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This Meeting Could've Been a Podcast drops you smack dab in the middle of the closed-door sessions where Jess Cook (Head of Marketing) and Joshua Perk (CEO) are working to turn their company, Vector, into B2B marketing’s next big thing.
In each episode, they tackle a real, strategic decision together—"Should we hire an agency?", "Should we push free trials or demos?", "What are we going to do with all the swag Josh bought?!"—dishing out pros, cons, knowns, unknowns, wins, challenges, and stories along the way.
Come for the big picture strategy and day-to-day tactics, stay for the jokes that make HR nervous.
[00:00:00] Jess: Hey Josh. Hey Jess. So we're like an ad tech company now.
[00:00:03] Josh: We are.
[00:00:04] Jess: Which means we should probably start running some ads.
[00:00:06] Josh: Touche. Tell me more.
[00:00:07] Jess: I just need a couple things. I need to bring on a designer 'cause I'm fine in Canva, but I think we're gonna want more polish than what I can pull off. And then someone to actually like launch the ads 'cause I don't know how to do that.
[00:00:17] And they usually charge some percentage of ad spend, so we'll just have to like take that into consideration and then I'll need some budget vie, nothing huge, just like tens of thousands of dollars.
[00:00:32] Josh: Jess. Remember when we pivoted to being an ad company, but we ourselves weren't running ads.
[00:00:36] Jess: Yeah, that was cool.
[00:00:37] Josh: Yeah. Then we couldn't do that for very long. Real,
[00:00:40] Jess: real, good luck. Yeah, so,
[00:00:41] Josh: so we needed to figure out how to run ads, but we had one problem. Yeah. We had never run ads.
[00:00:45] Jess: Right. Slight glitch.
[00:00:47] Josh: It's a slight glitch in the matrix.
[00:00:51] This, this was, I think, really interesting, I think for our listeners as well, because it's, I think every marketer wants to experiment with new things. Yeah. But like you often don't have the [00:01:00] expertise. Right. But you've got, every marketer has something that relates to parts of what they're gonna learn.
[00:01:06] Yeah. And for you, it was like creative. You'd done the creative side for a long time.
[00:01:10] Jess: Yeah, I, well, that was like the beginning of my career. I spent 15 years as a copywriter and creative director. On the B2C side of, uh, ad agencies, what kind
[00:01:20] Josh: of, remind me what kind of campaigns and like what, what were you working on?
[00:01:23] Jess: So one of the big clients I worked on was Kellogg. Nice. And the other one was Kimberly Clark. So like my main brands were like Eggo, Poptart, rice Krispies, Cottonelle.
[00:01:32] Josh: Is Kimberly Clark like a parrot company of those or of
[00:01:34] Jess: Kimberly Clark is like the paper goods company. So they do like Continental, they have a couple different diaper brands, that's paper towel brands.
[00:01:41] Um, so they were like the two big Yeah. Uh, yeah. Conglomerates. Um, and then we, I worked on like the smaller brands underneath them. Um, so yeah, I had done, I mean, 15 plus years of digital ad creative. Yeah. Um, so I know what I'm doing there. Right. Yeah. Like I've done. Like an one echo campaign [00:02:00] that comes to mind is we had like this little cat on a Roomba who would like zoom around the little, you know, the little 300 by two 50 square.
[00:02:09] Josh: Yeah.
[00:02:09] Jess: And then like a little speech bubble would pop up and he'd be like, I want echo. And then he'd like go a little further and he'd be like, but it has no thumbs. Right? It was like, has no thumbs. It did great. Like the. Which is like, this feels very on par for like us. Yeah. Our kind of like level of weirdness.
[00:02:23] Yeah. Um, explains
[00:02:24] Josh: a lot about our brand.
[00:02:25] Jess: It Yes, it does. Yeah. I, I have some experience in the weird, he
[00:02:29] Josh: was writing cats with no thumbs jokes back in the day.
[00:02:33] Jess: Yeah. I've been doing this a while. This ain't my first rodeo.
[00:02:35] Josh: Okay. So you were doing like. Cool. Creative stuff. Yeah. I think I remember when, when you and I first met you were even doing like copywriting for like McDonald's happy meal boxes.
[00:02:42] Yeah. Like so you've done the creative side of things, but you've never hit the big green button when it comes to launching money behind those things.
[00:02:48] Jess: No, I've always been the one to like supply the assets. Yeah. And the copy and you know, like the landing page where this thing is going to go. Yeah. Um, but I've never.
[00:02:56] S really been the one to like put everything into the [00:03:00] system and yeah. Choose the audience and hit the button. Um, and, you know, understand all of the budgeting.
[00:03:07] Josh: And, and this was concerning for us. 'cause one of the things you and I had recognized as like, uh, actually now that I say that loud, we've never actually like, sat down and written down like our.
[00:03:15] Pillars of what makes our marketing great. Like we should. Yeah. Should be like, why, why are you so good at what you do? Um,
[00:03:21] Jess: it'll be very long. Talking about very long. She,
[00:03:24] Josh: she unrun and unfurls a scroll? Um, no, but like in passing we've talked about like what are, what do we think makes our marketing great?
[00:03:33] And one of the things we have decided is that like our customers look into our own marketing function. Yeah. On how to use our product and, and ask how we're doing things. And so you and I were really concerned. We're like, we're moving into ads and like this isn't our area of expertise. Yeah. So how did you think about trying to fill that gap?
[00:03:53] Jess: So, I mean, the first kind of immediate step is like, bring on a vendor. Yeah. Someone who knows who's done this, you know, [00:04:00] for multiple companies. Yeah. Specifically B2B, specifically LinkedIn, because that's where we. Yeah. Uh, that's where our audience is. Yeah. Um, and so, you know, bring on someone who really knows what they're doing.
[00:04:11] We, we wanted to test. Yeah. Uh, you know, I know we had, uh, one of our episodes this season was about like budget. Yeah. And really thinking through that, this, this bucket of like paid ads. Yeah. And, um, paid media was. Uh, the largest bucket. Mm-hmm. In that, in that plan, which,
[00:04:29] Josh: going back to that episode really quickly, I think the good news is you and I were smart that we thought about it as experimental, right?
[00:04:35] Yes. So it wasn't like, Hey, we've never run ads before and here's a hundred thousand dollars this month. Yep. Don't screw it up. Right? Yeah. We went into it with. The expectation as a marketing team and as a leadership team that this was new. Yeah. And that we were gonna test the waters and that we might have to find some contractors to help us like fill the gaps.
[00:04:50] So that was good. Yeah. But keep going.
[00:04:52] Jess: Yes, exactly. And so we, we started with 15,000 a month.
[00:04:56] Josh: Yep.
[00:04:56] Jess: If you're consistently, like, if you have a built up [00:05:00] sophisticated ads program, that's a small budget. Yeah. That felt really healthy to me actually, that we were gonna have 15 K to play around with every month.
[00:05:08] Yeah.
[00:05:08] Josh: And, and we weren't gonna start by like spreading that 15 k around like 10 different channels. So to me it was a lot because we were just gonna focus on like getting one or maybe two things, right? Yes. Yeah.
[00:05:19] Jess: Exactly. So the one or two things that I was like, I kind of know what we should do there, uh, and specifically with the creative, and I knew we'd have content behind them.
[00:05:27] Yeah. Was, um, just kind of like awareness ads. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Um, and thought leadership. Mm-hmm. So you and I and Nick were posting really consistently. We'd had a couple that had like popped off organically and those felt like really good opportunities to put some paid, sponsored dollars behind from Vector.
[00:05:47] And put those out into, have more people see them.
[00:05:50] Josh: So you started just by taking what was already kind of working organically. Yeah. And just putting dollars behind it versus having to take on all of this sort of like targeting and segmenting and ad creative and [00:06:00] variance. Like you started with just like, let's put some money behind what's working.
[00:06:02] Yeah, totally.
[00:06:03] Jess: Yeah. And I think one of the ads that uh, really started doing well was, uh, one of the awareness ones. Yeah. Do you know what I'm about to talk about?
[00:06:12] Josh: Me pretending to be in the gym. Is that the one?
[00:06:14] Jess: No, we'll talk about that. That was the thought leadership one. Oh, so there was one that was like, it was just an awareness ad.
[00:06:21] Yeah. And it was like ghosty and uh, I think he had like a UI kind of screenshot next to him. Yeah. And the reason I wanna talk about this ad was because we didn't sell in the copy. Yeah. It was very, uh. I don't know. It was really fun and it, it got a ton of eyeballs, a ton of
[00:06:37] Josh: Describe the creative, I'm trying to remember.
[00:06:39] Yeah. For people listening. What, what, what did it look like again? So
[00:06:41] Jess: it was just like, it was our ghostie and he was kind of like next to kind of a, a product ui Yeah. Screenshot.
[00:06:47] Josh: Yeah.
[00:06:48] Jess: And, uh, we were talking about like the site de anonymization capabilities where like, anyone that comes to your site, we can de anonymize them and tell you who they are.
[00:06:57] Yeah. And so the copy was knock [00:07:00] knock who's there. Now you know. Now you know who. Exactly. It's so good. Yeah, exactly.
[00:07:07] Josh: That's so good.
[00:07:08] Jess: And it was like, it was, I think people appreciated the like joke also telling you what the product did. What the product did.
[00:07:18] Josh: Yeah.
[00:07:18] Jess: But it wasn't like site de anonymization as blah, blah blah.
[00:07:22] Yeah. And you can get it at Vector.
[00:07:23] Josh: I like. One of the things, there's a, there's a company out there called Fibber. Yep. Which, like, we love the founder of
[00:07:30] Jess: So amazing, like
[00:07:30] Josh: in, in a similar space of ad tech and he's building something incredible and he had a post I think yesterday or the day before about this like side-by-side post of like a normal B2B kind of boring ad versus like one of his ads, which has this like cute little tiger avatar.
[00:07:44] Yeah. Lion, avatar, lion in it. And I, I, to me, so much of advertising comes down to really good copywriting and really good imagery.
[00:07:53] Jess: Yeah. Yeah, I think especially on LinkedIn because. Everything starts to look the same. Yeah. It's kind of the [00:08:00] techie background with some copy on top of it.
[00:08:03] Josh: Yeah.
[00:08:03] Jess: There's nothing really visually to look at.
[00:08:05] Yeah. Um, and so yeah, I think, I don't know it, you can go a long way with just something unexpected.
[00:08:12] Josh: Yeah.
[00:08:13] Jess: Um, even a brighter color or, you know, I think actually, I think that's why our mascot works so well. Yeah. And I think Fibber kind of benefits from the same. Yeah. Um, things, they have a little lion mascot and he can kind of do.
[00:08:24] Yeah, certain things and like they, they use different poses and they stop the scroll. Like people are like, Ooh, what is that? Right? Yeah. I, I know I have stopped and looked at so many Fiddler ads just because they're different. Yeah.
[00:08:36] Josh: Well, in, in like hot take here, I'm curious if people will debate this. I think the, the ad creative.
[00:08:42] Is more important than the offering. Like if I see like a, I agree, cute vector ad and the vector ad is literally a, here's what our product does. Like the knock knock one does. Yeah. But it's q and catchy that I'm more likely to engage with that, even though that's a direct like awareness slash [00:09:00] conversion sort of app.
[00:09:00] Yep. Then I am like a, here's an ebook. Totally. Like if you show me a little screenshot of like a mocked up ebook, I'm like, I know what this is. It's an offer. It's an ad, like I'm out. Yeah. Which is weird, like. By all marketing principles. The ebook is like less friction filled. Right? Right. It's just like download a piece of content.
[00:09:17] It's not even a fill out a demo form. Yeah. But I'd more likely convert on like the, oh, knock, knock. Oh, see who's on my site. Like, cool. Yeah. Like I'll go, now I know what it is and I'll go convert. Yeah. Which is just. Fascinating.
[00:09:27] Jess: Yeah. I think we're gonna start to see more brands like lean into being a little bolder, being a little, uh, less safe in their advertising because that safeness just doesn't work anymore.
[00:09:40] Yeah.
[00:09:41] Josh: Yeah. You mentioned like scroll stopping was kind of what you were going for there. I know in a second we'll go back to like the things we weren't good at. Yeah. Which was the, all the other stuff we had to figure out. But um. Eventually you'll talk about how like you expanded beyond just this one ad and we went to other things.
[00:09:56] I, I wanna bring us forward just for a second to that moment. You had this [00:10:00] incredible scroll stopping ad with a. It was a pool. Yeah. And an inflatable. Yeah. And you did something really crazy with it. Can you, can you talk about that one? Yeah.
[00:10:10] Jess: Okay. So this was another one. I wanted to kind of take the same idea of the awareness ad, but use video.
[00:10:18] Yeah. Um, and I found this tool that would allow you to create. Videos that look like the animation or the image inside of your LinkedIn post was actually breaking through the LinkedIn post. So
[00:10:34] Josh: like in the video at the very bottom it looks like. Like likes and comments. Yep. And what all this sort of stuff, but it's actually embedded in the video.
[00:10:41] Yes.
[00:10:42] Jess: And so kind of the, the, the part that breaks through is like, there was like a pool and we had a couple of little ghosties like lounging in the pool, and then this little like unicorn, floaty, like floats along and kind of breaks that barrier. Yeah. And so initially you're like, what, what's happening on my screen?
[00:10:59] Josh: LinkedIn has a new feature. [00:11:00] Yeah, yeah.
[00:11:01] Jess: Interactive post. It's coming into my world. Yeah. But yeah, it was just kind of this tool that I found and I thought it was really a fascinating way. Yeah. Just to get people to be like, wait, wait, wait. Yeah. Like what is that?
[00:11:12] Josh: Well, and people actually like commented on the ad being like, oh, this got me, this was good.
[00:11:17] Yes. Yeah. That was
[00:11:17] Jess: like the majority of comments is like, okay, the breakout video. Yeah. Like, whoa. Yeah. Um, and so those are the things you have to try. Yeah. Like, I mean, that was a $40 tool like crazy.
[00:11:29] Josh: Yeah,
[00:11:29] Jess: it'd be silly not to just, yeah, give it a, give it a go and like see what happens.
[00:11:33] Josh: So, so far we've learned like even if you have imposter syndrome of like, I haven't launched ads before, there's all sorts of other skill sets you can bring to the creative process that can make you really good at running ads.
[00:11:43] Yes. But bring me back to it. So you wanted to start with sort of a, a couple small things, like what happened from there?
[00:11:48] Jess: I wanted to start with a couple small things and I wanted to start using Vector. For Vector. Yeah. Um, because I think we've. Obviously wanted to have some of those like internal case studies under our belt to be able to share with customers.[00:12:00]
[00:12:00] Josh: Yeah.
[00:12:00] Jess: So, uh, um, we brought on that, that, uh, contractor who helped us kind of just set things up and, and, and run these campaigns. We also have Isaac Ware. Yeah. Uh, from User Gems, who's an incredible one of our customers. Yeah. Uh, and incredible demand gen marketer. He did a bit of consulting for us around, you know, budgeting and like how not to spread things too thin.
[00:12:20] Building those lists.
[00:12:21] Josh: Yeah.
[00:12:22] Jess: So I worked with Sarah McNamara, who's our, uh, rev ops lead to like, build really good lists and kinda figure out who should, who should be in them so we can push them to Vector.
[00:12:30] Josh: Yeah.
[00:12:31] Jess: Um, pulling lists from Vector.
[00:12:33] Josh: Yeah.
[00:12:33] Jess: Um, so yeah, I was like, okay, let, let's try this a little bit.
[00:12:36] And so what we started to do, uh, with that was we, we started a couple different small campaigns. So one was like, um, one was right before we went to Inbound.
[00:12:46] Josh: Yeah.
[00:12:46] Jess: We wanted people at inbound. To know who we were before we got there. Inbound is a huge event. We're a small company. Yep. We didn't have a booth presence, um, which was totally fine, but we were doing like a sidecar event [00:13:00] and we wanted the people in the room to know who we were before we got there.
[00:13:03] Josh: And shameless plug before you explain how the tacticals of this work, like this is what Vector does, right? Yeah. Like native targeting is really difficult across most ad platforms. Yep. You can't normally say like, Hey, I want to target just the attendees of Inbound. Correct. Or if you're on Google, you, you can't say, Hey, when people search this keyword, I only will.
[00:13:19] Want it to be B2B marketers that we serve our ad to, like the targeting is really difficult. Vector lets you grab a list of contacts, whether they're ICP, event attendees, signal based. Right. And make it so you own only those people you're spending your ad dollars on.
[00:13:32] Jess: Exactly. So that's what
[00:13:33] Josh: you were using in this campaign?
[00:13:34] Jess: Yes. Yeah. So I, I was like, all right, so I have this attendee list and I put it into Vector. I was able to filter down to like our ICP. That's cool. And then. Put that through, push that to LinkedIn.
[00:13:48] Josh: Yeah.
[00:13:48] Jess: And then the ad creative was like a ghost because we know that, you know, ghostie performs really well.
[00:13:53] Josh: Yeah. And
[00:13:53] Jess: it all, I just ran it as like an impressions objective. Yeah. Because I just wanted as many people on this list to see it as possible.
[00:13:59] Josh: [00:14:00] Yep.
[00:14:00] Jess: I think I also included people in the San, uh, San Francisco area. Yeah. Who also fit our ICP. Cool. Because oftentimes those folks are just like. In and around inbound, even if they don't have a ticket, and it's like, ah, that's the right people as well.
[00:14:12] Yeah. So included both those folks and um, or both those groups of folks. And then, um, the ad was just like our ghost and it was just like, Hey boo, see you at Inbound. So
[00:14:23] Josh: cool.
[00:14:23] Jess: It was a really cute little ad and we ran like a light and dark variant for both of those. Right? Yeah. That's another just thing to think about is like the variance that you run.
[00:14:31] Yeah. Sometimes you'll be really surprised that like, you like one version better and the other one will actually, actually perform better.
[00:14:37] Josh: Can you tell me more about this? 'cause this was one of the things that I feel like you. Did really well in the well always. But in the early days you basically admitted like, Hey, I haven't done this before, but I do know that we should put a, a couple variants out, not spread ourselves too thin where you can't get any results from it.
[00:14:53] But you were spending a lot of time with our consultants sort of like figuring out which ones to double down on which ones to pull back, right?
[00:14:59] Jess: [00:15:00] Yeah. So another one we ran was, um, we launched a product called Signal Driven Ad Audiences. Yeah. It was kind of our us dipping our toe into this new ad messaging that we were bringing forth.
[00:15:13] Josh: Yeah.
[00:15:13] Jess: And we wanted to test it as an ad campaign as well. Mm-hmm. That was kind of our quickest way to see if it was resonating. Wait,
[00:15:20] Josh: so you used advertising to test the messaging for like when we were pivoting? Yes. Wow. Yeah. That's cool.
[00:15:27] Jess: So, um. You should know that though. I
[00:15:29] Josh: didn't know that.
[00:15:32] Jess: I'm pretty sure I mentioned that
[00:15:35] Josh: in one ear, out the other.
[00:15:38] Well, good. Good job. Thank you. Good job. I feel bad we only give you 1% promotion this year. I realize you were crush. We'll talk about it next
[00:15:44] Jess: time. It's okay. So this was, um. We had a couple different creative variants. I did actually bring on a designer to help me with this because I knew what I needed them to do and say, but I didn't have the bandwidth to create a bunch of different versions.
[00:15:59] Josh: Yeah.
[00:15:59] Jess: And so it was really [00:16:00] helpful to have somebody who could just kind of, I say whip those up. I know he spent time on them and everything, but like, actually get those ready. So, um, we had a couple where we, uh, one of the lines was like, put your signals where the scroll is. Mm. So the idea was, um, you know, a lot of companies use signals to power.
[00:16:17] Cold outreach. Yeah. Or sales motions.
[00:16:20] Josh: Yeah.
[00:16:20] Jess: And so the signals are great, but like they're not being used in a great way that's going to get you a lot of, um, uh, engagement. Yeah. Whereas ads is like, you're sending it directly to that person. You're not fighting in the inbox. Right. So we had this little ghost, he's on his phone and kind of next to him was like the list of signals.
[00:16:40] Uh, an example list of like signals you could use. And I did, um, kind of like a blue and a pink variant of that. And then we had another one where it was like the actual workflow was kind of mapped out, and I think we did a, a blue variant of that with different links of copy.
[00:16:56] Josh: Mm-hmm.
[00:16:57] Jess: And what we found was in the ghost holding the [00:17:00] phone.
[00:17:00] Josh: Yeah.
[00:17:00] Jess: Um, the short version of the copy worked better.
[00:17:04] Josh: Yeah.
[00:17:04] Jess: And in the kind of like little workflow version, the long copy version worked better. Interesting. I know. It's wild. And it's, it's. It's really like you just never know and that's why you have to test.
[00:17:16] Josh: Yeah. It's almost like your brain wants to draw conclusions of like, well maybe in the workflow that you get, people are more engaged in like the how to and then the long for, I don't know, but I know it, it's wild as well.
[00:17:25] Yeah. Can't make
[00:17:25] Jess: assumptions.
[00:17:26] Josh: No. And and the thing that I think is interesting is like, again, shadow Isaac ware. Yes. Um, because this last thing that you mentioned, where I think so much of go to market right now is like. How do we drive like outbound and automation and use signals for personalization? And Isaac was a huge part of our pivot.
[00:17:44] Obviously in our earlier episode we mentioned like bringing him to this, this meeting we had in Boston and he, he was the first one to help us understand like, hey, if. I don't feel like the other side of the table marketing in particular is being serviced in the same way. Yes. Like they [00:18:00] can't do signal based advertising.
[00:18:02] They can't have that same level of specificity. He's like, but I'm using Vector in this case. Right. To do that so that everything the Rev ops and sales ops team is doing, we're also doing in marketing. Yeah. Which I just think is like, it's so. That's so polished, right? Yeah. Where you're like, Hey, this buyer's gonna get an email when someone changed jobs.
[00:18:20] Shout out user gems. They provide a signal like that, but you're also able to then pass that signal into Vector State. They're also gonna see an ad Yeah. Of like, congratulations on that job change. Yes. When they get into LinkedIn. So I, I think it's so cool what you're doing there. So you had a couple different things going.
[00:18:34] Yeah. At this point, like some awareness stuff, some signal based stuff, some event stuff. Um, how did you, like, was one thing working and the other weren't? Did you kind of keep them all going? Like how did you know what to do from that point?
[00:18:46] Jess: We had, I had one more, um, that I tried that was, uh, anyone who came to the, to our site.
[00:18:53] So I was using Factor for this. Yeah. Anyone who came to our site who read an article on the blog. Uh, or the playbook [00:19:00] section. Yeah. So anything editorial essentially.
[00:19:03] Josh: Mm-hmm. Um,
[00:19:03] Jess: we serve them an ad to sign up for the newsletter and I did, yeah. Five different variants of that. Yeah. Different headlines, same creative.
[00:19:12] The only thing that changed was the actual headline in the image.
[00:19:15] Josh: Mm-hmm.
[00:19:16] Jess: Um, and it was funny because, uh, of those five ads, four of them were very like, benefit based. Yeah. Like what you will get. Out of subscribing. And the one that was the winner, the that performed the best was I had, of course had the ghost on it.
[00:19:31] All five of them did. Yeah. But it said, is your inbox haunted? Would you like it to be?
[00:19:36] Josh: Oh, I love that. That was the one that won so great. And so it
[00:19:38] Jess: was like, I don't know you again, like you just have to test
[00:19:42] Josh: what's your. What's your take on running ads, which aren't cheap Yeah. To something that's very top of funnel, like newsletter signups.
[00:19:51] Jess: Well, I mean, it, it depends on a lot of things.
[00:19:56] Josh: Yeah.
[00:19:57] Jess: Um, one of the most successful campaigns [00:20:00] like that I ever worked on was at a company I was at called Mar Pipe.
[00:20:03] Josh: Okay.
[00:20:03] Jess: And we had a really good newsletter. Yeah. Um, had like a 50% open rate and like a. I don't know, two or 3% reply rate. Like I would always get replies from, uh, the, the recipient list and, um, just talking about like how helpful it was.
[00:20:20] And we, it was, we were basically showing them like examples of what our customers were doing with the tech.
[00:20:25] Josh: Hmm.
[00:20:25] Jess: And, um, we kind of figured out myself and my, uh, my other per, uh, like partner on the marketing team, Susan, we undergrad. Yeah. She ran the paid media there and we figured out. That once someone signed up for the newsletter list, they were 60% more likely to book a demo.
[00:20:43] Josh: Oh, wow. Between three
[00:20:44] Jess: and four months after signing up for the newsletter.
[00:20:46] Josh: No kidding.
[00:20:47] Jess: Yeah. And so it became a really big, like, pipeline generator for us. Wow. So we started running ads to get people to sign up for the newsletter because it was such a good, um, kind of flywheel into pipeline. That's
[00:20:58] Josh: awesome.
[00:20:59] So [00:21:00] takeaway here, don't, don't be a putz. Like don't sleep on top of funnel content. Totally. Oh yeah, yeah. If it's
[00:21:04] Jess: really good content, like it can be. Treat it like a product. It can be part of the. The process to get people to sign up for demo. So yeah. So we have all these kind of test campaigns running. Um, and some were doing really well.
[00:21:18] The signal driven ad audiences had a couple of winners Yeah. That were doing great. The events was pretty short lived. Yeah. But, um, I think it was pretty powerful in, in terms of just like people recognizing us when we were there. Yeah. Which was great. Um, the newsletter campaign really just had the one winner.
[00:21:35] Yeah. Um, that was kind of a standout, right? Mm-hmm. The rest of them just performed. Well, but that one really stood out. Um, and, uh, the, the breakout kind of awareness, uh, videos did really, really well. So what we did was we would find kind of the variants that weren't working, and we would turn those off,
[00:21:52] Josh: okay.
[00:21:52] So
[00:21:52] Jess: that our spend would get optimized and sent to the ones that were working even more. And so we would start to see those. Did you
[00:21:59] Josh: turn off my gym post? [00:22:00]
[00:22:00] Jess: Ooh, let's go to this. I forgot. Okay, so we haven't even touched on thought leadership yet. No, I did not Turn off your gym post. So another bucket. That obviously didn't require assets being created.
[00:22:12] Yeah. Was thought leadership.
[00:22:13] Josh: Yeah.
[00:22:14] Jess: So between you, me and Nick, we have a, you know, a, a library of content we can choose from as, uh, from the vector page to like promote as thought leadership.
[00:22:24] Josh: Yeah.
[00:22:24] Jess: And so we had chosen a couple, um, that, you know, they did pretty well. And then, um, we decided we were gonna try and promote this one post.
[00:22:35] That I was like, I don't know, this seems a little out there. Do you wanna, do you wanna talk about it? It was one of yours.
[00:22:40] Josh: Yeah. Well, so first of all, for those of you that are listening and not watching, I'm jacked like in the most prime, I'm sorry, sheep, most prime sheep of my life. For those of you that are watching, don't tell the people that are listening.
[00:22:51] That's not true. Uh, so I don't know what. Got ahold of me, but in my neighborhood we have a, [00:23:00] you know, just an old neighborhood gym, right? Yeah. You know, maybe 300 square feet. Tiny, right? Yeah. And, and I went to the gym one morning and you ever go to the gym and you're just like, I'm just not feeling
[00:23:10] it today.
[00:23:10] Oh yeah.
[00:23:11] And like I made the mistake of like pulling out my phone. Anytime I pull up my phone, I either get a message, a slack, an email, right. And you just, you end up in a different world. So I'm like sitting on a machine, being that guy in the gym, uh, like responding to Slack messages and. Like, I'm sitting, like, I took this picture of me like sitting on like, I don't know, like a bicep curl machine and there's like, it's, it's a cable machine because newsflash, I'm not jacked, I don't do free weights.
[00:23:36] I'm just like a little prissy, like I have the cable machines, but you know, there's like the stack of weights where you put the little pin in and I just took like a top down picture of mm-hmm. The, the stack of weights. And I like wrote this post about like buying an A BM platform is like going to the gym and like.
[00:23:52] Not doing anything, like not lifting weights, which was, I eat exactly
[00:23:56] Jess: what you were doing. Literally
[00:23:57] Josh: what I was doing as I wrote the post [00:24:00] and, and I had this big like dialogue around like how it's wasteful. You put all this energy into the membership and you just, you don't do anything. Yeah. Um. And two things happened.
[00:24:09] One is like you and I already had like our established relationship. So you went in there and posted this like meme of um, I think it was from Impractical Jokers of like Joe, like eating a sandwich at the gym, watching people. Yeah. And between your con your comment and my content. It did really well. It did really well.
[00:24:28] Yeah, it did really well. It was one
[00:24:29] Jess: of those like unexpected, like, yeah, just takes right off.
[00:24:33] Josh: Thought leader.
[00:24:34] Jess: Thought leader, hashtag founder
[00:24:36] Josh: mode founder. So you took a bet and you're like, maybe, yeah, we sponsored this. I like, what's
[00:24:41] Jess: it gonna hurt? Right. And so we sponsored, um, we, we, uh, turn that into a thought leadership ad.
[00:24:47] And I had like an 18% click through rate. So dumb. So dumb. It's like what? Um, you know, when like you're hoping to get 0.5 on LinkedIn Yeah. Is pretty incredible.
[00:24:59] Josh: Yeah.
[00:24:59] Jess: [00:25:00] Um, it was our top performing thought leadership post. Uh, and 1%. Yeah. I just, yeah. Nice work. It's official. You are a thought leader. Leader. I'm a thought leader.
[00:25:08] Yes.
[00:25:08] Josh: THOT.
[00:25:11] Jess: That's right.
[00:25:13] Josh: Is it time?
[00:25:14] Jess: Oh my gosh, it's time. What is it Time for? It's time to stare longingly and deeply and awkwardly into the cameras. Make 'em
[00:25:21] Josh: uncomfortable,
[00:25:22] Jess: but also happy. Yeah. That we're telling them nice things about words of affirmation. Be in marketers. Let's
[00:25:27] Josh: go.
[00:25:28] Jess: Let's do it.
[00:25:29] Josh: Dear marketer, when you launch a newsletter in boxes, automatically make room by deleting everything else.
[00:25:34] Jess: It's the best part of Skynet becoming self-aware is just making room for your newsletter. Select
[00:25:40] Josh: all. Delete. I do that by the way. When when my inbox gets too overwhelming, I'm like, it'll find me again if it needs
[00:25:47] Jess: me. Yeah. Oh yeah. If it's important enough, they'll come back to me. Yeah, I've done that before too.
[00:25:52] Or it gets to like a thousand whatever, and I'm like, I can't delete.
[00:25:55] Josh: I'm good. Just
[00:25:56] Jess: do it. I've never actually been to inbox zero in [00:26:00] my work email though. I am paranoid to like move things around.
[00:26:03] Josh: Like you, like you, what do you They're just sitting in there, right? Yeah, just in there. Yep. Oh, but they're, they're, they're red, right?
[00:26:09] Or
[00:26:09] Jess: I mark them unread again so that I come back. Yeah. It's stressful. Damn. Yeah. My nervous system like doesn't understand the difference between like my inbox and a tiger attack. It's the same thing
[00:26:22] Josh: Dham does.
[00:26:26] Jess: Dear marketer, when you launch campaigns, competitors hire consultants to figure out what the heck just happened to them.
[00:26:33] Josh: Consultants are like, guys, huddle up. It's, it's gonna be fine.
[00:26:36] Jess: Hu hu 7 22 on the pick them roll.
[00:26:41] Josh: 6, 7, 6, 7.
[00:26:42] Jess: But it's gonna be okay. Don't worry.
[00:26:44] Josh: We're going out of business. We're screwed.
[00:26:48] There's plenty of history to say that some of the best ad campaigns worked and you don't have to change 'em. Like Chick-fil-A eat more chicken. Yeah, right. Like. [00:27:00] No. Like they haven't had to change it. No. They've prob, tons of marketers probably have thought about changing it and everyone's probably like no.
[00:27:05] Right. Yeah. Jeep right. Has kept some of like their creative the same for a long time. I'm sure there's a million others that you're probably more familiar with that you can laundry list. Like how do you know when to iterate change, try new things versus be like, this is working and it's not at diminishing returns.
[00:27:22] Keep it going.
[00:27:23] Jess: Well, it's funny you bring up Chick-fil-A. I was just listening to a podcast about them and they. They have actually wanted to change that multiple times. Yeah. Their marketing department has tested
[00:27:33] Josh: Yeah.
[00:27:33] Jess: Multiple, like big idea campaigns that would replace eat more chicken and the cows.
[00:27:39] Josh: Yeah.
[00:27:39] Jess: And every time they try to do that and they take it into testing, people are like, so what's gonna happen to the cows?
[00:27:45] Josh: Yeah.
[00:27:45] Jess: Like, you're just gonna have the cows, right? Yeah. Like people like it. Yeah. And so they decide like, it's not worth it. It would,
[00:27:50] Josh: yeah.
[00:27:50] Jess: You know, there's, there's actually an example of like where you can tarnish the brand Yeah.
[00:27:55] Where they're big enough that if, if they were to change that it would really disappoint a [00:28:00] lot of people.
[00:28:00] Josh: Yeah.
[00:28:01] Jess: Um, so I think you ha, I think you have to take a page out of that playbook and, and test it and make sure that like I. People are actually going to gravitate toward that. Yeah.
[00:28:12] Josh: Yep.
[00:28:12] Jess: Um, for a company as small as us, sometimes that means just running a small test campaign.
[00:28:17] Yeah. For something as big as them. Like they have to do that. Yeah. Kind of discreetly to figure out if that's something they should do.
[00:28:23] Josh: And you know what's fascinating is like, as you were saying that, I was thinking through the different variations of campaigns. Like I think there's. So for Chick-fil-A, it's literally been the same cow, the same copy, like the same everything.
[00:28:34] Yeah. Right. And then there's companies like Geico. Yes. Where it's like the mascot and the theme of the campaign stayed the same, but they have continued to iterate all the different variations and scenarios. Yes. That the little lizard is in. Um. And, and then there are, you know, B2B companies that change ads, creative copy colors every single time.
[00:28:56] Yeah. And I think knowing where you are on that spectrum, like if it's not working Sure. Change it. [00:29:00] Yeah. Right. If, if it's working, but it's working because people love the lizard, like
[00:29:03] Yeah.
[00:29:04] Change where the lizard settings are. If it's working because people love the cow and the copy is simple and they get it.
[00:29:09] You don't need to change it. Like, don't change it at all. Yeah.
[00:29:11] Jess: And I think with Geico too, like they just have so much money
[00:29:14] Josh: Yeah.
[00:29:15] Jess: That they, they have to. Have some variety in the creative, like they did the caveman thing, right? Yeah. They, they've, they've had a number of. Different kind of mascots and ideas over the years because they just have such a huge budget Yeah.
[00:29:29] That they have to find other ways to use it and test it.
[00:29:33] Josh: Yeah.
[00:29:33] Jess: Um, we don't have that problem. Right. No. Yeah. Um, and which honestly is not, that's quite all right. Yeah. At this stage. Um, so yeah, I think we wanna stick to what we know people like, which is the ghost and kind of our, our vibey copy and kind of fun little bit of cleverness.
[00:29:50] Yeah. Um, and not take ourselves too seriously, like we know that works. So we're gonna keep going with that.
[00:29:54] Josh: I like what the brand can, um. I like the weight that a, [00:30:00] a ad can lift for the brand. And what I mean by that is like Chick-fil-A and Apple have like very simple commercials. Mm-hmm. Like I don't think I've ever seen a Chick-fil-A commercial that's not like our new summer salad is here.
[00:30:13] Yeah.
[00:30:14] Try it out. And then like someone being like, my grandma loves it. Yeah, right. Like, that's it. It's literally the entire commercial. Yeah. Right. And Apple is just like. The most powerful, longest lasting battery ever. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And like that's it. And I think that the ad does a lot of lifting for what the brand's narrative is, which is like Chick-fil-A is simple.
[00:30:30] It's got like five things on the menu, like that's it. Apple is like very like leading their category. They don't have to do all the whole like, yeah. C AI 20, like yes. You know what I mean? So like your ads can speak volumes about what you're trying to establish in the brand.
[00:30:43] Jess: Yeah. Absolutely. And I think sometimes the media is the message.
[00:30:48] Josh: Yeah.
[00:30:48] Jess: So the idea of that video kind of breaking out of the feed, that visual alone is like, oh, these people are doing something different. Yeah. I think it says a lot about the company and the brand. [00:31:00] We are just in the. Boldness of like what we actually try to do. Great. We started pretty simple. Yeah. We started with awareness.
[00:31:08] We were just testing. Mm-hmm. Kind of trying to figure things out and we leaned pretty heavily on our creative to do a lot of the heavy lifting for us.
[00:31:17] Josh: Yeah. Because
[00:31:17] Jess: we don't have that demand gen marketer on our team and we just kind wanna see what works.
[00:31:21] Josh: Yeah.
[00:31:21] Jess: But a lot of our customers are really sophisticated, like using.
[00:31:25] Intense advanced signals. Yeah. To like drive stuff.
[00:31:29] Josh: Yeah.
[00:31:30] Jess: And so we had, we kind of had to do that. Simple learning really quickly. Yeah. Because we also need that credibility to be able to like service them well. Yeah. Um, how do you think about that as like, as we grow and how do we get to a point where like, someday we feel as sophisticated as our customers?
[00:31:49] Yeah.
[00:31:49] Josh: Well I feel like between the ads you ran and pivoting our product, like we got an MBA in advertising in like. A couple months, which was wild because like yeah, [00:32:00] we were just getting started with awareness ads and, you know, broad targeting. But our customers were running millions of dollars through programmatic, digital, out of home, uh, signal based.
[00:32:11] And so like we had to learn really quickly Yeah. Like how to talk to them and how our product would support them across these different maturities. Yeah. Which like, that was a, yeah. Brutal, but really fun way to get Yeah. Sort of indoctrinated into, into advertising. And so one of the things that we, um, created as like a piece of content to sort of help ourselves understand this maturity curve, but also help our customers is, um, essentially this like B2B advertising playbook, right?
[00:32:39] Yeah. This is like beautiful place mat that you could like print out and like look at your desk. And essentially on the left side is we mapped out. Basically how a marketer typically matures their advertising strategy, right? Yeah. Starts with everything you and I just described, uh, you know, top level awareness first.
[00:32:56] Then maybe you get into middle of funnel conversion [00:33:00] advertising where there's some sort of, um, offer or CTA Yep. Then you get into retargeting. Then you start to get into maybe. Sponsorships of other people's content, like emails and newsletters. Um, and then like as you get really mature things like signal based advertising, um, contact level, event based advertising, DSPs.
[00:33:19] And so we mapped out this like document of like, if you're gonna start an advertising, here's probably how you're gonna mature to it. Yeah. But what was really interesting, and it was almost more for our edification than it was our customers, totally on the right hand side, we basically put like, what should you expect when running these different types of things?
[00:33:36] Um, because our customers would come to us and say like, Hey, we're using Vector for like high level awareness. Yeah. And there's no CTA, there's no way for them to land on our website. Um, you know, one of vector's functionalities is de anonymizing people that click from your ads and land on your website.
[00:33:51] But if they're not coming to your website, like, should you expect Vector to help in that part? Right? Probably not. Right? And so we have this part in this graph that's basically like, Hey, if you're doing awareness, [00:34:00] expect low CPM, low CPC, but like really high cost opportunity. 'cause it's almost impossible.
[00:34:05] Yeah. On the flip side, if you're doing contact level targeting, you're gonna have really narrow audience. Which means the targeting's gonna be really expensive, right? Yep. LinkedIn and Google like to charge a lot of money. The more specific you are with your ads. So there's almost this inverse reaction that our customers see with our product, which is like, oh my God, I'm running a vector audience, and the Ccpm got expensive and the Ccpc got expensive.
[00:34:26] But then if you actually follow that through to, okay, what percentage of IC people. ICP leads are clicking those ads. What percentage of those convert? What you find is that the cost per opportunity is actually a lot less. Yes. Um, and so that was just interesting for you and I to realize it wasn't sort of like you could just look at LinkedIn's ad reporting and figure out whether our campaign was doing well or not.
[00:34:48] Yeah. You needed conversion tracking, you needed to follow all the way through the opportunity. Yeah. So we're, the good news is now that we're so focused on ads, we've been able to sort of build our roadmap around this maturity curve. Yes. And help our customers through it. Yeah.
[00:34:59] Jess: [00:35:00] That was a really nice little light bulb moment for us too, to like, there are companies who actually have like, um, their own kind of KPI.
[00:35:07] Josh: Yeah.
[00:35:07] Jess: That they come up with. And I, I've always thought that was a really nice little, um, sales tool, marketing tool. Like just all around, kind of super smart, like built into the product.
[00:35:16] Josh: Yeah.
[00:35:17] Jess: And it, it allowed us to have that, right? Yeah. Like this idea of like cost per ICP click
[00:35:23] Josh: Yeah.
[00:35:23] Jess: Is a really interesting little mm-hmm.
[00:35:25] Like measurement that no one's really. Been able to have before. Yeah. And, and it's really powerful.
[00:35:30] Josh: It's bru. We, we have this new thing. By the time this podcast came out, it'll be live. Um, and it'll be in our most basic plan. So, so all of our customers will have access to it. Um, but we have campaign reporting.
[00:35:40] Yeah. Where to your point, we, we built around this sort of like standardized metric. And I remember when we first launched it for ourselves, I was like, oh, this is mind blowing. Yeah. Right. Because like LinkedIn says, our cost per click is $7, but our cost per ICP click's like a hundred. Yeah. Right. And it really starts to change your mentality on which campaigns are and aren't working.
[00:35:59] Yes. [00:36:00] Yeah, exactly. So if you were to boil it down, like what was the, what was the core takeaways for like starting your first ad program?
[00:36:06] Jess: Yeah. Uh, I was, I would say start with broad awareness. Um, it allows you just to get into the habit of like creating the ads, honing your messaging, it being okay that it goes to like a larger group of folks.
[00:36:24] Yeah. And just to kind of get some information. Um, definitely create variance. Come up with a handful of headlines, a couple different links of copy, swap out the background color light, a dark, like just, just give yourself some easy levers to pull in terms of just creative variance. Is, is a, is a good one.
[00:36:42] Um, give yourself some time to know if it's working. It's really exciting to launch a campaign and then like check it every day. Yeah. But it's like those, like daily check-ins don't give you any really good information. It's
[00:36:54] Josh: like stepping on the scale every day. It's just Yeah. It's like, yeah. Brutal, right?
[00:36:57] Yeah. Where you're
[00:36:57] Jess: like, it's up, it's down, it's up, it's down. Yeah. Like I can't really [00:37:00] tell which direction it's gonna go. Yep. So like a week or two? Yeah, like two is probably better. Mm-hmm. Um, which seems like, ugh, it's like agony to wait that long. Mm-hmm. But that will give you a much better read on like, okay, what is actually the, the variant that's winning.
[00:37:14] Yeah. Which one, you know, which of the campaigns is actually performing for us. Um, so yeah, give yourself some time. If your CEO asks you two days after it launches, like what the ROI is.
[00:37:25] Josh: Commend your CEO because they're awesome. No, that's ridiculous. Tell them
[00:37:29] Jess: you need two weeks at least. Yeah,
[00:37:31] Josh: yeah.
[00:37:32] Jess: Um, so yeah, just
[00:37:33] Josh: say, turn your ads on, then go on vacation so they can't bother you.
[00:37:35] There you go. Yeah. Yes. Unless you're like me and you bother.
[00:37:37] Jess: Yeah. You're marketing leader on
[00:37:39] Josh: vacation.
[00:37:40] Jess: Another one I would say is like, try to figure things out in one channel mm-hmm. For a while before you move on. So we haven't, we have not graduated from LinkedIn. Yeah. Like, we are still trying to figure out LinkedIn.
[00:37:52] We will for a long time. I think, um, if we bring out a demand gen marketer, that'll be a different story. That's someone who's well versed in like [00:38:00] all of these channels and knows what they're doing. But for right now, we're, we're doing quite well on, just on LinkedIn and we'll stay there for a while. Um.
[00:38:07] And if you really don't know where to start, like just start with the stuff you have. Like the, the things, the campaigns we started with was content we already had, it was post You and I had already done that. We just turned into thought leadership ads. Yeah. It was pages on the site that were already built and we kind of dropped people off there.
[00:38:23] I know that's not like best practice. Yeah. Right. If the landing page doesn't like perfectly match the ad. However, when you're first starting out and you're a small team, like sometimes you just have to do the best you can. Yeah. Um, so that's where I would, that's where I would really start. If you're like struggling and you're like, I'm not really sure Yeah.
[00:38:39] Josh: Where to go, that's great. Just ship it.
[00:38:41] Jess: Just ship it.
[00:38:42] Josh: Maybe next time we'll give you a 2% raise. Oh,
[00:38:44] Jess: that'd be amazing. I mean, inflation's what, like eight, nine, so that's cool. It
[00:38:49] Josh: depends.
[00:38:52] Jess: So, hey, just like one last thing. Mm-hmm. That demand gen marketer. Yeah. That we don't yet have in house. Yeah. I think we should [00:39:00] hire somebody.
[00:39:01] Oh,
[00:39:02] Josh: anybody out there wanna come work for a killer company?
[00:39:07] Jess: Anyway. This was a good meeting. This was
[00:39:09] Josh: a good meeting. Could've been a better meeting if we had a demand gen market at all.
[00:39:14] Jess: It would've actually had some substance.
[00:39:16] Josh: This meeting could have been a podcast.
[00:39:18] Jess: It was. It was. This meeting could have been a podcast as a vector.
[00:39:22] Production vector lets you build ad audiences from real people that visit your site, click your ads and research your competitors. Imagine seeing exactly who will see your ads by name before you spend a dime. It's a great time to be alive. Marketers go give it a whirl@vector.co. See you next time.