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(01:03): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is AJ Wilcox. He is a LinkedIn Ads Pro who founded b2linked.com, the LinkedIn ads agency in 2014. He’s managed over 150 million in spend on the platform and he’s an official, or his company is an official LinkedIn partner. He is also the host of the LinkedIn Ads Show podcast has managed five of the world’s top 10 LinkedIn ads account. So aj, welcome to the show.

AJ Wilcox (01:35): Thanks so much, John. I’m excited to be here.

John Jantsch (01:37): I think we’re going to be, I saw your name somewhere. I’m speaking marketing profs maybe, or agents have Change Marketing World

AJ Wilcox (01:44): Or Inbound Agents of

John Jantsch (01:45): Change for sure. Okay. All right. So one of those coming up, depending upon when you’re listening to it, the fall of 2024, so I was saying all air. I wanted to have a LinkedIns ads specialist on the show because I hear from so many of our clients, particularly B2B clients who feel like, Hey, my target market is on LinkedIn, but I can’t figure out how to do LinkedIn ads. I’ve tried, they’re just expensive. So give me the high level. Maybe start with why everybody else is failing and you’ve cracked the code on it. What are they doing wrong?

AJ Wilcox (02:15): Yeah, so LinkedIn ads, as you compare it with any other platform, they look very similar, especially to Meta, but they act very differently. The really big positive we get, this is the reason why people, they just, even if they failed at LinkedIn ads, they keep getting drawn back, no substitute for the audiences that you can reach there. You can target people by their job title, their seniority, their size of company, their industry, and it just goes on and on. So LinkedIn owns, they have an absolute monopoly on our business data. So if you’re trying to reach a specific B2B professional, it’s the only way to go. But the challenge that everyone finds is, wow, the costs are three to five times higher than meta. They’re oftentimes in line with Google, and when you’re paying bottom of funnel kinds of prices, but your traffic acts like top of funnel, there’s always going to be a little bit of friction there.

John Jantsch (03:07): Well, one of the things that I find, I mean I’ll be the first minute. I mean, I don’t hang out on Facebook and frankly I go to LinkedIn for some engagement and things, but I’ve probably clicked on ads in Facebook. I don’t know that I’ve ever clicked on an ad in LinkedIn. Is that just me? Is that because the environment is so different that they haven’t kind of gamified it the way that the Facebook seems to have? Again, I’m willing to be completely wrong on this, but I, I’m in the same camp as the people that I haven’t been able to figure it out either. So help me out. Is the environment different in a way that makes us respond to ads differently there?

AJ Wilcox (03:45): It definitely could be. We find that when we launch a normal ad, because a normal ad will show as being from a company and you see a company post, come down your feed and you’ve never seen or heard of that company before. Most of the time you’re just going to keep scrolling. We see the average click-through rate being half of a percent, so 200 people scroll past your ad, one’s going to click on it on average. All of that changes when just last year, LinkedIn released something called Thought Leader ads. This is the ability to promote an individual’s post on LinkedIn and we see click-through rates. Being anywhere between about 2% on the low end to 11% is as high as I’ve seen. And so I think the fact that it’s coming from an individual, not a faceless organization, totally changes those mechanics.

John Jantsch (04:31): And you opened the door there. I was going to go certainly down the thought leader ads track because it seems, I mean definitely what you just explained, I’m more on LinkedIn. I’m way more likely to engage with a person, and in a lot of ways that’s what you’re saying a thought leader ad is. Tell me a little bit about how it works. Like you do a post and then that ad, it’s almost like a boosted post if

AJ Wilcox (04:53): You will. Exactly, yeah. You’re boosting an individual’s organic post that they put on LinkedIn, and it used to be that it could only be an employee, so they had to be an employee of your company in order to boost. But here, just a few months ago, they gave us the ability now we can boost anyone’s post so long as they have to give approval. So this opens us up to influencer promotions, customer testimonials, all of those kinds of things that are

John Jantsch (05:21): Well, or even just agencies, right, running the campaigns. Right. Yeah. You probably couldn’t do that before. So is it kind of one of those things where the consensus is, oh, LinkedIn ads don’t work, so people are not paying attention, and then this thought leader ad now is for people to get it or is really rocking it. Would you say that there’s an, why aren’t people using it more, I guess is the real question there?

AJ Wilcox (05:46): It’s an apt question. They’re really difficult to make work. You have to have a lot of things in place to even be able to sponsor one of these posts, so you have to really know what you’re doing. I think that’s keeping most people from trying ’em out. But to your first question, why is everyone saying LinkedIn ads don’t work? I think I know what it is. I think it’s because one reason is LinkedIn has a whole bunch of pitfalls in your way as you go to create the campaign. So we can sure talk about what those things are that are making people pay too much. But I think there’s also this aspect of people, they start advertising and they go, well, if I’m paying 10 to $16 a click, I better send them right to a demo

John Jantsch (06:29): To talk to sales. And

AJ Wilcox (06:30): We know cold audiences, they are not ready to talk to someone. They’re not ready to start a product trial, they’re not ready to get a demo. They’re still in research mode. And so if you start out by showing these perfect, ideal cold audiences, your talk to sales ad, they’re not going to respond and you’re going to say it doesn’t work. If you can segment things, sorry, not segment. If you can give them in the right order, first touch with them is something valuable and interesting. Second touch is something a little bit more involved. Maybe the third touch is where you finally get to say, okay, now do you want a demo? Talk to someone in sales. When we set up the funnel that way we actually do see actual results.

John Jantsch (07:09): Yeah. So you mentioned the word demo in terms that maybe are more related, like software companies. Are there industries or types of businesses that you see this working for? You mentioned a couple. I mean, imagine the high ticket consultant or even agencies. Is it working for service type businesses like that as well?

AJ Wilcox (07:30): Yeah, it’s mostly B2B because especially if we’re paying 10 to $16 a click on average, most B2C does not have that high of a ticket, but we do see some B2C working, so it’s mostly B2B. We’ve seen products and services work equally. It’s really LinkedIn, add this access to this audience that you can’t reach any other way. And as long as you approach them the right way, giving them the things that are engaging to them, then they’ll respond no matter what kind of product you have.

John Jantsch (08:00): So you started to mention, especially DIYing is a little tough on this platform, Swiss, I always find ’em frustrating because as soon as you figure ’em out, then they completely change where everything went. But what are some of the things that you have found like on Google Ads? I mean, if you just follow the path that Google tries to take you down, you’re going to spend three times as much money. So what are some of the pitfalls in LinkedIn ads or some of the things that people need to definitely watch for so that they get at least the most at or at least not waste their money?

AJ Wilcox (08:32): Oh yeah, several I could cover, but just for brevity, I’ll cover the very biggest ones. First one is after you design who your audience is, there’ll be a little checkbox that LinkedIn auto checks called LinkedIn audience expansion. We’re already paying a premium LinkedIn, please don’t put irrelevant audiences into our audience and say that you’re helping us, you’re not. So always uncheck that box. Another recommendation is down a little bit below that. LinkedIn will sometimes yes and sometimes no. Include the LinkedIn audience network. And when you advertise to the audience network, these are people who are supposedly the LinkedIn members, but when they’re around the web on trusted sites, sounds really cool. And when you advertise, you see, oh, I’m getting higher click through rates. My cost per click is a 10th of what I’m used to on LinkedIn. This looks great, but we don’t see very much quality come from that traffic. And a hundred percent of your traffic will go to the audience network and none to LinkedIn, so not super worth it.

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