Interview
The Gist
- The Drake method. How "Started from the Bottom" can teach you to thrive in marketing.
- Multiple marketing measures of success. David Bitton measures the success of his company's marketing campaigns through various metrics, such as cost-per-click, cost-per-acquisition, cost-per-conversion, annual recurring revenue (ARR), return on investment (ROI), and return on ad spend (ROAS).
- Advice for aspiring marketers: Bitton favors real-world experience, something he says always trumps textbooks.
As a five-time entrepreneur and author, David Bitton has been surrounded by real estate his entire life. Inspired by his parents who managed their own properties, he made his first investment at 21 — and by 22, had his realtors license and was a community manager.
After co-founding a legal CRM software company that was acquired (PracticePanther), David brought his knowledge of real estate and technology to co-found DoorLoop, where he also serves as chief marketing officer.
We caught up with David for a five-question Q&A on his role as CMO in the latest edition of the CMSWire CMO Circle series.
Editor's note: This transcript is edited for clarity.
Passion and Fate Lead to Marketing Career
Jennifer Torres: Hi everyone and welcome to CMSWire’s CMO Circle. My guest today is David Bitton, the CMO and co-founder of DoorLoop, a property management software company.
Welcome, David.
David Bitton: Thank you for having me.
Torres: So happy to have you with us. So, let's get right to it. First question, and always most interesting to me, how did you get into the field of marketing?
Bitton: Oh, wow. Okay, so how far back you want to go? I guess I always had a passion for marketing, always read books. I just consumed content, audiobooks, physical books, and YouTube channels when YouTube first came out. I took my first marketing class in college. I went to the University of Miami, fell in love with it, and then decided, this is what I love doing and I just took a lot of marketing classes.
Then, my first job out of college, I wasn't even applying for a marketing role, but they're like, can you do marketing? I was like, sure! Textbook marketing I guess you could say. And that was it. I ended up becoming the marketing director and just fell in love with it. And I was like, okay, this is my passion. I love this. That was it.
Riding the Marketing Rollercoaster, Facing Challenges
Torres: I've heard that from a few people. Somebody asked, hey, can you do the marketing here? And they got into it and found their passion. So, you just you never know where life takes you. Next question, what are the most significant challenges facing the marketing industry today and how do you plan to address them?
Bitton: I think the most difficult challenge, at least for us and our company, is that there's so much happening in the world of marketing. It's always changing. So many new technologies. It's getting obviously very hard to keep up. In our world, we do a lot of SEO content and there's always a Google algorithm update and new things to stay on top of. Now you have to add your experience, expertise authority and trust. There are always new things to look for, but generally, it's all the same, you know — put out good, high-quality content for that piece of the business. Yeah, I mean, there's so many ways we can do this conversation, but I'll go with that answer for now.
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Marketing, Metrics and Money
Torres: So, the third question, how do you measure the success of your marketing campaigns, are there some specific metrics that you go by?
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Bitton: Yes, we use a lot of metrics. One of the recent articles we spoke about is ROAS, but for us, depending on the channel — so if it's like pay-per-click, you know, Google ads, for example, or looking at like the cost-per-click cost, per-acquisition, cost-per-conversion, ARR, which is annual recurring revenue for the SAS people listening, ROI, obviously, for everyone and ROAS as return on ad spend. So, for us, we always look to make our money back within a year, you know, break even within a year, maybe it's two years depending on the channel. So, those are probably the biggest metrics that we look at numerous times a day.
Key to Keeping up With Marketing Trends: Consume Content
Torres: How do you stay up to date with the latest trends and technologies?
Bitton: So, a lot of content absorption. I am big on YouTube personally, but any channel really works. And I also love reading online sites, blogs, you know, a big one that I love is Ahrefs. There are things like Search Engine Land for SEO updates. There's just so much out there to consume. So, you find a few good people to follow, and then you just kind of watch them religiously. Then obviously the algorithms kick in on Facebook, YouTube, like Google knows what you're searching for. Everyone knows, they know who you are, and they just start feeding you all the content that you want. For me, all my content is either tennis, because I love tennis or marketing, and so I kind of consume that content.
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Best Advice for Future CMOs: Get Real World Experience
Torres: So, for someone just starting out and they want to get into marketing and maybe one day be a CMO. Do you have any advice for them?
Bitton: Wow, yeah. I want to use, I think it’s Drake, you know, "started from the bottom, now we’re here." So, you got to start somewhere, right? So maybe that's an internship, maybe it's free, maybe it's paid, whatever it is, but you’ve got to start somewhere. Learn as much as you can on the job. Every company will teach you so much.
I'll never forget that in my first job that I worked at straight out of college, was a startup company. I was employee number three. And I’ll never forget that I learned more in four months there than I learned in four years of college. Not to hate on any university, but real-world experience will always trump any textbook learning you could ever do. So, for me, it's consume a lot of information — for me it's books and YouTube — and try to apply it and try to get real world experience, either in your own business or ideally with an actual growing successful company so you can learn how they're doing it.
Torres: Well, I can't believe we're at the end of our session already. I want to thank you for joining us here today at CMSWire and sharing your thoughts.
Bitton: Thank you so much for having me. Always love speaking to you, Jennifer. I appreciate it.
Torres: We've really enjoyed having you. Thank you for being here and have a great day. Until next time, take care.
