The marketing movement by Refine Labs. Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Movement. So my name is Blake Strosik, performance marketing manager here at Refine Labs. And today I'm super excited to have on Matt Chanela, strategy director at Gorilla 76, an industrial marketing agency that helps mid-sized beauty manufacturers identify, attract, engage and drive sales opportunities.
Matt, really excited to have you on today and talk through like paid social one on one for me to be happy to have you man. Yeah, appreciate it Blake, really happy to have you to be on the show, not even have you on the show. You're really good man. Yeah, it's really nice to be on the show man, appreciate you having me on.
Absolutely. I've been in the event going through, had about 30 B2B markers on the event, talking through paid social, so I thought this would be a great addition to that. So really high level, what I want to cover today is just walking through, I mean we're pretty philosophical on how we use pay social for our clients, we use it for B2B SASH, we use it for industrial. And I thought it'd be great to walk through like a 1-1, how do you build a foundation?
So this is like my no means a defend of agenda, but really just want to walk high level through how do you set the strategy and get the executive alignment on how to use paid social, which platforms do you use, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, you even consider TikTok, Twitter, all those different things, targeting and how to build your audiences there, going through your tactical campaigns, and then like what content to run and how to measure performance, and finally how do you assign attribution to all of it. So pretty meaty list, but really just want to get started at the top, which how do you set like the strategy? So I mean, I can riff on this for a bit, but I kind of want to hear how you guys do it. I'm at Gorilla and kind of how you approach setting strategy and getting executive alignment when you're starting with paid social.
Yeah, so obviously we're an agency, just like you guys are. And so a lot of the alignment happens sort of at the outset before we even get in and start working with the client. So for me, what we do is we have a, we have this thing called the Industrial Marketing Roadmap, so we engage a client really in what amounts to a four hour workshop with them where we have a discovery survey, where we go over sort of what their top line revenue looks like, their profit margin, their, you know, sales cycle, what their primary channels are that are working. It's a very, it's a very comprehensive sort of survey.
And we kind of get that from the executive team, sales team, marketing team, if they have that as well. And then we dive in and we kind of dissect that with them in this workshop and really get to know their ideal customer profile, where they see the most growth for themselves, what their product does and who it best serves. And that's, that gives us a really good foundation to kind of come in with the strategy for them overall. And it's not just the strategy of like running ads.
It's also obviously a strategy of what content are we going to create, what kind of positioning or what kind of flag do we want to plan on the ground with you guys and then what content are we going to create to support that positioning and then distribute that through which channels. So for us, the foundation really starts with that kind of deep dive with the client and then we go back to our own research plus go through our notes and rewatch those, those, those workshops and then come through with the foundational plan in order to execute for them. Yeah, I love that. And I think that, you know, kind of what you keyed in on there, right?
Is like you're, you're starting with your customer and so like you're aligned with it. But then like for the clients you're working with, you're starting on their customers and like where they're coming from and having a deep dive in there. Because I think one of the things that, you know, I see like as a common, I don't want to call on mistake and be to be, but people were, people can go off track is that they don't start with their customer, right? They start with what they think or what they, you know, like, you know, kind of see what other people are doing and they think that's going to apply for them.
And I think like starting with, you know, your clients customer, where they're going to be online, what kind of, you know, as you said content, you can provide for them. I think that's key. So like when you're like, go ahead. Go ahead.
I think a lot of companies, whether it's startup or legacy companies, I think they struggle knowing who their best customers are and then leaning harder into it. I think it's very easy to kind of say we do well here and we want to grow here. So it's focused marketing here. But honestly, if you're doing well in a certain vertical or industry, you probably have a lot more market share to capture there and get for yourself.
And I think a lot of companies sort of lose sight of just wanting to grow somewhere else at the extensive focusing hardware. They already do well. And so really for us, the big part of those workshops is identifying where they're very strong and where we can help them get stronger in those areas. Yeah.
Cause I mean, that's a great call up because I feel like, I mean, in SaaS, I see this a lot, but like you can have a tool that's going to work across a lot of different industries, right? And when you're doing a strategy like this, you want to focus on typically in my experience, where are you best or like you said, where do you have the most opportunity? So do you see that a lot where it's like, there's a lot of different industries you have to really focus in on a couple that are working well? Yeah, 100%.
So like I know for in BBS, you guys are looking at finance industry or HR or something like that, right? So like where we play or where I play, it's like we're looking at automotive and we're looking at heavy fabrication and we're looking at oil and energy. These are all industries that everyone wants to get into, right? In some way, in some way, shape or another, you know?
And so for me, it's I want to understand who are your most profitable customers, where do you have the most in-road, where are you best known? And then what have you not captured yet there that we can work to help you do that? So for me, really it's trying to focus a lot on, you know, because the easiest thing to do is say, well, we want to grow here, but I mean, there's a lack of foundational knowledge to really attack that, right? But they haven't done a lot of customer interviews, haven't done a lot of market research.
They haven't done to know a lot of people in the industry by doing things like walking trade shows and just talking to people in there. So there's just a lot of foundational things missing to attack new industries. And I would much prefer to go after that with like a good swath of just research and data and knowledge. Yeah, and I totally understand that and I agree with that.
And I think it's one of those things where, you know, when you kind of like can get that calibration, right, where you're like, and said like, okay, I need to go in this right now. And so I think that's a lot of the things that I've done in the industry, you get all those different inputs from all those different sources. I think it's like crucial to like have that set up first because I feel like a lot of like companies or like marketers in general just want to dive into it. And while, you know, action is a really good thing and you should definitely prioritize in my opinion, progress over perfection.
It does kind of start at that strategy level where it's like we need to have a clear target and like, you know, clear goals and a clear plan. And then you can go out and implement execute for sure. You definitely should be shipping it. Like don't don't get it twisted.
I'm not telling you all this research to paralyze yourself. No, right? Yeah. But like spend some time having some having some like key assumptions that you're going to make going in that is that is that is founded on some research and some interviews and just something you did to have some first ten knowledge of what you're going after.
Yeah, for sure. So all right. So let's assume that, you know, we have a strategy in place so we know like what industries we're going to go after and we know who want to target. So let's start like the platform level, right?
So when you're thinking about platforms, I'll kind of go first here when we're thinking about platforms, really the primary channels we're looking at where we find B2B buyers are is we're looking at LinkedIn and they're looking at Facebook and Instagram. Yes, you know, there might be like a fringe use case for like Twitter or we're doing some experiments on Reddit, but we find like our core, you know, channels or platforms that we're looking at, we're looking at LinkedIn and we're looking at Facebook and Instagram is similar for you guys as well. And like how do you kind of approach that? Yeah, I would agree with with that in that order.
We definitely lean heavier towards LinkedIn for the big reason and probably the biggest difference between refined and what Gorilla does is our clients are a little less well versed in the idea of paid social. And so there's a lot of comfort level with LinkedIn with clients where they know the job title specifically of who they're targeting, they know the industry specifically of who they're targeting. There's data that can show them firsthand who is getting in front of and what and what consumption looks like. So we definitely have a lead more heavily on the LinkedIn side.
Although I know for I mean, we have done basically advertising as well for clients successfully, but to me, I really stop it at we have to be able to target by job title and I'm really not going to go much deeper than that. So if the job title doesn't exist for the client on Facebook, I'm not going to pursue it just because I want to make sure that they have a lot of certainty over, you know, who we're targeting, thermographically, and make sure they align with you. They're trying to target in terms of ideal customer. Yeah.
And I think you brought a great point like targeting different screen platforms, right? Because it's like, you know, if we kind of like say, okay, you know, we find real or wherever you're looking at a Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn are probably your best two spots on paid social start. Yeah, it's the difference in targeting, right? Because like, you know, even here we find labs, we use a tool like metadata where we can like target, you know, like LinkedIn, a little targeting on Facebook.
But still, when we look at like our allocation between Facebook and LinkedIn for most clients, like typically what I've been experiencing, I work across four accounts, we've been shifting heavier towards LinkedIn. And the reason is just because you're going to get that more concise targeting like you talked about, even when you have a tool like metadata, you can still get that targeting on Facebook. But a tool like that really only makes sense if you're spending, you know, 10, 15,000,000 on unpaid social. Yeah.
And even then it's like, you know, it's, you got to look at the ROI of it. So I think for most markers, if they're not in that camp, definitely like what you're talking about here and what we're talking about, like Facebook, if you can get the job titles, great, if not, probably just a simple retargeting place, the way to go. But LinkedIn, like you said, that's where you can build your audiences and you get all those demographic data, or you can see how they're engaging. I will say though, if you can accurately target on Facebook natively and get in front of your audio customer, you should do it over LinkedIn.
I mean, the cost efficiency is just so much greater for you. And you know, as long as you're doing the same kind of consumption analytics that you're doing, if you're doing just content distribution, it works really well. You know, I'm running this with one client, we're running, we're targeting firefighters basically on LinkedIn or targeting one Facebook. So you're talking about job title, right?
I mean, the cost of the CPM is $7.50 on Facebook and it's $70 on LinkedIn. So I mean, you're talking about by a factor of nine, it's more cost efficient to advertise on Facebook. So if you can find your job titles on Facebook, do it. But obviously for most of our clients, because of how niche they are, we tend to lean more towards LinkedIn and we're going to get more into targeting specifically and I can explain why, but definitely that's kind of where we see the direction going.
Yeah. And I think that's a great call. I mean, similar experience, like we're helping a client, they're targeting nonprofits, right? And like, you know, executive director CEOs and nonprofits and it's like, it's $11 CPMs on Facebook, $70 on LinkedIn, very similar, right?
It's like you're going to have that difference. Like you said, if you can get it on Facebook, like take advantage of it, right? And it's like, doesn't have to be the entire budget, but like take advantage of those cost efficiencies if you can. Oh, heck yeah.
I mean, geez, if you're spending 10 grand a month, I mean, you should be putting two grand, 2,500 towards Facebook, like do that audience and then taking the rest of the towards LinkedIn where you know it's going to be more expensive. I mean, that's, I mean, that's not an exact sign. It's on the call split, but I was thinking about it just off top. I had this kind of where I would be waiting.
Yeah, no, no, I definitely see that. Yeah, 10 to 20% on Facebook and maybe, you know, 80% on the other side of the face, but I mean, I'm not sure if I can, if you have more granular targeting, we've got like LinkedIn. So when you're thinking about targeting different audiences on, you know, these different platforms, right? Let's focus on LinkedIn for now as a good starter.
When you're thinking of like creating different audiences and who to target, what's your guys' historical approach you've been to that? Because I mean, I'll have you go first and I'll share kind of, you know, what we do and kind of like brainstorm and see if there's any similarities differences. Yeah. So for me, because most of our clients are smaller ad budgets, I mean, and I'm sure there's plenty of people listening to this podcast to operate with smaller ad budgets.
I know you guys play in a bigger space, but we're talking, we work with clients who spend as little as four grand a month and it's been up to 12, 12, 13, 14,000 a month, right? And so for a lot of our clients, you have four, you know, four or $5,000 a month to play with, you know, ideally what I would like to do if I had enough spend available is I like to have three or four or five different audiences within the same industry to go to approach simultaneously and kind of run against each other to see which does better. Or maybe too, we can do well and we can just focus on those two and just discard the other two because my clients tend to have smaller budgets. We tend to have to take more, I would say low risk bets on terms of the audience.
And so we find ourselves a lot with clients that size running to two account lists first so we kind of, we do the, I mean, it's tedious work, but we go through and we go find all the different different companies that exist within that ideal customer profile that would firm a gothlete they would want to go after by size or revenue or something like that. And then what we'll do is we'll take that and then we'll also try to compile a list of existing customers and then we'll exclude that out and then we'll see what that audience looks like. And then sometimes if you're going to do by job title after that, you know, the audience is just as large enough to run. So what we'll do and the other thing is just a lot of different people kind of within the buying community that exists, you know, it's not just a director of operations, right?
You also have the maintenance guy or you have the, you know, VP of engineering or someone, there are other people that kind of touch that. So we really look a lot and we kind of go the account list route is we also will segment further by function, like job function and then we'll also, if we have to segment further, we'll do it by, we'll do it by, we'll do it by industry if we need to, but mostly we try to do like job, like on the account list, account list and function, they usually get to a nice, a nice audience size that we feel comfortable running. Other kinds of things we try to do, definitely kind of go job title and industry and we try to be really tight about that. So it's very easy to go the job type around and then add in all the potential industries that exist in your, in your ITP.
So I'm going after like machinery and industrial automation and oil and energy and automotive. And next thing I know I have a, I'm going to 180,000. I'm looking at that and I'm going, this is way too big for, you know, five grand a month. So try to like, and this goes back to that outset of like getting aligned with the executive team on what you're going after, right?
So when you have that alignment, you know, we can cut out all these other industries that we don't need to approach and we can stay focused there. So job title and industry would be another one that I would also do also company size, you know, trying to get rid of the solar printer, they're trying to get rid of like the, I mean, the 10,000 plus if they don't want to play there, I want to get out of that. And then the other thing that I'll do, if it's something really specific, I'll target member skills, because sometimes member skills for us can be really, really good. Cause like there's some very specific member skills out there that apply in industrial.
So like one such as like, explosives, like we have one client who, you know, they sell to people who work with, you know, identifying IDs and homemade explosives. And so explosives is a very, very, very, very niche member skill that I can target really just that, that alone and run, you know, so I think some of it's being creative and it's, it's understanding deeply who you're trying to market to and who you're trying to sell to. And that really opens up a lot of audience possibilities for you. So I wouldn't discount member skills if you're really niche down, but mostly what I'm looking at as a catalyst and then also job titles plus industry plus, plus industry size.
Yeah. No, I think that's a great summary and like great point on the member skills. And I think just the great point on the audience targeting how you do that overall, it starts knowing your customer or your, in your case, your client's customer, but it starts with knowing them and then getting that targeting, like knowing what are the parameters that I need that are going to work best for me, right? Cause you'll hear, I feel like a trap, some marketers might fall into is like, they'll read too much stuff on LinkedIn or they'll read a couple of different like blogs about like targeting or watching different YouTube videos.
And like while all those resources are helpful, I think what's the most helpful is like, you need like a solid foundation. So like kind of what you talk about Matt account list or you can do like industry, job title, company size, or you know, if you have contacts, you can do like a contact list, but start with those fundamentals. But then also seeing like, what's right for my business, right? Cause it's like frameworks are just that, they're frameworks, but they need to be tailored to your specific audience targeting.
I think that's like a really, really strong call out there. Yeah. I think like another thing to keep in mind, anyone who does not run a lot of LinkedIn campaigns in their life or, or just getting started like the audience you start with is not the audience you're going to end up with either like, once you actually get in and start running, you know, the best part about LinkedIn for ads is the demographic data and use that demographic data to start further whittling your audience away and getting those bad fit job titles or bad fit companies or things like that out of your, you know, out of the audience. So I think like, it's like when you play fantasy football, right?
You drop the greatest team in the world and you're like, I'm going to go, you know, 13 or this year on the championship. And then by the, by the middle of the, of the season, like you basically flip half your roster through free agency. Um, it's the same thing when you're, you're at your audience on LinkedIn ads, right? You can build the greatest audience in the world.
But guess what? You're going to make a series of adjustments to it over time as you learn a lot running campaigns in those audiences. Man, I don't know if making audiences on LinkedIn is like being a fantasy football manager, I haven't made the playoffs in like three years. So I don't know if I can tell my clients that how bad I am at fantasy football.
Oh my gosh, it's funny. Um, cool. No, I mean, I think you're like a hundred percent spot on the like the audience you start with isn't the one that you're going to end up with, right? You make those tweaks along the way.
One question that I often get and like we've talked about this in the event, when is an audience too big, right? Cause I think that's where a lot of people get hung up there like, you know, they see something online where it's like, you know, audience needs to be this size because the algorithm needs to do this to learn. It's like, no, it's not that complex. It can actually be a lot simpler than that.
Um, I'll give kind of my take first. So we're basically like, what we'll do, I'll give an example. So we got a client and they were targeting restaurant owners in the UK. And basically how we built their audience estimate of like how many, how many we should target is we just like looked at some publicly available data from the government in the UK.
And we looked at, okay, how many registered restaurants are there? So there's like, I don't know, 120,000. And we say, okay, let's assume that there's three to five decision makers at each restaurant. So the smaller ones are probably only one, but we'll just make an estimate, right?
Get a rough idea. And we're like, okay, there's 120,000 restaurants and we've got three to five decision makers. So our target audience size, if we had every single person in our total address will market, it would be like between 360 to 500 K. And it's like a calibration.
And so obviously it's going to be like different and especially like, you know, I know you've talked about it and like we've experienced it as well where it's like if you have a tool that can go across different industries, those estimates can get pretty crazy or there might not be like publicly available data. But I generally think that like you need to start, again, it all goes back to like knowing your customer, start with like, okay, how many of my, you know, what's my market look like? What's my total address will market look like? What's the size?
And then I can kind of like work backwards from that. Because I think if you do the other way with just looking at what can the platform build, you can like, you know, that's where you can find some waste in there. Yeah, I would agree with that. I don't think like, so there is such a thing as too big of an audience, but I was looking at it against your budget more so like if you have, if you're spending, you know, $10,000 a month, I kind of have like, it's these are rules of thumb and not hard and fast rules for me.
But I kind of look at it as if like, I'm spending three to five K a month, I usually don't want my audience to exceed 25,000. Now I certainly have like ranges that I'll tolerate within that. And then I kind of just escalate what I think is an accessible audience size until I get to that point. But really what happens is that's all just an assumption that I'm making, right?
I'm doing my research, I'm building the audience of the platform, I'm doing external research as well to kind of get a sense of what the total address market might look like. And then, you know, what I'm doing is eventually you got to get to the point where you're running ads or running content to those people. And then it's like, okay, well, is my budget appropriate or not? And I always kind of look at that against frequency.
And so, you know, you can build the greatest audience in the world, but the actual number that matters is the reach, like how many of the audience is actually active on the platform and how many of them are you reaching, right? And so on LinkedIn, I'm finding you're going to reach 20 to 40% of that audience by and large, somewhere in that range. That's what I found historically to be the case. And then I'm looking at frequency.
So how many times is in the 30 day period? Am I hitting them? And if I find that my frequency is really low, then my audience is too big, in my opinion for my budget. So I mean, I think your budget needs to be to a certain point where you can hit frequency.
And if you're not hitting frequency, your audience is too big, you need to segment it and do it into a second audience and then run that concurrently. That's how I at least approach it in my head and think about it. I don't know if you guys do that a little differently. No, I mean, I think that's a good kind of benchmark.
I don't know if I have a hard and fast, like if I have this much budget, I'll target this much audience. I think it's, you know, it is that it is really, I think it's a good start. I'll have to think more about that. But in terms of looking at, you know, audience that we're using, you know, typically, like, you know, if we have say 130,000% audience, like I've got one running, it's like 130, 110 around there.
Like I have a segment in between as you were talking about earlier. It's like I've got my decision makers. So like, you know, the CEOs, the executive directors, and I've got like my influencers for who this, you know, client, it's like the marketing leaders, so the marketing directors. And so like I've got a segment to there and kind of exactly how you're saying, I've got my budget that I have for the month and I've got to be able to see, okay, am I reaching these decision makers, you know, three to four times or whatever my frequency and kind of set, and then for the influencers, am I reaching them three to four times, you know?
And it's like, for example, if I was reaching the influencers and that's great, that's fine at frequency, but I'm not reaching the decision makers to your point, it might be, you know, a good idea to like break that up and like make it in a smaller audience system and kind of get more greener level on the budget and then also kind of see the insights who you're actually reaching. Yeah, I think another thing to consider is like the higher up the org chart, you target the more expensive it's going to be for you. So if you want to go to CEOs and founders and owners and board members, like you're going to, it's going to be more expensive, right? You see if you're going to be higher, you're looking at 20 bucks a click, probably sometimes up to 30.
If you're doing website, you're doing landing page views. And then if you go kind of the lower down the org chart, you go to like, you know, the engineering manager or the operations manager, you know, tends to get more and like that $10 a click, $11 a click, you know, 45 to 55 CPM. So I mean, the other thing is to think about, you know, who are you targeting? Like, and what's their position in the org chart?
Because you should definitely be allocating your spend appropriately based on, are they the decision maker and how high up in the organizational chart? Are they because the higher up you go, the more expensive it is, you may want to allocate a little bit more of your budget percentage to that audience so you can get, you can reach them as frequently as you want. Love that you called out to kind of like getting really tactical here, but like, love that you called out like, you know, different screen, like if you're using a website visit versus if you're like, brand awareness, maybe that's like, talk through that because I feel like a lot of people, you know, a lot of people see online is like really high level strategic and I feel like there's like a gap in terms like tactical talking about this. So I mean, basically, I like what perch, right?
It's like, if we're running ads on LinkedIn or if I'm running ads for client LinkedIn, I'm using like two main objectives to distribute content. So I'm using brand awareness primarily, but then I am learning in website visits. If it's like a high value page that I want the audience member to go to that page, but I really think like the big difference for most people listening between the two, right? Brand awareness is going to be focused on getting your ad in as far as many people as possible in the feed and you're going to have lower CPMs, right?
But website visits, you know, obviously you might have higher CPMs, but and you might not reach as many people, but you're going to get more people to your landing page and as you're talking about CPC, get like a lower cost per click. So I mean, do you guys kind of approach it the same way we're using those two primary objectives? Or how do you think about that? Yeah, I do approach with those two primary objectives.
I've also used engagement before. So I had one client whose budget was very low and he wanted to visit a, he wanted to target a very expensive ad group and it was just like, the only way for this to work is to use engagement, which means basically any action they do on the ad you pay for, but it's very cost effective for you to do that. So I've used, I've used engagement as sort of the last resort objective. And if you have very, very small budgets and very, very expensive audience targeting, I would at least think about that if you find your brand awareness to be too rich for you.
But yes, overall website visits and brand awareness are definitely the things that we're we focused on the most obviously conversions if you're doing retargeting as well is the other thing to do. If you're not doing natively, gender's website conversions, which is another objective and if you're doing retargeting, you should be using that. You'll find your, you'll find your cost per click to be pretty reasonable there. So that would be the other one that I would not discount.
But yeah, so brand awareness has been really our go to a couple of things. Sort of I noticed in brand awareness that I like and I don't like. So brand awareness as an objective. I like that.
It's usually lower cost CPM. So you get in front of more people. I do like the optimization strategy of reach where you can reach as many people in your target audience as possible. I don't like that you are basically pigeonholed into maximizing your budget.
And so you don't get a chance to do anything around target costs. If you're going to use reach, for instance, as a, as a, as a bidding, as an objective or as a sort of an optimization strategy. So just something to keep in mind, if you're going to use brand awareness and then go use reach, which is what I would recommend doing. You have no control over your budget aside from what you set aside daily.
You can't try to gain the algorithm to get cheaper clicks or cheaper CPMs or anything like that. Website visits, I do like just for what you said, if I want to go to a high value landing page, I really want them to consume that content. I really like to run a brand awareness campaign in conjunction with the website visits campaign. So I'm at least getting reach and I'm getting that kind of high level message there before I can actually try to get them to click through and actually consume something on maybe a product, a product marketing, landing page, like an industry, civic landing page.
So so yeah, so those are definitely the two main objectives that we've got to roll through. One of the thing that I would caution you were to look at if you're going to use either of those two. I also like to just look at those two objectives against one another. Because one thing I've also found like if you're going to do website visits as an objective, you're obviously trying to get the most efficient landing page cost per click possible.
Sometimes when you run brand awareness though, you can get cheaper landing page clicks and reach more people at the same time. So, you know, I would, I mean, I would almost default to brand awareness and then, you know, see if that's successful, not getting the landing page that you're looking for, then I would go to website visits. But that's just my own approach and there's no right or wrong way in my opinion to do that. No, that's a super powerful like, I mean, I have the same thing happen where we were like testing different audiences and this is actually on Facebook.
And so we were looking at the different audiences and the same thing where it's like I had like some like, you know, brand awareness reach campaigns going on Facebook and then I directly, you know, same content, same audiences. But I like directly tested against the like traffic landing page views and I was getting more reach and cheaper landing page views and still good engagement when we go and look in GA with the reach objective. So it is like you said, and it all kind of comes back to what we're the main theme here. It's like knowing your customer, but then also knowing your own business and kind of setting your own benchmarks and really knowing like what's working for me, right?
Or what's working for my business and like what's working for my marketing? Yep, 100%. Like, you know, people are going to give their examples of campaigns that work great for them. And just because it worked great for them doesn't mean it's going to work great for you.
I mean, you know, take it all with the grain of salt. You're going to ultimately have to get in these core platforms yourself and go and go run with it and figure out what's most effective for you because there's no, there's no two identical use cases out there. Yeah, 100%. So I guess we've talked about really that kind of we like ladder down like, you know, from the strategy level.
Now we've got like kind of really tactical and I want to kind of ladder back up to the strategy before we jump back into the tactics. So you were talking a little bit about, you know, like product ads and we're talking about the content that we're actually running for these campaigns. So I guess, you know, let's start with like the strategy and the content that we're running. Because I think what a lot of people in B2B have seen over the years is a lot of the same plays, right?
It's like we make an ebook, we get it, we use a natively gen form and we runly gen on paid social and leave it for three months, right? And so I mean, I think a lot of listeners' podcasts are probably pretty, you know, online philosophical or they're approach or they're familiar with it. But I'll just kind of reiterate and you can kind of maybe add some color to it. But really the goal of how we're using paid social is we want to distribute valuable content to your target buyer.
And so that valuable content might be a case study of how other companies like your customer, how they had success with your product. It might be product ads, like how your product works and how it actually solves business problems within that customer's business or your target audience's business. It might be like a problem awareness blog where you're just like trying to educate and like share like, hey, you know, this is a problem that's, you know, that is alive in these different businesses, right? Especially like we work with a couple of companies that they're trying to create their own category.
So they'd have to really lean in on an education piece of like why you would need this product and what problem it solves. And so it's like leaning on different pieces of content like that. And as you talked about using like a brand awareness, reaching as many people in the feed as you can so that they are consuming that content so they're becoming more educated about your company, your product, the business problems that solves the potential ROI can bring for your business and how it can help them and how it's helped other companies, right? So you're kind of like telling this cohesive story in paid social where people already are.
So like that's kind of like my like 30 second or 60 second view of like how we're using paid social. Any color you'd add to that about how you guys are using it. Yeah, I think like one thing I would add to that is I think everybody thinks they can be very down the middle with their kind of messaging and get away with it. I talked about this only earlier this week.
But I think increasingly because of the disbursement of content that exists out there today, like there is literally content everywhere and everybody is seeing some amalgamation of the same thing out there. Like as part of your strategy and your positioning, you have to must it is imperative in this day and age. I don't care if you're in SAS or in industrial or in finance. You have to have a point of view that you want to make sure that you are communicating to the market and that you are consistently communicating across all these different content pieces.
So when you're running product marketing when you're running case studies when you're when you're running problem awareness blog, they all should fall under the umbrella POV that you've developed that you want to make sure that everyone knows because people today when you win on messaging at this point, probably more than anything in this day and age. And so it all has to all these content pieces which I completely agree with you. They have by far the most effective that I have run product marketing case studies for sure. And problem awareness blogs have to have a POV that kind of rolled that they all roll under that is consistent and that is compelling.
So I think the other aspect of that is to make sure you have something there that is differentiated and is unique and is clear to your audience. So that would be the only thing I would layer on top of that. No, I mean, that's so crucial, right? Because it's like you can't you have to like go all in like you said, like you're messaging, you have to have something to say, right?
Because it's like not enough to just say like we save you time. Everybody says that, right? I mean, at least you could call yourself like, you know, I have one client I ran and this is a great campaign I ran for them and I basically started to umbrella this with them like we ran like this is the original window manufacturing machine you've never seen. And then no one's done this before or since.
And that was one of the best performing product marketing campaigns. And like it doesn't have to be like this scorched earth position, but it needs to be a flag you're planning in the ground where you are this and you can roll with this or you can roll away from it. But the good thing is if you plant a flag like that, you will invariably if you do a good enough job executing rally people around that point of view. And then you will also do the other thing that you should do is alienate people away from that point of view.
And that's a good thing because when you alienate people away from your point of view, then you know what you need to do to fill that gap and shore up and shift them into, you know, your way and your perspective on business life category, et cetera. Yeah, I mean, that's key, right? It's like, you know, you have like you basically when you're coming to market, you have a new way of doing something. That's why you're in business.
That's why you're selling something. It's like, why not tell people about that? Why just, you know, why be so generic when, you know, not get people like fired up or like people seem like, oh, that makes a lot of sense like, no, go all in on it, man. And just, you know, really say with your product like, here's what we saw for here's how, you know, we're better than the old way or, you know, or here's how like, you know, the macro world has changed and how this better fits into the world like really communicating that is key if you really want to, as you said rally people to your cause and you're going to alienate some people, but you know, it's really key to having success.
It's like, it's like, it's like, peeps as people are like people buy people buy and make decisions on emotion and then they justify it with like reason and logic. So, I mean, you have to tap into emotion in some way, shape or form to get someone's attention. Because think about when you're running campaigns on LinkedIn, like, what is your objective more than anything? It's to get them to stop scrolling and read the and read the ad and the bonuses that they click through and actually read the landing page.
So, you know, what's your message and what's your creative going to be that's going to make someone stop and go, huh, I totally, that's interesting or that guy is full of, you know, so you gotta, you gotta kind of, you gotta kind of be willing to go after and go for emotional reaction. Yeah, totally. So I think, um, kind of like, you know, wrapping up here. One last topic I want to talk about with all this, you know, we've kind of gone through from the top of the strategy all the way through like the specific ads that you'll run.
Um, let's talk about like, how do we prove that this is working or how do we report on that this is working? Because if you're in B2D marketing, like, attribution is a central part of your job. Because you basically have to be able to communicate to your executive team and they have to communicate to the board or if you're high level, you have to communicate to the board. That marketing is working and bringing in revenue, right?
Not just bringing in leads, like, marketing is not hitting their target and sales isn't, but that marketing is contributing to the growth of the business. I'll serve that one up to you. How do you guys do it first? And I can kind of talk through some of the ways that we'll do it.
Yeah. So look, you and I both champion the same idea of content distribution, like un-gaining everything, put value in front of your audience, trust that they will find their way to your company in some way, shape, or form inbound to request a quote, request a demo, you know, begin a sales conversation, right? So the only way that doing content distribution like that works is if you break the rule of direct attribution across all channels, right? You have to take a holistic inbound attribution method to this and order for it to work because you're basically depending on people who are in the way that you're doing.
Depending on people coming direct to your website after being influenced and educated and convinced by your pay campaign efforts to basically come inbound. And what you're going to see is you're going to see a lot of people who come in and last touch attribution is going to stay direct traffic, branded organic, right? If it's Google ads, it should capture that for you, but not always, you know. So to me, the only way that this works from an attribution standpoint is if you use a holistic inbound funnel.
So you have to be willing to do that. You put things in place like self-reported attribution plus last touch, plus if you have attribution software that you can lay on top of that. And you should be looking at all three of those things against each other because none of them are all going to say different things. And what you're really looking at is looking at that quantitative data to make a qualitative assessment over what channels are working best for you and not, right?
And so you should be when you're doing self-reported, especially at the outset, you're going to get a lot of word of mouth heard about you here. This whole colleague referred you or I talked to someone and good that word of mouth is a good thing to know. And that doesn't mean you shouldn't be doing, you know, pay content distribution because what you really want to do is keep educating people. So they think of you when that question comes up in the first place, right?
So to me, like you use each of these data points to have the discussion around what's working and what's not. Over time, if you're doing it well, you're going to see that word of mouth start to take up a little bit more to get more towards heard about you on Facebook, heard about you in the Facebook community, or this Slack group or something like that. And that to me is a reflection that your product is good and that your and that your demand and efforts are working. Yeah, and I think you hit it on the head, right?
It's looking at all of those different tools. So taking the quantitative, like you said, making the qualitative decision, right? Because it's like no dashboard is going to tell you what to do next. It's going to give you the insights, but that comes from you.
Like you can't automate that. I feel like a lot of people. This one, like I went my clear line. I put in, you know, a dollar here and got five or $10 out and we can just scale it up infinitely until we are unicorn.
It's like, well, it's not always that linear. It's actually never that linear, you know. Yeah, I know there's like those breakthroughs that you have, right? You know, and you may, you may this point sort of indirectly, but looking at your attribution over a long time horizon as well.
Like if you look at attribution month over month over month over month when you're rolling this program out, you're going to be miserable. You're going to look at it after three months and you're going to see basically zero movement and you're going to go, this is a working term. This is all I did this with one of my clients. We basically did an entire just reboot of their whole marketing presence.
Right? We did their website, convergent optimization across on their home page, all the way through their contact page. We made new content for and we set it up. We repurposed it for specific channels.
We started running on demand, I'm using LinkedIn and using Google ad was our two primary or two primary methods of paid acquisition and first two, first three, first quarter I ran the mansion for this client and we were working on things on the website zero inbound pipeline that quarter. And I was like, we're in a lot of trouble. But I was like, be patient, be patient, be patient, be patient. It will come around.
We are in front of me. All the LinkedIn demographic did all the leading indicators on who we were going after all said we were doing the right thing. And I was like, be patient. This will work.
This content is good. We have the targeting, right? Like this just needs more time. Next quarter, $1.6 million in pipeline.
So you have to give it time for it to mature because it's not like it doesn't just happen overnight. You have to get your part of me, right? You have to get your content, right? You have to get your website conversion optimization, right?
You have to coach it. You have to coach your client sometimes on the sales handoff as well. And then you also have to respect buying cycles. Take a long time.
I mean, this client's buying cycle is nine months on average. So not just a lot longer. So, you know, you have to give it time to mature and play out and just be confident in what you're seeing qualitatively is going to pay off quantitatively down the road, but you have to be brutally honest with yourself about what you're seeing in the ad platforms and with the content. My job right there, I don't even know if I could even even attitude it.
But I mean, I think if I was going to add something to it, the only thing I would like really kind of like reinforce from that is, you know, yeah, you're taking these insights and you need to be patient. You need to like factor yourself. Time. But you also have to look at marketing as you kind of talked about.
You look at everything coming in through this like holistic website funnel where people are contacting you in their high intent and you have to look at like the metrics beyond that measure success, right? Like the goal isn't higher click-through rate or it just engagement. Those are good leading indicators, which we talked about helping form and then ultimately what you're measuring and what you hopefully reporting on to your executive team is, you know, you're looking at, you know, how many that we have come through the top is like, a demo or price request and you guys, a lot of you guys case, but then, you know, how many marketing opportunities that we create, how much pipeline and ultimately after you've given yourself enough time, you're going to look at how much close one revenue and then you're going to look at things after you get that in place like cell cycle length, pipeline velocity, different things. Also, just the efficiency of it, right?
Like, well, we'll lead the land ratio, right? And MQM, MQL, MQL opportunity to close one, you know, like all these things matter, like they're looking at efficiency, right? So with this client in particular that I mentioned, like their raw lead to opportunity is 9%, which is, I think it's pretty good. I'm pretty proud of it.
Their MQL opportunity is like 25%. Like, basically 25% of what we score is an MQL gets an opportunity. And opportunity with this client means their late stage pipeline. It doesn't mean like they're just in that sign of discovery session.
There's no dollar amount assigned to it at that point. So to me, like I'm looking a lot at not just, is it working? Are we getting people coming in? Is it also efficient vis-a-vis how the business is built to prospect and nurture people coming in in the first place?
Yeah, man. No, that's this has been great. I feel like we've walked through, you know, the entire obviously we go for like, I feel like we both good. And I kind of like walk through this.
But I guess, you know, today we've kind of covered like how you can like start looking at like paid social or if you're already doing it, how you can kind of like reevaluate it within your marketing org, closing thoughts, like anything you'd like to like leave like listeners with like wrap up or something for them to think about as they kind of go out, try to implement this on their own. If you're gonna, if you're gonna get started doing paid social, especially if someone hasn't done it much before, keep it simple for yourself. Very simple. Think of one audience.
You want to go after think of a few different ways to slice that audience up so you can test different audiences. Have your content ready. Have you all have all your ducks on your rope? Deeply understand who you're trying to target and why.
Make sure that you have, make sure you're looking at your website and that your conversion path is optimized. You're making it stupid easy for someone to talk to you if they want to. And that would be that would be sort of my my just starter advice for getting off the ground. You will as you run with that, learn a lot along the way and be able to optimize.
But to me, the starting point is no exactly who you're going after, no what content you have your disposal to go after them and make sure that your website is optimized for people to very easily talk to your sales team if and when they're ready. Yeah, and I would add to that and build on that with just saying, you know, you can't scale complicated. And that's the truth. I thought that was right on the money.
So it's like when you're talking about focus on one audience, we don't want to add, have your website ready, the conversion optimization, all those things, like keep it simple. And then like, don't try to recreate the wheel chances are you already have a case study on your website. Use that case study. Like, don't try to create a new page.
Don't try to go find your customer. Like, if you don't have it, yeah, you need to do that. But if you already have some content available, use that as your V1 and then iterate and improve. Yep, 100%.
Well, this has been great. Matt, really appreciate having you on. I hope this was valuable for everyone that's listening. But yeah, I mean, we'll have to do another one of these soon.
This is awesome. We definitely show man. I'll give people if people want to reach out to me and I'll be on LinkedIn, Matthew Shell. I'm sure it'll be on the show notes.
And then also, I'm on podcast with NJPaters, the industrial marketing show. If you don't work in SAS and you work in more conventional industries, really a lot of things we talk about apply across things aside from industrial, definitely by trying to listen to your interested. Awesome. Yeah, and likewise, you know, if anyone's listening, they have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.
I'm kind of an open book. Love to help out people that are, you know, in a spot where they can use them, you know, marketing help. And yeah, it's been great. Thanks, man.
Appreciate you.