Paid campaigns shouldn’t be the main tactic in your strategy, but at some point, they are essential to cut through the noise and play the game.

Paid campaigns allow startups in their early stages to accelerate market penetration, test their messages, learn about the responsiveness of their target audiences and achieve business opportunities… to just name a few opportunities.

But, paid campaigns can be a total waste of money and time, if they are not managed properly.

We orchestrate multiple channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Google ads, Reddit ads, Youtube ads, and many other dedicated ABM channels, in order to reach maximal impact for a minimal budget.

Paid campaigns and demand gen expertise should be tailored to the specific use case. Here are the main use cases that we manage:

  • Enterprise sales lead-gen (demand gen) KPIs – Feeding the sales
  • SaaS PLG ads that are aimed to increase product registration and enhance usage
  • OSS related ads where attribution is missing and the KPIs are completely different from previous use cases

Here’s how it works:

1

Strategy & KPIs

This is the ‘the brains’ of the operation. We never start working on campaigns before we define the quantitative KPIs (from traffic to leads to MQLs, SQLs, or an increase in product usage) as well as the high-level goals (such as validating messages, understanding the cost per SQL, understanding the cycle from lead-gen to the deal and alike)

2

Competitive intelligence

Always pay attention to your competitors – ads intelligence tools and tactics can reveal where similar companies in the industry choose to spend their money, what content they are pushing through paid ads, how their ad copy and creative looks like, and more. This is an essential step on the way to success, no need to explain why.

3

Media architecture

Some would also call this the media plan. Think about building a house. The architecture plan is the one that includes all requirements, materials, and steps needed to build the house. Same here, the media architecture draws a funnel and specifies the exact channels, campaigns, content, ad units (copy and creative), targeting, and budget per each funnel step. That’s the roadmap and it sets the future of the operation – a blast or a failure.

4

Content that fits ads and funnel marketing

This is where a lot of founders tend to get things wrong. They believe that every product or corporate content item can feed the media campaigns but that’s not the case. Paid campaigns require unique content that fits the media channels and the prospect’s state of mind when they see the ad. It needs to provoke curiosity, be teasing, appealing people that are not yet familiar with the brand, and NOT focused on selling the product. Top funnel content is different than remarketing content, Linkedin content is not the same as Google ads content or Facebook content. Lead gen content is different than demand gen one, and… you get the idea

5

Ultra smart targeting

How familiar are you with every ad channel (as an advertiser and not as a consumer)? Targeting options in the biggest ad channels are endless, and targeting strategies can be super smart, but they require a lot of experience. You can target companies from specific industries that are top growing, you can combine lists with enriching signals, and you can exclude specific attributions that would change the whole picture. In short, running smartly-targeted paid campaigns is a whole profession. Don’t underestimate it.

6

Uncompromising and continuous optimization

Every decent performance pro would tell you that campaign operation is a hungry beast! Optimization must happen on an ongoing basis and include a unique tech stack to avoid fraud and run smart analysis, ensure that new content is always available, disable bad performing ad units, run endless AB tests to reach new optimization levels… in short, it’s a game for pros.