Live from SaaStr Annual 2022: 3 Ways to Find An Edge For Your B2B Ads with LinkedIn

Hey.

So hi everyone. Welcome to the LinkedIn marketing conversation. We'll be here with you for about 15 minutes. I'm Brenda. I spend— I spend all my time thinking about how to help our mid-market customers think about getting more leads, getting more awareness, and basically getting you more Closer to your ear are goals. And it is really interesting to hear the other conversation. Over to you, Derek.

All right. My name is Derek. I am a partnership lead over at the B2B Institute. We're a small little think tank inside of LinkedIn that researches the future of B2B marketing and decision-making. A lot of our research has a contrarian bent to it because of this slide right here. A lot of the clients that we work with, they always love asking us, What is everyone else doing? But we think the better question to be asking is what is nobody doing? Because if you want to stop treading water and actually find a competitive advantage, you're going to have to invest in a marketing strategy that is right, but also contrarian. So today we are going to go through 3 contrarian ideas that are ultimately right. So we're going to start off with the 95/5 rule, which is going to show us how brand advertising actually works. Then we're gonna go to this idea of situational awareness, which is gonna show us what the goal of our advertising should actually be. And then I'll wrap it up with strategy by subtraction, which is gonna show us how we prioritize what we communicate as a brand. And then I'm gonna pass it off to Brenda, who's gonna show you how to actually use LinkedIn to apply a lot of these strategies to your business. So let's start with the 95/5 rule. To kick off the 95/5 rule, we usually like to tell a little advertising legend that ultimately asks the question, how soon does most advertising drive sales? So legend has it, two ad executives get into an Aston Martin. The owner of the Aston Martin goes, you know, I bought this car after seeing an ad for it. I guess advertising actually does work. The second guy goes, that's actually not possible. Aston Martin hasn't been advertising this model for over 50 years. And the owner goes, I know, but I saw that ad when I was 5 years old. So is this ad legend true? I do not know, and I cannot verify it. But what I do know is true is that the best brand advertising needs to work over long periods of time. The best brand ads has the power to create memories that influence us years, if not decades later. And the reason why brand advertising really needs to work in the long term is because most of our customers are not in market today. In fact, the 95/5 rule tells us that only 5% of our customers can buy from us today. Which means that 95% of our customers aren't going to buy our product or service after seeing our ad. The 95/5 percentages, they're not meant to be precise figures. They're serving more as heuristics, but the concept remains the same across categories, across business models, across markets. So for example, we know that companies only buy new computers once every 4 years. That means only 6% of companies are in market this quarter to buy new computers. We also know companies change banks only once every 5 years, which means that only 5% of companies are in market for new financial services this quarter. We also know that consumers, they buy new vehicles maybe once every 10 years, or in the case of Aston Martin, once in a lifetime. So what does this mean for us if most of our customers can't buy from us today? Well, it means that we have to rethink the traditional marketing funnel and instead flip it on its side. Instead of thinking of our customers at the top or bottom of the funnel, we think it's more helpful to think of your customers in two segments. So one segment of in-market customers who can buy from us today and another segment of future buyers who will be able to buy from us maybe in 5 weeks, 5 months, or even 5 years from now. The problem is that most of us are obsessed with targeting the 5% of in-market buyers, often at the expense of ignoring the rest, the 95% of our future buyers. In other words, a lot of us are spending 100% of our advertising budget on only 5% of our buyers. But the science tells us that the brand that gets remembered is the brand that ultimately gets chosen. And if you want your brand to get chosen, you need to make sure that you're targeting your future buyers. If you wait until they turn from future buyers to in-market buyers, it's already too late because they will have already been primed by your competitors. And the only way to target your future buyers is to invest in brand advertising. That actually is optimized for memorability instead of clickability. So if we agree with that, the next question becomes, how do we make our brand memorable? Well, memories are highly situational. And this brings us to our next idea of situational awareness. If you take a look at the academic literature out there, there's a lot of fascinating studies that look at the relationship between situations and memories. For example, experiments show that if you learn new vocabulary underwater, you are able to recall those new words much better when you're underwater again. Obviously, this is a very, very stupid and impractical example, but this phenomenon tells us how memories are triggered by situational cues and contextual cues. And we're gonna argue that brand memories work the same exact way, right? We remember brands over other brands depending on the buying situations we find ourselves in when we enter the category. The problem is, you know, most of us, we're not measuring our brand against situations. At best, we're only measuring awareness, but awareness is the lowest type of mindshare. It's not necessarily about if people know our brand. It's more important to know when people think of our brand. The goal is to attach our brand to as many buying situations as possible. And how do you determine what those buying situations are? Well, you can ask a series of the 5 W questions, which basically ask, you know, who are my buyers? Why are they buying my category? When? Where? With who? And most importantly, How are they feeling? If you can understand the buying situation in a much more multidimensional way, you can actually start developing creative that resonates with your audience, that gets your brand remembered. An example of this is the Salesforce Trailblazer campaign. It connects the Salesforce brand to different buying situations, like bringing companies and customers together, bringing governments and citizens together. And bringing manufacturers and customers together. It may seem like a superficial difference between general awareness and situational awareness, but it's often the difference between closing a deal and losing a deal. And if the goal is to attach our brand to different buying situations, then the question is, which situations do we attach our brand to? And this brings us to our last idea of strategy by subtraction. And this idea is based off of a very famous idea in theology called via negativa. And to do something via negativa means to simply improve something through subtraction as opposed to addition. Legend has it that, you know, when the Pope asked Michelangelo how he carved the Statue of David, he simply answered, "I just removed everything that is not David." And we would argue that the same philosophy applies to business as well. The essence of strategy is simply choosing what not to do. So how do you determine what situations you don't attach your brand to? The simple answer is this 3C framework to help us understand how we prioritize our category entry points. So the first pillar is commonness, right? How common is this buying situation? The more common it is, the more valuable it is to own. The less common it is, the more likely you want to subtract it from your strategy. The next pillar is credibility. How credibly can my brand deliver against this buying situation? The less credible it is, the more you're going to want to subtract it from your strategy. And the third pillar is this idea of competitiveness. How many other brands are also competing for the exact same category entry point? The more competitive it is, the more you're going to want to subtract it from your strategy. What does this look like in the real world? I'm actually going to pass it off to Brenda, who is going to talk about how you can use LinkedIn to apply this to your business.

Thanks, Derek. That was a treat. I, I'm so— I've been just so excited to be here, so excited to meet you at our stand, at our booth. Shameless plug, come see us after right over there. To listen to your stories and to just see how many hats each of you wears. Marketing is one of them at best. And I'm here to help you become better B2B marketers. I'm here to help you just feel like B2B marketing is more digestible, even if it's just a little bit more digestible than it felt 10 minutes ago. Product-led growth will get us so far, but marketing ultimately will always be what we need to do. I want to be honest for a sec. Our friends in B2C who get to sell deodorant, handbags, like they really have it easy. Who's the buying group? Super straightforward. What's the value prop? Really clear. How do I measure sales? Also pretty straightforward. B2B marketing, it's very unclear. And that can feel like a pretty big barrier to even Enter. In the next couple minutes, I have 3 goals for you as you become better B2B marketers. We're gonna create some FOMO. We might articulate a couple things that you're currently not doing and get you to wanna do those things. We'll provide some tangible examples to help inspire you, and we'll give you some tactics that you can actually hopefully put into practice right away. So in true LinkedIn fashion, we wanna be here together. We're gonna dream big. We're gonna have some fun, and so we'll start out with a poll. So I wanna get a feel for who's here. So we're gonna think about on a scale of 1 to 5 how much time we think about marketing. How much time we think about marketing. So with our hand, if we never think about marketing, probably don't care about it that much, don't think it's that important, we're probably a 1. If we spend all of our waking hours on marketing 'cause it's so fun and we think it's the most important we actually dream about it and we should be on stage right now teaching it, that would probably be a 5. So just how much time you think about marketing, 1 being not so much, 5 being a lot. You can look around. We— this is probably why you're all here, 'cause you are the ones who think about it. But we do have some 1s. And I think that's really helpful to frame this conversation so I know who we're talking to. And then you can also, you know, kind of do a self-assessment in terms of where you're at. And again, we're gonna be all become better B2B marketers after this conversation. So we're gonna take— let's see if— up, forward. There's only one button. Okay. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna take the 3 ideas that Derek ran us through and we're gonna unpack them little by little and put them into practice. So we'll take them one at a time. The 95/5, the situational awareness, the strategy by subtraction. So the first one, 95/5. Derek told us that 95% of our buyers are out of market in any given moment. What do we have to do? We have to find them and build relationships with them so when they have their buying hat on, they choose us. That is really good information to know and something that I frankly had never really thought about until I met Derek. So let's talk about how to find this audience. This is a vast audience. They can be— it can be overwhelming to think about how to find them. But ultimately what you need to do, it's run brand awareness campaigns. What you need to do when you run brand awareness campaigns is think about how to make your message relevant for the audience, memorable, and sticky, so again when they need you, they think of you first. So I'm gonna give you a FOMO fact. In fact, at this moment 80% of SaaS companies on LinkedIn are running an awareness or consideration campaign. And why do they do that? Because they know that it's the most best known brand in that category that is going to be the one that wins when that person slips into the 5% and puts their buying hat on. The other thing that we know is that your followers, your followers on LinkedIn are your best brand ambassadors. They will magnify your posts, give it some love, and they're gonna do all of that free of charge. So that's a little tip for you. You to know how to get some extra love for your brand. But I remember how it felt to feel like a creator imposter. I don't have the budget to hire a marketing agency. I don't have assets and I don't have time. That's probably true for many of us. But it doesn't matter. We just have to start small. As soon as we enter this creator economy and we start the flywheel that is brand, it is going to work for us and it'll work for us in perpetuity. So it's worth diving in and letting the learnings begin. So that was the first one. Two more. Second one, situational awareness. Okay, so Derek told us that it's not about whether your buyers know your brand, it's about when they think of your brand. And so we want to meet your buyers where they're at in that context with the message that's meant for them in that moment. And so here's a FOMO fact. Of any of us right now running awareness and consideration campaigns, we're probably doing it all wrong. We're probably posting content when it's convenient for us, not when it's strategic. We're probably putting messages out there that are generic instead of targeted. We're probably not— I guarantee you we're not posting enough. If you think you're posting enough, I would encourage you to post more. So there are some data-driven motivations for you as well. So on LinkedIn platform, there are 100 million members that visit us every month. 60 million of them are influencers. 40 million of them are, are in decision-making seats, and they are engaging more and more every single year. They are reading articles, they are liking pages, they are reposting posts and generally telling you what they care about and asking you to meet them there with content that will inspire them. And so we need to use that information that's there for us and create that content that meets them where they're at. Not sure what they're thinking right now? There are 3 things that I guarantee you a lot of your audience members are thinking about right now. They're thinking, how can I preserve margins and cut costs in this economic downturn until we kind of see the other side of it? They're thinking about this whole sustainability thing and when is it gonna— when should I enter it and should I enter it if at all? And they're probably thinking about how to return to office. So like, should I make everybody return to office? What does that look like? What do we do with my unused office space? And so again, meeting them where they're at with the relevant message in the moment that matters most, that's what's going to make them recall your brand when they pop into that 5% and put on that buying hat. And the last one is strategy by subtraction, quite possibly the one that became my favorite because it's so obvious, but nothing's obvious until it's made obvious to you. So you heard Derek tease this up. The main concept here is that we can't do everything. We have to prioritize. And how do you prioritize? The easy part is picking what you wanna do. The really hard part is picking what to deprioritize. It's a really cool concept, but how do you do that? So let's take the example of Microsoft Teams. They use the category entry points framework to determine what categories to not enter. Through this exercise, they were able to look at which category entry points made the most sense for them to not enter because it was clear it wasn't worth the time, energy, and resources. And by default, it was easy to identify the ones that they should pour their precious resources into. To think about this with a tangible example, you can look it up, um, when we're done here. Think about WalkMe. I love this company. They combine humor and honesty to call out the frustrations of adopting a new SaaS software. They wrap their message around the category entry points that made the most sense for them, and they really hit that sweet spot of high commonality and low competition to make sure that they found their niche audience and they really stood out in what felt like a sea of potential category entry points. And so we're gonna recap. So we've seen this a couple times, but if you didn't get a chance to take a picture, this is your shot. So the 95/5 rule. 95% of your audience is out of market. They are your future buyers. Build relationships with them now. Situational awareness. Meet your audience where they're at, with the message that's relevant and interesting for them. And they will recall your brand in the moment that it matters the most. And finally, strategy by subtraction, ruthless prioritization exercise. You cannot do it all. And if you try, it's gonna be painful. And so let's use our framework to decide what not to do. And then by default, you'll automatically— it'll be more clear in terms of what you should do. And so I wanted to say thank you all for joining what felt like a pretty brief time together. But hopefully we all feel a little bit more confident about how to become exceptional B2B marketers. I know I speak for Derek and myself when I say please find us on LinkedIn, send us a connect request, tell us what you thought, and on your quest to become better B2B marketers, we're here to help you. So go out there, um, I hope you feel inspired to do one thing that at least makes you really uncomfortable, um, but you know that by trying it you'll start that learning cycle. And that flywheel for your brand. And so come see us over at booth 315. And thank you again so very much for joining LinkedIn today.