Join hosts Laura and Lisa as they sit down with Taylor Wells, a seasoned marketing professional and owner of his own agency, for an insightful discussion on the world of paid media. Taylor shares his extensive background in digital marketing and his journey from new media to founding his agency. Delve into topics such as lead generation, B2B software, service organizations, and the importance of a holistic approach to demand generation. Gain valuable insights into overcoming challenges and identifying ideal clients in the ever-changing landscape of paid media.

Timestamps:

• 00:00 - Introduction: Welcoming Taylor Wells to The Paid Media Playbook
• 03:15 - Taylor's Background and Early Career Experiences in Paid Media
• 11:45 - Navigating High-Value Enterprise Deals and Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
• 23:20 - Overcoming Challenges and Advice to Young Media Professionals
  
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Links and Resources:

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• Laura Szczes on LinkedIn
• Double Z Media Website
• Double Z Media on LinkedIn

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Transcription:

Well, welcome Taylor and thank you for joining us on the paid media playbook. How are you this morning?

Doing well. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to our discussion.

Us too. Would you start by telling our listeners a little bit of your background with paid media?

Sure. Yeah, happy to. And it's. Yeah, it's definitely been I've been involved in paid media throughout my entire career 15 plus years in marketing and sales. I started out really in in, in what's called new media. I think I was on a political campaign. And so they. They gave me the coin new media.

So I've always really been in the social and digital world, less traditional. so my context is from that. And then also really focused on early stage organizations. So, like I mentioned, I worked in politics, but I also worked in some BTC companies. And then for the past 10 years, I've been working in B2B companies, early stage paid media.

So a lot of my past couple, you know, 5, 10 years has been from the paid media side. Lead generation. You know that's probably been the main focus is how do we drive leads? And obviously book demos and things like that, bottom of the funnel stuff. But that's been the main focus. And I know we'll get into kind of some of the challenges that I've been facing or I've seen in my career.

But yeah, some context for the audience on, on where I'm coming from.

And you have your own agency now. Is that correct? Potential opportunity.

So paid media is part of it. I also do outbound partnerships, content, customer advocacy. And so kind of all those are the kind of the and paid media, the 5 buckets of demand gen is how I think about it. And paid media is a really important part of that. But it's also what I found is if you don't get the other 4 buckets, right?

Or the 3 buckets really. Paid media becomes a lot harder, which we can talk about that more today, too.

Yeah,

Did we ask you what is your ideal client

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Yeah. , it's usually between, like, 1 and 5 million in revenue B2B software or service organization. So, most of them are software companies I work with a lot, but I do work with some service, service based organizations. You know, they're a service provider or they, they serve they, you know, they serve other businesses through services, but also software to a lot of enterprise deals.

So, like, there's like emotions, which are like. You know, probably under 5k annual, annual deal sizes, right? So kind of smaller, high velocity. I work in kind of the upper end of like higher deal sizes. So like 50, 25 to kind of six figures, which is getting sent to the, like ABM account based marketing world.

And and we can talk about paid media in that room too, as far as like one to one, one to two, one to many and those concepts but mostly enterprise B2B software service. Kind of in that early stage, one to 5 million. They don't have enough money to hire a CMO or a head of marketing or head of demand but they need the expertise.

Right. So they may have a small marketing team or maybe they have like a junior marketer on their team and need somebody to come in and provide the leadership, provide the strategy and also help execute.

absolutely. Yeah. It's funny.

This is like a perfect sales pitch. I'm going to, I'm going to take this and yeah, use this for an ad.

No, I'm joking.

Most of our clients are B2C but I got to play around with Terminus last year an ABM, which was so fascinating how it's like almost exactly the same, but not quite as a different DSP.

You know, all of the strategy and you know, A2B testing and optimizations are basically the same concept, but like what you're actually doing is so different.

Yeah. And actually, I've never heard of the DSP term. You want to educate me on that?

I, it's an, it's an ABM DSP. So it works with really closely with CRM information.

and A DSP is it means demand side platform.

Got it. Got it.

But I think for the startups, for, for folks that are, you know you know, pre product market fit, or just even getting, or even like under a hundred million in revenue, right? Like you. You have you just have so many more constraints. You don't have the ability to throw it. And then we're also dealing with a couple market shifts in the, in the aspect of competition.

So in the B2B space, an average SAS platform has anywhere from like four, 14 to 17 competitors, depending on what stat you look at. So you have so many more competitors now than you did seven, 10 years ago. Add onto that. You also have AI, which is. You know, not only I think, you know, AI is going to have a, which we can talk about a little bit today, too, around creative or paid media, which would be interesting, but AI is also a form of competition in the sense that they're going to, you know, people are creating software faster now because of AI.

So that means there's gonna be more tools out there. It's going to replace some service jobs. And so the competition, I think, as, as, which actually, I think most people don't talk about actually. And I think this, this year, like 2024, 2025, especially in my world. Like competitor ads and, and like actually going to market to like educate the market on how you're different from your competitors.

I think it was super important because everyone has a competitor now. So, so you have less money to grow, you have less money to spend on sales and marketing. You have more competition. And then now we can also talk about all the, the demission returns on all the paid media from whAnd so people just dump money on that. And then they also, I think like attribution and they have, they've done a great job. Google meta have done a great job at, and LinkedIn have done a great job of telling us that you are getting great performance on paid media when in all reality.

Who knows, like, especially in B2B where you have like sales cycles that can be multi year long, right? Who knows? B2C, if you have like a 30 day sales cycle, or 15 day, or 10 day, or 5 day, or whatever, a little different. But yeah, especially B2B where you're like dealing with really long buying cycles, you're like yeah.

So, I don't know. I think there's a lot

Yeah, that is true. Do you feel like in B2B, like one way to stand out? Do you do like a lot of testimonials or expert, like, you know, I'm just curious what the creative typically is like the thing you would recommend most to B2B. It just depends on the customer, I'm sure. But like, what do you find yourself doing when you like, if you had to make a 15 for most of your clients, would it, would it be something like a testimonial or

Yeah, great question. Thanks for asking. Yeah, I think it really depends. I mean, there's obviously like the top, middle, bottom funnel, you know, frameworks for content. And I still think those are great. And those are really applicable in a lot of ways. I think for the B to B side, especially since the sales cycles are still long.

It's very, like, it's not relationship it's not relationship based, but it's a relationship influenced. So relationships are so important. So to your point, customers, influencers, strategic partners even employee advocacy those areas, like, I think are, you know, Hugely impactful when it comes to your marketing, right?

No one really cares what we have to say. Like, we're all biased, right? We're marketers, salespeople. We're selling a product. Like, no one really cares about what we have to say. So I think customer advocacy, customer testimonials, hugely important, but also influencers, strategic partners, centers of influence is, I think, an older school term for, for what we're talking about here.

But yeah, centers of influence of how do you get how do you get folks that have the relationship with your ideal customer? How do you get them to advocate? How do you get them to promote? So there's part of that. I would say that's like, that's table stakes, right? Like, you got to have, if you don't have people that are recommending you and you're 15 second or even longer creative, whatnot, then, then you're totally missing out.

I think, you know, In conjunction with that, what I've seen the most also really effective is really thought leadership ads and thought leadership in general. And this is where, you know, it kind of goes beyond the 15 second short, you know ads, but it goes more into how do we provide value outside of our product.

And this is where I've like built my entire career really the past 10 years. And everything I've done has been successful is like, always kind of goes back to this, which is.

Hey, we're doing it right now. And we're actually, we're strategic partners. We're both, you know, we're leveraging each other's networks.

We're, it's a great, yeah, very super meta, but super accurate, right? Like we're, we're, we're, we're doing co marketing right now. We're creating a thought leadership all sorts of fun stuff. So a hundred percent agree. I think thought leadership, it's a term that's kind of been dragged through the mud, I think in some ways.

So I like to think about it in the sense of like, How do you help people solve a problem? How do you create impact pre customer? So that could be like in the B2B world, that could be product led growth, where you like giving somebody a free trial or a a freemium experience introductory tool, whatever for enterprise.

It could be a proof of concept. It could be a salesperson coming in with a consultative perspective, right? Where they're actually like, Hey, you know what? Why don't you do this right in the, when they're doing a demo versus just pitching the product. Huge opportunity there for salespeople, like the best salespeople I've ever interacted with.

Have been people that actually help people solve a problem in a sales interaction versus just positioning their product. You got to do both. But if you can build that relationship, build that trust, you'll, you'll set yourself apart. And then in marketing, there's just a ton of ways to do it, right? Like, there's obviously the product side, which we talked about, like, creating a smaller version of your product, but there's content.

There's simple tools and, and really how do you create and then if you can create content that's both, like, if you want to say, like, if you want to hear the, like, the best content I've ever seen work is you combine social proof and you combine thought leadership. So, an example of this could be, you could host an event where you have your customer come on a panel with other customers or prospects, even, which is really fun to do where you have prospects and customers on a panel.

You do a thought leadership discussion where you go through, you know. A relevant topic. And you get their expertise to share with the audience, right? Get value for the audience. Inevitably every single time, I kid you not, the customer that's on that panel is going to bring up your product,

Right.

right? So now you get this natural social proof, which is, I mean, let's be honest.

Like I was, I was reading a testimony yesterday and I was like, this is the most canned testimony I've ever read in my life. It was like, it was like AI wrote it basically. And I think actually a lot of testimonies are like that because it's, it's, it's You know, you're you kind of fine tune every little bit of the testimonial or you edit the case study video to make it like really

Right. Absolutely. Yeah.

as super unnatural, you know, and so I think what's really cool is getting that natural social proof where it's like, not staged.

Like I was, I was reading a testimony yesterday and I was like, this is the most canned testimony I've ever read in my life. It was like, it was like AI wrote it basically. And I think actually a lot of testimonies are like that because it's, it's, it's You know, you're you kind of fine tune every little bit of the testimonial or you edit the case study video to make it like really

Right. Absolutely. Yeah.

as super unnatural, you know, and so I think what's really cool is getting that natural social proof where it's like, not staged.

It's really natural. And it's like, you know, they kind of joke about it's like, well, you know, I don't want to. I don't want to position, you know, my, I don't want to sell the product, but, you know, we are customers of them and this is how we solve this

But it's more of a talking head with a name underneath. And so you're saying it's so canned versus being right there with somebody and having a conversation.

way more natural. And you're also providing value in that experience to the thought leadership. Right? So it's like they immediately win, but then they're like, oh, cool. So you help me solve 1 of these problems. And here's the concept that it kind of all boils down to is if you can help somebody solve 1 problem.

They're more likely to help. They're more likely to come to you to solve more, more problems on top of that. Right. It's kind of reciprocity, but it's a little bit different in this. It's more of this unconditional, like unconditional serving somebody. We're like, Hey, I can help you with this problem. Now let's, I built the trust, which is like the name of the game.

In business in general, but especially in B2B where people's careers are on the line, you're, you're making hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, you know, purchasing decisions. So huge, huge stakes. And so, yeah, if you can create yeah, ultimately that, that experience super powerful.

Cool.

Well, you mentioned earlier how paid media is only one bucket of the bigger picture. What would you say is a green flag that someone is ready to start paid media that would be beneficial to them?

Great question. So thank you. Yeah, good. A good, good flag. I would say, you know, paid media can, can help, you know, with ideation and, and and, and ultimately getting feedback quickly. I won't say this is a hard and fast rule because you can like go to market really quickly with, with paid media and start getting feedback on creative, getting feedback on what's working, what's not working, what's resonating with, with the audience.

Yeah.

Well, we're about at time. Taylor, thank you so much for joining us. Before we let you go. One last question. If you could give yourself at the beginning of your career, one piece of advice, what would it be?

great question. I think I probably will just reiterate what I just said. It's about that, you know, customer experience, time to value. How do you serve? I do think there's a concept that in my, my second book I'll write someday is called the selfless advantage. And it's actually really about this idea of, it's not about reciprocity where you get, you give to somebody and the expectance that they return it.

You know, they, they return the favor. It's actually about how do you serve unconditionally with and, and without expectation. And if you can do that I think you live a better life. You just have like you build more relationships, you, you you have more fun but you also reduce your costs, your, your cost of acquisition, your sales cycle gets reduced.

And everything just improves when you go with that mindset of how do you, how do you serve so yeah, that selfless advantage, how do you be selfless in every interaction? And it's not hard to do that in sales and marketing because we actually, by definition are the most selfish. Departments out of anyone in the org.

Our goal is revenue, right? And nothing wrong with that, but it's you know, customer success, product, R and D, all of them are really focused on the customer. And their whole thing is a customer where we're, we're more focused on revenue. So I think there's a ton of opportunity for people to kind of like, come in and focus on experience.

Be self selfish self ish self list as you

Yeah.

that 1 and it's not about like, not caring about revenue. It's not about not focusing on you know, driving and results

But believing in what you do, I think helps a lot to be selfless because you're like, I'm helping you. I get to help you. I get, I get to do that.

Is a huge part of that. Knowing that your product actually, you believe in, you've seen it, right? You've seen your product work. And then how do you take a little bit of that product and deliver it in marketing and sales, right? A little bit through content, through whatever it is. And yeah, build that relationship, build that trust.

It's a heck of a lot more fun than just like pushing people through a funnel. And you get way better results. I found

Cool.

right on.

Thank you.

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