Have You Ever Tried Anti Marketing?

Katrine Rasmussen (00:02) Beautiful thing about LinkedIn is that especially when you work for enterprise or when you target enterprise companies is that they're going to be on LinkedIn. They're all on LinkedIn. So you're to be able to find them on LinkedIn. Ben Ard (00:12) yeah. Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Katrina. Katrina, welcome to the show. Katrine Rasmussen (00:45) Thank you very much, it's a pleasure. Ben Ard (00:46) Katrina, I'm excited. You have some really tactical insights to share with the audience today. But before we dive into that, let's get to know you. Tell us about your work history and background. Katrine Rasmussen (00:57) Sure, this is always the worst question to try and answer, right? I think at this point I probably have around almost, I want to say 20 years working in marketing. Worked in e-comm for a while, worked on the agency side for a while, but really spent most of my career working in B2B, software as a service. Especially for tech companies. I spent way too long working for accounting software. I think seven or eight years Today what I do is I work in fashion tech. I work for a company called Pixels We basically do content creation for a ton of the bigger brands that fashion brands specifically so we Do everything from retouching images videos to creating AI content solution AI models AI little twins, anything you can even think of. anything that you see on All the types of content, the imagery that you see on any of the big fashion brands out there, a lot of that has been for our engine. So that's what we do. We do have an amazing platform. So again, it's fashion, it's B2B tech. We do work with very ⁓ large accounts. So for me, it's all about enterprise sales, enterprise marketing. We do have long sales cycles. When I say long, they can range from Well, really quick one could be free for months. That would be amazing. Up to two years. So it's complex sales cycles. We're selling to big teams, big brands, it's enterprise deals. So that's also the hat that I'm going to wear today. Yeah, it's the ⁓ enterprise marketing hat that I'm wearing, that's for sure. Ben Ard (02:38) I love it. This is great context. Plus I told Katrina we need to do another episode at some point in time because the technology and their platform is so cool and I love the approach. It is honestly what I think a lot of people need to understand and adopt the philosophy and how you approach it. But today we're not going to dive into that as much, but we need to do a follow up episode. Today we're going to dive into LinkedIn ads. Katrine Rasmussen (03:01) Yes. Ben Ard (03:01) So Katrina, you have a way of getting in front of the right people through LinkedIn ads. How are you doing it? What are you taking advantage of? Katrine Rasmussen (03:09) Yes. So the one thing I want to talk about today, I think it's maybe the best kept secret in B2B marketing. And I don't understand why I don't see more people, more brands doing this. And it's thought leadership apps. So this is basically just a thought leadership ad is any, it can be any post, right? It can be a LinkedIn post from me, a LinkedIn post from you, a LinkedIn post from our CEO. I'll take that. I'll create an ad from that. It's going to look exactly like that post. So it's not gonna look like an ad, it's just gonna look like a regular LinkedIn post. The only tiny difference is that all the way up under under the title, it's just going to say promoted by Pixels or whatever brand is promoting it, right? So it doesn't look like an ad. It's a thought leadership content piece that you're able to push out. And then the real power comes in the targeting, right? Here, even though you're not connected to the people that you want to get in front, you're able to actually get in front of them. And that I think is the real beauty. But before we go dive into that in just a little bit more detail, I think we just need to back it up a little and start in a different place. So like I said before, when we do marketing and sales, we target very large accounts. So it's account-based marketing. It's basically what we're doing. It's account-based marketing, ABM, it's everywhere. and we can talk about the in ABM, right? This is not a marketing activity. When I say it's everywhere, I mean everywhere. This is what we do in marketing. This is what we do in sales. This is what we do in customer success. This is our basically our go-to market tactic, right, within Pixels. So what that means is that we have a list. I think at this point, we probably have 400 and something. account of this list. These are our target accounts. We know exactly who they are. We know that they're a good fit with the service that we offer. And we know that they match our existing happy customers pretty well. We know who they are. So when we do marketing and sales, we're not just like... shouting from the rooftops, right? And hoping that the right audience will hear us. No, we know who the right audience is. We know who those brands are. We know who those people are. So for us, we're not just sitting back waiting for those people to find us and come to us. We try to target them very, very specifically, right? And we do this in a number of ways. LinkedIn is one of them. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. Beautiful thing about LinkedIn is that especially when you work for enterprise or when you target enterprise companies is that they're going to be on LinkedIn. They're all on LinkedIn. So you're to be able to find them on LinkedIn. Ben Ard (06:05) yeah. Katrine Rasmussen (06:07) And the way we do it with the sales reps, can even 400 and something accounts that's still like a really big number of accounts. So what we do every six months is that we sit down with each account rep from the sales team. They will have a list of their target accounts, the accounts they want to prioritize for the next six months. Could be between somewhere between, ideally it's somewhere between 10 and 20 accounts, so it's not more than that. We'll discuss each one of these accounts. Which part of the sales cycle are they in? Do they know about us already? What's their pain points? ⁓ Who are the champions? Who are the stakeholders? Who do we need to reach here? So we do this with each sales rep. So it also means that in the end, we have lists of 10 to 20 ⁓ companies or brands from each sales rep that we really want to target. And this is where LinkedIn and the Thought Leader Ads comes into play. So next step is basically just to create these audiences inside LinkedIn and we're actually able to target them like very, very specifically, not just with thought leader ads, but any ads, right? And the way we create the audiences is basically, well, first of all, of course we have the brand name, but on that list is going to be the Nordstroms, it's going to be the Macy's, it's going to be Ralph Lauren's, it's going to be the major fashion brands. And they also have a lot of retail stores, right? There is like a ton of people who doesn't work in the photo studio who are not the ones that we want to target so you need to combine that with the correct job titles. There you go, there you have your audience. The smaller you can make it, the better. There is a minimum on LinkedIn of 300. I love it when I can get down to 300 because that means that you have the right people on your list and you're gonna be able to ⁓ control the frequency, which what they see their ad much like pretty precisely, right? You cannot do it on a contact basis because of like, I don't know. There is, I'm sure some privacy, good privacy reasons for that, right? Ben Ard (07:42) Mm-hmm. I've been curious why they won't let you do that, but yeah. Katrine Rasmussen (08:07) Yeah, no. So it's all on company level. So combine that with the correct job titles, maybe even locations, and you'll have a beautiful, very narrow audience that sits there now and is ready to go and basically ready to ⁓ be targeted through your ads. So essentially that's what we do and we try to be extremely narrow with this targeting and just only getting in front of the right people. But it's definitely very, different from spreading and prepping. Ben Ard (08:38) love that. That's so cool. So some follow-up questions, because I'm really curious about the strategy. When you're targeting these accounts and you're promoting these thought leadership ads, do you, well, let's take a step back. How do you select the right LinkedIn content to promote? Is it based off of organic results, based off of the account fit, but how are you finding the right posts that you actually want? Katrine Rasmussen (09:02) Yeah. And that's a really good question. And I think actually the biggest, and maybe that's why not more people are doing this. I don't know. I think the biggest challenge when doing this is actually getting your sales reps to post regularly and post the right things on LinkedIn. Right. Because you do in order to do this, you do need the team to post and you do need them to post like. good posts about the things that you want your target audience to see, right? And most of the time, the sales team is going to be too busy to do that. They're going to like, they tell me all the time, we're too busy selling. And it's really, really difficult to argue with that. So that all comes back to right, how do we choose the posts to like get in front of the audience? So first of all, we do actually, even though we're talking about already small audiences, right, but 10 to 20 brands in each audience. Sometimes if there are... one of two of them that have that where we know enough about them to know that they have a specific pain point that they're interested in something very specifically then we might actually go ahead and narrow the audience down even further and create make sure to create content that matches their specific interests. Then sometimes we might have to go a bit broader with the job titles to get the audience ⁓ big enough to hit the 300. But if the company that you're targeting is large enough, we can totally run a campaign to just that one account. So say we know someone is really interested in our CSR or ESG, could be they're super interested in our prices, whatever it be right. If we have that intel already from the sales rep who's been talking to the account, maybe if we know enough about them to know what their pain points are, we will specifically either create or help the sales rep create a post about or maybe a number of posts, like preferably a couple of posts, right, about that specific topic, because then we can get that specific post in front of that specific brand and just talk about the things that they have top of mind. But we don't always have all that much intel, right? But then, of course, there are a number of topics that are very... that is top of mind across the industry. So it depends. But I think probably the real challenge and why not more companies are doing this is because it can be very, very difficult to encourage and get your sales team or your C levels to post regularly. So we also put a lot of effort into helping with this. We always encourage them to do it on their own because it's going to feel more authentic. It's probably gonna be better, right? And also, honestly, we have so much content on our website. They can go in, they can get a random blog post, they can get a report, they can get a webinar, they can pretty easily, with ChaiGBT, ask ⁓ to create a LinkedIn post, like summing up the top five learnings for whatever piece of content that is, get it out there. But... Well, I'm making it sound easy. I think there is for a lot of people actually sitting down and doing that. It takes more mental energy than just do this. For me, it's like, just do it. But it's not really that easy. we do we actually on the marketing team, we do spend a lot of time creating. Ben Ard (12:17) Yeah. Katrine Rasmussen (12:23) we call it recommended posts for our team. So it's sort of like ghost writing, right? So we have a list of what we call evergreen posts. This could be created from industry reports that we created, older webinars that are on demand right now. So that's all sitting in a library. They can go and pick and collect whatever they like. So that's one thing. And then we create more timely posts if we have an event coming up, if we have a product launch or whatever. So we do all the hard work. All of that, I think, I don't even know, we probably have like at least 100 posts right now, just sitting there in the library, waiting for someone on the sales team, the exec team, or anyone within the company, right, to go pick them up and go to LinkedIn and it. We also create, we're actually just kicking that off tomorrow. We are creating like a little bit of competition. We do have a bigger event coming up in London in a couple of months. So we divided the team. We're going into small groups and we are like giving points out for Ben Ard (13:13) you Katrine Rasmussen (13:21) posting this, for posting that, for even we are even building custom UTM so we can track which posts are actually like getting attendees and if you get an attendee to sign up then you get five points. So we're trying to like encourage the team giving out prizes, doing stuff like this but I want to say that the hardest part is definitely like actually getting the team. to post on LinkedIn. Even if you create all the content for them, they still need constant reminders that there is a content library. But having said that. It's all about just being consistent, not giving up, just like being like really annoying. Sometimes, well, like one thing I do, sometimes I'll actually like go and stand behind our CEO until he presses post on one of his LinkedIn. I'll do that. I'll stare at him until he gets it out there. So that's the hard part. And probably why we're not seeing more companies do that, because that takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of effort to create the LinkedIn posts for the team. Ben Ard (14:05) you Katrine Rasmussen (14:19) because if they don't post anything, we don't have anything, then we'll have to revert back to the company ads that looks like ads that... because they're ads and it's promotion and it's just... we look... so if we go and look at how well we thought that our ads are performing compared to traditional ads that looks like ads, right? That comes from the company page. I mean... Ben Ard (14:30) Yeah. Katrine Rasmussen (14:45) At this point, the click prize, I think, is about half of that. The CPM is half. Thought leader ads are just, in general, performing so much better. I mean, you can do the exact same targeting on your regular ads that are coming from the company page, but it's just so much more expensive. It doesn't work as well. It doesn't build the same credibility because think about it. It's not just when we push out the thought leader ads. It's not just about our content. Ben Ard (14:57) I love that. Katrine Rasmussen (15:13) It's not just about getting the content in front of them. It's also about getting the sales rep in front of them. So not only is pixels and our content top of mind, but the sales rep, like seeing the name pop up on their LinkedIn feed and making sure that they see that face. That's also a really big deal, right? When the sales rep is trying to break through to a certain contact person within a company. Ben Ard (15:38) I love that. So one final question, cause we're running out of time here. Do you have call the actions embedded in these ads or are people just looking at the engagement? you putting in links? How do you kind of take it from engagement on the thought leadership ad to the next level? Katrine Rasmussen (15:55) Yeah, and that's a great question because and that all boils down to right, what is the overall objective of these ads and what we're doing? What are we trying to do? So it really depends on the content, what we're pushing out there. For a lot of the more educational, more thought leader ad stuff, no, there's not, we're not embedding any links because LinkedIn doesn't like that. Also, We actually just want to provide or have educational content right there in LinkedIn so people don't have to leave the platform. So for a lot of that, no. I consider that brand awareness. we do use an attribution tool where I'm able to see not just clicks but also impressions. So even if there wasn't a click, I'm still able to attribute. If there was an MQL, SQL or ideal created, able to attribute some of that even though there was just an impression on DinkDink, which is awesome. That's very helpful. But then again, if it comes to a webinar, if it comes to an event that we're hosting, yeah, we'll definitely include a link because it doesn't make sense to to a webinar or an event, not include a link to the landing page, right? But we never try to push anything like book a demo. That's very clearly just an adage, right? It's not thought leadership. So no, we don't try to book demos. We don't try to promote our... like our self-serve signups or anything like that. No, I think this works well for like high level thought leadership, brand awareness, brand building on one side. Also works very well for event signups, webinar signups, stuff like this for like the soft sells. But I mean, honestly, we've never actually tried to book demos ⁓ using this. So I don't know if it works. I'm just assuming that it doesn't because it doesn't make sense in my mind. Ben Ard (17:42) Yeah. Katrine Rasmussen (17:42) but I mean, maybe some people will have success with that, but you're probably talking, you're probably not talking enterprise sales, you're probably not talking to your sales IOS and 15 stakeholders. I don't think the Boogat demo would work for that. Ben Ard (17:55) I love that. That's amazing. Well, Katrina, thank you for sharing these insights about how to hyper target using thought leadership ads on LinkedIn, everything that you're doing, the success that you're seeing there, and really being honest about the most difficult parts of the process and how you just sometimes have to sit behind your CEO and make sure they click that publish button. I love that example. I love that dedication. This is amazing. Katrina, if anyone wants to reach out and find you online, how and where can they connect with you? Katrine Rasmussen (18:23) ⁓ LinkedIn is definitely the best place. I'm very active on LinkedIn. Sometimes my inbox is drowning, but I'll get to you eventually. But LinkedIn is great. Follow me on LinkedIn. I post almost every day about stuff like this. Ben Ard (18:36) Very cool. And we will link to Katrina's profile in the show notes below. Thank you again, Katrina. I really do appreciate the conversation and you sharing all these insights. Katrine Rasmussen (18:45) Thank you for having me.