Key Activities
- Affiliate program management
- SEO / SEM strategy and execution
- Social media (organic and paid)
- Display and programmatic advertising
- Email and SMS campaign management
- App and voice channel strategy
- B2B digital marketing and account-based campaigns
- Loyalty and CRM retention program management
- Influencer and creator partnership management
Sending traffic to a broken experience is just paying to accelerate churn. Every pillar before this one must be working before you scale spend. The best campaign in the world cannot fix a bad checkout or a slow site.
KPIs
- ROAS (overall and by channel)
- Channel spend mix ratio
- Email open rate and click-through rate
- SMS opt-in rate and conversion rate
- Unsubscribe and list churn rate
- Search rank and organic traffic share
- Social reach, views, and engagement rate
- Affiliate revenue and commission rate
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) by channel
- CAC:LTV ratio
- New vs. returning customer split by channel
- Paid vs. organic traffic ratio
- Email list growth rate (net, after unsubscribes)
- Brand search volume trend (month-over-month)
- Cost per acquisition (CPA) by campaign type
Use Case: Brand Giveaway
A Thumb Drive Campaign That Sold Out in 90 Minutes
A thumb drive giveaway was planned for a 1-week promotional window. The goal was brand awareness and customer affinity. The campaign was simple: offer branded USB drives while supplies lasted.
The campaign sold out in 1 hour and 30 minutes. Not because of an extraordinary creative — because the operational foundation was in place. Inventory was accurate. The promotion engine worked. Fulfillment was ready. The site held up under traffic. Pillars 1 through 8 made Pillar 9 look brilliant.
90min
Sold out vs.1-week window
Current Best-in-Class Tools
Email / SMS (DTC Standard)
Klaviyo
The DTC standard for email and SMS. Deep eCommerce data integration with revenue attribution per flow and segment. Also has an evolving CDP to be considered depending on your stack.
Email / SMS (Enterprise)
Braze
Real-time cross-channel messaging with powerful segmentation and lifecycle journey orchestration at scale.
SMS (Dedicated)
Attentive
SMS-first platform with strong compliance tools, A/B testing, and conversion attribution built in.
SEO
SEMrush / Ahrefs
Comprehensive keyword research, rank tracking, backlink analysis, and competitive SEO intelligence.
Technical SEO
Screaming Frog
Technical SEO crawler that finds broken links, duplicate content, and metadata gaps across the full site.
Programmatic
StackAdapt
Self-serve programmatic DSP with strong retargeting, CTV, native, and display ad formats in one platform.
Affiliate & Partnerships
Impact.com
Modern affiliate and partnership management tracking influencer, affiliate, and B2B referral in one platform.
Paid Social
Meta Ads / TikTok Ads
The two dominant DTC paid social platforms. Meta for broad reach and retargeting. TikTok for discovery and acquisition.
Paid Search
Google Ads / Microsoft Ads
High-intent search capture. Performance Max campaigns now unify search, display, and shopping in one campaign type.
Attribution
Triple Whale / Northbeam
Post-iOS 14 multi-touch attribution that gives true channel-level ROAS without relying on platform-reported pixel data.
Predictive Spend Optimization and Media Mix Modeling
The shift from reporting on past spend to predicting future spend is where the real competitive edge lives. These tools tell you where to put next week's budget before you commit it.
MMM (Real-Time / DTC)
Prescient AI
AI-native MMM with continuous updates and real-time budget recommendations. Surfaces channel saturation and recommends reallocation before performance drops.
MMM (Scenario Planning)
Recast
Bayesian MMM with weekly model updates and 'what if' scenario planning. Shows predicted ROAS impact before you move budget between channels.
Incrementality Testing
Measured
Tests true incremental lift by channel using holdout experiments. Validates MMM recommendations before committing to large spend shifts.
MMM + Attribution
Northbeam Scenarios
Northbeam's scenario modeling layer allows spend reallocation modeling on top of real-time attribution data — practical for teams not yet ready for full MMM.
MMM (Enterprise)
Analytic Partners
Full-service enterprise MMM with real-time dashboards and analyst-supported scenario planning. Used by major retail and CPG advertisers.
MMM (Open Source)
Meridian by Google
Google's 2024 Bayesian MMM framework. Open source with strong community adoption. Requires in-house data science but eliminates vendor dependency.