The LinkedIn Ads Loophole: How to Reach C-Suite Decision Makers

All right. Good morning, everyone. Wherever it is that you're coming from, it is 9:00 AM Pacific. So we're going to wait a little bit, maybe a minute or two for people to come in here. And while we do, go ahead and type into chat where you're coming from. It's always interesting to see where y'all are coming from. And then we'll go ahead and get going in a moment. And I'd also be curious to know also where you're watching from as well. So type into chat where you're coming from. And we will go from there. The only thing I can see right now actually is just Instagram. So Instagrammers that are coming in, let me know where you're coming in from. I can actually see the comments that you're leaving and things like that. So we're going to be talking about a couple things around LinkedIn today, mostly around the ad side. And I'm curious to understand what your struggles are as well. And then we brought in our wonderful paid media leader, Stephanie, who I'm going to introduce in a second, but we're going to wait. We got Zeke coming in from Argentina. We got Gio coming in from Austin. And I probably can't even see Maya. I don't even know if I can see chat from other areas. Okay, Dorian, I can see that you're coming in from Austin. Okay, there we go. I can see all the LinkedIn people coming in now. Kalamazoo from David, Samantha, Connecticut, Nashville, all over the place. Okay, great. So while we wait, maybe another, I don't know, 20 seconds or so, if you all can type in what your number one challenge is with LinkedIn, I'd be keen to understand because LinkedIn is changing quite a bit right now. So organic reach is starting to tank. Okay. Just like Google website traffic is starting to tank. So organic reach is starting to tank. So what do you do about that? Right. I also tend to find that LinkedIn posters, including myself, are posting insufferable things. I also find it pretty easy to game LinkedIn too, from an organic standpoint. It's, all you need to do is be polarizing. Right. And so the game is changing quite a bit on LinkedIn and the game is changing everywhere. And what we wanna leave you with today is, some probably 3 or 4 things that might be, oh, like, damn, I didn't think about that when it comes to LinkedIn ads. And then maybe there might be some bonuses towards the end. So if you stay till the end, there's gonna be a couple things that are underutilized on the LinkedIn side that will be helpful. And we'll leave some time for Q&A as well. But before we get started, Stephanie, do you wanna introduce yourself first? Then I'll introduce myself and then we can go ahead and jump into it.

Yeah, for sure. I'm Stephanie. I'm the Director of Paid Media here at Single Grain. I've been doing paid media for about 13 years now. And I help with strategies from all platforms, but have really gotten my feet wet and dirty in the ABM, LinkedIn, targeting that B2B buyer, that C-suite executive. That's where I guess my bread and butter is and what I really like focusing on and helping our clients figure out how to do.

Great. Thank you, Stephanie. And then, yeah, I'm gonna be jumping in here and there. Stephanie's gonna be kind of running the show for this one, but my name's Eric Siu. So I'm the founder of Single Grain and I, Tried to dabble in a lot of different things on the marketing side to bring it over to you guys. And I just want to read off some of these things over here that some people are writing in chat. So some people are saying when it comes to LinkedIn challenges, so one person said the algorithm is so bad right now. Don said visibility for myself and poor content coming at me. So LinkedIn posters have become spammy. And then some people are saying so confused right now with the algorithms. A lot of this is organic, right? But some people are saying, okay, getting people to actually convert when they hit the landing page, that Okay, that's maybe a little more related to paid. Biggest challenge is narrowing down your audience. Carolyn, we might have some things for you there. Approaching prospect is AI-generated messages and bombarding DMs. So I think our job here is to at least make LinkedIn a little easier for you all. And Philip says the algorithm has definitely changed. So stay till the end. There's gonna be some goodies for you. Guarantee you this will be a good use of your time. Stephanie, I'm gonna turn it over to you and I'll kind of hide in the background. So Maya, you can take me away and I'll pop in every now and then.

Awesome. Thanks, Eric. Yeah. Before I share my screen, definitely do want to acknowledge that LinkedIn and I would say every platform has changed dramatically in the last couple of months with the introduction of AI and everything. There's— it's just been a lot of moving pieces and that really excites me. And so hopefully this here can really just kind of help serve as the base of where you can start your strategy from and you know, really reach those C-suite people since, you know, getting a bunch of leads is fine. But if they're not the right people, it doesn't matter. So we'll kind of dive in. You know, here's our LinkedIn ad strategy that we would use overall just to start reaching that C-suite and finding those decision makers. So this is kind of what some of you guys were feeling already. LinkedIn ads, the current state of things. People are really over-reliant on some really basic creative approaches. Everything is stock, and that's— some people were, you know, mentioning, you know, everything is just this AI-generated stock kind of thing. And yeah, we're definitely seeing that you have low engagement, you have low click-through rates, you're just not generating a lot of positive or even valuable interactions on your platform. And you can see Over here, there's a few examples of some creatives that really just are missing the mark. And you know, these are two different companies, but they look exactly the same. Also, the ads are really generic. So even LinkedIn themselves here has this ad that is just okay, great. Make your lead gen more effective. It's sure that's something we all are looking for, but that ad definitely doesn't stand out and definitely does not tell. Us what we can grow or do on LinkedIn. It's just saying, here's this generic thing that we can help you with. Again, these others, they all kind of follow that same template of generic stock photo, call to action, download a white paper. It doesn't speak to the client and their, their, you know, their pain points and what they're really looking for. Because if you're not speaking to the client in their language, They're just gonna ignore you and you're gonna have that overall horrible, boring, yes, Laura, boring creative here. The other thing is either you do basic segmentation without really strategic funnel stages and you're not using your ABM list properly, or you just are kind of, okay, here's my ICP and you're not evaluating if your messaging's actually reaching your ICP. There's a lot of ways you can do that, you know, whether you hone in on, okay, here's my target list, let's get that out to them, or you can segment the list a little bit more using LinkedIn's tools. But right now, a lot of people just aren't segmenting their list enough, and it's really hard to find that accurate, you know, person because they're saying, okay, I want everyone in this industry, when if you target everyone in the industry, maybe you're hitting admins. You're not hitting those true decision makers. The other thing that we're running into, that's really long and slow engagement cycles. So one of the things that we see is that, you know, C-suite, they don't have a lot of time to make a decision. If you spam them even once with an AI bot-generated boring ad, it's just not going to help you get what you need. So you want to provide value to them throughout the entire sales process. Disinterest sets in early on. So you hit them with one of those boring creatives to start, you're definitely not going to get the time of day from that C-suite down the road. So what do you want me to do? Basically, we just want to build that full funnel approach. This feels really, I guess, generic overall. This is the advice you hear from everyone is you need a full funnel, but I think You know, as a marketer, we're probably gonna scream that from the mountaintop that you have to, especially with the C-suite, provide interest, provide that full funnel and run really targeted ads to that full funnel. So with that, I'll give you our, our ABM playbook. So here is the way we really start and push people through with just using an account-based marketing strategy. Now, where this differs from a standard marketing strategy is ABM, you identify who you want to target first. Who are these companies and who do you want to actually go after? Whereas in traditional marketing, you start with that bigger bucket. So that's those standard LinkedIn campaigns that you see where everyone's targeting a specific industry or everyone with this job title. We just want to get them in. So in ABM, who is our target audience? Let's get in front of those companies. Then after that, for ABM, engage them, get them in those personalized conversations, reach them with a message that hits their pain point, hits their industry, really kind of speaks to them as, oh, I didn't know I had that issue. Yep, that's absolutely me. I didn't know I could save that much time. Let me look into that. And then finally, you want to build a relationship with them. So you can do all of that through your ads. And I would say, yes, your organic definitely does play a role there. As the director of paid media. I very much want to lean into ads, but I would say, um, you know, there is an organic play there as well. Reversing it, traditionally you say, okay, let's nurture these buckets of people, these big remarketing audiences, but it doesn't drive into those target companies. So by identifying the target companies first, you can already start to push people through that sales cycle that you know are actually qualified. Um, so starting with that full funnel strategy for that top of funnel, your recommended ad types, the 2 that we see the most success with, thought leader and video. Um, so thought leader ads are, you know, someone in your industry, maybe it's your CEO, maybe it's your head of sales, um, director of marketing can be really good for this, but you get that thought leader ad out in front of people. It's essentially I like to think of it as like an organic booster, like you used to do on Meta. However, on LinkedIn, when anyone that interacts with your campaign, you can then remarket to down the road. And if you have 4 or 5 thought leader ads that you would cycle through 3 or 4 a week, you can really start to push out more quality, more value for your customers and position yourselves overall as, okay, I am truly the expert in this field. Here's all this information I'm sharing with you. And, you know, slowly start to be front of mind for them. And then video ads. Video is huge. LinkedIn video is actually something that's very new to the market as far as LinkedIn goes and is something we see high value with. You can remarket to anyone with a video. Video ads also give a lot more of a dynamic context. People are used to video on every other platform. So LinkedIn is integrating that and it's really big, especially when you're on the mobile app. So with thought leader ads, I would ask you guys to be a little bit more creative as to who could be a thought leader for your company. You obviously have the CEOs, the VPs, the happy clients, heads of sales, things like that. But you also have brand ambassadors, and there are some really strong brand ambassadors that can definitely do do a good job for you guys. So, I would say overall, like, looking at those brand ambassadors, you know, are those your best customers? Are those people that you can just say, okay, I have this really cool software, can you film a video and show it off? And reaching out and finding new brand ambassadors for yourself. And then video. We love video because you can remarket to people depending on how much of the video they've watched. So, it can be 25%, 50%, 75%, or 97% of your video. So, overall, it looks like you can segment— overall, I would segment your audience to at least 15 seconds of a watch. So, if you have a minute-long video, that's a 25% audience, but I would go even higher if you can. So, if you can go up to 50% of your audience, it's really, really strong. So, I would say, let's, you know, start with 50% of a video watched. Make sure you brand in the first, first half of your video. Make sure you have your product somewhere in there, and it's not just this long catchy hook where they watch that and they go, well, I don't know what that was for, but that was really interesting. Definitely want to make sure you put that right there up front, and that's a really good way to get people interested and get them hearing more of your story. Since if you share more right there up front, you can really push people forward and get them to know more about your brand. And again, you can remarket to them and enter them into some of your middle of funnel audiences. Going into middle of funnel. So the main ways we like to do middle of funnel Document ads is number one. Free tools are really strong. And then if you don't have a free tool or a document to run for a document ad, you can do just some ads that are focused on your pain points. Where most people get the middle of funnel wrong is they only do the generic download this guide, download this white paper, and they don't provide any value while they're telling people to download it. So definitely recommend saying, hey, you know, download this white paper, but doing it in a document where they can scroll through the first 3, 4, or 5 pages and actually get value before they go, okay, yes, I do want to read the rest of this. The other way for your middle of funnel that, you know, they engage with your thought leader ads, they've watched your videos now. Okay, you're giving them a free tool. Maybe it's a keyword researcher that you have. Maybe it is some sort of AI tool that you've developed in-house that you can give them part of for free, a Chrome extension. Even a free trial sometimes can work in the middle of funnel, but giving, giving some more value can really help push and grow that forward. So I would say that that's another way I would definitely recommend, you know, starting to nurture people and get them to think highly of your company and know, okay, this company has already helped me with these great ideas from their thought leadership. They've given me these resources that are really impactful, and you're really teeing them up for when you— they're in the market and ready to go. So again, this is a little bit of what that thought leader ad can look like. They— it has a preview. So this one has like 3 pages and you would scroll through. It would say, do you want to unlock to see more? They have the form there and then it would give them the document ad after that. And so now we've done all this work, we've warmed them up, we're getting them into bottom of funnel. How do we go from here? Mainly what we'd recommend is ABO. We have those lists of people who have engaged with us all the way throughout. So we have, okay, here's all these companies we wanna target. How do we get in front of them with the right ad? Okay, you know, what should that ad say? What should it be? A lot of times what we recommend is, okay, let's do a demo request, a meeting. Let's get them in front of you. How can we get them to do that? Is it an offer? Is it giving them something to meet with you? Is it by hitting this pain point? Is it by calling out something that they're missing? So making sure that you have all of those pieces in place can really push leads through and those companies that have already engaged with you and get them to book that demo. Obviously, the goal here, close the lead, get them to your sales team, have your sales team work their magic and close that, close that sale. But definitely want to work on your copy and your creative here and constantly be testing. And here you can see one of the main things that does the best is calling out on personalization. So in this ad, there is some personalization right here in the copy. And over here, it's with this logo for the— and the name here on the ad that we're targeting. So when you're targeting those companies, just having those pieces there helps your ad actually stand out throughout all of LinkedIn. And then here's, I guess, a list of 3 different audiences I'd recommend. First off, today, tomorrow, start building these and get them— these segments out there because these are what we have seen really have the biggest impact the fastest. The first audience we call is your ghost list. So someone ghosted you. They set up a meeting. They didn't show up. Why didn't they show up? Maybe they got pulled in a million different directions. Maybe, you know, they had something come up. So running ads targeted specifically for them, saying like, hey, and in this case, you know, we called out the company name right here. See how we can help you. You can also call out more cheekily here. of saying, hey, like, come back. We would really love for you to come back to us. The other thing we can do is make sure that you're having that personalization effect and it really pushes them to reschedule that meeting with you. The next is site visitors. So if they visited your site, start showing up for them saying like, hey, we saw you visited our site. Are you interested in this? And again, test different messaging. Because maybe they're looking, you know, for something that saves them time. And they're looking at, okay, if I can save myself X amount of time, that's what's going to move the needle the most for my business. Sometimes they're looking, okay, if I can, you know, do this one thing faster, then I can put more revenue there. Or maybe they're looking at you to help their efficiency. So test different messaging. But the people especially that visited your website, if you use the tool, like Snitcher and integration, what you can do is you can call that out in the ad itself and in the creative for that company list of these people all spent over 5 minutes on my site. I'm gonna add them to this list of site revisitors and tell them why. And then the other one that we really like is people that downloaded or attended a webinar. What content did they consume? What report did they download? And retarget them based on that. So build up, you know, if they download a case study, highlight one of those facts again. If they're really calling out data from that first interaction, saying this is why you were interested in the first place, let me pull you back and get you back in. So saw a couple of questions about what kind of ad this is and how we run that. So we run that through a tool called Carrot. So this is a quick example of what Carrot looks like live, but it essentially will put the company name, the call to action. You build all of the creative there, and I'm actually gonna take you guys through a quick walkthrough. But this is a real way that you can actually have the logo, the company. Again, the logo and the company name are the 2 that we see have the biggest impact, and it pushes all these ads out at scale to that ABM list. So it's really, really cool because it automatically does it. I know as a marketer, I don't have to then build 50 to 100 to 1,000 different ads for each company. It does it for me. So essentially you would give it, you know, okay, I want people who work at Uber who are senior web developers, web developers, and have this title or the seniority level. And then as long as your audience list is over 300, you can run ads to that. So let me stop sharing that and I will start sharing the tool and we can do a quick walkthrough of Carrot. So there we go. All right. So this is what the Carrot tool looks like. You would come in, you know, you can name your tool here. You would have your start date. You can choose video or image for different ads. You have your objective, website brand awareness, conversion, lead gen, really depending on what you want to push people for and if you want it to be a last-click effort versus a more branding effort. So if you want it to be more of a branding effort and just to get in front of everyone at that company, you can do brand awareness or website visit. Just to push people over that line. Because keep in mind, these are people who they've interacted with you from reading all your thought leadership, downloading content. These are— they're not cold leads. So any of these do make sense for you to kind of push people through. Then you would have to set a daily budget because this specifically is for LinkedIn. Your budget does have to be big enough for— it's at least $10 a day for company. Um, you would set up all of your bids, countries, and then you would add your target accounts. So if you want to target, you know, we'll just say you target Google, and you can type that in and then add in Google and target them. If you want to target Meta, um, you can add them in as well. So whomever you want to target, you can target these accounts here. Now, the one caveat is your audience size, if you're targeting a company, does have to be 300. So you're not reaching that one person that downloaded, but you're reaching that company that downloaded. However, you do add refinements in to different seniority levels. So director, VP, senior, you know, manager, and you can see the audience size changing over here. And then you can add in additional refinements for job functions, saying we only want people who are in, let's say, marketing or comms, and the audience is different here. So I would recommend continuing to add in smaller and smaller, or as much refinement as you can for each one to get that audience as close to that. So then you can also Add in— so I obviously did that manually, but if you have a list of companies, you can add in your CVS list or CSV, or you can upload any list from the other campaigns if you want to relaunch those. And then on this next screen, this is where you would actually build your ad out. So you would want to have your intro text, image creative, headlines, call to actions, and more. So let's see. So if you're adding in your intro text, so work with us, and then you go to create ad image. And this is where it's really exciting because what you can do is you can say, okay, let's use this template. And this is speaking directly to that person who you want to target. So let's Let's say we added in Google and we want to target everyone who is a VP and above and we want to hit them with this ad. So this ad right here is definitely, you would say, okay, awesome. How do I personalize this to be for that person? So in this variable section, you can see company name or company size. So you can put either of those dynamically and then company image. That's what this sunburst is. That's actually the logo. So if I wanted to have it on here twice, I could add that again. And then right here you can add in the company name as well. And then this works very much like Canva. It's a very easy to use tool. So you can just make all of that, you know, 125 or so. The company name would populate. And you can add in. So this is a placeholder. You would just add in your logo. So, you know, that's something you could upload here, add in your logo. And we have all these different templates as well. But of course, anything that is more brand specific, you can definitely add that on. So all of that being said, let's say this is perfect. You have all of your messaging in and then you could just click done. And you will see here, okay, cool, the sunburst. And sometimes it doesn't update live in this preview, but you just click continue. And when you go back, it'll show the creative here and you can see Google popping in and then the company name will populate on the live ad. So you would add in all these other elements and you can have a different a couple of creatives. So if you wanted to have 3 to test, which is more best practice, you can add in up to 3 creatives. And then all you would do is you would click sync and it would sync into LinkedIn. I'm not going to do that live to save this beautiful creative I just made from going live. But overall, this is definitely one of the ways that I would recommend pushing that forward. So that's Carrot. That's the tool we like to use. There are a lot of other ways you can run ABM. You know, you can target, build it out manually doing one campaign for each company, layering in a lot of stuff. But I would say a lot of it is a lot more difficult in general to kind of do manually, but it is still possible. We like this tool because it makes it a lot faster. So jumping back into my deck, I just want to share a few things before we open it up for some questions. So these are some of the top tips of if you're targeting a company, the best things to do. If the company size is large enough, layer on different targeting elements. So layer on managing manager, VP, directors and higher. You can also test into job functions if your company is large enough. So again, like I said, keep whittling it down until you get closer to that 300. I would also say one thing you can do too is if your company, the companies you're targeting are really small, make sure that what you're looking for is what you're looking for in general is just that, okay, am I reaching this company? Cool. Because then if you're reaching, if it's 300 and you're reaching them, you're still reaching your decision maker. The other thing you can do is if your company only has 100 or 200, you can add your own company to that. And that way you make sure you're targeting just that company with that ad. And if people in your own company see that ad for the other company, ideally they're not clicking on it. So it's not costing you any money. So that's a little workaround for LinkedIn in general. If you're really doing this hyper-targeting to be able to show up where you need to. Some additional considerations with running these really targeted ABM funnels. Is that Carrot or ABM in general is really good at driving that influence pipeline. So it's warm leads. It's people who they've again, they interacted with your top of funnel. They've gotten that free tool. They've downloaded that document ad. So it's not always last click on these. So if you're evaluating if it's successful for you or not, a lot of times it is successful if you look at influence pipeline or overall lift. So are you seeing, okay, my revenue is going up and my ad spend is going down? Then great, the strategy is working. You're getting more revenue for less spend. The other consideration is really testing into some of those branding options. So website visitor or brand awareness, you can get more reach for less spend that way. If you're pushing people just to fill out a form or just to you know, do a demo or whatever on your website, LinkedIn automatically will charge you more for that and you won't be able to reach as many people in that audience. But if you're doing website visitors or brand awareness, you can reach a lot more people in that specific audience. We've even had people come out and reach out to us when we are running these ads for ourselves saying, hey, my VP saw our ad and they wanted us to talk to you. So I would say overall, like, yes, this is like a really great tool and tactic to use, but don't expect it always to generate the value from that last click. A lot of times that value comes throughout. All right. Kind of summing it up here, doing it right. Don't push cold audiences to try to book a demo. A lot of times you're just going to end up throwing money at those audiences and not get a lot of return, and they're not going to see the value from you and it's going to leave a bad taste in their mouth. Always make sure your creative and messaging is about them, their pain points, and not about you and what you have to offer. Build out that full funnel. Make sure you're giving them value throughout. Personalize your creatives to your audience. So we really like that through ABM, but there's other ways you can do that personalization. But again, speak to that C-suite, speak to that person who's running that company. What do they care about? Tell them. And then continue testing. Test ad types, creative messaging, pain points, social proof. There's a lot you can test. So test all those different things, see what works. And definitely, you know, always iterate and update on a regular basis. All right. So that ends the formal presentation part here. But we will open it up for some Q&A. So that being said, I see that there's a few questions in here specifically. So let's see. Eric just showed up again. Hello, Eric.

Answering some questions here. So great job, first of all, Stephanie, and I would say that a couple things. Some people are asking about Carrot. Yes, full disclosure that is our product. Also, if we can add value, we're going to do that. So there's a waitlist for it, but I know David asked about it. There is a temporary $500 a month plan that's available. I think we might take that away soon. So we're just kind of testing that right now. But to answer more specific questions around— so Stephanie, there's some questions in here around Are you able to target decision makers, for example, and things like that, right? Or can you add companies from your Sales Navigator? So I think it's probably helpful to answer some of these first, and then we can answer more general questions around LinkedIn as well, because the game is changing so much, right? So Steph, I don't— as you scroll through this, I mean, I'll just ask you first, how do you— So Carly has a question here and I'll kind of be the facilitator. How do you make sure you're only targeting decision makers?

So this is not, I don't think this is just Yeah, I would say job title targeting is the strongest way to do that. And you can layer on job titles at any point as long as your audience is at least 300. So that is the LinkedIn stipulation, not just for me. So I would say top of funnel, maybe that means you have your company list and you're putting in those job titles for those decision makers that you know, and that way you're targeting a larger audience. You know, pool because it's, you know, maybe 300 companies and you're giving them 4 job titles. So then that list size will automatically be a little bit larger and you can make sure you're getting your message right in front of them.

I would also say one more thing too, just to kind of take it, do some things in tandem with LinkedIn. So I don't, I think not enough people are paying attention to tools out there like La Growth Machine. So it's, you know, maybe I'll type that in, but it's lagrowthmachine.com. There's another one called heyreach.io. So it combines your SMS, it combines your emails, it combines your X messaging and combines your LinkedIn DMs. And so you kind of need to be everywhere at once. So even though this isn't an SEO webinar, we talk a little bit about search everywhere optimization, which will actually be the next webinar where we're talking about how AI SEO is changing. Everyone's getting a lot of— everyone's kind of spazzing out over what do we do about AI SEO, right? So that will come, but I think When you do things now, it's not just LinkedIn. It's when you're doing account-based marketing, you're not just touching them in one area. Maybe you're hitting them with direct mail. Maybe you're hitting them with gifts as well, right? For us, through cold email, we're incentivizing. In some cases, we're incentivizing a $100 Amazon gift card, and then we're booking people for different offers that we have. Doesn't matter if it's agency or doesn't matter if it's Carrot. That $100 gift card still works very well. And then we test it on a segment of people. We test different offers for like, we have 12 different offers. And then from there, we narrow it down to whatever's getting a good response rate. So we have a really good email sequence right now where for every 300 emails we send, we get 1 response. And so my encouragement to all of you is it's not just the LinkedIn stuff that we talked about here that Stephanie talked about. You have to do a lot more. And my take on this is if you're watching and you're a marketer, if all you know is SEO, you're in trouble. If all you know is paid media, you're in trouble. You have to know You have to become more of a T-shaped marketer where you go deep in one area and then wide in the others. And then you have to layer on the AI piece as well, right? And so I'm giving you a lot more than just kind of the LinkedIn ads piece, but I'm trying to arm you with, well, I'm kind of foreshadowing also the next webinar, but also getting you to understand things more holistically. Because if you don't, then people are going to run circles around you. You don't want that to happen. And that being said, I'm going to continue to facilitate here. So Mark has a question. Are they saying target one even though you're advertising to many, Stephanie?

your ads and all will be directed towards those few decision makers. So your— what ends up happening is because LinkedIn has that stipulation of 300 or greater, your ads will actually show up for all of them. But you don't pay either until they click, depend, or you can pay by CPM. But most of the setups are by click. So if you're really just pushing for that, that one person, it's really great because what you can do is You know, make sure that you show up in front of them. And yes, you may show up in front of, you know, 299 of their other employees at their company. But if they're also all talking about your company, that's another way to get that brand awareness piece and get in front of them and actually target that one person too. If you're looking to only target that one person, I mean, that's where Sales Navigator really comes in and those other places like Eric was talking about, email, you can direct email them. But with that LinkedIn personalized creative, it is them and 299 of their closest friends.

Yep. We got a question here. So from LinkedIn user. So Gartner's Q3 CMO report just came out and they strongly recommend— recommended targeting buying groups versus individual target roles. Does this tool enable you to combine roles into groups?

Yeah. So what you could do is you can say, okay, I want all of these companies. There's a way to do one-to-many where you can put in multiple companies at one time. There's also a way to run standard LinkedIn ads in there. And then there's the one-to-one that we highlighted. So the one-to-many is kind of what that is. So I might put in, you know, here's these 10 companies that are all in the same industry. So the creative speaks to them and here's the specific job titles. So there's a really easy way to kind of lump those job titles together and then run that creative to those.

Cool. And then David coming in from YouTube here. So Eric, you should have a look at $100 Million Money Models before you make a decision about the monthly money model. David, so Hormozi's a friend, both Hormozis. So he writes great books, but I think everyone, it's probably helpful for you all to watch the launch that he did this past weekend where they did about $3 million in book sales, but he probably cleared either $125 or $150 million on this launch. And so if we want to talk about what works with LinkedIn, you have to combine it with other areas too. So yes, we did drive our email list to this webinar. We do drive paid ads for this webinar too, because webinars convert for us. Even when I do the Marketing School Podcast with Neil, each webinar drives about $400,000 for them and they expect about 5,000 attendees. Now your mileage may vary. You don't need to drive 5,000 attendees. For this one, I think it's probably a couple hundred or so in aggregate. And so I think you just have to think about what works for you. So for example, we're in B2B right now. What works really well? Dinners work well. Oh, didn't know that, that you have to hang out with people. Yeah, dinners work well. Live events work well. This is a live event too, but this is an online event, right? If you're hosting event, that's gonna crush it too, right? Whether you're hosting event or a happy hour or something like that. Most people just aren't willing to go the extra mile and that's why they're most people. And so you're watching this right now. Hopefully you're not just most people. You can't just sit on LinkedIn and expect it to do well for you. But by the way, all my friends that have crushed it with organic in the past, they're not doing that well anymore, right? From just an organic standpoint. So you have to layer on what Stephanie talked about, the thought leader ads, those work really well. And every organic platform, Google back in the day, Twitter back in the day, all these platforms, Instagram back in the day, eventually what happens is this panacea of organic, it starts to go away and then paid starts to take over. And so I think it's helpful for everyone here to consider. You don't have to use Carrot, by the way. We have a couple competitors. One competitor was actually paying for Carrot and then they just copied the feature. And so you don't have to use Carrot. You can use something else or you can even do it manually. So Danny Chung, if you're still here, shout out to you. Yeah, sure. We're going to talk about our own products and services. Absolutely. Because at the end of the day, we're all just trying to do better for our clients and ultimately do better for our employees. That being said, let's see. Do you see any questions you wanna answer here, Steph?

I think there were a few around like lookalike audiences and making sure you build the right audiences. And I would say for some of your lookalike type audiences, you can build those in platform in LinkedIn. And I don't think that that's a great use of like the carrot tool for that ABM style, 'cause that's really just those targeted accounts. So, those are the ones, you know, are valuable. But if you want to look at some of those, you know, a little bit larger audiences, thought leader can be useful for that. I think thought leader is really, really strong. And that's that intersection between organic and paid that you, your organic will take off more if you put paid dollars behind it, your paid will take off more. And really, if you're able to find brand ambassadors or happy clients that are willing to post for you, That's the magic. People are always looking for reviews and all of that. So if we can get more of those in front of those lists, that can really help stuff take off.

Yeah. And if people are running thought leader in general, Steph, how much should they be spending? How should they think about budgeting for thought leader ads?

Yeah. So we like to put a lot more budget towards the thought leader and then ultimately this ABM, because not many people click. They may see the ad and a lot of times they wanna do the research on their own, so they'll go to their website. Which is great because then you're just saving dollars and getting in front of them. So I would put maybe 35 to 40% of your overall LinkedIn budget to those thought leader top of funnel ads.

Yeah. So how, sorry, maybe I missed this. What percent of the budget you think should go towards it?

Like 35, 40%.

35, 40%. Okay, cool. Great. Dorian has a question here. So Dorian, love this LinkedIn webinar and your cursor clogged code MCP video I posted. Yeah. So Dorian, if you can tell me the prompt that you're looking for, Maya, who's in the background right now. Maya, we had a lot of people comment prompt and we haven't sent them the prompts yet. We need to figure out a way to package and get it to these people. That's a blocker. But Dorian, if you can tell me which prompt you're looking for, that'd be helpful. Just so everyone knows here, I'll give you the high level. If you are using Cursor, Claude Code, MCPs, it sounds very technical. It sounds very scary because it's 3 different products. I was actually yesterday, I was playing around with it and So for Single Grain, we have very specific recruiting criteria. So we want people that have at least 2 promotions at 2 different companies. They're not job hoppers. They're very AI forward. They're spending money on AI out of pocket. When they've worked their hardest, they've probably worked more than 40 hours a week. So it's very specific, right? Now we put together a prompt within like 2, 3 minutes or so, and I was able to find exactly who I'm looking for. So how valuable is this prompt? If I can find exactly who I'm looking for from a recruiting standpoint, Because we're on LinkedIn, we're trying to do business, right? We're trying to recruit people as well. That's going to grow our business. It is one of the highest leverage things I think anybody in here can do. And there are crawlers working, tying with LinkedIn. It can even DM for you eventually too. And it's getting to the point now where I feel like there's 10 of me, or it's going to get to a point where there's 100 of me. And by the way, Stephen, I didn't read what you said over there, but I see a WordPress word. You can actually Have it scan your entire blog to understand where your keyword gaps are, what's converting for you, and what pillars you should be making. And then it'll draft programmatic posts for you to sit in your WordPress drafts or whatever CMS that you're using. So all these things are important for everyone in here because we're not going to just be clicking into LinkedIn and doing all these things. I don't even know if we're going to be using an interface like this. Probably in 5, 10 years, we'll just be on glasses or something, or maybe even something else. Karthik, this will be recorded, I think. I think you can rewatch it. At least on the very least, it'll be on the YouTube channel. So just search for Leveling Up with Eric Siu. And oh, Steven's idea. Okay. Be cool if you make the WordPress plugin that helps same customers make a landing page. That could be interesting. We might do that. I'll talk to my CTO, Sean, at lunch. Stephanie, any other questions or anything else you want to bring up here?

I think the main thing to bring up is just that while LinkedIn is one place to do this, and that's what we focused on, as Eric said, like, you need to be targeting these people across multiplatform. They are spending time on LinkedIn, but find other places where they are and target them there, even if it's not digital. There are instances where we've had people run billboards in front of just where one CEO drives. past to work every day. And that billboard ultimately, they saw it and ended up calling that company. So there's a lot of different ways to do ABM targeting. This is just one that is much more efficient. And I think I'm partial to it because it's a lot easier, but be creative when you think about targeting these people because there's a lot of different ways.

Yeah. And David here. So David says, I know that clients need at least 6 interactions for content, your brand before they buy. David, I'm actually going to argue. So there used to be the rule of 7. I actually think it's like the rule of 14 or 21 now because attention is so disparate. So going back to what I mentioned earlier with the search everywhere optimization stuff, you do have to try to be everywhere at once. And when you do a long-form video, you're building a longer-term relationship. But that's why we spend so much time and effort creating content everywhere. Because the reality is 99% of you watching this right now are not in market to buy, right? But if we keep doing these webinars, we keep doing the podcast, we keep doing the YouTube channel, we keep doing these things where we're just there all the time, right? And you mostly agree with what we say, then it might be worth a conversation down the road, right? But that's how you play the game. Just understanding that. How do you focus on the 99% of people who aren't in market and how do you nurture those people? I don't even think we do that the best. I think we're getting better all the time. And as long as you're getting better all the time, that's all you can ask for. And so yeah, Andrea, yeah, La Growth Machine is the first one. And then HeyReach.io, I think, is the second one. And these are both LinkedIn tools that you can use to make it easier for your outbound. Jennifer, does— I think I need to understand the context of your question. Does what get more creepy or does— you said, does it get a bit creepy?

Ad personalization. Oh yeah.

I mean, isn't ad targeting creepy in general? So that's my question. Honest question, right? I think, and by the way, we do have some clients that use it right now. Some of these are publicly traded companies. And they do get messages from people that are being targeted to tell them to stop sometimes. So to your point, Jennifer, I think it's a natural reaction. I don't think some people like it. And then let's see, anything else? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Just any, all of you watching on LinkedIn right now, there's still a good chunk of you. This is, you can get the recording on LinkedIn or you can go to the YouTube channel. Both are fine. But Steph, do you want to add anything else?

No, I think this is a good wrap-up point. I think we've covered a lot of ground here today. Great.

So guys, the next webinar is going to be around AI SEO and search everywhere optimization. I'll be running that one. That's probably going to be September 9th or so. And those of you that will be at HubSpot Inbound, I'll be speaking there alongside my podcast counterpart, Neil. So if you're going to be in San Francisco, we will be there hanging out. I know a couple people have asked already. And that being said, we'll see you September 9th. We're gonna start marketing that soon and look out for that. If you just go to singlegrain.com/register, I think you'll be able to register for that soon. So that being said, I hope you all have a great rest of your week. Stephanie, thank you for an amazing webinar and talk to you all later. Thank you.