March 2, 2021

Why You Can’t Always Measure the ROI on Content, with Fast’s Matthew Kobach

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“When we think about our brand, we think we are frictionless. We are going to make your life easier. If that was in clothes, what would that mean?”

If you’ve seen someone wearing a Fast hoodie, you have witnessed the magic of the company’s strategy. Fast’s Director of Content Marketing Matthew Kobach, who has engineered some truly creative social media moves for the brand, makes the case for throwing the traditional rulebook out the window.

CONTENT MARKETING IS A LONG GAME

“The point of pushing out interesting content isn’t necessarily getting a website to sign up with us—it’s getting people excited about the brand, and that’s hard to measure. There’s no way to gauge ROI, but we’re getting brands established in this community to be excited to use our product when they see it on a website. If we think long-term about building a brand, what do we want to do? How do we want people to think about us? You’re thinking in years as opposed to in months or quarters.”

STRATEGY CAN BE INFORMAL AND STILL WORK

“We’re still defining who our brand is, which is a very exciting time. We have the roadmap of where we want to go, and some of it is just gut, asking, ‘does it feel right?’ Take our hoodie for example. For some reason our hoodies took off. It wasn’t some savvy strategy we created. We had it on our site, we wanted people to test our product, we made it $5. The first day we released them, we got a couple thousand orders. I became a customer service expert really quick there. People like wearing this logo on their chest. When we think about our brand, we think we’re very frictionless. We’re going to make your life easier. If that was in clothes, what would that mean? This athleisure element came to us. I’m literally in a hoodie right now. I’m going to go work out after this, and I don’t have to change. Our branding is neutral; we’re not trying to be the star. We’re the supporting player that’s making it possible. That’s how we weave it together—express things, even if they’re metaphorical.”

BE FAST, BUT NOT TOO FAST

“After our successful athlete videos from Aspen, the team was saying, ‘do we do surfers, skateboarders, breakdancers next?’ And I’m like, ‘it’s been four days. Yes, let’s plan for the next one, but like, give me two weeks.’”

KNOW YOUR SOCIAL CHANNELS

“Twitter is our top channel. We encourage all of our employees to be active on Twitter. I could tweet about Fast once a day every day for the rest of my life. We needed to move beyond Twiiter where everyone knows us. That’s where Instagram comes in: Instagram is inherently visual, whereas Twitter is words and ideas. We approached some athletes, got them some gear, and filmed videos where they went fast. We’re not going to complicate it; we’re going for awareness.”

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