DCMN: Could you give us a bit of background on monday.com and the common problems your product aims to solve?

Aviv Bar Oz: monday.com is a work operating system (work OS). We enable information workers around the world — meaning, anybody who uses a computer and works on a team — to work on one centralised, consolidated platform that provides full transparency to all team members. The platform gives you the ability to track everything in one place using automations and integrations with other tools that you’re currently using. monday.com comes as a blank canvas and you can use it for everything — either choosing templates for specific disciplines like marketing, R&D, CRM, real estate or construction, or you can just start from scratch and create your own boards. 

monday.com is really intuitive and has been designed so that users understand the essentials in a matter of minutes. After spending a little bit of time on the platform, they can move onto the next level of integrations and automations, board mirroring, dashboards and so on. For example, if you’re working in real estate, you could see all of your listings in the map view, or if you are working on a project you can choose a kanban board.  

DCMN: We’d love to hear more about how monday.com approaches marketing. Which channels are your biggest drivers of success? Are your goals primarily branding or performance-based, and how do you balance the two?

Aviv: At monday.com, we put a lot of effort into both performance marketing and our brand marketing. As with many businesses, we started with online performance channels like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, organic social, Google search, etc. We optimised for qualified sign-ups and people who are likely to convert with clear calls-to-action like “sign up now” or “start your 14 days free trial”.

But within the last few years, we’ve expanded our scope to focus on brand marketing as well in order to reach new audiences. As part of that effort, we started to do a lot of out-of-home campaigns around 2018, starting primarily in the US, because it’s our largest market. After a couple of campaigns in New York and San Francisco, we expanded to London and realised that this approach really moves the needle in brand awareness. As COVID-19 hit, we pivoted our activities to become more reach and frequency-oriented and not so much focused on performance anymore. We did a lot of offline: TV, a Super Bowl campaign,  and CTV, which is now really big in the US. We started working with more audio channels too, like offline and online radio, Spotify, Pandora and podcasts. We’ve learned that when well-known hosts support our product, it gives it so much more authenticity. 

Currently, I think we have a really good mix of performance and offline channels. We definitely believe in out-of-home and have our own KPIs to measure its success, but recently when we were running an OOH campaign in Berlin we combined it with Spotify, Xing, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube campaigns. These were all brand awareness focused, so we didn’t optimise for signups, but rather towards visits, impressions and reach. The idea behind this approach is that in a couple of months when the acquisition team will show the same audience for example a YouTube ad that is more product-centric, people will already know the brand and they will more likely convert. That is the main difference between the brand team who strives to show you the uniqueness of monday.com and the acquisition team which focuses more on features etc. We always aim to serve a user with a product-focused campaign later down the line, so both channels enhance the other. 

DCMN: Could you share any learnings from your German campaign so far? Have you been surprised by any market-specific differences compared to other countries you have previously worked in?

Aviv: We’ve run brand campaigns in a lot of places around the world so far, including the US, the UK, South Korea, France, Australia, and Brazil. So far, we’ve learned that each country is truly different from the other in terms of culture, people and seasonality — and that’s why it’s so hard to single out the German market!

This was our first ever campaign in Berlin, so we started by gathering insights from our customers and prospects in the market. We want to target them when they are in a work mindset, so we needed to understand how they were commuting, where they lived and where they worked. And here we noticed the first unique challenge in the  German market — people are really big on privacy and we weren’t able to collect as much data as usual. Another point worth mentioning is how people reacted to the ads in Berlin. We ran three campaigns at the same time in Paris, Sao Paulo and Berlin, and in terms of our KPIs, Berlin was definitely the hardest to deliver in although the campaign had a very strong creative and really good media booking! We also commissioned some user testing on the initial creative, and the ones I loved the most were dropped as they didn’t get that same response from our audience. As you can see, it is really important for us to always localise not only the language of the campaign but also the whole approach we choose for each market.

Credits: Berlin U-bahn – DCMN; Sao Paulo Subway – Dojo; Paris Metro – Farid Ismail

DCMN: It is so interesting and refreshing to see your data-driven approach to both offline and online marketing! What’s next for monday.com? Is there still something you would like to test?

Aviv: We are very data-driven, indeed. People often ask us how we measure, especially our offline campaigns. We do have our methods of geofencing and testing certain areas. For example, we’ll run brand awareness surveys and ask our users how they found out about the service, to complete the picture. And that brings me to your question – our next step is to optimise the way we do brand awareness campaigns. There is always more work to be done and more questions to be answered, like what are the differences between markets, how do we allocate media, what kind of messaging we choose and how to work harmoniously between acquisition and brand goals? We learn from every campaign, but it’s still in the early stages of development. For example, this spring was the first time we used QR codes on the creatives in Paris and Sao Paulo in a bid to drive traffic – and the results actually exceeded our expectations. So that is another data point to understand: the relationship between creatives and traffic. For each campaign, we aim to learn, implement and optimise from our last one.

Reach out to us via hello@dcmn.com if you would like to bring your performance and brand marketing together, across different markets!