How to market a marketing agency using LinkedIn Ads – AJ Wilcox | DMR #225

Full transcript:

David Bain
Today we’re going to be looking at how marketing agencies can best take advantage of LinkedIn ads, including what type of campaign to use what creative works best and who to target. Joining me to discuss that is a man who has been specialising in LinkedIn ads for the past seven years. To date, he and his team have managed hundreds of LinkedIn ads accounts, spent over $110 million on the platform, and looked after four of LinkedIn, top 10 spenders, and he’s still got room on his credit card! Welcome to DMR, AJ Wilcox.

AJ Wilcox
Excited to be here, David, thanks so much for having me.

David Bain
Great to have you here sir. Of course you can find AJ over at B2Linked.com So I guess the big question is AJ… why not Facebook?

AJ Wilcox
Well, I mean, Facebook is a fantastic platform and I would never tell anyone that they shouldn’t be using it. But, when you use Facebook, especially for business to business, and especially for the kinds of clients we use, where are we’re often dealing with, where they have a high lifetime value these are high ticket items with Facebook, we can target, and this might have gone away recently but we can target by job title, but then you’re only hitting the like 5% of people who bothered to put their job title on Facebook. And so then what you’re left doing is, retargeting which is great, and look alike audiences based off of like your customer lists and stuff, and those are great, but those only scale so far

David Bain
within LinkedIn Sorry, I’m carry on there, sir.

AJ Wilcox
Break me off anytime because I could talk, but with LinkedIn, we can see ro in on it. Exactly, your target audience, I mean, these are people in HR, with, you know, who have a seniority of over, you know, VP or higher at tech companies with more than 500 employees, like we can get so specific, so we’re not shooting broad like you would on Facebook just from that lack of Facebook knowing who your, your audiences professionally LinkedIn knows like 95% of them so you have really full control over your, your ideal audience,

David Bain
I’ll tell you what talking about ideal audiences I was trying to set up a campaign on Facebook and on LinkedIn, earlier on today for my podcast agency casting credit. I thought would be a great opportunity to maybe actually talk about that as an example of perhaps actually setting up a campaign and when I was setting up on Facebook. What a nightmare I was having, because I’m a personal ad account, and then I was trying to add a custom audience and it was telling me no, you’ve got to add a custom audience using business manager, so add this personal ad account to your business manager Okay, did that went into business manager and it said sorry you’re not allowed to add a custom audience until actually your accounts been up and running for a few weeks. Okay. Brilliant, thank you so I can’t do that. Oh, just no thanks, appreciate that. Other Well I went on LinkedIn, and added the custom audience so it was more of a traditional ad platform I would probably call it a call it rather nicely Facebook that seems to be blending everything and making things a little bit more complicated. I guess I don’t really mind, which one I use, it’s just which one gets the best results, but obviously I uploaded my custom audience which is about 2500 b2b marketers in the UK, and now it’s crunching over the data guest to try and try and match it. So to get started, I noticed that LinkedIn have started breaking down their ad opportunities into awareness consideration and conversions. So, is it a mistake for example to go straight into consideration. Is it best for every campaign to start with awareness on LinkedIn,

AJ Wilcox
oh this is such a good question. The objectives as they are on Facebook are incredible. Like you tell Facebook, this is the exact objective I want to hit, and Facebook has so much data on everyone, that it can do it with LinkedIn on the other hand, I just, like, I’ve had so many come to me and say, Hey, we jumped right to the conversions objective because that’s what we want, and you go, well, LinkedIn doesn’t really know that much about, about who is able to convert and who’s willing, and you don’t have enough conversions on your pixel to really teach the algorithm. So, you know I like to start a little bit, a little bit differently than I think what LinkedIn would tell you to go straight for awareness is on LinkedIn, just, frankly, it’s very expensive, okay you’ll pay like eight to $12 per click on average. So and that’s in North America and elsewhere is significantly cheaper, but if you’re going to pay eight to $12 a click to get people to see your brand or go read a blog post that’s incredibly expensive. So my recommendation is to skip past the awareness phase, you can still build awareness by providing value. And so I go right to what I would consider the middle of the funnel, this is your first time people have heard of you, but you’re offering them something of such extreme value that they’re willing to fill out a form for a free checklist ebook. Free Guide, join this free webinar that kind of thing. And if you’re providing enough value you can get people to skip right to the middle of the funnel,

David Bain
and is it best to drive people to your website or should you get people to try and actually be a lead through LinkedIn because again, you can also actually get people to ask for more information about what you’re doing through LinkedIn directly and LinkedIn will provide you with their personal details as a lead, I would imagine that would be better conversion rates.

AJ Wilcox
Yeah, significantly better. You can use what LinkedIn calls their lead gen form ads, and the creative can look exactly the same so you can a be test like send some to your website and some to the form that stays on LinkedIn, but you will notice a higher conversion rate on LinkedIn, there’s, there’s no page load time like if they click it, and your page takes two or three seconds to load, they’re not clicking away because they’re bored, you, you can really get them to, you know, they trust LinkedIn so the trust stays with the form. And it’s much faster, much smoother. The challenge though is if you’re leaving all of that traffic on LinkedIn, that means you’re not able to track it on your site with UTM parameters, you’re not. You’re not able to retarget that traffic with your Google and your Facebook retargeting pixels. So, you know, there’s certainly pluses and minuses, but I’m a big fan of start with the lead gen forms, just because they do convert so much higher and you can test it out, see if it’s gonna work. Okay, so perhaps do some kind of split test

David Bain
with a direct call to action 50% of the time, using the lead generation forms directly within LinkedIn and 50% of the time driving people to your website. If you can get similar kind of conversion rates and don’t take advantage of the traffic and then retarget that further using other platforms and that’s probably a better way to do it. Oh yeah. Okay, great.

AJ Wilcox
If I can get similar conversion rates between those two options, I’m gonna choose, you know, get people to my website, 100% of the time, but usually the lead gen forms convert like, Like, you know, 30 to 100% better. And so, most marketers are going to go, wow, I’d rather have three times the leads, even if I can’t do as much.

David Bain
Okay, good stuff. Yeah, I guess you can even potentially use the leads, as a source for other retargeting campaigns and other platforms anyway.

AJ Wilcox
Yeah, true.

David Bain
And what about the type of ad. So we t, we seem to be moving towards video as being the primary form of content nowadays, and is a video ad a generally the best performing type of ad,

AJ Wilcox
not usually on LinkedIn. I don’t know why I don’t know what the reason is, but a static image ad is generally the best performing, and you’ll get, well at least it’s most predictable. Most of the time it’s 10 to 20% cheaper per click than video, but we also know that with video, you can make an emotional connection that you just couldn’t make otherwise, I mean, download five of my white papers and tell me if you know like or trust me yet, or watch me for a minute talking, and, you know, you can get know like and trust very quickly. Yeah video. So, my recommendation start with static image, If you can, and then test into video that’s, you know, it’s probably a little bit more higher risk, but you’ll if it works, you’ll probably see better results.

David Bain
Okay, okay, because I’ve recorded a video recently, I’ve added some nice graphics of subtitles to it as well emphasising different words on it as well. And it’s about two minutes long so I’m not sure if it’s a little bit too long for an ad, but it kind of covers the content that I wanted to share. It’s also an 16 by nine format. Is it better if I make it into a one by one video instead of 16 by nine.

AJ Wilcox
I think I would I would suggest one by one. If you do, you can also do vertical video that’s pretty new on LinkedIn, but I’m pretty sure you’d only hit mobile devices with that but with a one by one, you’re hitting every device yeah and yeah I think it’s certainly worth testing. And then, you know, you’ve done all the hard work of getting the subtitles, it’s like, 80 plus percent of people who watch your video aren’t going to watch with the subtitles on. So, the subtitles are really important to draw them in.

David Bain
Okay, great. You can tell I’m being really specific with my questions here because I’ve obviously it’s something I’m actively doing at the moment and want to get as effective as possible here, and some other option, one other option in there was to enable the LinkedIn. Audience Network. They say that you can get up to 25% more traffic on partner apps and sites. Is that a good idea do you get as good conversion rates from doing that.

AJ Wilcox
The, the audience network on LinkedIn is significantly better than it is on either Google or Facebook so I like it, but because you’re getting traffic when they’re not on LinkedIn, we now have lost a little bit of control over understanding what mindset, they’re in. So, if I can spend my entire budget on, just, just the LinkedIn traffic, where I can predict, I know what type of mindset, they’re in. Then, I’ll do that. But where I turn on the audience network is either when, when I have more budget than I can spend. So I’ll take that on and get a little boost. Or if I know that this is like a really high priority campaign, and I want to hit this audience, everywhere I can. Like, let’s say there’s a webinar coming up and it’s seven days away. I want every chance I can at that audience to let them know about the webinar,

David Bain
you touched on budget there, what’s a reasonable budget to begin with so you can get a feel for the metrics to see if a campaign is likely to be successful or not.

AJ Wilcox
Yeah, so if you target anywhere in North America, you’ll usually get statistical significance on your tests, down to the click through rate and the cost per click. After spending about $1,000 So, if that’s all you want to see is how are people clicking on my ads. Plan on spending about 1000 and get a feel for it. If you want your statistical significance, all the way down to the conversion rate and the cost per conversion, which is obviously really important for for us like for larger clients, then you want to make sure that you’re budgeting 5k or more per month in, if you’re targeting North America, like I said if you target elsewhere, that can come down significantly as costs come down significantly.

David Bain
Okay, okay, great stuff. And I mentioned to you that I’ve uploaded a custom audience it says processing that at the moment how long on average does a custom audience actually take to process.

AJ Wilcox
Yeah, LinkedIn will tell you it takes 24 to 48 hours to process, but realistically it takes closer to 72 Okay, so I hope they fix that at some point but yeah, don’t be alarmed if it goes all the way to three years.

David Bain
Okay, and another option with that is to expand the audience into a look alike type audience how accurate are they with their profiling of look alike type audiences

AJ Wilcox
look alikes are, they’re pretty hit or miss. Like, look alikes on Facebook makes so much sense because Facebook knows so much about you personally but doesn’t know hardly anything about you professionally. And so you can use a look alike to try to put these things together and find a b2b audience with LinkedIn, they already had the b2b audience. And so, when they came out with, with the look alikes I was kind of like why, like, if I know I want more people in HR or more people who are software developers, like, I’ll just go target them. And, you know, increase my budget so I think they’re kind of flawed right from the get go because I just don’t think LinkedIn needs it their targeting is so precise that you can, you can kind of expand your own. That being said, about half the time we turn on the look alike, it, it performs about as well as the audience we had before and then half the time it underperforms. So worth trying. But again, if you’re paying LinkedIn prices, you might as well be like altra intentional and precise about who you want to go after.

David Bain
Okay, so look alikes are good for lazy marketers, but if you’re a lazy marketer you probably shouldn’t be advertising on LinkedIn.

AJ Wilcox
Yeah, it’s a little a little expensive to be just rolling the dice.

David Bain
And obviously, LinkedIn provide a scripts that you can add to your website as well that you can do other retargeting with in the future as well is that a script that you can add on multiple websites, or did you just add that on one domain name.

AJ Wilcox
Yeah, you can put the same on all of your landing pages on your thank you pages on your website proper if you have multiple ad accounts you can tie them all to the same piece of code so you don’t have to have multiples on there, okay so yeah I highly recommend get the insight tag on your website and all your other properties.

David Bain
Okay great, so so for example I’ve gone digital marketing radio.com And I’ve also got casting red.com So what I’m thinking of maybe if people consume videos on digital marketing radio.com consume content on there, potentially retargeting them with the casting Credit Services, or so so in essence actually tracking people across multiple sites so just use the same script the same piece of code for that.

AJ Wilcox
Yeah. Yep, I sure would.

David Bain
Okay, sounds great. Okay, that’s the end of my very specific questions there he hopefully that’s, that’s of use that’s quite useful to other people there as well but now it’s time for ages thoughts on the state of digital marketing today so a more general questions there so let’s start off with secret software, so can you begin this one by sharing a lesser known piece of martech that’s bringing you a lot of value at the moment.

AJ Wilcox
Yeah, this one’s tough because I’m always playing with a bunch of different technologies, but this one is called KNIME, and it’s spelled K and I M E. And what it is is is it’s data, data processing. Think of it like that, so you can pull data from any kind of source from API’s or Excel sheets or Google, Google Sheets anything like that. And then you can transform it any way you want. Add Columns, calculate things, and then spit it out into any format you want. There’s certainly a learning curve I mean it’s very much like a data scientists, dream, and it’s taken me a lot of work, but I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve made some really cool reports that I used to have to go into Excel and do the same stuff every time, and now KNIME just builds it all for me at the touch of a button and it’s quick, it’s free.

David Bain
I haven’t heard of it before either which is which is great I love hearing about software that hadn’t heard of before. So where did you hear it from,

AJ Wilcox
I heard of it actually from a friend who runs an SEO agency, he was like, hey, my, my data scientist came and brought this software, have you heard of it, and I installed it and immediately caught the vision of like this could save me so much time. And so I went deep into it there,

David Bain
love it, I love the fact that you spelled it out as well. We’re always good for podcast listeners. Again, I m e.com So very easy to find. Yeah. Okay, so let’s move on to this or that round so this is a quick response right and 10 Quick questions just two rules here, try not to think too much about the answer and you’re only allowed to say the word both on one occasion, so use it wisely. Are you ready,

Unknown Speaker
I’m ready. Tick tock off Twitter.

David Bain
Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. LinkedIn, that’s the easy one. Yes, absolutely.

David Bain
YouTube for podcast,

Unknown Speaker
podcast, traffic or leads. Traffic

David Bain
paid search or SEO. It search ads, or influencers ads, Google ads or Facebook ads.

Unknown Speaker
Facebook ads, email or chat,

David Bain
chat, Mar tech stack, or all in one platform and one to one or scale

AJ Wilcox
that I’m gonna use my bow for now.

David Bain
Okay, so he says, why was it the board and that one,

AJ Wilcox
because both are incredibly valuable. Like, you need to have those one on one, interactions, for, for people to become real fans of the brand or, or the person, but you also have to have those out you know far reaching activities that help reach a lot of people so I try to balance my time between both.

David Bain
Okay great so for the next question, I’ll be very surprised if the answer isn’t LinkedIn ads but let’s see.

DMR Bot
The $10,000 question,

Unknown Speaker
if I were to

David Bain
give you $10,000 And you had to spend it over the next few days in a single thing to grow your business, what would you spend it on and how would you measure success.

AJ Wilcox
Oh, I think I may disappoint you here, David, my, what I would use it for is actually video production. I have so many ideas for the kinds of videos, like, little tips here and there of how to do things better with LinkedIn ads, and I know you know, production, it’s a lot of work and it’s expensive, but then once I have that video, I would go to YouTube ads and this is where I’d spend my own money, go to YouTube ads, and, you know, and push those out for those keyword searchers I push it out over Facebook. and I definitely run an ABM campaign on LinkedIn, targeting, you know, the people who already run LinkedIn ads at, you know the fortune 500 And, and those kinds of companies,

David Bain
so what’s best practice for using YouTube ads at the moment because it’s something else that I do want to experiment with. I’ve had lots of positive stories about doing things like being able to target people who have, in the previous few days, searched for specific terms on Google so you can be very hyper specific with them, with YouTube ads, how do you go about doing it yourself.

AJ Wilcox
Yeah, I think I would try a little bit of everything. Anytime that someone’s searching for something about LinkedIn ads, I would love for my video to just be at the top of their, their playlist. I would love to target, maybe even if it’s LinkedIn themselves their own videos about LinkedIn ads, I’d love to do the pre roll there. I’d love to have mine show up when as, Like let’s see if I have a sequence, if someone has watched the first one, or at least 50% of the first one, then I want to show them the next one in the sequence and kind of tell them a story. Maybe give them a little bit of a webinar, piece by piece. So there’s a lot I want to try out there.

David Bain
This is something else I’ve been listening to about Facebook, YouTube ads actually recently in that term, I think a lot of people have been killing greater organic success on YouTube by driving paid traffic to the same video, and apparently, if you do that and if your average view time for your videos, go down significantly, then your organic reach is good good diamonds as a result of doing that as well. You know, for instance if you have a video with an average watch time of 20 minutes and it’s doing really well on YouTube and you drive, drive paid traffic to that and suddenly it gets one minute view time, then you really are going to tank your average stats and you’re not going to do as well in your average rankings because of that. So, the advice that I’ve heard is to create separate videos for your paid campaigns on YouTube. Have you driven traffic to the same videos that you’ve got up there that are underground our and organic success as well.

AJ Wilcox
Yeah, that’s actually the only thing I’ve done on YouTube ads so far. So that’s a really good warning I’m gonna go about separate.

David Bain
Great stuff okay well I mean we can all learn off each other there are so many different facets for digital marketing nowadays you know you’re such an expert of LinkedIn, but you can’t be an absolute expert in absolutely everything you know but I’ll tell you what we’ve been having a great discussion about what your current digital marketing tactics are but I’d like to ask for my final question. What’s your going to do

DMR Bot
next on the list.

David Bain
So what’s one marketing activity or tool that you haven’t tried yet, but you want to test.

AJ Wilcox
Oh man that’s so hard. I think I want to try LinkedIn stories. I haven’t ever used stories like on Instagram or Snapchat or anything like that, as a consumer, so it’ll be a totally new experience, I’m not quite sure what to do for b2b, but I like the idea of little like tips and tricks and strategies just, hey I wanted to let you in on this, so I think that’s what I’m gonna try next and then also even try promoting them, which is a beta feature that should be coming out for LinkedIn advertisers, I would imagine in the next few months.

David Bain
Yeah, I think if you’re already successful on a platform, or you’ve got a decent number of followers or connections then it makes sense to try something new because generally, it’ll get more organic reach and you’ll, you’ll probably be highly likely to be successful with it but it’s a different type of medium as well so it needs a different approach and that’s an important thing that you pointed out there. So why don’t we start off. You have been listening to Ed Wilcox from BT links who, on today’s episode of digital marketing radio shared. For me, a very important tip was actually thinking about the value of what you’re doing with your targeting of your LinkedIn campaigns. I love the fact that you said probably don’t consider using look alike audiences. I love the fact that he actually touched on, well, use your custom audience but then maybe moved on to links at LinkedIn. Exact Match targeting after that because their targeting is so great so for me that was the number one tip you shared a lot of great Sam software, and nine, of course, everything that you mentioned, will be available in the video description on YouTube as well as the podcast show notes at Digital Marketing radio.com AJ, what is the best social platform for someone to follow you and say hi. You know,

AJ Wilcox
honestly, if you’re listening to this as a podcast I would highly recommend, go check out the LinkedIn ad Show podcast because I, I go much deeper we get real geeky on LinkedIn ads, so check out there but, of course. Yeah, send me a customised connection request on LinkedIn, and let me know that you, you heard me on David’s show and I’ll be happy to be connected to

David Bain
you do that as well. Super, thank you so much for coming on AJ, always a pleasure to talk to you sir,

AJ Wilcox
absolutely. Oh and I remembered you told me you were gonna ask about magical marketer, do you want to skip that one or should we

David Bain
do that it was my it was my notes for some reason, I don’t know where we were, we didn’t get we’ll get to that one, but let’s ask you, in terms of a marketer, That’s an up and coming marketer that maybe many people haven’t heard of yet but they’re sharing a lot of great insight at the moment. Can you think of someone like that you’d like lately to share with the audience.

AJ Wilcox
Yes, there is a magical marketer by the name of Mark Gustafson. I think he’s on Twitter. Mark us or something. Anyway, I can serve to make sure I get to the real one, but he’s, he’s spoken ones that he wrote off, but he’s, you know, relatively unknown, but he is absolutely brilliant when it comes to anything, anything paid marketing, he’s really, really involved on like PPC chat, and SEM Rush is Twitter chat, so definitely go learn from him he’s happy to share everything. And he’s not doing a whole lot of self promotion so it’s kind of a well kept secret,

David Bain
lovely okay well I will make sure that I get the right link from you and feature him within the show notes as well in the description on YouTube. As you can probably tell, your listener, wherever you’re consuming this podcast. It’s the first podcast of the show that I’ve hosted again for a while. It’s actually a show that I hosted for three years in a row and hosted over. Over 200 episodes this is episode 225 Actually, but it’s the rejigged version of the show, and so hopefully you like what you heard you like the format, obviously, we’re gonna get slightly more fluid, over time, and I will thank ag again for coming on, AJ, it was wonderful to have you on and you’ll really appreciate your insight there, I will just say that I’ve been your host ever been. You can also find me producing podcasts for b2b brands over casting career.com In the next episode I’m going to be joined by live streaming expert Ian Anderson grey, and we’re going to be chatting about whether live streaming is worthwhile for b2b brands. If you want to watch live, subscribe to the digital marketing radio channel on YouTube. And of course, hit the notification bell there as well to get the notification when we go live if you’re more of an audio only fan, well, you can find us on Apple podcast Spotify, Amazon music, all the other good places where you can find podcasts, But until we meet again. Stay hungry, stay foolish and stay subscribed. Aloha!