Welcome everyone, my name is Kerry Emodio and I am here to chat through some of the tactical ways that you can use generative AI in your paid media campaigns. I have a deck chock full of prompt examples and my hope is that you can walk away from today's session with some new ideas on how you can use a tool like chat GPT, whether you've used it before or not, I have some tips and tricks for you. I am not here necessarily to tell you how to save time with generative AI. This session is not really about cutting corners or just producing more output.
I am here to tell you how to use generative AI to be a better marketer, how to improve your messaging, how to reach your audience in a more impactful way, how to improve your branding and cut through the noise, because if you can do those things, you can boost revenue. Before we dive in a little background on me, I recently joined the team over at Refine Labs as a director of demand generation. I work with B2B brands on accelerating their demand with predictable scalable revenue engines across all channels. The QR code there on your screen is a link to Refine Labs' Playbooks, Go to Market frameworks, templates, hands-on training, all of which is free, so definitely check that out.
I'm also a regular contributor for Search Engine Land and I'm on the committee for SMX that helps plan these wonderful events, so thank you so much for your attendance and participation. Now, let's dive in and talk about what generative AI is and what it isn't. You hear so much about AI these days because it's truly everywhere that I wanted to just take a minute to explain what generative AI is and who better to tell you than AI itself. This screenshot is familiar to you, I'm sure.
It is Google's new Search generative experience feature that's showing up at the top of the SERP. It's powered by Google's Gemini tool, which is similar to any other AI chatbot like chat GPT, for example. Now, it says that generative AI is a machine learning framework that uses deep learning models and neural networks to create new content based on large amounts of data. While I know that I am surrounded by some of the smartest people in the industry, even I admittedly need to simplify things for myself to fully understand it and to use it properly.
So I asked chat GPT to pare it down just a little bit for me. Think of generative AI as a creative robot artist. It can create new things like text, image, and audio, and it does it based on information that it's seen before. It generates responses based on patterns and information that it learns during training.
And this is where it differs from human capabilities because it's not just doing a Google search. These chatbots are actually trained on a broad range of text data from books, articles, websites, and other written content. So it's training has included various topics, styles, and viewpoints to help the model understand and generate text in a way that a human would understand. This means, interestingly, that it does not have access to live data or data that recently changed because it actually goes through scheduled training cycles to update.
So you'll see that new versions of the chatbot models are released from time to time. And you're probably seeing examples of generative AI all over the place. Even if you don't know it, these tools can be integrated with lots of different apps to help brands improve their search features, shopping experiences, and customer service. And for marketing teams, there are some really cool tools at our disposal to help us with everything from bid management to data enrichment.
The ones that you see listed here are just the tip of iceberg. New tools are emerging every month driven by advancements in machine learning, natural language processing, and data analytics. And fueling these developments is the increased demand for personalized marketing, improved customer insights, and even more efficient campaign management. Now today's examples that I'm going to show you are going to be from chat GPT.
But I did want to show you a side-by-side comparison of three of the most popular chatbots, which are Chat GPT, Microsoft Co-Pilot, and Google Gemini. Each of them has a free version which either gets you a limited number of queries per day, limited access to features, or in Gemini's case, unlimited access with your Google account. So this means you really don't have to pay for a chatbot. Chat GPT does have a few features behind its paywall that could be worth testing out if you're just getting started.
But if you're just planning to ask a handful of questions each day, the free version is really a great option. What's cool about Co-Pilot is that it has multiple settings to choose from, creative, balanced, and precise. You can change those settings when you need more innovative or inspirational ideas, or when accuracy is critical, such as technical details or formal documentation, or you could stay right in the middle with that balanced option. And then Gemini is great as well.
It gets much better reviews than Google's initial tool, which was called BARD, if you remember that. It is integrated with the Google ecosystem, which is a huge plus. So you can ask the chat to pull in a Google sheet or get a Google Maps visual. It can answer questions from your emails or summarize your emails if you're a Gmail user.
When it comes to choosing one, I do recommend testing them all and see which one gives you the outputs that you're looking for and just which one you feel more comfortable with. With that being said, let's talk about how AI can help you boost revenue. When it comes to boosting revenue with generative AI, there are some key strategies that you need to focus on. First, use generative AI to dig deep into your data and refine your ideal customer profile.
This means understanding who your customers are, what they need, and where you can find them. Without this information, you're just not ready to go to market. Next, AI can help you craft compelling messaging that resonates with your audience. It can generate variations of ad copy and test them to see which one's performing best.
And this ensures that your brand is positioned strongly and your messaging is spot on capturing your audience's attention and interest. It can also help you design offers that are irresistible to your customers. By analyzing what works and doesn't work, AI can suggest promotions, discounts, or value propositions that deliver the outcomes your customers desire. This makes your offer more attractive and increases the likelihood of conversions.
Your website is of course your digital storefront and AI can optimize it for maximum conversions. AI tools can analyze user behavior on your site, suggest improvements, and even generate content that keeps visitors engaged. And this means more of your traffic actually turns into sales. Finally, AI excels at analyzing campaign performance.
It can sift through vast amounts of data to identify what's working and what's not. And with these insights, AI can recommend optimizations to improve your campaigns and find more happy customers. And this continuous improvement cycle ensures that you are always getting the best results. All of this adds up to a powerful strategy for putting your customers first and therefore boosting your revenue.
Because today's buyer is informed, they do their research, they read reviews, they compare options before making a decision, and they're looking for brands that are genuine and transparent. Brands whose information is easy to find and understand, and it's obvious what their product or service can help the buyer accomplish. In B2B, we're seeing sales cycles getting longer, perhaps not just because of the economics of budget cuts, but because more buying committees are getting larger, there's more vetting because choosing a partner or vendor to ensure the right decisions are being made for a long-lasting relationship. 81% of consumers state that trust is a requirement for buying from a brand, and that's on the B2C side as well.
So your strategy, no matter what kind of business you are, should focus on building that trust. Acquiring those new customers requires grabbing more attention from prospects. Competition is up, and marketers are 38% more concerned about their competition than they were a year ago. In some industries, the playing fields are getting more even, so every brand's touchpoint with the consumer means so much more.
Every effort to get in front of the right people needs to make a lasting impression. Marketers can get so caught up in the technicalities of keeping up with bidding strategies and match types that sometimes the lowest hanging fruit is overlooked, and that's your brand and your messaging. Consumers see hundreds, if not thousands, marketing messages per day. What can you do to make your stand out?
The key really is to speak directly to your audience and tailor that content to fit the unique style and audience of each platform. What works on Instagram might not fly on LinkedIn, for example. Not everyone will click your ad, remember that, and that is okay. Aim to create content that leaves a memorable impact even on those that just scroll by.
Use eye-catching visuals and compelling messaging that sticks in the mind of your audience. Educating your audience with valuable insights and information is critical as well, whether it's tips, how to's industry knowledge, engage your audience by building credibility and trust. Your goal should be to make your content invaluable addition to your audience's speed. When your audience sees your content as valuable, they're more likely to engage, follow, and remember your brand.
Brand building should be a very important part of your paid media strategy. Anywhere from just 1 to 5% of your buyers are in market at any given time. That's very low. So they are not ready for that demo offer that you keep pushing.
They're not ready to talk to sales to make a purchase. They're not even thinking about you at all. And that is where many advertisers are wasting budget. They're marketing an offer to an audience who isn't showing readiness to buy.
So the goal instead should not be to convert these people, but to educate them, educate them on everything they need to know about your brand so that when they are in market, you're the first brand that comes to mind. And we do this by tailoring our creative to tell a complete story. So it appeals to the audience at every stage of their journey. Someone who's never heard of your brand before will need a product introduction and explain your video.
And someone who has maybe heard of you but doesn't see a need for your product or doesn't understand how your product can help them might change their mind with some social proof like testimonials, user-generated content, or competitive comparisons. And once they're ready to buy the intense signals will be more clear. They will likely search for you or your product and finally get to that sign up or purchase page for what they are looking for. At Refine Left we develop full creative campaigns that educates buyers about your category product, value proposition, and core differentiation all while driving emotion and demand.
You need to have all three types of these content while keeping your core story top of mind. And that would be a tall task. How do you create content that truly resonates with your audience and where they are, especially with limited resources and a small team? Generative AI helps streamline workflows and increase engagement which translates to higher revenue.
By automating tasks like ad copy generation keyword research, bid management, we can focus on the bigger picture and this allows us to produce more meaningful work faster which means we can run more tests, enhance audience engagement with personalized content that resonates and achieve our business goals more effectively. So with that foundation set, let's now get into the technical aspects of this presentation. There is an art to leveraging the AI chat box and achieving your desired output and it starts with a prompt that you type in. The more details that you can provide upfront, the more specific AI's answer will be.
When it comes to your marketing strategy, nailing down the ICP is going to be the most important thing that you do. If you don't understand your audience, your message will be wrong, your targeting will be wrong, your keywords will be wrong, you'll be wasting budget and effort. So review the customer data that you have at your disposal, run CRM reports, understand your buyers, who are your high value customers, what are their pain points, what are their job titles, where do they work, sit down, talk to sales, talk to customer success teams, product teams, they're closer to the customer than you are as a marketer. Ask them the questions, what are they hearing during conversations, why does your company win deals, why do they lose deals, what's trending, what do customers care about these days?
It transcripts from sales calls, especially from strong relationship clients and high value customers and understand what solutions are they looking for, what are their pain points? If you can, conduct real market research, study those trends, look for common traits and common problems. And it could be helpful for you to have an understanding of how your current marketing mix is working as well, what current channels are you on, what's working, what could be improved, what keywords are driving high-intent or high-value conversions, what could you pause or turn off? These are questions that as a marketer, you should be digging into before you can even ask AI for help.
It's important that you are the driver of this strategy and not over relying on AI for the answers. And most importantly, the quality of the input that you give AI will dictate the quality of the output that AI gives you. Don't risk taking a garbage in garbage out approach. Once you're ready for AI, the most impactful prompts will have lots of detail.
Be very specific and goal-oriented. Tell AI exactly what you want to know and give it as much detail as it needs. And don't worry about giving it too much detail. I type my prompts like I'm writing an email to someone asking them for a very specific answer.
I write like they know nothing about the situation, I write in full sentences, not fragments. It's very different from how I would treat a search engine. And it will take you several iterations to get your outputs correct. And that is totally normal.
Don't give up. Just keep adjusting what you're asking for, adjusting your prompt until you get exactly what you want. You can try giving it a scenario, a command, ask questions, ask for insights, recommendations, you can give it a hypothetical situation. You can prompt for specific formats of the output, ask for examples, lists, step-by-step guides.
The better that you can explain exactly what you're looking for, the better that AI can respond. And what's really cool is that it learns over time. AI chatbots actually have a memory. So I can tell you that I use chat GBT to help me quite a bit with the content of this presentation.
And over about a week or so, I noticed the algorithm getting smarter. It was remembering more about me, remembering my previous prompts, and it really helped to reduce the need for me going back and editing my prompts or re-asking and adjusting what I was asking for. I was getting faster results that were more aligned to my initial request. And that being said, you may want to have a separate account for work versus personal to keep the information grouped properly and to not have the results skewed in any way.
So without further ado, now let's finally get into the seven ways that you can use generative AI and pay media to boost revenue. On each slide, I'm going to provide you with starting points. This is the information or data that you should have on hand to use in your prompt and feed to AI. It's important to know here that you can actually upload documents to chat GBT for analysis, which is a huge time saver.
Just know that there are some limitations to the amount of data that it can process. So you might have to break it up into smaller segments. Then we will look at what you want to know. These are the questions that we want answered in each section.
And then I will give you several examples of prompts that you might type into the AI chat box to answer some of your questions. Nailing down your ICP is the most important exercise because after all without your customers, your business wouldn't be possible. So not only can AI help you get to know your ICP better and help you build persona documents, but it can help you improve your product, your messaging, and customer experience to align better with your customers. Start with your existing ICP documents.
Who you're trying to reach, what you already know about them, where do they live, work, what do they care about, why do they use your product. And then look at the actual sales data. This is where chat GBT can really help. You can input your sales data and chat GBT can analyze purchase behaviors, identify top selling products, and who's buying them.
It's like having a data analyst at your fingertips, providing detailed breakdowns of your sales performance and helping to identify your most lucrative customer segments. You might actually find that this data differs from your initial ICP document. This can really help to narrow your targeting. Maybe you're casting too wide of a net and you should really focus on going after just certain segments or certain types of accounts.
Sales call recordings are another goldmine of information. So chat GBT can trans-ride and analyze these calls, pinpointing common questions, concerns, objections from your prospects. This can really help to tailor your approach, your sales approach, your marketing approach to better meet their needs. For company name lists, you're going to target them on LinkedIn.
Chat GBT can help you research and categorize company names based on industry size and other relevant factors. It can also help to fill in gaps in data. I had this example where I had a whole column of company names, but I didn't have their website URLs and it would have taken you in a very long time to fill that in manually. I just uploaded that one column to chat GBT and gave me all of the company's website.
You are all saving me a ton of time. It can analyze customer feedback, product reviews to help you fine tune your product, messaging, customer experience, lastly social listening reports capture what people are saying about your brand across social media. So chat GBT can sift through the chatters to identify trends and sent to me giving you a real time pulse on public perception. By starting with these essential data sources, AI can help you paint a comprehensive picture of your ideal customer.
It's not just about collecting data but transforming it into meaningful insights that drive your marketing strategy. Next up, gender AI can analyze your competitors' content across various channels by examining their website's blogs, social profiles, customer reviews, marketing materials, press releases. You can gather a wealth of information that helps you understand how your competitors position themselves and engage with their audience. AI can help you dissect competitor strengths and weaknesses, identifying what works for them, what doesn't, giving you insight to refine your own strategies.
It's also great at spotting opportunities and threats, evaluating content strategies from blogs or analyzing customer reviews to identify common strengths and weaknesses. You can uncover gaps in the market or potential areas of improvement for your own offerings. Prompting AI to compare unique selling points of the products or pricing strategies can also be incredibly insightful and this would allow you to position your products more effectively and competitively. Lastly, you can understand your competitors' keyword strategies, reveal valuable insights into their PPC strategies, get a feel for what they might be bidding on, helping you to adjust your own keyword bidding to stay competitive.
I recently have read some on site that positioning is like finding the perfect spot on a crowded beach. You want to be close enough to the water to enjoy the waves, where the customers, but far enough from the crowd, which are the competitors to have your own space. This is what these prompts can help you to figure out. Keyword research.
This is something that PPC marketers can spend hours on, and at least for me, this is one of my favorite ways to save time. I've listed out some maybe obvious starting points, your website, landing page, any marketing material, sales sheets, blog posts, ebooks, sweat papers, competitor landing pages, and then maybe there's some not so obvious sources as well. Analyzing customer reviews, social media exports of comments, or other social listening tool reports, Reddit threads, industry forums. This can really allow you to understand what your audience is actually looking for and talking about, stop guessing what your audience cares about and really listen to them.
AI can also help you generate long-tail keyword variations, ensuring that you're covering all potential search terms that your target audience might use, negative keywords are of course just as important, so you can really get a list from AI and save some budget there by avoiding unproductive clicks, and then refining existing keywords and making keyword adjustments via performance analysis and other great options, you can see which keywords are performing well, which one you need to be tweaking and ensuring that you're always optimizing for better results and driving more revenue. From a placement perspective, you can feed AI, your ICP Details, Channel Reports, Campaign Reports, Placement Reports to uncover new opportunities and optimize your existing strategies. First, understanding where your ICP spends their time is key. AI can quickly sift through data, providing you with a clear picture of where to focus your efforts.
If you're interested in tapping into Google Display Network, for example, you can ask it for a specific list of placements that might work for that specific audience. You can also assess how your existing placements are performing, allowing AI to identify which platforms are driving most engagement and convergence, helping you to allocate your resources more effectively. AI can provide a tailored strategy to maximize your ROI, it can take into account your budget goals, historical performance data to suggest the best allocation. And staying ahead of industry trends is vital.
Stay informed about new and promising platforms or ad placements to ensure that you are always one step ahead of your competitors. Now that you have who you want to reach and where to reach them, let's talk about how to create designs and messaging that will resonate with them. This slide is a little different because I wanted to showcase all of the different valuables that you can get out of chat GPT from a content perspective and that list there, trust me, is just the tip of the iceberg. Sometimes it can be pretty obvious that a brand is using chat GPT.
You can tell sometimes the voice and tone is a little robotic, maybe there's like this obvious overuse of emojis. So my advice here is to be smart and think about how you can be authentic to your brand without seeming like you're using AI to help you. Be sure to add some human elements like a sense of humor or a reference to pop culture or if that type of thing fits your brand. You'll of course want to start with your ICP here, but branding documents might actually be more important.
Tell AI the tone, voice, feel of your brand so that it can align its answers with the specifics of your brand. Even if you don't want it to actually do the creative writing for you, you can ask for topics, themes, outlines, drafts, even technical documentation to save you time. You can have it analyze your existing content, identify gaps in your content strategy. Just be sure to triple check everything.
Set up a quality assurance team and process to check the boxes of does this feel authentic to our brand? Does it consist into our brand? Does it speak to our audience in a direct way? Does it inspire action?
There's a lot of check marks that you can check off there. And then similarly, copywriting is a great place for AI can save you time or at least get you some ideas. When starting your copywriting process with AI, you'll need to provide some key details. The channel you're targeting, your company information, ICP details as always.
The product you're promoting, landing page, character count, the goal of the campaign, the messaging, the desired tone, and you might want to put all of these things in one prompt or maybe just add on as the iterations start coming through so you can work to finesse the output that AI has given you. This is one area where it can really take you some time and really take a lot of prompts to get it perfect. For an added touch, you can even specify the writing style. For example, I'd read somebody say this right in the style of David Ogilvy.
This allows AI to emulate that persuasive and engaging style of a renowned copywriter enhancing the effectiveness of your ad. And last up here is account structure. It can really take the guesswork out of campaigns set up. You can provide a keyword list, your campaign goal, your audience details, and content links.
AI can tell you exactly how to effectively set up a solid account structure. One of my favorite ways to save time is to have it group my keywords for me. I guide it by telling the specific campaigns that I want, brand, competitor, and non-brand like high-intent, medium-attent, and low-intent. It will then group those terms by those themes and the themes within it for each ad group to keep it tightly focused and relevant.
Especially on social, AI can recommend precise audience segments based on demographics, job titles, interests, behaviors, optimizing your ad targeting for better performance. Budget allocation is another area where AI can provide significant value. AI can analyze your goals and suggest how to allocate your budget across different campaigns and ad groups to maximize your ROI based on historical data. It is important and honestly very interesting to track the influence that chat GPT had on your work.
First, up to measure this, set some clear objectives and KPIs for your test, come up with a hypothesis, and track your performance meticulously. Use consistent naming conventions or labels for your campaigns and ads and UTMs for back-end tracking. This will allow you to know how well the AI driven strategies are performing compared to your baseline. You can compare the results, conduct a pre-versus post chat GPT analysis or set up AV test variations to see the direct impact of chat GPT's recommendations.
This comparison will highlight any improvements and key metrics like conversion rates and CPA. And then finally calculate the ROI. Assess the revenue generated from the campaigns influenced by chat GPT by analyzing the financial returns you can determine the overall effectiveness and profitability of integrating AI into your KDC strategy. By following these steps, you'll have a clear understanding of how chat GPT is driving performance improvements and contributing to your revenue growth.
And even more importantly, you need to understand the bigger picture. How do the efforts of your customer centric strategy influence revenue? At first, you'll start to see ICP engagement improve, driving higher quality traffic to your website, improved click-through rate, improved cost per clicks, more purchases, more high intent conversions like demo requests or free trials. And over time, depending on your sales cycles, this will start to equate to bottom line results like pipeline revenue return on investment.
As you prepare to take these learnings into action, there are a few rules that I want to reiterate. For a generative AI to deliver the best results, it needs top-notch data. Feed it with high quality relevant data to ensure it generates content that truly resonates with your audience. AI is powerful, but it's not infallible.
Keep it close on what it produces. Combine AI with human judgment and ensure that your content is aligning with your brand and your goals. A great hack is create prompt templates. I keep saying that it's going to take many iterations to get your problems correct, so don't forget them.
Keep a list or spreadsheet so that you know which ones work for you and you can easily plug and play next time, making your workflow smoother and more consistent. Always test the content generated by AI. Use A.B. testing to see what works best and refine your approach based on performance metrics.
Optimization is always key to maximizing your results. AI is a tool, not a strategist. It should enhance your strategy but not dictate it. Keep the strategic direction in your hands and use AI to support it and execute it.
While AI can analyze data, it's crucial to rely on your own insights and understand your audience. Use AI to complement, not replace your expertise. Always use AI responsibly. Don't replicate copyrighted content and be careful with sensitive data.
Ensure that the AI tools are handling company or customer data securely and in compliance with privacy regulations. In all honesty, I would never upload customer data, especially PII like names and definitely not email addresses and TV systems. When used correctly, AI is an incredible tool for strategy enhancement, but don't let it do your job. Let it evolve your job.
Think of it as an assistant who maybe needs some hand-holding guidance along the way to help you become a more efficient, productive marketer and be able to focus on being the best marketer that you can be. Thank you so much. I look forward to your questions. Hello.
Thank you so much for that, Kerry. That was such a fantastic run through of that. I felt like I didn't want you to stop talking. I was like, tell me more.
I need you know what you're talking about. You know what you're talking about. You know what you're talking about? You know what you're talking about?
You know what you're talking about? You should talk to my husband. I'll be honest with you. I don't think he has the same feeling.
Amazing. No, definitely. Before we get ahead, hi everybody. My name is Anu.
I'm the paid media editor here at the Joe Media and you might have seen my name pop-up. It's at such end-of-life articles. If you're a fan of that and if you're not, you should be. You should know about it.
You should have seen my name across the BBC articles on there. Thank you so much for joining us on this amazing talk that Kerry has given us. I'm not sure if there's any questions just yet, but before we get into that, please come with your questions. This is the session for you.
We have plenty of time to really get carried with all the questions that you just heard. She knows what she's talking about when it comes to this generation of AIT. You've worked with lots of clients. dealing with this, doing these solutions.
Now is a great opportunity to do this. But before we get into those questions, I also have this privilege of, as moderators, I think there might be a misconception that we're the moderator because we know everything. We know everything that speakers are going to talk about. I don't.
I'm learning as much of the same pace as everybody else. Some acronyms, I will be honest. I went over my head. So I will actually ask about one that was used so frequently that I was like, I have not heard of that one yet.
ICP. You use that in nearly every slide. I'm like, I don't know if I'm going to go that way. That is ideal customer profile.
It is your audience. It is exactly who you want to be going after. It is basically a fancy acronym for your persona. Yeah.
Yeah. Fantastic. So is that something that is not much like a B2B? Because I feel like in the PPC world, I've not necessarily come across it.
Is that something that's been used across the industry? You would find that something you have to interact with. I think it could be used either way, realistically, but I think it's so much more important in B2B because we are so focused on going after the right people a lot of times in B2C and ECOM, you're casting these wider, at least, nets. We are so sometimes niche and specific to who we want to be reaching on the B2B side.
So I think it comes into play and you hear that a lot more in a lot of conversations. That is an acronym I use on the daily. Fantastic. Interesting.
Very interesting. So you have worked much more in the B2B side. Do you have any previous lifetime that you've used to work at ECOM? Like if I were to ask you, what's the main difference between working with the B2B clients and ECOM clients?
Do you have an idea of that? I worked with some smaller side clients in the ECOM space. It's funny because I'm actually going to go back to what I just said. The audiences are just so different.
You have more fun in ECOM. I think that there's quicker, tangible results because you're seeing sales come in on the B2B side. It's different. There's a lot of pressure because these sales cycles are long and you're not sure if these deals are going to close because they take so long to do so.
So there's a lot of pressure. There's a lot more branding that has to go into it. I think there's a lot more. And somebody that works in B2C or works in ECOM is probably like disagreeing with me.
But this is just my feeling. I do feel like B2B can be more difficult, I think, because it's not somebody going and using their own credit card. It is you, as a B2B business, reaching an entire buying committee and convincing them to spend tens of thousands of dollars. It can be very, very difficult.
And I think the difference between the clients is the pressure is on the B2B side. There's a lot more to think about from a content and branding strategy perspective. Interesting. Do you feel that?
And this is based off the... I talk a lot with the community. I'm always listening on what PPC offices are saying about Google and their updates. Even Microsoft and the AI, it feels like, oh yeah, for ECOM, they know what to do.
For me, they don't get as much love in terms of updates and functionalities. Do you feel that way? It's definitely true. I think the last Google Live was probably the worst outcome for B2B.
We were completely left out of it. Yes, no, I completely agree with that. And I hate to say, but it's a lot of the recommendations that you get from Google. Their mindset is just so B2C and they just don't align.
A lot of times what I see is like Google's AI is set up and it's designed for these high volume accounts, ECOM accounts, for example, that are making hundreds of thousands of sales per month. And us that are generating five demos a month on the B2B side, that is not enough data for AI to work with. So these lower volume accounts are being left behind. So it's becoming less, at least in my eyes, less about the bidding strategies, less about the, I guess, sort of less about the algorithm.
I think there used to be a lot of lot of pressure on that. There still is, but it is so much more about standing out. It is so much more about what manual levers can you be pulling to make sure that as a B2B brand, you are bidding on the right keywords within your competitor set, right? And your messaging is standing out and making that click happen.
If even if the algorithm, your data isn't there, the data volume isn't there to make the algorithms get that person to click, you manually are going out and bidding on the right keyword with the right message and making that click happen. Amazing. Yeah. So do you feel like it's a lot of harder work than before?
Because that feels like you need to make a model. Has that always, is that how it should always have been done? And AI just highlights it? Or does that sound like a bit of like, because it almost sounds to me like, yeah, it's to be marketers work is harder now these days, always out how they always should have been doing it.
In hindsight, it's always how they should have been doing it. But you think about five, 10 years ago, when our days were more about like manual bidding adjustments, right? Like that was hard work. That was totally hard work.
It wasn't necessarily as big picture strategic as it is these days, right? Like our focus is not on these like mundane little bidding adjustments. It's on bigger picture. It's the way that I'm describing it, how brands should be more focused on their brand and their message.
Sure. I think only should have been that's like, right? That's easy. You should always be doing that.
But you didn't have to as much because the competition wasn't there. And buyers had a different mindset. Like these days need to be buyers are getting information in different ways. Like years ago, they used to be more willing to hop on a sales calls because they were doing less of them.
There weren't so many SaaS products out there trying to sell to them. They were going to conferences to network. They're not doing that anymore. You know, they're getting their information on LinkedIn.
They're getting their information from product reviews. They're spending more time just digitally online. So yeah, the stakes are higher. Messaging is becoming way more important and you need to do your best to stand out and be really, really clear about what your brand and product are.
Yeah, absolutely. I'm not going to hug the line. I have some questions that I have come through. We've got Eric Christensen who's asking, do you have any prompts for grouping keywords up based on ad groups?
Yes. So I would probably give it the whole list, whether it's a spreadsheet or you could even, it might be easier to just paste the entire list in. I like to give it a starting point. So generally, in the B2B world, I'm not sure what kind of company you're coming from, but in the B2B world, I generally set my campaigns up the same way as usually brand, competitor, and then high-intent keywords, medium-attent keywords, sometimes low-intent keywords for whatever reason.
I'll give that starting point. And then I will tell it, go out and find your own ad groups. So the prompt would probably be like, group these, group this list of keywords by ad group and fit them into brand competitor, high-intent, and medium-attent campaigns. And it will then give me the breakout of, it'll find the commonalities in those keywords for me and it'll group the ad groups.
It's quite the time saver. I know that Google Keyword Planner does have that option for you now, but what I like about this is, this is AI driven. So I can give it a starting point. Yeah.
Google tool will just kind of group it how I want. It's not necessarily going to take into account that I want specific campaigns like the high-intent and medium-attent. So this allows me to give it that starting point, tell it how I want to group to the campaign level, and then it can kind of do the rest of the work for me. And it's a huge time saver.
Yeah, I'm sure that sounds like it. Okay, so we then have Brent Whitlock asking, really like your stats about 5% of buyers in market and 95% needing education. So do you have any tips or advice on how to sell the value of that education? So yeah, speaking to the higher-ups, I'm like, we need that education budget.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of leaders are looking for attribution, right?
They're looking for you to prove to them that sponsoring this thought leadership post on LinkedIn equated to revenue. And that is a very difficult thing to do. That would have to be a perfect world. You have to work perfectly, right?
There would have to be like a UTM placed and you'd have to be a first touch. And like there's just depending on your CRN, you might not even like measure out correctly. You know the hurdles they have to go through in order to prove that. So what we prefer to do at Refine Labs is really take more holistic approach of looking at like how much you're spending across your channels, you know, what another month is going up and down.
And how does that equate to your bottom line? And I'm not just talking about the opportunities that or the deals that came from that channel just realistically, because you know that the buyer journey today is not linear. They are going all over the place. They are seeing your post on LinkedIn, and then they're seeing you're clicking your blog on Facebook, and then they're reading over V1G2, and then they're finally doing like an organic search for you.
There's a ton of touch points there. How would anybody ever attribute that success? So we are just really looking holistically. You really nail down your ICP.
You make sure you're talking to the right people. You really nail down your messaging. You make sure you're talking to them in the right way. You really give them a great offer.
You make sure that your website is optimized. You do all the right things. You just know it's good to go. And then you measure holistically how many opportunities are coming in and how that equates to how much you have spent on your ads overall.
And it's not perfect, but that is today how we overcome challenges. There are some pretty cool tools out there. I really like hockey stack for attribution. That can really help to kind of get different views on how LinkedIn impressions had influenced pipeline.
So that could be something to look into as well. Okay, hockey stack. Fantastic. Sounds good.
We also have another question from Brian to say, say you don't have a CRN system and have limited reviews to work from where would you start when sourcing information for an ICP? Interesting. It sounds like maybe you haven't done market research. I'm not sure if that is possible.
But you have to start somewhere. I mean, I don't know if you have any customers so far, but it's just going to start out with talking to people. I think your strategy is going to evolve so much. You can kind of get started with a baseline of outbound and inbound motions going between sales and your advertising approaches and what other channels there are.
But just be open to having everything evolve as you continue to have conversations and to learn. So if you have your sales doing outbound, reaching out to some people, get a feeling. Why are they interested or why are they not interested? And you kind of just got to continue building from there until you have that information to build on.
It's definitely more difficult getting started. I completely agree with you. Yeah, it can be difficult. But I do think, yeah, you hit the nail on the head there at the beginning.
Every business needs to start from talking to your customers while the pool is small. Yeah, at some point, you know, hopefully the successes you have a million customers and it's hard to talk to each and everyone of them and you need to find ways of sending surveys. But while that pool is small, there is a great advantage of actually approaching each individual person. Maybe you even know the customer because it's a friend that's trying to help you out or it's like somebody.
So that way, it's about talking and not making it a big system to do it, drop an email, say, hey, can I grab a coffee? Hey, can we chat and have a video chat? I think, yeah, those are kind of getting that feedback live is important. Yeah, that's true too.
I've also seen campaigns done where the company will send out an email and say, here's a $5 Starbucks card if you do a GT review, if you do some kind of review for us. There's always that approach and really trying to push that and just listening into conversations, any conversation that's being had, what can you learn from it? Even if you don't have a vast amount of data, any amount of data is a really great starting point to tweak your strategy. Yeah, absolutely.
When like, yeah, Brendan mentioned CRM, it made me also think back to your mention about make sure that the data we feed as a question where you're just like wrong data and it made me also think about Google and first party data and third party data and your cookies actually here to stay, kind of thing. Do you have any opinions about that? It's good data, first party data and third party data, third party cookies and bad data. Do you have any opinions on that?
The data in your CRM or your company data, your first party, that is always going to be the most valuable data that you have at your disposal. I am not surprised that Google ended up moving forward with third party. I'm going to be honest. The fact that they kept pushing it and pushing it, it just felt like maybe something was going on behind the scenes where they were trying to elongate the process or something.
It doesn't surprise me, but it doesn't, nothing doesn't matter. But there's so many other reasons why we need to rely on first party data anyway. This is still a big impact. When you think about this could work on B2B as well, but even on the B2C side, when you think about offline conversion tracking and optimizing for either the lowest point in your funnel in Google or if you're optimizing for purchases, not just website conversions, right?
You're using T-row as bidding, you're optimizing for the highest return on ad spend. That all comes from your first party data. It's so important. In order to make these really advanced bidding strategies work, you need that first party data.
That's really important there. I think from a targeting perspective, Google's audiences were never great to begin with. I really don't like using their data for targeting. I like Google's way not work for retargeting, but that's kind of about it.
I like YouTube retargeting or specific channel targeting on YouTube. But the first party data is always going to be king. There's just no way around that. Well, in what situations would you say that we, because what I'm hearing and what I totally agree with is first party data should be the foundation.
But are there use cases of like, okay, you've got your first party data sorted, but if x, y, z isn't happening right, use their party cookies to supplement it. And you're just going to ignore their party cookies. I really like the social channels third party. I don't like Google's.
But LinkedIn is fantastic. Right? LinkedIn is that is valuable third party tracking and cook targeting, because the person is providing their job title, their company information, like it's all right there. I honestly even really like Facebook.
Facebook, even though I think the third party targeting options can be a little wonky and they're always leaving to right if you're like targeting these 10 different audiences and all of a sudden they'll be like, Oh, we changed our targeting. We took these away. Like it's kind of always evolving because of privacy. So that can be a pain point, but their algorithm is really, really strong and a huge pro of using it is that their clicks are very cheap.
It's so much cheaper than LinkedIn. So I actually really do like Facebook. Again, first party is better and like Facebook better for me targeting. There's going to be some garbage, I think that still comes through Facebook conversions, especially when you're generating leads.
But you kind of make up for that in the low costs and the strong algorithms will still bring in some quality with if you can kind of put up with some of that noise and some of that garbage. Okay. All right. Fantastic.
We're gonna have a few more questions of coming as well. And yeah, Brent is like holding the flame up for our audience. So thank you, Brent, for giving us your questions. He asks again, do you ever avoid PPC where SEO is strong?
And do you have an AI related tool or tips on how to make SEO and PPC work better together? I love that question because I love like I'm someone who's been PPC for 15 years. I love going to like SEO conferences so that I'm literally like, they affect each other. We really need to be out of work out of our silos and really understand how the other channels work together.
Sorry, I'm still your line. I'm like, oh, that's a really great question. There are sometimes opportunities to rely on SEO. It depends on kind of where you're ranking already.
Like, if you are showing up for these like really niche topics and you go and you look at Google keyword planner and there's like no search volume for it according to that tool, like I'm not going to probably place an ad there. But if there's like a couple searches coming in, I just know that I'm going to get them organically. Sometimes happens for a brand. I like to bid on my brand for the most part just because it will, you know, most of the time guarantee that I come up number one depends on what the competition is there.
Honestly, you take a little bit of where your competitors bidding against you. If they're not, then maybe I won't. Maybe I will just rely on SEO. But I do like it too because it allows me to send them to a specific place.
It allows me to send them to a specific landing page and use specific messaging. So that's a pro. But you know, the downsides that I'm paying for it. So there's always, there's always that.
In terms of a tool for SEO and SEM, nothing quite comes to mind. But you might be able to, you know, maybe kind of upload two different lists to like a chat GPT or a similar tool and kind of say I would actually be interested if like Google Gemini worked a little bit better for this because it's Google products. If you like uploaded an SEO keyword list and you kind of said like, give me the opportunities for SEM or PPC from this list. I think that could be a really interesting prompt there.
Yeah, very true. And then yeah, Brendan, there's another question saying how many inputs do you need to make a successful first party beta system work best? So yeah, do you have a definitive answer for that one or like a range or something? Do you mean like how many records how many like leads in a CRM system?
Possibly. Yeah. Yeah. I would say a few hundred.
Okay. Because you know, when you, if in terms of uploading it to chat GPT, yeah, maybe a hundred. But if you're uploading that for targeting and you're uploading it for, you know, LinkedIn needs a minimum of 300 matches. So in order to get 300 matches, it depends on the quality of your email addresses and what your audience is using for their email address on LinkedIn.
A lot of times you have work emails, but they use their personal email. So that's why I actually don't love using email targeting. I prefer to use company targeting and then layer on job titles on top of it to capture the right people because there is a lot of times a mismatch. And my audience is usually much bigger than my CRM data is allowing me to target.
But they need a minimum of 300 matches and you would probably need a list of like a thousand plus and we're going to get those 300 matches. So you can take the company name route. And then I think Facebook is similar. Facebook might be a minimum of 300 as well.
But yeah, I mean, if you're just uploading something to chat GBT for analysis, I'm not sure there's a limit, you know, maybe 25, 50, 100, that would be kind of a minimum range, you know, I would input it and see if it can get any give you any valuable insights, you know, it's really kind of difficult to say. Yeah, yeah. All right, cool. And then Cory decided to help us out, which is fantastic.
Based on the question that we had about PPC and SEO working well together, he's suggested a software called Revim, which is R-E-V-V-I-M. He says it's a great software that poses branded keywords where you have no competition and your rankings number one, organically, love that. I love some automation there. Yeah, also there is an SEO PPC report that shows overlapping ranking so that you can pause really high ranking organic keywords in your PPC.
Love it. That's really cool. You've got that insight. I just Googled it over here to make sure I look into it later.
That's lovely. One thing I would like to talk about, I don't think there's any more questions than that might be it for today, but I wrote something down because as I said, even before we talked to Kerry, I absolutely loved your slides. And my thing, my favorite one was that last one about the meme. I'm a sucker for a meme.
Sorry, so you won here very much. That one saying the only way to keep AI from taking your job is to use AI to do your job better. And I absolutely love that. And I mean, what I'm getting from that is I feel like a lot of conversations that's had in the community, especially at the beginning was like, oh, is that going to take our job?
It's always like, you know, AI was the enemy. So you are confidently telling us that AI is not the challenge that we have for the future. But what is, what is even if with the AI, the power of AI, what do you think is the biggest challenge for marketers for us in the next few years? There's so many challenges because there's, you know, I think, obviously the economy, right?
Like we are all trying to accomplish more with less, lots of layoffs, budget cuts the past couple of years. Like that's really tough. Lots of competition, more competition is crawling up really across the board, which is raising the prices, even, you know, just natural inflation is causing these prices of clicks to raise as well. It's, it's getting expensive marketing, right?
Our budget is not going as far. And like finance teams are watching budgets way more closely. Like those days of like, grow at all costs are over. Like we are really on thin budgets and dealing with smaller teams.
So that is where AI is so much more important to help us guess, like help us get things done faster and produces like more output as, you know, competition increases. But it's also just to help us produce more meaningful work, like really, make sure we're reaching the right people, make sure we're talking to them in the correct way and we're giving them the best customer experience. We're giving them the best product. We're giving them, you know, just everything should be extremely quality.
There shouldn't be flaws, right? Because if there's flaws in your strategy, there's going to be gaps in your sense, right? There's you're wasting your dollars. So, yeah, it's not so much about like you need to worry about AI taking over your job.
There's actually a lot bigger things that us marketers are dealing with these days and AI is actually a huge benefit to us these days and something we can really should be getting on board with and embracing. Amazing. I love that. I love the sound of that embrace AI.
It can make your job a lot better and there's a lot actually more worrisome things to focus on that. I actually valid worrisome stuff, not just data. I feel like sometimes you just go, oh, yeah, it's not as bad as you think. They're actually some actual problematic thing that you realize I'm focused on.
Yeah, it actually helps us to do that better. I'm going to thank you so much, Kerry, for joining us today. Thank you to our audience. Thank you so much again, Kerry, and thank you to everybody that's joining us.