Align Media Strategy with Business Objectives
We dive into the crucial first step of planning any ad campaign: setting goals and expectations. James and Andy unpack the importance of understanding business models, sales team dynamics, and the complexities of the customer journey to set aligned and realistic goals.
What You’ll Learn:
1) How to set realistic goals and expectations for a successful paid media campaign.
2) How to tailor your approach based on your business and revenue model.
3) The impact of sales team structure on goal setting.
4) Measurement strategies that move beyond traditional in-platform KPIs.
Podcast Transcript
Welcome back everybody to digital banter. We’ve been on a hiatus for James has four months. It has not been four months. It’s been like six weeks, maybe. Sorry. Usual summer vacation. Except it was early because he decided to have a baby in the beginning of the year. But anyway, we are back and better than ever for season three of digital banter.
So I was doing a post this morning, James, and I realized that technically digital banter is 67 episodes and you and I have done 50 ish of them. That’s like. More episodes than 99 percent of the podcasts that exist out there. That’s because 99 percent of the podcasts that exist out there quit [00:01:00] after in less than seven episodes.
I’ve been able to call that stop. What does it ever, every time you see somebody, this is a, for everybody out there, anytime you see somebody post that their podcast is in the top 1 percent of podcasts, quite frankly, they are full of shit because in order to make the top 1 percent of podcasts, you literally just have to go beyond seven episodes.
Which all that means is that. You don’t have, basically you didn’t give up, so good job. If you made the top 10%, you didn’t give up. Now I always say are we doing something great here or are we just stupid for not giving up after seven? we’re persistent. It doesn’t matter. I have fun doing it. I learned a lot doing it.
It’s way more for me than it is for anybody else. And, hopefully we deliver value along the way, but. And if we don’t, eh, whatever, anyway, so season three,
We are kicking off season three with a six part series around paid media and [00:02:00] why pay media, because that is what we at dragon three 60 focus on, especially in the B2B realm of things.
And also because we see so many opportunities for basically the tagline of the series is building better ad campaigns. So we’re going to be talking about everything from goal setting to audience development and segmentation through to content strategy, positioning and messaging as it relates to paid media.
And at the end of the day, maximizing revenue through your advertising channels. But today’s episode, as you guys saw in the beginning, portion of it is around goal setting and alignment and paid media campaigns. Now, James, I think
We can both agree that it’s really hard to do a good job when it comes to any kind of marketing, but especially paid media.
Without setting any level of foundation as relates to targets and goals and KPIs. Yeah, I think it’s tough. I think a lot of companies come into this blind and we’ll get into some of the common things that we see here in a minute, [00:03:00] a lot of goals are not tied back to, it’s when somebody starts a paid media program or paid media campaign, like one, the goals can be all over the place.
any SAS company would be like, Oh, we want to drive demos, but then they’ll also say we want to grow our brand. We want to do top of funnel content. And like the way that you set goals for each stage of the funnel is different. The way you set goals for, your business model for your sales organization, like that, I think the major part that is missing for most people is like, Taking into consideration how you run your business and the cost of your products and everything that is like specific to your organization, right?
Like one of the things we’ll go through here in a second is some hot takes on industry benchmarks. The one thing we get asked the most is Oh, what’s the benchmark for this? What’s the benchmark for that? And, just companies taking those and using them as those [00:04:00] goals, because they heard some guru somewhere say, That’s the number that they need to hit.
And the reality is. It’s, not positioned for them at all. I have this belief that at least 95 percent of marketing goals are set by some random executive in a back room that’s just pulling a number out of their ass saying, you know what, we’re going to grow by five, five X this year. Go, do that.
there’s, almost never any data that backs up to it. A lot of the individuals and people that we work with have very little impact and say in how that number was arrived at and how they’re going to achieve that at the same time. cause I think when we need to think about
The true challenges with goal setting, it’s realistic goals.
Yes. You want stretch goals. You want smart goals. But realistic goals at the end [00:05:00] of the day. So I actually have no problem with ambitious goals at all. I think the thing that needs to be taken into consideration is, okay, you want to grow five X this year, right? That means if let me put it this way, if there’s a company that wants to grow five to 10 percent per year, a large enterprise company, you can essentially tweak and alter what you’re already doing to hit those goals, right?
It’s, about continued optimization. If you want to grow five X. Some sort of crazy number. What does that mean for me as a marketer? It means that I have to do something crazy, right? Which means that I either better have a ton of budget to do it, or I need to think so far outside of the beaten path that.
Like I’m going to have to do something crazy to hit those goals and that’s hope to get lucky and hope to get lucky at the same time and hope to get lucky. And that’s where, was it, that’s how most people make a shit, like anybody who’s super wealthy. A lot of them fell in the right place in the right time and made a lot of [00:06:00] money.
And that’s fine. You need to gamble in order to be able to do those things. But you have to understand that
If you do hope those five X, 10 X goals, yeah, we’re going to have to gamble to do some things. And. It is a gamble at that point. I think the other thing too, is
There’s been plenty of times where we’ve been handed or talked about some fluffy goal, even, growing by five X.
there’s a, tangible aspect to that, but. What is five X off of, right? Is it, and when is it five X from, is it five X over the course of the year and what’s our baseline. And I think also to that point, I personally like to talk about goals in the vernacular of targets. Somebody once told me you can hit or miss a target.
You can’t hit or miss a goal. Like a target is tangibly something that you are aiming for and you’re either going to hit it or you’re not. Smart goals, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic. [00:07:00] the purpose of this conversation is not to go through that. We’re going to tell you actually how to build goals for your business, but yeah, the stuff that they taught you in college is still legitimate.
Their high school or middle school. I don’t even know where they teach at this point. Maybe they don’t know. So anyways, let’s talk about some of those goals and benchmarks. So I myself and my friend chat GPT, as well as, some other industry standards that I’ve seen out there, I put together a list of.
Industry benchmarks. All of these are for B2B SaaS. a lot of these benchmarks that I’m about to go through are very, very common. so we’re going to go through and give a reactions to some of these goals. So the first benchmark 10 X snow without, with half the budget, just kidding. all right, let’s go on to some real metrics.
So [00:08:00] CAC payback period. This is probably one of the, Most common goals in B2B SaaS, the average for a good CAC payback period is 12 to 18 months, larger, enter larger enterprise deals, of course, are going to be a little bit longer. Startups will be a little bit shorter, but pretty much the lowest CAC payback that is considered good.
That’s out there is 12 months. I have to say If that’s a marketing goal that is out there, a lot of the goals that we see on the paid media side, don’t look anything like that, right there we get at. So 12 to 18 months is when you’re expecting the payback and you’re asking for leads today, tomorrow, like the goals that you’re setting today are not necessarily equating to that target.
How was that a marketing target? When there are so many other variables that play into whether somebody is going to [00:09:00] use the product for that amount of length of time, customer service, retention, customer marketing, depending on how you structure your contracts. if I use a tool and I’m out after a month, does that make me a bad acquisition and how am I on the marketing side of things going to control for that?
It seems faulty. it’s a, risk. I will say that if your goal is to have a CAC payback period of 12 to 18 months, then. Paid media is definitely going to be an effective strategy. And I feel like for most any brand, like that’s a pretty reasonable target, right? if you’re looking to say you close demos at 25%, and, so you’re looking for, I’m just trying to do some of the rough math here, but you can have a pretty high cost per demo and achieve that goal, maybe if you’re selling a SAS product, that’s [00:10:00] like.
50 bucks a month, you might have some struggle, but for most of the brands that we deal with, it’s, three to 5, 000 deals. And that is totally attainable. it’s effective because it’s measurable and the cost that’s getting invested into acquiring it. Yeah, for sure. All right. Next one.
So this is where we’re going to start seeing what we’re going to start seeing here as we dive into these metrics, these are all industry benchmarks and standard, but if you start to do the math between all of You’ll find that none of them. Equivalent to our equivalent to like the same ROI.
So the next one, I’m going to say row as in CAC to LTV ratio, because those are essentially the same thing. this is something that we talk about as an agency. I look for a three to one return on ad spend three to one CAC to LTV ratio. I would say it’s pretty attainable, but when you compare that to the CAC payback period.
Analysis, like those are, going to yield different results when you actually do the math [00:11:00] out. if these are industry benchmarks and standards, quite frankly, a, you’re, you can achieve a much lower return on ad spend for a CAC payback period of 12 to 18 months versus a 3 to 1 return on ad spend.
And that’s like more in line with what we’re used to seeing. I think it all goes back to what you set off this conversation around too. It depends on business model and how you’re selling like return on ad spend is a little bit more transparent if you are. Able if you are transacting in a transparent manner and the actual cost of the subscription or product being purchased.
Yeah. So let’s, some of the other things that need to be taken into consideration, I’ll just ramble through the rest of these metrics. Cause I feel like the first two are the ones that we deal with the most, but things you need to know, average time to close. So for a SAS deal, that’s usually three to six months and that’s from like lead to close.
So that means [00:12:00] three to six months after you get a demo request is when that demo is typically actually going to close or sometimes it’s shorter, sometimes it’s longer depending on the deal size, but that’s the average. So if you think about it, first impression to close one deal is going to add another three to six months on top of that.
So let me put it this way. If you’re running three month pilots for marketing programs. and you’re not running them for at least six months. Like you’re, missing out on, you’re never really going to be able to understand whether or not that worked. Sure. You can, there are campaigns where you can run and you’re like, okay, this is absolute shit.
I don’t want to do this. Nobody’s even engaging with our ads. there’s, we’re not getting anything from this, to understand the full longterm from awareness all the way to close. Like it’s a long period. all right. Average churn rate, five to 10%. that actually feels low [00:13:00] to me.
yeah, does it not real low? I don’t know. I think we’re exposed to a lot more data from like the startup space versus some of the more enterprise deals that are built into this, but, I know churn is like one of the biggest issues in SAS, especially right now. And, if you do have a churn of five to 10%, like that’s, pretty good.
all right. And then the last one, probably the one we get measured on the most cost per demo. So this is where we’re going to go into. It depends, but let me put it this way. I think the main thing I want you guys to get out of this is that when you’re calculating in platform conversion metrics for LinkedIn ads, Google ads, your goals for CAC payback period, return on ad spend and cost per demo.
Have to align, like you have to know, okay, this is our cost per demo. This is our close rate. This is our churn rate. these are all the things that we need to know in order to hit [00:14:00] the, line of profitability. and all of these are going to be different depending on what your business is, what your price point is and everything in there.
So you can’t go based off of these industry benchmarks that you see. like I said, they don’t ever align. and. That it’s just all over the place. I think the point, the thing that you’re pointing out here though, too, is a lot of these are measured in isolation rather than in aggregate. So for example, let’s say, you skipped over one and that’s average contract length, so ACV.
And if the ACV is one to three years, really you should be willing to pay more per demo. Because you have a stronger LTV, but so many brands don’t think of it in that capacity. And they think, and I don’t know if this comes back to the CMO shtick that we’ve talked about how many times about a CMO is out of business for two years, and then they’re [00:15:00] piecing out.
So they’re focused on the short term rather long term. But the point that I’m trying to make here is if your ACV is multiple years, you should be willing to pay more upfront because of the payoff that has over the course of time. Absolutely. I think it’s just, it’s. To your point, it is hard in that CMO role to not to look long term and look at those metrics.
I think that there’s just so much pressure on that position that you need to have short term wins. And that’s where you end up running into trouble with like high churn rates, trying to break into new markets that don’t make sense and things like that. so it’s definitely, I think it’s unrealistic goals come from outside pressure more than anything.
Thank you. And then they are added pressure when there’s silos that are created, where all of this data lives with somebody else and the people managing the day to day or trying [00:16:00] to move the needle day to day are clueless as to what exists and what the actual track record looks like. So main piece of advice here is you should be tracking all of the metrics that I have listed out here.
Number one thing as you’re like setting goals: make sure when you do the math, that it all adds up. Do you need to have a 10x return on ad spend to hit your CAC payback period of 12 to 18 months? Like you should, the math should work out for every single one of these. And if it doesn’t, then you know, you’re setting unrealistic targets. You know what? Perfect example. So this is what I was doing on my. Notepad, right?
Demo costs a hundred dollars. You’re converting 25 percent demos into customers. So your cost of acquisition of a new customer in that capacity is 400. Let’s say your price of what you sell is [00:17:00] 40 a month subscription. You should be break even at 10 months. If you add in an ACV of let’s say two years, everything after that first 10 months, you have margin and it’s growing margin and scaling margin that assumes that you retain the customer, which is where I went back to at the beginning of this hot take section of these are really difficult marketing targets when there’s other aspects of customer service and customer marketing that play into their success or not.
All right. So let’s talk about some other. Things that need to be consistent within an organization. So this is the one that drives me up a wall, the most defining lead stages. So
Most anybody in the B2B space at this point is familiar with the terms MQL, SQL, and pipeline. The problem that we see more than ever is that there is zero standardization for actually how these metrics [00:18:00] are
measured. So going back to benchmarks, any metric, any benchmarks that you see for MQL, SQL, conversion rates, anything with these metrics, like I would almost ignore completely because there is no standard definition for it. That said, there absolutely should be a standard definition for this.
So an MQL is a demo or a trial or a contact sales. It is somebody who is risen their hand and says that they want to talk to sales and they want to see the product. It is a conversation happens after an MQL. There is no like ebook downloads are not MQLs. Webinar signups are not MQLs. Somebody who visited the website and then visited three extra pages, or however you set up your lead scoring in HubSpot is not an MQL.
An MQL is somebody who raised their hand and said they want to talk to somebody they’re interested in buying. What about all of the ICP and persona layers that go on top of that? [00:19:00] Your, an MQL does not like fuel outbound, like that’s, we’re going to get into this, but if you’re focused on outbound, which that is way more of an outbound strategy, there shouldn’t necessarily be a lead scoring system because you’re like pulling those targets.
again, sales is not necessarily my thing, but if you’re looking to drive outbound, the. The scoring system and everything is a lot different than driving inbound. I’m going to argue with on this one real quick. You can drive and we’ve, seen this, you can drive 3000 MQLs and all of them are garbage because they are not somebody that will ever buy from your business.
And they were doing demos or handoff to sale types of actions. I’m going to argue that there has to be some layer of qualification that goes on top of. A hand raiser to define qualified or not. You can add ICP fit into that. Fine. [00:20:00] fair. this, there are, so I’m, I may be oversimplifying this a little bit.
Like you can add certain layers like that, but my point, my main point is like
Somebody who is downloaded a webinar visit, like some of the lead scoring that you can set up in HubSpot is absolute bullshit. And it needs to be somebody who like a hand raiser has to be one of the core functions of an MQL.
An SQL is now they have talked to sales and you can assign a dollar value to them. I can’t tell you how many times I hear people say, Oh, like, how does this impact pipeline? Pipeline, our pipelines down, blah, blah, blah. They don’t even know how to measure… pipeline is your sales qualified leads times the estimated revenue that you’re going to get from that.
If you can’t calculate an estimated revenue based on deal size, you’re not effectively measuring pipeline.
that’s that is how. The numbers work. [00:21:00] What about SALs? I don’t even know what that is. Stop making shit up. Sales accepted leads is an SQL. It’s the same fucking thing. No, there’s a conversation versus not conversation.
in your definition, sales accepted is, Hey, yeah, this makes sense. And I can actually have an opportunity to close them, but I haven’t talked to them yet. they fit the profile. They fit the ICP fit from a sales perspective. Yeah. I just wouldn’t, I sure somebody in the comments, tell me a reason why you need to measure SALs and SQLs because our definition is probably garbage.
That’s probably why. Yeah. an MQL is a sales accepted lead in theory. All right. Common thing that we see all the time. I think this is probably the most common question when not the other stuff is the [00:22:00] most common questions when setting goals,
The biggest struggle when setting goals and measurement at this point, especially in B2B,
is complex customer journeys. Andy, do you have any advice for how to take into consideration these complex customer journeys?
Avoid trying to figure it out at a granular level because it’s impossible. Between everything between tracking issues, how people consume content. Look, it’s literally impossible unless you are standing next to somebody as they go through their buying process. You will not know what’s going through their mind, what’s influencing them, and what’s driving them to make the decision or not.
You can ask feedback surveys and qualitative stuff to get a sense, but like the days of, yeah, this particular ad drove this actual transaction, and that’s the only thing that did it, so let’s throw more money at this ad [00:23:00] are gone. Like they just do not exist. Now, a little bit later, we’ll get into some of the measurement tech that helps fill in some of these gaps, but I think
There always has to be a basic understanding that the customer journey is complex.
It’s going to be different for every individual user. And the best thing that you can do is try to find commonalities in that customer journey and optimize based on those commonalities. But even that is going to like, there’s limited information that you can do with that. And that’s why it is super important to look beyond channel based attribution.
If you’re sitting in a conference room somewhere and you’re saying, Wow, our Google search ads are driving X percent of our revenue, but LinkedIn isn’t driving anything, like you’re missing part of the picture because those are hitting different stages of the funnel.
There are different tactics. Demand gen versus demand capture. Everybody’s heard that at this point. But you need to [00:24:00] have some other layer of tracking or modeling on top of in platform stats, like leads, demos, trials that are driven directly from that.
, right? Like you need to have, either you’re doing like media mix modeling, you’re doing holdout tests, you’re investing in attribution tech, like hockey stack, dream data, visible.
and one of the things, like if you’re, if you are. The marketing executive and you’re set sold on we really need to have the reporting in place. Like you, quite frankly, you have to invest in that sort of technology. if you’re, I feel like we see this all the time where client wants answers on these questions, won’t spend a thousand dollars a month on attribution software.
okay, you’re spending a hundred thousand dollars a month on LinkedIn and Google ads, and you want to know how they impact like the full customer journey, but you won’t spend. 1, [00:25:00] 200 a month on an attribution software. if you want those answers, you have to use those tools. we can’t just pull that shit out of our ass.
I think the other way to look at this though, too, is
What level of incremental improvements or declines do you have when you actually hone in on your true audiences? Rather than spraying and praying and saying, Oh yeah, this generic ebook applies to three different audience segments. If you break things down in a campaign mindset and start to measure it against the audience sets, you should start to see incremental changes.
If you’re truly making an impact on, I don’t know, AP managers and procurement managers versus IT crowd. You should see that filter through into the various leads that are coming into the pipeline, whether it’s demos or not. And if they’re converting, then you know. It’s fair. It’s fair. All right.
So [00:26:00] as I expected, to be honest, the, create conflict section on measurement of this podcast has gone on way longer than it should have. setting goals is really hard. A lot of people aren’t very good at a lot of people get frustrated with, the goals that they are given and expected to hit and not understanding where they come from.
So for the rest of this, I really want to go into how we approach goal setting. And, really what that looks like and how you take, all of the stuff that we were just complaining about, what are the actions that we can do to make this better? Ian, if you could bring up the slide on setting goals to your go to market motion.
The first thing when setting goals for any sort of organization is understanding what your actual go to market motion is. I have a couple here. [00:27:00] you’ve heard every sort of lead growth. At this point, customer led growth, community led growth, sales led growth, product led growth. I’m going to try to simplify it here a little bit into three separate buckets, sales led, product led, and e commerce.
Cause this is going to tell you, this is where you start, not only from like setting goals, but this is going to define your entire paid media strategy. That’s what your goals actually define your entire paid media strategy. So first things first, I understanding like how your business does sales. Do you have, so let’s talk about some of the sales led organizations.
So there are large enterprise, like we only sell to fortune 500. this is something that we’ve seen before, right? Yeah. There’s six fortune or five, 500 fortune, 500 CTOs that we can sell to. Okay. That is a. Completely different [00:28:00] measurement, strategy, structure, everything is completely different compared to, I have a 150 a month, SAS product for, I don’t know, it’s a data provider or something, right?
Completely different deal sets. So the goals and how you approach strategy, content, reporting, all that is going to be a lot different. So on the enterprise side, from a strategy side, the 500 people that you can. Reach. So how you go about measuring that is going to be different. of course, revenue is what happens at the end of the day, but in this position, your sales team already has the contact information for these 500 people.
They already know where they live. They could probably walk over and knock on their door. So what do you have to do? You have to. Focus on getting them to engage with your content and a lot of your measurement and reporting is more around how those accounts are engaging with your content. Do they like the content?
How are they? Are they looking at you in comparison to [00:29:00] competitors? there’s so much more that goes into reporting. Those 500 accounts. so from a goal setting, you’re really focused on engagement metrics more than anything. next one, large sales teams, heavy outbound. there’s a lot of talk around gated content versus ungated content.
Here’s where I’m going to try to help you differentiate what you gating eBooks, white papers, case studies, And things like that, is a strategy for a company that is focused on outbound. You are trying to develop warmer leads for outbound. So if you have a 300 person sales team and SDR team, and they’re trying to do outbound, they’re, creating lists on themselves or using tools like RB to be there.
Like in there, there’s this heavy outbound motion. Like you can do that traditional, lead gen waterfall strategy, and you can. [00:30:00] You can, measure and set goals based on the outbound sales teams, goals, and objectives, right? So that’s where you’re tying your goals to what they have. again, if you still want to make sure all of the math adds up at the end of the day, like some of those metrics that we were talking about before, what is your cost per contact?
does that align with the contact to, the con in this situation, the contact to close rates are going to be much, much smaller. So the volume of leads that you need to generate to hit the CAC payback period and return on ad spend goals are going to be way, way higher than if you’re solely focused on demos.
If you have a small state, so moving to the next one, a small sales team, like you’re not going to want to gate your content. you’re going to want to have campaigns that are more of have more of a demand gen focused strategy. And this is where it becomes, [00:31:00] your main goal is to essentially build an audience and then convert that audience into demos and trials.
again, there’s. I think here, one of the things that you can really focus on is quality. pretty much for large sales teams and small sales team, like the quality of traffic is super important. but I think that in this case, like a small sales team doesn’t want to reach out to a bunch of people who download an ebook, they only have time for people who had demos.
and now with some of the visitor identification software that’s coming out here, To be honest, I’m not even sure if the large sales team should be getting content anymore, but point being is like, you need to align your goals to your sales teams, goals, and each of these organizations and how you measure is going to be a lot different.
A product led organization is, you’re trying to drive free. Signups that are then going to be converted by sales. So in this situation, you need to set your goals based on [00:32:00] what is the conversion rate from a free trial signup to a actual closed one deal. and maybe in this case, there’s a whole strategy around taking those.
Free trials and converting them, right? That might not be something that you see in something that is more demo, human led sales team oriented. And then e comm literally just takes that to the next level where at this point, like there’s not even really a, usually these are going to be like smaller, you Smaller price point items.
A lot of times in e com too, it’s like a perpetual license versus a subscription. let me put it this way. If you have a perpetual license, like you’re not measuring like CAC payback period, because it’s a one that’s where we start to. Look at return on ad spend rather than CAC payback period. so first thing you need to understand how your business is run so you can tie your business, tie your goals to what your sales [00:33:00] team’s goals are.
I think what makes it challenging is when you have larger. Businesses that intermingle and have different go to market motions within and under the same umbrella. For example, I can think of at least one company that is product led, but has a sales team that becomes a squeaky wheel because they don’t have enough free trials.
When in reality, there’s plenty to do and they’re closing at a good clip. so I think that’s the other thing too, is while this graphic is meant to be simplistic. In reality, there’s a lot of other variables that come into play. Oh, each one of these is an internal silo. I can think of. Four of our clients right now that have an ABM motion and outbound motion and an inbound motion, and like you said, it’s just different business units operating in different aspects, and this is where there’s consulting work that needs to [00:34:00] take place on our end a lot of the time is like helping them guide them and say, yeah, you can’t be measuring the same stuff for your ABM campaigns as you are for your driving leads for your outbound team, right?
that’s, It’s apples and oranges, right? And the times that people get in hot water years, when there’s not an alignment or understanding of these motions and what’s being measured. And instead they’re listening to other frameworks out there that sound good in practice, but just do not align to the actual business in practice.
Yeah, it gets, It gets hairy, lots of politics. Maybe this is why a lot of executives just make up their goals because it’s just too complicated. where’s the, okay. So let’s talk about like small versus large sales teams here for a second. Like small teams can still do heavy outbound. where do you, what would you say defines [00:35:00] that line?
Is it pure count? Is it how they’re actually operating from a sales function? It’s definitely how they’re operating from a sales function, right? Like you can have a large sales team that’s heavily, you have enough inbound demo requests. That you can probably do that. there are some, I’m thinking, I feel like zoom info would probably be like a great example for it’s a very popular tool that almost everybody uses.
And you’re going to want to see a demo for hand. they’ve built the brand to this point where they probably have a ton of inbound hub spot would probably be another great example where they’re probably the best example, right? Where they probably have a very large sales team. That’s heavily focused on, inbound.
Yeah. Where I think that there are other, there are small startups out there that are also like heavily just focused on outbound, right? think about something I’ve been talking quite a bit now. It’s a lot of the AI SDR tools, [00:36:00] right? Think about how you can take a lead gen approach to help build a better list for some of these outbound AI tools.
So now like you’re able to feed these tools with. Content that they’ve engaged with content that they’ve downloaded. you have all of their information because you captured it via form and they can do the warm outbound nurturing process in a way that might be better than a traditional like email sequence followed by salesperson.
I’m not even sure if that really. Works that well anymore, you get a lead, send them into a seven email sequence just so they can unsubscribe. like you have to be a lot more creative than that, but you can loop it into your LinkedIn outreach, your gifting programs, your, track them down, see what conferences are going to be at, create, invite them to other events.
there’s a lot of interest. Like all [00:37:00] of those to me are like. Outbound motions once you have the contact information. so definitely varies. All right. So let’s say I’m the internal marketer now that’s in charge of pay digital. Great. I understand what our go to market motion is now. What the hell am I measuring?
All right. You want to, bring up the KPIs slide?
Maybe not. All right. So with a long sales cycle, you have to be able to track. Engage performance throughout the whole customer journey. And this is where it gets like. I would say like pretty complex, but you have, this is where you have to have the understanding that like our sales cycle is long and the things that we are tracking for a first [00:38:00] touch are not going to be the same things that we were tracking for the last touch.
But similar to what we were talking about with CAC payback, return on ad spend, all of that stuff, you need to make sure that these metrics and the math works out, right? are we sending enough quality traffic to our website at that converts at. 5 percent to get the appropriate demos that we’re needing, right?
Like all of that math should flow together. that said the way that we break it out is into four separate segments based on what we’re trying to learn. Number one is like reach metrics. these are probably the least valuable metrics, but also the most valuable at the same time, because the one thing about paid ads, some people don’t quite understand is you get what you pay for, right?
if you pay a thousand dollars a month, it’s only going to get you X amount of clicks, X amount of impressions, X amount of whatever. And if you are not [00:39:00] pushing the volume to hit your goals, like then you’re never going to hit your goals. Budget would be another one spend like that would fall under the reach category.
this is just kind of table stakes, things that you should measure because all of your conversion rates and everything else is going to be based off of this. You know what? The thing is that needs to lead into this though, is understanding what your total attainable market is. Because that defines, what quality reach and impressions means.
It creates a standard. Otherwise, like having the philosophy of spend more, get more, what you get might not actually be good. Yeah. You’ll get a higher frequency. That’s what you’ll get. Or spamming people that are never going to buy from you. Yeah. And you, like you do have to worry about if you have a small like wearing them out pretty quickly.
somebody told me recently, cause we were, [00:40:00] looking at some of the AI outbound tools is you can blow through your ICP and quite frankly, piss people off pretty quickly if they’re like not ready to buy. So there is you have to not overdo it too. cause not everybody is in a position to buy and they might be in a position to buy later and you don’t want to blow it now by, delivering them a frequency of 35 because they viewed a video on LinkedIn.
So this does lead into the next one though. early on in any form of strategy, what the number thing, one thing that we see all the time is what ads are doing well, but what you need to know is like whether or not people actually like the content that you are. Serving them. so before you can even worry about are these people converting into a trial or a demo?
This is where. Messaging and positioning is like super important. Like we want to test things [00:41:00] like, certain onsite performance. Are they viewing multiple pages? what’s their time on site? Are they visiting key pages? And then the other things on the engagement side are just like click through rate and social engagement.
Like those are the metrics and the benchmarks that are going to tell you. Whether or not your content is good. And sometimes it’s not all just numbers either. Like people can comment on ads and you can see whether or not people like the ad. we have, I saw a client recently where they had a lot of negative feedback on their ads specifically about their product.
And you have to, it shows that okay, you either need to, in that situation, they need to work on their product, but sometimes you see that feedback on ads too, where it’s not necessarily. Resonating with your audience. So with any sort of message testing, it’s, you want to really key in on these engagement metrics.
Cause these are going to be the leading indicators as to whether [00:42:00] or not these users are going to convert to trials or demos three to six months down the road. Yeah. it’s context and quality. Again, I think one thing that the jury might still be out on is like LinkedIn’s dwell metric, right? Yeah.
It’s, it suggests that people are actually consuming. The ad in a greater capacity, if it’s a higher dwell time, it could also be, they just got a call or they spaced out and they left their cursor on the ad. But, I think when we think about like time on site and page per visit, those are, They still hold true, but I feel like they are becoming more legacy and easily skewed in the grand context of things and things like dwell time, how much of a video you watch, whether the audio is on or not, which is a great metric.
If you’re running Reddit ads to look at, all of those other ancillary things come into play and suggest whether not just you’re hitting the right audience, but people are consuming it in a [00:43:00] deliberate way. Fashion that suggests quality engagements. it’s not a quality metric social actions just by itself because there’s so much crap that gets thrown into social actions.
if you’re running a conversation ads or in mail ads and people hit delete this conversation. That’s a social action, not a positive one, as James pointed out. I think the other thing that I would add here too, again, with some of the new visitor identification tools, as you can, there’s a couple of things in LinkedIn, you’re able to see all the different companies that have engaged with your ads.
there’s a qualitative metric right there. do these companies actually fit our ideal customer profile now? R to B, R B to B came out the individual user identification software. Like now you can, if you put that code on your landing page, you can see the name and LinkedIn profile of the user.
All of the majority of the U S visitors that visit your landing page. So you can say is LinkedIn’s targeting crap for what [00:44:00] we have? Do we need to build out a TAM list? Like, how can I adjust my targeting to make sure that I’m hitting the right people? Cause. Engagement always isn’t always a problem with your creative.
Sometimes it’s a problem with your targeting. And the reality is, that ad platforms don’t have the best targeting for every single ICP. and now there’s a lot of tools that can make you feel more confident that you’re at least hitting the right people. But I think as we look at kind of these four buckets, and we move from engagement to conversion, ultimately business, the big thing here is, do you know who your customers are?
And the audience that you can grow or want to grow in because there’s a natural waterfall that comes out of this. If you’re finally tuned and your reach is strong, okay, then what’s the engagement that you’re getting off of that reach and impressions because it’s qualified impressions on the backside of that, how many are trials?
And then how may are converting into business and, converting into actual paying [00:45:00] customers for X amount of years or months. And for what amount of money and revenue, which goes back to what I was saying before, when you asked me, like, how do you measure complex customer journeys? And I give you a bullshit answer of you can’t, it’s not necessarily bullshit.
It is true to an extent, but like when you break it down and think about it from an audience perspective, combined with actual metrics. There’s a way in which you can do it. It’s not foolproof. It’s still got a lot of gray areas, but you can at least get a sense of what’s working and what’s not within those umbrellas.
you need to build a system that ties each of these buckets together. Again, I’m going to go back to making sure that the math works out, but also, if you want to know how much. Like you need to be able to have benchmarks for all of your business level, metrics, transactions, revenue, customer acquisition, cost time to close, CAC, all that stuff, conversion metrics.
Like those are table stakes at this [00:46:00] point. Those are your raw platform extras trial, add to car engagement, but this is where the tools come in handy. Cause if you do use a tool like hockey stack, for example, you can tell whether or not somebody. the full customer journey that they took. You can see, you can upload, you can see that this individual, they saw a couple of our LinkedIn ads.
They subscribed to our newsletter. They were an attendee at this conference. And these are the three common touch points that they have. And then you can optimize based on what those common touch points are. If you don’t have a tool, you can’t do that. So that’s the underlying thing that I struggle with a lot is we get asked those questions and.
The recommendation is okay, we, let’s talk about some attribution technology and see what we can do to, improve on that. And it falls dead. And again, it’s seems to be a missing concept of like when a tool like that [00:47:00] is actually necessary. I think though, just to clarify what you’re saying.
And correct me if I’m wrong, a tool only comes into play when you’ve got the foundation and understanding of where you go to market motion is, how you’re defining success and what actually you’re running your ads against from a target’s perspective, right? Only then is a tool actually going to help you.
So don’t get fixated on tech and technology as The cart before the horse, you have to get all your foundations in place first, which I mean, to summarize is the whole purpose of today’s episode and why we’re leading it off in the first part of our six part series. So absolutely. All right, James. So we did this when we had guests on.
So I’m going to ask you now, and it’s not in the outline. So with our magic wand, what would you change if you had the power to change one thing about goal setting?[00:48:00]
man, for me specifically, I wish I would have access to all of the tech, to be honest, I, listen, tech does not tell you all the answers, but when you get asked all of the questions and you don’t have the appropriate tools to answer those questions, it can become frustrating. certainly in my years of experience doing this, I know all kinds of workarounds and tests that you can run on your own, but they don’t always give you the answers that, that you’re looking for.
So that’s something that I would really want access to. what’s the thing that I would change? comes back to making sure that goals are set based on realistic expectations and. Math that [00:49:00] actually works out on the backend. I think that a lot of goals are set based off of industry level benchmarks and they’re not actually set based off of the math.
I don’t know how to explain it behind the net. You need to have the appropriate reach. You need to have the appropriate engagement. You need to have the appropriate conversion numbers because all of those are the ones that are going to lead to transactions, revenue, et cetera. your time to close, like all of that stuff needs to work out.
Your paid media campaigns are not going to improve your time to close your paid media campaigns. Aren’t going to reduce your churn rate. Like that stuff needs to work out for you to hit your goals. I will argue with that on the last part because they can impact it. If your current paid media campaigns are shit, if you drive better, if you drive more quality users to sign up for the product, they will churn less.
Sure. Yeah, exactly. If you’re driving shit today, Yeah, you need to flip the script to make it. What’s [00:50:00] yours wave my magic, seltzer. What’s your, wave my magic seltzer. Okay. if I drink your magic seltzer, I would say, it’s very similar to yours in
Not just having access to the data and the insights, but the reasoning behind why targets are set.
And I realized there are some confidential matters that might come into that, such as a sale and acquisition that nobody’s going to know about, but you’re setting something up for the future. Getting at least an understanding of where these metrics are being pulled from and what they’re being based off of at least creates a conversation that defines reality.
Versus a BHAG that’s never going to be achieved. I think, that’s what I would change is getting an understanding of the reasoning and decision making.
I’m surprised you didn’t say clean, consolidated data. That’s a huge one too, [00:51:00] actually. Yeah. But nobody’s going to, that will never get solved because if you want to solve one problem in B2B, could you imagine if every client we had all of their metrics were standardized. Everything was in the right place. They had the integrations between the tools all set up instead of Oh yeah, we have a data center that pulls in impressions, clicks, and spend. thanks. That’s so cool that you have that. It’s so useful for everyone.
Now give us another 50, 000 and we’ll see what we can do with it. All right. Any closing thoughts? no, I think for me, the main thing is that it’s kind, for me, this is, it was tough to have a conversation around like goal setting. And I feel if I was looking at showing up to this episode, okay, cool, how to set goals.
I know how to do that. that’s probably the immediate thing I would think. But if there’s anything I want people to get out, it’s [00:52:00] there’s a lot more to it than just looking at industry benchmarks. there, there is a science behind it and you do need to make sure that goals are tailored towards your business model and align with your sales goals and initiatives.
And if they don’t that’s the place that you need to start. There you go. All right, folks. that concludes episode one of our first six part series. Tune in for the next one. and we will catch you later in the meantime. Like subscribe, we’ll see you next time.