Nuance.

Nuance is what you know because of the things you saw before.

You can’t have it without time.

I’m convinced nuance is also a feeder for intuition.

Take for example what happened recently with my LinkedIn ad campaigns…

There is a targeting setting I turned on earlier this year after a LinkedIn consultant we hired made me aware of it.

The consultant used this setting in the campaigns they ran for us for a couple of months, all of which failed.

I turned the setting on for the rest of my campaigns as well.

Why? It made sense to do so.

The setting narrowed the targeting down to business leaders/owners (CXOs), our target market.

Over the months since then, my LinkedIn campaigns, which previously brought in some results, were trending towards zero.

No matter what I did – changing the budget, upping the bid price per click, testing new ad media – nothing worked.

I thought it must be market conditions, competition, the economy, etc.

As I was reviewing our campaigns for my co-founder I saw that setting again.

That night as I went to bed, my brain went to that setting.

I realized even though it was meant to give us more of the right people, it may be having the opposite impact.

It could be reducing our overall audience size and forcing us to spend a higher bid price on a more premium group.

By removing the condition we will get more overall eyeballs to our ads at a lower bid cost.

Even though that means more of the wrong people see it, it also put us up in front of more of the right people.

That was my theory at least.

Last week I removed the condition. Nothing else was changed.

Within 48 hours we had 4 booked calls and one immediate sale, all after months of nothing from LinkedIn.

If I hadn’t spent the last two years inside the LinkedIn ad manager, I wouldn’t ever have had this counter-intuitive conclusion.

I wouldn’t had the nuance to see it as a possible cause.

I had to connect the dots, consider previous results, understand how a change in targeting, no matter how well intentioned, can impact audience scope.

With pay per click campaigns you can’t just trust audience criteria on face value.

I’ve learned this because every week I change settings, tweak campaigns, turn something on or off, even if I am doing what on the face of it seems logically wrong based on how a function is supposed to work.

Then I wait and see what the actual results are.

It’s not an exact science, but you certainly start to see patterns and trends over time — even instant impact sometimes.

Nuance is a valuable resource, especially because it takes time to create and often only applies to a very narrow field.

It can’t easily be replicated and can solve very specialized problems.

It can be enough of an advantage to build an entire business around it.

The caveat is that nuance only comes from repeated focus in one area.

If you keep changing industries or business ideas, give up, lose interest and restart with something else, you keep resetting your nuance meter.

As entrepreneurs we often underestimate switching cost.

Sometimes the better answer is to just keep going and build on what you know until it becomes a nuanced skillset.

It may not seem like the right choice when nothing is working.

If you keep experimenting, keep notching up micro-improvements, one day you can wake up with the result you want and a valuable skill.

I never would have seen myself as an ‘ad manager’ kind of person.

I saw myself as a writer, a content creator. I build audiences organically.

Then with a new business, I realized that paid ads were likely the best path forward.

Over several years I tested all the leading ad platforms (Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter/X).

Google and LinkedIn ads are largely responsible for my company blasting through the $100,000/month revenue level back in 2023.

I wouldn’t label myself an expert by any means, but now I feel very comfortable logging into any of these ad platforms, setting up campaigns, and incrementally improving them.

This gives me a massive edge.

As Alex Harmozi says, learn how to generate leads and you are set for life.

Every day I spend more time inside my ad dashboards. I’m adding experience and building up my ability to see the nuance in our campaigns.

I can tap into this skill as the marketing lead for our company and any future marketing campaigns I’m a part of.

It also helps me grow our marketing team. I can assess new hires coming from a place of knowledge. I can appreciate and understand when someone else brings their own nuance to our marketing campaigns.

All of this leads to more growth over time.

You can gain this advantage too, if you stay on track and build upon what’s come before in your company.

Focus on what is working. Do more, learn more, gain insight, and nuance will be the natural outcome.

Keep growing.

Yaro