PPC For SaaS – Top Experts Reveal Advice to Scale: Dylan Hey & Luis Camacho

Best PPC Channels For B2B SaaS Companies

Questioned about what channels (LinkedIn, Facebook, Google AdWords) generally generate the best success on PPC campaigns for B2B SaaS companies, on an ROI, cost per trial or cost per demo basis…

Dylan Hey says that it does vary depending on what kind of space your task company is in and who you’re servicing. The core pillar is always the same for them, ad platforms like Google Ads, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. And then the review sites, this specifically is where most companies can see a pretty quick and easy return without having to put too much time as well.

The way that they would set things up is considering who’s your buyer personas and where they’re spending their time. A lot of staff founders or SaaS marketers get nervous about advertising on Facebook and Instagram, especially the larger kind of enterprise businesses. They’ll say their buyers aren’t active there or it doesn’t make sense, but Hey got a number of enterprise clients who have deal sizes in the mid six figures annually recurring like they’re servicing these huge enterprise businesses and for some of them, like Facebook is a successful advertising channel, so it really varies.

There’s a few things you need which are really important when making paid social media, specifically about Facebook and Instagram. It’s super important to be feeding the platforms with as much high quality data as you possibly can. When running ads focusing on conversion, which is trial sign up or demo booking and it’s a cold audience, use lookalike audiences the most. That’s where a lot of testing is done and Facebook performs the best when you give it the lookalike audiences that are the highest intent, so usually that’s like the segment of highest LTV of previous customers that you’ve had.

For instance, maybe you have recent purchases or the largest deal sizes that you’ve completed recently. If you don’t have enough data to match an audience for those in Facebook, then start working backwards and start looking at lookalikes of trial signups or demos books. But where those platforms come into their own is when you have really good quality data.

We see LinkedIn at the moment is definitely an expensive channel, but working well for content promotions specifically. So where success is happening on LinkedIn at the moment is with building out content led campaigns, so promoting ebooks, webinars guides, and utilizing the LinkedIn lead form functionality. So basically when someone clicks on the ad link, you can choose which data you want to show in the form and it pre fills the data. So like first name, last name, company name, company size, LinkedIn profile, URL, everything will be pre filled. And the experience for the user is extremely simple. They click on the ad that is already filled and then they just press one button and then it submits the data. They get what they need and you sync that with CRM systems using Zapier most of the time because it doesn’t have the best integrations there. But those campaigns are working very well forgetting very good quality traffic into like mid top of funnel flows at the moment. So you can build out ABM lists or target company lists within LinkedIn and just run the ad specifically to those people.

Google is their number one place for high intent, like trial conversion, demo, booking conversion, just because you can have so much control over who you’re serving ads to, what the messaging is, the landing pages experience, etc. They are seeing the most success most of the time on Google, and that’s purely just because that’s where most people spend their budget. But in an agency view, the great success is on paid social, Facebook and Instagram. And something that you also need to make paid social work is good quality creative specifically for ads. Don’t be running five minute, explain the videos as an ad and expect them to perform. You need snappy creative that’s going to move quickly, that you can iterate on really quickly and introduce new ones frequently. And then you’re talking, just going back to Facebook, setting up lookalike audiences and looking at data there to refine your audience and get better targeting.

What is the minimum amount you suggest for emails of users that you have that you want to upload?

Dylan has heard different things from 5100, 150 as a minimum before, so everyone always says different things, and even Facebook says different things sometimes too. Facebook recently said that you need to match at least 100 people in the same location in the same country. So to match 100 people, you usually need a lot more than 100 people. That’s the key thing to match. Most clients rarely will have enough volume of emails to focus on LTV. Some of them will, some of them won’t.

So usually be looking at trials like previous trial converters and look likes of those, but you can always still just try and create the audiences and see what Facebook kind of does because sometimes it will let you build a really small audience and sometimes it will ask for large ones, but often the more data you can give the platform, the better. So always start with seeing if you can match enough people in the audience of the highest value and then working gradually backwards from there.

If you start looking and you don’t have enough trial sign ups to build a lookalike, the next step back from that is like visitors to the website. That’s usually when you can be running a lookalikes campaign to just website visitors expecting them to convert to a trial because often that’s when audiences become a little bit messy.

How SaaS Companies Should Be Setting Budgets For PPC to Maximize Results

Companies who are starting to look into setting up their PPC ads or start looking at that option, they’re looking for help in setting up their budgets, how much they should be putting towards this to get maximum results while still managing that aspect to be able to get enough data and generate enough revenue from ppc advertising.

Looking at this as a three to six month commitment, it does vary depending on a number of factors you have in your blog. Hey Digital has a post about how to calculate your PPC advertising budget. There they put in some top level calculations and things to think about before setting your ppc strategy. The way that they usually set budgets with clients is if they’ve run ad campaigns before, then it gives them a bit more insight.

But how do we plan a paid ads budget three months to six months in advance if we haven’t run ads before? Usually, you should make sure you have a defined budget for the first month, this is the top line of what you’re willing to spend for starting a ppc campaign. Then you will build out a media plan off the back of that. These are all of their campaigns, how much each campaign is going to spend to fit in with that media plan. And then as time goes on, you’ll start collecting data and building out the real kind of budgets after that, then setting flexible budgets for month two or month three and adjusting those on the fly.

Best Strategy Setting Up a Campaign or Optimizing Your Current Funnel

Asked about the best strategy for setting a Pay Per Click campaign being starting from scratch or coming in with what clients have in their funnel before optimizing it, Luis Camacho from Fantom Agency prefers when they already have stuff gone because it makes the job way easier. If you come in and they have a pretty good grasp on what they’re doing, it’s really cool because you just take a look and see what needs to be optimized there,  what new things need to be set up. But sometimes it’s very minimal compared to when you’re going completely fresh. The setup is time consuming, but typically, it’s very straightforward. The only thing is that you don’t have anything to base off results from.

Is Paid Media Campaigns a Good Strategy for Every SaaS?

Sometimes it is not a good idea and it’s not a good strategy to actually run paid media campaigns for a B2B SaaS company.

A lot of advertisers can relate to this and it’s like the biggest nightmare whenever the company doesn’t actually have a hold of their sales process. In the past, marketing and sales were completely separate from each other. Nowadays, everybody thinks that marketing equates to sales. In some cases it’s true, but that’s usually more the case with smaller products like ecommerce type of things, where there’s a very short sale site. You can be a very direct response in the sense that somebody will see the ad and you can make them want it right away. In B2B it’s a different game because you’re showing something. A lot of the time the person you’re showing it to is not the decision maker.

Whether you have a bottoms up product or a top down product, you have to know who you’re going after. The worst thing that companies can do is spend money on marketing, advertising specifically, and expect a sale especially, they’ve not cracked that sales process. If you’re not seeing sales just come from whatever you’re doing now, you shouldn’t expect to see them come from advertising because you need to be able to sell. So if you don’t have lead nurturing campaigns, probably not the time for you to start advertising.