[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, welcome. In this podcast we talk B2B marketing and what it takes to know your customer innovate and profit. We're glad you made it. This is the campaign by 97th Floor.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Hello everyone. Happy Friday. I'm Paxton Gray, CEO of 97th Floor, a digital marketing agency built to deliver world class organic and paid channel strategies for mid level and and enterprise organizations. Thank you for joining us today for another episode of the Campaign. The Campaign is a B2B marketing podcast about better knowing your audience, innovating beyond best practice, and converting visitors into customers. You can find past episodes on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify and at 97th floor.com.
so today we've got a really great topic. Every B2B marketer eventually hits this wall. You've reached the point of diminishing returns. Maybe you've maxed out the common LinkedIn and Google strategies or you've realized that your B2B buying committee is influenced by other chann.
The obvious answer add a new channel. But doing so is going to typically raise your cost per acquisition as you get that channel set up running efficiently while maintaining the foundation that you've built. So you're adding further complexity in terms of your overall messaging. The risk is that you don't learn fast enough, waste budget or you lose focus by distracting your team. The risk can be heightened by the economic and market conditions that we're facing right now.
How can you possibly consider a spike in CAC while your marketing plan and budget is under tight scrutiny? Right, we've got to show value of every single dollar that we're spending. Ultimately though, the investments make and the risk are worth it.
According to a study by McKinsey, companies using multi channel strategies achieve a 24% higher ROI than those relying on a single channel alone. Additionally, companies using multi channel marketing have two times shorter sales cycles, which is massive for B2B companies.
Plus, brands that adopt multichannel marketing see a 30% increase in customer lifetime value because more brand interactions actually increase loyalty.
So when's the right time to expand? What's the right way to evaluate and launch a new channel platform? That's we're going to be discussing today with our guest, Ryan Nelson. Ryan Nelson is Stack IT App's Chief Marketing Officer, where he leads all aspects of global marketing, communications and brand.
Prior to his role at StackAdapt, Ryan's journey spans four key posts including strategic marketing leadership roles at both Qualtrics and mx. At Qualtrics, Nelson served in product marketing, ABM field marketing and enterprise marketing. While there, he was instrumental in launching The Qualtrics customer experience business which quickly became the fastest growing product line and contributed the company's first billion dollar US in US revenue.
In his role as Executive Vice President of Marketing for mx, Nelson built world class team and led all aspects of marketing and brand including product marketing, demand communication field marketing and creative. Ryan, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today.
[00:03:05] Speaker C: Hey Pax, thanks for having me. That's quite the long bio. I think we should just shorten that up for future chats we have. But thank you for having me and thanks for everybody for joining today.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: Well, it's a well earned bio. I have to say. A lot of hard work went into that.
So let's start off for those unfamiliar with StackAdapt, like what if they haven't used that platform for what is stackadapt and what is it best at?
[00:03:29] Speaker C: Yeah, thank you. That's a great question. I appreciate the opportunity to be here today. So Stack Adapt is a very, very fast growing programmatic advertising platform.
We made some fun announcements last week. We'll get into as well to expand beyond Programmatic but we started about 10 years ago as a native platform and then expanded into display and video, audio, digital out of home and then connected TV and so you can basically run all of your end to end programmatic campaigns on the platform.
[00:04:00] Speaker B: Love that. We use stack adapt at 97th floor and at 97th floor our goal is to create intentional audience for channel strategies. We love Stack Adapt for its numerous targeting capabilities, cookie list targeting, ABM capabilities with no platform fee and that makes it a great way to get into ABM outside of LinkedIn and for its wide array of unique ad types. Plus it's all bundled in some really awesome reporting that shows how these work together which helps to kind of demystify some of the complexity around multi channel advertising strategies.
So Ryan, you mentioned that you just got back from your event which is Conversion in Nashville and you announced some new products and capabilities on the platform. You want to tell us about what what you launched?
[00:04:49] Speaker C: Yeah. First off, thanks for being a great customer. We appreciate it and we are very agency focused. I want to make sure that we're powering agencies that then go power incredible brands and so thank you for that. Yeah, we had an incredible week. Last week in Nashville we had an event called Conversion. We had about 300 of our top clients and partners prospects meeting with us to talk about innovation, bold breakthroughs in basically end to end funnels, Programmatic and we announced several things as you think about StackAdapt as a traditional Programmatic platform running all your campaigns.
We had a lot of feedback over the last year or so that clients wanted to run more end to end within email as well. So let's use a very common E commerce example.
You see an ad across different channels, you then go to a checkout experience, you abandon the shopping cart and we've all probably gotten a follow up email later to if you're doing it right, you get a follow up email saying hey, you know, complete this checkout for X incentive. We can now run that all in platform. With the launch of our email marketing platform last week, we also announced a customer data platform called Data Hub where you can start bringing in a lot of your data and connecting the systems. And so it's kind of choose your own adventure in terms of you can run it all within the platform or you can API out to HubSpot or whatever tool platform you're using. So it's been an exciting week with being able to connect a marketer end to end and kind of bridging the worlds of AdTech and MarTech.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: I love that.
So some exciting new capabilities to test out. And that was one of my favorite things about Stack Adapt is the ability to test new things without these massive barriers to entry that sometimes you see with new channels.
When somebody is coming to StackAdapt and they want to start, you know, running some programmatic ads or trying out new channels, what do you typically see spurs this what, what causes someone to add a new platform to their mix or go from display or native to CTV or out of home ads?
[00:06:52] Speaker C: Yeah, well, hopefully when you're ready to test a new platform, it means that things are working and you're, you're ready to kind of double down and scale even further. So we see some, you know, testing the platform, others go all in based on basically just the results they're seeing across other channels.
I'd say that broadly speaking we all as B2B marketers for many of us use LinkedIn and for their targeting and efforts and you know, having that ability to do so is great. We're a big, you know, customer of LinkedIn ourselves. But we're also, I have a unique position marketing to marketers and using our own platform to market to marketers. And so we are, you know, and try to be our biggest proponent of using our own platform.
And so we see the data we see and we understand these things and we actually see a lot higher conversions in many of these areas.
Using LinkedIn when we can, but then broadening our scope to different channels beyond LinkedIn to, you know, other display and even digital out of home targeting some of the events that we do and making sure when someone shows up at an airport or at a place and then they get into Lyft, where you have a partnership with Lyft, where you can run an ad, write an app to be able to start seeing that, for example, last week, welcome to conversion and they see the digital out of home board, they get in the lift, they see the ad there and like, wow, these guys are really good at being able to target where we are. And so to kind of summarize that, we open up a whole new world to marketers to be able to test and try things and we can maybe dive in a little bit more on the data of like what's working across those things, if that makes sense.
[00:08:31] Speaker B: Yeah, I'd love to dive into that. LinkedIn is one of those platforms that I think have worldwide, they have a reputation of this, you know, business, this is the business social network. And as a result, people by default are going to say, well, I'm trying to target business people.
LinkedIn is where I go.
[00:08:51] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:08:51] Speaker B: And invariably, especially, you know, campaigns that are launching on LinkedIn and only LinkedIn, I would say the most common result outcome is we spent a lot of money and didn't get a lot of results. That is the most common feedback I hear about people spending on LinkedIn.
[00:09:12] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:09:13] Speaker B: And you know, you had mentioned exploring these other platforms in addition to LinkedIn and I believe that investing in a single channel like LinkedIn strategy is not the way to go. It's you have to do multi channel in order to make LinkedIn worth it.
[00:09:31] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:09:32] Speaker B: Which is kind of a counterintuitive thing. So. What, what? Yeah, I'd love to hear any kind of information or insight you guys have on the impact of other channels on LinkedIn or maybe just how these channels are interacting with each other.
[00:09:44] Speaker C: Absolutely. So here's a stat for you. We actually were running the data across the platform last week or so as we prepared for this event last week. And so if you think about the correlation and the interconnectedness of channels, you got to understand. So, you know, connected TV in many ways is going to be a very top of funnel thing. But we're starting to see that we'll go more deep of funnel. Maybe we'll get into that in a little bit as well. But let me give you an example. If you were to just run a display ad and just run that display ad, it's going to convert this regular rates and will optimize performance and get better and faster and faster. But if you were to pair that display ad with a connected TV ad, the actual conversion doubles because you're starting to see validation from other places and you're starting to see, oh, wow, this company is showing up where I am. And so doubling conversion is an incredible thing. Now let's go the inverse. If you were to run only connected TV and just go, try, try connected TV and do that, you're going to see potentially some results there. But it's more going to be probably a brand lift.
Be a little more difficult to measure oftentimes for connected tv, but we're getting a lot better at that, which I'll talk about.
But if you were to run a display ad with that connected TV ad, the conversion goes up by 30x, so you have the validation and the, the proof points of seeing that in a large format.
And then you were to go online and you were to have a connected message with what you saw on TV, the conversion is going to go up 30x, which is really, really incredible. So. And that's just the power of what you can do when you can start to connect these channels.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: Yeah, it's something that sometimes we forget is the channel is the message.
And being multiple places lends itself to this brand credibility and ubiquity and trust overall. And as you can see from that data, massive payoffs from that.
So I do want to talk about something that we see which is like this healthy tension between volume and return.
If you focus on one of the two, you're either going to be wasting money or leaving money on the table.
So really, the goal is to find what our head of advertising, Hayley Riemann Schneider, she calls the Goldilocks zone, the perfect balance of volume and return.
You know, we've had cases where, you know, we really nailed the roas, and then we just kept going down that road. But then revenue starts going down. Yeah, it's great roas, but your total volume of purchases don't match that. And so we've learned over, you know, a decade of doing this that you have to find that correct balance. Once you hit the target roas, then the game is increased volume while maintaining that roas as much as possible.
[00:12:27] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:12:29] Speaker B: So generally, you know, it begins with like a learning phase where if there's no historical data, we need to test audience and messaging. But past that learning phase, we get into, like, the sliding scale of growth and efficiency where we work to dial in targeting and bidding strategies to hit target roas.
Also balancing that volume, like I said. So as brands work to drive up volume, we found that the great way to do that is experimenting with other channels.
And we've isolated like three signs that you should look at experimenting with other channels.
Number one is you're in a position where your current marketing mix is running at or above target efficiency. So you have a reasonable customer acquisition cost and that is sustainable. And your other channels are like your channel is well optimized. Number two, through audience research, you know for sure that your audience is in another place that you are not.
That is a key indicator that you need to be expand your marketing mix. And then number three, you've really reached saturation.
Spending more money on this platform is not going to improve roas overall.
You just can't spend more to grow. And so at that point you need to start looking at other channels. So my question for you is what should marketing leaders think about as they evaluate new channels?
How might they think about like de risking as these launch while also embracing like the value that these new channels are going to add?
[00:14:03] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. So I think it's really important to get the media mix dialed in understanding what the outcome and goal is that you're trying to drive.
Knowing that, you know, are you really in a bind to drive performance immediately, which is never obviously the best place to be. You can have a little more time to kind of think bigger. We ran a study recently with Ad Perceptions that found that 74% of marketers are prioritizing performance over brand or the other. You know, the remainder is prioritizing brand. And so I think about this a lot where if you think about zooming out to the most simplest way to describe marketing. There's brand marketing, there's performance marketing.
Both are needed in many ways if you.
The challenge we all have as marketers though is if you only focus on brand, you're probably going to get fired because you're not driving performance. If you only focus on performance, your top of funnel is going to probably dry up and it's going to be much more difficult to drive the roas you need to on your performance campaigns. And so I think that heart and mind that I've kind of like the data, the art and science, the heart and the mind of brand and performance is a really critical component to get your mix right connected. TV leans heavy, you know, many ways towards a brand play.
But with the technology and tools and QR codes and other things, we have now the ability to drive performance on those campaigns and then connect those across device is a fun thing. We came out with a new ability to do cross channel attribution. So you can start to see what attribution is working across channels and which performance channels are working best so that you can double down and optimize for that more. I think. Yeah, I think just in a more concise way to answer your question, thinking a lot about what's the media mix, what is defining the goal, what is the end outcome? And I think the most powerful word that we can be talking about is the word conversion. And at the end of the day, that's the outcome we're trying to drive, whether it's a brand or a performance campaign. Are we converting people to the brand with their heart and mind? Are we converting people to our campaigns through the execution that we're driving?
[00:16:10] Speaker B: Cross channel attribution is.
That's big.
So many brands get stuck on that.
I'd love to, maybe not today, but I'd love to dive deeper into that because that is a.
It's, it's where we need to be thinking, but it's also where so many people get stuck.
[00:16:29] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:16:30] Speaker B: You know, waste a ton of time building out these attribution models instead of just executing at the end of the day. So stack it up can bring that. That's a huge load off of a lot of marketers plates. Absolutely.
[00:16:42] Speaker C: Yeah. And with the proliferation of AI and just getting ads getting more personalized faster, less time being spent on the creative side of creating those ads, you can spend a lot more time on the measurement side and understanding what's working, what's not. And so you have the ability to help brands optimize, go bigger, make a bigger impact with AI helping on the creative side.
[00:17:05] Speaker B: You had mentioned the focus on brand and focus on performance marketing. And I sometimes I think about that distinction between those two and sometimes like they're useful as categories, but sometimes I think the existence of those categories limits our minds in terms of how we get.
You and I talked earlier about Coinbase and their super bowl ad being like the perfect example. Tell me your thoughts about the Coinbase ad.
[00:17:35] Speaker C: Yeah. So do you all remember this ad? So super bowl several years ago, Coinbase came out with, I don't know how old everybody on the call is, but the QR code, they did a QR code, remember the old VCR box that would kind of bounce to the corners of the screen and then everyone was hoping it would land on the very top corner and then everyone kind of freaked out. Coinbase used that play on that with a QR Code. And so for 30 seconds they had a QR code scan going across the screen and they had over 20 million downloads of their app immediately. And they basically took a large format like the super bowl and created a performance channel out of it. And I think we're going to start seeing a lot more of that. We have seen a lot more of that. But even more so where you could take something where what's the actual call to action, what's the conversion you want to really drive?
And they were the number one, I think, top app download of that week. They were trending all over Twitter at the time X and ultimately I think got a huge return on that campaign just by getting a little bit smarter about let's not go spend millions and millions of dollars of getting celebrities and others to promote and present this. Let's put that into the backend experience of our landing page and our conversion and our app and let's go get just straight to the result of what we wanted. And so that was kind of a creative way to do it. And it was very, very basic and simple, but it worked.
[00:19:06] Speaker B: Such a creative execution, you must get a front row seat to a lot of creative execution. On how brands are maybe using channels in unique ways.
I'm kind of curious and you may not be able to say reveal anything, but maybe without saying what these brands are, is there any either trends that you're seeing of brands like, oh man, using this channel in a way that is like off the wall or really cool execution, something that, you know, our listeners may want to hop on in terms of like a trend or a way to use a channel in a unique way?
[00:19:42] Speaker C: Yeah, good question. Digital out of home is actually blowing up right now. It's so for those that are not familiar with it. So digital out of home, all the digital billboards you see all around, those are becoming a lot more popular. And you can start to throw QR codes up. Not that you want drivers scanning codes, but there's also passengers and other things there's in Times Square, we run several things there. We ran a campaign recently with Heroku Salesforce to take over the sphere in Las Vegas. And so they run basically through our platform, run the creative, run the ad. Their whole executive team was there to watch. Kind of see that. That was during AWS re invent this last fall. And so it doesn't always have to be a huge budget or a huge like that to go big or taking over the sphere. You can do that in a lot of smaller formats in, you know, in a In your Lyft or Uber, seeing that in an app. We have a lot of integrations with apps as well. And so you're starting to get able to get in front of people in creative ways. And it comes down to who's your audience, where are they spending their time, what are the goals and impacts that you're really trying to drive, and then start to get really creative about where, what your message can be to make it fun and interactive. In that setting, we have a lot of geotargeting capabilities where you could be targeting, you know, a stadium in a city. If you had a concert, maybe, for example, Pearl Jam was in Nashville when we were there. You could be, there's a bunch of mega fans of Pearl Jam in that city and you could basically draw a box or even a, you know, a diagram around that geo and you'd be able to target their device with really targeted things related to that. And so it's such a fun time to be a marketer to start. Literally, the, the sky's the limit in terms of creativity and the ability to target and measure that.
So across the thousands of customers that we have, we're seeing just incredibly creative ways to integrate video, audio, podcasts, in person, in home, direct mail, like so many things that are, that are popping up. So. But I'm excited about digital out of home and connected tv. I think marketers are underutilizing that right now.
I think many dial and display and other things, but as you, as I mentioned previously, as you start to connect those channels and when someone sees something and then they see it on their phone and they go home and they see it on tv, it's like, wow, this company is everywhere and it really can be done very efficiently. We're not really everywhere, but it seems like that I always kind of joke, just to kind of wrap that up, is the number one validation that a CEO gets is when they get a text message from their friend saying, hey, I'm seeing your company everywhere. That's really like the holy grail of marketers. We want our CEO or our boss to say, wow, I just got this text from somebody I really trust and they're seeing us everywhere. That's really the goal.
[00:22:36] Speaker B: Yeah, that does have a big impact within an organization in terms of getting buy off and alignment, for sure. Let's see if it's impacting the CEO's life. Yeah, for sure, for sure.
So these cool channel strategies and cool out of home strategies overall, I'm just interested in your take as you look at these organizations. What kind of tools do they have in place? What do they have in terms of team setup? What are the common traits?
How should our audience think about the resources it takes to really do this kind of stuff?
[00:23:10] Speaker C: Right, Absolutely.
So we're a very, very agency focused company as well. So we have a lot of agencies on the platform. 97th floor is incredible agency.
We're doing some incredibly innovative things and so you know, definitely check them out and you know, as you dive into things, we're on the back end in many ways trying to empower the very best marketers and agencies to do their best work. And so but things are getting streamlined. We can do things faster, we can do things better. And that what that means is basically you can do and make a bigger impact with less.
That said like you gotta like make the leap and make an investment in budget to go do that. It's, it's difficult to go prove an ROI on a campaign when, when the dollars are not there. And so but yeah, where needed, start small on a channel, add to it, start seeing the results of it, double down and then start integrating cross channel into different things.
But we all know with AI and everything else that's happening, the ability to create content, create ads is a powerful thing. What's actually a fun cool thing, that's a trend that I'm seeing right now is it used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to create ads, specifically TV ads and running commercials, et cetera.
The world is opening up to smaller businesses, mid sized businesses who have not had hundreds of thousands of dollars to run and create the creative side and then there's no money left over to actually go execute and get that campaign out into the world. You can now start pulling dollars towards the execution and the channels because AI is making it so easy to create very world class video. And so I'd be an advice I'd have to. The group is just start shifting it towards the channel and getting your word out there in a bigger way, spending less on the creative side.
[00:25:02] Speaker B: Interesting. Are there any platforms that you're seeing be particularly successful or tools around the video creation?
[00:25:09] Speaker C: I think some of the advanced models and video creation tools that are coming up as new popping up all the time.
Our team has an ability inside the platform to pull video together as well. And so the, the technology, I mean but with across OpenAI, across Gemini, some of the other mid journey, some of these platforms that you're able to go create art and graphics, it's freeing up time for creative teams to think more about the audience. What the impact is what's the story you want to tell and then what's the prompt we want to give so that we can actually get this really dialed in. And it's fun even, you know, with audio.
You know, six months ago when you hear a podcast that's just completely AI generated, it's very robotic and now it's getting very, very personalized where you can basically pump in a script and that is an interactive discussion that it creates a podcast for you right away. I love these formats because we're real humans and being able to do that. But you can start to do a lot more across these channels.
[00:26:20] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. Yeah. I think for small businesses, if you are thinking of video means this like high production value thing.
TikTok is in my opinion a great thing to look at because people on the that platform are rethinking what it means. What video means.
[00:26:42] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:26:42] Speaker B: And it can be a lot of things that the traditional advertising video world has not yet kind of considered or at least deployed. And with technologies like Stack Adapt, you can really get in and test a lot of different execution strategies. So the barrier to entry on video is like lower than it's ever been before. Especially if you're willing to rethink what video means within advertising.
[00:27:08] Speaker C: Absolutely. Video is a powerful thing and you start to do large scale video in different ways. But even just everybody loves humor, everybody loves maybe a twist on something. And so video opens up that up to tell a story in a bigger way.
[00:27:30] Speaker B: Yeah, it really does.
Well, this has been great. We love our partnership with StackAdapt and love what it's been able to allow us to do for our clients. And obviously, you know, my plug for nice and floor is we've been around the block and we've tried and tested lots of things and so we can really help accelerate your advertising within, within the platform. And yeah, it's just been a really great partnership with you.
I want to share some takeaways to wrap up today.
Number one, you should look at other channels. If your current marketing mix is running at or above target efficiency, you really or you know your audience is in another place and you've reached saturation on your existing channels. Number two, the most important thing to consider when looking at a new channel is conversion.
What conversions do you need and let that drive your strategy and execution.
Always balancing too the brand and performance. You know, you never want to be sitting in either one all the time.
And number three, really the barrier to creating video is lower than ever right now. So like testing new tools and using platforms like StackAdapt to get that message out to as many people as possible.
Instead of focusing all your resources on production, focus that on distribution. As long as that message is solid, the opportunity's there to really get that out. So this has been super, super helpful episode. Ryan, thank you for joining and bringing some stats too, some amazing stats in terms of multichannel marketing. It's been a really great episode. Thank you for joining us today.
[00:29:10] Speaker C: Thanks pax. Appreciate you having me and thanks for everybody for listening in.
Yeah, I appreciate your partnership as well. You guys are really innovating fast and doing some incredible things and so we'll keep backing you up and excited for the partnership to continue.
[00:29:23] Speaker B: I love that.
Thank you everybody for tuning in today. If you'd like to connect with Ryan, you can reach out to him on LinkedIn.
Also, we've built a tool that helps with this. This tool is for evaluating new channels to accompany this conversation. It allows you to input the channels you're considering and then compare relative strengths and weaknesses between these potential channels and it reveals your overall readiness to launch regardless of the platform.
Also, if you're watching live here today, you're getting a link to this tool in your inbox on Monday. And for everyone else, you can find this tool at 97th floor.com.
tune in next week we're going to be joined by Ashley Foss to talk about trust as the fastest way to long term roi. Have a great weekend, we'll see you next week.
[00:30:11] Speaker A: Thanks for listening. The campaign is produced by 97th Floor, a 20 year old marketing agency that helps companies like McKinsey, Pluralsight and Check Point know their customers execute innovative campaigns and drive profitable growth. If you have an allocated growth budget and product market fit, we'd love to do research and build a proposal for you. Visit
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