Project 33’s Post

I analyzed the Google ad account of a $5M ARR B2B SaaS company this week. Here are the Hubspot stats: - Ad spend: $75,000 over the last 12 months - Leads: 2,073 ($36 CPL) - Won deals: 7 - Revenue: ~$140k (ACV is 20k) So high-level looking decent - that's a 2x ROI on the ad spend to revenue. Great. Let’s keep them running. But when I dug into the campaigns, I saw two things: 1. Out of the 7 deals, 5 of them converted on the search term being the COMPANY NAME (and *just* the company name) I would argue that those customers didn’t come from your Google ads - they would’ve become customers anyway. If someone googles the name of your company, you’ve won. They’re looking for you. 2. The remaining 2 deals both converted on the same ONE (non-branded) search term. They are running 100s of search terms. And this search term was a low-volume, high-intent keyword. It didn't generate a lot of leads, so the CPL for that search term was very high compared to the average. The bulk of the leads came from broad, high-level, “top-of-funnel” search terms, which helped drive down the average CPL, but none of them converted. Actually, once I looked at them in Hubspot, I could tell quickly that they will never convert: all of them had personal emails (@yahoo, @gmail etc) and besides visiting that landing page once from the Google ad click, never came back or interacted with anything else from that company. TAKEAWAY Now, considering that only 2 out of 7 customers came from Google ads, that’s $40k in revenue for $75k of spend. Suddenly, we’re underwater. Surface-level, your Google ads might look good. But probably: - Your branded search terms do all the heavy lifting  - You might want to reconsider spending budget on YOUR COMPANY NAME at all - The non-branded search terms generate the bulk of the leads and drive down overall CPL, but mostly just provide low-quality leads that go nowhere - Out of your non-branded terms, it’s generally a handful few of low-volume, high-intent keywords that drive all the value there In the above case, we can probably cut 80% of the ad spend while getting the same results for deals and revenue. #advertisement #marketing #googleads #b2b

Why is Patrick Trümpi, CRO at Unique, posting daily on Linkedin? He has grown his audience to 21,000 Linkedin followers by just spending 15 min/day. In this clip, he talks about: - what his motivation was to start posting. - how posting on LinkedIn is the best way to reach people. - how he leverages Linkedin to hire salespeople and reach their initial ICP Check out the video as well as the full podcast episode (linked in the comments). #demandgen #gtm #marketing #b2b #linkedin

We recently helped a B2B SaaS startup generate 45 qualified opportunities for their $100k product in 4 months by positioning their CMO as a thought leader on Linkedin. Super interesting case, and one of my favorite people we ever worked with, Kevin Bobowski, previously at Siteimprove. And instead of just putting this reference on our website, we decided to share the complete system we implemented to achieve this result and give it away to people. We’re giving away: 1. the complete content system we used to churn out new, high-performing LinkedIn posts every week in a fast, efficient way 2. the distribution concept we used to organically insert ourselves in the conversations their buyers were already having on social 3. the measurement framework we implemented to track resonance, double-down on what works, and associate deals & pipeline to this program For B2B SaaS founders doing between $1-6M ARR, this might be the missing lever to break the $10M ARR mark. Because these are the same problems that most growth-stage software companies are dealing with when selling complex solutions with high ASPs into MM or Enterprise. This is by the way the same system we implemented for ComX and their founder & CEO Philipp to generate 3-4 qualified demo requests every week for their $60k product by leveraging his expertise and positioning him as a thought leader on Linkedin. It's also how we helped SafetyWing book demos for under $250 by leveraging their content in targeted LinkedIn ads and how we generated $102,000 in revenue for ourselves from 1 LinkedIn ad alone and under $5,000 in ad spend. It's the same process we've implemented for SaaS companies like SecurityScorecard, Fireblocks, Shoreline, Zocks, and many more. If you’re interested in this process and the system we implemented, comment below or send me a DM and I will share it with you. #linkedin #demandgen #GTM #saas

#1 go-to-market motion for B2B scale-ups in 2024: a LinkedIn thought leadership motion leveraging one or multiple of the executives at your company. Here’s how: ➡️ Pick the right subject-matter expert: Take an executive at your company, ideally, the founder or CEO – someone who deeply understands your customers and their pain points – and has the expertise to speak to that. Take them and figure out a program – a repeatable process – to extract their insights on a weekly basis and turn it into LinkedIn content. ➡️ Weekly Interviews: At Project 33, we do it through a weekly interview. We sit down with our subject matter experts, once a week, where we ask them questions we’ve prepared for them related to their expertise and their product. We record their answers, transcribe them, and then turn them into bite-sized LinkedIn content. ➡️ Leveraging LinkedIn Ads: LinkedIn targeting has become so powerful that you can reach any prospect, even technical roles. If you haven’t yet zeroed down on your ICPs, pick one that you’re already semi-successful with and then just go deep on them. You can use your best-performing content pieces as creatives for your campaigns if you’ve already been posting organic content for a while. ➡️ Live Event/Webinar turned Podcast: You can host a weekly webinar where you invite your prospects, ICPs, and thought leaders in your space to interview them once a week. You build a community around it by doing it live so that your buyers can join and ask questions. You can then: - produce it into a podcast and a long-form YouTube video. - extract bite-sized content pieces from it to post on LinkedIn. You can send these clips to your guests and have them promote it for you. ➡️ The key to success here is the commitment from your subject matter expert. You need this person to: - actually commit to this program - prepare some topics before the webinars - connect with relevant ICPs and leaders on LinkedIn - reply to comments and engage with other people’s posts That’s how you create demand in 2024. #b2b #linkedin #marketing #demandgen

Here are 3 ways to strategically use content to land more enterprise deals: 1. People want to buy from the people they find credible In B2B, especially when dealing with mid-market and enterprise clients, you need to overcome a big barrier of trust and credibility, which takes time and filling up information gaps. Traditionally, that’s done through a salesperson. You book a demo, have a 1h call with the prospect, and then another call. Then, they bring in 2 more decision-makers into another call, and then you find time on their CTO’s calendar for the next call. You send countless back-and-forth emails, product one-pagers, proposals, and contracts. Content helps you do all of this at scale. You can create videos about everything your salespeople do on the sales call: - explaining your thesis - showing the product and how it works - highlighting the pain points that you guys solve - walking people through customer successes and the ROI - highlighting the team behind the product and who's building it, etc. You can have the most suited person to answer any particular question. Eg, your CTO might have a much better answer to a technical question that prospects frequently ask than your salesperson who doesn’t have deep technical insights. You can use these content assets: - Post them on your LinkedIn, YouTube, website, newsletters, and ads. - Have your sales team team leverage it in their outbound and follow-ups. This way, you can have your executive spend 7 mins once for 100s or 1000s of prospects to all spend 7 mins with your executive. That builds credibility at scale. 2. People want to get information upfront We're in a world where information is freely available. Buyers, now more than ever, expect to know details like pricing and product specifications before they even consider a sales conversation. If your competitors are transparently sharing this information and you're not, you're at a disadvantage. Think like a buyer: If you want to buy a product or service and have 2 options: - With one of them, you’re completely blind. You have no idea what exactly they do, how much they cost, who you’ll be working with, what integrations they have, what they have done for other people, etc. - The other one has all this information on their website and socials. Who are you most likely to work with? 3. People want to buy from the best If I want to buy a solution, I’d get it from the best possible person I can afford. How do I determine who’s the best? That's what thought leadership is. So, if I want to buy SEO services and I’ve been consuming LinkedIn content from an SEO expert, they are the 1st person I’ll go to. Only if they are way out of my budget, I’ll look for other providers. That’s why we believe Founder-Led Marketing is the best way to land enterprise deals. #b2b #sales #linkedin

Chatted with Peter Caputa about why he is posting almost daily on Linkedin as the CEO of a 100-people organization. Here’s what he said: “It seems crazy to me that most executives are not utilizing LinkedIn. If you're committed to building a defensible business for the long term where you need to continue to innovate, there is nothing better than a direct connection with your customers, partners, and people who might use your product in the future. So if you're not prioritizing somebody's efforts towards that, then I just don't think you're going to be able to compete in the future. If you’re selling confidential military hardware, then maybe don’t write about it on LinkedIn – do it privately. But for most of the market, you should be building out in the open. For the past 15 years, social was just a promotional media channel, but it’s now returning to being a social networking channel. It’s truly an always-on 24/7 networking event. People want to connect, communicate, follow, listen to what you’re saying, and do what you’re suggesting. It really creates a bit of a community when you combine publishing on LinkedIn as an executive with interaction with prospects and customers because they start to follow along. This morning, I got a message from someone who had been following me for over a year but never engaged. They said (I’m paraphrasing): 'Hey, we finally did that thing you've been talking about for a year. I was afraid of doing it before. I didn't think it would work. But I finally did it.’ Another partner who joined my mastermind group wrote, ‘It took me 9 months. But I finally got on board with what you’ve been talking about’ - and now they're all in and it’s a core part of their 2024 strategy. Sure, I can do this in a sales conversation or 1on1, but by doing it this way, I'm getting much more amplification for what we're doing.” #demandgen #gtm #marketing #b2b #linkedin

How do you measure marketing effectiveness when you start posting on Linkedin, run a podcast, etc? Here are the 3 levels Peter Caputa suggests to track for getting a complete picture of what your marketing is doing: 1. Measuring content resonance: If you're publishing on LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, or running a podcast, the focus should be on content resonance. It's about whether your content gets views, comments, reactions, likes, or followers. This isn't directly tied to website visits or sales, but it’s crucial to understand if your message is resonating. Then, it’s about tweaking and repeating successful messages across these platforms. 2. Continuing with automated analytics: Most companies already use Google Analytics, HubSpot, etc., and should continue using it. Using a marketing automation platform or Google Analytics is good for measuring the quality of your website traffic but not great for tracking down to sales. 3. Asking prospects directly In the pre-internet era, businesses asked customers, “How did you hear about us?” and you’d hear, “Oh, I looked you up in the Yellow Pages” or “A friend told me about you.” The digital version of that is “I follow your founder on LinkedIn,” or “I've been listening to your podcasts for six months,” or “I attended an event your CEO spoke at.” These are valuable qualitative insights you wouldn't ever be able to measure in your website analytics. The best place to ask is directly in your conversion forms like free trials or demo requests. The next best palace is for your salesrep to ask and enter it into a custom field in Hubspot. I’ve linked the full podcast in the comments section. #linkedin #b2b #marketing #gtm #demandgen

Selling a $60k or $150k software is different from selling a $7/month product. You can't offer a 7-day trial to prospects. You can demo it and show it on a call but then prospects need to commit to a long-term contract before they can actually use the software. That's why we believe in such cases, it makes a lot more sense to have a people-driven, nuanced marketing approach. You need a subject matter expert from your company - be it your founder, CEO, CRO, or CTO or another exec - to share their insights and expertise in places where your buyers spend time (in B2B, it’s mostly LinkedIn). You can’t sell an enterprise solution with an ad with a cute screenshot and a “Try for Free” button. Sophisticated buyers need to see, hear and feel your expertise before they trust you enough to do business with you. #b2b #sales #linkedin

Here are 2 huge marketing mistakes I’ve made (and that I’m surprised even mature, $5m revenue companies *still* make) 1. Not *really* defining their ICP Everyone says they have an ICP or customer persona or “know who their audience is”. But then you ask them and they say it’s “B2B companies” (that’s like half of all the companies in the world) or they say it’s Healthcare, Fintech, Retail, and Construction companies, as if that’s somehow a cohesive audience. The hard part about defining your ICP is that you need to put a stake in the ground and decide who you're NOT trying to talk to. Everyone tries to sell to everyone because they think defining a specific audience would cap their growth. I’ve made the same mistake for a long time. We didn’t have an ICP – we simply sold to B2B companies, which is half the world and doesn't mean much. 6 months ago, I analyzed all the customers we’ve worked with and found that we’ve had the most success with B2B SaaS founders with $1-10M in revenue with a sales-led motion. So I put a stake in the ground. 2. Not *really* understanding their audience It's not enough to just define your ICP – you have to dive into their world: understand their desires, how they’re doing business, the tools they use, the people they listen to, the problems that are biggest for them, their important priorities, the channels and communities they spend time in, and the thought leaders and podcasts they follow. You need to know these things to find topics that truly resonate with them. And there's no shortcut for this. It’s not something you can just Google. You need to actually have dozens, hundreds, of conversations with ICPs. You need to ask open-ended, curious questions and listen to them. Understand their priorities, how they speak, the jargon they use, and the tools they use. Most companies work with assumptions, thinking that they know what their prospects must care about. But they don't validate it by asking them because that’s hard work, especially when they're already struggling. A shortcut that could save you time is finding ways to listen to your ICPs that don't necessarily require you to be on a call with them. For example, I listen to the 20VC and Nathan Latka podcasts because they interview our ICP every week. What surprises me is that even mature companies with $5m revenue often don't know their ICP. They might have grown to that point through sheer brute force or because the founder has a strong network from having been in business for 20 years, but eventually they hit a growth ceiling. #b2b #marketing #demandgen