Episode 291 / Daniel Mark Carr / Brand & Marketing Director
Going Beyond Dashboards to Save Your Marketing
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Daniel Mark Carr has a 15-year plus career in marketing across start-ups, scale-ups, and big businesses, within lots of taboo industries from adult toys to vaping or medical cannabis. He’s learnt that “real marketing impact happens when you’re challenging people’s perceptions” but also that real insights can be found beyond the dashboards.
To succeed in data driven marketing, you need 3 things, according to Daniel:
Know “some of” the numbers - keep yourself informed of a few key metrics in your area to boost your credibility and anchor your arguments with data
Never present data cold - always send a pre-read and let people absorb your numbers before a meeting or discussion; that way you’ll be focusing on insights and actions, not on where the numbers came from
You have to understand the consumer.
This last point ties in with Daniel’s shiny new object, which is data outside the dashboard. His advice is to not just focus on cold hard numbers, but actually ask why those numbers are there: “Some of the best marketing decisions don’t come from data. They come from conversations with our customers, from human intuition and really having an understanding of the way that people actually buy things.”
You can always manipulate the data to make a campaign look good, but you can’t fake a great product or customer experience.
Tune in to the podcast to hear how to look for the data outside the dashboard and find out what you should become better at saying “no” to.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Daniel Mark Carr 0:00
Don't present data cold and be a consumer first and then a marketer.
Speaker 0:10
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Tom Ollerton 0:37
Hello and welcome to the shiny new object. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of automated creative, the creative effectiveness ad tech platform. And this is a podcast about the future of data driven marketing. How exciting. And this is episode 9,000,002 and every week or so I get the pleasure and the privilege of interviewing one of our industry's leaders, and this week, it's no different. I want to call with Daniel Mark Carr, who was recently the marketing director for Releaf. So Daniel, for anyone who doesn't know who you are and what you do, could you give us a bit of background?
Daniel Mark Carr 1:16
Yeah, absolutely. So thanks Tom, thanks for having me on. I've been really excited about having this chat. For the last 15 years or so, I've been working in brand and marketing, and I've had the opportunity to work with just some incredible brands and products from a variety of industries. I've worked with scrappy startups and hyper growth scale ups, and you know, those big matrix global businesses where just scheduling a meeting feels like a project in itself. And my career started in Shanghai, in China, which, trust me, is a hell of a place to dive head first into marketing. And it was a role where I was marketing luxury, adult, intimate lifestyle objects, which is a very polite and PC way of saying. I was selling high end sex toys to very wealthy people. That job taught me a lot about human psychology, breaking social taboos. I mean, imagine trying to sell something to people when customers don't even want to admit they're buying it. It forces you to become kind of insanely creative and sensitive to cultural nuances and be really razor sharp with your messaging and where you're showing up. It showed me really early on in my career, that real marketing impact, you know, it happens when you're challenging people's perceptions, and that's true whether it's a taboo product or just a misunderstood brand category. Fast forward a few years, I've worked across some other taboo industries, from vaping, intimate hygiene and as you said, most recently, Releaf, which is one of the fastest growing medical cannabis clinics in the UK. But alongside my day to day marketing work, I'm also a trustee, so I'm on the board of the KFC Foundation, and I'll be honest, it's just an incredible way to sharpen your leadership skills and strategic thinking. So I'm a big advocate for being a trustee. I've also recently been fortunate enough to be recognised as a Marketing Week top 20 future leader, and I've just wrapped up an incredible year with the Marketing Academy where I was on their scholarship programme.
Tom Ollerton 3:20
Right, that is a too impressive list of things to have done in your career. So very high levels of expectation from me moving forward. So as much as I want to talk about Chinese sex toys, we've got to move on. What have you become better at saying no to in the last five years when it comes to work?
Daniel Mark Carr 3:38
Yeah. So if there's one thing that I've really improved on in the last five years in general, it's saying no. You know, kind of historical people pleaser here, who's now learning to really set boundaries and kind of go forth with lots of intent and strength, but in a work context, I've become much more confident saying no to reactive work. So over the last few years, I've really worked with startups and scale ups, and in those environments where everything feels like, you know, it's on fire, everyone's idea is just a top priority. It can often feel like you have to say yes to everything, because the next idea could be that silver bullet. But actually what happens next is you get this cycle of reactive work where myself or a marketing team are spending all of our time chasing other people's kind of half baked ideas instead of executing clear strategy. So that's something I've been kind of really working on these last few years, that the power of No, and it's kind of counter to what we're taught at the beginning of our careers. I believe, because we're told, you know, say yes to everything. You never know what's going to happen. You've got to say yes. But there's kind of a turning point, an inflection point, in your career, where actually yes is no longer the magic word, and there's a lot more power behind saying no and keeping that focus.
Tom Ollerton 5:02
So basically, you say the strategy says no, so no, because I'm now too senior to say yes to everything, to say no, because I've got a strategy, you need to stick to it. I am being flippant here. Give me an example of how and when that has worked right, because I'm also a people pleaser at worst and at best. And also I think myself as a strategic person and a leader, but saying no, I'm terrible at it. But so how do you how do you deal with conviction and make it work?
Daniel Mark Carr 5:30
Yeah, I think it's about pushing back with purpose. So it's I don't walk into any meeting room and just say no and rip up an idea and throw it out the window. But I think if you can set clear boundaries early, push back with purpose and ask, what problem does this solve? How is that tying back to our goals? What do we believe this will do that our other activities or initiatives aren't doing it generally makes the person presenting that idea take a pause, take a beat and think, yeah, actually, why? Why am I thinking that? Am I just going on gut appeal, you know, and if the answer isn't clear, then it shouldn't be going on a priority list. I think being very transparent with your priorities, with your leadership team, your team and you know, all of your peers, really is important. Keep reminding people that focus needs to be placed on anything that's going to move the needle, not just kind of shiny new distractions that might come our way. I also think it's important to kind of create a backlog, create a car park for these good ideas. So, you know, I'm always trying to keeping a running list of ideas that maybe aren't urgent for right now, but allow people to feel heard. And you know, you can just lay out the clear expectation that revisit that when resources allow, yeah, I think it's a kind of culmination of those things.
Tom Ollerton 6:56
My objection to that is that kind of, one of the great things about working in this industry is there is all that mad, shiny stuff, sort of, kind of, hence this podcast, wait, like, Do you know what, there's weird thing on Tiktok, that everyone's seen, maybe should get on that. And I'm not saying that it should replace strategy or get in the way of the thing you're going to deliver. And I love that point of, what will this do? That there's something else won't do, but there is a magic and there is that is one of the exciting things about this industry, that there is always something new that you could get involved in. I assume, if we're doing like laying down international underwater cables, things don't move that quickly. I don't know. Maybe, maybe they do. So how would you not just pour cold water on actually, that fire that burns it does make this industry quite special.
Daniel Mark Carr 7:44
Yeah, I think this probably sounds a bit cliche, but showing genuine interest of something that I think a lot of your guests have talked about is, you know, being curious at all times. So if I'm presented with this kind of new idea or the next hot take, I want to find out more. I want to find out how it's come into their mind or it's come across their desk. But I also owe it to not just myself and the team, but to the business by ruthlessly having a focus on the goals and the objectives of an organisation.
Tom Ollerton 8:19
I don't remember who it was, but someone said it's like, you say yes, but not right now. Like, you're not saying no. You're like, Yeah, let's do that. But actually, I'm going to play out my quarter, or whatever it is.
Daniel Mark Carr 8:28
Yeah, look absolutely and I think back in the day, and you know, I'm talking many, many years ago, I always remember a founder was absolutely convinced they'd been out for dinner, and someone over the dinner had told them that, I think it was, it might have been clubhouse. Do you remember clubhouse? So the audio thing, yeah, yeah, the audio on Twitter or x space, and yeah, it was going to be the next hot thing, and it was going to be our number one channel. And, you know, at the time, we didn't have any data to push back. And I think I was very early on in my leadership journey, so I maybe wasn't as bold and as confident in kind of referring to the goals and the objectives and showing this person all of the priorities. So I said, Yes, yes. How exciting. You know, worked through that evening, got to the point of like, ordering mics and looking at talking points, and I think by the time we got there, the platform was tanking, and the person who suggested the idea completely lost interest anyway, and that was a bit of a light bulb moment for me, in that it's not about doing everything, but it's about doing the right things really well.
Tom Ollerton 9:36
So what advice do you have for listeners of this podcast to become better data driven marketers. What is that silver bullet, that kind of killer line that you find yourself sharing most often?
Daniel Mark Carr 9:48
Yeah, so I've be thinking about this, because at the beginning of my career, I was absolutely not a lover of data in any way. I'm far more right brain coded creative. Strategic. And I kind of have three top tips, but I think the first one is really, really basic, and it's just know the numbers, or at least know some of the numbers. I think it's really important to know these, like the back of your hand. Now, you don't need every data point kind of available to your business, but have 345, different key metrics that you can rattle off without even thinking whether that's conversion rates, cost of acquisition, whatever, genuinely spend the time every day, a couple of times a week, just updating those numbers in your head, I think the signal it sends to your peers, colleagues in the business is so strong. You know, this person's really understanding the direction of travel of the business. They're very commercial. They understand how their work drives us forward. So that's absolutely the top tip that I've ever learned. But if it's okay, can I squeeze in two more tips?
Tom Ollerton 10:57
The floor is yours.
Daniel Mark Carr 10:59
Amazing. So my tip number two, never present data cold. So obviously, I'm not talking about, you know, layering up when you do that, but what I mean is never, ever drop a spreadsheet or a data set on stakeholders for the first time in a group setting. I don't think there's anything worse than watching people kind of clamour over a table to squint at an Excel spreadsheet or to start picking apart numbers, because we've all been in those meetings. We've all been around those characters that like to go cell by cell and challenge everything without any context. It's really quite dangerous. It can derail a conversation, and often, I think strangely, it puts everyone on a bit of a defensive so my that's my second top tip is always send a pre read, give people a heads up on what's coming, and provide a little bit of context before you're in that space. And you know that way discussion becomes about insights and actions, not just about the numbers or where they're from. And then my third tip would be, being a marketer, or being a data driven marketer is not just about, you know, staring at dashboards or whatever API the IT team have kind of implemented for you. You have to understand consumerism and think like a consumer. So I think it's really important, you know, sign up to newsletters from brands you admire, from your own brand and business. It's staggering the number of people I speak to who are not signed up to their own company's kind of mailing list. Visit physical shops if you can look at out of home advertising. Don't use ad blockers. You know, let yourself be targeted by the algorithm. It's so important to understand meaning behind data. So they would be my top tips. Get on top of your numbers. Know some of them as the back of your hand. Don't present data cold and be a consumer first and then a marketer.
Tom Ollerton 13:06
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So we're going to move on to your shiny new object now, which is data outside the dashboard, and you've definitely set up camp around this topic already on this podcast. But could you help me understand why you've chosen data outside the dashboard as your shiny new object, and what specifically you mean by that?
Daniel Mark Carr 14:01
Yeah, so for me, this is my shiny new object, and it's something I'm a real advocate for. Businesses and leadership teams are obsessed with dashboards, and I get it. We have to focus on attribution models and understand the analytics that are driving the business. But some of the best marketing, marketing decisions don't come from data. They come from conversations with our customers. They come from human intuition and really having an understanding of the messy, clunky, non linear way that people actually buy things. And so the dashboards show us what happened, but not necessarily why it happened. Now this is always particularly challenging in startups and scale ups where genuinely, generally you won't have annualization, but you can be lulled into a false sense of security that your campaign structure is, you know, driving all the KPIs in the direction that we need. But if you've not got a year of trading data, you're a bit blind to kind of seasonality or understanding frequency of purchase, and data also often misses those first sparks of interest when we're talking very top of funnel, that random conversation, that bus that went past, or that viral Tik Tok, no attribution really can... can trace that. And so I believe it's really important to balance the data driven insights that we have available to us with kind of human intuition and understanding of the world in which we operate.
Tom Ollerton 15:43
So how do you do that, right? So it makes sense. And interestingly, the more senior data driven marketers that you speak to, the more that advice comes back that, yes, you need a dashboard, yes, you need data, yes, you need to prove ROI and track what happened. But why? That's a whole other thing, right? So how do you do it? How would you go about providing that was the word you use of mushy or gooey data alongside, like hard one, hard, cold ones and zeros. What's the what's the method for balancing those two things?
Daniel Mark Carr 16:15
Yeah, I don't think there's really a silver bullet. I think it's important that we understand the data that's moving the needle. So the number of times that I see people focused on vanity metrics, it's just, you know, drives me, drives me mad. I think we have to stop optimising for those vanity metrics alone. I think we need to think long term around brand building and lifetime value, and not just on acquisition. So particularly in a startup and scale up environment, there's a really kind of short term view. Understandably, you want to get that week sales, get those months targets, but you have to have a focus and have some consideration for what's bringing customers back to you. You know that top of funnel spend is not just a temporary fix. I also think we need to use data as guard rails, not as a not as kind of a road map. You know? I think if dashboards are the key to business growth, then you wouldn't need marketers. You just need people to kind of tweak the algorithm.
Tom Ollerton 17:27
So when you're going into an advisor company, what are the things that you look out for when people are falling foul of not looking at the data outside the dashboard. What I'm getting at is imagine someone's listening to this podcast, thinking I'm, a founder or a Sales Officer or revenue person. How do you know when you're not looking at the data outside the dashboard? What are the telltale signs?
Daniel Mark Carr 17:48
So I think the telltale signs are people who are not looking beyond a dashboard, I would say a relentless focus on one or two numbers, like the ROAs of this campaign. The secret is you can pretty much manipulate data to make any campaign look good, but you can't fake a great product or a great customer experience. So when I'm in those environments, one thing I'm always very keen to discuss and pick up with these brand owners is that customer experience really trumps campaign data absolutely every time. If your product isn't good or your customer experience is broken, all you're doing is speeding up how fast people will drop you. So I think some telltale signs would be really low retention, low kind of checkout basket spend, and when I talk about data from outside a dashboard. These sorts of insights come from talking to your customer service team, talking directly to customers. And while startups might not have big budgets for marketing research and insights and consumer panels, sometimes all you need is a 5-10, minute conversation with a customer, understanding why they haven't purchased again that month, understanding what made them click on that ad in the first place.
Tom Ollerton 19:04
And is there a you said, there's not a silver bullet for this, but is there a structure? I love that idea that, yeah, you're a time strapped founder person try to scale your business, and you're, well, you know, a 10 minute call, you know, is that? Is that level one and then it's level two, like 100 person survey? Or is there a process you can teach us to follow.
Daniel Mark Carr 19:22
I don't think there's a playbook as such, but I think when you're in these environments, and you know, when you're talking to founders or solo entrepreneurs, they're very creative, the brand that they're working on is their baby. You know, understandably, they would die for their business. And that's one of the amazing things about working with founder led business, actually. But what you can also find is that there's a real echo chamber. There's no concept in their mind that people might not like your brand or might not like your product. So I try to ask people to become very neutral. You know, don't be shy about your brand or your product's benefits, but also just be quite neutral. Talk to your customers, talk to prospects who have abandoned the checkout flow as well. So in a brand that I've worked with recently, we got some amazing insights from kind of exit intent. So we were able to data capture up front, and as soon as people were dropping off, we were literally getting an automated action to reach out to that individual and ask them what it was that kind of made them abandon that checkout flow. So I don't think there's a playbook as such. It's about using the resources that are available to you. So there is no silver bullet, as I said, there's no playbook that you can just roll out to any business. I think it's really important to take a neutral stance on your brand or business. So in the startup space, when you're working with founders and entrepreneurs, they have a relentless love for their products. That's one of the things that's really great about working in those environments. Unfortunately, with that becomes almost a disbelief that people wouldn't want their product or that there's better products or services out there. And I think your dashboard, well, it shows you numbers your customer's experience really tells the truth. And so if you are able to just speak to one customer a week, that is an absolutely fantastic start. If you're not able to talk to a paying customer, then give your friend or a family member free access to your platform or a free product, and you know, pick their brains on what they think you really need, that truthful you know, you need that dose of truth about the bad things as well as the good to make progress.
Tom Ollerton 21:37
So interesting, because I think about my exit experience of various products, right, you know? And it's all glitz and glamour at the start, isn't it? And then it's like, right, I no longer want to subscribe to this thing for 15 quid, or whatever it is. Then some people try and make it hard for you. Here's like, 20% off next month, or, you know, please don't leave us. And then there's when they give up. There's always that, like, grey box saying, Why did you leave this service? Like, five options and then other and then that's it. But what you're saying is, it's fascinating that actually, that's got all the good stuff in it, but, yeah, it's got no design resource applied to it. There's no like, we'll give you a fiver or a tenner or whatever, just if you tell us why you didn't like this service, or would you take a phone call, that's so interesting the the point in which they leave, and probably gonna be most honest at that point, maybe as well. So that's a fascinating idea.
Daniel Mark Carr 22:35
You'd be surprised. On the power of an Amazon voucher, people are always willing to kind of give their insights and their feedback. And, you know, I think we're conditioned. The human mind is actually conditioned to be kind of more negative than it is positive. And you see that if you look at, you know, review websites, the majority of reviews are going to be really negative and sour, because you go online to talk about a bad experience, not necessarily a good experience. So a lot of people actually would feel empowered if they didn't go through with your purchase. Having someone reach out with a personal message saying, I'd love to speak to you for five minutes. You know, under getting that real flavour from them, because understanding what page or what stage of a checkout flow people are dropping out on. Yeah, that's really interesting, but I think it could lead you to fixing the wrong things.
Tom Ollerton 23:26
That is a wonderful place to leave it. Daniel, for anyone who wants to get in touch with you, where's the best place to do that and what makes an outreach message that you will respond to?
Daniel Mark Carr 23:37
Yeah look, if so, if anyone today feels that something I've said really resonates. Perhaps they're a founder or a leader in a startup or scale up, who's looking for some help cutting through the marketing noise, then LinkedIn is definitely the place to reach me on I would say, just reach out. Say hi, say hello. Please don't invite me to a webinar. I have much more of a preference or a phone call, pick up the phone, let us have a chat, and let's go from there.
Tom Ollerton 24:05
Daniel, thank you so much.
Daniel Mark Carr 24:06
Thanks, Tom.
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