Eric's Experiment with LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads

0:00All right. So we're going to talk about why LinkedIn influencer ads might just be the thing that can help you drive more leads. So have you tried this out yet, Neil? I've messed around with it. I know you've run quite a bit of influencer Instagram ads. So how did it work for you? Well, LinkedIn influencer ads. Sorry. I meant LinkedIn, but yeah. You're good. You're good. So just so everyone knows, the way this works is when you run a link, let's say I write a blog or sorry, blog post. Let's say I write a post on LinkedIn. It does fairly well. Or maybe I'm sharing a case study or something like that.

0:33as part of an organization, I can sponsor any employee's post. I can sponsor my post. I can sponsor anybody that works on the team. What I have to do is I need a request. Let's say I need a request for myself to sponsor, and then I need to approve it or an employee needs to approve it. Basically, we are giving more airtime to whatever we think will perform well, whatever we think we should get more reach. And then that post will be just be promoted. Now, what I did was recently, I just ran like a$500 test. It was a really small test. Right. And basically I, I talked about like a case study with like, let's say here's some results we got with programmatic SEO as an example.

1:08Right. And so, you know, here's step one, step four, step two. So here's a couple of things you can do, blah, blah, blah. At the very end of it, there's a call to action saying, Hey, by the way, if you need, if you want to learn more about this stuff, you can subscribe to our email list, or if you need help with this stuff, you can, you know, go to, go to, you know, click on this link. And in that link itself, it links to the website and we have some UTM tracking parameters. So we're tracking if this ad actually generates leads. So in$500 in spend, we generated five leads and one was super qualified.

1:36And that is the beauty of a new ad format when new people are testing it. So I'll start with that first. So through our clients, we spent around$60 ,000 on this and we've done a lot of tests. It's a good ad format. Where we've struggled with is driving direct conversions into a purchase, right? It's great to get more reach. It's great to get more people to get to know you. But we found that it's extremely effective to get people into a soft conversion. What I mean by a soft conversion is like a newsletter signup, a webinar signup, things like that. We're seeing it being really effective to drive leads to a purchase at mass scale.

2:18We're not seeing it too effective, but we're actually seeing it really effective to, let's say, a webinar. And then from a webinar, a portion of those people end up turning into customers. I'm not talking about customers for ebook. I'm talking about actual, you know, a customer for a security company or a hardware company or something that's more enterprise. So how would this look for a client? So imagine what you did for us helping a company do that, right? Because they have people on their team who are influencers. Like imagine, you know, there's a lot of people who work for these companies like Gong or Cisco or Adobe or IBM or Microsoft.

2:57When they have 50 ,000 employees, 100 ,000 employees, there's people within there who are quote unquote, have massive followings on Instagram. So what we do is we find the people within the organizations who are influencers. We work with them to run the campaigns. Got it. Yeah. So I don't know if we're talking about the same thing here. Um, but it's still, it's still gated good data nonetheless. Um, but what, here's the something else that you shall consider. Everyone should do this by the way. It's, uh, I don't know if you're doing this yet with your LinkedIn, Neil, but, um, I had to change the link.

3:30This was a couple of weeks ago. And if you change it to, um, you know, a lot of people now, when you're posting something right under your name, it says visit my website. And I thought I had it on in the profile URL, right? But you actually have to adjust it and say like add profile URL and just put your website in there. but the cool thing is when you're running one of these influencer ads um i think they're like maybe they're called i don't think they're called sponsor posts but anyway so i haven't done what's that i was saying i haven't done that but i'm gonna end up uh definitely checking it out yeah so i think they're called no you know what they're called neil they're called thought leader ads that's what they're called they're not influencer ads sorry my bad everyone they're called thought leader ads so um for a thought leader ad if you're running these at the very top, when people can see your post, your name's there and it says visit my website.

4:16So that's a conversion in itself, right? That's a little micro conversion to get people to visit. And then to Neil's point, at the very bottom, you can say, hey, come to webinar, come into my email list or whatever, or, you know, hey, get a free marketing plan, right? Those are all like, you know, semi-soft conversions at the end of the day. So anything else? The key is really check out the soft conversions. I just think you're going to end up not doing well if you're asking for a hard conversion, like a big ask. That's an easier way to put it. It just doesn't work well. People have to build a relationship, and you need to build a deeper relationship with them off of LinkedIn to eventually end up converting.

4:51Yeah. Look, the reach is strong on LinkedIn right now. I think LinkedIn is a good game to play. We don't play it enough as we should. And so that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.