Welcome to Getting Granular

EPISODE SUMMARY

Social Media and B2B marketing are the stars of this episode. Steve Kroll (VP) and Mike Fleming (Sr. Manager, Paid Media) discuss why it’s important for B2B companies to have a paid social media strategy in place. They talk about best practices and how to get started designing a strategy for B2B marketing plans.

SHOW NOTES

What you’ll learn in this episode of Getting Granular: • How B2B companies can gain traction through paid social media • How paid social media can fit into the key attributes of a B2B strategy • How to research where your audience is on the internet • How to take advantage of targeting capabilities on social media platforms • How Facebook’s algorithms can impact a social media strategy • The types of content that work best for paid social media • How paid social media can help boost trade shows and other marketing efforts • How to measure campaigns and consider multi-touch attribution • How and why paid social media keeps your content alive for longer

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

Narrator: Welcome to Getting Granular, the podcast where digital marketing experts from the agency Granular talk about the latest trends, tried-and-true best practices, and share their unfiltered thoughts about the industry. Whether you’re here to learn how to grow your business, improve your digital skills, or just want to hear some Midwest PPC experts rant about digital media, you’ve come to the right place.

Steve Kroll: Welcome to the Getting Granular podcast. I’m your host, Steve Kroll. I’m the Vice President at the agency Granular. Today we’re talking to Mike Fleming, Director of Paid Media at Granular, and we’re going to dive right into the topic of why business-to-business marketers need a paid social strategy. Thanks, Mike, for joining me to chat, and we’re just going to jump right into it. The impetus for this podcast, like I mentioned in the title, is really based around B2B paid social. There are a lot of myths and inconsistent approaches and best practices to what marketers who have a B2B audience that want to reach their audience in social. They don’t really have a great roadmap that’s out there, best practices from a pay-per-click standpoint and how to approach it.

Steve Kroll: I’m not saying that Granular necessarily has the best approach, but I’d like to believe we have a great mindset and approach in terms of the types of questions we ask, the steps that we take to figure out what a strategy could look like on the social front. And this podcast is really inspired on a podcast series that you’ve been writing on the Granular blog in the last year-plus that’s performed really well, I guess what inspired you to start diving into this topic.

Mike Fleming: Well, I mean, honestly, working with some B2B companies and seeing their social media efforts, the truth about it is that most companies are just not very good at social. They think that social media is about posting updates about their company, and how great their company is, and that just really isn’t what social media’s all about. It’s in the name, right? Social media. We know in the context of a cocktail party, if someone’s walking around talking about themselves all the time, and not interested in who they’re interacting with, that that’s not a good strategy at a cocktail party, so why would it be a good strategy on a social media site?

Mike Fleming: And so, yeah, I was just kind of motivated to, basically to find out why… What does paid social have to do with social media strategy? Because there’s kind of the organic side of it, and there’s also the paid side of it. And why would it be advantageous for a B2B company who typically thinks that social media is not a great platform for them? Why is it important to be on social media? So that was kind of the questions stirring around in my mind that made me hunt down some answers for that.

Steve Kroll: What I’ve really heard you talk about, what I’ve read you write about, is that the audience you’re looking to reach, they might be B2B audience, but these are individuals you’re looking to reach that happen to be the decision-makers at these businesses. So, what I’m hoping to do in this conversation is kind of explore more of the detail around those ideas that you’ve mentioned in those blog posts around why you need to think about it differently when you’re trying to target these users on social platforms, and what you can do with the tools that are provided if you’re an advertiser on these platforms, versus if you’re relying just strictly on the organic posting and “free” traffic that you get.

Mike Fleming: Right. Yeah, definitely. I think really what it comes down to is all the attributes about B2B that make it perfect for social media, and that’s kind of counterintuitive to what people typically think. But if you think about it, B2B is a longer-term sales cycle, right? You have to sell long-term value on the value of your product or service. You have to sell to groups of people, you have to sell for longer, since there’s more dollars, there’s more people, there’s more commitment involved from the business that you’re targeting. You have to build more trust and relationship, because the investment they’re making is usually in the hundreds of thousands or millions, maybe even. You have to ensure the success of the buyer, not just sell to them the product, but in order to maintain a long-term relationship, you have to ensure that they’re successful with you, even after they purchase. And you have to sell your service and support more heavily, you know? How can you service my account after I’m a customer?

Mike Fleming: So all of those attributes of B2B, what a lot of B2B advertisers don’t realize is those attributes are perfect for social media because social media is cheaper and easier to spread your message than really any other medium we’ve ever seen. So in ways of communicating with your audience, and not only that, the point about there being groups of people involved in the decision-making, they can more easily share that content with each other and keep up to date on what’s going on with you. All those attributes are just perfect for social.

Steve Kroll: Okay, so to that point, what do you say to the skeptic who will tell you, “Mike, that all sounds well and good. I have a role where I’m overseeing marketing in a B2B organization where we sell professional services to enterprise, and we have a very niche service. Google makes sense, customers going to Google, they’re performing a search, that can make sense. LinkedIn maybe even makes sense, but our customers aren’t on Facebook, they’re not watching YouTube. We’re talking decision-makers who… They don’t spend time browsing there. We want to reach this targeted audience. It’s a more complex sales cycle.” What would you say to that, and someone who has that skeptical approach to B2B social advertising?

Mike Fleming: I’d probably say to anybody that skeptical about where their audience is online to do a little research, or to ask someone that really knows the ins and outs of the platforms, because the targeting capabilities of some of these platforms are very niche and very down to things like job title, down to things like uploading lists of companies, right, that you might already have a list of 1,000, 2,000 or more target companies that you’d like to work with, and these platforms allow you to upload that information. And so, yeah, you might think, “Well, my target’s not browsing online all day,” but that doesn’t mean they’re not doing it in their free time or on their weekends, or that kind of thing, or even during the day. A platform like LinkedIn, you see people in the B2B space there all the time.

Mike Fleming: It kind of goes back to the old saying of “always be testing,” right? Finding your audience online is another thing to test. You know, what platforms might they be on? And I’ve seen methods of not even having to use advertising dollars to find that out. For example, you can put a tag on your website in some of these platforms, and just collect audience data in terms of how big that audience might be, without ever running a campaign. And so you can go on and see, “Oh man, I’ve got 10,000 people have come to my site in the last 90 days that are on that platform, that have also been to my website.” Right? It really is all about giving it a shot and testing.

Steve Kroll: Mike, hearing you talk about that, the targeting and reaching the audiences, I think what is important to keep in mind is that those are methods and tools you can leverage if you’re willing to pay for the advertising, versus if you’re organically posting. So I want to explore that more, and hear you maybe talk about what has really happened with the transition from… If you’re a B2B marketer looking to reach your audience using these platforms, using the free tools they provide, how that’s really changed and evolved over time to make it so that way, you have to really be involved in the paid advertising side.

Mike Fleming: Yeah, I mean, the big problem over the years, really, has been that companies go on these social media platforms, and like I mentioned earlier, they just talk about themselves, they talk about their own efforts, and trying to get their audience to think well of them or buy their stuff, right? And this is really… It’s not a social media strategy, it’s a sales strategy, right? But just sales strategies does not work on social media. So, because they’re solving for their own problems instead of their customers’, it just makes social not a great platform for them.

Mike Fleming: So, what has happened over the years is, on a platform like Facebook, companies have continuously done this sort of salesy approach, and the analytics guru Avinash Kaushik, he actually named what happens in this situation called the Zuck Death Spiral, because what happens is businesses post company-focused content, and then humans don’t engage, of course, so the social platforms give less visibility to those business posts. In fact, we’ve seen Facebook within the last year, I believe, come out and say, “Hey, we’re adjusting our algorithm, we’re going to give you more of the content that you want from friends and family, and less from businesses.” And the funny thing about it is, of course, advertisers’ reaction is, “Oh, you just want us to pay more to get our content on the News Feed.” And while that may be true, the reality of it also is, no, you just haven’t done a good job of, as a community, giving us content that people want to see. Right? And because of that, we need to watch out for ourselves, because people are going to stop using the service if it’s annoying to them, right?

Mike Fleming: So, what happens is the business post gets less visibility, and so humans are engaging less, and then you keep going on and on, less visibility, less visibility. So, overall, what’s happened in this kind of Zuck Death Spiral is that brands end up getting like less than 1% of reach via their organic contributions on social platforms, and then on the 1% of reach they get, they get less than 1% engagement. So if you do the math, it’s like 0.1% of people actually even like or comment or anything, and what’s funny about that is 0.1% of your audience is being social on social media, so it really makes no sense. So, if you go, if the average B2B company goes and looks at the company engagement on their page, compared to the amount of followers you have, it’s probably pathetic.

Steve Kroll: Yeah, what really stood out to me there in your explanation as you’re laying this all out, to me it sounds like the organizations who had viewed social platforms, Facebook being a well-known one, as almost like a bullhorn, an opportunity to just broadcast to the users and not asking the question of, “What value am I adding to this user?” It sounded less like marketing and more like, “We’re going to post things, and it should just generate some sort of intended business result for us as a business,” versus, “The people who chose to like our page, who chose to follow us, what have I done for them lately to add value?”

Steve Kroll: And what I heard you saying is the answer isn’t just, hey, if we have had these same habits, and now we’re just going to pay to get the same type of content in front of users, they shouldn’t be shocked when the results are still poor, because what I’m hearing you saying is, you have to have the approach that, “What value am I adding to the user?” Even if it’s a business-to-business user, that’s still an individual of that business who’s chosen to follow or like your page, so you should probably think about, what are the… What is it like to be in their shoes? What keeps them up at night? What sorts of problems do they need help solving? What sort of novel information is good for them to know? The examples I’ve seen of campaigns that you’ve implemented and executed B2B social strategies, they’ve kind of had more of that flavor and approach, versus just broadcasting out content using paid ads as a blunt instrument.

Mike Fleming: Yeah, let’s be honest, it takes more work. Like, it takes more work on the part of the advertiser, because to develop content that’s truly valuable and unique, right, it takes work. You’ve got to know what your customer’s going to find valuable, and then producing it takes time, money, and energy, right? But I think what we’re seeing is businesses are realizing that if we’re going to spend the time, I’d rather have one piece of great content than a bunch of salesy posts over three months, right? Just forget… Stop posting, right? Stop posting about yourself. Produce me one piece of content that’s going to be valuable, that your audience is going to want, and going to want to use, and going to remember you by. And that really is the way to go.

Steve Kroll: So, thinking about it, B2B marketers should put themselves in the shoes of their audience, and they should think of the tools that they currently use to engage with customers and to get them into their sales and marketing funnel, even if it’s outside of social, and think about the times where it works well, why is that, and how can they leverage the social platforms to mimic or even enhance that experience? If you imagine, a lot of the B2B companies rely on exhibiting at trade shows, and trade shows, what’s happening? You’re having members of your team have physical real estate, a booth. They’ve got account executives, practitioners, a lot of times salespeople who, their job is once users who are walking by, a captive audience, has seen information about the booth, it’s, if you use the example of… The marketing has kind of brought them there to the booth to stop and engage, and it’s the salesperson’s job to educate, answer questions, and then get them to take the desired action, a lot of times, schedule a consultation or a demo.

Steve Kroll: That’s not too dissimilar from the digital experience in terms of, you could substitute out the booth design to get someone to stop, that would be an ad in that example. Getting someone to stop and talk to the salesperson, that’s not too different than what a landing page would be. And then the salesperson trying to get the user to schedule a demo or a follow-up consultation, well, that would be filling out a form or calling in. And so, obviously a lot of these organizations are investing money, a lot of times quite a bit of money, in trade shows, and they know the tactics that seem to work, being able to interact with the potential customer on their terms, answer questions, qualify them, but they’re not mirroring that in their B2B paid social strategy. I think that’s kind of interesting, that when I use that example, a lot of organizations will kind of say, “Oh yeah, I guess that is kind of similar to… I’ve never thought about it that way.”

Mike Fleming: Yeah, I mean, it’s basically an offline funnel and an online funnel, right? And honestly, 80% or more of a budget in the B2B space for advertising is going to be top or middle funnel, right? Because of that long buying cycle, because of the long decision-making processes that go on, the vetting processes most B2B people need to get, right, vet three companies or something to bring the decision-makers. Because of that, most of your efforts are going to be top funnel, you know, valuable information that they’re going to need, middle funnel type stuff, schedule a demo, read our white paper, that kind of stuff.

Mike Fleming: And so, thinking about it that way and how you would budget, and also the results that you expect, right? Too many times, B2B advertisers expect leads, leads, leads from every campaign, and it’s like, that is not the way to go about it, right? Especially when… You know, if an average sales is hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is it a lot of times, why would you expect one touchpoint to land that sale? You wouldn’t offline, right? So you can’t online.

Steve Kroll: That’s a good point. To bring this back to the specifics of paid social, and how that tool enables marketers to get in front of their precise audience, I think it’d be valuable if you wouldn’t mind just walking through the strategy and tactics around how you can reach that user on paid social, and you can solve the problem of getting in front of that right person, regardless of where they’re at in the funnel. I think that’d be interesting.

Mike Fleming: Yeah, so paid social, it solves the Zuck Death Spiral problem of you posting content, just nobody seeing it and nobody engaging with it. Yes, you have to pay for it, but there’s a lot of advantages to paid that organic just doesn’t have. For example, it’ll get you the reach you deserve, right? If you go through, like I said, the time, effort, and energy to produce a valuable piece of content, and then post it organically and no one sees it, what was the point? And so paid social really… You know, it allows you to get in front of a larger percentage of your audience, so that’s great. It also keeps you accountable, right? If you think about it, if you’re going to put a budget towards this, do you want to spend money on clicks on a crappy piece of content? No, you don’t. So it kind of, before you launch, you want to make… It keeps you accountable to create something worth paying for.

Mike Fleming: It also keeps your content alive, right? On organic social, you post it, 15 minutes later, it’s gone, right? Never to be heard of again, right? And then if you post it multiple times, people can get annoyed if they see it multiple times, that kind of thing. And so it keeps your content alive for however long is appropriate, and you can use platforms to make sure there are frequency caps, and some of the platforms even are getting into natural frequency caps, like they have algorithms that keep certain content from being shown too much to people. And so the platforms really help keep your content alive for longer, so that you get the value from it that you put into it.

Mike Fleming: And I would say the last one is they can build your own audience. On social, if someone likes your Facebook page, we consider that a rented audience, because you don’t actually own the platform. And so, if Facebook were to die, for example, or any of these other platforms, your audience would be gone. But your owned audiences are people that sign up for a newsletter, or they give you their information because you supplied some good content to them, so it allows you to then build those audiences up that you can then retarget on other platforms as time goes on. So, a lot of advantages of paid social that you just don’t get through organic.

Steve Kroll: Couple interesting things there I want to touch on that you brought up. The first is this idea around, you create a valuable piece of content, why wouldn’t you put money to make sure it’s in front of the right people and being able to set a budget for it? I think a lot of organizations, even though you’re starting to hear it more, there are still a lot of organizations that aren’t thinking, “What’s the ROI of this content we produced? Hey, we’re going to put money behind promoting it.” Being able to have the question of, “Well, why are we doing it? How are we going to measure the success?” That is something that may be in the past, you would have people who would just promote it for promotion’s sake, maybe put a couple dollars boosting it, what have you.

Steve Kroll: But when you’re saying B2B paid social advertising, some of those audiences you’re trying to reach can be expensive, I think it definitely is a smart approach, but an interesting approach to ask the question, “All right, what do we need to do to make the ROI for this make sense, even if some of the conventional metrics for measuring it aren’t the same as selling a widget, generating a direct lead?”

Mike Fleming: Getting kind of spoiled in that area, to be honest, online, because you can almost track anything, even though there are attribution issues still. We want to know exactly the ROI of our ad spend, and for most of social media, it doesn’t work that way. It’s hard to connect top-of-funnel actions to bottom-funnel purchases, necessarily. But you can, in a way, because you can create remarketing audiences out of those, but your metrics may be different at the top of the funnel than the bottom of the funnel. Like I said earlier, if I’m showing a valuable piece of content that doesn’t… I might not necessarily want to ask for an email address if it’s not a gated piece of content or something like that, and so I can’t measure leads from that, I can’t measure cost per lead from that. But I can measure reach, for example, I can measure engagement, for example.

Mike Fleming: And to be honest with you, on social media, your best metrics are engagement metrics, right? They’re how much is my message getting amplified, am I getting any applause, meaning are people liking it, that kind of thing. And paid social can get you, like I said, the exposure to find out which pieces of content over time resonate the best with your audience. If you post it organically, hardly anybody’s going to see it, so… Right? But paid social can really get you the visibility you need to see, you know, if you spend $500 on a piece of content, is it worth spending another $500 on? Did we do something right, did we do something wrong? That kind of thing.

Steve Kroll: That’s great explanation, and giving additional context. The other item that stood out to me from what you’re talking about with the benefits of paid versus organic was this idea of a rented audience. Now, that’s something where you and I have… In our conversations, I don’t think I’ve heard you say that phrase. It’s something that I think is really interesting, because as you explain it, it resonates, when you think of the platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, what have you, that you shouldn’t just have the mindset of, “Hey, we just have followers on those platforms, and they can engage with us in that platform.”

Steve Kroll: What I hear you saying is, let’s get those… Take advantage of the reach and the targeting ability to get in front of the audience, with the goal to get them into the ecosystem of the B2B marketer. They’re coming to the website, they’re submitting a form. Now they’re in their instance of Pardot, Marketo, HubSpot, their own CRM. They have the ability to market to them, they have their contact information. I think that’s an interesting insight when you’re looking at what the value was to acquire that self-qualified lead who’s come through that platform, and not just looking at it as, “Hey, we ran a likes campaign or a followers campaign on that platform.” You’re saying, all right, that’s fine if you know going in that’s the goal, is we want to be there, but really should think about this owned audience versus the rent audience. You may have found them on one of these platforms, but now they’re in your ecosystem because they’ve come to your landing page, they filled out a form that’s now tied into your marketing automation platform or CRM.

Mike Fleming: Yeah, and two issues there. Number one is you don’t have any control over those audiences, right? The platform does, because they like your page, but it’s really the platform’s page with your brand on it. So there’s an issue of control there, like if their policies change, that could change, you know? If their platform changes in the future, that changes.

Mike Fleming: And then secondly, it shows intent. Like, if someone is willing to become a part of your owned audience, even if they don’t purchase from you yet, they’ve shown intent, and that’s a signal, right? It moves them down in the funnel to where… Where are you going to spend the portion of your budget dedicated to getting, actually getting leads and sales? Like, earlier I said most of your budget’s going to be spent on awareness and driving people and… Really, it’s finding out who is going to be in your owned audience. It’s building that, and then using your owned audience to do more of the salesy type stuff and less of the social type stuff.

Steve Kroll: Sure. Yeah, if you don’t mind, there are a couple… I don’t know what you would call them, I guess critiques or putting on the cynic’s cap to being a B2B marketer using paid social, if you wouldn’t mind me kind of putting on that cap and asking some questions. The first would be, hey, you’ve talked about how you can use these platforms to get content in front of users, you’ve talked about reach. It would be interesting to hear how you would combat the… what a lot of individuals’ experience is that run campaign targeting some of these audiences that are B2B decision-makers, C-suite, where these are very expensive cost per clicks on LinkedIn, on Facebook. How reliable is that targeting information, especially if you’re having to pay quite a bit of money, cost per click? Aren’t there other forms of advertising, or do you really have to have a lot of money going in as a budget before you even get involved in doing paid social, otherwise don’t do it at all?

Mike Fleming: Well, I would say don’t do it at all if you don’t have content worthy of it. And then, if you do feel like you have content worthy of it, test it with a small budget. Don’t roll out and say, “Okay, we’re going to roll out a $10,000 campaign,” you know? Roll out a $1,000 campaign, see how it… See what happens, and then learn from that, and then take another piece of content, learn from that, another, learn from that. Pretty soon you’ll see patterns. You’ll see content that your audience likes, content that it’s not so much, right? So that’s how I would start.

Mike Fleming: And then, the biggest thing in terms of starting, too, is when it comes to the quality of your content, are you actually listening to your audience? That’s really the key. You were mentioning earlier about the offline process. There’s a lot of times the offline interactions that B2B people have, B2B marketers, have, should lead to content ideas, because they’re talking to their customers, they’re talking about their pain points, they’re talking about information they need to make a decision, maybe even information that a customer doesn’t even know they need to make a decision. All of those are ideas to create content, and not only create content, but then repurpose content in different forms. So, you might get an idea for a white paper that might turn into a video, that might turn into a blog post, that might turn into something else. And so, creating all different forms, but really… Really, that’s the number one, I think, struggle of B2B marketers when they think about getting into social media advertising, is, “What content do I create?” And really, the answer to that is, let your ears be your guide.

Steve Kroll: Yeah, that is interesting. In the process of Granular, we work with a lot of organizations that their audience is business-to-business, and as we’re trying to better understand their business so we can help them, they have a lot of these insights, whether that’s the executive team, sales, marketing, where they know very well their customer, they have all these interactions. And we don’t really talk about it that much, but it’s kind of interesting when you kind of scratch your head and think, boy, you guys have all of this great content, all of this great data, and you’re having a hard time wrapping your head around, “What does our audience care about?” Well, when we’ve just spent all this time asking you, “What allows you to be successful?” and they’re being very effective at saying, “We solve these problems, consumers who have these questions, these are the answers that we have. Here’s how we approach it, here’s the process for how we get someone qualified in our system.”

Steve Kroll: I know it sounds obvious, but it should really be, all right, how do you take what you just told us and use that as the fuel for the content, along the lines of what you just mentioned? That should really be driving it, based on what you’ve just told us.

Mike Fleming: Right, and you’re already investing in the talent at your company, right? That talent maybe you, if you’re the one listening and responsible for this. I think part of the B2B marketer’s job is listening for what the customer truly needs in the process, whether it’s early in the process or late in the process. That’s your number one job, I think, is to create content worthy of being promoted.

Steve Kroll: So, Mike, what would you say to someone who says, “Hey, content, great, content, content, content. I hear content is king, and I have to create content and reach, but Mike, what I really need are leads. I need people in our funnel that are qualified leads for our sales team to follow up on, and I don’t have the time to just create content with the hopes that I get people liking it and commenting on it, because we need to generate leads”?

Mike Fleming: Well, that’s the cool thing about digital, is there’s platforms and capabilities for every step of the funnel. So, if you think about search, it’s just naturally later funnel, because what drives a person to search for your solution? Well, it’s because they’re probably thinking about purchasing, right, whereas someone on social isn’t actively thinking it’s time to purchase what you’re offering. So that mix of search and social in your overall media mix is definitely important, and what’s cool is that these platforms can communicate with each other in ways.

Mike Fleming: For example, if you get someone on social to come to your website, they now are part of an audience that you can retarget on search, so if they ever do a search, you knew they were at your website before, and you can bid higher or get more aggressive with those people. And vice-versa, if they came to your site through search, you can retarget them with a bottom-of-the-funnel lead form ad that is like, “Are you ready to make a contact with us?” And they can easily do that through social. Yeah, it’s the interplay of the platforms, and typically, for any spot in the funnel or any audience, there’s a platform that we can find that the audience is there.

Steve Kroll: Awesome. Thanks, Mike. We covered a lot of ground, but I wanted to open this up if there’s anything else that you would say that listeners to this podcast should keep in mind or consider when they’re looking to invest in B2B paid social.

Mike Fleming: Yeah, just keep in mind the cycle of social media success, and the cycle starts with being a great voice of customer listener. And then the second step is producing valuable customer-focused content based upon what you’ve heard from your customers, and being consistent with it. The third step is gaining trust, which that consistency results in. As you’re consistent with giving content out, that’s part of the sales process, even though it’s more social than it seems salesy. Part of the sales process is gaining trust with the people you encounter, and online honestly is, like I said earlier, cheaper and quicker than any other channel. You can get information in the hands of your target customers more quickly and more cheaply than we’ve ever seen.

Mike Fleming: And then the last step is just reaping the rewards, right? Customers will come to you when they’re ready, in their time, when it’s ready to make a decision. And then just repeating that cycle over and over. They come to you, they purchase, but the relationship isn’t over, right? It’s kind of like a virtual golf course, right? Like, you work that relationship even after they’ve become a customer because you want them to keep their trust in you, right? It’s not like you sell them and then the relationship’s over. If they don’t feel like you care about them, they’re more apt to jump ship and go somewhere else, and so you want to keep hitting them with content that will build that trust and relationship over time.

Steve Kroll: That’s great insight and an awesome perspective for listeners to have. Is there anything else you would say that’s important to touch on before we sign off here?

Mike Fleming: Well, this may seem a little bit selfish, but all of it is quite the project, and as a PPC manager, the role that I play is to have that knowledge and have that support of how to use that content and how to reach the audience in the best way possible. So, yeah, my last piece of advice is just to find a professional. It’s totally worth it. We’ve seen so much success with just helping B2B marketers get the ROI that they need. So don’t be hesitant. Just like in any walk of life, focus on what you’re good at, and work with people that are good at what they’re good at.

Steve Kroll: Awesome. Yeah, that should be the obvious one, outside of the fact that we have an inherent bias being an agency that specializes in helping organizations. I think what I’m hearing you say is, like any other service in life, if it’s something that is outside of your comfort zone, there’s some complexity, there’s quite a bit of value in talking to a professional. Even if you don’t ultimately choose to hire them, it helps guide your thinking on what you should value, what’s important.

Mike Fleming: Yeah, I was just listening to… I caught a Dave Ramsey video, and he was talking about buying a home. The reason I caught it is because I’m actually looking for a new home, and so… What he said, it was kind of interesting, because sometimes people debate on whether to work with real estate agents or not, and he was on the side of, like, definitely get a good real estate agent, because if you make a 5% mistake selling the house by yourself on a $200,000 home, that’s $10,000, and that’s more than the commission of a real estate agent. So I’m thinking to myself, “Okay, would I make a 5% mistake?” Probably, because I have no idea what to do in real estate, you know, what to price my house at, or any of that kind of stuff. So I kind of like that analogy. It’s like, ultimately, yeah, you are shelling out some money for that benefit, but is it more than what you would cost yourself because you’re just not proficient at what you need?

Steve Kroll: Thanks for listening to the Getting Granular podcast. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on any PPC tips, tricks, or news in the digital marketing world. Also, be sure to visit our website for more content at granularmarketing.com. This is your host, Steve Kroll. Thanks for getting granular with us today.