How Modern Brands Spend Their Marketing Budget

About this episode

In this episode, host Shan A Salam sits down with marketing consultant Shams Bonsai to explore the intricacies of performance marketing and modern digital advertising. Shams shares his journey from the VFX industry to overcoming substantial debt from a failed business, leading to his career scaling ecommerce brands in the United Arab Emirates. The discussion examines how to identify market demand, optimise average order value through product bundling, and transition customers from initial direct messaging channels to websites. Shams details the mechanics of structured media planning, explaining how full-funnel strategies, attribution modelling, and empathy mapping help marketers understand customer psychology. He also demystifies programmatic advertising, clarifying the roles of demand-side platforms (DSPs) and supply-side platforms (SSPs) on the open web compared to walled gardens like Meta and Google. Finally, he stresses the critical need for marketers to master first-party data collection and combine organic brand storytelling with paid campaigns for sustainable growth.

Key takeaways

1. 1Increase average order value by bundling core products with necessary accessories rather than competing solely on single-item pricing.
2. 2Validate initial demand and build customer trust through direct messaging channels like WhatsApp before shifting traffic to automated web checkouts.
3. 3Utilise empathy mapping to assess what target audiences see, hear, feel, and think across each stage of the customer decision journey.
4. 4Track UTM parameters and attribution models across campaigns to accurately determine which touchpoints genuinely generate conversions.
5. 5Diversify ad spend beyond walled gardens like Meta and Google by exploring programmatic DSPs to reach wider open-web inventories.
6. 6Collect and organise first-party customer data to safeguard targeting capabilities against tightening privacy regulations and cookie depreciation.

Chapters

1. 0:00Highlights
2. 1:17Who is Shams?
3. 6:13Performance Marketing & Perfume Business
4. 19:52Performance Marketing vs Digital Marketing
5. 24:51How to Find Demand
6. 28:57Importance of Analytics
7. 34:28Finding the Trend
8. 35:33How to Research the Audience
9. 43:38Custom Audience vs Broad Target
10. 44:16Funnel
11. 49:44Media Planning
12. 52:31Ad Copy
13. 54:29Attribution
14. 1:08:07Programmatic Marketing & Media Buying
15. 1:16:23The Trade Desk & Data Privacy Rules
16. 1:20:38Organic Content
17. 1:30:29Essential Skills Every Marketer Needs
18. 1:33:37Digital Marketing Course
19. 1:38:34Final Thoughts