In this episode of the Immediate Future podcast, Tom Platt is joined by Immediate Future Managing Director Colin Jacobs to explore why B2B paid social is facing more scrutiny than ever before and what marketers need to do to prove its value.
As budgets tighten and leadership teams demand clearer evidence of commercial impact, many B2B marketers are finding themselves under pressure to demonstrate how paid social contributes to pipeline growth, lead generation, and revenue. The challenge isn’t that paid social is broken. The challenge is that many organisations are still measuring, reporting, and deploying it using outdated approaches.
Throughout the conversation, Colin shares why data integration has become the defining factor in paid social success. He explains how many businesses continue to rely on disconnected reporting systems that fail to capture the true influence of social media on customer journeys. From LinkedIn Insight Tags and CRM integrations to custom conversion events and end-to-end attribution, the discussion highlights the practical steps brands can take to move beyond vanity metrics and demonstrate genuine business outcomes.
The episode also tackles one of the most common misconceptions in B2B marketing: the belief that LinkedIn alone can drive immediate demand generation. Colin argues that successful paid social strategies require a broader view of audience behaviour, recognising that decision-makers spend time across multiple platforms and often need between five and nine meaningful touch points before they are ready to convert.
Whether you’re struggling to demonstrate ROI, improve attribution, increase lead quality, or simply make sense of evolving platform algorithms, this episode offers practical guidance for building a more effective B2B paid social programme.
Tom Platt 0:00
And well, hello everyone, wherever you are, whoever you are. I’m Tom, senior account director at Immediate Future Social Media Agency. Thank you for joining, taking time out of your busy day, or maybe sacrificing a nice lunchtime walk in the rain or shine, depending on wherever you are. If you’ve registered for this, you’re probably interested in finding out more about B2B paid social, and today we’re going to be focusing on one particular area with B2B paid, and how more than ever it needs to earn its keep. And joining me is CJ, who’s Managing Director here at Immediate Future, and he will be doing probably most of the talking. He’ll probably be ready to know, but please do send in questions and comments throughout. I’m willing to get to as many of them as we can, hopefully we’ll be delivering some useful bits and pieces for you to take away. So, when I, when we say B2B paid social has to earn its key, what, what do we mean by this? Well, most of you on this live, I would hope, are working in B2B marketing or within Comms PR, and if you are, you’ll perhaps be feeling a bit more under pressure than ever before to make your activities paid social and otherwise prove its value faster and more effectively. It’s not a new thing, as obviously it’s been happening probably over the last couple of years, but budgets are being watched more closely, and sales are asking for better leads. Finance wants cleaner proof, and marketing is often stuck in the middle. You’re trying to explain why a campaign that got clicked still hasn’t obviously moved the business, even though you know why it hasn’t obviously moved the business yet. But our focus, obviously, is B2B social, and how it’s not broken, but how the way we package it and present it and talk about it, might be so just short breakdown. We’re going to be looking at where LinkedIn really does help, where it gets asked to do a bit too much, high paid social can build familiarity before conversion reporting, and when it needs to, what it needs to look like for senior stakeholders, and how paid activity can give sales useful signals without making buyers feel like they’re being watched, so without further ado, let’s get cracking. CJ, let’s start with the big one first. What do you think’s the biggest thing B2B marketers still misunderstand about paid social?
Colin Jacobs 2:37
It’s got to be the data, and it’s got, well, it’s to the data side of stuff, and I will explain how you’re probably nowhere near comprehensive enough with your data at the moment, and you need to be. That’s the first thing I would say. The second thing is speed of evolution, and how much things change. I was thinking about my daughter is going from primary school to senior school this year, and it seems to have happened out of nowhere, right? The last three years just seem to have gone, and you think back to what we’ve been doing for the last sort of two or three years, and why am I saying that? I think a lot of people can forget how quickly time moves, and if you haven’t reviewed your social processes, and particularly how you’re delivering paid social for a number of years, if you’re still delivering paid how you did it, even last year, even as recently as January this year, if you’re delivering the paid social the same way, and delivering campaigns, how you have done for the last couple of years. Shock, horror, it’s out of date, and you need to change, you need to be doing things differently. So, the thing that surprised people, data and speed may explain the data, because I bet everyone watching is going, hang on a second, we launch paid, we get the reports, we know what’s going on. There are two levels of paid media, and this is my language now, rather than a social platform. You’ve got basic social media, where pretty much anyone now can go and deploy a campaign and can go and activate if they’ve got means to budget, whether that’s a company credit card or you’ve got an insertion order for debit set up, anyone can do that, and the on-screen cues to walk you through how to run the campaign are pretty good. They’re pretty good as a result of what Meta did 10 years ago. Everything LinkedIn is doing today is as a result of what Meta did, before people think mighty talking about Meta, and what Meta did around 10 years ago was convince everyone with a small amount of budget, one person, two person businesses, plumbers, for example, and the likes of Meta. Convinced the world or Facebook, as it was that rather than spending on Google, spend on Facebook ads, and you can get your local business awareness out there. Quarterly earnings for years went through the roof for Meta. They were profitable quarter on quarter, even amidst huge scandal and data flaws that took place, the Cambridge Analytica, and I know this for a fact, because at the time I was doing the quarterly earning calls on BBC News and BBC World News, and I was in there once a quarter going through the reports. The point being Facebook convinced the world to spend on paid advertising, and then Facebook works on making the prompts and the setup easy for everyone, and every social platform today is copy that, so you could go in and you can launch a campaign, but if you want really advanced results, conversions in B2B and attributed pipeline and custom goals evidence in the impact of the funnel, which can be done. You have to get really sophisticated with your data, and I always go as far as saying even the majority of our clients don’t have their data properly integrated with the social channel, properly integrated with their CRM, and having data flowing end to end, you need to do that if you want to be able to set up custom events and custom moments, which are the steps in your funnel to show how you’re nudging and nurturing your audience to conversion. And then the second part on time and speed. Why am I doing this call for us in Utah? That part of my job is to be on calls with the social platforms every week. The algorithms change, language has changed, reporting metrics have changed. Social media managers watching this are probably familiar with viewers popping up in their report over the last sort of six months. Initially, we all thought, well, that’s people watching a video, but it’s not. It’s the people viewing content.
If you’ve got a still and you scroll past it as a user, you don’t click on it, you don’t get an engagement metric as far as a like, a comment, a share is concerned, but now you get a viewer metric, and those viewers is adding to the data in the back end around the audience that’s consuming your content, so so much has changed and is changing quickly. I’m biased, I’m going to say this is the MD of if, but brands need people like us to actually say to them, this is what’s changed, this is what the challenge is, this is what is now happening on social. How do we respond to that? What’s the workshop to define the stages of the funnel they’re right for your business, the stages of the funnel we create content with, and the stages of the funnel we put paid behind to actually serve that content out, and if that consultative mechanic isn’t happening regularly, and you’re not getting the proactive information about the algorithmic changes, you just lose pace, and before you know it, your engagement metrics are dwindling, your conversion metrics are dwindling, and you suddenly think, well, okay. What are we doing wrong? You’re not. It’s just how the platforms have evolved. And before people watching this thing, of course, he’s going to say, “Oh, this preaching to the converted here, we’re delivering 6% ROAS for a client at the moment. I mean, a client that’s embraced all of this and is delivering it. It has taken them a long time to allow us to integrate the data correctly, and I know there’s a lot of B2B’s watching this, thinking, “Hold on, surely that’s just serving Meta or LinkedIn data into our CRM. We do that already. I’m talking about integrating the data, so that data comes out of social media, flows through your CRM, attributes to the custom goals and the activities within the goals, conversion revenue that’s happening, and flowing back out the funnel, so that the data is totally accurate in social and site side. I’m not talking about attributing an outcome based on a social media spend over here, and we saw an uplift over here, that’s a completely different measurement field, and I think the more brands realize that we’ve got to move to this super sophisticated integrated data mechanic and brace the headache of bridging that black hole of our CRM data. The brands that do that, recession, poor economic landscape, or whatever, they’re the brands that’s going to start evidence in outcome up the tree to leadership, and brands are doing it at the moment. 6% ROAS, I think the industry average is closing with. One in 3% if you’re lucky, so 6% is very much an outlier to so-called industry averages, and I should say that that example I’m talking about was running over a three-month period multi market global initiative. This wasn’t a sort of one hit wonder like campaign, but it’s a big job, Tom. Data and time, probably the two headaches.
Tom Platt 10:24
Yeah, I suppose wrapping around on this, I suppose the useful point there that CJ is getting to is that paid social performance doesn’t begin when the ad goes live. It starts with whether the campaign has the right data, the right role, and what was heavily being lent on there, which is the right route back into the business, as this, as this banner line says, pay social is easy to launch badly. It’s much harder to make commercially useful, and I think we’re just going to pull down now more into the LinkedIn element now, just for those B2B teams here. Why, CJ, why do you think so many B2B teams default to it, but what are they missing when they do that?
Colin Jacobs 11:04
Well, at firstly, I don’t want this to be a bashing of people that are sort of struggling and not wrap their heads around this. I mean, let’s be honest, every marketer right now, for reasons we all know, is having a tough time in industry, that the economy isn’t anywhere near as healthy as it should be businesses aren’t getting a great deal of support, and everyone’s having to fight for those marginal gains, and I think marketeers are feeling that more than most, because they’re expected to perform miracles with limited budget and deliver stuff. So, the default is, well, okay, what do we know works, and what can we do that delivers an outcome, so they’re defaulting to type, and I get it, I absolutely get it, but there are opportunities that can be had for significant returns on demand generation and evidencing the impact if some step changes are made, so to sort of drill down onto LinkedIn and what needs to be done, firstly there has to be an understanding that you need data, you need volume data of your target audience to help the system work, so you’ve got to have good engagement and awareness content that’s pointed at your defined audiences, and I don’t mean just generically go and hit everyone in it. If you’re a tech enterprise level business, got to be more sophisticated than that. Who are the individuals that are driving the strategic decision making around purchase? What’s the audience set that’s driving decision around listing acquisition, because we all know acquisition cycles are really long. So, who are the decision makers, who are the influencers, and who are the people that are actually going to grease that process and help it move along? So, you’re probably looking at three audience sets, then you need to serve good engagement awareness content that gets them looking at the content. I said previously, Tom, it’s not about likes, shares, video views, you need people watching. So I want to be really clear on the viewer metric right now. If you scroll through your feed and you stop at an asset, okay? Giving it the thumbs up, because what I’m saying, smart. If you scroll to an asset and pause on it, you’re registered as a viewer. The social platform is recording how long you’re looking at that asset, so in the same way that we say if you’re watching 25% of a video, that’s one queue on intent versus a 75% or 100% view being a high intent. If you’ve got a dwell time on an asset, depending on your dwell time, you get the queue and the signal about whether it’s low intent or high intent. That’s all going into the algorithms in the back of social at the moment. You need engagement metrics coming back as to the target audience, looking at your content, and then you need to serve them with a series of nudge nurture content to actually nudge and nurture them to a conclusion. Here’s the bit that we helped LinkedIn conclude some years ago, and I say it was us because we were banging the drum like mad, and we were talking with strategists and heads of service over there for ages, and then they came round to our way of thinking. For a brand to remember you, you need five to nine touch points within social media, so that’s five to nine pieces of content that then helps them come to the conclusion of you being a trusted business that can help me.
Tom Platt 14:37
Yeah,
Colin Jacobs 14:38
and only at that point are they then going to perform a conversion, and in that dialog, a conversion is a data share, whether that’s a report download, giving you an email address, that’s how social was running. Now we can take it up a level, and we can build custom events for all the steps along the funnel. All, so imagine you’ve got your nine touchpoints, and the first two or three are generic videos or awareness or engagement stories showing how your business delivers impact around an offering or a service. They’re your initial touch points going out, and it’s gathering just pure engagement and reach data going into the back end of LinkedIn, if you’ve got your data set up correctly, and I will explain what needs to be done on the data, so people don’t feel this is all generic, wishy-washy stuff. I’ll come back to the process in a second. Then what you can also have going out is specific content that’s focusing on people reviewing report information, considering a webinar, you can even have people that are actually following up with specific information around an FAQ, for example, to build out the touch points, all the while the system is looking at who’s engaging and who’s coming back to you and who’s converting, if you have it running end to end with your CRM, you can nudge and nurture an audience to conversion in B2B and deliver true ABM without having to like make attributed jumps, but to do that, you and I’m referring to some notes, so I get this right, because it’s quite an important process. You absolutely have to have the insight tag configured correctly, and by that I don’t just mean an insight tag pinging on LinkedIn. You’ve got to put the code on the website, and then you’ve got to set up the custom events. These are conversions in LinkedIn and Meta language, and events being a download, a report, booking a consultancy call, and there are optimized goals now for each one of these within LinkedIn. If you’ve then got everything installed correctly, the pixel, the tag, you’ve truly integrated the GA four data, and you probably need to remove the GA four, reload it, put up to date GA four tagging in it, and install your API for your relevant CRM platform, so the data can communicate end to end, your conversion data and your action data will flow through the system, so no longer does social in B2B lose out to that last click reporting, and what I mean by that is you serve a paid advert, people go away, consider it, they have a meeting internally, they come back, Google your brand because they’ve remembered it and had a discussion, but now you’re reported as a search result, and the search action goes into the CRM, and the social part is completely lost. The last action was search, so it’s dropped off social. If you integrate your data, you get it reporting on both, and you get the true return on advertising spend metrics, Tom, from what we’re doing in paid to what we’re getting the returns. Your question to me at the top was, How do we evidence it? What do we need to do more of? We’ve got to show it works, and we’ve got to show the outcomes, and we’ve got to show the individual isolated returns social can deliver, but it’s complex bits.
Tom Platt 18:19
Yeah, well, I think quite time this question’s been up for a while, so I think we should, we should answer this question, which I think is a very good one. She says she’s seeing a lot of people clicking on lead gen forms but not following through to fill it out. So, is so online you’ve got people saying there’s people wanting to give less data away and or don’t want to fill out a lot of questions. Is the reason a lack of reason for lack of conversions, or could there be other things going on? I think the short answer to this is coming back to what you said, is in terms of setup and having conversions, a pixel setup could be telling you a different story to what you’re seeing. Yes, it could be that people aren’t filling in forms because they’re having to do that a lot at the moment, and there’s a bit of fatigue, but your ads could still be engaging and interesting, and people want to interact with them, but it could be a creative issue, which we will come onto at some point, but there’s another one. I mean, Liv, this is a really good question, and I’m pleased you flagged it, because I mean, we’re partners with all the social platforms, and we have good friends about all the platforms, but one of the things LinkedIn do, which drives me crazy, and I’ve said this to the heads of independent agencies, directors, and such, is they push the junior sales people to push lead forms as a priority, so to answer your question, if you’re using the lead form as an initial impact piece, I’m not surprised you’re getting a big bounce rate, and nobody likes giving away loads of information if you’re getting very little back. So, it could be where you’re using the lead form in the journey. I really need to turn my reactions off. I’m setting off fireworks and all sorts of. It could be where you’re using the lead form in the nudge nurture, so it needs to be sort of further out to point nine or 10, not a point one, or you’re requesting too much information. There is a positive in this, though. You’ve got people clicking through, so there is a signal that there is something in the social asset that’s speaking to them on a level that says I want more information, I would suggest moving the form back in the nudge nurture lay down and putting more awareness engagement content up front to try and help people form more of an opinion around the FAQs, the offering, the impact before asking them to convert. This is the same as what was happening about 1015 years ago. Do you remember when we all put gates up on the website and we asked everyone to put their inside leg measurement on it, and we just wanted to drive people to the landing page, so we can say to the marketing director, look at all this traffic we’ve delivered, but then nobody was downloading a report, it was all a bit vanity rather than reality, and it’s one of the reasons why brands were encouraged by the social platforms, I might add, to take content from behind the gate and give away a bit of intellectual property to help foster that trust status before driving for conversion. If that hasn’t answered your question, Liv, please email me, cj@immediatefuture.co.uk and I will pick this up with you separately, because it’s a really valid question and a constant barrier that comes up, but you can get around it.
Tom Platt 21:31
So, I guess the danger is treating LinkedIn as the plan, almost rather than part of the plan, and it could be great for credibility and accountancy. I think we know that having the sort of belt and braces with pixels and conversion setups really important, and that kind of leads into the to the next question of whether B2B brands, and this is not marketers necessarily, but our B2B brands, so people who are not in the marketing space, perhaps CFOs, perhaps people in sales, asking paid social to sell too soon,
Colin Jacobs 22:03
100% I get it. I mean, I’m a real contradiction here, Tom, with my MD hat on. I want to see faster returns, I want to see greater market share, I want to see greater profitability, and I want to see our quarter on quarter impact operating incrementally, the marketer in me knows the challenge behind this, so I’m a real contradiction. Look, social takes time, good social takes time and investment, but if it’s set up correctly with the right integrated data and you’ve overhauled the integrations, and then you’re following a proper nudge nurture plan from driving awareness out, which needs paid going out to drive the awareness, and then the custom goals about what’s the content and the message that’s going to pull this lever to make people consider the webinar. Who are we retargeting for the report download, who’s probably going to avail of a consultancy request, etc. If you’re mining all of that out and putting paid over the top of it, magical things can happen, but it’s pointless doing all of that if you’ve not got the data integrated into your CRM, because you lose it to that whole last click mechanic, and then when your CFO is looking at your expenditure and your returns, it looks like search has done great and paid social hasn’t, and shock horror, right, the reporting in Meta over indexes Meta results, reporting in LinkedIn over indexes LinkedIn results, go into your GA for GA four over indexes on the search results, and it’ll tell you the paid or organic social is underperforming. Here’s the bit neither platform tells you, if you integrate the data through the API’s into your CRM and through the insight tag, so the data is going through your server and then coming back out, it truly gets the anonymized data evidences where the actions have actually taken place, and what you get back is a true, accurate picture of the social engagements, the true impact of search, and depending on your goals, let’s keep the language really simple. I want to know who’s created a basket to buy my tech product, who’s gone to the effort of creating an account, who’s gone to the effort of putting a billing source in, who’s instigated a purchase, and who has purchased, you will get all of that tangible data coming back out on the integration, and you’ll see probably hundreds of 1000s of link clicks, but then hundreds of conversions,
Tom Platt 24:43
yeah,
Colin Jacobs 24:43
That disparate number you want to see that, because that’s the integrated data taken out, Meta and LinkedIn, and GA fours over indexing of what they each do, and truly giving you a picture of where your impact is. And then if your CFO, seeing that report, looking at, okay, that we got a true return on investment, true return on ad spend at metric, now scaling conversations become a hell of a lot easier, but you’re, if you’re starting from scratch on this, you are two to three months away from having that data coming in, and then you’ve got to be consistent with it.
Tom Platt 25:24
Yeah, I mean, we’re going to, we’re going to come a little bit onto reporting elements and things that you need to pick out, so it’s, you know, these are things you can still tell along the journey, you know, while you’ve got the CFO breathing down your neck, there are certain things you can do that can help, but I think one of the things I’ll wrap around on what you’ve just said is that when we’re looking at clicks and we’re looking at audiences, we do know, b, that the person who clicks is rarely the whole decision. We know it’s always a group decision. We know it’s most multiple people sat around the table. Paid social might need to reassure the technical buyer, give the manager useful content, help the director recognize the brand, give sales a warmer route. In there’s so many different signals you can lead on, but as CJ says, if you’ve got all the bits connected, it wraps around and gives you a clearer picture. So
Colin Jacobs 26:09
it’s a really good point, Natalie, because the story for the CFO and the CEO right now is an entirely different, different one for, say, the marketing director, and I don’t mean that in a, I don’t want that to come across as a sort of disparaging or a disrespectful. The CFO, all they’re going to care about is, where’s this sitting on my balance sheet, and when am I getting the returns? Yeah, CEO is going to be looking at, is this delivering growth market share, or is this a luxury investment right now we can’t entertain because of geopolitical market conditions, whereas the marketeer that, whether it’s a CMO marketing director, they’re going to be looking at evidencing not just what their seats doing, but their team to keep people’s jobs.
Tom Platt 26:51
One is
Colin Jacobs 26:52
very metric orientated, but then we’ve got to change that language from metric to true brand impact, and the integrated data does that, but the integrated data needs a proper setup. I’ve just done it for a major consumer brand, and it’s taken around about eight weeks, end to end, to configure the data and get stuff running, but they’re a high-ticket brand product, 1000s of pounds. I’m not talking like 15 pound t-shirt, between 18 102,000 pounds here in the UK, and $2,200 in US, similar numbers out in Australia, and we’ve been delivering 6% ROAS off the back of this, and their industry average is one to 2% It properly works, and when the CFOs then see the report, it’s hilarious how quickly their language goes from hold on, let’s not waste paid media, we’ve got to make sure that we’re investing in the right way, to all of a sudden, why haven’t we put more paid media into it? The conversation can move very quickly, but you need tangible data, not attributed data, and historically social has operated on attributed data, battling against search outcomes, and that’s where senior leadership then gets sceptical of social. I totally get it, but the great news is that can all change. You ask the question, is LinkedIn is too much expected of LinkedIn. The short answer here, Tom, is yes. I have never walked into a B2B meeting where there has been any other expectation than we’re doing it on LinkedIn, and we need demand gen quickly, and we need it to impact our bottom line in the next two months. But LinkedIn isn’t the holy grail. We’ve actually had bigger conversion metrics for bb from Meta, which blows people’s minds, because Meta is not a B2B platform, except Zuckerberg bought a data insights agency, he bought B2B marketing agencies, he’s completely overhauled the practices, the AIs that are now running in the back end are optimized for B2B, it’s a completely kettle of fish to anything that was around just 12 months ago, 1110, years ago. You’ve then got great platforms in the developer world and DevOps, they’ll be familiar with the likes of GitHub and the such, and you’ve been doing great things on Reddit recently, because there are audiences that are dwelling there. The question comes back, Tom, to who are our customers, and where are our customers spending time? Yeah, the bit that properly frustrates people and blows their mind. Just think about your own behaviour on LinkedIn, and whether you’re dwelling there, or whether you’re going in to perform a task, a post, a recruitment ad, reply to an InMail, for example. Are you going in and scrolling and dwelling? And, unfortunately, the data shows Microsoft, LinkedIn, whatever you want to call them, they have a problem with this, and they have a. Problem with CXOs, because CXOs aren’t dwelling there, but here’s the kicker: inside data from Global Web Index and various other data sources, which have, I think, I’m right in saying 10s of millions of data points around this. It shows that they dwell on other social platforms. Now they’re not there to do business. I always say this: if they’re on Facebook, they’re likely there to be checking on and son and daughter off at university. Their friends have they got home from the Friday night out? If they’re living away, there are other reasons they’re on there. I want to check in with my bike club, whatever it is. But if there’s a piece of content that speaks to them in an asset that solves a problem they have got on their desk right now. I promise you, they view it, they might not like it, they might not share it, but the insights will show they’re viewing it, and that intent, depending on how long they spend on asset, goes in the back end, and they become one of the data points that you retarget, and this is why you can drive far more economical and far more meaningful conversion out of Meta. Now, B2B marketers look at me as if I’ve been smoking some wacky backy when I say this, Tom, but we’ve got years and years of reports showing this now, LinkedIn supposedly you get a quality of conversion out of LinkedIn, but LinkedIn themselves have had to go to TV advertising to promote LinkedIn. Why has that happened?
They’ve had to acquire new users because they’ve got an active user problem. So, how do you bridge the active user problem if a CEO is not dwelling in LinkedIn, but you want to convert with them on LinkedIn? You can’t run a short campaign. It’s got to be an eight-to-12-week campaign to give them that time window where they come in to perform the task, and then the sponsor content pops up in their feed. If you’re doing a hit it and quit it five day campaign, you’re not giving hard to reach people a chance to see your content, and again, these are pieces of information that you’ll get from the platforms if you’re able to go on calls with them, but if, of course, if you don’t have a relationship with them, that’s where consultancies like if really come into our own, because we can dilute all that information, give you the challenges and questions, your teams to then think, great, what do we do with this? How do we respond to that problem? And that’s the cool bit about marketing, right? We’re all problem solvers, give people the right, ask the right questions, get the right answers and challenges, and we can all create the right solutions to take our brands forward. So, I guess we’ve, we’ve spoken about sort of, I mean, you kind of already tipped into this. This was part of a two-pronged question that I had next, which was, how long do they really need in terms of B2B paid campaigns before marketers can judge it fairly? And what does an example of a good report look like? So, you’ve spoken about having everything connected in terms of starting up a campaign, but when it comes to pulling out the reporting, what are the key things that need to be, need to be noticed and led with, in order to make sure that those key stakeholders are happy.
Colin Jacobs 33:09
Depends on your, your paid social at the moment. So, let’s start with an assumption that people haven’t got their data integrated through their CRMs, so they’re more traditional deployments at the moment they’re serving paid and they’re having to attribute outcomes within the marketing mix. You will need all of your engagement metrics, all of the vanity stuff to show the impact, the top of funnel impact your content having, but then that should be supported with UTM traffic, and then all of the inactions that are happening off of the back of that, so you are probably pulling a bit of GA for data here, particularly around dwell times on landing page. Going back to live, brilliant question, if you’ve got a really low bounce, really quick bounce rate on your landing page of like 10 seconds or less, people are clicking out of social, coming through to your landing page and thinking, whoa, that isn’t what I expected, and that’s a bad signal that you need to change stuff. Some of that change might be taking the gate away, removing the button at the top, and moving some more relevant content above the fold, so the customer journey sort of continues that discovery of what they found in social media, but if you’ve got reasonable GA four data showing reasonable dwell time, that shows impact, but then you’ve got to work alongside the sales team if there’s a handoff, if you’re a tech consultancy, for example, I mean, we talk about tech a lot, because we work with a lot of tech enterprise businesses, and they do have problems with the black hole data and the handoff to sales. You need to bring sales closer to the marketing team. Now, there’s a bit of a stigma here, salespeople will always be. Means they work hard to get the sales conversion and marketing, whilst it helps, it’s not this shiny silver bullet that us marketers perhaps overplay at times throughout the year, but if you get your marketers to understand that you’re going to be helping them with leads and pointing them in directions of brands that are engaging with the content, you can then get a bit of synergy, particularly going to events. One of the things LinkedIn does show you is on a page report the companies that have engaged or acted on the content. You, if you are manually building your paid audiences, you will know the job titles that you are putting in to the paid delivery, so if you’re targeting IT directors, VPs of services, and then you’ve got ABC Limited showing up as a brand that’s engaged within the content, and they featured on one or two reports over a four to six week period, I would be giving that information to the sales team that you probably should have a sniff around these people within ABC Limited. They’re showing some intrigue around this offering. This messaging, is there any collateral you can send them that is an evolution of it? So, there’s physical reporting, but then there’s manual alignment between sales and marketing. And we did this. I was going to say, I don’t know if we can talk about it, but I’m going to talk about it, because it was several years ago. We did this for Fujitsu in Ireland. Louise Brady, I really hope you’re watching, Louise, so you can see the plaudits. She drove this initiative, and she was a bit of a game changer in industry, saying, I want to know the brands that have engaged with it, so I can get my sales team on the case going out and meeting them, and it actually led to pockets of conversions happening, but it took eight to 12 weeks to get it up and running, and then you’re looking at another eight weeks to prove the impact of it. These are not hit it and quit it, short term silver bullet solutions. If you give it time, things work. It definitely is not a six-day campaign, and in fact, you will get penalized if you try and run a six-day campaign. Don’t take my word for it. Try and build an audience in LinkedIn. Look at your CPC forecast, your cost per click forecast, look at the frequency rate that gets sent. With the frequency rate is the number of times your audience people are going to see your adverts, it is penalized really low, down to about one, because any more than that, you’re spamming the audience. So don’t do super short bursts on LinkedIn, don’t do really small audiences of less than 500 data points, you get penalised for that starting block for any bb marketer watching this, don’t assume you know your audience segments, challenge them today. Who really are the audience we’re trying to reach? Who are the people that strategically make these decisions around our purchase, and who are the people that influence? Then build out those audience sets, so you know the scope of the size of the audience and then get into a content workshop. What are the FAQs? What are the constant barriers to market? What content do we need to produce that helps people realize we’re a trusted business, and that we can help them, and we can solve problems. And then that becomes the basis for the early part of your nine point nudge nurture campaign, then you’ve got to get some really juicy bedrock content, killer reports, white papers, examples of webinars that have happened that are going to blow their socks off, and get that content put into the middle part of the nudge nurture, and then start inviting them on an optimized custom event, whether it’s to download a specific report to book a consultancy or to join a webinar, but be really smart and considered with it, and don’t assume what you were doing last year is still fit for purpose today. You’ll be amazed at where, if you follow the data, you’ll be amazed at where your target audience are on social, and you will find you have to be playing in Meta, whether you want to or not. Now, last bit that I want to throw in, this came up only this morning, and I wanted to remember to say this: people, if you’re running internal comms campaigns on social, that’s brilliant for a bit of vanity, but the watchers and the data that’s going into the back end, if it’s only your team that’s liking the content, you’re not learning anything about the audience you want. You have to push content externally that the audience wants. So, separate internal comms, recruitment brand, you know, we’re a great place to work. We need to support the recruiters. Separate those campaigns out. Don’t make them part of your primary marketing mix, because they’re not doing anything for you with your reporting and evidence and impact, and the more leadership become aware that social can be integrated, and I promise you, LinkedIn will start talking about it, Meta already are talking about it, and we’ve got a load of stuff going out for some, we’ve been on beta. Campaigns, we’ve got a load of stuff that’s about to hit the market over the coming week, showing that we blowing the roof off of this. There’s going to be a lot of discussion and intrigue around how you integrate this end to end data, and it will change the approach on social, but it will show you, taking you out to your first question, Tom, that social can not only pay for itself, but you can deliver some blooming impressive row asses that stand up to scrutiny, can be pulled apart, and show finally that social media as a channel is one of the most visible but business-impacting channels available to marketeers today, something we’ve all known. Katie Howe was on a conversation with me this morning, and she said a brilliant line: social is not a media channel, it’s a behavior, and she’s 100% right with that. If you think about the behaviour of your audience you want to reach, where are they? Where are they dwelling, irrespective of their reasons for being there, and then think about the behaviours of your audiences and the challenges they’re having, and how your brand solves problems and create content for that, and then think about the behaviours needed to get five to nine touch points, and then hit them with the conversion stuff, whether that’s the lead form that live was serving or driving to a UTM for a conversion or driving for a round table. If you do that with the right paid media over the top, your results will go through the roof.
So, if that’s the answer, CJ, why are you telling the world this, and why have you just given away all this intellectual property so people can blow up their campaigns? Well, here’s the kicker, guys. Unless you’ve got people that can get on a call with the platforms today, and I don’t mean the marketing teams, I mean the technical teams, you haven’t got a hope of getting this integration set up as a business. We have those relationships, and we’ve been doing it for brands, and we’ve got various ROAS reports evidence in the outcome of what we’re doing, but you need a relationship with a LinkedIn, a meta partner that doesn’t just meet with the marketeers, the marketing pros, as they call them, but meets with the technical pros and can get the technical pros on screen shares to go into your back end and do the configurations, because you have to configure pixels, you have to configure tags. You normally, we have to reconfigure GA four. You then got to build the custom audiences, and then you’ve got to test this on a test and prove campaign, all before you go and put the big paid media over the top. Development teams in house are too busy running what they’re doing, they’re being stretched like everyone, so your answer right now is to come to a consultancy like ourselves to help you, but my goodness, have we got some good reports and some good proof points to show this stuff really works, Tom. It’s quite exciting at the moment.
Tom Platt 42:54
Yeah, there’s, there’s, there’s lots to see into there, and obviously, if you want to speak to us about it, we’re more than happy to chat. I think we’ve covered off quite a bit about sort of paid setups and what you can see, what you need to do in the sort of build-up. Going to move ahead now and pivot slightly, because I’m sure some people on this might have been thinking, well, sure, but I know what my budgets are, and I know who my audience is, and I have a vague idea on what I need to do to improve my reporting, but one thing I am having a blocker with, and this might have been something that you ran into, Liv, you asked the question earlier, this might be something that’s weighing on your mind, might be the creative. So, CJ, what role does creative play when the platform is doing more of the targeting?
Colin Jacobs 43:40
It’s the Christmas shot window, Tom. Right, it’s you’re walking down, you’re walking through London, all the lights on, and then you’re looking at the windows displays. It’s the creative is the thing that grabs your attention and draws you in. If your creative looks like every other bit of creative that’s in social, you don’t stand out from the crowd. There is a brilliant report that we’ve got from one from the consumer market and one for B that I’m going to give you right now. So, in 2019 Katie Howell and I set about looking at all of the content that was being published for cloud computing, 94% of it was metaphoric cloud and weather imagery, you know, storms coming virtually every image you were seeing showed a black cloud or a thunderstorm, or why is that important? Well, nobody remembers the brand or the message, because you think I’ve seen this before, they just blend into one. We did the same report on the consumer side, by the way. 50 million, more than 50 million posts in one year were published in travel, and 29% of them were hot dog legs. Again, it just blurred into like insignificance, and people scrolling through it. Your creative is the thing that grabs the initial attention, and then once you’ve got that attention, the smarts are your white paper, your report, your bedrock content can come through, but you’ve got to give the talent in your business, the super smart people in your business, the people that have done the great work and got all of the customer case studies or proof points for your audiences, you’ve got to give them a chance at being seen, and that initial creative, that initial video is really, really important. One of my pet hates today, and it’s prevalent in technology, videos that are made out of stock library, I can literally look at a video and nearly always I can tell you which library of frames come from and whenever there’s the person pressing a device and data scrolling you can tell whether it’s come from a giffy or whether it’s come from a shutter stock they’re overused images so be original be bold and have something that truly stands out, and put your people out there first, and have an opinion on something. Is one of the biggest recommendations that I would give people, but don’t do what you’re nearest and dearest to doing, because you just get lost in a big sea of mess, and paid social is not spent to turn a crap asset into something the sort of impact. Paid social should be lifting your great assets and your great content and carrying it to the masses, so that you get truly stellar results. So don’t underplay creative production, and just because industry has had animations, or it’s had up until about eight years ago, infographics were massive in social, until finally people realized that mobile devices were too small to see an infographic, and we probably need to shatter the individual elements down, that’s fine, but come up with a cute animation to show what. Why does this matter? I’m going to swear now. Why is the audience going to give a shit about this information? And if you can’t answer those, don’t send the asset out. Right, that that age-old two meter original print production you used to run off the artwork, say 223 meter step back, will an audience give a shit about this, and if the answer was no, it got torn up, and you went back to the drawing board. And I think digital design needs to learn a little bit from that, and I think we sometimes rush to get stuff out without thinking, are the audience really going to act on this? Is the audience going to care about the messaging, have I gone far enough to grab people’s attention. Don’t be afraid to play on popular culture. We’re all, we all want to be entertained, and I’m not expecting anyone to come up with like a comedic skit and suddenly turn into like a top comedian, and or become Steven Spielberg overnight, but you know, don’t be afraid to play on trends, and don’t be afraid to play on something that’s popular and that stands out. I mean, B2B can learn a lot from the consumer markets from a design perspective. I still believe that’s the case, sadly, whereas I think the consumer markets can look, I would have said historically the consumer markets can learn a lot from B to B on data, but given the big data changes that happen on social, I think everyone needs to learn what the new data landscape looks like, and that’s why I keep saying to people, data, data, data is your number one, I think, bringing this up from
Tom Platt 48:44
Casey, because I think it’s probably one of the things that many B2B marketers are probably dealing with on a daily basis at the moment when it comes to AI. So, where do you see AI genuinely improving B2B paid social today? Where are the brands kidding themselves that the algorithm will sort it out without fixing their data and funnel design. I know that we have some pretty punchy views on
Colin Jacobs 49:05
before I answer this. I love AI, and I use AI daily. I mean, if you went into my, my Chat GPT, you, I mean, you would say I use it daily, so I can’t be a hypocrite on it. There are AIs that are really effective and really impacting a takeaway chunk of work, and buy us time back, and I am all in on that, because if people get time back to solve the more strategic problems, that’s the purpose of AI, of where it makes yards, some of the AI’s existing within social are not there yet, and this is against the backdrop. Zuckerberg has come out and made an outrageous claim that by the end of next year 75% of creative in Meta will be AI produced. He claims it’s never going to happen, you. Then got Musk on X saying that his Grok is going to be responsible for equal numbers. The people peddling the AIs are saying some really punchy claims, but from a paid social delivery point of view, they are not there yet, despite what they’re telling you in the back end. If you want to prove this, it will cost you a bit of cash, but you can run a test, and we’ve done it knowingly with clients. If you run an ad set, switch on all the AI’s, and have it rewrite the post for you, rework the image for you, do the targeting, and send it out, your results will be outperformed by the manually built campaign. Why is that happening? I’m going to give you a consumer market example now, because it’s the one place recently we’ve done a like for like test. I told the platform that the interest keyword was golf, because it was a golf brand, a golf product, and the AI came back with an audience that was full of people that just watch golf, have an affinity to follow golf. What it didn’t find for me was the audience that we’re going to spend money on expensive golf product. When we manually built the audience, and we put all the signals in, for example, and I’m, I really am giving away some, some IP now. We look to where do they buy from, and can we tell the platform to prove to us that they’ve either been to a point of purchase people that have a membership of investing in golf. So, should we be telling the platform that they need to have regularly gone to a golf course, and do they need to have followed media, consumed media, visited a tournament, and what we were trying to do with our signal profile was define the audience of people that were so into golf, playing it and spending on it, that considering a two grand purchase wouldn’t be a barrier to market, and we went and did it, and the results were superior. Despite, I should say, Meta constantly saying on the AI, if you make this change, you can avail of an 11% increase. We did, we never got the 11% increase. AI is coming, I think it’s there for helping you with the copy changes at the moment. It is definitely not there with the visuals. Do not let it put any of the overlays on it. It will take what looks like an original bit of artwork to look really fake right now, and, and I think people are starting to recognize what looks like a Chat GPT image and what doesn’t. You know, they, they, you can see when it’s bow, and unfortunately the platforms are still there, despite what you’ve seen on Grok. There are also morality issues with the AIS in social at the moment, until they lock all that down and they actually get that cleaned up. You don’t want what happened some years ago on Meta. You can activate what’s called audience network, and I didn’t want the hearts to come up, because I hate audience network. Audience network is mobile sites outside of Meta’s realm. We had this switched on for a tech campaign, and I want to be really clear on this: a client doesn’t know about it. Happened 1213 years ago.
Colin Jacobs 53:22
Meta took the ad out of Facebook, served it into another app that they had an affiliation with, and the brand advert appeared on a piece of Pornhub content and was spotted by an employee, and it all came back to us. The lack of control around image creation and image deployment still worries me, and until I see that cleaned up, you won’t get me advocating it, but bring it back to a cost perspective. Your CFOs and your CEOs are not going to thank you for using it at the moment, but undoubtedly, Tom, there will be a point where it’s better, but I’m led to believe the same problems are existing in programmatic display advertising. You still need those manual human checks, and if you really want to use social as a behaviour channel to define the people with the behaviours to buy from your brand, I strongly, strongly believe you have to build those audiences manually, and you have to layer so many behaviours and interests in. If you try and shortcut it, you’ll get some metrics, you’ll get some results, but you’re not going to drive demand gen, and that’s part of the problem. Remember earlier on, I told you, Meta convinced the world that if you’re a one-man band, go and spend on Facebook. They had to make it easy, so that’s where all these AI tools have come from, but if you’re at the sharp end of B2B marketing, and you’re trying to make your brand stand out in category, not just compete, but go in challenging category, and deliver demand generation, you have to invest time in the build, you have to invest time in your content workshop, and the creative production, and you’ve got to invest in budget. But fix the data bit for talk to us, get let us get your data integrated, so you can then go and show the world how brilliant your wares are, and the results that you’re getting. Don’t lose out to last click trumping from search, it drives me mad, and it no longer needs to be the case. That’s probably my biggest takeaway for anyone watching this.
Tom Platt 55:21
Okay, well, we got, we’ve got less than a three or three and a half minutes. So, let’s one last question. Couple sentences. If you were advising a senior B2B marketer tomorrow, what would you tell them to do first?
Colin Jacobs 55:33
Book a call with me and Katie Howel, genuinely, and let me have 30 minutes to tell you why we can change everything. No, look, audience challenge the data, get some insight around your target audience, and where they’re at. And if you haven’t got access to it, get in contact with us, and we can set something up through GWI for you, or we can do some social listening and stuff, but the reality is you need to see where your target audience is, what channels they’re on, and then you need to be getting into, well, how do we create content for that? Because paid social needs a content engine, and your content has got to be relevant to your audience and the problems you solve. If you’re fixing the content engine and you haven’t thought about the platform and the purpose of the content on the platform, you’re kind of going about it, asked about face for one of a better, better phrase, but this is the stuff that I’m really passionate about, and I mean, Casey and I’ve worked together 1112 years now, she is an absolute insight queen and data queen, the reason I have never moved away from Katie, she gives me the insight and the data, and then I can get carried away on the creative delivery and help brand. So, book a call with us is my two-minute takeaway. Tom, how’s that?
Tom Platt 56:53
Yeah, that sounds, that sounds good. I think Liv has asked to drop the email again in the chat, which I’m sure Katie will do as she’s looking through the chat at the moment, but I think that’s
Colin Jacobs 57:02
a really simple one, cj@immediatefuture.co.uk and if you can’t find me there, just send me a DM on Twitter or X at Colin Jacobs, there you go, simple as,
Tom Platt 57:15
yeah, so I think I think that wraps it up nicely, and I’ll just sort of summarize with just a couple of minutes to go, so to summarize here, bb paid social is not broken, it doesn’t matter what people in your business think when it comes to your data or anything else that you’re showing here, yeah, but the way that many teams are buying it, reporting it, handing it over, probably is, it’s just the way that it needs to be interpreted for certain people in the business. If paid asks to do more with less, it needs quite a commercial spine.
Colin Jacobs 57:50
Yeah, and you, it’s a bold person right now. If you’re an account manager or you’re a junior marketing manager that puts a head above the parapet and says, guys, I’ve watched a podcast and I think we’re doing things wrong, I get it, but be bold, because there are market share gains to be had, and if you think about all the seniors watching this, or the experienced people watching this, have been through recessions, there’s always those brands that come out of a recession as market movers because they were bold and did things differently, and I genuinely believe this is the tipping point for people on demand generation within a tight market. Your CFO is going to thank you for proving where your royalties are, and your CEO
Tom Platt 58:30
CEO is going to thank you for actually driving a proper attributed pipeline and proving the impact of it to be exciting. Great, yeah, I think I think that sums it up well, so you know, we one thing I would end with is that we know that buying cycles aren’t speeding up, you know, we know that the 95 five rule, only 5% of the market are actually in there to buy now, that’s not changed, the buying cycle term hasn’t changed, but people expect results quicker, that’s not going to happen, so it’s about how we can show that intention and within data, within conversions, and signals are all showing that things are working effectively, and that helps the key budget holders make their case as well. So that’s how paid social starts to earn its key. We’ve covered it very top line. It probably doesn’t feel like it, because we spent talking about it, but this is top level, and we hope you found it useful. Certainly, you can reach out to email CJ. It’s in the comments there from Katie’s message, or leave a comment on the on the LinkedIn invite. I’ll come
Colin Jacobs 59:32
back to you. And the last thing I would say, for colleagues in the consumer world, we were going to do one of these that focuses on the consumer market delivering allows us to get into the detail for that, so if you’ve, you’ve got any friends in industry, it’s worth flagging it to them. We’d love to get the opportunity to help them fix their days challenges as well.
Tom Platt 59:52
Thank you. Brilliant. Well, thanks all for your time, and yeah, have a good rest of your day, and hope to speak to you soon.