#201: Paid Spend | Mastering B2B Paid Spend: A 2025 Roadmap for Marketers with John Short, CEO of Compound Growth Marketing and Kym Parker, SVP of Media Strategy

When done right, paid spend is like throwing gasoline on the flames of what’s working in your marketing. Done wrong – it’s just a huge waste of time and money.

In this episode, Dave Gerhardt hosts an live session with John Short, CEO of Compound Growth Marketing (CGM), and Kym Parker, SVP of Media Strategy at CGM, who walk through tried and true strategies they’ve built from managing over $50 million in paid spend.

They also cover:

• How to choose which strategy is best for you and exactly how to target the right ICP
• The three keys to successful paid media, like setting up actionable reporting
• How to identify how much you can spend for leads/account at each stage of the sales and marketing funnel

Timestamps

• (00:00) - - Intro to John and Kym
  
• (07:29) - - Choosing the Perfect Paid Media Strategy
  
• (11:57) - - The $100 CPL Myth
  
• (15:32) - - Three Keys to Successful Paid Media
  
• (18:10) - - Qualification Is Critical in ABM Success
  
• (19:48) - - How You Should Think About Bidding Algorithms
  
• (22:32) - - Prospect Experience: The Campaign Funnel
  
• (24:12) - - Using a Multi-Channel Approach
  
• (29:32) - - Mid-Intent Funnel Examples
  
• (33:04) - - Executing on a Paid Acquisition Strategy
  
• (39:13) - - Tailoring Your Messaging for Buying Committee Engagement
  
• (43:47) - - Balancing Funnel Strategies
  
• (46:28) - - Justifying Higher Costs
  
• (50:43) - - Channel Testing and Target Comparison
  
• (52:08) - - How to Master Paid Media in Enterprise Marketing

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Former startup CMO Dave Gerhardt and guests share their marketing knowledge to help drive revenue at your company and grow your career in marketing. The podcast mostly covers B2B SaaS, but there's something applicable for anyone working in marketing today.Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:

You're listening to B2B Marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt. Here we go. It's the top of the hour. We're live. Craig was getting lonely. Craig was in here early. Craig, good to see you. Matt's in here.

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:24]:

Ashley's in here. Such a timely topic. I love that. Dan loves the plant. We've leveled up in here a little bit. I'm excited to do this. So, hey, my name is Dave. I'm the founder and CEO here at Exit Five.

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:36]:

Although I actually read this, the guy from 37 Signals, Jason Fried, wrote a post that, like, you don't go to the local grocery store, and the owner of the grocery store introduces themselves as the CEO. So no more job titles. I'm just Dave. I wore my collared shirt today, and I'm super excited because once a month, we do these live sessions. Don't you dare call them a webinar. We do a live session where we like to bring in someone from the Exit Five universe, subject matter expert to do a deep dive on a particular topic that is timely and relevant to you all. So in the past, we've done sessions on how to build a marketing plan. We've done SEO, we did an email teardown, we did website tear downs, and somehow we have gotten to this point in the year and we have not done a session on paid media, digital spend, paid marketing, advertising.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:23]:

Why do they say paid ads? You ever wonder that? Why is it paid ads? There's no such thing as free ads. So anyway, we have John Short and Kym Parker here from Compound Growth Marketing. We're going to bring them on in a little bit. But before I get into that, I just want to do quick housekeeping. So first hop in the chat and let me know who you are and where you're writing in from. So I'm going to write Dave. Burlington, Vermont. Okay.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:43]:

And I just want to show John and Kym how many people are here right now. So Todd's in New Jersey. Tom's in Chicagoland. John is in Oslo. Andy's from Chicago. Danielle's in Salem. What's up, Danielle? Emily's from Maine. Lee from Boise, Idaho.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:55]:

JR Monument, Colorado. Mary from Madison, Wisconsin. Alex from London. Heather from Boston. Sarah. Lynn's from Anaheim, California. Steve's from Chicago. Aaron from Durham, North Carolina.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:03]:

Faye from Vancouver. Anna. What's up, Anna? Anna's in Austin. Joshua Tree, California. Daniel's in Austin, Texas. We are just. We're there. I'm still full from all the meat that we ate there.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:14]:

Matthew Wolf is in Durango, Colorado. We Got somebody in Tel Aviv, somebody in Boston, Utah. It's amazing. It's amazing. Matt's in the six. Obviously, there's a bunch of people here. This is a popular topic. All right, so before I bring John and Kym up, here's how this works.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:27]:

They have some slides. We're going to use those slides as background for our conversation. The goal is never to, like, present for 45 minutes and not let you get involved. So be super active in the chat. Ask your questions. You're also all marketers here. So one of the best things about doing these live sessions is we give each other feedback. We talk about what's working in your company inside of the chat here, do all that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:45]:

If you have a specific question, though, use the Q&A tab at the top there. Cause then I can go through and we can sort them. We rank them by upvotes. And then at the end, I think we're gonna have probably 20, 30 minutes of full Q&A with John and Kym. And if you took the time out of your day to be here, use it to your advantage. These are two experts in paid. Use it to talk about your strategy, gut check things you're doing. We wanna bring you into this.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:08]:

And that's a really great part of this. Now, the only other last housekeeping item is that you can't. We have a rule here at Exit Five. You cannot ask if this is going to be recorded. Does anybody. Anybody out there remember what happens if you ask if this is gonna be recorded first? We all need T shirts to say this webinar is being recorded. Look at. What is this new feature? Yes, this is being recorded, and it will be emailed to you.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:28]:

But Aaron knows if you ask if it's going to be recorded, you have to send us a video of you running one mile and doing 100 burpees. For some reason, nobody's ever actually sent me that video. So I don't know, maybe I need a different hook or something or different punishment. But it's all good. We got it recorded. We're going to send you all this. You'll get access to the deck. We'll make sure it's all super easy for you.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:46]:

All right, without further ado, I'm going to host. I'm going to sit back into my host chair. We're going to bring on John and Kym and hey, thanks for coming. Good to see you both.

John Short [00:03:55]:

Thanks for having us, Dave.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:56]:

Yeah, this is great. This is exciting. There's people from. What do you think about that? People from all around the world here.

John Short [00:04:01]:

I love seeing this.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:03]:

Yeah. Digital marketing is a global topic.

John Short [00:04:05]:

Look at Daniel Murphy paying attention.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:08]:

That's Daniel J. Murphy, for the record.

John Short [00:04:09]:

Daniel J. Murphy.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:11]:

So, fun fact. I was the first customer of John's agency called Compound Growth Marketing, and it's been cool to watch you all grow since then. It started off as a similar story in that we each kind of had solo businesses. Today you run a really successful B2B marketing agency focused on full funnel, but SEO paid is what we're going to talk about today. And they manage $50 million in spend for clients from all over. So I'm excited to dig into those learnings before we get in the deck. Kym, why don't you say hello and then we'll kick it over to John.

Kym Parker [00:04:39]:

Definitely.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:40]:

Quick intro. Sure.

Kym Parker [00:04:41]:

Yeah. Hi. I lead media here at the Compound Growth Marketing organization. We are running quite a bit of media, as you said, Dave, on lots of different channels. My focus is on building media strategies for businesses that are looking to drive performance and scale and achieve a bunch of different goals. So excited to talk through kind of how we approach that today.

Dave Gerhardt [00:05:00]:

And you, sir? We got the same microphone, same shirt. The key is you could be asked to play golf at any moment. So you got to stay ready in this attire. That's.

John Short [00:05:10]:

Yeah, that's it. I'm John. I'm CEO of Compound Growth Marketing. The first 12 years of my career were spent on the operating side at companies of all sizes. Logged me in, which was post IPO all the way up to yesware, which was seed to series A. And so have been building out performance marketing strategies for companies for a really long time and started Compound Growth Marketing about seven years ago. Been lucky enough to have clients like Dave and other folks.

Dave Gerhardt [00:05:41]:

For the record, they've graduated to much more legitimate clients now. But everyone needs their first customer. All right, let's get into the deck. The goal today is to help people get smarter about their paid strategy for 2025.

John Short [00:05:54]:

So, Kym, why don't you kick us off? So the plan here is for us to talk about paid media planning for 2025. We're going to go through a lot of the different steps that companies should be going through in terms of choosing the right strategy, identifying what their goals should be, and how they should be thinking about media overall. So really excited about this. But, Kym, why don't you walk us through choosing the perfect strategy for the companies and what we see with the companies we work with.

Kym Parker [00:06:23]:

Definitely. So when we kick off with a client and when we're helping you build a media strategy. We're going to Retro Fitness. We're going to start with thinking about what your goal is. And many of our clients have different sub goals. Typically it's one major goal which is growing the business, but how you're doing that is exposure to raise more capital. You want to go public, you want to grow your bottom line and get new leads for a specific product, you want to launch a product, you want to learn about the marketplace. Any of these could be viable or all of these could be viable goals.

Dave Gerhardt [00:06:53]:

We're all still here. Just start.

Kym Parker [00:06:56]:

The way that we're going to plan this for you is starting with the goal. So our kickoff with clients and as we think about the different approaches to building a media strategy is going to be set the goal with the leadership alignment with you all and then work backwards to figure out how we get there. Can move on to the next one as well.

John Short [00:07:13]:

Yeah. So we talked about identifying what the strategy is based on what your goals are for the company, whether you're looking to go public, whether you're looking to raise the next round of funding. The next thing that we think most companies should be paying attention to is what type of paid media strategy is going to work best for them. And there's this great article that I recommend everybody go and read as it provides a ton of context for B2B marketers in terms of thinking about what the right strategy is for them based on the product that they're looking for. And it's called a hundred way. Five ways to build $100 million business. And it walks through on the axis on the left here, it walks through the average revenue per account that a company is driving and then it shows the number of customers on the bottom axis there. And so what we see most typically this isn't a hard and fast rule, but at a high level it seems to be true.

John Short [00:08:13]:

Once a company gets to about $50,000 of sale price or average contract value, the motion tends to be a little bit more account based marketing focused. And under that it seems like there's more of an inbound focus. So with abm you have a finite customer base. You're selling lower volume at a higher transaction side. And so you're more focused on personalization. And the ad networks and the strategies you might employ are going to be a little bit different versus an inbound or demand generation motion where you have a lower ACV and an infinite number of accounts. It's the onus is on marketing to qualify leads as they come in and prepare them to talk to the sales team. And so this is one kind of key theme that we would really recommend companies take a look at as they're starting to put together their plan for 2025 and thinking about the strategies they want to employ.

Dave Gerhardt [00:09:12]:

Do you have this like, is this a slide in your strategy? Because have you found that oftentimes this might seem obvious, but have you found that when you get in there with a customer, they actually haven't thought of it at this level? Like, do you see companies that should be running ABM level advertising campaigns but they're trapped. They're still doing a lot of this higher volume inbound motion and they need to separate this out?

John Short [00:09:33]:

Yeah, it's always a question that we're asking and trying to understand from customers to kind of understand the goals that they're going after. But yeah, we'll see a lot of companies that are looking to invest heavily into channels that are more likely to drive small businesses when they're really trying to get bigger clients and move upstream.

Dave Gerhardt [00:09:53]:

This is kind of like the meta lesson for anything that we've done with Exit Five. It's like so often you can get into the tactics and people want the specific little hacks and the tests and whatever, but so often it's that the goals of the company don't match the strategy of the marketing efforts and that all needs to be rewound. And that's where a lot of like the legacy companies that, well, you know, we have this one VP and they still support this segment of high volume inbound. And it's just you need to set and be able to come up with a strategy that's going to match 100%.

John Short [00:10:22]:

Yeah. And this comes down to alignment with your sales team and also the goals that the rest of the business has in terms of how they're building the product, et cetera. The next piece that I wanted to talk about here was the CPL myths. So I see this all the time and it happens across the board, whether it be executives high, high up in the company or entry level folks who just joined the company. And we'll come in and we'll ask, hey, how much are you willing to spend on a lead or how much are you willing to spend for qualified lead? What's the ROI that you're, you're looking to get to? And our belief is the market is going to dictate what the value is at each stage. So I hear it all the time. We're spending over $100 cost per lead or we're driving qualified leads and they're costing more than $100 for us. This seems to be a sticking point for people.

John Short [00:11:18]:

And what we recommend is we actually have a calculator that will be sent out after this, but we recommend actually looking at what you're able to spend at each stage in the funnel based on what your conversion rates are through the funnel. So you have an average deal size that you're typically driving towards, and you have a conversion rate from opportunity to customer, from qualified lead to opportunity, and from lead to marketing qualified lead. And by backing out of those numbers, you should be able to pretty easily understand, okay, here's how much a qualified lead is worth to us. We project that it's going to have this amount of value for us based on the amount of conversions that we see. And so you can come up with a more educated answer there to understand what the actual value is and what you should be willing to spend on these types of leads. Thanks for linking to that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:16]:

Yeah. And do you feel like people have a good understanding of these metrics and these numbers and is it okay to have a rough estimate if you can't get the perfect data?

John Short [00:12:26]:

Yeah, I mean, we do find that a lot of companies struggle to get the perfect data. So just getting a basic understanding of where these numbers lie is important. I do think the further down funnel you get, the more of a disconnect marketing has between the sales side. So I think one of the most important exercises somebody can do, especially those of the people who are in the audience who are in their first 90 days, is go through this funnel economics exercise to understand what the conversion rates are from each stage in the funnel and understand by channel, by customer segment, by offer or funnel type, like whether it's demo request or whether it's chat or somebody coming in from the pricing calculator, what the velocity is through the funnel, how they convert. And also what you can typically see is there are different average deal sizes depending on how customers come into the market. Dave, I am cheating a little bit. And I saw Craig Heron asked an awesome question.

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:26]:

No, pardon. This is not cheating. This is how a good session. This is great.

John Short [00:13:31]:

So please take Craig. Do I use or think about payback period at all? 100%. I like the payback period metric even more than I like the CACT LTV type calculation just because I want to be able to understand how quickly we're going to see return on that investment and over what period of time. And so I think it's a crucial metric.

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:55]:

Cool. All right. Keep going.

John Short [00:13:57]:

So then, to kind of set up the next step of this presentation, we want to outline the three keys to successful paid media that all companies should be thinking about in order to set themselves up for a lot of success. And so number one is building really strong feedback loops. I think all marketers are really good at optimizing to the metrics that they are given, but unfortunately, in a lot of cases, we're not feeding marketers with the right information. And so we want to be able to drive feedback loops into the applications we're using, like Google Ads, Met Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and also back to the marketers to help them understand whether or not they're driving qualified leads. And marketers are only going to be as good as the data that's available to them. So one of the things we're really focused on, and I've been focused on throughout my career, is how do we get solid down funnel metrics that are predictive of revenue in my reporting so that I can make decisions quickly and understand which campaigns are most successful in driving the best customers. For us, as roas Bidding and CPL bidding have become more popular, we're doubling down on the importance of getting those offline metrics from your CRM back into the ad platform so you can train Google, etc. On where they should be focusing their time, energy and money.

John Short [00:15:26]:

For us, the second is the prospect experience, thinking about from the search result or from the social timeline to the ad to the landing page experience to the offer and then future visits that come after that. How are we lining things up? So we're creating a really cohesive experience. A great example of a bad experience is when I'm scrolling through LinkedIn and a company that I've never heard of before have no idea what they are doing. The main call to action there is a demo. You got to introduce yourself to people first before you start to move them down the funnel. And then third and final is strategic targeting. So one of the things we really preach is building out a digital ICP that not just looks at what the profile is, that the customers that you're going after, but also looks at the different inflection points that your ICP is going through in their journey in order to become a customer. And I think we have some more slides on this further down in the presentation, so we'll go in depth to really talk about what I mean there.

John Short [00:16:35]:

All right. So, Kym, do you want to take this first one to talk about our qualification frameworks?

Kym Parker [00:16:40]:

Definitely. So the feedback loop is inclusive of what John was talking about, basically the experience of the user and how they interact with you and how they move through your systems. So with our programs that we run, we're always looking at finding the right accounts and finding the right people and understanding that their behaviors as you track them in your CRM and with the data that you have available to you, these are the things that are actually moving the needle. So when we think about abm, we want to track this against what are all of the possible accounts in your list and then what makes those accounts really good ones for us to target ones for us to be bothering to invest budget in. So we have some ways that we tier those, some ways that we help. So ultimately in abm for us, this is going to talk about like is this account hot? Maybe you have $0.06, maybe you have demand based. There are pieces of information that we can get in from this to understand how they're engaging and whether or not they're one that we should be investing in. So when we get a list from someone, we don't necessarily take every account in that list and go run and put budget against it, but we want to segment it.

Kym Parker [00:17:51]:

And if we segment, there's different ways to go about this. We can do that by intent, we can do that by potentially what products they might be interested in. We can do that by what industry and category they sit in. So we can personalize the way that we speak to them. So taking the ABM list you have in, slicing and dicing it is the best way to get the most value for your dollars here.

Dave Gerhardt [00:18:12]:

Very good.

Kym Parker [00:18:13]:

Awesome. John talked about this a little bit. So bidding algorithms, this is, oh, this is the dirty secret black box part of media. So the way that we bid on things on platforms, this is going to include Google and Bing and the ones that we really manage hands on keys, these are the ones that we want to feed them data so they can get smarter. They struggle a little bit with B2B versus B2C. They don't always know what signals they're looking for. So when we have just kind of leads being filtered in, we want to be able to tell them that this lead is a viable lead that's moving down the funnel. So one of the best ways to do that is actually adding some of your offline data.

Kym Parker [00:18:50]:

So that could include down funnel movement of these leads. So if we could link back and connect to SQLs and meetings so that it can see that this lead it generated moved through those stages, it'll give that some more information around that is more valuable if you have other components like they actually went on to take a trial. You could have those tagged individually within Google and say that that's worth 2x what somebody just filling out a form is worth and starting to give more of these pieces of information to. I'm using Google here because they have the most sophisticated version of this, but kind of feeding that in really allows us to use the bidding to not just be about volume. And to John's point, we're not trying to get the $100cpl, we're trying to get the right people. And feeding in that kind of down funnel information really helps. I feel like there's some questions I'm going to pause. Yep.

Kym Parker [00:19:36]:

Booked a demo.

John Short [00:19:37]:

Yeah.

Kym Parker [00:19:37]:

There's tons of things on sites that can show engagement. The action about. Yeah. Booking certain site pages that are visited. If you have a pricing page that they visit, that's a great signal. And then the ultimate deal is going to be connecting your CRM and that may or may not be viable, but if you can feed CRM data back into Google, which it does accept, it'll really help you optimize the way that the algorithm works and save you some dollars there.

John Short [00:19:59]:

Yeah. So for the signals, the question is what are the signals you're using? For lead scoring, we use a mix of signals, third party signals, proprietary signals. So like Kym Ari said, whether someone books a demo, whether they come in through the pricing page, but then also the third party intent signals that Zoom info might provide, or we've even gone out and found databases on the Internet that give us additional context or information about what might be going on at a company. And I think with the acceleration we're seeing through AI, I think the amount of information that we're going to be able to process and leverage in order to understand whether or not companies are coming into market and using that as a lead scoring tool, I think it's going to be fundamentally have a gigantic impact on our ability to get information and identify who the right accounts are that we should be reaching out to. All right, so let's go into prospect experience. Kym, could you walk us through this?

Kym Parker [00:20:57]:

Definitely. So what is another one of the things that we do in week one is we talk about what it is like to move through everything that you have out in the world. This is your paid, your unpaid, all of your channels. So as a customer is moving through everything that you have. And this is an example from somebody who's got some different campaigns in market around financial or retail. What are the Tactics, what are the channels that they might be engaging with? And then how do we kind of map back what we're saying to them on those channels to have a holistic experience? To John's point, again, you don't want the first touch point to be a paid ad asking for a demo. That's really down here in orange. That's your conversion effort.

Kym Parker [00:21:37]:

But we want to think a little bit about how you're using organic search. Are you gathering users who are doing research that way? How are you tapping into other channels like Programmatic or video, and kind of seeding your audience with a brand message before you hit them with the demo message? So as we talk about tactics here and the channels it's executed on, some work really well to introduce some work really well as they're starting to click through and engage and you can start to kind of feed those signals back to say, you know, this is a remarketing message. They visited this page on my site and this is what I want to say. Or this is somebody who's super qualified because their account is at this stage in my sixth sense. So I know I want to serve the message mid funnel here. So overall, as that user moves through, that messaging has to make sense for the stage that they're at. And that really tracks to, like, what are you asking them to do? Are you asking them to visit the site? Are you asking them to demo? Are you asking them to talk to you? Each of those things really has to be thoughtful and purposeful when you deploy it. I think the next slide is going to tell us a little bit more about what that might look like.

Kym Parker [00:22:37]:

So overall, you have tons of opportunities of these different channels that you can use. The ones that we typically tap into are we use a lot of organic and paid search, and we do so hand in hand, paid social. We definitely tap into LinkedIn. If you're targeting developers, you should be talking to Reddit, and somebody brought that up in the chat as well. You can upload lists to meta. There's tons of social opportunities. LinkedIn is the most natural fit. So it comes up a lot in kind of the first version of media plans for our teams.

Kym Parker [00:23:07]:

You can do remarketing webinars. You could do things like inviting them to a webinar and then having your SDRs follow up with a lunch. But you feed them those names, we address, we like, talk to the right account and feed them through all of those stages. So overall, this is kind of one of these journeys and what it might look like where we're really holding hands between what we're doing in marketing and what they're following up on from sales. So that that message that we deployed in an ad is the message that they're hearing from the SDRs and the folks reaching out to them.

John Short [00:23:38]:

Yeah. And one of the questions I really like that came in from Jesse Prier is what are the companies that give you additional data on what's happening at the company beyond mere intent signals? So I assume you're asking about outside of like Sixth Sense, which is a little bit of a black box and not necessarily sharing a ton of information about what goes into those intent signals. We do look at zoom info Apollo. I love Patrick mentioning Clay as an opportunity there. I think that's one of the tools that, you know, when I think about some of the exciting things that are going on with intent data, that gives you this ability to come up with your own ideas of how to leverage data, how to automate the process of collecting information about how companies are working. So I think that's really helpful. And then it's been industry specific. So when we've worked with companies in the commercial real estate industry, there are tools that give you information around who has recently signed a lease or who has recently closed on a commercial building.

John Short [00:24:45]:

And so that has been an intent signal that we've used. Had companies that are analyzing 10k reports from earnings calls to understand what's going on inside those companies as a data point to help them identify who they should be targeting and whether or not they should be prioritizing accounts. So outside of just the basic, like Bombora six senses of the world, those are some of the places that I would look. But go through this journey, think about the inflection points that might signal somebody is coming into market and then really look to think about where could I potentially get this type of information. Another example is a lot of times when there's turnover in a company, it's an opportunity to go in and get in front of an audience. So paying attention to job boards or looking at LinkedIn when a new person's been hired at a company, that can all be helpful for you to build audiences and target people with the right message at the right time.

Dave Gerhardt [00:25:50]:

Hey, we might cover this later, but I know you're a big, you're a big free tool type of fellow. John so Kyle says in the chat, would you consider free lead magnets too early to introduce in the awareness stage where you're asking further info?

John Short [00:26:03]:

Well, look at the next slide. Dave.

Dave Gerhardt [00:26:05]:

Wow.

John Short [00:26:06]:

So the mid intent Funnel is one of our favorite parts of this exercise. And when we're thinking about intent, our goal is to get inside the mind of the customer and think about what that customer could potentially need. And so for a long time SAS was really disrupting Excel spreadsheets. And so a great opportunity was to take the application you're looking to build. You knew that the companies that you were trying to target were already building an inventory management solution in Excel, or they were building their lead management or lead scoring in Excel and build them a version of that for them to use. So I think free tools are great upper funnel awareness tools. I think that a brand is some of all the touch points that you have with the customer. And so these free tools are a great way to take a specific feature that a customer is looking for from your tool and help show them how much more you do on top of just that one piece.

John Short [00:27:10]:

So like the automation or the AI that you then infuse into into the application that you build is a way to kind of upsell them, build more momentum down Funnel to get them into the consideration.

Dave Gerhardt [00:27:24]:

I just love this play in general. Like, I know we're talking about paid today, but for all you listening, one of the things that so John OG back in the day, John used to work at this company called Workable. And Workable was like a hiring platform. And one of the smart marketing plays that John did was they created all this content like templates like how to write a great job description. And that drove a ton of organic traffic and inbound demand to end up hiring somebody on Workable. And I think a lot of the B2B companies that I see, you go to the website or you see their creative on LinkedIn or whatever and it's always like contact sales, request a demo, start a free trial. I think you need to build more thoughtful bridges to actually to bridge that gap there. And so like in the world of like an agency, what did John do? John created a calculator because you're going to fill out the calculator and if it's valuable they'll have something to share with you after.

Dave Gerhardt [00:28:16]:

But I would think about like work backwards from like what's the thing that you're selling? Like the all time example is HubSpot, right? They initially had this like blogging tool when blogging was big and SEO was their thing. And so you'd go to their website, they had this tool called Website Grader. They have an AI grader now which is pretty cool. But you go to their website, you Put in your website, it tells you all the things that you're missing or done wrong about SEO and then they're like, they give you a score. This happens to be like a problem that we can solve with our software. We did something at Drift where you could, we knew that people didn't want to install the code to our product on our website right away. So we gave them, we built them a free tool which was actually John's idea to let them try our chatbot on their website without having to talk to sales, without having to do any code. Last week when we were in Austin, I sat next to this, this woman who's a CMO of a cybersecurity company down there and she told me that she's driven like $30 million in pipeline through this free tool that they created so much to the point where they switched the whole website funnel to be drive everybody to this assessment which basically lets you know, like security risks or whatever.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:17]:

This is good marketing. And then all that stuff by the way, gets even better with paid because in your driving, you're using paid traffic to drive to these channels instead of just driving paid to get a demo, paid to contact sales. Like who's going to go do that? Build more bridges, build these more mid intent funnels I think is really awesome.

John Short [00:29:35]:

Great color.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:36]:

Thanks man. I do this for a living.

John Short [00:29:38]:

Strategic targeting. Kym, do you want to walk through the different, this buyer's journey exercise that we do?

Kym Parker [00:29:44]:

Yes. So this is an output that you might get from a full kind of strategic media plan. So for all of these stages and everyone thinks about them a little bit differently, but you do have your, your awareness, your mid funnel consideration here, your conversion, your decision. What are we doing at each of these funnels? What are we saying to them? Where are we saying it? How much are we investing in it? So everyone needs to be nurtured through these stages and they might do so organically. Like Dave was just saying, they might go ahead and sign up for things and kind of get through that on their own. But if you have a high value user you're going after and this is going to come up a lot when we're looking at buying committees for big ticket items. So you need to guide somebody from the buying committee from awareness through to decision. How are you going to do that? You're going to introduce your brand, you're going to do that and you're going to use out of Home, maybe you're going to use ctv, you've got great video, you could do Hulu, you Could run kind of general LinkedIn and Facebook ads.

Kym Parker [00:30:42]:

Then what are we going to do for the audience and what is the message when we move them through to the next one? Okay, we're going to take that audience segment that's now moved into the next stage of consideration. That could be by the user, that could be by the account, and if it's by the user, it's probably something that is dictated by their behavior. Did they watch the whole thing? Did they visit your site? And if it's the account that might be connected to your platforms to know, then we're going to serve them a display ad and the messaging here is going to be creating a deeper understanding of your product. If you're going really deep on product and awareness, you're coming in a little bit hot. When you're starting to explain your product and what it does for you, you really want somebody to have a little bit of familiarity with your brand, which means they're really in this consideration or conversion stage. Then you're moving into. Okay, people are really getting into searching for their pain points, the things that cause them to need to spend money on your product. So they're doing research around the things that maybe they don't think they need a tool for this and they're trying to figure out a way to do it themselves.

Kym Parker [00:31:42]:

Maybe they already know they need a tool and they're starting to compare you to your competitors. Any of these things are kind of happening in this conversion or decision stage. So we're going to make sure we have presence on paid ads, especially if we aren't the top organic result or we have competitors who are going after us. This is going to have display, this is going to have remarketing messages at this point. I'm glad to have you drive them to a trial or a demo because they've already done the engagement of these previous strategies. So overall what we're going to do is kind of pull through the way that we target the user, what we say to them and then what the channels are that we're engaging with them on and then ultimately kind of filter this down into an effective media plan for you that shows you of your budget. How are you splitting these up? And then when you get to that bottom of the funnel, what does that really mean? Your CPL is what did you invest in getting this person all the way there? And if it's a single user and you have a PLG product, that's one story. If you're trying to get a 20 person buying committee to the Decision stage, that's pretty different.

Kym Parker [00:32:40]:

And those numbers are going to look a little bit different for that reason as well. So thinking about who the user is and whether they're acting individually or in part of a group is a really big component of building this type of strategy.

John Short [00:32:50]:

And I just want to add this is a fantastic exercise if you've been investing a lot of money in one channel and seeing a lot of really great results. Right. I think there's a time in many companies where they've invested a lot of money into Google Ads. They're starting to see diminishing returns, and they're trying to figure out the next channel that they should go to. This is a fantastic brainstorming exercise. And so I would recommend that for the people watching this, go into Excel and create columns for the awareness, consideration, conversion and decision phase, and write out these different rows. The overall goal, the measurable approach, the audience segment that you're targeting, the media approach. And then I'd add one more, which is like, creative and offer, like, what.

John Short [00:33:40]:

Yeah, what you're trying to get the customer to do, and just start filling this out as you're going into the next year. This is going to give you a lot of ideas of what you can execute. But the really nice thing about this for more quantitative people like me, is it provides a kind of qualitative approach to the buyer's journey that people across your company are going to understand. So whether you're CEO is quantitative or qualitative, you're going to be able to align with them. On looking at, hey, we've maxed out our conversion stage, Google Ads, we're going to need to move up funnel, and the way that we're going to measure that is going to need to be a little bit different than what we've done with Google Ads. So I would just call that out. I know we're. I want to make sure we have time for Q&A at the end.

John Short [00:34:27]:

So we have one more slide here to go.

Kym Parker [00:34:29]:

We.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:29]:

We do, but this is. You two are ripping right now. The feedback has been very good. We had 255 people live, so keep going. We're good. All right, don't blow it now. 39 minutes in. Don't blow it.

John Short [00:34:40]:

Go ahead.

Kym Parker [00:34:41]:

So I know you talked about cybersecurity, Dave. We do a lot of that, too. So we think a lot about CISOs. So this is a buying committee with a CISO at the head. These are the folks that are buying for cybersecurity product. There's a Lot of people in this group, and especially if you're investing in a big ticket cybersecurity product for your enterprise, you're going to have 20 different people weighing in on this. They kind of categorize in a few different ways. Decision makers, gatekeepers and influencers.

Kym Parker [00:35:12]:

Lots of different people. You could have champions. Everyone has slightly different language about this. Your decision makers are going to probably be your most senior. They're your economic buyers. They're the people who are the final approver. I am always going to tell you to target them with awareness, but I don't want you to sit around expecting the CISO to fill out a lead gen format. Not going to do it.

Kym Parker [00:35:32]:

But when we get over here into your practitioners, these are the people that are using it. They're the ones that are looking up. I have a problem with this. They're the ones that are. They've got a pain point. They're trying to solve it. They're initiating this process. These influencers, they could be your champion as well.

Kym Parker [00:35:47]:

These are the folks that are probably going to be bringing your brand to the buying committee. And these gatekeepers are going to be not necessarily stopping it, but they're going to be looking at how does this fit in with my current tech stack? Is this the right choice? Is this too expensive? They're asking the tough questions. So all of these folks could fall into the buying committee. You should probably target them maybe a little bit differently. They might need a different message. You're also not going to target all of them at every stage of that journey. Like we said, these decision makers show them a video, get the brand in front of them so that when the proposal hits their desk, they know your logo, but everybody else nurture them through. We've done some studies too, around like how many people from the buying committee need to MQL in order to impact the eventual close of that deal.

Kym Parker [00:36:33]:

So not only are we targeting an account, we're targeting the right people within the account. The more surgical we can get, the less waste you have and the better you can do at kind of tailoring this message to them and making sure that these are the right people in the room at the right time, championing your business and getting you to close.

Dave Gerhardt [00:36:49]:

Yeah, really good, Kym. All right, I'm gonna do this for you. So CGM is awesome at this, by the way. The chat has been awesome. Just go hit up their website and check them out. They can obviously help you through a bunch of this really thoughtful stuff. So reach out to John directly or go to compound growth marketing. You can check them out.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:05]:

We need to make more money so we can hire CGM to run our ads. Dan says their website is beautiful. Well written too. That's interesting. Okay, so we have a ton of questions in the chat. There's no way we'll get to all of them, but we're gonna do our best. So grab your. Grab your water, grab your lemon tea, whatever you need.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:19]:

Right now, I'm going to pull all these up. I'm actually going to kick this off because I host these. I have one question. I have a question for all you. I'm just curious. Is data and reporting still one of the biggest roadblocks for this? Because, man, I remember when I was in a similar role, I would think we were driving one thing from paid. And then you go into Salesforce and it tells a different story. And then you talk to the VP of sales and it tells a different story.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:43]:

So I'm just curious if that becomes. If that is still one of the biggest internal challenges that folks see with.

Kym Parker [00:37:49]:

I think you didn't say the word attribution, but maybe you should have. Yeah, yeah. I mean, John, how many hours did we talk about reporting yesterday? Like, yeah, yes, 100%. And this, this calculator works. If you have an understanding of the source of your data, if there is discord in your organization around where leads are coming from and why it is that they're moving through, it's going to be a lot harder to prove back out that this is an impact that paid had. So understanding the way that you currently attribute the leads and making sure that your tagging and your tracking is effective and maybe setting up things like holdouts from your targeting so that you can see if somebody engages with paid and doesn't, what is their behavior. Those are all ways to kind of troubleshoot that. But it's.

Kym Parker [00:38:36]:

To me, that's one of the meetings we have the first weekend. We talked about this first.

John Short [00:38:41]:

Yeah. And attribution's been popular in the chat. We think there are many attribution models are good, none are perfect. And so we focus more on data triangulation around understanding, hearing feedback from our sales team or asking people in the forms how they heard about us initially, and then looking at first touch, multi touch, last touch attribution models across all the different tools that you have access to. I think just looking at your CRM, looking at your web analytics solution, and then looking at the qualitative feedback provided by the customers and triangulating that data to come to an Understanding about attribution is most critical.

Dave Gerhardt [00:39:23]:

All right, this question is in the Q&A from Haley. What's your approach on how to split your budget between all of these buckets?

Kym Parker [00:39:31]:

I'm going to guess this is about the one with the kind of media plan view. And the answer for me there is it depends. But I will tell you what it depends on. So if you have a big media budget, you're going to be able to spread it out a little bit more. If you're working on a little bit of a shoestring and you need to drive leads, you have to have the middle and the bottom of the funnel. Can you get away without having the top of the funnel? Maybe it does depend a little bit on what your product is and it's not great to never introduce your product. But having that top of the funnel, that awareness, that's going to have another dependency, which is what's the message? And do you have creative that's even satisfactory for that? If everything you have built right now is about the product features and getting somebody to trial and demo and we've got plenty of clients that come to us with that type of library. Only you can build a decent plan with a mid and bottom of funnel.

Kym Parker [00:40:21]:

But where we're trying to kind of graduate everybody to is making sure that they're clear on what the message is at all of those stages and thinking about how we prepare for getting that awareness message out before they see that mid funnel message later, especially to those decision makers in their organization, no matter how big the target organization is. But a rule of thumb is going to be something like you're, you're kind of in the 40 to 60% at that bottom of the funnel if you're really in a growth stage. And the rest of it really should be that kind of top and mid funnel. But if you're a well known big business and you're competing to take other, you know, you're publicly traded and you're an enterprise and you've got to get in front of everyone who might want to switch over to you, you're going to spread it a lot more evenly. So I always want to have a good chunk down at the bottom to make sure we nurture those folks into that final step. But ultimately it's dependent on what your business goals are and what you're coming in with for creative and what you're able to build.

Dave Gerhardt [00:41:17]:

Made me think of like every time I travel, I go to the airport and you just see like, you know, Cisco billboards everywhere. And you're like, who's doing this?

Kym Parker [00:41:23]:

Who?

Dave Gerhardt [00:41:24]:

I just. Who on the team is like, those are measuring. Measuring the incremental lift of the sign at the Burlington, Vermont airport. Anyway, this question is from Morris. How do you know when the market is dictating your CPL versus your agency underperforming? If I can pay $500 CPL, does that mean I have to pay $500 CPL?

John Short [00:41:44]:

Yeah, that's a great question. I think the market dictating or how much that CPL is worth to you is one thing, but certainly you're trying to drive that CPL lower. One kind of asterisk I'd put on this is I talked about CPL above. I know it's out of vogue, but I am a big fan of the marketing qualified lead, when that is a metric that is actually predictive of revenue. So you've set up a good formula for that. And so when I talk about cpl, typically I'm talking about cost per qualified lead that we're driving in. I think that you're going to have to look into. Actually, I'm going to push those one over to Kym, but I think you got to understand whether or not the team that you're working with, whether it's an agency or someone who's in house is capable of doing what they're doing.

John Short [00:42:32]:

And if they are building out really good account management, whether they're structuring the account well, whether they're targeting the right keywords, whether they're investing in the right places. For you, that certainly is a challenge to kind of understand whether or not the person who's running this is valuable. Kym, do you have any other tips of how they can kind of understand whether or not they're bottomed out in terms of what they're paying for qualified leads or if they should, it also.

Kym Parker [00:43:02]:

Has to go back to your calculator, John. So, like, depending on what you're going after, if you're selling a $200,000 annual product and you're paying $500 to get somebody in the C suite, I might be fine with that. But ultimately, as a rule of thumb, especially on platforms, things like LinkedIn and Google, I don't love a $500 CPL, you're going to see it more on LinkedIn than you are on Google, because LinkedIn does have a bit more of an impact on kind of that full funnel, and I think it's a little bit more precise in its targeting. So I'm okay to see a higher CPL on LinkedIn than I am on Google. But ultimately, like, it might be okay if it's the right person and they're returning that value for you. But I would prefer you to be in the hundred to 300 range, even for an expensive product.

Dave Gerhardt [00:43:48]:

All right, this one's from Heather. How do you approach targeting specific Personas when your tal or total addressable lake.

Kym Parker [00:43:56]:

Target account list?

Dave Gerhardt [00:43:57]:

Target account list. Sorry, I'm. I'm a social media guy. How do you approach targeting specific Personas when your total addressable account list is too small to reach platform minimums? Good question.

Kym Parker [00:44:07]:

Oh, geez, you gotta get a bigger list, man.

Dave Gerhardt [00:44:11]:

Oh, she said gotta get a bigger list. That might be the answer.

Kym Parker [00:44:13]:

I mean, I'm going to think if I can come up with a good decision for.

John Short [00:44:17]:

Yeah, I mean, I think you're paid probably isn't the right place. If your target account list is too small, you probably want to be focusing on more kind of low funnel engagement channels such as network introductions, email outreach, meeting people at events, hosting small dinners. Like, I have found that the industries where it's so finite that it's not big enough to target on advertising, oftentimes there are little cottage industries focused on kind of getting in front of these types of buyers. You know, I know in cybersecurity there are a lot of CISO dinners where somebody in Las Vegas or Boston has a big network of the CISOs in the area and they're setting up those types of things. So paid isn't necessarily always the right channel for you when you have a very kind of finite audience that you're going after.

Dave Gerhardt [00:45:08]:

All right, this question is from Taylor. How can you prioritize resources and accounts in an ABM strategy when you don't have the tool or team for full personalization? What's the best way to balance strategic focus with scalability in this situation? We should be doing abm, but it's hard.

Kym Parker [00:45:23]:

It would be great to have personalized messages for abm, but you don't have to. You don't. It starts to straddle the line between ABM and just targeting accounts. Abm, you're in a perfect world. You're going to have those websites that are personalized and it's. The ad is going to say the name of the brand. Not everyone can do that. Many of our clients don't do that.

Kym Parker [00:45:41]:

Anyway, I think for this one, it's, it's going to be. And some of the personalization can be done, especially if you're using a platform like LinkedIn. In the ad copy where you're not actually building a net new ad, but you can tailor a little bit of the language to their industry or the segment of that account list and then repeat the type of ads that you serve to most of the qualified audiences. And then I think the big piece here for me is whatever you are sharing here, make sure that you are in lockstep with your sales team. So when it gets handed over then they start to really get that personalized experience and you don't have to go create a thousand personalized ads and landing pages for them. That's very tactical.

Dave Gerhardt [00:46:20]:

All right, here's another one. This is from Carlina. What's your recommended budget? This is, I would translate this as like how do you think about testing?

Kym Parker [00:46:26]:

Right.

Dave Gerhardt [00:46:26]:

So I'm on this session today. I need to get smart about Paid For Me as an example, I've been a first time head of marketing and it's like hey, we're raising money. You're going to have a much bigger budget next year. Time to go spend on paid. You can't just dump hundreds of thousand dollars into these channels, but you also need to test and learn. So what's your recommended budget? Slash spend? How would you think about a company testing ads for the first time?

Kym Parker [00:46:48]:

I have a really specific and a general answer. I would not spend more than 15% of any budget on testing. I would keep it to that or lower. Then as you are building a net new channel out, you are going to have. This is where what I just told you might become contradictory. If you're not investing probably more than five grand a month in the channel, you might not have enough reach on the channel to actually learn anything about it. So I would probably be pretty targeted. You're not going to spend more than 15% but you are going to try to spend five grand a month.

Kym Parker [00:47:17]:

You're going to try to run it for like 60 days to really get the sense of it. And then another thing that you can do, and I talked about this very briefly before, but it's a great strategy, is hold people out of what you're doing to see how the people that you are targeting with this new channel perform versus the people that didn't get the message from the new channel because you don't want to be completely reliant on the platform metrics from that channel to determine its efficacy. I would also say some of these platforms like Reddit and Meta, their behavioral trends are really different from LinkedIn. So when you're building that testing plan for them make sure you're planning for the channel you're on and not what you want the channel to do. People are not converting heavily off of Reddit, but they do on LinkedIn.

Dave Gerhardt [00:47:58]:

Let's do one more. This is from earlier, but this from Alex. What Dave said. How do you break it down between smaller scale SaaS versus the larger enterprise clients? So I would read that as basically you have two motions inside of the company. You're selling to bigger companies and you're selling to smaller companies. How do you think about breaking down the paid strategy for both? It's just targeting.

Kym Parker [00:48:18]:

If your business was targeting both enterprise and market.

Dave Gerhardt [00:48:21]:

Yeah, you have like, and a lot of the companies, a lot of companies in our world actually do this, right? Especially in SaaS. You might have a, you might be like Webflow, right? Webflow has a free like low end version that like a solo web developer wants but then they sell like high end big enterprise deals. So how would you think about the paid, roughly the paid strategy?

Kym Parker [00:48:38]:

Yeah, I can take a first pass on this.

Dave Gerhardt [00:48:40]:

You're. You're hot right now. Keep going.

Kym Parker [00:48:42]:

Yeah, enterprise, you need that full journey. So anytime you're targeting an enterprise, there's way more people involved in making the decision. And the recognition of your name and logo is one of those factors that's going to make a huge difference in getting you over the finish line. So you need a plan that has all of those stages, including awareness. And you also need to look at what your competitors are doing and this is going to start to get measured as share of voice. If they're boxing you out in search ad results, you need to be in the first position in all the search ad results. So enterprises, it's a little bit of a game of inches at the beginning of the journey where you're just trying to get in front of the right people with your message and then you're going to nurture those buying committee members all the way through the funnel. But you want to make sure that you are investing in awareness when you flip over.

Kym Parker [00:49:27]:

In a lot of the cases where we have both of these motions, we have like a free trial product or something like that when you flip over to that side, okay, now you're going to find the right accounts and you're going to find those kind of practitioner folks in the account and you're going to start with them maybe sort of in the middle of the funnel and you're going to be really, really clear about how you solve their problem. You're not going to talk about your product you're talking about how you're solving their problem.

Dave Gerhardt [00:49:51]:

All right.

Kym Parker [00:49:51]:

With the enterprise, you might be a little more product focused.

Dave Gerhardt [00:49:54]:

Producers in my ear saying, we got to go. Kym, Jon, that was amazing. Thank you so much. Real quick, before we go, we're super data driven here. They call me Data Dave because of how much I love data. But in the chat right now, we want to know we need to do a better job of getting feedback on these sessions. And so real quick, while everybody's here, rate this session one through five. Weekend five being like the best thing you've ever been on.

Dave Gerhardt [00:50:16]:

And this is great. A lot of fours, a lot of fives, high end here. Then we'll get all this data. Do the poll. Do the poll. Do the poll. Not in the chat. Do the poll.

Dave Gerhardt [00:50:22]:

So we can export one question away from an answer. So close. Were you in there, Oliver? I'm sorry about that. Just is what it is. We can't always make it. All right, really good. Kym and John, thank you for doing this. This was a great session.

Dave Gerhardt [00:50:33]:

Really good time of year to give people some food for thought to think about. I hope that people leave. This session is like, notice how we didn't talk about, like, creative does matter, but we didn't talk about a specific channel. We didn't talk about a specific tactic. This was a session to help you build a strategy and to be able to think about the strategy for being more successful with paid. The chat was great. People were in there answering questions. I thought you two did a great job.

Dave Gerhardt [00:50:56]:

So thank you for this, and hopefully we'll do more with you all soon. Good luck out there. Everybody in the Exit Five audience, good luck this time of year. I know it's a crazy time of year. We got Thanksgiving coming up in the US In a couple weeks. Everybody's asking to submit your budget, submit your plan, do all that stuff next year. So come in the community, ask the questions. We're all here to help you out.

Dave Gerhardt [00:51:13]:

And Kym and John will see you next time. All right, thanks, y'all. Enjoy the rest of your day. Go have a water tank. We'll see you later. Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode. You know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review, because I don't really care about that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:51:31]:

I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at Exit Five. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website exit5.com our mission at Exit Five is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at Exit Five. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest.

Dave Gerhardt [00:52:13]:

It's 100% free to join for seven days so you can go and check it out risk free and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more exitfive.com and I will see you over there in the community.

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