LinkedIn Ads Mastery: Targeting, Costs, and Strategy with AJ Wilcox

AJ Wilcox [00:00:00]:
This is something new on LinkedIn that they’ve just given us in the past, like, year and a half, which is it used to be that when we would boost, we would boost a company post. But you know how much people pay attention to your company posts. It’s not much. Like, company comes across your feed that you’ve never heard of, most of the time you just keep scrolling. But they gave us thought leader ads, which is what they call it when you boost a personal post. And so Lee, you put a video out of you in a talking head, we can then sponsor that same post to the audiences that you want to be able to see it. They they fit your exact target audience. And, and those are the highest performing ads on LinkedIn right now.

Announcer [00:00:39]:
Influential and thought provoking minds in marketing, sales, The business of marketing podcast.

A. Lee Judge [00:00:48]:
Welcome again to the business of marketing. I’m a Lee Judge. You know, I’m an organic marketing type of guy. And after all, my agency is based on creating content for inbound organic content marketing. But even we run ads mainly on Google but sometimes even on LinkedIn. Now LinkedIn can be a bit more of a difficult thing to understand so I lean on the experts. And you don’t see as many paid social experts on LinkedIn as you do on other channels, so I’m bringing you one today. Here is my go to guide for learning about advertising on LinkedIn.

A. Lee Judge [00:01:23]:
Welcome to the show, AJ Wilcox.

AJ Wilcox [00:01:26]:
Lee, thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

A. Lee Judge [00:01:28]:
Yeah, man. You know, we are on the speaking circuit. I get a chance to see every now and then. And, you know, we’re always typically on our paths for that day to get to our speaking engagement. So we don’t get a chance to talk a lot. So I wanna dig in today because I have genuine questions about LinkedIn ads. I know our listeners do too. So let’s get into it.

A. Lee Judge [00:01:47]:
Alright?

AJ Wilcox [00:01:48]:
Killer. Let’s do it.

A. Lee Judge [00:01:49]:
So, even on your profile on LinkedIn, you say that LinkedIn ads are difficult to scale efficiently. So you put that right on the table right out the start. So tell me why and how in the world did you end up specializing specifically on LinkedIn advertising?

AJ Wilcox [00:02:07]:
I started out my career. This has been, gosh, back in 02/2007. I started out my career as an SEO guy.

A. Lee Judge [00:02:15]:
Oh, okay.

AJ Wilcox [00:02:15]:
And I got really tired of the recommendations that I would put into place being not being able to actually see the results of those for, you know, four to six months. And then I went, oh, Google Ads is amazing. It’s the same keywords, but I get data same day, and I get to know what’s working. So that’s cool. With that skill set, I went into the the last company I I worked for, and it was a a pre IPO SaaS company. And, on my very first day, I was explaining like the strategies that I wanted to implement and my new boss, the CMO said, yep. Go ahead. Implement it.

AJ Wilcox [00:02:47]:
That all sounds good. But just so you know, we started a pilot with LinkedIn ads two weeks ago. Take it over. See what you can do with it. And I didn’t wanna look stupid to my new boss, so I saluted and said, yes, ma’am. Jumped in and started I I structured things the same way that I structured Google Ads back in the day. Just these tight ad groups, tight audiences kind of approach. And within about two weeks, a sales guy came up and said, hey, AJ.

AJ Wilcox [00:03:14]:
We are fighting over your leads. Whatever you’re doing, keep it up.

A. Lee Judge [00:03:17]:
Wow.

AJ Wilcox [00:03:17]:
And I went and jumped into it to Salesforce as our CRM at the time and looked at the leads he was talking about and every single one that he mentioned was sourced from LinkedIn ads. And I went, what am I doing? Wasting my time on these other platforms. And so I jumped in and, long story short, ended up scaling that over the next two and a half years to become LinkedIn’s largest spending ad account. Had really good relationships with the product team. They cared about what I had to say. And, that was the beginning of my love for LinkedIn ads.

A. Lee Judge [00:03:46]:
See, that’s why there’s so few of you out there because you have the relationships, you have the experience, you have a few inside tracks, it sounds like. Plus you have the experience before that of doing all the other places with Google and everything else. So give us an idea of, you know, your insider’s track. What are some of the biggest differences about advertising on LinkedIn versus other social channels and even Google Ads?

AJ Wilcox [00:04:12]:
Well, I think it’s really easy to differentiate between Google Ads and LinkedIn first off because when someone is searching for something on Google, they have intent. They’re telling you exactly what it is that you’re they’re searching for and you take the keyword and say, I want my ad to show up when someone types this and it’s great. The net result though is that your sales team is gonna get these leads of people who are what I would call hot and ready, but they’re you have no control over who they are professionally. Mhmm. So if you sell something that’s enterprise level, you get a lot of, like, mom and pops and and little leads coming through who don’t realize that, you know, the difference between enterprise and and, and SMB just because, you know, the keyword doesn’t communicate that. Mhmm. So on LinkedIn side, we get exactly the opposite. We can’t target people necessarily by what it is that they’re searching for right now, so we lose the intent.

AJ Wilcox [00:05:08]:
But what we do get is we make sure that our ads are being hyper targeted to the exact right people who can afford, who would be a perfect candidate for our product or service. So when the sales team gets these leads, generally the sales cycle is a little bit longer, but they’re a much larger lead. They fit your your ideal customer profile. You know, they’re the ones that you’re gonna be so proud to put their their logo on your website as a customer.

A. Lee Judge [00:05:34]:
Mhmm. So I’ve done LinkedIn ads both when I was working in corporate buying them for that company, also for myself. And I appreciate the things you just said about being able to really target who they’re going to and knowing who they are when they when they interact. But that comes at a cost and Totally. Even before we get on that part, which is probably the biggest, I think Achilles heel of LinkedIn ads is the cost. Let’s first talk about the targeting part, which is the good part about it. Now I noticed that just like every other ad platform, they want to push you to spend more and more. Like when I say, I just want, you know, CMOs who have, you know, who are in this region, who do this thing or whatever.

A. Lee Judge [00:06:19]:
Of course, the next thing they’re gonna tell me is, oh, that audience is too small. Go bigger. You know, or it may say you only have, you know, 10,000 people than what you just selected and you’re only gonna get so many clicks. Go bigger. So they push you to go bigger and bigger and bigger. So let’s talk to the people who have already kind of put their foot in the water and they’re going through that process. This is going deeper now. I meant to go so fast, but let’s just dive into it.

A. Lee Judge [00:06:45]:
You’re in that process. They’re pushing you to spend more. You’re trying to narrow down who you’re speaking to and utilize the best part of LinkedIn, which is being able to do that. What’s your advice on going down that path and not losing your shirt while you’re trying to specialize?

AJ Wilcox [00:07:00]:
Yeah. There are, first of all, LinkedIn wants you to spend more because they like to see more in in their pockets for sure. But there is also an element here that makes a lot of sense. It’s if someone comes on and only spends 3 or $400, doesn’t see a lead come in that their sales team wants to meet with, I’ve seen it over and over where they go, oh, LinkedIn ads doesn’t work, and they leave. And, you know, generally, I would say because, on LinkedIn, we are targeting what tend to be a little bit longer of these sales cycles and larger budgets. These do take time, and you do need enough of them coming through to be able to actually judge and say, yep. This looks like it’s working or no, it doesn’t. And so you really do wanna spend a a decent budget.

AJ Wilcox [00:07:46]:
What I recommend for most is to start with about $5,000 a month, which may seem high or may seem low to some of you, but what I’ve found is usually if you’re spending about 5,000 a month, by the end of the month, you can say pretty pretty much with certainty like, oh, this looks like it’s heading in the right direction or no, this sucks. We should cut bait and run. But, yeah, I would start out like, make sure you get enough data to actually tell what’s working.

A. Lee Judge [00:08:11]:
That that’s a good point. Because I know even on the early days when I was running I have more experience myself in Google Ads, which is, as you just pointed earlier, is very different. But what I found similar was there was a minimum spend before you could actually do the thing, before you had enough data, before it understood and learned what you were after, and you didn’t get this, you didn’t see very many results. At that time, I forgot, I think it may have been for that particular company I was with, we had to spend at least a thousand dollars a month to even start in the conversation of getting leads. And this was Google probably in 2018 or so. And I realized the number said when I dropped below that, the league stopped coming. Above that, then I was in the game. And so you mentioned with LinkedIn, there’s something like that too.

A. Lee Judge [00:08:56]:
I’m sure it varies. I’ll give you that caveat. But you said you threw out like 5,000. Like, are we talking about to to really play ball in LinkedIn, you’re spending that kind of money?

AJ Wilcox [00:09:07]:
I think so. And if you’re at smaller spend, it’s okay. It just means that you’ve gotta run for longer before you get those insights.

A. Lee Judge [00:09:14]:
So

AJ Wilcox [00:09:14]:
it’s kind of like a what what is your requirement for your speed to insights? If you’ve got all the time in the world and you wanna run this over three months, to spend that much money, that’s totally fine too.

A. Lee Judge [00:09:26]:
Mhmm.

AJ Wilcox [00:09:26]:
But what to your point of what you said before, when you have an audience that is super small, you know, LinkedIn starts to complain if you have an audience less than 50,000 people. But I would say, you know, try to go over about 20,000, because if you go much under that, you get into a position where you’ve really got a bid high to get any sort of traffic to come through. And if you’re spending $18.20 dollars a click, especially on a small budget, you may realize very quickly like, oh, this platform is too expensive for me. Whereas, if you had an audience that was bigger, let’s say between 20,000 and a hundred thousand, you can get your costs all the way down to like like, you know, $5.06, $8 a click, which is much more where I like to play.

A. Lee Judge [00:10:13]:
So what if you what if you know that the number of potential people in your audience is smaller than the number they’re suggesting you use? Like, for example, if you say, I only wanna talk to, you know, industrial engineers in the flooring and tile industry. You can find them by their profile, but they may not be 50,000 of those in your market. So what do you do when you’re you’re trying to play with those numbers and you end up in that kind of predicament?

AJ Wilcox [00:10:41]:
Yeah. I would say ignore LinkedIn’s advice. If you get down to your only audience and it does not make sense to expand past there, totally fine. I’d say move forward, but just realize that LinkedIn’s recommendations for bids, for budgets aren’t going to make sense for you. And I would suggest start out by paying by the click because LinkedIn’s default is is, maximum delivery bidding is what it’s called. It’s the most expensive way to pay. And so switch yours to to cost per click bid and maybe start out at something like $10 a click and just see how it does, if it spends your budget too fast, not fast enough, and you can adjust from there. And if it’s a small audience, it might just take, you know, you might not see clicks coming in every day.

AJ Wilcox [00:11:23]:
It might not be filling a whole budget, but of course, you know that every chance you get you’re getting in front of one of your ideal target audience. I think that’s okay to let it run over long term.

A. Lee Judge [00:11:33]:
So what are your indicators? I mean, you’re you’re spending money. You may or may not see those leads coming in. What are the indicators that tell you maybe I’m not spending enough or maybe I have my targeting set up wrong or maybe it’s working really well, but it’s just early. What are some of those benchmarks you would set to understand how you’re doing?

AJ Wilcox [00:11:52]:
What I have found over the thousand plus clients we’ve worked with is the vast majority of the time, the client wants sales ready leads and they want them fast. Like, that’s why they’re investing in LinkedIn. And if we comply, we we take, their demo focused ads, like, get a demo, talk to someone, do a free consultation, or whatever. If we run that to their cold audiences, the cold audiences are saying, we don’t know who you are. Like, no, I’m not ready to talk to someone. I’m still in the learning phase. And, it’s about 5% of the time we we have a client who their product or service is so disruptive. There’s this late demand built up in the marketplace where that works, but most of the time it doesn’t.

A. Lee Judge [00:12:34]:
So what I like plan is my first touch with an audience is very much like a a light educational helpful friendly kind of touch. Mhmm. Videos from the founder or an internal thought leader work really well here, where you can say, like, here’s a quick tip, a a trick, a strategy, an industry update that you need to know about, and that’s a great first touch. Then, you know, so let’s say you’re only driving those for the first month of advertising. What you’re looking for is a level of engagement. You wanna see, do people care about these posts? Are they watching them past 50% of the video or 75%? Are they liking, commenting? Are they clicking on whatever link? So that’s what I look for first, but then once I have enough of those to build a retargeting audience, now I create a second stage to my funnel, and I go, okay. If I know that you’ve already watched 50% of one of my thought leader videos, now I’m gonna target you with something else helpful. Come and read this free blog post, download this free guide, you know, something like that.

AJ Wilcox [00:13:38]:
And then once enough of those people have done that, then I create a three stage funnel, and it’s only in the third stage where I start asking for information. Like you’ve had at least two meaningful interactions with our brand, it’s time to talk to someone. Get a demo. Get that free consultation. And, of course, that funnel, it takes a while for people to work through, see your ads, interact with them in a in a way that they graduate down. Mhmm. But if you’re in it for the long haul, that is by far the the most efficient way to start generating sales ready leads because everything that comes out of that bottom of the funnel, they’re sales ready. They’re ready to talk to someone, and they’re a lot less likely to ghost you when they set up a call with a sales rep.

A. Lee Judge [00:14:19]:
I wanna dig deep on a couple of things you said there. I heard you mentioned analytics and you mentioned targeting. So analytics wise, for those who haven’t worked with or tried to use LinkedIn ads yet, what are some of the analytics we get on the back end? You mentioned, like, watch time, for example. What other things can we see on the back end while we’re doing advertising?

AJ Wilcox [00:14:41]:
LinkedIn has some great metrics. They’ll tell you, how many people clicked on them or engaged in any way, likes, comments, reshares. They’ll they’ll share, watch time with video or if it’s a document, they’ll say what percentage of the document people made it through. They have their own lead generation forms that are baked right into an ad. So if someone fills those out, they’ll tell you how many people opened the form versus how many people actually filled it out and and completed it. There’s conversion tracking. I mean, all kinds of great stuff. I can go on and on.

AJ Wilcox [00:15:13]:
Feel free to ask any question you want about it.

A. Lee Judge [00:15:15]:
Let me ask you this. If I’m not mistaken, short of filling a form out, LinkedIn won’t tell you who interacted. Right?

AJ Wilcox [00:15:23]:
Yes. And I get this request a lot. Like, oh, can I see who it is who’s clicking on my ads? But there are a couple workarounds. For those who hit like or hit comment, if you go to the actual ad, you can see the the identities of the people who’ve liked and commented. So right there, you can you get like, you look at their profiles and and gather a little bit of faith like, oh, yeah. Of course. These are the profiles that I I want to be reaching. It looks like I’m hitting the right people.

AJ Wilcox [00:15:50]:
There’s also personal identity resolution kinds of services. The one that comes to mind right now is rb2b.com. Mhmm. And they’ve got a free one with where they’ll resolve a 50 identities on your on your website or a landing page, for free. So anyone should go sign up for that, but that way if you’re sending traffic to your website, you can be like, oh, show me the identities of the people who are clicking, who may not have filled out a form yet. And again, just giving me faith that what I’m doing, like, I am hitting the right people.

A. Lee Judge [00:16:20]:
You know, I wanna share a little bit of a maybe a hack with the listeners that I do on the other side that is not advertising, it’s taking advantage of other people advertising. You mentioned that when someone likes or clicks on, an ad, I would go to my competitors and see who’s liking their ads. Oh. Because then you know who’s tuned in and who they targeted. And so I’ve gone to competitors’ ads and go, okay, these people liked this ad or they’ve been targeted, so that means that my competitor has figured out to target them. I’ll go through everybody who likes that ad and reach out to them. So I’m benefiting from that person’s ad.

AJ Wilcox [00:17:00]:
Oh, that’s so cool. And and throwing this out there, I can’t condone scraping on the platform because it’s it’s dangerous as a consumer service.

A. Lee Judge [00:17:09]:
But if I’m there Yeah. You know?

AJ Wilcox [00:17:11]:
Well, let me just throw this out there. If you can see who it is who’s commenting, if if you can add them to a list Mhmm. We can upload lists in the LinkedIn ads. So we can upload a contact list of individuals. So let’s say you somehow, whether it’s manually or somehow else, you procure a list of all of the people who are commenting on your competitors’ ads.

A. Lee Judge [00:17:31]:
Mhmm.

AJ Wilcox [00:17:32]:
You could upload let’s say you get a thousand people, upload them into LinkedIn. You know, you’re showing ads to people as like a like, trying to steal away from your competitor.

A. Lee Judge [00:17:40]:
Mhmm.

AJ Wilcox [00:17:40]:
That could be an interesting play as well. We can also upload list of companies. So if you have a hit list, a target list of companies that you would love to work with, maybe you know that these are companies who work with your competitor already or maybe they’re just they fit your your ideal customer profile, you can upload those into LinkedIn, add on other criteria like they have to have this job title or whatever, and you can show ads to them. They’re one of my favorite applications for LinkedIn ads.

A. Lee Judge [00:18:07]:
Well, so how does LinkedIn protect us from from spammers, from people who get literally scraped lists from databases and upload them? I mean, I think I’ve seen some reactions and some blocks before from from LinkedIn saying, hey, where’d this list come from? But share with us some of the things that you know or some things you’ve seen people try to do nefariously that LinkedIn has some, safety measures in there for.

AJ Wilcox [00:18:30]:
You know, LinkedIn does say, like, you have to agree when you upload a list. Like, I I own this this list. Like, I have a reason to have these. But, ultimately, when someone is targeted by an ad on any network, they don’t know why it is that they’re being targeted for that. Mhmm. They just know that this ad shows up in their feed as opposed to someone else’s. So I’ve never had anyone complain, about, like, wait, why am I seeing this ad? Like, what’s the difference between targeting someone with on a list versus telling LinkedIn, show ads to all people in this type of company.

A. Lee Judge [00:19:03]:
That’s a

AJ Wilcox [00:19:03]:
good point. Role. Like, they can’t tell whether they’re being targeted by a list or whether you’re just kind of spraying and praying with LinkedIn’s more general targeting.

A. Lee Judge [00:19:11]:
That’s a good point. Speaking of that, about targeting, I’m sure we everybody who’s on LinkedIn has seen an ad and wondered why was this targeted to me. It’s almost like Google has a little click. You say, you know, why was this ad shown to me? That That doesn’t go into specifically, oh, because you’re an engineer in Nebraska. But that’s what it’s trying to hint that it knows. Here’s the thing though. I’ve seen some ads well, two cases. One, I’ve gone to maybe a potential client’s website because of their potential client and then all of a sudden I get their ads.

A. Lee Judge [00:19:43]:
I’m like, okay, they’re retargeting me. I got their cookie. That’s what’s happening. Right? And I also think they’re wasting ad spend on money they could be spending with us because I’m like, why are you I’m not an industrial engineer. I’m your marketing agency that you’re looking to hire, but yet I’m getting all your ads and Yes. You know, I almost want to tell them, hey, maybe I should send them to AJ Wilcox and say, hey, you know what? You know, you’re an insurance company. You’re a medical insurance company, and you’re targeting us with your ads. You need to talk to my friend AJ here because the fact that I’m getting this is not good for your ad spend.

A. Lee Judge [00:20:18]:
Right? There’s something wrong. Right?

AJ Wilcox [00:20:20]:
Yeah. Totally. With any sort of retargeting campaign of, hey, I wanna show ads to the people who’ve landed on my website. What I do is I put guardrails on them. And, and that would be like, okay. If I know that I’m targeting people in, in the medical field, I’m going to take that retargeting list. And then before I show them ads, I’m gonna add on, like, by the way, you need to be in the medical field. By the way, you have to have, be at a company with more than 200 employees.

AJ Wilcox [00:20:48]:
By the way, you have to have a seniority of, you know, manager or above. And that way, if someone comes to your site because they’re looking for a job or they’re trying to sell you something or, you know, they’re scouting you for for being a vendor, whatever it is, you get cut out of that audience and they’re not wasting money on you.

A. Lee Judge [00:21:05]:
That’s so important. So I’ve seen it so many times, especially, you know, when you have a potential client, you go to their website or you’re looking at somebody’s profile and you go to their website because you’re interested in that person perhaps and you want to see where they work, but then you get targeted in in such a way it’s going on. And I think Yeah. That’s probably one of the things that kind of adds into the bad rep of the cost of LinkedIn ads because they don’t know people like you to get the information to understand how to do it correctly. Yeah. One last thing on that point too, often I see ads on LinkedIn that are like, they’re just consistently bombarding me with that particular ad. It’s like every three or four scrolls, I see the same ad over and over again to where I’m tired of seeing it. And I may think to myself, well, first of all, it doesn’t pertain to me.

A. Lee Judge [00:21:54]:
Like, they targeted me very poorly. And two, I have no way of letting them know. As a marketer, I want to say, look, please stop sending me these advertisements for jet jet planes. I’m not gonna buy one. So please stop advertising to me. Is there a way for either the consumer watching or the advertiser to see how they’re, you you know, where this leakage is when they’re wasting their ads?

AJ Wilcox [00:22:24]:
You can comment on the post. So as an ad comes, you can comment and say, like, hey, whoever’s running these ads, you might wanna check your targeting because I do not fit this criteria. Mhmm. You can also report the ad. So I think it’s in the upper right hand corner.

A. Lee Judge [00:22:38]:
Yeah. And I’ve tried that, but I didn’t want to, you know, report sounds so bad. Like, I don’t wanna say it’s a bad or obscene ad or something. It’s just that I want you to stop showing it to me. In fact, there is one ad that I get I just really don’t wanna see. It’s a really bad ad and it’s I’m a video person. It’s a horrible video, so it irks me even more. And so I’m like, how do I stop this ad? There’s really no way that I could do it other than reporting it, which I don’t wanna give them any negative points for that.

AJ Wilcox [00:23:06]:
Yeah. Good point. I would probably comment. Occasionally, I will go and search on LinkedIn, like, show me the marketing people at this company, and I’ll send a message to them and just say, just so you know, here’s a screenshot of the ad I keep getting. I do not fit your criteria. You may wanna adjust your targeting. But on the other hand, when I do that, there’s like a, by the way, you can hire me to fix it. Yeah.

A. Lee Judge [00:23:28]:
You should. So let me ask you this. Again, I mentioned earlier, so my company, ContentMasta, we create organic content that ends up on LinkedIn. We some of our clients, we even posted on LinkedIn for the math that we created, whether it be video or images or whatever. So let’s talk about formatting. Two points I wanted to hear from you about. One, are there particular formats that we we can say as a trend perform better than others? And also, I wanna understand the starting point. Do we start with creating an ad that is an ad or do we create start with organic and and boost it as an ad? So let’s start with the format part.

AJ Wilcox [00:24:05]:
Okay. So format wise, you know, if you would have asked me three years ago, I would have said, oh, don’t waste your time with video ads. They they don’t work on LinkedIn. You know, no one cares. I have changed my tune, and and I don’t know whether it’s user behavior on the platform has changed or maybe people just have started creating much better video content. But for whatever reason it is, video works extremely well. Especially if it’s talking head where you’re giving a a tip, a trick, a strategy. Those kinds of like free educational hits are some of the highest performing ads that we have on LinkedIn.

AJ Wilcox [00:24:41]:
Document ads are still pretty new and they do quite well. And what I love about both video and and document ads, we can create retargeting audiences that say, if you’ve watched at least 25% of one of my video ads or 50 I like 50%. Or if you’ve scrolled to 50% of one of my document ads, I’m gonna put you in a a new audience and target you a little bit more deeply into my funnel. And so I love those as a first touch for for someone’s top of funnel. I I call it my stage one. So those are and then of course there’s a single image ad, that you know, LinkedIn came out with those in 2013. They still are great. You know, in front of word processor and Canva, five minutes later you’ve got you know, something that you can put out there as an ad.

AJ Wilcox [00:25:28]:
So I I like to see those, but, yeah, those are my biggest trends.

A. Lee Judge [00:25:32]:
Well, you know, you mentioned video first. So I I can’t help but pause and say if any of our clients or potential clients of Content Master are watching, we specialize in talking head video. And it doesn’t have to just stop at the organic content we create for you. We can then take that and turn it into ads because talking head videos work especially in a time when AI is so prevalent and people are doing fake videos, both fake images and fake video. A real executive or a thought leader or a subject matter expert talking about your company, just giving a tip or informing somebody, becoming that trusted advisor is so powerful from organic and even on to paid. So let’s talk about the next step. You have a, an ad that could live as organic or it could be boosted. What what are your thoughts on either letting something live as organic until it proves itself, or do you suggest starting with the ad in mind?

AJ Wilcox [00:26:33]:
I suggest a little bit of both. So here’s how I think about that. If you put something out organically and you can see that it has has more views, it has more engagement than other posts, Not only have you decided, like, oh, it looks like this is a high performer organically, so it’s probably gonna work well as an ad, then, like, you’re you’re kind of you’re you’re like a seventies rock band where you come to concert, like, you’re not showing your new stuff. You’re playing the greatest hits. That’s kind of what that content is. What else is cool about that is all of the the likes and comments that that post has built up organically, when you turn it into an ad, it keeps all those things if you boost it. And so now you have all this implicit, like, social proof, that shows that that you’re a great brand, that this ad is worth paying attention to. So I do love that.

AJ Wilcox [00:27:26]:
The problem with boosting posts is you can’t really AB test. Mhmm. Because to do a proper AB test, you would have to post almost exactly the same post right back to back with, you know, some some minor change. Whereas, when we run things as ads, if we create them as ads, we can do a a pretty clean AB test. Like, I’m just gonna create two posts where only the headline or only the intro text is different here, and that’s really good for your testing.

A. Lee Judge [00:27:55]:
Okay.

AJ Wilcox [00:27:55]:
The other thing that’s really awesome about boosting, this is something new on LinkedIn that they’ve just given us in the past, like, year and a half, which is it used to be that when we would boost, we would boost a company post. But you know how much people pay attention to your company posts. It’s not much. Like, company comes across your feed that you’ve never heard of, most of the time you just keep scrolling. But they gave us thought leader ads, which which is what they call it when you boost a personal post.

A. Lee Judge [00:28:21]:
Mhmm.

AJ Wilcox [00:28:21]:
And so, Lee, you put a video out of you in a talking head. We can then sponsor that same post to the audiences that you want to be able to see it. They they fit your exact target audience. And, those are the highest performing ads on LinkedIn right now. They do great, and and I highly recommend using them, especially with talking head video.

A. Lee Judge [00:28:43]:
That’s music to my ears, AJ, because that’s right now, this is our our highest performing service in Content Monster is producing talking head videos of experts. And knowing that we have your type of approval on that works for ads on LinkedIn, that’s that’s awesome to hear.

AJ Wilcox [00:29:02]:
Oh, yeah. So let me ask you this. When you’re creating these talking head videos, what’s the length that you shoot for? What do you see being the most engaging organically? I’m I’m curious if that lines up with what I see from an advertising perspective.

A. Lee Judge [00:29:13]:
So in most cases, our our strategy of recording these is we start with the what we call the big content. So it could be a full conversation like we’re doing right now. Could be a podcast, could be a interview, but we also help our clients format it into sound bites so that they can get some quick short answers so that we can output what could be potentially an ad. So, of course, the goal isn’t ad. The goal is a short social piece that conveys value in a short amount of time, which then equates to a good ad. So, and those typically, we’re still averaging the sweet spot around sixty seconds, but it also plays into our larger picture of we try to make assets that work the best they can across platforms. So, Yeah. You know, between Instagram, TikTok, YouTube going up to three minutes now, TikTok going way beyond that, you know, we take all that into consideration, but we also take into consideration people’s attention spans, if it’s for business or not, and if we want to go further later on into advertising, we’re not gonna do a three minute clip and think we’re gonna turn into an ad.

A. Lee Judge [00:30:22]:
So the sweet spot is still around sixty seconds.

AJ Wilcox [00:30:26]:
Perfect. What I find is to cold audiences, I like to keep them between about twenty to forty seconds Good. To grab their attention.

A. Lee Judge [00:30:33]:
Uh-huh.

AJ Wilcox [00:30:33]:
And then in as a second touch, we can usually go thirty seconds thirty seconds to sixty seconds, because we we’ve we’ve earned a little bit more of their attention. They’re more likely to stick around. And so, yeah. Your type of content fits in perfectly with my search.

A. Lee Judge [00:30:46]:
That’s smart. Because, you know, our our rule of sixty second is to our editors. If the client wants a sixty second bite, we always tell them, but if you get the point across in twenty, we’re gonna make it 20. Right? Yeah. So if it’s a good one, we’re not gonna just keep on going just for the sake of trying to fill up time. If your thought comes across in twenty seconds, thirty seconds, that’s how long the shorts should be. And according to what you’re saying, that makes it even better if you wanna extend it to advertising.

AJ Wilcox [00:31:16]:
Oh, yeah. I think it’s perfect.

A. Lee Judge [00:31:17]:
Alright. Well, to wrap up, AJ, I’ll tell our audience that LinkedIn advertising, I think, is a great place to be. It’s a great thing to do. It does have its its cost and you have to know what you’re doing, I think, probably more than any other type of online advertising. So I wanna encourage them to reach out to you. So how can they reach out to you, AJ? Tell us about your company, what you do, how you help, and how they can work with you.

AJ Wilcox [00:31:41]:
Sure. So if you go to b2linked.com, the letter b, the number two, and the word linked.com, there you can see our pricing, like, what we do. Basically, we’re an ad agency that LinkedIn ads is our our sole focus. So that one’s great. I also run the LinkedIn ads show podcast. So obviously, if you’re listening to to this podcast now, you’re in the podcasts, go check out the LinkedIn ads show in whatever podcast player you have running, and reach out to me on LinkedIn. You know, I’m I’m easy to find. AJ Wilcox, and I I’m usually posting valuable free stuff two or three times a week and I would absolutely love to be able to connect with you there.

A. Lee Judge [00:32:21]:
Always. And also, if you’re going to a marketing conference and AJ is there, be sure to check out his sessions. You’ll learn a ton.

AJ Wilcox [00:32:29]:
Oh, and same thing with Lee’s sessions. Man, I I have sat in now on on probably three or four of your sessions in the last year, and they are they are killer. So way to go. I’m out in your audience as well.

A. Lee Judge [00:32:40]:
I hate when they have us back to back. I

AJ Wilcox [00:32:42]:
know. That happened.

A. Lee Judge [00:32:43]:
It’s always your favorite speakers that are all at the same time as you are. So, that’s probably a good sign to how, you know, how we are. They they know who’s good, right? Absolutely. So, again, AJ, thanks for joining us. To the listeners, if you’re listening to the podcast and want to also see AJ and I, video of this podcast and others are available in the podcast section of contentmonster.com. Again, thanks, AJ. And listeners, thanks for listening.

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