For Brand-Defining Marketing, an Olympian Emerges at Speedo

April 24, 2021 - 7 min read

Brad Sanzenbacher

Denise Teti is Director of Marketing + Sales Promotion at Speedo USA, a division of PVH Corp., and she’s our Manager-X Award winner for Predictability in Planning.

For Denise Teti, being predictable is not an insult. In fact, it’s a must for delivering brand-defining creative for Speedo USA’s market-leading products. With thousands of SKUs of merchandise and multitudes of channels for sales, her bi-coastal team of marketers must create a massive volume of assets worthy of their brand’s iconic status. That’s why Denise is our Manager-X Award winner for Predictability in Planning. Her ability to see the forest through the trees, prioritize projects that drive business results, and deploy her resources to execute at scale is essential. And for a global brand whose customers range from beach-lounging vacationers to gold medal Olympians, there’s no shortage of work to do.

We spoke with Denise about how she manages to cut through the chaos and lead her team to excellence.

How did you feel when you found out you won this award? When I got the news that I had won this award, I was honestly completely shocked because I didn't know an award like this existed. It kind of made me laugh a little bit too, because I love making a lot of puns on the name Wrike. Puns like, "They have the Wrike stuff." And I was like, now I really have the Wrike stuff.

Tell me a little bit about your role at Speedo USA. I oversee basically all consumer-facing marketing for the Speedo brand in North America. So that includes the United States, Canada, and Mexico. We work closely with our PVH corporate divisional marketing team, which is based in New York. The work that my team does looks at all product marketing, in-person marketing across regions, and digital marketing. It's a pretty robust set of deliverables that we're working towards with a lot of people and a lot of different places.

What are some of the projects that your team works on?

We create trim and packaging for every single product across all our lines of products, including any custom or exclusive products that we launch. We have tens of thousands of SKUs, so it's quite complex. And then we've got all of our in-store graphics kits, the point-of-sale signage, and we run all of our photo shoots and develop all of our own creative.

We also work with our advertising partners, whether it be print or digital advertising, across all of our paid partnerships, and create all scheduled marketing for speedousa.com. This means all of our site content updates, all of our direct-to-consumer email blast updates, and all of our social media development. It’s pretty complicated, and on any given day, you could be talking to around fifty people in Wrike.

Being bi-coastal and having such a broad scope of work, how do you get the visibility you need to prioritize projects?

My management philosophy is focused on transparency and being honest about what my priorities are, what the business's priorities are, and what's achievable. So we use Wrike and one of the things I love about it is its transparency, and how it can visualize task dependencies and capacity planning. That was also something that was very challenging to articulate before.

We also have bi-coastal status meetings that we run through a video conference, screensharing Wrike to review the statuses of all our projects and create the agenda for the meeting. We have two of those meetings a week, which makes it really easy for people to be like, "Oh. Mayday, mayday, I'm drowning," or, "Actually, I have some room to do this."

Speedo USA has a wide cross section of customers. Does that add to the complexity?

Absolutely. Sometimes we’re talking to parents that are trying to teach their kids to learn to swim and buying swim diapers. Other times, it’s competitive swimmers, or even people who just want to sit by the pool on vacation. It's a very complex brand.

The person who nominated you said you have a natural knack for prioritization and making sure the work you do is aligned with the brand’s business goals. What is the secret there?

I don’t think you can be an effective marketer if you don't understand your business's opportunities and risks. You’ve just got to be really dialed in, and spend a lot of time studying and learning. You have to make make sure you know your numbers and understand the sort of subjective, tangential color that goes along with managing relationships with different accounts.

Marketing is an art and a science, and I think so is prioritization. Every project isn’t its own art project—it’s part of an ecosystem of effort.

What’s the structure like on your team?

My team is very agile because we have to connect to a creative team that's organized by subject matter expertise, a product team that's organized by product category, and a sales team that's organized by distribution channels. And we are the stewards of the brand.

I have to have one person from each tribe of people on every project, which allows me to have a more holistic oversight of gaps or opportunity, and identify where we need to bring in more people, or where we can free some people to work on different projects.

How do you take in requests in a way that’s conducive to prioritizing and ultimately executing work?

I have an amazing project manager, and she audits every single brief that comes in. She’s like my police officer. She knows to loop in the right people on my team should the briefs be lacking enough information or direction to be executed at all, which is critical.

But before we even get to that point, I’ve invested a lot of time in training people in my department and outside of my department on how to write a brief and what a brief should include; not just the facts, but also the emotional intent.

A brief is meant to inspire your creative team to get them to do something that differentiates whatever you're asking for from whatever else is already out there. And I think that has really helped our partners on the product and sales team give us information so that we can take that and create something compelling to pass to our creative team to do their best work.

What’s the most rewarding part of your job?

Telling people I work at Speedo USA, because everyone I talk to always has some awesome personal story about how they grew up swimming or some funny story about a vacation they took as kid. It's amazing to be a part of a brand that means so much to so many people.

I can't tell you just how many times I've welled up with tears, and sometimes even started crying a little bit, especially talking to moms. It's the best feeling to know that our brand connects so many people to so many personal experiences.

Now that you are an award-winning manager, what’s the best advice you have, especially for people dealing with high volumes of complex work?

Know your business and build strong relationships with your senior stakeholders. You need to be able to walk the talk, and also be able to have frank conversations with senior leaders and have their trust, because not everything they request is achievable in the way they envision it.

I always say, “We can’t make steak from ground beef, but if we work together, we can make really delicious meatballs, and you’re going to love them.” To have those conversations, they have to trust that you and your team really know how to deliver.

For more information on the Manager-X Awards, take a look at our winners announcement.

Brad Sanzenbacher

Brad is a former Senior Corporate Communications Manager of Wrike.

#Brand #Wrike Customers #Marketing Teams

Leadership 5 min read

$250K to $1.2M in 18 Months: Hubstaff's 2-Step Process for Hyper-Growth

What makes companies successful? There are a myriad of factors for fast and sustainable business development, including building a powerful brand, forging strong partnerships, and having a flexible management system in place. But having a single, clear business goal is arguably one of the most important elements for success. A focused goal makes your team more purposeful in how they spend their time, and thus more productive—which paves the way for rapid company growth that's actually sustainable. As a 100% self-funded and fully remote team, we at Hubstaff have been using a simple, two-step process that has helped us grow and scale our business sustainably. And we're happier and more productive than ever: our marketing strategy examples helped us go from $250K to $1.2M in revenue in just 18 months. Here's how we did it: Step 1: Identify a single business goal As our co-founder Dave Nevogt says, a huge part of the battle of running a successful business is focusing your energy and resources on the right things. That’s why every year we set a very specific business goal and only take on projects that directly further this goal. Last year, our goal was to reach $70k in Monthly Recurring Revenue. To achieve this, we used the Theory of Constraints to break down our yearly business goal into quarterly goals. Then we broke quarterly goals down into weekly tasks: On our marketing team, for example, ROI on each task is measured by tracking time spent. Although a productivity tracking tool isn’t absolutely necessary, it does help make you (painfully) aware of how much time you’re wasting, which enhances productivity. Wrike's time tracking integration with Hubstaff helps us plan and prioritize upcoming work, as well as track time and productivity levels on each Wrike task without switching between tools. Step 2: Use time data to pinpoint tasks that drive ROI today Time data is one of your most important business metrics. Use it to assess ROI, know what’s working and what’s not, and determine the best use of your team's time. Plus, you can more effectively plan and scale your team based on actual business needs. For example, if your development team is spending more time on customer support than on dev work, it’s time to hire more support team members. Your team’s time data can give you these kinds of valuable insights. At Hubstaff, we track time on all our tasks across all departments, from marketing and customer support to development. At the end of each week, month or quarter, we can see exactly how much time was spent on a particular task—and how much revenue it generated. Here is the formula our marketing team uses to measure ROI for each task: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) = (# of hours spent on that task) x (your hourly wage + other expenses, like software tools)/(# of paying customers acquired from the task) Let’s say, from the above snapshot, I spent 5 hours updating our FAQ, used a $25 tool, and my hourly wage is $35. Using our analytics, I discovered we added 10 paying customers from that task. Here is what the CAC will look like: CAC = ((5 hrs X $35) + $25)/10= $20 per customer After calculating that number (CAC), we ask ourselves one question: is Average Lifetime Value (ALV) > 3 x Customer Acquisition Cost? If the answer is no, is there any way to make this strategy more efficient and cost-effective? If yes, try to refine it and measure ROI again. If the answer is yes, that’s a task with proven ROI. Once you’ve calculated the ROI of particular tasks, it’s time to use the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. The basic idea is that 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your marketing tasks. You just need to identify that 20% and bet heavily on them. It’s also crucial to keep in mind that just because something drives revenue today, doesn't mean it will six months down the line. The rule of thumb is that if you see any tasks with proven high ROI, you should double down on them today. Added benefits of the two-step process This two-step process has clear benefits beyond the numbers. Before we applied it, we were slightly disorganized, using multiple strategies to drive growth and betting that at least one would do the job. Now our team’s mindset has transformed. We constantly come back to the bigger picture and question not only whether a task is worth our time and money, but whether it will help us achieve our goal in the quickest and most efficient way possible. Author Bio: Madhav Bhandari is a marketing manager at Hubstaff. He helps acquire customers with high ROI marketing experiments, action focused analytics, and product iterations. You can follow him on Twitter at @themadbhandari

Marketing 7 min read

Frontline Education’s Marketing Team Gets 20% More Work Done with Wrike

Learn how the Frontline Education marketing team established a single source of truth for the entire organization, calculates the ROI of its efforts, and takes on 80 more projects per quarter.

Project Management 10 min read

How to Track your Digital Channels with Digital Marketing KPIs

In the good old days of digital marketing circa 1971 (when the first ever email was sent), the best indicator of campaign success was whether or not someone looked at what you put out into the world. Now that technology is more advanced and the market is flooded with content, marketers need to use a more sophisticated approach. Enter digital marketing KPIs. Today, agency and marketing directors use digital marketing project KPIs to improve profit, streamline resources, and prove return on investment to their clients. Keep reading to discover the definitions, examples, and tools top marketers use to remain competitive in today’s digital landscape. What are digital marketing KPIs? KPI stands for key performance indicator which is also known as performance metrics. A digital marketing key performance indicator is what marketers use to measure the success of a particular strategy or marketing channel. The KPI or KPIs you choose will depend on what your goal is for the project. Marketers will often choose one or two primary KPIs to support their main goal and a handful of relevant secondary KPIs to support any additional objectives. For example, let’s say you run a social media campaign on Twitter and your goal is to increase your engagement percentage within your existing audience. Your primary KPIs will be the number of comments and retweets each original tweet receives. There are three main categories of digital marketing KPIs to know: 1. Awareness Awareness is all about getting your brand in front of as many new people as possible. If your brand is already established, the next challenge is to help potential customers learn about new products or services they might be interested in. Common marketing tactics in this phase include cold emailing and calling. 2. Conversion The goal of this phase is to make a sale. Marketers often do this by building long-term relationships and trust. Content like blog posts and podcasts with problem-solving advice for the audience works well for this stage. 3. Analysis After you make a sale you can use analysis KPIs to determine how much you spent in resources to acquire each new customer. This information will inform your next campaign. Why set KPIs in digital marketing? KPIs in digital marketing prove return on investment to clients and stakeholders. They also help you measure progress, streamline processes, and quantify what would otherwise be intangible marketing benefits. Using KPIs in digital marketing will help you better understand why something does or does not work for your particular brand or strategy. Without KPIs, marketing agencies run the risk of throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks. If your agency does not assert its value and authority through actual proof, it’s hard to get or keep clients long-term. KPIs translate into concrete numbers that prove what you’re doing is getting real results. Who sets KPIs in marketing? At an agency, a marketing or agency director will set the KPIs. Otherwise, the responsibility falls on the campaign manager. Whoever chooses the KPIs also has to come up with a plan for tracking them. They may adopt related marketing tools and habits to make sure results are consistently recorded and monitored throughout the lifetime of each campaign. Agency project management tools such as Wrike can help streamline these processes. Users can easily assign monitoring and reporting tasks to designated teammates so that nothing slips through the cracks. Marketing KPI examples Marketing KPIs differ from project to project, platform to platform, and goal to goal. Use these most common marketing KPI examples below as a jumping-off point: Email marketing KPIs 1. Number of emails successfully delivered, opened, and/or replied to What it is: The total of all emails interacted with compared to the total sent. Why you need it: This information tells marketers if their messages are getting through to inboxes. It also demonstrates whether or not the subject line is persuasive enough and if the campaign promotes further engagement. How to measure it: Use an email marketing campaign software to bypass spam filters and track open rates. 2. Embedded link and CTA button click-through rates What it is: The percentage of people who have both opened your emails and clicked the link or button inside. Why you need it: The click-through rate shows how effective your offers or calls to action are. How to measure it: Add a link tracking app to test components like CTA messages, colors, and placement. 3. Social shares and forwards What it is: The number of times a post has been shared or sent to other people from social media. Why you need it: Sharing is a high-value form of engagement that gets your posts in front of more people which is great for increasing impressions and expanding your audience. How to measure it: Most social media apps include this information within your Analytics. Social media KPIs 1. Number of followers versus number of unfollowers What it is: The total number of people who have followed your account that day or week compared to the number of people who have unfollowed your account in the same. Why you need it: Ideally you'll have more followers than unfollowers but this KPI shows whether or not your content is targeting the correct audience and is interesting enough to keep their attention. How to measure it: Your number of followers is publicly available at the top of your social media profile. However, you may need to use a third-party app to track unfollowers. 2. Likes, comments, and shares What it is: These are the top forms of engagement for any social media post regardless of what platform it's on. Why you need it: Better engagement equals higher conversion rates, steadier audience growth, and stronger relationships over time.= How to measure it: This information is made publicly available on most social media platforms. 3. New impressions What it is: The number of times your content was organically shown to someone on the platform whether or not they interacted with it. Why you need it: This social media KPI demonstrates reach, which you should aim to increase over time through paid ads, better engagement, and more followers. How to measure it: Creator analytics or a behind-the-scenes app will show your new impressions by day, week, or month. Content marketing KPIs 1. Unique visits What it is: The total number of people (or IP addresses) clicking on your website within a given time frame. Why you need it: Unique visits document the volume of traffic over time, which is useful for selling products and services. However, some unique visits might be from bots which is why it's critical to also track engagement and conversions at the same time. How to measure it: Website analytics platforms like Google help users track this data after it’s set up, which means historical data will not be available. 2. Average time on page What it is: The average amount of time all visitors (both unique and returning) spend on each individual web page. Why you need it: Your goal should be to make the average time on page high because it will likely lead to better sales conversion rate. Plus it shows that your content is relevant to your audience. How to measure it: Website analytics tools will help you measure it. 3. Link and CTA button click-through rates What it is: The percentage at which all site visitors click on links and buttons. Why you need it: Most website links and buttons are tied to sales or important data capture such as email newsletters. Having a high rate of success means that your offers and audience are in alignment. How to measure it: Website analytics tools or third party link tracking apps are best. SEO KPIs 1. Keyword search engine ranking What it is: How high your website ranks for a specific keyword or phrase within popular search engines. Why you need it: Your goal should be to rank number 1 on Google and Bing. Or on the first page, at the very least, so that more people will find and click on your website. How to measure it: Type in your keyword phrase into a search engine to see if it shows up or use a tool like SEMRush for more advanced analytics. 2. Organic traffic What it is: Site traffic from anything other than paid ads. Why you need it: High rates of organic traffic means that more people are finding your products and services by simply searching related questions or words, which indicates that your SEO strategy is working. How to measure it: Use a website analytics tool.3. Link click-through rates What it is: The rate at which people are clicking on paid search advertisements or web pages that appear organically in search results. Why you need it: For paid ads, the link click-through rate shows how effective your copy is. How to measure it: Website analytics and third-party apps help you track individual links. Also, whichever search engine advertisement platform you use will likely track this data automatically. PPC KPIs 1. Click rate What it is: Percentage of people who see your ad in search engines and click on it. Why you need it: The higher the percentage, the more persuasive your copy is. How to measure it: Your advertising platform will have user analytics for you. 2. Sales conversion rate What it is: The total number of sales divided by the number of interactions with a given paid ad. Why you need it: This number shows whether or not the offer promised in the ad is still relevant for the audience the ad is being shown to and if it aligns with their expectations enough to persuade them to buy. How to track it: Your advertising platform will have these statistics for you.3. Cost per acquisition What it is: The dollar amount you pay for every new customer you obtained through a paid advertisement. Why you need it: This shows exactly where your budget is going and whether or not your campaign is worth reinvesting in.How to track it: Use an analytics tool or divide the total cost of the PPC campaign by the total revenue made from it. What are the challenges of marketing KPIs? The main challenge of marketing KPIs is choosing the right ones, monitoring them effectively, and turning data into actionable insights. To choose the right marketing KPIs every time, create SMART goals then match KPIs to link your channel type (like email or social media) to your desired outcome. To monitor them effectively, make sure that all your KPIs are measurable and that there are tools in place to capture all related data. Finally, turn data into actionable insights by using a professional services management platform to create automated reports plus easy-to-read insights. What to do when KPIs aren't met Now that you have your digital marketing KPIs set, it’s important to know what happens if your KPIs are failing. If they’re not connected to strategy, overshooting (or undershooting) your goals, or are too outdated now, the best way to get back on track is to adopt a marketing project management solution like Wrike. Why Wrike can help you with digital marketing KPIs Wrike helps directors and managers use digital marketing KPIs to make informed decisions. Wrike Report automates marketing, data capture, assessment, and reporting using visual graphs so that KPIs are easier to understand. At-a-glance updates like these save time and make collaboration that much smoother. Marketing teams can also create templates for repeated campaigns or to relive the success of another client’s strategy for a new project. Use Wrike’s two-week free trial to visualize your objectives and key results (OKRs) so that your KPIs are bulletproof throughout any project.

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For Brand-Defining Marketing, an Olympian Emerges at Speedo

Brad Sanzenbacher

Related articles

$250K to $1.2M in 18 Months: Hubstaff's 2-Step Process for Hyper-Growth

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For Brand-Defining Marketing, an Olympian Emerges at Speedo

Brad Sanzenbacher

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$250K to $1.2M in 18 Months: Hubstaff's 2-Step Process for Hyper-Growth

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