Adam Holmgren is the co-founder & CEO at Fibbler, a paid ads attribution tool. They are bootstrapped, roughly 2.5 years in, and just hit $1M ARR with a team of just two. Before Fibbler, Adam was Head of Demand Gen at Rillion and GetAccept.
In this episode, we talk about Adam’s founder brand playbook, how he batch-writes 5 Linkedin posts every Sunday night, his three content pillars, the $10-15k/month Linkedin ads setup behind Fibbler’s growth, and how their pink lion mascot became one of their best marketing assets.
Listen on: YouTube, Apple Podcast & Spotify
We discuss:
How Adam writes 5 Linkedin posts every Sunday night
The three content pillars behind Fibbler’s growth
Why almost every Adam post is an image post now (and why pure text posts stopped working for him)
His 100-like threshold to decide which organic posts get promoted into Thought Leader ads
Fibbler’s two-layer ad structure
The $100,000 ad-spend post that’s been running as an ad for over a year
Why the founder of an attribution tool ignores attribution for his own advertising
The pink lion mascot
Running ads on Hulu & HBO Max through Linkedin CTV
Hope you enjoy!!
Connect with Adam:
Adam’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-holmgren/
Fibbler: https://fibbler.co/
Connect with Finn:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/
Founder Brand & LinkedIn Consultancy: https://thormeier.co/
Full transcript:
Finn: All right. My guest today is Adam Holmgreen. He is the co-founder and CEO at Fibbler. Fibbler is a paid ads attribution tool that we use at my agency, Project 33. It allows you to connect your LinkedIn and Google ad account as well as your CRM, say HubSpot, Salesforce, and then it calculates influence pipeline or revenue for you. It’s great. Obviously, there’s other parts to it. I’m sure we’re going to talk about it. It’s a company that Adam and his co-founder bootstrapped over the last, I think, a little over two years, almost two and a half years. I mean, I think originally it was just you and then you had your co-founder joined a little later. They just recently hit a million in ARR. It’s just Adam and his co-founder, so they’re super lean. And before Fibbler, Adam was a Head of Demand Gen at Rillian and Head of Demand Gen at GetAccept. So I think you basically solved your own pain point here. Is that correct?
Adam: Yeah. And I mean, I feel like that’s the way you want to create a product or a company, right? Solving something you feel and then hopefully more people feel the same way. And I think that’s definitely proven to be true for us.
Finn: And it helps you with marketing because you’re basically marketing to people like you and you’re a user of your own product.
Adam: I mean, I’ve never marketed to marketeers before. And like, it’s crazy. It’s nice, right?
Finn: Yeah.
Adam: I mean, at my previous company, we were Marketing to CFOs. Like it’s two different worlds. I mean, it’s crazy how hard it is to market to a persona you don’t really know in the same way, at least. And now I can kind of, you know, create something funny and more people will at least think it’s funny than if I did it to the CFO.
Finn: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s also more competitive, I would say, you know, especially when you look at LinkedIn trying to reach the head of marketing persona, as well as head of sales and CEO founder type. It’s just the most crowded. So that’s a benefit if you’re selling to heads of IT or CFOs.
Adam: And I would say like, marketeers to marketeers, they are also very good, usually, like they do very good marketing. So that’s the struggle, of course.
Finn: Now, the reason why I wanted to have you on is because obviously you almost exclusively grew and bootstrapped Fibbler through LinkedIn. And that’s mostly your own founder profile, your organic content, as well as... The ads that you guys are running, Thought Leader ads, as well as regular single image ads I saw through Fibbler. And so this is what the show is obviously all about. So you’re very much in the weeds every day. And so I just want to talk to you about what’s working for you today. Both on the organic side as well as the ads side. How do things integrate with you guys? And yeah, that’s the main topic I want to dive into.
So maybe first question, I mean, how would you describe your approach to LinkedIn today if you had to put it into a nutshell? How are you posting, what you’re posting, how much time you’re spending? And then maybe we can compare that to, I don’t know, six or 12 months ago.
Adam: Yeah, but I think it’s even more today, like finding it. People should feel that it’s me writing, that it’s very authentic and coming from, you know, it should sound like me. And I feel like I write in a certain way and I want that to always be there. So I think in general, I spend maybe less time than I did 12 months ago. Not that I focus less on it, but I think I’ve become more efficient in general.
Finn: How much time? Like, what are we talking?
Adam: I mean, I still, I spend a few hours on LinkedIn every day, right? And during that time, I always put notes down if I read something inspiring that I want to write about and so on. But then typically my writing is done maybe two, three hours during the weekend.
Finn: So you post, it looks like daily, right? Monday through Friday, like about five posts a week?
Adam: Yeah, exactly.
Finn: And then you’re saying you batch write all five posts on the weekend?
Adam: Yeah, almost always at least, or at least a couple of posts. And then I might, if I’m not as inspired, I might do a few and then I have to add one during the week. But typically that’s how I, so during the week, I will be on LinkedIn for a couple of hours a day because that’s how it is. And during that time, I try to take as much notes as I can when I, you know, I typically put it just in my notes in my iPhone, just like outlines for posts or outlines.
Finn: What does a post, like a note might look like, like what might Say how long is it?
Adam: It could be that I read a post about someone talking about LinkedIn ads, right? And a strong point of view on it. And then I might write an outline about that, but another point of view on that topic. So it’s more that I try to Find topic ideas from what people are writing about.
Finn: So it’s more like a sentence or two rather than like a path fleshed out.
Adam: No, no, it’s 100% a sentence and two. And then typically during the weekend, I sit down, I open up my notepad and look at all of And then I start outlining the kind of post structure for the week because I always, I try to have a few, like two, three, maybe four even content pillars that I want part of my every week. So I want to have something about these certain topics always.
Finn: Do you have them like other explicit? Can you name your two or three content pillars?
Adam: Yes. So one is of course attribution because that’s kind of what we do with Fibblers. I want to talk about that as a topic. The second part is more about me building this company in public. And then the third part is more about LinkedIn ads specifically since I’m like an operator in that. So talking more about how to do that well. And those three are typically the ones I do. And then I sometimes add a fourth that’s more personal, what I’m doing, what I’m, you know, but those three, those should always be there during a week for sure.
Finn: And so how does it, like, okay, let’s, so you sit down, do you always sit down at the same time on the weekend?
Adam: I almost always sit down during like the Sunday evening-ish.
Finn: Oh, evening. That’s when your brain is already dead though from spending all day with the kids.
Adam: Yeah, exactly, exactly. It’s not ideal, but it is what it is.
Finn: Like what are we talking, like five till eight or like eight till eleven?
Adam: No, more eight to twelve or something like that, I would say, because that’s typically what I do work during the evenings. During the week as well, because we have a lot of customers in the US and the West Coast doesn’t align perfectly with Sweden, right? So I typically always have a slot between, at least I work between eight to 11 when the kids start to sleep and I do that also.
Finn: Okay. So eight till 11 on Sundays, you write five posts, you have your list of, you have your notebook with the different ideas that you jot down. Do you like... First thing, you go through it and you’re like, these are the five, and then you start drafting? Or do you go one by one? You’re like, this one feels good, so let me write it right now. Okay, I’m done. Let me pick the second one.
Adam: I do that. I typically find the ones I’m most passionate about and start with them. And then my kind of, you know, it gets later and I get less passionate about certain topics. And that’s, you know, I do like, I try to fully complete them, but I will change them most likely during the week as well when I have more energy and realize that they suck.
Finn: And so it sounds like you do like two to four hours maybe of a block. And so that’s like for five posts, that’s 30 to 45 minutes per post.
Adam: Yeah. And sometimes it’s also, if I don’t have five ideas, I might have to, during that time, also research and scout for a few more. So that also ends up in there. But then I definitely put maybe, I don’t know, 15 to 30 minutes a day, you know, editing these posts and coming up with maybe another angle to them during the week as well.
Finn: So it looks like you do almost always an image post, almost all of your posts. Let me actually share my screen.
Adam: And that is very, that is something that has changed dramatically during my time posting on LinkedIn, I should say, solely based on me seeing the biggest success with that.
Finn: Interesting. And do you think that’s just kind of you realize that over time that images just do better? Or do you think that’s something that actually changed about LinkedIn itself?
Adam: I do think it’s 100% algorithm. Or at least in the beginning when I started posting on LinkedIn, I almost only did text posts, pure text posts, no images. And those worked incredibly well. I mean, in terms of reach and kind of engagement and so on. But over time, at least my feeling is that that stopped. I feel like it became more competitive. So an image is a way to kind of stand out in the feed and get people to stop for a second and think. So that’s why I’m mostly running. And then I’ve had a few iterations of trying video as well, but it doesn’t work for me really.
Finn: What do you use to create these mascot things?
Adam: I have like, I don’t know, 100 to 500 of these mascots variants of the different poses and so on. And then I just use camera to put it together mostly. But for some of the images, I have designers as well that helped me, like for the more advanced images and so on.
Finn: Like this one?
Adam: No, not that one, but the latest one I did today.
Finn: So you just have like 500 different kind of versions of your mascot doing all kinds of random things.
Adam: Random things. Exactly. That I can put onto stuff.
Finn: Interesting. And this one, where do you create something like this?
Adam: That’s a designer that I’m working with.
Finn: Okay.
Adam: Some of those are more designed, but otherwise, like majority of my stuff is only done in like Canva and because it’s, you know, I want it to be very raw, authentic. That’s also a designed image as an example. Yeah.
Finn: Yeah. And what I noticed is you’re playing around with this, like the, you know, boldening and italic thing. I’m still, I’m kind of holding back from that because I feel like it just looks so... We saw a bunch of different types of posts here. There’s obviously more personal stuff like this with a picture with your daughter. I think this is announcing a launch about a new thing that you guys are going to do inside of the product. This is also more personal, Founder, a little funny, Workout, LinkedIn ad structure. This is very much thought leadership. Do you have a sense of what kind of post drives the most signups for Fibbler?
Adam: I would say like typically with everything I post, I try to never or very rarely at least talk about the product specifically, but be more adjacent to the topic. So for attribution, as an example, I will talk about attribution and my point of view of that. And then I might mention in the end, Fibbler is one way we do this. But I try to generally not talk about it, but obviously attribution is one that Not necessarily, it doesn’t drive the most engagement, but it does drive a lot of impact on signups for sure. LinkedIn Ads is the same. Whenever I tie LinkedIn Ads structure like that to some sort of measurement also and talk about that, it’s definitely a good Good angle. I mean, everything personal and all of those things are not a good signup driver in general.
Finn: Why do you think you do them? I mean, I do them too sometimes, but like in your head, why not just always talk about attribution and LinkedIn ads that you can tie it directly to?
Adam: Good question. I mean, I think it’s more to Try and create this relationship with people. I mean, obviously, in the end, I would love if they buy from us, but it’s like if they have more trust in me and kind of get a feeling behind the scenes who I am, I think it’s more trustworthy. And especially as a small player in this sea of like larger enterprises, I think That is what we have to play with. We can create that trust with our personality rather than spend, distribution, massiveness. And I think that’s why I’ve been doing it a lot.
Finn: I think it’s that and it also increases surface area. Signups obviously really matters and you want to grow the company, but it’s not that only signups matter. To you guys, there might be a potential co-founder, there might be a potential investor, there might be a potential partner, there might be a potential reseller, there might be an employee. You can go very specifically after those people too. If you decide, hey, I want to attract investors, then you could build a constant strategy around that. But I think just having some amount of this kind of Personal, that’s not just random, like here’s a random selfie for no reason, but you also talk a little bit about your life and what you’re interested in. It just gives people something to latch onto that could lead to things that you are not yet sure that you need or want.
Adam: No, it’s true. And I think those posts, they do give me a lot of followers. So that’s also like a long term, obviously they will see a continuation of my post hopefully over time. So I think that is also a good value or has been for me at least.
Finn: So, okay. So you batch write all of your content on Sunday. It sounds like you do not schedule them out at that point.
Adam: I do. I do. I do schedule a rough draft like of when I want them to go dependent on-
Finn: Like inside of the actual LinkedIn scheduler?
Adam: Yes, yes.
Finn: What time do you post always?
Adam: Yeah, no, I don’t have a, I’m still experimenting a bit, but I typically, my typical poll, like schedule is like 2 p.m. CET. So that’s like,
Finn: Morning US.
Adam: Yeah, exactly. Morning US, okay for us. And then sometimes I do earlier 10 a.m., which usually works fine as well, but I try to stick to the kind of 2 p.m. I schedule only because I want to have a good mix of talking about heavy subjects, not the day after each other. I don’t know if it matters, but in my mind it does. So I try to have a post like that, then maybe it’s something more personal, then going to LinkedIn ads, then something about building the company. And then it changes, of course, but that’s the...
Finn: Yeah. And then do you have a structure around how and when you engage on LinkedIn? Like, you know, okay, my post on... Tomorrow is Wednesday. Tomorrow my post is scheduled for, let’s say, 2 p.m., your default time. What are you going to do before or after that?
Adam: In general, I don’t do anything. The only thing I do is after it goes live, I hassle my co-founder to engage with it. That’s the only thing I do. And since I often tag Fibbler, I engage with Fibbler. But otherwise, I don’t do anything. I don’t think about being active right before. I don’t do anything of that.
Finn: You don’t make sure that you can be active Around like after it so that it doesn’t go live at 2 p.m. and then you’re on calls for the next four hours.
Adam: Yes. I typically always, of course, try to answer comments and so on as fast as possible, at least in the beginning. But it’s not something I plan out. It’s more that I tend to do it.
Finn: Got it. Okay. Any non-negotiables that you’re like, I do this every day on LinkedIn. I always check these creators. I always do inbox zero. I always, you know, comment on at least five posts or anything of that sort.
Adam: But I definitely always do inbox zero. It’s the same for my email. I get really stressed if I have a lot of things to answer. Sometimes I just, you know, I might not answer it, but I just decide that this is not something I’m not going to answer. So that is something I have to do every day, for sure, for both the email and LinkedIn, which is hard sometimes.
Finn: Any other unnegotiables?
Adam: No, I’m a scroller. I just like to go on there, scroll. I don’t have any people I go into and follow, but you have your typical algorithm of who you’re seeing, and that’s who you’re engaging with and so on.
Finn: Besides that you started using images, Anything else where you felt like you had to adjust recently, where something that used to work doesn’t work anymore or anything of that sort?
Adam: No, but I think definitely imagery is one of the biggest things I’ve changed, but also that I have very clear content pillars now. I didn’t have that before, like trying to be known for these very clear topics. I think it’s helped. My growth and kind of or continuing that growth because in the beginning, I think I started posting maybe four years ago and it was much easier the beginning and maybe not in the beginning, but at least after a little while when I started getting, you know, getting started. But then I feel like it changed maybe two years ago or something like that. It became much harder. So I think that has helped me at least to kind of continue along the same path. And then it also helps when you’re like, it’s way easier to post when you’re now, you know, running your own company. You can talk about so many different things related to that. It was much harder when I was in house to have something to say every weekday. And now it’s also more business critical, right? Compared to maybe how the company felt about me posting at the time, right?
Finn: Sure. Yeah. And now when you... You’re posting five times a week, you batch write them on Sunday, you have your three content pillars, attribution, founder story, and LinkedIn ads, and sometimes a fourth pillar for personal. How do you think about, and a lot of that is probably at this point subconscious and kind of intuitive, but if you had to explain to someone Here’s what a good topic is. Here’s how you write about it. Here’s what a good post is, how it should be structured, what should be in it, what should not be in it, how you write your hook. Like if you had to tell someone, here’s how you write a good post. What are those things that you look for and try to do?
Adam: I think in general, I want the post to give some sort of value, not necessarily that you need to learn something, but at least give some sort of knowledge maybe that they didn’t know before. And that could be just You know, oh, I succeeded with this thing or we reached a million dollars of ARR. This is what we did to, you know, this is what we focused on to do that. That is one, you know, we could do the same for 800K in MRR. So it’s like those are topics that are great. And I feel like You can still live and die with your hook, right? Which is why I think it’s so important to create interest there, but still be very authentic. I’m very opposed to... Too many, you know, numbers, big things. I’m more of a like, this is what happened and here I’ll share what we did. It’s more like trying to be very clear about what it’s about. And then I’m a big fan of these very structured posts of like, this is the... Campaign structure we use. This is the code layer. This is the retargeting layer. This is what’s in it. This is because I feel like that’s what a lot of people in my audience are looking for and kind of what I’m looking for as well, to be honest, when I’m reading. So I do think there’s some importance in how you structure a post and not necessarily just write whatever. Yeah, I think that’s the most, but value always. Like if I feel like something is too producty and talking too much about, you know, we’re launching this. I often, if we’re launching something, I often want to tie it to something else and then talk about launch. Like we launched something the other week and I talked about, you know, I’m getting called out publicly over Things in our platform that people didn’t like. And then we did the launch. I think there’s a way to package things in a more authentic way that brings out you and not necessarily the product.
Finn: How often or how much do you end up changing things when you write something on Sunday, you schedule it out your Monday through Friday, and then it’s Wednesday? How often and how much do you end up changing still on the day?
Adam: Yeah, quite a lot of them. Yeah, I typically sometimes I’m more bold when I sit there on a Sunday and like, oh, I’m going to have this aggressive take on something and then come the day and I realize that I’m a Swedish person and we are not that aggressive. So I’m toning it down a bit. So that happens all the time. And I restructure the days all the time as well, like which post should go out when. I have a much better performance on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays as an example. So I might want to have my attribution and LinkedIn ads post in there, kind of do the more personal stuff on Mondays or Friday. So that is something I constantly change. And maybe the hook is as well something I typically maybe the meat of the post, I won’t touch that much, but the hook I might feel better or worse about.
Finn: I’ll just point out three things that I think Are helping you here. I think one is you just have a lot of reps. I mean, you post five times a week, every week. You’ve been doing this four years, maybe not the five posts every week, but you’ve been active for a long time. So just doing that helps one kind of build up your intuition around What might work, what might not work, what are people interested in, as well as kind of developing your style, understanding how you want to show up, what kind of hooks you want to write that you don’t want to pack them with the numbers. And I think you can only really arrive by that by just doing it a lot. You can’t just think that up in an empty box.
The second thing is... When you think about, hey, I want to provide value to my audience in every post, it helps that you are your audience, you are a B2B marketer. And so, again, that’s what we talked about previously with the CFO. That’s a little tougher, right? Like if you’re selling to CFOs, like it’s much easier to get into the product marketer mindset, you know, or the demand gen marketer and just create something that serves your company’s benefits, but you Forget about will the CFO actually find this interesting and valuable. And even if you think about it, it’s often hard because you’re not a CFO.
And so I think the third thing that might help you is just you have some space between when you write something and when it actually goes out. And I think that additional space between also helps Because I think often the first version of something we write is oftentimes a little bit more marketing-y, is a little bit more self-motivated, like, hey, I want to inform the world about this thing that we’re launching. And then if you take a step back and then you have two or three days between that when it actually goes live, you’re like, wait a second, now that I read the hook again, I’m like, I’m a little too, you know... Just shoving my product into people’s face here.
Okay. We talked about organic. You have your five posts going out every week. Talk to me about your LinkedIn ad strategy. What do you amplify? What do you not amplify? What if this is thought leader ads versus company ads? How do you think about it at this point in time?
Adam: Yeah, I mean, obviously, when we started, I mean, a little over two years ago now, we did or I did only like organic posts, that was the start of it. And I think we had maybe our first 50 customers at least came from that. But it became very clear that, you know, my network was very European heavy. And we had to grow in the US because the ad business is so much larger in the US. And that was kind of Maybe that was even month two or three when we started thinking in that direction and started running ads already. We did it already when we had almost zero revenue, but I felt like we had to. We didn’t take salaries because we did it on the side, so we could put it all into ads. Was a really great strategy. And then we obviously did.
Finn: How much are you guys spending right now? I mean, I’m assuming given that you guys are doing a million in ARR, it’s not a ton of money. I’m just curious.
Adam: Now I think we’re spending between 10 to 15 K a month.
Finn: Okay. That’s a good chunk.
Adam: Yeah. I mean, that’s, yeah. Just for the sole reason that we really see that as the big driver and big distribution of our entire business at this point. And it also helps that we’re advertising only
Finn: What do you think is your estimation of incremental increase? So like what percentage of the million in ARR is attributed to LinkedIn ads? And obviously both matter, both touch people. So it’s the combination of both that works really well. If you would just turn off ads and you would stop spending the $10k to $15k a month, what would be the drop in new signups?
Adam: Good question. I think in the beginning, none, because we have a strong amount now, but I think over time, at least half, 100%.
Finn: At least half?
Adam: Yeah.
Finn: I’m surprised by that number.
Adam: For sure. Because I mean, that’s the way we reach out to the most people, right? If that stopped, we would just reach my small bubble of people and that That would be massively. And that’s also something that is so funny, right? We run this attribution platform now. I care zero about attribution for our own advertising. I just want to reach as many people as possible. I want to engage with them as much as possible. And if we do that, I’m so certain it will lead to good results. And so far, it has really proven that.
Finn: So how do you think about the difference between what you’re posting on your LinkedIn and what you’re running as ads? Is it the exact same content or what’s the difference?
Adam: It is. I think now when I’ve been running Thought Leader ads for so long, it’s still a big portion of the structure. I think about it already when I’m writing a post or at least I’m thinking like, oh, This could become a really good dot leader ad as well. And then I get really disappointed if it doesn’t work out organically that well. But it’s definitely in the part of my mind. And I tend to like going into the structure, I keep it very simple. Generally, I have this code layer where we target people that probably don’t know about us. And then we have this retargeting layer where we target all the people that, you know, visited our website or our company page or engage with other ads. So I try to Have similar content, but a slight difference, like in the cold layer towards completely new people, it tends to be more high level. I tend to have posts about my journey as a marketeer coming into building my own company, talking about going into a million dollars of ARR with only two people. And then I tend to also talk about LinkedIn ads.
Finn: So do you almost just add any posts across your, you know, three to four content pillars that you have into that code layer?
Adam: Yeah.
Finn: And just anyone, or do you have like a threshold and you need to get at least 50 likes?
Adam: No, it needs to get at least 100 likes. That’s my general threshold. And then, you know, obviously you have a feeling for what works at this point. I know these posts are about, you know, The company growing well and how we’re driving distribution. Those will work well in cold. I know that some LinkedIn ads posts will work well in cold. So that’s a lot of what I’m running there. And then in retargeting, I turn a bit more to the attribution side of this. Still not talking so much about the product, but more about lifting these attribution issues that I’ve been in these dialogues with the CEOs and so on that people can relate to. And that was literally everything we did after those first two months and for one more year. We put in as much money we could at the time, it wasn’t much, we didn’t have much, but we could really grow it over time also because we got a huge distribution compared to what we would have otherwise.
Finn: For the code layer, do you use LinkedIn’s targeting? Do you upload an account list? How do you build the...
Adam: I mean, for most, I would recommend using like an account list, but for us, we can sell very broadly. So we are using LinkedIn’s Kind of native targeting. It doesn’t matter really if it’s not perfect. So we’re using like company size, company industry, and then kind of title targeting. And for the title targeting, we are way more narrow though, I should say. So that’s kind of where we try to be as narrow as possible.
Finn: Meaning just head off and VP marketing.
Adam: Not even that.
Finn: Demand-chan.
Adam: Exactly. More demand-chan marketeers, growth marketing managers, heads of growth. Because some of LinkedIn’s titles are these kind of super titles, right? So if you write a head of marketing, you will pull in hundreds of different titles. I see that in your audience size. I’m trying to pick titles that are narrow enough so I see that it doesn’t increase the audience size too much in essence.
Finn: So I think I saw a LinkedIn post where you said you guys put about
Adam: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Finn: Do you have a frequency target? How do you think about audience size, et cetera?
Adam: Yeah, for sure. I’m trying to keep the frequency very low in cold. So between one and two, I would say.
Finn: For a 30-day frequency of one and two?
Adam: Yeah. And then the whole purpose of that layer for me is to push them towards the retargeting layer because that’s where we increase frequency quite a lot. I would say we’re probably at five to six maybe in the Retargeting layer, maybe even more sometimes. And we reach most of those people, right? So we have like an audience penetration of maybe 80% plus there and just hammer those people with as much as possible for a longer duration. That’s my entire take on LinkedIn that I really believe in.
Finn: And then for the cold layer, low frequency, so you can have a pretty big audience in there.
Adam: Yeah.
Finn: And you said you add posts that have 100 likes or more. How do you rotate posts? Do you take them out after a certain period? Do you do the rotate evenly or maximize performance? How do you think about it?
Adam: I do the rotate evenly, but I will remove a post if it drops very much in performance. So I typically always look at CTR because I think it’s a good proxy for engagement. So that’s what I use to look at it. And I want it to be about 10% in the annual. When I see something for me that is dropping below 10%, if it continues to drop, I will remove it for something else.
Finn: How many posts do you have generally in that code layer at any given time? Is there 10 in there or 100 in there?
Adam: No, no. Three or four, I would say, active.
Finn: Oh, interesting. So not more than that.
Adam: And then some of them have been running for a really long time without ever going down. So it’s not like I don’t change if I don’t have to in that sense.
Finn: Only once the CTR drops.
Adam: Yes, exactly.
Finn: What’s your, do you know your longest running post that you’re running in cold that has kept this 10% CTR the longest?
Adam: I think it’s that I started doing this full time was my, it’s my longest run.
Finn: Are you able to pull up the link quickly or send me the link here so we can.
Adam: It’s this post with like me talking about we spent $100,000 on LinkedIn ads over the last 12 months. I have this picture of the ad spend.
Finn: Interesting.
Adam: And this is though, like this is a second variation. I ran an exact same post for like a year and then I rewrote it slightly and just did it again. And then now I’m running that one. What kind of brand people think of? This is what our engagement benchmarks about everything. This is obviously what I talked about, about being very like structured in a way, like this is strategy. This is one, two, three, four. And here’s the results that have happened. And then I obviously for like add this at the end of these thought leader ads for all my posts, like they have some sort of call to action for Fibbler. And you can also, of course, track then whoever, how many people clicks on this link. Yeah, so this is definitely one of my longest time running.
Finn: Interesting. And then, but that almost looks like something that I would have assumed to see in the retargeting layer.
Adam: Yes, it’s often there as well. Because it’s not always I am... I sometimes run the same creatives in both Code and Retargeting. Because for me it’s like... For a lot of these things, I think we’re trying to create this mental availability of us, right? That the people know who we are or who our brand is. And I think it’s very strong to continue to run, maybe not the same always, but similar creatives. I do this for images as well. Over time, we also started running a lot of image ads, like specifically meme creatives with our kind of-
Finn: Let me share my screen here. I pulled up your ad library.
Adam: Yep, exactly. And most of these memes, they are running, the same ones are running in cold and retargeting because they’re just such a great way of us. It’s a good way for them to remember us. So we’re running typically those, the exact same ones, say in the cold, the retargeting, and then the thought leader ads structure is more different, I would say. But the meme creatives are exactly the same.
Finn: If I were to ask you right now, you could, you had to turn off all ads except one, like you could only run one of these creatives. Would you know which one you would keep?
Adam: Yeah. I think I would take the one on the red carpet with the, that’s also one I’ve been running for longest.
Finn: This one, the image ad with the CEO,
Adam: no, the other one, the other one on the bottom.
Finn: Yeah. Prove that our paid ads are working B2B. Well, it’s complicated.
Adam: That’s also one we’ve been running for like the longest.
Finn: Also like the CTA, don’t click unless this conversation feels familiar. Yeah.
Adam: And that’s like my take on advertising in general is trying to make people feel that like the situation they have been in this exact situation. And that’s kind of what we’re trying to portray with every kind of creative we were doing. Yeah.
Finn: I’m curious, are the results already in for this video that you guys did?
Adam: Not yet, but some results, of course. We started running it in CTV now. I’ve never run CTV before, so I was very interested in running that. The good thing about CTV is that people have to watch it, right? It’s not something you can skip. So you get 100% of people that watch the video. But I realized pretty quickly that CTV, you get very weird placements also because it’s the same as LinkedIn Audience Network. So I had to constrain it very much. So now I’m only visible in Like Hulu and all of these, HBO Max and those kind of platforms, because I believe that it might have a bigger impact there. But then it’s very hard to save. But I think it’s, you know, specifically in retargeting, I already know those people are good. And if we can just have another touchpoint with them in a channel we didn’t before, I think that’s value.
Finn: Sure.
Adam: But yeah, I’ve only had one person tell me that they saw the video on HBO. So I want more.
Finn: So if anyone’s listening and they saw this ad somewhere, they should let you know. Okay, so 30% is retargeting. You use a lot of the similar posts. Are you still running conversation ads? I think we recently chatted.
Adam: I’m not doing that now. I might do it again. It felt too pushy for me, I think. It’s more about if you have a good offer or something like that, I think it could be really valuable. We don’t right now. We could maybe Fix one because I think it makes sense. Like we do all of these thought leader ads and then we could have an offer that came from my head again. Like it makes sense to me, but I haven’t really figured it out.
Finn: Like a lead magnet type thing.
Adam: Yeah, but something like that. We have this report or whatever it could be. So I think it could be strong. But I’d rather put the money on these more engaging things.
Finn: You guys should build a Vibe-coded LinkedIn ad account audit.
Adam: That is actually a very good idea. Excited. Those things would work, right? If they have seen me for a long time and then I come into their inbox with like, audit your ad account in 10 minutes with me or something.
Finn: Yeah. Or like a robot version. And the takeaway is always, by the way, the takeaway is always, you need Fiblur. Hey, we ran this audit. Here’s the data. It’s a lot of data, but really the takeaway here is that you should buy Fibro. This is terrible.
Adam: It’s an independent review said that you would benefit from Fibbler.
Finn: How do you guys use Fibbler yourself? Feel free to share your screen. Do you actively use it every day? Is it something you check once a month?
Adam: It’s more once a week, once a month thing. I really just believe so much in our advertising, so I don’t feel like I have to look at the companies we’re reaching that much. It’s more that I will look at like at least that we’re reaching the right kind of titles that we are, you know, it is companies that are actually could buy from us, but I’m not so obsessed about, you know, seeing If we’re reaching the right companies that end up in the pipeline and so on, because I’m 100% confident that that will happen. So I would say we’re a bad user of Fibbler, but we also use the engagement data. But more manually, I would say, I tend to sometimes go on these sprees where I want to reach out to people working at these companies to manually kind of semi-pitch Fibbler because I feel like that has been... It has been pretty successful. Like it’s of course, very low volumes because when you type it manually, but it’s very easy to get people to answer. I feel like when, when it feels real. Um, and many of these people I already kind of, or we follow each other. So then it’s also easier.
Finn: Yeah, I think it’s one of the most undertapped things still for companies who sell into enterprise because I think this matters much more the bigger your deal size is. It’s like I’m in ad accounts that spend 50K a month and they sell 200K deals into the enterprise and the idea is still that basically what we want is that these companies come inbound to us and book a demo and And that’s the only thing that we look at and measure and track and care about. And it’s like, if you actually look at the companies and you can look at that in your ad manager or your Fibbler account, and you just filter by most engaged. And if you’re running an ABM list, you know that all of these companies are relevant to you. You will see that there’s a bunch of dream customers of yours who just spent the last 30 days clicking and engaging With a bunch of your ads, and it’s criminal. If you sell large deals, like you guys are a PLG Motion and it’s much smaller ACVs, but if you sell a large ACV, it’s criminal to then not go reach out to these companies, all of the four, five, or seven different potential stakeholders at that company.
Adam: There’s also an obsession of automating this outbound, right? That’s what we see. All the time on LinkedIn. But I feel like there’s a lot of strength in actually doing it manually. It takes a lot of time, of course. It’s maybe not scalable, but it’s very impactful.
Finn: I think it should all be dependent on how large your deal sizes are. True PLG, you might not want to touch it in any way. If you’re selling these like weird middle where you sell like a 5 to 15k ACV, you probably want to automate a large part of it. But if you’re selling 50k plus deals, you want an actual human to look at those companies and then just reach out to the people at that company.
Adam: Yeah, because it’s also very, like you get so many bad reach outs on LinkedIn, right? So whenever you get someone that actually genuinely feels like a normal person, it stands out to me.
Finn: And the assumption is that that person is already to some extent familiar or at least one of the five potential people is already familiar because you could see that they’ve been engaging with your ads.
Adam: Exactly.
Finn: Okay. Okay. Anything that you’re seeing currently with LinkedIn ads, anything that you guys changed over the last three or six months that’s new, that’s additional, that’s changing, something that used to work but didn’t anymore?
Adam: But I think in general, what I can mention, what I’m seeing, like what companies are doing bad on LinkedIn or on LinkedIn ads is that they are just not engaging with their audience, right? I think that’s the biggest thing that people are not succeeding with because it’s hard. Like the people are not engaging with their stuff. And if you’re not engaging, like I think that’s a pretty good proxy for if people are going to remember you, if people are going to I think that’s the biggest thing I really see from a lot of companies. They are targeting pretty much the right people, they are reaching them well, and that correlates obviously with people coming into the pipeline, but when it comes to engagement, they are Yeah, it’s not landing. Is it bad creative? Is it bad messaging? I don’t know. But it is very clear to me that the ones who win, they are very good at that. They obviously know their persona.
Finn: And you would evaluate that based on CTR?
Adam: Partly yes. It depends a little bit on what kind of objectives you run, but otherwise it’s a good metric to kind of compare against each other, I think. Yeah. And then it’s, of course, like, do you run video? You, of course, have to look at other things, like if they’re looking at the video and so on. But I still think that’s the biggest issue I’m seeing because it’s so competitive. So that plays a part, of course. But also, like, that’s why, you know, I’m such a big advocate for Thought Leader Ads and I know you are as well, right? Because those are much easier to succeed with when it comes to engagement, I think, than Generic ads because those are harder. Yeah.
Finn: Well, I think it’s easier to succeed with just because it comes from a person and not a brand. But I think the other one is just if you combine it, I mean, you’re posting five times a week every week. So that’s 12 goals on shot every month. And so just that volume helps you to figure out what’s actually resonating for free.
Adam: Yeah.
Finn: And then you just take your winners and you amplify that with ad budget. In terms of campaign objective, I assume in the cold, given that you have a very low frequency target, it’s just brand awareness?
Adam: For thought leader ads, I’m always running engagement because I feel like that’s, I haven’t tested them thoroughly enough, but I feel like that really gives me the highest Engagement that I’m looking for. I’m still reaching enough. I have maybe, I don’t know, maybe 70,000 people in my audience right now. So I’m still reaching a good chunk of that. And then for some of the other, for like the image campaigns and so on, I’m running Brand Awareness. And then in retargeting, a lot of it is kind of website visits.
Finn: Website visits.
Adam: Yeah.
Finn: Okay. Yeah. And then I was just the, the mascot. What’s the story with the mascot? I mean, how did you come up with the pink lion and how would you describe the value of having that?
Adam: I mean, it’s all by coincidence, really. I think we, I started with trying to come up with a name. I had these terrible names in the beginning, you know, all of these addify, this is terrible. And then I just realized I wanted a name that didn’t mean anything. And that, you know, I did all of these name generators and I don’t know, somehow Fibler came up there. So that’s kind of how that got started. And then I worked with my friend who is a designer and I told her that I wanted to have an animal as a logo and I wanted it to be pink because I really wanted it to stand out. And then she made the lion. That was kind of the start of the lion thing in the logo. The mascot came to be when we started designing our first ads. I did it with another designer. We did our first ads and she just randomly put in a bunch of different animals in there and one was this. Pink Lion, like a 3D version of our logo essentially. And I mean, it has been the best thing we’ve ever done. Like mostly because like we put so much effort into our kind of thought leader ads and all of that. And that’s something you can add to that as well. Right. And today we try to add it to as much as possible. As I said before, we have like 500 different variants in different posts that we can add to organic posts. We can add to ads. We can add it. It’s just a great way people remember us. It’s pink. It’s a lion. I don’t think anyone has it. Like people have similar stuff, of course, but not that exact one. So I think it’s just Such a good kind of tool for helping people remember who Fibbler is. Now we also have that at events, right? We have these plushies. We have customized that look exactly the same that we give out on events to people because everyone has kids and can take home to their kids. So that’s my long-term game that when the kids grow up, they have seen this plushie throughout the years. And then we’re there.
Finn: 20 years later, attribution. How did you hear about us?
Adam: Exactly. My mom.
Finn: Gave me your plushie 20 years ago and it was my favorite plushie.
Adam: Exactly.
Finn: I feel like you guys should do like rare ones, you know? Like if you go to an event, you have 20 lions and only 20 and they are specifically for that event. So maybe they have like, I don’t know, a logo or the... They’re slightly different, maybe they have a shirt on that’s relevant to the conference, and there’s only 20, and once you give out those 20, they never come back anymore, and then at the next event, I think that would be so cool because you would get some superfans who will want All of them. And it’s going to be like a trophy that because it’s like I got one of the 20 and here’s my collection. I think it works because they’re also just cute. I think you could come up like I would want one for my daughter because a lion, it’s pink, it’s super cute. It works if you just have some random ass.
Adam: No, that’s a good point. Add a bit of scarcity to it. So people don’t, yeah, I like that.
Finn: And then your real business is going to be like a collector’s rarity merchandise. Search-type business. You’re going to outgrow the SaaS. All right. We’re basically at time here. Adam, this was awesome. Thank you so much for opening the books here, talking about your approach to organic, your approach to paid. Obviously, if people want to check you out or want to check out Fibbler, links to all of that will be in the description. Anything I should have asked you that I didn’t ask?
Adam: No, I think it’s all good. And I mean, I have a bit of a cold, so I think we managed pretty good anyways.
Finn: I think you managed pretty good. Yeah. All right. Thank you so much. All right. This podcast is brought to you by Project 33. Project 33 is the leading executive thought leadership agency for LinkedIn. If you’re looking to activate your founder, your CEO, your executives, or any of your internal subject matter experts. And create thought leadership content for them to build trust and credibility for your brand. Reach out at project33.io.
