On this episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Nicole Goldberg. Nicole has been in e-commerce for 15 years working for premium retail brands with a focus in performance growth marketing. We talk about converting interest into leads, integrating last click and in-channel performance, crafting conversational ads with balanced keypoints,and so much more!
Nicole Goldberg is an experienced marketing professional with over fifteen years in the ecommerce industry.
Based in Los Angeles, she holds the role of Director of Growth Marketing at Faherty Brand, where she spearheads the development and implementation of the company's growth marketing strategy.
Prior to her tenure at Faherty, Nicole played instrumental roles in overseeing digital marketing initiatives for prominent brands including BCBG, 7 For All Mankind, Splendid, and AG Jeans.
Nicole is recognized for her strategic focus on achieving incremental growth and profitability while remaining aligned with company objectives. She excels in striking a harmonious balance between brand storytelling and conversion tactics, effectively driving impactful results across the marketing funnel.
For listeners of Honest Ecommerce, Faherty is extending 20% off with code HONEST20 at fahertybrand.com.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
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Nicole Goldberg
When you're on a smaller team, you don't need to create a unique page for every single thing, especially at that point. You want a better site experience.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business. Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. I'm your host, Chase Clymer.
And today I'm welcoming to the show Nicole Goldberg. She is the Director of Growth at Faherty. Welcome to the show.
Nicole Goldberg
Hi, thank you so much for having me on.
Chase Clymer
I'm super excited to chat to you because I am a fan of the brand. I have a bunch of clothes. So I know a lot about you. And you hopefully know some about me, I guess. I don't know where I was going with that.
Nicole Goldberg
Definitely listened to some episodes. So really excited to be here contributing. I think it's a great platform.
Chase Clymer
Mutual fans. I love that.
So quickly, for those that are unfamiliar with Faherty, could you let them know the types of awesome, and I mean genuinely awesome, comfortable products that you guys sell?
Nicole Goldberg
Yeah, so Faherty is men's and women's and some kids’ apparel. We're a little bit on the more high quality, sustainable, very casual beach vibes that really work throughout your day.
So we have some professional wear in there too, but really trying to make that emphasis of looking good, being comfortable, what you can wear and be active in your life, going from one place to another.
Clothes for on the go but really fitting into every part of your life.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. It's just... It's great stuff. Alright, so take me back in time.
When did you link up with Faherty? Or maybe take me back a little bit further to talk about your career before you got to Faherty. How's that sound?
Nicole Goldberg
Yeah, perfect. So I have been working in digital marketing, specifically in the retail ready-to-wear area for about 15 years now. Mainly focused in digital marketing. I've been to brands like Tom's, AG Jeans, 7 for All Mankind, BCBG, and a couple more there. But really focused on the paid space.
Really loved digital coming out. It was kind of before these things started to be taught in school. So I kind of learned more on the job versus now it's amazing seeing people coming out and knowing how to do everything right off of the classes that they took in college.
But yeah, so I've been in here for a while and then I've been at Faherty for two years now. The company itself is 11 years old. So I started already as they were pretty well developed there. But we've seen just huge astronomical growth the last few years at the company. So it's a really exciting time that I got to be in the company and be part of some of that really big uptick that we've seen the last few years.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And also the last few years, there's been just volatility and how you track this stuff, what you can get away with or do in all these different areas that affect growth.
So let's talk about not how or why you got your job, but what was the need for hiring someone like you? What does an almost 10-year-old brand need in a senior leadership role like you? What are you to bring to the table and help them accomplish?
Nicole Goldberg
Faherty, I mean, it was such a fun spot to be in when they were looking for a role that it was pretty irresistible to want to be at the company. They had grown significantly by word of mouth, very organic, and hadn't put that much effort into paid.
They had started just before I came on board. With some effort, they were getting paid search. They've started on Meta. They're getting out and we're trying to dip their toe and figure out how to expand and be further. They were starting to bring on some different partners but didn't have a strong strategy in place yet for how to really be expanding and grow and have a scale the way they want.
As I said, we've had some huge growth in the last few years. And then we were doing a lot of, especially when I first came on, throwing spaghetti onto the wall and seeing what sticks, which is great and so fun to actually step into a company that's willing to do that and have that. I think that's incredibly rare to see in a company.
And especially as you said, the markets have been really all over the place. So to have that flexibility was so much fun to come into. We were just starting with CTV. Podcasts were a huge thing that there was a lot of interest in. We played around in different types of social platforms like Reddit, we played with for a while. Different types of native display, different types of ads in that sense.
And so really, I kind of came in and looked at everything that we were doing under the growth umbrella and kept it going, started doing testing with them. Slowly, over the last two years, I have honed in on what's worked.
I think something that's incredibly important is looking at your kind of attribution between channels. There's a lot of how are you looking at between, there's last click, which is very kind of old school, but I think a lot of companies are still using that. But of course you can't still just look at channel performance.
And then there's different attribution models. I'm not a huge fan of attribution models because there's just, you're kind of guessing, are you giving a certain percent to the first click versus the last click versus the middle one? There's so many different models. You're playing a guessing game there.
So what we use at Faherty is incrementality, which is a tool we partner with a company called Measured, which I love. I think they're great, but there are other companies out there that do the same thing.
And that's really a lot of A-B testing, of turning off channels one at a time, and looking at if this was completely turned off, what is that channel going to be driving, or what's going to be driving without out there.
So you really can see what actually is coming out of this channel. So we base a lot of our performance on looking at the incrementality of our channel by each one. And then that's really helped us honed in and narrowed down what our marketing is.
That being said, we still are very lucky as a company and have a pretty good width, but we see what works, what audience works for us and hone in on what works better. And that's been huge. Been a super big game changer.
Chase Clymer
I love that you shared the tool that you're using because that's one of the favorite things our listeners like is to know what these things are and to learn about them.
I'm assuming you guys are spending quite a bit.
So what would you say for a tool like that setting expectations? Where they might need to understand where they need to be in their business to look at something like that? Versus maybe something that's a little more budget friendly?
Nicole Goldberg
I mean, I think it's so hugely wonderful, but it is about 10K a month to be working with them. Of course they'll do different deals depending on the size of your business, so I'm just giving a very big…
Chase Clymer
Ballpark.
Nicole Goldberg
An average on there. So I think that's overall pretty affordable. It's definitely much cheaper than getting a full MMM solution. So that's one of which those types of tools are great if you're really trying to look at your what is a billboard impact going to be doing? What are your retail stores having the impact of online? That's kind of the next level up, where I think Faherty will be growing in the longer run.
But we're really focused at this point on the Ecommerce channel. As I said, that's going to be our next phase, which we're probably going into, we're scoping things out, but by 2025, we're getting a little bit more omni in our marketing.
But I think that, judging it out, it's a great tool. It also aggregates all of your paid channels. We've never had a paid channel that we can't link up into there. That includes working with influencers, podcasts, where those are a typical kind of plug and play with most dashboards.
It really works as a hub of tracking all of our media spend, all of the performance in there, and then has that incremental and the testing value there. And every leadership team I've ever been on gets very happy when you say testing, that you're testing something. So gives that confidence of leaning in.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
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Chase Clymer
For our listeners, there's a lot of them out there that are probably more in that million dollar 7-figure range. What would you recommend to them with your 15 years of experience around growth and performance and how to not dabble in this world, but how to do it the right way?
Nicole Goldberg
Yeah, absolutely. When you're still at a million dollars, this is going to be too expensive a tool for you. There are some tools out there, don't know them off the top of my head, but search around looking for incrementality. You might be able to find some things at a $2,000 to $3,000 a month kind of range.
And there's more that are coming out because there's so much success in pop. So maybe that's coming out of a model like this. I'm seeing a lot more companies jump up. House was one that I just saw recently that looked cool. I think Rockerbox is one that does it, but there's a couple out there.
But until you get to that point, because really when you're really at that one of $5 million, your budgets are tight, you aren't getting a lot of tools around you.
I would really, this is till how I look at our marketing, I would be looking at both last click and in channel performance and have a dashboard where you've built out and you're looking at both of them, and really understand in your funnel where different tactics are hitting. That's where I would say is the most important.
So for example, for us, paid social, specifically Meta is our highest spend and we really see a lot of success there on pushing specific products to new customers. It's a wonderful new customer prospecting tool. But of course, if I'm looking at that at a last-click basis, you're not going to be seeing performance there. You're going to be saying, “Why am I doing something that's going to be a…” I'm just thinking of cross industries.
But like a 0.5% return on ad spend or something looking at a last-click tool, or even if you're doing amazing and looking at a lower funnel, you're still going to be at around a 2x for paid social. Why would I invest there when my affiliates are 15x or my search is 6x? Or whatever, those are for you.
And it's really understanding what tools go to the top of the funnel, what's going to be getting you new customers. You're trying to balance out what are your different ROAS goals and KPIs based off of the funnel points that you're looking at.
Setting expectations accordingly that you're looking at if you can pull in, if you're able to get tools or even using Google Analytics as a benchmark for what are your new customers coming in and what are your goals set on that and building towards that new customer.
So a tool like, again, prospecting and in Meta, prospecting in TikTok and display, getting those set down so you know that your last click goals aren't gonna be good. You're looking at how they're performing in the channel a little bit more as your basis point and that you have that full funnel approach.
Chase Clymer
That is an amazingly detailed strategy that I'm going to even ruin because I'm not a good Facebook advertiser, but I'm going to dumb it down for people. So I understood enough.
But basically, if you're going to do prospecting on Meta, A. Good idea. B. Understand the last click attribution is going to be bad. But if you switch the attribution to that new customer, which is difficult to track just in Meta natively, but you can do this with all these other solutions out there. If you can see the customer growth from that channel, you will then be a believer.
And just to give you an example, I know everyone out here also has iPhones and Androids and you're on Instagram and Facebook and you see yourself getting targeted by these brands a couple times a week or a day, that's because you're in their prospecting window. That's the time when you're trying to get a lot more exposure of the brand to potentially a new customer.
Did I do a good job of explaining that?
Nicole Goldberg
Yes. Thank you for making that much more digestible.
I would say one of the plays where specifically looking at, you see success in a tool like social media versus just maybe a more generic non brand tactic, which we do, but I think is a little bit of a more luxury when you're getting a little bit more spend there, you're starting to layer in non brand.
But when you're on social looking for a new customer, you're getting people that aren't specifically looking for something. They're on a platform and they just discover it because it's forced in their face.
It's almost the same way as a TV commercial would be except someone can click on it, you can be distracted, you can be really natively in the platform there. So that's why those tools work very well for new customer-specific acquisition.
Chase Clymer
No, exactly.You just have to understand that since they aren't actively looking, you need to show them a couple times. The psychology in it is like, “Maybe I am looking for that actually, because I've seen it a bunch and the ad is good and it's catching me. That looks like a comfortable t-shirt, I can see myself wearing that.:”
And then you go from not knowing anything about the brand to now you're interested, and that ad itself has now done its entire job, which has converted you from not existing in the ethos to now a warm lead for that brand. And then hopefully, they have got other ads in the funnel to do the job.
Nicole Goldberg
Absolutely.
I think this might have changed, sorry, changed over the years, but it's something like five to seven touch points are required for everyone before they make a purchase.
Chase Clymer
It's five to 700 now. I mean, I don't know. It's just so it's so there's so much noise on the internet and so much advertising out there.
Nicole Goldberg
One of the questions that I do get asked a lot for people that are really just starting their business is how where the first place is to start investing, “I have $500 a month, what should I be spending on?” And to your point of really just starting to get out there, get your name. And that's where again, I really would recommend starting on Meta, doing a campaign where you're doing an awareness campaign.
And you're just trying to get it. You're doing broad, you're doing about your brand, you're getting kind of that vibe and feel out. And then you move kind of slowly looking at like six weeks or so running an awareness, then you start to layer in a traffic campaign.
You have that start to build for six weeks and then you layer in something for more of a conversion campaign there. And you're keeping this awareness of your traffic still on as you're building that bucket of getting people to know about your company and exactly to your point moving them so little down the funnel.
Even though these are still all very prospecting campaigns, you're getting that really heightened awareness all the way down to getting a new customer to convert.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
I think if you talk to any senior marketer out there, they'll have a million opinions, love and hate on Meta. But they will all say it is still the number one demand generation channel for a physical product these days. There's by far nothing else can compete with it.
TikTok's coming along, but it's still Meta.
Nicole Goldberg
I would agree. It's definitely love hate. Like hate doing... But it sure does work.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. And that's the thing. Someone a long time ago compared Meta. It's like once you figure it out and you have a good structure to your accounts and your campaigns, it's kind of like an ATM. You just... You put a dollar in and more dollars are going to come out. You got to figure out that puzzle in the middle.
Nicole Goldberg
That's funny. I'm going to say use that.
Chase Clymer
Other than Meta, what else are you guys experimenting with? Even outside of just driving traffic and hopefully conversions from pay to ads and marketing. What else falls under the wheelhouse of your position?
Nicole Goldberg
Yeah, we have a lot of fun things that are going on right now. I would say when you have a budget, when you're getting a little bit bigger, maybe around $10 million, but really earlier than you would think that you should start looking at tools like CTV. It's a really fantastic tool to have in your media mix there for awareness, for storytelling.
It's much more affordable and much more actionable. You can do a lot more retargeting on it than a linear TV. The audience targeting is fantastic. And truly, probably the most difficult part of it is getting it so that your creative team is making something that works for that platform.
Chase Clymer
Pretend I don't know what that platform is. What is that?
Nicole Goldberg
I'm sorry. It's Connected TV. And that's where you're seeing most people now aren't going to watch cable just through direct TV. They have Hulu and Netflix and Apple TV and Amazon Prime TV and all these different networks where they're watching TV on. ESPN or through apps.
And it's commercials that are playing through the apps versus again, just going through your direct TV and it's you're clicking through the channels. Typically, you're moving between different apps. So CTV is commercials that are playing on those.
It allows you to be much more targeted to your audience. You shift dollars very easily between the platforms and you can scale in at a tighter budget than you can in a linear TV to again, really hone in. And it works very well.
It's a great awareness tool, but an awareness tool that you can also be putting retargeting for. You can see really good customer data. So it allows it to lean a little bit more lower funnel than well, then traditionally linear TV and then linear TV is also difficult because that audience is aging out.
If you're looking at a more millennial audience, there's even Gen X, you can really lean more towards CTV at this point for that core audience and then of course anything going down there, but that's a great tool. But it does require you to have video content, so that's a little bit of one area there.
Podcasts, this is one that we did a ton of experimenting with at Faherty, especially during the pandemic. People were listening to podcasts across the board. It was probably a little bit easier to test everywhere and get on and there were lots of ears.
At this point, we've honed in more on specific podcasts that we're doing advertising with, finding our niches, finding our audience, but we see a really good dedicated audience there, especially getting it so that it's host read.
You're getting it so that there's more of a connection, especially if you can get someone that has an affinity for the brand, which we're lucky. Faherty is one that's a little easier to...
Chase Clymer
I know all about ads on podcasts as a podcast host that does host red ads.
Nicole Goldberg
Well, I would say they work well.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, they do. I'm always asking for a better offer or a better hook. It's like, “You're hearing this. I'm not on a computer. What's going to make me stop and do the action?” And it's got to be a really easy action. Is that like a challenge that you guys find with writing the scripts for the ads?
Nicole Goldberg
Well, our challenge is that Faherty is a hard word to play or spell. So we always have to make it very clear that you're spelling out the website name there. Making it very clear. This is where you go and this is the code that you use.
I think one that's a little bit challenging where we've had to make some adjustments is that you want to give all these key points for someone to hit on your brand. And you're not really... When you're thinking about it in the context or what you're listening to, you want something that just feels a little bit more conversational, a little more casual. You don't want the host just saying you facts to you because I can just give you facts on a different platform.
What I'm getting is Chase telling me why this is a good product and putting your opinion in there. Loosening up your key points you want to hit and narrowing that down to just, “Here's two or three things…” And then you riff and tell me what you like about the product.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. I've worked with some pretty big brands on ads and the bigger they were, the more they said, “If you say these three things, we're probably gonna like it.”
Nicole Goldberg
Yeah, exactly. Narrow it down and let them go with it otherwise. But yeah, podcasts, I think are great.
And then one that we're playing a lot with now… This is for us really looking at, you know, Faherty is a huge company, but I'm based in Los Angeles. Faherty is an East Coast brand based out of New York, but it was started in New Jersey.
Awareness is still something that amazes me on the West Coast. It's not as much there, even though we do have stores in Malibu and Venice and down in San Diego, a number of stores here, but especially men have a better awareness of it, but women not as much. It's still kind of hit or miss here on the West Coast.
There's still a lot of potential for growth here, and so we really still try to focus quite a bit on new customers as we're expanding really over the cold country. And so we really have a focus on that. And we've started to play around in Google with our Performance Max campaigns, really focusing on new customers, focusing on non-brand. Trying to really hone that because of course, while it's a great tool across the board, you see great performance, it's AI based, which every leadership loves when you say something's working off of AI.
It does anything there, which is really trying to convert for, I'm speaking in broad strokes, but in broad strokes, when you're looking for what's gonna drive performance, it is gonna move a little bit more mid to lower funnel. So we've worked on trying to push that one up to be more new customer focus. Google is actually making that easier and easier to do with Performance Max. So that's one that we've been playing around with.
And on a tangent to that, you can also do similar things on Meta with ASC. With ASC campaigns, which is also their AI solution. So you want to manipulate and play with them a little bit if you're really pushing for new customers, but still get that AI benefit.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. I've only heard good things about Performance Max actually. Twitter or X really loves that product.
Nicole Goldberg
That's very funny. I'm not a huge X follower, but it definitely works very well.
Chase Clymer
It has gone downhill since the name change, let me tell you. Elon, please don't shadow ban me.
Nicole Goldberg
No, it works really well across the board.
As with any of these tools, when they're AI based, you lose a little bit of visibility. It's going across lots of different placements. You're getting YouTube, you're getting on Gmail, you're getting a display.
But also to the earlier point of wanting multiple touch points, there's a benefit to that and so actually, even though you might be, “I want to be getting the search”, “I want shopping to be showing up there”, the majority is, it actually has a benefit of having more touch points there than you realize.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Now I've got a question: does the on-site experience fall under your umbrella as well? Are you making sure that I can get the traffic there and it's still gotta convert?
Nicole Goldberg
No, we have a fantastic director of our site experience who I partner with very closely, because to your point, well, it's what pages am I driving traffic to? What is the experience once they're there?
We actually try to, for example, for our podcasts, we create specific landing pages a lot of times for that. Same with influencers. So trying to get the best hone in sight. But also, I mean, that's really from every touch point, whether you're looking at email, or what search landing pages you're driving to, or what products you're highlighting, or an affiliate newsletter that's going out, really making sure that onsite experience matches what you're speaking to and optimizing.
If something's not working, how are you changing that so that you're making adjustments to it? What tools are you using to test? So we're lucky that we do have a different team that's doing that. I certainly have been the one that's doing it, especially at smaller companies, where you're doing the digital marketing and on-site experience.
And I would also say, when you're on a smaller team, you don't need to create a unique page for every single thing, especially at that point, you want a better site experience. If it’s easier for you to manage five pages versus 20 pages for all these different places, find the five pages that work best that you can manage, that you can be staying on top of instead of linking to a page which you will forget about, and looked great when you launched this campaign but this campaign runs for three months and you're going to forget about it and not have the bandwidth to be updating it.
Take them to new arrivals. There's no problem with that. You'll be keeping it updated.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Nicole. I think that we could go on forever about performance and I've had so much fun talking to you but we are drawing close to the end here.
Is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience?
Nicole Goldberg
No, this was great. Really exciting. I would love to give a code, though, to your audience if they're interested in Faherty.
Chase Clymer
Personally to me because I'm going to use it.
Nicole Goldberg
Yeah, please. Please do. Use the code HONEST20 at fahertybrand.com. So that's F-A-H-E-R-T-Y, then brand, B-R-A-N-D.com. Simply HONEST20 for 20% off full purchase.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Nicole, thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll try to link to anything that you had mentioned in the show notes. We'll make sure that that code is in there as well.
Nicole, again, thank you so much. I'll probably reach out next year and have you back on the chat about stuff.
Nicole Goldberg
Absolutely. I would love to. Thank you for having me on. This was a lot of fun.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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Until next time!