Intro to LinkedIn Ads Strategy for B2B Marketing - Expert Webinar

All right, so, hello, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us today. We're very excited. I was just chatting and mentioning that I think it's really extra special fun to do this on a Friday afternoon because it's a nice way to wind down on your Friday. And we have with us today Anthony, who's from Speedwork Social, and as you can see by his title slide, diving into LinkedIn marketing and sort of deep diving into B2B strategies for LinkedIn. So, Anthony, thank you so much for joining today. We're happy to see what you've got for us.

Awesome. Well, thanks for having me. It's good to be here. I've known the Doc group for a while now. Katie and Taylor, we go way back, so it's good to see you guys again. So excited to share some notes from the LinkedIn side of things. All right, so I'll dive in. So some things I'll cover today. I'll Talk about why LinkedIn and why now. If you're doing any types of B2B marketing, why you'll want to consider it. I'll go through the different, different ways we typically do marketing on LinkedIn, a few different channels and, you know, a few different ways that people typically use LinkedIn for marketing. I'll go through the different targeting options, ad types. We'll talk about some benchmarks and funnel strategies, and then we'll have some time at the end for any questions anybody has. Happy to kind of chat through anything. So real quick background on me. I live in Austin, Texas. My agency is called Speedwork Social. All we do is LinkedIn marketing. We work with mostly B2B tech companies, but there is a pretty good var of, you know, different verticals and stuff like that. Most of it's B2B tech, but, you know, sometimes it's like a tech platform for finance or tech for HR or tech for something else. So lots of different verticals inside of there. I'm one of the LinkedIn certified marketing experts. This is like a new LinkedIn program. I'm like one of nine people that's actually certified in LinkedIn marketing in the US so that was fun to get this year. And then I've managed over 100 million in LinkedIn ads. So, so lots of different types of campaigns. We've done just about everything. So any questions you have, feel free to shoot at the end. So jumping into why LinkedIn? Why should you use LinkedIn now? Well, I'll kind of, you know, the big picture is like, over the last few years, obviously with COVID everyone was forced online during that time frame and had to, you know, figure out how to use online tools. So I remember years ago it was like, does anybody actually use LinkedIn? And nowadays it's like, oh, everyone's on LinkedIn, everyone's using it. You know, it's much more. It's developed into a mainstream social platform. Lots of professionals will kind of use it as their primary social platform, especially during the work week and during the workday when they're in that business mindset, people tend to use LinkedIn to, you know, scroll around, see what other people are talking about and like learn new things. LinkedIn's been growing a ton, especially since the Microsoft acquisition. They've kind of added a lot of fuel to the fire, which is great to see a lot of new features coming out, a lot of new connections and abilities into the other Microsoft tools and stuff. So it's opened up a lot of new possibilities. So it's great to see like a growing platform. They hit a billion members last year. I know that sounds like a small number compared to like Facebook and YouTube and other things, but it's been growing a lot. You can kind of see how it continued to accelerate in its growth. Other reasons why, like why now is a good time. There's been so much privacy changes recently over the last few years. IOS works 13 when that came out, all the removal of cookies and stuff like that, a lot of that impacts the platforms that would do a lot of their off platform learning, like Facebook, like YouTube and stuff like that. Where a lot of what they did was and do is based off a user's journey off platform. Like they go to the website and buy and stuff like that. You know, Most of what LinkedIn does is based off first party data and that does not change. People go on LinkedIn, they'll set up their profiles, they'll type in their own job title, company company name. People will set up company pages and say what company size they are, what industry they're in. So it's all kind of self input stuff. So none of that data is going away. That's all kind of first party data that's not available elsewhere. So who should consider using LinkedIn? Pretty much any B2B company can at least have some success organically on LinkedIn and then thinking about investing further into like maybe ads or stuff like that. LinkedIn's a good fit for you if you are looking to target professionals and businesses. When you, when you're looking for like a niche professional, that's hard to Find elsewhere. I think I have an example on the next slide here. But in B2B, you're usually selling to a very specific job title at a very specific type of company. It's hard to find that in other places. LinkedIn, you can type those exact job titles in exact industries, exact company sizes, and like reach that exact person. LinkedIn does have the reputation of being a more expensive platform to use. If you're using sales nav, that's like a monthly subscription, like 100 bucks. And then if you're using ads, the CPC and CPM prices are, are a lot higher than you'll see typically on Facebook or YouTube. So the best fits are when you have a high enough LTV that that ROI is going to make sense for you in the end. So if you're selling enterprise software or lots of different types of commercial software, a lot of them are like, you know, you're paying a monthly subscription or an annual subscription for thousands of dollars and companies are usually buying this. So when you have a high enough LTV for that ROI to make sense, that's when LinkedIn really works, you know the best. And then B2B marketing definitely takes a long time compared to B2C where in E commerce, you know you're going to click on an ad, go to a website, buy right away. That's a very easy to. It's a lot, it's a lot simpler to track that. B2B marketing is often, oh, I saw this ad, I downloaded a white paper, I sent it to my boss. I had to get finance approval tech, the IT team had to see if it will integrate with our systems. Then finally for a demo or like, you know, then we got approval and that we did buy. So could be like six months for that whole process to have. So it's best if you have a sales process on your end. If you have a salesperson who can help guide that process and work those leads and come in, those are the teams that we see have the most success. It'll be a lot more challenging for if you're selling very low price points. E commerce is hard on LinkedIn because the CPCs are just so high that if you're paying 10 bucks a click and you're selling a $10 item, you're probably not going to make that ROI back unless you're selling bulk or stuff like that. B2C offers. We're seeing a lot more B2C brands advertise on LinkedIn. Some of the car companies like Mercedes is starting to advertise on Linked. Oftentimes what I think about is like people are in the work mindset when they're on LinkedIn. So you know, if you're selling clothes or stuff like that, they're less, less in that mindset when they're on LinkedIn versus like when they're on Facebook. They are kind of scrolling around, they're kind of in more of a laid back mindset and they're more open to like personal stuff whereas they're, when they're on LinkedIn, they're more in the business professional mindset. And then of course offline businesses. You know, just like all digital marketing, if you're looking at target construction workers, you know, they're probably out in the field, they're probably not on LinkedIn as much. So those are things that we think about when we look at an audience. Here's that, here's that graphic I was talking about. So lots of B2B companies want to sell to a very specific person at a very specific type of company. If you're trying to find HR managers at like mid sized hospitals on Facebook, that's going to be like finding a needle in the haystack. And most of your impressions or traffic are probably people that are not going to be fitting that ICP versus on LinkedIn. You can type in the exact job title, exact company size, exact industry and selecting hospitals and stuff like that and make sure that you're only reaching those, those right people. When you start pushing a lot of traffic that's not qualified, you're really going to skew your website demographics and analytics that you're seeing. So there's kind of a lot of, a lot of waste that would then happen with that. So when you, when you compare the prices, if you're selling to that niche audience, that's where Linked really shines is, you know, you know you're reaching all these right fit of people. So even though CPMs are a lot higher, you know what's your effective CPM of qualified traffic on the other platform? Once you filter it out, it probably either matches or LinkedIn might be better. All right, so let's dive into some strategies here. So the three main ways that people use LinkedIn. Marketing of course starts on the organic side. Posting. LinkedIn has definitely developed into like a social platform where lots of people are posting on there. So they've implemented the follow model. So now you don't have to connect with people, you can now follow them. So it's a lot easier to build followings. So that's number one. Posting on your profile or on your company's profile. Number two is LinkedIn messaging. And this is when you can take your own profile and just start reaching out to people. So a lot of salespeople will do this. This definitely gets a bad rap because there's a lot of bad spam that happens on LinkedIn. But if you do this in the right way and you personalize it, you know, you can just, you know, there's no difference between like this and like a cold email to the right person. So reaching out to just people in your target audience, starting a conversation with them, seeing if they're interested in what you have to sell or say. And then finally is LinkedIn ads. It's very similar to Facebook ads, where you're going to design and run ads that are going to live in the newsfeed or different placements on LinkedIn, you can set up your campaigns so that you have cold campaigns, retargeting campaigns. You can build your audiences. So a lot of it works very similarly. Of course, the mechanics are a little bit different and the ad units are a little bit different, but we'll dive into some of that too. All right, so what do you need to get started? Typically, these are like the main things that you want. You want to know who your ICP is. Who's that specific person that you want to target? The more, the more specific you can be going into it, the better you're going to better chance of success. When you set up your campaigns, when somebody comes in, they say, oh, we can target anybody. It's like, well, it's going to cost you a lot, a lot to reach all those people. Why start with the best ICP first? Number two is the content. B2B marketing takes a long time and takes a lot of convincing of that person and the rest of the people at the company that need to make that approval. So having the content that's going to speak to those people. Number three is having your offer, you know, and your offer in terms of your whole funnel as well. So maybe you have a front end lead magnet piece of content somebody downloads. Maybe you have a demo or an assessment, and then the purchase offer from there. Then number four is having your sales process. So when a lead comes in, where does that go? Who is responsible for that lead? Who reaches out to set up a meeting and handle that lead from there? So let's talk about organic LinkedIn. So this is. Organic's been growing a ton as more and more people use the platform. There's a lot more people Posting, there's also a lot more eyeballs to reach. So organic has seen a lot of increase. I actually just saw somebody today post a stat or an article that LinkedIn just reached record engagement last month and that's up like 10% or more from like the last quarter. So just LinkedIn's been growing a ton. A lot more people are using it, so they'll be developing like into a full social platform. So start with organic posting. And if you are posting, most companies start with their company page. But company pages, and I think it's similar to Facebook, company pages get very little engagement. The content there is really just if somebody does go to your company page to research you, you want to have something there so you look like you're an active company. It's kind of more of a library of your content. But organic posting on a company on its own does not get a ton of impressions. So do prioritize posting on people's pages. So if you can get the founder, the owner to post your different thought leaders, different employees at the company, we definitely see a lot of companies put together those social strateg and involve everybody of starting with like leadership, getting leadership to post and then getting employees and team members to post and then just getting your voice out there on LinkedIn. You know, with the cost of how expensive LinkedIn ads are, you know, maximizing these free impressions can be very valuable. And then of course social creates a good foundation for other marketing that you might be doing. So engaging your network with posts. There's a lot around, you know, being around thought leadership in the B2B world and on LinkedIn. So getting your message out there, letting people get to know you. And I like to share a mixture of different types of content. Whenever somebody asks me like what should I be posting? Well, you know, share a lot of different things so people can really get to know you, really get to know your company. You can talk about day to day things that you're doing, share pictures. Selfies are always like the most engaging. And selfies with dogs are like the number one thing you could post even on LinkedIn. They always, they always win. So post stuff like that and then you know, work in the professional context, work in business stuff. So add some case studies, talk about how you, how you handle different projects, the results that you got, talk about the awards that you've won, share tips and tricks, share your journey. And then I do recommend adding personal side to it because that's really how like someone's going to get to know you as a person. And you're not just. Just an avatar that's online. Cats, I don't know. I just see a lot of dog pics. I'm sure cats would do good too.

Guinea pigs, like, just get all your pets.

All. All the animals. So, yeah, we had a joke at one of the. One of the companies. They're like, they're like, we can never beat the dog pic. It's always the dog pick that's number one. So. So, yeah, lots of opportunity, the social side of things. Have fun with it. Don't just be totally buttoned up and, you know, that just makes you seem like a person. Engaging comment on other people's posts. Outbound commenting was the. Is like the fastest way to like, make sure that you're getting impressions back in. So comment on other people's posts, don't just post your own. And then avoid posting links. I think Facebook's the same way. But when you add a link to a post, that gets very reduced on who's going to see that, of course, because you're taking people off the platform. So the platforms don't want to promote that. So avoid posting links or put them in the comments if you do. All right, number two is prospecting on LinkedIn. So these are those outbound campaigns. You can use the organic, the free search tool. It has like a handful of different options there. And if you, like, really want to do this, then you want to use Sales Navigator, because that gives you all the options out there. So doing so, you can build your lists and it's just like generating an email list maybe with all these other tools that are out there. But it's nice because you can do this on LinkedIn and then you can create these lists and then they're dynamic lists. And, you know, you just have the list. And as people add, you know, maybe get a job that fits your criteria, they'll then appear in your list as they get it, you know, remove that job will be removed from your list. So it's nice because these are dynamic lists, so you can build them pretty specifically. You can do keywords, you can do locations, industries, company sizes, kind of all those different criteria. And then from sales nav, you can connect with people, start conversations. You know, when they accept, you can start the conversation. You can send in mail messages and stuff like that. So this is kind of the prospecting side of things. And like I mentioned, there's lots of bad ones out there and lots of people that, you know, run these and just kind of spray and pray. And I still get people pitching me like mobile app development services. Because I was in the software world years and years ago and I'm like, obviously this is a bot. You can usually spot them pretty far away. So you just decline those connection requests. But when done right, and when a good script is written, written for your target audience and when you write, when you create a very targeted list, you know, maybe you choose one industry or one job title you want to reach, you can then write your script exactly for that person and then they're going to read it as if you wrote it right to them. So, you know, again, just like, just like email outreach, cold email, these work in the same way where you know, your reply rates, they can fluctuate. But what you're looking for is like the couple of hand raisers out of those numbers that, that say, oh, you know what, I actually am interested in what you're selling or what your company does. Let's have a call to talk further about that. And then when you do connect with people on LinkedIn, most people do share contact info by default. And then, you know, acknowledging that people use LinkedIn at different intervals, a lot of people, it might be just once or twice a week that they'll check. So if, you know, if somebody does say, hey, I am interested, don't be concerned if they like, if they like ghost you for a week because maybe they're just not checking LinkedIn for a week. So go grab their email address off their profile and then send them an email like, hey, we connected on LinkedIn, you know, did you want to grab that time? Or you know, are you available next week? And then you can go ahead that way to schedule the meeting. All right, lastly is ads. So ads are like throw fuel in the fire. I always recommend start with the first two because those are free, you know, South Nav, not free. But for the most part those are organic methods that are free to run. And then once you're comfortable with your target audience and kind of your script and what you're selling, then go run, run some ads. So just like Facebook ads, you can build, you know, you build your campaigns and you can build on your, your always on marketing system, you can build your campaigns for different steps in the funnel. You might have your cold campaigns and your retargeting campaigns. You can retarget people who have visited your company page, have visited your website, people have clicked on ads, all that good stuff. So these are the, the main targeting options we use most commonly. There are, there are a lot of targeting options on LinkedIn. But company, industry, you know, are they in financial services, are they in software development, are they in hr, are they in medical? There's lots of different, there's like over 400 industries on LinkedIn so lots of options to choose from there. And then company size. So these are brackets and they have both company size and revenue now. So you can do based off like I want one person companies for 1 to 10 or 500 to 1000 or the top is like 10,000 or more. So that's based on headcount of how many employees are at the company. They also have revenue numbers so you can target based on under a million, a million to 10 million, 10 to 100, 100 to a billion. And then over from that, the note is, you know that that info is not self input into the platform. So they're pulling that in from some other data source. So small companies often don't have that data. So that's best for when you are targeting big companies. Number three is education. There's lots of people in the educational space on LinkedIn and it starts with number one, students who are graduating. They're creating their profiles for the first time when they're still in college. So there are a lot of students on LinkedIn because of that, they're looking for jobs. Then we do find like the higher ed space is pretty active on LinkedIn so all those people are there. And then you can target people based on what school they went to, what degree they got, what they studied, their field of study. Can't use those a whole ton. But there was example of like we did like an alumni fundraising campaign and we target, we targeted one university and then we're able to reach those exact people who graduated from that school. Next one's job titles. These are the specific job titles that someone's typing into their profile. So I'm an HR manager or I'm a CEO or whatever title that is. This is a free text input. So LinkedIn's doing some, you know, guessing of putting this into a tree of where this really fits in the integrator schemes. But people can type in some random stuff. So not every job title is findable. It all kind of, it's all kind of a tree structure. So if you're looking for a job title that's not there, maybe you just look for the one that maybe is more general above it. But next here is job function and this is like really the broader categories of like HR as a whole function, sales as a whole function versus like job titles are like sales manager that's going to be under the sales function. So you can target functions as a more broad tool. And then seniorities are kind of. When you pair them with functions, seniorities are like the manager, director, vice president, how far up the ladder they are. So often we'll either use job titles or we'll use function and seniority to kind of go after the same groups of people. Next one, skills. So people can add skills to their profile. People can be endorsed by other people for skills. Skills are a nice way to kind of go even more niche. So if you're looking to target specific software developers, you can do I want somebody with a dot net skill or I want somebody with a web development skill to go even more niche. Like maybe the certain thing that they're working on. Groups. Of course, what groups of People join on LinkedIn, you can target based on what groups they're members of. I wish groups were better on LinkedIn. I'm hoping that they're going to continue to improve groups because I've seen how great they've been on like, Facebook has done a good job with groups and all the tools they have. I'm hoping that LinkedIn's going to continue to improve theirs because right now a lot of the public groups are just a lot of spam, but a lot of people still search out and join groups. So you can use that as a filter, and it's definitely like an interest filter. Like, I'm joining a group about AI because I'm interested about AI. You also got to just kind of keep in mind a lot of people join groups to sell to the group. So sometimes they're just a salesperson trying to sell to the group. But we do use groups a lot. Interests are the broader option for targeting like skills. Like interests. LinkedIn will generate them based off of your activity on LinkedIn, what you're posting about and what you're engaging with. I think I'm running low on time, so I'm gonna try to move through this. These are different ad formats. They do have a variety of ad formats. I have some examples that I'll show. They have image ads. They have the carousel swipable ads here in the middle. Video ads up here on the top are the right rail ads that will show up only on desktop. So these ones are out of the way. I think Facebook has right rail ads too. So lots of different ad units on LinkedIn. They also have the conversation ads that you can now you can build message trees. I think Facebook can do the same thing with like, with manychat and everything. So here you can build a message tree to somebody can click yes or tell me more here and then you can continue the conversation from there. LinkedIn also has the lead gen forms that Facebook has as well. It'll auto fill with profile info. And these are pretty handy because a lot of times with, especially with how long B2B marketing takes, sometimes you just want to capture interest, capture the lead and then you kind of start your sales process from there or just put them on your email list or something like that. LinkedIn also can do ABM marketing. It's I think, I think the only platform that can. You can upload company lists and then target based on the company. You can target the whole company so you can upload your target accounts list. Sometimes we'll even do open opportunities lists. Bigger companies will have like okay, these hundred deals are in our pipeline. We want to make sure we're keeping ads in front of those hundred companies that are already in talks with our sales team. Then we can take those lists. We can layer on different types of targeting. So target accounts maybe I want all the HR managers at these companies. I can layer that targeting and build those audiences that way. And there's some cool company engagement reports that are newer. So if I upload a list of companies, it'll just start monitoring them and I can see how many times those people see my impressions. Ad engagements and I think organic is another column here too. So it's a good way for maybe a sales team to monitor the engagement on their target accounts offers. We do start mostly higher in the fall because just like any other social ads, it's good for raising awareness. But when you're on LinkedIn and you're interrupting somebody, it's, it's a demand generating activity. They're not actively searching out at that point in time. So while you can retarget people with demo offers and stuff, LinkedIn is best as a demand gen channel. So top of funnel content, blogs, white papers, case studies are good webinars. And then you can get into retargeting with the lower funnel offers. Some benchmarks, average click through rate average. The one to call out here is average CPC is like 8 to 10 bucks for a mid level manager in the US this is probably up a little bit from here. If I was to go for mid level managers, maybe it's 10 to 12 or so. So that might sound very high to people but that's what the prices are on LinkedIn. It's cheaper if you go out of the US US is the most competitive and expensive. So it's a little bit cheaper internationally, but that is average CPC prices. So what we see for average, like content downloads could be about 50 to 100 bucks per lead demo lead gen 4, about 100 to 300. And then demo website conversions. Lots of variables here, but, you know, maybe like 300 to 1,000 per opt in there. So how optimize LinkedIn prioritizes engagement rates. So the higher engagement your ads are getting, the lower you can bid, the lower cost you can get to. This is what like a full funnel strategy can look like. Again, this can be very custom to every different company based on your sales process and your funnel. So this is just a graphic of like what we'll often implement, being very targeted on who we want to reach up front and then expanding. They're expanding the messages we're delivering to them based on how engaged they are with our brand. Right. I think I left maybe three minutes, but I can stay for a few more questions. A quick rundown.

Yes, we, we have a couple questions coming in. I'll just dive right to it. So Sakshi had asked, would you say that posts with pictures are preferred more by the algorithm than posts without pictures?

Overall, I'd say in general, yes. I do see a lot of people that post a lot with just text and with the right hook and the right message, text post can do well also.

And Miriam had two questions and she asked about nonprofits. Should the board of directors be posting about the organization as well?

Yeah, posts from people are always going to do better than post from companies. And then for the nonprofit, if their audience is on LinkedIn, then I would definitely recommend them posting.

And then the second one she had is, is it worthwhile to grow awareness for an organization by posting in groups on behalf of that organization?

Yeah, when choosing the right groups, some of the, again, some of the public ones are a lot of spam. So just pick the right ones where people are actually having good conversations. A lot more groups are being set to private or like admin has to approve and like being moderated. So there are some, there are some good ones out there. So posting into groups. Yeah, you don't want to just, just repost your, your post to the group or that people are going to look at that like spam, but add some commentary on top of it. But posting into groups is a good way to like pick and choose where you want to share your message to. Yeah.

All right, well, thank you. I think we are basically time now. So we did great.

I like looked up what I was halfway through. I was like, oh, right, I'm low on time.

There's just so much to cover. And it's. Yeah, it's been great. It was very helpful.

Show these slides. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Add a little message if you do. So I don't think you're a spam bot. And then we have a podcast about LinkedIn ads topics. And then we're getting our YouTube channel started. We're working on adding more videos to it, so there's some stuff there right now. A lot more coming.

Awesome. Yeah, looking forward to that. I'll share everything within the chat. So thank you so much. We really appreciate your time, and we hope everybody.