What to do before starting paid ads? Welcome back to a fresh episode of breakingvtv.com. I'm your host Sam Dunning and if you wanna join thousands of Legends in joint past podcast episodes, unusual SEO and B2B marketing tips, then why not check out the daily newsletter over at breakingvtv.com and hit that newsletter tab. So join me today.
I've got Megan, Val and Megan as a CEO over at Refined Labs with diving into hey, that's why you should perhaps delay starting them. Some tactical milestones that you should consider help to nail each of those milestones and setting yourself up the success of B2B company with paid ads. Megan, welcome to the show. How are we?
I'm doing really good. Thank you, Sam. Great intro, love the energy. I'm excited to be here and dig into the conversation today.
I'm surprised I have this much energy after watching the football year yesterday and having a couple beers, what's the matter? But we move the podcast doesn't stop from no one. So let's do it. So first and foremost, should B2B companies like, why should B2B companies fire up, wait to fire up paid ads, Megan?
I thought that was like day one, fire up paid ads and start going after quadified leads and demos and sales calls. What were we doing it wrong? Yeah, I mean, I feel like people that have that perspective believe that it's almost like a coin operated machine. Oh, I'm just gonna put some, you know, dollars in Google ads and then I'm gonna get, you know, hundreds back.
It's as easy as that. I just have to put the money in and then the sales will come out the other side. And that's not how paid advertising works, whether it's Google ads or LinkedIn or any other channel that you're working on. And so the truth behind paid advertising, you know, this comes from a CEO of a paid advertising agency is that any business needs to have, you know, a core go-to-market strategy and have a really strong marketing foundation with just the basics.
And that is a prerequisite in my mind before you take the leap to invest in a paid advertising strategy. So I do think it's, you know, possible to start it too early. There's lots of other alternatives and focusing on those fundamentals before you layer on a paid strategy is the way to go. Got it.
Are we gonna dive in? So I believe five or so fundamentals that you should have rolling fired up and in play before you spend your hard on cash, perhaps your investors hard on cash on paid media, Google ads, LinkedIn ads, wherever the channel may be. So yeah, let's say that, if we could perhaps hear that some of the core ones and then maybe we can dive into kind of the finer details of each one. Yeah, definitely.
And what I'll say is there are other forms of advertising you can do in the early days before paid. And so I just want to kind of call out that point and then I'll get into those five milestones. You know, a lot of founders and you know, sort of startups should be, for example, investing in organic social media versus paid social media, right? So you see that today all over LinkedIn or Twitter or other channels, there are ways that you can begin to leverage these channels just through your own profile to begin to communicate your messages, start to get feedback.
There's a cost because there's a time commitment, right? There's other cost forms, but it's not as expensive as paid advertising. So that's the other mindset I encourage people to consider is how can you accomplish a similar goal in a way that's going to be more cost efficient and effective based on the stage that you're in. So that's another, it's not sort of, it's not binary.
Like don't do anything related to that. But paid advertising can be a significant investment and making sure that you have the right foundation in place is really important. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it sounds like going from more sweat equity channels, like you alluded to LinkedIn organic content and publishing posts there, opposed to waiting to put stuff up to the marketplace.
Yeah, and in fact, doing that organically on LinkedIn might actually help you with these sort of five milestones that I believe a company should have in place before they invest a significant amount in paid advertising. So let me kind of break down the five and then we can kind of get into some of the details on each of them. Sounds good. Number one is really clarifying your ideal customer and your target market.
Seems totally basic. A lot of companies don't actually have this figured out. Who are you selling to? Who is your ideal customer?
And what's your total addressable market look like? Number two, strong brand positioning and effective messaging. This is another one when we kind of double click into this one. A really clear and compelling position and really strong brand strategy and a messaging strategy is crucial.
And that is easier said than done. It is not easy to get to a really strong place for that one. Number three, a compelling offer. So you need clear pricing and packaging.
You need to have clarity on how when your customer purchases that from you, it's going to drive a desired outcome, fix a problem they have. That has to be really dialed in and believable to your total addressable market. Number four, a website that converts traffic to sales conversations. Your website is so critical in any paid advertising strategy.
It becomes the place where all campaigns are sending traffic to and that website needs to be optimized for conversion. And it needs to be built with the modern B2B buyer in mind. That gives them the information that they want and gets them to a point where they want to raise their hand and talk to your sales team. And then number five is happy paying customers.
And so if you just have a great idea or you've built V1 of your software, but you don't have any customers yet, you got some work to do before you spend money on paid advertising. Get some customers. Have them tell you that it's working. Have them renew.
Have them buy more stuff from you. That's sort of the ultimate validation. And really, the milestone that's supposed to represent some semblance of product market fit, if you will. So those are my five.
Awesome. And before we dive into the first one, is there ever an exception to these rules? So I mentioned that you could do this with an organic strategy. I would say an exception is, and a lot of people will talk about this.
There are definitely ways to be really strategic and deploy a really targeted budget for some experimentation with paid advertising. And in some cases, that might actually help you, for example, diagnose if one of those five milestones is a challenge for you and or help test certain hypotheses on, for example, messaging. Like if you really aren't sure what, if your messaging has landed, you could run some controlled experiments with a couple of different types of messaging and measure whether that resonated with your audience, you can sort of guarantee distribution to them. So I think that there are some use cases where it can make sense.
But you need to be really clear about what the goal is and how much you're willing to invest in order to get that. And that there isn't an alternative that would allow you to do that for a lesser cost. So there's some use cases there and maybe some others that I haven't considered or mentioned. But getting those five milestones in place will ensure that when you layer on a paid advertising strategy, it will meaningfully help you grow.
Whereas before, if you don't have those things in place and you spend a bunch of money, you're basically gambling a little bit, in my opinion. You can't really count on an outcome if you're lacking one of those core business fundamentals. Makes sense. So let's jump into number one, which I believe was clarifying your target clients with target customers.
Yeah. And so I think, I mean, this typically starts with a hypothesis, right? When you're a founder, you're building a product and you service, you have witnessed some type of pain point, you believe you can solve it in a different or better way than other players in the market. And you have sort of a general sense of who your customer is, who's going to buy this thing?
What I've seen in all of the companies that I've been at over the course of my career is that that hypothesis is the right starting point, but that it is a starting point. And that once you actually start to get paying customers, when you actually try to sell your product and get feedback, people say yes, people say no, you start to get a lot more clear and begin to niche down a bit on the types of customers that really are the best fit and the right fit for your offering. And to be open-minded that that might evolve and change over time as your product and software evolves and grows. But it's really an interesting question.
If you pose that to a CEO or a founder of a new company, can you specifically describe who you're selling to? And typically what I find is it's quite broad. And when it's not specific enough and clear enough, it makes it really challenging to even put together a solid paid advertising strategy, which requires that clarity so that you can tailor your messaging accordingly. So it's really, it's getting clear on that.
What I always say is if you have 20 customers, 50 customers, who's your top 25% of your customer base? What do they have in common? How can you use that criteria to help develop a more concrete definition? And have that be the basis with which you think about how to build your website, how to build messaging, both for organic or paid social campaigns?
I'll pause there. Yeah, it's good stuff. And I think it's, I still chat to a lot of these to be founders via in tech businesses or services that like you say, perhaps haven't picked a niche or haven't even got to the hypothesis stage yet. So they're still the belief that they can sell to a massive target market.
And I've almost the belief that they're off for so good that it will serve anyone. And I've been in the past right trying to sell our services to almost anyone and anyone who would have it. But it's very painful, especially as a founder, like when you have such a broad market and an undefined offer, it almost values your work because you're trying to cast a net so wide with your marketing and sales activities that it's almost not having a knock on effect. But once you realize that, like you said, once you've got some data behind you and you've got a clearly defined client profile that has that expensive problem you fix, wants to actually solve it, has cash to invest it in the offer and can get value from the offer itself.
And you've clearly defined like what type of segment of business that is, what industry they've all what company size they've got when you have that data. It's so useful with almost everything like you said, your messaging, your website content, your ads content, it just fuels the fire really. So it's, what do you, for folks that kind of want to go with the hypothesis, is there any kind of tips you give to folks that perhaps not got enough data to clearly define themselves in a niche? Yeah, if you really don't have very many customers yet, I think the key here in my view is to spend time with the people who you think are your right customers and to essentially learn through doing some primary market customer research on your own.
And so, you typically, if you're a founder of some type of product or service, it's usually because in some capacity, you've witnessed the problem or the challenge, right? Or you've been your customer and you now want to solve for that. So there's usually some initial proximity to or ability to relate to your potential customer. And then the way that you begin to flesh that out is having ongoing regular conversations with those people.
Even if they aren't your customers yet, but they theoretically could be or should be. Another thing that I'll say too, is there's nothing wrong with having big aspirations, right? You could say, eventually, this entire segment should have our product. And that's great for an aspiration.
But typically, that's not true from day one. And there's a lot of companies that maybe they start selling into small or medium sized businesses but want to get into the enterprise. But the reality is like enterprise software requires a lot more sophistication and security and complexity and customization. But it's like, you're not there yet, right?
So where's your product today? Who's the customer segment that's gonna serve today? As your product evolves, so can your target customer profile evolve as well? But really being honest with yourself about the aspiration versus the reality and getting clear on who that segment is today could get you to that next revenue milestone, right?
And I do think this is something that isn't static. It can evolve and change. But what is it today? And how are we gonna optimize growth for today is really what you wanna get at.
And do you have a checklist in terms of what you should identify within that target customer, i.e., company size, sector, that kind of stuff? Yeah, so I think there's some basic thermographic company information that can be helpful to classify. That can also help, for example, in targeting for a paid advertising program. So it might be company size by number of employees or a revenue milestone.
It could be a type of industry, especially if you're vertical SaaS or something like that. It could also be things related to if they've received funding and have money to invest and or ambitious growth goals to achieve. So there's lots of, you know, there's some different criteria there. I think also there's more of the qualitative components that I think are, can sometimes be just as important.
So I'll give an example of what I mean by this. At Refine Labs, for example, some of our thermographic criteria, like we only work with B2B companies. We typically like to work with companies that are 10 million in ARR and higher. We know that if you're going to hire us, your ACV should be 20K per year or higher.
These are just like, these are some concrete things that are sort of true or not true, depending upon the company that you're in. On the qualitative side though, something that I have on my like ICP document is philosophically aligned with our view of marketing, with our marketing philosophy. We want to work with a customer that believes that, for example, paid social really should be treated as an awareness channel and not an intent channel. We want to work with customers that aren't optimizing for 1000 MQLs, but really want 100 really high quality demo requests.
And I know from experience that that philosophical alignment can often result in whether it's there, it can be a great partnership or if it's not, it won't lead us to the outcome that we want. And you're not going to find that piece of information in a database or online, right? You have to find that out in an actual conversation with your prospect. So I think there's benefit in having kind of like the, just like the really clear criteria that you can use, but then also some of those things that you really want to kind of suss out in your discovery conversation when you're on the phone with your customer.
It's a good point. It's a good point and be to be marketers or revenue folks tuning in. If you've got that data there, it's almost a luxury because as a founder, these are things that you'll have battle scars from probably learning the hard way by probably selling your offerings to clients that just aren't the great fit. Like you think when you're doing your initial, bringing your offer to market, be it a piece of tech or else wise, like you've got to learn this stuff the hard way through going through perhaps deals that maybe weren't the best fit, but you didn't know at the time.
And then realizing that perhaps your solution wasn't best fit to that company or they didn't appreciate the value or there was too much red tape internally, all these things that you'll learn the hard way, but then you can of course learn from it, document it, move on and then realize what companies you do serve best over time. So those are things and resources you can put together. It's going to save you a lot of time, pain for all parties involved. So yeah, some good points.
So that's clarifying target customer. And then we've got point two, which I think was strong brand positioning and effective messaging. Yeah. And so this is like marketing 101, but this is really hard to nail.
And I think a lot of people can be tempted of like, you know, we have a good enough positioning or messaging. Let's just launch some paid ads to get customers. And one of the things that I've identified pretty consistently, when paid advertising is not working for a company, usually one of the root causes is a lack of positioning and poor messaging. And so when I say brand positioning or your position, this is really, how are you different?
How are you positioning your company, your product, your service within the market of competitors to differentiate yourself, to create an affinity to create a recognition of why you exist and really your differentiated value? Actually, identifying that is really challenging. And then effectively, like articulating that is also challenging. And so, you know, there's lots of different exercises you can go through, whether it's like Andy Raskin's strategic narrative or some of April Dunford's like positioning frameworks, those are really good places to get started if you're feeling stuck here.
But you need to really have a strong and clear position. And then your messaging really flows from that. And this messaging is messaging that should be part of an organic LinkedIn strategy, a paid LinkedIn strategy, your website, et cetera. And then this is where if you're early on and just getting started, this is where leveraging like an organic LinkedIn strategy can be really powerful.
You can, other than spending time, you can put out content with different positions, with different messaging. And you can get some pretty direct and immediate feedback, whether that's landing or not, based upon the engagement you get, the questions you get. When you're having early sales conversations, you can test out different ways of saying something, whether something's really landing or resonating or the way that you've presented something actually convince them to sign the contract and make the purchase, right? So, again, this is not easy to do.
But the goal here is being really intentional with using some type of framework or some type of process to get to your, what you believe is your best positioning statement and then not being afraid to test messaging. This is where you can use paid ads sometimes, if you have the money, but there are other ways to also test via organic, et cetera, to sort of achieve that same outcome. Yeah, yeah, it's a good point. It is tough, like you say, and it does from experience help a lot if you've already got that target client, target market, well carved out, because then you can look to differentiate within that niche and you understand your customers, your target customers a lot better, right?
And then you can even look to create points of differentation based upon your target customer's pain points or their motivations or their jobs to be done or even taking a sense for what you hate about other players maybe compared to the industry, like there's so many different routes or it could be a podcast episode in itself. You had Pep Lea, who you probably know from winter on the show a while back. Winter is awesome. It's a great service to test your website messaging.
Yeah, highly recommend it. For sure, for sure, where he shared with us about starting in a really small sub-sector of your industry, trying to win there, be a differentation, rather than trying to go out in a massive marketplace, pick the small sub-segment where your competitors are basically neglecting, so maybe they're neglecting another very small industry or sector, whatever it is, go after that first, win in that sector and then eventually branch out. But there are plenty of tips within that episode for anyone who wants to skip back to that one. Yeah, some great points.
It's not easy to do, but cut, certainly conduct regular customer research and understanding what they care about and what makes you different is a big one for sure. Cool, so, I think number three we've got compelling offer. Yeah, so this is something that B2C companies are typically much stronger at than B2B companies. And just put yourself in buying anything that you would just buy for yourself, right?
It's like there's a product or service, there's a very clear price, and then usually you really understand what you're getting for the price, what the benefit is gonna be to you. What's interesting in B2B is if you go, I would say one out of every two websites you go to and when you go to the pricing page, there's not actually gonna be pricing. It's gonna be a form that says contact sales or it depends. Or you do go to a pricing page and there's way too many options and you're kind of confused.
Like, okay, there's like six different packages and it's from $1,000 to $20,000. I don't really understand the difference. And so what's challenging for B2B companies is, and this again, this is not an easy thing to solve for, but there's either a total lack of transparency on what the offer is, which in my view is price, what you get and sort of value promise desired outcome that's intended to be delivered. And usually, so sometimes companies have it and just do a poor job of communicating it on their website.
More often than not though, I find that it isn't really fully thought out in a way that it should be and sort of the excuse is, well, it depends. And it depends on how many licenses they're gonna have or how much of this or how much of that. And I get that to a degree and there absolutely can be a range or variability within pricing, especially for more complex enterprise software products. But I do think really nailing and landing on that offer definition is crucial in order for you to be successful in acquiring customers and being able to communicate that in a digital way.
Again, whether it's on your website, or through different paid or organic campaigns. Yeah, there's a lot we could talk about when it comes to offers. Something that's come to mind straight away is what do you feel with Separator, great offer from something that's quite mediocre? Well, like Winter, we were just talking about Pep.
Winter's, his website is great and his offer is super clear. It's like, pay this money and within 48 hours, you will get feedback from your target customers on your messaging. The pricing is accessible, the value is provided basically immediately. It's pretty clear what's gonna happen and what you're going to get.
And so I think that's a great example of a really clearly articulated offer that's valuable. And my understanding is he, Winter's doing great and it seems to be working for him. So I think that's like a great example of how to think about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Do you think like, it's becoming some general, should start small, i.e. one main offer and then look to reiterate that and maybe some more of the versions to get folks into their ecosystem and drive kind of signups or sales from, as a spin off, I suppose. Yeah, and I think it's an evolution, right? I think most companies that have been really successful typically had a really clear segment and had an offer for that segment.
And then, as you see these companies grow, a natural evolution is to build an offer portfolio for multiple different customer segments. But it's really predicated on the fact that, kind of just like as you were describing with your conversation with Pep, let's focus on this niche, let's dominate that particular niche, let's get all the customers there and then let's expand to the next one. Starting small and expanding over time thoughtfully, I would pick that approach over starting really wide and trying to build something for everyone where you end up in a position where you're essentially falling short and I think are typically in a state of mediocrity. That said, to grow, often you do need to build out different new products and extended offerings and expand into new segments.
So it's not something to never do this. It's just doing it at the right time, once you hit the right milestones and at the right stage. I think clarity is such an important keyword there. So like you said, like winter's offering is crystal clear.
It allows you to message test for your website and as soon as you land on the homepage, you know exactly what it does. You understand who it's for, you can hit the pricing page and then you can either get started or not. So I think there's a lot of lessons that people can take away from that just by not trying to do, almost not trying to do too much at once, focusing in on what that means. What that means service or offer a feature that you wanna have to double down on and who is it for, what does it solve, how does it help and then how can focus and investigate how much it costs, what's intelligent and all that good stuff once they understand it.
So that's cool. So this should be a fun one, a website to convert all that hard-earned traffic into sales pools or demos or whatever that cool tool action is. Yeah, and like I think this is so basic but it's so interesting how so many websites I think have room to improve. And so what I tell people on this one is put yourself in your customer's shoes.
And when you go to your website, I think that every potential customer really has four top questions that they wanna answer when they go to a company's website. So number one, they're like, is this the right, like am I in the right category? For the problem I have, the solution that I'm looking for is this correct for me. So there's sort of this like top order high level, like am I in the right ballpark of whether this company can help me solve my problem or not?
The secondary question then is, okay, if I validate that yes, that's true, is this the right vendor? Is this the right solution for me? I wanna answer that question, right? And whether it's this one or whether it's a different vendor offering something similar solving the same problem.
The next is, will I be successful? If I choose this vendor and I implement their software, their service, whatever it is, is it gonna work for me? Has it worked for people like me, right? That's why social proof can be really important.
And then the fourth question is, am I gonna derive my desired outcome? Am I gonna derive whatever economic benefit, whatever desired outcome that I'm looking for? And how am I gonna know that I was successful in that? These are sort of like the evaluation questions that any of your potential customers is gonna go through when they're in a sales conversation with you too, but that starts with your website.
So you should be architecting your website with those core questions in mind and making it really easy for people to consume that information very intuitively on your website and then have a really clear conversion path where when they're ready after their own research and self-education, that it's super easy to speak with someone at your company as quickly as possible, especially if they're interested. It's like, if I had to distill it down, like that's what you should be optimizing for. Yeah, yeah, yeah, some sort of points. And I think like you say, there's so many mistakes that BzB Tech and service companies make when it comes to their website.
Some of them you alluded to earlier, whether it's hiding pricing or forcing leads at all costs. So rather than going for kind of book calls, they might try to download some kind of lead magnet via a guide or sign up for a webinar or forcing a pop-up on you or that kind of stuff. Another one we often see is neglecting customer research, which kind of encompasses everything you've discussed so far, Megan and really understanding kind of what do our target clients actually care about learning, seeing, doing understanding and taking action of when they land on a website in our sector. Because we find that so many sites just build on guesswork or maybe what the exact team think looks cool or sounds cool.
And then as a result, prospects land on your website. But don't really figure out what you do, what issues it's going to solve or what job it's going to help them do. And as a result, get for straight and end up bouncing off to compare to that simply gives them clearer, more enjoyable experience. So good points.
I don't know if there's much you encourage folks to do when it comes to that research kind of things with their website or any recommendations you have there. I mean, I think the first is auditing your current site against kind of those four questions that I laid out and really identifying if you can honestly say that you're achieving those. And if not, identifying the set of changes that you should make to address those. That would really be the basic.
From there, there's ongoing optimization. But most people build their websites through the lens of the company. How can I make us look good? How can I make it look really slick?
Kind of what you were saying. And I think build through the lens of your customer and what they're trying to achieve. And then don't forget that your website is essentially your digital store. And it should be designed for driving purchases, right?
In a B2B context, that conversion could look like requesting a sales meeting, right? Maybe they're not buying something right on your website, which is fine. But you want to optimize for that conversion, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I think what a lot of B2B folks forget is that your website can be harming you, even if you don't know about it. So like a common thing we hear is that, my website doesn't matter because all our deals come from outbound sales or events or referrals. And no one checks our website. And I was like, well, if you're getting recommended by word of mouth, the first thing they'll do is check your website.
Yes. And if they can't tickle these boxes, like what you do, how much it costs, free for results, et cetera, then you're missing out on leads that you never knew were gonna come your way and getting that information they want to see before they're ready to book a call to the bookie demo. So you're losing revenue that you don't actually know about. Yeah.
But yeah, I'd probably say a good resource for that sort of thing is for me, it was building a story brand by Donald Miller just talks about making your website super clear and positioning your customers to hero as opposed to your business and now your business is guide. So good stuff, all good stuff. Fifth, final, last but not least, happy paid customers for starting ads. Yeah, and this is where I kind of mentioned when I'm talking with a potential customer to work with refine labs, I always get a sense of where they are in their revenue journey.
And most of the customers we work with are at 10 million ARR or higher. So they have a good amount of customers already, right? They've learned a lot of the things that we've talked about so far, even if there's room for improvement across all of those milestones, they have gotten it to a point where they're a $10 million business. So they've done a good job so far.
And so this is really meant to represent that you should not, I don't think you should, I would not spend money on paid ads if I have no customers or if I only have 10 customers. It's just too early in your journey to really figure that out. And so what this fifth milestone is really essentially meant to represent is when you have some semblance of product market fit via the number of customers or some type of revenue milestone, then a paid advertising strategy becomes a really important growth letter. If you've achieved all those things or above 10 million in ARR, you absolutely should make an investment in paid because that's gonna be how you get to 20 million and 50 million, 100 million, right?
Like there is the right time. And if implemented correctly with the right strategy and the right execution, it can be a primary growth lever for your business once you've hit those milestones. Let's pretend we were a B2B SaaS and we were doing 10 million ARR and we'd hit this checklist. What would be like the route that you'd say we should take in terms of choosing channels via Google Pay Search or LinkedIn ads or paid review sites?
Is that typical flow that seems to work well? Yeah, so I think the strategy to consider again is putting yourselves in sort of the B2B buyers' shoes. And when you think about your channel mix, it's really important to understand how are B2B buyers using these channels and your strategy should be appropriately tailored based on that. So let's talk a little, let's talk about the difference between like Google Search, paid search or paid socials, like Google Ads or LinkedIn ads.
When you're thinking about paid search, Google Ads, this is what I would call an intent channel. People are going to Google when they're in market to buy something, right? They're searching for this type of software pricing or comparisons between X and Y. They know they have a problem, they're in market to buy, they're actively looking for a solution.
You want to capture that demand, right? We want to identify who those buyers are, we want to bring them to the website, we want to get them into our sales funnel. This is the one, two, three percent of your market that wants to buy today and we want those buyers. So search can be a really powerful channel to redirect that demand to your solution, to your website, right?
The common mistake that we see typically on search is that people spend way too much than they need to on this particular platform with this desire to try to cover all keywords and everything from high intent to low intent searches and Google has built an extremely successful business on everybody advertising. And so the key for search and your strategy there should be how are you implementing a high intent demand capture strategy that really identifies the right budget level to capture as much of that demand as possible without spending any more than that to begin to get into diminishing returns and you really want to avoid having a poor return on that channel investment. So most customers we work with when we get started with them were actually usually lowering their search budget and optimizing it to drive better results. But that's your intent channel.
Paid social is different. When people are on LinkedIn, most people are not actively looking for your product today, but people spend hours and hours on social media. And it is a way that people learn about new products and services, but you can't deploy the same messaging strategy for example that you would on Google search on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is an awareness channel.
The goal is you want to think about how are we building campaigns or driving brand awareness, category awareness, talking about your product, talking about use cases. It's a medium to longer term play to educate the rest of your market that's not actively looking today, but might be tomorrow or next week or next month. And when they are, they're familiar with you and they'll come straight to your website or maybe pass through Google branded search to get there. And so what happens is a lot of time people will treat LinkedIn as an intent channel.
They'll try to get, you know, they'll run lead gen campaigns for try to get demo requests right off of LinkedIn. And that's just not going to work. That's not how that channel is designed. And so you want to take a very different approach to that awareness channel.
When you think about your media mix, it really comes back to your audience. Who's your audience? Who's your ideal customer? Where do they spend their time?
Maybe a majority of them are on Reddit or Twitter or maybe they are very engaged with industry specific publications or events. So your channel mix will vary, but it's rooted in where your audience is. Nice. And I suppose the benefit of doing these five steps around, clarifying a target customer, building out your positioning, your offers, building out your website is that you're going to, all of this will help influence the copy, the messaging that then go within these ads.
And you'll have an idea of what's likely to resonate with those target prospects, with those target clients and all that is going to kind of fuel that messaging, whether it's an awareness ad on social, whether it's more bottom of the funnel, kind of trying to attract someone that's already solution aware and searching directly for the offer on Google or somewhere in between. You'll have an idea of what you should be putting together and what your target clients actually care about seeing at that stage. Yeah, absolutely. All of these milestones help make your paid strategy much stronger and more likely to be successful.
Your ideal customer, you know who to target. Your positioning and messaging, how you're going to communicate through those campaigns. Your website, all the traffic's going to your website. It's now optimized to convert that traffic effectively, right?
Happy customer, social proof. So it's all related. But if you think about it in that way and do your best to try to sequence things appropriately, paid can be successful. I've talked to a lot of people that I tried paid ads and it didn't work, so I'm not going to do that.
It was too early or they treated an awareness channel, like an intent channel, right? So there's a lot of people that will say paid advertising doesn't work, but it's typically, again, you can map that back to one of these root causes that we've been discussing. Yeah, a lot of these lessons apply to most marketing or ad channels in general, right? We're building a business, yeah.
Foundational, right? And we've heard so many things especially who doesn't work or other channels don't work but it all comes back to knowing your customer and knowing their habits, knowing what you said, where they hang out on, how they actually get their trusted information, do they even use Google search or do they go to in person or do they ask their community on Slack groups or whatever? Because if they're not using the channel, you're trying to push down their neck. Why the hell is spending cash on it?
So yeah, a lot of those are really good piece of advice. So with that, Megan, I wanna thank you very much for coming on and sharing with them all things paid ads or not paid ads in this case. And please do share more about how our audience can learn more from yourself or the best way to get in touch. Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn.
I post once in a while on all things B2B marketing or leadership or some personal development stuff and then check out RefineLabs.com for learning a little bit more about our B2B Demand Gen Agency. Thanks for having me, Sam. It's a fun conversation. You're very welcome.
We'll put all of those links in the show notes below. Thank you once again, Megan. And as always, if you enjoyed the episode, why not check out the accompanying newsletter over at breaking B2B.com. And with that, I wanna thank you for tuning in.
We'll catch you on the next one for more NoBS actionable B2B marketing tips, great business and great revenue. See you soon.