9 Lessons Learned From Eating Our Own Dog Food

A few months ago I ran a test.

I decided to run some LinkedIn Ads for us, Remotion - and eat our own dog food.

To get high on our own supply as Biggie would say.

Why now?

I typically have not done this in the past for a few reasons:

1. We're usually running at, or below, capacity - and didn't want to overwhelm the system.
2. As an agency, our best clients have always been word-of-mouth, and we've never lacked for leads in that department.
3. I don't have a sales/BD function here yet, so all that work of following up is still on my plate - and I've had a full plate so say the least.

But I was feeling pretty funky with our new brand and I wanted to see how it would work in the "real world", so I spent around $2.7K in LinkedIn ads back in April.

I got 30 attributed leads at an average cost of $82 CPL. 

Here’s what I learned: 

1. An additional 12 leads (or 40% of leads generated) came directly to our website without converting from an ad. They reached out to us for a proposal via the site without being attributed to LinkedIn. 40%! These ended up being some of the best leads. 

2. Another 20% left leads both on the website and via the ads. 

3. I was actually able to generate a pretty high response rate by reaching out to leads directly on LinkedIn - without phone or email. 60% replied to my message.

4. I booked a meeting with half of the leads. There were some no shows, but I think I had meetings with at least 1/3 of the leads.

5. My response time had a HUGE impact on how likely the leads were to respond to my message. The first week I literally replied within minutes of the lead coming in, and nearly all of those replied to me. The next week I was lazier about it - feeling overconfident and it took me 3-4 hours or more to reply - connection rates plummeted.

6. You don’t need a million forms. I managed to get pretty cheap leads because I only asked for two things: First name and LinkedIn profile. If you have their LI profile, you have all the details you need to determine if the lead is qualified, and you have a way to reach out. 

7. Direct Response does work. 

I didn’t use content, I didn’t nurture anything, I targeted my ICP with a clever message for something I know for a fact there is a market need for, and people responded. 

8. However - compared to word-of-mouth, or organic social leads - these leads “performed” much worse. They were less likely to be in the process of shopping for my services, even if there was a great fit, and budget/need/authority, they weren’t in the market for my offer right now. 

9. From an SDR’s perspective then, leads attributed to LinkedIn seem the worst - where direct and organic leads seem the best - even if both of those leads actually originated from LinkedIn Ads. 

What does this all mean? 

We’re moving away from trying to reach perfect attribution models - those never existed to begin with - but we now realize that trying to hard to measure the exact ROI of this channel has been detrimental. Measurement/attribution should be used for optimization, but more holistic view should be used to quantify the contribution to revenue. 

And SDRs need a better understanding of what LinkedIn advertising is and how it helps them book more meetings and close more deals with their prospects even if they aren’t being directly attributed to LinkedIn.