182. How To Align Marketing With Business Goals with Francesco Alfano

Everyone was trying to communicate everything and as short a time as possible from a paid standpoint. And I understand that you're vying for attention, but I still feel that good content is worth watching and has a longer impact on a customer base. Welcome to the Mastering E-commerce Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Eitan Koter, co-CEO of Vimy. In an era of rising acquisition costs and increased competition, this podcast is dedicated to helping you drive sales, engage customers and build meaningful communities so you can turn passive visitors into active buyers. Don't forget to subscribe so you won't miss out on future content. Now, let's get started with the episode. Hey, Francesco, how are you? Welcome to the show. Hey, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. I mean, we had the Pratt call, I think, a while back. I'm really excited about your experience and knowledge and great value of bringing the beach to medium and leader, but also about your specific take on a career in marketing. And how do you work? How do you build teams? How do you work with your boss? And how do you maintain the culture of growth and learning and continuous development and optimization? But before we dive in, Francesco, I'd like I'd like you just to start with a quick introduction of about yourself. Sure. Yeah. My name is Francesco Alfano. I'm based in Toronto, Canada. I've spent over 12 years now working in media marketing on a brand performance standpoint, having spent time in agencies, really getting my hands on platforms, executing, reporting. And now we're in my current role, I'm a marketing leader, I manage teams. And it's really about how do we take the business strategy, how do we then turn that into an executional strategy and how do we report that back to the business to show the impact of our performance? So, yeah, I'm happy to be here. I was really excited when you reached out. So I'm looking forward to this conversation. Great. So, Francesco, before we dive in, as I ask all my guests, if you can choose like three words that are most important to you, probably describe better your belief, your thoughts. Yeah, I would say that I'm, I'm passionate, I'm engaged, and I'm interested. So I think for me, passion needs to be at the forefront of everything you do. If not, you end up presenting what you're doing, you don't really push yourself. So for me, for better or worse, I am passionate about it, believe in, and I'm not afraid to have a counterpoint to the popular narrative if I believe in it. And I know that it's coming from an educated place. So in marketing, I routinely have conversations with people where I'll pull up the data and the data will tell them something they don't want to hear about. But that's the fact that I'm passionate about the truth. So I will push on that. And that extends to my personal life. Everything that I do, the relationships that I have, the interests I have, it's all based on passion. I would say engagement falls within that. So what I put my time towards, I'm very engaged in. I'm always trying to push the envelope. I'm trying to learn more. I'm trying to ask questions. And to me, I feel like engagement is something that is not always given. You know, if you're not interested in what you're doing, you're not going to be engaged, which brings me to my third word of interested. I routinely have conversations with people in professional and personal life where I'll just ask them questions. I'm not there to force a conversation. I'm more interested in, tell me more about that. OK, you're doing this thing and you're learning this tech. Who's the vendor? What's the platform? Often people have asked me, why are you asking this? It doesn't even pertain to you. But for me, I'm interested in understanding the bigger picture so that I know where I fit in and how we all work best together. Right. It's just having this I don't know anything mentality, right? And just ask questions and try to understand. So I'll say at the rate of development now, right, you're never going to stay up to speed on everything. So you need to humble yourself and go, who do I learn what from and then really reach out to them and ask them as many questions as they're willing to answer. Got it. Got it. You mentioned initially company strategy. And so how do you make sure company strategy is aligned, you know, with day to day team goals and tasks and overall activities? For me, the biggest part is trying to understand what are the business goals? It's not always clear. You know, the business goal is always to drive profit and margin and total transactions. And that's great. But project to project, it's not always clear. Is this an awareness program? Is this a conversion tactic? Is this a lead gen campaign? And sometimes the business doesn't have those answers. So that's where you need to ask, engage and ask the questions to your leadership team to say, what does success look like in this program? And then decide on that together. And then from there, bringing your team along. So they understand the bigger purpose. You're not just sending an email, you're driving a campaign to drive an engagement or awareness strategy of a new product that's launching. And this is a soft rollout. The larger rollout will be happening in six months. We're trying to get learnings to date. So I think providing as much context as possible really helps because I know when I was on teams, the the biggest gap for me was why are we doing this? And if you don't know your why, you're not going to be interested. You're not going to be engaged. You're not going to be passionate. So for me, it's really about understanding what the business needs, relaying that to the team, and then bringing them up to speed throughout that whole process and giving them updates so that they know, is it working? Is it being positively received or not? Yeah. And when we talk about all these powerful words of strategy, company strategy, strategies in marketing, what do we actually mean? Right. What are the major components of a good, good marketing or a good company strategy? I think having a measurable outcome is number one. So yes, you want to drive sales, but in how long of a timeframe are you looking for? What is your target return on ad spend? Um, what is an awareness KPI? You know, I've done a lot of brand programs where clients could afford research that would validate brand lift. And most times they don't have the budget because some of these studies are cost prohibitive. Then what is that measure of success? So I think for me, it's really about quantifying the work and knowing where the gaps may be. If you're managing an entire marketing team where you have email, paid, organic, social, uh, digital flyer, you may not have a mixed media model you can rely on. And maybe mixed media models aren't even the be all end all, but if you know, you can't quantify everything together. You have to be realistic with your leadership team and say, you know, this email was not meant to drive a ton of sales. It was meant to do this part of the funnel. And here we can measure and here's what the gaps are. So obviously insights, measurements, like data is like a core aspect of everything. Um, and Dr. You get it. I mean, the way you just transitioned this into real day to day tasks for the team, how team culture is connected to all of this. Yeah. I think for me, a good team culture exceeds the sum of its parts because teams care about one another. Teams know when it's their time to shine, where it's their time to lay back. And I always do that. And I actually enjoy when we have a presentation and I let the team lead it and I don't need to be the center of attention. My role is to be support for you. So I think a team culture is built on knowing that people are feeling heard or respected or trusted, and then people take pride in their day and they want to do their best. Cause I, I actually believe people want to do their best and they try their best. And often it's despite their situation where they're not loving where they are. But no, I have a personal ambition to do the best I can every day. So I think as a leader, it's seeing those things, it's hearing those things. It's having the conversation and, and try to understand what each person needs and what they want. It's a one size fits all solution. You know, my preferred way of working may not be your preferred way of working, but even understanding that will make someone feel like they're more valued because they're being respected and how they work. So I think culture is everything. Best cultures. Those are the best teams, you know, in sports, the same thing. Like talent only takes you so far, but if you don't have the camaraderie or the, the connectedness, you're not going to really care. You're going to just do your thing. And I love being part of the team myself. So I, I try to think of what do I want. Yeah. And all of this, you'll think is driven by marketing leaders out there. And let's say in your example, by you to your, towards your team, or it's like a top down thing, or it's like bottom up or maybe a sweet combination. And I think culture is something that ultimately an organization sets because it's the parameters that you are working within. So I've been in various organizations and they all have their own standard culture. But then I also think as a leader, you need to take it on yourself to say, okay, here's the culture that we're in, but we don't have to do everything the culture demands of us. We can make our own culture in that. So I think as a leader, you need to champion it, but it doesn't have to come from your leader because sometimes leaders maybe don't have the capacity or they don't have the tools to really build a team. So it can come bottom up. But I think when it's organizational leadership driven, it's a lot easier for people to feel like they're not going against the culture, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And how do you know, right? Uh, what's important for your boss, what's important for your company. Yeah. I think from a company standpoint, it's usually pretty clear. I mean, sales, transactions, margin, that's what companies are graded on success or failure. But I think understanding what your boss's priorities are, help you prioritize your day to day. So certain roles that I've had, total transaction was my boss's KPI. Are we hitting transaction numbers? So then knowing that I won't be concerned so much with the margin side of things, because that's the business intelligence team. That's what they're focusing on, on a merchandising level. But for our team to succeed, we need to drive whatever our KPI is. So I think it's having those conversations, it's being interested, it's understanding, what does your day look like? Because if I know what your day is, I can anticipate what your needs will be, what success and failure is to you. And then we'll all build behind that together. Interesting. So this obviously requires like a very high level of communication internally, right? Both vertically and horizontally. And it's really, you know, it's not so easy to do in high pressure environments that we work today. So how do you recommend people to navigate this type of, you know, high pressure environments that are always, you know, available in organization? Yeah, I think there's always pressure. There's always a target. The target is always growing. But I think as a leader, it's on you to keep things in perspective, to say, look, we all make a mistake sometimes. Don't beat yourself up about it. You know, and then just having that transparency whenever you are having a conversation with your team. Either it's on a project basis or it's a weekly connect on a one-on-one, whatever the case may be. But I think over-communicating is not a bad thing because then people know what's going on. And then as we all have, a request will come and it doesn't make sense. And you go, why am I doing this? So if you get the background to say, here's why we're doing it, here's the pieces that you don't know, it's a lot easier for people to understand their purpose. Yeah, clear, clear. So Francesco, how, I mean, you talk a lot about personal brand, right? So this will be my next topic on our chat today, how your personal brands, you know, help you in the years, you know, from moving from agency to brand side roles. And why, why you think for other marketeers, you know, listening and watching us, personal branding is so important today. Yeah, I think, I think brand gets a bad rap usually when it's fake, you know, I think a lot of people want to maintain an image that isn't real. But what I really think about when I think about my own personal brand is what are people saying about me when I'm not in the room? You know, when you and I are hanging out and I'm a, I'm a potential client and you're a vendor, I'm your best friend, you know, but then when I'm not there, what are you saying about me? And, and that goes beyond work. Even in my personal life, I want to feel like my identity, what people think of me as is, is having integrity, is being honest. It's not trying to cut corners. Um, it's having a hard conversation when neither of us are really wanting to have it, but it needs to be had. So I think for me, maintaining your brand is what are people thinking about you? What are they saying about you? And for me, I've really built my career on having integrity and being transparent. So if I would RFP a rep, for instance, when I was in my agency time and it was a quick turnaround, I would just say, send me an Excel with your CPMs. I don't need to see the whole deck. I don't want you working until 10 PM at night. Cause you might not get on this buy. And then when, when they're not on the buy, giving them the reason why, okay, well, we've invested here. We've pulled budget from there. And then you leave that conversation feeling like, okay, well, you know, we did our best. We tried what we could. Uh, and then doing that over a long period of time, that becomes your brand. Yeah. And this is something you look at. I mean, you really look to hire a new, new members of your team, like personal branding. And it's really important. I think, you know, marketers today, obviously it's often the job description about brand building, content creation. You're putting yourself out there, but I think it's so important, right. For you as a person, but also for the company. So it's a real advantage, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. How personal branding helps, you know, the company, not just you, the company itself. I think your brand helps you in your career because people, they know what you're the expert in, you know, for me, I'm a digital marketing expert. I've been in this field for 12 plus years. I've worked on every scale account, large account, Canadian account, international account. Um, so when I enter an organization, that's who I am. I'm the marketing expert. I'm in the conversations with, uh, a vice president about here's the marketing strategy. Here's the channel strategy. I'm deciding those things. I'm driving those conversations. So I think having a clear identity means people know what to reach out to you for and what you're going to take and be accountable with. Yeah. And you mentioned you've been, you know, been doing this for like more than a decade. Obviously so many things has changed, right? I mean, there is no like, um, like a single channel that you can focus on just, you know, skate with it. I mean, those days are over. Uh, you need to be much smarter, right? Just to try to learn more about any channel, maybe operate in every channel. So how do you see marketing evolved and I'm looking forward in an era of AI or what are your thoughts about, you know, the right, you know, mix of marketing activities, channels, where, where your brand should focus? Yeah. The, the change has been tremendous and it's been accelerating. So every year there's more and more and more things. Uh, there's a new vendor you've never heard of. And all of a sudden they're the number one platform and then they go away. And, um, so I think for me, it's really about having a great network of people around me that I can reach out to across all forms of the industry. That helps me stay up to speed, um, attending conferences, helps watching webinars, listening to podcasts. I think you need to have an appetite for knowledge. Now you have to seek it out. It's not how it was 20, 30 years ago, where you learn how to buy TV, you learn how to buy radio, and now you buy on a cost per point and, and that's your role. You're a TV buyer. Those days are over. You need to know how to use all these platforms. You need to be able to get into the platforms, which is something that I've really done my whole career. I've been a campaign manager across social media, across Google ads, uh, built reporting dashboards, uh, traffic campaigns, you name it. So now when I'm in the role that I'm in, I can just pull up the screen and share that screen with my boss and say, uh, yeah, it's a good question. Let's see how Meta ads is performing. Pull it up, take a look. You could do an analysis yourself. So I think you need to be versed. You need to be in platform. And then in terms of AI, I don't think anyone really knows where things are going. I think for me, the biggest hurdle I see may never be crossed is integration between other platforms. Why would Meta want to give Google their first party data? Why would, why would Google want to provide that to Meta? Why would TikTok want to give information? So I think we're only going to get so far with everything becoming seamless and totally integratable. There's still going to need to be a human element because I think a lot of people are concerned about where do I fit in as a human being in a machine ecosystem? I think there's going to be a need for people, but the needs may change, but the integration portion, I don't think is going to be solved anytime soon. So until that happens, we're only going to get so far with marketing and AI. Specifically in terms of tech stack, right? Roughly, how many tools do you use, you know, the day to day, you know, job today? Are we talking about ads platform, analytics platforms, or stuff like that? You're asking everything in marketing, you know, marketing, you know, SMS, analytics side. So at least 10 plus or more, at least. Yeah. How do you, how do you evaluate, you know, performance wise in terms of how these tools are working together, how fast it gives you clarity on what's happening and flexibility and agility to update quickly and make changes? I mean, how do you evaluate this overall performance of all these architectures and tools? Yeah. I think the first thing is knowing where all the limitations are, you know, so doing e-commerce, what's the attribution model? Is that favoring one platform versus another? How much weight do you provide a view through conversion? You know, obviously you want to track a sale and you want to know who's buying from where, but how many touch points did it take to drive that sale? And then the other part, offline attribution. Every vendor is selling an offline attribution model. None of those vendors consider another vendor in their competitive set. So it's really difficult to build a clean report that says, here's all the platforms that we executed in. Here's a sale. Here's what each of those contributed, because there's so many interactions happening that don't get tracked, let alone offline. How do you track someone seeing a billboard and seeing a connected TV ad and then social and email and then buying? It's so fragmented that I think you need to understand where all the limitations are. And then you need to look at business intelligence results to give you a bigger picture. So did we drive sales increase when we were in market with this campaign? Yes or no. If it didn't, it failed. If that's your goal, because you can look at the channel performance, but ultimately the business didn't improve. And then doing a deeper dive on that to understand, are you executing your campaigns correctly? What are the metrics you're getting out of your platforms? What's the attribution modeling? And then it's a bit of an art to say, here's what all these data points are saying, because there is no one source of truth. Yeah, it's difficult because, you know, you have so many pieces of information out there that it's like something overwhelming where to focus and what's really happening. And what excites you right now in marketing? What do you see is like a really exciting, really interesting opportunity out there? Yeah, I feel like we've gone to a place where everyone was trying to communicate everything in as short a time as possible from a paid standpoint. And I understand that, you know, you're vying for attention, people see through an ad, but I still feel that good content is worth watching and has a longer impact on a customer base. So I feel like integrations, longer form content, curating a deep engagement with your audience. I think that's where it's heading. I think the quick soundbites, those are great. It's great to kind of catch someone's attention. But then what? You can't just serve someone five seconds worth of content every day. You need to then create a bigger engagement strategy. How do you nurture them? How do you make them an advocate? How do they really love your product? So I think it's a bit of an old school marketing approach, but I almost feel like we've gotten to such a short time span now that I don't know how that continues. Like how much shorter can you make an ad? Is it one second? You know, I don't know how much, how much less attention we're going to be vying for. So I think there needs to be a bit of a shift back to true engagement, building your brand, building an advocacy. Yeah. Because if you're really interested in finding a solution for something, right. You spend time, right. Yeah. You will wish you always on YouTube just to get, oh yeah, to get, you know, to learn about something and just to figure it out. Nobody's making a, a high purchase item investment without doing research and the research is YouTube. It's watching videos. It's listening to interviews. Right. So I think because the industry has shifted to metrics, vanity metrics, cost for completed view, uh, you know, uh, ROAS. Okay. Those are good numbers, but are you just racing to the bottom? Because you're trying to hit a number. Are you actually building a strategy for your brand? Yes. Yes. Um, Francesco, how do you approach, uh, you know, budget in marketing and, you know, justifying your initiative and investment, investment in digital strategy? I think it's understanding what the business needs are and putting business cases together to show the value. So. Oh, if you're using a organic social platform, but you have no social listening capabilities and you have limitations on how many platforms and there's, there's so many tools you're not taking advantage of that are basically benchmarks for the industry, you need to understand how do you position that to a senior leadership team to say, this is worth investing in. So that's where I think you need to be able to speak to them on their language. What is, why do I need this? Why do I care? That's how I usually think these conversations are. I need, I need more budget. Well, why, why do I need this? Why do you need this for? Here's what we need to afford. Here's the risk. Here's the benefit. Selling that through really helps your cause and doing that well means knowing the offering. So really investing the time with your vendors to understand in depth. Okay. Yes. You're giving me a list of things I'll be able to afford. Is everyone else doing this in my industry? Yes. Uh, what else can we take advantage of? What are other opportunities that we're not using that people unlock and then positioning that? And I think usually that is the best approach. Got it. Got it. What are some of the tips you can provide to other, you know, marketing's out there, you know, going to, uh, the end of 2025. And what's important to say, what to prioritize. Prioritize your wellbeing. Fair. Number one, because you know, different companies have different fiscal year ends. Let's say we're following a calendar year and November, December are nuts. Everyone is being overwhelmed. There's so many things being asked of you. You can't lose sight of yourself in that. So what I would tell people is to be honest, have those conversations. If you're feeling like you're being asked too much up, don't just say yes. I routinely say no. And I think that's a powerful word because it gives you control. Some things you can't say no to, but what you can say no to is, okay, here's 10 more requests. I don't have the bandwidth. So what needs to be negotiated away from this time? And it's a tough conversation to have because nobody wants to hear no. But sometimes if you don't hear no, you have a team of people that are burning out and you're not even aware of it and their mental wellbeing is struggling. So I would say what I would advise to marketers for their year end is take care of yourself. Nice. How do you take care of yourself? Allocating time to things that I love. So I spend a lot of time with my family, my girlfriend, with friends, um, things that fulfill me. And that way, when I, when I get back to work, I'm fulfilled. I'm energized. I'm ready to go. And I can give my best self and, and establishing boundaries where if I'm on a vacation, somebody else needs to be able to pick up the backfill. We all should be able to do that. If you have an emergency come up, take the day. And that's what I always tell my teams are. If you need the time, I trust, you know, what your workload is. Just tell me. I'll rarely ever say no because life gets in the way of everything. So you need to take care of that. You need to prioritize yourself or you're not good to anybody else. Yes. Just making the decision to spend time with yourself. It doesn't matter what you do. It's going to be movement, social, whatever the hobbies thing you do is just foundational for building resilience and just moving away from burnout. And this is a very important topic. For what we think employers realize just because you're not at your keyboard doesn't mean you're not thinking about work. A lot of my breakthroughs come when I'm not working on the weekend, I'll be running an errand and I'll go, Oh, that's what I got to do next week. And then I'll file it away. And the first thing I do Monday is that task. No one's paying me for that time, but I had the space from it. Think clearly. And so it's counterintuitive when people see a boundary that you put in place, but then they realize that that person's there every day and they're giving their best effort and they're, they're doing what's asked. So I'm not comfortable with it, but they're pulling their under the bargain, so I have to accept it. Yes. Interesting. Just moving your mind to this default mode, right? When you can stop, you know, daydreaming and innovating, having those aha moments. All right. Something happened here on the weekend and I love it. No one really pays you for that time. Right. It was a major shift doing things. Yeah. Cause your brain works in the background. You know, that's what I always think. It's if I'm not really getting a resolution on something, I need, I need to just walk away and your brain is still going through it, but you're not conscious of it. And then when you revisit it, you go, Oh wow, it was there the whole time. You can't see that when you're too close to it. Nice. Great. Francesco, thank you so much. So how people can find you and reach out to you? LinkedIn. That's the best place to find me. Um, Francesco Afano, you'll see me there. And, uh, yeah, I'd love to connect, meet other marketers in the space for me. It's always about how do I learn more? How do I inform myself? And the best way I found to do that is there's other experts in the field. So please feel free to reach out. Wonderful. Francesco, thank you so much for your time. We wish you all wishing you all the best and thank you so much. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. 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