Shop.com CMO Peter Gold Polishes Strategy For Global Growth
Social is at the forefront of Peter Gold’s plan to market the shopping site and its sister brands. “Somebody who’s on Facebook all day who is also shopping would like to learn, browse, and shop on that platform,” he told CMO.com.
Just a few years ago, Peter Gold ran his own senior management and marketing consultancy called The Gold Standard. One look at his extensive background, and you’ll see the play on his name is well-justified.
Gold began his career as a corporate finance attorney with major international law firms, then gained substantial senior management experience as the CEO of Power Station and manager of sports greats John McEnroe and Shaquille O’Neal. Next, he transitioned to a career in digital media and digital marketing at CBSSportsLine.com, which became the company’s most profitable division. Then he started his own business.
Today, Gold is CMO of billion-dollar e-commerce giant Market America and Shop.com, where he is responsible for helping to grow the “UnFranchise business” and shopping comparison site globally. He was a true goldmine of insight during a recent conversation with CMO.com.
CMO.com: In today’s ever-changing e-commerce environment, what do you consider to be the greatest challenge of your job?
Gold: Too much data, too many projects, too many programs, not enough people. I think resources are definitely an issue. For us, we must remember that we’re serving a global community. We sell over 87 million products into over 200 markets, so we basically sell everything in the world to everyone in the world. I’m someone who looks at challenges as opportunities, so for me, the challenge is to always be able to think globally about your brand, not just about the language that you speak or a country that you’re based in. The way that we accomplish that is through local and regionalized marketing teams on the ground.
So, for example, I don’t pretend to know what’s on the side of a bus in downtown Taipei. I’m not plugged into that culture, but we have a team there that is. So we’ll have discussions with them and say, “Here’s an idea or a program or campaign that we’re working on. Here’s the idea for the U.S. Think on it and come up with some ideas or twists that you think would make it more suitable for your market.”
CMO.com: What are some of your day-to-day job responsibilities?
Gold: I oversee and run all of our marketing programs, so that includes SEM, SEO, retargeting, display, and email. My days are spent usually meeting with various people around the company to talk about ideas we have for campaigns and about current programs to measure, monitor, adjust, etc. I’m constantly speaking with prospective vendors about new technologies or opportunities to take advantage of, particularly marketing technology, which is evolving at the speed of sound. I spend a lot of time in dashboards, seeing how programs are performing, making sure we get as close to real time as possible, and that we’re informed in all of our paid programs.
There’s a lot of creative process, too, whether it’s creating ads, emails, or coming up with clever hooks for taglines and copy. It’s never a dull moment. We have a lot going on, and we have a relatively small team doing it.
CMO.com: Let’s talk about some of those taglines and initiatives you’ve come up with. What are some golden ones?
Gold: I’m very proud of coming up with a tagline for Shop.com. We have this great e-commerce URL, and we weren’t doing a good job, particularly with new visitors, communicating our value proposition or what the site was all about. We are a cash-back site. That’s one of our major differentiators. So we came up with a tagline, “shop, save, and earn cash back,” to speak to the value proposition of Shop.com. We tested it for over a year, got really great feedback across the board, and started using that messaging in a lot of other campaigns.
CMO.com: What big trends in the e-commerce space are affecting the way you do your job?
Gold: Social media has really exploded in a good way. We’ve invested very heavily as a company in creating great social content and social engagement, and providing tremendous value to our communities on the different platforms.
One of the big shifts with social media is that every stat I’ve seen shows me that people—whether they’re on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter—like to be in that environment. So somebody who’s on Facebook all day who is also shopping would like to learn, browse, and shop on that platform.
CMO.com: How has knowing that helped?
Gold: We recently launched a social commerce program that includes shoppable Instagram for two of our brands, Shop.com and Motives Cosmetics. We’ve also launched a user-generated content program for Shop.com, Motivescosmetics.com, and Franchise.com, which is for our independent distributors, where we are ingesting posts for our communities and our people who like our products. We’re taking their user-generated content, populating it on the site, and using it as a conversion tool.
CMO.com: Can you cite an example?
Gold: A really good example of that would be if you are on a product detail page [for an item] you’re not that familiar with. You can read reviews and testimonials, or see a video testimonial of an actual customer who used the product and talks about how it changed their life or helped them with a particular problem. That type of content is very powerful.
We have a blog that our CEO [JR Ridinger] and senior vice president [Loren Ridinge] both [write] for. We are able to merchandise products in their blogs and link people directly to a product detail page or multiple product detail pages from an image.
CMO.com: You mentioned having a smaller team. How does the flow of information work, and how many are actually on the team?
Gold: We have about 30 people. When I first got to the company, the digital marketing team consisted of a head of analytics and somebody who pushed “send” on emails. We’ve now grown to include web analysts, marketing data analysts, digital marketing campaign managers, people who focus on retargeting, designers, and social media people.
Not all of these areas are part of my team, but we work closely with other areas of the company. We partner with them. For example, social media doesn’t report to me, but I work closely with the social team on strategy and, obviously, on the social commerce program. PR doesn’t report to me, but I work closely with the PR team all the time on positioning and strategy for our brands and products.
CMO.com: Analytics is obviously an important part of any marketing position. How do you use data to understand consumer purchasing patterns and other things that are relevant?
Gold: That’s a huge part of the digital marketing team, and what we do and our culture is very much one of a data-driven culture, particularly performance data. We are constantly looking at the performance of campaigns, projects, programs, etc. We then try to interpret that data in a way that says, “OK, if this campaign or this program worked really well, what is it about it that might have worked really well that we can use going forward? Or, what is it that didn’t work really well that we can learn from and go forward?”
We are constantly going through data to try to understand, as best as we can, what our customers are buying, what they like to buy, what they’re looking to buy, and what they are having a hard time [finding], whether through search or navigation.
CMO.com: What we can expect to see from the company in 2017?
Gold: I’m really excited for our social commerce program to kick in. I’m looking forward to that becoming an all-new source of revenue for us, and I’m looking forward to all our social media community managers being empowered with a new success metric that they’ll be tracking called “revenue per post.” For example, Motives Cosmetics has over 2.3 million followers on Instagram, and [we want to] get as many of them into our funnel as possible so that we can either turn them into customers or at least get them into our funnel by getting an email address so we can start marketing to them.
CMO.com: What else do you think could be game-changing in the industry?
Gold: We’re always looking to see what’s happening with wearables, virtual reality, augmented reality—things like that. I think we’re always keeping a mindful eye toward it, but always looking for the right time to act.