As a potential recession looms over the tech sector, Unbounce’s chief marketing officer Peter Housley said businesses should take this opportunity to shape and retarget their audiences.
Housley spoke with BetaKit editor-in-chief Douglas Soltys at the 2022 SAAS NORTH conference and dove into what it means to have a conservative approach in marketing, and the importance of having a laser focus on a ‘core’ customer.
“The critical role of marketing is to be the voice of the consumer.”
– Peter Housley, Unbounce
According to Housley, who joined Unbounce in April this year, the turbulent conditions of the current market require businesses to reconfigure their targets by focusing on data and analytics indicating the behaviour of their consumers and the return on investment of every initiative or program. “You can’t have any fat right now,” he said.
With a “cookieless world,” said Housley, businesses’ ability to reconfigure audiences is more challenged and the channels that allow that to happen are “broader than ever.” So, Housley explained, marketers need to gain better insight into their “very best customer” and how they consume media.
“The critical role of marketing is to be the voice of the consumer, and making sure they have their ears to the frontline consumers and that they are playing back to the engineering folks and the product-led growth teams,” Housley said.
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Driven by data and analytics, Housley said that he slashed Vancouver-based Unbounce’s spending on its paid media strategy by 30 percent, and cut the startup’s cost per acquisition by half.
“Marketing analytics and media attribution, and really understanding the performance of your media is one of the jobs to be done in this climate,” said Housley.
In his full interview with BetaKit, Housley spoke more on his conservative forecasting model for Unbounce, the increasing awareness of social responsibility among brands to expose and practice their values, as well as why advertisers are pulling away from Twitter.
Featured image courtesy SAAS NORTH.