Ready to get started with LinkedIn advertising? Not ready to get started with LinkedIn advertising because it’s overwhelming? Not a problem… we’ve got the expert here to give you all the top tips!

This week’s episode of Good Girls Get Rich is brought to you by Uplevel Media CEO and LinkedIn expert, Karen Yankovich. In this episode, Karen interviews AJ Wilcox, founder of B2Linked on LinkedIn advertising and all the things you need to know to start utilizing Linkedin advertising for your business!   

 

AJ Wilcox is a LinkedIn Ad’s pro who founded B2Linked.com, a LinkedIn Ads-specific ad agency, in 2014. As official LinkedIn partners, they manage among the world’s most sophisticated advertising accounts worldwide. He’s a ginger and triathlete, he and his wife live in Utah with their 4 kinds, and his company care is a wicked-fast go-kart!  

 

#GoodGirlsGetRich We want to hear your thoughts on this episode! Leave us a message on Speakpipe or email us at info@karenyankovich.com.  

 

 

About the Episode:

 

There is a TON of information in this episode that you need to listen to (or read the transcript) to get the full amount of info about LinkedIn advertising! However, I wanted to break down some of the most common questions I get from you guys about LinkedIn advertising in this blog, that AJ answered for us in the show.

 

Let’s dive in!

 

Before even getting started, you need to know one simple fact: you can only run ads from your LinkedIn company page.

 

You can’t run ads to build your personal profile, so therefore… let’s take a look at what your company page should have before you start running ads:

 

On your LinkedIn company page, if you want to know what’s important to your company page in general, read this blog here, however for advertising, you should focus on:

 

  • Having a solid logo for branding
  • Consistent page activity, whether it be posting 1-2 times a week, or 1-2 times/month
  • Having a good amount of followers for social proof 

 

We deep dove into how to gain more followers to your company page in the episode, however if you want more tips on that, check out the blog and podcast I have here on leveraging your LinkedIn company page

 

Now getting into the actual ads…

 

What types of ad’s are there?

 

AJ gave us a wealth of knowledge on each ad, and I want to go into detail about all of them here for you:

 

Where do you start when creating an ad?

 

Start with thinking about the offer: What is the CTA for your ad?

 

Now AJ explained that most LinkedIn advertising falls on a spectrum/scale between these different CTA’s:

 

  • Light Ad’s
    • Have CTA’s that feel light, such as “read my blog” or check out this video
    • The result:
      • These types of ad’s don’t have great conversion rates, hence,
      • You’ll be paying a lot for the clicks than the ad is worth
  • Heavy Ad’s
    • Have CTA’s that feel heavy, such as “buy my product” or “speak with me”
    • The result:
      • Cold viewers will feel like you’re asking too much too soon, without even knowing you or your product
      • You will get very few clicks, and the clicks are not likely to convert. 

 

So if neither of these ad’s work, what should your CTA for ad’s be?

 

The best LinkedIn advertisements to run have to be somewhere in the middle where you can at least get something out it. Your CTA has to provide serious value with high interest, such as:

 

  • Access to a free checklist or cheat sheet
  • A free download, guide or e-book
  • Free in-person event or webinar you’re hosting

 

This way, you can get information from people like their name, email address and maybe even a phone number. From there, you can use their information to have more direct contact with them, AND you know they were interested in what you had to offer. 

 

Now, back to the types of ads. Out of the 4 types of LinkedIn advertisements, AJ recommends this one first to most people:

 

Sponsored Content:

 

These are the ads that appear in someone’s news feed as a “sponsored post”. These are a nice “middle of the road” ad for people to start.

 

You can start with a single image (which AJ recommends), with a text intro, big image and text headline. It can also be a video, carousel ad, etc. 

 

These ad’s are versatile and have a lot of room for that CTA to shine and you can potentially get a decent cost-per-click depending on your targeting (which we’ll talk about later)

 

Here are other types of ad’s (in order from best to worst recommended from AJ)

 

Text Ad (only visible on mobile) 

 

On the right side of your browser, you’ll see 3 text ads on top of each other. They are text only, and pretty small, so here are features:

 

Pro’s

  • Most affordable option
  • Most visibility as it will be shown thousands of times before getting a click
  • Essentially free branding to anyone who does not click

 

Con’s

  • Much harder to see
  • Smallest click through rate
  • Could potentially be a waste of advertising budget

 

Sponsored In-Mail

 

With this type of LinkedIn advertising, you are essentially paying to deliver a specific message to people’s inbox

 

Pro’s

  • Can personalize to the person you’re sending to
  • Best option ONLY if you have a specific offer for something
    • I.e a free tool that is fit for them, an invite to an event or webinar, etc. that you know they will already be interested in

 

Con’s

  • Can potentially the most expensive ad option
  • Can be seen as “spam”
  • Low click through rates
    • AJ mentioned the average numbers can be around only 50% will even open it, and only 3% may click on your link.

 

Dynamic ad’s

 

Every now and then you’ll see an LinkedIn ad that your image gets uploaded to.

 

Pro’s

  • None

 

Con’s

  • High un-effective
  • Way more expensive than sponsored content
  • Lower click through
  • Higher cost

 

Now that we got the types of ad’s out of the way, I want to share one more important piece that we spoke about in this episode about LinkedIn advertising, which is…

 

Targeting

 

You can target people through 4 (now 5) of the following functions

 

  • Job title
  • Job function
  • Skills
  • Groups
  • Interests (new feature!)

 

These can be your 4 campaigns, however they can all perform slightly differently. The important thing to do when it comes to targeting your LinkedIn ads, is to tailor to your specific needs as you go and learn which type of ad performs better. From here, you can narrow down your type of ad to which different group is getting the most clicks and most conversions. This all allows you to learn about your audience on LinkedIn, which is the ultimate goal to gaining business through your advertising.

 

Have more questions about LinkedIn advertising? Fill out the form on AJ’s website b2linked.com and reference you found him through Good Girls Get Rich, and you can speak with AJ directly on ad’s and how he may potentially be able to help your business! 

 

Episode Spotlights:

  • Where to find everything for this week’s episode: karenyankovich.com/089
  • Intro to today’s episode (1:30)
  • Intro to AJ Wilcox (2:51)
  • The difference between Facebook ad’s and ad’s (6:45)
  • The impact your LinkedIn company page has on LinkedIn ad’s (8:34)
  • How to boost your LinkedIn company page followers (9:48)
  • How people use LinkedIn ad’s (14:38)
  • Average cost for the best types of LinkedIn ad’s (18:00)
  • What type of ad to start with and additional ad formats (19:25)
  • How to target ad’s to your specific audiences (26:32)
  • Where to start out with investing on LinkedIn ad’s (32:34)
  • Additional targeting tips that include behavior  (37:28)
  • Re-targeting on LinkedIn (40:38)
  • LinkedIn’s insight tag and website demographics (44:55)
  • AJ’s wrap-up tips LinkedIn hack (53:21)
  • Where to get in contact with AJ directly (56:12)
  • Episode recap (57:46)

Resources Mentioned In This Episode:

 

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Read the Transcript

Karen Yankovich  0:00    

You’re listening to the good girls get rich podcast episode 89.  

 

Welcome to the good girls get rich podcast with your host, Karen Yankovich. This is where we embrace how good you are girl, stop being the best kept secret in town, learn how to use simple LinkedIn and social media strategies and make the big bucks.  

 

Hey there, I’m your host, Karen Yankovich. And this is the good girls get rich podcast brought to you by up level media, the proud sponsor of the simple relationship and heart based LinkedIn marketing system that gets you on the phone consistently with your perfect people, people who you can’t wait to have the opportunity to chat with if you have listened to the show before. Or if you love what you hear today. I’d love to hear from you. So make sure that you subscribe to this show on Apple podcasts or wherever you’re listening to this and of course, I’d love for you to share this episode on social media use the hashtag good girls get tag me, I’m at @Karenyankovich. I’ll be sure to share your post with my audience. And this is how we all get more visibility.   

 

If you go to the show notes for this episode, KarenYankovich.com/089. You’ll see the blog, you’ll see all the notes for the show all the links we talked about. This is a good one. You’ll also see a link to speak pipe where you can leave us an audio review and let us know what kinds what you thought of this episode, but also what kinds of shows maybe you’d like us to have moving forward. This week. We have AJ Wilcox on the show. And this is a banner day for the good girls get rich podcast because AJ is our very first male guest in 88 episodes of women. Now we’ve got the male perspective. And I wanted AJ to come on to the show because people ask me a lot about LinkedIn advertising. And, you know, I can talk the talk but my company does not provide that as a service. We focus on strategy and execution of that strategy.   Energy and profiles and really positioning you to get the client. But I know that right now, we don’t have the bandwidth to do the job that I want to do on the advertising. So we partner with AJ, his company, when we need to bring in the best. And let me just tell you, He is the best in the world at LinkedIn advertising. I’m so grateful to have him on the show. Just a little heads up. We definitely geek out with analytics on the show. So if you love the geeky techie, analytic type stuff, you’re going to love this episode, if you don’t listen in, because I think you’re going to get some great insights as well. But when the time comes, that you’re ready to geek out and understand a little bit about LinkedIn advertising. This is the show for you.   

 

So I’m not going to keep babbling here. I can’t wait for you to meet AJ Wilcox. Okay, it’s a big day on good girls get rich. We have AJ Wilcox here. He is a LinkedIn ads pro who founded B2linked.com. LinkedIn ads specific ad agency 2014 as official LinkedIn partners they manage among the world’s most sophisticated advertising accounts worldwide. He’s a ginger. He’s a triathlete. He and his wife was in Utah with their four kids. And his company car is a wicked fast go court. And did you hear how I said he’s a ginger and his company car. AJ has the distinct honor of being the very first male guest on good girls get rich. So I am so excited to have you here. AJ, I can’t wait to talk to welcome to the girls get rich and thanks for doing this for us.   

AJ Wilcox  3:37    

Oh, thank you so much. How flattered I am to be the first man here. This is awesome. I feel a little bit silly. But I’ve been a listener of the podcast for a long time. But I’m like, Oh, this is this is for women, but I still get a lot of value out of it.  

Karen Yankovich  3:51    

Well, you know in you know in the very first episode I talked about the fact that I focus in on women because I think women have a harder time stepping into their into their greatness then men do, I just think that they have a heart, they just need a little more hand holding. So that’s really why. And on LinkedIn, it’s so important that you understand that you’re really positioning yourself with the value that you bring to the world. And women are like, I got it, don’t worry about it. And I’m like, No, no, people need to know why you have it. They need to know what makes you, you know, the best at what you do. Right? So that’s really why we focused on women. But you know, on that topic, I get asked so much, AJ, about LinkedIn ads, and I can talk to talk probably better than many people probably better than most people. But I also know that is not something that I am the best at. And that’s why I wanted to bring you on the show. Because when people say to me, what do I do? Who do I go to for LinkedIn ads, I say you need to go to AJ.  

Is LinkedIn strategy. Its its positioning and strategy and building relationships on a very micro targeted level, right, who is the exact right person that you can connect with and develop a relationship with on LinkedIn, that’s going to take your business to the next stratosphere, right, one person at a time, not 100 people at a time. So that’s where I shine. And while I can talk about LinkedIn ads, and strategy and the value of your company page, and we’ve done podcasts on the company page, I really wanted to bring you on to talk about LinkedIn ads, because it is getting hot. Do you see that happening?   

AJ Wilcox  5:38    

Absolutely. You know, I started this company five years ago. And I was like, man, I wonder if I’ll even be able to sort to support my family on, you know, this tiny little platform that no one knows about or cares about. But certainly in the last like, year and a half, it just feels like it’s just gotten a bigger and bigger topic out there. And y ou know, we’re at a point right now where we have way more leads than we can service, and it’s a pretty cool place to be.   

Karen Yankovich  6:02    

That is a pretty cool place to be. Because here’s the thing. You know, if you’re talking about, like, say Facebook ads, for example, you can mess around with it. And you can say, you know what, I’ve got $1,000 I’m going to throw at this and I’m going to mess around with it and kind of like I’m walking into a casino, right? I’m okay, if I lose that thousand dollars, that isn’t gonna get you far on LinkedIn ads, right? So to me, I would much rather spend that thousand dollars and or whatever I need to spend on somebody that knows what they’re doing. You know, where you can mess around and not lose a whole lot of money before maybe you dial in your Facebook ads. I don’t think it’s the same for LinkedIn ads. I think you really need to know what you’re doing. What do you think?   

AJ Wilcox  6:46    

Yeah, I think you’re right on on that one. I mean, Facebook ads was so hot. And it still is, for one very specific reason. It was cheap enough that you could make mistakes. And LinkedIn has never been a platform. So cheap that you could make mistakes and not care. And so everyone out there who’s doing business to business targeting on Facebook, yeah, their sales teams are telling them, Hey, this is bad quality, we got to throw all these leads out, you know, we got to throw 60% of our leads out because they’re not a good fit. But because the cost was so low, it almost didn’t matter. But now we’re getting to this, this point where Facebook is starting to get a lot more expensive, because everyone is using it. And you know, LinkedIn has not had a huge price increase, like we’re seeing on Facebook, really ever. So I’m excited to start seeing as you know, more and more people are going wow, Facebook doesn’t make sense. Because it’s gotten so expensive. You know, we’re paying three bucks a click for, for on targeted traffic, pretty much LinkedIn, we’ve got the most precise traffic. And I think we’re going to see a lot more people paying attention.  

Karen Yankovich  7:52    

And you know, here’s what I find. I mean, in the in the little bit of messing around I’ve done with LinkedIn ads, I find that when I do too target on LinkedIn with ads, first, let’s just say it’s for webinars or things like that, those people end up being my buyers. And that’s huge, right? That’s huge. Because I can see that and I know who they are. And they’re the people that sign up for the strategy calls and become my buyers beyond this. Right. So let’s, let’s take a few steps back. And let’s like, I want to kind of start in the beginning. Right. So I know and you know, but let’s just kind of put out there that on LinkedIn, LinkedIn ads had to be run from your company page. So tell us a little bit about that. Like, what should we be doing on our company page today, to start being positioned to be able to do LinkedIn ads tomorrow or in the future?  

AJ Wilcox  8:49   

Yeah, great question. And one that the answer might disappoint a little bit. The company page really doesn’t matter all that much for ads, what we found is, it’s usually like three to 5% of the people who interact with an ad will end up clicking through to the company page. So what I want to make sure you know, is if you’re not super proud of your company page, let’s say you’re not posting you know, twice a week like you should or whatever. Don’t let that deter you from advertising, because you know, only three to 5% of the people who are clicking will be exposed to it, the things you do need to worry about are like your logo, because that’s going to show up at the top of every ad. So make sure your company logo looks good. It’s a good fit. And then company page followers. It’s one of those just social proof kind of metrics that is going to be visible. So do whatever you can to get more company page followers before you start, just because the more social proof, the better.  

Karen Yankovich  9:48    

Okay, so let’s talk about that for a second. Because I, you know, I teach LinkedIn. So because I teach LinkedIn, I do a lot of speaking on LinkedIn, I have a ton of LinkedIn connections on my personal page, not because I go after that, because I absolutely don’t. But it just because people connect with me, because I’ve whatever. But I my link on my company page, like I think I have 11,000 on my personal profile, I think I have under 200. So how do you get more followers? Do you need to use LinkedIn ads? To get more followers?  

AJ Wilcox  10:18    

No, you don’t. And in fact, I tell people, I encourage people to not use LinkedIn ads to grow your company page followers, just because the costs are pretty high. I would almost suggest running Facebook ads or Twitter ads, targeting maybe the right kind of people to, you know, get as close as you can to ask them to come to LinkedIn and follow your company page. Just because the way that LinkedIn works, you’re probably going to pay six to $9 a click anyway for an ad. So if you’re asking people to like your company page and follow you, you know, you’re going to be like 13 $14 per follower. And that’s just a lot of money per follower.   

Karen Yankovich  10:59    

Yeah, that’s interesting. But you know, I do find that recently, LinkedIn is we’re putting a little bit more attention to it. So my followers are growing more quickly, they’re right, people are getting invited to my company page, when they accept my, you know, when they accept a connection request from me, which is a new feature that LinkedIn has been offering, right. I’ve been posting more on my company page, and then sharing it to my personal profile. And that is, has been getting me more followers on my company page. Right. So I’ve been doing a few strategies to grow that, because frankly, up until recently, I’ve almost kind of ignored my company page. It’s been kind of like a brochure, I wanted the logo, you know, I wanted the logos next to my experience section on my profile, right? I really wasn’t using it strategically. So now, in the past, maybe six months I have been. So that’s really interesting. So don’t worry too much about page just focus a little bit on the metrics and the number of followers. Yeah,  

AJ Wilcox  12:00    

I’m sure as you know, LinkedIn had it in pilot, but they pulled it out before I got a hold of it, where you’re going to be able to invite your connections to follow your company page. So when we all get that, I think that’ll probably be a good, a good way of upping our company page numbers. And what I tell most of our clients is, hey, just shoot an email around to everyone in the company, your employees, the executive team, even friends or partners of the organization, just saying, Hey, here’s our page, if you wouldn’t mind, just make sure you’re following it. And that can give you a nice little boost, you know, right out of the gate, as long as you’ve got enough people that your company works with?  

Karen Yankovich  12:37    

Yeah, yeah, interesting. My brain is working a little bit on a couple of ways that I can I can get this up, like maybe I’ll do some kind of a email marketing campaign that’s like one, learn how to use your LinkedIn company page, follow mine, and you can watch what I do. Right. So, interesting.   

AJ Wilcox  12:55    

You know, something I just thought of a while back, it’s probably been a couple years ago, my background in digital marketing is I was known as an SEO guy. So I had all of my SEO skills all endorsed up to 99 Plus, and that was all LinkedIn was suggesting to people. But I of course, wanted to be known for LinkedIn ads, and social advertising and business to business marketing. So I ended up moving those skills to the top of my profile. And then I just did a simple post on LinkedIn to my connections, saying, hey, if you wouldn’t mind, I’m trying to get my skills up my endorsements up, would you mind just going and, you know, endorsing me for my top three skills, and I’d be happy to return the favor. And that post, I mean, within nine hours, I went from something that had six endorsements all the way to 99 Plus, and I would imagine you could follow the same strategy with your company page. And yeah, post out to your connections and say, if you wouldn’t mind, please follow my company page. I’m trying to get numbers up. And a lot of your followers I’m sure would support.  

Karen Yankovich  13:55    

That’s a great idea. Okay, so anything else about the company page that we should be thinking about before we move on to whatever it is, because I’m going to leave this in your lap to whatever it is we move on to next? Because I you know, I’m I want to approach this with a beginner’s mind, I want you to kind of tell me, if you had a dream client, what would they be doing? What would they be doing now? And before they came to you?  

AJ Wilcox  14:17    

Yeah, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head for company pages. not that important for advertising in general. So if you’ve got good logo, you’ve upped your page followers as much as you can. And you know, let’s say you’ve shared your share a couple times a month, I think that’s enough to show that the lights are on in somebody’s home.  

Karen Yankovich  14:36    

Ok. Ok. So then what what what is working for LinkedIn ads? What, what kind of ads are working? And what kinds of I don’t know what I mean, people using them to get to fill to build their email list? Are they using them to get sales conversations? Or both? What What is, you know, what is working best these days?  

AJ Wilcox  14:57    

Well, Karen, this is a super important question. Because you know, what, this is something that we call the offer, it’s like, what is the call to action from your ad. And regardless of the audience, regardless of the ad format you choose, you’re going to have to ask someone to do something. And we know that there are some things that are appropriate to cold traffic. And we know that some types of offers are not. So I’ll walk you through how I think of the initial offer, because this is really where you have to start with LinkedIn ads.  

Karen Yankovich  15:26    

Perfect, thank you.  

AJ Wilcox  15:28    

So imagine any sort of call to action that you might give to someone, you might have something as light touch, or low friction as come and read my blog post. And then you might have something as heavy of a touch. And as high friction as like, you know, click here to talk to my sales rap, or open up your wallet and buy something. And so in my mind, those are the extremes, the super low touch and the super high touch. And anytime that you ask someone to do something, it’s going to fall under the spectrum of low friction too high friction. So both of those extremes really don’t work very well on LinkedIn. And the reason why, if we go to the super low touch, kind of just come and read my blog post, come and see this infographic I made, you’ll be able to get people who wants to come and do that, because you’re providing a lot of value. And it’s free, and you’re not asking for anything, which is great for your brand. But at the same time when you’re advertising, you’re going to be paying six to $9 a click for that traffic going to a blog post, and blog post don’t have an inherently high conversion rate. So at some point, you’re going to have to say to yourself, all right, I’m paying, you know, 500 to $1,000, for a conversion here, that may or may not be worth it. And you know, that’s pretty high. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you’ve got these really high friction kinds of offers, like talk to our sales rep, buy something, you know, offers that they’re too salesy, it’s it’s asking too much too soon from cold traffic. And that’s not going to work in an ad. Because anytime you show someone an ad that says click here to talk to sales, no one wants to convert, and no one wants to click. And so the ad will just essentially shut off because no one’s clicking on it. So where you really want to be on LinkedIn is somewhere in the middle, where at least you’re going to get an email address out of the commitment. So we found lower touch types of things that can still be gated to get an email address would be like a free checklist or a cheat sheet, you might have more of kind of mid range that’s like download this free guide or an ebook, you might have something that’s a little higher, like come and attend this free in person event I’m putting on or join this free webinar I’m doing. But all of those things, you’re providing serious value for people at a high interest. And all you’re asking of them is you know, first name, last name, email, sometimes phone number. And that’s really the right way to approach LinkedIn.  

Karen Yankovich  18:01    

Knowing that at the same time, you’re still looking at that eight to $10 an opt in or is it more like $15? It’s at $10 a click. So how much is it for each person that actually gives you their email address, on average, still at $10? Or is it higher than that?  

AJ Wilcox  18:18    

Oh, great question. Yeah, so you’re going to pay eight to, we’ll call it six to nine might be more like eight to $10 to get someone to your landing page. And then you have a conversion rate on that landing page. Let’s say you’ve got a really valuable webinar, that’s, you know, it’s promising to solve all of their pain points, that thing is going to convert at like 20 to 25%. So you do the math on that. And you might be like a 20 $25 cost per opt in. Or let’s say you just take any old white paper that was sitting around it in the in the annex, and it’s not super valuable, it doesn’t solve problems, that thing might have more like a six to an 8% cost per second version. And you might be paying more light or sorry, yeah, yeah, six to 8% conversion rate. And so you might end up paying something like 90 to $120 per conversion. So the goal for me is always what is the content that is so irresistible, that I can get those 20% conversion rates, so I can get my cost per opt in down to like, the 25 $35 range, that would be really good on  

Karen Yankovich  19:24    

LinkedIn. Awesome, awesome. So what kind of ads are those?  

AJ Wilcox  19:31    

I think for the most part, you know, I would tell people start with what’s called sponsored content. So these are the ads that show up right in the in the news feed. And the reason why I tell people start here, there are a really nice middle of the road ad. If any of you are by a computer right now, or if you’re on your mobile, open the LinkedIn app, look at the second item in your newsfeed, it’ll say promoted. And that’s an example of sponsored content, they can come as like a single image, which I’m recommending anyone who wants to get started, start with a single image app. And it’s just, it’s a text intro, a big image, and then a text headline, and that’s it. But it can also look like a video, it could look like a carousel ad. So very versatile and what they can do. But if you start with that one, you’re going to pay in that $69 a click range, depending on how competitive that audience is, it’s a lot of room to put in whatever call to action you want. So you know if it’s if you’re throwing a free in person events that you’re going to use for lead gen, or if you’re asking someone to download a checklist, or a cheat sheet, all of that can be within the same ad format. There are others as well. But that’s probably where I’d recommend starting.  

Karen Yankovich  20:45    

Okay, so what tell us tell us a little bit about what the other ad formats are? What do you use them for?  

AJ Wilcox  20:51    

Okay, the next ad format that I’d recommend is called text ads. And these are only visible on the computer. So if you’re on your mobile, sorry, you won’t be able to see these. But on the desktop, it’s in the right rail, you’ll see three ads, like three text ads on top of each other with tiny little, you know, 100 by 100 pixel images. And they’re really hard to see. And they are obviously ads. So because of those two things, the click through rates on them are just tiny, you’re still only paying when someone clicks. So you don’t really care about the click through rate all too much, you just care that you have enough people clicking to come to your landing page. But if you’re targeting a very specific kind of audience with click through rates that are in the point zero to 5% range, so that’s two and a half clicks every 10,000 times these ads are shown it, it’s going to be hard to spend any real money. But if you have a very large audience, this is the cheapest ad format. And you know, probably the most low risk.  

Karen Yankovich  21:57    

So these are the ones I’m looking at my LinkedIn, my LinkedIn page on desk right now that they say promoted.  

AJ Wilcox  22:04    

Yes, yep. And you’ll see three text ads underneath with tiny little images. Yeah, yeah. So those are text ads. I know because they’re so low risk. And they’re the lowest cost ad, you might pay, you know, three to $5 per click on average for these, I recommend them to only about 15% of advertisers. But they really do work nicely as a companion to, to sponsored content.  

Karen Yankovich  22:28    

Because you’re just getting more visibility, and more people see things, the more.  

AJ Wilcox  22:34    

And because they get shown thousands of times before anyone clicks. They are pretty much free branding. It’s anytime that you’re running these together, you’ll notice that your your sponsored content will get like 20% higher click through rates. And it’s simply because the branding, it’s you know, the lift and running both of these together.  

Karen Yankovich  22:56    

Interesting. And you know, think about how much money people spend on Superbowl ads, right? It’s just the visibility of it. Yeah, yeah. So people can see your name.  

AJ Wilcox  23:05    

Exactly.  

Karen Yankovich  23:06    

Okay, so what other what other kind of ads are there?  

AJ Wilcox  23:08    

Alright, so I’ll give you two more. And I recommend them less than less as we go. So  

Karen Yankovich  23:14    

the next one, here, we want to know,  

AJ Wilcox  23:17    

that’s right. I’ll dish all the dirt like I’m I’m anyway. So sponsored in mail is the next ad format. And this one’s kind of a sexy ad format to a lot of people, they really like this idea of being able to pay to deliver a very specific message to someone they come across like the normal email that you might send on the platform if you had Sales Navigator or LinkedIn Pro, but these ones say promoted. And you can personalize them a little bit like you can do insert, first name, insert, last name, company name, job title, you know, industry, you can personalize it a little bit. So it feels a little bit more personal. But really this is it’s a bulk message that you send out to a chunk of people that you’re advertising to. But I think the reason that people get caught up here is they go, ooh, this doesn’t sound like it’s very bad, we’re paying 35 to 85 cents per person that we send it to. That sounds pretty cheap compared to the six to $9. a click, AJ tells me I’ll be paying somewhere else. But what you need to understand is on these ones, you pay to send it to someone, and then only about 50% of the people who get it will open it. And then only about 3% of the people who’ve opened it will click on it. So you do that math quickly. And you’re like, Ooh, that’s like a 25 to a $50 cost per click. So I only recommend these to about 5% of advertisers. And those 5%, I do recommend it to it’s for one reason, and one reason only, they have a special offer something that feels like a personal invitation. So I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you’re going to let’s say you’re coming out with a new software tool, or something like that for your industry. If you send out sponsored email that said, because of who you are in the industry, I want to give you early access, or a sneak peek to this new tool or this new information. You’re fluffing up their ego, they’re they’re feeling like they’re valued. And they’re going to be a lot more likely to want to open want to click and convert. Maybe you’re even throwing an in person event, you can say we want to invite you as a VIP to this, this event, you’ll come and network with your peers come have drinks on us. Those are the kinds of offers that work really well here. If you are only asking someone to join your webinar, or download your white paper or talk to a sales rep, this is going to be one of the most expensive ad formats you’ve ever used.  

Karen Yankovich  25:45    

Okay, got it. Got it. Okay, so there’s one more you want to tell us about right?  

AJ Wilcox  25:50    

Oh, yes, the last one is called dynamic ads. Every once in a while when you load a page, you will see an ad that your image actually gets uploaded to so you you’ll see an ad that has your your face in it, maybe next to some company’s logo. I recommend these two zero percent of advertisers, please do not use them. They are terrible. They have click through rates that are low like text ads. And then they have cost per click that are higher than sponsored content. So if you ask me if I want to pay more for something that’s less effective, my answer is always going to be now.  

Karen Yankovich  26:24    

Yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh, so so good. Okay, so now I want to dive a little deeper, and talk a little bit about targeting.  

AJ Wilcox  26:34    

Targeting is the best part. This is the reason why we pay LinkedIn premium prices.  

Karen Yankovich  26:38    

Yeah, yeah. And it’s changed a lot in the last couple of years, which is why I’ve been paying more attention and why I think more people need to pay more attention is LinkedIn is, is giving us more targeting options than they’ve given us, at least as of like two years ago, we didn’t have the kind of targeting options we have today.  

AJ Wilcox  26:57    

You’re absolutely right. Yeah, when LinkedIn very first started, they had something like 810 different targeting facets, and they’re all very helpful. And we still use them on the regular. These are things like your job title, what department you work in, which they call job function, what level of seniority you are skills you have on your profile groups that your members have company, name, company, size, company, industry, all of these are really, really important targeting facets. But like you mentioned here, about two years ago, they started getting on the bandwagon, pretty much trying to catch up to Facebook, which is great, because Facebook has awesome technologies. And about two years ago, they gave us the ability to upload email addresses, up to 300,000 of them for targeting. And we can also do the same thing with company names. So if you said, Hey, AJ, I want to advertise to CEOs of the Fortune 500. We go and scrape a list of the Fortune 500, upload it right into LinkedIn, and then overlay like job title SEO on top of that, and you are reaching the most sought after audience in the world.

  Karen Yankovich  28:04    

Oh my gosh, that’s awesome. So how do you know how do you make determinations around targeting? I mean, I would imagine it’s different for every single ad campaign. Right, but what kinds of things should we be thinking about?  

AJ Wilcox  28:17    

Yeah, this is a, this is a funny one to ask me, because we have a system that we use for all of the targeting that we build. And it’s it really is a system, but it would be the equivalent of buying a Ferrari just to drive to the grocery store, like, I mean, kind of overload all of you, you’re going to all say this is crazy. But I hope you still kind of get the value out of it. So imagine you came to me and said, We want to target chief marketing officers. In my mind, I’m immediately thinking, Oh, I have four different ways I can reach a CMO, I can reach them by job title, I can reach them by job function, marketing, plus seniority of C level or cx out, I can reach them by marketing skills with a sea level filter of seniority. And then I can also reach them by marketing groups with again, a CXO seniority on top. So imagine this, you’re going after one kind of person. But you’ve built four separate campaigns, a job function, a job title, a skill and a group campaign. And even if you are running exactly the same two ads, inside of each of these four campaigns, you’re going to start to notice little personality differences. So the way that LinkedIn classifies each type of person, we know they only understand about 30% of job titles. So if we’re targeting by job title, we know it’s going to cost a little bit more, because there’s less inventory around them and a little bit more competitive. But it’s also a really specific audience. So maybe the lead quality is high enough to justify the higher cost. Maybe skills are so broad, that it’s bringing in some unqualified people. And even if the cost per lead or cost per click is low, it doesn’t make sense, and you want to shut it off. So these are the types of optimizations you can do along the way. As long as they’re broken out. If you start with just one really broad campaign, with all of your different audience segments, all kind of, you know, thrown together in it. When the performance comes out, if it’s either good or bad, or somewhere in between, you don’t have a lever, you don’t, you didn’t learn anything. But if they are broken up into separate campaigns, when one performs better than the other, and now you know that the only difference was a little bit of targeting that you did. Now you’re learning about your audience, it’s like generating leads, at the same time as running a private focus group.   That’s awesome. And you know what, that’s really one of the, that’s, you know, that’s where we’re separating people that are serious about this from people that are messing around with it. I think, you know, if you if you’re messing around with it, you know, here’s the thing on if you’ve got a couple thousand dollars, or 10,000, or 50,000, or a million dollars to spend on this, I would much rather see you spend the money to have somebody that knows what they’re doing, do that, then throw that money out the window while you’re learning how to do that. Does that make sense?    Absolutely. And I be trading myself a little bit here with this opinion. But that’s the way I learned, you know, I was working for a company. And they just they threw gobs of cash at me until I figured it out. But now I’m running this agency.  

Karen Yankovich  31:28    

We’re all jealous of you, by the way for that cost of you for that, because the rest of the world is like where do I find $100,000? It doesn’t LinkedIn ads.  

AJ Wilcox  31:36    

Exactly. I mean, I got, I got paid to to develop a deep session, which is pretty awesome. But yeah, if you asked me like, what should I do? I mean, I have a course out there on LinkedIn learning, that’s great for getting to learn it by yourself. I’ve got all kinds of content and YouTube videos that anyone can learn what it is that that we do buy our strategy. But really, if you hired someone like us, who deeply specializes, you end up you know, short cutting all of that steep learning curve on a platform that because it’s expensive, any mistake becomes expensive. So if you something you want to try, like, I’ve even got a free checklist that I can offer your your listeners that helps them know what they need to get in place. But yeah, reach out to me and  

Karen Yankovich  32:22    

We’re totally going to put links to all of that in the show notes, because I want all of that. And I want everybody else to  have all of that.    But let me ask you. So let’s talk about some success stories. Right? So I am, let me just pick it pick something. Let’s start with like, I’m a small business owner, I was small sales organization, I five sales guys. You know, in the past, I had inside sales people that were picking up the phone and making cold calls, those days are over, nobody’s even answering their phone. And even if you’re calling them for legitimate reasons, they don’t want you to call in them without an appointment right? In 2019. So so now they’re and they here, okay, digital marketing, inbound marketing, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and I’m like, you know, all that stuff is great, but like the businesses on LinkedIn. So basically, what I teach people from their personal profiles, is how to micro target and find the exact right people to get on the phone with. So that you’re you’re talking to less people with them more targeted, and you’re you have a better chance for success, right? How do we put some fuel under that with LinkedIn ads?  

AJ Wilcox  33:25    

Oh, I love this. So the exact way that you teach people how to target how to micro target and find their right prospect, we can use pretty much the same filters on our ads. So imagine this, your sales department is, is on their personal profiles, going out making connections, starting conversations in hopes of having a sales conversation? How much more likely are they going to be to respond to you when they’ve seen your ads? And subliminally they’re thinking, oh, I’ve heard of that company before. They must be legit. When we work in concert with a with an outbound sales team. Results are phenomenal. So yeah, definitely both work super well together.  

Karen Yankovich  34:05    

Yeah, awesome. Awesome. And, you know, the the, the reality is we I see, you know what, let’s take this down a notch. Okay, so, so from the small sales team, let’s go to the entrepreneur, maybe your solo printer, right. And, and I see this a lot, I see people that are struggling a little bit, they want to make the first six figures and I, I often get when people come to me, it’s when they’re making that six figures, maybe even multiple, six figures. And they’re like, why is the 30 money in my bank account? Because that’s not enough money as an entrepreneur. That’s not the same as a six figure paycheck, right? But my budget is a little tighter. Right? But But if I carefully budget this, I know I’ve got a $5,000 offer. So let’s say I have a $5,000 offer, do you think I could use LinkedIn ads to help me target people and make that make it profitable to fill my $5,000 offers? Yeah, it’s certainly possible.  

AJ Wilcox  35:01    

But here’s what I want to keep, I want you to keep in mind, we’ve talked about the offer, how you can’t just go right for the I want you to become a lead, you’ve got to you know, draw them in with content. So if you’re paying six to $9, a click to get people interested in the content, and then you’re nurturing those, and you might, you know, let’s say 10 people join your webinar. And you know, three of them end up responding, you know, two of them end up doing demos, and then one ends up closing, you know, that would be fantastic ratios. But if you have something that’s more like a checklist, where, you know, maybe it takes 20 people downloading before one of them responds to your emails, what you’re seeing is the sales cycle takes a little bit longer, and it’s going to cost more money over time to acquire them. And because of this, you really do need to have a pretty large lifetime value of a customer when you close it, to make sure that you get enough return on your investment, because you invested so much into it. What I tell people is  

Karen Yankovich  36:06    

this, because it’s so important, we know this, it’s so important to know this  

AJ Wilcox  36:10    

Totally, and it’s really important to be real, because you talked to any ad network, and there’s can talk like their crap doesn’t stand get out. You got to be real. And if it’s if it’s not a good fit, like, you don’t want someone to come on, say, oh, man, I invested all this money and and it didn’t work. And then they go around and be a detractor for your brand. So that’s the last thing I’d want?  

Karen Yankovich  36:30    

Oh, yes, absolutely.  

AJ Wilcox  36:31    

Yeah. So I tell people, if you’re going to make $15,000 or more, when you close the deal, LinkedIn makes sense. 100% of the time, if you’re less, if you’re more like that $5,000 range, there is no reason why you can’t tiptoe into it, you know, you start out with your most core audience, your best kind of offer or content, and then start with very small budgets, very low bids, and just chip away at that audience looking for gold. If you can find that offer that converts at 20%, then that gives you a lot of confidence that you can start to spend more money and more money, but just start small. And, you know, try to keep everything really tight. Don’t do what LinkedIn tells you, which is, you know, go at it with gobs and gobs of money. And, you know, and let them charge you too much.  

Karen Yankovich  37:19    

Yeah, yeah. Oh, my goodness. So what did I ask you that we that I should have asked you that we didn’t cover?  

AJ Wilcox  37:27    

Oh, we could actually talk about additional targeting. So I started telling you about the matched audiences where you can upload email addresses and company names. But they come out with quite a few other things since that are pretty exciting. So LinkedIn has always allowed you to target by who someone is professionally. But what it’s lacked are more of those things like intent filters, and you know, the kinds of things that you’d get if you were targeting on Google. It’s like, oh, if someone’s searching for something, I know what they’re in the market for. And I can provide that to them. So LinkedIn spit been at a disadvantage with this. But in just the last six months, they came out with two new targeting types that are really meant to hone in on behavior, rather than just who someone is.  

Karen Yankovich  38:13    

That’s, that’s enormous. That’s enormous. AJ, Yeah,  

AJ Wilcox  38:17    

it is. And I wish it were huger  

Karen Yankovich  38:19    

And now you’re putting content in front of people that you hope were interested in what you’re doing, now you’re putting your content in front of people, you know, are interested in what you’re doing.   

AJ Wilcox  38:27    

Exactly.  

Karen Yankovich  38:28    

Oh my gosh, that’s huge.   

AJ Wilcox  38:30

     So for instance, if we ever wanted to target someone who was a b2b marketer, we had very few options, we would target marketers. And then we’d look in the industries and realize, ah, there’s no such thing as b2b industry. And here, we have to go with either like Internet, or computer software or, or something that’s closest, so I wouldn’t be able to catch b2b buyers. But now because of interests, I can say, I’m going to target market with the right seniority at the right company size, and then I can go and overlay an interest in business to business. And that hits the right audience this time.  

Karen Yankovich  39:10    

Very cool. Very cool. So okay, I’m gonna let you keep talking about about what’s recently come out that I didn’t ask you and then I want to ask you another question that came up as you were saying that  

AJ Wilcox  39:23    

Awesome. Well, there are some other things that LinkedIn knows about you by your behavior. Like, if you keep logging into your, your profile, from different cities around the country or around other countries, they know that you’re a business traveler, and so they can put you in the segment that’s like, OH, as a business traveler, let’s let people like Amex or delta, target him who might want access to an executive traveler, you can do things like they know, if you have applied to a job, or clicked on at least three job postings on LinkedIn. They go off ages in the market for a job, let’s let advertiser’s be able to target someone who is actively looking for a job or exclude them if you don’t want active job seekers looking at your ads. So really exciting stuff that really hasn’t been tapped into. And if you just go look at LinkedIn targeting options, they’re kind of hard to find. And it’s a little bit of a yard sale. Like you’re looking at all these things, and there’s not real organization, you just have to read through them and see if any of them are what you’re looking for. But lots of new cool stuff coming on the horizon. And it’s not like LinkedIn targeting was no bad at all before this. It’s just getting better and better.  

Karen Yankovich  40:35    

So cool. So is there such a thing as retargeting?  

AJ Wilcox  40:39    

Great question, yes, there is and retargeting I’ve, I’ve kind of been a little bit of a detractor on. Since it’s been out. So retargeting on LinkedIn has been out for about two years. It requires someone to land on your landing page or your website.   

Karen Yankovich  40:57   

And then buyers you to have put a pixel on that page.   

AJ Wilcox  41:00    

Exactly, yes.   

Karen Yankovich  41:02    

Right. So let’s, let’s just say that and I’ll put a link in the show notes, too. I think LinkedIn has a great page that tells you exactly how to insert that pixel on your website.  

AJ Wilcox  41:13    

Exactly. And there’s something else really cool about that pixel that you might have already covered in your trainings or on other podcast episodes. But we can talk about it remind me to come back to web demographics. But yeah, you place this pixel on your website. every visitor that that comes to the website, LinkedIn tries to place a cookie on their browser so that it can identify them the next time they are, they come back, or Yeah, when the next time they go to LinkedIn. What happens though, is about half of browsers don’t accept cookies anymore. Anyone on an iPhone or an iPad, or anyone using Safari, so pretty much any Apple user, or anyone using Mozilla Firefox, all of those users, they don’t accept a cookie. So if you’re paying LinkedIn prices, like six to $9 per person to get to your website, half of them aren’t even making it into your retargeting audience. And then what happens is the cookie only lives for 90 days. So you’re investing into this, this audience that just evaporates after one quarter. And I think the nail in the coffin for me on retargeting on LinkedIn is just that LinkedIn is not the network that you go and spend a ton of time on. And the whole value of retargeting is staying in front of people staying Top of Mind wherever they are.  

Karen Yankovich  42:31    

So you’re saying exists, but you’re not really using it a lot.  

AJ Wilcox  42:35    

Yeah, and we will use it because there’s no downside to using it, you will get a little bit lower of a cost per click as you’re bringing people who are already been exposed to your brand back. But the real magic is if you’re advertising on Google or Facebook, or both, what you do is you use LinkedIn to get the right traffic to your your website. These are people that you know are your your right customers. And then you use facebook, facebook and Google’s retargeting to stay in front of them. They are superior technologies. Google is going to reach them anytime they’re on pretty much any website on the web, anything that uses Google AdSense, and Facebook has them anytime they are on Facebook or Instagram. And both are going to be probably around $1 per click. So you pay six to $9 a click from LinkedIn to get the right people there. And then you pay $1 a click to stay in front of them. That’s the real like best retargeting strategy.  

Karen Yankovich  43:31    

Awesome. Alright, so let’s talk about the pixel.   

AJ Wilcox  43:34    

Oh, and before we move on, I’ll just tell you, I’m really excited because LinkedIn is retargeting is about to get a lot better. And stop me if I’m getting too technical here. No, no, no.  

Karen Yankovich  43:44    

Because I know there’s a few people that we may be going over your head, but they can come back and listen to this again. I can I know that there’s people that are geeking out about this. And I love that we can do this.  

AJ Wilcox  43:54    

Good. All right, so the people who are taking out your welcome everyone else. I’m really sorry. But I’ll I’ll try to make it super simple. Right now you have to have a cookie on your browser to be recognized by retargeting. But that’s not how Facebook does it. It’s not how Google does it. At least not solely. They’re using something that’s called engagement retargeting. It doesn’t require the cookie, it just requires that the network is keeping track of who is interacting with what. So LinkedIn is going to have this in probably the next quarter or two. It’s coming. It’s on the roadmap. But it’s engagement retargeting where you can say, hey, if you’ve clicked on my ad, if you’ve liked, commented, or re shared it, if you’ve visited my company page, if you’ve watched at least 20% of one of my videos. The next time you come back, I want to show you something else, or I want to show you something in addition. So right now I’m not super excited about LinkedIn retargeting, but once we have engagement retargeting, I am going to be really excited.  

Karen Yankovich  44:53    

Got it, got it.  

AJ Wilcox  44:55    

Okay, so now we can, we can talk about the insight tag. So insight tag down three different things. This is the piece of JavaScript that you can place on every page of your website. If you are an advertiser, this becomes your, your conversion tracking. So this is how your ad, your ad platform knows how many people that it sent ended up turning into leads are closing. So that’s the job of this pixel. But it also does two other really important things. The second thing is it builds audiences for retargeting like we talked about. So if you do decide to use LinkedIn retargeting, you know, that’s what’s placing that cookie on people’s browsers. But the third piece that I think is totally under appreciated, is the website demographics. So have you had a chance to cover anything with website definitely  

Karen Yankovich  45:44    

We have not covered that and it’s a tough we cut we touched on it, I think a little bit, but we’ve not really dived into it. So let’s dive into it.  

AJ Wilcox  45:53    

Great. Okay, I’m glad to get to break the news to everyone. The website demographic, so LinkedIn, when you’re advertising, they will give you demographic reporting on who’s interacting with your ads. So you’ll have this little reporting station you can go into where you can see your your ads traffic, by what job function they are, what seniority they are, what job titles, what companies they tend to be coming from, you know, what geographies they tend to be coming from, and it’s, you know, kind of a check on your targeting to make sure you’re hitting the right people. But because that pixel is on your website, every time that a visitor comes, LinkedIn, checks them and says, ooh, I know that you have a LinkedIn profile, I know who you are, I’m going to take a note of this. So totally for free, all you had to do is install this tag on every page of your website, which I’m sure your webmaster can do very quickly. Now you’re getting that the same level of reporting about the demographics of everyone on your website, and it costs you nothing, you can see what seniority is 10 to visit my website, what, what geographies are people coming from. And even more importantly, this is a little bit of a hack, you can create segments. So you can say, I want to look at what do people look like professionally who visit anywhere on my website? And I want to compare that to what do people look like professionally who come to my offer pages? And then now I want to know, what do people look like professionally who have converted? You know, they’ve downloaded an offer from me, they’ve, you know, taken some extra step. And you can look at the differences along the way and see, Oh, am I getting the right people to my website, because they look like the people who’ve already taken action. And, you know, it’s really helpful to help you plan how you get traffic later on.  

Karen Yankovich  47:46    

And it’s completely free, you just haven’t, you have to have an ad account, to get this insight tag, and then place the insight tag on there. And then once I don’t even remember what the number is, but I think it’s something like 200 hits to your website, it’s a low number. Once you have some number of hits to your website, it starts to provide you with all of us reporting, which is cool, right, which is just cool. It’s good. It’s cool to see the different kinds of people. And you know, and then you can, again, this is where you would sit down depending on, depending on your business’s resources, and depending on your level of skill, I guess in some of this geeky stuff yourself, what can you what you do with this information? So what kinds of cool things have you seen people do with this free website demographics information?  

AJ Wilcox  48:34    

Well, I think one of the biggest pieces is if you are advertising somewhere else, let’s say you’re advertising on Google, or you’re advertising on Facebook, it’s a really solid check to understand whether or not you are wasting your money. So if you’re doing a lot of Google, you’re getting people by the keyword they’re typing, they’re, they’re looking for a service like what you do, but you can’t qualify who they are. So if your product costs a lot, you probably have target companies that are large enough to have a big enough budget for it. So if you’re looking at your demographics, and you’re like, wow, all this traffic from Google, and they’re all from, you know, one person companies or one to 10 person companies, they can’t afford us, I’m wasting my money there. So it’s kind of a cool insight there. And of course, what LinkedIn wants you to do, they want you to take a look at your website traffic and say, Wow, I wish we had more people that looked like, you know, these very senior people, I wish we had more VP here. And then of course, it’s a natural leader and to say, Oh, you want more of them just come and pay for ads.  

Karen Yankovich  49:36    

So cool. So cool. And it really is, you know, it really is interesting to see this, because this is the stuff that people get frustrated with, when digital marketing doesn’t work. They’re like I’ve been doing this, it doesn’t work. But if you’re not, if you’re not kind of if you’re a way to pay attention to the kinds of people that are responding to your digital marketing, and dialing in and and this doesn’t happen overnight, you know, this, you have to build up to this. But if you are looking to really take your profits to another level, this is the way you do it with digital marketing. It’s by it’s by being more specific about the kinds of people you’re sending to your website, the kinds of people you’re targeting. And and you know, I love that you mentioned this earlier, and I wanted to comment on it, then I love that you talked about the conversion rate on your pages. Because you know, all this is saying is this is who visited your page. But you know, then you want to look at it and go, alright, if I if I’m getting a 12% conversion rate, what do I need to do to this page, forget everything else? What do I initially to do about this page to get a 15% conversion rate? It’s not that you want to scrap the page, like this is what this is what I geek out on digital marketing, once you have something that’s working, I want to know how do I make it work better? Right? How do I get a 20% 20 to 25% conversion? I’ve got you know, like right now, I’m looking at my website demographics on the and the job function is is overwhelmingly that business development 47% of people that hit my website have a business development title. That’s awesome for me, right? That’s awesome for me, but then I look at the next thing. And in the time period, it went down by 15%. I’m looking at going Huh, what did I do in the last week, the drop that can’t micromanage this stuff. But it is stuff that you can pay attention to. Right, you can pay attention to this. And you know, if you’re looking at it, and you know, and you have a company like my company’s LinkedIn marketing, that is inherently business development. So if I’m looking at this, and my you know, let’s say the category that I’m getting the most people at my website is, you know, arts and designs or healthcare services, I have a look at what’s what am i driving to my website? How am I driving the one people to my website, right? So So all of this figures into that conversion rate, you know, if your if your conversion rate is where you want it to be, then you come back with your insights next year. But look at this, like, almost everybody that’s coming to my website is, you know, their job title is engineering. You know, they’re not really that’s not a LinkedIn inherent, necessarily job title. So what am I doing that is driving too much traffic from that demographic, right. So this is how you can just, you know, each percent that you can change that conversion is pure profit,  

AJ Wilcox  52:23    

I hundred percent agree. And in fact, I would even, I would even take that a step further and say that, that really, marketing has not changed in the last 200 years or longer sounds like blasphemy, but it has always been about getting the right message to the right person. And, you know, by being able to hyper target the way that LinkedIn ads cam, it just gives us that ability to make sure that we are giving exactly the right person what they want. And if we put an offer out to someone, we might think it’s amazing. But if it gets a 8% conversion rate, then we know it’s it’s not working. And now we get to go back to the drawing board and fix it. So definitely work more on what is going to be better for the user. rely less on what you think. And it gives you this perfect testing bed that you can just, you know, throw an offer out to the exact right people. And the data will tell you whether you’re right or wrong.  

Karen Yankovich  53:20    

Oh my gosh. Okay, so I’m gonna ask you again, is there anything we didn’t cover that that you think we should cover? I feel like we have overwhelmed people considerably. But the good news is, you’re not going anywhere. I’m not going anywhere. So you know, they can certainly reach out to either one of us if they want to dive deeper into this topic. So what did we not cover?  

AJ Wilcox  53:40

     Oh, I think the one thing I would share is, if you’re considering what types of companies work best for LinkedIn, I think we’ve pretty much hit these like high value lead gen types of offers. But there are a few more that tend to make a lot of sense to and not all of them are even b2b. For instance, if you are just working recruiting, its white collar recruiting, looking to hire a, let’s say, you’re a tech company that’s looking to hire, you know, 50 or 100 more people this year, because you’re growing quickly. Rather than going to recruiter and buying ads from the recruiter side of Lincoln’s business. Instead, open an ad account, target people who already have the job title you’re looking for in that area, and just show them an ad that says, You look qualified, you know, are you interested to see what you could make with us. And, you know, now you’re getting passive candidates, which recruiters just drool over. And you’re getting them at a fraction of the cost of what the recruiting departments doing. So that’s a great use of LinkedIn ads.  

Karen Yankovich  54:41    

What a great hack. I like that.  

AJ Wilcox  54:44    

Yeah, we work with a ton of b2b companies, not enough recruiters and I expect that at some point, that’s going to change.  

Karen Yankovich  54:50    

Yeah. Well you’re putting them out of business, but okay.  

AJ Wilcox  54:55   

We can help we can, we can be an edge. But you also have like a MBA schools, you can use LinkedIn as educational targeting to target people who have a bachelor’s, but don’t yet have a masters or PhD. And you can also target people who studied a certain subject or got a certain degree. So this is great for MBA programs to put ads out and say, Hey, you want to come get your MBA with us. Also, financial services, like I know, the credit card companies are big advertisers, you know, targeting people for, you know, 401k management and, and investing, those types of things work really well, because we can target you know, VP and above at companies with at least 500 people or 1000 people, you know, those people have disposable income. So lots of cool targeting methods you can use to even reach outside of business to business like you might think LinkedIn is all about. fabulous, fabulous, AJ, this was so much fun. Oh, my gosh, I love getting to geek out about this stuff. So what tell everybody how they can find you will put links to some of this stuff you shared in the show notes. You don’t share all of that and your victories and it’s me. But how can people find out more about you? How can they learn more about taking their first step into LinkedIn, that’s awesome. Well, here’s a dirty little secret for you. If you go to my website, be to linked.com. And you fill out the form on any page, you don’t go to a sales rep and you don’t get put on my newsletter, you just come directly to my inbox. And I’m not a sales guy. So feel free to reach out ask any question. I’m not here to close yet. So happy to help.  

Karen Yankovich  56:35    

Wow, that’s amazing. That’s amazing. Thank you so much for doing that. Okay, I feel like I have 1000 more questions now that we’ve talked, but I’m gonna have to save them for maybe interview number two. Yeah, we’re going to another time. But those of you that are listening, if you have more questions about this stuff, you know, don’t I mean, I’ll put some, I’ll share some ways that you can ask questions, but don’t hesitate to reach out to AJ and to reach out to me because we don’t want you to waste your money. You know, I think that’s something that AJ and I have in common. We’re not looking for you to just spend a lot of money for a lot of spaghetti at the wall and hope something sticks. I want I don’t you got a job to do, right? I can’t You can’t be spending all of your time on this. So let’s micro target let’s do this the right way. And we’re both here to help you do that. So thank you so much for being here today. And thank you again, for being our first male guest. It’s really exciting for me. Hopefully, it’s really exciting for everybody listening, and I had so much fun.  

AJ Wilcox  57:36    

Well, I had a ton of fun, too. Thank you, everyone for listening. And huge thanks to you, Karen, for letting me have this honor of being the first male guest. Awesome.  

Karen Yankovich  57:44    

Thanks again. So what did you think I would love for you to, again, remind you to take a screenshot of this episode, on your device, wherever you’re listening to this on. And let me know on social media, what you thought about AJ and this conversation, I can talk to him for hours, I’m sure you could tell by this. By listening to this episode, I can talk to him for hours. You know, there’s so much energy in the room, when I have an opportunity to geek out about LinkedIn strategy. And I’m with somebody like AJ, who’s excited and passionate about LinkedIn advertising. When you put them together, I mean, magic happens, magic happens. So you know that I want to support you in this. That’s why I do this podcast, we’ve got a free Facebook group that I’m in all the time, we do pop up live strategy sessions, so much more Q and A’s could join us in the Facebook group at Karen yankovich.com slash Facebook group. And remember that if you want to talk to me about what some strategy might look like for you, and your business, and by the way, we often bring AJ in on some of these strategy sessions, if you want to talk about LinkedIn advertising. So everything we do is custom designed, or I should say everything, most things we do are custom designed, so that you get the best bang for your buck. Just go to Karen yankovich.com slash apply. Let me know what a little bit about you and what you’re looking to do. And if we think it’s a fit, or what you know, we’ll get on the phone with you and no obligation at all. But I love those conversations, because we get to really talk a little bit about you and your business. And at the very least we’ll do a little free profile review for you. So check that out at Karen yankovich.com slash apply. I can’t wait to hear what you thought about this episode, I’m going to be looking for your hashtags. Good girls get rich and tagging me at Karen Yankovich on social media, I will share that when I see that so that we both get more visibility. And the bottom line is I know that there was a lot of geeky techie analytic type stuff. But once you know this, this doesn’t have to be complicated, right? We want I want this to be simple for you. That’s why I do this. I do this so that I can help you bring this down to brass tacks, talk about just the things that are most important that will give you the biggest impact and make the biggest change in your business. So let this be simple for you. I will see you back here again next week for another episode.