Ep04 - How to create sexy ads for your next campaign?

Episode Description

On today's episode of The Revenue Stream, I had the opportunity to chat with Joseph Hill, Founder of Revenu Agency.

Joseph comes with several years of experience creating paid campaigns that look incredible, tell a story, and more importantly drive pipeline and revenue.

We talk about lead generation vs demand generation, gating content, and what it takes to create thumb-stopping creatives for your next paid social campaign. If you're thinking about spinning up a new paid social campaign, this episode will give you the framework on how to approach it.

I had loads of fun chatting with Joseph Hill in this episode and I hope you enjoy the show too. See ya on the other side. 👋


Show Notes

Follow Joseph Hill: https://www.linkedin.com/in/digital-marketing-joe/

Learn more about Revenu Agency: https://www.revenuagency.io/

Follow Vikash: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vikashkoushik/

Learn more about RevenueHero: https://www.revenuehero.io/

Episode Transcription

Vikash: Welcome to the Revenue Stream, a podcast by RevenueHero. I'm your host, Vikash Koushik and today I'm excited to have a fellow marketer, Joseph Hill. He was the Director of Digital Strategy at Metadata until recently when he started his own agency called Revenue. But for most of us who are in the marketing world and active on LinkedIn, we know him from his sexy ads posts.
If you need creative inspiration for your next paid social campaigns, Joe is the person to follow. Joe, welcome to the show.

Joseph Hill: Awesome. Thanks for having me.

Vikash: I love the agency name. Revenue has a nice ring to it. Can you tell a
little bit about what you folks do?

Joseph Hill: Yeah. So Revenue, we're all just about demand gen demand capture and B2B marketing. So I guess startups and SaaS companies any, any kind of B2B company, mainly SaaS and startups is our ideal market. And yeah, we just
help come up with the story. Come up with hooks to get people to act and then turn that into sexy ads.

Joseph Hill: And yeah, build some demand and then capture that demand and turn it into revenue, which is why we called Revenu.

Vikash: So I want to. Start off with your opinion right? Facebook ads for B2B. Yay or nay?

Joseph Hill: So two answers to that. The answer is nay, if you haven't got a good data provider, because at the end of the day facebook's data isn't great. It's like interests and vague stuff. And my Facebook page, I don't know. I don't even
think I've logged onto Facebook like three years or so, but I definitely haven't updated my job title, even if I do go on occasionally.

Joseph Hill: So they don't have the data to do it. And obviously if you spend. Any marketing budget and it's spent on someone who isn't at the right company or isn't in like your realm of who you define as your ICP, it's wasted budget Like in B2C, it's a little bit different. Like anybody might buy a car, like it's any human.

Joseph Hill: With some money and that person may have money in the future and buy a fancy car. So even if you advertise Rolls Royce or Ferraris to somebody, when they make it big, they'll probably go get one. But with B2B it's different. Like usually you have a career, you have an industry and you either work in B2B or you don't, or you either work in a certain role or you don't.

Joseph Hill: And you need to make sure that you're pre qualifying your audience if you're going to use Facebook and the only way to do that. With the right companies and the right job titles is with a data provider. And I'm a bit
biased on the fact that I would recommend metadata and then meta match products because I've worked there, but I'm, here's my, obviously, obviously bias.

Joseph Hill: I'll let you know. There's a few other providers out there as well. But basically the answer is yes. If you have a data provider, you have a cheaper cost per Millie or CPM as people call it. So LinkedIn, CPM is like. I don't know. I've seen it get up there with 200, $200 for a thousand impressions.

Joseph Hill: And it's like, it's so expensive. On Facebook, I've seen it be as low as $10. So it's 20 times cheaper sometimes to advertise on Facebook than it is LinkedIn. And as long as you have the right audience, that's That like you may
not be appearing on business platform, like a business platform, but you are appearing in front of your target audience.

Joseph Hill: If you've got a good data provider and it's 20 times cheaper. So I don't know.

Vikash: There's also been a lot of recent updates to Facebook. Have you had a chance to sort of like experiment with those? I think very recently they rolled out. B2B targeting interest, that sort of stuff.

Joseph Hill: Yeah. So I've seen them, but they're pretty vague and like, it's, it's not the best stuff, like job title targeting is still hardwired to Facebook profiles. And because of that, they're just not going to nail the persona. They may be able to give you a vague idea of the companies you want to go after and people that interest.

Joseph Hill: People are interested in certain things, but it doesn't matter if you haven't laser focused. Like I've used some of the stuff that's available on LinkedIn, right? You've got like functions, skills, interests, member groups on LinkedIn, and they're still not the best. Like it's, it's all about the type of data you use.

Joseph Hill: And the context behind it, and the only way you can make sure for a fact, you're not wasting any of your marketing budget is by uploading company URLs and uploading job titles. And that is like the gold standard. And that's why LinkedIn is winning because of their job title targeting and their company targeting allows you to do that.

Joseph Hill: Third party data providers allow you to do it as well and you can plug straight into Facebook. So. Yeah, I think I've used a little bit of the Facebook data, I've played around with it, but it's a bit vague. It's not the best.

Vikash: Yeah. Yeah. So we use MetaMatch over here at RevenueHero. And I think the, the way I sort of describe it when I talk to my friends and peers is the reason why we use MetaMatch is. Because I know we want to reach our messaging to a certain set of people and with Metamatch I can ensure that's possible across channels, right?

Vikash: And I know I have a certain, a better amount of confidence in my head that, Hey, yes, we are definitely reaching our target audience. Right. So that's how I usually describe it to my friend. So, yeah,

Joseph Hill: Yeah. I think the question is always like Facebook and Twitter. Is it worth doing Facebook? They've actually just launched an integration with Twitter. Sorry, Facebook or Instagram. No, it was Facebook or LinkedIn was the anomaly of the debate. It's like Facebook. I would use LinkedIn, but should we start using Facebook?

Joseph Hill: But now. Love him or hate him, Elon Musk obviously changed it to X, whatever you want to call it, I still call it Twitter, I refuse to call it X, but if you use Metamask, you can also push to X as well, and that's going to be, and the thing is, these platforms, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and there's going to be further ones down the pipeline.

Joseph Hill: All these different tools, they all use different data and they're all massively restricted in what they can do. And Mark Zuckerberg's been dragged through the core. So he's, he's reluctant to use any data and everyone is going to be very standoffish. And so the only way to often do social media to a really high quality is to have a third party data provider.

Vikash: We we've already dived in a little deep, but before we go any further. I'd love to hear from you a hot marketing take that you have that probably many people disagree with.

Vikash: Yeah so every

Joseph Hill: friday I pretty much post a meme about it and it is eBooks. So there's definitely like a, there's an old marketing behavior, which every single B2B company has done at one point in their life. And a lot of them still invest most of their budget on it. And it's, here's a report, here's an ebook, here's a piece of gated content.

Joseph Hill: And I want your email in order to read it. Now, I recently saw a survey by, I think his name is Maurice Maxwell. Sorry, Maurice, if you ever see this and I've got your name wrong, but he did a poll and it was basically who's downloaded an ebook and actually read it. And 65 percent of people said that they've never downloaded an ebook and read it.

Joseph Hill: And it's like. I know a lot of people go through LinkedIn and save posts. I'm guilty. I'm like, save. That's good. I'll read that later because I'm lazy and I don't want to read it now. And everyone hoards information. Now I've got books on my bookshelf. I haven't read, I've got posts in LinkedIn. I've saved, I've not read.

Joseph Hill: I'm pretty sure that 75 percent of people who download eBooks also just have it sat in their desktop and they've never read it. So at that point, it's like, okay. What are we getting out of this interaction? We say we've got an
ebook. They say they want it. Cool. We get an email. And then, the most common thing that a B2B company will do is give that email to a salesperson.

Joseph Hill: That salesperson will try and ring or email that person and say, Okay, you downloaded our ebook. It's time you buy our software now. But no one does that. No one downloads an ebook and then magically goes This ebook is so good, I'm going to buy your software tomorrow. Like it doesn't happen. What people actually do is they learn about a lot of different things, a lot of different companies and what they do.

Joseph Hill: They learn about the problems they need to solve and how they can solve them. And then when it's time, the person, the customer will then be like, okay, I'm ready to learn more about a product and learn about pricing and maybe even buy it. But it doesn't happen just because you force an ebook on somebody.

Joseph Hill: And what's the best way to actually get information into someone's head. It's not by gating something. So ultimately it's, it's a game of maths. And do you want to collect emails of people who won't actually be ready to buy, or do you want 20 times the amount of people to actually get your message and reach out when they're ready to buy?

Joseph Hill: And that is the scale to, to, and a lot of companies are doing ungated now. And this is the reason why, but a lot of companies, they need a lead. They need to say, I've had a 20 percent increase in leads, but like, is it really a lead?Like the name lead is like, Oh, I've got a lead on someone who can buy my software.

Joseph Hill: And someone downloaded an ebook. It's not that. So there's not all leads. This is a phrase I use all the time. Not all leads are created equal. And everyone needs to start factoring that in. And that's my hot take.

Vikash: If I think about it like if, if people are pushing for an ebook download, right. Assuming they give that email, what's to say that they're actually giving their real email ID, right? I'm a marketer. If somebody is going to ask me for my
email ID, I know what they're capable of doing after I give them my personal information.

Vikash: Right. So I'm definitely not going to give my actual email ID. I have a bunch of fake email IDs that I created just for this.

Joseph Hill: Yeah. I feel like it's so that these tactics did work. When, when your inbox wasn't as bombarded as it is today. The tactic used to work get an email them nurture them through emails like these used to work and cold email is still A legit channel, but the way that cold email works is either you do it a really high amount of scale so you get like Hundreds of thousands of emails and blitz them because the conversion rates so low or you have a few and you have a salesperson who creates like they'd write down their name on a whiteboard and hold it up like, like if they, if imagine if I sent you an email as a salesperson and I put revenue hero on a whiteboard, took the time to do that and held it up like, Hey, I'm trying to talk to you and you personalize it.

Joseph Hill: So it's either Insane scale or insane personalization, but these middle of the ground emails just sent after ebooks by an automated engine, not at scale, but just like after you've downloaded the content. And that means each email probably cost you 50 to 100. And like, there's a ton of email providers out there that you can get them for cents.

Joseph Hill: Like you can get people's emails for literally like one cent and like at scale. So a cold email can work, but this way of doing it doesn't work anymore. And so it's really up to us to if you ever get stuck in your old ways. And I was stuck in my old ways. I used to be like, email marketing doesn't work.

Joseph Hill: And then I got given a ton of evidence from people's internal data that email marketing does work, but it's when it's personalized or when it's in second scale. And I've now changed my idea, which is eBooks and PDFing your ebook doesn't work. There's different, there's definitely a value of getting content out there and long form content in particular, but having it as a PDF, I just don't think.

Joseph Hill: Is the best route. And it's up to us to realize there are changes in user behavior. To your point, I, every single time someone asks me for my phone number, I write out all 11 digits and then change the last one. So the first 10 digits are my actual phone number, but then I changed nine at the end to eight.

Joseph Hill: And if I do my email, I write out all my email and then just before the at sign, I have one, this is the number one, and it's like. Everyone's doing this. This is a trending thing. And if we don't acknowledge the lengths or people are going to, to not get sold to and address our marketing in that direction, like you're going to be left with a ton of leads that never want to buy your software and that's not where you want to be

Vikash: Love it. I, I want to talk a little bit about something you posted yesterday. And I think you, you wrote something along the lines of. Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and how you should be able to tie that back how you should be able to connect your product with that, and your ads should sort of also have something along the same lines.

Vikash: Can you talk a little bit about that as well?

Joseph Hill: A hundred percent. So at the end of the day, if you're selling technology. You are solving a problem, so a lot of like in B2C people sell other things like there was a story. I think everyone's seen the new Nike movie now, but those are the same shoe was not being sold. And then Michael Jordan sponsored it, and then everyone bought it.

Joseph Hill: Now, why did they do that? Well, it's because of insecurity. People thought that they weren't good enough. So if they associate themselves with the shoe, which Michael Jordan wears, they'll be a little bit more like Mike, which is hilarious because the actual slogan was. Be like Mike, which if you rephrase that, it is, you're not good enough.

Joseph Hill: You need to be like Mike, go buy my shoes. And so they cashed in on insecurities, right? But that B2B is not like that. It's business cases, it's huge sums of money. And in order to do that, you need to solve a problem. And so  think every, and I think it goes back to Eugene Swartz and all these, these founders of this methodology, which is. Joseph Hill: Or not methodology, but ideology, which is everything starts with a problem. Storytelling as an art. So the problem that you solve is the beginning. So that's like the hero story is there's a dragon and it's come into the village and the dragon's running around burning buildings down.

Joseph Hill: That's the problem. The solution is how you solve that. Now, ideally you want to position. The hero is the customer. You're not the hero. You are like the guide to that hero. And this comes down to Joseph Campbell's hero story and the solution is, you need this really fancy sword to go kill the dragon.

Joseph Hill: So you become the sword and you put it in the hero's hand. And that's the middle part of the story. Then the hero goes into the village. Slays the dragon, they live happily ever after, he gets the, or the, it could be a female
hero, they get a wonderful partner, they get all the admiration, and that's why they should solve it.

Joseph Hill: And obviously no one else dies because there was a dragon in the village, right? So it's like, this is the story. Now, you can go a step further in the story, and you can have like, for example consequences if you don't solve it. So for example, you got what you solve, how do you solve it? Why should solve it?

Joseph Hill: But then what happens if you don't solve it, which is the dragon literally lives in that village and kills everybody. Like that's not good. Like you need to sometimes antagonize that problem. And another thing is. You need to talk about who you've solved it for and that have that social proof so they can see you can actually solve that problem.

Joseph Hill: And I think social proof was huge five years ago. It's all anyone spoke about, but it's kind of not really spoken about too much nowadays, but it's still human psychology. It's how. It works. And so if you found, if the, if the grand wizard came along with this sword and gave it to the hero, the hero is probably like, you're giving me a sword to kill a dragon.

Joseph Hill: You really think I'm going to be able to do that? And you go, yes, because this sword was used by this hero to kill this dragon and this hero to kill this dragon and this hero to kill this dragon. It is the dragon slayer, right? And they saved so many people and all that stuff. So you need that social proof alongside your story.

Vikash: Amazing. Amazing. And, and because, because you've been doing this hashtag sexy ads, have you seen some companies tie this to their ads really well?

Joseph Hill: Yeah. So one of the companies I'm always talking about is Cognism so shout out to all the team at Cognism. I love what they're doing. I'll just show some of their ads one second, I'll share my screen again. Do, do, do, do, do. Okay. So, for example, this is a great one. So, this is the demand generation ad.

Joseph Hill: So, for example, things sales reps would rather do than prospect with bad data. Update the CRM, look at their bank account after a heavy weekend.

Joseph Hill: What is that doing there? Looking at your bank account after a heavy That's not B2B. That's actually a funny joke that a human would make to another human. Well That's the point. You don't want to be a business talking to another business. You want to be a person talking to another person, reply to their grandma's birthday message on Facebook.

Joseph Hill: Like that's got no place in a boardroom, but it has got place in your B2B social media ads. Unblock the office toilet. Toilets? Come on. And the thing is, it's going to make people laugh. Sales people are going to laugh at this. And if you can. I think there's an old saying that you can laugh your way to someone's heart.

Joseph Hill: You can also make someone laugh to the point where they open up their wallet and give you all the money. And that's what Cognism do here. And another example is everyone does Wordle, right? So claim your free leads in Wordle format. So if you do Wordle, you see that, you look at it. So it's just, you want to make your ads not look like ads.

Joseph Hill: Another one here is kind of social proof here. So, Hey, I'm based in Europe. I found zoom info to be really poor since GDPR for EU data. We currently use Apollo, but we're doing a test against Cognism. Some random
person, where did you end up? We found Cognism is much better. Like this random thing on Reddit, everyone reads Reddit screenshots.

Joseph Hill: So it's like, again, it's all about problem, how you solve it, why you should solve it, and then bringing it to life in a. Good way. And there's a usual this formula is what I usually follow, which is clear copy plus a relevant visual

Joseph Hill: times. A powerful story will make a good advert. So you have to be clear and rememberable

Joseph Hill: If your message is too complicated, no one's going to remember it. A relevant visual. That means it's got to be relevant to what your story is and and the copy. But ideally, you need to, like, Bring it to life a little bit as well. You need to add a little bit of sexy ads to it. And then also the powerful story.

Joseph Hill: If you haven't got an idea of what you want to say, how on earth are you supposed to simplify it? And this is the problem. As people go, they start making an advert, they start writing. But they do not have their story up on the other screen or to the left of them. And you need to know the message, the overall sentiment, which you're trying to portray before you start creating your ad, because only then you can start thinking of creative ways to tell it.

Joseph Hill: And that's what Cognism do very well. Cognism know exactly what it is they're trying to do. And then they make it interesting. And that's the difference between them and other brands.

Vikash: I love it. I love it. Do you see any very specific frameworks that work apart from what you've shared so far? Like when when you say you know, trying to make it a little bit funny one thing that we've been trying internally is trying to make use of memes, right? Everybody loves a good meme.

Vikash: Have you seen something along those lines?

Joseph Hill: Definitely. Yeah. So I've got a few more diagrams. Just honestly, I just make diagrams in my spare time. I should be out doing other things. I should be going to the gym, but I just sit there and make diagrams. But this one is just a few different ones about how to bring copy to life.

Joseph Hill: So the time to value.

Joseph Hill: So it's in 30 days, you will make more money doing, after giving us this, whatever, like just the time to value. You've got rhyming, you've got breaking the fourth wall, future versus past familiar positioning. So, um, like that familiar positioning is what the Cognism did when they started relating to looking into the bank account after a heavy weekend.

Joseph Hill: It's like, that's taking that idea, that sense inside somebody and then applying it to their products. There's a few other here as well. And there's also a few ways to bring it to life with like psychology. So the law of candor is a
great one. I don't see this being used. I think the law of candor is probably one of the most underutilized.

Joseph Hill: Psychological loss. So if I was selling revenue as an agency, right, I would say we don't manage your website because we're not that great at code. But what we are great at is ads. It's what we do is in our DNA and we will make you the sexiest ads you've ever seen.

Joseph Hill: And then we will take those ads, show them to only the right people at the right companies with the right job titles. And we will optimize that like nobody else, but don't ask us to do your website because it's not what we do. That is me being honest. I'm not saying I can do everything I'm saying what I can't do in order to make you believe what I can do more.

Joseph Hill: And no one wants to do it because no one wants to point out the negatives, but by psychological hack. And there's a lot of other ones in here as well. And then there's some visuals as well. You've got before and afters diagrams, testimonials, product examples, and then obviously means incentives. Now, this isn't an exhaustive list.

Joseph Hill: But I think it's good just to have some ideas, some frameworks so you can take them and digest them into your idea, but also.

Joseph Hill: Loads of ads that you can look at and use as inspiration. And that's basically what the ad library is that I created. Like I use this myself. I load this up and make ads and it's, it's a spark sometimes.

Vikash: I love it. I love it. Because you brought up the gate getting and non thing I wanna go back and touch on that a little bit again. Since you were at metadata, in my mind at least personally, I think metadata, the folks at Metadata did it really. Wonderful job educating the market about whether you should when you should get it or first of all, whether you should get it or un get it.

Vikash: And a topic that is sort of parallel to it is again demand generation versus lead generation, right? How do you sort of view that and one of the things that I see a lot of folks, especially folks who are trying to switch from Legion to Dimension, the place where they struggle a lot, and personally, even I did early on is Legion.

Vikash: Trying to keep track of metrics, right? Because if you're taking the legion route, you have one or two metrics and you can basically just look at one metric, look at the cost per lead, see if it is going up or see if it is going down
and start making changes over there. So what are some of the things that you've seen on on on those two

Vikash: fronts?

Vikash: It's move.

Joseph Hill: Companies will have a steady income of leads and emails that they can to the marketing team, generate emails and they give them to sales and then sales reach out. But again, Cognism did some great stuff. One thing they did is there was completely honest.

Joseph Hill: About their conversion rate, their internal gated content campaign. And it was like the conversion rate was like 0. 14 percent from like a lead to like an opportunity or something. I can't remember the exact statistic, but it was like, Oh, wow. And then they looked at just the conversion rate of somebody who came to the website and clicked book a demo.

Joseph Hill: What happened then? And what they found is people who type in URL, press enter, and then click book a demo and then come in, they are 10 times or. I think it was like 2000. I can't remember a lot more. I think it was like 20 percent or something converted into an actual customer. So it was like, okay, well, how do we get more people who come through the website and just like book a demo versus gated content, then there's another factor, which is if you go out and go, here's a hundred dollars gift card.

Joseph Hill: Come and book a demo with me. That's a different interaction than someone naturally coming to you and asking for a demo. And every, all these types of leads have different conversion rates, and you need to acknowledge that first. You need to be like, okay, let's split the funnel and see where things are coming from.

Joseph Hill: So there's one visual that I quite like. I'll show this one as well, which is splitting the funnel.

Joseph Hill: So it's very important to think about. Inbound marketing is someone coming to you. Outbound marketing is you go into them and outbound sales is you go into them. Same with inbound sales.

Joseph Hill: It's like someone who's come through an inbound marketing channel and then goes straight to sales.

Joseph Hill: So there's all these different methods. Now, obviously not everyone will agree with exactly how I've split this out. Sometimes I split it out different as well. It's just to give that overall example. So of all these, all these different channels and different ways of someone coming through. Self declaredintent by the website is like up there, like someone just coming to the website and requesting a demo out of nowhere.

Joseph Hill: Converts so well, but why? Well, the reason why is because And it's not just that, it's brand search. Like if someone looks at a brand search term versus a non brand search term, brand search always converts better. Why is that? Retargeting versus prospecting. Why does retargeting work? Now, some people see that and they go, I'm only going to spend budget on retargeting brand.

Joseph Hill: And I'm sorry, retargeting and brand, because it gets so much of a high ROI there. It's like, well, you could be emptying the well, because if you only invest on people who already know about you. Then how, how on earth areother people supposed to know about you? And if you're a small company, that's death to your pipeline because you don't have a huge brand awareness.

Joseph Hill: Now, if you're a big company, you might get away with it because there's just so much word of mouth and knowledge about the brand. But if you're a small company, you're a startup. Just thinking that your brand term and your retargeting is where you should invest the budget and not acknowledging why. Is really going to hurt you longterm.

Joseph Hill: And that's where demand gen comes in. But the way to measure demand gen is to split out the parts of your funnel that are converting very high, but only convert because of a pre meditated idea of who the brand is. So if someone types in the URL and converts. Obviously they knew the URL somehow, like they didn't just like go, Hmm, I think I'm going to buy from revenue today.

Joseph Hill: www. revenueagency. io, like that doesn't happen. They need to
have obviously known about you. And so you need to think about brand retargeting direct organic brand search and organic social as a direct impact of the demand generation activities that you're doing when those channels perform well and they grow.

Joseph Hill: I may head in a general direction. It's because you invested in your own gated content and brand awareness and telling your story. All these different things that can help get these highest performing channels to scale. Now, there's a lot, a lot of people out there with a lot of ideas of how to do this.

Joseph Hill: There's a lot of people who say. Don't look at this type of attribution because it's broken and it's all based on last click and last interactionsand pixels and cookies are getting destroyed everywhere. They say, just look at your overall inbound demo requests and only focus on that. And it's like, everyone likes simplifying things.

Joseph Hill: If you can say you're the person who's simplified an idea to one thing and that's all you should care about. It's a great way to sell some snake oil. But ultimately, there's a lot of ways you need to look at things. You need to look at things tracked in attribution like this. You also need to think about self reported attribution and think about how you can capture that.

Joseph Hill: So when you are converting, where did you hear about us? LinkedIn, Google, like all the, you can have all the different self reported attribution options. And also have a way for someone to get more context from a demo call. The salesperson has to find out, did they see your LinkedIn ads? Just quick questions, get that from sales, feed that back in.

Joseph Hill: And you've got all of that information. So you have your attribution, you have your self reported attribution. So if you have data driven attribution, self reported attribution, and then sales collected attribution, you have all these different reports that you need to look at. You need to take in where they've come from and factor that in and have multiple views to really see top like overall what's working.

Joseph Hill: Now it's hard to do. This is why it's a trending topic. Everyone has. This is why simplified version or here's how I do it. Ultimately, Okay. It's tough to, and the thing is, when you look at things this way and you start, and this is why I like the direct and the brand and the retargeting, if you, if you can split those out when you're reporting and you can, they start going in the right direction, they can be used as a direct piece of data to go back to your CEO and get more money for demand generation activities.

Joseph Hill: But it's tough at the end of the day, like, you still kind of have to keep the lead generation going. So you might have to just start shrinking your budget on gated content and increase your ungated content. Start talking less about content you've made and more about the product and your problems and how you solve them in case studies and testimonials.

Joseph Hill: Because that's how people learn. But it's tough. It's a tough, obviously I could keep, I could keep going. It's a very, very complicated subject.

Vikash: Yeah, and one of the things that I the way you explain this, right, one of the things that I love about it is how the, how the ungated content sort of feeds into your demand generation. Right. And once you ungate your content, right people can start sharing it on social. It can act as a way for you to.

Vikash: Get traffic through organic, right? Versus if you just kept it as just an ebook in a PDF format, there's only one way for you to. Sort of distribute that. Right. And I love how the ungating mechanism sort of feeds into your demand generation thought process, and then how that feeds into your metrics, the attribution, all that stuff on the other side.

Vikash: Mm-Hmm.

Joseph Hill: Exactly. Yeah. So I worked about three years in SEO when I was younger. That was my first marketing job. And then I quickly was like, I can't just dramatically improve results in SEO as much as I'd like. I'd like to just throw more budget on it and just have an immediate impact. And that's what led me to going down the paid marketing route and the social media and Google and all that stuff.

Joseph Hill: But. I really like the fact because I've got this expertise and SEO from from many years ago, the principles inside me. And I think everyone talks about ungated content, they talk about gated content, and they talk about it as a way of telling a story. They talk about it as a way of being more effective.

Joseph Hill: Like, like we showed earlier, 20 times more people are going to see your message if you ungate something and don't have a form. And then you have like the lead factor, the lead quality. But one thing that like the biggest. I think unspoken truth about ungating your content is it can have a dramatic impact in your organic SEO and massively spike that to the top.

Joseph Hill: So I just want to do one thing as well which I think is a good, and we'll stick with Cognism for this example, just because we're giving them a lot of love, but if you go on here and you type in

Joseph Hill: somewhere, this is incognito. So I haven't been searching for the Icelandic volcano eruption, but if I type it in here, E book marketing 2024 or something like that.

Joseph Hill: And I press search. So we've got a lot of ads here. Number one result on, so if I skip all the ads, number one result is this, and it was posted. So it's about 17 days ago. Now this is basically. An ebook It just goes on forever. You can see the little scroll at the bottom at the right hand side.

Joseph Hill: It's very, very big. This is a resource. This is something that would perform very well if you were to gate it and start forcing people to give their email for it. But they haven't done that. They just put it on their website. And then they have, as you can see, the nav is here. So when it comes to gated content resources, you should forget everything you've ever learned about landing pages.

Joseph Hill: You want the nav there because you want people to read your content and go onto the nav versus when it's a paid landing page, you don't want them to go on the nav, you want them to stay on the page. You've got to reverse that methodology. And then add in, book a demo, book a demo. Like there's a call to actions all over this.

Joseph Hill: And you've also got subtle links out to different pages and different blogs where you can go. And this is ranking number one on organic SEO. But this is going to get a lot of traffic in the next couple of years. And it's going to be potentially introducing Cognism to a new market and letting them know they're the expert.

Joseph Hill: And then people probably want to learn more about it. So this is Cognism. And this is. He like content marketing done at its finest because it really highlights. And this is why I used Cognism for this example is that already ranking at number one. And it's not because I've been on this site before.

Joseph Hill: It's because this is an incognito window. This is because it literally is the best piece of content and Google recognizes that. So there's a few ways to get to this point. You could, there's two ways, I think. So you could just initially make an amazing resource. Then put it on your website, ungate it, have a great nav on the side so you can click around, ultimately navigate it and just push it out there with ungated content and let organic SEO boost your site and all that different stuff, right?

Joseph Hill: And not only is that gonna boost your organic SEO for that term, so you're gonna increase your domain health, all those different factors which are gonna let you rank for the terms that are the money terms. Like, for example, data for like data enrichment and things like that. Google knows it's a good website.

Joseph Hill: You're doing good stuff. It's going to help everything else in your organic SEO too. The other factor is if you've got a piece of gated content, it's the best performer, it's amazing, but it's starting to decline. It's it's performance
isn't necessarily driving the low CPL that you want. Cool. Use it for three months as a gated resource, then use it, repurpose it as an ungated resource in this way.

Joseph Hill: So you can have the gated content. You can have the, well, how, what's this phrase? You can have your cake and eat it too. You can have the, get the gated content. If you have to do it that way, then you can use it as an ungated resource, boost your organic SEO by recycling it on the backend. And I, I honestly think that it's such a good little tactic to boost your organic SEO.

Joseph Hill: And you may have five, six, seven eBooks that have just been made gated. No one goes to the landing pages anymore that are sat. And all the effort went into that content and they never made it to be recycled to help your organic SEO. And sometimes all you have to do is change 10 percent of it. And it's now the guide for 2024.

Vikash: That's a, that's a lovely way to put it. And you can also sort of, once you've un gated it, you can also use it to like you can create paid social ads and sort of start sending people. Directly to the ungated version, start seeing what the engagement is like on the page and see if that is resonating and that sort of stuff.

Vikash: So one of the things that I would love to hear what you're seeing I'm like, by now you've seen a whole lot of ads. I've been doing the sexy ads campaign as well. You were at metadata.

Vikash: I'm sure that there are no silver bullets over here. But if you have to sort of share a couple of top mistakes that you see a lot of folks do when it comes to paid social. Especially on the creatives what are some of the things over there?

Joseph Hill: Yeah. So biggest mistake, too much text. Like at the end of the day everyone can relate to this. If you have a mate, right? And he's sent you a text and it's huge. Now I'm guilty of that. I've got a lot to say, right? So sometimes I'm like, percent, percent. And you send out these really long paragraphs and then no one responds.

Joseph Hill: And it's like, they're your friends. Like I know that my friends, I'mmjust probably sending, I'm like, everyone's busy. Everyone's got their own life. They'll probably get back to me in two to three business days. Who knows? But like, if I send paragraphs, it's harder to respond to it. And it's, if that, if your friends sometimes take longer to respond to your long messages, right.

Joseph Hill: How do you think people who don't know you and know that you're a company are going to respond to long paragraphs? And the answer is not very well. So the max you'll give somebody and like someone walks up to you in the street, they're about to say something. They're usually like, all right, I'll let him say one sentence.

Joseph Hill: And then that sentence is donate to my charity. And it's like. Some kind of like immoral money building charity when 90 percent of the money goes to the infrastructure and 10 percent goes to the actual cost, or it's like someone had selling a new Internet provider, whatever it is, like, normally, humans won't just go.

Joseph Hill: No, thanks. Sometimes they do, but sometimes they let you say a sentence and then they say, no, thanks to the max. You can usually get out of somebody, whether it's in person or it's out there in the real world or it's sorry, no, if it's in the real world or it's on digital is one or two sentences max. So every single ad you can see in the sexy ads library, pretty much there's one thing that runs through all of the ads and it is simplified. Messages in the actual ad. One sentence.

Joseph Hill: And then if we go to another one, this is a little bit different because it's supposed to rip off the internal notes inside of a phone.

Joseph Hill: But again, not that much text, even though they're doing a UGC rip off of the notes. It's one sentence, three bullet points. That's it. Like it's, it's like there's very little text on most of these ads.

Joseph Hill: Some of them are creative and have a little bit more text. And if you are more creative, you can increase the text a little bit. But if you're just hitting people with product screenshots, you need one sentence and that's all you're allowed. That should get the attention of, and this is obviously Revenue Hero, you guys know that, one sentence at the top, that's it.

Joseph Hill: And then you have a diagram. So it's, yeah. The biggest mistake is too much text and not enough focus on the visual. The second is not really like a clear enticing headline. So, If you click learn more, where do you think you're going to go right now? So it says here, identify where your sales calls are going wrong.

Joseph Hill: So if you click learn more, you think you're going to be able to do that. Okay. That's fine. But are we going to a case study? Are we going to a blog? Are we going to a product page? We got like, where are we going? I think letting people know in advance where you're about to take them will let people. Let you lead them down that road like we're going to a case study.

Joseph Hill: Are we going to a blog? Are we going to learn more about the products? Like, where are we actually going? So like this, for example, try the live demo. If I click learn more, I know where I'm going. And I think that's the thing. It's like, if you're like, if the marketing is what's behind door number one, and you don't know how many people are going to open that door.

Joseph Hill: I think that's one thing to factor in as well.

Vikash: Interesting. Yeah, I love that. So one of the things that I've seen. While I was browsing for some creative inspirations and stuff is people are now also adding in brackets in the heading, in the headline saying read read the blog post followed by some heading copy, and then you have to learn more about it.

Vikash: Right. So I don't know if that works. But now that you've brought it, brought this up maybe this works

Joseph Hill: definitely. Yeah, I think so. One thing on Facebook is you get a headline and a description. So one of my old tactics used to be I guess I say old tactics. It's still a current tactic, but it was usually when I was selling gated content, not selling, but like getting loads of gated content leads. And I would have the title of the gated content.

Joseph Hill: And then I would say 25 minute read or five minute read. And that would basically say the length of what it is they're going to click to if it's long they think, wow, this is a really big piece of content. If it's short, they think, oh, it's bite sized, but at least I'm saying like, this is what you're going to get.

Joseph Hill: Do you want it? Like, I'm being honest with you. You don't have to come to the page and then bounce. You don't have to open the form and then bounce. You don't have to download it and then be upset with you expecting something else. So it's setting that expectation. You should always make sure that you've set the expectation of what that next step is going to be.

Joseph Hill: And so I think read the blog. Great. I think 25 minute read or something. Great. Any way to set the expectation, we'll make sure that you fulfill their expectations when they start going down that journey with you.

Vikash: Amazing. I love it. Sweet. Awesome. I think we covered pretty extensively on a lot of stuff related to paid social. But before I let you go I have a couple of quick fire questions.

Vikash: So first question what's a tactic or a channel that you're seeing work really well, but not a lot of people know about it.

Joseph Hill: Conversation ads. It always shocks me how many people haven't tried conversation ads yet.

Vikash: Oh, we haven't tried it yet too. So

Joseph Hill: Ah,

Vikash: go and try it sometime soon.

Joseph Hill: very, very good performer conversation ads, but a lot of people still haven't tried it for the first time. So. Yeah, definitely, definitely give it a go. I think the cost per demo, I think I can count on my hand the amount of times that an image ad has outperformed a conversation ad for the same conversion point.

Joseph Hill: And that's also gated content. Like, I'll demand you and I think conversation ads underrated. It costs like 70, 79 cents or something to get a message into someone's inbox. Like, that's amazing.

Vikash: Nice. Okay. I've got to go test it out. Any, any tips for me to watch out over there?

Joseph Hill: Yeah. So think about the conversation ad as a bot. So you have one opening message. So you want to try and get someone to click the buttons and it's yes, go to whatever you want them to or no, then make sure you have a second pitch. So it's primary message. Yes or no. Yes. Go there. No. Next message inside that message.

Joseph Hill: Try and sell it another different way. Yes. Go to the whatever you want them to know. Consolation message comes up. Consolation message is no worries. That's fine. However, check this out instead. And then at least you've got three attempts at getting value out of that person in the automated chat responses.

Joseph Hill: And so usually it's demo, demo, case study. So primary message, demo, secondary message, pushing the demo, still no. Okay, well, check out this case study or check out this video or check out like something to consolidate. Like a lot of people, they'll push and they'll push and they'll push. And if it's no, it's just okay, fine.

Joseph Hill: But you want to get something out of it. So always have a consolation backup plan, which is more value, but less of an ask.

Vikash: Nice. I love that. I'm going to test it out sometime later this week. Awesome. Cool. Who are some of your favorite marketers that you think our listeners should go and follow?

Joseph Hill: Um, Joseph Hill founder at Revenu agency. He's he's a great market. You should go follow him now. I'd say marketers that I follow, which we have some of the best content. So Maxine Paulson, he's really good. I really like Canberg Becker. He's really good. He's over at Cognism. Tim Davidson.

Joseph Hill: Is the guy who cuts through, is always interesting to follow. I'm trying to think off the top of my head. Robert Katai. He's also really good. He's talking a lot about the influencers journey and the content. Who else? There's a ton out there. But yeah, I'd love to get the folks over at content. Oh, the HockeyStack guys as well. The HockeyStack team are always posting stuff. There's a few of those people.

Joseph Hill: So look at all the leadership board of. The Hockey Sack folks,
they're always posting stuff. And Gil at Metadata as well, he's always posting stuff. He puts a lot of effort into his content, so I definitely follow him. They're probably my top people I follow.

Vikash: Sweet. Yeah. And where can people find and connect with you?

Joseph Hill: So You can find me on LinkedIn, Joseph Hill, founder at Revenue. My website is revenu agency, without an E. So it's revenue without an E, agency. io. But you can go to my LinkedIn or you can go to my site and book a call with me one to one if you want to talk more about improving your marketing. We can hop on a call.

Joseph Hill: I can show you what we do. I can do a quick audit. And then if I impress you enough, maybe we'll work together as well.

Joseph Hill: Also, I've got the other quick flash up of the the library as well. So a lot of people like this library. So I've basically got 350 ads which I followed basically follow the principles I've laid out today.

Joseph Hill: So some great brands. So we've got memes in here. We've got demo ads. We've got case studies. We've got a ton of stuff. So if you want this library of the, I think it's 341 ads.

Joseph Hill: Let me know. I'll send it into a DM, but you've got to come follow me first. And I've also, I guess I've also got one for Google ads as well, which is an underrated topic.

Joseph Hill: I think a lot of Google ads is boring. You've got to bring it to life. You've got to make sure the copy shines. And I've got a library doing exactly the same thing for all the Google ads stuff as well.

Vikash: Ooh, I've never seen that. I'm going to come hit you up on Linkedin and request for that.

Joseph Hill: Sounds good.

Vikash: Sweet. Amazing. Thanks a lot for you r time, Joseph. Thanks a lot for hopping on the podcast show with us today. For everyone listening to the show go follow Joseph Hill go check out Revenu Agency.

Vikash: I'll catch you all in the next one. See ya.

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