From Meta to meat raffles: Tracksuit CEO says to go where your customers are

When I sat down with Tracksuit co-founder and co-CEO Matt Herbert, I expected a conversation purely focused on digital marketing. After all, Tracksuit’s platform is designed to help brands track performance through online metrics. On the contrary, despite the increasing roar around digital, Herbert also advocated for traditional, offline marketing strategies.

“How many customers do you actually need? Who are your customers? Where are they spending their time?”

These are questions Herbert recalled asking a New Zealand dental practice that had invested heavily in Google AdWords and Facebook ads but wasn’t seeing meaningful results.

Tracksuit itself was co-founded by Herbert and Connor Archbold in New Zealand in 2021 and raised $20.5 million in Series A funding earlier this year. Expanding into the US and UK, the platform now tracks more than 4,000 brands globally, providing real-time insights into consumer sentiment and brand awareness.

But despite being an online business itself, instead of doubling down on digital ads, Herbert suggested the dental practice go old school.

“Go and print out flyers. Go to your local golf club, go to your local Bowls Club. Sponsor the sponsor the raffles, sponsor the prizes,” Herbert said.

“Go and do that first — show up in front of them consistently in the real world, and then start to work out some of your digital performance spend.”

Herbert acquiesced that making this call can be tough for brands, especially when the digital marketing space is becoming increasingly convoluted.

“If you don’t have that expertise, it can be a fast way to spend a lot of money without giving you results,” Herbert said.

For Herbert, it’s not about choosing between digital and traditional marketing but about finding the right balance.

“You can build brands on Tiktok. You can build brands online, sure. You can also build brands offline or on TV,” Herbert said,

“It’s not so much the channel — it’s more around the creative, the communications, how you’re using that channel. The content that’s fit for purpose.”

Herbert suggests looking at who your customers actually are and where they spend their time.

“You don’t need to be everywhere. But where are your customers, where your customers of today, or your customers of tomorrow, were they spending their time? Then show up there in the right way for them, in a distinctive, differentiated way that builds a strong brand.

Despite advocating for ‘traditional’ marketing strategies, Tracksuit strongly embraces the role of technology in simplifying insights — including the HubSpot platform and AI to help its own customers make decisions based on simplified real-time data.

Herbert said this has become all the more important as privacy regulations tighten and third-party cookies are phased out.

Comparatively, Herbert highlights Tracksuit’s ability to collect broad, anonymised data on brand performance to help businesses comply with regulations while still gaining valuable insights.

Tracksuit’s next steps will focus on scaling up across the UK and US, while continuing to develop its AI-driven insights to help brands stay competitive.

“We want to be one of those mainstream businesses that come out of our part of the world — reaches global impact and recognition and [results] in more people coming into the industry,” Herbert said.

The author travelled to Inbound in Boston as a guest of Hubspot.

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