Predictable Demand Generation with Linkedin Ads

Priyanka: Are we live right now? Can anybody hear us like properly? I just want one confirmation and I will start with can someone confirm if they can hear us and see us properly?

Okay. I think everybody can, yeah. As if you're saying that they can hear us. Cool. We'll get started. So hello everyone. Thanks for joining and welcome to another LinkedIn live. I have with me Shan, who's first of all, a good friend and obviously the founder of Spear Growth. He they are a marketing agency that help B2B SaaS companies generate pipeline.

They do everything from SEO to PPC. And they work with Unicorns and they also work with seed funded companies, YC companies. So on and so forth, they do all things, ads, demand gen, content, so on and so forth. So Ishan, first of all, welcome again. 

Ishaan: Yeah. I like how we, every time we also go live, we have to welcome people twice.

Priyanka: Yeah. But before that, I think somebody is asking will there be a replay? I'll just answer that. Yes, there will be a replay on the same link. This will just like keep on repeating. Yeah. Don't worry. There will be a replay. So today we are going to cover some ground on demand gen with.

LinkedIn ads. That is a little bit niche in itself. So maybe we'll go with. The basics of LinkedIn ads sorry, basis of basics of demand gen and maybe then dig through, why it is important now and all these things that we talk about, like how to project a sample funnel. And so on and so forth.

But before that, I think Speargrowth has done a great job with their LinkedIn ads themselves. I don't know what their clients, but your ads just look really great and obviously an inspiration for all SaaS companies to replicate and do that, so that's why we have you here. Starting with my questions how do you define demand gen, Ishan, what is demand gen for you?

Ishaan: Funny thing is, I actually went and asked this to everyone, including I asked Shree, Praveen, the factors also. I was asking everyone, okay, what do you even call demand gen? Because everyone has different definitions. So the one definition of demand gen that almost everyone agrees with is If people are not in the buying journey, so your audience before, sorry, are not in the, in, in market, essentially.

And before people are in market, any messages, anything that you're doing to influence their behavior to essentially generate demand for either yourself or your competitors, actually. So basically for your industry, that is demand gen. So in the process of demand gen, you also build trust for your own company.

But you do end up generating demand for your competitors as well. And I think that's something that's the only things you do when people are not involved. Once they are, then that's demand capture. 

Priyanka: And one more aspect to demand gen is that because you use the word competitor, if your demand gen is growing, that means, and your competitors demand gen is also growing, right?

That means the category itself. Is growing. So it's like really nice that it's actually a free market right there where Your positioning, your brand, your work defines, that it's meritorious way, right? Who does it well, will actually get that because the category has already been created.

That's how I look at it. 

Ishaan: Yeah, I think someone from growth, I don't remember someone from growth X or ad growth X said this and I have stolen this from them. It's cannot remember the name, but. So which game are you playing? Essentially, are you playing the game of capturing market share? Or are you playing the game of expanding the market, right?

And especially if you're, and it's usually a mix of the two, but if you're doing the second one, you need to do a lot more on Gen and Demand Cap. 

Priyanka: Yeah, correct. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Now coming to the now part of it everybody needs money today. Like they don't want to spend on. Things that don't get them revenue. So people generally ask that, okay, this is all fine, but how much money will I get out of it? What is, if I like spend 1, what is the return on it, right? So how do you measure demand gen? For now, right? Like, why is it important now? To do it obviously because of the cycle and the recession looming, all of that, but what is your perspective on why is it important now?

Ishaan: So you said this very, you said this line, right? Everyone wants money now. And I think people don't understand that. SAS companies really did not want money, right? I don't think people understood how cheap money was. So for example, you could, you're the, if you, your value of a company. Money is a store of value, so your company was valued, let's say, at 10x of what it should be.

Then you got money at one tenth of what the value of money. You essentially were getting money for very cheap, right? If you could, so if you're getting like 10x the value, if you're getting something for 10x, at a 10x discount a 90 percent discount, you want to use it. And so you were getting money at a 90 percent discount.

So yes, money was actually cheap. Things have got, have, are not the same anymore. That was like the golden period of SaaS. That's when Spear Growth was also founded. So I had it, I had a great run for a year, honestly. So now, for example, we're seeing even across industry, I'm generalizing, obviously, and I'm sure you have a lot of data as well.

It's much more than I have. But we're seeing across, like we're seeing impact, right? For example, close rates would have dropped. Even like buying cycles are becoming longer. But at the same time, but at the same time, longer, when it becomes longer, the closed is not because it's like. And also because of that, we are seeing ROI of your normal demands in campaigns where the same campaigns would have given us, let's say, five, six X ROI are now not working.

So you cannot scale them as much. So now with all of this. One demand gen, you always had to, it was always important, but I think now it's just that, okay, I would still recommend do demand capture first, but like the cap of demand gen is demand capture is reaching faster because it becomes unprofitable very fast.

You do have to scale your demand then, and now you really need some sort of metric to evaluate it. And I don't think people really have a good idea, and I did ask a lot of people, I'll not name, but I asked a lot of folks on how do they evaluate it. No one had a good answer, right? Okay, it's awareness.

You should you should definitely you should not look at it like, Hey, we should not generate cost per SQL and just look at it. I agree. But if you're generating awareness, there has to be some value of that awareness. And if you're spending, if the value of that awareness is X and you're spending five X to generate X value, that is a bad investment.

Priyanka: Yeah. And 

Ishaan: no one really had a way to even calculate that. So one, demand gen has become more valuable because you get to a stage where you should start demand gen faster and do your, it's become more important to measure how valuable demand gen is really versus just being able to spend 20 percent of your budget on demand gen right?

As a thumb rule or something. 

Priyanka: Correct. Yeah. Cool. So now let's move on to LinkedIn ads and demand gen, right? For example, if I say that I got a conversion for 1K, what do i, what I understand that it's not just like last click, right? This is not the actual source.

There have been. multiple sources influencing that one demo button, right? Can you just tell me that what does 1k conversion? 

Ishaan: Sure, I'll give you three, four instances, right? Instance number one, we had a good, I think, so I'll use these terms, right? I'll use influenced pipeline as a term.

And then I'll also use, let's say, a marketing source, right? Source leads is the general thing that we've all been doing, that, hey, what is the last source? And we say, okay, this lead came from this source. But if you then turn off a channel which wasn't... Generating those you saw drop in performance across so that wasn't a good metric because it only gave at by everyone knows It's a last touch isn't often So I think Praveen was the one who was talking about that He influenced pipeline or influenced accounts or engaged accounts.

How do you track that and we've been using factors for this But what we've seen is, for example, with one of our clients, we saw about a good 12 times pipeline influenced per X spent, right? And for us, we, because I also do all sales, I do know that we have to spend about, I think one or one 1K.

for one client, right? Just for a closed, like a closed client, we have to pay somewhere around, we pay LinkedIn about 1 to 2K for that. Yeah. So what I mean by these two measurements, right? For example, for our clients. We saw that in the accounts that were closed, we are not saying LinkedIn was the only reason for influence, but we do, we did say that, Hey, like seven or 10, seven people from the company.

And when I say people, we only run ads to people in the buying in the decision committee, no one else sees the ads. So seven people in the decision committee have engaged with the ads. I think 20 times, right? And then in the other company, there's again five, six and the numbers I'm taking in larger deals is I am taking conservative numbers.

We've seen numbers like, Hey, people have clicked on your ads like 30, 40 times. And then like that. I think that's, that wouldn't even be the average because somewhere like they've seen our ads or click engage ads like a thousand times, right? And then so that, so I cannot say that, hey, this only happened because of LinkedIn because the last test could be them searching for us organically, maybe a sales person reaching out to them and all of that, and it should be those things.

But we cannot also reasonably say that LinkedIn wasn't, And influencer, right? If an account has three impressions, don't give LinkedIn credit, right? Definitely don't give credit. So 

Priyanka: tough to measure LinkedIn ads. Yeah, but I had to say this. Go on. Yeah, 

Ishaan: yeah. So if something has three impressions, four impressions, don't give LinkedIn credit, but just have some sort of threshold that this seems reasonable for your company, that if someone has seen or a bit engaging with your ads.

20 times, 30 times, whatever, if they've engaged with so many times and then they became an SQL, then they became a contributor to your pipeline then call it like, okay, that amount of pipeline was influenced by LinkedIn also along with other channels. And that's what I mean by when I say that, Hey, so 11x, we saw in other accounts, we've seen, and I don't use the other accounts because it just sounds way too unrealistic.

So another comes in 23 X. We've seen like for us, I'm saying close numbers, right? So that's also seen, but that's what I mean by when I, when you say that, okay, this is what a conversion from LinkedIn looks like. And what I wanted to share today was, okay, how do you. At least measure the value of this influence.

How do you project this, essentially? 

Priyanka: Yeah. Good. Correct. Before we move forward, there's another person who is asking, would this be recorded? Yes, there is a replay on the same link. This is also being streamed on YouTube. I'll put the link right after the stream ends. So now We'll go to the sample funnel like later and the sample flow later.

But first another ground that I wanted to cover is what is the goal for demand gen with LinkedIn ads? I think that's extremely important given the variety of things that you can do with LinkedIn ads. The goal and the objective is what is actually the defining factor here. What are you trying to do with LinkedIn ads?

What are your metrics? What is your intent? How do you look at it and how have your clients and have you at Spear Growth have done it?

Ishaan: So we've I'll give, I'll answer this in different parts. Yeah. The first one is okay. What's like the broad KPI? The one thing that if this does not happen you're probably not doing a good job at it, right? What does that look like? That piece is essentially that you want, if you're running ads, and I'm, again, I'm talking, I've only worked with B2B SaaS companies, so I, that's the only context I have, I, if it's an so that's what I'm speaking for.

So if you're running ads there let's say it's not a sales service, a sales district demo that you're trying to generate, right? So in those cases, if you're running ads to accounts within, and it's usually faster, but within three to four months, you should see significant pipeline generated from the same accounts that you have reasonable amount of impressions.

That's one thing, which also means that you cannot just run memes and get impressions and then call it a day, right? And just you cannot do that also. So that's one thing. Okay. What's the big thing? You really have to generate pipeline within three to four months from the accounts and the running ads.

Yeah. Now, this, but you, we cannot wait for months to know whether an ad worked or not. And because then how would we know if it didn't work, then what? So what we. 

Priyanka: Yeah. Go on. Go on. Sorry. Yeah. 

Ishaan: What we do now from a metrics perspective, there are some some leading indicators you can look at.

One is easily that. Okay. Are the right accounts doing. The ads. So just be very careful about who's seeing the ads, who in those companies are seeing the ads. So one is that. Check that. Second is, okay is your message really resonating well with the audience? So if it's a video ad, are people watching it?

If it's an image ad, are people clicking it? If it's something that's not meant to be clicked, or if it's like a document ad, if it's an email ad, are they reading, are they replying? So whatever the sort of message is. Look at that. And then so this is like one set of like platform level metrics, another level of metrics you can look at.

is let's say if you and very often I I recommend let's say, let's merge your LinkedIn campaigns with an outreach effort to be accounts have influenced and I'll share that how that outreach is not really a sales outreach, but outreach effort, right? In those outreach campaigns, are you seeing a higher reply rate compared to other campaigns?

That could be another thing. So based on how you are using demand gen, your leading indicators can change. And so you can look at a few things on a weekly basis, a few things on a monthly basis, for example, reply rates, you'll have to look at on a monthly basis, usually your platform level metrics, you can look at almost on a daily metric, but at least make pivots on a weekly metric, weekly basis.

So those are essentially the things you can look at. 

Priyanka: Yeah. Yeah. When you said outreach you, I don't I might be wrong here, but I think it's a very unconventional method of, marketers. Yeah. Yeah. So it's usually Hey, we don't want to do inbound only. And that's how it should be, but do you think it's unconventional or it is unconventional for me?

Ishaan: I'll tell you, so I am, I don't know. I am an inbound marketer through and through. You about B2B SaaS inbound. I'll be very confident. I'll be, I'll go on lives and talk to you about it. I don't know outbound as well. Yeah, but, and again, just because, and so this comes from not as a praise and expert.

This is comes from my experience. So we, we've I'll give you an, okay, I'll give you another example, right? Let's say I remove the ability of you to publish a blog on a website. Okay. You can create a content piece, but you cannot publish it. Okay. And then if you are to think, okay, what is the best way to generate RY from it?

I've already have, if I can just email it, if I create a no brainer content piece and I email it to folks who really want to read it, that might just be much, and if only 10 people, but 10 influential people who I really wanted to reach actually read that. Or consume that content piece, or if it's a template, use a template, then that is much more successful than your, than most companies is organic post as a blog, because you get more traffic, but the right people, folks may not.

So I'm not against it. Should it be under marketing should be sales? I haven't tried this should be under sales method yet, but should it be under marketing? So then he's running as a marketing function, he's doing it at spear growth right now. Seeing how does that look like, and it's working really well for us.

So I can say it does work well for us. We're running two kinds of outreach campaigns. One is if we have very specific intent signal, then we reach out to them and say that, hey, if you're looking, we know you're looking for it. If you'd like more information, let me know. Or second, which is part of our demand envelope, that if someone is engaging with a content that is of a certain type, We just give them something even much more valuable as a step to that.

Hey, you've already been interacting with the ads. Then we're talking about bits and pieces of demand. Jim, should I just send it all to you in one place? Because you've just been engaging with it here and there. Let me, I have it all in one place. Let me DM it to you. Is it okay? Yeah. Not heard a lot of no's.

So that, that could be like another way of outreach. It's not cold definitely, but another sort of outreach. So that works well. 

Priyanka: We also do the similar thing at factors. So yeah, we essentially get the list from factors itself about who is viewing our LinkedIn ads. Then we do some per permutation competition combination within our sales team.

And here marketing and sales do not work as two different areas. So the thing is that our outbound S D R Works really close with who's our marketer. So they work really closely and they ensure that they reach out to the exact, not exact person, but the most probable person.

And yeah because Aswin has the context on the ad and the SDR has the context on how to do the reach out well, that combination works really well. So we we have that sort of a cadence running inside factors. Even if the bandwidth for a marketer or maybe the person who's actually running the ads, maybe they do not have the bandwidth, then you can easily actually outsource it.

Try to make a cadence within the organization to reach out and, get that thing, right? So get that thing running and have a report for it and do that like diligently. That's what also stood out for me when, so I did not see this earlier, but after this I was like, okay, this can also happen.

And yeah also about the questions, if Anybody has any questions, do put it on the chat. We'll take it up at the end of the session for sure. Yeah. I was just going forward and let's go back to the, sample flow that you were talking about, right? How have you done, like, how is the flow of running a particular campaign or many campaigns together?

What are what are like your major takeaways from that? Yeah, that's the first question on the sample flow point for me. 

Ishaan: One thing that I think people that one thing that makes it very hard to create a LinkedIn flow for some people is that Everyone's trying to push people, push your audience from some place to some other place.

And everyone expects that the entire buyer journey is going to happen with your company. In most SaaS companies, the buying committee is smart enough that once they prioritize the problem, they are going to solve it without your help. That is why they have the job. So that's one huge disconnect.

That if you are able to make someone prioritize a problem, they can solve it. And if that solution happens to be your, the thing that you're selling, they will buy it, right? So I'm not saying you cannot influence the rest of it at all, but the emphasis on it is too much. Everyone's Hey, let's run top of the funnel ads, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, and top will push to middle to last.

That does not really happen. I've tested it this multiple times in multiple companies. Just, I like making it much more simple. You just have two flows running parallelly, but, and it's, it works, I'll explain, right? So first one is your old audience, right? Now your old audience are people who, let's say you have a list of companies.

And you want to target you have the right folks in those companies that you want to target and you may have multiple audiences or sub audiences in there are different personas. You might be running different ads that you have that and you run one set of cold ads to them. Now these gold ads usually talk about either they either are showing that and very rarely are they showing that, Hey, do you not even know this problem exist?

That is, I think in 10, 20 companies in one company, that should, that's a good message to them. Almost everyone knows their job, right? Or your problem is not usually that unique thing is, okay, do, and these are like the more common ones. Do people not believe that the problem can be solved?

So you're trying to show them that it is a very solvable problem. It's not, you don't have to do things this way. For example, on this call on, on this line, we're showing people that, Hey, you're not demanding, you can actually measure it. You can actually project it and if you can project it, you can actually show it to your finance team and get more budget for it, right?

You don't have to just say, Hey, 20 percent awareness and just try and avoid those questions in every board meeting that comes. You don't have to do that. You can actually project stuff. You can show results, right? That's it. Okay. Is this solvable? Thank you. Third thing could be that, hey, maybe people don't understand that the problem that your company solves is very important.

The reason, again, why I'm focusing on problem is because your software solves a bunch of problems, just pick one, right? And maybe start talking about that more in your ads. And then the last one is okay, sorry. The third one was is the, do people not understand the importance of the problem? For example, let's say.

People get a lot of emails or something like that. Okay, we all know it's annoying. We all know it's a problem, but maybe we don't know that, oh we're losing four hours a day or something, like X hours a week or what's the calculation of that? So we haven't thought of that or how we could have done, go to market in an extra region if we just hadn't been looking at emails all day, right?

No one has quantified it that way. That could be one. So then there's three, four other things. that we can talk about. I'll share maybe if you want it, by the way, just let me know, I'll share an entire list of questions that you can look at to figure out what the message should be. So if anyone, if you want, just drop it in chat.

I think I'll share it with you. You can share it with others. Right? 

Priyanka: Yeah. So put it on the comment and comment section. Yeah. Anyway. 

Ishaan: So that's like the first is the code layer. It does that. You're just talking about the problem. Usually sometimes you're talking about just the actual solver, like how does the exploration of the solution bit?

That's the thing you talk. Now, that's the first code layer. Now, from the code layer, it's very straightforward. You have a retargeting layer after that based on engagement. You retarget folks. But since you've only spoken about the problem, understand they don't, they're not looking for your solution right now.

So now you're retargeting methods, stuff that you are doing, right? All of your retargeting now has to go on. Or usually it's usually better than I'm generalizing has to go on the facts that hey, if you're sharing a case study. The case study is going to be positioned as instead of saying that, I'll give you an example of a spear growth, right?

So let's say we've run an ad saying that, Hey, you're current, you may have a problem with going into a new market, or maybe you've seen a huge drop in ROI recently. That's the problem we've spoken about and we've told them how to solve it on their own. And although retargeting ad should not be spear growth helped.

Factors. ai, solve, save x. The retargeting ad, the same case study, we can position it as Factors. ai, which is now similar to the company we want to sell to. was able to save X dollars of their marketing spending. And then the side note is, see how Spare Gross helped them, right? So the messaging has to be relevant to the solution or the problem that they're solving.

It cannot be you flaunting your chest, right? Or it cannot be just a random clutch badge. So that's your first, that's how we do the retargeting. So it's like very straightforward and you can have one, two, three layers of retargeting based on how big your audience is. Usually start with one and then eventually you can grow that out.

You can have, I like layering, you can layer in your in mail audiences. You can have a, you layer in text messages, but you can text ads, you can do all of that. But essentially it's a code layer and then it's a retargeting layer. And this is your demand gen framework. Now, the second thing you have to do in your demand gen layer is you add, be very cognizant of, okay, who is, who exactly, which companies are engaging with your ads?

When did they start engaging? And and how much have they engaged? And all of this is data that LinkedIn gives you natively. You don't, and obviously, Factors makes it much easier, but if you want a starting point, just do it with native LinkedIn data. You can get, you might have to pull it, create some reports relatively creatively because it does not give you when did they start engaging, and that's very important.

But you can look at week on week, okay, how much did they start engaging? How much did an account engage last week, this week? When did this? So all of that you have an idea of engagement levels by timeline. So now once you have this, the second thing you can do is with this also have a team similar to what you described, who's just reaching out and sharing content.

And then this content has to be very valuable for the store. You have to be giving away something that people would pay for. It's a good, would people pay something to get this piece of content?

Sure. So this is your first flow, right? And I'll ask maybe Harish's question, how are you tracking, adding new specific content before they are? They share their PII data. Okay. Harish, if you go on LinkedIn you can actually see this entire thing. You can go to your audiences and you can act.

If you've uploaded a list of companies, you can see their engagement. The only problem is that it's not very good. And if you actually export the engagement, you can also see. It at a deeper level of how many people have engaged and you can also see it at the level of how many times, which ads, you can see all of those things.

The only problem is this data is that you don't have, okay, when did this start and all of that. So you might have to do manual exports every week and then try and map it all up. So that's something we figured out, but you can look at exactly which company how much and all of that. So based on that, you should be able to.

Then reach out to, then you have to guess that, okay, in a buying committee, let's say unless you're selling to enterprises where it's a very large committee, let's say that's five, six people in the buying committee. So you can just reach out to those three, four folks saying that, Hey, I saw that you're engaging with my messages related to this and then yeah, it's only gives, you've been engaging with companies with this with this type of message.

And then you can give like the larger content piece and yeah, like it only gives you company level engagement. Yes, it does. And that's what I need to report. Even if using first party, any kind of intent data, any type of deannotation used, you'd only get this. Harish, but you do have a. A set of people who most probably will be engaging with that content.

So your ad has to be very relevant. So there's two parts, right? One, you're only targeting the buying communities. You're only targeting specific people in that company. So only they could have engaged. So you know what job titles in those companies have engaged, what location they are in also and based on your campaign, those, these things.

Also, you also have this data of that okay there, there's only, if there's only these many people that are in a committee who could engage with this message because the message is very relevant. For example, our ad, if I run it, Bianca may see it, but her finance team would not see it, even if's the same company.

So I do know that there is five people in the company. Only three would even understand what I'm saying. It has to be very specific, so you can reach out based on that. So others would not engage with it. 

Priyanka: Correct. One more thing to add to Harish's question is that you would have already defined your job title, job profile while you're targeting, right?

That is one cue from your side itself. Again, like how we do it at factors is we have the entire list of accounts looking at our ads, right? Obviously at a company level giving personal level data is probably illegal. So obviously only company level data. We map it in a way that, for example, anyway, we have the job title job titles specification, which we have set inside our campaign manager.

We also see which city they are seeing inside factors itself. And we, that, that's the permutation combination I was talking about, right? That, where, okay, this person is from this city. So most probably this is the person who's actually looking at my ads. And then we. get our SDR to, get to tell them.

And I am not saying that we just hit it out of the park every day, but There have been multiple times when we ask the, not me, the customer asks us on the sales call that, how did you figure out it's me? And they think that we are using something creepy, but that's not true. It's just like some guesswork, some tech and some permutation to how I reach out to that person.

So yeah, that's something you can do, even if there is like company. Engagement. Even company like level engagement is huge. I think in the, that black box it's still like gold mine, if I would say so that I think LinkedIn has worked for us really well because of this itself, right?

Even though there's no direct, click through but as their team reaches out, they look at us in different ways. Organic plays a big role. So that's just it. I think I spoke more than Ishan on this topic, but good. 

Ishaan: That's like the first floor. So like initially completing that, right?

The first floor, there's a cold layer, there's a retargeting layer, which is very straightforward. Just add a reach out

layer you're trying to do is you're trying to increase the Amount of engagement people have with your ad now this entire or with your brand with your message with the problem You're solving and building that trust. This is your trust building layer essentially like your entire this entire flow is just for trust building now and Also to help people prioritize the problem So once you've built trust and your audience prioritizes the problem They will automatically go over and try and purchase from someone right and if you build trust and your message has been clear That someone may as well be you.

And if that is you so you have a second layer, which we call the known intent layer, right? Because we're not saying that, Hey, everyone else does not have a purchase intent, which like this is all we know that these people have a purchase intent. So do those people who we know that have purchase intent based on retargeting data, based on your DNN version data.

Based on first, second, third party, we can also use that stuff, but anything you have, basically just use a second, like a separate function where you're just running ads only for known intent. And this could be, you can make this easy. You can use your solutions. You can use your case studies from the get go.

It works wonders. And then just have a very hard sequence there also of reach outs and combine that with your retargeting layers, like a separate structure on the side. But this structure. So you can be much more salesy with, and you should be much more salesy with, you cannot try and go and court people when they're ready to marry, right?

Essentially that, 

Priyanka: Yeah, that, that's a good example, yeah. 

Ishaan: So that's it. It's a very simple two layer flow, 

Priyanka: essentially. Now coming to the projections, right? Like I understand it's not like just actually, you can just attribute it to engagement itself, right? And if you can't attribute it, how do you project?

And do you even know it's getting us a certain amount of money in revenue or whatever, at least generating that pipeline? So if not engagement, then what is that projection metric or projection secret that you have come up with, maybe? 

Ishaan: Sure. So I, I am going to say a lot of numbers and terms.

So Priyanka, you will have to stop me if it becomes too jargon. So the way we do it I'll say first with all the jargons and simplify it once. So the way you do it is you just look at, okay. Okay. I'll start with what not to do. Most companies do this Hey, we got impressions, clicks, landing page visits, conversion rates, leads, MKLS, don't do this.

This does not work. It is very misleading. LinkedIn will always look like it does not work. Yes. Don't do this one. So what do you need to do or what I am recommending you do instead. is have your impressions, have your engagement data, right? Engagement would have to then now change based on the level of engagement.

And again, mind you when reporting on it, you have to look based on accounts, but when projecting on it, you have to give some sort of overview numbers, you cannot look based on. Which account in all of that. So when you're projecting, look at your impressions, look at engagement, but after looking at engagement try and estimate the number of engaged companies you can generate from it.

So that's like the first thing. And after engagement, the next thing you really need to estimate it. with formulas is number of engaged companies. Then out of that and engaged companies, you have again, like the context here is your message is not a random piece of content and they like your message.

Here is you talking about the problem. So my, this method only works if that is the message. So if you are talking about a problem, what you have now is a list of companies that are engaging with you talking about the problem that you think that you believe they're facing. These are engaged companies with a problem or people engaged with you talking about a problem.

Now, the second thing, so now from here, again, you can then now cannot do the same thing in KLSK. So now what you need to understand is even if you wanted to, in most companies, in a lot of companies, there are periods where people buy. And even if you prove to them that you are great and they need you, they just cannot buy, for example, for some companies till the end of the quarter or till the budget is allocated against it, just like purchase decision just cannot be made for a while in a lot of cases.

Even after you've proven the problem, or maybe there's just like other stuff going on in the company. Which is very like, even if you tell me, if you prove to me that, Hey, your software is amazing. And suddenly for some reason, there's a problem with a major, like a major problem with some of our clients or something, I am not going to care at all about your software at that point.

And I'm going to go and look at the clients and that's going to be my number one focus. So there are all sorts of these things where there are phases when people can buy. So again, you've done your impressions, you've done your engagement, you've estimated the number of engaged companies.

Next thing you can try and estimate, and I know it's going really like a lot, you're taking a lot of assumptions, but you need to just take some numbers that, hey, this is the number of companies who may be in market. And this is my least favorite assumption in this thing. But you do need to take that. And then based on this.

You can understand that the influenced pipeline value, you can understand that, okay, like out of the engaged companies, the potential pipeline that you can influence, or it may not be pipeline, but okay, this is the value of potential value of the engagement is this. If they're in market, it's short term, if they're not, if let's say if 1 in 12 is just because 1 month, 1 month, this month out of the 12 months ever if they're in market.

So 1 12th. is your short term pipeline. 1112 is your long term pipeline. And then out of that, since it's not actual pipeline, you cannot add a close rate of 30%. It has to be close to maybe 2 percent for long term pipeline and 10 or 5 percent for short term pipeline. And I do understand we took a lot of assumptions, but then we were able to, we used this model, that's why we're launching this like next month, probably.

But we did try it out with, I think, In just three instances right now, in all three, the actual pipeline amounts were 20 30 percent in in the 20 30 percent error margins. Again, we'll obviously test it out at least 10, 20, 30 times more till I say that hey, this is the method, but this is definitely better than what

we had earlier. 

Priyanka: At least there is a projection. 

Ishaan: Yes. Yeah. And so you are sure that you are not at least spending 10 times of whatever value you're generating, you know what the value is. And sometimes it's nothing, right? Maybe your pricing does not, is not the right thing for LinkedIn. Great. You got to know about, maybe your account list is too small.

Maybe your cost per clicks are too high. Like this would just tell you, okay. If for any reason, if it's just completely not a good fit, you should not do demand then through LinkedIn ads, you will get to know. At least you'll have some, okay, maybe we need to change, or even if, for example, for these regions, do it, for these other regions, don't do it, or you'll also get insights like, for this to work, these many companies have to engage with your, this, your message has to be good enough that these, this percentage of companies actually engage with it, if they are not, then it won't be profitable, right?

So you also have insights like these. And a lot of times it's Oh, if we get a 0. 1 percent CTR, it's not going to work out, right? You actually need a lot higher. So with this insight, like our ads get us about 1 percent CTR on LinkedIn and or engagement, right? So this is for video ads and all of that.

So that's where it starts making sense for us. That's where we're able to generate conversions that the sub 2k. Yeah.

Priyanka: I think taking assumptions is also important, right? There has to be something constant for you to make a model with other variables. So I studied economics in college and that's like economics 101, Ceteris Paribus that's the language. And they said that all other things constant, we'll do whatever and all of that.

And yeah, now I see why it's practical. We'll wait for your launch and then I'll like, we can dig deeper into it on another live maybe. I think we're open to questions now. We'll take questions for another five minutes or so. Veeresh.

Can we rely on the LinkedIn website demographics to get account level engagement for the reporting? 

Ishaan: So is it probably the best place to start? Yes. Even it also tells you if you upload a list of companies, it'll also tell you people have visited your website to some degree. Is it as accurate as the automation makes over different software, including factors and sixth sense integrations?

No. But is it probably the best place to start? Yes. The thing that it misses if you are, your list is not good enough, you will just not get any information about it. So your list that you're uploading to LinkedIn has to be very good. And that is not easy. That is not easy at all. Yeah.

So for example, what we are also on, again, I know I'm just like maybe even promoting this at this point, but we are also launching this thing where we are manually going ahead and checking every account. Which is if the 10, 000 list, like someone can actually manually check for certain things, which is painful, but if it reduces Accounts by 20%, 20 percent saver.

It's 

Priyanka: like Ishan has hired someone just to do that. To go into that 10, 000 accounts and look at it. No, but I think it's essential, right? Otherwise, how LinkedIn works is it'll only show you some like top companies and maybe like enterprise level companies with bigger, much more employees. And what do you get out of it?

Nothing is there and we'll just go. If you have something like which can show you very crucial data for smaller set of impressions and smaller companies who have actually seen your ads, right? Like they're not totally irrelevant. They're very relevant. So something like that, if they show, and I think the list part also comes in handy here.

If the list is not good, then. You're not going to get anything at all. So not from LinkedIn and not from maybe any other place. But yeah that's, I think a crucial information there. Is there any other, okay. Harish is asking another question. Do you guys use intent data for the company list? How many accounts should you target ideally?

Do you use an account plus native targeting? 

Ishaan: I am going to go outside demand and scope and I'll just tell you like how we usually structure all of our or most of our accounts, right? Because I think that will answer this really well. So when you're running and I'm assuming you were talking about LinkedIn ads, but I'll just still zoom out a bit and then give you a, like a, the complete context.

So there's four major things you're doing in ads. Not LinkedIn ads, but ads. The first one is your demand capture. So all of your not all, but a lot of, most of your Google ads are just going to go there. Your Bing ads, your even if you're running things like G2 Capture and not G2 Capture, but your Google ads and all go there, right?

That's your first list. The second is your retargeting, right? Now, that's your retargeting, and retargeting can also be divided into known intent and unknown intent, right? For example, and you can also divide it by your products and you can divide it by days. So it's like a matrix. That's your second function.

The third function in is that's what you were referring to would be your non intent targeting. So it's like cold targeting. For example, they probably assuming they don't know your company, but you know that they have intent and you're targeting them through anything. For example, this is your buying your G2 data.

Anything at all, but it's not retargeting. So for example, the difference between this and intent retargeting is that if they have visited your website and they've gone to a certain page where you know that they have intent or they've come through a certain ads on Google where you know, they have intent that becomes an intent retargeting because you also know that they know about the company, your intent targeting without the re not retargeting, but targeting is essentially companies when you just use intent lists.

Through whatever medium you can find and you can target them. And then the fourth one is demand gen. I'm like, what did I miss? I missed demand gen. The fourth one is then your demand gen. These are your four. So your demand capture retargeting, high intent targeting, and your demand gen. Does that sort of answer?

So that's like the first one. Do you use intent list? Yes. Where do you use it? I've slotted it. How many accounts should you target? Ideally you've seen great results with 5, 000. 000 accounts or 20, 000 people not accounts on LinkedIn. Below that you, I'm not saying don't do it. It just gets very expensive sometimes.

Above that, usually the targeting is a little off. But it's not a hard and fast rule. We've seen different things work. The same thing for a different company just stops working for this company. So it's tested out, but still to give you a range, 000 is usually what we've seen working. And I personally prefer I personally, not all of Sphere Growth, prefer keeping it closer to the 5k range.

Yeah. 

Priyanka: Not all of Sphere Growth. Yeah. Yeah. 

Ishaan: Because Akarsha and her team have different viewpoints on this also at different times. They want to test different things. I want to test different things. It's fun. 

Priyanka: Yeah, of course I think we don't use any intent data for company list, but when we want to run campaigns for very specific set of companies, like really specific, and maybe they are they're like using a particular A tool and we are complimentary to it and we want to put a ad or something.

We used izer or XG Insights build with, these are all like techno. They give all the technographic data. So that's also helpful to some extent. At least it was helpful for us and we got quite quite a lot of. Qualified leads and they turn into customers eventually. Yeah, this is also like good again, the accuracy would not be like 100 percent maybe not even like 70%, but it's still good.

Yeah, that's like another thing. So if there are no questions we can wrap this up. 

Ishaan: I think we missed the last thing. I'll just quickly answer the last part. Do you use again, depends on all of that, but if you want quick answers, you always start with account targeting and then three months three months down the line, we test usually native that's tested out to see if that works, but that's like the rule of thumb.

Priyanka: It's a flow. Cool. I think okay. We have been live for an hour almost now.

Yeah, we thought we'd wrap it up in 20 minutes, 10 minutes. We'll take questions, but it's always good to see more engagement than we expect. So thanks everyone for joining. And I'll see you all in two weeks with another LinkedIn live. Thank you. Take care. Bye.

Ishaan: Thank you.