086: Mastering LinkedIn Ads & Mentorship in B2B Marketing with AJ Wilcox

 

Danny Gavin Host
00:05
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Mentor. I’m your host, danny Gavin , and, together with industry leaders and marketing experts, we’ll explore the meeting point of mentorship and marketing. We’ll discover how these connections have affected careers, marketing strategies and lives. Now get ready to get human. Hello, I’m Danny Gavin , founder of Optage marketing professor and the host of the Digital Marketing Mentor. Get ready to get human? A series that breaks down the complexities of LinkedIn to simple tips for B2B marketers. With over a decade of experience in performance marketing, aj has spoken at conferences and industry events across the globe, sharing his expertise in driving results through innovative LinkedIn advertising strategies. Today, we’re going to talk about mentorship and, of course, marketing and advertising on LinkedIn. How are you doing, aj?

AJ Wilcox Guest
01:01
Doing awesome. Danny, Thank you so much for having me on. It’s an absolute honor.

Danny Gavin Host

01:04
Yes, we met each other in San Diego a couple months ago and I’m like dude, I need to get AJ on the podcast. So I’m really glad you’re here. For people who don’t know, aj’s literally the LinkedIn guru he really is. When people need someone, they call him. I think in some ways, this is a compliment, but it’s also hard. Anyone else who wants to become a LinkedIn guru it’s hard because AJ’s there. But you’re awesome and in life you’re even better. You’re so friendly and awesome, so it’s just so nice to have you here today.

AJ Wilcox Guest

01:36
Well, I’m turning bright red, thank you. One thing I’m really bad at sales, but what I’m really good at is creating content and teaching, and I’ve just. Our company has turned now. You know, b2linked is now over 10 years old. From the inception of the company, I went okay, I’m not going to go and generate leads for myself by selling. I’m going to go and create a bunch of content and just teach everyone everything I know for free, and it pays dividends. You know, 10 years later, we have more inbound leads coming in than we can handle honestly, and I love it. So I think it’s a sales strategy. But it’s also part of my personality. I can’t not teach and share what I know.

Danny Gavin Host

 

02:15
And it’s such a good example of by sharing instead of holding back, that actually can help you instead of harm you. And I still have people today say, hey, should we share that? I’m like, yeah, actually it’s a good idea, because usually people don’t want to do things themselves. They’ll be like, ah, okay, that’s a really good idea, but maybe I’ll get you to do it. So, talking about education, let’s start off with where did you go to school and what did you study?

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

02:38
So I went to school at BYU it’s Brigham Young University here in Utah. When I went I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had served a two-year religious mission where I lived in Ukraine speaking Russian. So I kind of thought in the back of my mind like, hey, maybe with these newfound language skills maybe I could do something with international business. But I ended up sitting in on a class as I was learning about the business program, where you get to choose a focus inside the major, learning about the business program where you get to choose a focus inside the major and I sat in on a marketing class and I’m a big car guy Like I love anything cars and the professor he was the marketing professor and he had worked in automotive his whole career. So all of these examples were about BMW, mercedes, audi and Jaguar and I was like this is great. He had me hanging on every word and what I found is I absolutely fell in love with marketing.

Danny Gavin Host

 

03:28
And that was when I decided like okay, I’m going into the marketing track here. First, a shout out to BYU, because it happens to be a really good football school and their quarterback is, he’s Jewish, which helps. That’s a whole other story for another time, which is pretty cool. Looking back at your time, there were there outside of like that first professor. Were there any other experiences outside or inside of the classroom that pretty much led you to where you are today?

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

03:53
One thing that was interesting was that I used to watch Star Trek with my dad. He was a big Trekkie growing up and on Saturdays when I’d just go sit on the couch next to him and we’d watch, he’s a finance guy, he’s not a marketer, but when the commercials came on, he started quizzing me and he’d say hey, who do you think this commercial is talking to? Who do you think their audience is and what sort of action do you think that they want them to do? Is it just to remember this? Is it they want them to go and find him at the store and purchase? And so when I heard marketing was an option, I didn’t know what else I wanted to do. But I remembered watching ads with my dad back years ago and went like, oh, I enjoyed that. Maybe that’s something I could look into, and that was one of the inspiring factors.

Danny Gavin Host

 

04:42
Wow, that’s really, really cool. It makes me think of sometimes when I go to basketball games with my kids and there’s like, let’s say, the Kiss Cam or the Dance Cam and it’s like sponsored by a certain company, and then afterwards I ask them, hey, do you know who that was sponsored by? And like most of the time they have no clue because they didn’t even realize. But that’s like a fun trick to play. But talk about Star Trek. What a fun trick to play. But talk about Star Trek. What is your favorite series? Do you have like a specific that you like? Yeah, I really liked.

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

05:08
What’s it called Voyager? Okay, I really liked Voyager. That was my favorite. With my dad, I watched all the way through the Next Generation Deep Space Nine and Voyager and I really love the whole series. I love how prescient it is about what technology would be like in the future and I loved how inclusive it was and how it always taught a great message about how to be a better human, and that’s something I think TV may have lost to this point is having the good moral that every episode teaches you.
Danny Gavin Host

 

05:37
No, I agree. So I guess we’re right. I think we’re about the same age. So I also grew up through those three series and, yeah, going back now and looking at like the next generation episodes, so obviously it’s not as cool as it was when we were kids. But, like you said, the messaging and what you’re learning right, it’s just sad, like that just doesn’t exist in TV nowadays. Yeah, so, aj, how would you define a mentor?

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

05:59
I don’t think a mentor has to be something that is like an official relationship where you’ve both agreed. I would follow people in my career and just I really cared about their thought processes and how they taught and how they thought, and my goal was just to learn as much as I possibly could from them. A lot of times, this is just someone that you call a friend, or mentorship is just paying really close attention to what someone that you idolize is doing.
Danny Gavin Host

 

06:25
Yeah, I just had that conversation today with someone about. For me personally, some of my biggest mentors aren’t necessarily the people that I said, hey, do you want to be my mentor? But it’s like they gave me that hope that, oh, I could get there some way someday as well. I always wonder who they had, because some of the guys that I’ve looked up to they were like trailblazers. So I think it’s a lot harder for them. So I always say, ooh, I’m lucky that at least I had you to look up to Talking about some of your most influential mentors. Let’s first talk about your dad. I know you just spoke about him and obviously he must be such a big part of your life, but we’d love to know why do you consider him one of your mentors?

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

07:02
Yeah, ever since a young age, my dad has been my best friend and it was so funny. I think back to high school. All of my friends thought that my dad was a better friend to them than I was. I specifically remember coming home from a date and having all of my friends just hanging out with my dad and I was like, hey, you guys, you’re waiting for me. And they’re like, no, we’re here hanging out with your dad, thanks for coming. So maybe it’s a statement about like how cool I was in high school, but another like how awesome my dad was and how much he cared about me as a son and about our group of friends.

 

07:38
And he did his entire career in finance. He worked in banks, which is not what I wanted to do. I think I would probably go insane, but he’s my confidant. Every time I go to make a big decision, I run it by him and, for instance, when I created this company, b2linked, I went to him and said, hey, I’ve been running the largest LinkedIn ads account in the world for two and a half years. I know more about this platform than anyone. I think I might be able to start like a consultancy or an agency where I could do this for other companies and his answer was oh, being an entrepreneur, that’s really risky, like you probably shouldn’t do it, and I didn’t take his advice. I obviously went and created the company, but someone who’s a mentor. It doesn’t mean you have to always take their advice, but it does mean you have to care enough to say I want to hear both sides of the story, like let’s have a conversation about whether or not this is a good idea.

Danny Gavin Host

 

08:34
Yeah, so my dad is very similar in the sense that, like all the young people always gravitate to him in some ways. I found that a little intimidating growing up because it was like, ooh, he’s so cool, what am I supposed to do? So to me it’s a little bit of a challenge, but so many people don’t have that father figure in their life that they can speak with and have that, and you’re very lucky to have that and I’m sure that you don’t take it for granted.

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

09:02
No, in fact, I’ve gone through a divorce, so my kids live in a blended family and have this situation. I am so grateful that I grew up in a home where my parents were together and I feel like it was really an idyllic kind of upbringing, and so now I know I’m going to compensate extra well for my kids. I’m going to compensate extra well for my kids and I want to show them the same kind of behaviors that I learned from my dad. I got such a good example. I want to try to share that with them as much as possible.

Danny Gavin Host

 

09:36
Let’s move on to Alex MacArthur. I believe he was your boss’s boss’s boss.

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

09:48
But let’s talk about Alex. Yeah, so when I was in my second job after college, I was working in a search engine optimization agency and this was my boss’s boss’s boss, like you said. But he was a really cool guy and I liked the way he thought, I liked the way he presented and he didn’t make it feel like there was a huge power distance. So I was actually really good friends with my boss and my boss’s boss and they were good friends with him and so over time it wasn’t actually at that same company, but after we all kind of moved on and went other places, he and I connected over this love of hiking. I live in Utah where I have, within a 20 minute drive I have about 20 different hiking trails.

 

10:27
We went on and I knew Alex was kind of an outdoorsy kind of guy and so I just said, hey, you want to go hiking on a Saturday morning? And he said yes, so we went and it turned into something where, like it’s a tradition every Saturday morning, we went and over the course of the next like year and a half, he and I going, we got to know each other really well and we got really invested in each other’s careers, how do we help each other? And he would give me so much good advice. And then, you know, it came winter and he went hey, our hikes kind of have to stop unless we do snowshoes. And so we went out and got snowshoes and kept it going so we could hike all year round.

 

11:09
And what was so much fun about this is I understood the value of what I was getting out of that mentorship of me, learning from him that I started inviting all of these younger digital marketing guys who were in the area hey, every Saturday morning we hike, come with us. And then I got the opportunity to pass on exactly what Alex gave to me and I could help them in their careers. And they’re all now like fabulously more successful than I’ll ever be, and I get to claim a little part of that. I’m really happy for them.

Danny Gavin Host

 

11:39
Yeah, I would say the best result within a mentorship relationship is when the people who you’re mentoring, when they get even better than you right, when you see that amazing success, it’s, yeah, it’s so rewarding. Tell me about your own mentorship style. So, whether that’s like with your team members or some of these young digital marketers, how do you mentor them?

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

11:58
I really try to first of all be a friend because someone doesn’t care. They won’t care about advice that I give them unless they know that that advice comes from a good place. So genuinely, I mean I’m out to be a friend with everyone that I come across. It’s not going to feel fake, but I do. I want to learn about them, I want to become their friend so that when I give advice they care, and I also want to make sure that someone that I’m choosing as a mentor that they care enough about the advice, because I can’t tell you how frustrating it is when you know something great for someone and you offer helpful advice and they turn it down. I know I shared how I did that to my dad probably a lot, but I’ve taken his advice on a lot of other things to compensate. It’s really important as a mentee that you do actually honor that person’s feedback so that they’ll want to keep it going.

Danny Gavin Host

 

12:55
Yeah, it’s like a balance right, because on one hand, you want to give people advice but you also want them to make their own decisions, and sometimes you can see where the problem comes up, where you got some advice, you didn’t take it and you made the mistake. And then you come back to them and be like, ooh, I should have listened to you. So I think, being as the mentor, you kind of have to be patient, right. But you’re right. If you have someone and you keep helping them and they don’t listen and they keep messing up, it could be that you’re just the wrong match.

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

13:22
And you can now pick someone else as a mentee who does care and wants it more to who does care and wants it more, and you’ll now get to influence more and more careers.

Danny Gavin Host

 

13:31
Going down the path of LinkedIn ads outside of this really big client that you had and dealing with LinkedIn ads. What inspired you most about doubling down into LinkedIn?

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

13:41
What I loved. You know, I came from this world of search engine optimization where if I made an adjustment, I wouldn’t actually see the fruits of that for like four to six months, especially if you’re working on making an adjustment. I wouldn’t actually see the fruits of that for like four to six months, especially if you’re working on an enterprise level, national kind of site. And that was so frustrating. So I learned Google ads at the time because, hey, it’s the same keyword that I was optimizing towards, but because I’m putting dollars behind it, by the end of today I can tell you whether that was a good investment or not. So I got really into that. But when I stumbled into LinkedIn ads, it was totally different. It’s not keyword based, it’s based on who someone is professionally. And I noticed when I went into the last employer I worked for it was a SaaS company and I was doing all of the same SEO activities. I was doing all the same Google ads activities, even getting into the display network and other areas of marketing. The sales team came to me about two weeks after I started and said, aj, we’re fighting over your leads, keep it up. And I went like, oh, what are these leads they’re talking about. I went and looked in our CRM and every single lead that they had mentioned came from our LinkedIn ads campaign and I went oh, this is something that I don’t even know what I’m doing here. I better spend more time and attention. And so I kept investing and investing until the point where I finally said, hey, I called myself an SEO guy before I started. I’m gonna give SEO to an agency because I want to focus 100% here on LinkedIn ads, and that was the way it worked. I gave away Google ads as well, so I could be 100% focused on LinkedIn.

 

15:21
What I loved so much about it is, if I generate a lead from someone who typed a keyword, they search for it and then they fill out the form. I know that they have intent, because they were searching for what I’m offering, but I didn’t have any way of qualifying who they were. Are they looking for a free kind of option? Are they just looking for information, or are they looking for an enterprise-level tool? That’s what I was working with.

 

15:49
It’s like, okay, all these leads that Google ads are bringing in, they’re all what I would call the mom and pops and tire kickers. They were just very small deal sizes, but with my LinkedIn ads I could say I only want to target you if you have this level of seniority in this role at a company with more than 500 employees in this sector and because of that, every lead that I generated, everyone who sees the ad. They’re a perfect fit for what we do and that was something I couldn’t ever do with a keyword level marketing like Google ads. That’s why I fell in love with LinkedIn is access to qualifying an audience way better than I could and way differently, way more differently than I could on any other channel.

Danny Gavin Host

 

16:34
For those, who don’t know much about LinkedIn ads. When someone comes to you and says, hey, I’m really torn. I’ve got LinkedIn ads, I’ve got meta ads. I know meta ads are a lot cheaper. You could pretty much target also, you know what. Would you tell them? What would be the main differences between LinkedIn ads and meta ads?

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

16:52
Meta and LinkedIn. They both target audiences, by who someone is. The difference is meta doesn’t actually know who you are professionally. They know what you’re interested in and the kinds of things that you interact with, but they don’t know you professionally. Linkedin, on the other hand, has a monopoly, as far as I’m concerned, on your professional data. They know every job you’ve worked at. They know your title, what size of company those are, which industry. They know the skills that you’ve listed on your profile and the groups that you’re a member of. They know all of this stuff.

 

17:25
So, yes, meta is probably about a third of the price per click, meaning that if you’re getting some kind of a lead let’s say you know someone to sign up for a webinar your cost per conversion is going to be about a third on meta as it is on LinkedIn. But what we found with a client recently? We analyzed their meta spend and their LinkedIn spend and we found that, even though the costs were a third on meta by the time we walked them all the way through a proposal and a closed deal, linkedin’s traffic. It costs three times more, but the sales team had to throw out 90% of the meta leads. They only had to throw out and disqualify, like 5% of LinkedIn. And so now, even though the costs are higher on LinkedIn, we ended up with an ROI that was two and a half times higher than meta was. So your upfront costs are not everything. It’s so much more about the quality that you get out of the backend.

Danny Gavin Host

 

18:25
And I think that we can’t stress that enough, especially when you’re dealing with service based businesses, where it’s not about the initial lead form right of the back end. And I think that we can’t stress that enough, especially when you’re dealing with service-based businesses, where it’s not about the initial lead form right, but it’s about what happens afterwards. If you’re not looking what’s happening down the funnel and at the end and then bringing that back to your campaign, then you’re missing the whole point. So it’s awesome that you have although you maybe didn’t set up that A-B test right, but you had it and it’s the proof’s in the pudding. That’s so cool.

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

18:51
Yeah, and honestly, this is one of those things because we weren’t running the meta ads Right. This was an A-B test that was set up because we’re trying to show our value and if the client keeps saying, hey, the costs on LinkedIn are about three times higher than we’re paying on meta, we get really discouraged, like, oh man, there’s nothing we can do about how much LinkedIn charges. But after finding the results, we had this new love and appreciation for our LinkedIn traffic, just because it has a leg up on any other channel in terms of quality.

Danny Gavin Host

 

19:22
So this is a little bit of an advanced more of an advanced question. But in the world of Bing ads or Microsoft ads, you have the ability to use LinkedIn audiences. So do you ever work with paid search people with your LinkedIn sort of data knowledge in order to craft kind of a winning paid search campaign, at least on the Microsoft side?

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

19:42
Yeah, like you mentioned, microsoft has this targeting because they own LinkedIn. But to my knowledge, they only rolled out three targeting facets. So we have I think it’s company name, company size and I think we might have like job function.

Danny Gavin Host

 

19:56
So thin, it’s very thin.

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

19:58
Yeah. And so if I ever have an audience that I could define by those three things like yeah, I would definitely suggest go set that up in Microsoft, because you’re going to get access to the right people but you’ll get cheaper display inventory. So I love it, but because it is limited, it’s not like page one of my playbook.

Danny Gavin Host

 

20:17
So that’s a really good segue into what are some of the effective targeting strategies you recommend businesses looking to reach their ideal audience on LinkedIn. There are so many different knobs that you can turn. How do you usually approach?

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

20:28
it Anytime a client tells me this is the audience we want to go after. What I’m paying attention to are two different aspects. I want to understand who is the professional, his or herself, and then I also want to understand what type of organization are they at Like? Let’s say, if you tell me that your ideal target audience is CFOs but your product costs, let’s say, $5,000 a month, I’m going to tell you your audience is not CFOs of a five person company. They’re not going to have the budget for for your product or service. So I think of the professional targeting being their role.

 

21:03
And there are five different facets that I like to use here. Job title is the one that everyone goes to first because it makes the most sense. Here, job title is the one that everyone goes to first because it makes the most sense. Job title is also because of that it’s the most competitive and you’re probably going to pay a bit higher of a click cost by using it. The next one I really like using job function, which is their department, with a level of seniority built onto it, with a level of seniority built onto it. So if it’s CFOs, I can say job function, finance and seniority, c-level, or CXO, as LinkedIn calls it, and I’ve just gotten that same person. There’s also skills with seniority. I could do a really high level IT kind of skill if I want to hit that same CTO or CIO oh sorry, I think we were talking finance want to hit that same CTO or CIO? Oh sorry, I think we were talking finance. If I do high-level finance skills with a seniority, I can get CFOs and that’s a wider audience I’m probably going to end up paying less per click for.

 

22:01
And then there’s also groups. I could target just CFO groups, for instance, and hit the same person. So that just allowed me to narrow in and I can decide which one of those or if multiple of those make sense given the audience and the budget. But now I’ve just designed who was the individual. Then, on the company side, I get to shoot for things like a size of company. So I’ll use number of employees Most of the time. That’s my favorite one. I can narrow down by their industry and I can even narrow down by specific company names. So those of us in marketing that we know what account-based marketing or ABM is, where we want to show ads just to members of specific companies we can do that on LinkedIn and by combining those two aspects the professional and the type of organization they work at now you’ve got a really solid target that you just can’t get on any other way.

Danny Gavin Host

 

22:57
Yeah, it’s bulletproof, yeah, so what metrics should marketers focus on when measuring their success with LinkedIn advertising?

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

23:03
This one’s difficult because I think most new advertisers say hey, here’s this audience of ideal people that would make great customers for us. Let’s show them ads that say hop on a free demo, talk to my sales rep. And what we know is someone who does not know and trust your organization already. They are not ready to talk to your sales department. It’s like proposing marriage on the very first date. You might be a great marriage candidate, but you’re gonna scare them away by asking too much too soon. So what I do is I break my accounts into a three-stage funnel strategy and at the top of the funnel I call this my stage one. Here I just want to get their attention, I want to make some sort of an impact on them, and the very best way I’ve found to do this is with very personal kinds of content where I’m sharing a tip, a trick, a strategy, an industry update that you might be interested in, and I’m not asking for anything in return, I’m just giving value. Then, once you’ve interacted there, then I can show you something that’s a little bit deeper, a little bit more engaging. And then, when you’ve engaged there now I’m like okay, you’ve had at least two strong interactions with our brand. Now I’ve more or less earned the right to ask you for like hey, you look ready? Like, do you want to talk to someone in sales?

 

24:22
So I have very different metrics that I care about in all three stages of the funnel.

 

24:27
At the top, what I care about is I want really high engagement rates to show me that people that I’m showing the ads to care.

 

24:34
If they’re videos let’s say it’s a 20 to 40 second video where I’m giving a tip I want to see a cost per 50% view and a 50% view rate and a completion rate that all tell me people stuck around they cared about what I had to say. If it’s, let’s say, a document ad, I want to see that people are engaging, they’re thumbing through the document, that they got 25, 50% of the way through. If it’s a single image ad, I care about my click-through rate and my engagement rate. I can compare those to LinkedIn’s benchmark of like 0.5% would be a LinkedIn benchmark average, so about half of a percent. If my click-through rate or engagement rate are significantly higher than that, then I go okay, I’m providing value. Then, at the bottom of the funnel, I care more about what’s my cost per conversion, my conversion rate. You know my click-through rates and engagement rates there as well, so it just depends on how far someone is through the funnel where I start to care about the different metrics that they might be interacting with.

Danny Gavin Host

 

25:35
So I got two questions. So number one would be when you’re presenting this to the client, obviously you’re throwing in soft metrics, which makes sense at the top and mid funnel, but maybe they’re used to being like everything needs to show direct ROI. What would you say? The breakdown is People, but you have to, like, educate them or they, like already know that this is the deal.

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

25:54
I would say the vast majority of advertisers that we talk to need to be educated. So I tell them this on the very first discovery call of working together. That’s like a hey, by the way, going right for the kill does not work 95% of the time and this is the strategy that you’re going to want to follow. If they go, hey, sorry, we do gated content and have BDRs follow up immediately on those leads and try to close them. Okay, we could help you with that, but you might be better off on your own following that strategy. But come back when you want a three-stage full educational nurture that’s going to turn into a long-term lead generating machine.

Danny Gavin Host

 

26:32
I’m sure it’s hard to push away people, but in the long run you know what works and therefore, if they’re not going to buy into the system, it makes sense to push them away.

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

26:40
And we invest so heavily in our clients that bringing someone on who sticks around for three months and then leaves is not good for us long-term. I would so much rather make sure that the relationship is right, that we have a long-term potential relationship here so that we can keep investing everything we have into our accounts. I would rather push someone away because I don’t want to have a hard conversation in three months.

Danny Gavin Host

 

27:02
So, with the third stage, or the third funnel, what’s your opinion on lead gen forms, which would mean people coming onto LinkedIn and filling out the form directly, for sending people to a website or to a landing page where they’d have to fill out the form there?

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

27:14
Yeah, so big differences here. Linkedin made a native lead generation form built right into their ads, and what’s so cool about it is when it pops up, they’ve pre-filled all the information about the prospect that LinkedIn knows, and so it. Especially if someone’s on a mobile device, which 80% of the people on LinkedIn are. It’s so easy. You don’t have to type in your email address for the 50th time that day with your big thumbs. It’s so easy to hit that form and submit. But there’s no integration with a calendar. If your goal is to get someone on a call with sales, I’ve found that if you use these lead gen forms, you have a really high conversion rate upfront, which is great, but then you need to get them to take the next step and convert again, which is schedule a time on this sales reps calendar. So what I’ve found is actually, if I send them to a landing page form first, there’s a little bit more friction here. First of all, the page is going to take a little bit longer to load, and we know some people are very impatient when they click on an ad. If they bounce before the page fully loads, then they’re gone. You paid for the click, but they never ended up seeing anything to combat this.

 

28:25
I would highly suggest any sort of improvement you can make on your landing page. Load time is totally worth the investment there. Now you have a form on your website. We know it’s going to not have as high a conversion rate because it’s not auto-filled that kind of sucks but at the same time, when traffic is on my website versus staying on LinkedIn, it is worth so much more to me and I appreciate it because when someone’s on the website they could click around to the about us, they could read more about our products. If it’s the same cost per click either way, I would prefer them being on my website.

 

29:01
And then, you know, the extra nail in the coffin here for me is I can build a scheduler app right into the lead form. So if someone is saying, yes, I want to meet with someone in the same form, they can choose the date and time and send it out. So it’s only one conversion. Rather than the lead gen form we’d be asking for two. So a controversial opinion, because if you look at cost per lead, you’re going to say, oh, the lead forms are a third of the cost or maybe even less, but I actually get a lower cost per meeting booked and lower cost per meeting shown. I like to show up using my own landing page forms rather than LinkedIn’s lead forms. Take those into account and see. I think both are a good option, but if you want meetings, I’d go to your own landing page forms.

Danny Gavin Host

 

29:48
It’s tough, but everything that you’re saying makes so much sense To me. It’s just like you actually have to sell it to the client, right, yeah, but obviously you do a great job doing that, so it’s fine, but it does. It makes so much sense and that’s the idea, like, I think everything in life is like a long short path and then a short long path right, and that is, if you take the shortcut, in the end it’s going to be long. Something might seem long, right, it might be a three-stage funnel and you’re sending them to the website, but the bottom line is that’s the short path, because you are going to get the right people at the end of that.

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

30:20
So I love it, that’s right?

Danny Gavin Host

 

30:21
Sure, you have a million of these, but what are some of your top common mistakes that you see businesses making with LinkedIn ads? How can people avoid them in the future? It’s really cool.

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

30:31
I do a lot of audits on accounts and there are five mistakes in targeting that I see I have not yet audited an account that didn’t make at least one of these mistakes. So the first is the geographic targeting that you choose. Linkedin defaults to something called recent or permanent location, and I always switch that to be just permanent location because recent location, if I’m targeting the US, it’s going to capture people who fit the criteria otherwise, who are visiting during the summer from Europe or from Asia, and so all of a sudden, like clients in the summer, will start saying, hey, why are we getting leads from the Philippines? It’s like, well, they visited, and LinkedIn calls in the last six months. So they could have visited up to six months ago, which is kind of crazy. So set your geographic targeting to permanent and you get rid of that.

 

31:25
The next one is after you set your targeting, as you scroll down, there’s a little box that LinkedIn auto checks called enable audience expansion. We’ll put it this way you already pay a premium to advertise on LinkedIn because we want to reach very specific professionals. Leaving that box checked just enables LinkedIn to throw other audiences that you haven’t defined in there. It’s never a good idea. Always, always unchecking that box checked just enables LinkedIn to throw other audiences that you haven’t defined in there. It’s never a good idea. Always, always, uncheck that box. Then, as you keep scrolling, you get down to placements and LinkedIn will auto select a placement called the LinkedIn audience network, which sounds great in theory of hey, I want to target my LinkedIn people, but everywhere around the web and on different apps, but what we find is very low quality traffic coming from there and, surprisingly, a lot of bot traffic. Linkedin tries really hard not to charge you for the visits that they can tell our bots, but they can’t catch everyone. And, aside from that, it’ll spend 95% of your budget on the audience network. That’s lower quality and it steals all the budget from your just LinkedIn traffic, which we know is super high quality. So I uncheck that to begin with.

 

32:35
Then, finally, you get down to the bidding and budgeting section, and LinkedIn is very generous with themselves. They select the option that makes them the most money, that’s, maximum delivery bidding. We find that when someone uses max delivery bidding, they’re usually going to pay between $20 to $40 per click on each one of their ads, which is insane. The average that our clients are paying is like $7 to $8 per click in North America, so you can get traffic for a lot lower. So the way around that is, you pick the third option it’s actually hidden.

 

33:10
You have to click show additional options to get manual bidding and then the manual bid that they recommend. When you choose that, they’ll give you a little box that says let us bid 50% more whenever we think that someone is a really high value kind of audience. Uncheck that, because LinkedIn thinks that 70% of their clicks are higher value than what you bid, so you’ll just end up paying more. Then they’ll give you this range where they say we suggest that you bid $27 and other people like you are bidding 20 to 90 per click, which is absolutely insane. Ignore all of that.

 

33:46
Put a low number like seven or $8 in here, because the very worst thing that can happen as you launch this campaign if you’re not bidding enough for LinkedIn to see it being worthwhile to actually show your ads, they just won’t show enough of them to spend your budget. So in every two, three business days you can go in and just incrementally raise that bid until all of a sudden you start spending what you actually want to spend and if you follow that you’re not paying too much and you’re paying just enough that LinkedIn sees it to be worth their while to spend your entire budget during the day.
Danny Gavin Host

 

34:22
It’s like finding the same. We should use car example, right, but two cars that are exactly the same, but one just has this fancy logo on it, and because of that you’re going to be paying so much more. Same sort of concept, exactly. Have you ever used LinkedIn advertising for B2C?

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

34:36
Yeah, there’s quite a few B2C uses that LinkedIn ads actually shines for. Okay, and they may not be the ones that we think about. Recruiting is technically a B2C activity. True, the ones that we think about Recruiting is technically a B2C activity, but, as you know, linkedin kind of was built as a job platform, so it still rules for that. Also, higher ed is a B2C activity as well, like an MBA program looking for candidates. Those both are really big on LinkedIn. But we also see that the larger automotive manufacturers are advertising on LinkedIn. You can go into the ads library and you can see what Mercedes and BMW and Jaguar are all showing on LinkedIn ads. I even saw McDonald’s advertising on LinkedIn. I have no idea why. That seems crazy. Someone had an extra bit of budget for their end of year, but I got hit with a McDonald’s ad Wild.

Danny Gavin Host

 

35:25
Yeah, and I’ve seen it for some higher end like jewelry type of companies as well, which is really interesting. So obviously we see B2C advertising, but have you seen campaigns that have worked well? I don’t know if you’ve run any specifically, I was saying from that perspective, not like the hiring education perspective.

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

35:41
Yeah, especially those in finance, Like when you’re looking to target people who are potential investors if they’re a real estate investor, for instance, and you’re showing them projects. We’ve seen success there. We’ve even seen securities. We advertised a new stock I don’t know what to call it. Maybe we call it a mutual fund. We were targeting people who we already know are institutional investors, showing them that fund. That’s worked well.

 

36:09
Anything where I would call it a high lifetime value can result out of the bottom. So something like jewelry yeah, you get someone to buy a $20,000, or get someone to buy something, or partner with something that ends up bringing them lots more opportunities, or partner with something that ends up bringing them lots more opportunities. We’ve actually done this for products where we’ll target the purchasing, the buyer teams at the larger supermarkets of like a hey, here’s this product, and it gets the product in front of them to where they’re much more likely to respond when someone reaches out and says hey, do you want to carry this product? So we do see some of this. But I will honestly say 95% of the advertising we do on LinkedIn is B2B, but there are uses for what I would call, like you said, high-end.

Danny Gavin Host

 

36:55
B2C. That’s fair. And with recruiting, obviously you can go through LinkedIn’s platform to do a job posting. You’re mentioning that also typical pure LinkedIn ads. You can use that for recruiting as well, and it would be a good idea.

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

37:08
I actually like using LinkedIn’s marketing platform for recruiting more than I like using their recruiting platform. They’ve moved to where job postings are like a one-click apply and man companies hate this. Like HR people, they now have 300 resumes a day coming in that they have to then vet and there’s no way of knowing who’s being serious and who just clicked the button. But if I’m using the marketing side, I can put an ad together that says hey, look, how awesome this job is. This is about our culture and this is why we’re interested in you. When they click that, we take them to a full job application of like a cover letter, upload your resume and we’re going to get higher quality candidates, higher quality applicants coming through, and then we also get to make sure that they are much, much more qualified. So usually we can beat a cost per applicant that the HR team is already doing through LinkedIn Recruiter.

Danny Gavin Host

 

38:06
What advice do you have for businesses when it comes to budgeting for LinkedIn ads? So like what ideally should their monthly budget be at a minimum? Or if there’s like a ideal secret sauce of how much money in general they should invest on a monthly basis.

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

38:18
I wouldn’t recommend running ads on LinkedIn unless you have a budget of at least $5,000 a month. That would be if you’re targeting North America, which is LinkedIn’s most competitive. Like I’ll say, north America in English yeah, I wouldn’t budget less than $5,000 a month. If this is Europe, if this is other languages, costs are going to come down because it’s not as competitive and so you could scale your budget down if you needed to. But I would say it’s usually around that $5,000 per month where, by the end of the month, you can look and see like, yes, I see signs of life, this appears to be working or it sucks and something needs to change. If you’re not spending enough, you may not actually see, you may not be able to tell whether it’s working or
not, and so you just have to end up advertising for longer just to see and dragging things out.

Danny Gavin Host

 

39:05
Do you have a success story from one of your clients that illustrates the power of LinkedIn ads? I know you mentioned one before Any other stories that you’d want to share with the audience.

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

39:14
I had a client come to us and they were a product I’d never worked with before. It was a commuting service that flew people in a helicopter so think of it as like an Uber, with helicopters instead of cars. Flew people in a helicopter so think of it as like an Uber, with helicopters instead of cars. And they came to me and said we want to target busy executives who maybe live in Orange County, california, and commute to LA and vice versa. And I told them right up front I was like there’s no way this is going to work. We know they need to know, like and trust the brand first. We can’t just ask them to pull out their credit card. And and this you know growth manager in in San Francisco was like well, let’s just test and see.

 

39:53
I was totally blown away. It worked. These rides like each way in the helicopter was like 200 to 250 bucks and people, like crazy, were pulling out their credit card and commuting in a helicopter to and from meetings. I thought it was crazy. So I’ll share my best practices, what tends to work and what doesn’t, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t reasons to break those best practices. Basically, what it comes down to is don’t be afraid to test. Don’t go all in on one thing if you haven’t tested to see if there’s something that might make it a little bit more efficient.

Danny Gavin Host

 

40:29
So, with 2025 and AI, one or two tips when people are approaching LinkedIn ads that you think people should keep in mind, specifically where everything is going.
AJ Wilcox Guest

 

40:37
Yeah, we know, especially because Microsoft is a huge investor in open AI and chat GPT. We see them very quickly rolling out AI features into the LinkedIn ads platform and I just want to say, like, when everyone else is going towards AI and things are all written the same and they sound the same and they sound like a bot. Rotem, you are going to stand out more and more when you are making a human connection. So in 2025, make your ads about making a human connection. So in 2025, make your ads about making a human connection, not having everything be much more efficient because a bot created it, and I think you’re going to do a better job of standing out.

Danny Gavin Host

 

41:15
Awesome. All right, it’s time for our lightning round. I’m going to mention a topic and I want you to tell me what you think about, or your best of that. Item Number one cars Aston.

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

41:24
Martins are my absolute favorite brand. Super fast and performant, but they look like sex on wheels Gorgeous.

Danny Gavin Host

 

41:31
Are you a James Bond fan?

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

41:33
I am probably because of Aston Martin, yeah, cool.
Danny Gavin Host

 

41:36
Love it All right Music.

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

41:38
I love the piano. I love drums, guitar, bass. All of these things I’ll play within my free time. No one’s ever going to pay to hear me play because I suck at them, but my brain just loves music and understanding how to replicate the sounds that I’ve heard.

Danny Gavin Host

 

41:55
Well, I’m a guitarist and love to jam, so hopefully next time I’m in Utah we can jam. Please do. That’d be great. Cool Robotics and programming.

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

42:04
I absolutely love robotics. I’m not good at it, but I figured out a while back that you could Cool Robotics and programming around and we’ll find people who do light shows on their houses, where you drive up, you tune your radio to a station that they say and then you get to see the lights all bounce to the music. My goal for this next year is to do that myself. So I’ve been putting the pieces together and understanding the programming. I’m trying to hold myself accountable. This year I’ll have at least a small display up and I want to understand how this works from soup to nuts.

Danny Gavin Host

 

42:47
So, aj, where can listeners learn more about you and your business?

AJ Wilcox Guest

 

42:50
You’re obviously into podcasts if you’re listening to this, so tune in to the LinkedIn ad show. Every episode I go really deep into some area or topic on LinkedIn ads. But follow me on LinkedIn and in fact reach out to me. Like, customize the note on LinkedIn for the connection and say you heard me on Danny’s show and I would love to be connected to you. If you don’t customize, I don’t. I get a lot of invitations and I don’t accept them unless I know what they are. Also, our website, b2linkedcom. If you want to check out anything that we do, consider reaching out and doing a discovery call with me. I’d love to talk to you about your LinkedIn ads.

Danny Gavin Host

 

43:28
Awesome. Well, aj, thank you so much for being a guest on the Digital Marketing Mentor. This was so awesome, so many cool points and details. Thank you for being a guest on the Digital Marketing Mentor and thank you, listeners, for tuning into Digital Marketing Mentor. We’ll speak with you next time, thank you.
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