Maor Benaim and Philipp Schoeffmann chat about retargeting and remarketing strategies, plus more at Affiliate World Europe 2018 in Barcelona.

Interview with Maor Benaim | CEO, Wolf Marketing

By Philipp Schoeffmann

Interview Transcript

Phil:
Fantastic, and you’ve just been onstage at Affiliate World Europe 2018 here in fantastic Barcelona. And you shared a lot about your pixel strategy actually and how to use pixels to really scale.
Maor:
Yeah and I think that retargeting and remarketing, the correct use of the amazing technology we have is like, people who don’t use it are crazy, you know? The technology is so amazing right now that if you take advantage of maybe 25-30% you can kill it. Imagine knowing more. Duplicating that, duplicating your ROI and the experience of being onstage right now at Affiliate World Conference.
Phil:
This is extremely valuable. You’re speaking about a strategy that actually brought you like 400% ROIs and really helped you scale as far as I know. So maybe you can share with us three to four main takeaways.

Squeezing more from the lemon: Retargeting and Remarketing

Maor:
Okay, so let me start off by saying first of all, the most amazing thing is that because I’m an agency owner, an affiliate. I do lead gen, I do e-comm, I do everything from a lot of industries. I got to really test it by myself and not like hear from other guys or read case studies. And to really try and implement that on each and every type of platform and campaign. And there is no single platform that doesn’t work. That’s the first thing. Even if you heard about one of your biggest competitors trying to do that and it doesn’t work out for them, they are doing something wrong. I can tell you, there are no excuses not to use retargeting and remarketing. That’s the biggest thing right now for me in online marketing.

Segmenting Your Audiences

And what I do basically, is I segment the audiences. I take those big audiences that my clients or me have. And I segment it according to that specific marketing strategy and to that product. So if I know that I have an engaging site, I would send them to a more engaging lander than a normal site. If I know that I have old people and I have young people in that audience, I would segment that accordingly. And that moves all of the funnels. The segmentation is connected to the funnel, is connected to the creatives, is connected to the landing pages. And of course, everything needs to be connected to a really good tracker that tracks everything. That’s a big tip that I gave in my speech right now, which is connecting those SMS messages, boost messages, emails, to the click ID on Google and Facebook. So that the conversion window won’t be just one day after click. Because a lot of people aren’t that stupid anymore, you know. When you try and book a hotel, okay, you search for reviews online, you want to see videos, you want to see the room before you book. And you can see it, people are not stupid. They search for stuff. So do that.

Introducing: “Native” Search Remarketing

The third thing, if there’s one thing I would suggest anyone to do is what I called the “Native Search Campaign,” which is really creating a white label site, not related to your branding at all. And I gave the example of mattresses. So if you’re selling a specific mattress or a brand of mattresses, just search remarket, that means when a person comes from Taboola, Outbrain, Facebook, it doesn’t matter. And then he searches for one of your competitors or that specific brand itself. You’ll have a site that reviews mattresses and it’s native, completely. I’ve been doing it for like three or four of my clients landing right now and that’s the last campaign they would kill if they had to. And it’s generating a lot of revenue for their business.
Phil:
Fantastic. Wow, that’s amazing so basically you’re capturing that traffic, you have a review site, obviously, your product is the best?
Maor:
Yeah, so maybe I’ll have like a specific review site sometimes. Sometimes, it would be just a WordPress site. And sometimes, I like aggregation sites where I have like top ten, whatever, top ten mattresses if we’re using the same example, yeah.

Difference Between Affiliate and Agency

Phil:
Okay, that’s fantastic. So share a little bit about the different worlds of affiliate and agency. What kind of agency do you run?
Maor:
So the difference, the main difference between being an affiliate and agency, of course, a lot of stuff, if I had to choose one big one, I’d say scale. So when you want to scale as an affiliate, it’s just you and the decision making. You just decide and you’re taking a big action and you’re doing it. When you have a client in an agency, you really have to convince them. It’s a bit like being married, I don’t know if you’re married or not, but it’s like you have to convince the other party to do everything you want, okay? And yeah, so you really have to convince that partner to do whatever you want. And that’s like the transition I think a lot of agencies are going to go through. Or at least I think that should happen, is that the agency should really be a partner or the affiliate should be a partner of the agency. Because right now it feels like the interests really don’t collide. Sometimes for my clients they feel like I want to squeeze more budget out of them so I would earn more.

Find the Right Clients

Phil:
Yeah, I agree. So how do you go forward then with finding the right kind of clients because there’s a couple of things that you really want to get right if you go to an agency. Having the right clients is one of the core elements.
Maor:
So the first filter I would say is the budget. Of course I won’t take clients that are spending less than 20k a month on each platform at least. The second thing is that I see myself as a boutique scale agency. So we don’t really have the time and patience to really mentor clients. If you have an idea or you have something, we don’t take startups for example. We don’t go through the process of really escorting the start of every product in the company. We like to take companies that are already converting, that’s already —
Phil:
That makes a lot of sense.
Maor:
Yeah, because when you take a client that’s just starting, most of the times, the product is going to fail or the client is going to have something. And you would lose the client after up to three months. And that’s where you put on the most resources to really signing the client, and getting the campaign, and resources and creatives up. So I see myself as a scaling agency where I take products. I never ask my clients to leave if they have another advertising agency or affiliate or someone. I never ask them to do that. What I do is I just take another account, open them up and start running them. And I like that so much because when they compare results between those agencies, affiliates or media buyers, I always win. So that’s why I like it the most.

Bonus Tip: Never Stop Learning

Phil:
Alright, thank you so much. Any last tip that you would give to people here at Affiliate World. What they should do while here or preparing for the next show?
Maor:
Yeah, so it’s really easy to get stuck as an affiliate with running an offer and doing the day by day. So my biggest tip would be to really open up, learn from other people because a lot of affiliates think that they know everything. You don’t know what you don’t know. Right? And you need to remind yourself that every day, in and out of the affiliate marketing world and industry. So just remember, you can never be full and just keep learning all the time. Outside of your comfort zone, that’s what I did. It was crazy. It was a nightmare and then it was amazing.
Phil:
Thank you so much, Maor.