Why Great Marketers Test Everything (Even What They Know Works)

Speaker A: I actually wrote a LinkedIn post about this today and it just seems super, super relevant for this point in time, especially for me and for what I've been seeing recently, especially over the last couple of weeks. And it's just something I wanted to bring to the POD and just have a little bit of a discussion and a riff around with you, which is that recently I've, I've been doing a lot of, I mean look, we always test with all of our clients. We're continually testing on macro level and micro levels. But I've just been retesting some of my own assumptions and with a couple of new clients we've been working with, I've jumped in, uh, so this is in Google Ads and I've jumped into the account and one of the examples they had a brand campaign that was running on a bidding strategy that typically I would not usually choose. So I had the immediate assumption that, you know, I immediately wanted to switch this bidding strategy over on this brand campaign to what I know has worked for me on a number of other accounts. It works time and time again. Sometimes I mix up with a couple of the bidding strategies, but generally like there's one or two bidding strategies which is manual CPC and impression share percentage. Like they're the, they're the two, search impression share, they're the two that I'm basically running brand on. But this was using a uh, Target ROAS bidding strategy and usually for brand I would avoid doing that. And in this instance rather than just going in and blindly swapping it over and making that change into what's a relatively high spend account, I wanted to test myself and to run an experiment on it before making that hard change. So ran a three month experiment uh, testing the bidding strategies what I would typically use versus the one that was already in place. And I thought there would be a huge statistical win using my bidding strategy that I know personally wins. But there wasn't. The CPA actually doubled and we dropped in conversions on the experiment versus the control. And it was humbling but also just a huge reminder that just because it works for you in another account, on another client, on another channel, it doesn't always automatically mean that it's going to work for you in another account in a new client. So if you've just changed job roles, for example, and you're working with one SaaS and what's worked really well over there, you move into another SaaS business and you try and use that exact same strategy down to ad angles, down to account structure or bidding strategies, and so on. It's not always going to work in the exact same way. And so I think really what I just kind of want to put across is A, to, to not make assumptions, or you can make assumptions, but make sure to always test them. But B, is really just to be curious and to be open. And I think when you're curious and you're open as a performance marketer, that's when you can really unlock growth. Because look, I'm sure if I would have made the change to search impression share over time, we would have reduced the CPA like we did see that was happening during the course of this experiment. Right as we got towards the end, it is learned enough, we started to see the CPAs dropping, the conversions increase, but regardless, the other strategy was still winning. But generally being open and being curious means that you're testing, you're testing time and time again. You don't just make the assumption that, yes, this is the best way, I'm going to run it and do that. Whereas if you test, that's how you can use, you can know for a fact. Cool. I've just tested this bidding strategy versus this, this angle versus this, this account structure versus this. And that's how you know when you run them and you test for statistical significance, which one's going to win or which one isn't. And that's how you can then, um, with confidence, move forward and you can grow that business and you can scale the performance marketing up in the right way, knowing that the proof is, the evidence is there, you've already tested it, you've tried it. And so that's really kind of where I wanted to kick things off with. And I know that you've had a couple of instances recently with other clients where you've had people that have, that you're working alongside, that have come in and said, hey, this, why aren't you doing this? This is what I've just been doing elsewhere. And it works really well. This is what we should be doing. And little did they know that you've already tested that you've tried it and actually it didn't work for that client in particular. And so I think it's just super, super important that as a performance marketer, as a marketer in general, is just to be open, be curious, and to never believe that you always know what's best.

Speaker B: Yeah, a hundred percent. So I think like you mentioned an example there where it was like a lead form example, um, where somebody's had like great success with that, with another business. They've come into, you know, what they believe is a similar business as they had a growth role and you're working with them as an agency and they're saying like, you know, you should be testing this. Why, why are you not testing this? And it's like, well, it's already been tested and it didn't work. And, and you know, there's reasons for that. Obviously they're still wanting to do that regardless of that, which, you know, I'd be more than happy to do to, to prove it out. But there's, there, there's numerous examples of things like that where you, you know, you've done something like you say on one, one account and one offer, uh, you, it's probably quite silly to lift that exact thing that has worked for that business. If it worked for them three years ago in a different climate, that was working really well for that platform at the time, then you've taken that three years on, things have changed and you go and lump the same approach in on a different, you know, know, different business. By all means, in the same sector. It doesn't necessarily mean the thing is going to work. Like things change. The way people buy online, the way they engage with certain types of ads, the way they download information, everything, it changes constantly just due to how we advance, how the apps, LinkedIn, Meta, Instagram, everything is advancing all the time. So to go in with, you know, like I say, uh, a, a test on something that might have worked a few years ago for you in, in 2026 is probably not the best. What I would typically advises, first of all, understand what do you have enough budget to test with? Like if you have a certain level of budget, we will have gone through this in previous pods, but you'll have a certain level of budget you probably can't actually test. Like your budget is your test. And really what you're figuring out is what channel do, does my core consumer spend a lot of their time on and where, where do they spend their time? How can I get in front of them, provide them value or entertainment and make them, you know, brand aware and fans and then eventually advocates of us as a business. Um, you need to discover that and discover what resonates with them. Is it, you know, entertainment, is it value, LED content? What is it that really works for them for that, um, icp. That's what you want to be doing. And so your whole budget is a test really. You're testing channels, testing angles, you're testing creative types. Then when you get something that works, you know, that's where you can then go like an 80, 20 split so you can scale up your spend into doing more of what's working. That makes a lot of logical sense, doubling down on that channel and really starting to spend into it and making sure that you grow profitably like that. There's like 101 unit economics.

Speaker A: They're all there.

Speaker B: And then, yeah, you siphon off 20% and you go, okay, well, we've really grown our business in LinkedIn and we, you know, we feel that we've really maxed out, um, our audience on LinkedIn as much as we physically can. We've done, you know, customer imports and we're running directly to certain businesses. You know, we've got other breakouts on job titles, we're doing whatever. And you've really got good frequency and you're spending a lot. You could then go, what about a percentage that don't even go on LinkedIn? There's probably going to be some, some people that aren't even on there. Uh, are they on Instagram more than they are Facebook as an example? Depending on their age, a lot more people are on Instagram now. Could you go and test over there? The answer is yes, of course you can. Could you do more of a demand generation and maybe even test a bit of a performance, um, approach there if the offer's right?

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: You would you approach it in the same way you would LinkedIn. No, because they're very different channels and meta's a lot more. There's a lot more signal intent on meta and a lot less signal intent on, on LinkedIn. So that would be a test. So you could take, okay, cool, we've got 20% of the budget. Let's try that as a channel. And I think that's a really good example of a lot of B2B businesses especially. And high ticket B2C, they're very afraid of Meta. High ticket B2C less because they see that it's individual consumers and they know that they're on Instagram, so they find that that's more of an appropriate channel. So they're more willing to test their B2B definitely a lot less. It's still very much, you know, is our, uh, buying committee exists on LinkedIn, so we must target them there. But your buying committee most likely also exists on Instagram too. So why would you not also try targeting them there and entertaining them there if you can? Um, so I think that's a really interesting one because on LinkedIn at the moment I'm seeing a Lot of posts from VPs of marketing heads of growth that are, they're testing out custom audiences that they're important into matter as one, but also stepping away from that and doing what I'm really familiar with, which has been, and I know you've had super growth with this, with one client in particular, which is dialing in your icp, knowing exactly who you should be speaking to, which you should Already know from LinkedIn anyway, if you've been on there. But then reverse engineering their, you know them as an individual and what they want to see, what they're going to engage with and publishing that content on, on Instagram so that it stops, they stop the scroll, they engage with that, that individual stops with that. And so if you were speaking to VPs of growth as an example, yes, it's going to be very easy to target them on LinkedIn, but you can also very effectively target them on meta. And that could be, you could go down a comedic route depending on what you sold. And it could be something that really, you know, they come across in their job. And it could be about attribution. That would be probably a very good example. You could probably run some like meme ads as an example about attribution on matter and a VP of growth is going to understand it, so they're going to stop on that and entertain it. That's a great way of subtly getting in front of them without calling them out. But if you wanted to, you could also call out a VP of growth. You could do a comedic skit of being a VP of Growth for an exit as an example and then tie in your, your product or service to that. There's loads of different things you can do that will entertain them on that channel and stop them. But that could just be a test for you. But I think a lot of people will be very surprised at what that looks like. And you can go and use Meta signal intent to do all of that. So if you wanted, yes, you can use lookalike percentages of your existing audiences. You could use an interest if you wanted it. But you, what you could do is go completely broad and that could be maybe just doing ages. So you're not really going to get an 18 year old VP of Growth. So let's just say you did, you know, 25 plus or 30 plus and you ran that, and you ran that type of content and you put no interest on it at all. It was just simply age. I would bet very good money from what I've seen before that that would do a Fantastic job actually getting in front of those people. Very good cpm. You're going to get very good brand awareness and you could probably actually get probably strong leading indicators, newsletter signups. Um, you could get some very good early indicators. I'm not saying it's going to get you instant bookings or anything like that, but you could see the right type of people signing up to your newsletter, engaging, uh, with your podcast, potential webinars, looking you up on LinkedIn, you know, good GA, four numbers, all of those sorts of things. You would look out for early leading indicators. But um, you would absolutely be able to get that if you dared to experiment with meta. And like I say, I think a lot of people sort of think, oh it's legion, we must go on there, use lead forms. No, don't have to do that. There's a lot of different angles you can take with it. Sometimes sending them to your website and then freely finding out stuff about you and looking at your content is just as good. Forcing them to go and sign up to a lead form so you can get their email and email them instantly. Maybe not. So again, it's thinking about your business, thinking about how people engage with you in the, in the physical world, how that translates into the digital world and thinking about how you can, you know, best service them. So yeah, I've gone on for a bit of rant there but I think that's um, one of the big one, big miss. I see so much is certainly in B2B is uh, a lot of people missing out on that then on the, the B2C side high ticket B2C is there's still a lot of people that don't even think to build out demand gen as a, as a motion on, on meta, um, and get in front of people so that you're, you know, there's the 5% that are in market and you can still obviously get to that 95 that are out there. Um, but there might be 5% that are in market on LinkedIn and there's also going to be like a percentage of that that exists, exists within meta that aren't on LinkedIn. So you could still get in front of them and they're still going to be in market. So it's not to say that you still can't get in front of that like lower funnel audience on matter. It's not that as soon as you go to meta it acts like, you know, YouTube awareness as an example or CTV is still very much can be getting in front of your low funnel prospects. That I think just gets overlooked entirely.

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, I entirely agree. And just to echo on a few of those points, and there's, there's a handful of points I want to call out is number one. I completely agree that. And we've said this before on other parts, is that broad targeting on meta or no targeting, essentially just location and age has outperformed using meta's native targeting time and time and time again for me on a number of accounts and not just outperformed by 5 or 10% but by huge amounts. I know that we run. I ran an experiment just a couple of weeks ago. Again, I just wanted to double check and just reconfirm that this was the case. And I ran a test for the two weeks with one of our businesses and had one ad group that used Net Met as native targeting. So looking for like Facebook page admins and there was a whole bunch of other job titles experiences. Like there was, there was a lot of targeting going on there and then the other one had nothing. Literally just the age and location and the native targeting generated zero qualified leads to the same amount of spend, whilst the broad targeting or the zero targeting generated six qualified leads, all of which are uh, currently like in full conversation at the moment. So like six versus zero. It was, you know, the performance was unavoidable.

Speaker B: Was that interest targeting that you were using?

Speaker A: Yeah, correct. It was interesting. And also looking at like their job titles. So you can still do that within meta. You can still like for example, if they, if you're trying to find like a business owner, you can then look for a Facebook page admin owner, for example. This, there's different like targeting that you can use. But then again, if I was to go into a new account tomorrow and I was to run meta, I would, I would have one ad group that's broad, but I would also test it against some targeting as well. So that might be a 5% lookalike or 1% lookalike based off of a match list. And then I will also maybe run one on native interest targeting and demographic targeting if it suits that business. Run all three as a test in a small region. It all depends on spend really as to how much you can test. But run three, run three of them as a test for how long they need to get the spend, see what the outcomes are. I will still, even though I know that broad targeting works, I will still always double check. Just because you never know. Some ICPs can be so nuanced that the answers can shock you. And so I will always run A test, just to double check. And then the other point that I just wanted to call out, you mentioned that, you know, people take what they've done over in LinkedIn and they just run the same thing in Meta and hope that it works. It will not. And the difference that I see is that the creatives that you put out on LinkedIn, uh, should be very different to the creatives you put on, uh, Meta. And the way that I see that different is yes, you can obviously go down like the more informal comedic group potentially, like you said, you know, like

Speaker B: memes that just, just to pause on that, just to pause you on that. It's like the inverse works. So if you test a testing ground being meta, I think you can more often than not get matter to work on LinkedIn and less LinkedIn to work on matter. But sorry to carry on, but I just want to jump in there and, and caveat that because I think that's.

Speaker A: Yeah, I agree as well, but what I was going to say is that the creative that you put out on LinkedIn, you already know that you're targeting job titles, job functions, seniority, and potentially also a matched audience. Right? So you know that your ads for the most part are uh, being put in front of the people you want them to be. So you don't need to explicitly call out your ICP in your creative because your creative is going to land in your ICP feeds and you know that. Whereas if you were to take that creative that doesn't, you know, so that might just be a problem, a problem solution type creative, uh, you know, a value add creative on LinkedIn about your product, about your brand. If you just lifted that and dropped that into Meta, there is no way that it's going to find its way to the correct people because there's nothing within that creative that calls out the ICP or calls out the industry or the business that you're trying to target. So therefore it's going to fall flat because Andromeda's algorithm system is not going to have a way to push that creative in front of our people because it doesn't know who it's, who it's calling to. So the creative that you run in LinkedIn vs meta is going to be different. The creative and the copy you run in Meta needs uh, to quite clearly call out the person you're, the person that you're trying to target and, or the industry that you're targeting, whereas you don't necessarily need to do that in LinkedIn. Again, it's dependent on how within LinkedIn?

Speaker B: Yeah, I still think it's great, obviously like best practice to obviously have a content that is dialed in to speak to your ICP and LinkedIn. Like that's going to be better than not. Like I don't think it's any excuse to be lazy and go, well, we know we're putting it in front of the right people, let's just show them our product or let's just show them services. You should still aim to go, this is a problem that again I'll use the VP of Growth has around attribution. Let's dig at that and then put that in front of them because that's going to make them engage and that's going to make them stop on that thing if it's boring. But you know, you're going in, you know, it's like, hi, we solve attribution with this. Like no one's going to care, no one's really going to stop on it even if you get it in front of the VP of growth. But if you say like, I don't know, you're probably struggling to show which channel CAC is like uh, impacting CAC the most, you know, and essentially you're looking for something that solves that, that can help you prove that case to the board. They're speaking their language. You're like, yeah, that's correct. I am having, I haven't actually used third party attribution yet and if you solve that, I'll speak to you. But if it was just a list of like, you know, last clicks, this, this is that, this is that. It's like, well, don't, don't worry. But if you speak to the pain point or the emotive point that they're dealing with, that could be a strong hook to make them stop. So I still think it's very important there. But like, which is why I mentioned that you can, you can do that kind of thing and be more, maybe a bit more playful and a bit more fun on Meta. You, if that works, uh, that you can lift that on LinkedIn and put it straight in front of those people and it's probably going to work just as well because you've got people doing comedic skits now. That's getting into the door, that's getting them into the doors of enterprise level businesses and mid market businesses and it opens conversations because they, they speak to again, it's product dependent but they're speaking in a very entertaining way. They're doing high production comedic skits and it speaks to the problems that like those, you know, be it marketers or finance or whatever, it might be based in their day to day business and they're providing them entertainment about, about it and they're like, who's this? It's like a media company. Who is this that's producing this content? And it's like, oh, they're a software business that does this in finance. You're like, that's brilliant. I love that they're not actually like, you know, quietly tying in a solution to these problems within, inside a comedic skit that's on LinkedIn. And so that is not, you know, graphs and, and data points. However, if you're a business that you know, supplies data to uh, I don't know, procurement in another business or whatever it is and people use your data, that might be more statistic led and that might be what engages on LinkedIn and you might see 100 comments under a graph that speaks to a data set that nobody else has seen before. And that is a value, you know, to those people. A comedic skit in that environment might not be so impactful. So there's, there's obviously your industry or category, the service and then uh, you know, what you can and so can't do in that arena probably is also true. Um, as well. Like I think there's, there's a bit of impact there but sorry, um, to go, I can't remember what point I came off, um, from what you said before.

Speaker A: That's fine. Um, but just to again just lead on from that. Not only can I think so many people are scared of meta, like true hard B2B marketers and not necessarily marketers but B2B business owners, I think they are scared of meta. Like they're just like not.

Speaker B: We uh, sell to businesses, we must be on LinkedIn. Is that.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think there's a, there's a fear that their audience for some reason is not on there. Even though they themselves, owners of a business or managing directors of business probably sit there and scroll on Facebook on their weekends anyway and they probably buy from ads and for some reason they have this, it's just this old school train of thought where yeah, if you're selling business to business, don't be on, don't be a meta, you need to be on, on LinkedIn and it's really not the case. And like again the biggest thing for me is just be curious, just. Okay, cool. For, for two months or three months, let's put 10, 20% of the budget depending on what's Available into matter. Not only there's two ways that it's great for testing, right? Is number one is you can test to try to find and reach the audience. But also number two is it's great for testing creative as you said. So it's a like a great testing platform for two fold, both for the audience and both for the creative as well. But you know, before we've sold €25,000 software packages to wholesalers and distributors through Meta. Like it's you can do it, you really can. And I think it's just about stop being so scared. It's just really trying to drop the fear. And I honestly believe that uh, like fear and being scared is the biggest like issue that I see within businesses or because people are so scared to experiment with budget. Every, every penny they spend has to return X. And they're like well we know these channels work so we don't want to go anywhere else because we have to prove that every pennies. So there has to be this creative, fun, curious, non scared, non fear approach where you go actually well we know that works and that's why we put 80% of our budget. But also perhaps there's also somewhere else that we could tap into that actually might unlock cheaper growth. So let's start funding off 15 or 20% of our budget there and testing it. It doesn't work. Cool. At least we know we've tried it for three months, go back to what we know does and then maybe a few months down light or something else. But that's the biggest barrier that I see is people being afraid of diversifying. That's really the biggest issue that I see and I see it time and time again.

Speaker B: I think there's a bit of problem there as well where it comes from. Like for example, if they were to like say to their, you know, VP of marketing or whatever the position, cmo, we're working with this agency and I'm actually at the moment they're testing against broad audiences on Meta. They'd be like well why, why are they doing that? Why, why would they do that? They should be using lookalikes and they should be using custom audiences and everything else. So like, well they say that Meta's, you know, Andromeda, that's the way that it, that it works and that that should be tested. And it's like there's also a bit of a fear factor there of them getting essentially pressured and having to answer to that. So I think there's an element of that too. But I mean it's easy for us to explain it because we're in it and we're like, of course you would test it. It's proven it's worked for us before. It's going to work again. We should be testing the creative to do the targeting it 100% should be a thing. But I think there's an element of that where again, and then you take that step up and it's like, hi, cmo. Um, I know that you are, uh, really bullish on obviously our uh, ABM motion and everybody being on LinkedIn, that's the best way to target them. But we want to go to matter and they're like, well, how can we target a buying committee on matter? Is that. Well, we can import some audiences and test that, but we can also test out going broad to enterprises and see whether we can get in front of them that way. Which again, with the right type of creative, you definitely can. And the CPMs, you know, there's leverage with the CPMs. It's a lot cheaper than LinkedIn, a hell of a lot cheaper. So you can offset it that way, but you can do that. But it's, it's being able to have that conversation, you know, managing upwards and having the confidence in the conversation to be able to say that you're doing that and why you're doing it. And also like, as a, as an agency, obviously you've got case studies and

Speaker A: you can showcase that.

Speaker B: We did this on Meta, uh, crafted the, the creative in this way and it worked brilliantly. Yeah, I think it's the fear comes from that as well. It's like probably job security where people don't want to be seen to be taking like these crazy swings, but usually the big swings, you know, whether it's testing a, um, completely rogue angle with an ICP that no, no other competitors doing and playing safe isn't going to get you the big swings and the big advantages. But it's typically the ones like that that do you go over to matter and go, none of our are here, why don't we have a go? And then you're like, wow, wow. That we're getting unbelievable like incremental growth here. We didn't anticipate. And um, these big, big businesses that are like spending super big budgets that have already absolutely saturated LinkedIn, Meta, they're going to like connected TV, YouTube and they're doing incremental lift studies to see how they can spend more money and get their brand in front of more people in a fun way out of home. Yeah, they're doing all of that and they're doing, they're playing a different league to you testing Meta to see whether you can you know get in front of your audience a little bit better. They've done that, they've been there, done it. They've already scaled that out. They're going one level up and running TV ads and doing this and that because they've already got it. They've already done it. They've got product market fit, they've got in front of people across all. They've got great unit economics. They've scale scaled, they've done one channel, they've gone into another and it, you know you see it in E Com. A lot of E Comm businesses will scale out of meta in a, in a country and then they might go to some other countries perhaps and scale up on matter in those, in those markets but then in the UK market for as an example they might want to get more um, you know Google's demand captured typically but if we go to YouTube instead of Google search they might want to go uh, and see if they can get more users into the funnel through Google search and see whether they can get net new reach through Meta off the back of that um, which you can. And then they're doing lift studies on YouTube and they're spending multi, multi millions, you know probably millions a month. So they're, they're playing in different leagues and they're not scared to do it again because unit economics work. They're doing things on like a cacti LTV play. They're not thinking about you know, roas in a short term it's a very different play and I think once you're comfortable in those unit economics you could be more comfortable testing different platforms too. So it's not being short sighted as well. I think that's very, very important. You need, if you can't test and you can't explore new channels then there's also maybe a bit of a thing there about unit economics and you know what you're actually doing because it's not allowing you to do that. So you, that's a different problem altogether. But yeah, you want to be able to do that and to grow your business effectively. That's pretty essential. I think the other thing, the other complete reverse of that is testing too many things from the off so you'll get kind of um, people that will channel hop. Um, that's, that's also another thing. So it's like meta didn't work um, so we'll do this one instead. We'll go to Google. Google didn't work. Why don't we try LinkedIn? And it's kind of all these different things and that's way more common with early stage businesses that probably haven't got product product market fit or product channel fit and they're like, oh, uh, well, they get one of them to work and then it's the cost per acquisition's too high, the CACs too high or whatever. And in that state it's no, your unit economics don't work. So you don't have product channel fit because your, your CAC is say the same as everybody else's or maybe a bit higher or whatever it might be, but you just can't survive on the channel for that. So I think there's, there's also that, I think super important that a lot of people can find themselves jumping from channel to channel. And it's like you probably need to be finding, if you know your audience is there, you either haven't found an angle and an approach that really resonates with them in that environment. So that's one thing, or a format M or a style of content that resonates with them. So if you were just running statics that really just did not resonate with your audience at all, but instead you start to educate them with thought Leader and that resonated. You're testing different formats in the same environment, but you've got something that works. If you test the statics and said it doesn't work for us, let's go to Google. You've truthfully not tested everything in that channel and that's, that could be a huge miss for you. So I think that, that, that again, another thing that loads of businesses I've spoken to have said is that channel just didn't work for us. I'm like, that's funny because it's working incredibly well for that one. And they, I, uh, know that contradicts what we said at the very beginning of this, but it's like they're very, they are literally a direct competitor to you and they are just providing tons of value on that channel and it's clearly they're spending a lot that is most likely doing something for them, for them to get to where they got to or they're now scaling out on that channel and if you're just struggling to find anything to even work there, you're doing something probably very wrong. So I think like, yeah, there's like that level of accountability that needs to be taken as well. When you go on these channels and if you just want to go to Google and uh, do demand capture on keywords and just compete against everybody else all the time and not think about getting ahead of people before they're in market, then you can. But uh, you're going to be paying a lot to, to compete there. The price is always going up. It costs a lot just to get, you know, the cost per clicks are high. You, you're paying to rank up above other people. They're in the search mode so they're already comparing you to others. There's a very, very strong competitive advantage of being in the places where other people aren't and getting ahead of them, um, before they get to that point of choosing. I think that's so important.

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, channel hopping is a good one actually. And it's like as media buyers, as an agency, it's frustrating when sometimes you work with clients who like to channel hop and it's always our job to push back on them and remind them why not to do it. And there was a specific example where uh, we were running on meta and on Google and they were so short sighted in their approach. They were working on a long sales cycle but because they were under financial pressure for a funding raise so they wanted to get revenue turnaround as fast as possible. And so for them it was like, okay, well we're not seeing all the results we want like within an uh, absurdly short period of time. Great. We now need to move into Reddit. Okay, now let's move into being now let's move into LinkedIn. You don't have the budget to do that. You're not giving any of these campaigns or channels the time that they need to actually convert. And also you're not testing the variants that you need to be testing within these channels. All of your main competitors are in these channels. It's working for them. And you just have not found product market fit. You're not finding the right angles. But it's also probably further downstream from that. I mean in this case it was their branding wasn't up to scratch and they hadn't quite found product market fit yet. They were still in the early discovery phase. So that was actually a core issue. The channel itself wasn't the issue, it was a downstream problem for them. But yeah, channel hopping is a, uh, is a big no, no. And like again, it's something that I see time and time again where they've barely scratched service on Google. When you're looking at search impression sharing territories and services they're offering and immediately clients are. Can we, can we move into Bing? I don't have a problem with running ads on Bing and sometimes I think they can be effective but usually I uh, move over into Bing or market for advertising. Once you've actually hit a pretty decent search impression share over in Google and that's working very, very effectively, then I'm pretty confident that we can move over to Bing and make that work. Otherwise you're just leaving money on the table. So there's a few, there's a few times when we have to kind of push back on that.

Speaker B: It's like meta where it's like we, we need to be omnichannel. We should be on TikTok too. It's like no, no, not yet. Your budget's not you, you could scale so much higher on Meta. Like there's, there's way more audience to penetrate on Meta. You're not even close the same people are going to be on TikTok. There might be some arbitrage there but uh, realistically the type of TikTok, the content that people are engaging with is extremely different. Very short tension spans in that arena. You're going to have to put a lot of effort into getting the right type of content to get in front of them that is more native. That's on TikTok. You can't just lift your ads and put them there. The whole thing itself is a whole mission to just go into that. So just double down and do more of what is working for you. I think that's so important when you have really, really like spent through meta. Uh, then you can go and again it depends on your business. Obviously it's all business dependent but really you can just scale and work in one place where your audience are before you start thinking you need to go to TikTok. And the effort that's required in that as an example is pretty hefty Dealt with that.

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, it is and it's, it's also, I mean I'm not going to go into it too much but it's very, it is fascinating because the creative, like the best creative that works over matter. Even though you would think the platforms are similar, you know, especially if Instagram reels and so on. Like when you're, you know, this client in particular, this is predominantly video led. So you know the best performers on meta, a lot of them are video ads. And so therefore you would expect that, okay, it's 9, 16, it's real format, you'd expect that that would be performing just as well over in TikTok, but it wasn't. The content that performed over in TikTok was different to the, to the best form content on Meta M. And so that's always an eye opener. But what I just wanted to close off on actually was that even obviously we've pushed Meta hard in this, in this chat and obviously we know how effective it can be for B2B and even complex and even enterprise B2B if people are willing to test is that, that doesn't mean that as an agency that every client we walk into we just go, cool, you need to be testing on matter that's typically not how we run things. Often there's much, much more that we can gain from optimizing and being way more efficient and testing more within LinkedIn. Meta becomes a point of testing when there is budget that's available to test and when we're pretty happy with how the engine is performing on LinkedIn, like if we're building consistent pipeline over in LinkedIn, the team's happy. Great. We've got all of these future tests coming up, we've got all these future campaigns and ads to launch over there and we've got a pretty good pipeline operating there. But we've also got additional budget to test. That's when we can go, great. Well actually guys, let's go drop that 20% or 15% over in Meta and try that out. That's when we would do it. It often comes much later down the line for us when we start working with clients. It's not something that we just jump into straight away. It's usually something that happens perhaps five, six months into working with the business. Once We've optimize their LinkedIn, LinkedIn and demand capture channels, then we go, great, now let's help you move into, into other channels such as Meta. So I just wanted to finish off with that because I think that's important to just to know also.

Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. It's like you can go on LinkedIn and people don't even realize like what frequency they're achieving, what audience penetration they're achieving to their desired audience. They're still using like all of the native targeting and not using custom imported lists of businesses which can be a lot more accurate and custom imported emails and everything like that, which you can enrich and get very high quality data to import. So there's like a lot of big misses there that you'll see on LinkedIn still.

Speaker A: Yeah, there's a, there's a crazy amount that you can do.

Speaker B: And so I uh. Yeah, I think with that alone, like, and using like a FIBLA as a third party attribution to sort of prove that out as well I think is really good. There's so many business probably missing on that still.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And you would do a lot of that before you probably even get close, like you say, to scaling out into matter as an example. But say you had got that nailed and you were uh, like you say, had very good pipeline, you're testing different angles there and you've just got that engine really running. Then their met is a very good opportunity to test as well.

Speaker A: Yeah. Just to finally close and actually I think it might lead on to a good future pod for us as well. One real common thing that I see, I've been auditing a lot of LinkedIn ad accounts recently and one of the most common things that I keep seeing is a lack of creative variance. And obviously that's something that we take from, you know, previously in our roles we were, we were heavily involved in DTC and in, and in business consumer lead gen, where you are primarily running a meta and creative variance is the name of the game and it certainly has been over the last, you know, few years. And what I don't see is, I don't see that same mindset being moved into LinkedIn from B2B perspective. Often what you see is it's just a handful of creatives and you're sure they might change like some of the angles or they might change it based on an ICP or the service that they're offering or the industry. But there is a distinct lack of creative variants and different ad angles try to target different behavioral angles of their icp. And that's where I see one of the biggest unlocks over in LinkedIn. But that's a whole another conversation that I think it would be useful to pick up with, uh, with you on another occasion.

Speaker B: Could you. Some examples. We could pull up some examples of people that are doing a great job of it so people can go and check out their ad libraries.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker B: Cool.

Speaker A: Well, uh, thanks for the convo, Dan

Speaker B: and um, I look forward to catching

Speaker A: up on the next one.

Speaker B: Cheers brother.

Speaker A: Cheers.