Gaetano Nino DiNardi 🇺🇦

Growth Advisor 🚀

I’ve been in B2B marketing for 10+ years now, and I have helped over 50 SaaS companies with growth and demand generation. None of them were easy assignments—no layups, and no cushy strategic roles. I’ve battled in some of the most competitive trenches out there. 

I'm talking about categories like identity theft, business VoIP, employee monitoring, insider threat detection, LMS software, CX platforms, AI GTM software, engineering efficiency tools, etc. 

Maybe I just enjoy being the underdog? Who knows, but I have learned how to thrive in tough environments. 

If you want to work with a scrappy hustler who knows how to get sh*t done, that's me. 

I specialize in AI search and Google Ads for B2B SaaS. 
Need help? Join the waitlist: https://marketingadvice.io/work-with-me/

Just wanna follow along for the ride? 
Subscribe to my substack: https://marketingadvice.substack.com/about

Growth Advisor

Gaetano Nino DiNardi

Senior Demand Generation Manager at Cognism

Jamie Skeels

It’s wild what tools like Clay make possible now.

Things that used to be “impossible” suddenly aren’t 👇

We’re currently working with a SaaS client in the ESG space.

Targeting is tricky. 

CRM and customer analysis revealed customers spanned multiple industries and firmographics. No obvious niche to double down on.

But one clear pattern did emerge.

Businesses that either
 
- Operated in an ESG or green space or
- Have sustainability embedded in their mission or values

Appeared to be a better fit for the business.

The challenge? You can’t just plug those attributes into LinkedIn Ads.

So here’s how we built an audience to directionally test and validate our hypothesis.

1. Built a broad account list based on customer data

We built the initial account list based on where they’ve already won business:

- Industries
- Company sizes
- Location
- etc

This was intentionally broad with the intention to narrow down. 

2. Narrow using the keyword filter

Remember those sustainability-led companies from the analysis?

We used ChatGPT to analyse their LinkedIn company descriptions and surface the keywords that indicated:

 • They were operating in a green or ESG space
 • Or had sustainability/green initiatives embedded in their mission or values

(My colleague Joe Mclaughlin did a great post earlier this week on using keyword filters > https://lnkd.in/eY6QwGDN )

We layered these keywords over the broad list and filtered down to companies where they appeared in the description.

That took us to ~20,000 companies.

3. Validated and scored each company with AI (where it got interesting)

Keyword filters alone aren’t enough.

Plenty of companies would have a keyword ‘match’ in their description, but would not be the sustainability-focused companies we were trying to find.

So the final layer was an AI enrichment in Clay.

We had AI review each company description and score them:

High
Explicitly integrates sustainability or ESG into mission/values and offers products or services that directly contribute to environmental or social sustainability.

Medium
Operates in, or clearly serves, a sustainability-related sector (renewables, cleantech, etc.).

Low
No explicit mention of sustainability, ESG, or net-zero goals, and no clear environmental or social impact.

After enrichment, we were left with 6,000+ high and medium-score companies that we were confident to test in paid campaigns.

Is it perfect? No.

Is it good enough to move fast, learn, and refine? Absolutely.

It was all done within a day.

This sort of exercise wasn’t possible 5 to 10 years ago.

#demandgeneration #B2Bmarketing

If I could give one piece of boring (but effective) advice to SaaS start-ups, it would be this 👇



Record 👏 Your 👏 Sales 👏 Calls.

This might sound obvious to seasoned marketers, but it blows me away how many start-ups I talk to that still don't bother.

For early-stage SaaS teams, especially lean ones, sales calls are more than just transactional. They can be lifeblood for your marketing strategy, as well as grounding cross-department conversations in objective insights.

At this stage of growth, most marketers don’t feel they have the time or bandwidth to conduct deep customer interviews. It usually gets deprioritised. 

Sales calls are one of the easiest ways to gather real insights directly from your buyers:

- What triggered them to buy
- What use cases they came to you for
- What objections they had
- What competitors they considered
- What channels they found you through
- Which content, interactions, or touchpoints built trust before the call

With transcripts and AI, you can easily analyse a year’s worth of calls, score trends by frequency, and get a clear picture of your primary buying triggers, use cases, and objections.

It’s not slow, and it won’t distract you from shipping work.

When you’re stretched thin, these qualitative insights can take you from guesswork to a decent foundation for your strategy.

Want to go one better?

Don’t stop at sales calls - start running surveys on platforms like Wynter and talk to potential buyers who haven’t bought yet. This will help you get outside the “customer bubble” and reduce bias.

But if you’re not conducting any research or gathering qualitative insights at all?

Just start here. It’s easy, it’s fast, and it’ll help you make smarter decisions.

#B2Bmarketing #demandgeneration #saasmarketing

Audited a LinkedIn Ads account recently with a £300k+ monthly spend. Here were the biggest targeting issues we flagged👇


1. Needlessly huge audience sizes of up to 9 million

They were spending a fortune to reach segments they couldn’t afford to saturate.

In Q4, audience penetration ranged from 3-26% across most of their cold audience segments.

They were also running ungated product/content ads to these very broad audiences. With the budget spread so thin, there was no way to stay consistently top-of-mind with these same buyers month-over-month.

If you’re running ungated campaigns, we'd advise aiming for consistent exposure to the same buyers in your highest value segments. The goal is to increase your chances of being remembered when those buyers go in-market.

While their remarketing audience was growing, the broad targeting was also diluting that remarketing pool with lower-value prospects.  

We just couldn't see the upside of the targeting choices being made here.

--- 

2. Cold layer targeting 8 segments with huge overlap

At first glance, targeting multiple audiences in a high-budget account might seem fine, especially if there are meaningful differences between the segments and tailored messaging for each.

But after digging, we found major issues:
- Massive overlap across all segments
- No personalisation in content/messaging/offer for each segment

This led to a beast of an account with way too many campaigns and ad sets, making optimisation and performance tracking a nightmare.

This segmentation wasn’t driving any meaningful performance improvement or supporting strategic goals - it was just adding complexity without delivering results.

--- 

3. Remarketing campaigns only targeting a 90-day lookback

Here’s a quick win we think they missed:

With a huge remarketing audience and high traffic, they were limiting their remarketing efforts to a 90-day lookback window across all campaigns.

They were running both trust-building and offer-based campaigns to this 90-day audience, but they missed the opportunity to segment and tailor messaging based on recent behaviour.

A simple test that would have been interesting:

- Target stronger offers (e.g, gift cards, incentivised demos etc) to recent 30-day visitors/engagers.
- Nurture longer-term audiences with social proof and trust-building content-driven ads.

There was also potential to go deeper by testing specific messaging/offers to individual page visitors. They had the volume to make this viable.

--- 

What did we recommend overall to address these issues?

- Run a revenue analysis to identify their best-fit segments and target an audience they could meaningfully saturate

- Radically simplify the account and focus on a select few strategic segments aligned with their business objectives

- Segment their remarketing based on recent behaviour and align each campaign's content with the audiences lookback window

#B2Bmarketing #demandgeneration

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The Battle

Gaetano Nino DiNardi

Jamie Skeels

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The Battle

Gaetano Nino DiNardi

Jamie Skeels

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Jamie Skeels's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreJamie Skeels's LinkedIn Performance