Don't Be Like Mike, Be Like TikTok

Hey everyone 👋 welcome back to Pipe Rise. We show you a handful of cool things happening in B2B Marketing, in less than a 5-minute read.

In Today's Email:

1. Be Like TikTok 🤖

2. Use Template Libraries To Unlock Growth 📚

3. Paid Social Slowdown 👇

WHAT SMART PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT TODAY 👀

#1 - Be Like TikTok

Remember those Be Like Mike commercials? You know the ones where people that didn't even play basketball wanted to be like Michael Jordan. ( here's a throwback to the 1992 commercial...you're welcome )

Well, these days it looks like everyone wants to be like TikTok. All the Google execs are aligned on message saying search is going through a total reinvention. It's shifting from strictly being a questions & answers service to a service of exploration & discovery. Towards a more natively visual way.

Kinda like the way you go onto TikTok for the 'For You' section where you feel like it knows you better than you know yourself. Google's brainboxes are on the case to build an equivalent experience so that you can wander through stuff that you find interesting for hours and hours. ( you'll search for spa retreats and end up looking at fancy freestanding bathtubs that dreams are made of )

The classic list of links that show when you search for something are starting to disappear as well. They're going to be replaced by a series of images and informational widgets. Now...if that doesn't say 'it's not you, it's me' then I don't know what does.

Liz Reid, the VP who oversees all of Google’s search products, does make a fair point on why changing the user experience makes sense, "If you think about our ranking, conceptually as your scroll more, it gets worse"

Google's known to be a slow moving ship for launching new things. And this one's definitely going to take awhile since it impacts their core business model. Expect plenty of experiements to be thrown into the mix as they fight to stay the world's portal to culture and information.

#2 - Use Template Libraries to Unlock Growth

We've all been there. We're trying to generate truckloads of pipeline through down-funnel offers like demo requests, and it works well. But the law of in-market buyers ( I just made that law up but it works eh? ) tells us that there are only a few % points of people actually ever in-market and looking to buy something at any one time.

That means when our pipeline targets get higher and higher, we need to figure out new funnels to create and capture demand. That's where templates come in. In fact, seven of the ten fastest-growing apps use templates in their marketing. Success leaves clues as they say, so it's probably not by chance they use them to acquire and activate new customers.

So what makes them great?

Well if you're in a sales-led B2B motion, they increase distribution as another MQL type but they're closer to a down-funnel offer like a demo request than a high-level blog article. And if you're in a product-led B2B motion, they can be a fast path to people test-driving your product and increasing adoption.

Adam Schoenfield and Camille Trent from PeerSignal put together a brilliant deep dive article that walks you through common template strategies in SaaS, how they've evolved across sales-led and product-led companies, and when to best use them in your go-to-market.

Think of Canva. Canva is a beast of a company and has taken their industry by storm creating an empire of templates that helped them acquire over 4M backlinks and over 270M visitors a year. But they're not the only companies we know and love that use templates to grow faster, HubSpot, Gong, Typeform, Figma, and Notion are a few others executing well.

Templates help B2B and PLG SaaS companies:

• Clarify their positioning in the market

• Reduce reliance on paid ads and partners

• Expand distribution exponentially with minimal effort

• Bring in more MQL/SQLs

• Create an evergreen, repeatable content engine

• Help your audience get inspired, onboarded, and activated

Now...your company needs to invest in strong content culture if you're to make templates a core part of your overall growth strategy. But like I said earlier, success leaves clues. Until we have a better answer, we should copy and then innovate later.

#3 - Paid Social Slowdown

This is the biggest slowdown we've seen in paid social ad spending in years. Advertisers are spending less, inflation's at record highs, and the word recession is hanging around like cousin Jeffrey that you see once every few years during the holidays but can't wait to see the back of.

Flick through Twitter, YouTube, even the OG news channels like CNBC or CNN, and you'll be hit with doomsday predictions about Q4 and 2023. In a bad economy, marketing & advertising is always the first to get cut. But a bad economy isn't the only thing making Zuckerberg sweat.

Let's take a quick look at some of the other big picture trends that are slowing down the ad industry:

1. The likes of Facebook, Instagram, and Snap are a mess because of Apple's genius masterstroke. Wiping out billions from their piggy banks ( and forcing them on a hiring freeze ). Apple's throttling of data that used to make the ad platforms accurate and an instant favorite for every venture-funded SaaS company has blown them off course. SaaS marketers can't scale up demo requests as easy as they used to when the conversion data is upside down.

2. People are starting to realize there's a great big world outside of Google, FB, and LinkedIn. We've more options than ever before when it comes to allocating our bets in the form of euros and dollars. Ad-funded versions of Netflix and Disney+ are on the way, and Apple is building a next-gen ads platform and expanding quickly.

So what does that mean for all the operators in the trenches directing paid media budgets?I've one word for you my amigos - Discounts. Paid social opportunities are on sale. If everyone's jumping out for any of the above reasons but you're plain sailing, then lean in and make use of the cheaper CPMs & ultimately cheaper cost per conversion.

STUDYING THE GREATS 🏆

1. Compose like you recite. That's the crux to great calligraphy

2. Write like you talk. That's the key to great copyrighting

Ok...which one of those two sentences above reads better. Easy right?

For some reason, we're taught in school to use big complicated words that would make Shakespeare proud. People think this makes them sound smart ( it doesn't ). All it does is make your copy harder to understand and fade into the background.

Today's lesson spotlights Hey.com's homepage and how their copy naturally flows from the first sentence, to the second sentence, to the third ( and so on ). All simply because they write like they speak.

The academics of the world that love perfect grammar won't love how Jason starts some sentences with the words "And", "Yet, or "So". But they create the slippery slope that the greatest sales copyrighters in the world would say is A1 execution.

So take a read at Jason from Hey.com's wonderful execution and next time you're writing copy to either sell a product or sell your idea, remember to write like you speak.

MEME OF THE DAY 😂

This one goes out to all the troopers battling their pipeline targets right up until the very end.

The last day of the quarter. You got this ✊

That's a wrap. Cya next week for the first Pipe Rise of Q4