Take back 50-450% of your ad budget

Plus 2 other tactical wins from this week

This has been a week spent in the WEEDS.

Now that I’m clear on what I need to be spending my time on + truly dedicating time to those items, it’s been time to execute. As part of that, I got super tactical this past week, so I thought this week I’d change up the pace from the last few newsletters that were more strategic/philosophical + share what I’ve been getting into.

TL;DR for today: 3 things you can do that’ll improve your demand gen + marketing efforts ASAP.

In no specific order, let’s get to it…

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Sponsor: MarketerHire

Steve Jobs said the difference between average and great in most things is 2:1. But in software + our industry, it’s 50:1. Maybe 100:1.

Marketing and GTM are moving faster than ever. We have more channels + more mediums than we know what to do with. Product teams are shipping at insane velocities because they’ve adopted AI into their workflows.

...but then we have our marketing teams mostly stuck using the same operating system we’ve used for the past 5 years.

So that’s led to the topic du jour: if product is leveraging AI to ship faster, why aren’t we?

I’ve started seeing MarketerHire’s + their new “MH-1 model” recently. TL;DR of it is they have “elite marketers working in 2-week sprints with AI-augmented workflows.”

The sprint model is what makes this interesting to me. I’ve been talking a lot about focus lately + how most marketing teams have been getting spread too thin, so a model built around a very specific focus on something for 2 weeks + then seeing impact in 14 days is no small promise to make.

For most of us, our biggest bottleneck right now isn’t strategy, but execution. Seems like this is an interesting bridge as it’s less “outsource to an agency” and more “let’s build + run the new system together.”

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1) Win/Loss analysis

This is hands down one of my favorite analyses to run 🤓. I absolutely geek out with our data to find out things like:

• What worked

• What didn’t work

• Which bets are paying off

• Which bets need to end

• Where we should be doubling down

• Where we should be pulling back

• And so much more

To get started, hop into your CRM and create a report using the following criteria:

• All opportunities closed (won OR lost) last quarter/last year/etc.

• All opportunity sources (within same GTM motion - i.e. new customer acquisition, land/expand, etc.)

Next, add the following fields to the columns so you can break them all out in pivot tables + charts:

• Loss Reason

• Win Reason

• Opportunity source

• Company datapoints (size, location, etc.)

• Prospect (contact) datapoints (job title, seniority, etc.)

• Sales team info (team, rep, etc.)

• Date/time info (create date, close date, etc.)

• Incumbent solution info (name, none, etc.)

  
  From there, just start slicing + dicing to uncover a whole world of data to leverage.

2) LinkedIn ads bidding strategy

This is one I get HEATED about. Too often, I see marketers unknowingly outsource their thinking to LinkedIn’s “bidding algorithm” + blindly following that guidance without validating if it’s actually driving the results that are best for THEM - not LinkedIn’s bottom line.

Here are 2 examples so I can show you what I mean + how this shows up:

1. Bidding strategy

Does this section look familiar to you? Most marketers scroll right past it as “Maximum delivery” is pre-selected + we assume this is the best route to take. I mean, how could someone possibly argue with something that says “Get the most results possible with your full budget.”

Butttttt - what happens when you hit the toggle on it to see all of the options? That’s where the magic happens.

In the instance above with an example audience I’ve built out, LinkedIn is “recommending” that I spend $115.12 for every 1000 impressions served. A CPM of $115.12 - are you mad!?

This is telling you exactly what LinkedIn is going to charge you if you let them “optimize” this for you. Certainly no less than $115.12, but likely much more because “similar advertisers to you are also bidding here and we want to make sure you appear ahead of them.” Always so thoughtful to keep us in mind like that, that LinkedIn team.

And those “similar advertisers” they mentioned - LinkedIn is super thoughtful again + provides tons of transparency with the incredibly broad range they’re bidding, anywhere from $73 to $291 in the example above - a factor of 3.5x. Some solid logic here…

This is the least sexy thing you can do with your ad execution, but one I will die on the hill preaching. PLEASE take back control here + use manual bidding. Give yourself a week to calibrate how low you can bid + still hit your daily budget, then monitor from there.

Do this + you’ve just found a way to take back 50-450% of your ad budget. Share this one with your finance team after you do it as well for some extra brownie points (or to justify how you can now fund that experiment you’ve been wanting some budget for 😉).

Poll your customer champions

This is one of the best “hacks” to get past the overthinking spiral we marketers love to find ourselves in.

Whether it’s trying to come up with:

• The perfect homepage H1

• The text on an ad

• The hook for a LinkedIn post

• Who you should have on the podcast next

• A topic area to make a playbook for

• Or any other number of things

Ask your biggest champions. Simple as that.

You most likely already have these users gathered somewhere, whether that’s in a Slack channel, WhatsApp group, community platform, etc. Instead of spiraling for another hour over which specific word to use in a phrase or weighing the pros/cons of prioritizing [topic A] vs. [topic B] for the next month’s worth of content, just ask your champions.

I did this this past week. Nothing overcomplicated. Just popped into our WhatsApp group with the question we wanted an answer to. Created a poll for it with the 2 options we were stuck on, set it live in there, and a few hours later, had the data we needed.

As you can see, that data was WILDLY favored in one direction. And in a moment of quiet humbling, it was not the option I thought was going to win.

Yet another reason why doing these types of mini-polls or pre-validations before shipping something can be so valuable.

Bonus: a masterclass paid media session

Not an ad here, I’m just genuinely looking forward to this one.

YOYABA partnered up with Adam Holmgren (Founder/CEO at Fibbler) + are putting on a paid media masterclass on Feb 12th. I attend maybe 1 webinar/session per month, so when I saw this one + the topic/speakers, I knew this was one where I’ll come away with a few nuggets.

For anyone interested, here’s the link: https://www.yoyaba.com/masterclass

Your turn

As promised, that’s 3 things you can start in on next week + are guaranteed to improve the trajectory of your marketing efforts moving forward.

Give them a shot, let me know what you find, + reply back if it turns up anything interesting :)

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Book quote of the week

“His years in the jungle gave him experience rare in the trade. Unlike most of his competitors, he understood every part of the business, from the executive suite where the stock was manipulated to the ripening room where the green fruit turned yellow. He was contemptuous of banana men who spent their lives in the North, far from the plantations. Those schmucks, what do they know? They’re there, we’re here!”

- The Fish That Ate the Whale, by Rich Cohen

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See you next Saturday,
Sam