SMB Advertising Podcast: Recent Episodes

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Today’s guest in the studio is Andrew Davies. He serves Paddle.com as Chief Marketing Officer. Paddle runs the payments infrastructure for 3,000 software companies and after its acquisition of ProfitWell last year, also has the industry-leading Pricing team, Retention product, and a SaaS Metrics platform used by around 30,000 businesses. Today he will talk about the use of AI in marketing.

What are some strengths and weaknesses about using AI in marketing?

Strengths

• AI helps with ideation: It can help to instantly start the process to come up with ideas and something to start with. AI can improve the thought process and be used as a supplement to your own idea creation. It is a great place to start when you do not know where to begin.
• Customisation/Personalization: AI makes it a lot easier to make personalized scripts to use for reaching out to customers via email etc.
• Summarisation: AI is excellent at taking long articles and making them shorter.
• Data analysis: WIth AI you can analyze a lot of material, summarize main trends and gather useful information about your company in order to make improvements.
• Helping non technical marketers do technical tasks.

Weaknesses

• Human beings are still responsible to ensure the quality level of the content. When it is too easy to replace our own tasks with AI, people often question whether AI is good enough.
• Start to completion: AI rarely gets you from the start to complementation. To get the desired output, you most likely need to go through multiple systems and tools. One AI tool alone is rarely enough, because you must also control it and use your own skills, not just rely on the AI.
• AI doesn't raise the bar: AI generates large amounts of information in order to get the most suitable result, but also the most general and common result. This means AI will not be creative and innovative itself, because it will not be able to find new mountain tops. Therefore, as a marketer, you are the only source to finding new ways of messaging, new metaphors to use and new creative solutions.

What does this mean for marketing teams of the future?

• A marketer will not be replaced by AI. Nevertheless, knowing how to get the best out of AI will be a required skill. When using AI as a supplemental tool, the work can be done much more efficiently and it can be possible to do more with smaller teams.
• For Writers or Creators, it will in general be more focus towards their personality and connection, not necessarily the content. This job will not disappear, but the connection between the author and the audience will be even more important.

Examples of tools:

• Eleven Labs - A tool where you can type in text and choose a voice to read it. You can even train the tool to speak with your own voice. Then, you can for example use the sound in video making.
• Chatspot.Ai -A tool built by the founders of hubspot. If you use hubspot, you can use this tool as a supplement to exploit your hubspot data. For instance you can use the tool to ask questions like: “Please find all the contacts living in the US, and send them as a CSV to me”.
• More tools in Andrew’s linkedin post: “Examples of Paddle marketing team's actual use cases of generative AI this week”:(https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andjdavies_rather-than-yet-another-list-of-possible-activity-7039929622288814081-lm8R/)

Andrew Davies Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andjdavies/

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Today we have a very special guest joining us, Sigurd J. Vik, the managing director of Coupler, Sigurd has built and scaled several agencies in design, advertising, and media over the past 20 years. Sigurd J. Vik, is talking about mistakes that he often sees small and medium sized companies making within marketing. Today we will dive into five concrete mistakes:

1. Not using retargeting ads.

Not using retargeting ads is a common mistake, especially for companies with a small budget and no professional marketing team. Using retargeting ads means to target the ads to people that have already interacted with your page. It is to remind the audience that they looked at our product or service to get them further into the customer journey and eventually make them a customer. There is a misunderstanding, that you do not need a huge budget to do this, you just have to do it right. Often companies are using retargeting ads to an audience that already has been a customer, which is pointless, and should be avoided. Rather when someone only has visited your page without purchasing something, try to retarget them by following them up with a soft dialogue. For instance, share your brand values, what you offer, use a friendly reminder, and do not push the customer. Rather make them understand your values and what you stand for. For example you can use animated video ads that shortly explain what your agency is about, and knowledge the customer in another way than convincing them into purchasing a product. Then they can see your company from another side, through brand messaging, and importantly, keep it short and memorable.

1. You think video should be dead cheap.

It is possible to make a really great video, without a huge budget, if you just put some effort into it. With today's technology, you can actually make computer generated, high quality animated videos with audio over, for a small budget. Advertising is often better on film, and is a great supplement to other advertising methods. A video does not have to be expensive, because it is the message that makes good communication and the real value, not the money that is put into it .

1. You think 10 articles is a lot of content.

People often underestimate how much content you actually need to make for your audience to understand what you really talk about and to satisfy the audience to convert them into customers. It is important to make fresh content all the time and refill your website and advertising, because when the customer gets back to your page, you still have to retain their attention in order to succeed with the advertising. Therefore, be consistent and also use different platforms.

1. You’re not following up your leads.

It does not matter if you have 50 or 500 leads, if you do not follow them up and cannot convert them into customers. It does not matter if people interact with your page without taking action to become a customer. Therefore, connect, reach out, call or email your customers to remind and encourage them. Have a system to use that you can follow when you reach out to the leads. Also, it is important to follow up quickly.

1. You’re trying to build a house with a budget for a tent.

Trying to build too much, with too little resources is like arguing against gravity. Many people underestimate how much things cost, and it is important to plan out what strategies you want to use. Huge companies hire marketing agencies, which you can most likely not afford with a small budget. Therefore, when you do it by yourself, use templates and tools to cut corners, and nevertheless, focus on the messaging. Invest in the messaging to maintain visibility. Remember that a website that is not seen, is not worth anything. So invest properly in marketing in order to gain market share.

Likedin profile Sigurd J. VIk: https://no.linkedin.com/in/sigurdjvik

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Today we have our co-host and co-founder, Carl Wilhelm Vedvik on to look into the rise of AI-generated ads, talking about risks, benefits and how-to’s.

Over the past few months, we have seen a huge increase in the number of AI-generated ads, and not just AI used as a supplement tool, but fully AI-generated ads. These days, ads are created with Chat GPT-3 to write the ad copy and accompanying this with Synthesia.io to generate pure AI-videoes with humans that do not exist. Adline’s customers are launching these types of ads through the Adline platform, and our algorithms are even fully auto-optimizing these ads. There are basically almost no humans involved in the process.

What are some risks that may occur when creating AI-generated ads?

• The ads may start to lose relevancy and are not appealing to your target audience anymore, because they are being mass-produced.
• The ads lose the human, emotional touch.

What are some benefits or rewards?

• For business owners who primarily had to do all the creating themselves, it may save a lot of time to use AI to produce content and write ads for them. It is specifically hard to start from zero, but with AI, you do not really need to start from scratch, because you get the AI to help you with the first ideas to create content. Nevertheless, make sure to double-check and adjust the ads before publishing.

There are some principles you need to ensure when it comes to creating effective AI ads:1. Keep the ads relevant, engaging and informative.

1. Use templates - when you use AI templates, you follow their algorithms which will lead to the best results. The output will be most sufficient when you give the AI-tool the right input.

2. Make sure you know who the customer is so that the ads can cater to and appeal to the correct desires of your audience.

3. The more an ad looks like an ad, the less engaging it will be. Therefore ensure that the ads do not look like ads.

Generally, it is all about feeding the AI’s with the correct input and asking the right questions. When you want the AI to write an effective ad copy for you, you need to tell the AI exactly who your ideal customer profile is and what their desires, goals, and challenges are. That is when the AI-generated copy will work entirely well. Give the AI context, before you tell it to produce something.

Be careful of using too many AI-generated videos. The more real, the more genuine the ad is, the more compelling the ad will be.

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Today's guest, Nick Balazs is the founder of GrowthLab, a marketing agency helping D2C brands and apps scale profitably through Tiktok and Meta Advertising. Although they are a small, lean team, they specialize in helping small to medium sized businesses grow their customer base, get more sales, and optimize for success.

Although there is a lot of conversation going on about ChatGPT at the moment, we must remember that TikTok and Meta are still here and still very relevant. We can still exploit the power of TikTok, where one small video can go viral. In order to succeed with TikTok you need to know exactly what you are doing. TikTok works differently from other social media platforms, like Facebook, and has other algorithms to reach audience. Nick Balazs will be sharing tips on how to succeed with ads on TikTok.

What are some key strategies that you will be using for your customers now in 2023?

• Succeed with the creatives that you are using: You can be the best advertiser in the world, but if you are working with wrong creatives or creatives with low quality, the ads are not going to be effective.
• Understanding who our customers are: Do research on what your customers like and do not like and how they behave. Furthermore, mirror that into the creatives that you are generating.
• Implement new AI solutions: For instance implement Chatgpt to come up with new and ideas and different angles and strategies to hit the customers with.
• Try to grow on TikTok organically (non-paid as a TikTok user): It is possible to succeed organically on tiktok. If you produce high quality content, it can reach and affect as many people as a paid ad, or even more people. That way, you can touch people without spending money on ads.

Are there any misconceptions around advertising with TikTok?

• People often try to copy and paste their Facebook advertising into TikTok, because they think their strategies on Facebook ads are going to work as well as on TikTok ads. However, your audience on TikTok is going to be different from your Facebook audience. For instance, if you use a branded video from a Facebook ad on TikTok, it does not necessarily work, because you need to make “native” TikTok content for your ads - make ads that look like a TikTok video, not an ad.
• Most people think that the audience’s age only ranges from 18-22 years, but the elder group is increasing rapidly these days. Looking at stats for 2022, 40% of the TikTok users are 37+, which means, your audience is there, and it all comes down to how you target them and create content that will touch them.

What is your top piece of advice for someone who is completely new to TikTok ads?

• Firstly, do research on your audience to really understand who you are trying to sell to and mirror that into the content that you create for advertising.
• Secondly, invest time and resource into making high quality content with the right creatives
• Grow on both paid ads and organic side of TikTok
• If you have a small budget it is better to exploit what you have rather than doing nothing. Do not save until you have more money to spend, rather try to be creative with the little you have, because you will actually be showing the ads to audiences out there. Use the time in the beginning to test who your audience are and what they like to understand what works on them. If you have a very little budget, at least try to grow organically to put yourself out there.

Nick Balazs’ Linkedin profile: https://dk.linkedin.com/in/nick-balazs-a60225175

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Today we have a very special guest joining us, Stine Norum, VP of Commercial at CarbonCrusher. She is a serial entrepreneur with extensive experience from building and scaling companies internationally. She founded her first company in 2015, and has led global expansion for several companies in the Norwegian startup ecosystem over the last few years. Her passion is in helping Norwegian companies succeed internationally and sees a huge untapped potential in our very product-oriented country.

Today we are going to talk about something incredibly important for all companies and businesses out there, which is how to make the sales and marketing teams or departments work together.

What are some of the benefits of these teams working together?

• An incredibly important task for the marketing team is to warm up the customer before allowing the sales team to take over and convert the warmed-up lead into a customer. That can make the sales team’s job much easier and increase the number of leads converted. If the lead is as warm as possible, the time from meeting to close will be a lot shorter.
• It is also important to be directly in touch with the customer to learn what triggers them to push the buy button. If the sales team gives feedback to the marketing team with information about the customer, the marketing can improve even more. Thereby, the sales team helps the marketing team to understand the customer.
• Marketing and sales jobs do not necessarily need to be looked at separately since a marketing job is also a sales job and the opposite.

What are common mistakes companies make when bridging the gap between marketing/advertising and sales?

• A mistake is that the two teams do not align on their targets. Most companies have their main objectives and team-based objectives. Often the marketing and sales team have their own objectives, which do not match or correlate together. Having a main goal for both teams to focus on together is important for cooperation. It may also be smart to specify what effort has to be done toward the goals on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis.
• It is also important to know that a qualified lead for the marketing team may not be a qualified lead for the sales team. All leads are not useful for the sales team, because the audience watching a campaign may not always be in the mindset of purchasing a sale. Therefore, learn what “qualified leads” actually mean in the different teams.

What is a tool that could help with cooperation between different teams?

• Hubspot is a tool that has helped Stina a lot, mainly because it works with other tools and is sufficient for cooperation. The meaning of that is that if one team as a preference is using a very specific marketing tool, you can still get your KPIs out from using HubSpot. HubSpot can connect almost everything these days, which makes it easy for the marketing and sales team to work together.

How can you get started with a limited budget?

• Firstly, look at the resources and knowledge you already have.
• Secondly, do not be scared of trying new things.
• Try to figure out what you already know will lead to a successful marketing campaign and use that as a starting point. From there, try out different options, like trying different wordings, and selling points to express your main message. AB- testing may be a smart tool to see what actually works (explained in the previous episode 27).
• Do not spend much money in the beginning, but see what works first and spend in that direction. Exponate yourself out there and build knowledge!

Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stinenorum/?originalSubdomain=no

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Today we are going to focus on marketing strategies for startups, which our guest, Jonas Faizi has a lot of insight into. He is the VP of Marketing in a tech startup, Recognition, which provides traffic and customer insights to physical retail. Jonas previously worked in Coca-Cola EP Norway with their B2B Digital marketing.

What is a start-up? 📈

A startup company is a newly formed business, often a tech company, using innovative technology to sell a product or service. They often have the intention to grow rapidly as a result of offering something that addresses a particular market gap.

Typical goals or OKRs (Objectives, Key Results) for a start-up company? 🎯

• Getting funding to work full-time with the company
• Creating an MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
• Getting that first pilot customer or cooperation
• Achieving product-market fit (creating a product that the market loves)
• Grow rapidly

Why are these goals important? 🚀

Understanding how a startup works, how it survives, and how it grows is vital for a marketer in a startup. First of all, marketers are often introduced in startups at a later stage than the start, because startups tend to prioritize developing their product and sales, rather than marketing. But this is where it gets fun for many of us - if you are a creative person, this is a place where you can shine.

Typical marketing/sales initiatives for a B2B Saas Startup

1: Develop a solid Go-to-market strategy

• It should explain how you will attack your market by defining which audience you go after, how you position yourself, what pricing strategy you choose, your competitive advantages, your key messaging, what features you develop to serve that market, what resources to spend, and where.

2: Connect with the chosen market: There are many ways to do this and here are e few examples:

• Create a website that is content-heavy and focuses on SEO (search engine optimization), do cold calling or selling through partners. SaaS companies often tend to use a freemium model vs a free trial to attract and engage visitors enough to get users to love their product. Once they’ve fallen in love, they will convert eventually.

3: Choose your marketing channels:

• Do research on what channels to focus on. It could be email marketing, Linkedin marketing, or other social media platforms. Multiple channels may be an option, but often, if you do not have resources or time, you choose to focus on one particular channel. Do not be fixated on minor tasks when it comes to setting up ads. Rather, it is important to have clear objectives, which should determine your company’s success.

Typical marketing/sales initiatives for B2C product startups

• The main difference between selling to a business vs a consumer lies in how the customers behave and how you can convert them. A B2C buyer is often more impulsive than a B2B buyer. As a B2C startup, it is really important how you present your product, because that may be crucial for converting the audience to customers.
• B2C really depends a lot on the product, value, and positioning, as there as a million ways to convert visitors into customers., and you want to gain awareness for your company and product.

How to run ads or pay for marketing initiatives when you do not have any budget for it?

• Use your creativity and network! The contacts you already have may be very helpful; people you know that can promote your product, influencers, social media etc.

Jonas Faizi’s Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonasfaizi/?originalSubdomain=no

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Today we are going to talk about a hot topic, touchpoints that lead to conversion. We have a very special guest, Buğra Gündüz, joining us all the way from San Francisco to talk about this. He is co-founder & CEO at Hocketstack which is SaaS analytics platform that unites marketing, revenue, and product data. He started Hockeystack two and a half years ago and has bootstrapped it to more than 7000 companies worldwide. He is really transparent about their entire go-to-market strategy and company journey. He has gone from 2 000 to 8 500 followers in 6 months on LinkedIn by posting relevant and open content more than 2 times per day. Buğra Gündüz will answer questions about how to create content that leads to converting.

How many touchpoints should, or will an average lead need before converting?

• That is an impossible question to answer because you cannot track and know how many touchpoints a customer has. Our strategy is to get as many touchpoints as possible so that you have the highest chance of converting. It is also important to be able to articulate your message properly and show your business in a positive light. If your potential customer see you many times in a positive context, you are more likely to have a sale/get a customer.

Can you talk us through last touch convertings? What does this mean and where do you typically see the most coming from?

• Last touch converting is the last engagement that a customer has with brand before converting. Buğra Gündüz tells they get most convertings from linkeding ads. Nevertheless, that does not mean that Linkedin ads are the best influencing channel for sales. Even though Linkedin could have been the last interaction before converting, the customer could have seen the content on other platforms. It is important to look at the full customer journey. Therefore you should provide high volume of content, then follow it up by good ads, maybe on multiple platforms. When your customers are ready to take an act, you will be on the top of their mind.

There is a lot of discussion between what a “lead”, “MQL” and “SQL” is - particularly between sales and marketing - how do you guys at Hockeystack look at and measure these?

• Every company should have a different definition of those terms because they sell and target customers differently.
• Leads= Any company/person that has engaged and interacted with our company, which is a potential customer.
• MQL (A Marketing Qualified Lead) = a lead that has indicated interest in what a company has to offer based on marketing efforts or is otherwise more likely to become a customer than other leads.
• SQL (A Sales Qualified Lead) = a prospective customer that has progressed past the engagement stage and now is ready for the next stage in the sales process, which is purchasing the sale.

Now in 2023 - what is your best piece of advice to SMB’s around the world to implement when it comes to touching points, or in terms of their strategy?

• Buğra Gündüz’ tip is to measure the marketing process with the customer and optimize the marketing campaigns that work the best. Put effort into those campaigns that will give most cash return.

Buğra Gündüz’ linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bgrgndzz/

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In the studio, Mike Damnjanovic and Carl-Wilhelm Vedvik are going to tackle one of 2023’s challenges; and this is what to do when cookies go away.

What happens with your ads when cookies go away and how can you stay covered?

• When cookies go away due to the privacy regulations, it will become harder for channels such as Facebook and Google to track conversions as well as collect retargeting audiences.
• Specifically what will happen, is that it will become more challenging for Google and Facebook to track website visitors, where they are on your website and what specific actions they do on your site.

Are there any workarounds here?

• There is one key thing these channels allow you to do today and in the future; sync your own data and leverage offline conversions.
• Offline conversions means you will be able to upload or sync your own data into the advertising platforms to power your campaigns.
• What this means for you exactly, is that you will need to rely more on other 3rd party software such as Adline, that collects 1st party data for you that you own completely. To sync into those channels.

What is 1st party data?

• First party data is data your company has collected directly from your audience. It can be online or offline data, website visitors, app or CRM data (for instance a contact or customer list)

How is 1st party data collected?

• 1st party data is collected by installing tracking pixels on your website, or using other tracking integrations.

Why is it important to collect 1st party data?

• 1st party data can be used to power up your advertising with relevant data, such as remarketing audiences and conversion data when cookies do not.
• When cookies go away, remarketing in general will be weaker. If you then have your own data to push into the channels you will be more covered when cookies go away.

Inside information from Google:

• Carl was at a recent roundtable at Google in Oslo a couple of weeks ago, where Andrea Chiari, the ads privacy specialist at Google, revealed some very interesting data. She said that when you give your customers and prospects the opportunity to control their own data when engaging with your company, they become a lot more receptive when seeing your ads after giving you their consent. In other words, by giving website visitors the opportunity to select what you can and cannot track, they will be much more likely to convert when seeing your ad afterwards.

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Today, Carl and Mike are focusing on ads and more specifically, how to do a proper A/B-test with your ads. In short, here is what what you need to know about it:

What?

• A/B-testing is the art of experimenting different approaches to see what makes the best impact.

How?

• An A/B-test is often done by having a “Control”, the original version. It could be your current ad, an original ad, an original newsletter etc. Then you launch what’s called a “Variation” or more “Variations”. The goal is to get the Variations to beat the Control. Once you find a new winning variation, you make it the new “Control”.

Why?

• A/B testing is an endless experimentation loop, where you make several variations and beat the control where your product becomes better and better. Many successful tech companies today, started with doing a lot of experimentation and A/B testing which eventually resulted in rapid growth. The more you test, the more improved results you will have. SMBs can do this too.

Pitfall to avoid:

• When creating new variations, be careful of changing too many things at the same time. You need to know what caused the improvements. Was it your headline, image or was it the new audience you targeted?

How?

• When it comes to your advertising, you can experiment with different headlines, images, body copy, creatives or target audiences. Take your controlling ad, duplicate it for instance three times and make three different variations. Only change one thing per variation.

Example:

• Examples of elements to change in your ads isImage, video, headline, targeted audience etc.
• One example of a campaign with many variations could be; You have your controlling ad, then you have one ad with a different image, and another ad with a different headline. Then you could duplicate the whole campaign, and target these different ads to a different audience. Once you find a winning combination of headline, image and target audience, make it your new Control. And test again.

Once you find your winning ad - you develop it further!

Keep the ad as long as it is the best option, the winner.

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Today we have a very special guest joining us, Matias Rodriguez. Matias has over 15 years of experience in international B2B marketing and leading cross-functional global marketing teams across various industries.He is currently working as Head of Marketing, at a start-up within the real estate industry which is challenging the industry by developing a platform to digitalise the property development industry, which is today the second least digitized industry. Matias Rodriguez is an expert in building B2B brands and driving international growth marketing strategies.

B2B Marketing trends to watch out for in 2023:

Demand generation trend

• Demand generation is focusing towards targeted marketing programs to drive awareness and interest in a company's product or service.
• Due to GDPR, the death of third-party cookies, gated content is not working anymore, because Google Algorithms have been changed early this year. Therefore ungated content is not relevant anymore. Many companies are switching to Demand Gen to educate people as a strategy to get their attention and being on their minds when the customer is going to buy. Out of all the audience, 95% are not even ready to buy a product, and 40% of them already have a product working for them, and are not in a rush to buy. Marketing is changing rapidly, and the customers have to follow that speed. Eventually, when customers decide to make changes and are in the mindset of buying, you need to be in their top of mind. How you do that, is being social first. Make personalized advertising and connect with the audience early. The customer has an immense amount of resources, and options to educate themselves. Therefore, you need to really touch the customer and the field, and show why your product is the right choice for them. An example on how transition from product features, to personalization of advertising happens, is platforms like LinkedIn are now changing the way B2B are posting, from promoting “features” to becoming more human.

Increase of AI solutions available for marketing

• It is important to have the tools to understand and analyze your data to make improvements. There are many tools currently available to use in the marketing field, such as AI copywriting solutions like Jasper or ChatGPT. will make marketing different, change, Using AI solutions to be more effective will be more and more applicable. Other examples are:
• Hubspot SEO - using ML to determine how search engines understand and categorize your content
• Personalize or Seventh Sense for AI Email Marketing
• Adline for AI social media advertising

The main challenge for B2B marketers next year:

• “Understand your audience” and choose the right channel. Identify who your potential customers are, and be very good at using the channels you choose to focus on by providing valuable information to the customer. Be where you are good at and the best there. You do not need to cover the whole field.

Matias Rodriguez’s LinkedIn details:

https://se.linkedin.com/in/amatiasrodriguez

Feel free to connect with him here.

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Siril Jacobsen is the VP Marketing in the fast growing martech company called Papirfly that delivers powerful brand management solutions to brands all over the world. Siri is today's guest, and really passionate about bridging the gap between what consumers want to know, and the information we provide them through value-filled content. Today, questions and comments regarding this economic downturn that we are in the middle of, are going to be addressed.

Should you downscale your ads (or marketing) budget in an economic downturn?

We are now facing an economic downturn, and organisations have to adjust accordingly. It is not the first time this has happened, and we can learn a lot from how companies acted in the last recession. Studies have investigated how different companies acted throughout the recession, and what separated the companies that flourished from the companies that struggled. Can you guess what the difference was? The answer is that they invested more in advertising. While 80% of companies took a minimum of 3 years to return to the same level as they were before the recession, the 20% that grew were the ones that strengthened the company’s internal efficiencies and invested significantly more than their competitors in marketing and R&D.
Of course, it does not mean you should just throw more money at your advertising. You should absolutely invest in advertising, but do this while you re-assess your multichannel strategy. Take a closer look at what actually works, and in short, adjust so you spend more money on what the data is telling you is actually giving you the highest ROI.

What is the long-term financial impact of doing short-term cost reductions on marketing?

The ramifications of cost reductions can be huge. There has been a shift the last 10 years, where marketing is now much more recognised as the growth engine. 10 years ago, that was not really the case. The willingness to invest in advertising is definitely bigger now. If you can show the actual business impact of the marketing money you are spending, you can not only show the business case for why you should invest more, but you can also show the business case for the long-term financial impact of doing reductions in your marketing spend.

Marketing plays a crucial role in attracting and retaining customers. If you reduce your short term spend, you will most likely see a reduction in your sales and revenue long term. Even without looking at direct ROI from your investments, marketing is also very much about building long term brand awareness, which is an important factor in a business’s long term financial success.

Are there any marketing strategies or initiatives that companies should focus more on during uncertain times?

There is no cheat sheet saying “these are the three things you should always invest in during uncertain times”, but the disappointing answer is that you should invest in whatever works for your business. If you have the data available that tells you what your high performing channels are, there is your answer to where you should invest. Make sure you have a martech stack that gives you complete insight into all your activities and how they are performing, so that you can adjust accordingly.

People are in general a bit sceptical about investing in marketing technology when times are uncertain, and they do not want to add more tools to their stack. Nevertheless, investing in the right tools can turn out to be the smartest thing you have done for the business.

There are different tools you can implement for efficiency work. For instance, if your marketing team is facing redundancies, a smart investment could be to make sure you have tools that automates some of the workload, that reduces bottlenecks, which allows for flexibility and creativity.

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A very special guest is joining us from Orange County, California, Nick Shackelford. He is Co-Founder and CRO in multiple companies but to mention one in particular “Structured which is a performance marketing agency. He has now built his Twitter following all the way up to 36 thousand. Nick was kind enough to share some tips and tools to help you develop your twitter account, and whether it is the right move to make for your business.

Is it important for companies to be on Twitter in 2023, and why?

Companies should consider being on Twitter. It is an opportunity to reach out and share relevant content. An important factor for succeeding on Twitter is consistency. If you are a Founder, and you want to be a founder-led company, and want to engage with your customers and be consistent with it, Twitter may be the place for you. You should spend time working out a plan to be able to be consistent. And nevertheless, intentionality, being able to respond to those who reach out on your posts. Nick's recommendation is posting everything between to-five posts per day, and also setting time to plan some relevant posts a few days before. He usually plans his tweets on mondays and tuesdays. If you are not willing to invest time in Twitter, you should rather just stick to Facebook, Instagram and Google as marketing platforms.

Relevancy is important on Twitter. For instance focus towards significant events, for example World Cup and post opinions or comments about that may be a strategy to reach people. Twitter is also used as a help/support tool, where people post about their needs. During christmas, many people reached out when they were traveling and tagging airlines when planes were delayed. Brands are tagged when customers don't receive their purchases. In this way, brands can reach out to their customers and help them.

The reason Nick have chosen to spend so much time on twitter it is because of two factors:

1. The level of quality of people
2. The level of iIntentionality on the platforms

On Twitter you do not need to care so much about who follows you, unlike Instagram and Facebook. If you share something, it can be picked up anywhere. Nick has seen many more responses on Twitter sliding DM’s contra Instagram. Also, the people are often more intentional. Nick takes the opportunity whenever he can to interact 1:1. In the beginning, be ok with the fact that the reach is small, but knowing that it has been seen by someone. Take the advantage of that, and suddenly, if you are lucky, the most know-worthy people may start following you and sliding into your DM’s. When you manage Twitter correctly, the reward is worth the investment of time.

The current buzz around the platform, due to Elon Musks’ purchase of Twitter generated a lot of attention around the microblogging service. The excitement will eventually subside once Elon leaves as CEO. The user base has massively grown, because people wanted to pay attention. Many of the new users will probably disappear. Nevertheless, Twitter will still be a very relevant place to be.

Nick Shackelford’s Twitter and linkedin account:https://twitter.com/iamshackelfordhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/nickshackelford Nick has used three tools that have allowed him to be set to write clearly, and find the topics that may be relevant to his audience. Those are linked to below and can teach you more about Twitter and relevant tweets, tags and terms:
https://tweethunter.io/https://tweethunter.io/twemexhttps://typefully.com/write

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Today, a very special guest, Lauren Shoemaker, is joining the podcast to talk about common mistakes and some tips about what to do when it comes to advertising. Lauren is currently working at DNX Ventures, which is a VC based in Silicon Valley and Tokyo. She is supporting the growth of early stage B2B founders and obtained her degree in marketing from Santa Clara University also located in Silicon Valley. Before entering the VC world, Lauren has been working in marketing for startups, small businesses, non-profits, and higher-education.

Here are some common advertising mistakes Lauren has seen startups and small/medium sized companies make in 2022:

• Not knowing your customer: The biggest mistake is not knowing your customer. Your customer should be the main focus. Companies should know who their best buyer is. It's okay to throw a wide net if you’re still finding product-market-fit and getting started, but having too broad of a target customer base can have negative effects on a company. For instance, your website may be unclear and it can be confusing for the potential customer when you are trying to target many different customer types. A recommendation if you don't know who your key customers are, is to do some digging into your current users, interact with them and find out what they value about your product/service. Furthermore, develop the messaging around that feedback.
• Focusing too much on tech and features over business impact, especially in messaging: It is important that the key messaging is in focus on the customers. Keep it simple and clean → people have short attention spans. You should know what your customer wants/needs to hear, and where to reach them with that message. The advice is to continually test your messaging, and adapt it to your audience and the different channels. Think about the decision making process a potential buyer goes through and how you can guide them towards purchase with touch points throughout that journey. Also remember that your current user is different from a potential buyer, and therefore adapt messaging to all customers.
• Making the wrong marketing hire (or none at all): Hiring a big-time CMO – might not be the best at starting from scratch. On the other hand, being the founder and doing everything themselves is necessarily not smart either. The best advice is therefore to hire a startup personality over a paper success and big name.

What are a couple of things that companies should aim to improve in 2023?

• Generative AI is in the wind, changing the game especially in content marketing. Chat GPT and Dalle were the big news of 2022 and AI will be even more relevant in the following years. Automation cannot replace creativity, but it is fueling and enabling it. The power of video will continue to be big. According to Forbes Magazine, 40% of Gen Z users prefer using TikTok and Instagram for search over Google.
• Employee advocacy and Customer success on social media: Build a talented team. Their personal brands can lift up your company’s brand. Every interaction customers have with your team affects your company’s positioning in their head, whether or not that team member is a “marketer”.
• Even though the macroeconomic conditions today influence companies’ marketing budgets negatively, there is so much marketing material available free on the internet.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-shoemaker

https://www.dnx.vc

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The SMB Advertising podcast has an aim to “help 1,000,000 small and medium sized businesses advertise like a professional”. Today's episode is hosted by Mike Damnjanovic, who is an Adline specialist. His aim is to inspire, educate and help the listeners to succeed with advertising.

2022 can be described as riveting, in terms of “having the power to fix the attention”. When all competitors use the same advertising platform, it is all about standing out and being engrossing and fascinating. Although 2022 was an incredibly successful and instructive year, it has been a real rollercoaster. Now coming into 2023, this podcast will take on a whole new set of challenges and opportunities. We would love to have you with us, learning and growing throughout the year. During the year, we will invite a really exciting lineup of guests that will help us circumnavigate this bouquet of challenges.

In this very first episode of 2023, Carl-Wilhelm Vedvik (COO and Co-Founder of Adline) is today's guest, giving some tips about how to start preparing ads for 2023 and make it the best year so far:

1. Planning: Plan out all your campaigns for the whole year now in January. Ask yourself questions like:

• Specifically, which seasons shall I run sales campaigns etc?
• Am I going to have a Spring campaign? Summer campaign?
• Am I going to run BFCM (Black Friday Cyber Monday) campaigns? Prepare now.
• Set up campaign drafts and name them logically, so that you have them inside your account. When time comes, create the ads, set the budget and click start.

2. Prepare for a cookie-less world.

• You will need to implement privacy policy routines.
• Leverage other 3rd parties such as Adline to collect your own 1st party data.
• We will come back to this in detail in a later episode.

3. Don’t downscale your marketing budget too much.

• The long term impact of investing short term in marketing is what gives results. Consistency is everything. Maintain the marketing budget you have today, for the next year.

Happy New Year and hope you enjoy the podcast!

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In the studio are Mike Damnjanovic (CCO of Adline) and Carl Wilhelm Vedvik (COO of Adline). Today's theme is pertinent to every single small and medium sized business and even large businesses too. When campaigns are running, you have a great offer, you are satisfied with your clicterate and having great numbers, the next step is to pay attention to your landing page and improve it. When the ads get traffic it is not a given that you get sales, because your landing page is essential. It has to be appealing and optimized. Here are some basic areas to focus on while developing your landing page:

• Clear headline. - What do you actually offer?
• Sub-headline - A headline that supports the primary headline.
• Hero-shot - An image or something creative that supports the headlines and makes the message clear.
• Reviews from previous customers - Makes your business trustworthy, because the visitor can see proofs that other people have been satisfied with your product
• Logo - Include your logo on the page.
• Show your benefits - Include 3-4 bullet Points about benefit of the products to give visitor more information
• Call to action - a clear button that stands out which makes it easy to know what to do to become a customer

Should you be giving the visitor other options than “call to action” on the landing page, forinstanse showing the “menu”, or is that a distraction?

The landing page is often more simple than a home page, because there, the one goal is to convert a call to action, but if your landing page is also your home page, you would have more options. To know whether you should have multiple options, you should test different types of messagings and see what works best. Track the interactions and experiment. For instance you can have a video on the page with a person explaining your service or product or a “start free trial” option. Be creative when it comes to developing the landing page. Google optimizer is a smart and free tool to install on your page. With the tool, you can change the elements that are already on your page and be creative. Then you can test different texts on buttons and iven make two formats that you can split to the traffic, 50% will see one format and 50% see the other format.

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In the studio are Mike Damnjanovic (CCO of Adline) and Carl Wilhelm Vedvik (COO of Adline). Today, they are talking about a particular interesting theme given the pandemic that we have been through. Due to convid, the digital landscape has been even more competitive, which is why Carl talks about a strategy for small and medium sized businesses to implement today to outcompete their competitors. The strategy is called “Force Multiplication”. The term was actually coined in the 17th century by the military strategist, Carl von Clausewitz. It was a war strategy about dividing forces into different areas, to fight on multiple fronts, but also important to do a thorough work on each military troop, especially if you have limited resources. The same goes for small and medium sized businesses, since they have limited budgets. The clue is to divide your budget on different marketing channels. When the market is competitive, it is extra hard to stand out and get the right traffic and attention. While using digital marketing, you are fighting for attention, and that should be across channels, for instance, a mix of google search, google display, facebook ads, instagram ads and maybe even on snapchat. It is easier to get attention when you are everywhere.

If you have infantry and navy you are fighting on two fronts, which is like having more marketing channels, but when your competitor also has infantry and navy, but special forces and air force too, you need to be more strategic on how you use your resources. As a small and medium sized businesses you cannot compete on budget level, because the huge companies will always have more money, but you can outcompete when it comes to positioning, choosing multiple channels, how you are messaging and creatives you are using. That is the way you start even out on the playing field. Nevertheless, when using different platforms, you are also retargeting, because you may follow up the people that already know about you, which eventually can make them more likely to become customers. To put the strategy into other words, the idea about not putting all eggs in one basket.

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Today we are fortunate to be talking with Thomas Moen from Moen & Co. For the last 20 years he has been working within marketing. He has been working with brands like Tine, Orkla, Disney, Nike and Telia. Today, he is helping small and medium sized ecommerce stores to grow via his agency, Moen & Co. He also has two podcasts running; Success with Advertising and The ecommerce podcast.

Thomas is one of the very first people who started with Facebook advertising in Norway. He started in 2007 with Facebook advertising and ever since, facebook marketing has developed quite a lot, from simple, small banners to complex ads with specified reach, demographic choices and tracking and measuring opportunities.

How should a small business allocate their hard-earned ad budget? What channels should they invest in?

A disadvantage using marketing platforms like local newspapers, radio etc. is that there is no possibility to measure it. You cannot guarantee that the audience will give interest to the product. Nevertheless, facebook marketing is a much better alternative because it is measurable. It is a superpower that it is possible to actually see what is working or not. Start small, and do not overthink. You can start with as little as 10 euros and see results. Furthermore, you should only put more into it when you see the results. Be patient, because you cannot expect it to blow up overnight. It is a long term game where it is smart to hold back, and then gradually scale the budget towards what works best. Let the money follow the results.

Should a small business prioritize multiple channels, and not put all eggs in one basket?

Start with facebook as a platform. Facebook marketing is easy to measure and see results with. For most businesses, Google ads are also smart to start with. Those are the two minimum platforms Thomas Moen would recommend. Then, widen your horizon from there. Pinterest, for instance, is an undervalued platform at the moment. Tiktok and Snapchat are also interesting to try furthermore. Importantly, master facebook first, then from there you can broaden your horizon when you have already seen results. Nevertheless, you may be vulnerable with only focusing on facebook ads. Therefore, spreading the eggs is also smart.

Do you have any tips for SMBs regarding tracking their performance?

If you have a tracking issue, never start spending more money before the issue is solved. It is like driving on a dark road. Run campaigns with specific goals for your business and have clear expectations. For example, if you run a hairdresser business, track booking interactions, or if you have an ecommerce store, you should track ad to cart purchases. Do not spend more money before you trust the tracking numbers accuracy. Numbers from facebook, google analytics or other platforms should not variate more than 5% from each other. That way, you can assure the number to be more valid.

Do you have any general strategic tips or advice that SMBs can implement today to improve their digital marketing results?

Often, the message of the ad and the website do not match. It is important that it is clear what the audience should do when they hit your page after clicking into your ad. You know what the audience should do, and you need to track if the audience is doing that too. Therefore, it is important to measure what the audience actually is doing.

Through your webpage you should also communicate clearly what you offer. Images, text and videos should match and about products. The website should also be optimized, so that it is easy to use for your customer who knows nothing about your business. Therefore, showing a stranger your website and asking them what they think the website is about, is smart. Even ask your grandmother what they think your website is all about.

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The guest in this podcast is Elise Karlsen Bye from Telenor Bedrift. She started her career working in Norway’s first agency in Norway that was fully focused on inbound marketing. During her years as an Inbound Marketing Consultant she’s worked with companies within B2B and B2C, in several industries.

We can start with your explanation of what is inbound marketing, actually?

Inbound Marketing is a form of digital marketing that focuses on attracting your dream customers by creating relevant and valuable content. It’s the opposite to big commercial campaigns such as television, radio, billboards etc. which are non-digital, non-personal and shown to “everyone”. Inbound is more targeted.

It’s a form of marketing that’s supposed to feel helpful and useful, and only be shown to people that actually are interested in what you have to offer, or at least interested in solving a problem of theirs that you can help with.

By using blogging, online video, ads, lead capture and customer journey automation, you can more easily measure the effectiveness of your marketing, do adjustments based on data and get full control of the costs and value of your efforts. This makes the marketing more predictable and scalable.

If you are a small business owner, should you be putting effort into inbound marketing?

The requirements are: you’re selling products/services of high enough value to make the customer do research, usually a few 1000 kroners, depending on your industry/customer. Also, you need to have interest in and time to spend on content creation and lead management, or have someone dedicated for this kind of work.

Can you outline some key elements that many businesses are getting wrong when it comes to inbound marketing? And how to improve these?Do not think about it as a regular marketing campaign with a start and an end date. Doing inbound means thinking long term, and to stay relevant you need to continually produce and renew content for your customers, and to make sure Google finds your page relevant.
Do not expect results too fast and have realistic expectations. Expect that your content will follow the 80/20 rule: 80% of your content might actually fail. Have a proper plan and spend time preparing.Always cooperate between the Sales and Marketing department. There’s no value if the Marketing team sends leads to a Sales team that doesn't prioritize calling them. I recommend involving both teams from the beginning. If you feel like including elements from other marketing tactics, just do it. Make sure you’re analyzing it and if it works - great! If not, just change or stop it. Make sure you create a strategy that fits YOUR company.

How long before I see results?You often hear the “within the first 12 months” rule, but it of course depends on how invested you are, how well you prepare before starting on content creation and the market you are. Make sure to set up a plan with milestones, and have more KPIs than just “sales”. Maybe something like:

• SEO ranking of your content
• Blog visitors
• Number of blog subscribers
• Number of leads captured
• Success rate of your workflows
• Percentage of leads that becomes “Sales Qualified”
• Number of Sales Qualified leads

Extra question: Has something changed during the pandemic for companies doing inbound marketing?We know that the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation. Many have become more familiar with working from home and using digital tools. If you’re doing inbound marketing, maybe take another look at your personas and their buying process. Has something changed? Can you reach them in new ways? Do they have new problems you can help them solve?

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First, as a general rule of thumb, more traffic shouldn’t be the goal in itself…

But if you know that the traffic you drive to your website ultimately will convert, buy, or book a meeting because you have a predictable conversion rate on your website, then more traffic is the solution.

Then you need to start looking at your Click-Through Rate and the Cost Per Click, which is two metrics that can be used to determine the success of your ad itself…

• CTR is the percentage of impressions that click through to your website.
• Cost Per Click is the cost to get a click.

Clicks often become cheaper as your CTR increases, which means that the ad you are running is engaging and compelling for the audience you’re reaching.

And when the ad are engaging and compelling, you’re making Facebook and Google better platforms to be at, and they will reward you for that.

There’s a few very simple actions you can take;

1. Write compelling and engaging ad content. Learn to write headlines and copy that persuades the reader.
2. Make sure the ad content is relevant for the target audience/keywords you’ve chosen.
3. Continuously test new ads until you find some that works; The more you test, the more luck you’ll have.
4. Use eye-catching images and videos. Often all it takes is an original video/picture taken with a smartphone.

Change targeting… Often you’re just reaching the wrong target audience. Test new interest groups or keywords.

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One of the hardest things for SMBs is to actually sit down and write a good ad… What angle should I use for my ads? How should I write my headline and ad copy?

First of all, decide the overall message or offer you want to promote and then let these 3 approaches guide your ad copy…

1. Calling out your target audience
   1. Call out your target audience to catch their attention AND qualify potential customers. This tactic is useful if your target audience shares a particular trait, profession, or identity. You then need to understand your audience’s demographics, interests etc.
   2. Important; When it comes to FB Ads, you need to avoid calling out anything that implies a person’s race, health conditions, financial status, religion etc. This will quickly be flagged as discriminatory practices.
   3. Calling out your audience and making the ad copy relevant to them, will hold and keep their attention and persuade them to click on your ad.
2. Leverage customer testimonial in your ads
   1. People buy when other people have bought. Robert Cialdini calls this Social Proof and is an effective psychological element. It makes you and your company more trustworthy and credible.
   2. Ask one of your valuable customers to either record or write a review/recommendation you can use directly in your ad copy or ad image or video.
3. Use press mentions in your ads
   1. For example, if you’ve been featured in a popular media outlet such as New York Times or even a local newspaper if you’re a local business, you can leverage this to strengthen the credibility of your product and services.
   2. Here’s an example; High-quality office chair featured in New York Times”

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First of all, you need to check where the bottleneck is; start looking at your impressions and work yourself down to clicks and conversions…

• 1) Are your ads generating few to no impressions?
  • Has your ads been disapproved by FB or Google?
  • Is your ad budget over $10 dollars a day?
  • Check if you’ve added interest groups and keywords
  • Check if locations and demographics looks good
• 2) Getting lots of impressions but no clicks?
  • There’s a high chance that your ad didn’t evoke any response from the audience you’re targeting.
  • If that is the case, you need to test new angles and new messages.
  • Chances are that the message/offer is not aligned with your target audience.
  • Recreate a campaign with new ads and test new messaging and new creatives.
• 3) Getting lots of clicks but no conversions?
  • If your ads are receiving many clicks, it’s a very positive signal of market interest!
  • But if these people are abandoning when they hit your landing page this means they are no longer interested.
  • This is probably due to a mismatch or crash between your ads and your landing page.
  • Make sure the messaging and the look/feel is consistent between your ads and your landing page and then test again, and again, and again, until conversions start to drip in.
  • Last thing; Do not change anything until you’ve gotten 100 clicks to your site, anything less than that is too little.

To summarise;

Advertising is more science than it is art. Create and publish new tests and monitor the metrics and tweak until you get impressions, clicks and conversions. Begin with impressions, then clicks and then conversions.

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Why all this talk about attention?Attention allows for information to be taken in: If you’re not paying attention you are unable to understand, or learn and remember what you’ve seen. And old metrics like reach and impressions just don’t tell the story that we as media buyers for so many years have relied on.

• About 75 per cent of all online ads that you pay for against Media Ratings Council (United States-based nonprofit organization) standards, are actually not getting any human attention at all.
• Not all active attention seconds are equal (Mental availability).
• It takes 3 seconds active attention to an ad to access memory, and for every additional second, that brand lasts in memory for a further 3 days.

But how should companies, brands and agencies actually track and measure the attention they’re getting?*Tools: There are different tools popping up that will help them with this, and the first one that comes to mind is AttentionPlan from amplified intelligence. This is a tool that helps media buyers track actual active human attention across channels and formats, and more accurately determine attribution. Both in terms of numbers but also visual heatmaps of their ad creatives, using eye tracking tech.

Qualitative research: And they should do a thorough qualitative test to see if the combination of creative and the formats they are using it on, actually results in their brands being the one that is remembered. Because studies have shown than in many instances that if your brand and brand message is missing, that your audience fills in the blanks with predictions. And before you know it you are paying for your competitors attention in the marketplace.*

Is there anything that you can recommend for a small and medium sized business to implement today to help gain attention?

Sound fluffy, but I dare them to stand out more. As Seth Godin says, be a “purple cow”. Because that’s what marketing at the end of the day is all about; is this something worth talking about? With my peers, my colleagues, my boss, my wife, etc. And if you nail this for the right audience, with the right combination of things that then continues to grab and earn peoples attention, you are truly on to something. To quote Seth Godin again: People like us, do things like this. The ideal people that you are trying to engage with, will buy from you, they will tell their friends, and they will care about how you care for them.

Thank you very much, Jógvan Brimheim Gunnarsson from Smoc.ai

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What is experimentation?

Experimentation delivers data for decision-making. Experimentation replaces decision-making based on intuition, or can also complement data-science projects.

In any situation where a decision needs to be made, one action should be taken with one group of people and another action with another group of people. Let me try to illustrate this with an example: say you are interested in knowing how to best communicate with your customers, or how to personalise your messaging - no one really knows the answer. How would anyone know? Everyone needs to figure it out, in this case, you could use an experiment for that. You divide your target audience into different groups, ideally at random, and then you expose one group to one ad for example, and another group to another ad. If one of the ads performs better than the other one in terms of the actions you want your customers to take, you have yourself a winner.

What should companies experiment with? – in short, anything but in reference to marketing or advertising then I can suggest the following;

• Marketing, Customer Acquisition: Acquiring customers via different media channels, asking, which media channels are most cost-effective, or which media mix is.
• Marketing Creatives: to attract the most relevant customers, often those that are most valuable customers.
• Personalisation is one of the ultimate objectives in Marketing, and I was more and more often asked of how one could personalise the communication with their customers

Why and what type of companies should experiment? In short: all companies! It is rather rare to be perfect from the get go, and no matter where you start, experimentation helps you reach your goals in a very systematic and data-driven manner.

How should you experiment?

1. Know what you want to know (ideally keep it simple): Formulate Testable Hypothesis! A null hypothesis and an alternative hypothesis are mutually exclusive. If one is true, the other one is false. And on top of that, it has to be measurable. The decision criteria to find or not to find a difference between treatment and control is what should show up in both the hypotheses.
2. Develop a testing framework: A testing framework is about RnR, prioritisation of tests you want to run, what can be tested with alternative methods (f ex causal impact), but also how to make decisions if a test is a success or a failure (measurement framework). Every experiment comes at a cost, the direct cost of running it with all the resources necessary, but also an opportunity cost as an Economist would say: what would have been the value of not having run the experiment. That requires, of course, a framework allowing to prioritise hypotheses for testing.
3. Act upon the results, even if you don’t like them. Could be that you are ready to implement a new feature, maybe the test raised another question you would like to investigate, or maybe the test clearly indicated to drop whatever idea was up for the test. Act on the result.
4. Create a culture around experimentation: if you run experiments, but do not act upon the results, your employees will ask themselves why they should use their time on experimentation at all. Encourage decision-making based on data rather than intuition. Or put your intuitions to the test, if your intuition was wrong, own it, celebrate failures in experimentation and embrace them as a learning. And most importantly: don’t rest on your knowledge you acquired one day, continue experimenting, never stop learning.

There you have it - Experimentation replaces decision-making based on intuition, or can also complement data-science projects.

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Over the last 20 months we have spoken to well over 500 small and medium sized companies around the world.

One of the trends that we found is that there are surprisingly few that are optimising their campaign on a daily basis - especially across channels. 

We also found that for small and medium sized businesses that it is extremely difficult - dare we say impossible, to manually be optimising advertising campaigns. The reason for this is because it is not only extremely time consuming, it can also be really complicated.

Key Takeaway: If you are not optimising your ads, then essentially you are spending money on ads that do not perform.If you are listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts then we recommend heading over to our Youtube channel to actually watch the video and screen record.

Adline Youtube Channel.

Fake news: Algorithms will not take over all of your advertising - but it will automate the optimisation efforts. Which means you can focus on creating better content and/or creatives. 

Humans will always be better at generating genuine content that is engaging and appealing. The algorithm will, without error optimise your campaigns across channels, down to the dollar...or pound!

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Can you simply explain what CTR stands for?

• CTR stands for Click-Through Rate… Basically, it means how well your ad is converting eyeballs, impressions or viewers to clicks and traffic.

• It’s kind of the same thing as conversion rate where you measure how many visitors convert to leads or customers. CTR measures how many impressions convert to clicks.

• In other words, the higher CTR the more traffic you get, and the higher conversion rate you have more of that traffic will convert.

Where should an SMB start?

• I think it is wise to compare your CTR with the industry benchmark in your industry or niche, because then you have an indication of how well you are actually doing if you’re first getting started with ads.

• Here’s a few examples of industry benchmarks on Google Search; B2B (2,4%), Ecommerce (2.69%), Finance Services (2.91%), Health (3.27%), Industrial (2.61%) etc. etc.

• Now, you should focus on creating Google search ads that beat these benchmarks.

How do you improve your CTR?

• Relevant keywords
• Relevant and compelling headlines
• Relevant and compelling descriptions.
• Always test test test new copy.

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**We have a great episode for you today and we are going to be looking at 3 of the most important things to implement, improve or optimize on your website to ensure that the traffic coming to your website actually converts.

In the studio with me, I have Ingar Stokken who is the founder and owner of Nettsidekonsulenten which is a company based here in Oslo helping customers with everything they need to succeed with their website.

✅ Improve

What is the most common mistake small businesses are making with their website?***Not focusing on mobile (in the past desktop was the most used). Now viewing a website via mobile accounts for almost 70%+ of the traffic and desktop only about 30%.

Focusing on what you, as an owner want to tell, instead of the things people are looking for. Often owners have a lot of knowledge (they know it all), but it's hard for them to tell the audience in an understandable manner.

🎯 *Implement

Can you tell us a bit about SEO, you have worked a lot with this area. Is this something important to implement?** SEO is very important, and it stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is really important, because its the only perception the search engines ( like google ) look your site. And the way your website is created and how the content is created s:

1. The trick is to talk like you would to a human
2. Do research before you write.
3. Use keywords and tags the right way, but do not go overboard, be human and make it relevant. Use images with the right captions etc.
4. Do research on what people are interested in ( or get a company to do it for you )
5. Optimize the content with the right tools.
6. Monitize with google search console and analytics.

🔝 **Optimize

We often see our customers getting a really good CTR, that's "click through rate" which essentially means that a lot of people are clicking on their ads and landing on their website. However, I often get the question or comment “I do not seem to be getting any conversions, or sales even though we have a lot of clicks”, Why could that be?**Databox conducted a study which showed that up to 90% of people experience a lot of traffic from their ads but experience a low conversion. So, basically 9 out 10 experience low conversions.

The main problem is what the traffic is landing on.

You need;
- Relevant content to land on
- Content that matches/ is relevant to the ads/ consistent
- Poor quality of website; for example, sending to the main page of the website which may not be 100% relevant/in line with the ad.
- Continuous optimization of what they land on!!!
Read Ingar's post "5 common mistakes SMBs are making with their website that hurt their ad results" on Adline. Find out more about Ingar here.

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Today we are speaking with Ex Google Director, Lars Bratsberg! In this episode we asked Lars three important questions surrounding technology for small and medium sized businesses!

Question 1: Where do you see technology going? What are the biggest benefits and the biggest challenges?

Technology is going faster than ever. Technology is linked. It speaks to each other, hence the expression Internet of Things. IoT has become so common that sectors have emerged. You probably have heard of Software as a service or Platform as a Service. Adline is a platform as a service. But when things and services start communicating together within a specific sector you will see visions like Mobility as a service. You have all the apps that handle some sort of mobility, e-scooters, cars, parking, bus tickets. The vision for many sectors is that all of these works together and creates a seamless experience for the user. I think that is where we as consumers will see and feel this the most. These visions within sectors coming alive.

***The biggest benefit comes to the user. Technology that solves a big pain for the user or consumer will get traction. When that pain is solved by tech and the pain is big enough to scale - it is a win win for the user or consumer and the people running the service. Just like Adline.

The biggest challenge is legislation. The laws and regulations in this space is lagging behind - and tech is scaling faster than ever. Legislation is playing catch up and we need to have trust that tech is for good and not evil. Within this you have GDPR, Data storage geographically, data security and how your data is being preserved, used or sold to 3rd parties.*Question 2:If you were running an SME today, what are the top 3 technologies or softwares you would implement in your SME today?

1. Analytics tool: you need to be data driven. Collect your data in one tool and let them lead you to taking data driven decisions.
2. Ads platform: you need to be found and discover how to reach your audience digitally
3. An CRM solution to scale your outbound activities to take care of all people who interacted with your ad or converted to something.

Question from Adline customer:

Is it possible to pinpoint one singular thing that I as a small company should be doing on Google in 2022, in terms of becoming more visible?

**If you want to know more about Lars, buy his book (which I can thoroughly recommend) or find out more about what Lars is currently working on by connecting with him on LinkedIn. Link to his profile and the links to this episode are posted below . Lars also founded the growth tribe academy which is aimed at helping you and your team get ahead with skills in Growth Marketing, Data Analytics, UX Design and more.

Connect with Lars on Linkedin here. Check out Growth Tribe at : https://www.growthtribe.io/**

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Growing your Instagram following organically, you'll generate real followers who are actually interested in you, your brand and what you have to say. They'll be eager to see your newest post, watch your Stories daily and participate in any polls or engagement stickers you use.

Instagram helps give your business a personal touch through visuals, so it's important to bolster your community as best you can for continued growth and interaction from your audience.

Top tips from Joel

1. Longs posts are okay! Those that are interested will read and like - mix it up and do not just use short posts.
2. Data! Use the data in the analytics dashboard - this is very useful for trial and error.
3. Tie into awareness days. There are literally hundreds of days (internationally) that have different awareness days which can be key to present in your instagram.
4. Use Hashtags.
5. Be consistent!

Follow Joel Durston on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdurston/
To find out more about KEG check out their site here: https://www.keystoneacademic.com/

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Listen to Wassili's experience with Facebook and Instagram ads and how they have changed over the last decade?

Is Facebook dead? ☠️
No, it is not dead - but it is important to is to run multichannel campaigns - be present on the platforms that your customers and potential customers are active on and that also includes Facebook and Instagram.

✅ Best practices to implement today into Facebook advertising!

1. Create ads that are unique - stand out from your competition
2. Use POWERFUL headlines to grab attention
3. Make an offer that is impossible to refuse - or offer value - free e-book, free call or similar 
4. Ensure to talk about the benefits that your customers with get by choosing your service/product
5. Eliminate a potential customers fear  (example; "We guarantee quick and safe delivery" or "No hidden fees, one price only")
6. Strong Call to Action - What will happen
7. Use Funnels - they do not need to be complicated 
8. Create urgency and scarcity ( Example: This offer is available for 24-hours only)
   9.  Use exciting graphics or videos - videos are great for retargeting (people prefer to view videos) Keep the videos fairly short; 2-3 minutes
9. Use testimonials - show your potential customers who else is benefiting from your product or service!

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🥇 Start by testing and fact finding
***Go broad to start with - To get good results, I recommend to go broad in the start, in order to collect a lot of data.

Don’t be afraid to test out new channels, or channels you have bad experience with - things change.

One of the many benefits of using Adline is that you can test multiple channels in one campaign, super easy, without wasting your advertising budget.

The algorithm will optimise all the ads in your campaign 6 times daily. Adline will make sure you get the most out of your daily budged. The optimisation is based on clicks and conversions. The ads that perform the best will also get most of the budget. This optimisation happens between the channels, every day.

It is important that you give the algorithm time to find the right audience and the best performing ad.***

🥈 Determine your budget and let the algorithm to the work for you.

When it comes to digital marketing, you need to go with a high enough daily budget to get results out of your advertising. Higher budget will lead to higher reach.

When someone makes a purchase, it is more likely that they did so after doing their research online first. If your budget is too low to reach your audience you will not get good results from your advertising.

🥉 Identify Your Target Audience
In order for your ads in Adline to perform, it is crucial that you have chosen the right target audience for your services or products.
Make sure you know your audience’s age, gender, and interests.

❓ Question: How long should I run my campaign for, and what daily budget should I be using?

✅ Answer: You should keep your campaign active for a minimum of 14-days and have a minimum budget of $10 per ad per day.

If you want to find out more about Adline then please visit our website: www.adline.com

If you want, you are welcome to connect with myself, or Heidi Helene on LinkedIn.

If you have any questions then please send them to podcast@adline.com

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Objectives and Key Results!

OKRs in advertising;

🎯  Objective: Generate 1000 leads in Q3

✅  Key Result 1: Create 50 ads

✅  Key Result 2: Achieve 1.5% in CTR (check your industry standard first!)

✅  Key Result 3: Get 15,000 new visitors per month

Remember to push your objective and make it a stretch goal (aim for the stars and you may reach to moon, etc)

Short and Sweet!

If you want to find out more about Futureworks then you can visit their site: https://www.futureworks.com

Can also recommend connecting with Kim Leinan on LinkedIn - the leading OKR coach in Norway. 

If you want to find out more about Adline then please visit our website: www.adline.com

If you want, you are welcome to connect with myself, or Carl-Wilhelm on LinkedIn. 

If you have any questions then please send them to podcast@adline.com

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5 Reasons - Boom!

🙇🏼‍♂️  **Humans make errors and get tired, machines work 24/7 and do as instructed without any deviation. Paying humans to optimise your ads is also expensive.

⏰  Optimising your ads manually is time-consuming. As a business owner, you have lots of other important stuff to prioritise.

💰  Save money by using algorithms to optimise your ad budget according to performance.
Many businesses just divide their ad budget in two; 50% Google and 50% Facebook… But that allocation isn’t necessarily the best. 🥇 Algorithms are able to determine the best possible allocation.

🏌🏻‍♂️  More time and resources to produce content that is much better, and that again, will perform a lot better!

🤩  You’ll get rid of that feeling you are spending precious advertising budget on ads that just don’t perform.

Question: How many ads do we recommend when running a multi-channel campaign?

Answer: Depending on your budget. - Try to create at least 3-4 different ads on each channel (Example; 4 Facebook ads, 4 Instagram ads and 4 Google Search ads)**If you want to find out more about Adline then please visit our website: www.adline.com

If you want, you are welcome to connect with myself, or Carl-Wilhelm on LinkedIn. 

If you have any questions then please send them to podcast@adline.com

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H**ow do you actually go about analysing your advertising campaign? How do you know what you have to improve? How can you use data, or information to further improve your campaigns?

There’s always going to be a hidden growth lever in your advertising somewhere.**

You just need to look at your advertising with 80/20 eyes on 😎

✅ **80% of your advertising results come from 20% of your ad efforts.

✅ This truth is in every variable you look at.

✅ For instance, 80% of your clicks come from 20% of your ads.

✅. Drill down in almost every metric and see this.

✅. Look at the # of conversions by locations and focus only on the top 20% cities, counties or countries.**

✅ Take your 80/20 glasses on and create new ads based upon your top 20% ads.

<< **Maybe it’s not exactly 80%, but the point is that the majority of your results always come from the minority of your efforts. >>

Question: Is Facebook dead?

Answer: Good question. Facebook still has a huge user base - 2.89 billion recorded. Everyone that you know, everyone they know and most likely every that they know have a user on Facebook. It is the platform that has the most sustainable user base across all age group - You can reach whoever you want.

Question: Are Facebook ads for B2B?

Answer: Yes, it is. B2B is also human to human - you can reach whoever you want to. Facebook is all about reaching new people and attracting them to your service or product. You may not get "conversions" immediately but you can start to nurture that lead until they are in a stage where they are ready to "convert".

I added in some dating advice at the end here too.**If you want to find out more about Adline then please visit our website: www.adline.com

If you want, you are welcome to connect with myself, or Carl-Wilhelm on LinkedIn.

If you have any questions then please send them to podcast@adline.com

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Today we are talking about google advertising - What is one thing that we recommend for small and medium sized businesses when they are running Google ads?

**Here’s a high-converting Google ads tactic;

✅  Create a campaign and focus on only 1 specific keyword (ideally with 2-3 words).
<< Such as "online advertising software" or "which is the best online advertising software" >>

✅   Create a Google search ad that includes that keyword in the headline as well as a few synonyms. Write a nice description.

✅   Link to a landing page that also mentions this keyword in the headline on top of the page.**

Now, this set up will not only give you higher rank in Google Ads because of a highly relevant campaign, but it will also convert a lot better than many other campaigns because you’re actually giving a clear answer to a clear question that a potential customer is having.

If you want to find out more about Adline then please visit our website: www.adline.com

If you want, you are welcome to connect with myself, or Carl-Wilhelm on LinkedIn. 

If you have any questions then please send them to podcast@adline.com

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**So today we are going to be talking about how you as a small or medium sized business can succeed with your ads in 2022.

In the studio with me I have Carl-Wilhelm Vedvik who will be featuring frequently.**

**Carl, has been doing ads and digital marketing over the last 4 to 5 years and has been working with over 300 small and medium sized companies.

In this episode we will be covering the following;

What are the 5 most important things, a small business, should be focusing on in terms of advertising in 2022?**

1. Before you start advertising, make sure you have a compelling offer. Your offer is separate from your product.
   ✅ Package your product into a compelling offer that includes e.g. good payment terms, a guarantee, a bonus and maybe a time-limited discount.
2. Create original ad content (you don’t need fancy product pictures etc.).
   ✅ It’s enough with iphone pictures/videos or screenshots of your software or course or whatever it is.
3. Publish many, many variations! The more ads you create, the more luck you will have. Create 20 ads, and 2 of them will stand for 80% of your results.
4. Know your audience. Find the keywords they’re using, the newspapers, brands they follow on FB/IG.
5. Know your metrics.
   ✅ CTR determines how efficient your ads are. Bad CTR means you need to improve your ad copy or targeting.
   ✅ How much more traffic do you have? And is it converting?

If you want to find out more about Adline then please visit our website: www.adline.com

If you want, you are welcome to connect with myself, or Carl-Wilhelm on LinkedIn.

If you have any questions then please send them to podcast@adline.com

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Welcome to the SMB Advertising Podcast – “Helping 1,000,000 small and medium-sized businesses advertise like a professional”.

My name is Mike Damnjanovic - I'm an Adline specialist and the host of this very special podcast aiming to deliver value to our listeners. My aim is to inspire, educate and help all of our listeners to succeed with advertising and grow their business online. My co-host is Carl-Wilhelm Vedvik, CEO at Adline, who will be joining this podcast frequently.

There will be little chitchat, and more focus on actionable advice and insights.

Well, today is our very first podcast and we are really excited to finally get started and to share our learnings and knowledge when it comes to ALL THINGS ADVERTISING.

Over the next few weeks, months and hopefully years we will be inviting not only industry specialists, performance marketeers (from some huge brand names) but everyday heroes; such as business owners, marketing managers, content writers, website builders, growth hackers, entrepreneurs and basically, business legends.

The sole intent and purpose of this podcast is to help small and medium sized businesses.

So let's have a look at the next 6 podcasts and who we will be talking to too.

Coming up on episode #1 of “Helping 1,000,000 small and medium sized businesses succeed with advertising”

We have;

• How to succeed with your advertising in 2022!
• 5 Reasons why you should be upping your Facebook game in 2022
• 7 things that we learned from advertising on behalf of 50 SMB customers
• We will be hearing questions and answers from our listeners : Answering Facebook Questions from our listeners
• We have a few bonus podcasts that we will be putting out with interviews with our colleagues, learning about their days and some of their hidden tricks and tips.
• We will be chatting with some of our partners, some of our customers based in and around the globe and

Just generally sharing a whole load of value and information