Complete Guide to LinkedIn Ads

Welcome back to the digital marketing podcast brought to you by TargetInternet.com. My name is Daniel Rose and in this episode we have a step-by-step guide to LinkedIn ads. Okay, so in this episode I have an interview with the amazing AJ Will Cox. Now, AJ Will Cox runs a company called B2Linked and they specialize only in LinkedIn advertising and I was at the HubSpot conference. So inbound, that keep going on about. And basically, you can tell the quality of a talk by generally how many times people grab their phone and take a picture of the slides. And what I mean by this is that you can really tell that talk is giving loads of really good practical takeaways when people grab and take a picture of the slides. And AJ was one of the talks that had the most people taking pictures of his slides because he does what not that many people doing conference talks with his really high energy, really engaging great public speaker, but also really, really practical takeaways. And one of the things I always think of AJ is that not only is he a very lovely man, but also that he is very generous with what he gives away in terms of his guidance. Like he will give you exact stats, do this, get to this percent, you will be below this, do that if it's above this, do that. So I thought it was brilliant. I learned a huge amount. So we wanted to get AJ on to the podcast. And what we've got is an interview that really gives you a step-by-step guide to building LinkedIn advertising campaigns, but shows you how to spend a lot less. Because the reality is that the campaign will recommend to you very often. Or you should bid this much if you want your ads to show. Whereas there's some really clear guidance in here from AJ, how to approach it slightly differently. As ever, AJ's profile, he's got a step-by-step guide. All that sort of things will be in the show, note, so target internet.com/podcast, but without further ado, over to AJ Willcox and a step-by-step guide to LinkedIn ads. Okay, I am here with AJ, who I will get to introduce himself in just a moment, but a little bit of context to listeners. I was at inbound the HubSpot conference in Boston, at the end of last year. And there's a lot of talks and a lot of stages. And I saw one on LinkedIn ads, and I was like, "I'm going to go and have a look at this stage. You want to start by introducing yourself, talk about what you do, and then maybe we're getting to your process, because we're going to obviously focus on LinkedIn ads, so to introduce yourself." Yeah, perfect. Well, thank you, Daniel. First of all, I appreciate you having me on. This is an absolute dream for me. Yeah, I really stumbled into LinkedIn ads about, it's been about 14 years ago, I had a previous company. I went in as a search engine optimization and a Google ads guy, and my CMO, my new boss, said, "Oh, by the way, we just started a pilot with LinkedIn ads, so see what you can do with it." And I didn't want to look stupid to my new boss. So I saluted and said, "Yes, ma'am," and jumped into the platform. And I was totally surprised by about two weeks later, one of my sales reps came up and said, "Hey, AJ, we are fighting over your LinkedIn leads, whatever you're doing, keep it up." And I went, "Oh, there's got to be something here." So I continued to invest. Eventually, I took that to become LinkedIn's largest spending ads account in the world, and went, "Oh, okay, there's got to be more companies than just this one that would be a great fit for LinkedIn ads." And so just over 10 years ago, I started B2Linqt, and we're an ad agency that LinkedIn ads is 100% all we do. Fantastic. Okay, so what really caught my attention is that there may be opening a presentation, and you said something along the lines of, they kind of the ads cost like bottom of the funnel, but they act like top of funnel. And do you want to just explain that to people who kind of clarify what you meant? Because it kind of resonated with me. Yeah, I think top of funnel, people are so used to like meta where you're getting clicks and engagements for cents, up to dollars. And then you have Google ads that might be more like bottom of funnel. And those are in the tens to 20s of, you know, 30s of dollars per click. And when you look at LinkedIn, the average cost per click, if you're targeting somewhere in North America, is about 10 to 16 dollars a click. But we're targeting people by who they are professionally, with no understanding of what it is that they are trying to, you know, what they have intent for. So it's not bottom of funnel kind of traffic like Google might be. It's top of funnel, but we're paying more, you know, closer to bottom. So it's kind of the whole idea makes it. Yeah. And that resonates for me because when I've stopped ads previously and they've just gone, well, this is costing a fortune. And I'm getting nowhere with it. So I was absolutely fascinated to hear your, your kind of approach to it. And what you went through in your presentation was a kind of step by step approach. So do you want to maybe just talk us through a few of those steps because what I really like to see, you know, you're targeting your ad selection, but really your approach to bidding was just what really kind of impressed me as well. So I took maybe talk us through it step by step. Yeah. One of the very first things I like to share. And this is no shade on LinkedIn as a company, no shade on your LinkedIn ads rep, who might be recommending things. But truthfully, the advice that you get from both the platform and your reps are what I call expensive advice. Meaning if you take it, you're going to pay more. One of the biggest fallacies that we hear repeated over and over. And again, LinkedIn, they actually believe this when they say it, but they say, if you are bidding too low, you're scraping the bottom of the barrel and you're not getting the best quality prospects. You're not getting your ads in front of the best people. And so several years back, I said, okay, I want to test this. We had a client who was spending a lot. I mean, multiple six figures every month and said, okay, and they had a really good mechanism for judging and understanding lead quality. And they were generating a lot of leads. So I said, all right, let's do a two week period where we bid what LinkedIn recommends. We're bidding really high. And then let's do another two week period where we bid really low, significantly under what LinkedIn recommends. And let's see what difference there is in the lead quality here. And what we found, just kind of cutting to the chase, is that your bid amount had zero correlation with your lead quality, which tells us if having to bid higher doesn't increase your lead quality, then there is no good reason to bid higher because all that's doing is paying LinkedIn more money and running your budget out faster. So one of the best recommendations I have for everyone who's running their own LinkedIn ads is you bid manually to start out with. And if LinkedIn might give you a recommendation that's like, we think you should bid 20 to $80 per click, ignore that, put something low in like six or seven dollars. And the goal is to find out what is the least amount of money that I can bid for a click and still spend the entirety of my budget. So if I have a $20 per day budget and I'm bidding $6, if I can see over the next couple days that I'm not spending the full $20, I'm only spending, you know, 10 or 12, then all I, all that means is I just need to increase my bid a little bit. So I might go from seven to seven, 50 or eight and you just creep this up over time until you're right at that sweet spot. You're bidding just high enough to spend your whole budget, but you're not overpaying. Fantastic. And with that, you mentioned in manual bidding versus the other options that are in there. This is my younger, you mentioned in the presentation as well. Yeah, this is a really interesting finding too because when you look at the bidding as soon as you start your very first campaign or where any campaign, LinkedIn starts you out on a bidding model called maximum delivery bidding and they swear by it, they say this is absolutely amazing. You should be using this all the time. I've audited three accounts so far this month where they were using automated bidding, this max delivery bidding exclusively and they were paying on average $20 to $60 per landing page click. And immediately by switching it over to a manual bid and bidding significantly lower, we got like six to 12 times more clicks, traffic, engagement, out of their same budget without having to increase anything. So again, it's one of those it's expensive advice if you listen to it. Try try manual to begin. So let's take a step back as well because the whole targeting piece here of how big an audience size in my target team and how should I kind of go about that? What are you kind of your some of your tips on that? The targeting side of things when you're sending your campaigns up in the first place? Yeah, ideally you want to get an audience that's between about 20,000 to 100,000 people. And I can hear some of you saying, well, but my total addressable market might be a million people or four million people, it doesn't make sense to shrink it down. I'm not saying don't go after your total addressable market. What I'm saying is break them up into what I call microsegments smaller parts so that you can compare them against each other. And they act like little focus groups. And so not only are you generating the traffic and leads that you want by using LinkedIn ads, but now you're you're looking at this focus group that you didn't have to pay anything extra for. For example, if you say my target audience are marketing leaders of a certain size of company, it'd be really easy to say, okay, marketing leaders, that's anyone in marketing, that's job function marketing with seniorities of manager, director, VP and C level. And I can check all those things in a single campaign. I'll have this giant audience and it's really easy. I only have to create my my two ads for that campaign. What I would suggest doing instead, break those audiences up by their level of seniority. So rather than having one campaign, you have four. One represents the manager, seniority, one director, one VP, and then one are your CMOs. And put the same ads into all, the same ads that you were going to use anyway. Put them into all four of these campaigns, so you don't have to come up with new creative. But now what you see is based off of the ads you've been running, do they engage chief level marketers better than managers? Or are VP's really your target audience and managers aren't? You'll be able to find this by the way that they interact, engage, and even convert. - So that's, I mean, that was, I was, remember sitting there, and this is a genius. And I've got, I've looked at my notes, and I'll tell you what I'm just kind of scribbling all this stuff down from your presentation. So that iterative approach that you kind of take to building out, what was the kind of flow for that then? So you're going in, you're building out these kind of segments. How would you then iterate through that kind of process? - Yeah, very first off, when I start, I break out these little microsegments. I want my total audience that I'm targeting across all the different campaigns. I want it to be my total addressable market, but I want to break it up by these little segments. And then as I advertise, this actually happened with us. I figure anyone who wants LinkedIn ads, you're probably a manager and above. What we found over months and years of advertising for ourselves is manager level, at least according to what LinkedIn thinks, they're not our audience. They don't care, they don't book meetings with us, they don't engage, but directors do. So because we were kind of eating our own dog food here, we figured out, hey, it's got, cut out the manager level of seniority in our own ads, 'cause they don't care, directors, VPs, they tend to be our real bread and butter. And they mean what about ad types, the different variations of ad types? What seems to work or is that a test and learn process again as well? It's a bit of a testing process, but kind of taking one step broader, what we find is that most advertisers, their goal when they jump on LinkedIn ads is they want meetings for their sales reps. They want demos, consultations, whatever you call that. And we found, we've been in business over 10 years, everyone wants the same thing. So we go to these cold audiences with a demo focused ad and we get crickets. We totally understand that someone who's never heard of you before, they don't know like and trust your brand yet. And so they're not ready, or it's not even appropriate to ask them to hop on a call with a sales rep 'cause they're just not ready. So what we do is we break our traffic up into a three stage funnel where top of the funnel is very much, just we're gonna give you value and not ask for anything. And then once you engage with those ads, then we're going to give you something a little bit deeper, something you're gonna spend a little bit more time on to learn, engage and really get to know us. And then by the third touch, this is where we finally have earned the right really to ask for them to take some of their time and hop on a call. So we have very different ad formats that we recommend at each stage of the funnel. And but thinking of top, what gets the most engagement, what gathers the most attention, and most efficiently passes people to what I call your stage two, your second touch, that's video. And the very best kind of video you can run are called thought leader ads right now, where you're promoting the post from an individual, not the company. So imagine you have your founder or some sort of internal thought leader, record a 20 to 40 second video, explaining a concept, giving an update on an industry, giving some kind of a tip, strategy, whatever. If that's your first touch, they publish it from their own LinkedIn profile and then your LinkedIn ads account promotes it. That is the absolute ideal first touch. We also find that document ads are a great first or second touch because any, it's basically a PDF. You upload a PDF and people can cycle through and swipe through. But anyone who swipes at all through any number of the slides there, you can then retarget it. So I love those two for your first touch, your top of funnel. - I'm in a bit of what is you moving through the different stages, what do you feel kind of works later on? - For middle of the funnel, what I really like to do is I like to get people to some sort of like, subscribeable content. So if your brand does a podcast, getting people to subscribe to the podcast, or if you've got a YouTube channel where you're creating, you know, really consistent content, I think pushing people there is great. If you are doing live events or webinars, those are great. And so some of the best ad formats that we find, it's kind of boring, but it's your single image ads. In an image with 160 characters of text at the top and 70 characters of text at the bottom, it's really ideal for explaining to someone, here's the value of subscribing to this or joining something learning deeper. - And then that bottom of the funnel, those kind of lead gen ads, how much do you kind of recommend those? And do you try and get people to a website for that conversion point or do you do it within LinkedIn? - Oh, such good questions. Couple different directions I can go here is, yeah, for bottom of the funnel, I think single image ads is great. You have an ad that basically says, you know, hop on a phone, call, you know, with a sales rep for a demo because this is what you're gonna get out of it. Here's the value. And that's a great way of priming them there. There's another ad format that I really like called Conversation Ads. And this is where you pay to send a message into someone's messaging box. It feels very personal. You can call them by their first name, you can mention their company or title and it comes from someone at your organization. So at the bottom of the funnel, I love running both of those, inviting them onto a call. But then you bring up this super important point, which is LinkedIn has these native lead gen forms that have really high conversion rates. Do you use them or do you send them to your landing page that has a form? And what we find, this is kind of a recent finding for us, is that when you use LinkedIn's lead gen forms, you have extremely high conversion rates, but there's no integration with a calendar at all. So you'll get someone to fill out the form and identify themselves, but then you now have to hope that they click on the link from after the ad or click on the link from the email to then schedule a call with someone on your sales team. Versus if I send them to my landing page, as part of the form, I know it won't convert as high, but I can build the calendar right into that flow. So by the time they get done converting, now we have an appointment set with sales. So we started measuring what is our cost per booked call and our cost per shown call. And it actually looks like it's cheaper to send someone to your website. So I think it depends, do you want to get more email addresses so that you can nurture or do you want to get the lowest cost for a booked call? - I think it's amazing advice. And with this, I'm gonna be talking about what you would expect from a click through right at each of these kind of different stages a little bit as well. So can you just talk to us about, what are our expectations, kind of benchmarks maybe should be? - Yeah, this is a little hard because in order to have a straight benchmark, click through rate or conversion rate or cost at each stage, you have to run the same stuff at each stage. And we obviously don't recommend that for obvious reasons. Like, you know, pushing a demo from your stage one, from your cold, it's gonna be very expensive and won't be great. But what we find is in your first stage, compared to your second, we usually see an engagement where a click through rate jump by about 20%. And then from your second stage to your third stage, we see conversion rate increased by five times. And so what that tells us is, okay, it is worth the investment to get someone to that third stage, to having a third touch with us, because their conversion rate is gonna be five times higher than if we were just retargeting them at the middle of the funnel. That's my the very biggest evidence for why it's worth continuing to invest in touches, even when you're not asking for anything yet. - And what about if someone's building their first campaign and they're looking at what their expectation should be for that first touch point on a top of funnel kind of campaign? What would they, what should they be happy with with their click through rate? - It depends on which objective you use, because LinkedIn first asks you what objective you want in your campaign. And based off of what you choose, you're the definition of click changes. And so your definition of a click through rate is very, very different. So what I do to combat this, I like to look at a stat that they give you called engagement rate. If you have a thought lead around, let's say, it's just a video from your founder, and your whole goal is, I want them to watch that video and engage in some way. Then I care about engagement rate. And if you're in the like four to eight percent engagement rate, you're doing great. Like you can basically ignore click through rate. If it's using video, then I love to see a view rate, meaning of anyone who sees the ad come up on their screen, those who watched at least two seconds of it, I want to see that above about 35%. Okay. Then there's another metric that LinkedIn doesn't give you that if your goal is to get traffic to your landing page or website somewhere, I create a metric called landing page click through rate and that's your landing page visits divided by your impressions. And what that tells you is how good is this ad, how effective at getting someone to come to my landing page. And if I have a click through rate on that of over about, we'll call it half of a percent, 0.5 percent, then I feel like it's being effective. No, no, no. And let's go back to those video ads a little bit because for every of YouTube ads, we're we're forever playing around with different formats and all those kinds of things. And you said that, you know, in an ideal situation, you've got a thought leader within the organization, one of the leaders or someone else kind of doing that straight to camera kind of stuff as well. Any particular tips on what works and what doesn't work because you've only, you know, that first two seconds to grab people's attention and so on. What, how does it kind of, you see any particular formats that work? Yeah, what we've seen perform best is that talking head face right to camera and you get right to the point. Having a headline in the in the very beginning of the video, telling someone the topic that they're talking about, that's super important. And then we also found, I'm sure you'll understand what I'm talking about when I say this is the the TikTok style captions where it's big and animated, the words coming across the screen. It seems a little cheesy and it might actually seem off-brand to some of your listeners, but just by having those TikTok style captions, we saw that we could get twice as many people to stick around all the way to the end of the video. And I went, whoa, if I can get twice as many people because it costs the same amount, I'm going to use those every single time. So I love TikTok style captions. Yeah, we were talking about this in a previous episode about how people are pushing the boundaries of their brands a little bit sometimes. And actually embracing a slightly different format while trying to keep it on brand is kind of key with this stuff because I guess if you're consuming it on mobile, you know, you haven't got your audio on maybe you're reading it, whatever the scenario is, that does make a huge difference as you're going through. So it's interesting to that's working there as well. Yeah, and you bring up a really good point is like 80% of people who have who are watching video on LinkedIn are doing it with the sound off. It's like 80 plus percent. And so if you can imagine the whole goal of getting something out of this video is you have to understand what people are saying, captions at least, I mean, the very, very least you've got to have captions, but the TikTok style ones that really grab their attention and make them stick around longer totally worth it. Well, this is a ridiculously granular question, but just to see if you've got an opinion on it, one of the else is that we've been playing around with carousels, you know, uploading a PDF and whether this is an organic post or as an ad format would it be? Am I assumptional always been that it had to be very much mobile optimized in that it would be a few words per slide, but actually we posted something the other day and actually it was a really fairly in-depth article with a good cut solid amount of text on the page and it seemed to work really well. So do you have a viewpoint on what works for the format of those? Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, 80 plus percent of people are consuming LinkedIn's newsfeed on their mobile device. And the way I see it is like your mobile device is already small and then the window that you actually get to see that document is even smaller. And so if I saw a big wall of text in there, it's daunting and I don't want to engage with it, but you know, there are some people you might see a lower engagement rate, but a higher percentage of people who are consuming it because it's immediate formation and they want to read all the way to the end. They want to download the document and study it in depth. So I could see just try them both. Yeah, well, I think it was kind of anomalous and I kind of worked out why I think and that was because the main slide on the front page had this massive title on it, which I think it was like SEO is dead long live SEO or something. You see it on those lines. And then you swiped and you thought it's going to be in the same format and suddenly there was a wall of text, but I guess you'd already swiped so that it would indicate you'd engaged. That's true. So yeah, so that could quite positive. So I've been sitting there scratching my head on this one and you've made me kind of think, okay, yeah, I'm not mad. That was that was appropriate. One metric that you could create again, LinkedIn doesn't give you this, but if you wanted to measure in the ad platform like be feelong versus short punchy slides, if you take your document completions and you divide it by your maybe say your document 25% okay, engages that percentage is going to tell you how attractive people or if they made it to 25% how what percentage kept going all the way to the end. And that's a great idea. Yeah, we'll test that out. I like that. So how much does the company page matter in the mix of all this stuff? I love this question. It's I would say your organic and your paid efforts working together. This is going to become more and more important over time with LinkedIn. But as of right now, I would say your company page doesn't matter very much to your ads. When one of your ads shows up in the news feed, there are two pieces of your company page that people can see. The first is they see the name and logo. And then the second is they see the number of followers that your company page has. And that's on all your ads. So if you have I would say less than a thousand followers on your company page, you might actually be shooting yourself in the foot by having by showing ads from it. Because there are going to be people who look at it and go, the ad looks interesting, but oh, less than a thousand followers. This might be a new company, maybe no one cares. And so they'll they'll keep scrolling. Versus if you have over that thousand, it's usually that's like, it's like an implicit nod. Like, yeah, this company's legit. Okay, I'll pay attention to what they have to say. So you just spoke then about probably in the future, the organic and the paid working together. Just talk us through that a little bit because I think it's getting more competitive out there in in all aspects of digital marketing. So where's your thinking on this? Well, just a couple years ago, LinkedIn gave us thought leader ads. So we've been able to publish and post and repost posts on the company page for quite some time. But just in the last couple of years, we've now been able to start promoting an individual's post. So now we have an individual's organic post that can be threaded in with your ads plus your company's organic posts. And now we can promote more. I'm pretty sure LinkedIn's going to be continuing to give us more, more tools, more flexibility in promoting an individual's post because we don't have the same flexibility as we do when we promote a company post. So that's one. And then we have these event ads are kind of new on LinkedIn. Where if you're hosting a LinkedIn live or or something that you can attach to a LinkedIn event organically, when organically, when you go to actually like see the analytics, there's really rich analytics. You can see you can see like how many people were there and how how long they stuck around. But from a paid side, you don't get the same thing. So I think LinkedIn's going to over time give us more of the metrics that we had organically for our paid. And then conversely, we've got a lot of metrics when you pay for traffic, especially around video ads, where it's like what percentage of people made it to 25%, 50% completion that you don't when you post an organic video post. So this is over time. I think we're going to see more of this borrowing from both sides until like they really are a data-driven platform now rather than just shoot from the hip and see what works. Yeah, I mean, the thing I went to quite a few LinkedIn presentations that inbound in September. And the big thing they were kind of pushing a lot off was the CRM integration stuff. And obviously it was a hotspot conference. So I was talking about that. But it's expensive as far as it kind of looks for a lot of smaller organizations to kind of set this up. So what are successes have you seen with that with people kind of using that? Well, it's really cool. There's a whole bunch of ways that you can integrate with your CRM. And the vast majority is free. The only thing that would cost anything is like if your CRM set up, if you needed to be at a certain tier before the integration were possible. But there is one called revenue attribution report. And that is free to integrate with any of the CRMs that LinkedIn natively integrates with. So that would be Microsoft Dynamics, HubSpot, Salesforce. And there might be more at this point. But those are the big ones. And what it's doing is it's looking for when you close a deal, they look at that company and go, oh, over the last 90 days or maybe even longer, how did we maybe influence that deal? How many impressions did we serve to that people at that company? How many clicks? How much do we spend? And that's really cool. Because let's say your Google ads actually got credit for the deal. But you see that a lot of engagement came from that company on LinkedIn. You could say, hey, sure looks like LinkedIn contributed something here. There's also another one that many of your listeners will will know understand, no one understand is the conversions API or capy. LinkedIn now has this that, you know, what meta and Google had years ago. But this is a cook-y-less way of reporting back to LinkedIn, giving them signals about who's converting so that you can find more people like that. And and maybe making that connection between your CRM. And that one, if your CRM doesn't natively integrate, I think most do. But then there's a Zapier.com integration that again, totally free. Anyone can go and set this up and be set up within like three or four minutes because it's so easy. So if someone's going away now, am I going to, okay, I haven't really been taking my LinkedIn advertising seriously. Where would you say, right, you're going to be going to build your first campaign? What are just some of the kind of key considerations from what we've said? Yeah, be specific about who you want to reach, who you want to target. Don't be swayed by if LinkedIn says, ooh, that's too small of an audience. Don't expand your audience just because you're trying to hit some arbitrary number. So first of all, hit the audience that you know is appropriate. Second of all, make sure you're bidding appropriately. Start with manual bidding. Start much lower than what LinkedIn recommends. And plan to show them content that doesn't require anything of them yet. Just their attention. And don't require, don't ask for too much of their attention. I think if you follow those, your very first campaign is probably going to set the stage very nicely for retargeting them to create a stage two. And then in the future, you can think about retargeting your stage two into a stage three. And now you've got a three stage funnel. Brilliant stuff. Awesome. Very, very generously given tips there in terms of just some good benchmarks and insights for people to kind of follow as well. So where can people connect? Where can they find out more? What have you got coming up in the near future? Well, if you follow me or connect with me on LinkedIn, just add a little note there. If you send a connection request saying you heard me on Daniel's show, I'll make sure I accept it. But on LinkedIn, I'm constantly sharing little tidbits things I've learned. I also host the LinkedIn ad show podcast. So obviously, if you're listening to this, you're a podcast listener. If you want to get really geeky about LinkedIn ads every week, there's a new episode that goes into some deep aspect of LinkedIn. And then finally, our website, b2linked.com, that's a great way of just reaching out to us if you possibly wanted to work with us or we're finding out more information. But I also share if you go to b2linked.com/checklist, that is our free guide on how you actually get started from nothing to getting your first ad launched. And it's totally free. We don't even ask for your email address. Yeah, I just took a look at it literally early on today and it's a great guide as well. So we'll put all of those links into the show notes. So targetinternet.com/podcast, I'm going to put all those links through there. If you do reach out to AJ, just remember to mention that you were from the podcast. And I should say as well, AJ services, the pricing is an absolute world expert. But the pricing is really reasonable. I was looking for the pricing early on as well. So go and take a look at that and kind of connect up. AJ, thank you so much for your time. It's always been fascinating as it was last time listening to you. And some really generously given insights, I think. So I appreciate your time today and thank you for being on the digital marketing podcast. Thank you so much, Daniel, have me back anytime.