PPC for SaaS - Top Experts Reveal Advice to Scale: Dylan Hey & Luis Camacho #188

And then on the PPC side, what channels are you generally finding the best success for, say, specifically B2B SaaS companies on an ROI or even on, say, cost per trial or cost per demo basis? Is it LinkedIn, Facebook, Google AdWords? You guys are testing them all. What are you seeing the best results with?

Yeah, so it does vary depending on what kind of space your SaaS company is in and who you're servicing, but the core pillar is always the same for us. So Google, on Google Search, Google Display, YouTube in some cases, Facebook and Instagram, LinkedIn, and then the review sites. So Capterra specifically is where most SaaS companies can see a pretty quick and easy return without having to put too much time as well. And the way that we would set things up is you have to consider where, like who your buyer persona is and where they're spending their time. A lot of SaaS founders get nervous or SaaS marketers get nervous about advertising on Facebook and Instagram, especially the larger kind of enterprise businesses. They'll say—

Yeah.

isn't active there or it doesn't make sense. But we have a number of enterprise clients who have deal sizes in the mid-six figures annually recurring. They're servicing these huge enterprise businesses. And for them, for some of them, Facebook is our most successful advertising channel. So it really varies. One thing I would say is to make paid social work, there's a few things you need which are really important. And when I say paid social, I'm talking specifically about Facebook and Instagram, and then we'll get to LinkedIn in a second.

Mm-hmm.

But with Facebook and Instagram, it's super, super important to be Feeding the platforms with as much high-quality data as you possibly can. So for us, when we're running ads focusing on conversion, which is trial signup or demo booking, and it's to a cold audience, we use lookalike audiences the most. That's where we do a lot of our testing. And Facebook performs the best when you give it the lookalike audiences that are the highest intent. So usually that's like the segment of highest LTV of previous customers that you've had. Maybe it's the recent purchases or the largest deal sizes that you've completed recently. If you don't have enough data to match an audience for those in Facebook, then we start working backwards and start looking at lookalikes of trial signups or demos booked, for example. But where those platforms come into their own is when you have really good quality data. We see LinkedIn at the moment is definitely an expensive channel, but working well for content promotion specifically. So where we're seeing success on LinkedIn at the moment is we're building out Content-led campaigns, so promoting ebooks, webinars, guides, et cetera, and utilizing the LinkedIn lead form functionality. So I don't know how much you know or people listening to this or watching this may know, but LinkedIn have the option to build out and use their own LinkedIn lead forms. So basically someone clicks on the ad, you can choose which data you want to show in the form and it prefills the data. So we'll usually have like first name, last name, company name, company size, LinkedIn profile URL, Everything will be prefilled and the experience for the user is extremely simple. They click on the ad, that is already filled, and then they just press one button and then it submits the data, they get what they need, and we sync that up with CRM systems using Zapier most of the time.

Mm-hmm.

'Cause LinkedIn doesn't have the best integrations there, but those campaigns are working very well for getting very good quality traffic into like mid and top of funnel flows at the moment. So we'll build out ABM lists or target company lists within LinkedIn and just run the ads specifically to those people. Google is our number one place for high-intent trial conversion, demo booking conversion, just because you can have so much control over who you're serving ads to, what the messaging is, the landing page experience, et cetera. So that's a real quick breakdown. I would say we're seeing the most success always, most of the time on Google, and that's purely just because that's where most people spend their budget.

Mm-hmm.

But as an agency, we see really great success on paid social, Facebook and Instagram, and I think that's because we have like half of my team at Hey Digital is creative. So we've really doubled down on high-quality creative through video ads, GIFs, carousels, all different bits and pieces. And that's something that you also need to make paid social work is good quality creative specifically for ads. Don't be running 5-minute explainer videos as an ad and expect them to perform. You need like snappy creative that's gonna move quickly that you can iterate on. really quickly and introduce new ones frequently.

That makes sense. And then you're talking, just going back to Facebook, setting up lookalike audiences and looking at data there to refine your audience and get better targeting. What is the minimum amount you suggest for emails or users that you have that you want to upload? Is it— I've heard different things from 50, 100, 150 as a minimum before you want to go back and say, hey, let's use trials instead.

Yeah. Everyone always says different things and Facebook says different things sometimes too. Facebook, I think most recently it says that you need to have, Facebook needs to match at least 100 people in the same location, in the same country. And so for Facebook to match 100 people, you usually need a lot more than 100 people too. That's the key thing to match. So most clients that we work with, rarely will they have enough volume of emails to focus it on LTV. Some of them will, some of them won't. So usually we're looking at trials, like previous trial converters and lookalikes of those. But you can always still just try and create the audiences and see what Facebook kind of does, 'cause sometimes you can, sometimes it will let you build a really small audience, and sometimes it will ask for large ones, but often the more data you can give the platform, the better. So I always start with seeing if you can match enough people in the audience of the highest value, and then like working gradually backwards from there. If you start looking at, okay, we don't have enough trial signups to build a lookalike, so the next step back from that is like, Visitors to the website, that's usually when I'm like, okay, I probably wouldn't be running ads to those people trying to get them to convert. You can use content to help them, but I wouldn't be running like a lookalike campaign to just website visitors expecting them to convert to a trial because often that's when audiences become a little bit messy.

And another part that SaaS companies who are starting to look into setting up their PPC or start looking at that option, they're looking for help on setting up their Budgets, right? How much should I be putting toward this? How do you suggest to these companies be thinking about setting up their budget for PPC to maximize the results while you still having to manage that aspect to be able to get enough data and generate enough revenue and prove yourself within that short period of time? So you said yes, okay, look at this as a 3-month, 6-month commitment, but how much should I be putting in and thinking that I should be putting towards this to make it worthwhile for everybody?

Yeah, good question. So it does vary for for like depending on a number of factors. We have on our blog, we have like a post that we put together which is how to calculate your PPC advertising budget. So if anyone searches for like SaaS ads budget or Hey Digital PPC ads budget, they'll be able to find that. And so we put in some like top-level calculations and things to think about, which is kind of similar to what we were talking about a little minute ago with regards to working back off of averages and average numbers that you have from deal conversion rates And everything else. What I would say is the way that we usually set budgets with our clients is if they've run ads before, then of course that gives us a bit more insight. But I know that this is never an easy kind of conversation for anyone. It's like, how do we plan a paid ads budget 3 months, 6 months in advance if we haven't run ads before? So usually what we'll do is we'll make sure you have a clear defined budget for the first month. Like we'll say, okay, this is the, this is the top line of what we're willing to spend, like what we're willing to spend for that first month. And we'll build out a media plan off the back of that of, okay, these are all of our campaigns, this is how much each campaign is going to spend to fit in with that media plan. And then as time goes on, we'll then start collecting data and building out the real kind of budgets after that.

Mm-hmm.

So we'll usually begin with just setting a budget for the first month, like a firm budget for the first month, and then setting kind of flexible budgets for for month 2 and month 3 when we first begin and adjusting those on the fly. It's not like a, it's not a super nice answer where it's like, okay, you just take this and you do this and you do this, but that's usually the way that we start looking at things. And I think when people are factoring in their budgets, you just need to think about, if you're just getting started and you've never run any ads before, the first thing is figuring out, okay, you know what customers are worth to you, so if you decide to invest $10,000 a month, like that's your top line, or $5,000 or $15,000, whatever it might be, just figure out, like set some conservative estimations based on your conversion rates. It should then result in hopefully this many demos or signups, but you're never gonna know until things are up and running. So it's kind of challenging, and I think that's why sometimes people get a bit scared about running ads for the first time is as much as we like to plan and forecast, You never really get true numbers until ads are up and running because there's only so much that you can trust like Google Search Console's data and like Keyword Planner and everything else like that.

Exactly. When you're coming into these new B2B SaaS companies, you're looking at their funnel of what they have in place. Generally when you're coming in, what's the best strategy in most cases? Are you, you know, a newly set up campaign where you can start from scratch or do you prefer coming in where they have a funnel and you can go and just optimize it?

Oh, definitely when they already have stuff going.

Yeah.

It makes the job way easier. Right? Like a lot of times when, when companies, um, well, it depends though. Like if you come in and they have a pretty good grasp on what they're doing, it's really cool because you just take a look and see, okay, like what needs to be optimized here? Like what new things need to be set up? But sometimes it's very minimal compared to, you know, when you're going completely fresh. I mean, the setup is, it's time-consuming, but typically it's very straightforward. Um, but the only thing is you don't have anything to base off results from, right? In the past, like if a new client signs up and they have a lot of data that we can take a look at, we You know, immediately know, okay, we need to turn this back on. We need to turn this off. Uh, we need to restructure this right here, or what do we do with this? Um, when you don't have that, you're not really shooting blind in the beginning, but you just don't have like that baseline that I think most marketers would, would like to have, right? Because they have somewhere to base their judgment off of.

Is there any instances where, you know, B2B SaaS companies where you think it's not a good idea and it's not a good strategy to actually run paid media campaigns? If so, what is, when do you see that?

Yeah, I think, um, and I think a lot of advertisers can relate to this and it's like the biggest nightmare. Um, but whenever the company doesn't actually have a hold of their sales process, right. A lot of the times, like, they'll try to— it's funny because in the past, like, marketing and sales were completely separate from each other. Like, you wouldn't blend the two. Like, you'd never see that in the past. Nowadays, everybody thinks that marketing equates to sales, and in some cases it's true, right? Um, but I think that's usually more the case with like smaller products. Like, I'm, talking about like direct-to-consumer, uh, you know, like e-commerce type of things where there's a very short sales cycle. Like you can be very direct response in, in the sense that somebody will see the ad and you can make them want it right away. Um, in B2B, it's a different game because you're showing something. A lot of the times the person you're showing it to is not the decision maker. Um, depending, right, I think whether you have like a bottoms-up, uh, product or a top-down product, like you have to know who you're going after. Um, but I think that the worst thing that, you know, companies can do is spend money on marketing, on advertising specifically, and expect a sale, especially if they've not cracked that sales process. Like if you're not seeing sales just come from whatever you're doing now, I don't think you should expect to see them come from advertising. Um, because you need to be able to sell those people.

Right.

Makes sense.

So one of the things that we look at is like, if you don't have like lead nurturing campaigns, Probably not the time for you to start advertising.

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