All right, what's the best snack that you have in your house right now? So if you're not allowing yourself to buy gushers, if you went to your cabinet, pulled something out, what would be the best thing? I crave croutons, which is odd. So there's a store down the road that has pretty damn good croutons, scoped and butter.
So that's kind of like a guilty pleasure snack, kind of the savory and then sweet. I'm a big fan of cookies. We're often the not all like sneak downstairs in the middle of the night and grab one. So I'd say chocolate chip cookies is a big one too.
Welcome back to Stacking Greet Snacks. I'm Stephanie Lula and I'm here with Evan Hughes, the VP of Demand at Refine Labs to talk about Refine Labs philosophy on demand and media. Here's where we're getting to the media. So Evan, what is your paid media strategy when using the Refine Labs philosophy?
It's unique in a sense that it really values and recognizes the evolution of the B2B buyer. We have buyers now consuming content in dark social environments. We have word of mouth is always the biggest driver and success for most businesses. How you create that word of mouth though is really where we anchor our philosophy and our strategies with our clients.
There are the three layers. We have the demand creation, we have the demand capture and the demand convert. From an demand creation standpoint, we want to put a lot of eggs in that basket. We want to think about, you know, when we zoom out and look at total marketing budget, no matter the size or scale.
We like to invest about 60 to 70% of that budget into these demand creation channels. So the objective here is eyeballs. The objective here is reach. The channels are going to be ICP dependent whether you have more of a technical buyer, you might find different channels whether you have more of a marketing to marketer buyer, you're going to have different channels.
So how you put the budget is going to be a little bit different, but just recognize that majority of it is indexed on demand creation because that's what creates that buzz, that word of mouth, that interest. And then demand capture and this is usually where people over index, right? They have to invest too much in paid search. Marketers tend to do that because it's attributable.
It has a last look attribution. They're able to see direct results, direct ROI. The best way to think about like our philosophy and our go to market, paid media strategy is creation about 70% to capture about 30%. You can have all of the creation in the world, the best content, the best capture mechanism from a paid media resource.
But if you don't have the right website to actually convert that traffic, it's a big miss. So that's a big part of our conversation too. We talk a lot about paid media strategy, but I just I would be remiss if I didn't say your website to move that person further along is going to be a key blocker and or key accelerator for success for the program and for the business at large. How do you start to deploy that?
Can you talk me through a little bit about the transition process? Because I imagine it is not quick and easy. Step one is really arming the team with the right data. So we have to identify historically what we are doing.
And I would start by looking at paid social, paid search, each of those channels for paid social. It's identifying the audiences we were targeting. What was our campaign objective? By getting historical analysis of that, how much did we invest in these markets?
What was the success criteria around that? Do we drive revenue? And then on paid search, it's identifying those top performing keywords, running search where your reports to see what our buyers actually saying. How much of the money do we waste potentially on paid search?
And so it's really not a demand capture. People are using paid search as a demand-create channel, they think. It's identifying which it's either step two of having the data or step one if you don't have historic but who is your audience going to be? What is the message you're getting to them?
How are you targeting them? And then carving out a small test budget. So you don't want to just turn everything off. You want to be able to transition.
Generally speaking, you can look at some of your more traditional campaigns that are running, if they aren't performing. You can usually skim about 20% to 30% of that budget to run a demand-gen motion. So I'd recommend doing that for a little bit. Proving out the process internally, how are you getting campaigns in market?
How are you developing creative? How are you developing content? Push that into market slowly with this objective of demand creation, evaluate results, and then slowly start transitioning. So it's really auditing historicals, rolling out very slowly in market and really just cutting all the waste it's been that wasn't necessarily contributing to any sort of pipe revenue.
Evan, thank you so much for walking us all through that. Can you let people know where they can find, follow, and connect with you? Yeah, absolutely. So thanks for having me.
This has been a blast. So you can definitely find me on LinkedIn and pretty active on there, backslash at Enq's. And also see me in our ball community for those of you that are part of that as well in Slack. But yeah, and I'm always open to any sort of connections or different communities that you have.
So feel free to reach out. I appreciate the time. Thank you so much. And check us out next time on Stack and Go!
Snacks.