[Masterclass] 1 - Intro to LinkedIn Ads: Plan Your B2B Marketing Funnel

You're listening to LinkedIn Ads Radio, the podcast dedicated to exploring and mastering LinkedIn advertising with your host, Anthony Blatner from Speedwork. Hello. Hello. Welcome to the first episode of LinkedIn ads radio. The first season here will be a masterclass and today's episode will be an introduction to LinkedIn ads and a way to start planning out your B2B marketing funnel. I'm your host Anthony Blatner from Speedwork. I live in Austin, Texas and I and to manage well over 100 million in online ads from fast growing startups to enterprise level accounts. But believe me, that's all to say, there's been plenty of road bumps and lessons learned along the way that I wish I knew up front. So this podcast will illuminate those findings and smooth out those road bumps for you and we'll have some fun along the way. So whether you're a VP of Marketing, startup founder, or just someone looking for some tips, I'm sure you'll come away with some value. So over the course of the first season, we'll cover the foundations from launching your first campaign and mastering various ad formats, to audience targeting, optimizing your ad spend, generating leads, converting traffic and opportunities, and much more. Each episode is crafted to not only teach each topic, but to provide actionable steps that you can implement immediately. What you can expect are real tips from the field and not just high level generic marketing tips. I'll pull from different experiences and campaigns and accounts that I've seen on what works well or doesn't work well and different parts using LinkedIn ads. So we're taking this opportunity to document and share our best practices and this podcast is a way to get those insights out there for others to use and learn from and then looking to grow the community as a whole. So I'll kind of start with a personal story to give you a little bit of context on my background and also share a story on an example of how I got into LinkedIn ads, which illustrates how LinkedIn is a useful and powerful platform for B2B marketing. So my background is I come at marketing from the tech world. I moved to Austin way back in the day to work for IBM starting in their E Commerce consulting division. I did that for a number of years and then eventually spun off to start my own mobile app development company. And working in the tech field in Austin, we got to work with a lot of really great companies, a lot of really big companies, a lot of really small companies. And notice that after you go build an app, then you put it on the app store and then you have to go market it after that. We saw some companies do very well with a good marketing plan, a good distribution plan. Some apps went viral and had a lot of success, but we saw other apps that maybe was just as quality or as good of an app, spent a lot of time and money on the app and then put it in the app store. But without a good marketing plan, it just sat there and no one downloaded it. So saw the difference between the same level of quality and usefulness of software, but with good marketing, without saw that difference and how good marketing could really make technology scale. So we naturally got pulled into helping with marketing for different software products and apps. And that began my transition into the marketing world. I sold that agency a number of years ago and knew I wanted to get more into this marketing world because I was just fascinated by it. Back in the day, Facebook ads were the hot thing. Everyone was talking about those. So that's where I started. My journey began in the Facebook ads, Google Ads, traditional digital marketing, SEO and stuff like that. My I remember an early client account that so clearly illustrated the power of LinkedIn ads. They were doing the gamut of different marketing services covering Facebook marketing, Google marketing, SEO and LinkedIn ads. This was a data analytics platform platform. It was on the more expensive side. Costs could be up to like thousands per year. So typically it would be a company who would buy this given of the quality and price point that it offered. It was more about ingest a lot of data, create some different reports for that company. So it wouldn't often be a student doing this. Maybe a college department might, but a student wouldn't. And just somebody at home probably would not be buying this. So we were running a variety of different services for them and started with, we took over this account and they were already running a lot of these different services and noticing that Facebook was generating very cheap leads. Google was generating a good number of leads, and then LinkedIn had some leads as well. So you know the metrics that you look at. Facebook had very cheap leads. And Google people were searching for analytics solutions. And those look like very high intent leads. But when we actually investigated who these people were, we were finding that on Google it was often maybe students looking for research or different tools to use for some of their research in their department. And they were using all the best practices for, you know, keyword targeting and for exclusion, the demographic exclusion. But we were still finding that these were the people that were coming in and submitting the form. And then on Facebook, it was often like younger people and people that maybe like the flashy ad caught their eye. So they. We had this whole funnel and there was a lot of leads being passed to the sales team. And then they would say, 90% of these leads are no good. We're not going to follow up with them. It's just too many leads for us to even follow up with. Noticing very quickly that the LinkedIn leads stood out. These were the right people that matched their ICP that had the budget for what they want, what they were trying to sell to. So quickly we just turned off the other channels and just focused on LinkedIn because those are the people that had the budget. They were. We chose specific industry specializations that this platform served and had a lot of good case studies and examples for and got to be like very targeted on who you reached out to. And while the costs look higher, the quality and the leads converting into sales was a much higher rate. And also it didn't waste the sales team's time to have to go chase leads that were not a good fit very early. That was like one case study that just stood out to me and I was like, all right, LinkedIn is the place to be for B2B marketing. And that's not to say that there are some cases when Facebook and Google are useful and then different stages of the funnel when they can be useful and there's some new tools coming out that can help you use those platforms better. But LinkedIn's the number one platform for B2B marketing. If you're listening to this podcast, you probably already know that. So next is who's a good fit and who is not a good fit for LinkedIn ads. There's three things that we think about when we think about a good fit for LinkedIn. Number one is if your ICP is a certain niche professional. That's where LinkedIn's really going to shine for you. Using LinkedIn's targeting options, what's really great is being able to target by job titles and industry and company size to get varying targeted on who's that specific professional that you want to target most. A lot of B2B companies serve a very specific part of the market. Maybe it's software for HR professionals at retail stores or something like that, and on other channels like Facebook and Google. It's very hard to segment by some of these things and find that type of person on these other channels. It's almost like finding a needle in a haystack is an example I often use. So when your ICP is a niche professional. That's where LinkedIn is going to offer you a lot of value. If you sell to all business owners, maybe Facebook is a more cost efficient way to reach your audience. But if you need to target say HR professionals at big finance companies, that's very hard to find in other channels. Number two is knowing that LinkedIn ads is a more expensive platform. You want to have a high enough LTV to make sure that your ROI is going to make sense. If you're paying higher ad costs on the front end, you need to make sure that your revenue on the back end is going to cover those costs. So for that to happen, it depends on your sales process, your efficiency and a lot of other factors. We usually see that baseline starting point being around 10 to 15k in your LTV. So if you're selling small office widgets, keyboards and stuff like that just on a one off basis, that's probably not going to be a good fit for you. So usually E commerce is very difficult on LinkedIn. But what does better on LinkedIn is more of like software selling services and stuff like that. But that's to say E commerce doesn't work. It's just you need to make sure that you're selling things with a high enough price point. So that leads me to the last point is that to have a sales process is also important. So if we're spending a lot to drive traffic to your website and your offer and your company, then you need to make sure that you have a way to convert that efficiently into sales. Other platforms benefit from having cheap costs. Facebook, you can just drive a lot of traffic and then just hope that some of those conversion rates work out so that you can make some sales. But here you want to make sure you're maximizing your traffic because LinkedIn ads are so much more expensive. So having a sales process in place and structured that you can convert the traffic that you're going to drive from LinkedIn. So next is how are LinkedIn ads different from other social media platforms? And it comes down to number one, starting with a mindset that people are in when they are on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn they're usually going to jump onto LinkedIn to do a very specific action. People are either going on to update their profile or going on to research somebody that they're having a meeting with in a few minutes. That's probably one of the most common. People often are hunting for jobs on LinkedIn or recruiting on LinkedIn. More and more these days it is getting used as a social platform. So people are spending a lot more time on LinkedIn and hanging out there. But a lot of those things I'm mentioning is to say that people are in a business mindset when they're on the platform. On other like Facebook and Instagram, it's more of like mindlessly scrolling. You're usually more hanging out when you're not thinking about work. So LinkedIn users are more in a business mindset. They're ready and wanting to find more knowledge, things that are going to help them in their job and their business. LinkedIn is one of the only platforms that has the object of companies. Facebook doesn't have that. Twitter just released organizations which is interesting and we'll see how that evolves over time. But very few have did that on Twitter because they set a high price to even use it. I think it's $1,000 per month to create a verified organization. LinkedIn's only one that really has the company's feature that allows you to then associate a company size, company industry, company growth rate to those, to those companies and then tie those to users as well. So LinkedIn's one of the only places that offers that. And then in terms of, you know how it is maybe similar, it is most similar to Facebook ads in the way that it is social advertising. So it is an interruptive approach. You're interrupting people. They're not actively searching you out like they would on the Google Ads. Next, what are the demographics and types of professional on LinkedIn? I've heard most recently that LinkedIn's up to about 900 million people. So they're about to push that billion mark, which is, it is a big number. But when you put that side by side with Facebook and TikTok that is and YouTube, like that's a smaller number. So it is a smaller network but it is higher quality traffic. The stat I've seen is that it's over 50% manager and above people. On LinkedIn the demographic does lean towards older people, more educated people and those with higher income. So it is very different from like Facebook audiences, Instagram audiences and TikTok audiences. Twitter is getting pretty interesting but is a lot different from other platforms. And then if you think about the people who tend to use LinkedIn the most, number one is just executives, business people who they're probably not going to be hanging out in Facebook day to day but they, everyone's into the scrolling mentality these days so they need somewhere to scroll. They're going to choose LinkedIn because that's going to be the content most interesting to them, they're going to most care about business stuff. So number one is executives and number two is HR people. Whether they're doing recruiting and hiring. We tend to see HR is a very active function on LinkedIn. Number three is universities. There's a lot of university activity on LinkedIn and then a lot of students getting on a LinkedIn to number one to create and start their profiles, get them up to date as they go to hunt for jobs. Marketers. Yeah, we're a big segment on LinkedIn because we're doing the marketing work and we're looking for more marketing best practices. So marketers are a big segment on there. And then past that there's, there's always a variety of different industries available and Personas available there. I'm always surprised sometimes when I'm given a pretty niche audience, but I can still go find a quite sizable audience pool when I put it together in campaign manager. Sizable enough to run. But if you think about the zoom now, who are going to be the most digitally active industries and Personas, if you think about that for your audience, if you compare that to who may be less digitally active, say like for example, the construction industry tends to be a lot more offline because that's where they're doing the day to day work. Maybe the business owners or the executives are going to be the more online portion of that. But obviously a lot of that construction industry is done offline. That's who's using LinkedIn is the more digitally savvy, digitally active industries and then those different demographics that I just mentioned. Next we'll talk about what are some of LinkedIn's ad targeting options. So LinkedIn has a lot of similar targeting options that other platforms have, such as a contact matching, some demographic targeting in terms of gender and age. There are some limitations around those. But what LinkedIn has that no one else really has is going back to that concept of companies and then having a lot of company data there where we can filter by company size, company revenue industry. Also, its job title targeting is the most accurate because people start by using it as their resume as their job hunting. So job titles are usually the most up to date there. On Facebook, I've seen a lot of people type in job titles but then they never go back to that section to update it ever. On LinkedIn, the the main points people update their job description is going to be when they get a job and then when they get a promotion. So sure, there's times in there when they might not update it and they get like a small, they change a role or they get a small promotion or something like that, but even less so on Facebook and other platforms. So job title targeting is most accurate on LinkedIn because of that. That then lets allows them to do years of experience based on the time they've been enrolled and stuff like that. And years of experience tend to be even more accurate than age. LinkedIn does age by comparing to the year they graduated from college, which different people go to college at different times. So that's not always a hundred percent accurate. There's skills that people are putting on their profile to showcase skills that they have and that they've earned in through different roles. And then people can join groups on LinkedIn as well. LinkedIn also has interest targeting, which is largely how like Facebook is driven is through interest targeting. LinkedIn started to roll these out recently and it's been interesting to see the interests that have rolled out. It seems like it's based on what are the pages this person's viewing, what are the different companies and company types and service pages. Now what is the different type of contact, some content someone's interacting with to indicate what are their different interests. Also further on the company segment is LinkedIn's one of the only platforms that you can upload a list of companies and then take that company list and overlay job titles on top of that company. So this is the. The main driver for ABM marketing is choosing a set of target accounts and then overlaying various job titles on top of that to penetrate more into the buying committee. So we'll talk more about ABM and company list definitely later in this podcast. And then LinkedIn has a lot of similar targeting options like retargeting and lookalikes that are available on other platforms as well. So what type of ads can you run on LinkedIn? LinkedIn's got a variety of different ad formats. The main one that most people use is the sponsored content which shows up right in the newsfeed. And then the single image ad is the main ad that 90% of people use. That's probably 90 of where their revenue comes from the ads platform. But LinkedIn does offer a variety of different ad types as well. So they have video ads which can run in the newsfeed. Also they have conversation ads which are interesting. They these used to be called messaging ads, but either case they show up in your inbox on LinkedIn as a little sponsored ad. It looks like someone is sending you a message and you can click on a couple buttons to choose your own adventure and go through our chat Tree from there. LinkedIn has new document ads which allow you to upload a document right onto LinkedIn and you can either make this a gated document or you can make it just click to Download the document. LinkedIn has lead gen forms that you can attach to sponsored content ads. So somebody can click on an ad and open up a little form in there in the in LinkedIn, a native form that can auto fill with certain parts of their profile and then they can submit that and then become a lead from there. LinkedIn also has carousel ads. These are evolving on LinkedIn platform. It's traditionally been a series of tiles that someone could scroll through and now the new document ads are coming out and the new organic carousels are coming out. So we'll see how this format continues to evolve over time. LinkedIn also has dynamic and text ads. These are the smaller ads that live in the right hand side only on desktop. These are smaller ad units, they don't get as many clicks but they have their own certain use cases. And then finally LinkedIn has event ads. On LinkedIn you can create events and host events on LinkedIn. There are also an ad type for promoting events using that event ads. All right, onto part two. Let's talk about strategy. First, I have to say that B2B marketing can be incredibly complex. When you think about B2C marketing, it's like drive somebody to your Shopify store to buy a widget. B2B usually has a few more steps that can involve a sales team and a longer buying cycle. So ads and the marketing approach can be a little more complex as well. So where do you start? Let's start by discussing small companies and starter budgets and then work our way up to enterprise level. Account structure number one is small stage. So if you're a small business or a new startup, you likely want to be as cost efficient as possible. So I usually advocate for building your marketing funnel backwards. Your lowest hanging fruit is usually in your retargeting audiences. So start there. If a prospect is going to your website to learn more about you or your company page, that's the first person you want to market to. Here are some ideas of things you can put into those ads. Ads that showcase case studies sharing wins from your customers. These help share a vision of what you can help these prospects achieve. Ads that explain your process and list the benefits of your service or product. You know, sometimes on sales calls you might miss explaining certain things or you know, people don't read every page on your website. So think of using retargeting ads as a type of air cover to fill in the gaps of things people might miss during the sales process. Next is ads with intro videos. It's proven that more FaceTime is proven to build trust. So put your face into a video ad. Or maybe you introduce yourself and show off a demo. And don't forget to add captions because most people watch videos with the sound off on LinkedIn at least to start. Next are ads with awards and testimonials. You could even screenshot those and put them right into the ads as a way to build credibility with your audience. Lastly, an idea is ads that promote, subscribe and follow actions. So you can use follower ads and newsletter subscribe ads to get people into your organic circle to follow you so then they continue to receive updates from you in the future for free. Think about using ads as a distribution mechanism to tell your story and build their desire. Next is Mid Size stage so now say you're a mid sized company. Maybe you've raised a round of funding or maybe you've been around for a few years and are ready to hit the accelerator. One challenge I usually see at this stage is that many companies haven't really nailed their cold offer yet. An appealing offer on the front end is one of the keys to drawing interest from people who haven't heard about you before. Without bottom marketing, until you have brand equity, you have to give value to earn attention. All right, so what does this funnel look like at this stage? We're building out the cold and retargeting campaigns into stages. Cold we're segmenting by Persona. I visualize it as multiple highways into a city. You have to split test your audiences and you have to split test your content. You also have to track users through the funnel with conversion, tracking and attribution. Then we have our retargeting stage. We're segmenting by interest depending on who someone is and what actions they've already done. Again, with lower prior awareness. You need to use retargeting to convey your story. We're segmenting by engagers who have haven't yet scheduled a demo. Then we have high intent leads who haven't become an opportunity yet. And then we have opportunities who haven't closed yet. So these are different stages of your retargeting campaigns. Further, as you expand into your retargeting tiers, you have people who have engaged more recently based on time windows versus people that engaged longer ago and you can balance your budgets appropriately for that. Also next is expanding your retargeting of opportunities. So when you start to have leads and then opportunities, you start to have company lists there. You can then go and retarget leadership at those companies. You know, the more senior leadership you have on your side at each company, the more likely they are going to be to buy. Number three is at the enterprise level. So it's always interesting that sometimes the biggest accounts are also the simplest. What's also interesting is that the retargeting was the key in the last two stages. But for enterprise, they tend to focus more on top of funnel and net new opportunities. The reason is that they already have full teams of content executives that are working their prospects and existing customers. And they already have tons of Google and Taboola ads up there retargeting anyone who has even looked at our URL. So enterprise tend to be more interested in number one, net new opportunities and number two, brand building, usually cold has more layers of prioritization. Here we want to dominate a market and win the awareness war. So new prospects come to us versus a competitor. For enterprise approaches, the key is integrating with other efforts so that all sales and marketing efforts can work together most effectively. You want to sync your target accounts list to pair ads with other outbound efforts and partnerships that are going on. And it's about synchronizing your content and your messaging with quarterly themes, new product launches and new offers so that a prospect is going to see that on multiple different channels and kind of wherever they go, that it packs the biggest punch. We also want to plan ahead for different seasonal campaigns that will capitalize on the yearly trends that we know this industry goes through and these different buying cycle trends. Lastly is that yes, efficiency is always important, but usually at the enterprise level, we're strategizing in all the different ways that we can push as much volume as possible from a specific segment. All right, so to recap and summarize, we covered a lot today. The most important takeaways are who is and isn't a good fit for LinkedIn ads. So some signs that you are a good fit for LinkedIn ads is if you sell to a very specific type of professional and you want to target by job title and industry. Number two is if you have a high lifetime customer value so that the ROI works out. And number three, that you have a sales process to maximize this more expensive traffic. Next is how does LinkedIn fit into your overall marketing strategy at each level of company size, you want to build your funnel backwards. And for small companies, it's about starting with retargeting and going after the lowest hanging fruit. First, at mid sized companies, you want to really work on nailing your cold offer and building out an extensive retargeting funnel. And then finally for enterprise companies, it's about synchronizing your efforts so you have the biggest punch on a global scale. All right, so that's a wrap for episode one. Head over to episode two and learn how to set up your profile and page for success. Thanks for listening to LinkedIn ads radio. That's it for this episode. Stay tuned for more. Sam.