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Watch David dos Santos, our Chief Operations Officer and CEO Raphael Rohner talk about the leadership role in a very agile and cross-functional company like we are at R17 Ventures. David gives us insights into his top 5 leadership tips from development to design to Performance Marketing.
1. Clear communication is the key to success
In the day-to-day business of operational activities, clear communication and goal setting are very important. At R17 Ventures we host a daily Morning Goals meeting, where every morning we stand in front of a white board and each and every employee lists their main goal for that day. This helps each team member prioritise their day. In addition, everyone is up to date on what is happening every day in the respective department.
2. Smooth processes and good task management
The individual business processes and task management must function smoothly in order to guarantee the agile processes at R17. So how do we make sure that everyone involved sees the big picture as well as keep long-term goals in mind?
For this we use that Trello software tool. This is where we set out our long-term goals. We have both weekly and monthly goals listed on our Trello boards. In addition, we use Toggle, an extremely useful software for time recording. It is not about micromanaging the individual employees, but rather about analysing how much time is spent on individual projects, ensuring that every customer receives the amount of time they are entitled to.
3. Focus on quality and continuous improvement
The third principle is that one must always focus on maintaining high quality standards. One should always strive to get better - even when it comes to optimizing business processes.
Ultimately, there are two variables in performance marketing. The first is measured performance - this is monitored directly from the Facebook or Google Ad Managers and Shopify etc. And the second is the time you invest. If you focus on these two variables, you always stay up-to-date in terms of process and performance quality.
4. A data-driven approach is the be-all and end-all in performance marketing
Since we at R17 are primarily a performance marketing company, we have to make sure that we get the data and results from our media buying activities as well as from our creative department to continuously analyze and optimize. To do this, we use various variables from our social media and search engine marketing.
We have to make sure that the advertising material is of the highest quality and has high conversion rates. And we do that internally through tests. This is the only way to continuously improve performance. It's about, testing new things, eliminating things that don't work, and then keeping things that work and of course scaling them up.
For our creative assets, for example, we run test campaigns on our social channels in which we do things like measure click rates and even optimization events such as add-to-carts or purchases, to evaluate which advertising media perform better and which do not really work. So this is how we measure ours creative success.
As part of this, we have a competition among the designers in our creative department. Whoever wins gets one day off per month. Each creative strategist has their own Facebook campaign and creates a few design elements. After all, the design that gets the highest engagement and click-through rates is the winner in the end.
5. Coaching and constant skills development
Continuous training, coaching and ensuring that our employees learn continuously are very important to us at R17. Things are constantly changing, especially in our digital marketing environment. Therefore, an additional skill to master is that of Unlearning. Some things that we learned a year ago may no longer be relevant today. So it's about staying on the ball all the time, otherwise you lose track of things to ensure new competitive advantages and ultimately boost performance.
More than half of our employees take part in various courses, be it in the area of media buying, design or even development. We are constantly educating ourselves and are always ready to learn. And with that goes the coaching of the team members and making sure everyone is happy and is motivated to be the best version of themselves. This is the only way to go when you are in an environment that is constantly and rapidly changing. A few weeks ago, for example, the Performance Max campaign was introduced in the beta phase for Google, which fundamentally changed the world of marketing.
Each and every one of our employees has their own strengths: some are really strong when it comes to Google Ads, others in Klayvio email marketing. And so our specialists share their knowledge, experience and even their proactivity when looking for innovations such as the Performance Max. As soon as the tool was launched, our Head of SEM, Lorenzo Labia, showed all colleagues how to set up the campaign. This enabled us to achieve excellent results for many of our customers.
Are there any other points that should be considered when it comes to leadership in such a dynamic environment?
It is very essential to have a positive and optimistic workforce. Team members have to wake up in the morning and look forward to work. So we're trying a lot to create a positive atmosphere in the company. We want to encourage our employees to train themselves and develop further.
