Colby Flood | Brighter Click
For ecommerce brands, nailing a paid ads strategy is critical. And that takes lots of testing and iteration.
Brighter Click CEO Colby Flood specializes in building scalable paid ads strategies for ecommerce clients, and in this episode he breaks down the testing process that he and his team use to refine their approach and improve the ROI of their clients’ ad campaigns.
In addition to covering his testing framework, Colby shares how he thinks about the role of ads throughout the funnel, what metrics to track, how much you should be prepared to spend, and how the lessons he’s learned from working with ecommerce brands can be applied to B2B SaaS businesses.
Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.
Resources from this episode:
Check out the Brighter Click website
Learn more about paid ads in the Brighter Click resource center
Connect with Colby on LinkedIn
Colby and Kathleen recording this episode
Kathleen (00:02):
Okay, smile. Great. I can get that. Okay. 3, 2, 1. Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Colby Flood who is the CEO of Brighter Click. Welcome to the podcast Colby.
Colby (00:21):
Thanks for having me, Kathleen.
Kathleen (00:23):
Yeah. I'm, I'm excited to talk with you because our topic has to do with ad campaigns. And I feel like everyone in my network right now is talking about ad campaign performance and struggling with it. And it sort of seems as though it's a daily battle. <laugh> so we'll talk about that a little bit more, but before we dig in, um, can you share a little bit about yourself, your story and what Brighter Click is?
Colby (00:48):
Yeah, of course. I appreciate you asking. So, uh, Brighter Click is a paid social agency that works with e-commerce and software companies. So I started Brighter Click in 2019 after a couple of years of freelancing on my own and doing, uh, what most freelancers do, which is trying to catch it all. I've learned email marketing, website, design, uh, organic social, and then niched down to paid social in 2019. And that's when Brighter Click started, um, fast forward, last year we grew 300% and we're looking to kind of keep that pace up this year as well.
Kathleen (01:19):
Wow. That's pretty impressive. Um, having once owned an agency myself, I, I know what it takes to, uh, process that, um, volume of growth. And, uh, one thing I learned the hard way, uh, you know, when I own my business was growth, growth is great, but it can also completely kill you. Like it can be the thing that ruins your business.
Colby (01:38):
Yeah. Big, thank you to my operations consultant, Mike, who I, uh, brought on board to help with those things, cuz I've learned a lot of growth, brings a lot of additional, um, avenues and variables with things. So
Kathleen (01:48):
Yeah, well kudos to you for bringing on somebody from outside to help with that. I think that's a really smart choice. So we're gonna talk about experimentation and ad campaigns, but I guess I just wanna talk with like what you're seeing out there. I wanna start there because I, um, you know, I I'm in B2B SaaS, you, you work with software and e-commerce, which are the two categories that I'm involved in. So we I'm I'm head of marketing for a software company. That's a B2B software and we sell into the e-commerce space. Oh. So <laugh> I follow all the Twitter conversations, especially amongst the direct to consumer world. And it does feel like all anyone's talking about sometimes is, is ad campaigns. So I'd just love to kind of maybe start with you giving us a little bit of a pulse on what you're hearing and what you're seeing as far as, uh, performance customer acquisition costs. Cause I'm hearing like a lot of people talking about how those have skyrocketed on certain channels like Facebook, um, your perspective on the emergence of new channels. Like TikTok, I realize I'm asking you five questions in one, but it's deliberately kind of a big question cuz I just wanna hear like what's top of mind for you today, when you think about ad campaign performance.
Colby (03:01):
Yeah. That's a great question. The biggest thing that we've been seeing is that a huge priority. So I'm talking specifically Facebook, Instagram, um, but definitely LinkedIn as well. And of course TikTok huge priority on creative and focusing on the content that you're putting out. As we've seen, uh, Facebook iOS 14.5 happen, we've seen Facebook lose audience. Attritions we know LinkedIn's audiences, uh, they have different Metro or different, uh, parameters, but they can be limited as well. We've gone with a broad approach and we've seen the industry as going towards a broad approach approach with targeting. So it's not necessarily focused on how clever you are with your interest that you're running or how clever you are with your lookalikes and things like that. And really focusing on the content that's going out and making sure you're refreshing your content frequently and providing, especially for the soft, not just putting up stuff about, um, your product or what it does, but really providing that education needed because me personally, um, I think at least for B2B marketing education focused marketing is the now and the future for B2B companies.
Kathleen (04:14):
When you say education, um, are you referring more to kind of like that top of funnel content where you're sharing your articles, your blogs, et cetera, or are you also referring to content that is educational specifically about your product?
Colby (04:31):
Uh, both. I would say so. I would say top of funnel, definitely focusing on. So let's look at, um, like SMS marketing, for example, if you're an SMS marketing app or a company really focus on providing strategy top of funnel, providing the actual strategy that you're using to win in your campaign. Same thing with email marketers, same thing with what I do. If we're putting out content, both organic and paid top of funnel, it's really focused on just giving as much value as you can with no expectations back it's. It's so hard. I don't know where you stand on the gated versus undated.
Kathleen (05:06):
I am team ungate.
Colby (05:08):
Okay. Whew. I can speak unfiltered then. So it's so hard to get people to consume your content cause there's so much of it out there. And attention spans are so short. Um, a, we know gated content can be troublesome, but B even the way we package our content as well, making sure it's native onto the platform, making sure it's video that way people can consume it, huge fan of podcast as well. And I realize that's not in the paid acquisition funnel, but ways that you can, uh, package the content for people to create it. But getting back on track, cuz I get off track pretty often have to answer your question. Um, really focus on providing that education top of funnel that way.
Kathleen (05:43):
Yeah, no. And it's funny, you mentioned podcast, which by the way, feel free to go off track. Cause these things are very organic and we'll take this conversation wherever it should go. But like I am a big fan too, of podcasts and, and I, I sort of have this term that I've invented because there isn't a better term for it where I call this, this category that I call influencer marketing, which is different than influencer marketing. Like I think we think of influencers and we think of Kardashians and you know, people along those lines, but, but there's this whole broader landscape of, of influence where you are, if you want a fast path to, uh, traction in marketing it off very often the best way to get there is to go through someone else's existing audience. And it's just drafting off of the trust that someone else has already built. And that could be by guessing on their podcast or, you know, it could be by sponsoring their subs newsletter. There, there are a million ways you can do it. But I think that's a very interesting area of B2B marketing where I'm, I'm very focused on experimenting at the moment. So I love that you brought it up.
Colby (06:46):
Yeah. And it's, you know, it's very important, uh, being marketing focused instead of just sales focus as well because that the companies that focus on marketing, uh, equally importantly, or just as, or more so than just sales are the ones that stay around when we have downturns. And I don't know, uh, what you've been seeing. I've been seeing in a lot of groups and stuff. People are starting to prepare for potential recession or downturn that way sale marketing start to go down budget, start to go down. And it's the companies that focus on putting out that authority and focus on putting out that marketing aspect for inbound that really stay around and stay top of mind also.
Kathleen (07:21):
Yeah. What I'm seeing is definitely, I haven't seen like many layoffs. I think there, there have been some in the eCommerce world, like I know bolt just did a big round of layoffs, for example, I'm not so sure that that's necessarily like directly linked to what could be a coming economic contraction so much. It is a reflection of like what's been happening in those businesses. But I would say the, the CMOs that I'm talking to are all thinking about how they can extend cash runway. Um, so you know, not, not layoffs per se, not major cuts, but it's like maybe we just won't do some of those bigger plays that we might have invested in. Maybe we're just gonna keep some of that cash in our pocket for a little while just to see how things pan out. And so, um, it's kind of this wait and see attitude. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, alright. So I wanna shift gears cuz we did say we're gonna talk about ad campaigns and you guys have some frameworks for experimentation, um, which I'm fascinated by because you know, we're in the process of building our paid ads funnel at my company. And I have a person on my team who owns that and we're talking all the time about, you know, things like what's the volume of experiments we're conducting, you know, what are the nature of those experiments? Are we focusing on the actual creative? Is it the messaging? Is it the tone of the messaging? Is it the audience? Like there's so many different parameters. Um, and then there's also like how do you track all of this? Like what's the right system to use so that you can actually look back and understand what those experiments were and what the results were. So this is a very big topic and I guess I wanna think, I wanna sort of try to zero in on where do you start? So if you're, if you have a new new client that comes to you and says, we're trying to figure out our paid ads and, and you're thinking of setting up an experimentation framework for them, where do you begin?
Colby (09:10):
Yeah, that's a great question. The first thing we do is, uh, data research on what they've already done, understand their, um, target audience, understand any ICPs that they may have look at their reviews, Trust Pilot, G2, things like that. Look into their actual ad account, put together some understandings of audiences that may have worked ,messaging that may have worked. And then from there based on what has worked, um, start actually putting some of that into the implementation for planning I'm from North Carolina, we're a Southern state. We have a phrase if it ain't broke, don't fix it. So there's no purpose of reinventing the wheel. If, um, there's something that has worked in their account, but in this, in this hypothetical situation, we'll say we're starting completely fresh. Um, the first thing that specific audience tests that we're gonna be running, and if we're talking B2B SaaS, let's just say we're on LinkedIn.
That way, focus on trying to understand, um, what company headcount size, what specific, uh, job title or decision maker within that company. And we go with a couple of different approaches in the sense of don't feel like you have to get super narrow or super broad, right? Or sorry, just super narrow, go broad with your targeting too. One thing that we've actually seen here recently, excuse me, with targeting abilities, is that the schema on your website, the markup on your website has a huge impact on the deliverability of your ads with the audience, because that schema acts as an SEO and the bots from LinkedIn and from Facebook call your website, they see what that schema is and then they match the correct people on the platform within your audience to that as well.
Kathleen (10:51):
So now I know that schema is really crucial, particularly in e-commerce because of the way you format product listings and things along those lines. And also reviews are there when you talk about schema and your thing, and you're talking about be like a B2B SaaS, for example, what aspects of schema do you think are the most impactful? There?
Colby (11:10):
That's a good question. I'm gonna be completely honest and say, we have a guy in house that does the sche markups and I stay on the paid social side. Um, what I can't tell you is I have seen, um, the positive performance own SAS and especially on eCommerce as well, um, as we've been doing those that way. But yeah, you can definitely use that as an opportunity to go broad with targeting and in the ideal world, the algorithms that these companies, these platforms have built out, know what they're doing and they're able to build things out that way. So the first step we would do is go into audience testing and understand what specific audiences are working. Um, and then the next step we would go into is really focusing on understanding the messaging or the types of content that need to be going into your campaigns that way.
Kathleen (11:56):
So, okay. Me, uh, messaging, content audiences, um, there are like, I can't remember because I'm terrible at math, which is why I'm a marketer, but like, I don't remember what the formula is for exponentially. How many different combinations there are when you combine all these different things, but it's a lot, right? Like all the different messaging combinations, all the different creatives, all the different audiences. Um, and within the category of creative, like, you know, do people like blue versus pink? Do they like illustrations versus photos? Do they like men in pictures versus women? Like so many different things to test? How do you keep track of it all? And how many, like, I have a lot of questions around this and I'm not really sure where to start because it's like, yeah, how many tests are you running? How long do you let them run? How fast do you change them? Like, I don't know where to begin. <laugh>
Colby (12:49):
All good questions. So I'll start at the very beginning and say, we track them by using a tool we use Supermetrics, but we use a tool called Supermetrics and we make sure we have naming conventions in our ads and in our ad sets so that we understand what is what so like for example, creative, we tag that CR one, CR two ,copy CO1, CO2, headline E and then landing page LP1, LP2. We set up those naming convention combinations in our ads and then our ad sets. And then we use Supermetrics to segment those things out so we can see the performance of each, each individual. One tracking is the most important part of testing. Um, just because if you can't measure it, you can't understand what happened that way. And then for how we start going into all those variations. You're right.
There's a lot of variations there. We focus on creating, like I hate to use the term drop bucket, cuz that makes it sound like it's a cookie cutter approach, but we use like kind of thousand foot viewer drop bucket themes with what we're doing with creative, with messaging, with copy structures. And if we're talking about I'll stick to B2B SaaS, um, since you said your company is currently building that out and we can look at different things, right? So we know top of funnel, we want to be providing content that is value based that is focused on education and like strategy behind your business. So we could be looking at like specific, you can get granular with it. Um, I kind of taken into two approaches. You can go super granular with specific strategy, like down in the dirt breakdown of exactly how you do the strategy. The other way you can go with it. And there's a guy on LinkedIn called Chris Walker that does a great job at this. You can translate the down and dirty like strategy into high level, um, education that translates directly to the business, like to the CMO or to the business owner. And it doesn't necessarily focus on like bid strategies. And if we're talking about social media and, and campaign structures and stuff like that, it focuses more on like the high level stuff that can translate into the business. So you can do,
Uh, can have specific structures for like messaging kind of later down the funnel. Or if you want to try it top of funnel as well, we always find for software. Um, we go product specific versus feature specific with messaging to test that out. And I'll give you an example of help desk software. We could go product specific and talk about just help desk software in the creative or in the copy. Or we could talk about, um, their, uh, live support. We could talk about their, uh, one-on-one chat. We could talk about their, um, automated tickets. We could talk about a feature specifically for that product. We could talk about any high value offer that they may have or product guarantees. Let's say we're working with SMS marketing. Um, if they have AOA guarantee, if they have a 30 day free trial, things like that, um, ease of use or ease of switch over. Now, you gotta really think about your user, right? If you're, if your stuff set up on another scheduling software that changing over to yours and all the work that it's gonna be done, there can often deter people that way. So focusing your messaging and your, your offer as well and how easy it is to switch over, um, specific use cases, um, mass adoption, testimonials, reviews and credibility. PR always very big. Those are just a couple of messaging kind of themes or, or structures that we've gone with.
Kathleen (16:24):
So when you run tests, uh, I mean, is it very much like an AB test where you're literally, you have two ads and you're testing one thing against another or do you ever do larger sets at once?
Colby (16:35):
Yeah, that's a good question. So generally we'll do, like, let's say we have an ad set that has our defined audience. We'll run about three to four ads. Each of them is focused on a different, if we're in messaging testing, each of them is focused on a different messaging purpose that way. And that way we can see what specifically is working and what is not working. And you know, one other thing I should have added, um, what I was just sharing is another great way to find your messaging for anybody. Listening is understand what people have for objections by going to G2, by going to Capterra and look at your reviews and look at the pros and cons of what they're saying. You need to really focus on the cons, just as much as you do the pros. So you can understand how you can frame your messaging that way.
Kathleen (17:20):
So you, you get your experiments set up and you launch them. Um, how long do you let things run and how often are you checking in and looking at the data?
Colby (17:34):
Yeah, that's a good question. Um, generally we go for a KPI standard and instead of like a, um, like a chronological, uh, time there, we can tie it to spend as well. Like if we know we need to spend a certain amount that way, but like, let's talk about e-commerce. For example, if we see something, um, is spending, uh, 1.25 to 1.5, the desired CPA, and it's, it's just not going down. We'll cut it pretty quickly and start moving on to the next thing. Um, and
Kathleen (18:05):
What's pretty quickly,
Colby (18:07):
Um, pretty quickly in the sense of like, as soon as we see it's hitting 1.25 to 1.5, we didn't even set up automated rules for that, so that it, it cuts off and, and, uh, we can move on to the next thing that we're wanting to test.
Kathleen (18:19):
Nice. And how do you, the other, the other aspect of this is if you're running a lot of experiments. So like the last company I was at, I was much more deeply involved in our ad campaigns, which I'm not normally, but we were a small team. And so I, I kind of got back into it. And one of the things I found challenging is we would run a lot of experiments mm-hmm <affirmative> but the, the concern we always had was are we cannibalizing ourselves, right? Like, are we putting too much in front of the same audience and are, are our ads competing with each other? So I don't know. How do you handle things like that? Is that even a concern?
Colby (18:55):
Yeah, that's a good question. Um, what I would say is you can definitely over test and over optimize in an account. Um, let's talk about that specific example, just so I can understand a little bit more, you have, you have an audience, like how many ads were you running to that specific audience and were you doing it in like campaign or I think they're called campaigns on LinkedIn, but ad sets. Were you doing different ad sets, same audience with different creatives that way?
Kathleen (19:21):
This was actually on Facebook at the time. Okay. And we had pretty broad targeting, um, and we were running. Let's see, it was, um, it was probably, oh my gosh, uh, 10 or more different ad sets. Mm-hmm, <affirmative> aimed at the same audience because we had, we wanted to test everything from like, uh, we would have the same audience and we would test does positive or negative messaging work better. We would run a campaign and take the exact same ad and separate out Android versus iOS. So we could see how all the new iOS changes were impacting our deliverability. And whether that was skewing Facebook's ability, like for the AI to learn more about the audience, um, we would test different imagery with the same copy. Like it was just a lot of different stuff going on at once. And there was a point that came where we were like, maybe the volume is the problem, like in and of itself. I don't know.
Colby (20:22):
Yeah. I would say, um, keeping things simple can definitely help out, especially with, if you're going broader targeting, if we're getting super technical with it, if you're going broader targeting, you may not have as bad of an effect, but Facebook is a bidding out or bidding platform. So if you're running the same audience in multiple ad sets, you technically just based off of that are bidding against yourself. Yeah. If an audience has some people say 10%, some people say 13% overlap or more with another one you're technically bidding against yourselves and yeah. The same situation of, um, if you can like measure it and decide off of it properly, if you can. Awesome. But a lot of times, um, when you get to a high quantity of testing, sometimes it turns into more so focused on, um, granular data, as opposed to just like the
Kathleen (21:17):
Actionable data.
Colby (21:18):
<laugh> that? And like the, just the concept of marketing and like reaching the customer, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Reaching the customer with the message that needs to hit. So I know that's not a direct answer for you,
Kathleen (21:27):
But no, no, no. That's helpful. I mean, and, and I guess the next question really is then like, what data are you looking at? Because obviously platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, they all have their own way of reporting. Uh, they give you a lot of data. And, and I mean, I know just from conversations I have within the industry, that people have different opinions on what you should measure, you know, obviously there's, um, cost per click there's customer acquisition cost there's return on ad spend. There's all kinds of different metrics. And I'm curious when you are kind of looking at your experiments and trying to figure out what to keep, what to cut, which are the primary KPIs that you're watching.
Colby (22:09):
Yeah. If we're looking at e-commerce, we definitely look at, um, cost per click, CPM, click through rate. We look at our CPA, we look at our, um, landing page view percentage. I mean, the website matters just as much as, uh, Facebook's KPIs does on the front end. So landing page view, percentage, add to cart rate, abandoned cart rate, um, making sure we look at our rows as well for software. It can be a little bit more tricky, especially if it's for, uh, SDR led software. It can be a little more tricky if it's product led it's it can be a little bit more cut and dry. They, they signed up, they got it, right?
Kathleen (22:44):
Yeah. Product led software is very much like e-commerce. I mean, it sort of is e-commerce it's just by another name, right?
Colby (22:51):
Yeah. And with SDR led, you can look at those metrics, CPR or CTR CP CCPM, um, cost per lead. But the, the real thing you have to look at, and the real thing you have to decide on is, um, what is a qualified lead? How are we gonna measure that? How are we gonna make sure we understand qualified versus unqualified? What is the conversion rate from, um, MQL to SQL? Like what is really happening in that process as well? So we can make sure we're driving the right people or the right traffic to the situation that way. So,
Kathleen (23:24):
Yeah. Yeah. I feel like it's, it's a value chain, right? Like every little step there's a different metric and every metric tells its own story. Yeah. Um, you know, whether, whether the story is, oh, somebody was interested enough to click or somebody clicked, but they weren't interested enough to convert. And then is the problem, the ad, is it the landing page? Like there's <laugh>, this is why it's so complicated and people start to feel so overwhelmed. There's a lot of moving parts.
Colby (23:47):
Yeah. And, and to that, especially for software companies, the key thing to think about is, um, how many links in the chain do you have and making sure that your funnel is truly a funnel, right? So you have your top of funnel content. Let's say you're driving people to a blog page or something like that. Does that page drive people to the next step in your funnel? If you're retargeting them with a middle of funnel ad to drive them to a, a page, right? If it doesn't, then technically you have a funnel top of funnel, you have a separate funnel, middle of funnel, you have a separate one bottom of funnel. And then if you keep building that out with all these separate pages that have all these different actions, it's understandable that people get lost on your website. And the full system is not working because it's not interconnected on the back end. And when you build out super complex systems from the very beginning, there's a lot of links in the chain that can break, and it can be very cumbersome to fix that. So we always try to go with the approach of as minimum viable, as possible to start and then building out from there and seeing where we can go with it.
Kathleen (24:55):
Now, do you generally advocate creating dedicated landing pages for your ads?
Colby (25:02):
Yes. More often than not. Yes. Unless unless the company already has something very similar. Yeah. We like to, because you can lose the, they call it losing the, um, scent on the trail. Right. You can, if you're clicking on an ad that talks about an 8X ROAS guarantee, but the, uh, hero section on the landing page says nothing about that. Where did we go? Right. Yeah. So definitely focus on building out specific landing pages. And that too comes into minimum viable to start, because if you build 15 landing pages, cuz you feel like they're gonna work, that can be a lot of work. And then a lot of disappointment if only one or two of them end up do working.
Kathleen (25:36):
Yeah. Now let's talk about channels for a second. Um, because we've mentioned Facebook and LinkedIn and TikTok and I mean there's a million, there's Google, there's Twitter. What are you seeing today? As far as like channel performance? Are there, I mean, I know some people say, oh, Facebook is terrible and others are like, TikTok is where it's at. I feel like those are very broad sweeping statements. So I'm just curious to see what you've been observing.
Colby (26:00):
Yeah. So we've seen Facebook has continued performing. What I will say is, um, something I should have said at the beginning when we were talking about things I'm hearing is tracking is the big opportunity, really switching over to something like triple, if you can, for your tracking that way. With that being said, when proper tracking is installed and proper setups have been done in the account, we are still finding that, um, Facebook is performing well. Can you expect what you saw years ago with can consistent like eight, 10 X rows, long term that's cross channel is more of a long term strategy now than just one channel is with high rows that way. Um, so we're still seeing that Facebook is performing well. Yes. TikTok is an opportunity. Um, I've seen cuz we don't personally run ads on TikTok right now, but I've seen a lot of people talking about the cost are rising slightly on TikTok right now. Um, which
Kathleen (26:54):
Doesn't surprise me with the number of people that are kind of going over there to experiment. I mean it's a marketplace right. Supply. And by end
Colby (27:02):
It definitely is. And you know, the, the main reason we as an agency haven't moved to TikTok yet is just because we like to make sure we're doing what we do correctly. So our clients, uh, have a good experience. And if you're moving to TikTok, you need to have a full content strategy plan in place to be refreshing your creative, uh, as frequently as possible because TikTok is a creative platform. It is not like an ad. Like you're not focused on bid strategies and stuff as much as you are on the creative that you're putting out there. So if you can't create 30, 40 pieces of content every month, talk's gonna be a hard time for you as you're going in there. Um, to be testing things out.
Kathleen (27:41):
Yeah, for sure. And what about spend, this is the question I'm, I'm sure you get all the time and I, and I'm pretty sure you're gonna tell me it depends, but uh <laugh> but you know, you, or earlier talked about how, um, when you're looking at how long to let ads run, one of the things you said was we, we think about how much we need to spend. And I, and I have spoken to different folks in the paid ads world who have opinions on like, if you're not spending at least X, you're probably not doing yourself any favors. So I'm just curious if you have any opinions on that.
Colby (28:14):
That's a good question. We try to break it down by your AOV and your, um, average CPA as well. Um, we like to have account spending at least, uh, three to four times their AOV on the bare minimum, like on the bare minimum per day. Um, I would suggest most people start with the mindset of eCommerce. If you're just getting started, try to be able to spend like five to 7,000 a month on Facebook, uh, as you're going into that and look at scaling up from there. I mean, honestly, um, Facebook is a learning system or a learning algorithm as well. So the more data you give it, the more it learns that way. But that's generally where we suggest people start. If they're just getting started out with Facebook ads,
Kathleen (28:56):
Is there such a thing as too much spend? Cuz I have had some people also tell me that like, because Facebook is a learning algorithm, like throwing more money at it, sometimes doesn't solve it. So there, it feels like there might be a sweet spot in there <laugh>
Colby (29:08):
Hundred, uh, 1000% I'll say that. Yes, because spending more does not always mean better results. And if you work with an agency that says, we just need to spend more, unless you're only spending like $40 a day, that is not always the answer. And we notice sometimes when let's say we've scaled somebody up to like, uh, a thousand, $2,000 a day and spend, and we start seeing results, declining cutting spend is the answer sometimes like cutting spend and then recalibrating the account. So yes. Um, you wanna scale at 20% increments and make sure you're staying row positive as you're doing it. If you just bump your spend up, uh, two X or three X, what it is very quickly, you're gonna see a negative impact. Yeah. And it's gonna take a while to recover from it.
Kathleen (29:55):
Interesting. Um, alright. I wanna kind of shift over now and chat about results cuz you've worked with a lot of different companies. Do you have any stories, whether you can name the customer or not, doesn't really matter, but do you have any stories of like how experimentation has led to really great results and any, any key takeaways from those?
Colby (30:14):
Yeah, a hundred percent. I'll share a story. Um, about a company in Australia, there's a sustainability product. So an e-commerce product and we really focused on when we brought them on to the agency, focused on testing out, um, specific content types and specific messaging that would work well for them. They had a lower AOV product. So their AOV is, um, it's gone up a little bit now, but it was like 25 to $27. So super low. And luckily they were in Australia cuz it's not as competitive, but we tested out and found that their PR content was just crushing it. So we would take actual, um, one to two minute news interviews starts out in the station, the, the news anchors are there and then it goes to their actual factory. We would run that and make it look like an ad. And we would consistently see eight to $10 CPAs for those, uh, ads that were running. And then we also found that founder story copy and creative continued to perform well for them. And uh, after working with us for about two months, I was able to get a video testimonial from them, which was great. And they shared, we were able to start helping triple their revenue month over month just by running those ad campaigns on Facebook and really focusing on PR content, founder story, and brand mission.
Kathleen (31:35):
That's really fast. I mean, I've always sort of, kind of used the rule of thumb that like don't expect to see any results for two months and said, if you were able to do that, that quickly, that's impressive.
Colby (31:44):
And full disclaimer. So that is not a promise of working with us or anything. Right. I tell people in the sales process, the same exact thing is every ad account is different. What I, what I would say is this, what they have done very well of is not just saying, okay, we're doing Facebook marketing, check that off the list. Marketing. Now let's look at operations. They have been pumping out PR they've been pumping out a lot of photography. They've been pumping out a lot of content organic on their side and understanding that to succeed on the paid acquisition side, you have to be focused on your messaging and your brand and building that out as well. And that's the, that's a big thing that has helped them with their paid social.
Kathleen (32:24):
Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. So like for a normal company coming in, what expectations do you generally set for? Like how long should they be willing to invest before they really start to see results?
Colby (32:38):
Yeah. That's the phrase you're gonna hate to hear? Which is, it depends. It depends. <laugh> I'll tell you this. Why does it depend, um, what is their website performance right now? What is their add to cart rate? What is their website conversion rate? Um, what is that looking like? How quickly are they willing to take, fix those things as we're doing testing and we see that those things are needed there. Um, what I will say is this, the goal from week one is to have campaigns that are real positive and to be moving in the right direction that way. Um, as long as you can set realistic goals and understand that there's main levers that need to be pulled, it's your AOV. It is your repeat purchase rate. It is your website performance and it is your CTR, CPC and CPM. We can look at how we can move things in the right direction that way.
Kathleen (33:30):
Great. All right. Well, it's time for us to move into the closing segment of the interview. Um, I always ask my guests the same two questions. Uh, the first being, um, marketers generally tell me one of the challenges they have. And I think the paid ads world is, is particularly, um, challenged by this is keeping up with all the changes, right? There's always something new there's platform, changes, algorithm changes, regulatory changes, a million same thing. And it's like drinking from a fire hose sometimes. So how do you personally stay up to date with everything and keep yourself educated?
Colby (34:05):
That's a good question. So I use, uh, Google trend alerts to get updates in my inbox, uh, networking groups, very vital, as long as they're kind of a fruitful networking group conferences like ad world e-commerce world. Um, and then podcast of course. Right. So listening to inbound marketing, listening to, uh, State of Demand Gen, listening to Shopify Masters, things like that.
Kathleen (34:26):
Any particular networking groups that you found really valuable?
Colby (34:30):
Yeah. I'm in one for agency owners called Agency Go, that's been helpful for me. I'm in, um, one called, uh, Founders by Andrew Foxwell. That is for like, um,
Kathleen (34:41):
Familiar with yeah. Foxwell founders.
Colby (34:43):
Yeah. Yeah. Very good. And then, um, I'm in one from Cat Howell that is kind of similar to Foxwell for Facebook ads. Um, those have been very helpful for me.
Kathleen (34:52):
Great. Oh, that's, that's really interesting. All right. And then the second question is, of course this podcast is all about inbound marketing, which I define pretty loosely as anything that naturally attracts the right customer to you. So using that as a definition, is there a particular company or individual that you think is really setting the standard for what it means to be graded inbound marketing today?
Colby (35:11):
100%. I think, uh, Chris Walker is knocking it outta the park. Uh, I think he's his LinkedIn is a great model of what anybody in the B2B space should be doing content wise to attract people and to gravitate people towards your business. I, I saw him post something the other morning on LinkedIn. It had been up for I think, 15 minutes and had close to 60 likes and comments on it. So that's, that's a lot for LinkedIn.
Kathleen (35:37):
Yeah. He has been a guest on the podcast, so yeah, definitely. If you're listening, check out that episode, he shared some really good nuggets. Um, all right. Well, we're coming to our close Colby. If somebody wants to learn more about Brighter Click or wants to reach out and connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do that?
Colby (35:54):
Yeah, so they can go to Brighterclick.com or they can reach out to me on LinkedIn, find me Colby Flood on LinkedIn.
Kathleen (36:01):
Perfect. Um, as always, I will put the links to all of those, uh, places in the show notes, which are available kathleen-booth.com. And uh, if you know somebody else who's doing great marketing work as usual, please send me a tweet at @Kathleenlbooth on Twitter and I'd love to make them my next guest. Uh, that's it for this week. Thanks so much Cody for joining me. This was really interesting.
Colby (36:24):
Thanks for having me.
