LinkedIn Ads: What Marketers Need to Know

Do you advertise on LinkedIn?

Have you considered LinkedIn advertising and want to learn more?

To discover everything there is to know about LinkedIn ads, I interview AJ Wilcox.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview AJ Wilcox, a LinkedIn ad expert. His agency, B2Linked, specializes in business-to-business advertising and lead generation on LinkedIn. In addition to managing accounts, AJ also specializes in LinkedIn ads training.

AJ explores the different types of ads available on LinkedIn.

You'll discover what B2B marketers need to know about advertising on LinkedIn.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:

How AJ Got Into LinkedIn Ads

AJ is a long-time digital marketer who started out doing search engine optimization (SEO) and Google AdWords.

About four years ago, a company in Utah recruited AJ. On his first day, he laid out his plans for SEO, pay per click, and social media to the CMO. She gave him the go-ahead and also informed him that the company had started a pilot program with LinkedIn ads.

"See what you can do with it," she said.

AJ replied, "absolutely," and then turned around and started laughing to himself. He felt like a veteran at digital marketing, yet had never heard of LinkedIn ads. He jumped into the platform to learn about it to try to keep the egg off his face.

Within about two weeks, one of the salespeople approached AJ, telling him how much they loved the leads they'd been getting. When AJ discovered through Salesforce that the leads were all sourced from LinkedIn, he realized there was something to it.

Listen to the show to hear how AJ started his business, B2Linked.

Why Consider LinkedIn Ads?

AJ explains that while Facebook's and LinkedIn's ad platforms are very different, they share the same principles. That means that if you have something nailed on Facebook, it will probably work well on LinkedIn and vice versa.

While AJ doesn't run Facebook ads for his clients, when he's compared similar campaigns from Facebook to LinkedIn, he's found his conversion rate on LinkedIn to be about double that of Facebook. Plus, the sales teams have told him the LinkedIn leads are much higher quality than the ones from Facebook.

LinkedIn is by far the best for B2B targeting, he continues. You can target by job title, seniority, company, skills, specific group membership, geography, and years in business; information people aren't putting on Facebook.

AJ shares what he believes are the two best uses of LinkedIn ads. Number one is recruitment and the other is promoting B2B products and services such as an SaaS company (software as a service). Those businesses charge a substantial ongoing rate ($6,000 to $7,000 per month) for access to their software and have a lifetime value of more than $15,000.

If you have a lifetime value of under $15,000, AJ cautions, make sure your funnel and your processes are really ironed out on Facebook first, because LinkedIn's cost per click (CPC) is much higher than Facebook's.

Listen to the show to discover how to calculate lifetime value.

The Ad Types

When you go to LinkedIn.com/ads and start a self-service account, you'll have access to two different ad units.

AJ explains the first type is text ads. These ads appear in the right sidebar of the LinkedIn homepage (on desktop) and you'll often see three ads there.

According to AJ, text ads have a low click-through rate because most people are banner-blind to them. If four people click on them out of every 10,000 times they're viewed, you're doing great, he says.