Why Most B2B Paid Social Campaigns Flop with LinkedIn Ads Expert

Adam Shirley: So many organizations are wasting money on paid social because they don't get the basics right.

Gary: Welcome back to Generation Marketing. Today I'm joined by Adam Shirley and we're going to drill down on a topic we touched on in season one when we talked about paid media. But we're going to focus down on paid social, um, because obviously that's your area of expertise, Adam. So I want to start this by sort of asking for that sort of definition because some people get confused of what paid social is and it's that just LinkedIn or is that other things? So, two questions. One is, what is paid social? And the second question is why has it become so important in the marketing mix?

Adam Shirley: Uh, thank you for the intro, Gary. Paid social is essentially the advertisements you'll see as you're scrolling through your social media feed. So that could be anything from a carousel that you can scroll through to buy a, uh, set of trainers to an ebook that you're seeing advertised on LinkedIn. The remit of paid social has increased over the time I've been doing it. Now we're seeing platforms like Reddit come in where you're seeing paid threads appear in feeds where brands or individuals are promoting either themselves as influencers or particular products. So it's really just grown. But essentially paid social is adverts that companies are paying for to appear in your social media feed.

Gary: So, so why has it become so important if it's just, it's more than just an advertising platform. Right. It's. It's the way you can target specific people. I think that's what's really made LinkedIn an important sort of, um, piece in the B2B world.

Adam Shirley: I think paid social is really important for a couple of reasons. Number one, and this is something I say all the time, internally and to our clients, is everyone's on social media. All of your target audience is on some form of social media, whether it's on LinkedIn because they're looking for a new job or because they're trying to stay relevant in their industries, or even if it's just they have a personal Facebook account because they like to go to events, and Facebook is still the platform where you can create events the best. So it's really important because that is where your target audience is. Everyone is on social media. And the targeting features of paid social platforms are, I would argue, more advanced than some other paid platforms like paid search. So LinkedIn, for example, is probably the, the one for B2B companies that, uh, is the best. Yeah. Uh, in terms of you can target by job title, industry, company name, you can upload lists of prospective clients. So, so you can hit exactly the right people at the right time. But other social media platforms have really built up targeting abilities as well. Reddit, for example, has a retargeting Pixel, much like LinkedIn does, which means you could get quite complex with your paid social campaigns where you target your audience on LinkedIn, you drive them through to your website and then you retarget them when they're scrolling through Reddit. So the really important thing about paid social is that the targeting allows you to reach whatever audience you're targeting, so you're reaching the right stakeholders at the right times.

Gary: I, I suppose it's really not, I wouldn't say taken over, but it's, it's become more prevalent than email. Right. So before digital marketing was sending out an email, but, but now we all know it, our, uh, our email channels are, uh, just getting cluttered up. Right. A, we've got spam filters that cut a lot of that out, but we still get a lot of that into our inbox and personally delete them. If I don't know them, I don't see them, I read their headline, delete them. So, but with paid social, you can create this ubiquitous sort of feeling of being on multiple platforms in multiple places, getting people at different times when they're probably a bit more ready to engage.

Adam Shirley: Yeah. And, and it, it, I feel a lot less intrusive than email. Sometimes if an email lands in your inbox and you're not sure.

Gary: Yeah.

Adam Shirley: Who the company is, how they got your email, you feel a little bit creeped out.

Gary: Yeah.

Adam Shirley: Um, conversely, like paid social, because the targeting is so crazy, is, it is a bit creepy how, how, how detailed we can get with it. But at the same time, what that means is when we put an advert, uh, in front of someone, hopefully it doesn't feel out of place that they're scrolling through their LinkedIn feed and then they see an advert that is specific to them and the industry that they're in and it's relevant towards them. Or they're scrolling through their Facebook feed and a video appears and it's a, uh, thought leader talking about a topic that they are interested in, et cetera. So I feel like it is less intrusive than something like email, whilst at the same time being just as targeted as email.

Gary: Right. So I can definitely see the importance. And as I said before, a lot of our clients have, or pretty much all of our clients have some form of Paid social as part of their marketing mix. But we also see an awful lot of people doing it wrong. And a lot of time when I engage first time with potential clients, the comment I often get is, we tried LinkedIn, spent a fortune on it. It's very expensive, didn't get any return. So where is it that people go wrong? What is it they don't quite get right to get the return?

Adam Shirley: There are a lot of different factors that people don't get right.

Gary: How long have we got?

Adam Shirley: Yeah, we could do a whole podcast on just that. Um, number one is the budget you spend versus the reality of paid social. Paid social is paid for. You have to some extent pay to win.

Gary: Ah.

Adam Shirley: If you're going for enterprise targets, you need an enterprise budget or you need to be very clever about how you use a small budget to target people. Uh, and that kind of brings me on to the next point, which is that thinking about what platforms you use. B2B companies always want to use LinkedIn because like I mentioned earlier, uh, it does have a great set of targeting. Yeah, targeting factors that you can use. You can target by job title, etc. But if your budget is limited, perhaps LinkedIn isn't the best option. All of the paid social platforms have retargeting abilities, which means if you got website visitors that people that have actively searched your company in the first place, you'll be able to retarget them on these platforms.

Gary: Yeah.

Adam Shirley: So you are still able to hit the right people who may already be interested in. In what, what your business does. Another challenge that we often find with clients is because paid social is so visible, it's often something that people want to get live straight away. They want to show that the campaign has gone live. And we see this with organic social as well. But that means if you're rushing to go live, sometimes the content isn't ready or the campaign isn't defined enough. And so rushing to go live to prove that you have gone live can be a big problem, especially for marketing teams that are under pressure and big in big corporations.

Gary: Yeah. So just pulling you back on that minimum budget thing, because this is something you often pull me up on, is making sure there's a. Almost like a minimum viable budget to be effective. And if you fall below that, two things happen. One is you don't reach the audience you want to reach in an effective way. And the second thing as well is you don't give enough chance for the AI, the algorithms and everything else to optimize your campaign. Can you expand on That a little bit more.

Adam Shirley: Yeah. So your budget for each campaign will depend on who your audience you're trying to hear is, what platform you're running the campaign on, what geographies the audience in are, et cetera. It's much cheaper, for example, to target a campaign, uh, somewhere like South Africa with a massive population and a weak currency than it is at, say, the uk, where we still have a large population, but the currency is a lot stronger. The minimum viable budget thing is really important. And every year all of, uh, the social media platforms will release reports on how to be successful on their platform this year. And their account managers are all given recommended budgets to suggest to whoever's advertising on their platforms. Now, you have to take them with a pinch of salt because, yeah, they want you to spend money on their platforms.

Gary: It's their desire rather than best practice.

Adam Shirley: Exactly. But there is also, in our experience, a minimum viable budget for advertising on different platforms. So a platform like LinkedIn, the budget is, is quite high. We recommend budgets that are, uh, over $2,000 usually per month per campaign.

Gary: Right.

Adam Shirley: On LinkedIn. Yeah. Which sounds very steep if you're not going to get any results for the first three months.

Gary: Yeah.

Adam Shirley: But, um, LinkedIn needs enough money in order to deliver your ads into the feeds of your very specific target audience. You're competing against other companies who are also targeting the CEO of, uh, manufacturers in the uk. You need to be able to compete against their budgets because it works like an auction. Whoever, whoever pays the most has that ad scene.

Gary: Yeah. Okay. And then the other bit of that because. Because it can, I know it can be. If you want to go and tackle, say, the US market, you need a big budget because that's a big old market. That's a, of people you're trying to target. But you can also look at trying to narrow that audience down and therefore have more modest budgets, but to a smaller audience where it's this combination. You talk to me about the combination of reach, but also the frequency of reach, because if you're not reaching people multiple times, you're not getting that cemented in their head or getting that brand awareness you need.

Adam Shirley: Yeah. There's no point in your ad appearing in someone's feed once and they're never appearing again because they won't remember.

Gary: Yeah.

Adam Shirley: And on top of that, there's no point in your ad, uh, appearing someone's feed once and also not being strong content. So one, one of the other weaknesses we often see is when people rush to go live, the content isn't Quite there yet it isn't strong enough. Isn't well thought out.

Gary: Yeah.

Adam Shirley: And the ads, it doesn't matter how much budget you actually have. If you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per month on paid media, but your content is weak, people might be seeing your ads, but they're never going to engage with them.

Gary: Yeah.

Adam Shirley: If they're not going to engage with them, then they're never going to buy anything from you. So that is another thing to balance with the budget conversation is how good is your content? Is, is it strong enough in order to get someone to think or feel something? Because people are on social media often because they're trying to relax or to have their thoughts provoked or to just not do their work for 15, 20 minutes. So if you're trying to bring them back into a work mindset.

Gary: Yeah.

Adam Shirley: That'll make them think or feel something.

Gary: Right. And that's a good point because we often talk about the multiple steps. First. First is stop the scroll.

Adam Shirley: Yeah.

Gary: Right. So, um, I'm thumbing through and another picture of a data center is not going to stop the scroll. Right. Um, so. So that's the first thing. You've got to have something that catches the eye and then you've got to have that. You've got to have that instant sort of message that goes, ah, uh, it's got my attention. I want to read a bit more.

Adam Shirley: Yeah, you need, you need to grab someone's attention and then have a reason for them to stay paying attention to what you're saying. So something that is genuinely insightful, genuinely helpful solves a problem for them or gets them thinking about the problem they possibly have is what you need. And that's where, you know, strong content is really key.

Gary: Yeah.

Adam Shirley: The content balance needs to hit the budget balance, which needs to mean that you're not rushing to go live with these campaigns, which means that everything has to be taken into balance along with, you know, what is your marketing team's overall budget? When do you need this campaign to go live? If you got a webinar that is launching in six weeks time, and I've said to you that's not enough time to run a paid media campaign. You need to reallocate your marketing budget elsewhere to somewhere where it will be effective.

Gary: Yeah, yeah, because you're right, something like that is. Gabe and I talked a lot about this. The long and short of, of making sure you're building up the brand, um, and almost gaining the right to interrupt somebody's mindset or m. Their thought process, rather Than just think I can do one ad, I'm going to get a click, I'm going to get a form fill, I'm going to get a deal which is, you know, I mean, in

Adam Shirley: an ideal world we'd be able to do that and I wouldn't have to spend hours just staring at numbers going up and down on the screen.

Gary: Yeah.

Adam Shirley: It's knowing that when you're advertising on, on social, you're, you're speaking to a person, not a company. Uh, talk about this a lot with our colleague Mary. This whole business to business interactions have changed over time. Where it used to be very in vogue to talk as if you were a business on social media. And now what we're seeing more is clients are talking or they're giving personality into their social media, which is making it more engaging. But also we're seeing our clients actually promote their own social media alongside their companies. They're becoming brand advocates or influencers because it's helping the overall social media mix. And that's super important with paid social as well. You need to uh, be building the brand in a way that is authentic and you're talking to the person behind the screen, not the company the person works for.

Gary: Yeah. Seb always talks about when, when he talks about organic social makes social social and uh, just because we put paid in front of it, we often forget that and we go into advertising mode rather than social mode when you're right where we're putting our message on a social platform. So therefore it needs that social element.

Adam Shirley: Yeah. It needs to, to be something that people want to engage with or something that people see when they're waiting for the bus on their way home from work, which is traditional advertising on billboards and stuff.

Gary: So you talked about sort of aligning the campaign to the, to the media. So you use your example of the webinar, uh, with webinar, next week, let's start launching it on, on paid social. So how important is it to align your marketing strategy or have your marketing strategy and make sure that your paid media strand of that or your paid social strand of that is aligned to the purpose of what it's trying to achieve?

Adam Shirley: All right. Hugely important.

Gary: There's, it was a leading one.

Adam Shirley: There's, there's no point spending your money on, on LinkedIn. Spending that, what, $2,000 per campaign per month or whatever I said on getting someone to fill in a lead gen form on LinkedIn if then those leads don't go anywhere.

Gary: Yeah.

Adam Shirley: Or why are we running a lead gen campaign? Why Are we running a brand awareness campaign? What do we want to say about the brand? Yeah, has there been, you know, a change in branding? Has there been a change in the tone of voice? What, what is the overall strategy and how does paid media feed into it? I've uh, used this analogy with you before. Paid media is like this uh, is a horrible sports analogy. So apology for, for apologies to anyone that doesn't like sports. But paid media, if it was a football player, would be a midfielder. It can be a star on its own, but it usually works best when it's in a team that it can contribute to. So knowing what the overall strategy is, that's the game plan. That's how, that's, that's what we're ultimately aiming for. It's that win at the end.

Gary: Yeah.

Adam Shirley: And then how paid social fits into that game plan depends on what the overall goal is. Because if the overall goal is actually want to brand build. Well, I'm not going to run a lead gen campaign even though oftentimes a client might want to show that we've developed leads over time. Ultimately if their overall marketing goal is brand building, we shouldn't be doing that. Lead gen is actually a nice to have. So it's about using the client's budget effectively towards what the overall marketing goal is and setting the right KPIs as well. Sometimes I've got KPIs that the client have given to me and said we need you to generate X amount of leads per month. And I've gone, well, why, where are these leads going? How are the sales team picking up on them? Are they picking up on them? Is it, is it something they're actually seeing? Because if not, you're wasting your money on paid social and you could be using it or developing really good content or putting more money into paid search because people who are actually searching for your brand might be further along that sales funnel.

Gary: I think that's a really good point that you talk there. A lot of people think of paid social as a lead gen platform and it's not, it can be, uh, but it's not just that. So one good example of that is a lot of people use it as a brand enforcement or a brand awareness, um, play, which then generates an uplift on their paid search. So we all do it, right? If you get that response back From Google of 10 names, you click on the ones you know. So if you run a paid paid social campaign that's reinforced the brand, it works perfectly.

Adam Shirley: I actually have an example of that, um, My friend runs a small retail business, so direct to customer.

Gary: Yeah.

Adam Shirley: And uh, he hasn't got all of his tagging or marketing automation in place yet. It's a very small business. He has a website. Right. And that's it. He started running a paid meta ads campaign and he was getting some direct sales through the meta ads campaign. He could see that through the limited tagging he had. But what he also saw on Google Search console was just a massive uplift in people googling his brand name which, which then uh, coincided with an increase in sales. So the brand awareness benefit can sometimes be indirect. You might not be able to directly attribute it, but if you get your marketing automation in place and get all your tagging in place, you can attribute it better. Uh, yep. And it can be effective for small direct to customer businesses as well as business to business.

Gary: Yeah. The first podcast of this season where we was talking about marketing budgets. Gabe and I was, was talking about the whole thing of the holistic approach and how these things fit together. And sometimes certain channels cannot be directly attributed to generating leads. But there's a correlation and I think that's the case of looking at a paid social and saying it's got multiple purposes. And going back to that example of I was saying about using pay social to raise brand and then search to actually be accessible or found. You can also do that by sequencing your activity on paid social. So doing the brand campaign and then the sales activation campaign, you've sort of seen that and how it works.

Adam Shirley: Yeah. So we had a client, a large American software as a service client that had been running a lead gen campaign on LinkedIn for six months. They're real specialists in their industry. Um, but they had over the six month period spent $20,000 and got two leads.

Gary: Wow.

Adam Shirley: Which 10, $10,000 per lead, cost per lead. That's just the spend on LinkedIn, let alone the time that their internal person was using on it. And so we took on the work and we said to them we're going to run a brand awareness piece to the same audience for three months. First we're not going to run any lead gen and we're going to spend half your budget just on the brand awareness piece. And this is a hard sell to a client. But they were on board because they'd already spent six months of the year trying to generate leads and had only got two. So we ran this brand awareness piece for three months to the same audience and then after three months we left the brand awareness piece running and we launched a lead generation campaign. That first month we got two leads. So we'd already matched the uh, previous six months or in four months and then by the second month we got another eight leads and now that campaign has, has about 20 leads a month and it's spent only slightly more in the six month period. So in total I think over six months combined they got 28 leads compared to the previous six month period where they got two leads. Yeah. And that is 100% down to running a brand awareness piece to their target audience first.

Gary: And that's, and that's two bits. What I'm hearing from that is two bits. One is it's aligning it to the strategy, getting the strategy right, doing the right things at the right time. And then the second bit related to what I talk about is I talk about the buying cycle has changed. The buying cycle's got longer but also the, the proportion of that buying cycle that is now self serve and online is longer, a lot longer. So it's up to sort of 80, 85% of that buying process. So that's where it comes back to. It's not a one and done in terms of campaigning anymore because you're not generating a lead and a sales guy picks it up from you know, 10% into the buying process. You've got to keep engaging for 80, 85% of that buying process. And a social platform is the ideal platform to do that. So that's why I suppose where remarketing and retargeting etc. Is, is key.

Adam Shirley: Yeah, no, 100% retargeting is super important as well because with those leads that we've generated, we've now been able to generate lists for lookalike, uh, audiences on um, paid social. Which means that our uh, campaigns uh, are getting more complex for this client because we're trying to generate more and better leads for them. And it's currently working. We're getting more and better and we're keeping costs down because we did that legwork to begin with with the brand awareness piece because their audience now knows who they are. And we continue to run um, always on brand awareness campaigns at this audience. So we're constantly reminding them this is our client, they are the experts in this, which is an industry you need because.

Gary: Yeah, and the other bit you touched on before is being really hyper focused in terms of your targeting. And we're working with a number of clients. Um, one where we're doing ABM or many we're doing ABM campaigns for. And that's really good because not Only can you segment or build your clusters, but you can also then segment those clusters and do pincer movements going up to the exec level and then the operational level, etc. And then the other one we've, where we're doing for clients is where they do a lot of business through channels, channel partners. So it's a real push and pull integrated marketing program. But they're going out to their channel partner salespeople and using the social platform to actually reach those people rather than just reach their end user. Um, so that's the sort of level of things you can do, right, in terms of segmenting.

Adam Shirley: Yeah. And it goes back to my first point of everyone is on social media pretty much some of these platforms have billions of users. LinkedIn I think has 1.2 billion users in the world. The likelihood of your target audience being on that platform is very high. Yeah, LinkedIn is obviously owned by Microsoft. Meta is one of the biggest companies in the world. These platforms have very sophisticated targeting that allows them to target these huge user bases. So all you have to do is be clever about where you use the budget, what content you're promoting and really refine down to who you're targeting and you'll get the best results.

Gary: So we've talked about sort of set up your campaign. Great creative, great, um, messaging, great call to action. So we've created this brilliance of a campaign. We put it live. What do we do then? We forget it, just let it run.

Adam Shirley: It, uh, made my job a lot easier if I could just leave it, leave it to run. You will hear me sometimes advocating for that internally and to our clients. Um, my recommendation for anyone running paid social campaigns is to check in regularly, but don't make changes unless you have to. Because often with paid media platforms, but especially with paid social platforms, they need time for the back end to optimize to your audience. And LinkedIn, for example, say that it can take one week. But speaking to some, uh, ads managers on LinkedIn said, and they have said to me before, it can take four to six weeks for a campaign, uh, to fully optimize. It depends on your audience. It depends how strong your content is. It also depends on the time of year. I've had a campaign before where we ran it the first time for eight weeks. It wasn't getting any results, but then the conversation in the industry changed over the preceding six months and so we turned that campaign on again and it suddenly started getting results. So make changes when you have to monitor often, but only make changes when you have to and also in thinking about why do you need to make changes? Is the campaign running as we expected it to?

Gary: Yeah.

Adam Shirley: If not, why not? Is it that uh, the content is old and the audience is fatigued? Is it the content is frankly not strong enough? Is it your audience isn't right? Is it that piece we talked earlier about brand awareness? Are the audience still really cold like thinking about that? And that's where doing clever things like testing different messaging, testing different assets which every social media managers should be doing, whether they're doing organic or paid comes in. You need to be testing and learning and then applying those learnings in the future.

Gary: Yeah. Because you talk a lot about a B testing and, and sometimes it's a real smallest of things can have a massive difference. We had one we worked on together where we had a dark colored ad and uh, a light colored ad and absolutely everybody who put the campaign together love the dark ad. But the light colored ad work really, really a uh, lot better in terms of performance. But going back to your point there, it's a bit like statistics, isn't it? If you make decisions on a small sample size, you make the wrong decisions if the bigger your sample size the better. So if you're doing your A B testing, you've got to give it time to get a good sample size and to, to separate out the anomalies from the trend.

Adam Shirley: Yeah, yeah, well exactly. With um, with a B testing as well. I know I've had quite frank conversations, clients before where they've gone. You've been running this test now for two months and we don't have any results from it. What, what do the results look like? And I've had to say to them, these are the results I have right now. But because your budget is limited or your audience is so small or whatever reason, I'm not confident these will be the results in two to four months time. So we need to keep this test running. It doesn't necessarily have to be the same campaign running, but we just need to run this test again in a different campaign and then accumulate the right data to see what works well and what doesn't. And you know, it's running fair tests as well. Often the temptation with paid media and social is we want to get the best results straight away, short term thinking. So we're going to turn off this ad, this ad and this ad because it's not working right now. And you go, well hold on a minute. We don't know if it's not working because the audience hasn't seen it enough or if it's not working because it genuinely isn't working. So yeah, it's having the patience to suffer the short term losses so that you can get the long term results.

Gary: Yeah. And that's where, so I find talking to you and you rationalizing that stuff to me. I understand and I get it because you know me, I get impatient. Right. Hey, what instant results. Like everybody. And the second thing is, because it's the ad that we've created, by the time it goes live, you're almost bored of that ad. So you go, I'm on to the next one. Right. I want to create another one. But that again is the worst thing you can do. You've got to give it longevity because you get the compounding effects with people seeing it multiple times. Yeah.

Adam Shirley: If you might have seen that ad hundreds of times because it's gone through, uh, a two month long approval process because brand teams that got involved or other, other teams that got involved, etc. But your audience may have only seen that ad once.

Gary: Yeah. If that, I don't want to turn it off and put a new one on there. What a waste of money.

Adam Shirley: Yeah, exactly. So it's, it's having the patience with these test tests to ensure that your data is big enough so that uh, your learnings are accurate.

Gary: Yeah.

Adam Shirley: And also sometimes you might have to rerun a test.

Gary: Yeah.

Adam Shirley: Because social algorithms change. Your audience might have changed, your brand might have changed. So yeah, it's always applying the learnings of tests but being open to re evaluating them as well.

Gary: Right, Brilliant. So I'm going to put you on the spot now. If you could say three or four must do takeaways from this, what would they be? To be as brilliant as Adam on, um, paid social, what are the big three things?

Adam Shirley: Make sure your content is strong in the first place. So your message on paid social is aligned to what the overall marketing strategy is. And you're providing something insightful to your audience because people remember you if you make them think or feel something. Make sure you have the budget to run a successful paid social campaign.

Gary: Yeah.

Adam Shirley: And if you don't have the budget to run a successful paid social campaign this quarter, use, uh, your budget on creating great content. Run the campaign next quarter. And three is social is supposed to be fun. It's social media. And this, uh, something Seb says all the time. Social is meant to be social.

Gary: Yeah.

Adam Shirley: Make your content fun and engaging because people are on social media usually to take a break from work, even if you're in a B2B space. People want content that will, you know, will stop them scrolling.

Gary: And yeah, you're marketing to people, not businesses. Right?

Adam Shirley: Exactly. You're marketing to people, not businesses.

Gary: So, Adam, thank you very much for joining me today. That's been really useful, really insightful. I personally have learned something, so thank you again for joining us.

Adam Shirley: Yeah, thank you for having me.

Gary: Hope you found that episode useful and informative. And you, uh, learned something like I did from, from talking with Adam. Uh, if you don't want to miss any future podcasts, then please, uh, subscribe or, uh, follow us on your podcast platform. Also, if you want to see the video version of this, you can go to YouTube. And if you've got any questions for either myself or for the, uh, paid social team, then please send them through to podcastreemark.com. thank you.