INSIGHTS FROM EXPERTS ON LINKEDIN
Liam Moroney argues that instead of asking for the ROI of brand marketing, companies should ask what they’re giving up by not investing in being known. Brand is often what allows businesses to move beyond small pockets of demand and compete for the wider market, especially in B2B where buyers rarely choose brands they’ve never heard of.
Pranav Piyush shares an example from Uber where brand awareness rose from 50 to 65 during a campaign, then dropped back to 50 just two to four weeks after the budget was cut. The point isn’t that brand always fades this quickly, but that awareness is an upstream metric that needs time to translate into revenue, and short campaigns with long gaps can mean constantly rebuilding the same awareness.
Adam Holmgren shares 10 reasons why Fibbler reached $100K in MRR with just two people, from building an audience and posting consistently on LinkedIn to keeping the product simple and owning 100% of the company. Strong attribution, extensive documentation, a recognizable brand and, perhaps most importantly, a high level of trust between the two founders have all helped them grow without external funding.
Andrei Zinkevich shares a huge collection of ABM guides covering everything from strategy and account selection to sales alignment, reporting and real-world case studies. Successful ABM isn’t really about having the biggest budget or fanciest tech stack, it comes down to solid GTM fundamentals, a strong operating system and marketing, sales and product actually working together.
Jonathan Bland says most paid search problems can be traced back to five basics: search terms, intent, quality signals, ad relevance and landing pages. Once those are in good shape, marketers can dig into bigger issues like brand preference, market changes, auction economics, positioning and what happens after the form fill, but the first step is focusing on the things you can actually control.
Anni Kristiina Salo argues that as ad platforms take more control over where and when ads appear, marketers need to get much better at the data they feed those algorithms. ChatGPT Ads push this even further, with OpenAI deciding when an ad is relevant based on the conversation, so if your conversion data is messy or unclear, the algorithm won’t have much to work with.
Fabian Van De Wiele shares what they learned from testing ChatGPT Ads in the US, where CPCs were high, leads cost around 5x more than Google Search, and optimization control was pretty limited. His bigger concern is measurement: people may discover something in ChatGPT and convert somewhere else later, so he recommends treating it as a mid-funnel channel and using geo-lift or incrementality testing instead of relying on UTMs and pixels.
WHAT'S NEW IN THE INDUSTRY
New LinkedIn B2B Institute research shows that social video can help brands become more discoverable, credible and easier to choose by making complex products easier to understand and share across the buying group. With nearly two-thirds of B2B buyers saying social video influences their decisions, the research highlights video’s role in building familiarity, trust and confidence before and during the buying process.
LinkedIn says more than one million people have used its AI slop feedback tool, and members are seeing around 40% less content the platform classifies as low-quality or inauthentic. The article points out that this does not mean AI-assisted posts are automatically getting 40% less reach, despite some reporting suggesting otherwise, though LinkedIn does confirm that content flagged as inauthentic can lose distribution.
Google is bringing Google tag and Google Tag Manager closer together, giving websites access to a more unified setup, a simpler interface and new no-code event tracking. Advertisers will be able to create events by selecting elements directly on their website, while optimized containers could also improve data transmission speed and website performance.
Google is adding Gemini Omni to Asset Studio, allowing advertisers to turn creative briefs, brand guidelines and existing assets into campaign-ready videos. The tool can generate and edit multiple video formats through simple prompts, helping advertisers create more variations for Demand Gen, Performance Max and YouTube campaigns without relying on separate production tools.
Google is testing new controls that would let advertisers influence which Performance Max channels the algorithm prioritizes, including Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps. Rather than assigning fixed budgets, advertisers could tell PMax to value conversions from certain channels more or less, but they’ll need to consider each channel’s wider role in the customer journey, not just its directly attributed performance.
The article argues that marketers should focus their limited testing capacity on questions where uncertainty could have a real financial impact. Before running a test, teams should also agree on what actions they’ll take for different outcomes, turning the results into clear decisions and useful benchmarks for managing performance between tests.
That’s the scoop for this week! If you found this valuable and any useful insights caught your eye, feel free to share them with your network.
Until next week!
