Zapier’s Head of Paid Ads on Storytelling, AI-Targeted Ads, and Why He’s All-In on Influencer Marketing – InstantFollowerz


Happy Fall, MiMers! Grab a pumpkin spice coffee, settle down with Noah Kahan’s Stick Season, and get ready to hear a paid marketer who’s all about influencers, storytelling and AI-targeted ads.

(I’m sorry I can’t offer a more recent fall-inspired album. To be honest, I’m still obsessed with mine Mix “Summer 2019”..)

Keep reading to find out why Zapier’s The paid ad boss thinks the golden age of paid advertising is over.

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1. Fully embrace the influencer buzz.

James de Feu says the golden age of paid advertising is over. And he’s fine with that.

He is also a paid ads manager at Zapier.

(I’m imagining it right now Mad Men’s (Don Draper rolls over in his TV wife.)

De Feu is so confident in influencer marketing that he negotiated to put him under his paid ads team. He succeeded because, moving forward, “we see this as the movement of our brand.”

In fact, when I asked him how he would spend a hypothetical $1,000, de Feu told me that he invested a whopping 40% in influencers.

But don’t delete your Google Ads account just yet. De Feu says he would still give 50% of that hypothetical budget to paid ads. (The other 10% would go to SEO, if you get stuck trying to add this to 100.)

As he admits, “Paid ads will always be on, and we’ll still spend a ton of money on it. But paid ads live and die in that month of spend. It doesn’t give us the reach we used to.”

That’s why de Feu doesn’t put all his eggs in one basket. Paid is still a good egg (err-basket?), but he’s excited to seek out influencers who thrive on the same platforms Zapier customers hang out on.

“I laughed when you mentioned influencers, because that’s the name of the game — even for those of us in the B2B space,” he tells me “It’s not just about cool teenage products anymore.”

2. Storytelling is the bread and butter of marketing.

“In the world of paid advertising, we fixate on one unique experience and just keep optimizing it until it’s perfect,” says de Feu. “But one thing we’ve learned is that storytelling is huge.”

“Storytelling is huge” is exactly the same idea I gave my parents when I was trying to convince them that majoring in creative writing was a good financial decision—but de Feu isn’t wrong. If there’s one truth that remains consistent in the world of marketing, it’s that people always have and always will love a good story.

“Stretching something, building a story, creating use cases, highlighting testimonials – I’ve let go of that in the last few years, and I’m just grateful now that we’ve reset. Storytelling has always been and will continue to be our superpower as marketers.”

So if you’re not sure where to start in the world of paid ads, try this: talk to your customers, learn their pain points, and then convey your solutions through a good old-fashioned story.

3. Get used to the cha-cha-changes.

David Bowie preached it: You have to keep up with all the changes happening in the advertising industry or risk throwing precious money down the drain. (Those are lyrics, right?)

For de Feu, that means running tons of tests to learn how to use AI to personalize Zapier’s ads—not only in creating assets, but also in targeting audiences.

“You have to be really on top of all these recent changes or you’ll end up losing money,” he says.

An example might be a sports brand that uses AI to target yoga wear ads to its vinyasa-loving consumers, while ensuring that their golf wear is sent to every guy on Wall Street.

In other words: The future of advertising will look a lot more like targeted, high-intent content and less like the generic, multipurpose ads we’ve come to know and hate.

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https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/zapier-head-of-paid-ads

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