Mary Keough’s Post

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Director of Product and Content Marketing at CoLab Software | 🎙️ Co-Host Purposeful Marketing Podcast

If I had $1,000 to conduct a marketing experiment to prove the efficacy of paid social here's what I'd do: 👉  1. Install a LinkedIn Insight tag and Facebook pixel on the website. 👉  2. Wait for 30 days while this collects data. 👉  3. During the 30 day period, I'd create a custom landing page focused on product aware content. Product aware = proving to the prospect that you're the best option. Assume your prospect already knows how your solution could solve their pain. Now they need to know if your solution is best for them. The focus should be education over conversion. 👉  4. I would then use Canva to create a killer ad in both 1:1 (1200x1200 pixels) AND a 9:16 (for Facebook stories). High quality image, minimal text. 👉  5. I'd make sure my CRM was set-up to collect essential data (name, email, company, job title). HubSpot is free for up to 2,000 contacts. USE IT! 👉  6. Assuming the 30 days is now up. I would set-up a retargeting campaign in both LinkedIn and Facebook. $500 for each channel. I toyed with sending more $$ to LinkedIn, but I've become more bullish on Facebook recently. If you're on the opposite end of the spectrum, do a $750/$250 split. No audience expansion. Ads show up in the feed only! 👉  7. Let that budget run dry and report on the results. The results will NOT be sales. If your leadership team expected this, they either don't understand how marketing works today or you did a poor job of setting expectations. The goal is to prove: ☝️ Our audience is on social media. ✌️ Here are the ideal buyers we can target here (company and job title data). 🤑  If your company doesn't continue to feed this experiment after these results, run. #marketing #b2bmarketing #industrialmarketing #manufacturingmarketing #dobetter

Does this really "prove" the efficacy of paid social? 🤔 The tags collect data from the website. How does the website get visitors in the first place? There must be awareness, salience, and so on. The LinkedIn Insights Tag needs at least 300 unique members (aka unique visitors). Facebook Pixel recommends >= 1.000 users. If i have >= 1.300 regular unique visitors to my website, i´m already relevant. Without comparing it in a on/off scenario over a longer timespan, even a larger gain is not of any significance. Within paid social, retargeting might deliver the best returns.  But does that prove the efficacy of paid social in general? I´d say no. I would run if i see a company feeding their paid social strategy on this "experiment".

Bob Iasillo

V.P. Sales and Marketing - 3X Start Up Medical Device Launches - Tele-health - Tele-Optometry - Demand Generation Marketing - Digital-Marketing

1y

Being able to target is Key. FB removed so much of the most valuable targeting. For companies that missed the boat, they could have a rough time getting FB to work. I can still run ads to all previous people who engaged with my ads. It's a huge competitive advantage. Run the test for the length of time of your average sales cycle. Copy of the ad is really important. Disruptive content in the visual. I use cartoons, comic strip style, 4 or 5 images I drop in a movie format, put some music to it. My other content pillar is HD video of our tech etc, fast moving. I try to come up with different visuals that will stop the scroll. Copy of the message is equally as important, maybe more so. Compelling copy. Convey the message. Educate at scale. Self reported attribution, how did you hear about us, free form entry on the website. Direct book calendar link. measure avg sales cycle. Will be faster.

Patrick Cumming

Head of Performance Marketing (Europe) @ KlientBoost | B2B Lead and Demand Gen Specialist | $21M+ Pipeline Generated in 2023

1y

This is great. LI really needs a save function for stuff like this 🤔

Todd Mumford

Marketing & Demand Gen Leader | B2B SaaS Scaleup Growth | Go to Market Fundamentals

1y

Mary Keough what KPIs would you use to measure outcomes for this type of experiment?

Lysa Goodman

B2B Marketing Mgmt for Manufacturing | HubSpot | Leading Content, Social, Product, Demand Gen

1y

Clear, concise, actionable.

🫶 Aaron Weekes

🧠 Building B2B marketing that performs with purpose | 🎙Co-host of the Purposeful Marketing Podcast | 🖐 Want to be a guest? DM me to jump on the pod

1y

Just poured some coffee and read through the comments this morning. Oh boy...there are so many insightful nuggets in here for improving your paid strategy. Appreciate you starting the convo Mary! The recommendation I would add is to really evaluate your T.A.M. if you're going to build a cold audience. Do you really sell to 300k+ buyers or in actually 30k+ buyers? I would also avoid over-segmenting if you're just getting started and want to try this 30 day experiment. Add job titles, interests, member skills, member groups, etc. to get your T.A.M. right. But you don't have to break all those parameters into their own audience. Especially, if you only have $1k to validate the experiment.

Pierre Herubel

Build and launch a B2B Content System (Course) → Join the Waitlist Now

1y

Technical and crispy love it. I can see your experience with this. Might need a full post on point 4 because behind “killer ad” there is a lot to do. Also did you use this strategy pre IOS14 or post IOS14 ? Thanks Mary

Dan Martin

Brand, Content and Product Marketing Leader I Vice President of Marketing @ DHI Group, Inc.

1y

Nick Martin Thought you'd be interested in this.

Sana Shahid

Marketer | B2B SaaS | PMC Certified

1y

Love the post but I have a question. How far and how long one can run? And what is the best way to educate + make them prioritize the budget for marketing?

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