International Digital Marketing: How to Scale Ecommerce Globally

so what i'm going to talk to you guys about is really about three things um and really about how we achieve massive success over the last 12 18 months and that's about these three key tenants it's about focus precision and scale and i just decided to throw in this picture of kai greene who's like one of our biggest ambassadors and a bit of the face of right away because that's what he's

about to as you can obviously tell from the picture but i also want to talk to you about one of my favorite marketing slides and i hope that anyone here has been in marketing for a while has seen this which is uh one of the most famous charts in production from lesbian and peter field who are two marketing professors which shows the the difference between um when you do sales promotions versus

brand building what you see on the yellow line there is what a lot of companies particularly the e-commerce space kind of gets stuck into where they end up doing a lot of sales promotions um all they focus on is sale south south south south and you see there with the yellow line you get that big spike when you do a big sale but then as soon as the sale stops everything sort

of drops back down more or less to where they were before and you keep going on and on and on with this and what happens here is that when you a business lacks discipline to actually see it through this is what they end up calling they end up calling the cycle of just doing sale after sale after sale in comparison what the red line is is what happens when a business aims

to just look at focus on building a brand they don't necessarily not do sales but the sales they're less reliant on sales but what you see from that is that over time that red line will grow beyond that yellow line and what you end up with is a more sustainable brand you know a brand with a much more sustainable model and there's a short-term effect there well yes there's a six month

period where you know the sales approach is going to generate more revenue but if you stick to your guns and just focus on building a brand you can see that long-term effect there and the reason why i show you that is because that's what rideaway did so rideaway has been around for 11 years now this is our 11th year um but this only goes back to 2015.

but you can see there at the very start of that it's very slow like the growth which we had it was nice growth it was nice consistent growth but it was nowhere near what some of our other competitor brands like gymshark which i'm sure a lot of you have heard of you know even muscle nation the sort of growth they had over that period and a lot of that was for the

fact that throughout the better part of the decade rideaware was caught on the treadmill of sales there was a lot of sales a lot of promotions and really not a whole lot of focus on brand but then around that middle of the chart there around 2018 2019 was when we actually started to think about who we are you know who who do we stand for and more importantly who are we not

for as well so as a brand you know what's our purpose what's our meaning you know why should people you know become a right away customer and that really started to take shape you know in 2019 and from what you see there on the right part of that chart where that growth has just gone you know it has up and to the right you have that hockey stick growth which we're starting

to see now yes there are those spikes from the black fridays and the easter sales etc but really that baseline has lifted quite substantially now so where we were in 2019 is that we were 17 million business now last year we did 42 mil and this year we're on track to do about 69 70 million so still amazing growth through that period and a lot of that is driven because we know

who we are and we know what our brand is so right away also through this period as well while we're an adelaide brand we're an adelaide owned and operate a brand everything is designed here we sell globally this is just a bit of a snapshot of where our customer base is and i'll tell you a little about what this one is versus a google analytics slide where you know it's more just

like you see a bit of heat map we sell to 173 countries around the world our biggest markets are australia us and the uk but literally every other country i look through the list sometimes and i'm just amazed by these random countries i've barely even heard of which buy from us you know and you've got customers there who buy from us every month but what this chart shows is the importance of

a large part of the writers strategy which has been influenced in marketing so what this shows with the blue dots and the red dot the red houses is the proximity of an influencer to where there's a cluster of customers what has really driven our growth and why we were so we grew so quickly in the us and the uk in particular is because we focused on actually setting up influences there you

know actually reaching out to influencers you know who who while they had a global presence were also hugely influential in their local market as well and we were able to quickly see that where there's an influencer you're going to get a cluster of customers and where there's a really dense population influences there's even bigger cluster of customers so in the u.s where you can see there's that huge chunk there of like

the blue and red dots you've got some real city you've got some cities there like phoenix la uh dallas and new york and miami where we have a lot of influences no coincidence that they're also our biggest us markets so that has been a part of our strategy unintentionally so you know as we've actually started to as to how we've grown globally now as we further expand to the eu we've now

got a really strong focus on identifying recruiting and signing up influences in in european markets so in the last 12 months we've also opened up a u.s and uk warehouse what this has meant is that our u.s customers and uk customers are able to get their their products much faster than they did before but in the uk the uk pre-brexit also allowed us to service the entire european market much better as

well so what we've done over the last six months in particular is really start to identify and scout european influences which has also led to a big growth in our european market as well israel enough germany is probably the third biggest uh e-commerce uh consumer in the world and they spend more on e-comm than than many other countries in the world so that for us moving forward is a big part of

our strategy and something which for any brand looking to grow globally is looking at particularly for the consumer market is what's the influence of strategy if you are going in there don't be shy to go out there and recruit and find influences in those markets you're trying to expand too but a big part of what we did in the last 12 months is really understand who our tribes are like i mentioned

before not just who we are but also who we're not for as well if you go back to the earlier slide i showed you with that chart around 2017 2018 when right away's history isn't bodybuilding you know with with um you know uh really like like kygreen he saw before but people who would compete in competitions like you know um like the wbff you know mr olympia those those competitions like that

but around 2017 we started to lose our way a little bit we started going into track we started going into yoga we started going into all these other sports and we really lost that identity of who we are but it also was confusing to our customers who had known us historically as a bodybuilding brand as a weightlifting brand or something like hang on are you really for me anymore so what we

did particularly in the 2019-2020 is refocus on who our tribes are you know not so much who our personas are who our customers but really focusing on who's the tribe who are the tribe of people who when they look at right away they know that we're the brand for them and a lot of that was going back to our roots going back to our roots in lifting not being so much for

hardcore bodybuilding anymore but more about lifting and strength training anyone who is going to the gym to put on muscle for their mental health or their physical health and their overall well-being we want it to be the brand for them because knowing our tribe suddenly allowed us to then create a whole content strategy around that in terms of the advertising we were putting out our social posts our blogs um everything which

we did each different touch point you know suddenly became much more than just about you know putting people who look good in the outfits but actually how do we actually inspire people how do we actually talk to people in our tribes and what we identified was that our tribes were two tribes really one is what we term now the games girl and also the gaines guy but then also the warrior women

and the warrior men so the game's going against guy like it sounds the people who go to the gym because they want to lift they go to the gym because they want to lift and build muscle and look good as well you know and going to the gym for them is just part of who they are and then the warriors they're ones who go there because of the discipline around it they

go there because i love getting up at 5am and just smashing their targets smashing their goals if they want to lift heavier they want to lift more you know they want to push themselves to the absolute limit knowing those two tribes then change our whole approach to how we were going to market with them it changed the language we which we were using it changed the the types of ads we will

put out you know it also changed our targeting where ryan was talking before about targeting um in in your facebook ads our targeting when i joined in 2018 was extremely broad you know we're pretty much looking for anyone who is interested in buying activewear you know whether they are looking at luna lemon or nike or gymshark or anything like that we didn't really care if you were looking for activewear we were

targeting you what we did was actually focus that and bring that focus back on who are our tribes you know and making sure that our targeting was only speaking to those people so we were minimizing the amount of waste through that we were able to get our creative to be much more effective and to work much harder for us than it ever had before so just purely from a road level which

is the return on advertising spend that went through the roof just by able to be targeting a little bit better who we were speaking to but the other thing which worked well in our favor as well last year was how we responded to the pandemic um there was no every business was affected by it as you all know and what they talk about is that it's a k-shape recovery from that where

you had some business who slowed down who did very poorly but there was some business some businesses who did extremely well from that right away was very fortunate in that we were in one of those businesses who did very well because suddenly health and fitness you know that self-care became top of mind so while everyone was pivoting and trying to do that we're already in that space but what we need to

do was make sure that what our content still resonated through that as well one thing i'm particularly proud of which we did is our pandemic response because when the pandemic hit we were a very gym focused brand everything which we did was in the gym all we did was show people in the gym lifting you know doing deadlifts squats bench press whatever it was you know all our youtube videos were nothing

but you know how to do you know a proper bicep you know curl you know talking about all these techniques to help people level up the game at the gym so what happens when the gym closes we very quickly were able to pivot everything which we did we changed all our ads got all our local influencers reached out to all our athletes around the world and actually got them to shoot content

for us you actually invited them to create content to replace all our gym content in the ads so we were able to do that very quickly and start pumping out a lot of home workout stuff you know stuff to help people look after themselves at home you know we were doing things like live um you know ig live workouts you know home workouts with with a lot of our top athletes we

had we ran a two-week series where every day we had athletes doing workouts and had thousands of people following along around the world you know we're putting out ebooks we're putting out a lot of content to help people through this period we also managed able to source um booty bands and uh and resistance bands very quickly which sold out like that we thought we'd have enough for like for months they sold

out within a week but very quickly we were able to pivot and make sure that we stayed top of mind and a lot of that with any brand particularly now is to understand what you need to do to remain relevant and topical if we had persisted with the gym approach people would have tuned out our customers would have tuned out we would have got no traction in the market but by quickly

pivoting towards home workouts and understanding what the market actually wanted and where things were heading we were able and still continue to remain relevant now so even as gyms have reopened now we continue to have diversified content which we put out there which isn't just about the gym but also with how attitudes towards strength and strength training and fitness have changed as well you know we also continue to evolve there as

well one of the big trends which have emerged from the gym is that with all the gyms closing thirty percent of people who used to have gym memberships have now said with jim's reopening they don't intend to join a gym again they've either got home workout setups or they're just looking just to diversify and do other things instead so we need to think about how do we stay relevant there as well

you know by making sure that all we're putting out we don't just go back and do things as i were but we adapt we adapt to what the world looks like now and will look like in 12 to 18 months and longer so ryan talked about this before and this has been a really key part of our journey as well and something which i'm super passionate about which is about the power

of data every single business collects an absolute mountain of data you know more data than you can ever conceive of but the majority of business that data is dark data meaning it just sits there and you never use it you know and you don't know how to leverage it for e-commerce businesses you think about all the different platforms that you're using you know we have shopify you know we have you know

google ads facebook ads you know all these different tools which we're using and all are collecting data you know even google analytics as well but most of the time we're reporting that data in isolation we're not actually figuring out what's the insight from that data how can we actually use that data to better understand our customers so a big part of our growth has really been through our data strategy and really

unlocking the power of our data by looking at our customer base and really understanding who is buying what one of the big things that identified when i when i joined was that a lot of our marketing was focused on existing customers particularly in e-commerce are there anyone who works in e-commerce here just seriously yep cool you probably know that you know the importance is that you need to look at not just

how many new customers but also retention as well and it's also the whole thing about you know you know it's cheaper to retain a customer and acquire a new customer but the problem is all you do is market to your existing customers eventually you're not going to be filling the funnel with anything and you're going to run out of customers and that was what i saw at right away by looking at

the data and looking at who was buying we were heavily focusing on existing customers just marketing to the same people over and over again and we weren't going out there and prospecting and finding new customers but that was only impossible by looking at the data looking at the behavior of who was actually buying our data it's like who was actually buying our products and starting to segment them and understanding the differences

between you know a shoe customer versus you know a more traditional bodybuilding customer versus you know one of the warrior women who may only be buying certain styles but also looking at the the lifetime value as well from each different channel we were looking at so we'd actually start to prioritize where we actually wanted to to focus more of our efforts in and right away like i talked about before a big

focus for us is our influencer marketing strategy also looking at which influences drive the most return from us either through traffic to the website or usages of their of their discount code by analyzing some of that data we were able to make smarter decisions about which influences to retain versus which influences to to to let go of particularly when you have a paid influencer strategy that can really add up over time

you know where you're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for influencers so you really need to understand what value they're trying to drive as well when i joined we only looked at influences from the through the lens of how many times did their code get used but by looking at other analytics particularly around how many times their posts get seen when they post about right away and how engaged people are with

that post we're able to start to flip the narrative around how we looked at influencers so we didn't just look at influencers purely from a revenue perspective but also from a reach and engagement perspective as well and from that an influencer who we would normally cut because they had no one using their code we actually started to keep on because we realized the value of the influences wasn't in how many times

that code got used but in how engaged the followers were with the content they were putting out about us so that really started to change a lot of what we did but then also then looking at in terms of a product strategy as well looking at which products are selling which product is selling at full price versus which products need to move into discount as well by unlocking that data and seeing

you know what's the you know the sell the rate of products you know at launch um you know over their lifetime you know during sale periods and off sale periods we were able to start making really informed decisions you know about what we then went on to order which colors we went on to order you know which styles were going on to order but then also which markets we started to funnel

more products towards as well and then also looking at through our website as well understanding more about you know what's behavior on our website how are people using the website you know are there certain sections which anyone already has access to in google analytics but one thing as well which we did was to tile that together because a lot of this data lives in isolation lives in his own silo you've got

your facebook data here your google analytics here yeah your shopify data here what we did was that we created a data warehouse as well we found a way to actually pull all that data from all these different sources and build pipelines into a data warehouse once the data is in that data warehouse we were then able to put a bi layer over the top of it so a business intelligence layer which

allowed us to actually analyze and report back and pull out real insights from that data you know to be able to understand how that joins up between different um you know all those different sources looking at the trends you're seeing between something which happens at facebook versus something happening with shopify you know versus something which happens on a product level you know to be able to see what all those movements are

um but again you need to be able to pull that all together you can't just look at the data in isolation within those platforms so another one following on from where orion talked about is the importance then of being able to leverage that data you know to personalize our marketing so a big part of this is once you have the data is then figuring out how to unlock it um like i

read i mentioned before i've i've been in a number of places before and have worked at a number of places to implement marketing automation platforms from exact target which is now owned by salesforce um to hubspot um to marketo and now recently one called a master's i've also worked at clario as well the one thing which you need across any of these platforms is data if you don't have the proper data

to put it and if the data isn't clean it's not going to be very useful for you what we did after we were able to clean up our data you know to deduce customers across each site you know to get rid of you know you know all the dirty data which was which was which was polluting our data data sets you know was to then find a tool which was able to

help us then leverage the insights which was being found there you know with all these platforms out there there's so much power which you can unlock particularly through automation as well and also automation and personalizing things at scale one of the projects we undertook last year was to implement a masters a masters is a marketing automation platform designed specifically for e-commerce in particular fashion while it does everything which all the other

other tools do on the box you know sends emails it sends sms's you know allows you to personalize the website does all these things what sits at the core of it is this amazing cdp customer data platform where we actually feed in all the data from all these different sources and then it pulls out those insights and starts to understand more about you know what what products someone is most likely to

buy you know the machine learns and understands that someone who buys you know the block black right aware hoodie is also most likely to buy these other products as well and then allows us to then take that data and put that into our messaging into our communications across all our different touch points so what we did recently with through a masters was to really start personalizing the customer journey so that when

a customer subscribes and buys from us in the emails we send them we're not just personalizing it by saying hello name you know in your country or whatever else we're actually personalizing it with recommendations of things which we know that they're that which we think they're likely to buy by doing that that significantly has increased the revenue we're generating from all our different touch points in particular email our email revenue has

increased 40 in the last three months simply by implementing recommendations on there that's allowing us to scale to do this personalized genetic scale which is then adding to the bottom line in addition to that by actually having a marketing automation stack too through a master's it also allows us to personalize the customer experience so someone who visits a new customer who we've never seen before who visits a website versus someone who's

been on the website multiple times and buys from us every month they get vastly different customer experiences they see different images they see different banners on the site so what i mean by that is that someone who arrives at the site the first time you know and they get that pop-up of hey you know you're working with the site sign up we're going to give you a discount code if they sign

up and get the code and they never use it we can still we still retarget them so through facebook we will still retarget them on different platforms to remind them that they have that code to use and when they arrive at the site that code is there for them to use again we are prompting them again to use that code so we're constantly reminding people about those different offers but also through

the power of the data which we have we're also starting to segment our lists as well to understand who are loyal customers but then also who are defecting customers and churn customers so what i mean by that is with every business you've got a life cycle of a customer where someone doesn't buy for you within a certain amount of time you're likely to have lost them as a customer for an apparel

business particularly the the active workspace that's about 90 days if someone doesn't buy from you every 90 days they're most likely to defect and have gone on to another brand so we now have different tactics which we put in place to ensure that people never reach that point you know or if they start to reach that point we are targeting them more aggressively you know or we are looking at other ways

to get into inbox to stay relevant and top of mind for them to hopefully push them towards another purchase so that they stay as a loyal right aware customer and we're doing that across multiple touch points because it's not just through email but it's also through our website and it's also through sms and it's also through the ads we're putting out there as well to make sure that is as personalized and

really relevant towards that customer as possible while we're still fairly early on in this journey as well the other things we're looking at now is to understand more about who our customers are in terms of where do they train do they do more hip training at f45 or are they more gym-based and lifting weights are they more into it for strength training or they bodybuilding we're starting to build up a richer

profile of a customer as well based on going out and surveying them um you know asking them questions to help fill out their profile so that we can actually start to then serve them more relevant content so that rather than show everyone kai greene we can show them an athlete you know or exercises or activity which is more relevant and more related to what they're interested in as well and yesterday we

kicked off our right away loyalty program as well um which when the first day has has four thousand plus members um which has been uh which has been a bit of a journey as well and a bit of a game changer for us to make sure we now have an automated program in place to to try to nurture customers and ensure that you know we are keeping them on as loyal right

away customers and obviously encourage them to purchase from us more as well and because there was a question at the back there um earlier on about you know tech stacks um when ryan called me out before i was actually pasting this into the deck which is a picture of what our tech stack looks like a right-of-way when i joined one of the things which uh which we had was that we had

a lot of tools and we didn't really understand where the tool sat in the stack uh matter of fact if you asked anyone what text that looked like no one could have actually answered that question for you and the reason why is because every single tool was all about you know getting the tool because i've got this problem so we need to fix it so we're going to get this tool to

fix that problem so we end up as being this whole jumbled mess of where everything sat and also where ownership of those different tools sat as well so what we did was actually start to understand what role each which part of the customer journey each each each tool fit in and then starting to cluster them together and then start to look at all the relationships each one had between each other as

well so we knew what each one was was meant for so what you can see in this diagram here is that everything revolves around shopify shopify is our it's our everything you know that's where we transact that's where we do all our comments so everything in some way shape or form connects back to shopify but then you can see where all the analytics platforms the performance platforms you know even our inventory

management what that relationship looks like between all of them so we can understand better how we can leverage the data across each platform as well this also translated to how we've actually restructured the organization as well because the most important thing through all this is making sure you have the right team to support any growth as well there's no point having the best tools in the world if you don't have the

team to support it and one of the major achievements which i've which i've done over this uh in the last 18 months is looking at how do we actually restructure the team you know we've taken the team on a journey from being a very flat marketing structure with one senior marketer and everyone reporting into them to then having different teams to having a brand team an e-commerce team a performance team and

a creative team as well so that everyone understands what's the relationship between that actually putting in systems and processes and frameworks so that every team and every individual understands what they're accountable for so we can actually operate this at scale and perform even faster than before in addition to that as well is making sure we have those relationships across all the different teams including customer experience operations warehouse so it's a seamless

operation and while we're still very early on in that journey you know i feel very confident about the fact that what we're building is a brand and a company which is which is built for scaling growth over the next few years so that's all i have for you today any questions well okay uh i think that one hi mal i'm jacqueline thorne here now a shout out to robina for just the

the the speakers one after the other have really built on the knowledge which is fantastic now i had two questions for you first of all fantastic you're doing data driven insights i think that's just a no-brainer and it's great to see in practical terms the value it's actually made to the bottom line secondly just um walk me through again is it just semantics the difference between a tribe and a persona like

the warrior women is that a tribe or a persona or is tribesmall the group of people and the person it's a persona group for example great great question um because we struggled with that as well i come from like a digital product world so we did everything by personas but what we found because when i joined the first thing i did was that we started to actually build personas what we found

was that personas were way too limiting like everyone got so laser focused on that persona that from a design and a marketing and a brand activation level we were so focused on what that specific you know what you know what michael the 36 year old bodybuilder wanted so we actually took he actually zoomed out and went okay what's actually going to be more relevant for us which is when we focus on

the group you know on the tribe so great question thank you uh if any of you haven't read it yet i do recommend that you pick up a copy of seth godin's uh tribes which i think that kind of draws on and really does um explain further that whole concept it really is geared around a very simple mantra of people like us do things like this so if you haven't read it

add it to your reading list i did pop a link in twitter so hopefully you guys can uh can see that i think there are some more questions yep i'll go over here and then a couple over here ollie hi mal kim here thank you for taking my question um this is probably aimed more so at the smaller businesses or brands that are looking at the growth and um scale phase and

how does riderware manage the risk to the brand when using influencers and micro influencers so what was the start of that question um what is how does rideaware manage the risk to the brand when using influencers and micro um that's a great question as well scouting and making sure that there's a really good fit as well as you should like rather than just reaching out to any influencer who you know is

sort of vaguely in that space making sure that you know as a brand what your values are and ensuring that that influencer you know um aligns with those values too and we've also cut plenty of influences before you know particularly for black lives matters that was like something which you know was so eye-opening just like the amount of influence we had to cut because like oh my god we had no idea

you had those views so instantly it was like we cut them and we apologize for it we owned it because we got called out saying hey your influence is da says and then we said you know this doesn't represent who we are so there is always going to be element of risk in everything you do but it tends to influence this making sure that you act fast if there is anything there

which which doesn't align with what you do but also doing your homework early upfront as well great we'll knit to the back of the class because the mic is up there and rachel can come around to the front thanks her presentation my question is about influencer marketing and would you recommend doing white listing and this you know so you might just cut out a little bit there so my question is about

influencer marketing and white listing would you recommend doing that or do you do do you guys do that at right away yeah so without with all our influences like we we get them we don't use any influencer marketing software to like any troll we don't use tribe or anything like that to just farm out you know content we actually have an in-house program so we've got a team which actually will scout

and manage those influences so it's very account managed in terms of what we do so it it also arguably doesn't scale very well but i think the results which we get significantly would outpace you know a platform where it's more automated uh you're gonna pass it over to will next door yep thanks mel um just a quick question about your launch strategies so whether it's a new line of clothing or even

as you mentioned before pivoting like in covert um what what does that look like for you in terms of preparing a launch campaign in terms of i guess the content strategy you put in place the marketing strategy to make sure that you're kind of getting the audience warmed up prior to launching um so every campaign which we do starts off with you know first of all like what's what are we trying

to achieve you know whether it's launching a new collection or it's a sale or something like that from there it gets briefed in and then we'll develop a creative concept so the creative team will will come up with a few different concepts um and then from there they'll pick a concept where we'll we'll approve a concept which we'll go with and then we'll bring the other channel owners involved in there so

between the brand and digital team um you know all the different channel owners would come together and then flesh out what their go to market plan is for that so it's a very collaborative process where we throw out a whole different bunch of ideas how we want to activate it across different channels what we always look for is how do we actually integrate it it's got to be integrated you know historically

this channel does that this channel does that this channel does that but by bringing everyone together in a room we can then get a really tight integrated approach to it and then from there it's mapping out the timelines so with most collections actually everything you do you know there's always a teaser phase which you do about a week or so out um to try to build your type of momentum towards the

launch of a collection or a sale and then we'll do a pre-launch and then a launch and then depending on the length of it as well like if it's a black friday which can go for two to three weeks there's also activity which we plan um just to sustain that campaign as well just to make sure there's there's constantly interest in it or we can really spike some interest when things naturally

start to tail up cool can we just say can't you see the show of hands for any further questions or they maybe just come down the front oh actually and over this side actually and then rachel can do this side uh yep at the front here mario hi thanks for your presentation it's um fascinating to see an adelaide brand do so well globally so um congratulations my question is i'm just curious

to know who right away sees as their main competitors and in a market that is so cluttered with activewear brands how you i guess position yourself to stand out from the rest of the crowd sure um great question as well so in each market we've got different competitors but i guess overall in i'll focus on australia so in australia we have our direct competitors and then more our aspirational competitors so when

our direct competitors said they're the ones who are kind of targeting the same tribes as us and are of a similar size to us so of those there's muscle relation do you even are probably the the biggest ones and there's some small ones like muscle republic as well because you're right it is a really really crowded space um but then we also look at our aspirational competitors which are the gym sharks

and the nikes of the world um where we look at them and we want to take inspiration from what they do and we aspire to be them but we know we're not them you know and we know that we can't ever hope to compete head-to-head with them so what we're focused on more is about how do we differentiate ourselves from our direct competitors and and making sure that you know we give

people a point of difference for why they should buy right away great ben over to you for a question and i think there's a couple in here rachel yeah so being an apparel brand um and then you spoke about how there's a 30 decrease in gym members actually wanted to go back to the gym um and i know she'd actually opened a gym um what was the strategy behind opening a physical

gym great question um so many great questions so we started doing that before copenhagen so we're kind of locked in but it actually still plays part of the strategy um what we have with right away is that we are focusing more of an ecosystem strategy similar to how um to own the vertical of that fitness pla of that fitness space we don't ever expect to have well one day we may have

brands all around the world but right now those gyms are that physical mecca particularly for an e-commerce brand it's so important for people to be able to have a way to touch and fuel your brand even if they can't necessarily be there to actually have that physical reputation so if you think about it this is going to sound so corny so yeah don't don't don't don't grill me for this um if

you think about a religion right you've got like every every religion has like an altar a temple where they go to the to pray you know where they take to worship and and do whatever right i bow down to the god of marketing no no seriously at your feet but that's what the gym is the gym is that place where if you're in the right aware tribe if you're part of our

tribe it's the place where you can look to that's your mecca right so that's how we view it you know and and and and we want to add things around as well so that's really about the having that physical presence i think it's so important for every brand to have that ability for your customers your fans your tribe to be able to touch and feel and experience your brand jim sharp doing

incredibly well with their events like they kill events and they go all around the world doing events you know and they go crazy it just creates so much hype and fomo around it as well we want to do the same with the gym all right i think we'll take one last of how many questions we've got left i think there's two all right we'll take these last two sorry polly and dina

that we're going to be running a little bit late and sorry we'll be running late into lunch thanks again for the thanks again for the presentation um really interesting to hear from you i guess my question i wanted to drill down a little bit more into what you spoke about one other one of the question is about white listing your influences um because i know you spoke about doing your homework and

also you had how you had a team scouting influencers as well um we personally just started to venture into the world of influence and marketing and we actually had a really bad experience we thought we found the influence it was a great fruit for our personas the numbers look really good so i suppose i wanted to know a little bit more about that process for doing your homework and your team with

the scouting because you know you spoke about the regional engagement playing a larger part rather than just being the revenue and the numbers um how do you translate that reach and engagement and actually quantify that because all influencers i suppose are always going to say they've got reach and engagement um so how are you actually getting that and and i have an answer sorry um there's a tool which is probably my

one of my favorite apps at the moment is one called loud crowd um i don't get commissioned for these guys i'm going to tell gary that i talked about it i'm gary's founder so loud crowd is an influencer management tool which will allow you to create lists and audiences of the influences in your in your book in your portfolio and then you add your hashtags in there as well so every one

of their influencers when they post us on instagram stories youtube whatever they have to use a hashtag their software connects with well he connects with facebook instagram um youtube apis to actually look at the reach and engage the number of impressions and the engagement on posts which from those influences which tag you so that's how we do it so we can actually then see you know the metrics they're telling us like

great cool and then we can very very quickly see you know whether they're bullshitting us or not yeah so that's that that's how we do it um i'll drop a link in the slack community uh that's a really valuable way for me to get my affiliate link first uh yeah no sorry i'll work for mel's affiliate link but yeah loud crowd uh we've got one last question i think here yes yes

yeah thanks robina thanks mal um from one data analyst to another uh such an impressive uh effort in building in-house analytics teams so i was wondering if you could give a couple of tips on other businesses going through this process and a little bit of the journey and how to make it easier because it sounds like a mammoth effort effort it is it's a huge effort um and look the nature of

right-of-way um because of how it's growing we were hacking things together you know we were like we're extracting things from like you know different platforms pulling into google sheets and then doing all this with this manual reporting and this manual analysis on it um and really what brought it to a head was that a whole bunch of the google sheets just broke yeah and it was just like we we could not

cut any more columns from it it was like well if we delay any more columns like we're just not going to do anything it's like we can't really grow it's going to move rows we can't see back that far and i was just like well if we want the reporting it was just basically easy conversation with ceo like if if we want to keep reporting on this we need to invest in

it which then triggered allowed us to then put together a data strategy um to look at all those different sources and then look at the efficiencies around that as well like the amount of time it was me going out to there were about four or five of us within the business who were heavily in google sheets in excel you're pulling out these reports and calculating how much time everyone was spending each

week and going well if we move to this it's the sticker price is pretty big but the saving is this we were literally getting like one and a half more people you know back by investing in this can i ask what data sync warehouse or data or visualization tool or whatever yeah um so we use panoply so panoply is our data warehouse that's p-a-n-o-p-l-y the reason why we're meant to panoply is

because it's a managed data warehouse meaning that you just need to connect all the different sources and then they do the rest whereas if you use like um redshift or something like that there's a hell of a lot of manual setup and we only have one developer being an e-commerce business we only have one dev which is remarkable um so we didn't have the resources to properly build those pipelines ourselves so

we went to panoply who helped us do that for us and on top of that we used tableau so tableau for all our bi and visualization so we have like dozens and dozens of reports running off tableau and executive dashboards marketing dashboards which are all updated in real time um so we can easily see like even when we go back to the influencer question as soon as we go on board a

new influencer and we add their their handle in there we start pulling in analytics straight away in terms of their performance how much traffic they drive to the website how many sales they're driving and then over time loud crowd doesn't have an api yet but that will then start feeding into there as well so you can imagine how powerful that is when those insights are just there rather than having to go

and hunt for them yeah i gotta say now work um we use starter box as our data visualization tool of choice but yeah it's an absolute game changer when you're not actually having to search for the data you just presented with the graph and you're like oh what happened on that day i better go find out because there's a massive dip in conversions or whatever so on that note i'd like to

thank malchia for his time and thanks