May 5, 2020
Show Resources:
LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course
Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.
Show Transcript:
Are you ultra limited on budget and not sure if LinkedIn Ads will be a good channel for your company? Then this strategy is for you.
0:13
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.
0:21
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! People reach out to us all the
time asking, saying things like, "hey, I've heard your
recommendation for making sure that we have at least $5,000 a month
for budget, but I just don't have that much money or my boss, I
just can't convince him or her to do it". Well, you're in luck.
Today, we're going through exactly the lowest budget strategy is to
test out LinkedIn Ads as a platform that we've found.
0:46
Let's hit it. So as for the news, LinkedIn has reported that
they've seen an 8% weekly increase in posting on pages, which is
pretty exciting. I've been asked by several people during the COVID
crisis, "what's happening to organic usage of LinkedIn? Is it going
up? Is it going down?" And there are a couple stats here that
LinkedIn has released to us partners letting us know that yeah, it
sure seems like usage is increasing. The first stat here is that
weekly posting of pages is up 8%, which is fantastic. That means
more people posting for whatever reasons, maybe they're trying to
get additional business or they're trying to just connect with
people, either way, and 8% increase in posting on pages is awesome.
And at a partnership conference last year with LinkedIn, one of the
senior executives at LinkedIn told us that creating in the newsfeed
was up 40% year over year, and that was fantastic knowing that
people are just spending more time in the newsfeed and they're
posting. We just found that the statistic now is that year over
year increase in creation of posts in the newsfeed is up 60% this
year, so wow, I thought 40% was huge last year now at 60. It gives
me a lot of hope for the future for where I see organic usage of
the platform going. And what's so exciting to me about the organic
increase is the more people who are using the platform organically,
the more ad inventory is created for us to use. So I think they
really go hand in hand. I wanted to highlight a few reviews that
we've gotten just on the podcast. Thank you guys so much for
reviewing the podcast. Like I've been asking for the last few
episodes. Thank you so much for reviewing the podcast in your
individual podcast players. I wanted to just say thank you and
shout out to a few people who've reviewed so far. "There's this one
excellent podcast packed with value. AJ is the go to resource for
all things LinkedIn ads. Thank you for this great podcast." That
one's by Greg Tosi. Greg, thanks so much for leaving that. The next
one "Ain't nobody no LinkedIn ads like AJ. Not only does AJ know
his stuff, when it comes to LinkedIn, but he's entertaining and
does a great job making things easy to understand to boot. If you
are considering running LinkedIn Ads or scaling existing campaigns,
then this is the podcast you need to be listening to". That one's
by Tucker Stoffers. Tucker, thank you. I know you. I know how great
you are at Facebook ads, at Google ads, and even LinkedIn. So thank
you, that means a ton to me. The next one, "the OG of LinkedIn Ads,
AJ pulls back the curtain on LinkedIn Ads and doesn't hold anything
back. He speaks from real world experience, not repeated secondhand
information. AJ is the authority on LinkedIn's advertising
platform". That's by George Krahn. George, thank you so much for
the kind words. Seriously, these mean the world to me. I put in
hundreds of hours into this podcast so far, and I want to make sure
that it doesn't join the graveyard of podcasts out there. So we're
gonna keep going. Thank! Every kind word, every review that you
leave, helps me keep going. Alright, so let's jump into it
strategies here. We know that LinkedIn as a platform is expensive.
And we know that the traffic really reacts and acts like more of a
top of funnel type of traffic. And on top of that, the user
interface really isn't all that kind. And there's a pretty steep
learning curve to all of it. So of course, testing out LinkedIn Ads
can feel really daunting to someone, because I think you're wary of
screwing something up on the platform. And of course, any mistake
you make on an expensive platform becomes an expensive mistake. So
follow these steps to ensure that you're properly evaluating the
channel at its very best. And I read a bumper sticker one time that
said, "If you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at
my best". So my recommendation here is and this is what you'll feel
from all of these recommendations, test out the channel at its very
best so that you can see if it's worth expanding and increasing
your volume to see not that you're going for the worst. But,see if
it's even worth it at its best to consider it and expanding the
program.
5:05
For any sort of test on social media, I use the acronym AMO. And it
stands for your audience, your message, and your offer. Now, these
are the three things that you need in order to have any sort of an
ad happening on social media. And so what you're looking for at
very first of any campaign is you want AMO alignment. You want to
know whether you're reaching the right audience with the right
message in the right way. And without testing, you won't actually
know any of this for sure. But give this a shot with your best gut
guesses and then you can start testing from there. On the audience
side, don't worry about not fitting every potential prospect in
your I'm giving you permission to be ultra picky about who your
audience is, in your targeting. Then your message, you want to take
your best shot at what you think motivates your audience to click
and then convert. You may not have this fully dialed in yet, but
give it a shot. And then your offer, you've got a couple different
directions you can go here. You can either try what we call a
bottom of the funnel offer, where you're saying something "like,
click on this ad, this is what we do, click here to talk to our
sales department or click here for a demo". And you can try that
out about 95% of the time, that type of offer fails. But maybe
you're in the 5% that this can work. So if that's what you're
trying, I would say your risks are pretty low. Because if you're
only paying when someone clicks, if you have an offer, that's not
interesting, the worst thing that can happen is that no one clicks
and LinkedIn just kind of shuts it off. And it didn't cost you very
much except for your time. Of course, those who do click it will be
a pretty expensive cost per click. But all in all, it's a pretty
low cost kind of test. So sure, go ahead and try that first.
7:00
If you are going the content route though, which I recommend the
vast majority of the time, go take a look at your analytics and
find what is your best performing content offer. Look specifically
at the conversion rates that you see on your various offers, or
come up with something that you think is going to be far and away
the most valuable thing that your audience could have. Diving into
more detail to your audience here. You want to keep your audience
to the very most core. Of course, you could get business from a lot
of different industries or roles, but just keep it to the ones that
you know are a perfect hit. And then of course, once you've tested
the very most core, the people who very most feel the pain of what
you solve. Sure, you can always expand to their colleagues, their
bosses, other decision makers, but start with just the ones that
you know are feeling the pain. Then with your offers, if you're
using a content offer, look for conversion rates that are over 15%.
That will tell you that this is a rockstar offer that people want
and really appreciate. And if you're using a bottom of funnel type
of offer, realize that you're probably going to see in the long
term, conversion rates between 1.5 to 4%. So this is very low,
which means if you're using a bottom of the funnel offer, look for
any conversions. Any conversions within the first few days is going
to tell you that yes, it really seems like there's something of
value here for them. Early on, the signs that you're watching for,
you're very first looking for high or low click through rates.
Because your click through rate is in effect going to tell you
whether your audience is interested at all in what you're offering.
If no one clicks on the ads, you're obviously not presenting them
with a value that they care about. If it's a sponsored content
newsfeed ad, watch for click through rates in excess of .4% because
.4% is about the average. And so you know, if you're performing
above that, you're doing something right. And if you're doing
something right, that tells you that you have some alignment in
your ammo, your audience, your message, and your offer are doing
something here. And of course, at low budget with very few clicks,
you may or may not get conversions along the way, you probably
won't. So the first little bit, you're looking just for click
through rates, and then as soon as you get enough clicks, that you
start to see conversions. That's when you can really start to make
a determination about whether or not your offer is converting.
Okay, as for ad formats, I would recommend using sponsored content
first, because these show up in the newsfeed. Now I would recommend
there are lots of different variants of sponsored content. I would
recommend the single image version first, because it's the easiest
to troubleshoot. So realize that sponsored content is the most
versatile ad format out there and will probably give you the most
traffic. But bids, if you take them all the way to the floor,
you'll probably still spend between $4 to $6. At least in North
America. So if you're working with budgets between let's say $2,000
to $5,000 per month, then sponsored content is a probably a great
way to go. However, if you are working with ultra low budgets, I
had someone reach out this morning and say that they were trying to
spend $300 a month on ads, then you really only have one option.
And that's using text ads. Because text ads, you can take them all
the way down to the bid floor of $2. So think of this as just
dipping your toe in the water. You just want some traffic from
LinkedIn to see how it works. Because text ads only have a click
through rate of about .025%. Again, that's two and a half clicks
out of every 10,000 times they're shown. You really need to have a
pretty large audience for this to really spend any money at all.
However, if you're just trying to spend $300 for the month, you can
definitely do that off of pretty much any audience size that you
want. Text ads are also very, very easy to troubleshoot. Because
there's only two things you have, well, I guess technically three,
you have a little 50 x 50 pixel image. Sometimes it's 100 x 100.
You have a 25 character headline, and a 75 character ad line. So if
it's not working, you know you get to adjust one of those three
things to make it work. Whatever you do, no matter how sexy they
look, avoid sponsored messaging ads at all costs here, because
sponsored messaging ads are LinkedIn's highest risk and oftentimes
most expensive ad format.
11:47
Okay, what about bidding strategy? We've talked a little bit about
how we're bidding by cost per click. We've talked about how we're
going to be at the floor, but let's go into a little bit more
detail here. When you very first create your first campaign on
LinkedIn. LinkedIn's defaults will set a whole bunch of different
things. They will set you to automated bidding, which is what you
don't want. You want to change automated bidding, to cost per click
or CPC, whatever you're doing, go and find the CPC version of that.
And that's because it takes away your risk as an advertiser, you're
now only going to pay when someone clicks, as opposed to paying
every time your ad gets shown, and really removing that whole issue
where you're going to pay even if people aren't actually interested
in your ad. The next thing you want to do is LinkedIn will tell you
a price range that they suggest you bid at. But just ignore that
entirely. You're not interested in the bottom of the range, you're
interested in the floor price, that means the very minimum that
LinkedIn will let you pay. Because on low budgets, it does not make
sense to set high bids. You will blow your entire month's budget In
just a few clicks, and you don't want that. You won't learn
anything and then you'll feel robbed. So what you do is you go to
that bid, that maximum CPC field, and you go and enter in $1, and
then click away. LinkedIn will then pop up in red lettering saying,
oh, the minimum bid for this audience is actually and then they'll
tell you a number like $4.75 or $6.26. Now, you know, the absolute
floor, the very minimum that LinkedIn will let you bid for traffic.
And if you can fill your entire budget, at that level of bid, then
you just won, you just spent your entire budget at the very
cheapest cost per click for your ideal audience. Now there is a
chance depending on your ad, if it's if it's not interesting or
it's not providing a whole lot of value, there's a good chance that
you'll have to increase your bids to start spending enough but at
least this gets you started out on the right foot. And only
increase your bids if you aren't getting enough traffic to actually
spend what you want to spend. And then of course, only increase
your daily budget, if you're hitting the budget. If your budget is
$10 a day, which is the minimum, and you're only spending on
average $3 a day, then it's okay, you can leave your daily budgets
at $10 because you're not hitting them. But if you look and see
that you're spending on average $10 every single day, you know that
that audience is hungry for what it is you're doing. And you could
spend more if you want, and of course, make any changes you want
later. You don't have to cement yourself into a bidding or a
budgeting strategy yet, you can always change those things in the
future.
14:50
Okay, here's a quick sponsor break and then we will dive into the
targeting
15:00
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more?
AJ Wilcox, take it away.
15:10
B2Linked is the LinkedIn Ads focused agency. We manage many of
Lincoln's largest spending accounts worldwide, and are official
LinkedIn partners. Contact us on B2Linked.com to get in touch, and
our team can help you enact these and other strategies to help get
you the very best performance on your ads.
15:28
All right, now let's jump into the targeting aspect. As you're
trying out LinkedIn's targeting, I would recommend you use job
title targeting along with your ideal company size, and or industry
here. And job title I recommend because it's so tight, you can get
so specific around who someone is. And if you're only going to be
spending a limited amount of money here. You might as well spend it
on exactly the right people. There's not leaving anything to
chance. If your product or service is expensive, where you know,
only certain sizes of companies would be able to purchase it, then
make sure you segment to exactly the right company size. And don't
be afraid to segment down to individual industry as well. Because
you may say I'm going after, let's say, HR reps, maybe decision
makers, director and above. But you may decide, oh, if I had
someone come in from the arts industry, or if it was an ad agency,
it wouldn't make sense. So go ahead and use industry to make sure
you're hitting the exact right people. Because on low budget, you
don't want to waste a dime. You might also consider doing what we
call account based marketing here, and that is targeting only
specific companies. If you have a list, like this list is the most
qualified buyers are the most likely to purchase from us. Yeah, go
ahead and target just the companies that you know would be a good
thing. for you. If you do target by exact account, though, I would
recommend get away from the job title targeting that I recommended
before, and instead use something broader, like skill or job
function, and probably attach onto it a seniority layer as well
because job title targeting is really tight. So if you have a list
of just companies, and then you add job titles on top of that,
you're probably going to have an audience that is too small even to
advertise. Or if it's not, you might just not be able to spend your
budget even if it is small. Remember that we're hoping to test our
very most likely to be valuable here. So don't worry that there is
someone who could purchase your product or might be interested who
fits outside of your targeting. That's okay. Right now you're going
for just the core just the people who are feeling the most pain.
And of course, you can always expand later as it's successful. We
had a client who sold only to IT decision makers, in companies with
50 or more employees. But they told me in the course of
advertising, that their ideal audience was actually those in the
500 to 1000 range. So because we were just testing and starting, we
went ahead and changed our targeting to just 500 to 1000. So they
were bringing in the highest grade prospects. And as soon as we saw
success, we went ahead and lowered all the way down to the 50
person and above companies. But we started out with the most
core.
18:37
So let's talk about timing, because I get asked all the time when I
mentioned that I suggest budgets of over $5,000 a month for
LinkedIn Ads, and people go, "ah, but what time period do I have to
spend that $5,000 over? Is that a month? Is that a day is that six
months?" And what I want to remind you here, we're generating this
data for data and now analysis. So it doesn't necessarily matter
that it's over a particular period of time, it just has to be
enough data to actually analyze. So whether this is spent over the
course of two days, or over six months, the data will be relatively
the same with one caveat that if you're running ads over some
serious seasonality, like over Q4 in December, when people are
checked out and getting ready for for Christmas and New Year's and
the holidays, or if you're advertising over a crisis like COVID
that we're going through right now, then, yeah, I think user
behavior will change over time. But for right now, I would say if
it takes you six months to spend that much money, great, go ahead
and do it because this is a long term play. You're in this for the
long haul. Make sure that you just get enough data to make sure you
know whether or not it's working. Okay, so I mentioned about
budgets that I see suggests budgets of $5,000 a month or more. But
of course, it's possible to advertise at lower budgets. So let's
talk about what you need to keep in mind as you're doing this. So
here's the amount of data that you need for each type of analysis,
we find that we usually have to spend about $1,000 advertising
before we can get statistical significance around our click through
rates. So that means if our goal is to find out what sort of
message is most engaging, we can do that after about $1,000 in
spend. And if we have a content type offer something like download
this free ebook or guide or checklist, we usually have to spend
about $5,000 before we get statistical significance around the cost
per conversion, and around conversion rates. That means if you're
spending less than those amounts, it means you just have to spend
for more months. And until you spend that much money, you will
likely not know whether or not it's working. Of course, if it is
totally hitting it out of the park, like you have the lowest cost
per conversion you've ever seen. Yeah, even if you haven't spent
that much money, maybe the programs working great. And you may
spend that much money and have zero conversions. So you might tell
yourself, okay, maybe this isn't working for me. But if you're
really anywhere in between, you probably need to spend more money
to have confidence that this is working. Remember, this is a
marathon, it's not a sprint, and you need to be in this for the
long haul. So don't call the test early if you're spending $300 a
month, because it's going to take lots of months to get a large
enough data sample size, to have any sort of significance. And of
course, you might be really lucky and close a massive deal after
$300 in ad spend. Or you might be equally as unlucky and not see
anything come from that. So side with statistical significance here
and make sure you have a large enough sample size that when you
analyze it, it's enough to actually be meaningful. It usually takes
100 clicks before we're starting to look at conversions at all. And
it usually takes 20, 30 conversions before we're looking at that to
try to assess lead quality as well. So adjust your expectations for
how fast this is going to happen. There are some default options
that LinkedIn will select for you when you're building a campaign.
The first is audience expansion. And what this is, is you tell
LinkedIn who your audience is, and then you check a box. And then
LinkedIn will go and find more people that they think are closely
associated. Now it sounds like a good idea. But remember, what we
said here is that you're going after the exact audience who's
feeling the pain, and you don't want to leave anything up to
interpretation by LinkedIn, either algorithmically or of course,
they're not going to be putting things in manually. So make sure
you uncheck that box. You don't want any traffic outside of the
exact audience that you're selecting here, Then if it's sponsored
content as an ad, one option you have is called LinkedIn Audience
Metwork or LAN. And this is actually pretty cool. But what it is,
is the ability for your ads to show up to the right people, even
when they're not on LinkedIn. So maybe they're flipping through the
Flipboard app, while they're checking out their news, they could
see one of your ads there, or maybe they're on the homepage of Wall
Street Journal, and maybe they see your ad there as well. What's
nice about LAN is your cost per click overall will come down,
because those placements cost less. But in this test that I'm
recommending to you, I would say you want to make sure that all of
your traffic is in exactly the right and same mindset so that you
can analyze it properly. And if someone comes from a site that is
not LinkedIn, you don't know what mindset they're in. So I would
uncheck that box and make sure that if you get 30 clicks, you know,
all 30 of those came from people who are on LinkedIn, which means
they were thinking about their job or their career and making them
better. Another big problem for small budgets is they are
oftentimes spent during the middle of the night. So let me explain
to you how this works. LinkedIn bases all of their timing off of
the Greenwich Mean Time, or Universal Time, that's in the UK. So
that means here in North America, I'm in the Mountain Time Zone,
and I'm six hours behind that.
24:36
So that means that when I have an account that hits its full budget
for the day, it then becomes eligible to show again, at like 6pm
for me. So that means a small budget where you're going to fill the
entire budget if you get, you know, two, three clicks, is starting
at 6pm the night before and it's likely going to be spent by the
time that someone comes comes into the office at like 7am and
starts actually being ready to convert. So you're getting traffic
during the worst time of the night, when people are not going to
convert, you're just getting the night owls and insomniacs. It's
not the traffic you want. Now, there are services that will do this
for you. But chances are, you're probably not going to invest $500
per month or more for a tool when your ad budget is small anyway.
So I would recommend go ahead and plan on manually turning your
campaign group on and off during business hours and after business
hours, just to make sure that your budget is spent during the most
valuable part of the day. And we are going to have a whole episode
about day parting in the next couple months. So watch for that
topic, because this whole thing will go a lot deeper and B2Linked
is actually coming out with a tool to help people do this that will
have a freemium version. So watch for that. Make sure you are
actually you know, turning things on, turning things off manually
right now. So you can take advantage of the best part of the day,
and then realize that at some point we'll have a tool and we can
bail you out. Okay to recap, I want you to focus in on your most
core audience with the offer that you expect to be the most
successful to them. Clean your audience targeting out of anything
that could muddy the waters like audience expansion, or audience
network. Make sure you're bidding by cost per click to start out
with to take away the risk and bid the very minimum, not what
LinkedIn says is the minimum, but the actual floor minimum and only
raise your bids if you're not getting the traffic that you need or
enough of it. And finally, run your ads only during the most
successful parts of the day to make sure that you're not wasting
all of your budget to just the night owls who aren't going to
convert and make good leads for you. Okay with that I've got great
episode resources coming up for you. So stick around.
27:08
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more?
AJ Wilcox, take it away.
27:17
All right, as for resources, make sure you sign up for the B2Linked
newsletter so that you can know when we come out with our day
parting or ad scheduling tool. I'm sure this will be super helpful
so that you don't have to manually turn things off and on again.
Believe me, I did it for years. If you're just dipping your toe
into the water, you are going to love our LinkedIn ads course that
we launched on LinkedIn Learning. There's a link right in the show
notes down below. So check that out. Also look at your podcast
player right now and make sure you hit the subscribe button so you
can continue hearing episodes like this. If LinkedIn Ads are
important to you, you are going to love this content. And please
rate and review the podcast on whatever player you listen. I would
love to highlight your reviews and give you a shout out. So make
sure you do it and watch for your name being shouted out on a
future podcast. If you've got any ideas for shows, or any
questions, feel free to reach out, Podcast@B2Linked.com. We'd love
to hear your feedback on how to improve the whole show. We'll see
you back here next week. And we're cheering you on in your LinkedIn
Ads initiatives.