Episode 15: The Evolution of a Marketing Strategy

00:33
Nate Statt
All right, welcome, welcome to another episode of Marketing Moves. I'm your host, Nate Statt. And today's episode is all about the evolution of a marketing strategy. Our guest, Aaron Saks, is a native Clevelander turned Utah turned Clevelander again, who now heads up one of the country's leading suppliers of sustainable products. His father, Steve Saks, started Green Paper Products over a decade ago, and since then, its size and market share have exponentially grown. As of today, they're still headquartered in Cleveland, but have become a multi million dollar brand, shipping to homes and businesses across North America. I've had the pleasure of being the project manager for Green Paper Products and working with Aaron for over three years now. And in that time, I've developed quite the list of topics and questions to unpack with him about GPP's marketing evolution.

So, Aaron, welcome to Marketing Moves, and we can get started.

01:20
Aaron Saks
Great. I'm glad to be here.

01:21
Nate Statt
Amazing. I think, first off, your story and the brand story is really inspiring. So I'd love to know more about GPP or Green Paper Products. The full name, the inception of the brand, how it started, how your dad started it, and then we can talk about maybe what the old ways of marketing were.

01:38
Aaron Saks
Yeah. So Green Paper Products was started by my father, Steve, and his childhood friend Harry. They were retired from their careers and looking for something to do, they wanted to do something that they thought would be good for their children and their grandchildren. So they had a couple business ideas that they were working on, and the one that stuck was selling compostable tableware, things like cups, plates, bowls online. They built a website and started by just shipping one order, and then it was two orders, and then it was ten orders, and it just kind of grew organically. They started it in 2009, so it grew organically from 2009 through 2019. Harry was the general manager. He ran it.

02:20
Aaron Saks
He had to retire, and my father didn't want to close the business, and he had something else he was working on, so he didn't want to run it. So he recruited me to move back to Cleveland with my family and run Green Paper Products.

02:32
Nate Statt
But going back before you even got there, what would you say characterized the marketing strategy for Green Paper Products at the time or up to your involvement in 2020?

02:43
Aaron Saks
So when they got started, they attended a conference at Tri-C and the speaker there was talking about SEO and they got connected with him. And really their marketing started out with organic SEO and then they started to do some paid digital marketing, really Google Ads, and that was it. They were just all inbound for the most part. Right? All inbound. Eventually they got into email marketing. And in 2019, well, in early 2020, when I came into the business, basically our marketing was Google Organic, Google paid, and some email marketing, and that was it.

03:26
Nate Statt
But then you came in 2019 going into 2020. And I think part of it is maybe because they were changing career paths, wanting to do other things, but I think the pandemic probably brought you in or brought you more fully in. So I'm just curious, what was the business seeing when March 2020 hit and up until maybe we started to partner up at the end of the year?

03:47
Aaron Saks
Yeah, my coming into Green Paper Products had nothing to do with the pandemic. It was coincidental. I started in March of 2020, right when that Friday, March 13 happened, when the world shut down. I'm sure everybody remembers that. And I didn't really know anything about Green Paper Products. I mean, I knew what they did, but I didn't really know anything about the business. And things slowed down for us for a short period of time. So March and April of 2020 were really slow as it was for everybody. I mean, it was just a whole different time. But then things picked up because there was this big movement towards takeout delivery and our products are really well suited for that. So I just kind of picked up where Harry and Steve left off. I learned all the marketing.

04:38
Aaron Saks
We continued to work with the individual that was doing our SEO and our SEM for us, and he stayed on board for about a year. But I really wanted to grow the business, and I'm an engineer by training, so I'm really interested in the data and understanding the data and making sure we make data based decisions. And I came from a career also in management, so I kind of know how to manage based on information and data. And the person who was supporting our marketing, he just wasn't going to be able to scale with us the way that I wanted to scale the business. And as we looked to grow, whether it was our website or our marketing, that's kind of when we got introduced to Vividfront, we had some initial conversations with Vividfront about some other topics.

05:23
Aaron Saks
But that just led into Vividfront kind of taking over our marketing and then eventually taking over our website as well.

05:30
Nate Statt
I remember being involved in those initial calls about marketing, realizing that you had already had conversations with us that kind of petered out beforehand, and then realizing how specific your audience segments are and how attuned they are to economic impacts, like Covid, for example. And were still in the thick of it. So maybe walk through what your audience segments really are, or why they maybe cause such a significant shift for your business at that time.

05:59
Aaron Saks
So we do both B2B and B2C. I mean, the b to c is just your average consumer wanting to purchase cups or plates for an event. And that business has actually been pretty steady. It's pretty steady and there's growth to it, but it probably only makes up, I would say, maybe 30% of our revenue. The other 70% is b to b. And before the pandemic, we served a lot of offices, like office break rooms, where they would have coffee cups and plates for people to eat lunch in their office break room. While everybody moved from working in an office to working at home restaurants in March and April, all the restaurants were more or less closed. And then they quickly learned how to serve through takeout and delivery.

06:43
Aaron Saks
So in about May of 2020, instead of selling a lot of hot cups and cutlery and napkins to offices, there was a big shift towards takeout products like takeout containers and clamshells and food containers. And so our segment of small and independently owned restaurants really took off, really geared towards the takeout food business.

07:10
Nate Statt
Yeah, the ones who understood the importance of doorDash, Grubhub, and all of these.

07:14
Aaron Saks
Right, right.

07:15
Nate Statt
So I wanted to kind of peel back the curtain a little bit because I think we've had some really interesting years, long discussions, maybe debates, civil debates about different marketing tactics. And I think one thing I wanted to talk about were those initial obstacles and maybe where you saw the most amount of friction with your customer journey or your ability to scale, and not even how we came in, but what the biggest pain points were for your business.

07:42
Aaron Saks
On the marketing side, it's always, how do we find new customers? We have a pretty well established kind of algorithm for how we run our business and what we spend on marketing, and we continue to operate with that algorithm. And I know you want to talk a little bit about the marketing funnel, so I'll kind of lead into that, I suppose.

08:02
Nate Statt
It's our favorite topic.

08:04
Aaron Saks
We were always very bottom-funnel oriented and when I would evaluate where we are in our funnel and how much opportunity I felt there was, I wanted to make sure that were extracting every dollar that we could from the bottom of the funnel before we started to move further up the funnel. So we had our ROAS targets, we had our budget, we knew what were doing on the bottom of the funnel. And I would continue to push and say, I'm not ready to move up the funnel yet, because I still think there's more. There's more opportunity at the bottom of the funnel. One thing that's a difficult kind of, you talk about pain points, but maybe it's more of a decision point is how do we really know when we've gotten everything we can get out of the bottom of the funnel when we're.

08:48
Aaron Saks
I use the term saturated, and you can't really spend anymore to get any more business, and then you start spending higher up in the funnel. So that's a tough call to make. I think that we've done a good job, and that is a lot of debate and looking at data and trying to decide, okay, are we ready? Is now the time to shift our spending further up the funnel?

09:08
Nate Statt
Yeah, I think you're one of the few marketing clients we have where from the start, we don't have set budgets going into the next month, necessarily, because so much of our performance, at least in the bottom funnel, is going to be based on the success of the previous month and where the demand is. So summer months go really hot. If there's demand for it, I mean, you're willing to push the budget if you can see a return. But fall months, then that's when we kind of look to hopefully now gain new customers as maybe there isn't as much demand.

09:36
Aaron Saks
And I think that’s one of the differences is a lot of businesses will look at their marketing budget as a fixed cost, and I look at it as a variable cost. And so if we sell more, we can spend more. If we sell less, we can spend less. I think the trick is trying to make sure that we're kind of leading and not lagging. I don't want to get stuck in a situation where I'm spending less, so my revenue is going down. So I'm spending less and my revenue is going down because that's like a feedback loop that is in the wrong direction. I'd rather spend more, make more, spend more, make more. Right. That's the way we want to go.

10:09
Nate Statt
Yeah, but I want to get back to the marketing funnel, of course. But I did have one question on that note. How might being a supplier also contribute to maybe some reasons for budget changes, too? Because we have seen those periods of time where we may see a ton of demand, but since you're not being able to control manufacturing or demand, there's some significant shifts.

10:31
Aaron Saks
Yeah. So probably at the end of, really the beginning of 2021, most of 2021, we had the supply chain crisis that you hear people talk about, and that impacted us as well. So we didn't want to spend a lot of money to acquire customers, but not have any product to sell to them. So there were times when we said, hey, we have a limited amount of inventory, one, we want to charge top dollar. We don't want to discount that inventory because we know we're going to sell it, and we want to make sure that we're not paying too much to acquire customers because we know that the customers that we have or the customers that we can acquire inexpensively will purchase the inventory that we have available.

11:11
Aaron Saks
So, yeah, I mean, that's just kind of, as business ebbs and flows, we have to be able to respond to that. I think that what I think is unique about our relationship a little bit is between my involvement and VividFront's understanding of our business and their relationship with me, we can make those decisions on the fly as we need to.

11:31
Nate Statt
Agree. I also think one benefit that you have as a supplier is drop shipping and the ability to get new products incredibly quickly. I was pretty naive to the concept of drop shipping before, I think, working with your brand. But when there are, I think, trends such as shifting not only from disposables, but really aesthetic, disposable and eco friendly products, you guys are on it, like purchasing these. And the great thing is, it's not filling up your warehouses here.

11:58
Aaron Saks
And when I talk to a supplier, the first thing I tell them is we're not a drop shipper, we're a stocking distributor. That's what they want. They want people who will buy the truckload and put it in a warehouse. But I also explain to them that I can't decide how much of a new product to buy because I've never sold it. And they're pretty understanding, and they work with us to start on a drop shipping basis for new items so we can see what the demand is. And once we know what the demand is, then we'll stock it. And that's worked out really well for us.

12:25
Aaron Saks
I think that there's a lot of, I'll use the term startups out there, but there's a lot of people who want to start a dropshipping business that they think they can just spin up a website, open a Google Ads account, and all of a sudden they're a dropshipper. And it's always a lot more complicated than that.

12:43
Nate Statt
Unlike a lot of business owners, for the past three years, we've observed you being very much in the know about marketing tactics, and I think it's been extremely beneficial for us. At least one of our goals as an agency is to always be in the room with stakeholders and decision makers who can actually get things approved quickly, and that's been really helpful. But I think your experience, and I believe this was your former job title as a chemical engineer, has also really helped in this way. And I was just curious, not only how is that helping your understanding of marketing, but also the day to day operations of a razor thin margin business.

13:20
Aaron Saks
Yes, I was a chemical engineer. And when you learn about engineering, to use analogy, if you have, like, a storage tank and you have something coming into a pipe coming into the storage tank and a pipe coming out, and you know the level in your storage tank, well, if you're taking more out of the storage tank, eventually the tank is going to run dry. So the goal is to put as much in the tank as you can, take as much out as you can, while still maintaining the right amount of level in the tank. And it's the same with any of our, whether it's inventory or our marketing, it's a process. There's inputs, there's things that happen inside the black box, and then there's outputs.

14:00
Aaron Saks
And our job is to try to understand what's happening inside the black box so we can figure out how much to put in and how much to get out.

14:08
Nate Statt
Yeah. I've observed during our meetings, it's incredibly quick how much. We're like, this is the demand. This is the budget we think we want. You're like, this is the cash flow. And then we immediately lock in. Okay. This is where we can make room. This is where we may have exceeded our understanding of where we should push. It's been incredibly useful, but I think a lot of that is from your experience, too.

14:30
Aaron Saks
And I hope that throughout our relationship that I've been able to teach you guys some stuff or give you things to think about. Our relationship is really a partnership. Like, I don't view you guys as just another vendor or supplier. And while most of the time I treat you like I would any of our other employees, I know sometimes I can be kind of hard on you guys, as I am with anybody, but I think that it's definitely been a partnership type of relationship.

14:58
Nate Statt
Well, the partnership, when you talk about that, the first thing that comes to mind, say it with me. The website. I think the website is a huge part of our marketing efforts and really was something that we didn't start working on until a year into our partnership. So I was wondering if you could talk through now the flip side of we know our marketing strategy. We have all of our maybe initial funnel ideas in place, but what was lacking on the website and where did we want to take it?

15:24
Aaron Saks
Yeah, I mean, we wanted to grow the company, and the website that we had really wasn't scalable for what we wanted to do. I mean, like any asset or technology, it's got a useful life. And our existing website was close to the end of its useful life. So we needed to either really overhaul it and upgrade it or build a brand new one. It's like putting a roof on your house. You can only reroof the house so many times before you just have to put a whole brand new roof on it. So that's what we had to do with the website. I think that we did a really great job building it in parallel with our existing website and then cutting over in literally like hours to where there was very minimal interruption. And I think we all were surprised.

16:09
Aaron Saks
I mean, I wasn't surprised because in my mind, that's how we built the whole thing. But how surprised how smooth the cutover really was.

16:18
Nate Statt
Yeah, I've done this a few times now and I still am like, it's going to be like the Challenger explosion. This is going to be horrible. And it ends up being all right. And I think the effort that our teams put into this has just been incredible. And it was.

16:29
Aaron Saks
Why?

16:30
Nate Statt
It was maybe like a two to three hour launch versus something drawn out. So I think the one thing about the website that speaks to our partnership is the compromises along the way in every phase. I think during the design phase, the development phase, we had to figure out with your team the most important parts that needed to exist within platforms that are not custom for GPP. Because I can empathize with you having to move from something that's really tailor made for your business to something scalable, but also that has its limitations with what you can carry over.

17:04
Aaron Saks
Yeah, and everything has its pros and cons, or you kind of do like a cost benefit on everything and you say, okay, I want it to do this, but to get it to do what you want. It's going to cost a lot of money, but I can get 90% of the way there for a reasonable amount. And I think that we generally go for the 80% to 90% solution.

17:26
Nate Statt
We always say the 80-20 rule.

17:28
Aaron Saks
Right.

17:28
Nate Statt
What's the 80% of the time going to be? And let's go with that. Well, I think zooming out, a couple of other things I wanted to touch on before we do three rapid fire questions here. The first is, just tell us a little bit more about your team. What's always astounded me is the size of your team. I think maybe it's because you're a supplier, very low margin business, but you're family owned and operated. You have a very small amount of employees, considering the revenue that you're bringing in. And I'm just curious, is a lot of that due to the groundwork that you and your dad paved along the way to keep this really tight and close so you remain in lockstep?

18:03
Aaron Saks
Yeah. And part of it, too, is the website. We try to automate most everything. Most of our customers we have zero interaction with. They go online, they find us, they order automatically. Their order goes to the warehouse picks the order, packs it, ships it automatically, they get tracking, and it gets delivered. So they don't have to have any interaction with us. So I would say that 90% of our customers, we don't have to have any interaction with. If you take like, a traditional sales model where you have a salesperson and they have to interact with a customer, and then the customer has to interact with some type of customer service person, you're limited in how much time you have to interact with customers.

18:45
Aaron Saks
So you're limited in the amount of sales you can get with the website and with Shopify and how we've kind of constructed things, we don't have to sit there and babysit. The process, it can run on its own.

18:58
Nate Statt
But from the outside, I think maybe that could open you up to difficulties with having a unique differentiator. You're a supplier, so you're not necessarily manufacturing any of your own products in house. And you also are almost entirely digital right now. And so what do you think has allowed you to still have this very unique differentiator in the space of a lot of competitors?

19:19
Aaron Saks
I think that we make it really easy for people to find what they need. We offer a lot of different options so they can be specific with the type of food, packaging or container that they need. They don't have to settle for something that won't work for them. We offer really competitive pricing and we have really good customer service and delivery. So it's as simple as going on, finding what they need, ordering it, and it shows up. I mean, we make it seamless for them. People want a seamless purchasing experience and that's what we offer.

19:49
Nate Statt
Yeah, I think what I've seen through the reviews is it's a very good mix of really good customer experience on the website. But then you also have a phenomenal personal team that's reaching out to customers, making sure if they're having difficulty, they can find what they're looking for.

20:04
Aaron Saks
Yeah, certainly. Like, if a customer has a question, if they can call us, we answer the phone. We're in Cleveland, we're in Ohio, we're us based. If they email us, we respond. Right. Can really. They can access us as they need to.

20:17
Nate Statt
This year has thrown a few curveballs, and one of them, outside of just economic impacts that have been affecting all of our clients, has been maybe a shift in environmental language or how you can really sell your products as being eco friendly. Can you talk through some of the updates in the industry and how they've impacted us?

20:38
Aaron Saks
Yeah. Any industry has a certain amount of, whether they're regulations or industry guidelines or standards, and our business is the same way. Our products, pretty much all of our products are produced to have some type of environmental benefit. If it's a plant based product, it's made from plant materials that can be regrown and re-harvested annually, versus some type of petroleum product. If it's a recycled product, it's made from post consumer or pre consumer type of waste, the end of life is also important. So if it's a compostable product, it can go to a composter. If it's recyclable, it can go to a recycler. So you have to understand all the various different types of aspects and characteristics of the product.

21:20
Aaron Saks
So there are regulations and there's standards, and we do our best to maintain accurate information on our website to stay up to date with what the standards and the regulations are. There's different regulations in different states and fortunately, the tools that we have with our website allow us to kind of tailor the sales experience to customers in particular states if we need to do that.

21:42
Nate Statt
Yeah. From my point of view, when this all started to happen, it almost seemed like it just got to a boiling point where so many other fake green brands were starting to use that word and almost throwing it away to where now we have to be really specific in our marketing efforts, to be both true about the products and also really compelling about how you need to dispose of these to actually have the right environmental impact.

22:06
Aaron Saks
Yeah, I mean, the goal is to explain to the customers what the real environmental impact is, what they need to do when purchasing or disposing of the product to have that environmental impact, and to not overstate what the environmental impacts are.

22:21
Nate Statt
All right, amazing. So to wrap things up, I have three rapid fire questions here. The first is just one that goes back to maybe one of our ongoing debates or earlier debates. What role do you think aesthetics and marketing play specifically for your brand, and have you come around to it in the last few years?

22:39
Aaron Saks
I still think that I still have a bias to function over form. My goal is to give our customers the best possible purchasing experience, make it as easy as possible for them to find the products on our website. Or first find us find the products on our website and then check out, yes, there's aesthetics involved in how the website looks because I'm not the best at that. I sometimes will default or defer to people who have more expertise than me in that area, so long as it doesn't detract from the functionality of the website.

23:17
Nate Statt
I think that's one of our great handshake compromises that we've had over the years where we've acknowledged that different audience segments may require different things to attract them to your website. And that maybe speaks to a business audience versus home audience. A home audience scrolling on Instagram and Facebook is probably going to need something scroll stopping and really engaging to get them to your site. Whereas a business audience that's looking for the best price or the best customer experience isn't going to necessarily be as compelled by those. Is that maybe accurate?

23:48
Aaron Saks
Yeah, that's accurate.

23:49
Nate Statt
Cool. And then the last cheesy question is, what's your favorite part of the job right now? What feels the best or what's the most exciting about the prospects of this year and next year?

23:59
Aaron Saks
Well, our continued growth is the most exciting. I think that anything that we can do to improve our competitive position is good, whether it's through marketing or through pricing. We continue to add products on our website, which is always exciting because you're offering customers new items and you get to see what people want and what their response is to new products. But the continued growth is always very exciting.

24:23
Nate Statt
Well, that was my last question.

24:25
Aaron Saks
There's only two.

24:26
Nate Statt
Yeah, I think I merged two there. And I also asked you already about your career as a chemical engineer. So I was kind of ahead of the gun there. How about you ask the last one? Any questions?

24:37
Aaron Saks
What do you like best about working with us?

24:41
Nate Statt
I think it's the fact that we get to be collaborative over the entire experience of a customer's journey. So it sounds like a pitch almost. But I'm not really interested in anything that's just marketing or just web. I think it works best when we can work together on both sides of it so that if there's a marketing effort, I can collaborate with our developers designers to make sure it works with the website efforts. So right now, I think that's the most exciting, where it feels like we're really in lockstep about where we want to take both of these. Amazing. Well, that was it. Aaron, thanks for coming in. Three years in, many more to go, I hope. And we'll continue to keep trucking on and building your brand.

25:20
Aaron Saks
All right, thanks for having me.

25:21
Nate Statt
Of course.