Hello everyone, welcome. For those of you that don't know, this is the Refine Labs Expert series. We host this once a month and we bring in typically a CMO or a demand leader from either one of our customers or a thought leader. But lately we've decided to also introduce some of the stars at the Refine Labs team to be able to share particular things that they've been doing with their clients across multiple companies.
I'm going to be able to share that experience. It's also something that I'm seeing a lot this topic in particular. So today we got the man, the legend, Matt Janela, senior director of demand, Janet Refine Labs joining us. I was telling Matt in the back before we started.
There's like a whole agenda here on my phone. I might look at it for a second, but I'm just going to be treating this as if I have an opportunity to get a bunch of free consulting from Matt. Matt's really much more in the details than I am today. And so I know that he has a lot of tactical stuff to share and sometimes this podcast and these events are higher level.
I can assure you this one will not be high level. We'll be getting really into the details. And hopefully there are some takeaways that people can go and use whether it's later this week or into the rest of the year. So I want to frame up the topic a little bit before we get into it because when you get out of advertising in PPC, think Google ads or putting ads for pay per click on like G2 or something like that and you get out of that intent based, get a click, send them to a landing page and you move into social channels like LinkedIn, YouTube connected TV, any other place where the creative, what you put in the channel is not just blue letters, like it's in Google.
We need to put a video and image words. Additionally, the people that are seeing these advertisements are not searching for our thing. They're just browsing through their feed and getting the content that they would get. So we need to figure out how to deliver a message and knowing that that is the psychology of the person using the platform.
And when a lot of companies try to and a lot of marketing teams try to move like we're overly invested in Google ads. We need to start to diversify into, you know, LinkedIn and other types of channels. If you measure it the same way that you measure Google, you're going to get stuck on the lead gen hamster, wheel and paid social. There is data published on hundreds of thousands of leads and tens of millions of dollars in spend showing that that strategy is highly ineffective unless you have deal size is much larger than 100k a year.
And so when you move into these channels, we need to be thinking a lot about the creative and that is what holds up a lot of companies because they're used to just taking an ebook and using a lead gen form and putting it on LinkedIn. But over time as we've continued to work with customers, we've seen there is gold, there is content gold everywhere on their website, the feature pages, the use case pages, customer case studies, the messaging they have on their home page, there's all of this strategic messaging, product marketing works, social proof content, product update announcements or product walkthroughs that are highly valuable and could be repackaged and reused directly inside of these channels and be a total unblocker for companies to go out with a different strategy inside of these channels. And so we're going to be talking about that with Matt today. Matt does this with customers, one of the first things and I'll let him explain his process.
But looking through the website and figuring out all the different key assets that we already have sitting there that we've invested time and money to create that if we connected the product marketing work and that type of work with demand gen and had that flowing downstream, we'd have a almost an infinite amount of content that we can create if we could use these channels. And so Matt, maybe like a minute to a little intro on what you've been working on and what you're up to and then we'll get into the details. Yeah, sure. What's up everyone?
First off, thanks so much for spending an hour with me today on Flatter. You all decided to spend one shower with me. I've been a huge fan of Chris and a line of guests of the Crystal Locker methodology for, gosh, since Chris first started working on LinkedIn and one of the highlights of my career was getting hired by Refine Labs and getting a chance to actually put that playbook into motion and then iterate on it myself with the class I've worked with that refine and that has given me a really great window into how to deploy creative for clients and how to kind of think about it and then also how to level up or round out your messaging across your website and have it be complemented by what you're doing on paid social, which is to first of all, a completely different execution that a lot of what you're doing on PPC because you're trying to have, to me, like you're trying to really harmonize three messaging tiers at the end of the day. If you want to break it down, your brand messaging, your product messaging and your social proof and in some way, shape or form, you are trying to either isolate or combine those things to educate your market to get them to have affinity for you.
And when they are in market and meeting your solution, you are one of the first people under consideration set. And so your social obviously needs to achieve that objective for you, whether that person is three, six or 12 months away from actually making your purchase. So I do a lot of work with clients, helping them kind of figure this out, idea where they're weak and trying to level that up. And so I'm not here to just talk about it.
I actually came with several examples that I'm going. So if you're here and you're listening to this on revenue vitals or something like that, tough luck dude because I'm going to be doing some screen shares. Yeah, jump to YouTube. If you're listening to this afterwards, you want to actually see me break a few of these things down for clients.
So I guess like one of the first places I would start is going back to the aspect of your messaging tiers and like, normally when I work with clients, they're usually way over index on brand or product messaging on their website. But don't really have both figured out very well. And then even the ones that I do see, they do have a figure out. I'll give you an example of one who I really think kind of has all three figured out.
They have no idea how to repackage it for paid social. And that I think is just one of the criminal things like when you have all those ingredients organically or through your direct traffic and you just don't have that figured out. So one thing I want to offer for people, by the way, if you want to volunteer your website and have me kind of do a dive on it, man, I'm more than game to do that. Even if I may not have a complete thing like if I had a couple days, I'll get your website and maybe some reps that I'm more than happy to die through and sort of talking some of the things on your website and give you some ideas for ways to deploy it.
So happy to do that. So all right, let me start with the main thing. I'll put the genet already is volunteering or site. That's awesome.
Thanks so much for that. All right. So let me start with features because I think features is probably one of the places that is the most obvious area. I mean, people, whether we like it or not, they actually do buy off of certain features, certain features are usually what catch people's eye first about your product.
And most people, if you have like a really robust kind of solution, like a platform, what's called at the end of the day, normally they're really attracted to a couple of features and that's what gets them in. And that's the first thing that they're trying to use and then it's on your customer success team or your inside marketing team to like get them to use other aspects of the product. So I'm going to do like my first example here because once particular use case of this I have is in the tech space, clinical education software in particular and so I'll share a screen and kind of get into this example. And one of the ways you can kind of look at this yourself internally is like just looking at how people have their, you have your website even organized.
So this is core higher education group. If you don't know this company and if you don't work in tech, you probably don't. They sell clinical education software. So like experiential learning management systems to think about companies that have an apartment of pharmacy or department of nursing, where there's a lot of externships and preceptor relationships and all these other things like they sell a really specialized LMS that lets you manage that from a clinical aspect, a really cool product.
It is a super robust product. If you get into their flagship product, which is their experiential learning management, I mean, look at this platform just this one UI right here and sort of how robust this is. Like look at all these features that they have within the learning management software. And when you think about how most companies are trying to market or advertise their product, they normally just stop here and say explore learning management software from core and see kind of all the things you can achieve.
Well, you kind of have to use your advertising a little bit to educate people a little bit more on these aspects. And so looking at the clues here, if I'm looking at this UI, one of the first things I'm thinking about is like, why do people usually buy this product? And so looking at the order of features, my guess is that scheduling requirements and requirements speak specifically to accreditation. If you work in the clinical education space, being accredited is a huge part of your ability to get a moment.
These things are key features. These are the reasons people buy because they are literally trying to solve this with a spreadsheet or trying to swear peg around hold this into like blackboard or something like that, not really a use case that it's for. So when you go to the, I mean, LinkedIn as a library is such an awesome resource for looking at stuff like this. And so when you go in and you look at kind of what core does from an advertising standpoint, like this is sort of the creative that they run where it's like requirements tracking, bogging you down, program admins can customize requirements, key track of them, updates, you know, like you're just listening this out on the creative and not really thinking about showing them, right?
You're just telling them that you can do this. And this is just the wrong ad format for what you're trying to accomplish with this kind of messaging. This is right for a carousel ad or a loom video where like if you can get in the product with someone on your product marketing team and they can give it one minute rundown on how you can specifically customize requirements or track them or do smart match scheduling, which is a randomized scheduling feature that they have. If you go down the product page a little bit more and how that works, these sorts of single image ad presentations for really complicated features is not the right way to go about trying to educate your market on this, especially when this is the wedge that gets you in in the first place.
So when we talk about features as kind of like a core component of what we're doing with Adtray, I feel like the thinking sometimes is all wrong. We're like, we're trying too much to tell people what the feature does instead of show them how it works and then what capability they end up getting out of it. And that's ultimately where I think the big miss is especially with a lot of softwares that have features with a lot of self features to give a lot of capability within it. Yeah.
So I want to talk about how to like really put this into practice, right? And when we think about explaining the features, like you mentioned that leveraging a video might be a more appropriate way to tell the story than a single image ad. I think most people lean towards single image ads because they're cheap to build, right? They can be very inexpensive to build a single image ad against a 30 second well thought out commercial.
And so in this exact example, do we want to go through core's websites? We want to find assets that explain these things and then show people that the way that you can tell the story already exists because I think that when you really break it down, what holds people back is, Hey, I want to do this strategy on LinkedIn or I want to do this strategy on connected TV, but I don't have $60,000 to make a video. And to be clear, if you are really running an average, if you're really running connected TV and you're doing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in media, you should be spending an appropriate amount of money on the creative to get that result. But if you're doing a $5,000 a month test, if you're trying to get something up more quickly, leveraging existing assets that can be repackaged quickly by a producer and editor, I think is a great way to get the ball rolling on a channel for an initial experiment.
Yeah, 100%. Can I agree with you more on that? I got another features example too that I think I actually work with this client, hold disclosure. So I'm going to walk through, eat my own dog with here.
This is something that I think we'd have to do with our advertising strategy. Let's go back into the software space. I'll go back to share. This is Sierra, one of the most crowded categories out there.
I mean, CRM is brutal as anyone who has ever worked in it can tell you. This other feature example, I think is really cool because I really like what this, I think this company has really good product marketing and struggles a little bit more on the brand messaging aspect. But this is a CRM designed for field sales. And one of the things I love about software in general and I really, really like software products that do not sell into like a lot of other software companies.
So when you think about a company like my customers, they sell a lot in the field sales. So manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, people who are on on the road all the time who really don't like CRM because it's not really made for them. And so I really like that solution a lot. This company has really nice product marketing.
I know the previous side of marketing people know Mary Keough who did an excellent job of leveling up the product marketing for this company. And so they have all these super nice features that are really unique to the field sales, CRM space. And there's only a couple of competitors that play like in the super little niche down area. So they have mapping and routing account segmentation, leaf binder, territory management, reporting analytics, are super specific use cases for field sales or works who don't necessarily sell to desk jockeys, eighties or looking for like calendar scheduling and things like all those other things that try to make the full funnel sales experience super friction free.
So if we go into one of their features like LeapBinder, really meet little product that have where they like port into Google Maps or waves or anything like that and help field sales reps find accounts to sort of knock on doors and potentially unearth new leads for them. So when we go and I was thinking about we were trying to create more of a full funnel strategy in this aspect. And so what I wanted to do was like we needed to have high level parameter, we needed to have product marketing, we kind of walked into these features. And the first thing we started doing was just simply doing to versus point single image ads.
Well, this is a really nice page that has a lot of capabilities that you kind of walk through with this. And if you're trying to essentially create zero click consumption and have people basically get the entire point on paid social, not have to click into the site and go down and figure out how well single image ads, which is largely what we were having doing in this instance or where we started is not the best route to go, but we did start in this route. So what are we doing? We're of course moving into other ways that we can present this and to me, the most obvious one is carousel ads where you use carousel ads to sort of walk through.
Here's all the things you can do with the LeapFinder feature from my customers and you literally pick the three or four main things here that make the most sense that are the biggest use cases for the feature and went through it very similarly with my customers, they have another feature called account segmentation also super useful away to visualize your accounts on a map for your team so they can prioritize to one tier two tier three accounts. So I'm going to go through the Chris's past experience at home. Probably there's a lot of relevancy with that. And so again, like this is not something that lends itself well to a single image ad yet we kind of started with that, but this goes back to like 30 second to one minute loom overview where you kind of walk through it.
This company has a very technical founder who can kind of walk through that in a very easy to understand way or again carousel ads where you can walk through commanding your account a way to visualize it, not missing follow ups and pinpointing accounts to drive revenue. These are things you just cannot explain with single image ads, but it's not just this particular company. A lot of companies try to walk through features using single image ads and try to get you to the landing page to scroll through the whole thing. When really fraudly the best way to go about doing that is using carousels or using short-form video to explain that in a more comprehensive manner where they don't have to leave the feed in order to absorb the entire point that you're trying to drive up.
Let anyone follow up with a comment there or Chris did you have anything to add on that? Yeah, I mean, just a note on data, like if you are relying on people to get to your landing page in order to consume the message 99.4% of LinkedIn ad impressions do not receive a click. And even then those clicks can be a like or an engagement. So it's not even that clear.
And so an impression might cost five cents. A website visit might cost 10 or $10 to $20 leveraging what the space you have in the feed with the low cost distribution in order to actually tell that story is a much more cost effective way for sure to get that across. Talk about the facts. It's actually interesting.
Like one of the best use cases I have one of the best book the rates I have with one of my clients and we have a super focused ICP. We have tons of industry leaders thought leadership videos where they do these chats with, you know, people who really know what they're talking about. This is one of these industries that's medical device when they really listen to their peers but do not necessarily care what the marketing team has to say. And we're getting like 1.25 to 2% of the rates on some of these ads, which is phenomenal.
But when you think about that, that means like 98 out of 100 people don't click through and actually check the product page out. So if you're trying to like optimize for that, I mean, you're at best optimizing for 200 people to actually go to your website and check the content out at best. When you think about other sort of metrics that LinkedIn has recently sort of introduced dwell time, probably being one of my favorite recently, you now have a way to measure how often people are like paying attention to your ad and it gives you a nice comparison point between single image and carousel because one of the worst things to measure when you're looking at carousel ads versus single image ad is like the number of clicks because they measure car clicks differently than single image clicks. But dwell time is a bit of an equalizer in that respect.
So if you're looking at a carousel, versus single image ad and you're like, how do I compare the two like dwell time to me is probably the best way to look at it, the higher the dwell time, obviously, the more people the more you stop the scroll and people actually are absorbing the messaging that you have in the ad. So just be aware of some of the new metrics that LinkedIn rolls out that give you a more holistic way to measure how people are absorbing and engaging with your content when you're doing paid social. We'll probably get into questions in about five to eight minutes here. I got a couple more from that to set the table.
So like what are the common missteps? We watch a lot of companies try and do this in order to get a new advertising strategy up and out more effectively without having to create a big roadblock. So like what are the things that get in people because it feels simple, right? Everybody's on here.
It's like, oh, I can just go to my website and pick that out and have something to run as it feels simple. What are the things that people miss? The biggest thing to me is distribution planning and like planning ahead when you make a pillar content piece or you have a huge content effort. Like everyone here has had assistance where it's like we want to make a sizzle reel for our company or we want to make this huge first party data ebook.
I have one example I can bring up and talk through as well. There's one company that the company called Glo there and HRTI platform really, really great company and they have some awesome logos on their under what say you can check them out master cards, C gate, standard charter and they have people on their HR team who are more than willing to go on camera and they have these really well produced videos of all but one of the things that I always find as a shame is like when people make these success stories and they make them three and a half to four minutes and then think that they can just put a three and a half to four minute testimonial video only then and expect people to watch that entire thing. So there's just not a lot of planning ahead or like you're working with your video agency and it's like, okay, like first off, just get the whole story. But then also we need a 30 second version of the story.
We need a 15 second version of the story. We need a 60 second version of the story. So like planning ahead when you're doing these video projects with your videographer with your agency or freelancer and say, Hey, like within the scope, I want to get the full story because it'll go on YouTube and go on a company page and it'll sit there and in perpetuity and so we decided to work it to the business anymore. But like if you want to try to make that into an ad, it's really hard for to ask your videographer to tell the full story and then they make it and then you give it to them again and go by the way, we actually need a 30 second and a 60 second and a 15 second version because if you let your person know ahead of time that you're looking to get that kind of modulated content out of the full piece, then they can plan ahead a little bit and how they shoot it, how they pay the questioning, how they sort of we ask questions because any good person who was doing a video is going to ask the same version of the question a couple of times to get a couple of different answers.
So when you get into the planning of your content, understand that it doesn't just stop at being on your website or being on a YouTube channel, you want to extend the life of it as far as you can. And so just understand what steps you need in order to execute on that and give it to your personnel ahead of time so they understand it. It's the same thing as the very popular and basic thought leadership, break it down for long form, break it down for short form and then you have clips for LinkedIn and TikTok like the thing that I've been doing for a long time, but applying that to the assets that you create from product marketing, brand and content marketing, long form ebooks, customer testimonial videos, vertical pages that when you sell into FinServe or you have specific technology for tech or something like that use cases, there's a lot of gold that sits there that could be good for one to many and it could be really appropriate for one to few when you think about some more specialized content. And I think there's just a it's just taking the existing sort of content waterfall framework that most people know well for thought leadership, but now applying it to product marketing and content marketing.
Let's get into the long form ebooks to your point or the long form first party research thing because this is one of my favorite examples. I absolutely love vendor as a company. I think I know they're marketing lead. I like their CEO.
I like what they do. I think it's a really nifty product and I just kind of like the way they run themselves. Their satisfaction is one of the most interesting first party data pieces that get released quarterly. It's really well done.
I recently have partnership with Brex who's another really well known player in the payment space and I think this is just such a well done piece. But when you think about the way they promote this for paid social, it's really kind of bare bones and I think that there's a lot of different ways that they could promote this just given how thick it is. It's such a fit piece of content leaderboard purchase trends renewal trends, data purchasing trends like how to control spend all this stuff and the way that they promoted normally is through like, you know, maybe carousel ad or like a single image ad or something like that. But when I have a big piece like this and I'm looking at it and I'm thinking about media planning for it.
One of the first things I'm thinking about, especially when I have an active CEO like I know vendor does is how do I get my CEO to talk about chunks of this report and then we and basically redeploy it out and pay social to kind of give people bite sized chumps of what is really a comprehensive report like this. Anytime you do something like this with your first party data, what are you ultimately trying to accomplish with this content? You're trying to shape perception of it. Right.
And so it's kind of hard to shape perception when you're kind of anonymously promoting it only then or maybe there's a couple of LinkedIn posts know that some people get feedback differently through audio video and so the fact that they go through this effort every quarter to shape opinion on the state of procurement and sass and beyond and don't like use the mouthpiece of their CEO or any other personnel with audio or video format or go towards podcast and they try to re-promote it that way. I think it's a bit of a miss in terms of the effort they put into this and then how they choose to get or extend a shelf life of it. So when you think about when you're doing these kind of first person pieces for yourself and family here is doing any of those going to distribution planning like I'm trying to shape perception of whatever it's trying to do. So I want to make sure that I have this audio video component of it where people hear how I talk and think about it very much the same way you talk about demand.
Chris and the way you were doing it five years ago like companies should be using data like this the same way you do a picero and try to like shape perception around the category that they're playing in. Yeah. I think companies spend a ton of time, money and resources to create these really thick PDFs and some of them, especially when they're using first party platform data can be really compelling and helpful that to have a workflow where you spend a quarter and all this like engineering and resource and content marketing and design time to make this thing and then to take the thing and say, okay, the first thing that we're going to do before we even release it is we're going to have an event and our CEO is going to present the findings of this PDF that could be easily become a deck and then we're going to have a one hour cut of presenting these findings and then we can take that, take the video, put it on top of the slides and make a 30 second overview of one of those things and then we have thought leadership ads and we have organic content for our CEO. We have niche down videos that we can put on YouTube and search optimized and so it's about thinking about the plan.
If you're especially when you're going to put a lot of effort into one thing, like for my live event that I do on Tuesdays, like there's a lot of effort and energy and resources that go into putting that on that to not be able to think and make the whole use of it for a marginal amount of additional money. I think we really need to be planning for that. Cool. Matt, anything else you want to add on this topic?
I'm going to go out a bunch of notes plan. I know you want to get a lot of key points across. So I'll give you a floor for that and then after that, we'll transition to audience questions. I have more notes, but we can get a question that I make one more point, especially if you go with video, for instance, or audio or you're going to clip things, don't underestimate the score, the music overlay that you're going to apply to some of your content.
I was I watch this really interesting thing last week from Mickey Hart. Anyone knows who Mickey Hart is? He's one of the percussionist with Grateful Dead. And he had this great docu series where he talked about the percussion over the context of sports and life and all these other things.
I thought it was super interesting. And I think about brands that do a really good job of that. There's really not a lot of examples in like B2B tech or anything like that. I could think of Apple, Volkswagen, in particular, do a really nice job of using music to elevate what they're doing from multimedia format.
I think one of the better examples in the B2B space that does this is a company called Build B-I-L-L-D. Look at their YouTube channel and like get a sense like their ICP is commercial stuff, contractors, blue collar stuff. And again, I thought I love B2B tech. That does not sell in the other B2B tech.
They sell in the kind of other trades or industries. And I really, really like the way that they utilize music in their content and especially in the way that it really matches the brand and matches who they're selling to. So be intentional about those kinds of things. Not what you like.
It's what your audience is going to identify with that thing of the day. And it is very additive when you nail it. So that's probably one other point I would want to leave people with when it comes to repurposing their content, especially if you're going to try to go with a router video. Love it.
Stephanie, all right. I'm sure you got some stuff queued up. So let's get into it for any of those people that are want to still look at their website or they're working on a specific thing or they just need a clarifying question. Everything's open for the rest of the time.
So feel free to come online and ask your question. Awesome. We're going to pull up Sam for a question first. And then we do have a website shared if you all want to take a look at that.
Hey guys, how's it going? Thanks a lot for the session and nice to meet you. Mount your energy is infectious. So thanks a lot for sharing your insights.
My question specifically relates to what you talked about around that vendor report and when you think about the size of potential decision making units that this customer is trying to get in front of, how do you go about breaking down and selecting the messaging, the ad creative, the format, the holistic campaign to get that message from the full decision making unit? Yeah. So for the, in the vendor example, like when you think about, they really set quarterly. So do you get like every quarter you get a chance to iterate on it?
So I think you just start with the starting point and then sort of just post more to make every quarter and then be like, all right, what worked and what didn't work, what got traction, what didn't get traction and what we do differently with the next quarter report, like something like that that they do, it's really serialized. So you really are giving yourself signposts to, you know, move on and add new things and experiment because you know you're always going to be doing it every three months. So when you have something that you're going to be consistent with, have a starting point of foundation where you know it's going to be your friend and butter, you're going to do it every single quarter no matter what. And then always be thinking about what are two or three things that we can do differently in distribution or in format that we can test and just see what happens with it.
Yeah. I guess to go a little deeper, I think it was something that was quite niche, for example, as I said, the security business or something like that. He sells specifically into CEOs and CEOs who understand technical messaging, etc. Would you consider breaking out more brand led messages to run alongside Dr.
Pat's influence, the CMO, the CPO, the finance, et cetera, or would everything sort of ladder up to that one report? That's a good question. I Chris is smiling. He may have a opinion before me.
So I'm going to, because if you have anything, I'll let you jump in first. I want to think about that question. Yeah. So I just got to say vendors platform.
I don't know what it costs, but finance can make that decision on their own, even deeper in a bigger company, like procurement, a sub function of finance can make that decision on their own. I think that people are very obsessed with this like buying group concept. But oftentimes, one single person can make that decision. If it's important enough to the business, I think we need to at least consider that.
And so like if you're vendor, right, and you're selling a procurement platform and you're wasting your time making creative for the CMO that has no bearing on whether it doesn't care if you use a procurement platform or an order, which one it is, it's just wasted effort for the idea of marketing to the buying groups. I think we need to just be practical about this. And my rationale forever is deliver a business message to business leaders and every single person that matters will receive the message or send it to the person that needs to know it. And so just elevating instead of thinking about how do I repackage my message about the procurement platform for the CMO, why don't I tell a business story to the C level executive team around how vendor helps their business and then maybe the CMO will care a little less than the CFO and then you don't get run into all of this operational complexity around ads and creative and targeting for this persona versus this persona versus this persona.
In reality that level of granularity you probably need 100k 200k a year deals to justify that type of work. Yeah, I think that's an add on to that. I remember when I worked in manufacturing we would sell an OEM product and the people who ended up using the product never actually ended up being the one to make the purchase decision. It was always your point laddering out and I always remember splitting message chain or add or add thinking or when I was trying to create content around it.
There was like the core user and then there was the end user right and user was the person who was ultimately probably making the purchasing decision. But the core user was usually the person who was most enthusiastic about the product and was your internal champion the one we've going to use it every day. I got a really good friend of mine who works in this house for space and works for Mandian. And I remember interviewing him when I had a client I would find in a cyber security space and asking him about how much is he so actually going to follow up in these purchasing decisions and he was telling me they do an internet response like high level is there a response for big companies and he was like usually it's an event or something like that that ends up sort of spearheading that they call like reach miss or something like that where they're like there's a breach and also I'm like there's a need and then the CISO comes in at the end of the quarter of the year and go say what do we need in order to like store up our services.
I really always feel like you have an user and a core user that you're ultimately probably messaging advertising to and I would probably never try to complicate it more than that at the end of your advertising strategy. Yeah, and if it's just to be for some people that advice like if you're selling a million dollar a year solution to a hundred accounts then maybe that strategy makes sense where you need it's cross functional transformation across the business and you need all these different people IT security finance marketing sales customer success CEO finance like if you need all those people and to deal size justifies it then it might make sense to make an event that specific to the finance department event that's for the IT department and so I just want to for the edge cases there is a reason to do that sometimes but for most people it's probably not worth the squeeze. Cool. Cheers guys.
I wanted to hear so. Yeah. Right on good to see Sam. All right, so we do have Jeanette who is willing to share up a website.
So I'm going to give you screen share permission. We're going to get that up. All right, so we're an education technology program. We sell reading programs to schools and districts.
So we kind of have a main website. Are you seeing my website? Got it. Yep.
So we just redid the website. We have some brand messaging on the home page but we have what we consider product pages over here and then solutions pages over here. So our products we have something for K3. It's called reading horizons discovery and we have one for grades four plus which is called reading horizons elevate one question is like should we just put the product names here and then the solutions like this because it to me it's like I'm wondering if this be better but let's just say we go on one of the product pages.
We were thinking about driving people through ads. We actually don't do many ads at all. So we're just kind of getting into it driving people to the product page. What type of ad would you run like it's more for brand awareness I guess and then we also have like a lead magnet on every page.
So we also considering driving people to the squeeze page for the lead magnet. So we're thinking that those ads would be different right so if you're going to create an ad for the product that might be different than if you're going to actually try to promote the ebook. So maybe just some thoughts around what types of ads you would do for those two different cases. Amazing.
Yeah go ahead Matt. Let's do it. This is a good example. No this is a really good example.
I think one of the first things that I would ask is like do you guys have a high level POV on literacy that you can sort of umbrella under the product before you actually get into it like just sort of a universally known problem that no one's done anything about yet. Do you have anything on your website about that to use as kind of a starting point or an entry point into your company. Do you mean an actual piece or just like a perspective on something perspective and a piece obviously that would be a great additive to that. Yeah it's that's a good question.
We have basically an instructional methodology. We teach reading which everybody needs to learn how to read this or very mission based but we teach reading with an instructional method that was like originally designed for special education teachers for students who have dyslexia very complex very difficult to teach but we've totally simplified it so that every classroom teacher can teach like a special education teacher. So we call it our method or instructional method which really sets us apart from everybody. So we have a page for the method as well.
So we do have a method here which is really what separates us from other companies that just sell reading programs. I would start here before you got into the product at all because I think you need people to be attracted to your method before you can actually sell products at the end of the day. This kind of goes into what prescriptive five years ago where we talked about the state of demand and then started an agency by accident. So like I think this is where you should start on advertising.
How long is this video? This video is I think it's three minutes. So this goes right back to my earlier point like you got this probably really great three minute video that I bet you could condense into a couple one minute thirty second forty five second versions and essentially start there and I would start here before I got into your product because people need an entry point into your methodology. I think before you actually sell them something physical or service in nature.
So this is where I would start before I got into products and ebooks. This would be my starting point just generally speaking because I don't know if you have if you agree or have a different take on this. Yeah same point and I wouldn't call it your method. I would call it something that's like more more descriptive.
I would give language into that secret sauce. Yeah, I would really read it something like it's the reading horizons method. You could call it that even if you wanted to and then putting the I mean this is pedagogy at the end of the day right is what we're talking about. The pedagogy of teaching people to read through like a special education method and you basically talk into that into the reading horizons method and I think that is almost where I would start and I would just begin here before I got into the product but yeah I just was just like I would brand this pedagogy in some way shape or form for yourselves.
Just a follow up question if we were to put a white paper on this page for the method or what have you would you suggest we don't get that. I would suggest not getting it. I would suggest using this video as an entry point and inviting people to sort of read the whole pedagogy. I mean people in education tend to actually like to read longer form things that's been finding that I've seen going back to the core instance.
I know they have a trans and nursing education for instance that they run quite a few bit of ads on so obviously must be doing well for them. So yeah I mean I think talking to white paper underneath and over ungating it. I think it's a smart thing to do if you want to know how many people actually read it you can put a conversion on your ads like then over Facebook using scroll down there's something like that to get a sense of like how much people actually consume the content if assuming it's on HTML and then yeah you can kind of use that as sort of the way to measure the success of it or not. All right well thank you.
Yeah a hundred percent of that was helpful. Very awesome. Next up we've got Alan who wants to talk through some format details. Oh no no let's do it.
Hey Chris and Matt pleasure to meet you both. So I work in a B2B or we're in the investment industry which is a very compliance heavy environment when it comes to marketing. Currently the crux of our company's content strategy pinches on the blog. It's a lot of thought leadership market commentary investment insights and for my job as it relates to our organic link in feed for repurposing that content is pretty minimal transformation.
It's kind of a copy paste because you know any kind of net new copy would have to go through a compliance review process. So I'm kind of stuck with the content as it exists on our blog. So I'm just curious if there are any sort of formats that tend to perform well for repurposing content as it exists on a thought leadership blog. We market to everyone from like independent practitioners to enterprise executives.
But our content on the blog is a lot of that market commentary investment insights. And you know I've got templates set up to put stuff in some like short paste up into short videos and document tiles. I'm just curious from your points of view if you've seen any formats kind of perform best for that copy and paste approach from a thought leadership blog. I got an answer for this one if you want me to go.
Go for it. I mean work with a compliance heavy clients. I'm wondering about how to go for it. Yeah I mean I spent the first five years of my career marketing medical class to medical devices where it's heavily compliance driven all the languages pre approved.
You can't change the language once it's approved to go back through legal and clinical review. So like once you get the asset that's the thing that you can market and we had some things that worked really well for us. So if you had like a customer story for instance that customer story got approved or if you had a blog about a position on a clinical trial or in your case you had a blog about a position on a particular stock or investment sector or whatever that treating those things as news cycles basically all you're doing is leveraging the media to distribute the high level message. So the people that just see the ad in the feed see blah blah blah company published the study and the study came out and told me this and you can just take a sliver like a quote that came from the article and use that as a way to entice people to click and see the full article.
So it's truly using social as a way a method of just getting someone onto the website to read the whole piece of content because of the limitations and that can work really well. What I will say for your particular instance is that potentially your B2C customer is not worth marketing to that way that a customer must have a specific lifetime value to be able to justify running a LinkedIn ad where the clicks on a cost $15 or even like a meta ad right now where your clicks could be $38 that sometimes you just with the conversion and the click costs and all that type of stuff you just can't make it work for like I don't know what your pricing is but B2C typically like less than a hundred bucks a month maybe. So I'll just caution you on that for that segment. I think you have to be running product oriented performance marketing and be able to make the cactile TV equation work.
You can be a little bit more customer journey oriented when you have larger deal sizes. Yeah, I mean I have more questions and I have answers. So I would want to dive into like okay POV blog, what kind of POV is it? Do you have any key partnerships, just aspects like that?
If you DM me, actually I'm kind of curious to dive into the use case. I don't know that sort of time to dissect it before giving you incredible answer. Yeah, sure. Happy to.
I mean, like I would love to bring up the blog but I don't even know if compliance would shoot me for its particular people like that, you know, exactly the situation. But yeah, but happy to DM you. Thank you both. That was helpful Chris.
I appreciate that. I'm going to do some more extra help. Playing in the compliance space is where there's a heavy regulation can be a blessing and a curse at the same time because everybody's got to play by the same rules. So you can figure out just how to play by those same rules better.
Yeah, compliance is one of those things where I feel like you again, it goes into like advanced planning and you got to kind of really have conviction about the things you want to do. And you got to kind of go all out on it. I got client in the medical device base. They sell like a really niche thing for cervical fusion and they have all these fine circuits who use their products.
And so they set up when they go to these trade shows, they set up these content series where they interview them and they really do a nice job of it. And it's been one of our best performing ads when we run it because essentially they evangelize the product for them and we almost get the bypass compliance because when you're here, because when it here says something about your product instead of using it as a company, compliance is usually a lot less, let's say, personically about the content as a game to shoot it because it's someone else saying it about your company and not you. So I don't know if I gave you an idea on that out or not, but just thought I'd throw that in. Love it.
All right, everyone. Really appreciate you being here. Matt, thank you so much for joining. I think this might be your third appearance overall on the podcast.
So one of the few people that have made three appearances. So shout out to you. Really appreciate the insights. Really appreciate all the work you're doing for refundlabs and customers.
Thank you for everything. Thanks, everyone for joining. Hope it was valuable. Hope you found something that you could take and put into practice later this week or into the rest of the corner.
So hopefully this was actionable for you to be able to get a new channel off the ground or just get an idea that gets you thinking differently. So really appreciate you being here. We'll be back again next month. I'm not exactly sure when Stephanie, maybe if you know the date and time for the next one, we'll just get it on us right now.
Yes, we will be back on Tuesday, September 17th at 11 a.m. Central and that's going to be on YouTube strategy. Oh, yes, we got YouTube strategy coming on September 17th. So the registration link is available.
It'll be in the show notes. Where can people go to register? People can go to the show notes on any one of the upcoming revenue finals episodes as well as if you sign up for the refind lab's lab report. Weekly, we'll send out registration links.
Amazing. So plenty of different ways for you to get it. Thanks all for being here and we'll see you again next month. Thank you.
Thanks, Matt. See you.