How to Maximize Paid Advertising ROI in B2B SaaS

Evan Fehler (00:02)
Here's a great example. At my last company, if you looked at last touch attribution for paid advertising, you would say we were getting, let's say it was 60 cents on the dollar from AdWords. If you factored in

you know, okay, well, we were calling some things outbound that really came in with paid advertising too, but outbound had a touch point with, you know, based on our rules of engagement internally. Okay. Now you're at like 80, 90 cents. And then you look into, well, hold on. We also collect self-reported attribution data and a ton of these people are saying they heard about us through paid ads. And you add that group in there. It got up to, and you start understanding all these methods and we have all this tracking in place with multiple attribution, you know, collection points. You're now at a dollar 78.

for every dollar you spend on AdWords. And now all of a sudden you're going from turn this program off to like, how do we spend more money? Is there any more juice to squeeze out of this?

Benjamin Ard (01:04)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Evan. Evan, welcome to the show.

Evan Fehler (01:09)
All right. Thank you.

Benjamin Ard (01:10)
Evan, I'm excited for this conversation. Even in the pre conversation, I can tell there's some really good passion and information behind the subject. It's going to be fun. Before we dive in, Evan, let's get to know you and a little bit of your background.

Evan Fehler (01:23)
Yeah. So I've been a B2B SaaS marketer for a little over 10 years. I worked at a lot of high growth SaaS companies and about four months ago, I made the switch to the agency side. Now working at Directive and we're selling to all the B2B SaaS companies, which as a marketing leader is really cool because I came from selling online facts software, healthcare compliance software, and I'd really have to spend time learning the buyer. And now I get to sell to myself effectively and be like, no, this wouldn't work on me or yes, this does.

it's a really fun perspective to have.

Benjamin Ard (01:51)
I love it. And tell us what you love about content and marketing.

Evan Fehler (01:55)
Sure. I saw this question when I listened to some of your other podcasts you had done in the past. You love to ask it. And there's two things I landed on. So number one is I love how raw good content is, right? I think as marketers, we spend so much time trying to make content perfect. And if you look at what's working out there right now, it's like raw thoughts and things can be spelt wrong. And it's not any of the formats we spent, you know, 20 minutes.

weeks making a 20 minute video and it's not necessarily that format. And it could just be a quick thought leadership post on LinkedIn or it could be a one pager. I guess I just love how raw and sometimes wrong we are as marketers about what's going to be the most engaging environment.

Benjamin Ard (02:32)
I agree with that. I love that standpoint because I feel like I am more more drawn to like that. Just yeah, like you said, I think raw is a really good word, authentic, almost like vulnerable content where I'm like, like I can relate to this as opposed to the super polished kind of stuff where I'm like, I don't know if I really get that to be honest.

Evan Fehler (02:50)
Yeah. And

we're getting more and more data on what cuts through and everyone's like, shoot, this is what's actually working. Right. and the other thing, the second thing I really love is I think there's still this incredibly large gap between, we kind of alluded to it, but what marketers think good content is for their ICP versus what's actually working. you know, the big example is companies and you know, this from your content agency, like companies are moving away from.

I need to go after the high volume keyword. Like for us at Directive, we shouldn't be writing about tackling the keyword, what is demand generation? None of our actual buyers, those VP of marketing of B2B SaaS are ever typing in what is demand generation. Sure, it has the highest keyword volume because some guy in a random place heard the word while they were talking to their friend at a bar and wanted to Google it. But there's still this really big gap in writing quality content for the right people. And SEO is changing so much right now because of it.

And the type of content that's out there is changing because of both thoughts. But I just think there's still this huge gap for content marketers to solve and all of us to figure out on how to really write the right content for our audience. Even though we've been doing it for 100 years, we still have a space to figure out.

Benjamin Ard (03:55)
yeah. A funny story, my brother who's a software developer, one day he was on Google and he was searching for something extremely specific, extremely targeted. And all of sudden the search results opened wide up and Google said, hey, if you're searching for this very niche thing, you might be a good fit for us at our company. You should take this quiz and stuff like that. So I love your analogy there of really understanding what people are looking for. You're right.

You know, in my role, having done demand generation for ages, it's been probably 20 years since I've ever contemplated the search, what is demand generation or would I care about the article? I'm hyper focusing on very specific techniques and strategies and trying to educate myself on something very specific. And so I think that's really cool and powerful. I love that approach.

Evan Fehler (04:38)
Yeah. And I think, I think SEO and organic is sort of catching up from the standpoint of like, you know, now with this like no click searching where they just quickly get their answer. We're actually content like the, platform itself, like Google, or maybe you're asking Amazon or voice search, like is now going to speak to what you and I or the buyer would actually care about and answer that question without having to go super deep to whatever the high volume keyword is. So it's just an interesting world that it feels like, why aren't we closer to solving this? and in

Going back to the original, like now I'm the buyer, I really get to be our BS tester internally for content where people have ideas and I'm like, honestly, like I already knew that or yeah, that's not impressive or yeah, that's amazing. Let's go deeper onto this topic specifically, because I feel like this is the juice that we're trying to figure.

Benjamin Ard (05:20)
I love that. That's awesome. Well, Evan, today we're going to talk a little bit about paid advertising. So ads in general, I'll be the first one to admit I've spent a lot of money on ad spend. I really am better at organic. So I'm really looking forward to learning and understanding more from you. But when it comes to that, what are some of these trends that you're seeing in today? When it comes to ads, again, I feel like AI and a whole bunch of stuff.

has really got people scratching their heads saying, okay, what the frick do I do? I know a lot of people are like, is the ROI there anymore? I mean, there's just a lot of people really confused about it, especially now that they're asked to be like really profitable in their ad spend. And so now they really have to know their systems. They can't get away with really bad targeting. So what are you seeing in this space in general?

Evan Fehler (06:04)
Yeah, and this is a content podcast, so I'm excited to talk about the content side of ads, but I wanna get to that. It's funny, there's this internal content, we're talking about creating good content. There's this internal content piece I'm working through with Garrett, our CEO, and Sam, our director of marketing. I think it's no secret that ad spend is down, right? And it's this three-part problem, in my opinion.

And I want to talk through this before, and then we'll talk about the content for paid advertising that's working. Right. So I get to see Directive has over 250 million in annual ad spend we manage and we're stealing best practices all from each other. Directive spending, you know, well over a million dollars a year on ads to test things ourselves that we're passing the best strategy to our customers. But okay, three part problem on, in my opinion, why paid advertising is down across all of SaaS. The first problem and it goes in order is people don't understand what their North Star metrics are. So right now,

at Directive, I know that if I hit certain cost per, so if I hit this cost per proposal, this cost per close one, some companies it's LTV to CAC, some companies dollar in, dollar out, I know I'll get more budget. They'll figure out how to give me more budget, I'll get more budget if I could do that in a scale way. Not every company I've worked for had that answer clearly, or they're like, well, it's sort of kind of this and kind of this. There's a lot of like road bumps and nuances in there, but that's problem number one is companies don't understand really what their North Star metrics are that,

If you hit this while advertising, you'd get more budgets. So that's one reason budgets are down. Number two is people don't know how to measure their results.

Here's a great example. At my last company, if you looked at last touch attribution for paid advertising, you would say we were getting, let's say it was 60 cents on the dollar from AdWords. If you factored in

you know, okay, well, we were calling some things outbound that really came in with paid advertising too, but outbound had a touch point with, you know, based on our rules of engagement internally. Okay. Now you're at like 80, 90 cents. And then you look into, well, hold on. We also collect self-reported attribution data and a ton of these people are saying they heard about us through paid ads. And you add that group in there. It got up to, and you start understanding all these methods and we have all this tracking in place with multiple attribution, you know, collection points. You're now at a dollar 78.

for every dollar you spend on AdWords. And now all of a sudden you're going from turn this program off to like, how do we spend more money? Is there any more juice to squeeze out of this?

And so there's a big tracking problem. And it first starts with not understanding what you need to track towards, then the tracking problem. And then, and I think Directive solves this really well, the methodology on how people advertise is brutal. Like we open accounts all the time, look at prospect accounts all the time. And it's incredible how bad strategies are out there because these products are evolving, but the...

the learning from the main person running these accounts maybe isn't evolving as quickly. And so that's one of the benefits at Directive where you have, we're managing 250 million in spend across well over a hundred accounts. Like, you we get to see all the best strategies and use that across. Okay. Now we frame the problem. Let's talk about the content side of the solution. Any, I'll pause there. I feel like I'm over talking, but like, does that make sense?

Benjamin Ard (08:54)
No,

I loved it. I loved the framework 100%. And I love the steps there. Know what you're ultimately looking for, figure out how to track it, use the right methodology. I'm falling right in line. I love it. This is great.

Evan Fehler (09:06)
Yeah. And those seem like really basic things, but there's so many nuances when you're actually working on a software company. Like I didn't always have my Northstar metric set up. I didn't always have the tracking set up and you have to, takes time to build these things. And then you get to the strategy, but most people are trying to run a paid ad strategy because you need growth now before they solve the other stuff. so eventually you're to look at it from the top down and it's just going to fall flat. the content side is really interesting because

And I think this is the continuation, we were talking about this before of the podcast you had earlier where you were talking about what does advertising look like in a no-click world. There's a few things that we're seeing on the ad side. So first off, most people have an understanding that X percent of my budget is towards conversion ads and then X percent is brand awareness. I think most people are at that point. Let's call it 80 % conversion, 20 % brand awareness. That number is shifting a little bit, right? It probably depends where you are in market, your product market fit.

competition, all these different things. The question, and I think what I'm really focused on is what goes into that 20%. We're figuring this out at Directive, just to be clear, but some of the things that I'll call out that we've seen.

Posting Most people for their brand will create an ad so the 20 % brand which that number is growing They'll create an ad from their company. What we're seeing is that if you've tested those ads organically So post it from for us It's our direct of our account or some of our individuals like Garrett's ads or maybe I'll make a LinkedIn post post organically It's free and you just grab the best pieces of content to promote as opposed to promoting that new

we've seen customers with up to a 12 X difference in performance, right? That, I mean, that's drastic and those are real numbers. So we, we look at this customer, we're like, stop just creating ads for your brand. Like, why don't you just post things from individual and company accounts and use that as your promotion, whatever's the most engaging. It seems like a no brainer idea, but people aren't doing this. We see it all the time. The other thing I'm seeing a lot is companies don't have the right rotation in there. So how often should you change out the

brand ads? Well, if you look at most companies, they maybe have three or four brand ads they're running, um, three or four different pieces of content. How often are they changing it out? When I look at LinkedIn and I see even the companies doing it right, where it's like they've tested this individual post, it's something that went viral or promoting it. I've seen that same piece of content 11 times as opposed to seeing constantly different pieces of content. So in my opinion, you should have 20 plus ads in that rotation at all times. And then they rotate out every month or so when it gets stale and

So then the question is, well, how do you fill up 20 pieces of content? What is it? Right? And these are the problems that paid advertising teams need to be thinking about from a content perspective. The good news is it shouldn't be as hard to create content. Thought leadership is just a post. It can be raw. Maybe it's like, hey, here's awesome G2 reviews we just got. Some of it is your brand story as well, which should be easy to create in ads.

that's the balance that we're trying to figure out a directive and we're starting to get a better point of view on and we're learning this from our customers. We're learning this from ourselves and that's where the game is right

Benjamin Ard (12:01)
I love that. So for everyone that's running paid advertising, like you mentioned, there's that 20 80 % split and I love that because for a long time it wasn't the case. And I do think 100 % people are realizing you gotta fill up the top of the funnel if you ever expect something to come out the bottom. And I think that that's a great methodology. When you're looking at the 80%, you know, we just mentioned the podcast episode about zero click content and things of that nature. Where are you seeing trends in the space?

about are they driving traffic to websites? Are they trying to collect lead forms on social platforms? You know, with AI is the volume going down? Like what are your recommendations for someone saying, where do I even go with the advertising stuff? Cause I feel like everything's just changed on me.

Evan Fehler (12:44)
Yeah, in full transparency, like for us, it's been a 20 80. I think we're to move more to like 40 60 in the coming months because we feel like there needs to be more of a top of funnel. This also has to do with ad saturation of your tam and all the other things. But let's stick with 20 80 because that's what I've seen at most companies. And I think it's the right place to start on the 80 % side. What contents driving conversions is the number one question in the Historically, and directors been shouting this from the rooftops, maybe to our own fault for years.

Conversation ads on LinkedIn have been incredibly effective for us. Giving out gift cards as the call to action and to take a demo has been incredibly effective. We've been shouting it for years. Unfortunately, we look at the data on the cost for those conversation ads just in 2024 versus 2023. It got seven times more expensive year over year. LinkedIn caught on. The community caught on of advertisers, and they're like, this is super effective. Let's go there. So some of the game as advertisers is you need to go where

not everyone else's and advertise there because the cost is cheaper. And that was conversation ads for years. It still works. You can still absolutely get it to work. But even at Directive, we're figuring out how do we diversify? What's the next upcoming play? We're still running tons of conversation ads. Our clients are getting great results from conversation ads. But that's one place I'd say super effective. you're coming from LinkedIn, don't have to... Conversation ads is a great place, but wouldn't send people off site to landing pages.

That's just extra clicks. You're losing people. Obviously places like Google, you're going to have landing play pages, things like that. I think what's interesting too is five, 10 years ago, it was just harder to look up and find companies, but now everyone's so comfortable. if you see a good LinkedIn post, you're like, well, let me just Google that company real quick. And if you want a demo, you can just ask for it. You know where to find it, how to Google them really quickly. So I think this over reliance on having to have a perfect conversion funnels changing.

speaks to part of why we're moving a little bit away from that 20 80 split more towards 40 60 because if people are consuming good content from us, we'll just go to our website and convert. And that's already happening today. And the only way to know about this is to get self-reported attribution. We look at the self-reported attribution from our main website and people are saying, I heard about you on LinkedIn. I saw you, saw a post from Garrett. And so if you're not tracking that, once again, going back to how do you get ROI and the measurement in that middle,

you're never gonna be able to spend more money on advertising because you're not measuring everything that's coming in from it. It's just going to direct website, which is basically no man's land. It's unattributed.

Benjamin Ard (15:02)
Okay, so I've got a curveball because I love this concept as someone who loves content and our audience does as well. And I love how you're focusing on this. you also have heard the statistic 95 % of your market is not ready to buy and 5 % is. Is there ever a case where you should have retargeting be your bottom of the funnel advertising and everything else be brand awareness? Is that a terrible play?

Is it going to go in that direction or do you feel like there's still that middle ground where there's this bottom of the funnel advertising to non retargeting traffic?

Evan Fehler (15:35)
an interesting question. The retargeting has changed in the past few years of importance because now you can just upload a list of your TAM and say only advertise to these people. So it's sure. It's like, that's like the coldest audience. but in a way that was retargeting historically where like, please, just anyone who's willing to engage with us, that's clearly our audience who we want to convert. So to me, retargeting is just more like a different spot in the, in the same funnel. As long as you have the right audience, that's the most important part.

of advertising in general. And then you need targeting throughout that funnel. And yes, you should spend more on people in the middle of the funnel than completely cold contacts. But priority one is making sure you're getting the right people to retarget in the first place, which by the way, most people aren't doing. Because if you were to look at who visits your website and who your buyers are, I'd argue that it's maybe a 50-50 split if you could look at that data at any company I've worked at because investors, because your friend's mom.

who heard about the name of your company, you're gonna spend money on retargeting those people. It's more important to advertise to your buyer than like, it has to be retargeting. And if you look at like the directive customer methodology, like verifying your TAM and making sure it's perfect and manual verification of all that is like step one because that's the biggest miss we see across accounts is they think they're advertising to the right accounts, but they're just spending money on their friend's mom with retargeting.

Benjamin Ard (16:55)
I love that. love that. Well, Evan, we unfortunately have run out of time. These podcasts go by so quick. I was fascinated by the conversation. If anyone wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?

Evan Fehler (17:07)
Yeah, LinkedIn is the best place to go. It's just forward slash Evan Feller. Would love to connect with anyone. So thank you.

Benjamin Ard (17:13)
love it. We will link to Evan's profile in the show notes below. Evan, again, thanks so much for your time and insights today.

Evan Fehler (17:19)
Cheers, nice to talk to you,

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