Get More Leads with this LinkedIn Hack | Ep. 2610

I think LinkedIn's a good game to play. We don't play it enough as we should. I just ran like a $500 test. It was a really small test. We generated 5 leads and 1 was super qualified.

It's great to get more reach. It's great to get more people to get to know you, but we found that it's extremely effective to get people into—

All right, so we're going to talk about why LinkedIn influencer ads might just be the thing that can help you drive more leads. So have you tried this out yet, Neil?

I've messed around with it. I know you've run quite a bit of influencer Instagram ads. So how'd it work for you?

Oh, LinkedIn influencer ads.

Sorry.

I meant LinkedIn, but yeah. You're good. You're good. So just so everyone knows, the way this works is when you run a link, let's say I write a blog or sorry, blog post. Let's say I write a post on LinkedIn. It does fairly well, or maybe I'm sharing a case study or something like that. As part of an organization, I can sponsor any employee's post. I could sponsor my post, I could sponsor anybody that works on the team. What I have to do is I need a request. Let's say I need a request for myself to sponsor and then I need to approve it or an employee needs to approve it. Basically, we are giving more airtime to whatever we think will perform well, whatever we think should get more reach. And then that post will just be promoted. Now, what I did was recently I just ran like a $500 test. It was a really small test, right? And basically, I talked about like a case study with like, let's say, here's some results we got with programmatic SEO as an example, right? And so, here's step 1, step 4, step 2. So here's a couple things you can do, blah, blah, blah. At the very end of it, there's a call to action saying, hey, by the way, if you want to learn more about this stuff, you can subscribe to our email list, or if you need help with this stuff, you can click on this link, right? And in that link itself, it links to the website and we have some UTM tracking parameters. So we're tracking if this ad actually Generates leads, right? So on $500 in spend, we generated 5 leads and 1 was super qualified. And that is the beauty of a new ad format when new people are testing it. So that— I'll start with that first.

So through our clients, we spent around $60-ish thousand on this and we've done a lot of tests. It's a good ad format. Where we've struggled with is driving direct conversions into a purchase.

Right?

It's great to get more reach. It's great to get more people to get to know you. But we found that it's extremely effective to get people into a soft conversion. What I mean by a soft conversion is like a newsletter signup, a webinar signup, things like that. We're seeing it being really effective to drive leads to a purchase at mass scale. We're not seeing it too effective, but we're actually seeing it really effective to, let's say, a webinar. And then from a webinar, a portion of those people end up turning into customers. I'm not talking about customers for ebook. I'm talking about actual, you know, a customer for a security company or a hardware company or something that's more enterprisey.

So how would this look for a client?

So imagine what you did, but us helping a company do that, right? Because they have people on their team who are influencers. Like imagine, you know, there's a lot of people who work for these companies like Gong or, Cisco or Adobe or IBM or Microsoft, when they have 50,000 employees, 100,000 employees, there's people within there who are quote unquote have massive followings on Instagram. So what we do is we find the people within the organizations who are influencers. We work with them to run the campaigns.

Got it.

Yeah, so I don't know if we're talking about the same thing here, but it's still good data nonetheless. But here's something else that you should all consider. Everyone should do this, by the way. I don't know if you're doing this yet with your LinkedIn, Neil, but I had to change the link. This was a couple of weeks ago. And if you change it to— a lot of people now, when you're posting something right under your name, it says, visit my website. And I thought I had it on in the profile URL, right? But you actually have to adjust it and say like, add profile URL, and then just put your website in there.

Yeah.

But the cool thing is when when you're running one of these influencer ads, I think they're like, maybe they're called, I don't think they're called sponsored posts, but anyway.

So I haven't done— Sorry, you froze on me.

What's that?

I was saying I haven't done that, but I'm going to end up definitely checking it out.

Yeah, so I think they're called, no, you know what they're called, Neil? They're called thought leader ads. That's what they're called. They're not influencer ads. Sorry, my bad everyone. They're called thought leader ads. So for a thought leader ad, if you're running these at the very top, when people can see your post, your name's there and it says visit my website. So that's a conversion in itself, right? a little micro-conversion to get people to visit. And then to Neil's point, at the very bottom, you can say, hey, come to webinar, come into my email list or whatever, or hey, get a free marketing plan, right? Those are all like semi-soft conversions at the end of the day. So anything else?

The key is really check out the soft conversions. I just think you're going to end up not doing well if you're asking for a hard conversion, like a big ask. That's the easier way to put it. It just doesn't work well. People have to build a relationship. And you need to build a deeper relationship with them off of LinkedIn to eventually end up converting them.

Yeah. Look, the reach is strong on LinkedIn right now. I think LinkedIn's a good game to play. You know, we don't play it enough as we should. And so that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.