WolfMaster1997

Imo, paid ads are the best & fastest way to grow your company. When all the pieces click into their respective places, you have a system that turns advertising dollars into profit.

I've talked to a lot of business owners and the aforementioned scenario is definitely not the reality for many.

Maybe you tried to run ads yourself or even hired an agency to do it for you, but in the end you burned more cash than you made. Why?

I mean if you logged into your Meta business manager, clicked a couple of buttons and called it a day, what did you expect?

Or if you hired an agency to do that and all they did was launch a couple of ads in your BM..

Congrats, you paid 4 figures for someone to to click through a setup that's so easy that you could guide a grandma through it through phone.

Month over month, META is making it easier and easier to set up campaigns, but you don't make money through paid advertising by clicking a couple of buttons.

Here's the process we use to launch successful campaigns for us and clients - only 10% of the whole thing is clicking buttons in business manager.

Whether you sell B2C or B2B, same principles apply.

Research & positioning

This is a fundamental part of running ads that many overlook, but it's mission critical to successful campaigns.

Interview your customers and clients to find out why they love your product or service and more importantly, what made them buy.

Go to your competitor amazon reviews and find what people don't like about your competitor products.

Go to your competitors GMB reviews and see what people dislike about them.

Go to forums/Quora/reddit and find what people talk about your industry and services in it.

Your goal with this is to find burning problems that people have and want solved.

Once you have list of common problems and pains, you can position your service as a solution to them .

If you overlook this process, you won't have successful campaigns.

I've used the same principles when selling prefab home kits for $80k and when selling board game - If you figure out what signals people need to see to take the next step in your funnel, you will consistently be able to put them in front of your potential clients and make your campaigns produce profit.

This is the absolute hardest thing to nail down in paid advertising. If you fail at this, no amount of tweaking, optimisation or ad account hacking won't make your ads profitable.

On the other hand, if you put your head down for a day and do proper research and positioning..

Couple of clicks in your business manager with broad or LLA targeting and an eye catching creative will do wonders.

Campaign setup

It's never been easier. This is the structure we go with when starting out.

1 ABO Campaign with either Sales or Leads objective

1 Ad set with broad (or some cases 1 huge interest) targeting

5-10 different ads mixing traditional videos, UGC, carousels, images, text images, etc.

Then I let it run and depending on what happens, adjust.

For example, you might be getting a lot of add to carts but not much purchases.

If that happens, create an ad with a discount or other incentive to push that add to cart to a purchase.

Or maybe you're getting a lot of leads but no actual conversions from them?

Add a seperate ad set with ads meant to educate your lead before they purchase your service.

That way, you nurture both the leads before they become a lead and after they become a lead, in the end increasing conversion rate and increasing lead quality.

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Let me say it again - research and positioning are key to make paid ads work. Don't pay 4 figures to an agency who does what you can do in 30 minutes and send you "monthly reports" of shitty performance.

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As title says, if you're in the B2B space and need more leads and meetings booked, I'll write out a fairly detailed lead generation strategy personalised to your specific situation for free.

If you find it valuable, feel free to run with it.

Write in the comments:

1. What's your product/service
2. What problem it solves / why it's better than competitors
3. Who's your ideal customer

I've generated meetings and helped close deals for agencies, industry-specific softwares, whole sale, construction and even commodities.

First come first serve, I'll do this for first 10 (if there's even that many)

A little back story:

Last two years have been a rollercoaster to say the least.

Sold an affiliate business in summer of 2022 that kept the lights on and allowed me to live the "laptop lifestyle" for 4 years. I definitely took advantage of it! Traveled a lot, converted my van into a camper and had a blast traveling around Europe and even bought a plot of land, all thanks to the affiliate biz I started while I was still working a 9-5 as a CMO for a clothing retailer.

I got way too lazy and complacent - I started a lot of new projects during this time knowing that the affiliate sales are going to dry up sooner or later, but gave up on all of them.

Then an offer came along for a nice chunk of money. Taking that deal was the scariest thing I ever did. Trading a steady 5 fig income for a lump sum meant that I had to commit to one of my half-assed projects.

With my living expenses eating into my savings, I decided to focus on my local marketing agency. I already had 1 client and the experience of being a CMO.

I soon realised that it's freaking hard to get new clients. Especially ones that can afford what I was charging.

My bottleneck? No systems in place to generate a stable pipeline of new leads.

So down the rabbit hole I went - learned everything I could about cold email lead generation, even bought a course for 8k.

After a lot of trial and error (burning domains, not verifying leads, ect) I landed on a strategy that worked for me. I was booking 3-5 calls every week.

This is the part where I'd like to claim that I made $100k in bizarrely short amount of time, but that's not how it really happens. Especially not if you're a small agency (1 full time-me + 2 freelancers)

I decided to pivot away from offering paid ads to small businesses and started to offer the same cold email lead generation that I was using for myself to a lead list of potential clients.

My thinking was that I could work with fewer clients and make more by charging a retainer + commission to businesses that already had proof of concept and sales process to close the leads.

Boy, was I right..

I was doing the same amount of work while working with 1/3rd amount of clients, but since the deal sizes were much bigger, I was making 4x more.

I soon started to incorporate paid ads back into the offering, but tailored to B2B.

So what the heck am I focusing on in 2024 to generate leads and deals for me and my clients?

Short answer: META ads and hyper targeted cold email.

Let me explain.

With META ads you have the advantage of reaching a huge amount of your ICP with relatively little spend. This is great for smaller to mid sized deals, $2k - $10k, but you're unlikely to reach CMO of Nike.

With cold email, you have the advantage of filtering the list so you reach EXACTLY the people who you'd want to work with. This is great for bigger deals, $10k+. So you could easily reach CMO of Nike if you wanted to.

Not saying this to brag, but I helped a coffee company land a wholesale client who purchased a container of coffee for $100k.

I did that by scraping every roaster in the US and UK and sending a semi-personalised email to every single one of them. On top of that, I found a database that allows you to filter incoming shipments by category.

So naturally I scraped every company that imported coffee that year in the US.

I have a detailed post on how you can set up the architecture to send personalised emails at scale in my post history somewhere.

Took me a day to set up, 2 weeks of warming up and 40 minutes per day answering to interested emails and forwarding meeting requests to my client.

But it's not as simple anymore. You can't go in there, guns blazing, scrape 10k leads and blast 1k emails per day blindly.

Not with the new google restrictions. They're tightening the grasp on blatant spammers. In result, every bulk sender suffers. If 3 out of 1000 emails sent get market as spam, your inbox is done.

That's why, going into 2024, I'm putting much more effort into scraping and filtering leads.

That means sending lower volumes, but only sending to a laser focused list.

Less 5000 lead list campaigns, more 300-600 lead list, granular and laser targeted campaigns along with specific messaging.

For example, instead of reaching out to all US coffee roasters with the same messaging, I'd separate them all by state, size, revenue, etc and tailor the messaging based on that. Don't send to those who're too small or boutique, because they wouldn't buy in bulk anyway.

If the offer is good and relevant to the ICP, there's no way to not get a conversation started with a potential client if you do this.

​

As for Meta ads, there's a lot of strategies floating around, but I like to keep it simple. Also, I see a lot of comments on this and marketing related subreddits that meta is not good for b2b. That's simply not true.

Everyone has an instagram and facebook profile. CEO's with 10m/yr companies have it, CMO's managing 80k/mo brands have it, purchase managers responsible for buying potatoes have it.
You're not going to reach Bill Gates with your ads, but if your market is broad and you have a good offer, you can definitely utilize meta ads.

For B2B, I always use 2 funnels.

First is direct response based. You have an ad with an offer, calling out your ICP and their problems which leads to an opt-in page on which you have social proof, overview of your unique mechanisms and a form. After the form is filled, there's a call booking page. Super simple, super effective IF your messaging resonates.

On average, we see $30 cost per lead, $50 cost per booked call, 60%-70% show-up rate and close rate of about 1 or 2 in 20.

Second funnel is value based. You create a valuable course, PDF or doc that solves your ICP's major problem and you give it away for free in exchange for contact details. Then you nurture them through email and SMS, asking to take action once in a while + setters who reach out to the most fitting leads.

Cost per lead we see across couple of accounts is $5 - $15.

Going into 2024, I'm going to put much more effort in building a central hub where leads will be directed after taking action. Facebook groups are perfect for this. This is where nurture and appointment setting will happen. I've seen people implement this and the biggest benefit is that once you stop the ads, you still can generate deals as long as you keep nurturing.

If you're interested in more specifics about either cold email or paid ads for b2b, I have a couple of posts on my profile where I go more in-depth.

Very excited for what's to come, I absolutely love B2B marketing.

A little back story:

Last two years have been a rollercoaster to say the least.

Sold an affiliate business in summer of 2022 that kept the lights on and allowed me to live the "laptop lifestyle" for 4 years. I definitely took advantage of it! Traveled a lot, converted my van into a camper and had a blast traveling around Europe and even bought a plot of land, all thanks to the affiliate biz I started while I was still working a 9-5 as a CMO for a clothing retailer.

I got way too lazy and complacent - I started a lot of new projects during this time knowing that the affiliate sales are going to dry up sooner or later, but gave up on all of them.

Then an offer came along for a nice chunk of money. Taking that deal was the scariest thing I ever did. Trading a steady 5 fig income for a lump sum meant that I had to commit to one of my half-assed projects.

With my living expenses eating into my savings, I decided to focus on my local marketing agency. I already had 1 client and the experience of being a CMO.

I soon realised that it's freaking hard to get new clients. Especially ones that can afford what I was charging.

My bottleneck? No systems in place to generate a stable pipeline of new leads.

So down the rabbit hole I went - learned everything I could about cold email lead generation, even bought a course for 8k.

After a lot of trial and error (burning domains, not verifying leads, ect) I landed on a strategy that worked for me. I was booking 3-5 calls every week.

This is the part where I'd like to claim that I made $100k in bizarrely short amount of time, but that's not how it really happens. Especially not if you're a small agency (1 full time-me + 2 freelancers)

I decided to pivot away from offering paid ads to small businesses and started to offer the same cold email lead generation that I was using for myself to a lead list of potential clients.

My thinking was that I could work with fewer clients and make more by charging a retainer + commission to businesses that already had proof of concept and sales process to close the leads.

Boy, was I right..

I was doing the same amount of work while working with 1/3rd amount of clients, but since the deal sizes were much bigger, I was making 4x more.

I soon started to incorporate paid ads back into the offering, but tailored to B2B.

So what the heck am I focusing on in 2024 to generate leads and deals for me and my clients?

Short answer: META ads and hyper targeted cold email.

Let me explain.

With META ads you have the advantage of reaching a huge amount of your ICP with relatively little spend. This is great for smaller to mid sized deals, $2k - $10k, but you're unlikely to reach CMO of Nike.

With cold email, you have the advantage of filtering the list so you reach EXACTLY the people who you'd want to work with. This is great for bigger deals, $10k+. So you could easily reach CMO of Nike if you wanted to.

Not saying this to brag, but I helped a coffee company land a wholesale client who purchased a container of coffee for $100k.

I did that by scraping every roaster in the US and UK and sending a semi-personalised email to every single one of them. On top of that, I found a database that allows you to filter incoming shipments by category.

So naturally I scraped every company that imported coffee that year in the US.

I have a detailed post on how you can set up the architecture to send personalised emails at scale in my post history somewhere.

Took me a day to set up, 2 weeks of warming up and 40 minutes per day answering to interested emails and forwarding meeting requests to my client.

But it's not as simple anymore. You can't go in there, guns blazing, scrape 10k leads and blast 1k emails per day blindly.

Not with the new google restrictions. They're tightening the grasp on blatant spammers. In result, every bulk sender suffers. If 3 out of 1000 emails sent get market as spam, your inbox is done.

That's why, going into 2024, I'm putting much more effort into scraping and filtering leads.

That means sending lower volumes, but only sending to a laser focused list.

Less 5000 lead list campaigns, more 300-600 lead list, granular and laser targeted campaigns along with specific messaging.

For example, instead of reaching out to all US coffee roasters with the same messaging, I'd separate them all by state, size, revenue, etc and tailor the messaging based on that. Don't send to those who're too small or boutique, because they wouldn't buy in bulk anyway.

If the offer is good and relevant to the ICP, there's no way to not get a conversation started with a potential client if you do this.

​

As for Meta ads, there's a lot of strategies floating around, but I like to keep it simple. Also, I see a lot of comments on this and marketing related subreddits that meta is not good for b2b. That's simply not true.

Everyone has an instagram and facebook profile. CEO's with 10m/yr companies have it, CMO's managing 80k/mo brands have it, purchase managers responsible for buying potatoes have it.
You're not going to reach Bill Gates with your ads, but if your market is broad and you have a good offer, you can definitely utilize meta ads.

For B2B, I always use 2 funnels.

First is direct response based. You have an ad with an offer, calling out your ICP and their problems which leads to an opt-in page on which you have social proof, overview of your unique mechanisms and a form. After the form is filled, there's a call booking page. Super simple, super effective IF your messaging resonates.

On average, we see $30 cost per lead, $50 cost per booked call, 60%-70% show-up rate and close rate of about 1 or 2 in 20.

Second funnel is value based. You create a valuable course, PDF or doc that solves your ICP's major problem and you give it away for free in exchange for contact details. Then you nurture them through email and SMS, asking to take action once in a while + setters who reach out to the most fitting leads.

Cost per lead we see across couple of accounts is $5 - $15.

Going into 2024, I'm going to put much more effort in building a central hub where leads will be directed after taking action. Facebook groups are perfect for this. This is where nurture and appointment setting will happen. I've seen people implement this and the biggest benefit is that once you stop the ads, you still can generate deals as long as you keep nurturing.

If you're interested in more specifics about either cold email or paid ads for b2b, I have a couple of posts on my profile where I go more in-depth.

Very excited for what's to come, I absolutely love B2B marketing.

So before the comment section gets filled with "I NEVER open cold emails" "STRAIGHT to jail with that spam" and "I just send 100 highly researched, manually written emails and it works much better"

I hear you!

My inbox gets flooded with 50 quick questions every day, all with cookie cutter "15 meetings or you don't pay" script. It used to work a year ago, but now everyone and their dog is watching a 15 minute youtube video about cold email and setting up their campaigns the next day.

They send out their first campaigns with the same cookie cutter template and proclaim that cold email doesn't work.

Well, yes, it doesn't if you're doing exactly what 1000s of others are doing.

In this post I'll go over the framework that I use to generate meetings that lead to closed B2B contracts.

A lot has changed since I last wrote about cold email. Google and Outlook are cracking down on mass senders (spammers) to keep their reputation safe and this has stopped a lot of lead geners in their tracks.

Not us though, and that's because we're adopting quickly to the changes that everyone saw a mile away. There's 3 main areas that you need to think about when it comes to generating meetings.

1. Actually delivering emails on a massive scale - having an appropriate email sending "architecture"
2. Having a good response rate - personalized copy and an interesting offer or lead magnet.
3. Having good reply to call booked ratio - Knowing how to set meetings.

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Let's tart with the email sending architecture. I have a whole post about it on my subreddit here

But a tl:dr version of it is that you'll need to purchase bunch of inboxes on Gsuite, Outlook and a third party sender of your choice. There are many popping up as the demand for inboxes increase.

Ideally, you want to have a mix of three - 33% Gsuite, 33% Outlook and 33% 3rd party.

Bare minimum, you should have 10 inboxes on each, 30 total.

With 30 inboxes, assuming that you want to stay safe and send 30 emails per day each, you'll be able to send 900 emails per day.

Now to not burn your inboxes too quickly, you'll have to use spintax. It changes each email you send out to use different wording while retaining the original message.

Why is that important? Because if you send the same email from 30 inboxes, you make it too easy for google to understand you're a spammer.

But if all of those 900 messages are unique, you're much more safe.

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When you have your sending infrastructure built, it's time to refine your offer.

In more sophisticated markets like when you're targeting ecommerce brands, use a super valuable lead magnet that you use in your CTA instead of directly asking for a call. Then, when they express an interest in your lead magnet, send it over along with an invitation to a call. Have a calendar link in your lead magnet so they can book once they read or watch through.

But if you have a great offer and great case studies, you can be much more direct.

Here's a structure you can use:

"Hey Janice, loved that case study about how you did X for Y

We helped {competitor} generate {ideal outcome} in 45 days without {major pain}

Would similar outcome be valuable to your company?

Best,

Robert

Founder of SharkTank"

Now you might be thinking - how do I generate that first line about case study? ChatGPT for sheets.

It's a free addon that lets you use GPT in sheets. All you need to do is scrape website URL and ABOUT sections for all your leads, write a prompt and let chatGPT write your first lines.

Now like with anything, there's a lot of testing involved. I run tests in 500 lead increments. Meaning that I'd have a subject line + copy test for first 500 leads, then another subject line + copy for the next 500 and so on until I find a copy that prints meetings.

You can't just write 1 copy and expect to be booking meetings every day, but if you test, you will stumble upon a copy that does just that.

Having good reply to call booked ratio - Knowing how to set meetings.

My number 1 hack that I use to book meetings is after they express interest, I try to share an obvious suggestion that might improve their business from looking at their LP or asking directly what they struggle with the most.

Then, after they answer, I pitch the "Are you open to discussing this further on a call? How's tomorrow at 15:00PM PST looking?"

Never send a calendar link, it's killing your campaigns. Just ask if a specific time works and manually book using google calendar.

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KPI's to look for

I don't track open rates - it's a vanity metric and reduces your own inbox rate. In fact, I send all of my emails in plain HTML - no tracking whatsoever.

So the only KPI's I track across my own and client campaigns are Reply rates, booked call ratio and booked call - closed deal ratio.

Reply rates:

• Below 2% - Bad,
• 3% - 5% - Average,
• 5% - 8% - Good,
• Above 8% - Very good

Why we track this - This is a clear indicator of weather your copy is resonating with your target market. If reply rate is low, we change the angle and copy.

Booked call ratio:

• Below 0.1% - Bad
• 0.2% - 0.3% - Average
• 0.3% - 0.6% - Good
• Above 0.6% Very good

Why we track this - Low booked call ratio means that the offer is not enticing, the lead magnet is not converting or inbox manager is too slow at replying.

Booked call - closed deal ratio

• Below 1% - 5% close rate - Bad
• 5% - 10% close rate - Average
• 10% - 20% close rate - Good
• 20% close rate - Very good

Why we track this - Low close rate can indicate inexperienced closer, bad lead list / targeting or bad back-end offer.

As with anything marketing related, it comes down to following a set process and a system like a robot. If you let your emotions go wild, you won't be able to make it work.

As the title says, if you're currently running FB or IG ads for B2B or B2C, I'll analyse and troubleshoot your current strategy to get you on track.

Alternatively, if you're wondering if you should start running paid ads and not sure where to start, I'll write out a brief plan for you.

If you're interested, in the comments leave what's your service, who's your customer, what's your offer and what's your current strategy.

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Some of my recent wins:

• $340k generated for home service biz with $3k spent in ads.
• $17 CPA and 4 ROAS for a niche ecom brand
• $120 CPA and 14 ROAS for a luxury brand ($800+ product price)
• $40 cost per appointment for an agency
• $24 CPA for $97 info product

I'll be here for an hour and help first 10. First come, first serve.

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