hopefully we're putting out a lot of really interesting unique research stuff. We're finding what's working, what's not working, ideas, and just an overall place to just have an open dialogue.

Brett:

And so I think, hey, if you're in a spot where it makes sense, reach out to Brendan and start chatting with the team about what an engagement could look like. At a minimum, you got to follow this guy and you got to pay attention to what they're doing. And the content coming out here, I know it's going to be fantastic. I've had the privilege, like I said, over the last several years of just chat with Brennan on a regular basis and talk about what we're testing. And so as some of that comes to light, you're going to learn a ton. And so pay attention to that to content, to those videos. I will also tease, this is maybe a little premature, but I'm going to throw it out there since we're on the topic we're redoing that course. So the smart Google Traffic course is in a full reboot right now, which is super exciting. And so that'll be released sometime this year. Okay. We're working working with Ezra and team on that, so stay tuned. We'll keep you posted on the podcast and through other means, but we are, we're working on that as well, which will be really cool. So any closing thoughts, tools, recommendation, anything else you want to plug here before we sign off?

Brendan:

No, I just want to say thanks a lot for having me on. This is a lot of fun. I appreciate it. It's been great over the years working together. I've been building that Trail Labs for exactly a year now, and you've been a vital part in jumping on monthly and feeding back ideas. And I really appreciate that. And I think our core principle at the individual level, but also at the business level is build relationships, keep your reputation and work with the unicorn brands and unicorn people, and you're a unicorn brand and I truly appreciate that,

Brett:

Dude. Thank you. That means a lot. That means a lot. I appreciate that. And awesome. Yeah, good times. Really great content. Love seeing what you're doing, love the growth, and excited to see how this thing unfolds. And

Brendan:

Yeah, and I'll see you in Dubai soon. <laugh>.

Brett:

Dude, I got to get to Dubai. I guess I got to do it. I mean, it just seems like a lot of work to get there, but I got to check it out. I definitely do. So absolutely. Awesome. All right, man, fantastic stuff. Thank you so much for coming on.

Brendan:

Thank you.

Brett:

Awesome. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. Would love to get that five star review on iTunes if you think we deserved it. And also I am getting more active on social media. I had a Twitter account, or do you still do, but back in 2010 I was active or something like that. And then it took about a decade off. More than a decade, I don't know but I'm active on it now. So check it out at Brett Curry on Twitter, LinkedIn v Brett Curry. So I'd love to connect with you and continue this conversation on social media. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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