S2 E7 - Paid Advertising In A World of Rising Costs [Clearbit Webinar]

Hi everyone, welcome back to second growth podcast. I'm one of your host Sydney Waterfall vp of demand here at refine labs And on this episode I have a pleasure of chatting with Colin White on a recent webinar we did together He is the head of demand generation at Clearbit and we discussed paid advertising in the world of rising costs So a couple things we dug into was what is customer acquisition costs and why B2B marketers need to be thinking about it and how they need to be thinking about it why ad costs are increasing across B2B marketing and how B2C advertising plays into that and then we also talked about some solutions that decrease your overall costs and hopefully create some efficiencies in your business We dug into specifically what you can do about that. So strategy adjustments, building an efficient ICP targeting and how to do things that stand out So I hope you take away some good tips from this episode. Let me know what you think.

Thanks. And we are live. Hello everybody We'll wait a minute just so everyone gets in and settled and then we'll do like the quick housekeeping that we still have to do Even though it's 2022 for some reason that's still the thing that we have to let everyone know about I guess what that I'll just go through it so quickly housekeeping everyone knows this But yeah close extra windows and apps to improve the performance these webinar programs and software eat up your computer Basically questions are very encouraged I said you and I want to answer everything that you have and yeah So we'll answer through this session But then we'll do a larger Q&A at the end and then click the bell icon at the top of the chat or questions tab That's just a pro tip because it pings you every single time someone sends a message and yes The recording will be available and that is the question that always gets asked It will be available after the fact that you get like an automated email that happens very quickly after afterwards with that I'll do some introductions. So for myself, I'm calling I head up the demand-gen team here at Clearbit Ben and B2B marketing for I don't know seven eight years and running ads programs for a lot of that time and with me I have Sydney Sydney.

Do you want to do a little introduction of yourself? Yeah, definitely. Hi everyone I'm Sydney waterfall I'm the VP of demand-gen here at refine labs where a demand-gen consulting and go-to-market agency So we help people with running a lot of ads and performance and just overall consulting on all things demand Gen to optimize for a revenue. So super excited to be here Also have been in the v2b sass marketing game for about 10 years and various different functions ops campaigns full demand ads events You know all the different channels.

So super excited to be here with everyone Sydney I didn't ask this in a pre-call but is this your first agency role? Were you in house before? No, yeah, it is my well Yeah, first I would say marketing agency We when I was super early in my career I did work as like a through an agency with Microsoft a lot of their workforces, you know supported through agency partners But it was definitely more in like a operations project management dabble a little bit into marketing It was like right when I first started out. So yeah, definitely my first kind of more in agency experience But one thing that's just caveat that's kind of interesting is a we definitely work like full in house marketers Having access to like all their customers CRM's and stuff.

So I feel like that's why I really love it Yeah, you're basically like an in-house team but for lots of companies which means you have like extra expertise, which is awesome Allegedly, I'm just like see if people think we're smart as we go through our conversation Yeah, just a note on what we'll discuss through this webinar Yeah, this is paid advertising and I were love rising costs We're gonna specifically focus on customer acquisition costs and you know why B2B marketers think about it And then a little bit of why we believe city and I cost our skyrocketing and you'll see that across all of the markets right now And then some solutions and I will say our solutions are a little more strategic than they are tactical But I do think that they will help you think about the overall situation very very Hopefully cool. Let's just start off with a quick description of what is CAC or customer acquisition costs for anyone who doesn't know I don't think it's a metric that a lot of marketers think about definitely not at the you know performance marketing or advertising level So do you see is that something you see? Yeah, once I feel like you kind of get into the leadership level you start thinking about it Because that's how you can go ask for my budget and justify more budget to different areas in the business But you know personally like I really didn't start getting into CAC until I became a director Right, but I think that's the difference between like a business leader and a marketing leader is understanding these metrics So I think every marketer should start start learning and start getting familiar with this type of metric Yeah, I think so too. It's definitely one of the things that your finance team cares about We'll talk about why you need to think about it here in a second But for anyone who doesn't know customer acquisition cost or for CAC whenever you see that word basically all it Sounds to is the cost to acquire one customer So you know you take all of your go-to-market spend all of your salaries all of your ads bend everything We'll get a good and divide it by how many customers you want in a time period and that's gonna give you your acquisition cost basically The same thing as you know our CPA but for the entire business right around the entire go-to-market business So pretty simple concept.

I think the thing is that it really does show what the overall situation for a business is versus Yeah, just looking at your one ad right There's a couple That's like the high-level version right? Yeah More and more companies they have kind of there's a bunch of different subtypes of CAC calculations as well That's important to call out because if you just like Google customer position costs or you know You're gonna see a lot of different variations This is obviously the one that recommend like all the whole kid right But you can break that down is just like just marketing CAC and just looking at the marketing department And then for marketers or for team members who you know you don't have access to that financial data for Everybody's salary or anything like that. You can calculate advertising CAC as well And that's a good good metric to look at if you don't have access to maybe that holistic financial viewpoint Maybe given your organization or where you are on the team So for example advertising CAC is just the total advertising dollars divided by the customer one in that period versus so it's a different calculation But there's a couple different versions for sure. Yeah very similar to Advertisers probably heard of return on ad spend or like an ROI it's very similar just dividing by the total number of customers one Specifically that absolute value and then I guess just to flip over to you know Why you should think about it as a you know a tactical marketer or a director if you haven't yet on your way to Transition into you know a business leader versus just a marketing leader I think you put that really really is a business leader metric I think the first thing is like we talk a lot about you know marketing needs to think about revenue not leads or pipeline Not leads, but honestly, this is further right like it's a further metric deeper deeper in the business house and Just thinking about straight up revenue right and then secondly It does give you that overall view of marketing and sales and then even if you are applying some of those other subsets of CAC It's giving you an overall view of maybe just your marketing Organization health or just your spend or variable spend health or just your advertising health right as long as you are generally the goal would be to Continue to decrease right the overall cost or if you're keeping stable and everyone's happy that means you're running a vision program Right and then lastly This is the stuff that your finance team and your e-staff team think about on a daily basis I guarantee your CFO and your CEO are looking at CAC every single quarter and you know Like everyone says you know we need to be thinking about revenue as marketers now But again, there's deeper business metrics and CAC is definitely yeah, definitely I think again, that's what kind of elevates you to the CFO table and having conversations with the CFO also justifying shifts in strategy How are they working?

Ultimately? We want to look at customer acquisition costs and in my experience We look at like what your baseline customer acquisition costs We get looked at the baseline for total customer acquisition costs right for go to market marketing and then advertising You can look at different buckets and a lot of times if you ask your Finance team they want to tell you they want to get you into this data Of course, they're not going to give you all the calculation behind that data because that some of it is like private salary information and things like that But they will definitely be communicating with you like where we currently at how are we trending? I think that's a very acceptable question for anyone to ask in the business no matter what your level is But I think this is kind of how you can start shifting your mindset is when you look at all these metrics But really start focusing on that a couple call outs to is most of the time we want to lower CAC, right? But we also look at CAC payback So, you know, what's the time period?

We actually pay that back to the business if you're looking at a 12 month annual recurring revenue model Sometimes this has happened for a couple customers bars their ad CAC payback is so low It's like a month and a half or two months We're like we got to put our foot on the gas like this is a signal that like we need you to be investing more in marketing to spur growth So you can look at it from a bunch of different angles to very similarly like CAC is one piece to it But the calculation that most companies will look at is is CAC to lifetime value of a customer So say you you keep a customer for on average three years that means you have a three-year LTV Your cost to acquire a customer is about the same as your ARR That's sort of the gold standard You know one year of ARR and cost-back position to three years in LTV and you're like healthy business from a SaaS perspective And then you can look at either side of that Are you higher than that three-to-one ratio or are you lower and you can you can start to push or pull back or find efficiencies Based on what you need and really it is the health of the business number again, so Yeah, it's it's definitely the thing that's gonna get you into into the conversations with your e-staff or your finance team And let them know that you're thinking about it and the added benefit of them trusting you because you're thinking about the efficiency of the business Is enormous as a marketer when you go and ask for a bunch of money out of the blue, right? Yeah, very very important. Let's keep on and talk specifically about some of the reasons why costs are rising And I think probably everyone in the room the virtual room has felt as felt this if you're a digital marketer in any way shape or form Stuff's more expensive ad platforms are more expensive even sponsorships I don't know like they're going up every time we reach out to sponsor something new and newsletter or something the prices have increased it's just the case and Part of the big reason is just because of supply and demand economics like it's so simple think back to like your first year university economics course Like now I feel like I would do so much better now. That's exactly it, right?

Like you didn't even think that this would be a thing you would think about if you wanted to be a marketer It has huge impact on what you do if you think for advertising There is a limited set of advertising inventory There's only so many eyeballs and there's only so many placements on the ad platforms and now there are more and more companies I mean we just went through a crazy market. I know we're in a little bit of a rough spot now There's been some downturn, but the cash injection over the last 12 months into B2B or even not B2B Just overall in all digital marketing channels is insane and that is eating up the supply the demand is extremely high The supply is not as high as the demand and therefore cost you up. It honestly is that simple Unfortunately, it's the unfortunate reality of where we're at right now Yeah, I'm a little volatile too So, you know, there's always ebbs and flows to the market that businesses respond to as well Yeah, we're going to I think see some of this fluctuate over the next couple months as some companies claw back some companies reinvest Double down, you know, there was just this crazy period of growth. Yes now things have slowed down But you know, there's still cash in market to go There's a lot of cash.

Yes. Yeah, and then something I want to point out that a lot of B2B at least on the B2B side advertisers Don't think about that I do see is that direct to consumer or consumer brands have also increased their online presence Their digital marketing through covid. They didn't have retail stores open So that's the only way they could make money they had to do everything digitally And so they're eating up more inventory than ever before right? It's funny like we get so stuck in our bubble of B2B marketing or for me Like B2B Martak B2B sass like you're stuck in this bubble when you don't necessarily think about the broader view all the time But it's a huge factor overall, right?

Yeah, definitely everyone everyone's trying to market to people Whether they're yeah, you know interest whatever their interests are, you know, I get ads all the time for like Unlooker'sy dog. Mom's I get a ton of dog ads for like dog accessories But then I also get a lot of ads for the marketer and I'm in demand so I get a lot of martak ads, right? So you're still competing for that same impression of for me whether you're a B2B company or B2C company Absolutely. It's just important to remember that yeah We're all people and we all use the platforms that we are getting advertised on and that we advertise on in both ways Right, not just as a business forum.

Yeah The other big piece is that buyer behavior is changing and I know Sydney y'all that refine the ops think about this a lot Yeah, do you want to walk us through some of your thoughts there? Yeah, I think Ten years ago it was all about gaining knowledge and understanding and researching products through you know trade shows through peers through analysts firms through like Content that has like been gated and that was like very very acceptable to okay I'm gonna go to this trade show and we go three a year because I want to learn I want to network I want to understand what's going on in the in your space Now obviously with you know the internet has changed that but coven's really like put the foot on the gas So everybody now is for cities internet They know how to access all of their peers online and they research and buy products very differently They don't want to fill out forms They want to become anonymous and they trust their peers and they have more access to their peers now So this concept of dark social is really where like buying processes start to happen now not which is you know less trackable So think about you know slat communities even just like chatting with kalen on linkedin dm For example text messages peer-to-peer communication YouTube Reddit like all of these like platforms have become way more popular for sharing expertise sharing information Finding out pricing finding out packaging before you even go to the website and become a known user So you really need to recognize that that has changed and also change your marketing strategy to align to that You're not going to win With an older strategy that was designed for different buyer behaviors And if you are running probably more traditional like lead gen approach I can your cat is going to be probably a lot happier Just given that what we've audited a lot of different self-force instances So I think you need to kind of think about that buying behavior and why costs are rising Yeah, I'm excited to dig in a little bit more on the strategy side in the next section But let's keep going through a couple other reasons that I think we're seeing cost rising the next one online privacy is locking down You know targeting is getting much harder. No problems are taking away cookies We're also seeing it happen in email where you know the things like the apple changes that have recently happened are reducing the Importance of open rate because it's no longer a symmetric to use There's a lot happening and honestly The ability to target on a lot of these ad platforms is one of the things that drives cost down for advertising Right and now that you essentially have to be a lot more broader and to a degree That's it's not wrong to go into some of a broad strategy But you still need to find your niche and be focused and some of that ability is going away How have you seen that impact? Yeah, some of your clients Sydney?

Yeah, I think Targeting is a huge letter that you have especially in the advertising space Obviously on organic is just as important as paid But it takes a longer time for organic and you're you can't control the targeting mechanism there And you build that over time just like you would build a community over time So, you know People are having to go wider or people are going to be pulling budgets From platforms that they don't feel confident in the targeting because they're they don't want to risk that like that You know They don't want to risk that budget if they don't feel confident that they are reaching the right audience And they don't have a way to validate if they're reaching the audience and a lot of other platforms too that are more experimental Or you know coming out, you know, like reddit ads and things like that Like they're targeting targeting options vary very much by platform So you don't see as many people investing in those types of platforms because of the lack of confidence in there Yeah, yeah, that's that's an important factor Just the confidence for a marketing leader to invest the budget in a certain platform because of targeting And we see that a lot I clear bit of course we have a product that helps you improve your targeting overall and especially on the platforms that you don't get Could be targeting on like facebook so yeah, it's definitely a key factor I think the last thing just to call out and this is Definitely in the supply and demand piece too. It's just that there's more competition. There's more channels There's more platforms overall engagement across all of them are reducing right You know you think about how often you actually engage with something on instagram anymore or you know linked in a little bit different So it's hard to judge because for us especially Sitting like we're in martech. This is one of the channels that we use Um, we're gonna be marketing and we sort of have to use it but across all the other platforms It's just harder to engage with people there's more stuff going on and it's harder to get attention, right?

Yeah, there's more players in the space now too taking that attention to other platforms, right that Are less trackable. So I think that's the key piece and just think about how you can zoom and where you engage You know, it's you're going through this curl You're kind of lurking but you're not engaging but you're lurking and think about the top channels that you engage with and maybe what your Audience actually engages with like reddit and discord or like their engagement is probably way higher than you can Facebook reporting They'll record on earnings and active users and things like that and the macro trends are Not as much growth there, right for you number of users. Yeah, you know what a personal ad story of mine And now I'm afraid to click on ads especially like random v2c stuff So I got this ad for a thing called on your neck. I don't know if anyone has ever seen this It's a thing you attached to your head.

It's supposed to fix back pain apparently I'm intrigued I've seen the ads so many times you attach it to your head and has like a string basically that you attach to the wall and you like do movements Anyway, I clicked on it just because like what is this thing? You know, it was more curiosity never gonna buy it but I swear like it's every second ad now I'm just scared to click on it and this is all coming to the point of like I'm now terrified to click on ads because and I'm an advertiser Because they're gonna follow me around right and I know it and they're going to aggressively target me and honestly I don't want to see iron neck anymore and sadly I sent the link to my marketing team and a bunch of people on it Because it's so ridiculous and now they have the same experience as me So I just oh my god It sounds like a product like an f1 driver when he is because they do like so many like an extra Further job like that sounds like that's their favorite Scott who's in the background of this this webinar just put it in chat Please do not click on it unless you want to see the ads maybe incognito mode. I guess that helps But yeah, it's ridiculous. I think that's a good point is like people are more protective and aware of their privacy now too Yeah, like people like you know think you know five years ago seven years ago people be filling out their forms with their mobile phone number It's like that's matter.

Yeah, like no big deal But now people are aware and they're more protective of their privacy and then they also get you can kind of do some detriment to your brand You know, like right now. We're not talking positively about that brand, right? So you can also do some detriment to your brand as well. So you kind of have to balance that Absolutely totally agree.

All right. Let's flip to yeah some of the stuff that we can do I think the first thing that we're gonna talk about is some of that strategy that you mentioned Sydney. Do you want to walk us through? Yeah, the refined labs model.

I think we have a very similar thought pattern to what y'all do So yeah, I would appreciate to hear Yeah, we essentially kind of believe in that you should meet people on channels where they are and how that channel is supposed to be used So we have two distinct categories that you know, you can kind of separate it in your brain. You've got Capture demand, which is conversion based right conversion based probably like 90% of what like my career has done and whatever marketer is more used to Those are going to be like Google ads review sites and lead gen ads on social like that's still you're still capturing you're optimizing for a conversion Any type of things like that or you know sponsored stuff where you're trying to get the meeting or get the conversion point that's all very much Capture demand most marketers stay there and most marketing strategies stay in that realm as well because it's it's more trackable It's it's the kpi said everyone's used to tracking But knowing that our buyers have changed knowing that everybody kind of has changed in the past, you know Two years specifically, but even before that You really need to start educating the market and getting in front of your market In a way that is non-destructive like just putting a form and conversion in front of them So you need to think about this notion of creating demand. How do you create product awareness? How do you create?

I don't really use the term brand awareness. It's more product awareness awareness awareness about problems that your company and the category that you are In or creating is solving and why that is important And doing that in an ungated way something that is optimized in feed that you're really focused on engagement and educating and getting messages in front of your market That's kind of the shift right from like lead gen to demand gen is kind of that approach and thinking more about That type of strategy rather than just running a bunch of ebooks and running a bunch of lead stuff If you don't switch your strategy your costs are in your cack is not going to go down You need to align to that. So curious to see like kind of how you guys think about it too Yeah, we use this framework called the five stages of awareness It's from a book called breakthrough advertising if you just google five stages of awareness I don't have to link up, but it's a really interesting framework of instead of thinking about you know How do I just get my product in front of people? It's it's thinking about how do I take people who are In a state of total unawareness of even that there's a problem that they have Or that's a pain that they have and make them aware of that pain Make them aware of the problem And then how do I make them aware that there are solutions to that problem?

And how do I make sure that they are aware that my product is a solution to that problem that they have and then you sort of go through this process of Okay, we need to it comes back to building top of home Content like we talk about those words, but It's what they mean Like you hear their buzz wordy and you just like use them you put them in your strategy deck or whatever You're like my tofu content, but you really need to think about it. It's true. It gets true I'm I have done that I'm not gonna lie. I have done that I think my thinking has changed over the last couple years, especially since I've been cleared it Two these awareness stages where you know, we're trying to move people through not a funnel But through just the stages that they take to learn they should buy a product or learn that they they could improve their life With the product right and then and I follow up on one thing Yeah, I love the concept of capture demand versus create demand I use that all the time because if you look at the five stages of awareness and as you Scott just included a link to it The bottom stages are what most people focus on the end stages the last two or three Right, it's just taking people who are already in market for a solution to a problem that they know they have and trying to bring them into your world Right.

Yeah, but eventually that amount of people tops out. There's only so many people who are in market right now Especially if you're not pushing the market to grow right and so that's the create demand piece That's that the top end of the five stages where you're convincing people There's a problem or showing them that there is and then telling them there's solutions to it They can actually solve it in their life in their day today and then showing them that it's your product, right? Yeah, and I think that's where That's where the advantage is most companies aren't doing that and that's how you win You want someone to know your company and google your company before they even type in a high intent Like keyword into google or if they type in a competitor you're way too late like beyond late um and so Even before you know, there's a lot of um intent tools in the market and stuff like Create demand pushes people to even think about what terms and what things that they should be researching and looking and because you're already above that You're already winning there and you know, yes, they might still evaluate two or three other vendors But you're they're already the first one that they went to you're looking at the content You're already building that trust and subject matter expertise They might trust you a little bit more because they're used to hearing your subject matter expertise type of content and your um pillars there And I think if you don't change the strategy, you're not gonna you're not gonna win and if you don't change your strategy You do the same thing that you've been doing for five years 10 years 20 years It's not a surprise that your customer acquisition cost is gonna go up Absolutely and everyone's taking the same strategy now like the strategy hasn't changed in 10 years Everyone's gonna be doing the same thing. Yeah, and so you have to you have to change it All right, let's move on to the next piece which is basically build a very very good way to target Your iCP for anyone who's in the know around iCP.

It's a concept around your ideal customer profile Basically finding the best people who are your customers that Vermographic traits or the technographic traits, whatever you can use to define that group That subset that cohort of who is the best customer, right? And the That is the thing where you can define your best customer as the ones who take the least cost to acquire Or the ones that stick around the longest or any other uh multitude of metrics and find those Customers that bring efficiency, right? And it's a big way to reduce cost is just to focus on the right people You know, if you're bringing we all know like the conversion funnel if you're bringing 10,000 people in at the top But you get a hundred customers like not Yeah, that's not good Like that goes against all of the strategy that we just talked about right? And so you want to make sure you're focusing on the right people through your entire go-to-market motion from Advertising programs all the way through on your website to how your your sales team talks to these folks or how your product operates to eventually, you know, give them as a paying user in advertising the Specific ways you might go around that you can buy a tool of course I'm gonna pitch clear bit to everybody because we have you know a solution that does this it lets you You're a marketer.

You know, we're marketer. I got to do it We're you know, we're doing scale scales scales here But there are other tools that allow you to do this or you can go and Find even just upgrading your local like audiences to use your ideal customer profile All the customers you currently have as a base right to create that look like audience and Facebook Etc. There are lots of ways to do this But just think about who is the best customer not just any customer the ones that are doing the best with your product and stick around the longest And bring you the most money the most ACD There's a little bit of art and science to developing it and we have tons of content On clear bit around developing your ICP. So I do recommend if you don't know how to Check that out, but really building that targeting machine, right?

No, I think one thing that we really work with customers on is you know, say, hey, who's your who do you think your ICP is? Hey, they normally will give you a pretty wide or uh, they will say here's our total addressable market. So Yeah, you know, we also go in Salesforce and we're gonna be looking into how do we segment down or niche down But cover that entire niche or that entire Segment of customers. So not just the decision makers You know, not just the people who are signing the deals, especially if you're in Lamar Sales Lead Motion Um, you want to make sure you're covering people end users who would actually use the product people who are influencing and In the actual deal, but they may not mean that mean, you know decision maker So it's like once you kind of actually segment all right, this is you know, something that is reasonable Not your total addressable market, but more based on data Then it's how do you then cover and make sure that you have been a strategy for that that whole segmentation?

Yeah, that's exactly how we think about it too internally like we have a total addressable market our tam And then we have an ICP definition that's a subset of that overall And those are the people we really want to focus on and that's not to say that that definition won't change and grow or expand or will Bubble off a second ICP with a second product we build or what have you it's just to say that those are the best fit customers right now That can change overnight depending on you know, what's your product or your business But really just finding those people and targeting them properly is going to give you Honestly a competitive advantage because you're no longer trying to talk to any of the people outside of that who don't really need your product Or don't need it as much as you might think they do right Go ahead. Sorry. No, I'm saying exactly. It's good.

Yeah, okay Let's move on to the last point. Um, and then we'll add there's a couple questions or points we can talk about The last point just in general like this is is not a technical marketing at all It's just very creative like you have to do things that stand out now We talked a minute ago about how engagement is decreasing and you were mentioning like look You can't take the same playbook that you've been applying, you know You're over a year for the last 10 years. You have to do things that are engaging you have to do things that stand out In my opinion The biggest lever you have to your advertising program in general is the offer the thing that you're actually trying to get people to click on Right if that is not good if it's not interesting or it's not engaging It's good care. You know like and I've definitely been in companies in the past where I've been advertising stuff and I haven't really thought about it You know like I created ads and we created you know copy and create it But the actual offer that we had just wasn't good And that it doesn't work.

Yeah, it doesn't doesn't matter. Yeah, I think that with It sounds like super obvious like oh right do things that stand out but It's you know, you're gonna have some content where you know, you might need to optimize for a click right to be able to consume But you also need to optimize Ads for consumption and engagement and so you can take very like fun, you know punch a copy Animations designs like you can do a bunch of fun stuff that does stand out in the feed And then you can also get really creative with your offers and things as well So I think the use of video is kind of like table stakes nowadays as well Animations video Don't just like animate something that's boring, you know, like even though it's video you still need to be able to stand out as well So You know once you have some kind of some core stuff running I would say like make sure you're pushing the boundaries make sure you're always like testing new things Because you'll be really really surprised what might work like some of the most raw You know direct type of stuff works the best for some brands some brands that does not work at all with their audience Like you really need to kind of experiment and do things that you've never seen before or that you see on maybe more consumer trends You really kind of have to you have to push it if you're gonna put dollars behind it needs to be good I'm always surprised by the fact that people will spend you know tens of thousands of dollars on an ad Pushing it in in a platform, but they won't spend any money on creative They're still making like, you know a design in Canva and sometimes that's fine Sure, but for the most part like yeah spend a little bit of money on design and it's gonna go a long way You know, you're already putting so much money behind this thing You want it to be good Great. Yeah, I mean honestly, that's one of the reasons we stood up our creative department at refine labs. We saw a huge Gap and need in the market.

So, you know, they're gonna hire us to come in and really help them like with all things demand But also we run paid media for them And we're we saw correlation that we can get better results with better creative And so why don't we offer that as a service and enable our teams to be successful and ultimately the customers add dollars to be successful, right? And yeah, it's amazing what you know, you have that before and then the after I love those like, you know, I don't really like tear down shows because I'm like, oh, yeah, I don't know like maybe they're just doing the best They can like the one after kind of stuff is like it's super interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I very much agree I have to find I'll try and find the link and and go after but we modeled a lot of our creative off of this designer Do something like that, but basically he's creating consumable content organically On Instagram and because in organic Instagram, you can't Have links to anything, right?

You have to make sure that all of the content that you want to get across is in that ad Right and so we started to essentially do that in our carousel advertising. What a difference like It's I don't have the exact metrics, but it's the only thing we do now when it comes to creative Like we build our carousels and we do mostly carousels in video So that the carousels or the video it's swicable Right and you want to swipe on it. You want to engage essentially with the ad so that you're getting the information that's in there And then there's always the want for more right a little bit of FOMO at the end But you actually click through because there's there's more information in the thing that we're actually advertising whether it's a blog post or Yeah, I love that like taking inspiration from other platforms that are doing well or other creators that are doing well And how can you apply that to your overall marketing strategy? Good.

Okay. I think that is the end We have some some questions or comments in the chat I'm going to flip through because there are some things to point out We've you'll get these after the fact, but we have a couple other webinars on demand series that you can look at something about Quicklyless world see how advertisers are reacting to that And then the four pillars of paid media strategies Because strategies I recommend that as well And then the last one how to reach large highly qualified audiences with your ads And then I'm going to shout out all of the refine labs podcasts demand gen live plus Sydney What's the newest one that you you all are running? Yeah, we just launched a new podcast So we have state of demand gen which is really focused on you know all things demand gen and marketing and then a part of that We have demand gen live which is a community event you can join every Tuesday night and ask live questions to chris or Megan And we just launched one called stacking growth, which is we've got five co-hosts at refine lab So it spans across go-to-market teams. So we have like our director of sales in there We've got our our chief growth officer.

So really looking at like the entire go-to-market team And what a resource honestly all right, I'm gonna flip through the questions There's only a couple of questions, but a lot of comments that I think we can talk through Let's start with just the first question It was around customer acquisition costs. Do you recommend counting all customers one or only those customers which are directly attributed as So you can do both the way we operate our marketing budget as a whole is on the overall view So we come up with between us and our finance team a number that we're comfortable with is essentially what we're trying to find From a paid and organic perspective What's the number that feels good that matches to our cat payback period our overall cat LTV ratio All of the business metrics that we do need to hit and then if we are hitting that number overall Finance gives us a thumbs up. We do go and look at internally the direct attributed as well But we don't pull ourselves to that number fully that's more directional now than anything because we're we are We're recognizing that you can't track everything and cookies are going away and everything is sort of on fire in attribution right now To be totally honest, right? So we're measuring it more holistically.

I guess I don't like to go but holistically, right? I would also echo that like we look at it blended And mainly due to the fact that there are large gaps in attribution software and how people actually buy today Have kind of what we talked about earlier So we look at it blended like if you look at advertising all advertising dollars Which is all deals one marketing cap all marketing spend and programs and all that versus all one and then all cack is all Um as well if you start looking at it like super granularly you're can use them with that for directional Yes, but you're gonna miss on other things that are not working You know One way to get some more data on that is what we call hybrid attribution You can add like a how do you hear about us field or gather that information from your customer somewhere in the customer journey And that will give you a lot of insights to use for more optimization and how to allocate spend and where to move the needle But from a cap perspective blended blended all this in my opinion I'll give you a very good example We did a study internally around a new product that had launched We hadn't really done a lot of advertising for it and definitely hadn't done any of our you know demand generation versus just to make Capture so we're like, okay. There's probably people in the market already Let's throw up those you know lead capture sort of advertising and it worked like successful But we had zero organic for that product prior to launching these assets and if we look at the blended number It was double what actually came through as directly attributed right and direct and organic So through that over a month period we really recognize like okay It might not look like it, but our paid media is driving our direct and organic to Yeah, yeah In a bit financially specific, but do you estimate your tax operational costs within this within the same period or do you just divide the amount That monthly salary versus weekly I see I believe it's just all spent In the period so it doesn't matter whatever period it is whatever you put out in that period divided by the total customers that can Daniel what channel do you find works best for demand gen or is it more of an omni-channel approach You want to handle that one? Yeah, where your customers are consuming content is the channel is probably going to work the best for a more demand gen approach You really have to test and optimize What's going to work well for your iCP?

But what we find well like as holistically is social media Everybody's on social media So facebook instagram linkedin those are our core that we start with and we optimize optimize budgets around based on the different audience or different Industry, you know based on the signals that we're seeing But then the best way to understand what channels is to talk to your customers get some customer insights If you want to kind of go outside and test some other types of mediums as well That's exactly the same answer I give so love that we're in sync I do want to give a shout out to james because he has dropping knowledge in chat if no one's Paying attention to it. I think I agree with almost everything that he's been in there Yes, every metric does tell a story and it tells a different story. You have to look at all of them You can't take one and trust it as a total truth Huge and agree. Yes, we need to be talking to customers and prospects way way more We have some user testing that we do internally mostly for you know some free tools that we're building But we recently just discussed like we need to set up user testing for all of our marketing It's not just you know some specific things that we're doing Who is the person you modeled creative off of I am going to find it for you?

Now you can just go to clear with great of a selfie there Yeah, just and seriously, I mean you can feel free to copy us You know, I want every advertiser to do well. Honestly, can we talk a little bit about best practices with advertising landing pages? I don't think I'm gonna have anything out of the norm on that one. Honestly, the best practices on landing pages are pretty well defined I guess especially if you're doing gated.

So I would say go to cxl or some other resource and look there Yeah, we I mean for more of like, you know product awareness or in feed consumption type of that We don't really worry about the landing page You can you normally normally hopefully your site is good enough that we want to pick a solutions page or blog post page or page That correlates to like the message that we are communicating But like we just want the person to consume the message if we get the click awesome And then we want to make sure that they go not to like a push conversion page like fill this form or do nothing Right, you can't get out of it But we want to push them to explore more onto the site So it's normally like a really nice solutions page or product page or something like that Where they can learn more about whatever the topic that we're talking about is and obviously there's a conversion point on there But it's not like a traditional only fill out this form. You know, nothing super simple kind of push page or anything Yeah, how do you measure the success of new creative ideas? It's a tough one because it depends on what those ideas are I'm assuming we say you're talking about like bigger campaigns or more interesting things You know, if you're just testing ad creative I think you still use the regular metrics that you want to look at like click the rates etc Or depending on what the goal of the ad is It clicks a video views it could be whatever you really are trying to get the person to do I think you always need to be thinking about like what's the desire to come? And that's the measurement you need to take like if you want someone to watch a video don't measure leads There's there's a mismatch You see rate and view percentage on that one Exactly exactly I'm sorry.

I think that we do People can get really caught up in like which exact ad and placement and like you just don't sometimes always have the audience sizes or the scale to really Compantly say so when we roll campaigns out we look at like the overarching like theme Like what was the overarching theme? We were communicating to the market and campaign one versus campaign two and we look at kind of those like holistically regardless of ad placement or Creative we're gonna have a bunch of different creatives in there But I think to guide more like larger term like messaging or what resonates like as a topic with our audience I think you should kind of look at it more from a theme perspective and compare with theme one versus theme two or campaign one versus campaign two all up as well I very much agree with that. Um, you know, we do take internally We take an idea of like seasonal styles a lot of the time especially for stuff that we're doing over and over again Like webinars is a good example for us It's a program that we run and we take seasonal styles for it and like honestly if they perform a little bit worse We're not too caught up in that, you know, because we still believe the content's valuable We still believe that honestly the people who are engaging with the content are the right people So that's all that you know really really matters the end of the day But yes, sometimes you can you know, you can get more of a click-a rate by you know creating some over the top engaging thing But again, like it's more about the holistic view than the singular very very singular especially down to an ad Very much agree. Um, I'm still by the way in the background trying to find this person on instagram I can't I can't maybe they don't have their page anymore I don't know but a couple other other pieces I just wanted to call out James again Thank you.

I agree that people have are caught up in marketing attribution or like the technical aspects marketing I think we saw like between the early 2010s to just the past couple years this pendulum of being really really really technical and Your performance based swing. That's all you did. You forgot completely about the creative aspect of marketing And now it's coming back and a lot of what we've been discussing through this is is that you The pendulum is swinging back you're no longer able to just game the ad platform into getting you results You have to be engaging and you have to be you know interesting In your creative and offers that you generally and to do a lot of that. Yeah, you need to talk to your customers Know what they want know what they think we're really likely at their bit because we are the customer You know, we sell to the gen growth schemes So you have a really good gut sense, but honestly, it's so surprising sometimes we live in our own bubble And we do still talk to our customers because it definitely changes Cool.

I think we're we're at time. So I will actually spend time trying to find this It's because now i'm really frustrated that I don't remember the exact name Yeah, we'll see if we can get it in there, but thank you Sydney for joining the discussion has been honestly really really great Yeah, it's been great having you. Yeah, thank you for having me and excited to chat with everyone in the chat and thanks for jumping on Yeah, awesome and thanks to everyone in chat really engaging this time around so huge appreciation. Thanks.

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