What are your guilty pleasure snacks? For me, I'd say it's probably chocolate. These days it's been bueno. What kind of a bueno move these days?
Apples and peanut butter, always a good go-to. Or, honestly, cheese bowls are always good. Like, I'm not a classy snacker. Like, if you can buy it at a gas station, I'm about it.
Welcome back to Second Growth Snacks. I'm Saf Krenola, and today I am here with Libby Shell and Melin with Jay Niyaka. Thank you so much for being here. I'm so excited to wrap up our remarketing topic with a little bit of future forward thinking, a little bit of experimentation.
We've talked about metrics, we've talked about goals, we've talked about process, and now we're going to talk about the things that maybe aren't proven yet, but we've got an exciting eye forward on. So, I hear you've been running some tests, some experiments. Can you talk us through those, Libby, and what you've seen, what you hope to learn, what's coming next? I think that experimentation with remarketing is a really, really good way to kind of take advantage of some of the different ad formats that are available on LinkedIn.
Basically, the situation that I found myself in is we had some creative delays with a couple of my clients, and we were starting to hit frequency, and there wasn't any new creative coming down. The pipeline to rotate in anytime soon. So, we needed to get scrappy and think about, okay, what can we do with a minimal lift that will allow us to get some diverse by content in market and also continue to engage with this audience? So, I have been kind of digging through the archives and formats of LinkedIn to try and find easy lift ways to utilize existing content.
Some of the ways that I've done that, first, we have found that with a really highly engaged remarketing audience, a conversation ad has been very effective. Now, what we're thinking about message ads on LinkedIn, you know, there's your standard kind of direct one-to-one inbox message ad, and then there's the conversation ad which I've been testing. And I like to think of this one as more of a choose your own adventure, because it does have more of a chat bot flow. You have the ability to create a bunch of different if-then scenarios and route your audience to a couple of different end results based on what they're interested in and the options that they choose.
That one has been very effective for me because I think that we're just giving someone a frictionless experience to really get what they're looking for. What I'm seeing with a highly engaged audience is, you know, they very engaged with some content or a couple of pieces of content or they've been to a high intent page on our landing, on our website, and then they're probably going to be the most likely to want to request a demo or talk to sales, something like that. So, it's worth asking at that stage. And it's pretty much the same kind of format as writing an email or some kind of out-that message.
So, very low lift, very fun experiment, and it's pretty inexpensive overall. All things considered in terms of just competition. I also really like conversation ads because they have built in capping for your frequency. So, you're not going to have a conversation ad sent to the same person multiple times in a row during a certain duration of time.
So, you don't have to worry about people getting hit up multiple times with that exact same ad content, and there's a little bit of a safety net there. Another one that I've been running for remarketing has been document ads, but I'm not using document ads in the way that you would normally think. It's not just, you know, your standard, cool, this is a PDF and I just got scrolled through and the text really, really tiny. What I've been doing is actually utilizing them to share social proof.
So, a lot of companies have case studies or success stories already built out in PDF form. And whether that's a one-pager, a two-pager, maybe even three-page document, that's something that we can very quickly turn into a document ad and really get in market to engage with this remarketing audience that already has the core of your messaging, but maybe wants a little bit more social proof. The other thing that I've been testing here is basically creating a bunch of different cover pages for the exact same document ad. You have all of the same content afterwards, but you just have a couple of different styles of that first slide.
So, I've been running them simultaneously. So, we have one that's just like your standard PDF, like, has your text on there. We have one that's a little more visually dynamic, maybe has a stock photo, and then we have one that's more conceptual or just really out there in terms of that cover page style. And I've been running them all at the same time to see with this audience, which one is more likely to get a click through?
Which one is more likely to get a click and then a completion? Which one is more likely to drive a document download? So, I think that there's some opportunity for testing there as well. It's a little bit more of a design lift, but it doesn't require all the copywriting resources because you already have that content.
And really, all you're doing is running a different cover page with the exact same stuff on it. I was actually thinking about it, and there was one experiment that I've been utilizing lately that has been paying off for remarketing. And it's actually kind of outside of the box thinking when it comes to remarketing. One thing I noticed when looking at self-reported attribution data for some of my clients is on the forum, we asked people how did you hear about us, right?
And a very common thing we kept on seeing was, oh, I used to use you at this company, and I used to use your product. So, that made us think about what we call a former user campaign. So, it's a form of retargeting where we're not necessarily retargeting people who visit our site or anything like that. We're targeting our past buyers that might have moved on to new companies, started new jobs, and trying to re-engage them and remind them, hey, use this before, why not use this at your new company now?
And that has been working really well. So, in terms of actual stand-up for this campaign, what we did was we went to our CRM, pulled up some of our top and biggest clients, customers for our client, and just kind of looked at the job titles and targeted on LinkedIn, I used to work at these companies. So, there's an option where when you select company names on LinkedIn, you can select either current companies or I used to work at this company. By toggling between those, you could actually select people who no longer work at those customers of yours that might have moved on to different companies, but still have similar job titles, right?
So, retargeting the same job titles, but they're no longer at that company. That had immediate impact, actually. We were seeing directly attributable demo completions from these audiences that was really well paid off. The only challenge I will say with this type of campaign is actually a couple.
One is this I used to work at option on LinkedIn targeting is a manual targeting option. So, you can't upload a company or account list and toggle it to target, you know, past user or past employees. You can't do that way. You have to manually type in and select the company names on the LinkedIn campaign manager.
So, there's some drawback there. You've got to do some manual work. Another thing is that you're capped out at 50 accounts. So, you can't go beyond 50 companies when you do this option.
So, think about that when you select, you know, your top 50 accounts or whatever that you want to try this experiment with. And then another challenge is refreshing this list, right? So, let's say you get this list and you see the immediate result like we have with our clients. Now, several months down the road, you know, it's gone sale.
These people have already seen your ads. The audience size is not that large to begin with, right? You're working with 50 account names. So, you got to think about ways to refresh that list.
So, whether the threshold might be whether you use frequency as a basis or just time, you know, whatever months or however long you want to run it for as a basis for you to change the list out, adding some new companies, take out the other ones. Older ones have already ran and kind of refresh it that way. One of my clients is exploring actually a third-party tool to help with this called UserGems. It's a third-party tool that takes intense signals.
It takes your company data to look at champions of your product, people who may have referred other people to use your product, and use that to build a limb. So, you can try it using a third-party tool or you can also look into your CRM to get this information. That is so smart. I had legitimately had never even thought about using the people who used to work at Option.
I'm feeling that I'm going to go test that right now. One of the other things that I was thinking about while you were explaining this experiment is I believe that there is a filter or an audience that LinkedIn has built out. It's like an option that you can opt into where someone recently moved jobs. And that would be someone who maybe just got a new job and they're just starting that 30, 60, 90 day period of getting up and running with their new organization.
I feel like a lot of people are pretty receptive to new solutions and trying to just solve internal problems during that period. So, that might be another layer of targeting to add on there so that you're really capturing those people who are energized. They're going to push and make some of those early changes versus people who've maybe been at their organization for a while. Yeah, they were passive user like two or three years ago, but things have changed.
They're comfortable. They don't need to see a whole lot of. They don't want to make waves internally. So, that might be something to layer on top of it too.
Either as an inclusion or an exclusion that might add some more nuance to that targeting. I love the excitement and the back and forth that you've had giving each other ideas and learning from each other. I've learned so much from you and I hope you all watching have as well. Libby, let us know where we can find you and follow your work for more of these insights and thoughts.
Find me on LinkedIn, Libby Shell. We're just looking to refine labs on the only Libby under there. And if you have any questions, slide into my DMs. I'd love to chat strategy and talk right there.
Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn as well. Name is Melinda, which is Nica. And as well, you can type in Melinda under Refine Labs employees. And you can find me there as well.
I have to get in touch. Amazing. Thank you both so much. Thanks y'all for watching.
And we'll see y'all next week.