My marketing learnings from 2024
A transparent deep dive into everything that is and isn't working in marketing at Yonder.
Every November I spend a few days writing down what I’ve learned about marketing at Yonder throughout the year.
It’s not something that ever came naturally. When you’re marking your own homework it’s tempting to look at everything through a rose-tinted lens.
Fortunately at Yonder, we have a culture where consistent learning and reflection is valued above everything, so it’s become easier and easier for me to really reflect on what’s working without feeling like I’m going to get sacked tomorrow.
It’s also nice to acknowledge the things you’ve learnt along the way. Every year the way we think about marketing, growth, brand and everything in-between changes so without going through this process we’d likely just keep going about things the same way, banging our head against the wall when we’re in the same position next year.
So while I don’t typically share these publicly, I’m hopeful it might help other marketers evaluate how they’re going.
Let’s dig in.
In summary, I’d give our marketing a ‘B grade’
We’ve built a good marketing strategy so far, but it’s not yet great.
That’s not to say it’s all doom and gloom. I think we’re on the right track, but we haven’t yet worked out how to scale the impact of our good work into a consistent strategy that drives growth for Yonder.
Below I’ve outlined a handful of areas that I think capture where we’re at.
We’ve done some awesome creative work, but we’re not reaching enough people consistently
Anecdotally, we hear all the time how much people enjoy the work we do. It hasn’t happened on accident either. We spend loads of time on creative ideas and execution, and I think it really comes through in a lot of the fun way we try to get our message across. Like this letter to Heineken, or when we stuck our Chief Risk Officer in a bath or gave away cash for spilt drinks this summer.
But while we’ve had moments of amazing brand love, we haven’t done it consistently and don’t yet know how to best allocate our budget across different media.
We’ve grown primarily through word of mouth, performance marketing and comparison websites but our other brand bets on content, campaigns and PR haven’t worked as effectively as they should yet.
A screenshot of our October brand awareness data
Brand awareness is vital for us. It’s directly related to how much of the addressable market we can capture. If someone doesn’t know we exist, they can’t purchase from us. It also has a direct impact on reducing our acquisition costs. A recent study by Tracksuit and TikTok has shown that:
A brand known by four out of ten consumers is 43% more efficient in driving performance marketing outcomes on TikTok than a brand known by three out of ten consumers.
Tracksuit
Driving organic content growth is really hard
Around 75% of 25-34 year olds use Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and listen to Podcasts each week. Making these channels the most obvious ways to reach customers who aren’t yet in market.
They’re also the most affordable, given that creative is programmatically promoted based on quality and not media buying, so the ceiling on social platforms is effectively limitless when the ceiling on media buying is always capped by available media and budget.
But while we’ve made some progress on our social growth and engagement, we haven’t yet proven that this can consistently drive traffic to Yonder over time.
Which is annoying, because I often here how much people enjoy our organic content despite the numbers not growing at the speed we want. Maybe they’re lying to me.
We’ve also learned that followers don’t really matter anymore. 80% of our Instagram content is being seen by non-followers, so we’re no longer optimising to that metric. Instead, we’re driving these two metrics:
Reach: the individual accounts we reach each month. It’s an efficiency metric, telling us how good we are at reaching the most amount of accounts.
Engagement %: the total likes, shares, saves and comments in a month divided by the number of accounts reached. It’s a quality metric, telling us how good our creative is at engaging people.
So we have loads of headroom to improve here next year. We’ve recently brought in a new videographer so we can bring that in-house to improve our quality and quantity of content.
There’s also a huge opportunity with influencers we haven’t yet cracked. Influencers bring large, engaged audiences to your brand but working with them has proven tricky in the past. They’re often expensive, unreliable and measuring the impact of their work is difficult. However, they present a huge opportunity for us to leverage their reputation to drive brand love, so it’s important we revisit this part of our strategy in the future.
Earned Media and PR has changed massively.
We’ve hit a wall with earned media and haven’t been able to get the consumer coverage we need.
While we’ve been able to secure consistent trade coverage through well-known tech media like Sifted and other publications, we’ve noticed that the impact of this coverage on our brand no longer moves the needle like it did when we first launched. A couple months ago we secured dozens of pieces of coverage on our fundraise with almost no noticeable impact on our brand metrics around that time.
With significant changes in the world of PR, the appetite for ‘paid editorial coverage’ has grown substantially and is perhaps the main underlying reason why we struggled to get meaningful coverage for Pint Protection and WTF is APR despite having strong consumer insights driving both campaigns.
We’ve also learned that these kind of consumer campaigns don’t drive meaningful sharing amongst consumers, a core hypothesis behind both our Pints and APR campaigns. Moving forward, we’ll take learnings from our Make It Rain campaign and angle to our own customers to drive word of mouth as the main measure of success for these fun consumer activations.
Potential customers can’t find us when they enter market
We can’t capture high-intent search traffic because we’re being drowned out by competitors and comparison sites.
Why is this important? Well, the reason brands want to capture search traffic is because the intent is considerably higher than on social channels where customers aren’t actively looking for new products. Generally, you can show up for high-intent traffic in four ways:
Search Engine Optimisation
We’re unfortunately in an industry that doesn’t mess around when it comes to SEO. Amex have around 400k organic visitors a month with 3.6k ranking pages. MoneySavingExpert have 6.1M organic visitors a month with 7.7k ranking pages.
All the high-intent traffic is either hoovered up by totally unsustainable Google Ads or highly-optimised editorial pages on MoneySavingExpert.
Paid Search
To compete here we need to both improve our domain authority and significantly increase our acquisition budget beyond anything remotely sustainable. We’re drowned out by comparison sites that are far more effective on these channels and have the scale to make these channels work when we can’t.
Comparison sites
To further compound our issues around discoverability, one of the only ways we are discoverable to people in consideration and purchase stage is through aggregators where we’re also competing with dozens of other options in the market.
Editorial and affiliate content
Listicles, advertorials and other related affiliates who write about the best credit cards or the best rewards in the UK. It hasn’t been a focus for us until recently and there is likely a long-tail benefit to building out a plan for this type of traffic though it’s unlikely going to massively move the needle.
We’re not great at performance marketing (yet)
To keep growing, we invest more into performance marketing which is driving up costs and our incremental CPA. The flow on effect here is that we pulling funds designated to drive brand value, creating a spiral that limits our long term growth.
The key to performance marketing success is creative experimentation. Amex has 389 current experiments live on Meta launched in the last 14 days. We have about 30. We have to experiment faster here if we want to make this channel work.
We’re not doing enough to keep low-to-middle intent traffic engaged.
Every pound we spend on market isn’t optimised because, effectively, our spend only makes sense if we can capture a customer on that day. If they’re not in market, and just poking around, we give them no other way to stay engaged.
If we want to find them again in future, we’ll need to advertise to them again when we could be giving them an easier way to stay in touch now.
So what should we do about it in 2025?
Below are a few key directions to help address all of the challenges outlined above. We’ll refine these over the new month or so but will equally try to keep them high-level enough to allow us to pivot as we learn more.
Invest in long-tail affiliates and paid PR coverage
If consumers can’t find us when they enter market, we need to do all that we can to be discoverable in the channels they land in. This means:
Onboarding an affiliate tracking platform and closing as many deals as possible with YouTubers, bloggers, affiliate websites, and financial gurus.
Using tools like Linkby to get 2-3 pieces of paid PR coverage in consumer PR channels every month.
Set minimum brand budgets to invest in awareness
We need to establish a smarter way to spend our marketing budget that protects our top of funnel spend from being eaten up by our lower funnel needs.
Then we need to spend small to medium investments in scalable channels that grow our awareness in London and around the UK. This means:
Set minimum spend each month on our brand awareness - podcasts, OOH, YouTube and other media
Work out how to make influencers, creators and customers the centre of our marketing so we can drive brand love through their audiences
Build our content and performance teams together around high-quality, high-performing integrated content
Our organic and paid content needs to feel one in the same, meaning we can use our best performing organic content as our performance marketing creative.
If we do this well we’ll get more out of every piece of content. Every video will serve as both organic and paid media and we’ll reach more customers with great creative that is more consistent with our organic work and we’ll see our CACs on performance marketing go down substantially meaning we can invest more in our top of funnel, reducing CACs further.
Got any advice for me on all my problems?
There’s every chance that someone reading this has already worked out how to solve some of the challenges we’re facing. If that’s you, please slide on into those DMs and save me the trouble of working it out on my own. Appreciate it.
Otherwise, I hope this is useful and I’d strongly recommend you give it a go with your own marketing functions. Let me know how you get on!