Paid advertising isn’t for every brand. Honestly, some brands are better off spending $50K at a trade show booth over $50K on LinkedIn. In this week’s episode of Digital Banter, it’s only Andy & James. Talking ads. And we are going to answer some of your questions about what it takes to get a pilot campaign off the ground: Are we even ready to run ads as a business? How do I find the right channels? What content do I need? Join us as we confront some of the most common conflicts when debating whether or not paid advertising should be added to your marketing mix.
What’s up, everybody. We are back for another episode of digital banter. As you can see, we’ve got a little bit of a unique setup piloting it today where James and I are in the same room. So those that are catching the audio version of this, just so you guys know, we do stream this live. Every single episode.
So for the video visuals, and for today, we’re going to be doing some, some definite video visuals. Check out the dragon three 60 LinkedIn page where you can catch all the video versions of this. But on today’s episode, it’s just James and I, and we are kind of doing a semi AMA. around the core topic of should I be running ads?
Now, [00:01:00] this is your brainchild as an episode. So why don’t you set it up a little bit? Yeah. So this is really, he said an AMA. I mean, if you guys have questions, definitely throw them in the chat on our end. I’m not going to lie. We have a list of frequently asked questions that we get, and I think it’d just be helpful for us to go through it.
Honestly, the other thing. We’re winging the setup for the first time. So you’ll notice we don’t, we don’t have a guest this week. I wouldn’t want to, uh, bring a guest on for our first episode of the new setup. Who knows? We were just messing with the mics for what, 20 minutes trying to make sure. Actually, I think we were in here messing with this for longer than 20 minutes.
So if anybody’s trying this for the first time, let me know. But, um, yeah, I mean, ultimately, you know, we are a paid media agency and. What we deal with all the time is like people who are trying to add paid media to their marketing mix and trying to figure out if it’s the right fit for them. [00:02:00] And the reality of the situation that we find all the time is that, you know, paid ads isn’t for every business.
It isn’t for every company. Um, you know, and I think that in our experience, we’re at the point now where we can be honest with people if something’s not going to work before it even starts. But like, we’ll, we’re going to go through some of those questions today. So to kick it off, the first question, I always find this one pretty interesting and that comes down to what are the toughest industries to run ads for digital, just for the record, we’re all, we’re talking digital ads, not print, nothing like that.
All right. So define difficult though, honestly, like hard to reach your target audience, how do you kind of convey the product? Uh, I mean, thinking about this, like what, what do we find in our experience of the most difficult ones to run for? I mean, it could, I’m thinking of, I can think of a couple off the bat and I’ll get into them, some of them, not necessarily the B2B focus, but costs are too [00:03:00] high, it’s too competitive.
Well, that’s what I was asking because if you go cost wise, legal is far and away, number one. Right. Uh, I mean, I think it depends on who your audience is. Because that’s really the meat of it all, regardless of cost. Does your audience actually hang out online or do they? Still go old school and just read publications, listen to radio and pretty much just hang around in their cars or drive around.
Yeah. I mean, you mentioned old school, like the first, the main, like we’re B2B focused, right. And you know, there are B2B companies right now who are working on getting their first website and trying to like sell products online. Like that’s still, uh, it’s still out there, unfortunately. Um, and that’s where I think that some of the biggest difficulties lie.
Like, I mean, in my experience. Manufacturing products are the most difficult, not, not manufacturing SAS. That is different. I’m talking, if you are trying to sell, you know, some [00:04:00] large piece of. Machinery. Sure. Okay. Right. And you know, cause sell it like that, that is a, that is an industry where like the trade show, so you’re not going to be able to show, I don’t think about it as like a huge machine that takes up the size of this office.
That’s made for pouring plastic resin into boats, making something up, right. Like being able to spec that out and explain all the details, like. In a digital format is kind of hard. Um, yeah, but okay. So this goes back to my post today that led off for kicking off this episode is. You know, paid isn’t right for everyone, but it’s also based off of what you have to work with and how you’re thinking about it.
Just given your situation of what you described. Okay. Yes. Traditional digital advertising in a legion model does not make sense based off of what you’re selling and who you’re selling to, but I can guarantee there’s still a digital avenue to take [00:05:00] by taking video, getting in front of people and playing a halo effect for all the SDR outreach that’s happening.
For those large ticket items, there’s still a paid digital version of that. Yeah. It’s, I think it’s hard to visualize, like, think about this. Like if it’s a product that you need to like touch and feel and use. And like, I think that that is hard to portray, right? Like if we’re talking about SAS, SAS is like probably one of the easiest things because you can easily, I don’t know about that.
You still have to know what the hell you’re selling and how you’re selling it. Yeah. But you have, you can get them into. A demo that is going to allow them to have a hands on experience with the product. Right. So like, what’s, what’s everybody talking about in stats? Like, show me the product, show me the product, show me the product, right?
Like you can’t show somebody the giant piece of machinery that pours resin, right? Like it’s, it’s very hard to do that. I mean, like you said, video. Yeah. There’s, there are some cool things that you can do there, but you know, to think about taking somebody through like a full funnel [00:06:00] experience through advertising.
I think that’s difficult. Sure. Okay. Well, let’s stick on the SAS route then. Right. So there’s everything from seed stage, startup bootstrap, Kickstarter, whatever you want to call it all the way up to enterprise behemoths. Right. What is the right, and this goes into the next stage of question that we always get is like, when is paid right for me based off, based off of my growth stage.
So this is, uh, this one’s interesting because it depends on what you’re, this truly depends on like what you’re trying to achieve, right? If you’re a pre product market fit startup, You can run ads. It’s if you’re trying to run ads to try to, uh, get customers at a certain CPA, then, yeah, you’re probably doing the wrong thing if you are trying to learn something really quickly, like, Hey, We feel like we might have product market fit with this persona, this persona, and this persona.
[00:07:00] Okay. Let’s run ads across those three personas and see which one that we should kind of narrow in on to get things started. Like you’re going to be able to learn a lot faster with ads than you are, you know, content marketing channel, or like building a community or some of the more organic things that take a lot of time and a lot of work, right?
You can. Pour 20, 000 into ads if you have the funding to do so and get the answer to those questions like really fast. Okay. But in that case, then how are you How are you measuring market fit? Uh, it depends on what your, your call to action is. Right. So like, I think ultimately what you’re trying to do is like provide some level of offering.
Right. So think about, um, there’s a couple of different ways that you could do. There’s a lot of like, um, product led companies. I think that this is probably like a really good fit for it because you can get the, people will sign up and try something for free and you can be able to gauge their level of [00:08:00] engagement.
Of whatever free version of the software you’re doing and kind of have that be like the primary CTA and tested across all of them. Um, I mean, there are other things where you can maybe come up with some other sort of like value add offering, um, and just get, get the level of engagement based on that.
But like, even like, so that’s on your website, probably more of the business in line metrics, but also just like looking at ad engagement and like, do people actually care what you have to say? Yeah, because I mean, there’s been plenty of times where I get. Leads that come in to us that want to run pilots at like a thousand dollars just to see if paid works for them.
But the way they’re going about measuring it is, Oh, well, what’s the revenue that’s going to come out of that? Yeah. Both based off of that amount of money and lack of readiness for paid. Like that’s a losing strategy at the end. And that’s where I was going with, how are you going to measure market fit?
Because it’s very different than if you are paid ready and ready to scale revenue. It’s all [00:09:00] about what you’re trying, like, what are you trying to learn? Right? You’re that early on the whole thing has to be what you’re trying to learn. It’s kind of like, um, Dave Ramsey, right? So Dave Ramsey financially talks about like, um, When you’re, when it’s okay for you to buy a boat.
Right. And he’s like, if you could take that money and you can put it on the floor and set it on fire, then you can do it. So it all depends on like where you’re at financially too. Right. Like have you and Jen actually done that? Have you set your money on fire before you’ve bought one of your boats? If there’s a, um, You know, if you are a trying to bootstrap your startup, that’s probably not, if you are doing a spinoff of a larger company that is already successful and you have the funding to do it, or you have a couple million dollars in funding, like you can, you can do those types of things because you want to learn and you want to learn fast.
Sure. Okay. Um, all right. So what budget does [00:10:00] somebody need to do that? Oh, boy, this is a tough one. So I’ll put it this way. A 500 test. You want to dabble and try something is never going to be worth your time. Right. And I think that that’s the thing that we get all the time. This is more from like, you know, I don’t think that we get a lot of companies who are just saying like, Oh, I want to spend like, 1, 000 and like run ads for the first time.
I think that we get this more with like clients who just want to test a new channel, right? Like, Hey, like we can’t just take the 1, 000 out of your 20, 000 budget and put it towards YouTube or put it towards Facebook. Like that’s not really. To me, like, that’s not really a valid test and it’s like hard to learn anything with that data.
Um, so going back to it, like, how do you establish what the budget is? The factors that you need to consider are like, 1, like, what are you actually trying to learn? And what do you need to get? I’m not going to say [00:11:00] statistically significant data because that always. And it doesn’t be a big number, um, but enough data to get you the answers that you’re looking for.
Um, I mean, if I was to throw a dollar amount out there, like I would start any tests with like two, 3, 000 as a test. Um, but what kind of test is it? A test of an expansion of existing strategy into a channel, or is it a pilot? So this is a, this, this would be like an initial startup. Hey, I’m, I’m running ads for the first time.
Like, what is the budget that I should set aside to actually, Get some sort of proof of concept going, right? Like you’re not going to get, like I said, you’re not going to get a proof of concept with 500. Um, but there’s so many, like, you know, I’m, I’m throwing out numbers when I probably shouldn’t, I should probably be answering it like every other marketer and says that it depends, um, because it does.
It depends on your market size. It depends on the competition. It depends on the average cost per click. But my point is, is that if you’re just trying to like dabble and. You know, spend the amount of money that you spent [00:12:00] writing a blog post, running ads, like it’s not going to work for you. So I disagree on one of the things that you mentioned as far as like channel expansion.
And a couple of thousand or even, you know, less than that, not being a worthwhile pilot. I think it depends on what you’re currently running and whether that expansion just plays into what you already have versus creating that new. The point though, at the end of the day is you can’t measure an expansion in the same way that your operational strategy is already working.
In that case, you are talking about measuring, does our audience hang out there? Are they engaging? Are they engaging in the right way? And is there incremental reach and impact that we can get by continuing on this channel? You can’t measure it the same way though. Yeah. I think it depends on the channel too, right?
Like YouTube, like, I feel like this, I feel like this is the one that we get the most often, like, Oh, Hey, let’s test YouTube. Like, and in the context that we usually get this in [00:13:00] is. You know, we have clients that are focused on bottom of the funnel activities. They’re trying to drive demos. They’re trying to drive trials.
They’re trying to drive leads. And then they say, Hey, let’s add YouTube, which is like more of a top of funnel, awareness, uh, demand gen channel that, you know, they think that they are going to be able to track to your point, the same way that they’re tracking their LinkedIn lead gen ads or page search or something like that.
That is.
So the other thing here that I want to address in a rant, I think, is how a existing piece of content or asset or campaign is not just a, Oh, let’s take this, throw it on, let’s say YouTube and see if it works. And the reason I say that is because number one, for whomever’s managing it, whether it’s agency or an internal person, you are adding now another channel to the mix [00:14:00] That has its own targeting that has its own reporting that has its own everything.
And it’s not just like, Oh yeah, here’s another channel. Let’s try it out. Like, no, there is an actual level of work that goes into that, that extends and expands the responsibilities of the individuals or team managing that. Yeah. Let’s let’s, this is fun. I would love to get, I would love to get anybody’s feedback on this.
Cause this is a debate that we have all the time when it comes to like, Our actual pricing and it goes and how that goes. Right. So like as an agency, our pricing is a channel agnostic, meaning that like our pricing is based on. Your budgeted ad spend and has nothing to do with the amount of channels that you’re on.
So, right. So you would pay the same if all of your ad spend is on LinkedIn versus if it was scattered across five different channels. Uh, we do that because we think that it’s very important for our clients to be able to. Be flexible and not feel like it’s an upsell. If they want to like test a new channel or try [00:15:00] something different.
Or if we propose testing, not just if they want to test. Now it is twice as much work to manage Google search and LinkedIn at the same in comparison to managing one channel and every channel that you add. significantly increases the amount of work and not only does it increase the amount of work because you’re managing different channels and people have different skillsets between paid search and paid social, the reporting tools also become a royal pain in the ass when you want to add certain channels because reddit doesn’t, you want to, okay, so you want to run your 500 reddit test, right?
Like reddit doesn’t. integrate with all of the reporting aggregation tools. So you want to see that red spend all rolled up nice and pretty next to your other spends. And the truth is, is like, that’s a lot of manual work and sucks. So anybody who, uh, the debate is always like channel based pricing or all inclusive, I feel like everybody wants all [00:16:00] inclusive.
I just want to let you know, there’s a story behind it. Let’s try and bring this back to you. Okay. Let’s try and bring this back. Yeah. So, okay. If we decide. As a business that yes, we want to, we want to do something with ads. Well, how do we figure out where to start from a channel perspective? And is that the right place to start?
The right place to start the right place to start is with audience and your audience research and what channels your audience hangs out on comes through that audience research. And. I mean, truthfully, so like all of your audience research should be based on customers. If you’re an early on startup, like interviewing people who are actually in the market and trying to figure out, you know, who that ideal, you can really want to boil it down to two, 30 things.
You want to have your ICP ideal customer profile. That’s more like the type of companies that you want to work with and then break it [00:17:00] down into the personas from there. And then, yeah, you know, From the persona perspective, we like to break things down even further than that, between like essentially who’s the champion in the deal and then who is the rest of the buyers committee.
And that really weighs into like the type of content that you’re going to end up serving to them later on. So think about it this way. If you’re like the champion in the deal, like you care about a lot of different things than the buyers committee. Right. So like, Hey, if I am a. I’m involved in managing day to day LinkedIn ads.
There’s a new like AI creative thing. That’s going to make our creative team job easier. Like that’s cool. That’s going to help the people on the creative team. It’s gonna make their jobs easier. Andy, the CEO is the one who actually has to sign off on the expense and justify whether or not the time saved is going to equate the value that you’re paying, right?
So like the, the messaging for those. is, is going to be different. Um, so anyways, that’s kind of how you want to break down your audience. And once you have like those personas mapped out, then [00:18:00] each individual channel, how you go about deciding whether or not that’s the right channel that is kind of differs per platform.
LinkedIn is sales. And that is a great tool to see whether or not people are active. Uh, each tool has its own. Audience research tool built in where you can essentially build out the audiences based on the personas that you have, and it’ll give you the estimated size and some level of information around there.
So what you’re saying is like, shouldn’t just take 1, 500. Throw it at ads and see if it works. Not without, uh, not without some research. Okay. Well there’s, there’s answer number one to should I run ads and problem number one of if you are choosing to do that without doing your audience research, right?
Yeah. I mean, that’s the, what’s the, one of the most common things that we see when we’re like auditing accounts is they have [00:19:00] a feeling of who their audience is. They group them all together. So like you have, I’ve seen people targeting like procurement in their ads, right? Because Oh, what we deal with procurement people when they’re signing off on the product, right?
Like that’s not like part of your target audience. And that person does not care about the same things that person’s actually going to use it to, but like grouping all of those together and then. Spending 1, 500 and realizing like you didn’t learn anything from it because you you’re the level of audience segmentation that you didn’t, like, wasn’t good enough.
So I think the other thing too, beyond audience is understanding what your go to market motion is and how you actually convert. Opportunities and anything into business. And that should decide and help define where your, your channel strategy lies. And by that, I mean, is if you have a multi person SDR team, that’s going to actively go out there, nurture [00:20:00] leads, really work the phones, the emails, things like that.
Okay. Well, that’s, that’s going to allow you to support a little bit more of a larger scale content strategy where you can work various types of leads. Versus a founder led or PLG kind of motion where you just got to get somebody into the product, into a demo and convert them out of there. Um, and I think those types of conversations and thought processes ultimately lead you into understanding, well, if I need to show value and impact up front versus over the course of time and needing to feed a sales team that decides whether you’re going to go multi channel or single channel out of the gate too.
I mean, the big thing that that tells me is, like, what format your content needs to be in. Right? So, like, the, I think it still is a debate because I will tell you the exact reason why right now, like, gated content versus ungated content. Right? Like, if you were trying to push leads [00:21:00] to an outbound motion, like, you want to have a gated content strategy, right?
Because no matter what people say, like somebody who went saw an ad, visited your website and downloaded your content is a better lead than somebody that you just downloaded off of a list because they showed some level of intent and some level of engagement with your brand versus someone who may have no idea who you are.
Um, so there’s value in that. And I think that, you know, if you do have like the appropriate lead scoring system in place, you can create warmer leads for an outbound motion. If you have just a smaller sales team and all they want to do is demos, like, no, you shouldn’t be calling your gated content leads and asking them to do a demo, like, you know, pushing them right down through the bottom, right?
Like that’s where you do want to have more of a. Uh, you know, only count, you’re only gaining your, whatever your bottom funnel CTA is, talk to sales, give a demo, get a trial. So then what content [00:22:00] do I need to be successful? If I decide to spin up ads, spin up ads. All right. So, well, this, this is going to get complicated because we have a whole framework where I’m going to keep it simple for just getting started.
Um, cause a future episode, we’ll kind of go through like paid content strategy in detail. But in order to get things going, the main high level overview of a paid media strategy is you have two functions. You want to build and engage an audience and then convert that audience. So there’s really two types of content that needs to do that.
Um, starting with audience, we talked about champions versus buyer committee. If you’re started, the first campaigns that you should be running should be focused on whoever your champion in the deal is, whoever the end user is, because you need content that is going to resonate with them first. Uh, if you are a marketing SAS product, like you are not targeting CMOs to [00:23:00] start, you are targeting the person who is actually going to use it.
The social media marketing manager, the influencer manager, like whatever that, like, those are the. That’s the difference, right? Um, so the first content that you need to create needs to be some level of some content that’s going to create an emotional response with the, uh, end user of the product. Um, so think about this, like what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to add value and then tie it back to the solution, right?
So there’s. The 1st content that you want to have wants to focus on, like, what their actual pain points are. Right? So, like, um, you know, I was looking at something the other day. It’s an influencer management platform and essentially what these what they’re doing is they’re spending a. Ton of what influencer managers are doing is spend a ton of time tracking and managing influencers.
They have 500 influencers, they’re managing it all in a spreadsheet. Right. So what does that mean? That means the pain point for them is [00:24:00] they’re on Instagram on the weekends, trying to check and see if these people post it, right? Like what a pain in the ass that is. Right. So that’s like a pain point that I frankly, like maybe your boss doesn’t really care that you’re like working weekends and like trying to, trying to get.
Trying to distract this one thing. So like you need to create content that resonates with that person first. And then, you know, once you, if you have a longer sales cycle, then you can get in the rest of the fires committee, add things like social proof and like case studies and things like that. I think the big thing there is you’re trying to really understand the champion and connect with the champion because.
The TL the version of that is they’re your advocate. They are the ones that are going to push hard or just balk and stand down. If they get pushed back from the person signing off on it. Like if you come to me with something, obviously I’m going to ask how much does it cost? What’s it doing? Was it, is it valuable or not?
And if you don’t feel like it’s valuable enough to impact you personally, you’re not going to fight for that versus something [00:25:00] that, you know, damn well is something that’s going to change you and the agency. You’re going to, you’re going to push hard at me for that. And the same thing goes for anything out there, whether that’s a DTC item that is between you and your wife or you and your partner, if it’s B2B and you have to go up to the CIO or CTO and push hard as the manager of.
Information systems or it architects or anything like that. Like that CIO CTO does not give a crap unless you’re going to come to them with a solution that makes sense for you and ultimately the business. Absolutely. Um, all right. So before we get into the fun part of today’s episode, I do want to ask you going back to this channel thing, do you run banners?
Just like display ads, banners, do banners work in my opinion? No. Okay. I mean, I’m asking because in [00:26:00] some people’s minds, that is a cost effective measure, because if you’re looking at. Reach metrics or CPM or impressions as a metric of success. There’s a inherent flawed aspect to that. The reality is that’s not like metric of success.
Yes. Even, even if you’re doing like a brand campaign, like the, you know, you should be looking at measuring things like brand with recall, like chill like that. Not CPM impressions. Like CPM is. CPM is you get what you pay for, right? Like, that’s, you know, like, uh, there is no, there is no negotiating with the ad platforms.
I mean, there are some things that you can do with programmatic banners by negotiating deals and stupid shit like that. But like, it’s a waste of time. It’s a waste of time in the B2B space. My D2C experience is not where it used to be. So I’m not going to make any claims. Fair enough. All right. So now for our last [00:27:00] segment of today, you’re the one that put this together as far as an idea is concerned.
So you start it off. All right. So this one, uh, I’ll be honest, we’re winging this for the first time. So both Andy and I have chosen some, uh, B2B technology startup. Each of us has 3, 000 in spend to kind of put together a little strategy for each of these clients. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to bring up each of their websites on the, uh, on the screen here.
And. Andy pulled one for me. I pulled one for him. We have 3, 000 to spend. What are you doing? What are you trying to learn? Um, essentially, where are you starting? How do you approach audience research? Pick whatever we want, go through it. And, uh, we’ll go from there. All right. Who’s going first? Oh, uh, Ian, my link is in the, in the document.
Ian is the producer.
Yeah, maybe you can find this as we go. [00:28:00] So I’ll do mine first. So I chose a company called Arrow. I actually think it’s a pretty big tech startup. Uh, yes. It’s yeah, anyways, listen, I was going through Crunchbase just looking at startups, but Arrow, I have not heard of you. So, um, they are pretty big, but Arrow is an AI powered B2B SaaS platform that Automate social media, content creation, and management for businesses with features like ready to use posts, custom content channels, and dedicated user success managers, Aero helps busy professionals, seemingly seamlessly posts, engaging content, grow their following and build.
So a pretty large audience. Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, there’s a couple of different ways to look at that. I mean, where I start is. What, what does their go to market motion look like? What is the thing that hands off to sales and how are sales conducted? Um, and I know Ian’s going to pull up the website [00:29:00] here shortly, as soon as he gets it, um, so that we can kind of see it on the fly, but I think that defines a lot of where I take things next.
The second biggest thing there is, I mean, just you said it yourself, the audience is. It’s potentially gigantic as far as the TAM is concerned. Um, so let’s, let’s jump into that. It’s, it’s early on, right? So I guess this is a bigger, say you, they just started, this is what that, this is the product they got.
Like, what are you trying to learn? Do you have a TAM like that? I’m splitting it and I’m understanding who I’m going after. Am I going after other organizations such as agencies or in house? Markets, right? So business content as a service, I don’t even know what that means, but okay. Um, anyway, maybe we should bring Anthony Perry, but there’s that side of it, right?
And then there’s the creator side of it. Um, where you have potentially a much larger [00:30:00] market that is more willing to test and trial something, uh, that you probably just spun up as a startup. Um, and I feel like that is probably the better way to go when it comes to initial strategy and paid. And the reason I say that is because.
Number one, you’re going to have a larger market to engage with. Number two, in most situations, you’re targeting both the champion and the decision maker because they are the same person because they are the individual. You want help with your LinkedIn content, right? Like that’s, Hey, Ian, I think this might help us with this a little bit.
Hit the pricing page. I think that’ll give us an idea of like, we can narrow that out. Okay. So we got answers right away. Oh yeah. Uh, I [00:31:00] start with creators and individual people and I understand what they are challenged with when it comes to content and creation, whether it’s social or written or visual.
Okay. And I lean into understanding and developing messaging and creative that appeals to those pain points because at the end of the day, their time is limited and they want to be maximizing their dollar value through the lens of if I am charging 2, 000 to do X, Y, Z work, I want to do that in the most efficient way possible.
minimal amount of time possible, because that means I can take on more work as an individual and get paid ultimately more revenue that I’m putting in my pocket. And because of that, and because of that audience, I am going heavy on social, I’m going heavy on Tik TOK, and I’m going heavy on LinkedIn, depending on where this breaks down from a consumption perspective, LinkedIn that’s bold at 19.
That’s [00:32:00] four clicks, man. Well, what we don’t know here necessarily is. The LTV off of a subscription. Well, it’s funny. I was gonna like, uh, I was gonna say, you know, obviously you need to validate audiences before you actually run any of these channels, but I was going to say, based on your experience, you’re winging it.
So we had 3, 000, right? Like what channel are you going in on? I am going any audience research at all for the record for everybody. No validation, no validation. Uh, you know what I’m doing? I’m going all in on LinkedIn with message ads, LinkedIn, because that is how I know I’m going to be reaching the right people and prompting them to Without relying on them to see me in their feed.
And I’m crafting a message that is going to be resonating with them. And I know based off of who they are and what they do for a living, they hang out on [00:33:00] social. That’s fair. I was saying that I would go again, no audience research. I’ll probably all in on like social media managers. Pick a certain company size.
Like there’s cer, they’re, they’re pretty busy people. I mean, this is something that’s pretty easy to get signed off. I think like the, in like, just ’cause I’ve played around in the space a bit, just looking at like, you can target people who are like influencers or trying to create their own content. Like, I don’t know, I just don’t know how much I believe in like that targeting that’s available, like without a list.
Like if you’re trying to take that more like, I don’t know, solopreneur, so like founder type. Yeah. I, I think that that’s a. A more difficult play early on versus, you know, if I’m testing something from scratch, like I know that social media managers are actively doing this and trying to create content. I mean, you know what?
I’m not running, I’m not running search. I’m not running YouTube. I’m not running anything on Google. I’m not running anything on programmatic. You’re not bidding on content creation, AI [00:34:00] right now and search and paying 20 a click when I have a 19 revenue. Talk about things that are hard. Like I don’t, I don’t.
That’s the search AI game now. Yeah. So, I mean, without any research gut field, throwing it out there, that’s what I’m doing off of this. Sounds good. Let’s, uh, all right. You don’t get off as easy, uh, for, for years. I don’t get, yeah, I’m just trying to be nice marketers, marketing the marketers. He’s going to pick, I know I’m getting a feeling that it’s some sort of manufacturing because I said that that’s the most difficult space to play.
Alrighty. And bring up mine. All right. So yes, we are talking about canvas G F X, which short version of it is a digital transformation product that allows, that allows people, let’s say on the floor of manufacturing plants. or in any [00:35:00] facilities, visually get their instructions, understand how something works if they need it and provide feedback digitally so that further instructions, further tutorials, everything that goes into how you operate either a system or a chain or anything like that, uh, is modified and updated.
So this is a SaaS product? Yep. For manufacturing. We will say, like, think of it as like, uh, directions, floor operations. All right. So, or plant operations, if you want. Go that route. Yeah. So Ikea. Directions for digital. ia. Digital. Digital. Ikea. Directions for, sorry. Can, if I’m insulting your brand, this is kind of cool and I can see how it’d be very useful.
But yes, and each each widget and shows how many dowels you have to insert before you actually do the cam system. Okay. I mean, that is cool. I [00:36:00] think that that is definitely a tough one. Um, in I’d be curious to have anything around like the industries canvas company. No, I mean, it’s kind of a platform with with, uh, solutions and products built into it.
Um, no, I am going to, so it’s probably operations, people who are managing a manufacturing facility, job titles. I would have to do the research to actually see like who those people are and whether or not they’re on LinkedIn. I will say that I do not, I mean, search is a no. I even think like Facebook, Instagram is probably a no.
Um, so I, I do think that. For this to work linkedin is probably going to be your best bet. Um, And I think do you think those people hang out there [00:37:00] though? It’s tough. I think that Let me put it this way because I think the approach Is going to have to be like first party data focused, right? I, I think that, you know, you’re gonna be able to find like certain floor manufacturing positions.
But yeah, to your point, like I, I’m not sure if they’re, I, I actually highly doubt that they’re kind of active on LinkedIn. Um, that said, like we’ve managed ads for a similar audience to this before and LinkedIn was successful. So that’s really going to, uh, that’s really going to depend on like the audience research in the end, but I’m going on LinkedIn and I am doing message ads with an ABM focused strategy, ABM as far as accounts or contacts.
ABM being [00:38:00] well depends on what the client has available. I would go with contacts before I would go with they got nothing available Let’s put it that way. They have no idea Yeah, I mean we we would have to work with them to pull together a company. Let’s work with their sales team I would take an abm approach for this and I would do abm through linkedin.
You only have three thousand dollars We don’t have All right. So I’m going to grill you on that then. So you’re going to ask the sales team to give you an account list. Don’t you think that’s going to be skewed towards who they want to get versus who they can get? There’s some coaching that happens there for sure.
Um, but, uh, what do we talk about? Like how marketing and sales should work together where, you know, you, Kyle was talking about having them sign a contract. Part of that contract should be like, Uh, You know, Hey, don’t come up with crazy lists for your ABM programs. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think what’s interesting about this type of company though, that’s going to [00:39:00] make it like really hard is like, you’re not going after a brand, right?
Like Nike has hundreds of manufacturing facilities and probably 90 percent of them are not owned by Nike, right? So you have to be able to find like those individual sub brands of like where those people work and find out. Essentially like who the, who the owners, who the floor managers are in those companies.
Uh, and that’s where I do think you will have to be careful working with sales, making sure that they’re not just giving you. Fortune 500 companies and really being able to break down and understand like, and that’s where I was going with, if you’re letting sales decide who your targets are, I don’t want to go down this rant necessarily where compensation structure commissions, everything else has a influence on who they are selecting versus what are the, I don’t want to call them easy wins, but what are the most [00:40:00] realistic wins that you have to gain.
To going back to what we’ve talked about throughout this entire episode. What are you trying to learn and measure against? And while I would love to help them fix that process, uh, that’s somebody else. All right. Well, that was, that was interesting. Uh, all right. It had to go manufacturing, didn’t you? I thought it’d be easy for you.
Easy. Yeah, easy. It’s ’cause it’s the hardest one to run ads, and there’s only one thing you can try and it either works or it doesn’t. Or you’re just running branded search campaigns and claiming how good they are. Hey, look, there’s nothing wrong with that . There’s definitely something. All right. So as we bring today’s episode to a close, I don’t know, what would you say are our takeaways are of today?
Uh, okay. So first thing, get started. You have to segment your audience on target. Everybody at once. Like, you know, if you are going to be launching a paid campaign with a limited amount of budget, make sure that you are focused on either learning something about your audience or you have what [00:41:00] you feel like is a pretty narrowed down ICP step two.
Uh, segment between influencers and decision makers when you, sorry, not influencers, uh, champions and the buyers committee when you are doing your personas and again, don’t loop them all together and create content for each of those personas separately, or else you’re just going to be talking to the wrong person.
I think the other thing that was a takeaway today is that this actually didn’t go that bad Given our new setup and how we did not have the right equipment necessarily Yeah, but you know what it shows to anybody that is listening or watching You kind of just got to go for it and just see if it works and see if it doesn’t don’t let things get in your way of actually Proving that something can be successful much in the same way that we just talked about paid ads today.
So next week [00:42:00] we’ll have two cameras. We’ll be doing split shots between there’ll be three producers, updated lighting, um, boom mics, he’s not going to approval for all those expenses. But anyway, thanks again for joining us today. Really appreciate it until next time.
