Fractional CMO Services: Strategy Before Tactics

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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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AJ Wilcox (10:47): When you go to pay LinkedIn, there’s the section that’s all the bidding and budgeting. The default bidding method that they set there and that they recommend to everyone is called Maximum Delivery. And it’s a pay by the impression, and LinkedIn can bid as high as they want in order to spend your budget for the day. And so we find that’s the most expensive way to pay for your traffic 90% of the time. And they’ve actually hidden the option for manual cost per click bid, which is the lowest. And so I always recommend always start manual cost per click bids significantly less than what LinkedIn recommends because their recommendations are trying to pad their pocket not yours. And if you can get past those three initial roadblocks, chances are you’ll probably pay a third as much as what you would’ve. Yeah, I

John Jantsch (11:34): Always loved those recommended bids. It’s like, here’s what we recommend, you should pay us. Exactly. It’s like, wait a minute,

AJ Wilcox (11:41): Should I just hand you my wallet and you

John Jantsch (11:43): Just take

AJ Wilcox (11:43): Whatever you want and give it back.

John Jantsch (11:45): Talk a little bit about creative. I mean, have you seen, again, this changes all the time, I suspect, but what’s working right now? Is it the same thing that’s working well in the feeds for ad creative? Yes, of course. Yeah. So what does that look like?

AJ Wilcox (11:57): I noticed as I’m scrolling through my organic feed, just seeing what my friends are posting and other thought leaders, I get a feel for what engages me. And I generally use that to come up with ideas for creative video is working really well, but it’s not just any video, it’s personal video. So just like you and I are talking right now, if an ad pops up in your newsfeed and it’s someone giving you good advice, sharing a viewpoint, someone who’s authoritative, even if it’s only 15, 20 seconds, that’s going to perform really well, people eat that up and you can retarget anyone who’s watched at least 25% of that video to show them another touch. We see that if it’s single image featuring faces is great, especially if the photographic of an image, sorry, photographic image of a person, if they’re either looking directly at the camera or if they’re looking towards the call to action, that performs really well. And we’re also finding that documents are working really well and it’s not just, I’m going to upload my whole white paper or something like that. It’s you design each page of the document, like it’s a blown up version of, here’s one big stat, flip to the next slide. Here’s one big stat or one main takeaway. Those also tend to be performing really well.

John Jantsch (13:20): Talk a little bit about segmenting again on some of the traditional, or I should say other ad markets. You want to segment small and have your ads be very relevant to that segment is a similar type of activity on LinkedIn.

AJ Wilcox (13:36): Very much. I’ve heard a lot of people who advertise on meta saying, Hey, we used to micro segment and choose these very specific audiences, and now we find that the broader we go, the better it performs. LinkedIn is totally the opposite. I think it’s LinkedIn just doesn’t have the same level of data that Meta has. And so even though LinkedIn says, we recommend that your audiences have at least 300,000 people in them, oh wow, I recommend segmenting those down to 20,000 to 80,000. Keep a really small, tight segment ‘EM based off of specific job titles or departments or seniority industries, company sizes, you can get really specific and then treat all of your data a private focus group where you get to see how each of those segments performs and reacts to your ads.

John Jantsch (14:22): And I’m sure everybody has their own way to organize, but in terms of structure, campaign structure, how you keep things straight, do you have a methodology that you really have developed that again, especially when you’re working with multiple clients, it’s really important, but just for that person trying to do it themselves, are there some tips?

AJ Wilcox (14:41): Oh, absolutely. I name all my campaigns. There’s this natural reaction to name a campaign after the asset that you’re advertising. So if a marketer goes, Ooh, I just got this new ebook, I want to go publish, they go in and they create a campaign and they call it ebook. And we don’t do that. What I highly recommend is you name your campaign after the things about that campaign that won’t change. So the things that won’t change about that campaign, the ad type that you’ve chosen, the objective that you’ve chosen, those all stay the same. You’re going to add all this targeting. Maybe it’s like these job titles at this size of company in this geography, put all of that in the campaign name. And now as you’re looking through all your campaigns trying to keep things straight, you have this one entity. It’s an evergreen entity that anytime you want to show that kind of ad to that audience, you can put in it. And that campaign’s going to live forever. Otherwise you’re just creating like, here’s an ebook, here’s a guide, here’s a thought leader. And all of these campaigns just clutter up your account and after they’ve served their purpose, you throw ’em away. And then LinkedIn never gets a chance to learn from your history.

John Jantsch (15:50): So do they have, showing my ignorance here, do they have a business manager type of platform? Yeah. Okay.

AJ Wilcox (15:56): Yeah, they totally do. I would say it’s fairly recent. We’ve gotten in the last couple of years, but it’s actually gotten a lot better in the last couple of years.

John Jantsch (16:04): So you mentioned retargeting. That’s a fairly new capability on LinkedIn ads, isn’t it?

AJ Wilcox (16:10): Yeah, it’s had the ability to retarget website visitors since, I want to say 2017, but LinkedIn keeps adding all these others because retargeting your website visitors is totally based off of you having a cookie in your browser.

John Jantsch (16:24): And

AJ Wilcox (16:25): IOS devices wipe the cookie. Mozilla doesn’t store it either. There’s lots of reasons why people would delete their cookies in between, so it’s not all that great. LinkedIn realized that and said, well, hey, when someone is logged into the platform, we know who they are and all we have to do is pay attention to what it is that they’re clicking on and interacting with. So now we can create what we call engagement based retargeting audiences. I can go to LinkedIn and say, Hey, build an audience of anyone who’s watched at least 50% of one of my video ads in the last 180 days. And it can go, oh, I remember all the people who did that. I’m going to build that. And then two days later, I have an audience to target. They have a whole bunch of different retargeting audiences like this, and I don’t know of any other ad platform that has that capability that many different ways of building these retargeting audiences.

John Jantsch (17:18): When you launch campaigns on LinkedIn, you probably have a hypothesis about what will work, how do you approach testing ad copy, ad creative segments the whole bit? I mean, how do you go about really launching a bunch of things to see what works?

AJ Wilcox (17:33): Yeah, we could definitely go really deep here, but in general, when a client comes to us and they say, here’s an audience we want to go after, I’m trying to define what is an AB test going to look like? So if they came and said, Hey, we have three different podcast episodes. We want to try advertising here, I’m going to say, alright, let’s test episode against episode. We have a lot of things, but if they came to us and just said, we only have one guide. This is our big research report that we do every year, I might suggest, Hey, let’s come up with two different variations or four different variations, all that are covering that same asset. And then let’s test and find out which assets are more interesting to your audience and what wording imagery are you using to try to draw people in. And so we design everything like an AB test to gather later and find out what works to which segment of the audience.

John Jantsch (18:30): A very common funnel for marketers is, let’s sell a low ticket item. Obviously they become a buyer of that low ticket and then we’ll sell them other things. Do you find that working that works pretty well on Facebook? Do you find that type of approach or anybody running that kind of buy the $12 ebook kind of thing?

AJ Wilcox (18:49): Not great on LinkedIn, because the cost per click is so high, you’d have to have a really high conversion

John Jantsch (18:55): Rate. So there’s no way to get your ad spend return. Yeah, okay. Yeah, makes sense. So it really is, so to summarize a bit, the thought leader ads really kind of promoting education and just what you talked about, the thought leadership is really the approach that you’re seeing the most effective

AJ Wilcox (19:12): And realize that these audiences you want to go after because they’re perfect for you, they’re not ready to buy until they’ve had multiple positive interactions with you. So quit jumping right to the bottom of the funnel with these audiences and warm ’em up. Use the retargeting to graduate them down to where they’re going to be more open to that kind of interaction.

John Jantsch (19:32): Yeah. Awesome. Well, aj, it was great catching up with you. Has spent a few moments on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Is there somewhere that you would invite people to learn more about your work or connect with you somehow?

AJ Wilcox (19:42): Yeah, if they go to b2linked.com, that’s our website. So there’s plenty there. There’s our podcast, our blog. I’d also love for you to connect with me on LinkedIn. Find me, I’m AJ Wilcox, and just make sure you send me a custom connection request. Just say you’ve heard me on John’s show, and then I’ll make sure I see it and accept the connection. I share. Lots of good stuff there.

John Jantsch (20:03): Awesome. Again, I appreciate you spending a few moments. I look forward to seeing you when we’re both out there on the road.