In this interview, AJ Wilcox, a LinkedIn ads veteran with over a decade of agency experience, contrasts organic LinkedIn posting with paid advertising, highlighting the unreliability of organic reach versus the precise control offered by ads. He introduces several new LinkedIn ad capabilities: boosting personal posts (which he calls "the new hotness"), promoting LinkedIn events and newsletters, and using advanced targeting options such as company‑name targeting and creating individual lists without needing email addresses. Wilcox also discusses robust retargeting methods that go beyond cookie‑based approaches, including retargeting visitors to a website, a company page, or anyone who interacts with ads. He showcases a sponsored thought‑leader ad format that hides follower counts and can be video, single‑image, or text‑only, emphasizing the use of the engagement objective to enable further retargeting. Throughout, he points listeners to a podcast episode and a free checklist (theb2link.com/checklist) for step‑by‑step campaign setup. Joe Apfelbaum reacts, underscoring the power of targeting without data.
Chapters
I've been running my LinkedIn ads agency now for over 10 years, and I fell in love with LinkedIn ads about 14 years ago. First is we use organic LinkedIn because it's free. The downside here though is that we don't actually get to control our reach. The amount of exposure is unreliable. Uh, one time I'll put a post up and it'll get, you know, 50,000 views, and then the next one I do gets 346, and it's a little bit unreliable. LinkedIn ads, on the other hand, we We pay a premium for them, but we do get 100% control over who our audience is. And the amount of exposure is totally reliable because you get to set a budget for it. So there is, like I said, an interplay between the organic side of the house and paid, and we're starting to get a lot more. We have been able to boost company posts now for lots of years. This isn't new. The next one though, this is really exciting. This is where you get to boost your personal posts. Personal posts. Do so well. And if I'm going to move a little fast here, but if I have any time at the end, we can talk more about the kinds of engagement that you can get personally. I call this the new hotness. If I'm running an account for a client, I'm going to go and launch these personal posts first. We can also boost LinkedIn events. So if you happen to be running a livestream through a LinkedIn event, you can now promote these. And we can also promote if your personal profile has a newsletter, a LinkedIn newsletter, you can promote those, obviously trying to get people to RSVP and join the event, trying to get people to subscribe to the newsletter. If we are paying a premium to LinkedIn for being able to use these ads, we obviously want that control and make sure that we are showing to the very best, the highest quality prospects, uh, the right people. One of my favorite parts about targeting on LinkedIn that you just can't do on any other platform is we can target by specific company name. We can also target a list of individuals. On LinkedIn, it's actually more powerful because we don't need someone's email address. If you can tell LinkedIn the person's first name, last name, their company name, and their job title, LinkedIn's like, I don't need an email address to find who that person is. I know exactly who that is. And so we can create lists in our LinkedIn ads without having to get an email address. Very powerful. We also have a whole bunch of ways of retargeting people who have already engaged with us in some way. If they've visited your website, it's a little like website retargeting out there on every platform is really weak because it's cookie-based and there is a war being waged on cookies right now. We can also target anyone who visits your LinkedIn company page and anyone who interacts at all with any of your ads.
So this is crazy, AJ. This is crazy because people don't realize, people don't, people don't even realize the power of not having data. And being able to, like, for example, pull a list like you're talking about and start, and start just targeting their ideal clients without even having their information. That's crazy. This is powerful.
This is the types of LinkedIn targeting that I use. Everything you see here on screen, this is only about a fifth of everything that's available, and you can combine them together to make ultra tight, awesome audiences. So, ooh, love it. Okay, that'd be super fun. Here's an example of LinkedIn CEO did one of these sponsored thought leader ads early on. And this is kind of what it looks like. You'll see the person's name, their face. Instead of seeing the company logo and how many followers, they actually hide the number of followers. So you don't have to worry about your profile not looking super attractive. This right here, video, single image, or text only. And you have to use the engagement objective. It's great because you can then retarget anyone who interacts with the ads. If you scan this QR code, this takes you to my podcast episode where I explain how to launch these ads because they are a little bit limited, a little bit tricky. And so listen to that if that's of interest to you. Check out theb2link.com/checklist, a free guide for getting your campaigns set up and running so that you have everything you need to get started.
