Jonathan and the team at Omni Lab are focused on using paid channels to generate demand that drives pipeline for clients.

The primary, lagging indicators they track are:

Along with a host of other leading metrics, to know how the ads are performing. By focusing on Lead to Opportunity, they’re able to gauge how effectively they’re targeting the right audience, with the right messaging, who eventually reach out to book a call with sales and become opportunities.

They looked at case studies, social proof, quotes, and best-performing deals in the CRM.

One insight this revealed was that most of the “best customers” came from employee sizes of 10-50. But the client had been targeting companies much bigger than that.

This process essentially allowed them to reverse engineer who the best clients were (who gave testimonials, case studies, etc) and refine the targeting to reach more of the same.

A huge benefit of starting with a niche audience in paid, is that they were able to focus their budget in one place, vs just spreading it across a wide swathe of geo, industry, company size, etc.

It also allowed them to add better personalization, which drove higher conversion.

For example, they could make the creative more specific: logos of companies that look like them, or case studies of peers they’d know.

They’ve tested every possible booking flow with clients, but have found the most success starting with a form, then going to a booking tool like Calendly or Chili Piper.

When choosing a time, prospects have to go off-site to open their calendar & see what times work for them. That means there’s always a % that don’t come back. By using a simple form as a first step, you can send the booking form and remind them, to try and get them back.

Like many early-stage companies, this client didn’t have a dedicated product marketing team. So they got an overview of the ICP’s articulated pains, values they wanted, and overall buyer journey.

How?

This allowed them to create messaging that had the best chance of resonating, without the benefit of in-depth research. Jonathan believes that if you’re really early, this messaging may just be coming from the Founder’s brain. The key is: don’t wait for it to be perfect. Get it good enough, based on some positive input, and start testing.

Before putting thousands of dollars of spend behind it, they did small tests with the new target audience to see how the messaging resonated well. Jonathan also said that this is where most people go wrong when testing messaging or creative: they test too many things.

They change creative and visuals, messaging, and CTA, so it’s impossible to identify what change made the biggest impact or how each piece is performing.

Rather than try and optimize for immediate conversions or website clicks, they focused on getting more consumption of the message on-platform.

They used retargeting ads to answer common objections and questions prospects had, and to provide social proof so they felt more comfortable with the client.

This meant that by the time the retargeted prospects did become leads, they converted at a much higher rate because they were already more familiar with the company and had many of fears/uncertainties answered.

These steps led to a 49% increase in the Client’s Lead to Opportunity Conversion Rate (from 25% to 74%).