Future Proofing Your Marketing Investments (Episode 5 of 5)

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:16)
And welcome back to this special edition of The Bliss Business Podcast. We're talking about how to turn your marketing dollars into an investment. And we've had a discussion so far, I'm Tullio Siragusa with Josh Prizer, who's the VP of Digital Marketing at Zero Company. This is our fifth episode and our final episode. We've been talking about first in the episode one, we spoke about understanding the basics of marketing investment. We talked a great deal about the fundamentals of spending and versus introducing this concept of ROAS, return on advertising spent. Then we talked about setting goals and having the right expectations, and how to manage those expectations, and top of the line, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel. We've discussed all these various elements of marketing. Then we talked about in episode three, the importance of measuring your success and understanding the numbers, really getting good at the metrics and understanding the various conversion ratios, just really just getting a handle on your business in general, and how your investments in marketing translates into return on investment for your business. Then we talked on the last episode, the importance of having good analytics and optimizing your campaigns for peak performance. Today, we're going to talk about future-proofing your marketing investments beyond the horizon. How to keep up with everything that's happening in this space. I want to welcome back Josh. Josh, good to have you again. Good to be here. Let's go right into it. How can businesses stay ahead of the curve in marketing in terms of their investment strategies?

**Josh Prizer** (2:09)
I would say it's important to periodically ask your agency, what else could we be doing?
Certainly, in Zero Company, we try to be proactive and bring new ideas to our clients, but it's very easy for an account executive to get caught up in just managing an account and improving what we're already doing. So, don't be afraid to ask, hey, what other ideas do you have for expansion? What else could we be testing? And that should be an exciting question for a good account exec. You know, a bad AE would think that's more work, that's just more I have to add on to what I'm already doing. But a good AE should think, all right, this client wants to grow, let me help them. And I would say for me, and I'd say for most A.E.s, I would say in this industry, growth is fun, right? It's where we get the joy from our work. And then a step beyond that, it's just human nature that if we have an account that's more fun to work on, we're probably going to spend, end up spending more time on that account. So I would say, you know, let your account exec know that you're willing to invest more and grow, and then you will.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:26)
It sounds like a pivotal and important strategy for future-proofing. Your marketing returns is investing in the relationship. Get to know your agency, build a relationship with them, and look for an agency that wants to do the same. That's what I'm hearing. Okay, let's go into what emerging trends could impact the future of marketing ROI and ROIs.
I mean, we've seen, for example, Google has evolved over the years with their algorithm. That has had tremendous impact on SEO, for example. Remember, you could have a three-month return on SEO efforts. Now it's a long-tail effort. I think the first update that changed all that was the Panda Update, if I recall correctly. Yeah. How can emerging trends have an impact on both ROIs and ultimately ROI?

**Josh Prizer** (4:26)
Well, they will have an impact. I mean, the market's constantly changing.
When I think of change for the immediate future, the big one that pops in my head is the cookie-less future. Right? It certainly remains to be seen, how that's all going to play out as of the time we're shooting this. You know, Google is testing it with 1% of the market. 1% of people are not seeing having cookies used anymore. They haven't told us which 1%.
But they're testing it out and seeing if it's scalable. And they have third parties testing that out too. And honestly, I have a lot of thoughts on the cookie-less future. That topic alone is probably bigger than we have time for here. But I think all marketers view change with a bit of trepidation, right? Is this going to be good for my clients? Is this going to be bad for my clients? But the bottom line is that change is always an opportunity, right? It's an opportunity to get ahead of your competition in making that adjustment when, not if, when the landscape changes. So I would say be open to change and look for an agency that is excited about the opportunities afforded by change.