LinkedIn Ads Show

Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Episode 51: Boosted Posts

Episode 7: Account Organization

Episode 36: AB Testing Strategy

Episode 17: Leadgen Forms

Episode 20: Audience Sizes

NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox

Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.

 

Show Transcript

What are the top challenges that LinkedIn advertisers face? How do you get around them? Well, we're tackling them directly from the community this week on the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So we asked you, the LinkedIn Ads community, for the top challenges you face on the platform. And today I'm going to share our recommendations, explanations, how to overcome them, work arounds, anything like that that would be helpful to your largest challenges. I think it goes without saying, but a huge thank you to those of you who responded by providing your challenges. We always love to hear from our listeners and we certainly love to explore all the different areas of LinkedIn Ads. Alright, let's hit it.

Okay, longtime listener of the show Maninder Paul says, "I want a schedule feature! It would save so much hassle. Is there another way to automate ad scheduling, say only on weekdays, just trying my luck, smiley face." She followed that up by saying, "Curious, do you let the ads run over the weekend, or keep them strictly for weekdays." So lots of questions specifically about scheduling. And we'll definitely have an episode about this in the future. But this is super, super important to be able to schedule on LinkedIn. We know that the majority of the traffic patterns are going to follow the patterns of the general work day, which is not something that we see on the other ad platforms. And the fact that LinkedIn has never released a scheduling feature is actually just kind of embarrassing. For lots of years, I did things like waking up early to make sure I unpaused campaigns at certain times and pausssed at the end of the day and pause before I left for a weekend. I'm pausing when I came back. So even if you can't really schedule your campaigns, at least automatically within campaign manager, there are lots of different things that you can still do to test everything that you're asking about. So it is manual, but you can test different days of the week. That's actually pretty easy because even if you're just letting your ads run, you can still analyze your data by day of the week. And LinkedIn lets us do that pretty easily. When you start pulling in data from your analytics platform, and CRMs, that's when you can start to figure out what times of day certain leads, or certain lead quality is occurring. So I would highly recommend, you know, at least to start out, go ahead and run your ads across all days of the week, but go back and analyze and if you find that your weekends are bringing in a higher cost per lead, or a lower quality of lead, that could be a clue to you that you might want to pause on the weekends. But as fair warning, we've had several clients who actually perform better on weekends and less on weekdays so we end up bidding them up over the weekends, or even trying to fully exhaust their monthly budget based just on weekends. So totally depends on the strategy, the audience, the offer the client, all of that. Like we've mentioned before, ad scheduling is definitely a challenge. That's why we came up with our own internal scheduling tool. So if you partner with us, you get free access to the tool, along with access to our full team of experts. So little bit of a plug there. But yeah, we've felt exactly the same painn, and we turned to technology to solve it because LinkedIn obviously wasn't gonna do it. Another longtime listener of the show and friend, Leonardo Bellini says, "Hi, AJ, I have some questions or issues." And he lists three points here. Number one, "As you know, it's now impossible to use message ads here in Italy. What's the best LinkedIn ads alternatives?" Number two, he asks, "When is it meaningful to use message or conversation ads?" And then number three, "Speaking about follower ads, I have noticed are not performing and are a bit expensive, which is the best campaign or approach to increase a LinkedIn page follower count?" So this is something that we haven't talked about on the show before. But in Europe, because of GDPR, LinkedIn basically took all of the sponsored messaging ad formats, message ads, and conversation ads just off the table. And I certainly hope their lawyers are hard at work trying to figure out how they can make these work, because they are certainly helpful ad formats. That being said, I've talked about in the past how they are LinkedIn's most expensive ads on average, and they probably only work well in about 5% of the cases that we see. They work best when you have a personal invitation. So Sponsored messaging looks like it comes from a person. And if it's just saying, Hey, I thought you'd like to download this white paper, or I thought you'd like to talk to our sales rep, those things don't feel personal and because you pay for the sand and not for the click, if you have an offer that doesn't get clicked on the overall cost per click and therefore cost per lead becomes insanely expensive. Here in North America, we see an average of like $28 to $58 per click on these message formats. So most of the time, I would say, not a big loss. But if you do have a really good personal invitation type of offer that would work well, and you happen to live in Europe where we can't use them, my recommendation would be, if you can't use the sponsored messaging ad formats, use sponsored content ads, instead. Most of the time these perform better anyway, they will feel less personal. But most of the time, they'll have a lower cost per click, and therefore a lower cost per conversion. And because they're right there in the newsfeed, which as we know, is the default experience for both desktop and mobile users of LinkedIn, you'll definitely reach quite a few people. It won't be quite guaranteed delivery, like the sponsored message ad formats are, but as good as it comes. Then, for your question or point on follower campaigns, there are two ways through advertising that we can increase followers. The first is, like you mentioned, follower ads. Now follower ads are a variant of a dynamic ad. And we see dynamic ads usually costing anywhere between about $6 to $8 per click. Well, one of these variants, the main call to action is to follow the company. So they're not high in volume, it's really hard to get a lot of followers from these ads, just because they're over in the right rail, which is only on desktop so immediately, you're cutting out like 80% of your your possible users here who could see the ads, and we find that they have about a 50% take rate. So on average, you're gonna end up with like a $13 to $16 cost per follow, which, if you ask me across any other platform, I would say that's insanely expensive, but if that's your goal is to get more followers, that's by far the the most cost effective way to do it on LinkedIn. The next way that you could do it is by using sponsored content ads. And specifically by choosing the engagement objective. When you use the engagement objective, it puts in the upper right hand corner of the ad, a company follow button. So what we've tried in the past is put an ad together where the main call to action is to hit that button, like, make sure to follow us for more like this. The cost per follow on these are much higher, because the call to action isn't nearly as easy, not nearly as direct, but it can be because it's in the newsfeed, meaning it's going to be seen by people on mobile as well. It could be a good combination effort in conjunction with your dynamic follower ads to work together. We're running this for several clients currently who their main objective is to get new followers. And yeah, definitely the cost per follower are higher from sponsored content. But when we use them in concert with each other, we can get a higher volume of followers in the timeframe.

Another longtime follower and fan of the show, Lindsay Beaulieu. Lindsey, I hope I'm pronouncing your last name right, feel free to correct me. She listed four challenges to her on the platform. Number one, "The ability to easily change campaign objectives without having to duplicate the entire campaign. Other platforms enable us to change objective depending on what we're optimizing for." Alright, Lindsay, I'm going to tackle this one straight up, and then we'll move on to your other ones as well. You're right. If you go to a campaign and you tell it to duplicate, there's no way to change the objective. So if you are duplicating a video ad campaign with a video views objective, oh, sure, you can change the name of the campaign and the targeting. But it's going to be a video views objective and a video views campaign when you're done, which really isn't all that helpful, especially like you're intimating here, that you're testing and changing different objectives based off of your actual business objective. Imagine that, it's smart practice. So the way that I do it is I go into the campaign that I want to duplicate. And when you scroll down right below the targeting, on the right side, you'll see view audience summary and save audience. So if you hit save audience there, it lets you basically make a copy that sticks to your personal LinkedIn profile. It's not in the account, you as the ads manager now have this saved, and you can reuse it on any account that you have access to. So you save a copy of this audience and then you just go through the normal campaign creation process. And basically right as soon as you start creating the campaign, right next to audience, you'll see a drop down that says saved audiences. When you click that, now you'll see the one that you just created are saved. So what you're doing is rather than duplicating the campaign, you're creating a new one and you're just bringing the targeting over. Of course, that means you still have to name the campaign, you still have to set your objective, you still have to set your bid and budget, but at least your audience, if this is a group campaign, and you've gone out to go find 100 groups to fill up your targeting there, this is helpful, it's at least a time saver. So she lists two challenges here, "A low number of lead form submissions", and "High costs per conversion". So these are definitely challenges on the platform and from what we found, there are several contributing factors here. So the low number of lead form submissions, we find that most of the time, it's because the offer is not attractive enough to make people actually want to fill out the form. And so our job then as advertisers is to find out what is it that our audience actually really wants? What would they be willing to sacrifice, their email address, and first name and last name for. If your offer is truly great, people will jump over any hurdle to get access to it. So I know that puts a lot of pressure on us as marketers to research and find something that our audience likes. But really, everything hinges on your offer being actually attractive. Some other contributing factors that add friction to this, though, are things like asking for too much information or excessive fields. Just because you're using LinkedIn lead generation forms, and everything gets auto populated into the form, it doesn't mean that you can ask for 9, 10, 11 pieces of information and expect that it's going to have a great conversion rate. Anytime that we are asking for more information, even if it's auto filled, people get a little bit suspicious and protective of their data. Also, if you add what we call high friction fields, so fields like forcing them to put their work email address in rather than just taking their login email address, or adding their phone number, these fields are high friction, because the user actually has to type and its information they usually try to guard really closely. They've got to really want that offer that you're presenting in order to fill out those fields. So if you're using too many fields, or any of these high friction fields, that will cut down on on your conversion rates here. Something else we've noticed, if you're using LinkedIn lead gen forms, the form itself, at the very top, you'll get an opportunity to give them a little bit more information than the ad itself was giving them. I like to think of this as like a cheerleader step, when they get here, you can be like you're one click away from getting access to these awesome, amazing insights that our researchers come up with basically telling them you're on the right track, you've made the right decision to open this form. Keep filling it out. Now, of course, if you're not using LinkedIn lead gen forms, and instead you're sending people to a landing page, the biggest element we've seen here that leads to low form fill rates, aside from the offer just not being inherently interesting, is page load speed. So if you're sending traffic to a landing page, and you have a redirected link, so LinkedIn automatically will create an lnkd.in shortened link. Or if you're using your own bitly links, that probably takes a full two seconds right there to just work through that redirect, especially on 3g connections when someone's not by Wi Fi. If your pages taking 3, 4, 5, 6 seconds to load, when you're talking about eight seconds all ina and people when they click on an ad are like, yeah, I didn't really want it that bad and they bounce. So LinkedIn will report the click, they'll say you're paying for this, these 16 people clicked. But you look at your analytics and you're like, analytics only says four people made it here. Well, that's not because LinkedIn is cheating you, it's because they came to the page, but left before analytics was able to track the visit before that tag was able to fire. And of course, low conversion rates lead to high cost per conversion. So Lindsay, that takes care of your third point there. And your last one here, "Creating a look alike audience off of detailed targeting". So for anyone who doesn't know, you can create a look alike audience inside of LinkedIn's matched audiences based on pretty much any audience that you have collected there. So you can do a look alike based off of your website retargeting or lists that you've uploaded. And what LinkedIn is doing in this case is looking at the original list and trying to find people it feels like are similar but not on the list. So we can't create a look alike based off of LinkedIn's native targeting specifically using matched audiences, but you can by the feature that they've added in there that's auto checked all the time called LinkedIn audience expansion. Now in general, we do advise against using audience expansion in about 100% of cases. For several reasons, performance has never been great. From our experience, it tends to muddy our audiences. And we can't actually analyze this audience separately from the native audience that we've selected. So basically, our campaigns targeting gets dirty, and we have no way to tell like what parts dirty and what parts clean. So that's why we don't like audience expansion. But if you're trying to find a lookalike version of native targeting that you've done inside of a LinkedIn campaign, then audience expansion is your best way to do that. I would absolutely love to hear from any of you who have had a really good experience with LinkedIn's look alike audiences. Because in every case that we've ever tested, our explicit targeting beats the look alikes every time. When we do use it, though, we always make sure to layer additional native criteria on top of the look alike audience to put some guardrails on it, like we'll usually put a geography and securities or usually not something like job titles, it's too restrictive, but things like that to just put some guardrails on it to make sure we're getting the right people in. But again, anyone who's had really good experience with lookalikes, please do write us in the show and let us know. I'd love to see an example of this.

Abby Kelsey mentions a really, really good one here. She says, "Strategies for ABM campaigns, organizing audience sizes, key offerings, stages of the funnel, etc. It can be hard to do tailored content and offerings for different ABM campaigns and balanced audience size and personas". Abby, you're so right, this is a huge, huge pain. And it definitely requires a lot more of a deep dive. So as a little bit of a hint, we have an upcoming episode on ABM I would imagine here in the next month or so. There's too much in this question to simply answer here. But stay tuned for that episode, because we'll dive really deep. But thanks for that awesome question.

Efrat Dekel mentions, "Hi, AJ, my questions are about boosted posts. What's the best practice to mix them with the overall LinkedIn ad strategy? And how do you demonstrate their ROI to clients?" Thanks, Efrat, I have one really, really good answer for you. Actually, if you go back and listen to episode 51, it's pretty much all about boosted posts. So go and check that one out. All of your questions will be answered there as well as anyone else who has that same question.

Longtime follower of the show, Felicia Gheorghe, says, "I've been testing out different ad formats for the same audience and I find it particularly annoying that you need to make a new campaign for let's say, a lead gen form with an image format, and a new one for lead gen form with a video format, same audience and same offer. Plus all the waiting in between to gather data for each format. Of course, I wouldn't run them at the same time to compete against myself in the auction. Would be cool to hear your thoughts on this. Thank you." Alright, Felicia, I have really good news for you. At least I think it's good news. What you're experiencing here is something that that we as advertisers have faced for a long time, and LinkedIn have heard our concerns there. So last I heard they were working on being able to have multiple ad formats within the same campaign. And so if it works, the way that I think it's going to, we will have a campaign that represents the audience. And then underneath that campaign, we'll be able to insert different ad formats. So you can have a video ad and a single image ad, and maybe even a sponsored message ad going to all the same audience. I think that would be super, super cool. I love the concept, I would definitely use it, it would definitely cut down on the number of campaigns that we have in accounts. You did mention, of course, we wouldn't run them at the same time to compete against myself in the auction, I do want to clarify something here. As long as you're within the same ad account, you're not going to compete against yourself in the auction. So when a new piece of ad inventory opens up, LinkedIn is going to look at your account and find maybe you have several campaigns that are all ready to show an ad in that one slot. So certainly LinkedIn auction is going to have to decide which of your campaigns and which of those ads get to show there. But it's more like cannibalization, where they're taking an impression from one area of the account that could have gone to the other, but less of actually competing against yourself. When I think of competing, I'm thinking like bidding yourself up in the auction and making you pay more. That will happen if you're running two separate accounts for the same client gets the same audience, but as long as it's all within the same account, don't worry, you're not actually bidding yourself up. I know it's annoying, but at least for the time being, what we do is just go ahead and create a separate campaign for every objective, every audience, and every ad format. And what we do is we put a naming structure in place to make it really easy to sort out which objective is being used, which audience is being targeted, and which ad format it is. And because of that naming structure for our campaigns, it makes reporting a lot easier. So if I were you, until we have that feature of being able to put multiple ad formats in the same campaign, I would take a really good look at your naming structure of your campaigns, and see if you can put something together that makes it a lot easier to measure, analyze, and watch. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into more of the challenges and possible solutions here from the community.

20:47 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

20:56 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the ad agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us at getting you the lowest cost per lead, and the most scale of your ads. Were official LinkedIn partners and you'll deal only with LinkedIn ads, experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns. We'd absolutely love to work with you. All right, now let's jump back into the additional challenges.

Again, we have a loyal listener of the show, Alex Panchuk. He says, "Not being able to target or make adjustments by device. In 2022, it's so 2000ish". Alex, I totally agree. And not having any scheduling options like running campaigns Monday to Friday and not Saturday to Sunday. Even far newer Quora, Reddit, Tik Tok, etc. all have them. Alex, I totally agree with you, I think it's pretty ridiculous that we don't have scheduling. I know I mentioned it in a previous answer here, but I do hope at some point that LinkedIn realizes the value and importance of doing that. I know they've gotten the feedback. I know I've given it to him. So hopefully they'll take it to heart. Again, that's why we created an internal tool to do it. We needed the functionality, so we just had to build it.

Brett Creed asks, "Is there a way like on Facebook where you can do social interaction retargeting for anyone who has clicked on your ads, page, or engaged with you in any way minus the people who have completed the lead gen form? Seems so simple on Facebook, wondering if you have any secrets you could share?" Really good question. So LinkedIn does have the same type of thing where they have these engagements that they can retarget, but the engagements are so much more limited than what Facebook allows. We can't retarget people who've liked or commented or anything like that. The best that we do have though, we can retarget those who have opened a lead gen form. So at least if they've shown enough interest to click on the ad, you can retarget them that way. The most effective way though to get people into your retargeting audience is to target 25% video viewers. So what you can do is basically upload a video ad that's less than 10 seconds long, call it something like eight seconds, and then retarget anyone who has watched at least 25% of that, that way, anyone who passes the two second view mark, which is like a quarter of everyone in the audience, usually you can at least get them into your retargeting audience. But I really, really hope we get this in the future. LinkedIn has rolled out so many more of these engagements that you can retarget, like a company page visitor, for instance, there's so much more they can do here. And this is especially valuable because website retargeting across all the platforms is just it's drying up, it's dying, with the death of the cookie.

Tom McAllister asks, "Do you have any thoughts on campaign organization? Recently came into a new business that just started running LinkedIn Ads with an agency. That agency created top of funnel and middle of funnel campaign groups with about 19 campaigns in each of them." Tom, really good question. Check out episode seven of the podcast about account organization, I go into a lot more detail there. We don't like campaign groups, they tend to not do much at all, they just take up space and make you have to click through more levels. So we'd probably end up doing something similar to that other agency where we're creating, like, significant numbers of campaigns at different stages of the funnel. We just do it all in one campaign group, usually, unless we absolutely had a reason to split it up by campaign group. Hopefully that agency is doing a good job. It sounds like if they're willing to go in and create 20ish campaigns per campaign group, hopefully that means that they are pretty good at what they do. But, certainly come hit us up if you ever want a quote.

Mark Nelson says, "Hey AJ, I love the show. I'm struggling setting up an ABM campaign with limited audience sizes on LinkedIn, Google Display, and Facebook. Say that you have 200 target accounts for your ABM campaign and you upload your contact audience, say 1000 contacts, averaging five per account, and assume LinkedIn matches 90% plus. If 25% of the audience interact with my ads, and I create a new audience for this, so as to target to the next stage, I'm stuffed as my audience isn't large enough. Could you come up with some specific pointers to address the issue?" Mark, this is really, really good. I love the way that you've laid this out, I will have the ABM episode coming up in the next probably month or two. But in short, LinkedIn is absolutely amazing for account based targeting. But it is terrible at being able to customize the messaging by account, you always have to have at least 300 people in an audience for it to be able to serve, period, which is a huge limitation. My suggested strategy here is add as many accounts as you can, you obviously want these audiences to be as large as possible. And don't use job title to match on these accounts. Try to use something that's a little bit more broad because LinkedIn only understands about 30% of job titles out there. So if you can use something more like job function with seniority to narrow in on those five contacts per account, you'll match a larger amount. But then even getting 25% of your target audience to interact with the ad, it would be hard to count on that and especially all of that happening within the timeframe that you're allowed to create a retargeting audience, which is 180 days. So my recommendation would be to flight your messaging to that audience, to that ABM audience. So rather than relying on having two separate campaigns, one being the original audience, and then one retarget, anyone who interacted, I might suggest, and you could actually do both of these strategies concurrently. I would suggest run the brand awareness messaging to that first audience and then once those ads have run their course, then show more of like a middle of funnel or bottom of the funnel type of ad and work them down. What you'd be doing is hitting the same audience and saturating them over time, in hopes that they would naturally be ready for the next step in the funnel. And then hopefully, by the time you've done this a few times, the engagements that you did get on those ads, hopefully, things like a 25% video view or a lead form open, you could get an audience that's larger than 300, to be able to retarget them at the next step.

Next challenge. Laura Conti says, "Hi, AJ, thanks for your precious podcast. It would be amazing to go into depth with optimization. I listened to your podcast and it was interesting. How to optimize step by step? What is statistical significance? How long to run a campaign to decide to stop and optimize? Thanks." All right, Laura, great questions, great requests. But I definitely can't fully address all of those aspects here, Episode 36, which you've probably already listened to. That's a really good resource on how I think about optimization and testing. But this is really good feedback. I'll plan a future episode to go through more of this.

Addison Witt says, "The quality of lead generation forms. Any recommendations on manual fields to add to the form?" Addison, check out Episode 17, where we go into a lot of depth on the lead gen forms and we do touch on quality. This isn't what you're asking, but basically, anytime we use lead gen forms, we do get feedback from sales teams talking about how the lead quality dropped. And that's kind of unfair to say it's not because the people in the audience are any less quality. But it's usually because we've made it so easy for someone to convert that more of the people who didn't decide to convert, end up converting, and they may not be as committed or have the need you solve. The classic answer here is to add a work email field because most sales teams and most lead scoring algorithms will look at an email address that's like a Gmail or Yahoo email address and they'll call that low quality. But it's still problematic if you add the work email field, because it's not going to autofill in the vast majority of cases. And so now you're telling users who are on their mobile devices, that they have to stop and type in their work email, with their thumbs on their mobile device, which is a lot of effort, and we will see the conversion rates drop from doing this. But then there is no way to validate that it actually is their work email, they might still type in their Gmail. And so because of this, there have been a lot of companies who are big spenders on LinkedIn, that can't use the lead gen forms, they have to send to a landing page where they can actually validate and qualify the email that's being written is not one of the free services out there. If you're ever in that circumstance of where you have too many leads for your sales team to work with, you can always add a little bit of extra friction to just further qualify them so that sales is only dealing with the cream of the crop. But, most of the time I would say I hear marketers talking about how they just want more leads and more scale. We had an example of a client who they needed to collect someone's net worth. And obviously, we can't target by net worth on LinkedIn. So what we did is we created a net worth drop down manually. And we'd give ranges would be like $0 to $200,000, and $200,000 to $1,000,000 and then all of those different ranges, and then that's a manual field that they have to fill out. And so if that is a requirement that they have a high net worth or a low net worth, you do get that data from the form field. So I hope that answers your question. Hopefully, it's helpful.

Ben Milsom asks, "Dynamic URL parameters. Facebook ads has a ton of quality of life features that blow LinkedIn out of the water. I know it's a larger platform. One feature I miss the most is dynamic UTMs." Ben, I totally agree with you. I have been wanting dynamic URL parameters for so so long, I hope I'm not breaking any sort of confidences by saying this. But the good news is, this is coming. LinkedIn knows that it's a high priority and they've reassured me on several occasions that this is on the roadmap, and it's coming. I don't know if that means it's two months out, or two years out. If I had to predict I would guess something like six months.

Then Nayan Prakash says, "If I take an example of sponsored Inmail ads, the only challenging part is to identify those audiences who have opened the message ads. I know LinkedIn doesn't give any option to populate a list based on openers. What's your thought?" Nyad, I hope I'm saying your name right. You're absolutely right, we get opens from message ads and conversation ads, but we don't have the ability to retarget people by whether they've done that or not. And honestly, an open is something that is so low in commitment that I don't expect them to ever give that to us, I would sure expect something like if they clicked on anything, like within a conversation ad if they clicked on any of the options, I could see that or at least clicked on a positive option, or clicked on the call to action from a message ad. I mean, the more engagement retargeting options that we get, the easier it's going to be to justify using LinkedIn campaign manager for retargeting. The more audiences the better, which is really going to help when cookies are dead here in the next year. One little bit of warning here is that message ads in general have something like a 55% open rate. But my gut tells me that a large portion of them and I don't know how many, but a large proportion are opening it just to mark the messages read so that it's not calling their attention as they're looking at their inbox. Probably the best thing you could do in this case, if you're trying to build a retargeting audience of those who've engaged is probably use a conversation ad, and then try to trigger the lead generation form to pop up because you know, you can retarget anyone who triggered a lead gen form opening. Obviously not in a tricky or a spammy way, but that's probably the best way to do it. I wish we could insert a video into one of these ads and then retarget video viewers, but lead gen forms are probably the best you're gonna get.

Okay, Quentin Clair says, "Targeting efficiently, small audiences in niche markets versus needing critical mass to perform." Quentin, these are great points. For the bit about audience sizes, go and check out episode 20 of this podcast. But the bit about critical mass to performance totally depends on your definition of performance. For example, for us, we probably wouldn't be very happy with an account that was spending less than like $5,000 a month. But to some marketer, if they had a $1,000 or $2,000 a month budget, they would be fine spending that over the course of three months and being patient, and they would call that performance. So for us, we would suggest if you're targeting in North America, making sure that you have a budget of at least $5,000 a month. We find that usually your AB tests become statistically significant to the conversion level so you get a statistically significant cost per lead, and a conversion rate after spending $5,000. We also recommend audience sizes of 20,000 to 80,000 per campaign. But that doesn't mean that you can't have a much smaller or a much larger target audience size. It's just if you have a really large total addressable market, we would break that audience down into segments of 20,000 to 80,000 people. But if you're smaller than that, that's totally fine. running campaigns with 300 people in them is totally fine. It's just not going to spend very much and may or may not be worth your time, depending on what your time's worth, or what you consider to be highperformance. Small audiences maybe won't spend much but the value of dripping something out to your ideal market over time is still a lot more value than not showing at all. So it might be worth running some of these small audiences Hope that helps. Alright, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up so stick around

35:03 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

35:14 If you have any of the same questions that our community members had, go and listen to the episodes that are recommended around those topics, those will be super helpful. We'll have links down below in the show notes. Also, if you are new to LinkedIn Ads, or you have a colleague who is or someone that you're trying to train, check out the link in the show notes for the LinkedIn Learning course that I did in partnership with LinkedIn. It is an extremely good course if I don't say so myself being the author and it's also really inexpensive compared to anything else that you'd find out there, especially for the quality. LinkedIn Learning does a really good job. And of course, look down at your podcast player. If that subscribe button isn't already lit up, hit it for me, especially if you want to hear this in the future. If you don't leave it off, that's fine. Please do rate and review the podcast in whatever player you use or podcast platform. Any review, I'll give you a shout out and it is very, very much appreciated to help get the show shown to all the other ad professionals out there who need it. And of course, with any show feedback or questions or suggestions, shoot us an email at [email protected]. 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: NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.

 

Show Transcript

You've seen that button hiding off to the right in campaign manager called performance chart. What does it do? And why do I love it so dang much? Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. Well, if you're anything like us, you're constantly testing and tweaking and adjusting things to improve your ad performance. That means you'll need to see your KPIs change over time. You can do this in Excel with pivot tables and pivot charts. But that tends to take a lot of time, and it's really monotonous. And if I've learned anything, it's that if something is cumbersome or time consuming, it's naturally not going to happen as often as it really needs to. Luckily, the performance chart option in campaign manager is surprisingly powerful and easy to access. So today, I'm going to walk you through exactly how to access it, and how to use it to improve your ad performance.

First, the news. This week, I had a LinkedIn Product Manager reach out to me after listening to the last episode about boosted posts, and corrected me on something. He said, all ads created on LinkedIn go through the ad review process to ensure that the ad is adhering to the LinkedIn Ad policy. There are two types of review methods that we use. AI Model Review, this can happen almost instantaneously where ads are immediately approved. When this review happens, your ads can be published almost instantaneously. But it's only done for ads, where the AI model on LinkedIn side has a high confidence in its decision that the ads don't have any sort of an issue in them. If the model's confidence is low, then the ad is sent for human review. And during human review, he said this process can take between 24 to 48 hours. So I wanted to throw that out there as a retraction. I also want to say I've seen the human review take up to 72 hours. And I see this especially on text ads, usually sponsored content tends to get published a lot faster.

Okay, I wanted to highlight a review that came in Swimmer 10 said, "Great show. Thanks, AJ, we are listening. I love your show and have missed it. Can't wait to see more shows this year. Thanks for the great content." Thank you so much Swimmer 10 It's always great to hear the feedback that you're listening and that you appreciate the episodes. We should be releasing episodes a lot more regularly. Now, we actually have a member on our team who is committed to helping me get these episodes out more often. So hopefully, you'll see a lot more coming. And of course, I want to feature you please do go and leave a public review. And I just heard that Spotify is now accepting reviews. We have a whole lot on Apple Podcasts, but I would absolutely love it If you guys would be able to go out of your way. You'd be doing me a huge favor to go on to Spotify and leave a review there. And of course, anything I see all give you guys a shout out. Alright, on to the topic at hand, let's hit it.

It's pretty rare when LinkedIn does a feature better than Facebook. But every once in a while this happens, I can actually count on two fingers, the number of times this has happened. But years and years ago, LinkedIn Ads had a feature that I and many other advertisers really, really liked. The first thing that you saw when you logged into your dashboard was a customizable chart with the ad performance tables down below. And one of my biggest complaints about Facebook has always been the difficulty in visualizing your ad performance over time with trends. Well, then LinkedIn redesigned the platform to become much, much more Facebook like when they released objectives in 2019. And unfortunately, one of the features that disappeared was the chart, despite it actually being way way more helpful than the way that Facebook handled it before. Thankfully, it didn't die entirely. It still lives on the platform, although now it takes an extra couple clicks to get to. So what it is is a performance chart that you can tell it exactly what kinds of metrics you want to see and over what time period. Whether you want to analyze campaigns, campaign groups, or even individual ads, you can just simply select them in your normal campaign manager view. And then look for the button in the top right that says performance chart. Or if you don't select anything, or filter anything from campaign manager, it's just going to plot your aggregate performance for whatever you're looking at in campaign manager at that moment. So once you open the chart, you'll notice along the top that it will say Display Clicks. You're almost always going to want to click that and pick some other metric to look at because clicks is about the least helpful metric I can think of to start with. You'll notice that you can see metrics like your clicks, your impressions, and your spend. But raw counts of things like clicks and impressions really aren't helpful without context. And I'll give you an example. If I told you that I have an account that got eight clicks yesterday. You just tell me Is that good or bad? Well, of course, you're gonna say, Well, I don't know, what's their budget? Did they have 16 clicks the day before? Do they have a multi million dollar monthly budget? Or are they only budgeting for four clicks? So that would be a problem. So how do you make these metrics helpful in really any context. The easy way to do it is you turn them into a percentage, you divide it by something and make it a ratio. So anytime I'm in the performance chart, one of the first things I'm going to go for is I'm going to change display clicks to average click through rate, or cost per click, or cost per lead, or cost per conversion. I will say the one simple metric that isn't a ratio, or percentage that I do find helpful is your total spent. And this can be helpful for budgeting. You can see how much you're spending by day, you can see if that decreases or increases over weekends. So, I do still like total spent that basically every other metric there, I only care about if it's a percentage. Now I mentioned that you could select different campaigns or ads or even campaign groups before you click on performance chart. But one thing that we've really enjoyed watching is you can actually put a search filter into the search box in campaign manager. And then anything that matches that search filter is automatically going to be included in your performance chart. So for instance, anytime that we're running lead generation form ads, we always put LF in the campaign's name. And then that means if we wanted to chart performance of lead gen form campaigns, we could just go to the search box and just type LF. And then we can hit performance chart. And it's only going to show the performance of those filtered campaigns. The same thing goes with ad types. If I want to look at just my text ad campaigns, I'm always going to put TA in the campaign name to tell me which ad format I'm using. And so if I type TA it'll filter there. This is really helpful because if you combine text ads with any other ad format, your average click through metrics are going to become totally useless. And that's because text ads have such a low click through rate compared to every other ad format. So whatever you have in your campaign names, you can use here as a filter, so you can try to get them into the performance chart. A really cool feature I like is that if you're charting multiple campaigns or multiple ads, there's a little switch in the upper left that says aggregate. You can flip it off to disaggregate those campaigns or ads, and then it will show you a separate trendline for each campaign or ad that you're looking at. And this is really helpful to look at, but realize you can only disaggregate if you have three or fewer campaigns or three or fewer ads that you're looking at. So that's a little bit of a limitation. But I like using this if I want to compare different audience segments against each other. So for instance, I could go and increase my bids a static amount, or a set percentage across several different campaigns where the targeting was the same, but they're just different by their seniority levels. If I increase two campaigns by 50 cents a piece, did my manager segment increase as much as my director segment that might tell me if one of these segments is more competitive than the other? Another test that would be really fun is wondering if, after pausing a campaign and then unpausing it later, after a certain amount of time, does it cause the ads to go back into the learning phase for LinkedIn's auction? It'd be interesting to find out if time being paused affects which one is selected as the winner and therefore receives more impressions. Any other ideas for cool tests you guys have, please share it with us. Send us an email at [email protected]. I'd absolutely love to hear from you what you're doing. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll get to dive into the limitations and the gotchas of the performance chart.

The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million dollars on the platform, and no one outperforms us at getting you the lowest cost per lead and the most scale. We're official LinkedIn partners, and you'll deal only with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns, We'd absolutely love to get to work with you.

Alright, let's jump into the weaknesses and limitations here. In my mind, the biggest weakness of the performance chart is that we can't overlay metrics on top of each other. Thankfully you can do it if you need to. But, the way that you do it is you have to go in export your data by day or by month, or whatever sort of granularity you care about, but usually by day, and export it into Excel, where you can actually build your own helpful chart. If I could do this, here are a few ideas of what I would want to do. For instance, I would chart total spent on the same chart as costs per click so I can see how maybe small bid changes affect how much the account spends in total, that could help me in predicting what a bid change might do for my budget for the month. I would also like to chart costs per click on the same chart as cost per lead, or cost per conversion, if you're using the website conversions. And then maybe after something like a bid increase, I could see if increasing bids 20%, did it result in a 20% increase in my cost per lead, or maybe bidding higher would give me access to a more valuable audience, in which case, my conversion rate could be higher and I might spend 20% more, but have a cost per lead that comes in maybe only 10% more. I haven't found this type of thing to happen on LinkedIn, but it's sure nice to compare and see if we can learn how the platform is handling our individual bids and all that. I also think it would be fun to chart cost per click on the same chart as conversion rate. And that would allow us to do something like test to see if bidding more aggressively reaches an audience that's more likely to convert or if it's unaffected. Another weakness is that the performance chart can't aggregate more than 300 campaigns or ads at a time. So if you have a large account, let's say you have 500 campaigns, you'd either have to export it to Excel and do it manually, or just analyze in smaller batches, or by ad format, or by some smaller segment that you have. It's not going to show you the data and combine it if you have more than 300 entities in there. Another weakness is that if you're using lead gen forms, it will let you chart your cost per lead, but it doesn't give you the option of your conversion rate, which I think is arguably more important, since it wouldn't be swayed by your bid, or any cost changes, or increases in competition on the platform from your competitors. Same thing goes with cost per conversion. There is a metric for cost per conversion, but you don't have the ability to choose conversion rate. Even if we did have conversion rate, we know that LinkedIn's definition of a conversion, a website conversion, is is skewed. What they do is they combine both your view through conversions and your post click conversions into that one column of conversions, which I don't think is helpful because so much of the time your view through conversions are much, much higher than your actual conversions or form fills that would have come in, especially if you're running text ads, they tend to rack up the view through conversions. So even if we had it, it probably wouldn't be very helpful. But, we can still do this in Excel.

The LinkedIn product team likes to use a phrase that says if you could wave a magic wand and change the product, what would you want it to be able to do. And I know that LinkedIn listens to the podcast. So here I'll say, hey, LinkedIn team, consider this my voice of the customer feedback session for the performance chart. Here's my wish list of the top three things that I wish I could do with the performance chart. Number one, I want to be able to overlay different metrics on top of each other, like we talked about before, where I could show a trend line for total spent, at the same time as a trend line for cost per click, or cost per lead.

Wishlist item number two, what I wouldn't give to see bids or budgets here on there. We could see what day a bid or a budget was increased or decreased. And then what sort of effect it had on the rest of the campaign for that day. This really could function as an account change history, which by the way, all other ad platforms have and LinkedIn still doesn't. We can see certain changes on the account and when they happen. Bids and budgets would be really interesting. I'd love to see quality score or relevancy score at the same time. So that would all be really, really helpful, but of course, I still would love and account change history. Please, please, please give us that.

Wishlist item number three, I would like to customize my own metrics. So for instance, when I'm using sponsored messaging ad formats, it doesn't make sense to compare click through rates against any other ad format, because of the way that LinkedIn defines a click with sponsored messaging. LinkedIn calls an open have one of these ad formats as a click. And so when you see your click through rate, it will say like a 55% click through rate, but of course, that is not the case. Generally, these ad formats have around a 3% click through rate and so the difference between a 55% click through rate and a 3% is giant. So what I would do is I would go and create a custom KPI in the dashboard to rename cliques. And I would say the new definition for a click is clicks plus sponsored messaging clicks minus sponsored messaging opens. And then I would also create a new click through rate metric based on that so I could compare click through rates across all ad formats and have the same definition. I could calculate a cost per click that works regardless of which ad format you're using. Alright, keeping it short and sweet today, 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.

Hey, LinkedIn Ads fanatics. I hope you enjoyed that episode. Here's some great resources you're going to love. First off, I did the course with LinkedIn Learning about LinkedIn Ads. It's really an intro into everything LinkedIn Ads. It's fantastic if you're just barely getting into the channel, or newer to the platform and they're looking for a resource to learn from. It's incredibly inexpensive. There's a link right there down below in the show notes. So definitely check that out if you're in that situation. If this is your first time listening or heck, your 50th, but you're still not subscribed, please do look down at your podcast player right now, hit that subscribe button. I'd love to have you back here next week. And if you like what you hear, please do rate and review. Especially go to the Spotify page for the podcast and leave reviews there. That would be the most helpful because that's brand new and honestly, you'd be helping us out a ton by getting us out to more and more audiences to people who want to know more or the right way to do things on LinkedIn Ads. With any show feedback or episodes or topics you'd like us to cover, please do email us at [email protected]. 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:

NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox

Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.

 

Show Transcript

On LinkedIn, what's a boosted post? And how is it different from a standard LinkedIn ad? What is direct sponsored content? When should you use them? We're going to discuss all of this in this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! I get the question from advertisers probably monthly about boosted posts, dark posts on LinkedIn and I think we're going to be getting it a lot more often with the moves that LinkedIn is making. It really is a pretty simple question with some mostly simple answers, but also a lot to unpack and a lot of nuances. So here we go. First of all, I hope everyone had an amazing holiday season and break no matter what you celebrate. My kids and I had a really fun Christmas where we stayed home and relaxed. I'm really excited to be back sharing all of my favorite tips and tricks on LinkedIn ads with you, of course, and hopefully we're back to a weekly cadence here. Thanks for your patience with me. And I hope you all have an amazing 2022 advertising on LinkedIn.

All right, let's hit it. First, we need to define what a boosted post is. Because this is something that Facebook actually pioneered, and then of course, LinkedIn adopted later. What it is, it's where you create a company page post organically and then you push that post out in your ad campaigns as an ad. When LinkedIn very first released sponsored content back in 2013, it was called Sponsored Updates. And boosting posts like Facebook has, were the only option. I was so proud to be one of the pilot users and in fact, I was so early of a user that LinkedIn actually gave us 1000s of dollars in free adspend just for running them and giving them feedback. Oh, boy, those were the days. At the time, I had launched 32 campaigns. So of course, that meant I had to go and create 64 sponsored content ads, no big deal, right? Well, at the time, I had no bulk tools. So I put headphones on, I locked it in and I just crank them out at about one per minute doing copy, paste, post. Copy, paste post. Not the most glorious work, but let's be honest, everyone listening here is too highly compensated to do so many of the tasks that LinkedIn's Ads platform makes us do on the regular. I was very used to it by this time. The ads of course performed really, really well. Surprise, surprise, it was the first time that anyone had seen an ad that looked like this on LinkedIn, because everything was just text ads before it. There was a pretty significant downside to this strategy, though. Because as I went through and created 64 organic company page posts in a row, I realized how confusing this must be to our company page followers. You see a company page post that looks eerily like an ad and you brush it off, you're not interested. And then a few posts down, there's another one that looks exactly the same, then another, than another. The most active of our followers, we're getting inundated by the same message. This was also really problematic for my tracking and attribution. Because like a good technical marketer, I had specific URL tracking parameters in each of those ads, so I could associate their performance with their ad spend. The problem is that this wasn't a very pure test. A company page follower might see this post and then convert, and then someone in my advertising audience saw it and converted. And you look at both of those conversions, they are at very different stages of the funnel and they are very different audiences. The company page follower already has a high degree of affinity for your brand. They're following you, they're fans maybe, and watching them convert, they're going to convert at a much higher rate. They're going to be a much more highly qualified lead as opposed to someone in a cold audience who saw my ad and then converted, these are just very different. And of course, this was all before conversion tracking came out on the platform. So by the time that these leads, made it into the CRM, my test results were dirty, I couldn't count on them anymore. And of course, at this time, Facebook already had a solution for this. Facebook had dark posts where you could create 10s or even hundreds of ads at a time. And they wouldn't inundate or muddy tracking because these were ads that were not exposed publicly. They were shown only to the users who were being expressly targeted by the advertisers ads. And I gave this feedback to LinkedIn as I'm sure many of the other Alpha participants did, and told him we just couldn't continue using these boosted posts because it was hurting our brand organically. I'm still shocked that it was less than a year, but in July of 2014, LinkedIn released Direct Sponsored Content is what they called it, or DSC for short. I'm sure that we're all used to the fact that LinkedIn releases the same features that are found on other platforms. But then of course, they have to give it their own name. So that was DSC or Direct Sponsored Content. That term is very non descriptive of what it actually is. And so I'm really glad about this, but little by little over the years, LinkedIn has started to adopt the same terminology that Facebook uses. I'll hear LinkedIn reps regularly talk about dark posts, or boosting, which is definitely Facebook's terminology. Thank you, Thank you LinkedIn for this. When you've got a good thing, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. There's no shame in using Facebook terminology here on these small issues. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into why you might not want to use Direct Sponsored Content,

5:56 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

6:06 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $140 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead, and the highest scale. We're official LinkedIn partners and you'll only deal with LinkedIn ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com, we'd love to chat with you about your campaigns.

Alright, now let's jump into the Direct Sponsored Content versus boosted posts. Okay, so catching you up in July of 2014, LinkedIn released this ability to create dark posts or direct sponsored content. And what that lets us do is now we can publish ads directly within the ad platform. And the only people who will see them are those who are part of our advertising audience. This takes care of all of the issues I had with where I was muddying my tracking, my analytics, as well as totally inundating my organic audience. The one exception is that when rarely, someone creates some sort of a social action on an ad, which causes viral reach of that ad to people who are their first degree network, but this rarely happens. So most of the time, your ads are really only being shown to those that you're paying to get in front of. Even if it is viral, though, just remember that traffic is free. So it's It's gravy anyway, it might muddy your conversion numbers slightly, but usually not very much. Okay, so when someone is using a boosted post, you can go right to their company page, you always have been able to, and you can look right at their ads, right alongside all their other company page posts. But it's interesting to note that when they are using Direct Sponsored Content, you can still see their ads. You have to visit their company page, and then click on their posts. And then you have to click the ads filter. That will let you see all of their sponsored content for the last six months. Thank you again, LinkedIn, we love this feature. Okay, so those are the major benefits of direct sponsored content. But there can be some really good reasons not to use Direct Sponsored Content, and just use boosted posts instead.

The three reasons I've come up with and if you have others, I would love for you to share them in case I forgot something here. The first reason is to preserve the social proof across your ads. The second is simplicity, if you just don't care about tracking. And the third, they don't go through the same review process as Direct Sponsored Content.

Alright, so diving in deeply here, the first one about preserving social proof. So LinkedIn ads falls behind almost all of the major ad platforms in feature set. And here's a great example of something that we advertisers have been asking for for years that LinkedIn still hasn't addressed. So when you go to create a Sponsored Content ad on LinkedIn, you have two choices, you can either create a boosted post, where your tracking will be messed up, it'll be dirty, because you've got your organic audience and your paid audience seeing the same ad. But you do get to preserve your social proof. So any ad where you can see the likes and the comments, if the same ad is shared by multiple campaigns, or maybe the ad has even run organically, before it became an ad. Everyone who has served that ad gets to see these likes and comment count. That of course is going to give them a little bit of a warm feeling that oh, they're not alone here. They're not being tricked. Lots of people are getting value out of this ad. Your other option is to go with Direct Sponsored Content, where each individual ad that you create starts back out at zero social proof. And I'm sure many of us know, getting that first like or that first comment on an ad is really difficult. No one wants to be the first one. But once you have one or two, then it really starts to ramp up. This is a pretty significant downside. But the real upside here is that the tracking link allows you near perfect attribution of exactly which ad and which audience led to that closed deal when it makes it into your CRM. Now because there are significant pros and cons to both approaches, you're going to have to decide which one you choose.

Here at B2Linked, we've decided that tracking is more important to us than social proof, simply due to the power of our internal reporting tools. And feel free to ask me about the reporting tools anytime because I love to geek out on this stuff. The second good reason to use a boosted post is for simplicity if you don't care about tracking. So if you don't know what I'm talking about when I say tracking parameters in your URL, or when I talk about UTM parameters, then you should be on the lookout for a future episode, where we're going to go way deep into tracking. But you should also do yourself a career favor and go and look them up. I've said that for years technical marketers are the ones that won't be replaced by AI, or will be immune to being replaced by their younger up and coming generation of marketers. That being said, if you don't care about tracking parameters, then the easiest path for you to launch ads will be with boosted posts, or simply using dark posts still, but just sponsoring that same dark post to several different ad campaigns, just that you get to reuse that same ad creative and not have to create a whole bunch of new ads.

And finally, here's a little ninja tip that boosted posts don't go through the same review process. This is helpful in one little situation where let's say you keep launching ads. And LinkedIn keeps disapproving them for whatever reason. We had a client who was advertising a wine industry consortium. Our ads kept getting disapproved because they mentioned wine. And LinkedIn has a rule against promoting alcohol, after multiple attempts at getting LinkedIn to appeal their decision and overturn it. Because obviously, we weren't advertising alcohol, we were advertising an industry event, we finally just decided to launch the ads as boosted posts. And since boosted posts are already public on a company page, they don't go through the same approval process and review process, we were able to launch the ads and run. But it is important to note that this isn't a way to cheat LinkedIn's ad approval. If we were actually advertising wine or alcohol, or something else offensive or blatantly against the rules, the community would have reported our ads and LinkedIn still would have come and rejected them. But this was just more of a workaround when LinkedIn reviewers were simply not having a follow the spirit of the law and not the letter of the law kind of day. 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.

All right, I hope you enjoyed that episode. It was short, but sweet. Now, if you are just getting into LinkedIn Ads, or if you have a colleague or a friend who is you'll definitely want to point them towards the LinkedIn Learning course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. The link is right here in the show notes and it's incredibly affordable compared to any other LinkedIn Ads course out there. And the quality is fantastic, if I do say so myself. LinkedIn Learning really does a great job. Make sure to look down at your podcast player right now and hit the subscribe button so you don't miss any of our future episodes. And whatever podcast player you listen to, or service you use, please do rate the podcast and leave a review. If you leave a review. I'll shout you out live on the episode. Well, not really live, but you get the idea. With any ideas for future podcast episodes, any topics you'd like us to cover, clarification, anything like that, reach out to us at [email protected]. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week, hopefully, cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Benchmark Episode

Slide of benchmarks and hurdles

NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox

Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.

 

Show Transcript

One of the most important skills that you can learn as you're managing LinkedIn Ads campaigns. That's right. We're talking about troubleshooting your ad performance. Let's do it.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. I'm really excited about the topic today. And I have a special guest that I want to introduce you to. But before that, a quick story about why this topic is so important to me. So back while I was working on my undergrad at Brigham Young University here in Utah, I got a job doing tech support. And it was like second level tech support. So a little bit techier than what I was used to. And I was responsible for internet connections and servers for 30,000 or more locations. I've always been really good with computers, but the topic of internet and modems and networks was all new to me at this point. So I went through the training process and I did my best to do what I could which was memorizing the different tactics of ways you can fix things. And you techies will probably appreciate this part. I found that it was pretty common to reboot the router or the modem and that would work to restore their internet connection.

Have you tried turning it off and on again? Hello, IT? Have you tried turning it off and on again?

AJ Wilcox 3:09 I also found that sometimes computers had proxy settings erroneously set up in the browsers. On one of my first calls that I ever had with a customer, unbeknownst to me, my manager was listening to the call, I was super nervous and I was asking the customer to try everything. We were rebooting modems and routers, we were checking proxy settings, we were all over the board. My manager right after the call, he called me into his office, and he taught me a principle that would serve me my entire life. He taught me that throwing every tactic I knew at the problem was super inefficient. And that the much better way to do this would be to systematically test through the system. In the case of computer networking, he taught me that you can either work from the outside to the inside, which would be like checking the internet connection to the building first, and then moving to the router to see if it's working, and then to each computer. Or you can work from the inside to the outside. So check the computer status first, and then move to the router, then move to the modem. And he taught me that it didn't matter which direction you started from, but that the most important thing was ruling out the tactics that wouldn't be useful and helpful to try in our troubleshooting. That skill of systematic testing is something that I took with me into digital marketing and I count it as being one of the most important skills that I could have had and I would recommend that any other marketer can have. Today's guest is going to teach us how to apply these same troubleshooting and testing strategies to your marketing which will make you an infinitely better advertising professional, especially on LinkedIn where the stakes are just quite honestly higher due to the high costs. Let's hit it.

Alright everyone, I'm super excited to introduce you to Parker Williams, who's on our team. He is one of B2Linked's most senior account managers. He's built and sold his own company. He grew a startup software company from zero to 1 million in ARR, he's married with two kids, lives in Mesa, Arizona, and if he's not working, he's either mountain biking or riding his dirt bike. Parker, so excited to have you here. Thanks for coming on.

Parker Williams 5:13 Man, it's a pleasure, AJ. Happy to be here.

AJ Wilcox 5:16 Alright, so maybe give us the backstory here. The topic that we're talking about today is troubleshooting. Why did you feel like this was such an important topic? And why did you volunteer to hop on to get grilled by me?

Parker Williams 5:27 Yeah, no, that's a great question. I feel like my career in marketing or as a marketer really pivoted when I started to understand the process of troubleshooting because, you know, I think back to early days, when I got into marketing, marketing my own company when things went wrong, which they always do, I always approached it with a process of like, throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks which to some people that might work, but it didn't work for me. I would freak out, I get nervous or running advertising campaigns, like, you kind of panic, and you start making decisions that are not good when things don't go right. And so I feel like once I understood the process of troubleshooting an ad campaign, sales campaign, it was pivotal for my career as a marketer, I started to excel and started to find areas to improve, and I started to see success faster than previously. So I feel like it's crucial, very crucial.

AJ Wilcox 6:29 I totally agree. I think as a marketer, you really can advance. You can have great positions by just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, right? My personal feeling on it is, if you actually understand the process right from beginning to end, you understand what makes a difference where, you're thinking more strategically as a marketer, and less tactics focused. And I think ultimately, that makes us a much better marketer because you can see the whole picture.

Parker Williams 6:56 Yeah, exactly. It becomes an engineering and science game versus like, a guessing game, you know, you know exactly what to do to improve an ad campaign or not necessarily know what to do, but you know what to focus on next. And because it didn't work, doesn't mean it's not going to work. And so being able to troubleshoot something it's way better. It's just so much more, it's more fun to me when you approach it that way.

AJ Wilcox 7:26 Same here, I've said this before, but basically, every time I run a test, doing something with LinkedIn Ads, despite the fact that I've got 10 plus years of experience, I feel like I'm really good and comfortable on the platform, I still am going to fail half the time, right? And most of us don't want to admit that, but everything we do in marketing is a test. So if you're going to be testing things, but you don't know what your inputs are, what your levers are, you're probably going to be running some pretty risky campaigns.

Parker Williams 7:56 Right? I heard an advertiser I think was Frank Kern. He's like a big time advertiser, marketer. He mentioned one time, like if if marketing worked every time like we'd all be, it would be easy. Everybody would be millionaires, and super rich, and like, we would never have any issues. But this is not the case with marketing. It never works the first time. Sometimes it does, but it rarely does. And like being able to troubleshoot things that don't work, like that's a game changer. That's a huge game changer.

AJ Wilcox 8:30 It is. It takes it from an art where only a few people are skilled and turns it into a science where right anyone can follow a repeatable process. I love that. So maybe share with us a specific experience where you had to troubleshoot and walk us through that process. What you thought about what it took.

Parker Williams 8:47 Yeah, that's a great question. So you know, initially, when I came on and started helping manage ad accounts at B2Linked, one of the things that was stressful to me was, click through rates. Getting click through rates above our benchmark, which was 0.4%. And I remember I was assigned a client, they're called Asahi Kasei, they're a big Japanese company. Our click through rates were a bit low and I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to get him up. AJ actually gave a training on troubleshooting and showed the process of how to fix problems or solve problems in advertising. He presented us levers that you can pull at certain points or certain hurdles that you're experiencing. And so in this case, my click through rates were low. And I knew from that training that I had certain levers I could pull to improve that click through rate and so one of the things we tested was the headlines and the intro text or they were text ads in this case. And so we started to tailor our ad copy to be more industry specific and we saw a dramatic increase in our our click through rates. I think we went from like, they were text ads, so they were less than .04 percent. We were like .01, .02 percent like really low, but our average click through rates went up above .04 percent, which was a game winner for their ads.

AJ Wilcox 10:10 And for the uninitiated, that is basically it's almost two times the average for text ads. So we took something that was performing below benchmark, and then doubled LinkedIn to benchmark with it. That's pretty awesome. Right? So this might sound a little bit silly, but why did you decide based on knowing that the click through rates were having an issue? Why didn't you go and make changes to the landing page or recommend a different offer? Or, you know, why did you go right for the headline in the description?

Parker Williams 10:38 Yeah, so I think that goes to kind of the process of, you know, troubleshooting, what is it? And how do you prioritize what things you need to fix? And so, you know, I chose click through rate initially, because that was our first hurdle. And then I had listed from that training, different levers we could pull to improve it, or improve or overcome that hurdle. And I prioritized ad copy because that was the initial contact point. And so I knew that that would be the priority. The landing page, in this case, it was a follower ad. So there wasn't really a landing page, but if there was a landing page, like it wouldn't improve that click through rate, it wouldn't impact it. So I chose the headline, because that's what people are engaging with, or the audience was engaging with. I knew it would impact it more than changing the audience. I guess that was another lever, like before changing the audience, which is a lot of work. We could test something minor and quick. So that was a big reason.

AJ Wilcox 11:44 Yeah. So it sounds like a silly question. But those are the kinds of things you might do as a marketer, if you didn't know what levers you could pull to get better performance, you might just say, Oh, I I know how to make landing pages convert better. I have a poor click through rate here, but let me go and work on the landing page and try to get better performance, when that's really not your pain. Can you walk us through? What are the hurdles that we face as advertisers? And maybe what are the levers that you can pull if we're stumbling over one of those hurdles?

Parker Williams 12:14 Yeah, absolutely. Back to the point of which hurdles we pull on advertising, there's two main ones, which is click through rate and conversion rates. There's levers for each one. And a lot of times, they're very similar levers, like ad copy, or messaging, or audience or your call to action. Those are some examples of levers you can pull. The click through rate, we can discuss what those levers are and then we can discuss what the conversion rate levers are next. So the first levers I usually look at when it comes to click through rate is ad copy. So your intro text, your headline, or your image text, right, your image ad copy. The next thing I'll look at or consider is the image, you know, is the image engaging. Is it interesting? Does it look too ad-ish? Does it capture people's attention? So that's the next thing I'll usually test. The other library you have is that you can pull is the offer, the actual offer that you're advertising. So if you're advertising an E-book or a white paper, what exactly is that offer? Is it enticing enough to get your individual, your audience to engage with you? I don't usually go to that offer, or I don't go to that level until I've tested everything because to change an offer, that's a lot of work. So before changing the offer, I'll even test the audience. Maybe our audiences just slightly off, maybe we're not targeted enough. Or maybe we're too broad. So those are the levers I typically pull when it comes to click through rates. Conversion rates, they're going to be similar.

AJ Wilcox 13:50 Actually, let's stop right there. What is the punishment you receive as an advertiser if your click through rates aren't great?

Parker Williams 13:57 Yeah, that's a great question. To answer that question, it can be pretty in depth or it can be pretty simple. If your click through rate is low, let's say 0%. You're not getting any clicks. Right? That's the first terrible thing that can happen. But if you are getting clicks, let's say you're getting .2% click through rate. And from that same ad, targeting that same audience if you double that, so let's say .2 and a half percent if you double that, it's 5.5% click through rate, you just doubled your clicks from the same amount of impressions. And so your efficiency just doubled with that one ad. We can go into depth on that, but it's it's pretty simple at the same time, like poor click through rate like your gate to the ad performance is not opened all the way. It's like not performing at all.

AJ Wilcox 15:00 And then I think if you are bidding by the impression, let's say you are using LinkedIn to auto bidding, literally, you just reach twice the number of people for the same cost. I mean, literally, when you say you doubled efficiency, it's true. But if you are bidding by the click, you're basically like trying to bribe LinkedIn to get them to show your ads. If you have a .2% click through rate. It's like, alright, LinkedIn then I'll try bidding $15, will you show me then? What if I bid $20. And on the other hand, if you've doubled that, and now you're at like the .5%, you can bid down significantly, you're paying so much less for the traffic. And of course, it matters in your scale, and it matters in your ads efficiency. So I think that's a really good example.

Parker Williams 15:45 It's also kind of like a faucet, like everyone uses a faucet everyday when they brush their teeth, right? If you turn on your faucet, just a tiny bit, and you had drips coming out, that's kind of like a 0.1% click through rate, and you got to wash off your toothbrush, like you can't do that with drips. And so if you increase that click through rate, and you open your faucet more, you're gonna get more clicks, and it's going to achieve your goal faster, you're gonna be able to test faster, you're going to be able to prove your offer faster, you're going to be able to, you're gonna have way more data to work with. So I always think of faucets when I think of click through rate, like, that's your faucet to your funnel. So if your click through rates are low, like, you're not gonna have any data for conversions, which is the next hurdle.

AJ Wilcox 16:27 Oh, so true. And I love that metaphor, because I can imagine, if you're trying to wash your toothbrush out with drips, think of how many toothbrushes you can wash when the faucets going full blast, I mean, several can be under there, that could be a whole bunch of different tests around. That leaves us really, really nicely to the second hurdle. So tell us about the second hurdle and tell us why it's important. And maybe what levers you'd be trying to pull to, to effect a change there.

Parker Williams 16:53 Yeah, absolutely. So that the next hurdle is conversion rates. This can change quite a bit depending on where you're sending traffic to. I know there's a lot of native forums on LinkedIn now, even other platforms as well. If you're running traffic to like a lead form, the levers are going to be a little different. If you're running traffic to a landing page, the levers are going to be a little little different, but it's the same hurdle. And so let's just use the example of running traffic to a landing page. The levers you're going to pull there are going to be similar to click through rates. The first thing I like to check or prioritize is my ad copy on the landing page. Now, what is the messaging? Is it congruent with the ad, for example, if you're running an ad campaign for like the ultimate guide to LinkedIn advertising, and that's in your ad, and they come to a landing page, that's like the ultimate guide to Google advertising? What do you think's going to happen to that conversion rate, it's going to not be that great, because people that clicked on the ad came the landing page with the expectation to be served the Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn advertising. So messaging needs to be congruent with your ads to see good conversion rates. So that's usually what I like to test first, is the messaging on the landing page. The other lever that I moved to next is traffic, is the traffic clean that we're sending to the landing page. Is it the right audience, that's an easy lever to pull, it doesn't take a lot of effort to pull that. So the other lever is going to be your offer? Is your offer back to the ad campaign? Is it something that's irresistible to your audience? Are they going to be stupid for not saying yes to this offer, basically. So those are the typical levers we pull, you know, there are little tactical things, but I don't think those last they work and change all the time. But really, it's your offer, message, and audience that you need to focus on.

AJ Wilcox 18:48 And what I want everyone to get out of this, if you've listened to me for any amount of time, you've heard me say that the offer is everything. Notice how when Parker was talking, the offer was actually a piece of the troubleshooting and the performance for both improving the click through rate and improving the conversion rate. Literally, it feels like you're pulling teeth, trying to get traffic on LinkedIn, your performance really sucks. Take a hard look at your offer. Because more often than not, when you've tested everything, and you just can't figure out like why are my ads not working? It's because the offer isn't attractive enough. Think of it from the perspective of your prospect. If they look at it, just like Parker said, is it irresistible? They would be stupid not to put their their information in to get this or is it something super high friction, like sign up for a trial or hop on the phone with a sales rep where it's scaring them away active,

Parker Williams 19:43 Your audience temperature can play a big part in that too. And that's that goes to the to what you said earlier, like maybe the offer isn't positioned at the right time for that audience. So if you're targeting, like a LinkedIn Ad campaign we'll use that as an example. If you're targeting cold audience like, let's say your offers a free trial 30 day trial, no one knows likes or trust you, you're probably gonna have low conversion rates with with something like that. But if this audience has engaged with your content, they've raised their hand to other pieces of content that's created demand for your product or service. retargeting those people or putting uploading a list of those people and targeting them with a 30 day trial, you probably see higher conversion rates than you would with a cold audience.

AJ Wilcox 20:35 Oh, very true. That know, like, and trust factor is ultra important. And if someone already knows likes and trusts you, they'll be open to a really high friction offer. But I think you have to earn that trust, you have to earn that like and so much of what we do, I think in terms of cold traffic, because so much of what we do on LinkedIn is reaching new audiences we haven't reached before. That's really really insightful. Here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the rest of the interview,

Speaker 4 21:02 the LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

AJ Wilcox 21:12 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We spent over $140 million on LinkedIn ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead and the maximum scale of your campaigns. We're official LinkedIn partners, and you'll only deal with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one, fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns. We'd absolutely love to work with you.

All right, let's jump right back into the interview with Parker.

So Parker, walk us through when you're inside of a LinkedIn account, you're inside of campaign manager, and you're looking to analyze some of these things, and decide what to test what to troubleshoot. Where are you looking? What are you doing? Teach us so that we can follow along?

Parker Williams 21:57 Yeah, absolutely. I'll tell a story about this. So one of my responsibilities and B2Linked is consulting or helping. You can purchase consulting time with a director. And so I've had the opportunity to do that and one of the first things I do when someone asked me to take a look at their account is I pull up the campaign, or I go into the ad campaign group that we're running ads in, that we're wanting to focus on and improve. And I make sure that my timeframe is set to either 30 days or 90 days, I want as much data as I can initially to analyze the performance of the campaigns we're focusing on. And then depending on what offer, how you have your campaigns set up, I'll make sure that those campaigns are selected. And then the first thing I'm looking at is my click through rate. So back to troubleshooting, I'm going to I'm going to be in the campaign level, looking at all the campaigns. And looking at the average of the click through rate. Let's say it's one specific campaign, though, that we're wanting to look at, I'll make sure that I select that one campaign, so it pops it up in the the header bar, the campaign manager view. And that's usually where I go initially. And then, depending on your objective, if you're trying to get leads, if you're trying to get downloads, if you're trying to get followers, then I'll look at that conversion rate. And sometimes you'll have to export that data to be able to analyze that, depending on that objective. So that's kind of where I go initially. If I want to get into more information and a deeper dive, I'll export it to an Excel sheet, and then I'll run like pivot tables, and I'll do a little bit more digging so I can analyze the ad copy, the ad imagery, maybe the offers, if you've ran multiple offers.

AJ Wilcox 23:52 I really, really liked what you said, I follow the same process, I will export from LinkedIn, and I will export specifically the ad data. But when I get it into Excel, I build my pivot table by campaign name. And that way I can look down the list and see, like you said, any campaign that sticks out as being a really poor performer, that's really what troubleshooting is looking for the poor performers right, then once I found a campaign, I'll break that campaign down to see the ads that make that up. And really often I'll find that there might be two ads or maybe four ads that have run inside that campaign. And one of them is actually doing really well but the other one or the other three are the actual poor performers. And so one quick thing we can do is just pause the poor performers and turn the best one backup or or back on if it were off.

Parker Williams 24:46 After listening to you talk about that. I think there's a few key ingredients to troubleshooting that we need to discuss which would one of the first ones would be benchmarks, knowing your benchmarks and what to compare to troubleshooting is pretty useless if you don't have any benchmarks.

AJ Wilcox 25:04 Great point, for those of you listening, Episode 15 of the podcast, and we'll link to it down below in the show notes. Episode 15 is all about benchmarks. And if you go and listen to that, you can compare your own performance against benchmarks to see where we are. Okay, keep going.

Parker Williams 25:20 Yeah, so I feel like benchmarks are a key ingredient. And then we've talked about this already identifying being very specific on your hurdle, that's one of the other ingredients is knowing your hurdles. And the other key ingredients is, are the levers which we've discussed. So I just wanted to hit on making sure that you know your benchmarks, and you know your hurdles, and you know, your levers you can pull. And you've identified them, and you've listed them. I've got a noted document in my computer, I used to have it on a piece of paper, but I refer to it all the time. What are my hurdles? What are my benchmarks? And what's cool about this process is, it doesn't only work for LinkedIn Ads, but this also works for everything else you do in business, and even sometimes in life, which not to get off of the topic of LinkedIn Ads. But I've found myself with clients, I've had situations where I've, we've had great performing campaigns, like our front end is working really well, we're producing really good leads, we're producing really good click through rates. And it gets to the sales team. And they're coming back to us and saying, hey, we're not converting any of these. Well, before we point fingers at advertising and saying, hey, advertising is not working, because we're leads aren't converting. What's that next hurdle? And sometimes I can advise the sales team on what are the hurdles, what's the next thing that you're sending them? Is it an email or calling them like? I'm able to help them identify their next hurdle that they're dealing with. So if you're a marketer have a small team or a big team, being able to provide advice or direction for the sales team is also beneficial, and build your value that you add to the company, not just in advertising.

AJ Wilcox 27:11 So true, you could be the very best LinkedIn Ads professional on the planet, and still totally fail if sales doesn't know how to how to handle your leads. Or if you don't have a good enough offer to advertise. I've said before, but you can only put so much lipstick on a pig and it's not getting any prettier. Right? I thought it'd be interesting to interject here. For those looking to troubleshoot the conversion rate hurdle. If you are running lead generation form campaigns, then what I like to do is, you will have a lead form open rate that's can be interesting. But more often than not, I'm just taking the number of leads and dividing it by the number of clicks to get a conversion rate. And that's really simple, but when you're running like a website visits campaign, for instance, or an engagement campaign, and you're running the conversion tracking on the website, LinkedIn's metrics won't tell you the whole picture though. They will seek to tell more of a picture than what it deserves. If you just look at the conversions column, it will show you a number of conversions. But if you go into your like leads and conversions view of campaign manager, you'll see that that number is actually made up of two different metrics. One is last click conversions, and one is view through conversions. And if you ask me, it's not right for LinkedIn to claim the view through conversions. Those are basically conversions that occurred from a different marketing channel of yours that LinkedIn knows that that member saw at least one of your ads in the last, you know, 30 days or seven days, whatever you set your window to. So anytime I'm doing this analysis, I don't use LinkedIn's conversions column, I specifically pull the column that is last click conversions. Those will tell you the ones the conversions that actually came because of clicking one of your ads.

Parker Williams 29:05 I love it. The data LinkedIn provides is a little skewed sometimes. That's another key ingredient to troubleshooting is making sure you're you're pulling the right clicks. Because LinkedIn, we've learned this, LinkedIn says if you look at the original view and campaign manager and you look at clicks, those are all clicks to your landing page. They're not all clicks to your lead form. Sometimes they're clicking share, like, or the see more if your text is long. So that's not actually true click through rate. So making sure, like initially when I look at an account, I just quickly glance at that click through rate. But if I want to really know what the number is, I'm exporting the data into an Excel sheet and looking at it that way.

AJ Wilcox 29:53 I so agree. Knowing the definitions of what each of the metrics mean is really really important. Case in point, if you're running any of the sponsored messaging ad formats, LinkedIn, in so many different views inside of campaign manager, they will tell you that you have a click through rate that is like 55% or higher. But when you really look at it, you'll realize, oh, every time that LinkedIn sees the word click there saying an open of that message was a click, I mean, we have to change our definitions, we have to pull that data out and recalculate our own click through rate of the like sponsored message, or message ad clicks, divided by the number of opens, just punctuating your point, we really do need to know the definitions super valuable. Alright, so last question for you. What advice would you have to give to a marketer who wanted to get better at troubleshooting and testing?

Parker Williams 30:49 Yeah, I think I've kind of mentioned it already. But just being super clear on your hurdles, and your levers you can pull when it comes to the ad campaign you're running. Whether it's on LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, or even your landing page, just being clear on those hurdles. And those levers is a game changer to me. And I feel like, you can go deep with those levers, too. So it's messaging is broad. Right? Like just saying, hey, are levers in messaging Well, what does that mean? Like? It's the ad copy. But like, what do you change in the ad copy? Sometimes there's only so much you can change about an E-book, like at least being clear that, hey, the messaging is what we need to fix. But like, what are the things you could pull off of your tool bag when it comes to messaging? Like, what different types of ad copy like what kind of emotions? Should we use fear? Should we use novelty? Should we use...? What types of influence should we use this messaging to hopefully try and improve click through rate? Should we talk to more of their pain points, or the benefits of the the E book? So when we say lever messaging, like, we actually mean a little bit more than just messaging.

AJ Wilcox 32:04 Yeah, I totally agree with that, I find that in troubleshooting, we're oftentimes looking for the largest pain point. So if we take a look at an ad, and we go, the imagery isn't great, but it sure looks like the ad copy is, is really terrible. Let's take a swipe at that, we may not have to redesign the image yet, we're going to do something with the message. And let's say we fix that and click through rate doubles, we might come back and see an image and say, oh, let's make a change here and maybe we can improve another 10%. And then we'll find another, like optimization we can make, and maybe we can get an additional 5% performance. And so we're alleviating the biggest pain that we see from an ad and then making marginally better decisions about how to optimize it. So at first, you'll make big, big pieces of difference. And then later on down the road, you'll find that every change you makes a smaller difference. That's okay. That is the process of optimization.

Parker Williams 33:06 Yeah. And one thing to add to the question you asked about, you know, what do you need to do to be successful at troubleshooting and outside of identifying hurdles and levers, being able to prioritize those hurdles, and then prioritize those levers is very crucial, because to your point, let's say the click through rate is poor. And that's the hurdle you're first focusing on. And you pull the offer lever before you even touch messaging, you just wasted a lot of time and potential resources, like just changing the author may not change the performance of the ad, like it could. The messaging, which is yes, it has a big impact. But it's a quick, like, advertising is all about being fast. And failing fast. I never understood that before, when people would say that, but I do now, with understanding troubleshooting, like, if you fell fast to advertising, you're going to be really good at it. And being able to prioritize where you need to fail next, basically is, is kind of the key.

AJ Wilcox 34:09 And every failure teaches us something. That's why we call it testing and not necessarily failing. Yeah, even if something is an absolute failure, it still taught us something that we never want to do, again, in the future, in that campaign or with that messaging. And that's valuable. The longer we do it, and the more tests we run, then the better marketers we're gonna get, it breaks my heart when companies are making these super dramatic changes to ads, and they don't have a set AB testing strategy, because you can move things around and get better performance, but you didn't learn anything along the way. And you paid for those learnings, you might as well claim them.

Parker Williams 34:48 Yeah, you just brought up a great point to AJ. In advertising there are variables everywhere. Advertising, marketing, sales, there are variables everywhere and if you want to be good troubleshooting and solving problems, solving hurdles that you deal with along that sales funnel, limiting your variables is huge. I can't tell you how many times when it comes to consulting or helping a new account that we're taking over or looking at. They're running like five different ads, there's different images, there's different intros, there's different headlines, that data is useless. Because we don't know what actually influenced that specific ad or that campaign. But if we had all the same images, all the same headlines, and a difference was the intro. We'd be able to say, with confidence that the intro is what's impacting that and we would know where our hurdle really is. Maybe it's not the image maybe it's not the headline. Right now we're focusing on the intro, and that's what we're trying to improve. So limiting your variables with the data's is also another key ingredient.

AJ Wilcox 36:00 So true, it makes the test. Well, Parker, thanks so much for coming on, and teaching us an ultra valuable principle. And being an in full transparency one that I didn't know I wanted to cover in a podcast episode. And Parker came to me and said, hey, there's this really important principle, I think it'd be good to have an episode on so Parker, thanks so much for driving that, I really think there's been a ton of value here. Anything else you'd leave the guests with,

Parker Williams 36:24 I'll just have fun. doing marketing, have fun. troubleshooting. won't matter if you're not having fun, at the end of the day. If you don't enjoy marketing, like go somewhere else. This is what I've learned as a marketer, as sales. Like, if you're not having fun doing it, then you're probably not in the right place.

AJ Wilcox 36:42 I agree. If you're not excited about learning, the results of the last test that you ran, and you're eager to start another one, you can still do your job, but you're not going to be fueled by what else can I learn? What else can I do? And it's my firm belief that marketers who approach it, like you said that they are excited they want to learn and to approach it as a scientist and not necessarily as an artist. I think your career is going to be much greener. Awesome. Well, Parker, thanks so much for joining us. Just for everyone here, I have a couple slides that I share. One is specifically like helping you visualize where the hurdles are. And then another slide that's all about benchmarks. So make sure if that's interesting to you, go check those out. I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around.

Speaker 4 37:36 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

AJ Wilcox 37:47 As promised, here are the episodes resources. We made mention of the benchmarking episode so go back and listen to that. That's Episode 15. Plus, you'll find the link down below. I also included the slides, the benchmark slides, and the hurdles slide that we made reference to during the episode. So check the link out for that. These are slides for my actual presentations that I give. These are advanced LinkedIn tactics slides. So definitely check them out if that was interesting to you. And if you are just learning LinkedIn Ads, or you have a colleague or a friend who's looking to learn, definitely check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning, you'll see the link for it down below in the show notes. But this is everything that you'll need in order to become a solid starting advertiser. And because it's on LinkedIn Learning, it's so so cheap, so definitely check that out. Also, whatever podcast player you're listening on right now, look down and hit that subscribe button, of course, only if you want to have more of me in your ears. But yeah, hit it. And please do rate and review the podcast. It helps other LinkedIn Ads professionals to find out about the show. And you'd be doing me the biggest favor you can do. With any feedback for the show, hit us up at [email protected]. Let us know any feedback you have for the show or topics you'd love for us to cover. I love to hear from our listeners. All right, with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiative.

Show Resources

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Article on LinkedIn Audience Network Measurement Error

LinkedIn Ads Support Group NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox

Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.

 

Show Transcript

Matched audiences aren't new in social advertising. But LinkedIn gave us something special that no other platform has. What is it you ask? Listen, find out.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! So Facebook blew us all away by offering custom audiences back in 2013. That allowed us to upload lists of individuals for targeting of ads. It also included website retargeting through the facebook pixel, which was very cool indeed. Then Google Ads released customer match in 2015, it was a lot more limited, but still pretty cool. Ever late to the game, LinkedIn released matched audiences in 2017, with very little fanfare, but this was the most epic release to date. Not only could we upload individuals, which was a total game changer, and we can of course do website retargeting. But we got a feature that no other platform can match, account matching, or company name, uploads, whatever you want to call it. Today, we're going to discuss why this is the most important feature you'll ever use on LinkedIn Ads. This month, I listened to a podcast by a woman named Lisanne Murphy. And it's called The Marketing Matrix podcast. It's really good. If you're into Facebook ads, it inspired me to do my episodes a little bit less like a Wikipedia article where I just toss everything out there that you could ever imagine about a topic and make it so you have to take tons and tons of notes, and instead focus more on individual features that you can walk away and focus on much smaller facets of the LinkedIn Ads platform. So I would love your feedback as you listen to the next few episodes. If this is a little bit easier to listen to a little bit less Wikipediaish. Or if you still found yourself scrambling for a pen. Lee Gannon, who's a friend of mine and a friend of the show, he found out something that was pointed out to him by LinkedIn support, he was asking about skills targeting and when he found the documentation that the support was referring to, it said something about how skills targeting is done. It reads, "skills include those explicitly added by members in their skill section, as well as keywords and phrases mentioned throughout their profile and summary." Okay, just capitalizing on what this means. This means not only are we targeting people with the skills listed in their skill section that they themselves added, but LinkedIn is also apparently looking for keywords and key phrases throughout the profile. I'm imagining in your about section, or maybe even in your headline or title. It goes on to say, "LinkedIn uses modeling to infer skills from a members job title and job description." Alright, this was a big shocker to me. And actually, one that I don't know is actually out there in the wild. I have a feeling that this is actually not something that has been rolled out yet, but probably will in the future. And the reason I say this is because when we have leads come in to one of our clients accounts that are of poor quality, we asked the client to bring us a link to the the client's profile, and we go figure out which campaign was targeting them, and what sort of targeting we were using. And every once in a while we will find skills targeting that brings in someone who was of lower quality, but we haven't yet experienced where when we look for the skill that we were targeting and we look down into their skills that that particular skill is not there. So that leads me to believe that this either happens very, very rarely, or it's just not happening yet. I would absolutely love it. If any of you listening, if you have any evidence of this happening, maybe a skills campaign was targeting someone that you cannot find that skill in their profile, please, please please reach out and let me know that would be really great to know. And then Rishabh Rastogi from India, he put in the LinkedIn Ads support group, which is a LinkedIn group. If you're not already a member of it, I highly recommend it. I'll link to that in the show notes. He pointed out an ad format that looks like a text ad, but it was actually in his newsfeed. And he provided a screenshot of it. It was in the newsfeed right in between two posts. And it was actually right above a promoted post, a sponsored content. And because we know sponsored content only goes at max one out of every five slots in the newsfeed and this was right above it. We know this wasn't sponsored content. So he reached out about it. And this one in particular, the headline says LinkedIn ads drive business results reach buyers with the power to act. And then it does have an image and it's around image and the call to action says Create Ad so this is obviously one that LinkedIn is using for themselves to market their own LinkedIn Marketing Solutions products. This was pretty interesting. And I would absolutely love it if we got this kind of an ad format in the future, because I don't know about you, but text ads are one of my favorite ad formats on LinkedIn. They're inexpensive, they're really good for branding, they do such a good job of propping up all the other ad formats that I'm running at the time. And the only problem is that because they're way over in the right rail, and they're on desktop only, so most users aren't seeing them that they get clicked on very, very little. So if I could have a text ad that was in the newsfeed, I think that would probably be really, really powerful. And then Tamas Banki from Budapest, he shot me a private message. He saw this new ad format and wondered what it was. So what it is, it's a sponsored content post that says it's from LinkedIn. And it does say promoted. And then it asks, How familiar are you with and then lists the company name. And then there's some, it's like a poll, like a sponsored poll where they can click very familiar, somewhat familiar, I've only heard the name, and not at all familiar. And he hadn't seen this anywhere. So he was wondering, is there any way that this is a new ad format. And the truth is, this is an ad format that everyone can get access to, if you're spending at least $90,000 per quarter. And maybe you've even seen it inside of campaign manager, there's a new heading right at the top there. It's right in between campaign performance and website demographics. And it's called testing. When you click it, it will come up with the ability to create a test. Now we've been able to run these tests if you are spending high budget and had a LinkedIn Rep for quite a while. But this is now right on the front end where anyone can run these. The way it works is if you're spending at least $90,000 per quarter, as you spend, LinkedIn is going to ask people questions about your brand. There are six different studies that you can run and if you want to run all six of them, you just have to make sure that you have a minimum budget of $270k for the 90 day period. So immediately the small spenders are out. But you large spenders, this is actually really fun to run. The first is a brand lift test. And then there's also an aided awareness test, a brand familiarity test, a brand favorability test, a brand recommendation test, and product consideration test. And what it does is as you are advertising at obviously high volumes, it's asking people how familiar they are with your brand. And by doing that, you'll get data back about how effective your ads are from a branding perspective. It's really cool.

Next, just this week, LinkedIn started notifying their customers who were using the LinkedIn audience network. There was a measurement issue we had to do quite a bit of digging for because if you go to the Adweek article that LinkedIn published, there is like zero information about what actually happened. It just says that this mis measurement applied to roughly 8% of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions customers, and for 66% of them, the impact was less than $25. So of course, LinkedIn is crediting that back, some of our clients were getting refunds in the $1,000s of dollars, which obviously made us really curious about what caused this. So in doing a little bit of digging, a source at LinkedIn responded that the effective timeframe is a little over two years, with a heavier impact occurring during the two months leading up to the discovery of the issue. If you want to calculate the impact, basically, you look at the total number of LinkedIn audience network clicks, and basically discount 1.21% of them for any date that was from June of 2021 to before that. This is the average impact that could be on some smaller campaigns. They said this is the average impact so some accounts could see a much smaller effect, and some could be higher. And the effect was higher here in May and June. It seems like every time an ad platform comes out and admits that they had some kind of a mistake, and they go to credit their advertisers, which I think is really awesome because they could just as easily just not tell anyone and let it go. But they do they more or less fess up to it. They give people refunds, which I think is super honorable, but then some jerk or some set of jerks. always end up suing them over it. So please, please, please do not join a class action lawsuit against LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. I would reserve those kinds of actions for companies who do terrible things to you and then don't admit it and you have to find it out yourself. Okay, that's it for the news.

Then we've got a couple of reviews that came in one by the user wixfi. It says, "The authority and LinkedIn ads. AJ is a great voice on running LinkedIn campaigns and doesn't hold back. He gives strategic and tactical tips on how you run the ROI positive campaigns for your business." Wixfi, thank you so much for saying that. I really do try to not hold back and just share everything I know. And of course, our goal is always ROI. And then Betsy Hyndman, from Nashville wrote, "AJ is the real deal. Great podcast, super guy, very knowledgeable. I've learned a ton from AJ generously sharing his deep expertise." Betsy, I'm glad to call you a friend. Thanks so much for leaving such a kind review. All right for you right now who are listening. Yes, you! You're listening, you haven't left a review, please go do it. Honestly, it helps the show a lot. It's going to get more people to listen to the show. And plus, I get to shout you out and tell people how awesome you are for saying such awesome stuff about us. So here we go. But honestly, please go do leave a review, I would love to feature you.

Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. We're getting right into the meat of the show today. So we're talking about matched audiences. And my favorite part about matched audiences are the list uploads. And so there are two different kinds of list uploads you can do one is a contact list, which you think of as maybe email matching, but I'll tell you why that's not, it's a little bit of a misnomer. And the next one is the company name list upload or the account list. Sometimes you'll hear it referred to as the ABM account targeting list. It's important to understand that with all of these list uploads, there are three things that you can do with it. You can either include that list in your targeting, just targeting those who are on your list. You can exclude those from your targeting. And then you can also use that to create a look alike audience. As long as you're listening to this since 2019, you've been able to do that. So let's touch on the the individuals the contact list upload, there are so many different uses that you can have for uploading a list of individuals. You can use this to target individuals who've joined your email list, that's pretty cool. You can use it to exclude your current customers from seeing your ads. How awesome is that, that you can avoid showing ads to someone and having them pay or you know, charge you, to click on your ads when they're already a customer. So lots of different uses. Now, it's a little known fact that you don't actually need an email address for targeting here, more info on that later. Then you've got the company name list upload. And this is, like I said in the intro, my favorite part of LinkedIn Ads in general. What this allows us to do is upload lists of accounts for inclusion or for exclusion. So inclusion would be like if I had a list of companies on my account based marketing list, and I wanted to fire out some ground cover across those audiences so that when they see our next ads, they're much more likely to interact. They're one of our target accounts, we want them. You can also do the same thing of uploading a list of let's say, your competitors, the competitors by company name, and then you could exclude that list from all of your campaigns. And now all of a sudden, your competitors have no idea what you're advertising, you're flying completely under the radar. That's pretty cool. You can also exclude your current customer list, the companies they work at, or how about you could include a list of all of the companies who've become a lead for your organization, but haven't yet closed. So this becomes kind of a lead acceleration or a sales acceleration type of campaign.

Alright, so why is this feature so sexy? Why is it my favorite part of LinkedIn Ads? Well, here's the reason. This is the one feature that no other platform can touch. Facebook, they allowed us to target for a long time people's organizations and their job titles, but guess what, so few people on Facebook ended up putting their professional information in. Facebook is just not the place where you have that kind of data. And so even if Facebook released the ability to target by company in bulk, it would just give you access to such a small percent of the population, it just wouldn't even be worth it. But hey, everyone on LinkedIn tends to list the company they work for. That's kind of the point. Add that to the fact that when you're doing account based marketing targeting, you're targeting a much smaller population. And what that means is, it's not going to allow you to spend as much money. This is a downside for the larger advertisers. But for the smaller advertisers, this is something really powerful you can do and it doesn't take much budget budget. I firmly believe that every B2B company on the planet should be doing this, targeting their absolutely ideal accounts that they want to go after. And it doesn't cost very much, just a few bucks here and there to reach your absolutely ideal audience so they know who you are. That's pretty awesome. Also in the LinkedIn Ads support group on LinkedIn, Jennifer Karos asked this question. She said, "Hey, guys quick question, we uploaded a list with roughly 12,000 contacts. The system recognized about 6,000 of them, but it says it matched 85%. Do you know how this inconsistency could be?" And then Joanna from LinkedIn came in and said, "Hi, Jennifer. I'm Joanna. from our Product Marketing Team at LinkedIn, we see this when we find a match to multiple inputs. For example, if a personal and business email was provided, and we found a single member match to both records, you would see a higher match rate versus the member count." So to put that into perspective, if you upload a list with let's say, first name, last name, company, and title, if it found a match with the company name, and the title on, let's say, half of everyone, it could still say 100% match, but you'd only end up with half of the contacts in your list being represented in your targeting. This was absolutely news to me. So thank you, Joanna, for explaining this to us. We'll come back to this for sure. The next is, it's really important to understand when you upload a list of any kind, it goes through a processing stage. If you've uploaded one of these, you'll see the words "your audience is currently building and may take up to 48 hours or on rare occasion longer to start delivery". One thing I really like about this is you can attach an audience to a campaign even before it's finished building. And what's going to happen is as soon as it's done building, it will immediately start serving the ads. So you don't have to be watching for the status to change, and then go and launch your own ads. Okay, so LinkedIn says right there in their documentation, "It may take up to 48 hours, or on rare occasion longer for a list of process." I call bs on this, I have never ever seen a list to finish processing in under 48 hours. Most of the time it goes to 72 hours and beyond. There's obviously not much I can do. But that's pretty disappointing. I would love to see LinkedIn do something about that. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into some research about what I found that gets lists to match at a higher rate.

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All right, let's jump into it. So I've been doing audience research now for years. And what I share with you this certainly isn't like a benchmark data by any means, but they should help you understand a little bit about how the matching algorithm works. So a couple years ago, when LinkedIn stopped including email addresses in our connections export, I exported all of my connections on LinkedIn without their email address, and then uploaded it to LinkedIn. This was so interesting, because it reported a 90 plus percent match rate, but then the resulting audience that it gave me was only a quarter of the size of my network. So that means there were a lot of those records matching on other things, but a whole bunch that matched on none, at least from what Joanna from LinkedIn shared. So then what I did is I uploaded a list of all of my followers, and this was just their first and last names. And I just wanted to see what it did. It matched it only 50%. But it did return about half the number of my followers. Because first and last names really aren't all that unique. I would not be surprised at all, if some of these were matching people who had the same name as my followers, but weren't actually the followers. I didn't actually advertise this audience. That would be, I don't know, I'm not very confident in that one. And then me and my team found out that you can get a much higher match rate by including in addition to first and last name, also job title and company name. By doing this, we ended up finding that we got a 90% plus match rate, which is awesome. And then just last week for fun, I uploaded my followers list again, my most updated one,, and I wanted to test two things. I included in both of them first name, last name, and company. But for the job title field, I wanted to see if LinkedIn pulled more from their actual job title in the experience section or if it was their headline. My hypothesis was actually that LinkedIn was going to pull more from their headline because more people use their headline I feel like, but boy was I wrong. When I use the headline as the job title, LinkedIn reported that it matched 85%. But it only matched just a little over 61% of the contacts that I uploaded. Okay, that's interesting 61%. Then I uploaded that same list, but with the job title field as the job title. LinkedIn reported this as matching at 90%, but it actually matched 75%. So that's 14 more percent of a match, just by using the job title field instead of the headline. That was really interesting to me. So the takeaway is here, the now what, when you go and upload individual lists, make sure you include first name, last name, job title, their actual job title would help, and their company name, that's going to help you get a much, much higher match rate. One thing you'll notice if you go in and export a list of connections from LinkedIn, if LinkedIn sees an @ in any other field, except for the email address field, it's going to fire off an error. So for instance, if someone has the @ in their headline, because they're saying, I'm the VP at this company, you're gonna have to get rid of that before the list will even validate to process. The way I do that is right inside of Excel, I just do a search and replace on every column except for email address, where I search for the app sign and replace it with nothing.

Okay, I know the LinkedIn products team listens to the show. So I'm going to give you and everyone else here, my wish list for how LinkedIn can make their matched audiences product even better. The first is, like I mentioned before, faster processing. It really shouldn't take 72 hours to process lines of text, I would expect it to take that long, if there was a human in the background, like manually doing things in Excel before the list could be processed. That would make a lot more sense. If the list has 300,000 rows, which is the maximum, I could understand it going longer. But like I said, I've literally never seen any list finished processing under 72 hours. And most of the lists that we upload are in the 10,000 to 30,000 rows range so we're not maxing it out by any means. Something else I would absolutely love in the contact list. I want to be able to target by LinkedIn URL. Forget matching by first name, last name, company name, email, job title, if you have the LinkedIn URL for the person that you're going after, even better, I would much rather use that, it would match it 100%. Please LinkedIn give us that. Then back in 2017, when we got the matched audiences feature, I asked why LinkedIn just shows 90% or higher as a match rate for company names. Why can't they show us the actual if it's really 100%. And LinkedIn replied that it was because they were worried about privacy. Now I get it being a privacy issue, if you are showing an exact match for individuals for a contact list. But there is absolutely no privacy issue with company names and targeting. A company name is public. I just think that's totally a non issue here. So I would absolutely love it. If we got a real match rate for company match. Show us the exact percentage matched. Now recently, if you go into your your list uploads, there will be a tab for companies matched and companies not matched. And that's really cool. If I targeted let's say I was targeting IBM, and I typed in just the letters IBM, but LinkedIn was only going to match it if it was i dot b dot m dot, then if you go into that list, it will tell you that IBM did not match on your list. And that's pretty cool, you can fix it, but I just don't see why the general percentage match shouldn't reflect the exact match for company. And finally here, we've talked about this a little bit, but the match rate really should be based on the number of matches that occurred out of the total number of rows uploaded, I definitely shouldn't have LinkedIn reporting to me 85% match rate to do my own calculation and find out it's actually 61%. That one definitely seems like a product that was built by engineers, not advertisers, I would love to see that one fixed, or heck give us both metrics. Maybe one shows the number of rows that resulted in a match and another one that shows the strength of each match. That could be cool, but I'd want to see both. I don't want to just have the strength of the match shown to me instead of the raw number. Alright, I've got the episode resources coming right up for you. So stick around

25:01 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

All right, first of all, there's that article that LinkedIn published about the LinkedIn Audience Network, and its measurement glitch. So I'll link to that it's on Adweek.com. Just be prepared, the article says absolutely nothing, but you're welcome to take a look at it. Also, if you're trying to learn LinkedIn Ads better or have a colleague or a coworker who is make sure to point them towards the LinkedIn Learning course that I'm the the author of. It just got a refresh early this year and we added about 25 extra minutes of content plus updating everything. It's really good. If I don't say so myself. If this is your first time listening to the show, thanks for tuning in. please do hit that subscribe button on whatever podcast player you're listening with. Please do rate the podcast and like I said before, it really helps the show if you review. That's exactly how you can repay me for dropping all this knowledge, those are knowledge bombs. Okay, so if you want to reach out to us, give us any ideas or any feedback for the show hit us up at [email protected]. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I sure hope. We're working on more consistency here. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Video Example of Green Headlines, reported by Mark Gustafson

Georgiana Dumitru's Case Study

NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox

Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.

 

Show Transcript

You love LinkedIn Ads hacks, I love LinkedIn Ads hacks. Heck, everyone loves LinkedIn Ads hacks. Buckle up.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So I posted out on LinkedIn asking for other advanced advertisers' favorite LinkedIn Ads hacks or strategies. And there were some really good ones. The post had over 20,000 views, and 149 comments last I checked. So for this episode, I'm going to be sharing the community's top strategies. And don't worry, I removed all the bad advice before recording the episode. In the news, we got something really cool that I've been excited about for a long time, we can now rename the default campaign group in an account. And we can pause it. So no promises here, it's rolled out to all of my accounts. But I did talk to a couple people who haven't seen it yet. So it may not be fully rolled out. This is so great because before this happened, we had this entity in there called default campaign group that we couldn't do anything with. It sat there and if we decided not to use it, it still took up space. So now we can pause it, we can rename it, and life is good. I also had a good friend reach out Mark Gustafson, who's the CEO of 900Kings, an agency that focuses just on paid social. You may remember I consulted with him for the Google Ads and the Facebook Ads episodes early on. He brought a really cool feature to my attention, he sent me a video of it, I'll link the video down below. And what we can see is on mobile, as you scroll down past an ad, the headline itself turns from the cream color that it starts out as to a light green. And this is really cool because it's going to bring more attention to ads. And it's not something that I would call very in your face, or gross or anything like that. I think this is a really good change. So it has rolled out to Mark's profile, but I don't have it yet. So I'm going to keep watching. And this could just be a test. Who knows LinkedIn might not be rolling this out forever. But boy, I liked it. And I hope it does roll out, I'd be really interested to see what sort of a difference it makes. I also want to apologize to all of you loyal listeners of the show for having so few episodes this year. In full transparency. I just went through a divorce, and it reduced me to a crumpled pile of human for more months than I'd like to admit. The good news is though, I'm back on the upswing, and I want to thank all of you sincerely who reached out to check on and see if everything was okay. I do have a whole slew of episode topics already planned. And my intent is to go back to getting out a weekly episode. So if I don't hit it here, in just the next few episodes, just know that that's the plan moving forward. That's what I want to start getting back to. There are a couple reviews I'd like to highlight. The first is from Phil Ilic, who's from Great Britain. He said, "This podcast is so valuable. There's so much wisdom in every single episode. Literally I cannot thank AJ enough for everything he has shared so generously with the LinkedIn Ads community. It has been a massive help." And Phil, thank you. I've enjoyed seeing your comments on the posts I put out and interaction with the podcast episodes. So thank you, that means the world to me. The next is from Steve SeeBerg here from the US. His review says, "Conversions through the roof. Based on AJ's insightful advice and his talented staffs AB testing suggestions. We've experienced conversion rates four to five times LinkedIn's benchmark. If you're interviewing LinkedIn Ad agencies, stop, I've tried a few and none can match B2Linked, actionable insights and bottom line results. AJ, you're the best." Steve, thank you so much for that unsolicited review. I'm so grateful for it. Awesome getting to work with you and your team. And I'm excited to get to keep working together to keep killing. Steve runs a mar tech company called NGAGGE and I'm going to spell it, it's n g a g g e, definitely check that out. It's a cool product and one that he's going to be keeping free to us marketers forever. If you're listening to this and you've gotten value out of the podcast, please please, please leave a review on whichever podcast player or portal that you use. I would love to feature you here. Okay, with that being said, in no particular order. Here is the community's favorite hacks and strategies. Let's hit it.

Blake Prichard is a customer success manager at Through. And he said I'm not into marketing at the moment. But when I managed LinkedIn Ads, my favorite targeting method was building an audience by specific skills. You can get very targeted. For example, if you want to promote a webinar to people who are skilled in a specific web app, you can do that with the skills audience. And of course, you can select the level of seniority and experience level on top of that. Blake, I love what you shared. Because we found the same thing. A lot of times someone will have experience with a certain type of software or a certain area of business, that it's not important enough to make it to their their job title proper, but it is worth them adding to their skills. And in fact, on top of this, we found lots of times they'll go and join groups around that topic as well. So targeting people by both skill and group is awesome. Kristine Sergejeva, who is a friend and super loyal listener of the show, she runs SmartB2B. She said, my favorite LinkedIn Ads hack is to do the proper homework, the initial assessment, for each company. We find out if it's suitable for LinkedIn Ads, and what the unique opportunity is on LinkedIn among its competitors. Does the company have proper offers, and if not, which offers should they create, what can be done with possible target segments, etc. And for every offer, what types of campaigns would work best to which segments and which ads. I invest most of my time and efforts in the initial assessment phase, and then the implementation is very clear, easy, and bringing excellent results. I really like this because when you're spending money on LinkedIn Ads, it's inherently high risk because the costs are higher than other ad channels. So any research you can do ahead of time to find out what's going to be good, accepted by this audience, what's going to excite them, it's all going to be very useful.

And then Yoel Israel, who's another LinkedIn Ads fanatic, he's based out of Israel, probably here in the next, I'd say six months, we're gonna have an episode where we interview him, he shared an account based marketing strategy. He said, account based targeting of accounts sales is trying to close. We make blogs that address the objections in the sales process, and we don't gate them. Click through rates are super high and this really helps the sales team close those super low funnel deals. We then sync this ABM list with HubSpot to make sure it's always up to date. I love account based marketing. Yoel, thanks so much for sharing such a cool tip.

Colton Taylor, who's actually in my same state, he's here in Utah. He's the Sr. Demand / Digital Marketing Manager at MX. He said targeting is everything. Audience segmentation and sophisticated build out takes time. But the foundation for effective hyper growth scaling, for example, 200%, year over year budget increase, but is the foundation for effective hyper growth scaling. He follows this up by saying, "And always keep learning. The beauty of marketing is that it's ever evolving. And mastery is a journey." On the sophisticated account build out. I love this because when we build a really complex build out, we're essentially building a ton of small AB tests between audiences. And once we've been running ads for a while, we can then look back at all of those different segments. And it's going to teach us something. It's going to teach us which audience segments are going to be successful and which ones aren't. Who likes what, who responds to what? So Colton, absolutely, I love that comment. And then the bit about always keeping learning. That's my favorite part about digital marketing in general, is we can't ever sit back and rest on our laurels because it's always going to be changing. And those who try to sit back and not learn. They get found out pretty quick. Always keep testing. Always keep learning.

Next is Lucy Kikuchi. She's a podcast host as well. And her advice was, "Listen to AJ Wilcox. That is my go to strategy. Assume nothing. Test everything. Test, optimize, test, optimize and give things time. Nothing happens overnight. There are no quick wins, and no one owes you that." Lucy, I laughed when I read that. Thanks for recommending people listen to this podcast, obviously. But I definitely agree with you. We need to approach LinkedIn Ads, like everything as a test. I know a lot about the platform, I have a lot of experience with it. And even still, I have tests that absolutely fail. If you approach it scientifically, it's going to be a lot better in the long run than just assuming that you can turn something on and it should be successful from day one.

And sorry for slaughtering this name, but Vojtech Toulec from CDN77. His recommendation is, "Use Sales Navigator or recruiter to find the real profiles matching the ad targeting criteria and then optimize the targeting to cut off the non relevant audiences." I love this go and find examples of who the people are who your targeting would hit. You can do this with Sales Navigator. If you see profiles coming up that you're not happy with, you wouldn't want them to be in your target audience. You can then use exclusions. I love it.

Cody Lee, who's a VP and growth marketing and digital advisor, he said, "Favorite quick one, call out your target audience in your copy, just like he did so well in this post." When I put out the post, I said, attention LinkedIn advertisers, I've definitely tested ads that do call out the audience to get their attention, and they really can be some quick wins. He also gave four other recommendations here and I'm going to run through all four of them because all four of them were great. He said, focus on adding value to your target audience with qualified content. Frame it more like news or a resource than an ad. Number two bidding, adjust your manual bid up or down depending on your click through rate. Better click through rate than benchmark, lower your bid. Targeting, upload target account lists. Make sure to use exclusions to not waste spend. And the fourth funnel, have a strategy throughout your prospects awareness journey from unaware to problem aware to solution aware to brand aware into pipeline. Remarket LinkedIn audiences on less expensive channels." Thanks, Cody. All good all the way through.

Next, Maninder Paul, who again, is a great listener of the show, super active on LinkedIn. She's a paid social specialist at Bloom Mentor. She said, "Always test a single image ad. Keep creative, simple." I love this because we find so much of the time when we try to get complex, it slows us down and makes it so we can't test as much. So if you approach it with the very simplest test possible, you can at least get something out and start running data and find out what's going to work. She also recommends using a perspective company list, an ABM list, she said it's been successful for her clients, I will back that up.

Zoltán Kozma, who if you remember right from Episode 44, he was actually one of the winners of the perfect ad performance contest. He's a digital marketer at CBRE Hungary. He said, "It's hard to choose, I love to use daily spend data to make sure I don't pay too much, while also staying competitive in the auction." What he's talking about is, if you look at your budget column, LinkedIn will show you a percentage of over the last however many days they calculate how much of the budget you've spent on a daily basis. So he likes to have that at least 80% of your daily budget. And this makes a lot of sense. If you go significantly under that, you've got to bid higher to spend more with that audience. And if you go too much above that, you're at risk of basically bidding too much and blowing your budget for the day on those days when you actually do spend the whole budget. He also says, "For further fine tuning. I like applying the learnings from the campaign demographics to find the best engaging audiences, these often helped to push cost per lead down." And then he adds, "Another great one is the engagement objective hack to trick the algorithm that I learned from you, AJ". And this one, if you've caught it before, what we find is because the floor price for engagement objective ads, because it's 35% cheaper, you can find when you're running ads, where less than 35% of the interactions come from social, then you can switch from website visits to the engagement objective and essentially save some cash. Here's a quick sponsor break.

The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

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Ben Evans, who's the President at Auditec Solutions, he said, "Hi, AJ, this is more of a relationship building strategy. But what I find when I first make a new connection with a new contact, I send them a personalized video message through the mobile app introducing myself." I know this isn't specifically ads related. But Ben, you're absolutely right. The more something feels personal to us, like someone went out of their way to make us feel special. The more indebted we're going to feel to them. Whether you're doing organic or ads. This is a great way to help make that relationship strong.

And then Vishnu Prashanth, he's a performance marketer. He says, "Spy on the job listings posted by your target account lists and find out the right job title that matches with your products pain point and use them in targeting." Yeah, if they're trying to hire for it, chances are there is a pain point that they're looking to solve. That's pretty cool.

And David Planchot, Growth Marketing atiAdvize, he said, "Using smart links on your LinkedIn ads." For those of you who don't know what smart links are, when you're using Sales Navigator, the upgraded license on LinkedIn, which I just barely started using the other day,it's fun. You can create one link that has a whole bunch of different calls to action or different resources there. And then when someone downloads or accesses something, you get the data from them opting in. And it's a cool way to have conversion tracking without nearly as much friction as you'd have in specifically having them fill out a form. He even included a really cool screenshot of a workflow, where he shows how he automates the smart links and gets them into HubSpot. Pretty dang cool.

Georgiana Dumitru. She's in B2B demand generation. And she said, "As I see it with LinkedIn ads, it's crucial to first win the view, the attention, and then worry about the click. The battle on the feet is fierce, and we must get noticed first, so I put all my money on crafting highly effective ads, making the best ad copy and image. At some point I started to use the journalistic approach. Have my ad copy answer the what, where, when, and why questions that make the ad sound like news rather than a salesy message. And it worked." She even links to a case study she created about writing better ad copy.

And Michael Bennington, who's a marketing specialist at Edelstein & Company, he says, "Creating a bid by click that is the minimum instead of what they recommend. Learned it from you during your 2020 inbound presentation." Michael, thanks for pointing that one out. It's amazing to me how many people look at the ranges that LinkedIn recommends for a manual CPC bid and they just take whatever the recommendation is that LinkedIn provides. Those recommendations might be accurate if you're spending six figures a month or more. But for accounts with lower budgets, absolutely, you can start by bidding a heck of a lot less.

Raphael Yarish, who's the co founder of AdFind.co which spoiler alert, I think we're probably going to have an episode specifically mentioning this one coming up. But he said, "Here are my three favorite insights. Number one, using user generated content instead of stock images to stand out from the feed and get higher click through rates. Include text on the image or video, a free placement for copy that really pops. And finally, use day parting having specific times when you should run your LinkedIn Ads for optimal performance." Raphael, I think those are totally spot on.

The next is Ricardo Ghekiereand I've been on his podcast before. He's the head of paid social at Upthrust. He said, "sking for the LinkedIn URL in your lead gen form, instead of bombarding people with questions, then scrape the API, and then scrape the profiles to get all the information that you would have asked for, then upload into a CRM, and then automate a relevant connection request from your sales department based on the call to action that you provided, and then have a message based follow up." Now, Ricardo, I think this is great. I love the system. I can't recommend scraping LinkedIn because as a partner, I probably wouldn't be in very good standing if I did. But I love the line of thinking here.

Lee Gannon, who is the head of paid social at Receptional, he said, "With a primary strategy of lead gen forms, I like running some follow up retargeting based on the form engagement." He also recommends running text ads as a complimentary ad format, alongside the sponsored content, especially for targeting account lists for cheap brand awareness. He said, "Learned that from the master AJ Wilcox". Well, I'm glad you picked it up with what I shared it. I think it's fantastic.

Claire Williams who is apaid social strategist, a woman that I've gotten the chance to, to train on LinkedIn Ads. She's amazing. She says, "Manual bidding. Not sure that that's a hack, really, but it's super important." And I totally agree with that. As soon as LinkedIn started making auto bidding, the default I got to watch LinkedIn's average CPC is just climb and climb and climb. It was probably like 30 to 50% increases in costs per click. Just because LinkedIn rolled that out. I'm sure they're patting themselves on the back getting lots and lots more money. But the fact of the matter is for advertisers, the vast majority of them are probably paying way too much for clicks. So I agree. Manual bidding is a great way to go.

This one's pretty self serving, but Andrew Tull, who's a great marketer here in the US, he said, "My key resources letting AJ Wilcox guide me, lol. Oh, in the day parting and automation magic provided by B2Linked.com." Thanks, Andrew. I appreciate it. Your checks in the mail.

Next, Ryan Gervais is a Demand Generation & Paid Media Strategist at Deloitte. He said, "Strategic usage of account exclusion lists. For example, competitors, vertical based, pipeline, etc." I love using exclusions. Thanks, Ryan.

Theresa Sturm is a digital consultant at Via Digital. She says, "Working on badass creative and copy. A good click through rate is key to high quality score." I totally agree Teresa. We tend to bag on marketers who care too much about click through rates. But the fact of the matter is, getting a good click through rate really is key to getting high performance. They have to go hand in hand,

Matthew Sciannella, he has a great recommendation here about targeting audiences that don't always fit in neat, firmographic target. So he says, "I try to go and find LinkedIn groups for these niche industries. And I target them as a seed audience. And then I look in LinkedIn's demographic data, to look at their industries, function, job titles, etc." And he also actually looks at some specific members profiles to look at their skills and that gives them more data to create skills targeting. Love it Matthew.

Simon L. who's a Director of Marketing at Acodis. He says, "Build your target group, and then focus on frequent contributors as they are much more likely to interact." Ah, I thought this was super cool. If you look in the additional targeting traits, you'll see that there is a way to layer on frequent contributors. If you target them, they are much more likely to be active on LinkedIn. And I would imagine that means that they're going to click at a higher rate. Simon, I'm going to go test that.

Alexandra Wittmaier from GBTEC, she said, "Use an optional checkbox in the lead gen form for subscribing to the newsletter. Yeah, if you're going to get people signing up for an asset, you might as well get them into the newsletter as well and have it be compliant."

Alright, let's jump into the rest of the recommendations. Kris Selway says, "Running 55 second video ads on cost per view, building up a low cost remarketing list, and targeting all those that viewed the video for at least 25% of the duration with a more commercially focused ad." I love it, Chris, anything we can do with warming up cold audiences and running them through a funnel is awesome by me.

Michael Ham says, "Using work email address as a custom field in your lead gen forms rather than just the default email address. So people type their work emails, surprisingly, most people do." Great advice, Michael. We know that in working with a lot of sales teams, they really prefer having a work email address. And of course, it's hard with the lead gen forms because you can't force someone to put in something that isn't like a gmail, but when you specify it, you will get more people doingit.

Márcio Miranda gives three different strategies. The first is put UTM parameters on your URL, and then retarget on your other social media networks based off of the parameters in the URL. I think this is awesome. I've been an advocate of that for a long time. The next thing the companies that interact with my ad, and then go on YouTube and play a TrueView ad in that company channel. This is what I haven't experienced, I'm not sure how to get the ad interactions on LinkedIn over onto YouTube to get the TrueView ad to trigger. This is one I haven't fully wrapped my head around. So my understanding here is that Márcio will go and look at the companies who by name who've interacted with the ads, and then go and find their YouTube channel and then play a TrueView ad in that company's channel. It sure sounds interesting. And then finally, on the lead gen form ads put the last URL after the submission with a link to direct scheduling platform like calendly. I think this is super cool. If you're going to push people right after they've converted right to something like a calendly link. Oh, rad.

Diana Leyton recommends targeting based on LinkedIn group membership. If you choose the right ones, I generally find it's the best ways to find a captive intent based audience.

And then Jordan Lapendry says, "I tried many iterations to test my audience format and content. I've seen that most of the time. The classic works well for acquisition and then video ads have good performance on retargeting."

Thanks again so much for everyone who contributed. This was awesome. So much gold in one LinkedIn thread. I just couldn't wait to share it. All right, I've got the episode resources coming up right away. So stick around.

Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

24:40 All right, here's some cool resources. Like we mentioned earlier, Mark Gustafson submitted a video showing the green highlights on the LinkedIn Ads headline. So down below in the show notes we've linked to that video so you can see for yourself. And then we also have a link to Georgiana Dumitru's post where she has a case study about LinkedIn ad copy. Don't forget the newly updated LinkedIn Learning course that I have the link down below for that one. I am the author. So I'm a little bit biased. But by far, this is the best LinkedIn Ads course. If you've enjoyed the episode today and you want more insights like this, definitely hit subscribe in whatever podcast player you're listening on right now. Please rate the podcast when you're in there. And please also do leave a review. I shout out everyone here on the podcast. And then if you have any recommendations, any questions, any feedback for the show, please email us at [email protected]. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

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Show Resources

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Global State of Sales Report 2021

Sean Callahan

LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox

NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox

Certifications

 

Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.

Show Transcript:

 

AJ Wilcox LinkedIn released the state of sales in 2021 report, and I can confirm, it's fire!

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

AJ Wilcox Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics, I have a confession for you. I am a marketer. I'm a marketer through and through. And I don't consider myself a salesperson. In fact, I consider myself to be the furthest thing from a salesperson. But after years of internal debate, and reconciling the image of the sleazy used car salesman with what I do, I finally come to admit to myself that sales performance is deeply and undeniably connected with my LinkedIn Ads efforts, it's absolutely not uncommon for us to be absolutely slaying it for a client and getting incredible costs and results and low cost per lead. But then just to find out that their sales team doesn't know how to handle the leads, they don't close any, and it makes us look bad. Or the other way around. We can be doing decently, but maybe we haven't quite hit our stride with optimizations yet. And then sales happens to close something. And suddenly, we look like rock stars. No matter which way you slice it. We as marketers live and die by the performance of our sales counterparts. Because of this connection. I'm pleased to have Sean Callahan from LinkedIn as our guest this week. I've gotten to collaborate with him on many projects, I'm lucky to call him a friend. And his team has recently released the state of sales report. And I know you're going to find it fascinating, as well as it will help you become a better marketer.

First in the news, in May, LinkedIn released several new features. So let's walk through those. The first is boosting posts, basically, like a really simple version of campaign manager for maybe a social marketer who doesn't do much on the paid side to be able to boost their posts to target audiences. I'm not very excited about this, I kind of think, meh, because I would much rather use campaign manager. But maybe you've got folks on your social team, or maybe even organic team that would be interested to know about this. Next, LinkedIn officially released their event ads. And on the roadmap episodes in the past, we've talked several times about event ads and what they're going to be in my testing, I haven't found them to outperform a single image sponsored content ads when promoting an event. But it's definitely worth testing to see if you can get them to help perform. One thing of note in our testing is that you can't have multiple copies of the event for like individual campaign tracking. So it's kind of like boosting posts, you pretty much create one event, and then share it into multiple campaigns. I don't like that for attribution. So I hope we'll have a little bit more control over attribution for event and in the future. The next one I am really excited about this is we're now able to go live on LinkedIn live without a third party app. So I absolutely love using Restream.io. They're my favorite streaming platform. But every single time I go live on LinkedIn, I always have some sort of a technical hurdle. Because I'm trying to run through, you know, three or four different applications, it runs my laptop so hard, that it's just you know, the fan is screaming. And so now we get to do this by broadcasting directly through something like zoom or a WebEx that you might already be using to go live. It simplifies things. And it's going to give me a lot more confidence when going live. And hopefully, you'll be able to see me go live a little bit more often. We also got some beefed up event analytics. So these are more insights into your LinkedIn events, which is something we're super grateful for. We've really wanted this ever since events came out. Every time LinkedIn releases a new feature, we want to you'll have all kinds of insights into whether or not it's working. And now we actually have that for events. In the same release, LinkedIn also released mobile page insights. So if you've ever wanted to see how your LinkedIn page was performing, but you were on the go, you were just pretty much out of luck. Well, now LinkedIn have released the ability to see your page analytics, right from the LinkedIn mobile app. And this is fantastic. I applaud anytime we get more control and insight in the mobile app. Something else really exciting. I've been asked about this for years and years, LinkedIn just released their official certifications. And not only are they free, but if you get certified within the next 30 days. It's probably like the next 20 days after this podcast goes live. But you'll get one of the like bragging rights of being one of the very first people to be certified. So check the notes down below. In the show notes, you'll see a link right to the certifications. There are two that you can take right now and get them attached to your LinkedIn profile to show off that you rock at LinkedIn Ads. And our last piece of news here something I'm really, really excited. In many of the last episodes, I've kind of hinted and teased about this. But as of this week, the official LinkedIn Ads course update is now live. So to give you an idea, I recorded the last LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads. It's been several years now. And the content was about an hour and five minutes long. And I've been collecting feedback and questions, and you know, all kinds of different insights over the last several years. And I've now gotten to put that into the update. So if you've taken the course in the past, I would highly recommend go and take the updated course, I think it's about an hour and 45 minutes long, and it is chockfull. I couldn't be more proud of the information and the learnings that you'll have within the course. So hit the link in the show notes, go to LinkedIn Learning, and take the course you'll be absolutely pleased you did. Popping into recent reviews, first of all, a huge thank you to the one person who rated this podcast with one star and didn't even leave a review. I don't know what I did to piss you off. But feel free to reach out to me to discuss what I could be doing better on the show or how we can better support you. We had a review from Max in Thailand, and he says, "This is Max. I'm an Italian living in Thailand, I just want to drop a note to say thank you for your work, and really appreciate the level of details in your podcast. I'm not a podcast listener, and I stumbled in your channel by chance. But I have found this to be one of the best free radio sources I have ever seen. Congratulations, and thanks again." Max, thank you so much. It means the world to me that someone who's not into podcasts would become a podcast listener because of this show. So thanks so much. And on behalf of the medium of podcasting, I hope you find lots of other valuable stuff here too. We also had David leave a review who said, "I'm an intern, and our founder has assigned to me with finding the absolute best podcast. So I had to reach out to you because the LinkedIn Ads Show podcast is absolutely amazing. Our company is focused on providing the necessary tools and knowledge to our customers to fill their calendars with demos through cold emails and LinkedIn." David, thanks so much for sharing those experiences. First of all, I'm glad that the show showed up in your searches, as you were out trying to find this for the CEO, and boy, glad to have you as a listener. Okay, with that being said, I want to feature you all of you here in the reviews highlight. So make sure you go to whatever podcast player or hub and leave us a review on the podcast. Of course, I would prefer not leaving one star reviews. Especially not saying why. But certainly, please leave a review. Let us know what you think of the show and we'll shout you out. Okay, I'm so excited to have Sean Callahan. Let's jump right to the interview.

All right, Sean Callahan. Welcome to the show. Sean is a Senior Content Manager at LinkedIn. He works out of the Chicago office. Personally, he's the author of several children's books, including the most recent Voting with a Porpoise. He helped create LinkedIn's latest state of sales reports. Sean and I go way back. We met at CES several years back. We've gotten to collaborate on a bunch of different projects and things. And now I'm really excited to get to talk to you about this latest report. So welcome to the show.

Sean Callahan 8:25 Hey, thanks for having me on. AJ, it's great to connect again.

AJ Wilcox 8:29 Always, always fun pleasure for me. So first of all, tell us about the state of sales report. And why you and your team decided to take it on, how long it's been running, all those goodies.

Sean Callahan 8:40 Yeah, well, this is a this is a report. This is the fifth time we've done this state of sales report. It's a survey of what's going on in sales. We're trying to talk to our customers for the LinkedIn Sales Navigator product and the LinkedIn Sales Insights product about where sales is headed. We're just trying to be useful to the marketplace. And this report is pretty extensive. So it's global in nature. We interviewed or we surveyed more than 7500 people in 10 countries, the US and Canada, Netherlands, Germany, France, UK, Brazil, Mexico, Singapore, Australia and India. And I think that's actually 11 because we did have the Netherlands this year. And we asked them a huge battery of questions. It's buyers and sellers were asking, so we're getting both sides of the sales process. And we also use LinkedIn data for this. You know, on our platform, we're able to tell through Sales Navigator analyzing actions by salespeople, what actions work and what don't. We find generally that if you share content on a regular basis, but not overly sharing that you do better, same with sending emails, we've got some data on that. And we also interviewed 30 to 40 sales experts and sales leaders for this version of the report, which was something new. So we brought in different perspectives from the industry, not only in the US and Canada, but around the globe, Latin America, EMEA, and APAC and got their points of views and included those in the reports, there's a global version of the report that's coming out in a month, we have already released a US version, UK version, a version for France just came out this week. We have Brazil and Mexico already out and a version of the Netherlands in English out and the other reports will be coming out over the next several weeks. So it's a pretty extensive project. And and again, we're just trying to be useful for the sales industry and and talk about what's happening, I can go into the seven trends that we found here, I'll just list them we'll talk in more detail, I think as we go along in this conversation. But number one was virtual selling is good for sellers and even better for buyers. Number two is sales organizations and managers must adjust to a remote working world and the just now, sales organizations are preventing sellers from putting buyers first I think this is a really interesting one and I can go into detail on that as we dive in a little deeper. We found six sales behaviors in particular that are killing deals. We found that sales technology provides, especially in this virtual selling world, a key pathway to building trust. Number six was for sales organizations, data is more crucial than ever. And number seven was buyers and sellers are ramping up their use of LinkedIn.

AJ Wilcox 11:35 Oh, so first of all super interesting trends. I loved reading all of them. What I really like about this report is it really is an amalgamation of so many important things. Of course, there's the survey. So you're getting data from your customers, but then you brought in experts. And my favorite part is you're actually using LinkedIn data. I can't imagine anyone else who has more insights about what sales folks are doing than LinkedIn. And so I'm so glad that you've gotten to bring that to the table.

Sean Callahan 12:03 Yeah, I think it makes our report unique, and gives us a view of the sales world that is almost impossible to replicate.

AJ Wilcox 12:12 Oh, yeah. So because our listeners are for the vast majority, LinkedIn Ads professionals, mostly in the marketing job function. I'm really curious, what sort of impact do you think this data and these findings will have on us as marketers? And what insights can we take from it?

Sean Callahan 12:30 Yeah, well, I think one of the key things is that marketers should just understand that sales is in a period of change right now. And I think that may help as a marketer myself, and working with a bunch of salespeople. I understand, you know, and throughout my career, that marketing and sales don't always work together, as well as they probably should have, or as well as certainly as well as we want them to. But I think understanding that there's a huge shift happening in sales right now, with virtual selling technology coming on, remote work coming into play, I think it's important for marketers to understand that that's number one. Number two, I think there's some interesting stuff in this report about the power of brand for salespeople. And it can give marketers sort of a leg up in explaining to salespeople the power of marketing for them. You know, I think sometimes it's hard for salespeople to appreciate what marketers can do for them. And this helps, because, for instance, in the six behaviors that are immediate deal killers, and this is all data from the US Canada report. One of the top behaviors that is seen as a deal killer by buyers is that the salesperson is affiliated with a brand that I don't trust. So putting money behind branding is something that is going to help salespeople gain the trust of buyers. I think that's an interesting, you know, thing that I think sometimes it's hard for marketers to communicate that and here we have it. In our survey, we also had buyers rank the factors that are important in influencing the purchase of a product or service. And number one was trust in the brand of product or service, like it had nothing to do with the salesperson, you know that number one thing is about the brand of the product or service. And I think that speaks to how marketers can begin to talk to salespeople about what marketing and investment in marketing brings to the table for salespeople and helping to close deals, meet their quota, etc.

AJ Wilcox 14:42 Oh, I like it. Okay, so that leads me to another question here. What can we do to strengthen our sales teams with the findings from this report? Is this as simple as like forward it to the sales team and you try to get them to read it? Like do you have any tips for us as marketers to help our sales teams act on this?

Sean Callahan 14:59 Yeah. I think talking about brand is important. And I think salespeople understand it in their gut, you know that if they walk into a customer, or if they're emailing a customer, the brand in the.com, you know, is one that they're confident that the customer, the prospect is going to recognize and has as a good feeling about. I think that's very powerful and seeing it come from not a marketer saying this, but buyers saying this, you know, I think that's very valuable from the marketing point of view. It's kind of a recapitulation of the idea that no one ever got fired for buying IBM. Buyers, like the comfort of a brand that they recognize. And marketers can use this to argue for more investment in brand, which ultimately is not helping the marketer, but helping the salesperson and helping the salesperson close deals.

AJ Wilcox 15:54 So true. And we find this time after time, anytime that we're running an account based marketing or an ABM campaign, if our clients are doing active outreach from their sales departments to their buyer, we find that as soon as we start advertising, our advertising gets a lot more efficient. And their success rates get a lot more efficient, just because these people now if heard of you, they know who you are, they assume there's some legitimacy to your brand. And so I definitely second that branding is super valuable to what we do.

Sean Callahan 16:25 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm partial to the phrase or the slogan that if they don't get into the top of the funnel, you're not going to get them to the bottom of the funnel.

AJ Wilcox 16:34 Oh, yeah. So without spoiling the exciting stuff in the report, can you talk about what went in to finding these trends? And maybe a little bit about what may have surprised you?

Sean Callahan 16:44 Yeah, one of the surprising things is this concept of buyer first is interesting to me. And it's interesting that in what we found is 65% of sellers say they always put the buyer first. And only 23% of buyers agree. So it's about 1/3 of buyers, but there's more closeness in there, then you would think so what we found is that it's it's kind of a necessity to put the buyer first, especially in the first days of COVID happening, you didn't even know whether your buyer was, you know, in business anymore. So you really had to think buyer first, you know, some companies were doing very well like say Netflix or Peloton in the first days of the of the pandemic, they were doing well. And so maybe they were going to buy products. But then there were other at the other end of the spectrum, there were companies in the travel industry, let's say where they were probably completely on hold and that and not going to buy buy anything. So So we found that but this buyer first thing is very interesting with sales people sort of wanting to be buyer first. And buyers obviously wanting salespeople to be buyer first. But there's a disconnect in whether it's actually happening. And we found, we identified that we had six behaviors that we said, okay, these behaviors are inarguably buyer first. And some of them, for example, are providing free and easy access to product reviews and other content, that's a buyer first behavior. Staying actively engaged after the sale, to ensure value delivery, being completely transparent about pricing. All those are what we would call buyer first behaviors in the sales process. What we found is that both buyers and sellers totally agreed that these were important in the buying process. So we found that there was total agreement on that, but where we found the disagreement was, you know, buyers saying that sellers practice these behaviors all the time was, you know, around 30%. So similar to the number that said that, you know, sellers are putting buyers first. But we also found that individual sales people are saying like I put the buyer first. But, then they were also saying that we asked them about whether their organization puts the buyer first. And they said kind of they said no. They said I am, but my organization doesn't my organization put the buyer first all of the time. And the you know, for these buyer first behaviors that we were talking about providing free and easy access to product reviews and other content, staying actively engaged etc, was around 40% of the time they said that their organization put these behaviors into practice all the time. And so I think what that speaks to is that there are barriers in the organization to being buyer first and we found some of these barriers are kind of obvious, right like emphasis on short term sales or revenue goals. limited budgets, maybe limited commitment to training or inadequate coaching. Maybe it's just the organizational culture, or the lack of the right skill set among existing sales talent, because we know sales has gotten much more complex, especially in, say, the technology industry or you know, even old smokestack industries like manufacturing, etc, are relying more and more on technology. And so the sales process has become more complicated. But organizations aren't adjusting, and they're making it more difficult than it should be for the average salesperson to place the buyer first. And that's what we found. I think that's like one of the key takeaways from the state of sales report.

AJ Wilcox 20:45 It sounds like the sales reps are ready for this change. They're creating the groundswell. And now it's the organization's time to catch up to come and do the right thing.

Sean Callahan 20:55 I think largely, that's true. I mean, I think some sales organizations are well ahead of the curve. But yeah, I think sales managers and sales executives, you know, they need to take a look at their organization and kind of assess whether they are enabling their salespeople to do what they need to do to, you know, really, to sell in this current environment. And I don't think this current environment is going to change very much. I think remote work is kind of here to stay and virtual selling is going to continue to remain important. But there probably will be a hybrid as the pandemic begins to recede, where you're doing some in person along with virtual selling, and you're probably going to need to be skilled at both to be successful.

AJ Wilcox 21:40 Oh, totally agreed. How do you think COVID has impacted virtual selling? And I know you already said this, but what do you think in the future? Why do you see that this is a change that that is so permanent? What makes you think that the world can't just go back to where we were pre-COVID?

Sean Callahan 21:58 Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question. I was listening, we just happen to have a live event, live virtual event today where we were talking about this very thing. And it was a sales expert, Alejandro Cabral, he works in Argentina, for Kimberly Clark Professional. He said that evolution never goes backwards. And he was referring to you adapt these sales technologies, and they become de facto how you how business gets done. So the technologies that enabled salespeople to sell virtually in the pandemic, companies saw that, you know, hey we can close deals without getting in front of customers, we can reduce our travel and entertainment budgets, and still close deals. Buyers told us in this report that 50% of them in the US and even more globally said that buying became easier when they did it virtually. And they were working remotely. And buyers said by huge numbers that they would love to work more than, you know, I think it was something like 60 some percent wanted to work remotely more than 50% of the time. So this this remote work, which kind of requires a virtual selling approach is not going away. Companies see it as valuable, their employees like it, not only from the personal standpoint, but from the business standpoint, in fact that it makes buying easier. So I don't think any of this stuff is going away. I mean, obviously we're going to start to go back to conferences and meeting people as the vaccination levels go up. And the disease begins to recede. But these changes are permanent to a large degree. And it's in some way, because these changes were already happening with sales technology, enabling a lot of this virtual selling and closing deals without ever actually shaking hands with a person in the flesh.

AJ Wilcox 24:03 Yeah, I agree with that. It's more like it didn't change the way that we do business. It just accelerated the change that was already in the works. And now we're living the way that Yeah, we probably naturally would have within three or four years, but COVID sure accelerated us towards it

Sean Callahan 24:20 Yeah, accelerated is the word. I mean, this was coming. But it made it happen much faster in something that you know, your marketing audience might remember is like, I think 2008, 2009 that downturn really had an impact on the adoption of online advertising. I think online advertising was something that companies were doing, but in that downturn, they understood that it was cheaper, and they could prove immediately whether it was working or not. And in that era where there was such tight money, companies really move towards that much faster than they would have normally. And they moved away from things like print where it was harder to prove the value to online advertising. And that changed, you know, the value of advertising online like almost overnight.

AJ Wilcox 25:13 And what a beautiful change that was. Yes, for you. It was a great, great change. True! You said something earlier that made me think of a quote that was actually in the report. I absolutely loved this quote. It's by the CEO of Flockjay, Help me with his last name, it's Shaan Hathiramani, is that close? Enough?

Sean Callahan 25:32 Close enough

AJ Wilcox 25:33 Okay, cool. He says the digital world is here to stay. The inefficiency of travel of in person business meetings, late night dinner appointments will make face to face meetings less common and not necessary. In many cases, organizations will use more data, more video more telesales? I don't think that we will go back to the world that was

Sean Callahan 25:53 Yes. I totally agree with Shaan. I think that's he's absolutely right in everything. And I think we're seeing right, I don't think anything, you could argue with any aspect of that, quote.

AJ Wilcox 26:06 Yeah. So it'll be interesting to see. Because there's, there's a lot of this stuff that was in person that was really annoying. And we wish we could do it remotely. And then there was a whole bunch of things like events and conferences, where, you know, we did a lot of that, for fun and for work. And I'm interested to see if that comes back, you know, raging. People have been locked inside for a year and a half or two years. Now, I can't wait to get out and meet people again. Or if people are just gonna say, oh, I found that I really liked being in my house. I don't think I need to do conferences anymore. Do you have any insights into maybe what can happen there with public events?

Sean Callahan 26:41 Yeah, I think events will come back. And we talked about this hybrid idea, right? I think it's going to be harder to meet individually, like a buyer at our office, for instance, I think that's going to be hard, especially in the near term. Because I don't think companies want people from the outside coming into the office, it's just, you know, they're not sure it's safe yet. But I think that these conferences, especially the best ones, are going to thrive, because people still in this hybrid model are going to want to get together. And it's going to be maybe even more important than it was in the past. Someone was telling me a long time ago about why they thought that the events business would thrive in B2B, where publications might not. And this is, I think turned out to be true, is that events are the only thing that Google can't do. You know, in person, it's something that the online world doesn't enable us to do. But these events, you get to meet people meet new people, shake hands, go out to dinner, have a drink, whatever, that stuff is going to be more important at these events, because it's kind of going to be at least in the, say, foreseeable future, the only place you can do it.

AJ Wilcox 28:00 I totally agree with that. My thought is, you know, so many of us are so burned out by zoom, we've participated in so many virtual events. And really, no matter how you slice it, the type of learning that you do in a virtual event is significantly different than the type of learning that you would do in person. And so I think people will be excited to get back to that level of learning where they're not multitasking. And yeah, thanks during that.

Sean Callahan 28:25 Yeah, I mean, I'd love virtual events. And I think virtual events are here to stay. But the one thing that they lack, to the degree that an in person has is, you know, the aisles, the conference hallways where you meet people and talk to you know, that's an important part of a conference. And I think that's something that we're going to crave.

AJ Wilcox 28:44 Yeah, good point, someone's gonna find a solution for that.

Sean Callahan 28:47 Yes. Well, there are like, you know, there's sort of, you know, you got breakout rooms that virtual events and you have the chat down the side. But they're trying to approximate I think, the conference aisle-ways in hallways,

AJ Wilcox 29:02 Yeah, you get some of the serendipity and meeting with those types of things. Boy, it's gonna be hard to replicate the I was just randomly standing behind this person that, you know, at a food truck, or we were both in line to ask a speaker a question and ended up striking the conversation. I hope we get to preserve those kinds of things. Okay, here's the quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the rest of the interview.

The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

AJ Wilcox 29:34 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $135 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one. I mean, no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead. We're official LinkedIn partners, and you'll deal only with LinkedIn experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns. We'd love to work with you. And definitely let us know that the podcast sent you. Alright, let's go ahead and jump right back into the interview.

Out of curiosity, we've talked a little bit about how COVID really affected selling. But tell me how you think COVID affected the buying of the buyer side of all this?

Sean Callahan 30:17 Yeah, well, I talked a little bit about the the remote work. And I think that's part of what's going on here that buyers 50% of buyers say that working remotely has made the purchasing process easier. That's from our survey data. And we also found that remote job postings, they're not going away, they've increased by more than 5x globally since the start of the pandemic. And that's, that's LinkedIn data, LinkedIn platform data, 64% of buyers in North America are working remotely more than half of the time. Again, that's our survey data and 70% of buyers want to continue working remote they have for more of the time in the future. So that's really transformational, I think. And for selling, it's huge that, you know, how we work in offices is going to change forever. I'm lucky or odd in that I've worked from home on 1, 2, 3, like five straight jobs. I've had a home office job since 1998. I've been working. But I think more and more people are going to be like that. Working from home all the time, we found that it's doable. There are obviously downsides like your resume, fatigue is a real thing. And people want to have connection with people. That's why conferences are going to continue to work. But there has been a definite shift. Like I said before, that that idea that evolution doesn't go backwards is real too. We're not going to be able to walk this back, the genie is out of the bottle.

AJ Wilcox 31:49 I love that example you shared about the 2008 downturn and the adoption of online advertising. I hadn't considered that before. And I've been wondering like, ooh, is the world going to go back to the way it was? I think you just cemented in my mind that no, it's not this, this is an evolution.

Sean Callahan 32:08 I really think so. Because that we didn't really go back to print advertising, you know, it hasn't really recovered

AJ Wilcox 32:16 Oh yeah. Alright, so shifting gears here a little bit? How are sales organizations using data?

Sean Callahan 32:21 Well, I do know that sales organizations are using tons of data and more all the time. And one of the key things is their metrics, how they measure success. And that has changed over the past few years. You know, the cliche is that sales organizations measure quota, individual quota and team quota. And what we're finding is that customer satisfaction, and customer retention are two of the top metrics for sales organizations, rather than individual quota and team quota. Those are still important. But they are not what they used to be as far as like far and away, what organizations are measuring organizations are taking a longer term view of the world. That's an important thing to take note of. They're also using a lot of data in how they go about identifying customers. They use it to identify accounts they can go after, industries they can go after, geographies they can go after. And you know, LinkedIn, frankly, is one place where you can find that kind of data. And that stuff is becoming more and more important. And one of the quotes in the state of sales is that you know, data for sales organizations has become table stakes. If you don't have data, you're sort of driving without your headlights.

AJ Wilcox 33:56 Oh, beautiful.That was an amazing answer to a question I didn't think through very well before I just read it off. So let me ask you this one, how are sales organizations using the data from this report?

Sean Callahan 34:10 Well, I hope they're they're using it to look at where they're headed, where this industry is headed. I think what this report does is there are several key insights about how to become a buyer first sales organization. And I think that's crucial. And I think the report also works to confirm what I think sales leaders understand in their gut, that remote working is here to stay. The virtual selling is a skill that you are going to need to succeed. And those kind of insights, I think this report can help sales organizations to prove to the rest of their company that there are certain changes that need to be made

AJ Wilcox 34:59 Wonderful. Because we've talked about this report, it's obviously awesome is the furthest thing from a fluff piece that we've ever seen from from anyone. Where can we go and find this report? Where can our listeners go to, to actually, you know, search through these insights themselves?

Sean Callahan 35:13 Yeah, we have a short length. That is, well, it could be shorter. Let's put it that way. But it's lnkd.in/stateofsales2021. So it's lnkd.in/stateofsales2021

AJ Wilcox 35:31 Perfect. And we'll throw that in the show notes as well, for those of you who don't have a pen around or just want to scroll down from your podcast player and hit that link. And, Shawn, and this can be either for you, business life or personal life. What are you most excited about that's coming up?

Sean Callahan 35:50 Well, I'll do a business one, I've been talking about state of sales, this whole thing, we've got a little piece of state of sales, that's going to come out a little later in the year. It's what top performers do differently. So in the state of sales survey, we're able to identify sellers who met 125% or more of quota, and compare them to others who took the survey, and were able to identify certain things that these sellers do differently. And I'll give you a couple examples. To whet your appetite for this piece. It's top performers do more research, they actually spend a little bit less time selling than average performers. And they do their research those they're totally prepared when they they have a call. They by about 15 to 20 percentage points, they do more kind of things like look up person's LinkedIn profile, visit the company website, find out who's on the buying committee through Sales Navigator. They do those kinds of things, more than average performers. There's some other material in there, too. That's very interesting. But it's that that research piece and that total preparation piece that top performers have. And I will also tell you that this may be coming out after this, but I have the entire week from July 5 through July 9 off, and I'm looking forward to that.

AJ Wilcox 37:12 Oh, very cool. Without divulging too much. Is there anything on vacation that you're really looking forward to? Or you're you're gonna make sure you do.

Sean Callahan 37:20 I waste a lot of time in my life playing golf, and I will probably do that over that period of time.

AJ Wilcox 37:27 Cool. I love it. Well, I'm super excited for that next report because that sounds exactly what we want to share with all of our clients and their sales teams. Let's get more of those 125% of quota folks out there. So Shawn, if people want to connect with you, what's the best place to do it?

Sean Callahan 37:44 Well, you can always look at my LinkedIn profile. Or you can send me an email and my LinkedIn address, which is [email protected]. I would love to talk to anybody who wants to talk state of sales.

AJ Wilcox 37:57 Love it. All right. Sean, thanks so much for joining us. We'd love to have you back again, sometime here soon. Maybe even talk about the what top performers do differently piece. So anyway, stay in touch. And thanks so much for coming on.

Sean Callahan 38:09 Hey, thanks for having me. AJ really enjoyed it. Talk with you soon.

AJ Wilcox 38:13 All right. See ya!

Sean Callahan 38:14 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.

AJ Wilcox 38:35 All right, I've got some great resources for you today. First of all, there's a link to the state of sales report down in the show notes. That's lnkd.in/stateofsales2021. It's a little bit long. But yeah, just go click the link. Next is Sean Callahan. He mentioned his email address is scallahan. So that's [email protected].. And there's also going to be a link to his LinkedIn profile, he'd love to connect with you all. I've also got a link to the new LinkedIn Ads certifications. So make sure you level up your own resume and go and get those ASAP. And I've also got a link to the new LinkedIn Ads course that I told you about. I'm super proud of it. Of course, I want you to take it, but certainly if you have anyone in your organization who is trying to level up or learn LinkedIn Ads, point them towards this course. It is by far the best resource out there. If you have any suggestions, any questions about the podcast, anything like that, reach out to us at [email protected]. Please do look down at whatever podcast player you're listening to right now. And rate us you know, subscribe. And definitely leave us a review as well. We'd love to shout you out. All right, with all of that. We'll see you back here next week, I hope. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Phil Gerbyshak on LinkedIn

Free 60-day trial of Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Course with Phil

Grab time with Phil to chat LinkedIn Ads

Effect of iOS14 on LinkedIn Ads

Amazing podcast episode from Phil Graham - Next Level FB Ads Podcast

Metadata benchmarks report

LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course

Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.

Show Transcript:

You've heard about LinkedIn Sales Navigator, but you're not sure if you should be using it instead of ads or in combination with them. Well buckle up, it's time for the full scoop.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show - here's your host, AJ Wilcox.Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics.

So Sales Navigator is one of those topics that comes up a lot in LinkedIn circles. So I got one of the top organic LinkedIn pros to come on and share his wisdom with you. Phil Gerbyshak is one of the most well connected people I've ever met. He's provided sales training for everyone from the Fortune 500, all the way down to small business owners, and everything in between. We're going to talk about everything from what Sales Navigator is to who in your organization should be using it, as well as how it will complement your ad strategy.

First in the news, my apologies for the last several months with no episodes at all. I've got a ton of great episodes and a bunch of great content planned, but they may come sporadically for the next little bit while I'm dealing with some personal and family issues. But so much has happened with LinkedIn Ads since the last episode. So let's run through some of them. The first is the Twitter user @DannyGavin, who's a VP of Marketing for an agency. He brought to my attention when his rep sent him an actual document of the types of things that LinkedIn expects to be affected when iOS 14 rolls out. And of course, by this point, we already have iOS 14.5. But it's a cool graphic that I'll share with you. Then a few weeks later, one of my own account reps send it to me as well, but Danny gets props for getting it to me before my reps. So thanks for that. We're, of course going to have a whole episode all about the cookie-geddon and the effect on LinkedIn Ads. But for right now I'll just say LinkedIn has this available, ask your rep. And I'll go deeper into it in a future episode. Next, I want to point you to towards one of the best podcast episodes I've ever heard. So there's a podcast about Facebook ads specifically and it's called Next Level Facebook Ads Podcast hosted by Phil Graham. And specifically, the episode that I want all of you to go and listen to is Episode 196. How I'd spend $20 per day on Facebook Ads. The whole goal of of his podcast episode is just to talk about like running low budgets and testing. But what he ended up doing was showing a masterclass on how to approach testing and optimization, AB testing, how to strategically test through your your content. So I'll link to that in the show notes. I highly recommend going to listen to that episode, I absolutely could not have said it better myself. Then I was really excited by something I saw in my inbox. This been a couple months ago, but LinkedIn started sending out new emails with a subject line that says you have a new comment for review. This was back at the beginning of March of 2021. When I got my first one. And I was so excited by this because if you've talked to me about comment moderation inside of sponsored content, you've probably gotten an earful about how, how difficult it is, as a company to moderate and plan and understand the comments that are coming in. So with this one, some of our clients started getting emails that says, "hey, you got a new comment, click here to see it". Now there's a whole lot I wish we got with these emails. I wish it would give us like the text of the comment with, you know, quick actions like like or respond or something. But at least for right now, we're getting something. I'm sure this is not rolled out to all accounts yet, because I'm assuming I would get inundated with these on like an every few minutes basis. But at least some of our accounts did I think probably three or four accounts have access to this so far. So watch for that in the future. And I'm excited to keep watching LinkedIn roll this stuff out. Next, the company Metadata.io released their own benchmarks report from LinkedIn Ads. And I'll link to it in the show notes down below. But it's entitled What We Learned From $15 million in Spend on Facebook and LinkedIn. And you can see the data directly, they put it into like a nice Google Data Studio report. And they also say get the report. So definitely worth checking out in quite a few cases, the benchmarks that we see versus what Metadata sees are quite different. And I know plenty of the Metadata folks, and I have a good understanding of their strategy as to why we might see differences there. But it's definitely worth checking out to see what other people are seeing in the world of LinkedIn Ads.

Okay, I wanted to highlight a couple of reviews for the podcast. Rudeboyj on Apple Podcasts says, "AJ, the hero of LinkedIn marketing, I love love, love AJ, his LinkedIn Ads podcast, so much valuable information and as an agency owner, this is the best place for me to get insider information, tips and tricks that LinkedIn won't tell you about directly. Amazing content. Well worth a listen. Kind regards, Rudy." Rudy, thanks so much for leaving such an awesome review for me. I really appreciate it. Then we have nandogevers from Apple Podcasts. Sorry if I mispronounced the the handle there. But they say learn from the best. "I listened to a ton of business podcasts, it is hit or miss. The LinkedIn Ad podcast might however be the best I've ever heard. No generic nonsense, but actionable points. Keep it up." Absolutely. Thank you so much. That's exactly why we create this. I love to share, okay, and I want all of you to go and leave a review to so that I can shout you out. I want to feature you here. So please let me know what you think of the show. Alright, with that being said, let's hit it.

Okay, everyone, I'm super excited to have Phil Gerbyshak here. He is not only the VP of Partnerships for us here at B2Linked.com. He's also the chief Revenue Officer of Process and Results, his company, Phil, so excited to have you on the podcast, this is Phil Gerbyshak and tell us what's new in your world.

Phil Gerbyshak 6:21 Oh, boy. So lots of stuff, AJ, with all the changes that's happening with the different ad formats and stuff. You know, LinkedIn is hotter than ever, especially for those self employed folks. And we're seeing a lot of action there. In my world, you know, a lot more engagement in some spots, less engagement and others, and automation still not working on LinkedIn. Funny, right? How that works, sending 1000 connections a day doesn't work. In fact, many of the groups that I'm in say that LinkedIn has shrunk that down to be 100 connections a week. So it's even more important to find the right people to start the right conversations so that you can possibly work with them.

AJ Wilcox And we used to get something like 75 per day. So this is a big restriction.

Phil Gerbyshak Yeah, yeah, for sure. Huge.

AJ Wilcox Lots of people getting their profiles. temp band, I guess will say

Phil Gerbyshak Yeah, or shadow banned are not able to send connection requests, or oh my gosh, right, you've reached a commercial limit, because all you do is search, search, search and you never add any value to the network. I mean, lots of things contribute to that, which I'm grateful for. I really think that's an awesome opportunity for all the relationship sales and relationship marketing folks that are listening to this podcast.

AJ Wilcox 7:31 Oh, yeah. And we've talked before about the spam problem on LinkedIn, just from so many people doing it wrong. I'm usually not a fan of LinkedIn cracking down on things. But this is one I'm really glad they're cracking down on.

Phil Gerbyshak Yeah,

AJ Wilcox I obviously have you on here to talk about the sales side about Sales Navigator, about organic. Tell us about your background. Why are you the one that I brought on here?

Phil Gerbyshak Well, you know, years ago, when LinkedIn was really infantile, and it was six degrees of Kevin Bacon, I get started with it. And I worked in financial services and my advisors would be like, hey, is this actually something that people actually care about the internet? And this is a long time ago, obviously. And I was like, yeah, I think so. I think so. Right? And I showed them how they could use it. And then, you know, over time, I quit my my day job as a VP of IT, working with financial advisors to learn technology, and moved into my own consultancy. And I started seeing, hey, LinkedIn is thinking about this additional offering that offers more search capability, more opportunity to kind of segregate between an organic user and a paid user, and offer just more and more power. So I started using it, you know, people started asking questions, I started coaching sales teams, I ended up being a VP of sales training at a software company in Tampa, Florida for about a year and a half. I mean, it just naturally happened. And it just totally makes sense. Because really, just about every day that I'm on LinkedIn, I'm looking at Sales Navigator, because I've got 14,000 connections, but I'm like, well, who I just want to focus on Who are those 100, 200, 500 people that I want to pay attention to this week, and Sales Navigator just makes that so much simpler. So I've trained a lot of self employed folks on how to leverage it. And I've been leveraging myself pretty much since Sales Navigator rolled out.

AJ Wilcox 9:20 Oh, that's awesome. Well, so glad we got the Sales Navigator pro on here. So the big question I get from people, and I don't quite know how to answer it, which is, hey, AJ, you're the ads guy, but we've also heard about organic LinkedIn, and we know people are doing outreach and we've heard about Sales Navigator. And they asked, you know, what should we prioritize? What should we be doing with LinkedIn? What's your response there? How would you answer that?

Phil Gerbyshak Well, the answer is all of the above. Organic Sales Navigator and sponsored for sure. When you think about organic everybody in the organization should be organically using LinkedIn. Should be building their network, should have a good profile, right, should be an ambassador for the organization, sharing content, you know, doing things just like they would in the office as an on matter of course, right? I mean, people want to work with you if you're a company that's welcoming, so be a company that's welcoming, right? I mean, be that way. Get all your employees using organic for sure. And frankly, there's a lot of things that are only available in the organic version of LinkedIn that show that you're not dead, right? Posting to LinkedIn, building your actual network, not just sending in mails, things like that. So organic, for sure. When we think about sponsored, that's the marketer side, that's the brand side, that's the opportunity to build brand awareness, and in many ways to make better offers that if your sales team made may or may not resonate all that well, because they're just kind of blasting it out there. They're not gonna, they're not going to really hone in on the exact target. Not that they mean to, I'll tell you, right, as a sales guy, of course I mean to. But I'm not just connected to the right people, and frankly, putting it in front of them at the right time. Well, I can't always do that. I send out when I have time, not necessarily when is the best time or when LinkedIn knows that they're on. So sponsored, helps with that, and then Sales Navigator for the sales team, for those heavy duty recruiters. Absolutely. Sales Navigator is great, because all just about all of the search features that we use to target on advertisement on the sponsored side are available on Sales Navigator. So if you think about Sales Navigator, it's almost like advertising for one on one results. And sometimes if you already connected or your second degree connected, this is why you gotta use organic side and get connected, right? You can send a message hyperfocus that says, hey, AJ, are you interested in learning how to increase your revenue with LinkedIn advertising? And if he says yes, well, then we have a conversation here. And I can send a link to maybe sign up for that same webinar that the sponsored posts are, save the ad dollar, and sometimes get an even better target, but not always, because we're not always connected to everybody that could benefit from our products or services.

AJ Wilcox 12:03 Absolutely. All right. So I may have jumped the gun a little bit. Can you define Sales Navigator for us? Like, what is the product, you've kind of told us a little bit about what it does?

Phil Gerbyshak Sure. So LinkedIn Sales Navigator is their most premium sales solution. LinkedIn premium is an option as well, I would tell you that it's it's about 10% as effective as Sales Navigator, so I'd focus on Sales Navigator Sales Navigator is a separate sign up, it costs anywhere between $80 a month, if you go month to month, or $65 or so if you go out for a year at a time. And it is an awesome laser focus search tool that allows you to save leads and save people that you want to work with in different lists so that you can review them. And it allows us to see, oh, are there lead updates? Meaning did Phil's profile post anything new. Or account updates, did Process and Results, did B2Linked post anything new on LinkedIn. Have both of those things. And then it's also an opportunity to interface with the CRM, that's a more premium tool, but you can interface with Salesforce, or with Microsoft Dynamics and some of the other tools to interface so that you capture every interaction so that if I go on vacation, an agent needs to pick up my accounts, he can see that interaction, but only if the company pays for the team solution of Sales Navigator.

AJ Wilcox Ah, okay, so this is like the power tool for sales folks.

Phil Gerbyshak Absolutely.

AJ Wilcox Yeah, cool. And I love this because between 65 and 80 bucks a month, that puts it at about twice the cost or maybe a little bit more than like LinkedIn premium, but it has so many more features that has basically like a little mini CRM. And anyway, that feels like a really, really good value to me.

Phil Gerbyshak 14:00 I think so right? I mean, if your leads to close, right, if it takes you let's say 10 or 15 people to get there at $65 a month. And let's say that's all one of your sales people gets. Well that's $6.50 a lead. If you turn that into one meeting, which turns into one, SQL or MQL right, depending on how you target that. Well, heck, I think that's a pretty fair price. And your salespeople have to do outreach, right. I'd love to tell you that just marketing is enough, but it's not. We see all the time that folks that advertise with us, they may not have a great sales process at the end of that. And then they're like, Well, hey, people are magically spitting money at me. It's like, well, no kidding. If you don't have a sales process, it just, it frankly, doesn't work. So you need a sales team that's using that and you combine the two, right? It's like if you remember the old superfriends right wonder twin powers activate form of revenue. It's pretty cool.

AJ Wilcox Perfect. Well, so we here at B2Linked, we do, obviously, a lot of advertising. And the strategy in our advertising is generally trying to get a cold audience from our ideal market to identify themselves and make it so we can start nurturing up and following up and starting a relationship. But I would gather that the approach with both organic and Sales Navigator as an extension could be quite different than how we're approaching it. So tell us about the difference in strategy and audiences there.

Phil Gerbyshak 15:33 Sure, well, first of all, organic and Sales Navigator are really meant to be one to one tools, more than one to many tools, those certainly when you post something, your status, I mean, you're hoping your whole network sees it, you're hoping it goes viral, let's let's be honest here that that's the hope. But it's hard to know if it did anything valuable when you don't get any engagement. So what I would say is, if you think about using the organic side, and you post something, whoever then comments, whoever likes, whoever shares, whoever, you know, does something interacts, get some engagement, then the sales team should follow up with them and try to see there's an opportunity for a conversation. Well, on the sponsored side, we run an advertisement. And, you know, they might have never heard of the company before. But hopefully, you're posting something in the sponsored content that solves a problem or illuminates a problem. Or sometimes, you know, that offers a vitamin to make things even better for you. You know, those are the three reasons we run sponsored. And you're hyper focused on who you're talking to, right, you have that audience really dialed in, you've got those facets dialed in, but you don't know their name. So to personalize, you have to go Sales Navigator organic, because I have to see your name. But on the sponsored side, you're really more demographically targeting them plus some company size and things like that. So again, right, you have to think about, okay, organic is mass network. 5000 10,000 50,000 people, right, depending on how big you've grown your network, sometimes less. But then we've got the Sales Navigator, which is super targeted at an individual one at a time. And then the sponsored content, which is super targeted at the persona that we're having, but yet we don't know their name, who I love three prongs, all important.

AJ Wilcox 17:27 So one thing we've noticed is that when we are running ads for a client, and the client is also like their sales team is engaged in in outreach, we find that they really supercharge each other. Like when someone has been seeing our ads for a month or two. They're a lot more likely to respond when someone reaches out. Because they're like, oh, I've heard of your company before you guys must be legit. Like, let's talk.

Phil Gerbyshak Yeah, it seems so obvious when you say that, AJ but let's break that down. Right? Let's, let's talk a little smaller. Right? So I've never heard of your company before and you cold call me. And then I email you. And then I send you a LinkedIn inmail. And maybe I follow you on LinkedIn. And maybe you happen to find me on Twitter and maybe engage with you on Instagram and okay, so I email you. So I did 6, 12, 15, 20 touches, Still nothing. Now imagine instead, if they knew your business name, and they knew that you solve problems they do. Even if they don't know it. They know it right. It's here. It's here. It's in the back of their head. And they think Oh, interesting. So B2Linked does LinkedIn advertising. Oh, that's cool. And then me the sales guy calls up and says ring ring. Hey, AJ, Hey, buddy. I was wondering, do you, you know, do you need some LinkedIn advertising? And he might say no, I'm good. Or he might say, oh, yeah, I've heard of you guys. That's pretty cool. Well, again, supercharge those by combining streams, get them together because building awareness, though, that you don't really want to pay for awareness. It's important, right? I mean, you want to pay for results. Let's be clear. But that awareness is a nice byproduct of what happens for people who don't necessarily click the ad that you can't retarget that don't sign up for you because they're like, oh, I've heard of you. Especially if you do a good job of the company's marketing. It helps your sales team just so much. Oh my gosh.

AJ Wilcox 19:16 Oh, yeah. And one thing I really wish LinkedIn would have taken across the finish line. A couple years ago, they had a beta, where a sales team could add leads in Sales Navigator. This was called Project Stereo, by the way, and as soon as they added it, they were tagging those leads, then the marketing team could pick this up for direct targeting. And so you could really target the exact individuals that the sales team cared about. And we had several clients who were part of the beta. It worked great. And then we heard that they sunset it, it was probably just too much work to upkeep

Phil Gerbyshak Or it's super creepy, right? I mean, that's the challenge, right? I mean, sometimes we get super creepy I mean that that is sometimes a challenge. So I think that's why you have to do all of them even more because that Stereo project. It's interesting, right? If I just talk to you, and then I pop up, I mean, what do we Facebook here? Come on AJ?

AJ Wilcox Sometimes I wish.

Phil Gerbyshak Right.

AJ Wilcox Alright. So obviously, the LinkedIn advertising is oftentimes handled by the marketing department. But we see that outreach, even handling of Sales Navigator is oftentimes over on the sales side. And there's a definite divide there. So when you work together with these strategies with these different effectively channels, how do you do that? And who owns what leads? How do you kind of heal the divide?

Phil Gerbyshak 20:41 Sure. So if you think about sales development, and business development, that's a marketing function, and a backup sales function, meaning when I make a phone call, if I'm, you know, not shy about sharing my company name, I'm aiding in awareness of the company that I work with. Well, we might say, well, oh, that's Phil, that's marketing. Okay. But it's a phone call. So you might say, well, Phil, that sales? And the answer is it's both. So here's what you want to do, right? It to heal that divide is you need to meet together, you need to spend some time together and say, Hey, here's the 3, 5, 7, 10 campaigns, we're going to run. And sales team wants to run behind this. And as you're talking to people, you could just ask, Hey, have you heard about XYZ campaign? Now they might say no. And that's perfectly fine. Not a problem, right? But if they say yes, well, now we've got a conversation path. Now we've got something to do. And this is really important, because what gets measured gets repeated. Okay, understand this, right? So if you measure the fact that the sales team put in there, oh, yeah, they're aware of one of these 10 campaigns. Now, marketing says, oh, cool, right? We're, it's a marketing attributed lead. That's fantastic. The work we're doing is actually helping the sales team. But a lot of times, we worry so much that if marketing helped us, we're not going to get full credit for that deal, for that lead, for that conversion. That I'm not going to put it in there. I'm just going to say, Yeah, they were totally cold. And marketing might say, well, if I tell them, well, they're never going to tell me back. So why should I do that. So I want to encourage you, if you're, you're listening to this, even if you have a marketing team and a sales team of one each, to spend some time together, talk about those campaigns, really heal that. And then make sure that it gets measured, make sure that gets put into your CRM, make sure you know even if you have a simple CRM, like a spreadsheet, just put it in there. Oh, yeah, this customer heard about, and then gently let the marketing team know hey, by the way, gang, thanks so much. This week, six of our leads came through, and we're aware of that campaign that you had. Now they might not have clicked it, they might not have filled it out, they might not be in your CRM from the marketing side. But they absolutely should be from your sales side. And they can partner up because then you know what works. Now you got feedback. Now you keep that feedback loop going. Do more of what works, less than what doesn't, invest in the winners, ditch the losers.

AJ Wilcox 23:18 I can't impress on everyone enough how important this is for marketers to play the sales enablement role. And for sales to play the marketing enablement role. That communication is absolutely crucial. Phil, something else you mentioned, that is really interesting to me. You mentioned how Sales Navigator has a lot of the same targeting criteria that ads do. So what that makes me think is me as the advertiser, I could go to the sales team, and I could say, hey, here is the exact way we're targeting here are the audiences we're going after. And then someone from sales could say, perfect, I'm going to go and run searches with exactly the same parameters. And that's how I'm going to start my outrage. Is there value there?

Phil Gerbyshak Yeah, well, there's huge value there because you can set that up as a default search criteria. So you can search inside that universe. So let's say the marketing team is going to target you know, this much of the universe, they might target 100,000 people. Well, each salesperson might only really responsible. Say you got 10 salespeople, everybody's response for 10,000. How do you slice that up? Well, it could be by industry, so they add one parameter, industry. Okay, add another, location. Now, let's also not forget, and many sales people do, they broaden it out to everybody on LinkedIn, instead of shrinking it down first, and going first and secondary connection that people you already know. And the friends of people that you already know. I mean, folks, if I drop AJ Wilcox's name with a prospect that has heard of loves AJ Wilcox, they are going to open right up and we're going to get to have a real conversation about what's going on. On the other hand, I cold call and I pretend like I don't know AJ. That AJ is an oh, who's that? I don't know. Well, that's not going to open it up and it's gonna be harder. Now replace the word AJ Wilcox with your company name. Replace that with B2Linked, replace that with Process and Results. Replace that with your company name. And if they're aware of it, now they're going to open up. Oh, yeah, I've seen that. So you have to row together? Absolutely. And let's not forget, sales team can feedback. You know what, I appreciate that you gave me those seven criteria. But you know, what I found really helpful is when we include X, Y, or Z, you know, maybe it's people who've only been on LinkedIn, you know, less than 30 days or 90 days. Or maybe it's people who've changed jobs in the last, you know, in the last 90 days, something like that, that sometimes the marketers forget is available, so they can dial it in even more. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into more on Sales Navigator, and specifically how we can make your job with this easier.

Unknown Speaker The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linkedcom, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

AJ Wilcox If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you be to B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $135 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting the lowest cost per lead. We're official LinkedIn partners, and you'll only deal with LinkedIn experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com And we'd love to chat about your campaigns.

Alright, let's jump into it here, Phil, tell me because there are a lot of people doing things really wrong on LinkedIn organically? What are the common mistakes that you see with organic? And then what are some of the common mistakes you see with Sales Navigator?

Phil Gerbyshak 26:51 Well, with organic, a lot of your people look dead. They haven't posted in a while they haven't gotten any updates in a while they haven't done anything to their profile. And it still maybe lists their old job, it lists things that they're no longer doing. Or they don't take the time to even copy and paste the job description that you provided them. So work with HR to actually build out your team's profile, make sure that profiles are strong. And then make sure that you tell your sales team, hey, here's content that you can share as often as you want. And don't forget, please add some of your personality. Because here's here's the truth, right? Everybody interacts more with you, if you're just talking about stuff, if you're talking just about work. If you're in a networking event, you're like, come on, man, that's horrible. So share some of that personality share some of the stuff outside of work. Yes, I understand marketers, you want them to push your webinar, your white paper, all that sponsored content. But don't forget to encourage them to be them selves. That's a big miss that I see with a lot of these folks on incomplete profiles or out of date profiles or dead profiles, and then not sharing enough. And then frankly, I'm going to give you one other big mistake on organic and then I'll shift to navigator and that is they don't connect with everybody inside the organization. I can tell you right now, most of your higher level associates on the team, whether they're whether you're a big company, and you have CEOs and C-stars, or whether you're a smaller company of an owner, it doesn't matter. You as the owner, as the C-star likely have more reach and more connections, then anybody in the organization. You should be sharing those with your sales team. your sales team should be able to see oh, look, AJ is connected to this person. I should mention AJ now they might not know AJ, because AJ might be willing to connect to anybody. Or AJ might be super tight with his networking and not connected anybody that he doesn't know. If it's the latter, and I drop AJ's name. The person's like, Oh, yeah, I saw AJ at this event or that event, or we work together at this thing, or we went to church, or we are part of this group, or that group. That is an opportunity for your sales team to immediately build rapport. But your executives, your leadership team has to connect to the sales team. Because otherwise, that's an opportunity lost.

Okay, so what are some of the big mistakes with Sales Navigator? First, they set it up terribly. Or they don't set it up at all right? Then the marketing team doesn't give them any of the criteria. They need to be successful in that they just say, Oh, yeah, we'll just use a persona. Really, what's the marketing campaign that you're working on that you want me to focus on for this 30 days because I can change it. Sales Navigator is not static. So that's another big mistake folks make. They change their target, but they forget to change in Sales Navigator. Now that doesn't mean they change their profile, it could, in fact that encourage them to right to really focus on who are they trying to be a resource for, but they might forget to change our targeting which saves them or will cost them some keystrokes, every keystroke saved is one or two extra calls that can be made today, so that it's way easier to reach your quota. So they don't do that. The other thing that they don't do, they don't set it up, they don't change. The last thing they don't do is they don't actually save anything inside of Sales Navigator. Tthey don't save leads, they don't save accounts, they don't do anything with that stuff. And when you don't do that what happens is LinkedIn is automated, artificial intelligence doesn't help you. I think you should combine all these forces. You should throw them all in a blender and use them all. Because when you do them all, organic, sponsored, and Sales Navigator, marketing and sales can sing together and make beautiful music. And when you don't, well, you're almost fighting against each other.

AJ Wilcox 31:05 Oh, yeah, I'd much rather be singing Kumbaya and fighting a sales department. What about measuring success, because on the advertising side, it's so easy to measure the success. If you're tracking your leads into your CRM, you can literally know at the individual ad level, what your cost per marketing qualified lead is or your cost per sales accepted lead or sales qualified lead, cost per proposal given, cost per close. And so we thrive off of the metrics. But when it comes to the organic, sometimes it's a lot harder to determine is what you're doing being successful. So how are you going to measure that success?

Phil Gerbyshak Well, first, how many of the leads that are in the pipeline? Have LinkedIn profiles associated with them? If you're using Salesforce, if you're sing dynamics, many of them do just automatically. They pop up. But here's the thing, is your sales team actually doing anything with those? One of the things that you could use to measure success is LinkedIn's own social selling index. They're talking, they've talked for, actually, for at least the last three years,"We're doing away with the SSI score." I don't think they are, they might call it something else. Right? Because social selling is a total misnomer. That's a whole other episode. But social selling? Nobody sells on social, they sell with social, let's be super clear. Totally different episode, but just be aware of that. Okay, so how do you measure that right? Is your team is their SSI score? Are they looking at profiles, you can see that, again, if you have an organizational account, you can see are they viewing profiles? Are they doing searches? Are they investing their inmail? Right? Are they actually taking those inmails? 20, 30, 50 emails a month. And are they sending them? That is almost like a direct line to the right person that they're wasting? Imagine if you provided them with 1000 direct dial phone numbers of every person that they want to talk to him of their ideal target customer, and they didn't call them and instead, they're like, oh, well, I didn't know that was valuable. Come on. So sales team, use your inmails. Use your inmails. So you measure those and then you measure some of that engagement. Did they did they put anything back into the CRM? Because otherwise, what happens is, the salesperson keeps the connection, it never makes it to the CRM, and there's never any connectivity, and you just wasted $80 a month because you can't measure anything. So that's how I would do that. And then again, you know, periodically look at their profiles. Don't just use LinkedIn's SSI score, but actually look at them. Right? Spend some time every quarter train, retrain your sales team, get them hey, what are some best practices? What are you doing? How has this helped you get them to share that I would say at least a quarter, probably once a month, though. Just don't do it at the end of the quarter and the end of the month, because you want to tick off a salesperson forced them to get quota. And then don't let them work at the end of the quarter because they're busy on training. Don't do that.

AJ Wilcox 34:06 Great. Great point. Yeah, let the sales guys fly free for the last week of every month. All right. So if someone wants to get started with advertising, obviously, like listening to this podcast is a great place to start. But if you want to get started on the organic side, Phil, can you tell us like what are some simple things, some simple steps that you can use to get started?

Phil Gerbyshak 34:27 Sure. So first, I can't get dressed before you get busy. Get your profile up to speed. First, most important thing, second, get connected, right? Connect to the people that you know that you need to know that you want to know. Third, get sharing, share some content, get some stuff out there. And fourth, do it every single day. Real simple process there. Just four little steps, get dressed before you get busy, get connected, get sharing, and then get out there more often.

AJ Wilcox Great. And then what about Sales Navigator? If someone's listening to you? And they're like, yes, this would be the ideal step for my organization. How do they get started with Sales Navigator?

Phil Gerbyshak Sure. So we're going to put a link here in the show notes for you so that you can get a free 60 day trial. If you've never used Sales Navigator before. Sign up, that seems obvious, but sign up, right actually input your credit card information and sign up. Secondly, set it up, like actually go through and be mindful about that stuff. You might have to partner with the marketing team, you might have to ask yourself, whatever that is, and then show up, get there all the time be frequent. Again, just like on the organic side, you can't expect Sales Navigator is just going to work magic for you if you don't work the tool.

AJ Wilcox Beautiful. Okay, so it sounds like a lot like running a company that runs LinkedIn Ads is already hard enough. And it's a little bit scary, a little bit daunting to think about okay, great strategies, I need to add these onto my plate. How can people get started without losing all their hair? And you know going crazy?

Phil Gerbyshak 35:57 Oh, my gosh, yeah. You know, I mean, some some people believe bald is beautiful. And that's perfectly cool, right? I'm great with that. But you know what, we created just a little course, for you the Sales Navigator jumpstart for busy business owners and teams, it is really simple. If you sign up by the fourth of June, we're gonna make it just $97. If you sign up for that, it's $147. But it's gonna be some zoom calls, just like any other meeting that you're used to where you can ask them questions, but it'll be facilitated by yours truly, we're going to go through that. And we're going to share lots of stuff. So that's the Sales Navigator Jumpstart for those busy business owners, for those self employed folks, and for salespeople.

AJ Wilcox Can give us a little sneak peek on what's going to be in the course what people are going to actually learn.

Phil Gerbyshak Yeah, absolutely. So first, you know, you're going to learn a little bit more about what is Sales Navigator some of the ways that I've used it, I'm going to share with you, we're gonna talk about some best practices for setting it up. So you can be successful, right from the jump, super important, what you use it for, how should you use it, some of those tools who should be responsible for this? Sometimes you might send one of your sales people and they might say, Well, you know what, this isn't really for me. So let's talk about that, we're going to talk about some of those things that you're going to discover. We're also going to talk about augmenting navigator with advertising and advertising with navigator. So if you've got some ads that you're running, you can send your sales team with that. We're going to show you some of the things that people do wrong when I actually do use it. And then some of those daily habits so that you can actually maximize your efforts and get the jumpstart you need so you can actually use Sales Navigator as a lever instead of just one more expense.

AJ Wilcox And a little sneak peek I'll be making a guest entrance on the topic about the ad side about how to use Sales Nav and sponsored ads together so anyway, I hopefully that doesn't push anyone away. Who's this best for? Is this for sales teams? Is this for business owners? Is this for individuals? Who is gonna get the best use out of it?

Phil Gerbyshak 37:59 Yeah, well first you know self employed folks right they're responsible for making them rain a lot of times, driving the business for their for your business. So if you're a busy self employed business owner you should certainly attend. If you're a sales team and each person on that team has a individual Sales Navigator license well that's another great opportunity to take part of this and if you're responsible at all for lead generation or revenue generation, you're someone that definitely could benefit from this Sales Navigator jumpstart.

AJ Wilcox Okay, awesome. And even if you don't make the early bird $147 for all this information is a total no brainer. So I would highly encourage everyone to check it out. Where do we find the course?

Phil Gerbyshak Yeah, so the course is found at B2Linked.com/sales-navigator-jumpstart. That's B2Linked.com/sales-navigator-jumpstart. It's going to be held the week of June 22. And we would love to see you there. You can sign up when you're listening to this atB2Linked.com/sales-navigator-jumpstart. Sign up it's $97 by June 4, or until the week of the 21st that will be $147.

AJ Wilcox 39:14 Beautiful. Alright, so we'll obviously have a link to that down in the show notes. You can navigate directly all that. Alright Phil, you are a rock star. Thank you so much for coming on here. Where can people find you and connect with you?

Phil Gerbyshak Well, if you want to talk about LinkedIn Ads with me you can go to B2Linked.com/meet. And you can certainly sign up to talk about LinkedIn Ads. I'm on the ads team. We talked about that stuff. I can get you signed up, send your proposal. Whatever it is that you need there, answer questions. Always going to add value to you there and of course finally on LinkedIn, Phil Geryshak. Tell me you heard me on the LinkedIn Ads podcast. Tell me that you know AJ or that you don't let me know and let's connect

AJ Wilcox And tell him that you like short walks on the beach because sand gets everywhere on long walks, just saying.

Phil Gerbyshak That's it.

AJ Wilcox 40:07 Alright Phil, thanks so much for joining us. And I'm sure we'll be hearing from you here again soon.

Phil Gerbyshak Thanks, 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 40:33 If you want to connect with Phil on LinkedIn, you can go to linkedin.com/in/philgerb or just search for Phil Gerbyshak, he's gonna be the only one that shows up. He is definitely one in a million. You'll also see that link down below in the show notes. You'll also find the link for the free Sales Navigator 60 day trial. They offer a 30 day trial by default. But we were lucky enough to get a free 60 day link. So wanted to share that with everyone. You'll also find the link to the Sales Navigator jumpstart course. As Phil mentioned, it's B2Linked.com/sales-navigator-jumpstart. But of course, it's always easier to just hit that link. And if you want to meet with Phil, because he's actually the one who's going to talk to you if you want to do business with B2Linked, you can go to B2Linked.com/meet and book a time directly with him. He's awesome. Like we talked about in the new section, we have that graphic showing the effects on LinkedIn Ads of cookie-geddon, iOS 14 update. So you can check that out. Open that up, you can also see a link to the Phil Graham digital podcast episode that I thought was so amazing, as well as a link to the metadata benchmarks report that we talked about. And of course, if you are trying to uplevel your LinkedIn Ads or have someone in your organization who needs to check out the course, it's linked down below in the show notes. And it's the LinkedIn Learning course on LinkedIn Ads. Definitely valuable, and Hint, Hint. Watch here in the next, I would say month or two to see the update to that course coming out. So check that out. Also, be sure to subscribe. If you've liked this content, you want to hear more of it, make sure you subscribe in your player. And then please do go and review the podcast. I would love to shout you out. And thank you for whatever kind words you have to share. It definitely helps other people find the show. So we will take any rating and review that you've got. If you have any topics that you'd like us to cover or questions related to anything we've talked about. You can email us at [email protected]. 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:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryankmacinnis/

[email protected]

twitter.com/rkmac

LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course

Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.

Show Transcript:

LinkedIn product pages just launched. And we've got some great news about what it means for marketers coming right up on the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ad show.

Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. You may have heard about LinkedIn rolling out product pages since about the summer of 2020. We brought a friend of the show Ryan Macinnis back. And you might remember him if you listen to Episode 31. He is the Product Marketing Manager at LinkedIn who's over the products marketplace. He reached out to me a couple months ago and let me know about some really cool functionality that's coming to LinkedIn. And I had to keep it a secret from all of you. Sometimes we have to do hard things. And now we finally get to spill the beans about some really cool revelations with these new product pages. But first we highlight a couple reviews. Tom Tigwell from Great Britain says, "A trusted advisor. Without a shadow of a doubt, AJ is a trusted advisor for those interested in optimizing their LinkedIn ads to deliver high quality leads. Every podcast drops value and we appreciate your wisdom. Keep it up." Thanks, Tom. You are a total stud. And then we have Alessandra from Italy. She says, "Fantastico! Just what I needed to do a professional job in setting up a campaign for a customer. Great episodes, good insights and tips, useful resources, keep them coming. And I'm listening to all the episodes and taking notes, Grazie mille, as we say here, a thousand thanks. Alessandra from Italy." You're amazing. Hello, Alessandra, thanks so much for leaving such a kind review. And it's been a little while since I've been to Italy, but boy do I miss it. Everyone who's listening I want to feature you. So definitely go to whatever platform that you listen to podcasts on and give us a rating and review and I'll totally shout you out. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. Ryan Macinnis is a Product Marketing Manager at LinkedIn over the products marketplace, which is a really exciting area of focus for LinkedIn. He's a marketer just like us. And we're excited to feature his insight. Ryan MacInnis, super excited to have you on again. Thanks so much for coming back.

Thanks for having me.

Oh, anytime. So obviously, we've had you on a previous episode, where we were talking about the Brand and Demand Playbook. Tell us what's new with you what's changed, and what you're working on now?

Sure. So the Brand and Demand Playbook, which we launched back in September, was obviously a huge hit. And you obviously gave me the opportunity to talk about it here on your podcast. Since then, I've moved over from the sponsored messaging world where I was the product marketer for my first year at LinkedIn. And I've transitioned over to the pages team. So within the pages, ecosystem, all of the free tools that we know and love to help us expand our reach within our employee, community, or grow all of the advocacy work we're doing within our external facing communities. I joined that team at the end of last year, and I've been working on our new newest feature product pages.

3:08 Oh, yeah. So tell us first of all about product pages, what's LinkedIn's intent? And then how should we as marketers be thinking about how to leverage them and and be using them even already?

3:18 Sure. So product pages, at their core, are a new tab that companies will see that help them showcase the best of their products. And so for a long time, especially for larger companies, it's been really hard to separate your brand from your product. When you think about voice on a company page, company pages are top of funnel, maybe you're trying to share a response to something that's happening in the world or an update of what it's like to work at that company, there's really not a great place for you to spotlight and showcase products. And so if you think about product pages, this is our bottom of the funnel, pages offering, company pages, showcase pages, product pages, that give companies the ability to take all this work they've done growing their community organic community on LinkedIn, and channel that into product interest, and ultimately lead gen. That is our goal. So cultivating a product community and ultimately turning that interest into customers. And so I like to call it the digital storefront for your brand, which you know, it's kind of the greatest hits of all of your different assets on LinkedIn and on your website. So you can really showcase users that are using your product, rich media, how to use the product, as well as featured customers. Somebody like me is interested in using the product. I can see companies that aspirationally I'd like to be like and know, okay, directionally, they're using this tool to help them do what they do at that level. That's really exciting for me. So that's what it is. Our intent with it is to really give marketers one more tool in their tool belt, so they can take advantage of all of these things for free at the bottom of the funnel. And when you think about competitively smaller companies, it's really hard for them to stand out in the crowd when you're competing. In a market that has a really large incumbent, maybe you're in a noisy market, product pages are actually a great way to be discovered. So if you're a smaller company, in a space, like marketing automation, if you're looking at a competitor that has a really large following is really well known. That discovery aspect of seeing other products in that category gives you a fighting chance to be discovered and, and to showcase what you can offer to a prospective buyer. So that is our intent is to make it really easy for people who use the product to be advocates for it. And then people are interested in buying it or in the market have a really easy way to do that in correspond with the brand. And so that is some context of product pages.

5:40 Cool. Well, I don't think you'll find any marketer who's disappointed with this. This is obviously everyone wants leads, everyone wants more interaction for their products and services. So that's great. And just out of curiosity, because I know that the product pages have really been launching over here over the last few months, who's doing a really good job with their product pages. Who should we look at as an example or for advice?

Yeah, that's a great question. And so first of all start with what the experience has been like over the past year. So we've really tried to understand what does it take to provide a new page that page admins find value in that marketers are really excited about, and make sure that we're doing it in a way that also members on LinkedIn, see as valuable. So at the end of last year, we shared that more than 10,000 products are now live, they have their own pages on LinkedIn. And it's really exciting. What we're doing now is we're rolling that out to new companies within the B2B software space. So that is a large amount of companies that you'll see over the next couple months, they're gonna get access to this. And so along the way, we've seen some really great examples, a couple that I mentioned, aside from LinkedIn campaign manager tool, which I know that you've left a review on, which was great, GitHub has a really great product page. Atlassian, generally, within their products that they have, I think they do a fantastic job. listing the ideal roles that are great fits for products, I think that's another highlight of product pages is when I land as a prospective buyer on a product page, I want to relate to the problem that this company or this product is solving, and to make me feel that I'm part of a community even if I'm not already a customer. So that's another good example. And I think Asana does a great job, from a project management perspective, another example of a noisy space, and then trying to find ways to really elevate your community to be advocates for you. I think those are three examples that I would highlight,

Okay, we'll go check those out and see if we can build something similar. So from the perspective of a marketer, how do product pages help drive traffic and interest to us?

Yeah, so product pages are one of the first things that you'll see if a company has one when they land on your company page. So it's really cool that this concept of a highlight reel, or most of what's new on your product page, or products are going to be one of the first things you'll see whether it's a company has added a new product page, or somebody left a new review. That is what gets surfaced pretty high up on someone's company page. So that's really exciting. In the long term, we're always looking for ways that we're going to drive additional sources of traffic to these pages. But I think in the short term, there are so many interesting ways that you can drive traffic to this page. We've had companies like Twilio say that they've actually included this in their internal employee advocacy platform, to say, "Hey, everyone, these are the tools that we work on every single day, we just got a product page, it's really cool. Share it on LinkedIn, tell everybody to go check out this product that you're really proud of." And so that's a really interesting way to drive traffic. And we've had other companies try to figure out how they can plug this into their LinkedIn ad strategy. So I know, that was one of the things that you and I talked about previously. But within even conversation ads, if somebody is going through that flow of evaluating whether or not they'd be a good fit for a product, it's a great way to keep them on LinkedIn without sending them to your website, and potentially losing that lead when they go to a different experience. So that's how marketers today I've been driving driving traffic to these pages. And like I mentioned, we're evaluating new ways to get more eyeballs on these pages as we roll it out more.

9:12 Oh, I love that. Just out of curiosity on the reviews because people can leave reviews. Is there an opportunity for moderating or responding to maybe like lower rated one?

Yeah, it's a good question. Today, we're we're getting feedback from companies and how they'd like to interact with those who are leaving reviews. One of the things I'm personally most proud of is the very small amount of negative reviews or malicious reviews that we've seen on the platform. And I do think that there's an element of accountability that comes in your profile is tied to a person as opposed to maybe some anonymous individual that can speak differently when there's no accountability involved. And so we'll remove reviews if they're malicious and in any way they violate our terms of service, obviously or if they're false. So an example we use is, you know, LinkedIn doesn't work in New York, or there's just something that's not true. We have the tools to make sure that those are reviewed and removed if that's the case. And then we're working with page admins and marketers to understand how you'd like to respond. Do you want to be able to encourage people to upvote? reviews, make sure that the most helpful ones are first? Or would you like to go ahead and respond to the ones that are most pressing, maybe constructive, that can influence your product roadmap. So today, there's no opportunity to do that. But it's definitely something we're looking to do is to give these moderation tools an opportunity to be more involved and engaging with the community. Because at the end of the day, that's why people leave reviews because their customers, they're passionate about whatever that product is, or the problem that they solve. And we want to give marketers the ability to interact with them.

10:50 Oh, I love it. And then what about if we're marketing a certain product? Is there value in us? I think you said Asana sent out internally. Or maybe that was Twilio sent out internally, like, "Hey, everyone come in, like hop on the page and follow it." Is there value there in like, as many people as you can show that are using your product, or experts with it, to try to organically get more people seeing and exposed to the product? Is there like organic benefit there?

Yeah, there's organic benefit in a really interesting and cool way. As somebody, we just rolled this out over the last couple months, this concept of being able to see who in your network is using a certain products. So if I were to go to JIRA, because I'm on the product team, I have a lot of product managers in my network, I think I have 113 connections that use JIRA in their day to day jobs. And so as a prospective buyer of JIRA, that makes me feel awesome, it makes me feel that I know that I've kind of come to the place where my network has told me, you know, this is a form of social proof and validation that we get when buying a car or asking a friend or recommendation on something. So when you get your network to share with customers, hey, we just launched this page, please go and you know, maybe add this product as a skill to your profile, it benefits you long term, because if a prospective buyer goes to that page, and sees that folks in their network, use that product that makes them feel a lot more comfortable, maybe presenting that product to their manager, or even bringing it on themselves to go ahead and become a customer. So there's a huge opportunity there.

Oh, yeah. And I'm even thinking from an ads perspective. If someone wants to target let's say, Salesforce users. Right now, the way we have it is like Salesforce groups or Salesforce skills. It would be amazing in the future, if we had the ability to say, hey, let's target people who we know our users like they're certified users of the software. So I could definitely see how that could play into our ads targeting the future. So Ryan, before we hopped on, you were telling me about something that I thought was really exciting, which was lead gen forms on product pages. This is like being able to use the lead gen form function for something organic dealing with the company page, something that's not paid by ads. Tell us about this, like, how did you come to it? And how does it work?

13:07 Yeah, so as I mentioned earlier, product pages are great for bottom of the funnel conversion. But if you think about it from a buyer perspective, putting your website as the main CTA just feels like a lot of additional steps that someone would have to take to express interest. Like by being on a product page, you're showing a level of intent, where somebody as a marketer just would say, hey, this is pretty much as bottom of the funnel as it gets, if they go from awareness from a company page, or maybe they attended a webinar to now they're physically on the product page, looking at, you know, customer examples, and reading reviews like this is where we want to convert them. And so we were, in our mind thinking, if lead gen forms were on this page, the barrier to convert would be so low, that we would start providing a ton of value for a lot of these companies to start really promoting their product pages to start growing these communities a lot faster. And so lead gen forms on this page to your point, we've only had lead gen forms available through campaign manager for advertising platform, or if you're using it from an events perspective for from a registration point of view. And by having it on product pages, it's a really great way to expose a ton of marketers to something maybe they didn't have access to before. You know, maybe they maybe they're at a startup, they're at a company that isn't doing a ton with LinkedIn right now. They see this functionality, and it's a great way for them to say, product pages are providing a ton of great value for me today, what are ways that I can amplify this down the road, maybe I can put a product page as a carousel ad as somebody who's going through the experience of what does this page look like in the feed, or as I mentioned earlier on a conversation as if a sender is from a sales rep trying to get you to schedule a demo, and you know that maybe they're not going to do that within the first CTA product pages are a great way to evaluate that offer more. And then the Legion forum is just a great way to make sure that they within the LinkedIn ecosystem can take that action you want them to and you're still providing a ton of value while that barrier and that friction is very low.

Great, are we going to have to have a campaign manager account? to set that up? Like, is that still gonna live within campaign manager? Or will lead gen forms be available right from the company page?

15:11 Yeah, they're gonna be available right from the company page. So you would be able to download leads, right from the admin view. And you'd be able to have a lead gen form behind one of your calls to action on a product page. So yeah, it's super easy. They're gonna even be able to download them right from the admin, admin view. And then you can upload them to your marketing automation software or your CRM. But we're essentially trying to make this as easy as possible and as transparent as possible, right. I'm a page admin, and I'm really excited about the team is doing it's so exciting to see leads are coming through a page, right? It's not something that you have to have a certain skill set to have access to what the lead gen number is, or a report that's generated, so it's going to be really accessible.

Oh, and I'm assuming same partners, like you can still push right into your CRM. If you're Marketo, HubSpot, like those probably still use Zapier.

Yeah, today, when we're launching lead gen forms, we're really focused on getting feedback. So today, the main functionality will be just the download capability. And from there, within our iteration of that, it will be working with partners to make this available within how it is today and campaign manager. But we wanted to find the lightest weight way to provide value. And just to start to build that behavior, where, you know, folks know that lead gen forms are a thing, here's what their value is, maybe somebody's never heard of lead gen forms on LinkedIn before, if they've only had a company page, and then from there, start to plug into the ways that they've used lead generation and other platforms. So that's the plan.

16:36 Yeah, that seems like such a no brainer, you're already getting leads from LinkedIn organically. And it's the same experience. Of course, you're gonna say, let me start wanting to promote some things that were added.

Thank you. The other thing that I'll share that has been really cool for me to see is that many marketers, we talked to who managed company pages are different than those who run advertising campaigns on LinkedIn. So there's an opportunity for us to actually bring together marketers internally, to work on a shared objective, like if you think about historically, maybe the role of a company page or a showcase page, it's been around awareness, or it's been around trying to really grow a community at the middle to top of funnel. But a lot of these marketers really haven't had a way to contribute to a bottom of the funnel conversion metric like they would if you're running paid ads. And so we're seeing this really cool convergence, if you will, of personas within larger companies come together and actually collaborate and say, Hey, this is what what kind of messaging has worked really well on my ads, maybe you should use this in the description of a product page, or somebody who's built the product page says, Hey, we're really getting a lot of good traction on this page traffic point of view, you should think about promoting this in a piece of sponsored content or whatnot. So it's really been cool to see how those barriers have been knocked down even internally within these companies.

Oh, yeah, that interplay? I mean, you're bringing marketing teams together, which is fantastic. Everyone should be doing that. And of course, I'm going to be curious about the interplay between product pages and ads. So how can we bridge those two worlds and be able to start promoting through campaign manager? I'm assuming because it's lead gen forms, there will be like a solid interplay between the two where you could maybe promote something that you've already been running organically or vice versa? How do we think about that?

Yeah. So today, essentially, what the interplay is between campaign manager and product pages is using a product page like he would a website URL. In the early days of product pages, we're focused on two things. One is getting it to the scale that we can provide value, not only to companies but to members on LinkedIn. And then in the second act of this, trying to understand how we can make it even easier to amplify these pages. So I like to talk about the grocery store analogy, because I spent four years of my life working at a grocery store, where you want to make sure the grocery store is stocked before you go ahead, and you try to get people to even come. And then you open the doors when you're ready, you think okay, this has things for everyone. And then before you start to hand out flyers, you want to make sure that the grocery store is at least successful. And so well, I used to work for a grocery store that did flyers. So the flyer example might not be prominent anymore. But then from there, billboards, flyers, that sort of thing. So that's what really focuses product pages is today, we're working with a lot of marketers to view that URL as a way that they can plug into it, like a website URL, like they're doing a conversation ads, carousel ads, things like that. And then the other thing that's really cool about product pages, too, if you were to go to a product page and hit the share button, you can actually share that product page in the feed. So there's a little caption that will come up a little preview screen about that product. And it's a great way for you even organically as a company to share the things you're really excited about. But to answer your question. That's where we're focused on first is trying to get people excited about the organic offering, then making sure that there's a really easy way to think about how they would promote one through campaign manager and then from there, evaluating Let's figure out where we go from there.

20:01 And that seems to me like just such a no brainer when when I'm saying, Okay, do I spend all this time sending a request over to it to build me a new landing page or app, let's just send them to the existing product page on LinkedIn. Lincoln's already made sure this looks good on both desktop and mobile, it has everything I want. It's got, you know, customer stories and ratings. And all that definitely seems like a shortcut for marketers to start sending right there. And when can everyone expect to have product pages for their companies? What does that roll out look like? Also super excited if there's anything you can share about when some of these capabilities will kind of creep into campaign manager. And as advertisers can start to look forward to them?

Yeah, I can't share anything on the campaign manager front, but you'll be one of the first to know when i when i do have more information on that. But what I will say is that we're starting very slow with product pages, because as I mentioned, we want to make sure we get the experience, right. So over the summer, we conducted a ton of interviews, we rolled out an alpha and a beta, just trying to make sure that the page was as we would call it, the greatest hits of your company, we want to make sure that it's kind of the skinny version of your website, so that it has everything you want, that you found helpful when it comes to converting prospective buyers, we can have that there. And so we had just over 10,000 product pages live by the end of December, which is really exciting. And this quarter, we're rolling it out to many, many more B2B software companies. And so it's probably 2030 fold the amount of companies they'll have access to. And our goal by the end of this quarter is every B2B software company will have access to a product page. And we're starting with B2B software for a couple of reasons. One, members on LinkedIn are already talking about these products every single day, like they've had, they've never really had a place where these can all come together so that that information can be accessible to everybody. So if I'm really skilled in campaign manager, and I have that as a skill on my profile, and I've been talking about it in the feed, how do we get everybody to make sure that you know who in your network is using this and you can reach out to them if you want to do that. So we're focused on b2b software. It's the most amount of, of products that the members associated with today, and it's a great way for us to understand at that scale, what works really well within this marketplace before we start to bring it to other use cases and verticals. But that's where we're really focused today.

Great. And if someone is in B2B software, but somehow maybe they just didn't have it on their website properly, or anything. Is there an application process? Is there a way that someone can can start one? Or do they just have to publicize it nicely on the website and wait for LinkedIn to come crawl?

22:43 That's a good question. So and this happens, where, you know, maybe they see a week lag between a competitor in this space having access, and then it's, we are rolling it out slowly, they can reach out to me directly if they'd like to. It's [email protected] . Or we have an alias that they can they can email that's product [email protected]. And both of those will actually get routed to me. So I try to respond to almost every single one. And we'll evaluate it if it is a product and a software product. Indeed, we'll we'll do that, but I think one of the most interesting things is it's caused a lot of marketers to ask themselves, am I a product or my service? And you know, is this a feature or is this a product? And as a marketer, I would think it's a very good thought experiment, even to think about our own positioning to go back to our team and say, "Hey, we should really think about how we can play in this space, because this is what's going on here." So they can reach out there if they are indeed a B2B software company.

Fantastic. All right, I'll put your the product email address in the show notes that way people aren't like bombarding you personally.

Sounds good.

Okay, that sounds great. Another question I've got, how should marketers think about product pages in terms of their overall marketing strategy? At what point would you say this is super valuable for someone to pay attention to their product page, and maybe put something else on the shelf?

24:03 Yeah, so one of the most interesting stats, and I'm sure it's higher now is that more than 70% of buyers are completing the buyer journey in a digital only environment in a digital only setting, which means that the likelihood you talk to a sales rep before making a purchase is very slim. And so as marketers, we should think about how we can use this to empower our teams at all aspects of the funnel. And so the reason why I say you should use it as much as possible as one, it's free, you can create one at any time, it's free to use. Two, it really has everything that you would want to look at, if you're trying to convince someone that this is a good product for them. So maybe there's already people in their network that use it. And if you're a sales rep, you've already identified what that messaging is. You can also see the companies they use a product and there's also an opportunity for the brand to showcase product tutorial videos, rich media of what certain dashboards or features may look like. And so if I'm being prospected into, and I see all of these things on day one on LinkedIn, that's a really interesting way to get my attention. So it's new, it's exciting, not a ton of companies are doing it. As I mentioned, we're slowly rolling this out, it's a good way stand up. And it's different than just sending somebody to your website, and hoping that this landing page, you've optimized for other channels is going to go ahead and get their attention and get them to convert, which means that you're gonna have to send them a five to seven touch email to get them to come back around. So as a marketer, I would say, because this is such a lightweight thing for you to stand up, you should be using this at all stages. And then give it to your team, so your customer success team should be asking your customers to add this product as a skill to their profile to leave a review, if they'd be so inclined. And your sales team should be using it maybe as their footer for email outreach, or even just to say, Hey, we were a part of something really new and exciting that LinkedIn is rolling out, we think it would be a really good way for you to get to know our products get to know our brand a bit more, you should check it out. So I think it presents a ton of new opportunities for marketers to really differentiate themselves and help other teams

26:05 along the way. I love it. Okay. And obviously, before we go off to the product, I'm going to ask about you like, personally, professionally next, but anything else that you want to share with us? Anything you're really excited about with product pages, or anything else that we haven't covered that you'd want people to know?

No, I think that I would just say, I'm really excited about this. I always think about this, as Ryan, the marketer before joining LinkedIn. Ryan as somebody who's always struggling to differentiate myself from the competition. And it's really hard if you don't have the same budget, if you don't have the same market notoriety to really play on the same playing field. And product pages, as I mentioned, they give a ton of great opportunities for marketers to be on the same playing field from a discovery point of view, and to see what other products are in similar categories. And so we're always going to keep that in mind of like, how do we make this a true marketplace where people can go and find the right products for them. And then at the end of the day, make this really valuable, not only for the companies, but for the members, people who are coming to these pages, who are either users to say, here's what I love about the products, or as a prospective buyer to say, hey, this is what i'd love more information on. We're always going to be evolving these pages. But I'm really excited about how they turned up as a start.

So cool. Ryan, thanks so much for sharing that. And my last question for you is basically what are you most excited about either, personally, professionally, or you can list one for both. But what what's in your world that you're excited about?

27:32 Sure. So I'll list one for both because I'm selfish. So today, I finally I have a puppy, a three month old puppy, my dog finally was able to use the bathroom outside today. We've been trying to get him to do that over the last couple weeks. He's gotten used to going to the bathroom inside. And so this is big news, what a way to start the week off. So that's what's exciting me personally, I feel like I'm making progress on my dog. What's exciting me professionally, is I think that the way that teams are working together marketing teams, during this time, where everybody is at home, is really exciting. I think we were nervous about it at the beginning of the pandemic. And there are so many great ways for us to stay involved to stay connected from a marketer, using the LinkedIn pages ecosystem, for example, there's so many great things, both internally and externally to really bring your company together. And I actually think that a lot of the success that marketers are seeing is going to influence how companies go back to work. And so that's what's exciting me professionally.

Oh, that's cool. Seems a little bit what we'd expect that by forcing ourselves to be separate, it brings us together, but I think you're absolutely correct there. Well, Ryan, I'm super excited to have you on for round two. So I definitely hope there's around three. Thanks for sharing such awesome news with us. Do you want just share again, like if people want to follow you? People want to reach out and give product feedback? How can they do that?

Sure. I would say the easiest way to reach out to me is my email. I'm totally fine. Giving that out. It's [email protected] if you want to connect with me, also great place to share feedback there. And if you're on Twitter, I'm @rkmac

29:14 @rkmac? @rkmac. Okay, beautiful. All right, everyone listening make sure you go follow Ryan. Keep him in mind as your as you have feedback from a marketing perspective. Remember, he was a marketer before he was a LinkedIn Product Manager. So excited to have you on our side and building great stuff for us. Thanks so much, Ryan.

Thanks for having me, AJ.

I've got the episode resources for you coming up. So stick around.

Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

Okay, I promised you some great episode resources. So here they are. In the show notes below. You'll see a link to Ryan Macinnis his profile on LinkedIn, give him a follow connect with him. There's also his email address if you want to reach out and give him any feedback, also a link to his Twitter. Now I've got some fun news. I've talked to you a lot about the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. And it is, of course, the best resource if you or someone on your team is looking to learn LinkedIn Ads, you should definitely check it out. But I've got some exciting news that within the next couple or few months, the course is going to be fully updated. We're working on that now. So I'm super excited to have you see all the new updated material. So check that out. Please look down on whatever podcast player you're using right now and hit subscribe if you want to hear me in your ear holes. And like we mentioned at the top of the episode, make sure to rate and review and I would love to shout you out. With any topics on your wish list or ideas or for feedback, whatever. Email us at [email protected]. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Congratulations to the LinkedIn Ads Show contest winners!

It's fortunate that this week's episode is all about creating the perfect ad, when we also get to reveal the 3 winning ads in our performance contest! We had so many incredible submissions, showing us examples on how to be rockstar marketers on LinkedIn. 

Here were the winners (in no particular order because they're all rockstars) along with their high-performing ads and landing pages:

Winner #1: Highest CTR and Lowest CPC

Zoltan Kozma from CBRE Hungary CTR: 5.60% & CPC: €0.14

Why so Amazing?

LinkedIn's average Click Through Rate for Sponsored Content is ~.4% and Cost Per Click is in the $8-12 range. That's why getting a CTR that was 14 times higher than average is excellent. With a CTR that is 14X the average, paying by CPM, Zoltan found himself paying a tiny fraction of what competitors would be paying.

It's targeted to an audience who had already been really responsive on a past campaign, so he knew he was setting the company up for success. It's an organic company Page post that he boosted, so it had good social proof from the start, which helps. It also leads to an article on Forbes Hungary, which helps increase trust.

Not only did he find that the article was getting tons of cheap traffic, but he also noticed ~35 new followers from the effort over a short period of time. 

Well done Zoltan!

 

Winner #2: Highest Landing Page Conversion Rate

Alex Panchuk from Reply.io

Conversion Rate: 62.14%

Why so Amazing?

We call any offer on LinkedIn that gets over a 15% conversion rate a "Rockstar Offer." Alex ran this video creative(traditionally harder to get good performance from) to a cold audience, with an external landing page (think of how much higher the conversion rate would have been if it were a Lead Gen Form Ad), and on top of that, they required a Business Email, and it still got a 62% conversion rate!

It pushed 65 unique downloads, plus a couple of view-through conversions for good measure. Obviously the high conversion rate has so much to do with the offer and the landing page, so check that out here: https://reply.io/cold-email-handbook/

Nice Work Alex!

 

WINNER #3: HIGHEST CONVERSION RATE

Eric Southwell from SupremeOpti

Conversion Rate: 65.40%

 

Why so Amazing?

We would have guessed that the highest-converting winner would be through a LinkedIn Lead Gen Form ad (On average, they convert 10-50% better than landing pages) but this blew us away.

This is a 65% conversion rate, on an ad and offer that has been running for 7 MONTHS now to a cold audience! Most ads on LinkedIn wear out their audience after ~1 month, but this ad/offer is like a fine wine and performance has actually continued to improve over time. UNHEARD OF!

On top of the leads it generated, it also drove 9 CONVERSIONS, which is likely from viral signups that wouldn't have been served the Lead Gen Form.

Eric, you slayed it!

 

Honorable Mention: Highest Conversion Rate

Lindsay Beaulieu from Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Conversion Rate 325%!

When we saw Lindsay's submissions, we had to take a double-take. It's ultra-rare (I dare say, impossible) to get a conversion rate over 100%.

When we looked into it, we found it was a Text Ad, and the vast majority of the conversions were view-through conversions. Ok, so you might say "LinkedIn wasn't responsible for those conversions since they were view-through," but this is a testament to me that Lindsay's team is targeting the right audience across multiple channels. The huge amount of view-through conversions on Text Ads (which show a ton of impressions) is proof that her other channels are targeting excellently and we see those reflected in LinkedIn's metrics.

Thanks for teaching us Lindsay!

 

Show Resources

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

DRIVE Sales: The 5 Secrets to Increase Your Sales by 400% by Woody Woodward

 

LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course

Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.

Show Transcript:

We've created the formula for the perfect LinkedIn Ad. And of course, we're going to share it with you because we're not the type to hold back. This is the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So writing ads is an incredibly involved task, it doesn't seem overly difficult because you have some characters that you have to stay within. And then you kind of get to write or put whatever you want. But then, of course, you have to keep in mind who your audience is. And then what's interesting to them. And of course, you have to communicate what you have to offer them. But without asking too much, so they get overwhelmed, and you have to stay within the character limits. That's a lot to keep balanced. So today, I'm going to walk you through our ad creation process, and let you in on a little bit of the B2Linked secret sauce for how we create high performing ads. First of all, I'm sure many of you notice that this is our first episode in a couple months. And thank you to so many of you who emailed and messaged asking if I'm doing okay. That means a ton to me. So what originally happened is around the holiday of Thanksgiving here in the US, I ended up getting knee surgery. Right near the beginning of COVID, I ended up having a lot of knee pain after some hiking. And I love hiking, I do a lot of it. But that pain didn't go away for a long time. So I finally went to go see a doctor. We did everything we could and eventually we decided it had to be surgery. Without getting too graphic here. My meniscus, which is like the padding in between my knees, what takes all the impact as I'm running downhill, it was torn into places, my cartilage was messed up and needed to be kind of burred down. And my knee cap was too far over to one side, so they released it so it would go more in track. I expected this to be something very simple and I would be just back at work the next day. But boy, it it really sidelined me. For like a week I was on medication and laying down in bed just trying to get work done. So podcast had to go on hold. Plus, around that time we had the holidays, which present their own little bits of complication, as we have family all around and you know, four kids and all that. Plus, I worked on two giant audits for Fortune 500 companies. And as a company, we just moved into bigger offices, we just hired six new people, and now we're training them. And then something I think you might find really exciting. I'm in the process of working with LinkedIn Learning to update our LinkedIn Learning course that I talked about every episode. So with all of that going on, basically this is the first episode in a little while. Where we left off, there was a contest running for a LinkedIn Ads performance contest. And I'm so excited to announce the winners and tell you what they did that was so amazing, and how you can replicate it to get better performance for your own ads. I wanted to give a quick shout out to any of you who are listening from the Instazone site. We were recently featured on there so thanks so much for those of you who are joining us potentially for the first time here. So getting here into the contest, thank you to everyone who submitted. There were so many entries. We had some amazing entries and it took a lot of work by me and my team, but we did go through and select three winners. For those of you who aren't up to speed, in November, I announced a LinkedIn Ads performance contest. And I promised that the prize would be awesome and super unique, but I couldn't share with you what it was. Well, the time has come, I finally get to share with you what the prize is. Because LinkedIn doesn't have hourly reporting, we know that there are certain times of the day where performance is going to be better than others, but we can't prove it because there's no hourly reporting. Well, what we've figured out is we can go into an account, and we can have our team go in and take all of the performance every hour, and then just subtract it from the total. So we're getting only the performance during that hour. This is of course a lot of work. But we've put together a really cool dashboard, where you can look at it in your own time zone, you can see what times of day, and which days of the week perform better than others. So for you three winners, congratulations! You're about to get something that we've been really excited about internally. And it will give you insights like what time of day your audience wakes up, and when they go to lunch, and all of that good stuff. Okay, so how we selected the winners. It was a contest to see who could show us what gets the best click through rates, the lowest costs per click, and then the highest conversion rates, which of course leads to the lowest cost per conversion. We selected the winners by analyzing all of the top submissions, and then we reached out and actually verified, we got account access, we verified that all the metrics were what they looked like. We took into account the competitiveness of the geographies that were targeted, and the strategy being used. And then more than anything, I wanted to just highlight these amazing marketers and what they're doing so that you can learn from them and improve your own strategies. So without further ado, here are the three winners in no particular order. We have Alex Panchuk from Reply.io, who he happens to live in the Ukraine and I lived in the Ukraine for a couple years. So it's very near and dear to my heart, Alex, congratulations. Then we have Zoltan Kozma, from CBRE Hungary in Hungary. And then finally, we have Eric Southwell is the Chief Marketing Officer of Supreme Optimization and he's a total globetrotter. I love following everything he's doing. And I do have one honorable mention, I couldn't make this a fourth winner, but Lindsay Beaulieu, who's the Digital Marketing Specialist at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. She did something amazing that I think is really good for us to hear about. So we'll highlight a little bit of her strategy here, as well, all four of you, thank you for being loyal listeners. Thank you for just being rockstars and showing the rest of us marketers how to do what we do better.

Alex PanchukSo starting with Alex Panchuk from Reply.io. His entry had a conversion rate of 62.14%, which is amazing. Candidly, the highest conversion rates that we've ever seen have been 59%. So he absolutely blew even my records away, which I'm ecstatic about. And of course, you'll be able to go down into the show notes and take a look at the ads themselves, like a screenshot, you can see the landing pages that were really high converting where applicable. So go and check these out and learn from them. Some things that Alex did really well, as well as some of the things that made this truly impressive. First, he required business emails, and we know that when you make it a little bit more difficult for people, then we see conversion rates come down. So this is an amazing conversion rate of 62%, when they're still requiring business email. Plus, there was an additional question in there. And this was right when square video on LinkedIn Ads came out and so very few did it. And I think that helped it stand out quite a bit. So Alex, congratulations, everyone, go check out his ad and his landing page, so you can learn more about it.

7:29 Zoltan Kozma And next, Zoltan Kozma. And I'm so sorry for anyone that I'm butchering your name, he won for having both the highest click through rate and because of that the lowest cost per click is click through rate was 5.6%. And his cost per click came out to 14 cents. What was so amazing about this is that it was created to look native. It goes to an external site and so there's there's nothing gated. This was pure value to create awareness. And it was an interview article. And one that actually started out as an organic post from the company page and then it was boosted once it had 122 likes and some comments. What Zoltan did to get this is he went and found an audience that he'd already targeted earlier who happened to be really responsive. He released this content that was really easy to consume, there wasn't any jargon. And it sure doesn't hurt that the page that it's going to was actually Forbes. And then with click through rates that were so high, you know, over 5%, my recommendation would be to use either auto bidding, or bid CPM really high to make sure you're always showing up in the top position. But this blew me away. It was a manual CPM bid, but it was bidding below the recommendation. Which generally produces pretty poor results, but in this case, it rocked. So in addition to getting really good ad performance, they also got 30 to 40 new followers. So that was a happy byproduct of these ads. It was created in the engagement objective. So I wanted to look in and see okay, you know, which were actual clicks on the article, and then which ones were engaging with the ad like, likes, comments, visiting the company page, following the company page, etc. And 3% click through rate was actual clicking through to the article, so that's amazing. And then the rest were followers and likes and comments, therefore helping it go out viral. Zoltan, nice work. I'm super excited for you. It was really impressive. Even though it was outside the US where it's quite a bit less competitive, this was still amazing, and I had to give it to you.

9:43 Eric Southwell Next is Eric Southwell from Supreme Optimization. Eric's team absolutely destroyed with a 65% conversion rate. So that's even higher than Reply.os', but what's even more impressive to me is that these ads have been running for six plus months, they still have a 65% conversion rate, even after six months of running the same offer. That was totally legit, I loved it. And as I looked over time, cost per lead has actually been going down over time. Now, this was 65% conversion rate on native lead gen forms, which makes sense. I totally thought the conversion rate winners would be using lead gen forms, but what I also liked is that not only did they have leads from the lead gen form, they also had conversions coming through so that was people who weren't even part of the target audience who were seeing the post and going and actually completing the form on the site. It averaged $5.18 cost per click. And they were not bidding the absolute minimum cost per click here. And the vast majority of that traffic, those conversions were coming from the US. Eric, super impressive. Congratulations, got to hand it to you.

10:58 Lindsay Beaulieu And then we had Lindsay Beaulieu, who is our honorable mention. Now, when she submitted, it was an over 100% conversion rate. And so I got really excited, like, what in the world would cause an over 100% conversion rate. When I dug into the account, I saw that it was a text ad. And I know that text ads get shown to a lot of people, a lot of times at high frequency. So immediately, I went to go look at the conversions. And the vast majority of conversions were coming through as view through conversions. And so for purposes of this contest, I wasn't counting view through conversions as being like real conversions here. But I wanted to use this as an example, because all of us could and should be using text ads to just very expensively cover your audience, your ideal target audience. So they're seeing your ads, they're seeing your brand. And then of course, when they're converting on other channels, we can see that yes, LinkedIn is contributing here. So Lindsay, nice work. Thanks so much for sharing such an awesome example with us.

12:04 Reviews HighlightsA quick highlight on reviews that we've gotten on the podcast. Lea Pica shares, "Where deep passion, expertise, and value divinely connect. AJ is one of the digital marketing industry's best love speakers for good reason. His massive knowledge base in a platform that is otherwise to disdain allows him to deliver insane value in a truly actionable way. Don't walk away from getting started with LinkedIn Ads without giving him a good listen." Lea, thank you so much for leaving that you are awesome. For those of you who don't know, Lea Pica is the host of the Present Beyond Measure podcast and she is absolutely amazing. If you want to learn anything about data storytelling, or data visualization, you have to check out what she does, and her show, of course. And then Dan Marzullo, from Marzullo Associates, he shared, "Highly recommended. If you're getting started with LinkedIn Ads, AJ is your guy." Dan, thanks so much. Dan is the founder of Podcast Bloggers, so he knows a thing or two about podcasts. So a huge thanks to you for being a listener of ours. And of course, everyone who's listening, I want to feature you. So definitely, wherever you're able to review, and I totally want to feature you. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it.

13:15 LinkedIn Users Are In a Hurry Some things that you definitely want to keep in mind about writing ad copy, and creating ads on LinkedIn is that in general, LinkedIn users are in a hurry. It means you've got to cut right to the chase, and front load everything with value. When I know that people are in a hurry, and I need to catch their attention in just a split second, I'm probably going to lead the ad was something like, Hey, did you know that x&y, or people like you are losing out. The really attention grabbing statements right at the beginning are the best thing to do. You don't want to lead with our brand name does such and such in the industry, that will just get ignored.

Imagery And then of course, you have a visual component to your ads as well. Most of the time, we're using static ads. But of course, you can use video as well. The rules that you want to follow with imagery is realize that LinkedIn, when you look at the whole color palette, when someone's there, they see a lot of blues, grays and whites. And so if you ask a designer, what do you need in order to stand out from blues, grays and whites, they'll point you towards the color wheel, and they'll say, go and find whatever is opposite of blue on that color wheel. And of course, that takes us to orange. So one of the best tips I can give you is use lots of orange, reds, greens in your ads, because that will stand out from the rest of the fluff that's on LinkedIn. I also follow the billboard rule. Those of you who are Facebook, advertisers will probably know the 20% rule that I've heard isn't getting anyone punished anymore. But it used to be that on Facebook, you couldn't show an ad that had more than 20% I have the image as being text, and then for a long while, you could put it in the image, but then it would stunt the performance of your ads. LinkedIn has never had anything like the 20% rule, which is fantastic. We've always been able to put as much text in an image as we want. But we've also found that the more text in an image, the less likely people are to read it. It looks like a giant wall of text to them and so they're disincentivized, from even starting to read. So because of that, we follow the billboard rule. So don't try to sell with copy in your image. That's not the images job, the job of the image is just to be a thumb stopper, it's just to get them to stop scrolling, so that they'll read your ad copy. So the billboard rule for those of you who don't know, is use seven or fewer words, because that's all the time that you're going to get from someone as they pass by your billboard on the freeway is get a good six or seven words in.

Video Video is a little bit different. So with video, depending on their connection speed, there's going to be just a split second, or maybe even several seconds while your video is starting to load. And that's really important time because that's time where people are scrolling past, and they may not get a chance to see what it is that you're showing. So with video, I like to make sure that within the first two seconds, there is some kind of action happening. So don't start with a black screen fading to your logo and waste several seconds, you'll lose your entire audience with that, you need to show them something that's exciting, interesting, and worth their time. And then also make sure that you put a thumbnail in there because the thumbnail is what's going to show up in the videos place while it's loading on their screen. So have a really cool visual, something that gets their attention. And then of course, LinkedIn video, it's the same as all the other social video, it's going to play autoplay, but muted. And so you need to make sure that you have subtitles on that video so that 80 plus percent of people who are going to watch it without sound can still get drawn in and follow along. I like to suggest keeping videos really short, like 15 to 25 seconds short. But of course, depending on your video creative, you could probably make a 10 minute long video work really well, just depending on how creative and how attention grabbing it is.

17:20 Alright, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into some of the secret sauce, along with our formula on how you create the perfect ad.

The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $135 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead. We're official LinkedIn partners, and you deal only with LinkedIn experts from day one. So fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com. to chat about your campaigns. We'd love to work with you.

18:03 DRIVE All right, let's jump into creating the perfect ad. What we've learned over time is that your motivation to convert or engage is incredibly important. It's one of the most important things there is. And so one of our secret sauces as an agency is writing compelling ad copy. And the reason that we're so good at this is because of the book and teachings by someone by the name of Woody Woodward. And his book is called Drive Sales Secrets. I've put links to the book and links to his website down below in the show notes. But the gist is that the entire population breaks down into five different kinds of motivations. And the first letter actually spells out the word drive. DRIVE. The D stands for director. And this is someone who cares about freedom and creativity. Then the R in DRIVE is a relator. Someone who cares about relationships. The I is for intellectual. This is someone who cares about systems and processes and blueprints. The V stands for validator, this is someone who cares about recognition and appreciation. And then finally, the E is for executive. And this is someone who cares about proof and crushing the competition and winning. So the concept in the way that we use this is that people have a natural inclination towards a certain type of motivation. And there are some professions where people have similar drives tend to aggregate. For instance, the majority of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 are executives. They are win at all costs, crush the competition. Proof is what wins. And then when you look at the accounting industry, the majority of accountants are intellectuals. They love systems processes. That's what convinces them. So if you know what's likely to drive your ideal persona, you can start to write really compelling ad copy that caters to them. I know this is very high level. This is hard to follow on a podcast. But I'll share just a brief example of how I might customize ad copy to each of these drives.

20:09 So if I were writing ads to directors, and let's say we're trying to sell some kind of software, remember that directors are those who are really excited by freedom and creativity, I might say something like, "This will help free up time to give you freedom." With relators, who again, are super interested in their relationships, I might say something like, "It will strengthen your relationship with your CFO to have this software" or to be on top of this processs. With intellectuals, those who are really interested in systems and processes and blueprints. I might say, "This software contains the complete blueprint on how to drive your goals." With validators, those who are really interested in recognition and appreciation and praise, I might say, "This software will make you the hero." And with executives, again, those are those who care about proof and crushing the competition, I might say, "This software will get you out in front of your competition, you'll be on the bleeding edge, check out these ratings and testimonials." In so many of our tests around different drives. What we do is we come up with a hypothesis of which drive or drives are likely found in this target audience and then we run some ad copy tests to see what the lift in click through rate looks like. And that gives us how effective this drive ad copy is. And this has been fantastic for us, so I highly recommend, go get Woody's book, find out what drive you are, and find out what drives you're trying to cater to.

21:39 Anatomy of the Perfect Ad So the next bit of secret sauce here, we have what we call the anatomy of the perfect ad. And we're going to use sponsored content as our example here, because it's the most common ad format. What we have in a sponsored content ad, we have an intro, it's the text that comes above the image or video. Then we have the headline, which is the text that goes below the image or the video. And then of course, we have the image or the video, we'll pretend this is a static image, and that you've already followed my rules from the previous section where the image has seven or fewer words, and relies a lot on the oranges, reds, greens, purples to help it stand out. So then we go to the most important part of this ad, which is the intro. In all of our testing, we have found that changes to the intro sway ad performance the most. More than image changes, more than headline changes. The intro is super valuable. We try to keep this under 135 characters because the shorter the better here. And we like to include two different pieces. The first thing that all of our sponsored content ads contain is why you should pay attention some kind of pain point or benefit. Remember, this is what we're using to get their attention. So if they're scrolling and you say, hey, do you have this pain point, they're likely to read on and say, ooh, does this person have a solution for me. That's going to make up the majority of that 135 characters. And then what comes after is the second piece that's required here is the call to action. So this is where we will include a succinct short call to action that strong. So it might be download our FREE eBook today, or join the webinar to learn how to do this yourself, something like that. So intros, keep them short. The two pieces you want are number one, why you should pay attention and number two, your call to action. Then we get down to the headlines and headlines we found to make the next most biggest difference. So if you're testing things, I would test intro first and then headline second. Try to keep your headline under about 55 characters if you can. And the two pieces that we like to include here are number one, and we do this in square brackets, which many of you may have already seen something like within square brackets. We tell them what to expect what the asset type is. So if I'm doing a webinar in square brackets at the beginning of the headline, I might say free webinar or free guide, something like that. And then the second piece you want to include here is actually the title of the asset. So I'm sure you and your marketing team worked really hard to come up with a great title for this asset. This is where you get to show it off. And as you're writing ad copy, and this applies to every network out there. But remember, you're not writing ad copy for yourself based off of the benefit that it brings you. You're writing to the benefit of someone else. So I keep in mind the acronym WIIFM, I call it everyone's favorite radio station. It stands for what's in it for me. As you're writing ad copy, make sure you are crystal clear about what's in it for the prospect. In order for them to want to see it, click on it, and then convert. All right here come the episode resources, so stick around.

25:08 ResourcesThank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. In the shownotes, you'll see the winners of the contest their ads, their landing pages, where applicable, definitely go and check those out and learn from them. I also have the links to Woody Woodward's book and the drivesalesbook.com website where you can learn more about the drive sales process. And if you're just getting started with LinkedIn Ads, or maybe you have a colleague who is let them know about the course, the LinkedIn Ads course on LinkedIn Learning. The link is right down below. And also, if you watch over the next couple months, you'll see that we're in the middle of updating that so there should be a new version of the course to get excited about so keep an eye on that. If you're not already subscribed, look at your podcast player right now and hit that subscribe button. We'd love to have you listening on future episodes. And please do rate and review the podcast. It really helps other LinkedIn Ads marketers find us and want to listen and share with us. If you have any tips, questions, or anything you'd love to see featured on the show, reach out to us at [email protected]. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week, cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.