Session Topic 1: LinkedIn Ads: The B2B Marketer’s Secret Weapon?
B2Linked’s AJ Wilcox shares secrets of advertising success on LinkedIn.
Some Key Points
“A little bit about me I stumbled onto linkedIn ads about nine years ago and totally fell in love with it because not because the platform is especially user friendly or great in any way but because my sales reps kept coming up to me and saying AJ we absolutely love your leads we’re fighting over and over here keep it up and anyone who’s ever worked with sales reps well I mean I haven’t heard that sense so you know that’s pretty special but I live in the state of Utah in the United States with my wife and four kids all home schooling right now going a little bit stir-crazy but my background is in search with SEO and Google Ads before that so the reasons you might look into LinkedIn ads.”
“if you’re already running let’s say Facebook ads and or Google Ads if you’re using search channels and you’ve maxed out your search volume there just aren’t more people searching for what your product or category is and you need to fill the top of that funnel LinkedIn ads is probably a really good way to do that.”
“LinkedIn works especially well with disruptive products and services where the category isn’t created yet and people don’t know that you exist and you need to let them know. On the Facebook side a lot of times your sales reps will complain about the lead quality especially after you get past the custom audiences and the look-alikes and retargeting. Once get past that you start broadening into interests and you end up spraying pretty wide and of course the cost per click and conversion is going to be lower but your lead quality is gonna take a hit as well. Also if you’ve just hit the limits of scale where you just need something more LinkedIn ads is definitely worth considering.”
“There are some fantastic things about it and of course some not so fantastic things about it number one reason why we use LinkedIn and we pay their prices and put up with them is they have the best business targeting of any platform out there and it’s a near-perfect scale especially here in North America. Wth LinkedIn we have got to like 95% of white collar professionals on LinkedIn so it’s very rare when you have a budget larger then you can actually spend on the size of audience who is willing to click on your ads on LinkedIn and then we of course like to keep our profiles up to date. I like to joke that LinkedIn is the second person to know when I make a career shift after my wife. I tell my wife first and then I go and update my LinkedIn and because of that, advertisers aren’t wasting impressions on me because I forgot to update my job title you know six months ago or a year ago when someone’s on the platform they’re in the right business mentality they’re thinking about their job or their career and so when you’re giving someone something that feeds that then they’re going to have higher conversion rates and better lead quality.”
“And then finally when we’ve studied several times the interplay of each of the different ad channels and marketing channels we find that LinkedIn always closes the largest deal sizes and you know. “If you want deals to close fast, Google Ads always closes that deals the quickest but the large deals the that you’re gonna be so proud to put the logo on your website those are the ones that LinkedIn drives now certainly it’s not all sunshine and rainbows for LinkedIn advertisers. Number one, the costs are high here in North America, we pay eight to eleven dollars a click. It’s significantly cheaper outside of the English language and outside of North America but that’s you know really the rub here in the US.”
“We also can’t do device level bidding I’m not sure if that’s even on the roadmap LinkedIn’s been kind of kicking against that we don’t have ads scheduling so we’re actually building a tool to help people do day parting and ad scheduling because LinkedIn doesn’t offer it themselves so if anyone who’s listening is interested in being a part of our day parting beta let us know that this is the ability to say I only want my ads running between these business hours or on certain days.”
“Finally, many of you will be familiar with Google ads Quality Score Facebook Ads relevance score LinkedIn has the same kind of thing that they call relevancy score they just don’t show it to you. You can run a report at the campaign level and see a number zero to ten but they don’t tell you how often it’s updated or what that is at the ad level so these are certainly my wishes for LinkedIn I wish it were less expensive but that doesn’t seem to be happening but I wish they would add additional features for us because the costs are so high we wonder.”
“Okay who is the right kind of person or company to consider LinkedIn ads and what we find is if you’re in business-to-business lead generation and when you close a deal it’s worth ten thousand or fifteen thousand dollars or more then LinkedIn ads is a no-brainer.”