Experimenting with LinkedIn ads for CTV, Introducing new services without case studies, How to find good paid SaaS agencies, and Encouraging clients to approve case studies

0:00So this next episode is covering a portion of our agency owners association 1.5 hour call that Neil and I did. So if you're an agency owner or if you're looking to just learn more about how to scale an agency, there are a lot of questions that we get from the community members in here. This is basically a sneak preview into how the group works and one of the major benefits of the group. So if you're interested, please listen. And without further ado, here is the episode. Bill, you got anything? Yeah, I wanted to get some of your guys' opinion on the new or some of my new LinkedIn ads for the CTV.

0:36Have you seen anything working there kind of creative and any kind of insights that you've had there? I haven't seen anything from it. I haven't played with it. Maybe my team has. Just being blunt, I haven't tried it out at all. Is this for customers or are you trying to run it for yourselves? Yeah, for customer. Something to offer to customers. Just haven't done it yet. and wanted to kind of bring a little insight to them and, you know, give them a little push that they need. Yeah. I would look for case studies, even if they're not from your agency, if anyone's talking about it, you're going to be able to find it on LinkedIn and share like, look, these results have been amazing.

1:19People are doing it. We want to try it out. Let's start with a really small budget and let's go from there and try it out with a few customers. Experimenting with new stuff is always cool, but you want to make sure it's a really, really tiny percentage of their budget, because if you push it and it doesn't work well, then you look bad and you're burning their money. And B, I wouldn't push that until, if you haven't doubled down on what's working, because like, let's say if they're doing paid Facebook ads, but they haven't maximized their budget and it's profitable, double down on that first before you would pitch, you know, LinkedIn's connected TV or whatever the new ad feature is.

1:58Got it. Does that help? Yes, yes. Thank you. All right. I'm telling you, just be really careful because if you're pushing something new and it doesn't work out well and they're spending a good chunk of money, they're going to be pissed off. So you say it's like more of a higher risk, low reward here? What's the main service you offer? Mostly the B2B, go-to-market strategy. So we're doing a lot of LinkedIn ads already, a little bit of Google ads. but this is just something that looked like a lower, like something that I know we've talked a lot about with them, a lot of like connected TV, being able to reach their audience away from the computer or their mobile, but just haven't had much experience there and didn't have like some kind of a case study to back up that we think this may be a good option for them.

2:47First question for you, with most of your clients that you're doing LinkedIn ads on, are they able to just scale up and spend more and do it profitably or no? Yes. Okay, then focus on that before anything else. Got it. Thank you. All right, let's go with Scott, and then we're going to go with Nathan, finally. Somewhat related question to previous discussion. If you have one service, and obviously there's value in offering multiple service because then clients stick around longer, in theory. if you're introducing new services and you don't really have case studies for those like you said you know if you mess it up then you end up in a situation where the client is pissed and not happy right because they spend the money how do you tackle this problem if you're known for the seo you're starting to introduce let's say organic linkedin or video do you do you do a test pilot with them for free to give i was about to say okay test stuff out for free or for at cost or really cheap and don't get them on a retainer get them on just like a small test that's just really really tiny you can even charge them for it but it just has to be a really tiny fraction of the budget and it has to be more like hey we're offering this it works well for some clients or we haven't tested too much of it you can just be transparent and we'll do it for free or we'll do for like 500 bucks let's just see what happens you already spending 20 grand a month what's 500 and we'll just carve it out of the budget like are you okay with this let's try it out for one month and you got to keep having the culture with your clients that experimentation is the key to winning because if you keep doing the same old stuff that everyone else is doing it becomes saturated and more competitive over time so they got to continually test and experiment and a portion of their budget should go towards that each and every single month even if it's a small fraction like a few percentage points.

4:40And Scott, one thing we do with SingleGrain is we constantly reinforce the fact that if they are coming to us with ideas, they're pressuring us with ideas, they should fire us. And that's something we say on our sales calls and everything. So we're constantly putting the pressure on them with ideas. And eventually they're just like, okay, yeah, let's try this stuff, right? But to Neil's point, I think the key thing here is you're setting the expectation that it might not be all smooth sailing and this is very much a test. That's why they're paying nothing or pennies on the dollar. Okay. Right.

5:06To throw the wrench into that, with speed advertising, if we test, the feedback loop is fast. A week, a couple of weeks, you get the response. When you do organic, let's say LinkedIn or video, obviously, if you do it for a small test for a month, the impact is not going to be as quick and maybe not even there unless you do it continuously for several months. How do you tackle that issue? I think you need to set the milestones, right? It's like, hey, what are your expectations. Here's what we think is good by month one, we're going to hit this month, two, month, three. So that way, because to your point, Scott, the time to value is very important in agency.

5:42Like when you tell people, oh, SEO is going to take six months or whatever. Sure. That's true. But like there needs to be that they need to feel like they're getting something. You know what I mean? So yeah. Okay. All right. Thank you. Cool. All right. So let's go to you, Nathan. You got anything? If not, I'm going to go over to Matt. Yeah. Yeah. I've got one. Good to see you guys. So again, my agency, we do lead generation and then we'll help convert that to revenue for newsletters. I'm thinking about other niches that that same skill set, that same service line could work for. I'm like mildly interested in SaaS.

6:19So like maybe, you know, mid-market, lower ticket, S &P SaaS. What companies, could be agencies, could just be SaaS companies themselves, do really good paid social to converting to trial, you know, subscription? Well, you're asking who's a good paid SaaS agency? Is that what you're asking? It could be agency actually, maybe even more interesting because I can just look at ad libraries and funnels or the companies themselves. Who does that really well coming from, let's say, MetAds? Okay. So I'll give you an agency first. They focus specifically on SaaS. It's called Powered by Search. They're based in Canada.

6:55Neil, you have any SaaS companies that come to mind that do good with Meta? I'm kind of blanking on that right now. QuickFunnels has done really well over the years. Ah, that's a good example. Yeah. But they're like, yes, yes, it's SaaS, but it's like, it's kind of different because Russell packages an offer through a webinar. He does his perfect webinar sequence and he bundles everything together. So it's a little different, but they do they do have a ton of ads. I think that's something that's worth copying. No, but the reason I say ClickFunnels is yes, they don't do it in a conventional approach and it's worked for them.

7:27That's what makes it so successful. Everyone else, not everyone, but a large chunk just do the same stuff over and over again. But ClickFunnels has a really unique way of selling. And I think that works well. Yeah. Do you think it's possible without, is there almost like info product with SaaS on the backend. Do you think it works well? It's just direct to offer SaaS? It does. And they also do a direct to offer to SaaS. They actually try to push the SaaS first, not the info first for a lot of their offers from what I've seen, at least. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association.

8:01This is a peer group for agency owners, think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Alian, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need and the group responds. Great experienced members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well.

8:32And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io slash agency, and we'll see you inside. Cool. Any other logos you have to look at? I got Nathan. I think one company that's unconventional, they're smaller, but they're growing very quickly right now is Beehive. If you look at how they're on Twitter and they're attacking ConvertKit, Nathan's a friend, but just how they're going about things, Um, and how they're shipping, right.

9:09They have a marketable moment every single month. Right. I think that that's pretty intriguing to me. Um, so up and comer. Yeah, they're cool. We're running, uh, Tyler's newsletter and then, uh, their flagship newsletter too. They're great. Cool. All right, Matt, over to you. You might be the last one, Matt, so make it count. Okay. Thanks. Uh, yeah. So, uh, we wrote a case study on our sort of flagship client. We've this client. We've been with them for five years. We've done amazing work for them. They've grown tremendously in that time. And I'm really excited to get the case study out. But the client, it's been sitting with them for a couple of weeks now, and I can't get it approved.

9:47I can't get it out. You know, I can't get them to give us approval to publish it. So I was curious if you guys had any ideas on how to encourage the client to move on that, number one. And then number two, earlier, Neil mentioned sharing case studies on LinkedIn for B2B business. I was wondering, are you suggesting using LinkedIn articles to share that case study or just using regular LinkedIn posts driving traffic? So the second one I'll answer first is just a post. The first issue that you have with problem number one is, so when you're posting a case study on LinkedIn, just do it as a post.

10:21But the first question that you asked, you should have your contract set up in a way where you're able to just create case studies and publish it without their approval. If you don't have that and you're not allowed to and it explicitly says, then of course you need to work with them and get their approval. And it really is up to them to showcase it or not. But typically when clients don't wanna showcase their case studies, is it could either be A, sensitive information, B, they don't want other people to copy. What you wanna also talk to the customer about is the pros of showcasing the case study, right?

10:57because a lot of times they think about the negative. Think about how the engagement you can get in brand recognition. Think about the backlinks you can end up getting. There's other factors that can help them grow too and help their brand get out there. Yeah. I'm afraid that part of the problem is that there may be a competitive issue here, that there's sort of a category-defining leader in their space, right? And now there's all these new up-and-comers, competitors coming after them, and I think they're a little bit sensitive. They're currently working on a funding round, And so I'm worried that maybe they're, they're concerned about like letting their secret sauce out.

11:30You know what I mean? And I don't know. Yeah. But it also can give them really good press and get them out there where it could help them with the fundraising round because people can see how smart they are and how well they're doing. Right. Right. And then I, on the second part, did you say, you said LinkedIn posts driving back to the, to our way. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. All right. Anything else from anybody before we work on wrapping here? to touch on that is there value in adding video to that as well doing something like a testimonial video also resonates more than just a single post right bingo you got it right yeah i would milk it too not like a five minute video like it could just be like 30 seconds one minute you know something short scott you know um there's people for example there's um you know what's it taylor right from common thread collective if you follow him on on twitter he actually does a really good job with constantly telling customer stories.

12:24And so I think people sometimes they just use the customer, they use the case study once you can, you can use it. You can have a document ads for the case studies, right? If you have like a, like a PDF for it, and then you can tell some different stories related to it as well. So I think it's taking one story and making it into 20 to 30 different things. I don't think people do that enough, especially if you have an innovative way of doing something, it's not just one and done. Yeah. Yeah. And David and a group is good too at creating those video testimonials. I was just thinking it would be perfect fit if we were to do test video case studies and whatnot.

12:55So yeah. Okay, cool. Sounds good. Can you repeat that name? The one you said, because I would love to see his work. Taylor Taylor from Common Thread Collective. T-A-Y-L-O-R. The Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend is where systems get stress tested. Traffic surges, inventory moves fast and every second counts. you need a platform built for the moment. That's Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and 10 % of all US e-commerce. With Shopify, you can launch fast with thousands of templates and tools that make your site not just beautiful, but conversion ready. Shopify is packed with helpful tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography to increase your reach during the busiest time of the year.

13:39You can also stress less knowing that Shopify's award-winning customer support team is on standby 24-7 to help with any issues that arise allowing you to get back to business as fast as possible. This Black Friday, join the thousands of new entrepreneurs hearing for the first time with Shopify. Sign up for your free trial today at shopify.com slash marketing school. That's shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school and make this Black Friday one to remember. Okay. Taylor Holiday, is that the guy? Yeah, that's it. That's it. All right. Awesome. Thank you. Cool.

14:17The number one challenge for businesses is hiring. And more specifically, the number one thing I get asked for all the time is, Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer? And the reality is right now, when you think about the world, we have inflation. That also means wage inflation right now. And it means that when it comes to hiring talent, you can't spend as much as you would have in the last couple of years because it's just become too cost prohibitive. And so we've partnered with one of the best offshore recruiting firms when it comes to marketing. They've been a great asset for us, and I believe that they will be a great asset for you.

14:48All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io slash hire. Again, it's marketingschool.io slash hire to learn more. You can fill out the form there, and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires that we can help you find. I have one quick question. Go for it. For you, Eric, and Neil, when you guys created AOA, what is your why behind it? What was your why behind it? I'll just be very honest. So, so that there's, there's actually two. One it's I've been in a lot of communities. Neil's been in a lot of communities. We see the power of communities just going to get stronger. And if we open it up the school community, we make it public.

15:27We know it's good to drive a ton of organic traffic. That's besides the point, but to have a group of people where we can knowledge share with each other, partner with people, send some of our leads out that we can't work with that. That's a big piece of it. But the other piece too is like, okay, Kevin, is there a certain point where it makes sense for us to partner together where we do some type of deal, right? Or are there potential targets for M &A in the future too, right? So there's a whole host of different benefits here, but Neil, go ahead. Yeah, so it could be you guys partnering up with each other or Eric acquiring or one of us trying to acquire, you guys trying to acquire another.

16:00But being also really transparent, I didn't know we created this until Eric created it and then told me. Yeah. You know what happened, Kevin? Because so Neil has all these ideas, right? Sometimes he needs to incept himself into this idea because I had this idea years ago. And then he had this idea. And then I was like, okay, I'm just going to do it. And I did it in a different way that he wasn't expecting. And then we have this now. And now that it's moving, he's like, oh. That's how you have to understand who you're working with sometimes. Yeah, totally. Well, listening to you guys for so long, I totally see the dynamic in your relationship.

16:32And I love how you guys work together. Eric just goes and does it. I just want to say thank you for doing this because I've been part of a lot of masterminds. paying 500 bucks a month and getting nothing out of it. I've gotten a lot out of this school. The school aspect of it is really great. It's helped me to set up some schools for my clients and communities. And I've learned a lot from you guys practically. But what I love is the camaraderie we have as eagles. We're all eagles. We're not chickens. We're not hens. And you need to be around eagles need to be around eagles. And so thank you for providing this eagle's nest where we could gather.

17:12Of course. And Kevin, there's a lot more to come. I mean, there's the live component that I think that we have a lot of experience with. So we'd like that to happen too. But one step at a time, this group's only been around for a couple of months. So happy to have you here. Happy to have you all here. And Ezra, thank you for doing a tremendous job. Without Ezra, this thing would just not work. Absolutely. I think it's a good opportunity to say that. So with Ezra, he's going to be moving on in a couple of weeks, but we have an Ezra replacement coming in who's actually Ezra's friend. So the Ezra replacement used to work with Ezra at Mindvalley and then now works at another company, which I'm not going to mention right now.

17:50Sure. Yeah, that's what's going on. So thank you for that, Kevin. Thanks, Ezra. I'm going to make sure he's going to take really good care of you guys. Awesome. Cool. Well, look, I think that's it for today. Ezra's going to send you guys a survey just to see what we can do better here, please be brutally honest with us and we look forward to doing the next one thank you have a great weekend thanks guys