How To Measure Your Marketing Efforts (And Why Click Attribution Is Dead)

If you're thinking about attribution software and you're spending less than 100k, something has gone terribly wrong. You're focused on the wrong thing. At that stage, it should be obvious what is working and what is not working. The reason it's not obvious is because you're taking 100k of spend and you're peanut buttering it across multiple channels and you're spraying and praying and hoping something works. So what would I do if I were in your shoes? I would pause all that spent. I would test each channel one at a time to see if I can inflect whatever that metric is for success. Let's take powermark's example. Our leading metric is demos booked on our website. If I'm going to do advertising, I'm going to do one channel at a time until I know it's proven. My message, my offer, my targeting, my distribution is awesome before I move to the next channel. And so I don't need attribution because I'm doing one channel at a time. There is nothing else to attribute. And if you do it that way, you build your layer cake and by the time you're done, your business is off to the races.

I'm here. We have a great session today. Pranav is the founder of Power Market and Marketing. Lesson number one is replay the hits. And Pranav has been one of the top rated speakers at almost everything that we've done. He spoke at our flagship conference drive this year. This topic around marketing measurement is always one of the most popular, most interesting sessions for people out there. And so I'm super happy to be doing this. Yeah. So Danielle mentioned. Where's everybody at the chat? So I'm Dave, I'm the founder of Exit 5 and I'm your host here today. We do these live sessions once a month where we bring in a subject matter expert for a topic that matters to you. In B2B marketing, we do a deep dive. We do SEO, email teardowns, website teardowns, ABM. Today the topic is measurement and attribution. And I used to do this podcast where I interviewed CMOs and I would ask them all at the end of the interview, if you could snap your fingers and solve any one problem in marketing marketing, what would it be? And they all say the same thing, which is measurement. Pranav has an awesome way to help you think about this, to help you solve these challenges, and really, most importantly, to stop battling over credit inside of the marketing team. That's where a lot of this falls Down. So we'll bring Pranav up in a minute. But first do me a favor, write in the chat. Let me know where you're writing in from. So I'm Dave, I'm in Burlington, Vermont today and I also want to know why, why are you here? Why did you take time out of this? You could have just signed up and you could have been one of the, you know, a thousand people to sign and we'll just send you the recording. But I want to know why are you here today? What do you want to learn? You just like hanging out in the chat. You heard that we do awesome webinar. Not webinars. But why, why are you here? That's what I want to know. Pranav just here because he loves hanging out with me. Danielle said because you'd fire me if I skip this. Yeah, that's, you know, those are, these are all good. Tara says I keep asking myself why I'm here every day. Well, we don't do them every day. We do them, you know, once a month. We got Sacramento interested to see how you measure performance, marketing performance, how to show our team's value to a data driven executive team. Liz, we got you, we got you here right in the, right, in the right place. Martha wants to know how to improve information for decision making. Stephanie wants to see if there's anything new learn. So we got you all covered. Now last thing, I'm going to give you one. This is unprovoked before we bring it, before we bring in Pranav. And during this session today, you're going to put your questions in the Q A, put them in the Q and A because we can sort them by upvotes and then we can bring them up. So Pranav is going to present for a little bit. He's got a nice little deck we're going to go through. Not long, quick, tight. And then we're going to take all your questions because it's, he's really great at helping you solve your problems. And we want to make this about you. But I want you to go back, I want you to put this book down. I want you to go and find the book Purple Cow. Anybody read this Purple Cow? Seth Godin, it is more important than ever today that you read this book. This book came out in the early 2000s and it is more important than ever today. Because why? Because AI is everywhere. And everyone says that AI is just going to take everything away from us, commoditize everything. But also there's more startups there's more competition, there's more noise than ever. And the premise of Purple Cow is, hey, if you're driving down the road, you see a hundred black and white cows in a row. Those cows are not interesting. They don't stand out to you. But if I'm driving down the road and I got my kids in the car and there's a purple cow, you better believe we're going to stop and take a picture and tell everyone about that purple cow. And so I just want to read this really quickly to you since you're a room full of marketers in here. He says no one is going to eager. No one is going to eagerly adapt to your product. The vast majority of consumers are happy, stuck, sold on what they've got. They're not looking for a replacement and they don't like adapting to anything new. You don't have the power to force them to. The only chance you have is to sell to people who like change, who like new stuff, who are actively looking for what it is you sell. Then you hope the idea spreads with them and it moves along the curve of adoption. I love this mindset of thinking that nobody wants to buy your product. Right. It is your job to convince them that you are different and to show them how you can be the purple Cow. Go back and study the timeless lessons in marketing. This is the stuff that's always going to pay. Go pick up this book, study Purple Cow. If you've already read it, send me a dm. Blue ocean is greater than red ocean. That's right. All right, Danielle, that's my preamble. Let's get the talent up here today. This is Pranav. He's the founder and CEO of Paramark. Used to be one of us back in the day. Now he's a founder. He was head of marketing, head of growth at a bunch of great SaaS, companies you've probably heard of. He knows exactly where you're coming from if you're in the chat today. And I'm excited to have you here, Pranav. So the stage is yours, my friend.

Amazing. Thank you, Dave. I gotta start this story. So I remember buying a course. I think even before DGMG, you had the 10 laws of copywriting. That's right, Laws of copywriting. And that was my introduction.

Damn, you've been. Dude, you've been in my funnel for that long. That's so cool.

And I took that course and I'm like, oh my God, I am hooked. This is the way. And just, you know, here we are, how many years later, so super thrilled to be here to be talking about marketing measurement. But I will start with something different. I'll start by saying measurement is Robin. All right, what do I mean? The Batman is actually creative. And so I tell this to every marketer. Measurement is not going to solve your growth problems. It's not going to solve your business problems. What is going to solve your business problems is creativity. And creativity is not something daunting, something that you lock yourself in your room with a designer and just do that. But it's really thinking deeply about your audience. You know, where they are, who they are, their jobs to be done, their problems, their aspirations, and then tying your message back to those things in ways that are going to be noticeable. If you get that right. If you figure that out, measurement is easy. So we're going to talk about measurement. But yeah, that was a quick intro from me and happy to jump into. There we go. Okay, so how do we measure our marketing efforts? And importantly, why is click Attribution dead? And I know everyone hates this whole topic of like, x is dead, Y is dead. Is it really dead? It's not dead. But I'm here to tell you seriously, that if that is the only way that you measure the impact of your marketing, you're in for a world of hurt. And I will help you understand why that is. Questions are extra welcome. So if you have spicy questions, put them in the Q. And a quick intro on myself. I'm an engineer who turned into a marketer over the last 15 years. Spent time at PayPal, at Dropbox, was at Adobe, was@bill.com, reported into the CMO in my last gig before starting Paramark. And like Dave mentioned, you know, I myself kind of experienced this problem, but I also talked to a whole bunch of marketers around me, and everyone was struggling with the same thing. And I'm like, we spend a trillion dollars on marketing every year, and yet this is still a problem. We can't figure out how to measure stuff. And so that was the starting point for why I got so excited about measurement. Okay, I've talked to, if I can summarize, probably thousands of marketers in the last three or four years about this problem and whether it's B2B, B2C, Enterprise, SMB, PLG, D2C, use any acronym. All the CMOs, all the CFOs are asking the same questions. And it's these six questions. So before we talk about UTM codes and click IDs and MMM and incrementality forget about all of that and just remember that whatever you're doing, if you're not answering these six questions, none of it matters in the measurement game. You got to really simplify and boil it down to these six. Take this, stick it on your wall, put it on a notepad, put it somewhere, and try to figure out how you're going to answer these questions in the next three months. And hopefully today's conversation will help. What do you think, Dave? Were you thinking about it this way in your last operating role or when you're talking to your team today? Do you think about it in this way or is it wrong? Oh, mic issues. That's fine. I think he's saying, yes, Pranav, you're 100% right. This is exactly what I used to think about. And we'll see when he comes back online. Okay, so I don't know if you've seen this episode of the West Wing. This was one of the first episodes that I watched when I moved to this country in 2011. And funnily, the second episode of this first season was titled Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc. This is Latin. And what it says is after this. Therefore, because of this, this is a very simple sort of concept that just because an event happened right after another event does not make the first event the cause of the second event. I'll give you an example. I clicked on a Google Ad and then I converted does not mean that the Google Ad caused the conversion. It's a very simple concept. But for whatever reason, this is hard for people to really internalize. So the real question is, what happened to inspire that Google search in the first place? And that is the inherent problem with click attribution and touch attribution. It assumes that whatever that click was has a cause and effect relationship with your conversion. And so I kid you not, how many teams that I talk to, how many marketers that I talk to that tell me that come to me and say, hey, all we are doing is search ads because we can't figure out how to measure anything else. Dave, are you back? Dave's still figuring it out. So, you know, whether it's YouTube, whether it's Facebook, whether it's LinkedIn, marketing doesn't work in this linear way where you see an ad and then you immediately click on it, and then you immediately fill out a form, right? How many of you do that? We don't. The way it works is you see an ad, and if that's interesting to you, maybe sometimes you click on it, but more likely two days later or three days later, you just type out exit5.com in the browser and go direct to the brand. Right? Even more common, you go check out their LinkedIn page and see if you can track down the founder and have something interesting that you can learn from that founder's profile on LinkedIn. Or sometimes if it's a consumer product, you go to Amazon and you search for it on Amazon and buy the thing that you want. So this idea that you can track everybody through the entire path and through this entire journey, it just doesn't work. And then you add all the privacy issues and the consent issues and you're dropping a whole bunch of data. So in any click or touch based attribution model, you always often are going to underweight, undercount all of the channels that are more, I would say top of funnel, video, audio, graphic, and you're going to overweight the channels that are bottom of the funnel, search, intent, signal based. So I don't know if you agree or disagree. I'd love to take questions on this, but my opinion is there's something much better than touch based or click based attribution. And we'll talk about what that is. But before we talk about that, a related and a very important point here. By now you have heard this probably a gazillion times. It's become a hot topic on LinkedIn, the whole 955 rule. But if, in case people aren't familiar with this, what it says is that it's not a perfect science of 95, 5, it might be 97, 3, it might be 80, 20, it might be different depending on your industry. But a vast majority of people in your audience and your category are not in market to buy whatever you're selling. So it's a fraction of people who are in market. And the people who are in market, you know, they're probably doing their research that they're searching, they're going to G2, they're checking out your LinkedIn, they're checking out your website, they're leaving what has become popularized as signals, right or intent. And that is all limited to that very small set of your market that is immediately ready to buy. You should absolutely figure out how you should reach them and measure the impact of your efforts. But on the other side, you have this 95% of the market that is not ready to buy. And every day some of that 95% become in market. And you also have to figure out how to measure the impact that you're having on that 95%. And did you get them to, you know, think of you as they are entering the market? And so this is a really important concept. It's like inherently related to how we should be thinking about measurement. Okay, so what are some of the best companies doing to solve this? Right. This is like I said, a trillion, you know, dollars are spent a year on this stuff. So surely somebody must have figured this out. And yes, it turns out they have. You look at some of the best companies out there, whether that's, you know, consumer like PNG or B2B like Asana. And there are published blog posts go to go Google Asana marketing mix modeling. And you will see that five years ago they started on this journey. Five or six years ago they built their own internal model. Yes, they had to go hire a bunch of data scientists. It was expensive, but they figured out how to measure all of their channels, not just their search ads. And how do they optimize their marketing mix with that broader view and picture? So it's not impossible, but yes, it is expensive. And you know, maybe the costs are coming down and we'll, we'll talk about that a little bit. Seems like Dave's back. Maybe.

Is there a worse product ever invented than the Apple Magic Mouse?

What did the magic mouse do to you?

Well, the magic mouse lost connection with my computer. And the only way to fix that, it needs to come out and it needs to be plugged in.

Oh my God, yes. The worst design ever. I always think about that like Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.

It's insane. Some like trapped on mute. Nothing is working.

Now I see what happens.

I knew that with this group, I know that other people have that mouse in this crowd. And I was like, all right, once I get back on, I gotta.

Sort of. I also joke about this all the time, that if we figure out we have so much investment going into AI, we still haven't figured out Bluetooth.

No, but yeah, but won't AI agents just solve that? They're going to solve everything else, right?

I wish. Audio, video, connectivity to your devices, still an unsolved problem. And we're all so excited about AI. So there you go. You could build a trillion dollar company on solving that.

I've been listening and you're doing great and I'm happy to provide color now.

Awesome. Okay, so we talked about click Attribution, Touch Attribution, not working. And we talked about these companies like Asana and PNG and DoorDash. And indeed, these are all public posts. You can Go look them up. What are they doing? What they care about is not attribution and credit. They care about incrementality. And that's a, funnily enough, not even a word. It's actually a made up word called incrementality. But the idea is amazing. It's simple. There's the version of your business today, you do some marketing and then you have a future version of your business. Does that business grow? And if it doesn't, then whatever you're doing in marketing is not incremental.

You know what's funny? This is the first year that we've really started to spend on our business. And so like this is me as a, you know, business like thinking from our, from our product as an example, right? And within the last couple months we've basically 10x our spend on LinkedIn ads and everything is up across the board. Website traffic is up, emails is up, trials is up, organic search is up. We haven't run the math on all of the numbers, but it just directionally feels like that incrementality feeling is like, oh yeah, every, everything seems to be better with a, you know, still relatively small investment on LinkedIn. Like let, let's keep going. And then there's no, because we have a simple business, there's not a lot of nonsense or bs and so it's like it's working, let's keep doing more of it. And I think a lot of this just where it falls down is when you get inside of the company and you got to argue over, you know, the sales team and the cfo and there's just a lot of nonsense. But I, I, what I've always appreciated about your, your approach is just taking these concepts and kind of making them simple to understand and like relatable in a very.

And the reason it's working for you, Dave, and for everybody else who's, who's been able to crack this is the prospect that you're reaching on LinkedIn would not have become an Exit 5 member or bought a subscription unless they saw that ad. Because if they, if they would have done that anyway, then your ad is not incremental. It's not driving anything. So you got to figure out the incremental, the incremental impact of that ad. And guess what? When you're really, really small, when you're starting from a small baseline, it'll be obvious, right? You don't need math and software. You will do it and you will see the business grow because you're only doing it on one channel. When it gets complicated is when you have multiple channels. And imagine, Dave, if you had LinkedIn running, you had YouTube running and you had, you know, I'm just making this up, Instagram running. And now you're trying to figure out, well, is it LinkedIn, is it Instagram, is it YouTube? And now suddenly the picture is a lot murkier. Right? So how do you make sense of that? The first thing that I said, and it ties back to your point. We overcomplicate everything. In SaaS, there are a gazillion different metrics. And I love this quote, everything that can be counted does not necessarily count and everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted. So start with what is it that counts? And I would argue that this is the contrarian take here. It's not always revenue. Let me explain. I'll take the example of a business that has an 18 month sales cycle, true enterprise, 18 month sales cycle. I run marketing, and by the time it shows up as a closed one, it's 18 months. Am I really going to tell my CFO, hey, hey, hey, wait up. It's going to take 18 months before I can show impact on revenue. I can't do that. Right. So this whole idea that you measure marketing through revenue is a little bit of a cop out. It's like people saying things without actually thinking about.

Well, and you have to think about the flip side of that also. Right? Which is like, and I always struggle to articulate this, but it's like the flip side of that is also like, what if you only. You know, for me, I've always done podcasting. I think it's a great, it can be a great strategy and it does lead to pipeline in some way. That's a little bit hard for some, sometimes people understand. But at the same time, if you only did things that could directly measure tied to revenue within the next 30 to 60 days, then the playbook of how you would do that would be completely different, 100%.

And guess what? If that was the only way to do it, everybody else would be doing it. And then what's the defensibility of the business? So there are some challenges that you have to think about now. Okay, so what do you do? Right? How do you then go from this? Like, let's take the Same example, right? 18 months sales cycle, don't go with revenue as the measure of success. Yes, you got to keep your eye on revenue. The whole business has to. But marketing is driving something that is a leading indicator to that revenue. Is that pipeline, is that qualified opportunities what is it? That is a leading indicator. That means it is truly correlated with future success, but also moves fairly quickly with your marketing stimulus. And this is also where a lot of marketing teams get hung up. Because if you're not going to have an easy way to demo your product, an easy way to talk about pricing, an easy way to even book a meeting with your sales team, then this becomes really hard. You don't have a leading metric because everything is like takes three months or six months to actually get full visibility. But if all of those things are happening, if you're doing good marketing and you're making the buying process easy, then guess what? A demo call a demo booking on your website can be a leading metric. So you pick that and you measure your marketing success on overall meetings, on overall demos that your business is driving. And then you look at every single channel, right, I mentioned you've got LinkedIn running, YouTube running, Instagram running, you got Google, maybe you've got events, you've got email. Guess what? You can actually take all of that and the activity that's happening in those channels and start to find the relationships between each of those channels and your demo bookings or your pipeline number. This is called marketing mix modeling. I overly simplified it, but this is possible. This is being done at public companies, pre IPO companies, fast growing series A, series B startups. This is not out of reach for a majority of marketers. Now you can't do this or you shouldn't do it. If you're only doing 100k and spend, would I recommend that exit 5 go do this? No, it's absolute overkill. But even just visualizing what I'm showing you on the slide right now of what my key metric is, and then the impressions across every channel, time over time. So week over week, month over month, will give you insights where you're like, oh wait, look at that little spike in events. And that correlates perfectly with my pipeline going up. Hmm, I wonder if there's a correlation there. Right, so that's exactly what you are doing, simple common sense stuff without getting overly, you know, granular about tracking each individual through the journey. Now if you were doing this at scale, guess what? This is what you get. You get this amazing visualization of incremental versus baseline. You can take your entire pipeline and say how much of that pipeline is incremental as a result of all your YouTube and LinkedIn and your Google investments. And baseline is really interesting. Baseline is a concept, is saying your word of mouth, your organic demand in the Market. And the last one, your built up brand equity. Your built up brand equity is what you have invested in over the entire history of your brand. So think about it this way, right? Salesforce, They've existed for 25 years. Their baseline is massive because there's so much built up awareness, there's so much built up brand equity. And so your in month, in quarter marketing is driving a small percentage of your total pipeline. So both your incremental and your baseline should be going up and to the right. That is what good marketing looks like for almost all brands that we work with. And then you can break down your incremental into individual channels and what have you. And if you have sophisticated data scientists and analysts, they can do this for you in house. There are open source tools from Google, from Meta that let you do this in house. You don't need expensive software to get going. It gets a little bit harder when you run into like multiple geographies and you don't have a data scientist and all that fun stuff. And that's when you go out and get help. Okay, this is my favorite topic, Dave. I've done, you know, with, with Exit 5. We did this offer earlier in the year where we had a brand consultation, right, with a bunch of brands. I probably had like 50 conversations in January alone. And a lot of those brands were spending only 100k, 200k, 500k a year. And they're like, hey, we're stuck in the strap of like only investing in search because I have no way to prove that these other channels work. How do I do this? How do I communicate to my CEO and my cfo? I don't have money and time to do. Mmm, it's too complicated. I don't even have the data yet to be able to do it. The simplest answer is running a simple geotest. Very, very simple. I'll explain how you probably will. Take the Exit 5 example. You can probably look at all new subscribers to Exit 5 in any given month and you probably have some location information on them, right? So you can take like we got 500 signups and this is how they split up between California and New York and Texas and what have you. You put that through and put it in a spreadsheet and you'll be able to visualize your top states. You pick a state that is big enough where you can have enough sample and take all of your LinkedIn advertising that you were just talking about and just focus it on that state. That's your test. Everything else is your control. And when you do that now, over the next one to two months, you will see whether your LinkedIn spend, because that's the only thing that changed in that test period, caused an inflection in your subscribers from that test state. Now you have clear evidence and you can roll this out nationally. And when you go back to your cfo, guess what? You look like a rock star. Because why? You ran an experiment, you have statistically valid results and there's a clear proof and linkage between your investment in a channel and the impact it had on your metric that you care about. Rinse and repeat across every single channel. So again, it doesn't work if you have 10 deals a month. But if you have 10 deals a month, why are you worried about measurement? Go figure out how to get to 100 before you worry about measurement. So between things like marketing, mix modeling and incrementality testing, you've got this sorted. I'm going to jump through a couple of slides and then open up for questions because I think there's some really good content here. This is from 2011, you guys. This is when I was at ebay. I didn't have a role to play in this. I was part of the PayPal team. But the ebay team ran this study where they took all of their branded search ads, everything that had ebay in it, and turned it off both on Microsoft and on Google. Guess what happened? Nothing. All of it just went into organic. As simple as that. And so the first thing that I recommend to every brand is you're probably spending 10, 20, 30k a month on your branded search ads. Go test it. Go test turning that off and seeing what it does to your business. Do it for a certain time period, do it in a certain location. This is the easiest, easiest test that you can run. We did this with a brand series C startup, fast growing, guess what? 300k in savings identified right off the bat. Go take that to your CFO and be like, hey, we tested it, it doesn't work. Can I take this and reallocate to YouTube to see if we can drive growth there? The easiest conversation you're going to have with your executive team. Now, there's a flip side to this, right? Some people you might be in a competitive environment and some competitors bidding on your branded search terms. And yeah, maybe, you know, there is some incrementality to branded search ads, but not at the 300k level. Maybe it's at 100k level. So this is also just not a blanket statement of like, branded search ads are bad the idea is to test and test the right level of spending so that you're not wasting money and you're finding opportunities to go test other things. Okay, here's another example. I love this one. This is from Sundar. I'm just giving him some free airtime here. You can go check him out on LinkedIn. This is a post that went completely viral. I think close to 10,000 likes just happened two weeks ago and they just turned off a certain set of their meta ads for Uber and their expectation was that signups and first rides are going to go off a cliff. That was the expectation. Guess what happened? Nothing. Business just continued. And again, they did it in a controlled way, in a testable way where they're able to show that by running these tests they can find the appropriate level of spend. This is not all the money that they were spending on meta. This is specific campaigns, specific strategies that they had a hypothesis that maybe this is not as incremental as our attribution models show. You have to be able to do these types of tests before you are ready to call is your channel or campaign incremental or not. Okay. And then I will leave it here with this last slide. I said a lot of words today. I made a strong case for why you should think about other ways than just touch based or click based attribution. But guess what, it's not just me saying this. These are direct quotes from meta, from Google, from LinkedIn. They're all saying the same exact thing. And so this is coming straight from the horse's mouth. There's a reason that Google has an open source marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing product. Same thing for meta. LinkedIn doesn't have one, but they really should. So don't take my word for it. Go do your own research. There are ways to do marketing measurement that do not rely on faulty click based data. I will pause now, get off my high horse and see if there are spicy questions.

Good. Yeah, we got a lot of questions. Take a drink of water. I have one actually in. So in that example you mentioned like turning, you know, focusing one geo on LinkedIn ads, for example. Right. Let's only show LinkedIn ads to people in New York and let's measure that. I understand thinking about the lift on that. Right. How do you think about it with something that's not a paid channel? Right. I think with paid channels it's easier to be like we're going to spend X and we want to get Y out of that. I think from what I see around Exit 5 is, you know, people have questions about like how do, how, how would you educate the org and think about doing something like content, podcasts, YouTube channel.

Yeah.

You know, where the result might be over time you build a reputation, you build a brand, you do a great job with it. People, you know, hey, we're going to do a five episode series of some type of fun, funny, you know, we sell to hr. We want to do some like, you know, reality show for hr. That's obviously not a direct sales offer, but we may end up booking deals from that. Do you have any guidance on how to help folks think about making those type of investments with the same type of thinking?

Yeah, absolutely. You, you first have to decouple two things in that question. One is the, the asset and then the second is the distribution and the asset production. I think of that as your content. Right. What is, what is it that you're doing that is going to speak to your audience and I think about investing in those like massive underinvestment and creative across the board. Right. So is that a blog post? Is this an ebook, is this a podcast, is this a video? Whatever it is. But you got to have a set budget for content production, asset production, and you can't measure the ROI of that directly. That's dumb. Like if that's the conversation that's happening with your CEO and your cfo, go find a different job. Or like try to figure out how to convince them that you have to have enough fuel that you have to put in the engine. Now let's talk about distribution. That's the engine. You have organic channels, you have paid channels. Let's not use organic, I hate that word. Owned channels and rented channels and paid channels. Let's use that. You can't do geo targeting for rented channels like organic social. That's not possible. But what is possible, and this is something that we do all the time, is you have to test different types of assets on those organic channels at different times. So you will see from me and Dave, you do this right, you're trying videos, you're to trying, you're trying ads, you're trying ads on organic. I even do that. You know, long form posts, short form posts, 60 second posts, podcasts, all of those. You try and see what's going to get the best engagement. And engagement is the measure of success. It's comments, it's likes, it's impressions. But most importantly, you can now get statistics on ICP impressions. I don't know if people have seen this, but you can look at your LinkedIn stats for any post and see the titles, you can see the company sizes, you can see the locations and as long as you're looking at those over time and you're seeing that, oh yeah, lots of VPs of marketing liking and commenting and seeing my post you have clear signal that the algo likes you and it's putting it in front of the audience that you care about. If you're getting it all from folks that are not your audience, then stop doing that. Even the vanity stuff doesn't work. So there are ways of looking at those leading metrics for organization, organic, social. You can do some type of testing in a pre post way. I'm going to post once a day, I'm going to post twice a day. And how do you do that? For one month you just post once a day. The next month you post twice a day and you see if anything in your impressions and engagement changes or not between those two months. So you can construct your tests in your own way. You don't have to be a scientist to get this right. Just do stuff and have a common sense approach to how you're going to measure it.

All right, and then we'll get into the Q and A. But I wrote this in the chat. I also think one common trait among good marketing leaders that at least I've seen is the ability to talk about the marketing strategy and how things should be measured versus if you let the whole org decide how they should think about measuring marketing, it is a different position to be in. I think seeing some of your slides and being like, here's our strategy, here's why we're doing the things we're doing, here's how we're going to think about them sets the context for like changes the discussion inside of the org versus being like, okay, well we've done six episodes of our podcast and we don't have any incremental sales meetings yet. So why are we doing this? Well, the reason we're doing this is because we believe X, Y and Z and where that's going to lead to this outcome down the road. And I think you do a good job of that. I think it's a behavior that people should model inside of their their companies for talking about the marketing strategy, having a strong opinion. Here is our marketing strategy. You know, you're not going to tell me how we're going to think about measuring this. I'm going to tell you how we're doing it and how it benefits the company.

And I think the the other thing that's related here is getting away from this marketing source, sales sourced, whatever, whatever conversation. Like the, the first thing you have to do if you're in that situation is no, no, no, our goal is overall meetings. I don't care if it's inbound or outbound, it's overall demos, it's overall pipeline. And the moment you have that conversation, the whole credit game goes away. And you're now thinking about how do I drive that number? If that number was 100 for this month, how do I go to 120, 150 next month. And as long as you're on that track, you know, who cares? I think what's really interesting is, you know, there's this whole notion, I see a comment in the chat actually that says what about business models where it's not a demo, it's like all sales led. And what I mean by this is it's door to door type of environment where I'm like a salesperson, one on one conversation at an event, at a conference, it's very like sales led as opposed to you can just book a demo on your website because it's a 300k product. I'm not going to book a demo on the website for whatever reason. I will challenge that, but let's just say that that is true. Then what do you do? Then your measure of success for marketing is actually quite clear is the number of sales meetings that are successfully being booked every month. That's it. And now you're thinking, well it's sales job to book that meeting. So how is marketing thinking about that as a measure of success? Here's why. If you are doing your job right as a marketer, when the salesperson reaches out to your audience to book that meeting, they've already heard of you, they've already seen you, they've already developed a preference for you and so booking that meeting is a lot easier. So if you think about the same concept that sales meetings is actually a can be a measure of success for your marketing initiatives, the same concept that we walked through today applies and it works. So that would be my answer to some of the questions in the chat about a non marketing led type of motion.

All right, let's get to these in the Q and A by we we'll sort them by most upvotes. This is from Chris. In your opinion, where should startups focus? Often CAC targets are aggressive and budgets for branding are often overlooked because every dollar needs to tie back to the growth model.

Quite simple. You have a You're a startup and you don't have a ton of cash. Guess what? Powermark is a startup. We're two years in. We don't do a whole bunch of spending on marketing. Our go to was organic social. I am always, always surprised when I talk to marketers and they don't have a strategy for LinkedIn, for Instagram, for TikTok, for Reddit, for, you know, all of these things that are at your disposal without any spend. And guess what, you take the stuff that works and that organic stuff and you boost it through ads and there you go. That's your test. And learn strategy. Go all in on social that whether it's B2C B2B. I've talked to marketers who have spent billions of dollars in both B2B and B2C and they say the same thing. Start with organic social, start with communities. That's where you learn, that's where you hear what's really going on in the community and then you take that and amplify it with paid.

I'm always going to be a fan of scrappy marketing, startup marketing, guerilla marketing, like those ways to get going and to get initial traction. Let's bring some of that stuff back.

Tell me about it.

All right, this question is from Megan. My boss really wants to be able to correlate the money spent to returns, but we don't have things like MRR subscribers or demos to track activity. We just have close contracts or not. Given my own lack of insight into CRM pipeline contracts process, how am I able to attribute revenue to my own marketing actions?

Great question, great question, Megan. So listen, there is no shortcuts to this. So my first response to you when I hear that, when I see that is you gotta go instrument some stuff on your website or your, you know, buyer journey. You know, if you have nothing other than a closed one contract, you don't even have the infrastructure to be able to do the right measurement. So measurement, like don't worry about measurement right now. Go fix that problem of like how do you get your sales team or whoever is doing all that data entry into the CRM to be able to log the first meaningful meeting that they have with a prospect and that's going to give you the data. Then go do stuff. You could do proxies, right? People hate on the idea of traffic as a measure of success. I think traffic is great. So if you don't have anything and you have to start somewhere, traffic is a great starting point when you're spending money. See if you're actually inflecting the traffic to your website in a positive way, you can run the same geo concept that I talked about, run in a few cities. And if it's working, you will see your GA light up like overnight. And if it's not working, you'll know that everything is flat. Okay, clearly it didn't resonate. So traffic is a good proxy, but taking that to a CFO and a CEO will be a little bit challenging. So, you know, be ready for that conversation and then tell them, well, CEO, go tell the sales team to instrument a better sales process. I'll have a better, you know, metric for you. But right now traffic is all I have.

It's like that the answer in there is in the question, right? It's like that's the end state that we want to get to. So what, what do we need to do in order to be able to measure this? What, what do we not have? Yep, this question was in the chat, not the Q and A. But I want to ask it, what type of attribution is most appropriate for companies like under 100k? I know you said mixed marketing models, geo testing and incremental is more appropriate for bigger than that.

If you're thinking about attribution software and you're spending less than 100k, something has gone terribly wrong. Let me explain. You're focused on the wrong thing. At that stage, it should be obvious what is working and what is not working. The reason it's not obvious is because you're taking 100k of spend and you're peanut buttering it across multiple channels and you're spraying and praying and hoping something works. Sorry if this comes off as too direct. So what would I do if I were in your shoes? I would pause all that spend. I would test each channel one at a time to see if I can inflect whatever that metric is for success. Let's take Powermark's example. Our leading metric is demos booked on our website. If I'm going to do advertising, I'm going to do one channel at a time until I know it's proven my message, my offer, my targeting, my distribution is awesome before I move to the next channel. And so I don't need attribution because I'm doing one channel at a time. There is nothing else to attribute. And if you do it that way, you build your layer cake and by the time you're done, your business is off to the races. So trying to do attribution when you're spending 100k 200k. I would even argue 500k.

Waste of money questions from Leonardo. Does it still make sense for you to ask customers, where did you first hear about us?

Absolutely, yes. You should always get that data because talking to customers is priceless. And don't just ask them, where did you hear of us? Ask them, hey, what else do you listen to? And what else are you doing? Try to really understand your customer. And there's nothing wrong with asking, where do you hear of us? There's always a. I'll give you this example. I bought a new service recently for our business, and I remember that I saw some type of an ad on some type of a social platform. And when I finished buying this service, they had a form with like 20 options of where did you hear about us? And I'm like, this is E commerce.

Anytime I bought a product like, like a, like a consumer product, they. They have, literally, it must be a database. They pull like every possible way someone's ever bought and they ask you to add it there.

And, and so that's my point, right? Of ask the question. But please be careful in how you construct that question. And where are you asking it? How are you asking it? Because if you were to tell me Instagram versus TikTok versus Facebook stories, I can't tell the difference between those three because in my head I'm just like, scrolling my phone so it makes sense to ask it, ask it the right way. There's lots of good research on how to ask it the right way.

What would be the goal of looking at that data anyway? It's not like to take it as a. Is it just like a directional, like, roughly. I feel like I know where people are coming from. It's a way to get insights like, what. What would you do with that data?

So in. Very good question, Dave. To me, it's a sanity check. You're not actually making many decisions off of that data other than doing a sanity check. And your gut tells you that your organic social is working, but it doesn't show up in any of your attribution models, because guess what? That's what happens. And so when you ask that question and you see, oh, LinkedIn, and you're like, but I'm not advertising on LinkedIn, but I am doing a whole bunch of organic. You can draw some simple sort of correlations there. So I don't think it's bad, but it's like, does it really help you in deciding how much you should invest more or less in a certain channel? I don't think it does. Yeah, but there's nothing wrong with the data. Like it's good. Additional data point.

When I was, when I was a.

Cmo, does it really help you in deciding how much you should invest more or less in a certain channel? I don't think it does. Yeah, but there's nothing wrong with the data. Like it's, it's good. Additional data point.

When, when I was, when I was a CMO at Privy, we, we asked that question on everybody that signed up and kind of out of Nowhere, within a 60 day period, we got a ton of referrals from TikTok. And that was an example where it was a really cool thing. And we found this one woman who, who owned like, you know, she had started a channel that was basically for like Shopify entrepreneurs and she recommended Privy as a tool. And that's an example where like that data helped us be like, huh, I wonder if there's a play here where like A, could we reach out to her and incentivize her to do more of this and then B, clearly there's an appetite for this. So could we go find four or five other influencers and then could we go and you know, go run some plays after that? Right.

Love that example. Yep.

I know I'm a genius. How much budget should be attributed to testing new channels? Oh, this is a great one. How much budget should be attributed to testing new channels versus tried and true when budgets are tight and sales targets are aggressive? And let me also add one more thing of this. I think I've learned a lot over the years. I think I'd be a much better marketing leader than I was then. One of my weaknesses was being very short term focus because of the pressure to hit the number now, this quarter, this year, right. CMO 10 years, marketing leader tenors are short. All of a sudden the plan grows 25, 30% next year. I haven't scaled marketing channels on the same path. There's not one channel you can just drag and drop or drag the spreadsheet to make it work. So I'm curious to hear that question, plus kind of my nuance there. And how do you figure out testing and learning and testing into new channels?

Yeah, this is a hard conversation because there's not a short answer to this. You have to get this right in your planning cycle. Because if you've already done the planning right, I'll give you an example. We're sitting in February here. If your annual plan for 2025 is set and now you're Thinking about, how do I allocate money for experimentation, that's a much harder conversation. You're not going to go back to the CFO and say, hey, I need more budget for testing. So if you're in that situation, your best bet is to figure out your entire allocation, right? You've got brand search, non brand search, LinkedIn, email, whatever, whatever. And you have to reallocate between those channels to make room for testing. And that's your only real option. Before you can go back to the CFO and say, hey, we ran an experiment within our own budget, prove that we can get more incremental returns out of X, Y and Z, and therefore give me more money. If you were proactive about it, you will think about it before the annual planning cycle. And if you were lucky enough to do that, then you're asking for at least 10 to 20% of your budget in an experimental bucket. So 10 to 20%, that's what the best teams are doing. And why is it 10 to 20%? It's actually a quite simple answer. Whenever you're doing an experiment, you're trying to create lift in your metric, right? So if you're trying to create lift in demos or pipeline or what have you, if you only try to create 1 or 2% lift, it's basically just noise. What that means is those. Is it really lift or is it just, you know, happenstance? You can't tell. So you really have to aim for a 5 or 10% lift in your experiments. You have to aim high. To aim high, well, you have to invest high, right? If you invest 5 or 10%, maybe you can get a lift of 5 or 10%. You see what I'm saying? So it all boils down to, you know, have at least 10 to 20% of your budget for the entire year set aside for testing and, you know, do those tests every. Every month, every two months. That's my recommendation.

What's the question you think somebody should be asking right now?

Oh, wow.

And you just went through, and you're hiring a marketing leader right now. And so maybe you know what's.

Okay, here's something that's interesting. A lot of the time I've spent in the last six weeks talking to many, many, many, many startup marketers. I asked them, have you done any audience research? And almost always their eyes light up and they're like, no. What is that? Tell me more. And I'm like, go Talk to your 10 best customers and ask them about how do they consume media. Ask them to open up Their phone, what's on their home screen. Ask them what podcast they listen to. Ask them what YouTube shows they watch. Ask them, you know, what TV they're watching, what newspapers they're subscribed to, whether digital or physical. And I kid you not that 90% of marketers aren't doing that. And why am I saying this? I'm saying this because, again, going back to the fundamentals, forget about measurement. The fundamentals are, where does your audience hang out, how do they consume media, and how are you going to show up in front of them? And if you haven't done that research, you're just kind of throwing spaghetti in the wall and hoping that somehow you'll get lucky and measurement will work. But if you were to do that upfront investment in audience research, your shots on goal, your efficiency of testing is going to be much, much better. So I don't know if that was a question, but I did want to.

I also think one of the hardest problems is, like, that everything in marketing has been proven to work for some company at some time. And so it's like, we could do ABM, we could do SEO, we could do TikTok, we could do events, we could do direct mail. Da, da, da. It's like, I almost want less options. And so sometimes it's like, more. It's like, I want less budget, less team, less resources, because we can only do it this way. And it gets hard when you're like, can do anything and so shrinking.

Dave, I kid you not that one of the CMOs that I was having dinner with two weeks ago, amazing, amazing person. He's like, I told my CFO to reduce my budget this year. I'm like, why'd you do that? And he's like, because I'm a shareholder, and I think that if we can reduce our sales and marketing as a percentage of our revenue, the company's gonna be worth more. And I'm like, yes.

Do more. Yeah, get more organic or more inbound? More organic. Okay, this is not a question, but I want to. So in two seconds, Danielle's going to throw up a poll. We're going to get live feedback on this session. We do it. You can rate. Rate, rate, Pranav, rate. Are, you know, rate this session one through five. Can you. You've said to me that right now, in the. In the age that we're entering in, I've started this session talking about Purple Cow. It's more important than ever to stand out, be remarkable. You know, you're. You're a former Engineer, you're doing a measurement company. You're very data driven, analytical. And yet you say to me that the variable for success, the number one thing you care about right now is in marketing, is creativity. Can you just share your take on that and why with this audience? And I just think it's such a healthy narrative. And especially on the heels of I saw some chatter earlier in the week on LinkedIn about another community in the kind of SaaS and tech space. And someone was basically saying, like, everyone wants the CMO to be the CRO. They all kind of want to fold marketing in to just be a part of sales. And there's this whole camp that I think we could do a better job advocating for, for which is like, what's the job of marketing? You know, if we level set here, it's about creativity, it's about storytelling. And I want to hear you say that before we wrap.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's so simple in many ways, right? It's back to the purple cow story. Do you want to be like everybody else? And if you are like everybody else, guess what? You are going to have the same business as everybody else. Shrinking margins, pricing pressure, no differentiation. And that's what are you left with? You're left with a small, small business. And that's okay. Like, maybe that is what you had in mind. So if you had running a lifestyle business and you do not need to differentiate, hey, every laundromat is pretty much the same. As long as you have a great location, you'll be fine. That's okay. But if you're building a business and you have an ambition to get to 10 million, 50 million, 100 million, a billion, guess what? Those brands require standing out from everybody else. It's a very simple. I don't know if you've heard this story that in every market there's only one or two majority winners. So if you want to be a majority winner in a market, that means you've taken 50% or more of market share. There's only one or two. And so how do you become that one or two? You have no choice but to stand out in a way that's very, very different. And that takes creativity and measurement. Is your sidekick like that's going to help you on that journey of growth? And ultimately you got to figure out how you're going to unleash the creativity within you, within your business. And we think we play a small part in that. And that's what we're here for.

Love it. Like some Tony Robbins Unleash the creative within. All right, give us a rating of this session, one through five. Let us know how. Hated it. Loved it. Somewhere in the middle. I thought it was great. Caught me taking a bunch of notes during this for my own, for my own benefit. Always great to chat with you, Pranav. Go check out paramark. Paramark.com follow Pranav on LinkedIn. I found that that's a good way to stay smart on some of these topics. After we have these folks on our podcast and the community on these live sessions. Hop in there, follow him on LinkedIn. You'll get a steady stream of. I think you can do a good job of curating your own knowledge by basically finding people that you find interesting and want to follow them on LinkedIn. I think it's a great, great way to do it. Go follow Pranav. Pranav, great job. Back to work. You're in founder mode. This is fun. Get back into founder mode now. That was great. Thanks for doing this.

I'm going to plug one last thing, Dave. I'm going to take all the questions that are in the chat or in the Q and A and I'm going to answer them on LinkedIn over the next few days. So we'll. Or, or maybe in the Exit 5 community. I'll do it both.

Just upload them to ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT to write the answers and post them.

Yeah, I'll do that.

All right, man. Great to see you. Thanks everybody for hanging out with us. We'll see you all next time. I'm gonna go charge my magic mouse. My kids are home from school. I'm out of here.