(21) B2B LinkedIn Ads Playbook: What Works (and What Doesn’t) in 2025 - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsdhf23lomE

Transcript: (00:00) get any impressions to certain companies because you're going so niche to certain companies and certain uh job titles at those companies so at the beginning are are we at least getting coverage to our target accounts are we getting those great past that you will want to have conversion tracking set up to see are those brand awareness campaigns are people getting to the website are they getting to high intent pages are they submitting those forms so your standard conversion could be like a form submission conversion that most people set up but you can also have page view conversions so you could just you could (00:28) set one up for if somebody visits any page boom that's a conversion and then you could have high intent pages like your pricing page or your get a demo page so are they make are they going to the pricing page are they going to the get a demo page and then you can show okay we've driven you know x amount of people to our website from LinkedIn we've driven x amount of people to the pricing page x amount to the demo page even if we don't have any demo requests yet we've at least gotten that far and then boom you eventually start to see (00:53) people submitting that demo form and kind of going from there [Music] and we're live this is so exciting hey everyone I am Danielle head of content at Exit 5 and if you're expecting Dave today um I'm hosting so I'm very excited to host for the first time with you guys yeah Dan where's the bald guy uh I have a lot more hair than Dave if you haven't noticed um hi Carrie oh I'm so excited to see you guys um do me a favor and put in the chat where you're from while everyone's kind of like signing in and finding their links from their calendar invites and all of that pennsylvania New (01:37) York Dallas Wisconsin great cheese there philly great cheese steak sunshine State we'll ignore you because it's like 30 degrees where I am right now we got Toronto wow there's people from all over that is so cool um so I'm excited if you have not joined one of our Exit 5 live sessions do not call them a webinar because they're way more fun than a webinar um we are live today to talk about B2B LinkedIn ads um we're excited to do this session because for people in B2B like that's the biggest probably paid channel you might be working with right now um and we always get a lot of (02:17) questions about it so we thought we'd bring together a handful of experts um to help us out with that so I'm really excited about who we have today and a big thanks to our partner Metadata who is um partnering with us uh to bring you this content live so I'm excited so a couple of housekeeping things um yes this is being recorded it will be emailed to you you don't have to ask in the chat um I won't make you do laps and burpees like Dave will but I will probably give you a little sass just kidding it's funny um for the Q for (02:51) questions that you have for our experts today who we'll introduce in just a second um throw them in the Q&A tab i think it's on the right hand side of your screen it's on the right hand side of my screen um add them in there and then what we'll be able to do is keep track of them and throw them up on the screen but we'd also love you to like be involved in the chat throw in your two cents your questions whatever you want um so now I'm just going to do a brief intro of who we've got coming to teach you about LinkedIn ads today really excited we have Tag Loz who is from Dobo (03:22) which I just learned how to say um and something really cool about him is they actually won the best B2B linked ads campaign award um I think it was last year i'll have tagged up here in a second and he can fill in the details there then we also have Anthony Blatner who is known to many in the Exit 5 community and he is one of only nine s like LinkedIn certified marketing experts in North America and he's actually doing a whole um course for them right now I think but so I'm going to bring them on stage hey guys how are you doing we're doing great i'm good how (03:56) are you awesome all right tag so correct me about the award who gave you that and like what was it for and just like brief give us give us who you are yeah so Dochebo um is an Italian company but our headquarters is in Toronto and we won the Canadian Marketing Association gold for best B2B campaign on LinkedIn awesome i love it very cool and then Anthony tell us a little bit more about what you're doing with LinkedIn right now i think it's is it launching or has it not launched yet uh it'll be launched in about a month or two from now we're creating new LinkedIn (04:28) learning courses there there'll be two different courses one is LinkedIn ads tips and tricks so some different advanced strategies and tips for LinkedIn ads and then the second course will be B2B marketing on LinkedIn where we'll kind of cover all different uh different channels of like different ways to use LinkedIn so just film those they'll be launched in about like a month or two from now that's so exciting all right we'll definitely have to check those out and then we'll find them and share them with everybody once it's live so are you excited to talk about B2B LinkedIn ads today talking about (04:56) LinkedIn ads i know we probably like two biggest like LinkedIn and I say this with love B2B ad nerds we could so I'm excited so I'm going to kick us off with um we talked about a couple questions beforehand and I love kicking off with this one because I feel like it gets us in a good headsp space and everyone's always wondering like what am I doing wrong what am I doing right so what are some of the I guess biggest mistakes you're seeing right now with B2B and running ads on LinkedIn go ahead the ones I always see it always starts with like targeting uh (05:27) I'd say like the most common things I often see is like when I hop into an account you'll look at the targeting that's set up and um some of it's you know kind of some of it's intuitive but that a lot of the options maybe aren't as intuitive as you might think uh and I'd say like the best way to like plan out your targeting is to go do research and go look at like several um customers or prospects actual pages because sometimes they're not in the industry you might think that they would be in um sometimes they're at in a top level industry or another industry on LinkedIn so I've seen lots of times where people will select the wrong facets and then if (06:01) you have the wrong targeting then everything's off from there so go go go go analyze a couple of your customers or top prospects uh pages to like reverse engineer your targeting that's a really good point tag what what would yours be yeah I'll speak from my own experience and own fails as opposed to what what other people have gone in i've spent pretty much the last five years of my professional life almost entirely on LinkedIn and I would say from the start to from the beginning until the end I think that what I've learned is that um at the start my calls to action my thought process was entirely way too far (06:40) down in the funnel i was way more advanced i think that what my experience has taught me is the importance of the brand awareness component um I think that what my experience has taught me is how important the creative is and so I think I was always lacking I think early on I was lacking creativity and trying too hard to create the end goal that I wanted um as opposed to thinking ultimately I think simpler uh simpler and a little bit higher up and and thinking more from the user standpoint i think I I think that it was uh way too (07:17) complicated and probably not the right media at the start and my time has taught me to uh educate first deliver value first don't let your content speak to your goals just deliver value to the user would you agree with that Anthony yeah it's very easy to jump to like get a demo ads and just focus on that because that's you know at the end of the day that's what most people do want but you got to be careful not to jump to that too fast otherwise you might be getting demo requests coming in but people have no idea what you actually do if if you jump to demo too fast so I (07:50) think what Tag said is definitely correct uh start with building awareness educating the prospects on who you are and then retarget to demo um if if that's your end goal um but yeah very easy to jump too fast to those get a demo ads and then you might be getting leads but you might not really know what you do yeah and as far as creative goes like what's what's one way to make an ad stand out in in the LinkedIn feed or what formats are you finding a lot of success with right now tag what are you what are you seeing uh I I mean in the context of B2B in particularly I think (08:26) that video having good video that is clever and creative um and still on brand and on point and delivers a solid message i I think that that is absolutely the hardest thing to do but also the most effective um that being said I think that that's a great leadoff i'm interested to hear what what Anthony has to think because by and large what I see from uh like I'm right now I'm in the middle of doing an audit of our biggest accounts that we've closed in the last 180 days and what we're seeing in terms of engagement is is how important the mix is so I think in terms of making a great first impression you (09:07) can't go wrong with video it's absolutely the most powerful and most effective way to lead off an introduction of yourself to a prospect but I also can't really um I can't speak I have to also speak to how important it is to have a media mix so having long form sorts of content having still image again clever and and brandier sorts of things speaking directly to the customer pain points I think those are things that are also effective too but you really have to hang your hat on a good video I think if you want to have a (09:38) holistic approach to a healthy campaign yeah no I agree with that uh video can be the most powerful format when done right it's just such a high fidelity interaction where you get to see and hear from somebody and you can cram a lot more information into a video ad than you could just an image and like taking that one step further could be like thought leader ads with video especially when it's like a a a founder or owner or CEO and like kind of telling the story uh you know those selfie videos those do awesome and it's like uh (10:08) a very hight touch interaction where somebody gets to hear and see from the founder you know really get to learn from them and then you know that's so much more than you can convey so much more than you can in just an image ad when you have video there so a very hightouch interaction it's very sticky and you know that facetime is gold and like you don't get facetime unless you're like seeing somebody at an event or if somebody joins a webinar or something like that so being able to do that with ads put that in the feed uh (10:33) it's a great format yeah um I wanted to you both kind of mentioned the thought leader ads and those are relatively newish to LinkedIn um and we've been running them at Exit 5 and having a ton of success with them um and Kelly in the chat has said she's been wanting to try them out um just kind of what are your best practices there what are you seeing in terms of results and you know what what should Kelly try that out with yeah thought leader ads have been great so first to define it is thought leader ads (11:01) are boosting posts from people um LinkedIn calls them thought leader ads so that's that's what we call them um but essentially just boosting a post from a person so anything that you would post on LinkedIn you could then go boost that into an ad uh I guess the caveat is it's like single image single video you can't document post you can't do multi-image there are a couple restrictions but um for the most part boosting push from people and we just see like they get much higher uh engagement rates and much higher more (11:30) importantly dwell time of like people are sitting there and reading that content more than if it was coming from a company page and it makes sense you know people will always engage and want to hear with people more than just a business um so yeah they they create you know much higher engagement rates much more dwell time so people are sitting there and reading it and then that allows you to bid a lot lower so you can get much better CPMs and costs in your ads than company page uh ads um so those are thought you're doing this for us at Exit 5 so if you've seen Dave in your feed it might be a thought leader ad (12:04) yeah so if you've seen Dave a lot more on LinkedIn recently it's it's those thought leader ads uh and those have been crushing it so you know stuff like that where it's like if you have if you have a uh visible founder or like a well-known founder or somebody like that's that's even better if you have that otherwise you know if you don't then you can still boost your CEO's post or your founders's post and like you know help get their voice out there more it also doesn't need to be just the CEO um you you know if you're a bigger company you probably have a lot of like really smart people uh on your teams (12:34) like if you might have engineering leaders who have a lot of like have written a lot of like really great code that they can share their thoughts and stuff like that so you know there's there's a lot of opportunities with them yeah and Rachel actually has a good point sorry go ahead tag i was just going to add to that and say that there's nothing like as a campaign manager there's nothing like when you see one of your leaders that post something really great that you don't have to do any planning for in terms of a content or a campaign that being said what my experience has been I would try (13:02) to enable the people that would be on your short list and have some brief conversations with them because what I've come across is like oh man this would be a perfect thought leader ad if it just was like this or if it they'll be so I would say that do remember it is going to be new content to an audience that probably doesn't know you so I've gotten burned a little bit just because getting in the thought leadership ad craze and uh haven't had always still have had great success i I'm by no means am saying that thought leader ads aren't what they're what everyone says that they are but you still need to have a (13:38) good high quality piece of content and if you're going to involve people that are are close and in your network it would probably be worth a 15minute call to discuss some guidelines of this is what we need or probably more importantly don't do this x y and z had a good question in the chat um she said "Are those posts that you're boosting are those from an employee or an external influencer?" And we kind of we kind of do well we don't do both um but we run ours as Dave so that would be an example of like an employee or CEO (14:08) running them for exit 5 but one of the things we also do with our partners is sometimes we create really good content for them on LinkedIn and then like they run them as thought leader ads which has worked really well and it adds I think a boost to any kind of like influencer campaigns if you're doing that in B2B you get permission from them and then you can run that and then it's like another face too yeah and you you can boost people from post from people outside your company too so you can in the when it first came out it would only be employees but now you can do people (14:36) externally too um so one of one of the one of my favorite plays is like if you have customers who are posting good things about you on LinkedIn th those are great to be boosting you know anything like testimonials from like you know well-known companies well-known people um anybody saying something good about you on LinkedIn like boost that like hearing directly from a person is so much more powerful than reading a testimonial on a website um so if you have any of that out there like those are great to be boosting good question from Josh so we've been saying like crushing it a lot in the chat so let's (15:04) turn to metrics and metrics of success and what you're looking out for so can you just dig into a little bit maybe tag like what you're looking for in terms like what's a successful campaign to you by the numbers and then you Anthony as well yeah uh so I'm almost entirely brand awareness so I do in terms of the objective that I work at is is brand awareness when I meet with my content team the question becomes well how do if we're using brand awareness campaigns and then we're optimized for reach then how do we use engagement metrics to (15:36) determine the success of the content right and that's where I think uh Anony's already mentioned it once but the dwell time what has kind of evolved as our strategies evolved and we've gotten more in the corner of working almost exclusively with brand awareness campaigns looking at click-through rate isn't necessarily or an engagement rate that isn't necessarily a good indicator what we have seen and what we've been doing since they've come out with that metric is the dwell time and so trying to assess our content's performance on (16:06) the premise of how long on average people are actually looking at it that's uh that's been that's been an adjustment for us and uh a way for us to take what's important from us object from an objective standpoint but then also use engagement to improve our content yeah so yeah Dual Tie has been awesome i'll I'll kind of build on what Tag said um that LinkedIn's average click CTR is like 04 point4 so that means 99. (16:40) 6% of people are not clicking on your ad so clicks are probably not the best engagement metric but are people sitting there and reading it you know just think about scrolling in your feed what do you what do you stop on what do you read and then you probably keep going so you don't click on most things in your feed but what are you sitting there to read that so that those stats have been like yeah some of the best for like are are people sitting here and reading this you know what are they interested in reading uh so yeah dwell time is that new metric (17:04) and it's nice because that metric also works across formats so previously video would tell you how how long and percentage of watch time people would watch that video and then you're like okay well how do I compare this to you know image post or other things now dwell time will tell you dwell time across image versus video versus document or anything else so you can see which of your content formats are people sitting there and reading the most are they sitting there and watching a video longer or are they reading your long form post because you know because it is (17:33) a thought leader ad and they're you know they're reading your strategy that you put in that post so yeah dual time has been a great metric what's a good starting point for dwell time i've seen that come up a couple times in the chat around how to optimize for it like what's a good starting point what should you be aiming for yeah for company pages I think like the average I usually see is like starts at like three so 3 seconds so if you're above 3 seconds then that's better than average if you're below 3 seconds that's worse than average so it's about three for average for company pages um for thought leader (18:00) ads it's more to like the five to six second range and again this is an average so you know some people are sitting there reading it for you know a lot longer than that some people are just kind of scrolling by um so those are some some averages I usually see i'll give a hack a dwell time hack for the group um you know CTV ads are unskippable so if you throw in a bunch of CTV ads your average number will go up and that's probably relevant to some of the leadership questions that I saw in the chat what's a CTV ad connected TV (18:30) ads yeah it's basically the uh Yeah starting at the Olympics last year is where they started to implement the B2B inventory into um connected TV ads which are basically unskippable ads on larger devices through streaming platforms um it's a newer inventory inside of LinkedIn that's the the award the award-winning component of my company and our content what we done we basically did a video interview series we did nine episodes of an interview series that we distributed through connected TV which was really great there's some additional guidelines that go into that like for instance it's a (19:07) it's the the times a six a 15 a 30 and a 60-second they have to be exactly those times there have to be a standard bit rate so there's some nuances there but it is a guaranteed full view impression and so your dwell time ends up ends up going up and and ultimately you you know what we've seen too is a lift in our brand and impressions in terms of organic search as well didn't even know you could do that with LinkedIn so it just goes right to my TV yeah the future is here it's like we used to think of (19:36) like getting on TV advertising is like the Super Bowl ad commercial right like that conventional type no it's not that way you can you can go get in people's' homes and on their larger devices like in very small with very small purchases and buys now the key is to have the good high quality video content that is certainly the gap here yeah interesting anthony have you had any experience with that maybe we need to get Dave on connected TV yes yeah no CTV ads um they're still very new on LinkedIn um so but like as a (20:10) format they're great because you know being honest like people only spend a certain percentage of time on LinkedIn every day you know usually during the workday they'll they'll scroll a little bit or maybe like the average person just jumps on LinkedIn to like look up somebody before their next meeting and then hop off so it's great to have another channel to reach people when they're not on LinkedIn so yeah CTV opens up that whole that whole inventory of uh you know reach people in another channel uh when they're watching TV there's a lot of different partner placements that LinkedIn has so it'll (20:40) it'll pre-roll uh on like those TV channels i always uh forget that not everyone is like as LinkedIn LinkedIn to LinkedIn as we are and then I mean this this group probably spends a lot of time on LinkedIn but your average prospect out there yeah my husband's I was like "Who did you see this on LinkedIn?" And he's like "I go to LinkedIn like twice a week. (21:03) " Yeah the password i see a question in there about it it I don't believe it's in beta anymore what it is is that it's a when you create a campaign it will be at the very top and it's just a button you can toggle it's a toggle button that you can you can click at the very top of your campaign creation template yeah you have to click brand awareness first for objective yeah show up awesome jennifer's got us hooked up with the the the FAQs and the chat um so let's go to some audience Q&A i feel like this has just been like I can scroll down for quite some time so I'm going to throw these on screen we're (21:39) going to answer them live i got one from Maggie how much should I be spending on LinkedIn ads for them to actually be effective my company has a very niche audience we find it hard to target on LinkedIn because the audience is so small yeah I can grab this one because I would I would I know Anthony has a lot of experience with niche audiences but my day-to-day is certainly uh certainly that um so we're a learning company right and so we target highly very senior HR professionals inside of enterprises and so you can imagine that is a very niche audience this is how I (22:13) do it um I know that the default and the best practices around LinkedIn target audiences they tend to be big like for instance there always trying to get you to have at least north of 50,000 people inside of your audience as an example um one way to make sure that your budget is congruent to your size is first thing I would recommend is stay away from daily budgets if you use a lifetime budget that will help you um not waste money because what ends up happening a lot of times is if your audiences are too small and your budgets aren't proportionally perfect for them let's say that your CPM (22:52) ends up going through the roof and so you kind of see some money going out the back door that way so if you set up if you go away from a daily budget and look more at a lifetime budget then the algorithm is going to take a little more time to be uh vigilant with its spend let's just say that so that that would be my first recommendation um the second is I would have make sure to also have enough variance of your ad like have make sure to have at least five ads inside of your campaign so that you can (23:23) maximize frequency caps um I would I I made mention I'll make mention of what a question that I saw in there and they asked for like an optimal frequency i typically don't go more than 12 within 30 days but one thing that's important to understand about the content piece it's like LinkedIn's hard because it's a professional audience right there's no I don't there's no incentive to be sensationalistic which is something that I think in B2C marketing is is quite common and then a lot of times just to kind of have content and just keep a fresh feel that's what a lot of people (23:59) do but I would say making sure that your budgets are set up for a smaller audience stay in the lifetime lane and then also make sure to have uh have multiple variants that are in there so that you can maximize your frequency to that audience in a given amount of time um but by and large the smaller your audience the more your CPM is going to go up um uh and have the smaller your audience and this is how I represent it to my stakeholders usually the smaller your audience the more complex your content needs to be so that's my best recommendation is that the best way to (24:36) try to circumvent the increase in cost from your smaller niche audiences is to take some time and have really really really good content that way your engagement goes up so whatever increase in cost that you're having from an impression perspective you're offsetting with an increase in engagement how much would you say like a starting budget for a smaller audience should be anthony you want to go with that one yeah uh I I would go back to say that that depends on your audience size and I would say do (25:07) watch your frequency metric when you launch to see am I spending too much on this audience or am I spending not enough like if your if your frequency sits at like one to two that means you're not getting many impressions per person and maybe you'd need to shrink your audience or maybe you need to increase your budget but if yeah if your frequency jumps up to 20 within a couple days then you're like okay I'm spending way too much on this audience and I should lower it and spread it out a little bit more um you know it kind of depends like what you're trying to do with LinkedIn to decide how much you (25:35) want to spend i can like share some like uh you know just kind of average recommendations like a let's talk like audience size sorry to interrupt you but I think like what would you classify as like a small audience a medium audience and then like large in terms of size yeah anything under um so first of all LinkedIn will have a little popup that if you're under 50K it used to be like a red message now they change a little bit so it doesn't look as error like but um you do not need to be above 50K you can have audiences smaller than that but that said you know if you start to get (26:07) under like 20k people then you start to see some serving inconsistencies and it just depends on how active your audience is so if you're under like 20k people you might see it spend more on a couple days then maybe you don't spend for a couple days so it just depends on the size of your a you know how active that audience is um and then you know for an average campaign again depends on budget and audience but like 30 to 80k people is like usually a pretty good size for a campaign again a lot of dependencies here but um if you're above 80K people (26:38) in a campaign sometimes you have more opportunities to get more targeted where if you're like "Hey I have 200k people in this campaign then all right well how about adding some skills to get more niche or groups or interest that targeting to get a little bit more niche into who I want to be targeting. (26:55) " Um but that said if you have like a really large budget you're looking to push a lot of results then you will need a big audience so at th those points then you need to like open it up a little bit more um so average campaign I usually you know try to have it between 30 to 80k people um but that said if you have a really big budget then you have to like open it up a lot more gotcha and I would say under 10K is a small audience all right now moving on to Alexandra's question linkedin lead ads versus pointing people to your own landing page this is a hotly debated topic if anyone reads your comment (27:28) uh it depends on the offer so there's a lot of dependencies here but it depends on the offer um and if anything split test it but the general differences here is yes a LinkedIn lead form will pop up it'll autofill people are still on LinkedIn it makes it very easy to submit it almost too easy sometimes so they do have higher conversion rates on average but it's a less it's a less hightouch interaction um splitting that with going to a landing page somebody is going to go to your website going to get to read a lot more probably see more of your branding and info fill out your form (27:58) there manually on that page so much uh a lot more work they have to go through to submit that so you know it's usually more higher intent that you'll see um so split test it see what works for your company um I have lots of accounts that will go one way or the other and like focus more of their spend on either one of those i'd say kind of for like a rule of thumb is like if you're really just trying to start with some content downloads and get those moving then you can use the LinkedIn lead form to make it really easy to start getting some content downloads but just know that people are just downloading piece pieces (28:28) of content that's not a hightouch interaction and then if someone's going to go request a demo they probably need to go to your website to learn more about your company before they're really ready to request that demo so I'd be careful using the lead forms too much for demo requests you know point people to your website to go read more about what you do and then request a demo yeah I'll uh I'll piggy back on that and say that I've learned that lesson um what demo ads have actually been very effective for us is driving website (28:59) traffic the adjustment that I made a while ago that has really done well is instead of just sending them back to the website like be contextual and now for instance me the audience that's seeing a demo ad for me they've had to have been to our website multiple times and have also already had to engage with an ad okay so given that let's just call it a third touch the fact that it's a third touch and I know that they've been to the website before I early on was taking them to higher funnel pages on the visit that on the website um taking them into like a product tour or taking them into (29:32) the product page like being mindful of where you're dropping them off that ended up being way more effective than a form fill or a demo form fill was actually people going to the site than converting them when I was putting them in the right part of the site so I think the best a or the best advice that I would have for the the demo or and or site or both is be mindful of what the audience has seen before and if it's nothing then they probably need to go to the site and if it's something then they probably need (30:05) to go somewhere else on the site i would be mindful of both and when you're crafting the campaign yeah thought that would be a lot spicier i want more to Yeah a lot of it just depends on like how you're like thinking about these leads and planning to use them so if a if a somebody signs up to download a piece of content don't treat that like a demo lead and don't expect it to move like a demo lead so just good advice for like all of marketing not just ads right cool and real quick somebody said we dodged the cost question sorry uh I'll jump back to that (30:37) real quick is so if you're looking to just test out LinkedIn um you know it just depends on what you're looking to do but I'd say like if you're really just trying to like test it out like hey can we squeeze a couple leads out of this platform then maybe you start with a really simple uh lead genen content download campaign just to like hey can we squeeze out a couple downloads from this platform yes or no uh usually about 3K is a good little test budget to start with again doesn't have to be that much (31:00) but that's usually a good starter test budget you'll see what your performance looks like you'll squeeze out a couple leads and then all right are these leads that people want to target great let's build out some more stuff on the platform um that said you can start as little as 10 bucks a day with LinkedIn ads uh and then if you're doing thought leader ads you know usually because you can bid really low you can get better costs so you don't need like a a full 3K to really test thought leader ads um but for most people I'd say plan to spend at least 3K to test it out more or less (31:25) depending on your budget what did we spend to five is it 5,000 we started with i don't know if I'm allowed to say this live but I'm going to ask for forgiveness instead of permission sorry guys somewhere between five and 10 yeah I'll say the way that the way that I think of it is try to take what is a benchmark cost of whatever historical cost is your impression cost and then take what your budget is and then understand exactly how many impressions that's going to give you and then when you have your audience size you can divide your audience size by the projected amount of impressions and you (31:56) have a understanding of frequency and so the frequency for me in the budget planning is something that's very important because I want to make sure how much I want to know and be be calculated and how much visibility and an individual ad is going to get to that audience and so that's the way that that I do it as opposed to just going "Oh well I have $5,000 and that's going to be for the audience. (32:22) " It no I have $5,000 the historical CPM cost for me is 50 bucks okay so that's going to buy me this amount of impressions and if my audience is that size is it giving me the visibility that I want so I definitely think of not only the budget amount but also the audience size and how much visibility that's going to give me did that address the cost question i don't know if the Yeah do we have any other any other burning questions on cost throw them in the chat we'll get to them what is the ideal frequency number i think I think Anthony you had this it was like above i don't know i'm not going to try and answer that yeah i (32:54) think I think tag mentioned 12 at something some point for 12 in like 30 days i try not to exceed that and that's the amount of ads that people see that's the amount of one ad one probably they're probably going to see a multitude of ads for me but I don't want them to see one of them more than 12 in 30 days okay cool um I'm going to go to Jazelle's question because I think I saw this earlier in the chat too about ROI so it's been really challenging to show ROI for top offunnel LinkedIn campaigns can you share best practices and then someone else in the chat was saying um I (33:27) have a lot of hard time like justifying the kind of brand awareness spend that you were talking about earlier tag so maybe we can also add some element of that in there too yeah um so I would say this was this took a while for to manage up on this and I totally get get it um this was I'm three years into my work here uh with Doebo and I would say that year one this was probably the biggest issue um what helped was a mutual agreement on leading and lagging indicators i think it's the leading indicators and it's the understanding (34:03) that if you can get buy in on what your leading indicators are and what your lagging indicators are that's the best way to get buy in for us for us and what what seemed to be the magic I guess you could say or whatever the uh uh the mechanism was that got buy in was our branded impressions and so while we we know that our customer journeys are 9 to 12 months and we know that if we're going to pursue bigger clients that it's going to take longer how do we how do we piece in some sort of a quantifiable metric that is going to be meaningful before we know what the business bottom line is going (34:42) to be so what we built was basically a table brand tracker that takes into all of the organic impressions the branded paid impressions and we have a graphical look to see what the trend is basically of how often people are going to a search bar and typing our brand name that that was on a month-to-month basis or on a quartertoquarter basis before we're seeing uh business outcomes to be able to prove stuff out that was like the leading indicator that our programs are being successful because our brand (35:13) impressions were growing so for us in particularly and I think that you know this is a uh a challenge that would be unique to each individual organization and that even the personality of its leaders but that was an example of what really worked for us in getting buy in on this brand awareness initiative how are you reporting on those branded impressions carrie asked that in the chat yeah Google Analytics oh Google Analytics all right Anthony what about you yeah um I've had lots of different teams care kind of about different metrics but if you're starting just top (35:45) of funnel um in the beginning it can be hard to kind of show what's been the impact of these of these ads if we're just getting impressions out there or people seeing us um at the top level LinkedIn's got the new company pages report or companies report which has been handy so if you have a target list of companies you're going after you could upload that to LinkedIn and then you can monitor how many impressions you're serving to these companies so that's usually a good front-end thing to start with is like are we reaching the target accounts that we want to be reaching sometimes in in B2B it's hard (36:13) to just get any impressions to certain companies because you're going so niche to certain companies and certain you know uh job titles at those companies so at the beginning are are at least getting coverage to our target accounts are we you know are we getting those great um past that you know you will want to have conversion tracking set up to see are are those brand awareness campaigns are people getting to the website um are they getting to high intent pages are they submitting those forms so your your standard conversion could be like a form submission (36:42) conversion that most people set up but you can also have page view conversions so you could just you could set one up for if somebody visits any page boom that's that's a conversion and then you could have high intent pages like your pricing page or your get a demo page so are they make are they going to the pricing page are they going to get a demo page and then you can show okay we've driven you know x amount of people to our website from LinkedIn uh we've driven x amount of people to the pricing page x amount to the demo page even if we don't have any demo requests yet we've at least gotten that far and then (37:12) boom do do you eventually start to see people submitting that demo form and kind of going from there um so those are things you can put in place and then on the on the in like a competitive sense you can on the LinkedIn company page there are some competitor reports and you can see how your brand is doing with some uh pages that you put that you've written down as your competitors and you know how many engagements have you had versus them and paid can definitely impact that a lot so you can see are we getting more engagements than our competitor or not um and a lot of (37:44) companies care about that and then taking that a step further LinkedIn reps can pull like a share of share of voice report it's called share a feed whereas like you know all on LinkedIn to this audience are you winning more of a share of voice versus your competitors or not uh and a lot of brand teams care a lot about that so those are all kind of all different things you can look at to tell how much you know how much share of voice are you taking on LinkedIn um and like you know are you reaching those right companies and then are those (38:10) people making it to the website and stuff like that sorry go ahead one more thing I'll add in there is that there are also brand studies you can do with LinkedIn if you have a really big budget there's like Neielson studies like that are very official that you can do with LinkedIn um it is like an extra fee to do that so you got to have like a big budget but there are a couple built-in ones um that if I think you have if you're spending like 20k a month uh more than that then then you can unlock these brand studies and it's like built right into LinkedIn if you go to like the test (38:39) tab you can access them there so there's some things like brand lift um product consideration like stuff like that questions you can you can like survey your audience to see you know they can answer the question you can get some results there sorry and I what I was going to add was on this topic you know the definition of influence like versus trigger I think typically what in the demo campaigns and when you know leadership in terms of managing up they always want to know like well what did it produce well I think on the brand awareness side it's about influence and (39:10) so for instance uh the leaders in learning content series that I was speaking of the award-winning um leaders in learning content series so we weren't able to say well it sourced this amount of revenue for the company what we were able to say is that 80% of the pipeline had seen at least one impression right so I think understanding what you want to discover understanding the frame the words that you're going to use to actually define what's important did leaders in Learning did our award-winning content series generate all of these customers that's the wrong (39:46) lens to look at it through it influenced 80% of our pipeline that's value that's value yeah that's a really good point and it kind of goes into the next question I want to get to um from Tiara sorry if I'm saying that wrong tiara um asks "What are some best practices for reporting on LinkedIn ads we seem to be seeing different data in different places within our campaign manager account. (40:11) " I've had this experience too where like within LinkedIn it maybe reports something and then our website reports something different and are there any like best practices or tools that you use to help your tag we so we're an enterprise organization so I feel like the data in a business intelligence team um really leads this conversation um it also means that there is uh a small variety of what would I think we would call sources of truth um in terms of our reporting and the platforms that we use um our business intelligence team pretty much considers Tableau to be our source of (40:47) truth um I use I use metadata.io IO for our ad server and also for uh our site uh our account engagement reporting um and then also pair that in tandem with what we do with LinkedIn so for us it's a LinkedIn campaign manager metadata.io and a Tableau that's tied into Salesforce so it's a combination of four things that really go in to our quote unquote reporting and sources of truth yeah a couple other others I'll throw in there i think somebody in the chat mentioned the LinkedIn revenue attribution report so that is like a (41:20) built-in tool that you can set up in business manager and connect Salesforce to to LinkedIn it is very like limited in what you can see but it's at least something that's it's a free tool you can set up very easily um past that like I like to use I like to you know when I have when I can get the CRM data to be able to combine the CRM data with your LinkedIn data and if you can you know figure out what campaign a lead came from and then put some charts together with that so you can blend data in Looker um so you could have it pulling from your CRM uh Salesforce or wherever (41:51) that's coming from and then there's lots of there's lots of integration tools to pull data from LinkedIn so you could have those kind of both pulling into Looker and then you could set up your blends and Looker and Tableau can do the same thing and like all these other platforms do the same thing but yeah there's a lot of like data tools that can pull it from LinkedIn then you can blend it put in a dashboard like Looker or something like that um and then past that like there's a lot of new tools that are coming out that have been uh great to like connect all your different platforms so like uh hockey stack and (42:19) dream data are a couple relatively new platforms and and those do like leverage like APIs to similar to how the raar the LinkedIn ra can you know just based off impressions tell you if LinkedIn's making an impact hockey stack in raw they're grabbing the attribution report sorry that was like a dinosaur the the Yeah I say that way too often um but yeah some of these new platforms can do can do a lot of cool stuff too and like you can connect all your different tools and all your different advertising platforms they can start to put together (42:49) like the journey um to see like oh somebody you know saw you on LinkedIn and then they Google us for you and then they ended up in your then they requested a demo and kind of being able to see that journey is uh very insightful the raw I was like "What?" Um awesome that was great um cool this one I think is is fun so I'm going to throw to this one um what are some little known targeting features in LinkedIn that can be highly effective any any secrets that you guys are willing to share h targeting secrets (43:24) features features i'm trying like the features I think is throwing me off uh I'll say this as a standard best practice every time I set up a campaign I go and set up I like preload even if it never gets used and even if there's not even a creative that goes in it I basically pre-make its retargeting campaign that that has like that's just been like mindful for me so like standard in the process you make the campaign go out then for me to like make the make the next step like that was kind of my challenge for me and my stakeholders when I first got in into B2B is like we always try to think we (44:00) only think like one step in advance right um and oh this is oh we're going to run a campaign we're going to show them this well the reality is particularly in B2B like whatever you show them they need a lot more of that and they need more time and you need to be impressionable during that time like uh it's I wouldn't call it a feature but just a best practice of mine is that if they see one ad I'm gonna already have it set up i'm gonna take the couple extra the 90 seconds or two minutes and have it set up and have it be named in (44:31) accordance with what the original campaign was if anything else that keeps me thinking about what's next for the audience and I feel that that served it well but but also I just think you always have to be thinking about what are they gonna see what are they going to watch what are they going to see next and that that has really helped me extend the I guess you would call it entertainment value to my target audience make make sure they see you everywhere after after that first touch um universal discoverability is pretty (45:05) big deal yeah um I don't know if I have too many little known features um but I think like one of my favorite things to do is like if you're using HubSpot or any CRM like that a lot of them can sync lists to LinkedIn so very common to have like sync your target account list and then as sales people add and remove accounts from that list that'll automatically push to LinkedIn and automatically update your campaigns and then same for your open opportunities list you know as you close deals then that list or like as as deals enter the (45:35) pipeline and as you close deals you're updating that list in HubSpot and then that's automatically syncing to LinkedIn and automatically syncing to your campaigns that are running so I love using that um uh otherwise you know little known features for targeting if you have a LinkedIn rep there's actually there's like a h like a bunch of like ones that you can't see on LinkedIn most of them are not useful um but there was one that I've used a bunch of times to only target members with one open job because (46:06) one of the challenges LinkedIn targeting is that if somebody has multiple jobs on their profile LinkedIn will consider all of those when looking at when when looking at targeting so if you're trying to target CEOs of tech companies of a certain size somebody could be like a software developer at Microsoft but then be CEO of their own side hustle and then they look like the CEO of Microsoft because that's how the targeting adds everything together you could use something like this to you know limit it (46:31) to just uh people with one open job you can also just exclude the opposites uh of the targeting facets when you're setting up your targeting but yeah LinkedIn reps have some other targeting options they can add most of them haven't been super useful but there are there are a handful of them in there that can be can be useful so if you have a LinkedIn rep and you're spending a good amount ask them for that list and they can share it with you all right I think we have time for like one to two more questions so I'm going to throw it to this one by Christina do you have any (46:55) great frameworks or approaches for AB testing different adsets we haven't really talked about testing a lot so I'm curious to hear you guys thoughts go ahead Anthony uh yeah as far as AB testing so you can use the LinkedIn built-in tool to do like the official AB testing and it'll like you know it'll keep the impressions separate and the audiences separate and test like that um I different teams I work with prefer different methods of testing so we do use that for some accounts but I'd say more common is just kind of launching those ads in the campaign because then (47:23) you can keep running them when the AB test runs it's kind of like it's done it's off and on its own you can't reactivate it other than that like AB testing you know I'd say like something I think about a lot is like be careful not to test things that are too small um I think I had a post about this last week of like I call it swath testing a lot of times is like I want to find those big differences or those new ads that are you know a whole new type of ad that's going to work to this audience so I'll test like very different things (47:48) more often uh because if I just change the button color if I just like play with my headline a little bit like I learn a little bit but then also like over time in social like that's going to fatigue and I'm going to need to find something new so I like to test like bigger things and like learn more by testing bigger differences not between two different shades of blue right yeah yeah the red button or the blue button get more clicks it's like tag I know you have some interesting experience with AB (48:13) testing especially like the text of ads yeah yeah that was the first thing that came to my mind too when when we talked about this so we had a test it was very simple ad design uh color-based and basically one sentence right it was a lessons learned deal so lesson number 276 fill in the blank and that's the ad um so we ran about half million impressions so 500,000 impressions each exact same look and feel the only thing that changed was like the one lesson or the one sentence that was the lesson in the ad um the first 500,000 impressions (48:52) I would call it a generic uh sentence it wasn't very bold they were kind of just a middleof the road folklore or general wisdom that would apply to our ICP the second looked exactly the same there's really at first glance absolutely nothing but then when you actually read the sentence the second one had I asked the writer I asked our writer I go what what's what's the difference he goes I chose the side of the fence the engagement was exponential so the exact same audience exact same look and feel of the ad and this almost works against kind of what Anthony was saying in terms (49:28) of thinking bigger or maybe Anthony maybe this isn't this is in the category of thinking big but taking and making it exactly the same but having one changing the one sentence which is the centerpiece piece of the ad uh went from zero comments to eight it was shared this ad said the the the the B test of this was eight eight shares compared to excuse me eight comments compared to zero 11 shares compare compared to zero um in the engagement rate I think was 5x total just from one sentence just the exact same design look and feel serve the exact same audience the same amount of times and having one sentence that (50:09) was kind of controversial if I'm honest kind of controversial made that much of a difference in the in the engagement yeah one of the things I liked when you said when we talked last time was that the kind of the first test that that didn't do as well was kind of like maybe average copy you'd call it and then this the other alternative was was like you said today like choosing a side like being more controversial um that stands out a lot more to to people so you know things like that that is great to that is great to test like you do want to be testing that your phrasing what's your point of view and stuff like that so um (50:40) if you just write average copy that's generated by chat GPT that's just the average of what that's scanning out there then you're going to get middle of the road stuff that's you know it's going to be okay but then if you like you know really choose a point of view a strong point of view you have a lot better chance of like grabbing someone's attention awesome well yeah copy matters i love it thank you guys so much for joining today um we are gonna wrap up here and then Anthony we can find you on LinkedIn tag we can find you on LinkedIn as well and Anthony I know you're always in the in the community as well so thank (51:14) you guys so much for joining us today i hope this was helpful um maybe we'll do another one on this if it was useful i feel like we got to we had so many questions and we obviously didn't get to get get to all of them um so thank you guys for joining today i really appreciate it of course thanks for having us yeah thank you [Music]