Raminta Keršulyte On Branding & Marketing Strategies

Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time and inviting me to meet you.

Okay, so if we were to start from childhood, then I guess I was always quite determined in the things that I wanted and kind of saw the direction that I was going, even at a very early age, which is quite surprising for some people. So I grew up in Lithuania. My hometown is called Panellist. It’s quite a small town, just at the northern border of Lithuania, not too far away from it. And I was growing up in the 90s in Lithuania. So very interesting landscape to be growing up in. Just post the Soviet block and everything, it was just kind of starting to pick up after long years of blockades and things like that. So, yeah, growing up, I was, I guess, yeah, quite determined. As a child, I was someone who I think at the fifth grade, I went to my parents and I was like, I want to go to a different school. I want to be learning this and this and that, and I don’t want to be here because I don’t see much perspective and things like that. So I guess I was quite determined from an early age. My grandparents from my dad’s side are teachers, and my dad is now teaching as well.
So there’s quite a lot of educational background in my family. So, yeah, from the sort of teenage years, I always knew that I’m not going to stay in Lithuania necessarily. I always wanted to sort of go into wider waters and explore the things that you couldn’t necessarily explore in Lithuania at the time. So getting into fashion for me was quite interesting because when I was sort of looking at where to study, I’ve got a few things in mind, which was, I really like photography, but I was really bad at physics, so I couldn’t do it because to study photography in Lithuania, at least you need a physics grade. I was really into human psychology, but I knew I didn’t want to be a psychologist or a therapist. And I just kind of pieced it together that fashion sounds like a good field for me to be in. And at the time, there wasn’t anything like that in Lithuania, so the fashion industry was barely existent. You can imagine after the book, like, the Soviet Union, where the whole fashion was kind of scraped out of the picture. There was one type of coat that everyone could buy in the shop and that’s what everyone was wearing, type of thing.
The industry was just starting to sort of stick back up and it wasn’t sort of a normal thing for anyone to study. If you say that, oh, I’m going to study fashion, everyone assumes right away that you’re going to be a designer. And I was like, no, I want to get into the business side of fashion. So not designing things, I was never good at drawing or anything like that, but more like the business side of it. So I graduated from high school and packed up my luggage and went to Scotland to study fashion marketing and retailing. At the time, I thought I was going to study in Edinburgh because here you at what? The university that I went to, the main campus, is in Edinburgh. Only when I arrived did I realize that my campus is actually in the middle of nowhere, on the Scottish border somewhere an hour away from the main campus, let’s say. So I spent two and a half years there. I studied fashion marketing and retailing. And after two and a half years, I really loved what I was studying and the studies were really good, but it didn’t make sense to me to be studying fashion marketing in the middle of nowhere.
I was like, I need to apply my knowledge. I need to go into the industry and start working. So that’s how I got to London. I stopped my studies in Scotland and arrived in London to sort of look to get my foot in the door in the fashion industry. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do back then. As I said, for me, not having the background and fashion, that not being a thing, really. I didn’t really know what the different types of work are, or even what’s available. So I kind of got my foot in the door and started working in fashion retail, mainly for luxury brands, and then got into fashion PR. I was working for one of the biggest fashion PR agencies in London and throughout my gap year that I was taking out of Uni. And that’s how I sort of got my foot in the door. I started doing PR. I worked in retail quadra throughout my studies as well. I got back into uni. I graduated with a fashion PR degree and continued interning and working in PR for both agencies and luxury brands. But soon I realized that celebrity life is just not interesting.
It’s just very hard for me to be good at my job as a PR because I just really don’t have the interest in the celebrity lifestyle or anything like that. I can never remember anyone’s name and I just realized that it wasn’t a good path for me. So I sort of reverted back into marketing, which was what I studied as well, and started working in one of my favourite brands at the time, all saints, where I was doing kind of a hybrid role of retail management, merchandising and digital marketing. And there I sort of figured that digital marketing seems like a good field for me to get into. It doesn’t necessarily require being in a certain place. It’s all digital. I really like that aspect. It’s all fast paced. There’s always things to learn. You can basically never be bored. So from then on, I continued working in digital marketing, sort of going from broader digital marketing roles, looking after agencies, making sure that businesses deliver. So I was mainly contracting different fashion companies in London. Quite like the contract mentality, where you come in and you get the job done and you go somewhere else.
It’s kind of exciting and interesting for me as well. So I did that for quite a while, and then I got a contract at Post, which was a startup back in the day, and it was growing quickly. So I got the role there as a web content and email content manager. And after a few months, they’re delivering to the brand’s expectations. They offered me a long term position as an international ecommerce manager. The brand was experiencing massive growth back then. We got some really good investment, and that was a really fun time to sort of see what we can possibly do with that investment. So one of the things that we did was we upped the marketing budget for the year by 300%. So we piloted maybe five pilots to just sort of see how far we can push it. And that was really just, I just, I think, realized how powerful marketing is when done right with the right team in place, and how much you can actually achieve with that. And I spent a good year and a half at Toast. I really enjoyed my journey there. And then I was approached by another fashion brand who saw our success with toast at the time, and they invited me to be the head of digital there.
Okay, so that’s sort of the breaking point. That was a breaking point for me because I did step down from toast, and initially I thought that I would take up the offer that that brand was giving to me, because it was a very attractive offer, I have to say. But it just didn’t feel right. Something was just not there. And I was already working with some clients, sort of on the side and having the sort of interactions. And working at Toast, I was always a four day week. So I think in terms of the remote type of working, we were caught ahead of the curve. I would say. We were working for four days, sometimes remotely. So I kind of saw that there can be flexibility in it, and we still can deliver great results. And I just decided to take my step and not take another position, but actually start doing something of my own. And that’s when I decided to go full time with the WFMA Agency. So just before COVID very interesting time to start, I finished working for Toast and that’s when I started with WSMA full time, while the agency has been running since 2017, but it was more of a sort of part time on the side basis.

So most of our teams are quite flexible. We tend to work in the Pod type of team. So actually most of my team members are remote and they’re part time. We just sort of gather the teams as the projects come and so we don’t have a base location. Everyone’s working remotely, the team is remote and we’re sort of working on a per project basis. So the team is like a permanent team, you can say it’s three people, but then depending on the project, we have different community members coming on board. And having spent almost ten years in the industry, naturally you have quite a good amount of contacts to go to. And I try to always personalize the sort of projects with the clients to sort of think what types of people would be best in the team for this particular project, how their strengths can bring in something that’s valuable for the client. So we kind of work in the Pod type of structure, which is quite flexible and it does expand and it shrinks as the agency life goes up and down.

Yeah, so our offering, I call it Boutique Omnichannel Ecommerce Agency, because as I said, we tend to work on a more personalized basis where we tailor our scope according to what client needs. We do have the general offering of, let’s say these are our standard packages, but we always like to look at the brand and just determine what it is that they actually need from us as a service to achieve the goals that they have. So we offer our service includes branding strategy and then implementation of the marketing campaigns, and that’s across multiple channels. Again, we sort of see what channels would be the best for a certain campaign and we implement across those. So we’re sort of a mix between branding strategy and the actual implementation.

Yeah. I’ve been working on the internet since then. In the beginning, I was still actually in high school with my existing co-founder and CTO of WordLift, David Ritchie Telly. We were in school together. The first business was about web hosting. We were buying storage from servers in the US and then we were starting to resell it in Italy for people that wanted to understand what this World Wide Web thing was. That was the beginning.

Yeah, definitely. Sometimes customers go with the sort of standard packages that we offer off the menu, let’s say. But a lot of the time I think what people think that they need and what they actually need is not necessarily the same thing. So sometimes after performing the strategy and the research phase, you actually think that whereas maybe your client was thinking of going into, let’s say SEO actually they need a bit more of social advertising or something else. So it’s kind of yeah, we do more of a cost custom package. We try to do it as much as we can and customize it to the clients’ needs.

So I would say an ideal fit for us is a more creative ecommerce brand. As my background is in fashion, we tend to sort of work with fashion, beauty, lifestyle brands the most, but then we do get clients that are not from ecommerce and they’re not from those specific sorts of fields. And then we look at the values of the client and our values, what sort of goals they’re looking to achieve, and then we identify if we’re a good fit or maybe they should be looking somewhere else. So yeah, I would say as an ideal fit, fashion, beauty, lifestyle, ecommerce brands, ethical brands, brave brands that are not afraid to try new things. We love testing and implementing new ideas. And who isn’t a good fit, I guess in one sentence is someone who’s looking for overnight success and doesn’t maybe care about their brand, just wants to achieve the sales and the volumes. Because I don’t believe in just selling. I think there’s great value in the brand side of activity as well. And there’s a great book called Lemon how Advertising Brain Turns Sour. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it.
It basically talks about the fact that marketing turned into this very numbers driven game in the last decade or so and the fact that brands are not paying as much attention to the more creative advertising and more brand messaging is actually damaging the brand in the long term. So whenever we work with clients, we try to include both the short term term goals that are generally more numbers driven but also remember the long term perspective and make sure that we’re doing certain brand activity to support that and to grow brand equity.

Exactly.

Exactly. I’ve seen it way too often where people exhaust those short term strategies and then you kind of need to go deeper and deeper into something that’s just ruining your margins and you’re ruining your brand at the end of the day. So I don’t think it’s a sustainable strategy to work with.

Yeah. So in terms of onboarding, I’m in love with email marketing myself. I know there’s been a myth that email is dead. I don’t know where it is coming from. I definitely see big value in email as a channel, especially with all the privacy changes lately and all the algorithm changes. And so I utilize it in our agency as well as for our clients. We use email sort of automated email process to board our clients, to let them know what will be happening within the next few weeks, to ask them for certain information that we need from them in order to start our work, like questionnaires and things like that. So we sort of do an onboarding call and then do some of the onboarding throughout the email flows as well. And then, depending on the scope of the project, we either start with workshops if it’s more the brand, let’s say brand strategy, or any sort of creative work, or if it’s more on the digital marketing end and sort. Of numbers driven. Then we start with analysis of the account first and then we sort of go into the strategy and what we should be doing next.
So it’s always a bit of a very research driven process in the beginning and then we have workshops with the client to sort of align and make sure that we’re taking the correct route to what their expectations are and to make sure that we deliver to those goals. And then in terms of management, I guess just the usual project management tools. I’m a big fan of Excel sheets. Love a good excel sheet. That’s probably a merchandiser in me talking. Yeah, just I guess the standard automated project boards and Excel sheets. Really, I’m not a fan of having it too big of a stack of tech to work with. I think there’s a lot of conversation about people just bringing new and new and new tools. But at the end of the day, even if you don’t use that many tools, you’ve got the core ones. I think you can still do great in terms of marketing and everything else.

Yeah.

Yeah. So one of the best tips and a very simple tip, I think that is the key is just planning in advance. Once you lay everything on paper, on Excel, on whatever it is that you’re using, it’s so much easier to see what content needs to be edited, what other pieces of content we may need to support certain channels. If you just lay the sort of backbone of your, let’s say, yearly plan out, it becomes quite obvious what pieces you’re missing, where you might need a bit more content, where you might need to tweak what you have. And it’s quite I don’t think you need to reinvent the wheel, really. It’s just by planning content in advance, looking at what you’ve done last year, bringing in the same pieces that you already have and that have been working for your company, like the Evergreen sort of content, and also bringing in some new ideas, once you put everything on paper, it’s all quite an easy process. I think it’s hardest when people try to do it on the fly. That’s when you get the inconsistencies. That’s when I feel like a lot of brands start trying to reinvent the wheel, where there’s no need to do that sort of thing.
It’s just using your old content that works for you, adding some new content where you want to drive, maybe a certain change of the attitude or just like new topics into the brand. And it’s quite easy to plan it that way, I think.

Absolutely. And then when something like that happens and you see that in your clients accounts, I think that mismatch between the different channels and between the communication that the brand is putting out there. I think what always helps is just to go back to the brand strategy, to the brand values. What do we stand for, where do we differentiate? What is it that we are trying to tell our customers? And I think once you take that step back, it becomes very clear to everyone what it is that needs to be done. But sometimes I think we just get too close to what we’re working on and we sort of get carried away without even thinking about the end consumer necessarily and how they will be taking this information from us. So my ex-boss used to always say put your customer hat on and I think that’s really a valid point to be making when you’re delivering any piece of content. Really think back at the brand and think back at the customer and if you’ve got those two elements, you can’t really go wrong.

So in terms of omnichannel, I don’t think it’s an enhancement anymore, I think it’s a need. These days I’ve seen not one brand that thought that they had their golden ticket in this one channel that drives a good CPA at a good brings a good customer in at a good CPA a good amount of time and then something changes and everything falls flat. So I don’t think you can afford that as a brand anymore. If you’re looking to survive beyond tomorrow, if you want to be operating without big hiccups, you need to have at least a few different channels employed to be able to catch those customers wherever they are in their buying journey and whatever channels they like to use to be able to communicate to them there. Because if you’re not there, then someone else is going to be. And we all know that the brand loyalty these days is really low compared to what it used to be. So it’s so easy to jump around and find that option that offers you the best possible service that I think brands can’t really avoid. Omnichannel. I think you have to do it and you have to go and see where your audience is and get on those channels because they will not be walking an extra mile for buying your product or buying your service.

So in terms of omnichannel, I don’t think it’s an enhancement anymore, I think it’s a need. These days I’ve seen not one brand that thought that they had their golden ticket in this one channel that drives a good CPA at a good brings a good customer in at a good CPA a good amount of time and then something changes and everything falls flat. So I don’t think you can afford that as a brand anymore. If you’re looking to survive beyond tomorrow, if you want to be operating without big hiccups, you need to have at least a few different channels employed to be able to catch those customers wherever they are in their buying journey and whatever channels they like to use to be able to communicate to them there. Because if you’re not there, then someone else is going to be. And we all know that the brand loyalty these days is really low compared to what it used to be. So it’s so easy to jump around and find that option that offers you the best possible service that I think brands can’t really avoid. Omnichannel. I think you have to do it and you have to go and see where your audience is and get on those channels because they will not be walking an extra mile for buying your product or buying your service.
You have to make sure that you’re there when they need you. And that, again, that wherever your customer meets you, that you sound like the same brand and you are about the same things. And perhaps you do change the style of the way that you communicate certain things depending on the platform. But your brand essence should still stay the same. It should still very much be the same brand that everyone knows. Either you’re in store or you’re online or you’re somewhere completely different.

Yeah. So in terms of evaluation, we generally look in the initial stage, we look at the magic quadrants, we see where the competition is and how the brand that we’re working with fits in these quadrants. And then looking at that, we sort of evaluate what are the steps that we’ll be taking next. So in terms of measuring those, it’s either brand mentions, it really depends on the KPIs as well. Sometimes we’ll look back at the sales as well, but generally it’s more like brand mentions and that brand sentiment. Sometimes we go and go to sort of more deep data agencies and ask them to gather that really underlying data from all of the activity that we have been doing because sometimes the results might look a certain way, but if you actually put them together and correlate everything together, you might get a very different picture. So if it’s something more complex, then we always go to sort of like deep data agencies that connect all those dots together because yeah, it’s not an easy thing to measure. It isn’t as simple as, let’s say, performance marketing, where you can just look at the numbers and see what’s happening.
You can’t really measure the brand that well. So sometimes it goes to taking interviews with the customers of the brand and seeing how they perceive the brand and what they think about it. That’s always a good way to evaluate as well. It just sort of depends.

Yeah. So in terms of email, I guess, again, the main thing that I think you need to be doing is serving the right content to the right people. If you’re serving good content to your audience, you know what they like, you know what they don’t like. You segment your audience and you only send the relevant content to people. You rarely get complaints, you rarely get bad sender reputation and things like that. So that’s definitely my number one, just to really look at what your audience likes and whether you’re talking in their language and whether you’re actually adding value with the content that you’re bringing. Second, I would say don’t violate privacy laws. They’re becoming more and more strict and that’s for a reason. We have been abusing them as an industry for quite a while. Don’t buy your list, don’t look for shortcuts because I don’t think there are many or if there are, they very quickly become from hacks, they become spam in a couple of weeks time. So don’t try and sort of look for shortcuts, I would say, and clean your list. A lot of clients find it quite hard to say bye to their inactive subscribers, but it is definitely much better to clean those out rather than continue sending to the emails that don’t read what you’re sending anyway.
Or perhaps they bounce and the inboxes change and things like that. And I guess the last point is consistency. As with any marketing as well, you can’t expect that things will just work right away. If you promise to send only once a week, don’t do it five times a week, people will start getting annoyed. So just aligning I guess, what you’re offering to your audience, to what you actually deliver.

What I use the most is HubSpot, Clavio and Omniscient at the moment. I have worked with quite a lot of different tools. I think there are great tools for different sorts of niches or let’s say B, two B versus BTC. My BTC favourite is definitely Glavio right now. I think there’s a lot of buzz around it, but I mean, it is a very nice tool to use and it is very nice to even pass on to clients and for them to use it on an ongoing basis. Let’s say it’s quite self explanatory, but it does still offer quite a lot of possibilities. And yeah, HubSpot more on the B to B side of things, but I do find it a bit limited. It does get very expensive if you want to have all of the features. So it depends again on the budgets, on the project, on the client, what their needs are.

So again, with content we always start with research. If we have the brand sort of pillars, we look back at those as well. What are our focus areas? How can we maybe find new ways about communicating about that and looking into trends, what people are searching for. You sometimes see certain topics popping in the area that you’re writing about and they might have not been there months ago, but now they’re there and people are very interested to find out more. So just sort of by doing the research to identify what it is that we can talk about, what is relevant right now. Tapping into anything that’s going on in the world is always a nice way to engage with people as well because obviously everyone knows about those things. Everyone is interested about certain news or certain happenings in the world. So just tapping into what people are talking about, really by using, again, search intelligence tools and things like that, and then planning things out in advance. I’m very much about that. And then in terms of when it comes to measuring, we go back to analytics and we love testing. We test certain elements of content out and we see what’s performing best.
So it’s mainly a B, testing both on the end of email and advertising and on website content as well. Just sort of seeing what it is that is working for the brand and what customers want to see in front of them.

I guess just staying relevant and really digging into the audience. I think that’s one of the biggest problems that I see around brands, actually not really understanding who it is that they’re talking to. And really if you just niche down to a couple of different audiences and you really understand them, there is a big power in that. And I think a lot of the time people are just delivering content that sort of pleases everyone, but in the end it doesn’t please anyone. So just really narrowing down, I guess, really remembering what you are about and what your audience is about and how you can deliver value to these people that already are engaging with the brand. So I think always just trying to be helpful and maybe teach something new or maybe find a different angle on something and be outspoken. I think about your values, what you believe is right and how you do things. It always brings in that sort of more personal engagement with a brand. When you’re talking about these things, people can actually relate to them on an emotional, personal basis.

A lot of the time what we work is Shopify. I wouldn’t say that. I think it’s the best platform for SEO, again, depending on the client, what sort of stage they’re in. If they don’t necessarily have the background, but do want to still be hands on with the whole back of the store management, then naturally Shopify is your go to solution. But on the SEO end of things, I don’t think it’s great. There’s a lot of limitations there. So if there is a sort of conversation about what platform should be used, I always tend to go with WordPress because it’s just more flexible in terms of what you can do with it, how you can optimize it and things like that. So I would say, yeah, I probably would say my preference is WordPress with the types of clients that we are currently working with.

Yeah, so I really find it hard to choose my favourites. I’m very bad at that generally. So again, really depending on the client, sometimes the success is actually not even that massive number. But if I’m thinking about the recent successes, I think one of the biggest ones was that we just finished a marketing automation project for one of the major players in house and home retail in Lithuania and they’ve seen an ROI twelve within less than a month. So that investment basically paid for itself, I want to say like within a few first days of us actually finishing the implementation and that helped them to achieve their main goal, which is increasing the client retention and bumping up the repurchase rate. So that’s one of the most exciting ones. But then also looking at a different perspective. Again, we started business in COVID, we started really working full on in Wfma agency. And one of my clients, he’s a well known DJ, Sebastian Malart from Sweden. His team transitioned with our help. They transitioned from the dance floor into online education space and they now have multiple courses with multiple musicians teaching people that are passionate about music how to produce, how to sort of enhance your creativity and how to use it in different environments and more specifically while creating music.
They’re all quite different and very personal for each project. And sometimes it is that big revenue boost, as in the house and home clients success, but sometimes it seems more meaningful than just the sort of revenue numbers. It’s more about growing, for example, for a circle of life for this client, growing that community and keeping that community that used to maybe meet on the dance floor in an event, but still putting them all together in the online space and still sort of nourishing it. I think that’s quite a beautiful goal to achieve as well.

Yeah, so horror stories, I think there used to be more of those in the beginning stages of the business. And that generally, I noticed it comes from the misalignment between the agency and the brand. So the lesson learned from that was to improve the selection process, improve the discovery, to make sure that the clients that we are working with their values are aligning with our values. And we’re both on the same page and we’re managing the expectations. I think expectation management is another big thing in agency life. I used to be on the other end, so it’s quite easy for me to sometimes see where the clients are coming from. But sometimes it’s very hard because as a marketer, you don’t even grasp what kind of things clients can be expecting. Sometimes if they don’t necessarily brief you in properly on those, and then unless you manage the onboarding well and you give out the information on what they can be expecting, I think a lot of the time there can be that sort of misinterpretation or expecting something that is not even achievable, let’s say. I don’t know. I want my SEO performance to improve in a month.
That’s just not going to happen. So again, learning to cover those things and the onboarding process was really a key to avoiding those horror stories and selecting the clients that are right for us and we’re right for them as well. So everyone’s just on the same page. Because I think for me, it’s like the nicest projects to work on are the ones that the team is happy with and the client is happy and everyone’s sort of writing off that excitement and it all flows so much better. These are sort of the main things that I would say. Nothing particular, just a couple of our clients, I guess, in the past, but they are avoidable by putting certain processes in place, for sure.

Sure.

It’s a difficult one as well. I always say 60s in America because they just seem so fun. But also like the 1920s in Europe could be interesting. Yeah, I’d probably say these ones. I wouldn’t go further than the 1920s. No. Middle east? No, but yeah. Twenty s to sixty s, maybe.

You? It’s always a call. I’m pretty bad as a marketer, I think. I spent so much time online writing emails and ad copy and things like that, that when the end of the day comes, I really don’t want to write any more text, so I always prefer a call.

In terms of my professional life, I’m now returning to the conferences, which is very exciting. That hasn’t been happening in COVID for quite a while, so I’m preparing for a conference in a week. I might be a keynote speaker there. It’s still to be confirmed. So that’s something new that I’m exploring as well. Going more into the speaking more kind of educational content creation and things like that, and just kind of constantly growing the team and looking for the next things that are happening in marketing, and they’re always happening, so just sort of keeping on top of everything. There’s always a trend that’s going on.

From the marketing world? I think Seth Godin is my absolute hero. I love the work that he’s been doing and in terms of psychology and how that plays into marketing and his books that he’s written as well.

My last Google search? Wonder. Let me have a look at my history. There’s probably some brand research for someone looking at someone’s competitors.

But I haven’t witnessed that personally. We had some very embarrassing political zoom calls in the beginning of COVID where someone’s partner appeared half naked in frame and like, a political conference. Thank God I wasn’t a part of that. It’s nothing crazy on my end, I don’t think. Yeah, I can’t remember any very embarrassing moments.

What’s going on? What are we doing here?

Yeah. What have you done here? Or what are you doing? Something to do with the purpose of it all, for sure.

Yeah, definitely. What’s going on? What’s the plan? God. Where are we going?

Thank you. Thank you so much for your time. And thanks for inviting me to have a chat with you. It’s a great pleasure.

Our one.