Why Your LinkedIn Ads Aren't Working

0:00Hey, this is John. And before we get started, I have a gift for you for being such an amazing listener. Everyone's talking about AI these days, but most of it's about tactics. We've created a series of prompts we use to create strategy, and you can have them for free. Just go to dtm.world slash free prompts and grab yours. Now let's get started.

0:30it. Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Janss. My guest today is Anthony Blattner. He is the founder of Speedwork Social, a leading LinkedIn ads agency that helps B2B companies generate high quality leads, close enterprise deals and scale revenue using advanced paid media strategies. With a background in software and enterprise sales, Anthony has helped hundreds of businesses from SaaS startups to Fortune 500s leverage LinkedIn's robust targeting and analytics for measurable results. So Anthony, welcome to the show. Hey, John. Thanks for having me.

1:09Excited to be here and talk about LinkedIn marketing. You bet. So let's just start the basics. I mean, what makes LinkedIn ads uniquely valuable? You You mentioned B2B specifically for B2B marketers compared to other social ad platforms. Yeah. The biggest thing about LinkedIn is the audience, number one, who visits LinkedIn compared to who visits other platforms. It's definitely the professional audience. Everyone starts by creating their LinkedIn usually when they're entering the job market. So that's where it starts. Some people never updated after that, but a lot of people do along their career path.

1:41And it's also evolved into more of a social platform now. A lot of it on the business professional side. So number one is audience. And then number two is just pure how you can target people. Because people start with using it as the resume, their job titles, their companies, those company pages are all, that data is there. It's all filled out, pretty up to date. So having those ways to target people based on job title, company, industry, company size, those options don't exist on almost any other platform. So it's a great way to be able to target those types of professionals. So if you're a B2B company and looking to target a niche professional, then LinkedIn usually has the best options for you.

2:19Are there industries or types of offers that do particularly well on LinkedIn that you've seen? Yeah, there's a wide variety. I'd say overall, it's like who visits LinkedIn the most. And it is mostly like the tech, tech-oriented industries, the more digitally active industries. Those are the most active. So tech, software, SaaS is like the biggest one. After that, it's a lot of the marketers out there. So the marketing industry is big and active on LinkedIn. And then past that, a lot of it's like the recruiting industry. HR is very big on LinkedIn because they're doing a lot of that recruiting.

2:54A lot of those people spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. So then you get into industries like that. And that said, these days, it's always interesting when we have a very niche audience and we build it out and size it up, how many people we can find on LinkedIn. But then past that, it just depends on the activity level of that audience. some industries that tend to be more of like working in the field industries, they might not be as active. So definitely the tech software and then the marketing folks. So I'll be honest. I have a lot of people that come to me and say, I've tried LinkedIn. I can't make it work and it's really expensive.

3:27And, you know, I'm guessing they're probably just going on there and just doing whatever like the easy button is to set up an ad or something. Are you finding that there's a campaign structure or type that delivers consistently and maybe without spending too much time, we ought to identify kind of the various options on LinkedIn. But are you finding like right now today, this campaign structure really works? Yes. So there's kind of two ones that are the main ones, the winning ones right now that I recommend to most people to start with. But before I get into that, you're definitely right. People get onto LinkedIn, they try the ads platform and they will see much higher CPMs and CPCs than other platforms.

4:06So when you compare it with like Facebook or other advertising platforms, like your costs are going to look a lot higher. And then the challenge is most people will just, you know, if they're not familiar with the platform, they're just going to set it up, use the default settings, click launch, just like they would on Facebook or Google. But a lot of those default settings aren't great for your small to medium sized business. They're more built for enterprise businesses. So - Or for LinkedIn to make a lot of money. Yeah. Ad platforms are in the business of them making money themselves. So a lot of those default settings aren't serving the small to medium-sized business.

4:40So we usually recommend changing a lot of those initial settings because somebody might set up a campaign, click launch, and then you then find out your budget didn't reach who you really wanted it to reach due to audience expansion options. options and then it didn't serve exactly where you wanted it to. It served more a third-party website as part of the ad network of LinkedIn because that's the default option. So you spent your money, you didn't reach who you wanted, you didn't serve your ads where you wanted. So of course you didn't get any good results out of it. So that's the most common scenario of what we review accounts.

5:12So when you use the right settings, you can reach the right professionals and address the results. And the main two things right now, the main two things in general that work. The first one is kind of more the traditional one. B2B sales takes a long time. So it's not going to be like selling widgets on Facebook, creating an e-commerce store. Someone's probably not going to click and buy right away. So you kind of have to plan for the long game. You might, to start that interaction, you might offer what we call a lead magnet, which is like a guide or report. You might get somebody to sign up for a webinar, sign up for a newsletter.

5:46What's that stepping stone to start it on the way to making a purchase? And you might then retarget them to then offer them a demo or a consultation afterwards. So first one is lead with value. Lead magnets and lead generation campaigns are always a good way to do that. Those are always, you know, it's kind of a traditional tactic. The newer one is what we call thought leader ads. And this is just the boosting of posts from, of people on LinkedIn. And so you'll post on LinkedIn from your profile. And as of maybe about a year ago, now you can boost posts from people. So we just see that these perform so much better than a traditional company ad because people are on LinkedIn to hear from other people, not to read ads from companies.

6:29They're there to hear from other people. So walk me through that a little bit. Is that similar to like, would you actually have some sort of arrangement with that thought leader to where they would write a post that's maybe favorable to something you're trying to push, almost like an influencer would in other platforms. Yeah. And you can set up external influencers, but probably step one is you yourself or people in your company or your CEO and founder. That's usually, it's just called thought leader ads. It's the name of what the ad unit is. So most companies are going to start with their founder, CEO or themselves.

7:03And then, I mean, nowadays yes lots of people are setting up arrangements with third-party influencers and doing those kind of you know sponsored deals but yeah step one is like your ceo founder and then like you know a lot there's a lot of content you think about it a little bit differently where it's like what is somebody going to post that somebody wants that their prospect wants to read and then starts that interaction so what we see work very well across the board like in different industries have different things that are going to work and different you know companies but across the board It's like a really good case study is a great way to kind of start that because people are on LinkedIn to learn from others and learn how they can do better at their job or in their company.

7:46So often they want to read successful case studies by similar companies, similar people. So that's a great content format to start with. So if you have really strong case studies, you know, write that as a post and you do have to write it of like, hey, I'm going to teach you something, read this. And then if you are interested in what we did, you can contact me. You can click here to learn more and then you can kind of continue the journey from there. But we just see that those get so much higher engagement rates and LinkedIn reports on dwell time, which means people are, we get those stats. So we can see people are sitting there and reading that content two to three times longer than a traditional company ad.

8:21So it just shows like people are reading this content, they're absorbing it. And like, that's what we want out of marketing. Yeah. So is there any secret sauce to targeting? You know, you've got all the selects that they give you, seniority, company size, job title, all those kinds of things. But I still feel like that doesn't get narrow enough. You know, are there targeting mistakes that you commonly see or are there, I guess I'm asking this two ways. How do people make mistakes and then like how do people succeed? What's the secret sauce? Yes, there's a lot of sauces and lots of flavors on LinkedIn.

8:52but it starts with number one is that what I told you earlier of like, don't do the default settings because default, it says audience expansion and like even Facebook and Google try to do the same thing. I think there's might be a little more clear sometimes, but you know, on LinkedIn when you're selling B2B, you usually want to target a very specific professional at a very specific type of company. So when you have, when you allow the algorithm to go find similar people, suddenly you've made a couple of hops and are not in the industry and job you want to be reaching. So that's number one. Yeah.

9:22From there, secret sauces are, we usually start with like audience research. Give me a few of your best customers or a few of your target customers. Let's go download their, you know, look at their profiles. How do they categorize themselves? What are the job titles? What are the industries, company sizes? And then we'll build a demographic profile from that of who we want to target. And then the way to kind of take that a step further is to get more niche into what are the skills or interests or groups on top of that. when you do Facebook and Google advertising, often you give it a very big audience and you let the algorithm go find the right person for you.

9:59LinkedIn's algorithm isn't as advanced as these other platforms, but we also don't need it to be. We don't want the algorithm to do any work for us. We want to have the campaigns reach exactly who we want. So don't give it very broad, very big audiences. Give it very small and niche audiences of exactly who you want to reach. and then past that kind of the most advanced thing that we often recommend is to build your own company lists when appropriate when you can do that there's a lot of third-party data platforms out there that can be useful but also if you're you know if you're if you know your industry you can sit down and off and like write that list yourself or have a bdr salesperson write that list and then you can upload that to linkedin and make sure you're going after the exact companies you want.

10:45There isn't always a LinkedIn industry definition for the exact industry you want to reach. And sometimes you have to make your own list. Hey, you want to keep up on all things duct tape marketing, the stuff I read, the books, the people I interview, check out the duct tape marketing newsletter. Every week, we're going to keep you up to date on what's going on in the world of marketing. And just for subscribing, you're going to get our free chat GPT prompts that will allow you or assist you in the creation of marketing strategies and plans. So check it out. It's at dtm.world slash news. That's dtm.world slash news.

11:29I think just, you know, we're obviously, we've got 20 minutes. We're going to teach everybody all the ins and outs, but I think just what you've said at a high level, certainly ought to at least put people on notice about how they need to be thinking. So let's talk a little bit about budgets. I'm sure you have some clients that have been used to paying$1.17 for a click on Facebook and all of a sudden see$6 on LinkedIn. Obviously, it all comes down to ROI. Does that$6 produce better than the$1.17? How do you make the, you know, the economics work? How do you do the reporting so that you can make a case for saying, no, this is money well spent?

12:06Yeah. And so number one, it does start with having higher costs as a platform. Just, you do have to have a high enough LTV for that ROI to make sense in the end, in the end. So you're probably not going to be selling kind of small widgets or, you know, very cheap services. If you do, you know, you would just stick to the organic side of the platform, you probably wouldn't spend too much on ads or maybe your ads are just retargeting people who are already visiting your website. So you use stuff like that. But yeah, you need to have a high enough LTV for that ROI to make sense. So usually we say you want to have at least 15K of your LTV.

12:44So this is more enterprise level software, more bigger ongoing services. So if you know like, hey, maybe I do client services and on average, of clients sticks with us for a year and we make 20k from that client great if you're you know 10k or lower you know 15k or lower then you just want to be a little more careful of making sure your stats are working out and that you are keeping clients or retaining clients so that's usually what we say to people that line i'd say is moving a little bit with the new thought leader ads the other advantage is they get so much higher engagement rate and people sit there and read it to all time, like I talked about, which then allows you to get cheaper costs on your ads.

13:24Like every other ad platform, they want to be delivering content that the user, their user, wants to engage with that keeps them on the platform. So if your content is getting very high engagement rate, that's a good sign for the platform. They give you a discount on your ad costs. Inversely, if your content does not get much engagement, not many clicks and stuff, then they charge you a premium. So it's all playing that game. So with Thought Leader ads, it does allow you to get higher engagement rates, get cheaper costs. And then your LTV could be lower than if you have a good Thought Leader campaign running because hey, maybe you are getting...

13:59Because to give you some benchmarks is, you said six bucks, but I'd say the average LinkedIn click is like 10 to 15 bucks for a standard company page ad. So that's expensive. So yeah, you just need to make sure your ROI is going to work out there. With the Thought Leader ad, If you are getting very high engagement, we see thought leader ads get$1 to$2 per click. And then you are comparable with a Facebook ad and maybe even better than a Facebook ad. Some of the best ones we're running right now are below$1 per click and are just crushing the Facebook results that they're getting on Facebook because we have the targeting we want on LinkedIn.

14:33You mentioned something I want to circle back to you, retargeting. Can you, do they have the similar pixel idea that you can actually put on your website? And then can you run only retargeting ads? So somebody's come to your website, now they hopped over to LinkedIn, now they're going to see your ad? Yeah, definitely. The two things are most common is website retargeting. So yeah, same pixel, very similar to Meta's pixel. It'll track who visits your website and then retarget those people. And then also people who visit your company page, you can retarget those people as well. Company pages rank very well in Google.

15:03So often we'll see, oh, you already have a good amount of traffic to your company page. People are already visiting. Let's start by retargeting them. So one of the things that it seems like almost all the social platforms are doing, you know, you used to run an ad and you drive people to a landing page, but now they've all come up with their own sort of lead capture form and they seem to be encouraging people to use their forms. Do you see that to be true or do you have something that you recommend one way or the other? Yeah. So I still, there's still cases for both. I do often recommend the LinkedIn forms because you're just, your CPL is going to be better, much better than having somebody click off to a website, submit a form there.

15:43And when you're already paying LinkedIn's higher prices, you just need that math to make better sense for you. So you do use LinkedIn's forms a lot. Your average executive might not spend too much time clicking off to a website, reading a bunch, finding the form, submitting it. So let's just make that an easy process. But with the thought leader ads, you can't use the native form. So we do still use landing pages a lot with thought leader ads. but then again the benefit of those you get cheaper cost per clicks so you can get cheaper cost per clicks to your landing page is how do you handle ad creative and copy you know it's not quite the same as you know you're not going to have a reel or a video or something in an ad i suspect or is there have you kind of cracked what and again having said this your answer whatever you answer i know that like it's two months from now might be a different answer right but what are you finding that's working right now from a creative and copy statement yeah and it's interesting like linkedin continues to evolve and in a way we see it getting closer to like a to a facebook and the style of creative people are using i think just as it matures as a social platform the more people use it you know we see what we see what gets human attention on meta and human attention is on linkedin too so it works on linkedin so we're seeing more of that style they'll start to bleed into LinkedIn.

17:04That's also to say like B2B creative could always use like some spicing up. So we don't mind some of that. You know, the creative style, a couple of things I usually recommend. Number one is you don't want to go too far to the Facebook side of things where like Facebook marketing tends to be very flashy, get someone's attention, draw them in, get the click. On LinkedIn, you want to be more clear and direct. Who is this for and what are you offering? because even with Lincoln's good targeting, you still will have an audience and not everyone in that audience is a perfect fit. So you wanna reduce the unintentional, untargeted clicks.

17:42Again, back to those expensive prices, if somebody isn't a perfect fit, you don't wanna just grab their attention and get them to click on something that's not relevant and then you paid 15 bucks for that click. So you wanna make sure you're getting targeted clicks. So we do keep creative a little more clear and direct under who are we talking to, What are we offering so that we get the most clear, you know, get the most targeted traffic that does come through? Yeah, it is interesting. You're seeing the culture, if you will, change a little on LinkedIn. I mean, it used to be people would actually give people crap for posting personal stuff on LinkedIn, you know?

18:13And now it's like, no, it's definitely become a more, I mean, it is a lot of business stuff there, but you definitely see people posting, you know, more personal types of things there as well, don't you? Yeah. I think there's like a benefit to that too. You know, it doesn't need to be all just business. It's nice to get to know people a little bit. So I do appreciate that type of content. I'm curious how AI has impacted every industry. I'm curious how it's impacting what you're doing for folks on LinkedIn. Yeah. AI on social is a whole can of worms. I'd say like right now, the thing that LinkedIn does need to figure out is the, there are a lot of AI comments that get left on things.

18:52And like, you can just, most of the time you can tell like, that's an AI comment. That's an AI comment. 100%. I know they're taking steps in the right direction. It's a hard problem to solve because, you know, sometimes it's hard to tell when someone's really commenting, thanks versus AI, thanks. But, you know, I think they're taking steps in the right direction. They just, that needs to be figured out because there is some fluff and spam with that. And not to say it's any better on Facebook, like if anything, worse Facebook. So there's like the authenticity aspect. And I think, you know, when you're buying something for your business, when you're spending more money, people are going to critique it, analyze it more before they make that purchase.

19:35So I don't know, you know, right now, like AI generated videos aren't super useful or effective because there's no authenticity to that. People don't trust that content. So it doesn't work. So it's interesting. You know, we'll see what happens. Sure. AI copied. That's helpful for marketers. It's helpful for everyone to, you know, create content. Sometimes you're in niche industries and it's hard to, you know, it takes a lot of time to learn that industry. So you'll use AI to help you write that content or critique your content. That's all beneficial. So very early days. We'll see what happens with it.

20:11I certainly like it for testing. You know, if you're trying to run 27 versions of an ad to figure out what's going to work, you know, it's pretty good at doing that type of work. So Anthony, I appreciate you stopping by the Ductate Marketing Podcast. Is there somewhere you'd invite people to learn about your work and connect with you? You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm the only Anthony Blattner on LinkedIn. And I try to talk a lot about LinkedIn ads, LinkedIn marketing, always sharing best practices. So that's the number one place. I'm just on LinkedIn. And then past that, we have a podcast, LinkedIn Ads Radio, that we share all LinkedIn best practices.

20:47and then our website speedworksocial.com if you want help with your LinkedIn. Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road. Sounds good. Thanks for having me.