I'm going to regret sharing this

How we stand out from our competitors

I was in a 1:1 with my CEO the other week.

We get to talking about how tough the market has been on recruitment organizations (our ICP) this past year and how, despite that, more competitors are entering the space than ever before.

Then he says to me, “Marketing must be getting harder for you as it’s getting more and more crowded out there.”

I looked back at him, smiled, and said:

“It’s actually making it easier for us because it makes what we do stand out that much more”

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Sponsor: HockeyStack

Your CEO just slacked you: "We have our board meeting in 2 days. Send me a slide with what's working + anything they need to know."

Did your palms get sweaty reading that?
Or is this an easy ask because you can easily get to this info already?

I'm neurotic about forecasting + tracking performance. I have reports upon reports and dashboards upon dashboards.

So when Emir + Claudia over at HockeyStack asked me what my perfect dashboard would look like, I immediately started geeking out.

And when they sent this dashboard mock-up back to me yesterday, I was in nerd heaven 🙌

2025 planning is here. And it's also never too late to add some solid reports or views to your dashboard, so hopefully this provides some inspiration to any of you who are looking to level up your dashboarding game.

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Some quick background

The other week, Liam Moroney shared this post dropping a truth bomb:

“In SaaS, we don’t just have a performance marketing mindset - we also have a performance messaging one. So much of how we present ourselves to new audiences is through the lens of “look how impressive we are”, and it misses the mark by a mile.”

I couldn’t agree more.

All of the self-promoting “We’re proud to announce…” posts
All of the “We’re at the top of G2’s quadrant!” reports
All of the ads + outreach with the baked-in assumption that the recipient wants to buy from them

The tone-deaf list goes on and on. So much so, that when research was done by The B2B Institute and System1 on the state of B2B ads, the found that 75% of those ads scored 1 star or less on a scale of 1 to 5…

Link to study

So to the title of the chart above…

We have a crisis of creativity

And this is exactly what I’m capitalizing (and counting) on.

I’m not here to pick on the brands below, but sharing these to prove a point. Below are ads from three competitors in the larger space we serve.

The first ad is super broad - confidently navigate change? Then when you read the social text above it’s about a Gartner award they’ve received. This ad is all about the company and creates nothing compelling for the audience.

The second ad is too general - grow smarter, not harder? Again, what does this even mean? Then the supporting text is filled with jargon such as “streamline your workflow” and “scaling your business.”

The third ad’s use of stock imagery makes me think they flat out gave up and were just like “well, we need to have something in the design for this ad”.

Then when looking across the 3 of them together, what do you see?

➡️ Heavy usage of similar shades of blue, B2B’s default color of choice
➡️ Vague + generalized messaging
➡️ Stock imagery that could represent any number of brands

Are you starting to see where I’m going with this?

Creative is THE biggest opportunity to differentiate ourselves in crowded markets. And as more and more companies enter the space, or more and more money is spent by existing players, they’re only piling into this pool of ≤ 1 star ad creatives.

So while our competitors are trying to outdo each other in the “who can create a better blue + overly vague ad” competition, we’re taking a completely different approach and actually standing out. Here are a few of my favorites from this past year.

We ran the “Frankenstack” creative during Halloween season, playing into both the time of year and a common pain our ICP experiences with tech stack overload.

We ran the other two ads as we’re coming across more and more “early majority” buyers who are typically sticking with “good enough,” despite knowing that there are better options out there and revenue is being left on the table as a result. So we went text-heavy on these to drive a few key points home.

Below, we got into more fun, brand awareness plays. We recognize that 95% of our market is not actively in market, meaning they’re not shopping right now, but they may be in the coming years. So by getting ahead of the market so they know who we are, what we do, how we can help, and doing it in a memorable way, is how we ensure we make it on their “day one list” when they finally do come to market.

So back to the study shared at the beginning of this newsletter - you tell me, do you think we’re vying to create the “best” ≤ 1 star ads? Not a chance. We’re in the camp of “let’s be memorable” and recognize the disproportionate results we can achieve by putting in more effort here than 99% of our competitors are willing to do.

That’s the big secret.

This is one of the most underrated and underutilized plays you can run as a marketer to drive significant results.

And that’s why I’m going to continue not to be concerned about our space getting more crowded.

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Tactical tip of the week

Sequential retargeting funnels don’t work.

On paper, they’re perfect. Prospect fits ICP criteria and is served ad 1. They engage with ad 1, then they get ad 2. They engage with ad 2, then they get ad 3 which drives them to the demo page.

Simple enough, right?

Here’s where it breaks down:

Let’s say your ICP is 1,000,000 people. You target them and get a ton of eyes, great!

But to get to ad 2, a *good* ad CTR is 0.4%. So take 1m people * 0.4% and your audience is now at 4000 people seeing your MOFU content. Welp, that dropped quick 😅

But you can’t forget to drive them to ad 3 to get them to take a demo! So you now have 4000 people seeing ad 2, and we’ll be overly-gracious and say you’re going to blow it out of the water with it and have a 0.8% CTR.

So you have 4000 people * 0.8% and you have a whopping 32 people able to see your demo request ad. Not to mention, you have to get these 32 individuals to click on the ad AND want to sign up for a demo. So again, let’s be even more overly-gracious and say you’ll have a 1% CTR on ad 3. You now have 0.32 people who have clicked on that ad, and that’s not even a guarantee that they’ll convert on the page.

Good luck 😂

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See you next Saturday,
Sam