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Dr. Alex Sharp, CEO of Shared Practices Group, a unique DSO that originated from a podcast joins the GDN podcast. He discusses the evolution of Shared Practices Group, which has grown from 18 to 36 locations in just two years, focusing on full arch dentistry. Key Topics: The origin story of Shared Practices Group Growth strategies and the focus on implant dentistry The importance of culture and collaboration in a remote DSO Leveraging technology for clinical excellence Insights on the future of the dental industry To learn more about Shared Practices Group visit their website - https://sharedpracticesgroup.com/ Make sure you subscribe to The Full Arch podcast - https://thefullarchpodcast.com/ Make sure you also subscribe to the Shared Practices podcast - https://sharedpractices.com/the-shared-practices-podcast/ Thank you to OSDental for sponsoring this podcast. Find out more about a unified operating system for growing dental practices. Visit https://osdental.io
Get to know Kim Larson and Bill Neumann. From the Open Wide Podcast recording with Janesh Patel and Dr. Scott Drucker. In this episode Scott and Jinesh chat with Kim Larson and Bill Neumann of Group Dentistry Now. They dive into details of the birth and growth of GDN, and touch on all the various elements of the GDN business. The group discusses the ongoing trend of consolidation in dental, and some of the controversy that surrounds the DSO space. Kim and Bill share some advice for both dental practitioners and dental vendors, and reflect on the DSO conference scene, as well as the DSO media landscape. 1:39 Introductions 5:08 Origin story of GDN 13:08 GDN behind the scenes and business components 31:56 Controversy around DSOs 48:36 DSO metrics that matter 52:28 The DSO conference craze 1:06:34 Most popular GDN content 1:08:01 Media competition in the DSO world 1:12:26 Advice from the Experts Find their podcast here - https://openwidepod.podbean.com/
Eric Giesecke, CEO of Planet DDS & Rod Ganjifard, Vice President of Technology of Onsite Dental join the GDN podcast. The two discuss: the need for integrated data DSO tech challenges What is DentalOS? Much more If you would like to learn more about Planet DDS visit - https://www.planetdds.com/ . If you would like to attend or learn more about the Planet DDS Orbit 2025 conference visit - https://dso.pub/Orbit2025 You can also learn about Onsite Dental here - https://onsitedental.com/ If you like our podcast, please give us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review on iTunes https://apple.co/2Nejsfa and a Thumbs Up on YouTube.
Jill Hasselmann, Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at HR for Health joins the GDN show to discuss the upcoming DSO Leadership Summit. The DSO Leadership Summit takes place in Atlanta, GA, September 26th - 28th at the Marriott Marquis. Use code GDN2024 to save $200. Visit https://dsosummit.com/ to register. Highlights of the DSO Leadership Summit include: The emerging groups to watch awards DSO Diagnosis segment Point/Counterpoint Georgia aquarium party Much more Register for the DSO Leadership Summit - https://dsosummit.com/ and make sure you use code GDN2024 to save $200 If you like our podcast, please give us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review on iTunes https://apple.co/2Nejsfa and a Thumbs Up on YouTube.
Unterschätzt & falsch eingesetzt - Das Google Display Netzwerk (GDN) ist keine neue Erfindung mehr und dennoch wird es von vielen Unternehmen nicht richtig eingesetzt und seine Leistung definitiv unterschätzt. Wie Du das GDN für Markenaufbau, Engagement und sogar Verkauf und Kundenbindung einsetzen kannst, das erfährst Du in dieser Folge!
the end of the GDN era, the start of a clearer one. polarity, peace & passion. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/klaejomind/message
Kelly Bevington, Director of IOS Technology at National Dentex Labs, Dr. Robert Mongrain, Director of Clinical Advocacy at Heartland Dental, and Jamie Stover, CDT, Senior Manager of Dental Laboratory Applications at Carbon join the GDN show. The panel focuses in on digital dentures. They discuss: The right time for digital dentures When and why should digital dentures be offered to patients Best practices for scanning digital dentures The future of digital dentures To find out more about digital dentures you can email Kelly Bevington at kelly.bevington@nationaldentex.com or visit https://nationaldentex.com/ To find out more about Heartland Dental visit - https://heartland.com/ To discover more about Carbon visit - https://www.carbon3d.com/ If you like our podcast, please give us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review on iTunes https://apple.co/2Nejsfa and a Thumbs Up on YouTube. Our podcast series brings you dental support organization and emerging dental group practice analysis, conversation, trends, news and events. Listen to leaders in the DSO and emerging dental group space talk about their challenges, successes, and the future of group dentistry. The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry has listeners across North & South America, Australia, Europe, and Asia. If you like our show, tell a friend or a colleague.
2023.08.23., szerda 9-10 óra NÉGYZETMÉTER: Milliókat kaszálhatnak az albérletes csalók. Kiemelt veszélynek lehetnek kitéve azok, akik az augusztusi albérlet dömpingben magánszemélytől vesznek ki ingatlant - figyelmeztet Gadanecz Zoltán, a GDN Ingatlanhálózat alapító-tulajdonosa. A szakember elmondta, a csalók szemrebbenés nélkül veszik át az első havi bérleti díjat és kéthavi kauciót az érdeklődőktől, többekkel megismétlik napokon belül, végül nyomtalanul eltűnnek. A GDN Ingatlanhálózat vezetője kiemelte, ezt úgy lehet biztosan elkerülni, ha ingatlanoson keresztül keresünk albérletet, a cégeknek ugyanis kötelező azonosítani a kiadót és a bérlőt egyaránt. Gadanecz Zoltán, a GDN ingatlanhálózat alapító-tulajdonosa EQUILOR TŐZSDENYITÁS: Deák Dávid, üzletkötő SZUPERZÖLD: Szeptemberben 15 helyszínen várja az érdeklődőket a Nemzetközi Zöld Építés Hete. A programokkal a Magyar Környezettudatos Építés Egyesület célja az, hogy jövőbemutató gyakorlati példákkal, szakmai beszélgetésekkel és gyakorlati műhelymunkával segítse elő az építésgazdaság és az ingatlanszektor szereplőinek innovatív gondolkodásmódját, a magyarországi épített környezet karbonmentessé alakítását. Szarvas Gábor, a Magyar Környezettudatos Építés Egyesület elnöke
Summer is a beautiful time, but not a lot of people know how to fully experience the amazingness it can bring. Never fear, le GDN is here as I give you guys my tips & tricks on how to fully realise the potential of summertime. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/gdn/message
Get up to speed with the Digital Marketing News and Updates from the week of Feb 13-17, 2023.1. Pinterest Has Refreshed ‘Pinterest Academy' - Pinterest has launched its refreshed Pinterest Academy (originally launched in 2019) learning resource, which includes a range of courses and insights designed to help you become a Pin marketing expert. Here is what Pinterest wrote in the announcement:“Whether you're new to Pinterest ads or looking to boost your expertise, Pinterest Academy has it covered. From basics like ‘Why Pinterest?' to modules like “Measurement solutions,” you'll find instructions and tips for every step of the campaign process.”To enroll, visit http://www.pinterestacademy.com/ 2. Google Business Profile Strength Widget Now Live - Last June, Google began testing a "profile strength" widget or status icon that shows you if you need to do more with your Google Business Profile. Well, that just went live on Friday and seemed to be fully rolled out. A lot of experts are unhappy with this rollout because Google will give you lower score if you do not sign up for Google Ads. Another soft nudge from Google to sign up for Google Ads and pushing you to spend $$.3. Google's John Muller Dislikes Keyword Rich Domains - Keyword-rich domain are domain names that have the keywords in them. For example, cheapiphonerepair.com. In the early days of SEO, Keyword-rich domain names were once thought to be an effective way to increase a website's visibility and improve search engine rankings. But that has changed at least since 2014. Now John Muller is repeating his old message that keyword-rich domains might be detrimental to a website's long-term success for a few reasons. They are: Generally people will think you are a spammer. This is because spammers often use keyword-rich domain names to manipulate search rankings and attract unsuspecting website visitors. As a result, a website with a keyword-rich domain name may be viewed as untrustworthy and unprofessional, which can drive away potential customers. Changing business focus, or even expanding is harder. For example, if a company with a domain name like “best-running-shoes.com” decides to start selling other athletic gear, it can be challenging to convince customers that the website is a trustworthy source for those products. You will have no brand name, there is nothing that people can search for which “obviously” should show your site. You're always competing, you're not building value with long-term users. Despite all these cons, if you search for the term “keyword-rich domains” you'll get a ton of results (including tools) that will suggest you to use keyword-rich domain. If you were to ask me, I prefer to listen to John Muller vs reading blog posts some random guy claiming to be a SEO expert. YMMV.4. Google's Advice On Which Structured Data To Use For A Services Business - During a recent Google SEO office hours, an user who is an owner of a service based business asked how to fix the invalid item error when they use product structured data on their webpages? This is because the service price vary. John Mueller made an assumption that the business is a local service provider and recommended to use the local business structured data because it allows you to specify a price range for your services. One thing to keep in mind is that while Schema.org Product structured data supports service based business, Google's Product structured data documentation clearly focuses on product content and has no provision for service businesses. Their Search Central page for structured data makes it clear that for enhanced SERPs listings, use this structured data type for products.So if you are wondering who you should listen to, my recommendation is that you listen to Google. By the way, if all this talk about structured data is making you dizzy then it is high-time you seek the services of a reputable search marketing agency or expert.5. Google Simplifies Policy Circumvention Spam Policy - ast November Google introduced a new catchall search spam policy named policy circumvention.It was covered in Episode#136. That spam policy was listed to be able to take action on sites that bypass the other Google spam policies through other means. Now after receiving feedback, Google has updated that spam policy with simplified language. The policy circumentation document now reads:If you continue to engage in actions intended to bypass our spam policies or content policies for Google Search, we may take appropriate action which may include restricting or removing eligibility for some of our search features (for example, Top Stories, Discover). Circumvention includes but is not limited to: Creating or using multiple sites with the intention of continuing to violate our policies Using other methods intended to continue distributing content or engaging in a behavior that aims to violate our policies 6. Google Updates SEO Link Best Practices Document - Google has published an updated document on SEO link best practices. The previous document was just on how to make your links crawlable but the new one adds tips on anchor text placements, how to write good anchor text, internal links within your content and external links from other sites. Here are the seven things you should be cognizant of when using links on your website: To make your links crawlable, it is recommended to use full URL over relative URL. Anchor text (also known as link text) is the visible text of a link. This text tells people and Google something about the page you're linking to. So place anchor text between elements. If you do not use anchor text then Google will attempt to use “title” attribute. For images that are links, Google uses the “alt” attribute of the “img” element an anchor text. So be sure to add “alt” text to your images. Write good anchor text that is descriptive, concise, and relevant to the page that it's on and to the page it link to. It provides context for the link, and sets the expectation for your readers. You should cross-reference or cross-link your own content when possible. However, do not over do it. Use the “nofollow” attribute when linking to an external site and you are unsure about the reliability of that site. For example, you're a cheese enthusiast and someone published a story bad mouthing your favorite cheese, so you want to write an article in response; however, you don't want to give the site some of your reputation from your link. This would be a good time to use “nofollow” If you were paid in some way for the link, qualify these links with “sponsored” or “nofollow”. If users can insert links on your site (for example, you have a forum section or Q&A site), add “ugc” or “nofollow” to these links P.S: As a reminder, last November Google said external links will be less important as a ranking factor in the future.7. Googlebot Will Ignore The “noindex” During 301 Redirects If You Do Not Do This - William Sear asked Gary Illyes "Will directives (noindex, nofollow) from a URL that redirects (301, 302) be respected or ignored?" "This particular use case the noindex, nofollow directives are in the HTTP header, so crawling the HTML would not be required to see the directive," he added for clarification.His response was, "I think we shouldn't forward the noindex with redirects unless we can be exceptionally certain that the target also wants the noindex. I imagine that on same site the noindex would forward in some cases, but across sites it would not. This is a pretty bad hijack vector, hence being vague."8. Google: CDN's “Checking if the site connection is secure” Is Not Search Engine Friendly - Gary Illyes from Google said that those "Checking if the site connection is secure" interstitials you see on some sites, some of the time, is the "last search-friendly things you can do."This is a feature that CloudFlare, and other CDNs have, to help prevent spam bots from accessing your website. In CloudFlare you can configure how strict you want this prompt to be and I keep it at the lowest level. But some sites do not and I guess for Google, it can cause issues.So what should you do here? Listen to the show recording for my thoughts on this topic.9. Google Ads Is Testing Disabling Opt Out Of Search Partners & Display Network -A week or so back, Google Ads users were posting on twitter how Google disabled the ability in campaign settings to easily opt out of your campaigns being also shown in the Google Search Partner network and the Google Display Network.Although it's still possible to opt out of the GDN and Google Search Partners through the "Choose Networks" dropdown. I bet that some marketers and small business owners may feel pressured to include the GDN in their search campaigns, or they may don't even notice the hidden option.I'm against opting-in to either of these options because you usually end up spending a lot of $$ without any insights and results.I wish I was making this up but I'm not since Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, confirmed this test. Here is what she had to say:“1. Yes, this experiment is aimed at encouraging users to remain opted-in to the recommended setting – more on why below – while also providing opt-outs.2. The team did multiple user studies over nearly 6 months to ensure the design balanced advertiser choice w/ a clear recommendation.3. Why opt-in is recommended: Typically advertisers see more conversions at a similar ROI because Display Expansion (& Search Partners) serves ONLY when there's unspent Search budget AND we believe we can match or beat your Search CPA. More on how it works here: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7193800?hl=en.I get the initial reaction to this experiment, particularly if you've long reflexively opted out or haven't tested Display Expansion in a while or ever, but hope this helps explain the why behind this test. Happy to answer any questions.“10. Instagram Launches ‘Channels' Broadcast Chat Feature - Instagram is rolling out a new feature called ‘Instagram Channels', which is essentially a group messaging function within the app where you can stay up to date on specific topics, brands, people, etc. Instagram Channels is a ‘broadcast chat', which will support text, images and polls, all within IG Direct. After you join a channel, it will be added to your IG Direct chat list. You can then read and react to messages posted in the chat – though you can't post yourself to the chat feed.Hmm. To me Instagram is building a quasi-whatsapp within IG.Hey, they are welcome to try different things to keep creators on the platform and and increase engagement. I'll expand on this in the show.Creators who are interested in Channels can sign up to be considered for early access here.11. No More Live Shopping On Instagram - If you have been a regular listener to my show, you know that I was not a fan of live shopping even though it is a huge thing in Asian markets. To me live shopping in North America never made sense because of the cultural differences. Looks like I was not so wrong and Techcrunch wrote that “as of March 16, 2023 Instagram users will no longer be able to tag products while livestreaming - a capability that has been broadly available to U.S. businesses and creators since 2020.”Lesson for Instagram and other business owners : Don't just blindly copy. Make sure it is relevant in your market.12. Meta Announces ‘Meta Verified' Paid Verification Scheme For Facebook & IG - Gandhi once said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Looks like this is true when it comes to charging a fee for verification. Everyone was up in arms or ridiculed Twitter owner Elon Mush for charging a fee for verification. Now, Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that that Meta's launching a test of a paid verification program, much like Twitter's $8 verification scheme. Here is what Meta wrote:“To help up-and-coming creators grow their presence and build community faster, we'll begin testing a new offering called Meta Verified, a subscription bundle on Instagram and Facebook that includes a verified badge, which authenticates your account with government ID, proactive account protection, access to account support, and increased visibility and reach. We're starting with a gradual test in Australia and New Zealand later this week to learn what's most valuable, and we hope to bring Meta Verified to the rest of the world soon.”
Diona joins me and Daniella in the room, as we discuss Part 1 of Season 4 of YOU, Rihanna's Super Bowl Halftime Show & her status amongst the greats. We also ask whether Valentines Day is at all necessary, and I bless you guys with a work of GDN art. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/gdn/message
MERRY CHRISTMAS GDNATION!! The girls join me for the biggest podcast in GDN history as we discuss the ratio of attractive men to attractive women and why Christmas seems to have lost its spark. We also choose which 2 people we'd like to have on a desert island with us & discuss why dating 'medium ugly' isn't the hack you think it is. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/gdn/message
Los villeguenses Benjamín Moneta y Alejo Cabezas son cofundadores del Barcelona Powerchair Football Club. Benja es además, presidente del club. Llegué a conocer este deporte, el del fùtbol en sillas de ruedas eléctricas, gracias a Mauro García pero grande fue mi sorpresa cuando supe que detrás de la fundación del primer club catalán había dos jóvenes de General Villegas. Este es el plus de la entrevista. Porque no es solo una iniciativa valiosa, sino que ha sido desarrollada por chicos que se formaron en nuestra comunidad (y digo chicos, porque lo siguen siendo para mí) y a los que vimos crecer. Con Alejo presente en el estudio de la radio, siempre en Villegas en esta época del año por la realización del GDN que lleva 18 años y Benjamín del otro lado del charco telefónicamente, que sumó también a los jugadores y cuerpo técnico de Los Tritones de Barcelona, reunidos en el club, escuchando y participando con mensajes conmovedores. Qué es el powerchair, cómo se juega este deporte que permite a personas en sillas de ruedas dejar de ser espectadores para pasar a ser protagonistas y por qué tiene un fuerte corazón que lo impulsa, todo lo vas a encontrar en esta entrevista. En febrero, Benjamín estará en nuestra ciudad y quizá sea la oportunidad para que uno de nuestros clubes incorpore esta disciplina. Nunca es fácil, pero ya sabemos que nada es imposible. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/maria-celina-fabregues/message
Do you have to move to Canberra for your APS Graduate Program? What extracurricular activities should you be involved in to add to your resume? What is the application process like? How do you take part in APS graduate-led organisations and what are the benefits of being part of them? We have answers to some key questions you should know before applying for your APS Graduate Program.In this Q&A episode, we are joined by Victoria Vuori, a current graduate in the Taxation stream at the Australian Taxation Office, and David Randall, a Spatial Analyst at the Department of Home Affairs. Victoria is currently one of three co-chairs for the Graduate Data Network, and shares with us the benefits of joining APS graduate-led organisations like GDN. David reflects on his time during his Graduate Program at the Department of Home Affairs and shares how he secured a role at the Department after his program.Stick around on this episode, as Gradcast co-host Callum goes outside of the studio for some special interviews at the recent Innovate Australia event hosted by the Public Sector Network. He asks some of the attendees the question, “What advice would you say to a Grads at the start of their Grad year?”.3 things discussed in this episode:What to expect when starting your APS Graduate ProgramHow to take part in graduate-led organisationsOpportunities available after your Graduate Program Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
About ChetanChetan Venkatesh is a technology startup veteran focused on distributed data, edge computing, and software products for enterprises and developers. He has 20 years of experience in building primary data storage, databases, and data replication products. Chetan holds a dozen patents in the area of distributed computing and data storage.Chetan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Macrometa – a Global Data Network featuring a Global Data Mesh, Edge Compute, and In-Region Data Protection. Macrometa helps enterprise developers build real-time apps and APIs in minutes – not months.Links Referenced: Macrometa: https://www.macrometa.com Macrometa Developer Week: https://www.macrometa.com/developer-week TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Forget everything you know about SSH and try Tailscale. Imagine if you didn't need to manage PKI or rotate SSH keys every time someone leaves. That'd be pretty sweet, wouldn't it? With Tailscale SSH, you can do exactly that. Tailscale gives each server and user device a node key to connect to its VPN, and it uses the same node key to authorize and authenticate SSH.Basically you're SSHing the same way you manage access to your app. What's the benefit here? Built in key rotation permissions is code connectivity between any two devices, reduce latency and there's a lot more, but there's a time limit here. You can also ask users to reauthenticate for that extra bit of security. Sounds expensive?Nope, I wish it were. tail scales. Completely free for personal use on up to 20 devices. To learn more, visit snark.cloud/tailscale. Again, that's snark.cloud/tailscaleCorey: Managing shards. Maintenance windows. Overprovisioning. ElastiCache bills. I know, I know. It's a spooky season and you're already shaking. It's time for caching to be simpler. Momento Serverless Cache lets you forget the backend to focus on good code and great user experiences. With true autoscaling and a pay-per-use pricing model, it makes caching easy. No matter your cloud provider, get going for free at gomomento.co/screaming That's GO M-O-M-E-N-T-O dot co slash screamingCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Today, this promoted guest episode is brought to us basically so I can ask a question that has been eating at me for a little while. That question is, what is the edge? Because I have a lot of cynical sarcastic answers to it, but that doesn't really help understanding. My guest today is Chetan Venkatesh, CEO and co-founder at Macrometa. Chetan, thank you for joining me.Chetan: It's my pleasure, Corey. You're one of my heroes. I think I've told you this before, so I am absolutely delighted to be here.Corey: Well, thank you. We all need people to sit on the curb and clap as we go by and feel like giant frauds in the process. So let's start with the easy question that sets up the rest of it. Namely, what is Macrometa, and what puts you in a position to be able to speak at all, let alone authoritatively, on what the edge might be?Chetan: I'll answer the second part of your question first, which is, you know, what gives me the authority to even talk about this? Well, for one, I've been trying to solve the same problem for 20 years now, which is build distributed systems that work really fast and can answer questions about data in milliseconds. And my journey's sort of been like the spiral staircase journey, you know, I keep going around in circles, but the view just keeps getting better every time I do one of these things. So I'm on my fourth startup doing distributed data infrastructure, and this time really focused on trying to provide a platform that's the antithesis of the cloud. It's kind of like taking the cloud and flipping it on its head because instead of having a single region application where all your stuff runs in one place, on us-west-1 or us-east-1, what if your apps could run everywhere, like, they could run in hundreds and hundreds of cities around the world, much closer to where your users and devices and most importantly, where interesting things in the real world are happening?And so we started Macrometa about five years back to build a new kind of distributed cloud—let's call the edge—that kind of looks like a CDN, a Content Delivery Network, but really brings very sophisticated platform-level primitives for developers to build applications in a distributed way around primitives for compute, primitives for data, but also some very interesting things that you just can't do in the cloud anymore. So that's Macrometa. And we're doing something with edge computing, which is a big buzzword these days, but I'm sure you'll ask me about that.Corey: It seems to be. Generally speaking, when I look around and companies are talking about edge, it feels almost like it is a redefining of what they already do to use a term that is currently trending and deep in the hype world.Chetan: Yeah. You know, I think humans just being biologically social beings just tend to be herd-like, and so when we see a new trend, we like to slap it on everything we have. We did that 15 years back with cloud, if you remember, you know? Everybody was very busy trying to stick the cloud label on everything that was on-prem. Edge is sort of having that edge-washing moment right now.But I define edge very specifically is very different from the cloud. You know, where the cloud is defined by centralization, i.e., you've got a giant hyperscale data center somewhere far, far away, where typically electricity, real estate, and those things are reasonably cheap, i.e., not in urban centers, where those things tend to be expensive.You know, you have platforms where you run things at scale, it's sort of a your mess for less business in the cloud and somebody else manages that for you. The edge is actually defined by location. And there are three types of edges. The first edge is the CDN edge, which is historically where we've been trying to make things faster with the internet and make the internet scale. So Akamai came about, about 20 years back and created this thing called the CDN that allowed the web to scale. And that was the first killer app for edge, actually. So that's the first location that defines the edge where a lot of the peering happens between different network providers and the on-ramp around the cloud happens.The second edge is the telecom edge. That's actually right next to you in terms of, you know, the logical network topology because every time you do something on your computer, it goes through that telecom layer. And now we have the ability to actually run web services, applications, data, directly from that telecom layer.And then the third edge is—sort of, people have been familiar with this for 30 years. The third edge is your device, just your mobile phone. It's your internet gateway and, you know, things that you carry around in your pocket or sit on your desk, where you have some compute power, but it's very restricted and it only deals with things that are interesting or important to you as a person, not in a broad range. So those are sort of the three things. And it's not the cloud. And these three things are now becoming important as a place for you to build and run enterprise apps.Corey: Something that I think is often overlooked here—and this is sort of a natural consequence of the cloud's own success and the joy that we live in a system that we do where companies are required to always grow and expand and find new markets—historically, for example, when I went to AWS re:Invent, which is a cloud service carnival in the desert that no one in the right mind should ever want to attend but somehow we keep doing, it used to be that, oh, these announcements are generally all aligned with people like me, where I have specific problems and they look a lot like what they're talking about on stage. And now they're talking about things that, from that perspective, seem like Looney Tunes. Like, I'm trying to build Twitter for Pets or something close to it, and I don't understand why there's so much talk about things like industrial IoT and, “Machine learning,” quote-unquote, and other things that just do not seem to align with. I'm trying to build a web service, like it says on the name of a company; what gives?And part of that, I think, is that it's difficult to remember, for most of us—especially me—that what they're coming out with is not your shopping list. Every service is for someone, not every service is for everyone, so figuring out what it is that they're talking about and what those workloads look like, is something that I think is getting lost in translation. And in our defense—collective defense—Amazon is not the best at telling stories to realize that, oh, this is not me they're talking to; I'm going to opt out of this particular thing. You figure it out by getting it wrong first. Does that align with how you see the market going?Chetan: I think so. You know, I think of Amazon Web Services, or even Google, or Azure as sort of Costco and, you know, Sam's Wholesale Club or whatever, right? They cater to a very broad audience and they sell a lot of stuff in bulk and cheap. And you know, so it's sort of a lowest common denominator type of a model. And so emerging applications, and especially emerging needs that enterprises have, don't necessarily get solved in the cloud. You've got to go and build up yourself on sort of the crude primitives that they provide.So okay, go use your bare basic EC2, your S3, and build your own edgy, or whatever, you know, cutting edge thing you want to build over there. And if enough people are doing it, I'm sure Amazon and Google start to pay interest and you know, develop something that makes it easier. So you know, I agree with you, they're not the best at this sort of a thing. The edge is phenomenon also that's orthogonally, and diametrically opposite to the architecture of the cloud and the economics of the cloud.And we do centralization in the cloud in a big way. Everything is in one place; we make giant piles of data in one database or data warehouse slice and dice it, and almost all our computer science is great at doing things in a centralized way. But when you take data and chop it into 50 copies and keep it in 50 different places on Earth, and you have this thing called the internet or the wide area network in the middle, trying to keep all those copies in sync is a nightmare. So you start to deal with some very basic computer science problems like distributed state and how do you build applications that have a consistent view of that distributed state? So you know, there have been attempts to solve these problems for 15, 18 years, but none of those attempts have really cracked the intersection of three things: a way for programmers to do this in a way that doesn't blow their heads with complexity, a way to do this cheaply and effectively enough where you can build real-world applications that serve billions of users concurrently at a cost point that actually is economical and make sense, and third, a way to do this with adequate levels of performance where you don't die waiting for the spinning wheel on your screen to go away.So these are the three problems with edge. And as I said, you know, me and my team, we've been focused on this for a very long while. And me and my co-founder have come from this world and we created a platform very uniquely designed to solve these three problems, the problems of complexity for programmers to build in a distributed environment like this where data sits in hundreds of places around the world and you need a consistent view of that data, being able to operate and modify and replicate that data with consistency guarantees, and then a third one, being able to do that, at high levels of performance, which translates to what we call ultra-low latency, which is human perception. The threshold of human perception, visually, is about 70 milliseconds. Our finest athletes, the best Esports players are about 70 to 80 milliseconds in their twitch, in their ability to twitch when something happens on the screen. The average human is about 100 to 110 milliseconds.So in a second, we can maybe do seven things at rapid rates. You know, that's how fast our brain can process it. Anything that falls below 100 milliseconds—especially if it falls into 50 to 70 milliseconds—appears instantaneous to the human mind and we experience it as magic. And so where edge computing and where my platform comes in is that it literally puts data and applications within 50 milliseconds of 90% of humans and devices on Earth and allows now a whole new set of applications where latency and location and the ability to control those things with really fine-grained capability matters. And we can talk a little more about what those apps are in a bit.Corey: And I think that's probably an interesting place to dive into at the moment because whenever we talk about the idea of new ways of building things that are aimed at decentralization, first, people at this point automatically have a bit of an aversion to, “Wait, are you talking about some of the Web3 nonsense?” It's one of those look around the poker table and see if you can spot the sucker, and if you can't, it's you. Because there are interesting aspects to that entire market, let's be clear, but it also seems to be occluded by so much of the grift and nonsense and spam and the rest that, again, sort of characterize the early internet as well. The idea though, of decentralizing out of the cloud is deeply compelling just to anyone who's really ever had to deal with the egress charges, or even the data transfer charges inside of one of the cloud providers. The counterpoint is it feels that historically, you either get to pay the tax and go all-in on a cloud provider and get all the higher-level niceties, or otherwise, you wind up deciding you're going to have to more or less go back to physical data centers, give or take, and other than the very baseline primitives that you get to work with of VMs and block storage and maybe a load balancer, you're building it all yourself from scratch. It seems like you're positioning this as setting up for a third option. I'd be very interested to hear it.Chetan: Yeah. And a quick comment on decentralization: good; not so sure about the Web3 pieces around it. We tend to talk about computer science and not the ideology of distributing data. There are political reasons, there are ideological reasons around data and sovereignty and individual human rights, and things like that. There are people far smarter than me who should explain that.I fall personally into the Nicholas Weaver school of skepticism about Web3 and blockchain and those types of things. And for readers who are not familiar with Nicholas Weaver, please go online. He teaches at UC Berkeley is just one of the finest minds of our time. And I think he's broken down some very good reasons why we should be skeptical about, sort of, Web3 and, you know, things like that. Anyway, that's a digression.Coming back to what we're talking about, yes, it is a new paradigm, but that's the challenge, which is I don't want to introduce a new paradigm. I want to provide a continuum. So what we've built is a platform that looks and feels very much like Lambdas, and a poly-model database. I hate the word multi. It's a pretty dumb word, so I've started to substitute ‘multi' with ‘poly' everywhere, wherever I can find it.So it's not multi-cloud; it's poly-cloud. And it's not multi-model; it's poly-model. Because what we want is a world where developers have the ability to use the best paradigm for solving problems. And it turns out when we build applications that deal with data, data doesn't just come in one form, it comes in many different forms, it's polymorphic, and so you need a data platform, that's also, you know, polyglot and poly-model to be able to handle that. So that's one part of the problem, which is, you know, we're trying to provide a platform that provides continuity by looking like a key-value store like Redis. It looks like a document database—Corey: Or the best database in the world Route 53 TXT records. But please, keep going.Chetan: Well, we've got that too, so [laugh] you know? And then we've got a streaming graph engine built into it that kind of looks and behaves like a graph database, like Neo4j, for example. And, you know, it's got columnar capabilities as well. So it's sort of a really interesting data platform that is not open-source; it's proprietary because it's designed to solve these problems of being able to distribute data, put it in hundreds of locations, keep it all in sync, but it looks like a conventional NoSQL database. And it speaks PostgreSQL, so if you know PostgreSQL, you can program it, you know, pretty easily.What it's also doing is taking away the responsibility for engineers and developers to understand how to deal with very arcane problems like conflict resolution in data. I made a change in Mumbai; you made a change in Tokyo; who wins? Our systems in the cloud—you know, DynamoDB, and things like that—they have very crude answers for this something called last writer wins. We've done a lot of work to build a protocol that brings you ACID-like consistency in these types of problems and makes it easy to reason with state change when you've got an application that's potentially running in 100 locations and each of those places is modifying the same record, for example.And then the second part of it is it's a converged platform. So it doesn't just provide data; it provides a compute layer that's deeply integrated directly with the data layer itself. So think of it as Lambdas running, like, stored procedures inside the database. That's really what it is. We've built a very, very specialized compute engine that exposes containers in functions as stored procedures directly on the database.And so they run inside the context of the database and so you can build apps in Python, Go, your favorite language; it compiles down into a [unintelligible 00:15:02] kernel that actually runs inside the database among all these different polyglot interfaces that we have. And the third thing that we do is we provide an ability for you to have very fine-grained control on your data. Because today, data's become a political tool; it's become something that nation-states care a lot about.Corey: Oh, do they ever.Chetan: Exactly. And [unintelligible 00:15:24] regulated. So here's the problem. You're an enterprise architect and your application is going to be consumed in 15 countries, there are 13 different frameworks to deal with. What do you do? Well, you spin up 13 different versions, one for each country, and you know, build 13 different teams, and have 13 zero-day attacks and all that kind of craziness, right?Well, data protection is actually one of the most important parts of the edge because, with something like Macrometa, you can build an app once, and we'll provide all the necessary localization for any region processing, data protection with things like tokenization of data so you can exfiltrate data securely without violating potentially PII sensitive data exfiltration laws within countries, things like that, i.e. It's solving some really hard problems by providing an opinionated platform that does these three things. And I'll summarize it as thus, Corey, we can kind of dig into each piece. Our platform is called the Global Data Network. It's not a global database; it's a global data network. It looks like a frickin database, but it's actually a global network available in 175 cities around the world.Corey: The challenge, of course, is where does the data actually live at rest, and—this is why people care about—well, they're two reasons people care about that; one is the data residency locality stuff, which has always, honestly for me, felt a little bit like a bit of a cloud provider shakedown. Yeah, build a data center here or you don't get any of the business of anything that falls under our regulation. The other is, what is the egress cost of that look like? Because yeah, I can build a whole multicenter data store on top of AWS, for example, but minimum, we're talking two cents, a gigabyte of transfer, even with inside of a region in some cases, and many times that externally.Chetan: Yeah, that's the real shakedown: the egress costs [laugh] more than the other example that you talked about over there. But it's a reality of how cloud pricing works and things like that. What we have built is a network that is completely independent of the cloud providers. We're built on top of five different service providers. Some of them are cloud providers, some of them are telecom providers, some of them are CDNs.And so we're building our global data network on top of routes and capacity provided by transfer providers who have different economics than the cloud providers do. So our cost for egress falls somewhere between two and five cents, for example, depending on which edge locations, which countries, and things that you're going to use over there. We've got a pretty generous egress fee where, you know, for certain thresholds, there's no egress charge at all, but over certain thresholds, we start to charge between two to five cents. But even if you were to take it at the higher end of that spectrum, five cents per gigabyte for transfer, the amount of value our platform brings in architecture and reduction in complexity and the ability to build apps that are frankly, mind-boggling—one of my customers is a SaaS company in marketing that uses us to inject offers while people are on their website, you know, browsing. Literally, you hit their website, you do a few things, and then boom, there's a customized offer for them.In banking that's used, for example, you know, you're making your minimum payments on your credit card, but you have a good payment history and you've got a decent credit score, well, let's give you an offer to give you a short-term loan, for example. So those types of new applications, you know, are really at this intersection where you need low latency, you need in-region processing, and you also need to comply with data regulation. So when you building a high-value revenue-generating app like that egress cost, even at five cents, right, tends to be very, very cheap, and the smallest part of you know, the complexity of building them.Corey: One of the things that I think we see a lot of is that the tone of this industry is set by the big players, and they have done a reasonable job, by and large, of making anything that isn't running in their blessed environments, let me be direct, sound kind of shitty, where it's like, “Oh, do you want to be smart and run things in AWS?”—or GCP? Or Azure, I guess—“Or do you want to be foolish and try and build it yourself out of popsicle sticks and twine?” And, yeah, on some level, if I'm trying to treat everything like it's AWS and run a crappy analog version of DynamoDB, for example, I'm not going to have a great experience, but if I also start from a perspective of not using things that are higher up the stack offerings, that experience starts to look a lot more reasonable as we start expanding out. But it still does present to a lot of us as well, we're just going to run things in VM somewhere and treat them just like we did back in 2005. What's changed in that perspective?Chetan: Yeah, you know, I can't talk for others but for us, we provide a high-level Platform-as-a-Service, and that platform, the global data network, has three pieces to it. First piece is—and none of this will translate into anything that AWS or GCP has because this is the edge, Corey, is completely different, right? So the global data network that we have is composed of three technology components. The first one is something that we call the global data mesh. And this is Pub/Sub and event processing on steroids. We have the ability to connect data sources across all kinds of boundaries; you've got some data in Germany and you've got some data in New York. How do you put these things together and get them streaming so that you can start to do interesting things with correlating this data, for example?And you might have to get across not just physical boundaries, like, they're sitting in different systems in different data centers; they might be logical boundaries, like, hey, I need to collaborate with data from my supply chain partner and we need to be able to do something that's dynamic in real-time, you know, to solve a business problem. So the global data mesh is a way to very quickly connect data wherever it might be in legacy systems, in flat files, in streaming databases, in data warehouses, what have you—you know, we have 500-plus types of connectors—but most importantly, it's not just getting the data streaming, it's then turning it into an API and making that data fungible. Because the minute you put an API on it and it's become fungible now that data is actually got a lot of value. And so the data mesh is a way to very quickly connect things up and put an API on it. And that API can now be consumed by front-ends, it can be consumed by other microservices, things like that.Which brings me to the second piece, which is edge compute. So we've built a compute runtime that is Docker compatible, so it runs containers, it's also Lambda compatible, so it runs functions. Let me rephrase that; it's not Lambda-compatible, it's Lambda-like. So no, you can't take your Lambda and dump it on us and it won't just work. You have to do some things to make it work on us.Corey: But so many of those things are so deeply integrated to the ecosystem that they're operating within, and—Chetan: Yeah.Corey: That, on the one hand, is presented by cloud providers as, “Oh, yes. This shows how wonderful these things are.” In practice, talk to customers. “Yeah, we're using it as spackle between the different cloud services that don't talk to one another despite being made by the same company.”Chetan: [laugh] right.Corey: It's fun.Chetan: Yeah. So the second edge compute piece, which allows you now to build microservices that are stateful, i.e., they have data that they interact with locally, and schedule them along with the data on our network of 175 regions around the world. So you can build distributed applications now.Now, your microservice back-end for your banking application or for your HR SaaS application or e-commerce application is not running in us-east-1 and Virginia; it's running literally in 15, 18, 25 cities where your end-users are, potentially. And to take an industrial IoT case, for example, you might be ingesting data from the electricity grid in 15, 18 different cities around the world; you can do all of that locally now. So that's what the edge functions does, it flips the cloud model around because instead of sending data to where the compute is in the cloud, you're actually bringing compute to where the data is originating, or the data is being consumed, such as through a mobile app. So that's the second piece.And the third piece is global data protection, which is hey, now I've got a distributed infrastructure; how do I comply with all the different privacy and regulatory frameworks that are out there? How do I keep data secure in each region? How do I potentially share data between regions in such a way that, you know, I don't break the model of compliance globally and create a billion-dollar headache for my CIO and CEO and CFO, you know? So that's the third piece of capabilities that this provides.All of this is presented as a set of serverless APIs. So you simply plug these APIs into your existing applications. Some of your applications work great in the cloud. Maybe there are just parts of that app that should be on our edge. And that's usually where most customers start; they take a single web service or two that's not doing so great in the cloud because it's too far away; it has data sensitivity, location sensitivity, time sensitivity, and so they use us as a way to just deal with that on the edge.And there are other applications where it's completely what I call edge native, i.e., no dependancy on the cloud comes and runs completely distributed across our network and consumes primarily the edges infrastructure, and just maybe send some data back on the cloud for long-term storage or long-term analytics.Corey: And ingest does remain free. The long-term analytics, of course, means that once that data is there, good luck convincing a customer to move it because that gets really expensive.Chetan: Exactly, exactly. It's a speciation—as I like to say—of the cloud, into a fast tier where interactions happen, i.e., the edge. So systems of record are still in the cloud; we still have our transactional systems over there, our databases, data warehouses.And those are great for historical types of data, as you just mentioned, but for things that are operational in nature, that are interactive in nature, where you really need to deal with them because they're time-sensitive, they're depleting value in seconds or milliseconds, they're location sensitive, there's a lot of noise in the data and you need to get to just those bits of data that actually matter, throw the rest away, for example—which is what you do with a lot of telemetry in cybersecurity, for example, right—those are all the things that require a new kind of a platform, not a system of record, a system of interaction, and that's what the global data network is, the GDN. And these three primitives, the data mesh, Edge compute, and data protection, are the way that our APIs are shaped to help our enterprise customers solve these problems. So put it another way, imagine ten years from now what DynamoDB and global tables with a really fast Lambda and Kinesis with actually Event Processing built directly into Kinesis might be like. That's Macrometa today, available in 175 cities.Corey: This episode is brought to us in part by our friends at Datadog. Datadog is a SaaS monitoring and security platform that enables full-stack observability for modern infrastructure and applications at every scale. Datadog enables teams to see everything: dashboarding, alerting, application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, UX monitoring, security monitoring, dog logos, and log management, in one tightly integrated platform. With 600-plus out-of-the-box integrations with technologies including all major cloud providers, databases, and web servers, Datadog allows you to aggregate all your data into one platform for seamless correlation, allowing teams to troubleshoot and collaborate together in one place, preventing downtime and enhancing performance and reliability. Get started with a free 14-day trial by visiting datadoghq.com/screaminginthecloud, and get a free t-shirt after installing the agent.Corey: I think it's also worth pointing out that it's easy for me to fall into a trap that I wonder if some of our listeners do as well, which is, I live in, basically, downtown San Francisco. I have gigabit internet connectivity here, to the point where when it goes out, it is suspicious and more a little bit frightening because my ISP—Sonic.net—is amazing and deserves every bit of praise that you never hear any ISP ever get. But when I travel, it's a very different experience. When I go to oh, I don't know, the conference center at re:Invent last year and find that the internet is patchy at best, or downtown San Francisco on Verizon today, I discover that the internet is almost non-existent, and suddenly applications that I had grown accustomed to just working suddenly didn't.And there's a lot more people who live far away from these data center regions and tier one backbones directly to same than don't. So I think that there's a lot of mistaken ideas around exactly what the lower bandwidth experience of the internet is today. And that is something that feels inadvertently classist if that make sense. Are these geographically bigoted?Chetan: Yeah. No, I think those two points are very well articulated. I wish I could articulate it that well. But yes, if you can afford 5G, some of those things get better. But again, 5G is not everywhere yet. It will be, but 5G can in many ways democratize at least one part of it, which is provide an overlap network at the edge, where if you left home and you switched networks, on to a wireless, you can still get the same quality of service that you used to getting from Sonic, for example. So I think it can solve some of those things in the future. But the second part of it—what did you call it? What bigoted?Corey: Geographically bigoted. And again, that's maybe a bit of a strong term, but it's easy to forget that you can't get around the speed of light. I would say that the most poignant example of that I had was when I was—in the before times—giving a keynote in Australia. So ah, I know what I'll do, I'll spin up an EC2 instance for development purposes—because that's how I do my development—in Australia. And then I would just pay my provider for cellular access for my iPad and that was great.And I found the internet was slow as molasses for everything I did. Like, how do people even live here? Well, turns out that my provider would backhaul traffic to the United States. So to log into my session, I would wind up having to connect with a local provider, backhaul to the US, then connect back out from there to Australia across the entire Pacific Ocean, talk to the server, get the response, would follow that return path. It's yeah, turns out that doing laps around the world is not the most efficient way of transferring any data whatsoever, let alone in sizable amounts.Chetan: And that's why we decided to call our platform the global data network, Corey. In fact, it's really built inside of sort of a very simple reason is that we have our own network underneath all of this and we stop this whole ping-pong effect of data going around and help create deterministic guarantees around latency, around location, around performance. We're trying to democratize latency and these types of problems in a way that programmers shouldn't have to worry about all this stuff. You write your code, you push publish, it runs on a network, and it all gets there with a guarantee that 95% of all your requests will happen within 50 milliseconds round-trip time, from any device, you know, in these population centers around the world.So yeah, it's a big deal. It's sort of one of our je ne sais quoi pieces in our mission and charter, which is to just democratize latency and access, and sort of get away from this geographical nonsense of, you know, how networks work and it will dynamically switch topology and just make everything slow, you know, very non-deterministic way.Corey: One last topic that I want to ask you about—because I near certain given your position, you will have an opinion on this—what's your take on, I guess, the carbon footprint of clouds these days? Because a lot of people been talking about it; there has been a lot of noise made about, justifiably so. I'm curious to get your take.Chetan: Yeah, you know, it feels like we're in the '30s and the '40s of the carbon movement when it comes to clouds today, right? Maybe there's some early awareness of the problem, but you know, frankly, there's very little we can do than just sort of put a wet finger in the air, compute some carbon offset and plant some trees. I think these are good building blocks; they're not necessarily the best ways to solve this problem, ultimately. But one of the things I care deeply about and you know, my company cares a lot about is helping make developers more aware off what kind of carbon footprint their code tangibly has on the environment. And so we've started two things inside the company. We've started a foundation that we call the Carbon Conscious Computing Consortium—the four C's. We're going to announce that publicly next year, we're going to invite folks to come and join us and be a part of it.The second thing that we're doing is we're building a completely open-source, carbon-conscious computing platform that is built on real data that we're collecting about, to start with, how Macrometa's platform emits carbon in response to different types of things you build on it. So for example, you wrote a query that hits our database and queries, you know, I don't know, 20 billion objects inside of our database. It'll tell you exactly how many micrograms or how many milligrams of carbon—it's an estimate; not exactly. I got to learn to throttle myself down. It's an estimate, you know, you can't really measure these things exactly because the cost of carbon is different in different places, you know, there are different technologies, et cetera.Gives you a good decent estimate, something that reliably tells you, “Hey, you know that query that you have over there, that piece of SQL? That's probably going to do this much of micrograms of carbon at this scale.” You know, if this query was called a million times every hour, this is how much it costs. A million times a day, this is how much it costs and things like that. But the most important thing that I feel passionate about is that when we give developers visibility, they do good things.I mean, when we give them good debugging tools, the code gets better, the code gets faster, the code gets more efficient. And Corey, you're in the business of helping people save money, when we give them good visibility into how much their code costs to run, they make the code more efficient. So we're doing the same thing with carbon, we know there's a cost to run your code, whether it's a function, a container, a query, what have you, every operation has a carbon cost. And we're on a mission to measure that and provide accurate tooling directly in our platform so that along with your debug lines, right, where you've got all these print statements that are spitting up stuff about what's happening there, we can also print out, you know, what did it cost in carbon.And you can set budgets. You can basically say, “Hey, I want my application to consume this much of carbon.” And down the road, we'll have AI and ML models that will help us optimize your code to be able to fit within those carbon budgets. For example. I'm not a big fan of planting—you know, I love planting trees, but don't get me wrong, we live in California and those trees get burned down.And I was reading this heartbreaking story about how we returned back into the atmosphere a giant amount of carbon because the forest reserve that had been planted, you know, that was capturing carbon, you know, essentially got burned down in a forest fire. So, you know, we're trying to just basically say, let's try and reduce the amount of carbon, you know, that we can potentially create by having better tooling.Corey: That would be amazing, and I think it also requires something that I guess acts almost as an exchange where there's a centralized voice that can make sure that, well, one, the provider is being honest, and two, being able to ensure you're doing an apples-to-apples comparison and not just discounting a whole lot of negative externalities. Because, yes, we're talking about carbon released into the environment. Okay, great. What about water effects from what's happening with your data centers are located? That can have significant climate impact as well. It's about trying to avoid the picking and choosing. It's hard, hard problem, but I'm unconvinced that there's anything more critical in the entire ecosystem right now to worry about.Chetan: So as a startup, we care very deeply about starting with the carbon part. And I agree, Corey, it's a multi-dimensional problem; there's lots of tentacles. The hydrocarbon industry goes very deeply into all parts of our lives. I'm a startup, what do I know? I can't solve all of those things, but I wanted to start with the philosophy that if we provide developers with the right tooling, they'll have the right incentives then to write better code. And as we open-source more of what we learn and, you know, our tooling, others will do the same. And I think in ten years, we might have better answers. But someone's got to start somewhere, and this is where we'd like to start.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking as much time as you have for going through what you're up to and how you view the world. If people want to learn more, where's the best place to find you?Chetan: Yes, so two things on that front. Go to www.macrometa.com—M-A-C-R-O-M-E-T-A dot com—and that's our website. And you can come and experience the full power of the platform. We've got a playground where you can come, open an account and build anything you want for free, and you can try and learn. You just can't run it in production because we've got a giant network, as I said, of 175 cities around the world. But there are tiers available for you to purchase and build and run apps. Like I think about 80 different customers, some of the biggest ones in the world, some of the biggest telecom customers, retail, E-Tail customers, [unintelligible 00:34:28] tiny startups are building some interesting things on.And the second thing I want to talk about is November 7th through 11th of 2022, just a couple of weeks—or maybe by the time this recording comes out, a week from now—is developer week at Macrometa. And we're going to be announcing some really interesting new capabilities, some new features like real-time complex event processing with low, ultra-low latency, data connectors, a search feature that allows you to build search directly on top of your applications without needing to spin up a giant Elastic Cloud Search cluster, or providing search locally and regionally so that, you know, you can have search running in 25 cities that are instant to search rather than sending all your search requests back in one location. There's all kinds of very cool things happening over there.And we're also announcing a partnership with the original, the OG of the edge, one of the largest, most impressive, interesting CDN players that has become a partner for us as well. And then we're also announcing some very interesting experimental work where you as a developer can build apps directly on the 5G telecom cloud as well. And then you'll hear from some interesting companies that are building apps that are edge-native, that are impossible to build in the cloud because they take advantage of these three things that we talked about: geography, latency, and data protection in some very, very powerful ways. So you'll hear actual customer case studies from real customers in the flesh, not anonymous BS, no marchitecture. It's a week-long of technical talk by developers, for developers. And so, you know, come and join the fun and let's learn all about the edge together, and let's go build something together that's impossible to do today.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:36:06]. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Chetan: My pleasure, Corey. Like I said, you're one of my heroes. I've always loved your work. The Snark-as-a-Service is a trillion-dollar market cap company. If you're ever interested in taking that public, I know some investors that I'd happily put you in touch with. But—Corey: Sadly, so many of those investors lack senses of humor.Chetan: [laugh]. That is true. That is true [laugh].Corey: [laugh]. [sigh].Chetan: Well, thank you. Thanks again for having me.Corey: Thank you. Chetan Venkatesh, CEO and co-founder at Macrometa. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry and insulting comment about why we should build everything on the cloud provider that you work for and then the attempt to challenge Chetan for the title of Edgelord.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
This is the second DSO Declassified, part of the Group Dentistry Now Show. This month Bill Neumann shares his thoughts on current events and news in the DSO industry. In this installment we focus on: Dykema DSO conference review Upcoming DSO events including DSO Leadership Summit Increase in solo dental practice owners interested in selling Discussion regarding recent articles on GDN including membership, rental agreements, TAG activity, DSO People, DSO Deals, Oakpoint podcast and much more If you have any suggestions for what you'd like to hear on the DSO Declassified podcast email bill@groupdentistrynow.com To find any of the events or articles discussed on the podcast visit https://www.groupdentistrynow.com/ If you like our podcast, please give us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review on iTunes http://apple.co/2Nejsfa and a Thumbs Up on YouTube. Our podcast series brings you dental support and emerging dental group practice analysis, conversation, trends, news and events. Listen to leaders in the DSO and emerging dental group space talk about their challenges, successes, and the future of group dentistry. The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry has listeners across North & South America, Australia, Europe, and Asia. If you like our show, tell a friend or a colleague.
Misconceptions about GDN are rampant in the eComm world. It's too hard. It's too expensive. The targeting isn't as good as Facebook. It doesn't work. Justin Brooke knows better. Justin is an ad veteran who knows just about every ad platform out there. He's partnered with and trained media buyers for Russell Brunson, Frank Kern, Dan Kennedy and more. He also worked for Agora Publishing. He KNOWS his stuff. And he believes GDN ads are better than Facebook? Why? You can still get $.40 and $.80 clicks. GDN offers targeting that you can't match on Facebook. GDN creates the impression that your brand is “everywhere”. Here are some tips we cover: His unique approach to GDN for eCommerce. His landing page must-have elements. How quality is in the quantity when it comes to GDN headlines and copy. Testing 3 angles for every idea - toward pleasure, away from pain, and something controversial. Utilizing the overnight celebrity strategy with testimonial GDN ads. How deadlines and testimonials work together. How to work hand-in-hand with the algorithm for amazing results.
Misconceptions about GDN are rampant in the eComm world. It's too hard. It's too expensive. The targeting isn't as good as Facebook. It doesn't work. Justin Brooke knows better. Justin is an ad veteran who knows just about every ad platform out there. He's partnered with and trained media buyers for Russell Brunson, Frank Kern, Dan Kennedy and more. He also worked for Agora Publishing. He KNOWS his stuff. And he believes GDN ads are better than Facebook? Why? You can still get $.40 and $.80 clicks. GDN offers targeting that you can't match on Facebook. GDN creates the impression that your brand is “everywhere”. Here are some tips we cover: His unique approach to GDN for eCommerce. His landing page must-have elements. How quality is in the quantity when it comes to GDN headlines and copy. Testing 3 angles for every idea - toward pleasure, away from pain, and something controversial. Utilizing the overnight celebrity strategy with testimonial GDN ads. How deadlines and testimonials work together. How to work hand-in-hand with the algorithm for amazing results.
Season 2 of "Great Dane Nation" comes to a close, as Morten Andersen and TommyFreezePops (Tom Carroll) go on their summer break for 2022.The guys look back at the first 89 episodes of GDN, reflecting on their favorite guests, biggest surprises, funny moments, and looking ahead at their guest wish list for the 2022 NFL season!
You can break down advertising by the medium of communication, and since we all started with text ads, we're comfortable with that format. We've also become comfortable with image ads. But there's one format that can throw a lot of us – video. Of course, the production cost put into videos can vary wildly, and ad platforms like youtube have a huge number of options and nuances to know, but the one thing all video has in common is it makes a human to human connection that other media formats cannot hold a candle to. To demystify this field, we're talking with the founder of Variable.media One of the nicest people you'll ever meet in the PPC industry He has appeared on EDGE OF THE WEB, INBOUND SUCCESS PODCAST, HeroConference A4 Congress – Advanced Analytics & Advertising (Lima, Peru | Video | 5/21-5/23/19 Hero Conference USA (Philadelphia, PA) | Video, TBD | 4/23-4/25/19 Hero Conference (London, UK) | Video (YouTube) | 10/22-10/23/18 SMX Advanced (Seattle, WA) | Video (YouTube, Facebook) | 6/11-6/13/18 Hero Conference (Austin, TX) | Video (YouTube) | 4/15-4/17/18 SMX West (San Jose, CA) | Unleashing The Power Of Online Video Ads | 3/12-3/15/18 SMX West (San Jose, CA) | Workshop, Video (YouTube) | 3/12-3/15/18 SMX East New York | Unleashing The Power Of Online Video Ads | 10/24-10/26/17 SMX East New York | How to Maximize & Measure Performance on the GDN | 10/24-10/26/17 SMX Advanced Seattle | A Year of Change in Online Ad Universe | 6/12-6/14/17 SMX Advanced Seattle | Social Media Advertising Workshop | 6/12-6/14/17 SLCSEM 2017 Utah | Hacking Facebook & YouTube | 1/18/17 IIeX North America Atlanta | Altruism, Automation, & Effective Advertising | 6/13/16 and many regional digital marketing events… He played basketball at California Lutheran while getting his degree. People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show https://youtu.be/iTLVoj4iNr4 7 Types of videos suggested by Marcus Sheridan Talking head video Video placement options: channels, keywords, custom options You may also want to check episode 54 on the Visual Sale and episode 20 on video creation You can contact Cory via LinkedIn or Twitter. For more details, please visit https://funnelreboot.com/episode-86-video-ads-with-cory-henke/
Do you choose to continue pouring your valuable time and effort into relationships, projects and situations that stopped serving you a long long time ago? You're a clown - stop that. I also discuss why what you want sometimes doesn't come to you, with Spiderman, Insecure Boyfriends and a whole lot more of that sumptuous GDN waffle right her for you beautiful people. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
Se viene la fiesta más familiera del año, el GDN2021, la versión pospandemia en su edición Nº 17. Nacho y Rama, nos adelantan algunos detalles de la organización y cómo se viene este año de regreso al encuentro. Y como siempre, su fin solidario, pata enorme de esta excusa que ya lleva cosechados muchos logros para instituciones del partido de General Villegas. A prepararse, que GDN ya está en marcha!!! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/maria-celina-fabregues/message
The last 2 members of the team are met and the crew must now find a way to obtain money and get back to Vasaad. Chaos ensues, money is lost and gained. Play Ball! Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/veturiumcaulfield/play-ball-0?ref=user_menu Follow us on twitter: @AreWeDeadYetPod Check out our website: https://www.1upPodcasts.com Intro and Outro Music by David Cole of the Four Orbs podcast. Our intro was a custom commission by Dave Cole and the outro is "The Cliff" by Dave Cole. Find more of his work on YouTube by searching for dColeMusic that's D-C-O-L-E-M-U-S-I-C on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/dcolemusic Background music tracks include: "Bar Room Brawl" by Sword Coast Sound Scapes. Link to their YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SwordCoastSoundscapes "Castle Jail" by TabletopAudio.com "Blood Soaked Plains", "Nightime Medieval City", "Medieval Nighttime Docks", and "Fantasy Tavern" by Plate Mail Games. Sound Effects include Sound Effects provided by GDN under license purchased through Humble Bundle Additional Sound Effects used from FreeSound.Org under a public domain dedication.
A new season brings a group of not so great people together. What havoc will they spread throughout Eberron in their quest for revenge, fortune, fame, and souls? Find out as we begin the Evils of Eberron campaign. Thanks for listening to this episode of Are We Dead Yet? Intro and Outro Music by David Cole of the 4 Orbs podcast. Our intro was a custom commission by Dave Cole and the outro is The Cliff by Dave Cole. Find more of his work on YouTube by searching for dColeMusic that's D-C-O-L-E-M-U-S-I-C on YouTube. Background music tracks include: Daytime Medieval City and Medieval City Merchant's Gate by Plate Mail Games used under license purchased through Drive Thru RPG. Hide and Seek by Dark Fantasy Studios used under license purchased through humble bundle Casual Themes 3, 4, and 5 by Andrew Sitkov used under license purchased through humble bundle Age of Sail by TabletopAudio.com under an attribution non-commercial license from creative commons. Deadly Roulette by Kevin MacLeod used under a standard license from filmmusic.io - Link in the description Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3625-deadly-roulette License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Sound Effects include Sound Effects provided by GDN under license purchased through Humble Bundle Additional Sound Effects used from FreeSound.Org under a public domain dedication.
One big challenge facing marketing leaders is knowing when to make key investments, like advertising on the Google Display Network. On this episode, Mary Davin joins the show to talk about her experience running responsive display ads (RDAs). In this conversation we talk about: the difference between traditional and responsive display ads when a company should consider RDAs examples of responsive display ads that performed well reporting capabilities of RDAs what elements are needed to fuel RDAs
想跟大家講剛看的一篇我認為是相當有趣的新聞,我們經常在google放GDN廣告,但又覺得沒怎麼貢獻到確實的數字,好像只能夠讓多些用戶看到牌子的名字而已。https://www.hdcourse.com/content-marketing/google-ads-fake-site/ #google #假新聞 #廣告流量
MEMORIAL DAY SALE Relax FAR Infrared Sauna Use code MEMORIAL21 to save $175 thru 5/31/21 Aqua Cure Moleculra Hydrogen Machine - Use code EHR20 to save $500 thru 5/31/21 ANNOUNCEMENT! Dissolve-It-All - breaking down scar tissue, inflammation and calcification PUFA Protect - Eliminating a lifetime of a high PUFA diet Use discount code EHR15! Today we celebrated 700 shows! I can't believe we've done it! I hope you enjoy! On Last Thing! As always your support via your donations and bookmarking our Amazon link to use each time you purchase is how we keep our show going. Thank you for bookmarking our Amazon link even if you're not buying anything right now! :) Thank you all! Sponsors For This Episode: Extreme Health Academy Use code EHR14 for a free 2 week trial! AquaCure® Model AC50 Use Code EHR20 to save $500 thru 5/31/21 Relax FAR Infrared Sauna Use Code MEMORIAL21 to save $175 thru 5/31/21 Green Wave Dirty Elecrtricity Filers Bellicon Rebounders Featured Products For This Episode: Joovv Red Light Therapy Elk Velvet Antler Magnetico Sleep Pads BARF World Raw Dog Food Rapid Release Technology Pro 2 Colostrum Qigong Course Stockton Aloe One Blue Blockers The Biomat Chemical Free Organic Skincare! Show Guest: Justin Stellman Show Links https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oza1j2_WqBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdN--11btc0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A867t1JbIrs https://twitter.com/chrisbergpov/status/1247680994821509121 https://www.instagram.com/p/CPWCe-aAroD/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CENB-2CA1Sz/ https://chiro.org/LINKS/FULL/Death_By_Medicine.html https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6122858/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15847934/ https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-17718/v1 Please Support Us If You Are Able: (Opens in a new window - Every bit helps us to keep delivering even better shows that help you heal & thrive!) [spp-transcript]
In this episode, we speak to Desriann Blackwood. A Jamaican Media Buyer specializing in getting leads in the coaching and education market. She talks about the importance of being across all of the elements of the funnel to keep and retain clients. We also discuss the transition from a fee-based agency to a pay-for-performance model.Reach out to Desriann at dezchamps@IriePhoenix.comWant to hire an AdSkills certified media buyer? Click here: http://mediabuyers4hire.com/ Schedule an appointment with one of our team to show you around AdSkills: https://get.adskills.com/tour/
Ben Blackmon's expertise in dealing in challenging markets and making sure they stay out of the AD Network “Red Zone” had fellow media buyers calling up and asking how are you keeping your ads running? Ben’s brilliant approach takes a “caution first” to compliance which helps his clients up and running when others can’t. How do you replace before and after photos? What happens when a client insists? Lot’s of meaty information in this interview. Get in touch with Ben at ben@onefocusmarketing.comWant to hire an AdSkills certified media buyer? Click here: http://mediabuyers4hire.com/Schedule an appointment with one of our team to show you around AdSkills: https://get.adskills.com/tour/
One of the lasting side-effects of the pandemic was every single local business on the planet needed to have an online media buying strategy. Sheena Murphy was at the front lines working with clients to create business models and ad strategies to help clients survive and thrive in the pandemic environment.In this interview, we talk about how she worked with clients during Covid and how she is applying those local business strategies now. We also discuss the new media buying landscape and talk about some opportunities there.Reach out to Sheena at sheenalmurphy@gmail.comWant to hire an AdSkills certified media buyer? Click here: mediabuyers4hire.com Schedule an appointment with one of our team to show you around AdSkills: AdSkillsTour
Listen in as Sheena Groat, Co-Founder of GDN, interviews Carolin, Founder of GDN, on the topic of faith and stepping into the God-dream over our lives. Hear all about where the journey of GDN began, how to stay faithful in pursuit of the vision and why everyONE truly matters. Be inspired to take action in your day-to-day living, as well as your dance, and go after all God has placed before you. -- We would love for you to subscribe to our podcast and share it with others. To find out more visit: https://globaldancenetwork.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/globaldancenetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/globaldancenetwork/
Both Google and Facebook generate over 80% of their revenue from advertising, clearly because of their extensive reach. That’s why Facebook remarketing and Google Display Network comes in handy with generating personalised and targeted ads to users. These tools help to increase brand loyalty, awareness, and click-through-rate. On one hand, Google is the world’s largest search engine. But on the other hand, Facebook is the largest social network. Both mediums are the perfect place to advertise, but for different reasons. After marketing for a long time, at Web3 we know that it is never one size fits all. Does this sound like something you want for your business? We discuss which advertising network is best for you and has the best ROI: Facebook remarketing or Google Display Network. Within each network, we break down: How it works How it can help Their display features Other factors to consider Google Display Network Google display ads help to promote and advertise your business on Google web properties, including YouTube, Blogger, Gmail, and more. Google Display Network embeds ads into websites that use Google advertising. GDN can often be confused with Google Search Ads, which display the ads as text-based search results above the organic results. Overall, GDN is an opportunity to build brand awareness and increase the click-through-rate of your site. When your website receives clicks, a portion of your money goes to the service. However, this percentage of money does not come without its pros. Google display ads offer an impressionable global reach. It also allows you to connect with users of over a million websites, such as news articles or blogs. Important Features Google display network offers a variety of display formats. They include text, image, flash image ads, in-video ads, mobile web, and mobile games. They are all designed to capture the attention of potential customers. You are bound to find your desired target marketing through at least one of the available formats. Although, these aspects need to have approved specifications based on their display ad requirements. How does Google Display Network work? GDN offers a variety of targeting options to ensure your advertisement is targeting your desired and relevant audiences. I bet you’ve noticed certain ads appearing on the webpages you visit in your spare time and wonder, how did they know I’m interested in that? Well, Google notes its users’ previous site visits and clicks, using cookies to link your interests and demographic categories, showing you these highly targeted sites. Facebook Remarketing Facebook remarketing includes displaying target ads to audiences who have not progressed on your website or have abandoned their cart. Cart abandonment has recently increased. It can be immensely frustrating pinning down why your audience is clicking through and bouncing around your site or adding items to their cart but not progressing. Facebook tracking pixels will identify these users and deliver them with highly targeted ads to lure them back into where they left off. Cool, right? People spend more time on Google, yet Facebook receives higher pageviews. It is because it can target them more times. Frequency is key to most marketing strategies. Facebook remarketing is the perfect way to win back lost traffic, as it allows you to target specific demographics showing your ads up front and center. Facebook Newest features When it comes to ad creative, Facebook has gone above and beyond over the past couple of years. They introduced their ‘instant experience’ which showcases a product or service from the user’s screen. With the inclusion of a 360 video, mobile devices are now interactive and engaging. This new inclusion makes for a fun, sophisticated and professional experience for your customer to reconnect with your business. How does Facebook Remarketing work? To target these customers, you must first create a custom audience. These could be existing customers or people who have interacted with you on other platforms. Then add and test your pixels manually or via tools like Shopify. It is a valuable platform that can target your lost leads, increase conversion rate, and cart abandonment issues. Reasons for Consideration People are, on average, spending about one hour on Facebook, which is significantly lower compared to the combination of Google’s web properties. Facebook remarketing also has a lower click-through-rate, potentially being affected by the minor ad formats and options for display compared to Google Display. The placement of these ads includes newsfeed, sidebar and mobile. Summary Facebook remarketing and Google Display Network can increase your ROI and rapidly grow your business in conjunction with organic advertising. Overall, it comes down to what your business needs and the behaviour of your audience. Transcript James Banks:Hello everyone. And, welcome to another episode of the Web3 Marketing Debate show. I'm your host, James Banks. Joseph Chesterton:And, I'm your cohost, Joseph Chesterton. James Banks:Today we will be debating remarketing. Specifically about the two gorillas in the room, Facebook versus Google Display Network remarketing, and which one is best? I'll be debating for Facebook remarketing. Joseph Chesterton:And obviously, I'll be talking about the Google Display Network. James Banks:So, Joseph for why is the Google Display Network better at remarketing, or better for remarketing compared to Facebook? Joseph Chesterton:Well, firstly what is Google Display Network and Facebook marketing? Google Display Network is often confused for Google search ads, but it shouldn’t. It's a completely different part of the Google advertising suite. Display ads can help to promote your business. When browsing online, people see ads on other websites. Those ads are put/injected into those websites via the Google Display Network. These ads can be placed on any website that uses Google advertising, YouTube, Gmail or mobile apps that use Google Display Network advertising. Websites hosting the Google Display Network script, get a portion of the money once the ad gets clicks. As a result, Google gets to display the ad on their website. The Google Display Network reaches most users worldwide and has millions of websites using it. What's Facebook remarketing, James? James Banks:Facebook remarketing, is quite similar to how you describe Google Display Network. However, rather than your remarketing ad displayed on any one of the thousand websites in the Google Display Network, it only shows up on one website, Facebook. This will appear if you have the Facebook pixel on your website, and active Facebook ads remarketing campaign. You can configure your settings, controls and marketing scripts via our previous episode on a Google display versus direct integration through Tag Manager. But essentially, with Facebook remarketing, your ad can show up to these users’ Facebook. When they enter your website, they get ‘cookied’, and once they’re on Facebook, depending on your settings, they will see your ad. That's essentially how it works in a nutshell. You can also choose your remarketing ads to show up on other Facebook properties, such as Instagram and Messenger. You also can select and choose which platform you wish your ad to show up in. Joseph Chesterton:So, which one produces the best results? The answer to that is like how long is a piece of string. It comes down to what you need. So, where are your customers hanging out? Google Display Network, covers 95% of web traffic, so that’s all your news outlets, blogs, and random cat video websites. If they’re using advertising on their website, it’ll most likely be through Google Display Network. If your customers are on those websites, you can target them using Google Display Network. Whereas, with Facebook remarketing, you're just limited to Facebook’s platforms. So, if that's what you're targeting, then Facebook may be the solution for that. But chances are, your customers won't be just on Facebook, they'll be going across any number of websites. Google Display Network, will cookie the user and display your ads across multiple websites, then you can essentially have a billboard right in front of the user's face, across their entire online journey. However, with Facebook remarketing, they use the Facebook pixel to track you so they can see where you're going around the web, but it's not until you returned to Facebook when you get remarketed to. Overall, Facebook is essentially just a couple of apps. Whereas with Google Display Network, you're targeting the entire internet. Done deal. James Banks:Well, not quite Joseph. Yes, Facebook might not have the actual width or breadth of individual site placement. However, the activity within its platforms is dramatically higher with higher dwell time. For example, people spend a lot more time per day on Facebook, as opposed to any one of the thousands of sites in the display network. As the saying goes in advertising, the business that is the most recent and frequent and front of mind is the one that ultimately earns customer loyalty and the sale. So, if your audience is spending a fair bit of time on Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger, and your remarketing messages are showing up in front of them everywhere, you don't want them to get burnt out. There is a high chance that they could click through and potentially make the sale because they spend most of their time there. But, as you said, it's very situationally dependent on the business, and how they're marketing and advertising. It’s one component of a big piece of the wheel. So, why would you say Google Display Network is better for lead generation or sale generation, as opposed to Facebook remarketing, Joseph? Joseph Chesterton:It comes back to where your customers are hanging out. They may spend a lot of time on Facebook, but their entire online journey (if you consider every single website that a user visits) will take up the majority of the time. So, with that said, if you're able to put banner ads or billboards, essentially, in front of people and target them across every single website, then it kind of can feel more natural. Whereas, with remarketing, you have to wait until they return to Facebook. It just feels like they're stalking you. The great thing about a display network is if you go to one site you can set triggers, so that if they go to another site, then a different or a similar ad can be displayed. You can get crafty with your advertising so that it's easier to sell. Customers will then more likely be able to see your ads and buy from you. There's a really good story I heard, it's about a small toothbrush or toothpaste company... This smaller company were trying to get into Walmart or one of the big department stores. They worked out where the head office of Walmart was and their geolocation. They set the display network to target only people in that specific area. The ad was something along the lines of ‘Walmart staff have stinky breath - that's why they should stock this toothpaste and, all their problems will be gone.’. Something along those lines. They targeted the head office of Walmart who was in charge of the stocking and became visible to the people at Walmart. After seeing it all over the internet, they ended up contacting the toothpaste saying, stop this, you're ruining our reputation, we don't have stinky breath. This then opened up the conversation to stock the toothpaste brand in Walmart. The amazing thing was that they only spent tens of dollars on their advertising, and were able to target the people in Walmart. If they had done that on Facebook, then perhaps they wouldn't have been able to have the same effect because that ad was everywhere. And it made the people at Walmart think that this toothpaste company was spending millions of dollars to advertise it. This toothpaste that they stocked was inferior to the one that they already stocked. So, it's a pretty interesting story that they used the Google Display Network to do that. And, they did that with pennies, versus targeting millions of people. It was a very interesting thing, if you're smart about it, you can target people and cause a big impact. It just depends on your ability as a marketer, I guess, because yes, you can do lead generation on Facebook, but can you target specific people across the entirety of the internet? James Banks:I love that story. But I'd argue, you could probably have gotten a better result by doing it through Facebook. I don't think Facebook ads were in play when that story happened. But, here's the thing, they could have remarketed to anyone that works at Walmart as an example, or has visited the site and works at Walmart. And then, they show them an ad set of, a Walmart person with stinky breath, or whatever it might be. Which is arguably more targeted than just using a geolocation filter. This is the thing where I think Facebook wins... when you do the good old Google versus Facebook debate, it still is a tried and tested method. It allows you to target friends of friends. So, you have someone that has entered your site, and their friends meet your targeting criteria. You could then have that remarketing ad show up to the friends of the friends, through custom audiences, things like that. So, it can give you different options of targeting, a little bit more personalised targeting as opposed to the display network. However, as we have said earlier before, it does depend on how you're marketing your business. For example, if you are using Facebook ads, non remarketing, like straight-up Facebook ads, brand Allegiant campaigns, someone enters your site and it makes sense to remarket to them. They abandon your site. You go to e-commerce, they don't check out. It makes sense to remarket to them with a cart abandonment ad through the Facebook platform, cause that's how they originally discovered you. However, ultimately if you're remarketing on Facebook, then why not also include remarketing across the Google Display Network? As we mentioned earlier in the piece, recency and frequency is a core component to being able to have the brand that wins the brand loyalty of the uneducated customer, at the end of the day. So, being able to combine both of them is typically how we approach things, and then being able to tailor the targeting and the platforms accordingly, depending on the context of the business, the products and services being offered. So, with that said, Joseph, is there anything else you wanted to add to this debate? Joseph Chesterton:No, I think I'll just echo what you said. It depends on where your audience is and what you're selling. Chances are your clients are going to be in multiple places. They will be on Facebook because it's the largest social network in the world. But, they also will access dozens of other sites where the Google Display Network will work. So, what better way to sell to them then every single place they go online. So, I would say both are just as good as each other. You just need to know who to target. James Banks:Well, I think that's a wrap. So, again, thank you so much for shooting into another episode of the Web3 Marketing Debate show. Hope you enjoyed that and learned something new. We will be in your earbuds, hopefully again, real soon. So, with that said and done, have a lovely day. We'll talk to you again real soon.
#ppcchat Twitter discussion that runs on Tuesdays at 5pm GMT - Led by Julie F Bacchini (@NeptuneMoon) & Marc Poirier (@marcpoirier) Q1 How do you define “programmatic advertising”? Q2 What is a DSP and what’s the difference between for instance, GDN (google Display Network) and a DSP? Q3 Are you currently doing any programmatic advertising for your clients? If so, what are you doing? Q4 What are the biggest challenges in either implementing or getting approval for programmatic advertising for you? Q5 What do you think programmatic is best suited for - awareness, prospecting, retargeting or all of the above? How are you using it/how would you like to use it if you’re not currently? Q6 Do you use any tools or services to manage programmatic advertising for your clients? Q7 Is there any data or insight you can get from Programmatic Advertising that you don’t get from other types of advertising? --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ppcchat/message
Priyanki Amroliwala, Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition of 42North Dental discusses dental recruitment with GDN. Priyanki shares tips for interviewees and also talks about recruitment challenges in the DSO industry. Our podcast series brings you dental support and emerging dental group practice analysis, conversation, trends, news and events. Listen to leaders in the DSO and emerging dental group space talk about their challenges, successes, and the future of group dentistry. The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry has listeners across North & South America, Australia, Europe, and Asia. If you like our show, tell a friend or a colleague.
CTR และราคาเฉลี่ยของ Facebook Newsfeed ads, Stories Ads, Right Column Ads, Twitter Ads, Instagram Ads, GDN, Google Search และ LinkedIn
Voice of the Grizzlies, Matt Mahony talks with Jorge Vallejo of GGC Men's Soccer and the FCA. Also, GGC Tennis prepares for the ITA Oracle Cup by competing in GDN's version of Guess Who?
Dr. Rodney Alles, Chief of Clinical Affairs for DECA Dental, Dr. Parth Patel, CEO of Smile Culture Dental and Melissa Marquez, COO of Jarvis Analytics are the panelists that discuss KPIs, dental practice analytics and secrets to the best performing clinical teams on GDN's DSO Study Club series. Find out more from Jarvis Analytics - HERE. Our podcast series brings you dental support and emerging dental group practice analysis, conversation, trends, news and events. Listen to leaders in the DSO and emerging dental group space talk about their challenges, successes, and the future of group dentistry. The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry has listeners across the North & South America, Australia, Europe, and Asia. If you like our show, tell a friend or a colleague.
Jon Rognerud’s career began as a Rockstar, but today he is a skillful media buyer He spent many years in software development, and after that, he started a media & marketing agency, in Los Angeles. Even though Jon has written 3 books on SEO and web optimization, he recognized in media buying a very valuable skill to develop. He mentions the importance of having professional guidance and mentorship when you’re developing a skill… and how a community of like-minded people can make all the difference. Jon’s 3-step “formula” to online success comes down to: Targeted traffic, your positioning, and conversions. When it comes to traffic, he’s specialized in Facebook, Google Search, and GDN. He’s had a lot of success working with clients who are in health & beauty, wellness, finances, e-commerce, and local businesses. You can reach out to Jon on https://chaosmap.com/ and https://jonrognerud.com/ Get access to his Google Ads tool here: https://adsauditreport.com/Want to hire an AdSkills certified media buyer? Click here.
In this episode, Fred Vassallo shares passionately and profoundly about the power of movement. Recorded during our GDN event in Los Angeles, Fred speaks about personal experience and testimonies around dance and spirituality. ---Fred is a Choreographer, Director, Writer, Dance Educator and speaker specialising in Hip Hop Dance, with over 20 years of professional experience. Fred fuses his love and training of original Urban Dance styles with his background in Movement Therapy.He has been an avid partner of schools, dance studios, ministries and learning institutions, developing programs to reach and teach students of all ages and backgrounds.His Commercial credits include appearances in Music Videos, Television Shows and Commercials along with appearing and directing numerous stage-shows and productions. He is the choreographer, co-writer of a full-length musical film called Bright Ones and he just launched his online movement school www.FreedMovementAcademy.comFred's passion is to see people set free through movement and this stands as the cornerstone to his teaching, choreography and classes. ---Find out more on http://www.freedmovementacademy.com/ We would love for you to subscribe to our podcast and share it with others. To find out more visit: https://globaldancenetwork.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/globaldancenetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/globaldancenetwork/
Demetri82 presents an hour the freshest dance bangers along with timeless classics from a variety of sub genres. If you're feeling what you hear or want to make a request simply request in the timeline on Twitter or Facebook @demetri82 along with either or all hashtags #yeahmate #GDN #demetri82 or #globaldancenation. Peace to all. Be good to each other. New heat from Tiesto, Rodge, Dash Berlin and more
Brandon Fiegoli is the Product Manager at Butterfly Network, a company whose aim is to democratize medical imaging across the globe. The ultrasound probe they have developed is much more compact than the industry standard machines. It sends imaging files directly to your iOS or Android smartphone via their app allowing for a quicker, more flexible process.Butterfly Network launched their compact ultrasound probe and integrated app last October. Their launch was global, initially covering 11 non-English languages and 13 countries. Now they have clearance in 23 countries and their product is helping physicians battle the Covid-19 pandemic. Brandon joins us today to discuss the translation from start to launch and shares his advice for others looking ahead at doing the same.Topics: [01.14] About Brandon and Butterfly Network. [03.48] Why create this product and what applications does it have? [09.25] Why did you need language translation? [13.03] What had to be translated to meet regulatory requirements? [14.22] What were your top priorities for the translation project? [15.55] What preparation did you make going into the translation? [18.04] What technological challenges did you face? [20.24] What was your timeline for the translation? [21.50] What aspects of the process and collaborating with Smartling made it work? [23.50] What happened after launch and what happens in the future regarding translation? [32.54] How do you report back to the team about translation progress? [34.19] What kind of results have you had since launch? [35.24] What do you wish you had done differently? [38.09] How did you choose which markets to launch in? Resources and Links: Butterfly Network Website Brandon Fiegoli on Linkedin Smartling Website Full transcript which almost certainly contains typos (thanks for the forgiveness!)Announcer:You're listening to The Loc Show, presented by Smartling.Adrian:Hey, what's up, everyone. It's Adrian Cohn from Smartling. Thank you for listening to The Loc Show. My guest today is Brandon Fiegoli. Fiegoli, an Italian name. Brandon is a product manager at Butterfly Network. Butterfly Network is a digital health company whose mission is to democratize healthcare by making medical imaging universally accessible and affordable.Adrian:They have this beautiful handheld device that is able to create images that render on your iPhone or Android. Brandon is also a standup guy with a great story. So, let's get into it and thanks again for listening.Adrian:Hey, Brandon, welcome to The Loc Show. How is it going?Brandon:It is great. Thank you so much for having me.Adrian:I am pleased to have you. You're such a fantastic person to connect with. We've had the opportunity to chat on a number of occasions. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you right now and who do you work with?Brandon:Sure. So, I'm sitting in my apartment. I'm in Manhattan right now. Lived in Manhattan, and outside of Manhattan my whole life. At the moment, I work with Butterfly Network. I'm on our product team there. I lead a couple of our different product offerings, focus really across all of our core platforms, so Android, iOS, cloud, work on our international expansion, really a very broad role that has gotten me involved very, very deeply into our translation systems.Adrian:So, what exactly is Butterfly Networks?Brandon:Butterfly Network is a company that builds a handheld ultrasound system. And most people are familiar with ultrasound. If they've had a child, sometimes if you go into an emergency room. Hopefully you're not there too much, you may get an ultrasound. Ultrasound is a really, really cool technology. I think in the last 10 or 15 years, it's gained a lot of popularity largely because it's quick and also because it's safe. And I would say, most importantly because it's safe.Brandon:If you think about an x-ray or a CT scan, they're also quick, they bring that ionizing radiation. And with ultrasound, you can get a window into the human body with mere sound waves.Adrian:That's amazing. So, the innovation that Butterfly Network brought to the market though is that this thing is it's a handheld device, right?Brandon:It is. So, I'll share the story in just a second. I'll pull it out. It lives in this case. This is a handheld device that fits in my pocket. So, let me just grab the device here. Here you go. This is the entire ultrasound probe. This is actually a special probe, the butterfly probe is a special one because it actually works with your entire body.Brandon:In a traditional ultrasound system, there's usually a large cart. They get wheeled in as you imagine your 1980s computer to look on a cart, and they usually have three probes with them, a linear phase and a curved transducer. Our entire probe is very different because it actually uses semiconductor technology to function as all three of those probes.Brandon:So, we could dive into the semiconductors if you'd like or we can just keep going.Adrian:It sounds really interesting and what I think is particularly cool though is that this is a mobile device and it's corded. So you can actually plug it into your phone?Brandon:It is. So, the device comes in lightning and USB-C, works with both iOS and Android devices. It's incredibly flexible. Some people use it on tablets. Some people use it on their phones. We fit the entire spectrum.Adrian:So, what's the point of developing such a product? I mean, isn't what we had before sufficient?Brandon:Great question. So, we talked about first of all the size of ultrasound carts. You wheeled them in, but that's not really where the problem exists. The problem exists in their cost today. Their cost and the ease of use of those systems. So, if you think about a traditional ultrasound system, you may be able to get a used system on the order of $30,000.Brandon:But if you go out there and you buy some of the most advanced cardiac imaging systems, they could be upwards of $200,000. And I don't have to tell you this, but you would imagine that in many parts of the world, and even in many parts of the US, it's simply not feasible to buy one of those systems.Brandon:So, you think about it, an emergency room today may have one. A really modern very busy emergency room may have three or four. In a smaller setting, you may have one or you may have none. Now, we talked about this a lot as actually being able to replace that stethoscope. So, 200 years ago or so, you started with the stethoscope. You could hear into the human body. You start to hear if somebody has pneumonia, an arrhythmia and now, 200 years later in 2020, we're able to look into the human body. That's sort of remarkable.Adrian:It is remarkable. And because you have both an iOS app and an Android app, the image is rendered in the moment on the screen of your phone?Brandon:Absolutely. Plug the device in, sign into the app, plug in the probe and you're ready to go. We like to say pick a preset, not a probe. So, the probe actually does all the work for you in regards to focusing, in regards to adjusting the proper frequency whether it's deeper in your body, whether it's more superficial, all controlled by software.Brandon:Just for anybody out there listening, just to compare that sort of with traditional ultrasound technology, this is typically done with piezoelectric crystals. So, those are actually crystals that are grown in a lab. When you pass a current over them, they vibrate and that's how you generate the sound waves.Brandon:In our device, we're still using sound waves. However, we're using the technology that a digital camera may use today except we've added little silicon drums on the top of it and when that electric current gets passed, those drums actually vibrate to generate sound waves. We have about 9,000 microdrums on the transducer itself.Brandon:A traditional ultrasound machine has anywhere between 90 and 190 crystals. And because it's all software controlled, we can adjust how those little drums on the probe resonate. This is really where the innovation started, all with the semiconductor chip and then we sort of have built out the ecosystem with the various software platforms, with the storage, with all of that.Adrian:Wow, that technology allows you to look at a whole range of different things inside the human body to reveal whether or not a person is healthy.Brandon:Absolutely. So, I think at the most positive use of ultrasound, we talked about it a lot with obstetrics. So, pregnant women. One of the most positive experiences they can have is going and seeing their growing child. So, I think a lot of people have very fond memories of ultrasound in that sense.Brandon:The other side of the spectrum, people are using ultrasound for everything. Cardiac arrest, it's been very popular for looking at people's lungs. We call them B-lines for the COVID outbreak. The uses are sort of endless. Things like inflamed tendons, inflamed muscles, even ocular scanning. Basically anything, and when you think about the portability and the cost, and not necessarily having to go, have radiology bring you to go get an x-ray, it really is quite exciting.Adrian:That's awesome. I love technology and I specifically love medical technology. My grandfather was a surgeon. My great grandfather was a surgeon. My mother is in the medical publishing space. So, it's always like really interesting to me to see all the advances in science and technology that enabled doctors, physicians, people to take scans of their bodies or to learn more about their health or condition.Adrian:I'm particularly interested in how as COVID-19 became this global healthcare crisis, Butterfly Network was able to utilize its technology to help people diagnose themselves or others with the infection. Is that right?Brandon:That is correct. I wouldn't go as far as to say diagnosing. As people were getting more ill, we're able to go and actually take a look at the lungs and get a better sense of what's happening. We still are obviously relying on the actual test. However, this was an incredible tool and remains a really incredible tool to track how serious people are doing.Brandon:Often time, someone may say, "Hey, I'm not doing that bad or I don't feel that badly." When the labs come back, when the imaging comes back, you see something different and vice versa. So, this is just a massively helpful tool. When you think about COVID also, one of the big things they talk a lot about is contamination and the spread of it obviously.Brandon:Talk a lot about getting a CT scan for somebody's chest, those rooms that those CT scanners are in may be done for 45 minutes or an hour between patients while they get sanitized. With this, you drop it in a probe cover, covers the entire cord, covers the mobile device. You're ripping off that covering, you're patient to patient very quickly.Brandon:In COVID where every minute matter, this really became an incredibly powerful and versatile tool.Adrian:So, where, Brandon, does language translation fit into all of these?Brandon:It's a great question. So, language translation is an essential part of our business, I would say. So, if you go all the way to the top and you think about our mission from our founder, Dr. Jonathan Rothberg, his mission, our mission is to democratize medical imaging.Brandon:And to do that meant a couple of things. The first meant getting some groundbreaking technology. If you are going to democratize something, you probably need to do a little bit differently than it's being done today. So, they've been working on this technology for six or seven years.Brandon:The other thing meant, "Okay, now that we have the technology, how do you share it with the world?" And that's everything from education to commercialization and everything in between that. So, when you think about that and we've talked about this before, you really think about, okay, if we're going to give education, there has to be multiple languages. Not everybody around the world speaks English.Brandon:If you're going to sell in other languages, you obviously need to have information that's relevant, that's correctly translated all in those languages every other area of the business. So, from shipping, making sure that people's shipping information is communicated to them in a way that they understand.Brandon:I think we take for granted quite a bit that fortunately many people in the world speak English. However, democratizing this technology really means we hope to be in rural insert X country. And you could imagine that in those countries, they don't speak English. I guess the other point that I would be remiss if I mention was just about the regulations.Brandon:So, we are a medical device. We are FDA cleared, and obviously, we have CE mark and clearances in every country we ship in but part of that clearance, part of those regulations for us, especially as a medical device is that our labeling, that our information for use is in the appropriate language. And again, that's for safety reasons.Adrian:Yeah, so when did this translation journey start for you? What was it like? How long ago was it?Brandon:Yeah. So we started this, I guess, almost a year ago now. I've been asked to look at our international expansion as a company. So, everything from how do we store data safely in the cloud in other countries through how do we ship these devices and make them appear on people's doorsteps. We are sold largely via an ecommerce model, so unlike a traditional ultrasound system today, you're going online. You're certifying that you're a medical professional and you're paying and that device arrives at your door.Brandon:So, there was a lot of work streams that went on here and one of the big ones is obviously translation. And it sits, as I just described, over all of those. So, part of my role was overseeing that entire project. So, at that point, as we started looking at this, we realized it was going to be critical to our success and frankly, critical to even being able to do it.Brandon:The place we always start is at regulatory. So you can go to market and do a bad job marketing something but you're not hurting or breaking any rules. You may just not achieve your goals. For us, it really started with how do we legally sell this device? How do we meet the regulations so that we're not getting in trouble and we're not hurting anyone? And that started with regulatory.Brandon:From there, it moved on to things like data privacy and then it moved on to other work streams, how do we sell it, how do we market it, what do our websites need to look like? But our first goal is meeting those regulations and really finding a translation vendor who is going to be able to run with us.Adrian:What content did you have to translate to meet regulatory demands?Brandon:So, the information we have to translate is what they call the Information For Use, the IFU. And like many guidances you see today, it doesn't get hyper-specific. So, it says any directions that are needed to use the device in a safe and effective way.Brandon:For us, it became really important. Obviously, the instruction manual was the first place we looked. And then after that, of course, the UI of the system.Adrian:The mobile or the-Brandon:And mobile app and/or desktop app. After that, everything was sort of from there, it was about how do we commercialize it and how do we get our messaging into the right languages.Adrian:You started with how to use the product and actual product content. That was the baseline that you needed to translate to meet regulatory concerns. And then after you accomplish or started thinking about how to tackle that, you would move on to go to market content?Brandon:That's actually right.Adrian:Cool. That's still a pretty significant volume of work, I would imagine. Like I get products all the time and sometimes the user manuals are super thin and sometimes even for a simple device, they're really thick. What were some of your priorities when you started to consider how to go about accomplishing this project? What was important to you?Brandon:Yes. I think there were a couple of things and to be honest, not all of them were apparent to me when we started. I think first and foremost, we needed to make sure that the translations would be of high quality. So, again, if you think about the regulatory side of things and just the quality side of things as a brand, focusing more on the quality and the regulatory means that the translations are accurate. It means that people are "brought up to speed" with your product. What are they translating? Is it giving context making sure that they're familiar with it?Brandon:So, ours is obviously in the medical space. There's a lot of big words in our app. There's a lot of very scientific words in our app. Just last week, we were translating stuff about our fetal calculation packages which are the short name would be OB calc, so for obstetrics calculations, for measuring the size of babies, there was all kinds of abbreviations in there.Brandon:So, having translators that could work with that and understand it and ask questions when they needed to was really critical for us. So, the first thing was making sure that people had the right domain expertise. The other things were things like having a team that we could tightly integrate with and basically become part of our team.Brandon:There's nothing worse than buying a service and then you're only told, "Hey, the only way I can get in touch with these people is file a support ticket." Like that, at the volume we were running, at the rate we were running with, it would never work that way frankly.Adrian:Yeah. What were some of the things that you had to prepare as you went out to start translating all of those content? You talked about having two mobile apps, an iOS app, an Android app, you have a help center that you needed to translate and also support documentation that it sounds like it was user manual, maybe offline content.Brandon:It is offline content, yeah.Adrian:Offline content.Brandon:We did it in phases when you talk about that. Where we really started was two things. We've spoken with a couple of vendors. We had even tried a couple of passes just with some vendors in the industry as we're honing in. We wanted to understand a little bit about how they work and nobody on the team was particularly familiar with translations.Brandon:So, we would send out little bits of content and we would get them back and we would think about the experience. I'll be honest, we didn't have a lot of time. So, just given our company goals, given our volume of work, we had to move fast. When we got to Smartling, all of those things that I just mentioned, the expertise in the domain area, the reliable support team and I would say they sort of swarmed us. They sort of encapsulated us and said, "Here's the plan. Here's how we're going to implement this." And it worked.Brandon:And then obviously, the technical expertise was a big one for us. So, I personally had never thought about how this really works, but certainly putting a bunch of strings in a spreadsheet, sending them off to get translated and getting those back and pumping them in is not how it works.Brandon:There's a lot of really complex integrations that need to work seamlessly if you want this to just become part of your everyday process.Adrian:That is sort of like a requisite for a fast-moving company because the way I sometimes think about translation is it's a very layered process. From the surface of your phone like you see one language but if you turn it to the side at an isometric sort of view point, there are a lot of layers that go behind it that are each of the different languages that I don't use. I speak English.Adrian:But the Spanish user of your tool or the German user or the French user of your tool, they need to access the versions of the content that are behind the English version, right? Was that a significant technology challenge for you all to think about solving?Brandon:I will be honest. I'm thankful I wasn't the person who had to do that. I was the person sort of overseeing it. If you talked about the steps we took, so we found somebody who ... We got recommendations internally. We had one of our engineers actually recommend Smartling as they had worked with them in another company. We got, I call it swarmed on the overview. We got so many questions answered.Brandon:Everything from our quality team, how is this done? Why should I believe that these translators know anything about healthcare? Through how do you guys do your translation and edit steps? Somebody is translating it. Somebody is editing it. So, nothing is getting to us before there's at least two sets of eyes on it. Through people like Sergio as our technical solution architect, going and sitting with our engineers and looking at how our strings were set up.Brandon:For the year before we started doing this, the engineers always said to me, "No problem." When we're ready to translate this, we were wrapping our strings. We wrapped them in a special ID that says, "They're ready to translate." I said, "Great." We decided we're going to run a test. We sent something up to Smartling. They sent us back what they called pseudo-translated files, and those files basically take all the strings in the app and they doubled them.Brandon:And we found out two really important things. One, there is about 10% of the app that we just didn't have wrapped in those strings, in those IDs. So that was a bit of a project to find those. That was great, solved pretty quick. The second one was more of the important one. And that was what happens to the UI when German is doubly as long as English?Brandon:And at that point, we found out there were places were things broke. They didn't wrap properly. Buttons were pushed off the screen. That was another project that we implemented and we went through and we took an inventory of everything that broke. At that point, we had decided to go with Smartling. We were moving along on the API integrations and then we really begin to work through automation.Brandon:How do we automatically send those strings up? How do we pull them back? How do we merge that code back into our code base? And then I guess the other one would be what you just mentioned is how do you actually display those on the screen? So that required a couple of changes in our app. But it all happened. It was very quick. It was a little bit stressful but we had a really good core group of people focused on it and I think that that was critical to our success and to meet our very, very aggressive timelines.Adrian:What was the timeline? Because oftentimes, translation does sort of come in, in the last minute, and people like you are expected to make miracles happen and you do because you work hard at it but it can be a very stressful time. What sort of time were you working on?Brandon:I wish I could be lying to you and tell you it was longer. I believe these conversations started late in July and we went live October 1st in 13 countries. So, those translations were actually done, I believe our internal deadline was September 15th, and that was because for all regulatory purposes, did our own QA actually sent devices out to people in those countries and had them run QA on it to make sure everything we were sending to the public was safe and accurate. It came back really cleanly thankfully because I think otherwise it would have been really tight to hit that deadline.Adrian:That is an awfully fast deadline and it makes a whole lot of sense to me that you would have sent that out to experts for quality assurance given the value of the content and the type of content and complexity that it carries. Why do you think it went well?Brandon:I think it went well for a couple of reasons. I'll talk about us first then we can talk about you. Internally, it was a priority. It was not an option, as are many things at Butterfly. It was not an option to fail. So one way or another, that content was going to get translated. Joking aside, what that really translated to was a lot of people focused on it.Brandon:So it was a top engineering priority. It was a top priority to get the contracts with you guys through legal. It was a priority for me to be on top of it every time an issue was opened with the translators to respond to it quickly because we knew if we drop any of these balls, we weren't going to hit our deadline.Brandon:On the Smartling side, you guys really excelled in basically understanding the importance, the significance and then really running with us. And I think a lot of times you don't find that. We had a CS manager. We had a solution architect. We had someone on the language services team. We had our account manager when we realized we left something out of the initial order, we would be able to add that on. It was a really well-oiled operation, I would say, from that front. And there was daily check-ins and things were clicking.Adrian:So, you started this project in July. You finished the initial effort in September, to send devices out so that they could be tested for quality. You got thumbs up from the people who you sent the devices to. You go live with your, how many languages?Brandon:I think we got a bonus because I think we got Austria using Germany's. So I think it was 11 non-English speaking languages. I think we did adoption into English for the UK, and I think it was 13 countries. So, 11 languages, 13 countries.Adrian:Okay, so you've translated content to 11 languages ready to deploy for 13 countries. You deployed this experience in October, what happens next?Brandon:That was really the start of a lot of really exciting chaos. It was a really good problem to have. We had been building excitement for Butterfly to go global for a while. So, at that point, we activated all of our channels, marketing, digital marketing. And at that point, the requests, the sales started coming in for devices and we very quickly became a global operation. But we also learned a ton.Brandon:So, you jumped to the punch a little bit before, but things like our knowledge-base, things like our website and our website was actually part of that initial push. But things like our knowledge-base, things like video content, all of that still had to be translated. And I think one of the things that you and I have spoken about previously is, it's one thing to meet the regulations. It's one thing to launch internationally. But I think to be a global business and a global brand is a totally different ballgame.Brandon:I think it's nice to be able to say, yeah, we excel internationally. But people don't want to read your English content. They don't care. Even if they speak English, they want to see it in their language. It would be like I read a very little bit of Spanish, and even if I could get through the passage, I'm going to be more comfortable with it in my native language.Adrian:It's so interesting that you say that because all I speak is English. And the language translation problem for me is far less visible because English is my native language and so much content is in English. And when I think back as to like when I've been challenged most, it's when I'm forced to try and buy something that's not in English. I'm thinking about like holidays that I've booked in Italy or in Spain, Airbnb's or before Airbnb with a real bnb or a hotel and you're trying to decipher their content, a double bed is that two beds versus like a single bed that's a little ...Adrian:All of those things come into play and it certainly rings true with me that the effort to translate the content does have meaning that may be a little bit harder to understand for those of us that are English native speakers and don't think about language on a daily basis.Brandon:I agree with that fully. And I think we're given a lot of really amazing tools. When I read something when I get an email that's literally in Mandarin and this happens, I'll pop into Google Translate and in five seconds, I have an idea of what that email is saying. But I would say us trying to sell something and say, "Hey, Butterfly is in these countries," or not even, forget selling. Saying, "Hey, Butterfly is in these countries," but not giving the tools for the experience that, "Hey, we're really here and, hey, we've really invested in being here," I think is a whole other discussion in itself. And I think that was really important for us.Adrian:And I want to ask a question about that but before we do, I want to go back for a minute because you said something that really was interesting to me about how when you launched, it was not just that you flipped a switch and all of a sudden your translations were available through the app and on your website. It was a fully integrated company wide effort.Adrian:You're on the product team, you spearheaded and centralized this whole process. What was it like working with all of these different teams to coordinate a launch that's company-wide?Brandon:It was really fun. It was really challenging. I felt like I was running a flight crew at NASA although let's be clear it wasn't that fun. I think the last email I sent out on the night of September 30th, I think the subject line was something like "All Systems Launched."Brandon:So, it was a little bit of everything. It was excitement. It was frustration. It was everything. We're trying to meet regulatory requirements. That's our top company priority, above everything else is don't break the law and don't hurt anyone. Those are, I think, any company's priorities or if they're not, they should be.Brandon:So, make sure we meet our regulatory priorities but then it's things like you're getting pulled from the marketing team. I need this email translated or we need to start doing this. It was really a prioritization thing. We said we can do it all, we just needed to sort of stagger it. And we looked at it and we said, "Okay, regulatory, check." Now, we start getting emails in other languages for support, making sure that we can start to get that content actually sent over to them in ways that they understand. It was a little bit of everything.Brandon:Making sure that we're dealing with sending our shipping information in the right language, getting our quotes translated, it touched really on every bit of the business and I think the one thing we had going for us amongst a lot of things but the really important thing was everybody saw the importance. And while there may have been a lot of challenges, everybody was driving towards expanding imaging, expanding this device to other parts of the world.Adrian:You sure chose a great time to do that.Brandon:I promised it was completely by accident. It is really humbling and exciting to know that our device is making a difference. Our founder, Jonathan, whenever he's in the office, he loves to say he measures our success by the number of lives saved. And for anybody who's in business, I don't know that everybody can do that and I think it's really cool.Brandon:One of the things we love to do is to share those experiences, and a couple of them come in yesterday. And it just makes everybody remember how important all of these is.Adrian:Well, certainly, the product and the mission of the business is quite aspirational and humbling. So that's a really strategic advantage that you have and your colleagues have working there and serving the global community. I think that's really cool. The effort that you had to undertake to get this initial push out the door or the "All Systems Go" email that you got to send, that was just the beginning. I mean, you were able to get through that sprint. But that's not where the story ends, I assume.Brandon:It's not. Translation and localization today, I don't want to say are a part of our workflow, I would say are very close to becoming. So, on the technical side, things are running smoothly, I mean almost no thought which is great. The only thought is, "Hey, do we make sure that we merge all those strings before we send out the app?"Brandon:On the marketing side of things, things are really, really close. And that's not for lack of trying, it's that we are moving so quickly that the only thing I have to keep reminding that team is I need 24 to 48 hours to get that stuff translated. And to be honest, I think I've pushed the Smartling team really, really hard and they have not yet disappointed. I hope they don't hear this.Adrian:They probably will, Brandon.Brandon:I probably shouldn't have said that. They always deliver it and what I'm really saying is just getting people to remember there are humans looking at these strings and we can do it really quick. Just give us 24 or 48 hours before you plan to send this thing out and you'll get a really great result.Adrian:You're exactly right, like there is a human process here that has to be considered. But what you're also sharing with me is that you're still translating a lot of content. It's not like you had this initial push and then you're done. You're translating on a daily basis, weekly basis?Brandon:Absolutely. So, the way our tech systems work, actually every time code, we use GitHub for it to manage our code. Every time, what we call pool request, which is a bit of code gets pushed into our system, it actually triggers a process and that process actually calls the Smartling systems and sends those strings.Brandon:Every time every night, I believe it is, we automatically call Smartling and we say, "Bring these strings back, anything that's been translated that day." And that's where we talk about that app automation working.Brandon:On the support side of the house are knowledge-based just actually in the last few weeks. We've set that up to fully automate. We rewrote the whole thing and it's just about done. I think tomorrow everything will be back. And then we have some more ad hoc stuff. We have subtitles. I'm working with our video marketing team. We're working to get a bunch of our videos subtitled. We've done a little of it already. We're trying to scale that up.Brandon:We use the GDN, Global Delivery Network, to handle our websites, so making sure that that content, the right content is served. That's something that just runs because we're doing our user manual, I would be hard-pressed to find a service that we're not using at Smartling.Adrian:So, how do you report back to your team on the efficacy of this translation program that you're running for Butterfly?Brandon:Yeah. I think I said this jokingly to you before, the best report that I can give, no report, which is nothing is broken, nobody has said the word is wrong. We have forgotten a string, like that is my goal from a quality perspective. From an overall perspective, what do I say to people? I tell people all of our tech systems are translated. If we add a new piece of content, so the announcement that I'll be making next week when we launch it is that our knowledge base is translated.Brandon:It is now so ingrained in our processes that there's not a lot to say thankfully. And I think this is one of those things that is the less you say, the better. I don't think anybody is going to say, "Oh, wow, that's in French." But if it wasn't in French, I promise you we would hear about it. Just like if you go to Amazon.com, you're not going, "Wow, thankfully, they put it in English," but if the only way you could get to Amazon.com was in French, I bet you your top complaint would be that's it all in French.Adrian:So, measuring in terms of the number of people who can access your product or service is one of the most important benchmarks that you have as a company for language translation?Brandon:Absolutely. I think that's really well stated.Adrian:So, I think this is all really fascinating. The products now are available effective in October. How have the results been? Have you been able to ship devices around the world with some level of success and you get app downloads so that people are using those devices? Are you tracking this?Brandon:We have. It's obviously really important to our mission. So I believe we have global clearance in 22 countries, 23 possibly. And these devices are having more impact that we can ever imagine. You probably saw us tweet out the other day. Our probes are in every corner of the globe on the Mars desert testing, understanding what they can do in space. I know they went to Base Camp at Mount Everest. Whether they went up higher than that, I'm not sure.Brandon:Every corner of the globe, and it's amazing to me where we see people we can sell in those countries and deliver it at scale. But when you hear about these stories of people taking their probes with them missions all over the world, that's really where things get very interesting and I think the most exciting for me.Adrian:Yeah. Brandon, when you look back on all the success that you and Butterfly have had in delivering solution to all of those different countries, what do you wish you had done differently?Brandon:What do I wish we had done different? That's a great question. I wish we had more time. Anyone listening and any company who's about to do this, one of the reasons that we were very thoughtful about it is because we know that taking on translations, taking on localization, taking on support in other languages is a new thing that you have to account for. It's not always easy and I think having some time to develop that strategy, having some time to educate the company, your peers, your coworkers about it would be really important.Brandon:I think the other thing would just be to know a little bit more about how translation works. So, one of the things that was exciting to us about Smartling was the language pre-flight we did. It was a little painful for me in the sense that I had to go through our app and actually capture screenshots of all of our error states and everything. But being able to send up that context to the translators so that they can say, "Oh, this is what the word means in this context," improved our quality and actually, I think shortened our time to deploy so much.Brandon:I think having a platform, a transparent platform that I can go in and click through. We started this session talking about how if I had to do this over email, it would have never worked. I mean, how many emails a day could I send versus how many times do I go into the Smartling platform and actually look at something or adjust something? Doing it without that, I think, would be impossible. I would urge everyone to think deeply about their technology and the technology that they want in their partner. I think those would be the big things.Adrian:The first takeaway that you have, I think, is it's almost like a poetic one which is it's more than just setting up the integrations, translating the content and getting it out to the users. It's a commitment to your business and to your customer base that you are going to support them no matter what. It's a lot easier, let's put it in another way, Brandon. It's probably a lot easier to say you will support a new market than it is to take away that market.Brandon:I agree with that. The one thing I did know about translation when we started all these is once you start, you can't stop because people do notice. And you hold a commitment to your customers, to your users, to your patients that that content will remain high quality and frequent. And all of the things that you could imagine are really sort of prominent company.Adrian:And this is a question that probably would have been well-suited at the beginning but how did you choose the markets that you currently support?Brandon:Yeah. It's a great question. So, we looked at a couple of things. Like everything, it was multi-faceted. So everything from number of physicians and medical professionals, so looking at the biggest impact we could make, places where we were able to get regulatory clearance.Brandon:So for example, Europe, everyone in Europe or all countries in Europe use the CE mark. CE mark was something we had worked for, for many, many months. And we knew it was going to be really exciting because when you got CE mark, it opened all Europe. It also opened to all of Australia and New Zealand.Brandon:So, impact regulatory clearance developed ultrasound programs so we know that we're still in early days and we have a long way to go on how do you educate these users and how do you move past just ultrasound experts but also enabling people who are not familiar with ultrasound. And in a lot of the European markets and the Australian market, it's quite developed. So, this got a jumpstart to this democratization and now obviously, we circle back and are deeply committed and deeply focused on that educational aspect.Adrian:Wow, Brandon, I feel like I've learned so much from this conversation. And I am so impressed by all the amazing work that you and your team have put into delivering this solution to the global marketplace. Thank you, thank you for being on The Loc Show.Brandon:Of course, thank you for having me. It's fun.Adrian:Yeah, it was great to have you. And we're going to make sure that people know how to find you. The URL for your company is?Brandon:Butterflynetwork.com.Adrian:Butterflynetwork.com?Brandon:Yes.Adrian:And I really encourage everyone to go to their website and just check it out. First of all, for those of you who are marketers here, they've got a beautiful website. There's great product marketing. You can really understand the solution that they offer, see images of the product, see images of the image that the product shows on the mobile app. There's just so much cool stuff there. Brandon, we'll make sure that people can find you too on LinkedIn.Brandon:Perfect. Yeah, feel free to reach out. Lots of info to share, a really fun journey, really excited. There's more coming, so stay tuned.Adrian:We will do that. Thanks again, Brandon.Brandon:Thank you.Adrian:I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Brandon as much as I did. If you like this episode of The Loc Show, hit the Subscribe button so the next episode will be waiting for you. And if you loved this podcast, please leave a review. Five-star reviews go a long way. If you're not ready to give a five-star review, give our next episode a shot. We appreciate you're listening. If you have any feedback or want us to interview one of your favorite people in localization, just email me, acohn@smartling.com.
Kevin Milani decided engineering was not for him, so he moved to New York and worked in many companies that are driven by direct response marketing - Fortune, Columbia Records, Think Tank, and more.He's best known for his YouTube ads chops, although he excels in many other areas, such as Adwords, Display, and even radio or TV.He read Perry Marshall's book on Google Ads back in 2006, then started experimenting on his own, and developed a "map" in his head.Today, he manages about $3 million every month in ad spend, across multiple clients. For him, YouTube ads are the best platform to scale campaigns to $50,000 per day and beyond... but the secret is having great creatives. He once scaled a customer from $0 to $27,000 a day (profitably) in a week.However, YouTube can be very challenging, according to him. A number of his processes were found through trial and error... and often they seem to be counter-intuitive.Kevin works with clients in every vertical, and he does a lot of health, wellness, fitness, ecom. He's very interested in clients who want to expand their spend above 50k a day, mainly on YouTube, Adwords, and GDN.With over $100 million+ in ad spend, Kevin is regarded as one of the top Google Ads guys in the world.You can reach out to Kevin at https: //www.mq-c.com or kevin@mq-c.comHire an AdSkills certified media buyer. Click here
Az Ingatlan SztáRock eheti vendége Gadanecz Zoltán a GDN ingatlanhálózat alapítója és tulajdonosa.
What do high growth companies with savvy marketing teams do to drive traffic growth? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Directive Consulting founder Garrett Mehrguth shares what his team does to help companies like Allstate and Cisco boost traffic even after all of the low hanging marketing and SEO fruit has been picked. TL;DR, It all starts with product marketing, SEO and a focus on bottom of the funnel, high intent leads. Garrett shares the specific strategies his team at Directive uses to get results for their clients, as well as his advice for startups that want to do it right from the beginning. Highlights from my conversation with Garrett include: Garrett says that everything Directive does is based on the belief that your brand is more important than your website. What that means is that when someone with high purchase intent is searching online for a solution, you need to make sure you're discoverable. He says that sometimes your marketing metrics have an inverse correlation with your financial metrics, meaning that if you focus on the top of the funnel, you might generate a lot of traffic, but you won't get as many high intent leads as you would if you focus on the bottom of the funnel (which generally results in less traffic). Garrett's advice is to track CAC (cost to acquire a customer) and LTV (lifetime value) and use that to determine whether you are paying a reasonable cost per demo, opportunity or proposal -- NOT cost per lead. For many companies, the best place to focus their initial marketing efforts is on ranking on review sites. Done well, this can allow a lesser known, newer market entrant to unseat an incumbent player very quickly. You can pay review sites to conduct review generation campaigns on your behalf, and Garrett says it is absolutely worth it to spend that money. Another strategy that works well is to use LinkedIn ads for awareness raising. Garrett says that leads that come through LinkedIn are not high intent, so you shouldn't spend a lot on a cost per impression basis. Instead, he and his team "trick" LinkedIn by advertising on a cost per click basis. Not many people click the ads, so LinkedIn accelerates their placement in the feed and they get seen by a lot of people. In terms of content, Garrett believes the traditional approach to pillar content and topic clusters promoted by HubSpot is wrong. Instead, he uses that same content and creates product pages as pillars, which he then uses to link to from blogs that address bottom of the funnel topics. Garrett builds authority for product pages by guest blogging (where he can control anchor text and backlinks) and doing podcast guest interviews. He says that where its tough to get your subject matter experts to create written content, you should invest more heavily in podcast guest interviews. Garrett's advice for companies right now is to double down on online advertising. Because so many companies have shut down or pulled their online ads back, prices are down and it is easier to get found. Resources from this episode: Check out the Directive Consulting website Follow Garrett on Twitter at @gmehrguth Connect with Garrett on LinkedIn Email garrett at gmehrguth[at]directiveconsulting[dot]com Listen to the podcast to get specific strategies for combining product marketing and SEO to generate more qualified bottom of the funnel leads. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week my guest is Garrett Mehrguth from Directive. Welcome Garrett. Garrett Mehrguth (Guest): Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. And yeah, excited to chat about search. Garrett and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Yeah, I love, I love getting into nerdy marketing topics, so I'm really excited about this. Before we dive in though, can you please tell my audience a little bit about yourself and your story and also Directive? About Garrett and Directive Garrett: I'd love to. I did my degree in three years in economics and I wanted to do my masters in a year. I was playing soccer. I thought I was going to go pro, be like a pro soccer player. I hurt my knee, and that kind of reset a lot of that stuff. And so I said, "Hey, you know, maybe I could try this consulting thing." I applied to Boston, Bain and McKinsey. I'm not sure about Deloitte, but kind of the big ones and instantly got this auto-response. In the application process, I knew I was doomed because you go to their portal and the university I attended was not one of the options. I was like, "They do not tell you that before they take your money." So from there I was like, "You know what? I'll just build my own agency and they'll have to acquire me." I don't know why. That's how I thought, and was just like where I went. I had no tangible skills, so there was that problem. I have this belief system that perception is reality and I knew that people perceived I knew the internet and so I figured I should learn it. So I started to try to learn how to do WordPress sites. And then I got this little shwarma shop in East LA. I was on my little moped. I had a 78 Peugeot 103. I was going around town on that thing and I essentially got the client. It was really, really small. I don't even remember because I was so bad at this point that I didn't put the amount in the contract. I still have the contract, but I don't remember the amount. It's probably like 200 bucks. I did that for 30 days, came back on the 30th day to get the check. He said come back tomorrow. The whole place was boarded up. So that was our first client. I was selling $5 social media calendars on Fiverr and I was just hustling and doing all this stuff. And then I got a hookah shop and the hookah shop asked me to build them a website and then I did that. It was okay. Looking back at, it wasn't the best website. And then he wanted to rank number one for hookah shop and all that stuff. I said, "All right, I'll try." I've never done it before. So I went online, read everything on Search Engine Land, Moz, WordStream, Search Engine Journal, teaching myself kind of SEO and PPC. I ranked him number one and all of a sudden you got all these people in a shop and it was completely dead before. I was like, "This is kind of cool." So, one of my best friends who's my roommate said, "Hey, don't go to law school. You know, come join this company with me. We'll be millionaires" or whatever he said. I was paying him $3 an hour at this point. So we kind of just started from there and now we get to work with really large enterprise accounts and mid market companies, mostly SaaS, doing SEO and PPC still. So pretty fun. Kathleen: Great. Now one of the things that I think is interesting about the perspective that you bring -- and we've had lots of people on the podcast talk about SEO and PPC, I was interested to chat with you because you do have these bigger clients and I think there are pros and cons to that, right? The pro -- having owned an agency myself -- the pro of having big clients is they've got big budgets. They've got teams to support getting work done. They are generally very savvy. One of the -- I don't know if I would call it a con -- but the tough thing about accounts like that is very often, they've already done all of the basic things that they should be doing. They're sharp, they know their stuff, they have their act together, so being able to really show results and traction requires taking things to a much more advanced level. As I think you were saying when we first started talking, you've already squeezed most of the juice out of that orange. So how are you finding those opportunities for the last few drops? You had some interesting thoughts on that and I'm really interested to hear what you have to say and to get into that technical level of detail with you. What do top SEOs do to prevent traffic from plateauing? Garrett: Let's do it Kathleen. So first and foremost, it's such a blessing because I got lucky. Everyone gets lucky, I think, in business to get somewhere. I had no capital. I started this thing with 20 bucks. We have no debt. We have no anything, right? I think we got Allstate when I was like 23 to 25 years old. And we've had them ever since. Right? So there's little moments like that. Or, we did the global SEO for Cisco when I was 26, I think. So like, you get these little moments and they really help you. And obviously you have to deliver, right? And then you can scale that. But one of the things that I think allowed us to be successful regardless of who we were working with, whether it was a Series A startup who was trying to go to the moon, or a mid-market SaaS firm that was trying to go after the market leader, or the market leader, right? You have these kind of three groups to work with and they all need to slow down and reframe how they approach the idea of search. And that's what I think Directive is really special at, is taking a moment to say, how does your customer discover the products or services you sell, and how can we rethink our approach? So here's what we do. We have two kinds of fundamental beliefs. First and foremost, if you can eat enough humility as an SEO and say that my brand is more important than my website, you become an incredibly powerful and creative marketer. So our first fundamental belief at Directive is your brand is more important than your website. What that means tactically is that when someone searches at the bottom of the funnel and has the strongest purchase intent, you need to make sure you're discoverable. Now, the old adage was, you need your website to rank, but see something has changed in consumer behavior. I call this the Yelp and the Amazon effect. See, consumers got trained at the transactional level that even before we spend $3 on a lollipop or on a breakfast burrito, we're going to look on Yelp to see the reviews. Well, guess what? Before we buy quarter million dollar software, we definitely look at reviews. See, Google caught onto this and they started to change the types of websites that they were showing when there was bottom of funnel purchase intent for SaaS. That's G2, Capterra, Software Advice, PC Mag. It goes down for days and hours, right? There's all these review sites. Well if you search your primary keyword, let's say "ERP software", and you layer it with "top", "best" or "reviews" or "comparisons", you have purchase intent. Also your most expensive cost per click and Google ads, all the sites are review sites. That's because Microsoft Dynamics has no SEO. That's not because Oracle has no authority or content. That's because Google is choosing to show these types of websites. So if we take that fundamental approach that our brand is more important than our website, we can be hyper successful. Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. And I've noticed that, too, with reviews. Over the years I've spoken with some other review sites that you mentioned. They've pitched me when I've been at different places and it's really fascinating to just do those searches. And you're right, if you do it -- if you search those terms -- those are the sites that will absolutely come up first. So when you consider that you need to appear on review sites, how do you go about tackling that? Because it's not as simple as just claiming your presence and setting up your profile. You can still get lost in the sea of companies that have done that. How to leverage review sites to drive traffic Garrett: The first step we want to do is we want to take another fundamental hypothesis and understand it, which is that sometimes your marketing metrics have an inverse correlation to your financial metrics. And it becomes very, very, very dangerous for SaaS firms. So here's what I mean. Most agencies have this belief that in order to generate more MQLs for the demand gen team at a SaaS organization, they need to essentially increase the amount of keywords they rank for. They need to start going to top of funnel and they need to generate more leads. So what happens when organizations pursue what I call a "breadth approach" is they start to experience what's called in economics diminishing marginal returns. In other words, their marketing KPIs improve. So let's say you're trying to go for "top ERP software", but you just have a Google ad running. Instead of saying, "How can I show up more often when there's purchase intent?" and going with depth -- and so essentially expanding search impression share in Google ads for your primary terms that have purchase intent and then ranking on individual review sites through their cost per click models, and then evaluating all of that at a cost per demo level, not cost per lead level, and then doing financial allocation, right? That's what we do here. We focus first on demand capturing before pivoting to demand generation. So we go to the bottom of the funnel and say, "Cool. When there's purchase intent, we're going to show up as often as possible and as many places as possible before we try to show up for more terms." So this allows us to experience increasing marginal returns for our clients in the first two quarters and get buy-in. See, what most people do, is they start to go with their Gartner report and they start to leverage that, which isn't an intrinsically a bad idea. But when they start to essentially go after informational intent and go to the top of funnel, they start to lower their cost per lead, they start to increase conversion rate and they think they're winning. But if you're a savvy growth operator in SaaS, you know, like for example, I convert at 60% on lead gen ads on LinkedIn. Okay, target market giving me their information -- 60%. I get that all the way down to $17 a week. Yet that is 17 X more expensive than buying that same lead from ZoomInfo, and I have no greater purchase intent than someone essentially downloading an asset or me buying them from ZoomInfo. So now I'm paying 17 X on a cost per lead. And so that's the diminishing part where your marketing numbers look better, but your revenue doesn't increase because you have horrible CAC-LTV on top of funnel versus bottom of funnel. And so that's kind of the other approach, is putting everything through an LTV-CAC model and then focusing on bottom of funnel first. Start at the bottom of the funnel and capture high intent leads Kathleen: So let's, let's dig into that a little bit. So you talked about starting at the bottom of the funnel and going really deep to capture high intent leads for very specific terms. If I came to you and I said, "All right, let's go. I want to do that," can you walk me through what that looks like? You mentioned showing up as often as possible for that one, high intent term. Garrett: Yeah. So first we're going to do what's called category defining. So we need to find your category. One of the most difficult problems in SaaS, as most people approach it, is they want to create their own category or they exist as a subset of an existing category. You have a lot of experience in cybersecurity, correct? Kathleen: Yep. Garrett: We do a lot there as well. So like we've been working with SentinelOne for a long time and other large players in that space. Now that's endpoint protection, right? People know they need a security solution, they don't always intrinsically know they need an endpoint solution. Right? So how do you generate demand and increase MQLs if you're in a new category? Okay, so first we do what's called category definement. And what we'd like to do is not only position you in endpoint, but position you in the security software category and then do hyper product differentiation through like product naming conventions and positioning, so that your CTO or whoever that person is who's your audience, they're searching and when they go to security software, we want them to show up above the fold with your brand as endpoint protection and then essentially drive awareness from the greater category to our subset or our pain solving product. So that's kind of first step is define that category. Then we ask ourselves, are we above the fold? So on Capterra, when you land on that, do you have to scroll for a couple hours to find you? How many reviews do the top five have versus you? That gives us a review target. Then we'll help you and say, "Here's how we've seen other clients go about getting reviews and here's the strategy you could pursue." Now we have a competitive amount of reviews on all of our categories. Kathleen: Let me ask you a question about that real quick. Most of those review sites have, uh, call them packages that you can purchase where they will, you know, you give them your list of clients, they'll email them, offer them an Amazon gift card or something along those lines to get reviews. And so essentially there's a cost per acquisition model that you can use. Do you find in most cases that that's worth doing, or do you work with your clients to develop their own outreach and review generation campaigns? Garrett: That's totally worth doing. I think there's nothing more important than other people advocating for your product, especially with how consumer behavior has changed at the B2B and B2C level. So no, that's critically important. Now, what we need to be able to do here though, is we need to be able to measure everything on a cost per opportunity, cost per demo, cost per proposal -- whatever you want to call it -- level, not a cost per lead. What we've found across over 350 SaaS companies that we've worked with over the last five years is that the cost per lead between Google Ads, Capterra, G2, Software Advice, et cetera, has a really, like it's not that different, maybe 15 to 30% range between each. But then I found that third party review sites have a 230% lower cost per opportunity. And so what we do, like, we got hired a couple of years ago by a publicly traded sales compensation software company and within one quarter we increased their demos by over 300% by only pivoting budget. That's the craziest part of all this, is most people are still evaluating their demand generation at an MQL level, not at an opportunity level. And so the biggest, easiest thing you can do is go one step further and look at opportunity. And then the furthest step that we've now actually evolved to as an agency is putting all our clients in LTV-CAC models, and then looking at activation rate. So not cost per trial but trial activations, right? So how well people are going from trial to demo, or demo to close rate, and then we're evaluating channels by close rate or by trial activation rate. And when we start to do that, that's hugely powerful for for financial allocation. How can you use intent data to drive traffic and revenue? Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. Now one of the other questions I had as I was listening to you talk about this, you talked about intent and bottom of the funnel and a lot of those platforms that you mentioned, in addition to being able to purchase a package and drive reviews, now they're selling their own intent data. Are you also working with intent data and taking it and creating ABM or audience match campaigns around that for your clients? Garrett: Yeah, so you can do a lot of that stuff. I think we, like most people, are using that engagement data or enriching stuff with Bombora for sales dev. Right now, if you do traditional ABM with account based advertising, so let's say Radius, Terminus, DemandBase, Madison Logic, Listen Loop, I mean we use Terminus personally internally. Now the reason is, is we need to be able to do cookie-based targeting, not IP-based targeting. Because, for example, right now, if you're trying to run IP-based targeting campaigns during COVID, you're not reaching any of your audience. Kathleen: Oh, you are preaching to the choir, because the product that we sell incorporates IP obfuscation. So anybody using our products, you couldn't target them by IP. I think it's going to happen more and more, and more people are going to use tools like that. Garrett: Yeah. I think to answer your question, yes, we are doing bi-directional syncs from HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot or Salesforce into our ad platforms. But you still have a really poor match rate because people are using personal emails on social because they don't want to get fired from their company and their LinkedIn goes down. So, essentially what happens is, your match rate is really poor on social because the only one who still has firmographics after the whole Cambridge analytical debacle, -- because you've got Axiom data in Facebook and you can be really powerful there. Twitter has always been crap, but essentially GDN is terrible right now unless you're doing managed placements, you're actually going in a search engine results page and then searching keywords and then finding every site that ranks in the top five for your keyword that uses GDN and then doing targeted URL placements That works because it comes off as a native ad. But then other than LinkedIn, it's not working. But then LinkedIn fails because there's no purchase intent and the CPA is too high. And so what we're finding is the way we're doing LinkedIn is awareness, with text ads and spotlight ads. And that's actually working. But there's a lot of nuance in all that for sure. How to use LinkedIn ads to raise brand awareness Kathleen: So then you're generating awareness on LinkedIn and are you hoping effectively that that'll get somebody to go to the client's website? Then, you can retarget them on other platforms? Garrett: We're actually being a little bit humbler than that because I don't think I can control my user. And what I mean by that is, the click through rate is crap on LinkedIn. In fact, it's so bad for spotlight and text ads and we've tricked it and we've figured out a game. So we run brand campaigns for our clients and for ourselves based on what I call "clarity." It's this concept of saying what you do and who you do it for, and being humble enough to know that you have to get your message across without the click. So what we do is we actually do it on a cost per click level on LinkedIn and we're able to deliver because nobody clicks. What happens is LinkedIn accelerates our impressions and gives us a much lower CPM when I do CPC, than when I do CPM on LinkedIn. And then we personify everything. This is the biggest trick to LinkedIn. So you take your primary asset, let's say "The Ultimate Guide to Demand Generation", and then you turn it into "The VP's Guide to Demand Generation", "The CMO's Guide to Demand Generation", and "The Marketing Manager's Guide to Demand Generation." All you have to do is change the cover page and then run lead gen ads and we're converting at over 50% across the board. So there's that route. And then the awareness campaigns and the text ads and spotlight ads, you're on a CPC level and then you focus on what you do and who you do it for, and then you personify that. You put that all together and you have really, really cool awareness campaigns. And then I say, spend as much money as you're willing to never stop losing. And if you take that approach and you say, "Look, are you willing to spend $5,000 a month until you die and not know what it does for you?" Because I'll tell you right now, I can target your exact audience to perfection and deliver your message to them till you've decided you're done with this organization. "Are you okay 'wasting' five grand a month so that every person in your audience on LinkedIn knows who you are?" Yeah. The trick is to not get results. Because what happens is, people go into it thinking they'll get results and they pause before they ever could have gotten results through a brand campaign. And so when you take the other approach, it works really well. Kathleen: Yeah. That's a really interesting way to think about it. I would love to be a fly on the wall as you have those conversations with clients to be like, you know, "You're going to spend all this money and I'm not going to show you any quantifiable results from it, but you're going to have to believe that the results are there." It's like playing the long game and having faith. Garrett: Yeah. Do you believe that this is your exact persona on LinkedIn? Here's your exact title, firmographic, industry, size of account, revenue...do you believe that? Yes. Do you believe that your message is valuable enough to communicate it to them on a consistent basis? Yes. Cool. How much does your company spend on snacks? Kathleen: Give up the jelly beans and advertise on LinkedIn! Garrett: Yeah. Honestly, it's the frappuccino a day is the kind of the joke I make. What's your coffee budget? Cool. Could you spend that on this and never stop it? And it usually gets some pretty good buy-in. How to optimize your website for traffic Kathleen: That's a really interesting way to think about it. Do you do anything with your clients in terms of what they should be doing on their own site to support all of this? You talked about how it's not necessarily about everybody getting to your website, and how the brand is more important, but I would think that there are still some things they need to be doing on the site to provide supportive content and other assets that you can then use to go out and have success on these other platforms. Garrett: Yeah, that's a relative statement to shock people to think differently. It's not that your website's not important. It's that your brand truly is more important than your website. You really have to understand your brand is more important than it was. Now your website is obviously critical, so what you need to be able to do is communicate who you are and who you're for and what you do for them. We do custom landing pages here. We have a really strong conversion rate optimization team. And so all that review site stuff I'm telling you about, we're split testing two custom landing pages with messaging, calls to action and what I like to call psychological friction tests. So the biggest issue right now in all of SaaS that they could change if they listened to this, is changing their call to action. Almost universally it's "request a demo." There is nothing more psychologically friction than "request a demo." Every time I speak to an audience, and I get to speak about 30 to 40 times a year at conferences, I love to ask, who here likes to do a demo? Who here likes to have a day of demos? Nobody raises their hand. Kathleen: That's like saying, "Who here likes to sit through an hour long webinar?" Garrett: Yeah, and so when I ask them, I said, what if you did something really simple? What if you change it from request a demo to watch demo video? You still gated it. You still sent that lead to sales development or your account executives, but you are asking yourself, can I give my visitor something of equal or greater value to what they're giving me? That's the number one question with calls to action and demand generation is, am I giving someone something of greater value than they're giving me? When someone requests a demo, they fill out a form and nothing happens and it says "Someone from our team will contact you in 24 hours." You're not doing it. So what we always do, and we can take clients universally from around 2 to 3%, to over 10% conversion rates by simply doing watch demo video. And then all we do is have a form that says "Fill this out and we're going to give you a five minute demo video so that you can have a better educated sales conversation when we follow up." Close rates go up, activation goes up, sales development teams are begging for these leads because they're having product conversations, not like "who we are and these lame 30 minute intro slides" to finally get to price. It works universally, exceptionally well. So that's what we do on the website level. But when it comes to content, and I think that's kind of where you're headed with this, is like what do you do with that content engine? Are you familiar with HubSpot's pillar content approach that everybody's following? I think it's a bad approach, financially. The reason I believe it's a bad approach financially, it's due to what I was communicating earlier. HubSpot's approach is you take a really, really beautiful strong asset, and then you lead to that asset with other types of content clusters that support that and you essentially do lead generation through that asset. I say, do that same thing but with features. Here's an example. We do our own SaaS products at Directive to make sure that we're not just full of crap. Not enough people do that. We rank in the top five for all our keywords. We actually spend a ton of money on PPC and we try to actually test everything and our hypotheses on ourselves. What we're doing right now is, we have an educational product called Institute. This teaches our clients and we give to our clients free of charge because we believe that education drives adoption. As consultants, you don't need to only make recommendations, you need clients to adopt them, right? And so we need to educate them as to why. So we educate them on SEO, PPC, et cetera. We sell it to the market for $39 a month. It teaches people how we do what we do, all our templates, our approach, et cetera. We have 40 lessons. So I'm asking myself, at a $39 a month product, my CPA, my cost per lead is too high to do a ton of paid acquisition. So how can I drive organic leads from my product? So here's my strategy and I'll share with your audience because hopefully it can help them. I'm taking the top five to 10 keywords for every one of my lesson pages. So, "how to do Google ads" or "how to do keyword research for PPC", okay? So then I put "keyword research for PPC" into a keyword research tool. Now I take the top five questions people ask around that. Now I'm going to use entity tools like Clearscope or Content Harmony or something like that to really understand what I need to write here to rank. So then I write five articles all around that one lesson. Then, above the fold on all five articles, I link to that lesson and say "Want to learn how to do it with video?" and come up with an offer that resonates with where they're at in intent. In other words, they intend to learn this. That's why they're searching it. I can satisfy that intent with my product feature, AKA my lesson. And now I also create a content cluster. So all of these content pieces around this topic are internally linking back to my lesson page, which I'm trying to rank at the bottom of the funnel. And so I'm using middle and top of funnel content with lead gen assets all internally linking and with magnets essentially generating leads for my product. So instead of trying to generate informational intent leads, I'm trying to generate purchase intent leads. So their hypothesis of what they want to do with content clusters works for HubSpot. The issue is that getting someone from informational intent to purchase intent is incredibly long and most marketing people won't survive their tenure if they're only focused on driving informational intent leads. So we try to pivot everything to purchase intent. Does that make sense? Kathleen: Yeah. So it sounds like what you're saying, if I understand correctly, is basically the product page on your site effectively as the pillar. Garrett: Yup. Turning product pages into content pillars Kathleen: The same exact approach applies only you're not writing a 4,000 word guide. You're creating the product page. Garrett: Yeah. You just audit all the competitors in the industry to say, "Okay, how many words do I need on my product page to rank? How many internal links do I need? How many referring domains do I need?" And then you say, "Cool, now I'm going to create the entity, the topical understanding to Google that we're the best answer to the questions people have related to the product we sell." And then when you do that whole approach, you're amazing at what you can do when driving MQLs and demos at the bottom of funnel. What should your SEO strategy look like if you're just getting started? Kathleen: So one of the things we talked about when when you and I first chatted about this was that, you work with a lot of big companies and they're coming to you and saying, "We're already doing a lot right. How can you take us to the next level?" But then there is this other school of thought that, if you have, let's say a startup or a new company or a company launching a new product, they have this opportunity to do it right from the beginning -- to greenfield it. Paint a picture for me of what that looks like. You're starting a new company and you want to really ace it out of the gates. Garrett: First and foremost, I'm going to look at all the review sites and ask myself how many reviews I need to be perceived as a market leader. It's the coolest thing in the world, right? Because someone searches now "top whatever software" you sell, and a review site shows up. You don't actually have to be the best! You might not be because you've only been in the game for a couple of months. But if you can get the reviews there, you look like you're the best and that's 99.9% of marketing. So first and foremost, we're going to position ourselves to be discoverable. When there's purchase intent, we're going to focus on demand capture, okay? Because to rank our website as a new organization, we don't have the authority, link profile or content, and investing in all those things takes a large financial upfront investment and has a long runway -- probably two years to build that organic engine. So if you have a 24 month runway to build your organic engine and you need MQLs now, the easiest thing to do is paid SEO. Now with that being said, we don't want to wait two years to try to rank because now we have another two years to get there, right? So we need to start from the beginning to try to position ourselves organically, to lower our cost per acquisition and have a better CAC-LTV ratio. So what do we do? We are going to say, when someone searches for your product or your features, we're going to try to create as much bottom of funnel content as possible. So not only a product page, but a feature page and solution pages. These are saying when someone has pain that your product solves and they go to discover that, can we show up? Perfect. Next what we're going to do is, we're going to start with our link building. So one of the things I had to do at Directive is, before we niched into SaaS, we were niched into just B2B. We had a lot of like manufacturers like Pelican Cases and stuff like that. So we had a lot of B2B players as well. So I couldn't rank for the keyword "B2B SEO", but I wanted to. I didn't have enough authority. My site wasn't large enough. It just wasn't going to happen. So what I did is I went on Search Engine Journal and I wrote, or Search Engine Land, I think it was, a fresh perspective on B2B SEO. In other words, I used someone else's site to rank for my keyword and they control the narrative. So with a startup, what you're gonna want to do is, you're going to go on CIO or Tech Crunch and instead of just bragging about how much money you raised, you're going to want to actually try to position yourself for what your buyer journey is like. We're going to leverage these other third party sites to do what's called guest posting to then rank exceptionally well for these top of funnel queries while internally linking from those guest posts back to our bottom of funnel pages we already built so that we can once again increase our rankings for purchase intent. So you can actually win at the bottom of funnel faster than people realize because nobody's product pages naturally build links. So if you do a really aggressive link building strategy early, using guest posting where you can control the anchor text and the destination URL to point to bottom of funnel pages, you can grow. And so then from that guest posting for bottom of funnel, now we'll focus on those products, kind of clusters we were talking about and our blog strategy, as well as Google ads review sites. And next thing you know, you're 24 months later, you might have one of the best imagine engines in the whole entire industry because you did it right. How to get executives and subject matter experts to create content Kathleen: Love it. One of the pieces of pushback I hear often, especially when you're a startup and you don't have a huge team where often your CEO or your CTO are the primary thought leaders and they're busy, I hear a lot of "Oh, we don't have the time to do all that writing." Any tips for how you can get the goods out of their heads and onto paper in a way that's efficient and scalable? Garrett: Yeah, the most scalable, best link building and PR you can possibly do is exactly what I'm doing right now. Podcasts. There's zero preparation for the thought leader. It takes exponentially less time and you have a much more engaged audience than an article. The best part is, when you guest post and you pitch a guest post, your success rate isn't always as high because not everybody accepts guest posts. Not everybody cares what you have to say. Sometimes editors are busy. On the flip side, the entire podcast content medium is guest dependent. So Kathleen's job is to secure interesting, engaging hosts for her audience. And so when you pitch Kathleen, you're going to have a much higher success rate than if you pitched Kathleen blog articles because now Kathleen has to edit your blog. She might not agree with your opinions because blogs aren't intrinsically the same format as podcasts. They're not op-ed like podcasts are. And so the best thing SaaS companies can do right now is link-building via podcast, hands down highest success rate, most scalable, easiest ended up. Kathleen: I totally agree, but I will say please, for the love of all that is Holy, take two minutes and learn something about the podcast and what it's about and tailor your pitch. I get pitched a lot, by a lot of podcast booking agents. Generally they're pretty good at doing their homework. But I can't tell you how often I get pitched from people who are like, "So-and-so built his real estate empire and can talk about earning money and like changing your life." And I write back and I'm like, "What does this have to do with inbound marketing? This person sounds like an amazing entrepreneur, but that's not what my podcast is about." Garrett: I'd say we have over a 75% success rate. So I'd give your audience some tips on how they can pitch. Get their name right. I know it sounds simple. Write a subject line that doesn't stink. Everything should be about how you make the podcast host's life easier and better for their audience. What I mean by that is there's a really important word when you do outbound or pitching. You say, "I am emailing you because", and that quickly allows someone to know why. And then you hit them with why the audience cares, not about yourself. So a lot of people like to say, "Hey, you know, my client, uh, built his agency from one to $10 million, you know, would love to be a guest on your show. He's been featured by Forbes, Tech Crunch, in the Inc 5,000." And then the podcast host goes, "Who cares?" Right? Compared to saying, "I'm emailing you because I'd love to talk with your audience about a topic that I know they care about, that I happen to be an expert in. Here's three different topics I think your audience might be interested in. Do any of these resonate with you?" Ideally, you want your podcast host to just say "Yes, this one". And then that's all the preparation required and you're good to go and it works. Kathleen: Yeah, I totally agree. At the last two companies I've been in, it's been a part of my strategy to get my CEO as a guest on podcasts. It's so much easier than trying to get them to write blogs. I think there's a human connection element of, you hear the person's voice, you get to know their personality, that that draws you in so much more than written content can do. So there's that aspect of it too. Garrett's advice Kathleen: Well, any other last words of advice that you think my listeners should know about related to this topic? Garrett: I guess one of the blessings we have with our portfolio is we have a lot of first party data. So I guess some encouragement. Since March 1st I wanted to look at what happened across our portfolio. Spend is down 24%, but conversions are down only 18% because click through rates are up, CPCs are down and conversion rates are up. So here's the really cool part about cost per click advertising is that it scales with demand and doesn't create waste. In fact, at a unit economic level, your advertising is actually more efficient now than it was before. Is volume down? Yes. But also auction competitiveness is down. See, all CPC advertising and all channels is based on an auction. It's based on inventory. It's like an economic model. Supply and demand. Well, because fewer advertisers are advertising right now, you're actually able to satisfy the existing demand that does still exist for whatever product or service you sell at a lower rate and you will have better efficiency and effectiveness in your advertising right now than you did before. That's just at the ad level. It's not necessarily the close rate level or at the volume level. But just at the actual cost per click and cost per acquisition level, it's actually much more efficient right now to advertise, which is kind of cool. That's across over $1 million in spend. Kathleen: That makes sense. So don't give up your ad budget altogether. Garrett: Just to meet demand. But remember your ad budget will do that intrinsically. So as long as you're not spending a ton on display and CPM type stuff, you're going to find a ton of efficiency on CPC because fewer people are advertising, thus lowering your cost per click, and there are some people out there buying and you want to make sure you're discoverable to those people. So it's a kind of a cool way to still win right now. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Absolutely. All right, well switching gears, I have two questions I always ask all of my guests and I'd love to hear what you have to say about these. The first is, this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now with inbound who my listeners could go check out as an example? Garrett: I mean, HubSpot's a monster at this. They still are. I know. And everybody knows that. Kathleen: I'm going to make you tell me someone besides HubSpot though. Garrett: I know, I know, I know. The thing is, it's a lot harder now to move somebody out of a top 10 ranking. And so you see a lot of people pivoting away from that old school, gated content theory of inbound. And so that's why off the top of my head, I can't think of someone who's like doing that part of it exceptionally well because the game's kinda changed. Kathleen: Who do you think is killing it with marketing right now in general? Garrett: I always like what is Zoom is doing? Because I liked what they did with like offline advertising and I think that's so cool. I think they're really creative in the sense of thinking about how to position themselves. I love the organizations that are investing heavily in podcast ads. For myself, that's one of my highest performing channels is niche-based podcast ads. I advertise on almost all the SEO or PPC podcasts that I can find because it works exceptionally well at a low CPM. I like the D2C stuff. I think the D2C people are kicking B2B butt. Like Baboon to the Moon. I love their branding. I think if B2B had a little bit more boldness like this... Kathleen: Yeah. What did they, I've never heard of them. I'll have to check them out. Garrett: So yeah, if you want to see somebody who I think is brilliant and actually has a brand opinion and stance and is hyper creative and out there -- Baboon to the Moon. Drift gets way too much credit for it because I don't actually think they're that good at it from a branding standpoint. They just have a free product so it's a lot easier to act like you're doing really good at it. They like try to take the human side of positioning. I think Baboon is doing something really cool because they're taking a hyper creative approach and it's like they're on acid. It's like a goldfish on a human's body using their product, but it's brilliant because they are so consistent with it in their messaging, copy, and creative that it actually creates a brand theme that I don't recognize in B2B. I think B2B organizations need to do a better job creating a brand theme. Like for us at Directive, we're trying to do a lot of people in our branding, but instead of just doing people in our branding, we're also like labeling them with their titles and their names so that it's so people know it's not a stock photo. So we're trying to bring it to life. We can obviously do it a lot better. We're not nearly as creative as that, but I think if B2B looks at the direct to consumer brands that are doing so well right now, at the end of the day it's very similar if you have a self onboarding SaaS company to a D2C product. It's very still transactional. And so if you can take your self onboarding, your trial-based SaaS company, and do that, and take that DDC stuff, and build that brand guide and just be really bold and crazy and ambitious with it, I think it'll pay off. Kathleen: Yeah, that's, and you need to have leaders within the company that are willing to take a risk and be different. There's a lot of sameness in general in marketing and I think when everybody else is going right and you go left, there's a lot of opportunity there. Garrett: Oh, a trillion percent. It's hard to get that buy in. I mean, I don't know anyone in my portfolio is actually doing it. That's why I'm in my head trying to think. It just starts at the top. You just need a CEO and a board that supports a bold new direction, not just verbally, but actually, and really actually sees it all the way through, especially when they get that first negative feedback or whatever from someone who doesn't like it. Kathleen: Yeah. There are going to be people who don't like it, that's for sure. Garrett: B2B is terrified of making anyone feel anything. That's truth, right? They're terrified of if someone doesn't like something. And the point is, the worst marketing is marketing for everybody. And so if you can be bold enough to have people hate you or like you, that's when you actually have marketing. Kathleen: I totally agree with you. All right. Second question. The biggest pain point I hear from marketers is that trying to stay on top of the changing landscape of digital marketing is like drinking from a fire hose. And so I'm curious how you personally stay up to date and educate yourself on all of that. Garrett: I think it's actually less important to stay up to date with things than people think, and here's why. Most marketers don't have a fundamental belief and a hypothesis of how they approach generating revenue for an organization. What's allowed myself and my organization to be successful is we have a fundamental belief that you need to make a brand discoverable at the bottom of the funnel regardless of channel. Now, the beauty of that is that it doesn't matter if digital marketing changes. See in 1997 when Google first came out, what was the whole point? People came to people and said, "Hey, I want to show up on this new search engine. How do I do it?" And the answer was, "Well, you need a website." See, the new answer is, "Well, you need reviews for your brand and you need to be positioned." As long as you don't get married to Capterra and G2, but get married to the idea of showing up when someone has purchase intent for what you sell, everything can change without changing anything because your fundamental belief is that you need to be discoverable when there's purchase intent. And so my encouragement to people is ground yourself in a fundamental belief of what you actually believe. It's such a critical part of marketing. If you want to make a ton of money in marketing, you need to actually have opinions. And you actually have to have beliefs and a hypothesis. You have to also be willing to adjust those, but you need to have them. And so I think if people have a real belief system and fundamental approach and then say we want to be essentially discoverable when there's purchase intent, that allows you to just naturally adjust whatever happens in the market because all you're doing is maintaining your belief. And that's, I think, what's so important for marketers, is to get away from this idea of, "Oh, what could I try? What new trick or hack can I try in a channel?" to say, "How can I essentially take my belief of discoverability and apply it to all my chanels?" When you do that, it allows you to stay really even keeled and focus on your customers. Kathleen: Yeah, and I would add to that, the best marketers I know in many cases are not actually marketers. You're a great example. You studied economics. The best marketers I know tend to be the most avid students of human behavior. People who understand people make great marketers because they're focused on the things that are timeless. It really doesn't matter what Google does with an algorithm because, honestly, Google is just trying to solve for people, right? So if you're focused on people and how they behave and how they buy, none of the bells and whistles matter. Garrett: Take that same person and then they learn financial modeling. Now you have the best CMOs in the world. People who have a really authentic, true belief of understanding of people and how they buy, and then they also understand financials? You put those two people together -- those are the CMOs of the Fortune 500. How to connect with Garrett Kathleen: Amen. I could go on and on about that. If somebody is listening and wants to learn more about some of this or has a question and wants to get in touch with y ou, what is the best way for them to connect with you online? Garrett: I'm active on Twitter. I'm @gmehrguth. So first initial, last name. I'm active on LinkedIn. Shoot me an email, it's just initial last name at Directive consulting. I'd love the chat and help anyone who has questions around demand gen. I'm pretty active on there trying to share all of our data and different tactics and things that we're doing. Almost daily I shared a new tactic or approach and a thread for essentially how SaaS markers can generate revenue. So if you're interested in that, feel free to follow and engage. Kathleen: Great. And I'll put all those links to Garett's social profiles and his email in the show notes. So head there to check that out if you want to connect with him. You know what to do next... Kathleen: If you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learn something new, I would greatly appreciate it if you would head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast a five star review. We talked a lot about reviews in this interview and we know how important they are, and they are equally as important for podcasts as they are for products. So take a minute and do that. That would mean a lot. And if you know somebody who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next interview. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Garrett. Garrett: Well, thank you Kathleen. Glad to be here.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Couple of great resources: 1. Quick video of the pros/cons of Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads for B2B: Google Ads vs LinkedIn Ads for B2B 2. LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you’d like AJ to cover. Transcript: Google Ads is the OG of ad platforms. How does it stack up currently to LinkedIn ads? 0:12 Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here’s your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:19 Hey there LinkedIn ads fanatics. Google Ads was the original ad platform and was synonymous with digital advertising for years and years. Now, though, as competition has increased, since all of your competitors use it and use it, well, are there bigger opportunities for you there or in LinkedIn ads? We’ll dive deep into that today. Let’s hit it. My favorite lead qualification methodology is called BANT, B A N T and it stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. And the way it works is that when you’re qualifying a lead let’s say it’s a SDR, sales development representative, who’s qualifying a lead? They’re trying to score it in four separate buckets. The budget, does this person have enough budget to afford us? The authority? Does this person have the signing authority to actually make the purchase? Or do we need to reach their boss or their boss’s boss? The need, does the person actually need what it is we’re selling? And timing, is the timing right for them? Or is this a deal that’s gonna have to go down months, or even years from now? So the way that this works is, if you’re looking at search channels like Google, whether it’s SEO or paid search on Google Ads, or even Bing Ads, these channels tend to score really high on both need and timing. And the reason why is because if someone is searching for something actively, which is where they would find you, if they were searching, and you were putting yourselves out there with search, you know that there’s at least some sort of a need, something drove them to complete that search. So they’re probably going to score high in need. Of course, timing is likely pretty good, because they probably wouldn’t have been searching unless there was some kind of timing matching up for them, they at least know they have some budget in the future, or at least are looking into an initiative. So search channels like Google are going to score really high in the N and the T in BANT for need and timing, but they’re probably going to score really poorly on the budget and the authority portion, because native to what someone types, it doesn’t tell you whether they are qualified to make that purchase decision. Sometimes it’s an administrative assistant doing the searching. Sometimes it’s the person themselves. Sometimes it’s an employee, you never really know. LinkedIn is a little bit opposite. It scores really high in the budget and authority categories, but really low in the need and the timing. And it scores high in budget and authority. Because if you’re putting together an ad targeting someone who needs something that you have, that means You’re probably going to target the people who are in company sizes and industries, large enough that can actually afford what it is you do. And you’re going to be targeting the people who have the authority to make that decision. Because that is one of the things that’s so great about LinkedIn ads platform. But of course, you’re targeting people, whether or not you know that they are in need of something currently. So that’s why they’re going to score really poorly in the need and the timing aspect. That means these leads on LinkedIn are going to take longer to close, Google ones are going to close a lot quicker. So let’s jump in then to the individual pros and cons of Google, as we’ve covered already, intent is the big pro with Google. And this is the reason why we like Google so much, is because you can catch people right at the bottom of the funnel, who are already signaling that they are looking for what it is you’re offering. That means you don’t have to do too much nurturing, and you can send them right to a demo or a purchase. If they’re already down there looking for one of those services. You don’t have to hit him with a white paper or something to try to brand yourself first. We’ve done quite a few different channel studies. Every time we have a client who has a great insight into data deeper in their funnel, we’re always understanding and we’re always excited to understand which channels produced what. And the common behavior we’ve always found in our studies is that Google always closes deals the fastest because they have a fast buying cycle because they were already at the end of the buying decision when they got to you. And LinkedIn always closes the largest deals, because you’re able to target the exact right people at the exact right size companies giving you really high quality leads, but again, they may not close super quickly. So outside of intent, there’s a lot of really great things about Google’s ads platform that used to be called Google AdWords. Now we call it Google Ads. 4:51 Next is retargeting. Google’s retargeting platform is incredible. It’s ultra inexpensive, and ultra powerful. It’s great tech, and you get access to pretty much the whole Google Display Network, or GDN, as the geeks call it. That gives you pretty much 90% of the web that runs on the GDN. Pretty much anyone who’s using AdSense installed on their website, because it’s the easiest way to start having your website generate advertising revenue. Google is also very versatile, because it has this search capability that we’ve already talked about that so good at being at the bottom of the funnel. But, it also has this whole display network, which is contextual advertising based off of keywords, and they also own YouTube. So all of these very different personalities in between these networks, makes them very powerful and versatile. Pretty much any marketer can find a way to use at least one, maybe even all three. It’s also helpful to understand that Google’s platform is super well baked out. Google early on made all of its money from Adwords back early, early. And because of that, they continued to innovate and move to make advertisers lives easier with the platform. They kept adding more and more features, really thoughtfully adding new algorithms and “better things”. And it’s now very full featured. And I would say it’s almost maybe to a fault, because now you have this platform that is so so featured that you really have to be an expert at pay per click advertising to really understand all of the ins and outs. And so to someone just getting started, it probably is really daunting. But all of this leads to them having a really, really solid platform with about every option you can think of. Google started out really early on by setting a floor price that was really reasonable. They started at five cents per click early early on, and then based off of competition, other people bidding five and 10 and 15 cents for a click. We started to see competition. aggregate around certain combinations of words. Now, of course, we have tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of words in every language. And competition is driven on Google by certain combinations of these words. And so you have keywords that are like buy CRM software, that could be really, really expensive. And you might see a keyword like, which are the better options in SUVs that maybe is not very competitive, because it’s not showing a whole lot of intent. It’s still signaling that someone’s in the research phase. So what this means is you have a way for competition to really be spread out. There are so many millions of combinations of words, maybe even billions or trillions, that competition could aggregate around. And so it keeps costs relatively low for everyone until you start having real competition. Then you have this ability to really protect your brand with something that we refer to in the industry as branded search. The idea here is you are bidding on your own brands keywords. So I might bid on b2b links calm or be too linked, or p3 link in case someone makes an error. And I can make sure that even if I’m not doing well organically for that keyword, that my ad is still gonna put me at the top of the page. And it also means that any competitor who was trying to snake on my brand that I can try to beat them out. And this is really both it’s definitely a double edged sword. It’s both a blessing and a curse. Because it also means that if someone comes and clicks on your ad when you’re bidding on your branded term, there’s a really good chance they would have scrolled a little bit further down and found you organically anyway and and it wouldn’t have cost you anything. But certainly you don’t know if a competitor were bidding on your keyword and maybe they would have grabbed that traffic. Before they made it down to you. So this is both a brand protection and trying to capture keyword traffic that your competitors might be trying to steal. It also gives you something really powerful, which is something I wish we had some way of measuring on LinkedIn. It’s this ability to measure real interest in your company. If you are bidding highly for your own brand’s, keyword, your own brand’s name, then you can look at the impressions that that ad delivers and have a really accurate view of, hey, how many people are searching for my company? What is the real interest around my company? If we were to do this on LinkedIn, it would probably look like “how often is my company showing up in in searches?” and “how many people are actually viewing my my brands company page or organizational page?”. Which of course that would be somewhat powerful information, but definitely not nearly as powerful as seeing how many people are searching Google, rather than the few percent who might be actually coming to LinkedIn specifically to look at it. Google also has some really fun stuff for power users. My favorite above those is called scripts. And it’s essentially the ability for Google to say, “hey, we’re not going to build every tool that you want, but we will give you this interface where you can enter your own JavaScript code”. And you can make the platform Do whatever you want without really having API access. So certainly, if you are going to build a platform, like an ads management platform, on top of Google ads, yeah, he would definitely want to have API access. But if you’re looking to just add a little bit of expert functionality to your account, you can find someone who knows JavaScript well, and build you a cool tool that can help you manage any of your accounts really quickly and easily internally. I would love to see LinkedIn ads script basics, so we could add a little bit of our own functionality as well. 10:59 Something else that they have is called observation audiences. And I would kill for this on LinkedIn. Essentially, you have an audience that you’re already bidding on. But you can add a filter to it, that becomes an observational audience. And you can actually even change your bids on it. So you could bid up your observational audience, but we’ll get to that. So the way that it works is if you don’t change anything you just have this filter on on a campaign or an ad group level. What you’re doing is breaking out that audience by filter to see how it functions with or without, and so it’s kind of like running a private focus group. One of the big no brainers to add here for an observational audience is adding your remarketing list or your retargeting list to an existing campaign, because then you can see they’re still kept separate. You can tell exactly what is coming from those who are part of your remarketing list and those who are not. But you can also bit up a little bit. So you can say if you’re part of my remarketing list, you can maybe bid up by 30% or up by double. on Google, you can also break out your observation audiences by things like business services, parental status, marital status, education, whether they’re a college student or not, their educational background, home ownership, they have these things called affinity audiences, which is like, what do I know that they’re they like or are currently interested in. And these are all things you wouldn’t have to build out entire new campaigns or ad sets, or sorry, ad groups on Google. In order to take advantage of these you can just layer them on as observation audiences to your existing campaign and get a readout of “Hey, it looks like people who are marital status single tend to like this better. So I’m going to decide to break off a new ad set or a new ad group, just for that.” I would love this for LinkedIn. And the way I would use it is if we were running, let’s say, a job function campaign, I could add an observation audience of just certain job titles to understand how many of those job titles are being picked up by that job function. That would be really interesting to understand. I’d love the idea of layering on a retargeting audience to see how differently it performs. I’d love to throw on traits, like some of the new custom segments that that we’re getting things like, how do job seekers or how do people who are open to education, how are they interacting with my my ads and content? That could be really cool. I also would like to layer on things like interests. I don’t know how good LinkedIn interests are. I don’t know how well they play in to someone being of high quality. So I would love to add an observation audience onto my LinkedIn campaigns. Just saying, “hey, show me what people who are in Interested in B2B marketing or interested in CRMs will do”. My next absolute favorite thing about Google right now is they have access to all of YouTube inventory, and all of YouTube Ads, obviously. So YouTube is kind of a combination of search and display. Its search because it’s keyword based. But it’s display because it’s a little bit social. And you can bid by audiences and behaviors. So with Google, now you have access to all of the Google Display Network, all of Google Search. You have YouTube and you also have Gmail. And all of these things are really high market usage, meaning that if you use them, you can get access to a lot of scale very quickly and very easily. And then they do have one really awesome thing that I kind of alluded to that is YouTube only. I wish we had this for the rest of Google, but they have something called custom intent audiences and the way it works is you can say, “hey, Google, I know that I can’t see the words that people are searching. But hey, if someone searches for any of these keywords here, I want to add them to a retargeting audience for me to show just YouTube videos”. And you can imagine how powerful this gets, because you’re essentially saying, if someone’s search query contains, let’s say, my competitors’ brand name, or keywords by competitor, I’m really doing YouTube retargeting around someone else’s retargeting list. And that is so so cool and powerful to me. 15:37 Okay, obviously, Google is not all sunshine and rainbows, we spent a good bit of time talking about the great stuff. But there’s also a lot of cons here that you should be aware of as well. The first is that your sales team will likely tell you that a lot of the leads coming from Google are of poor quality, even though they’re they’re telling you right now, this is what I want and I’m ready to buy. A lot of times people are not actually qualified to buy from you. And so the sales team will tell you things like, hey, these are we’re getting a lot of mom and pops or small potatoes kinds of companies who can’t afford us if you’re, let’s say mid market or even enterprise. And because we can’t filter out the small fish, the people who can’t afford us, or we even can’t filter out our competitors, which is big, we’ll get into that here in a minute. We have to start filtering people out by ad copy. So if you could imagine you now have to write into your ad copy something like the platform for enterprise, if you’re trying to signal that your product costs too much for maybe the small to medium sized business. And that hurts your click through rate, hurting your relevancy score, as Google calls it, quality score. And it just gets the whole situation a little bit stickier, a little bit tougher. Also with Google, it’s very competitive because like we mentioned at the beginning of the episode, your competitors are all on there. And they’ve been optimizing their efforts for years. And so if you are a brand new startup who hasn’t really figured out what your lifetime value looks like, you haven’t calculated what your cost per acquisition looks like. You’ve got a lot of testing. You’re up against a big wall of all of these competitors who have all optimized into their positions and really left you in a bad spot to try to fight for your position in that market. Because it’s more competitive, it’s not uncommon to see clicks costing $40 or more, especially for enterprise software. It’s not uncommon in legal keywords to see $100, $200, $400 per click, it’s crazy. So certain keywords can get very expensive, especially because they are likely very high value keywords that have been bid up over time. The nice thing is it really is very market appropriate how these keywords are priced. You know people are willing to pay them. That much for a keyword because it’s worth that much. Google is also very bottom of the funnel. So if you don’t have a list of keywords that are already searched for, that people might try to find your product or service with, you’re really stuck with whatever you can get. That means, let’s say you’re bidding on all of the right keywords, and your boss comes to you and says, “Hey, this is working really well, let’s double our budget for next month”, you don’t have a quick, easy way to turn that dial up to double and can’t spend it because if you’ve already gotten 100% of the impressions of that keyword, then you’re really stuck. You can’t just generate more without scaling broader and watching your quality fall. So if you have a disruptive product or service that people don’t know about already, so they don’t know to search it, they don’t know it exists. It’s gonna be really hard on search to drum that up. You could use Google’s Display Network and try to spray a little bit broader to try to build that awareness so that people will then come and search for you. And that’s what people have done for years and years. But certainly, it’s not nearly as good as if you already have people in your market who know to look for you already. Also really hard for business to business startups for a lot of reasons. Also, a lot of these B2B startups are doing something that is disruptive, so people don’t know to look for them. But then they have the same challenges of like, how do I muscle my way into this industry, you know, against all these people who’ve already optimized their way here and made things work, I’m going to be really inefficient while I try to find where I can fit. Competitive transparency is so so tough on Google, because everyone Google’s their own keywords to see how they rank and to see their own ads. And then of course, when they do this, they see their competitors what their ads say, and a lot of times they will click on their ads to punish them. Brands really like to do this click fraud to charge the other guy money. Well, of course your competitor is doing this to you as well. And so everyone loses here, the fact that you can’t exclude your competition from seeing your ads is a big deal. It’s a constant struggle to not have to pay for competitor click fraud. And really my final con about Google is that Google is so large, they just don’t care about you anymore. They’re so massive, they only really have to listen to their top, let’s say, hundred or 500 customers, and so they don’t care about you unless you’re throwing around hundreds of millions of dollars a quarter. And what’s even worse, in B2B, Google has a track record of just not caring about business to business. They do so much great around business to consumer advertising, that they really leave us B2B advertisers out in the cold. They don’t give us new features. They’re not actively thinking about ways to help us out. Okay, here’s a quick sponsor break and then we’ll dive into LinkedIn pros and cons. 20:57 The LinkedIn Ad show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 21:06 You guessed it B2LinkedIn, the LinkedIn Ads focused ad agency. We manage many of Lincoln’s largest accounts worldwide. And we’re official LinkedIn partners. Contact us on B2Linked.com to get in touch. And our team can help you enact these and all other strategies to get you the best performance. 21:24 All right, with that being said, let’s jump into LinkedIn pros and cons. One of the top reasons you want to use LinkedIn is this ability to capture new audiences to get in front of people who didn’t know that you or your product or your service existed before, and so they wouldn’t have been reachable with search. You can grow the whole funnel by filling up the top with people who are brand new audiences who didn’t know who you were. And this is especially amazing for those of you who have really maxed out your search channels. And now if you could add any more to that funnel, if you could add more awareness from social channels, it would just superpower your search results. Like we talked about early on in the episode, LinkedIn brings really high quality leads, because we can target the people by their budget, their authority. And this gives us the types of leads that when they get to your sales team, your sales team is saying thank you. These are exactly the right people. They may give you crap because they’re not sales ready yet. But that is just where this sits in the funnel. Any social channel will be really difficult to find that level of intent, the need and the timing aspect to BANT. But certainly with LinkedIn, you are getting the budget and the authority and you’re getting access to your very ideal audience. You can get very micro targeted or you can spread it broader and try to hit more of the right people. You’re also catching people when they’re in the right mindset. When they are on LinkedIn. You know, they’re either thinking about their job or their career broadly. And so you’re giving them some kind of offer that augments their job or their career, it’s a great place to be, you’re going to end up having really good positive associations with them, as well as having high conversion rates. Another pro is LinkedIn can be cheaper than Google Ads, depending on the keyword, depending on the industry. We have worked with some clients who will see a LinkedIn $12 per click, and they get excited because they’re paying double that on Google and they can definitely make that work. I absolutely love on LinkedIn, how we can layer on exclusions to help cut out unqualified people, because we’re paying really expensive clicks here, you know, eight to $11 for a click. And so we don’t want to waste that eight to $11 on someone like a competitor, a past customer, a current customer, and we can pretty much virtually eliminate click fraud if we’ve set up our exclusions properly. So that means us as an agent See, we would exclude ourselves from being able to see our clients ads, we would exclude the clients company, so employees aren’t clicking. And we can upload lists of customer lists, email address lists, and try to cut those errant clicks down to a minimum. If you want to spy on someone, because you’re a very sophisticated advertiser, you still have access to some transparency. If you navigate to your competitors page on LinkedIn, and click on the ads tab, you can see their last six months of advertising. And it won’t cost them for a click, which I think is really good, but you can spy a little bit, you can tell at least what their ads say, and what offers they go to. And finally, LinkedIn is constantly improving, now. Certainly it has a ways to go still before it’s really playing in Google and Facebook’s arena. But we do see LinkedIn putting a lot more effort into improving the platform. And of course, I am so grateful for those strides. 25:01 So now we get into LinkedIn cons, it really is not great for the bottom of the funnel like search, especially like Google is. Every advertiser we talked to wants to jump right to the demo and the purchase. They want to pay a certain amount of dollars to get a demo, hardcore lead, someone who wants to buy something. But because LinkedIn is very top to middle of funnel, the audience is not ready for an offer like that. They’re not ready, like search would be. So if you can’t go right for the kill, you need to start a little bit higher up in the funnel, and think about them more in the middle of the sales process. You also have to keep in mind that on LinkedIn, people are busy and you’re actively trying to distract someone from doing what they wanted to do otherwise. So you have to make it valuable for them to actually lure them in with your content or your thought leadership or something that actually solves a pain point or a problem for them. And this will Create a non-sales ready lead for the most part, but it’s getting you in touch with exactly the right kind of people that will want to be your best customers. Certainly the largest con that we hear from people all the time about LinkedIn is the cost. You can expect to pay between $8 to $11, a click, and some much more even than that. And that immediately prices much of the B2B market out of the market. So we’re constantly telling people, if your lifetime value isn’t over, you know, $10,000, $15,000, then LinkedIn is probably too expensive for you to have a return on your investment, even if the targeting is just perfect for what you do. The high cost really comes from a supply and demand problem where both supply and demand are really challenged. On the supply side, LinkedIn traffic is really low compared to Google or Facebook. It’s kind of the platform that you would come back to, you know, three or four times a month to comment on something, to connect with someone, to see who is viewing your profile. And so it’s going to have limited ad inventory, keeping the supply of ads relatively low. And then advertiser demand is pretty high, because advertiser demand on LinkedIn pools around a narrow set of professional facets. And so with Google, you’re looking at combinations of words. And there are millions, billions, trillions of combinations of words. Now we’re looking at certain individual sets that people tend to congregate around. Like for instance, there are only so many senorities out there. So something like managers, directors, VPS C level, there’s only so many buckets. And so it creates fewer combinations of things, meaning that the demand is going to be higher around these relatively few combinations of things. And advertisers who find really high value in certain audiences and they’re going to bid it up. So LinkedIn is at a little bit of a disadvantage. On the cost side, competition can rise faster on social, especially with so few options than it would on search. LinkedIn has these long sales cycles, usually, most likely for a few reasons. But I would say mostly it’s because the traffic is mid funnel. And we often times have these larger purchases we’re making we’re asking people to make, so a larger purchase is going to take more consideration more time, and it’s mid funnel, so they haven’t made the decision yet. They’re still working on that. So these long sales cycles. Most of the time, these sales require committees and specific budget allocation, further lengthening the sales cycle, and increasing involvement from people who are outside of just the one person you were targeting, who was feeling the pain that you can solve. 28:54 And finally, LinkedIn significantly lags behind the other platforms on just the table. stakes. For instance, we don’t have the ability to target by device yet. The retargeting platform, although is going to get a lot better in October of 2020. It’s still really weak right now. We don’t have anything like an ad set or an ad group level. And I could go on and on about improvements that are needed for the platform, in order for it to compete with the other world class platforms. So it has a long way to go still to catch up to Facebook and Google. But certainly, like I mentioned before, they’re in the process of improving. I think LinkedIn really catches the vision for what their, their platform can become. And I’m cheering them on. Your style as you’re an advertiser, Google’s style is going to be very search, meaning it’s going to be very high intent, getting people who are all ready to close. The types of other platforms that you might look into. If this is a great style of traffic for you would be things like G2 crowd and Capterra, who are already looking to make a decision about software and now they’re just trying to compare. Also Bing Ads does really well, Yahoo search will be in the same arena. And also kind of Cora advertising. I really am intrigued by Cora. I like that it’s very search focused because it’s around keywords of questions. But it’s probably more middle of funnel more learning kind of like a social channel would be. The search style is going to close deals quickly and really give your sales team sales ready leads. LinkedIn, on the other hand is going to be a very targeted display type of platform. So very highly targeted with low intent. It’s going to play a more in the middle to top of funnel and produce longer sales cycles. So I hope that that gives you a really good view as you’re trying to figure out pros and cons. How do I weight each of the different platforms in my marketing mix? So let’s talk about opportunities in each of these channels. First of all in Google, I think you have the awesome opportunity to capture the whole bottom of the funnel. You can send your amazing LinkedIn traffic who is highly highly qualified, send them to your website and then retarget them on Google to stay in front of them on the whole Google Display Network really inexpensively with really good technology. I think this is by far one of the things I would recommend. If you are running nothing else on Google except for just retargeting, do it in combination with your LinkedIn traffic, you will supercharge your LinkedIn traffic. Also do what we talked about earlier about targeting and protecting your brand terms. Don’t let a competitor come in and start stealing your bottom of funnel traffic away. Because these are people who are already looking for you and you don’t want to lose that. I know there is some disagreement out there in the digital marketing world about, you know, paying for your own brand terms when they would have come to you anyway. But ultimately, I think it’s worthwhile. You probably want to do it just for the pure brand protection. It’s like brand insurance. I talked about how amazing I think YouTube ads are. They’re amazing for video. It’s cheap, and it’s great technology to run video ads. And of course, we have those custom intent audiences that are like it feels like cheating to retarget the traffic that was probably going to your competitors. Amazing. Then on LinkedIn, I think there are some significant opportunities as well. I use LinkedIn to capture the most valuable top of funnel or middle of funnel approach and reaching the people who are in the right mindset who are the most qualified to do business with me. I love the idea if you’re not using lead gen forms to send traffic to pages that your Google remarketing and your Facebook retargeting can take over and try to stay top of mind with those people. As you know from previous episodes, LinkedIn is amazing at ABM, or account based marketing. Every company I talked to has at least a list of 20 to 50 brands that they would kill to work with. So it’s worth putting together a campaign targeting just those brands, even if it doesn’t spend very much just to make sure you’re staying in front of the most valuable people that you would kill to be in front of, you’d kill to have their logo on your website. All right, I’ve got some episode resources coming up for you. So stick around. 33:30 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 33:39 First resource for you here is a video that we created that really just breaks down the basics of Google Ads versus LinkedIn Ads. So check that one out. It’s like six, seven minutes long, not big. You can easily send this if you’re trying to make the case someone internally. Send it to them to help make up their mind. Also, I created the course on LinkedIn Learning around LinkedIn Ads. So if you’re looking to just get started on LinkedIn, check that course out super high quality. And of course, it’s endorsed by LinkedIn. So can’t be half bad, right? The standard ask here, please make sure whatever podcast player you’re listening to this on, make sure you hit the subscribe button. Make sure that all of these episodes as I go deeper and deeper down the LinkedIn ads rabbit hole are coming right into your ear holes. And as a favor, please do rate and review this podcast. There are relatively few listeners right now. I’m actually refusing to look at the analytics because I’m a little bit scared. I put a lot into this podcast and any sort of rating and review you can give that would help those metrics out will really make me feel a lot better as soon as I actually let myself look at them. If you have any questions or suggestions about what we should do on the show in the future, give us an email to Podcast@B2linked.com. We’d love to hear from you. And of course, we’ll see you back here next week, cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Resources for this week: LinkedIn Ads vs FB Ads for B2B Video Marketing Land Article – FB :37 min per day Wordstream article from 2018 with 17 mins per week Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you’d like AJ to cover. Transcript: Facebook ads are all the rage and have been for years in the world of digital marketing. But how do they stack up versus LinkedIn ads for B2B in 2020? 0:16 Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here’s your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:23 Hey there LinkedIn ads fanatics. So Facebook ads are incredible. And so many marketers swear by them. And it’s probably all you’ve heard for the last five years. But they’re sure a heck of a lot harder to make work for B2B companies. So let’s walk through what you should be using Facebook for and what you should be using LinkedIn ads for, and you’ll find they actually work quite well hand in hand. Let’s hit it. So first, a little bit about each one of the platforms. So Facebook, and I’m sure so much of this is going to be like, like, yeah, AJ, we get this. We know what Facebook is. But it’s a social network that owns about nine percent of your social activity. I mean, between the time that you spend on Facebook and Instagram, and WhatsApp and Oculus VR, and any other sort of Facebook properties out there, it is an incredible time suck and it’s a place where they have access to you. It’s so very powerful for B2C. The interest targeting the level of data that Facebook has on you that marketers can then leverage is incredible. They also and we’ll go a lot deeper into that this, they have the best retargeting technology on the planet. And it’s not the most, it’s one of the most recent ones created. So they’ve done amazing things. And just by virtue of their technology, and the way people use it, it makes it the best retargeting platform. It’s also really insanely good for the top of the funnel, because it’s cheap, and this is what display is supposed to be. It’s about getting your message in front of people who haven’t heard of you before, but also because of their amazing retargeting technology, it plays a significant part all the way through your buyers journey as well. So it’s not just a top of funnel strategy. We know that because it owns about 90% of your social activity, it has high usage. The averages that we see are somewhere around 37 minutes per day used on Facebook. And that’s a lot of time where marketers can be in front of you. It’s a very intensely personal platform. This is where people go to connect to people that they love their friends. And that’s the mindset they’re in is really connecting, consuming, and generally being entertained. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is also a social network, but it’s very, very different. It’s focused 100% around who people are professionally. And if you’re listening to this podcast, I know this is probably not news to you. But LinkedIn started out as kind of like your online resume, and it started that way, but ended up becoming something into like, where you consume professional content and get advice and connect to people. So LinkedIn is really in this resurgence right now or I guess it’s not resurging, it’s a surgence. Starting from where people didn’t really know what it was good for to now we’re seeing a lot of value coming out of it. Now, LinkedIn does not release their usage numbers, but estimates from a 2018 word stream study, say that people spend about 17 minutes per month on LinkedIn. And we know usage has gone up significantly so I wouldn’t be surprised to see, you know, 25-30 minutes a month, on average, maybe even higher here in 2020. But, you know, LinkedIn does not release these numbers, probably because if you compare them to what Facebook is at 37 minutes per day, 25 minutes per month doesn’t sound very amazing. But because of the capabilities of the platform, and if you’re listening to this, I know you believe this. It’s very, very worthwhile. We all know that LinkedIn ads are expensive. But you know, we get the best b2b focused targeting on the planet. And that makes it worthwhile for the vast majority of us. It’s also best used for the middle of the funnel, as we learned from Episode 01, if you listen to that, and that’s really where we want to focus with LinkedIn. It’s too expensive to be at the top of the funnel, you know, at $8 to $11 bucks a click, it’s pretty hard to send people to your blog posts or whatever. And because it’s a social platform, we can’t send people right to the bottom of the funnel to buy something or hop on the phone with a sales rep with any sort of volume because it’s just too much too soon, so it plays best in the middle of the funnel. Okay, so jumping into Facebook’s pros, because there are a lot of pros to it. I will never knock Facebook as a platform. It’s got some incredible technology. It’s just not always of the best use for my clients, but I certainly respect it. So first off, we’ve talked about retargeting. How they have the best retargeting platform on the planet. And because of their amazing reach of having 90% of social activity. When you do retargeting, you can be in front of someone, you know, during so much of what they do and interact with online. That’s pretty amazing. 5:15 They also have a technology called look alikes that LinkedIn recently rolled out look alikes. But Facebook has incredible look alike. You can pretty much create a look alike off of any data set that you have. If it’s a retargeting like a web retargeting audience, or maybe a list that you’ve uploaded, or something like that. There’s a slider from 1% to 10%, where you get to say, here’s how tight I want you to make my look alike. So if you leave it at 1%, the minimum This is going to make it the tightest audience that Facebook knows how they’re going to not explore very far outside, just the immediate criteria that makes that person valuable to you. And you can slide it all the way up to 10% where it’s like, hey, show this to anyone who is remotely like this person and everything in between. Very, very cool. But realize that this is a machine that you have to feed with good data. The garbage in garbage out model is especially effective here. If you feed a look alike audience with garbage, it’s going to give you a totally unrelated audience, that’s not going to be helpful. And vice versa. You feed it with great data, like, here’s a list of all of our past customers who have already paid us money. And it might give you a really good list of potential customers you want to go after. Facebook is really good at their optimized objectives. They have so so much data on each person, because they have their whole personal life there in front of them. So all of these millions and millions and millions of interactions, interests likes, who you’re connected to. All of that plays really well into their model. So when you tell them I want you to optimize towards this objective, lots of times it nails it, Facebook video and ads have been incredible for a long time. Now there’s kind of this regular ongoing battle between people who like Facebook video ads and YouTube ads, because they are a very different kind of model how you pay for them and how they’re used. But it’s really hard to deny Facebook came out with video ads very inexpensively. Of course, they lied about how many times your videos were getting seen and all that early on. They’ve set the tones for that. But even still, video advertising on Facebook is very inexpensive. And the best part it works right in with their retargeting platform, you can put two videos in sequence and say once you’ve watched 50% of my video, now I want to show you the next one. And we’re going to get that with LinkedIn here in October of 2020 is current estimates. But yeah, Facebook started with it and it’s great. 7:51 There’s also some functionality around events that are really, really cool. So you can run event ads on Facebook, that and then you can actually retarget anyone who clicked that they were interested. And they also have a native integration with Eventbrite. So if you’re putting on a kind of in person event, it’s a, an incredible ad format that I hope LinkedIn has a copy of at some point. And what I’m imagining is, if you had something like a digital meeting, like a webinar or a summit, something like that could be really cool on LinkedIn. And when you use an event ad, the day before your event happens, you get a free push notification to anyone who said that they were interested, which I think is awesome. Facebook was one of the first to the chatbot game. So you can go in and do a type of ad format called messenger ads. And you can do lead generation through messenger with prompts instead of form fields. And that really leads to high conversion rates, makes you feel like you have a relationship with this company because of how interactive it is. And you can connect with things like drift and mobile Monkey and other chat bot types of software. And then really keep in front of people keep conversations alive, keep a relationship happening. And that’s again, something I think LinkedIn will fall into step with here at some point. But you know, for right now, Facebook is just amazing for the chat bot experience where you don’t have to have a live human chatting with someone. Now, Facebook does have some targeting around B2bB that you should probably be aware of. They have things like your job title, your industry, company name, and they used to have things like company size, office type, seniority, and other types of targeting. Now, I don’t know what was fueled by Facebook guessing or how much was fed by third party data sources. But the B2B targeting on Facebook has always been really rough, very small proportion of people I’m estimating something like 4% to 6% of people would even bother to write their professional information in so there’s just not much there to begin with. And those who did have it, oftentimes it would be outdated, they would have their position from, you know, six months ago or a year and a half ago listed. And then, of course, all of us B2B marketers, we would target these same people by job title, because that’s who we want to go after. And we would try to max that out. And so it becomes competitive really quickly driving prices up. Facebook also owns Instagram. So Instagram reach is, you know, great right now. And it’s such a hot network, the younger generation tends to have really adopted Instagram. So the older generation going to be on Facebook, the younger going to be on Instagram, with a large subset of the population using really both Costs on Facebook have always been a subject of interest, because they started out being very low cost. And we keep hearing rapidly how costs are rising on Facebook, sometimes triple digit percentages every quarter. So we’re getting to a point now where Facebook is going To start getting into the realm of being LinkedIn expensive, but there are still opportunities, there’s tons and tons of inventory out there. And they’re always opening up new targeting, new inventory, new ad formats, which really do help keep costs low. But you know, certainly, we’re seeing costs rise quickly. And people do spend a ton of time on Facebook. It’s really the go to app, especially with messenger. You know, people are on there talking to their friends all the time. This is definitely a network where people will spend a lot of time. And of course, Facebook is not all sunshine and rainbows. On the con side here. When you put B2B stuff on Facebook, it’s perceived as boring and it tends to get punished with really heavy costs. So on the B2C side, you might see costs in the, you know, .30 to .80 cents to get someone to your website. But on Facebook, you might see it’s really hard to get someone onto your website for a B2B offer. You might be looking at similar cost per click clicked to LinkedIn. I was looking at an example yesterday with someone paying $6 to $12 per website visitor from Facebook. So yeah, that’s definitely definitely in LinkedIn territory. And of course, like we mentioned, the cons here about Facebook, the B2B data that it has is outdated. And also, you know, pretty weak. It’s not over much of the population. And as soon as you’ve really maxed out the data that seems to be pretty exact for you in b2B, like around job title or company name, of course, you then have to scale up and start getting into things like interests and other ways of targeting your type of professional, and of course, costs come down when you do that, but so does your lead quality. So your quality of lead gets really low on Facebook because of how weak the targeting is. But it’s also less expensive in a lot of cases. So people want to start there. They want to dip their toe into the B2B marketing or social advertising realm there on facebook. And that makes a lot of sense to me. When you are a b2b advertiser, you have to understand the mindset that they’re in, they are most likely distracted, they are there to be entertained. They could be on their way to go play Farmville, they might be looking at pictures of grandkids, or anything in between, you just don’t know. And so if you’re giving them an offer, it’s really hard to predict what mindset they’re in and how ready they’re going to be for that offer. 13:27 All right, let’s jump into LinkedIn then. The pros, people are there for work, they’re in the right mindset. And what that means is you give them an offer that augments either their professional life, their career, and they’re going to have high conversion rates, and really hold you in a professional, very favorable kind of light. As I’m sure you know, it has by far the best targeting for professionals on the planet. So you as a B2B advertiser, you care about this targeting a lot. You want to be able to target them by their job title, their department, their seniority, their skills, the groups that their members of, their company name, their company size, industry, skills, groups, all of these things really spell out exactly the way you’d want to target and speak to your ideal audience here. And one of the favorite things of mine about the network is not only is this targeting amazing, but if you’re targeting white collar professionals, especially in North America, where I am, so many people, so many of these professionals have a LinkedIn profile. And so it’s really near perfect scale. Whereas on Facebook, you might hope to hit you know, 4% to 6% of your ideal target audience, because that’s really all who would bother to put their professional information into their profile. On LinkedIn, you might hit 95% of them as long as you’ve got the budget for it. So it’s a great way of giving you perfect access to your ideal audience, even if the costs are quite high. We also know that LinkedIn professionals tend to keep their profiles up to date, because it’s a reflection of their professional self. They are interested in what other people think about them and know about their careers. And this is really the point of LinkedIn. This is where you go to kind of update your resume, as people expect. So LinkedIn tends to have the most updated version of, you know, where someone is at in their career. I like to joke that I, you know, LinkedIn is the second person to know after I make a career change, after my wife, I tell my wife first, and then I go and update my LinkedIn, because I’m proud of who I am professionally and I want everyone that I’ve done business with in the past to see what I’m up to. And, you know, be able to also generate leads going forward, because as long as people know what it is you’re doing, they can refer people and so it becomes this virtuous cycle. The lead quality from LinkedIn tends to be crazy high, and that is probably because of two different factors. Number one is the targeting you’re only going to target the people who would make a really good fit for your product or service, of course, but then it’s also really high quality. Because the mindset that people were there for when they saw your ad, they didn’t associate you with the belly fat ads of Facebook, they associate you with their colleagues, their work, their professional life, and so they’re going to tend to trust you more right off the bat. Now, certainly LinkedIn has its cons as well, chief and foremost here, is the cost. Now we’re seeing an average cost per click of between $8 to $11 cost per click right now. And that’s only going to rise. You know, some of our clients have to bid in the $14, $15, $16 range to get traffic. Certainly we have clients who are paying well below that as well. But that’s really the new normal, this is where we’re going to be paying. 16:44 You also have to grab their attention quick, because while they’re on LinkedIn, they are usually busy, they’re on their way to go do something. And so you’ve got to get the value out very quickly. On Facebook, the real common knowledge and practice is make your ads long, tell a story, try to lead them in, and you know, tease them. On LinkedIn, you don’t really get to bug someone for 45 seconds while they try to figure out what you’re trying to sell them. You really have to get right to the point. So think on LinkedIn, you move quick. And that’s not necessarily a con, it’s just the approach you have to use. We also know that LinkedIn tends to be pretty middle of the funnel, because of the cost. Like, it’s difficult to treat it like a top of funnel platform. When the costs are so high. It’s, you know, maybe middle of funnel cost, but top of funnel type of mindset. So if I could have my wish with LinkedIn, I would love to see costs go down. So we could treat it as more of a top of funnel type of traffic, but because of the cost, we have to send them right to the middle of the funnel, most of the time asking for some kind of information in exchange for a content asset of some kind. Okay, now we’re going to take a quick break for a sponsor, and then afterwards, we’ll dive right into some other areas here, like retargeting and how each of these should fit into your marketing mix. 18:07 The LinkedIn ad show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com. The LinkedIn ads experts. 18:17 B2Linked as an ad agency and LinkedIn ads is all we do. So fill out the form on any of the pages of B2Linked.com to get in touch, and our team will help you enact all of these strategies and more to get you the best ad performance. All right, now we can jump right into retargeting. So LinkedIn has a retargeting platform as of 2017, as you’ll know from Episode 03, where we went through the whole history, and the retargeting platform is just it’s pretty weak and nothing against LinkedIn on this. It’s a technological hindrance here. The reason why is because the retargeting is all cookie based. And we know that half of LinkedIn traffic comes from mobile and about half of mobile traffic is on iOS devices like iPhone, iPad, and those and any Safari browser, or Mozilla Firefox browser, none of those will accept this third party cookie. And so immediately, you know, let’s say you pay for 300 visitors to come to your website, because you know that the minimum audience size to retarget on LinkedIn is 300. But then you find out I’ve actually got to buy more like 600 visitors to my website before I’ll fill up that that audience so that I can start targeting them. So you really have to have a high amount of traffic for this to really be valuable. And you know that half of your visitors won’t even qualify to be retargeted. The other thing about LinkedIn retargeting is that people don’t spend very much time on LinkedIn. And so if there’s not a lot of time to get in front of them. Not a lot of opportunities for you as a marketer to stay top of mind. And it’s not exactly inexpensive either. You know, we see that if we pay $10 bucks for a click, we might pay $5 for a retargeting click. So it’s not a huge discount, but certainly it is appreciated. And I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t use LinkedIn’s retargeting, you absolutely should. There’s no reason not to because it’s certainly cheaper and it’s a way to get in front of a warm audience. But if you’re relying on it on its own, you’re missing out on a lot of value. So the retargeting Dream Team, as I like to call this, and I would recommend you send all of your traffic, maybe not all, you’ll have other traffic sources too, but you’ll use LinkedIn to send exactly the right people to your website. But then you’ll use Facebook’s retargeting platform, which is the best tech on the planet for retargeting to stay in front of them. What that gets you is this ability to stay in front of these people that you might have paid $8 to $10 bucks a click on LinkedIn to acquire them. But then once you have them on Facebook, you might be paying, you know, $1 to $1.50 per click to your stay in front of them and that’s incredibly powerful. Not to mention Facebook’s retargeting is all engagement based, so it doesn’t rely on the cookie like LinkedIn’s does. And so any action they take whether they are on desktop on mobile, they’re always logged in Facebook has an incredible reach and insight into who these people are. And you can stay in front of them on multiple machines. Basically, wherever they are on the planet. It’s awesome. Now, Google’s tech is not half bad either. If you’re retargeting on Facebook, you pretty much get access to them anywhere on Facebook or Instagram. But if you do the same retargeting logic on Google, you get access to probably 90% of the web, which is what we call the Google Display Network, or GDN. And this is a great way of using very similar awesome retargeting technology for very inexpensive to stay in front of people wherever they are on the web. So Facebook hits them on social Google hits them on the web, that is my ideal retargeting audience. Now, when we get Engagement retargeting from LinkedIn, I’m definitely going to recommend layering that on there. And this is probably in October. So if you’re listening to this after October, I hope you in the future are getting to use this. Then I will probably recommend always using all three. And I’m really excited for LinkedIn’s retargeting to get much better so that I can use a lot for exclusions. That’s my excitement there. 22:23 So as you’re thinking about your marketing mix, what part really should Facebook play in that? Well, I would say if your audience is on Facebook, and you can reach them there for less expensive, then I would go at it all day long, I would put as much budget towards it as possible. But let me qualify this when when I say if you can reach your audience there for less expensive, I don’t mean if you can show your ad there for less expensive because you can. I mean, if your cost per qualified lead is less on Facebook than it is on LinkedIn, then I would continue to invest there and I would invest big. This doesn’t always happen. And in fact, it doesn’t happen really often at all, for my experience, because Facebook sure is cheaper. But as soon as you start throwing out all of the bad leads, because they were unqualified, or they were mom and pop kinds of audiences, you know, tangentially related, you start looking at, okay, what do we actually get for the sales team here, and lots of times you’re going to notice that your costs are much higher than they even would be on LinkedIn. So your job as a marketer is to get much more sophisticated than the platform’s are by default. It means you have to use these channels at the acquisition level, and then blend them all with their costs after the form fill with a CRM to get this data and understand what your cost per qualified lead is, or cost per proposal or cost per closed customer. All of these are things that none of the platforms will give you readily, but you as a sophisticated B2B marketer are going to be able to do and you will be able to see exactly how much you should continue to spend on Facebook versus LinkedIn. I would suggest here that Facebook is really good for dipping your toe into the water of social ads, and getting a feel for how people like your content and your ads. It’s a really good testing ground, I think, because for not very much money, you can put your content and offers out there and see how people engage with them. So if you are a small company just getting started, or you don’t have very much budget, I love the idea of starting on Facebook, put an offer together, target the very best you can and just see, does my content get a 6% conversion rate? Does it get a 50% conversion rate or somewhere in between. And keep in mind that if you’re doing business for business sake, you’re probably not going to work very well on Facebook. What I mean by that is if work is a core part of you, and you hang out with your friends talking about work, then Facebook is going going to be a good place to get in front of those types of people, because they’re going to be on Facebook, and they’re going to be in this business mindset. If you’re going after jobs where people tend to check out at 5pm, and they just don’t want to be thinking more about work, then reaching them on Facebook, when they’re trying to take their relaxation time is probably not going to work very well. There are some segments that I found to be very reachable on Facebook. And that would be things like small business owners, freelancers, real estate agents, people who are into MLM or multi level marketing. Those are the types of people who really make Facebook their playground, even if they shouldn’t. This is just, it’s where they’re comfortable personally, and then that’s where they try to build their businesses. Now, forgive me for the ammunition and the guns reference here. But I like to think of Facebook like a shotgun approach to marketing. It’s one bullet that doesn’t cost very much but it spreads really broadly across a target. It’ll hit the target a few times, a few times it’ll miss, it’s really good value. And you can really do a lot of it, you can do a lot of damage, tends to be a very broad kind of approach, not very precise. So then as we start thinking about LinkedIn, how it plays into your marketing mix, let’s carry that metaphor a little bit further. LinkedIn is really a lot like a sniper rifle kind of approach to marketing. It is highly targeted, you are going to hit that target come hell or high water, it takes a much more thoughtful approach. And you know that a shotgun shell doesn’t cost very much, but that sniper round costs a lot. And so you invest a lot more into it. And you really only get a few shots on goal with this. Whereas Facebook, you kind of get to spray and pray a little bit. And if you have a very narrow subset of highly valuable target audience, LinkedIn really is a no brainer. I was talking to a client the other day who has a an audience of 3,000 people worldwide who could buy their product. And I said, it really doesn’t matter what you offer them, you should just be in front of them at every possible turn because if there’s only 3000 people that doesn’t cost very much on LinkedIn to stay in front of them and get every chance for an impression, you can. Now you are obviously a sophisticated marketer if you’re listening to this. So you’re going to be measuring how the leads convert past the initial form fill. And this is where LinkedIn really wins, because everyone who isn’t measuring is, is complaining about how high the cost per lead is, or cost per form fill, but you’re going to go deeper, you’re going to be measuring what’s my cost per marketing qualified lead from the CRM, what’s my cost per sales qualified lead, my cost per proposa,l cost per closed deal, what’s my ROI, and as you’re doing this, you will be comparing the platforms and my guess is for the vast majority of you, LinkedIn is going to start looking really good. Sure that initial cost per click is high, but your access to the most highly targeted, the most valuable prospects that would ever do business with you is totally unprecedented. 28:09 So as we start talking about opportunities here, and you know what the outlook looks like for each of these networks, I would say that on Facebook, B2B brands tend to be pretty hung up on brand image. And so they tend to keep things pretty drab, which on Facebook, you really have to come across as conversational, as fun, as funny. And so Facebook does not work very well for B2B brands, unless they get a little bit fun. And on LinkedIn, lots of people are starting to push the envelope on LinkedIn, and trying to be creative. And this makes for a really fun kind of environment. And of course, the name of the game in marketing has always been standing out to get a disproportionate amount of attention. So anything you can do on LinkedIn right now, especially where people aren’t totally understanding of, you know this is a professional place, but we can also have fun. Try to push the envelope with things like meme ads, or one of the best performing images I ever had was an illustrated cartoon or comic just stand out a little bit. And don’t be don’t take your brand image too seriously. Unless your brand guidelines team is really down your throat. User generated content creative is trending really high right now on Facebook. And I don’t think it’s going to be very long until we start seeing a lot of that on LinkedIn, too. So feel free to jump the gun and start moving the direction that we’ve seen people on Facebook have success with in the past. Okay, I’ve got some great episode resources for you coming up right after the break. So stick around. 29:51 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 30:01 Okay, here’s some great resources for you. First of all, in the show notes, you’ll see a link to a YouTube video where I did in just a quick seven minutes, LinkedIn ads versus Facebook ads for B2B. So pretty much a breakdown of this episode. So if you want to send this to a boss or a co worker, so that they just get the gist, that would be a great one to send them. There’s also a link to the Marketing Land article that talks about how Facebook users spend about 37 minutes per day on average. So you can see how Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram all compare with daily usage. You’ll also see the link to the word stream article from 2018, where they show that people spend about 17 minutes per month on LinkedIn. Also, if you’re just looking to get started with LinkedIn ads, because I know many of you are, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning, All About LinkedIn Ads. It is pretty much the whole first hour and a half of what I teach people when I go to train teams internally, individually, and for that, I charge $500 an hour for that training. And I think on LinkedIn, you get it for $25 bucks if you don’t have LinkedIn Pro, or if you do have LinkedIn Pro, it’s free. So it’s a great course to get you started. On whatever podcast player you’re on, please hit that subscribe button so you can keep hearing these episodes. We’re going to keep coming out with them. And of course, I would love it if you would rate and review, because that’s going to help other people know that there’s even a podcast out there about LinkedIn ads. Of course, any ideas you have for the show any subjects you’d like covered. If you want to reach out, hit us up at podcast@b2linked.com. And I will see you back here next week cheering you on and your LinkedIn ads initiatives.
In this episode, Joanne Brethauer , North American Special Markets Manager of Septodont joins The Group Dentistry Now Show to discuss her tenured experience in the DSO space. She also introduced the audience to Septodont's latest technologically advanced delivery system called the DentaPen. Here is a link to an indepth article on the Dentapen from the GDN website - Dentapen - It's the Next Generation Cclad This is a must watch for emerging dental groups and DSOs. Our podcast series brings you dental support and emerging dental group practice analysis, conversation, trends, news and events. Listen to leaders in the DSO and emerging dental group space talk about their challenges, successes, and the future of group dentistry. The Group Dentistry Now show has listeners across the North America, Australia, Europe, South America and Asia. If you like our show, tell a friend or a colleague.
Jim Conte, Senior Director of Strategic Accounts N.A. for Carestream Dental and Jeff Telford, Director of Product Management for Carestream Dental’s Cloud Practice Management Solutions discuss DSO and emerging dental technology solutions. Also Jim and Jeff discuss the Carestream Dental Global Oral Health Summit and the DSO track geared toward emerging dental groups and dental support organizations. Use code GDN to save $50. Find out more about the Summit - HERE. Our podcast series brings you dental support and emerging dental group practice analysis, conversation, trends, news and events. Listen to leaders in the DSO and emerging dental group space talk about their challenges, successes, and the future of group dentistry. We have listeners across the North America, Australia, Europe, South America and Asia. If you like our show, tell a friend or a colleague.
Cześć! Dzisiejszy odcinek odbywa się w rodzinnej atmosferze, bo rozmawiam z moim młodszym bratem, Kubą Wołkiem, o przekładaniu marketingu na biznes. Kuba pracował dość długo w Eura7 i agencji Abanana, a obecnie pełni stanowisko Revenue Marketing Managera w Drukarni Chroma, czyli osoby odpowiedzialnej za zwroty z inwestycji.Czym dokładnie zajmuje się taka osoba w firmie? Wylicza zwrot inwestycji w marketing i dba, by był on jak najwyższy. W związku z tym musi też m.in. potrafić określić, które obszary marketingu przynoszą największe zyski. Pojęciem ściśle związanym z obowiązkami Revenue Marketing Managera i zarazem hasłem tego odcinka jest skrót ROMI – Return Of Marketing Investments. Wskaźnik ROMI odpowiada na pytanie, ile złotówek dla firmy przynosi złotówka zainwestowana w marketing. Jaki jest podstawowy wzór na ROMI na koniec sezonu? Prezentuje się tak:zysk (nie tylko przychód) – koszt marketingu = xx / koszt marketingu = yy x 100% = ROMIROMI wyższe niż 100% gwarantuje zwroty na wysokim poziomie i powoduje, że prowadzone działania marketingowe mają sens.Do tego typu obliczeń potrzeba jednak transparentności, aby znać np. wysokość marży do wyliczenia zysku. Zaufanie na linii biznes–marketing często nie jest jednak takie, jakby się chciało. Do jego zbudowania trzeba więc szczerości i zwyczajnej uczciwości z każdej ze stron.Czy ROMI wylicza się w kontekście jednego produktu lub kampanii, czy też całych inwestycji? To zależy od potrzeb – ten wskaźnik można wyliczać czy dla jednej akcji, czy dla sezonu. W przypadku drukarni sezonem jest rok kalendarzowy. Wówczas aby wyliczyć ROMI bierze się pod uwagę m.in. koszty użycia narzędzi i oprogramowania, mediów, współpracy z podwykonawcami czy koszty zatrudnienia osób w marketingu.Można wyodrębnić dwa typy ROMI. Pierwszy to zysk, a drugi, bardziej marketingowy, dotyczy dwóch typów wzrostu firmy – zysku wygenerowanego przez nowych klientów oraz zwiększenia koszyka zakupowego stałych klientów.Znajomość ROMI byłaby bardzo przydatna,np. przed rozpoczętą współpracą, jednak wyestymowanie wskaźnika na tym etapie jest niezwykle trudne. W takich sytuacjach opiera się raczej na innych wskaźnikach, np. KPI – kluczowych wskaźnikach efektywności kampanii – typu zasięg w grupie docelowej. Jak więc chociaż częściowo przewidzieć ROMI w trakcie planowania i czy to możliwe? W tym przypadku trzeba zacząć od pytań: czy ROMI mierzy się tylko w e-commerce? Jaka jest atrybucja?W obszar dzisiejszego zagadnienia wchodzi też kwestia percepcji reklam, dlatego rozmawiamy m.in. o ślepocie banerowej, web searchingu i web browsingu oraz podświadomości i jej roli w dokonywaniu wyborów. Podajemy też potencjalny najlepszy sposób na wyliczenie ROMI po akcji, np. po zapisach na jazdę próbną trwających 1 miesiąc.Ostatnia kwestia, którą poruszamy, to wskaźnik ROMI poniżej 100%. Może to skutkować zerwaniem współpracy, ponieważ zazwyczaj oznacza to po prostu porażkę. Jest to też lekcja dla zespołu marketingowego i okazja, aby wyciągnąć wnioski na przyszłość.To dość skomplikowana dyskusja, ale też pełna nowych pojęć i merytorycznych stwierdzeń, dlatego zachęcam do przesłuchania!Z tego odcinka dowiecie się:Co to jest ROMI?Na czym polega ROMI?Jaki jest wzór na ROMI?Jakie dane są potrzebne do wyliczenia ROMI?Co oznacza wskaźnik ROMI na poziomie wyższym niż 100%?Jak musi wyglądać współpraca, aby otrzymane dane były rzetelne?Czy ROMI wylicza się w kontekście jednego produktu lub kampanii, czy też całych inwestycji?Jakie aspekty codziennej pracy firmy są składowymi, z których wylicza się ROMI?Jakie są typy ROMI?Jak wyestymować wskaźnik ROMI w trakcie planowania akcji i czy to możliwe?czy ROMI mierzy się tylko w e-commerce? Co to jest atrybucja?Co to jest kampania GDN?Co to jest ślepota banerowa?Czego dotyczą i czym się różnią pojęcia: web searching i web browsing?Jaki jest najpopularniejszy typ atrybucji?Co to jest ROAS?Jakie mogą być pułapki w ROAS?Co oznacza wskaźnik ROMI poniżej 100%?Dołącz do grupy networkingowej podcastu Marketing ludzkim głosem:https://www.facebook.com/groups/MarketingLudzkimGlosem/Jakub WołekW branży digital marketingu obraca się od 8 lat, przez 4 lata prowadził dział mediowy w Eura7 i Abanana. Od 2 lat pracuje na stanowisku Revenue Marketing Managera w największej drukarni internetowej w Polsce, równolegle wspiera w działaniach marketingowych klientów z branży deweloperskiej w Krakowie i Warszawie. Specjalizuje się w płatnych kampaniach online opartych na mechanikach łączących różne kanały (np. Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, LinkedIn). Stara się odpowiedzieć na pytanie "czy i które działania marketingowe mają sens?". Dużo rozmyśla o danych, analityce, atrybucji i integrowaniu z natury odseparowanych kanałów marketingowych, a także o tworzeniu zaawansowanych lejków sprzedażowych. Prywatnie mąż Julki, tata 5 dzieci, muzyk–kompozytor–multiinstrumentalista.
Digital Marketing Strategist, Joakim Hansson, is the founder of Win Win Win Marketing. A direct response ad agency, working with 7 and 8-figure companies to scale their advertising profitably on multiple ad networks.In his past life, he was a CEO and CMO of 6, 8, and 9-figure companies and he's now a passionate direct response marketer and media buyer.Joakim discusses the success he saw with one client who was running cold traffic to a webinar funnel, selling a $500 product. During testing, they spent 3000 Euros on each ad network, Facebook and YouTube. They went on to pay close attention to both the CPL and EPL of those channels, to discover insights.If you'd like to work with Joakim, you can reach him at the following links:Facebook profile - https://www.facebook.com/WinWinWinMarketingEmail - hello@wwwm.eu
Alex Makarski is a technical marketer and AdSkills Certified Media Buyer who has managed millions of dollars of ad spend on Google Search, Shopping, GDN, YouTube, Microsoft Ads, and Twitter.Alex recently helped a Silicon Valley cloud computing company go from Series A to a successful acquisition by a multi-billion corporation, an eCommerce brand improve its ROAS from 200% to 800%, and a Toronto local services company grow their sales by 270% in just 18 months.He learned how to manage paid traffic by starting a local business and putting his own money into the ads.If you'd like to work with Alex, you can reach him at the following links:1. Facebook profile - https://www.facebook.com/alex.makarski2. Linkedin profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexmakarski/
Jeremy Gillespie is an AdSkills Certified Media Buyer with significant experience building multi-channel campaigns using Facebook, Search, YouTube, Shopping, GDN & Native Ad networks. He specializes in lead generation, as well as eCommerce and has helped companies break $100k in sales in a single day. Jeremy is a growth-oriented marketing geek, technology enthusiast, and customer evangelist. He believes in customer acquisition through optimizing the entire customer lifecycle - from acquisition, activation, conversion, and retention.If you'd like to work with Jeremy, you can reach him at the following links: https://www.facebook.com/jeremygillespie11 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremygillespie1/
#OMR19 ist vorbei, hier ist #askOMR71! Auch diese Woche nimmt sich Andre Alpar die Zeit, die schwierigsten und ausführlichsten Online Marketing-Fragen zu klären. Dieses Mal sollte man sogar fünf verschiedene englische Abkürzungen kennen und einen einstündigen OMR Podcast gehört haben, um überhaupt die Fragen zu verstehen. Hmm. Aber Andre schafft es wieder einmal, die Antworten simpler als die Fragen wirken zu lassen. Hier nochmal die Fragen zum Nachlesen: Wie machen B2C Brands heute am besten Branding? Wenn Sie Display machen: GDN oder lieber DSP und warum? (1:55) Im Podcast #177 hat Sebastian Johnston davon gesprochen, dass sie CPG / FMCG Produkte bauen indem sie die Nachfrage bestimmen anhand von Suchvolumina auf Google / Amazon. Dort finden sie heraus was Konsumenten suchen, warum sie es suchen, suchen sie es Bio, flüssig usw., wie muss das Produkt konstruiert sein, wieviel sind sie bereit zu zahlen etc. Wie funktioniert das und mit welchen Tools (abgesehen vom Keyword Planner) setzt man sowas um? (14:38) Schickt uns wie immer auch gerne eure Fragen via Whatsapp. Wir binden auch eure Audionachrichten gerne in die Folge mit ein! Die Nummer direkt ins Herz von #askOMR lautet: +49 176 30010452 Die Übersicht aller bisher gestellten Fragen findest du hier: https://bit.ly/2szU7yb Alle Infos, Links und die Shownotes zur aktuellen Folge findest Du im Laufe der Woche hier: https://goo.gl/Av2V79 In #askOMR beantworten wir Eure Fragen rund um das Thema Digitalmarketing. Stelle im #askOMR Slack-Workspace Deine Fragen an unseren Podcast-Host Andre Alpar. Du kannst hier einfach alles loswerden, was du von Andre & OMR wissen willst. Wir beantworten deine Frage für Dich und alle Hörer im #askOMR-Podcast, jeden Montag neu. Just ask OMR. Join now: www.omr.com/askomr podstars@omr.com
In the final episode of Digital Talk for 2017, I cover the new AR creation platforms from both Messenger and SnapChat, Instagram letting users follow hashtags, GDN’s new custom intent audiences, and the end of Net Neutrality. Listen to the full episode below. - In a special feature release, Facebook has also introduced responsive ads to digital marketers.
Over the past couple of years, Google has shifted its focus away from predominantly text-based ads on the Google Display Network (GDN) to more visual ad units. However, creating various compelling ads on the Google Display network can be difficult and time consuming even for the most advanced marketers. In this installment of MoreVisibility's Eye on Digital Marketing podcast, learn how Responsive Display Ads can help advertisers: Appear on the GDN with many different ad sizes and formats Reach more users on more devices Lower paid advertising costs And more. Listen to learn how to optimize your paid online ads with Google's Responsive Display Ads. Have questions? Please contact the Interactive Advertising experts at MoreVisibility.
Jason Stogsdill has been a member of the AdSkills community for more than 3 years and has gone from marketing jack-of-all-trades to GDN ninja.He's helped his clients diversify their traffic sources off of just Facebook, build consistency in their traffic flows to allow them to effectively split test, and construct campaigns that are on a pay-per-conversion basis.Big B2C companies are climbing over Jason to get his services due to the results he's produced for past clients.If you'd like to work with Jason, you can reach him at the following links:1. Facebook profile - https://www.facebook.com/jason.stogsdill.562. Email - jstogsdill@traffictitans.co
With more powerful targeting options on Google properties including GDN and YouTube and more sophisticated algorithms for automated bidding, PPC is very different from what it used to be just a few years ago. In this episode of the PPC Show, Anya will chat with Mandy Fitzberger of Atypical Digital about what the 2018 shakeup of Google's ad lineup means for the future of ad biz. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/the-ppc-show-podcast/message
If you want to know the value of your business and where it comes from, do the work. Take the time to collect the data, then hone in on what is the right fit for your company. Prioritize figuring out what makes your business tick in order to grow a sustainable brand. The bulk of Babak Azad's body of work lies in growing the Beach Body brand from 100 million to over 1 billion in revenue in eight years. Now working as a consultant in marketing for multimillion dollar businesses, Babak and his team focus on customer acquisition, retention, and the power of customer experience. Babak is here today to talk to us about building a lasting brand by helping business find a few channels that work well and hitting those home. Episode Highlights: Babak shares his unique way of looking at customer acquisition in every type of business he touches. Why business metrics are not as difficult as people think if they start with the basics. Start somewhere and then refine over time. The importance of knowing what a good customer is worth in any business. The things business owners should be tracking at a minimum. Look at the levels and the patterns. Get things right for a few to start off before rushing around trying to scale up too quickly. It is crucial to your success as a marketer to seek out and hone in on the best channels for your business. What your strategy should look like once those channels have been targeted effectively. Use service marketplaces such as Fiverr and Upwork to find small ways to find qualified staff to collect crucial data. How Babak helps clients discover the right intersection of branding and direct marketing then infuses that with customer sustainability. Why it is so important to start taking care of the customer. Hear Babak's 4 pillars of brand building. Transcription: Joe: So Mark I know that amongst all the Quiet Light Brokerage, Jason is probably the fittest. But I occasionally do get my butt kicked by someone online with beachbody.com. Most recently a young lady … I can't remember her name but I keep going back to it. I love the program and I love the story behind Beachbody's success. Because as you know I'm an old radio spot ad, radio infomercial, TV infomercial guy and that is where Beachbody started; I believe. And you had them on the podcast is that right? Mark: I did. Yeah, I think pretty much everybody has heard of Beachbody at some point or another. I mean it's a huge brand; huge name. I was able to talk to Babak Azad. He was the Senior Vice President for Media and Acquisitions; really fancy title, big companies … that comes with the big companies are fancy titles but his role at beach body was to figure out their customer acquisition strip. And this is what he does now. He's no longer with Beachbody. He did leave a little while ago. He's now with Round Two Ventures and they help e-commerce companies eight figure or nine figure, primarily e-commerce companies hone in on their customer acquisition strategies. What was great about this discussion is seeing as at scale, seeing what a … somebody who's in charge of a business that when he came into to Beachbody they were doing 100 million dollars in revenue annually. That's a lot of money. Joe: It's a lot. Mark: When he left in just a few years later they were doing over a billion dollars in annual revenue. Joe: Wow. How long was he there for? Mark: I don't know. I would have to take a look to see but it wasn't more than a few years. So he's really responsible for the explosive growth. I mean again a lot of people have heard about Beachbody or remember hearing about them. Way back when I was in college which unfortunately is too long ago now, so I remember hearing about them then. Now I mean everybody knows Beachbody. Everybody knows the brand and that was because of his customer acquisition strategy. We talked a lot about what that was and we talked a lot about problems and mistakes he sees especially in seven figure e-commerce businesses and even eight figure e-commerce businesses as they're trying to grow. I'll leave some of the mystery for the actual episode here but a couple of things that I pulled away from this that I thought were really good; one, he said that if he comes across a company and they have more than four main acquisition channels that he's guaranteeing they're wasting money and that they are completely … not doing what they should. Some people get all worked up and you know they think oh I need to be on Pinterest, I need to be on Instagram, I need to be on Facebook, I need to be here or there and everywhere. And he said that's not how it works. He said find a few channels. He says it should be no more than four. Ideally, it should probably be maybe three or even two to start. And do those well and just milk those for what they're worth. Really hit those homes. That was one thing that I really pulled away and the other thing I pulled away was his emphasis on data collection. And I run into this problem since that I own all the time as I always want the data collection to be perfect. And then I get kind of lost in the weeds, right? You get all the state in front of you. You have your analytics. You have all this stuff coming in and you're like what do I do with this? And his response was what I've heard from so many other successful entrepreneurs, just start doing something with it. You know he said go out and hire a college kid, go out on Upwork and have them put it into Excel and start analyzing the data. He said the data will start bubbling up from that by itself and start giving you insights and then that can direct you into what you should actually be collecting; a fascinating conversation from somebody who's done some pretty big time stuff. Joe: Yeah. It sounds like the data will speak to eventually. And even though when he left it's a billion dollar company I think that the lessons that he's learned along the way are incredibly valuable for those doing six and seven figures in revenue. You know a few weeks ago we had Ryan Daniel Moran on the podcast and he said: “find your customers”. Find your customers and then send them to the least half of resistance to ordering. So it's going to be interesting to see how those two things jive with … back in what he said here in the podcast. Let's get to it. Mark: Absolutely, let's go. Mark: Babak Azad thank you for joining me. Babak: Thanks a lot Mark, glad to be here. Mark: Did I butcher your name? Babak: You did not. You did it well the first time. Thank you. Mark: We literally just rehearsed this. We rehearsed it and then I hit record. I'm like I'm so going to screw this thing up. Cool, I … thank you so much for joining me. I know you and I talked about a year ago for a piece I wrote on entrepreneur.com and I'm super glad to have you on the podcast right now. We have a little bit of a tradition here at Quiet Light where we have our guests introduce themselves because hey you're better at knowing what your background is than I am. So why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself real quick? Babak: Sure. I live here in LA with my wife and two boys. I started out as a math major investment banking business school. I kind of came from that route. I started a magazine here in LA which failed miserably; best 25 grand I ever lost. I needed some humble pie, what I read that point of my life and then spent eight years in Beachbody. So the bulk of my professional experience was there; built analytics and then oversaw media and customer acquisition. So P90X, Insanity, 21 Day Fix, Shakeology, all that. Those efforts are for eight years and we kind of had a nice clean 10X. I already got there at 100 million so there's already substantial scale; really I obviously helped to push that thing to over a billion when I left three years ago right when my second son was born. The simple version of it, I have to start something, the team fell apart really quickly and then I started working on building a consulting business. So that's what I do right now; help generally seven and eight figure businesses, sometimes nine on … heavy on marketing, support around customer acquisition, retention, and analytics and really much more recently heavily infused with customer experience and really how to … I'm leading to writing a book about it too but really just the power of customer experience that's very much consistent with performance marketing approach but also really layering in building a lasting brand. That's really where my focus is today and I love what I'm doing. I have some great clients and yeah … so I'm having a good time with it. Mark: I love that you lead with the fact that you had a magazine startup that failed and then you just kind of glossed over the fact that you were part of the team that grew Beachbody from 100 million to a billion dollars. You know just a small footnote in your career history there. Babak: Yeah it's a … you know I have a … I appreciate all the experiences. You never want to go through those negative ones. I think we all have gone through them and just … I had to say I'm not sure I'm as humble as I need to be at times but [inaudible 00:07:25.5] as I mentioned it was an important thing of learning what it's like. I've been really much more of an analyst at that point. And then yeah I mean Beachbody was awesome. I had a great experience and … but it was time for me to go. You know eight years was a long time there and I grew a lot. I met my wife through one of my best friends there and [inaudible 00:07:41.6] me up for kind of this next chapter that I'm in right now. Mark: Cool we're going to be talking today about customer acquisition and also building a brand and some of the lessons that you pulled away from Beachbody and are now doing at Round Two Ventures is that right you're doing this at Round Two? Babak: Correct. Mark: Okay. I will link to Round Two Ventures and then your personal blog in our show notes and anything else that you want us to link to in the show notes. But … so we're going to talking a little bit about customer acquisition, lifetime value, and this intersection of branding. You have kind of this unique way of looking at this customer acquisition strategy, maybe we could just kind of start with kind of a general look at your philosophy when it comes to customer acquisition in the e-commerce but also in the SaaS world. You know I think metrics, being really metric heavy on customer acquisition and lifetime values, this is really kind of a SaaS world sort of conversation but you take it towards e-commerce and towards every other type of business as well. Babak: Yeah it's funny because I started really with physical products and given that distinction which I mean physical products, we sold DVDs and multi-vitamins at Beachbody. And that's really where a lot of my real marketing and just … I would say professional experience came from. And so this distinction of physical versus info versus SaaS really was nothing I ever really considered until I started frankly getting out of that world and talking to other folks. You know when I was at Beachbody and then started to learn about this but yeah I mean … so first off I was a math major but you know I wrote a piece a bunch of years ago saying business metrics are not college math, [inaudible 00:09:12.7] barely high school math. And I think that's the first thing is … I think I know a lot of people who are intimidated by the metrics or surely daunted by how do you do it or their systems. And you know I'm a firm believer first just to start with something. I think Peter Drucker you know said what you don't measure doesn't get better and so with the opposite is very much the case. That what you do measure, what you report on, what you send in an email or whenever it's your phone because it's fun to mine you just start to pay attention. So there's always a bit of grounding of just the basics in fundamentals. And that's really I think my approach. I'm not a shiny bright object guy. I believe that if you get the basics and fundamentals then much of what you need to do starts to take care of them itself. But really when it comes to customer lifetime … I mean I look at e-com and frankly all of the businesses, you know fundamental is I grew up as a paid media guy in marketing. And I think it's evolving over time but you know from a Beachbody and beyond heavy on TV, heavy on digital, you know that was what I knew. And certainly one of the core 10X. If you're going to run paid is you've got to know what a customer is worth. You know people sometimes ask like what's a good CPA? It's like I don't answer that question because I don't know your business. I don't know what a customer is worth. You know are you … do you have business constraints around needing to be casual positive on day one, on day 30, ideal business goals. There's so many factors that come in so this but really my belief is … and I just don't know any other way is especially when you're running paid media you need to know what a customer is worth because you need to know how much you can afford to pay for them. That sounds really basic and fundamental and hopefully for a lot of folks that is. But you know that's the core of it because ultimately it's how do you know if you're going to spend more or less? How do you know if your numbers whether in Facebook or otherwise are good or not? You have to have some of that measure. So a lot of the core work that I do with folks … and really I'd write about and all that is really if you're going to be running paid you need to understand those basics around customer acquisition. And then again start with whatever you have even if it's all customers that's … you're not dissecting by ad said or by Facebook versus Google. Just start somewhere and then you start to refine this overtime. Mark: All right. I love these conversations because I go into them sometimes not knowing what I'm going to ask and then after the first two or three minutes I've got a list of questions. So let's start with basics, you said start with the basics and fundamentals. What are those? What should somebody be tracking at a minimum? Babak: So let's assume [inaudible 00:11:39.2] whether you're a SaaS business, info product, physical product you know certainly from a from a traffic side the core stuff of spend, click through rates, CPC's, [inaudible 00:11:50.5], cost per click, conversions, cost per acquisition … whatever that means for you; for some folks, that's if your lead gen versus you're loop driving to an order. Those are just conventions and so the philosophical stuff and the strategic stuff applies to both. Certainly, you want funnel metrics, how many people hit your site whether it's landers or blog pages … you know get through the funnel and so whether you have one step or a five step process I would say again start with … if you have GA set up or you have others tools set up, what kind of just basic tracking of how many people are hitting pages, what's your conversion rate, average order value, and then ideally over time … and whether it's someone converts on day zero or beyond, what is the value of those people over time. So I generally try to look in ice sized chunks of day one … day zero, day one to 30, 31 to 60, and then beyond. And depending on your risk profile, your business goals, all those things you may determine how long you want to look out and how much you want to apply towards customer acquisition. Mark: Let's talk about that a little bit here because this is something that I've run across a few times recently. You know looking out over these different strata of periods of time; zero to 28 and then this kind of second up to maybe around 60 days; why are you taking a look at that? And you're taking a look at this in terms of the value that client is going to bring to you right? Babak: Right. Mark: So why break it out into those different groups? Babak: Well first and foremost depending on the business goals and constraints, that can oftentimes going to define how you're going to approach managing. Let's say … I mean I'm going to talk about paid media for a moment, that's going to manage that because if you look at … if you need to be breakeven based on credit terms, cash flow, whatever that is; if you need to be breakeven by day 30 or day 60 then you need to know what that customer is worth. And so based on a margin basis not just certainly on a revenue basis but on a margin basis you need to know how much you're making by day 30, by day 60 cumulative and that's going to help to define what your CPA targets are. And then it's … again for me, there is no right and wrong whether you're managing to a breakeven, to a margin percent, and if you are just revenue driven and you've got venture funding and you need to be driving those are not for me to say. And I never have a perspective of right and wrong … it's those are personal and business decisions but you need to understand that. And then frankly once you have some of these base lines then it's a matter of how do you start to improve those things over time. So if you know what day one, day 30, 31 to 60 then presumably someone in your team whether it's the owner, the single person, or someone on the team is spending time testing to say how do we actually start to drive this and improve that. And again different models you may need to look at 180 days, you may look at a year … I mean I work with folks that have a one year break even because they can afford to do that; some folks breakeven on day one. And so different businesses and different models can allow for that and some it's much more difficult. So you just have to understand the nature of your business and then what kind of things you're trying to constrain with. Mark: Yeah, by the way, some example … so something that I've run into in a business recently where we had a solid lifetime value number, and we were able to calculate it pretty well by taking a look at customers that had … this was a subscription based business, we took a look at customers that have canceled over the last six months and looked at their average lifetime value. And you know the number was something like I don't know $130, $140 but the average ticket value for any single sale was maybe about $30-35. What we found was that there was these whales and there right? These whales in there that were spending $3,000 and it took them years to be able to get to that point. So when you take a look at that lifetime value analysis we say okay that they might be worth $140 or $130 whatever the number was but was in order to do that you need a couple of these whales to wait for three, four years before you can actually get that value back. Babak: Right. Mark: So we had to kind of take a look at that from that kind of strategic way [inaudible 00:15:50.3] okay actually what are we getting from clients on average in month one and then in month two and then a month three and beyond that. We're not going to care too much about the lifetime value because it's going to take too long to recoup that cost. Babak: Right. Yeah and some businesses may not be able to afford to wait that long for those whales to kick in. And really then it means A. you're managing your risk in a certain way. Again, whatever is appropriate and then you're basically operating at a higher margin than maybe you could operate if you could tolerate that and maybe you want to take some of that and spend it into media. But if you can't wait that long and there's just too much risk and it's too small of a percent and too inconsistent then that may just be the way you run it. I think I get in some ways the same question when you're first starting, it's … that's great if you have five years of data and you have a much more sophisticated and robust [inaudible 00:16:37.1] data in your business. But if when you're just starting you probably need to start more conservative right? An owner that has bootstrapped the business knows that you start with what you can afford and then as you learn, as you develop and have this history… the history in the business then you start to understand your customers better; what they're worth and then maybe you can start to manage your media and how you think about that better and surely hopefully concurrently you're optimizing the funnel so your customers are worth more, you're converting better, all these types of things right? But that's just the nature of again where businesses are in there maturity and how long they've been around. Mark: Yeah one of the common objections I hear from people … because we ask people who are selling their business all the time what's the average lifetime value of a client? And one of the biggest objections I get to that is I have no idea because customers are still with me. And you said something at the beginning and that is just start. There's a lot of models out there, just start with something. Do you have a basic model that you like to follow? I know for myself I just like to take a look at okay I might sell if a customer is with us and from the Quiet Light perspective we can say the same thing. Our business is typically one off but we have people who have sold two, three, four businesses. All the same, we don't want to assume that, we're just going to take a look at what … the lifetime value I spend right now with the assumption it could grow. Do you have a recommended model for people that are saying I don't know how to [inaudible 00:17:58.7] for these people that are still with us? Babak: So the fact that a customer is still with you for me is not a reason to not understand what a customer is worth. And so let's say they've been with you for … let's say the businesses have been around for a year and you've got 20%, 50% of the customers have been around that long. Do the average based on how ever long that cohort has been around. And if the other ones are … you know seem like they're directionally going that way then great. And then as you get more information you can start to build your model and add to it. But you know I think part of the thing also to be careful over depending on how long the business has been around is how many people are you looking at? So if you've got 100 customers versus 10,000 you trust more volume, right? And then the other part is just looking at I like to break things down into monthly cohorts. Let's assume it's just purchase, so I'm not lead gen but it's purchase, I like to look at who are all the people who first transacted in January, and then in February, and then in March and look at their relative month one, month two, month three revenues and certainly again margin and then start to see what kinds of patterns start to form and then again. And starting really that at that level and then you just start to refine this thing and as you get more data and … then great then you start to layer in. So worst case you're being conservative because you have customers who are going to stick around a little longer but that's a good thing and that's a good worst case to have as opposed to certainly the opposite where you may be overestimating or you may be overlooking at one group that's worth a ton and everyone else isn't remotely tracking towards that super high value group. Mark: I think a problem that people run into a lot is they've up the perfect be the enemy they good, they want to get that perfect model and if they think they can get it then they don't do it. I know I've fallen victim to that quite a bit as well. I want to [inaudible 00:19:41.4] Babak: Quote I have on my phone that shows up is perfect … done is better than perfect. And it's really easy to get stuck in that analysis paralysis perfection like … and also frankly this idea that everyone else has it better. I think a lot of people think that bigger companies or those using better tools always have better data but is definitely not the case. Like a lot of times the bigger companies they have too many legacy systems so I think oftentimes that comparison can pull people back because they think I'm never going to be able to achieve what someone else is doing or all that big data stuff. I mean just start with what you got and literally it could be Excel with a college kid and then you start building from there. Like literally it can be that that can be very very effective and I've seen it be that way. Mark: Yeah that's a good lead into my next question because you know you started at Beachbody with 100 million in revenue right? So you guys wanted to go ahead and start digesting data, you put a million dollars towards hiring on a new team just to be able to digest data. The entrepreneur who has an e-commerce business doing three million, four million bucks that's a lot more of a challenge for them to bring on that much of a team. Excel, analytics, are there any other programs they may want to look at or systems that you know of that might be a good starting point or would you even recommend going out and hiring a college kid or going onto a place like Upwork to be able to have somebody to crunch numbers? Babak: Yeah I mean so first of all when I joined again it was seven, what you think maybe a hundred million dollar business has in terms of systems and processes I would say first of all the tools today are so so much better. But I looking back, I work with some hundred million dollar businesses now that have dramatically better systems and reporting frankly because the tools are just much easier. So you know it took a year or so for me to get correlatively cleaner data and not even clean. So first of all even back then it wasn't like everything was so dialed in, that's kind of part of my point. And then second again like depending on people whether on Shopify or Magento or whatever your platform, honestly the basic thing is do a data dump. I've hired for multiple clients someone part time on Upwork to basically do some slicing and dicing; basic stuff, get some things in place. And we're not talking … so first of all even if you hire someone full time and let's say that person is 50,000 a year just picking a number, your exposure to that person is not 50,000 because within 90 days you should know whether that person is going to be working out or not. So let's say it's a quarter of that plus maybe a little bit more so oftentimes first people think about if you're going to bring on someone full time that that annualized cost that's really not what it is. You should know I think within 90 days that you're getting what you need and they're on a path. But at the very least there are definitely folks on Upwork and really just looking for someone who's got some similar work; I put people through an Excel test to make sure they can do the basics. It's all made up information and yeah you start with that and I've literally had college kids help out just … who were good at Excel. They don't need to know that much, they just need to know how to slice and dice some information. And maybe it's an MBA, I'm not saying you have to go there but certainly Upwork, Excel, using again basic tools. You do not need certainly anything remotely close to enterprise so you get stuff going. And I will say I do, I run some numbers for some of my clients and it's literally … I did one about a week ago, Excel, Hubspot, Shopify, GA piece it all together and we had a pretty rich view. It took some time obviously but we then had a pretty rich view of what those customers look like. Mark: So with somebody who has a Shopify store or an Amazon store where you can't really track customers as well with Amazon, but let's say Shopify store where you can track your customers, or a SaaS application or anything else where you're tracking those customers would you literally just go out and do a dump of that data of the customers and go back and start to calculate okay this is what … you know graphing it out, these customers are worth this much in those first 30 days and then it starts to look like this when we move out? Babak: Yup that's exactly. I mean … so and that's what we did. Let's say you're looking at 2017 data it's literally [inaudible 00:23:52.4] all the new customers and that's part of the thing is making sure they're new versus repeat. But let's just say you can identify that hopefully relatively easily; who are the new customers who purchased for the first time in January of '17, February of '17, March of '17 and literally track those people. Look at their February orders for January, look at the March orders for both like you know January and February and really that's literally started that way. And you can then start to slice and dice by traffic source, by product, by offer, by ad set. But that's next level, for some folks they just want to get the pure basics. Just start with that average thing and then once you have that and then you start to refine over time. But literally it's a data dump and you know if you can marry it with GA or with your CRM or ESP then great but at the very least start with the overall, start with maybe one line and then you just start to get better from that point. And frankly again that's what I did with Beachbody, that's what I do with my clients. And whether it's me or working with their teams you just start and then you start to refine over time. Mark: All right so let's go to the other side of this conversation. We started to get a good sense for our lifetime value and what a client brings to us in terms of different time frames; the first 30 days, the next … the first 60 days and so on and so forth and we know our cash flow requirements. Again, people listening, you have to keep in mind if you're going to spend $50 on a client and they're not going to pay you $50 until month six you need enough cash flow to be able to get to that payback period. Let's build a strategy, what does the strategy look like then at that point from acquiring the customers and going through different channels? I know obviously with Beachbody you guys did television, you did radio, you did a lot of media which was hard to track. And we see this a lot with … you know online platforms are really good right now at tracking with view through conversions and everything else but there's still some of those mediums out there that aren't great and imperfect. How does that sort of factor into your decisions when it comes to acquisition channels? Babak: Yeah I mean so no matter what channel you're in attribution is the bane of everyone's existence. A very very few people have it down and like oh I know what that means to have it down. You want to get to the point where you feel like a level of comfort and confidence. You know these days again most of the work … I have one client that I work with on TV and it's a very rare exception of how good their attribution model is but let's say that for the most part, most people are doing … I mean it's digital heavy. So for me, I basically focus and work with folks on really only a few channels so Google … which for me is Google and Bing. I mean people always forget about Bing, it's another 5, 10% and my joke is if you don't want that 5, 10% can I have it? And I'm joking but no one ever says yes. But it's using higher ROI's especially when you're talking slightly older demos. But Google and Bing, Facebook and Instagram, your internal e-mail and affiliates, and frankly just … and I said just but if you focus there I've seen plenty of businesses go well into nine figures; focus there. And then certainly you can layer on radio and podcast, TV, direct mail; but honestly Google, Facebook, affiliates, e-mail and internal … you know that's really where I put a lot of time and attention. And I'll say even then attribution is a bit of a mess because Facebook and Google don't talk to each other. So they're each one who takes some credit … you know or using GA last click, what's happening are people opting in through Facebook and then converting through e-mail? But you really just have to start to piece together things, at the end of the day again depending on your business model your PNL and bank account are the true measures of it. And so that sounds like a totally average overall view but yeah that's again I work with folks that have that and then they've got to a certain level of sophistication. So you start with … you know start and piece together what does Google say, what does Facebook say, like if you add up those two do you even have that many orders? You're going to have to be very careful about double counting but you just start to piece together this … the data starts to tell a bit of a story. I would just say one thing you mentioned view through, I am a very very very conservative on view through so the point of it I basically I ignore it; certainly from a GDN side and really even from Facebook. I just think unless you prove it I'd rather start with a [inaudible 00:28:07.2] and it doesn't work. I mean you got to prove it as opposed to just proving it. But I know that you know 28 day click one day view on Facebook is the standard set up. I moved most people to 7 day click not because it's right but mostly because it … we got to account for double counting, AdWords, what's going on in email, things like that. So there's … again there's no right and wrong but that's one of places I've kind of dialed in a little bit is looking at 7 day click. But honestly my biggest … the biggest mistake I oftentimes see with people with channels is they have too many. And so I think if people say oh I heard someone's doing something on Pinterest or YouTube or I got to do this, frankly if I see people who have four channels where it's 25% in each, that says actually something is not being done well enough. And usually, it's people who are really scaled, I kind of have this thing of two offers two channels, most businesses that have scaled substantively they've gone deep and hard in a couple channels which basically means they're left probably some money on the table elsewhere maybe but it means they're focused. And that means they're exploiting where things are working. And so I think that's one of the things, people think I got to be in so many places, I don't … I have not found that to be the case at all. And even though it sounds like you're concentrating your risk it also means you're exploiting an opportunity. And that's really I think oftentimes what you're really trying to do. Mark: How do you know when to give up on the channel if it's not working or would you? Babak: You know it's a good question I think at some point you have to make a call so it's … I don't have a rule around it and I put it that way hard and fast. I think it's … first of all, I like modeling off of other people; not copying but modeling. And so it is … it can be dangerous because you can see all these other people seemingly running a bunch of ads and yours may not be working but you may not know what their goals are and their goals may be different than yours. So I think it's always … you got to be careful about comparison but you know I think at some point you have to take … just like a lot of things you have to take an honest assessment and say do we feel like we've given this a fair shot? How much time and money have we invested? Frankly, what is it pulling because we all have tradeoffs whether you're a six figure business or a nine figure business everyone is resource constrained in their own relative way. So you have to pick and choose your battles and really where you think now. I guess … and sometimes the market maybe telling you something too that it may not be the channel but maybe the way you're executing on it right? Which may be kind of the same thing for you but I think that's one of the things too is really you have to take an honest assessment of what have you done, what have you tried, have you talked to people, have you pulled in whether experts or friends or done some research and you know. I think then it's relative to other things that you have in front of you, where is your time, your capital, your resources is better allocated. Mark: Yeah all right that's awesome. I told you before we started recording this that we were not going to get to the one thing I really wanted to talk to so I'm going to get to it now. And that is something I find fascinating about your approach to direct response marketing because direct response marketing we often think about in terms of the money that goes in we want to make sure that we're getting a positive ROI out of that and we're just measuring that and that alone. And we see it almost as this opposite of brand marketing which is splash it out there splash it out there and splash it out there and it's kind of a long play. But you have this intersection and you do this a lot with Beachbody as well, you have this intersection of brand and also the direct response. If somebody is focusing on those four that you put out, the Facebook, the Google, affiliate, and internal e-mail, what can they do to start building a brand and why is that important? Babak: So I think the first distinction is around something you said and I think a lot of people will latch onto which is brand marketing. And so really what I focus on and try to talk to folks about is building a brand. And so for me the distinction is brand marketing oftentimes is associated with you spend a bunch of money on media marketing whatever that's basically non-trackable and that is trying to build brand awareness but without necessarily tying it to some kind of metric. And I say that as opposed to focusing on building a brand. For me, that really comes down to the customer experience. And so those are totally can be integrated with a performance marketing direct response model. And really that's about how do you start to take care of the customer and treat them frankly like you would want to be treated if you were the customer. So I think it's less about brand marketing initiatives and it's more about this idea of does the word in the Lexicon around building a brand, about building something that's lasting; how often does that come up in the organization? I had breakfast actually with a friend this morning and we're talking about the idea of what's on brand versus off and what that means. But really at the end of the day, it's are you building something that's got some sense of sustainability? And I think oftentimes especially when you're earlier on the idea of shortcuts of doing things that are maybe … whether it's not as clean or not as brand building, I get that everyone's got to make their call all around those things but ultimately if you want to build something that's got some sense of scale and got some sense of sustainability I do believe you have to be focused on building a brand. Because when you do that you start to treat the customer better. You start to invest more in your product. You start to invest more in the kinds of media and frankly, that kind of stuff can be infused in your acquisition efforts. Did I mention that I'm writing a book on customer experience and that really came from how do you start to bring DR and brand together and really things like tapping into a sense of identity in community. That's not just brand marketing that's non-trackable, you can start to build that into your video ads on Facebook, Dollar Beard Club … now The Beard Club and they've done a phenomenal job of there's this sense of identity in association with you're a man with a beard. And so they tap into that and who you are, what that means, and so that is one layer of customer experience and building that brand that is clearly tied to performance marketing but it starts to infuse that. I would say two things like … you know so my four categories is really around the human and emotional stuff; there's product, there's the transactional experience, and then there's content like video. And they're not mutually exclusive [inaudible 00:34:16.0] stretch. But I'll say like with subscription businesses whether online … I mean media, SaaS, or physical box, one of the best places or best examples I see people have make some mistakes is around order notification. So this is not brand marketing, this is are you treating the customer better? Are you letting them know that next order is going to ship, that next feeling is going to happen? And oftentimes I see people say well if I send an email before that billing my churn rate is going to go up and my response is absolutely you're correct but also you know what happens is your customer is actually aware of that billing. They're not annoyed. I mean I think we all faced that thing where whether it's a meal subscription or otherwise, a billing happened and we didn't know about it we're annoyed we got to go cancel. We tell our friends, we post. That kind of stuff actually has an impact on the brand. And honestly one of the best examples I've seen of how to use that notification positively is Dollar Shave Club, they send a notification but they use that as a promotional opportunity to say your order is about the ship do you want to add something to it? And so whether it's their shaving cream or any of their other products they use that … and again 20 or 30% of people are going to open your email if you're lucky. So it's not everyone but you get the brand benefit of notification but then use that as a promotional opportunity and say do you want to add something more. And I would much rather be playing in that kind of world rather than trying to sneak in what you think is a one or two more orders but it's very hard to quantify. But you absolutely are hurting the brand if you're playing a longer game when you're trying to sneak stuff in and not be as clean and upfront. And yes Netflix and Direct TV don't do that but again those are very very different businesses than subscription boxes or something that you start on a risk free trial that frankly doesn't get the kind of use that Direct TV and Netflix would. Mark: Could you repeat those four categories again? Those are great. Babak: So the first one is really I talk about as like the human and emotional aspects. So that's things like identity, community, exclusivity, things that are raw human needs and traits. The second is really product, and there are multiple layers on it but I think it's kind of crazy that I have to focus and emphasize it but the number of people that I see that don't have the attention to detail on product. I've talked to people who's starting they want to private label fine but the better your product [inaudible 00:36:35.0] part it doesn't always win but a better product gives you a better chance at that. Third is the transactional experience, so how do you take people through your funnel, what is it like to get a refund, what it's like to get … I talked to customer service those kinds of things. And the fourth is content, so how do you use video, music, spokesperson, or a character. I mean really each of these things, there are plenty of examples of companies that are using all of them or just one of them to really start to enhance that experience and really start to rile their customers. That's the [inaudible 00:37:05.3] kind of thing but you basically need customers these days to be blown away. It is … you know I like to say it like it's … when people say it's the easiest time to start a business because generally the tools are easier but it's also like that means it's brutally difficult to compete and to differentiate. So you've got to be just a ton better than everyone else. And my experience is that customer experience and these kinds of things is really what you need and again it's infusing this idea of playing the longer game into performance marketing and direct response. These two are not at odds. Mark: Cool. All right you got a book that you're writing right now do you have any idea when that's going to be done? Babak: Best case is Thanksgiving time but I've started … I mean I'm happy to post a couple of links to some of the things I've started to write about whether in LinkedIn or in Twitter to just to kind of go a little bit deeper into these and show some specific examples. But yeah we're still talking a few months out. Mark: Okay I know we've had a couple of other people that are reading books and we always get e-mails after saying “Hey can I get notified when that book is out?” So do us a favor one when you do have that out send me a message and I'll make sure I update everyone that wants to be updated on that. And then where can people learn more about you? Obviously Round Two Ventures, any other place? Babak: Yeah I mean my business is Round Two, it's Round Two Partners. Visit the website. But yeah the same thing and it's like a holding company but my blog is the easiest. It's just my name, it's Babak Azad B-A-B-A-K-A-Z-A-D.com And that's what … I put a lot of content there and then frankly there and LinkedIn. I'm @BabakAzad pretty much on everything other than Gmail of all things but … another Babak Azad stole that from me but … he was earlier but yeah I'm on pretty much every platform. But my blog and LinkedIn are the two easiest platform. Mark: Fantastic, this is great. So thank you so much for coming on, I really do appreciate it. Babak: Thanks a lot Mark I'm glad to be here. Links and Resources: Round Two Partners Babak's Blog LinkedIn
This week on The PPC Show podcast, JD is joined by Justin Brooke, Founder of AdSkills, to discuss his tactics for scaling Google Display Network campaigns that eventually got 14,000 customers. Tune in to the podcast as we dive into: - Justin's story of how got started out as intern running ads back in 2007 - His 5X3 method for starting out on the GDN and tactics for scaling performance - How you can set up GDN campaigns to be as targeted as Facebook ad campaigns --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/the-ppc-show-podcast/message
When you talk to eCommerce merchants about the Google Display Network (GDN) or display ads, in general, they usually fall into one of 3 camps: 1. They feel it's only effective as a remarketing vehicle. 2. They feel like people are more likely to get struck by lightening than click a display ad (had a guy say that to me once). 3. They're intrigued but apprehensive because they've heard so many display campaign horror stories. I've always been in camp 3. Very intrigued and knowing it could work, but also knowing that the road to success with display ads (outside of remarketing) is more than a little bit tricky. I first met Mike when we both spoke at Traffic & Conversion Summit in San Diego this March. Mike has officially cracked the code for creating profitable GDN campaigns. He is the co-author of The Ultimate Guide to AdWords and the owner of AgencySavvy.com. He's been actively managing AdWords campaigns since 2004. Mike is the real deal as you will soon witness. This podcast reveals the method behind the madness that produces GDN campaigns that work and scale.
The Agents of Change: SEO, Social Media, and Mobile Marketing for Small Business
Just what the heck is Google Display Network (GDN), and how can you make it work for your business? With so many ad platforms out there, what makes this one special and how can your business best benefit from using it? GDN allows businesses to advertise images and videos on websites of their choice, so you have the ability to get pretty niche here if you choose to. Plus, think of all ways that can help your online branding! You have the ability to find and reach customers that otherwise might have been missed through other advertising platforms. Lisa Raehsler is about as “expert” as you can get on the topics of PPC, display, retargeting, and social media ad campaigns. Her strategy and program development for countless businesses over the last 17 years has shown quick, proven results. www.agentsofchangecon.com/153
Show Notes Buzz 1: Dan Lyons new book, Disrupted a. What we can learn from Hubspot's response to a very public joust with Dan Lyon's apparent attack on Hubspot and their methodology. b. 4,000 word excerpt from Dan Lyon's book: http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyons/ c. Dharmesh Shah's personal LinkedIn response to Dan: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/undisrupted-hubspots-reflections-disrupted-dan-lyons-dharmesh-shah d. Classy, professional and lot marketers can learn from a PR perspective. Buzz 2: How to make Remarketing Profitable a. Visitors who are retargeted are 70% more likely to convert on your website - research by Comscore who also found retargeted ads lead to a 7-10x increase in branded search traffic after 4 weeks of retargeted ads exposure. Source: http://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2014/09/infographic-retargeting-advertising-statistics.html b. What is remarketing: It allows you to position ads in front of defined audiences that have previously visited your website - as they browse elsewhere around the internet. c. The biggest network is GDN, reaches 90% of all internet users. d. Tip: Just Get started. You must have a minimum of 100 active visitors or users within the last 30 days for your ads to show; lists targeting Google search must have a minimum of 1,000 active visitors or users. Source: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2472738?hl=en> e. Tip: 3-4 sizes account for 80% of impression share: http://blog.netpeak.us/google-adwords-banners-what-are-the-most-effective-ad-sizes/ f. Categorise your ads. Great resource from Adroll, page 12: https://www.adroll.com/en-NZ/resources/guides-and-reports/20150730-performance-marketers-guide-retargeting-part-i/view/en-NZ § 1. All visitors. This is your broadest segment, and will include everyone who visits your homepage. § 2. Product. Set up product segments for users who have looked at a specific page, product, or piece of content. § 3. Cart segment. Cart segments capture high-intent users who made it to your checkout page, but didn’t convert. For B2B companies, this could be people who landed on a free trial page, but never filled in their information. § 4. Conversion segment. Finally, create a conversion segment to identify users who already converted. You can then exclude them from retargeting campaigns, or create new loyalty campaigns to encourage repeat purchasing. g. Some final considerations on creating ad creative that converts: i. CTA vs stage in buyer's funnel ii. Keep in context what they already know iii. Have a different creative for different lists iv. Auto-tagging in google but don't auto-tag in HS, issues with data visibility in terms of campaigns/ads that worked.