Accelerate Pipeline with 1:1 LinkedIn Ads & More

All right, everyone, we are live. We are live. And thank you all for joining us. We're going to stay for about a minute or so, maybe 2 minutes, and wait for more people to roll in. Meg, if you didn't see my response already, yes, this will be recorded. Drive safe, please. I know you're in traffic. The rest of you, please tell us where you're coming in from today around the world. It's always interesting to see the different locations people are coming in from. And we'll get started in a little bit, but first and foremost, tell us where you're coming from. We got Dylan from Chicago. We got Samen from Lisbon, Tara from Toronto, Meg Washington, another Meg, multiple Megs.

That's cool.

Cool. While we wait for some people to roll in, there's some interesting data that we're seeing. On one end, when I talk to other business owners right now, especially people that are in services agencies, We're seeing that there is a decline of anywhere from 30 to 75% of lead flow coming in. Our lead flow, just to share numbers, we're probably down, I don't know, anywhere from like 35 to 45% or so. We're talking month over month. But then when we look at our clients, I was just looking at what Steph said. I'm going to introduce Steph in a second, but what multiple kind of, whether it's Meta reps or Google, or like I've talked to friends over at Meta, but they're seeing declines as well. And so it's a little bit of a shaky economic environment right now. We're gonna talk about what we can do to kind of break away from this, especially in the B2B world. So hopefully you get at least one tactical thing that you can take away and do. We've got Neil from Massachusetts. Awesome. Cool. So here's what we're gonna do for this presentation. Basically, Steph's gonna have a lot of stuff to walk you all through. Steph's our head of paid media over here at Single Grain. So she oversees all things paid media and she's seeing a lot of trends. She's seeing a lot of data. There's some cool things she can share. And then what I'm going to do is I'm probably going to pop off for a little bit. I might pop in and out. But those of you that have any questions, type it into chat. There's a Q&A section, or you can just type it into chat, whatever questions you have, and we'll try to get to them as well. And I'll probably throw up a poll probably midway through this when the timing makes sense. But that being said, so first and foremost, my name's Eric. I am the Founder of Single Grain. And then again, Steph over here heads up the paid media side. So that being said, Steph, I'm going to turn it over to you and then I'll kind of pop in and out. Are you ready to go?

I'm ready. Let's do it.

All right, let's do it.

All right. So as Eric said, I'm Steph. I am the Director of Paid Media here at Single Grain. I've been doing paid media for over 13 years now. Since back before we even had many platforms to advertise on. And it was back when display ads were the hot new thing. So now there is a new platform to advertise on almost every single day, which can be really fun and really exciting. So without further ado, we will get into a little bit more about how we can kind of work in the economic environment that Eric called out and push through some of the struggles that we're starting to see in the slowdowns. So with that, one of the main ways we wanna do that is by working the pipeline that you already have and trying to create a little bit more pipeline. So in general, I wanna start with just a couple of definitions. So with that, what do we mean by pipeline? Seems really simple, but a lot of times there's the sales funnel, which is what a lot of marketing teams operate in. And then there's the sales pipeline, which is what the sales team operates in. So within that, there's places they align and places that they're a little discordant. So when we talk about pipeline here, we are specifically talking about on that sales side. I know that sounds interesting coming from me. I am a marketer at heart, will always be. But at the end of the day, if we don't drive revenue, your marketing doesn't matter. So we really want to focus on the sales pipeline side and how do we get people from just filling out a lead form to being qualified, to scheduling that demo, to pushing through their procurement or negotiation, to actually signing that contract. And the reason we like to think about it this way is we have that 95/5 rule, and that's something that comes into play, especially right now in Q4. 95% of our buyers are not in market and 5% are. So with— when you think about the sales pipeline, that's even only focusing on that 5%. So one of the things you wanna look at is, okay, how do I add more to that, capture a bigger percentage of that 5% away from my competitors? Looking at again, the current state of where most businesses are within this pipeline, you can see marketing has typically a lot of responsibility for these first couple buckets, lead generation, qualification, and getting that initial contact in that booked meeting. Sales typically is then, okay, let's negotiate, let's close the deal. We don't think that this is the best way to do this. And this is something that with a lot of different testing we've done with a lot of our clients and then also on ourselves, we've seen that if you truly integrate the sales and the marketing departments better, you can have sales push through this pipeline faster by making sure you have marketing at all of the different touchpoints across the way. I think we're all very familiar of the discord that you can see in some of these businesses. So a lot of the reasons that we see that is that marketing is just going after a generic ICP. So we want people who fit this bucket, this industry, this job title. And then a lot of times those leads that come in, sales does not agree with. And they're like, this isn't a valid lead. I'm not even going to reach out to them. So that already starts to set you up for failure and wasted ad spend. And then on the other side, sometimes marketing is just, well, I'm held to this demo number. I have to get these booked demos. And they're pushing out that messaging across the board to everyone. So it may be someone that's never even heard of your business and they're saying, hey, book a meeting. And, you know, most people, if they don't know you, they're not going to take a meeting with you. So you have to kind of warm them up a little bit. So those are some of the key things we see kind of driving some negativity between the teams and also negativity with potential future customers. That's part of what can prevent those people who are considering your competitors to go with them over you. So we all have to work together. So what does that look like? I'm going to do this in a microcosm of just how you can use LinkedIn better. But there's— I do want to call it— there's a lot of other things you can do with email marketing, with, you know, other platforms, whether that's Google or YouTube or Meta. This is more specifically just on that LinkedIn piece because it's just one factor of how to influence it. We're gonna start with targeting. One of the main things, and if you're— you've been in marketing for a while, you've probably seen this before, is just that if you're targeting by just generic ICP or demographic data, the person who you're targeting is, you know, could be anyone. In this example, Prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne, they have the same exact demographic data if you're only looking at these things. So With that, you wanna make sure that your targeting is a little bit more honed in. So how do you do that? One of the best ways that we've seen across all of our clients is for the marketing team to work with the sales team and get that list from sales of going, hey, here's all these people I wanna target. When you get that list of all these companies, you know that any lead you drive from there is automatically going to be slightly more qualified. So that's taking that part of the pipeline of just that lead generation piece. Towards that lead qualification piece. So pushing more people through overall, you really want to make sure that you have like larger list sizes to do this. I will go into detail about how you can get some of these lists later in the presentation, so I won't pause too much on that now. But you want to make sure that it's a decent size of list. So when you're running your LinkedIn ads to all of these people, it's actually enough people that your ads will run. And then once you get those target lists, you need to determine, okay, great. Now I have all these companies that I know will be more qualified if they do fill out a lead form. So pushing them down that lead pipeline a little bit. What messaging should I give them? So that's something that as you start to look at, okay, where they're at in your funnel, if they're net new prospects, that's going to be a very specific top of funnel value type messaging of why they should consider you. If they are someone who Maybe they've attended a webinar or maybe they've filled out an ebook form, but they haven't done anything else. You can hit them with a different message. So you just wanna make sure that as you're going through, you're not just asking everyone for a demo, you're actually educating them on what you can do for them. So a little bit more on that is making sure the message is light and also personalized. The more you can personalize your messaging, the more leads you can generate. So in this example here, this is going to the beauty industry. And this is someone that this company can do direct mail to anyone, anyone that wants to buy direct mail. But this ad specifically, we listed out the industry for beauty and really made sure that the image on that matched what those customers would send out to their clients. We also called out, you know, beauty brands right there on the ad creative. Again, any more personalization you can do, the better. We're going to get into how you can do this for imagery. But I will say LinkedIn just came out with a new feature. It just got out of beta where you can actually add into the copy personalized name and job title and company name. So previously that was only in messaging ads. Now that's in even your single image ads in the feed. So I would say if you don't have a tool like this, maybe look into one, but at least use that messaging because that can at least give you that hint, that hint of personalization as you go through. The other thing to think about is making sure the ask matches where they're at. I mentioned this previously, but if they're brand new to your company, don't try to force them down that lane of book that demo. In this case, we're just giving them a benchmark report. They give us an email, we give them a benchmark report. And then we can start pushing them through the funnel a little bit stronger. Um, also, this personalization shouldn't just live on the ad. In the ideal scenario, this also lives on that landing page. So, um, this is a bit more of a lift for most people, um, unless you have some sort of tool that can do this for you. But ideally, you know, you have a page for people who are in discovery and trying to learn more about your company, if you, you know, this example here that you're showing is a tool that we use to do one-to-one landing pages on scale called Carrot. But if you don't have access to a tool like that, then you at least wanna build, you know, maybe 4 or 5 different landing pages depending on the different touchpoints you have in your funnel. So your marketing will constantly meet people where they're at. I think having the one-to-one is a lot better because then that one-to-one landing page speaks exactly to that person. But if you don't have the ability to do that, just make sure you match where they're at in the funnel. And so what can you do with all of this? You wanna make sure you don't just stop at getting them into your funnel and getting them qualified. You wanna go and look at the full pipeline. So this is where you take that next step as a marketer and go, okay, great. I already have all these leads. They've booked a demo, but they haven't signed a contract. What can I do to help them either sign that contract faster, improve our close rates, you know, make sure that actually show up for the meeting and things like that. So that's where you want to make sure you're nurturing them all along the way with a message that actually resonates to where they're at too. All right. So we'll get into a couple of practical tips about how to get those lists and a little bit about the messaging here as well. So first, how do we get all these fun ABM lists that you can do all of this stuff for? Um, there's a bunch of tools over here that you can use that are these third-party tools to generate these warm and cold prospect lists. Um, there's Snitcher, which is, you know, people that have visited your site. Fiddler does the same thing. Sixth Sense and Demandbase also are really good tools to use to pull some of those lists from. There's Apollo, Pipedrive, Warmly, and a myriad of other ones you can use to do this. So any of these are great to start getting those prospect lists if you don't already have them. The other thing you can do is pull warm lists from your CRM. So anyone that has, you know, closed but they went to your competitor, well, what's the normal length of contract in your business? Is it 6 months? Maybe 4 and a half months in, you start advertising to them again. Trying to pull them back, trying to say like, are you seeing these problems within your system? Maybe reconsider us. Maybe, you know, take another meeting. Ghost is one of our highest performing list types that we've seen across the board. These are people who we call them ghosts because they ghosted you. They didn't show up for a meeting. So they booked that sales meeting, were never there. That ghost list often is very strong because they are qualified. So there are people that we want to retarget. If you have a newsletter, anyone that signed up for that, add them to a list. You know what content you're putting out in your newsletter, match your ads to that and see if they're interested in actually purchasing something from you. Same thing with people that download white papers or attend a webinar. You know what content they're consuming, so continue to hit them with more messaging around that. And then the final way I'm going to cover here on how to generate an ABM list is to use LinkedIn. Add the pixel to your website, and then you can create an audience of everyone that visits your site in LinkedIn, and they'll give you a list of all of those companies. You can then determine which ones are valid for you to advertise to and which ones aren't. And you can build audiences off of that. You can also build audiences off of your LinkedIn ads. So anyone who views a video, engage with a post, opened a message or opened a form. So those are all really good lists. Again, review the companies that do these things and then decide if you want to move forward with them in, you know, additional ads. But if you do, then, you know, okay, great. These are already one step warmer down that funnel. Into a few key messaging tips that we've seen work really well with our clients. I want to make sure you guys have something tactical to take home with you. So I want to highlight these as well. So for those downloaders or webinar attendees, make sure you're really talking about something that connects to that that webinar or that download that they had. So show them a follow-up, call out some of the data, a specific stat can be really strong in this, but also make sure you're testing like 3 to 5 different things here. A lot of times people will build out 1 or 2 ads and just run with it. That's probably not gonna get you the best results. A lot of times if you have 3 to 5, you'll notice one really start to take off. And within that testing, You can go, okay, great. This kind of a stat worked well. This kind of social proof worked really great with this audience. Let's do more ads like that. And it can just help accelerate that pipeline because you're already testing more things at the start. The other messaging tip I want to call out here is just offering a limited time discount. A lot of people will offer this audience a gift card to sign up for a meeting. I don't know if you guys get all of those LinkedIn messages. I get a decent number of them saying, hey, We'll give you a $100 Amazon gift card, $50 gift card to a store of your choice if you just take this 30-minute meeting with us. What ends up happening when you run ads like that? You will get maybe more meetings, but they're not as qualified. So if you've already prequalified the audience with an ABM list, then you know, okay, they could be more qualified and that's a decent test to do. If your audience isn't prequalified, I would not recommend running that ad. A lot of times you'll just get people that will show up to the meeting because they want the gift card, and it's not really going to get you much of anywhere. I prefer, even with the prequalified list, of running a discount towards your audience. The discount is 10% off your first month, maybe, you know, 20% off your first month, 10% off your first year, whatever discount makes sense still for your bottom line. And make it a limited time offer. So this discount's only available for the next you know, next 3 weeks or till the end of the quarter or whatever the case is, because then the people who will take your meeting are the ones that actually want your service. They're not just there for a gift card. They're there because, okay, I want this service. Now's the time. Let me make sure I sign up to get this offer. Similarly, that ghost campaign that I talked about before, this has been, again, one of the most successful Always test the different ad copy and messaging. Make sure you're testing things like savings language is really great. Saving time, saving money, saving, you know, your bottom line, things like that. Again, those offers are always really strong here as well. And then I would say the other piece that's really good with this ghost audience is social proof. By that, I just mean testimonials, calls from your customers, things like that. Can be really impactful to get these people to rebook. So a lot of times with an audience like this, we will do 2 separate campaigns, one where maybe we're running just straight thought leader type ads to them, really pushing them through. And the other one where we're trying to push them to book, rebook with our sales team. So the first one's just, okay, let me give you more people talking about us, give more of that positivity towards our company, not just from us, but from some of our other top customers. And then we'll go, okay, great, let's push them across that finish line with a personalized ad saying like, hey, we missed you, come rebook with us. So as I mentioned before, the way we really like to do that is with a tool called Carrot. And I'm going to walk you guys through this here. It's a really impactful way to get personalization onto the ad. You can do it with company names and that will pull directly onto the creative. You can do it with logos onto the creative and unlike on just that LinkedIn messaging update where it would only be in the copy at the top, this is actually on the creative itself. And that's what most people see when they're scrolling through LinkedIn. A lot of times the copy gets cut off and you get one, maybe 2 lines. But with this, it's that image that's right there in your face. So with that, I will do a quick walkthrough of the platform just so you guys can see how easy it is to really use. So basically, you could log in, you can decide what kind of campaign you want to run. So there is like the standard LinkedIn campaign type you can run here. They have a personalized where it's one-to-one. So one ad to one company, and that's where you pull the company name on. And then they have one-to-few. So if you really want to segment to like some different industries, whether it's beauty or if you want to segment into like sports or entertainment, that can be the way to do it there. But I'll just walk you through a little bit of this one-to-one personalized campaign. So we'll just go ahead and create that and then it brings you to this screen. So you can— you have to pick like the start date, end date, the ad type. We'll just do image for now. Your objective, a daily budget, and then any your bid changes. All the main things that you would have to pick if you're you know building out a LinkedIn ad. The conversion type, any audience exclusions. So a lot of times this might be your current customers, country refinements. So in this it might be you know job function, interest, seniority, titles, etc. That you want to narrow that list down to. And then we have companies here. That just means if you're trying to target a company that's too small, that's how you can kind of get it to show is by adding in a couple of other placements. So you start with adding in companies. So let's pretend we wanna target Apple. So you would type in the name and it would find that company. We would click add. And then let's say we also wanna target Microsoft. Again, you can type in all of the companies one at a time. If you just have a few you wanna hit, You also have the option to load the CSV. So don't worry about having to do it all manually. You don't. You can do this really easily that way. So we'll just pretend we wanted to do that. And if you want to add those refinements, this is where you can do it here. So for job functions, we'll just say business development and we want to target marketing. And you can see those audience sizes decreased. And then if I want to say, okay, great. So what if I want to add on seniority and I only want you know, people who are senior manager, director, VP and higher. And you can see again, those audiences are smaller. So that's the setup part. So that's not the fun part. This is more of the fun part is creating that custom ad. So you would want to create an ad image and it comes with some templates in here. So there's a lot of different templates you can run with. So if you want to run with any of these, so you can do that or you can just pick one, you know, say you just want to pick a blank one, you can start from scratch. But we'll just say, okay, great, let's use this. And then you can move any of this very much like Canva. It's really intuitive and easy. You don't need to be a designer to use it. It can be really just simple. This is how— okay, great. Let's move that. Let's move on. And then for variables, you can add in the company name. So you would just type this into any text field. So instead of, hey you, it could be, hey, company name. So it, you know, you would type that in and then have that there. So that can kind of, you know, help pull in that personalization piece that I was talking about. And again, with these ads too, you always want to make sure that they look really good in the editor since they're going to show up on LinkedIn. But you want one main point. You don't want it to be too busy. So here you can just add in, you know, if you want to add in your logo here, you would delete that and put your logo in. And then this thing here, this is the other company's logo. So where I have company name, how I added in Microsoft previously, that's where Microsoft would show up and then Microsoft's logo would go here. So what's really cool about this is if you think about the, you know, 400, 500 like target accounts you have and the amount of effort it would take to create an image like this for all of those, this does it like that. And all of a sudden you're able to call out each company individually and have a very specific ad targeting them. And in today's age, I feel like we're all really looking for that personalization in our marketing. And it's almost that when you're scrolling and you see something that, you know, isn't personalized, it's just white noise to you now. So this enables us to hit all of those like target accounts really, really easily. So we'll just say this is done if this is what we want. So you click done and then you can see the name changes here. If you go continue, you'll see that the logo changes as well. Does it pull a library? So, Kat, great question. So you can see here it automatically pulls the logo and the logo comes from the LinkedIn page. So as long as they have a LinkedIn page, you get all of those company logos. You'll have to load your own in, but you don't have to load in any of the target companies. So, you know, Apple's on here. If you want to see Microsoft, you get all of those. So that's how we like to do that, those ABM ads at scale. And you can go back in and adjust the size of the copy to make it fill the full space, um, and things like that to really make these ads, um, as impactful as possible. And of course, you can edit the background colors and all of that to make it match brand too. All right, so a few top tips with thinking about targeting. And this isn't just for Carrot. This is for all of LinkedIn. So again, Carrot's a tool we like to use for that personalization piece. LinkedIn does have that messaging piece you can do that is helpful for just the copy. But if you really want the image, I would recommend looking into a tool like Carrot because that's really going to help you get that personalization at scale. So again, a few targeting tips that are really impactful and important. One, layer on those pieces. So where I layered on seniority and job function industry, make those audiences as close to 300 as possible. 300 is the minimum size LinkedIn lets you target. So make it as pointed towards that key person as you can. Now, you do want to make sure you're targeting some of the decision influencers versus just the contract signers. So if we only target C-suite across the board, you're probably not going to get many contracts through. The people that want to buy your product and are interested in it, a lot of the times are the people who are in their day-to-day. And they might go to their boss and be like, hey, have you heard about this thing? This is gonna speed up my time. Like, can we look into this? And then, you know, they would have, you know, maybe they're the ones even creating that shortlist to give to their boss and like, here's this problem I have, here are 3 options. So we wanna make sure we're including that person in this decision-making process. So that's one of the reasons why you want your audience a little bigger. The other is LinkedIn stops you. You have to have at least 300. Now, if you're targeting a bunch of companies that are smaller than that, there is that append company list. That's where you can add in a couple of additional companies to make it a little bit easier to target those companies that don't have 300 employees. And one of the best features that are in Carrot and There's a few other tools that do this, is that you can now do ad scheduling. You cannot do ad scheduling in LinkedIn itself, but you can do ad scheduling in Carrot. So you can turn off ads on the weekends, you can turn off ads in the middle of the night. What LinkedIn will do is a lot of times they'll just push your budget out. So the budget rolls over, you know, midnight and all of a sudden you don't even have budget by 7 AM. So you may not even be showing up during business hours, which is kind of the point of LinkedIn. It's a business platform. You want to show up when your key audience is on there and they're thinking about things within, you know, within their decision-making process for this new software, for this problem they have at work that you're going to help them solve. So with this, you can show up on just workdays, work hours and workdays, or you can set even a custom schedule. And we've seen With this, if you wanted to spend the same amount of money, you get a higher volume of leads. Because if you even analyze your own data, a lot of times you'll see that like your Saturday and Sunday, your cost per lead is really high. And then if you look at time of day throughout your account, a lot of times accounts run out of budget before the workday is over. So this just makes sure you're actually showing up during the full workday when people are trying to solve those problems. So definitely recommend looking into something. Again, Carrot does this, but there are other tools that can do this ad scheduling. It really helps you save a lot of money in the long run. And then finally, Carrot and other tools like this are really good at driving influence pipeline. If you're truly trying to build your full pipeline and start to finish and make sure you have everything and lead generation to lead qualification and taking more of that, you know, 5% of people that are in market. ABM can do that with a target list, but it's probably not going to help you grow and expand as much as possible. So if you're really looking for let's close some pipeline, yes, Carrot's the tool to go to that ABM at scale. If you're looking to let's influence a lot of pipeline, I would say look into some thought leader ads. That can be a really good way. Maybe you do want to have all of your target company lists because those are the companies you really want to double down on and save money in this time where we're seeing leads volume decrease and we're seeing cost per lead go up. Yeah, let's load in that really big ABM list, but maybe not with that 1-to-1 ad yet. Let's get some social proof behind it first. And then, you know, the other thing I would mention is just website visitor campaigns are your friend on LinkedIn. A lot of times people just run conversion campaigns. And if you run a conversion campaign, your cost per lead's higher, your CPMs are higher, you're probably going to run out of budget before the end of the day. But a website visitor campaign, because the ask is lighter and more people will click to your website, you'll get a lot more people interested in you, learning about your product, and learning, um, more if they want to shortlist you or come find you in another way. So with all of that, um, Again, thank you guys for all this time. We have a couple of questions for you all here, but that is everything that I had for you guys. Cool.

Thanks, Steph. I'll read off some of these questions here. You guys can continue to ask questions, and the Q&A part's usually the most engaging part. So, Neil, we will share this video webinar. I think it's on demand, Maya. You can type it in there. And then, yeah, so it will be sent out an hour after this ends. Feel free to drop any questions. I think in the meantime, Steph, what other interesting B2B trends are you seeing right now with numbers, things like that? You kind of alluded to sentiment and things like that. Anything else that could be interesting for the audience here?

I think what we're seeing is that Q4, normally we start to see a slowdown towards the end of the quarter, and we're seeing that happen a little bit earlier this year than we have in the past. There's a lot of different reasons at play for that, but I think one of them is just with the quarter, the Q4, we'll say holiday slowdown is almost starting to hit a little bit earlier. And you're kind of seeing that as well with a lot of the layoffs some of the bigger companies are doing. So one of the things we're seeing be really successful for us to actually work around this are those thought leader ads, are building that top of funnel with those key audience lists, because then we're able to really hone our spend in just to those people who we know are valuable for us. So that's, I would say the number one thing is not to look a little bit past the cost per lead and look towards the cost per new customer since that's where we're able to actually have a bigger influence.

Cool. I'm going to actually throw this poll up on stage too. So let's hit show on stage. Those of you can vote on this. And there's a couple other, while you guys vote on this poll. So this is how much are you spending per month on LinkedIn ads? But there's 2 economic indicators that I look at. So you can look at, there's Michigan kind of economic sentiment. They do their research, but then you also have restaurant performance index data. And so what that does here is it shows you, I mean, if people are stopping eating out, then that means, you know, people are kind of saving a little bit, right? But I also look at railroad traffic data. So after we kind of finish this poll, I'm going to show you how you can look at these things. And I wouldn't say these are the end-all be-all, but I think it's interesting to hear from, like, if you hear from the big tech companies that, okay, spending is kind of tightening up. tightening up a little bit and you look at data from your customers, that's something that's out of your control, but you only worry about the controllables, right? And so for us as a company, as a business, and we're all businesses here, right? We're like, okay, where can we cut costs or where can we find efficiencies from AI? Or if we need to hire headcount, where can we really focus just hiring the best of the best, right? Because we don't want to cut corners there, right? And then what would be bad is if we hire people and we cut corners and then we have to cut those people. That's bad for morale too. And so that's something to be very careful and cognizant of in a kind of shaky economic environment. Unfortunately, it's been shaky for quite a while now, ever since 2022 or so. So let me share my screen real quick. I'm going to close this poll out. So I'm going to remove from stage and then I'm going to share my screen real quick here. And then you guys can continue to ask any questions here. Where's my screen share thing? Oh, I see it.

Okay.

Okay, check this out. So I'm going to share this window. Okay, so this is railroad traffic data. So when you Google this, you can see, um, the traffic in 2024 is the, the lighter blue, and then 2025 is the darker blue, right? And so you can see, um, at least in the beginning of the year, the volume was higher, and then kind of right now it's, it's, um, it's dipping below. So right here, look at this, week 40 over here. 2025, it's gone significantly below, right? And so again, this is just one data point. I wouldn't say this is the end-all be-all. This is total traffic. You can also look at the RPI. Here's Restaurant Performance Index. So you can see earlier this year it dropped quite a bit. I would say right here, but then as of August, Restaurant Performance Index rose 0.1%, right? And so there's a couple things you can look. You can say GDP has gone up to 3.8% and AI is driving 40% of that. That's a data point that I saw. And I think there's a lot to be excited about with AI, but I think we should always temper expectations and probably err more on the conservative side. So I just wanted to add that for you. And so Steph, here's a question for you from Tara. So the question here is, how effective are in-mail ads? Are other objectives, any other objectives do you find effective?

Awesome. Yeah, I love in-mail ads, but I don't like them to a cold audience. I think if you send emails to a cold audience, because it also sends an email to their inbox, a lot of times you're just going to get deleted. I think the email ads are really good if they've interacted with you first. So that's where I would run video ads or because video actually on LinkedIn is one of the best ad types you can run at top of funnel and you can really push that out to, you know, getting people to view your video. And from there you can look at the list of everyone who viewed it and pull those people. And the next step can be that InMail ad. You don't wanna just send them the InMail 'cause a lot of times it's a discordant experience.

Yeah. You know what's interesting? I saw a, we can talk about conversation ads for a second, but I think I saw a conversation ad or at least an InMail come in from one of the sales reps at ServiceTitan. And basically ServiceTitan, they're like a SaaS product. They work with a bunch of service companies. But it was like, hey, if you sign up now, I'm also going to give you a $1,000 Amazon gift card. And I'm like, man, if I work somewhere right now, I'd be pretty incentivized to sign up for that, right? And so what we find from our cold email campaigns right now, we're just offering $100 Amazon gift cards and that's booking a lot of calls for us. And we're going to try to see how we can continue to tweak that. But Steph, do you see that? If we wanted to play that with conversation ads, how do you see that working potentially for us selfishly?

Yeah, I think the conversation adds— the journey would have to be like, okay, step 1, if we want to keep pushing this gift card, we can do that. Okay, book a call. And we actually— it can link directly to a Calendly calendar. So if we want to just push that through, great. If we want to actually qualify them with a little bit more detail in a form, would recommend that to save some salespeople time. But if your salespeople are begging for leads, maybe just push them to a calendar first. So, and then the other part of the conversation, I would say, like, if they're not interested or not ready yet, then we could just send them like, okay, great, they're not ready. The next path we can send them on is asking them like, what is their biggest struggle? And from there, we can determine what they have, like have a big call out for what we do well, and then send them either to like a page for our SEO, GEO, paid media, whatever their biggest pain point is, and then send them to our website so they can learn a little bit more about what we can do for them. Cool.

Amazing. A final thing before we close out here. Steph, do you have anything else to add before I give a final note?

I think the number one thing I would just want to preface to people is that lead volume is slowing down a little bit, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't continue to build your funnel and make sure that you're set up for when people do have that budget again, you're the first thing they think of. So a little bit, it's a little backwards from where if everyone's looking to buy, you put more money in your bottom of funnel. When people aren't looking to buy, maybe you're having a harder time closing sales. The top of funnel is actually what's gonna help you get those sales down the road.

Yeah. And I think Steph had a slide in here earlier just saying like, look, 99% of people aren't ready to buy. They're not in market to buy. And so I would just say that we have a couple of enterprises we work with at the Karat side where they talk about air coverage. And so the word people like to use when they like to spend a lot of money just to stay top of mind is air coverage. And whether you're using LinkedIn ads or Karat or something like that, just to stay top of mind, that goes a long way, right? And as marketers, our job is always to figure out how we can hook people, stay top of mind over and over, just get people's attention. Ultimately, where we're trying to go as a tech-enabled service business is that we are, what matters for companies at the end of the day? Okay. Awareness. Okay. So that's marketing. 2, people want booked meetings and closing deals, right? They just want customers ultimately. And then the 3rd thing is they wanna fulfill, right? So then recruiting kind of goes into that. So it's those things ultimately. And so where we're trying to go as a company, I'd encourage you all, if you're a marketing agency listening to this, is maybe don't think so much about paid media or SEO or whatever. Just think about what outcomes can you deliver. And so for us now, we're constantly thinking about, at least on the software side, how can we just gift wrap people a meeting, a booked meeting or a customer, right? If you can do that, we were talking to someone yesterday, they're like, dude, we'll pay you $1,000 per booked meeting that you give us. And everyone we talked to, they'll pay a couple thousand dollars for these. Because even if they end up closing a customer, the cost of acquiring a customer, maybe it's like $12,000, $15,000, $20,000. But if the LTV's a couple hundred grand or like a couple million dollars over a long time, then they'll do that all day, right? And so that's what I would say. And I think we have one final question here from Tara. I'll read it out. Do you prioritize organic posting to help with paid ads? Not sure if this question is relevant to this webinar, but it'd be great to know your opinion. So I'll give my thoughts here. We are actually using a provider right now. If you look at my Instagram, you can see that I'm actually putting a little more effort into it. And what we're trying to do there is I might share business stories or marketing stories or stuff where I'm trying with AI, but there's a call to action in there. And we use ManyChat to collect emails from that. But also I can see our views are starting to compound. We just started with these guys this month and we were just, Maya and I, who's invisible right now, We were just on a call with these guys and I'm like, okay, where do you see the average views per reel, organic posting, social posting going in the next 3 months? Because right now we're averaging 2,000 to 3,000 or so, which is not much. And then she's like, I can see it going to 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 at least. And so what we're going to do with that, Tara, is whatever performs well, whatever is relevant to our audience, we should be taking a reel that gets a couple hundred thousand views or a couple million and then Tacking on a call to action at the end and then making those into paid posts. Right now we just have a bandwidth problem internally, so we can't do all the things that we wanna do. But I would say that's how we look at organic. Steph, how do you think about it?

Very similarly. So we already do a version of that on LinkedIn. So I would say LinkedIn, it's your company page. Yes, you wanna have something there so people see that there's content you've engaged with, but it's actually, you get more reach from a person. So that's where Eric does a great job of keeping everything up there. And what we'll do is we'll see his organic posts and which ones really start to take off that are relevant and have a call to action. And then we run those as thought leader ads, kind of like as I was mentioning earlier. So that's something we're doing today on LinkedIn. And as this initiative grows on Instagram and we're getting those reels with like 40,000, 50,000 views, we can whitelist his Instagram as also on our paid ads too. And that just kind of helps amplify everything at like, you know, that top middle of funnel of, okay, great, this is what's working. Let's do it. And whitelisting's actually one of the best ways to show up on both of those platforms.

Yeah. And the final thing I'll say here is, Tara, and anybody here really, organic is big because my podcast counterpart, Neil, so his email list has like 2 million people on it. And then he just drives people to a webinar every 2 weeks and each webinar makes about $500,000 for him. So they've cranked out the numbers quite a bit. So what I would say is the way he's been able to collect his emails has been through SEO. Ours might have to be through organic and again, leveraging ManyChat to collect these newsletter signups, but we would like to do that a lot more. And that's why I've been half-assing a lot of these channels for quite a bit. And then now that we're finally getting better across the board, I'm able to kind of full-ass some of them, right? Maybe that's a weird expression, but anyway, I would say if you're starting from scratch right now, I would focus on one channel ideally. So more so do as I say, not as I do. And then try to get that down. Whether it's, it could be a TikTok or a Reel or something like that. Double, triple down on that, get it going, and then you can focus on other areas. And then we have another question here from Mahesh. Is Carrot specifically designed for LinkedIn alone or can it work with multiple ad platforms like Facebook, Twitter, X? Also, what is the price? Okay, so Mahesh, we're actually going to be bringing, and then Steph, you should probably talk to Sean about this too, but we are going to be adding Meta. We're going to be adding Google because we have to, right? Right now it's a very, Yesterday, I talked to my CTO, Sean, about this, but right now with Karrot, we want to make sure it's a painkiller, right? Where you can log into it, it can solve a bunch of things on the ad side for you. Pricing-wise, I mean, it depends. We actually have a self-service version now too. So you go to karrot.ai, K-A-R-R-O-T.ai. There's a self-service version that you can check out. And that being said, I think that's it for today. Thank you everyone. Thank you, Steph, for an amazing webinar. And hope you all have a great week. Well, next webinar is going to come up, um, Maya, like what, 3, 4 weeks, something like that, right, Maya? Maya's typing. She's like frantically typing. Um, what does it say? It says November 19th, guys. November 19th. We'll see you then and, uh, have a great weekend. It's not even the weekend yet. Have a great day. Bye.