How does a LinkedIn post go viral?

AJ Wilcox is a LinkedIn ads professional. He Founded B2Linked.com, which is a LinkedIn ad specific agency back in 2014. He’s an official LinkedIn partner, host of the LinkedIn Ads Show podcast, and has managed among the world’s largest LinkedIn ads accounts worldwide. Did you notice the theme there? Yes, it’s all about LinkedIn. I love that focus. He also happens to be a ginger and a triathlete. He and his wife live in Utah with their four children. His company car is a wicked fast go-kart, how cool is that? AJ, welcome to the show.

We met when I heard you speak. I instantly loved your energy and your vibe, as well as your expertise. There are a lot of entrepreneurs out there that are wondering, “Which platform should I use? Is it content or do I need to run an ad?” There are many questions people have that you have the answers to. Before we get into your expertise, this is about successful pitch and stories. Take us back as far as you want, your childhood. You and I have talked about how the LinkedIn thing all happened, which is a great story. You can start there or you can go even further back, wherever you want to start.

Starting from my family life, my parents and family are all fiscally conservative. My dad was a VP at a bank for his entire career. He retired. We don’t have an entrepreneurial bone in our entire family tree body. My thoughts in growing up were, “I’m going to go and work in a job and become a manager and then a director and then a VP and then, hopefully, a CMO or CEO someday.” That was my career trajectory. That’s what I thought I was going to do. I’ve always been highly technical. In fact, in college, I had a job troubleshooting network connections and internet servers. I enjoyed the technical. At the same time, I was studying marketing. The fears of a college student brain, it was like, “If all I know is tech, who’s ever going to hire me in marketing when I graduated?” Marketing is tech-heavy so I laugh at that but back then maybe that was a legitimate concern.

One of my professors brought in a guest speaker who spoke about search engine optimization. As he was talking, the light bulb went off for me and it was like, “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life. This is tech plus marketing all in one.” I went up after class and I begged this poor man for an internship and he took me on. This was back in ‘07. He and his team taught me search engine optimization and how to build websites and Google Ads. Fast forward a bunch of years, a couple of agencies later, a couple of in-house gigs later, I got brought into a company that’s publicly traded that was a business-to-business SaaS software company. On my first day, talking to the CMO, she asked me about my marketing strategy and I tell her what I want to do and she goes, “All that sounds great. Go ahead and execute it. Just so you know, we started a pilot using LinkedIn ads so see what you can do with it.”

I didn’t want to look like an idiot to my new boss. I jumped in and started trying to figure things out. Within about two weeks, one of our sales reps came up to introduce himself and he said, “By the way, we are fighting over your leads. Whatever you’re doing, keep it up.” I was like, “What are you talking about?” I logged into our CRM to go and investigate what are these leads. Without fail, everyone he was talking about was sourced from LinkedIn ads and that was not the only channel we were running.

Long story short, I kept investing until I took that to become LinkedIn’s largest spending account worldwide. After running that for about 2.5 years, I ended up getting laid off from that company. It was at that point where I went, “I have skills on this platform called LinkedIn ads that I don’t hear anyone else talking about. Maybe I could do something with that.” Years ago, I launched B2Linked and we’re an ad agency that only focuses on LinkedIn ads. Back then, who knows if this can even support our family. We’ve got a little bit of a runway, let’s see. I’m sure the majority of the readers have at least heard about LinkedIn. It worked out nicely.

It’s fascinating because a lot of people go, “Facebook, they got all this advertising. You can create lookalike audiences. I don’t know that LinkedIn can do any of that.” Let’s start with that because I’m trying to anticipate what my readers are thinking and ask those questions beyond my own personal questions. The first one is if someone is trying to decide between a Facebook ad versus the LinkedIn ad, are there certain advantages that one platform has over the other or are they pretty much even as far as the ability to laser in like that?

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