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How to Leverage Google Ads in B2B - Paris Childress

Be a B2B Leader
Be a B2B Leader

144 plays · May 11, 2023

In this episode, Paris answers some key questions about Google Ads that B2B Leaders might have. He explains where Google Ads fits into the overall B2B marketing strategy and when to run performance max campaigns. By listening to this episode you will learn more about value-based bidding and why it's important, particularly in the context of SaaS vs. enterprise deals. Paris shares with us how intent data can be used in conjunction with Google Ads and explains why we have to focus on marketing fundamentals instead of hacks! Listen to this episode to explore the world of Google Ads with Paris Childress and Felicjan Rybka. Timestamps: (00:40) - What do you wish every B2B Leader would know about Google Ads? (02:20) - Is it easier to become a Google Ads specialist? (03:00) - Where do Google ads fit in the overall b2b marketing strategy? (04:30) - When to run performance max campaigns (05:30) - When do you reach the maximum efficiency of paid search? (09:30) - What is value-based bidding and why is it important? (14:00) - SaaS vs enterprise deals and value-based bidding (17:30) - Where do Google ads fit into dark social? (21:00) - Using intent data and Google ads (24:30) - Downloading data to put it into Google ads (26:00) - The biggest takeaway - we’ve gone full circle (31:50) - Where you can find Paris LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/parischildress/ Hop Online - https://hop.online/ Paris talks Marketing - https://podcasts.apple.com/bg/podcast/paris-talks-marketing/id1535338813

Transcript

Speaker: Hello and welcome to Be a B2B Leader.

Speaker: I'm Felicjan and I'm a marketing manager who wants to learn more about business, marketing and leadership.

Speaker: Today my guest is Parijs Cildres, the CEO and founder of HubOnline, a marketing agency where they offer growth and performance oriented marketing solutions to high growth SaaS companies around the globe.

Speaker: Paris will share with us his knowledge about Google ads and explain where it fits in the overall marketing strategy.

Speaker: So let's get started.

Speaker: Hi Paris and welcome to the show.

Speaker: Hey Felice Jan, nice to be here and thank you for having me.

Speaker: So Paris, please tell me, what do you wish every B2B leader would know about Google ads?

Speaker: I wish that every B2B leader would know and appreciate the full power of Google Ads and the capabilities that Google Ads can deliver today.

Speaker: So what is that power?

Speaker: Because everybody knows about search, everybody knows about display, but what's behind it?

Speaker: I think the real power now of Google Ads is the power of automation.

Speaker: And I believe a lot of people that are using Google ads are still taking a fairly manual approach to it, manually adjusting their bids and not leveraging all of the power of Google's AI.

Speaker: So Google's AI can really now ingest a lot of data and deliver better results than most marketing people can do with a manual approach.

Speaker: That's interesting.

Speaker: And like, when did it change?

Speaker: Cause you know, I don't have any experience with Google ads and yeah, it's something that I'm looking into at first.

Speaker: So.

Speaker: It has been progressively changing over the last several years.

Speaker: And I can't say that there was ever any real milestone or any tipping point.

Speaker: But where we sit today, I can say that almost in any use case, if you're spending at least a few thousand per month on Google Ads, and you're driving at least 30 conversions per month, then you should be doing automated bidding and you should be using Google's AI as much as possible.

Speaker: And most likely that would give you better results.

Speaker: So would you say that it's easier to become a Google Ads specialist today than it was like five years ago?

Speaker: No, I wouldn't say that.

Speaker: I think it's just as hard, if not even harder today, because you still need to understand how to take over the manual controls when you need to.

Speaker: And because of the rich features that Google has continued to add over the years, it's more complex.

Speaker: It's a more sophisticated platform than it was a few years ago.

Speaker: So it's not that the old knowledge is obsolete.

Speaker: It still is important.

Speaker: But there's so much new stuff.

Speaker: And there's so much to do now with understanding and figuring out what inputs to bring into the platform as well.

Speaker: That's interesting.

Speaker: And where do Google Ads fit in the overall B2B marketing strategy?

Speaker: Usually Google Ads is synonymous with paid search and paid search sits at the bottom of the funnel.

Speaker: So this is typically a relatively small but high intent, highly motivated product.

Speaker: audience that is in market, so to speak.

Speaker: So they're actively searching for your brand or for your competitor's brand or for your product by a certain category or non-branded keyword or search query.

Speaker: And

Speaker: That's not all that Google Ads is, but still most of Google's revenue, I believe even today, it probably is 65 to 70% of Google's global revenue is still driven from not only Google Ads, but specifically paid search, which is search ads.

Speaker: And the rest of Google Ads is still, I'd say, powerful.

Speaker: YouTube and display is still really, really popular.

Speaker: And now there's something called performance max, which allows you to run in a single campaign.

Speaker: It allows you to run ads across Google's entire set of platforms or properties, which is YouTube display search, the Google discover feed and Gmail.

Speaker: So do you think it always makes sense to run those performance max?

Speaker: Cause yeah, I can imagine that sometimes your budget will be better spent if you focus on one channel instead of all of them.

Speaker: Right, right.

Speaker: What we found, and we've tested Performance Max at least in a couple of dozen, with a couple of dozen clients so far, it doesn't always work.

Speaker: I think Google is still experimenting a bit with the algorithm of Performance Max, but we're seeing that it is improving over time.

Speaker: And it's not, I think, probably one word of caution to the audience is that this is not a channel that can replace performance.

Speaker: paid search or replace display or video or paid social, but rather it's an incremental channel that you layer on top of those other channels, especially with paid search.

Speaker: If you have paid search and you've more or less driven it to its maximum potential, then performance max is a nice add on after that for incremental, incremental reach impressions and conversions.

Speaker: So you said the keyword that's always interesting to me, like maximum performance.

Speaker: Like, how do you know that your campaigns are fully optimized, that you can't get more out of paid search?

Speaker: It's the point at which every additional dollar invested yields less than a dollar in return.

Speaker: It's the point of maximum efficiency.

Speaker: So normally the goal with Google Ads is to

Speaker: make it work in terms of profitability.

Speaker: So if you need to get a, let's say you need to get a return on ad spend of 200%.

Speaker: So every, every $1 or one Euro you put in, you get two back out at the point at which you're no longer getting two back for every one that you put in, I would say you've reached the ceiling or the plateau.

Speaker: And then if you want to continue growing, you need to find other channels.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: And what if you find a way to optimize the campaign further?

Speaker: Or your website or something.

Speaker: You can.

Speaker: Yeah, you can do that.

Speaker: You can always try to improve on a few metrics.

Speaker: So one thing that I guess one of the universal laws, like the law of gravity, is that CPCs always go up and they never come down.

Speaker: So you can't really optimize on a lower CPC unless you go out and try to find cheaper keywords.

Speaker: But most often when you find cheaper keywords, they're cheaper because they have less intent and they won't convert at as high a rate.

Speaker: So let's say you can't do much with the average cost per click.

Speaker: You can optimize for impression share, which means that this is the number of times that you're appearing in the auctions, the qualified auctions.

Speaker: So if there is, for your set of keywords, if there is 10,000 searches that happen in your market per month and your ads appear 10,000 times and you have achieved 100% impression share.

Speaker: And it's regardless of whether or not people are clicking.

Speaker: But let's say you've also maxed out your impression share.

Speaker: The next way to optimize further would be to try to drive a higher click-through rate from your ads.

Speaker: The way that you do that is with great headlines and great ad copy.

Speaker: And this is something that's been a tried and true principle since almost the very beginning of Google Ads, is to write a headline that pops, that stands apart from the other text ads that surround it.

Speaker: And so if you have a good click-through rate, you can always try to improve it.

Speaker: But let's say you've done a whole lot of testing.

Speaker: You've achieved what you think is really the top level of a click-through rate you can get.

Speaker: The final step of optimization then is the conversion rate.

Speaker: After people click, they're going to come to your website or to a landing page.

Speaker: You want them usually to be focused on one single action, one conversion goal.

Speaker: And...

Speaker: Good conversion rates for a lot of companies could range from two or three or maybe up to 5%.

Speaker: It's kind of rare that we see conversion rates as high as 10%, but it does depend on the type of conversion.

Speaker: But that's the final frontier of optimization in my view is getting more people who click to convert through a great landing page experience.

Speaker: And if you've done all those things and you feel like you're doing them as well as you possibly can,

Speaker: Then there's one final thing to do if you're willing to play the longer term game, which is you need to get more people searching for your brand or for your keywords.

Speaker: And that's when you start investing more into the middle of the funnel or the top of the funnel to drive more education, more awareness, and to invest in things like thought leadership so that more people are coming to search in the first place.

Speaker: Thank you for this answer because you perfectly broke down everything.

Speaker: I wasn't prepared for that, to break it down in such detail, but once I started going through the steps, I thought it's going to be best to really give you the full comprehensive view on all the different ways that you can optimize in Google Ads.

Speaker: It was perfect.

Speaker: Literally the perfect answer.

Speaker: So on our pre-interview, you mentioned value-based bidding.

Speaker: So can you explain what it is and how it fits into...

Speaker: Sure.

Speaker: The whole thing you talked about.

Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker: Value-based bidding is one type of automated bidding that Google has.

Speaker: So automated bidding is when you allow Google to set your CPC bids automatically without you doing it manually.

Speaker: And as I said earlier, I think if you're in a position to switch to automated bidding,

Speaker: In almost every case, you should do it.

Speaker: So the types of automated bidding are typically either going to be cost-based or they're going to be value-based.

Speaker: A cost-based automated bid would be something like a target CPA or a target cost per acquisition.

Speaker: That's when you know I'm willing to pay, let's say, $50 for someone who fills out this form, a lead generation form.

Speaker: And if you have a pretty good idea about what that's worth and you can set a price that you're willing to pay, then target CPA bidding is probably the most popular form of cost-based bidding.

Speaker: Now, value-based bidding, on the other hand, is training Google to bid to the value, either the revenue that's generated or the value that you attribute to the conversion.

Speaker: And in order to use value-based bidding, you need to have values.

Speaker: You need to feed Google values either from, let's say if you're in e-commerce, it's a value of a transaction.

Speaker: But if you're in SaaS marketing, it's most often going to be the value of the revenue data that you can pull from your CRM.

Speaker: Or it could even be something as advanced as your predicted lifetime value of that customer once they convert.

Speaker: So if Google has high quality data, revenue data from the CRM and or value data coming from somewhere else, first party data, then you can tell Google, I want to get a target return on that ad spend.

Speaker: So if I wanted to get $2 back from every dollar that I put in and I wanted to use value-based bidding, I would set a target ROAS of 200% in Google.

Speaker: And if I'm feeding Google back the revenue data, then Google's job and Google will be focused on this like a heat seeking missile is for everything that I, for every dollar I invested, they need to, they need to give me back $2 in revenue or in value that I'm,

Speaker: That's brilliant.

Speaker: That I'm bringing into the platform.

Speaker: That's brilliant, but does it work as it's, yeah, as you described it or are there some problems with it?

Speaker: It does work.

Speaker: And in our experience is that it works better and better the bigger, the bigger the campaign or the account gets.

Speaker: When you, the more data that you can feed to Google,

Speaker: on this type of an approach, on a value-based bidding approach, the more accurate, the more successful you're gonna be.

Speaker: Where we see it fail is with relatively small budgets and a small number of conversions.

Speaker: And Google simply doesn't have enough data

Speaker: uh, to really leverage the AI that's driving automated bidding and value-based bidding.

Speaker: So in that case, you're probably better sticking with something like target CPA bidding where you're telling Google, please just bring me the leads or the conversions at, at a fixed price.

Speaker: Awesome.

Speaker: And yeah.

Speaker: What would you say?

Speaker: What's the minimum amount of data that you have to have to make it work?

Speaker: Well, for automated bidding, Google will say that 30 conversions, I believe that's the latest guidance that you ought to have about 30, 30 to 50 conversion events tracked and reported per month.

Speaker: Um, in our experience though, to really make this work, I think the number should be even higher.

Speaker: Uh, it, it also depends on the value of that conversion as well, I think.

Speaker: But, um,

Speaker: What we have seen the most success with our clients is when the conversions are not in the tens per month, but in the hundreds per month.

Speaker: Then we see it working much, much better because the sheer scale and volume of data that Google can work with is so much greater.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: So I guess it will also depend on the type of business you are in.

Speaker: Because, yeah, do you think it can work for enterprise deals, for example, where you have

Speaker: services that cost dozens or hundreds of thousands of dollars?

Speaker: Or is it better suited to products like SaaS?

Speaker: It's better suited to SaaS.

Speaker: If you're really enterprise level and you have an ACV, annual contract value in the tens of thousands or maybe even in the hundreds of thousands,

Speaker: then most likely you've got a, probably a very long and complex sales process.

Speaker: And, and that could be months long.

Speaker: I would presume if, if the ticket, if the ticket values are so high.

Speaker: So,

Speaker: There's that to consider as well, because if the lag time is several months that you're feeding the value of that conversion back to Google, that also really kind of breaks the power of the automation.

Speaker: So what you need is you need a very tight feedback loop, and you need relatively smaller values that you would typically see more with SaaS or even with B2C.

Speaker: And if you're talking about enterprise deals,

Speaker: with several months long sales cycles, then I think you're better off focusing really on purely generation where you have traditional MQL that you need to progress to SQL and then to, let's say, an opportunity in your CRM.

Speaker: That's interesting because I think some people would go into an argument with you on that.

Speaker: But I still believe that when it comes to those enterprise level deals, we have to get that first touch and then just nurture the relationship bit by bit.

Speaker: Because people need the time to get convinced that you are the right solution, that you are the right provider that can solve their problems.

Speaker: Someone once told me that

Speaker: They've never seen a big bank go to Google and search for a new vendor.

Speaker: Like it's always based on relationships.

Speaker: It's always based on some data that they gathered before.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: And that's a good point.

Speaker: And I think one thing that's also has changed in recent years is that the sophisticated buyers, they're still using Google search.

Speaker: But I don't think they're putting as much weight in their decision process.

Speaker: I don't think they're giving as much weight and influence to the Google search results that they once did.

Speaker: I think now they're looking at their LinkedIn feed, they're networking more, asking for recommendations.

Speaker: They're going to sites like G2, especially if it's SaaS, G2 or Capterra, where they can do very detailed comparisons of different tools within a category.

Speaker: excuse me, they can look at reviews and read testimonials that might be on G2, they might be on the company's websites.

Speaker: So there's so many other parts of that journey, that research process that people are going to do before they go to Google.

Speaker: And then they might wind up at the end going to Google and searching for the brand or for brand A versus brand B. But that's usually what I think is more true than ever is if a

Speaker: if a searcher is discovering your brand for the first time, uh, based on a Google search, and most likely, even if you get that conversion, it's not going to be a very high quality conversion.

Speaker: Um, you need to be also thinking about how to invest higher up in the funnel to make them aware of your brand, educate them and, and, and demonstrate some thought leadership so that when they do search and if they do click, there's a, there's an inherent brand bias that comes with that click.

Speaker: So,

Speaker: That's the perfect transition to the next point I wanted to talk with you about, because there's this concept of dark social and basically dark social, you can call it as the upper top of the funnel where you don't know what's happening, but you can create that awareness.

Speaker: You can create attention around your brand.

Speaker: So how does Google ads fit into dark social?

Speaker: Can you use it to reach the right people?

Speaker: That's a very interesting question.

Speaker: Dark social, in my view, is the reason it's dark is because it's hard to measure or it's hard to attribute value to that activity, to that investment.

Speaker: And it's social because it's not Google, I guess.

Speaker: And I think everything that's not Google is social media, really.

Speaker: So including YouTube, by the way, I would say.

Speaker: But anyway, that aside, what's the relationship?

Speaker: I think that there is a tight relationship because...

Speaker: one of the reasons that you would invest in dark social without having a very clear picture of the return is because you do want to grow the search demand for your brand and for your category.

Speaker: So you could be doing one of two things.

Speaker: You could be trying to convince people through dark social that they have a problem that they weren't aware that they had.

Speaker: You could also try to convince people that

Speaker: there is a solution or a category of solutions to a problem that they already know they have, but they might not be aware that there's a whole set of tools out there that can help them.

Speaker: You might also be speaking to people who are even aware of the category.

Speaker: So they're aware of their problem.

Speaker: They're also aware that there's a category of tools that exists, but they don't know that your brand is in that set of tools.

Speaker: Your brand is not yet in the consideration set.

Speaker: So all three of those scenarios are great for dark social.

Speaker: Problem unaware, problem aware, and then brand unaware, basically.

Speaker: And when you can nurture those people through dark social across each of those stages with different types of content, and it really does require different types of content, ultimately, a couple of things could happen.

Speaker: Either they're going to become confident enough that they're going to want to go straight to your website, or they'll click through the content that you're sharing on LinkedIn, and they will convert on your website, or they'll message you in LinkedIn, or they'll find a way to get to you.

Speaker: Or they'll go to Google and they'll search for your brand.

Speaker: Or they'll go to Google and they'll do another search that implies that they have done a lot of research and they're ready to convert.

Speaker: They're really in market and with high intent.

Speaker: So the relationship of dark social is to feed the funnel into paid search effectively and to widen the funnel essentially to get more people searching for relevant keywords, either in your category or for your brand specifically.

Speaker: Like, lots of people talk about dark social and basically creating demand.

Speaker: But, yeah, not everybody knows how to do it right.

Speaker: Because they don't align on the ICP.

Speaker: They don't have the answers that their ideal clients are looking for.

Speaker: And they just want to push people into a conversion, basically.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Like that's one of the problems that I see often that people just use paid social to try to book a demo, try to jump on a call, whatever, but there is no intent to buy at all.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: And I wanted to ask you a different question about Google ads and intent data.

Speaker: Like how do you combine those two?

Speaker: So you have intent data on your site that, for example, some of your ideal clients have been visiting your page.

Speaker: Do you use only retargeting ads or is there a different strategy or approach that one should take?

Speaker: Yeah, that's an interesting question.

Speaker: So intent data would be data that would indicate that somebody is in the market either by looking at your brand specifically on your website or maybe your competitor's brand.

Speaker: And I think the most common follow-up or the most common use case with intent data is account-based marketing, which means that if I know you, Felician, were looking at my profile on LinkedIn and maybe I could see that, then I might want to send you a message directly or I might want to check out your company.

Speaker: And if I think that you're a great prospect, I'll not only message you, but I'll try to find a few other people

Speaker: that are maybe in the marketing department or sales department.

Speaker: And I'll also try to work as many angles as I can to get my foot in the door into your company.

Speaker: But the intent data was the data that showed me that you were visiting my profile.

Speaker: Now, within Google Ads, you have remarketing.

Speaker: And you can remarket not only within Google Ads across display, search, and video,

Speaker: but you can also remarket on social media as well.

Speaker: So if you think, let's say for B2B, most people think Facebook ads isn't a great channel for B2B, but if you have a lot of intent data of people that are visiting your site, you can create those audiences, those remarketing audiences and put them, give them to Facebook and you can retarget people on Facebook.

Speaker: even if you might think, all right, well, people are not on Facebook to shop for B2B, but if they've already been interested and have been researching you, then you can still get in front of those people through remarketing.

Speaker: I also think that there's another...

Speaker: Interesting part of intent data for, for SaaS specifically, that's the industry that we focus most on.

Speaker: And that's what these, these comparison sites like G2, because G2, the G2 is main revenue model is selling its intent, intent data.

Speaker: And what you do with those, you can typically get, you don't know the name of the person, but you get the company name.

Speaker: Usually that's based on the IP tracking.

Speaker: And then you can put those companies into a remarketing audience.

Speaker: But you need to do that at a certain amount of scale.

Speaker: So there's something called customer match in Google Ads, where you can feed a set of email addresses into Google.

Speaker: And then you can retarget people based on their email addresses.

Speaker: And from that customer match list, you can create something called a similar audience, which is Google's version of a lookalike audience.

Speaker: And so these are other ways that you can retarget to intent data in Google.

Speaker: Okay.

Speaker: So basically if you have the email addresses, you can target the relevant people.

Speaker: Yes.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Okay.

Speaker: So what if you scrape data from zoom info, let's say of your top 100 dream clients, yeah.

Speaker: Get their email addresses uploaded into Google and will that work or isn't that a strategy that one should follow?

Speaker: That could work, yeah.

Speaker: There may be some either GDPR or privacy concerns there because

Speaker: Now it's not considered ethical to be sending out emails or to be marketed to people that have not consented.

Speaker: But you're not really spamming them with spam email.

Speaker: You're showing them remarketing ads.

Speaker: So that is actually a common strategy where you can acquire relevant email addresses through tools like ZoomInfo or

Speaker: Apollo and there's lots of other tools that you can do that.

Speaker: And in that case, you can create a customer match list.

Speaker: And by the way, there's a hybrid approach there too, which is you can take intent data.

Speaker: So a lot of, let's say by an IP address, look up, you're able to identify which companies are visiting your website every day.

Speaker: And you can go to a tool like hunter.io and you can come up with the email format

Speaker: of that company.

Speaker: So I, if it's first name dot last name at company.com, then, then if you find the people you can search through LinkedIn and you can find the people that you want to talk to, maybe it's a CMO, maybe it's this, the chief revenue officer, whoever.

Speaker: And you can, you can also, without even having to pay to scrape those emails, you can more cheaply build an email list that way.

Speaker: That's awesome.

Speaker: So, Paris, what would you say?

Speaker: What's the biggest takeaway from this whole conversation?

Speaker: I'd say the biggest takeaway is something that we touched on about five minutes ago, which is that there are fewer and fewer hacks and shortcuts to success.

Speaker: And I think that maybe five to 10 years ago, I think the glory of digital marketing was to be a hacker, which meant that you found a shortcut.

Speaker: You found a way to beat everybody else, to do something that was cutting against the grain.

Speaker: And what you're really trying to do is shortcut success.

Speaker: And that's why I think there was always an obsession with paid search.

Speaker: And there was a race to the bottom of the funnel

Speaker: Before people even really invested in building a brand, they said, well, look, there's a certain number of people that we know are looking for our product category every day.

Speaker: Let's go straight there.

Speaker: Let's compete and let's bring people to the site and let's convert them right away because that's going to bring us immediate revenue.

Speaker: Typically, that approach just doesn't work anymore, especially not with B2B, where you have more sophisticated buyers who go through a longer process.

Speaker: They invest more time in places like LinkedIn.

Speaker: They self-educate and they rely less on salespeople in demo calls to educate them.

Speaker: And by the time they get to Google and do a search, they're way more educated than they were a few years ago.

Speaker: And so they're coming to search with a bias that they didn't have before.

Speaker: And that kind of eliminates

Speaker: the shortcut to success and it eliminates the whole hacker mindset, I think.

Speaker: That there's, you shouldn't really be proud or think that the ultimate success is to be able to hack marketing, but to really to do it properly, which is to invest at every stage of the customer's journey, top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel.

Speaker: So back to that framework, problem unaware, we need content that tells people, hey, you might have this problem that you don't even know you have.

Speaker: category unaware says, you know you have the problem, but you don't know that there's tools out there.

Speaker: Now, these are a set of tools and we're one of them.

Speaker: And then the next is the brand aware, which is that you're looking in our tool category, but you need to really pay attention to us because we're the best one in this category.

Speaker: And that takes a lot of investment in the whole funnel and there's no shortcut to success with that.

Speaker: And you can't, in my opinion, you can't hack your way

Speaker: to outsized unfair advantages like maybe you could 10 years ago.

Speaker: So I think that's the biggest takeaway for me.

Speaker: I love it.

Speaker: I absolutely love it because really I see just too many companies that, yeah, they want to hire a growth hacker that will magically make their brand visible across the whole universe and revenue will just flow in.

Speaker: But yeah, the times have changed.

Speaker: It's not 2010 anymore.

Speaker: Like you have to go back to the basics and basically educate everyone and help them buy.

Speaker: I think that if you put this in about a 15-year perspective, and I'm going to date myself here, but the first type of pure growth hacking happened in SEO.

Speaker: You used to be able to really manipulate the search results with Black Hat SEO, and that existed for maybe about 10 years until around 2012, 2013, when Google cracked down with two infamous updates, the Google Panda update and the Google Penguin update.

Speaker: And those forced people to create better content and to build legitimate quality links to their site.

Speaker: And it made SEO much, much harder.

Speaker: So the ROI from SEO plummeted in terms of how much effort you have to put in for what you get back out.

Speaker: And then the pendulum swung massively to paid search.

Speaker: And for the next, I would say for the next six, seven, eight years,

Speaker: paid search became almost the new growth hack where you would get the most back for the least amount of effort that you put in because the way people bought back then was people would go straight to Google and they would do lots and lots of Google searches and chances are if you could catch them in the right moments, you'd convert them and you'd win them as a customer.

Speaker: And they weren't doing a lot of other stuff outside of Google in terms of research.

Speaker: And that existed because

Speaker: for a long period of time.

Speaker: But now, due to, I think, the emergence of LinkedIn, especially, and the fact that buyers are becoming so much savvier in their research, that you no longer really have a growth hack opportunity with paid search.

Speaker: Paid search simply is the end of the journey that you still have to do well, but you can't do only that.

Speaker: You really have to invest across the whole funnel.

Speaker: And so,

Speaker: That's putting things in a broader term perspective because the best money used to be Black Hat SEO.

Speaker: Forget about whether or not it's ethical, but it simply had the best ROI in marketing for a long, long time.

Speaker: And then Google cracks down, money shifts to PPC, huge ROI there, but then that's now being eroded year after year.

Speaker: And now I think we're coming to a point where really marketing...

Speaker: Really classic marketing, which is focusing on your audiences and how do you segment them and how you deliver the right message to different segments and structure those across a journey.

Speaker: We're coming full circle again.

Speaker: And I think that's great for marketing in general because there's not many tricks and hacks left, I think.

Speaker: Yeah, like we've gone full circle.

Speaker: You have to go back to the basics and focus on your buyers.

Speaker: Paris, it was great to have you.

Speaker: Please tell the audience where they can find you and how can you help them.

Speaker: Sure.

Speaker: You can find me on LinkedIn.com.

Speaker: search for Paris and most likely I'll be one of the first ones popping up.

Speaker: And our website also is hophop.online.

Speaker: That's our agency website.

Speaker: I've got a podcast called Paris Talks Marketing and we're launching about one episode per week and I welcome you to check that out.

Speaker: And how we can help, I do believe that

Speaker: If everything that I talked about today, if you're interested in doing that at a high level, whether through paid channels or organic or a combination of both, I would love to talk to you and introduce you to some people in our agency.

Speaker: Awesome.

Speaker: So as always, you can find all the links in the description of this podcast.

Speaker: And Paris, it was great to have you.

Speaker: I've learned a lot.

Speaker: And see you on LinkedIn.

Speaker: Thanks.

Speaker: Thanks, Felicjan.

Speaker: Thanks for having me.

Speaker: Thank you for listening to this episode of Be a B2B Leader.

Speaker: If you liked this episode, make sure to leave a review in your favorite podcast app.

Speaker: Also, if there is something you would like to learn, let me know.

Speaker: After all, we are building a knowledge base for B2B.

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