LinkedIn Advertising Secrets: How to Achieve 5X the Success at Half the Cost

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Today we have an exciting topic.

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We are talking about how to win with LinkedIn advertising, and we have the perfect guest to help us talk through this.

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He's managed over $150 million of LinkedIn advertising campaigns AJ Wilcox welcome to the show.

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Eric, thanks so much for having me.

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I'm stoked to be here.

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So why don't we start off by you taking just a minute or two to explain a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

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Yeah, you bet.

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So I stumbled onto LinkedIn ads.

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This has been now 14 years ago when, at a previous position, I had just been hired, I was the first digital marketing team member at a pre IPO SaaS company and I remember going to meet with the CMO on my first day and talking about the SEO and Google ads and Google display that I was going to be doing those were kind of my specialties and she said all that sounds great, go ahead and execute it.

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But oh, by the way, we just started a pilot with LinkedIn ads, so see what you can do with that.

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And I jumped in basically with the same strategies that I used for Google ads at the time, because I didn't want to look stupid to my new boss.

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And within about two weeks, the sales team came up to me and was saying hey, aj, we're fighting over your LinkedIn leads, keep it up.

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And I went Ooh, there's something to this.

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So over the next two and a half years, I grew that, I continued to investing, grew it to become LinkedIn's largest spending account in the world and after two and a half years of running the biggest account, I had LinkedIn's product team asking for advice and asking questions and had them on speed dial and I went okay, there have to be more than just this one company that would kill it on LinkedIn ads.

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And so, just over 10 years ago, I started B2Linked, and we're an ad agency based out of the state of Utah.

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That LinkedIn ads is all we do.

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We were kind of the originals in the space and I absolutely still, to this day, I love everything about LinkedIn ads.

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That's pretty awesome.

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You've made that channel really, really sing.

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That's great.

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I think when you have sales coming to you saying we're fighting over your leads, that's the best case scenario, right.

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That's just amazing.

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I think the reputation of LinkedIn ads has been over the years that they're good but they're expensive.

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Yep, Is that what you've seen across your clients and managing things you manage.

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Is that true?

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Yeah, I've seen it over the entire 14-year history of me and LinkedIn ads.

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From the very beginning, linkedin ads set a minimum bid threshold of $2 per click, while at the same time you could get Google ads for about a dollar a click and you could get Facebook clicks for about a third of a cent a piece.

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So in comparison to the other channels, linkedin has always been more expensive and that continues to this day as competition has continued to grow and the platform's grown.

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The average cost per click in North America on LinkedIn is like $10 to $16.

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And you can imagine, you know, meta might be down in like the $4 to $5 range for a B2B kind of offer.

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Google is who knows where for a B2B kind of offer.

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Google is who knows where, just depends on on what kind of niche.

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But yeah, they, they have always been expensive.

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But where LinkedIn wins and this is the reason why it's, it's a monopoly it's the only option for B2B advertisers because there's no other platform that owns your professional data like LinkedIn, has it up to date, has the depth of knowledge about it.

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So if you're in B2B, your goal is to sell a specific kind of software to a specific kind of user, linkedin is the only channel where you can narrow down to that job title at that size of company in this industry.

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And so, even though it's expensive upfront, what you realize is because you're hitting the right people.

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The lead quality is easily five times higher than it would be from something like meta, and if you're looking all the way down the funnel, your cost per lead might be high on LinkedIn, but when you get to the cost per let's say cost per proposal or cost per closed deal all of a sudden LinkedIn looks way better than the other channels, because the quality was so much higher.

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Yeah, quality matters a lot, so we're ready to be inspired.

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Tell us what it looks like to live the dream.

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Tell us a story about some of the most successful marketing you've done with LinkedIn advertising.

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Yeah, it's an awesome question.

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It's one that I have so many ideas in mind that I've got to try to narrow this down, so I'm going to share one example of this.

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But the same principles have applied time after time.

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This is easily repeatable.

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So we have a client who they have invested heavily in what I call personal video.

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So if you tell someone, go and create video ads that are going to run on LinkedIn, they may have all kinds of things in mind.

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They may have like oh, we have to go to a studio and pay tens of thousands of dollars, or we need to go and create an animated explainer video, and those things are all good, but they also cost quite a bit and they're difficult to actually get done.

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If I tell a client we want one of these, we might not get it for six months.

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But what is really killing it on LinkedIn right now is what I call personal video, and that's where, if you have an internal thought leader maybe it's the founder or head of marketing, head of sales they hold up their phone to their face.

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They give a quick tip, a trick, a strategy, an industry update that their customers should know, just something really interesting and of free value and we use Descript, which I know you use as well.

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For 12 bucks a month and the free phone in your pocket, you can create little snippets of you know 20 to 40 second video ads that are really engaging.

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When you see a person's face on your screen, you care about what they're saying and we can overlay subtitles on top is great for the 80 plus percent of viewers of the ads who don't have sound turned on and they're getting the gist of the message.

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And then, within the last year and a half, linkedin released a new ad format called Thought Leader Ads, where you can promote not only a company's post but an individual's as well.

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So what we did in this case is and I'll explain why we do this we created Thought Leader Ads from the founders and major thought leaders within the company, where it was them in the video they post about why this is so interesting and why people should pay attention, and then we're able to use these in ads.

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Now the reason why this is so groundbreaking is, I think most LinkedIn advertisers will tell you everyone wants sales conversations, they want demos, they want sales ready leads.

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But if you go to a cold audience who's never heard of you before and you say talk to our sales rep, get a demo.

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You might see some clicks because people are kind of curious but they're not ready to meet with your sales team yet.

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They need more nurturing, they need to know, like and trust you before they're willing to hop on a call.

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So the goal then is we know that the eventual goal is getting them on the phone with sales.

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What experiences do they need to have before that, in kind of a funnel structure before it starts, before the audience is nurtured and ready for that, and we decided that the best way to do that would be to create a three-stage funnel where the top two stages were all these personal video, and once you watched at least 50% or 75% of one of these video ads, then you graduate down to the next stage and finally, by the third stage, we know that you've had at least two significant interactions with the brand and then we've earned the right to then ask you like it looks like you might be interested.

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Do you want a demo?

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And what was so cool in this?

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Three-stage funnels and we run some that are five-stage funnels.

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Linkedin doesn't make it easy to set up, so it was quite a bit of work and it does take a good amount of budget to put in the top to get three stages of where the bottom stage is spending enough that it's worthwhile.

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So we're talking here this is probably $15,000 of data collected dumped in the top before we got a bottom of the funnel result that we could share.

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But what's so cool?

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We were measuring conversion rates at we call it stage one, stage two and stage three, and we were measuring costs cost per click, cost per conversion and what we found is by the third stage our conversion rates were five times higher than they were in the second stage and costs were less than half like a cost per click.

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And all of that to say like, if you're getting a cost per conversion of like $900 in the stage two, by stage three you'd be paying less than like $150 per lead for the same kind of call to action.

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So that is recently one of the stories that I'm most excited about.

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Took a lot of work and we put a lot into it.

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But it wasn't costly things, it was more strategic things that we were able to put into it and get a really solid result that the sales team is just singing our praises right now.

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Now that is really remarkable and LinkedIn has been investing a lot in the video and sort of pushing video because of the success that TikTok and Instagram Reels has had.

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But I'm curious in particular to the thought leadership ads.

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Is there a magic that makes them the best ad form on LinkedIn today?

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The magic?

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is, if you show someone a post from a company they've never heard of, they are so likely to keep scrolling.

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The average click-through rate of a company post is like half of 1%.

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And then if we say exactly the same thing as an individual, as a human, and then promote that as a thought leader ad, we see click-through rates or even engagement rates between like 3% and 12%.

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We see click-through rates or even engagement rates between like 3% and 12%.

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So we're talking orders of magnitude more interesting to users and I think that really is the magic.

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When you promote something from an individual.

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You see an individual you don't know in your newsfeed.

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You stop for a minute and go.

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Who is this person?

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Should I know them?

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Do I know them?

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Should I be listening to what they have to say, whereas if you were only relying on what the company is saying, companies are just not getting that much traction or attention.

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It seems like this trend is going to even further continue and amplify in 2025.

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That seems like the direction this is going.

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Is that right?

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Definitely, and there are some more improvements that LinkedIn can do on these thought leader ads to make them even better.

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They so this ability launched in 2022 that we could do thought leader ads, but we were stuck with only promoting posts from our own employees.

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Oh, sorry, it was in 2023.

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In 2024, they gave us the ability to promote posts from people outside of our organization.

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So now you can do like UGC, user-generated content of one of our customers just posted let's promote that or an external influencer that we're working with maybe we can promote their post.

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So that's been really cool.

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But right now, the biggest weakness is that these thought leader ads are very limited.

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You can only promote a post as a thought leader ad that is either a single image, no image, text only or video, and so if you have an individual who posts a poll or a document or any other format that tends to work really well, you can't promote it.

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We're also stuck using only the objective where you have to pay.

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You don't have to pay nearly as much, but you pay a little bit for every kind of interaction on the ad, not just the ones that are taking you to a landing page that you care about, and so if they give us that ability to do to run these on.

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My favorite objective is the website visits objective.

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We're we're going to be able to pay, and I hope LinkedIn does this.

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We'll be able to pay only when someone clicks on the link that we care about that takes them to our site, or you might be able to apply a lead generation form to the ad, which you can't do now.

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I'm hoping those enhancements come.

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You'd think that they would make these advertising enhancements.

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It seems like the LinkedIn division of Microsoft.

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Their revenue is over $16 billion a year and directionally half of that is advertising and directionally half of that is advertising.

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Do you think if they can crack the nut on some of this stuff that they'll get more people doing more advertising on the?

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platform?

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Absolutely.

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I've seen what I consider exponential growth.

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I don't know the exact numbers because I'm not internal, obviously, but for the first 10 years that I was focused on LinkedIn ads it was very slow growth.

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It took a lot of time for marketers to think like, hey, what other channel should I consider?

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Hey, maybe this LinkedIn ads, even though it's expensive, maybe the targeting is going to be worth it.

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And just in the last three years, three, four years I've seen exponential just a spike, where more and more companies, even if they've tested them before and they weren't successful, they're coming back again because LinkedIn is the only platform where you can have this level of business targeting.

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And as they do, as we see all of this adoption happen, we're seeing costs rise for all advertisers because it's an auction platform and we do.

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We see some advertisers are now paying $20 plus per click, which is kind of crazy.

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But if there's that many people bidding for and fighting for that audience segment, then that's what it is.

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But I see this continuing to rise, more and more advertisers getting more and more value out of LinkedIn in limited tests and then saying, okay, let's bring more budget.

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And then saying, okay, let's bring more budget.

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So for the thought leadership ads, can you do the targeting application to them as well and target certain industries, types of companies, job functions, Like you can do pretty precise targeting with the thought leadership ads right.

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Exactly All the same targeting you can do with the other ones.

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You're just putting a personal post in front of people that they care about more.

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It's a formula for success, for sure.

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I've heard a lot of people doubling down on the strategy you said of using thought leadership ads with customers and with influencers, well-known people I haven't really heard celebrities yet, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that.

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Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised to see that.

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Yeah, but it's interesting that I think customers would probably be one of the most powerful amplifiers, because people take those endorsements probably even more so than influencers, right?

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If, like I'm a customer, I've used it, it's been great, people will listen to that and believe that a lot more.

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So the authenticity of that seems pretty money to me.

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I agree.

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Yeah, you have a post from the CEO or head of sales.

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Of course she's going to say wonderful things about the platform and the product you're selling, but a customer, I think, just adds all that extra little bit of trust factor actor.

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Now you have a podcast about LinkedIn advertising and you've done more than 150 episodes right?

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Yeah, totally, and so you are a deep expert on this topic.

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We could probably talk for many hours about this, but going into 2025, what are a couple of things that you broadly recommend to clients to do if they want to be successful doing LinkedIn advertising in the next year?

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First thing I would say is start ignoring LinkedIn's own recommendations.

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I say the recommendations that your rep gives you and the platform give you while you're inside.

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They are very expensive recommendations if you can get where I'm headed with that I agree.

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There are five settings that I could rattle off that right from the default of where they're set in the campaign.

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If you uncheck them or change them, you're doing really good.

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You can get your costs probably less than half of what most advertisers are paying or what you'd be paying otherwise.

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So I would say top number one strategy is make sure you get your costs in line.

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Don't overpay for the traffic you're getting just because LinkedIn says, hey, you should bid like this or bid high, because it's all bunk and they're not lying.

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They just don't know.

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The next is invest in personal video because it's so cheap to create and it is so effective as an advertising tool.

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People love to see someone's face.

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It builds trust and especially when that face is giving short, quick value bites, it's amazing.

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And I think third part is if you just show these like bottom of funnel kinds of offers to cold traffic, you may get a lead or two, but it's going to be expensive and so much of the time they're going to ghost the sales rep.

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It's not worth it.

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So think about building at least a two-stage funnel where you can nurture people first before you're going right for the kill, and I think you'll see a lot more success in 2025 doing that.

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Awesome.

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I think those are three really great pieces of advice to change the game in the next year with LinkedIn advertising.

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So I'm going to link to your website and your LinkedIn in the show notes so people can get in touch to learn more.

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Is there anything else you wanted to share today that I didn't ask about LinkedIn advertising?

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Maybe what I can suggest is the strategies for how to do bidding on LinkedIn that get you the lowest costs guaranteed.

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That's episode 89 of my podcast.

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That's called the LinkedIn ad show, so I can send you a link.

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You can put that in show notes.

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But if you're going to listen to one episode of the LinkedIn ad show, make it that one.

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It's the most popular episode, for good reason.

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It saves people a lot of money.

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Awesome.

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I will link to that in the show notes and thank you so much for being with us today.

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We appreciate your stories, your tips and your insights.

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Aj, Thank you very much.

00:18:21.424 --> 00:18:22.907
Hey Eric, thanks so much for having me on.

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Invite me back anytime for a round two.