Melanie
Welcome to the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast for all decision makers and action takers. Take it away, Esther.
Esther
And welcome back to another episode of the Monday Morning Marketing podcast. Today, we're joined by Kristian Downer, and we're going to be talking about LinkedIn ads. Welcome, Kristian.
Kristian
Hello. Nice to see you both.
Esther
And you. Thanks for joining us today. We have talked a lot about different aspects of LinkedIn, but I don't think we've had anybody brave enough to go and talk to us about LinkedIn ads. Seems to be the one aspect of LinkedIn that most people avoid. So you're here to tell us today why we shouldn't avoid it and we should embrace it. And hopefully we can of an summer audience to go on the dark side, too, and embrace their LinkedIn ads. Tell us a bit about how you got started in LinkedIn ads and why specifying that rather than what the majority of people do on meta ads or Google ads.
Kristian
Yes, so as you know, I run ads on both Meta and LinkedIn. And what I love about LinkedIn ads is the fact that they're so specific. When Can you run ads on Google or Meta? You have to leave it to the AI and just hope that the people that you want to reach are the right people. So you see data around clicks and you're like, well, is that the right people clicking on that? Or is it some student that's doing their dissertation and just happens to be looking up what your topic's about? So with LinkedIn, what we have is with the ads, actually, you have two types of metrics that they actually give you. You can see the clicks, the impressions, and the reach. And I'll hold my hands up and say, compared to what you might be used to on a particularly meta, the costs are higher. But you have another tab, which is your professional demographics. And we can actually see the people that are clicking on our ads. So therefore We can not only know that we're targeting people by job title, company and so on, but we can actually show it by going, oh, well, actually, the top 20 companies that have looked at our ads are these, and these are the job titles, and troubleshoot and out the ones that we don't want and exclude them from our ads. So what I love about LinkedIn ads is that level of specificity we can have and the fact that we can actually show it as well.
Melanie
I did LinkedIn ads a million years ago, and I know that it's vastly changed. I had some training from LinkedIn towards the end of last year, and they do run regular trainings for people who have accounts. But one thing I did notice was that they've got more emphasis on the image than they previously did before. Do you feel videos or images still do the proper justice to a LinkedIn ad, or is it really the words that make the difference?
Kristian
I think it's the principles of digital advertising apply on LinkedIn as they do elsewhere, which is our goal is always to stop people in that scroll and get them to pay attention to the message that we have. Video on LinkedIn is evolving both organically and through the advertising platform. So I don't want to date myself by giving too much of a specific take. But what I love with LinkedIn ads, particularly around video, is you can actually do four leadership ads where you can take a post that you or someone in your company has put on, or even outside of your company has put on LinkedIn, on their personal profile, and you can promote it for your business page. So So you can combine the best of the personal profile and the fact that people buy into people, and you can run ads to that. And then you get that really powerful option, which is retargeting. So people will watch that for a certain amount of time, we can put in a bucket and retarget them with future messages. So image ads definitely still the roost of what captures attention. But I think video is definitely something we would have as part of any strategy strategy we were looking at for a client that was looking for a long term LinkedIn marketing strategy.
Esther
Okay. And LinkedIn ads, do they work better for B2B? Would you recommend them for B2C, or is it more for people looking for the right people for your jobs? Or what works best on LinkedIn?
Kristian
So I'll be honest, we haven't done a ton of experimentation around B2C on LinkedIn, because given the nature of the platform, B2B really is its best use case, particularly what I would say at the top of the traditional marketing funnel, where we're trying to make people aware, we're trying to drive engagement, or we're going to get people to take action right at the top. So sign up for a webinar or an event, or maybe visit a case study or do that first bit of information about your your business and making sure we're putting that in front of exactly the right person. Whereas there is, I would almost segment LinkedIn ads from a recruitment perspective and the LinkedIn recruitment tools as a separate part of LinkedIn. Again, I would probably look to speak to a LinkedIn recruitment specialist if I was going to look to use LinkedIn for recruitment, even with the advertising, because it's a slightly different beast and works in a different way. What I love about LinkedIn ads is that B2B functionality where we can literally go either target by job, title, and industry, or we can go account-based. We've run ads for clients where, literally, we'll target a company like Network Rail, and go, look, we've got tenders out or we're trying to get business in with that company. So we're going to target that company specifically and make sure that that company can't turn on their computers in the morning and not see our case studies and our brand in front of them.
Melanie
That's pretty convincing stuff. So when it comes down to doing LinkedIn ads, is there a lower rate? How Where can you go, basically? And how much should you spend? And I know it depends, but how much should you spend? And over how much of a time period? Are we talking a week, two weeks, a month? Just give me a ballpark so that we give people an idea of where to start.
Kristian
Sure. So technically, the absolute minimum you can spend on LinkedIn at the moment is £8 per day. And obviously, there's no real cap on that. If you, LinkedIn, like most digital advertisers, whether it's in your interest or not, if you offer them money, they will take your money. And I think that's often where people get burnt is because they just run with the system standard set up and recommendations that are pre-set and run. And then they go, well, it didn't work. And it's because the LinkedIn ads is all about those little nuances that make all the difference. And we've run campaigns for clients. In fact, one last month for a construction client, getting people to attend a live event. And they spent about £600, and they got 55 people signed up for that event from their LinkedIn ads. Now, that is not a typical cost-based, £10 per event sign up is, I think anyone would bite your hand off for that in that B2B space. However, it shows that if you understand what you're doing, you can make it work. I would normally say a thousand £7 a month as a bare minimum budget. And then typically we're looking at that £30 to £40 per day on a particular campaign. But it really does depend on, as you said, a million other factors, one of which is the audience size. If you're targeting UK-wide and you've got maybe 100,000, 200,000 people that fit that bill, it's a lot cheaper than if you've got 10,000 CEOs that you're trying to target because they're the most sought after people. It's an auction. So the more high value the people you're targeting, the likely is the more you're going to have to pay to reach them. But that's the superpower of LinkedIn is you pay more, but you laser target on the people you want rather than that hope that you're running your ads and you're getting into action. But is it the right people?
Melanie
You get the DMAT, don't you? You get the decision makers and the action takers That's the plan. Which is a hashtag, DMAT.
Esther
So you said your agency runs both Meta ads and LinkedIn ads. If you had to choose, if a business comes to and said, we need to run ads, we want to run ads. This is our budget of £500 a month. Would you run the LinkedIn ads for them or would you say, you really need to move up or just run the ads over on Facebook? What advice would you give somebody that says, I need ads?
Kristian
No, I get it. That's a question we get every a single day. And really it's dependent on two main factors, one of which is intent. So where are the people you're trying to target in their buying process with you? If you've got on LinkedIn, It can work really well if you've got people that are quite low down, but you're retargeting them, or they're right at the very top and you're building awareness. So generally, we say, look, if you're looking for high buyer intent, i.e. You want to close out a sale and you need revenue immediately, We don't pivot to LinkedIn ads automatically because we see it as a much more relationship start of a journey type product. So that's where we might be more inclined to go to Meta, and particularly on that lower budget level that you mentioned there at that £500, you can do a reasonable amount of damage for a lot of products on Meta with £500, whereas on LinkedIn, that is the lower end of where we would consider starting. So if that was your parameters, that's where it would be. And the second part of it would be, we've talked about intent, but also what mindset are the people in? If you're targeting B2B, LinkedIn is always going to be where I'm going to want to go. But we've run successful campaigns on B2B on Meta as well. It's just about understanding the style and where your brand fits. It's very hard to run very tight late tight-laced campaigns on Meta, where it's particularly financial services, and you're running quite a boring, because of regulation, quite boring time of campaign. It's going to be difficult to get that to cut through on Meta. You're going to need to be a bit more creative, a bit more thoughtful, and you're really distracting people's attention and pulling them back into their-.
Melanie
Financial flash dance.
Kristian
Exactly.
Melanie
A flash mob. Let's do it.
Kristian
Pulling them back into their day. Whereas on LinkedIn, they're in that business mindset so you can be a little... You can get away with a little bit drier content on LinkedIn than you would on Meta because of the way that people interact with those platforms and their expectations of what they're going to see on the platforms as well.
Esther
Okay, and so we know Facebook has their pixel that gets added, and that's part of finding where the retarget, where the audience to retarget, etc. Does Does LinkedIn have that as well, or is the retargeting done in the app or the website itself with the data that is gathered?
Kristian
So LinkedIn has what's called the Insight tag, which is the equivalent of the Meta Pixel. And again, they have their own conversions API style piece to that as well. And that sits on your website. And just like the pixel, there's a Insight Tag checker Chrome extension. So if you're not sure if your website has it, you can download that extension. And then any website you go on, if it has it, you'll be able to see if it has that on there. It also can, as you said, retarget by action. So it can target by people that have watched a certain amount of your video, interacted with your page, gone on your website. You can even target people by buttons they've clicked on the website or pages they've been to. So really well-rounded retargeting. You can also target people by... If you've got your CRM and you've got the appropriate consent, you can upload that and target people in another place already in your sphere. You can also build out audiences where you upload company lists. If you've got an ideal set of companies you want to work with, you can actually upload that and create an audience. So LinkedIn's targeting really is where the game's at for them. They're creative and the way the ads function isn't quite as dynamic as it might be on other platforms. But what they really give you is this pretty much... I'm not going to use the word guarantee because I'm not looking physically at the data.
Esther
Never in marketing.
Kristian
They're giving you as close as you can get to saying, look, if I want to reach these people and I have the budget to pay for it, I can put myself in front of them in a way that you just can't do. I always say that for me, the next best thing from Running LinkedIn ads, if you're targeting a specific company, would be putting a massive billboard in the roundabout outside the HQ. It's the equivalent. You can pretty much do the same thing. And I always advocate doing the roundabout thing, by the way. I've never had a company take me up on it. I think it's genius, but maybe I'm a crack genius when it comes to that thing.
Melanie
I wanted to ask, let's say one of our clients, one of the people who are listening to us right now, I was thinking, okay, so I want to get my LinkedIn ads done. What do they need to bring to the table apart from the customer avatar and that stuff? I mean, do they have to hand over their LinkedIn account to you or can you go on like Meta can so you can go on the back end? Can you explain what the experience is going to be like as people arrive and on board?
Kristian
Yeah, so I have some good news. If they've run meta ads, particularly is LinkedIn's back end is a lot less complicated than Meta's when it comes to advertising. It is a lot easier to navigate through when you're less likely to get stuck in a loop, like you sometimes can feel like you're doing on Meta. So LinkedIn also has a business manager, and it also has ad accounts. So you can have your ad account, you can add people to access that with the similar controls as you do on Meta, whereas they can just be an editor, they can be a super Admin, which I love that name, by the way. It always makes me think I'm a superhero.
Esther
Just get your cape on.
Kristian
Or for the larger companies, you can actually go and create a business manager account where you can then add agencies and give them access and do it in the same way. It's a much simpler infrastructure than Meta. I think if you've managed to navigate Meta, you'll be absolutely fine on LinkedIn.
Melanie
So it's not massively time consuming. It's something that They can just add you on to the ad account, and then you can pretty much take over from there.
Kristian
Exactly right. I'd say that LinkedIn's, in fact, entire ad ecosystem is incredibly lightweight in being able to set up. The difference is just there's the nuances of the full process behind some of it that makes it more complicated. The actual button clicking, if you like, is actually probably the simplest I've seen. From a digital platform. I'm sure that will change as they all do over time. But at the moment it's relatively simple.
Esther
Yeah, please don't change stuff anymore. We're sick of learning how to do things again.
Melanie
Amen.
Esther
So where do people go when they say, right, I need LinkedIn ads, I need Kristian's help. How do they contact you? Where do they find you? What do they need to do to start working with you?
Kristian
So naturally, one of the easiest places to find me is going to be LinkedIn.
Melanie
No, really?
Kristian
So Kristian Downer on LinkedIn.
Melanie
Christian with a K.
Kristian
Christian with a K, yeah. Or dowsocial.com, our nascently redeveloped website, where we've just really focused in on the fact that we're offering LinkedIn ads as one of our core services, because It's something we've always done. But I think the market is just about to change with LinkedIn ads because the demand, I think, is going to really increase because we're seeing a number of factors happening, which is the AI is coming into things like Meta and to Google and giving marketers less control over who sees their message. We're seeing tracking and privacy becoming bigger issues, so it's harder to reach the same people. And then I'm telling you we've got this tool where I can actually people are first-parties And I see data being the big thing is people are logging into their LinkedIn accounts, giving you their name, job title, industry, interest, their whole professional background, experience, and so on. And you can target that because it's first-party data. So I think from a B2B perspective, I see LinkedIn ads becoming more and more popular because people are like, well, the other games in town are becoming more complicated, and they treat us like they don't want us, whereas LinkedIn is simple to target, and we can make sure we're putting ourselves in front of the right people.
Melanie
Now, one thing I want to ask before we finish is about the reporting, Kristian. So how do you, how do you get the reporting back to the client? Because one thing I don't like about LinkedIn is the dashboard isn't great. So how do you... It's not as detailed as what we're used to in certainly in Google Ads and in in meta-ad. So how do you report and what information do you give people?
Kristian
So one of the things we are working on at the moment is some API reports for ourselves that we're going to custom build to give you that data. The thing is with LinkedIn reports is the data is there. It's just not laid out in the way you may traditionally be used to seeing it on those platforms, and they deliver different data. So LinkedIn's main Dashboard is split into about six or seven different views, if you like, same as you would on Meta, performance being the default one. But then you have engagement. So you can even see people that are going on to your LinkedIn page. You can see people are going on to your landing page. You can see the follows, the likes, the comments as you would normally. And you can also still see conversions and impressions. Now, Reach is a funny figure on LinkedIn. Sometimes, some of the metrics they like to show it on, some of them And they're much more... You feel like they're less confident on that figure than other platforms pertain themselves to be, which I actually respect. They're like, look, this is roughly the reach you've got, but we're not nailing our colors to the mast here and saying that's 100% what you've got. And as I said, with the other side of it, you've got the demographic side of it, the professional demographics, where you can see job titles, companies, and so on. It is, unfortunately, a bit of a manual build at the moment, where we take the figures that we want or export it to an Excel document and, again, just manually manipulate the data available. But realistically, you're only ever going to have five, really five, up to five data points you'll really truly care about within a report. So we tend to just custom build those depending on what the objectives of the campaign are and the client we're looking at. You're always going to have reaching impressions in there. But then is it leads? Is it cost per click? Is it engagement? Is it that company data?
Melanie
Can you measure the ROI as well?
Kristian
ROI is an interesting concept when it comes to B2B ads, because I think if you're looking at ROI on the services and products that work best on LinkedIn, that's a false measure because it's so high top of your funnel that saying, oh, well, If you put £10,000 in LinkedIn ads today, I'd be wanting you to wait 12 to 24 months before we analyzed how effective that was. Because if you think you're looking at SaaS software, you're looking at IT infrastructure, you're looking at professional services, three to five year buying cycles. That ROI is a much more difficult thing to measure, particularly if we're looking at what I'm going to put you in front of all the people in a certain business. And the multi touch point way marketing works now is LinkedIn sucks as a last click attributed model. I think you have to build it as a much more rounded piece, which is why I'm quite happy to say out loud that LinkedIn ads isn't for every business. And if you're a Marketing Manager or Sales Manager that's got an MD banging down your door right now saying, I need revenue and I need you to be able to link it back to every single penny we spend, This isn't the game for you. And we look at your high intent Google searches, look at your Meta ads at the at the lower end of that conversion funnel. But for me, LinkedIn is about, I can put your message in front of the right people, particularly for those communication managers who are putting tons of time, effort, money into developing their organic assets. Let's not worry about going viral. Let's just spend the money on putting ourselves in front of the right people and going, let's crush it with them and make sure everyone in our space that matters sees our stuff. And I reckon, rather than spending someone that's trying to play the organic game and having to create 20 pieces of content a week or whatever it is that they're under pressure to do in that full-time wage. The equivalent on LinkedIn, we can create 10 pieces of top level content, smash that out to the right people and have a much higher success rate than we would if we just had someone that was working hard. And don't get me wrong, doing great job on the organic side of it. I wanted to say that. I'm just coming here and saying organic is, don't ignore organic LinkedIn. But for me, take the stuff that works really well in your organic LinkedIn and give it some real purpose and a real targeted focus by using LinkedIn ads to really make sure that the people that matter see it.
Melanie
Okay, that does make a huge amount of sense. You did touch on organic there briefly. I just wanted to ask, just before we close off, we've all noticed that there is a more interest-led, more non-follower-led type of algorithm that's showing up on Meta now. Are you seeing something similar with LinkedIn?
Kristian
Not currently. But then LinkedIn is the misfit toy of the social media marketing world. Its algorithms have never performed or acted in the way that Meta and other algorithms have in social media, because that's why it's been so popular in the last, up until the last 18 months, because it was the last platform to start pulling the organic reach from its users. It was the last bastion of organic reach for the average person. So we haven't We are seeing that now. We are seeing changes, and we are seeing it become more competitive and more challenging to get consistent organic reach on the platform. But again, it all comes down to measurement, because most people on LinkedIn are what we call lurkers. So seeing your content, but they're not engaging with it. So you don't feel like you're getting any progress. But you must have had it before where someone who hasn't liked or commented on something you've posted, you've met in real life, and then asked about the thing that you said you were doing or that you have. It's because they were lurking. So LinkedIn is a very challenging environment, organically and paid, to attribute success to sometimes, and that ROI, because it is so much about the brand awareness and that continual pushing people through and building your reputation. Now, I get it, we've all been performance marketers. We've all been in that space. That's a challenging messaging message to put out there. I'm not naive about that whatsoever. But with LinkedIn, again, if you build your network to the right people, and I've just cold 5,000 connections in the last week and a half from my-.
Melanie
I remember seeing that.
Kristian
From my face.
Melanie
And I didn't comment.
Kristian
Exactly.
Esther
Did we make the cut?
Melanie
Oh, I did.
Esther
I haven't checked.
Kristian
I'm not sure Esther. I have to hurriedly add you back in. But if you build a network that reflects the people you're trying to work with and the people that you know, then when you do post, again, it's almost like a microcosm of the paid way ecosystem is the first people that are going to see your content are people that are more likely to be interested. So therefore you're more likely to get the engagement and what you're looking to achieve. And that way, if you do get lots of reach, the chances of you being within the right people is much higher. I think going viral on LinkedIn is essentially worthless for most people because it's great if you're big in Nicaragua, that's fantastic for you. But I don't know how that helps you build your professional services business in Bolton. So it's all about perspective and really being like, well, if we're going to build a custom avatar, let's make sure they see us.
Melanie
Yeah.
Esther
Yeah. Okay, so give us one piece of advice to someone who's still sitting on the fence and still going, oh, it's too dear. It's something I've never done before. It's all the reasons you've heard before. Give us one last piece of advice for people who are not sure yet about using LinkedIn ads.
Kristian
Okay, so what does that get you scenario? If you said, look, I've got that, I've got that eight pounds a day, Kristian, you said is the minimum I I can spend on LinkedIn. What would I do? I'd go, well look, if you've got a website and you've got a case study, or write the best case study you can possibly think of and put it on your website. Make sure it's got plenty of imagery, all the things that really tell the story of what you do. And then come up with the ideal people that you want to work with, a job title in industry, or literally come up with, if you're 50 companies locally to you that you'd love to work with, create an audience of those, and then run that £8 a day to that case study. It can never hurt for people you want to work with to know that you're good at what you do. So drive people to that case study and see if you get any traction and follow up. Check those demographics, maybe look and see which companies did see your posts, connect with a couple of people and go, oh, by the way, just curious. We've seen a few people in your company have checked out our case study. Have you seen it? Or would you like me to send you the link? And then that way you're organically marketing on LinkedIn using your paid as a wedge to open the door because you've now got a piece of data to to look from. So that's how I... If I had micro budget on LinkedIn, it would be that, or I'd run a webinar, and I'd do the same process, pushing people to that. But I think the case study is an easier sell, because you can just sit in your place of excellence. And as I said, if people know, if you don't think there's value in your potential customers knowing how good you are, then I don't know what to tell you.
Melanie
Well, this has been eye-opening, I've got to say. There's a lot more to LinkedIn ads than I realized. Like I said, it's been a long time since I've done them, and they have changed and grown immeasurably. So thank you so much, Kristian, for taking the time to speak to us today. And you're obviously the best person to speak to when it comes to managing LinkedIn Campaigns. So thank you so much for doing this today.
Kristian
No, thanks for having me.
Melanie
Pleasure. Well, that's all the time we have for, for today. Thank you so much for listening. And if you've got any questions about LinkedIn ads, don't ask me. Ask Kristian. We'll be back next week with another podcast. Bye for now.
Esther
Bye-bye.
Melanie
See, he waved. It's not just me.
Kristian
I always wave.
Esther
So, Kristian, which is your favorite child? LinkedIn ads?
Melanie
All right.
Kristian
I thought-.?
Melanie
So did I.
Esther
No, I've had children.
Kristian
So-.
