What are the benefits of a well-run paid marketing program?

Effective marketing programs are one of the most efficient ways to acquire new customers – most companies need to invest in paid marketing if they want to scale. Organic growth is possible (and often present in addition to paid growth channels) but it can only help you grow to a certain extent if it isn’t amplified by paid marketing channels. Paid programs help you acquire low cost, high quality customers who are crucial to your business’s development. 

Alongside direct revenue impact, they increase brand awareness – although customer acquisition is the objective that you optimize for when running paid marketing, brand awareness is a valuable halo effect that helps future customers discover and remember your brand, even if they don’t convert immediately. 

Paid Marketing Spend 

What are the different options for allocating paid marketing spend? 

Google ads should be the primary focus for most B2B SaaS companies – Meta ad products are more useful for B2C companies. While LinkedIn is also useful in the B2B space, Google ads provide enough accessibility and scale that most small-to-medium businesses can profitably spend the majority of their marketing budgets on the platform. It’s only advantageous to scale your LinkedIn campaigns before your Google campaigns if you lack organic search volume and must generate demand yourself. 

Google
Audiences it works for			A less specific (from an ICP standpoint) but high intent audience that is actively seeking to learn about your product.
Advantages			Google Search has an enormous amount of inventory and high search volume for whatever niche you operate in. Because Google ads are designed to let you home in on customers who are actively searching for the solution you offer, you can target high quality, high intent customers (low-hanging fruit) who will be easier to convert.  These advantages manifest in higher conversion rates and lower costs per lead—and the potential to scale significantly before maxing out the campaign’s efficacy.
Disadvantages			Google Search can be expensive, especially if you don’t know how to limit your scope and prioritize the campaigns that are most important for your business. It’s difficult to gain traction if your budget is too small and spread too thin across numerous keywords.
Tips to optimize			• Start with Google Search. Only expand into other products like YouTube if you’re spending $1MM+ per month.  • Do fewer things better. It’s easy to get distracted by chasing after too many keywords at the same time, and the largest gains usually come from running a limited number of strong campaigns. • Scrutinize your broad match keywords, be careful about your broad match budgets, and don’t let those campaigns indefinitely run on autopilot.

LinkedIn
Audiences it works for		ICPs who can be identified by their job title, company size, or industry.
Advantages		LinkedIn can generate brand awareness or deliver hyper-targeted ads to your ICPs by refining audience based on professional criteria. LinkedIn can also increase demand generation by introducing new/upcoming products to a target audience that doesn’t yet know to search for the product.  LinkedIn’s lead gen ads provide a unique way for you to offer content (e.g., you might offer a talent professional an HR salary report) in exchange for their email address. In addition to gaining contact information for your target, you can demonstrate how you add value and further advertise your services through the content they’ve unlocked.
Disadvantages		LinkedIn can be prohibitively expensive for many companies, and conversion rates are very low.
Tips to optimize		Becuase the majority of LinkedIn users access the platform through the app, usesimple ads that collect email addresses and make it as easy as possible to sign up. Then, focus on following up with potential customers through an email campaign instead of developing a complex LinkedIn advertising strategy.

Combine Google and LinkedIn in your approach to grow and capitalize on demand – while both platforms are useful in their own right, well-designed marketing programs leverage the advantages of both to achieve the greatest impact at reasonable levels of spend. For example, many businesses use Google to maximize existing demand volume and use LinkedIn to raise additional awareness and generate new demand amongst a highly targeted demographic. In turn, this new demand fuels incremental Google search volume, continuing the cycle. 

How do you improve audience targeting across your paid marketing campaigns? 

Minimize audience targeting on Google – search ads are designed to target people who are searching for your terms or product. Unless there’s a specific subset of that audience who you don’t want to invest in reaching, your campaign will perform better if you layer on as little targeting as possible. 

Target by platform and format instead of audience – use Google Search instead of Google Performance Max (PMax). PMax is popular because it’s an easy way to achieve significant volume through a single blanket campaign across Search, YouTube, etc. However, PMax only lets you control bid, budget, and a few small details; you can’t control your keywords, display ads, or video selection—all of which directly impact the efficiency of your campaign. Focus instead on running ads that you can control. 

Use LinkedIn to target as specific an ICP as possible – if you cast too wide a net, you won’t reach your most important customers on a meaningful scale (and it’s impossible to create an ad that is optimized for multiple ICPs). Your LinkedIn audience should never include more than 50k-100k people unless you’re spending more than $1,000 per day. If you don’t know who your ICP is, you shouldn’t be spending money on LinkedIn. 

How do you decide between exact vs. broad match keywords for Google Search campaigns? 

Keyword type		What is it?		What’s the risk?
Broad match		A keyword that matches your ad to searches that are related to your keyword, even if they don’t contain the keyword itself.		You have less control over a broad match campaign, and you can only determine how responsibly Google spends your money after evaluating the relevance of the broad match results.
Exact match		A keyword that matches your ad to the exact word or phrase you’ve specified (or a very close variant of it).		You have more control over an exact match campaign, but you might be missing out on valuable search volume and important keyword insights.

Broad matches can help you scale your campaign – since 15% of Google searches are new everyday, you shouldn’t assume that the keywords that have always worked in the past will continue to work in the future without optimization. Use broad matches to understand how your customers are searching for you and how much potential volume exists on the platform after you’ve maxed out your exact match keywords.

Use exact matches to extract the greatest value out of high-opportunity areas – after you identify the broad match keywords that perform best, layer on phrases and variations of those keywords and run exact match keywords based on your broad match insights. Exact match will let you retain better control of your budget and invest in the highest value campaigns. If you have a limited budget, nearly all of it should be focused on exact match. 

How do you identify keywords that matter in your market? How many keywords should you target?

Steps to Identifying Keywords

Step 1: Ask an LLM for a keyword structure – use a prompt like: “I am a Google Ads specialist. My website is X. Can you give me a keyword campaign and keyword structure for Google Ads that I can use to launch campaigns with?” The structure can include a mix of broad and exact match terms and ad copy.

Step 2: Choose and test 3 of the recommended keywords – put the 3 most promising keywords into a broad match campaign to understand which related keywords might have the best traction. Plan to spend $100-$1,000 a day on this test depending on your budget.

Step 3: Test additional keywords from the Google search terms report – this Google report tells you exactly which keywords people are searching for. Build broad match keyword campaigns ($100-$1,000/day) to help you test some of those terms as well.

Step 4: Build exact match campaigns –  using both the Google report and the LLM’s suggestions helped you cast a wide net to ensure that you’re identifying a selection of valuable keywords. Now, build exact match campaigns for the most valuable keywords and work toward maxing out those campaigns. If you end up saturating the   valuable keywords, you can repeat this process for the other promising terms and phrases that you identified in Step 3.

Step 5: Repeat – ​​Identifying relevant keywords shouldn’t be a one-time project. Regularly seek out new promising keywords and test accordingly to make sure search patterns aren’t shifting away from your campaigns.

AI can provide a helpful starting point for developing keyword structures – use ChatGPT (or an LLM of your choice) to create a first draft of recommended keywords. Make adjustments as necessary, but having a chatbot provide your framework can save hours at the beginning of this process. 

Keyword quantity depends on performance – there is no “right” number of keywords that you should be using, though it is helpful to always have a broad match campaign running (or recently run) so you can keep a pulse on new keyword ideas for future expansion. Because Google search volume is so high—especially for certain products and industries—many companies never max out their most valuable keywords.   

What does an effective ad look like? What does strong ad copy look like?  

Strong ads show a direct connection between the keyword and the ad itself – make it as easy as possible for customers to see that your Google search ad result meets their needs. Your ad should include the keyword and use clear and concise language to convey a relevant message. 

Redundant, direct ad copy is helpful, not “cringe-worthy” – with search ads, err on the side of being repetitive. For example, if a customer searches “best credit card”, they are more likely to click on an ad that says “best credit card”—not an overly creative ad that discusses the side benefits of good credit cards. Stronger performance is also often compounded by the fact that Google rewards ads that show clear keyword relevance. 

Keywords should remain consistent from search to CTA – in addition to including your keyword at least once in the ad itself, you should make the keyword easy to spot on the landing page you send people to. If you don’t match the keyword above the fold on the landing page, you will struggle with conversion. 

How do you evaluate ad performance? How do you improve the performance of an existing campaign? 

Metric		Why it matters
Conversion rate		Your goal is to get people to take action when they see your ad. While click through rate indicates how many people are responding to the ad itself, your campaign will only be successful if it drives conversion or incentivizes someone to submit a lead.
Cost per lead		Closely related to conversion rate, this metric weighs your ad’s ability to get customers to react against the investment in the campaign itself. If your cost per lead is too expensive but your conversion rate is strong, you could be overbidding, spending in the wrong places, or paying more to compensate for an ad structure that Google doesn’t prioritize.

Constantly run experiments to improve all aspects of your campaign – utilize the experiments section in Google ads, which is designed to help you run regular A/B tests. Here, you can test different ads, keyword match types, or specific keywords against one another to make sure your campaigns are constantly evolving to better appeal to your target demographic. 

How can platform algorithm changes and updates to data privacy laws impact your paid marketing strategy? 

Work closely with your website owner to ensure geographical and platform compliance – adhering to industry best practices like cookies policies, T&C policies, and even website loading time falls under the eCommerce team’s domain, but failing to comply with requirements could create legal issues for you in the future, or reduce performance on Google ads. Take a proactive approach to make sure that your eCommerce team is aware of any upcoming changes and has a plan to adjust as necessary.

How do you scale a paid marketing campaign?

Start with your most valuable target and only expand after you’ve maxed it out – the “do fewer things better” philosophy should guide every paid marketing growth strategy. Responsible expansion plans start with the smallest, most important keywords or ICPs and maximize spending in those areas. If you get excited and recklessly layer on new budgets and campaigns, they will never perform as well as a well-thought-out, responsibly executed growth plan that balances direct performance with scale. 

		Scaling Google campaigns		Scaling LinkedIn campaigns
Example of what not to do		Spend $100k+ per month targeting 1,000 keywords just in case your customer uses something you wouldn’t think to include in a smaller exact match campaign.		Spend $200 per day on an audience of 3M people who work at companies of various sizes in multiple geographies just in case they might like your HR software.
Example of what to do		Without necessarily reducing your $100k+ budget, dial back your campaign to your 10-20 most valuable keywords. Then, pull your top keyword into its own campaign (with the greatest budget allocation), and try to max out your budget on your most valuable keywords. Finally, use the broad-to-exact match process to augment your keywords as needed.		Tighten up your targeting to home in on your most valuable customer: HR Managers (job title) at 500-1,000 person companies (company size) in the US (geography). If performance improves—proving that you have the right ICP—layer on additional budget. Once you’ve maxed out your budget or reach for that ICP, take the same approach to targeting your other ICPs.

Landing Pages

What does a well-designed landing page look like? What common mistakes do companies make with landing pages? 

Landing pages should be mobile-first – 90% of LinkedIn traffic occurs on a mobile device, so any LinkedIn ad that links to a landing page optimized for desktop risks losing the potential customer before they’ve been presented with a CTA. Mobile-first landing pages have limited real estate, so it’s crucial to understand the customer and exactly what they need to see to convert. 

Your most important information should be above the fold – in addition to including the original keyword in this area, all relevant information must be visible before the customer scrolls down. You have 2-3 seconds to capture your customer’s attention, so the relevant offer, key information, and clear CTA must all be obvious without scrolling. 

The faster it loads, the better – if your landing page takes too long to load, it doesn’t matter what’s on it. Your loading time should take as little of those 2-3 seconds as possible to give your landing page the best possible chance of presenting all relevant information before you lose the customer’s interest.  

The Nine Features of a Perfect Landing Page

Example of a Strong Landing Page

Forms 

What content should you gate with a form?

Content must “earn” the gate – just like ad copy and landing pages, gated content must be carefully tailored to the search phrase. If your content isn’t compelling enough, there’s no reason for customers to share information with you to get past the gate. 

Content should be gated if: 

• Interesting and extremely relevant to the keyword or ICP
• Difficult or impossible to find anywhere else (which is becoming increasingly difficult with AI)

Content shouldn’t be gated if:

• It’s generic 
• The information is easy to access elsewhere
• The content is of average quality

How many fields should you have in a form? What information should you look to capture? 

Ask as few questions as possible – the longer the form, the less likely your target will complete it. However, forms that are too short defeat the purpose of the form in the first place. Identify the most important information that your sales team needs in order to make the most out of the new opportunity and collect only that information. 

Don’t ask questions you can answer elsewhere – many form fields become redundant once you consider their implications. For example, if you ask for the name of a customer’s company, you can find the size, industry, and location of their company through ZoomInfo or possibly basic online research. It’s probably a better use of your budget to pay someone to regularly research the companies of all new leads than to invest in LinkedIn ads that don’t convert because your form is too long.   

Increase conversion by asking customers to make 1 decision per page – if you do need to capture a lot of data, break up the flow of your form by asking 1 important question (or having 1 required input) on each page. This helps your form feel more manageable and can increase conversion by 30-40%. 

Overall

What are the most important things to get right? 

Match each keyword to its ad and landing page – if you don’t have consistency between the keyword, ad, and landing page, you risk wasting thousands of dollars to get—and lose—the attention of valuable potential customers. The simple habit of spelling out your ad’s relevance prevents you from accidentally hamstringing campaigns that would otherwise be successful. Basic blocking and tackling can improve the performance of almost any ad campaign. 

Focus improves performance – there are so many ways to reach customers—but not every way is equally useful. Don’t be afraid to shut off low-performing networks or platforms, cut out inefficient campaigns, and double down on what’s working. Commit to a minimalist approach to paid marketing and get good at what works for your business. Then think about how to expand. Too many marketers are tempted to skip to the final step before going through the crucial stages before.