A Day In the Life - Growth Marketing

Written By Garrett Long

Maggie is a growth marketer at ACME. She wakes up to an email from ACME’s CMO:

“Our biggest competitor just announced huge price cuts across the board. I will get you 10% more budget for the rest of the month…but you’ll need to guarantee to me that this will hit our numbers. 

Please prepare a proposal for our exec review later today. 

Also check the news on tariffs, every major customer is reacting differently to the recent changes”. 

Maggie’s job is to hit ACME’s targets for ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), no matter what chaos stands in her way – but this is a new level of pressure.

THE OLD WAY: FRANTIC ROAS GUESSWORK

Before Omnifold, Maggie’s day would go something like this:

Morning:

  • Set up a series of “war room” Zoom meetings for internal alignment

  • Call the agency partners, telling them to revise their MMM (Marketing Mix Modeling)

  • Promise to get them updated data and assumptions

Afternoon:

  • Realize the MMM can only work off simple assumptions and correlations in the past data, and won’t be effective in this scenario at all – Maggie will need to figure something out herself

  • Try to decide which SKUs will be most impacted by tariffs: discover that it’s not enough to just understand how ACME’s pricing will change given procurement costs – Maggie also must quantify the effect of competitor’s price changes

  • Analyze past data to see how promotions and ad spend can drive demand for the impacted SKUs; discover that it’s very unclear whether the impact to demand would justify the decreased revenue per transaction from the promotion (and the additional ad spend)

Evening:

  • Throw together a plan that’s 20% data, 80% assumptions

  • Try (and fail) to get alignment from Finance (“our model shows that the impact to margin is not justified by the additional revenue”) and Production (“we can’t ramp inventory for the promoted SKUs quickly enough to meet our OTIF targets”)

  • Revise the plan, ASAP, after discussions with the CMO don’t go well

ACME might have a plan after three days of thrashing – but nobody is happy with the compromises made, and new developments mean their analysis is already stale.

THE OMNIFOLD WAY: CHAOS TO CLARITY

With Omnifold, Maggie’s morning is laser-focused on the things that truly matter:

  • She pulls up the Omnifold web app, and types in the new business context: “competitors’ prices are up ~50%, except for our largest competitor, who is down by 20%, and total ad spend budget is up 10%”

  • To account for today’s news, Maggie instructs Omnifold to “consider what customers are telling us about tariffs and competitive alternatives.” Omnifold pulls and analyzes all this information via a CRM integration. 

  • She shares consumer sentiment and loyalty data with Omnifold, which gives a view of head-to-head performance trends. 

  • Proposed spending allocations are ready in real-time as she adds data and context, showing revised daily spend for channels, such as Google and Meta

  • Omnifold also instantly updates the revenue forecasts at a detailed level: per SKU, Channel (DTC, Amazon, Retail), and Region, and shows how the new plan will deliver on the ROAS target.

Maggie has finished her work in a few hours – before Omnifold, it would have taken weeks, and she still would not have gotten a good result. Maggie doesn’t need an AI-chat interface – the dozens of “talk to your data” tools Maggie tried before Omnifold didn’t solve her problem. Maggie is not looking to get “insights” from the past data – instead, she needs systems which help her optimize for the future. 

Only Omnifold answers her “what if” scenarios as fast as she can think of them, proposes creative ideas which consider everything that is happening across ACME’s business and the broader economy, and produces detailed plans which not only impact marketing, but ensure the entire supply chain is equipped to deliver on this new opportunity for growth.

Now Maggie is equipped to go faster and further. After a quick huddle with her boss, she creates three scenarios to present to execs: 

  • Scenario A: Focus the new budget on top-performing SKUs, and create buy-one-get-one-free promotions for three days after the ad spend is increased

  • Scenario B: Strategic price matching against ACME’s top competitor, but only through e-commerce channels

  • Scenario C: Identify the geographies where ACME’s largest customer has substantial market share, and increase ad spend for top performing SKUs. Reduce ad spend in regions where our other competitors are forced to increase prices.

Optimizing ROAS and Demand Planning = Success

The exec meeting is decisive and to-the-point. They decide to ask Omnifold to propose its own scenario, concurrently optimizing revenue, margin, and cashflow. The system outputs a solution which combines the ideas Scenarios A, B, and C, and produces detailed recommendations at the daily level – not just for marketing, but also for the demand and supply planning teams:

  • The demand planning model increases, recalculating inventory levels to account for lower prices while ensuring no impact to OTIF

  • The production planning models update, preparing revised materials and labor plans for ACME’s factories and procurement managers

  • Finance and execs get a real-time view of the projected margins, cashflow, and ROAS

By 2pm Maggie is done and breathes a sigh of relief. But in hindsight, there was never anything to be stressed about at all. 

The rest of Maggie’s day is spent preparing for a big change next quarter – launching TikTok ads for the first time. She meets with an exec to brainstorm a new series of simulations to run in Omnifold, and researches which comparable products are outperforming on TikTok. As always, each set of questions leads to some answers and many more questions. 

“Something for Omnifold to dig in to tomorrow”, Maggie thinks, and heads out for the day.

Garrett Long