987: Qry E-Commerce Marketing Agency: Level Up Your Ecommerce Business with Samir Balwani

Robert Plank 00:05 Hey, welcome back to the podcast. We're here with Samir Belani. He is the CEO and the founder of query. And their website is we are q ry.com. Query is really good at scaling brands. They're an E commerce marketing agency. So Samir is going to tell us some fun and amazing stories about his unique secret sauce and what he does and his failures and successes and what we can learn from him. So Samir, super great talking to you.

Unknown Speaker 00:31 Thanks for having me. I'm

Robert Plank 00:32 really excited to chat. And I'm excited to chat to you. And so this is your show. This is your floor. So what has you focus these days? What has you passionate, what has you just excited to start the week sometimes?

Unknown Speaker 00:44 Yeah, I mean, I'm telling you right now is a really fun time to be an econ. I mean, it is challenging right now with with just how consumers are spending. But I think that's what makes it really interesting and exciting. So, you know, in the retail world, there's so much opportunity for people to get get in front of people to find ways to engage with them. And with the fact that it's always changing. It's always something interesting to try and something new to do. So what what are we excited about right now? You know, I think for anyone that's been in our industry, the whole transition from Google Analytics from UA Universal Analytics to GA for has been a really fun, and I say fun sarcastically experience, but it's definitely led a lot of our clients and our teams to really think through. Okay, well, what does attribution and measurement really mean for a lot of our clients? And how are we thinking about it more holistically, versus just, you know, dollars in dollars out, really thinking about it from a brand perspective as well. And so that is definitely one of the things that we are really leaning into really excited about helping our clients really understand what is the best way for them to measure the results of their campaigns, and how to move forward from there.

Robert Plank 02:00 And you know, you're tapping into something that I think is really important, which is this idea of thinking, right? And it's it's easy to think maybe at the wrong time, or to not think enough and to be like, Oh, well, I made that plan six months ago, and then I did all the stuff. And it seems like what a lot of the e Commerce Guys and the analytics type of guys are really good at is on knowing when to kind of shift back and forth, right, because it's really easy to not take any action and just be stuck in thinking mode and have all these master plans, and then you don't get anywhere versus you take all this action and you just on a runaway freight train. And you're not going back and being kind of slow and deliberate and looking at the data almost obsessively. And so whenever I talked to a commerce guy such as yourself, I always asked kind of like, how do we tap into this sort of recurring obsession? Because it seems like the kind of thing where if you're not careful, then you're missing all these pieces in your business, you're not looking at the data, you're not making these good decisions. So how do we become the type of kind of like more on purpose obsessive business owners? Yeah, it's

Unknown Speaker 03:03 really funny, because I think EUCOM has the tendency to have this frenetic pace to it. And I blame like Shopify app where every time it dings, every time or purchases goes through, like people just feel that like energy that they need to really focusing on every individual transaction and see what happened. And, and that myopic view that that microscopic view in terms of each transaction, each thing that's happening, you start to lose sight around the overarching strategy or things. And so that's actually I think one of the biggest mistakes that most ECAM marketers do is they overly focus on little day to day hour to hour trends, instead of really looking at the whole, and, you know, we do a really good job, and we push our clients to really think, okay, is this a blip? Or is this you know, a thing that we should really be focusing in on? Because, you know, I think a lot of people make the mistake. So yes, you should think and then action, it's not enough to just think you have to action on it. But you also have to remember that action costs money, and actually doing things means that you're taking a risk. And so if you, let's say, your hit rate on making the right decision is 70%, which would be great. Like no one's 100%, let's say you're 70 to 80%, right on on an action, that still means you're making 20 to 30% of the wrong decisions. So if you make a lot of decisions really fast, and that rate comes down to 50%, it's going to cost you a lot of a lot of money. So why not make sure that you're very thorough and very confident in the decisions that you're making versus you're just changing things for changing sake. You should really understand what the expectation is. And so that forces you to think and forces you to take a step back and be like, should I actually change this or am I doing this? Because I'm nervous or feel like we have to change something just to change something or I'm getting swept dug in the, in kind of what's happening around me. And so yeah, creating these roadblocks to force us to stop and look around is really key.

Robert Plank 05:10 That's some really deep thinking that there might be some uncomfortable truths. And if you haven't yet grown and scaled your business, then it's like a blank canvas. And everything's important anything is possible. But then once you get all these things in place, once you have all the sales coming in, and you have like the workflow and the employees, and all that the website and all these things are kind of careful carefully delicately in place, then suddenly, priorities matter, right. And it's like, if you might do something that makes you kind of uncomfortable, like, I mean, we've all we're all in these systems where there's all these different pieces kind of strung together, right. And like I had this conversation a couple months ago with, I had this client where he had like four different payment systems all working together, and he felt a little uncomfortable about it. And I was just like, well, it's working, it's in place. And you could either put your time into kind of pulling things out and making and breaking things, or you focus on like increasing your conversion rate, or working on your marketing or working on things that will actually kind of change things to make you money. And you mentioned in there that like taking action costs money, like it's easy to think that, Oh, I'm just putting in the extra time well, you put in time and something it takes away from what other things that you could be doing. And so like something that kind of blew my mind a bunch of years ago was, at one point, I heard someone kind of kind of talking about this relationship of money in time, right. And when you pay put money into something, you kind of like accelerate time, and instead of something taking you like 10 months, it can be done in like 10 days or one month by throwing more bodies at the problem. And that's kind of another mindset I kind of am looking to look into is like, in again, with you like ecommerce guys. And with scaling and thinking, like, do you ever think about that? Just the whole, like, getting into that mindset of like valuing your time more than money, and maybe being a little less afraid of putting money in the business to get more time out of it? Do you ever think about these things?

Unknown Speaker 07:02 I mean, this is exactly what we tell our clients all day long, like, you can scale either through money or time. And like, if you've got a good product and a good positioning, and you've got some word of mouth going. And your business is just growing organically great, it'll it'll scale it, whatever that organic growth rate is, it'll just take a long time. Or you can pour a ton of money into it and help scale a little bit faster, but it's gonna cost you money. And there's, there's definitely, you know, diminishing returns over time. So we help our clients really understand that element of, okay, well, how much if you need to shorten the time in which you scale. And for some clients, it makes perfect sense for them to do that they get cost benefits on bulk orders, or they're trying to reach a certain revenue target, because they've promised an investor that and like, they just need to invest to do that sooner rather than later. It makes sense. But for some of our clients, it's no, it doesn't make sense. You don't have this like need to grow at a specific rate, let's let's not invest overly, and let's grow slowly and methodically. So it's really helping them understand that pendulum almost, and where do they want to be on on it, and then build out plans accordingly.

Robert Plank 08:12 I love it. And so like you're you're imagining a pendulum and with the picture that's in my mind is like there's like a like a treasure map. And there's different points and you want to go from like here to there, the there. And it's like if you're pointed towards the next.on, the map then dump in the gasoline. But if you're pointing in the wrong direction, then putting in all this extra effort will put you way in the wrong path where you don't want to be.

Unknown Speaker 08:34 Yeah, I mean, you have to be very, very confident that the direction you're going in is the right direction, right? Like, you know, I'll give you a perfect example. We will run a new campaign for somebody a new client and it'll be like we want to run, tick tock give you an example. We won't run tick tock will never go to a client say hey, we're on we're on tick tock, let's do 100 grand a month and tick tock right off the bat, right, we have no idea if that channel is going to work, what kind of messaging needs to be. So originally, we're gonna test it, make sure we're pointed in the right direction. And then once we see it working, all right, let's dump a ton of money into it. And let's start scaling it up and see what how that goes. But it's interesting because the idea of the map is really accurate. And in this idea of making small changes to get you closer to where you want to go, when you're really far away, and you get you try and point yourself to the point. If you're off by a little bit, when you get closer, you're gonna be off by a lot. And so that's where it's, yeah, earlier on, you're just trying to get into the vicinity of that point. And so you just need some positive notes to know that you're going in the right way or some money into it. As you get closer. Don't stop, don't think, Alright, cool. We figured it out. We're gonna keep going. We're just gonna keep pouring money into it. We'll get to where we need to get stop, pivot. Make sure you're pointed in the right direction. Again, make those incremental adjustments and continue on. And I think that that a lot of people don't make Make those incremental adjustments and just get to the end after pouring a few $100,000 into something going well, why didn't that work? Well, we never stopped to check if we're going in the right direction every step of the way,

Robert Plank 10:11 part of the whole strategy process, right accounting for things that you don't plan for, and just making the little tiny corrections, I love it. And so when, when dealing with E commerce, I'm sure that you're in all kinds of weird and crazy, maybe not obscure niches, but just like, you know, industries that we don't even think about, like all these things that we never see that make the world go around. So do you have any fun stories to share with us about just some of these just never heard before, companies never heard before industries and some of these problems you solve?

Unknown Speaker 10:41 I mean, I'll tell you, we've gotten everything from like, fishing gear to like ball bearings. It's just interesting. So you know, it's interesting, no, no specific story around anyone. I think when you really look at it, the best brands, the ones that we get most excited about have this community around them and the niche, the more obscure the niche, the more excited the community, which is kind of awesome and fun and motivating. But no, like specific stories around it other than you just don't realize how many people buy all kinds of things. And just like passion. We saw a client the other day that's like in the yarn industry. And it's just knitters, right? Like you, it's awesome to see things like that. And we look around. One of the questions that we ask our team members, when they come on board is like, what are you passionate about? We love looking for niches in those things, because it's fun to work on new clients that are in the industries that you're excited about. And so we really try and match that as much as they can.

Robert Plank 11:51 Well, fun and yeah, sometimes you hear about like your miracle bringing to mind like the talk show John Oliver goods and all these weird, obscure areas. And I think at one point, he like made the whole knitting community angry at him. And they were like making all these posts and writing all these letters. And I was like, I didn't even know there was a knitting community. It's freaking crazy and funny. And so it would you say like, is the whole community aspect? Like, is it something that is it? Is it essential? Or if a brand doesn't have it should be something they should be like, looking into, like building that social media creating the video content? Do you think it's something that maybe like, people should be like leaning into more these days?

Unknown Speaker 12:29 Yeah, I think it is essential, and I will caveat community around. Community is more like passion around your industry. And so let's use knitting as an example. For you and me yarn is a nice to have for someone in the knitting community yarn is a need to have. And so transitioning your brand and product from a nice to have to a need to have for some segment is absolutely the most important thing if you want to continue to grow. And more. If you don't want to shrink when you know, the market is not doing well, when demand starts to stop. I think we're at this pivotal point right now, where a lot of brands that drafted off of COVID demand are starting to realize, oh, man, we never invested in our community. And we just did really well, because people were buying everything. And now that consumers are starting to pull back. They're the first ones to get hurt, because they don't have a community that's really excited or feels like they need their product. And so yes, I think having a community that is passionate about your brand and your product, and that you solve something for that community is absolutely integral for growth in the next stage of econ.

Robert Plank 13:47 I love it. And so we've been thinking about just some of the these important aspects to keep in mind these things that are there's like simple, foundational, common sense, but they're so simple, it might be easy to forget to build that community and be focusing on how to transition them from a nice to have to a must have and some of these ideas that you've explained like looking at your data and thinking and knowing when it is time to scale or when it is time not to scale. And so when you look at just the the various mistakes being made in E commerce and these clients that that come to you, do you see like a number one mistake or is one of the big mistakes one of these things we already mentioned?

Unknown Speaker 14:29 Yeah, I mean, I think the number one mistake is just not really not having a really clear understanding of the problem you solve for your consumer. And I think one of the biggest things is a lot of brands don't really understand their audience. They understand the audience they want to have and they don't understand the audience they actually have. And I think that that is a really core mistake that is made by almost all sides of business. You know, this hope of, I mean, there's so many we work with a lot of luxury lifestyle brands. And I'm always surprised like they are. It's always a fun meeting when we go in. And we have to explain to them who their audiences and who's actually purchasing and how it's wildly different from the persona that they hope to have. And really helping them understand why that may be happening. And then really understanding the problem that they need to be solving for who they want to solve it for, is, is key for success.

Robert Plank 15:26 That's very spooky, in a good way. And interesting to think about that whole buyer persona, it's easy just to kind of brush it off and treat it as a cliche, but I like the way that you're thinking about this in that a lot of these companies, they're thinking in terms of the buyer persona they want to have and all the attributes that they that they have. And so they're kind of not the marketing is not quite sticking. But then if they can come to an agency like you and pour through all the customer data and look at these things, then you can come to them and say, well, they're the think that they're this, but really, they're they're all this stuff. And then if you can maybe speak more in terms of their language and mirror what they want, then you can amplify kind of what you've already stumbled upon accidentally, instead of just trying to change all these things. Is that about kind of a good kind of summary as far as the mindset shift that some of your clients have?

Unknown Speaker 16:19 Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, for us, we're a media agency. And so one of the most important elements of it is really understanding who that customer is, and what motivates them, where do they engage with media? How are they going to actually engage with our creative? And so audience and community ends up being really important for us? Because we want to know who the customer is, what motivates them to actually purchase? And what problem do you solve for them so that we can lean into that and really lay that out for new people? So yeah, all of that is, is pretty important for us to be successful.

Robert Plank 16:54 Who is there a brand that really impresses you that we should all aspire to be like, sometimes you see, like delta, or Wendy's or Taco Bell, they kind of it's almost like, I can go to like Taco Bell's Facebook page, like expecting the laugh expecting a joke, and they just seem to always kind of be, it feels like sort of on the nose for some reason, as far as like talking to their customers. So is there any kind of brand that you kind of considered to be like a really good role model as far as, like having the feedback loop really figured out?

Unknown Speaker 17:24 Yeah, I'll tell you who we are the client Peak Design. And I think that they have absolutely nailed this and every step of the way, their culture internally is exactly their culture, externally, the the amount of work and energy they put into each one of their products, it shows up, they've got such a great sense of humor that resonates and all their ad campaigns kind of resonate around it. And they built this community of people that are super passionate about the brand. And they want to tell people about it, right? Like, I will be I'll have a peek bag and be walking around the airport, and somebody will absolutely inevitably stop and tell me, Oh, I have that too. That's an awesome bet. And that's, that's what you need to build. If you the best brands grow from that advertising is just gas on the fire, the bigger your fire, the bigger that we can grow it. And so that's where we talk to clients and say that passion and community, that passion that you have for your business, if your clients don't have it for your brand, it's not gonna matter. And you got to figure out how to get that.

Robert Plank 18:33 I love it. And so you're a lot of things are making sense to me now. Because sometimes you'll see some company and you'll see like, the Facebook ads they run and their Facebook community, and then their website, and there's like one of those like staff pages with like, everyone has a really good photo and like the group photo of everyone. And sometimes it seems like just it all kind of makes sense all across the board. And so that's what you seem to be talking about here is having the culture inside and out. So that way, it's like the people working there are just as passionate as the customers and even like you were mentioning a few minutes ago there about when you have a new hire, you say, Well, you know, what are your hobbies? What kind of obscure niches are you into that way? Like the exciting he'd just be there all around. And it's it's not just like putting on a show. It's kind of within within the womb without all kind of all you know, existing. And so if someone out there in podcast land says, Okay, well, I really like a lot of what spirit has to say. And I want him and his team and his agency to help me with my ecommerce brand. How do they know if they're like a right fit or right size? And what problem should they be looking to solve when contacting you?

Unknown Speaker 19:39 Yeah, I'd say one, just contact me I love helping you calm brands, regardless of size. Just getting started just contact me like I will share my thoughts and we'll have a conversation and then I'll be reading from you from the sidelines. But if you are looking if you're running paid media already and are trying to actually scale it up, that's the right time. To be reaching out to us, we'll help you kind of implement the systems and processes to actually grow it over time and get you to where you need to be. Easiest way to reach out to me, we are QR y.com, hit the Contact page, you're gonna reach me directly. So that's the easiest way. And I'm excited to chat with anybody.

Robert Plank 20:21 Fantastic. And I think that you're doing something that we all need to be aspiring to do is to be like, just constantly excited to solve problems and help people and communicate and just be a service to the world. So we are q ry.com. To check out query, see what they can do for you hit that contact button, and context Amir and tell him about your problems and the solutions that maybe he and his team can provide for you. So as we're wrapping up our conversation here, Samir, it's always fun to end with like a number one tip or piece of advice or quote, or moral or lesson. So what comes to mind to you, as far as any of those things? Do you have a favorite quote or favorite saying? Or what do you have to kind of end this conversation with the Big Bang?

Unknown Speaker 21:05 You know, I'll tell you, I'll give you one of our core values around curiosity. I think the best brands are the ones that are always excited. The best brands, best people press business owners are the ones, they're always excited to learn something new and challenge the status quo. And I tell people, even if you aren't sure about it, let's try it. Let's figure it out. Let's see how it works. And I think that that is ever more important in the marketing world than it has ever been before. And so that's what I leave with you. And I'm excited to see what people come up with. After trying new things.

Robert Plank 21:34 I love it. Excitement, curiosity, experimentation, challenging the status quo. And you can do all those things in one and more by going to we are qry.com. So check out query and Samir and his team, and we'll see you there and thank you very much, Samir for blowing our minds giving us some really good life advice, business advice, personal advice. I really appreciate what you had to say.

Unknown Speaker 21:57 Thank you so much for having me.

Robert Plank 22:03 Thank you for tuning in to the marketer of the day podcast. marketer of the day is managed by dF why podcast claim your 12 podcast boosters at Def Why podcast.com/free