Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

LinkedIn Ads: A Comprehensive Look (AJ Wilcox Interview)

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 147

Share episode

Everybody talks about Facebook and Instagram Ads, but what about LinkedIn Ads? If you are targeting a lucrative demographic or are a B2B company, LinkedIn should be one of the focus points of your marketing. Join me in this interview with one of the world's foremost experts on LinkedIn Ads, AJ Wilcox, as he teaches you all of the different options you have and how to make the most of them for effective advertising on LinkedIn.

For those of you interested in my Amazon pre-order campaign for The Age of Influence, please purchase a paperback copy here and then send me an email of your receipt to neal@nealschaffer.com to be invited to my two exclusive live webinars. Listen to episode 144 for further details!

Key Highlights

[00:38] Introduction of Podcast Guest, Aj Wilcox

[03:07] How AJ Started Doing LinkedIn Ads

[05:15] Aj's Advice For Beginners

[09:37] The Ideal Threshold For Impressions

[10:32] The Concept of Lifetime Batting Average With LinkedIn Ads

[12:31] Unique LinkedIn Ads Features

[14:33] Different LinkedIn Ad Products

[17:13] What Is A Sponsored Content?

[17:52] Lead Gen Form VS AV Testing

[20:07] LinkedIn Ads Best Practices

[23:31] The Visual Aspect Of LinkedIn Ads

[25:40] Connect With Aj

[26:37] Final Thoughts

Notable Quotes

  • If you're going to be paying that much for traffic, it means you've got to make sure that your funnel is pretty tight, your sales processes are good, and you know how to follow up with them. And you have a high enough lifetime value after a deal closes, that you can basically pay for those expensive clicks along the way.
  • Build that strong history into your campaigns, don't just run one campaign for a month, and pause it and then start a new one, because you won't be building up history that will work in your favor in the future.
  • If your goal is to, is to generate conversations with highly valuable people, send them to a landing page where you're going to make the strongest impression and get to know them. But if all you want is to get as many email addresses as possible from a target market, so that they can go into your database and be nurtured then lead gen forms make a lot of sense.
  • My recommendation is to target pretty tightly, you're going to be paying a lot of money for these clicks. So definitely make sure it's exactly the right people that you would want in your funnel in your sales process.
  • Be really smart about how you're tiptoeing into the platform, don't take Lincoln's recommended bids, don't don't leave the box checked for audience expansion, what you want to do flip to maximum cost per click bidding, and bid low and just see what happens.
  • When you're on LinkedIn, you have a mission in mind, you are going to do somethin

Learn More:

Neal Schaffer:

This is the maximize your social influence podcast with Neal Schaffer, where I help sales and marketing professionals, entrepreneurs and small business owners, build, leverage and monetize their influence in digital and social media. Hey, everybody, welcome to episode 147 of the maximize your social influence podcast with Neal Schaffer. A lot of people talk about paid social. They talk a lot about Facebook ads and Instagram ads. But what about LinkedIn ads? Well, today, I am lucky, really, really lucky to have the who I believe is really one of the foremost experts specifically on the niche of LinkedIn ads. AJ Wilcox, on this podcast, I first met AJ at the content marketing conference back in Boston, I believe it was three years ago, I saw him present on LinkedIn ads, and I've seen him a few times since not only is he extremely knowledgeable, but he is one of the friendliest people you will meet in the social media marketing space, you know, maximizing your social influence, we'd like to try to do everything organically. But obviously, the paid social helps accelerate our efforts. So if you have a big ticket item, you're targeting other businesses. This episode is for you. Welcome to the wonderful world of LinkedIn ads with AJ Wilcox. And once again, before we start, this episode is being sponsored by the age of influence. My new book on influencer marketing that will be published on March 17 2020. If you're interested in the pre order campaign, where you get exclusive access to two free live webinars, make sure you listen to episode 144. Or read the show notes for how you can take advantage of this opportunity. Without further ado, here is AJ, I have a very, very special guest, we're going to be talking about everything you need to know about LinkedIn ads. Now this is someone that I saw speak, I believe it was at the content marketing conference in Boston, where I saw him speak the first time. And there's a lot of people who talk about Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and Instagram. And there's a lot of people that talk about Facebook ads. I think the Social Media Marketing World next year is going to have like nine people just talking about Facebook ads. But you know what, if you want to pay to play, there's a lot of options out there, right? You got Twitter, the Pinterest, obviously Instagram owned by Facebook. But what about LinkedIn? And there's not a lot of people who talk about it right? In fact, I think that my guess is sort of like the only one who talks about it. And that's why it's really a special treat to be able to introduce to you really, I think the premier expert on LinkedIn ads in the world, but also just a great guy that if you ever have a chance to meet him at a conference, hopefully we'll go up and introduce yourself. AJ Wilcox. AJ welcome.

Aj Wilcox:

Well, Neil, I'm turning bright red. Thank you for that super kind intro. Dude, you've been

Neal Schaffer:

doing LinkedIn ads for a few years. Now. You have quite a track record. You've managed millions, if not maybe 10s of millions by now. And adspend. So how, how did this all start?

Aj Wilcox:

Well, it all started, because in my background, I've always been a digital marketer for about the last 12 years, I started in search engine optimization, moved into Google ads and just loved it to death. Well, here about eight years ago, I got recruited into a company, and it was my first b2b company to go and run all of their digital marketing. And on the very first day, I'm talking to my son, my cmo that my new boss, and I'm laying out all the channels that I want to use and my strategies. And I remember her saying, okay, all that sounds great. Go ahead and execute it. But just so you know, we started a pilot about two weeks ago with LinkedIn ads, see what you can do with that? And I saluted and said, Yes, ma'am. Absolutely. And then I walked out of her office and went, what is LinkedIn ads, I've never heard of it, it must be terrible. But I went and jumped into the platform, because I didn't want to look stupid to my new boss. Two weeks later, I had a sales rep come up and introduce himself who said, AJ, we don't know what you're doing over here. But we're fighting over your leads keep it up. And I was like, What is he talking about? And I logged into Salesforce, to look at the leads he was talking about, and every one that he was talking about was sourced from LinkedIn ads. And so that was like, the very first inkling I had that, okay, there's something here, you might want to keep investing into it.

Neal Schaffer:

Well, this stuff actually works, right? Hey, social just in general is, you know, it's something I mean, way back when I wrote Maximizer socialist back in 2013, I sort of I gave the analogy of like the water spigot. So organic, social takes time. Time is money. And if you ever it's like, hey, we need to build a pipeline, we need 10 more leads this month, or we need 10 more followers or 10 More collects. You just turn on the water I cost and it comes flowing through but and we'll talk about the intricacies of LinkedIn ads. And it sounds like obviously you started off with success and from there you've built upon it, but I think a lot of beginners really struggle with LinkedIn ads, because number one, it's more expensive if you're used to it. Facebook ads, it's expensive, especially when compared Pinterest ads. But the other thing is sometimes they don't like give impressions for your ads. So why don't we start with if you're just new other than obviously going out and hiring your company to do it for them. For beginners, what are the things that you you teach them to get them over the hurdle where they can understand the value and actually start to see positive results from and maybe it's not for everybody, either. So you know, what is your advice for that as well?

Aj Wilcox:

Oh, man, I have so many responses here. So if I get off track, just steer me back in, no worries. So first, I start with the economics behind LinkedIn ads, because like you mentioned, we know the platform's pretty expensive, we know it's going to be between about six to $9 per click to get that traffic. So if you're going to be paying that much for traffic, it means you've got to make sure that your funnel is pretty tight, your sales processes are good, and you know how to follow up with them. And you have a high enough lifetime value after a deal closes, that you can basically pay for those expensive clicks along the way.

Neal Schaffer:

So let me pause you there, AJ, so six to $9. So I think if you go on to LinkedIn, I haven't done it recently. But it used to be minimum bid $2 per click is.

Aj Wilcox:

It is $2 per click on text ads, one of the ad formats. But when you go to sponsored content, which is kind of the the halo ad format that everyone should probably be using. Yeah, it has a variable floor. So sometimes for some audiences, it'll be $4, some it'll be eight, some, but most are kind of around that $4.50 cent to $5 range.

Neal Schaffer:

And depending on the audience that you're targeting, then depending on industry, the number of people,

Aj Wilcox:

yeah, the more layers that you add on, the higher your floor goes. So if you could say, hey, anyone in the entire North America who has this job title, chances are as long as the job title isn't super, super competitive, which it probably won't be at that size, you'd probably end up with like a $4 floor. But if you start saying they have to have this job title and be at this size of company, in this industry in North America, that's when it starts raising up and you might pay 550 or 575 at the floor. And of course, if you want a lot of traffic, you're not gonna be very competitive at the floor, you got to bid up a little bit from there,

Neal Schaffer:

guys. So the first mindset is it's it's $5 a pop minimum, if you're trying to get budget, and therefore you have to have you have to have that that ROI conversion that makes sense to do that. You're not like trying to buy a company page followers here at five bucks a pop, probably, although you could be. But chances are, that's what it comes down to. So that's that's a great point. What else would you say I know you, I'm sorry for interrupting. I know you have a few more points.

Aj Wilcox:

No, interrupt away, this is great. The next thing I say is you have to have some kind of offer that people care about. The idea here is if you just ask someone to go right to your sales team, you have an ad that says click here to talk to sales, no one has any sort of incentive to click on that ad, because there's nothing in it. For them. It's just an overt sales pitch. So someone might click if they're already maybe considering a product. And this might be helpful, but the vast majority won't, which means you'll end up getting a really poor relevancy score, which is similar to Google's quality score, or Facebook's relevance score. And after you get that LinkedIn will look at it and go, Ah, well, it's not actually worth showing this person's ad. Because it gets it doesn't make us money very often, it doesn't get clicked on very often. And that's when you see that issue that you talked about where impressions just stopped being received. So you don't want to go to the bottom of funnel with that offer. And, and I can talk about like the opposite direction when you go to low commitment. But what I really like for LinkedIn ads, the the ideal scenario here is starting with gated content where as soon as someone clicks, you know, you're going to pay six to $9, to get them onto that page. And at least they're going to download something that's valuable, at least you're going to get an email address out of them showing that there's a little bit of commitment there.

Neal Schaffer:

Absolutely. And that sort of goes down to b2b marketing in general, that notion of having a lead generation asset and acquiring an email address, which then goes to a salesperson or into marketing automation. So, you know, getting back to that. So I've found and maybe you can talk about it. So with Facebook or Twitter with other platforms, even if that engagement score for the ad that you talked about the quality of relevance, whatever it is, is low, they'll still sort of push out that out. But with LinkedIn, it seems like they'll give you I don't know, a six hour window or an 18 hour window and then boof, that ad fatigue just is most accelerated on that platform. Maybe because it's a higher quality and the quality product they want to deliver. But do you normally see like 24 hours? Or is there sort of a sudden you see where if you're working with a client and you're not getting engagement? It's like, okay, it's been 48 hours, you're not gonna get any more impressions. We didn't do we need new ad creative?

Aj Wilcox:

Yeah, it's usually about 12 to 24 hours where they will give you impressions, assuming that you have a decent relevancy score. And then if you fail to get over that, that minimum threshold for whatever your bid is, they label you with a relevancy score. And like you mentioned, it's actually like pretty, pretty ruthless of a relevancy score. If any one of your ads gets judged as being not great. Good luck resurrecting that ad later. We tell people even if it's the exact same ad creative pause that ad entirely relaunch a brand new ad with exactly the same stuff. So it's to us, it's the same ad, but to LinkedIn, it's it's new, and then try launching that on a Monday or a Tuesday, which generally give you more favorable relevancy scores.

Neal Schaffer:

So AJ, do you think that from an algorithm perspective, so there's an algorithm that governs, obviously supply demand? You know, ad cost relevancy score? Do you think that if you've been publishing a lot of relevancy score ads, or ads with low relevancy scores? Do you think that you have sort of like a lifetime batting average with LinkedIn ads? Do you think that concept exists?

Aj Wilcox:

I do, the way I envision it, and some LinkedIn engineer can correct me. But the way I see it is every individual ad has a relevancy score, then the campaigns that they're within have a lifetime relevancy score, and then the account has a relevancy score. If you have an ad that's performing well, like it's poison, it's never gonna run. But if you've run some stuff that's been good inside of the campaign, and you just have one or two bad ads, it's probably not going to poison that campaign. But if you've just over and over, you've tried to run the same crap ad, there's no amount of lipstick that you can put on the pig. That is, whatever your offer is, you can't get people to click chances are like dad looks at it and goes, ooh, this campaign is not not high quality enough. So we're going to put it at a disadvantage for every new ad that gets launched inside.

Neal Schaffer:

Gotcha. And then obviously, if you do well, on the flip side, then obviously you get the most competitive ad costs, although they're obviously going to be more expensive, because that minimum threshold, but also you're going to get we could say impressions, which are precious, because if you're out isn't good enough, you just don't get the impressions, right. So it's a little bit different from the other paid social networks in that aspect.

Aj Wilcox:

Yeah, yeah, totally. And the really nice thing that you mentioned about that history is if you have a single campaign you've been investing in over time, when you launch a new ad, even if it sucks, LinkedIn will give you the benefit of the doubt saying we assume this ad is going to be good, it'll launch at a good price, it'll get good impressions. And then of course, if it sucks later, it'll get shut off. But certainly build that strong history into your campaigns, don't just run one campaign for a month, and pause it and then start a new one, because you won't be building up history that will work in your favor in the future

Neal Schaffer:

makes a lot of sense. Any other other than sort of the pricing, the impressions, or you know, this ad fatigue, this, this need for really, really quality ads. And then obviously, the pricing determines sort of how you're going to calculate the ROI. So you need to be able to accept cost per lead $5, what have you any other sort of unique features of LinkedIn ad platform that the community should be aware of?

Aj Wilcox:

Yeah, I think there's some really cool things. Like, for instance, if you are just following Lincoln's recommendations, building a brand new campaign, they're going to throw a few things at you that you want to change immediately. The platform by default is not set up for success for you. So to give you an idea, by default in a campaign, there will be a checkbox called Enable audience expansion that allows LinkedIn to stick other pieces of audience in with yours. And if you're paying that deer cost per click on LinkedIn, I sure think that you should maybe start with just the audiences, you know, are going to be successful. I mean, I wouldn't pull it that at all. So uncheck that box, they'll also automatically set up automated bid. And you don't want to automated bid for a brand new campaign, for the simple reason that it's all based off of machine learning. And if the machine doesn't know yet how your ads are going to perform, it's going to try all kinds of bids from high to low. And you might look in your account and all of a sudden see like a 25, or a $50 cost per click. So just do yourself a favor, switch to max cost per click bidding, where you're essentially saying, I'm just not willing to pay any more than x amount, make it something really low, like like four or $5. See where Lincoln's floor actually is. And then, of course, if you're not spending as much as you want to, you know, you can always build up from there. But start with max cost per click, just because the guardrails are on your you won't pay more than you're willing to.

Neal Schaffer:

Awesome. I think that advice really is sort of universal. With any platform, though, they're going to give you minimums or recommended bids that are just way more than you probably need to spend, especially at the beginning. So awesome. So let's take a step back for those that are new to LinkedIn ads, because you have, you know, I remember when I first saw you speak a content marketing conference, LinkedIn and just announced or just rolled out the sponsored in males. So LinkedIn in terms of ad products have a few different things you can do. And some of those obviously, are unique to LinkedIn. So can you give an overview of the different, you know, LinkedIn ad products that exist and which ones you think are more appropriate for which situations or businesses?

Aj Wilcox:

Yeah, and I'm glad you brought up sponsored in mail. Let's start there, because it's a very nuanced ad format. And I think a lot of people get really excited about it. And so I hope not to be a wet blanket to you in in this but I it's certainly helpful to know. So the vast majority of LinkedIn ads, you can set to a pay per click model, so you're only going to pay when someone is actually showing some sort of intent on your ads. And that's really nice to you as an advertiser, because it takes the onus off of you the risk away. Because if you launch a crap ad, you won't pay anything for it because no one decided to click sponsored in mail is a little bit different though, because you actually pay per person you send it to, and you'll get metrics back, like how many opened it, and then how many clicked on your Lincoln side. And then of course, you'll have your conversions that came out the other end, if you're looking at sponsored in mail, in general, on average, they'll have about a 50% open rate. So you'll pay 35 to 85 cents to send it to someone, about 50% of them will open it, and then about 3% will end up clicking on it. So if you do that math, you end up with an astronomical cost per click, it's like 23 to $56 on average. So I don't recommend this ad format to everyone. The reasons that it is really worth using is if you have an offer that feels like a personal invitation. As an example, if you were to get your email from someone you didn't know cold, would you be excited about it? Or would you call it spam? If you'd be excited about it, chances are this is the perfect offer for for an InMail something like because of who you are in the industry, you know stroking their ego, we want to give you early access or a sneak peek to something or invite you as a VIP to this this free event network with your peers can have drinks, we're interested in you for a job opportunity. Those are the types of offers that work really well. If you don't have that, please don't use sponsored in mail, you will pay way, way way too much.

Neal Schaffer:

I mean from you know the average marketer, you're assured that your message is going to reach them. And a 50% open rate to me is like wow, one out of every two now the 3% click rate is very similar to email marketing in general, right. So you know, some but you have to you have to do the math, as you said, it has to make sense. And when you do that math is a lot more expensive than you say. So that that's really awesome advice. So I assume that outside of that, then, although you do have similar to Facebook, you have the right hand, you know rail, but I'm assuming that all the action is really in the feed is in posting things that go into the updates of the people you're targeting correct,

Aj Wilcox:

the vast majority is in the feed. This ad product is called sponsored content. And it has quite a few different flavors, you have a single image version. So you have text, a big beautiful image, and then more text. That's what I recommend everyone start with, it's the most simple and easiest to troubleshoot if there's a problem. But they also have video ads, they also have carousel ads. And all of these can be fixed with something called lead gen form ads, which if you're familiar with Facebook, it's just like lead ads where someone can convert, they can fill out form right within the ad itself without ever leaving the LinkedIn experience.

Neal Schaffer:

Now, would you recommend always using a lead form? Or do you recommend AV testing? Or what's your experience? Man?

Aj Wilcox:

Oh, great question. What we have found is so about 60% of our clients right now are using lead gen forms only they're not sending to a landing page. The great parts about this is if you're using the lead gen form ads, they have really high conversion rates, it's usually 10 to 50% higher than if you were using a landing page, people love that volume increase watching their cost per lead come down. So that's why most are doing it. But be aware that someone who converts because LinkedIn auto filled the form for them, and it just shows them the submit button, that's all they have to do to get whatever you're offering, it's going to be a lower quality lead, they decided to convert after reading 150 characters of text. You also can't track that visitor with UTM parameters, because they're not on your website, you can't target them. Also, because they're not on your website. So just be aware, if your goal is to, is to generate conversations with highly valuable people, send them to a landing page where you're going to make the strongest impression and get to know them. But if all you want is to get as many email addresses as possible from a target market, so that they can go into your database and be nurtured then lead gen forms make a lot of sense. Our lead

Neal Schaffer:

gen forms integrated with you know, email marketing software or so basically, you can automatically opt them into whatever email software you use.

Aj Wilcox:

They integrate into HubSpot Marketo, Eloqua, Salesforce, a couple others at this point. And if you don't happen to have one of those obviously, enterprise solutions for 20 bucks a month, you can there's a Zapier plugin that you can do to basically ship the lead into whatever platform you have,

Neal Schaffer:

or I assume there's an Excel spreadsheet that you can generate. Yeah, I wouldn't

Aj Wilcox:

suggest the Excel spreadsheet cuz you're gonna be downloading a new CSV every day. And in the last 24 hours, some of those leads have cooled off. So certainly integrate if you can, but there is a possibility to download.

Neal Schaffer:

Gotcha. Okay, cool. You know, we only have about 10 minutes left, and I want to spend the rest of the time I think, hopefully everybody listening has gotten a very, very good idea as to sort of the landscape of the land, right in terms of LinkedIn ads, who it's going to be good for what's the cost, what are the products so what are some of the best best practices for lack of a better word, so you Want to invest in LinkedIn ads? You're going to get started, you already mentioned some of these default checkboxes that you want to make sure you they are not checked, right? Can you give you know the audience two or three best practices and or case studies of clients you've worked with, to, you know, illustrate some things that they should be doing in order to have success,

Aj Wilcox:

my recommendation is to target pretty tightly, you're going to be paying a lot of money for these clicks. So definitely make sure it's exactly the right people that you would want in your funnel in your sales process. So don't be afraid to to target really tightly. Obviously, if you go too tight, you probably won't spend very much money, but that's something you can fill out along the way. So use LinkedIn targeting because it's awesome. Use it to your best advantage.

Neal Schaffer:

I was just going to add a note on that if you've never done LinkedIn ads, and you're used to something like Facebook targeting, I actually think that LinkedIn ad targeting is easier to manage easier to control. And because we as people put so much more into our LinkedIn profile than we do on a Facebook profile, the options you have in terms of company name, what have you, it's very, very easy to get that very, very niche target. I'm sure you'd agree. Right, AJ?

Aj Wilcox:

Oh, 100%. Yeah, Facebook targeting is really cool, because they just have everything, but very little has to do with business. There's only so many things that unite us in business. It's our job title or seniority, what company we're work at the industry company size skills groups. And so it's really easy for LinkedIn to build a lot of power around the few things that we do know about business. And we don't have to worry about who someone's cell phone carrier is. And if they're a smoker, and if they own a boat like that, that's the stuff that Facebook can worry about.

Neal Schaffer:

Yeah, that's a great way of looking at so sorry, sorry to cut you off. I know you were gonna go over a few more things there.

Aj Wilcox:

The next one we talked about a little bit earlier on, which is just be really smart about how you're tiptoeing into the platform, don't take Lincoln's recommended bids, don't don't leave the box checked for audience expansion, what you want to do flip to maximum cost per click bidding, and bid low and just see what happens. If you're not spending enough. When you do that. Sure, you can always come in incrementally raise it, you know, 25 cents, 50 cents a day until you are spending what you want. But don't take Lincoln's advice and pay too much. Because if this is a pilot test for you, you want to see if the network is capable of giving you something that you want, definitely don't, don't pay too much, just kind of dip your toe in the water with the minimum. And then the third piece I want to share with you is going back to that offer, you know, what is that piece of gated content that you can offer to someone to get their their attention, because two advertisers could both be doing a webinar. But if one webinar offer is just not interesting, it's the same thing people have already heard, there's not a whole lot of value there. There's nothing that I can do with your ad creative to make people want to convert. Whereas if you've done the research, and you know that your ideal audience has really specific needs around a certain topic, and you create a webinar that's all about helping them solve their problem and satisfying their curiosity, then there's almost no mistake I can make with the ad copy that would make people not want to convert. So your offer will cover a multitude of sins, make sure you you've put a lot of thought into the right kind of offer that people actually want.

Neal Schaffer:

So I'm assuming when we get into that ad copy when we get into the creative, obviously, there's a textual aspect. And there's a visual aspect, I'm assuming for the textual aspect, you want to obviously keep it simple, very clear, as the benefits for the visual, though, do you find including people versus not including people or cool colors work better than warm colors? Have you ever done any experimentation at that level? Or are you usually just not normally using the creatives that your clients give you if you're not part of that process?

Aj Wilcox:

So first of all, no, you are brilliant. The fact that you keyed in on this most people don't understand is that when you're on LinkedIn, you have a mission in mind, you are going to do something. And so if you do the thing that you do on Facebook, which is like, all right, big, long posts and tell a story, that stuff just does not work on LinkedIn, you need to be really short and concise. So for that textual component, make sure you get right to the point, you're telling someone, this is what you need. This is why and here's the call to action, you get those two things and and that will help your ads perform. You don't want to get too creative there. Yeah, with that audience who's gonna give you much attention. And then for that visual component there, I've seen all kinds. So it's hard to say like for sure use a person or use lifestyle imagery, or just using stock photo, that type of stuff is hard. But the things that we've definitely noticed that really help out are make sure that your ads are contrasting to Lincoln's color palette. Same thing goes with Facebook, so I'm sure this this will feel pretty familiar. But the whole color palette of LinkedIn is blues, grays and whites. And so if you can have your image pop with the oranges, reds, greens, purples, that kind of stuff will help it stand out. The job of your image is not to get people to convert on your offer. The job of your image is to attract someone's attention so that they read your ad copy. So make sure it stands out enough and obviously it has to be a little bit relevant otherwise people are gonna comment like WTF like What does this have to do with anything?

Neal Schaffer:

Right? And I think your comment and advice on the ad copy is just something of any advice. Whenever you're reaching out to anybody on LinkedIn, you have to assume that they're a busy professional. Wi I fm what's in it for me. And if you cannot be clear about that, whether it is ad copy, or a LinkedIn invitation request, on LinkedIn, email, whatever it may be, people just tune you out. And they're not going to ask you, Hey, what do you mean by that question, they're just going to go to the next thing. So it's a great reminder for everybody that LinkedIn really is. It's not like Facebook, where you are spending 30 minutes scrolling or Instagram, you are there, as you said, on a mission. So want to make sure that you you adhere to that and everything you do there.

Aj Wilcox:

Amen. Nail, amen.

Neal Schaffer:

Tell us all where people listening can find you, as well as just a brief introduction to the types of ways in which your company helps, you know, the companies that are listening to this podcast.

Aj Wilcox:

Awesome. Well, thanks. Yeah, I'm pretty easy to get ahold of VPO to be two lengths calm and fill out the form on any of those pages, you don't go to a sales rep and you won't end up on our newsletter, it just goes directly to my inbox, I'm not a sales guy. So feel free to reach out ask anything for how we work together, probably about 90% of what we do is managing people's LinkedIn ads accounts for them. And then about 10% is teaching training, consulting, auditing, on just a project basis, helping people advertise better themselves. So basically, anything you need around LinkedIn ads, we want to be the ones to help you out with

Neal Schaffer:

it. And as I said, I think after you, you listen to this, and you do a little bit of research, AJ really is really as the man when it comes to this. So I hope that if you have any questions that you will reach out to him and obviously be dueling Comm, AJ, thank you so much for spending your time sharing your wisdom with everybody, any sort of final thoughts, final nuggets that you want to leave the audience with, who if

Aj Wilcox:

I could, something that's been really interesting to me that I don't see a whole lot of people doing is you can segment your audience on LinkedIn very, very cleanly, because things like job title are so clear cut. So rather than like, let's say your audience is someone like marketers, who are decision makers, so maybe manager and above, rather than just creating one campaign that is marketers, manager. And above, what we would do is split that out into four different campaigns. So marketing managers, marketing, directors, marketing, VPS, and CMOS. And even if we launched the exact AB test within each of those, you know, that's the same two ads, and every one of these, what happens is now we get data, it's kind of like a silent focus group, where you can see who in your audience cares about what you're doing. And if you find that you're really resonating with VPs and above, or they're ignoring you, and you're really resonating with managers, that tells you what your content is doing. And then you have an opportunity to adjust. If you want to be speaking more to VPs and CMOS, then, sure, adjust your content. And now you have data that is telling you click through rates are three times higher for managers than they are VPS, it'll actually tell you to take action. Whereas if you left that all in one campaign, they would either perform well or poorly, and it doesn't give you a lever, you don't know what that means.

Neal Schaffer:

That's really awesome advice. And in fact, I think that obviously, LinkedIn, your ads are primarily going to be b2b focused. So at what level if you think of the target personas you have, what content engages out what which persona, right? Where with Facebook, that same notion of sort of experimentation, I think is there in terms of visuals, colors, what have you. But because of the LinkedIn targeting being so different, it does allow you to do that that high degree of experimentation that you talked about, that's an awesome point. It costs money, because there's similar things you do on Pinterest ads to get hold of data that then you use for your organic social media. And in this case, the data you get from your LinkedIn ads you can use throughout your company with all your corporate messaging. So that's really awesome advice. AJ, thank you so much for being on and congrats. I know that. By the time this podcast is published, hopefully your book will be out there. So make sure you got to beat you, link.com. Or you look up AJ Wilcox on Amazon, where I'm sure it'll be. And you pick up a copy of the book, and you reach out to him. So AJ, once again, thank you so much. It's been awesome. We'll keep them better touch. Hopefully we'll see you at a conference sooner rather than later. Well, there you have it. All you wanted to know about LinkedIn ads. Obviously, LinkedIn is a very, very lucrative demographic. So the advertising costs do come at a cost unintended, but the benefits depending on your product or service can be extremely beneficial. I want to thank all of you that have gone out of your way to review this podcast on iTunes, which is now known as Apple podcasts. I wanted to give a shout out to Andy 189219. Really helpful social media Podcast. I'm new to the social media world, having stepped into a role where I'm trying to grow social media accounts from 200 followers to triple the number, having a hard time so came across this podcast and so glad I did. Thanks so much for existing and putting out great content. Thank you so much, Andy 189219 It's comments like that really keep this podcast going as we near the 150th episode. And for all of you who get any value and feel this is a podcast you would recommend to your friends, any and every review that you provide would, I would thank you from the bottom of my heart. Obviously, if you're listening to this podcast on a phone, take a screenshot posted on an Instagram story tag me. I'd love to share that with all of my followers as well. So, once again, thank you for listening to the podcast and until next time, wherever you are in the world, make it a great social Day. Bye Bye, everybody.