How PMG Brought in New Customers for IQBAR Using Full-Funnel Advertising

Ari Paparo (0:10)

Welcome to Marketecture, where you can get smart fast with in-depth interviews of leading technology executives. I'm Ari Paparo. I am coming to you from Amazon Unboxed in San Francisco, and my guest today is Ryan Walker, the Senior Director of Commerce for PMG. Ryan, thanks for joining me.

Ryan Walker (0:26)

Of course, happy to be here.

Ari Paparo (0:28)

We're here to talk about full funnel marketing. Tell me, what brings you to Amazon Unboxed?

Ryan Walker (0:34)

Well, I love this event, first of all. It's a great opportunity to see all of the new product solutions that Amazon is going to be releasing, and it's going to be focused on in the next year. It's a good opportunity to help our customers understand where our space is going over the next 12 months. It's really an exciting time to be a part of that, and one of our customers, Iqbar, has been super focused on taking advantage of all those solutions, so always enjoy the opportunity to talk a little bit about the work that we do to support our customers like that.

Ari Paparo (1:04)

Yeah, absolutely. So we're going to focus in on Iqbar and their use of full funnel advertising, because I think Amazon as a retailer is known for kind of bottom funnel, but now they're making a lot of noise about full funnel. So tell me a little bit about how PMG and Iqbar use some of the new Amazon marketing cloud, AMC full funnel products.

Ryan Walker (1:28)

Yeah. So just a little bit of background on Iqbar, they sell a high protein bar. So it's in consumer packaged goods category. So consumable, it's fast moving, relies really heavily on acquiring new customers and getting trial and acquisition. So that's a key need that the brand has and it's a problem that we help them solve.

We've of course used Amazon's demand capture solutions like sponsored ads, sponsored brands, sponsored print video. Those are all very performant. As Amazon's evolved its solution stack, we've continued to use the new solutions that they offer. So display and video and in some cases audio as well, been part of the growth story for Iqbar. They're a digitally native brand. So it's been exciting to ride the solution innovation that Amazon's offered as the brand has grown over the last couple of years. So for Iqbar in particular, we've been running video pretty aggressively to help reach new customers and then continuing all the way down the funnel with a full funnel campaign strategy to make sure we're meeting customers as they discover the brand, want to learn or consider more about it and then ultimately convert.

Ari Paparo (2:35)

Right. So is that the short story here, which is full funnels about new customers or a mix?

Ryan Walker (2:41)

I think it's more about bringing a message that makes sense to the customer at every point in their purchase journey. So from the moment of discovery when they did not know about the brand to when they're considering it, comparing against other options, maybe thinking about what ingredients are in the product and making sure we have a message for that, and then also being visible when they're ready to actually buy.

Ari Paparo (3:01)

So what did you find? What did the data show?

Ryan Walker (3:03)

Yeah. So Iqbar has been on a really aggressive growth trajectory over the last five years that we've been working together.

And triple-digit year-over-year growth regularly. And early this year, we noticed that that growth was plateauing a little bit. We had to ask ourselves why. Like, we're doing all of the right things. We're running video campaigns. We're running display campaigns. We're running lower-funnel demand capture. And growth still wasn't where we were used to it being. And we needed to think about how can we change that? What else can we do?

Ari Paparo (3:33)

Your protein maxed?

Ryan Walker (3:34)

A little bit, yeah.

We maxed the number of people that were easy to find in the protein category. So we had to do something a little bit different. So we ran some Amazon Marketing Cloud analysis to understand how many potential new shoppers were we reaching and was that number growing or shrinking. We found pretty simply that we were, despite our efforts to try to meet new customers, reaching a fewer number of potential new shoppers. Yeah. Okay.

Ari Paparo (4:00)

You're just reaching the same people.

Ryan Walker (4:01)

Exactly. We were doing a great job of creating loyalty and capturing demand that we've already gotten to try the product. But we needed to do a better job of reaching potential new shoppers.

Ari Paparo (4:12)