041. When Does Digital Advertising Make Sense

Foreign this is Emilio Garcia from Boundify. Welcome to another episode of Demand Gen Studio. And as becoming a tradition now Gabriela Garcia is also here with me. Hi Gabby, how are you?

Hi, I'm fine, how are you?

Very good, very good. So I have, I'm hoping that everyone that's either watching this live or listening to it in the podcast is doing pretty well. We are actually testing for this episode having like, like a recording already. So while you will be seeing this live on the app platforms is being recorded a few, a few days before mostly because we want to prevent, you know, mostly from my end, my dog Max barking and you know, interruptions going on. So we will have a little bit of time on the addition to cut out those incidents. So without further ado, let us start about the topic for today. I, I got inspired about this topic because I have been having conversations and with prospects and usually happens with clients as well on the expectations of digital advertising. And it's understandable. One thing that happens with digital advertising that doesn't have a good order mediums is that you have the ability to test ideas very quickly both in terms of keywords that you want to rank for search engines or audiences that you want to present yourself in front of on places like LinkedIn display in general, you have the flexibility of, you have an idea, you test it out and you get results out of it right away. And that's fine. I, I don't mind when clients or prospects or our marketers use digital advertising as a way to test things. However, I do see sometimes the challenge of treating something that should be seen as a test as certain or the way supposed to be. And let me elaborate on that. Usually when we are having conversations with clients, we start talking about the audience and talking about the, you know, the places where we're going to show and the messaging that we're going to use. And inevitably the conversation goes into the realm of well, you are a marketer, so you should know and what I mean by you are a marketing, I mean clients telling me you are a marketer. So we are going to launch this digital advertising campaign as a way to generate, generate demand. So you will tell us what we will say, right? You will tell us how we will present ourselves. You will help me discover the audience that I should target. And that's the part that I'm saying that that's the moment that digital advertising is becoming a test rather than a sure thing or at least something that can have expected results. And it matters because demand generation, using digital channels to Create demand has some prerequisites and some agencies will offer those services along with the actual deliverable or execution of demand duration. Some others won't. But in any case, you as a client or you as a marketer that are interacting or engaging with a freelancer or an agency, or any other, any other person that is going to deliver that service for you should know that you have those prerequisites. The best example that I can use is when you are doing digital advertising that you have a logo and that you have a way that you present your brand. And what they sometimes call brand kit is a given, right? Usually the person that is going demand generation will not help you to define the colors that your brand should use, right? And you say, well, when I'm going to create the ads, I can test different ideas, right? I can test different colors. Yes, you can. But then that's going to be a test, not an effort that is geared toward demand generation in the traditional way. Because the expectation is that the ads will look and feel like the rest of your brand, meaning they will match your website look and feel in the graphical sense, if that makes sense. So in the same venue, the same happens with the messaging. It is true that marketers, you know, you gotta be creative when you are coming up with a copy because you have reduced space for headlines, reduced space for descriptions. You have to come up with catchy or interesting or feed stopping images and videos so people can pay attention. Because usually those ads are shown in places where people the, the target is not necessarily, you know, doesn't have the most time and it's not receptive to advertising. All of that makes sense, but still that message has to be relevant to what the brand already is. And what the brand already is should be expressed on the website itself, right? So in that sense I want to cover some of the things that you should know ahead of time to set up a campaign with success. And in case you don't know how can you use digital advertising to test it? But just again, be mindful that if that that's what you're going to do, then you are really using advertising to test ideas and not to guarantee or at least get a certain level of performance or results, right? Your mindset should change because then you will see, well, I'm going to invest all this money to figure it out and not necessarily to get a return or an impact on an audience and a product that I already have my mind setting to. So let me try to break it down in pieces. For example, the first one is who is your audience? Right. And who is your audience is break down into pieces. One is you have an audience that you want to target because of who you are or the type of company that you are going to advertise. And then you need to describe very direct, very specifically the type of companies and people that you're going to target. Right. So the who you are is all about positioning and I love that word because that the positioning is something different than the brand. Right. The brand obviously is the accumulation of the visuals and you know, the, the way that the, the company makes other people feel about it. Right. That's the perception that you get from when you see the logo. There's some things that you perceive about that brand, but that's not what I'm talking about here. Position is more about narrowing the market for you, for the company. Is, is what you say when you say well we are, let me use an example, an advertising agency or a marketing agency in general, you can say something like where we are a marketing agency. Well that's super broad from a positioning point of view because are you doing digital? Are you doing traditional? Are you working for B2B? DC is a specific industry, a specific size of company. So there are so many questions that are unanswered, unanswered on the question or on the description or presentation as marketing agency. So if you narrow it down then you can be more specific and then your marketing efforts will be. Will work better because with the same budget you will accomplish more. Let me put you an example. So you say well, not marketing agency, I will say digital marketing agency. And that that will reduce your. Not just your target market, but especially the messages that you will convey. How do you present yourself will change radically by changing that mentioning even if it's the same brand, right. Your positioning is being narrow. But then you can go a step further and say something like well, digital marketing, but we focus on B2B. And then you can say well, all the, of all the things that you can do on the B2B. I will work with these specific industries and I will work with and I will focus or specialize in this particular skill set, tactics, strategies, whatever you want to call it. Demand generation, email marketing. And so think about the impact that that will have on the keywords that you will pick if you want to capture demand or the audiences that you will define and the messages that you will use. Right. So. And that has nothing to do with the expertise of the freelancer or the in house resource or the agency that you hire. Right. But it will change tremendously. Everything. Like if you go and go, if you go to Google and look at the volume of traffic that people is, you know, that Google has for keywords like marketing, even digital marketing, it is tremendously high, right? Or if you pick the whole world or the whole of the US it will be very large. But as you keep narrowing down the, your positioning as a company, then the volume gets smaller, smaller and the same budget will, will be in front of more and more people that is relevant to you. Also, how the message will resonate to them will change. And the same applies for the audience. If you are doing display or social media, right, what messages you would use. If, for example, you are focused on a specific industry, it will mean that you will present yourself on, let's say, education. You will showcase education case studies, you will showcase education testimonials. You will talk about the specific problems that you solve for that industry and that will have a tremendous impact. Yes, your, you know, a good marketer will come up with great copy for both scenarios. They're very broad and they're very specific. But the success of the campaign will be completely different in one or the other. Now if you say, well, I truly don't know, then you are running a campaign that is a test, right? You want to test. If I present myself as a digital marketing agency, I presented myself as a traditional marketing agency with, you know, traditional offline efforts, and I run two campaigns and I gauge the quality of the leads and the cost of acquisition and the revenue that I will get. That that's a valid thing to do. But don't expect your marketing to tell you what market you should pick, right. And therefore how you present yourself. So that's the part. Well, yeah, if you already know your audience, an expert marketer will know how to find that audience in the relevant places. That person will translate your positioning into relevant keywords and it will translate your ideal client profile or the type of companies that you target and your buyer Persona into parameters that can be sourced to places like LinkedIn ads or Facebook, even Facebook ads, if you have access to metadata for B2B companies. But without that positioning, you are putting that person in a very hard place because they can accomplish so much, right. Without restrictions. They, they can target to everyone. And your effort will be diminished, if that makes sense.

I really like the way you ran that topic like that, that specific idea about when a, when a company knows who they are, right? Because me as a specialist on the my generation, I always struggle with, you know, like the optimizations on, on our clients accounts and something that we, that we do at first. When you start a campaign, when you, when you start doing this like creating that group of ads and stuff like that you, you actually struggle thinking about, well, this company put any name you like, who are they, what they have to offer to that audience, what is relevant to that, to that people like what are going to be the main topics? How am I going to be more specific every time with every keyword that I'm going to use to let people know that that answer is going to be the right one? When you talk about, when you don't know like who is this company, what they, what they do is like walking just in the dark. Like you don't know where you're going to, you have to sit and think how am I going to translate that information? How am I, how am I going to translate that to the people, to the audience so they know this is, this is the way that you are going to find whatever you're looking for and we are going to provide that, that solution to you through, through that ad and make it compelling and make it the, your first choice, everything you like. But it is really important for us, like you say like freelancers or people that, that do this to know if you can do it. It is marvelous. It takes a lot of weight out of our shoulders because it accelerates the process and it's in a better way a best, a best practice obviously for, for even optimizing every time because you know your audience and you know what, what are you going to just remove from there, right? So I think that is really, really important. And this is a topic that I, I really think that no one thinks about, about it like that, you know, like people might don't know who they are and where their company is is heading to. And if you don't know them, then like you said, everything's going to be a test time after time and it's not going to change unless you know what your objectives are and who are you dealing with on the other side of, on the screen right now.

It is easy though to overlook it, right? As you said, looks obvious, but it's easy to overlook it. And, and the other thing is that to get answers to those questions, right? Who you are, who do you target? And especially what are the benefits of your solution? Not just the features. That's probably what most marketers already know pretty well. They can define very clearly the features of the solution or the product, but they might struggle with what are the benefits for the client. And it's again, something that sometimes without knowing you are trying to test, you're saying things like, well, can you, can you, can we highlight these two or three features and see how people react to it? Or, you know, I think we are, we provide these benefits to the clients, right? 1, 2, 3, 4. Can we add them to the, to the copy of the ad and test it? And again, there's nothing wrong with it. We can do it and should be done. You, you want to see which ones resonate better with the audience. But what truly should have happened is that you had already described those benefits based on conversations that you had with your current customers and past customers, especially with your happy customers, right? So that's the part that is missed, is that most of the times those marketers or those companies have very little conversations with actual customers, if any. And therefore that's why they don't know the answers to those questions, to the positioning. Because if you have conversations that can be interviews with your, your customers and ask them, how do you find us? You know, what mediums do you use? Can you describe what we do? Right, in your own words, not as we describe ourselves. How do you, how do you describe what we do? Can you tell me, where do you spend time and research for solutions like ours? Right? Especially the, for the happy customers. Why do you pick us and not the competition? Because usually we have this idea that our company is very unique and it might be true, but we cannot describe precisely how is that it's unique. And that usually boils down to the benefits or the things that are unique to our solution. So the features might be shared across different companies, but the benefits that the client perceives, the client of our client, the only way to know them is to ask them. And so that's the process that needs to be reversed. You don't come up, you don't necessarily come up with ideas to test what to put on a landing page, for example, for an advertising campaign based on, well, I have no idea, or I have three, these three or four assumptions. Let us test them all. That, that is, again, not the right approach. What you want to say is, I have had multiple conversations with clients and if you don't have the bandwidth, I hire a company that do that, right? That a company that does that, that is specialized in customer surveys. And we have asked these questions and we know the answers. And what we really want to try to test is variations or different ways to present that benefit and see which one resonates better. That's the, that's What a true test on copy for a landing page should look like. Not. Well, I don't know exactly what are the benefits? Let us put something and see which one sticks again. It's a test worth doing. But then you are doing market research using advertising budgets, not demand generation, because that should be a given. And, and that's why I insist that much on that. The, the digital advertising when you're doing demand generation is like an amplifier of what you already have is not going to bring something new in in terms of you are not, you should not use it to discover who you are and who you're targeting to and where your, your benefits is. You have that, you have done that work organically already. You have test those messages on your website. You have asked to prospects to current clients about them, they have give you feedback and now you have reflected that on your website. Maybe for example, in the case of social, you have test the message organically with your audiences and the content that you put out there. You have seen if you've resonated with searchers on Google and you take the best of what's working for you already and then you use digital advertising to expand it. And that's when advertising can function as this generator that you have control over to speed out your results, right? If you use it that way, if you, if you don't want to do that, if you don't want to do the test organically in small volume, not a scale, then just be mindful that you will be using advertising to scale the test. But the performance, you know, if you get great performance, that will be lucky rather than intentional, right? So applies to benefits, the same goes for, the same goes for testimonials and case studies and similar things. Once you catch the attention of a user, you cannot only focus on the solution. But if, if you have not test out the product in the market or service people have used it and experience you know the product, there will not be cases or there will not be testimonials. And therefore there's no social proof, right? And so a campaign or a demand generation effort where you don't have social proof will not have the same impact that one that does. But to have that, you have to have sold the product already, right? If you don't have that, if you, if you are trying to get new customers through advertising, but you don't have any ones previously acquired through other channels or mostly referrals, when, when you are not doing any marketing at all, then consider your advertising effort as a smoke test. They call it Right. And we have done some of those. The idea is, I have this idea for a product or service. I feel strongly that people will want to buy it if they had a chance. And you run a campaign where you show for certain keywords or certain individuals and you present a landing page that describe the product, even might have pricing. Right. Suggested, and then you have a call to action, that is, we want to talk to sales or you want to start the ordering process. But the only, the only thing is that you don't have not, you don't have anything behind it. Right. You don't have the product still. So if someone is interested, you'll say something like, well, we are working on the, you know, the beta of this product. You want to be one of the first users, you offer an incentive and that way you gauge interest. And especially if you put pricing, that's fantastic because then you, you can see if people is willing to pay what you have in mind. You can do that organically too, which is the recommended way. Right. I always tease entrepreneurs and startups that have ideas that when they share with people, if you don't say the price, everybody will say, well, it's a fantastic idea. I think you're going to have a lot of success, you should do it. So what you need to do is to say, oh, that's fantastic. I'm thinking on selling it at this price point, would you buy one? Right.

Yeah.

And, and when they say what, you know, I don't know, that's when you start asking questions. Why wouldn't you? Right. Is it the price? Is the features, is the proposed benefits, is the pain not that high that you need to pay for it? That's the intelligence that you're really trying to gain from presenting the product and the price organically and getting those answers. Because those objections on pricing, on the features, on the potential benefits is what you want to put out there through advertising, Right. Not to discover them using paid. Right. Because it's going to happen. If you don't have, if you haven't answered those questions already, what will happen is that people who have interest will click on those ads. They will not get the answers on the landing page because you don't have them. And they will not convert. They will. Just similar to, yeah, it looks like a nice idea, but I don't want it right now because I don't believe in it or I don't have a pain point large enough to justify the change. I rather stay where I am. Or it's just too expensive. Right. If that might be, you know, I don't see enough value in it. Rather than not being too expensive, I don't see enough value to justify the change. So that's in a nutshell, the idea that I wanted to share. I hope you found value in it. Just super, super mindful of. Am I doing a test to discover who I am, what I'm targeting, to what are the benefits, why people should buy, and to discover objections. Treat it like a test. Don't expect a lot of it in terms of performance, expect a lot of terms of learning, and that's perfectly fine. But if you want to do demand generation, those questions has to be answered and it's not up to, necessarily to the person or the marketer that is helping you to launch to answer them. Because all of the, all of the potential levels can be marketed. Right. We can market, you know, a marker can, can tackle or target the whole world if you need to. Right. That doesn't mean that you have to do it. All right, very well. Well, I hope you have found value in this episode and obviously we are eager to talk to you and share more about demand generation in the next episode. Until then, take care and thank you.

Bye, everybody. Bye, everyone.

You, Bye, Gabi.