Mastering LinkedIn Ads: Strategies for Success with Devin Littlefield

But LinkedIn has really, really good retargeting, native retargeting functions that you could leverage. You can build retargeting audiences of people that have clicked on your ads or completed forms. And so we always recommend setting that up as well so that we were not losing out on that, you know, that one touchpoint of driving them to a landing page. Welcome to the Agents of Change. The podcast experience you've been waiting for your entire marketing career. Search, social, mobile, AI, blockchain, and neuromarketing. These are the Agents of Change, and so are you. Digital marketing success awaits, and your transformation begins now.

Welcome to another episode of the Agents of Change podcast, the podcast that helps you reach and engage more of your ideal customers online, build your business, build your brand, and build your career. My name's Rich Brooks, I'm your host. This is episode 544, powered by the Agents of Change Digital Marketing Conference. The first few times I tried LinkedIn ads for a client, I was underwhelmed. Compared to the cost of Facebook and Google ads, LinkedIn ads seemed both expensive and limiting. Was it because I just wasn't very good at running LinkedIn ads back then, or has the platform gotten that much better over the years? I don't know, probably a little bit of both, but I can say that LinkedIn ads today can provide incredible value if you understand them, which is what we're going to be diving into today. Now, just a quick reminder that the 10th Annual Agents of Change Digital Marketing Conference is coming up this fall and you don't want to miss it. This is an in-person event that takes place in Portland, Maine on October 9th, 2024. We've got 15 top digital marketing experts ready to spill the beans on how you can reach and engage more of your ideal customers online and grow your business. We've got great networking opportunities and VIP passes that give you face time with our experts. Plus on October 10th, the following day, we've got our world-famous deep dive workshops. These are half-day, hands-on, limited-size classroom workshops where you'll get to work through things like LinkedIn ads, Facebook ads, video, AI, and more. For the full agenda and our list of amazing speakers, head on over to our website at theagentsofchange.com. What's that? You can't make it to Portland, Maine this October? Well, that really is disappointing, but don't worry, you can still participate in the conference because we do a live feed and we have all the content on demand. More of that information is at the website again at theagentsofchange.com. Now let's uncover the secrets of LinkedIn ads. My next guest is on a mission to share his passion for digital marketing with businesses and help them improve their bottom line. Originally trained in outdoor education, he brings over a decade of experience in digital advertising, demand generation, planning and execution, optimizing websites for search engines, and working with a multifaceted team to produce outstanding marketing results. He currently holds a position of CEO at Market Vantage, a fast-growing digital marketing agency based in the Boston area, and co-founder of the Vermont Huts Association, a nonprofit based in Vermont. Today we're going to be diving into LinkedIn ads with Devin Littlefield. Devin, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me, Rich. It's an honor.

I'm excited to, uh, dive in here. This is a really important conversation. I'm a big fan of LinkedIn ads, but, uh, can you explain to us the concept of audience alignment and why it's crucial for LinkedIn advertising success?

Yeah, it's a great question, and I think it's a fundamental starting place for a lot of advertisers. One of the things that we find is that people go in thinking that, oh, LinkedIn ads should be able to produce great results for me, so I'm just going to go ahead and launch a campaign and hope for the best. And I think unfortunately, it's not an uncommon problem that we see where people just expect those results to come in. What it really first requires is that understanding of your ideal customer profile, profile and your buyer personas. You want to make sure that you first have documented those and you understand who you're really going after and making sure that it's completely aligned to, of course, your bigger marketing plan. From there, once you have that information and you know exactly who you're going after, that's where we see the first step when you are building a campaign in LinkedIn ads is to then make sure that you are layering in multiple ICP targeting criteria along with multiple buyer persona targeting criteria. And the reason why we recommend that careful layering, which when I'm saying layering, I'm referring to, and statements. So you want to say somebody with this job title of director of marketing, chief marketing officer, whatever, and somebody that works at a company in this industry, and somebody with this many years of experience or this skill set or whatever it happens to be at that point. You want to make sure the reason for using those and statements is you don't want to just open this up to be spaghetti on the wall effectively. Using proper— the proper alignment between your ICP and buyer personas will allow you to get much more specific, much more targeted, and you will see generally much more effectiveness in terms of who you're actually reaching your ad campaign with. So that's usually the first step is making sure that, again, you've documented that ICP and buyer persona. It's clear everybody knows who you're going after on your— in your team, and then you're aligning your campaign strategy to that. So that's the first— usually the first step.

You talk a lot about ICP and buyer persona. How do you differentiate those? Like, how are they similar and how are they different?

It's a great question. So on the ICP side, what we talk about or the way that MarketVantage thinks about that is your target company. So I'm thinking about that at that company level. What is the type of company that I want to go after? Am I targeting mid-market software companies? Am I targeting enterprise healthcare companies? Am I targeting small businesses, you know, with brick-and-mortar shops? So that's how we typically will think about that ICP. On the buyer persona side, I'm then thinking about the people inside of the ICP who make decisions to buy services or products from you. So Markavantage, as an example, we would typically go after mid-market and enterprise-level customers. Our buyer persona will be typically either director or VP of demand generation. They could be VP level in terms of just marketing in general, or then the chief marketing officer. Those are really the 3 big titles that we go after. And so those are our buyer personas. They make the decisions, they hold the budgets, they're the, they're the keys to the kingdom, so to speak. So in that regard, when you carefully document those and you have that clear understanding of both of those in tandem, that's when you will really, again, get that kind of key alignment around the LinkedIn Ads campaigns. And even I would say even more broadly beyond LinkedIn Ads, those are just incredibly helpful to have because then you can start doing any marketing activity and making sure you're, you're kind of targeting both the appropriate companies and the appropriate buyers.

That makes a lot of sense. Once we've kind of honed in on those things, what do you feel are some of the key elements for creating compelling ads on LinkedIn that drive engagement? Are there differences from, say, the type of ads we might run on other social platforms, or are there specific things that you found over the years tend to be more effective?

It's a great question. And for us, what we see particularly on LinkedIn ads is that single image ads and video ads are by far the most effective ad types. They have other formats related to in-mail or text ads, carousel, which is kind of a fun type, document ads. There's, there's different formats that you can literally choose from. We find that really potent single image ads or video ads can do incredibly well in terms of attracting that and getting the attention of that, that buyer persona and the ICP that we're going after. What we often see with those, the most effective ads are usually those that have a very, very clear call to action. They're very kind of upfront. They are in the appropriate size or dimensions, which actually may not seem like incredibly important, but it is. For those of you who don't know, on LinkedIn, if you have a vertical ad, so something that's say like 1080 by 1920, so that's a vertical aspect ratio. Typically most things on the internet when we look at it, like on YouTube, is horizontal. So that's 1920 by 1080. We flip that and put it up vertically. Those are mobile-only placements on LinkedIn ads. And that actually comes with keeping in mind that when you have a mobile-only placement like that, typically an image that size will take up the entire screen. And so if you imagine you have somebody scrolling and you literally get a few seconds and you've captured somebody's attention, it's literally the only thing that they may see on their screen. And so you want to make sure that you're leveraging that appropriate type of format in that way. And then again, just having the right message to put in front of them, something that's kind of bold, that's not particularly overly wordy or distracting. We've even found through a series of testing things like bright backgrounds on the images or bright colors that will typically get people to stop, you know, to scroll and to look at the, look at the ad a little bit more, even click through. So I think it's a matter of just kind of playing around based on your brand guidelines, playing around with those different formats to see what works and visually can kind of capture that attention. But again, it's images and videos. Those are typically the two formats that we recommend for, for running ads like that.

And those ads tend to be in the newsfeed themselves. But obviously LinkedIn does have other places you can advertise. You kind of name-checked a few of them. Do you think it's important to stick with one type of ad or one type of ad placement, or should we be experimenting with different ad formats based on what our objectives might be?

It's a great question, and I do think like anything, it's always worth testing to see what works for you. But generally speaking, we know that single image ads and video ads will typically get the highest click-through rates and could lead to the highest level of conversions. So that's why we typically would want to say at minimum focus on those. When you go into other formats around like messaging as an example, that requires, I would say, a little bit more careful planning around then how do you develop that content? And obviously you've got to write out potentially multiple messages should there be a sequence or carousel images which require having actually multiple types of images, you know, all kind of shown in a row. So we also find that single image video is a little bit harder to produce, but particularly single image. It's the easiest thing to be able to produce on LinkedIn typically with the one exception of text ads. But again, we don't find that those are very highly clicked very often. But you bring up a great point. Like anything, I would absolutely recommend testing with different formats to see what works for your industry. We see right now that a lot of B2B companies, particularly software technology and even some professional services, are getting exceptionally good lead generating results from single image ads. But that may not be definite and Maybe even by the time this podcast airs, it could be outdated news. So the idea being, yes, you're testing and you're kind of always watching the data to see what's actually driving real results for you as well, not just clicks to your landing page or potentially even form fills, but what's driving pipeline for you or what's driving deals, deal flow.

And how about the— I believe LinkedIn also has, like many social media platforms have, they have lead gen forms that are on LinkedIn so that we don't even need to take somebody offline. Have you used those very often and what kind of results do you see with those?

Yes, it goes without saying, everybody, my opinion, almost everybody should be using lead gen forms inside of LinkedIn. They absolutely drive the best results. I mean, we've been seeing for clients as an example, upwards of 40% lead form completion rates. So that's, that's effectively a conversion rate between the people that are clicking on your ads to then actually completing the form. 40% is bonkers. That's off the charts. And I think I have never seen lead form completion rates or conversion rates like that if we're driving from an ad on LinkedIn to a landing page. So I absolutely and highly recommend people explore using the lead gen form. There is additional setup work that's required as part of that, but I think bar none, it's, it's worth it. Even LinkedIn's data would suggest at least a 1%, if not 2% bump in your overall conversion rate by using a lead gen form compared to driving to a landing page. And functionally there's almost no difference with the exception that you're not going to be able to track. You won't get to track that user explicitly hitting your website and then through retargeting, you know, retargeting them that way. But LinkedIn has really, really good retargeting, native retargeting functions that you could leverage. You can build retargeting audiences of people that have clicked on your ads or completed forms. And so we always recommend setting that up as well. So that we were not losing out on that, you know, that one touchpoint of driving them to a landing page. So I would absolutely recommend the lead gen forms and where we see those to be most effective, especially is for downloadable content, assets, resources, guides, toolkits, right? Anything in that regard, that's a lead magnet. We also do see that they work well, though not at the same volume for things like a demo request or request a call. The very bottom of the funnel type approach where we want to drive people that have shown some form of interest to really try to kick them off into a sales-related call or get them to engage a bit further. So I think lead gen forms, again, used strategically, can provide a ton of value in terms of driving marketing qualified leads or top of funnel leads, and then being able to even bring in people that are really expressing interest in your product or service down further down in the funnel. So sales qualified or sales qualified opportunities as an example.

You kind of teed up the next question I was planning on asking, and that's how should we tailor our content strategy for the different stages of the funnel on LinkedIn?

Yeah, and it's natural, of course, right? One leads into the other. So now continuing on with what I was saying a minute ago, when we think about a very traditional 3-stage funnel, top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel. LinkedIn campaigns can be completely catered and set up in that very simple structure. So we try not to overcomplicate it. I think 3 stages is more than enough for most companies where when we think about that top of funnel, we want to build out a broader awareness campaign. This is something that could be slightly more widely targeted. It's still to your ICP and ideal buyer persona, but we're doing that at a level where It's not quite as granular of an audience. And the focus there is how do we just get them to learn more and understand your service, right? And that those are typically more broad, you know, it's a broad audience, but it's cheaper cost per click, it's cheaper to actually get impressions on. And we're just trying to gauge interest in terms of will people want to learn more about our service? We typically recommend driving people just to a landing page in that particular instance. It doesn't necessarily need to be a lead magnet. We just want to make them aware that this is the product or service that we have. When we think about that middle of funnel, that's when we really want to dig in more in terms of that target audience. We want to make it smaller. We want to make sure that it's nice and specific. We do want to capture people that have also been to our website, and that's when we want to then offer them something. We want to capture their information. So the lead magnets come into play— toolkits, guides, downloads, anything in that nature. That's where lead gen forms will become incredibly impactful. Because again, they have that higher conversion rate. Then when we get into that bottom of funnel, that's where we're really just trying to get to the people that we think will have a direct interest to buy our product or our service. And that is more exclusively towards that, that target audience that has absolutely expressed some form of previous interest around our website or our offers, or are people that we're even trying to potentially nurture in our sales funnel. I don't think lead gen forms are a particularly bad option in this stage either. Again, it's just the offer and making sure that it's aligned to the expectation there. For an example, if we have a retargeting campaign that we're running, it's bottom of funnel. Somebody's been to our website multiple times, they've downloaded our content, but I, you know, we haven't had a sales call with them yet or, you know, they haven't necessarily expressed interest in our service. That's where I might put out a really kind of juicy or compelling offer like, hey, get a free marketing audit, right? Get a free strategy call, something in that nature to really try and sink people in and say, oh, I have a need for that. I'll raise my hand and sign up for that. So that's a really great bottom of funnel offer as an example. And that's where, again, now you have kind of a completed funnel where you're driving nice, cheap kind of clicks at the top, still relevant. You have nice lead magnets in the middle for your really nice qualified buyers. And then that bottom of funnel recapturing, trying to get them in the door for something. And so that's how we would typically recommend structuring a campaign like this.

Nice. Now, we talked about lead forms, but when we're not using lead forms, we're obviously driving them to our website, hopefully a landing page. What best practices do you have for us for landing pages that might be specific to running a LinkedIn ad campaign?

Absolutely. And it's, it's, you know, it's funny, some people miss the fundamentals here. And I think it's really important to make sure, bar none, that there is one distinct call to action and the form that's minimal, minimal to complete. We don't want to make it a huge hurdle, but really it's completely aligned to the campaign that you've run. It's completely aligned to then what people would expect. It's using language that your audience would also expect. And that again, that form is also very crystal clear. This is exactly what I'm going to get. I know what I'm going to get, and it provides value for completing this form often. And amazingly, what I see sometimes is that people have this preconceived notion like, oh, people already know who I am, they know my brand, right? So I don't need to necessarily tell them about my brand. Here's just the form and like 2 sentences about what the offer is. We all know that that's not going to work, you know, even if it's for paid search campaign or, you know, anything, right? That, that's not necessarily going to be effective. But for LinkedIn ads, I think one of the unlocked powers here is being able to, should you decide to go down this rabbit hole of being like really specific, being able to then even target by title or by really using like name dropping to some respects. So like one, Rich, I'm sure you probably see these as well, but FounderCard, I actually love their ads on LinkedIn. And the reason is they call out in the intro text and then when you hit their landing page, hey, Mr. or Mrs. CEO, we've got unlock specials for you, right? I love that. It's super potent. It's in your face and it's clear like this is for you. This is not for, you know, the entry level junior on your team or my team or whoever. Or like, this is for the CEO and founder of the company. And I love that. And so I think similarly, making sure that for others that are running campaigns, we want to make sure that language is very specific, it's very focused on you, and that there is again, that clear call to action above anything else. We also certainly, it goes without saying, I think I often find landing pages are just not quite long enough. Or, and I, what I'm also saying in there is that there's not enough information to actually convince people that you're a service or product worth pursuing. So I think it's mission critical to also make sure you are— I would even say before launching a campaign, getting your potential examples of your buyers or existing buyers to review your landing page and get their honest opinion. You know, does this make sense? Does this clearly convey the service or the product that I have? Does it clearly explain it well enough to get you to peak interest and to fill out a form of some kind? So I think that is also incredibly valuable feedback to get from existing product, existing customers or existing clients. In that regard as well.

That's a great piece of advice, and I hope people, whether it's LinkedIn ads or anything else, that's just a piece of advice that I think most marketers don't currently practice but absolutely should. As we're thinking about putting together these campaigns, do you have any quick-hit tips or best practices for setting up LinkedIn ad campaigns that can either help us save money or improve performance?

Yeah, and I will point out just really quick on the creative side or the ad format side, I think people try to overcomplicate creative. I think some of the most powerful and influential ads out there are those that are super simple and easy. And I actually often think and gravitate towards like really powerful magazine ads. Actually, Tesla just released one recently that it was a full page or a half-page ad in one of the magazines. And it was a Tesla that was like out of focus and zooming away. So like it looked like it was going off out of the, off the page. And then there was some really potent texts about like 0 to 60 never looked so good or, you know, catching the blur. Like it was very, it was just a very well put together ad. And then it just had the Tesla logo at the bottom. I love Shopify, uh, was running a campaign for a while that just had a woman on her cell phone, wasn't overly complicated. And then the text was get paid faster. Like super potent, super clear. Any graphic designer could have pulled that together in 5 minutes. It wasn't incredibly hard or difficult, but I think the simplicity— the power came in the simplicity of that type of graphic. So I do want to make sure that that's emphasized. We do not need to be overcomplicating these campaigns or these images. But some other quick hit settings that I absolutely recommend everybody consider pursuing: I almost always use manual bidding for every single campaign. I never use the auto or max any form of maximized campaign bidding. The reason is we just find that LinkedIn runaway runs away with your cost per click. Typically, we always recommend disabling audience expansion, so we never want to give them the opportunity to potentially go see other audiences. One exception to that may be at a, like, a brand awareness level, but otherwise, you know, in most cases, or brand awareness campaign, you may want to consider doing that just for short-term tests, but otherwise we always recommend disabling that. One other quick tip, keep your intro text, the text that shows above the image, but under your, your name and your icon, keep that to 2 lines or 160 characters. Anytime you see that see more button show up when it's a paid ad, that is a chargeable event by LinkedIn and they will count that as a click as well. So you do not want that to show up in there because otherwise you will get charged for that and potentially then you could be double charged. As an example, if somebody clicks on that first and then clicks on the call to action, you're just going to be spending more money for functionally what is no less, you know, no, uh, fewer people actually visiting the site or visiting, you know, and completing the lead gen form. So definitely keep that to 2 lines. We also do not recommend, uh, using the audience network by LinkedIn. So there's— it's 2 different functions. It's different from the audience expansion. The audience network is kind of like the expanded display network for Google Ads. Like, it just goes out somewhere in the ether, you don't really know where it is, and that's where most of the money is going to go. So we don't recommend that. And then the last thing, and this is more of just like a sidebar or pro tip, I always recommend setting end dates for your campaigns, especially for those that you're going to be self-managing and it may not be checking in on every single day. The reason for that is simply so that way campaigns don't just go on indefinitely in case you lose track of it. If you're not actively managing it, it's best to just be safe, turn it off for a short period of time or let it run its course. And then your budget or your money won't just continuously run if you're not actively kind of paying attention to it. So that's just another, maybe more like a pro tip on the management side, not so much, not so much a campaign setup side.

Understood. I know that most people who spend money on advertising want to perhaps expect to get immediate results when you're talking to a client and helping them manage their expectations on LinkedIn. How long do you usually say that it will be? Do you say we're going to get immediate results for you? There'll be an immediate ROI, or you say it's 3, 6, 12 months before it really gets up to speed?

Yeah, and it's a great question. I think you and I have probably experienced a lot of the same things. People want instant results. No, you do not get instant results from advertising. LinkedIn is no exception to that. We are typically recommending at this point 3 months as a minimum, like an absolute minimum, like we need at least 3 months to kind of dial in the campaigns, the messaging, the right tone, the ad creative. Like, that's just minimum maintenance time to make sure that we can start to prove out some results. And when I'm also saying prove out results, I'm referring to are we seeing strong click-through rates that are in line or above benchmarks for your industry on LinkedIn? Are we seeing that there's lead flow coming in at an adequate rate Is the cost per lead viable and is it in expectation or in line with the expectations of what the client is willing to pay? Those are several things that we think about and how we kind of optimize within the first 3 months. From really like 3 months onwards, even like 9, that's when we then take a much more close look around the actual sales funnel for your product or service. We want to make sure that we're actually seeing deals that are coming into pipeline that show some form of interest in that in your product or service. And we give it that, that timeframe somewhat arbitrarily. It depends entirely on your business and what your typical sales cycle may look like. If you're selling a product that it's incredibly easy to buy online, even, even like a self-serve B2B software as an example, that would certainly have a shorter time horizon and something where we might expect that within even within a 3, 4, 5 month time period. But if you're selling large enterprise deals that are multi-millions of dollars, those take a lot of time and therefore we need to reflect that in our, our timeline of how we look at this, certainly. But all that to say, it is partially dependent upon your product or service and how long deals typically take to close. But we would expect that campaigns should be able to produce some top line performance, those 3 metrics I mentioned earlier, certainly within 3 months. And that's what we use to gauge initially. Beyond that, then we're looking at hard CRM data to see where these deals are actually coming from and is the deal volume sufficient. At the end of the day, though, any decision around running LinkedIn ads should be entirely based on is it helping achieve the goals that the marketing team and/or the business is expecting to achieve? And I think if the answer is no in both of those cases and you've given it a sufficient amount of time in testing, then it's absolutely not worth running. But if you are seeing the results and it's, you know, just taking a little bit longer time, that's less concerning to me. You can, we can, you know, ultimately figure out how to kind of shorten that up over time. But I think that, that then comes down to much more aggressive testing. So unfortunately the answer is it depends in this case, but ultimately I would not expect anything less than 3 months. And I would say if you are not seeing anything beyond even 9 months, that's when I would start to get concerned. Even for companies that are selling enterprise-level services or software at that point, I would still expect something within 9 months, at least some, some signs of life at that stage.

Right, maybe not closing the sale if you have a very long sales cycle, but you should be getting some sales qualified leads at that point that are expected to lead to a certain— Excellent. Devin, this has been great. If people want to learn more about you, about MarketVantage, where can we send them online?

Absolutely. So the best place to find me is either on LinkedIn. So it's Devin Littlefield, just nice and easy. Go to LinkedIn, just type in my name, and that's Devin with an I. Otherwise, I am becoming more active on X and Reddit as well. Both of those, you should be able to just find me by my name. And then otherwise, MarketVantage. So marketvantage.com is the other best place to track me down.

Awesome. And we'll have those links in the show notes. Devin, thank you so much. For coming by today.

Thank you so much. It was a pleasure, Rich.

Did you miss anything? Was there something that you wish that you had been taking better notes on? Don't worry, we've got you covered. You can get the full transcript and the highlights and takeaways from this episode and all the links that Devin shared with us. Just head on over to our website at theagentsofchange.com/544. And while you're there, be sure to check out all the information about our upcoming 10th Annual Digital Marketing Conference. It's a lot like the podcast, except it's in person and we all get together and you get to meet everybody and break bread and raise a glass. It's a pretty amazing experience, which is why we've been able to put it on for so many years. I'd love to see you there. I'd love to meet you face to face. So go ahead, grab your ticket, reserve your spot, and I'll see you this October. Until then, remain an agent of change.

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