Marketing Strategy Talk w/ Dylan Hey, CEO & Co-Founder @ Hey Digital

Transcript

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  Ian

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  Founder

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  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  So, Dylan, thanks so much for joining me on another Marketing Strategy Talk.

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  Dylan

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  Agencies Marketing Strategy Paid Marketing

  Dylan

  No problem, Ian. Looking forward to chatting with you today.

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  Ian

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  Founder

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  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Yeah, definitely. So you have some very unique experience—you work with a bunch of different SaaS companies across the globe at your agency, Hey Digital. And over the years, I’m sure you’ve compiled this massive war chest of experience through testing and trying different strategies and tactics. And honestly, I was just hoping we could get you on this thing and share maybe your top five paid strategies for B2B SaaS companies you’re seeing at the moment.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  Yeah, for sure. So I’m looking forward to jumping into this. As you said, at Hey Digital, we manage paid ads, PPC campaigns for SaaS companies. Specifically, I’ve been doing this for a couple years now and I was working in SaaS businesses myself within marketing growth, sales before then too. So hopefully, what I’ll be able to share today is some useful information to people who are listening to this if they’re thinking about starting ads for their business, or if they’re running them and they have some question marks about them. I know that in the pre-interview that you and I were just chatting about one of those areas where I would like to dive deeper into with you today specifically is around Facebook and paid social as well.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  I know within the B2B world, within the SaaS world, so many people are scared of Facebook. They ask questions like, “Hey, am I target buyer? Are they hanging out on Facebook? Are they even going to click through on ads that they see on Facebook? Is it going to put them off because we’re a B2B business? And we shouldn’t be advertising that.” We have seen the very beginning success on paid social with pretty much all of our clients. But right now, over the last three to six months, we’ve really been doubling down our approach and strategies there and seeing some really good wins. So I would love to jump into that first if that’s okay with you.

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  Ian

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  Founder

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  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  So I’m so excited about this because I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had this conversation, multiple companies I’ve worked for, even CustomerGauge, my current company. It’s a difficult thing for, I think, not only executives, but everybody to wrap their head around that these B2B SaaS leaders could be on Facebook, they have a profile that could be active, they could click on an ad. It’s so hard for people to wrap their heads around Facebook being the best platform for B2B SaaS. And I’m so excited you brought that up. So let’s just kick it off. So clear it all up. If you’re talking to a CFO, you’re talking to a CEO and you’re saying, “Hey, we should run Facebook marketing right now to generate leads and business for our B2B SaaS company,” what should they start with? What should they focus on?

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  Yeah, really great question. So the first thing I always recommend is starting with the very basics. So anyone that you listen to on a podcast that knows anything about marketing or paid advertising they will give this advice. So I’m not going to go too deep on this part, but everyone should, at the very minimum, no matter what kind of company you are and what you’re trying to achieve, you should have your remarketing campaigns set up. This is the standard. You should not have anything running for every month, especially within B2B and SaaS where you and I both know the buying experience and the customer journey, especially if you’re a product with let’s say like a 3 to 9, maybe even 12 months sales cycle, in some cases where there’s demos involved, multiple salespeople involved.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  You can use Facebook and paid social as an opportunity to stay top of mind with your prospects for a very low cost. So that’s one thing. And then also capitalizing on those high intent audiences too for, “Okay, maybe someone came onto a demo booking page. They didn’t complete the demo booking. Like it makes a ton of sense to be serving an ad to them to make sure they go ahead with that demo booking.” So this is the first thing. But then what we start to look at with all of our clients is we have this three pronged approach, I guess. So the first thing is remarketing, and then the second thing is going with depending on the budgets that we have as well and the target audience and the sales cycle for the customers that we work with, or a SaaS business where you have a self-service model like trial signup, 14-day trial where they can sign up, don’t need to get on a call with anyone.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  One thing that we’ll be looking at immediately is going straight for conversion-focused ads to cold audiences. And it’s funny because most people would say like, “Hey, you need to warm people up with content. You need to do this, you need to do that.” And we’ll talk about that in a moment. But we see a lot of quick wins often for clients as long as they have good data points for those cold audiences. So, for example, we’re talking about building lookalike audiences off of your customer lists, but more importantly, your highest value customers. So if you’ve been running for a while, you have this day to learn your CRM system, segmenting your customers by highest LTV or highest payment plans. If you don’t have enough data to do that, then just segmenting by paying customers is also an okay starting point.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  If you have these kinds of data points, you’re not a completely new business. We’ll always start to look running campaigns with a cold audience, which is that lookalike audience, trying to get them to sign up for your platform. And I’ll talk in a minute about that kind of creative approach to how we do that in a second. But just setting up those audiences with those lookalikes of customer lists or lookalikes of people who completed a demo booking, for example, people who completed a signup within the last 7, 14 days that you can do some testing there and then running those. It sounds like maybe it shouldn’t work out and you should be warming these people up, but because Facebook is gained so intelligent now, like their algorithms are working so well at serving ads to the right people, as long as you feed their platform with best quality data.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  So if you were to just create an audience, targeting someone who’s never heard of you before and trying to get them to sign up for your platform and you’re just using job title targeting or interest-based targeting, to be honest, you might be able to get it to work, but the costs are probably going to be pretty high. These lookalike audiences we’re seeing like low costs immediately. So that would be one thing that we look at. And we also see that working for companies who have a demo booking focus as well. So, for example, there’s one client we’re working with right now. We are just about a month into our relationship with them. For them, they have no self-service. Everything is focused on demos being booked. They have like a 9 to 12 month sales cycle with a minimum deal size of $70,000 or euros a year.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  And then right now, there’s a campaign that we’re running, which is a cold audience. It’s one of those audiences that I mentioned. It’s actually targeting lookalikes of people we’ve booked to demo over the last 30 days, I believe, where we’re driving demo bookings for €36 for them at the moment. And that’s been three to four weeks of first launching a campaign. So there’s a lot of work that we can be doing there too.

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  Ian

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  Founder

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  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Absolutely.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  Yeah. So that’s like one thing that I would definitely be looking at as long as you actually have data points. If you have a couple hundred website visitors a month and you don’t have a long list of customers, or you haven’t been running for a few years, then that approach won’t work out for you. It’s all centered around feeding Facebook with the highest quality data that we possibly can. And then what we’re doing is, for anyone listening to this, they should go to Google and they should search for Facebook power five methodology. So this is something that Facebook share at their B2B events and other events doing as well. There’s a webinar about it on their website, lots of useful information.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  And I won’t cover it too much, but essentially it’s Facebook telling you how to see the best results from their advertising platform. And a lot of it is centered around the first piece which I mentioned, which is those high quality audiences feeding the platform with the best data possible. And then one of the second elements is letting Facebook make a lot of these decisions for you. So anyone who was running ads even asked like a year ago, I would say, “Give us little control to Facebook as possible.” You want to be manual about everything, you want to be creating hundreds of different variants of ads, you want to be creating all of your own ad sets, managing the budgets for each ad in each ad set manually. Over the last six to nine months, it’s been like a complete flip on that. Now, we’re going with a real simple account structure and letting Facebook do the optimization for us. And this is what’s working really, really well.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  So in our ads account, the only campaigns that we’ll have set up will be the remarketing campaigns in one campaign, will be the prospecting campaigns in one campaign, and then will be the content campaigns in one campaign. And then within those, we’ll have a couple of different ad sets, which will usually be the audiences that we’re testing, within those will have the various ads. We’ve experimented with letting Facebook and testing specific ads through their own ad testing. And we’ve experimented with us being manual about ads, and we’re seeing fairly similar results with both. But the point I wanted to make is letting Facebook take the control, having a very simple account structure, and having the budget set on the campaign level.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  And this is something that I think is now mandatory. I’m not too sure they’ve been trying to roll that out for a while. But we see the best results when we set the budget on the campaign level and when we let Facebook lead in terms of making those decisions. So what it will do then is Facebook will see over time when you’re running which ad sets are performing best, which creatives are performing best, and it will assign the budget itself based on what’s performing. Whereas what we would do in the past would we would be making those decisions. Maybe we trust Facebook too much. But over the last six, nine months, they’ve done an awesome job at that.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  And when we first started testing, this really poured back simplified account structure. We were really surprised at the results that came through. So that’d be one thing. If you’re a CMO right now or a marketing leader and you go into your Facebook ads account and you have like hundreds of campaigns and hundreds of ad sets, you really want to strip that back and simplify it as much as you can and go and check out that power five methodology. So that’s one strategic or structural thing that I would recommend.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  I want to talk about those three campaigns. So we’ve talked about the straight for demo or straight for signup, we’ve talked about the remarketing. The only thing that you really need to be testing with remarketing is different remarketing audiences, and then of course your creative. So we’ll usually test remarketing to the entire website traffic, but of course removing any previous converters, current customers, stuff like that. But then we’ll be testing things like high intent pages. So visited the demo page, didn’t convert, visited the trial page, didn’t convert. And we’ll be testing timeframes as well, so last 7 days versus last 30, versus last 3 depending on website traffic. And we’ll have you covered for remarketing.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  And then the other campaigns that we’ll start to look at are content lead campaigns. So this is where if you have a little bit more of a budget, we introduced content as well. If you’re just spending like a couple of grand a month on ads, just set up remarketing. And if you have data, just set up the straight for signup campaigns. If you don’t have the data, then set up the remarketing and these content campaigns that I’m going to talk about. But if you have like more than $5,000 a month budget, you should be doing all three of these.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  So what we do with content is as long as you have good quality blog posts that are going out, or ideally high quality videos like informative, fun educational videos, my team we create a lot of these for our clients. So there’ll be things like let’s say they have a podcast, they have webinars, we’ll be creating clips of those, putting them into a high-paced video. And we’ll start using these, just promoting these pieces of content, promoting blog posts with no conversion objective, just with the objective of getting people to either watch the videos or visit the blog post on the website. And we’ll be using these to build out remarketing audiences for those remarketing campaigns. But we’ll also be using them just to educate people and get more people through to the site, which then increases performance of our remarketing campaigns, but more importantly helps with that element of like top of funnel marketing for SaaS and B2B. And you’ll see really low costs, like link clicks on blog campaigns, for example.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  And what we see with a lot of our clients where we have volume of videos, we’ll actually just run multiple different videos of theirs and build audiences off of people who have watched, let’s say, 50% or more of some of these videos. And those will be really high converting audiences within remarketing, focusing on demo booking or trial signups. So those is the three campaigns that we look at, content remarketing, what we call prospecting, like straight for signup, straight for demo. Now, what I wanted to talk about this super practical is that from a Facebook and a paid social perspective, one thing that really is important to drive good results like you talked about… I think it was before we started recording, but you talked about how you believe and you’ve seen Facebook being one of the lower cost like lead generators.

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  Ian

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  Founder

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  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  For sure, yeah.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  And you see it with all of our clients who are running on Facebook, like the cost per lead is always significantly less than Google search or LinkedIn. And so there’s so much opportunity there to be maximizing this. Now, where people struggle is on the creative side of things. So I think the reason people are a bit scared about Facebook and that is easier for them to go to Google is like managing Google ads is hard, but it’s not as necessarily as time intensive from a team perspective as Facebook because it’s you do the keyword research, you write your ad copy, you’re making constant changes. But with Facebook, it’s a visual platform. Facebook and Instagram, even LinkedIn, too, they’re visual platforms.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  And when people are on those platforms, if you think running a three-minute explainer video as an ad on Facebook is going to work, then that’s why you haven’t seen success in Facebook, or if you think like just putting a picture up of the cover of your eBook and nothing else and the cover is like the most corporate boring looking thing in the world, that’s why you’re not seeing results with Facebook. So what we really lean into is when it comes to social advertising, I’m always looking at what eCommerce business is doing. And the reason I do that is because eCommerce businesses are fueled off the back of ads and people in eCommerce they make decisions off the back of ads. They make purchases off the back of ads. You see an ad for like a tripod like this, if you really like it and you want it, you’re going to buy it immediately.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  Obviously, sales process is different within SaaS. But the way that they advertise, we know that it works on social because that’s where the businesses are built. So we used to think, “Okay, how can we take what they’re doing and replicate that across our SaaS clients?” And the way that we do that is through the creatives. So we have an amazing creative, like digital designer on our team called Irada. And she comes from an eCommerce background as well. And for all of our SaaS clients, we’re producing those video ads that are really high paced and the length doesn’t necessarily matter too much. But we’ll produce video ads between maybe 6 and like 18 to 20 seconds at maximum for our top of funnel and our prospecting campaigns. And then we’re also producing videos that we actually call them GIFs internally. Technically, they’re videos, but they’re like three seconds long, four seconds. And I’ll talk about the strategy with those in a moment and where those work best, but we’re doing that and we’re doing this at volume.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  So we’re switching out creative with our clients honestly like every two weeks, sometimes even more frequently, sometimes we’re introducing more. Of course, if things are working well, then we’re going to leave them. But we’re going to take what’s working well and try and introduce more because Facebook doesn’t like to serve the same thing to people too many times like performance will stagnate. And I think that’s where people are seeing challenges as well. Now, I know not everybody has the resource to be pumping out creative at this volume, or even doing good quality creative because you may have a designer on your team, but no disrespect to them, they probably haven’t designed for ads before. There’s a difference between designing ads and designing like an ebook or a blog cover, something like that.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  And so my recommendations would be if you can hire a team to support you with that, some people don’t want to do that and they can’t, so the next best thing is I really do think it makes sense to either start training your designer or getting them spending time focusing purely on design for advertising, it’s one thing, or you can go onto numerous freelancing platforms or websites and try and sift through the design talent there and find someone that’s really good. But if you can find someone that has motion design skills as well to create these videos and GIFs, that would be really, really helpful. If you… Yeah, go ahead, go on.

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  Ian

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  Ian

  Let’s just talk about this real quick because you made a lot of really good points, but I think designing for ads is a very different approach than designing for exactly what you said, other content. So internally at my company, we’ve obviously tested over 20 or 30 creatives on a single ad set. And it’s funny because our designer… And it’s difficult because they tend to design things in a certain way. They have a style which you have to ask them to break. You have to say, “All right, these three look too similar. Do it completely different and change the gradients. Don’t use gradients, try black and white.”

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  Ian

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  Ian

  And it’s funny because as I mentioned, we tested a good amount of creative and I’m curious to see your feedback on this as well. But some of our best performing content was not super designed out. So it’s simple. It’s like a pattern interrupt, at least on our end. I don’t know what your thoughts are on this. But it was like a white background with a very colorful eBook, something super simple with a very simple title. And that’s what’s driven our CPL from like 200 bucks initially down to like I think about 20 or 30 range. So what’s working for you guys?

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  Yeah, that’s a really good point. So I wanted to jump in there because one of the things I would say is there are so many articles online about best practice for ad design, like never read those. When someone gets into a best practice conversation with me, I hate it because best practice is just guessing, or if someone’s doing something, it’s usually stopped working like three months ago kind of thing. So I know that’s tough, but the point that you said around pattern interrupt, so that’s the key. Now, with us, of course, we want our design to be high quality. The most important thing is on brand for our clients. If they’re working with an external provider, that’s also really important.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  But the absolute key is those pattern interrupts like you said. The way that we do that is with these really engaging fast moving videos with these GIFs I’ll talk about in a second or one point that you touched on, you said one of your best performing creatives is a white background with a really vibrant eBook, for example. So this is a really fascinating point. There’s a client that we’re working with right now. And they asked us when we were designing ads and when we were sharing with them like, “These are the variants that we want to test.” There were some that had a white background and they said, “Hey, look, based on the Facebook best practice that I’ve read, I don’t think it makes sense to run these ads with a white background because they’ll blend in the newsfeed, etc.” We had a really tough time pushing back on that, but we did push back on that.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  And then literally 30 days later, surprise, surprise. The top performing ad of the month was the one with the white background. The reason that was is because the creative itself was really vibrant and sending out. So I know it’s really challenging with design, especially to give feedback or via audio like this as well. But I would say that you have to figure out what works, you have to be testing a lot of things. And also a lot of the time what you expect to work isn’t the thing that works out.

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  Ian

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  Ian

  So that’s it. Yeah. What you expect to work generally doesn’t work and you need to trust Facebook to tell you what’s working. And I think that is again worth repeating because it’s approach that I think guys like you at Hey Digital have that most marketers maybe think, “You know what? This works on this other channel. I should just translate to Facebook or LinkedIn.” It’s just not the case. You got to let the data guide your decision-making.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  Right. And to give some really practical examples, too, so a few examples of creative that we’re seeing work really well right now. I’ll try and explain the best I can like [crosstalk 00:20:45]. So there’s one thing that has been working really well for us from a retargeting perspective. So the thing that’s really cool to think about also with Facebook and creative is at what point is this person seeing your ad within that journey? So if they’re seeing it from a remarketing perspective, they’ve been on the website. The creative you want to show them and the ad copy has to be different to someone that’s never heard of you and the brand before. Some people forget about that sometimes.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  But what we see work really well right now on remarketing is what we’ll do is we create these like… We call them GIFs, these short four or five seconds repeating videos. And it will be focused on one specific feature or one specific use case of the product. So, for example, one of our customers is a project management suite of tools. So it’s similar to people who will be using tools like Asana, Trello, things like that. One of those platforms similar to them that also has invoicing and financing built in, it has time tracking built in, like all of that kind of stuff.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  And what we do for them, to explain this point, is we’ll make various three to four seconds repeating GIFs about one specific subset. So one will be like an invoice coming up onto the screen and showing that you can create an invoice and then the ad copy ties into the invoicing element. One will be something about time tracking and it will be just something really short that shows… it’s very clear within those three or four seconds that that’s what this is. And when you see the copy, that ties in as well. With some of our other clients, the way that we’re approaching this is instead of being feature-specific, it’s focused on the use cases for their product or for their solution. And what we’re seeing work well is stacking those into our remarketing ads, to having a number of different ads, talking about the different features or the different use cases and having a fast-paced GIF that ties into those. That’s one creative that’s working really well right the second right now across multiple clients.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  And we’re also having within those remarketing campaigns ads purely focused on getting someone to book a demo or getting someone to sign up. So the copy actually within the creative itself will be about booking a demo. And there’ll be what looks like a physical button, which is like “Book a Demo” that will flash up or something like that, the more typical things that you would expect. Include those as well, but try including some of these feature-specific or use-case-specific animations. Now, if you don’t have the team internally do that, even some static on those might be worth a try. So that’s one creative that’s working well.

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  Ian

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  Ian

  And would you target the same audience with multiple different ads like that, where it’s literally feature stocked with use cases stocked so they see a stream?

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  Yeah.

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  Ian

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  Ian

  Yeah, okay.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  So you also want to keep an eye on the frequency, too. A mistake that I see sometimes is I’ll jump into someone’s ads account when they’ve been managing it themselves or had another agency managing it and the frequency will be like 20 or 25 that [crosstalk 00:23:49]. And they’ll have one or two creative and nothing else so that that same person has seen the same thing over and over again. My recommendation is usually we don’t really want our frequency to go above five or six. And if we do, there’s a couple of reasons. One will be testing different ads on them. It’s the time to switch out the ads, or the other one will be… Honestly sometimes with some of our clients, we’ve actually tested increasing the frequency and being more aggressive and actually seeing better results. But with some clients we’ve seen lesser results.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  So that’s something that you would need to check out by yourself. Yeah, that would be for remarketing. And then for prospecting, for completely cold audiences, there’s a number of things that we’re seeing work pretty well. But one that I’ll share, I know it sounds like pretty self-explanatory, but I still don’t see many SaaS or B2B companies doing this is carousel ads are working really well too, going down the same kind of approach, focusing on… We usually do one carousel ad that’s feature-specific, one carousel ad that is use-case-specific, and then one that’s maybe more general. And then we’ll test different variants of those, whether it’s different color palettes, or whether it’s different call to actions on them, for example.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  But for a couple of our clients, like last month, the top performing ads were actually carousel ads from a prospecting perspective. And I think that might be because if it’s engaging and if you can get someone to click through, there’s a lot more real estate that you can take up. And it’s like if someone’s taking action to click through and look through, they’re engagement with your ad more because I would usually expect like punchy, 15, 22nd video ads to perform best from a cold audience or at least getting people into our remarketing audiences. But we’ve seen those carousel ads work really well. So that would be another thing that I would recommend trying.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  And then one other tip that I would give on this if it’s okay with you, Ian, is I’m seeing… Something that we try out every so often is instead of building an ad through ads manager like we would do normally, we’ll write a post on the company’s like Facebook page, but we’ll do it in the style of an ad. So we’ll treat it as though it’s an ad and we’ll post it on the page. And then the first thing that we’ll do is either ask their top user group to go and take a look at it and maybe drop some comments on it, or we’ll run a very low budget campaign to drive some engagement onto that post.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  And then in our Facebook ads manager, in our prospecting campaign, or in our remarketing campaign, you have the option where you can pull through a post through the post ID, and we’ll use that post ID, pull it through and then run it as an ad. One of the negatives of that is that you don’t then have the option to create like the Facebook ad call to action button or subheadline or something like that. But the benefit is the ad already has gathered a lot of social proof. And if someone has never heard of your brand before, they see your ad and they see like… Even if it’s just five people or a couple of people commenting like, “Oh, I use this and I love this,” or whatever it might be, that can really help with the performance.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  And also, another thing that’s slightly different, but another thing that we’ve seen sometimes, you have to be more calculated with this. But sometimes we’ll run an ad purposely knowing that it’s going to cause more people to engage with it because we then see that if people engage with the ad, Facebook sees more people engaging with it and often tends to push it more and we get better performance. So one time, to be honest, we actually did this completely unintentionally. There was a tiny, tiny error in the creative itself. You wouldn’t even really call it a spelling error, but it was like one letter was capitalized when it shouldn’t have been. But because it was like an I, you wouldn’t have even noticed kind of thing.

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  Dylan

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  A few people did notice and commented on it. And at first, our client was like, “Oh, maybe we should stop this.” But then when we looked at the data, it was the top performing ad over the last three months or something. Don’t go making spelling errors on purpose or whatever, but think about what can you do to make people want to actually engage with your ad. And that post ID idea is one that can potentially work out as well.

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  Ian

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  Ian

  What’s the spelling errors that what we’re going to call the drizzly strategy, right? That viral email go out with all of the… That’s still one of the funniest things that’s happened in 2020. So that actually made me laugh out loud. But okay, so a couple of things to unpack there. I don’t know if you would go out and say, “Make mistakes on your ads,” but I think your point of like, “Do something that makes people engage with it, whether it be the grammar police or other people,” that’s a really good point. And the second one, or it was actually the first one, which is warm up your posts, get social proof on it and then push it out to a wider audience.

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  Ian

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  I worked at a company previously that I leveraged that pretty successfully. They actually bought very cheap likes and comments from India for like 200 bucks. And I don’t think that’s the move anymore, but your point of getting the right engagement on a post ahead of time through a user group or something like that is a very good strategy to warm that post up. And Facebook, thankfully, it does allow you to take that post out in your ads manager and run ads on it that’s already had the social proof on it. So that’s a really good point that I think marketers should definitely take. Yeah.

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  Yeah. Even just like you could take even like a $10 budget or like a $20 budget and run it against the audience of your current customers, because in Facebook, you’ll have an audience of people that have converted and don’t mind spending $10, it’s fine, it’s nothing. And you’ll have some customers that will see it and will comment. Obviously, you just want to hope that they don’t be like, “Hey, why am I seeing this ad or something?” But it’s definitely something that’s worth testing. It’s not something that’s making up a big portion of the budget that we’re spending, but it’s something worth testing.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  And the other thing on that point that’s maybe a little bit more tactical even is within Facebook ads manager. I don’t know how I would explain this without being visual, but I’ll try my best. One thing that you can do is that when you’re creating ads, you can replicate the same creative and the same ad across multiple ad sets or campaigns. Whilst if you use the same posts, you can basically publish the ad, take the post ID, and pull it across all of your campaigns so that no matter what campaign it’s running on, if someone comments on it, that comment will be seen across all of the campaigns that you’re running.

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  Dylan

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  And it’s hard for me to explain exactly how to do that, but people can probably Google search and figure that out. That’s one thing that we’ve been doing that’s super tactical that’s actually working really well right now is meaning that some of our clients, all of the ads that are running, pretty much all of them have good comments or engagement on them. And it’s because they’re just being at one or two variants of the creative being pulled across the multiple campaigns that we run. So that’s one tip as well.

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  Ian

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  Ian

  And that’s a great point too. So my buddy and I used to work with the head of paid acquisition at HubSpot and I’ve talked to him a couple of times. And he basically said the same thing as like, “We have one ad that we run across and test multiple different ads accounts and it’s still the champion ad. And it has just a ton of built-in social proof over the years of running it, that it’s just really, really hard to beat because it’s so ingrained and people see the thousands of comments and likes on it and it’s just like, ‘Wow, this is something that I should check out.'” So, again, social proof, for sure, for sure important on Facebook ads.

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  Ian

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  Ian

  All right. So I could listen to you talk about this stuff all day long. Facebook, I’m super convinced is one of the best channels, if not the best channel for B2B SaaS to generate leads, to generate demos, to generate class one business. And I think there is a disconnect between what marketers are seeing and what executives are buying into from a business strategy. I know there’s the Facebook boycotts going around now, which might make it more difficult for marketers like myself to get buy-in for a strategy like that. But when you look at the dollars and cents of a Facebook versus a LinkedIn, what are you seeing? How is it different on Facebook versus LinkedIn? We were just talking about this the other day that we wish the LinkedIn algorithm was 100th as smart as the Facebook algorithm. So I think the listeners can probably guess where this is going, but let’s dive into LinkedIn real quick. What are you seeing that’s working there? What are some strategies that companies can put in place to generate some business?

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  Yep. So we do advertise on LinkedIn as well to make that clear to everyone, is still an important channel. The reason I get so passionate about Facebook is for the exact same reason that you said, Ian. It’s so easy to drive lower costs there. But with LinkedIn, the challenge is that it’s still very expensive as an advertising platform. Now, sometimes execs at companies are okay with that because their argument is that, “Yes, it’s expensive, but in theory, the lead quality should be better because [crosstalk 00:33:09] capabilities and the people that hang out here and all that kind of stuff.”

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  Dylan

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  Honestly, I don’t really see that across the accounts that we manage. Sometimes it will be better, but there’s like how do you differentiate what’s better in terms of quality when maybe the quality of leads might be better on LinkedIn, but you can get three leads on Facebook or four leads on Facebook or maybe even more the price of one lead on LinkedIn? And if two out of those four is good, then it’s better than LinkedIn. That’s one of the conversations that we have sometimes. But what we see working on LinkedIn is that very, very rarely do I see those campaigns that we talked about earlier that we do on Facebook, where it’s like, “Okay, you choose your target audience. You serve an ad to them, which is like a single image or a video and you ask them to sign up or book a demo.” Very, very, very rarely do we see those working.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  Sometimes they might get people to take an action. And yes, you’ll get people booking demos or signing up, but the costs can be out of control. So that’d be one thing. What we see work on LinkedIn and what we use LinkedIn for is having it set up with remarketing. Using LinkedIn remarketing audiences is one thing, but LinkedIn, our approach is more focused on content. And especially now, you might have seen, or anyone listening to this might have seen that very, very recently LinkedIn finally said that they’re going to roll out the ability to retarget people based on how much of your video they’ve watched on LinkedIn ads. So that’s one thing that we’re going to be experimenting with a little bit because there wasn’t that opportunity before.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  But on LinkedIn, all we’re really running is content lead campaign. So promoting eBooks downloads and promoting videos that we’ve created offline and podcasts clips or videos of clips of webinars, that kind of stuff. And then how we do that from an eBook or lead magnet perspective, we see the best results or the best cost per result through using the LinkedIn lead forms. So, for example, we’ll run an ebook ad, and if someone wants the eBook, they’ll click on the ad and then a native form on LinkedIn will pop up. The thing that’s great about the forms on LinkedIn is that it can basically prefill all the data that you want it to, like company size, company name, LinkedIn profile, URL, all that kind of thing.

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  Dylan

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  So the experience for the user is literally they click the button on the ad, they see the form, rarely do they have to type anything in, they click the button itself and then they move forward. And then you can add in things to that lead form if you want and we can talk about that. And then we deliver them the eBook there and then. And we connect them up with our CRM system through whichever integration is. And that’s one thing for cheapest and highest volume of downloads for eBooks and downloads we use those LinkedIn lead forms.

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  Something else that people could try, I’m not going to say I have tons of experience with this one, But I’ve done a couple of small tests with this and I’ve interviewed people on my podcast who have done larger tests with this. And that right now is the LinkedIn Conversational Ad Beta. So it’s essentially like LinkedIn Sponsored InMails 2.0. I’ve seen good results from the small test that we’ve done. And the people that I’ve spoken to have seen good results from this as well. It’s essentially sending out a Sponsored InMail to people, but it has a mini chatbot functionality built in. So you can preprogram responses and actions that you want people to take. So you could ask them prequalifying questions, for example, and then send them to your LinkedIn lead form depending on how they’ve answered those questions.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  And I’ve seen… To give some numbers on those, like for example, I did a podcast interview with Jason Widup, who’s the VP of marketing I think at Metadata, and he was driving demos for… I think it was like $120 to $150 for a demo booking for the team there. And I know that you’d scaled that up to… It wasn’t just like five or six demos. I think last time I spoke to him he was maybe doing like 30 or 40 a month at that kind of price. And then Gabriel Lim, who’s the founder at a company called Saleswhale, I had him on my show and he was doing something very similar for even lower cost. I think he was getting like $50 to $80 maybe for a demo book. So that’s one thing that you could maybe experiment with.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  And one of the other good things about those is with the Sponsored InMails or with the Conversational Ads is that it appears in someone’s inbox and then they won’t be able to receive another sponsored ad in that inbox from anyone for 30 days. So if you don’t take an action, you’ll live in their inbox for 30 days and they won’t get another sponsored message and you only have the option to add a small… It’s like a tiny square. You can add like a cover image up there. So it can be pretty good for branding, like just sticking your logo up there or something with a CTA on it. So that’s one thing that you could maybe experiment with that. I’ve seen a little bit of success with, but we haven’t spent a ton on just to be clear,

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  Ian

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  Ian

  Kind of sounds like a gold rush, to be honest. So if they can’t get a Sponsored InMails for 30 days after one’s served to them, seems like volumes of the play to the manager.

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  Dylan

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  Yeah. I think that’s why some people are talking about it, but some aren’t is because people are worried of like, “Okay, how scalable is this?” Because if you’re targeting like marketing leads or heads of marketing or whatever and much companies are trying this, then you’re going to run out of volume. So that’s why it’s one of the things that we haven’t tested too heavily either is because it’s essentially not like the most scalable channel. But yeah, that’s how we’re looking at LinkedIn.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  One other thing that we do look at LinkedIn for, if the companies we’re working with don’t have a high volume of data or don’t have lots of information in their CRM and we want to make Facebook a success, is we’ll actually run some LinkedIn campaigns driving a high volume of traffic from LinkedIn to our site. And through the LinkedIn insight tag, we can essentially use that to help us build out more intelligent audiences for Facebook. That takes a bit more time and a bit more volume of spend. But if you don’t have any data in the backend and you really want to go like aggressive on paid ads, that’s one other way that you can maybe experiment a little bit to build out good quality audiences for other social channels.

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  Ian

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  Have you had any luck with like targeting skills or job title, things like that in LinkedIn. I know that’s not super available on Facebook. So that’s one of those things that LinkedIn maybe does have over Facebook as far as targeting is concerned and it’s in there.

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  Dylan

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  Yeah, it does have that. I think that’s why most people lean towards LinkedIn for B2B in saying, “Hey, we should go down this route,” because you can be so specific with the job title targeting, the skills, the interests. But it just comes to the costing thing. It’s like, “Okay, we can be limiting these people, but the price is just so, so high.” And within Facebook, once it figures out what your audience is that’s converting, it really optimizes very well towards that. And you can just constantly see volume and conversions come through. Whereas with LinkedIn, we struggle to get sometimes to the volume that we want for our clients and the CPL or the cost per lead or the cost per acquisition that we want. And it just doesn’t feel like a channel that we want to scale out too often when we can be taking that spend and focusing it on social or focusing on Google if it makes sense to do that.

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  Ian

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  Ian

  Yes, makes total sense.

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  Dylan

  I would love it to work more, but I think it’s still early days. So you can definitely see success there, 100%, but I would rather spend advertising dollars elsewhere and have LinkedIn as a channel that we have a presence on.

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  Ian

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  Yeah. And I think speaking of presence, so Hey Digital and yourself specifically, you have a really, really solid LinkedIn presence. So if anybody’s listening to this, go check out Dylan Hey, his personal profile, check out Hey Digital, follow them. He does a fantastic job rolling out content on a daily basis, but it’s super high quality, too. So everything’s branded. Like he said, those really hard-hitting videos. He has that down to a science, I think better than anybody else I’ve seen honestly doing. Not to throw a compliment your way, but I always know it’s you, I always know that I’m going to watch it because it’s super valuable. There’s minute and a half, two minutes, sometimes three minutes worth of content in there, super digestible. But presence is super important specifically for like B2B companies these days. Anything you can give there as just a quick one or two hit points on that?

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  Dylan

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  Yeah. I would say take a look at… Obviously, most people listening to this will have checked out Drift and what they used to do and still do to some degree on [crosstalk 00:41:45]. But then I would look at a company called Sweet Fish Media. James Carbary, I know that you know him.

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  Ian

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  Ian

  Of course, yeah.

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  I’d look what they’re doing and then look at a company called Gravvy, G-R-A-V-V-Y. They’ve taken over LinkedIn over the last couple of weeks or so. So what you’ll see when you look into those is those companies are doing an awesome job of empowering their employees to be active from their personal profiles and build their own brands. And that is having a big impact on brand awareness and positioning for the business at the end of the line. And Drift were the first company that did this and now there’s other people experimenting. Those three that I mentioned would be the first three that… My team is very small, but I’m building out a program to be doing something very, very similar. Because for us as a business, every single deal that we’ve closed has been… Well, not every single one, I would say 95% of them has been through LinkedIn content that I post on my own personal page and then a couple of deals that we’ve closed from podcast guests and just friends I’ve made through that sphere.

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  Dylan

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  But we’re by no means a huge agency right now, but I’ve built us to a pretty successful point already with a small team with no sales work whatsoever. And that’s because of LinkedIn. And I see a really big opportunity scaling now. And I think B2B companies, software companies can be doing that too. And it’s a win-win for everyone because you as a business you receive more awareness, more authority. And for your employees, if you approach it in the right way with them, you’re not just asking them to share loads of stuff about your company, you’re empowering them to be active and build that brand and build that audience.

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  Dylan

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  And when they leave you… I know you don’t want to think about that, but ultimately very rarely is someone going to stay with a company for like 40 or 50 years anymore. And when that time comes and they do leave, they’re going to be leaving you with something that’s also really beneficial for them that they can take anywhere that they go. And that’s a huge play for them. It’s how I set up this business. I built my personal brand when I was working at Leadfeeders. It was great for the company. We grew a lot and it was great for me.

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  So if you can think about that and have those conversations in the right way with your team, that would be, for me, the opportunity on LinkedIn. You can spend way less than you need to on ads and you can empower your team to build their brands, to grow as individuals and see a significant uptick. And then when you’re advertising your job as an advertiser, becomes easier and more people have buy-in to you, your brand and your team. It just makes everything else easier. So that’d be my advice around that.

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  Ian

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  Ian

  Yeah, great advice. Thanks for that. And I think those companies that you called out are great, specifically James and Sweet Fish Media. They’re doing a great job getting all the podcast content out. And I agree Gravy, Gong’s really good at it too. But there are companies that are investing in their employees like that and actually enabling them to do that at scale, which I think is a really interesting strategy. And you can already tell companies that are investing in it it’s paying off because they’re top of mind, you know what they do, you know what their software is capable of just through their employees, which… That’s like a new generation of marketing I think. And the companies that aren’t doing that I think are going to miss out on a pretty big piece of marketing mindshare.

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  Ian

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  Ian

  So, all right, we’re almost out of time here. And Dylan, thank you so much. It’s been super, super interesting to hear your take on Facebook and LinkedIn. Obviously, the last one we have on the list here is Google. Can we run through Google in five minutes or so? Just because I think Google is one of those things that’s been around for a while that gets pretty much common knowledge on what works and what doesn’t. There’s obviously a couple of tricks here and there that I’m sure you’ll enlighten us with. But what are your thoughts on Google?

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  Dylan

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  Yep. So similar to all the other platforms, the first thing you should be doing is setting up all of your remarketing campaigns. So that’s through the Display Network and then through remarketing search ads as well. Just always have those set up at the very, very minimum. Then the next most common go-to route for most people is targeting those high intent, low hanging fruit keywords. So through your keyword research and through your knowledge, you’ll be able to figure out what those are. And I won’t go into the specific tactics of like budget strategy and bidding and stuff like that because I’ll try and keep it to a couple of minutes. But building those out makes a ton of sense.

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  Dylan

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  And where we’re seeing really good success on Google specifically and some things that you can try, especially if you’re wanting to drive more volume and traffic to your site as well to then improve your remarketing audiences, you’ll see that I have this habit of like, “Okay, how can we be building out better audiences for our social ads and how can we use other platforms to do that?” And so one way that we do that right now is with the Google Display Network through using like the… Essentially in custom intent audiences within Google Display, you can do things similar to Facebook with some more tricks and tools.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  So you can go into Google and one thing that we’ll do is upload a list of all of our customers’ users or all of their previous converters. We’ll use the Google Analytics conversion of, “Okay, this person’s converted.” And we’ll say it to Google, “We want you to find people similar to these, similar to converters.” There’s one campaign that works really well. So we’ll set that up in the Display Network. And when you’re doing display campaigns, there’s a few things you have to be really careful of because they can go out of control very easily and drive a lot of quality traffic. So one is make sure audience expansion is turned off for any of these campaigns. And Google are making it harder and harder to find that setting. It changes all the time. So just Google search how to turn off audience expansion in Google Display if you’re running display campaigns right now because I see that a lot people leave that turned on. Go ahead.

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  Ian

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  Ian

  Would you consider that a general rule for all social channels, Facebook and LinkedIn? Would you also turn that off?

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  Yeah, always turn it off. They think it helps, but very rarely I’ve seen it work very well. So always have that switched off, especially in display it’s super important because otherwise you’ll start seeing like hundreds of thousands of impressions sometimes. And you can be driving a load of traffic to the website. And if you drive really poor quality traffic to the website, it then ruins your pixel and your audiences. So be really careful with that. Make sure you have your location targeting set up in there as well and make sure you set your exclusions.

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  Dylan

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  Everyone has their own opinion on this, but you definitely don’t want to be appearing on certain political sites, especially given the nature of the world right now. And very rarely do we see the SaaS and B2B businesses… There’s no point in running in the app store or within games or something like that. Turn off any adult content. Just when you’re running these display campaigns, it seems like a lot of work, but just be really, really tight with them. And once you do that, the costs are so, so low to drive traffic through to the site. And so one is those similar to previous converters or customers.

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  Dylan

  Another one that we love to use is you can go in and you can plug in the URLs of your competitors’ websites and say to Google, “We want people similar to people who have been on these sites.” So you can list in like 10 competitors or 5 competitors or whatever and be serving ads to people that Google classifies as similar as those. Over time, we also like to experiment with you can layer in different demographic targeting or in-market audience targeting. So Google classifies… It will have people that it thinks are in the market, the enterprise software as an option, people that are in the market for productivity software, like these thousands of options that Google has in market audiences.

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  Dylan

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  And it takes that data by seeing what your behavior is like across the internet and categorizing it and then giving it to us advertisers. It’s like weird if you start looking into it, but you can use that in your ads. So we use the display network a lot for driving traffic of good quality and building out our remarketing audiences. So that would be one thing that a lot of SaaS companies don’t do and B2B companies don’t do. So check that out.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  And then the other thing would be… This is more like an account structure thing. But we’re seeing good results right now with… Over the last few years, everyone was talking about this account structure of SKAG, which is Single Keyword Ad Groups. And with the way that Google has changed some of its structures, we don’t see that being the best performing ad structure right now. We call it a modified SKAG model, where you keep to the Single Keyword Ad Groups, but you include all of the match types within one single ad group. So I know we said that we’ll try and keep this up for five minutes. I think I’ll cap there. But again, if anyone wants to chat more about this with me, I’m always happy to just answer any questions if people ask about this.

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  Ian

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  Ian

  Yeah, I appreciate that. So that’s a really good summary. Specifically, I love the target your competitor is driving. It’s a really good tip. All right. So, Dylan, it’s been amazing. I think your knowledge on the subject is pretty much unmatched. So thanks for taking the time. Let’s do the lightning round to finish up. You good with us?

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  Dylan

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  Yup, let’s go.

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  Ian

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  Ian

  All right. So what’s your favorite marketing book of all time?

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  Yeah, that is a great question. For me, it’s this recent one from Drift.

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  Ian

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  Ian

  He’s grabbing it out of his-

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  can be way faster.

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  Ian

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  Ian

  Yeah, it sounds good. This one scale. Yeah, I love it.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  Good one, yeah.

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  Ian

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  Ian

  Good one. All right. So if you could get all of the marketers listening to take one thing away from this talk, what would it be?

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  Try Facebook ads.

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  Ian

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  Ian

  There you go. I knew you’d say that all. All right. So where can people find you? Give us a little bit of a snapshot about Hey Digital, throw some plugs out!

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  Yeah, yeah. So they can just go to heydigital.co, like .co. That’s our website. We just relaunched that. So hopefully you’ll enjoy that, or the best place for me really is LinkedIn. I’m there active every single day. So if you search for Dylan Hey, I’ll be probably the only Dylan Hey that you’ll find and you’ll find me pretty easily. So, yeah, that’s the best places to check me out.

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  Ian

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  Ian

  Nice. Thanks again for joining up another Marketing Strategy Talk here, Dylan. It’s been amazing and we’ll talk soon.

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  Dylan

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  Dylan

  Thank you so much. It was a ton of fun.

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  Ian

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  Ian

  Thanks.