B (3:20)

So I'll be honest, I have a lot of people that come to me and say, I've tried LinkedIn, I can't make it work and it's really expensive. And you know, I'm guessing they're probably just going on there and just doing whatever like the easy button is to set up an ad or something. Are you finding that there's a campaign structure or type that delivers consistently and maybe without spending too much time, we ought to identify kind of the various options on LinkedIn. But are you finding like right now, today, this campaign structure really works?

C (3:48)

Yes. So there's kind of two, two ones that are the main ones, the winning ones right now that I recommend to most people to start with. But before I get into that, definitely right, people get onto LinkedIn, they try the ads platform and they will see much higher CPMs and CPMs than other platforms. So when you compare it with like Facebook or other advertising platforms, like your costs are going to look a lot higher. And then the challenge is most people will just, you know, if they're not familiar with the platform, they're just going to set it up, use the default settings, click launch just like they would on Facebook or Google. But a lot of those default settings aren't great for your small to medium sized business. They're more built for enterprise businesses, so.

B (4:30)

Or for LinkedIn to make a lot of money.

C (4:32)

So yes, you know, ad platforms are in the business of them, you know, making money themselves. So a lot of those default settings aren't serving, you know, the small to medium sized business. So we usually recommend changing a lot of those initial settings because somebody might set up a campaign, click launch and then you then find out your budget didn't reach who you really wanted it to reach due to audience expansion options. And then it didn't serve exactly where you wanted it to. It served more on third party websites, part of the ad network of LinkedIn because of the default option. So you spent your money, you had didn't reach who you wanted, you didn't serve your ads where you wanted. So of course you didn't get any good results out of it. So that's the most common scenario of what when we review accounts. So when you use the right settings, you can reach the right professionals and you know, drive some results. And the main two things right now, the main two things in general that work, the first one is kind of More the traditional 1B 2B sales takes a long time. So it's not going to be like selling widgets on Facebook, creating an E commerce store. Someone's probably not going to click and buy right away. So you kind of have to plan for the long game. You might, to start that interaction, you might, you might offer what we call a lead magnet, which is like a guide or report. You might get somebody to sign up for a webinar, sign up for a newsletter, what's that stepping stone to start it on the way to making a purchase. And you might then retarget them to then offer them a demo or a consultation afterwards. So first one is lead with value. Lead magnets and lead generation campaigns are always a good way to do that. Those are always, you know, it's kind of a traditional tactic. The newer one is what we call thought leader ads and this is just the boosting of posts from, of people on LinkedIn. So you know, you'll post on LinkedIn from your profile and as of maybe about a year ago now you can boost posts from people. So we just see that these perform so much better than a traditional company ad because people are on LinkedIn to hear from other people, not to, you know, read ads from companies. They're there to read, hear from other people.

B (6:30)

So, so walk me through that a little bit is that this, is that similar to like would you actually have some sort of arrangement with that thought leader to where they would write a post that's maybe favorable to something you're trying to push. Almost like an influencer would, you know, in, in other platforms.

C (6:47)

Yeah. And you can set up like, you know, external influencers. But probably step one is you yourself or people in your company or your CEO and founder. That's usually the, it's just called thought leader ads. It's the name of, okay, what the Ad unit is. So most companies are going to start with their founder, CEO or themselves. And then, I mean, nowadays, yes, lots of people are setting up arrangements with third party influencers and doing those kind of, you know, sponsored deals. But yeah, start step one is like your CEO, founder and then like, you know, a lot, there's a lot of content. You think about it a little bit differently where it's like, what is somebody going to post that somebody wants that their prospect wants to read and then starts that interaction. So what we see work very well across the board, like in different industries have different things that are going to work and different, you know, companies. But across the board it's like a really good case study is a great way to kind of start that because people are on LinkedIn to learn from others and learn how they can do better at their job or in their company. So often they want to read successful case studies by similar companies, similar people. So that's a great content format to start with. So if you have really strong case studies, you know, write that as a post and you do have to write it up like, hey, I'm going to teach you something, read this. And then if you are interested in what we did, you can contact me, you can click here to learn more and then you can kind of continue the journey from there. But we just see that those get so much higher engagement rates and LinkedIn. LinkedIn reports on Dwell time, which means people are. And we get those stats so we can see people are sitting there and reading that content two to three times longer than a traditional company ad. So it just shows like people are reading this content, they're absorbing it and like that's what we want out of marketing. Yeah.

B (8:27)

So is there any secret sauce to targeting? You know, you've got all the selects that they give you, seniority, company size, job title, all those kinds of things. But I still feel like that doesn't get narrow enough. You know, are you, are there targeting mistakes that you commonly see or are there? I guess I'm asking this two ways. How do people make mistakes and then like, how do people succeed? What's the secret sauce?

C (8:49)

Yes, there's a lot of sauces and lots of flavors on LinkedIn, but it starts with number one. Is that what I told you earlier of like, don't use the default settings because default it says audience expansion. And like even Facebook and Google try to do the same thing. I think theirs might be a little more clear sometimes. But you know, on LinkedIn, when you're selling B2, B you usually want to target a very specific professional at a very specific type of company. So when you have, when you allow the algorithm to go find similar people, suddenly you've made a couple hops and are not in the industry and job you want to be reaching. So that's number one from their secret sauces are we usually start with like audience research. Give me a few of your best customers or a few of your target customers. Let's go download their, you know, look at their profiles, how do they categorize themselves, what are the job titles, what are the industries, company sizes. And then we'll build a demographic profile from that of who we want to target. And then the way to kind of take that a step further is to get more niche into what are the skills or interests or groups. On top of that, when you do Facebook and Google advertising, often you give it a very big audience and you let the algorithm go find the right person for you. Lincoln's algorithm isn't as advanced as these other platforms, but we also don't need it to be. We just, we don't want the algorithm to do any work for us. We want to, we want to have the campaigns reach exactly who we want. So don't give it very broad, very big audiences, give it very small and niche audiences of exactly who you want to reach. And then past that kind of the most advanced thing that we often recommend is to build your own company lists when appropriate. When you can do that, there's a lot of third party data platforms out there that can be useful. But also if you're, you know, if you're, if you know your industry, you can sit down and often like write that list yourself or have a BDR salesperson write that list and then you can upload that to LinkedIn and make sure you're going after the exact companies you want. There isn't always a LinkedIn industry definition for the exact industry you want to reach. And sometimes you have to make your own list.

A (10:54)

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B (11:29)

I think just you Know, we're Obviously, we've got 20 minutes. We're not going to teach everybody all the ins and outs. But I think just what you've said at a high level certainly ought to at least put people on notice about what, how they need to be thinking. So let's talk a little bit about budgets. I'm sure you have some clients that, you know, have been used to paying, you know, a dollar seventeen for a click on Facebook and all of a sudden see $6 on LinkedIn. Obviously it all comes down to ROI. You know, does that $6, you know, produce better than the $17? How do you make the, you know, the economics work? How do you do the reporting so that you can make a case for saying no, this is money well spent.

C (12:06)

Yeah. And so number one, it does start with having higher costs as a platform. Just you do have to have a high enough LTV for that ROI to make sense in the end. In the end. So you're probably not going to be selling kind of small widgets or, you know, very cheap services. If you do, you know, you would just stick to the organic side of the platform. You probably wouldn't spend too much on, on ads or you know, maybe your ads are just retargeting people who are already visiting your website. So you use stuff like that. But yeah, you need to have a high enough LTV for that ROI to make sense. So usually we say you want to have at least 15k of your LTV. So this is more enterprise level software, more, you know, bigger ongoing services. So if, you know, like, hey, you know, maybe I do client services and on average a client sticks with us for a year and we make 20k from that client, great. If you're, you know, 10k or lower, you know, 15k or lower, then you just want to be a little more careful of making sure your stats are working out and that you are keeping clients and retaining clients. So that's usually what we say to people. That line I'd say is moving a little bit with the new thought leader ads. The other advantage is they get so much higher engagement rate and people sit there and read it dwell time like I talked about, which then allows you to get cheaper costs on your ads. Like every other ad platform, they want to be delivering content that you're, that the user, their user wants to engage with. That keeps them on the platform. So if your content is getting very high engagement rate, that's a good sign for the platform. They give you a discount on your ad costs. Inversely, if you're if your content does not get much engagement, not many clicks and stuff, then you may charge you a premium. So it's all playing that game. So with thought leader ads it does allow you to get higher engagement rates, get cheaper costs and then you know, your LTV could be lower than if you have a good thought leader campaign running. Because hey, maybe you are getting because like to give you some benchmarks is you said 6 bucks but I'd say the average LinkedIn click is like 10 to 15 bucks for a standard company page ad. So that's expensive. So yeah, you just need to make sure your ROI is going to work out there with the thought leader ad. If you are getting very high engagement, we see thought leader ads get 1 to $2 per click and then you are comparable with a Facebook ad and maybe even better than a Facebook ad. Some of the best ones we're running right now are below a dollar per click and are just crushing the Facebook results that they're getting on Facebook because we have the targeting on LinkedIn.

B (14:33)

You mentioned something I want to circle back to you retargeting. Can you do they have the similar pixel idea that you can actually put on your website and then you can you run only retargeting ads? So somebody's come to your website now they hopped over to LinkedIn, now they're going to see your ad.

C (14:47)

Yeah, definitely. The two things are most common is website retargeting. So yeah, same pixel, very similar to like meta's pixel. It'll track who visits your website and then retarget those people. And then also people who visit your company page, you can retarget those people as well. Company pages rank very well in Google so often. We'll see. Oh, you already have a good amount of traffic to your company page. People are already visiting. Let's re. Let's start by retargeting them.

B (15:10)

So one of the things that it seems like almost all the social platforms are doing, you know, you used to run an ad and you drive people to a landing page, but now they've all come up with their own sort of lead capture form and they seem to be encouraging people to use their forms. Do you see that to be true or do you have something that you recommend one way or the other?

C (15:30)

Yeah, so I still, there's still cases for both. I do often recommend the LinkedIn forms because you're just. Your CPLs are going to be better, much better, you know, than having somebody click off to a website, submit a form there and when you're already paying LinkedIn's higher prices. You just, you need that math to make better sense for you. So you do use LinkedIn's forms a lot. You know, your average executive might not spend too much time clicking off to a website, reading a bunch, finding the form, submitting it. So let's just make that an easy process. But with the thought leader ads, you can't use the native form. So we do still use landing pages a lot with thought leader ads. But then again, the benefit of those, you get cheaper cost per clicks. So you can get cheaper cost per clicks to your landing page is how.

B (16:17)

Do you handle ad, creative and copy? You know, it's not quite the same as, you know, you're not going to have a reel or a video or something in an ad, I suspect. Or is there. Have you kind of cracked what. And again, having said this, your answer, whatever you answer, I know that like it's two months from now might be a different answer.

C (16:35)

Right.

B (16:35)

But what are you finding that's working right now from a creative and copy standpoint?

C (16:39)

Yeah, and it's interesting, like LinkedIn continues to evolve and in a way we see it getting closer to like a, to a Facebook and the style of creative people are using. I think just as it matures as a social platform, the more people use it, you know, we see what, we see what gets human attention on meta and human attention is on LinkedIn too. So it works on LinkedIn. So we're seeing more of that style start to bleed into LinkedIn. That's also also to say like B2B creative could always use like some spicing up. So we don't mind some of that, you know, the creative style. A couple things I usually recommend, number one is you don't want to go too far into the Facebook side of things where like Facebook marketing tends to be very flashy. Get someone's attention, draw them in, get the click on LinkedIn. You want to be more clear and direct, who is this for and what are you offering? Because even with LinkedIn's good targeting, you know, you still will have an audience and not everyone in that audience is a perfect fit. So you want to, you want to reduce the unintentional untargeted clicks again, back to those expensive prices. If somebody isn't a perfect fit, you don't want to just grab their attention and get them to click on something that's not relevant. And then you paid 15 bucks for that click. So you want to make sure you're getting targeted clicks. So we do Keep creative a little more clear and direct under who are we talking to, what are we offering so that we get the most clear, you know, get the most targeted traffic that does come through.

B (18:04)

Yeah, it is interesting. You're seeing the culture, if you will, change a little on LinkedIn. I mean, it used to be people would actually give people crap for posting personal stuff on LinkedIn, you know, and now it's like, like. No, it's definitely become a more. I mean, it is a lot of business stuff there, but you definitely see people posting, you know, more personal types of things there as well, don't you?

C (18:23)

Yeah, I think there's like a benefit to that too. You know, it doesn't need to be all just business. It's nice to get to know people a little bit. So I do appreciate that type of content as well.

B (18:32)

I'm curious how is AI has impacted every industry. I'm curious how it's impacting what you're doing for folks on LinkedIn.

C (18:40)

Yeah, AI on social is a whole can of worms. I'd say, like right now the thing that LinkedIn does need to figure out is the, there are a lot of AI comments that get left on things and like you can just most of the time you can tell, like that's an AI comment. That's an AI comment 100%. I know they're taking steps in the right direction. It's a hard problem to solve because, you know, sometimes it's hard to tell when someone's really commenting. Thanks versus AI. Thanks. But, you know, I think they're, I think they're taking steps in our direction. They just. That needs to be figured out because there is some fluff and spam with that. And not to say it's any better on Facebook, like if anything, worse Facebook. So there's like the authenticity aspect. And I think, you know, when you're buying something for your business, when you're spending more money, people are going to critique it, analyze it more before they make that purchase. So I don't know, you know, right now like AI generated videos aren't super useful or effective because there's no authenticity to that. People don't trust that content. So it doesn't work. So it'll be, it's interesting, you know, we'll see what happens. Sure. AI copy. That's helpful for marketers. It's helpful for everyone to, you know, create content. Sometimes you're in niche industries and it's hard to, you know, it takes time, a lot of time to learn that industry. So you'll use AI to help you write that content or critique your content. That's all beneficial. So very early days, we'll see what comes, what happens with it.

B (20:11)

I certainly like it for testing. You know, if you're trying to run 27 versions of an ad to figure out what's going to work, you know, it's pretty good at doing that type of work. So, Anthony, I appreciate you stopping by. The Duct Tape Marketing podcast is there somewhere you'd invite people to to learn about your work and connect with you?

C (20:30)

You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm the only Anthony Blattner on LinkedIn and I try to talk a lot about LinkedIn ads, LinkedIn marketing, always sharing best practices. So that's the number one place I'm just on LinkedIn. And then past that we have a podcast, LinkedIn Ads Radio, that we share all LinkedIn best practices and then our website, speedworksocial.com if you want help with your LinkedIn.

B (20:52)

Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

C (20:57)

Sounds good. Thanks for having me.