Podcasts about b2linked

Show Resources: Amazing video ads performance with Chandler Quintin Chandler Quintin on LinkedIn or funb2bads.com Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Subscribe  Rate/Review Contact us with any questions, suggestions, or corrections Summary: In this surprising episode of The LinkedIn Ads Show, host AJ Wilcox teams up with guest Chandler Quinton of Video Brothers to bust a long-held belief: that vertical video outperforms other formats on LinkedIn. After analyzing over $140,000 in ad spend across multiple campaigns, they discovered that horizontal (16:9) video significantly outperforms vertical (9:16) and square (1:1) in view rate, completion rate, and cost efficiency—by as much as 2x to 4x. Show Transcript: For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 160

Send us a textIn this episode, Danny sits down with LinkedIn Ads expert AJ Wilcox to dive into his marketing journey, his views on mentorship, and his laser-sharp insights into B2B advertising on LinkedIn.AJ shares how a passion for teaching and authentic connection laid the foundation for B2Linked, an industry-leading agency for LinkedIn Ads. He discusses the power of mentorship, from hiking with his boss's boss to mentoring rising marketers in Utah, and shares the advertising strategies that generate real ROI.Episode Highlights: AJ explains why he left SEO and Google Ads behind to become a LinkedIn Ads specialist focused on high-quality B2B leads.He shares how weekly mentorship hikes evolved into a career-boosting tradition for local digital marketers.Learn the essential elements of effective LinkedIn targeting and why deeper funnel strategies outperform surface metrics.Discover the benefits of combining mentorship with marketing expertise—AJ shares his advice for building both.AJ compares native LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms vs. landing pages, and how to pick the right tool for your campaign goals.Episode Links:

If LinkedIn ads have ever felt expensive and intimidating to you, you're not alone. But what if you could actually turn your ad spend into high-quality leads and serious ROI? This week on Rocky Mountain Marketing, I'm sitting down with LinkedIn Ads pro AJ Wilcox—the founder of B2Linked and host of the LinkedIn Ads Show podcast.Inside this value-packed episode, AJ shares:Why LinkedIn ads cost more—and why it's worth itWho should actually be running LinkedIn ads (and who shouldn't)How to build a powerful three-stage LinkedIn funnelCommon LinkedIn ad mistakes (and how to fix them)How $5K a month can scale your B2B marketing—if you do it rightTimestamps:00:00 – Why LinkedIn ads seem expensive01:00 – Meet AJ Wilcox, founder of B2Linked02:30 – When LinkedIn ads make sense (and when they don't)04:30 – How LinkedIn targeting blows other platforms away06:00 – How scarcity drives LinkedIn's ad prices08:00 – What kind of video content works best right now10:30 – LinkedIn's new video feed: what advertisers should know12:00 – Building a 3-stage LinkedIn funnel15:30 – What to expect for costs per click and per lead18:00 – Why your sales process needs to nurture, not rush20:00 – How to structure your budget across the funnel22:30 – DIY mistakes and LinkedIn ad traps to avoid29:00 – AJ's dream ad campaign and final adviceThis is your roadmap for turning those high-dollar LinkedIn clicks into high-value clients.Sign Up with Metricool today!https://metricool.com/katieJoin AJ's community of LinkedIn Ads fanatics:https://fanatics.b2linked.com/Visit AJ Wilcox's social media pages:Website: https://b2linked.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wilcoxaj/LinkedIn Ads Show Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/6Z88iXkXHKEZ5um04mtpAq?si=7a7d8d248c8e47a8Learn more about Katie and Next Step Social Communications:Speaking: https://katiebrinkley.com/Website: https://www.nextstepsocialcommunications.comLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katiebrinkleyYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/@rockymountainmarketingInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamkatiebrinkley/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/socialprofitlab#LinkedInAds #B2BMarketing #RockyMountainMarketing #KatieBrinkley #QuickCast #DigitalMarketing #PaidAds #MarketingStrategy #LinkedInForBusiness #LeadGeneration #AJWilcox Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Show Resources: Here are the resources we covered in this episode: Watch this episode Connect with Adam Robinson on LinkedIn Get RB2B! It's Free! Sam McKenna's case study using LinkedIn Ads w/ RB2B Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Rate/Review Email us with any questions, suggestions, or corrections! Summary: In this episode of The LinkedIn Ads Show, host AJ Wilcox sits down with Adam Robinson, founder of RB2B.com, to discuss the hot (and surprisingly free) trend of website visitor identification—what it is, how it works, and how B2B marketers can use it to level up their LinkedIn Ads strategy. Adam shares how RB2B helps marketers identify individual website visitors—complete with LinkedIn profiles, emails, and more—and how this signal can be used for lead generation, retargeting, and enhanced CRM workflows. Together, AJ and Adam walk through a real case study where just $200 in LinkedIn ad spend drove a 1,478% spike in traffic and real pipeline results. The episode also takes a valuable detour into organic content and personal branding, offering gold-level insight on how to find your voice on LinkedIn, what makes a "banger" post, and why authenticity trumps polish. Key Takeaways: Visitor identification is a powerful signal—not a silver bullet Knowing exactly who is on your site gives your sales and marketing teams an edge—but it needs to be used thoughtfully and with context. Use CRM integration to turn raw identity into smart outreach When integrated with tools like HubSpot or Salesforce, visitor identity can trigger customized workflows based on your defined ICP and buyer journey stage. Thought leadership ads can drive high-impact, low-cost traffic Combine high-performing organic posts with paid amplification, and use tools like RB2B to retarget visitors across channels—even without cookies. Final Thoughts + Call to Action AJ wraps up by urging listeners to get RB2B's free plan installed on their site immediately, emphasizing how it helps verify targeting, improve retargeting, and amplify the effectiveness of every marketing channel. Adam shares his excitement about expanding RB2B's integrations and his journey toward building a conscious, bootstrap-powered SaaS brand. Check out RB2B.com, connect with Adam Robinson on LinkedIn, and don't forget to join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics Community for advanced training and support. As always, AJ invites listeners to leave a review, subscribe, and send in their questions or voice messages. Show Transcript: For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 158

In this episode of The Digital Marketing Podcast, Daniel Rowles sits down with LinkedIn Ads legend AJ Wilcox, founder of B2Linked, for a deep-dive into everything you need to know to run effective, budget-friendly campaigns on LinkedIn.AJ has been living and breathing LinkedIn Ads for over a decade and shares insights honed from managing millions in ad spend. Why LinkedIn Ads Work Differently AJ explains why LinkedIn ads often cost like bottom-of-funnel, but act like top-of-funnel. Understanding this difference is critical to setting realistic expectations and structuring your campaigns for success. Avoiding Expensive Advice From platform recommendations to rep suggestions, AJ breaks down why the default guidance often costs more, and how you can outsmart it. Learn how to bid lower and still reach the right audience with zero drop in lead quality. Smarter Bidding, Better Results Discover AJ's manual bidding strategy that consistently reduces costs while keeping quality high. AJ explains how to find the sweet spot between visibility and efficiency. Segment for Insight, Not Just Scale Why target your entire audience in one go when you can break it down into microsegments that act like live focus groups? Learn how to build campaigns that teach you as they perform so you improve as you go. Building a Funnel That Actually Works AJ outlines a simple but powerful three-stage funnel: Stage 1: Awareness through video and document ads Stage 2: Engagement with deeper content like podcasts, webinars, or YouTube Stage 3: Conversion via direct CTAs or sales calls The result? Up to 5x better conversion rates without wasting budget on premature CTAs. Ad Formats That Convert Find out why “thought leader” video ads and TikTok-style captions are crushing it at the top of the funnelan, and how to retarget strategically using native lead gen forms or your own landing pages (depending on your goals). Metrics That Matter Impressions and clicks are just the surface. AJ shares the real KPIs you should be tracking, from engagement rates to cost-per-booked-call, and how to calculate custom metrics that LinkedIn won't show you. Organic and Paid: Better Together Discover where the LinkedIn platform is headed and why your organic and paid strategies will need to work hand-in-hand. From thought leader ads to CRM integrations, the future of LinkedIn marketing is more connected, and more powerful than ever. -- You'll find all links on TargetInternet.com Show notes:  Have any feedback on the show? Send us your feedback, tell us what you love and what you think could be better. And, if you are really enjoying the show, please leave us a review.

LinkedIn advertising with expert AJ Wilcox, founder of B2Linked, lays out why LinkedIn ads are uniquely powerful yet challenging to scale,  the ideal budget ranges for effective campaigns, and understand how to properly target your ideal audience. AJ shares insider tips on content formats that perform best, including the rising success of thought leader video ads, and reveals his three-stage funnel strategy for generating quality leads, as well as actionable insights from one of the platform's most experienced practitioners.

Learn how to use LinkedIn's organic and paid strategies to attract leads and boost conversions. Most B2B marketers know that LinkedIn is a goldmine for leads, but few truly know how to tap into its full potential. They post content, run ads, and hope for the best—without a clear strategy to maximize engagement and conversions. But here's the thing—LinkedIn success isn't just about showing up; it's about showing up the right way. In this LinkedIn marketing masterclass, I'm breaking down the strategies that separate high-performing professionals from the rest: Organic Authority Building – How to create content that gets seen and sparks engagement Thought Leadership Ads – The secret to running high-impact ads at a fraction of the cost The 3-Stage Funnel Approach – A proven method to warm up cold prospects and drive more conversions Plus, we'll reveal the top mistakes people make with LinkedIn Ads and how to avoid wasting money on campaigns that don't convert. If you're serious about using LinkedIn to grow your business, this episode is packed with insights you can't afford to miss! To guide us through all of this, I'm joined by AJ Wilcox, one of the world's leading LinkedIn Ads experts. AJ is the founder of B2Linked, a LinkedIn Ads-only agency that has managed over $150 million in ad spend and worked with five of LinkedIn's top ten spending accounts. He's spoken at 80+ industry events, been featured on over 200 podcasts, and hosts The LinkedIn Ads Show, where he shares expert strategies for LinkedIn success. Beyond marketing, he's a triathlete, a redhead, and drives a ridiculously fast go-kart as his company car—so you know this conversation is going to be a fun one! Links: https://predictableprofits.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@PredictableProfits https://www.facebook.com/PredictableProfits https://www.linkedin.com/company/predictable-profits/

In this episode of Do This, Not That, host Jay Schwedelson interviews AJ Wilcox, a LinkedIn ads expert and founder of B2Linked.com. They dive into the world of LinkedIn advertising, debunking myths, exploring strategies, and offering actionable insights for marketers aiming to leverage the platform effectively.=================================================================Best Moments:(00:40) Introduction of AJ Wilcox as a LinkedIn expert(01:56) AJ's journey to becoming a LinkedIn ads specialist(03:40) Dispelling myths about LinkedIn ads and their effectiveness(04:56) Advice on how to start with LinkedIn ads and budget allocation(07:15) Discussion on LinkedIn's new "predictive audiences" feature(08:37) Insights on LinkedIn InMail effectiveness and best practices(09:33) Addressing the challenge of obtaining business email addresses from LinkedIn leads(10:54) Views on automation tools for LinkedIn outreach(12:22) Tips for improving organic reach on LinkedIn(13:48) The growing importance of video content on LinkedIn(14:20) AJ's hypothetical plans if LinkedIn were to disappear(15:21) Information on how to follow AJ Wilcox and his podcast=================================================================Guest Bio:AJ Wilcox is the founder of B2Linked.com, an agency specializing in LinkedIn ads. With over a decade of experience, AJ is recognized as one of the foremost experts in LinkedIn advertising. He also hosts the LinkedIn Ad Show podcast, sharing in-depth strategies and insights on leveraging LinkedIn for marketing success. AJ's expertise stems from managing one of LinkedIn's largest spending accounts globally and working closely with LinkedIn's product team.=================================================================Check out our FREE + VIRTUAL EVENTS! -> EVENTASTIC.comGuruConference.comDeliveredConference.com=================================================================MASSIVE thank you to our Sponsor, Marigold!!FREE Guide → The Loyalty Program Optimization GuideBuilding customer loyalty today means going beyond traditional rewards. Successful programs engage customers at every touchpoint, creating experiences that feel personal, valuable, and worth returning for. With nearly 70% of consumers willing to pay more for brands they love, your loyalty program can significantly drive engagement and revenue.In The Loyalty Program Optimization Guide you will learn:Customer Loyalty Today: Explore the latest loyalty trends and why customer loyalty remains a crucial growth driver in today's market.Key Strategies to Optimize Loyalty Programs: Discover must-know tactics to craft a loyalty program that's engaging, personalized, and impactful.Turning Loyal Customers into Superfans: Learn how to cultivate emotional connections that make customers feel more like brand advocates than just shoppers.Get the FREE Guide today and create better loyalty programs that drive revenue and engagement:jayschwedelson.com/marigold

Show Resources: Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Ian Nelson on LinkedIn Block Lists for Right Rail Ads Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's YouTube Channel LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! In this episode of The LinkedIn Ads Show, host AJ Wilcox explores the evolution of LinkedIn Ads, the perception challenges it has faced, and how new advancements in measurement tools are changing the game. AJ takes a deep dive into LinkedIn's Measurement Insights Tool, detailing its features, functionality, and how it can provide better attribution and campaign insights for B2B marketers. Key Discussion Points: The Evolution of LinkedIn Ads: LinkedIn Ads historically faced criticism for being expensive and underdeveloped compared to competitors. Recent years have seen exponential growth in platform adoption as B2B marketers recognize the unmatched targeting and traffic quality LinkedIn offers. LinkedIn's investment in advanced measurement tools is a game-changer, aiming to prove the platform's value beyond cost. Introducing the Measurement Insights Tool: Overview: LinkedIn is rolling out a new tool called the Measurement Insights Tool, accessible via the “Measurement” tab in Campaign Manager. Stages: The tool organizes data into funnel stages—Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, and Revenue—based on campaign objectives and CRM integration. Features and Insights: Performance Chart: Visualizes campaign performance metrics (e.g., impressions, clicks, cost per click, leads) over time. Company Funnel Analysis: Tracks companies through funnel stages based on engagement and CRM data. Top Performing Audiences: Identifies high-performing audience segments by seniority, job function, location, and company size. Top Performing Ads and Campaigns: Highlights ads and campaigns generating the highest results for specific objectives, though efficiency metrics are not prioritized. Advanced Attribution: LinkedIn analyzes the last 50 touchpoints (impressions and clicks) per member, allocating credit for conversions across funnel stages. The tool relies on LinkedIn-specific attribution models but encourages comparison with external attribution systems. Opportunities and Limitations: While the tool offers valuable high-level insights, it lacks the ability to drill down into specific campaigns or ads for deeper analysis. It's a strong starting point but requires further refinement to become more actionable for advertisers. Why You Should Listen: Learn how to leverage the new Measurement Insights Tool to improve campaign strategy and attribution. Discover how LinkedIn's advancements in AI-driven reporting are shaping the future of B2B advertising. Gain practical tips for integrating LinkedIn Ads data with your overall marketing strategy. Call to Action: Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics Community to connect with top advertisers, access courses, and participate in weekly group calls with AJ. Share your feedback on the Measurement Insights Tool with LinkedIn reps to help shape its development. Connect and Contribute: Submit questions, feedback, or reviews via LinkedIn or email at podcast@B2Linked.com. Attach a voice recording to be featured on the show! This episode is great for those who want to understand LinkedIn's newest measurement tools and how they can help you maximize your LinkedIn Ads investment.  Show Transcript: For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 155

Show Resources: Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Evergreen LinkedIn Ads Account Benefits Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's YouTube Channel LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! In this episode of The LinkedIn Ads Show, host AJ Wilcox dives into strategies for nurturing cold audiences on LinkedIn to prepare them for meaningful engagement and high-conversion offers. If you've struggled with converting cold traffic into sales-ready leads, this episode walks you through how to build a multi-stage funnel using LinkedIn Ads retargeting features. Key Discussion Points: Why Cold Audiences Need Nurturing: Most cold audiences (95%) aren't ready to engage with sales reps or bottom-of-funnel offers. Nurturing involves multiple retargeting stages to move prospects down the funnel, warming them up to higher-friction calls to action. Building a Multi-Stage Funnel: Stage 1 (Cold Traffic): Use LinkedIn's native audience targeting to reach cold audiences who align with your ideal customer profile. Stage 2 (First Retargeting): Retarget website visitors, company page visitors, and ad engagers from Stage 1. Apply targeting "guardrails" like seniority, job function, or industry to refine the audience. Stage 3 (Hot Traffic): Retarget prospects from Stage 2 who have engaged meaningfully. These are primed for bottom-of-funnel offers like demos or sales calls. Best Practices for Funnel Organization: Use a campaign naming convention like S01, S02, S03 to clearly identify funnel stages in your account and ensure they're sorted alphabetically. Exclude retargeting audiences from the previous stage to avoid overlap and ensure prospects graduate down the funnel. Retargeting Audience Management: Create retargeting audiences based on specific engagements (e.g., video views, document interactions). Combine smaller audiences (e.g., website visitors + company page visitors) to ensure they hit the 300-member minimum for ads to serve. Budget Considerations: A multi-stage funnel works best with a monthly budget of $5,000 or more, though smaller budgets are possible with longer ramp-up times. Testing and Optimization: Run bottom-of-funnel offers in earlier stages as a test to gauge audience readiness. If Stage 3 doesn't yield high conversion rates, adjust ad messaging to clearly communicate value and reduce friction. Recent LinkedIn Updates: LinkedIn Wire Beta: Advertise as pre-roll videos on high-trust publisher content like Bloomberg and Forbes. Holiday Ad Tips: Lower competition during the holidays results in reduced CPCs and CPLs, making it an opportune time to run campaigns. Pro Tips: Take advantage of seasonal or holiday-themed campaigns for better engagement. Use organic posts from company representatives to complement paid ads, especially during events. Call to Action: Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to expert insights, courses, and weekly group calls with AJ. Subscribe to the podcast for weekly LinkedIn Ads tips, and leave a review on Apple Podcasts to help other marketers discover the show. Review and Connect: AJ welcomes listener questions, suggestions, and feedback via LinkedIn or email at podcast@B2Linked.com. Submit a voice recording to be featured in a future episode. Show Transcript: For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 154

AJ Wilcox, Founder of B2Linked, has worked with 5 of LinkedIn's top 10 spending accounts and managed over $150 million in LinkedIn ad spend. Host James Lawrence chats with AJ as they delve into key strategies for maximising the output of LinkedIn ads in 2025, the significance of Thought Leader ads, lead-generation tactics that actually work and more.Key Takeaways:The evolution of LinkedIn ads over the yearsEffective LinkedIn ads strategies and funnelsLead generation and conversion tacticsThought Leadership ads: A game changerLinkedIn ads vs. other platformsEffective creative for LinkedIn adsExploring Connected TV adsAdvanced targeting techniquesThe future of LinkedIn adsGuest:AJ Wilcox is the Founder of B2Linked, a LinkedIn Ads-only agency that helps B2B marketers get better results from their LinkedIn campaigns. AJ has worked with 5 of LinkedIn's top 10 spending accounts and managed over $150 million in LinkedIn ad spend.He is a trusted expert in LinkedIn Ads and has spoken at more than 80 industry events and appeared on over 200 podcasts. You can follow AJ on LinkedIn.Find Us Online:James Lawrence LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameslawrenceoz/ Smarter Marketer Website: https://www.smartermarketer.com.au/ Rocket Agency Website: https://rocketagency.com.au/ Rocket Agency LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rocket-agency-pty-ltd/Buy Smarter Marketer:Hardcover: https://amzn.to/30O63kg Kindle: https://amzn.to/2ZqfCWm About the Podcast:This is the definitive podcast for Australian marketers. Join Rocket Agency Co-Founder and best-selling author, James Lawrence in conversation with marketers, leaders, and thinkers about what it takes to be a smarter and more successful marketer.

AJ Wilcox, Founder of B2Linked, delves into leveraging LinkedIn ads for B2B growth. Streamlining lead capture and audience management are crucial aspects of maximizing your return on investment (ROI) with LinkedIn Ads. Martech integrations offer powerful solutions to these challenges. Today, AJ discusses the best martech to integrate with your LinkedIn ads.Connect With: Aj Wilcox: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

AJ Wilcox, Founder of B2Linked, delves into leveraging LinkedIn ads for B2B growth. Streamlining lead capture and audience management are crucial aspects of maximizing your return on investment (ROI) with LinkedIn Ads. Martech integrations offer powerful solutions to these challenges. Today, AJ discusses the best martech to integrate with your LinkedIn ads.Connect With: Aj Wilcox: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

AJ Wilcox, Founder of B2Linked, delves into leveraging LinkedIn ads for B2B growth. With its extensive network of professionals and robust targeting options, LinkedIn offers a unique opportunity to connect with decision-makers in your industry. Strategically crafting and deploying LinkedIn ad campaigns helps you reach your target audience, generate quality leads, and nurture them through the sales funnel. Today, AJ discusses how you can leverage LinkedIn ads to build your pipeline.Connect With: Aj Wilcox: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

AJ Wilcox, Founder of B2Linked, delves into leveraging LinkedIn ads for B2B growth. With its extensive network of professionals and robust targeting options, LinkedIn offers a unique opportunity to connect with decision-makers in your industry. Strategically crafting and deploying LinkedIn ad campaigns helps you reach your target audience, generate quality leads, and nurture them through the sales funnel. Today, AJ discusses how you can leverage LinkedIn ads to build your pipeline.Connect With: Aj Wilcox: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Rate, Review, & Follow on Apple Podcasts In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed AJ Wilcox, a LinkedIn Ads expert and founder of B2Linked, a company specializing in LinkedIn Ads account management. Wilcox is renowned for his in-depth knowledge of LinkedIn's advertising platform and his ability to optimize ad campaigns for maximum ROI. His insights provide a comprehensive guide to transforming clicks into clients through effective LinkedIn Ads strategies. AJ Wilcox's extensive experience with LinkedIn Ads offers listeners practical tips and advanced techniques to enhance their B2B marketing efforts. He explains the nuances of LinkedIn's advertising tools, the importance of targeting the right audience, and how to create compelling ad content that resonates with professionals. This episode is a must-listen for marketers leveraging LinkedIn Ads to drive business growth and achieve substantial results.   Key Takeaways I know we've all clicked on a Facebook ad or two before, but have we clicked on a LinkedIn ad? Though we see them every time. AJ Wilcox and I discuss LinkedIn ads' rising popularity and unique advantage in B2B marketing. He stresses the importance of optimizing ad spend and creating high-impact content. He shares strategies for effective targeting and measuring success, ensuring every dollar spent contributes to achieving marketing goals. He states clear messaging, strong visuals, and robust targeting options are essential for driving engagement and conversions. In this episode, you'll learn how to hack LinkedIn Ads, why Meta struggles to compete, and why all these strategies are essential for long-term agency growth. More About AJ Wilcox: Check out his Website - b2linked.com/ Follow him on LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/wilcoxaj

Send us a Text Message.Today, we're diving into the world of LinkedIn advertising with none other than AJ Wilcox, the founder of B2Linked.com, a leading LinkedIn ads agency. AJ is here to share his expert insights on how to use LinkedIn effectively to boost your business's sales and marketing strategies.In this episode, you'll learn: •

AJ Wilcox, Founder of B2Linked, delves into leveraging LinkedIn ads for B2B growth. Streamlining lead capture and audience management are crucial aspects of maximizing your return on investment (ROI) with LinkedIn Ads. Martech integrations offer powerful solutions to these challenges. Today, AJ discusses the best martech to integrate with your LinkedIn ads. Connect With: Aj Wilcox: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

AJ Wilcox, Founder of B2Linked, delves into leveraging LinkedIn ads for B2B growth. Streamlining lead capture and audience management are crucial aspects of maximizing your return on investment (ROI) with LinkedIn Ads. Martech integrations offer powerful solutions to these challenges. Today, AJ discusses the best martech to integrate with your LinkedIn ads. Connect With: Aj Wilcox: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

AJ Wilcox, Founder of B2Linked, delves into leveraging LinkedIn ads for B2B growth. With its extensive network of professionals and robust targeting options, LinkedIn offers a unique opportunity to connect with decision-makers in your industry. Strategically crafting and deploying LinkedIn ad campaigns helps you reach your target audience, generate quality leads, and nurture them through the sales funnel. Today, AJ discusses how you can leverage LinkedIn ads to build your pipeline.Connect With: Aj Wilcox: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

AJ Wilcox, Founder of B2Linked, delves into leveraging LinkedIn ads for B2B growth. With its extensive network of professionals and robust targeting options, LinkedIn offers a unique opportunity to connect with decision-makers in your industry. Strategically crafting and deploying LinkedIn ad campaigns helps you reach your target audience, generate quality leads, and nurture them through the sales funnel. Today, AJ discusses how you can leverage LinkedIn ads to build your pipeline.Connect With: Aj Wilcox: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

AJ Wilcox - CEO - B2Linked | LinkedIn Ads Performance Agency AJ Wilcox is a LinkedIn Ads pro who founded B2Linked.com, a LinkedIn Ads-specific ad agency, in 2014. He's an official LinkedIn partner, host of the LinkedIn Ads Show podcast, and has managed among the world's largest LinkedIn Ads accounts worldwide. He's a ginger & triathlete. He & his wife live in Utah, with their four kids, and his company car is a wicked-fast go-kart. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/dylanconroy/support

LinkedIn is the easiest social network to go viral on, says AJ Wilcox of B2Linked. And that means it has tremendous potential to expand your business's organic reach. But to make this free marketing method work, you have to take a very specific approach, adds AJ.  In part 1 of this interview, AJ highlighted the advantages of LinkedIn over Facebook and Google, the best ad formats, and why this business-oriented social network isn't a good advertising fit for every business. Here in part 2, we expand on the organic side, including how to expand your influence using your personal and company profiles.The main reason most company LinkedIn profiles don't much attention or trafficHow the latest LinkedIn update leveled the playing field The most effective content to post on LinkedIn – and when to post itWhat you need to know about how LinkedIn's algorithm “judges” your new content And more

Even though LinkedIn advertising can be incredibly effective for certain industries and businesses, not many agencies specialize in serving clients using this social network.  There's no better authority to speak with than AJ Wilcox, of B2Linked, who, at one point, managed five of LinkedIn's top 10 ad customers.  Like with many ad networks, being effective on LinkedIn is all about getting quality leads. You should also be able to track what spend gives you what results – and best contributes to your bottom line.  But you'll have to use different tactics than you would with Google or Facebook ads. AJ gets into all the details, including…Why many companies are “priced out” of LinkedIn – and how to figure out if yours isHow to figure out if your audience is on LinkedIn – and if you can target themThe key element of an effective LinkedIn ad campaign that will engage your target marketThe minimum amount you need to spend per month to get resultsAnd more

LinkedIn Ads have become a powerful tool for companies, but using them to their full potential requires a strategic approach. In this episode, I'm joined by LinkedIn Ads expert AJ Wilcox to discuss the advantages of LinkedIn Ads, how companies can use them to increase their warm and hot leads significantly, the many types of ads available, and what happens when you dabble in the platform. 4 Steps to a LinkedIn Ads Strategy Target the right audience based on budget. Find out who the audience is and what they need. Offer free and/or subscribable content. Build the know, like, and trust factor. About AJ Wilcox AJ Wilcox is a LinkedIn Ads pro who founded B2Linked.com, THE LinkedIn Ads agency, in 2014. He's managed over $150M in spend on the platform, and they're official LinkedIn partners. AJ is the host of the LinkedIn Ads Show podcast and has managed 5 of the world's top 10 LinkedIn Ads accounts. He's a ginger & triathlete. He lives in Utah with his beautiful wife and 5 adorable kids, and his company car is a wicked-fast go-kart. Strategic LinkedIn Ads LinkedIn Ads can be a powerful tool for companies, but it's important to invest in them strategically. AJ says that simply dabbling in them might not yield immediate results, especially if you're advertising at a low volume. You need to understand that the impact of your ads may take time to materialise. To make the most of a low-volume approach, AJ recommends targeting warm audiences. By focusing on the people already familiar with your brand, you increase the chances of achieving positive outcomes. LinkedIn Ad Types Using LinkedIn Ads without professional knowledge can be challenging. With it, you may end up wasting a significant amount of money on ineffective ad campaigns. AJ provides some guidance on how to use this as a learning experience and advises marketing managers who are asked to start using them without training. LinkedIn offers a huge variety of ad types, from direct messages and sidebar ads to news feed ads, including images, carousels, and videos. Video ads are gaining popularity because they are a much more direct way to build the know, like, and trust factor in getting your audience from a cold or warm lead to a hot one. Video is becoming the future of LinkedIn! Do you use LinkedIn Ads? What do you like about them? Have you ever invested money in LinkedIn Ads and received little to no return on your investment? Let me know your experience in the comments on the episode page. In This Episode What kind of companies should invest in LinkedIn advertising [7:30] What happens when you dabble in LinkedIn Ads [11:00] The reality of using ads without professional knowledge [16:00] How marketing managers can make their case to their managers [20:45] Why you can't use your Meta strategy on LinkedIn [22:45] How to start working with an agency [24:30] The power of free and subscribable content [26:00] How many types of ads exist on LinkedIn [27:15] The power of LinkedIn video ads [29:30] Links & Resources Learn About LinkedIn Ads Fanatics Get the Free Comprehensive LinkedIn Ads Startup Checklist & Guide Listen to The LinkedIn Ads Show Find AJ Wilcox Online Follow AJ Wilcox on LinkedIn | X | YouTube Find Louise Brogan Online Follow Louise Brogan on LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube Subscribe to LinkedIn with Louise Brogan on Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Today on our SaaS Expert Series, Jeff sits down with AJ Wilcox – founder of B2Linked.com, LinkedIn Ads expert and Linkedin Ads Show podcast host. shares insights drawn from his experience managing a staggering 150 million in LinkedIn ad spend.AJ provides a crash course on circumventing common pitfalls, creating effective content and tracking metrics for successful campaigns. Plus, we'll delve into how advertising has adapted to the changing market dynamics and how it continues to play a vital role in enhancing brand awareness and reaching the right audience.With his expert guidance, we explore the potential of LinkedIn's unique targeting options, focusing not just on arbitrary interests but the professional identity of potential customers.Key Takeaways[00:03:58] - Strategic Gratitude in Business[00:14:14] - Shifting Strategy for Increasing Brand Awareness[00:23:23] - Emotional Connection in Advertising's Power[00:29:30] - Imagery and Ad Copy in Advertising[00:36:34] - Optimizing Click-Through Rates and Costs[00:39:36] - Optimizing LinkedIn Advertising With Limited Information[00:46:27] - Bringing Personality and Humanity to Business[00:49:40] - Learning Value of Niche Podcast[00:51:19] - AJ Shares Tips for LinkedIn AdsTweetable Quotes"I think right there lies an underutilized superpower, and that is gratitude. It's the soft whisper that can cause a seismic shift in workplace morale and customer loyalty and the relentless pursuit of progress." - 00:03:22 Jeff Mains"Pausing to express heartfelt thanks isn't just nice, it's essential, and in the midst of chasing KPIs and bottom lines, taking a moment to genuinely thank someone can really be a game changer." - 00:04:13 Jeff Mains"When gratitude percolates through your organization and employees and customers don't just feel valued, they feel like they belong. And that is next level." - 00:07:55 Jeff Mains"What we've found is email address is a really tricky field in B2B because their login email address is usually their personal email, but sales only wants a business email. So if we take whatever email addresses we have, which are usually someone's professional email, LinkedIn doesn't recognize those and they don't match at a high rate." - 00:37:02 AJ Wilcox"So I don't love that in this strategy, I'm basically telling LinkedIn like, hey, I'm going to keep renting your land forever, but it is pretty awesome to be able to reach specific people without having to get their email address." - 00:38:14 AJ Wilcox"I love the one of being able to switch your bidding model when you get particularly high click-through rates. That's one that a lot of advertisers kind of stumble on." - 00:41:20 AJ Wilcox"I find that when I can mentally lock into a physical activity I even work on a treadmill desk, so even when I'm normally working, I'm still doing some physical activity. It frees up my mind and helps me focus better on a long term kind of task." - 00:49:50 AJ WilcoxSaaS Leadership Lessons1. Fostering a Culture of Gratitude: Emphasizes the significance of fostering a culture of gratitude within the workplace. This includes expressing personalized appreciation to both employees and customers. Gratitude can enhance a positive work environment and strengthen customer relationships, making it a strategic tool for business success.2. Mastering LinkedIn Advertising: Emphasizes the importance of understanding your audience and customizing your targeting strategy to reach them effectively.3. Building Rapport with Potential Customers: It's...

How do you handle reaching the pinnacle of your career, only to find yourself unexpectedly let go? In this episode, we sit down with AJ Wilcox, a remarkable marketer who, just like many of us, found himself on an unexpectedly unique path. AJ shares his experiences running the largest LinkedIn ads account, successfully generating top-tier leads for his sales team for over two years. But, there's a twist – he was fired by the very boss he had personally trained.Our conversation explores the crucial themes of advocating your worth and self-promotion, shedding light on the significance of recognizing and communicating your value in the professional world. AJ takes us through the twists and turns of his career, transitioning from a Rainmaker for others to becoming a Marketing Owner for himself.Join us as we uncover AJ Wilcox's inspiring journey, from career peaks to unexpected detours, and discover the valuable lessons he learned along the way.Learn more about AJ Wilcox:AJ Wilcox is a LinkedIn Ads pro who founded B2Linked.com, THE LinkedIn Ads agency, in 2014. He's managed over $150M in spend on the platform, they're official LinkedIn partners, he's host of the LinkedIn Ads Show podcast, and has managed 5 of the world's top 10 LinkedIn Ads accounts. He's a ginger & triathlete. He lives in Utah with his beautiful wife and 5 adorable kids, and his company car is a wicked-fast gokart.AJ Wilcox's Links:LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/wilcoxajTwitter: twitter.com/wilcoxajConnect with Veronica on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vromney/If you're serious about advancing your career in marketing and you're looking for some personal insights into how then I invite you to schedule a free Pathway to Promotion call with me: https://pathwaycall.com/If you found value in today's episode, I would appreciate it if you could leave a rating and review.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Product Market Fit How to scale your LI Ads Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript So you want to scale your LinkedIn Ads? Well, beware of the blocks and hurdles on your way. We're discussing what's keeping you from scaling your performance on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, you've certainly heard the phrase, nail it, then scale it. It's referring to when you find something that works, and you want to take full advantage of it well, because of course in business and digital marketing, where things are moving so fast, something that worked well yesterday may not work at all tomorrow. This is almost always the goal that we have with LinkedIn Ads. Nail it at first, and then scale it up in the 1000s of advertising accounts that we've run and consulted on, we've seen about every possible combination of situations where a team is wanting to scale their successful efforts, we've seen about every possible combination of situations where a team is wanting to scale their successful efforts up, but there's some blocker or hurdle in the way. So today, we're gonna go through all the possible things that can hinder your ability to scale. First in the news, one of our awesome B2Linked teammates, Landon Thorne noticed something new called group objectives on one of his accounts. And essentially what this is, when you go to create a new campaign group, LinkedIn says, if you're willing to attach an objective to that campaign group, and have every single campaign under that campaign group share the same objective, then LinkedIn can do this dynamic budget optimization thing. And this is taken directly from meta over there. It's called campaign budget optimization, or CBO. But essentially, you say, I have a whole bunch of different campaigns here, LinkedIn, I'm going to let you decide which campaign you give more budget to and which ones you give less to just optimize for whichever is performing best. Now, I'm imagining that this is something that's going to be rolling out over the next several weeks, and we'll start to see it in more accounts. Personally, I'm not in a huge hurry to try to use it simply because choosing an objective for a campaign is one of the levers that we have to test and get better performance. And so I feel like if I'm forced to choose the same objective within a campaign group, it's constraining and could hold back my performance. But for those of you listening, I'd love to hear from you. Please reach out to us at podcast at B2Linked.com. If you've got a great use case for this, and especially if you find it to work especially well. Alright, quickly highlighting a review, Exclusive8 on Apple podcasts from the UK says, "Thank you, I'm following you for nearly a year and all the tips and tricks that you and your team shares help, and they work 100% of the time. It gives me confidence and motivation to improve strategy regularly." And the heading of that review was LinkedIn Ads Bible. Exclusive8 , I don't know who you are, but I really appreciate you leaving a review. As that is the biggest compliment you can pay us. And I'm so glad that we've been helpful to you in your LinkedIn ads journey. And you, yes you, I want to feature you here on the podcast as well. So if you haven't already, if you're a regular listener, please do go and leave a review, especially on Apple podcasts. All right onto the topic at hand, let's hit it. First off the hurdles that keep us from scale. There are a whole bunch of different hurdles that you'll come across at different times and in different ways. So these will be a no certain order, for sure. But we'll go pretty deep into each of them. The first is audience size. So when you're trying to scale your campaigns, and you want to turn the budget up and start getting more, if you don't have a large enough audience size, you may realize that you try to turn that knob up, and nothing happens. Or what's worse is when you turn that knob up, you start increasing your budgets, and you do start spending more, but it's just your costs to increase. And it's not actually your performance, you're not reaching more people. And this is something you can test actually very easily with your current audiences. Try increasing your bids by 20%. And just see did your level of impressions and did your reach increase over that amount of time? If so, it means you probably haven't hit that level of diminishing returns, which is great. That means you have some more ability to scale if you want it. But let's say that you don't have that that ability to scale, your audiences limited. Well, there are several ways that you can go out and try to increase your audience sizes and do that thoughtfully. Episode 22 of the podcast is all about how to scale and that would probably be a really good playbook for you to go and understand how to increase that audience size. Somewhat related is what about if your audience isn't very active on the platform, and that's part of the challenge that we have with LinkedIn is it tends to be a platform that we don't go and use all all the time, well, maybe you and I do., but regular users are probably only on there three to four times a month. So you may notice if you're targeting someone like dentists, for instance, maybe you see the audience there, there are enough people in your audience. But then when you're actually advertising, it's kind of hard to serve impressions, or spend any real kind of budget. In this case, sometimes you can't really do anything about it, you can't force people to come and be more active on the platform. But there are some things you can do to help. First, you could increase your audience size. And of course, thoughtfully, we don't want to just open up the floodgates just because we want to spend, but you can also try to reach these people off of LinkedIn. And you can do that with LinkedIn Audience Network, or what we oftentimes call LAN. Now, we don't always have the most success with LAN, it's kind of hard to spot the quality signals in there, it leaves us doubting sometimes. But it can be a good way to reach these audiences all around the web, not just when we're sitting around waiting for them to come back to LinkedIn every so often. You also may be able to find segments of the population that you're not currently going after, that might be more active. Targeting like groups targeting tends to reach people who are little bit more active on the platform. So it might be worth to try that as well. The next big hurdle that we see is budget. And I know you're thinking duh, AJ. But if you're spending, let's say, 10k a month on LinkedIn ads, and you want to spend more, but your boss is saying, nope, 10k it is, well, that's a huge hurdle. And it's probably not one that you're gonna get over very easily, I would encourage you to go listen to episode 39 of the podcast, all about making the case for scaling on LinkedIn. I can't tell your boss that they should give you more budget, but that episode has some great points that you could make a business case. Somewhat related would be the daily budgets that you're actually putting in your campaigns. If you want to spend more and your budgets are in the way, this is a really easy way to say hey, I want to spend more. So I'm going to increase all my campaigns budgets by 10%, 20%, 50%. Somewhat related to budget is actually your bidding. Let's say you've taken our advice from Episode 89, all about bidding. Well, good for you. One of the pieces of advice that we give is bidding lower than LinkedIn is recommended range. But in the case of scale, sometimes this advice can hinder you. So for instance, if you have a budget of let's say, $5,000 a month, and you know, you can spend that entire $5,000 by bidding at the like $8 ranch per click. If you all of a sudden decide to increase your budget from $5,000 to $10,000 a month. At that same bid level, you might find that your budget moved, but your actual spend didn't. And in that case, increasing your bids and becoming more competitive, reaching more of your existing target audience could be the ticket for you. When you scale this way by bidding, realize that let's say you're increasing your bid by 20%, it means your cost per click and your cost per lead are probably all going to scale up by 20%. So make sure you've communicated that clearly to your other stakeholders that if we scale this way, we are going to see our costs rise. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the sources of friction. 8:18 The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment. Do you want to return on that? Consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, The original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years. And our unique scientific approach to ads management combined with our proprietary tools allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency, in house team, or digital ads hire. Plus, we're official LinkedIn partners. To schedule a conversation, just go to B2Linked.com/apply and we'd absolutely love the chance to chat with you. Alright, let's jump into the friction sources that can stand in between you and scale. I absolutely love the concept of friction in physics. And it's there's this constant drag that makes your formulas not quite work as well as you'd hoped. And I think this is a very apt metaphor for LinkedIn Ads, because there are little things that introduce friction into the system that drag us down and drag our performance down. And sometimes we don't even know that it's happening. Again, in no particular order. But one of the biggest sources of friction that keep you from scaling, or even performing well is having nonperformance ads. So let's say for instance, when you're advertising on LinkedIn with sponsored content ad formats, the average click through rate is about .44%. So let's say you're performing anywhere near that average at .44%, that's less than one half of a percent of everyone who sees your ads actually clicks on it. And if you have a pretty small audience, it's going to be hard to drive very many visits with that level of performance. Now, it depends on a lot of different factors. But it's not too terribly difficult to launch an ad that gets over a 1% click through rate. So by launching these new ads, they may be going to the same call to action, it may be saying nearly the same thing. But you've made tweaks to make it stand out more and speak more to the pains that they might be feeling. And now 1%, so twice as many people are now willing and able to interact with your ads. So I hope I've painted for you this picture that if you have ads that aren't performing super great, this can be a drag to your system. And no matter how much more you're willing to pay for ads, you find trying to grow your account is like pulling teeth. By the way, the metaphor of pulling teeth is totally gross. I don't know why I use that. It makes me feel like not going to the dentist anytime soon. So related to non performing ads, I might suggest using a different ad format, because a different ad format sometimes gets access to new inventory. Or maybe it has the capability of performing much better than your original ads. What I would highly recommend to you is trying to run video ads, there will be an element of cannibalization if you're running single image ads, for example. And then you launch video because those do take much of the same inventory, if not all, but you may find out that there's a big contingent of your audience who wants to interact with your video ads, but they were never going to interact with your single image ads, or vice versa. So let's say that you're already using your sponsored content very well, well, when you launch a new ad format, like dynamic ads, or text ads, and I probably shouldn't mention sponsored messaging, since that's probably going to be a thing of the past here in the next, I don't know, three, six months. And of course, I want this episode to be future proof. So yeah, I definitely won't mentioned sponsored messaging. But as you tried new ad formats that use new inventory, that's of course, a great way to scale, because now you're filling slots that are not competing with your other ads. So we've talked about ads that are maybe providing some friction, some drag by not being very performant. But we can also talk about having nonperformant or non compelling offers. And as a reminder, when I say offer, I don't mean a percent off or a direct call to action, like buy my product. Now, what I mean is what we are offering our prospects in exchange for their attention, right. So an offer can be anything from read this blog post to buy something now. Well, whatever that offer is, if you have an offer that is not compelling to people, it doesn't feel valuable. It's not attention grabbing, the best copywriter and the best creative in the whole world could not create an ad that gets you a high click through rate. Although if any of you here want to challenge me on that, and we want to set up some kind of a test, I would love to watch that happen. So I would encourage you go look at the offers that you're putting out there. Look at them with fresh eyes, pretend you're one of your prospects, and you've never seen it before. Is it interesting? Is it helpful? Is it attention grabbing? And of course, you can test this, you can put three or four different ads, all pointing to a different offer to an audience and just see which one gets higher click through rates. Maybe that'll tell you the two or three offers that you shouldn't even bother running, or rethink and totally retool, and then come back when you think you've got something interesting. The next hurdle I want to talk about here is actually time. And what I mean by that is if you're going to cold audiences who've never heard of you before, just because you're willing to spend two times or three times more this month than what you were spending before, it doesn't mean all of a sudden two to three times that number of people are going to want to buy your product or service. They still need time and they still need touchpoints by being nurtured so that they can come to get to know like and trust you. Now I don't have a time machine, so there's not too much I can do to help you out with time as being a hurdle, except just set your expectations properly. When you're going to cold audiences, it may take 3, 6, 9 months to really get them thoroughly nurtured and warmed up. And then of course, once you start driving demos or discovery calls, you still have your whole sales cycle to worry about. Many of our clients are large B2B organizations with long sales cycles. And it certainly doesn't make sense if you have an average sales cycle of let's say, nine months or 12 months to expect that LinkedIn Ads is going to close any faster than that. The next hurdle that I want us to go over is your business constraints. So maybe you're in a situation where the sales team couldn't keep up with additional leads if you were to generate them. Or if you scale very quickly. They're not equipped to handle them at that scale. And in that case, you really need to prepare internally for scaling on LinkedIn Ads. That means don't just say oh, as the marketing department, we've got more budget, we're gonna scale up by 20%, or 100%, or whatever, and just not tell the sales team. They absolutely need to know. And of course, this goes for all channels, not just LinkedIn, if you're going to scale up your Google or your meta, or whatever, please, please, please go talk to your sales team. Make sure everyone's agreed and ready and prepared. Almost nothing makes you as a marketer look worse than when you start sending really high quality traffic to the sales team and they take weeks to get back to those prospects. Not a good look. Another big business constraint is something that we talked about on Episode 90, it's all about your product market fit. Now, I hate to suggest this to anyone, but it's totally possible that the reason that you're having a hard time scaling your LinkedIn Ads efforts, is your product doesn't actually have product market fit. It's not solving a big enough pain point to actually make people buy it. We go really deep into that on episode 90 so go listen to that. Another hurdle here is actually your number of campaigns. Now, this is actually a pretty easy hurdle to get over. And it's one that I've been jumping over on pogo sticks for the last many years. The concept here is that if you have any campaign that's running on LinkedIn, it's only going to be in the auctions and eligible to show a certain number of times or at a certain amount of scale. And sometimes when you increase your bids, increase your budgets on just that one campaign, it still fails to get as much reach and as many impressions as it could otherwise. So sometimes, you can just create another campaign, even with the same targeting, but I usually suggest vary your targeting a little bit. So if you're targeting by something like job title, maybe try targeting by job function and seniority, or by skills with seniority, or groups with seniority, just something different. And now you'll notice that those two campaigns, or maybe you go the extra mile, and you have four campaigns all targeting a similar audience. And now because you have a higher number of campaigns, it becomes much easier to spend on that audience. Plus, like we talked about regularly, you now have more data about what types of targeting are working to drive your best traffic. It acts like little private focus groups, giving you data on what people like and what they don't like, and who likes it. Alright, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up, so stick around. 17:29 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Alright, like we mentioned in the Podcast, Episode 90 is all about product market fit. Episode 22 is all about how to actually scale your LinkedIn Ads. So in this episode, we went all through maybe different things that could stop you from scaling, we gave a couple little tips, but that's the episode that's going to go all the way and teach you how to actually plow over those hurdles. Now, if you want to be a member of the premier community for LinkedIn Ads experts, come join us at fanatics.B2linked.com. It's a very low cost subscription and it gets you access to all four of my courses taking you from absolute LinkedIn Ads beginner to expert. Plus, you get access to the whole community of other LinkedIn Ads experts to be able to ask questions and bounce ideas off of. If this is your first time listening, welcome! We're excited to have you here. Make sure to hit that subscribe button on whatever platform you're listening on. Now, if this is not your first time listening, please do go and pay me the biggest favor that you could possibly do and that's leave a review on the podcast. And of course, as you do, I'll shout you out live here on the episodes. With any questions, suggestions or corrections because we are open to corrections, reach out to us at Podcast@B2linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Google Analytics 4 Events Episode Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript Are your landing pages leaving something to be desired? If so, your LinkedIn Ads aren't performing as well as they could be. We're teaching you how to make your landing pages super powered on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, your landing pages dictates so much of your performance that you can get from your LinkedIn Ads. But it's really complex, because a lot of marketers who are responsible for paid social are not responsible for the landing pages or the website. But with landing pages that are inefficient, it makes everything you do look worse. Never fear, I'm about to give you a framework for landing pages that perform on LinkedIn. And let's be honest, every other channel too, because that's kind of how it works. But first in the news thought leader ads now support video. We've shared in the past how thought leader ads could only boost a post that was single image or text only. So now thought leader ads can boost video posts, which I'm really excited about. The more power we can get from thought leader ads in my book, the better. Eric Jones brought up the LinkedIn ads fanatics community that document ads now have their own version of retargeting, which is amazing. The more ways that we can retarget also the better. So now when you run a document ad, you can now retarget anyone who interacts with the ad in any way or just people who performed chargeable clicks on your ad, or those who downloaded the content of the ad. This is awesome! LinkedIn, keep it up. I really hope this means that dynamic ads retargeting, text ads retargeting, and the messaging ad formats, event ads even, I hope all of these are going to get their own retargeting very soon, I want to highlight a review that we got on the podcast Vaanee Goel says, "Such a fantastic LinkedIn Ads podcast. I've been following AJ on LinkedIn for a while. And about a week back, I subscribed to the podcast and started listening to it. When I heard the first two episodes, my mind was blown. It's been just about a week and I've listened to almost 10 episodes. They're incredible, so much content, such great explanations, and very articulate and coherent. I see these helping me a lot. I'm gonna listen to them all over the course of time. Now, thanks for sharing your knowledge with people including me. This is an abundance mindset in its truest sense. And it really helps." Vaanee, a LinkedIn Ads consultant out of India. Vaanee, I hope I'm pronouncing your name right. Thank you so much for sharing that review. That means a ton to me. And as you guessed, I am big on an abundance mindset. So I'm really excited that you're getting a lot of value out of it, as well as everyone else, too. I'm not trying to keep this all for myself. And neither are any of us here in the B2Linked team. We're constantly looking to see how we can share better. And everyone else, I want to invite you to leave a review on the podcast. I would love to shout you out live like this as well. Alright, without further ado, let's hit it. Our topic here is on landing pages. And it's a really complex topic, because there's so many different elements of a landing page. And I want you to consider the landing pages that you're currently using. And think about ways that you can use these tips to make your landing pages even stronger, or fix them if they're not performing very well. I'm gonna list a lot of different kinds of elements, I want you to know that these are really in no particular order, unless I say this one is really important. And I will say that. Consistency in Messaging The very first one is consistency in messaging. Now one of the big challenges that we run into is that oftentimes, we say something different in the ad than what we say on the landing page itself. It may seem like a small thing that in your ad copy, maybe you're talking about this free content. And then when they go to the landing page, they don't see you talking about the content in the same way. But this can be a real source of confusion for your visitors. So what I recommend is make sure that whatever way that you're referring to the content in your ad, make sure that the landing page itself reflects that. Use the same words, use the same title of content, any way that you can connect that original thought so that when the visitor gets there, they're not left confused or wondering if they made it to the right place. Meeting Expectations And this leads us to our second point your landing page should fulfill and meet the expectation that it's been given. So in your ad, if you're saying something like get access to this free ebook, if they get to that landing page, and they have to hunt around to understand, like, where is this ebook? Or is it being offered? Or was I bamboozled? And is this a bait and switch for something else, you need to make sure that your offer is easy to find. They clicked on an ad specifically promising them something, as soon as they get to that landing page it should be abundantly clear exactly what it is that they requested and they get access to it right then. This also means that you need to clearly articulate the value that your visitor is getting. A lot of times when I audit landing pages, I notice that right up at the top, this is the area of the webpage that everyone is going to see, it's the most important, that people waste time. They start talking about something else, rather than getting right to the benefit. If you're offering a free piece of content, your first paragraph should not be about your product or something unrelated, it should be all about, here's the content that you're getting access to and here's why it's valuable. Coding and Backend We do need to talk about the coding and the back end of the landing page and website as well. Hey, LinkedIn charged us for 100 clicks, but when we look at analytics, it shows only 40 visitors came from LinkedIn. No, this is not LinkedIn trying to trick you or overcharge you. What inevitably happened is someone clicked on that ad. And so LinkedIn charged you as the advertiser, but then when they sent them to the landing page, there was enough of a delay, the visitor got impatient and left before the page fully loaded. This is the same issue for all channels, but I definitely hear it a lot related to LinkedIn Ads. Anytime that you have a redirect happen, it takes some time for that redirect to occur. When you click on a LinkedIn ad, LinkedIn reroutes you through a different link. And so there's just a little delay there, maybe it's a fraction of a second. And this is exacerbated where maybe you have a bitly link or some sort of a shortened company link in your ad, then it has to go through two redirects, which takes even longer. And then your landing page will take some time to load. Generally landing pages load faster on a desktop than they do on mobile. But we know that 80% or more of your visitors from LinkedIn Ads are going to be on mobile. So my best advice to you is work on your mobile landing page experience. Make sure that it loads as fast as possible. Generally, this is going to be on mobile, you want your page to load in less than one second. You'll obviously want to talk to your developer about this. Because this is not a skill that most marketers have is being able to minify their code on their website and speed things up. But your developer will know this is incredibly important. Some things that can help here are getting faster hosting. So if your website is using any sort of like a shared hosting, that's going to slow it down, because at different times, the server may be getting more requests for another website and so it's slower to serve yours up when it's requested. So one of the best things you can do use cloud hosting, I know it's a lot more expensive, we've considered exactly the same thing for our website, but don't cheap out on hosting. Get good, fast, dedicated hosting support. Another thing that can really help your page load speed is you'll have a lot of different JavaScript libraries being called in your code. You'll also have a lot of different CSS files. There are different tools that developers can use, where they can do what's called minifying. They minify the JavaScript and the CSS files, that could mean shrinking them all into just one simplified file and getting rid of all of the redundant calls there. Or just making it so the server doesn't have to request as many documents. This is definitely outside of my paygrade, but I've worked with developers in this process of minifying, JavaScript and CSS, and you really can get a big benefit here. Now I've been a digital marketer for a long time, especially near the beginning of the WordPress heyday. WordPress is especially susceptible to this. But what happens is, if you add enough plugins into your website, because hey, there's so many plugins that do great things, well, all of those plugins can bog the website down, because every time someone requests a page, maybe four, or five, or 15, plugins all have to be called and referenced. So one of the best things you can do is remove plugins. If you're running off of something like WordPress, or Drupal. You can decrease your page load speed very quickly, just by doing some of that. Another thing that I've seen web developers do is to go through and specifically resize images just for what they need. So for instance, if you upload an image, that's like four megabytes, but you're only displaying it as a thumbnail, even though your web server is showing that only as a thumbnail, it has to load the whole four megabyte image and send it to the user. And that slows down the page, giving them anything else. So there are a few tips that you can give to your web developers, and hopefully give them a big leg up in speeding up your pages. I might also suggest have them design the page to be mobile first, because a lot of times we design a desktop version of a website. And then the mobile version is just like a scaled down version of that. But if you build the whole website or page specifically for mobile, and then maybe have a separate desktop version, that can help your page load speed quite a bit as well. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the design and general appeal areas of your website. 9:57 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment. Do you want to return on that? Consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn Ads accounts over the past 12 years and our unique scientific approach to Ads management combined with our proprietary tools allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency, in house team, or digital ads hire. Plus, were official LinkedIn partners. Just go to B2Linked.com/apply, we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. Alright, let's jump back into our design and appeal of websites. Design and Appeal I want you to look at your landing page and your website and assess how easy it is to actually read the content that's there. Look at it as a new user, like you weren't the one who created it and see how attractive is it? Are there giant paragraphs that look like big walls of text that no one's going to want to start reading. If so try to break up your paragraphs to where they're just a line or two a piece. This is going to invite a lot more people to start reading and keep reading. Think about what you have above the fold. Because if we know that not everyone is going to keep scrolling all the way to the end be really thoughtful and intentional about what you put at the top of the page that you know is going to get read the most often. And of course, with landing pages, the name of the game is really minimizing distraction. The purpose of most landing pages is to get you to either fill out a form or take some action or leave. That's really lit. Like give someone an opportunity, and if they're not willing to take it, there's not much there for them. A lot of times, this means removing links that go anywhere else except that landing page itself. That means the logo at the upper left hand corner, you might want to take the link out of that so that they can't go back to your homepage. You might want to remove the navigation that's at the top of that page that's global across your whole website, just to allow fewer distractions and the ability to leave the landing page that you've crafted. Do you have multiple popups that could annoy someone, obviously try to get rid of them or at least minimize them to just like one pop up. Realize that most of the people who are visiting your landing page are going to be on mobile and a pop up takes over the entire screen so I would highly recommend don't use any pop ups if you can. Now the same thing I think goes for the GDPR cookie banners that you see, I've seen some really good cookie banners. And I've seen some really poor ones. Obviously, from a data perspective and from an analytics perspective, you want as many people to accept those cookies as possible. So make that really easy. It shouldn't take up the whole screen, but if it does, you may not want it to take up the whole screen. Or maybe you do and have it take up the whole screen just to make it really easy to click accept all. That's totally up to you how you handle it. But you should look at your cookie banner as a new user with fresh eyes and see if there's any way that you can improve it so that it's easier to click accept. Now we definitely need to talk about form fields. Because many marketers your whole goal in sending someone to a landing page is to get them to fill out a form. So first, consider how many form fields you have. Because if people have to fill out too much information, they're gonna get bored, they're gonna get distracted, they're gonna get upset or frustrated. And they may just leave entirely, whereas they were maybe close to just clicking Submit. There are some big SAS companies that make us look pretty bad. You may know the ones I'm talking about, but you go to register for a webinar. And they asked 15 questions about how much you spend, and what your title and position at the company are. I would try to keep it as short as you possibly can. First name, last name, email address, if you can keep it down to a minimum, that's going to help you way more Plus, you can always enrich that data later at a pretty low cost. So it doesn't make sense to add more form fields trying to qualify people. I think we also have to address that your landing page should be nice to look at. It shouldn't be visually offensive. Now I will say that I've sat through conversion optimization presentations, especially from Chris Daly that we've mentioned on the show before. And in his presentations. He does the results of AV tests. So he shows you the before the after which versions tested and then he shares the results. And I will say I was shocked because in one of those examples, it was the ugliest possible version of the page. It didn't match the brand colors or style guidelines. I mean, it looked like a Frankenstein of a page but it converted better. So I do realize that sometimes ugly converts, but I also realized that you're paying a significant premium to be advertising on LinkedIn and every interaction every touch that you have with someone is a touch with your brand, but it really is nice to make sure that that touch that they have with your brand, every touch is on brand. And it feels modern and appealing and isn't a real turnoff. It inspires confidence that you're good at what you do. Social Proof And next, that brings us to a really important category, here are things that go on your landing page, which is your social proof. Wisdom of the crowds is a real thing. No one likes to be the first person to comment, or the first person to like, or the first person to click. They feel like a guinea pig, they feel like they're being tested. And maybe if no one else is willing to do this, then maybe they shouldn't be either. As humans, we just feel more comfortable taking the same action that other people have already taken. So I think a section of your landing page, specifically devoted to like, here are the companies we've worked with that can quiet people's fears, because they realize they're not the first ones who are going through this. You're already proven with other brands like them, or maybe even larger than them, I suggest the same kind of treatment with where you've been featured. So if you or your executive team has been featured, maybe they've been interviewed on podcasts, or they've been featured on the news somewhere or even in press releases, you can claim that. You're gonna have logos that say like, hey, here's where we've been featured. You can pepper in other elements like case studies and testimonials that help people realize that they're not alone. And they're making a smart decision by deciding to work with you. And this relates a little bit to the coding of the webpage. But I see a lot of marketers get tripped up here. The way that your tags fire on your page, your JavaScript tags is really important. If your analytics and conversion tags and your retargeting tags for all of your different stuff. If they all load at the very end of the page, then what's happening is these visitors that come to the page, and if they decide to leave before the whole page is downloaded into their browser and displayed to them, then your retargeting is not tracking them, your conversion tracking is not tracking them, your analytics is not tracking them, you get the idea. So most digital marketing channels have this little JavaScript pixel. LinkedIn calls their's the Insight tag, and they're pretty lightweight. So my recommendation would be to take all of your least your most important pixels, that would be your LinkedIn insight tag, maybe your Google Ads tag your meta tag, and make sure that these fires really early on in the head section of your HTML. That means even if a user leaves before the page fully loads, at least they'll qualify to be in your retargeting audience, if they were on a conversion page, then at least you get to mark that as a conversion. And your analytics is marking them as having come from LinkedIn. In episode 105, All about Google Analytics 4, we told you exactly how to set up page scroll depth and time on site events. These can be really helpful in understanding how people are interacting with your landing page. If you send a bunch of traffic and no one scrolls past 50%, or no one sticks around long enough to actually read what it is you have, then there's an obvious issue there. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. 18:17 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Alright, in the shownotes, you'll see a link to Episode 105. It was the last episode all about Google Analytics 4, so I would highly suggest checking that out if you haven't already. These are things that you can do as a marketer that help you evaluate your LinkedIn Ads traffic better. If you haven't already, make sure that you've joined the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community. That will get you access to our four courses that take you from beginner to expert, and they also give you access to the whole community of other LinkedIn Ads fanatics. You can bounce ideas off and ask questions anytime. Me and my staff are constantly in there as well. Depending on when you listen to this, you may still be able to get in at the lowest cost it will ever be, our founders rates, but you'll have to act fast. Go to fanatics.b2linked.com to see exactly how to sign up. If this is your first time listening, welcome! We're excited to have you here. Make sure to hit that subscribe button wherever you're listening. But if this is not your first time listening, please do rate and review the show. Nothing would be more meaningful to me than going and leaving a review. I would appreciate that so much. And it really helps out the show with any questions, suggestions or corrections on what we've talked about. Reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Google Analytics Login Scroll Depth Tracking Time On Site Tracking Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript Does the mention of Google Analytics 4 send shivers through your bones as a LinkedIn advertiser? Never fear. I'm walking you through everything you need to know about GA4 on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn ads fanatics, Universal Analytics is now gone. And Google Analytics, or GA4 as we'll call it, is the new reality for us marketers, I don't want you to miss a beat during this transition. So we're going to go through everything that you need to set up and use in the new GA4 that will help you analyze your LinkedIn Ads traffic. So this isn't going to be a resource for setting it up. You should already have GA4 setup. So I'm not going to go through any of that. But my aim here is to give you all the tools to analyze your LinkedIn Ads specific traffic. We're gonna go over which reports to use to actually analyze your LinkedIn Ads traffic plus specific events that you'll create to show engagement from your ad audiences and how to create conversions from them. First, I want to highlight a review here, Vadim Aizenshtein left a review that says, "One of the most awesome professional marketing knowledge sources out there. As a performance marketer, I quite often find myself looking for inspiration and knowledge. The problem is the mass of bs and fluff, "experts" out there that help fill the airwaves with irrelevant and misleading content. AJ's blog and podcast is an oasis of amazing insights and guides for marketers who actually want actual results, and not just show that they're making noise out there. Thanks, AJ." Hey, Vadim, I really appreciate such an awesome review for us, we try extremely hard to make sure that there's no bs here. And that the information we're putting out is exactly what we wish someone would be able to share with us as we were learning. And please, everyone who's listening, do go leave us a review, it is by far the best way that you can say thank you, for us coming out with this content every week. And of course, I want to feature you here on the podcast as well. Alright, without further ado, let's hit it. As an advertiser on LinkedIn, you're likely not just sending all of your traffic to a form asking for a conversion, or at least I hope you're not. So in this case, you're paying high LinkedIn prices for traffic, but you won't have conversions to show for it, at least not yet. But how nice would it be if you have some proof that the traffic was actually working, they were engaged with your content, they were liking what you were putting out, I've got two great ways for you to do exactly that. The first is called a scroll depth event. We've linked down in the show notes to an article by datarivenu.com. And it walks you through exactly how to do this through Google's Tag Manager. Essentially, what you're doing is you're telling Google Tag Manager to watch and see what the user is doing. Once they scroll past a certain depth of the page, it can fire an event that then gets logged into Google Analytics. Now, it's important to know that by default, Google Analytics 4 has an event that is called scroll event, but it has some serious disadvantages. So I'm going to help show you how to customize yours so you can get past all these. The default Google Analytics for scroll event, it triggers only when visitors get to 90% of the web page. So almost the bottom, this is actually pretty good practice because many websites have footers that take up a little bit of room. So you don't actually expect people to make it to a full 100% Scroll if they have consumed all the content. So 90% is a good rule of thumb. But relying solely on a 90% scroll depth is pretty weak in my book. I would like to go and add another couple scroll depths that would help us understand how intensely people are engaging with our website. So go read the article on datadrivenu that will walk you exactly through how to do this, my recommendation would probably be to create one event that's at 50% scroll, and another one that's 70% scroll, and then the default GA for one is going to trigger at 90%. So now you have three ways of finding out how many people are scrolling past 50%. One little correction that I have for the data driven you article, as you're following it through, we tried to follow it. So about halfway down the article where it actually starts teaching you how to set this up. The headline here says how to set up scroll depth in Google Analytics for with Google Tag Manager. And it starts with a tip it says before you begin copy the measurement ID on the top of your Google Tag Manager account, you will need this in step four. And then when we got down to step four, we actually tried to create this event using the Google Tag Manager ID and it actually fired an error. So we figured out what it's actually asking for is the Google Tag measurement ID from Google Analytics 4. It starts with a G- but other than that, that article is perfectly helpful at helping you get this setup. As an overview, what you're going to do is go into your Google Tag Manager, you create a new tag called scroll depth and then you're going to define how deep that depth is. You have three different choices. You have a scroll depth threshold, so past a certain threshold, you have a certain number of pixels or percentage, and then you can also fire an event based off of scroll direction, if they're scrolling vertically or horizontally. So once you've created these scroll depths inside of Google Tag Manager, now you go into Google Analytics to set to recognize those events. And the cool thing about this is they're already there. That's right, you don't actually have to go into Google Analytics and do anything, these events are being pushed right into Google Analytics. And all you need to do is know where to see them so that you can make use of them in your reports. We'll get to that here in a little bit. And I decided to make my scroll depths based off of percentages, like I said, 50%, 70%, and 90%. But you can decide to do it however you want. You can even do a certain number of pixels down the page or anything like that. I just thought percentages were sure nice. Okay, so what if you don't really care about scroll depth. So scroll depth isn't the end all be all, because sometimes we want to measure how long they're spending on the site. So the next thing we want to do is create time on site events. In the shownotes, we linked to a really good YouTube video that walks you through exactly how to create these. Again, this is in Google Tag Manager. Similar to scroll down GA 4 already has a way of telling whether someone is engaged for a certain amount of time. GA 4 has an event that comes with it called engaged sessions. Now engaged sessions is anyone who stayed around longer than 10 seconds or converted or had two or more pageviews. So yeah, that's nice. But you know, me, I want a little bit more control here. I want to fire an event, anytime someone makes it to a one minute time on site, a three minute, and a five minute time on site. I feel like if someone spends five whole minutes on our website, they are probably super engaged. Alright, so what you do is you go and create an event inside of Google Tag Manager, and I called my first one web page timer one minute. And then for the trigger, I triggered it to fire at the interval of 60,000 milliseconds. So that equals one minute. So if you want to follow our lead here, you're going to make a three minute one, and that's going to be 180,000 milliseconds, and then a five minute one will be 300,000 milliseconds. Alright, so that's all the math that you're going to have to do here. So again, go follow that YouTube video, we've linked to it down below, it's super easy. And that's gonna get you as many of these page timers as you want to fire. So as you guess, now you have these scroll depth triggers that are firing and you have time on site triggers that are firing and Google Analytics 4 is waiting for these to come in and allowing you to just add them to your report willy nilly. It's great. 7:36 Alright, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into setting up conversions and letting you know which reports to use. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment Do you want your return consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years. And our unique scientific approach to ADS management combined with our proprietary tools allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency, in house team, or digital ads hire. Plus, we're official LinkedIn partners. To schedule a discovery call just go to B2Linkedlinkedin.com/apply and we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work together. Alright, let's jump back into it. We're going to be setting up conversions. So the way that GA 4 works is everything is an event. Every page view is an event. These scroll depth triggers and these page timers, all of them are events. Conversions or an event. You get the idea here, okay, so all conversions are in GA 4 is just an event that you've told LinkedIn. This is really serious to me, I want to call it a conversion. And that's really easy to do. What you do is you go into the cog, the admin cog inside of GA 4, and underneath property, you click on events. Now you'll see a list of all of the different events that GA 4 is tracking. If you've been following along, you might see here a scroll depth 50%, a scrolled up 70%, a scroll depth 90%, a web page timer for one minute, three minutes, and five minutes. Okay, that's great. Over in the right hand column, you'll see this toggle switch called mark as conversion. So let's say I wanted to mark a five minute page duration and a 90% scroll as a conversion for something that I'm monitoring, I can flip that little toggle switch or I can flip that little toggle switch to on. And now anytime I'm viewing my reports, and it shows conversions, I know I'm tracking one of those things. Or you can keep conversions for when someone fills out a form. This is totally customizable by you. Now, be aware that when you set up an event inside of Google Tag Manager, it's gonna take a little bit for Google Analytics 4 to recognize it and to start calculating data based off of it. So don't be upset if you've set this up inside of Tag Manager, and then you go inside of GA 4 and you don't see it as an event yet, don't worry, it'll happen. Give it a day or two. So if you had already set up conversions in Google Analytics, chances are all of those conversions that you had previously created got automatically added to your new GA 4 property. That happened with all of ours that we had set up, we didn't have to create a single conversion event. But what if you want to create a new conversion event, let's say you just came out with some new landing pages or a new thank you page and you want to create a new event inside of GA for that's pretty easy. We were already here, but click on the cog, the admin cog, and then go down to events under property. And here, you can click the button that says Create Event. Now it's a little bit tricky. This is very technical, the way they have things worded. So I actually had to look up some help for it. So for my event name, this one's easy, I just typed or whatever, like a thank you page. Then down below, you have three boxes, you have a parameter, operator, and a value. For parameter, you put page location. This is for if someone makes it to a thank you page, you want to call them a conversion. So that's a page location, then the operator we did contains, and then the value is what you actually have in your URL. So in this case, we just said any page that contains thank dash you, let's call that as a conversion. And that's nice and easy, you would just hit submit there. And we've now created a conversion event inside of GA 4. Very cool. Now what you do is go down in that list of existing events, go find your new one that you've created, and toggle that switch to mark as conversion. And now all of your reports are going to see that as a conversion. Very cool. Alright, so this is where rubber hits the road. Now we want to start talking about the kinds of reports that you can run and look at an actively managed inside of GA 4 in order to tell what your LinkedIn Ads traffic is doing. There are two ways that you can do this. You can either go into reports and look at the pre made reports and maybe even do some light customizations. Or you can go into the Explore menu and create Universal Analytics used to call a custom report. In full transparency here, what I wanted to do for you is I wanted to go and create an exploration, one of these custom reports that would be really easy for everyone to just be able to import right into their GA 4 accounts and use these right off the bat. I jumped into it though, and suddenly realized how difficult this was and how unhelpful this is going to be. The challenge that I found here is that in any report, whether it's one of the premade reports inside of GA 4, or whether you're creating an exploration, like if you're making a custom report, you're limited to being able to see only one event on the page at the same time. That's actually not true, you can either see all events, or you can filter down to a single event. So what I really want to do is I want to create an exploration, a custom report here, that shows me based off of my ad, or my campaign, how many one minute timers fired, how many three minutes, how many five minute timers fired, how many scrolls got down past 50%, 70%, and 90%, I want to see all of that on one page. Well, here's the big weakness in GTA 4, you can only really have one event on the page at the same time. So as much as I would love to have a single report that would be so easy for everyone to scroll through once and see exactly what their different ads were doing. I ended up giving up and going right back to the old prepackaged reports. The way that I do this is I go to reports in the left hand navigation. And then I click on acquisition under lifecycle and then traffic acquisition. This is the report that is going to tell you about where you're getting traffic from. And when you're advertising, this is the right option, we want to analyze where we're getting our traffic from. So there are a couple graphs at the top of the page. But as I scroll down to the table down below, which is where I'm going to spend most of my time, I noticed that everything that I see here are broad categories like organic social, organic search, direct email, etc. So right at the top in the header, it says session default channel group, I'm going to click down on that. And I want to go to session source/medium. So what this does is it breaks down all of my traffic by the source and the medium all in one column, which is very cool. And I can see source mediums here like Google organic, LinkedIn, organic, LinkedIn, paid, Bing, organic, etc. Now, if you've been listening for a while, we've talked pretty good length about reporting and UTM parameters. I'm a big fan of being able to break down all performance all the way down to the unique ad level. The way we do that is through the UTM content parameter. So every one of our ads, if you look at the UTM content parameter, it identifies the exact ad. And these are all 100% unique. So what I could do is right next to the header there that now says session source/medium, I can click the little down arrow and this is us adding a secondary dimension. And immediately you're on a search box. So I just searched for content and found session manual add content. So this is the UTM content parameter that was set manually by the URL that occurred at the beginning of the session. So now as I scroll down, I can see all of those individual unique UTM content parameters and how they performed during this time period. This is way awesome if you want to analyze any individual ad, but maybe that too much in depth for you. Okay, so you can go back up to where it says session manual ad content, and instead click on that and type in campaign and select session campaign. Okay, so now you're looking at each row, not just being a single ad, but you're looking at it being a campaign. For us, the way that we treat this inside of LinkedIn Ads is the campaign name on LinkedIn is what goes into our UTM campaign variable. So now looking down here, I can see my performance by individual campaign, which the way that we create campaigns describes the audience. It's very cool. I'm trying not to get too geeky out on you here. But this is really, really exciting. Once you have your table looking like you want it, scroll over to the right until you see a column called Event Count. Now, right underneath event count, you'll see all events. And that's tracking every single kind of event that you have set up. But as we've talked about in GA 4 everything is an event. So you'll see these giant numbers in the 1000s or 10s of 1000s. Depending on what you have set up. If I click that down arrow there, I can go and select which event that I want it to filter by. Alright, so let's say I want to filter by scroll 50% depth, now I can go and see which of my campaigns is driving the highest quality traffic because they tend to scroll most of the way down the page. I haven't found a sexier way to do this. So if any of you have, please let us know. And of course, you can always reach out to us at Podcast@B2inked.com. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to keep coming through and selecting a different event. If I want to go see a scroll at 90% or a webpage timer at three minutes, I can go and select those and analyze my traffic that way. And of course, I'm a huge Excel nerds, I want to export this into Excel as fast as I can. But boy, it's got me wishing that I could see all of this on a single page. So if any of you know how to do it, please do think to reach out. So once I got this to where I wanted it, I clicked on the little pencil to customize the report, I saved it as a report in my library. So I thought, hey, this will help me a little bit to just make sure that I don't have to set all this stuff up again in the future. Well, I came back after the weekend and went and clicked on my report that I'd created and sure enough, it had just all reset back to default. So I had to create it again anyway. I'll chalk this up to one of the weaknesses of it just being GA 4 and still being new. But I do hope this all gets fixed in the future. Alright, so there you have it. This should be everything that you need to make Google Analytics 4 seeing and work for you as a LinkedIn Ads expert. I've got the episode resources for you coming right up, so stick around. Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Alright here the resources we talked about. First off, there's a simple link to your Google Analytics login. I find every time I go in search for any sort of Google product, finding the login button is really annoying. So go hit this link, and then add this to your bookmarks. Next is the article by datadrivenu.com, all about how to set up scroll depth tracking. So go follow that one. It's excellent. Followed by the YouTube video that helps you set up your time on site tracking. So go follow those literally, we're talking 10 minutes here max, and you can have all these events set up and tracking to your heart's content. No matter where you are on your LinkedIn Ads journey. Come join the LinkedIn Fanatics Community at fanatics.B2inked.com. This is where you're going to find the community of other LinkedIn Ads experts, as well as all four of my courses taking you from beginner to expert with LinkedIn Ads. Plus, if you join the community, as a super fanatic, you'll get to join a weekly call with me where I can give you direct feedback on the campaigns you're running. Plus, if you sign up before August 1, you'll get grandfathered into our lowest pricing ever. So go join immediately and hop in either as a fanatic or a super fanatic and we're excited to see you there. If this is your first time listening to the podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button. But if this is not your first time listening, if you're a loyal listener, please do go especially to Apple podcasts and rate and review us there. And of course I'd love to shout you out. Alright with any questions, suggestions, or corrections reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week and I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript AJ Wilcox Do you want to guarantee that your LinkedIn Ads will be successful? This is the episode for you. Buckle up and let's go. We're talking about everything you need for success on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. AJ Wilcox Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! We've talked to and worked with many 1000s of marketers all about LinkedIn Ads. And there is one common thread if I can draw this. And that's everyone wants a guarantee that their LinkedIn Ads are going to work. Although it's impossible to guarantee success. We put this episode together to give you the highest chance of success. And I brought a special guest today that I know you're going to love. AJ Wilcox First highlighting a review Detayil from Turkey says, "Great podcast for LinkedIn Ads. This is my go to podcast for LinkedIn Ads. AJ Wilcox has insights and thoughts on different subject matter are super helpful." And then Detayil left the shooting star or shining star emoji. Now I hope I'm pronouncing your name, right. So please reach out and correct me. But I love your name. And thank you so much for the kind review. I'm so grateful that our content can be helpful to you. AJ Wilcox Alright, I'm stoked to bring Parker Williams on as a guest. He has been working with B2Linked for years, first as an account manager, then he was our head consultant. And we've also given him in charge of sales. Parker talks to advertisers and marketers every day. And he knows the process all the way through. I'm bringing him on to share his insights for what brings success. All right, let's hit it. AJ Wilcox Hey, everyone, I'm super excited to have Parker Williams here. For those of you who don't know, Parker is our head consultant. He's our head of sales. And I'm bringing him in on this conversation to talk about what it is that you need when you're starting LinkedIn Ads. I wanted to bring him in for this conversation to discuss are you ready for LinkedIn Ads. So Parker, thank you so much for joining me today. Parker Williams You're welcome. I'm excited. This is gonna be awesome. AJ Wilcox So Parker, I've got to ask you, because you're the one who was the first person to talk to all of our clients. Why should you even care about LinkedIn? What does it have that other channels don't? Parker Williams Yeah, that's a great question. I don't believe that there's any other platform out there that allows you to target a specific company and the job title and be able to pair that with intent triggers or data that signifies that they might be in market for a service that you're selling. That's just extremely deadly to me. And that's for just companies that are wanting to add business to their pipeline. If you're using LinkedIn for other objectives, which we're going to go into that don't deal with sales, maybe it's with recruiting, or just brand equity, and employee or employer value proposition and building your brand equity. There's no other way to do that than on LinkedIn. AJ Wilcox And I especially love the scale, because there are platforms out there that will let you target by things like job title, and company name and company size and all that. But LinkedIn, because the vast majority of white collar professionals out there have LinkedIn profiles, the scale is near endless. I don't know if you feel the same way. But it's so rare when someone comes to us with a larger budget than they can effectively spend on LinkedIn. Parker Williams Yeah, so true. AJ Wilcox Alright, so who should be considering advertising on LinkedIn? Parker Williams Yeah, I get asked this question a lot. And it really depends on your purpose. And, of course, the size of your company. And if you have the budget, it is an expensive platform. We always tell people that. But it's only as expensive as you make it. So I do think it's important to always consider your purpose or the objective for advertising on the platform. So we usually break it up into three categories. The first category is if you're wanting to generate leads or sells utilizing LinkedIn Ads, you want to make sure that you have a lifetime value between 10 and 15k, or an average deal size of 10 and 15k or, or more. And then the next thing is making sure that you know that your buyer is on the platform. So we work with a lot of B2B SaaS companies. And if I told you, if you're a B2b SaaS company, and you were wanting to and I told you this platform was perfect for you, but you sold software to dentist, this probably wouldn't be the best platform because dentists aren't always necessarily very active on the platform. So the real question you want to ask yourself is, is my lifetime value, the right size for the average ticket value the deal you're selling? And is my audience active on the platform? You might also be wondering, you know, what is active mean? And that can be to me, weekly basis would mean active. If they're not active more than once a month, then it would be like fishing in a pond with very little amount of fish. And it would be extremely hard to get their attention. You'd struggle to spend your budget. And that's what we've seen with brands and companies that we've worked with where their audiences and active on the platform, we just can't spend their budget. And we can't achieve their goals of generating leads and sales for their company. AJ Wilcox I specifically remember a campaign we were trying to run where we were hiring door to door sales reps, and I thought, oh, sales reps are on LinkedIn all the time. But I totally misjudged the idea that if someone is doing door to door sales, they're not working in front of a computer. So of course, they're not going to be active on LinkedIn. And it was intensely hard to reach those people. I would have called that campaign a failure. Parker Williams Yeah, that's a great example. And it really is so important to just ask yourself, Are they active on the platform? And you might be wondering, well, how do I know if they're active on the platform? And this can be simply done by doing some outreach, and just running some tests by reaching out to people and seeing if you can get any responses from them? Or ask your sales team? What are you using right now to get in front of your audience? Are you getting any sales from LinkedIn and reaching out to people through LinkedIn? If you are, then it's fairly promising that if you are, then it's potentially a great opportunity to advertise on the platform. And that's a good signal that your audience is active. AJ Wilcox Awesome. What about recruiting? We had an episode not too long ago all about recruiting on LinkedIn, we know it tends to perform pretty well. What about that as an objective? Parker Williams Yeah, that's a great question. I really think what you want to consider here when leveraging LinkedIn ads for finding individuals for roles that you need to fill in your company, you need to ask yourself, how valuable is this employee? If you're hiring, blue collar, or I think a good rule of thumb would be anyone that's not an executive or a director, or it's probably high pay, right, like $50,000 or more, $75,000 or more and pay, how valuable is this employee to your company, would be really important to consider when you're thinking about running ads to recruit individuals for your company and getting specific talent. But it can be really deadly and it can definitely out beat recruiters themselves. Sorry, recruiters, I don't mean to hurt your feelings or anything. But we've seen this be an extremely valuable tool with finding individuals who are employed right now. Because those are your best employees. They're paid players. They're individuals that aren't out looking for a job. Those are the ones that you want to get. And I don't know of any other platform out there that really allows you to target a job title or someone already with the skills you need and the talent that you need, and be able to put a job opportunity in front of that person. I just don't think there's any other platform that allows you to do that. AJ Wilcox Yeah, I found exactly the same thing. Alright. So aside from recruiting and selling, are there any other uses of LinkedIn Ads that you can think of? Parker Williams Yeah, that's a great question. We've worked with some cool companies in the past, one of them was a major Japanese conglomerate, and they wanted to just increase their follower count for their company, and their employees that worked for their sister companies. And we leveraged LinkedIn to be able to do that. It was extremely powerful. We achieved their goals. So if you're trying to improve the overall brand equity, and make your company look big, it's a great tool. It's also a great tool for companies like Coca Cola, or Nike, or a Gap that want to just build more awareness of their company. For those that might be looking for jobs, maybe for the lower paid employees, maybe the blue collar, because when they are looking for jobs, it is also another way to build more awareness, where these companies just have massive amounts of employees that they need to hire for maybe seasonal periods of time. So that can also be a really powerful tool. AJ Wilcox And another great use I can think of, we just recently worked with a major Fortune 500 retailer, and their whole goal was EVP or employer value proposition. The whole concept is raising your brand with the people who are already working for you. And LinkedIn can do this so well, because we're able to target the employees of specific companies, and especially the larger the company, the more efficient and able we are to show ads to them. You can think of it like doubling up their internal intranet with additional messaging that makes them proud to work where they are. Parker Williams Yeah, thank you for clarifying that. I think that's really, really important. AJ Wilcox I think it's safe to say that everyone who is talking to us wants to have success immediately. It's like they want leads in the door that are gonna close like yesterday, I have to ask, what do you need to have in place in order to be successful very quickly in a short amount of time? Parker Williams And that's like the golden question right there. Honestly, when it comes to being successful on LinkedIn, immediately within like a month to three months, I think about targeting being the most crucial aspect, if you don't have an audience that's hot, you know, they know like and trust you, you know, they're the buying stages, right now they're the decision stages, if you don't have that, you can pretty much expect to not have any results right away. Other thing too, is you got to make sure that the messaging and the offer that you're providing that audience, so the value proposition or your product market fit is dialed in, because you could have an audience that you might consider hot, but if your messaging is off, and your product doesn't solve a need that they have, then it's fairly likely that you're also not going to see results, I wouldn't even call that a hot audience, truly. So making sure that you have product market fit, we hit on this already, your lifetime value needs to be 15k, you need to have spot on messaging, your audience needs to be dialed in, they've got to be a warm audience are a hot audience. And then one of the things people forget a lot is what kind of content do you have to support this buyers journey as well. You need to be able to answer their questions that they're going to have in the process of buying your product or your service. And then most importantly, is do you have the budget to achieve these goals? We've mentioned this a lot. LinkedIn is expensive. And so making sure that you have the budget to be able to achieve those goals is really important. And then you have something to capture sales, so does your sales team set up to be successful. And if you're generating leads, and you don't have anyone that can close the deals, you're just gonna waste your money. So I feel like those are the most important things that you need to have in place in order to be successful in a really short amount of period, the first one to three months of running ads. AJ Wilcox Alright, let's say that we're lacking in any of these areas, or we have a brand new market or brand new company coming to advertise, when do you think they could expect to see results? Parker Williams Yeah, that's a great question. I usually tell people, and this is based off of what we've seen as an account management company. And as a service provider for managing budgets, we tend to see companies like that that you just described, they start to see results in the months between 6 and 12. And what I mean by results that can mean sales or deals that are in cells hands, like they're working a deal that could potentially turn into a major contractor or sales opportunity for the company, or they've closed some deals. We do see outliers. There's always people that see immediate results, because there is that market that is in the buying phase or is currently in the market for the service that you provide. We know that that's between like 3 and 5% of the market. So you could potentially see results in the first three months, but it's really unlikely. AJ Wilcox All right, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive right back into the interview. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. AJ Wilcox Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment want to return on that investment? Well, consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years. And our unique scientific approach to ads management, combined with our proprietary tools, allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency, in house team, or digital ads hire. Plus, we're official LinkedIn partners. Just go to B2Linked.com/apply. And plus, you'll get to do your discovery call with Parker, our special guest today. All right, let's jump back into the interview. AJ Wilcox So we definitely know that LinkedIn Ads is a premium platform, you've mentioned as much. What should we expect in terms of cost and performance as we're jumping into LinkedIn ads for the first time? Parker Williams And so thisis a really hard question to answer because every company is so different. There's so many variables, we do know some average costs on LinkedIn, you can pretty much expect that your average cost per click can range between $10 and $16. And there's always outliers, we've seen some accounts where their cost per clicks are in the $30 range. And we've had some down below the $10 range. And that's mostly due to the competitiveness of that audience and who's trying to get in front of that audience. And that can also vary. I've had accounts where our average cost per clicks were in the $10 range. And then at a certain point in the year they've started to bump up and the only explanation was, we're either hitting ad fatigue and our quality scores were going down, and we had competitors come in and start targeting that person. So costs can totally vary. If you're selling this internally to your boss or to a team. And you're a first time advertiser to set clear expectations that we need to come in and set our own benchmarks and set our own expectations. You can kind of give them some range. We've seen on average cost per calls booked between $400 up to $1,500. And again, there's always outliers, I've seen lower costs, I've seen higher costs. So hopefully that gives you an idea. But if you're a first time advertiser, you've got to set some of your own benchmarks. Or you can really get yourself into some trouble and potentially lose your job because you set expectations and totally over promised and under delivered. So yeah, be careful. AJ Wilcox So how much does someone need to budget for LinkedIn Ads? I know this is a tough question. Parker Williams Yes. So to go back to the objectives, why are you advertising on LinkedIn? Are you wanting to generate leads? Are you wanting to recruit somebody? Or are you purely just doing EVP or increasing the brand equity of the company, the budgets going to change in range. I'm going to use the example of generating sales, because that's majority, I feel like that's what most people want to do with the platform is generate more sales and leads for the company. So for first time advertiser, we usually recommend anywhere from 5k to 8k, up to $15,000. Whenever you can budget there, your goals do play a part in that. So if if you have an objective to generate leads, but you have a quota or a company goal to generate a certain amount of sales, by a certain point, your budgets going to affect that as well. But we always recommend $5 to 8k Starting budget. And if you can get more up to 15k, that should give you enough data to be able to learn the platform, set your own benchmarks start to generate some leads and sales for your company. Of course, with all of the things we talked about previously in place as well. AJ Wilcox Alright, so let me give you a scenario here. So I have a budget of $15,000. I come to you with a list of like 300 companies and a couple of job titles that those companies to target. What would you tell me? Parker Williams Good luck spending that $15,000. No, but seriously, we would consider that like an ABM approach, right? You've got it an account list of companies you want to sell to and market to, it's probably not likely that you're going to spend that $15,000. If you have somebody managing that account. If you gave the keys to LinkedIn, you probably will spend that 15k. But it's still probably really not likely. So with a an account based approach, or even a retargeting approach where you're retargeting a small audience, you can expect to spend anywhere from $,1000 to $5,000 and get in front of that audience and get some results. But don't expect to yield a bunch of leads out of that. And you don't necessarily need to either, AJ Wilcox I can definitely second that if you give the keys to LinkedIn, they really can spend that. But then you find yourself spending like $50 to $80 per click, and it's not spent wisely. Okay, so as a new advertiser, what advice do you have for me in terms of mindset? How do I need to mentally prepare for this? Parker Williams So I love talking about mindset and marketing, because I feel like this is where I see a lot of marketers fail. I don't know if you know who Mark Rober is, but I love him, my kids love him. And we're subscribers to his crunch labs. And it's really changed my mindset to think like an engineer in marketing and sales. And so if you're a new advertiser on LinkedIn, you've got to go into this with an engineers mindset, expecting to fail in identifying where are we failing, and be okay with that, and then pull the levers and make the tweaks and changes that you need to to help improve the performance of the campaign and get the results you need. But having an engineers mindset is, is so important, because you're gonna get your feelings hurt, and you're gonna see failures. And so if you come into it thinking, oh, gosh, we're going to hit a goldmine, we know our audience is here, we're going to generate so much revenue from this, like, just understand that that's just not reality. If it was, everybody would be doing it. And everyone would be making so much money off of this platform. And there are people that are, but it takes this mindset to be able to do it. AJ Wilcox I'm so glad you mentioned Mark Rober. Me and my kids are huge fans. And I definitely think that was really good advice that don't let your feelings get hurt. Our job as marketers is to test because ultimately, we don't know what's going to be successful. People will even ask me like, is this going to be successful on LinkedIn Ads, and I'm probably going to be wrong more than half the time. And I've got a lot of experience doing this at this point. Another question that we get really often is what kinds of ad formats and objectives do you suggest running on LinkedIn Ads? Parker Williams This is a really important question to ask internally when you're planning to run some ads because it does help you set up our team and your team for more success. If you have in mind already, what types of ads you're going to run. So creatives, the types of formats this does set you up for some success, but we always advise that you're going to run single image ads, so newsfeed single image, and then video ads, but single image is a must. Video ads aren't always necessary, but they do help build trust really fast. So if you're wanting to get results faster, I plan on having some video ads, and then we always recommend running text and dynamic ads to help support the other ad formats. I like to refer to them as the supplemental ads. So they're kind of like the supplements you take to help with your day. I AJ Wilcox write Yeah, I think that's really good guidance. I remember once running a test where we were running just single image ads, and then we turned on text ads to the same audience. And just by having text ads running, we saw our click through rates jumped 16% on our sponsored content. So most of our diets nowadays require supplementation. So do our ads. Yeah. And Parker Williams I also think it's important that you don't overthink this single image. And video ads can be simple, they can be authentic, real, not overly produced. And those can do fairly well. We've also got an awesome client that I love working with, they're called Video brothers. And they're like a Harmon brothers highly produced incredible production level. And they've also seen great results from this as well. And so you can have both sides of the spectrum. But at the end of the day, I always tell people, the format and the medium doesn't matter. It's the content and the audience temperature. If you're answering these three questions, do I have the right message at the right time in front of the right audience? You're gonna be successful. Now? How do you distribute that that format, it's important to have these three in place, but it's not overly crucial. And don't put too much emphasis on having it perfect. AJ Wilcox Yeah, that's great advice. Alright, so if you have someone who's looking to possibly work with you, what's the onboarding process look like? Parker Williams I'm gonna kind of answer this as if you were to work with us or even do this on your own for advertising. So I always tell people, it takes our team about two to three weeks to get ads up and running. I think it could take somebody who's full time for a company to do a little bit quicker. And that's if you have all of the things in place that we've talked about previously. So you've got your messaging, your offers landing pages, content, your targeting, I don't know if I mentioned that. But you have all those key things in place, you can expect to have ads running and live fairly quickly. But just plan on two to three weeks, because there's conversion tracking, and there is targeting and you do have to wait for lists to upload sometimes that can take up to 48 hours, sometimes 72 hours, depending on the list. So there are certain things that you need to plan and prepare for but just plan on two to three weeks, whether it's working with us or doing it on your own. AJ Wilcox Yeah, so it's definitely not one of those, like, open up the platform and you're live within a few hours. If someone's considering working with us. Can you share a little bit about what those costs look like? Parker Williams Yeah, absolutely. So we're definitely on the higher end. I you're going to work with us, we bring a lot of value and it's mostly due to our experience, the tools we've developed the processes, the strategy that we've developed, so you definitely get what you pay for. Our price range ranges anywhere from 2k to 3k for budgets under $15,000. Of course, depending on your objectives. So if you've got an ABM approach or a retargeting audience that you want to run ads to, you can plan on spending anywhere from 2k for management fees up to $3,000. If you're from $8,000, in spend up to $15,000 plan on a $3,000 management fee. If you're over that $15,000 monthly media spend, our prices range anywhere from 20%, down to 9.5%. And if you're listening to this right now, at this time of year prices do change, we do increase the value we provide. So we do highly recommend, go check out our website public about our pricing, we try to update that regularly. So if there are any changes, you can pretty much expect to find it there. AJ Wilcox So why would you want to work with us with B2Linked instead of another agency or hiring an in house person to run it? Parker Williams Yeah, great question. We've been running ads since 2011. And we've got a lot of experience. We've worked with a lot of different accounts in different industries, helping solve different goals and objectives and problems that companies are dealing with the platform. The platform is constantly changing. We're always staying up to date on the changes and what's working, what's not working. We are the only ad agency out there that is partnered with LinkedIn. And so we do get a lot of information from LinkedIn that they don't necessarily always publicly shared right away. So forward thinking with the platform on top of that, I feel like one of the biggest things, though, is the proprietary tools we've developed that help us save anywhere from 30 to 40% on costs, and helps us get additional insights that the platform doesn't provide. We're able to launch ads faster than anybody else out there because of these tools, so we can learn faster. So these are some of the things that if I was a buyer, I'd be really interested in because a media buyer at the end of the day, it is somewhat of a commodity like anybody can launch ads. But without these proprietary tools and these and this experience, and just overall relationships we've developed, it'd be hard for me to decide to go somewhere else if I was buying the service. AJ Wilcox Yeah, I think you're right on there. Something else I'm really proud of is we have access to LinkedIn's API. We've built our own reports that pull really deep data from LinkedIn that LinkedIn themselves don't have so we can give insights to our clients that they just can't get anywhere else. So that's one of those little brags I like to throw in there. Parker Williams Yeah. And also one thing I forgot to mention, Ajay kind of struck my memory here that I feel like not a lot of agencies do this. I've shopped for agencies myself at other jobs. Something that I was really impressed with when I started working at B2Linked was that you take time to look over every single account that we are managing. You schedule office hours with all of our account managers, and you dedicate that time to make sure that they're getting their questions answered, and that they're becoming the best at LinkedIn Ads as well. And so you're still putting your own personal touch on every single account, which I think is really impressive. Not a lot of people do that. I also feel like something I've seen in the marketplace with agencies is I've seen accounts that account managers that aren't very transparent about what's going on in the account. One of our values of the company's transparency, so we strive to educate our customers on what we're doing, why we're doing it, and how we're doing it. It does take extra time, but if you're going to take this account and take it internally, we want to help set you up for success to do that, if that was your objective, and that happens a lot. We see that happen all the time. We don't necessarily like that, because we always want to keep a customer long term. But I do think it's important that if you are hiring an agency to help you discover this platform, and test it and learn it, or even just manage and optimize the account that there's that transparency. AJ Wilcox Yeah, I totally agree with this. I absolutely hate when I hear about ad agencies that are holding the keys to an account. And then once the client leaves, they don't give them access. Everything we do, the client owns. They own their account, they own their data going forward. And I feel much better about that than trying to hold an account hostage, trying to keep a client longer. Parker Williams Yeah, I think that's huge. And it happens more often than not, I've taken over account. And I've learned that I've that previous provider that were the person running the account had deleted a bunch of campaigns and removed things. And I just think that's ridiculous. But I think that's huge. So outside of that, though, I feel like our staff is trained by one of the best advertisers, I think in the world. Has tons of experience. We're constantly training and teaching them and helping them improve as marketers themselves. So on top of all the tools, the experience, the processes, our staff, they're incentivized to take ownership. And that's also really important as well. AJ Wilcox Alright, so let's say someone is interested in working with us, what are the next steps to working with our team. Parker Williams So the next steps, I would recommend reaching out to us so you can go to our website, B2Linked.com/apply, or just to our website, B2Linked.com. And you should be able to book a discovery call. You'll meet with me or AJ, or one of our other consultants. And we'll make sure that we're a fit, first off, and make sure that we can help you with your goals and objectives. And we're very transparent and honest about that. We don't take on clients that we know we can't help. And so make sure to schedule that call and visit with us first. And then we'll help put together a customized proposal that will help kind of guide you along the way of purchasing the service and also working with LinkedIn for running ads. Following that if you decide to work with us, and it's a fit, you're gonna fill out an onboarding sheet, and our team goes through that onboarding sheet, and they'll verify it with you on an onboarding call, and then pretty much off to the races from there. They'll start setting up the account and start getting ready to launch as within a two to three week period. So yeah, that's usually what you can expect with onboarding and next steps. AJ Wilcox Love that. Will Parker, thank you so much for coming and sharing your guidance here. It's been super valuable. I tend to talk about this stuff quite a bit. So it's always really fun to hear someone else talking about it and hearing their examples and their approach. So thanks so much for sharing everything here with us. Yeah, absolutely. Parker Williams Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure. AJ Wilcox All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. AJ Wilcox Do not miss your chance to join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics Aommunity, go to Fanatics.B2Linked.com to get grandfathered into the best pricing that there will ever be for the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community. You'll get access to over four and a half hours of courses leading you from absolute zero to absolute LinkedIn Ads expert. Plus, you'll be a part of the community where you can bounce ideas and learn things from your fellow LinkedIn Ads experts. Now if this is your first time listening, welcome! We're excited to have you here. Make sure to hit that subscribe button. But if this is not your first time listening, please do go review the podcast on Apple podcasts. It is by far the best way that you can say thank you for all the hours that we put into coming out with this content every week. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections reach out to us at Podcast@B2linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Jae Oh's LinkedIn Profile Jim Habig's LinkedIn Profile Link to help doc for setting up Revenue Attribution Report B2Believe Episode Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover or with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript Revenue Attribution Reporting just launched in your LinkedIn Ads account. What is it? I'm glad you asked. We're diving into the new functionality on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! As of July 1 of 2023, LinkedIn launched the Revenue Attribution Reporting tool within LinkedIn Ads. You can access it now, it just requires that you have business manager set up for your account. What the report does is it connects your LinkedIn Ads to your CRM, so you can get reporting further down in your sales process, which is super valuable. You've heard me talk about this before. This is a rare public beta. So there will continue to be further developments and new features added. This is just the beginning. To teach you about the revenue attribution report. I have not one guest, but two guests to drop hardcore knowledge bombs on you. The first is Jae Oh, you've heard me mentioned him on the podcast before. He's been with LinkedIn for five and a half years. And he's a director over product management. Jae and I go way back to 2018, where we met at a LinkedIn hosted customer advisory board event. And he's been over so many products that we've all worked with on LinkedIn Ads, he's awesome. The next heavy hitter I have for you is Jim Habig. You may remember him from Episode 79, when I highlighted his presentation at the B2Believe event in San Francisco. It was a fantastic presentation. I got to sit front row. Jim Habig is the Vice President of Marketing at LinkedIn, which I know, is really awesome. Now make sure to stick around to the very end, because I have some thoughts on this. Plus, I'll tell you exactly how to get it set up. First in the news. If you listen to episode 100, you'll already know about this, but we just launched the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community. And if you join before the end of July in 2023, you'll be grandfathered in to the lowest price that it will ever be. That's $59 a month. Inside the community, you'll have access to our four brand new courses taking you from the very beginnings of campaign manager all the way through our expert training. You'll also have access to our whole community of like minded LinkedIn Ads professionals that you can bounce ideas off of, ask questions, and of course, I'm in there, my whole team's in there, nd you can ask us anything. Go to fanatics.B2linked.com for more information there. I wanted to highlight a review that the podcast got. This one came from Sean Possemato. He's the head of operations at Cameron Digital Consulting out of Boston. And he said, "Great guy and a trusted resource. Fivestars. I've had the pleasure to get to know AJ professionally and a little bit on the personal side. He went out of his way when I was helping build out the next steps in my career five years ago. I'm competent in LinkedIn Ads, but always refer my network to AJ because I can trust that he will treat anyone I refer with the utmost respect and deliver quality results. Oh, yeah, amazing show. There aren't many, or any marketing podcasts that walk through actual data to learn from." Well, Shawn, a huge thank you for me, I really appreciate you leaving the review. So grateful, the contents helpful and so grateful, I could have been a helpful mentor to you in your career. And also thanks for the ride to and from the airport and getting to hang out with you whenever I'm in Boston. And to all you listeners, I want to feature you and shout you out here as well. So please do go leave us a review on Apple podcasts. Alright, with that being said, it's time to hop into the interview. Let's hit it. AJ Wilcox Alright, everyone. I'm so excited to have these interviews for you today. First off, Jae Oh, he's the director of product for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, leading teams, building the audiences and measurement capabilities of the LinkedIn Ads platform. So Jae, super excited to have you here. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Anything I didn't cover in the intro? Jae Oh Hey, great to be here, AJ, thanks for having us on. Not covered in the intro is the fact that I'm probably getting less sleep than I ever did before with a two year old running around. I'll talk about that a little bit more later. AJ Wilcox Congratulations. Jae Oh Thank you. And of course, you know, there's always something going on these days with construction. And so we're renovating stuff. So outside of work, if you see me that's what I'm doing. Trying to build stuff inside the digital world as well as out, but really excited to be here. AJ Wilcox Cool. I've got five kiddos, none as young as two so you're battling right now. And I love the toddler stage. So congratulations on that. Jae Oh I'm going to stop complaining now. I'm going to withdraw my comment entirely. But kudos. AJ Wilcox Oh, it gets easier. The more kids you have, the more they entertain each other. So right now you're in like war territory. You got to give all your attention. I get it. First off, let me ask you what is the product that you're most focused on right now? Jae Oh Yeah, one thing that we have been focusing a lot on these days is how do we help our marketers tell them better story about the value that they drive in their day in day out workflows, right? As marketers, are you just showing ads, are you driving ads for a purpose. And one of those things we're trying to change is, you know, that value narrative has to come through in our products. So one product specifically is a revenue attribution report, we want to be able to help our marketers tell a better story that is effectively speaking to the bottom line of the business and is more than the clicks or the conversions or maybe even engagement rates that they've been maybe more routinely trained to talk about from vanity metrics perspective. AJ Wilcox I think this is so valuable, like this product, the Revenue Attribution Report. For the longest time I've looked from the outside, I've seen LinkedIn that has that much better targeting than any other platform has, and it charges a premium. So we know that we're going to get access to better and more qualified candidates, more qualified conversions, but we're going to pay more for them. And when you pay more for it, it means that you have to pay more attention and catch issues before they pop up. The biggest issue I've seen is people spending on LinkedIn, but not having the revenue intel to actually back it up. So I'm super excited about this, especially given economic uncertainty that we're seeing right now. Tell us a little bit about how the report works, when it's coming out, where we might access it, all that kind of stuff. Jae Oh Yeah, so it's early days for this product. And you should see us adding more support for more data, more events, more connections in terms of partners in future days. But right now, the Revenue Attribution Report lives in business manager, it attributes our CRM data. So our customers outcomes data to add engagement activities on LinkedIn to help our advertisers better understand and demonstrate the impact of marketing efforts on their actual business outcomes, whether that's new pipeline, or new opportunity, or new deals closing. So with marketers having increased accountability, drive sales results, they should be able to look at this and say, hey, this is where my money is going, hopefully, allowing them to justify the ad spend and unlock additional investments. So you should see at a metrics level things like top line, you know, return on adspend, or revenue one, or pipeline, how LinkedIn played a role in that, or maybe even at the funnel level, leads, open opportunities, closed one ops. And ultimately really more granular to when you want to start connecting the dots and campaigns. So conversions like win rates, average decent, close, average deal size. And by speaking at that level, as you addressed earlier, you know, in this time of uncertainty, what's most important is to understand how are you impacting the growth and sustainability of that business? Marketers should have the language to speak to that. AJ Wilcox So you mentioned that it's inside of business manager, does that mean that if you don't have your account attached to a business manager, you wouldn't get access to the Revenue Attribution Report? Jae Oh That's right at this point, that's true. Business manager is currently in an open beta right now so theoretically, any customer could go and set one up. Having said that, the reason why it should live there is because it should be looking across all your ad campaigns. You know, if we want to talk about return on adspend, it's not just for one campaign, especially when it's a B2B sales cycle, where as multiple touchpoints, many campaigns that might influence the deal within a day. AJ Wilcox Excellent. And I don't know if you're able to talk about the CRMs that have current integrations, or that are planning on having integrations, can you touch on that at all? Jae Oh So currently, we have Salesforce CRM that's integrated, we are planning for additional ones as we start talking to more customers, and certainly just a backlog that we need to work for. But you know, ultimately, at the end of the day, the same data applies in terms of the kinds of metrics that you would see so that you could understand the performance of the influence aspect. AJ Wilcox So it's an open beta right? Now, does that mean that you have to go to your HR rep right now and request access, Jae Oh if you're in business manager, you can actually connect it assuming if you have a Salesforce integration? If you have a rep great, it's even easier. But if you don't, you should be able to go into business manager and turn on the feature once you integrate your CRM system. AJ Wilcox Very cool. Is there a help doc and LinkedIn to help that walkthrough? Like wiring it up? Jae Oh There? Is there is it should be pretty easy to search. Yeah. AJ Wilcox Okay. Very cool. All right. Thanks for all of those initial questions, kind of understanding where it fits. What sort of requirements are there? What do you need set up on the back end in order for this to function properly? Jae Oh Yeah. So at a minimum, it would just be the CRM integration, and assuming you have the relevant fields to help us understand, you know, deal status, size, dates associated with it. Leads data, of course, as well as company data, these pieces are just foundational. Assuming that that is there, you know, we can certainly fire the report, and the plan is to support other data sources as well, in addition to other CRM sources that you asked about, AJ Wilcox Beautiful. How is this different from the offline conversions report that we can upload right now? Jae Oh Yeah, so two ways. Signal source and customer use case. So the signal source for CRM, as you'd expect is through our in product connector when right now we're supporting Salesforce, as I mentioned in business manager. The offline conversions is through an uploaded list or a server to server integration. So the source data already differs. While some customers offline conversion data could add heavy overlap with a CRM, it's not always the case so we're starting in terms of where do we know houses the data that we need to power the support so a customer can get value on day one. So the customer use cases the other one. So it's targeted towards customers who have supported CRMs, who would like to combine their data and do other things, maybe even like, you know ABM level can I understand, you know, for a company engagement is demonstrating business outcomes from marketing and driving specific companies to close or accounts to close, or customers have high sensitivity of sharing data. Offline conversions is different because it extends our online conversions data streams, as from the insight tag to offline conversion data, so you can optimize campaigns and support conversions reporting. Now, the logical question is, is there a possibility these two things converging? It is something that we're evaluating because we want to support as I mentioned, multiple data sources, rather than forcing you to have one product or feature per data source? And that really just doesn't make sense in the days ahead with all the signal loss and fragmentation we're seeing in the landscape? AJ Wilcox Oh, beautiful. You answered the question before I even had it. So thanks for that. We know that advertisers currently have very full marketing stacks and tech stacks. How does the revenue attribution report fit into the existing attribution tools that someone might already be using? Jae Oh Yeah, we totally understand measurement. attribution modeling is a sensitive topic and very often quite bespoke to a lot of the customers, especially the more sophisticated their stack is. But having said that, this is the first time we're having a standalone measurement solution for LinkedIn that attributes revenue to impressions, or clicks or engagement behavior. So this is our first chance to start telling the story natively. But having said that, that doesn't mean we want to be mutually exclusive, but other solutions in the market. We understand B2B is long. B2B is complicated. And so it's really top of mind for us, and how we integrate ourselves to be compatible, complementary to existing solutions in the market. So they tell us a consistent story that is worth supporting and making plans around. AJ Wilcox So I have a question that I didn't actually prep you for here. So the offline upload that we do for revenue attribution, it's based on email address, but like you mentioned, the source of the revenue attribution report that comes from the pixel. So it reasons to me that someone who maybe they have their personal email address saved in LinkedIn, and someone else who has their work email saved as their default login, it's not going to matter, like the pixel knows who that person is, once they make it into the CRM. Am I correct in this line of thinking, like, maybe the revenue attribution report should have a higher match rate than we should expect with the offline app load? Jae Oh It is very, there's a simple answer. If you have a really rich CRM data set, which is every CRO or CFOs dream or every head of sales, leadership's dream. If you have a rich data set, like we can probably do quite a bit with that, especially if it's in combination with a insight tag or any other offline identifier stream like copy, online data stream like copy. And so it's additive is maybe the simple answer. It allows us to have more signals to connect those dots, but in and of itself, it's kind of hard to say because the results will vary depending on the customer's data set. AJ Wilcox It does seem like it'd be easier for LinkedIn to match this data up because once your CRM says that you close, let's say IBM, sure, like LinkedIn has that information to know who's an IBM employee. Jae Oh Totally. So in that aspect, company level matching, yes, 100%. Like LinkedIn is a great spot for that. And in fact, but I do think when it comes to a B2B attribution product, we have more ways of matching for an account level or a deal that's worth leveraging. But we're deeply invested in to your point. AJ Wilcox Perfect. Well, I think we've covered a lot here, like how we get access to it, what requirements we have, is there anything else that you want to share with us about the RAR that revenue attribution report? Jae Oh Yeah, I think Jim's going to go into more detail next. He's far more visionary than me and will promise you things that I will have to ultimately deliver on the roadmap. But what I would say is, the key thing to take note of is we're trying to create B2B solutions for our customers, because they've been asking for that for a long time. Knowing that B2B is more focused on specific individuals, not everyone is the buyer, it's a longer look back window that we have to employ and try evaluating different attribution methods to you know, understand for your business model, which is a right one to understand where to pull the levers where to draw back. No, I think these things are really critical and how LinkedIn fills a certain role in that equation, because LinkedIn data is not available everywhere else, when you start factoring in what's working and what's not. And so, I think that reframing is the passion that is driving a lot of the innovation that you'll be seeing from this team in the coming days and weeks. But with that, I hand it over to Jim. AJ Wilcox Okay, I want to honor you for that focus on B2B. Coming from the background of Google Ads and Facebook Ads. There is no other platform that caters to B2B and there's this giant need. LinkedIn has stepped in quite nicely, so we sure appreciate your focus there. Jae, what are you most excited about right now, personally? Jae Oh You can't go anywhere right now without talking about AI and machine learning these days. And so we're also creatures of our own personal lives, I've been finding myself making parallels to how quickly my two year old son has been learning and the way that AI is continuing to evolve. And so, you know, given that it's a really exciting time for us, and we reevaluate how AI can help us to do some things better or faster or differently. It's giving me an opportunity to reflect on what's important, and to be clear about what I want to accomplish. And how I tie that to my personal life is recently I was solo parenting with my son in New York for a week, which, you know, wow, I won't do that again anytime soon. Yeah, but I leverage GAI to create an itinerary for our toddler activities and meals for the week in less than five minutes. Amazing. And like four days, several rounds of ice cream later, he was pretty happy, I was ready to put in a bed, things went really well. So in the context of like, work, like deeply understanding that role. What do we want the machine learning models to do to help us improve over time? It's not business as usual. Can we support similar independent operation or growth that we have in like young kids, but in our systems, can we make that more automated, but with the right guidance is something I'm really really excited about. Translating these specific things at work, I really want to solve our attribution measurement intelligence capabilities, like let's shed the light on the things that we need to do more of and maybe less of and so, you know, making things like the Revenue Attribution Report more actionable. Whether it's like drilling down to metrics at a campaign level from that abstracted business level view, recommending how to optimize existing and new campaigns based on the success that we're observing down funnel, like launching new insights, intelligence products to help our customers more deeply understand and connect with our audiences, is something that I truly believe will result in improved experiences for both our members and our customers and that shared value segment. AJ Wilcox Awesome. Jae, we sure appreciate your thoughts and insights here. How do you want people to interact with you? Jae Oh As you'd expect, you can definitely find me on LinkedIn. So feel free to message me to connect with me. I'd love to hear more. AJ Wilcox Perfect. Thanks so much, Jae. We appreciate having you on. Great being on. AJ Wilcox Alright, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the rest of the interview. Speaker The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. AJ Wilcox Managing your LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment. Do you want to return on that? consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years. And our unique scientific approach to ads management, combined with our proprietary tools, allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency, in house team, or digital ads hire. Plus, we're official LinkedIn partners. Just go to B2linked.com/apply, and we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. AJ Wilcox Alright, let's jump back into the interview. Next up, we have Jim Habig, who's the VP of Marketing at LinkedIn. He's leading a team helping B2B marketers succeed. Jim, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast here as well to talk about the Revenue Attribution Report, as well as overall what we're seeing here in the current economic climate. Jim Habig Yeah, thanks, AJ, for having us. A longtime listener first time caller, as they say. Very excited to be here and talking to you and happy to go into measurement or any which direction? AJ Wilcox Awesome. Well, first off, tell us a little bit about yourself anything that I mentioned here in the intro? Jim Habig Sure. Well, like Jay, I am also in the quote unquote, toddler zone. I guess I'm passing out of it and passing into it. I have a almost five year old and a 16 month old. And so he's just nipping at the heels of Jae's kid, probably literally, actually. Sort of the thing that he's doing now. And yeah, he's just teething and climbing to perilous heights. So it's a constant struggle to make sure he's not falling from things. AJ Wilcox Awesome. Gotta get together for a playdate and watch the magic happen. Jim Habig Absolutely. AJ Wilcox Cool. Well, as you know, we just talked about the Revenue Attribution Report with Jae, I want to switch gears slightly. Tell me about the state of marketing right now. It's no secret that marketers budgets are being slashed right now. They're under scrutiny, we have to make the justification for performance, especially during these uncertain economic times. So what advice do you have for marketers as we kind of tiptoe through this cycle? Jim Habig Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. You know, I mean, there's a reason we're here talking to you about revenue attribution report and measurement more broadly. Because I think the key to weathering you know, not just this moment, but just going forward and beyond is in this story. It's in the story that we tell even within our own organizations, and I see the key to weathering this moment. is really in investing in two key relationships. And it's with your CFO and your CRO. And as you're investing in those relationships, I recommend doing three things. And the first is, is probably going to be obvious to all of your listeners, but don't fall into the last click trap. When all your reporting to your partners in finance and other organizations is on last click, you can sort of get yourself stuck, you know, you're really just you're painting a keyhole sketch of the value that your team is actually providing. So what you do instead is my second piece of advice, which is align on just a more comprehensive methodology, with your CFO and your CRO, and really focus on speaking the same language, specifically as your finance team, because we think that's the key. And you could talk about attributable revenue, vis-à-vis Revenue Attribution Report, future cash flow, relate you know, the campaign's that you're delivering, put them in those terms of sort of what's the real enterprise value that they're driving, that's going to start to paint a fuller picture of the results that you're driving. And then you start to build a model. And then my third piece of advice here is do the same thing every time, you know, I think you need to build some expectation. One of the biggest fallacies in our business is that there's some sort of like silver bullet for measurement, you know, there's some mysterious column, if only we could light that one up or turn that one on, you know, that's going to tell the full story. And it just doesn't work that way. You know, it's a mosaic. And the key is on aligning those pieces, aligning on what those pieces are going to be, and then keeping it consistent, because measurements really about consistency over time and cultivating faith via that consistency. AJ Wilcox Perfect. What do you think B2B marketers need to do more of or do better to actually demonstrate the value of their work? Jim Habig Yeah, absolutely. So you know, one of the central theses that we have over here at LinkedIn is that B2B marketers need to be investing more heavily in upper funnel brand building activities efforts. You know, considering that only 5% of your potential audience is ever actively in market, at any given time, it becomes incredibly important that you're building those memory structures that will land you on a day one list when buyers finally do come into market when they're ready to buy, start shopping around. So that introduces a measurement challenge, because we all know, brand is a bit tougher to prove out. But it's not impossible. So one of the ways our organization on the marketing side is trying to solve this is with more econometric modeling. So we feel that in MMM, you know, granted, this is a structure that's given to us from the B2C world. And we're trying to make it work for B2B. But we're doing the best we can and we feel that this and it really changed the conversation internally. It gave us more fodder for talking about that full picture. But you know, MMMs are hard, and they sort of take a long time. And so RAR is one of our attempts to sort of democratize some of the key principles behind that and make it more accessible to a broader audience. AJ Wilcox So can you define MMM for us?  Jim Habig Oh, sure. It's a medium mix model. It comes to us from the old days of like, CPG advertising, where you got to look at a lot of channels, and you got to sort of come to a hypothesis of how they're all driving benefit for your business. AJ Wilcox Makes perfect sense. So when you're thinking about the opportunities ahead, what's LinkedIn focused on to help B2B marketers meet their current and future challenges? Jim Habig I think that one of the real frontiers in the B2B space is in helping marketing and sales teams work in concert. B2B is super unique in that we have this reliance on this relationship, really just we have reliance on relationships. You know, you can't just go into the B2B store and buy a CRM. You got to talk to people, and you got to do this delicate dance and it's across organizations. It's intra organization. That's sort of the animating force behind things like revenue attribution report is how do we just get marketing and sales working closer together talking to each other, identifying maybe when there's a disconnect and smoothing out some of the friction in that system? Because it's a system that B2B just is incredibly reliant upon. And I think there's a ton more that we could do in this space and aligning audiences and aligning messages, and just showing the benefit in both directions, getting them working, singing from the same songbook. AJ Wilcox Absolutely. I want to ask you a few questions just about your background, because it's fascinating to me. Your background like you've worked at Pinterest, YouTube, Google, where does your passion for B2B come from? Jim Habig Oh, boy. So here's the thing. I've always worked on B2B teams within broader B2C organizations. It sort of did a lot to codify how I think about focus how important it is that we actually have a set of tools that are built specifically for B2B because it's a different animal, you know. I think for too long we've been reliant on just like, MMM, that I was just talking about that. is a thing that comes to us from the B2C world. But is it calibrated for our needs? Probably not, you know, we've been making do with these good enough solutions. So I think having that sort of outsider's eye, which was honed in those B2B functions at B2C companies, is what really was the impetus for leading me to this opportunity. And now I've been here LinkedIn for well, how's my son 16 months, 15 months? Basically, that's a good little mnemonic to for remember how long I've been working here. It keeps me going and keeps me you know, super engaged, because there's just so much more to solve. We're at the earliest stages of figuring out what a B2B marketing platform should look like. AJ Wilcox Alright, so same question for you that I asked Jae, what are you most excited about personally? Jim Habig Oh, boy. So as you pointed out, AJ, both Jay and I are in a fun mode where watching these little kids grow up is very rewarding. Not unlike watching the progress of GI. It's what you call a callback. So yeah, Ian, my son is, like I said, 16 months. And he's just a ton of fun. He's like doing this sort of zombie walk around. And Eva is almost five. And this is actually her first summer break. She's in preschool. And that goes year round. And now she's taking summer off, we've got a full agenda. We've got a lot of like swimming dates, and things like that coming up. So I'm very excited just to spend some more time with her over the course of the summer. AJ Wilcox And then what are you most excited about professionally right now, Jim Habig Honestly, that there's still so much to figure out. I think the thing that really invigorates me is just the opportunity ahead, and I look around. And we talked about what, like six or seven problems here. But there are dozens more, you look anywhere. And there are other things that we're using a good enough solution. And we're still trying to make do with things received wisdom from other industries. And it's just a lot of stuff to figure out. And that's fun. We're at the early stages, and I like those heady early days on things. So it's gonna be hard, but it's hard, fun. AJ Wilcox And grainfields for sure they are ready to be harvested. Jim Habig Amen. AJ Wilcox Was there anything that you want to share with us about what you're working on or anything like that we would talk about. Jim Habig Now we're just super excited about the stuff that Jae talked about with RAR. We think this is a big step forward in terms of calibrating that measurement for the B2B world. Like I said, I think there's more we could be doing. And we're still in the early days of it, but this is one of those things where run, don't walk, go check it out for yourselves. We think it can really change the conversations that you're having with your constituents, even within your organization's so we urge you all to check it out. And please give us feedback. We're nothing if not for your feedback, your advice, your consultation. We're trying to build this stuff for all of you. So please, let's make it a two way dialogue at all times. AJ Wilcox Beautiful. Thanks for sharing. Is there a way you want people to be able to get in touch with you? Jim Habig Please reach out on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active on the platform. I know Jae is as well. And yeah, love to hear from you. Like I said, you know, we're nothing without your your feedback, your comments, and your thoughts. And tell us what other challenges you want us to try and work on solving together. AJ Wilcox Very cool. And I would recommend everyone listening, reach out to Jim, reach out to Jae on their LinkedIn profiles. Customize your invite and let them know that you're connecting because you heard them on the show that'll help them know which ones to accept and which ones are going to be spam. Awesome. Jim, thanks so much for being here. We sure appreciate all your insights. Jim Habig Thank you, AJ. AJ Wilcox All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around, and right after the resources, I'm going to share my thoughts on the Revenue Attribution Report and teach you exactly how to set it up. So don't skip to the next episode yet. Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. AJ Wilcox Alright, like we talked about in the interview, you'll see a link in the show notes below for Jae Oh's profile on LinkedIn. Make sure to connect with him, follow Him whatever. You'll also see Jim Habig's profile as well, do the same there. We've linked to the help doc all about revenue attribution report, so check that out if you're curious. It'll walk you through the process. We also mentioned episode 79. It was our recap of the be to believe event. If you haven't listened to that one, I would highly recommend go back and listen to that, especially the segment where I covered Jim Habig's presentation. Come be a founding member of the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics Community. Act fast and you'll get grandfathered into the lowest price that the community will ever be. And you can do that at fanatics.B2Linked.com. If this is your first time listening, welcome, please hit that subscribe button. But if this is not your first time listening, please do rate and review the podcast especially on Apple podcasts. It's by far the best way that you can say thank you for us coming out with this content. With any questions, suggestions or corrections, reach out to us at podcast at B2Linked.com. AJ Wilcox Alright, so here are my thoughts on Revenue Attribution Report. I know there are plenty of you marketers who have very strong opinions all about revenue attribution so don't freak out if you log into the product for the first time, and it doesn't fit your exact use case. Remember, this is just a starting point. And I'm so excited about LinkedIn jumping into this fray. As it's starting out the only CRM that it syncs to is Salesforce. But of course, I expect in the future, many more CRMs rolling out. I do see that the usefulness of the Revenue Attribution Report is really going to be dictated by the match rates. And that is the ability of LinkedIn to match up who your customers are to who they are on LinkedIn. And we don't know this yet. We don't know what match rates are going to be like. So as we learn more, we'll announce it and let you know. But between you and me, I expect them to be really good, just from understanding how the technology is working on the back end. If you want to go set this up right now, go log into business manager. In the left hand navigation, you'll see revenue attribution as its own tab, you can click on that and then you'll see the option to connect to your CRM. LinkedIn wants us to note that it can take up to 72 hours for data to appear once business manager has successfully synced with the CRM. Now this is a public beta. But in the fall when it comes out as a general release, we'll get a lot more additional features for the report. I specifically love that this is all self serve, and we don't need to go to our rep for this. Okay, there we go. We'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Pixel Helper for LinkedIn AI for writing ad copy Thomas Veraar on LinkedIn Free LinkedIn Ads Startup Guide Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover or with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript Everything you need to set up and begin optimization of a LinkedIn Ads account in one podcast episode. That's right, you best buckle up, because it's gonna be a wild ride. We're covering the complete startup checklist for LinkedIn Ads on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! Years ago, we launched the LinkedIn Ads startup checklist. At the time, it was a one pager with nine checklist items that we created for the community and we gated it. It was helpful for those that were just getting started advertising on LinkedIn, and just needed a simple resource to get moving. We've kept improving it over time and it's now become an 11 page guide with not just checklist items, but detailed instructions on how to do the things that we recommend. Plus, we went beyond the nine necessary items and scaled it up to 14 that included the non-essentials, but highly recommended steps to getting success on the LinkedIn Ads platform. This guide is currently free and totally ungated. If you go to B2Linked.com/checklist. I think there's a ton of value there and I highly recommend it. So this episode kind of acts like an audio companion to that free guide. But I'll also get to expound quite a bit here and audio in ways that it wouldn't have made sense in the guide, it would have made it too verbose. First in the news, I have a whole bunch of things that have built up over time, so we're gonna cover all of them very quickly. The first is that Thomas Veraar, who's a LinkedIn rep out of Bulgaria, you've heard me mention him on the show before. He reached out after the recruiting episode, and gave our listeners a little bit of a tip. I mentioned that job title plus geography is one of the ways that we like to target for recruiting. And he chimed in and said, especially for recruiters, he loves the fields of study targeting facet. He said that fields of study are far more aligned worldwide than job titles are. And they are pretty general. He said, job titles for the same position can differ by region, which is especially important where he's from in Europe, because regions aren't very large. He said, another reason why I like the field of study for recruiting is because fields of study are added more to LinkedIn profiles than job titles. So even if someone didn't ever update their job, they're usually going to update their field of study. Sometimes he suggests using this as an option, because sometimes people end up working in areas that they didn't study in. But lots of times it lines up and make sense. Of course, it depends on the ICP, but for example, architects, lawyers, engineers, etc, are much easier to target with fields of study. Now, I really like this idea of using fields of study. But I do think we can layer on job function on top as a way of getting the best of both worlds. So we get field of study to make sure we're getting someone who studied what it is we're looking for, but then a job function on top that tells us whether they're doing it right now. So Thomas, thank you again, for taking me up on what I always suggest, which is, let us know give us feedback on the podcast episode. And I'd love to shout you out and share your advice as well. Thomas also mentioned something that I've actually been wondering about for a long time, the concept is when we install the LinkedIn pixel, sometimes it's really complex to know whether or not it was installed properly. And we pretty much have to just wait for retargeting audiences to build or some conversion starting to come through for us to tell whether or not it was set up properly. Sometimes it's pasted right into the code of a website and you can miss some pages. Sometimes it's dropped into a Tag Manager like Google Tag Manager, which is very convenient, but then it's hard to check, because then all of that JavaScript is running at the event layer. And because I'm not a JavaScript programmer, I don't understand where it is. So I found a really cool resource. It's actually a Chrome plugin, and it's called Pixel Helper for LinkedIn. You can see the link in the show notes that will take you right there. But it's basically a Chrome plugin, but it is really basic. It's a Chrome plugin that just tells you whether or not you have the pixel installed properly on any page that you visit. It works only for LinkedIn Ads. And then if you click on it, it will tell you your partner ID that you can very easily match up with the partner ID that's in your insight tag. So it makes it super, super simple. So Thomas Veraar actually reached out and said that he has a manual way that he does this, and I followed along and tried it out and it is really cool. The pixel helper Chrome plugin is a very simple way of doing this, but I thought this was fascinating to see exactly how to do this manually without a plugin. So what he suggested is, when you get to a page that you want to check this on on your website or a client website, you press F 12, and that gets you into the developer options. Then with developer options open, you want to refresh the page on PC that's Ctrl, R or F5. I like f5. But then you go into the network tab that you see there in your developer options, then you'll see a search bar and you want to search for ads.linkedin.com. And sure enough, it's going to show you this PID, it's the same as the partner ID in your LinkedIn insight tag. And what you want to do is you want to look for a status code that starts with a number two, because in webpages, a status code that starts with two means okay, and it loaded. If it starts with anything other than that, generally, there's an error, and it's not working properly. So Thomas, thank you for both resources that you've shared today. This was fantastic. I would highly recommend that everyone out there go follow Thomas Veraar, because he is absolutely one of the great ones. Next, someone at LinkedIn in Europe released a five slide deck, all about LinkedIn Ads, summer seasonality. And what was so interesting for me to see on this was that over the summer, LinkedIn Ads costs tend to drop, which is not what I would expect to happen. I would actually expect that fewer people are at their computers, which then drives costs higher for advertisers. And I would share this deck with you except whoever it was who posted it, didn't make the deck downloadable. I also knew that this was based off of European data. And so it probably wouldn't be valid for everyone who's listening. But certainly those of you who are in Europe, you'll probably appreciate higher click through rates and lower costs throughout all of the summer. Within the last month, I also saw a pop up within campaign manager that let me know that the LinkedIn Audience Network now publishes reports showing you the pages that you appeared on, which is super cool. I think this is a huge stride for the LinkedIn Audience Network to show transparency about where our ads are being shown. And if you follow the LinkedIn Ads page on LinkedIn, on June 7, they released a pulse article. It's just a LinkedIn article that used to be called pulse. And they announced that they're rolling out right now an AI helper for writing ad copy. So many of you may already have this by the time you're hearing it. And so when you go to actually write ad copy, you can have ChatGPT 4 probably because Microsoft is a huge investor in OpenAI that runs ChatGPT. And of course, Microsoft owns LinkedIn. So we're going to benefit from some of these AI plugins. I wanted to quickly highlight a review here on the podcast, this was left by Gareth Evans. He's the Director of Demand Generation at Workiva, based out of the UK. And he said, "Great practical tips, great content with a lot of really useful practical tips that are both explained, well, and actionable." Gareth, I really appreciate you going to leave that review, it helps so much. And please you if you have not left a review yet, but you're a regular listener, please do go and leave us a review. It is by far the best way that you can say thank you for this content. And you get to join the likes the amazing Gareth Evans, who left a killer review already. Alright, with that being said, let's hit it, we're gonna get down to the comprehensive LinkedIn ads startup checklist and guide. Company Page Very first off, the first thing you want to do is make sure that you get access to your company page, because the majority of your LinkedIn Ads actually live on the company page. If you're an in house marketer, you probably want to have super admin access to your company page. But if you're an agency, most likely, you're going to ask for a lower role called sponsored content poster. It's underneath paid media admins. All of your sponsored content, which are your newsfeed ads, and your follower ads that are a dynamic ad. These are all based off of your company page. And then now these new thought leader ads that have come out, they're based off of employees who have claimed your company. So again, it's based off the company page. So someone can give you access to a LinkedIn Ads account and not give you company page access. But all that means is you can boost existing content that the company page has posted. But you can't create new ads, which is obviously lame if you want to create ads. You can actually also give company page access through LinkedIn business manager, but you don't need to, which takes us to our next step which is access to the ads account. Ads Account Now this one can be a little bit different, because if you've ever set up business manager for your ad account, you are stuck with it, you can't divorce your account from business manager. So you'll have to do everything through business manager. But if you haven't already attached your ads account to business manager, great, keep it there because I don't think business manager brings a lot of value. Whoever has admin access to the LinkedIn ads account, what they do is they go to manage access, they go to account settings in the navigation, and then click on manage access. And there they get to add you. Account manager means that you can make any changes in an account. A campaign manager means you can't add or remove people, but you can do everything else. And of course, if you don't already have an ads account or a company page, you can go set those up for free. Set Up Billing The next step, and you will not be able to forget this because there is a red nag banner on every page, as you're setting up the ad account, they will want you to set up your billing. So you have to go in and register a credit card. It's really easy, you just click on the nag banner, it will take you right to a place to enter your credit card. If you're already spending pretty healthily and you have a track record of several months at least of advertising, you can contact LinkedIn and get set up on invoicing rather than an accrual credit card spend. Now the only person who can set up billing is the billing admin on the ads account. So if you're not the billing admin, you'll see the nag banner, but you've just got to go and tell whoever is the billing admin to go and click those links. Install the Insight Tag Alright, like we talked about in the news section about the LinkedIn insight tag, this is step number four in setting up your ad account. You do want to make sure you've installed the Insight tag that does three different things for you and all three are important. Number one, it acts as your conversion tracking so anytime you want to track conversions, this insight tag or pixel is the thing that's doing it. Next, it also creates your website retargeting audiences, which is super valuable. And finally, just the presence of this tag on your website enables LinkedIn to give you what I call LinkedIn analytics. But it's a free website demographics report that shows the business makeup of anyone who comes to visit your website, even if you didn't drive them from LinkedIn Ads. It's a very cool report. And it's totally free. You don't have to spend a dime on LinkedIn Ads. To get to your LinkedIn insight tag, you click on analyze, and then insight tag, and it will let you either generate one there, or it will even send one to a web developer that you want to email it to. LinkedIn suggests pasting this in your website's global footer. And that's all fine and good, but I actually like to load it in the header because that gives me a higher chance of the tag actually firing before someone leaves the page if the page is taking too long to load. Set up conversions Alright, with the LinkedIn insight tag setup, that enables you to start setting up your conversion tracking. Now occasionally, an advertiser will come to me and say, well, we're not tracking conversions, or we won't need to for a while. But I would still set this up ahead of time, even if you're not driving people towards a conversion event yet. And this is for the simple reason of being able to track view through conversions. So set up conversion tracking for any event across your website that you might eventually want to target with a conversion, or just any conversion event that's happening on your website. And then when your other channels, let's say you're running Google search, or Facebook Ads, or SEO, if anyone there ends up converting on your website, but they've also seen your ads, you'll start to see view through conversions tally up inside your ads account. We know that a buyers journey is not linear, they touch so many different channels at so many different times and so when I see view through conversions start to increment up, I know that my cohesive multi channel strategy is working. To create your conversions, it's also under analyze, and you click conversion tracking and set up your conversion events there. I can't overstate this enough. I highly recommend when you set up conversion tracking to ensure that you have a thank you page that you get redirected to whenever anyone fills out a form. Some web developers will push back on this and they'll say it's a bad experience. It's not modern, but I will tell you it is infinitely easier to troubleshoot and set up if you have a separate page that's your thank you page. Otherwise, the web developer is going to have to troubleshoot it when an if when someone clicks on a button, it doesn't fire as a conversion. Simplify your life and make sure that you have a thank you page rather than just firing a conversion based off of someone clicking a button. Consider target audience Alright next here is consider your target audience. Because after all, the reason that we come to LinkedIn and we pay a premium for this traffic is access to this premium audience. But you don't want to waste money. So put some thought into who actually is your ideal buyer? What sorts of companies do they represent? I really like to have a combined targeting where one element is targeting who the person is professionally. And then the other element is what type of company do they represent. So for instance, if I'm going to use job title targeting, maybe I target something like Salesforce administrator, and maybe that gets me the right person. But then it's still important to understand what type of company I'm going after. So for this, I might also layer on what industry the company is in, or what size it is, or maybe even company names, if you're going to do an account based marketing approach. By putting serious thought and research into who your ideal buyer is, your targeting is going to be a lot more effective. Set up campaigns the right way Next is when you actually go to set up your campaigns, setting them up the right way. We talked about this a little bit in Episode 100. But here are the basic procedures for creating a new campaign that you absolutely need to pay attention to. First off, as you create your first campaign, it will ask you to select an objective, you can really start here with whatever makes sense, but I highly recommend website visits if you're trying to send traffic to your landing page. And lead generation if you have a gated type of asset, or you're just trying to get someone to fill out a form that isn't on the landing page. The others you can kind of test into after that. After you do the targeting portion, you'll see a little checkbox that's usually checked for you, and it's called nnable audience expansion. I highly recommend always uncheck that box. We have not yet found a case where audience expansion was actually good for an account. It's usually very, very bad. I tell people, it's the COVID-19 Delta variant of LinkedIn Ads. Next, if you choose one of the ad formats, that is in the newsfeed, LinkedIn will automatically have you in a placement called LinkedIn Audience Network. There could be some use here later on as you test into it, but I would highly recommend avoid using this when you're very first starting, it tends to generate traffic that is much lower in quality than if you were getting them right from LinkedIn. So probably stay away from that one to begin with. Next, as you keep scrolling down the page, you'll get to the bidding and budgeting section. And this one is really important. The default bidding method that LinkedIn sticks you on is called maximum delivery. And it is the most expensive way to pay for LinkedIn traffic 90% of the time, the option that you want to start out with is manual bidding, and it's hidden, you have to click on show additional options, then click on manual CPC bidding. And this is going to allow you to set a bid and say LinkedIn, I'm not going to pay more than this amount anytime someone clicks on my ad. And LinkedIn is going to give you a crazy range that it recommends, it might say something like your competitors are bidding between $20 and $70. For this traffic. If you're just getting started and you have a low budget, don't listen to those at all, you can bid significantly lower than what LinkedIn is recommending, because the worst thing that can happen to you, if you bid too low, is you just won't get traffic and impressions. And you have to come in the next day and maybe incrementally increase your bid a little bit until it does start spending. If you do leave it on maximum delivery, you'll likely end up paying, depending on how well your ads perform, somewhere between about $20 to $50 per click, which is insane. You really shouldn't have to pay more than like 10 bucks a click, and that speaking specifically for targeting the US. Other areas of the world are significantly cheaper. And then finally, at the end of your campaign creation process, there will be an option to add a conversion to that campaign. And there's just no downside that I've found to attaching every possible conversion to every possible campaign. So don't get stuck here. Don't feel like you're out of your depth here. All right, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive right back into considering your offer. 19:27 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com. The LinkedIn Ads experts. Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment. Do you want to return on it? Consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years and our unique scientific approach to ads management, combined with our proprietary tools, allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other in house agency or digital ads hire can. Plus, we're official LinkedIn partners. Just navigate on over to B2Linked.com/apply and we'd absolutely love the chance to chat with you about your campaigns. Consider your offer Alright, let's jump back into your offer. So before you start running your ads, you really need to understand what it is that you're offering your audience in exchange for their attention. 95% of the time, a cold audience, which means someone who's never heard of you before, they're not willing to convert on something like a demo request, or talk to sales or buy something until they've been warmed up. So as part of this warming, we highly recommend launching an offer that teaches your audience something new, solves a major pain point, helps them do their jobs better in some way. We'd recommend doing this through ungated assets and content. Things that really have next to no friction, and just provide a lot of benefit. Free assets like ebooks, webinars, podcasts, online communities, etc. These all provide a ton of value and we'll get people really appreciating you and keeping you top of mind. Craft your message Next, once you understand what it is you're offering someone, the obvious next step is to start writing and crafting your message of what they're going to get out of it. You obviously want to identify what sort of struggles your audience has an offer significant solutions to those problems. And don't be afraid to issue a strong and clear call to action. And we highly recommend running two ads per campaign so that you can AB test and learn over time what people prefer, versus what they don't prefer. Gather imagery for your ads After you've crafted your message, the next step is to get imagery, visuals for your ads. And this is so important to tell you, your imagery is not meant to convert. So often I see advertisers who try to cram way too much into their image. They think, oh, this is what's getting their attention, so I have to jam a whole bunch of explanatory text in here. Oh, and I gotta get my logo and a button and a subtitle and their image just ends up looking so cluttered. Instead, I would highly recommend that your imagery follows the billboard rule. If you've ever bought billboard media, billboard companies will tell you don't put more than seven words on your billboard, because that's about what people can get just at a glance as they're driving without having to take their eyes off of the road. The same thing goes for LinkedIn Ads, keep your imagery very simple, because its whole job is just to get people to stop scrolling. We call this a thumb stopper. Your ad copy is going to do the converting and the convincing and the solving problems, but your imagery, its whole job is just to get someone's attention so that they'll read your ad copy. Now because LinkedIn is color palette is very blues, grays and whites, you want your imagery to really stand out. So if you look at a color wheel, this is what designers use, opposite of blue is orange. So it's helpful to include pops of orange, reds, greens, purples, anything that's going to help stand out against that blue and get attention. We find that imagery on LinkedIn that is square tends to perform much better than about any other dimensions. So in sponsored content, if you're going to do like a single image ad, we'd recommend 1200 by 1200 square. Launch your ads So now as a recap, you've created the account or you've gotten access to it, you have access to the company page, you've set up the insight tag and conversion tracking so you're all ready to go there. Now you've identified your audience, decided on an offer, and now you've crafted messaging and imagery to help support that. You are ready to launch your ads. LinkedIn makes it really easy as you're going through the campaign creation process to put you right on the spot where you can start actually creating the ads and then launch them so you won't need any extra help for me on this. That being said, I'm going to walk you through the next few steps that like I mentioned at the beginning are optional, but highly recommended. Plan a holistic LinkedIn Ads strategy full funnel Point number 12 here is called plan a holistic LinkedIn Ads strategy. And like we've already talked about, if this is someone's first time hearing about your company, it's highly unlikely that they want to buy your high ticket product or service just after seeing one or maybe two ads from you. So you'll need to plan this holistic strategy and make sure that you're providing value all along the way and walking this cold traffic through your sales process until they become warm, and eventually hot leads for you. What this means is you'll want to specifically think about the kinds of offers that are useful to someone who doesn't yet know you, like you, or trust you yet. I really like video content for helping people get to know me and like me, because it's totally possible for someone to read like five of my guides, but still not feel like they know me like me or trust me. Whereas if you watch a two minute video of me talking and sharing something of value, maybe you're already knowing me, liking me, and trusting me just from that. The same thing is gonna go for your audience. I also really like subscribable content as a way of getting people to know me, like me, and trust me, because it takes the same amount of work to get you to go and listen to a podcast and subscribe to it as it does to get you to go and download a guide. Well, the guide is a one hit. Once you're done reading the guide, you're kind of done with me. But if you come and listen to this podcast, you're now hearing me in your ears every week. And it sounds strange, but it builds a relationship with your prospect to where by the time they reach out to you, they feel like they already know you, you have a friendship. So content like newsletters, like weekly live streams, podcasts, a YouTube channel, all of these are subscribable and get you multiple shots on goal with your prospect getting to know you. Create matched audiences But of course, when you get someone introduced to your brand, now you need to follow up. And this is something called retargeting. On LinkedIn, we create retargeting through something that LinkedIn calls matched audiences. Inside your LinkedIn Ads account, if you go to plan in your navigation, and then go to audiences, then you can click create audience and LinkedIn will show you the bevy of options of all the different kinds of retargeting audiences that it can create. So think of it this way, your very first set of ads where you're just being helpful, and getting people to know you and hear of you, that's your audience have cold traffic, and then based off of them taking action on whatever your ads are asking them to do, you can graduate them to the next level of retargeting, and there's no limit to the number of layers that you can push people through. But just realize that every retargeting audience needs at least 300 people, even to serve. So I would recommend right at first, create more of like a two or a three step funnel, where they interact with your cold ads, and then you graduate them to a warm, and then graduate them to a hot. And the way that graduation works, when you create a retargeting audience, you can then exclude that retargeting audience from your original cold audience. And that makes it so once someone interacts with that level of ads, let's say your cold ads,, they now get removed from that audience and now they only qualify to be shown your ads at the, let's say, middle of funnel level. And this is how you create sequences. It's how you can walk people from the top of the funnel down to the bottom of the funnel, and to create a demand generating machine. Optimize and scale My very last tip here is optimizing and scaling because once your ads are live, you never know what your audience is going to like or what they're not going to like until you've actually tested it. So you've launched these ads, and you watch the progress as it happens. If something's not working, you can pause it, you can shut it off, or you can even bid it down so you're making LinkedIn less incentivized to show that. And the things that are working well, you can bid them up and give them more budget and do more of those things. Really, at this point, the world is your oyster, and you're about to learn a lot about who your audience is and what they like, while at the same time you're generating leads. It's a beautiful thing. And it does take work and it does take attention. And quite honestly, that's why we have a job here at B2Linked because we do all this for you. When you're just barely getting started on an ad channel, there are so many moving parts. And quite honestly, that learning phase is so expensive. Working with someone like us who have already mastered that learning curve, we can get you right to an optimized campaign of LinkedIn Ads. Who knows it could be up your alley. If you're in that situation, reach out to us at B2Linked.com/apply. Alright, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Like we mentioned in the news section, there's a link to the Pixel Helper Chrome extension that will help you understand whether your LinkedIn insight tag is installed properly or not. You'll also see a link to the pulse article from LinkedIn Ads where they introduced the new AI tool for helping you write ad copy, which I think is really cool. I do highly recommend that you go and download this checklist and guide that we went over today because then you don't have to listen to me and hit pause and then rewind, just in case you missed something. You'll have the whole checklist ready to go. And like we just announced on Episode 100, we just recently launched the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics Community, where you get access to our four courses that take you from absolute beginner to expert level LinkedIn Ads professional. And if you're listening to this within the first month, chances are you still have access to the founding members discount. You get grandfathered into the very lowest rate that this will ever be at either $59 a month for access to the community and courses, or $259 a month to be part of the super fanatics where you get to hop on a weekly call with me. If this is your first time listening, hit that subscribe button so you keep hearing content like this in the future. But if this is not your first episode, please do go and rate and review the podcast especially on Apple podcasts. It is by far the best way that you can say thank you for us constantly coming out with this great content every week, if I don't say so myself. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections on what we've talked about, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: April Dunford on LinkedIn Conversation Ad Changes Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover or with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript AJ Wilcox We ran LinkedIn Video Ads under three different objectives and compare the results, we show you exactly how to get the best performance for your video ads on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Speaker Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. AJ Wilcox Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, I've got a guest for you that I'm super excited about today. It's Eric Jones, who is B2linked head of marketing. He brought the results of a killer AB test to me and I just had to have him on as a guest to share with you the results. Eric is one of my favorite people on the planet. You'll appreciate the depth that he thinks about LinkedIn ads in his responses, I know you will. First in the news. When I logged into the platform today, I saw a pop up announcement that says, "We've added new metrics". While we make improvements on conversation ads, we'll start tracking and reporting on headline impressions and headline CTR. And then you can click learn more. So I did. As I clicked this, it took me to a help article, all about the new conversation ad format. And I was actually really shocked to see this because I knew at some point that conversation ads are going to become conversation starter ads. But this seems like an evolution even before that. So there's this table in the bottom that shows you the difference between legacy conversation ads, and the new and improved ones. And what really caught my attention, were a couple of the things. First is in frequency caps, you probably already know that legacy conversation ads, they've only been sent to a LinkedIn member once every 30 days. So once you've sent one, your competitor can't send one for 30 days. But in the new and improved one, it says it will generate up to three impressions every seven days. So this is really interesting to me. Now our conversation ads are going to have more impressions rather than just that initial one. Now, you probably already know that the only way to pay for conversation ads before was on a cost per send. And that was usually anywhere between about 50 cents to $1 per send if you were sending in North America. But the new and improved conversation ads have a cost per click price. It says advertisers pay only for the initial click that opens the message. The last call out I'll mention here is that with the legacy conversation ads, it was right at the top of either the focused or the unfocused version of your inbox. But in the new and improved version, it opens in the focus tab. And if someone clicks on the ad and then clicks on a call to action button, the ad will stay in the focus tab. But if they click to open the ad, but don't engage with any of the calls to action, then it automatically gets moved to the other the unfocused inbox. So this actually sounds really cool. And now that I'm reading through this, this really could become conversation starter ads. So maybe that's what this is. They're just not putting a name to it yet. But everything I'm reading so far, I'm a fan of. I wanted to highlight one review here from Apple podcasts, the user FancyNancyPansty, which is the greatest username in the whole world. Nancy, reach out to me, let me know that this is your review. I'd love to tell you how impressive that name is. But she says, "Makes me better at my job five stars. It's pretty nerdy to look forward to a podcast about paid media buying, but I do. Really great actionable content here. Fun and lighthearted and not dry. Give it a listen." Nancy, I really appreciate that review. I try really hard not to make this dry. Alright, without further ado, let's jump right into the interview. AJ Wilcox I'm so excited to have Eric Jones on the podcast for the first time. Eric is very much what I would consider my partner in crime. I'll give you kind of his background here. He's been in digital marketing for six plus years now, plenty of experience, obviously with LinkedIn, but also with Google and Facebook. He's managed ad campaigns in many different industries, many of which were also B2B, SaaS, healthcare, finance, entertainment, and more. He's currently our Director of Content Marketing here at B2Linked. Eric, welcome to the show. Eric Jones AJ, I'm so stoked to be here. Thank you so much for having me. AJ Wilcox Absolutely. Eric, is the reason that we put these podcast episodes together so efficiently. He works together with me on almost every single one. So having him actually be interviewed on the show is a big deal because he's been behind the scenes so much. So I'm excited to actually have people hearing from you. Eric Jones And honestly, that means a lot. Thanks, AJ. I appreciate that call out. AJ Wilcox Of course. All right. So obviously I give you a little bit of intro tell us anything personal or otherwise that I didn't cover in the intro. Eric Jones I think you pretty much covered it. I'm a digital marketing nerd at heart with a passion for advertising and content strategy. That's my profession by day, I would say if I were to add anything more, I do have some side projects that I'm working on, including a graphic novel and some tabletop games. So super fun stuff, just things that I enjoy doing in my spare time. AJ Wilcox And I'll tell you, the graphic novel was one of the main reasons that I wanted to hire you originally. How long have you been here? Eric Jones It's been about three and a half years now, AJ Wilcox Three and a half years. So three and a half years ago, as I was interviewing you, I was like, Whoa, if he's willing to work on a graphic novel on the side, like that shows an intense dedication to craft, it shows interest in writing, interest in visuals, these are all very, very important to advertising, obviously. And it has not led me down. You have not let me down, Thank you! Eric Jones That's good. That's really good. But I lived up to the expectation at least. It's actually really funny because I did start my graphic novel, but it's really been pushed to the backburner, especially because I think my tabletop games have have kind of taken off a lot faster than the graphic novel. So I've been investing a lot more time into that lately. And I mean, I've got like three that I'm working on all at once. It's a little chaotic, but it's been a really, really cool learning experience. Like I said, it started out as a passion project. But I would be thrilled if I could sell them in the future. I think that'd be really cool. So that is my eventual goal. But as of now, it's just been a really fun passion project. And I'm excited to see where it goes. AJ Wilcox And this is all totally new to me to this. This is great to hear. The reason we're bringing you on here for this episode is because you just recently ran our super cool AB test. I'd actually probably categorize it as a an ABC test. And I was so excited to share the results of this with the audience. Who else better than the person who ran the test to tell us all about it. So you've been running this really cool test for about the last month. Can you give us the setup? Tell us about what led you to want to start the test, how it was set up, and all that? Eric Jones Yeah, absolutely. So the whole test really revolves around the video ad format. It's arguably the ad format that we've had the least experience with as a company. And that's not to say that we don't believe in video, it's just that we've always held this belief that video content is expensive, and time consuming to produce. And I think a lot of businesses feel that way. I mean, as we've worked with clients in the past who have wanted to run video, that seems to be a consistent concern that they share with us is it's difficult in general to create. And so we've we tend to steer clear video. But we've recently come to the realization that video doesn't have to be expensive or time consuming to produce. Video can be raw, it can be concise, it doesn't have to be overly produced to be effective. And personally, I think it's more authentic that way. So we've been testing more short form video content as a company. And because of that, because we haven't, like used this ad format, much in the past, I did want to know what was the most efficient way to run video. So that essentially led me to testing this in the first place. AJ Wilcox I love it. Okay, so here's the test, it was running exactly the same video ads across three different objectives. Because many don't know, you can run video under a website visits objective, which is kind of interesting. I think most know you can run it under a video views campaign, that's in the name. So we have three different objectives we can run it under. And I think you got tipped off by one of the members of our team that there was a certain objective that worked really well for video. Tell us about that. Eric Jones Yeah, so one of our team members, we were just talking about video ads and talking about the initiatives that we wanted to run for our next paid ad campaign. And he talked about the experience that he was having with running his own video ads, because he was running video ads at the time for a client. He was saying that under the engagement objective, he was seeing more cost efficiency then, when he was running the website visits objective. And I thought that was super interesting. So that was really where this whole test started off was. I thought okay, well, this is a great hypothesis. So based off of this information, if we go into this thinking that the engagement objective is going to be more cost efficient than the website visits objective. Well, that's a great thing that we can measure against, right. That's a great hypothesis we can test. And so when we went into this whole test, the way we set it up was like you mentioned we chose between three objectives. So obviously engagement in website visits because that tied into that hypothesis, but I also wanted to test video views, because like you mentioned before it's in the name, it made sense to test video views alongside these other two. So what I did was I left all else the same. Audience targeting, campaign structure, ads. The only thing I changed was this one variable and that was the objective. And I tried to keep bidding the same across them all as well. I bid manually for clicks in both the website visits and the engagement campaigns, and then I bid manually for video views in the video views campaign, since LinkedIn doesn't allow you to bid for clicks under this objective. So I tested each of those objectives at separate times, because LinkedIn also doesn't allow for ads with differing objectives to be in a single campaign. And I ran each objective for about seven to 10 days, and then monitored and compare the results from week to week. AJ Wilcox And what order did you do it in? Did you do engagement, then web site visits, then video views? Eric Jones Yeah, yeah, that's exactly the setup. So yeah, engagement first. Wanted to launch with that one, just to test that hypothesis with that anonymous tip that we got from our employee. And then following was website visits and video views. AJ Wilcox Alright, so when you went to go set your bid for video views? How did you set a bid there? Because that was the one where bidding is going to be different? Did you look at the effective cost per view on the other objectives, and then try to set around there? Or did you just set somewhere in Lincoln's range? Eric Jones Great question. So with the first two, I should say, so for engagement and website visits, we typically like to bid low. So what I did actually was I compared to LinkedIn bidding recommendations, but I tried to bid as close to the lower end of those ranges as I possibly could. For website visits, I may have been a little bit lower. Just because historically, in the past, we've been able to spend our full budgets and get even more cost efficiency by bidding lower than LinkedIn is recommended bidding range. So for website visits, I may have been a little bit lower. But for engagement and video views I did use LinkedIn's recommended range as a benchmark, and I bid on the lower end of that range, just to start off with. Excellent, that's super helpful context. And I should note, so about the videos themselves, the video ads, what they were was they were essentially stories. So we wanted to introduce our audience to be to B2Linked's why. If you're familiar with Simon Cynics start with why. That was kind of the inspiration, we wanted to tell more of a story revolving around the origin of the company, its mission, its values, our intent with these videos was to communicate to our audience like these stories in a relatable way. And in a way that established an emotional connection between us and our audience. AJ Wilcox Oh, I love it. Perfect setup. So with these videos, they're essentially telling a story. So what we wanted was for people to watch the story. When I say the word objective, we don't know if it's the marketers objective, or if it's the objective that someone selected inside of LinkedIn. So we're saying our objective as marketers was, we wanted people to watch the videos. And if someone clicked to the web page, which is the homepage afterwards, that's great. It's a nice little bonus. But that wasn't necessarily what we altra cared about, right? Eric Jones Yeah. You nailed it. AJ Wilcox Okay, soyou've told us all about how the test gets rolled out. This is great. The planning is all super sound, in my opinion. Now, can you share with us the results? What did you actually see from all three of these objectives? How are they different? Eric Jones Yeah, so this was definitely super interesting to compare the results. So there were really a lot of different metrics that we looked at. But the core metrics that we wanted to analyze were our cost per click, our cost per view at 50%, and what that means is essentially, like, you can track what percentage of the video people watch. And so we wanted to see people who at least watched half of our video content. We consider that to be high intent. So anything beyond 50%, we wanted to measure from a cost standpoint. And then the last metric that we measured was completion rate. So starting with our CPC, we noticed that engagement and website visits were both roughly around $20. Website visits was about $20. And then engagement was just a couple dollars more, so really close. But then video views was double that. So we were around $40 for CPC. So from a cost standpoint for clicks video views was really expensive. So that's the interesting thing is when we look at cost per view, engagement was about $5. It was $4.75 and then web visits was higher than that. So it was more expensive to get views at 50% under website visits than an engagement. We were sitting around $7 for website visits. But then video views, under the video views objective, we were getting views at 50%, around $3. So even though it was the most expensive for clicks, it was the cheapest for video views, which totally makes sense. Again, it's in the name, that is the thing that LinkedIn is going to be optimizing towards. From a completion rate standpoint, it was pretty much the same. Video views, we have the highest completion rates, and then website visits, we had the lowest completion rate, and then engagement sat somewhere in between them both. AJ Wilcox It's so interesting to me to see under the website visits objective, the completion rate was a third of that of video views objective. So if you're only looking at your cost per website visit, you're thinking like, oh, website visits is looking pretty good. And then when you start looking at your cost per completion, your cost per 50% view, all of a sudden, it's astronomical compared to video views. This was great for me to understand and see. Because, you know, for the longest time, I've talked about how LinkedIn is objectives, they don't have nearly as much data to work with and optimize because people don't use LinkedIn nearly as often as people use Meta. So when Facebook says, Yes, we can optimize towards those who are more likely to watch video content, I say, absolutely. I trust it. With LinkedIn, though, LinkedIn hasn't had video for very long, they haven't had conversion tracking for nearly as long. So when we start looking at their objectives, I kind of tend to count them out. But this study actually proves me dead wrong. Eric Jones Yeah, absolutely. And you and I have talked about that too, in the past. And so I think that was probably one of the most surprising results from this test was just seeing how well LinkedIn did optimize towards its given objectives. It was really cool to see that kind of unfold over the past few weeks. And in AJ Wilcox the data, it's very clear that when we bid for video views, we got cheaper video views, when we bid for website visits, we got cheaper website visits, we bid for engagement, it was like right down the middle, which I think makes sense. A website visit and a view of video are both types of engagement. So when you tell it to like, take any kind of engagement into account, it's probably gonna do a little mix of both of those. Let me ask you this. Why do you think this was the case? Why do you think we saw the results that we saw? Eric Jones I think youyou already kind of hit on it. I mean, LinkedIn is optimizing towards what they're claiming to optimize towards video views is obviously optimizing towards getting more video views, web visits, is optimizing towards getting more website visits, and engagement, is really optimizing towards getting any sort of click or interaction with your ad as possible. So that includes likes, comments, shares, and clicks to your landing page, and more. So I think that's why we saw the results we did. But the one head scratcher for me was really looking at cost per click between website visits and engagement. Because I looked at that, and I thought, well, there's really not much different here. Like there's not enough statistical significance. What visits was just slightly cheaper than engagement, but it was like a $2 difference, right? Like, we're not talking about a huge, huge difference. Not like web visits to video views, where video views was double the cost in cost per clicks compared to website visits. It was super comparable between web visits and engagement. It kind of made me think like, why is that? But also the added context of engagement is getting a similar cost per click as website visits, but a cheaper cost per view at 50%. And so I looked at that, and I think the reasoning for that is, engagement is almost operating like a website visits campaign in this instance. I mean, the two objectives in general are very similar. They're optimizing towards clicks, even though engagement is really optimizing towards any sort of click. In general, it's very broad website visits is only optimizing towards clicks that are driving traffic to your website. But but they're really similar in those regards. They're optimizing for clicks. But my biggest question was, where are we getting cheaper video views under engagement and cost per click is staying the same? Well, I think it's likely due to the fact that those who engage more with ads are also willing to watch video content for longer periods of time, if that makes sense. So if your audience is engaging with your ad, they're liking, they're commenting, they're sharing, it's likely that those people are also going to stick around and watch your video for longer than those that LinkedIn is optimizing for under the website visits objective, which is literally just sending traffic to your website. AJ Wilcox And that actually makes perfect sense to me. Because if engagement objective is optimizing towards the kinds of people who are going to generally interact with an ad, some are going to click on the landing page and leave. And so they're going to stop watching the video at that point. Some are gonna like and comment. These are types of actions that you can do while the video is still playing. So it makes sense website visit, as soon as someone clicks, you get charged, but the video stops. And so there is going to be this teeter totter effect of website visits, you get more visits, but less viewing? I think it actually makes sense that way. Eric Jones Yeah, absolutely. You nailed it. AJ Wilcox Perfect. So if we as advertisers, if we're going to take something away from this, what did we actually learn from this? If I'm gonna go and start running video campaigns in the future? Can you tell me like, are there certain objectives that I should stick to or stay away from? Eric Jones Yeah, so based on the results, I would say that website visits is probably the weakest of the three. You have a higher cost per view at 50%, a lower completion rate, and CPC is on par with the engagement objective, even though we talked about it's slightly lower, it's really only a couple dollars cheaper in the test that we ran. So not enough difference there for me to want to run website visits over engagement objective, especially when you consider the much lower cost per view at 50% that you get under the engagement objective when compared to website visits. So we're talking about a similar CPC, between website visits and engagement, and a lower cost per view at 50% for the engagement objective compared to website visits. Engagement feels like the better option between the two. And in general, when you compare all three, engagement seems to be a healthy balance of both clicks and views. You're getting a comparable CPC to website visits, decent click volume and getting a good CPV at 50%. as well. Video views on the other hand, even though it has the worst click volume and CPC of the three, it's drastically outpacing website visits and engagement on the cost per view at 50% front. And even it has the highest completion rate of the three, which, again, to me shows really high intent. So the biggest takeaway for me is this if your goal is to get as many people to consume your video content and completion as possible, then video views is going to be your best option. But if your goal is to get a healthy mix of both website traffic and video views, then go with engagement. And probably just avoid website visits altogether. But that said, I mean, these are results that I saw from my own test, someone else's experience could be totally different. So I would encourage anyone listening to this episode, really to test this for themselves, and find what works for their accounts. But feel free to use this data as a guideline if you're wanting to get video ads going quickly. AJ Wilcox What and there are very different kinds of video ads. So I think depends on the setup of the ad. These ones were very much like we talked about, they were telling a story, we were more interested in people watching them and consuming them than if they clicked. But let's say a different scenario. Maybe someone has a video ad, but the video is what I would call a decoration. Like maybe it's a boomerang video, that's five seconds that repeats over and over just something to grab their attention. But your actual goal is to get people to click on your call to action. Maybe in that case, website visits would be a better objective. But I think it just comes down to what is the actual result you want. And knowing that LinkedIn is objectives actually can get you what they say they're optimizing towards. Eric Jones And that's a really good point. I think if our video content had been a little different, like where you said, our main focus was really just getting people to watch the video. If we have made more of an emphasis in our content to hey, click to the landing page, click to the website learn more about us at B2Linked.com. Like if we had made that more of the emphasis of the content, I think our audience would have behaved a lot more differently than where we were with our current test where we were really just focusing on getting people to watch through the entire video. AJ Wilcox Perfect! Eric Jones So I'll say one more cool takeaway, in addition to what I talked about before was when you take a closer look at cost per completion, which this wasn't a metric that we talked about earlier. But as advertisers we consider a click, right, we consider a click to be a signal of intent. Someone has at least an ounce of interest in what we're promoting that they're willing to click on our ads and be driven to wherever we're sending them to. I consider a video completion to represent the same thing. So just to give you some some further metrics, cost per completion was also a lot lower for the video views objective in comparison to the other two, we were sitting around, just under $5 for cost per completion. For engagement, it again set in the middle around $8. And cost per completion for website visits was under $16. Eric Jones Wow. Drastic. Eric Jones It was a lot higher. Yeah. But when you compare these costs to an average cost per click on LinkedIn, especially the video views, one, I mean, it's about four times cheaper for us to get a video completion than it is to drive someone to our website. Eric Jones Wow. Eric Jones And that's not to say that these two things are an apples to apples comparison, right. But if we're just considering level of intent, like I say, that's a pretty significant difference. And you consider also like how long it can take to build audiences to retarget and nurture further, where LinkedIn requires an audience size of at least 300 people that the platform recognizes in its user base in order to create a campaign. I mean, retargeting audiences can take months to create if you're building them based off of leads or website traffic. But retargeting audiences can be built in a matter of days using LinkedIn, video views, retargeting, even if it's an audience full of those who watched your content all the way through, which again, I think is pretty significant. AJ Wilcox That's absolutely huge, great call out there. Here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive right back into the interview. Speaker The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linkedcom, the LinkedIn Ads experts. AJ Wilcox Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment. Do you want to return on that? Consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years. And our unique scientific approach to Ads management, combined with our proprietary tools, allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency, in house team, or digital ads hire. Plus, we're official LinkedIn partners. Just go to B2Linked.com/apply to fill out the form, and we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. AJ Wilcox Alright, let's jump back into the interview with Eric Jones. AJ Wilcox So we've learned some great things here. I'm sure you're looking at this already devising your next test. What's the next thing you want to test? What's the next thing you want to learn based off of the data you already have here? Eric Jones Great, great question. So my test revolved mainly around bidding manually for all of these objectives. So like, if I were to further this test, I think it would make sense to continue to test efficiency and how it's affected when bidding by impressions, or even running the brand awareness objective, which only allows you to bid for impressions or reach. I think that makes the most logical sense to go next. AJ Wilcox I love it. Alright, so we can try bidding aggressively, we can try changing bid type, there is one more objective that we can try. So lots of different options here. And I hope I mean, just given the initial start, we've already learned, like which objective seems like the better bet. It seems like just testing, aggressive bids, very low bids, somewhere in between, we're going to learn something. But I think the majority of the learnings here, we've presented pretty well. Eric Jones Yeah, for sure. And I mean, you could also test like we hinted to earlier, I mean, you could test different types of video creative or different calls to action within your content, to see also how your audience might behavior or respond differently based off of, you know, what is actually being promoted or presented in your video content. So there's really a lot of different ways we can take this, but all I would say are great ideas. AJ Wilcox Well, I think that'swhy we're presenting this now and not three years ago is because video ads are just really complex. With everything dealing with click like single image, it was really easy to test different elements. But it's so hard to stick a pin in something in video and categorize it. Because there's so many different ways of communicating emotion and a product and a service all in video. So to just put everything into a category and say, This is how video works extremely hard. So that's why it's taken us this long to present it. But it also makes it really hard to analyze too, because video is just so intimidating. So please let us know how future tests go. And I'm excited to get the learnings from it. Eric Jones Yeah, we'll do. AJ Wilcox Alright, so next one, is there anything that LinkedIn is working on right now that you're excited about that maybe could influence or help with these tests? Eric Jones Yeah, you know, I'm really excited for thought leader ads. I know they were just barely released and masked to advertisers this past week. The thing that crushes my soul, though is that it's limited to single image ads. So if you have content that promotes or utilizes video or utilizes an in feed document, like you can't use any of that content, like you can't boost it, it's not even available under the thought leader ad format to be able to put money behind. So that's super depressing to me that I can't boost a video ad. AJ Wilcox Hopefully LinkedIn fixes that in the future, maybe they release different kinds of personal posts that can be boosted. That would be cool. Eric Jones That's my hope, too. I think releasing the feature and limiting it to single image ads, I think makes sense. But I do, I hope they make updates in the future. So I know that's not directly related to video ads, particularly. I hope we can do like video thought leader ads in the future. But as far as anything else that LinkedIn is working on, I'll be honest, I'm not super excited about anything else related to video. I have heard that in stream video ads on LAN, LinkedIn's Audience Network, are coming. But I'm not super, super excited about those for a couple of reasons, right? Because every time I've tried the LinkedIn Audience Network, I've never gotten great results. I've always seen really inflated click through rates and seemingly low quality of website traffic that comes from land. So I'm not thrilled about the idea of more stuff coming out on LinkedIn that is related to LAN just because I've never had a positive experience with it. But to add, most in stream video ads that I've seen, have been more of a turn off than anything. So just the combination of those two things. The fact that it's in stream videos, and it's on LAN, really doesn't get me too excited. So I'm not very, very thrilled about that. But I am hopeful that video thought leader ads can come to us in the future. That's what I have to say on that. Eric Jones Amen to that. I think video representing the company page is definitely going to be not as exciting as video that represents a human. II think people are going to interact with it a lot more. I am so excited that you know, as of the time of recording, thought leader ads have just barely been released to all accounts. So I'm with absolutely thrilled. So professionally right now, what are you most excited about? Eric Jones Professionally, I would say I recently discovered April Dunford. If you've heard of her, she's a thought leader on positioning. And I've essentially subscribe to her content. She's written a book. And she's coming out with a sequel here soon, which is exciting. But all of her content on LinkedIn is great. She also just released a podcast, which is awesome. Like just so much value that she brings to the table on the topic of positioning. And so I'm kind of just kicking myself that I wish I had discovered her sooner because their insights on the topic are just so helpful. And so mind blowing to in just a way that I've never heard from anyone else who talks about positioning. So April Dunford, she's awesome. If you guys aren't familiar with her, I would encourage you to check her out to look her up on LinkedIn, Google her and her book. But I mean, in addition to that, I mentioned before that I'm making a lot of tabletop games in my spare time. And I'm working on a few all at once. But there is one in particular that I'm deeper in the playtesting phase. And that's been really exciting. I know it has nothing to do with LinkedIn ads. But it is just exciting to kind of see this project, like come so far after investing so much time. So that is also just something kind of a combination of professional and personal that I'm excited about. AJ Wilcox Amazing. I love it. Well, thanks so much for sharing your insights on such a cool test. This definitely won't be the last time we have you on the show. We'll have you back to share either a different insight or deeper into video ad testing. Eric, thank you so much for joining us. Eric Jones Yeah, thank you so much, AJ, for having me. This was a real treat. And a real pleasure. Thank you. AJ Wilcox Alright, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. Speaker Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. AJ Wilcox Alright, Eric mentioned April Dunford, who was big on positioning and we've linked to her LinkedIn profile so you can go follow her. She's awesome. We also have a link to the help article where LinkedIn is talking about the new conversation ad format. That's well worth a look. Also, just in case you missed it last week on episode 100. We announced the official LinkedIn ads fanatics community that you can be a part of. Go check it out at fanatics. B2Linked.com. And if you sign up within the next month, you can be one of our founding members and be grandfathered into the lowest pricing ever. The community has our four courses that take you all the way from the very beginner stages of LinkedIn Ads all the way through 1% expert. Plus, there's an upgraded tier that we're calling the super fanatics and for an extra $200 a month on your subscription, you get access to weekly group coaching calls with me and the B2Linked team. If this is your first time listening, please hit that subscribe button. But if you're a regular listener, please do do us the honor of leaving a review on Apple podcasts. And I'd love to shout you out live. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections on the show, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Campaign Setup Bidding/Budgeting Audience Segmentation Offers that Drive Conversion LinkedIn Insight Tag Conversion Tracking Retargeting LinkedIn Ads Performance Benchmarks Excel Reporting Playlist AB Testing B2Linked's Blog Follow AJ on LinkedIn B2Linked's Youtube Channel Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics Community and Get Access to Our Beginner-Expert Courses LinkedIn Learning Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript Are you a LinkedIn Ads 1%er? I'm going to show you exactly what it takes to close the gap and become a LinkedIn Ads expert on this week's episode, the 100th episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! I'm so excited to tell you that this is the 100th episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. You longtime listeners, thank you for sticking around and spending so much time with me. It's absolutely an honor to know that I get to join you when you're commuting, exercising, walking your dog, washing your dog, exercising your dog, anything you choose to do while listening to podcasts. If you're new to the show, thank you forgiving me your ear as well. My mission with everything B2Linked does is to empower 20,000 companies advertising on LinkedIn to give them the best tips, tricks, strategies to get lower costs, better scale, and higher performance. And you are all part of this mission. Now I know many of you are already advanced advertisers. Some of you are primed and ready to go from zero to LinkedIn Ads hero. No matter where your starting point, this episode is what you'll need to get you into the top 1%. In researching for this episode, we went back over the last three years, and we hand picked the topics that we're going to be the most valuable to you. Of course, we would invite you to go back and listen to each of these episodes individually if you want to deep dive. But I'm going to touch on the top principles and topics that will really help you get the most traction. In the news, I have an announcement that I'm absolutely bursting at the seams to tell you. Because you are loyal listeners of the LinkedIn Ads Show, I wanted to give you an exclusive benefit here. For years I've been asked to put out courses. I've even partnered with LinkedIn Learning, and a couple others to create training content, but we never had our own. Candidly, this was 100% my fault that we didn't put these courses out. It felt to me like an absolutely insurmountable task to build courses that I was proud of. And then to keep them updated over time, and to promote them along the way. I've talked to many course creators in my close network just to get their ideas and experiences and advice. When I do courses, I don't want them to be like many of the useless courses I've taken over the years, I want them to be something special. Special to me doesn't say paying a high price for one course or a package of courses that you never actually get around to taking. And real success comes from not only watching course content, but implementing it and taking part in the community. So for me courses from B2Linked would have to be so much more than this. Well, I'm actually shaking right now, as I'm telling you this, I am so excited to announce that this dream is finally a reality. Because as of today, the courses are live. We created a community for you LinkedIn Ads fanatics, where for not a huge one time fee, but for a low monthly fee, you get access to all four courses that range from beginner to expert presented specifically and designed by me. But that's not all, you'll get access to the whole community. My highly specialized and highly trained to be to link staff are in this community answering questions and sharing valuable platform updates. I'm in there answering questions as well. You'll then have access to the combined knowledge and experience from all the other LinkedIn Ads fanatics in the community to bounce ideas off of and learn what's been successful for them. We are calling this community the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics. I feel so strongly that the value has to be there for you learners, especially here at launch for you founding members who will be some of the first in the community. So we priced it specifically low. $79/month gets you access to all the courses, as well as the future courses and additional content, all updates, plus unlimited access to the community. Then we have a higher tier for you A plus students out there, we're calling you super fanatics, you get access to everything that I've already talked about. Plus you get access to a weekly group workshop with me. And that's for a total of $279/month. These are all month to month no contract cancel whenever you need or if you stop getting value out of it. But as a bonus for our founding members, the first ones in those of you who subscribe before July 16 of 2023, you'll be grandfathered forever into the discounted rate of $59/month for the community and course access and $259/month for the higher tier super fanatics groups. So don't delay get in now as one of the founding members so that when prices rise in the future, you'll be cemented in at the lowest price that it will ever be. To go claim your spot as an official LinkedIn Ads fanatic and founding member go to fanatics.b2inked.com. And of course, you can always use the link in the show notes. if you can't figure out how to spell fanatics. Don't worry, I got you. But I can't wait to see you in the fanatics community Highlighting an awesome review of the podcast, Anna Rice, who's a digital growth marketing associate at Northern Trust Asset Management here in the US. She said, "Amazing insights. This show has become one of my go tos as a beginner turned expert in LinkedIn Ads. I discovered it at a B2B marketing conference when AJ held an expert session and I haven't missed an episode since. This is such an amazing tool and resource to learn about and optimized LinkedIn ads 100% recommend." Well, Anna, thank you so much. It's wonderful to hear that our content has helped you on your way to becoming a LinkedIn ads expert. It's so apropo considering that this episode is all about becoming an expert so you've really just lent a lot of credibility to the topic of the episode. Way to go. For all of you other listeners, please do go and leave us a review on Apple podcasts for the show. It's by far the best way you can say thank you for all the content that we keep putting out. And I'm always excited to shout you out on the episodes as well. All right. With that being said, we've got to get to the topic at hand,. Let's hit it! I'm going to go over some of the topics that I feel are most important to master. Specifically, if you want to be a LinkedIn Ads expert. The first really is campaign setup and structure, you can go back to episode seven to get the full basis there. But it's incredibly important to get a few things right here. First off, your campaigns need to be set up in an evergreen way. What I mean by that is your campaigns are here to stay. They're named in a way that your account stays organized for a long period of time. And you're not constantly creating a new campaign here, a new campaign there, and letting others fall to the wayside. The way that you do this is you name campaigns after the description of the audience, not the date you created it, or the content that you put in the ads, or anything like that. My theory here is that campaign names should describe the details about the campaign that won't change, and then you just don't go and change the things that can that means your campaign names should reflect the things that don't change, like your targeting, like your ad format, like your objective. Now, don't misunderstand me here, there are certain things about campaigns that you can and should adjust and change along the way. Most importantly, you should be adjusting your bids and budgets along the way. Which brings us to our next point here that you need to master. This is one that the vast majority of LinkedIn advertisers that I talked to just don't get. And that is your bidding and your budgeting, Episode 89, so a recent one, we went back and did a super deep dive into this with all the new objectives and everything. And there are a few things that you need to understand here at a basic level. The first is that LinkedIn's default bidding method for traffic is called maximum delivery and this is by far the most expensive way to pay for your traffic 90% of the time. This type of bidding is literally handing your wallet to LinkedIn and saying take whatever out of it you want. And if I could be so bold to say, this type of bidding being the default is the reason that costs are rising so rapidly on LinkedIn. Too many advertisers are just taking the default and running their campaigns and then LinkedIn just gets to increase your bids as high as it needs to outbid someone else. And they just are throwing more and more money into their pocket. So don't fall into this trap. Instead, start your campaigns by manual cost per click bidding, and bids significantly lower than what LinkedIn recommends. You can always increase those bids if you're not getting enough traffic. Now, I did mention that maximum delivery is the most expensive way to pay 90% of the time. Well, what is that 10% of the time where it's actually the best method? Well, that comes when your click through rates on your campaign are two and a half to three times the average click through rate for that ad format. So for instance, sponsored content has an average of .44% click through rates, and we find that we can switch to maximum delivery bidding when sponsored content is up over about a 1% click through rate. So when your click through rates are insanely high, that's when you want to use maximum delivery, otherwise avoided like the plague. The next topic to master is campaign segmentation. We covered this really well in Episode 65 of the podcast. So make sure you go back and listen to that. But I highly recommend that you break up your audiences into campaigns that have an audience size between about 20,000 to 80,000. We find that audiences that are less than 20,000 You may have to run them for potentially months before you get enough data back To tell whether or not they're working, and for your tests to become statistically significant. Now, if your audience sizes are much larger than 80,000, and in fact, LinkedIn themselves recommend over 300,000 in a lot of cases, we find that there's usually some way that you can then break up that audience into two smaller pieces to learn more about it. I just find that when my audiences are over about 80,000, there's usually something about that targeting that I can split into. Maybe I can break it up by company size, or seniority or something. And now these two smaller campaigns, they're serving the same purpose, but they both act like little mini focus groups that you can then learn from them. Now, there are plenty of those out there who suggest Nope, just keep one large campaign, and then look at your ad demographics later and decide which segments are performing and which aren't. But I will tell you, that is extremely limiting, you can't see how each micro segment actually engages with specific ad creative unless you break them out into separate audiences. Plus, if you're tracking parameters in your URLs, you need to actually be able to put those tracking URLs in ads that signal to you which ad and which campaign and audience they represent. The flip side of this is don't break them out so small that each segment doesn't get enough data. For budgeting purposes, we usually plan about one campaign per $750 to $1,000 per month in budget. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't have smaller retargeting audiences, or ABM targeting, those are all fine, just don't expect them to be pushing a whole lot of volume for you. The next topic that you'll need to master is offers. For us this is episode 10 goes into the kinds of offers that people are willing to engage in and convert on. But as a friendly reminder, cold traffic, yes, you can get them to fill out forms in order to access some of your content. But your conversion rate from MQL to SQL, like getting them on a meeting with your sales team is going to be near zero. Before you do this, you will have to do more nurture. But that episode is going to set you up really well for the kinds of content that work deeper down in the funnel. For any platform, you need to get comfortable actually in the platform, navigating around the user interface. Campaign manager is no different here, you have to have that experience, I recommend no matter what just getting in and messing around. Even if you don't actually launch an ad, get practice by just navigating and setting things up. The courses that we just launched in the fanatics community. Course Number one is actually holding your hand and walking you through LinkedIn's campaign manager. So I would highly suggest watching that course when you make it into the community. There are a whole bunch of technical aspects to LinkedIn Ads as well, that might not come naturally to you if you come into the world of digital marketing through more of the creative side. Those three areas here are understanding the insight tag, setting up conversion tracking, and setting up retargeting. All three of these revolve around the Insight tag so check out the blog post that we published just a couple of weeks ago here on what is LinkedIn's insight tag and how do you install it. Then episode 38 goes all into how to set up conversion tracking how to use it. And then those special cool what I would call ninja hacks and uses for it. Of course, it's super important to set up retargeting. You almost can't nurture traffic, and then expect meetings and demos without a retargeting setup. That's episode 58 so go back and listen to that in more depth. Alright, so you're advertising. Things are up and running. How do you know if what you're doing is working or not? I mean, for all, you know, if you haven't compared yourself to anyone or anything, you could be doing a crappy job. Or maybe you're doing amazing and you deserve a raise, but there's no one to know. That's why it's so important to understand the benchmarks of what to expect on the LinkedIn Ads platform. Go back and listen to episode 15 all about the benchmarks. So you can compare and see if what you're doing is working and if you're doing a good job. And of course, if you're not outperforming benchmark, don't beat yourself up, just take that as a clue that there's an area of the account that you need to now go and spend more time in. Now if your job is to manage everything around LinkedIn Ads, there are several skills that you need, or will at least need to be able to dabble in. There's creative creation. We really like to get comfortable with Canva to create imagery. But I also recommend getting comfortable with video creation and editing. Even if you're not going to do it professionally, just get enough experience that you know what goes into it. Spend time writing ad copy and other content even long form content. I know when I was in high school in college, I kept thinking, man, I can't wait to be done with journalism and writing. Those are skills I'm never going to have to use again. And now I use them every day. Same with math If by the way, so get really comfortable creating. And of course, you can always use something like chatGPT to help you out. But don't ever rely on and hand your job over to AI tool. Another skill that oftentimes gets overlooked is your general marketing strategy. This means actually understanding your positioning and your value in the marketplace. How do you then communicate that value? And how do you picture and help your customers through their journey? What's that holistic strategy? If you just go and become a LinkedIn Ads expert, you're going to miss out on all the other platforms and channels, how they all fit into your holistic strategy, you're gonna miss out on so much there. And yes, you can spend all day within campaign manager, but we've covered several things inside of campaign manager. But we've covered several things that you can't do in campaign manager that you have to do by exporting your data out of campaign manager and getting it into Excel. In the shownotes, you'll see a playlist that we put together on our YouTube channel, walking you through the creation of a whole bunch of Excel reports. Don't sleep on Excel, guys, it's not that hard, but can give you such a powerful lead over other marketers who are not willing to dive into the data. The two most powerful formulas that you should know in Excel are vlookup. And this isn't really a formula, this is pivot tables. I use pivot tables every single day, don't sleep on pivot tables, go learn them. And that YouTube playlist is going to help a lot because you'll see all of those things in action. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive back into what you need in order to become a LinkedIn one percenter, 16:39 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment. Do you want to return on that? Consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years and our unique scientific approach to ads management, combined with our proprietary tools, allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency and the in house team or any digital ads hire. Plus, it helps that we're official LinkedIn partners. Just go to B2Linked.com/apply. We'd absolutely love the chance to get to discuss with you. Alright, let's jump back in here. We'll go through the experience that you'll actually need to navigate LinkedIn and to become an expert. I'm sure this isn't news to you, but book learning will only get you so far. You actually need practical experience. It's totally possible to take courses and learn as much as you possibly can, but still be absolutely clueless when it comes to jumping in the platform and doing something simple. From my experience, most of you listeners fit into one of two camps. You're either a freelancer looking to learn, or an in house or agency marketer who's actually doing this for clients or yourself. If you're a freelancer looking to learn, I would highly recommend pick up a client that wants to advertise and is willing to give you a shot at actually running the thing for them. Your first one you could offer to do for free or cheap, it doesn't matter, just something so you're actually getting real world experience because the things that even you'll learn in our courses, they won't mean anything to you unless you have a real business purpose to actually apply them. So pick up that account and those accounts. And as you gain experience, you'll get to charge more to future clients as you get that experience, and especially confidence that comes from knowing that you actually know what you're talking about. If you're in house or agency, you are actually getting the experience hands on, which is fantastic, but every single episode from this podcast, everything you read, it has to be applied so you can learn it. So try to take every episode, every blog post away, and apply it to what it is that you're actually doing with your LinkedIn Ads account. That's about the best advice I can think of for those two camps. The next thing I think you need experience to understand is scaling and account. You don't understand the scale on any platform. Unless you've actually worked with it. It becomes really simple to scale. We've worked with some very large spending accounts. And after a little while, it feels like just the same old numbers you're used to dealing with just with a couple or a few zeros at the end, you get really comfortable with large accounts. And I hope all of you get the chance to scale a normal size account up to one that's very large, just so you get the experience. You do have to be very careful as you do this, but I'm excited for you to get to try. Then there's a skill that you have to get comfortable with because you're gonna use this forever, and that is optimization skills. You just have to watch the account and make adjustments and then look at what the effects are. I like to keep what I call a testing journal. Every time I make an adjustment or run a test, I'm making a note of what date I ran, what my hypothesis was. And then I always have to go back a week or two or three a month, whatever and actually compare, okay, what was the result of that test? This gets into continued education that I would highly recommend. And that is, you have to always be running AB tests. Episode 36 was all about the AB testing procedure that we recommend. But you've got to learn which ads resonate with your audience. Which ad types produce what kinds of predictable results? What results do I get if I bid differently if I bid higher or lower, or on a different bidding model? What about if I tried different objectives? We do this a lot with video,. There's three different ways that you can bid on video, you can bid by the impression, you can bid by the click or the view. And depending on your objective, depending on what it is you're trying to do, any one of those could be much more effective than others. And you could save a lot of money. But you have to actually run these tests. You've got to test different audience features different targeting different members of the audience. And you've got to learn how your audiences respond to changes in your bids, seasonality, creatives. One test I really like to do with this is do a 20% bid increase. If I bid up by 20%, do I get 20% more impressions? If so that was a perfect linear scale. But what if I bid 20%? Higher, and I get 25% more impressions? Wow. Now I actually just got access to more scale, and what have I been up 20%, but I only get 15% more impressions? Well, now I know I've hit the edge of diminishing returns. And I know that if I try to bid up on this audience, I'm just going to get less and less efficient. These are tests you have to run, and every audience is going to act a little bit differently. So make sure you've built a culture internally of AB testing, it will save your bacon. Throughout my career, it's been so sad to me to see marketers who had a lot of promise, and I see them kind of peter out, they lose the fire, and they stop doing things that actually advance their learning. One of the best recommendations I can give you is to keep that hunger and keep following up to date resources. I'm gonna keep doing everything within my power to keep coming out with episodes of this podcast. So certainly keep listening to this show. But there are also especially just in the last year, there are some great LinkedIn Ads pros on LinkedIn sharing what they know. If you follow the LinkedIn Ads hashtag, you should see all of that. We've got a YouTube channel where we're continuing to invest into more and better video. There are several other YouTube channels out there that cover LinkedIn Ads. So I highly recommend subscribing to them and watching them. Follow the B2Linked blog and our newsletter. Every week, we try to put something really good together that's going to be helpful to your career. And of course, we just announced the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community that is launching the day this podcast goes live. So if you're hearing this, it's active, I can't think of a better way for you to learn and grow and get experience and collaborate with others than joining the fanatics community. Again, that's fanatics.B2Linked.com, go check that out. I also recommend finding a mentor someone who drives you and holds you accountable, someone that you like to explore with and share results with. To me it's one of my good friends Mark Gustafson. I've mentioned him many times on the podcast. But I think everyone who's striving to be better need someone like that. I will mention if you sign up on the upper tier of the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community, I'll be personally mentoring you and meeting with you weekly, so I can help be a mentor to you as well. But if you don't have some sort of a mentor that you can look to keep your eyes open and try to find that person. Alrght, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up, so stick around. 24:11 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Like we mentioned in the episode, there are so many different episodes and resources for you to check out. They are right here in the show notes. But you'll see the episode on campaign setup, bidding and budgeting, audience segmentation, offers that drive conversion. You'll see the blog post all about how to install LinkedIn's insight tag and what to do with it. The episodes on conversion tracking and retargeting and performance benchmarks to compare yourself against. There's the playlist on YouTube for how to do complex Excel reporting made very simple. There's the episode all about AB testing that I can't recommend enough. You'll see a link to B2Linked's YouTube channel that you can keep getting free value from, as well as a link to our blog. I've shared before, but if you want to check out the community, go to fanatics.B2Linked.com. I still have the LinkedIn Learning course. So although it doesn't cover nearly as much as the community, it's still a great course. If this is your first time listening, I would highly recommend hitting that subscribe button so you hear more of our content when you're mowing your lawn or commuting. But if you've been listening for a while, please do go and rate and review the podcast on Apple podcasts. It really is the best way that you can say thank you for all the research and work and cost that we put into this show. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week for episode 101. We're cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Dashboard Lashay's Visual Framework Lashay on LinkedIn Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript AJ Wilcox What kinds of blog content reliably turns prospects into customers through your LinkedIn ads, you'll get the whole framework on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. AJ Wilcox Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! If you've been a listener for a while, you know, I don't do interviews very often, especially outside of LinkedIn employees and partners. But Parker on my team heard today's guest on the Exit Five podcast, and she dropped so much gold, we had to have her on here. She's a content creation master. And she's going to share how us marketers can use blog content, along with our ads to result in closed business. She's really opening the curtain and sharing her full strategy on how you can do it too. So get ready to take some serious notes. Today's guest is Lashay Lewis. She lives near Washington, DC, and has plenty of stellar case studies on how her approach works. First off, I have to tell you that Lashay is so my people. She's a hardcore lover of B2B SaaS, she's got lots of kids like I do, she's an entrepreneur at heart, you're absolutely going to love her. Before we get into the interview, I have to tell you, this is episode number 99, which I am so stoked about. But get ready because we're going to have a full on celebration for episode 100 next week. We've got a big announcement coming. And I don't want to spoil it now, but you're not going to want to miss it. The review we want to highlight this week is from user Daniel356. And sorry, Daniel, I don't know who you are from your username. So I don't know how to thank you personally. But Daniel left this review, he said, "Best LinkedIn Ads resource on the interwebs. The LinkedIn Ads Show is by far the most insightful and comprehensive resource to stay up to date on LinkedIn Ads. You also get cool ideas and strategies you can try right away. I can't think of another podcast or piece of content on the interwebs that provides so much actionable information to run LinkedIn Ads properly. You can tell AJ and his team spend a lot of hours preparing each episode. I love the structure, because you can always come back to any episode in case you need a refresher." Daniel, thank you so much. I absolutely love this review, because you shared specifics about what you love about the show. And I'm absolutely honored that you'd leave it. As an aside, I don't always know when I'm reviewing a podcast what to say or how to share it. So I have to say that your review is an absolute masterclass in giving feedback. Ahuge sincere thanks for doing it for our show. And you if you're a loyal listener, I would absolutely love to have you go and leave a review on the show. The best place I found to do that is on Apple podcasts. And if you leave us a review, I'd love to shout you out live like this. All right, with that being said, let's hit it and jump right into the interview with Lashay Lewis. All right, Lashay Lewis, I'm so excited to have you here on the podcast. For those of you who don't know, Lashay Lewis is the founder of AuthorityPlug. Lashay tell us like give us your intro, brag a little bit. Lashay Lewis Yes. So thank you so much for having me. First of all, like you said, my name is Lashay and I am founder of authority plug. So what I do is I teach B2B SaaS companies how to create profit driven content marketing strategies. And a little bit about my background like I've been doing this stuff since I was 16 years old. I started off building Amazon affiliate sites for all my people out there that remember those? Started off doing that. That's where I first really gotten to the methodology of different parts of the funnel, top, mid and bottom. And the funny thing is, ever since I started doing that, I kind of have ingrained this methodology in me, but as I grew in my career, I realize you know what, SaaS companies would pay me a lot more to do this than just me going off and creating these small microsites and you know, a really low percentage commission. I'm like, Saas companies will pay me a whole lot to do this. Fun fact, I did not like working with SaaS companies. In the beginning, I actually did ecomm in the beginning. But I feel like that experience in ecomm actually transcended to B2B. And I feel like it makes me bring a different angle to the B2B marketing space. It's not as boring and you know, things as kind of like the stigma that's out there, like, oh, B2B has to be B2B does not have to be boring. And I think my time and ecomm kind of helped me bring that direct to consumer experience to the B2B space. AJ Wilcox I totally agree with that as marketers when we start blending disciplines and blending skills, we're able to make things a lot more interesting. Yeah, B2B should not be B2Boring. Alright, so the reason I'm having you on the podcast, I got to hear you share a methodology a strategy with the Exit Five podcast, which is a podcast dealing all in B2B stuff. I was floored by what you shared and several members of my team were floored with what you shared. So I was so excited to have you on those of you who are listening, you know that I don't oftentimes do interviews with people that aren't product people from LinkedIn. So that should signal just how excited I am about the conversation we're going to have. Lashay, tell us a little bit about the strategy that you helped clients implement? Lashay Lewis Yeah, for sure. So first, to kind of bring it back, I noticed that there was a gap in the market, I noticed a lot of content marketers, and you know, even SEO agencies, content marketing agencies focused a lot on how much traffic can we drive a company, instead of how many leads can we drive a company. So just from that, I wanted my differentiator to be being able to tie a number to my name, and being able to say, I can drive you X amount of leads per month. And when I came into the industry, I seen a gap there. And even working in SEO agencies and content marketing agencies and seeing all the fluffy reporting and things like that. I just knew I wanted to bring something different to the space. So that's what really kind of helped my positioning and saying, like, I create profit driven content marketing strategies for B2B SaaS companies, instead of just, I help you increase traffic. I feel like there's enough marketers out there promoting, I help you increase traffic. But my differentiator is that I help you increase leads in the door actual demos in the door through content marketing. AJ Wilcox And I would say that's the biggest ask that we have from our clients is, yeah, get us all the MQLs you want get us leads or whatever. But what we are really interested in is we want meetings, our sales team wants to have demos or meetings set up. And that's what we're judging success. That's where we can actually tell our ROI. And what you're sharing with us here, you're talking about how you can actually prove and take content to the meeting to the demo to revenue. And that's why I think this conversation is so incredibly important. Tell us how did you come up with the strategy? Lashay Lewis Yeah, so basically, again, you know, going back to my history with building affiliate sites, I kind of just took that same methodology, and applied it to B2B SaaS. So, you know, other content marketers do and agencies do is they focus on top of funnel, so they're looking at the keywords with the highest search volume, the highest amount of impressions, and how many clicks is this going to get and I'm looking at it a little bit differently, I like to look at it like, instead of starting top down, I like to start bottom up. And when I say bottom up, I'm referring to the bottom of the funnel. And usually, because even though the clicks and the impressions and the traffic, which is what I call top of funnel metrics, it's like, even though those are present, it's like the money is at the bottom of the funnel. And the reason aaS companies can't really attribute content to revenue is because they're too focused on top of funnel metrics until six to eight to 10 months down the line. And they're like, Okay, our traffic was growing. This was great. But how are we making money? When honestly, you should be asking that question from the jump. I feel like asking that question from the beginning would solve a lot of issues that SaaS companies deal with. It's like, a lot of them don't ask themselves this question until they're already knee deep into an SEO campaign. And like, okay, great. Yeah, this is awesome. But how are we making money? And a lot of agencies and content marketers alike can't answer that question. So the methodology I like to come into every engagement is starting bottom of the funnel and working my way up from there, because this is the quickest way to actually drive demos in the door through content marketing. AJ Wilcox And then how are you proving these demos? I'm assuming this is a connection to the CRM system in some way. Like, when you're working with a client, how do you prove that you are getting an ROI? Lashay Lewis Sure. So again, you know, working with a lot of different content marketing agencies, this was a gap that I've seen. So what I like to do is I like to use Looker Studio, and Google Analytics. So what I do is I just really create a dashboard that is able to filter certain pieces of content. So when I would work with clients, or, again, when I was looking at content marketing agencies, I would create a look or studio dashboard. And I would put the content that I specifically wrote in there, and it would actually track the demos that came from the content that I wrote specifically, I love to do that because it shows the C suite in the higher ups like here is how content is contributing to your MQL and not just MQL, but actual demos that you have like coming into the door. So it's just really Looker Studio and Google Analytics is really the only two things I use. But yeah, that's how I kind of show like the higher ups here is how content is contributing to actual revenue. AJ Wilcox Oh, that's nice. You're able to set a conversion action inside of Google Analytics. Lashay Lewis Yes. So goals and events and just being able to tie that directly into the Looker studio so you know in a higher up and or someone that wants to get a deeper knowledge on okay, how is this content marketing working for us? They can come in literally see which piece says of content are driving the demos. AJ Wilcox Perfect. So I expect that when you go to a team and you start telling them like, no, your focus doesn't need to be on ads going to demos or something, it needs to actually be on content. That's going to be a little bit of a mindset shift, especially for the executive team. How do you suggest that marketers are positioning and messaging this internally to get buy in from the executive team on this mindset ship? Lashay Lewis Yeah, no, that's a great question. And I feel like marketers need to make an SEO mindset shift. So when I say SEO, I don't mean search engine optimization, actually means sales enablement optimization, right? So they need to start looking at content as sales enablement. Because in all actuality, it is. It's like, if you have someone, a prospect that comes through the door, and they're, they want to know more about the product, you can send them a written case study. Actually good content will actually warm up a prospect before they even get to sales. So I feel like if leaders start switching their mindset and stop looking at content as like, oh, just this thing that we're publishing every month, just for the sake of doing it, oh, because other companies are doing it, and they look at it, like this piece of content can actually drive in sales, we can actually use this to warm up prospects, at every stage of the buyer journey, you're gonna get a lot further than just thinking like, oh, our content team is just producing what I call company updates style content, like, oh, our company did this this month. And when the truth is, people really don't care what your company did this month. Like they care about how your product can help solve their problems. AJ Wilcox So true. Alright, so you've talked about the types of content and starting from the bottom of the funnel? What blog pieces are you suggesting we create? And how do you decide what blog posts to send traffic to? Lashay Lewis Yeah, that's a really great question. So I like to decide on what blog pieces to create. So there's a couple of different modifiers that kind of helps you determine what a bottom of funnel article would look like. So example, like a modifier would be like best, or versus, or top, or best product for use case. So there's a couple of different ways to identify a bottom of funnel term. And usually, again, like, that's where I like to start. Going back to your second question, AJ, I feel like ads can actually be ran to all types of content, top, mid, and bottom of funnel. So if we were to methodically go through this step by step, so usually, companies run kind of like brand awareness, LinkedIn ad campaigns to top of funnel content. So maybe they're trying to promote an e book or a white paper, very, like high level top of funnel. And usually a lot of companies just stop there. And a lot of time I see when companies are trying to get demo signups. They're just like, okay, boom, here's our demo, here's our ad, you know, sign up for the demo, when it actually shouldn't be done like that, you should actually be nurturing this person from the top of the funnel down to the bottom. So maybe, for a top of funnel piece, maybe if we were talking about sales enablement, a top of funnel piece will be what is sales enablement, right? So that's somebody that's not exactly sure what sales enablement, is, you know, maybe they feel like they'll need it now. Or maybe they need it in the future, very, very high level information. So a middle of funnel article and example would be like, how to improve sales enablement, or how to create sales enabled content, right. So they know a little bit about sales enablement, but you know, they're still trying to kind of put the pieces together a little bit. Again, this is the middle of the nurture, like this is where you really want to take the time to educate them and continue to nurture them. A bottom of funnel piece would be best sales enablement software, right. So as it relates to LinkedIn Ads, so if you were to start start at the top of the funnel, you would get them into a lead magnet, maybe like an ebook or a white paper, again, take a middle of funnel article and retarget, that same person that just came in through top of funnel, you know, whatever they opted in for. And then even from there, you can retarget a person again, with a bottom of funnel ads, so best sales enablement software, and you've effectively nurtured this person. Now, the sales process may not look that linear, but just for demonstrational purposes, just for example, purposes, like that's essentially how companies should do this. And a lot of times what I see is like they're only running like brand awareness campaigns, or they're only running, sign up for demo, It's like, if you were to actually create an entire funnel strategy on LinkedIn, you would probably be seeing more signups than you're seeing now. Probably higher conversion rates and lower click costs. But again, a lot of companies don't do that. They're just like, okay, let's try to get as many people into this ebook, into this webinar, into this white paper as we possibly can. But then they don't think about okay, how do I retarget this person? How do I continuously nurture this person down the funnel and that's exactly what we were talking about earlier with sales enabled content. A lot of SaaS companies probably already have the content in their arsenal to execute on this, but they just don't know that they do. But yes, essentially, you should be nurturing somebody from the top all the way to the bottom, not just like, pushing top of funnel and then automatically Okay, sign up for a demo. It doesn't work like that, like you need to be nurturing them at every stage of the funnel. AJ Wilcox And in this strategy, isn't there a place for gating content? Or would you advocate like you leave this ungated all the way up until they're ready to schedule the demo, Lashay Lewis I do feel like there's a place for gating content, right, because we do capture emails and things like that. But it's tricky to say, but I think like a lot of content that's gated should be ungraded. Because to be honest, a lot of people don't care about the thing that you're selling. So it's like you want them to care, you want to give them as much information as they need. You don't want to gate everything. Now, on the flip side, again, there are some things that you should be getting again, because you want to get this information to be able to get them onto their email list to retarget them and remarket to them. But a lot of things that you have gated, you probably shouldn't have gated. Like a webinar, I probably wouldn't get that. And again, like, if I'm super top of funnel, I don't even really know what my problem is, and you're making me put in my email to sign up for a webinar, I probably really don't care that much, I'm not gonna lie to you like. You need to worry more about educating the customer before you ask for something. Like don't just come out the gate and ask for something like, even when we're talking about top of funnel content, like educate the customer down to a point where they're like, oh, okay, so I've learned a lot from this post. Now, I feel comfortable enough to give them my email. And even if I can relate this to my own business, it's like, I give so much value on a daily basis before I ever ask for anything. People that opt into anything that I have to offer, they feel comfortable doing it, I don't have to push them to do it. They willingly want to do it because I give so much free value. They're like if her free stuff, is this good? What does her paid stuff look like? Like what is behind the wall? So it's like a lot of companies just jumped the gun with wanting to gate everything, when that's actually slowing your growth. AJ Wilcox totally 100% grade, I find that B2B marketers in the past, we've been so in a hurry to gate things to try to get email addresses because we feel like that's what we need to do in order to introduce them to sales and start that nurturing process. But that also feels really desperate to be like from your very first interaction, expose yourself, tell us who you are. So if all you're doing is just giving value, yeah, as marketers, we have to wait longer to see the lead. But under your strategy, we may not be generating an MQL now, and then, you know, waiting weeks or months until that turns into an SQL. We are delaying that until MQL and SQL happen at exactly the same time, it's like, but now their sales ready. And now sales is actually probably going to close this lead. And it's a little exercise in patience, I think for us, as marketers Lashay Lewis For sure. And if I can relate it to like a real life circumstance, it's like me going out on a date and the guy asking to marry me after the first date. It's like, bro, let's do some stuff first. Let's get to know each other. Let's date for a little while. You don't make that ask right away, you need to be giving as much value away as possible. And then the person will opt in when they're ready to opt in. You don't force them to do that, because what's gonna happen is they're gonna get pissed off, they're gonna be like, you know what, screw this. They're gonna go to your competitor that has their content ungated, where they can learn more about the problems that they have. And what they're gonna wind up doing is rolling with a competitor instead of you. So I would definitely tell companies like consider ungating some of that content that you have. I'm not saying ungate everything. But it's like, you're asking for too much for somebody that's extremely top of funnel, it's like, now if they're bottom of funnel, they know what their problem is they're hurting, they need a solution. At that point, yes, they're kind of ready to make a deeper decision. Even past the lead magnet, now they're actually like ready to sign up for demo. But again, when somebody is top of funnel, like they don't care about your webinar, they don't care about your ebook, you want to educate them into caring about your webinar, or your ebook. And I just think that if companies made that another mindset shift, which is like ungate some of your stuff, it's holding back your growth by you not ungating. Ungate some of your stuff. AJ Wilcox And so if we can transition now you understand the strategy, you want to start creating content that is on gated, and we talked about starting from the bottom of the funnel. What are some of the tips and recommendations you'd have for a marketer? How do they actually go to start creating bottom of funnel content? Lashay Lewis Yeah, another great question. So if I could start with the issue, the issue is, even companies that have bottom of funnel content, a lot of them don't know it, but the companies that do know it, that content doesn't convert how it should for them because they're writing their bottom of funnel articles same way, they would write their top of funnel articles. And that's not how you would do that, because somebody that's bottom of funnel is way more aware of what their problem is than somebody that's top of the funnel. So when you start writing bottom of funnel content, you really have to get specific with the pain points, you need to get specific with the features that solve that pain point for that prospect. And again, it's like top of funnel is just like, what is this thing, the history of this thing, maybe topics, statistics, it's like very, very high level things that even AI can possibly write. But when you get down to the bottom of funnel, it's like, there's a disconnect they don't need. So if I'm looking for best sales enablement software, there's no reason I should go into your article and see any paragraph that says, what is sales enablement? At that point, you've lost me like I'm bouncing. So I think the difference is just getting the information inside of your organization to be able to craft bottom of funnel articles. So to dig into that a little bit. It's just interviewing subject matter experts within the org and just getting the information from them just the years of experience and just being able to extract their brain and put it in written text and be able to again, match the features of your product to the specific pain points that your audience is dealing with. That's what's going to convert not high level fluffy information, like they want to get down to brass tacks, like they want to know, at this point, how does your product solve my pain point, so get right to it, it's no need for an extended long intro or anything like that. I noticed a lot of companies make this mistake as well, they have like this extremely long intro well, you know, 50% of sales enablement, is based or they don't care, right, get to the point. If you're looking for a sales enablement solution, you're probably dealing with one of these three problems, pain point one, two, and three. Here's how you know, boom, some of the article and then get right into it. It's just totally different from how top of funnel content is written. And again, it's like leaders need to go through and assess how their bottom of funnel, if they even have any bottom of funnel content, they need to go through and assess how that bottom of funnel content is written. Is it written for conversions, or is it written as if I'm talking to somebody in a top of funnel article, very high level fluffy information? So I think the first thing to do is to like scan that bottom of funnel content and to see, is it written for conversions? Because just because you have bottom funnel content, doesn't mean you're going to convert has to be written the right way? AJ Wilcox Oh, totally true. I'd say it's deceptive. It seems like it'd be very simple to do, because hey, this is you writing content that's very close to your product. It's bottom of funnel. But then I can also see marketers probably making some serious mistakes, like you talked about addressing, like too much of a top of funnel piece when you're not in the mindset that your prospect is actually in at that moment. Yeah. As a consultant as an agency, when you're helping other people to do this, is this very difficult? Because they know their product better? They know their customer better? And you're helping consult like, is there a world where someone from outside could come in and help with this? Or does this need to be done by someone who's internal? Lashay Lewis Yeah, that's a great question. So even as a consultant, a lot of companies don't have their information together consolidated. So even if I'm coming up as a consultant, I can still help drive the strategy. It's just the gap is companies don't have their information all together. And not just for me as a consultant. But even for your in house writers, you need to have all of this information together for them. Because what's happening is, they're hunting around or trying to, you know, if you guys were even doing interviews, because I know a lot of SaaS companies don't even hold subject matter, expert interviews, and they should, but your writers are going around trying to land these interviews and trying to do this and trying to do that. When if you had all this information consolidated for them, they could spend more time writing and less time trying to reach out to different stakeholders to get information. Because this was a huge pain point for me, when I was writing with content marketing agencies and in house at aaS companies like I would have to go and dig and search for all this information that should have been together for me previously. So I think that's the first thing. It's like having all of your information consolidated. So not just me as a consultant, but an in house writer can come in and say, Okay, here's the ICP, here's what they struggle with. And you might have different ICPs that's when it gets a little bit more nuanced. It's like, you'd need to have all of this information together for you know, consultants for in house writers, for freelance writers, for SDRs that come in that need to learn about the product. It's so many different use cases of why you need to have all of your information together. And so many companies missed the mark on this. I was freelancing for years and years and years and none of the SaaS companies that I worked for dot this right, none of them. So I think just being able to speak on that alone, I know I'm good. I resonate with somebody right now, you need to start consolidating your customer information, it's going to help your team so much better, they're going to spend less time researching actually more time creating high quality pieces. AJ Wilcox And that is so worth your time as a marketer, actually defining these things. Because I think, right, like first touch, first blush, it probably feels to a marketer, like, this could be a waste of time, like, Oh, I'm taking time away from doing my actual work to create the strategy and think, but all of a sudden, when you have that, when you have this document, like you're talking about, where you truly understand your product, and the pain points that your customers are feeling, now all of a sudden writing content is super easy. And you can hand it to an agency because it's concise. And it's really easy to write ad copy and create new offers. So I think this is absolute gold, but you've just shared Lashay Lewis And I think, on the surface, it may seem like it's a waste of time. But once you have all this information together and your in house writers or freelance writers or, you know, SEO agencies that you're working with get a hold of this information, it's going to change the way you do content marketing, it's going to change the speed of which it's done, it's going to change the quality in which it's done. Again, because a lot of your competitors aren't doing this. So if you were to actually take this advice and actually go run with it, you're probably going to be ahead of a lot of your competitors that don't have their information together, they just have writers on the team, they're like, Okay, so choose a keyword, write some content around it, you know, boom. And here's another thing he gets like, this is the reason I'm able to get more inbound demos from four blog posts a month, and others are able to get the 20 plus a month, it's because I focus on quality over quantity, I'm talking to the ICP, I'm matching features with pain points, I'm talking about the feature benefit, I'm talking about the future consequences. It's not difficult to conceptualize when you have all of the information together, because it's like whoever's writing, the article can pick and choose what they want to put in the guide. And it's like, it all comes from subject matter experts within the company. So you may not and I know another pain point was like, oh, having to view you know, interview subject matter experts for every piece is such a time suck, and this and that. But again, this is the importance of consolidating that information. It's like, maybe hold one or two or three interviews, and then take the information from those interviews and put it together, you really don't have to interview too much more after that, especially for bottom of funnel pieces. Because a lot of the content is the same. It's just written for different ICPs. And the angles might be a little different. But the general features and the pain points are basically the same, but the angle might be a little bit different. But again, if you have all of that information, consolidated, you don't have to contact for five or six stakeholders, you have this consolidated info, and you're picking and choosing what you want to put in the article. And it's not just random information that you got from Google, you got this information from inside of your organization, this is exactly the customer that we're talking to, you know what I mean, it's just so much easier on your writers to do this. And this is something else I preach as a content marketer, I don't feel like we're appreciated the way we should be appreciated. It's like, good leadership is going to make sure these things are together for your content team to be successful. AJ Wilcox I totally agree. I feel like we should have a culture of interviewing, this shouldn't be something that you're just like, oh, all of a sudden, we need to start doing some of these interviews with subject matter experts. I think there needs to be this culture of we interview our prospects, we interview our current customers, so we can understand more about their pain points more about what they're looking for. So we can give them what they're asking for. We need to be interviewing, maybe someone in sales or engineering or something. But we need to be having these interviews with subject matter experts. So you've totally won me over on that. I think that's super valuable. Lashay Lewis Absolutely. And you just saying that just kind of reminded me of something else. Like, even outside of subject matter experts. Like you need to be interviewing sales and customer success. Because again, you know, like I mentioned on the exit five podcast, it's like, sales gives you a vision of what life is like for the prospect before they have your product. And then customer success gives you a vision of what life is like after they have your product. And your product is the bridge between the before and after. That's storytelling. If you can storytelling, your content, you're gonna be able to drive some sales. But the problem is companies don't storytellers. They go on Google and they copy what everybody else is doing when the reality is those people are probably not converting so you copying them is doing yourself a disservice. AJ Wilcox Totally. So I think we need to ask about AI because you did mention AI. There's bottom of funnel content that AI can't create. What do you see AI? Where does it play in to this process? And what do you see it doing to content strategy and content writing as we go? Lashay Lewis Yeah, so I feel like AI can definitely play a part in the process. It would be like I mentioned earlier, it'd be like more top of funnel because the way AI gets his information as it gets it from the internet, right? So it's getting it from other articles that are already out there, the thing that it doesn't do is it doesn't get information with inside your organization. So it's more difficult to have AI write, middle of funnel and bottom of funnel articles again, because that information is not coming from Google, it's coming from within your company. So AI plays a good role when it comes to just thought ideation, you know, okay, so how should I, you know, write this headline? Or how should I do this? Or what does a good outline of an article look like? AI is excellent for ideation, that I will say, I wouldn't even say it's bad for top of funnel content, because it's good. It's only so many ways that you can write a top of funnel piece with like, what is sales enablement, right? So again, when we go back to our sales enablement, example, there's only so many ways that you can explain the same thing. But even for top of funnel piece, I would still say maybe you should hold an interview for top of funnel piece as well, because a subject matter expert may have a contrarian opinion or something different to bring to the table that no other website or your competitors or whatever have even talked about. So I wouldn't even say go full blown AI on top of funnel content, but it definitely can be used more with top of funnel than it can with bottom a funnel, most definitely. Even, just to you know, I know, we kind of been talking about this, but to kind of like, touch on this a little bit. Something that I would love to bring to the industry is an AI product that can actually scan customer calls and customer information and be able to help you create an outline based on the specific information of your ICP, not information that was found on Google. So it's something I've got in the works right now. But as of right now, as you know, AI stands it's like, don't use it to write your bottom of funnel content. It's just not there yet. And until someone comes up with a product that can actually do these things, like let AI play its part but don't think that, you know, you can tell you, right, okay, you know, use Chapt GPT and AI to create, you know, 50 articles for us. Because what's gonna wind up happening is, somebody's gonna have to clean up that mess later on. You cheeping out on your content marketing, your SEO is probably going to be the most expensive mistake that you make. AJ Wilcox I think you bring up a really good point about where I think AI is going to go in the future. And the Jordan Harbinger show, it's one of my favorite podcasts, they actually ended up doing this. They pushed all of their episodes all probably their transcripts into ChatGPT. And then they have this chat bot that you can go and ask any question about the show. And it'll say oh, and in Episode 364, they talked about this topic, go listen to that. I would love that for the LinkedIn Ads Show because by the time we record, this is episode 99. We've 99 episodes, and I don't remember everything I said in all of them. And sometimes I shared some gold and then have totally forgotten it later. Yeah, I love the idea of like, sick AI on your internal content on the output from these subject matter experts. And now all of a sudden, you have more opportunities to create content without having to just have a new interview every time you want to write something. Absolutely. AJ Wilcox Here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive back into the interview. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. AJ Wilcox Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment. Do you want a return on it? Consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years, and our unique scientific approach to ads management, combined with our proprietary tools that allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency, in-house team, or internal digital ads hire. Plus, we're official LinkedIn partners. To apply just go to B2Linked.com/apply and we'd absolutely love the chance to get to chat with you. AJ Wilcox Alright, let's jump back into the interview with Lashay Lewis. AJ Wilcox So we've talked about how to create the bottom of funnel content. Do you have any tips or recommendations for us on how we could create more middle and top of funnel content? Lashay Lewis Yeah, for sure. So middle funnel content, what a lot of people don't know about that is that middle funnel content can actually drive demos as well. It's just really all dependent on how you angle it. So for example, if we go back to our sales enablement example, it's like, you know how to improve sales enablement or how to create a sales enabled process or something along those lines. It's like two angles that you can use for middle of funnel. Okay, so let's say the term that we're going after is how to improve sales enablement. So if you have a product that helps people improve their sales enablement, one angle you could take is actually doing kind of like a demo walkthrough of how someone wouldn't be able to improve their sales enablement with your product, and then have a call to action to say, did you like what you're seeing, you know, sign up for demo. Angle number two is you could take them through the manual process of how to improve their sales enablement, and then angle it and say, well, instead of doing all that, you could just sign up for our product, we do this than the third, we automate this entire process for you sign up for a demo. And I know this is a common occurrence because as much as I love bottom of funnel, like there are only so many bottom of funnel terms before you exhaust everything. But here's when you start to get crafty with angles and things like that when you move up to the middle of funnel, because there are a lot more middle of funnel terms. And there are bottom of funnel terms. But again, it's really all about how you angle that content in order to be able to drive that demo. And with top of funnel content. It's really just, again, educating the customer as much as possible in order to be able to get them into something gated not pushing the gated thing right out the door. It's like, for example, there's no reason you shouldn't be getting a case study. Like I don't know who I'm calling out right now. But underneath the case study dude, like, let it go, you need to enable your potential prospects to be able to get a vision of what life is like, using your product case studies does that it's like no, they're not going to put in their email to get a case study from you. Like that's something you should be willing and able to give to them to show them value. Here's how our company can help you. Right. So I think, as it relates to just creating top of funnel pieces, it's just you want to educate them as much as possible. Again, if you can get a subject matter expert to give some golden nuggets of information or contrary and opinion, just deep expertise on the topic, it's going to shine through your content every time. So different stages of the funnel requires, I don't want to say a different level of expertise. But it just requires you to get deeper and deeper as you go down the funnel. Again, you know, top of funnel content can be pretty high level because the person doesn't know exactly what their problem is yet. And then as you get to the middle of funnel, they're starting to Okay, I have this problem. I'm not quite sure how to solve it. But let me look and then bottom funnel like they're ready to sign up. It's just about understanding the buyer journey, and then understanding how to angle each piece of content based on where they are in their journey. AJ Wilcox And I think the mark of success of a good funnel strategy is you start to see demos along the way, even when they haven't made it to the bottom of the funnel yet. Absolutely. And it's because you're answering the right questions, you're addressing the right things as you go. Yes. 100%. Alright, so as the time of recording thought leader ads at LinkedIn have not come out yet. The the date that I've heard is June 15, of 2023. LinkedIn is going to be releasing these new ads where we can start promoting personal posts rather than posts that come from companies. How would you see this as affecting the content sharing strategy? Lashay Lewis Yeah, I think this is going to be huge for product evangelists. Because this is something I've said time and time again, it's like personal profiles, at least from what I've seen, like do better than business profiles on LinkedIn. So I think this is going to be huge for people that are product evangelists for their company. If you're in leadership right now, and you don't have a product evangelist, you and you're actually running a LinkedIn strategy, you may want to think about getting one because I just feel like this feature is just empowering us more. And when I say us, I mean like individuals, it's just empowering us to be able to really become influencers in this b2b space. I know that's something that's, you know, arisen. And you know, a lot of people think that's only for B2C. But influencers are actually rising in the b2b space, I think it's a viable strategy that SaaS companies should probably start paying close attention to there's a reason that LinkedIn is coming out with this feature, because they see what's going on. I want to say if you stay ahead of the curve, you're going to be good to go. I'm not gonna say like, oh, this is a, you know, there's a certain time period that we're going to put on this. But I would definitely say like start paying more attention to having product evangelists in your company, because this is going to do nothing but push that initiative even more. AJ Wilcox Oh, beautiful. Okay, so in our pre interview chat, as we were talking, you mentioned several times where you've seen this work very well with Facebook Ads. I know that things that tend to work well on Facebook Ads are probably going to work really well, if not better on LinkedIn Ads. Yeah. Can you share one prominent example of this process working with Facebook? Lashay Lewis Yeah, for sure. So I have a client that's in the accessibility space. So basically, software that kind of helps websites become compliant with accessibility to people with disabilities and things like that. So one of the issues where he had a lot of top of funnel content, again, a lot of traffic, but it wasn't generating any demos. So what we kind of set in place was to run Facebook ads to our bottom from a content that we hadn't, you know, newly created, and what that did for us, at least I found anecdotally, like it helped us rank higher in Google. And it also gave us insight into which bottom of funnel pieces specifically, we're going to convert before others. So the reason that's so important is because if you know which content pieces are going to convert, even before they're ranking in Google, like you can put a priority on those specific content pieces. So just imagining having a crystal ball, and being able to see into the future and knowing this piece of content is gonna rank. One of those pieces of content is going to convert if you're able to rank it in Google. So that's how even getting into like how I methodically rank content, everything I do is data driven. If I'm running Facebook Ads to a bottom of funnel piece, and I'm seeing like, it's actually converting from the Facebook Ads, good chance that if I rank it organically, it's going to convert as well, it's probably going to convert even better. So that's really how I put a prioritization on which articles I rank. I'm not just guessing, and I'm really being very data driven. And it's like, if I see, you know, this article got to conversions. Okay, let's put a priority on ranking this piece. And then, you know, I know we're talking about Facebook ads, but this relates to Google Ads, because I know a lot of SaaS companies are running paid ads as well. So this relates to Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads, like right, so it's like, your paid ads strategy can actually fuel your organic strategy. So if I could dig into this really quick, like, another I know, we talked about two mindset shifts already. Mindset shift number three, stop looking at paid and organic as competitors and start looking at them as teammates, right? So your paid ads can actually fuel your organic strategy. So if you're currently running a Google Ads strategy, go to your AdWords account, and take a look at the content that's actually converting right now. And ask yourself, can I create a blog post around the same topic. And the thing is, it's like, once you do create that blog post, and let's say you rank it, you now have two pieces of real estate on the first page to be able to drive demos. Again, it's like Google AdWords will give you a forward view of what is already converting for us. Let's take that and use that to drive organic strategy. And again, it's just a leaky bucket. It's like something that companies are doing, you know, running ads, but they're not using that to fuel the organic side, they're just like, okay, these are two separate things, we need to keep them like that, when in all actuality, a lot of your organic strategy is probably rooted in what you've been doing on the paid ads side. AJ Wilcox I love that. Alright, so if LinkedIn advertisers want to start using the strategy that we've been talking about, where do they need to start? Lashay Lewis If I could give a step by step order on what they need to do? The first thing to do would be do a content audit, right? So do a content audit of the website. First, understand if you even have any bottom of funnel content, okay. So if you do have bottom of funnel content is it written for conversions? Again, defer earlier into the episode of how I you know, mentioned that bottom of funnel content should be written. If you feel like it's written for conversions, that's when you start retargeting people that are already in your ecosystem with those bottom of funnel ads. So it's really just as simple as that. It's really no more complicated than that. It's just really about putting your bottom of funnel glasses on and just starting to understand how these pieces play a role. And then just start incorporating them into your LinkedIn strategy. Just like that from top to bottom. AJ Wilcox And then what comes next, I know you've got some cool resources that you've shared on your LinkedIn profile. You even had some posts go very viral, where you were sharing some free resources. Can you talk a little bit about those and share with us those resources? Lashay Lewis Yeah, so one of the things I didn't mention is one of the places to start is by you know, like we said earlier in the episode is like consolidating your information. So I want to say three months ago, I came out with a content marketing dashboard that helps SaaS companies easily be able to consolidate all of their information for freelance writers, for consultants that come on board for agencies for you know, whomever, so I have that resource. And you can find that at authorityplug.com/content-dashboard, just go there, grab the dashboard, it's a notion, it's really going to help you think through who your ICP is, if you have multiple ICPs. It's going to help you run through that has quite a few things in it. It has a tracking dashboard that lets you set up your Looker Studio to be able to see which specific pieces of content are driving demos. But all in all, you want to start with making sure your information is consolidated how we talked about earlier in the episode. So more than welcome to go and grab a dashboard. That's going to be the first step into everything that we've talked about. AJ Wilcox Oh, and this is such a cool resource. I want to encourage everyone who's listening, go grab this dashboard. Lashay is giving this away for free. And it's awesome, Lashay Lewis For sure. And for anybody that kind of wants to visually see this methodology in place, again, what we talked about how starting, you know, with bringing somebody in through LinkedIn as top of the funnel, and then retargeting them with middle funnel and bottom of funnel content, I have a visual framework that will be linked in the show notes that gives a wonderful visual of kind of like, how this would work, what type of topics are considered top of funnel, middle funnel and bottom of funnel? And exactly just how to, you know, run through this process. AJ Wilcox And it works really well with the dashboard as well. They work well in tandem. Lashay Lewis Yes. And you know, speaking of that AJ like even on LinkedIn, like I come up with visual frameworks multiple times per week. So anybody that wants to learn content strategy through visual because I'm a visual learner. So anybody that's a visual learner that wants to learn content strategy, or more about how a strategy can fuel your LinkedIn ads, definitely follow me on LinkedIn, I dropped visual frameworks every week. AJ Wilcox Oh, I love that such a cool resource. Alright, so we are going to link to Lashay's dashboard and the visual framework, as well as her on LinkedIn. So make sure you go and follow her go check out these free resources. You don't want to miss that. All right. And then finally, there's the question I like to ask people that I'm interviewing, what are you most excited about personally, right now? Lashay Lewis I would say, probably my fitness journey. That's the thing that's really been fueling me. It's gotten my mental health so much better. And I've heard people say this so much. It's like, just the discipline. And everything that I've learned from fitness is just bleeding over into business. It's really bleeding over in every aspect of my life. So the thing I'm most excited about personally, is definitely what I've been doing as it relates to fitness and mental health, for sure. AJ Wilcox So cool. All right. And then what about professionally, what are you most excited about in your business right now, Lashay Lewis I'm most excited about being able to partner with B2B SaaS companies on creating their content strategy, like, content strategy, to me is just so fun. It's just like my zone of genius. The thing I'm most excited about is my consultancy, for sure. Just being able to really touch a lot of people. Honestly, when I first started this, I'm like, well, you know, how much of an impact and I really have, I'm really just talking about marketing and sales and things like that. But to read the endless amount of messages I get on a daily basis, and the emails I get, and just how I've been able to impact people in their processes and how they've been able to just achieve so many results, just from the basic knowledge that I think is basic, but to other people's gold. Yes. But just from the knowledge, I've been able to share just how it's impacting people like it's really bigger than marketing. When you take a step back and look at it. It's amazing. So I look forward to continue to provide value to anybody that's willing to listen. AJ Wilcox Well, let's share we are cheering you on. Thanks so much for dropping all of this gold. It's all stuff in your mind that's simple marketing, but honestly, so much of this was groundbreaking. So thank you so much for sharing it with the LinkedIn Ads Show audience. Lashay Lewis Thank you for having me. AJ Wilcox All right, I'vegot the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. AJ Wilcox So Lashay mentioned her content dashboard. So check right below in the show notes, you'll see the links to her content dashboard. I also put a link to Lashay's awesome LinkedIn post about her visual framework, she actually walks you through an example of gongs marketing that I think you're going to love, so check that out. You'll also see a link to her LinkedIn profile o go follow where there. Ask to connect and all that. If you're new to LinkedIn ads, or you know anyone who is check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning, you'll see the link right there in the show notes as well. It's by far the lowest cost and the highest quality course out there. If this is your first time listening, welcome, and make sure to hit that subscribe button if you want to hear more of this. But if this is not your first time, I would encourage you please do rate and review the podcast. It helps us share the show with more people who are going to find it valuable. And it's by far the best way that you can say thank you for everything we put into the show. With any questions, suggestions or corrections, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Demographics & Analytics Episode Bidding Episode Relevancy Score Episode Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!   Show Transcript Are you having trouble spending your budgets on LinkedIn? It's a common problem. And we're talking about how to spend your daily budgets without getting gouged on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics! One of the challenges that we regularly face with LinkedIn Ads is difficulty actually spending our defined budget, it's actually really easy to spend your full budget if you don't mind paying too much for your ad traffic. But we're operating on the assumption that you're a sophisticated marketer that doesn't want to overpay. So on today's show, we're going to talk about all the aspects of spending your budget and how to do it efficiently. First, in the news, Shae on our team, she is winning every award right now for finding new stuff, she noticed that some of the accounts she's working on have a new UI change, where when you hover over a campaign group name, or a campaign name, the edit button appears right underneath. And this has been really confusing to advertisers for a long time. Because if you know, if you click on the actual campaign name or the campaign group name, it assumes you want to see the performance underneath that and the ads underneath it and not access the settings. So how many confused clicks have happened over the years where someone clicks on the campaign name, because they want to get to the settings just to realize that they are now in the wrong place. And they have to hit the back button. I bet that there have been collectively 10s of years wasted on that particular oddity in the user experience here. So the fact that we have a nice easy edit button, right, as soon as you hover over, you don't have to hit the three dots over to the right, I think is actually going to save a lot of time and a lot of headaches. Like I mentioned, this is only in some of our accounts so it's probably on a rollout. I would imagine that everyone listening will probably have it within two, three weeks. Corey on our team also noticed something and honestly, he actually noticed this month's back, and I made a note and I just forgot to tell you guys, so here we go being transparent. It used to be that we could get ads approved that had up to three emojis in the ad. But now he realized that we're limited to two emojis, unless it's a video ad. We don't know how many more emojis that we can stick in a video ad. But we know that it's more than two. So Cory, thanks so much for pointing that out. I wanted to quickly highlight a review that's been left here on the show, Mony Chhim, who's a LinkedIn Ads specialist out of Toulouse, France. He left the review, "Best podcast for LinkedIn Ads. Great podcast. Thank you, AJ." Hey, Mony, I hope I'm pronouncing your name right. Thanks so much for taking me up on my invitation to leave the show review. I really appreciate it. You rock. All right, anyone who's a regular listener, I want to invite you please do leave us a review, I want to shout you out live as well. All right on to the subject at hand. Let's hit it. First, I think we need to define what budget means because there are so many different definitions to be aware of the first meaning of budget is your actual budget. This is the money that you have set aside as a company to spend on LinkedIn Ads. So for instance, if your boss comes to you, or your VP of marketing or whatever, and says you have $15,000 a month to spend on LinkedIn Ads, that's your actual budget. Now that actual budget is going to be dispersed among several different campaigns most likely, then we have a campaigns daily budget. This is the daily budget that set on the campaign level. And this is mostly what we're going to be talking about today. LinkedIn allows itself to overspend your campaigns daily budget by I think 50%. So this isn't really a hard and fast rule. But we rely mostly on these campaign daily budgets, then there's also a lifetime campaign budget. Now this is where you can kind of just give money to a campaign and set it and forget it walk away. As soon as it's spent all of your lifetime budget, then it will pause the campaign. Now, I will admit we don't use lifetime budgets very often because I see it as being very much a lazy way to manage LinkedIn. And of course, we're not lazy and how we manage. But this is a tool that you actually have in your tool belt. Alright, so with spending full budget, like I mentioned in the intro, it's really easy to spend your entire daily budget on LinkedIn, but I guarantee you that you will pay too much in the process. What you do here is that you set all of your campaigns to the default bidding method, which is called maximum delivery. And whatever you have set as your daily budget, the system will bid as high as it needs to to spend that entire budget. So even if it has to bid $1,000 CPM, it'll do it. And if you're a regular listener, you know that max delivery bidding is the most expensive way to pay for your LinkedIn traffic 90% of the time. But if you're like me, and you don't want to pay LinkedIn more than you have to for ad traffic, you'll want to bid manually. Now, one of the results of bidding manually is that you'll set your daily budget and your bid, but if that bid isn't strong enough to get enough impressions to yield enough clicks to actually spend your budget, then you won't hit it. For more insight, specifically into bidding to get lowest costs on LinkedIn, go back and listen to and this is a recent episode, Episode 89. That's all about it, and it's updated when we go super deep. I'll also mention that spending your daily budget isn't something that you actually need to do. In fact, most of the time, I don't even count on spending my daily budgets. That's because it's actually better for performance, if we set daily budgets higher than we actually want them to be. But we set the bids just low enough until it naturally spends the actual budget. And then that way, if there's a sudden influx of interest or activity on the platform, it can naturally overspend a little bit, but I know other days, it'll understand. Alright, so let's say that you're not hitting your daily budgets, or you're just not spending as much as you want to be. Well, it's important to understand the levers that you have to pull and what actually determines how much you're going to spend. So the four levers that you have in spending your daily budget are number one, your audience size, number two, your click through rates, number three, your bid, and number four, your audience activity level. Here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into exactly how to find which of these levers needs to be pulled to fix your spending struggles. 6:44 The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment. Do you want a return on that? Well consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years. And our unique scientific approach to ads management, combined with our proprietary tools allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency or in house team or digital ads hire. Plus or official LinkedIn partners. To apply to work with us just navigate to B2Linked.com/apply. And we'd absolutely love the chance to get to chat with you. All right, let's jump into how do we figure out which of these elements is actually holding your LinkedIn ads account back. Our first lever here is audience size. Now we want to look at the audience size of the campaign, which you can do by hitting edit on the campaign settings, it'll show you there in the upper right hand corner. If you don't have anything to compare to, you may want to look at other campaigns that you've run in the past and how much they were capable of spending. We really like audience sizes to be between 20,000 to 80,000. But this is a general guide because we know that if you have an audience of 20,000, and your budget is $15,000 a month, there's just no way you're actually going to spend on that audience. Or if you do, you're going to spend way too much for the traffic you get. So you want to go and compare to another known similar audience size to see what it's capable of spending. And then you can ask yourself, is my budget appropriate for the audience size that we're going after? As soon as you start bidding more than you have to for that traffic, you'll be paying too much for the traffic, we'll get a little bit deeper into that too. But let's say you find that your audience size is too small for your budget. Naturally, you'll want to look for ways that you can expand your audience, you obviously don't want to go in and start adding people who aren't part of your target audience. That doesn't make sense. But you could go and identify new audience segments that are relevant to expand your reach. The next lever we have is click through rate. So if you are bidding by the click and you're not spending your budget, you may just not have a high enough engagement rate. I'll give you an example. If you have a sponsored content ad that has an average click through rate, it'll probably be getting about .44% click through rate. And then if you go and launch an ad that actually has a .8% click through rate, you can pretty much double your budget with the same audience size. So we find out that how often your ads get clicked on and how interesting they are to your audience actually means more than just your audience size. If your ads aren't interesting enough to get the right clicks, you'll want to test new ad creative and angles and hooks and offers. You'll want to refresh your ad creative and copy. All of this until you actually find ads that perform better that get higher click through rates. And Eric, my head of marketing, he recommends testing only one thing at a time because when the change happens, you won't know what drove the performance up or down if you change multiple things at once, pull more than one lever at the same time. Something else you can do that can affect your click through rate is actually to adjust and change your targeting. If you're showing the right message, but you're showing it to the wrong audience, it's still going to be a failure. So go back and check Episode 54, where we talked all about ad demographics. You can go and check your demographics tab, look at the criteria of those that are getting served impressions, those that are clicking, and even those that are converting if you're using lead gen forms. And if you see any of those audience segments that don't make sense for your product, or service or whatever, you can start excluding them. Okay, the next level we have is your bid. So let's just assume that your click through rate is staying constant. Maybe you have an ad that's already performing well, or multiple ads that all have about the same click through rate, assuming that your bid now is what determines how many impressions that you're going to qualify to receive. And if you remember our episode 72, all about relevancy score, you'll know that it's your bid, plus your relevancy score that determine how many auctions for the impressions you win. So if you're bidding too low, you won't get enough impressions, to get enough clicks to actually spend your budget. In this case, you may need to raise your bid. If I'm launching a campaign with no prior history, I'd probably start incrementally raising my bid, depending a little bit on how much I'm off. So let's say I'm underspending, my budget by hundreds of dollars, I'm probably going to increase my bid by increments of $1. So I might go up to $7 or $8 per click. But if I'm only off by $10, $20, I might increase my bid by 10 to 50 cents. That's just an approximate level that you can start but adjust based off of how your audience reacts. But here's a word of warning for you, Audiences that are on the smaller side, raising your bid may not actually get you more traffic. You could actually just be paying more for the same traffic. So here's the methodology that I would recommend it actually approaching this test. So let's say you have a small audience, and you actually have kind of high bids, what I would do is, after about a week, I would raise my bids by 20% and I want to take note of my impression count, my clicks count, and my cost per click during that week interval. Then after that next week is over, I want to go and compare the results from that 20% bid increase. If I noticed that my impressions and my clicks increased less than 20%, then I know that increasing my bids isn't actually the answer, the audience activity, the audience size, I'm already capturing the majority of them. So bidding higher just means I'm paying more. However, if I actually increase my impressions by over 20%, then I know that the audience size isn't the limitation here. And it's actually my bid that's causing me not to spend my whole budget. So that's a test you can do it, it actually doesn't matter what audience size you're working with. It's just the smaller your audience, the more likely it is that your audience size is the issue. Okay, let's jump to the fourth one, which is your audience activity. If you have an audience of 20,000 people who never go on LinkedIn, of course, you're going to have a hard time spending your budgets. We know that some audience segments tend to be more active on the platform, and therefore create more ad inventory that gives you more opportunities for your ads to show and you'll get more impressions and more clicks. We pulled an example from two of our accounts. With one account, we're targeting dentists. And we've noticed that it's actually kind of hard to spend money on dentists and medical professionals like doctors. And I would imagine that this is an audience activity issue. So we grabbed some stats, and I want to compare them side by side. We have dentists versus marketers. The audiences were similar. The dentists were about 30,000 and the marketers were about 25,000. So it's not quite apples to apples as a comparison, but you'll see it's close enough that we can draw some conclusions here. On dentists, we spent $238 during that week, and on marketers, we spent $122. So we spent about half on marketers, but look at this reach that we got. With dentists we only reached 1300 of these people that's unique dentists who received an impression that week, but marketers we reached 1800. So 1300 versus 1800. And then we looked at the frequency. We could see see that marketers received an average frequency this week. And sorry, I'm saying week but I actually mean month this was done over the course of a month, the frequency of marketers was 2.74. But the frequency for dentists was only 1.69. So with marketers, we spent less to reach more and have a higher frequency. So all of that to say, we know that marketers tend to be more active on the platform than dentists. And that allows us to reach more of them at a lower cost and reach them more often. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up so stick around. 15:42 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. All right, we have the episode all about LinkedIn's demographics and analytics. That's episode 54. You'll see all of these links down there in the show notes. There's also the episode on bidding that was not too long ago, it was episode 89. And then the episode on relevancy score. That was episode 72. Now, if you or anyone you know, is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, go check out the course that I did on LinkedIn Learning. And you'll see a link down there in the show notes that takes you right there. It's by far the highest quality and the lowest cost course out there. If this is your first time listening, welcome, we're excited to have you here. Make sure to hit that subscribe button. But if this is not your first time, if you're a regular listener, please do rate and review the podcast. Most of the time, these reviews are done on Apple podcasts. So I'd encourage you to do it there. That is by far the best way that you can say thank you for us putting out this content week after week. With any questions, suggestions or corrections on what we've talked about. Reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

While considering various strategies for attracting website traffic, you might be exploring numerous possibilities, particularly those requiring paid advertising. However, I'd be willing to bet that LinkedIn Ads isn't one of the tools you're utilizing. AJ Wilcox is the host of the LinkedIn Ads Show, an expert in the field, and the owner of B2Linked, a LinkedIn Ads agency that has $150 million in ad spend under its belt. He joins the show today to discuss some of the surprising growth opportunities on the dark horse of social media platforms. Listen in as AJ shares what you need to know in order to understand LinkedIn better, whether there is anything worth exploring for your eCommerce business, and why it is the easiest platform to go viral on. We also discuss best practices for LinkedIn Ads and organic content, what you need to know about running paid ads on the platform, and some of the ways entrepreneurs of all kinds can leverage LinkedIn for their businesses. So tune in, get ready to take some notes, and prepare to elevate your LinkedIn game to a whole new level. You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: https://bit.ly/3BJomGr Interested in our Private Community for 7-Figure Store Owners?  Learn more here.   Want to hear about new episodes and eCommerce news round-ups?  Subscribe via email.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Top Rank Marketing's Site Lee Odden's LinkedIn Lee Odden's Instagram Follow AJ on LinkedIn   NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript AJ Wilcox Are you using influencer marketing community and thought leadership as part of your LinkedIn Ads strategy? We dive into these topics and more on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. AJ Wilcox Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. Today I have a special treat for you. Lee Odden has specialized in B2B marketing for his almost entire career. And I'm grateful to call him a friend. He and I have spoken at many of the same B2B events. Although I have to admit he's oftentimes the keynote, while I'm one of the breakout speakers. But, I've always looked up to him as a mentor and a thought leader and a friend. Today, we have a wide ranging conversation covering everywhere from thought leadership to influencer marketing and building communities in B2B, and I promise as a B2B marketer, you'll get a lot out of this. I wanted to highlight a review here by Alessia Negro. She's a senior sales and marketing executive in the hospitality industry out of Dublin, Ireland. Alessia says, "Absolutely great podcast. I have learned a lot about LinkedIn from this podcast. I think whoever wants to learn LinkedIn ads should follow it." Alessia, thanks so much for the kind words. And I do agree. Although I realized I'm a bit biased. And if you're a regular listener, I want to feature you so make sure to leave a review. And I'll shout you out live here. All right. Without further ado, let's hit it. Alright, we've got Lee Odden, co founder of TopRank Marketing. Lee, thanks so much for joining us. We're super excited to have you here. Lee Odden It's great to be here, AJ. Good to see you. AJ Wilcox Alright, so first off, tell us a little bit more about yourself. Anything that I didn't cover in that rather short and sweet intro. Lee Odden I started in marketing, and basically the late 90s. I was actually got into the website sales game selling websites over the phone to small businesses, believe it or not, people would fax us their brochures and we'd make a website out of that. And then of course, people started asking how are we going to get traffic to these websites that you're making us? And that's where I learned about SEO, you know, about creating doorway pages and, you know, creating different web pages for different search engines AltaVista excite Lycos hotpot, you know, no one has heard of those. But then Google came on the scene and linking, and content became more important blogging, social media, and really, over the last 10 years really leaned into the whole idea of CO creating content with influencers. So ultimately, what we tried to do is help customers be the best answer help our clients, b2b tech companies mostly be the best answer for their customers. And it's worked out really well. And, you know, it's kind of funny, on the path from being a really small agency to serving small customers to now serving large enterprise brands. I took that advice myself, right. So I started blogging, and I started doing the kinds of things to make myself known in the industry as a magnet to the agency. You know what I mean by speaking at events and being active on social and connecting with people who were influential to make myself influential, you know, and it's been a fun ride. And when I'm not doing marketing stuff, I'm usually running running is kind of been my thing during COVID. Basically, when I'm actually training for my first marathon, which is going to happen in four weeks. So I'm pretty excited about that. Oh, that's so AJ Wilcox Exciting! Alright, so what's your preparation for the marathon look like right now? I know, you start to do a lot more mileage as you go. Are you doing like low high mileage right now? Lee Odden Yeah, my highest mileage will be tomorrow. But I did 23 miles last Saturday. And I'll probably do 23.5 or something like that tomorrow. I don't need to do much more. Because the whole race is 26. Yes. So yeah, I've been running more than 13 miles for the last seven weeks or so. I've even run a couple of half marathon races just as a workout, which is kind of a crazy idea. Because a year ago, I was wondering whether I could even run 13 miles, let alone run one quickly. And quickly is subjective quickly to me. Not quickly, compared to a lot of friends of mine that I have out there that are runners that are just smoking it, but it's a great way to get out. It's a disciplined thing. It's a lifestyle thing. Now for me, I feel odd if I haven't run that day. And so it's good for your health. And it's great to have goals, right? Yes, it's great to work towards a goal and having a commitment to a thing that takes a long time is incredibly rewarding when you've been able to reach those milestones, right? And also you connect with a community of other like minded people. And now I'm starting to get all these Instagram posts from running communities with these inside jokes about running and it's like, oh my god, this is so funny, but nobody else cares, nobody else cares. It's fun. AJ Wilcox Well, It's so fulfilling, I think to accomplish something physically, that is hard that you know, other people can't. Before a knee surgery, I used to be a runner. And so I do a half marathon every year and an Olympic trial. And I love those kinds of things. I loved accomplishing something physically, that's awesome. Plus, it gives you insight, because you're already community minded, which we'll talk into more, but it gives you something to compare and think about, as you're developing communities around an interest that people have, you can mentally I think, compare it to like, oh, for me, this is running. But for someone else this is whatever the community is. Lee Odden You know, that's really important insight. There's a lot of value in metaphor analogy, when trying to break down new or complex ideas into something familiar for people. Because in order for those ideas to be adopted, they have to be communicated in a way that people will be willing to receive. And so yeah, that's a great point running as metaphor, or, you know, overcoming challenges. A lot of people, I'm inspired by our fitness people, but what I'm inspired by them about isn't so much about the fitness it's about overcoming challenges and worldview, and, you know, being resilient and those sorts of things. AJ Wilcox Perfect. So jumping back here into B2B, how did you originally get interested in b2b? How did you land? Because my understanding is you're exclusively B2B with your clients, or do you have some VC? Lee Odden Exactly. So my agency top rank marketing did start as SEO and PR firm, I had previously mostly consumer experience in marketing doing SEO for consumer websites. And my partner, though, had been working mostly with B2B tech companies as a director of marketing, VP of marketing. And so over time, well, through her knowledge and experience, I learned a lot more about B2B. And the market was responding in terms of inbound interest in our services from B2B companies. And I have a fun story about the big leap early in our business, we were working remotely. And I was working in my unfinished basement, right. And I had a desk down there. And I got a call and someone asked me if I would come speak at their conference, this company was fortune 15 company. So I had been blogging, I spoke a little bit, people knew about me being able to talk about SEO and public relations. So that was a unique intersection. And they wanted me to come speak at their event. And I spoke one morning to their marketing people. And then they said, Come back tomorrow and talk to all of our PR people. So they were a company that was so big, they brought all their different businesses, all the marketers from their all their different businesses and had a little mini conference. And so the second day, I talked to all the PR people. And my contact said, Hey, one of our senior executives was in the room yesterday. And we wanted to know if we could engage your agency on an ongoing basis. So this is the fortune 15 company was a b2b business unit that wanted to hire us. And we were only four people I'm working out of my unfinished basement. Wow. So of course, I said, yes, absolutely, we can help you out. And we figured it out. And that was a fast track to learning about b2b and learning the language of large, complex organizations, because obviously, that's very different than working with a small or medium sized business. And that laid the groundwork for me and the people that I had to competently be able to serve other b2b companies. Right. So now, Adobe, and you know, we've had experience with companies like SAP and Oracle, I've done work for Microsoft, and a really large telecom that I cannot mention, ever, but you know, biggest one, and so on and so forth. So and LinkedIn, my God, what am I saying, we've been working with LinkedIn for gosh, almost 10 years now, providing content and SEO services. So it's been an interesting ride, and b2b is a great space, because there's so much opportunity to raise the bar, it doesn't have to mean boring, boring, there's a lot of exciting things you can do. And there's so much room for us to be able to do it with because of the longer sales cycles, emphasis on content and education and that sort of thing. AJ Wilcox Well, I'm glad you shared someof them, I get the feeling that a lot of the kinds of clients that you were with are the kind that don't want you saying that you work with them. So it's really good to understand, and from my understanding a lot of the community and many of the thought leaders within LinkedIn that we hear from, I won't say created by you that you're the one behind them, but you're kind of the inspiration there. Do you have any comment or anything to share on that? Lee Odden Well, certainly, it's one thing to make a decision that people within your company should have greater visibility that you want to grow their influence, that you want to facilitate social interaction. But it's another thing to do that with intent with intent in a way that will achieve a particular outcome. So that requires doing some homework developing a strategy and architecting Okay, exactly how are we going to execute this in a way that is best going to accomplish the goal that we're after? So it's not just about tweeting more, or doing a LinkedIn live every once in a while. It's like, okay, what's the topic? And what is the anchor topic? What are the derivative topics? What are the conversations that we can repurpose from that? Who are the content collaborators or influencers on that topic that we can connect with, not only for co creation, but distribution, and so architecting all that stuff is really where the most magic comes from. And then for some companies, we do write content for them. But like I said, a lot of the magic comes in through the strategy and the architecture of the all that, and then of course, the ongoing optimization of performance. And then of course, yeah, and then some content here and there. AJ Wilcox Beautiful. I love it. Alright, so talking about thought leadership, specifically, tell us about why B2B marketers should be investing in being seen as a thought leader. Lee Odden So if you mean is, like B2B marketer, as an executive at a company or B2B marketer, like you and me are B2B marketers. AJ Wilcox Yeah, I think a little bit of everything. I think, executives, I think the frontline workers, everyone in between, like, what's the value? Lee Odden Absolutely. So there's a lot of value in that. We all are familiar with the idea, I think Nielsen came out with this research about how people don't trust brands, and they don't trust advertising. And of course, that's been repeated, by different folks since and it still is a challenge in combination with the overwhelming amount of information available to us. I don't know about you, but my email inbox is more of a monster now than it ever was. I mean, just keeping up is crazy. The social channels and people that I follow, I made a lot of effort to craft who I curate, and listen to, but it's just overwhelming amounts of information. I can only imagine what it might be for other folks who haven't had expertise in curation, right. So being a thought leader being a source of truth, for people who are in need, and let's face it, if you're in marketing, you're in need of up to date information every day, right? Ours is a dynamic industry. And so it's super important and to be competent in our industry, it's really very important that we connect with people that are on the forefront of what's new, what's trending, what's relevant. And so being a thought leader helps you as a person who is capable of original thought, who has something to offer, because that's kind of a prerequisite here, and being able to provide value to others in the industry. So that manifests as community building. It manifests as, you know, customers coming to you saying, hey, AJ, I've been listening to your podcast, and I've heard you talk about LinkedIn ads in this way or that way. It's like, you know, we're actually now in a position to get some help. I'm sure that happens all the time. Natalie, I can tell you from personal perspective, I've had it happen. A million times, it feels like where people say, Haley, I saw you speak last week, I saw you speak 10 years ago. And this is people who want to hire my agency, because I'm when I speak, I tell stories about the work the agency does, as well as just best practices, but also people who want to work for me will say, Yeah, you know, I saw you speak, I've been following your blog. And I'm just wondering if there's an opening, oh, my goodness, this person's amazing. And they're coming to us, you know. So for other folks, if you're an executive at a company, if you want to be listened to, if you want to be relevant, it's not enough for your own brands marketing, to go and put out information you think your customers need to know, buyers are looking for sources of truth. buyers are looking for people, humans that they can relate to, that they can subscribe to, so to speak. And if you have subject matter experts, if you are a subject matter expert, and you have something to offer, then it makes sense for you to go down that thought leadership path and make a connection and create value for those folks out in the industry because you know what they desperately need it. And they're overwhelmed with other information. And so you can actually provide them a service. And guess what, what's going to come back to you is new business. What's going to come back to you is community what's going to come back to you is connection with people who can make things happen. And AJ Wilcox What I hear from you is you actually have to have something to say in order to be a thought leader. So don't strive to be a thought leader for thought leader sake. But strive to be a great business professional, a skilled expert in your field, and then take that to share with others. Lee Odden Yeah, and so there's two things I'd say too, if you don't have that yet, if you're not there yet. I feel like if you're Junior in New York career and you feel like thought leadership is in your future. Two things. One, if you don't have a lot of resources, you could document your journey towards thought leadership. And that actually could help you be a thought leader, as a junior person, you could connect with others who are already thought leaders, they could do things like interviews, you could do things like, get quotes from them, or whatever. And so you can document that journey as you are learning more and more about a particular subject matter. And, you know, hey, I experimented with this. And I found this as an outcome, or I talked to this person. And here's some insight that they shared, I noticed in the news, they're talking about this. And here's what I think about that. documenting that journey can actually help you become a thought leader. The other thing is, if you do have resources, you're at a brand. And you don't know how to do this, you can certainly hire an expert, like an agency, or a PR firm or someone like us who can help you develop a plan for thought leadership, maybe even provide some of the content. And that doesn't happen that often. But it can. AJ Wilcox That's a great point. All right. So we've talked about thought leadership as individuals, what about getting your B2B brand to be seen as a thought leadership brand? Do you have any thoughts? Lee Odden Yeah, absolutely. You know, for companies, it's a huge differentiator in a crowded marketplace to be thought of first, when companies have a problem, and they're thinking of solution providers, right. And thought leadership is something especially in B2B. But you know, in general, it's useful from a marketing PR perspective. But in B2B, especially, these are large considered purchases. So you're not just looking for the best solution, you're looking for a solution that you know, is going to be relevant, and maybe innovative and important for you in the long run. So if a brand invest in thought leadership, and what that means is you're articulating a point of view, and it's validated by third parties. So that means that industry publications and industry influencers that are validating the ideas that you're putting forth, you're putting out original research, you're pointing out points of view, you're creating opportunities for other people who are important voices and trusted voices in the industry to have conversations with your executives with people that represent your brand. And that kind of combination of information, helps people subscribe to your religion, so to speak, they subscribe to your point of view. And they start to rely in trust on you as the source of truth. So a great example is Edelman puts out the trust research. Edelman is a huge, huge agency, obviously, they have a lot of resources. But it's like, you know, you can rely on Edelman's research about how people trust brands or not, year after year, because they continue to put out that research and they have other marketing conversations around that. For our small part. You know, we put out a report on B2B influencer marketing. And it's really been a great way for people to know that there is data, thoughtfulness and expertise behind the fact that we're a source of solution when it comes to working with influencers or content in the B2B marketing space, because we are connecting with third party entities influencers and media to corroborate those ideas, right? So brands is thought leaders super important. If someone's got a problem, don't you want them to think of you first, as a solution? I totally agree. AJ Wilcox I think especially in a crowded marketplace, where you have 15 vendors that you can go to for a CRM and information security service, of course, you're gonna gravitate towards the one that you feel like you have the best relationship with. And I think that comes from the thought leadership that comes from community that comes from being a voice that people want to hear. Absolutely. So I think you've touched a little bit here on parts of the strategy. But if someone wanted to start becoming a thought leader, or having their company be seen as a thought leader, what are the steps, the components that you would tell them? Like, here's the strategy for how you actually start to implement this? Lee Odden That can be a really big answer. So I'll be succinct. If I can, I think the first thing you got to do is, you know, specify what is it that you want to be a thought leader about? There's got to be topic specificity. You can't be a thought leader about all things, right? That's just not resource practical. But you've got to identify that thing that sits at the intersection of how you want to be known and what customers are most interested in. And so be a thought leader about that thing, right? Because that represents what's in demand and relevant to your solutions. And as you make that determination, then all things flow from that. What kind of content will you create? What kind of connections will you make? What kind of cadence will you publish and interact at right? So you get an idea about the resources that are needed in order to put something like that into action, right? There's got to be some consistency and continuity of message from thought leader. So in other words, if I talk about 10 Different things over a period of time, it's like, well, yeah, he talks about a lot of stuff like I guess marketing. But if I'm talking about, you know, B2B content, B2B content marketing, b2b content marketing, I mean, I'm talking about derivative ideas around that concept. But really, it's like, wow, B2B content marketing or B2B influencer marketing, people will come to know you as that very specific thing. So you've got to have some choices made about the topic derivative topics, you've got to think about the publishing platform or platforms, you know, is it the company website, the blog, or social channel? As the center of your hub? And the spokes? Are your distribution channels? Okay, where am I going to amplify this? Am I going to amplify through email? Am I going to pull people in through ads? Am I going to do some media relations and talk about these stories with journalists in the industry? Am I going to connect with industry experts? Am I going to partner with them and collaborate with any of them on initiatives? We have what we like to call best answer strategies, how to be the best answer is really kind of a thought leadership play. And you can do things like this is a practical tactic things. Okay, so let's say you want to be the best answer for a particular thing. It's like, okay, Fast Track way to get on the radar of the most important people in the industry, about that topic is to do what we call an honoring post, right? So it's like a list where the 25 top cybersecurity experts, right, I'm a cybersecurity provider of some kind and finance, right. And so here are the top finance cybersecurity experts. I don't even know if I could find 25 of those, but I'll do my best. And then I reach out to them. And I start to create a relationship with those folks. And I'll simultaneous to that, I might do a small version research, what are the trends, what's happening, and I'll invite those folks to be a part of that research. I'll start a podcast. And as I gain momentum, I might do something like, you know, a list of disparate resources like books, conferences, communities, and so on, and so forth. So I become like this destination around the topic. And that seems like a lot of work. But guess what, there's a lot of competition. And to be the best answer, guess what you've kind of have to be the best source of information, I would just say, as far as a thought leadership strategy, whether it's just you, or whether it's your brand, you don't go it alone, that would be one of the biggest mistakes. And that's why I suggest the idea of connecting with other industry experts, and finding opportunities to collaborate with them, you can start a podcast and become a thought leader on the thing that the podcast is about, that's cool. But if you involve other people, that are also well known about that idea, and you can create collaboration opportunities that create mutual value for you and your collaborators, then everybody wins out true, not just you and the person or people you're collaborating with, but especially the audience that you're trying to attract and engage. AJ Wilcox Oh, so true. I think it's so easy. If you're, let's say scrolling through your LinkedIn feed, and you're saying, I want to be a thought leader, let me see what other people are doing. You see someone is running a live stream, and you're like, oh, maybe I need to run a weekly live stream, and then someone else is running a podcast, and then someone else is recording videos, screenshare and posting them to YouTube, you're like, oh, I have to have a YouTube channel. And when you start taking from all of these ideas, you overextend yourself, because yeah, there isn't a strategy. So what I appreciate so much about what you shared is like this actually is a specific strategy where you can put the blinders on and ignore some of the other methods that other people are doing work on your own. And then you won't overextend yourself, like you can actually do this. Lee Odden Something I learned a long time ago about, you know, being known about a thing is one element, one leg of the stool is document your success, and then duplicate. So be specific, like you're saying, be specific on a particular or very specific channel, grow community on that channel. And you'll get to a point where it's like, wow, now it makes sense for me to extend into some other channels, right. And you can duplicate what you learned in that one channel into others. And that way, you can manage resources appropriately. And you create that continuity of message. And you'll be putting forward the most effective tactics for communication, as opposed to being in a constant state of experimentation. AJ Wilcox Yes. And when you look at what everyone else is doing, a lot of times they have a team that's helping them. And so I think that you can do this all yourself, you know, by the time you've done what you've talked about, which is really building a community around one channel or one thing, by the time it's ready to start expanding into other channels and taking on more things. By that time. You've probably built up more of a team and it's a She realistic, you Lee Odden could do that. Yeah. And then just thinking of myself, I started blogging, my only thing was I just started blogging, I could not write. And I started blogging in that blogging. You know, I always made mention of other people, I was just a way to have a conversation. And then social media came on. And people that read the blog started following me on Twitter, and then LinkedIn. And then I started speaking, and then I wrote a book and you know, just grew organically 100% organically. I did have help with the book. But with the rest, I publish all my own social stuff, I do all my own speaking stuff. And so it does make sense, at least in my case to branch out, you can get help to facilitate and expedite that stuff. But as an individual person, I think topics specificity specific channel is a great thing to get started with and expand from there. AJ Wilcox Oh, amen to that. Here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive back into the interview. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. AJ Wilcox Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment. You want a return on some of that investment? Consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, the original LinkedIn ads performance agency, we've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years, and our unique scientific approach to ADS management, combined with our proprietary tools that allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency in house team, or digital ads hire plus or official LinkedIn partners. Just navigate on over to B2Linked.com/apply. And we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. All right, let's jump back into the interview with Leo. Alright, so let's shift gears now talking about influencer marketing, because I know you've done a lot with influencers. We probably see a lot of influencers in b2c we have for a long time, hate actors and celebrity involvement. But in B2B, I think this is a little fresher. And I think a little bit more new. What can you tell us about how B2B marketers should be thinking about leveraging influencers in B2B? Lee Odden We're kind of in a do more with less age, right? There's a lot of marketers pulling back right now B2B tech especially. And, you know, a lot of folks are looking for what are the most effective things I can be doing? Because the demands on delivering on mid to end to funnel KPIs, you know, forget about brand, right, are really high on people's lists. Well, the B2B Institute at LinkedIn did some research. And they found that at any given time, 95% of buyers are not in market, they're out market, right for any solution and only 5% are in a position like, yeah, we need a solution. And so that's not changed. Well, why influencers? Well, here's the thing, you know, you've got factors that are working against you, as a marketer, in this environment where you got to do more with less, we've got to produce, we've got to get results, we've got to react to this economic environment that we're in. And people are as buyers, you know, they are confronted with this information overload that we talked about before they are struggling to find single sources of truth. Who do they trust, they don't trust advertising. They don't trust brands a lot of the time, but they do trust people, they trust people that they follow. And so the idea of what would happen if you're able to connect with the most trusted voices in your industry? What if you're able to collaborate with them on creating content that was super targeted, super valuable to your buyers, and you're able to build a community of subscribers to a regular cadence of that kind of content, imagine how much more effective you'd be at reaching buyers that are actually going to pay attention, versus, you know, singularly relying on interruptive types of communications, right. And so influencers can play a very important role, not for everybody, but for a lot of companies that want to break through and want to attract and engage with buyers, that are really relying on industry experts that are influenced by people who are the thought leaders in the industry, right? And so there are very effective ways in which marketing programs can be put forward, that are creating content of value, of course, but our collaborations with these industry experts, so it's not just like every influencer is the same. It's not like I'm gonna think of a B2B marketing influencer and handling right? And Haley's, a wonderful, wonderful human being. But just because an Hanley is in a piece of ebook that we make or a video we make doesn't mean that's going to solve all problems. And handle is really broadly known as a very unique individual. She has both broad popularity, and she's actually super competent about her discipline. And so she's a unicorn in that way. So she's actually going to help satisfy bringing people in that don't haven't even heard of you, and actually start to consider you because she has that discipline, competency, about copywriting about content marketing, and that sort of stuff. But not all influencers are like that. So it's not just about working with influencers, it's about okay, how do we pair the right kinds of influencers for different stages of the buying cycle, for example, you know, the most popular influencers, those, you know, the pro influencers, they're doing keynotes. They're publishing books all the time. They're professionally famous in the B2B world, in their respective industry. Those are people you use to attract top of funnel types of outcomes. But then you work with people who are actual practitioners in an area, they can actually speak authoritatively on the discipline. So whether they're super user, whether they're a customer, or whatever, for those middle end to funnel types of content, assets, right. So you kind of line things up. So influencers are important, because everyone is influential, but everyone is influenced on a daily basis in some way. And you can architect programs that not only make your brand more relevant, and more credible, and can reach people that you're not reaching with your ads. But over time, you can build relationships with these most trusted voices in your industry in a way that they are starting to organically advocate for you. And that's priceless, right most valuable form of advertising word of mouth, if you can facilitate that as priceless. Oh, totally true. AJ Wilcox I have noticed in B2C influencers, usually they're paid off in some way. But in B2B, I see a lot of influencers, gotten through collaboration opportunities, and a lot of times money doesn't even have to exchange hands, you're doing something that's mutually beneficial to both of these companies are influencers audiences. Yeah, and you know, that's becoming more of an art to achieve that. Lee Odden So we started doing influencer marketing for B2B brands back in 2012. So back then, yes, it was true that the vast majority of influencer engagements were what we call organic. In the case of B2B influencer marketing, most of the influencers are contributing to content that lives on the brand channels. So if a person who's really well known in their particular subject matter area, could be seen in combination with a major brand, that's really credibility building for them, right. So they're creating influence for each other in that way. And so they'd be happy to do it for free, so to speak, obviously, it has to do with the ask too, if I ask someone for a quote, you know, no problem. But if I asked someone to write me 1000 word article, these days, that's probably going to cost something if I want them to write an article every month, that's gonna cost something. So it used to be maybe 90%, were organic 10% were paid way back in the day. Nowadays, it's like 60/40 60% might be organic activations, and 40% are paid. And that paid number is going up and up and up, as more people who are influential in the B2B space are creating media properties for themselves, right, they've got a really established podcast, they're part of a network of podcasts, you know, they're a blogger, or increasingly video assets of some kind, right? And so they're able to not only just say one nice thing about the brand, but they're actually able to put together a package of social distribution and content assets and this and that we're even, you know, do reports, and so on and so forth. So it's great, though, to have that mutual value, it's important to find something that you have in common with the influencer. And in some cases, they may want to contribute, because it's an easy Ask, and it aligns with what they want to do, and it doesn't cost you anything. And it could be that's the first thing you do. But then you might follow up and say, Wow, that was amazing. We'd really like to do to do this more robust thing, how much would that cost? And they're going to appreciate that. And trust me, when you pay an influencer. It's awesome, of course, for the influencer, but it's awesome for your brand, because now you've hired them. They are accountable to delivering to a specification. Whereas if you engage with people organically, and they say, Yeah, sure, I'll give you that thing by next Thursday. And if they don't, you have no recourse. You can't count on it. Right. They're not signing an agreement. So paying influencers is actually a really good thing. It's up to you to negotiate and to do your due diligence as far as who they are and their ability to deliver and have impact. AJ Wilcox Beautiful. I want to switch gears to talking about community because we've mentioned community several times. Yeah, you've put a lot of value and community over your career here in B2B, what role do you see communities playing in B2B. Lee Odden community is hugely important, I think because so many buyers are going to rely on their peers for recommendations. I mean, think you've probably had it happen I know I have. It's like, we go to remote work, and we need a new phone system that we can work, you know, so I don't know who to go to. So I asked a friend of mine, I go to a group community that I'm part of, and I say, Hey, does anybody know what's a good phone system? And this isn't real. But you know, I'm thinking of a silly example. And this happens every day. Right? And so being present with a community is important for b2b because it helps make you relevant, right? I talked about that expression being the best answer, right? Being a thought leader, being first choice means being where your customers are. And certainly your customers are part of different communities. So you have a couple of choices. You can be present in communities where your customers are, and you can exchange value, you can be a participant and you know, answer questions and interact or whatever your salespeople can or whoever, or you could create communities, right, you could say, Look, you know, we see that there's a common interest here, there's something that we can solve for. And it's not something we can do by ourselves. Why don't you join us at helping solve this problem together? Or why don't you join us on this journey to making our industry a better place, we actually are at the beginning of building a community around elevate b2b, right, elevate b2b marketing. And you know, we want to make b2b marketing a better place. And there are different messaging pillars that go along with that marketing, that is more experiential marketing, that is more inclusive, marketing that is more focused on connection, right community building, that sort of thing. So community is super important, I think, to be relevant, to be relevant. And first choice to customers in spaces where they're actually spending time. And where there can be a value exchange, right? It's one thing to provide useful content or utility to your customers through content marketing. It's another thing for you to create a place where as a brand, where your customers can connect with you, but also they can connect with each other. And there's a lot of momentum that can come from that. So I think community is super important. And when it comes to influencer marketing, same thing, you can engage with influencers on an individual basis, and that's fine. But when you can create a community of influencers that can connect with each other, in the context of your brand is solving Wow, now you have something really powerful right, that you can go to market with. And that can have a much bigger impact than these little one off campaigns, people are kind of dipping their toe in the water with here and there. Perfect. AJ Wilcox Alright, so lead, tell us what are those components to creating a community, especially as we're thinking about it for b2b? Lee Odden So as I mentioned, with, you know, thought leadership, I think that idea of topics specificity? Well, it's around the problems that you're trying to solve for, or the things that you stand for, that would be best served by the community. Right? So what's the glue that's going to hold this community together? What is the common interest that they have that aligns with that intersection of what it is that you stand for as a brand? And what's interesting to your customers, right? You also have to define who's going to be part of this community? How is the community get a function? There are other practical questions to be answered? Like, what platform are you going to use? And who are going to be your champions and your moderators? And what are the goals that you have for the community in terms of messaging penetration, in terms of size, in terms of engagement, and ultimately, you have to be accountable to some sort of ROI, right? And with any marketing initiative, those things all need to be defined, right? So sometimes community can start very intentionally. Yeah, there's communities is starting all the time where people just start in a LinkedIn, LinkedIn group or Facebook group or something like that. And it's just like, hey, and they invite a couple of other people who have a common interest. And it just starts organically and they start inviting, who do you know, that we can invite into this community and so on and so forth, or community could be an extension of an event? I think about marketing profs, and their marketing community, right, or Content Marketing Institute, has a whole community, but they also have an event, right? There's a marketing conference called PubCon that's been around. It's an SEO conference been around forever. And there's absolutely a community, you know, that is tied to that event where people you know, get to actually meet in person. So, you have to make choices about what is the purpose of the community, what are the topics that You're gonna cover what problems you're going to try and solve. And then you gotta identify some champions, some people who are going to help facilitate conversations, there's technology choices to make. And then obviously, you got to set up what kind of goals you're trying to achieve, not just for yourself, but the goals for the community itself. Well, selfishly, this AJ Wilcox is an awesome conversation, because we're actually just getting ready to launch our LinkedIn ads, courses and community all together. And so I'm paying special attention here. So thanks for the free advice. What are some of the phases that you'd actually go through in building and then scaling the community app? What should we keep in mind as we actually go to build this? Lee Odden Well, you know, again, you've got to think about some sort of milestone goals. Maybe the first phase is simply, you know, creating the architecture of the community. And as it relates to the major topics, the subtopics, and getting people involved that represent relevance and interest around those topics, inviting them to be actually be a part and then you've got to decide, okay, what are we going to offer them, right? You're so you're offering courses? Or you're offering opportunities for roundtables or discussions? Are you giving them visibility opportunities, and, you know, set some goals for that first milestone of having a certain level of participation. Maybe your first phase is very private. And no one knows about it, except, you know, those early invitees. And we've seen this demonstrated by the social networks that have all popped up all over the place over the last 20 years, or 15 years. And then maybe once you get to a certain threshold or milestone of participation, then you open it up, you know, more publicly as a phase out. And this is what I've observed being successful. One thing though, that, I think what happens is, there's a lot of excitement about anything new. And it's going to be really important to keep that excitement alive. And so you've got to allocate resources to a community manager, or managers that are not only going to be moderating stuff, but are going to be paying attention to what's the ebb and flow from a topic interest standpoint, from a content format standpoint, and adjusting and optimizing. Because if you do the same stuff, six months or a year into your community, it's probably going to peter out, right? If you're not responsive to where the community is growing and showing interest, you're, you're going to lose them probably. So hopefully, I think that's something to look forward to. That's something to anticipate from a face standpoint, maybe, you know, not every community has to start as an exclusive thing. That seems to work really well, though. And then it evolves into an inclusive thing, as there's something of more substance for people to experience, once you open the doors to all. I love it. AJ Wilcox Haley, just kind of off the wall question here for you specifically about LinkedIn ads. I mean, we've talked about communities, we've talked about thought leadership and influencers. One of the new features that's going to be coming out here in the next I would estimate one to three months that LinkedIn has are these thought leadership ads, where we're going to be able to boost personal posts, rather than rely on boosting or creating posts that come from the company for something like this coming out. What role do you see this playing? Do you have any feedback or thoughts or advice for us marketers? In thinking about the new ad format? Lee Odden I'm super excited about that. Because we know that things can get lost in the stream, but not so much about being able to put money behind a thought leadership posts for an individual. It's just like, you know, the targeting, how can we make sure how can we increase our ability for people that we want to see this thought leadership content? Well, other than through a feature like this, right. So I think that's super, super important. And, you know, we've already talked about the importance of individual thought leadership. And by the way, we did some research in our influencer marketing report about the value of executive influence and executive thought leadership at 65% of the companies that were engaging with building their executives, as thought leaders, said that that effort elevated the influence of the brand itself, right. So something like this being able to augment organic content at the individual level with LinkedIn thought leadership ads. Excellent, excellent opportunity. And, again, it'll really help people be able to be a little more intentional and targeted about what's showing up to who, and I think will really give those advertisers a big advantage over those who are relying on just the organic visibility that happens when you post normally I AJ Wilcox love that. All right, so final switch of gears here. What are you most excited about professionally right now? I'd love to ask the same question about what are you most excited about personally? Lee Odden Well, professionally, you know, we are celebrating our 22nd year in business this year. So that's amazing. That is amazing. Wow. And, you know, we made some strategic hires recently in marketing and sales. And we're launching a fresh brand fresh brand new website and blog will be launching with hundreds and hundreds of articles on content, search and influence, and a lot of really cool features, but a really well architected brand, and messaging and all that stuff. So I'm super excited about it. We haven't launched a new website in 10, fit 12 years, and we haven't really had a professional brand engagement with like a branding agency ever, never ever. So I'm super excited about that. Launching for influencer marketing here, late summer, and lots of other things happening. So I'm super excited about that great team. Yeah, an even bigger things plan that can't even talk about later on this year. So I'm super excited about that. I'd say at the intersection of personal and professional, I get to speak at a conference, the biggest conference for b2b in France, next month in Paris. Wow. And then a week later, I get to speak at the largest b2b conference in the UK, in London. So I'm super excited about that. And then I get to visit a client of ours in Geneva in between. So you know, that's pretty awesome. Get to do a little travel, get to do a little business abroad. And there you go. AJ Wilcox That's a lot to be excited about. All right. So I've caught a couple of the resources that you've kind of mentioned here. You talked about the Elevate b2b marketing community, you've talked about your influencer marketing report, I will put the links to those down below in the show notes for anyone. But as for resources, what would you like this LinkedIn ads audience to do what you want them to come follow you contact you in some way? Join the community, download a report, like, what do you have that we should be paying attention to? Lee Odden Absolutely check out top rank marketing.com. Our blog is there as well. With those actually, it's more than hundreds, it's 1000s of articles. But it's probably in the hundreds of those that are most recent and relevant. Yeah, toprank marketing.com, people obviously can connect with me on the socials, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, to see all the crazy food that I eat and all the running that I'm doing and other thing and travel especially, that's always fun, le e o d, d, e n. Yeah. And that's where we're going to announce our report. And we've got a enterprise brand, influencer marketing report coming out very, very quickly, we have a search intent report that's out already. So lots of fun resources there. And also, I have to say, if you're in the LinkedIn ads audience, if you're not already, you've got to be subscribing to the LinkedIn marketing blog. The LinkedIn ads blog, for sure. Also, in the LinkedIn Collective is another great resource over at LinkedIn. That's a great example of LinkedIn, own thought leadership. And of course, the b2b Institute is another great resource at LinkedIn. And you know, my disclaimer is that yes, LinkedIn is a client. But these are resources I, myself personally, rely on quite a bit. AJ Wilcox Perfect. Well, Lee, thank you so much for sharing your mountain of knowledge here. I'm grateful to get to hear it. Everyone, please go follow Lea, check out the resources that he and his company have come up with Lee, thanks again so much. And we'd love to have you on for around two sometime down the road. Super. Thanks, AJ, I appreciate it. I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. AJ Wilcox All right, like we talked about with Lee, if you go to his site, top rank marketing.com. And we have links to that down in the show notes. You can get access to everything, all the reports and everything he was talking about. You'll also see his three social media handles there in the show notes, his LinkedIn, his Twitter and his Instagram links. So go follow him stay caught up on what he's doing. He's constantly sharing gold. I'm telling you, if you or anyone you know, is looking to learn more about LinkedIn ads, check out the course that I did on LinkedIn learning all about LinkedIn ads. It's by far the lowest cost and the highest production value course that there is out there. If this is your first time listening, welcome. Thanks for coming. Make sure to hit that subscribe button if you've liked what you've heard. If this is not your first time listening, though, please do go and rate and review us. Usually it's Apple podcasts, but anywhere where you can leave a review. That is by far the best way that you can say thanks for us putting out this content week after week with any questions, suggestions or corrections about what we talked about here, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Reporting Episode Bidding Episode   Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Have you used LinkedIn Ads to recruit employees? You mean it's not just for B2B marketing? Yeah, we're talking about white collar recruitment on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So Thomas Veraar, who is one of our loyal listeners, he's also a LinkedIn rep out of Bulgaria, he reached out and suggested we talk about this topic. And it's a really important topic, because it's one that gets overlooked regularly. LinkedIn themselves in their marketing have gone all in on B2B. So these alternate cases where it's technically B2C, they don't really get much attention. Well, that changes today. We're gonna go over recruiting and hiring. We'll cover why it's great to do on LinkedIn Ads, and exactly how to execute campaigns like this. First up, we have the news. Our last episode was all about the ad rotation settings and we had a listener, Laura Seery​, who's the Senior Social Media Strategist out of the Marketing Practice in Seattle, Washington, she reached out and said, "I use rotate ads evenly for a week or so when adding new creatives to an existing campaign to give them a fair shake up against the top performing ads that were already there and let the algorithm learn about these new ads. Not sure how effective the strategy is, but it's what I've always done." And, Laura, I want to thank you, that's a really cool use of even ad rotation. As you know, one of the biggest problems with the LinkedIn ad auction is that existing ad creatives are weighted much heavier in the auction, because their performance is already known to LinkedIn. And it's less risky to keep showing ads that you've already shown before. So your usage here is actually really smart. It allows you to keep running existing creatives that have performed well and test something new into them. That said, I generally recommend against this, because when you launch new ad creatives, if there's anything detracting from them, you won't get data as fast. So my personal recommendation would always be to pause previous creatives when you launch new ones. But if you don't want to do that, yours is actually the perfect approach. And as a reminder to everyone, please reach out to us I share the email address Podcast@B2Linked.com all the time on here, and I want you to use it. Reach out, let us know what you're thinking about episodes. Let me know if there's anything I missed. I also want to congratulate LinkedIn and their employees. Many of you may not know but May 5th this year, LinkedIn celebrated 20 years in business. So so cool. And Eric from our team, noticed that there was a layout change in the campaign creation process. As you go to select an objective, there are prettier buttons and icons that kind of draw your attention to what objective you're going to care about most. And then when you get down to the ad formats, where you get to choose those, the buttons and icons are prettier there, too. So very cool, doesn't change the functionality at all. But hopefully, it's going to be a lot easier to draw our attention to the objective and the ad format that we want. drewva left a review on Apple podcast that says, "New to B2B marketing. I run a services firm that's beginning our journey into the B2B Digital Marketing. AJs podcast has been a great source of learning and ideas. My entire marketing team is listening and using his techniques. We really appreciate the knowledge and value he is sharing. Thank you, AJ." Well, Drew, I absolutely appreciate you sharing it with your team, the tips and tricks and secrets that I'm sharing. I absolutely love it when you share it with others. So thank you for the awesome review. And thanks for sharing it with your team and getting everyone listening. And everyone else I want to feature you here on the podcast as well. So leave us a review on Apple podcasts and I'd love to shout you out. Alright, with that being said, let's hit it. We're talking about why LinkedIn Ads is actually good for recruiting? Well, first of all, LinkedIn really is at the core, a hiring platform. And I tend to fight against this concept a bit, because it's a great platform to spend time and to learn and to grow professionally. But I can't argue that it really started out as a job platform. In fact, up until 2013, when the newsfeed rolled out, it was only then that in my mind it legitimately became a place that you could actually spend time and interact socially. That was really when it actually became a social media platform in my mind. I recently had a friend reach out who was part of a reduction in force. He was let go from his company. And I got a chance to give him some advice for things that he could do on LinkedIn to help him find his next gig. And I couldn't stop thinking about how much more effective it would have been for him to be active on LinkedIn already. And then it's so much easier to find the right gig when you have a strong network and following. One of my favorite podcasters out there, Jordan Harbinger, he runs the Jordan Harbinger show. In every episode, he says, "Dig that well before you get thirsty" and I think this is a great analogy. Be active on LinkedIn. Build a personal and social brand so that when you need it, it's there. It's a lot harder to after the fact and say, oops, now's the time when I need a job, I better go start getting active on LinkedIn. And there are some great hiring platforms out there and we've had the opportunity to work with many of them as clients. But none of them are as much of a no brainer to go to as LinkedIn when you're looking to hire. This may not surprise many of you, but LinkedIn has a whole recruiter side of their business and it actually makes up the biggest part of LinkedIn is revenue. Before Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn, I used to listen to the quarterly earnings calls. And it stayed pretty steady, where LinkedIn revenue was made up about 60% by their recruiter side of the business. And then the ads business made up about 20 to 22%. And then 20%, more for Sales Navigator side of the business. So early days, that means that recruiter got a lot of LinkedIn's attention. And it got the majority of the development and new features and all of that. So what is LinkedIn recruiter? Many of us may not know. Well, it's an upgraded profile that recruiters can use to reach out and find people and ask if they'd be interested in exploring an employment opportunity. And as part of some of those LinkedIn recruiter packages, you also get some advertising spend, and ads management as part of it. And if you're curious, this is actually where dynamic ads came from. They used to be an ad format that were specifically for recruiter and you may have seen some of them They put your picture in the ad, and they say, picture yourself at x company. And then Marketing Solutions got a hold of the ad format so now we can use them as spotlight ads and company follower ads. And we've gotten to see many of these campaigns. And if I'm being honest, they're really not great. Usually, they select all the defaults, which we talk about regularly not being a good idea. And I get the feeling that the employees who actually build these campaigns don't have a lot of real advertising experience on the platform. It makes sense if they spend most of their time in recruiter, they're probably not ads people. Too many times to count, we've built competing campaigns to aid in recruiting and ours have always outperformed. So I feel pretty confident in saying that you as a marketer, you're probably going to outperform your internal recruiters and your HR department by following the tips that I'm giving you today. Those of you who are recruiter users, you'll notice that there's some additional functionality for you in campaign manager now, like you have a whole objective called job applicants that we don't really get to use. There are some other things in there as well, but we won't get into it. So let's talk specifically about recruiter and why it's good. One big plus that you have with recruiter is that the focus is on reaching those who are actively looking for a job. We call these active job seekers. And this makes sense. These are existing people who want what it is that you're advertising, and you're giving it to them, and they convert, pretty cool. I will say though, one of my favorite parts about using LinkedIn Ads is we can actually reach people who aren't the active job seekers. And let me explain. The ones who aren't active we call them passive candidates and passive candidates are gold. With active candidates, there's always this question about why they're currently unemployed. Is it possible that they're difficult to work with or unproductive, or really any of those fears, and please don't misunderstand me saying that active candidates are bad, and they're not worth considering. They're definitely not. There's absolute gold there. It's just that with these passive candidates, we get around a lot of these potential concerns, because we know that someone is already gainfully employed, and they're passively considering their next gig. So if you go and make an offer to a passive candidate, lots of times, you're the only one that they're considering, and you don't have to be bidding against anyone. As opposed to active job seekers, if they've been searching for a while, they probably have many other irons in the fire, so to speak. So you'll be competing with a lot of other potential employers when you give them an offer. And if you do actually want to reach active candidates, you can do that, too. There's a trait inside of LinkedIn Ads that allows you to reach those who are active job seekers. So you really can get the best of both worlds. Some campaigns targeting just passive and others targeting just active candidates. So there's some awesome stuff about LinkedIn Ads. Native to the targeting, it allows us to target those who already have the right skills that would make them the perfect candidate for the job that we're recruiting for. And you can also target the geography they have to be in this certain metro area. Plus, we can even target past job titles and past companies they've worked with, it really is ideal. Plus, the dirty little secret here is that recruiting is really a bottom of funnel kind of offer so it shouldn't work well to cold audiences. But because the outcome is a step up in someone's career, people actually respond really well. All, we tend to see high conversion rates, along with higher candidate quality that you just can't get with other platforms. So that's why I love using LinkedIn Ads for recruiting so much. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into exactly how to execute hiring campaigns on LinkedIn. 10:16 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment. Want some of that back? Consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked.com, the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years, and our unique scientific approach to ADS management, combined with our proprietary tools that allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency, in house team, or digital ads hire. Plus, we're official LinkedIn partners, just go to B2linkedin.com/apply, answer a few questions, and we'd be excited to get to talk to you. Alright, let's jump into exactly how to go and execute these hiring campaigns. Execution here can be really simple. You just create a campaign that is targeting those with the skills and experience that you would require in a candidate. And your messaging can be pretty simple, too. The message could say something as simple as, "Hey, you look qualified for this position do you want to apply?" You can lead them to a job posting and collect resumes there, but we can go into more detail here about the options you have. First off in targeting, this depends a lot on how many applicants that you need, and how widespread the skills are that you're looking for. You can even consider how wide is this talent pool. So you can decide if you want to target very tight or a lot more broad. For instance, if I were looking for a highly technical role in my home state of Utah, and I can tell you that there are only like 2,000 people who fit that criteria, I'm probably going to target tightly around that specific technical skill set. And I'll know because the audience is small, I'm probably only going to get a handful of applicants for it. Or maybe I'm looking for something like a marketing manager who can work remotely, I can then broaden my targeting to 10s, or hundreds of 1000s, maybe even millions. And I might be able to expect a flood of applicants, and I won't have to bid as high to fill my budget there, too. I can also do a slow drip out to my ideal potential employees and get a slow and steady stream of applicants. This is really helpful for those companies who are always hiring, they're always looking for good talent, you can just have the steady drip going on, that keeps bringing you great candidates. When I'm targeting wide, I like to use job function plus seniority, plus, obviously geography. If that's too broad, you can tighten this up a little bit by layering on a skill, or groups, or interests. You may even want to layer on years of experience here. If however, you want to start doing some tight targeting, I really like to use job title plus geo. And you can even get that one tighter by requiring specific past employers or past job titles. And you can always use years of experience here as well. Did I miss any targeting tricks? Reach out to us at Podcast@B2linked.com. With how you actually message this, it can really be simple it can be whatever you want to say. I'd suggest messaging and an ad format that makes the job feel special and makes the candidate feel special that you'd be considering them as well. Initially, I'm thinking probably single image ads probably make the most sense. But I've seen a lot of recruiting also happen with text ads. So really, you can't go wrong with whichever ad format you choose. Let's talk about the landing page experience. Because this is probably the most important part. If you send a potential candidate to your normal job requisition page that has a bunch of fine print that's legally required, like must be able to lift 10 pounds and work in a dimly lit environment, then you've probably ruined the whole experience. It looks the same as everyone else's position and now you're being considered just like they would consider everyone else's positions. Instead, consider this, you can definitely send to a page that has the traditional upload your cover letter and upload your resume. But that won't perform as well as a page that makes the position feel special. And if you're treating it more like lead generation than as a job application, it's really going to stand out. Think maybe something like a page that has a video showcasing cool elements of your company culture. And maybe the hiring manager talking about the impact that this position is going to have. That kind of approach is really going to make your job stand out. And you could even use native lead gen forms to make the application process a little bit more simple, a little bit less friction prone. Maybe something like submit your name and email and we'll get back to you to schedule a conversation. I wanted to share a really cool example of recruiting campaigns on LinkedIn to really show you what's possible on the platform. We've gotten to implement this approach at real scale and we've spent over $30 million hiring on the platform. So I hope you'll geek out with me for a minute to see what's possible. We helped a particular hiring platform acquire candidates a few years back. They were specifically hiring software engineers. But there are so many different kinds of engineers out there. There's Python, there's Backend, there's Front end, C++, Java, etc. So we built out a campaign for each programming specialty. Let's say there's 20 of those, but then we have three different ways that we can reach each of those developers. We can reach them by their job title, like Ruby Developer, we can reach them by something like a skill, like a Ruby on Rails skill. And we can also reach those who are in Ruby development groups. So now you do the multiplication and now we have 60 campaigns. But then we also had different geographies that we can target these top 10 cities that were mostly hiring these developers. So we broke all that out. So now we have 600 campaigns, but it didn't stop there. Then we had different ad formats that we wanted to be able to use, we had text ads, we had sponsored content, dynamic ads, and sponsored messaging. So we built each one of these campaigns inside of each one of those ad formats. So now, if you do the math, there's 2400 campaigns. And in the process of this, we found that the limit that campaign manager allows in an account was a bit over 1200 campaigns. The way we decided to do it was one account per ad format. So it was a lot of campaigns to manage. It was definitely a lot of ads, especially when we had to refresh ad creative once a month. But what this allowed us to do was to make micro adjustments at real scale. And it gave us incredible control over the account and the efficiency metrics. If the client all of a sudden came to us and said that database developers are not in demand right now, no problem, we just shut all of the campaigns off that we're going after database people. If they came to us and said that demand for C++ developers was higher this week than it was last, we could go in and raise budgets, maybe 10% for each of the campaigns that were targeting C++ developers, and we can raise our bids a bit on them, too. At any time, we could go and pull data from LinkedIn and see based on click through rates, which programming discipline was most in demand that week, we could also determine quickly what level of competition was required to reach each of these specialties by looking at the CPCs. Or even looking at the floor bids for each of them. All of this is very quickly done with a pivot table in Excel. And if you're curious about that, go check out episode 69. That was all about reporting outside of campaign managers platform. So this wouldn't be complete without telling you what to avoid and what not to do. First off, your position still has to be an interesting and competitive and alluring proposition. Don't think that just because you're advertising it on LinkedIn, that you can include a position with fewer benefits and noncompetitive pay, and somehow candidates are still going to come out of the woodwork. Advertising is always pouring fuel on a fire. And if there's no fire to begin with, adding fuel just creates a flammable puddle on the ground. A big thanks to Dennis Yu for this analogy that I still think of and use all the time. But when the fire is already burning hot, pouring more fuel on, it just is going to make it a lot more impressive. We've covered this already, but don't send traffic to a boring job rack, try to make the position feel special. And as always don't use audience expansion. It's just going to extend your reach to those who wouldn't actually make great candidates. Make sure you're bidding properly. Go back to Episode 89 all about bidding. The same exact approach is going to work here in recruiting as it does on B2B advertising. And really don't do the stuff that I would normally tell you not to do all advertising on LinkedIn because it is so similar. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around 19:11 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. All right, here's your resources. For this episode. We have the reporting episode ahat was episode 69. You'll see that in the show notes as well. We also just mentioned the bidding episode that was episode 89. Just a few back but if you or anyone you know is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, have them check out the course that I did on LinkedIn Learning with LinkedIn. It's by far the lowest cost and the highest quality course out there at the moment. If this is your first time listening, welcome! We're excited to have you here! If you like what you heard, hit that subscribe button. But if this is not your first time listening, if you are already a subscriber, please do me the honor of going out and reviewing us, especially on Apple podcasts. But I have heard some people reviewing us on Spotify as well. And I'd love to shout you out for doing that. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections on anything that I've purported to have said, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com.. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: AJ's post describing how AB testing tool works Episode on AB testing Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Ad rotation settings on LinkedIn Ads. Should you rotate your ads evenly to get better data for your AB tests or leave on optimized for performance? It's a trick question. And we'll cover exactly why on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! As most modern ad platforms do, LinkedIn has an ad rotation setting that at first glance appears very intelligent to use, but it's not. And we're going to talk today about why. I'll even share with you why I call this the "charge me more and show me less button". In ad rotation, there are two different options. There's the default called optimized for performance. And then there's one called rotate ads evenly. I want to love rotate evenly because we're always testing. But it is rarely the best option to use and we'll cover why. First off in the news, Shae on our team brought to my attention a new rollout called comparison metrics. And I've noticed this in many of my accounts, since what it is, is when you choose your time range, you can choose the comparison range as well. So if you're looking at the last week, it'll automatically show you the changes from the previous week, along with percent changes next to each metric. So in the screenshot that Shae took for us, I can see that spend was up 37%, and visits were up 23.9% and costs were up 18%. So in this screenshot that Shae gave us, I can see that in the past seven days for this client, our spend is down 37% visits are only down 23%, which shows cost savings. Cost per click was down 18% and number of impressions were only down 11 and a half percent. It's hardly what I would call a game changer, but this kind of data can be really helpful just for understanding what's my performance doing over time. And being able to see that right within the platform. I applaud LinkedIn for coming out with changes like this. I wanted to highlight a couple reviews. We have DenisefromCumbria, and Denise I'm sorry, I can't figure out who you are on LinkedIn, just searching for Denise and Cumbria. But she said, "At last LinkedIn ads takes the floor. AJ is an expert in the space and then sharing some detailed information here. Episode One is packed with detail". Denise, thank you so much. I sincerely try to pack every episode with detail. So I do hope you're still a listener, we'd love to give you a shout out there. And if I can find out who you are, I'll shout you out by your full name and title and all that. Then we have username CGProverb, CG says, "A fantastic source of information five stars. I recently found this podcast when AJ was interviewed on another marketing podcast I follow. I have to say, after only listening to a few episodes, the content is invaluable. I am hooked. Thanks, AJ, for sharing this with us." CG, I'm so glad to have you hooked. Thanks for listening. Same goes to you. If you want to reach out to me and let me know who you are, I'd love to shout you out full name and title and company on all that. Okay, back to the topic at hand. Let's hit it. So we get asked a lot about the rotate ads evenly option versus the optimized for performance option. And I first started playing with this feature back in 2011. And like I mentioned in the intro, I really wanted to love it because I'm always running an AB test. So of course, I would want both of my ads, or maybe even all four of my ads to be shown evenly. So I can tell which one is getting a better click through rate. As we know with the way that LinkedIn ads works, when you launch, let's say two ads in a campaign, one is probably going to get a significant amount of impressions more than the other. So I wanted to even that out. So I started testing this and I actually started out testing it at a large scale. And I'm really glad that I was spending hundreds of 1000s on this test, because it allowed me to see the impact very quickly. And now I'm sharing this impact with you. Every single time I turned on this option, I noticed the same thing happened, impressions would drop. And this is significant. And my effective cost per click, no matter how I was bidding, would increase significantly. At the time, I had to go to my LinkedIn reps and ask what is going on here? Why would this be happening? But then LinkedIn and later years have come out and actually changed the definition of what this option is. So if you open up campaign manager, you have to actually go into editing one of your campaigns, and then get to the ad step. And right at the top of the page as you're seeing your ads. It'll say ads in this campaign, and there's a little cog, a little wheel. And as you click it, you'll see the two different ad rotation options. The definition for optimized for performance, it says recommended and I also recommend this, it says this option delivers impressions to the creatives evenly at first to learn which creative performs best, then more impressions will be delivered to the creatives with the best performance. Then when you read the definition for rotate ads evenly, it says, this has a nice clue in it, "this option enters each creative into the auction evenly", I added a little bit of emphasis here, "giving the ad a fair opportunity to compete for an impression without taking performance into account". So if you read into this enough, you'll understand why this is actually deleterious for your performance. What's happening is it's not showing each ad evenly to your audience, what it's doing is it's entering each ad evenly into the auction. But the auction is very strict. With the auction, better performance wins. And worse, performance gets hammered. What's actually happening here, let's say you have one ad that has a relevancy score of seven, and another one that has a relevancy score of five, both ads are getting entered into the auction evenly. That's exactly what it says it's going to do. But the ad with a relevancy score of seven is going to win more auctions every time it's put into the auction. And it's going to win it at a better rate. So maybe your effective cost per click from this ad is going to be $10. But what about the ad with a relevancy score of four, it's entered into the auction just as often as the other ad. But because it only has a relevancy score of four, it's going to lose most of the auctions it's put in there against. But when it does when you're going to pay a significant premium, because the ad has a poor relevancy score. So when you run these auctions, one after another over and over, you start to see that you've lost a lot of impressions, because you were entering a loser into the auction just as often. And the times when those ads do win the auction, your prices went up, and you had to pay significantly more for them. So this is why I call this option the charge me more and show me less. This is not great dynamics. And because of this, I don't recommend this option for most advertisers. There are limited cases where we do recommend though, and we'll get into those right here after the break. 7:10 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. Managing LinkedIn ads is a massive time and money investment. Do you want to return on that investment? Consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn accounts over the past 12 years. And our unique scientific approach to ads management, combined with our proprietary tools allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency in house team or digital ads hire could. Plus, we're official LinkedIn partners. Just go to B2Linked.com/apply, we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work together. Alright, let's jump back into the cases where we might actually recommend even ad rotation. And I know a lot of times what we tell you is don't listen to LinkedIn recommendations, because they're not always in your favor. But in this case, LinkedIn is actually really clued in. You'll notice that optimized for performance is the default ad rotation setting on most ad formats. And it used to be actually for all ad formats. The one that I would pick out was sponsored messaging ad formats. So that was message ads and conversation ads. The only way to bid for those was percent, which if you put this into the same parlance as the rest of the advertising that we do, you can only pay per single impression that you were sending. So if you had two different message ads going head to head, the only way for LinkedIn to know what a click or an engagement was, which one of these was performing better was with opens. But an open is not a very true form of engagement here. It doesn't tell you which ad was performing better. That comes to the click the actual click. But clicks on sponsored messaging, oftentimes will happen three, six days later, after the ad has already been sent to them. And that's not enough notice for the auction to take it into account. So we would notice that when we ran sponsored messaging campaigns with optimized for performance, one of the ads would get shown a disproportionate amount of time, and the other just had next to no impressions. We used to do this manually where we would go switch all of our sponsored messaging campaigns over into rotate ads evenly. And this allowed us to do more of what we actually wanted to do, which is AB testing our two creatives. And this has been to three years now, but LinkedIn caught on and realized that this is the experience that advertisers should be having with sponsored messaging. So now when you open a sponsored messaging campaign, your ad rotation settings are going to be set to even. But all the other ad formats as far as I know, they're all by default set to optimize for performance, which is exactly the right way to go in my opinion. I think defaults should be set for the majority of advertisers. This is one case where LinkedIn got the defaults totally right. This is an advertisers best interests. We also had a situation recently where one of our clients, they're not going specifically for high click through rates, because this is very much a long play for them. They're just doing brand awareness at this point. And what we noticed with this client is pretty much every ad that we launch has about average click through rate, but we have a lot of different creatives that we want to test and we want to learn about. So what we ended up doing was turning on even ad rotation here. And it's actually turned out really well for us, but that is only because the ads had similar click through rates to begin with. If one of your ads has a lower click through rate, inevitably, you're going to start getting punished with lower impressions and higher cost per click. So far, those are the only two cases where we actually recommend even ad rotation. But if any of you have any other great use cases you found, I'd love to hear about it. Reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. Okay, so that leaves a giant hole for us on LinkedIn Ads, because we still want to do this AB testing. But if we tried to use the ad rotation setting that was built for AB testing, but it ends up being bad for us, then what's an advertiser to do? Well, LinkedIn heard us loud and clear. This is a tool that has been coming for a long time. And we actually posted about it a couple of weeks ago. If you go to the left hand navigation inside of campaign manager to test, you'll notice you can now create an AB test. And we've talked about this in a past episode. But we also did a whole post about it, you'll find this post down in the show notes if you want to check it out. And LinkedIn actually reached out to us about that post to let us know what was coming in the future. Because currently, we don't find this feature very helpful. The main reason why is when you create a new test, whether you set up a campaign versus campaign, or an audience versus audience, or an ad versus ad, it creates two brand new campaigns, each one with a single ad in. And I do not think that this is the best environment for an AB test to have. These are two campaigns competing against each other from the very beginning with no history. So honestly, we haven't even used this feature, I just don't even find it useful. But LinkedIn did reach out to us on it and let us know. And I'm going to share a quote here. They said, "The good news is that customers can use the winning AB test campaign as an evergreen campaign following the conclusion of the test. Additionally, allowing for existing campaigns in new AB tests is in our roadmap. So more to come." So backing up a little bit, one of the biggest reasons why we don't like having new campaigns created every time we launch a new test is those campaigns are now just littering the account. We're going to now have several if not 10s, 20s, 50s, of campaigns that are absolute garbage, that we then just have to mark as archived and try to ignore them inside the platform. The AB testing feature that would be useful to me is AB testing ad creatives in a single campaign. And then that way, it's not littering up the account. And as we move forward, the winner gets to stay in the campaign and the loser, we can just turn off. And it sounds like from this response. That's going to be the functionality in the future. But right now, we're stuck with having to create new campaigns. If this topic is really interesting to you, you may want to go back and listen to episode 36. That was all about AB testing on the ads platform. And we do cover it pretty intensely there. But I do want to share with you now the basics of how I approach AB tests on the platform. First, I'm always going to start by leaving ad rotation on optimized for performance. Like I mentioned, except for when we're using sponsored messaging ad formats, I'm also going to run multiple campaigns targeting the same audience at the same time. An example of how I might do that might be one campaign is targeting the same ICP by their job title, but another one might be targeting them by job function with seniority. So same ICP, but different campaigns and ways of reaching them, then I'm going to launch the same AB test in both of those campaigns. And it's a little bit more complex than I'm making it sound because we're probably going to have more than two campaigns targeting the same ICP. And the more you have, the better this data is going to be. But let's say in one campaign, ad A wins and gets better reach at lower cost. But in the next campaign, LinkedIn actually decided that ad B one and ad B got more impressions at a lower cost. You might be wondering, okay, which of these ads is actually the winner. So that's why you might want 3, 4, 5 campaigns targeting your ICP, which is one of the reasons why you would hire us to do this, rather than trying to do it yourself. But I realized that's not in the cards for everyone. Hence why I'm sharing with you our approach here. But when you run this test over time, you'll notice that the platform in general will start to prefer one of your ads, either ad A or ad B. And now you know, regardless of whether LinkedIn made the right call in each of those campaigns, as to which ad won or not, you get the overall data telling you that yes, ad A is the winner here. And you should go all in on an A. Or, you do have the data telling you that hey, in one of these targeting types, or to one of these sonorities ad B is actually a better ad creative. And so you can leave ad B running in those and leave ad A running in the ones where it won. You've got lots of options here. But the principle stands. If you run an AB test in just one campaign, LinkedIn may choose the wrong ad to give the better relevancy score to and over time, it'll shake out it'll get better, but I usually want better ad data right from the very beginning. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. 16:20 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Like we mentioned in this episode, the post that's describing how the AB testing tool inside of campaign manager works, you can go and read that post. It's a great one. There's also episode 36. That's all about AB testing. So we've linked to that as well. Now, if you or anyone you know, is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads and managing them, check out the course that I did on LinkedIn Learning all about LinkedIn Ads. It is by far the highest quality and the lowest cost course out there. If this is your first time listening, welcome, we're excited to have you here. And I invite you to subscribe. If this is not your first time listening, please go and rate and review the podcast on whatever player you use. Most are doing this on Apple podcasts. I've heard several mention that they've done it on Spotify. I just don't get to see the reviews on Spotify. But I'm imagining at some point they're going to roll it out and I'll be able to see them and I can start shouting you out for them. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections, please do reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Click to Message Ads early sneak peek Vidmob Study by Cooper Nefsky Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Are you prepared for the LinkedIn Adspocalypse come down into my prepper shelter. And let's talk about the end times. I promise I have enough mashed potatoes and root beer to get us through the turbulence on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, my apologies for skipping a week of recording recently. I went on a much needed vacation with my wife over spring break. We ended up going on a cruise down to Honduras and Mexico. And it was absolutely amazing. But now I need to work on losing those four pounds that suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Pesky pounds. Like I shared in the teaser, we're talking today about changes to the platform that may come. And I'm super geeking out in this episode, so I'll leave it at that for now. Let's jump into the news for this week. First off Vidmob, who has an official LinkedIn partner, they released a study recently all about how people are interacting with video ads. And it's a really solid study, lots of good data. I couldn't even begin to plan a test like what they've done. They analyzed all different types of things that video ads might include. They might be length, or color contrast, or whether a logo was present, or who the subject of the video was all of this stuff that is very subjective with video, but they have incredible data for it. I've linked you to an article on LinkedIn by Cooper Nefsky, who's head of partnerships at Vidmob. And he wrote it up really well. Here were some of the quick points that I pulled out. For all objectives. videos that are shorter than 30 seconds tended to have the best engagement. So that's a great reminder, we should keep video ads short. Make sure your logo is burned into the video. There is quite a bit of advice out there saying like don't dwell on your logo and don't try to make it a big branding piece. But honestly, I totally agree with what they said, because they noticed an average 17% lift in click through rate when the brand logo was present during the first few seconds opening. Another great tip here was to make sure you include a human storyline when possible. They said especially in the consideration phases of advertising in those objectives, that human storylines tended to play much better. This one's not a big surprise. But I'm really glad to see the data around it. Brighter colors and high contrast works really well in the awareness objectives. And this makes perfect sense, because it makes it a thumb stopper. This is what we've always recommended with static ads in having bright and high contrast and colors to what else is on LinkedIn. So this was really cool to see. I was also really impressed, they had three different reports. One that was industry agnostic, they had one specifically for financial services, and another one where all of their examples are tech. So I highly recommend go check out those reports. I was really impressed. I also got an email recently. And the subject line was credit available for paused LinkedIn ads that were launched in error. As I read into it, LinkedIn realized that there was a glitch that happened back in December of 2022, where some paused creatives went through a review and actually went live despite being paused. So this may or may not apply to you, it actually only applied to like four of the accounts that we manage. And I don't know how big that credit is that we're going to get. But I do just want to take this chance to commend LinkedIn for going back after the fact and letting us know when they've caught an error and refunding us. This is something I haven't seen on any other platform, at least doing it this actively. And I have high praise for LinkedIn to reach out with these types of things. I had two reviews I want to highlight this week, a user by the name of India9076 Sorry, if your name is India, I don't know how to figure out who you are. So I can't thank you by name. But they said, "Great podcast. I've learned a lot from listening to this podcast, great for those who are looking to scale up their LinkedIn activity." India, thanks so much for leaving that. We also have a review left by BillyGubby. He's the Pps Director at pink sheep out of the UK. He left a review that says, "Great as always consistently great, useful info from AJ." Billy, I really appreciate you saying that we work hard on consistency. So with that being said, I want to feature you. So if you're listening and you have not left us a review yet, please do go leave us a review. And I want to give you a shout out live here. Okay, on to the topic at hand. Let's hit it. Back during episode 92, in the news section, we talked about a glitch that had happened. Many advertisers noticed that several features had disappeared. And it only took a few hours for LinkedIn to realize and start responding to the community letting them know that this was just a glitch and everything actually did return to normal within a few hours. But it did get us thinking what is the future of LinkedIn Ads? How wouldn't be respond, what would we do if any of the features that we know and love and use were taken away from us? Of course, we know that change is absolutely inevitable on every ads platform, and LinkedIn is no exception. Just ask SEOs who lost referring keywords from Google Analytics back years ago. Or ask the Google Ads folks who all of a sudden had no control over Google starting to show their ads for close keyword variants that they weren't even targeting, regardless of match type. Maybe ask those Facebook ads, folks who are upset that every 10 minutes, the platform's UI totally changes, it makes it more complex to navigate and find where things are. Or when Facebook shuts down accounts left and right, and you have no recourse or human review process when your business is hurting. I've probably beaten this dead horse way too much here. But there's so many examples of this happening with digital marketing platforms. So if things do go away, how can you be prepared for it? I think when you actually understand and know a platform, inside and out, everything becomes a lever. I talk a lot in broad terms on this show. I'll talk about how certain ad formats don't work, or certain bid strategies aren't effective? Well, the truth is, there's probably some case maybe except for audience expansion, where every option could be used to your advantage. So what I want you to get out of this is not only concrete things that you could do to prepare for platform changes. But I also want you to think deeply and critically about how the platform works, I want you to understand it and learn it inside and out. So that you can roll with the punches when and if something changes. Also is one word of warning, don't be too reliant on any one thing in the ad platform. That means don't be married to one ad format, or an objective, or a certain targeting type. We actually had a client, they started out by using several different ad formats, and they found sponsored messaging to work really, really well. And they're based in Europe. Well, then, as many of you know, in Europe, GDPR killed the sponsored messaging ad formats. And once message ads went away, we ended up losing the client, because they were too reliant on that one thing. And we definitely learned from that experience, we should have helped them to make sure that they were running a wider variety of ad formats and hedging their bets there. But we're always sad to lose a client. So we want to help you understand the ads platform at that deep level. I want to help you think critically about how LinkedIn Ads works, and what you can do to work around these things. When this glitch happened, it also made us wonder, could this have been actually an accidental early rollout instead of just a simple glitch. So if these things actually do roll out in the future, and we lose features, let's talk about what you would actually do if some of these things were removed. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into what to do if any of these glitches actually do get rolled out. The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment. Want some of that back in terms of a return? Consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years. And our unique scientific approach to ADS management, combined with our proprietary tools allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency in house team or digital ads hire. Plus or official LinkedIn partners. To book a call, just go to B2Linked.com/apply and we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work together. Alright, let's jump into how you can react if any of these glitches do become permanent. So first off, one of the things we noticed is that text ads as an ad format were removed. For each of these features being removed, I'm gonna go through the same framework listing, why would this be bad if it happened? Why it could possibly be good. The things you could do instead. And then finally, the likelihood of this actually being rolled out permanently. Alright, first off with text ads being removed. Why would this be bad? Well, I think removing text ads would be terrible. We love them as branding reinforcement on our other ad formats. They get so many free and cheap impressions. And they're especially good for those on very small budgets. But let's flip the tables here. Why could this actually be good for LinkedIn or even for us? I could definitely see LinkedIn doing this because text ads take up valuable real estate on desktop for users. And because they're very inexpensive clicks, LinkedIn probably doesn't make very much money on them. We've also noticed that outside of North America, text ads rarely actually make sense because LinkedIn still enforces the same him to dollar floor bid on them as when they launched back in 2008. So in other areas of the world, people are getting clicks for less than $1 from sponsored content. So text ad clicks are actually more expensive. Alright, so let's say that we actually do lose text ads in the future. What could you do instead? Well, dynamic ads are about three times the cost, but they do take up three times the real estate, and get three times the click through rate. So you might be able to argue that it could be worthwhile to use it. And they are often a couple bucks less expensive per click than sponsored content clicks. So a spotlight ad might be worth testing into. Alright, so how likely is this actually going to happen, I would actually give this about a 60% chance of happening eventually. And one clue I've got, we actually did see something with text ads change here a couple years ago. LinkedIn used to promote the top text ad in the three pack to the very top of the page as a text link. And LinkedIn internally used to call this ad slot, the one by one, it was visually out of place, and it made no sense. And then they killed it. I didn't especially have much of an opinion on removing that. But one of our clients got so much performance from that inventory, that once it was taken away, they were forced to abandon it. And it really shook up their results and their whole approach to the platform. Okay, the next thing that advertisers were reporting back during that glitch, they noticed that inside of the website visits objective, you could no longer bid by max delivery. Alright, so why would this be bad? Well, anytime someone takes bidding options away from us, it's always bad. Bidding options are one of the best controls and levers that we have to optimize costs on the platform. But let's think about this. Why could it be good if this happened? Well, I can kind of see LinkedIn logic here. If you're trying to get people to click on your ads to go to your site, maybe in LinkedIn's mind paying by the click makes more sense than paying by the impression. It's a bit of a stretch, but maybe I could make a case for it if I were there internally. Alright, so say this happens, what could you do instead? Well, since paying by the click is the cheapest way to pay on LinkedIn 90% of the time, I may not miss this particular feature. But we know that paying by the impression is actually more economical when you have really high click through rates. So if I were running ads that did get really high click through rates, I would probably try launching the same ads to the same targeting but in a different objective that would allow me to use maximum delivery. I'd probably start with engagement, I might consider the conversion objective as well. Alright, so likelihood of actually happening, I would give this one probably a 1% chance of happening. I really think that this is sincerely a glitch, it wouldn't make that much sense to me. But here's the next glitch, we noticed that spotlight ads were gone. We could no longer create a spotlight ad. So why would this be bad? Well, this is bad for anyone who is having success with spotlight ads. Losing any ad format is rough for those who are currently having success with it. But I'm sure there are some people who really rely on and really like spotlight ads. Alright, so why might this be good for us? Well, dynamic ads in general really aren't my favorite ad format. The only bright spot for me is follower ads. It's by far the best ad format for getting more followers to accompany page. So LinkedIn, removing spotlight ads wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for me. But if you take away follower ads, then I started to have a little bit bigger of an issue with it. Alright, so if spotlight ads go away and you wanted to use them, what could you do instead? Well, I think single image sponsored content ads are great. And in my experience, they tend to be about $2 to $3 per click more expensive than spotlight ads. But now since we don't have a bid floor, you could try running a similar ad to what you were running in your spotlight ad and just run it as single image sponsored content. And now just bid manually lower, so that you're paying in the range of what you're paying for spotlight ads. What about likelihood of actually happening here? This one could actually happen if LinkedIn decided, say, for instance, not enough people were using it to justify the maintenance. Since I don't know how many people are actually using these, I'd probably give it maybe a 20% chance of actually happening. Then we noticed the glitch that message ads were gone. The reason why this glitch caught my attention is because LinkedIn had already let us know that they were going to be sunsetting or getting rid of message ads. So when this ad format disappeared, I started to get concerned because if a bunch of weird things happen, I can just assume that it's a weird glitch. But because a bunch of weird things happen and the ad format that we were expecting to go away actually went away. That made me question if it's possible that this was actually an accidental early rollout, rather than just a simple glitch. So we know that message ads are actually going away. And by the time you listen into it, they may actually be gone. So this might be a little bit of a moot point to cover this. But why would it be bad to lose this ad format? Well, again, losing any ad format is sad for those who found success with it. It's such a unique ad format and you can't do this kind of functionality on any other platform, being able to pay to message someone. But why could this be good that it's going away? Well, it's an ad format that's always been LinkedIn's most expensive traffic. And I haven't found many scenarios where they work very well. Outside of very VIP offers and warm audiences. The price has always been a huge turnoff for me. So honestly, good riddance. But for this one, what will we be able to use instead? Thankfully, we're about to get much better options to replace message ads. We actually published an article last week on click to message ads that are going to be rolled out soon. More on that in a future episode, but check out the article about it in the show notes below if you want to get some early insight. So now the likelihood of this actually happening? Yeah, this is 100%. We're definitely gonna lose message ads. So I do have some advice for you some best practices to help you stay ahead of the game, just in case platform changes could derail your performance. Three pieces of advice here, number one, don't be a one trick pony. Test different objectives, different ad formats, different messaging, different bidding methods, be willing to test everything. And then that way, you'll have some backup things in place, just in case something fails or disappears or changes. Advice point number two, don't get comfortable on the platform. Realize that there's going to be changes and they will be disruptive at some point. So just start to expect the unexpected. Advice point number three, make hay while the sun shines. And that means if you have something that's working well, keep using it, enjoy it, appreciate it. I had a glitch early on where I could target audiences down to an audience size of one. And that was back when the platform only allowed targeting of 1000 plus. I knew it was a glitch. I knew it would be caught and patched at some point. So I prioritized tests and I had fun with it. And boy, you really missed the things that you had once they're gone. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Alright, we talked about the click to message ads early sneak peek. So check that out in the show notes. You'll see there's a link to the article that we wrote there. There's also a link to the Vidmob study that was done by Cooper Nefsky. Great article, great study, definitely check that out. If you or anyone you know, is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, I highly recommend the LinkedIn Learning course that I did with LinkedIn on LinkedIn Ads. That's a mouthful. But it is by far the highest quality course at the lowest cost for LinkedIn Ads, check it out. And there is a nice quick link there in the show notes below on that one. If this is your first episode, you've listened to welcome, thanks for coming, and make sure to hit that subscribe button. But if this isn't your first time listening, if you've gotten any value out of the podcast, please do let us know in the form of a rating and review. We've had lots of people leaving on Apple podcasts, but also Spotify. It really is the best way that you can say thank you for us putting this content out. All right with any questions, suggestions, or corrections, reach out to us at podcast at B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Illiana Acosta on LinkedIn Partner Hub Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript AJ Wilcox LinkedIn 's official marketing partner program. Who are these partners? And how do you become one? What are the requirements? We cover the LinkedIn partner program on this week's episode of the LinkedIn ads show. Illiana Acosta Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. AJ Wilcox Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, you've heard us talk about how we're an official LinkedIn partner. And you've probably used the tools of other partners to manage or report on your LinkedIn Ads initiatives. I met Illiana Acosta , who's one of the senior managers of the LinkedIn partner team at the B2Believe event that was in November. We talked all about that event on episode 79. And I thought it would be really interesting to bring her on and talk to her all about the program. Many of you have asked me what it takes to become a partner. So this episode is for you. First in the news, Jae Oh, who's head of ads measurement and audiences at LinkedIn. He wrote an article this month, called What's New With the Company Engagement report on LinkedIn. For those of you who don't know, there's this report that if you go and click on any of your audiences that our company list uploads, or sometimes we call them our ABM lists, if you click on that Companies list, it now takes you to this report called the company engagement report. And this is so cool. If you're advertising to a list of companies, now you can get all of this analytics and demographics information about who is actually engaging with your ads. It's way cool. Well, Jae talked about all the new updates that have happened to it. And I wanted to point out the things that I thought were really cool. First off, there's this company segmentation feature. So now you can dynamically prioritize the accounts that you're going after in certain campaigns, you can actually create a static list of here are the companies I want to go into which segment. But what's so exciting to me is the dynamic segmentation, where now you can say every day, I want LinkedIn to go to my list and go just for the companies that have the highest engagement. And let's show ads specifically to them. And you can have another segment, that's all about low engagement. So now with your campaigns, you can show different messages to companies that maybe aren't as engaged so we can try something new. The static segment is actually just a snapshot of the lowest engaged companies. And it's not going to change. We've linked to that article down in the show notes. So go give it a read and check it out. If that's interesting to you. I wanted to highlight a review left by Craig Sea. And that's the last name is S E. A. Craig says, "Very insightful and educational. I'm so happy I came across this podcast, I've learned a lot from it. Myself, being a beginner, started listening to this podcast. I've also started AJ's course, which is giving me a lot of confidence to get started running my own ads. Great podcast five stars from me." Craig, thanks so much for heeding the call and leaving that review. I'm so glad that couple of our resources could give you the confidence to begin advertising. You get five stars for me as well. Thanks, Craig. As a reminder, I want to feature you as well. If you haven't already left us a review, please do. And I'd love to give you a shout out. All right. Without further ado, we'll go ahead and jump right into the interview. Let's hit it. Illiana, I'm so excited to have you here. For those who don't know, Illiana is a senior manager on the LinkedIn ads business. She supports the LinkedIn Marketing Partners. She's also the Global Co Chair of the Latino ERG at LinkedIn. Illiana, thanks so much for being here. Illiana Acosta Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate the enthusiasm and welcoming me on your show. AJ Wilcox You and I actually just met at the B2Believe event not too long ago back in November. Yes. It was awesome to get to hang out with you get to know you a little bit. I was excited to have you on the show because obviously you know so much about this. So give us an introduction to yourself. Tell us about yourself anything that I may not have covered in the intro. Yeah. Well, I was Illiana Acosta Well, I was born on a Monday. Oh, wait, no, I won't go back that far. I have been with LinkedIn for about four and a half years and I have been supporting our channel sales business which is our LinkedIn marketing partners program since day one. So I've seen it since its let's call it infancy stages to now its teenage years where we are operating almost like a mid level startup, if you will, right. It's like this crazy, awesome, high growth team and business that's supporting so much of what we're doing in our ads business to grow our business, but more so ensure that we are driving value for our customers with our marketing partners. In addition to my day job in managing our enterprise partners ad tech team. I am also the global co chair, as you mentioned, our Hispanics of LinkedIn's Alliance ERG, which is really helping to pour into our Latino community within our LinkedIn doors, but also within the community at large. So I've been in that role for a couple of years now, I'm actually stepping away from the co chair role in a couple months and giving an opportunity to newcomers, which is a little bittersweet, but we've done incredible work. And I will continue investing in diversity, equity and inclusion in some way, shape or form within the organization. So really excited to be here. So thank you for having me. AJ Wilcox Very cool. I announced that you are part of the Latino ERG, we may have listeners who aren't part of large organizations who may not know about employee resource groups, can you share just a little bit about what these groups are? Why They Matter? Illiana Acosta Absolutely. Let's take a step back as an employee, right? Every single person experiences their tenure, if you will, with an organization in different ways, some more than others, some negatively, some positively. And so when we look at our workplace, we tend to say like, I want to go somewhere where I feel like I belong, or I want to make sure that people understand me, or that I'm seen and heard and valued in a way that I haven't before. And for that I need to find community. And so at LinkedIn, we have about 10 ERG is employee resource groups that go everywhere from Black, Latino, LGBTQ, plus the Asian community, veterans, etc, etc. There's so many incredible groups and communities that people can be a part of, as soon as they join the organization feel a complete sense of belonging as soon as they join day one, but also find people that they can relate to and build community with. And it's also an incredible opportunity for allies, to learn more about different communities and how they can be of support. Because at the end of the day, we spent so much of our time at work and working with individuals and colleagues. And all we want to make sure is that we're doing really great work for people who appreciate us who see us and understand that our differences are what makes us so unique and great together. AJ Wilcox I love that. All right. So switching gears here to your role there at LinkedIn, I would love to hear how you specifically are supporting advertisers, maybe those of us who are listening who may not already be LinkedIn partners. Illiana Acosta Yeah, absolutely. So our LinkedIn marketing partners, is a global community of qualified technology and service providers that help our customers, our marketers achieve more on LinkedIn, in simple terms, like on our own work about us, you know, we're great, but we're so much greater with our partners. With partners, everything is better, right? So if I can give an example. So today, customers are facing changing buyer behavior, right, for example, shifting to e-commerce, etc. There's growth in the tech landscape. We're seeing an increase in spending martech from advertisers. There is now more new and emerging channels, right? Like think about it, the average number of channels to make purchase decisions increased by 2x in the last five years. And so it makes marketers jobs that much more challenging to actually go get to their goals and objectives, right. And so our marketing partners, our LinkedIn marketing partners can help navigate and reduce some of these complexities. And so what my role is, it's really working with a team of great amazing high performers. And I lead a team that's working with our enterprise level partners. And those enterprise level partners are typically those partners that are working with our enterprise or global strategic accounts. So those bigger, bigger customers at LinkedIn. However, we have three different teams that support our channel business today. So we have our enterprise partners, which I just explained, are those bigger partners that are working with our biggest accounts, so enterprise and strategic accounts, then we have our skilled partners team that's led by my colleague, John Hall, who's total awesomeness in the West Coast. And he's working with these partners that are typically supporting our online sales or customers or small to mid level size customers. And then we also have our content partners, who are creating these custom content solutions and creative solutions that help enhance a customer's LinkedIn campaign on the platform. And that's led by my colleague, Ally Rash, who's based out in New York. And so we have a whole ecosystem of partners that can help customers address some of the marketing challenges that they have, not only for LinkedIn, but as a whole for their, you know, social media buying as a whole. And so these partners, regardless of their enterprise, or scale, what we classify them internally, they help customers save time, right? So that they have to go through a less of a manual process to set up or manage your campaigns. Like, seriously, can I get an amen for saving time? Amen. Right. I'm like, I love saving time, anything to make me operate more efficient, Sign me up. And so these partners allow marketers to do that. They also allow them to plan more accurately, or target for every stage of the funnel. And so now you can actually sync your marketing strategy, your campaigns optimizations across multiple channels, all within our partner platforms. And so when you're thinking about activating your ad campaign gains, you want to get the most out of every single dollar you're investing. And so they also allow for a more in depth understanding of the performance of your campaigns. So you can make better decisions, you can shift dollars, you can shift creatives, you can do things, and optimize on the fly and get so much more value out of your campaigns with LinkedIn, and across our marketing partners. AJ Wilcox So we obviously don't want to call out any specific partners. We don't want to give anyone a preferred treatment here. Can you tell us about what are some of the kinds of things that you can do through partners, I'm imagining some will help you create campaigns, some will help you optimize and manage some will help you report. What sort of categories am I missing? Illiana Acosta Yeah, there's a few categories. So one, there's a ton of value in using the partners just because, you know, they allow you to do so much more with us. Over 70% of customers today, with LinkedIn are already using one or more partners. And so everybody's coming to the party. And so they are tapping into a partner for planning. Right. So insights, helping you developing the right content and creating your campaigns, targeting the right audiences at scale. So planning, we have partners that support campaign execution and tracking. So whether that's page management or campaign management with LinkedIn, we also have partners that are supportive reporting and ROI. And lead gen, everybody loves a good lead gen campaign. And so there's so many ways that a partner is supporting customers needs. It just really depends on what are your goals and objectives, right, and let's start there. And then let's make sure that as a company, LinkedIn, we're doing everything possible to tap into our arsenal to address those challenges that you're having, but also allowing you to get to your goals and objectives. And sometimes that means, like, rockin out just with LinkedIn, right? But sometimes that also means tapping into a partner that can help you really elevate your campaigns and take your campaign further. AJ Wilcox I totally agree with that. Alright, so if I could, I would love to pull all of our listeners and ask them who is using a LinkedIn partner for their campaign management or for any part of it? But obviously, since we can't do that, I hear you correctly, you said 70% of LinkedIn advertisers are using a partner in one way or another? Illiana Acosta Yeah, over 70%. They're using one or more partners. In many cases, customers are using multiple partners for different use cases, right. And so one might be using a partner for reporting. Another one might be doing for lead gen, there's different use cases, everybody has their special sauce, you know, and so a marketer has the option to work with many partners in order to meet their campaign objectives and more so their marketing goals for the year for the quarter, whatever the case may be. And so yes, so a really good chunk of our customers are already using a partner for their LinkedIn campaigns today. AJ Wilcox Oh, yeah. All right. So this leads me to a really good question. How have you seen partners in one way or another elevate your customers LinkedIn campaigns? Illiana Acosta We're on a time constraint, so I can't even tell you all the stories. You know, again, I've been here four and a half years. So I've seen you know, across the gamut, small partners, large partners deliver so much value for our customers. And so if I think back to some recent real great wins, so we have metadata metadata, and I know we're not supposed to calling out but these are success stories, and you can find them on our hub. I'll give you the site later, but one of our partners metadata helped oyster with their full ABM strategy. And you know, we talked ABM at b2b believe in November, and so therefore, ABM strategy and execution of ad campaigns, I believe it resulted in 3x engagement rate on the campaign, and it's doubled their ROI in less than 12 months. And so I'm like, what is it that we did that right? It's like, okay, medicine is one of our enterprise level partners that one of my colleagues, managers, and then we have Zapier, who works with so many of our customers. It's like Zapier makes you happier, it's an inside joke on our team. But Zapier is real time. I know, it's so corny, but it's fun. They have a real time lead gen solution, and it worked with a customer harnessed.io to look at lead automation, and they were able to improve the accuracy by 99%. From campaign manager to market like huge Wow. And so it's kind of insane. And there's there's other stories of like, you know, teams have reduced their time by six hours per week. And while that might seem a lot take six times 52 weeks, like that's a lot of hours that you're saving a customer in managing their campaigns. Helping them operate more efficiently, helping them to do more with less especially now with this economic climate that, you know, we do have less resources, we may have less people. So how do you operate more efficiently when you're a brand that's activating 10, 20, 30, 100 campaigns in any given quarter? I would like to think that we're all super people, super women and men and people, but there's only so much we can do. So sometimes getting automated tools and tapping into the right tools more than anything, I think can make the biggest difference when you are executing your marketing campaigns with us. AJ Wilcox I totally agree with this. We've had several episodes in the past that are a partner product spotlight. So if anyone's ever curious, they can go back and listen to some of those spotlights we put on partners and different tools. But to your point about saving six hours a week, I just think of this as a marketer. Yeah, it's not a big deal to save six hours. But think about it. This is six, super mundane and monotonous hours that don't need to be spent, you can now go and spend that doing the really high value stuff, digging deep into the account finding opportunities for scale or decrease costs. So this really is a big deal. Yeah, we shouldn't be doing the mundane. Exactly. And Illiana Acosta Partners make it more accessible. They have scalable tools, it makes your day to day job a lot more simpler and more efficient. And you can spend more time doing the things that really, really require the most attention being more strategic. But you know, when it comes to like copy and pasting things, right, like that, sometimes it's a really long time, if you're managing multiple, multiple campaigns. So how can we collectively LinkedIn and our partners help to increase customer value, like, that's really why I'm even on this team and in this business. I want to help drive value, and I want to help make a difference, and how people are operating every single day. On our own, again, I mentioned, we're great, you know, we have amazing tools. But sometimes our customers need more access to different tools that our partners provide. And with our partners, they can do things simpler and more efficient, like day parting and auto optimization rules, and add flighting, and management, and creative optimizations and all the things that customers need to enhance their marketing campaigns with us. AJ Wilcox Yes, and I can't tell you how excited I am that there is now this partner ecosystem, because I kind of, quote unquote, grew up in the world of PPC. And there are so many partners out there, if you're running Google Ads, or Facebook Ads, there's so many different tools that you can take advantage of. LinkedIn hasn't had that it hasn't really been considered a tier one platform until what I would say is fairly recent. And now we have all of those types of things that you'd want to execute that you just mentioned, any of those needs you have, you can go out and find a partner who is doing this on LinkedIn. And I just want to say I think this is super powerful. I'm so proud of where it's landed. Illiana Acosta Yeah, you know, it's so funny, because like, before I started working here, I was like, B2B. B2B doesn't have to be boring, B2B can be fun, and really insightful, and really an incredible way to drive some meaningful business outcomes. And so we really have transformed over the last several years, I'd like to think it's when I joined the company, but I know that's not accurate. But it really has transformed into this platform that I am so proud to be a part of the growth of our LinkedIn ads business, the growth of the overall organization, what we stand for, and how we're so we are really doing everything we can to make sure that our customers, our marketers are getting everything that they need from us to be successful. And that is something that I am incredibly proud of. AJ Wilcox Oh, I love it. I know there's a lot to the partner programs, there's different tiers. Could you tell us a little bit about what maybe benefits are there for partners? Illiana Acosta Yeah, so we have different tiers of partners, depending on the tenure with us, but more so depending on the bandwidth and the use cases that you all support, right? Data linked, is a partner of ours, too. Yes, we know you're an OG, so this is good. Some other benefits include having a one to one relationship with a partner manager, depending on your level of tier. And that is incredible, because you have a trusted resource that you can literally work with every single week to help identify meaningful go to market strategies that are going to help to elevate and drive awareness around our value together as partners, and what we do for our customers together. And so that is powerful, because we have, you know, over 1000 partners in our ecosystem, but not every single partner is managed, and that every single partner is certified they're all on a journey. And so that's the journey that's the path to get partner certified and into the the level of tear that they're hoping to as they grow with us and they get manager or partner manager on my team or John's team or Bruno's team or Lara's team that I work with but, more so you know there's opportunity to tap into additional resources that we have to drive go to market together. There's opportunity to sync directly with our sales teams. There's opportunity to work directly with our sales leaders to identify leads, prospects, and more. So identify where can we drive the most value for our customers together, there's opportunity to be a part of our events that we have throughout the year B2Believe, Partner Connect, I heart ABM, there's so many different touch points that we can include here within, and vice versa, right. There's also an opportunity for us to show up for your events and be a part of any thought leadership, any webinars, any in person sessions. There's opportunity to tell stories together, I love telling stories together. Because together, we can really help make a big difference. And so how do we tag team on all efforts to really help again, elevate not so much our companies but elevate the value that we're offering customers, right, because if together, we continue to build solutions that will help address market challenges and marketers find value in it working with us, it's just going to be a byproduct of that, right? Like they want to work people that can help solve things for them. And we want to do that with our partners. And so So that's some of the benefits that you can expect to receive from our partner program. Working with our cross functional teams, we have dedicated resources on the business development side, on the partner end side, we have our B2B Institute, which is our think tank and is fully equipped with incredible thought leaders. We have a full partner marketing team that is ready and able to start on some really cool marketing concepts that again, can help elevate the value that we're driving for our customers. And so as we evolve this program and continue to grow, there's so much information that we disseminate through webinars and different methods. And so you can find a lot of that on the hub, which is our LinkedIn marketing partner hub. If you search on Bing, you can directly find that link. And I can also share the links with you, AJ, so you can share out to your followers, your subscribers on here. But yeah, so I think that there's opportunity for are always on marketing programs, which obviously you get visibility on our hub, which is external facing for all customers and marketers to visit. So that will give you free marketing and visibility for customers to come and learn more about you. That hub also houses our success stories with customers and partners. So that's another touch point that we can really have there. And then again, as I mentioned before, I think for us, it's really, really valuable. And we've had a lot of feedback from partners, that having that FaceTime with our sales team, either one on one or one to many, whether it be in a larger format or smaller, has been incredibly valuable globally. And so our marketing partners program is not just in North America, but it's literally across the globe. And many of our partners support our customers across the globe. And some are starting to really branch out into different regions as well, helping to have that global footprint, which is great. AJ Wilcox I love this. All right, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll jump back into the interview. Illiana Acosta The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. AJ Wilcox Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment. Do you want some of that investment back? Consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years, and our unique scientific approach to ads management, combined with our proprietary tools, allowing us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency, in-house team, or digital ads hire. Plus, we're an official LinkedIn partner, which after this episode, you'll know exactly what that means. Just mosey on over to B2Linked.com/apply. We'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. Alright, let's go ahead and jump back into the interview. So I have to ask what qualifies someone to be a marketing partner? I'm imagining because this is with the API. This means these are people who are building tools, right? Who else is able to become a part? Illiana Acosta It really just depends on the use cases that you support, right? What's your special sauce? And whether or not our API's currently support the use case that you're looking to really invest in with us. And so you know whether you as a platform can support a campaign management, reporting an ROI. We talked about this before, but audiences, page management insights, lead gen content and creative. So if you fall under any of those use cases that we are API support today, these are all specialties that our current partners do support. If you fall under any of those, you may have a good chance of becoming one of our LinkedIn marketing partners. So there is a developer website that you can visit to apply to become a partner and we will evaluate the use case that you currently support how you're looking to really plug into our LinkedIn API's. And if there's a match, and you fall under any of those specialties, then we can start working together. AJ Wilcox Oh, if there is someone out there who's creating a tool or wants to create a tool, what advice would you give them? What can they do to better help their case to have a higher likelihood of being prioritized or or being taken on as a partner? Illiana Acosta I think one be specific in your application, right? As you can imagine, we get a ton of requests, be specific on what's your special sauce, we want to hear about your special sauce to obviously, if you have customers that are asking for it, that's always a really great story to share with us. And so many of our customers are working with us, they want to activate their LinkedIn campaigns to our platform. And guess what, hey, we don't have integration with you. So can we work on that? And so that's a really great way, right? Because now we have customers asking for this integration to happen. And we can start having those conversations, we can start working with our business development team, with our partner interest team, with our product team and getting all our ducks in a row to make sure that happens. And total sidebar, I said, ducks in a row, and I'm looking out my window. And there's four ducks walking across the way by the lake. And it's so funny. AJ Wilcox That's amazing. Illiana Acosta Perfect line. Yeah. So I think if they do that, I think that will help build a case, right? Because whatever our customer needs from us, like, we want to make sure that we're accommodating that. And if one customer is asking for it, the likelihood of many other customers is very high, are also demanding that. Again, we want to work with customers in the way that they want to work with us. And if that's via a partner, let's make it happen. And let's make sure that we are helping to simplify the process and working with LinkedIn as much as possible, ease the transaction between customers, as partners, etc. To make sure that again, we help to simplify the process working with us while also delivering value, and really great outcomes for the marketer. AJ Wilcox Awesome Illiana. This has been fantastic. I appreciate you sharing all this information about the partner program. My last question for you is do you have anything exciting that you're working on professionally, and personally? Illiana Acosta Yeah, I'm actually working on a few projects right now. One, I just finished his voiceover workshop not long ago. And I really took the course just to try to do more public speaking because I really enjoy it, it really fills my cup. And then I started realizing, wow, this is a really cool like opportunity to tap into. And it's been really, really fun just trying to find ways to adjust my voice and work on different projects. So voiceover has been really fun. Also, I have a newsletter called Lost in Translation and sort of tapping into the diversity piece. But the newsletter focuses on highlighting challenges and limitations for historically excluded groups. And it's a focus on experiences that have shaped who they, I am, and how they and we and me I show up both in my professional life and my personal life, because based on our experiences that really shaped who we are and the way we show up at work. What else am I working on? I'm doing a bunch of speaking engagements around the power of authenticity and taming your inner critic, because you know, impostor syndrome is real. AJ Wilcox We've all got it. Illiana Acosta Oh, my gosh, even on my best days, I'm like, wait, I'm like, no, no, just go to sleep, go to sleep, girl go sleep. But you know, covering topics, you know, the power that we each have. We literally every single person listening on this and not listening, we have the power and influence to create more diverse, more inclusive, and more equitable spaces for every single member of the workforce. And we have more power than we think. And so as you look at your colleague next to you, whether it be in person or on the virtual screen, I talk about how can we show up for others in a meaningful way. And even the smallest action and thought could actually make the biggest difference. And so I've been doing a lot around speaking engagements around that, because I think that, you know, the only way that we're going to change what this world looks like, for future generations is if we start doing the work now. That's some of the stuff I'm working on. AJ Wilcox So true. Is there any way that you want people to be able to reach out to you after this interview? Do you want them to reach out to you on LinkedIn or anywhere else? Illiana Acosta Yeah, tap into LinkedIn, honestly, crazy enough, my main social platform and more tech platform that I leverage on a regular basis, not because I work here, but I really enjoy being on the platform. I feel like it feeds me in different ways mentally, spiritually, and educationally and professionally. So LinkedIn, connect with me, send me an InMail happy to dialogue, you know, have some dialogue on there. And yeah, happy to answer any questions as well. AJ Wilcox Perfect. So we'll put a link to your LinkedIn profile down in the show notes as well as the link to the marketing hub. Yes. Ileana, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing of your wisdom. Do you have any parting words for us? Illiana Acosta Yes. I have parting words for everyone listening, whether you are a customer, whether you are a prospective partner, whether you are an existing partner of ours, ask for what you need. If you don't ask, you don't get right. We want to support you. We want to help you, in working with us in a greater way. We want to have long term sustainable partnership with our partners. We want to have long term sustainable relationships with our customers. And we want to make sure that we're doing everything possible for you to work with us, and that we drive value in the way that you expect from us and so ask for what you need. Connect with me and let's start the conversation. AJ Wilcox Perfect. Illiana Acosta ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. And please do everyone reach out to her shoot her an InMail make sure you're connected to her. She's a fantastic resource, especially for those who are partners or want to be partners. So thank you again for being here. Illiana Acosta Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. AJ Wilcox All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around Illiana Acosta Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. AJ Wilcox Okay, like we mentioned in the interview, we'll have a link to Illiana Acosta's profile on LinkedIn. So make sure you go and connect to her, send her a message, tell her she's awesome. She also mentioned the partner hub where you can go and find out all about LinkedIn marketing partners, the links there as well. You'll also see the link to the company engagement report that we talked about that was posted by Jae Oh, at LinkedIn. Now, if you're just getting started on LinkedIn Ads, or know someone who is I'd love it if you'd point them towards the LinkedIn Ads course on LinkedIn learning. I'm the instructor on that one. And I know I'm a little bit biased, but it is by far the highest quality and the lowest cost LinkedIn Ads course out there. If this is your first time listening, thank you and welcome. We'd love to have you subscribe, so you can hear more episodes like this in the future. If this is not your first time listening, I would love to invite you to rate and review the podcast on whatever player you're using. Or if you can't find a review function, go over to us Apple podcasts version. That's where the majority of the reviews come in. We don't charge anything for listening to this podcast, obviously. So the best way you can repay us and say thanks, is by leaving us a review. I'd really appreciate it with any questions, suggestions, or corrections for this episode or the podcast in general, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. With that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: LinkedIn Certified Marketing Hub Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Are you a LinkedIn certified marketing expert yet? It's time to get on that. This is your study guide to get certified on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! After announcing that I was one of the first six certified marketing experts with LinkedIn, lots of you reached out to ask how you could get the same certification. So this episode is a walkthrough of the certified LinkedIn Marketing Program. So you can get certified as well. We'll cover what it takes to achieve all the levels of certification, as well as how to stay certified once you get there. First in the news, we had a little scare happened last week, where some advertisers suddenly found that several features of the LinkedIn Ads platform we're missing. Hat tip to JD Garcia for pointing this out in a post he put out. We found that on some accounts, text ads were gone as an ad format, website visits campaigns could no longer bid by max delivery, message ads were gone, which is not totally unexpected from what we talked about in the news last week. So all of us advertisers were totally up in arms, trying to figure out what are we doing without these features. Luckily, LinkedIn confirmed later that day that it was just a bug, but we still got some fears around it. So we're planning an episode soon that will go into depth on all of these things, what it means the future, and what we can do to work around things like this, if they ever do change permanently. So stay tuned for that. I wanted to highlight a review here, the username, thecrusher1263 said, Great podcast. This is easily the best resource on LinkedIn ads that I've ever found." So the crusher, I don't know who you are. So I can't thank you by name. But I certainly appreciate the shout out there. Me and my team all work super hard to make sure that this stays the best resource on LinkedIn Ads out there. So thanks for that. And you listener, if you agree that this is the best resource out there on LinkedIn Ads, please follow the incredible example of thecrusher1263 and go and leave us a review. Honestly, it's the best way that you can say thanks for all the work that me and my team put together for the show. And of course, I will give you a shout out. So go leave a review, Apple podcast is usually the best place to do that. But anywhere you can leave a review, I would love it. Okay, without further ado, let's hit it. So we're talking about LinkedIn certified marketing program. And for those of you who want me just to read you the address, you can go to training.marketing.linkedin.com. And of course, that URL is in the show notes below so you can just get easy access. Just scroll down look at the show notes. This program has been a long time coming. For years and years, I've been talking to LinkedIn about having a certification program. Five years ago, I was even working with the team to create a certification exam. And then that project kind of got shelved and it got pushed off. But now that it's out, it actually turned out to be a much bigger deal than I originally thought. I remember the early days of Google Ads and Google Analytics certifications. I believe Google Ads was always free., but the certification exam has been kind of difficult. But I definitely remember Google Analytics.  remember paying $50, and you only get one chance. And if you don't pass, you have to go pay another 50 bucks. But it was a really complete training course. And the end exam was something I really had to study for. $50 is obviously not a ton to invest into your career, but it definitely shows if you're willing to pay 50 bucks, you're in and you're invested. And that was also a low enough amount that companies would sponsor their employees. We'd be willing to pay 50 bucks to get an employee certified. Then Facebook blueprint came along and to become Facebook certified, it was actually kind of expensive. I don't remember the cost, I want to say it was like $2,000 or something like that. But you had to really want it. So going into this LinkedIn have some great models to follow. And here's how the program ended up being structured. First of all, it's free, anyone can do this, which I really appreciate. It's also a very complex program with lots of requirements that goes way beyond just passing a test. And actually, there are multiple tests in a variety of different areas of marketing. When you go to get signed up for the first time, you'll sign in with your LinkedIn credentials. And the instructions are pretty clear how to work your way through the program. I'll also say that especially later on in the program, in levels two and three, it is very hands on. You're not just passing tests that you work on, you're actually working with LinkedIn staff all along the way. And there's a selection process to get you into the higher tiers. I'm going to walk you through the whole program and share insights that will help you get through it faster and more effectively. With one caveat, the program is always subject to change. It's always in flux. So your mileage may vary and the requirements may certainly change. So the very first level that you get to earn you get to earn it through taking certification exams. This is called level one certified marketer. Currently, there's a fundamentals course, and a marketing strategy course, and a content and creative design course. For each one, you can watch modules that are 40 to 60 minutes long. And they're essentially training courses on the ads platform, and other areas of marketing on LinkedIn. A lot of it is even just theory. Once you're done watching all of those videos, you can then take the certification exam. And actually, you are able to just take the certification exam without watching the videos, which is totally something that you can decide to do, I'm not going to tell you how to do it. What I will say though, is I did not get a 100% on any of them. And I know you might expect the host of the LinkedIn Ads Show podcast to get 100% on everything, it's important to understand that a lot of the questions are subjective, or maybe a little bit trickily worded. And there were even plenty of the answers that I didn't actually agree with. But all of them are taken directly from the content of the videos. So it's definitely worth your time. What I would do, if I were you, I would set aside an entire day, just to watch all of the videos and take the tests and the exam, just knock it all out in one day. But of course, you can string this out over time. But after you take these exams, you'll get a certificate, and you can then add that certificate to your LinkedIn profile, you can share it with your network, and just generally be proud of getting a level one certified marketer. Now, I originally took all these exams over two years ago. So by the time I got to the highest level, my certifications had actually expired. And so I needed to go back and retake the exam. It's not a big deal to retake. I think the tests are something like 60 questions. So it's not huge, but you do have to plan on re-upping those every so often. But that gets you to level two. And at level two, they call you a certified marketing Insider. And by the title insider, you're obviously starting to think, oh, there's something more involved here, I'm going to be part of a group. And that's because at this level, you get access to the network of other certified marketing insiders. So it's a LinkedIn group that you're then invited to. You also have new events put on by LinkedIn that are available to you. Now, these are digital events and you can and should start attending the events that you see. You also get access to a bunch of resources. There's guides on how to use LinkedIn business manager, there's getting started with document ads, there's all about the LinkedIn Audience Network. So lots of great reading material that you can get read up. And you get here by passing all of the certification, the fundamentals, the marketing strategy, and the content and creative design tests. So really not hard. Like I said, you could get to this within a day. But once you're here, you now need to attend quarterly virtual events. So you don't want to miss those. They don't happen all the time. You're also expected to participate in the insiders group on LinkedIn. So make sure that you're in there actively participating. Okay, here's the quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into what it takes to get to level three certified marketing. 8:03 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment, want some of that investment back? Consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years. And our unique scientific approach to ADS management, combined with our proprietary tools, allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency in house team, or digital ads. Just go to B2Linked.com/apply and we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. All right, let's jump into the level three certified marketing expert. And this is a little bit of a misnomer, because this is actually two level. Because once you get here, you'll become what's called a certified expert in training. There's even a badge for that. And this is actually a little bit funny. But I really wanted to rush through this level as fast as possible, because I didn't want to have no training on my badge. So I didn't even post this certification to my profile. But you remember those quarterly events that I was talking about in the previous one? Well, these are still really important at this phase as well. Now you need to attend all of the expert training workshops as they come along. You also have to host your own training session about LinkedIn fundamentals as part of this training. And don't worry, LinkedIn provides you with materials to make that a lot easier, but you do have to lead a training whether internal or external. You'll get periodic communication from the LinkedIn team. And they want you to make sure you're filling out surveys and questionnaires so they're learning along the way. And currently, you're required to participate in an in person event in order to fully fulfill the requirements of the certification. Okay, does that sound like a lot of work to you? It certainly did to me as well. But here's what you get for unlocking this level. Number one, you get to be showcased on the LinkedIn Marketing Lab site, you'll be invited to attend regional certified marketing experts networking events, and you'll get the certified marketing experts badge that you can attach to your LinkedIn profile and just generally be very proud of. It's not currently clear how many of the quarterly events that you need to attend. So I'm sure LinkedIn is still working this out. But suffice it to say, this needs to be something that you're focused on and committed to. I should also mention that it takes a lot of LinkedIn resources to put together these regional events. So we don't know how often these are going to happen and in what regions. All of that to say, it's probably really important to make sure that you are in every one of these quarterly trainings, and really active in the group. Those are the things that I think you can do to stand out to make sure that you get invited into this group. And then of course, once you get the badge, your job isn't over. At this point, I get to call myself a LinkedIn Certified Marketing Expert, but I don't get to keep this forever, unless I actually keep up on it. So to keep it up, there are compulsory and optional activities to maintain my standard is what LinkedIn lists on the website.  still need to attend all of the quarterly events to make sure that I'm keeping my certification. So yeah, you'll see me there. I also need to keep hosting these LinkedIn trainings at least once per year. And although it's not currently a requirement, LinkedIn does share that they want success stories shared with the insider's community. So there you have it, this isn't something that you willy nilly do and then check off. You've got to attend all of these quarterly meetings for the foreseeable future. You'll have to retake the exams every two years, and keep up on it. So it is a time investment. But I've always loved certifications, because they are an implicit nod that yes, you are an expert at what you do and you can be trusted to talk about these topics. I totally see everyone out there who's a LinkedIn Ads expert wanting to make sure that they also have this badge to back them up that they're not just some fly by night, showed up yesterday, decided to come out with a course. Okay, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. 12:19 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Like we talked about in the episode, if you look in the show notes, you'll see the URL to go and actually get set up and on your path to becoming a LinkedIn Certified Marketing Expert. If you or anyone you know, is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn on LinkedIn Learning, all about LinkedIn Ads. It's by far the highest quality and the lowest cost course out there for LinkedIn Ads. Now you did just hear me talk about LinkedIn certification program, and how they have essentially a course and it's free, you should definitely go take those especially because you need to for getting the certification. But I will say the course that I did with LinkedIn is much more complete, and walks you through from the beginning, all the way until your setup and advertising well. But the link is there in the show notes. If this is your first time listening, I want to welcome you. Thanks for joining us. Please do hit that subscribe button if you've liked what you're hearing, so that you hear every episode as we come out with. But if this is not your first time listening, I would encourage you I might even go as far to plead with you. Please do leave us a review and rate the podcast. It helps the algorithms weigh more than any of us understand. And this is how you can do your part to share this material with other marketers out there who need to know about LinkedIn. With any questions, suggestions or corrections, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Microsegmentation Episode Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript What standing in the way of your prospect buying your B2B product or service. It's the buyers committee. Today on the LinkedIn Ads Show, I'm going to teach you how to turn these into advocates instead of roadblocks. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! In B2B, we can reach the end user, but most often, someone else needs to sign off on the purchase. We call these individuals, the buyers committee. And although our end user really can campaign internally to try to get the deal done, it can be very profitable to help them along. On today's episode, we're going into detail about who the buying committee is and what we say to them. And make sure to stick around to the very end, as I'm going to share the exact methods of targeting that I use to reach the buyers committees. Let's go ahead and get started. First in the news, we got an email back on March 15, from Romina Bin Mac Donnell from LinkedIn. And she said that on May 22, message ads will begin to sunset. And you may experience slower campaign delivery. As I'm reading into this, it's probably something like a quarter of the profiles on LinkedIn are going to be sunsetted each week. I think many of us are used to LinkedIn having things roll out on Tuesdays, it looks actually like things are starting to get rolled out on Mondays instead. Because May 22 is a Monday. She said as of June 19, advertisers won't be able to create new message ad campaigns. And then by July 31, message ad delivery totally ends. So there's going to be that gap between June 19 and July 31, where you can't create new message ad campaigns, but they will still deliver to that last few people who still have access. In the past, we've talked about the new ad format that's replacing them being called click to message ads. It looks like they now have a new name. They're called conversation starter ads. And she says, "Conversation starter ads are a new messaging ad format that appears as a rotation of ads in a fixed placement in the inbox. They encourage members to click to initiate conversations in the focus tab. And they will replace today's sponsored messages. As with message ads, conversation, starter ads will not be available in the EU." Now this is AJ again, I was really hoping that this new ad format would allow us to start advertising in the EU that maybe somehow they made it around the GDPR regulations, but it doesn't look like that's the case. She goes back on to say, what action should I take? To minimize disruption to your message ad campaigns, we encourage you to switch from message ads to conversation ads by June 19. And this is all 2023, obviously. Conversation ads will automatically evolve into conversation starter ads, starting on May 22, with availability increasing over time. Conversation ad campaigns require no attention at this time. I'll definitely have more to share on these because we are in the beta for conversation starter ads. So I'll have more info to share on that in the next few weeks. On March 20, we noticed several of our client accounts had access to the new AB testing tool. If you've been listening for a while you may have heard us talk about this. This is a tool that we've heard LinkedIn talk about for years now. Well, it looks like it's actually just been rolled out. If you don't have access to it yet, just wait because it's probably being rolled out a quarter or a sixth at a time. And again, launching on Mondays. So check your account. If you don't have access check next Monday. The way you can check to see if you have access to this tool is you go under test in campaign manager and then when you go to click on create test, we used to only have brand lift test, but now we have AB test. The call out inside of campaign manager says test different variables like your ad format, your creative content, your audience, or ad placement to see what performs best. As we dove into it to see what kinds of tests we could create, I was actually really disappointed. And that's because you can choose to test an ad or an audience against each other or a placement against each other. But even if you do ads testing against each other, the test says it will automatically create two campaigns to test the two versions of your chosen variable. So that means you can't just AB test your current creative inside of a single campaign. It's going to arbitrarily create two brand new campaigns that after the test is over, these are just cluttering your account. We are very much proponents of an evergreen account strategy, trying to reuse campaigns whenever possible. Because those campaigns you're investing spend and trust and history into them and by continuing to use those, not only to keep the clutter of your account out. But it also allows any new ads I launch inside of that campaign to start with higher relevancy scores to cost less and get better reach right out of the gate. So we have yet to test the new AB testing tool, but I would love to hear from you guys what experience you have. Same thing, if you've already run any of these conversation starter ads, please reach out to us. We'd love to hear about your experience. I wanted to highlight one review. Nunosbpereira mentioned that this is the best LinkedIn podcast. They mentioned, "I've learned practically all I've had to learn through this podcast, what an amazing resource" and Nunos I wasn't able to tell from your username, who you are or where you're located, but I just want to say thank you so much for leaving such a glowing review for us. It absolutely warms my heart to know that our podcast has been such a great learning resource for you. Alright, for those of you who have not left a review, I want to feature you so make sure you go and leave a review for us. With that being said, let's go ahead and hit it right into our main topic. So we're obviously talking about the buyers committee. And this is predominantly a topic in B2B. But B2C also has a buyers committee, it just doesn't function the same way. In business to business, we have these buying decisions that are more complex, they're decisions that take longer and involve more people. More often than not a B2B purchase decision is one that is more expensive. So we have these larger deal sizes and the purchases being made through a budget, rather than coming out of someone's wallet. We know that buying is a decision that is very much made emotionally. But in B2B, oftentimes, we're still going to buy emotionally, but we just have to rationalize it to others, the end user is still going to be affected emotionally by their pain point. And then that end user has to convince everyone else in the buyers committee to move the deal forward. I love this about B2B that these decisions are made from a budget, meaning that it's already been set aside for and our end user is just trying to make decisions about which tool or which product ends up being taken from that budget. I also love that the deal sizes are large, and that it's a more complex sale, because that's more data for us to be able to analyze. And as I'm sure you know, I'm a huge data geek. In business to consumer there is still a buyer's committee Ask anyone who's done door to door sales, more often than not, you'll hear, I got to check with the wife or I've got to check with the husband or the partner. So we know that there is this buyer's committee happening. But now we need to understand who it is who makes up the buyers committee. First off, we have the end user, I call this person the pain feeler. They're the ones who experience the pain that your product or service alleviates or solves. Then generally the boss of the end user gets involved in this decision. They're the first line of defense the first person that the end user has to convince. Lots of times the boss's boss gets involved in this decision as well. Everyone who's responsible for that budget may have to provide some buy in. Then if it's a large enough purchase, which in B2B, it usually is there's usually someone involved from finance. In larger companies that might be someone like director level or manager level in finance. But in smaller companies that might go directly to the CFO or the VP of Finance. Large companies usually have a role set aside for purchasing or onboarding from vendors. And they usually have a title dealing with buying or procurement. It's a standardized role for onboarding new vendors. If you're targeting smaller companies, oftentimes, the main decision is being made by the CEO or the founder or someone else in the C suite. Alright, so who else could be in the buyers committee? One of the ways that we've found to be really successful is talk to some of your sales reps because your sales reps will find out who it is who's standing in between them in their deal. Listen for statements like, well, I need to get sign off from x, from some role, or some person in the organization. Make a list of all of those types of roles that tend to be in the buyers committee. And you can take them into account in your marketing. We're obviously talking about how to leverage the buyers committee within LinkedIn Ads. So I want to give you a recommendation that we want to reach the buyers committee with ads. So let's talk about what the value is for reaching them. First off, brand awareness helps a ton for the buyers committee. The way this works is if someone signs off on a deal or with a vendor, if that vendor or deal doesn't perform, it's a risk to them looking bad because they signed off on that vendor that didn't end up performing. By the time this deal crosses someone's desk. You want them to be able to say, oh, yeah, I've heard of this company before they must be legit. Otherwise, they may feel like they have to go and do more research. And if they have the power to shoot down or veto the deal, if they come across something that makes the vendor look less trustworthy, they may just shoot the deal down right there, then it's going to be a lot harder to convince the buyers committee why they should go along with the deal. So here's the campaign setup that you might want to have for targeting these buyers committees. First off, these should be a separate campaign, because you don't want to intermix your messaging that's going to your end user, or what we'll call your your ICP. And this is for three reasons. Number one, you want to report differently because this traffic is going to perform quite differently than when you're targeting your end user. Number two, we like to use micro segmentation of your campaigns for more control and visibility. And number three, we definitely want to hit them with different messages, and maybe even different offers than we would target with our ICP. What about ad formats? You're probably going to want to hit the buyers committee with ad formats that are more friendly to a brand awareness kind of approach. You want to get them brand familiar, but you're not necessarily asking them to take action. For this, I absolutely love using text ads. They're super low cost, and they're really high on impressions and frequency. The big downside here, they're only going to show on desktop, and most users on LinkedIn or on mobile anyway, so you may not be able to fully reach your buyers committee, but it's a great assisting ad format. Next, I think sponsored content makes the most sense, usually single image ad, but I could totally see a video or a carousel ad doing good awareness work here. Sponsored content is more expensive than text ads. So costs are going to be higher, and click through rates might actually be lower than when you're targeting your ICP. And you probably don't want to expect conversions. Although it's not too uncommon to have conversions come in, because someone in the buyers committee wants to go and answer questions for themselves or do their own research. You could also do dynamic ads, especially follower ads, or even spotlight ads. And they are a little bit more costly than text ads. But I could definitely see someone from the buyers committee following the company because they want to learn more about it before they make the purchase decision. All right, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into how to message the buyers committee. 12:21 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities from your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use and it can be painfully expensive on the front end. At B2Linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing your ROI while minimizing platform costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ads strategies that are customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way that B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in the world, we've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call today at B2Linked.com/apply. And we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. Alright, let's jump into the messaging and calls to action that we can use with the buyers committee. First off, what messaging would you use, as you're talking to the buyers committee, we find that more often than not our ad copy when we are targeting the end user or our ICP, they have a pain that needs to be solved. And it's a very specific pain. But the buyers committee, they're oftentimes aware of this pain, but they don't experience it intimately the same way that your ICP will. They understand it in concept they've heard about this pain through meetings or emails or something. But you can still talk to this pain at a high level. And your call to action from these ads are likely going to be things that are more like learn more than download now. And you want to help them be brand aware rather than having to ask them to take action. Don't be too worried by these folks not having high click through rates. The goal here isn't a click, the goal is to be in front of them as often as it takes to gain their mindshare. What about offers? What are you offering these people? Well, obviously, we talked about your call to action of learn more, but you could send them to a blog post or a web page or more about the company. It could be a video to tell a story. Obviously we know in marketing storytelling is so powerful. Any way that you have to tell the story of why your company is trustworthy and why it can help solve this pain. It's going to be an asset to you. We would highly recommend don't gate anything here. Everything you share, make it ungraded because you don't want to add any friction. All right, I've got the episode where you sources for you, along with our recommendations of exactly how to set up your targeting to hit the buyers committee. It's coming right up, so stick around. Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 15:24 For the resources from this episode, Episode 65 of the podcast goes all into micro segmentation so if you have questions about that as a strategy, or how you can use it on LinkedIn, go check out that episode. If you or anyone you know is just getting started with LinkedIn Ads, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn on LinkedIn Learning, you'll see the link in the show notes. And it is by far the highest quality and the lowest cost course out there. If this is your first time listening, welcome, so excited to have you here. Make sure you hit that subscribe button so that you're hearing all of these episodes as they come out. But if this is not your first time listening, please do go and rate and review the podcast on whatever podcast player you have. Most of the time this is done on Apple podcasts. That's where the majority of the reviews come in. And that is by far the best way that you can say thank you. It's a zero cost way of supporting us. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. All right, as promised, here's the targeting of how we go about to actually reach the buyers committee. First off, we want to use company name targeting, because usually we know the name of the company that we're already talking to, so we can type in up to 200 company names or we can upload a list as a matched audience. And you can have up to 300,000 companies when you're doing the match audience. Then you'll probably want to layer on the roles at those companies. More often than not, we use a combination of the job function and the seniority ways of targeting on top of those companies. And that's because it's the broadest way to reliably target. And we want larger audiences here, because we're targeting by company. And since targeting by a limited number of companies usually results in a smaller audience size, we want to maximize that and reach as many people as we can, that could be part of the buyers committee. Otherwise, we're going to be paying higher costs. And it's going to be harder to get in front of the people that we want to be aware of our product. Remember, we're not being stingy here, we're trying to reach as many people as we can, as opposed to campaigns that we might run to our ICP, where we want to be totally specific to those who are most likely to have our pain point. But with these buyer committee campaigns, we want to be a little bit broader. So you'll be targeting the end user in your other campaigns, these are the pain feelers. But you also want to reach their co workers. A lot of times, that's the job function and the seniority of your pain feeler. And of course, you can exclude the individuals on a contact list so you're not reaching your pain feeler here. But I would argue that it's not a problem if they're seeing your ads as well here. But you want to reach their department and level. You're gonna get your pain feeler and their co workers in their department. Next, you want to hit their boss, and maybe even their boss's boss. So that's their job function with one or two seniorities up. So let's say that the person who feels your pain is the senior seniority. When you get to reach their boss, you want to get manager and director. If you're working with large companies, you can go after the procurement roles. So that's a job function of purchasing. And you probably want to use either all securities, or maybe everything, but entry level and training. If you're at small companies, and you want to hit the CEO, you want to use job function of business development, you heard that right, and then add a CXO, or a C level seniority, that's gonna get you the President and the CEO at the smaller companies. How about in finance? If these are smaller companies, you're probably going to want the VP and above, VP and CFO level finance. If you're targeting larger companies, it might be someone more like a senior or a manager or a director level. I've got a little bonus hack for you here. If you have a contact list that you might upload to LinkedIn, to be able to target a bunch of these individuals, what you can do is if you have their company address, the @companyname.com, in Excel, you can strip that out and leave just their company's domain name, then you can turn around and upload that as a matched audience as a full company list. So that's how I would take something that would have been a list of contacts, and we've turned it into a list of companies to go after. Just a word here on audience sizes. So let's say that there's 10 people at each company who you could feasibly see as being in the buyers committee. That means to get over the initial hurdle of needing 300 people in your campaign so that you can launch, you'll end up needing at least 30 companies on this list just to get over that. So realize we're not going to be spending very much on these audiences anyway. Even if you might have to pay a higher cost per click, or a cost per impression to get in front of them. You'll probably have to bid higher anyway, because these ads aren't nearly as relevant to your buyers committee as they will be to your ICP. Alright, hopefully those were really helpful hacks. We'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Drew Boyd's LinkedIn Profile Positioning interview with April Dunford April Dunford LinkedIn Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Over the hundreds of LinkedIn Ads accounts we've managed, we've seen a lot of companies fail. Today we're talking about what you can do to make sure that your approach is built for success on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! I don't like to admit defeat, but after managing hundreds of LinkedIn Ads accounts, unfortunately, we've seen many companies fail at LinkedIn Ads. My definition for fail here is this is client churn for us where after they work with us, they stop advertising on LinkedIn completely. Analyzing these failures, as well as many, many successes, thank goodness, we found the common denominators, the essential components to this success. We'll go through each one of these in a lot more detail. But here are the essential components. Number one, the client needs to be clear on their ICP or their ideal customer profile. This means they understand their pain and who they are. It's our targeting in LinkedIn. Number two, they clearly understand the value they offer to that audience. They have product market fit. And number three, they know how they're competitively positioned in the market. So today, we're gonna dive into ways that you can research and develop your ideal target audience, and figure out what messaging will work in your ads. We're addressing your go to market strategy as it relates to LinkedIn Ads, but this is also going to relate to your entire business, your whole marketing approach. In the news, we've heard some really great feedback from our last episode, and I'm so glad that you all enjoyed it so much. It was the one on bidding and budgeting. And afterwards, I got a great question from Steven Owen, who manages demand generation at a company called Getac. He smartly asked about manual CPM bidding, since we didn't cover it in the episode. And I didn't cover it because when I want to do CPM bidding, 99% of the time, I'm already using maximum delivery. There are times though, when you might want to use a manual bid, when you're bidding CPM. So because we didn't cover this in last week's, I wanted to quickly answer it here for you. So when I want to use CPM bidding, I tend to use maximum delivery, like I said, 99% of the time, because when you're bidding CPM, it's just the easiest way to do it. The trick with CPM bidding is that your bid needs to be high enough to secure you in the top placement in the first ad slot. But not any higher because then you'll be overpaying. And that requirement of being in the first slot is really important, because that's where CTRs are the highest. And when we have high CTRs is exactly why we're bidding CPM anyway. So this is absolutely crucial. But when you do manual CPM bidding, you get more control. You may remember from our holiday traffic study that those who are still using maximum delivery over holidays, their costs spiked way up. And that's because on maximum delivery, the platform is going to bid as high as it needs to on CPM to spend your daily budget. So if you want to be insulated from those market forces, you can bid manually, that's just one of the few ways that I can think of where you'd want to do this. Another reason could be that you can get better pricing manually bidding than you can with maximum delivery. So if you do want to do manual CPM bidding, I like to do some variation of this. So I'm going to look at the suggested bid range. And I'm going to set my initial bid at kind of mid to high in that range. Because like I said, I want to make sure that we always show up in the top slot, then I'm going to run ads. And the next day, I want to look at my effective cost per click. And remember, your effective cost per click is what you paid for your clicks, regardless of if you were bidding by cost per click. So if I'm bidding a CPM of $90, for instance, and I go and look at my effective cost per click the next day, and I see that it was $16. But I realized I could have been paying $15 If I was bidding by manual CPC, then I'll try lowering my CPM bid by five ish dollars, I kind of tend to move in $5 increments, then I look at my effective CPC the next day to compare it to the previous, if your effective cost per click went down, then you can try bidding even less and see if you can get a cheaper cost. So in this case, I would lower my CPM bid from 90 down to 85 and see. And if my effective cost per click is now at $15, I could say well, let me see what happens if I drop this down to an $80 CPM bid. You probably also want to try increasing your bid. So let's say I bid $95 CPM for a day and measure and see what it did do my effective cost per click. And the reason for this is if you're ever falling into a second ad slot, that's six or seven posts down the page, and fewer people are going to make it that far, meaning that your click through rate will be likely less. Which when you're bidding CPM, you're counting on getting the best click through rate possible. It is a lot of babysitting and hand holding to your campaigns to constantly be changing your bids, and constantly trying to find where's that sweet spot where I pay the least amount for my clicks. And that's why I like maximum delivery, when it's available of course. But if you're willing to do all of this work, you can get costs lower by doing it. It just requires some attention and patience. I wanted to highlight a review of the podcast. Valentin QWP, he left a review that says, "Best marketing podcast. I found AJs podcast a few months ago, and the content of the podcast is gold for anyone managing a LinkedIn ads account. This is definitely the most useful marketing podcast nowadays." Valentin, thanks so much for leaving that review. And I will tell you, that is very high praise. Anytime that we can have the most useful podcast in marketing, I'm in. I really appreciate that. If you're a regular listener, and you haven't left us a review yet, please do because I want to feature you and give you a shout out. All right. With that being said, let's hit it. First, we're talking about getting clear on your ICP, or your ideal customer profile. This is important, because if you're not speaking to your correct audience, your ads will fail, period, end of story. Think about it like this, the value in LinkedIn ads is this precise audience targeting. And we pay a significant premium for that opportunity to laser focus on exactly the right people. But if you end up targeting people that won't ever be your customer, you'll never be able to get a return. Occasionally, we'll onboard a client. And when we ask them about who it is that they want to target, they may not know. And sometimes we'll prod and we'll dig a little bit deeper. And they may turn it back on us and say, well, you guys are the marketing experts. And I'm certainly not complaining here. This is a dynamic that just naturally happens when you're an ad agency that works with a wide variety of industries and companies. But I can say for certain, and I'm sure you'll all agree that just because we're marketing experts, we're not experts in your specific industry, or with your exact target audience. And we're definitely not experts in your company's offerings. Given enough money and time, we can become experts in all of these things. But if the company doesn't already know its audience intimately, it's likely going to take 10s of 1,000s of dollars in ad testing, and many months of time to get to that point. So if the marketer already knows their audience, then we can just jump immediately into success on the platform. So we can show run ads, but you get to decide is your goal in running LinkedIn ads going to be audience testing, trying to figure out who it is that we need to target? Or is your goal demand generation and actually reaching the right people and driving your business forward? So if you don't already know who your audience is, how do you find out? Well, ideally, your founder is already a clue here, because your company founder or founders, they started the company based off of solving a problem that likely they themselves faced. So you can reason who are the types of people who feel this common pain that the audience suffers from. We can think through the possible roles, who would feel the pain or be responsible for the pain that we saw. Sometimes it's easy, and we're right, right out of the gate. Sometimes certain industry segments or certain company sizes have a bigger need or feel the pain more, or maybe they just have the budget to solve the pain. To give you an example, we have a client who built this awesome technology. It can read any document if it's handwritten or digital, whatever. And it uses AI to grab all of the data from those documents and pushes it right into a digital format that the company can read. The product is called Pixie Docs, in case you're curious. So we targeted several industries that we thought would have a great use for this technology. We reasoned that insurance providers will likely want to use something like this if they're getting bids from other vendors. And of course, they're always trying to keep costs as low as possible when they're replacing things that customers have made claims for. So we started targeting those insurance providers with ads. And several revisions later was sponsored content ads, we were still getting like a 0.2% click through rate, which as you likely know is about half of the benchmark. So I knew we were failing. So we went to go talk to the head of sales and asked for some insights about this industry. Why can't I get click through rates above like .25% He ended up asking a couple prospects. And they told him that they already make all of their vendors enter the bids right into their system. So all of that data is already digitized. So they don't feel that pain point that we saw. That makes perfect sense. But it's something we just couldn't have known without getting to know those prospects better. Let's talk about product market fit. And you can ask yourself here, are people buying your product? Are they happy and satisfied with it? Sometimes, like we've talked about the founder has created this product to solve a pain point. And it's probably one that they felt, but your product market fit is, is it a significant enough pain that people will seek out a product to solve it, or they're willing to pay enough that it's in your best interest to solve that pain point for them. And if you don't have this product market fit, no amount of advertising is going to save it. I feel like in business to consumer, product market fit is oftentimes easier. Think about it, you open a pizza restaurant because everyone needs to eat. And there's a lot of people who live in this area. And my guess is if you took a poll, probably 95% of people would say that they like pizza. Now if you own a pizza restaurant, I'm not saying that this is easy. But you can imagine you have product market fit right out of the gate. This is much harder in business to business. Sometimes it's really hard because we don't have detailed understanding of what your customers are experiencing, especially in different industries. And sometimes founders go and create a solution to a problem they felt. But you find out later, they're the only ones who feel that problem, or they were the only ones who felt it strongly enough that it was worth seeking out a solution for so you may need to validate your product market fit and ask yourself serious questions as a founder, like is it possible I'm the only one who struggles with this particular problem, or so many people feel it, but it's not acute enough that people are willing to open up their wallets to solve. Sometimes your solution is really valuable to those in different industries that you didn't predict. With Pixie Docs from our previous example, for instance, we stumbled across the medical industry. We found that doctors offices were struggling with onboarding new patients. You know, when you go to a doctor and you fill out a bunch of paperwork on a clipboard and hand it to the receptionist, well, then that receptionist has to enter in all that information into the computer and they get backlogged. But then it holds up things like patients getting their prescription. So it's a significant pain point. So we found some great success targeting them. And the founders never would have thought when they were building this product that they were building it for medical practices. Now, I've described a little bit in these examples how we can use LinkedIn Ads to validate the pain points of the business. In this example, with pixie docs, we were targeting multiple industries segmented out as separate campaigns. And that way, when I ran a report inside of Excel, showing general performance by industry, I could look at it and say, wow, there's this one industry that has really low click through rates. And here's this other one that's shining. So that is a way that you can use ads to validate. Once you've found an audience, you can run different messaging against them until you find out what sticks. If you're at a very large company, you may have budget to do actual market research. You can conduct focus groups or customer interviews. If you remember episode 87 when we were talking to Andrew harder at Cisco, he was talking about how he used customer interviews and didn't have to spend significant budget on market research. He just conducted his own. And I think that's super cool. You can send out surveys, you can do these interviews. You can even use social listening platforms to understand what people's pain points are. These are all ways that you could potentially validate. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into how to communicate this value to your potential customers. 13:47 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use, and can be painfully expensive on the front end. At B2Linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI while minimizing your costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn strategies that are customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way that your B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 12 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in the world, we've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. So if you want to generate more sales opportunities from your ideal prospects, consider booking a discovery call at B2Linked.com/apply. We'd absolutely love the opportunity to get to work with you. Alright, let's jump into communicating value. So if we're speaking to the correct audience, but we're not saying what they're going to respond to, we're gonna fail. We need both. We need the correct packed audience, and we need to be saying the right things. So how do you actually learn what they want to hear? And how do you get them to take action? The way you do this is you have to understand your audience. And there's no shortcuts here, you have to understand their pain points, acutely. What keeps them up at night? What words do they use in their vernacular to describe their problem? When you actually know who your customer is, you gained two superhuman ability. Number one, you know how to talk to them. And number two, you know what you can offer them that they'll pay attention to, because it'll help solve their problem. Most of you who are listening are marketers. So I'm going to try to use an example I came up with the if someone targeted you with ads, and they said, we help marketers get more unique loads of their HTML file. Sure, I can interpret what it is they're saying. They're saying that they can get me more unique visitors to the website. Everything in that is technically accurate, but they've entirely lost my trust and credibility, because they didn't use the same language that marketers use and the I'm already comfortable with. If they don't know the terms that I use, do I actually trust them to actually be good at what it is they do? Probably not, that ads gonna feel a lot like spam. So once you actually understand your customer, how do you talk to them? I'm a big fan of Drew Boyd, I got to attend a workshop by him where he walked me through the values framework. I've mentioned Drew on the show before, but he's a marketing professor and a LinkedIn Learning instructor. And he's absolutely phenomenal. He ran me through this exercise that totally blew my mind. He had me get a bunch of sticky notes of different colors, and arrange them all over the wall of a conference room. At the bottom, we started by placing basic product features and spread them way out. Then up above, we listed all of the basic benefits that customers get from each of those features. So for instance, if I were doing this with the iPod, I could have put a sticky note at the bottom that says feature 16 gigabyte hard drive. And of course, the iPod was famous for not putting in their ads, that this has a 16 gigabyte hard drive, therefore you should want it. They understood that people want it for the benefit. Then up above that we list the high level of benefits. We're talking about how these benefits get a little closer to home. In our iPod example, we might say 8,000 of your favorite songs in your pockett. Follow so far? Okay, good. Then at the very top, we listed the values that those high level benefits lend themselves. What value as a person would make you perfect for a product that could provide this high level benefit. So in this example, I could say, my value is I'm a music lover. I value having my music library, everywhere I go. I could do this for all of my features. And then all of the benefits of high level benefits and nailed down what are those common values that my customers have. And now if my job were to write ads for the iPod, I could write a very powerful copy. Because I understand the things that our ICP really values, and I know how my product benefits them. I would highly recommend running through this exercise with your company's features, benefits, and values. You should also realize how important it is that your message coincides with where your customer is, in their journey. If people are just in the very beginning of their journey, understanding your brand, your message is going to be very focused on value proposition. If they're in the consideration phase, though, they're probably asking different questions and feeling different things that your content needs to address. Anytime your ad is just listing benefits, we call it benefit dumping, it's going to come across very much like an ad. But if we can take those benefits and weave them into a story, it's a lot more interesting. People are programmed to pay attention to stories. I think we have to hit on brand positioning, because it's not enough to figure out what value that you're offering to your target audience because your competitors can offer that same value, or at least they can say they can. So you need to clearly articulate how what you provide is different from anything else on the market. And I'm not discounting this because as a business owner, I realized this can be really scary. You'll come up against legitimate thoughts and concerns like, well, if we declare exactly who we're ideally for, will that alienate potential customers and our revenue? Will it turn away some of our current customers? So it's definitely worth sincere thought here. Someone who speaks to positioning very well is someone by the name of April Dunford. We highly recommend checking out her content. And in the show notes, we've linked to an interview that she's done. Okay, so once you understand your brand positioning, and who your ideal customer is and what they care about. Now, you can start crafting offers and remember by my definition, An offer isn't something like a percentage of or a coupon. The offer is what you're offering your prospect in exchange for their attention. So an offer could be anything from read this blog post to buy something now to anything in between. If you want to dive deeper into offers, go back to Episode 10 of the podcast that was all about offers. All right, I've got my last little bit of advice for you on this topic. So make sure you stick around all the way to the end of the episode and I'll share those with you. Okay, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around 20:37 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. So you'll want to go down and look at the show notes below. I've listed a link to Drew Boyd's LinkedIn profile, so you can go check him out, follow him there, check out his LinkedIn learning courses. They're insane. We've also linked to an interview that April Dunford did for winter.com called How To Make Any Offering Obviously Awesome. We've also linked to April Dunford LinkedIn profile, so you can go follow all her great content there. If you or someone you know is brand new to LinkedIn advertising, I highly recommend that you share with them my course on LinkedIn Learning all about an introduction to LinkedIn Ads. You'll see the link in the show notes. It is by far the highest quality course at the lowest cost possible. If this is your first time listening, welcome, I would love to invite you to subscribe to the podcast, so you'd never miss another show. But if this is not your first time listening, please do rate and review the podcast, especially on Apple podcasts. Not to guilt trip you or anything here, but we spend hours and hours prepping every one of these episodes and this is all we ask of you is please leave us a review. It's going to help the show in the algorithm so more people get to find out about it. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections reach out to us at podcast at B2Linked..com. Alright, with that being said, hear my last thoughts on this episode. As you're trying to figure out who it is who's your ICP? What do they like? What do they care about? What do they value? And how you're positioned to help them. It might be a little disheartening to realize that there's no guide or completion meter letting you know whether you've done it sufficiently or effectively. And honestly, this process is never complete. You're always learning more about who your audience is, and especially how they're changing. So you have to keep testing and developing. But I do know this for sure. The sooner you get started, the sooner you'll be having a lot more success. I'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: New Interests for Interest Targeting Explanation of CPC vs CPM bidding on LinkedIn Relevancy Score and Auction Episode Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript You're paying way too much for your LinkedIn Ads. Today, we're going to fix that. We're talking about bidding on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics! For those of you diehards who've been around long enough to have listened to Episode Six, it was all about bidding and budgeting, and it was our most listened to episode of the entire series. Well, things have changed with bidding a good bit since we recorded that episode back in early 2020. So I definitely think it's time to refresh ourselves on the topic. Not to mention, I'm a very different podcaster after 89 episodes. And so I'm excited to have one of the most important topics covered in an episode where I don't sound nearly as awkward Bidding is the number one reason that advertisers are paying too much for their ads on LinkedIn. And this is incredibly important to master because this is something that really affects your bottom line. The strategies and principles that I'm sharing with you today came after I'd spent over $30 million on the platform. So these learnings are well earned, and I'm excited to share them with you. We've now spent over 150 million on the platform. And we just continue to fine tune these. So make sure to listen to the very end of this episode. Because at the very end, I'm going to give you my framework for how to get the lowest costs from LinkedIn ads every time. In the news, you may remember back in episode 87, we mentioned that the new feature called website actions was seen out in the wild, and that it might be part of a beta. Well, I got confirmation from Mark Gustafson this week that it is indeed in beta. So if this is something that you're dying to get access to, then reach out to your rep. And Mark, thanks for that correction. There was a new post on the LinkedIn ads blog this week by Jae Oh, and Jay is definitely someone that I'd love to have on the podcast. So we'll see if I can get him on in a future episode. But he posted all about the new release of interests for LinkedIn targeting, we've linked to the whole article down below in the show notes. But he basically explained the interest targeting on LinkedIn in three different categories. He talked about general interests, service interests, and the newest product interest attributes. They launched over 20 new service interests, and over 120 new product interests. He said, you can now fine tune your campaign targeting with over 400 professional interest categories. For product interests, he mentioned that there are 18 categories to choose from. And the initial focus is software, which makes a lot of sense, because when they rolled out product pages, they were exclusively for SAS software,. Makes sense that that's where they would be getting the data from. And they go down to subcategories that zero in on specifics, like you mentioned, data visualization software, revenue management, software, sales, analytic software, etc. Under the new service interests, it's all about engaging with services pages, they launched with their initial set of about 20 categories that includes services such as real estate, environmental consulting, and app development. So if this is interesting to you, definitely go check out that article, I want to highlight one of the reviews, Patrick Alessi who's the Head of Customer Success at ProfitMetrics.io in Denmark. He left this review. He said, "AJ is clearly an expert in his field. Listening to this podcast has already given me a lot of tips and insights that I didn't have before". Patrick, thanks for that, I'm turning a little bit red. I'll move on here. If you're a lover and a listener of the show, and you haven't left a review for us yet, please go and do that, especially on Apple podcasts. I know I say it every episode. But it really helps with the algorithms of getting the show mentioned and shown to new people who haven't discovered it yet. The biggest compliment that you can pay us is by leaving a review and help other advertisers find the show. And of course, if I can figure out who you are, when you leave your review, sometimes you can't tell from the username, I'll give you a shout out. So I want to feature you. Alright, let's go ahead and get to the topic. Let's hit it. First, we need to talk about the different bid types that are available the ways that you can bid. The default is called maximum delivery. And it used to be called auto bidding back years ago, and I actually liked the term auto bidding better than maximum delivery, but whatever, I was not consulted. The way that maximum delivery works is you pay by the impression and LinkedIn bids as high as it needs to in order to spend your daily budget. It's the default option for most campaigns. And it is the most expensive way to pay for your traffic about 90% of the time from the studies we've done. It's only available for sponsored content, which is your newsfeed ads. But if you're anything like us, the vast majority of our budget ends up going into sponsored content. So it'll feel like a lot. Next, we have manual bidding. And with manual bidding, you can pay either by the click, or by the 1000 impressions. The concept of being able to pay by the click is what put Google Ads on the map. I absolutely love getting to tell people that when you're paying by the click, you don't pay a dime unless LinkedIn can get someone to actually take action. What LinkedIn does is it gets as much traffic as it can at your maximum bid until it hits your daily budget. Although many of us know it regularly overspends daily budgets, manual cost per click bidding results in the cheapest cost per click from LinkedIn about 90% of the time. So I get really comfortable with manual bidding. And I suggest you do the same. What's interesting about manual bidding is it's actually a hidden option. I joke about this, but in a campaign, you'll see under bidding, maximum delivery and cost cap bidding. And then there's an option that says more options. And when you click that, it reveals manual bidding. So this is effectively a hidden option, because it's an option that takes up one row that LinkedIn has hidden with a toggle that takes up one row. Obviously, this means that it was hidden intentionally. If you're listening to this podcast, I'm imagining that you are an advanced advertiser. And this is by far the best option for advanced advertisers that are looking to improve performance. It does take more work, but boy, it's worth it. When LinkedIn costs what it does to be able to get costs down 20, 30 50%. You'll also notice a little checkbox under manual bidding when you select it that says enable bid adjustment for high value clicks. And if you hover over the little question mark there, it says it allows LinkedIn to bid up to 45% higher to capture someone that LinkedIn thinks is most likely to convert. I would argue that this data is very limited on who is actually high value so I usually uncheck the box. In theory, this works the same way that target cost bidding used to work. But we'll talk about that here in just a moment. The option in between is called cost cap bidding. And LinkedIn says, "With automated cost cap bidding, you can set your maximum cost per key result. Oour bidding system will deliver as many results as possible at or below that price point." So of course, this sounds really cool, so we went and started doing a bunch of tests. And although they were limited, we tested cost cap against manual bidding, where we left the bid exactly the same. And in every case, we ended up with the same volume, but our costs were just higher. So I can't recommend cost cap bidding. But cost cap bidding replaced target cost bidding, and it went away a year or so ago. We never found success. In fact, the results that we had were very similar to what cost cap bidding is now. It appears to act very similarly. And I'm not sure why they took it away and replaced it. But in order to give it a different name, they must have changed something significantly on the back end. But we can't really tell the results are so similar to cost count bidding. Now, right underneath your bid type. You'll also see something called optimization goals. Those of you who are really experienced with Facebook advertising, you might remember the old bidding method on Facebook called OCPM, or optimized CPM bidding. OCPM on Facebook was awesome. I absolutely loved it. And what it did is it allowed you to pay Facebook's really low CPMs. So you're bidding by CPM, but the auction system is optimizing to show ads to those who are most likely to click. So you've really got the best of both worlds pay on low CPMs. While the advanced system found those who are most likely to click, it resulted in really low costs per click is fantastic. When you change your optimization goal to landing page clicks while you're bidding with maximum delivery, this is effectively the same thing as Facebook's old ocpm. The difference here though, is that LinkedIn CPMs aren't cheap. And I don't think that LinkedIn data is nearly as good at Facebook's about who's most likely to click. You can also set your optimization goal to impressions, which means you're telling the system to optimize towards showing as many impressions as possible, which isn't really an optimization. It's more of just what the ad platform is meant to do. But based off of your objective, you may also see some additional optimization goals. Like if you're in a video views campaign, you can optimize for video views. If you're in the brand awareness objective, you'll notice that you can optimize towards reach meaning hitting as many different people as possible rather than showing the same message the same person over and over. If you're in lead generation, you can use the optimization goal of leads meaning bid on those who are most likely to actually fill out a lead form. With website conversions, you can optimize towards people who are most likely to convert and then under sponsor messaging ad formats, the only optimization goal you get is sends, which is basically like optimizing for impressions. The system's not having to think too hard. So your optimization goal and your bidding strategy can change based off of the objective and your ad format. And there's way too many permutations to cover here. But for example, under the brand awareness objective, if you want to run a dynamic ad, let's say a spotlight ad, you'll be limited to just impressions as your optimization goal. Whereas under any other objective, you'd be able to set clicks as your optimization goal. And many people don't know this, but you can run a video ad under a website visits objective. If you set video views as your objective, you're limited to only being able to bid by the video view or by the impression. But if you put a video underneath a website visits campaign, you can set an optimization goal of landing page clicks, which is a cool hack. Okay, with that groundwork being laid, we can talk about how bidding actually works. If you haven't yet, go back and listen to episode 72 about relevancy score on LinkedIn, and how the auction works. We get really geeky into it. So when you start manually bidding, which again, I recommend about 90% of the time, it works on the basis of an auction. And LinkedIn calls it a second price auction, which is the same model that Google engineered back at the very beginning of Google Ads. And the logic goes like this, an impression comes up for auction. So let's say someone from your target audience just logged into LinkedIn, they navigate to their feed. And now LinkedIn hosts this very fast auction, that just takes a moment to let all the advertisers who want to show up in this user's feed to start to compete. Whoever wins this auction wins that impression. And then when someone eventually clicks on their ad, they end up paying one cent more per click than the loser the second place person would have paid. Whether you win the auction or not, it's a combination of your relevancy score, which is how well LinkedIn says that your campaigns are performing and your bid. If you have a high performing ad, meaning that it gets a high click through rate, it means you don't have to bid as high to get traffic. If your ads are low performing. It may feel like pulling teeth to get LinkedIn to try to show your ads or LinkedIn or show them but you get gouged by crazy high costs. So under this auction system, you show enough impressions that you start to get clicks and other interactions on your ads. And since you're bidding manually, you pay no more than what you bid. So you might be asking yourself, if that's the way the auction works for manual bidding, how does it work on maximum delivery or auto bidding? Maximum delivery is cost per 1000 impression bidding where again, LinkedIn gets to bid by the impression and bids as high as it needs to to spend your daily budget. This feels like a little bit of a conflict of interest to me, just imagine handing your wallet to LinkedIn and trusting them to only take as much out of your wallet as it really takes to advertise. It's not gonna happen. Since you're bidding by the impression and you're bidding high. LinkedIn doesn't even need to hold much of an auction for you. Because the whole auction environment, it's a way of maximizing profit among advertisers who are bidding only for performance. But when you're bidding by the impression, the auction doesn't care how your ads are performing, or performed in the past, because it gets paid handsomely guaranteed, just for showing your ad. So bidding this way, it's far easier to get traffic, you'll notice that it takes far less babysitting your campaigns to spend your budget. But because you're bidding so high on CPM, it leads to a much more expensive, effective cost per click 90% of the time. If you want to see how all the math works here, check out the YouTube video that I linked to below. It's all about CPC versus CPM bidding, and you can really see me nerd out. Now I've mentioned a couple times that maximum delivery is more expensive 90% of the time. But what about that 10% of the time that it's actually more efficient. We've found that that break even point starts when your click through rates get to two to three times the benchmark for that ad format. That of course means you need to know what your benchmarks are. So go check out episode 15, in case you missed that. And that click through rate of two to three times that's an average sometimes with more competitive audiences, we find that you have to be performing more like three times the benchmark. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll get to dive into the advanced bidding tips. 14:44 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com. The LinkedIn Ads experts If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities from your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use and can be painfully expensive on the front end, which is probably why you're listening to this episode. At B2Llinked, we've cracked the code to maximizing your ROI while minimizing the costs you pay on LinkedIn. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ads strategies that are customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way that B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn advertising budgets in the world, we've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call at B2Linked.com/apply, we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. Let's jump into those advanced bidding tips. When you're bidding manually, I recommend usually bidding significantly lower than what LinkedIn recommends, I'll just remind you the average cost per click on LinkedIn is usually between about $8 to $14 per click in North America. So if LinkedIn is telling you that you need to be bidding $25, $40, $60 per click, you really don't have to trust that advice. It's bad advice. If you have a giant budget like Fortune 500 or if you have really small audiences, oftentimes you will have to bid significantly higher to spend those budgets. For instance, we know that we can't fill our budgets with bidding near the floor if someone's budget is more than like $10,000. So generally, I suggest bidding low and then if you're not getting enough traffic, then start to increase your bids. But many of you have asked me about starting by bidding high and then backing down. And I used to recommend this strategy, because by doing it, you can kind of pad your relevancy score. But I don't recommend it much anymore, just because of how much money was wasted during the first few days because of how much money was wasted during those first few days of bidding really high. I found that LinkedIn relevancy score will eventually shake out. If you have good ads, chances are, even if you're bidding low, the system will learn that you have good relevancy scores, even if you're bidding low. Sometimes if the ad platform gets it wrong, like if we're bidding low, and the platform gives us poor relevancy scores and so we see that the ads just aren't getting served, oftentimes, we'll pause those ads, and we'll relaunch exactly the same ads. We call this refreshing. So that's a tool in your tool belt. But if your ads are good, and your audience is tight, performance should be good and you shouldn't have to try to trick the relevancy score algorithm. Alright, let's talk about budgeting. So when you're doing manual bidding, you'll see that there's a daily budget. And there's also actually a lifetime budget, but we'll get to that. But when you're doing manual bidding, your daily budget is effectively just a safety net, that shuts your account off and takes you out of the auction, so that you stop spending. And LinkedIn will allow itself to spend over 50% of your daily budgets, which I think is a little bit excessive, but hey, I'm not on the back end. When bidding manually, I like to set my daily budgets really high, just to get it out of the way because the last thing you want to happen is your daily budget kicks in, shuts your account off before you actually find what that campaign is capable of spending at your bid level. Then after a couple days, you can analyze where you're hitting spend wise, and you can either lower your bids, or raise your budget, or maybe even both. So that's under manual bidding. But how does daily budget work when you're using maximum delivery? Well, this way, it's very simple. You set a budget, and it hits it or likely exceeds. Unless your audiences happen to be pretty small, then it might not actually hit it. But on small audiences watch because those costs per click, you might be paying $50 per click, since maximum delivery gets to bid so high. Keep an eye on that. So we mentioned lifetime budgets. If you've been listening for a while, you've likely guessed that I'm a fan of daily budgeting. I love that control that it gives us or the evergreen advertising approach that we recommend. When lifetime budgets first came out, it was back when a campaign would expire when it hit its lifetime budget. And when it expired, there was no bringing that campaign back from the dead. If that campaigns results ended up being great. You'd be recreating that bad boy from scratch. accounts would be littered with 10s or hundreds of unusable campaigns. They took up space and they weren't good for anything except for reporting. So to work around them, I used evergreen campaigns with daily budgets. And if for whatever reason I didn't want to keep running ads to a certain audience, I would end up pausing that campaign and I can resurrect it again in the future by simply unpausing it. And this does mean that you have to be consistently paying attention to the account. If you try to do the set it and forget it thing, you can end up overspending budgets. And this works out great for us because managing LinkedIn Ads is all we do so we don't mind having to have to look at an account every day. But I realized that there are those of you out there who manage multiple channels, and maybe don't have the bandwidth. And if that's you, then lifetime budgets can be okay. But here's how lifetime budgets work. For example, if you have a campaign that you want to give a lifetime budget of $1,000 to, the campaign then goes and tries to spend that $1,000 and then shuts off. This can happen over the course of one day, or it can happen over the course of two months. It's really just however long it takes based on your bids. Now you can set a daily budget as well. So let's say you set a daily budget of $50, and a lifetime budget of 1000. So it would try to spend the same $1,000, but it would pace it out over about 20 days. But of course it could take longer. I do like this level of control better if you want to use lifetime budgets, because blowing an entire campaigns budget for the month in one day is very difficult to explain to a boss or a client. So back to budgets when we're manually bidding, let's say that you have a $50 per day budget for a campaign. If you're bidding too high too aggressively, you could spend that entire budget by 5am, before the workday is even started. And on top of that, of course, LinkedIn reserves the right to overspend your daily budgets by 50%. So it could be even worse, you could spend today's and tomorrow's budget by 5am. If you're not bidding aggressively, if you're bidding more on the low end, that budget should last all day. Daily budgets with maximum delivery bidding are a little bit different. Because what you put in is your daily budget, LinkedIn is going to bid as high as it takes to actually spend that. Whereas with manual bidding, if you're only bidding, let's say $8 a click, and you have a budget of $50 for the day, if people just aren't clicking, LinkedIn is not going to do anything to try to get you to spend more towards that $50 mark. You might just spend $14 for the day and be done. And of course, there's a lot of back end logic that goes into this calculation, which is probably one of the biggest reasons that LinkedIn recommends not trying to time your campaign by pausing them and unpleasing them at different times of the day. You can imagine that if max delivery is trying to spend your budget by the end of 24 hours, if you pause your campaign until the beginning of the work day, and then pause at the end, you may only end up spending half of your daily budget, which would obviously be confusing for that algorithm. With manual bidding, though we don't have the same issue, which I actually really like. As a reminder, daily budgets work off of UTC timezone, which is in the UK. Now I'm here in the Western US, I'm in the Mountain Time Zone. And so when a campaign has hit its daily budget for the day, it turns back on fresh at 5pm. So you can spend the entire day's budget before the day actually begin. I really, really don't love that. In fact, I actually really hate it. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up, along with my framework on how to get the lowest costs from LinkedIn Ads 100% of the time. That's coming up right after the resources, so stick around. 23:23 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Alright, like we mentioned in the news section, the article from Jae Oh on the LinkedIn ads blog all about the new interest targeting, you'll see a link to that. You'll also see the YouTube video that I did on CPC versus CPM bidding. You'll get to see all of the complex math behind how that calculation works. Episode 72 was all about relevancy score and the auction. So you'll see a link to that. Make sure just in case you missed that episode, you go back for it. If you or anyone else is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, maybe you're just getting started, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning all about LinkedIn ads. It's by far the least expensive and the highest quality course out there. If this is your first episode you're listening to, welcome! We're so excited to have you here. Make sure you hit that subscribe button. But if this is not your first time you've listened, please do consider rating and reviewing the podcast. Like I mentioned earlier, it's by far the best way that you can say thank you for the hours and hours that it takes to put this podcast together. With any questions, suggestions or corrections reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. So here's the framework I've been telling you about. Marketers really love frameworks so I'm giving you one of my favorite campaign launch frameworks. This works with any size of budget, any size of campaign, and it's designed to produce the very lowest costs on the platform period, 100% of the time. Get ready to take now notes. So you start out by bidding a campaign with manual CPC bidding. And I recommend significantly lower than the recommended bid range. In North America, maybe start around the $7 to $8 mark. And you set a budget that's significantly higher than what you actually want to spend. And don't worry, you likely won't actually be hitting it so don't be worried about it being sky high. I really like to set my budget so high during this initial testing phase, just to get it out of the way. You might be asking yourself, well AJ, how high? Here's my rule of thumb, I want it high enough that there's just hardly no way that it'll ever spend it, but not so high that if it did spend its budget, that I'd lose my job. So I launched my campaigns with that low manual bids with high budgets, and day one to one and a half will probably be the learning phase. So you don't want to touch your campaigns during that. The results from day two, though, should be pretty informative. On day two, you compare your actual spend for those campaigns with your desired budget. Now, notice, I didn't say your daily budget, I said your desired budget. And that's because I told you to set your daily budget higher than you actually want to spend. And that's because you don't want your daily budget to get in and shut your campaigns off mid day, you want to get a good feel for that audience's ability to actually spend based off of your bid level and your ad performance. For example, let's say that you set your daily budget at $200 per day, and you're actually wanting to spend about 50, at the end of day to look and see how that compares, did you weigh under spend the $50 mark, it means your bid likely isn't aggressive enough to reach enough of that target audience. Or it could be that your audience is just too small to spend that budget. I'd recommend increasing your bids by one to $3 per click, just depending on how severely you understand. What if you just kind of understand what it does mean that you'll need to bid higher to get into the auction enough to spend your budget. And here, you don't have to increase your bids quite so much. You could try increasing them by 10 cents to $1. What if you actually hit your desired budget for the day, it means that you're bidding at just the right level to spend your daily budget. And this is the holy grail. You just found out how to bid low enough to get the best pricing, but high enough to spend your whole budget and get scale. What if you actually spent higher than your desired budget though? Well, lucky you. Even at a low initial bid, you still overspend. And that means that you get to lower your bids even more and get even cheaper traffic while you're still spending your daily budget. Depending on how much you overspent by, you can lower your bids by again 10 cents to $1, or maybe a few dollars. There's no exact science here, you've got to make changes and see how the campaigns respond. Now as soon as you're comfortable spending your desired budget, then go ahead and lower your daily budget to match your desired budget. Or maybe lower it to a little bit under since LinkedIn can overspend your budget. And now your safety net is back in place. Oh, doesn't that feel good. Now you've let this campaign run for a few days, I like to look at a three day uninterrupted stretch. Now I want you to look at your click through rates. Do you have any that are consistently way above benchmark? With sponsored content campaigns, I look for click through rates that are over 1%. With text ads, I look for click through rates that are over .045%. If you get one of these, hurray, you can now switch to maximum delivery bidding. And this will actually start saving you money. And like we've discussed before, maximum delivery bidding is really convenient, it's a lot easier to use as an advertiser, then watch over time. Because if you have another three day stretch, where your click through rates are falling below that point at which your click costs became cheaper. Then you want to switch back to manual CPC bidding, and then rinse and repeat. The reason this happens is over time when you show your ads to the same people, they get less and less likely to click. And we call that saturation. You can go check that episode all about AD saturation. But this could happen over a week. It could happen over a month or two months. So you have to keep your eye on click through rates over time. And I reevaluate, I go through the same process. Every time I launch new ads or new offers since they're sure to change the click through rates, which then changes the relevancy score, which changes where your bids need to be in order to spend your ideal budget. If you launch new ads, and they get click through rates that are significantly higher, that's great. That means you're probably going to get to go and decrease your bids and get even cheaper traffic and still spend what you want to spend. Or maybe you launch new ads and they don't spend what you want them to, you can go and reevaluate by increasing your bids a little bit. Maybe you've been talking to your rep and your rep has been saying, no don't bid low because you'll end up getting bad quality leads. This is, from our experience, absolutely false. Without fail, every time we've tested lead quality associated with bid levels, we find no difference in lead quality. If you find that there's a difference though, go check your targeting, since you may inadvertently be letting people in who aren't part of your ideal customer profile, your ICP. So that's the framework. I hope you love it. Hope you took great notes. With that being said, I'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Job Title Targeting Nuances Workplace Learning Report In-Demand Skills Civil Rights Day (MLK Day) Ads Analysis Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript Did you know that the LinkedIn Ads definition for a video view is different from LinkedIn organic definition, or that a senior seniority isn't very senior at all? We're covering 11 things on LinkedIn Ads that don't mean what you think they mean, on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! The LinkedIn Ads platform continues to evolve. It's really coming into its own as a tier one channel, truly ungrateful. That being said, there are still several areas of the platform where LinkedIn's definition of something is not going to match up with your likely definition of that same something. In today's episode, we're going through the 11 areas to be on the lookout for so you can make sure that metrics and campaign manager don't lead you astray. First in the news, LinkedIn recently came out with their workplace learning report. And it's actually based on LinkedIn Learning. And you'll find the link below in the show notes. It was actually a really complete report. And I read through it, and the one conclusion I came to is surprise, we're in a fast paced industry, and we need to keep learning and growing to stay ahead. The good news is, if you're listening to this podcast right now, which you obviously are, it means you likely already understand this. So I congratulate you for being in the top 1%. LinkedIn also released their 2023 most in demand skills. And this is based on skills that people are looking for in their job postings, and probably also based off of the skills that people have in their profiles that only LinkedIn has access to. And again, really no surprise here, they mentioned that things like social media as a skill are in demand. The problem with the skills on LinkedIn is that so many of them are so broad, that I don't even find them valuable to draw trends from, let me know if I'm off base and you disagree. But check out the report, as I've linked to it in the show notes as well. Also continuing from the popularity of our analysis around the holidays here in the US, we just published an analysis of ad performance around Civil Rights Day, or Martin Luther King Day here in the US. And that's live on the blog right now. Go check it out if you want to see the trends. And as a sneak peak, Superbowl and Valentine's Day are also coming up. So stay tuned. I want to highlight one of the reviews. It was left by the user name Giugiugiu. And they say, "AJ is probably the best LinkedIn Ads expert on the market. I attended one of his workshops in Boston a couple of years ago and I was in aw. I finally found someone who knows how this tool works. He's funny and very good in explaining all the functionalities. Absolutely the go to resource if you're starting with LinkedIn Ads. Thanks, AJ for sharing your knowledge." Well Giugiugiu. I wish I knew who you were. So I can thank you specifically. But I really appreciate the super kind review here, me and my whole team, we try so hard to explain the functionality very simply, and so grateful we can be a resource to you. A huge thank you to everyone who's been reviewing the podcast lately. It's really picked up aand I really, really appreciate. And if you haven't left a review yet, please do it. I want to feature you live here on the podcast. Alright, without further ado, let's hit it. 3:20 Like we talked about in the intro, we're talking about the discrepancies that you might find in the platform today. So let's say that there's a discrepancy in the platform. Why does this actually matter? Why do you actually need to know about these discrepancies? I think it's really important to know what you're actually reporting on. You obviously want to make decisions with accurate data so that they're the right decision. You also want to have confidence in your data. That way you can defend it if you're challenged. An example that I come across really often in digital marketing is the bounce rate in Google Analytics, because it doesn't mean what you think it means, unless you've actually done like the Google Analytics training courses. I don't know if the definition has changed for Google Analytics 4 that's rollout. But with Universal Analytics, a bounce just meant that they didn't go to another page. So if you're sending someone to a landing page where the whole goal is to get them to convert, then it actually makes a lot of sense that you have a 95% bounce rate. I want you to be able to digest accurate information, because you're actually using this data to go make decisions. It's not good business to be heading the wrong direction at anytime. So now that we're in agreeance, that this is actually important stuff, let's jump into the first one we have. 4:34 Sponsored Messaging Ad Formats under Performance So sponsored messaging ad formats, if you're under the default look for performance, you really can't trust much of the data there. Anything relying on a click is just totally boldface wrong. If you listen to episode 79 about the B2Believe event that happened in November, you know that LinkedIn announced some big changes in Q2 2023. So this may or may not be relevant in the future, but I'm guessing it is, I'm guessing this is still going to be an issue. So if you're looking under performance, if you look at your clicks, as well as your cost per click, and your click through rate, it's actually calling an open a click. So you might look at your sponsored messaging and say, wow, we have a 55% click through rate and our cost per click is less than $1. I hear this a lot and tend to just shake my head, because definitely, that's not what's happening. What's happening is they're measuring your open rate and your cost per open, which isn't very valuable if you ask me because people will open it just to mark it as read. But a valuable definition for a click to me is actually someone taking action on the ad. That means clicking on some sort of a call to action that I've given. The simple solution here is under the performance column. Look under sponsored messaging. There, it actually breaks out your sends, your opens, and your clicks, and gives you the proper metrics. So this is one that's actually more or less been fixed, if you're looking under the right column's breakdown. 6:05 Conversion Column Another one that we come across really often is you're looking at the conversions column, trying to decide your cost per conversion, or your conversion rate and decide if that's good or not. It's very important to understand that the conversions column should actually be called total conversions. Because it's not just conversions, it's made up of your click through conversions, which is great. That's exactly what you want. But it also includes your view through conversions, which, depending on your campaign, depending on the other channels you're running may or may not be conversions that you actually want to attribute to your LinkedIn Ads. The solution here then is to go to the columns drop down and select conversions and leads. You'll of course, see the conversions column, but right next to it, you'll see your click conversions and your view conversions. So when I'm taking my data and doing an analysis, I'm gonna throw this data into Excel. And then I get to decide which column I actually care about. And most of the time, I'm going to use my click conversions column, instead of just my conversions column. As an agency, I would be so embarrassed to go to a client and tell them that yeah, we had 10 conversions when they look in their CRM and see that there's only four. And then I look like I'm lying. 7:21 Clicks Column The next one is somewhat related. And that's just looking at your clicks column. Because the click metric actually changes as your objective changes, I think it should be called chargeable clicks. If you're using the objective of engagement, the definition of a click is any click that happened on that app. So if someone hits like on your ad, or clicks to go see your company page, all of those are going to be called clicks. But if you're using the website conversions objective, a click is actually a lot more indicative of what's happening, because that was someone who clicked on your call to action that took them to your external landing page. If your objective is lead generation, just like engagement, you'll notice that any click on your ad becomes a chargeable click. And these tend to go unnoticed because they have such a high conversion rate. But you really should know. And that means that if you go and look at your cost per click metric, and your click through rate metric, they're affected the same way as well. So if you're looking at multiple campaigns that have more than one objective, your metrics are definitely being skewed, it's almost like you have to look at the metrics for each objective separately. When I get this data to a spreadsheet, I choose one metric to unify all of my definitions. So instead of just using the clicks column, I like to use landing page clicks. And you can find this under the engagement column drop down. Inside of campaign manager, it's called clicks the landing page. And of course, it's just another column when you do an export to Excel. But when you're looking at the engagement drop down, you'll see that there's one called other clicks. We don't know everything that counts as an other click because you'll see a lot of other types of clicks there that have their own columns. But most of the time, it's when you have an ad that has the ...see more at the end, because your text was truncated for being too long. Other clicks is someone extending that. All right, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into more discrepancy. 9:20 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts 9:29 If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities from your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use, and can be painfully expensive on the front end, at B2linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI while minimizing your costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ads strategies, customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way that B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 12 years, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in the world, we've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities from your ideal prospects, book a discovery call today at B2linked.com/apply. We'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. 10:21 Video Views All right, let's jump into video metrics because there's a lot interesting here. Like I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, the organic definition and the ads definition for a video view, are very different. If you post a video either from your company page or personally, and then you look at the views that have racked up, a view as anyone who watched at least three seconds of that video. But the definition for a view in Ads is two seconds with 50% of that video on the screen. And if you're curious why the definition for ads is shorter, realize that when you're bidding by video view, LinkedIn only gets paid when someone counts as a view, hence why they'd want to make it 33% shorter. 11:03 Video Completion Percentages And then how about the definition for video completions because this is something that has been changed very recently. If you're looking at the formula for a 100% completion rate of your video, that's calculated using your completes divided by your starts. This means anytime the video started, whether it made it to two seconds or not. So of course, it would make sense that your view rate is going to be your views divided by starts. Well, it's definitely not your view rate is views divided by impressions. To see how much this is actually affecting you, go compare your impressions to your views and your starts. And you'll see sometimes this can make a really big difference. 11:47 Organic Stats Another one dealing with the organic stats, you may or may not already know this, but when you post something that's not a video, your posts show the number of impressions that that post got, that means the number of times it showed up in someone's newsfeed. But anytime that you post video, it shows views which are very different. Like I said, go compare your impressions to your views, you might find that one video gets one view for every four impressions, you might find another one gets one view for every one impression. So they can be very different. 12:22 Forecasted Results Column How about as you're actually building a campaign, you'll notice over in the right hand column, there's a section called forecasted results. We actually had a client recently who was upset that their results didn't match the forecasted results. So I think this is really important to point out some people are looking at these like their gospel. What you need to understand about the forecasted results column is that these numbers are not based on your performance. They're based on your bid and your budget, your optimization goal, and your audience size. But because they don't actually take your performance into account, it's wildly inaccurate. I'll give you an example. If you know that when you launch ads, you get click through rates that are like 1.5%, you'll look at those forecasted results and they'll say, oh, we expect that you're gonna get a click through rate between .45% and .6%. But if you have a click through rate, that's more than double what they're predicting, you'll likely get cost per click way lower, and you'll likely get served a lot more than what they're predicting. It really needs to take into account your performance before giving you forecasted results. Plus, as we were playing with it, we found that it was blatantly wrong in several cases. The example that we looked at, it was predicting that cost per click would be lower when bidding by impression than it would have if we were bidding by click. It showed an expected click through rate of .45% to .6%, which is not in the range where bidding by impressions would be cheaper. So there's some bad math going on here behind the scenes. I do hope that someone from LinkedIn will look into that. But as a reminder, don't bank on these figures. They're not based on your performance, or your audience. These are simply something to let you know what you might expect, probably for the most basic brand new advertisers. 14:08 Rotate Ads Evenly Alright, let's talk about rotate ads evenly. Because in theory, it sounds really interesting. For me, I love AB tests. I love to test things. And to get an accurate AB test, you really need to have both test versions shown about the same amount of times. So of course, when you're editing the campaign, and you're on the ads page, when you see that little cog and you click it and it asks you if you want to rotate your ads evenly or optimize for performance. If you're like me, naturally you'll want to say oh yeah, I do want to rotate my ads evenly. There's a major reason why you don't want to do that. I call this the charge me more and show me less button. Here's why it acts like that. When it says it's going to rotate your ads evenly, it's not showing your ads evenly, it's entering them evenly into the auction. And here's the big difference. Each of those ads gets its own relevancy score from LinkedIn. And LinkedIn won't tell you what the relevancy score is. The only indication you get is at the campaign level from a campaigns report. So let's imagine that one of your ads has a relevancy score of four, and the other one has a relevancy score of six. If you select the option for rotate ads evenly, you're forcing both of those ads to go into the auction in even number of times. But the ad that has a relevancy score of six is going to win more auctions at a cheaper price. And when you're forcing the ad into the auction, that only has a relevancy score of four, it's going to lose more auctions, and when it does when it's going to have a higher cost associated with. So the net effect here is that when you are running this option, you'll notice your overall costs per click will rise. And your overall impressions will fall. For years, LinkedIn have talked about a new tool that they're going to come out with, but I think they're going to call like the AB testing tool or something. And I do hope this solves the issue here because we don't want to mess with the auction. What we want to do is show our ads evenly so that we can get accurate tests. So I do expect that we'll be able to have some sort of a solution for this in the future. 16:19 Senior Seniority The next discrepancy here is in seniorities. You'll notice that there's a seniority called senior seniority. And people tend to think that this means like an executive, maybe in job titles like senior vice president or senior manager. But according to LinkedIn, that's not what senior means. It actually means individual contributor. This is someone who manages projects and things, but not people. And of course, LinkedIn doesn't actually know who is managing people and who's not. But they try to deduce this from job titles. In a past episode, we mentioned that dentists show up under the senior seniority, which I think is crazy. I remember I spent millions of dollars on the LinkedIn Ads platform, targeting the senior seniority, along with VPs, and C level before I ever realized. So take my learnings and go and save yourself some time and headache. 17:15 Super Titles Now, we mentioned this next one, on the job titles episode, when you're targeting a job title, you may be targeting a lot more than what you think you are. The way that this works is something called super titles. Titles on LinkedIn are a free form field. So people can go and write whatever they want. You can give yourself a cutesy title or a really standard one. And then to make this a useful feature for advertisers, LinkedIn then has to go and collect all of the job titles out there and stick them into buckets of common groupings that you might type to target a group of these people. And then they take it a step further by aggregating similar titles into something called super title. And the reason I think that this happens is it might not be a great user experience, if you went into job title, and had to select 50 or 60, similar titles to get who it is you want. They want you to select 2, 3, 4, 5, whatever, and then feel like you've accurately covered that audience. There are definitely some glitches, though, and how this works. I mentioned this back on Episode 60, all about job titles. But we noticed that if you target the Chief Marketing Officer job title, it's also going to include Marketing Consultant, job titles as well aand you can't exclude it. Because if you're targeting CMOS, and you do an exclusion of marketing consultant, job titles, your audience size drops to zero. 18:42 Company Size Targeting All right, next, let's talk about company size targeting. What you need to understand is when you are targeting by company size, you're only targeting by known company size. What that means is, if you're targeting by company size, let's say 11 through 50, the only people who can show up in there are those who are associated with a company who has gone and declared that it is size 11 through 50. And you may have noticed that there's a lot of people on LinkedIn who either aren't associated with a company page, maybe they wrote the company name in their company, but it's not attached to a page so it just shows up as a little like gray building as a logo. It means those people will not be part of this targeting. And the way this will rear it's ugly head is if you ever tried to use company size targeting as an exclusion, you'll be very, very surprised. Let's say you want to exclude small companies. So you exclude myself only through maybe 10 employees. What that's going to do, LinkedIn is going to go out and obviously try to target those that are 11 and higher, but it's also going to be targeting all the unknowns. The people who represent companies that don't have a company page, which usually tend to be smaller companies. So, you went in thinking that you were going to exclude small companies, and you ended up getting even smaller companies as part of your target. So unless you have a great reason for wanting the unknowns to be targeted, you don't want to use company size for exclusions. They're only for inclusions. Are you aware of any discrepancies that I might have missed here? Let us know by emailing us at Podcast@B2Linked.com and I'll make sure to include your feedback here in the next episode. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up, so stick around. 20:39 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 20:50 All right, if you look down in the show notes below, you'll see links to these resources. Episode 60, where we talk about the nuances of job titles, that episode is definitely worth listening to. You'll also see a link to the workplace learning report that we talked about in the news section, as well as the in demand skills report. If you're hiring, or even trying to just improve where you are in your career, it might be worth checking those out, making sure you're making strides on those in demand skills. I mentioned the analysis that we did based on Civil Rights Day, or Martin Luther King Day here in the US to go read that on the B2Linked blog. If you or anyone else is looking to learn about LinkedIn Ads for the first time, go and check out the course that I did on LinkedIn Learning. You'll notice the link down below and it's by far the lowest cost and the highest quality course you'll find about LinkedIn Ads. If this is your first time listening, please hit that subscribe button so you don't miss the next episode. But if this is not your first time listening, please do consider going to rate and review the podcast. This is the very best way that you can support us and say a big thank you for the hours and hours and hours that we put into this show. With any questions, suggestions or corrections reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.  

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Follow Andrew Harder on LinkedIn Awesome viral post about LinkedIn document ads from Andrew Another excellent viral post from Andrew about this video strategy Certified Marketing Experts Certification Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript AJ Wilcox Are you interested to hear how LinkedIn Video Ads drive actual opportunities, not just leads? Well, you'll love this case study with Cisco on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. AJ Wilcox Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics! I get asked so often about video ads on LinkedIn. And the truth is that it's so hard to answer what works and what doesn't with video, because it's so very different from static. There are infinite ways to deliver a message through video. It sure makes it difficult to narrow down and find a set of best practices that we can then present to other marketers as a recipe for success. When a friend reached out and told me that he'd had extreme success with video ads, I was listening. Then he shared how video ads weren't just getting high click through rates or low cost per view, but they're getting him low costs per opportunity. Well, he then had my full attention. He's got gold to share. And of course, I wanted to share that gold with you LinkedIn Ads fanatics. Andrew Harder, and I have crossed paths lots of times in the past. He started out his career at Hanapin Marketing, the agency that puts on the advanced PPC conference called Heroconf, and also do the blog, PPCHero. I absolutely love this conference in this blog and I've been blessed to speak at hero comp for the last like six years. It's by far one of my favorite shows that I attend every year. I've also been blessed to be named one of PPC Heroes, top 25 PPC professionals for lots of years running. And Andrew wasn't behind any of those decisions. So don't worry, this is not a conflict of interest. But Hanapin got acquired by Brain Labs and they're a mega agency. He moved on and now he works for Cisco under WebEx events. I'm really excited to interview Andrew about his results at Cisco. So we'll dive into the interview. AJ Wilcox But first in the news, one cool feature. So one of our loyal listeners, Joshua Stout, from the Impactable agency, who consequently I actually got to meet last night when he and his team were in town for a team building exercise, and we got to go to dinner. But he posted this week that he got access to a new feature on one of his accounts and it's called Website Actions. If you remember from the B2Believe event, this was one of the features that was announced would be coming, but didn't let us know when it would be coming. So I was so excited to see it out in the wild. To check to see if you have it in your account, navigate in the left hand navigation bar, under analyze, and then look and see if you have a heading there for website actions. I have to tell you, this feature is going to be so cool. And the reason why, I have to ask you, have you ever tried to set up a conversion action as an event, not just as a thank you page that people land on and it triggers the conversion? To do it as an event, you have to put a bit of JavaScript on the button that you want to track. And if you're like me, you don't happen to know JavaScript, it's a whole lot of troubleshooting, and wasted time, and no way to tell whether it's implemented correctly. What this feature does is it scans your landing pages to find buttons on the page, and then allows you to create any of those buttons as a conversion event just by selecting it. It works by having your insight tag installed on the page. There's no custom JavaScript, no wondering if it's set up properly, you just click an action and call it a conversion. This is one of those rare acts of brilliance by LinkedIn. I love the concept of this feature. I'm excited to get to use it. And it's also one of those features that I totally would have expected someone like Meta or Google to come up with. And yet we have it here on LinkedIn. Hurray. Justin Rowe from Impactable suggested that this feature may have been a result of the marketing analytics company called Oribi that LinkedIn acquired back in February of 2022. And that sounds totally plausible to me. Another awesome listener, Jay Rathell mentioned that he thought this was part of a beta so it might not actually be out yet. Your rep may have had to register you in the beta to get access. And I'm not sure what the truth is there. So just watch out in your accounts for when you get it. I wanted to give a shout out to Dig Altamiranda. Dig left us a review here on the podcast that says, "Best LinkedIn paid podcast ever. I love how AJ is unbiased and unguarded when sharing his expertise, the performance of my campaigns has definitely seen a boost since I started listening. And I will be a fan of the podcast for a very long time, a must listen. Dig, thanks so much for sharing that you've been able to take the things that you've learned from this show, and then use them to boost your campaigns and your performance. Well done. And of course, thank you for the kind words. It means a lot to me and the whole team who support me in the creation of these episodes. As a reminder, if this is not your first time listening to the show, please do leave a review and I want feature and shout you out as well. All right. Without further ado, let's jump into the interview with Andrew Harder. Let's hit it. AJ Wilcox I'm so excited to have Andrew Harder here. He's the senior paid media manager at WebEx events. It's a Cisco company. He lives in the Bloomington Indiana area. Andrew, I'm super excited to have you here. Andrew Harder Thanks, AJ been really looking forward to this thing. Thank you for having me. AJ Wilcox Oh, of course. First of all, tell us a little bit about yourself. Like give us the whole background. Andrew Harder Yeah. So have been in the PPC paid media world going on six years now. I had a few jobs post college, it was a little bit late getting into my current marketing career arc now. But I started at Hanapin, a small agency that's located here. That was actually how I first heard about you, AJ. So it's fun being on your podcast today. It's what little I knew about B2B at the time, like you were always the guy that we went to for resources. So yeah, I was there for about three and a half years. And then in the spring of 2021, I joined Socio, an event software company. And we were then shortly after acquired by Cisco, so hence the rebrand to WebEx events. But we're still a standalone software that's a part of the larger WebEx suite now, but I joined just to really run like their paid media. And it was just kind of search at first, but we've expanded a ton into paid social, especially LinkedIn, which is I know what we're gonna be chatting about today. So looking forward to diving in deeper with you. AJ Wilcox Awesome. Well, my roots with Hanapin go really deep. They're the ones who put on the Hero Conference. I've spoken there for years and years. 2023 is actually got cancelled this year, which, you know, just telling everyone else, which is so sad, because it's the first time we haven't had Hero Conference in a long time. I always look forward to that one. Hanapin was purchased by Brain Labs, like you were just telling me how many acquisitions they've gone through. They've been really growing a bunch of stuff, which is super cool for the digital marketing, but exciting background. So tell us about when you went to WebEx events? What kind of shape was the LinkedIn Ads account or the LinkedIn Ads initiatives before you got there? And what did you I guess, set up and start to do? Andrew Harder Yeah, so I mean, there technically was a few things that were just getting launched, like the month I started, but it was very bare bones, there have been a few like small tests here. And just kind of top of funnel content, and some like event promotions, like webinar promotions, but really, it was kind of a blank slate. So it was super fun. I mean, for most B2B brands, like searches, you know, priority in terms of driving MQLs and pipeline and revenue. So that was what I spent most my time with at first, but I was also only the fourth marketer hired on the team. So we didn't really have any content. There was another content marketer that started with me, but we're a team of four. And then because of the Cisco acquisition, we were able to grow really fast, and you know, just have a lot more budget. So our team then grew to a team of 20. So we had a content team, events team, it really took a while like having to think now. It was probably the first year I was there, it was just kind of adding in some more top of funnel content, promoting some things of course, like with the rebrand needed a lot of brand awareness around that, but there wasn't nearly the same level of like strategy as we have now. So we do have a lot more into video, but it was just kind of your traditional, like gated lead gen with some brand awareness. AJ Wilcox Very cool. Alright, so obviously, we have you on the show, because you've really knocked it out of the park in a lot of ways. I'm curious, what kinds of initiatives did you take on? After you came in you saw where it was at? You mentioned that you start some video, tell us how that all really progressed. Andrew Harder Yeah. So I mean, first thing, we hired another person to work with me because our budget and channels have gotten so large, so I was managing all like search and social and programmatic channels. And so we hired the amazing Krystal Marquez to work with me. And so she was a huge part of this transformation because like I said, we were just running just a lot of lead gen. There wasn't a ton of pressure for us to generate down funnel results. But we could do a lot more if we really started honing in on our audience on LinkedIn because, you know, for us, like we do have a few different ICPs but primarily like event marketing managers, field marketing, you know, a lot of those folks are on LinkedIn. And so at the same time, our events team was producing just amazing virtual events that we could use as like cut down. So I'm getting a bit head I think, but we started to put on paper, hey, we're gonna spend a lot of time analyzing our CRM, see what job titles were missing, and also, instead of having like, just like this large ICP audience, we're gonna segment that. So that was like kind of step one of like, audience segmentation. And then we also really want to talk to some of our customers, which is, like kind of a small step that's easy to gloss over in this process. But I think it was a huge part for us was, we wanted to actually talk to you. And we were able to talk to you like four different ideal, like customer profiles and different job levels. And really ask them frank questions about like the buying process, how they heard about us what channels are on, because we wanted to validate some of the things that we were going to do from a channel perspective, but also the type of content. And then we spent a ton of time cutting down these videos writing really like in depth ads. So it's not just, you know, slap a couple lines, hey, watch this video, like we really were taking the time of what's breakout, like, what are these nuggets that we can share with our audience. And so we spent a lot of time doing that. So that was a three month process really, of doing that. But before that, there was a lot of internal discussions about how we're going to change our strategy, and also took some work kind of convincing our bosses to to like, hey, we're going to take some of our lead gen budget, and we're going to start doing a lot of video where you don't get direct results from. AJ Wilcox Oh, yeah, so there's a lot of different areas. I want to dive in here. The first let's talk about this, what sounds like customer focus group or really market research. We just recently had an episode by the time this one comes out about market research. So this is something that's very top of mind for me. Did you go out and hire a market research firm to conduct this? Did you just grassroots say, hey, let's just start sending emails to our customers. How did you go about doing this Andrew Harder Super simple process, I'll break down that. Literally anyone can do, especially you're in paid media, you don't typically think of paid media folks doing this. But if you have, you know, whether you slack or whatever, internal comms, you need slack, you need Google docs. And that's literally all you need is an email. So like there's no hiring a firm or anything like that, it was I sent a message to our customer team, just asking for a list in for contacts of customers that would be willing to speak with us, and I prefaced it with hey, like, we're marketing. So they might think, Oh, they just want more case studies and things like that, which we do. And a lot of our customers are happy to do that. But I was framing it as hey, we literally just want to get some feedback for some things that we're gonna be testing out on social. And I got a list and I can't remember how many I was given, but we ended up being able to conduct 10 interviews over the course of like a month. And when I say 10, you might think, well, who cares? Like that's like nothing is a small sample size. I would say we have so much data like you know, we're marketers, we always want to be data driven, you can get that in the platform's, but really like spending half hour to an hour, with 10 different customers upwards of 10 hours of like, really in depth, going back and forth, you can discover so much more information. And also like we got a lot of ideas to from different types of creative that you want to test on LinkedIn and the types of content that we could go back to our content team and event team and say, hey, like people are talking about XYZ, are there plans for that? Do we already have some of that? And so it was super helpful, I would recommend that exercise to anyone. And also you'll be surprised if you have a great product you have for sure customers that are going to be happy to talk about it, especially if it helps them do their job better. Or for us like event software, a lot of event managers like have just horror stories of like, you know, event apps that didn't work or took super long time to get things set up. And so, you know, when they experience something that's a lot easier to use, or they're able to like justify ROI from their sponsorship, just like different things like that. They're pumped to talk about that, just like how I am as a marketer with different tools that we use in our everyday. So yeah, I would say do it. AJ Wilcox Did you have to offer them anything for their participation? Like a gift card or discount or anything like that? Andrew Harder Yeah, good question. So we didn't like have to I don't think. We offered, there's a WebEx merch store that actually does have a lot of cool stuff on it, so we offered like, I think it was like a $50 voucher to that. So it was just kind of like a thank you. But I honestly I would say probably all of those people would have done it without anything. But yeah, because we also do for anyone that's in B2B SaaS, like, we do a lot of reviews, too. Like we do gift cards, and like those reviews are great, but like, doing these actual like in person, or like through virtual, like those interviews, like it's so different than just, you know, filling out a few questions on G2. AJ Wilcox Yes. And what I want all the LinkedIn Ads fanatics out there to understand is, I don't want you to hear this and say, Well, of course, Cisco has the budget, to go out and hire market research firms and go and do all this, but I'm just a lowly paid marketer. That's not my job. I don't want you to let yourself off that easily. This is what Andrew did. He started this program as a paid marketing manager and did it by himself without a significant budget. And you heard him say he didn't even have to offer them anything for their participation. They would have been stoked to chat. But of course, it's always nice if he can offer something. So very insightful, like thanks for sharing us with us about the program. You also mentioned that you were cutting out video and that video was an initiative that you wanted to take on. First of all, what was spurred you to decide that you wanted to go all in on video? And how did you go about that? Andrew Harder Yeah, so I guess starting with kind of like the bigger picture reason why we did have a lot of I would say good solid image assets and different things that we were running like, it wasn't like we didn't have quality. But we knew, especially on LinkedIn, again, if your audience is engaged on it every day, multiple times, like, people do stop, at least I'm talking from personal experience, if there are videos, it doesn't have to be video necessarily, but for the sake of this conversation, like there are certainly that is about like other paid media, marketers talking about things that they do, or different tools, like I certainly, like, stop and watch those things. I don't like it. I don't like do anything to like, give LinkedIn, some feedback. So they get that, but a lot of times, you know, I send a Slack message to my team and say, hey, like, what do you think about this? And so one of the reasons why we really wanted to video was, we knew that we wanted to start, people use the term like creating demand, it might be a bit generous for what we were doing. But I do think we were really trying to like speak to just pain points and different like, ways that we could educate, who we were trying to bring in whether you know, they come in six months from now through a PPC click, or they come in through a different means or like, do they start falling on LinkedIn page, and then, you know, they click on us, you know, three, four months from now. We weren't so obsessed with like getting like this direct response from that it was really about taking these like 30 seconds, even upwards of like, two and a half, three minute clips of hey, there's a ton of virtual events, event marketer, and we're talking to you, how do you increase like virtual engagement awareness? How do you measure that? That's just one small example. But we were cutting this down. So we had that like focusing on like the virtual aspect, because our platform is virtual and person and hybrid speaking to, we have a lot of higher ed companies, a lot of member based organizations that their business or their event, like programs really run on sponsorships. And so like, we talked a lot about how to prove ROI from your event sponsorships how to, like get better at partnering with different sponsors, things like that, that were just very specific like one message. And this goes back to like the audience targeting we'd split this out. So instead of like this one large, like, okay, we want all these people, we knew that, you know, people that work at universities are very different than and they have very different event needs than someone who works at a fortune 500 company, doing a big internal event, or doing like, you know, their big summit, whatever they use cases. So we were showing these ads to all these audiences, because we had each event, we were probably cutting down like three to six different ads. And so we could see who was engaging with what so we're looking at all those engagement metrics, view metrics, and then this really allowed us to build a quality remarketing pool of people who were watched, like 50% of our videos, and we started so in the more and then we get some more like the product videos that were more like down funnel, and we saw a huge lift. And like we had like an overview video of our platform, when we just show that to a cold audience. Now surprised like, there's not a very good watch time. I don't have the numbers in front of me. But when we showed that maybe two, three, like remarketing sequences down the funnel, it was like 2 or 3x, higher, this small things like that. I'm just trying to give some examples of like what we were seeing. So as you can tell, there's a lot of stuff that goes into it. AJ Wilcox I love that. So you're talking about multiple step sequences. How did you set that up in campaign manager? Andrew Harder Yes, I guess preface this, we use metadata to run all of our paid social. So you can do all this natively. But what we were doing in campaign manager, you can, you know, create those remarketing audiences. So we could capture anyone that saw 50% or more of these videos. And then you know, it took a while when we first started, because some of these prospecting audiences we were targeting were not like super large. Also, we started with a lower budget. And when we started seeing good results, we started increasing that so we could get a larger pool. And then we'd create these campaigns. So we're only targeting people that you know, saw this specific video, we've combined some of them. But again, because we service a lot of different ICPs. We also have a big difference, like virtual events very different instant in person. So we could show specific mobile like event ads to people that maybe saw one of our like event cut downs that we're talking about how to get the most out of your event app, just like specific things like that. I mean, you can do, it's pretty easy to set that stuff up in your audiences. And then when you're creating your campaign, just selecting those remarketing audiences. AJ Wilcox So obviously, we can put together video programs. And if you can't actually tell something's working, it can be hard to convince, you know, upper leadership to give you more budget or hang on a little bit longer. What was the effect that you actually saw on your lead gen programs as this video strategy went on? Andrew Harder It changed a lot and for several reasons. One, we were starting to invest more in video and less in our lead gen. Because we started like I mentioned this earlier, but what I was able to get as a test budget for this was 20% of our paid social budget, which was a decent size. It was plenty for us to get going but that started to creep up to like 30% and like four already percent after a few months. And so we were seeing a drop in our leads, but because of our increased efforts in like targeting more refined audiences, and I would also say like, I don't have data to prove this necessarily, but I think, you know, running this alongside all of the video ads that we were doing that we're not like super pushy, or even, like, just kind of generic B2B stuff that no one really cares about, like it was educational. And like, you could take stuff away from that, we saw huge drops in our CPL, like we saw, like over a 60% drop in our CPL. But the other thing was, we had a budget reduction, like, you know, a lot of SaaS companies, we're starting to see throughout 2022, so we had more of that hit. But what I did was I measured this, after the first three months of doing this, I measured that against the spring when we had a much larger budget. And we were doing just pretty much all lead gen. And we had 28% fewer leads, but we had a 63% drop in our cpl. So it was like a massive, like we should have had really way less leads. But we were seeing the audience targeting I think even just like the quality, and there's a lot of things that go into this. So I know I'm oversimplifying a bit, because we were testing a few different offers. It wasn't apples to apples, but overall, like for paid social for LinkedIn, our budget was like 70%, less from like this comparison period. But to answer your question, we were still running a lot of the same type of lead gen, but we don't do any hard direct response, like demo request. But even so we saw saw a huge lift and the opportunities that we were producing both from like, kind of a first touch triggering standpoint, but also just like influencing, we can see these metrics because our serums integrated with metadata, kind of like, you know, the headline numbers was like, we spent like 70% last, but we had like 60% more pipeline that our sales team had generated. So again, like a lot of stuff goes into this. But I mean, that was like a pretty astounding difference, especially with the budget difference. And also 70%, less budget, but also like we were spending roughly half of that at this point on video. So like we were spending significantly less on lead gen. So it's a combination of a lot of things like we changed our audience targeting, we had all that video creative, we were running. Yes. And you could also say, well, all that stuff, you're doing the springton that influenced the fall? Yes, of course, it totally did. So it's not like a clear cut, you know, like AB comparison. But it was such a stark difference. We really had a stark stop, like in September when we started this, like, Okay, we're gonna really change our strategy. And we started like increasing that investment. So for anyone that says, like, oh, you can't get demos looked at our quality from LinkedIn, you definitely can like there's different ways to do it. I know there's some brands still do run some of that direct response or conversation ads, and that does drive pipeline. But like for us, like we try that it doesn't work at all. I mean, I see this all the time. I go into our CRM, I see our HubSpot reports, and I see, oh, we've had some more paid social meetings booked. And I'm like, oh, is that from this month? Did they come through this month? And a lot of times, it's no, they actually like downloaded one of our guides maybe like three or four months ago. And then they came back through search or like email alerts or different things like that. And now like they're either ready to buy, or like they weren't in market at all. And now they are and like we've been top of mind for them. We've been educating them, not like harassing them to like book a demo. And they came to us. And I think I've heard this before. And I love this way of like measuring is it working? Like you can tell if your marketing is working, if more people are like coming to your sales team to ask to talk versus how much are you going out and like asking them? I just love kind of like that idea and way to quantify it. So yeah, the very long winded answer to your question, but but certainly has changed. AJ Wilcox And I think marketers, myself included in this, we feel like once we've warmed a top of funnel well enough that eventually you've earned the right to ask for a demo. And in this case, you're seeing demos come in naturally, like you're not even having to ask for them. But even if you do run demo ads, you still don't feel like you're getting a great response from them. It's almost like people are perceiving us as being too pushy when we're asking but if we leave them alone, they'll naturally do it. Andrew Harder Yeah, absolutely. And I would even say to like one way how I justified testing 20% of our budget for video was I crunched the numbers on Okay, of all these leads, like yeah, you can show low CPMs especially on LinkedIn. Like it's good because a lot of times you call them like ICP leads depending on like title or company but what I did was actually measure that down to the full funnel different getting through the sales cycles and like close one and I'm not a huge fan of just focusing on like first touch like okay, did this trigger from like, I love looking at influence metrics and things like that, because obviously there's so many different touch points. And there's some great marketing tech out there now that can help with this, but it was like a no brainer to be like oh yeah, you can test 20% because like it's not like we were producing millions of dollars in revenue from this. It's like Okay, we have some great content to produce also, like kind of an added bonus. And this is kind of a caveat leftfield thing. If you're running virtual events or in person events, and you have that footage, you have to, like, repurpose that and run that on LinkedIn especially. And I would say, don't just do an organic channel so that all your employees and your family like it, put some paid budget behind it, target the audience that you know, is your target persona. And use that content, like you're gonna get much more out of that. And also, it's like a win win for like the content team, the events team or whoever is doing this. Or if you're a solo marketer, or a small team, like you can just get so much more out of that. So I would say even from just a, I don't know, like marketing team ROI standpoint, like it just makes a ton of sense. AJ Wilcox Alright, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive back into the interview with Andrew Harder. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. AJ Wilcox If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use and can be painfully expensive on the front end. At B2linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing your ROI while minimizing platform costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ad strategies that are customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way that your B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 12 years, we've worked with some of LinkedIn's largest advertisers in the world, we've spent over $150 million on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities from your ideal prospects, book a discovery call at B2Linked.com/apply. And we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. AJ Wilcox All right, let's jump back into the interview. I want to dive in a little bit deeper on video because we talked about the customer research, and anyone can do that. But now as we start veering over into video, now, the production value is getting a little bit higher. And you actually have to start dedicating some budget unless you happen to be a videographer by trade and can throw things together. How did you attack video specifically? How did you deal with the overhead of the cost of video? Also, how did you decide what types of videos to film and actors or employees or customers? How did that all line up? Andrew Harder Yeah, so I mean, this answer might be a bit strange, but I think it might give some people some more confidence to test this, like we Krystal and I, like knew the type of strategy we wanted to test. And we didn't have net new budget or things to do, or money to play with to create that new stuff. So we went and looked at okay, what do we have? And you also might be thinking, well, he works for any event company, like they have event software, they are like doing these things. Yes, huge advantage. I will say that for sure, but a lot of marketing teams still have some, you know, own first party events. And to kind of speak to one thing you were saying like, I would actually say you don't need super high production, I would actually advocate it's better to have more just authentic real video, especially on LinkedIn, because you know, you're seeing your network and then all of a sudden, you see like this really stocky photo, video type stuff doesn't really kind of penetrate your mind, you don't really care about that. So I would say like, you don't necessarily need the super high budget, you don't to go out and like, you know, spend 100 grand on some agency. We do have like a freelancer they used to help with, like some of these cut downs, but there's a lot of freelancers out there, they're gonna like break your marketing budget. I mean, Krystal stepped up big time, she spent a lot of time cutting down these videos, so huge props to her for I mean, she's a paid media marketer, just like myself, but she was like, well, I can like cut down some of this stuff. And over time, like when we started doing this more, our team started seeing like how much of an impact this was having our events team and content team are getting more proactive and like, oh, we're gonna plan this event that's upcoming, we know that the paid team is going to use this giving us timestamps, and in that to our freelancers, but to say more concisely, like, you don't need a ton of budget for an agency. Yes, we use our event software, but you don't need that, like you can use something which should say WebEx first or zoom. Like you can use something like that, and record that. That's just fine. I mean, you can see you can look at the engagement metrics and I would actually say if you already have some video that's super high production value or something like compare that against something that's more just raw. And I would even say to there are some larger brands out there SaaS brands that do this and I think it works well. Caveat to is if you do work for a large brand, like there are brand standards and I get that because I worked for Cisco so like there are certain things we have to abide by, but like at the end of the day, you can definitely do this. I would say it's not as easy as what I made it sound like for the customer interviews like that's super easy. Like it is a different thing, but I think anyone can do that. AJ Wilcox And how did you plan what type of video content you'd show? At what stage in the buyers journey? Andrew Harder Yeah, great question, I think also super important thing that we learned as we went on, because we really started with just kind of more. I don't like the term thought leadership, because I think it's more than that, how we were kind of framing it was like, Is this educational? Like if I wasn't, and we would even ask, like our events team, like, would you interact with this? And a lot of times, it was them saying, so it's like, yeah, of course they would. But like, the questions I would kind of ask myself is like, is this going to help someone that's running events do their job? Is this differentiated enough from just kind of like the generic advice out there, and all the events we're doing, like, very well thought out, and so we do have the benefit of that. So like, that's where we started off with was like that content that's really going to hit a pain point, or just give some value. But then from there, we'd get a bit deeper, like I was saying earlier, you're talking about hybrid events, like the value of that go a bit deeper and say specifically, like, you really need to hone in on like event sponsorships, or you really need to make sure you have the right event technology. And like you could say, well, that's kind of like a hard sell, we actually have a lot of content from our team that's saying, like, you need something and then like, oh, yeah, of course, like, we can provide you with that technology. But it's kind of educating to like, there's, this is specific to the event industry. But like, there's been so many changes, as you can imagine, with like COVID coming up on like, three years, and like it went in and out from in person to virtual. But now like, there's just a huge range, and like what hybrid even means. And so we would take people on these journeys, if anyone is familiar with like YouTube sequence ads, it's kind of similar, like, you can just set this up to then go a bit deeper into that. And then really, the best kind of journeys we had was, okay, we have like this educational video to show, then we have another layer of that, speaking to something more specific, maybe we had one or two of those, and then layer in like a more specific like this, how our product can do that. And so it's a bit easier to explain when I have like a spreadsheet to show, but hopefully that helps the audience a little bit. AJ Wilcox Very much. So let's say smaller marketing teams that don't have a budget for maybe something like metadata. Maybe they're working with a basic CRM, what's some advice that you'd give them on ensuring that they could take cold prospects, educate them through video, and actually ended up with close deals? Andrew Harder That is a great question. I hope I can give a great enough answer to that because I think there's so many factors that do come into this, because I would say we had a lot of things going for us with the video content we already had to play with. And then we were able to expand that. But if you are a smaller team, you don't have as much budget for tech or video, things like that. This is kind of obvious advice. But just like start small, even before that I would challenge like, look at what you're doing right now. And really challenge yourself and ask yourself the questions like if I am my, like target audience, if I am this, you know, X persona, do I actually care about this? Like, is this giving some value? Or am I just noise in this person's LinkedIn feed? I think you'll find a lot of your stuff is either stale, or it's really just kind of about you the company versus like, how can you first like give value and not ask for anything in return. But then from there, like if you have products that are fairly easy to record, like some tutorials to like, you might have a subject matter expert on your team. So that I would say that's kind of a hard gap to fill. But you can use free tools out there to just record either yourself or someone on your team, walking through the benefits of what you get from XYZ, like whatever your product is, or service is. And so yeah, I feel like I didn't meet my expectations for answering that question. But hopefully, I would like to starting with, like really challenging, like what's working. And then if you have content, like reuse that content, and you can go from there and get learnings and segment your audience so you can see who's engaging with what. AJ Wilcox I love it. Yeah, I think that's perfectly fine. Great answer. Well, the one question I like to ask everyone I interview, what are you both personally and professionally most excited about coming up? Either in 2023 or in the following months? Andrew Harder Yeah, love that question. I'll start professionally. I think I'm excited. So we are really early days and testing out a true like plg like free motion. It's new for us because we've been very like enterprise software. Like you can't really use the product without talking to us. I'm really excited for us to test that just from a marketing standpoint. But also how it's gonna play into our paid campaigns, especially like with LinkedIn, too. I see so much opportunity and I follow some other brands that do this so well and really just showing people like how easy it is to get started. I think you can apply this to anything in life. Everyone wants to like, you know, be in better shape or read more books or do things like that, but it's like just getting started. That's the hardest and I think cuz there's so much potential for us. There's not too many competitors that we have. There's a lot that have like that motion, but their software isn't as powerful. And I think just being able to learn as a marketer how to do that it's gonna be really fun. And I think getting more into being a quote unquote, content creator on LinkedIn, I'm very inconsistent still, but it's been fun just to put myself out there more. I mean, it's really how it's opened up opportunities like this to speak with you. And I think I'm just looking forward to meeting more marketers that I can learn from share some of my experiences, beginning of this, like I didn't set out to have a career in marketing, I didn't even know what PPC was. And I think it's really, really fun to speak to younger marketers. And so I'm, I'm hoping for more opportunities like that. And then personally, I have two young kids, my daughter is about to be three next month, which is crazy. And my son is just over eight months. So last year, couldn't do a whole lot because had a young baby. And so I'm excited for we have some fun trips planned. So I'm originally from Minnesota. I have a cousin getting married so getting out there and seeing some family. My younger sister's getting married this summer as well. So excited for that. And for my kids to hopefully have some memorable flower girl type moments, you know, that'll be super fun. And we have some friends in Wisconsin that we go up to see, looking forward to that. My wife and I love to travel and just with young kids don't get to do it as much. And this year, we have more plans. So excited for that. And yeah, especially on a day like today when it's like I don't know, like it was in the teens this morning maybe it's in the 20s now, but so cold, and I'm already looking forward to summer. So yeah, that's kind of what's on my mind. AJ Wilcox Awesome. Well, you're doing a great job of creating content on LinkedIn, for sure. I'm going to put down on the show notes. I want to invite everyone to come follow Andrew there on his LinkedIn profile. Also, I don't know if you have a minute if you can share with us. Maybe some insight into the posts that really caught my attention you posted, it was kind of like a mini case study about using video ads on LinkedIn. Can you tell us like was that he most popular thing you've posted on LinkedIn? What sort of engagement did you get from that? Does that inspire you to do more? Andrew Harder Yeah, so it was actually the second most because the first most was also another kind of LinkedIn case study is about document ads. I don't know if I was one of the first first but I was early into testing that. And it really if for all the people that love the gated versus on gated conversations, like we really put that to the test. The ungraded document did fantastic for us. And like that got a ton of engagement. Like I said, I'm still early. So I'm trying to kind of find what stuff I want to talk about, hoping to talk more about personal stuff, too. But yeah, it did get a ton of engagement. I mean, I was thrilled when I shared it with you. And you said you shared it with your team. I was like, okay, that's why I know it's good, then if Aj is sharing that. So yeah. And I honestly, like that's probably an easier thing to go to that post. And it really breaks down the process that we did, and some of the results that I shared today. But it really makes it pretty simple. I think a lot of times, it's easy to get just like oh man, I can't revolutionize my strategy or something, you know, just sounds so big when you break it down into like these bite size steps. So I think that's maybe why it got so much engagement. Of course, yeah, the results do catch people's eye, but a lot of marketers found it helpful. So yeah, definitely connect with me. I'm only active on LinkedIn. I'm not really a social media person, ironically, being that I advertise on it. But yeah, please connect with me on LinkedIn. I appreciate you sharing that AJ. AJ Wilcox All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. AJ Wilcox All right, like we mentioned during the interview, I've got some great resources for you. First of all, you'll see in the show notes below Andrew Harder's link to his LinkedIn profile, go follow him or even connect with him. You'll also see what we mentioned the post that he posted about his LinkedIn video ads strategy. And that one got a ton of attention, which is so cool. It's actually the reason why he's here on the show. He also had another viral post about LinkedIn document ads that actually went more than double the amount of virality is that one so definitely check that one out. Both links are in the show notes. If you or anyone you know is looking for a course on LinkedIn Ads, check out the one that I did on LinkedIn Learning. You'll see the link in the show notes. But it is by far the most succinct, the highest quality, and the lowest cost of any LinkedIn Ads course out there. Also, if this is your first episode you've listened to make sure to hit the subscribe button. But if this is not the first time you're listening, please do go and leave us a review. It is a terrific zero cost way of supporting the podcast and I would be eternally grateful to you with Any questions, suggestions or corrections, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. And I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Harnessing the power of LinkedIn Ads with the King of LinkedIn Ads A.J. Wilcox! AJ is a LinkedIn Ads Fanatic, Dynamic Host of The LinkedIn Ads Show and CEO B2Linked.com Looking to supercharge your company's leadgen efforts? Looking for a speaker for your next event or podcast? Contact me on LinkedIn (Only personalized invitations, so mention the Rev It Up with Jess Tiffany podcast) Email: AJ@B2Linked.com Visit: ☞ https://B2Linked.com Suggested Video: Everything you've ever heard, everything you've ever tried, and everything you've ever done -- it's all wrong. https://jesstiffanyconsulting.com/wrong Jess Tiffany is an author, speaker, strategist, podcast host, and marketing consultant. He is a #1 International Best Selling Author (Growth Hacking: Strategically Grow Your Business Connections from Zero to 10K in 365 Days), Marketing Strategist, C.E.O. of MNU e-learning and MNU Digital (Minneapolis Digital Marketing Agency). As a business and marketing strategist, Jess is very passionate about his in-depth service offerings like finding businesses $50k in hidden revenue opportunities in under an hour. Upon request, Jess coaches businesses to higher revenue, lead generation strategies, joint venture creation, unique proposition isolation, and implementations. Jess utilizes over 100 dynamic business strategies to cause mass growth in company sales and profits. For those unable to work with Jess, he offers an online version called the 52 Week Industry Domination Training. This program has been called “the most powerful and dynamic client attraction program ever created!” Jess Tiffany's other platforms and resources To have Jess speak or train your organization on revenue generation, LinkedIn Optimization and Marketing, or Social Selling. https://jesstiffany.com/speaker/ See the beta of a new social media platform that is making social media fun again. https://jezster.com To grab our free LinkedIn Marketing Cheat Sheet go to https://mnudigital.com/linkedin-marketing-cheat-sheet/ To Check out our online e-learning system go to https://jesstiffanyconsulting.com/guidedtour --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jess-tiffany/support