How To Run a Successful B2B Paid Ad Program in 2023

B2B marketers are facing both new challenges and opportunities when it comes to paid advertising.

In this interview on Demand Gen Chat, Silvio Perez, founder of AdConversion, shared his insights and strategies with Tara Robertson on how to run a successful B2B paid ad program in 2023.

The Power of Re-Marketing and Epic Content

Silvio Perez made a bold claim in the podcast that a re-marketing audience is equally, if not more important, than an email list.

He explained that email lists typically have a low open rate, and the opt-in cost per lead for most B2B SaaS companies is high.

To demonstrate the power of re-marketing, he shared a test he ran with a 24-minute YouTube video that he promoted through Facebook Video Views, where he paid only 69 cents per view.

The conversation also highlighted the importance of creating epic content and optimizing it to penetrate a market and position yourself as a thought leader.

Silvio emphasized that creating epic content and optimizing it is key to success, as it can be done at a discount and is a form of media arbitrage to maximize distribution.

He also advises listening to engagement signals to optimize the quality of the content.

The Shift Away from Third-Party Cookies and Tofu-Mofu-Bofu

The conversation also touched on the shift away from third-party cookies, which will be removed by Google in 2024.

And as a result, Silvio stresses the importance of retargeting and un-gated content when it comes to marketing strategies since tracking is getting harder and harder, and in turn, high-value and accessible content is key.

Furthermore, they discussed the use of the Tofu-Mofu-Bofu strategy for planning paid media. While this approach is still used by many B2B companies, Silvio and Tara suggested that it is ineffective for maximizing returns.

Instead, they recommend the Five Stages approach, which is Create, Capture, Accelerate, Revive, and Expand for sales-led companies, or Create, Capture, Activate, Revive, and Expand for product-led companies.

Silvio also suggested auditing accounts to ensure that the audience is large enough to make the investment profitable, and to play around with audience combinations.

Building an Audience and Personal Emails

The conversation shifted to the struggles of using email to market, with Silvio noting that many emails are not reaching the intended inboxes.

He emphasized that building a loyal and owned audience is critical and that personal emails are more valuable than work emails when it comes to conversions.

Finally, the speakers warned against “checking boxes” and instead suggested seeking out novel tactics.

They explained that creating granularity in the sales process is important and recommended the previously mentioned Five Stages approach for planning paid media.

Wrap Up

B2B marketers in 2023 should focus on creating epic content and re-marketing, utilizing retargeting and un-gated content strategies, and optimizing the Five Stages approach to maximize returns.

Building an audience and utilizing personal emails can also be valuable.

By taking these strategies into account, B2B marketers can navigate the challenges and capitalize on the opportunities in the paid advertising landscape in 2023.

Episode Links

Follow Tara Robertson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taraarobertson/

Follow Silvio Perez: https://www.linkedin.com/in/silvio-perez/

Gated: https://www.gated.com/

Canberk Beker from Cognism: https://www.linkedin.com/in/canberkbeker/

AdConversion’s Website: https://www.adconversion.com/

Ad Conversion’s Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AdConversion

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Tara Robertson: Welcome back to Demand Gen Chat. I'm your host, Tara Robertson, Head of Demand Gen at Chili Piper. In this episode, I'm joined by Silvio Perez, founder of AdConversion. Silvio was previously at Metadata for a couple of years where he got a ton of exposure to the paid programs of other B2B companies. We spoke about a few paid strategies he learned in his time there and why he thinks B2B marketers should be putting more of a focus on their retargeting audiences than list building. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Silvio.

[00:00:28] Tara Robertson: Silvio, so excited to have you on Demand Gen Chat. Thanks so much for joining me.

[00:00:32] Silvio Perez: Thank you for having me, Tara. I'm so excited to be here.

[00:00:35] Tara Robertson: So excited to catch up. We talked a little bit when you're back at Metadata, so now you're doing your own thing. Um, let's just start off with something fun. What's the marketing hot take that you wanna share

[00:00:43] Silvio Perez: with our audience?

[00:00:44] Silvio Perez: I have one that comes to mind that, that always ruffles feathers, and essentially it's that a remarketing audience is equally important, potentially more important than an email list. And I know a lot of people hear that and they kinda lose their mind. And I'm not saying you shouldn't have an email list. Obviously, you should. You have to make sure that you own your database, your contacts.

[00:01:09] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:01:10] Silvio Perez: But the challenge with just relying on an email list is if your average open rate is between 20% and 40%, you know, that means 80% or 60% of people are never gonna actually see your emails. And then the other challenge, too, with building an email list versus building a remarketing audience is depending on the average opt-in cost per lead, and I've looked into a lot of B2B SaaS companies and there are people who are paying $250-plus just for gated content leads. And you compare that to a remarketing audience, where I've literally tested this on Facebook video views, this is where I was, like, everything switched for me. I ran this experiment where I had a, one of my YouTube videos is 24 minutes long and I promoted it through Facebook video views and I paid like $0.69 to get somebody to watch 100% of a 24-minute video. Just blew my mind. And ever since then-

[00:02:06] Silvio Perez: Wow.

[00:02:07] Silvio Perez: ... the value of a retargeting audience has weighed more heavily for me. Definitely do both, but in terms of what you lead for, I, I definitely think leading with, and this is what we're seeing, too, in terms of, like, the shift towards ungated content, content consumption, promoting things and feed, but I think this is gonna become even more important, uh, post-2024 when Google removes third-party cookies. This is the counterargument people always make to me. They're like, "Well, I need the database and then I can upload it and I can use lookalike audiences." Totally. Um, but even that, all of your contacts won't match. You know, there's always a margin of error-

[00:02:42] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:02:43] Silvio Perez: ... in terms of the match rates for those contacts. But all these remarketing audiences that you build through the platforms, it's all considered first-party data to that social platform, so to LinkedIn, to Facebook. So that means your deliverability will be much greater and it's not contingent on third-party cookies. I honestly feel like the playbook in the future, which is kind of what we see moving towards, is creating epic content, getting as many people to consume it, optimizing that. And when you do that process, you're essentially creating influence at scale, at a discount.

[00:03:15] Silvio Perez: Like you're manufacturing celebrity when you really think about it. It's like my book, you know, [laughs] uh, in terms of, you know, you can penetrate a market, you can position yourself as a thought leader, you can basically do media arbitrage to make sure that you're getting maximum distribution for the lowest cost. And then at that point, it's just a matter of, like, inputs and outputs in terms of optimizing quality and listening to engagement signals, you know?

[00:03:41] Tara Robertson: Yeah. I mean, that's definitely a new take. I haven't heard that one. [laughs] But that's always a good thing. But I mean, it, it makes a ton of sense if you're getting people to watch a YouTube video that's 24-minute. I don't think I've ever spent 24 minutes with a piece of gated content or any book. [laughs] Definitely not 24. Don't think I have. Um, one thing that I'd love to dig into and we can get into this later, but just other types of audiences that people could be thinking about, because you're right, email is tough. It's getting tougher. I mean, even for me, we have a newsletter that goes out to around I think of like 20,000-something marketers, but the amount of bounce backs I'm getting now from, "Oh, I don't work here anymore 'cause I, obviously, I have a new job."

[00:04:19] Tara Robertson: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:19] Tara Robertson: Almost everyone in marketing [laughs] and B2B does. Um, so that email, kinda useless to me now with gated and other tools like that coming in, getting about 5% of our emails are just completely not even making it to people's inboxes. So getting tougher

[00:04:33] Silvio Perez: out there [laughs] for email marketers.

[00:04:34] Silvio Perez: Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point, too. I mean, when you factor in the amount that are work emails and the attrition of those work emails, some people-

[00:04:39] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:39] Silvio Perez: ... you know, they, they find new jobs. That's also, too, when it comes to audience building and building your database, there, there could be an argument in terms of putting more weight on the value of the personal email versus the work email.

[00:04:52] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:53] Silvio Perez: And I know when you look at conversion rates, typically, people often with the work email will convert into an opportunity sooner, which makes sense because they're still, they're still employed, right, at that company-

[00:05:02] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:05:02] Silvio Perez: ... and they have a need that they're trying to solve. But at, at, at the end of the day, it's kind of like what is the stage you're focusing on, what is the outcome you're trying to drive, and then how you measure it differs, which is kind of like-

[00:05:12] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:05:12] Silvio Perez: ... the second hot take is most people, when they do strategy planning, especially with paid media, they'll do ToFu, MoFu, BoFu, and that's fine as a starting point. But if you really wanna take it to the next level, I highly recommend that you create some more granularity. So the way I like to do it is I call it the five stages. So it's create, capture, accelerate, revive, expand. That's for sales-led companies, your product-led company. Instead of accelerate, it's activate, so like activating free trial users-

[00:05:41] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:05:42] Silvio Perez: ... and trying to get them to, you know, become paid. And that allows you to see all of the different areas that you can have ac-, have actual impact from a marketing perspective, specifically from your paid campaigns. And then you can build that full-funnel orchestration, so that way you're reaching people throughout that whole process versus if it's just ToFu, MoFu, BoFu, it's like you're probably not gonna be thinking about revival campaigns and getting closed-lost ops back into the fold. Probably not gonna be thinking about acceleration, definitely not gonna be thinking about expansion. So, like, all these other stages that your dollars could be going to in terms of driving return in the short term, you know?

[00:06:19] Tara Robertson: And you recently, I mean, you were at Metadata doing all kinds of things. [laughs] You had your hands in a lot. But in your experience looking at a ton of customer accounts, where most B2B companies still doing just that ToFu, MoFu, BoFu and kind of moving on with just those three stages, is that what you

[00:06:33] Silvio Perez: were seeing?

[00:06:34] Silvio Perez: Yeah. It was, it was mainly ToFu, MoFu, BoFu or, or, uh... This is actually super timely. I, uh, I audited 60 LinkedIn accounts. I'm doing this post on, on LinkedIn soon about, like, what is the ultimate campaign group structure, 'cause I was generally curious.

[00:06:48] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:49] Silvio Perez: And it, it was like a big part of it was like ToFu, MoFu, BoFu, or people would just break it out based on region and account list.

[00:06:56] Silvio Perez: Yep.

[00:06:56] Silvio Perez: That was another one that was really common, or it would be like region offer, so like North America demo request as an example. Um, but, yeah, I would say those, those were, like, the most prevalent ones. There was very few people that I saw took it a step further, which I think is extremely valuable-

[00:07:13] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:13] Silvio Perez: ... is if you can segment by the region, the offer, the stage, so practically like North America, create, um, and then the level of awareness, so thinking about, like, what's the level of awareness within that, the audience criteria that you're going after. So if you're going after, like, content-based audiences, solution-aware, and then doing the offer/persona, so it could be like demo product managers if I'm going after product managers as an example.

[00:07:40] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:40] Silvio Perez: And then that makes your life really easy, especially for LinkedIn specifically, because reporting out of LinkedIn natively is so painful. It's probably the worst of all of the platforms for reporting. So by being a little bit more granular and having better segmentation, it's gonna really set yourself up for success to make it really easy to distribute budgets and then report on performance, uh, just at the campaign group level.

[00:08:04] Tara Robertson: I think breaking that down, in theory, it always sounds great to me to be so segmented 'cause then, obviously, you can get targeted with your content, with your ads. But one thing that I hear a lot and I've run into myself is for B2B, our audiences aren't always as big [laughs] as we want them to be, so it's often we do all that work and then realize, "Oh, there's 50 people in this audience, so is this even worth my time, my budget?"

[00:08:24] Tara Robertson: Yep.

[00:08:25] Tara Robertson: How would you recommend people approach that? Is there other audiences that maybe they're not thinking about

[00:08:29] Silvio Perez: that you've seen?

[00:08:30] Silvio Perez: The first thing I always recommend is to, is to play around with your audiences. Upload your contact list, your account list that you're going after, and just start to play around with your audience combinations so that you can prove and validate there is something here for us to, to work with, because to your point, sometimes it is too few and then it doesn't makes sense. For example, with one company right now that I'm talking to, they really wanted to do closed-lost campaigns, but I guess there's a good problem. They don't have a lot of [laughs] closed-lost deals, uh, in their CRM that we could pull from, at least not enough to meet LinkedIn's minimums.

[00:09:05] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:06] Silvio Perez: So for us, we're gonna do it in the future, you know, when that accumulates over time. But right now, it's just not a, it's not a need priority.

[00:09:13] Tara Robertson: Mm-hmm. We ran into almost the exact same thing. [laughs] We wanted to do closed-lost retargeting based on the lost reason, which makes sense, in theory. Um, but then we found out that field wasn't being used accurately, so it would have been kind of a mess anyway and-

[00:09:29] Tara Robertson: Yeah.

[00:09:29] Tara Robertson: Yeah. So really, you have to make sure that the data is real. [laughs]

[00:09:32] Tara Robertson: Yeah.

[00:09:33] Tara Robertson: It's legit

[00:09:33] Silvio Perez: instead of-

[00:09:34] Silvio Perez: And then taking it a step further, right, in, in the sense of, like, you can't segment that granularly, then go back one layer. So you can't do, you know, all closed-lost opportunities-

[00:09:45] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:45] Silvio Perez: ... based on a disposition reason, for example. That's, like, super granular. So people who closed-lost due to, you know, timing or price, whatever it might be, if you have that in your CRM, take it a step back. Okay, can you just do all closed-lost ops, right? And then is that-

[00:09:59] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:00] Silvio Perez: ... large enough? 'Cause that's still better than, than nothing at all.

[00:10:03] Silvio Perez: Right. It's better

[00:10:03] Tara Robertson: than having nothing in front of that group that, obviously, was qualified at some point or another. That totally makes sense. So I'd love to dig into, I know you have this brand-new role that you've kind of spun up for yourself. Um, so how has that been going and what has surprised you about digging into client accounts

[00:10:19] Silvio Perez: again?

[00:10:20] Silvio Perez: Yeah. It's been, it's been awesome, uh, consulting again. I, I was consulting before Metadata. Uh, but being back at it now, it's been great just to really work closely and, like, dive into the ads manager and be doing the day-to-day optimization. And I think what surprised me the most with the clients that I'm working with right now, a lot of people will come to me and they'll say... I give you a perfect example. Like, one client that I started working with about a month ago, they came to me and they said, uh, "We're running Google Ads, but performance is declining month over month. And we've kinda done everything that we can. We're not sure if that channel works for us, so we're gonna go and move on to this next thing." Like, a, a lot of B2B marketers have a tendency to fall into the trap of what I call checking boxes-

[00:11:05] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:05] Silvio Perez: ... where they're just like, okay, you know, we all kinda know the things, like, the same tactics. There's really nothing truly novel. There are a couple of things, but it's nothing like, you know, earth-shattering. We all kinda know what to do for the most part in terms of what you hear out there. But it's not the what, it's the how. It's, it's the level of the execution. You know what I mean? It's, it's sweating the small things. Like, just giving a really tactical, practical example, it's like when you set up Google search campaigns, the way you structure your campaigns and then being, you know, taking a step further and creating, like, unique image extensions by campaigns. Like, things like this are what makes the true difference. Like, it's, like, all those accumulated details that allow you to have that success.

[00:11:47] Silvio Perez: Uh, optimizing your landing pages and making sure that, you know, your landing page passes the five-second test. I can land on your landing page and in five seconds, without scrolling down, I can understand what you do, why you do it, what's the next step. Simple things like this, I think, surprises me that the fundamentals is usually what most B2B companies get wrong, which I don't know why I'm surprised. But I guess I always wake up one day and I'm like, "All right, the fundamentals, we're gonna get it, you know. It's gonna be-

[00:12:14] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:14] Silvio Perez: ... more of a table stakes," but it's really not. It's, it's, it's not. I think we're so, we're almost too smart for our own good. We're, we're like, "We need to do this super retargeting strategy and we have to, you know, create this messaging for this." And it's like, "Okay, great, but are you doing steps one to three first before you start worrying about steps four to six?"

[00:12:39] Silvio Perez: Yeah. I mean, I think

[00:12:40] Tara Robertson: at least from, in my personal experience, we just have so much FOMO of what other marketers are doing and we wanna be doing the new shiny thing, right? Like, we wanted to be running retargeting based on video views of six different video ads and sending them to custom pages. But that landing page hadn't had one conversion yet, so maybe we should probably [laughs]-

[00:12:58] Tara Robertson: I

[00:12:58] Silvio Perez: always say you cannot scale complicate it. A lot of what I do-

[00:13:01] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:02] Silvio Perez: ... when I start working with clients is, uh, addition through subtraction. A lot of what I'm doing is just I call it cleaning, a, from, like, a very practical example of the Google Ad account, cleaning the account or the Facebook ads, the LinkedIn ads, you name the, the channel, just cleaning the account, regrouping the structure, the campaigns, simplifying things, so that way we can pull insights easier from a reporting perspective. Um-

[00:13:25] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:25] Silvio Perez: Do we have reporting? Do we have tracking in place? Do we have dashboards? So I think a lot of times, for sure, it's FOMO. Absolutely. [laughs] You know, you, you hear, "TikTok is a new channel, we need to get on that," et cetera. And there's definitely value in, in all these channels, especially primarily if your audience hangs out there. But you just have to have a real honest conversation with yourself. Especially now where, you know, resources are constrained and there's a lot of things going on from a budget perspective, I think being honest with yourself and being okay with doubling down on what's working and making that better before you start to tackle on new things and add into your plate is gonna help you get further ahead in the short term. Sometimes you have to take those two steps back in order to move three steps forward, you know?

[00:14:10] Tara Robertson: Yeah. I think you're right, especially now marketers are getting, I mean, at least from my experience, I know who I'm talking to, just more pressure to make things work before trying new things, which last year, I felt like it was all about, like, "We have to be everywhere. We have to be trying every new channel, every new community. We wanna be in there."

[00:14:26] Tara Robertson: Yeah.

[00:14:26] Tara Robertson: And now it's really like, "Okay, let's get the basics right. Make sure that we're actually making money from these channels and scale from there."

[00:14:33] Silvio Perez: The, the, the biggest gap that I see bar- bar none with most-

[00:14:37] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:37] Silvio Perez: ... B2B organizations is everyone from, um, specifically for paid ads, is no one really has a paid media program. They just have a lot of campaigns that they're running. They're very tactic-focused. They haven't took in a, taken a step back and actually built up the whole program where, you know, you, you think about like paid media strategy, that thing is the biggest gap in terms of, like, skill deficit that I'm seeing. And everybody is just, they're executing Google Ads or executing LinkedIn ads, but everything is very siloed.

[00:15:09] Silvio Perez: They don't have an overall framework from a strategic perspective, right? Maybe as simple as, like, what I outlined. Uh, they don't have, um, consistent campaign groups or naming conventions that are relevant across channels. They don't have the program visibility to measure what's working, what's not. They don't have, uh, an experimentation framework in place to be able to build on their learnings and to create, like, that environment of testing.

[00:15:35] Silvio Perez: And super shameless plug, but this is literally why I'm, uh, my first course that I'm launching, 'cause I'm in the process right now of transforming AdConversion, which is a newsletter, into a digital advertising academy. And the first course that I'm launching is all about this, this one topic, which is building a paid media program, because it's like this is the cart before the horse, but it's so foundational because this makes everything else easier, you know, when done right.

[00:16:02] Silvio Perez: And even the performance marketers listening to this, not just the demand gen managers, a lot of performance marketers, they think too small. They're, they just think in terms of Google or they just think in terms of LinkedIn, they just think in terms of Facebook, or whatever you name the channel, but they, they don't see the big picture. So by starting with the program level and mapping that out, that makes the execution of the campaign level a lot easier.

[00:16:27] Tara Robertson: And why do you think those silos exist now? Is it just, "Oh, paid search is someone else's job so I'm gonna focus on LinkedIn," or is there another kind of stress

[00:16:37] Silvio Perez: causing that?

[00:16:38] Silvio Perez: I think it's definitely specialized work. A lot of times... I mean, when I first started out in paid, like, I was the Google Ads guy.

[00:16:44] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:44] Silvio Perez: All I did was Google Ads. And then, you know, a lot of teams, the way they structured is, like, they'll have a Google Ads person, they'll have a paid social person. But I honestly think a lot of us just, we just don't know what we don't know. It's like lack of... There's not, no one's really teaching this. You know what I mean? Uh, at least at, like, a-

[00:17:02] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:03] Silvio Perez: ... program level, it's very, like, most courses you come across, it's like, "How to scale Google Ads or how to launch LinkedIn ads or YouTube ads or whatever," but no one's telling you how do you connect everything.

[00:17:15] Tara Robertson: Yeah. I think I've been, I'm in a different position 'cause I've always been kind of a team of one. [laughs] So I haven't had the luxury of saying, "Oh, that's someone else's job," but I could definitely see how teams get built out that way, where they're hiring someone to own YouTube and scale that, someone else to scale LinkedIn. So when you're working with a new customer, how do they, what, or first of all, what metrics are they looking to get help with? Is it they wanna drive more pipeline? Is it cost per lead? What do they typically come

[00:17:42] Silvio Perez: to you with?

[00:17:43] Silvio Perez: Yeah. Every, every B2B company for the most part, it's pipeline and revenue I think if you have to summarize it-

[00:17:48] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:48] Silvio Perez: ... into two things. And the first thing that we do is we start with an audit, which is if I have a secret hack of, like, what is the one thing that you do that, uh, allows you to find repeatable success is I do an audit. You can't fix what you can't see, right? And that's half the battle.

[00:18:07] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:08] Silvio Perez: One of my... I learned this lesson the hard way. One of my first jobs out of college, I was running Google Ads, like all the paid search for, uh, this, like, chain of gyms in, here in the US. It's like a Planet Fitness competitor. And I made a bunch of changes to the Google Ads account really quickly. I was, like, really excited. I'm like, "Oh, I see all these different areas of opportunity where we can improve." And I made all these changes. And I remember the first week, the cost per acquisition was the lowest it had ever been in company history. And I remember my manager coming to me and just being like, "Oh, my god, what have I been doing?" Like, "This is amazing." Like, "This... You're killing it."

[00:18:45] Silvio Perez: And then fast forward to the second week, the performance just, like, dropped off a cliff and it never recovered. So I learned from that experience, always measure twice, cut once. Like, make sure you run the audit, you analyze, you know, what's your budget allocation based on campaign type, campaign theme, so how much budget is going towards, for example, non-brand versus brand versus competitive. A big trap people fall into as well is they just put too much money on brand, and that's where Google Ads gets a bad rap because you're just capturing people that were already going to convert. Ideally, you know-

[00:19:23] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:23] Silvio Perez: ... 70% of your budget should be on driving net new acquisition research. Um, and running through that audit is, is super helpful. So just looking at what's your budget allocation, what are the offers that you're running, so whether it's LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, I'm always looking at the distribution by region, the distribution by offer in terms of performance, um, ads, what's the distribution by ads. Are you just using single image and carousel? You know, low-hanging fruit for you might be to start to weave in conversation ads, uh, document ads, a new one that's having a lot of success recently. So just looking at the allocation by theme, by offer, and by region is really helpful. If you just look at those three variables, it'll give you a lot of clarity and context on what levers you need to pull or what you need to work on in terms of your accounts.

[00:20:11] Silvio Perez: And is there any

[00:20:12] Tara Robertson: consistencies you're seeing in terms of things that accounts are just missing or getting wrong? I know you already talked about the different stages, but is it maybe-

[00:20:22] Tara Robertson: Yeah.

[00:20:22] Tara Robertson: ... they're spending in a certain geo that they shouldn't be?

[00:20:25] Silvio Perez: I think the biggest one that I see is lack of tracking.

[00:20:27] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:28] Silvio Perez: So most folks, they'll have, on the one extreme, no tracking at all or in, like, sort of the middle ground is they have tracking in place, conversion tracking, but they have way too many conversion actions associated to their different campaigns and it's just very noisy. I have one client that I'm working with right now that last month, they had 20,000 total registered conversions to their account.

[00:20:55] Silvio Perez: Wow.

[00:20:55] Silvio Perez: And their, their goal is, like, less than 4,000. So there's no way that's real. You know what I mean? I mean, there would be-

[00:21:04] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:04] Silvio Perez: E- everybody would be getting promoted, like, six times over. So-

[00:21:07] Silvio Perez: Yeah. That sounds great. [laughing]

[00:21:09] Silvio Perez: So that's one big trap, is you need to reduce the noise. Again, you cannot scale complicate, right? Like, go fundamentally clean house. What are the one to three primary conversion actions that you really wanna train these campaign algorithms to optimize towards? I think we forget, like, how powerful these platforms are in terms of the machine learning and the, you know, the AI behind the scenes. And what you need to do as a marketer is outside of setting your audience parameters is you need to feed as much high-quality conversion data and train those algorithms how to bid and optimize for you if you're leveraging automated bid strategies, because it's all in them in terms of the auctions that they wanna apply to, try to bid for.

[00:21:52] Silvio Perez: And by you training these algorithms with high-quality conversion data, you can train them to bid more aggressively for the conversions that matter. So practically, what does that look like is if you have three different conversion actions, whatever they might be, let's just say lead MQL, SQL, you can put $1 per lead on the conversion value, $2 for an MQL, $3 for an SQL, that gives LinkedIn, Google, name the channel, some sort of understanding that "Hey, an MQL is more important than a lead. I should bid more aggressively for people based on their audience attributes, their browser activity, all these different characteristics that they have behind the scenes, to bid more aggressively and to win that auction so I can show up for these people that I think are more likely, based on my predictive algorithm, to become an MQL."

[00:22:38] Silvio Perez: So I think that's another big miss, is we don't have the right tracking in place or we have too much of it and it's just too noisy. Uh, but in a perfect world, I would say especially now it's becoming more normalized, is to start tracking server-to-server offline conversions versus using these pixels. Especially with everything that happens on the client-side with the browser, tracking by-

[00:23:00] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:00] Silvio Perez: ... the pixel, even if you debug it through Google Tag Manager and you triple-checked and it's perfect, you're still gonna have irregularities in terms of your conversion counts natively versus what you see on your CRM, because it's just the nature of the browser, cross-device tracking, there's a lot of limitations and fragmentation. So the most accurate thing you can do in terms of putting yourself up for success is to track server-to-server because you're closing the gap between your CRM, which will always be the source of truth for the business and the platform. And every time, uh, an event is registered in your CRM, you can trigger that as a signal that fires back into the platform that gets registered as conversion, so that way the platforms learn and they're learning from your source of truth, right? So you're reducing that proximity.

[00:23:43] Silvio Perez: Yeah. I

[00:23:44] Tara Robertson: love that. So you talked a little bit about how smart these algorithms are, but they don't know what an op is worth to you. They don't know that an op is better than an MQL. So making sure that that's really spelled out for the

[00:23:54] Silvio Perez: platform and-

[00:23:55] Silvio Perez: One of the things that I did at Metadata was, uh, I helped build our AI. I worked with our data science team. And I'm telling you from behind the scenes actually seeing this thing, it's just a formula. They don't know.

[00:24:09] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:09] Silvio Perez: It's, it's just a formula. So it's like you need to tell it what matters to you. It's extremely powerful and it's extremely smart, but it is literally just a math equation and you need to make sure that you're feeding it the right inputs.

[00:24:22] Tara Robertson: Right. And as a demand gen marketer, you should have access to your CRM. You should know this, this data. If you don't, you could definitely get some help internally from your ops team probably. But again, the algorithms can't see that data that

[00:24:34] Silvio Perez: you have access to. You have to make sure.

[00:24:35] Silvio Perez: And, and I always say, like, just bare minimum, just $1, $2, $3, $4. Like, keep it as simple as that-

[00:24:40] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:41] Silvio Perez: ... if you know that custom deal amounts and you can be more advanced. But if you can figure out, like, the custom deal amounts and associate it, even better. But just keeping it as simple as like one, two, three, four is more than enough to get started and find much more success.

[00:24:55] Tara Robertson: On the success side, you mentioned that document ads on LinkedIn are something that people are trying now. It seems to be working for some of your customers. Is there anything else that you've noticed in the last couple of months that's really emerging as a new, could be a tactic or new

[00:25:08] Silvio Perez: channel?

[00:25:09] Silvio Perez: Yes. Uh, two things that come to mind. Number one... Actually, I guess three. Uh, number one is how much low-hanging fruit there is in terms of acceleration campaigns. So for example-

[00:25:22] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:22] Silvio Perez: ... one thing that's awesome on the acceleration side, and again, if you do have the audience size, is you can ask your CR-, uh, your CSMs to basically do a video of them talking about what it's like being a customer, and you can promote that to open opportunities. So it's kind of, you know, as they're browsing through LinkedIn, they can see that. Uh, the other one, too, that's really powerful is if you can create a list of all the common objections that you have, and then your product marketing team can create collateral based on those objections, kinda help answer those concerns, you can then push that into the acceleration campaigns. So as they're going through the sales process, they're talking to your team, they're getting served ads that are, ideally, preemptively answering their objections outside of the sales call. So that's a really low-hanging fruit in terms of helping improve the average time to close that I'm seeing. That-

[00:26:12] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:12] Silvio Perez: And it's really cheap because that audience size is pretty small for the most part. Um, and it's just helping again, like, with less resources to, to further expand your impact. And then another one is Twitter Ads. Not a lot of folks are advertising on Twitter. It's not as mainstream, but especially with everything that's happening with Elon Musk taking over and a lot of big brands pulling media budget. Twitter was always cheap, even before this. But now with Elon taking over, a lot of these big brands that saturate the, the CPMs and they're, you know, they're buying up all the inventory, a lot of them pulled out, uh, which unfortunately, like, has yielded into, like, layoffs and a lot of bad things inter- internally at Twitter.

[00:26:52] Silvio Perez: But for advertisers, it's definitely an opportunity in terms of reduced media costs. So if you haven't joined Twitter, highly recommend it. I mean, just to give some context, you can get CPMs as low as $3, you know, uh, for certain campaigns. So that's, I mean, it's, it's so cheap. Especially if you run video views campaigns and you have success there, there's a lot you can do on the Twitter side. They accept customer lists so you can up- upload customer lists into Twitter. And, um, at the bare minimum, what I always recommend people do if you're just starting out with Twitter is retargeting and you can expand your reach, uh, through Twitter on retargeting. And the really cool thing about Twitter specifically, and I'm totally nerding out here, [laughs] is, um-

[00:27:33] Silvio Perez: I know. I love it.

[00:27:34] Silvio Perez: ... Twitter allows you to retarget based on impression count. So most platforms only allow you-

[00:27:40] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:27:40] Silvio Perez: ... to retarget based on engagement. So somebody who clicked your ad, somebody who liked your ad, et cetera. Twitter allows you to retarget people who just saw your ad that were served an impression. So the ability to create a retargeting audience on Twitter is pretty insane. The other one that is like this that not a lot of people are using is probably one of my favorites is YouTube. With YouTube, you can also retarget people who viewed your ads or watched certain videos on your YouTube channel or subscribed to your YouTube channel. So YouTube is also a huge opportunity. I think the biggest challenge of why folks don't get started on Twitter, they don't get started on YouTube, which is what I always call, like, the targeting handcuffs. For lack of a better word, [laughs] we're spoiled. You know, as B2B marketers-

[00:28:23] Silvio Perez: [laughs]

[00:28:23] Silvio Perez: ... we're spoiled in the sense of we are so used to LinkedIn targeting hyper small audiences-

[00:28:29] Silvio Perez: Yep.

[00:28:29] Silvio Perez: ... a third-party account list that we source, you know, all these things. And we're spoiled where we're thinking in the sense of, like, if we can't have absolute clarity and granularity on the audiences that we wanna go after, then we're not even gonna bother. And what I wanna remind these folks is, how do you think advertisers used to market before the Internet? Like, how do you think they were able to get in front of their ICP? Like, the most extreme example I always use is Claude Hopkins who invented the coupon. Like, I can only, I can imagine Claude Hopkins in the 1800s sitting in his desk, preparing his campaign. He sends his campaign out. He spent months to collect the data. The audience targeting is like the whole city or the town. [laughs] I mean, there's no segmentation.

[00:29:10] Silvio Perez: Um, how was he able to find success and actually get in front of his ICP? It's very simple. It's something that we've been doing since the dawn of time. It's your messaging, your ad. Ads themselves, the message of the ad can act as a filtering mechanism, where the best ads, they attract the right person and they filter out and they exclude the wrong person. If your ad is attractive to everybody, then it's really attractive to nobody, because it should only speak to that specific person that you want to bring in fully, and then everybody else should be repulsed by it and they just walk away. They filter, they scroll through, et cetera. So when it comes to getting started-

[00:29:46] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:29:46] Silvio Perez: ... on these broader channels where you have less, and there are things you can do on YouTube to improve your quality of targeting, but still it's not gonna be like LinkedIn, this is where the video creative itself is essential to your success, because it does need to have these different elements in place to be able to act as that me-, that mechanism.

[00:30:04] Tara Robertson: And to your point, a lot of B2B marketers haven't touched Twitter, especially on the paid side. [laughs] Um, but what type of content are you seeing that's working there? Because it's a bit of a, I don't wanna say scary, but it's just a brand-new channel for a lot of B2B

[00:30:17] Silvio Perez: marketers.

[00:30:18] Silvio Perez: Yeah. I, I recommend that you just start with your best content that's performing on Facebook and replicate it on Twitter.

[00:30:24] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:24] Silvio Perez: That's a starting point. That's always what I recommend because it's, it's a data-informed decision. Uh-

[00:30:29] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:29] Silvio Perez: Generally speaking, video works really well on Twitter just because of the really cheap costs. You can get a lot of video consumption pretty cheap. Um, but with Twitter, one of the things that I will say is people are more vocal, so don't be-

[00:30:45] Silvio Perez: Yeah. [laughs]

[00:30:45] Silvio Perez: ... surprised if you get trolls and bots that are commenting on your ads. It's actually better now. In the past three months, I've seen less bot comments compared to Twitter Ads before Elon. It used to be pretty aggressive where, like, you would get spam and comments from bots. Um, and it hasn't been as bad. Now it's, like, maybe like one or two, you know, every, like, 25,000 impressions or something like that.

[00:31:12] Silvio Perez: Okay.

[00:31:13] Tara Robertson: Yeah. That's good to know. We ran a small, it was very small because, [laughs] to your point, we got overwhelmed by bot replies when I ran this test I think early last year, and I just quickly paused it 'cause I was like, "I don't trust this audience at all." [laughs] "I'm doing something wrong here." Um-

[00:31:28] Tara Robertson: I-

[00:31:28] Tara Robertson: So it might be worth

[00:31:28] Silvio Perez: revisiting.

[00:31:29] Silvio Perez: I ran this test with my newsletter where-

[00:31:32] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:32] Silvio Perez: ... I ran the same thing on TikTok 'cause when I first started advertising on TikTok in January of last year, I was super skeptical. I was like, "There's no B2B marketers here." Like, "I don't know what you're talking about. It's kids," et cetera. And I ran this test where I basically set up a custom lead gen form and it was to sign up for my newsletter and they had to put in their job title and their name.

[00:31:54] Silvio Perez: [laughs]

[00:31:54] Silvio Perez: And I think that was it. I'm not sure if I... I don't know. I put your job title with your name, and then are you a B2B marketer, yes or no, and it was like little checkbox. They had to put yes or no. And this is TikTok. There's no pre-filled information. So if you talk about user experience, awful, right?

[00:32:08] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:08] Silvio Perez: But I wanted to run this test and be extra, you know, specific just to see, like, what do I get back. Uh, long story short, it was pretty remarkable. I mean, I got titles. I did get some, like, weird titles. Like, I got, um... somebody put Queen, like Toad Wrangler, like, just all these strange titles. But then I also got some-

[00:32:26] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:27] Silvio Perez: ... legit ones as well, like senior demand gen manager, CMO. I also got sales-related titles even though it's mapped for marketing people. Um, and I was targeting the broadest of audiences. It was literally, like, people interested in marketing and advertising, you know?

[00:32:41] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:41] Silvio Perez: But it goes back to my video itself. The first thing I did in the video was I called up my ICP. I'm like, "Hey, if you're a B2B marketer looking to learn how to scale pipeline and revenue with paid ads," and then, you know, I kinda went into my pitch. So-

[00:32:53] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:54] Silvio Perez: The same is true on YouTube. Like, the script is the most important part foundationally of any video ad success when you're gonna use the video ad for prospecting.

[00:33:05] Tara Robertson: Yeah. I like that. So starting with if you're not sure about the audience yet on these channels, starting with that call out to almost disqualify people from continuing if they're not in your ICP, that makes a ton

[00:33:15] Silvio Perez: of sense.

[00:33:16] Silvio Perez: Yep. And you can do it directly or indirectly, right? So directly is like-

[00:33:18] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:19] Silvio Perez: ... you legit call them out. And, "Hey, if you're a B2B marketer, da, da, da, da," or indirectly is you can call it an experience that only they would know. So for example, you can start the ad like, "There's nothing like when your pipeline target gets increased three times in the same year and your budget got cut by 40%. Am I right?" Very specific person is gonna be like, "Oh, I know what you're talking about."

[00:33:41] Silvio Perez: Yeah.

[00:33:41] Silvio Perez: Um, so this is like the ways you can manufacture it.

[00:33:45] Silvio Perez: Yeah. I'm

[00:33:45] Tara Robertson: sure other people would be like, "I don't know what pipeline is." [laughs]

[00:33:48] Tara Robertson: [inaudible

[00:33:48] Silvio Perez: 00:33:48].

[00:33:48] Silvio Perez: [inaudible 00:33:49]. [laughs]

[00:33:49] Silvio Perez: Yep. Yeah. And that's totally fine, especially with YouTube because you don't, you don't pay unless they watch 30 seconds of

[00:33:55] Tara Robertson: your ad.

[00:33:55] Tara Robertson: Also, on the flip side of new channels, um, obviously, people are making some tough cuts and tough decisions on programs right now. Do you have kind of a set parameter that you use or a set framework to help people decide what should we pause, what should we cut at least for now, maybe we'll revi- revisit soon, but what are the low-hanging fruit that we should be cutting

[00:34:15] Silvio Perez: today?

[00:34:15] Silvio Perez: I think the, the most simplest way to get started is look at, look at all of your paid campaigns that you are able to attribute. So specifically, we're talking about campaigns that are driving people to a direct, you know, demo request free trial. So think things like Google paid review, uh, LinkedIn remarketing, combo ads, things like that. I would say number one is to look at the contribution, the pipeline to spend contribution and see, you know, what is the efficiency there, and then as well, uh, revenue, of course, your return on investment based on each campaign and use that as a starting point.

[00:34:51] Silvio Perez: But before you make the decision of "Should I completely pause this thing or not?" is go back to the fundamentals with an honest look and, like, really assess that campaign and, and see, "Is this campaign not working because we truly gave it our, like, the best go and it just, it just didn't work," right? Like, that's part of the process. "Or is it because maybe there's an opportunity to refine and filter this campaign and optimize it some more so that it can, you know, produce what we're looking for?"

[00:35:22] Silvio Perez: Uh, so for example, with Google search, um, I had a client of mine that was doing non-branded competitive terms. They were running it for a while, really was not profitable for them in terms of not even revenue, just like pipeline creation. And long story short, we looked at the campaign, we looked at the search terms, and they thought they were bidding on high-intent keywords, but the reality was they were paying for really irrelevant searches. So they're not even actually getting-

[00:35:49] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:49] Silvio Perez: ... in front of the people they thought they were getting in front of. So in this case, it was a fault of execution, not necessarily the, the strategy behind it, like the, what we wanted to do with that, that thought process. So I would say think through those things. If it is the case that, you know, you, you did im- implement it to the best of your knowledge and you, you know, you kinda checked the primary boxes, then from there, you do have to kill your darlings. It's very hard. It's very easy to pause something that just didn't work, it didn't give you anything. It's a lot harder to pause something that generated some contacts, generated some opportunities, but never really closed into revenue.

[00:36:24] Silvio Perez: And for those things, you're probably gonna have to be more strict, especially right now due to budget restraints, and pause those campaigns, um, and just get more refined and more granular so that you can stretch budget even more. So, like, another really tactical thing that people can take away from this is for paid search, specifically if your budgets got cut, one little thing you can do versus having to pause everything first is instead of showing your ads seven days a week, show your ads Monday through Friday. That'll allow you to further consolidate your budget, stretch it further.

[00:37:00] Silvio Perez: So kinda thinking in terms of order operations, like number one is what is the impact towards pipeline and revenue? Number two, how is the execution? Are we actually doing what we think we're doing? It sounds so stupid to say it, but you'd be shocked. [laughs] Um, and then third, it's like, "Okay, was the, the premise here, the hypothesis flawed," right? "Did it really truly not convert or is it, was it a lack of how we, we, we set up the experiment?" Um, and then from there, it's kinda like, "How can we further stretch every dollar?" So that usually-

[00:37:32] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:37:32] Silvio Perez: ... means not casting a wider net, it's casting a smaller net. So thinking through, okay, uh, if you're targeting all of North America, well, maybe only 30 states in the US are actually profitable for you and the rest are junk. So I kinda think of all these things as like your optimization levers and you're kinda looking for the gold within the dirt. And it's like the, the locations, the ad schedule, the devices, the audience parameters, the ad types. These are all things-

[00:38:03] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:03] Silvio Perez: ... that you can pull on to further improve your efficiencies and just cut cost.

[00:38:08] Silvio Perez: Yeah.

[00:38:08] Tara Robertson: The timing is a really interesting one 'cause I could see how rather than running out of budget and not having ads running for the whole last week of the month, turning off weekends, it just makes so much sense to conserve

[00:38:18] Silvio Perez: that budget.

[00:38:19] Silvio Perez: And again, I'm always like a test until proven otherwise. You know, I, I... The one thing I know for sure is I know nothing, because what I think works-

[00:38:28] Silvio Perez: [laughs]

[00:38:28] Silvio Perez: ... for one account doesn't work for another.

[00:38:30] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:30] Silvio Perez: It doesn't work for... You know. There are parallels and similarities, but at the end of the day, look at your data. You know, I always... This is one of my favorite things about paid media, I don't wanna sound like such a nerd but I love this stuff, is your account is telling you a story and it's communicating through the metrics. So it's all about understanding how to interpret the metrics to read the story-

[00:38:51] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:51] Silvio Perez: ... that your account is trying to tell you. For the most part with paid media, you, and es- especially if you have conversion tracking set up, like, you're never truly blind. There's always, like, an indicator and there's something that you can pull on that thread to understand and kinda get back down to the first core principle of what's going on here.

[00:39:09] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:39:09] Silvio Perez: So just like practically speaking, let's say your ad is not showing up on the top of Google. That's the, the big problem that you're, you're facing. If you understand that your ad rank is calculated based on your max cost-per-click bid, your quality score, and your expected impact of ad extensions, now you can drill down a little bit further, and those are the three components for you to further dive into. So then from there, it's like if it's bidding-related, what's your bid strategy? Is it automated? Is it manual? If it's automated, maybe you have a, a bid cap that's hurting you. If you're using target CPA, maybe your cost cap is too low. Can we increase that? Will that help improve ad ranking visibility? On the quality score side, it's like expected impact or ad relevance, landing page experience, expected click-through rate. Which one is hurting our quality score overall? If it's ad relevance, then there's an issue in terms of how we're structuring our ad groups and our keywords and our ads. If it's-

[00:40:02] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:02] Silvio Perez: ... landing page experience, we don't have relevant landing pages. If it's expected click, uh, click-through rate, it could be the segmentation of our campaigns. So it's kinda like, there's like this, like, within every level, there's a level. And it's all about understanding how to pull the threads. If you take anything away from this conversation, when you look at your campaigns, don't just stop at the highest level. Like, don't just look at the total campaign, the total cost, the contribution, and then roll up your sleeves and walk away.

[00:40:31] Silvio Perez: Take a second, just, like, dig deeper. Because at the outset, you might have a campaign that looks awful, but then you drill down to the ad level and you have one ad that is absolutely crushing it. So instead of you pausing the entire campaign, maybe you pause all of the other ads but the one that was actually doing well. So that's one thing, like, I think a lot of folks get wrong is-

[00:40:51] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:51] Silvio Perez: ... they're too, they don't understand how to do that analysis and just kinda drill down a little bit further, 'cause there's always something to learn from every campaign.

[00:40:58] Silvio Perez: Yeah.

[00:40:59] Tara Robertson: One that you brought up, um, one silo that I've seen in my own experience here at Chili Piper is the landing page conversion. So it's one area that I don't own, which is kind of rare in my role. [laughs] Um, but we did the same thing. We looked into devices and found, especially on our competitive campaigns, we had zero conversions on mobile. So it was a very easy, like, "Let's just pause this, put all the money towards desktop," and then right away, our conversions went up and everything is looking more solid on the exact same spend. We didn't have to move money around. It was just pausing that one

[00:41:30] Silvio Perez: thing.

[00:41:30] Silvio Perez: Yep. It's like all that inefficiency, you know? Like, that's kinda what-

[00:41:33] Silvio Perez: Yeah. We were

[00:41:34] Tara Robertson: just throwing [laughs] money

[00:41:35] Silvio Perez: away, basically.

[00:41:36] Silvio Perez: And that's kinda what I referred to as like finding the, the gold within the dirt. Like, the gold is like-

[00:41:41] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:41:41] Silvio Perez: ... those little segments that are doing really well and the dirt is just like all that wasted spend around it. It's, like, almost like if you're, you know, you, you're trying to, like, actually dig up gold-

[00:41:51] Silvio Perez: Yeah.

[00:41:51] Silvio Perez: ... and you're there, like, shifting the dirt off, like, all that is like the wasted spend.

[00:41:55] Silvio Perez: Yep.

[00:41:56] Silvio Perez: You're just trying to find what are these, these things at. Now the, the trap, though, I will say, 'cause anything in excess is bad. The trap, though, is you get too segmented, too granular. Yeah, your return is amazing, but you have no scale. So this is where-

[00:42:11] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:42:11] Silvio Perez: ... the balancing act. And, um, this is also, too, where it's really helpful to just run experiments. So for example, uh, most tools allow you to do AB testing. So you can say, all right, your initial structure versus the new structure, and then run an AB test and see what is the impact on volume but also, you know, your, your efficiency in terms of cost.

[00:42:32] Silvio Perez: And then what I always recommend, too, really practically is if you do find some cool insight, like in your case, you're like, "Desktop is much better," break it out to its own campaign and then just pause the original campaign, so that way you can always, worst-case if you need to, turn the old campaign back on if you need it. Uh, never, ever, ever, ever remove campaigns, like, ever. Because once you remove the campaign, it's gone. Google account rep can't restore it for you. The same is true across most channels. So just get in the habit of pausing versus removing.

[00:43:04] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:43:04] Silvio Perez: I learned that one the hard way. [

[00:43:06] Tara Robertson: laughs]

[00:43:07] Tara Robertson: So looking ahead to the future, maybe the rest of this year, I think I know the answer to this, but [laughs] what's something new that you're working on that you're excited about?

[00:43:15] Silvio Perez: I'm so pumped to launch my academy. So at AdConversion, I've transformed it, like I mentioned, from a newsletter to a digital advertising academy that teaches B2B marketers how to scale paid ads for free regardless of skill level. And what really excites me about it is not that it's an academy, but it's how I'm building the academy. So for example, I, I truly believe online education is flawed in terms of the, the current setup. So most academies, the way, the way they approach course production is they choose a topic. They keep it as broad as possible. Uh, they stuff as much information as they can. They sell it to as many people as they can to maximize profits. And then the outcome is like hundreds of courses, terrible course completion rates, students left with, like, surface-level learnings.

[00:44:03] Silvio Perez: So for me, I'm like, "Okay, we're not doing that." And, like, I have these five commitments that I created for students. It's kinda like our, what we stand for. And one of them is on-demand courses will always be free. So all of my on-demand courses are free. We don't make money by charging students for courses, 'cause I truly believe courses are a means to an end. So instead, the way we're gonna approach it is, number one, we keep it relevant to one niche so 100% exclusive to B2B.

[00:44:30] Silvio Perez: And then from there, we, we, um, we try to only limit... So one of the rules is no lesson longer than 10 minutes. So by default, we're thinking of how can we compress the 80/20? What is the most important stuff that you need to know, so that way the courses that are, are not 50 hours long, it's only 3 hours long as an example. Uh, and then from there, we, we try to just focus on that one person, that one topic, keep it relevant to that one niche, and then we give it away for free so we can maximize impact and not profit.

[00:45:03] Silvio Perez: And we're really focused more so on, like, the learning experiences. So for now, it's courses, but there is gonna be, like, um, a SaaS component to it in the future as well in terms of, like, simulations and things like that. So it's like a whole learning experience that's end-to-end, so how do you get somebody to go from literally a true beginner in a, you know, in paid media to becoming an expert. And then I've kinda mapped out, like, what do those journeys look like.

[00:45:25] Silvio Perez: That's

[00:45:25] Tara Robertson: super exciting. I'm excited to follow that along myself. And we'll definitely get the link for everyone who's listening. I'm sure a lot of you are interested in upping your game on the paid side, especially now with everything being scrutinized. So it's a great timing to launch this. So moving on to our quickfire round, I know we're coming up on time here, is there another marketer you follow that our listeners should go

[00:45:44] Silvio Perez: check out?

[00:45:45] Silvio Perez: I'm gonna give a shout-out to Canberk from Cognism. He is awesome and he's been posting more content re- recently on LinkedIn. He runs all the paid media at Cognism. So definitely recommend checking him out, especially now that he's posting more. And he has, like, a lot of-

[00:45:59] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:59] Silvio Perez: ... great insights in terms of experiments that they're running. And he's a, he's a great person to

[00:46:03] Tara Robertson: follow.

[00:46:04] Tara Robertson: Yeah. They're doing a ton of cool stuff on paid. And they seem really transparent about their experiments, which is always fun to follow along. Is there an under-the-radar channel, we've covered a couple channels, but maybe a new tactic that you're loving right now or that your customers are?

[00:46:17] Silvio Perez: Uh, it's an old tactic, but we'll, we'll reframe it as new so people have FOMO and then they can go do it, and that's improving your landing pages. [laughs] Like, really taking the time to optimize your landing pages. And, uh-

[00:46:30] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:30] Silvio Perez: On the new side, one thing that is really cool to see, um, and I was super skeptical about this but it actually is having a great impact, is personalization. So if you can have a strong landing page and then you can use a third-party tool, I don't wanna namedrop any tools, but you can Google them and essentially they can personalize your page in real-time based on, like, different parameters, so you can serve up different headlines based on, uh, the UTM source, certain keywords, things like that. That's all little things that you can do to further boost your, uh, boost your conversion rate. And it has been pretty significant as well if you can also dynamically change the language of your landing pages. That's been a really cool use case. Instead of running different international campaigns for different geos, instead of having to create multiple pages, uh-

[00:47:13] Silvio Perez: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:14] Silvio Perez: ... you can just dynamically personalize content based on the person, where they're coming from. But you don't need that to get started. I'm always, like, a huge proponent of, like, foundations first, tech later. If you can just follow best practices and make sure that you're [inaudible 00:47:26] navigation above the fold, remove the footer, you have one primary call to action throughout the page, uh, things like this, you'll find more success from your existing stuff.

[00:47:36] Silvio Perez: Yeah.

[00:47:36] Tara Robertson: So start with the basics, but there are a ton of shiny personalization tools [laughs] out there to explore if you're ready to move on.

[00:47:42] Tara Robertson: 100%.

[00:47:43] Tara Robertson: Great. And lastly, where can we go to find out more about you? I know you're on YouTube, LinkedIn. Anywhere else?

[00:47:47] Silvio Perez: Yeah. You can check me out on LinkedIn. Uh, I have a YouTube channel. Just search my name, Silvio Perez. I have over 50-plus video tutorials on, on advertising. And if you wanna follow along, especially with all this stuff with the academy and my newsletter, just go to adconversion.com and subscribe and then you'll be updated with everything that comes up.

[00:48:05] Tara Robertson: Awesome. We'll add all those links in the show notes as well so everyone can come find you. Thanks so much, Silvio, for your time. This was

[00:48:10] Silvio Perez: great.

[00:48:11] Silvio Perez: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:48:14] Outro: Thanks for listening to Demand Gen Chat. Demand Gen Chat is a Chili Piper podcast, hosted by Tara Robertson and produced by me, Nolan McCoy. If you're enjoying the podcast, please leave us a five-star rating on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. It only takes five seconds and helps other marketers like you discover Demand Gen Chat. Also, if you'd like to have a question answered in a future episode, you can connect with Tara Robertson on LinkedIn. Send her a DM with your question and it could be answered on a future episode.

[00:48:43] Outro: Finally, if you've gotten this far and are wondering what Chili Piper even is, Chili Piper helps B2B marketers book more qualified meetings for their sales teams. You can't afford to leave opportunities on the table, so let your leads self-qualify and schedule a time with the right rep instantly. And that's just one of the many revenue-impacting things that Chili Piper does. Visit chilipiper.com to learn more. And thanks again for listening. We'll see you on the next episode of Demand Gen Chat.