All right. Hi everyone. Welcome back to Second Growth. I'm Sydney Marvoh, host joined by Kobo Samkinli.
And today we have a special guest. We're going to be chatting with Grant Duncan, VP of Marketing and Zingtree. And recently you joined the Zingtree around five months ago. And the main reason I wanted to have you on the podcast besides your amazing LinkedIn content that I see all the time dropping knowledge bombs, but is to talk about your experience there and how you successfully crafted and implemented a full demand strategy, which a lot of our listeners try to do at their company.
So I thought it'd be a great topic to dig into with you. So excited to chat today about that. Thanks, and in Sam, great to be here. I also really enjoy following both of you.
Yeah, we go back and forth with the comments and DMs a lot. So it's fun to actually be on a podcast together. All right. So first question.
I just want to dig into what's kind of the current state and strategy of marketing when you started at Zingtree? Like where did you start when you came into the work? As you mentioned, I started five months ago at Zingtree's VP of Marketing. And to give a little background about Zingtree, we're an interesting startup in that it was actually bootstrapped for about six years by a few people.
And they got about 700 people to swipe their credit card, fully PLG. And it was only a couple years ago that they decided to take on venture capital and really try to grow this at a fast rate and switch to more of an assisted PLG motion where you also have sales and marketing in the mix. So fast forward to when I joined. At that point, marketing was bringing in almost all of the pipeline and ARR revenue.
They essentially didn't have an outbound or channel motion in any play, largely because of that history of the company and what was working well. All of the paid media spend was on Google and Bing search for capturing the existing demand. And they were also at a place of just starting to build more of a foundation of content to improve the website for sales, demand, et cetera. And one of the things I noticed early on was they were starting to hit the limit on diminishing returns for paid search.
So they couldn't just throw more money on it and get more results. They tried that and it didn't work. And one other part of this as well that's important in thinking about where we were is the company was also looking to move up market more and that meant refining RICP, thinking about new positioning and messaging. So it was a fun time to join.
Definitely. I think there's two big things that are unique to that work experience but also unique to people trying to deploy and maybe pivot to a demand-gen strategy, which is you're maxed out on your capture demand. And you can't really, there's not enough movement there. And then also you're trying to go up market.
Those are two very common things that we hear across a bunch of different company types. So that's interesting that those are the two big indicators that you've walked into there. What does your team look like when you started? Just so the people can get a sense of what did the marketing team look like?
Yeah. So we're a series A company. There were three full-time people. And I think about something like four part-time freelancers or boutique agencies helping.
Interesting. So when you got started, 100% of the pipeline was there a strong brand of Finamide as entry already or was it lower volume? I know that's always the goal of every market is to sell the pipeline and everything. So it's just curious aside from if you're really only doing Google where they have the active need, was it truly they refine you on Google when that need arose enough or did they just know who's entry was from other means?
This has been something I've been trying to figure out over time because it's a very really important question. My hypothesis so far is that because the company had been bootstrapped in PLG with a self-serve model, there's people who have used it years ago and now they come to a new company and they say, oh, I want to bring Xingtrian to this. I enjoyed using it before. And so then they'll reach out to get a demo or get a trial account set up.
So that is one part of it. And actually on my second day I added the how did you hear about us as a required free text field on our forms. And that was able to show us. So I had the suspicion that people were coming to us because they'd used it in the past.
And after about a month or two of data, I saw that 22% of our inbound leads, which are all high-intent leads, said they heard about us through a friend or colleague. They were usually more descriptive than that, but the boil it down, that was a very big amount. And I think a lot of that was people being told, oh, yeah, I use this in the past. There was another I think about 5% if I recall that said they explicitly used it in a prior company and wanted to try it again.
So that was part of it that was really part of our demand, is just old users or recommendations. But also your hunch is correct. We were overspending on Google, spending on unnecessary keywords. So after doing some analysis, I was able to cut our paid search budget by 50% and have no impact on the paid search pipeline.
It actually went up 10k from paid search after cutting. I wish that we could put this on a loop of repeat. So every 100 years, it's like, you can slash your paid search budget by 50% and you will be fine because most of it's garbage. So that's incredible.
So why do you move to a full demand strategy, aside from the building the field in the form, what was it that really gave you that motivation? There are a few bigger factors. One was that doing this initial analysis, I was seeing that we were hitting diminishing returns on paid search. And so what had gotten us to this point wasn't going to get us to the next level of VC growth that we wanted to get to as a company.
Another is that I do buy in that the buying behavior has changed for people today. I mean, I'm obviously talking a lot about this and I agree with it. But I mean, just think about the last time you saw an ad about some product that you've never heard of. You filled out that LinkedIn or Facebook, Lee Genform and then you bought a $25,000 piece of software.
You probably can't think of any examples because that's not how it happens. People need to be educated before they're ready to buy, especially that solution on a way or to solution aware for startups and why you in particular. So I really believe in that philosophy and wanted to move us to a demand and strategy that fits that. And ultimately, we needed to try something new if we wanted to hit our growth goals.
I mean, it's smart that you recognize that. Where it's diminishing returns, what got us here isn't going to get us there. We have to figure this out. Otherwise, stagnation is death more or less.
And thankfully, the others at Symmetry as well were open to trying new strategies. So I didn't get a lot of pushback. I did have to do some internal education about what is capturing demand mean, what is creating demand mean, why is this happening. What's really cool now is others in the company, like our CFO or CEO or head of RevOps, they will use the terms creating demand and capturing demand now.
That wasn't in their vocabulary. Yeah, that's a huge one. So you were probably in a good situation where you didn't have a lot of pushback, which like marketers dream, right? But I always say work for someone who gets marketing.
But you did have to do internal education and probably still advocate and educate for the strategy and prove things out and socialize that. So what did that process look like for you and how did you go about that internally? I started to share some of these insights that we were seeing around paid search being capped out, overspending there, trying to share about the buyer experience and helping them connect how they personally interact with what we should do from a marketing perspective to actually tie to how that works. And I also shared, I think it was episode 281 of the State of Demand Gen podcast.
And I shared it individually with about six different leaders and then asked to ask them to listen to it and then chat about it. And having those conversations proved very valuable because it wasn't just me making up this language. They listened for 45 minutes to someone else put it in a framework in a way that I could probably not articulate as well on the spot. So those were a couple of the big items.
It also just took time to plant the seeds and for it to become more of a main thought for them. I love it. I love that you knew the number of that episode. I was literally just going through Spotify to find what was the name of that episode.
It was why B2B companies don't create demand. It was one of Chris's keynotes. But he talks also to say this just so everyone that said it's not as fun to know. Yeah, I think it was a good one to share because I've been thinking like if I'm going to share something, what's a good resource to do so?
That episode is focused on almost talking to a CEO or CFO at like a Series A, Series B, let me Series C company. And what do they think about in the midst of how buying has changed? So it had a little bit more of a macro perspective. Yeah.
And those are often some of the hardest conversations to have like getting a CEO on board, getting a CFO on board, even your board, you said that you're a Series A right now. So we call it the vulnerable period when you're kind of in that flux between switching strategies from traditional to something like a point to imagine. So how were you presenting the early results and why you were changing the strategy over whether it was the first quarter, a couple quarters to your leadership or the board? For the leadership, it was a lot of these conversations and then showing some early indicators.
For our board meeting after the first quarter, I presented some slides about marketing and largely about these changes in our demand-gen strategy. So for that presentation, I can walk you through an overview of some of the slides, how I structured it. Yeah. I'll be able to copy some of this.
So first, I wanted to ground them in who we believed our current ICP was and how we wanted to dig deeper to understand that more, as well as the expectations of this ICP. As we talked about before, moving up market, adding sales into the mix more. That means that their expectations are different than how we had previously been operating. So getting everyone on the same page there was the first thing.
Then I level set on what the current stages of our GoToMarket programs were at that time and where we planned to get them in six months. It was a similar model to the revenue R&D stages that Chris Walker has talked about, but I added in the now versus future part to that. Next slide was showing the past pipeline growth and the projections for next quarter broken down by inbound, outbound and channel. Thankfully, I think all of this went off better as well because we'd grown 54% quarter over quarter.
In pipeline, that quarter, basically my first three months there. Of course, I can't take all the credit for that, but I did try to make a number of changes with the team and having better numbers always makes conversations go easier. Then the next slide was focused on how we were changing our demand strategy, breaking it down into capturing demand, creating demand, the unique points of view concepts we were planning to start to share, and then some buyer experience changes like packaging, leave flow. And the talk track went something like this for the slides explaining those.
In the past, think trees focused solely on capturing demand, the people who are already in market and searching online for what we had to offer. And we're trying to say, hey, come consider us too. And in analyzing this further, we're able to connect the data for the first time from ad conversion all the way through to closed one. When we then looked at the past 12 months of data and found many keywords never produced an opportunity or closed one.
So we stopped spending on those, saving us about 50% of our paid search budget. With that money saved, we want to start creating demand. At a high level, we believe we have a demand creation gap, not a demand capture gap. There just aren't many people searching Google for what we do because we're sort of creating a new category.
So we buy necessity, need to start creating demand and educating people to move them from solution unaware to solution aware. And of course, positioning us as the best option for when that trigger happens and they want to buy. So you can see I'm weaving in some of the things we talked about to show how this is how we need to get to the next stage. And I talked about how we're doing this primarily through paid and organic social.
That's educational, optimized for distribution and reach, not like e-book downloads or website conversions, as well as some other ways we're looking to create demand. I talked through some of the thought leadership or POVs that were unique that we're planning to build out on. And then the next slide was focused on showing these early indicators for creating demand. At this point, we were only, I want to say a month, maybe two months into actually starting create demand efforts.
So it was early. But thankfully, we had positive signals early on. So on one side of the slide, I showed examples of our ads that were intended to catch someone's eye while they're scrolling so they could see what we were doing here. And then on the left side of the slide, I gave some of these specifics.
So we've reached 30% of our current ICP on average of seven times over the last month. And keep in mind, most of these people have probably never heard of Xingtree before. So going from almost zero brain awareness to 30% in a month. And we already had a deal come in and get closed one for 43k at that point with three more requests in progress that later turned into pipe in closed one.
So the fact that that happened within that month or two window, extremely fast sales cycle, that also helped as well. And then there's some smaller indicators that I included like CTR, reactions, comments and shares we've gotten, changes, growth in direct traffic for high-intent web pages. I was told our board really likes a lot of detail. So I included some of these.
But in my top track, I didn't necessarily speak to all of it. So that's kind of a quick summary of how I tried to explain to them why we needed to do this and how we've seen positive signals and results already. I mean, you said, yeah, you said quick summary. I just going to say the same thing.
Like, this is a master class. It's a quick master class on how to do the state of board, which is awesome. We have said the exact same terminology. That's hilarious.
I know I have questions since I'm curious about, but I've already asked a bunch of questions and you probably have some I don't want to eat up all the time. No, one is I want what was their reaction? I mean, obviously this was like a well thought out, well articulated presentation. You put time, effort into it.
You had your talk track down. You're always very prepared. So what was their reaction to this? And then did you get any questions or any like follow up things from the board or your CEO after the presentation?
Yeah. There were some questions during the meeting. I think they were generally supportive and positive about it. One was a suggestion to focus on the solution on aware to solution aware part rather than problem unaware to problem aware with the idea of being it's a lot harder and more expensive to help people see they have a problem rather than addressing a pain that they have but not realizing they could actually fix this pain.
So that was one suggestion. Another was asking like how does this relate to the outbound strategy and was able to speak to like essentially providing air cover over the same accounts that the outbound team would be focusing on so that we can hit them in multiple ways. Before the meeting, my CEO, Joanne was also asking like, okay, how many leads have we gotten from this? And what's the results?
And being able to ground him in some of those early positive signals like click through rate, reach was important. But frankly, having one deal closed one already and some in leads and ops was probably the most helpful part there. And of course, the nerd tactical side of me has different things. I'm curious.
One thing that you said that really stuck out was you're talking about all of your like the create demand levers. Talk about paid organic and organic or sorry, paid social and organic social. Many companies I see think of like creating demand is strictly a function of paid spend. How many ads can we get running?
But it sounds like you have intentionally done more than just the ads. We see you all over LinkedIn. I'm curious. What are some of those other tactics that you said you're five months in?
What else do you have in play aside from just like paid media spend? Yeah. Getting active on social, especially LinkedIn for our employees as well as our company page is a part of that. In the paid and organic, I think works nicely together.
There are a couple of popular customer support communities out there. We're essentially mostly targeting customer support teams. One has about 3,000 people and another has about 10,000 people in it. So becoming active in those and trying to be a normal member rather than just pitch slapping all the time but answering questions, giving advice, asking questions, etc.
That's one. Whether that we haven't started much but plan to is to look at getting on podcasts in the CX customer support arena. At this point, that's probably higher leverage for us than starting our own and building from scratch. We are also planning to start a customer referral program.
Technically, I think we'll accept referrals outside of our customers but knowing that they're probably most likely to refer us. And this is kind of like having them create demand on our behalf. And then if someone becomes interested, and we close the deal, then they'll get a payment from that as well. So those are a few.
We plan to add more over time. But a big focus is trying to knock down the ones that we have and improve those rather than getting stretched too thin. Only a couple of experiments in your framework at once before you move them to different phases and then say, okay, now we feel good about this. It's delivering.
Now we can kind of try what's next on the roadmap. One. It is hard to do that though. It's very interesting to want to try lots of different things.
Yeah, so it is definitely hard. So how do you as like a leader of the marketing team kind of balance that? Do you have to self-regulate yourself and your team a little bit? How do you kind of, I mean, I know you use OKRs because you've published them on your LinkedIn profile.
But how else do you kind of regulate that with you and your team to set expectations? That's probably the biggest thing having our quarterly OKRs helps ground us in the main plan that we want to focus on. And then we have a running spreadsheet list for experiments that we want to do. These are both company-wide experiments and tests as well as like marketing experiments, some more strategic, some tactical.
So that helps us balance the bigger main programs that are working more along with knowing what our experiments that we could do or are currently in process. One of the company-wide experiments list is that we don't want too many disparate experiments happening because we want to keep the company focused so that we can have more effort to see iterate faster, can this work, or should we move on to something else? So those are a couple of things that helped ground us. I would also say as a way to iterate or test some of these experiments, I'll do the first part a little bit myself to see what it would be like and if it could scale, as a way to sometimes not add extra items on to already burdened teams.
I'm sure every marker out there is like, can you come work at my company? We're not going to call out names that they don't put their managers on the spot. We've all been there. Yeah.
So like an example of that is I have this hypothesis that because we've been around for so many years in this bootstrapped manner, there are probably people that have used us in the past and now moved on to another company. Could we look at those past users and do some manual lookups and then see what company they're at now and reach out to them to see if they would be interested in exploring, bringing Xingtree into their current company. Zoom info can do this if they're in Salesforce already, but not all of our product users are in there. So this is an example where like, I'm just going to test this with X number of contacts myself and then if we see there's promise, then bring others in to help scale it.
It also does not know what goes. I think that a lot of people could use something like that. I think there could be, I'm very interested to try it. There's two main ways that I'm looking to test this.
One is looking at the like deleted or deactivated users because they probably were deactivated because they moved to another company and the admin changed that. And then the second will be people who are considered current users, but their email is no longer valid. So run it through like a zero bounce and see what comes back is invalid. I think those will be the two lists that we'll look at.
Of course, a subset to try, but yeah. We'll see how it goes. Yeah. What's up, part two?
What's up? All right. So we kind of talked about some of the experiments, but one thing that also kind of fascinated me, which we here this a lot with just clients we work with or people we talk to and help advise with, it's like, you got a deal so quick. Like everyone's like, yeah, the board's loving that.
You got a deal right away. Like this is amazing. Like if I had this result to show, this would be great. But I think one part is kind of understanding like what is the foundational layer that got you there.
Start running random ads and luck out and you got a deal come through. There was going to be some sort of foundation of clearly your targeting was right, your messaging was right, and your positioning was right in order to get that result that quickly. So yeah, curious on what that looks like for you. And then any advice that you'd have to other people around thinking around that part of your strategy before you actually launch this approach.
Yeah. I think you hit on some items that are so key. You could have the best demand gen execution, have amazing design, have your website and buying flow dialed in. But if what you're saying, like that story isn't compelling and differentiated, people are probably never going to actually want to go to your website to learn more.
So I think that's a really important piece to think about as you're hitting on the positioning there. I'd also say though, you have to turn this into actual assets like web pages, content, videos, and then turn it into ads as well. And for a lot of companies getting those foundational elements, first will probably be the first stepping stone before they can do something impactful. For example, if you want to target a specific industry, well, it could be helpful to have a web page that is relevant for that specific industry.
But if you don't have that before, you can't launch the ads yet. Yeah. That sounds cool. Well, I have one final question and then we'll pass the floor over to you.
But I'm always curious to hear like, what's something you're working on? I know you said you've got that list of experiments that you're going to be like, what's something that you're working on that you're genuinely excited about? As you can tell, I am excited about that experiment. But a different one is creating a news entry narrative and point of view.
It's kind of going to be like a manifesto like Play Bigger talks about. But the main idea is to be able to connect with our ICP in a more meaningful way, like articulate their pain points, tie it to a larger narrative, show how vendors are trying to solve this issue and then how we are solving it. Essentially, they're doing a good job in some ways, but there's these gaps in other ways. Here's how we fit in.
And last week I wrote the first draft in a couple of hours, but I think it'll probably be another 10, 20 hours of feedback and revisions with people to get it to that level that we really want it to be. So I'm very excited to get this out though, because I think it'll really help up level our message and connect us with the buyers in a more meaningful way. I'm excited to see it. That's not a small experiment.
That's what I'm excited about. Yeah, it was, I wrote like 2000 words in like two hours and now it's like, okay, how do we refine this and how do we get it to the level that we want it to be or add in new concepts or move others. But I've been brewing on this for a while. Yeah, I love that you're focusing on that.
I mean, so many organizations really don't have a good narrative, a strong point of view. Like they're in a blue background, they blend in with the rest of everything else in their category. It's a good way to really stick out with your prospects like you say. So that's awesome.
That's awesome. That's gonna be fun. Yeah, that is the help. Cool.
Well, what, like, is there any questions that like City and I can help you with? Is there anything that you'd be curious to ask other of us just with what we see across clients or the industries of all? Oh man, so many. One to start with would be I'm curious, at what point should we try something beyond single image ads in our create demand focus there?
We're planning to expand outside that soon. I'm curious if you have any best practices for what to do next and when for others listening. Sydney, any thoughts? I know I've got some, but I'll let you start first if you do.
Yeah, we'll see if our POV is aligned here. We might have to make the answers, which is always healthy. So single image is the main placement, the number one placement. It's especially if you've got the vertical size for mobile placement in there as well.
You're gonna get the most out of that. I think after you've launched and you feel comfortable that your targeting is right and your campaigns are set up correctly with single image, I would naturally start going into new ad formats because I look at ad formats or in placements like some of the whole. You've got four to five placements, maybe let's just talk LinkedIn, you've got single image, you've got carousel, you've got document now, you've got video, those are four core placements. So those are four placement opportunities that you have to bid on that inventory and then get that ad placement to show to your user.
So obviously you can't resource wise to you probably for at the same time every time when you launch, but I would kind of start once you feel comfortable, it seems like you've already generated results, you're confident in your messaging and targeting, then I would go into probably video next and then document ads and carousel document and carousel are pretty close. Obviously, carousel is gonna be probably easy to kind of spin up off of your creative that you already have, but what we see across the board is like video, just is the placement where you see the highest engagement and consumption. Obviously, we're still testing document ads and we're kind of learning and they've just launched and they've been in beta for a little bit. But also, that's probably not like a best practice, but I would say like if after a month or so or after a period where you feel like you have it dialed in, like start with adding placements.
We're on the same page, Sydney. Love it. Yeah. Yeah.
My next recommendation like you is video. What I've seen work really well is using it as like once you're your static ads have been running for up once people have familiarity with you. So you can either do it as a retargeting campaign or if you've been running cool targeted ads for three, four months, you have a good ICP size, a couple hundred thousand or something. You're pretty well sure that they've at these senior ads, they're familiar with you.
So the reasoning behind this is one, people consume content differently. Some people like written formats, some people like audio formats, some people like video format. So video is another way to just reach more people in a way that they want to. But the other thing that works well on is when you think about what it allows you to do.
So these people are familiar with your brand. And so what I like to do is in the retargeting version is instead of just talking about a problem in feed, like, you know, here's the problem, as you said, you're another problem where solution unaware. So you call it out right in the beginning and I say, like, I love Loom Style videos. Like the overproduced video ads that look like television commercials, I'm at the point where I've told people like, it looks like an ad smells like an ad.
It's an ad and most people are just going to see it and be like, eh, like I don't want to be sold to. We've run Loom Style ads with clients that have done very well, 60 to 120 seconds. And what you do is you put the user in the like end user seat of what it's like to use the product. So instead of starting up the video for five seconds with your logo, it doesn't say anything in the first three seconds that everyone skips through, like, and you've lost them.
First two seconds be like, here's the problem, here's how you fix it. Right off the bat, you catch their attention and then do it in your product. Let them see what it's like. It's a mini demo in essence.
So those of those have done really well. I would say like, you don't need to overproduce it. Don't overthink it. Sometimes simpler is better.
Think about how you want to consume at the end of the day. So yeah, I'm big on video. Just make sure you don't get caught into the trap of like measuring it off of click-through rate because again, purpose of videos to be watched and not clicked. So look at view rates and that mechanism.
I've had leaders say, turn off that campaign, click the rates look. And I'm not going to be clicked on. So we'll go look at the view rates and that's actually much more effective at delivering the medium. So yeah, long-winded way of saying, Sydney, I agree.
Nice. Also for video, I compare cost per view of over 50% of the video versus a cost per click. And you will quickly see the way to articulate to someone who's maybe doubting it or saying, let's push more budget in the area. Our cost per 50% view on this is X and it's four times the cost to get a click to the website.
So we're going to keep investing here. Yeah, that's awesome. And if they're watching 50% of video like Sam's talking about, that means they're seeing 30 to 60 seconds of a demo and how you're addressing a real problem. So salespeople would love to get that much time in front of thousands of people.
Yeah, they're already in our inboxes. Hope you don't mind my professional persistence 10 DMs later. Did you get some good ones today? I think I'm going to have to get some good stuff.
Anyway, any other questions for the camera? Yeah, that's a great one. I want to add some videos to our queue based on that. Thanks.
Kind of either add a payback period or just like CAC payback period in general, do you recommend going to, let's say the CEO or CFO and ask to test putting more money on what you're doing to see if you can improve the results there? David Kellogg with Kellogg had a great blog post about this recently, basically showing that it depends a lot. Like he says, some people say six, others 12, others 18, but curious what you're recommending and seeing people get buying with. Yeah.
It definitely depends on how you're looking at that payback period if you're doing just based on ad spend, if you're doing your marketing department, if you're doing it all up, if you have overhead, gross margin, those are different things that you'll want to think about. But most of our clients usually keep it pretty simple and just stay at the ad hack level if they want to stay clean marketing costs, we will too, because that's more common. But usually say healthy payback period nine to 12 months or so, because when you think about most contracts, they usually are about one year. So you want to make sure that you're recouping any spend to acquire them and then after that it's pure revenue.
But if you're looking at ad pack payback and you're, I mean, you have a, it sounds like you're ACV might be around $40,000 or so, you know, if you're looking at a three month payback period, I'd say you're leaving money on the table. I would try to get that to six months, seven months, eight months somewhere in there. You know, it's, of course, it's not as efficient as three months. It's like, yeah, but you're also not bringing in as many potential customers as you could be.
I mean, you spoke about the point of diminishing returns earlier, you get that and you're bored to get to it. So what's the balance of where we efficient versus where are we not being aggressive enough and being able to achieve some goals? Yeah, makes sense. And just to clarify, were you saying those ranges of months for ad payback period or cap payback?
Yeah. So the, I was looking more like the ad cap on that one, but if you do go, I mean, if you're higher ACV, I mean, that's still going to hold roughly the same numbers. It's going to start getting a little really low ACVs that gets tricky. So I don't think you have too much of that problem.
It also depends to, I'm like, how we typically personalize this advice towards the company is like, well, what is your CFO's expectation and your CEO's expectation in of overall cap or department cap? Like, if you kind of know what they're comfortable with, like, Hey, we're in growth mode, so we're actually comfortable with this range. And from your ad cap, obviously you reduce that because ad cap is, you know, more, you're going to add more stuff into your total cap or marketing calculation. But so you can kind of get that sense, like from them, what is their comfortable, acceptable cap and then just back in ad cap to that as a percentage of overall spend versus like your total marketing budget.
And you can kind of back into that. But yeah, if, if you're under six months and your priority is a business is growth and not like net revenue or net, you know, you know, expansion revenue, you know, if your main priority is net new acquisition as a, as a, your main OKR as a business, you need to go like you need some more money there to, to, to push into. I would say though, don't scale it all at once. Slow it like, you know, don't do it in one month.
I would say if you're getting a large increase or a decent size increase, like scale into it. And that's a big miss that we will see people invest like one month or one thing and then they're, you know, wondering what's going on. It's like, it's better to slowly ramp up that. And that's going to also make it a little bit more efficient for you and not make on the chart, like your ad cap look like it skyrocketed one quarter or one month and then it leveled back out, right?
So that would be a recommendation. So yeah, great advice. Thanks. Another question I'm curious about.
So we're currently running around 15 to 25 single-arm jads target audience per month optimized for distribution and reach around like a seven to 11 frequency in total. And doing this on LinkedIn and Facebook slash Instagram. What do you like to shoot for in terms of frequency and number of ads running in any given month? Love this question.
So there's a couple of different, there's three layers of frequency that I think teams should look at, logo frequency. So is that 711 like total, like total times that they've seen your logo? And then when we look at logo frequency, you know, typically on LinkedIn, 7 to 9 is a rough estimate we like to say around and 7 to 11 is Facebook. We'll go a little bit higher on Facebook just because of the cost and the scalability of Facebook in formats as well.
Again, caveat always depends on the situation, right? You say one thing and people like Ricky for like, that doesn't apply to this one situation. So at least I'm going to put that caveat in there. Theme frequency, I think is honestly a theme and frequency is like the main frequency I like to look at is of those total, you know, 15 to 20 images you're running, like, are they two themes, but they have multiple images and different creatives or messaging around them or how many themes are you running to the audience?
And maybe you have two core audiences and you've got a couple themes running to each, or you've got one core audience and a couple of themes running to each. And I think that's what I like to look at the most of like also how do you know an ad is working at the ad level. It's like, you know, we're not doing A, B testing statistical significance here, but at the theme level, what is that theme frequency? And then which theme is resonating more with the other?
We'll give you like some more insights, I think. So for the theme, three to five on LinkedIn and then 47 in a 30 day window, you can look longer than 30 days too. I just think that's the default. If you've got campaigns that haven't hit your frequency yet, you know, and they've been running for 45 days, look at a 45 day window.
And then the ad frequency, one to three, one to five on Facebook before the actual ad unit, individual time that they've seen it. That's kind of general recommendations there. Love that. It's very specific and actionable.
So thank you. Awesome. So we're planning to launch ads to the contact list that outbound is going after soon. Most of these people should already be covered by our existing audiences that we're advertising to because we're lined on as a company on the ICP titles and such.
But some might slip to the cracks if the outbound people are listed as different or unique titles that maybe aren't getting picked up. Do you agree with this approach to add these outbound contacts to your create demand campaigns? Yeah. As long as it's not pulling from like something that's working well and you're spreading yourself too thin, like you mentioned before, I think there is a lot of benefit to doing something like this.
So one is it completely changes the dynamic of the conversation when sales finally does talk to them because if they keep seeing the ads over and over, not over and over the bad way, but they're familiar with Zingtree, who are you? So it's not like your grant from what company again? What do you do versus like, oh, yeah, I saw like Grant's post on LinkedIn. I saw this ad talking about this.
Cool. Great time. We were just talking about this in our company. So it helps them with conversations just by showing up more being top of mind.
And then another thing I like in LinkedIn is if you set this up as its own contact list audience, you can get a lot more insight that the sales team can also use where maybe they haven't reached out quite yet. But you can see like what accounts are spiking, what are the job titles, where the people that are engaging more highly? So you can use this to help them have better outreach just be more informed. If you have a thousand people on the list, you can be like, oh, finally, I've time to call 40 of these today, which 40 should I prioritize?
It really helps them with that as well. So yeah, I'd say overall, there's no harm in something like that at all. And it's even something that we're starting up an experiment with is like, if you do it pass the outbound reach, but say that they're already in pipeline, what if we start marketing additional contact lists of people who are in that buying committee that aren't our ICP, but like the CTO to definitely get involved in implementation or other people. It's like, it helps if they know who you are and what you do.
And they have that affinity. And so I think it's really great. Who's this other tech company that you want us to sign a check for to like, okay, like I've seen what they do. That makes sense.
It's so cost effective to be honest, like relative to the upside that you can get where I get absolutely worth it because these are small lists like, you know, it's not going to be 100,000 people. It's going to be a couple thousand. So you're talking about spending $1,000 a month on this for substantially better conversion rates opportunity or win. So I say go for it.
I think you should work for you. Yeah, super cool. Well, thank you, Sam and Sydney. Great talking to you today.
Yeah, I'm excited to kind of root you on from the sidelines. You've already done like so much great work. I'm excited to get an update on some of the experiments you're running. And then if you if listeners want to follow you and kind of follow on your journey and your tips, where do they where do they connect with you?
Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter, Grant Duncan. Maybe I didn't think she and that'll help with the search results. I love it. Highly suggested of all of them.
So thanks so much, everyone. And it was a great episode. We'll see you soon. Bye.
Bye. Bye. Bye.