Speaker 1
so I think the strategy to consider again is putting yourselves in sort of the B2B buyer's shoes. And when you think about your channel mix, it's really important to understand how are B2B buyers using these channels, and your strategy should be appropriately tailored based on that. So let's talk about the difference between Google Search, paid search, or paid social. So like Google Ads or LinkedIn Ads. When you're thinking about paid search, Google Ads, this is what I would call an intent channel. People are going to Google when they're in market to buy something. They're searching for this type of software pricing or comparisons between X and Y. They know they have a problem. They're in market to buy. They're actively looking for a solution. You want to capture that demand, right? We want to identify who those buyers are. We want to bring them to the website. We want to get them into our sales funnel. This is the 1, 2, 3% of your market that wants to buy today. And we want those buyers. So Search can be a really powerful channel to redirect that demand to your solution to your website. The common mistake that we see typically on Search is that people spend way too much than they need to on this particular platform with this desire to try to cover all keywords and everything from high intent to low intent searches. Google has built an extremely successful business on everybody advertising. The key for search and your strategy there should be, how are you implementing a high-intent demand capture strategy that really identifies the right budget level to capture as much of that demand as possible without spending any more than that, to begin to get into diminishing returns and you really want to avoid having a poor return on that channel investment. So most customers we work with when we get started with them, we're actually usually lowering their search budget and optimizing it to drive better results. But that's your intent channel. Paid social is different. When people are on LinkedIn, most people are not actively looking for your product today. But people spend hours and hours and hours on social media. And it is a way that people learn about new products and services. But you can't deploy the same messaging strategy, for example, that you would on Google search on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is an awareness channel. The goal is, you want to think about how are we building campaigns that are driving brand awareness, category awareness, talking about your product, talking about use cases. It's a medium to longer term play to educate the rest of your market that's not actively looking today, but might be tomorrow or next week or next month. And when they are, they're familiar with you. And they'll come straight to your website or maybe pass through Google, a Google branded search to get there. And so what happens is a lot of time people will treat LinkedIn as an intent channel. They'll try to get, you know, they'll run lead gen campaigns for try to get demo requests right off of LinkedIn. And that's just not going to work. That's not how that channel is designed. And so you want to take a very different approach to that awareness channel. When you think about your media mix, it really comes back to your audience. Who's your audience? Who's your ideal customer? Where do they spend their time? Maybe a majority of them are on Reddit or Twitter, or maybe they are very engaged with industry-specific publications or events. So your channel mix will vary, but it's rooted in where your audience is.