LinkedIn Ads for Startups & VCs - Best Practices Interview with Anthony Blatner

Hi everybody, my name is Taylor Ellis and I am the Marketing Director at Fulcrum Equity Partners, a lower middle market private equity firm based in Atlanta, Georgia. We primarily invest in software and healthcare IT companies and a recent initiative of ours is to collect the different department leads of our portfolio companies into quarterly roundtables to talk about relevant topics and challenges and opportunities that they're all facing. So one of the communities that we focus on marketing has recently come to me and requested to learn more about LinkedIn marketing. So a lot of them are trying their hand at LinkedIn marketing. They know there's a place for it in their marketing playbook, but they want to figure out how and why and what are the best practices to make LinkedIn work. Which is how we met Anthony here. And I'd like to go ahead and introduce Anthony Blattner and bring him on to talk about what we recently discussed in our marketing roundtable on LinkedIn.

Hello everybody, my name's Anthony, I'm from Speedwork and all we do is LinkedIn marketing. So we're in the platform all day, every day and we talk about LinkedIn a lot. So what we talked about this past week on the call was for people getting started with LinkedIn. How does, where does LinkedIn usually play into the funnel and then how can people get started on LinkedIn? So the three main ways that people most people use LinkedIn often starts. I often recommend starting with the organic side that's free. You just gotta put in the time to create your content and then post it onto LinkedIn and the easiest way to get started. So I recommend for most people to start with a personal profile. You can post on both your personal and your company and you'll want to have some activity on your company page. But personal profiles are going to get the most engagement, especially in the beginning because most people have have their existing network, they have more connections and followers to start than a brand new company page does. It'll take time to build that up. So most people start on their personal page and then also with just the natural tendency that people interact with people more than to do companies. So start by posting on your personal profile. You want to have some activity on your company page and maybe you repost stuff between each other, but start on your personal profile and then maximize that free organic channel. And then as a company grows, often as they start to hire salespeople, then starting with outbound, starting an outbound motion on LinkedIn can be effective. Using the LinkedIn Sales Navigator tool, you can build lists based on lots of different criteria like industry and company size and job title, and build your target list that way. And then you can start reaching out to those people, connecting with them, starting conversations, and then let your sales team kind of handle that from there. And then the third and final way is using the advertising side of the platform. This is where we can get really build out some more complex and advanced marketing campaigns. And you can be setting up your different campaigns to target different Personas, different customer segments. And then you can build out different levels of retargeting so that you have different content that runs to cold prospects versus people that have checked you out or been to your website, and then building out your retargeting funnel that way. So Those are the three different ways to get started with using LinkedIn.

Yeah, super informative, super helpful. I think it's also pretty notable how LinkedIn prioritizes personal profiles versus company profiles. So a lot of people, when they start LinkedIn marketing, they just post on their company profile and they're confused why they're not getting a ton of engagement. And I think that's a pretty key component that you need to make sure that yourself and your employees are interacting with your company page to help kind of spread the news and whatever it is that you're wanting to share.

Exactly. And the other thing is that LinkedIn wants you to pay for ad spend to promote company companies on LinkedIn. So you can boost company posts in advertising campaigns, but they want you to run ads to promote companies. And then it's just the natural things of people have more connections to start than company pages and that people interact with people when they're new companies to start.

Exactly. So on the ad side, what are the most common pitfalls that you see people run into? Because I know a lot of marketers will start LinkedIn ads and they'll be spending a lot of money because it's more expensive than other platforms and not getting a ton of results. What are the most common issues that people don't see?

Yeah, there's a few of them. So when somebody new gets started with LinkedIn ads, we often see that they've probably tried out running Facebook ads before or Google display ads or stuff like that before. So we see often see that they'll be taking the strategy and the settings and the ad creatives they used in those campaigns and trying to port that over to LinkedIn. You know, all the platforms work different, so you just want to be cognizant of the settings that you're using when you run the campaign campaign For a new company getting started, a lot of the default settings in LinkedIn ads aren't the best option. So a lot of people might just click through their first campaign and hit launch, but then it's using all the default settings that are more made for bigger enterprise companies. So for example, when you set your targeting initially in ads, you'll want to turn off audience expansion to start. Audience expansion gets you more reach out of your audience, but it does that by taking a few hops from that initial targeting that you set. Usually in B2B, you want to target a. Most companies sell to a very specific decision maker at a very specific type of company. And then when you're turning on audience expansion, suddenly you're a few hops from that initial targeting that you had set. And then you're reaching people who are outside of who you really want to target and also outside who's really going to be interested in what you're promoting. So you'll see kind of we're doing that. And secondly is Audience Network is on by default. And again, this is a way to get more reach out of your ads by showing ads on third party websites off of LinkedIn. And the problem is when you turn that on, a lot of your ad spend can go to those other networks and then suddenly most of your ads are run off LinkedIn. And when you're on a third party site, it's an ad out of context. A lot of times people don't, you know, are less familiar with what they're seeing. They're assuming it's kind of something that's part of that other site that they're on. So we see the best performance from running ads on LinkedIn. So initially you'll want to turn off Audience Network until you've really nailed those on LinkedIn campaigns and then when you do just want more reach, then turn Audience Network back on. And the last two things are on the bidding system on LinkedIn, if you use the default max delivery bidding, it's going to spend as much as possible as it can to deliver, to spend your budget. But that can involve bidding very high, almost too high, and a lot of traffic. So usually recommend starting with manual bidding. And then until you see those initial performance stats, you might switch to a different bidding method afterwards, but start with manual bidding. And the last item is a lot of times when people are reusing ad creative they might have used on another platform, it was probably created for those platforms, using those platforms best practices. But on LinkedIn and the issue with that, I usually see is on Facebook, for example. And like Google Display, it's often kind of curiosity invoking ads where you're just trying to draw the click in. You're just trying to draw traffic into your website, no matter what. On LinkedIn, especially when you're bidding manual there, you want to think about not drawing in the wrong people. So you want to be very clear onto what you're promoting and who you're promoting that to. If your ads are, you know, those crazy ads that are just trying to draw people in, you're going to get a lot of clicks, but it's going to be from everyone, not necessarily the people that you're trying to reach. And then when they do click through, they're not going to really know what they're clicking on and they're going to bounce and they're not going to convert. Usually with LinkedIn ads, you want to be pretty clear and direct on who it is that you're talking to and what you're promoting. And the way that we think about that is to reduce any wasted clicks.

Yeah. I think one of the key things takeaways that I took from your session that you led was it's really quality over quantity when you're getting started on LinkedIn. And that's the benefit of LinkedIn is that you're able to be very targeted and focused and just really hit the folks that you want to be in front of. Not just the pray and spray method.

Exactly. Because it is also like a more expensive platform than say, Facebook ads or Google Display ads. So you want to be careful with that ad spend that you're putting there. And you know, for a lot of B2B, it's find those very valuable decision makers. Most B2B companies don't sell to everybody. So it's find those specific people you want to reach and just focus on them.

Great. Well, I know that our marketing leads found your session very informative. Thank you so much for taking the time to come meet with us and thank you for taking the time to do this recap today.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.