Get Started: Performance Marketing Plays that WORK

Today on Stacking Growth, Matt Chanel Elizah, our monthly roundtable with special guest Kai Shaw of DemandOS. Together, they cover performance marketing plays that work. They give tactical advice on how to launch three different specific plays, offer a few frameworks on aligning sales, and then at the end, they welcome an attendee on live to chat through a real-time problem they're facing to find solutions. Hope you all enjoy.

Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome to our V2B marketing roundtable. I'm going to give everyone's minute or so to just kind of get in, but I'm here with Kai Shaw, the founder of DemandOS. Is it DemandOS or DemandOS, right?

DemandOS. Yeah, DemandOS, yeah. I was going to say DemandOS, and that was not going to roll off well. I'm super excited to talk performance marketing plays with you all.

We got three examples of like cold hard ones that we've run that we've shown that work, and then we got some other ideas as well. We also have a lot of the kind of cleatex and setup as well that you're going to want to cover before going into an effort like that. But really, this is supposed to just give you guys some ideas going into this quarter and in the next quarter. Really, a lot of these things are plays that you can run in the next couple of weeks.

I'm really excited to run through that. I'm going to give you a chance to introduce yourself real quick. You're back on your performance marketing. Also, what you're doing at the Mint OS, you can do that once you're screened.

Cool. Yeah, started actually started my career in sales, which I guess is why I have a privilege towards performance marketing and instead of brand. So I get that a few I get that every now and then and then started marketing really with LinkedIn ads back in like 2017 for a large HR company. Matt, you and I crossed paths at gravy for a while.

That's where we really started running some of these plays. Like we were running gift card campaigns in like 2020, 2021. And SDR outreach through Instagram, every time you're doing some wild stuff. Yeah, we were doing anything and everything to get points on the board.

So that was a fun time. And then and then spun off and started a demand agency. And you know, took a lot of inspiration from the refined labs model. We worked with a little bit earlier stage companies.

And then as of last year, we've pivoted hard into products. So we took a couple internal tools and spun those out as a LinkedIn optimization platform. So handling bidding, audience management and analysis. So we're not pumping in audiences.

But what people do is take like their six senses, their primers and take a look at like how those are actually delivering against against each other to find their right audience. And so that's what we're up to now is is mostly just software and then analyzing how how spend is going across. We have almost 40 million in and spend that we have access to. So awesome.

All right, let's walk through these these placements. So we got we got three like use cases. I'm also curious if anyone here like kind of actually want to workshop a couple also. So if anyone here is running performance marketing plays or isn't planning for one and you know, we'd like if anyone wants to volunteer themselves for a campaign that they're doing or are in planning, like we'd love to walk through that with you.

And yeah, preferably, preferably. So I prefer to work with non marketers as an ICP. Like I'm kind of markets marketers now, but a lot of our business like supply chain logistics, medical, like healthcare. So it would be interesting if there's people that have like, Hey, I'm not marketing to marketers, like does this actually work?

You're not marketing to marketers? Because that is some things sometimes I hear that. So yeah, let's go to the goals for today. Yeah, let's go for a minute.

Good for all right. So let's go for three plays that are working right now. You've definitely heard them. My goal is to just get you to try them.

And so I think we're going to try to like crawl walk run of like how do we set up a simple test to get this going? A couple frameworks on sales alignment and structuring and offer. And then like I said, it would be great to do a live example from the audience. Yeah.

Sweet. All right. Cool. So let's start with some disclaimers and assumptions because I think it's important to know like where we're coming from when we talk talk to performance marketing because there's definitely there's definitely a few things that absolutely need to happen in order for the stuff to be successful and other through this kind, you can definitely jump in if you have anything.

But one is like you have to be tightly coordinated with sales. Typically you want to work with like one or two SDRs or AEs when you're doing an effort like this, just so you're super tightly coordinated. You can create the feedback loop for yourself. You can you can also commit yourselves to the same to the same service level agreement and hold each other to it.

And you can get that kind of iterative feedback to improve on the ads pretty rapidly. Other thing is these plays are always situation dependent. So like when we go through them, like these have worked for Kai in his situations, for instance, but they may or not work for your particular market doesn't mean they're not worth trying. It just means that they might not work and you may need to think of other performance marketing plays to run.

We're assuming low brand recognition here, although there's plenty of use case for high brand recognition companies to also run performance marketing as we'll show and we'll show when we get to the understanding of your market section. And then the other option is that you need pipeline now like you're not getting it through direct through direct channels or not coming through organic, you know, some of your other programs are not working. You're not seeing even you know influence attributions or other aspects. They're like, you need pipeline now, it's got to be direct.

You got to show impact. So those are the things that were rolling with there. Anything you want to add to that? No, I think that's no, we'll get into aligning with sales and yeah, like I think everyone here is this you hear only done here at private conversations like we don't need to turn this into a lighting with sales webinar and we can we can hear those.

We can hear those agreements later. But how I like to frame this is frame it with your sales leader as a pipeline activation project. So like, hey, we're not going to do this big like strategic company wide like we're changing our entire strategy. Let's just like, how can we MVP this as a pipeline activation project get one to two as the other AEs that you're going to be talking with a few times a week to stay tight on how the leads are being handled, how the conversations are going, are people responding and syncing with them after every call to make sure that you can change the offer on the front end if you're getting the wrong people if they're showing up with the wrong expectations and then time box it like it doesn't need to be this like I said, big company shift and how we go to market.

Let's just carve out a little piece of our time to run a strategy that we think may or may not work. But we think more like we need to work if we really nail our market. And I think the next slide we have the activation charter that I've used before and we can drop the link in maybe something we can drop it in and people can just make a copy of it. But it'll go through it just kind of goes through again, I don't think we need to make it a sales alignment call.

But it goes through how to set this up. Because if you don't set this up at the front end, then what ends up happening as leads fall off, people don't respond. If the first few come in that are not perfectly ICP, then you lose credibility where you want to establish upfront, like, hey, we're working together to activate pipeline and it's okay if a couple aren't perfect ICP, let's iterate together. And so it's all about getting you and sales on the same side of the table without making it feel like a giant overhaul of the go to market.

So understanding your market, I think it's really important and this kind of speaks to this might or may not work in your market, but it's important to understand where you are between novel solution and competitive market. And when you have a novel solution, you don't really need as much direct response. You can run really creative brand plays, product marketing, just show the product, people will get it and they will convert. You see, I saw the former Refine Lives Index that yesterday posted about their VPN demand role.

They have 45,000 people on the wait list. They have a novel solution in a very niche market. And so they don't have to run as much direct response. So something like a clay, right?

Everyone understands this unique functionality that you didn't get previously with Zoom info or Apollo or some of the other people that they're going up against. And then in competitive markets, you have people like Ramp, like Rippling, like Build.com, that are running, even Zoom info that are running to direct response, heavy direct response offers, because neither competitive spaces. And sometimes you just need to get people on the phone. So I think it's important to understand this.

And I'd ask the audience, like, where does it feel like your product sits? And just getting real with where you stand in the market and how competitive it is. All right. Let's welcome this to Rules for Direct Response.

I think this is super interesting as well, because companies like Ramp and Rippling obviously have fairly high brand recognition in their space. And despite it, you still need more direct response because that space is super competitive. So just because you have brand doesn't necessarily mean they can carry you through the day without needing a good reason to convert either. So I think it's not it's definitely not either or.

But these teams are sending millions of cold emails. They're running incentivized demos. Like they're running downloadable assets. Like they're running all of that and brand on top.

So it's definitely not an either or. But when you're in a more competitive market, you do need to dial up the direct response. 100%. Okay.

So let's put some rules for direct response in. So one thing that I think is should be obvious because if you're going to get your sales team to align with you and work with it and work with you closely on it, you guys need to agree on and align on that name to countless. You can use key play use clay if you use Apollo's and info whatever like habit but you know make sure that you are in lockstep with your with the SDR the A.E. that you're going to be working with on that account list manually.

But at all times you want to control your bids and auction if you do max delivery, you're going to use a ton of budget that you don't necessarily have to in order to reach people. This is especially true if you're going to run things like like like the leadership ads or static image or document ads or things like that. Conversation ads tend to be on a unit basis even if you run max delivery fairly in expenses but still would recommend manipulating on that. Don't be afraid of lead gen forms.

Lead gen forms are part of producing the friction for your prospect to actually convert and then allowing you to make sure that you have that you have tracking and can run that really fast follow up with your sales team. And then one record audiences in most cases doesn't matter. Kyle, I'll let you I'll let you examine that a little bit because there are use cases where you probably do will really prefer a warm audience to a cold audience but in some aspects it's not as important. Yeah, I mean, I'm speaking to the assumption that you need pipeline now and I think it's easy to add a bunch of constraints, unnecessary constraints of like, hey, well, we don't have a huge warm audience.

So I don't know if this is going to work on the cold layer and I hear this in conversations. And at the end of the day, we just need to get campaigns. At some point, we need to get campaigns out the door and in front of customers and see if they're if they're going to resonate with what we have to say. And then on the manual bid piece, like again, like if you're approaching this as a as a as a carve out of your of your of your wire strategy, you don't want to necessarily change your entire strategy.

Mainly bidding can help you just be that much more efficient with your with your delivery, especially if you're not allocating a ton of budget to this. All right, let's run through the first offer. Let me address Brittany just asked a question about where to start on manual bids. You'll hear there's a ton of expert opinions on this somewhere between 50 and 100% of the lowest bid.

I usually just start at the lowest number that the lowest bid number that they that they recommend and then turn off enhanced bidding or optimized clicks and then and then look at your daily spend versus your daily budget. And so if your if your daily budget is is overspending, you might need to pull the bid down even more. And if you're if your daily budgets underspending, you might need to raise the bid. So that's how I approach it content offer, right?

So like we've all heard content offers give value, give value, give value. Okay, what does this actually look like? And I started like thinking through this framework back in the gravy days, this is like five, six years ago. And so let's go.

Yeah, so so much content that you see is this one on one level content. I went to a couple large brands, you go search for their their resources, you go to their blog and it says, you know, what is marketing attribution or what is accounts payable software? That's not really actionable. And that content is going to struggle to convert into deals or even the state of accounts payable software, like that's going to struggle to convert into deals because you're not really targeting a specific job line in a job description.

So I try to get people to avoid the blogs, white papers, e-books mindset and target a specific line in a job description of something you can give them to to solve their problem. So I think it's easy like solving upstream problem for free. That's great. Okay, but what does that actually look like?

So pick a pick a specific line in the job description. I think side 10, we can kind of show this problem solution framework. Yeah, the form. But I think this was I think this is our old Russell Brunson framework.

Yeah, this might be like an old clickfuttle is like old school like 2010, but I found it to be to be very helpful in framing how we think about where our content sits in the in the mind of the customer. Yeah, so problem solution, new problem, new solution or our solution. And so like in the context of this webinar, we need more pipeline from our marketing campaigns solution. Here's three plays that are working, new problem, our team has an capacity new solution.

Maybe we should talk to refine labs and most of your content should sit in that first solution bucket that solves something upstream of your products. So you don't need like here's all the reasons why you should you should talk to a marketing agency or here's the five questions to ask your marketing agency, because first of all, everyone has that content. But second of all, it doesn't really help them. It helps their, I guess it helps them hire a marketing agency, but that's rarely aligned in a job description of the go hire marketing agency.

One of the lines in the job description is generate marketing source pipeline. And so sitting in this first solution bucket and focusing your content there can help be a nice frame for how that works. Yeah, I think one thing that's also key on those solutions, when we talk about where most of your content should sit, is just how actionable that content should be. Like you should be able to take that and be able to action something in your job, jobs to be done off of it immediately, instead of it just being this kind of really wide bowl of wax that you really can't necessarily take action on to create a new problem for yourself.

You know, like the goal for today is like you sit on this webinar, you leave to this afternoon and you start working on a campaign, you schedule a meeting with your sales leader and you get your pipeline activation project going, right? Like we're giving you things that you can actually handle today. So it's a bit meta, but I think it's a helpful framing for, and like I said, we can go through an example with someone live at the end if we want. Yeah, I hope someone does not want to.

All right, this thing is super key in my opinion, this conversion components bank because this really helps frame how you work with how you work with sales and how you actually sort of frame this up for yourself to go to go attack the issue. Yeah, so you want to fill out obviously these four, these four pieces customer role, who are we talking to? And then the second piece is like, again, what line in the job description are we impacting and what problem are they having with it? Like this gets very clear.

This is not a persona that are, you know, the VPs we target, likes to take their dog on walks on the weekend. Like here's exactly the problem that these VPs are having. Here's the line item on their job description. And then what are the three best options that people try in most cases before they buy a software or a service solution?

And so is it an Excel spreadsheet? Cool. Can we give them a better Excel spreadsheet? Is it a notion template?

Cool. Can we give them a better notion template? Is it a, you know, what are the three options? And then what are the fatal flaws in those three options?

And you should, you should stop gap that. Like to the point of this content offer, these content offer slides, I think a lot of people say, here's like, you should give value, give great content. And then they don't give you the components that go into. They don't give you the components to help you actually brainstorm what that content piece should look like.

Yeah, the idea of solving the upstream problem to me is like a really great kind of way to think about doing your content like this literally to that job description. Because when you think about the things I'm trying to solve for, it usually comes back to that. So I love this component's bank just because it's very actual, it's super clear. And you can really, and it really details the understanding of what it is you're trying to accomplish with a play like this.

So we got some examples on the next slide with a couple of like, here's how you would do this for certain examples. So like there's that HR and payroll SAS one, or the upstream problem is we're growing, but I'm wasting my whole week manually running payroll and tracking PTO, excuse me. And then what are the three options that you would think about or that or that they would use to solve that for themselves? Like they would use a manual tool or a simple tool or they would just do nothing complacency.

Right. So the manual would be using this giant error prone spreadsheet. A simple tool would be using a cheap consumer grade, consumer grade payroll tool or doing nothing, would just be doing it manually with with with their spreadsheet and hope they don't make a costly mistake. And then what's key here is you find a flaw in in each of these.

So you find the flaw in option one is it takes 10 hours and you're terrified of tax noncompliance. Or the flaw in the simple tool is it can't handle the B2B complexities that your product can solve for. Or in three, it's sometimes it just comes back to ego. And it's like, I am a CEO making, you know, 300,000, 400,000, even more than that a year.

And I'm doing, you know, minimum wage and then work, or at least it feels like that. So the option you can create here on the content offer would be like the better lead magnet. So like, and this is not just some like 10 page 20 page thing you're talking about a compliance checklist that you can if that is as applicable for every single state. So the new hire compliance checklist for every state like the exact forms, I-9-W-4 state withholding that you would need for your new hire.

So if you're looking at an example, like in the HR payroll SAS, like this would be a way to frame this for yourself in terms of like running through the upstream problem, what they use, what the flaws in those are, and then that helps that hopefully leads you into well, what can I make that can be 10x that value that I can use as a play. Yeah, and I think like signals are a big, signals are a big topic of conversation. Right now, there's all these signal providers that are popping up. And I think someone downloading assets like these is it's signaling that they have a problem that's related to your product.

Whereas the state of HR payroll or the state of HR, it doesn't necessarily signal anything. They could just be interested in keeping up with the industry. They could, their problems could be solved by another payroll provider. They're just interested in seeing the data of what other HR leaders are saying.

And so I think the important piece is like does the content, if sales sees like, yes, I want to talk to every single person that needs a new, that downloaded our new hire checklist or on product management, like, yes, I want to talk to everyone who's struggling with product feature, standardizing product feature requests. Like you want the conversion to be interesting enough for sales to say, yes, if someone downloads that, I absolutely need to talk to them. Where it's less of a signal when you're talking about more of these top of funnel awareness kind of state of industry type plays. Right.

And then the real important thing on this is the follow up and how you frame the follow up and talk through it. So go ahead, because I know that this is something that you work on a lot, Kai, just things you want to talk through on this one. Yeah, like I really like champion targeting here instead of going after like the everyone wants to target VPC suite. At least that's what I hear is like, you know, we sell to the C suite.

But I think it's better to actually target again the line in the job description of the person that has this problem. And then getting the champion engaged. And then obviously this requires deep customer understanding. Like you have to understand out of the 10 things in a job description for a head of payroll or head of HR compliance, like which ones actually have a ton of pain and which ones don't and then build content around that.

And then quick sales fall up like within five minutes sales needs to be reaching out. I think this gets a bad rap. Like you see SDR shamed on LinkedIn more than more than a couple of times a week. And you see people hesitant to download things, mostly because there's not that intent, right?

Like I just want to download the state of X, Y, Z report. I have no intent on buying this product. And so then sales is reaching out and there's no intent because the software doesn't match the upstream problem. But when your content matches an upstream problem, it's easy to assume like, okay, you downloaded our new hire compliance checklist, like curious if I can show you how we can onboard employees in less than four minutes.

And then add some guarantee. Like we'll guarantee you stay compliant or you don't pay. And the guarantee should be framed in such a way that it doesn't add additional risk to your business. But it makes the prospect feel more likely to book the meeting.

Right. It basically de-risk the time commitment for them. And then the other thing is that you make it a low time commitment for that prospect. And if you're doing it quickly, especially if that content really matches the offer and what you all sell to do that to solve that upstream problem, this can definitely be a really successful play overall.

Yeah. I think so, you know, you want to make sure the lead routing is fast. I mean, there's a ton of solutions around this. Chili Piper default.

I'm sure there's others. Tracking positive replies. So making sure that you're tracking this in either a HubSpot campaign or a Salesforce campaign. And then reiterating on the first call, like, hey, how did you hear about us just to confirm?

And you're going to get some insights back. Like, I really liked the new hire checklist. Like that was actually helping me do X, Y, or Z. That takes me to, uh, can you jump to slide 16?

Yeah. Cause like, these are things that you should start to hear. It's like, Oh, your template helped me solve. Why?

Thank you. Even if they don't buy, like their ICP, they're, they might already have a solution in place, but you help them solve a problem whenever new will comes up. They might reach back out or to like, I read everything you guys right. Or I'm trying to find a way to bring you guys in.

We're still in a contract with someone else. Like, do you hear the things your sales rep should start hearing? If your content is solving a problem in their job description. Bit of a question from, do you want to do you want to adjust that question now?

What are the better signals for sales to use? I'm not sure I quite understand the question. What are, what are the better? You can come on.

We can bring it on. Yeah. Yeah. I see it.

There is on camera. Thanks, guy. And Matt. So my question was more so around when you were talking through the SDR approach of, Oh, somebody downloads this content and they're not ready.

My question was, if you have a sales team that is going to be using that type of approach, what are the types of accounts scoring models that you should use? Or are you saying that's not even the right approach? It should be when they're ready and they've consumed amount of content. They'll let you know.

I think the content, the content can signal intent. I guess my point is that some of the top of funnel content or a lot of the top of funnel content that's created today, like the state of type reports or the 2026 report doesn't necessarily signal intent around a pain problem that they're having in their day to day job. Whereas a new hire checklist or the 10 minute product feature request template signals that they're trying to solve something. Now it's not perfect.

I'm not saying those people. But the signal is stronger than just kind of a broad industry survey or report because a lot of us are just interested, right? Like I'm sure we've all downloaded. I want to hear what these 500 marketers had to say about performance marketing this year.

And I've known 10 on ever buying that product. I just want to know what they're saying. Whereas if they have a specific template and things that I need to do to do my job, I think it signals higher intent. So it's outside of this play.

Like I think technographic is really strong, like a particular, like using like a built with or a lapelizer type tool to get adjacent tools. Like we target people that are on six cents because we know that they're using their audiences inside of LinkedIn ads and they might want to compare them. So like I think using technographic, if you don't have a content play can be a great signal. Number of people in the department, I think Clay does this really well.

Like we use that before. How many people are in marketing or how many people are in product management? Like those can be certain signals as well. And you want to stack them.

Like ideally you're stacking them and you're not just doing every company between 1000 and 5,000 employees. Very helpful. Thank you. Thanks, Duke.

Okay. So going back to the conversion follow up, just making sure that Lee routing is seamless and fast. Like that first touch, we go back to that SLA template. We're talking five minutes, like to kind of make sure that touch point happens.

Because obviously if you're matching the content offer to an offer to sit down on sales, there should be a lot of context and it should be a through line with something like that. So that five minutes can make that offer and that sit down, especially if you have that kind of guarantee behind it, very relevant and powerful. Whereas in 24 hours, it might kind of lose its urgency or its relevance in the moment right then and there. Like they're experiencing, they just downloaded it.

They have an issue with new hire. It's top of mind. Let's jump to the free tool. Okay.

Free tool. Take your content plays and turn them into free tools. I think the other way I like to frame this is like reframing an ROI calculator. You can go to you can go slide 18.

Yeah. There's more spots here. I got a fix. Sorry.

Go ahead. Reframe an ROI calculator. Everyone has an ROI calculator. It's always biased towards like look how much money you're going to make with us.

I think that's fine. Like I think it's okay to include ROI numbers, but you usually want to back it up with like a unique data set and then answer a specific question they're already thinking about. So an ROI calculator deep in a sales process might answer a question for like a CFO of like, okay, hey, what's the ROI of this thing? But there's upstream questions that people want answered.

So let's jump to 20. Yeah. I'm going back to hammering that again. Yeah, just real quick though.

You still want to do all this conversion components bank part of it before you kind of even get into building the tool. So this part, this little preferred slide here, this applies to almost any of the offers that you're creating here. So you'll see that across the tool and the content offer and the last one. Go ahead.

Sorry. So reframing the ROI calculator, I think you still want to show the ROI. But like an example of the supply chain SaaS we did was like, what's a fair 3PL price at my volume? And then within that, you can show the ROI of like, here's the fair price without our tool and here's the fair price with our tool.

But here's the fair price and you're answering a question because they're thinking through like, okay, I have all these 3PL vendors, like some of them are charging me this, what is actually a fair price. And this did over 300,000 in close one business. I think they're still open deals around it. And then for us, like a question people ask is like, how big should my audience even be on LinkedIn?

And then giving expected results. I spun this up on VersaL to show you that it's fairly, it can be fairly lightweight to divide code these things. And then what I would do is just put a, it's just put a like a HubSpot form in front of this and then embed this on a landing page. Unique data really helps here as a campaign requirement.

Like for the supply chain company, they had a bunch of the 3PL data. So they were able to give you what the fair price was. And this much like, this is adjacent to the state of 3PL pricing in 2025. But you're actually getting them to put in like, here's my volume, here's like, it's more tailored to what they're doing.

And you're able to get that you're able to now approach the first sales call with like, Hey, notice you're doing X in volume. Here's what our RLI calculator told you. Here's actually like, you can, and then, hey, we'll actually, we think we can do even better than that because we kind of soften the numbers on our RLI calculator. And again, quick sales follow up here.

And then resources to build this out. I use Verself for a lot of these little one off things. And all you all, if you're trying to be scrappy and do this as like a quick 90 day project, just throw a HubSpot form in front of this and capture the leads that way. Right.

What's up, I'm word to run this. So if something like this tool, you want to run, you can run a thought leader ad with the video where the subject matter expert is like, is, is previewing this almost, you know, there's a really, there's a lot of light easy ways to run like kind of quick videos like that with the person you see people do this all the time on LinkedIn. It's just a matter of how good is that content, you know, most people never have a problem with it when you see these sell leader ads with how they frame the offer. It's more with how disappointing the content is or how, you know, or whether they even get it at all.

Conversation ads are another really solid way to go communicate this again. Cheap inventory. Very good. You get a lot of, you get a lot of sends you kind of, you can kind of really look at that from a performance marketing angle.

And then single image ads is another one you could do this thing that you could run with the lead gen form to get right to the tool if you wanted to, or you can have a click right through, have a quick pop up, have a quick pop up form with HubSpot to Kai's point and then have them access the tool immediately, give them something to download as well. And then hopefully you can get that record somehow yourself and be able to run your follow up motion with it. So yeah, I think just the type of bow on the free offer tool is like, you know, there's like, I mean, we aren't like the AI age right now, where like, you know, some people can actually figure this out using AI and I don't want to ignore that elephant in the room. But really what it comes down to when it comes to something like this is if you have that unique data set that you're able to layer into that for yourself, where you can really provide something unique that AI couldn't replicate by trying to get this kind of answer for themselves.

Because you can ask that kind of question on chat GPT and get an answer. But what you can't get is a unique data set behind it to give them a more contextually relevant answer that they can take with them. So it really comes down for something like this is having, you know, getting that unique data set for yourself and being able to apply it to a tool like this so we can distinguish itself. Yeah, and I think it adds a layer of social proof as well.

Hey, we've analyzed two billion dollars of supply chain spend and we'll tell you what the fair price is. Right. So it adds a layer of social proof and credibility. Yeah, for sure.

Okay, let's talk about the kind of elephant-y sort of sort of one Kai's eyes just got lied. But we were of course going to talk about the incentivized conversation ads because Kai gets a lot of flack for this. Kai gets a lot of flack for this, but I do, but I watch Kai run this at Gravy. Like it basically printed money for the company.

It was an unbelievable notion. And he was one of the earliest people that I knew doing it. So this is basically like a Jedi Master talking about conversation as well. But go ahead.

And look, there's other people doing it that are doing it really well. And they talk about only 10 that are spending a ton of money around it. I think go to the next slide. I ran a little test ahead of this.

We spent 2,500 on conversation ads and we ended up closing four deals out of that. We still have six or seven that are open. And it was just a $105 gift card. And I think to address some of the concerns here, like this was two B2B SAS marketers.

So everyone posts about it how they don't like it. And I've gotten some flack for it. And so I wanted to know like, okay, if I run this to a B2B SAS audience that are advertising on LinkedIn, like what's the response going to be? And it was overwhelmingly positive.

Like the calls were rarely like aloof or just showing up for the gift card. But it was structured in such a way that I think we highlighted the problem well enough. And so it's okay to give prospects a nudge. They're not going to find it off-putting.

It takes so many impressions for people to even remember who you are. Offering someone money for their time is rarely going to leave a bad taste in their mouth. Unless you're just absolutely hammering them every single day. And I would highly recommend not doing that.

But ramp does this. I did a straw poll of like 35 SAS marketers that I know are also running conversation ads. And I have three people say that they didn't really work at the cost per weed that they needed or cost per deal that they needed. And the rest said, yeah, these are working really well for us.

And so I think it's kind of like this, the forgotten stepchild of B2B advertising. But it can be a nice backstop, especially if lead volume is down quarter over quarter. And you really just need to put some points on the board and you're getting a lot of pressure from your team. I think the important piece here is narrow ICP.

Like you want almost 100% chance that if someone converts from this audience, we want to talk to them. And so I think the audience that I ran this against was like 88,000 people. We had vetted how many LinkedIn ads they had run. We had vetted how many people were on the marketing team.

We had vetted like I think we did last funding round. And so like we had all these data points like, okay, if they if someone in this audience converts, whether they're in marketing or not, we want to talk to this company. The second piece is go ahead. Okay, I'm on the ITPC.

We just go through some of the details on that. So you had an 88,000 personality and said it was a cold audience as well. Yeah, even though it was vetted. Correct.

Cold audience. Same audience that I have run thought leader ads to. I recommend running one cold audience. Like don't stack cold audiences until you really get LinkedIn running.

But one cold audience. So they may or may not have seen some of our some of them I thought leader stuff. And so yeah, that's the answer question. Yeah.

And you're going outside of marketing even as well, you said. So you're talking, do you know how many people are on the marketing team, but you're also looking at, I guess? No, no, I mean, I said it in such a way that like if if someone outside of marketing at one of these companies converted, we would still want to talk to a company. Like that's how you should frame the account building.

And but no, I don't think I think it was I think it was 90 plus marketing. How many accounts could I say to the eight thousand? I think it was four thousand. Okay.

I spent around there and some larger companies and then some smaller companies, we didn't split them out. Like I didn't do any of the other hacky like splitting out large companies, small companies. It just so happened like the four customers that did convert it. I mean, the smallest ones like 43 people the largest one is a few hundred.

So send it from a real person. Like I get if you go if any of you want to call go to your your LinkedIn inbox, like I would say it from a real person ideally the rep that they're going to be speaking with. And the way to do that is to just segment if you have a name to countless with your reps, like just separate the campaigns by rep. And that way there's some continuity between the the message I get and the first person they talk to.

And then again, very quick sales follow-up. Like I just embedded I just hadn't said it to a calendarly, but very quick sales follow-up. Let's walk through the example you have here. Yeah, so I frustrated with your like immediately call out the problem.

I think is is the important piece. And then like one sentence around what the product does. I'll give some of the the tractors a bone here and say, look, we sell advertising software. So to use ads to sell advertising software, there is a bit of a nice like meta aspect to it.

And then the PS like I did like a guarantee like I'm so sure that you're going to find this valuable that if you don't I'll send you the gift card, you just send a gift card anyways. Yeah. But just double down like I'm so positive that you're going to find this valuable. I'm curious if anyone on this call has run incentivized demos and what their experience is if you just want to drop it in the chat.

Or if you got push back on it. Or if you got push back or if you hate it, if you hate the idea, I'm also open to those to those. Yeah, on meta. Yeah, we're using Ryan, where you I'm assuming you're using a like a third party account list vendor for meta.

Colonians. Okay. Yeah, but we're using like a, how are you we're using like meta native targeting? Yeah.

I'm going to go deep in the weeds here. Ryan, I'll treat a text after. I'll treat you as a developer. Yeah, it was native targeting.

Okay, so let's talk through like a low risk way that you guys that you guys could actually run this. So go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Yeah, yeah. I would start if you have if you're already running LinkedIn ads and start with a retargeting audience, like they'll know that you exist. Send at least 1500 messages, monitor the meetings and book trade. And then, and then pause it, like and then see how the meetings.

Yeah, Brittany. Yeah, really specific ICP is kind of the is kind of the hit in Jim here. Like the ICP target has to be really specific that that the ad resonates well enough. Or you're going to get people that are, because even if you want people that don't recall it, even if they're just fishing for the demo for the gift card, that they're in such an ICP fit that they will that some percentage of them will find the product interesting enough to open a sales conversation.

And so if you get meetings booked after the 1500 messages, then you can just turn them off and wait for that cohort to go through the sales process. And so 1500, like if you're targeting really senior people, this is going to cost you, you know, $3,000 and $4,000. But it should be anywhere from like two to three grand plus the plus the gift cards. Right.

And then just in terms of some other performance plays, like we covered those three that work. There are some other ways that you could use their other offers. I mean, really, this comes down to when we talk about performance marketing is getting out of the chasm of how most people run performance marketing, which is either retarget to a demo, or let's have a very low value content content offer or even or even live event. So there's other things that you can do even within what there's so many things you can do in terms of offers within that range that can be a segue to get a person into a sales conversation.

So some other things that we've run, quite a lot of marketing for a couple other clients. We have one, I've one client in the medical device space where we run a lot of LMS direct response ads and we use that to get them into a meeting with the principal scientist at the company and then and then get that to get them to demo the product. And we've had really nice success with that. So sometimes depending on your ICP, if it's a very technical audience, like like my example is like something like an LMS where it's a low time commitment and then and then having a good follow up on that with like the principal SME can be can be a really nice performance marketing play.

And we've had good success with it. Another thing that I'm testing out now is a free pilot offer with combo ads. Usually we couch something like that. So it has to be like that they have to fit a certain number that to fit a certain threshold to fit ICP like it has to have that to have like in this case it's software testing.

And so they have to have a certain number of tests and and product releases that they have every year that require a certain number of quality tests to be done. And if they do they can qualify for a free pilot. So normally so we're going to run we're running something like that with that kind of play in mind. Competitive Google ads Kai I'm sure you've run a lot of this where you do where you've been on competitors.

I actually have one client in space where they bid on CRM and they're not a big company and it's extremely expensive to run to run CRM based exact match. So we actually have found it to be more competitive for them to run just straight up competitor Google ads against their primary competitors. The lower the cost for opportunity is lower as well and it tends to still be really good ICP fit. You want to talk through that as well.

Yeah I mean when we were great we did competitor take out ads and then we offer in the thing was like we'll buy out your contract. Yeah that's what we did offer that. And so like you can get the offer into the actual Google ad it helps a lot and then obviously you need continuity into the landing page and then continuity from the landing page to the sales call like the rep needs to know that that's what ad they saw and like that goes back to the sales alignment. And so yeah like competitive competitive take out I think the trade show association piece was like really interesting that I haven't done it but I think you're dabbling in it.

Yeah I'm testing it now it's super interesting if you're in a space where so I'm doing this with a client where we can't do Google ads with them because they have what they sell runs of that with the ad policy. So in order to do Google ads and run performance marketing and with paid search like we're actually instead of trying to target the commercial terms which aren't really that relevant anyway just because of the ICP. We're actually targeting the trade associations that the ICP are members of and that tends to be super low cost per click with decent volume and almost nobody competes for it. So like you're basically sitting there on an island the only person competing for that term and it's actually been in terms of like the in terms of what I've seen from from the delivery aspect has been really interesting.

I'm still really early in it. I don't really have a lot of results with it yet but that is yeah it's been even even in doing like my keyword research on it presenting it to the client against like the commercial terms it's so much more cost effective and the competition is a lot lower. Well we have like eight minutes do we want to there's anyone want to volunteer to do a yeah come on somebody I've example I'm going to volunteer Ryan if he doesn't come up. All right let's do it go to slide 28 and let's pick um who like who are we selling to Ryan give us a real live example.

Um so who are you bringing this up to tomorrow like you don't have to give the actual name but like uh the industry uh the google one uh industry is the rest of my industry so I think um I'm a pop diners not huge conglomeration is like algarden or something like that but um they might have a couple locations in the city and so generally talking to the owner of it or the manager of the location and what line in their job description an owner obviously has a ton but like what what uh responsibility of their of that role are you are you targeting the event um the line of the job description is really um food delivery and managing orders from multiple ordering platforms so it kind of centralizes all of your orders into a single platform and gives you the ability to deliver in the area as well and uh competitive space I think I've seen a few of those yeah. The competitive space well yeah the delivery aggregators oh yeah it's yeah you've heard of them you've heard of all the competitive space yeah um okay so like three best options like how often is there an incumbent and how often are they like just watching receipts pop out of their out of their printer. So uh we state the question how often are the customers that you're talking to like do they already have an aggregator in there and you're selling us like a better aggregator or are you selling against the receipt printer and they're trying to manage all and the receipt printer and a little iPad and everything you know I've been in the pizza shop where they have like five things five different ordering things. Yeah so um usually they're taking over from someone else um they have a lower tier price um and so they're usually able to come in in when a competitor's business um they do have better success if a company doesn't have any platform at all and they're just manually doing it themselves.

Yeah um I mean this is more like a uh because you're selling a small business so it's like it's less of a LinkedIn play I'm guessing you're doing a lot of that up yeah yeah um like I would probably like the my brain immediately goes gift card like uh for for owners because they're like they're gonna value their time much differently than uh like they will see the value and like here's a hundred dollar gift card especially if they're like mom and pop one or two shops so like my brain really goes there but if you don't want to do that I think it's some kind of like like uh 100% in like I'm assuming they'll handle all the integration themselves and then you write some guide of like how to how to get off of an expensive um how to get off of your expensive uh delivery aggregator or it's some kind of like uh here's how much uh like here's how much your delivery aggregator like here's how much you're losing here's how much profit you're losing to your delivery aggregator some kind of calculator like that um even better if you can integrate directly to the systems like have them log into it um and like connect their connect their POS and then you can show like real data otherwise they can just do it as a as a calculator but you're you're framing it as profit margin loss instead of our live for your tool yeah um that's actually good that's actually good uh good way to frame it that goes back to the upstream problem right like what is if you're the manager you know what's the main thing you're trying to solve for yeah like they're solving for profit right like they want they need operating cash flow um and then the other option like if if depending on if this is a venture funded company is doing like a contract buyout like hey we will buy out your xyz solution and we're going to give you a cheaper price and we're going to implement it for you like you stack them up so it's like an absolute no-brainer and if they're going for market share then uh then that works really well if they're not venture backed obviously that doesn't it's tougher to do that if you're bootstrapped yeah unless you could do like I mean would you do something like a minimum commitment on something like that like you I was assuming you're gonna offer the buyout and all the other things you don't least yeah i mean you'd have to get them into a like a two-year contract for your contract to make the ltv worth it um like you want to guarantee that you're at least break even especially like even if you're uh venture backed like i think you would want one to one um but those are kind of the three three ways i would approach it i don't know if that's interesting or not ronhen could be found out no no it's super interesting um this has been on my mind because i've been trying to go to get card route and i'll tell you candidly we got a lot of garbage from just saying that at the dollar value um especially on facebook how we how we went about getting there was uh we developed some content and you know going through this presentation right now i'm like mmm like maybe the content should have been better um because now reading your slide i think was slide 16 where you talk about upstream problems and when your content should live i'm like okay maybe that's gonna be um maybe that's kind of where the problem was because basically we created this content uh put it behind a legion form and um basically we weren't really following up with everyone we just wanted to see the quality of the people who are requesting to see it and we go okay like we have this content we have this legion form this is a cool audience but if we use these settings in this big audience like owners and managers are coming in so now we can go back to this audience with maybe a more of a bi-mofonal offer um like an incentivized demo and what came out of that was a ton of leads that a lot of people were just kind of um a lot of people were just lying on the forums which is unfortunate right um so it's definitely a different thing than with the invites and that comes back like that goes to targeting really i just replied to your message in the thread like uh resquared it's a local like they have a ton of local business data um nice so you might want to try them out there's a couple others i can dig up that i've used in the past um because it is a different beast and incentivized demos like we probably should have made that more uh emphasized that is like incentivized demos really only work if you have just ridiculously tight iCP targeting otherwise you're going to get tire kickers um like you just have to have a really really tight audience and it might just not be possible like i don't know ryan i don't know uh i haven't sold into restaurants so uh don't know the data quality that exists i see you've gone through a few of them so uh a few vendors yeah yeah no i appreciate the feedback definitely you're gonna check out this r u2 r u squared yeah appreciate it yeah cool leery it whatever yeah i mean i'm surprised guys have not looked at primary yet as a as a source i don't bring any comment around and i i think it would be good i'm i'm very successfully targeting surgeons using primer right now so like i i know it can find people outside ses alright um okay so uh that was pretty valuable that was super valuable uh we got to definitely some questions i'm like will this deck could share will this leave behind thing be shared the answer to those things are yes of course we will share those things with you um kyman i just am so happy to finally do an event with you because you and i have known each other for oh uh yeah it was in seven or eight years now and we actually never collaborated on that even though we basically worked at gravy at essentially the same time i think we started a month apart and i'm first off just super proud of you as a professional and a peer for like where you've taken where you've taken your expertise to launch your company so i just want to give you your flowers here in public on that um most i just want to thank you for sharing your expertise uh performance marketing with everyone i think a lot more people struggle with this than they care to admit um and i think that a lot of people struggle with it because they don't think they don't think more they don't think it all the way through when it comes to the offer uh and the alignment that it takes like it takes effort and it takes work and it takes time and it maybe takes failing every now and too in order to get there but uh i guarantee it it takes failing to get i can actually guarantee that that not everything you put out will work um but if you just think through like the only thing like it's really like really tight targeting and then just especially for content and tools like does this map does this signal intent of a problem uh that we solve and so much so much of the content out there really signals like i just want to i just want to learn something interesting and not not enough of it signals i'm struggling with a problem yeah cool all right i appreciate it uh thanks so much man thank you all so much for attending we will make sure that we send everything out here and we'll see you all next month for our next event appreciate it thank you