[Masterclass] 8 - Next Level LinkedIn Advertising: Strategies for Scaling

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 and welcome to the final episode of the LinkedIn ads masterclass today. This is the last episode of our first season, and I'm excited to dive into the topic of scaling today. We've heard a lot in this first season of our show from the Basics and Getting Started, which cover a lot of the foundational tips that'll make the rest of your marketing more effective. And we've touched on almost all the topics involved in running effective LinkedIn ad campaigns. As a masterclass, we're trying to touch on all these topics so you can understand all the foundations and then identify where you need to dig further into your own campaigns. In future seasons, we'll be picking out specific topics here and going even deeper with part twos and part threes on the most important topic that you want to know. And if you jump right to this episode, I don't blame you for wanting to know the best tips and tricks for scaling. I hope that you'll find a couple good tactics today. I'm really excited about today's episode because scaling is always a fun topic. Scaling means that your marketing foundations are working and now you're ready to crank up the volume. Maybe you've made your first sale from a LinkedIn lead, or maybe you fine tune your ROAS into a profitable number. For some, scaling can mean raising your budget by a few hundred dollars a month, and for others, it can mean cranking up your budget by a few hundred thousand a month. All right, so part one here we'll be talking about when to scale your LinkedIn advertising campaigns. Now, first, getting ready to scale starts with your reporting and your analytics so that you know the numbers that you're hitting and you can know that you're getting positive results. So there's a few signs that you're ready to scale your campaigns. A few stats you want to look for. Number one is knowing if you have a sizable TAM on LinkedIn, and that's total addressable market. Obviously, if you have a very small audience on LinkedIn, if that number's not enough people, there's only so far you can turn up the budget before you start hitting diminishing returns. So if your impression frequencies are low, that means there's room to crank things up more. But if you see your frequencies start to spike up, that means that you may be hitting a saturation point. Number two is that if your campaigns are getting Very good performance stats. That's a sign that you can turn things up. If your campaigns are struggling on performance stats, that's a sign that it might be difficult to scale up campaigns because LinkedIn will throttle you if your ads are getting low engagement rates. So things you want to look for are, are your CTRs, you know, around 1% or higher? Are your campaign quality scores an 8 or higher? If you're hitting both of those, then that's a good sign that you can turn things up and performance will still hold. Now, number three is most importantly to make sure that your cost per opportunity and your return on ad spend is positive. If you're going to be cranking up budget, usually you'll see efficiencies decrease a little bit as you crank a budget. So make sure you're following your stats and keeping an eye on those. Now, when is not a good time to scale there's two things that come to mind here. Number one are holidays, of course, when a lot of people are out of the office, you know, especially at the holidays at the end of the year, that can be a tough time because people are mentally checked out, their traffic is low, traffic is more costly. And. And then the second thing is end of quarter. We usually see both, both end of month and end of quarter. A lot of companies will budget their marketing on a monthly or a quarterly basis. So a lot of times you get to the end of the month or the end of the quarter, and other advertisers are pushing to spend those budgets. So competition can get very high during those times. So if you're also trying to crank up your budget during that time, when other people are pushing to spend their budget, you'll have high competition. So think about planning at the start of a month, at the start of a quarter. And I know that's not always possible to plan it exactly at that time, but that would be the most ideal time to start. Now, it's best to approach scaling as a process where you'll step through a couple steps of cranking up your budget and then analyzing your results, refining your campaigns and your audiences and your ads based on those results, and then going through another cycle of cranking it up, refining your results. If you crank it up too fast and don't analyze your results, you can see a lot of performance inefficiencies that will start to become apparent as you do that. At each new level of scale, you'll uncover new challenges and new insights at each of those levels. For example, you might have an ad that has like a 1 to 2% difference in conversion rate. And when you're spending a couple hundred dollars a day, that doesn't have as big difference. But when you compare that to spending a couple thousand a day, you might have a very noticeable difference in cost per conversion at that point. So you have to check your campaigns more often and keep eyes on those stats. Again, remember that scaling is a process. As you crank up your budget, refine your results, it first starts with honing your audiences and your ads. The tighter that is, the more efficient you can then go scale. All right, for number two, here we'll be talking about how to scale. There's a couple different ways to scale your ad account. Number one is vertical scaling. And this is when you're increasing budget and you're simply just cranking up the budget number that you're putting into the campaigns that you're running. As you do this, you often need to increase bid and audience size to support that. If you're starting with a narrowly targeted audience, then there's only so much budget you can push to that campaign that you can push that audience cost effectively. And as you crank up that ad spend, often you'll need to increase your bid so that your campaigns can reach those people. So as you crank up budget, keep an eye on your engagement rates and your frequency. Those will be the two things to look for to know if you need to increase your bid and audience size. Number two is horizontal scaling. Once you find that your campaigns are working well for one industry or one customer segment, then horizontal scaling is then taking that success and replicating that across other industries, maybe other Personas you might be adding in other job titles at that point to expand your audiences in those ways. As you do this, you'll probably need new or updated ad creative. As you start scaling horizontally. For example, what resonates with the tech industry may not resonate with financial industries. And the third method is ad format expansion. Because most people start with sponsored content ads in the newsfeed. And as you crank a budget on your sponsored content ads, you'll start to see your newsfeed prices get more expensive for that given audience. So you may want to diversify into other ad formats and start incorporating dynamic and text ads, video ads, conversation ads, all these different methods to get in front of that same audience, but not compete against yourself for that same inventory. And again, keep an eye on ad frequency and CPMs of your newsfeed ads. Those can be signs that when those start to spike, you're hitting a point of diminishing returns and you would be better served by incorporating other cost efficient app formats here. I'll also mention a method that I like to use when I get into the scaling process for enterprise level accounts that are spending a lot. Often there'll be a lot of different campaigns running. And then anytime you're doing that, you'll usually see like on any given day, usually campaign A might perform better or campaign B might perform better. And you'll often have a lot of different customer Personas running a lot of different campaigns running. And you'll kind of see the different trends where like maybe one day campaign A does good, one day campaign B does good. So what I like to do is pit campaigns against themselves and I'll have very similar or even exact campaigns running with the same targeting and the same ads. I call this the golden campaign scaling method where you'll run duplicate or very similar campaigns side by side. And then every day you'll reset these budgets to a baseline level. And then early in the day you'll identify which are the best performing campaigns and then you'll crank up the budget for those specific ones. Because any given day, you know, what we're really doing here is we're, we're using an algorithm and you can visualize campaigns almost like the Snake video game where they each start out on their own path. But some campaigns get on a good path on any given day and some campaigns get on a bad path any given day. And this is just the randomness of as a certain campaign runs, it'll reach certain people, and then on that day those might just happen to be or not to be the types of people that are going to engage with these ads and convert. So as the campaign then gets quality scores, it might just have low CTRs one day just because it happened to get on a bad path and reach non ideal people versus another campaign might get on a better path and reach more ideal people and get a better quality score early in the day because of that. And then I'll choose that campaign to go scale up on that day. So I'll keep an eye on what are the highest CTRs that earn the lowest CPCS on that day. So you can crank up that budget on that one Goldman campaign. Once again, the Goldman campaign scaling method, you have the exact same target, exact same ads, or very similar. And then every day you'll reset the budgets and whichever campaign starts out the best, you'll crank up the spend on that one. And then the next day you'll reset the budgets and start again and it's kind of like a survival of the fittest competition, but for advertising. Next, let's talk about some scaling optimizations you might make as these campaigns run. The first one is to separate out and exclude your cold versus retargeting audiences. Now this is a good method to do either way, but even more important when you're scaling so that you can force your cold campaigns to go after new prospects while your retargeting campaigns focus on your retargeting audiences. And what you do here is simply in your cold campaigns, you'll exclude your retargeting audiences from your cold campaigns so that anyone who has engaged or been to your website or whichever methods of retargeting you're using, they'll be excluded from your cold campaign so that those campaigns will go after new people. Number two is identifying your top segments. So as your campaigns run, you'll be collecting a lot of data and it can be effective to split out your top performing segments and that might be by industry or job title or even geo to push more budget on those. Because something that we see on the GEO level is that impressions are often dispersed based on population. And it kind of makes sense if you're targeting nationwide. Big cities like New York City will eat up a lot of impressions and budget, but you might find a handful of smaller cities that are performing particularly well. So you can split those out into a top performers campaign and focus more budget on them. Next is to share that the most scalable days are typically Tuesday to Thursday. That's when traffic on LinkedIn is at its highest compared to the weekends when traffic is lower. And then on Mondays people are usually digging out of email after the weekend and on Fridays they're leaving the office early. So the best day to crank up your spend the highest are during the week, that Tuesday to Thursday period. And then as you get into the weekend, you might lower your bid in budget over those lower over those weekend days because there's just less traffic there, it's more competitive, but it's not non existent. So you don't want to totally turn off your campaigns on the weekends, but maybe you just lower your bid and budget to bid more cost effectively. Next is to keep an eye on your budgeting and your spend as you crank up your budget. It's important to know that on any given day LinkedIn can spend up to 50% more than the budget number that you're typing into the campaign. Now LinkedIn campaigns can also underspend those days, so there can be a big swing in how much the campaigns are going to spend on any given day. You want to be careful because if you're planning on a certain budget for a certain day or a certain week, to know that LinkedIn can spend up to 50% more than that. And also if you're leaving your campaigns for a few days before checking on them, you might see some big fluctuations and swings in terms of how that spend is allocated. And the last scaling optimization is new creative is even more important. So ad creative fatigue happens a lot faster when you're spending high amounts. And that's because more budget means more impressions that you're serving, often to the same audience. And ad blindness can set in faster. So you need to have a queue of fresh creative ready to go to continue adding into the mix as you see CTR start to decrease and frequency increase on those certain ads to keep those ads fresh for your audience. Now, as you're scaling your account, you're probably creating a lot of new campaigns and a lot of new ads that are going to be running. So to revisit, a tip that we talked about earlier in a previous episode is that I'd recommend getting familiar with the bulk actions functionality. This allows you to export a spreadsheet and then you can update budgets across a large number of campaigns. You can update bids across a large number of campaigns. You can edit and then re upload that list to LinkedIn to process those changes. Because when you're editing just like three to five campaigns, it's easier and quicker just to do it in the interface and apply it there. But if you need to update 20 campaigns, then the spreadsheet method is better and also less error prone than doing it one by one. So again, if you have to update a large number of campaigns or ads, try using the bulk actions method to export those into a spreadsheet, make all your changes and then re upload that to LinkedIn. Now, as we're talking about scaling your LinkedIn ads campaigns, I think it's also important just to acknowledge a couple of the items that we're not going to dive into here, and that's topics like your website optimization, your sales process optimization, and then your sales and marketing automation. Those are three different categories that are still important and become even more important as you scale your budget. Because as you spend more on ads, even small percentages of performance improvements can have big impacts. So if you want to add another hundred K to your ad budget next month, also consider how improving your landing page load time can also have a big impact on your results. So if your extra a hundred K in ad spend drives another a hundred demo requests, also consider that refining your sales team's follow up process is going to be important as well. Make sure they're not getting backed up following up with those prospects and at the same time make sure comments on your ads and social posts are also getting to responded to in a timely fashion. All right, so as we close out today's episode and this masterclass, let's round up a quick recap of all the episodes and all the topics that we covered. So as a recap, episode one was an intro to LinkedIn ads and planning out your marketing funnel. It was about getting your strategy outlined before you dive into your actual campaigns. And then episode two was setting up for success and preparing your company page and profile ahead of running paid traffic so that all those profiles were in line so that when you're pushing paid traffic, you know people are going to go do their research on both you and your company. So have your profiles up to date and filled out as best they can be. Episode three was creating your first LinkedIn ad campaign and we did a full walkthrough of launching a new campaign and explained every option along the way when you go to hit that launch button. Episode four was mastering targeting and how to make sure that you're reaching your ideal audience on LinkedIn. If your targeting is not right, then everything is set to fail from there. Number five is crafting compelling ads and this was all about copywriting and design for LinkedIn advertising. This is one of my favorite topics and my favorite episodes. Episode seven was optimizing your campaigns. So once you hit launch, this was about the analytics and performance tracking as a campaign run and how to monitor and know your campaigns are performing and what you should do next. And then lastly, today's episode was next level advertising and strategies for scaling and and then the optimizations you want to make as your campaigns are scaling. Now as I look forward in future episodes, we're planning to mix up the content and format. We have a lot of interesting interviews planned on various topics on the platform, such as organic LinkedIn, which works with a paid side very closely, so mastering your organic side is also important. And then we'll be deep diving onto various topics and interviewing specific experts. We'll be talking to LinkedIn representatives to get insights and best practices from the inside, along with interviewing other experts and other specializations that you'll need to know such as B2B, branding, copywriting, design, maybe even a topic on AI tools along with reporting and analysis. So these interviews that we have planned and additionally we'll be picking and choosing various key topics that we need to keep deep diving into. This masterclass serves as a great foundation and we covered a lot, but to really master some of these topics will definitely need some more time. Again, copywriting is one here that comes to mind, along with all the ongoing updates that I know we're going to be seeing on the LinkedIn platform. So thanks again for following along on this journey. I hope you got a golden nugget or two out of these episodes. If you'd ever like to get in touch with me, you can find me on LinkedIn or reach out to us at podcastpeedworksocial.com I'll see you in a future episode.

Thanks for listening to LinkedIn ads radio. That's it for this episode. Stay tuned for more.

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