Petar Cerina
Prepare for an enlightening conversation with the growth master, Petar Cerina, as we dive deep into the world of business expansion, strategy, and success.
Prepare for an enlightening conversation with the growth master, Petar Cerina, as we dive deep into the world of business expansion, strategy, and success.
I am a Performance Marketer and co-founder of an agency called Commbakers with over 8 years of experience in the digital marketing industry.
I was lucky enough to work in 2 fantastic digital marketing agencies in Croatia, SeekandHit and Degordian, where my passion for e-commerce started.
After that, I moved to Stockholm to work for a Swedish brand, Happy Socks, as a Performance Marketing Manager. That was followed by a short spell at TourRadar (Vienna).
Last year, my friend and I decided to found our own boutique agency, called Commbakers, that focuses on helping small and medium e-commerce businesses to grow profitably. We offer services such as paid advertising, SEO, tracking and analytics, CRO, and consulting on Performance Marketing strategy.
I always found the impact of performance marketing on a business' growth fascinating. In the era of DTC brands, performance marketing can make or break a business, and I find it super exciting to be part of it.
Helping brands that drive positive change in society is my biggest motivation in this job. We are proud to have clients that are driving positive change through ethical initiatives, being pioneers in sustainable mobility, supporting inclusivity, body positivity, and much more. Working for such brands gives me a sense of doing something meaningful, so that's a huge part of my ideal client profile.
The most recent example is a Swedish underwear brand that had an amazing start to 2024.
We helped them grow net sales YoY by 40% with only an 8% increase in spending. Their profitability for that period grew significantly.
The change in results was a combination of different factors, with the most important being a focus on products that drove higher AOV, account consolidation, creative diversification, use of optimized landing pages and the use of Meta AI tools like Advantage+ campaigns.
In my experience the key to success is knowing your customers.
You can apply all those fancy strategies, have shiny website and polished ads but if it doesn’t speak to your customers, you will most certainly fail. Most of the time, I see brands focus on talking about their products' features, instead of how those products can solve customer problems.
High product quality is a must.
You can’t fool people, your product must fulfill your promise or bad reviews will drive your sales to the ground.
You need to know your economics.
Every business is a game of numbers, before you start with advertising make sure to understand and set your Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) and new Customer Acquisition (NCAC) targets. There is a huge difference between growing revenue and doing it in a profitable way.
Your website is key.
Invest in your website and landing pages. Driving traffic to the website that won’t convert is just money down the drain. If you’d go to the physical store where you can’t find clear prices for products, where you need to wait for the door to open for 10 seconds, where the cash register glitches and asks you 4 times over to do the checkout, you’d probably avoid that store next time. Well, your website is your store, make sure customers find it super easy to shop there.
Testing leads to success.
In order to unlock your success, test as much as possible but make sure that you’re making meaningful tests that are backed by the research. Copy, hooks, creatives, offers… try to test them all and apply learnings but also make sure to challenge those learnings with new tests.
Every brand is individual so I always treat it like a blank canvas.
Everything starts from one question: ‘What problem do their products solve?’.
This allows me to get to know their audience, their pain points, where they spend their time online and what content they consume.
I find it as a central point of every strategy, from here I do the research on industry, competitors, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the brand, and so on.
My strategy usually focuses on 5 pillars: Customer, Finance, Analytics, Technical setup and Creative.
I already mentioned Customer above. For Finance, it’s crucial to understand profitability goals, understand your budget, and set your KPIs. Analytics are about the quality of your data, which sources you use and how good your tracking setup is. Technical setup is about landing pages, advertising platforms you use, this goes more into the tactical part of your campaign execution. Last but not least, Creative goes into the content you’ll be creating, this part relies heavily on your customer research.
Analytics are the foundation for any effective growth strategy. Your decisions are only as good as the data you have. When we start working with a new client, analytics are one of the first areas we look into.
One misconception is that you can buy your way to success.
Sometimes, I see brands trying to fix all their issues with more money put into advertising. I always say that advertising is a catalyst. If you have everything in place, advertising can skyrocket your business. If that’s not the case, it can break your business.
Another common misconception I see is that you can build your growth on one single channel (eg. paid advertising), or even worse, on one single platform (eg. Meta).
Never put all eggs in one basket, you have organic, CRM, affiliate marketing, etc. Work on growing all of them.
For us at Commbakers, we are all about sustainable growth but often you need to find the balance because short-term revenue boosts (eg. Sales) are part of every brand’s strategy.
The key is that those short-term actions don’t hurt your long-term goals. Running sales and discounts constantly will surely hurt your brand perception and often attract customers that will spend less. Therefore, it’s very important to plan such actions in advance so that we can understand their impact, rather than do it in panic, and potentially hurt your long-term growth.
In our Customer research, industry research is a very important part.
We try to understand trends, existing solutions, competition, size of the industry, costs, etc.
You need to know the landscape you’re coming in, otherwise you can make costly mistakes.
We work a lot in the fashion industry but even within that there are so many categories. For example, it’s very different to advertise underwear to lifestyle clothes. With underwear you might be faced with ad restrictions, whereas lifestyle clothes are a super-competitive industry where it’s very hard to stand out.
User experience is every interaction a user has with your brand, from that first ad or organic result/post to post-purchase experience.
I can’t stress enough how crucial it is for ecommerce growth.
I suggest brands to map out their customer journey and constantly improve every step of it. Customers often have 15 or 20 touchpoints with your brand before purchase, you can easily lose them if they have only one bad experience.
Equally important, post-purchase experience is key to get that customer to buy again, don’t miss out on that opportunity. That second purchase is much more profitable for your brand than their first purchase.
Digital marketing is an unforgiving industry. You need to constantly learn and improve your skills if you want to stay in the game.
There are great courses and resources available out there but I find Linkedin being one of the best sources. You have so many industry experts sharing their experiences and knowledge for free, it’s amazing, I find a lot of valuable information there. We spend a lot of time on social media, so why not turn it into learning, instead of only amusement.
In the end you’ll learn the best by testing new things and analyzing the data. If you have an opportunity, learning by doing is the best way.
Customer feedback is your gold mine. You can find out all about your customers there. Their problems, what’s important for them, if your product is good or not, if your delivery service is good, if your customer support is doing the right things, everything. Put time and effort into getting your customer feedback, it’s the best possible data you can get.
This would be a sum of all things I mentioned already above.
First advice, you are there for your audience, so make sure to get to know them, their problems, habits and never stop listening to them. Never forget that there is a human person on the other side.
Second, get the basics right. Your product must fulfill its promise, you need to understand the financial aspect of your business, get your logistics right, have a good website, make sure that your post-purchase experience is as good as your pre-purchase experience. Lay your foundations right.
Third, never put all eggs in one basket. Being dependent on one source of traffic could hinder your growth. I suggest you start developing your organic and CRM channels first. You’ll get valuable insights into who your customers are, what they like, what are their problems, interests, demographics, etc. This will help you immensely when you start with advertising.
Finally, there are no shortcuts to success. Whatever you do, make sure that you don’t lose focus on sustainable and profitable, long-term growth. Otherwise, you’ll be soon out of the game.
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