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Welcome to today's episode.
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Today, we are talking about how to have massive success with LinkedIn advertising and how to stop wasting money on ads that don't work.
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We have the perfect guest to help us talk through this.
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Josh Stout has run over a thousand campaigns on LinkedIn and helped companies achieve massive success.
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Josh, welcome to the show.
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Thank you, I'm really happy to be here.
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So why don't we start off?
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Can you share just a minute or two, a little bit more about who you are and what you do?
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Yeah, absolutely so.
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As you mentioned, my name is Joshua Stout.
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I am the director of advertising at an agency called Influent.
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I am leading the LinkedIn ads division there.
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For the last five plus years.
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I spent my time with an agency that was also LinkedIn centric and I basically built their ad service so kind of from the ground up.
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I managed enough campaigns where I couldn't take any more and then I had to hire the next person.
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I had to hire the next person and train them, and then the next, and then next, until ultimately I had to create a training program that went on to train at least 50 more people on how to run LinkedIn ads.
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So during my time there I either personally managed or oversaw strategy and, as you said, over a thousand ad accounts.
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A few months ago I did get flown to London by LinkedIn to receive my LinkedIn certified marketing expert certification, and at some point last year they must have found my content pretty valuable, because they also gave me the elusive LinkedIn top voice badge, which is now my profile.
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Nice.
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So you're basically a LinkedIn black belt is what you're telling us.
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Yeah, I was.
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I was born, molded and formed on LinkedIn, so everything I've done is focused on LinkedIn and you know, while I I have run other channels and more cohesive B2B strategies and omni-channel strategies to achieve results, it all really started with LinkedIn and hinged around LinkedIn, so it's always been LinkedIn-centric.
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So you have these LinkedIn jiu-jitsu moves.
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We're ready to be inspired, so you have these LinkedIn jujitsu moves.
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We're ready to be inspired.
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Tell us a story about some of the remarkable results you've been able to generate on LinkedIn, some that really stand out above the rest and I say quite a few because I have done, obviously, countless audits, jumped into countless accounts.
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I've seen everything from $300 a month budgets to over $100,000 a month budgets, basically managed millions on LinkedIn spend, and it's surprising or maybe not how common it is to find certain settings and errors that can waste a lot of budget for companies all the way to Fortune 100 companies.
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I think a big reason behind this was, if you really think about it, until COVID, linkedin wasn't nearly as prevalent as it is now in the business networking game.
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Not that they weren't there and not that they didn't already have an offer an ads offer for businesses.
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But when COVID hit, people couldn't go to conferences anymore, they couldn't go to events anymore.
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You couldn't go door knocking anymore to try to make sales, and all of these people were desperate for a way to get in front of businesses to network their business right, and LinkedIn was sitting here waiting for everybody.
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They said come, my children.
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We're more than a job site.
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We've always been more than a job site, and you started seeing this paradigm shift from people thinking of LinkedIn as a site that you go to to look for your jobs or for computers to use, to where businesses were finally able to start marketing themselves and, as such, what that left was a pretty big deficit in people that were actually experts in LinkedIn advertising.
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Right, because you have a lot of digital marketing agencies.
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You have a lot I mean so much competition out there with people that focus on meta or programmatic or Google or the numerous other marketing channels there were.
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But when you go on to LinkedIn, it's similar.
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A lot of these platforms are similar but it's also vastly different.
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You're not an expert in the right settings to use and how to build target audiences that.
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You know the right nuances, such as audience expansion and audience network, on on building an actual structure within linkedin to maximize your budget, to get the most roi out of it.
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Then you can be wasting hundreds or thousands of dollars on linkedin.
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So that's typically what I've seen.
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So, so obviously, like as I mentioned, I kind of grew up on the LinkedIn scene.
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I was there for it when people were switching over to LinkedIn and that's how I learned all these best practices.
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So there's one, though, that sticks out to me the most, and they were a financial services industry, which usually is a pretty hard industry to promote or to market with.
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There's a lot of restrictions on other channels, for example, like on Meta, you can't even upload a list if you're in financial services industry.
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You can't retarget or set up retargeting campaigns if you're in financial services industry On Reddit, they require you to have certification to prove that you can advertise in each and every state that you want to in the financial services industry.
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So it's an extremely difficult industry to be able to market for.
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Now.
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When I first got in to that account and I first started seeing how we could revamp their strategy and what we can do, they did a mistake that I've seen so many companies do, and that's running lead gen forms on-platform forms for prospects to fill out at your top of funnel, with no follow-up strategy.
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This is a way that you can really waste budget.
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Also, you have to have your matched audiences in place on LinkedIn in order to maximize the return that you're getting from those prospects, and if you only run Legion Forms top of funnel to a cold audience that doesn't know about your business, you're getting your ad in front of some busy entrepreneur decision maker and they might be interested.
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But if you're already asking for their information, you're not going to get the results that you want.
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There's really high friction there.
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Now for this client in particular, they did have a very, very strong video top of funnel and they got a lot of results.
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But as I usually see for companies that do that, they get a pop of results and then it starts dwindling down and they get diminishing returns over time and then it stops yielding the ROI.
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They think LinkedIn is too expensive of a channel and they don't want to run it anymore.
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So when we came in, they were doing the structure and they had basically I think it was like four salesperson's territory who had uploaded very narrow niche lists that they were targeting and they ran this video and they ran the lead jumps for them.
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They got a pop of results over a few months and then it died down.
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So the first thing that I'm going to do when I go into any campaign and any account is I am going to set up the appropriate structure.
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I am going to set up the appropriate structure.
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So LinkedIn is extremely powerful for two really big reasons.
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One, it has the most up-to-date data for professionals.
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If you think about it, when somebody changes a job, you lose a job, get a job, change positions you don't rush to meta to update your Facebook profile.
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There's no other social platform that you're like oh, let me go update my job on here On LinkedIn.
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It's almost instant.
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You're almost instantly going to go to LinkedIn and update your information.
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That means the data on LinkedIn is the cleanest that you can get for the current jobs that people have, better than any databases out there, any data centers that you can get.
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All this aggregated data from different places, linkedin is going to have the cleanest, best, most up-to-date data.
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Now, along with that, linkedin gives you a ton of professional filters that you can use Job titles, industries, company size, revenue just a ton of things that you can use to try to find your ICP the best way possible.
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And that's really important, because every dollar that you spend that's not for your ICP is wasted budget.
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You might as well throw it away, right, because if you're showing impressions of somebody that's not your audience and not a potential client of yours, it's wasted budget.
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So LinkedIn gives you that power to be able to find these people.
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Now the other is the mindset of the user on the platform.
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When people get on LinkedIn, they're thinking business, they're thinking career growth.
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They're thinking business growth.
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So by getting on LinkedIn and showing your B2B ads there or B2C if it's professionally driven you're most likely to engage the people that you want and you're ensuring, because of the targeting, that you're getting it in front of the right people.
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So, all that being said, so I'm going in there and that's what I'm looking for.
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So I'm looking for a structure and your top of funnel.
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When you're targeting people that you don't know if they've engaged with you, you don't know if they've been to your website, you don't know if they've seen you.
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It's high friction.
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Ask for lead gen forms Because they had success there.
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We didn't want to change that, but instead we added to it there should be a multi-pronged strategy to everybody's accounts on LinkedIn or campaigns on LinkedIn.
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So the very first thing that we did is we set up the retargeting audiences.
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The very first thing that we did is we set up the retargeting audiences.
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You would be amazed at how much ROI you can squeeze out of your target audience simply by retargeting them.
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I don't think there's anywhere on the internet that, if you look up, how many touch points or impressions does it take to convert someone for a business or to convert someone into either a demo or a sale?
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It's going to say one or even two, right, I think some Google sites I've seen said you know, eight to 12.
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I think more likely.
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If you look at the business landscape today, it's 20, 40 plus.
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One recurring theme that we can see is it's staying in front of the people that showed interest, building trust and credibility and influencing that conversion.
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There's no easy changes in a business and no easy decisions.
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When I was growing that last agency with my partners even switching from a Google Sheet into a platform like ClickUp, it took training.
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It took time.
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It took effort.
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Framing it took time, it took effort.
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It wasn't an expensive move to buy the software, but it was an expensive move to spend everyone's time doing it, because you're paying salaries, other people are getting paid to work for you and they're taking their time to learn this new system and transition everything over.
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So I'm looking for that structure.
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Right, there's not a structure, so I want to put it in place.
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I'm going to build matched audiences based on people that have visited the website, people that have visited the company page or people that have interacted with the previous ads and with their specifically.
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As I mentioned, they were running a video top of funnel with a lead gen form.
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You can set up a matched audiences or matched audience for a prospect who's seen a certain amount of that video.
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Theirs was kind of a longer video, which I'll touch on here in a second, but so we targeted at least people that watched 50% of the video or more.
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And also you can retarget people that opened the lead gen form but didn't submit it.
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I guess a better way to say that is you can retarget people that opened the lead gen form and you can create another audience from the people who submitted, and you can create another audience from the people who submitted it and you can exclude them from your campaigns.
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So you're not trying to serve top of funnel ads to people that have already converted.
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First and foremost, right there we use the same exact videos, retargeted them with those videos instantly started getting more leads for them.
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Now you don't want to rely on leads either.
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So if you're going to run videos, you also want to run static images, static images.
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Well, videos will get the highest intent if somebody watches a video and clicks on the call to action.
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That's the highest intent you can get.
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Right, they watched your video, they're still interested.
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But to get the most traffic and easiest interest you have to use static images, and a combination of those two is what's going to work best.
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Top of funnel implement five different ads, each have different pain points and benefits for your ICP, and then run those in tandem with your videos.
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Now, those ads, we're not going to run lead gen forms to, we're going to send them to the website, treat it like a true funnel top of funnel audience and let them learn more about the company.
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Again, we're going to retarget the people that are interacting with those ads.
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Now, in our retargeting layers, we're going to do the same.
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We're running that video and we're running the ads.
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So now we start getting conversions on the website.
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Plus, we're getting the leads from LinkedIn.
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So now we've really improved their results, lowered their cost per leads incrementally and we're getting more conversions on their website.
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Finally, another thing we had them do and I could obviously probably talk for hours.
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I'm not going to go full into depth about their full structure, but we had them chop up that video.
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So I highly recommend that if you're using a video in your top of funnel campaign that you want to use shorter videos 15 to 45 seconds, maybe a minute max.
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People have short attention spans and if they don't know who you are they're very unlikely to give you that attention.
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You have to catch it quick and you have to keep it.
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And if you have a long video two minutes, three minutes it's just not very likely that people are going to sit there and watch that whole video and they have no idea who you are, unless it is very good and very enticing.
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So we chopped up that video into five different shorter video segments.
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We move that top of funnel.
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We move the longer videos to middle of funnel.
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Remember, up here people don't know who you are.
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That's top of funnel.
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Get their interest, get them interested in what you're offering.
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Have them engage in some way.
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Now they've moved into your middle of funnel.
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In the middle of funnel you want to build trust and credibility.
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What makes you the best at what you do?
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Why should someone go with you instead of with one of your competitors?
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So they're much more likely also to spend much more time watching a video.
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They already showed interest.
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You already got that initial interest from them.
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Now they're much more likely to give you more of that consideration.
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And then, finally, you have to have something bottom of funnel, asking for the next step.
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You've whined, you've dined and now it's time to take the relationship to the next level, right?
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And if you're not asking for it, you're never going to get there.
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You're going to be friend-zoned, right.
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If you want to get serious about this, you need to pop the question, and so we do that in a couple of different ways, but mainly using a variation of ads 10 to 15 ads, both middle funnel, bottom of funnel.
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For those bottom of funnel campaigns, you can build audiences based off anybody that engaged with your middle of funnel content or ads and also anybody that went to your website company page within the last 30 days.
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So now you have this high intent audience that you're serving a direct call to action for.
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That feeds into your full funnel structure of bringing an instant audience to middle funnel, building trust and credibility and ultimately asking for the conversion.
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With this combination and this just beautiful, mature funnel that we were able to build out, we over doubled their results, not only just in leads but also with conversions, and ended up exponentially increasing the budget to drive more results.
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So what does success look like?
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Should people think about things in terms of a cost per lead and a certain sort of conversion rate on LinkedIn as like, what is the gold standard that people can get to if they're doing all of these things right?
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Yeah, that's great, because a lot of times it's a great question because a lot of times it's not so compartmentalized or siloed right, so a lot of times it's the other influences too.
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So it's hard to just say, hey, like, what do you want from LinkedIn?
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But I'll tell you, like, typically, what I'm looking for.
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First and foremost, if you're just starting and you don't have traffic going to your website, or even if you do, if you're using LinkedIn to make sure you're bringing in the right traffic to your website, you're going to have higher costs.
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Top of funnel always costs more.
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Consider this.
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Most people are trying to target CEOs, directors you know C-suite right and a lot of people target really big companies or even if it's small companies.
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It's a highly sought after position to get your ads in front of, and LinkedIn is one place to show that ad.
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You are waiting for these people to log into LinkedIn so you could show them that ad and engage them.
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It's going to cost a lot.
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Your are waiting for these people to log into LinkedIn so you could show them that ad and engage them.
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It's going to cost a lot.
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Your CPM is going to be high.
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Your cost per click is going to be higher than you're used to on other platforms.
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Other platforms have a million other places they can show your ads.
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On LinkedIn, you're saying, hey, I want them to engage here.
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So $5 to $15 for a click is not unreasonable.
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In fact, if you're targeting CEOs at 10,000 plus, companies expect a higher cost per click.
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This is an extremely busy person and you're trying to appeal to them with your offer.
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Expect it to be expensive.
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So that's top of funnel.
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And the reason I want to distinguish that is because, yes, it can be more expensive than other platforms to bring people in, but once you start retargeting and you see the re-engagement, once you're building their interest with content like blogs and white papers and eBooks and you're putting testimonials and social proof in them, you're going to 10x the amount of time that they spend on your website and considering your offer.
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So now, with that, you're going to see a $1 cost per click.
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So when I'm talking about, like, overall cost per click, when I'm looking at LinkedIn, I do want it to be somewhere within $1 to $5 when it averages between the different layers.
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Don't just take it at face value, though, on what your cost per click is top of funnel.
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It's not the right way to assess it.
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Now, that's cost per click.
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Of course a lot of people.
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They also want results, right.
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They want leads, they want conversions.
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So the way I usually reverse engineer that is you know what's the lifetime value and new sale value of a client to you and now we have to work backwards, right?
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Because how many sales calls does it take to close a sale?
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How many leads does it take to hold a certain amount of sales calls?
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Not all leads hold the sales calls a certain amount of drop off there and not all sales convert into a sale for the company.
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So you have to work backwards, right.
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If it takes five calls to close a $100 sale, I mean obviously it's going to be much higher on LinkedIn, but that's going to be $20, right?
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So now it's $20 a sales call.
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So if you reverse engineer, what is a lead worth to you?
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That should be your benchmark.
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That should be your benchmark of what you're going for.
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And the way that you can continuously optimize on that and lower it is by looking at the demographic data.
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So you have your ICP, but you don't know where the interest in the market is right now.
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But you can look at the demographic data available and see the people that are engaging the most with your ads and that gives you an idea of how to optimize your campaigns to get lower than the benchmark that you want for this channel and to get the best ROI possible.
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And also make sure you're not.
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It's not an apples to apples comparison with other channels.
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I've seen people all the time that came over to LinkedIn that said, meta did not do good for me.
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I got a ton of leads.
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They were trash leads, right.
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I got 20 leads and one was interested.
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Well, on LinkedIn, while the appearance of the cost is higher, you're getting higher quality leads.
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So maybe if you get 20 leads on LinkedIn, you know eight or nine of them are going to convert in their higher quality leads because you're engaging them in the right place at the right time for the right people.
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So ultimately, there's no number that I can just throw out.
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I can't throw out the same number for somebody that has a $10,000 offer for somebody that has a $100,000 offer.
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You have to reverse engineer what is a lead worth to you.
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Set that as your benchmark, of course, at first.
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If you're first building your funnel, it's going to start higher than that.
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But optimize based on the data, ensure you're converting at the right amount.
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Talk to your sales team, talk to your marketing team, talk to the ops and that's the benchmark that you're looking for to exceed.
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So what is the hardest thing about being successful with LinkedIn advertising?
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There's two things that I'm going to say.
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One, as I mentioned before, it's the expertise of the platform, because if you don't know that your settings are done the right way and that you have the right structure in place, you're wasting budget and that's going to give you skewed perception of the platform.
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An easy one to mention is audience network.
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It's a highly debated feature of LinkedIn.
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Every platform has their own audience network, right?
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It's basically a programmatic channel where you can show ads in other places that aren't the platform.
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And if LinkedIn is so powerful because of the mindset of the user, then if you're showing ads on other platforms, well, because of the mindset of the user.
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Then if you're showing ads on other platforms, well, maybe you're losing some of that value behind it.
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So that's a big one.
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Just the settings on the platform and an audience network.
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You can still make it effective, but it has to be highly excluded and people just don't know that.
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They just don't know LinkedIn makes it so vague.
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They intentionally make it where you really can't pick up on that, or unless you know how to do it, because it gives and they're not.
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They're not evil here, right?
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They're not trying to like, just take your budget and, like some, some evil bosses behind the curtain saying, well, just give it all to me, right Cause then you wouldn't want to run on LinkedIn anymore.
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But it gives them the ability to show your ads in other places, so of course they want to use it.
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So settings like that and the certain nuances, like matched audiences you need to know what you're doing.
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The other part is it takes work.
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It takes work.
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You have to be actively looking, testing and optimizing and because of that, you know, I've always believed in all these tips and all this data and knowledge that I know.
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I've always believed in sharing it freely online.
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I post about it.
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I've posted about strategies.
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I lay out the strategies.
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I've posted about everything that I know, because if you can take that information and use it, great, that's 100% great for you, that's awesome.
