Ep. 150 - De-Risking Paid Social Campaigns: A New Approach with Ken Lempit

Guest: Ken Lempit, President & Chief Business Builder at Austin Lawrence Group

In this episode, Austin Lawrence Group’s Ken Lempit shares a bold approach to overcoming the inefficiency of traditional advertising campaigns. 

He emphasizes a new strategy: combining foundational customer interviews with rapid, real-time testing via high-frequency organic social media posts. 

This iterative approach helps identify messaging that resonates most with target audiences before significant ad spend, enabling SaaS companies to avoid costly missteps. 

Lempit calls out outdated "ivory tower" methods, where messaging was developed in isolation and assumed durable for years. 

Today, he argues, messaging must evolve constantly based on audience engagement.

Key Takeaways:

1. Real-Time Validation Beats Guesswork: Test messaging in organic social media environments before committing ad budgets. Insights from live engagement can refine campaigns and improve ROI.
2. Messaging Is No Longer Durable: Static messaging fails in today’s dynamic market. Iterative testing ensures campaigns stay relevant and effective.
3. Drive Action with the Cost of Inaction: Instead of focusing on ROI, highlight the risks of staying in the status quo to compel prospects to act.

This practical framework bridges the gap between creative intuition and data-driven decisions, setting a new standard for SaaS advertising.

Other resources to check out:

Interview with Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius who publishes a yearly report about how B2B buyer behavior is changing.

The Lead Gen Mistake I Guarantee You’re Making – how to create content that better identifies intent from today’s b2b buyer.

And, if you want an outside look at your content with actionable advice, take advantage of our Content Audit. Valued at $20K in free consulting

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Thanks for listening to the SaaS Backwards Podcast, brought to you by Austin Lawrence Group. We help SaaS firms reduce churn, accelerate sales, and generate demand. Learn more at AustinLawrence.com.

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Is your messaging a sales ally or sneaky saboteur? Let us help with our free messaging audit.

We’ll look at your website’s messaging, content, and conversion potential from the eyes of today’s buyer and deliver a presentation with new combinations to more sales conversations and demos.

And the best part? It’s absolutely free.

Get started today!

Transcript

Jason Myers: Welcome to SaaS Backwards, a podcast that helps revenue leaders of SaaS companies to accelerate growth and enhance profitability. Our guest today is our very own Ken Lempit, who normally hosts the show. He's also the president and chief business builder here at Austin Lawrence Group. And if you've been listening to us for a while, you know that every once in a while, we like to flip the script and talk about what we're hearing out in the marketplace. And what we want to talk about today is avoiding some of those pitfalls involved in paid social advertising and we're gonna talk about a new approach to de-risking campaigns. So Ken, welcome to your podcast. 

[00:00:49] Ken Lempit: Hey, it's always nice to be on SaaS backwards, and it's exciting to talk about de-risking, paid social and really helping listeners and potentially clients to get more return on their advertising investments. 

[00:01:05] Jason Myers: So let's dig right into that. Then when you say de-risking campaigns, everybody's talking about doing more with less and being efficient. So what is this new approach to de-risking campaigns? 

[00:01:16] Ken Lempit: Well, what we're trying to do is to accelerate our understanding of what will drive prospects off status quo and get that insight into the advertising that's being fielded by ourselves on behalf of clients. And that really requires a more real time approach to insight generation based on the foundations that we would have built before. So we're going to marry up some of our traditional interview based approach to insight development and put that right into a high frequency organic posting program, multiple posts per day to let us leverage the interest graphs on these social properties and learn from engagement with the content we're putting out there, what prospects are going to respond to most. 

So what this really looks like, if we want to drill down into the traditional interview process, just a little bit, is we'll interview subject matter experts at your client company, your company, and we'll understand from our point of view, what the problems are that we're solving. Some people call that the jobs to be done. How does this product that we're selling, this software solve problems in the client environment, and then we're going to interview your customers. And instead of a long drawn out process of within our own four walls, building the messages that we think are worth investing in, we're actually going to go out and test those with organic posts, as opposed to testing them with paid advertising of all kinds, and get quickly to an understanding of where there's the most interest, out in our prospect universe in the kinds of solutions and problems that we're solving for our customers. This integration of a real time, high frequency posting in social media, along with a foundation of actual insight work that we traditionally do will give us the greatest certainty that our paid work is going to return a high amount on our investment.

[00:03:35] Jason Myers: How is all this different than how we used to do messaging? And what do you think is the big opportunity? 

[00:03:40] Ken Lempit: You go back five years ago, I think we had real ivory tower mentality to messaging. And I think we perhaps fooled ourselves that could shortcut it with just a handful of interviews, the insights from those interviews, marry it up with our industry knowledge and our advertising messaging expertise and come up with durable messaging. And maybe that's the thing that really needs to be talked to is that messaging isn't as durable as it used to be. So we would build a campaign and run it for a year, run it for two years, and it would work. And it was very simple. There's not the same durability. Things change so much today that we need a method that allows us to rapidly get the current environment so we can invest with confidence and continually monitor which messages are resonating. It's almost like this constant bubble up of which messages are working best. So we need to have systems analytics and people able to, in real time, monitor the progress and the changing fortunes of each of our creative exercises. Each of our messaging exercises, because they're just not durable the way they used to be. 

[00:05:01] Jason Myers: Someone out there says I've already interviewed customers and built personas and mapped customer journeys, but they still aren't happy with the results that are coming in either through website or advertising or whatever it is, what are they missing?

[00:05:15] Ken Lempit: Well, I think the interview portion has to really be focused on the jobs that these people are trying to do in their area of influence. Sometimes you're interviewing people that. They're individual contributors, and that's what you're trying to learn about. Sometimes they're people that manage entire divisions or companies. So the interviews need to be consistent with the scope of the prospect, the decision maker or decision influencers that we need to reach. That often, I think, is a blind spot that we're interviewing people. We're comfortable asking for the interview, not necessarily the people who are most likely to give us the insights we need to be more successful.

After we do those interviews, though, we're not done. We can't build messaging in a vacuum, and we can't base our investment thesis on the answers from a handful of people. And I think this is the part that maybe it's easy to miss in this new model for, validating the messaging work that we've started to do here as we've done the interviews, we're starting to see trends, but we can't necessarily validate that our findings, our gut feel, our insight from our experience in the business is enough.

So let's say that we've interviewed 16 or even 20 people to generate an initial thesis of what the messages and features and benefits might be that are most important. Well, now we have the chance to test that in real time in social media. So let's just make it specific and talk about LinkedIn. If we can post daily or more than once a day on LinkedIn, and build our messages based on the findings from those, let's say, 16 or 20 interviews, we can put our messages out there in front of hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of people at no cost. That's, I think, the fundamental thing here is that we're not paying to get in front of those folks, we're posting those messages, and we're then doing analytics against what starts to get some take up in the live, real world of social media.

On our own case here at Austin Lawrence, Jason, you're posting every day. Multiple times a day across things that we think are important to us, whether it's revenue generation, is it your advertising investments not being aligned correctly, the things we think are important to our revenue leader prospects. And we're getting really good data and it's up to us to decide how can we convert on that as an opportunity. But it's pretty clear to me that question has a high degree of resonance among the people that we would like to influence. So we could take that to the next step. 

Let's say we're doing organization design consulting for our clients, SaaS business model consulting. That's certainly be a place where we might be able to do some paid promotion and build on the learnings that we have just from the last week or two. What we're advocating here is. is to build multiple iterations and variations of messages that you think might be important. Source them from your interviews that you're going to do in a marketing research motion, and you have to take the insights in real time where you can get them and put them right out into your organic and keep iterating on that.

And once you have the messages that resonate, that are most valuable to you, as I got to intersect, right, that have to be resonant with the market and they have to be valuable, then we can put paid motions behind that. We can build simple creative in the beginning. And as the thesis has proved out, invest more and more in the creative, go up to high production values. So that's, I think, a good picture of what we're advocating for here. 

[00:09:16] Jason Myers: Yeah, it's always interesting, different content pieces that I think are going to do well and don't kind of fall flat. And then something that I do is almost an afterthought goes viral. So you just never know. It's just a matter of throwing stuff out there and seeing based on what you already know about your client base.

So you mentioned also driving somebody off their status quo. And I think that's worth talking about because like, how do you do that? Most of the messaging that I see on websites, advertisements, content, it really doesn't do that at all. And so no, amount of testing is going to help you if your messaging isn't stopping somebody in their tracks to get them to pay attention.

And I think in B2B complex sale environments to drive somebody off their status quo. We've got to get agreement on a problem, right? So talk a little bit more about how you do that in the messaging and through the interviews, once you have the interviews, how do you pull that together into messaging that you can test that's going to drive people off their status quo?

[00:10:30] Ken Lempit: Well, I think there's two components to advertising that have to be mastered. And a long time ago, our tagline used to be the art and science of business marketing. And there's both an art and a science to what we're talking about here. And what we were trying to communicate there is that we have to understand people at deep level.

And we have to have experience building the kinds of communications that are going to motivate people to take some initial action to stop them and cause them to think about what it is they're doing and what they might be able to do better. And that really takes experience, insight, writing ability. You have to have some imagination that is strengthened over time through experience, through putting ideas out there and having them responded to.

The science is, how do we measure these things? How do we build an audience that we can stimulate with our messages and then measure their response to what we're doing? The answer to that, I think the question is, we have to marry both this deep experience capability to write with good sensing tools, good audience design, and good sensing tools.

We need to be able to measure the impact of our paid and organic content and interpret those results and come up with what is going to move people. And if you want to visualize it for yourself, you're, if you're listening to the podcast, you're trying to visualize what I'm talking about. We're all exposed to hundreds and hundreds of advertising messages a day.

And I think the best ones to understand this through are billboards. And as you drive along today, tomorrow, next day, take a look at billboards that come across your screen. If you ride public transportation, plenty of opportunities to see billboard writing. The copywriting on billboards, you're trying to make your point in six to eight or nine words. And if you focus on the writing of those headlines and the lack of anything else, because there really should be almost nothing else, that'll tell you what you need to know about writing for social media, advertising, social media, organic content. Needs to be very short, very pithy, very challenging in a non confrontational way, but in a challenging your assumptions kind of way. Or tickle your funny bone, but you got to stop someone and make them think. And we certainly have some great examples of that. 

[00:13:10] Jason Myers: So now we've really been doing a lot of this work with our clients recently. Do you want to talk about the recent use case with one of our clients of how we're looking at this?

[00:13:21] Ken Lempit: One of our clients hired us about seven months ago when they were really struggling with their advertising. This is a company that spends a little more than a million dollars a year in paid space. And they had a number of problems that kind of all needed to be fixed rapidly to really save their year.

They noticed that the number of inquiries that they were getting was going down and their quality of inquiry was deteriorating quickly as well. So the vast majority of this client spend is in paid search. And what we needed to do was revamp the paid search campaigns, which had many overlapping campaigns that were targeting the same keywords, which made it very difficult for us to understand which keywords and creatives were performing best.

They not only were the keywords, that they were paying for overlapping, but often the creatives were. So it was very difficult to understand what this 30 or 40 thousand dollar a month investment was doing, because of the nature of their business, which is a, an insurance product. They were also getting a lot of spam inquiries and this had to do with, in no small part time of day that they were allowing ads to run.

So it turned out by reducing the overnight advertising spend to near zero. We cut out most of the spam form entries that they were getting. But perhaps the most important thing we've done. And that's playing out really right now is we're leveraging the CEO of the company as our spokesperson, who was already doing one or two posts a month on LinkedIn and Instagram into a daily activity where he's working against our most important prospect segments and testing different messages for each of those segments. And we were able to do some analysis of who are the high value prospects for them. And a lot of times we have An ICP, and we cut it by just firmographic, what size company are they?

What else are they doing technology wise? If we're a tech vendor, what their revenues are, where they are, how many locations, things like that, but we're not looking necessarily at their responsiveness and we try and get at responsiveness through intent tools. And I think the first party and second party intent are highly valuable here.

So first party intent being what happens on our own. Internet properties, the things we can measure, second party intent, things like trust radius or G2 who can provide us with their true search and content, content consumption data, and as well going even further beyond that, serving up leads to us if we pay for them.

So we can take first and second party intent data and then marry that up. With what we learn in the real world on social media, kind of funny calling that real world. But if we measure what occurs in social media against what we see from first and second party sources, we can actually make more people that look like those inquiries that come across in our first and second party intent. So what we're trying to do is take all these sources of information, whether it's our organic posts, our paid advertising on social, the other ways that we generate insight from our own properties, or again, other paid means like a trust radius, You know, how can we build an audience that's closer and closer to the ideal?

An ideal customer profile is one thing, but the ideal real world audience, I think is what we're really trying to get to. And we're trying to get them with messages that they're going to most respond to. And I think that's the holy grail here. We're trying to take all of this stuff and put it together.

Where we started in the podcast today, This idea of marrying traditional messaging development with what we can sense in social media can be augmented even further by taking these other sources of information. And that's going to create quite an efficiency in the end for any advertiser that really integrates all of these sources of insight.

[00:17:46] Jason Myers: What type of advertising do you find is working right now on LinkedIn? 

[00:17:52] Ken Lempit: I think it's really important to match the media to the kind of behavior that can be expected. LinkedIn is not an intent channel. It's not a place where people are shopping for their next piece of software. Where they're either keeping up with their professional peers.

They're trying to educate themselves, or maybe they're even job hunting. So we have to look at that environment for what it is. And assuming that people are doing any of those things, they're going to be most interested in educating themselves. Self edification more than searching for a solution. So as advertisers, we have to put content and experiences up that are going to match the expectations of that audience.

It's not to say that we can't do some form of demand generation, on LinkedIn, but it's a lot harder to do the same job we might do on, Google ads on LinkedIn. So best materials would be true thought leadership. research based white papers or subject matter experts providing real added value that's going to help people do their jobs better or move to the next job more confidently. Experiences that they're going to want to participate in. So you might be pushing out virtual events or live events on LinkedIn. Those are the things we find doing the best. Anytime we try and really get people to sign up for a demo on LinkedIn. That's Pretty hard slog. That's just not where it's at.

[00:19:32] Jason Myers: I've noticed a big trend in SaaS companies is to align everybody or restructure under a chief revenue officer. And it seems to me in a lot of those cases that they tend to look more like the old sales and marketing vice president, where they're really in charge of sales and somebody in marketing reports to them.

So, what should those CROs be doing? Marketing, advertising, and messaging to one, ensure that everybody is aligned around the same messaging and second, how do you ensure that it is helping drive the sales process and at the same time, balancing that long term demand gen customer creation angle, which they tend to disregard because they're more about the short term.

[00:20:27] Ken Lempit: So the CRO often ascends through sales, and so this person probably doesn't have training or deep experience in marketing as a discipline, and that's a really challenging place to be. You're being asked to spend a significant amount of money. By the , marketing manager, marketing director, head of marketing.

These folks are asking you to spend tens of thousands a month or more on a discipline you don't understand well. And I think that's going to require some education, no doubt about it. But let's take a look at how you might start to think about these investments. And I think you, you started to lead us down the right path.

There's short, intermediate and long term goals. That a chief revenue officer has, and he or she has to marry their marketing investments to those timeframes. And some of the things that we're trying to accomplish, let's say we're trying to get more inbound inquiries. We're trying to rely a little less on the outbound sales motion.

If we're trying to get more of those inquiries, we have to build our reputation such that people come to us. They look to us for a solution when they know they have a certain problem, certain job to be done. Those investments look very different than capturing the opportunity that's in market today.

That's a lead generation or demand capture opportunity. And that's a different set of things we're doing and we're probably communicating in different places. So demand capture, very well accomplished on Google Paid Search. I'm looking for accounting software. Best accounting software for manufacturers might be a query that somebody makes on Google, if they're a small to midsize manufacturer looking for accounting software. However, if they're not in market, and that's probably 96, 97 percent of your true ideal customers, your target, your total addressable market, those people who aren't in market today, but might be in market in the future, need some kind of stimulation to begin to rely upon your organization as a source of good insight to help them do their jobs. And that's that investment in the future that marketing people are always talking about. But I think for us to be effective marketers, we have to frame the problem in terms of timeline and the CRO has to begin to understand immediate, intermediate, and long term goals that we're all shooting for and putting the investments in each of those buckets. So a long term goal of getting someone to organizations to recognize they have a problem that they need to solve. That starts to sound like brand building and thought leadership.

Being a reliable, reputable source of insight about how to solve a certain kind of problem. That's brand building. That's thought leadership. On an intermediate basis, where people have started to recognize the problem, but they're not yet ready to make a decision. We have to move people off the status quo, and that's where the action really is.

Those people know they have a problem, and now we have to get it to be one of the things they're going to do now. As opposed to the 3 or 10 or 20 other problems that are on their list, probably on a whiteboard somewhere is a list of the problems they're faced with. And we have to move people up.

Move our solution up into the top two or three that they're going to work on. And that's the whole business right there. Almost anybody can place ads on Google for buy something today, right? Accounting software for manufacturers. It's not so super hard to do brand building for the future, though it requires great writing, great thinking, but the action really is taking the 40 to 60 percent of your TAM that knows they have a problem, but hasn't moved on it to go to a decision making cycle. And that's where we start working with things like prospect theory, getting people to realize what they're missing, not the return on investment that's a reflex action in B2B marketers. But the cost of inaction, I think is the secret sauce here that a lot of people miss. So from now on, when you guys see advertising that's talking return on investment, start looking for the alternative to that. What is being missed? The lost revenue, the lost sales, the lost opportunities.

People hate to miss out on things. We talk about the ones that got away much more than the ones we got. So I think that's where the action really is for marketers. Talk timeline to your CRO and then focus on that middle field after you've made good on the people who are shopping, which again is 3 to 5 percent of most of your market.

[00:25:35] Jason Myers: Let's talk about also what it's going to take to fix inbound today. And I'm defining inbound as. attracting the people that agree that this is a problem and start digging into the website. Maybe they're easier to close. I'm not defining it in an SEO context because I think that's largely falling apart.

But in short, it used to be much easier to attract, nurture, and book appointments based on content and engagement. And today, There's so much noise around all those things, including email that is just not working as well. And sellers have had to really slog it out on the outbound front. How do we fix inbound today?

[00:26:21] Ken Lempit: I think that's a great question. And I think it is a new inbound. It's not the SEO driven inbound. We're often paying for the privilege at this point. And what does that look like? I think we have to be where our prospects are. Our prospects are, especially from my perspective, getting younger and younger.

And those folks are on review sites. They use reviews for everything they purchase. Any considered purchase from a dinner on up. They're looking at review sites. So if you're not active on G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, SoftwareAdvice. You're missing a gigantic opportunity to get leads in the pipeline, people that are in a shopping motion.

And when we talk about this inbound, we're talking about people who are shopping, right? They're out there looking for a solution to a known problem. So we have to be where they are. That's really important is these review sites, another place that they congregate and it's different for each vertical market, but often we're going to find these people on Reddit.

We need to communicate with them organically on Reddit, where appropriate. And we should definitely be advertising on Reddit if there are subreddits or forums, where they're congregating and talking about the kinds of problems we solve. So for one of our clients called TVEyes, a broadcast media monitoring solution, they're active on the public relations subreddit.

Makes a lot of sense. So we need to be where our prospects are. And a great tool to understand that would be Rand Fishkin's SparkToro. If you want to know where your prospects are hanging out, that's probably one of the best tools to get very quickly to where are the most likely places to find the people that care about what we sell.

We need to be doing paid search against likely keywords for our solution, driving people to good experiences that help them educate themselves as to why they might want to dig deeper. Going right for the jugular going right for the demo is probably a mistake for most of today's buyers. They know how to get to the button that says schedule a demo. So we want to make sure we're educating people on our web properties, on the landing pages, we drive them to want to make sure we're educating them before we go for the demo. And I think that's hard for people to do the reflex action. When you look at most web properties, the schedule, a demo CTA is everywhere on these websites. It's almost like a rash. There's buttons everywhere. 

[00:28:51] Jason Myers: I always like to say that's indicative of, we're trying to control the sales process where we are losing control all the time. So we're trying to create a lead out of everything. And the buyer just isn't having it. 

[00:29:04] Ken Lempit: That's exactly right. And the research from our friends at TrustRadius bears it out over the last few years. They even call the subject of the research, the buyer seller disconnect. You need to be thinking about what does the buyer want to experience as they're trying to decide which two or three solutions to get serious with, it's truly like a, Intentional dating scenario. When you're serious about dating, you want to go get married, you focus on a few things that are important to you and you want to make sure all the candidates have those things that, you know, you're most interested in. And, and I think in the case of the software as a service market, we have to think that way. What are the handful of things that most buyers really want to know before they're going to get into a sales process with us and make that information really easy to come by.

And that's everything from the initial messaging research, all the way to that web experience, the advertising in the middle. Whatever form that takes, whether it's paid search, paid social, email. We have to always be thinking about what is the, what is the buyer mindset as they're trying to decide how important this problem is to solve? Like, should I focus on it? And then which two or three vendors should I get into serious conversations with before I make a decision? 

[00:30:27] Jason Myers: And I think that's a good place to land the episode. So if anybody wants to get ahold of you, what's the best way to do that? 

[00:30:34] Ken Lempit: I'm easy to find on https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenlempit/

I'm KL@austinlawrence.com and please, if you haven't subscribed to the podcast, please do so wherever podcasts are distributed. And Jason's doing a great job with our YouTube presence. There's lots of great shorts there for each of the episodes, which if you don't have the time to listen to a 30 minute episode, find the SaaS backwards podcast on YouTube, and you'll get some great insights on those shorts and reach out if we can be of any assistance at all.

[00:31:07] Jason Myers: That's great. And if you'd like some help figuring out how to optimize your messaging for today's buyer. Take us up on a free offer to do a marketing and messaging review. We're going to look at your website, messaging, content, and advertising, give you some ideas on how you can maximize those SQL conversions. So just reach out to me at jm@austinlawrence.com. Ken, thanks for joining us today. Always insightful. 

[00:31:35] Ken Lempit: Thank you, Jason, for driving another great episode.