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How to do YouTube Ads for B2B
LinkedIn Ads Blueprint, Monday's 3.7m subs playbook, Replit founder and more
Okerosi Davis
December 29, 2024 • Letter: 9 minutes
Hello Marketers.
It’s been a minute since our last Product Weekly. Moving into 2025, I want commit to deliver a weekly issue in your inbox.
Kindly share the newsletter to your Marketer colleagues.
The Playbook Behind Monday.com Insights’ 3.7 million email subscribers
A while ago I was listening to the Exit Five podcast, where Dave hosted the Monday .com content marketing team - Eliana Atia & Arielle Gordis.
The team shared insights behind the company’s 3.7 million email subscribers dubbed; Monday Insights.
Arielle who writes the newsletter every Monday shared how she does the research during the week and prepared the issue - same time, every week.
You know, employees are not doing as well. And so then the conversation is like, how do you support employee well being? Those are kind of like, some of the things that guided it also could be that mother's day is around the corner. And so I'm like, we should write about how to support the parents on your team. And then it's often combination of conversations with people that can relate to the challenges. You know, I'll speak with parents at Monday and ask them, what are things your managers do that's really helpful? What are things that you wish your manager did? What are, you know, and things in the past and kind of combining it. So it's a combination of research.
Aside from the company’s massive acquisition efforts through ads and SEO, the newsletter is a great nurturing and retention tool. I have written about Exploding Topics, a SaaS company built by Brian Dean based on SEO, and its weekly newsletter, Exploding Topics Tuesday.
Before Semrush's acquisition, Exploding Topics had over 96k email subscribers. Now, Semrush runs ads for its products on the list every Tuesday.
The Playbook: Monday.com’s newsletter is designed to empower employees while Exploding Topics is designed to help readers get ahead of the curve on what is trending in tech.
Step one: Create a branded newsletter
Step two: Set the topic and consistent schedule
Step three: Have a separate landing page to collect the emails
By the way, Robinhood acquired Chartr newsletter under its media arm - Sherwood Media.
In the age of increased cost of acquisition and tanking organic traffic across social media channels, having your distribution channel is a sustainable strategy. And spinning off a branded newsletter is a great way to do it.
Proven Growth
LinkedIn Ads Blueprint - Paragon ($0 to Millions)
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Brian Yam, Growth & Marketing at Paragon hopped on the SaaSOpen event to share their LinkedIn Ads blueprint;
Nail your ICP - In LinkedIn, your ideal customer profile is not the traditional one with TAM and all.
Example: “Product/engineering leaders at non-verticalized B2B SaaS in North America, Europe, and Australia companies with 50-500 employees or >$10 million in funding, who don’t have a dedicated integrations engineering team and have less than 30 native integrations.”
5 Reasons NOT to invest in LinkedIn Ads
1/You don’t have a clear idea of what your ideal customer profile (ICP) is
2/Your ICP doesn’t spend their time on LinkedIn
3/You don’t have content your ICP will find valuable*
4/You have a very low ACV (average contract value) - ballpark <$5k
5/You have less than $5000 to spend on the channel
The Creative Formula
Context - What part of the stage are they in?
Offer - What content/topics are relevant to them?
Ad Messaging - How do we make them interested in our offer?
Founder Story
Amjad Masad - Replit, a side hustle now worth $1.6bn
Am a huge fan of My First Million Podcast by Sam and Shaan. This week I watched a conversation with the Founder of Replit ( ‘Shopify for Developers ‘).
My key learning: Patience - Amjad started Replit as a side hustle about 15 years ago, stuck with it, and even resigned from Facebook to build it and it’s eventually paying off. From the outside, it may look like a 10-year overnight success but it is not.
How to do YouTube Ads for B2B
In this age of less than a goldfish attention span, marketing comes down to grabbing attention (in 3 seconds) and building trust that converts.
Recently, 42 Agency wrote an issue on how to do YouTube Ads for B2B.
YouTube’s strength lies in its ability to blend storytelling and reach. It’s an ideal platform for engaging potential buyers who may not be in-market yet but are open to learning about your brand and offerings. Whether you’re using it for thought leadership, product demos, or customer success stories, YouTube is a platform where your brand can shine in three seconds in ways that go beyond traditional text-based ads.
One of the key differences between YouTube and other ad platforms is to shift the focus away from purely bottom-of-funnel performance marketing that can be 100% measurable.
B2B marketers often make the mistake of measuring success based solely on immediate conversions and are obsessed with attribution. While conversion metrics are important, and attribution is a must, YouTube excels as a brand-building tool and a great addition to your marketing mix.
Some of the best ad formats to test for B2B marketing include:
In-stream ads skippable after 5 seconds; best of brand awareness and top-of-the-funnel engagement
Discovery ads; best for middle-funnel, they appear on the YouTube search results
Bumper Ads, non-skippable for 6 seconds; great for retargeting
Non-skippable in-stream ads; up to 20 seconds, best for promotions, announcements
YouTube Masthead ads for broad brand awareness
YouTube Ads Shorts - vertical video clips
Proven Startups
Octolens - feedback from AppSumo (SaaS marketplace) to refine ICP
The volume and variety of users meant we got feedback we might have taken many months to gather otherwise. We learned that some of our original assumptions about who would use Octolens most effectively were spot-on, while others needed adjusting. This feedback didn’t just come in the form of “I like/don’t like this feature”; it helped us understand what types of customers derive the most value, which workflows are most common, and what features are truly must-haves.
App scaled to $725 MRR - Going global on the start
Although I planned to launch globally, I didn’t consider it in the design phase. The UI broke on most screens because English typically has more characters than Korean (since I’m Korean and launched in Korea first). Design your UI with the longer English text in mind from the beginning. Additionally, the US uses pounds, so to properly convert weights between kg and lbs, all numerical types need to be doubles. This seemed obvious, but I had integers in my screens and database, requiring a complete migration to doubles. Also, always store times in UTC in your backend database. I foolishly stored times as local dates, forcing me to migrate all timestamps, which was extremely painful.
That is all for this week.
Which section stood out for you today?
-Okerosi