LinkedIn Ads - The Power of Retargeting for B2B Growth. AJ Wilcox

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] MICELLE J RAYMOND: Welcome everybody to the LinkedIn for B2B Growth show. I'm your host Michelle J Raymond, and I have the pleasure of welcoming back my favorite LinkedIn ads fanatic AJ Wilcox. Welcome to the show.

[00:00:14] AJ WILCOX: I'm so excited to be here for a round two. Thank you, Michelle.

[00:00:17] MICELLE J RAYMOND: There is nobody else that I would ask back when it comes to all things LinkedIn ads.

[00:00:21] MICELLE J RAYMOND: So as everybody knows, I love all things organic when it comes to LinkedIn and Company Pages especially, but I recognise that there's a place for paid strategies to compliment that, and that's where you and I had our first conversation and we're gonna dive into everything that people need to know right now about LinkedIn Ads.

[00:00:42] MICELLE J RAYMOND: But I have a question I haven't asked you before, how did you get started on LinkedIn and what was your journey like back in the beginning?

[00:00:49] AJ WILCOX: Yeah, it's funny cause if you would've asked me 10, 15 years ago do you think you'll be all in on LinkedIn Ads? It'd be like, I don't even know what a LinkedIn ads is. It was absolutely crazy. So my background was in search engine optimization primarily, and then I, I stepped away from that and into Google Ads because I was like, Ooh. When I make a change in SEO I don't see the results for 2, 4, 6 months down the road, and it's really difficult to run tests. But when I do it on Google ads, I can run tests and get data by like the end of the day. So that was my foray into ads.

[00:01:25] AJ WILCOX: I got hired into a B2B brand. It was a big SaaS company. While they were private, before they went public, and I was their first digital marketing hire. And I talked to my CMO, my new boss on my first day, and laid out all my strategies and I remember her saying all that sounds great. Go ahead and execute it. But just so you know, we started a pilot with LinkedIn ads about two weeks ago. So I put that hat on and see what you can do with it.

[00:01:50] AJ WILCOX: And I didn't wanna look stupid to my new boss, so I jumped in with both feet and about two weeks later I had a sales rep come up to me and he was like, Hey, we don't know what you're doing over here, but we are fighting over your leads. Keep it up.

[00:02:04] AJ WILCOX: I went and jumped into our CRM to see what are, what leads are they talking about? Where are they coming from? And every single one of the leads they were talking about, came from LinkedIn ads. And so over the course of the next two and a half years, I continued investing. I ended up taking that to become LinkedIn's largest spending ad account at the time.

[00:02:21] AJ WILCOX: And after two and a half years of running the biggest ad account, I was like, all right, there's gotta be more companies than just this one that could use the help.

[00:02:28] MICELLE J RAYMOND: It's amazing how neither of us ever set out to be that person, but here we are both seen as industry experts. Everyone, if I mention LinkedIn ads, they're always go see AJ. It doesn't matter who it is around the globe. So I appreciate you coming on the show. We are literally just gonna dive in. I've got five questions that I'm gonna ask you, which I don't know how we're gonna fit it all in, but we're going to do our damnedest to make sure that we can. So let's start. What are the top three LinkedIn ads features right now that you think B2B marketers should be utilising, and how do they actually make the most out of them?

[00:03:08] AJ WILCOX: All right, so I may come back to you and ask for a refresher. Cause I'm trying to keep all three of these things in my mind. But number one, I think are matched audiences. This is what LinkedIn calls retargeting or list uploads. Specifically like I think most of us probably know that you can take a, an email list and upload it into about any ad platform .And so on Facebook, I can target the people on Facebook that I've already captured their email addresses somehow, on Google I can do the same thing. LinkedIn is really special in this regard. They've given us the ability to upload two kinds of lists, either of individuals or of companies. And no other platform provides the ability to upload a list of companies.

[00:03:50] AJ WILCOX: Here's some like really cool secrets I think. First off, on the personal side, when you're uploading a list of contacts with every other platform, you need their email address and then you're always wrestling with what if I upload a professional email address to, to Meta Facebook and they only know someone's personal address.

[00:04:10] AJ WILCOX: Like they don't get matched, they get left out. With LinkedIn all LinkedIn needs to know is their first name, last name, what company they work for and what job title. And so you can add people to a list that you haven't even gotten them to fill out a form and convert before. I think that's amazing.

[00:04:27] MICELLE J RAYMOND: Wow. That is just something that obviously not being an expert in your field, I'm sitting there going, what potential does this absolutely have for businesses out there? Because this year's like pretty tricky. It's financial ups and downs all over the world. Here in Australia where you know, high inflation businesses are struggling to find opportunities, and I'm listening to this thinking. Is this the time I should be putting some money towards this as opposed to saving my money? Cause there's such a big opportunity.

[00:04:58] AJ WILCOX: Right? Yeah. And this really could be and that actually dovetails nicely into another product that I mean I probably talk about here in another few questions probably.

[00:05:07] AJ WILCOX: But yeah, I think there are huge opportunities there. And LinkedIn has had this ability for years and I don't think people use it the way that they should. One cool use of this might be go and generate like download from LinkedIn, a list of all of your connections. You can then upload them into LinkedIn Ads and show ads that mention you like to the people who are already connected to you.

[00:05:31] AJ WILCOX: Can you imagine like the engagement rate and that ability to know you're reaching everyone who already is warm, they have an affinity for you? I think it could be crazy.

[00:05:40] MICELLE J RAYMOND: Wow, if I look like I'm a little bit distracted for those that are watching this back on the video replay, that is because my mind is just going the possibilities here of, yeah, just for me it's about another way that you can reach your community and often we don't control anything that we put out onto LinkedIn and this, to me, paid strategies are almost your way of being able to take back control if your budget allowed.

[00:06:06] AJ WILCOX: It's true, and when you're talking about reaching small audiences, budget really isn't that much of a concern. If I wanted to reach all of my connections, I think I've got 30 something thousand like followers, but connections, I think I only have somewhere around 7,000. I bet I could reach all of them with like a hundred bucks with a specific ad over the course of a month.

[00:06:28] AJ WILCOX: We're talking about a small audience and you can set it to only pay when you click. Or pay a little bit every time your ad is shown, if lots of people are clicking and interacting, cause they already know you. It really doesn't have to be like a huge enterprise sized budget to, to do little targeted stuff here and there.

[00:06:45] MICELLE J RAYMOND: My mind is gonna keep spinning around, but so we don't get off track because I could very easily sidetrack this conversation. Is there any other LinkedIn ads features which you think people need to know about right now?

[00:07:00] AJ WILCOX: Yeah. The other one I briefly mentioned about being able to upload a list of companies.

[00:07:05] AJ WILCOX: This one is really cool for a lot of the same reasons but I like it for in marketing we call it account-based marketing or ABM . Where like we probably have a list, like every company probably has a list of like their ideal, their dream customers. You can take that list, upload it into LinkedIn and show ads only to specific people at this exact list of companies.

[00:07:27] AJ WILCOX: So that's amazing. Account-based marketing on, on LinkedIn is a total no-brainer cause LinkedIn knows whoever has a company page LinkedIn knows about it. But I love to use these for exclusions. I like to upload a list of all of my current and past clients and all of my competitors even ourselves.

[00:07:45] AJ WILCOX: So we're not showing ads to to people that doesn't make sense. You can upload all those into a list and exclude them from all of your other ad targeting. So anyway, it's just, it's a way of cleaning up your budgets. It can be amazing that way.

[00:08:00] MICELLE J RAYMOND: The thing is, I'm sitting here thinking one of the very first things that I do when I'm teaching people how to use LinkedIn, and it can be company page or personal, is start with the game plan and write down a list of goals, and that includes target customers, your dream community, as I call it. We want to build those. And I'm working with one of my clients at the moment, and hopefully I'm gonna get him to listen to this episode because I've now got a plan for how we can help him grow his business in the future by if we build that list and then there'll be a referral to you because you're my go-to.

[00:08:34] MICELLE J RAYMOND: But I can see now how these pieces of the puzzle actually all fit together. And I think a lot of the times we think organic and paid, they're completely separate. But the more times I talk to you, the more that you get them to work together, the better the results. And this is just another way I've learnt, and I'm sure there's other people out there that have their minds ticking. This is just amazing.

[00:08:57] MICELLE J RAYMOND: Do you have a story that you can share or a case study that just shows the power of LinkedIn ads for people who wanna grow their B2B? Cause you and I both love this space. What lessons came from that particular growth experience?

[00:09:13] AJ WILCOX: Yeah I think there's been this transformation that I've gotten to watch from the front row. Over just the last couple years. And I think the predominant idea in B2B marketing for the longest time was if you offer someone an ,asset a gated piece of content, that was good enough, people like your cold traffic would come and download it. They'd expose themselves to you like you have access to now their email address, so you could try to follow up. And the thought was, now if we give all of those email addresses to sales, they follow up and we can get a certain number of those MQLs will turn into SQLs and we close business. And I don't know whether this just has never worked or if user behaviour has changed over. I suspect that it's the latter.

[00:09:57] AJ WILCOX: But what we find is, yeah, if we have a good enough free asset, we can get MQLs we can get people to fill out a form and expose themselves. But when sales goes to follow up, we're finding the vast majority of the time, we have a 0% conversion rate between MQL and SQL. And so what that's caused us to do is go a hundred percent all in on understanding the customer journey, like what it actually takes to take someone who's cold and build it, build them so that they come to know you like you, and then trust you enough so that when you do ask for something, they actually do it.

[00:10:37] MICELLE J RAYMOND: Just to your point, I wanna share my personal experience with that because I feel like sometimes marketers are a little bit desperate. There I said it. It's been going on for me because recently I've signed up for some great assets. I've bought into it and wanted to have a look.

[00:10:53] MICELLE J RAYMOND: I just wanted to see what it was all about, and then all of a sudden I'm in this sequence that is just bombarding me daily, sometimes more, and I'm just getting overwhelmed. I feel like, what is going on here? I didn't even get a chance to read the thing. And then they're already following me up and telling me all my problems, and I'm like, Whoa, slow down.

[00:11:15] MICELLE J RAYMOND: It's it's not, Tinder, it's, I wanna get married to these companies, so to speak, to use that analogy. I want to take things slow. And bombardment. You know what, if I can get that message out to people, just slow down, slow down.

[00:11:29] AJ WILCOX: Absolutely. And LinkedIn ads is perfect for this because if you imagine organically, you never know who is following you, either yourself or your company page.

[00:11:40] AJ WILCOX: You never know what stage of the journey they're in. And so there's no way to segment like, these are my cold audiences and these are my warm. But with ads we can build these retargeting audiences that are like maybe my first set of ads that I send to cold prospects is here's getting to know us as a brand, and then if you've watched at least 50% or 75% of that video, I'm gonna graduate you from that.

[00:12:02] AJ WILCOX: You're not gonna see those ads anymore, and now I'm gonna show you the next stage. Maybe it's something that gets you more to like us and then graduate from there. It's especially powerful when you're, when you pay for it, because you can do this segmentation that you just can't do any other way.

[00:12:17] MICELLE J RAYMOND: That is brilliant because I feel like there's a difference between someone that just wants a free download and somebody that actually has a problem, looking to solve it, thinks that might be the option and wants to learn more, at their own pace is what I would encourage people. And I get it's not so black and white out in the real world when you work for somebody else and you have targets and goals and a sales team that's hungry for leads and that whole process often drives behaviours that maybe wouldn't do if those circumstances weren't there.

[00:12:49] MICELLE J RAYMOND: So totally understand it.

[00:12:51] AJ WILCOX: To that point actually, just a couple weeks ago, we turned a potential client away. They were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on LinkedIn ads. We are ultra qualified to be working with them, like we do scale really well. But it came out in the sales process that their goal was to get MQLs, like that's what their CMO was pushing 'em really hard for.

[00:13:13] AJ WILCOX: And we looked at their process and their assets and we were like, this will not breed success. You're gonna have a 0% conversion to SQL, and then you're gonna come back to us and complain that your ads aren't working. So we had to turn 'em away and say, come back to us when you're willing to be more patient, to work from the ground up, we'll get to the point where you're getting sales qualified leads and appointments and demos.

[00:13:36] AJ WILCOX: We'll get there, but don't expect that for the first like three plus months when someone's just still getting to know you.

[00:13:43] MICELLE J RAYMOND: I feel like there are some people that are just throwing money at things which cover up the issues that are actually going on within the business, but they have a budget to cover it, and they probably have reports which say, oh, we spend this much and look at us we've got all of this. It's not actually converting into anything. And business growth comes from those conversions, not from being busy for the sake of being busy.

[00:14:08] MICELLE J RAYMOND: Now I don't know much about targeting AJ, it's certainly a frontier that I've never crossed and this is yours and I love the things that you've shared, but what are some of the common pitfalls to avoid when it comes to targeting with campaigns on LinkedIn ads?

[00:14:25] AJ WILCOX: Yeah, I think the biggest thing that a newer advertiser or someone who is newer to LinkedIn ads might think of, it's like when we're building a target out, we're gonna be really specific and I think a lot of people have this fear of if you're too specific, you might miss someone who might convert.

[00:14:46] AJ WILCOX: They might be a good client for us. A good example here would be like we talked to a, a potential client and they say we reach CEOs of small companies are usually the ones who make this decision. Oh, but can we broaden it a little bit to include COOs and CFOs? Because oftentimes they get brought into those conversations.

[00:15:04] AJ WILCOX: And I like to tell people if budget allows, sure, we can broaden and start reaching people who are the maybes. But we are paying a premium for traffic on LinkedIn. And especially if someone has a limited budget, like if you're targeting in North America, you're paying $10 to $16 per click every time someone clicks on your ads.

[00:15:24] AJ WILCOX: It's a little cheaper elsewhere in the world. If they have a limited budget, why not let's say they, they only have something like $3,000 a month to advertise. Why not have spent a hundred percent of that on your ideal, your absolute target that you know this is relevant to, versus spread it out and have $2000 go to the ideal and then spread the $1000 across the maybes.

[00:15:48] AJ WILCOX: I don't know if that comes across well, but that's, yeah.

[00:15:50] MICELLE J RAYMOND: So hedging your bets is not the way to go, is that what you're saying? Go hard, go all in and place your bets on where you think it's gonna pay off most? Yes. For me, what I find is the more people spread things, the less they seem to have a target in mind.

[00:16:07] MICELLE J RAYMOND: And spray and pray never works anywhere on LinkedIn, whether it is organic or paid. That approach is just not gonna generate results, and this is why I think I've gotten a bit little bit smarter over time when you know, same thing when clients come to me to work with me and I ask them, who's your ideal client?

[00:16:27] MICELLE J RAYMOND: And if they're at that stage where it's like pretty much anyone that will buy, it's like, oh, we got a problem. Let's just back this off a little bit because you're just gonna be busy being busy again. I have a question for you just because, I work with a lot of CEOs redoing their profiles and different bits and pieces and often, they complain about LinkedIn is that they're just bombarded. Is there too much focus on directing traffic towards CEOs? Is that the holy grail when it comes to LinkedIn ads or otherwise? Because I just find everybody just goes, oh, you have CEO or founder or whatever in your job title. Bang, we're just going to bombard you. And I think that's why lots of CEOs are hiding on LinkedIn cause they're like, just leave me alone.

[00:17:15] MICELLE J RAYMOND: What do you see on your side of things?

[00:17:18] AJ WILCOX: Someone on LinkedIn who is in high demand for ads, like they're gonna have the same user experience on the platform as someone who's not in demand, like there's only so many ad slots on the page as they scroll down. So if you ask me, I think the real offender are Sales Navigator users who are sending Sales Navigator messages to people.

[00:17:40] AJ WILCOX: I think that's what causes them to feel bombarded. From an advertiser side. Yeah. To reach a CEO we might have to pay more per click because they're more competitive, but their experience doesn't change. They don't know that clicking on an ad means someone paid $20 for them versus $8 for someone else.

[00:17:58] MICELLE J RAYMOND: Totally got, yeah. Yeah. Those Sales Navigator messages, they're outta control. Yeah. That's a whole other conversation, which I think I should have on another episode. Anyway, I won't even go there. Let's talk about trends that you're seeing that B2B marketers should be paying attention to when it comes to LinkedIn ads, and what should they start preparing for?

[00:18:19] MICELLE J RAYMOND: Do LinkedIn ads follow the same trends as what's working organically? Like as far as formats go? Or is it different yeah, I'm curious to see what's going on out there.

[00:18:29] AJ WILCOX: Yeah, It's a lot like. I pay attention to the organic side. I obviously like, I'll give all credit to you on, on, on that.

[00:18:36] AJ WILCOX: I wouldn't call myself a, an absolute pro or anything, and I'm not selling any organic services. But I see a lot of tie-ins between the two. Where with a few a few exceptions too. Like for instance document ads, I. We got document ads and they don't seem to work very well, but a document post organically tends to do really well.

[00:18:57] AJ WILCOX: I don't know if you say the same thing.

[00:18:59] MICELLE J RAYMOND: Yeah carousels is another name for people that may not know those as well. There's different types. I think what's happened is AJ, it's like everything. Someone says that they're the greatest and then all of a sudden the platform gets flooded.

[00:19:11] MICELLE J RAYMOND: Yeah. And then people are creating them for this sake of creating them. And then it just, we all turn away from it and go, I don't care. The good ones get lost. And I think that's what's going on at the moment, on a format that when they're done well, they're really valuable and like a mini masterclass. But what I'm seeing now is people doing it for the sake of it.

[00:19:32] MICELLE J RAYMOND: And the slides are going from, used to be about seven or eight. I've seen on average 25 seems to be the magic number. I saw one that was close to a hundred. I'm not even lying. Like that is not the right way of doing things. I'm always curious cause short form video or vertical video was also something that people are like, yeah, it's gonna take over LinkedIn.

[00:19:54] MICELLE J RAYMOND: I haven't really seen that on my side. How about your side with ads? Do they work?

[00:19:58] AJ WILCOX: Yeah, we're actually getting really excited about video ads. If you would've asked me a year or two ago, I would've said, nope video ads on LinkedIn, totally not worth it. LinkedIn is not the network that people come to to watch video and relax.

[00:20:11] AJ WILCOX: Like they do that on YouTube, they do that on Meta. But just over the last year, we've seen several cases now where video ads are starting to outperform single image. That is all, the same kind of messaging, selling the same kind of offer. And what that tells me is user behavior on LinkedIn is changing.

[00:20:30] AJ WILCOX: People are actually starting to get more use out of it and wanting to come back, wanting to spend more time, wanting to engage. And I'm actually really excited about that. I'm going all in on video personally.

[00:20:41] MICELLE J RAYMOND: Yeah. Interesting. That little thing called TikTok hasn't gone away like everybody expected to do. It's got street cred. You can see now Reels, we've got Shorts and LinkedIn will be slow to adapt those things, but eventually they catch up. And I've been playing around with it myself. I miss when we had, LinkedIn Stories, you know when before they pulled the pin on that. Yeah. But I've been playing around with it.

[00:21:04] MICELLE J RAYMOND: But it's interesting to me that especially with the platform being mostly 25 to 34 year olds, they take up the lion's share of the platform. They're used to that. They want to see that. And so I've been playing around with it cause I don't wanna be like the old nana on LinkedIn that's afraid to try new things.

[00:21:19] MICELLE J RAYMOND: But, it's been fun. And the less polished, the more it performs. You find that with paid as well? Or do we still need high production values when we're going down your path?

[00:21:30] AJ WILCOX: Yeah we found several times that something really highly produced, underperformed something that is not highly produced.

[00:21:38] AJ WILCOX: What we see a lot of in video is I've actually, we did an ad for ourselves where I was on this background and I've got a blue wall behind me and some studio lights and like a good camera. But it's not a studio by any stretch of the imagination, but it does the job.

[00:21:52] AJ WILCOX: It looks pretty good. That video saying exactly the same thing, totally underperformed me, walking around, looking at my cell phone with a park in the background. Like I, I think when you see something that's highly produced, you're immediately suspect. But when you see something that feels like this is the friend next door who's recording this I think we give it more mindshare, more credibility.

[00:22:19] MICELLE J RAYMOND: I read some research the other day that basically said that we don't trust branded content because we just assume you're paying for it. Of course you're gonna say something good and so there's this element of I don't believe you. And so I think it's really interesting that you discovered the same thing no that side.

[00:22:39] MICELLE J RAYMOND: There's a particular kind of ad which everybody's talking about right now, AJ, on the platform, and it would be remiss of me not to have the question to ask you. Tell me about, I don't know the fancy term for it, but where company pages can pay to show employee posts to a wider audience. So talk me through this whole process. What are the right terms they should be using and is this something we should pay attention to, or is it all hype and no follow through?

[00:23:08] AJ WILCOX: Yes. I love that you asked me this question. This is the ad format that I'm more excited about than anything else on the platform. It's LinkedIn just barely released it, so this is hot off the presses. It was middle of this month we're in June. I think it's June 15th. They turned it on for everyone.

[00:23:23] AJ WILCOX: They're called Thought Leader Ads, and it's exactly as you described. With all of our ads before we've only been able to post as a company and I'm sure like you're not living under a rock, you know, company pages really well, like a company page post doesn't tend to do as well as a personal post.

[00:23:40] AJ WILCOX: I think so much of that comes down to like, when you interact with a company, you have no idea if there's anyone on the other side and if they care. But on a, a person, like if you see me or you pop up in your newsfeed, if you comment, likely one of us is gonna respond back and it feels so much more personal.

[00:23:59] AJ WILCOX: That's the beauty of this ad format is we can put a person in front, which is a personal post, is probably gonna get eight to 10 times the engagement. And with LinkedIn ads, when you have a really high engagement, it brings your overall costs per way down. And so we see like if, if a post gets eight times the engagement, from a person as it does from a company.

[00:24:26] AJ WILCOX: It means our effective cost per click gets cut into an eighth. It really is amazing like thinking about the prospects here.

[00:24:33] MICELLE J RAYMOND: So everybody that's listening to this, if their brain does what I do, we're like, oh, wow. Now the platform's gonna be flooded with people who have money paying for rubbish posts to get out there and get seen by more people.

[00:24:47] MICELLE J RAYMOND: Is that gonna work? Because I'm hoping that there's some kind of system in place that just goes rubbish in, rubbish out. It doesn't work that good. You still have to have quality thought leadership content. Or is it a free for all? Please, I hope it's the former, not the latter.

[00:25:05] AJ WILCOX: It's totally a free for all Michelle. No uh,

[00:25:07] AJ WILCOX: I'm gonna rock in the corner there.

[00:25:10] AJ WILCOX: There actually is a, a really nice, it's a double-edged sword. If you have really good content, you can get some of the results, like I talked about, like getting clicks or traffic for an eighth, the cost. But if you're promoting someone, something that nobody cares about, you're getting punished.

[00:25:24] AJ WILCOX: Like you're gonna pay. You'll probably pay $10 to $16 a click or higher just to get people to see the post, just to have no one interact with it. Plus that can tarnish your brand. Like I, I don't know about you, but if I had a post that was being promoted and it had zero, reaction, zero comments, I'd be a little bit embarrassed.

[00:25:45] AJ WILCOX: So it is, it's a double-edged sword. We're, We're gonna be safe cause those who are trying to just push garbage they're gonna pay dearly

[00:25:53] MICELLE J RAYMOND: for it.

[00:25:54] MICELLE J RAYMOND: Okay, so thankfully there's some kind of dumb tax in there that doesn't encourage the behaviour or reward the behaviour because, I think there's an element of you need to understand what works for your community.

[00:26:07] MICELLE J RAYMOND: What do they wanna see? What kinds of formats, what kind of information are they looking for? It doesn't matter whether it's organic or paid, if you don't understand what your audience is looking for. You can create something that's amazing that goes nowhere, because you are not answering what they're looking for. Which is something that I see all the time when people are just active on the platform and they're putting out value posts and here's how I'm so helpful, but it's not what the audience is looking for, which is a totally different kind of kettle of fish.

[00:26:38] MICELLE J RAYMOND: So as far as this goes, is there any other trends that you would say people need to keep an eye on when it comes to LinkedIn ads?

[00:26:47] AJ WILCOX: This probably applies to all video, but we just ran a test recently where we were running video with just LinkedIn's native subtitles. You upload a SRT file and now you have subtitles.

[00:26:59] AJ WILCOX: We've measured that versus and I don't even know what to call it, if there's a, I call 'em snazzy subtitles, but might be TikTok subtitles or Alex Hermozi style subtitles, but you've probably seen these where it's like animations of the words changing color on your screen and emojis popping up.

[00:27:17] AJ WILCOX: And anyway, it was just a test we ran just this last week and we found that we could get twice the number of people to watch all the way to the end when they had these snazzy subtitles. Probably worth paying attention to across all channels.

[00:27:32] MICELLE J RAYMOND: I have been paying attention to those, and there's a really cool program I've been using called Opus Clip or something like that, which does those automatically for you.

[00:27:41] MICELLE J RAYMOND: And so it's really brilliant, which is why I was sharing about some of the things that I've changed. Even just recording this podcast on video, you'll notice that I've stripped back lots of the branding, the names, and why, because as creators we always have to adapt and evolve and see what's working.

[00:27:57] MICELLE J RAYMOND: Now, vertical video is how, for instance, I've changed some of my things because if you look at the new LinkedIn activity section, the layout for that activity section on the video tab is all vertical and vertical videos look a thousand percent better than horizontal YouTube style. And so there's these little signals that LinkedIn's giving us, and I can see AJ's like, Hmm, I'm gonna go and think about that.

[00:28:22] MICELLE J RAYMOND: I'm gonna make a YouTube video on it. So stay tuned. But it's just something that I notice that LinkedIn has flipped the switch to where I think they see video going, and these are the things that we need to adapt and evolve and take note of what's going on around the platform and bigger trends off LinkedIn.

[00:28:40] MICELLE J RAYMOND: LinkedIn's never a trendsetter. I've got one last question for you. I obviously have a lot more, but I'll stick with one. What's something let's call it unconventional, maybe overlooked as far as a LinkedIn Ad strategy goes that you found to be highly effective for B2B growth.

[00:29:00] AJ WILCOX: Ooh, that's a hard one. I'm digging deep for this one.

[00:29:02] AJ WILCOX: I know.

[00:29:03] MICELLE J RAYMOND: Dig deep. I'll play some music in the meantime while you think about it, cuz I think, you know LinkedIn ads so much and you live and breathe and I love that you are always experimenting. But yeah, what's a cool one that people could try that no one else talks about?

[00:29:17] AJ WILCOX: I think it, it has to be like, we talked a little bit about retargeting.

[00:29:21] AJ WILCOX: I think it has to be this ability to segment, to be able to show messages just to your warm audiences. I'll actually add onto this too. I've got another one that I might wanna talk to, but we can take a list of newsletter subscribers and show ads to them. We can take my my connections on LinkedIn and show ads just to them this is really cool.

[00:29:43] AJ WILCOX: There's lots of different ways you can do that. LinkedIn has even more capabilities where they can do things like, if anyone who visits my company page, I can put them into an audience to, to retarget if they've interacted with one of my single image ads in any way, if they've watched at least 25% of my video ads.

[00:30:01] AJ WILCOX: So all of these things come down to Can I take this audience who is already engaged? I know if I advertise to them, I'm gonna get better results. So if I need quick results, don't start with people who've never heard of you. Start with the people who have.

[00:30:19] MICELLE J RAYMOND: Such obvious, but I am going to imagine overlooked often when it comes to LinkedIn ads, and I can only imagine how quickly if your budget has been wound back this year and you've gotta do more with less this to me sounds like the perfect answer for that.

[00:30:37] AJ WILCOX: I totally agree. I think it's overlooked and partially because it's a little bit technical. To go and set up all those audiences, it might feel like a waste of time. And on LinkedIn you can't run an audience until there's 300 people in it. So sometimes you start building this audience and then you've waited around for long enough where you just forget about it.

[00:30:57] AJ WILCOX: It's not a thing anymore cause it didn't hit 300 people fast enough. But if you will give it your attention. I think retargeting is incredible on LinkedIn.

[00:31:06] MICELLE J RAYMOND: So patience is your friend. Now, as we wrap things up, I love to give the audience actionable tips. What is one thing that the listeners could do, maybe they're not running ads now, but they're planning it in the future.

[00:31:19] MICELLE J RAYMOND: What can they do to start building these lists? To me, the key thing that I've learned throughout this is the more we can segment. The more targeted we can be. So how do you actually do that? What does a list look like? Is it like an Excel format? Can you step us through that?

[00:31:34] MICELLE J RAYMOND: Cause I think that would be really helpful.

[00:31:36] AJ WILCOX: Yes. You definitely can upload a list in Excel. So if you've, you have data in that format, that's great. If you have a LinkedIn ads account, you go into audiences cause we, they call, they're retargeting matched audiences for some reason. And then you just say, I want to create an audience.

[00:31:53] AJ WILCOX: And LinkedIn will give you like the 10 different ways that they can build an audience. Some might be like, anyone who visits my company page. Cool. Set that up now. And so it's building. And then if you ever want to run an ad to just people who visited your company page in the last. 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, you can, you now have this audience built.

[00:32:14] AJ WILCOX: Wow. I think it's, and also install the LinkedIn insight tag. It's the little piece of JavaScript from your ad account on your website. You don't have to pay a cent, you don't have to advertise it all. To get access to this, you stick it on your website. And now LinkedIn's gonna start giving you free website demographic data about which, about how LinkedIn users are using your website.

[00:32:38] AJ WILCOX: And this isn't even traffic you paid for. It's like traffic that comes from all over. LinkedIn will tell you about their seniority and where in the world they are and what job titles they have, and what size of companies they represent. Lots of cool data that you get for free.

[00:32:51] MICELLE J RAYMOND: Oh my God, I've now got homework.

[00:32:53] MICELLE J RAYMOND: So I am going to be taking this action because it's something that whilst I don't do now, and I always encourage people to install, on their website as you said, and I'll put the notes on how we can do that. But ultimately we're planning for the future. So even if LinkedIn ads aren't your thing right now, and I think what I've learned today is they might be more accessible to me than what I imagined.

[00:33:16] MICELLE J RAYMOND: I always have this picture that it's just the top end of town with huge budgets, but maybe there's more that I can do for less these days. Now, if you have been inspired, like I have to consider LinkedIn ads, there is only one person in one company that I will be sending you to and that is AJ Wilcox.

[00:33:32] MICELLE J RAYMOND: Please go follow him on LinkedIn. His whole profile details will be in the show notes. And AJ as always, like you've got my mind like just buzzing around and lots of actions to take. So thank you for always being that person that shares so generously with us and doesn't hold back and shares your experiences and your experiment results with us.

[00:33:54] MICELLE J RAYMOND: So I appreciate you and I'm sure my audience does as well.

[00:33:58] AJ WILCOX: Oh, you are most welcome. Thank you for having me on the show. And I love, like you can tell I geek out about this stuff. I love to share what I know. So thanks for giving me the invitation opportunity to do that.

[00:34:08] MICELLE J RAYMOND: Don't worry, it's an open invitation that will be still outstanding and I'll probably get you back in another six months to see what else is playing out.

[00:34:15] MICELLE J RAYMOND: Thank you so much. Thank you to everybody that's listened in and I will catch you all next week. Cheers.