LinkedIn Company Pages - The Power of organic and paid strategies to grow your B2B business. Guest: AJ Wilcox

TRANSCRIPT

MICHELLE J RAYMOND: [00:00:00] And welcome everybody to the Good for Business Show. I'm your host, Michelle J. Raymond, and I am excited because I'm a podcast host and I'm allowed to say that because I have brought together an amazing guest. AJ Wilcox, welcome to the show.

AJ WILCOX: Oh, Michelle, I'm so excited to finally get to hang out with you here. Thanks so much for having me on.

MICHELLE J RAYMOND: We were talking about that you and I have been circling, in the similar orbits for the last couple of years and we've crossed paths over in Clubhouse a little bit. But this is my first time where I get to pick your brain because we're almost two sides to the same coin.

So I'm going down the company page track all about organic. You are going down, pages and paid strategies and I wanna talk today about how they work together. But before we jump into that, for people that don't know the LinkedIn Ads King, tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and who do you help?

AJ WILCOX: That intro, I don't think I need anything else, but my name's AJ Wilcox. I started running LinkedIn ads back in 2011. Ended up growing LinkedIn's largest spending ads [00:01:00] account. And seeing that there was just a big opportunity that other people were not seeing. And so in 2014, I started B2 Linked. We're an ad agency that LinkedIn ads is the only thing we do. So I like to joke, we're one trick ponies and proud of it.

And I live in the state of Utah in the United States. It just, it's snowing here for the first time of the year, so I get to drive in that now. And yeah, that's what we do is we manage LinkedIn ads for companies, generally business to business or recruiting.

MICHELLE J RAYMOND: I love it and this is the thing you and I have in common. So you set out around 2014, a bit of a trailblazer in that space where people were questioning why LinkedIn ads and you just kept going and now people are looking at you going, you're the only person that. Every single person when I speak about LinkedIn ads, they're like, go talk to AJ.

Go talk to AJ. So that's what I'm gonna be doing today. The one thing that we also have in common is the benefit of record ad spends on LinkedIn. So thank you to you for all [00:02:00] the money that you're spending with your clients. Because we're seeing new features come through on Pages for organic and you were speaking about some new features that are coming through, but LinkedIn Ads in 2022, we're almost coming into 2023. Can you give us like an overview, like how are things going? Where are they headed? What's exciting for you?

AJ WILCOX: Yeah, so it's probably not gonna be a surprise to anyone here who's listening if you're in marketing. But the death of the third party cookie that we've been talking about now for years it's heavily impacted LinkedIn.

And so because of that, we have the more third party cookies that don't work, the more LinkedIn's retargeting solution isn't working. So what they've released that I'm really excited about is they continue adding new features on, onto what we call LinkedIn's event based retargeting. So the concept is someone comes to your website and LinkedIn sticks, a cookie on 'em and says, Okay, they've been here, but when they leave, if their browser throws the cookie away, then it's not gonna remember who they are.

But [00:03:00] remember if they took an action on one of your ads or on your company page, on LinkedIn or anywhere else on LinkedIn, they're logged in. LinkedIn knows exactly who they are, it knows what they clicked on. So I can go in now and create an a retargeting audience on LinkedIn and say, anyone who's visited my company page, stick them in this list and I can show them ads later.

Anyone who's done any sort of a reaction or a social comment share anything like that on one of my ads. Stick them in a list. Anyone who's watched at least 25% of a video ad, stick them in a list. So this onsite retargeting is fantastic. That's I think, the biggest outcome from 2022.

MICHELLE J RAYMOND: I think that's what people misunderstand about LinkedIn because they get caught up in trying to compare it to other platforms and we'll talk about LinkedIn ads versus Facebook ads, 'cause I think that's the thing that comes up most. And again, I don't do any paid strategies, it's not my area of expertise, so I am definitely gonna be asking you questions that are based on [00:04:00] zero experience because I'm keen to understand with my clients how I can work with them organically to set them up for success when we come to ads.

So one of the questions that I have for you, being someone that doesn't know a lot about ads, what kind of minimum budgets are we looking at? What's the minimum period? Is there any guidance around we can give people when it becomes worth the effort and worth the cost?

AJ WILCOX: Yeah, so there are two minimum budgets.

There's the actual minimum, like if you go to LinkedIn, what's the very minimum you can spend and that minimum is $10 per day. Then you have the recommended minimum, which I would say like it's almost not worth advertising on LinkedIn unless you're planning on the North American equivalent of around $5,000 per month.

I say North American because that's where the cost per click is the highest. It's the most competitive market for LinkedIn. And so if you're advertising in, let's say Eastern Europe, the click costs are gonna be like a fifth of what they are here and so it means your budget can go to a fifth. [00:05:00] So Eastern Europe or South America minimum budget I would recommend is a thousand a month. But if you're advertising in North America, 5,000 a month is a great place to start.

MICHELLE J RAYMOND: Excellent. Now, there's one of the features that are on company pages with posts, there's a little button there that says Boost. Do you know much about that? Do you recommend it? I typically tell people don't press it. It, to me it looks like a bit of a gamble.

It's just an easy way for LinkedIn to get some money for you to pay for your post to go elsewhere. In my experience most people that do that don't have an idea of where they're going or who they're trying to target. Is that your experience as well, or is that just, something that I've got wrong.

AJ WILCOX: No, I think you're a hundred percent right. Where this came from, LinkedIn realized that if you're a marketer, you're gonna go and create a LinkedIn ads account and you're gonna be posting ads and you might consider boosting from within your account. But they added that button there for those, they're already capturing the money from the paid ads marketers. Then you have all these other marketers who are the social ones. They may have some sort of a budget, but [00:06:00] they are just responsible for organic social in general. And this was a play to say, Hey, if you have budget, why don't you amplify your organic and you'll get to take credit for whatever comes in from that.

So I don't recommend using the boost button for the exact reasons you do, but I do think that boosted posts have their purpose and we can totally talk about that. But I would do it from within the ads platform.

MICHELLE J RAYMOND: Yeah, that's what I say to people. If it's really something that you have a budget to spend, you want to get the best return on that budget and just playing around with a button, I don't think is a good strategy. Now one of the other things that I say to people is and again, I have never been anti paid strategies, even though it's not something that I do.

I understand how much of a niche and expertise is required to get the most out of it and to be honest, I don't wanna learn while I'm using somebody else's money. So I'm just sending them straight to you. I'm like, Don't give me your money. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't wanna do that. And so from that perspective I wanted to go in and ask you, [00:07:00] as a company page trainer, I'm working with businesses, what are the kinds of things that you think we can do over in organic land that would help boost if people wanted to do ads in the future? What are the kinds of things that you are looking for that would make life easier?

AJ WILCOX: Oh, I love this question. No one's asked me it before and it is super important.

So the majority of our ad spend goes to an ad format on LinkedIn called Sponsored Content. And what you need to know about sponsored content is it originates from your company page. So when your company page doesn't look good, it can influence your ads in a negative way. The main things that in every single one of these ads, it says your company names, you obviously want your company name to look good, be clean. It shows your logo, so you want your logo to be spot on. But by far the most important is it shows your page followers. So when you see an ad that says, Here's this company name you've never heard of that has 109 followers, chances are you're gonna say, Ooh, I [00:08:00] don't know that, that may not be legit. So I think the best thing you can do long term, like on the organic side, is get your follower count up. So you have this implicit endorsement from enough people that people go, Oh, okay, they must be legit. I'll pay attention to what they're saying.

MICHELLE J RAYMOND: I got tagged in a post the other day, somebody that runs LinkedIn ads that kind of raised this point and you often see it when in the feed people that are running ads that have 54 page followers. So they've set up enough of an account to be able to run the ads and you see it and they've got 54 followers and they've paid money for ads. And I'm thinking, how do you know what works for your audience?

But this person who runs ads for people, their point was they would go out and buy 1000 followers before they ran the ads and I was like, I understand what you are saying and the point behind it actually echos what you're saying. And of course I'm anti buying them because I think in the long run it's gonna undo things for you. Now that LinkedIn organically gives us 250 [00:09:00] invite credits per month, there's really no reason that if you get the team on board and get multiple page admins, that you can't get that number up pretty quickly. And that's one of the new features we've seen in the last you know, 12 months that that's now rolled out to everyone.

So you can use those organic invite credits. You don't have to pay for them, get as many people across. And I would recommend building like a niche, B2B community around your page. And then that way you've got more information around, that you can go to AJ set up these are our ideal types of people we're trying to reach. I would imagine that would help you to have more accurate information rather than someone trying to, shortcut the system.

AJ WILCOX: I totally agree. Cause there are three ways of getting that follower count up. There's the buying which we've discussed. I think we probably all know someone who bought followers on Twitter and then all of a sudden all of the bot finders came out and exposed all those people for being frauds. Then you have the inviting, which is I'm a hundred percent with you. I think that was a fantastic feature. [00:10:00] And then you have the being able to buy followers or like through ads. So we can use LinkedIn's ad, it's called a follower ad to try to acquire people that way. But then you're paying, it's usually like nine to $15 per follower, which really adds up. You pick your way that you want to grow your page, but I like your way best.

MICHELLE J RAYMOND: I think I'd take the invite credits and especially now they've given us other ways that we can do it. Employees get another 30 invite credits per month and they don't have to be page admins. So again, it becomes easy. As an individual, I've got an extra 50 invites that I can send people to other company pages and again, I don't have to work there. I don't have to have anything to do with them. I think that was some of the feedback that I've been giving to the Pages team. Originally I was like people come to me, they wanna see results quickly. Spending 6 to 12 months to build up a follower number of 1000 is not realistic in a business, you're gonna turn people away.

So the faster that you can set them up organically, of course that opens up the door, down the track for paid [00:11:00] strategies. So I think there's really such an alignment between what we're both trying to achieve here. One of the things that always comes up in the conversations that I have, and again, I have no experience with this, so I'm just gonna ask it blindly.

LinkedIn ads versus Facebook ads. All I ever hear is LinkedIn ads is so expensive, And so Facebook ads are over here. I don't know either. I don't know if you can answer this question, but what's your comeback to that?

AJ WILCOX: Yeah, so I, first of all, I'll say I love Facebook ads for what they are. What Facebook has is probably the most sophisticated ad product that has ever been created.

It's a fantastic platform, but when it really comes down to it, Facebook doesn't know who you are professionally. They know everything else about you as a consumer and they can try to stitch things together, but they don't know what your job title is. They don't know what company you work for. They don't know what seniority you are what work skills you have.

And that's all of the stuff that we enter into our LinkedIn profile on day one. So what I love about both platforms, I love that [00:12:00] Facebook is less expensive. It's probably like a fourth or a fifth, the cost per interaction which is great and I, I love it for the social interactions the B2C kinds of offers that you can do, but LinkedIn because it knows your title where you work, what your seniority is, what companies you've worked for.

It allows advertisers to target in a way that you know on Facebook, if you run a B2B offer, you'll probably end up sending all the leads to your sales team. They'll disqualify 95% of them to keep the 5%. On LinkedIn it's totally opposite. You are only showing ads to the people who are already a perfect fit for your company, and so by the time they get to sales, sales is disqualifying maybe 5% and keeping the 95. That's where it actually starts to make financial sense. You'll see a return on your investment further down the funnel in LinkedIn.

MICHELLE J RAYMOND: It seems like it's gonna waste less time as well. Because you are so highly targeted that these things are gonna again, bring forward lead times on how quickly you see a [00:13:00] return and actually convert more, which brings those costs down. In a recession type of conversation that's going on in the world right now, whether it hits or doesn't hit, different parts of the world will be in different things. But I would imagine there's a lot of businesses trying to do more with less. Are you seeing any of that come across with ad spend at this point, or is it something that you recommend now is the time to actually invest in ads to make sure you are getting those new leads coming in?

AJ WILCOX: Yeah, I would say the LinkedIn platform continues to grow especially on the outside. When I very first started, the cost per click was like $2 to $4 on and the whole marketing community was saying, Whoa, that's so expensive. In North America we're now to like $8 to $16 per click. And of course people are still saying, Wow, that's way too expensive.

But it's become more expensive, not because LinkedIn is just arbitrarily raising the costs. It's bringing it because other marketers are flocking to the platform. [00:14:00] They're finding success, they're increasing their budgets, and that's driving costs up. So the sooner you can get in, the further ahead of your competitors you are who haven't already tried it out. That would be my recommendation. Get in early.

MICHELLE J RAYMOND: That's always the thing, isn't it? You can sit back and hope and kind of question, but if you not in the game, it's a hundred percent, you've got no chance. Those people that getting in amongst it. Whether it starts off organically and leads up to paid. I think that's the strategy that I always tell people.

If you can work out what works with your community and find out what kind of content resonates best with them, then I would imagine if I can come to you AJ and say, look, these graphics work, these words work. Can you help me get it in front of more people? Is that how it works in reality? Am I, again, on the right path here?

Cause I wanna send my organic clients in the right direction so that if down the track, and it may not be today, it might be in two years time, three years time, is that what they can focus their time on, [00:15:00] working out what organic content looks like and reads like, so that you can help them get it further?

AJ WILCOX: I would say yes, for sure. There are two different ways of approaching ads and one is a an effort heavy but low cost method. That's what you're talking about. The other one is a cost heavy, but a lighter lift. Which some of our clients, it honestly, it's usually highly funded VC funded startups who they're not necessarily caring too much about an ROI.

They just want to see market impact. They could come in and throw money at the problem. So I don't know what my audience wants, what they care about. So I'm going to develop several different offers and advertise to them. And then based off of the advertising statistics, I'll find out what they like, what they pay attention to.

And you can brute force it and it'll cost a lot of money. The way that you're recommending is. Be like boots on the ground, get to know your audience. And then by the time you get to know them, you can then put together a more of a sure fire. I put money behind this, it's going to work. I don't [00:16:00] care which method someone uses. I honestly, I think both are smart. Just depending.

MICHELLE J RAYMOND: It depends whose budget, who's got what, right? And I would imagine timelines come into play as well, how quickly they wanna see returns on things. And ultimately, I would imagine if you want to increase numbers quickly or bring timelines forward, you just get your wallet out and write a big cheque to AJ and say, go and spend this. That's where you're gonna most likely see some form of return. But yeah, it's funny. Money does fix a lot of problems. Even on LinkedIn.

AJ WILCOX: It does. If you ask me for my company I'm gonna want to go effort heavy and light on cost, like I'm gonna go organic first, which we did. We didn't spend any money on LinkedIn ads until the company was, six and a half, seven years in. Everything was organic up to that point.

MICHELLE J RAYMOND: Wow, that's amazing. I would not have expected that. I would've probably expected it to come a lot earlier. What was like the thing that held back because being a LinkedIn ads person, you know it inside out, you're the guru, you know everything that's coming up. I know [00:17:00] you do some stuff with LinkedIn as well. What held you back in that space? That other people could learn from?

AJ WILCOX: Such a good question. This is really embarrassing for me to admit, but I was the one holding us back. I've never liked sales and I've never been in sales. I was handling all of our sales for the majority of the life of the company. And because I was scared to hire someone else to take it over, I kept the sales duty for myself. And I'm busy trying to run the whole company managing directors and account managers who are all working on these accounts. They're our top priority and we honestly get a lot of leads.

We get a lot of organic just referrals and, leads that come in that way. And they would fill up my schedule to the point where I didn't have time to take on new demos and stuff. So if you ask me like what I would do next time, I would hire sales earlier to get that off of my plate so that we could expand and grow the way that a company on fire should.

MICHELLE J RAYMOND: I really appreciate you sharing that because I think it's those lessons that help people more. I'm completely the opposite to you. So I spent 20 years in [00:18:00] sales. I'm someone that's had to become friends with marketing. In the next few weeks, I'm launching The LinkedIn Branding Book.

So that's how far I've had to come in the last three years is to actually understand like the importance of branding, all of the paid strategies or a whole other world that I'm yet to learn about. But there is just so much power in this and as a business owner myself, I can see how I'm the one that would get in the way of these successes.

I appreciate you sharing the lesson because I'm guarantee that there's people out there in the same position. It's hard work being a business owner. It's hard work wearing so many different hats, and sometimes paying an expert is, the thing that's really gonna push us forward.

I don't know anything about LinkedIn ads targeting, and I know you've mentioned bits and pieces, but can I have a LinkedIn ads 101, ads targeting 101 like just so I can wrap my mind around it. What are the different ways we can do it on LinkedIn? I know about the insight tag I can put on my website.

That's about where my targeting info comes from, and ends. [00:19:00]

AJ WILCOX: Perfect. The native targeting on LinkedIn is incredible. This is the reason why people are willing to pay a premium to advertise on the network. The ones that are my favorite. I love targeting by job title. I love targeting by department and seniority.

I love targeting by skills, but people have listed on their profile. I love targeting by the groups and we can target by the specific names of groups that people are members of on LinkedIn. So that's really cool. Being able to target by company size, so number of employees, the company's industry.

We can even target by company name, like a specific, like only advertised to employees of this company. That's really cool. Then we have these list upload features where we can upload a list of individuals up to 300,000 in one sheet. And either just advertise to them or exclude those people from all of my ads.

You can do the same thing with company names. So up list, upload a list of up to 300,000 company names. and everything I've mentioned, that's only about [00:20:00] a fifth Of all the options that are available, there's a whole bunch more. But that's, those are the ones I care the most about.

MICHELLE J RAYMOND: And they're the ones that I can see would have most value. Again, I think the benefit that I'm getting out of this conversation is the more you know about who you are targeting, then the better the results that you're getting. And I know it probably seems captain obvious. But at the same time, I don't think most people, even when I'm working with them in the beginning when I ask them, What's your business goal?

Most of them can't answer. And then I said if you can't give me that in a lot of detail, I can't give you any kind of strategy on LinkedIn because I don't know where we're driving to. And I'd imagine you would have similar conversations up front with some of your clients is the more they can articulate the business goals and who the target clients are the better the results again, And I keep saying the better the results. I assume this is how this works.

AJ WILCOX: Yeah, totally. The way that I think about it for any sort of social ad, there are [00:21:00] three things. I call it the three pillars of social advertising that you need. It's your audience, your message, and your offer.

So it spells A.M.O like ammunition, but missing an m i, I wish I had an extra m make that finish out, that acronym. But that, that's what it is. It's like you figure out who the audience is. You can do that like we talked about. You can do it organically and learn who they are. Or you can go into the ad platform and start putting this targeting on. Your message is really like the ad format you choose and your image and the ad copy you are going to write.

And that all depends on the "o" your offer. That is what are you offering a prospect in exchange for their attention? It could be, here's some free information. Go check. Go read this blog post. It could be download this free guide or ebook or something that's gated, or it could be something as high friction as Buy now or talk to our sales rep or take a demo.

But you really do need to figure out what it is that you have to offer someone before you even spend a dime.

MICHELLE J RAYMOND: I am gonna [00:22:00] ask you some questions. I'm gonna fire them off. I'm gonna go off script a little bit here. So on organic, on the organic side of, creating content, quite often we'll see new formats come out.

For instance, carousels or sliders or whatever you wanna call them, and we notice that they perform better. Now I have seen LinkedIn have c reated a couple of different ad types, like I think like event ads came and carousels and different, Do you see any of those performing better? Is there a particular format of ads that works better as they release new ones or it doesn't work like that over on your side of the fence?

AJ WILCOX: It's interesting. I actually follow the same kind of logic that you do where I'm paying attention to what's working organically. And then as soon as they create an ad format for us, I go, Great polls work or document post work. So as soon as I have an ad for that, I wanna try it out. Most recently, LinkedIn just released document ads and we got really excited about it.

You can now show let's say you have an ebook, someone can flip to the first three or four pages of the ebook and then it'll [00:23:00] say, Hey, you have to put in your information to unlock the rest. And we found that it seems like that would work really well, but unfortunately we haven't yet found them to convert nearly as well as just a normal ad saying, Here's what the ebook contains.

If you want it, you'll fill out your form, your info to get it. So there's a little bit of a difference but I would say they tend to run together. But some cases like that, this, it's a little bit.

MICHELLE J RAYMOND: Interesting. And again I don't have any experience, so I'm just gonna ask the questions that I, think about from that perspective. So we're almost coming into 2023, so it's nearly that time of year where we start planning what's coming up, assess what's happened. Is there things that, if I'm thinking about running ads, That you predict will work well in 2023 or do ads kind of, it's same old, same old. Like Is there any differences that you think will happen in the next year?

AJ WILCOX: It's funny LinkedIn has had video ads since, I wanna say like 2018. And [00:24:00] we know that social is going so much towards video and so I've wanted to like them. But the problem is with video ads and you may have seen the same thing organically on the network, I don't know, but it seems like video ads work really well on platforms where people go to consume video content or to be entertained. So it works really well on YouTube really well on Facebook. We would put video out inside of ads and people would just scroll past or we'd get charged cuz it was on their screen for at least two seconds.

But it, the video was a crappy fade from black to the logo and like they didn't get any sort of value out of it before they, they scrolled. What we've started to find is that for the first time since video ads have been out, we're starting to see video ads outperforming static image ads in a couple of cases.

I think that speaks to the way that people are using the LinkedIn platform now. I wouldn't be surprised if more and more people are finding more and more value and so they're staying and it becomes a place where you stay to get educated and [00:25:00] take a break from work. But whatever it is, my prediction for 2023 is video ads are finally gonna start working on LinkedIn.

MICHELLE J RAYMOND: It's really interesting that you say like, how do people consume it? And I know that the platform seems to be split 50 50 Boomers versus Gen Z and millennials, and I think we'll see things. For me personally, I've had to do a bit of, soul searching and go, I can fight what's working on the platform.

So if selfies are what's working and I don't necessarily think that's great content, but they're working. As a content creator and as a LinkedIn trainer, it's up to me to research and go back and look at things and not ever have a fixed mindset, and I think that's what you are sharing today.

One last question for you. Every show I ask my expert guests, what is one tip that you could give people that would set them up for success in ads? If they have taken inspiration from this conversation and are considering doing ads in the future, what things should they get [00:26:00] done up front that you would say is the best tip you can give to give them the best chance of success in the future?

AJ WILCOX: I would say you have to really think about that offer that's going to get their attention. We found that it's really difficult to get someone to like, Here, download this ebook, and then I'm gonna follow up over email and then get 'em on a phone call. It's just, it's asking too much too soon.

It's too big of a leap. So my recommendation is, first of all, make sure that your offer, whatever it is that you're offering, is something that is solving a migraine problem, not a headache problem. When you have a headache, you can still go to work. You can still kind of fudge through things. It's not pleasant, but when you have a migraine, it's stop the presses like, I'm not going to work today.

That's the kind of problem that you need to solve with your ads. And when you have that, you will get people's attention. You will get enough people clicking that it brings costs down. You will get enough volume coming in that your sales team is excited about those quality of leads. So think about what that is, and it has to be very [00:27:00] related to the problem that you solve as a company.

MICHELLE J RAYMOND: I love that and I've read some stats from LinkedIn somewhere and you can correct me, but it was something like if people have seen your content organically so many times that when you play them an ad because they're familiar with your brand, that there's a higher chance of them, clicking or converting or whatever the right words are.

The two work hand in hand, And so I appreciate everything that you've shared here today. I have learnt a ton. As I said, an area that is not my expertise, so I wanted to get the LinkedIn expert. So what I'm gonna encourage people to do, because I've seen your newsletter, your podcast, the articles that you put out is such great content.

So go to AJ Wilcox's LinkedIn profile. Top right hand corner underneath the banner is a bell, and I recommend people to actually click on that bell, stay up to date with all things LinkedIn ads because there is no one better. I've searched the world and AJ, you come so highly recommended by everyone, and now I've had this [00:28:00] chance to talk to you I understand why, so I appreciate you.

AJ WILCOX: Wonderful. Thanks so much, Michelle. And while you're there on my profile send a connection request. Just make sure you you customize it to say that you heard me on Michelle's show. That way I'll make sure I accept it cause I stopped accepting requests, that I can't tell what they're for. So yeah, I'd love to be connected.

MICHELLE J RAYMOND: I love it. So next week I'm gonna be talking to Bill Sherman about thought leadership and how that impacts social selling. So always about business growth. Looking for different ways to give companies an edge. Today, we've learnt about LinkedIn ads now and into 2023, so I appreciate everybody for joining us.

Cheers.