Alexandra Soldan

Seems like we are moving more and more in an online advertising world where online tracking (cookies) is available for some subpopulations, but not for others. For example, due to consumer choices to opt-in to tracking (or not) under Apple ATT (iOS users), GDPR (EU residents), or now Google's new informed choice experience in Chrome. #onlineadvertising #cookiedeprecation #consumerprotection #privacy #privacysandbox #google HEC Paris, Hi! PARIS Center - AI for Science, Business & Society

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Really frustrating. Why are B2B companies continuing to use Paid media as an inbound lead channel? Versus going straight to the digital channels with a large subscriber base matching your ICP? Paid media is basically the digital version of the Yellow Pages. There's no question, with enough money, you'll see a flood of leads, but what about lead quality? If your ICP is 100+ employees - probably not. A little more to consider: - 𝐓𝐡𝐞 98/2 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐩: Even with sophisticated targeting, a significant portion (think 98%) of your leads will be unqualified. Hence, sales become a filter, wasting time sifting through irrelevant leads before identifying the golden 2% - if you're lucky to see this much. -𝐇𝐢𝐠𝐡 𝐂𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐋𝐨𝐰-𝐐𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐬: The cost to acquire those precious qualified leads continues to go up - see the latest trend report. You're essentially paying a premium for unqualified contacts. Want more intel on how to cut this co-dependency and shift to a smarter approach? Lets connect - and refer to this post. https://lnkd.in/gm_az-Mq #sales #marketing #digitalmedia #marketinginvestment #marketingroi

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🔥 Have you heard about Large Language Models Optimization (LLMO)? ⬇️ 👉 Just like #SEO was key to appearing first on Google, adapting to the rise of #LLMs is crucial for marketers, as these models power search engines (SE) like Chat Gpt and Perplexity. But how can they do this effectively? The key element brands need to remember is that you must facilitate the "job" of LLMs in their crafting of conversation-style answers. The Harvard Business Review lists three KSFs in an article published in May. 1. 🎯 Employ strategic text sequences Inserting "strategic text sequences" - specific phrases added to product information - can increase the likelihood of that content being surfaced in LLM-generated search results. Marketers should identify and utilize such sequences relevant to their products and brands. 2. 🧠 Optimize for natural language queries With LLMs delivering direct answers instead of web links, consumers will discover brands through conversational queries rather than keyword searches. Marketers must ensure their product details are accurately represented and showcased appropriately for relevant natural language queries. 3. 🧑‍💻 Embrace the role of "LLMO" experts The shift to LLM-powered search creates a new vital role: LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization) experts. These specialists will help companies and marketing firms optimize their content and strategies to be properly handled by LLMs and surface in AI-generated search results. 💡 I would add one more thing here, which has been key since the dawn of marketing. Your product will be only great if you solve a real customer problem (which most probably will be the very query your customers type on their search engine). That should be your content's main focus. As David Ogilvy, one of the fathers of marketing & advertising, once said, "The customer is not a moron. She's your wife." 🫶 To read more about LLMs, LLMO, AI & SaaS marketing, you can visit & subscribe to my Substack blog here: https://lnkd.in/eCHi9nea

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What Makes a Great CMO? After working with 70+ CMOs and Co-Founders handling marketing, I realized the best ones have 3 qualities: 1. They know their numbers Great CMOs obsess over attribution and the financial impact of each channel. Their job is complex, involving multiple channels and different product lines. They need to understand the role of each channel, analyze current numbers, and make growth roadmaps. When they can’t have a deep understanding of each channel, they ask great questions to understand metrics. They don't just look at numbers; they seek to understand the real financial impact of each spend. 2. They know their customers Good CMOs know their customers inside out. They understand customer pain points, needs, and goals, and can discuss their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) like their best friend. They know the customer journey with their product and obsess over messaging. They know the exact copy to use and what message will resonate with their audience. They have enough data to know what message will move units and what will tank. 3. They build relationships Great CMOs are people persons or at least visibly so on the surface. Marketing in Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) is a cross between product and finance. Apart from customer care, they are the front face for the customers. They communicate customer feedback, market trends, and competition back to other stakeholders. That's been my experience after working with multiple marketing heads. Anything you would add to the list?

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Monday Musing #1 Why B2B marketing annoys me and why branding matters If Coca Cola was marketed like B2B products this is how it would read… Coca Cola is sweet, brown and fizzy. Download the white paper to learn more. 😂 “95% of thirsty people agree that B2B Coke solves their thirst problem,” B2B Coke promise 😆 Because of branding, however, when we think of Coca Cola we think of red cans with fancy writing and polar bears. “It’s the real thing” Branding matters especially when products are very similar, in which many B2B vendors are too disillusioned to admit This article is valuable to consider buying behavior in vendor evaluation and the role that brand plays. How important is Branding in B2B marketing? What do you think? I feel like I have fought this battle my whole career to get leadership and sales teams to stop talking features and start being clear about what the company stands for and believes in. As Simon Sinek says, your WHY is why people buy. Not your How or What! Like the content I share? Follow me for free on Substack https://lnkd.in/eAq_DKVd #branding #b2bmarketing #buyerjourney #mondaymusing

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How multI-touch attribution misallocates credit in marketing channels 🚫 A common pitfall in multi-touch attribution (MTA) reports is the misallocation of credit among marketing tactics, particularly over-crediting mid or bottom-of-funnel activities like branded search and retargeting, while under-crediting top-of-the-funnel tactics such as video and display advertising. This misattribution typically occurs because MTA often fails to recognize the incremental value of awareness tactics, which are crucial for introducing new customers to the brand. Such flawed attribution can lead marketers to invest heavily in lower-funnel strategies past their point of optimal return, effectively wasting budget on tactics that do not contribute to overall growth. This overinvestment in non-incremental channels underscores the need for a more balanced and accurate measurement approach. Concerned about the effectiveness of your attribution model? 📥 Reach out for a demo to explore how Lifesight can help refine your attribution strategies and ensure a more equitable distribution of marketing credits across all funnel stages. #marketingattribution #Lifesight #marketingMe

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Will Google's Biggest Acquisition Shake Up the Marketing Industry? - Google's parent company is said to be ready to buy Hubspot. What will that mean for marketers?- Based upon the Today Digital Marketing Reports: "Google’s parent company Alphabet is said to be close buying Hubspot — the large marketing automation platform. If it goes through, it will be the largest acquisition in its history. Hubspot is worth about $30 billion. (By way of comparison, Google bought YouTube for about $1.6 billion in stock. Pretty good deal considering YouTube brought in more than $30 billion in revenue last year alone.) Why Hubspot? Why do they want Hubspot? To compete with Microsoft’s lead in the productivity suite space. Google is in third place among cloud services, but is well behind the first two. Amazon controls about a third of the market, and Microsoft holds more than twice what Alphabet has." Let us see how things are going. https://lnkd.in/gr7HfkrE

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"If LLMs become the new search index, which ones will have your brand and which ones won’t?" It's an interesting proposition: #SEO as historically defined and developed may take a backseat to #LLM-Search Optimization. I, for one, have been using multiple #GenAI models when doing market research over the past 6 months. Depending on what you're looking for, the results you find from Google's Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT-4o, and Anthropic's Claude can be very different. And that's just scratching the surface. As these models perform real-time search on the business website or product page, what they pull and how they prioritize the resulting output can vary greatly. Being able to effectively optimize these results may be essential to business growth in the coming years.

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4 key trends driving the evolution of #search — from Philipp Schindler at Google Marketing Live 2024 🥁 ----- ⭐ 1. Search queries are getting longer and more specific According to Google, the volume of searches with five or more words is growing faster than the volume of shorter queries. To illustrate, while not so long ago someone looking for running shoes might have queried “men’s running shoes”, a more modern search might look like: “how to pick the right men’s running shoe for beginners with high arches”. ⭐ 2. Searches are getting more complex While complex searches traditionally entailed a more progressive or layered approach to getting information, today, people are seeking direct answers to multi-level questions like: “what are good options for a day out in Dallas with the kids? And recommend some ice cream shops near each option”. ⭐ 3. Searches are expanding beyond words Google reported 12 million visual searches per month using #Lens, with more innovation in the pipeline, including #CircletoSearch, which will allow you to circle anything on your screen (including a screenshot) to launch a search for it! ⭐ 4. Searches are increasingly triggers for exploration More and more, we are using the search bar to explore topics at a broad level — things like: “outfit ideas”, “best places to eat with kids”, and “rainy day activities”. ----- Of course, these trends present brands with new challenges, and more importantly with new opportunities to lean into, many of which by leveraging #GenAI 🤖 Discover the roundup of announcements from #GML2024 below👇 https://lnkd.in/eRZyE4Sr Need help making sense of it all. STEP MARKETING is here to assist 🤝

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One day left to register for this great webinar on how to maximise the ROI on your Google Ads spend! We are going to be getting a detailed insight into the online ads ecosystem from Akbur (VP Client Success at Full Fabric) before we dive into conversion, optimisation and ROI with Luca (Ads Engagement Manager at Google). If you are wondering what questions you should be asking your ad management agency, then this webinar is for you!

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We scaled our paid programs from 0 to 7-digit monthly marketing budgets in the past years. We opened and tested many channels: Google ads, Bing ads, Review Websites (10+ sites), Quora ads, Reddit ads, Programmatic ads, Native ads, Communities, etc. Here are some lessons learned: ⚡️ The more money we invest ≠ the more revenue we get. Each channel has a point of diminishing returns. When you hit it - your growth slows down and if you invest more - ROI starts going down. ⚡️There is a lot of fake and fraudulent traffic in paid channels. Especially, in automatic campaigns, focused on TOFU conversions (for example, form fill). Building the right architecture can be a game-changer (choosing BOFU conversion, trying fraud protection software, manual placements cleanup, etc.) ⚡️Many channels are super difficult to measure. Everything is quite simple with Review Websites, Google, and Bing Search networks, especially in SMB when the first touch will likely be the last. But other channels are more difficult to measure. I had situations when we worked with the community and there were $0 attributed to UTMs, but users on calls mentioned they came from the community. Try asking this question during sales calls (not in early calls), test self-attribution, try incrementality software, or optimize for specific channel metrics. ⚡️The audience isn’t the same on all channels. Running the same prospecting campaign with the same messaging and creatives across all channels won’t work for some channels. Even if it is the same person - his intent isn’t the same across channels. It is important to understand these differences. In Bing, the audience is slightly older than in Google. In Reddit expert content and memes should show better metrics. DuckDuckGo users are more focused on security. Adjusting messaging can help to move the point of diminishing returns. ⚡️Demand creation can be cheaper than Demand capture. Usually, first paid campaigns are launched to capture existing demand. These users are at the end of the buyer journey and their sales cycle is quite short. You get first customers and learn fast. But when you grow and reach a point of diminishing returns or have high competition in a niche, creating a demand can be cheaper. It is important to understand that the sales cycle will be longer (as users should complete the whole buyer journey) and you need to understand attribution. We had examples when we created the demand for a specific segment and nothing happened, but in some months leads started growing. ⚡️Team is everything. Dmitry Starikov, Alex Panchuk 🇺🇦, and Zhenya Rodina - you are crushing it! If it is helpful - I can continue as LinkedIn has a limit of 3000 characters 😉 #marketing #paidmarketing #digitalmarketing #demandgeneration

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I’ve seen marketers gain as much as a 50% ROAS boost when they… 1. Don’t waste ad dollars on sign-ups and clicks. 2. Don’t assign the same CAC for all campaigns. 3. Identify their most profitable audiences. 4. Calculate the value of each user. 5. Use value-based bidding. Notion did this and achieved a 38% increase in pROAS. Miro did this and achieved a 33% increase in pROAS. Want the same? Understand the importance of… Timely optimizations + right signals = enhanced marketing effectiveness How? Drop by our webinar tomorrow at 1PM EST. 👉 https://lnkd.in/g6KzXH6A #growth #strategy #artificialintelligence #digitalmarketing #VBB

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The edge in performance marketing today is off-platform. The most powerful optimisation levers are not anymore the ads, the keywords, the bids or the targeting. Most companies when they can't scale performance marketing, they've hit a false ceiling. When they ask me what to do they often think they need to do more of the same to improve - obviously to deliver a different outcome a different kind of work is needed. Here are some off-platform levers that can be used: - Invest in technology for greater automation / personalisation - Improved team resource allocation (particularly in large teams some areas are over resourced vs others) - Review and improve KPI - Deeper insight from product marketing for better performing ads - Work with product to develop marketing friendly features e.g. free features - Work with product to improve onboarding - Work with finance to review pricing - Improve team process: documenting best practices and test results for better overall optimisation - Work with sales to shorten call back time and improve conversion rate Any more off platform levers? #performancemarketing #growthmarketing

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Analysing Marketing Performance: A Strategic Approach Step 1: Identify Key Variables Impacting Your Metrics Start by pinpointing the metrics that align most closely with your business objectives. Break down each metric to understand its components. Take, for instance, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Key variables for CAC include the cost incurred and the number of new users acquired. Are there noticeable trends or changes in these variables? If costs remain stable but the number of new users declines, it’s crucial to investigate what might be affecting this decrease in new user acquisition. Step 2: Assess Changes and Impacts Once you've identified the variables, delve deeper into what might be influencing them. For example, consider the 'number of new users acquired.' Analyse the list of marketing channels and the total new users each channel has contributed. What percentage of the total do these channels represent, and are there any significant shifts in performance? Identifying the channel with the most substantial drop in new user acquisition can direct where to focus your investigative efforts. If the factors influencing your key metrics are unclear, break down the data into more detailed components. This granularity can provide a clearer understanding of what needs optimisation or adjustment. Example Application: Boosting Sales When aiming to increase sales, consider the prerequisites such as website traffic needed for conversions. Suppose the goal is 100 sales with a 1% conversion rate; this translates to requiring 10,000 website visits. Then assess the quality of your traffic: Is your website's conversion rate optimal, or could improvements be made? Focusing on driving traffic might involve strategies to increase visitor numbers, whereas improving conversion rates could mean optimising the website experience or the quality of the traffic itself. Conclusion: Prioritise Effectively Throughout this process, apply the 80-20 rule to prioritise efforts that will yield the most significant impacts. By methodically breaking down and analysing each component of your marketing metrics, you can identify more effective strategies for improving performance and achieving your business goals.

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Here’s one way to do this: (That is especially relevant for people in ecom) 1. Pick your best angle for your product 2. Make a list of different UGC formats 3. Go to JoinBrands and hire a creator 4. Have them make videos for those formats 5. Test the formats against each other 6. Settle on the one that works best 7. Hire more creators to do that format 8. Start testing angles against each other too 9. Keep testing for other factors It’s a grueling process, but it’s necessary.  Do the work.  P.S. My UGC marketplace helps you find proven creators and get persuasive content made for affordable prices. Hit the “visit my website” button to check it out.

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Marketing leaders, how much are you planning to invest in Brand vs. Demand in 2025? 💰 Research by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) suggests that the optimal marketing mix gives 60% of budget to brand, compared to 40% for demand. 💰 Data from WARC research via eMarketer shows a similar trend, with more marketers investing in Brand this year than in prior years. 💰 B2C marketers typically have invested more on the Brand side than on the Demand side. 💰 B2B marketers are notorious for having websites that all look rather samey, and using similar demand gen, content marketing, and performance marketing strategies, but many of those areas are becoming more competitive in recent years. 💰 However, many B2B marketers are waking up to the importance of Brand investments. After all, only 5% of buyers are usually in the "buying stage" of the buying cycle, so Brand investments keep your company top of mind. It's a longer term investment. 💰 The impact of demand marketing is declining quickly over time. The investment in brand, while more difficult to prove the ROI from, keeps on giving. 💰 Brand salience and distinctiveness ensure your solutions come to mind first in any buying situation – and that potential customers listen to what your content and ads have to say. Personally, I believe there are many investments where you actually can do both, not just one or the other. Events, for example, are often a one-two-punch, if you execute well. Content marketing and SEO also are good examples of investments where you can obtain major Brand benefits while also driving Demand. The question for me is more around where you decide to place certain capabilities and competencies within your org structure, to unleash the combined power of your collective Brand and Demand investments. Marketing friends, how are you seeing this change unfold? Are you seeing more interest in Brand investments recently? How is your own strategy changing as a result? I'd love to hear your thoughts. #marketing #cmo #brand #demand

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Mobile marketers - don’t worry, SKAN is not dead. 🙏🏻 During WWDC, Apple announced that it’s shifting from SKAN to a new attribution framework - AdAttributionKit (AAK). 🥁 If you’re a mobile marketer and you fear another change, worry not. 😎 The differences between SKAN and AAK are pretty clear, and most of them (not all), aren’t big enough to stress you out. 2 main changes: 1. Alternative App Store Support That means there is now a “marketplace identifier” which will indicate which app marketplace an app install came from. 2.  Re-engagement support In AAK, The conversation type field will have 3 options: download, redownload, and re-engagement. Those are big, positive changes, but not critical - re-engagement is already supported, and with very few alternative iOS app stores, there’s no rush to switch to AAK. If you’re working with a reliable attribution platform, and if your tech stack and BI are solid, both SKAN and AdAttributionKit should be fully supported for you. Keep an eye on Apple’s future updates, but also keep doing what you’re doing. #mobilemarketing

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The number 1 mistake in performance marketing: 99% focus on number crunching, only 1% focus on ad creation. Data-driven marketing is crucial for customer acquisition. But data analyses and campaign optimization alone don’t drive strong enough results. Ad creation is the most undervalued skill in performance marketing. Many performance marketers outsource it completely. But it’s not just a designer’s or copywriter’s job. Marketers must own their ad creation to maximize campaign performance. They need to understand ▶ What messages resonate? ▶ What visuals grab attention? ▶ Which ad concepts engage? ▶ What CTA's drives action? Understanding language nuances and customer behavior is crucial. Creating ads that grab attention and drive high quality conversions can multiply the ROI of any campaign. Mastering ad creation is invaluable to any Marketer. Crunch the data - then turn it into compelling ads to drive performance. How do you ensure the right focus on ad creation in your performance marketing? --- I hope you found this valuable. Please like and repost to share with others. Follow me for more posts on leveraging product development, marketing & AI for growth.

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“Apple’s AAK(Ad Attribution Kit) is the next best thing since sliced bread.” - lots of people. I’ve been reading some posts saying AAK is a massive gamechanger for mobile advertisers. Not so fast! 🚫 Here’s why that’s wrong: • AAK has minimal changes compared to SKAN. • Core components remain the same: 64 conversion values, 3 postbacks, crowd anonymity. • Interoperability between SKAN and AAK: means advertisers barely have to change anything. If you dig further into details, you'll see that AAK inherits SKAN setup details with minor parameter name changes: • Ad Network ID ➡️ Ad Network Identifier • Transaction ID ➡️ Postback Identifier • Target App ID ➡️ Advertised Item Identifier • Source App ID ➡️ Publisher Item Identifier While AAK supports alternative app stores and re-engagement, these features are rarely used by most advertisers(if you’re in the tiny minority that could use these features, by all means pay attention to these). ** For the vast majority, it’s same difference. If you have SKAN you should be set.

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