- Jon Brody is a former professional poker player,
and now he runs an agency in New York City called Ladder.io.
And what they do is scalable PPC campaigns,
so ad buying campaigns for a lot of startups
and huge enterprise companies.
And they have a system that they built
that allows them to get clients through pay-per-click.
So I had him on to break down his entire strategy,
so here is the best of that webinar,
How to Actually Grow an Agency with pay-per-click.
What are you looking at, especially when it comes
to driving leads with PPC for agencies?
- Most importantly, why are you doing PPC in general,
why are you spending your time and cash on it.
Ultimately you want to get ROI,
so really for us, the person that we look
at success by, simply put, are we getting more ROI from it?
And really that means, are we getting more qualified views?
- [Alex] The thing that I love about you guys
that you do different is, you're not
just doing the normal content.
- Yeah, we build an actual platform that basically helps us
build strategy each month, where we launch tons
of different marketing tests that target KPIs
in our own funnel.
We know the levers that have to get pulled
and one of our main levers actually driving data
that we know leads to more ROI customers to hit up.
- [Alex] When you're looking
at this strategy, what is your funnel right now?
- So I will say this, if you're gonna try PPC at your agency
definitely automate the lead scoring.
It's really difficult to know what
the hell is actually working when it came to PPC itself
when you have that type of lead scoring system.
So at Ladder what we do is, when somebody converts
as a lead, when they actually answer a series of questions,
every question has a score assigned to it,
so when somebody does convert through PPC,
we know automatically this was a qualified lead,
this wasn't a qualified lead.
- So what does that lead score look like?
Is that, the customer's are answering questions,
is that the sales people are filling out,
are there certain steps?
What does that actual lead scoring look like?
- I would basically ask for how much you spend
each month on marketing, is one question.
The second is your business type.
Are you B2B or e-commerce?
That's a really important question.
And we also ask you basically, what's your ARR?
How much money do you make each year?
Those are three to four kind of main questions that we ask.
- What platforms are you hitting,
what are these ads look, like how
are you attracting high quality people with these ads?
- Bunch of different channels actually.
We run activity across three to four prime channels,
like Facebook definitely, Instagram,
AdWords, as well as Quora,
but we've had success with Twitter, LinkedIn of course,
especially with things we are doing in email strategy
for enterprise, LinkedIn makes a lot of sense
because you could target the same companies you're emailing.
And get in their face through some additional
kind of touchpoints, I mean that's actually
gonna increase click to rate
and open rate on emails as well.
Yes most people who we'll be searching for aren't qualified.
To me anyways, that's not the game,
the game is actually optimizing
how many qualified leads you get,
not focusing and worrying too much about
how many unqualified leads are being brought in,
at the end of the day if you have a strong funnel.
- What would be some very low risk test you would run?
- Take the list of qualified leads you've had historically,
build up a local audience on Facebook,
that's one low-hanging fruit to get
a higher quality audience that hasn't done much testing.
Another one would be re-targeting.
If you're not doing retargeting throughout
your entire funnel, not just getting people to become
a qualified lead but to re-target your leads
once they're in the sales funnel.
That is PPC, it will definitely strengthen
your conversion rates way down funnel as well.
- [Alex] That's interesting, are you pulling out
the unqualified leads for the re-targeting
based on the lead score?
- Exactly, I've also said too that one good perspective
is they're not qualified leads right now for you
but you're still getting people who have money to spend.
You know we have three years worth of unqualified leads
and we get a lot of unqualified leads each month
but we're now developing offerings that
are able to monetize them and leverage them.
For us now we have technology built
that's really well suited for these unqualified leads
and actually, when we first started testing again
like a subserve kind of technology for us to funnel,
we actually went exclusively at our unqualified leads.
For us if we didn't have that unqualified lead workload,
we never would have been able
to actually test these new offerings.
It became like a playground to test experimental services,
and new types of technology
that everyone would try to market.
- The main thing we've been doing
for digital agencies is saying no to them.
Having all of those qualifications going now,
maybe it's easier to PPC.
- Yeah I think it makes sense, when you think of PPC
in general it is a conversation starter, a touchpoint.
We know our customers also have when
they show engagement, we can then escalate.
I think without a PPC it would be very difficult to do that.
Obviously with an email drip you can
but I think PPC is just one more way
of taking that proven kind of process,
and to be able to broaden, widen who you're speaking to.
- What are you sending them throughout this long period?
How do you keep them engaged?
- So we basically just send content drips,
also as well you're probably building content
if you're an ambitious agency founder.
Even one piece a month, just throw that into a Facebook ad,
and have some different creatives rotate.
Even that does the job, because you're just trying
to basically keep your brand a top
of mind with these companies.
PPC is a great way of automating,
you're not having to pay somebody or do it yourself
constantly emailing people one to one,
hoping they get back to you.
When you try a new marketing tactic,
you're assuming it's gonna impact
some KPI that will lead to you having a good strategy.
- So how did you know that PPC
was the channel worth going after?
- We know throughout our entire funnel right,
and there are a lot of steps, somebody sees an ad,
they click the ad, they go right on the landing page,
there's like three or four actions that convert.
If they're qualified then they go to Intro Call,
we have to hold the Intro Call,
Intro Call goes demo, the demo has to be good and qualified.
That then goes to some proposal-type stuff.
And then we're trying to close them.
That's a lot of steps there, what the value
is at getting somebody to convert as a qualified lead.
- Alright I just realized something huge
about myself while you were talking.
I haven't done PPC seriously since then
and I'm wondering now that you're saying that,
how much of this is having a business idea
that actually works, because with cold emails
it's the same way.
- There's now way we could target successfully
if we didn't have a well tested landing page,
and a good proposition, and a high converting funnel.
- That was my experience,
literally I gotta go and do it again.
You ever live one way for a very long time
and not realize you're getting everything wrong? (laughs)
- My other good strategy that we used at Ladder
for clients as well, tests lots of interests,
like interest-based targeting.
And then even if the interspace targeting
isn't performing well enough to be ROI positive,
know which interests work best,
and then layer those on top of a look-alike audience
that you built based off
a customer set or a qualified lead email set.
And that is a pretty good way of adding
some more firepower to the quality of audience.
- [Alex] What does it look like setting up a PPC campaign?
Is it easy enough for non-techy
or something they should hire out?
- I would say definitely don't hire out.
If you can't figure it out yourself,
you will hire the wrong person.
- [Alex] So I was gonna say, I've got two sides to that.
One is, try it yourself even if it's a trashy attempt,
spend $20 on it, and then that will be enough really
if you're not passionate about it all to go hire somebody.
I think Neil Patel said this in
a post a really long time ago, he's a marketer as well.
And he said that he would never hire a consultant
for something he didn't at least try and fail at.
- I completely agree with that.
Definitely try yourself first.
- What's your email sequence look like
once you get the lead's email?
- The first thing most important is what
is the entire purpose in life for our email sequences.
For us, it's simply to increase
the percentage of a qualified lead.
How's it improving that one number.
We have four stages right now, to be honest actually
they're all working really poorly.
We actually saw recently we have an amazing conversion rate
of qualified leads to being booked.
- I'd love to look through your emails.
Maybe in another video, and see
if there is anything we can do to drive that up.
Especially if it's not performing.
So how do you know what the number for Ladder is?
- The most important input to start with is
what is a customer worth to you lifetime.
Everything before then, from what you pay-per-click,
what all your different conversion rates are percentage wise
to get to a customer, you can add it all up.
You always are going to know on average
how much you're spending your marketing budget
and then how many sessions you get each month.
That basically equals your average aggregate CPC.
A very end to the other side is money.
What happens when somebody actually converts.
Every single percentage in between
those two different goal posts
is literally influencing whether
or not you are making money or losing money
when you pay for that individual session each month.
So we're looking at all the different steps.
You have two numbers, the lifetime value on one end,
the average CPC on another calculated
by the number of sessions and how much you spend
each month on marketing, total.
And then in between that you simply
have percentage values, what is the percentage
of somebody who actually goes from
a click to actually submitting a lead.
What is the conversion rate percentage
of a lead to a qualified lead,
qualified lead to a meeting booked,
meeting booked to a meeting held,
meeting held to a demo, demo to a proposal,
proposal to an actual sale.
Those are all percentages that we track at Ladder.
- Wade says how much money does someone need
to get started in this strategy
if you had to estimate roughly?
- Start very small in a funnel.
Drive leads to a page where they convert
as a lead and then try to get introcall
and try to just based off of that.
Just basically look at click, convert, talk
to someone in your team, close.
- Yeah and it depends on how you take feedback too.
I know for me, one of the reasons
why I couldn't get PPC to work
when I was just starting a business,
testing business concepts, is because there really isn't
that real-time feedback, it's so easy
to pour money down, there's so many different variables.
And then once you get a couple clients,
like you've got a landing page
you know is an offer that people want, then you
can try cold email, you can try all this other stuff.
And I think that systematic approach is key.
Are there downloads you have of this, right?
- Yeah we actually have our own software platform
that we open source to the public,
that basically lets you run growth tests
the same way Ladder does in terms
of testing individual creatives,
messaging strategies and so forth.
- I might do a review on that because it really is,
all right, X27, we know we generate leads
for digital agencies, so now it's
how can we riff that into 30 different ways
to get an ad that works?
- It's basically like one massive multivariate test
that basically validates how to
get your brand to perform at its best.
Not doing PPC is essentially not making choices
because you are scared.
- [Alex] What are the biggest pitfalls
to avoid when starting out with PPC advertising?
- Bad tracking number one, if you don't have
a measurable and transparent goal for success,
like a qualified lead and you know how to measure that
with total accuracy, don't spend any money.
Number two would be, define your customer personas
before you start.
That will force you to not do things that
are off brand basically, and also allow you
to have data come back that isn't just,
okay things converted that need convert,
but actually translate it into actual business intelligence.
- So for you, who are your customer personas?
I'd love an example.
- Yeah, for us one would be somebody
who works in manager plus sales person
or STRX at like an NSMB.
That persona is interesting to us.
Another persona for us would be a startup founder
at a company where we know their biggest pain point in life
is they're losing money, like they're gonna die, basically.
If they don't keep raising money
or they don't figure out their funnel very quickly.
We know their pain points are actually survival,
that they have to figure out a strategy from the ground up,
and they actually have to figure out and validate,
what is the winning combination
of creating strategy, messaging,
actually validate their personas,
where they spend their time online,
channel selection, those are ephemeral questions
that you would focus our messaging on in our funnel
if we were talking to a founder persona at a startup.
- You're really inspiring me, I gotta double down on it
because I was thinking of the Reddit experiment.
We partnered on a Reddit experiment
that I think didn't generate any income
for us in terms of conversions
but I'm thinking we gotta try another one.
But that's a perfect example of a little test,
we spent maybe $50 on Reddit, found out
maybe we should double down another time,
but for right now it's something not to try.
It's the same for Instagram or Behance or any of these.
If you can get the ads spent to be
under 100$, then why not try it.
- Winning isn't the more pans you actually win,
or the number of pots you win,
it's how much money you win in the end.
- [Alex] Where did this mindset come from?
How did that come around?
- Yeah it's just poker to be honest,
before that I wanted to be a creative writer,
so it definitely wasn't during that stage of life.
It was just playing poker, I played so many hands
of poker that it just became ingrained in me,
about how to think about decision making like this.
- [Alex] What's the future of Ladder?
I know you're testing a bunch of different stuff right now.
- It's kind of our life outlook
is all about good decision making through more data
and little bets, but from marketing it's really all about
how do we let companies collect more information
by testing more aggressively and then translate
that information and power that you can
then leverage through better strategy
that makes you more money.
- One hundred percent, and I know
with cold email that looks like us having
a spreadsheet, which I still haven't released
to you guys, I'm going to release to the audience soon.
But it's this subject line performed this way,
this subject line performed this way,
this subject line might of had an 80% open rate
but the require rate dropped by 40%.
It starts with tracking all that data
and that's something that is so frustrating to set up,
it really is, I'm glad you did a lot of that for PPC.
- We're focusing more and more too, on that initial setup,
that audit and getting your analytics
all set up in the first place.
- Are there any online resources, who are we supposed
to be reading if we want to learn PPC.
- I would say Wordstream and Brainlabs,
is a European agency, arguably named
the best in the world when it comes to PPC.
And obviously the Ladder Blog has some good stuff too.
- [Alex] Where should people go
if they want more info on you?
- Just Ladder.io is our website,
and then if you just want more of our content
it's all free non-gated, just go to blog.ladder.io.
- [Alex] Follow Brody, go check out Ladder
and I'll talk to you later, thanks for being here.
- Yeah awesome man.
- If you found this video valuable I'd love
if you would share it with a friend,
identify somebody, write 'em a quick email.
Hey you'd love this video, it's all about pay-per-click.
Send it over to em.
And if you want more enterprise clients for your agency,
huge companies billion dollar brands,
you wanna work with those guys, check out experiment27.com,
we'd love to find those clients for you.
If you are a consultant, you have a business book
and you want it turned into a documentary
that's not your regular corporate video
but it's something that has art
that can end up in film festivals
and on Netflix, while also generating you
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I'd love to talk.
And if you want to work one on one with me,
the only way to do that currently
is through experiment27.com/consult,
and you can buy me by the hour.
I feel like pretty woman, especially
in this fancy hotel room.
Thanks for watching, I'm Alex Berman.