Jennifer Montague, Planday

I'm Jennifer Montague, and I'm the head of Global Campaigns at gerne scherk's traditionally be to be it doesn't be do well on face so I'm going to talk to people about what we did to increase our leads by over 400% in six months with B2B and Facebook Lead Gen ads. So Facebook Lead Gen ads are where you can, within the Facebook application, you can send your, you just click on the ad and it sends your information to us, for example. And it's very easy for the user, which is really great and helps drive leads, but the problem is in B2B, you don't want everyone being a lead, right? We have a certain profile of, in terms of size and industry, so what you can do with the Lead Gen form is that you can introduce different parameters. So we introduce, for example, a drop-down list of size, number of employees and industry. So we can find people who fit our sweet spot and are most likely to be a very good fit, and we can prioritize them, and then perhaps people who aren't as good of a fit, a bit of a lower quality lead, we put into a nurture flow so they get to try our product for 30 days and get more to grips with it and hopefully become higher quality, and then they can be converted at a later stage. It's for our sales team, the high quality leads that they get, they call them within seven minutes of receiving the lead through Facebook, and that's a really great way of making sure that the lead is still hot, they're still interested, and they're the higher quality leads, so they prioritize those, and then the lower quality leads, we nurture a little bit further. There's a few things that we did that really changed the game. The first thing we did was reframing our awareness funnel. So instead of just trying to spread awareness, we look at different levels of awareness within that part of the funnel. So for example, people who have no idea they even have a problem, people who know they have a problem but don't know a solution exists, and then people who know about the solution, people who know about you. So it's kind of making that awareness level a bit more granular, which helped us segment our campaigns and our messaging. So people who don't even know they have a problem need different messaging to people who know you exist, for example. The other parts we did was localizing ad text. We operate in six languages, so we worked with customer support to really make our ad text native to the different markets. Last but not least was introducing the Facebook lead gen ad formats, which really, really changed the game for us and helped us scale. Start for me was we focused a lot on Google paid search, and we had a good business case. We were converting well on it, we were making good money, so the business case was why focus on Facebook when this is working so well. Even in the funnel, if you have people who already know a solution exists or know you exist, that works great for Google search because they're already Googling employee scheduling software, they're Googling Plan Day. But what about the people who don't know they have a problem or know that a solution exists? They don't know what to Google because they don't know you exist. And that's where Facebook is really great because you decide who is a good fit for you and you show your ad to them even if they don't know they need you yet. And so that was kind of the genesis of let's see if we can attract more people rather than just relying on people who already know we're a thing. Let's focus on people who don't know we're a thing yet and nurture them. So we give them high level content, highlighting pain points, things that would resonate, you know, wouldn't you rather save time on this? There is an easier way to do this particular activity and trying to generate awareness of the concept of what we do in our technology before we go straight in for the sell. Yeah, it's well, we do a lot of tips for our target market. For example, we're very big in hospitality. So we'll do interviews with hospitality experts and try to give a holistic kind of service of things that managers need to know, not just strictly about scheduling, but about branding, about stocking and making sure your pricing is OK. We try to do a holistic service, but also making sure you're adequately staffed is a really important part of the industry. So it's kind of trying to help people. And if they engage with that, then we know, OK, these people are interested in what we have to say. They're in our target market. So then we can retarget them with maybe more specific business driven ads later on down the funnel. When we looked at the conversions and the leads that would come through, I started running tests with animations. At the time, I had to have an outside source make them for us. So it was time consuming and expensive. But we saw sometimes up to four times as many engagements on things that were moving, whether that just is our product or whether we made a cinemagraph, you know, where part of the image is moving, part of the image isn't moving. But anything that had movement, we saw a much better engagement rate. But it just was becoming unsustainable to keep outsourcing constantly this stuff. And so I made the business case that we can take it to the next level if we have someone in-house that can make me something very quickly. The industry moves very fast. A-B testing happens very quickly. We need to be able to make something very quickly using the learnings that we get from previous campaigns. And also, you know, we totally recognize how important testimonials are and getting that social proof in driving conversions and having video testimonials are a much easier way of spreading that message and social proof to potential customers. We're in America for 10 days and we have five videos booked. We keep him busy with animations as well, teaching people about the Plan Day product because again, we're going super upper funnel and we're having to re-envision how we educate people about why they need us first. And doing that with decreasing attention spans and increasing competition is kind of an art. And he's learning very quickly and we're all learning very quickly how to get our message across in a very short amount of time to really capture the attention of people in a very crowded market. There's 2.3 billion people on Facebook and everyone's competing for them. You have 0.8 seconds when someone does this and swipes right past you. How are you going to grab their attention? How are you going to stand out amongst all the other advertisers? I think that's one of the big problems. And how are you going to convey your message in three seconds or less? It's not an easy thing to do and the people who do it do it so well and it's brilliant, but it's not easy to do. And that's why they stand out because they do something really difficult really well and make it look easy. We have loads of still images. We have a library of still images that we can use, but we didn't have a lot in video. But when I was able to kind of get a video done here or there, we would throw it in an A-B test. So I would always do a small test, only testing two things, whether motion or still would work. And I could see time and time again motion was working and I said, look, we need to do this more. I don't have the time or the resources to constantly outsource it. So I made the business case that we needed to hire someone and get them in-house and make me things very quickly. My first advice would perhaps be start small, like we did with cinemagraphs and small animations just to see whether or not it will work. I know it works in my industry. I know it works with my particular customers. I can't say that across the board, but that's where A-B testing is really great and Facebook is really easy for A-B testing so you can build your own business case. I think that customer testimonials, everyone knows that word of mouth is the number one way of marketing more so than any creative ad I could ever make. So you need those testimonials and the best and fastest way to get that information to people is through video. So it's a time tested truth that video is the way forward. As I said, I think the short videos that are punchy and get your point across and educate about your product is going to always be great. People can do that well. People love watching them. People love sharing them. I think that's going to continue. But I think in terms of ads, also I think more immersive ads like Canvas ads and things that take up a whole screen and tell you a story, whether it's a journey of a customer using your product or whether it's your company's origin story, but this fully immersive take up the whole screen, swiping left and right and scrolling down I think is going to be really the future of video marketing and marketing in general to capture attention and really have people buy into your not just your product but your story and the experience that you give people. I think an important skill for any marketer to have is a healthy dose of skepticism. You can go with your gut and I talk about in my presentation that I went with my gut and I was wrong. The data told me I was wrong and the data shows that I'm right. So I think it's healthy to have a good instinct but don't rely entirely upon it. Always use data. Always be willing to question yourself and not dig your heels in and say I'm right if the data tells you you're wrong. So that's I think the first kind of mindset of being prepared to test something out. Have a hypothesis that's great but test it out. The other skills I think to have are again this brevity. Get your message across. Get it quickly and get it to the right people in the right way. Think about the awareness. Think about people who don't even know they have a problem. How do you tell them something versus someone who's actively looking for a solution? No two customers are going to be the same and so you have to kind of create a series of ads but not one per person because obviously that's crazy but be better at segmenting and getting your message across in a very short succinct way.