LinkedIn Ads for the First Time: What to Expect

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Show Transcript

AJ Wilcox Do you want to guarantee that your LinkedIn Ads will be successful? This is the episode for you. Buckle up and let's go. We're talking about everything you need for success on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads show.

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

AJ Wilcox Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! We've talked to and worked with many 1000s of marketers all about LinkedIn Ads. And there is one common thread if I can draw this. And that's everyone wants a guarantee that their LinkedIn Ads are going to work. Although it's impossible to guarantee success. We put this episode together to give you the highest chance of success. And I brought a special guest today that I know you're going to love.

AJ Wilcox First highlighting a review Detayil from Turkey says, "Great podcast for LinkedIn Ads. This is my go to podcast for LinkedIn Ads. AJ Wilcox has insights and thoughts on different subject matter are super helpful." And then Detayil left the shooting star or shining star emoji. Now I hope I'm pronouncing your name, right. So please reach out and correct me. But I love your name. And thank you so much for the kind review. I'm so grateful that our content can be helpful to you.

AJ Wilcox Alright, I'm stoked to bring Parker Williams on as a guest. He has been working with B2Linked for years, first as an account manager, then he was our head consultant. And we've also given him in charge of sales. Parker talks to advertisers and marketers every day. And he knows the process all the way through. I'm bringing him on to share his insights for what brings success. All right, let's hit it.

AJ Wilcox Hey, everyone, I'm super excited to have Parker Williams here. For those of you who don't know, Parker is our head consultant. He's our head of sales. And I'm bringing him in on this conversation to talk about what it is that you need when you're starting LinkedIn Ads. I wanted to bring him in for this conversation to discuss are you ready for LinkedIn Ads. So Parker, thank you so much for joining me today.

Parker Williams You're welcome. I'm excited. This is gonna be awesome.

AJ Wilcox So Parker, I've got to ask you, because you're the one who was the first person to talk to all of our clients. Why should you even care about LinkedIn? What does it have that other channels don't?

Parker Williams Yeah, that's a great question. I don't believe that there's any other platform out there that allows you to target a specific company and the job title and be able to pair that with intent triggers or data that signifies that they might be in market for a service that you're selling. That's just extremely deadly to me. And that's for just companies that are wanting to add business to their pipeline. If you're using LinkedIn for other objectives, which we're going to go into that don't deal with sales, maybe it's with recruiting, or just brand equity, and employee or employer value proposition and building your brand equity. There's no other way to do that than on LinkedIn.

AJ Wilcox And I especially love the scale, because there are platforms out there that will let you target by things like job title, and company name and company size and all that. But LinkedIn, because the vast majority of white collar professionals out there have LinkedIn profiles, the scale is near endless. I don't know if you feel the same way. But it's so rare when someone comes to us with a larger budget than they can effectively spend on LinkedIn.

Parker Williams Yeah, so true.

AJ Wilcox Alright, so who should be considering advertising on LinkedIn?

Parker Williams Yeah, I get asked this question a lot. And it really depends on your purpose. And, of course, the size of your company. And if you have the budget, it is an expensive platform. We always tell people that. But it's only as expensive as you make it. So I do think it's important to always consider your purpose or the objective for advertising on the platform. So we usually break it up into three categories. The first category is if you're wanting to generate leads or sells utilizing LinkedIn Ads, you want to make sure that you have a lifetime value between 10 and 15k, or an average deal size of 10 and 15k or, or more. And then the next thing is making sure that you know that your buyer is on the platform. So we work with a lot of B2B SaaS companies. And if I told you, if you're a B2b SaaS company, and you were wanting to and I told you this platform was perfect for you, but you sold software to dentist, this probably wouldn't be the best platform because dentists aren't always necessarily very active on the platform. So the real question you want to ask yourself is, is my lifetime value, the right size for the average ticket value the deal you're selling? And is my audience active on the platform? You might also be wondering, you know, what is active mean? And that can be to me, weekly basis would mean active. If they're not active more than once a month, then it would be like fishing in a pond with very little amount of fish. And it would be extremely hard to get their attention. You'd struggle to spend your budget. And that's what we've seen with brands and companies that we've worked with where their audiences and active on the platform, we just can't spend their budget. And we can't achieve their goals of generating leads and sales for their company.

AJ Wilcox I specifically remember a campaign we were trying to run where we were hiring door to door sales reps, and I thought, oh, sales reps are on LinkedIn all the time. But I totally misjudged the idea that if someone is doing door to door sales, they're not working in front of a computer. So of course, they're not going to be active on LinkedIn. And it was intensely hard to reach those people. I would have called that campaign a failure.

Parker Williams Yeah, that's a great example. And it really is so important to just ask yourself, Are they active on the platform? And you might be wondering, well, how do I know if they're active on the platform? And this can be simply done by doing some outreach, and just running some tests by reaching out to people and seeing if you can get any responses from them? Or ask your sales team? What are you using right now to get in front of your audience? Are you getting any sales from LinkedIn and reaching out to people through LinkedIn? If you are, then it's fairly promising that if you are, then it's potentially a great opportunity to advertise on the platform. And that's a good signal that your audience is active.

AJ Wilcox Awesome. What about recruiting? We had an episode not too long ago all about recruiting on LinkedIn, we know it tends to perform pretty well. What about that as an objective?

Parker Williams Yeah, that's a great question. I really think what you want to consider here when leveraging LinkedIn ads for finding individuals for roles that you need to fill in your company, you need to ask yourself, how valuable is this employee? If you're hiring, blue collar, or I think a good rule of thumb would be anyone that's not an executive or a director, or it's probably high pay, right, like $50,000 or more, $75,000 or more and pay, how valuable is this employee to your company, would be really important to consider when you're thinking about running ads to recruit individuals for your company and getting specific talent. But it can be really deadly and it can definitely out beat recruiters themselves. Sorry, recruiters, I don't mean to hurt your feelings or anything. But we've seen this be an extremely valuable tool with finding individuals who are employed right now. Because those are your best employees. They're paid players. They're individuals that aren't out looking for a job. Those are the ones that you want to get. And I don't know of any other platform out there that really allows you to target a job title or someone already with the skills you need and the talent that you need, and be able to put a job opportunity in front of that person. I just don't think there's any other platform that allows you to do that.

AJ Wilcox Yeah, I found exactly the same thing. Alright. So aside from recruiting and selling, are there any other uses of LinkedIn Ads that you can think of?

Parker Williams Yeah, that's a great question. We've worked with some cool companies in the past, one of them was a major Japanese conglomerate, and they wanted to just increase their follower count for their company, and their employees that worked for their sister companies. And we leveraged LinkedIn to be able to do that. It was extremely powerful. We achieved their goals. So if you're trying to improve the overall brand equity, and make your company look big, it's a great tool. It's also a great tool for companies like Coca Cola, or Nike, or a Gap that want to just build more awareness of their company. For those that might be looking for jobs, maybe for the lower paid employees, maybe the blue collar, because when they are looking for jobs, it is also another way to build more awareness, where these companies just have massive amounts of employees that they need to hire for maybe seasonal periods of time. So that can also be a really powerful tool.

AJ Wilcox And another great use I can think of, we just recently worked with a major Fortune 500 retailer, and their whole goal was EVP or employer value proposition. The whole concept is raising your brand with the people who are already working for you. And LinkedIn can do this so well, because we're able to target the employees of specific companies, and especially the larger the company, the more efficient and able we are to show ads to them. You can think of it like doubling up their internal intranet with additional messaging that makes them proud to work where they are.

Parker Williams Yeah, thank you for clarifying that. I think that's really, really important.

AJ Wilcox I think it's safe to say that everyone who is talking to us wants to have success immediately. It's like they want leads in the door that are gonna close like yesterday, I have to ask, what do you need to have in place in order to be successful very quickly in a short amount of time?

Parker Williams And that's like the golden question right there. Honestly, when it comes to being successful on LinkedIn, immediately within like a month to three months, I think about targeting being the most crucial aspect, if you don't have an audience that's hot, you know, they know like and trust you, you know, they're the buying stages, right now they're the decision stages, if you don't have that, you can pretty much expect to not have any results right away. Other thing too, is you got to make sure that the messaging and the offer that you're providing that audience, so the value proposition or your product market fit is dialed in, because you could have an audience that you might consider hot, but if your messaging is off, and your product doesn't solve a need that they have, then it's fairly likely that you're also not going to see results, I wouldn't even call that a hot audience, truly. So making sure that you have product market fit, we hit on this already, your lifetime value needs to be 15k, you need to have spot on messaging, your audience needs to be dialed in, they've got to be a warm audience are a hot audience. And then one of the things people forget a lot is what kind of content do you have to support this buyers journey as well. You need to be able to answer their questions that they're going to have in the process of buying your product or your service. And then most importantly, is do you have the budget to achieve these goals? We've mentioned this a lot. LinkedIn is expensive. And so making sure that you have the budget to be able to achieve those goals is really important. And then you have something to capture sales, so does your sales team set up to be successful. And if you're generating leads, and you don't have anyone that can close the deals, you're just gonna waste your money. So I feel like those are the most important things that you need to have in place in order to be successful in a really short amount of period, the first one to three months of running ads.

AJ Wilcox Alright, let's say that we're lacking in any of these areas, or we have a brand new market or brand new company coming to advertise, when do you think they could expect to see results?

Parker Williams Yeah, that's a great question. I usually tell people, and this is based off of what we've seen as an account management company. And as a service provider for managing budgets, we tend to see companies like that that you just described, they start to see results in the months between 6 and 12. And what I mean by results that can mean sales or deals that are in cells hands, like they're working a deal that could potentially turn into a major contractor or sales opportunity for the company, or they've closed some deals. We do see outliers. There's always people that see immediate results, because there is that market that is in the buying phase or is currently in the market for the service that you provide. We know that that's between like 3 and 5% of the market. So you could potentially see results in the first three months, but it's really unlikely.

AJ Wilcox All right, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive right back into the interview.

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

AJ Wilcox Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment want to return on that investment? Well, consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years. And our unique scientific approach to ads management, combined with our proprietary tools, allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency, in house team, or digital ads hire. Plus, we're official LinkedIn partners. Just go to B2Linked.com/apply. And plus, you'll get to do your discovery call with Parker, our special guest today. All right, let's jump back into the interview.

AJ Wilcox So we definitely know that LinkedIn Ads is a premium platform, you've mentioned as much. What should we expect in terms of cost and performance as we're jumping into LinkedIn ads for the first time?

Parker Williams And so thisis a really hard question to answer because every company is so different. There's so many variables, we do know some average costs on LinkedIn, you can pretty much expect that your average cost per click can range between $10 and $16. And there's always outliers, we've seen some accounts where their cost per clicks are in the $30 range. And we've had some down below the $10 range. And that's mostly due to the competitiveness of that audience and who's trying to get in front of that audience. And that can also vary. I've had accounts where our average cost per clicks were in the $10 range. And then at a certain point in the year they've started to bump up and the only explanation was, we're either hitting ad fatigue and our quality scores were going down, and we had competitors come in and start targeting that person. So costs can totally vary. If you're selling this internally to your boss or to a team. And you're a first time advertiser to set clear expectations that we need to come in and set our own benchmarks and set our own expectations. You can kind of give them some range. We've seen on average cost per calls booked between $400 up to $1,500. And again, there's always outliers, I've seen lower costs, I've seen higher costs. So hopefully that gives you an idea. But if you're a first time advertiser, you've got to set some of your own benchmarks. Or you can really get yourself into some trouble and potentially lose your job because you set expectations and totally over promised and under delivered. So yeah, be careful.

AJ Wilcox So how much does someone need to budget for LinkedIn Ads? I know this is a tough question.

Parker Williams Yes. So to go back to the objectives, why are you advertising on LinkedIn? Are you wanting to generate leads? Are you wanting to recruit somebody? Or are you purely just doing EVP or increasing the brand equity of the company, the budgets going to change in range. I'm going to use the example of generating sales, because that's majority, I feel like that's what most people want to do with the platform is generate more sales and leads for the company. So for first time advertiser, we usually recommend anywhere from 5k to 8k, up to $15,000. Whenever you can budget there, your goals do play a part in that. So if if you have an objective to generate leads, but you have a quota or a company goal to generate a certain amount of sales, by a certain point, your budgets going to affect that as well. But we always recommend $5 to 8k Starting budget. And if you can get more up to 15k, that should give you enough data to be able to learn the platform, set your own benchmarks start to generate some leads and sales for your company. Of course, with all of the things we talked about previously in place as well.

AJ Wilcox Alright, so let me give you a scenario here. So I have a budget of $15,000. I come to you with a list of like 300 companies and a couple of job titles that those companies to target. What would you tell me?

Parker Williams Good luck spending that $15,000. No, but seriously, we would consider that like an ABM approach, right? You've got it an account list of companies you want to sell to and market to, it's probably not likely that you're going to spend that $15,000. If you have somebody managing that account. If you gave the keys to LinkedIn, you probably will spend that 15k. But it's still probably really not likely. So with a an account based approach, or even a retargeting approach where you're retargeting a small audience, you can expect to spend anywhere from $,1000 to $5,000 and get in front of that audience and get some results. But don't expect to yield a bunch of leads out of that. And you don't necessarily need to either,

AJ Wilcox I can definitely second that if you give the keys to LinkedIn, they really can spend that. But then you find yourself spending like $50 to $80 per click, and it's not spent wisely. Okay, so as a new advertiser, what advice do you have for me in terms of mindset? How do I need to mentally prepare for this?

Parker Williams So I love talking about mindset and marketing, because I feel like this is where I see a lot of marketers fail. I don't know if you know who Mark Rober is, but I love him, my kids love him. And we're subscribers to his crunch labs. And it's really changed my mindset to think like an engineer in marketing and sales. And so if you're a new advertiser on LinkedIn, you've got to go into this with an engineers mindset, expecting to fail in identifying where are we failing, and be okay with that, and then pull the levers and make the tweaks and changes that you need to to help improve the performance of the campaign and get the results you need. But having an engineers mindset is, is so important, because you're gonna get your feelings hurt, and you're gonna see failures. And so if you come into it thinking, oh, gosh, we're going to hit a goldmine, we know our audience is here, we're going to generate so much revenue from this, like, just understand that that's just not reality. If it was, everybody would be doing it. And everyone would be making so much money off of this platform. And there are people that are, but it takes this mindset to be able to do it.

AJ Wilcox I'm so glad you mentioned Mark Rober. Me and my kids are huge fans. And I definitely think that was really good advice that don't let your feelings get hurt. Our job as marketers is to test because ultimately, we don't know what's going to be successful. People will even ask me like, is this going to be successful on LinkedIn Ads, and I'm probably going to be wrong more than half the time. And I've got a lot of experience doing this at this point. Another question that we get really often is what kinds of ad formats and objectives do you suggest running on LinkedIn Ads?

Parker Williams This is a really important question to ask internally when you're planning to run some ads because it does help you set up our team and your team for more success. If you have in mind already, what types of ads you're going to run. So creatives, the types of formats this does set you up for some success, but we always advise that you're going to run single image ads, so newsfeed single image, and then video ads, but single image is a must. Video ads aren't always necessary, but they do help build trust really fast. So if you're wanting to get results faster, I plan on having some video ads, and then we always recommend running text and dynamic ads to help support the other ad formats. I like to refer to them as the supplemental ads. So they're kind of like the supplements you take to help with your day. I

AJ Wilcox write Yeah, I think that's really good guidance. I remember once running a test where we were running just single image ads, and then we turned on text ads to the same audience. And just by having text ads running, we saw our click through rates jumped 16% on our sponsored content. So most of our diets nowadays require supplementation. So do our ads. Yeah. And

Parker Williams I also think it's important that you don't overthink this single image. And video ads can be simple, they can be authentic, real, not overly produced. And those can do fairly well. We've also got an awesome client that I love working with, they're called Video brothers. And they're like a Harmon brothers highly produced incredible production level. And they've also seen great results from this as well. And so you can have both sides of the spectrum. But at the end of the day, I always tell people, the format and the medium doesn't matter. It's the content and the audience temperature. If you're answering these three questions, do I have the right message at the right time in front of the right audience? You're gonna be successful. Now? How do you distribute that that format, it's important to have these three in place, but it's not overly crucial. And don't put too much emphasis on having it perfect.

AJ Wilcox Yeah, that's great advice. Alright, so if you have someone who's looking to possibly work with you, what's the onboarding process look like?

Parker Williams I'm gonna kind of answer this as if you were to work with us or even do this on your own for advertising. So I always tell people, it takes our team about two to three weeks to get ads up and running. I think it could take somebody who's full time for a company to do a little bit quicker. And that's if you have all of the things in place that we've talked about previously. So you've got your messaging, your offers landing pages, content, your targeting, I don't know if I mentioned that. But you have all those key things in place, you can expect to have ads running and live fairly quickly. But just plan on two to three weeks, because there's conversion tracking, and there is targeting and you do have to wait for lists to upload sometimes that can take up to 48 hours, sometimes 72 hours, depending on the list. So there are certain things that you need to plan and prepare for but just plan on two to three weeks, whether it's working with us or doing it on your own.

AJ Wilcox Yeah, so it's definitely not one of those, like, open up the platform and you're live within a few hours. If someone's considering working with us. Can you share a little bit about what those costs look like?

Parker Williams Yeah, absolutely. So we're definitely on the higher end. I you're going to work with us, we bring a lot of value and it's mostly due to our experience, the tools we've developed the processes, the strategy that we've developed, so you definitely get what you pay for. Our price range ranges anywhere from 2k to 3k for budgets under $15,000. Of course, depending on your objectives. So if you've got an ABM approach or a retargeting audience that you want to run ads to, you can plan on spending anywhere from 2k for management fees up to $3,000. If you're from $8,000, in spend up to $15,000 plan on a $3,000 management fee. If you're over that $15,000 monthly media spend, our prices range anywhere from 20%, down to 9.5%. And if you're listening to this right now, at this time of year prices do change, we do increase the value we provide. So we do highly recommend, go check out our website public about our pricing, we try to update that regularly. So if there are any changes, you can pretty much expect to find it there.

AJ Wilcox So why would you want to work with us with B2Linked instead of another agency or hiring an in house person to run it?

Parker Williams Yeah, great question. We've been running ads since 2011. And we've got a lot of experience. We've worked with a lot of different accounts in different industries, helping solve different goals and objectives and problems that companies are dealing with the platform. The platform is constantly changing. We're always staying up to date on the changes and what's working, what's not working. We are the only ad agency out there that is partnered with LinkedIn. And so we do get a lot of information from LinkedIn that they don't necessarily always publicly shared right away. So forward thinking with the platform on top of that, I feel like one of the biggest things, though, is the proprietary tools we've developed that help us save anywhere from 30 to 40% on costs, and helps us get additional insights that the platform doesn't provide. We're able to launch ads faster than anybody else out there because of these tools, so we can learn faster. So these are some of the things that if I was a buyer, I'd be really interested in because a media buyer at the end of the day, it is somewhat of a commodity like anybody can launch ads. But without these proprietary tools and these and this experience, and just overall relationships we've developed, it'd be hard for me to decide to go somewhere else if I was buying the service.

AJ Wilcox Yeah, I think you're right on there. Something else I'm really proud of is we have access to LinkedIn's API. We've built our own reports that pull really deep data from LinkedIn that LinkedIn themselves don't have so we can give insights to our clients that they just can't get anywhere else. So that's one of those little brags I like to throw in there.

Parker Williams Yeah. And also one thing I forgot to mention, Ajay kind of struck my memory here that I feel like not a lot of agencies do this. I've shopped for agencies myself at other jobs. Something that I was really impressed with when I started working at B2Linked was that you take time to look over every single account that we are managing. You schedule office hours with all of our account managers, and you dedicate that time to make sure that they're getting their questions answered, and that they're becoming the best at LinkedIn Ads as well. And so you're still putting your own personal touch on every single account, which I think is really impressive. Not a lot of people do that. I also feel like something I've seen in the marketplace with agencies is I've seen accounts that account managers that aren't very transparent about what's going on in the account. One of our values of the company's transparency, so we strive to educate our customers on what we're doing, why we're doing it, and how we're doing it. It does take extra time, but if you're going to take this account and take it internally, we want to help set you up for success to do that, if that was your objective, and that happens a lot. We see that happen all the time. We don't necessarily like that, because we always want to keep a customer long term. But I do think it's important that if you are hiring an agency to help you discover this platform, and test it and learn it, or even just manage and optimize the account that there's that transparency.

AJ Wilcox Yeah, I totally agree with this. I absolutely hate when I hear about ad agencies that are holding the keys to an account. And then once the client leaves, they don't give them access. Everything we do, the client owns. They own their account, they own their data going forward. And I feel much better about that than trying to hold an account hostage, trying to keep a client longer.

Parker Williams Yeah, I think that's huge. And it happens more often than not, I've taken over account. And I've learned that I've that previous provider that were the person running the account had deleted a bunch of campaigns and removed things. And I just think that's ridiculous. But I think that's huge. So outside of that, though, I feel like our staff is trained by one of the best advertisers, I think in the world. Has tons of experience. We're constantly training and teaching them and helping them improve as marketers themselves. So on top of all the tools, the experience, the processes, our staff, they're incentivized to take ownership. And that's also really important as well.

AJ Wilcox Alright, so let's say someone is interested in working with us, what are the next steps to working with our team.

Parker Williams So the next steps, I would recommend reaching out to us so you can go to our website, B2Linked.com/apply, or just to our website, B2Linked.com. And you should be able to book a discovery call. You'll meet with me or AJ, or one of our other consultants. And we'll make sure that we're a fit, first off, and make sure that we can help you with your goals and objectives. And we're very transparent and honest about that. We don't take on clients that we know we can't help. And so make sure to schedule that call and visit with us first. And then we'll help put together a customized proposal that will help kind of guide you along the way of purchasing the service and also working with LinkedIn for running ads. Following that if you decide to work with us, and it's a fit, you're gonna fill out an onboarding sheet, and our team goes through that onboarding sheet, and they'll verify it with you on an onboarding call, and then pretty much off to the races from there. They'll start setting up the account and start getting ready to launch as within a two to three week period. So yeah, that's usually what you can expect with onboarding and next steps.

AJ Wilcox Love that. Will Parker, thank you so much for coming and sharing your guidance here. It's been super valuable. I tend to talk about this stuff quite a bit. So it's always really fun to hear someone else talking about it and hearing their examples and their approach. So thanks so much for sharing everything here with us. Yeah, absolutely.

Parker Williams Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.

AJ Wilcox All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around.

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

AJ Wilcox Do not miss your chance to join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics Aommunity, go to Fanatics.B2Linked.com to get grandfathered into the best pricing that there will ever be for the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community. You'll get access to over four and a half hours of courses leading you from absolute zero to absolute LinkedIn Ads expert. Plus, you'll be a part of the community where you can bounce ideas and learn things from your fellow LinkedIn Ads experts. Now if this is your first time listening, welcome! We're excited to have you here. Make sure to hit that subscribe button. But if this is not your first time listening, please do go review the podcast on Apple podcasts. It is by far the best way that you can say thank you for all the hours that we put into coming out with this content every week. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections reach out to us at Podcast@B2linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.