97FL (00:00)
Hi, welcome. In this podcast, we talk B2B marketing and what it takes to know your customer, innovate and profit. We're glad you made it. This is the campaign by 97th floor.

Pax (00:19)
Hello everyone, happy Friday. I'm Paxton Gray, CEO of 97th Floor, a digital marketing agency built to deliver world-class organic and paid channel strategies for mid-level and enterprise organizations. Thank you for joining us today for another episode of The Campaign. The Campaign is a B2B marketing podcast about better knowing your audience, innovating beyond best practice, and converting visitors into customers. You can find past episodes on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, and at 97thFloor.com.

So today we've got a really great topic. Every B2B marketer eventually hits this wall. You've reached the point of diminishing returns. Maybe you've maxed out the common LinkedIn and Google strategies, or you've realized that your B2B buying committee is influenced by other channels. The obvious answer, add a new channel. But doing so is gonna typically raise your cost per acquisition as you get that channel set up, running efficiently while maintaining the foundation that you've built. So you're adding further complexity in terms of your overall messaging.

The risk is that you don't learn fast enough, waste budget, or you lose focus by distracting your team. The risk can be heightened by the economic and market conditions that we're facing right now. How can you possibly consider a spike in CAC while your marketing plan is in budget is under tight scrutiny? We've got to show value of every single dollar that we're spending. Ultimately though, the investments, make and the risk are worth it. According to a study by McKinsey, companies using multi-channel strategies achieve the 25 %

24 % higher ROI than those relying on a single channel alone. Additionally, companies using multi-channel marketing have two times shorter sales cycles, which is massive for B2B companies. Plus brands that adopt multi-channel marketing see a 30 % increase in customer lifetime value because more brand interactions actually increase loyalty. So when's the right time to expand? What's the right way to evaluate and launch a new channel platform?

That's what we're to be discussing today with our guest, Ryan Nelson. Ryan Nelson is StackAdap's Chief Marketing Officer, where he leads all aspects of global marketing, communications, and brand. Prior to his role at StackAdap, Ryan's journey spans four key posts, including strategic marketing leadership roles at both Qualtrics and MX. At Qualtrics, Nelson served in product marketing, ABM, field marketing, and enterprise marketing. While there, he was instrumental in launching the Qualtrics customer experience business.

which quickly became the fastest growing product line and contributed to the company's first billion dollar US and US revenue. ⁓ In his role as executive vice president of marketing for MX, Nelson built world class, world class team and led all aspects of marketing and brand, including product marketing, demand communication, field marketing and creative. Ryan, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today.

Ryan Nelsen (03:05)
Hey, Pax, thanks for having me. That's quite the long bio. I think we should just shorten that up for future chats we have. So, but thank you for having me and thanks everybody for joining today.

Pax (03:15)
Well, it's a well-earned bio, I have to say. lot of hard work went into that. ⁓ So let's start off for those unfamiliar with StackAdapt, ⁓ what, ⁓ if they haven't used that platform before, what is StackAdapt and what is it best at?

Ryan Nelsen (03:29)
Yeah, thank you. That's a great question. I appreciate the opportunity to be here today. So StackAdapt is a very, very fast growing programmatic advertising platform. We made some fun announcements last week we'll get into as well to expand beyond programmatic. But we started about 10 years ago as a native platform and then expanded into display and then video, audio, digital out of home, and then connected TV. And so you can basically run all of your end-to-end programmatic campaigns on the platform.

Pax (04:00)
Love that. We use StackAdapt at 97th floor and at 97th floor our goal is to create intentional audience for channel strategies. We love StackAdapt for its numerous targeting capabilities, cookie list targeting, ⁓ ABM capabilities with no platform fee. And that makes it a great way to get into ABM outside of LinkedIn ⁓ and for its wide array of unique ad types. Plus it's all bundled in some really awesome reporting that shows how these work together, which

helps to kind of demystify some of the complexity around multi-channel advertising strategies. So Ryan, you mentioned that you just got back from your event, which is conversion in Nashville, and you announced some new products and capabilities on the platform. Tell us about ⁓ what you launched.

Ryan Nelsen (04:49)
Yeah, first off, thanks for being a great customer. We appreciate it. And we are very agency-focused. We want to make sure that we're powering agencies that then go power incredible brands. And so thank you for that. Yeah, we had an incredible week last week in Nashville. We had an event called Conversion. We had about 300 of our top clients and partners, prospects. ⁓

meeting with us to talk about innovation, bold breakthroughs in basically end-to-end funnels, programmatic. And we announced several things. As you think about StackAdapt as a traditional programmatic platform running all of your campaigns, we had a lot of feedback over the last year or so that clients wanted to run more end-to-end within email as well. So let's use a very common e-commerce example.

You see an ad across different channels. then go to a checkout experience. You abandon the shopping cart.

And we've all probably gotten a follow up email ⁓ later to if you're doing it right, you get a follow up email saying, hey, you'll complete this checkout for X incentive. can now run that all in platform with the launch of our email marketing platform. Last week, we also announced a customer data platform called data hub, where you can start bringing in a lot of your data and connecting to systems. And so it's kind of choose your own adventure in terms of you can run it all within the platform or you can API out to HubSpot or whatever tool platform you're using. So it's been.

Pax (05:48)
Yeah.

Ryan Nelsen (06:12)
exciting week with being able to connect a marketer end-to-end and kind of bridging the worlds of ad tech and martech.

Pax (06:19)
I love that. so, ⁓ some exciting new capabilities to test out. And, ⁓ that was one of my favorite things about stack adapt is the ability to test new things without these massive barriers to entry that sometimes you see with new channels. ⁓ when somebody is coming to stack adapt and they want to start, you know, running some programmatic ads or trying out new channels, what do typically see spurs this? What, what causes someone

to add a new platform to their mix or go from display or native to CTV or out of home ads.

Ryan Nelsen (06:52)
Yeah, well hopefully when you're ready to test a new platform, means that things are working and you're ready to kind of double down and scale even further. So we see some tests on the platform, others go all in based on basically just the results they're seeing across other channels. I'd say that broadly speaking, ⁓ we all, as B2B marketers for many of us, use LinkedIn for their targeting and efforts. And having that ability to do so is great. We're a big customer of LinkedIn.

in ourselves, but we're also, I have a unique position, marketing to marketers and using our own platform to market to marketers.

And so we are, ⁓ you know, and try to be our biggest proponent of using our own platform. And so we see the data, we see it when you see these things. And we actually see a lot higher conversions in many of these areas. Using LinkedIn when we can, but then broadening our scope to different channels beyond LinkedIn to, you know, other display and even digital out of home targeting some of the events that we do and making sure when someone shows up at an airport or a place and then they get in the Lyft where you have an inner partnership with Lyft where you

can

run an ad, write an app to be able to start seeing that. For example, last week, welcome to conversion. And they see the digital out of home board. They get in the lift. They see the ad there and like, wow, these guys are really good at being able to target where we are.

And so ⁓ to kind of summarize that, we open up a whole new world to marketers to be able to test and try things. ⁓ And we can maybe dive into a little bit more on the data of what's working across those things, if that makes sense.

Pax (08:30)
Yeah, I love diving into that. The LinkedIn is one of those platforms that I think have worldwide. have a reputation of this, you business. This is the business social network. And as a result, ⁓ people by default are going to say, well, I'm trying to target business people. LinkedIn is where I go. And invariably, especially, you know, campaigns that are launching on LinkedIn and only LinkedIn.

Ryan Nelsen (08:50)
Yeah. Yeah.

Pax (09:00)
I would say the most common result outcome is we spent a lot of money and didn't get a lot of results. That is the most common feedback I hear about people spending on LinkedIn. And, ⁓ know, you had mentioned exploring these other platforms in addition to LinkedIn. And, ⁓ I believe that investing in a single channel like LinkedIn strategy is not the way to go. It's you have to do multi-channel in order to make.

LinkedIn worth it, which is kind of a counterintuitive thing. So what, what, yeah, I'd love to hear any kind of information or insight you guys have on the impact of other channels on LinkedIn, or maybe just how these channels are interacting with each other.

Ryan Nelsen (09:39)
Yeah.

Absolutely. So here's a stat for you. actually were running the data across the platform last week or so as we prepared for this event last week. so if you think about the correlation and the interconnectedness of channels, got to understand. So connected TV in many ways is going to be a very top of funnel thing. But we're starting to see that go more deep a funnel. Maybe we'll get into that in a little bit as well. But let me give you an example. If you were to just run a display ad and just run that display ad, it's going to convert at its regular rates.

and will optimize performance and get better and faster and faster. But if you were to pair that display ad with a connected TV ad, the actual conversion doubles. Because you're starting to see validation from other places and you're starting to see, oh wow, this company is showing up where I am. so doubling conversion is an incredible thing. Now let's go the inverse. If you were to run only connected TV and just go try connected TV and do that, you're going to see potentially

some results there, but it's more gonna be probably a brand lift, be a little more difficult to measure oftentimes for connected TV, but we're getting a lot better at that, which I'll talk about. ⁓

But if you were to run a display ad with that connected TV ad, the conversion goes up by 30x. So you have the validation and the proof points of seeing that in a large format. ⁓ And then you go online and you have a connected message with what you saw on TV. The conversion is going to go up 30x, which is really, really incredible. And that's just the power of what you can do when you can start to connect these channels.

Pax (11:20)
Yeah, it's something that sometimes we forget is, ⁓ the channel is the message and being multiple places lends itself to like this brand credibility and ubiquity, ⁓ and trust overall. And as you can see from that data, massive payoffs from that. ⁓ so I do want to talk about something that we see, which is like this healthy tension between volume and return. ⁓ if you focus on one of the two, you're either going to be.

wasting money or leaving money on the table. And so really the goal is to find what our head of advertising, Haley Riemann-Schneider, she calls the goalie lock zone, the perfect balance of volume and return. ⁓ You know, we've had cases where, you know, we really nailed the ROAS and then we just kept going down that road, but then revenues starts going down. Yeah, it's great ROAS, but your total volume of purchases don't match that. And so we've learned over, you know,

Ryan Nelsen (12:11)
Yep.

Pax (12:19)
decade of doing this that you have to find that correct balance once you hit the target rise and the game is Increased volume while maintaining that row as as much as possible So ⁓ Generally, you know it begins with like a learning phase where if there's no historical data We need to test audience and messaging but past that learning phase We get into like this sliding scale of growth and efficiency where we work to dial in targeting and bidding strategies to hit target row as

also balancing that volume, like I said. ⁓ as, ⁓ brands work to drive up volume, ⁓ we found that the great way to do that is experimenting with other channels. And, ⁓ we've isolated like three signs that you should look at experimenting with other channels. ⁓ number one is you're in position where your current marketing mix is running at or above target efficiency.

So you have a reasonable customer acquisition cost and ⁓ that is sustainable and your other channels are like your channels well optimized. Number two, through audience research, you know for sure that your audience is in another place that you are not. ⁓ That is a key indicator that you need to be expand your marketing mix. And then number three, you've really reached saturation. ⁓ Spending more money on this platform is not going to improve ROAS overall.

You just can't spend more to grow. And so that at that point you need to start looking at other channels. So my question for you is what should marketing leaders think about as they evaluate new channels? ⁓ How might they ⁓ think about like de-risking as these while also embracing like the value that these new channels are going to.

Ryan Nelsen (14:03)
Yeah, absolutely. So I think it's really important to get the media mix dialed in, understanding what the outcome and goal is that you're trying to drive, knowing that, you know, are you really in a bind to drive performance immediately, which is never obviously the best place to be. You can have a little more time to kind of think bigger. We ran a study recently with ad perceptions that found that 74 % of marketers are prioritizing performance over brand or the other, you know, the remainder is...

prioritizing brand and so I think about this a lot where ⁓ if you think about zooming out to the most simplest way to describe marketing there's brand marketing there's performance marketing.

⁓ both are needed in many ways. ⁓ if you, the challenge we all have as marketers though, is if you only focus on brand, you're probably going to get fired because you're not driving performance. If you only focus on performance, your top of funnel is going to probably dry up and it's going to be much difficult, more difficult to drive the road as you need on your performance campaigns. And so I think that heart and mind that I've kind of like the data, the art and the science, the heart and the mind of brand and performance is a really critical component to get your mix right. ⁓ connected TV.

leans heavy, you know, many ways towards a brand play. But with the technology and tools and QR codes and other things we have now, the ability to drive performance on those campaigns and then connect those across device is a fun thing. We came out with a new ⁓ ability to do cross-channel attribution so you can start to see what attribution is working across channels and which performance channels are working best so that can double down and optimize for that more.

Pax (15:39)
Mm.

Ryan Nelsen (15:39)
I think just

in a more concise way to answer your question, ⁓ thinking a lot about what's the media mix, what is ⁓ defining the goal, what is the end outcome. And I think the most powerful word ⁓ that we can be talking about is the word conversion. And at end of the day, that's the outcome we're trying to drive, whether it's a brand or a performance campaign. Are we converting people to the brand? With our heart and mind, are we converting people to our campaigns through ⁓ the execution that we're driving?

Pax (16:09)
that chop across channel attribution is, ⁓ that's big. So many brands get stuck on that. ⁓ I'd love to, ⁓ maybe not today, but I'd love to dive deeper into that because that is a, ⁓ it's, it's where we need to be thinking, but it's also where some people get stuck and, you know, waste a ton of time building out these attribution models instead of just executing it in a day. So the stack it up can bring that that that's a huge load.

Ryan Nelsen (16:29)
Absolutely.

Pax (16:38)
off of lot of marketers' plates.

Ryan Nelsen (16:41)
Absolutely.

and with the proliferation of AI and just getting ads getting more personalized faster, less time being spent on the creative side of creating those ads, you can spend a lot more time on the measurement side and understanding what's working, what's not. And so you have the ability to help brands ⁓ optimize, go bigger, make a bigger impact ⁓ with AI helping on the creative side.

Pax (17:01)
Mm-hmm.

you had mentioned the, focus on brand and focus on performance marketing. And, ⁓ I, I sometimes I think about that distinction between those two and sometimes like they, they're useful as categories, but sometimes I think the existence of those categories. Limits our minds in terms of how we, yeah. ⁓ you and I talked earlier about a Coinbase, ⁓ and they're superblad being like the perfect example. Like tell me your thoughts about.

Ryan Nelsen (17:24)
Yeah, Glenn.

Mm-hmm.

Pax (17:34)
the Coinbase ad.

Ryan Nelsen (17:34)
Yeah.

Yeah. So you all remember this ad? So the super bowl several years ago, Coinbase came out with, I don't know how old everybody on the call is, but the QR code, they did a QR code. Remember the old VCR ⁓ box that would kind of bounce to the corners of the screen. And then everyone was hoping it would land in the very top corner. And then, you know, everyone kind of freaked out. Coinbase used that play on that with a QR code. so for the, for 30 seconds, they had a QR code scan going across the screen and they had over

20

million downloads of their app immediately and they basically took a large format like the Super Bowl and created a performance channel out of it. And I think we're going to start seeing a lot more of that. We have seen a lot more of that, but even more so where you could take something where what's the actual call to action? What's the conversion you want to really drive?

And they were the number one, I think, top ⁓ app download ⁓ of that week. They were trending all over Twitter at time, X.

And ⁓ ultimately, I think I got a huge return on that campaign ⁓ just by getting a little bit smarter about let's not go spend millions and millions of dollars of getting celebrities and others to promote and present this. Let's put that into the back end experience of our landing page and our conversion and our app. And let's go get just straight to the result of what we wanted. And so that was kind of a creative way to do it. And was very, very basic and simple, but it worked.

Pax (19:06)
such a creative execution. You must get a front row seat to a lot of creative execution on how brands are maybe using channels in unique ways. I'm kind of curious and you may not be able to say reveal anything, but maybe without saying what these brands are, is there any either trends that you're seeing of brands like, man, using this channel in a way that I, that is like off the wall or really cool execution.

Something that you know our listeners may want to hop on in terms of like a trend or way to use a channel in a unique way

Ryan Nelsen (19:42)
Yeah, good question.

Digital out of home is actually blowing up right now. So for those that are not familiar with it, so digital out of home, all the digital billboards you see ⁓ all around, those are becoming lot more popular and you can start to throw QR codes up, not that you want driver scanning codes, but there's also passengers and other things. ⁓ In Times Square, we run several things there. We ran a campaign recently with Heroku Salesforce to take over the Sphere in Las Vegas. And so they run basically through our platform, run the creative, run the ad, their whole executive

team

was there to watch, of see that that was during AWS reinvent ⁓ this last fall. And so ⁓ it doesn't always have to be a huge budget or a huge like that to go, you know, big or taking over the sphere. You can do that in a lot of smaller formats in, you know, in your Lyft or Uber. Seeing that in an app, we have a lot of integrations with apps as well. And so you're starting to get able to get in front of people in creative ways. And it comes down to who's your audience, where

spending their time, what are the goals and impacts that you're really trying to drive, and then start to get really creative about where... ⁓

what your message can be to make it fun and interactive in that setting. have a lot of geo-targeting capabilities where you could be targeting a stadium in a city. If you had a concert, maybe for example, Pearl Jam was a national when we were there. There's a bunch of mega fans of Pearl Jam in that city and you could basically draw a

box or even a diagram around that geo and you'd be able to target their device with really targeted things related to that. And so it's such a fun time to be a marketer, to start literally the sky's the limit in terms of creativity and the ability to target.

measure that. So across the thousands of customers that we have, we're seeing just incredibly creative ways to integrate video, audio, podcasts, in person, in home, ⁓ direct mail, like so many things that are popping up. but I'm excited about Digital Out of Home and Connected TV. I think marketers are under utilizing that right now. I think many dial and display and other things, but as I mentioned previously, as you start to connect those channels and when someone sees something and

Pax (21:49)
No.

Ryan Nelsen (22:02)
and

then they see it their phone and they go home and they see it on TV. It's like, wow, this company is everywhere. And it really can be done very efficiently. We're not really everywhere, but it seems like that.

Pax (22:07)
Yeah.

Ryan Nelsen (22:15)
I always kind of joke just to kind of wrap that up is ⁓ the number one validation that a CEO gets is when they get a text message from their friend saying, hey, I'm seeing your company everywhere. That's really like the holy grail of marketers. want our CEO or our boss to say, wow, I just got this text from somebody I really trust and they're seeing us everywhere. That's really the goal.

Pax (22:26)
Yeah.

Yeah,

that does have a big impact within an organization in terms of getting buy-off and alignment. Let's see if it's impacting the CEO's life. Yeah, for sure. ⁓ So these cool ⁓ channel strategies and ⁓ cool out-of-home strategies, overall I'm just interested in your take as you look at these organizations. What kind of tools do they have in place? What do they have in terms of team setup? What are their common traits?

Ryan Nelsen (22:41)
for sure.

for

Pax (23:05)
Like how should our audience think about the resources it takes to really do this kind of stuff right?

Ryan Nelsen (23:11)
Absolutely.

So ⁓ we're a very, very agency focused ⁓ company as well. we have a lot of agencies on the platform. 97th floor is incredible agency. ⁓ We're doing some incredibly innovative things. so, you know, definitely check them out. And as you dive into things, we're on the back end in many ways, trying to empower ⁓ the very best marketers ⁓ and agencies to do their best work. so, but things are getting streamlined. We can do things faster. We can do things better. And that what that means is basically

you can do and make a bigger impact with less. That said, you got to make the leap and make an investment in budget to go do that. It's difficult to go prove an ROI on a campaign when the dollars are not there. ⁓ But yeah, where needed, start small on a channel, add to it, start seeing the results of it, double down, and then start integrating cross channel into different things. ⁓ But we all know with AI,

everything else that's happening, ⁓ the ability to create content, create ads is a powerful thing. What's actually a fun, cool thing, that's a trend that I'm seeing right now is ⁓ it used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to create ads, specifically TV ads and running commercials, etc. ⁓

The world is opening up to smaller businesses, mid-sized businesses who have not had hundreds of thousands of dollars to run and create the creative side. And then there's no money left over to actually go execute and get that campaign out into the world. You can now start pulling dollars towards the execution and the channels because AI is making it so easy to create very world-class video. And so I'd be an advice I'd have to the group is just start shifting it towards the channel and getting your word out there in a bigger way, spending less

Pax (24:52)
Hmm.

Ryan Nelsen (25:01)
on the creative side.

Pax (25:02)
Interesting. Are there any platforms that you're seeing be particularly successful or tools around the video creation?

Ryan Nelsen (25:09)
I think some of the advanced models and video creation tools that are coming up, new popping up all the time. Our team has a...

ability inside the platform to pull video together as well. so the technology, mean, but with across OpenAI, across Gemini, some of the other mid-journeys, some of these platforms that you're able to go create art and ⁓ graphics, it's freeing up time for creative teams to think more about the audience, what the impact is, what's the story you want to tell, and then what's the prompt we want to give so that we can actually get this really dialed in. And it's fun. ⁓

you know, with audio, ⁓ you know, six months ago, when you hear a podcast that's just completely AI generated, it's very robotic. And now it's getting very, very personalized where you can basically pump in a script. And that is ⁓ an interactive discussion that it creates a podcast for you right away. I love these formats because we're real humans and being able to do that. But you can start to do a lot more across these channels.

Pax (26:01)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah. I think for small businesses, if you are thinking of video means this like high production value thing, TikTok is in my opinion, a great thing to look at because people on the, platform are rethinking what it means, what video means. And it can be a lot of things that

The traditional advertising video world has not yet kind of considered or at least deployed. ⁓ with technologies like StackAdapt, you can really get in and test a lot of different execution strategies. So the barrier to entry on video is lower than it's ever been before, especially if you're willing to rethink what video means within advertising.

Ryan Nelsen (27:08)
Absolutely, video is a powerful thing and you start to do large-scale video in different ways, but even just everybody loves everybody loves ⁓ humor everybody loves Maybe a twist on something and so video opens up that up to tell a story in a bigger way

Pax (27:30)
Yeah, it really does. ⁓ Well, this has been great. We love our partnership with StackAdapt and ⁓ love what it's been able to allow us to do for our clients. And obviously, you know, my plug for Nice Synth Floor is we've been around the block and we've tried and tested lots of things. And so we can really help accelerate your advertising within the platform. ⁓ yeah, it's just been a really great partnership with you. ⁓ I want to...

to share some takeaways to wrap up today. Number one, you should look at other channels of your current marketing mixes running at or above target efficiency. You really, or you know your audience is in another place and you've reached saturation on your existing channels. Number two, the most important thing to consider when looking at a new channel is conversion. What conversions do you need and let that drive your strategy and execution. ⁓

always balancing to the brand and performance. You you never want to be sitting in either one all the time. ⁓ And number three, really the barrier to creating video is lower than ever is right now. So like testing new tools and ⁓ using ⁓ platforms like SACADAPT to get that message out to as many people as possible. Instead of focusing all your resources on production, focus that on distribution. As long as that message is solid.

the ⁓ opportunities there to really get that out. this has been a super, super helpful episode. Ryan, thank you for joining and ⁓ bringing some stats to some amazing stats in terms of multi-channel marketing. It's been a really great episode. Thank you for joining us today.

Ryan Nelsen (29:10)
Thanks, Pax. Appreciate you having me and thanks everybody for listening in. Yeah, I appreciate your partnership as well. You guys are really innovating fast and doing some incredible things. And so we'll keep backing you up and excited for the partnership to continue.

Pax (29:24)
Love that. ⁓ Thank you everybody for tuning in today.

Pax (29:27)
⁓ if you'd like to connect with Ryan, you can reach out to him on LinkedIn. ⁓ also we've built a tool, that helps with this. ⁓ this tool is for evaluating new channels to accompany this conversation. ⁓ it allows you to input the channels you're considering and then compare relative strengths and weaknesses.

between these potential channels and it reveals your overall readiness to launch regardless of the platform. Also, if you're watching live here today, you're going to need a link to this tool in your inbox on Monday. And for everyone else, you can find this tool at 97thfloor.com. Tune in next week, we're going to be joined by Ashley Foss to talk about trust as the fastest way to long-term ROI. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week.

97FL (30:11)
Thanks for listening. The campaign is produced by 97th Floor, a 20-year-old marketing agency that helps companies like McKinsey, Pluralsight, and Checkpoint know their customers, execute innovative campaigns, and drive profitable growth. If you have an allocated growth budget and product market fit, we'd love to do research and build a proposal for you. Visit us at 97thFloor.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe. See you next time.