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The Digital Marketing Podcast
Complete Guide to LinkedIn Ads
00:32:29
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...
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- [00:00]
Daniel Rolls
Welcome back to the digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com My name is Daniel Rolls, 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 A.J. wilcox. Now, A.J. wilcox runs a company called B2 linked and and they specialize only in LinkedIn advertising. And I was at the HubSpot conference so inbound that I 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's was one of the talks that had the most people taking pictures of his slides because he does what not that many people do in conference talks with these 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, percentage 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 onto 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 the campaign will recommend to you very often. Oh, 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 notes. So targetinternet.com forward slash podcast. But without further ado, over to AJ Wilcox 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, right, I'm gonna go and have a look at this. So why don't you start by introducing yourself, talk about what you do, and then maybe we'll get into your process because we're going to obviously focus on LinkedIn ads. So two to introduce yourself.
- [02:40]
A.J. Wilcox
Yeah, perfect. Well, thank you, Daniel. First of all, appreciate you having me on. This is an absolute dream for me. Yeah, the. I really stumbled into LinkedIn ads about. It's been about 14 years ago. I. At 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, A.J. we are fighting over your LinkedIn leads. Whatever you're doing, keep it up. And I went, oh, there's gotta 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 B2Linked, and we're an ad agency that LinkedIn Ads is 100% all we do.
- [03:43]
Daniel Rolls
Fantastic. Okay, so. So what really caught my attention is that maybe opening your 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 and kind of clarify what you meant? Because it kind of resonated with me.
- [04:00]
A.J. Wilcox
Yeah, I think top of funnel, people are so used to like meta, where you're getting clicks and engagements for. For cents, you know, up to dollars. And then you have Google Ads that might be more like bottom of funnel, and those are in the tens to twenties of, you know, thirties 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 a click. But we're targeting people by who they are professionally with no understanding of what it is that. 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 kind of the whole idea makes.
- [04:47]
Daniel Rolls
Yeah, yeah. And that resonates for me because when I've set up ads previously and they've just gone, well, this is costing a fortune. I'm getting nowhere with it. So I was absolutely fascinated to hear your, 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 liked is, you know, you're targeting your ad selection, but really your, your approach to bidding, which is what really kind of impressed me as well. So talk, maybe talk us through it step by step.
- [05:12]
A.J. Wilcox
Yeah. One of the very first things I, 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, 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, for judging and, and, 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, 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, you know, really 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 would, 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 6 or $7 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 7 to 7:50 or 8. 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.
- [07:46]
Daniel Rolls
Fantastic. And with that, you mentioned manual bidding versus the other options that are in there. This is me. I remember you mentioned in the presentation as well.
- [07:54]
A.J. Wilcox
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 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, you know, 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 6 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.
- [08:44]
Daniel Rolls
So, so let's take a step back as well, because the whole targeting piece here of, you know, how big an audience size am I targeting 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 setting your campaigns up in the first place.
- [08:58]
A.J. Wilcox
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 4 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 micro segments, 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, 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 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, you know, 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 that you've been running, do they engage chief level marketers better than managers or are VPs 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.
- [10:44]
Daniel Rolls
So that's, I mean that was, I was remember sitting there going, this is a genius. And I've got, I've looked at my notes earlier on today. 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, how, 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?
- [11:04]
A.J. Wilcox
Yeah, very. First off, when I start, I break out these little micro segments. I want my, 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, 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, you know, 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, cut out the manager level seniority in our own ads because they don't care. Directors, VPs, they tend to be our real bread and butter.
- [11:56]
Daniel Rolls
And then what about in terms of ad types, you know, the different variations of ad types. What seems to work? Or is that a test and learn process again as well?
- [12:03]
A.J. Wilcox
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, you know, whatever you call that. And we found, you know, 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 because 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 going to 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 going to 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 you know, thinking of top, what gets the most engagement, what gathers the most attention and most efficiently passes people to what I call your stage, to your, 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, 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, you know, giving some kind of a tip, a 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, you know, 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. So I love those two for your, your first touch, your top of funnel.
- [14:28]
Daniel Rolls
I mean, what about as you're moving through the different stages, what do you feel kind of works later on?
- [14:33]
A.J. Wilcox
For middle of the funnel, what I really like to do is I get, I like to get people to some sort of like subscribable content. So if, 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.
- [15:17]
Daniel Rolls
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?
- [15:25]
A.J. Wilcox
Oh, so 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 going to get out of it. Here's the value. And, 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, you know, 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, and this is a 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, 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 showed and 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?
- [17:24]
Daniel Rolls
I think it's amazing advice. And with this, you know, I remember you talking about what you would expect from a click through rate at each of these kind of different stages a little bit as well. So can you just talk to us about, you know, what our expectations kind of benchmarks maybe should be?
- [17:37]
A.J. Wilcox
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. Yeah, we obviously don't recommend that for obvious reasons like you know, pushing a demo from, from your stage one from your, your cold, it's going to be very expensive and, and won't be great. But we, what we find is in your first stage compared to your second, we usually see a, an engagement or 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 going to be five times higher than if we were just retargeting them at the, 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.
- [18:41]
Daniel Rolls
And what about if someone's building their first campaign and they're, they're looking at what their expectations should be for that first touch point on a top of funnel kind of campaign. What, what would they, what should they be happy with with the click through rate?
- [18:54]
A.J. Wilcox
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, your, 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 leader ad, 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, then I care about engagement rate. And you know, if you're in the like 4 to 8% 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, 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%.
- [19:50]
Daniel Rolls
Okay.
- [19:51]
A.J. Wilcox
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 point five percent then I feel like, like it's being effective.
- [20:23]
Daniel Rolls
Phenomenal. And let's go back to those video ads a little bit because forever of YouTube ads we're, we're forever playing around with different formats and all those kind of things and 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.
- [20:39]
A.J. Wilcox
Yeah.
- [20:40]
Daniel Rolls
Any particular tips on what works and what doesn't work? Because you've only you that first two seconds to grab people's attention and so on. What. How does it kind of. Do you see any particular formats that work?
- [20:49]
A.J. Wilcox
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, 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 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.
- [21:37]
Daniel Rolls
So.
- [21:37]
A.J. Wilcox
I love TikTok style captions.
- [21:39]
Daniel Rolls
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 whilst trying to keep it on brand is, is kind of key with this stuff because I guess if you're consuming on mobile you, you know, you haven't got your audio on, maybe you're reading it, whatever the scenario is that, that, that does make a huge difference as you're going through. So it's interesting to. That's working there as well.
- [22:00]
A.J. Wilcox
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, at 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.
- [22:26]
Daniel Rolls
1 this is a ridiculously granular question, but just to see if you've got an opinion on it or anything else is that we've been playing around with carousels, you know, uploading a PDF and whether this is an organic post or is an ad format, whatever it may be. And my assumption had always been that it had to be, you know, 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 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?
- [22:56]
A.J. Wilcox
Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. 80 plus percent of people are, are consuming LinkedIn's newsfeed on their mobile device.
- [23:04]
Daniel Rolls
Right.
- [23:04]
A.J. Wilcox
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, is even smaller. And so if, 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 media information 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.
- [23:36]
Daniel Rolls
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 along 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.
- [23:54]
A.J. Wilcox
That's true.
- [23:54]
Daniel Rolls
So, yeah, so that, that could quite possibly be it. So I was trying. I've been sitting there scratching my head on this one and you've made me kind of think, okay, yeah, that I'm not mad. That was, that was appropriate one, one.
- [24:03]
A.J. Wilcox
Metric that you could create. Again, LinkedIn doesn't give you this, but if you want to measure in the ad platform, like beefy long versus short punchy slides. If you take your document completions and you divide it by your maybe say your, your document 25% engagers, that percentage is going to tell you how attractive people were. If they made it to 25%, how, what percentage kept going all the way to the end?
- [24:30]
Daniel Rolls
And that's a great idea. Yeah, we'll test out. I like that. So how much does the company page matter in the mix of all this stuff?
- [24:39]
A.J. Wilcox
I love this question. It's. I would say the. 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 newsfeed, 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 like, it's like an implicit nod like, yeah, this company's legit. Okay, I'll pay attention to what they have to say.
- [25:41]
Daniel Rolls
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?
- [25:53]
A.J. Wilcox
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 is 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, 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 gonna 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 and 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, 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.
- [27:36]
Daniel Rolls
Yeah, I mean the, the thing, I went to Quite a few LinkedIn presentations at Inbound in, in September and the big thing they were kind of pushing a lot of was the, the CRM integration stuff and obviously it was a HubSpot 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 successes have you seen with that, with people kind of using that?
- [27:56]
A.J. Wilcox
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 you're 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, ooh, 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, it sure looks like LinkedIn contributed something here. There's also another one that many of your listeners will, will know under know and understand is the conversions API or CAPI. LinkedIn now has this that you know what meta and Google had years ago, but this is a cookie 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, you know, three or four minutes because it's so easy.
- [29:38]
Daniel Rolls
So if someone's going away now and they go, okay, I haven't really been taking my LinkedIn advertising seriously. Where would you say, right, you're going to, you're going to build your first campaign. What are just some of the kind of key considerations from what we've said?
- [29:51]
A.J. Wilcox
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, 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 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.
- [30:41]
Daniel Rolls
Brilliant stuff. Well, some 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, in the near future?
- [30:54]
A.J. Wilcox
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 ads 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'll 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 ads launched. And it's totally free. We don't even ask for your email address.
- [31:44]
Daniel Rolls
Yeah, I just took a look at it literally early on today and it does. It's a great guide as well. So we'll put all of those links into the show notes. So targetinternet.com forward/podcast and we'll put all those links through there. If you do reach out to aj, just remember to mention that you are 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 through the pricing earlier on as well. So go and go and take a look at that and kind of connect up. Aj, thank you so much for your time. It's always, it's 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.
- [32:17]
A.J. Wilcox
Thank you so much, Daniel. Have me back anytime.
- [32:21]
Daniel Rolls
For more episodes resources, to leave a review or to get in contact, go to targetinternet.com podcast.