AJ Wilcox - LinkedIn Ads

AJ Wilcox is the founder of B2Linked. B2Linked is a LinkedIn advertising agency that specializes in account management, training and consulting for LinkedIn Ads.

AJ and his team manage over 300 LinkedIn Ad accounts and have spent over $110 million on LinkedIn Ads, which includes ads for four of LinkedIn's top 10 accounts. 

You can listen to the podcast HERE.

This episode is so jammed packed with great advice on LinkedIn ads, I decided to put the entire transcript in this post. Enjoy!

TRANSCRIPT

Ryan: AJ, welcome you to The BRAND New You Show.

AJ:       It is my pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for the invite.

Ryan:   I have wanted to talk to you since I joined Melonie Dodaro's LinkedIn course where did a webinar for her about LinkedIn Ads so I appreciate your time and for being a guest on the podcast today.

AJ:  Thank you so much.

Ryan:  Now, you've been in digital marketing for a long time. Is that the career path you've always been on?

AJ:        No, I knew I liked marketing and advertising, but when I first graduated from school, if you said, "What is marketing?" I'd go, "It's kind of like advertising," but I didn't know what it meant.

In my junior year I showed up to one of my classes and a digital marketing guy was talking about SEO as a guest lecturer. As he was talking, I went, "This is what I want. This is marketing plus technology, this is what I want to do." So I kind of stumbled into digital.

Ryan:     Okay. You got started with SEO out of school and did that for several years, then you hit a career stumbling block. Can you tell me about that?

AJ:         Yeah, sure. I had been running LinkedIn's largest spending customer worldwide for ads for like two and a half years when I ended up getting laid off.

So after getting laid off, I was like, "Well, I have more skills in this one platform that no one cares about than anyone else on the planet. Maybe I can do something with that," and my wife was like, "I don't know. I'd still wished you got another job."

But, instead, I started B2Linked under the assumption that, "I hope it's a big enough niche to support our family," and it's turned out to be that and more.

Ryan:      Yeah. What was it like when you first got started? What was it that made you go, "You know what? I'm just going to start a business."?

AJ:          Quite frankly, it was the scariest decision of my life. Both me and my wife are very conservative fiscally kind of people. We always had lots of savings. We figured we had something like an 11-month runway if we wanted to try something.

We're both also pretty religious. So it was something that I went out and got job offers just to see and we prayed about it, and the answers I got back were like, "Nope. Turn them all down. Pursue your thing."

Ryan:       What was that like after you got the business started and you're going, "Okay, I need people who pay me."

AJ:           Yeah. I mean, I understand digital marketing and so I went, "Okay, well, I may not know how to sell, but at least I know how to attract demand." So I went and started doing immediately what I thought was going to be the highest priority stuff.

So I went to sources like oDesk, the freelancer sites, looking for anyone who was looking to hire just freelancers to help with something. I just wanted that hourly work and to see if anyone wanted LinkedIn ads.

Then I took all of my closest friends out to lunch and just said like, "Hey, this is what I'm doing now. I'm hanging out my own shingle. Keep me in mind." And as soon as I was all-in, people started saying, "Yeah. I'll refer people to you." So you got to show people you're all-in.

Ryan:    Your company manages 300 accounts and $110 million plus in ad spend. That's very impressive.

AJ:        Well, thanks. That’s over the course of four and a half years now, but I am super proud of where the company is. We're not massive. There are only four full-time employees. But we're lean and mean, as I like to say, and certainly highly specialized.

Ryan:    In January (2019) this year, you actually started working for LinkedIn as an instructor and trainer. Tell me about your course and what's that been like for you.

AJ:        Well, it's been a long-time goal for me to get a course up on Lynda.com and then a few years ago, LinkedIn bought Lynda, and so I went, "How cool would that be if I were the one teaching the course on LinkedIn Ads for a course company that's owned by LinkedIn?

Anyway, long story short, it took a year and a half of having conversations back and forth with them until it made sense. Sure enough, now I'm a course author and we released the basics of LinkedIn Ads course that's out there now.

Ryan:     Congratulations, it's a really good course. I recommend people take it. It is called Advertising on LinkedIn. The name is exactly what you get in the course, and it's very good.

Who do you think LinkedIn is really geared towards from an advertising standpoint?

AJ:        I have four different criteria for how I decide if LinkedIn Ads is a good platform for you.

1.    You've got to have the budget to afford LinkedIn clicks. LinkedIn is a pretty expensive platform, especially when you compare with something like Facebook.

If you're paying $6-9 a click, usually what that means is you got to spend between $3,000-5,000 before you start getting conversion data that is statistically significant.

2.    You have a large enough deal size on the backend that you can afford $6-9 for that very first and interaction with someone. If the thought of paying somewhere between $35 and $85 for a conversion scares you, then I would say, "Let's stay away." But if you look at that and go, "Oh no, when I close a deal, it's worth $15,000 or more to me," then all of a sudden that makes a lot of sense.

3.   You need to have good content because you can't just put an ad up that says, "Click here to talk to our high-pressure sales rep," because no one would click that. So make sure you've got something valuable to give away and then the ability to nurture that lead afterward.

Ryan:     Why advertise on LinkedIn versus, say, Facebook?

AJ:          I think the audience is the biggest reason. On Facebook, you can target by some things like job title and interests and company size, those types of things, but the targeting is so fuzzy, you'll pay less per click, and your sales team will come back to you and talk about how they're talking to mom-and-pops and low-quality leads and tire kickers.

Whereas with LinkedIn, you can be so specific about here's the job title, here's the department, there's seniority, the company size, the company industry, location, and that's only probably a fifth of everything that's available targeting-wise.

You can get so much more precise with your targeting, so you're getting only the very best types of leads plus you're getting that at scale. Because on LinkedIn, you can probably reach 95% of white-collar professionals.

Ryan:     What makes a good audience size? 100 million? 10,000?

AJ:          I really like audience sizes between 20,000 and 80,000. You can target all the way down to an audience size of 300, and we've managed quite a few of those.

But if it's in that 20,000-80,000 person member mark, that's a campaign that I know is actually going to spend enough that it's worth creating, and it's also really hyper-targeted.

Ryan:      In order to be able to advertise on LinkedIn, you have to have a company page. Does the type of page matter or do you just need a page?

AJ:       No. You just need a page, all of them work with ads.

Ryan:    Once I have a company page, how do I then access the ads account?

AJ:        If you're logged in with your profile, you can click on the business section in the upper right, and click on ads. Another way is to just type in LinkedIn.com/ads into the browser and go straight there.

Ryan:     Can you explain what the LinkedIn Insight Pixel (tag) is and why I need it?

AJ:         The Insight Tag, is a little snippet of JavaScript that you to put on every page of your website. Essentially it's just like a Google analytics tag.

Once you install the pixel, LinkedIn identifies every user to your website and can add them to retargeting audiences, which means you could create a campaign that says, "Anyone who comes to my website, now show them this ad." So that's pretty powerful.

 The pixel also allows you yo utilize LinkedIn's free demographics feature they call audience demographics. So even if you're not advertising, you can stick this script on all your pages and LinkedIn will give you a report and say, "The visitors of your website look like this professionally. 80% are CEOs and 40% are in agriculture," that kind of stuff you can get.

The pixel will also do conversion tracking for you. So once you have a conversion from your advertising, it can radio back to the platform and you can calculate live what your cost for conversion looks like.

Ryan:     After we have a company page and the Insight Pixel installed, we need to decide what kind of ad to use. There are four different kinds; Text Ads, Sponsored Contents, Sponsored InMail, and Dynamic Ads. Which ones do you recommend people get started with?

AJ:      I would say, 95% of people should start with just the vanilla Sponsored Content. This is the ad format that shows up right in your newsfeed.

Then go with the one that's just a static image and text because it's the easiest to troubleshoot if there's an issue. You want to go with your core audience. The audience who you can solve their pain point the most.

You want to go with the core offer that provides the most value. Then you want an ad that is the most simple and straightforward. If you combine those three things, you end up with a super easy funnel, and if there's a problem, it's really easy to diagnose which step was the problem.

Ryan:     You noted that Sponsored Content ads are easy to troubleshoot. What do you mean?

AJ:        If I launch a Sponsored Content ad and I have a low click-through rate... the average click-through rate platform-wide is 0.4%, so a little less than half of a percent.

If I end up with a click-through rate that's more like 0.2%, immediately I know something about that ad is not resonating with that audience. So now I'm on the hunt to try to figure it out.

AJ:    Well, it really could only be two things. It could be the text you used or the image you used. So you could take a guess at it and say, "Maybe the image... There's too much blue and so it kind of blends into LinkedIn. Let me try using something that's very orange or green and see if that does it." Or you could say, "What I'm sharing text-wise isn't interesting enough. Let me try varying it up and maybe giving it a different call to action." That's two quick tests you can figure out to find out what your audience is actually interested in.

Ryan:    Facebook limits the text you can put on the image. Does LinkedIn limit you on text that can be in the image?

AJ:        Absolutely no rules right now. As long as your image doesn't have anything profane or is some way objectionable in it, they'll let it go. So it could be 100% text and that would be okay.

Ryan:    Text Ads are the ones that show up on the right-hand side, if I remember right, on the desktop as you're looking at your computer. What's the value in the Text Ad?

AJ:         Text Ads kind of catch a bad rap, but I really, really like them. The majority of the big accounts on LinkedIn are all running a lot of Text Ads and the reason why is because they don't get clicked on a whole lot.

We obviously perceive them as ads, so they only get clicked on like one-fourteenth the time as Sponsored Content, but the clicks are all coming from someone at a desktop computer.

So you know they have full access to a keyboard and you can ask them to fill out more fields in a form. You also don't necessarily have to offer content with these. They can be like, "Hey. Here's our software. Get a demo," kind of ads. Those can actually even perform. So I like Text Ads. They're also the cheapest ones.

Ryan:      So a combination of the Text Ads and Sponsored Content might be a really good place to start. But for companies that are wanting to get directly into your inbox, that's where Sponsored InMail comes into play. So when would I want to spend the additional money to get something directly into somebody's messaging or inbox?

AJ:      Sponsored InMail is the one ad format that's not like the others. The others you only pay when someone clicks when they take action. But with Sponsored InMail, you pay, it's usually between $0.35-0.65, to send it to someone with no guarantee that they'll see that they got it or open it or click on it.

So you paid less, but now there are quite a few steps in between you and actually getting a conversion.

AJ:     The way it works, you pay $0.35-0.65 to send it. Half of the people will open it. Then only about 3% on average will click on it. So you do that math and it comes out to like a $23-50 cost per click. So automatically, that's pretty expensive.

But where we have found these to work super well is if your offer feels like a personal invitation.

If you got this in an email, you would be excited about the opportunity, that is the perfect kind of offer to use in a Sponsored InMail. Something like, "Because of who you are, we want to offer you early access, or sneak peek, or VIP treatment somewhere, or free attendance at an event," something like that. All of those work really well because you'd be excited to receive those.

Ryan:    As we get ready for the campaign in your course, you say you need AMO, Audience, Message, and Offer.

When we talk about targeting the audience, what is the targeting capability of LinkedIn? How deep can you go using LinkedIn?

AJ:    There are about 23 different targeting facets that LinkedIn gives us, and I'll name off a few of them. You can target by job title, department, skills on someone's profile, groups that they're members of, seniority, company size, company industry, even company name for account-based marketers who want to target just only very specific companies, and interests, and the list goes on and on. Gender, age, location.

So as you're thinking about who is my persona, who is this person that I want to target, chances are you can usually find three to four different ways of using LinkedIn's targeting to reach exactly the right person.

And if you can reach them three or four different ways, that means you could separate them into three or four separate campaigns and compare the performance. And over time, get to the point where you know, "Here is the least expensive way of reaching my dream prospect."

Ryan:     So, if I'm going to do an ad, is it better to go after a group of titles who might be in the same function, or do you think it's better to separate that group out by title?

AJ:        Great question. I like to group campaigns around very similar types of people. So if you had a whole group of... Here are digital marketing specialist, online marketing specialist, digital marketing analyst. I mean, these kinds of titles, I would put them all kind of in the same bucket.

But if you had titles that were like marketing manager, marketing director, digital marketing VP, CMO, and you had all of those, I would split them up by their level of seniority because you know that someone who is manager level is probably going to respond very differently than the CMO to different types of content.

So keeping them separate allows you to customize the message to each or even show them the same message and just gauge what level of seniority each of your content is really speaking to.

When you break your audience into separate groups, if one performs well and the other one doesn't, then you can say, "What's the difference here? The one that performs better, maybe that's more my audience. Or maybe that targeting is better."

Ryan:     LinkedIn allows you to upload an email list. So for anybody who's capturing email addresses, you can upload them into LinkedIn and LinkedIn will use it to create a Matched Audience, correct?

AJ:         You can upload a list of email addresses to either create a look-alike of or just target explicitly. You can even exclude those as well. So lots of cool stuff you can do with your targeting.

Also as part of Matched Audiences, you could upload company names. You can upload up to 300,000 company names and do the same thing. Either include or exclude or create a look-alike audience off of. So very powerful if you have already a good idea of who your ideal kind of customer is, here are some awesome ninja things you can do with it.

Ryan:       Yeah, I just pulled up an ad on the computer screen here and I'm looking at job titles. You can even search by degrees that people have and the groups which they belong to. Why would I want to target an audience by the group that they're in?

AJ:          Well, the cool part is, right now on LinkedIn, you really have to go out of your way to go and join a group.

So let's say my title is just President and that's all LinkedIn knows me as, but I'm the president of an agency who is really insanely interested in social media advertising. So if I go and join a group about social media advertising, that's me raising my hand and saying, "I know you couldn't reach me by my title, but this subject is really near and dear to my heart. So, I'm going to tend to be a little bit more active of a user.”

Ryan:      How does LinkedIn figure out interest?

AJ:         Yeah, interest is a little bit of a black box. We know LinkedIn pays attention to what we interact within the user feed. So I don't know what the numbers look like, but maybe it's like if I hit like on nine or more posts about artificial intelligence, then LinkedIn goes, "He likes artificial intelligence. Let's put him in that category." So I think that's one. Your interaction with things in the feed. Liking, commenting, sharing.

But also, if they have data about your Bing search history, they'll link that to you too because Microsoft owns LinkedIn and they're sharing data. So if you happen to be a Bing searcher, they can say, "AJ searches a lot about LinkedIn Ads. Let's tag him as someone interested in LinkedIn Ads."

Ryan:     So for the 12 people that are listening that use Bing, know that LinkedIn knows what you're interested in.

AJ:       It's true. And we know it's a small data sample size, but they are using it and obviously, if you search for something, that's a much stronger signal than what you like or comment on in the user feed. So I hope more people do use Bing so we get better categorization.

Ryan:     The first part of the AMO formula, is Audience. The second piece is messaging. How important is it to make sure you get that message right on your ad?

AJ:        What's really funny here is of Audience, Message, and Offer, of the whole AMO acronym, messaging is the least important simply because if you have a really good offer, it almost doesn't matter how you sell it, people are going to look past it and be interested.

So you could really screw up the ad copy, not have a great call to action, whatever, on an amazing offer, and people would still find a way to click and convert at a higher than normal rate.

AJ:    But what we do find with that message is if you tell them immediately here's why you should pay attention, and then you tell them your call to action like, "I want you to download this guide," or, "Join this webinar," and then you have an image that stands out from LinkedIn's blues, grays, and whites, the combination of those things, the vast majority of the time, we will outperform LinkedIn's average by two to three times in click-through rate.

So if you can get the messaging portion right, you can get your cost per click down a lot further than your competition.

Ryan:   You don't get a lot of characters for your message either, correct?

AJ:       LinkedIn will give you about 150 characters in your description, what they call the intro before it truncates and you have to click "see more."

Ryan:    You're almost better off then finding an image that's really relevant and that kind of raises curiosity if you will.

AJ:          Totally. Yeah, we've had some great image tests where... I mean, something like even just a boring chart, but it's so zoomed in that people have to kind of lean in and they want to see what the other information is in that chart. Something like that will get double, triple, quadruple the normal click-through rate. So yeah, be thoughtful about what imagery you choose. Not just a stock photo.

Ryan:      If messaging is not as important as the offer, so what does make a good offer?

AJ:          Your offer has to be something that provides value before you ask for something. What we find is if you can solve someone's major pain point or satisfy their curiosity, then they'll be willing to give you their email address in exchange for that content.

 So start with, "What are the pain points of my users? Can I create content that is a one-page checklist or a cheat sheet or a five-page guide or a 40 page eBook or a 60-minute webinar?"

Whatever the format of answering someone's question or solving their pain point takes is great. Just so long as you do solve that pain point. Like we talked about before, if you have a really good offer, it's not hard to distill that down into 150 characters of text, and get a really high click-through rate.

Ryan:     I've noticed LinkedIn has implemented a thing called Lead Gen Form ads so that when you click it, it actually pops up right there. That's relatively new, right?

AJ:       It is. And they're really cool. Probably about half of our clients use these. What they're for is if every time you ask a user to do something, you'll have fallout from that ask, and you'll have some kind of conversion rate there. So the less that you ask of a user, the more people that you'll get to actually fill out the form or convert.

So what LinkedIn figured out is, similar to what Facebook's had for quite a while with what they call Lead ads, when someone interacts with an ad, you can pop a drawer down with a form in it and you could have someone convert right within the ad without even leaving the LinkedIn experience.

When you do that, you can usually get 10-50% more conversions for the same price. I mean, it's literally a 10 to a 50% higher conversion rate on your ads.

 I wouldn't say it's as high a quality of lead because they didn't have to do as much to convert. If what you really need is volume over that quality, it's a great way to go.

Ryan:      What have you found to be the best thing that people will convert for on LinkedIn?

AJ:        We had a client, actually several, who started with a report and it was a really valuable report, and they said, "Okay, we're going to format this as a one-page checklist, as a 20 page eBook, and do a 60-minute webinar on it.

And let's A/B test all three of these offers." Same kind of messaging. Really the same content. It's just three different ways of consuming the data. What we found is they all had nearly an identical conversion rate.

So what that told us is the format really doesn't make all that big of a difference. What it really is, is the promise of the problem you're going to solve and people want a promise.

That being said, webinars are a little bit of an interesting animal. We have a lot of clients who use them that they're still a really good offer. But we know from webinars is you'll ask someone to sign up, there's a little bit of initial friction because they know it's 60 minutes in the middle of their busy day and they've got to plan that out on their schedule.

But because they stuck around for 60 minutes to hear your thought leadership, they may have a lower conversion rate at the front-end, but they'll have a higher close rate because now they know, "I can trust you."

Plus, we've also found that even though only about 50% of people will show up to your webinar on average, all of that other 50 % of people who didn't attend, they still raised their hand and said, "This is an important topic for me." And you can still follow-up with whatever your offer is.

Ryan:  Is it better to advertise webinars in advance or advertise, say, evergreen webinars that you can just click on and boom, start watching it?

AJ:      Advertising a live webinar is much better. The further ahead you go, the better. What we found is if we start advertising a month in advance for a webinar, we'll have a chunk like three, four weeks out, who are the people who need to get it on their calendar otherwise there won't be space.

You'll have a lull for about two weeks, and in that last week, the week of, tons and tons of interest. So yeah, try to push people there.

 You know that if you're doing a live webinar and if someone misses it, that they're going to miss the content, you know that's a pretty significant prodding like the FOMO is getting stroked really hard. Whereas if it's evergreen, they go, "This looks interesting, but I can watch this any time. I'll do this over the weekend," and then they forget about you.

Ryan:    Let’s talk about B2Linked. What is it that you do when you help your customers?

AJ:     We ask our clients to bring us whatever their offer is, give us the landing page and content, then we try to take absolutely everything else off your plate. We write the ad copy, we design the A/B tests, we manage the day-to-day budget and performance. We're basically being an advertising agency for you.

If LinkedIn Ads are a major channel for you, then we want to be there to help. Whether it's me training your team on how to handle it internally, or us managing the account for you, we're super happy to do that, and very, very low pressure.

Ryan:     You also offer consulting one-on-one services. So if somebody has an ad that they want you to review or take a look at, you're willing to do that as well, right?

AJ:   100%, yeah. I know we make a lot more money if we manage someone's account for them, but I'm a huge self-starter and I'm a huge fan of building internal competencies. So if I can teach someone or coach them, consult along the way, and we make less money, I still feel more fulfilled.

Ryan:    What are some of the best ways for people to get in touch with you?

AJ:      Well, two things for you here. We've got a checklist that we give out for free. It's the eight things you need in order to get started advertising and it's the same checklist we use to onboard new customers.

If you go to https://B2Linked.com/checklist - you can download the checklist and if you don't click the box that says, "I want someone to reach out to me," you'll never hear from us ever again.

Second, if you fill out a form anywhere on the website, you go straight to my inbox.