The Creative Testing Gap: Why Most B2B & B2C Lead Gen Campaigns Fail to Scale

Speaker A: Over the last couple of months we've really ramped up the amount of businesses that we're auditing from a uh, creative standpoint. And I think it's been a real eye opener uh, certainly for me to see the lack of creative uh, like lack of creative variation that I was seeing inside what should be very, very big pay media accounts both across LinkedIn and, and over in Meta and it's just, it's really shocked me. It's, it's what I'm seeing time and time again. Apart from a couple of really good looking accounts and out of the 30 plus that we've ordered literally in the last two to three months, the majority of the feedback apart from obviously there's a few nuanced bits of feedback that we give but the main bit of feedback that I find myself coming back to is just there's a distinct lack of creative variance and it's something that just I. It kind of took me m by surprise and then the more that I've been thinking about it over the last couple of weeks the more I've realized that I think it's one of the biggest gaps that I certainly see in, in both B2C legion. Not so much B2C legion but more heavily in B2B you do get it in some B2C legion. I think it depends on the maturity of the business and also the volume of the business. So what I mean by that is if you're a super, super high volume B2C selling insurance for example and like it's just all about getting as many quotes as possible. Those types of businesses you actually see pretty good creative variants. But in longer uh, sales cycle B2C higher contract value. Those types of B2C which are similar ish to B2B that's where we then start to see the lack of creative variance sneak in. I've tried to kind of have a think about the reasons why and I think it's just, I just don't think it's ingrained in the B2B marketing world. I don't think creative testing is as ingrained as it is in the direct to consumer E commerce world where you know, with E commerce yes you've got obviously got to have an amazing product and a great offer. Uh, but creative testing and creative volume is the number one like factor for big ecom brands. If you jump into any E Com brand the amount of ads that they will be running across metal would be crazy. I mean we used to work in them, right? We used to see how many ads that they'd be producing and creating week on week. And obviously as the amount that you spend increases, the amount of creative testing you need to do also increases because you burn through so, so many more ads. But we just don't see that over in B2B. You know, I jump into all of these LinkedIn accounts and you look at the creatives that are out there and also they do the same over in Meta. And you know, the most that we will see really is the same static image produced five times over with different background colors or five different headlines on each one. That's just simply not enough. You need to be actually building out net new creative concepts. And so we'll kind of go into the different creative tests that you can do because I think it's just a really good brainstorm for people to understand how they can test. But just as a whole like, and just to frame this podcast really is that that is the number one issue that I'm seeing at the moment from what I'm auditing in B2B, which is a distinct lack of creative testing. And I don't know if you've got any immediate thoughts on that, but I want to discuss exactly the types of things that you can test because once you actually understand how to test and what you can test, it immediately opens up your mind. You're like, oh wow, there's actually hundreds of variants here that I could go for. And it's not just different static images, it's different formats, different channels, different messaging, different angles. There's so many variants which will come onto. But obviously there are ways in which you need to handle that. But if you've got any immediate comments off the, off that first bit at all.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's completely slept on. Like you say, less so in B2C Legion, at least in mature companies that uh, are probably spending like hundreds of thousands a month and they already understand they need to be scaling out angles and different concepts and different ads because predominantly they rely on online digital acquisition at scale. And it's kind of, yeah, it might be a high ticket B2C offer, but they still are going business to consumer. They're playing within Meta and they know they need to be there and they know what they need to do to find new pockets and get the cost per lead down as an example is probably going to be one of the main things or at least the overall cost of customer to enter their ecosystem. They need to be driving that down. So I think there is an element of some of them have that done already. But the ones that are probably entering those spaces with a new mechanism, a new approach to things will probably be in for a bit of an awakening. When they recognize, you know, we got one winning ad out, you know, testing 10 variations and they go cool, let's scale the spend into this. And they realize how quickly the they, they saturate through that, that audience that that one ad finds and they go well why is our uh, costs going up to acquire new customers? And it's because you're, you've got one winner and you need to get another 10 of those winners and you've used 10, you need another 100 ads to find and find another nine to get, you know, to keep it going. Um, and that's when the realization comes that it becomes like a full creative system. And from that you then need to go through like this hypothesis, data collation, forming that into concepts, taking that to test, put it in a matrix and you go through that whole system and it feed and it goes for a feedback loop of test and learn. And you keep on creating like you say, net new concepts which I think realistically more valuable than just simple variations of existent money concepts. NET news always going to find you new pockets, variations are going to find you similar or maybe just a slightly higher cost, um, CAC through the, through the ad. But like I say there's definitely pros to it. I see more positives to testing these things than negatives. And if you just want to jump over in B2B and you have the likes of Chris Walker doing B2B he's speaking to enterprise businesses, VPs of marketing, um, and closing deals that would have been six figure deals deals and um, bigger probably seven figure deals for his business. He, if you want to think about creative testing, yes he did it organically but his creative testing was every single day on LinkedIn. He would talk to current market conditions through user generated content and thought leader content. So he's churning seven pieces of content every week. So you can obviously or maybe more and that's business to business and that's him speaking to his market about common pain points and trends and what's going on at that, you know, that's relevant at that period in time. Um, and obviously the reality is the thing that sits behind all of that is his business that can help solve those problems. He's figuring out through sales calls what points to speak to, what people are frustrated with, what they're struggling with. He's then talking about how to solve them in real time user generated Content. And if you're in B2B people would typically say oh we don't need to be doing that or there's no real need for us to, or it doesn't work for us. It's like it can. And if as long as you're in front of where your customers exist and you're speaking to those sorts of things that are relevant to them, you can at least make them aware of you existing within the world. So these people, he wouldn't have, Chris uh, wouldn't have been looking to go, great, I'm going to get them right now and to convert and get on a call with me. It would have been a case of I'm going to get them to listen to my podcast as an example or at least be aware of me, follow me on LinkedIn, whatever. And at some point, maybe in the next two years, they might be ready for use. Our agency that's going to charge them upwards of £30,000amonth, which is a big ticket. But the this they've been hooked in from the content in the first place. So there's no reason that if you exist within multiple different verticals industries that you can't be a thought Leader on LinkedIn if you happen to have people there that listen to and engage with content there and you could test organically types of thought leader content that resonates and then decide to promote that with paid. And also when you find a winning angle, you could then whip up a more polished video, uh, educational. It could be static ads. You can obviously then start to vary like variate, like variations of your formats. Yeah, it's very much slept on. Like you say, the common thing that we see is you go into an ad account is very basic creative. There's no real diversification. You don't have anybody speaking to people that are uh, um, maybe the majority speaking to people that are in the 5%. They're problem aware and that they, they want to buy, they want to suit that you know, that they're solution aware. So they're at the point of going we're looking for a solution. And all of your creative speaks to the people in the bottom 5%. But again there's another 95 that sit without that sit outside of that that you can still speak to in a different way and so you can still have content that speaks to them. And so your, your content should be varied. Speak to people at different stages. There could be people that you know, don't even haven't come across the pain point of inflated cac yet, but it's going to happen because they're going to scale, put more spending and then they're going to realize the CAC's going to increase. Then they're going to be facing a problem where they need to find an agency or somebody that can scale up creative for them or analyze their, like their, um, user journey to help reduce cac. But that might not be that for them at that point. So something else might be educating them about that and say it's something to look out for. But at some point they then have that and they get more content. And obviously there's different, different types of content. You can stage through that, but you want to have content that speaks to that. Another, another Varian, it would be, you have a certain icp. Um, it could be that you provide a software solution to car dealers as an example. And you've probably got, you know, car dealers that are established and already have a software solution and you want to speak to them about why their current solution isn't great and they should move over to you and the reasons for it and why you're better than what's in the market. So you're speaking to those people that are at a, um, certain point there's probably going to be. Other car dealers don't even have software yet. They don't even know they need to be looking for it. So you can speak to them in a different way, captured those car dealers and then there, there will be another car dealer, uh, who knows that they need software because they're scaling up and contemplating getting software. And you can speak to those at that point. So there's three different points there that you, you can speak to that one audience or the one icp, which is the car dealer, but you're speaking to three different versions of the car dealer at once through three different types of creative. And let's say you saturated through your pocket of car dealers that were the ones you were getting on board for your software, that were thinking of swapping over. And you've really got those churning again. You're getting them to move over and these are the big car dealers that are already established. You then go, do you know what, let's go and have a go at this pocket here and see what the CAC is on this one, which is the car dealer in the middle that's going, we're at a scale now where we need the software. Before we relied on spreadsheets. Now we need something you can speak to them and start approaching that section of your market. Because they should still be there. So I think like that's an example of where you can like use very creative variations to scale across your icp. But a lot of people will lean into one, get one that's working and then not scale beyond that. So I do think there's obviously one of the things that comes into it is spent. So you obviously, if you're going to scale out creative, you need to have the spend bucket. There's no point in having 100 different creatives or 50 different creatives and not having the ad spend but behind it doesn't make sense. I think that's important to note. If you are in that paid game and you're trying to scale up paid media, then yes, you need to make sure that you have the spend to back it and you're willing to test, have a, have a budget that you willing to test against. But yeah, like there's obviously a process to it as well which is obviously having the most important part of the process before you do anything is your is doing the intelligence analysis at the beginning and doing the research and gathering the data before you do anything. That whole exercise that has to be so thorough and so well thought out before you then put it into a structure, into angles, into variations. If that part is done poorly, everything else doesn't really matter. It really doesn't. You know, certainly on Meta, but I mean if you're on LinkedIn, um, yes, you can still get in front of the right people, but if you're speaking to them with the completely wrong message, why are they going to, why are they going to engage? They're just not. Because, yeah, you can go, I'm in front of VPs of these companies. Great. Be speaking a different language or you're speaking to them in a way that's 2022 problems, they're dealing with 2026 problems. You got it completely wrong. So you need to have current up to date research on your, on your core target market and speak to them in the right way. And another thing I think whilst I'm on this sort of rant here about this is in that sort of world you can also have kind of live content that's completely relevant to market conditions, depending on what your business is. So it could be in the investment world or um, the banking world, the finance world, it could be way more data driven and you're talking about live data and live conditions and economic shifts. So that's kind of like an ongoing thing. But then there could be this, it's to the side of that an evergreen approach which could be for people that are looking to get into the market, looking to invest in the type of investment that you do. And they're paying attention to like the business and what you solve and the problem that you handle and why you're better than what exists in the market. But there's also going to be another type of person that will engage in live like market conditions and you being more of like a media hub that speaks to these things and talks about these updates and these live conditions and they might come in through that way rather than coming in for your evergreen content that speaks to more core problem solution things within that same market. Whereas with like, say, go back to Chris Walker with Refine Labs, a lot of what he spoke about was live market conditions because it was just the main thing to speak on. But there were also fundamentals tied into that fundamental marketing. Marketing fundamentals that were always sort of planted, um, at first principle thinking that was always planted within it. So it's kind of like a hybrid of the two, um, and really well done. But it spoke to live conditions and life problems, which is good. But like I say, you can break it out depending on what you provide. Data providers, the one you've worked with before for them, they can have two approaches. This is what we do for the market. This is the problem we solve. This is what we can give you. We can take this data, uh, get it collated, give it to you. No one else can do this, only we can do it. Are you that person? Do you need it? Also, we'll do live events and live talks on current market conditions. So we're also going to inform you and give you educational value, LED content and data and stats that could also bring you in. So you have two ways of bringing them in. I think that's important to note about those kinds of markets and industries that have that. That can lead with like live market value too.

Speaker A: Yeah, nice. And I think just to touch on your intelligence point, intelligence point, if people are kind of asking, well, what like, what data do I need to collate? There's if like it's going back to basic marketing principles of build understanding and building up marketing Personas. So literally building out and knowing who is it that I'm actually speaking to? What does that individual look like? What's their age range? How long have they been in their role? What like those very, very basic marketing Personas, obviously build them out in detail, but that's one part of the intelligence that you need to build out. And the second Part which has been the most useful is certainly the most useful when we jump into accounts and start working with new business is to understand and audit their closed one and closed loss deals. And again it varies based upon the data of which these businesses have. In some instances they have transcripts of the discovery calls and the calls like post discovery, but usually the discovery call is the one where we really learn their core pain points and problems and what they're actually looking for. And those transcripts are incredibly useful. They are goldmines for helping you to creative test. They are so, so key. But understanding those discovery calls and understanding your best close one deal, your closed lost deals, collating all of that together is that intelligence part. That's what's going to help you to understand what you need to do to then creative test off the back of that. And obviously also understanding in depth exactly what your competitors are doing, not just what products and services they offer, uh, but what ads are they running and literally analyze their entire creative library so that you can see exactly what angles they're running. And then you can basically have this system mapped out where you know what's out in the market, where is, where are the gaps that are being missed. Hold on, they're actually running this angle constantly. That's a good indication that's probably winning for them. So maybe we can spin up a variation of that. Uh, so there's. You need to really understand your competitive market in depth and it's also worth looking if you're only based in the UK for example, have a look at what your alternative businesses are doing in the U.S. are they running ads in the U.S. that actually you could then bring in the news in the UK you can pull in ideas from other places as well. So ideation is incredibly useful.

Speaker B: Persona part that you spoke to that like you can do a great deal of that just from surveying existing customers if you have them, but again surveying your market and getting that information from the market. So again use the car dealer example. You can have like Simon, the guy at uh, the car dealer that's you know, however many employees, call it 200 employees and whatever. And then they, you know, high end and they are the ones that are swapping over to new, the new businesses and you going to speak to those differently to how you speak to Joe at uh, the one that's got you know, 10 to 50 employees and he's not actually got up to that level yet needing the software. And then there's one where it's five to 10 employees and that's you know, Jack and he's like, he's going to need it at some point, but he doesn't have it yet. Um, and there might be an alternative solution for him that they, these other two obviously don't need. And the way that you can then you can get that information from surveying those individuals or broadly across the building up profiles of those, those different individuals and going, okay, we're going to speak to this one in this way. So Persona 1 we're going to speak to them like this. Persona 2 this way, Persona 3 that way. So there are three different types of individuals you're going to speak to within your ideal customer profile. But you, you might then say within that, uh, so within that audience of car dealers you then have like an free ICPS as an example. But you might go for ICP3 which is Simon, who's at the car dealers, whatever I said 200 to 500, uh, employees, whatever it might be. And they actually give you a CAC of X over however long. But the LTV that customer is, you know, the capital TV is incredible on average and they let, they use your software for three years on average or something like that. And it's worth X amount to you. So after testing those Personas within the market, you could really hone in on that one because it's the most valuable one to you and make sure your content really goes towards them within the market as well. I think that's so valuable and that's going super deep into it. But understanding that as well rather than saying oh, ah, we can get loads of these smaller ones with a lower cac, but they churn in four months typically because of X. Well that's a lot of money being spent to acquire people that are churning in four months where you could focus more on say the lower volume but, and higher cac, but way higher LTV and it's way more profitable for you as a business. Um, that's one of the first things I think that when you're doing the research stage is understanding what customers ah, are, are the most valuable to you and why and then obviously understand the sales cycle, everything like that. But yeah, that, that intelligence piece at the start, surveying customers and surveying potential customers if you can is, it's incredible. I think that just gets overlooked completely. I think back to Dango, uh, when we started it, the first thing we did was surveyed the industry before we did anything. That's one of the things we did. We just surveyed them to help build out the site but also completely provided everything we needed to market with, I think I say you'd just be surprised how much that gets missed. And then it's also doing your research on the places they really engage in. So if in Reddit, they might be in forums on Reddit, it could be in LinkedIn, looking at the comments, looking at what are the people that are buying your service talking about and how are they speaking about other people? Really, really important. Um, yeah, grabbing, like you say, competitor intel as well. How do they speak to the market? And then how can you. Obviously you're speaking to the same market, so you need to make sure you're speaking, speaking to it in a unique way that's going to also appease some people. They might like the way you talk to the market better than the competitor does and therefore they're going to go with you over the other one. But if you're not there speaking to them, why would they choose you? They're going to probably go with the one that is speaking to them. So great reason to run ads in that industry, which again, when we do these audits, think about how many we don't even see running ads. And you see one competitor just absolutely wiping the floor. It's crazy.

Speaker A: Yeah, you mentioned obviously the, you know, the multiple ICPs and I've, I've done this in certain, uh, accounts where it fits. And this is one of the, this is one of the parts of like how to create a test basically that I actually want it to come onto so that segues nicely. Again, it depends on the business that you're running and exactly what it is that you do. But for example, we've worked with businesses where they have many services and those many services can suit many different ICPs and they might not necessarily have a budget that enables them to run effective paid media campaigns across all of their services to all of their ICPs, because it would probably just be ridiculous. And uh, so obviously you start to understand, okay, what's the most valuable, etc. As we just discussed, what ICP is the most valuable, what services are most valuable? And you start with those. But that's where you can first begin. Your testing is actually starting to test different ICPs, even with one service. For example, let's say you're a business that sells five different services. Even with one of those services, chances are, uh, there's probably a handful of different ICPs that you could suit. So actually that becomes your first creative variant you can run a test on. So you run the same ads, but five different ad groups of five different ICPs so and that can be broken down based off of, okay, cool, we're gonna say we're gonna run ads to these job titles here. Or it might be to different industries or different seniority levels. So already just within testing it at the ICP level. If you haven't already nailed it down, if it's relatively broad, then you've already got a huge amount of like testing you can do just from an ICP perspective. Yeah. And then similar to that, you can also do the same with your service offering. So yes, you might have your one to two key services or products that you have. If you're a SaaS, for example, you might have like one to two core products on your SaaS that uh, are the kind of the real breadwinners. But maybe you run a test of five different products and see which products are actually hitting in the market right now. Which ones do people actually. Because what you might find is that there's one or two core products that funnels the acquisition in and then they actually get upsold on the other five or six products that you've got. So and testing, test those different products. So you can test your different service offerings, you can test your different products. That's already another set of, that you can do at a very top level in terms of, that's not so much creative testing that it's like figuring things out.

Speaker B: It's like testing your products and where it's in the market.

Speaker A: That's, that's very, very top level testing. But once you've done that, so already you've got a huge amount of variance that you can test there. But let's say you don't have that and you've just got one solid ICP and one solid, uh, service offering. What's the first like level of testing that you can do? The first thing that you can do is you can attack the pain points or the problem solution that they're kind of two of the same things really. So for example, you analyze the last 30 discovery calls that you've got. Then off the back of that you will have a list of pain points and problems that people are looking to solve. And as long as you, your product or your service actually does solve those problems, then immediately you'll have a list of pain points or problem solution angles that you can use in your different ads. So that immediately becomes your first point of creative testing is okay, cool. Well, we know that these commonly come up. Let's actually now put them out there into, into the ad world, into the, into the feed and let's see which ones actually resonate with people. That's one example. And then you could segment down from there. And this is where you can then really start to dial in from a uh, a creative testing perspective. Which is where we see the lack of, well, we also see a huge lack of people actually testing different pain points. But anyway, so you found the pain point that really resonates. That doesn't mean, by the way, that you never test pain points again. You should always continue to test them in different formats as well. Because markets change, things change all the time. So you should continue to test. But let's say you found the one angle out of the five that has really worked, giving you the lowest cac, the most amount of conversions and the most qualified opportunities possible. Great, we know that that one's working. Let's dial that up. So the next step that you can then do is you go, okay, we know that this one angle works. Now how many creative variants can we make off the back of uh, that let's create five net new static images off the back which are all vastly different from each other. And that's the key. They need to be net new creative variants, not just different backgrounds, not just different headlines. They actually all need to be genuinely different looking ads. Different backgrounds, different copy. They have to be distinctly different. That's one thing that obviously as B2B marketers now that we took from the D2C world in EECOM, you can't just test tiny little like tweaks. I mean you used to be able to and you can at certain um, points. But when you're first beginning to create a test, they have to be distinct. So you can test say five different static images. Okay, so that's one type of test that you can do. Then moving on from that, it's then going, okay, well we know that this pain point really works. We know that that really lands. Let's actually now test different formats. So now let's run carousel. Let's run a document ad. Perhaps if we want to do like a lead gen type style, we can then also run a video. We could also run a podcast off of that and then clip that and then run that as a video ad. Let's run thought leader on it. This. So already you then open up to all these different formats and then you jump into each format and then you have multiple variants of that that you can test. So for example, with the videos you might then have five different versions of a video. One might be a super polished podcast setting, one might be More of a UGC style setting immediately you've got so many different variants that you can go down and you can test. And then for example, if you started to do remarketing or sorry, if you started to run retargeting campaigns. I know this is a test that we used to run within our retargeting uh, campaigns in LinkedIn was we used to find that in mail ads worked very, very well to tight, tight retargeting segments. So we know that they were relatively high intent users at that point and we used to run in mail ads and they worked extremely, extremely well at the time. But again we didn't just create one ad and send it out. We have three or four variants and we would test to see which ones, which subject line, which cop, which body text worked. So you, you have to be, even though you're testing different formats, test within that format as well.

Speaker B: That's.

Speaker A: And so once you start to understand that ah, there's so many levels of creative testing that you can do and it becomes really easy and it also becomes exciting because you know that you're doing the maximum that you can to try to reduce your CAC and to also increase the amount of qualified opportunities you've got. Obviously we'll come on to this like if, if you're working over a longer sales cycle then obviously one of the questions is well, how do I create a test if it's, if we did don't get the conversions there and then it might be a six months long sales cycle, we'll come on to that. But creative testing is, you know that you're doing the most as a marketer and it, it makes your marketing job more exciting because you're brainstorming constantly. Okay, what angle could I go for next? You're learning constantly. You're, you, you're looking at the data that you're getting back and going great, that one's absolutely smashing the click through rate. So that's resonating somewhere. But then they're not turning into qualified opportunities. Why is that? And it's just really trying to understand those different angles and working that all out. And that's how ultimately you start to win as a marketer for a business. That's how you start to reduce your CAC and increase qualified opportunities is by creative variance testing and testing and testing and testing all the time. And I just do not see it enough, I really don't. And it's, I'm sure there's many reasons behind it, but it's, it's overlooked Entirely. And I think we personally don't overlook it because it's what we've dealt with massively from a D2C perspective and also from B2C. You know, we deal with a lot of B2C legion volume plays where they need thousands of leads a month, which means, which means high spending accounts. And immediately when you're trying to get thousands of leads of high spend accounts, you also need mass volume of creative. And you can't be churning out the same creative because you'll very, very quickly see your CAC absolutely fly through the roof. Yeah, so we've obviously taken that philosophy and we've brought that over into B2B and it works and we. I just wish I saw more people do it. And that's where we see the biggest

Speaker B: gap is I think, touching your point. Like if you just go B2B enterprise, like you say, trying to get a feedback loop is very difficult. I think you could play around with trying to get the right people in your ecosystem with it and getting in front of the right people. I think it's a test that you can do on meta. I'm talking here m meta, LinkedIn, I think Enterprise ABM motions. Good, good. Like obviously everybody can execute on that. If you were to try and sneak into matter and have a go there as well, I think it's still possible, but it's a different way of thinking. If you were going SMB, um, on meta, I think it's very possible to do it that way. Well, I know it's possible because we've done it. So you can do it and you can drive like engagement and demos and calls booked through meta ads for SMB and then even obviously the solopreneur community as well. Very effective. But meta's great for that. The volume that, that sort of volume play. But yeah, from an ABM motion, I still think you can get it to support it and I still think you can use, I know you can use matched audiences that you can bring over into meta, which we've touched on before, and you can run towards those as well as testing out matters, sort of signal targeting. So to spe. So it does work in those environments, it just has to be tested. The question is, if you're not getting immediate feedback loops because of your sales cycle, when you're not trying to grab a lead, email a lead, all of that, then what can somebody do to figure out whether their creative is working? Um, let's say you go with type of angle towards type of ICP and you want to go out for that in the market.

Speaker A: Great.

Speaker B: Run it, test it on Meta. Is Meta having an impact? What like again, what spend are you putting into it? What sort of uplift are you expecting to see? What sort of people are you expecting to visit your site? You should have a rough idea. So if you're using a de anonymizer tool, you'll be able to see what traffic's landed on your site and whether these people are uh, visiting from what companies. You'll be able to pick that up from a DE anonymizing tool, GA4 data via utms too. What's the engagement time? How long are people spending on the site? Um, and then there's other various signal tools obviously you can use to gather as much intel. Early doors. Another thing you can do is if you have a newsletter where people can um, sign up or subscribe to anything to get further information about you. Are you seeing the right sort of people after running that motion? Signing up to your newsletter, these are leading indicators is essentially what you're looking for. So yes, they might be buying from you a year, two years down the line, but are you getting the right people in your ecosystem through the angles you're speaking to? On Meta as an example, you should know like, you can do it. It's just that you're not, your feedback loop is different. You're not using a feedback loop that's like an immediate validation of I've got a demo booked within a week because I've run that angle or, you know, X amount of people are signed off for demos very quick because we're a lower AOV player, you're not going to see that. But you could run that motion for maybe an agency and you've run that for three months and then you know, in three months time off the back of it you have two booked calls and that they could be worth obviously a great deal to you after just spending six grand. Those two book calls and a close on those could be worth 60 grand to you. You got 10x return on your ad spend but you, if you didn't see that immediately, you could go with none of this works. And the thought leader content we tested as a waste of time, but it's not, it's, it's looking. It's how you measure that thought leader content. Early doors, like I said, leading indicators. Are you seeing you uh, know an uplifting pod listeners? Are you seeing certain people engaging with your LinkedIn content that weren't before? Have your followers started to increase on LinkedIn off the back of you running Meta ads, have your subscribers increased? Yeah. Are you seeing GA 4 times increase in engagement times like increase in the market that you're going for? All of these things you can and look at and isolate. So you want to run Meta ads in the UK only and you were doing eu but you wanted to go UK and you were testing the UK market for that. Um, and you've had some success there before. Okay, run that motion there and then see what's happening in GA4 from the UK market. And again, are there UK businesses there engaging? Have they signed up to your newsletter? Uh, you can measure impact from that and I think it's, it's a good thing and you can tie that back to the utm. And so if you're testing multiple creative variations on it, signals are going to tell you how much spend is going through. For one, there's probably going to be one that's getting all the spend. The odds are that's the most engaging and getting the right people through it with Meta. So you're then going to see that. But look at the UTMS too. Could it be the, the UTM data is different and actually one of the ads you weren't expecting to do it was providing way more higher engagement levels. In which case now meta gives you the opportunity to push more spend behind that. So maybe that was getting all the spend but it was getting 10 second engagement rate which means it's going to the wrong person. But there's a different angle. There's actually getting a 45 second engagement rate on the page. Let's push more spend to that and get that in front of more people because that's potentially going to scale out to an audience, a small match to us. So yeah, I think it's like say super slept on, on longer sales cycles too.

Speaker A: It shouldn't be.

Speaker B: It has a place it's just using again like when somebody has a hammer, everything's a nail. It's such a cliche term but it's true. I think when you, you have that approach to. You have to be more open minded with using the tools, using ads. You're using ad creatives on LinkedIn but you can also use them for the same purpose in Meta. But it's just being creative with how you use meta, uh, and cheap CPMs and still ways of measuring the success of those. And if you can't get them to work, it doesn't matter. You at least you've tested that environment but you should at least be trying that sort of thing and depending on your market. Like I say, if you're going for smaller businesses, if it's SMBs and it's not enterprise ABM motions 100%, you should be having a go at it and testing it out and seeing what you can do and not going for immediate conversions. But maybe you're educating people and using those leading indicators. And off the back of it, over the next six months, what do things look like, um, on the back end when you do get the demos booked, where did they first see you? Is it Instagram ads? Was it, you know, have the conversations in sales call actually saw an Instagram ad, went and checked you out on LinkedIn or googled you went there. Then I signed up to a newsletter. Then off one of your newsletters, I thought I needed to speak to you. So you find that information out down the line. But, um, it's hot, you know, having the, say the leading, leading indicators are very important when you're testing out on those longer sales cycles because you don't get an immediate feedback loop.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a very, very good point. And also I think it's probably just worth mentioning as well, over and over in meta, you know, let's say you are a B2C or even B2B and you're running high volume over there, which is the amount of variance that you can start nuance on. Like, if you're genuinely spending a lot of money and you're getting a lot of conversions through your ads, that is when you can start to do more nuanced, smaller tests because you've, you're spending a lot and you're running a lot of ads and you find the ones that are starting to work. That's when you can then start to work towards like tighter variants. So for example, you might have a video that's your best performer. Great. So what can I then do with that best performing video? Well, the first thing you can do is you can create different hooks. So you could try, let's say three different hook variants of that and then you could also maybe cut it down to three different lengths. So one's a minute, one's a 30 seconds, whatever. So there's like variants you could do within the video. So that becomes one source of running variants on your best performer. The second is you can actually then run copy variants. So you keep the same video. You then run five or three different copy variants based off of that, if you can, and if you see the space to do that. So you run copy variants where you're changing the headline, you're changing the body copy, that's variance. You can run thumbnail variants that gets hugely slept on. So you can then actually run the same video with three different thumbnails. Thumbnails are massive. That's what stops people, especially on Facebook, when they're scrolling. So you can then test different thumbnails that becomes new variants. You can. I know many people really hate Advantage plus Creative, but test it. As long as you go through and you actually check to see what you're switching on and just verifying it, you're happy with it. But I've, I've done it. You know, I've taken the best performer, switched on a handful of Advantage plus options on that creative that I've uh, kind of gone through and double checked and verified that's beaten the best performer. I didn't believe it would because I'm pretty anti Advantage plus Creative, but in some instances it's actually outperformed the original. So there's so many. Even once you've got your winning ad, there are many, many variants that you can increase off the back of it. So I think it's just important, certainly from a meta perspective where it's like high volume, I would also suggest leveraging. You find your best performer. There's so much more that you can do with it. That's what I mean by like once you open your eyes to it and you understand, oh, wait, I can test thumbnails. All of a sudden there's so many variants. Wait, I can test hooks. Wait, I can test copy. You've got so many variations that you can run with. It's it reopens your eyes and actually makes your job as an advertiser easier. Yes. You still need to be producing net new concepts weekly and you need to be creating net new ads all the time. But you can also make your life easier at the same time by also running variations of your best performers. And I think that's a really good slept on hack as well. Again, it happens all the time over in the D2C world, but in our world that we're in at the minute, you just don't see it so much. And certainly that's what's really driving lower CAC for us at the minute is that emphasis on creative variation testing, both at the top level, but then also at that nuance level as well. Obviously like that example there, you wouldn't be doing that on LinkedIn for enterprise because you just don't need.

Speaker B: Doesn't make sense.

Speaker A: You don't need to be doing it because it's not a volume play. So you're testing at an enterprise level. Again, it depends on the amount that you're spending and the amount that you're also returning. You know, if you're getting hundreds of demos booked a week or a day or a month, then you can afford to have more creative tests. But if you're not, and it is a really big contract value, a real slow play, then obviously you're going to have a much tighter pool of creative testing. So your creative testing at that level might just look like testing different formats and three different pain points. And uh, maybe that's all you need

Speaker B: to do for a short while to target count lists.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, correct. So you're just, your pool can just change and expand based off of your business needs. Basically. It's, it really comes down to that. But yeah, it's, it's completely slept on at the minute and it's like, it's frustrating when you jump into these accounts, but it's also good because you can see where there's so much room to, for these businesses to grow. And it's, I mean that you can never guarantee. But you know that if you walk into these businesses and presuming that everything else is working as it should, that running those creative variants, you can lower their CAC pretty quickly, or at least their cost per lead in the first instance. You can lower that pretty quickly just through creative variants, than just testing more. You know, most of the businesses, even some of the big enterprise businesses that I've gone in and checked out, all they're running is 80% static image ads plus 20% video ads, and that's it. And it's just, most of those are just repurposed. You just sending out to different ICP segments.

Speaker B: Do you then jump in against their competitors? And they've got thought leader ads, they've got like polished video, they've got like 16 animation animations, case studies, UGCs.

Speaker A: They also run email markets.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: They're also then running Legion on uh, on webinars. They're also running Legion on document ads. There's. Do you know what I mean? There's so much more that you can go at just by looking at different formats as well.

Speaker B: Yeah. And sees that they're saying like you've got the one person in the industry saying ads don't work for us. The other ones are saying, this is great. Like we're scaling this business, we're at this level of revenue because we're doing this and they've invested in you Know, getting more market share and be more visible in the market. You say like the others are still, uh, you know, they're back in 2016 running a few static ads, trying to grab an MQL and you've got other people doing the full, fully fledged, you know, media ecosystem that you can't get there like instantly, but you can at least build up if you measure it the right way. Build up the confidence to test these things. Like you say, test the market and work with what resonates in your market.

Speaker A: Yeah, confidence is a, is a key one there. I think most people in LinkedIn marketers, like most of the businesses that we go into, they don't have confidence to test. They, it's just, they see it as a very. This is done this way. Like it's, they treat as a strict platform. They're not open with it and not fun with it. That I'm not saying like to make your ads fun and creative, but I mean they, they lack that vision of they just, they believe that you can just run an ad and it's going to kind of work on LinkedIn because it's going to the right people. But it's not like that. You have to find out what's going to resonate. And the only way you can do that is by having multiple options to see which ones resonate. Not just you deciding what's best for that icp. You need to see what's going to actually resonate. And the other thing that I just actually wanted to finish on is timing, which is you have to give your ads time to test. I've seen that also happen many, many times where they'll run a test for, I don't know, three or four days. Okay. It spent this much haven't returned like seeing a low click through. It hasn't returned this switch off. You, you have to give it. And there's. We've spoke about this before in terms of like how long you should give things because it does vary obviously based

Speaker B: off of budget and measuring against.

Speaker A: Yeah, correct. So there's too many factors to be able to say you have to run for X days, but just from overall, you have to be able to give it time based on all of those factors. You need to give it enough time to understand. And also you should have calculated your. Whatever metric that you want to look at. You will have a calculation where you will understand. Cool. If this, if this spends X and we have not hit by metrics that is a failed test, we can close it off. And also you can Just compare it to other ones to see how they're performing and be like, okay, running five variants here, they've, they've all spent over the threshold that we want. These are the two worst performers. Switch those off, let's now dial up for the other two. So just, you need to make sure that you give them the time.

Speaker B: It's even things like um, like a comment on an ad can just completely change his course if it's like the course of its direction. So if it's on LinkedIn and you just shut it off in three days on day four, it gets two comments, then people pay more attention to that adding and more people in the relevant industry comment on it. You've now got a really strong performing ad that's driving a lot of engagement. But if you shut it off on three days because it hadn't done anything but you could see that it was getting a reasonable share, it was getting shares, it was getting this, it was getting that, but nothing really looked great on the back end. But the engagement rate on the front end was solid from it and you switched it off because I've got a demo booked. But I mean you just wouldn't do that. But I know that does happen. Um, and that's again you're just not running your paid activity. Correct. So you say it's again educating when educating people on what they should be looking for and when running these tests, know what your soft metrics and then what are the overall things you're looking at on the back end to signal whether that traffic is, you know, the right sort of traffic for you as well? Um, a good marketer should be able to do that. Obviously if you're, you know, not such a great marketer, you probably wouldn't do that. And you go, didn't win. Because we've got a low click through rate. It's like, no, obviously there's a lot more to it than that.

Speaker A: But um, I completely agree Dan. And also just to close out, I know I mentioned at the start that We've audited over 30 plus businesses over the last two to three months. If anybody is listening and would also like to receive an audit, please feel free just to reach out to us either through our website@mayfairmediagroup.com or you can find our uh, LinkedIn details in the uh, description of this podcast. So feel free just to click into that. Shoot us a DM and we line up a free audit for you guys. But thanks for your time again Dan and look forward to catching up on the next time Cheers, bro. Pleasure. Cheers.