Even though LinkedIn advertising can be incredibly effective for certain industries and businesses, not many agencies specialize in serving clients using this social network. There’s no better authority to speak with than AJ Wilcox, of B2Linked, who, at one point, managed five of LinkedIn’s top 10 ad customers. Like with many ad networks, being effective on LinkedIn is all about getting quality leads. You should also be able to track what spend gives you what results – and best contributes to your bottom line. But you’ll have to use different tactics than you would with Google or Facebook ads.AJ gets into all the details, including…

• Why many companies are “priced out” of LinkedIn – and how to figure out if yours is
• How to figure out if your audience is on LinkedIn – and if you can target them
• The key element of an effective LinkedIn ad campaign that will engage your target market
• The minimum amount you need to spend per month to get results
• And more

Listen now...

Mentioned in this episode:

• www.b2linked.com

Transcript

Steffen Horst: Welcome to the Performance Delivered Insider Secrets for Digital Marketing Success podcast where we talk with marketing and agency executives and how they build successful businesses and their personal brand. I'm your host, Steffen Horst. Today we're going to talk about LinkedIn advertising. Here to speak with me about the topic is AJ Wilcox who is the founder of B2 Linked, an agency that specializes in account management and consulting with LinkedIn ads. To date, they have managed hundreds of LinkedIn ads accounts spent a good amount of plus hundred million on the platform, and they actually managed five of LinkedIn’s top 10 customers. AJ, great to have you on the show.AJ Wilcox: Super excited to be here, Steffen. Thanks for inviting me.Steffen: AJ just talked about before we jumped onto the podcast recording. You know, there are not many individuals or companies out there that really focus on LinkedIn advertising. Before we dive deeper into LinkedIn advertising, tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself and how you came about to find found a company that really focuses on LinkedIn only.AJ: Yeah, so I started our life as a search engine optimization guy. And I got into Google ads, you know, Google AdWords at the time. And really, that was my introduction to digital marketing. And I thought it was pretty hot stuff, you know, four and a half years into my career, when I went to go by the digital marketing manager for a local SaaS B2B company. And on my very first day, I remember talking to my new boss, the CMO and laying out all of my digital marketing strategies. I had my SEO, I had display ads and search ads, and she kind of stopped me and said, okay, all that sounds great. Go ahead and execute it all. But just so you know, last week, we started a pilot with LinkedIn ads, so see what you can do. And I saluted her and said, Yes, ma'am. Absolutely. And I walked out of her office and went, what have I gotten myself into I, I've never even heard of LinkedIn ads, these must be terrible. But I didn't want to look stupid to my new boss. And so I jumped into the platform and really started trying to figure things out.Then about two months or two weeks later, I had a sales rep come up to me who said, AJ, we don't know what you're doing over here. But we love your leads, keep it up. And I logged into our, our CRM, Salesforce at the time, and looked at these leads, he was just positioning. And all of them he was talking about came from LinkedIn ads. And that was not the only ad channel I was running. And so I kind of got this idea like, Oh, well, if they like these leads, maybe I should keep investing. So I kept investing more and more and more. And over the course of the next two and a half years. I built that to become LinkedIn’s largest spending account worldwide. And after I left that company, I went Wow. There are more, there's more than just this one company who needs help on LinkedIn ads, maybe I should do something to help all of them. And so about five years ago, actually five years tomorrow, I jumped off and started bt linked as essentially a consultancy or an agency that any help someone needed with LinkedIn ads. We wanted to be there to help them, whether it was managing their account, or teaching them how to do it or auditing their accounts, all that kind of stuff.Steffen: But it was interesting. So about seven years ago, that's when you started your LinkedIn journey.AJ: Yeah, yeah. And it's been a real fun journey ever since. Just because, you know, the whole time I was playing in the platform, I was going, Wow, I am killing it on this platform. And I'm watching no one's talking about it on Twitter. No one's writing articles or blogging about it. Like, why hasn't this ad platform seen wider, wider appeal or engagement? And certainly, over the last five years, I've watched that change and now LinkedIn ads a pretty hot topic.Steffen: So back then it was kind of gold rush on lead. And like what we've seen in the early 2000s on Google, for example, back then over to Yahoo. And then like 2010 on Facebook in the following years.AJ: Well, I wish it was LinkedIn like Google when they very first started out, they set a floor of five cents per click, and they just kind of let everyone go and have success and tell their friends and invite more and more friends on and then competition kind of naturally arose. Facebook did the same thing with very cheap CPM. And, you know, everyone who tried it had success and went and told their friends, LinkedIn, when they very first started, they set the bid floor of $2 per click, which was very expensive at the time. This was starting in 2007. So I think from the very beginning, it was expensive enough that it wasn't a home run for everyone. And now it's just gotten, you know, even more, competitive since then, but I think that's probably what we have. Thanks for not saying, you know, huge global acceptance like Facebook and Google and even overturned it.Steffen: But I would assume with a $2 CPC, and I think now CPC is in excess of $6 to $9.AJ: Yes.Steffen: For some industries, right. That kind of excludes industries automatically because you're in a business that is regional and doesn't make hundreds of millions of dollars might have a hard time finding success online.AJ: Yep, I totally agree. They've priced themselves out of the markets are out of the market for quite a few different types of companies. I get asked pretty regularly about maybe app installs. If you had a business to business type of app, the cost per download that you usually look for, or a cost per install on apps is usually around three bucks. So if your initial cost per click is $6, even with a 100% conversion rate, you'd still you know, be double. So yeah, all kinds of different companies can't make it work. on LinkedIn pricing, so that makes it really important to find like, who is a good fit for LinkedIn ads?Steffen: So then let me take that what you just said. So who is a good fit? How does the company have to but what company can find success on LinkedIn?AJ: Well, I think there are four things that qualify someone in my mind. Number one, your audience has to be on LinkedIn defined by something, you can reach them. So LinkedIn will let you reach people by job title, and seniority and company size, company name, those types of things. So if your audience is just women between 35 and 65, you can easily get that traffic somewhere else, I wouldn't waste my time on LinkedIn. So the audience is kind of number one.Number two, you've got to have some kind of offer that will engage someone if you just say, Hey, I'm another real estate agent. For some reason. Maybe you want to click on this and then get on the phone with me. No one will ever want to click on that ad, just there's just nothing in for them, it's a perceived commodity, and you don't stand out. So what you want is something that actually engages this audience, I think gated content or, or lead magnets, something like we're going to give you this valuable free cheat sheet or checklist, or join our free webinar or come to our free in-person event, something like that in exchange for their contact info. And that's usually the best way to get very highly sought after people to engage with you. So that's number two.Number three is you've got to have a pretty significant budget. Because if you if you're spending less than, like, will say three or $4,000 a month on LinkedIn ads, it's really possible that you won't see enough conversions to actually see the impact on your business. So you want to make sure that your budget is high enough so that you can, you know, see that business impact and know whether or not it's money well spent. And then the fourth thing that you want to make sure you have, make sure that you have the deal size or a lifetime value that is large enough so that those expensive clicks at the beginning are worth paying for. So I kind of draw this line in the sand that's like, if you're going to make $15,000 over the lifetime of a deal. Certainly, you can pay $6 to $9 a click upfront, and then nurture that person over, you know, potentially months until the deal closes.Steffen: That makes a lot of sense. You know, before we dive deeper into LinkedIn, what I would love to talk about is the difference between, you know, the LinkedIn platform, Facebook, and other social media platforms. When it comes to specifically b2b advertising. Where do you see the difference between all those platforms?

LinkedIn vs. Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest

AJ: Well, Facebook is one of the greatest ad platforms in the world, their technology is fantastic. But the one thing that they don't have is your business information. They have the place for it. You can put in your job title and your company and those types of things, but only four to 6% of people even bothered to fill that out. So for a while, Facebook would let you target people using those fields like job title and company size. But you just reach such a small portion of your audience that it didn't necessarily work, you couldn't spend very much. So naturally, you try to go broader. So you'd want to use things like look-alikes and their retargeting, which are great. But then when those kinds of ran out, and you wanted to spend more than you went to things like interests that go super broad, and now all of a sudden, you're getting a lot of leads, and they're not costing very much.So you're, you're okay with it, but you're getting a lot of leads that you have to cherry-pick through and quite a few of them are just not the best quality. They're not. They're not qualified for your sales process. Then you take that in contrast to LinkedIn, where the costs are higher, but the targeting is so good that every single name that you get in the database, every single lead that comes in is someone who is from your ideal target audience. So lead quality is massive. scalability is huge. It's very rare when someone comes to me with a larger budget than they're actually able to spend on their audience on LinkedIn. So, you know, the possibility of reaching potentially 95% of your ideal target audience, and making sure that it's only them who are saying it is really an attractive prospect. Plus, when someone's on LinkedIn, they're in the right mindset, they're thinking about their job or their career. Whereas on Facebook, you'll you're probably, I mean, they're on their way to look at cat pictures or play Farmville or look at pictures that are grandkids.Steffen: Yeah. So you just said you know, your, your cost per lead most likely on Facebook will be lower, but you will have also a lower quality of leads and on LinkedIn, because CPC is high, your cost per lead probably will be higher because the CPC is higher, but the quality will be hired to that kind of begs the question how important it is for businesses to really have figured out sales process because, you know, just because you get 100 leads in compared to 10 hundred from Facebook compared to 10 leads from LinkedIn doesn't mean that because it's 10 times more expensive Delete on LinkedIn, that it actually is less valuable to business. Right? Because at the end of the day, the sale is what comes not the initial lead.AJ: Yeah, I think you're totally right. When a sales team is used to search leads, leads that came from SEO, or Google ads or Bing Ads. These are people who are showing intent. They're coming to your site because they want to talk to you or work with you or buy something. And so a sales team who's catching these leads, they're going to get fat and happy on people who want demos. But as soon as the sales team started fielding leads that came from a social channel like Facebook or LinkedIn, it's a totally different story. They were surfing around, sometimes mindlessly sometimes in search of something else and they came across you And they filled out your form because you are offering them something of value. So the sales team can't just reach out to that person cold and say, Hey, I saw you downloaded our white paper. Do you want to get a demo? No one, like, no one's gonna do that. It's just it's too much too soon, it feels like you're coming on too strong or too aggressively. So I think to make sure that your sales team is ready for a social leader, in general, is incredibly important. And, you know, maybe it makes sense to test that on Facebook leads just because they cost less, get your sales team tuned and ready. And then when you feel like the process is very smooth. That's when you can turn on maybe the more premium LinkedIn leads coming through.Steffen: And I think that probably is also one of the challenges that many businesses face. In many cases. The sales cycle is not you know, someone does a demo or downloads of the white paper today, do a demo next week, and then the following week, they're going to buy the product. When we talk about products that have a lifetime or products that generate a lifetime value of $15,000, the initial price for that product or service is club probably higher, which means it might take a month, two months, three months, four months, till that one lead that was generated today becomes a sale. So, therefore, it's a much longer period of time that has to be reviewed to determine whether something is successful or not.AJ: Yeah, I agree 100%. With that, when, when you start doing these large b2b deals, not only do they take a lot of time to close, but they also involve more people in that purchase decision. So it's not just the person who is feeling the pain, they also have to get their CFO involved, who's going to sign the contract, and the CMO to talk about how that product influences marketing, and now you have this whole committee. And with all of that additional complexity, it could be really hard for a marketer to say, Hey, I can't spend 10 thousand dollars a month on LinkedIn ads test. And I can't keep doing that for a year and a half just to prove that these ads are going to close or these leads are going to close. And so what we need to use are these proxy metrics. You know, when you get a conversion and pass that into your CRM system, and have the sales team, categorize those, as you know when they've talked to them, they become a tell that they have some level of interest, you call them a sales qualified lead. And when they get a proposal, you know, they're there in proposal status, and then when they close. So the whole time you're advertising you're watching for where you get the data. So maybe during month one, maybe for the first few days, you're maybe only looking at click-through rate to tell whether your click-through rate is high enough to show that your ads are actually engaging your audience. But then by the end of month one, you have a lot of leads or conversions that you can look at maybe by the end of month two, you have a whole bunch of marketing qualified leads, maybe even some sales qualified leads. And so if you're watching those conversion rates tricks all the way down. You don't have to advertise for a year and a half just to prove out whether the laser high quality enough that they'll endure a year and a half sales cycle, but you're getting clues along the way telling you that yes, these leads are quality you can continue or No, these aren't a good fit, you should shut it off.Steffen: Yeah, I think that's a good suggestion. certain social channels or advertising channels in general. They work well for some specific industries. So for example, Pinterest works quite well for e-commerce. Are there specific industries that do better on LinkedIn compared to others?AJ: Oh, I love that question. I found that there are certain industries or certain people that when you go after them, you can get pretty significant discounts on them and, and pay less. So that one's kind of fun. If your target audience is in human resources or sales, both of those professions live on LinkedIn. So what they do is they create a whole bunch of excess ad inventory. And it kind of brings the costs down for everyone. So if you're going after one of them, chances are you'll pay $1 or two less per click, then you might go after someone else. But in general industries, I haven't found industries that work especially better or respond better. It's pretty much whatever that offer is that you find a pain point for someone in that industry. And if you can solve the pain point for them, they tend to, to interact and engage. But I wouldn't go so far as to say like, you know, construction companies never respond, but tech companies do. It's not quite that cut and dry.Steffen: So over time, ad formats and ad units, in general, have seen kind of a transition back in the days there was a lot of static, free move to Facebook. For example, nowadays, we see A lot more videos a lot more gifts in ad units to kind of change things up. Does the company need different ad types to advertise on LinkedIn? Or can they use the the the ad units they use for other display activities, whoAJ: I think I would recommend starting with just a single ad format, just because you could really complicate your account and your approach by trying a different a bunch of different things. So what I would recommend is for just dipping your toe into the water to test LinkedIn ads, start with sponsored content, the one that's just a single image. And the reason why is it's a really nice middle of the road ad format. It's not the least expensive, but and it's certainly not the most expensive, but it can reach a lot of people because it shows up right in the newsfeed and because you just have two pieces of text and one image. If you launch this ad and you have a poor click rate, you know that something, it's just very simple to see like, you have to change either your imagery or your ad copy, because it's just not hitting the mark. Whereas if you were trying to use a different ad format, let's say something like video ads, you wouldn't know if people weren't clicking because it was, the video wasn't good, or the ad copy wasn't good. Or maybe the video wasn't engaging enough to get people to read the ad copy. So it's just a lot easier to troubleshoot. And make sure that you're on the right track. So start simple. And then once it's working great, then you can start testing into maybe other ad formats.Steffen: So what are the other ad formats available on LinkedIn in addition to sponsored content?

Ad Formats on LinkedIn

AJ: So after sponsored content, the next one that I recommend the most is called text ads. And it was actually the original ad format that was released back in 2007. They're over in the right rail only on desktop, and they're tiny, you get like a 100-pixel by 100-pixel image and then yellow. 95 characters of text, so not a ton of room, but this is LinkedIn cheapest ad format. And it shows a whole ton you get a ton of free impressions. So it's a great ad format to have it's low risk because it won't spend tons and tons of money just because it gets clicked on so little. And when it does get clicked it’s much less expensive. So that's a great supporter ad format for sponsored content. The next one that I find myself recommending is called sponsored InMail. And as opposed to the others where you only pay when someone clicks sponsored in mail, you pay to send it to someone's inbox, it comes to them like an email, and then you've paid when they get it but you have no guarantee that they're going to open it or like see that they got it or open it or click on it. So those can get pretty expensive unless your offer is really really attention-grabbing and really attractive. And then the final one is called dynamic ads. I don't recommend this to anyone. It costs more on a per-click basis than sponsored content. But it gets clicked on very little like text ads. So just a bad combination. Anytime I would be using it, I'd rather just use sponsored content.Steffen: So the sponsored InMail, since you know, you literally have no control after since it is that one of the cheapest ad formats they have. Do people also have to pay $6 to $9 for sending a single email there?AJ: Well, you'll pay 35 to about 85 cents to send it to someone will cut then, like Follow me on the math here, only about 50% of people will open it on average, and then only about 3% of those will click. And so if you do that math, you end up with something like a $23 to a $56 cost per click. So although it doesn't look very expensive, seeing 35 to 85 cents to send someone like on average, it's not great, but you will have those kinds of offers that feel really special, it feels like a personal invitation. And someone's excited to receive it. Like, you know, we want to invite you like a VIP for free to this awesome event that we're doing, where you get to network with your peers and have drinks and offer like that would probably perform really well. And you'd probably see your cost per click, come in way lower than maybe you can even get them with sponsored content. But if your offer is like, just download this ebook, or you know, talk to our sales rep, chances are it'll be a really expensive cost per conversion, and you'll wish that you just paid by the click.Steffen: Can you share some best practices when developing ads for LinkedIn? Is there something that really stands out that people should do or should not do in order to set themselves up for success?

Developing Ads for LinkedIn

AJ: Yes, definitely. LinkedIn is kind of a funny network because it's not really when people are on the network there. They usually have a goal or a mission in mind. And so they're not there to just peruse pass the time. So with your ad copy, you always want to say as much as possible, in as few words as possible, get right to the point, tell them, here's why you need to pay attention. Here's your call to action. And just keep it super simple that will serve you well on LinkedIn. And then anytime that you use visual creative, whether it's video ads or just a static image, realized that LinkedIn is a color palette is lots of blues, grays, and whites. So to stand out, you want to go opposite on the color wheel, you want to go to oranges, greens, purples, reds so that you can stand out the goal of your image is not to convert someone. The goal of the image is to get them to stop scrolling so that they can read your ad copy.Steffen: Great advice. So we talked about ad formats let's move on to targeting. One of the great things about LinkedIn is the sheer amount of business-related data the platform offers and collects which should help to find you know, LinkedIn campaign. What targeting options Do companies have available when setting up the campaigns?AJ: So I love LinkedIn targeting I'm a little bit of a fan here. This is the reason why we're willing to pay six to $9. A click for traffic is because LinkedIn got the targeting so right, we can target by job title, but that's where everyone goes first. And so it's more competitive, you'll probably pay more per click for job title targeting. So maybe consider some of the other variations. You can target by someone's department and their level of seniority. You can target by skills they've listed in their profile because each member can list up to 50 skills. You can target just members of specific groups. So you know, if you're trying to target it, people, for instance, go and find the nerdiest it groups out there and target just the members inside and that's going to get you it people as well. You can target by company name, which is amazing. So many people are just crazy about account-based marketing or ABM right now LinkedIn has been able to do that. Since 2007, so be really explicit set up a campaign targeting just the, you know, 50 companies that your sales team would die to talk to. You can target by industry, by interest by geography, education, the list just goes on and on. Certainly, you can find a way to reach your ideal audience using their 23 different targeting facets.Steffen: So when you set up when your team sets up campaigns, what are they doing first, when trying to engage with a specific audience? Are there specific steps specific targeting options that they always use in order to find you in and create the sub-segments of audiences?AJ: Yeah, so I'll preface this by saying that we might go a little bit far on this. It's kind of like buying a Ferrari just to drive to the grocery store. We take things a little bit too far. But I will share with you our strategy, just in case, this is helpful. First off, anytime someone tells us the persona that they want to go after, I immediately split them into two pieces. I want to understand who that professional is his or herself. And then I want to understand what type of organization they're out. Because if you told me that you just target CFOs, and maybe your product costs 1200 dollars a month, I'd tell you that a CFO of a two-person company is not the right fit for you. So if you can understand the job title of CFO and the fact that they have to be at a company size that's large enough to afford that budget is really helpful. So understanding the pieces that dictate what type of company or organization someone represents. Those are company size. That's the number of employees company industry. And then, of course, the company name is getting really specific. And so no matter the targeting that we choose for the professional will always use either one or a combination of, of those company facets, to describe the type of organization just to make sure we're hitting the size of company who can afford us, they're the right industry to have a need for us, then you start looking at the professional. And we will try to break them into four different audiences. If we can, we will target the same persona, four different ways, one by job title, one by job function with seniority, one by skills and seniority. And then one by groups with seniority. And some of these personas will maybe be too niche, like targeting department and seniority. I'll use an example something like if you're targeting digital marketing, folks, you don't want to use the job function of marketing. It would just be too broad. You'd hit all types of marketers, so you wouldn't want to use job function. But if you can, then now you have four different ways of reaching exactly the same audience, and you can start testing and what you'll find is one of these ways of reaching your target audience is going to cost less and perform higher than another. And if you can learn that right up front, eventually you can just shut off the types of targeting that are costing more not performing as well. And chances are your competitors are using those. And you just found a way to pay less and get better performance from you, your target audience. That sounds good.Steffen: How good is linked in with providing your insights into your campaign and what works and what doesn't work? So for example, I could have an approach to go broad and collect more information, short period of time to then identify, okay, this specific audience who performs better, which has these kinds of signals in regards to title responsibility, and whatnot, and then basically, scale it down or better, but segmented, are you able to get this kind of information on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn Insight

AJ: To a degree? Yes, when you're running a campaign on LinkedIn, you can get Once I think it's spent at least, it's probably something like two or $300, you will get the ability to go into add demographics, and break down that audience by seven different areas, functional areas. So you can break down that audience by the top 10 job functions that are in there, the top 10 securities, the top 10 years of experience, the top 10 companies who've interacted. So quite a few different options there. And I think people like seeing that data, it's fun to see the demographic breakdown of who's interacting with our ads and who's clicking on them. But there's not very much actionable there. It's not like if I went in and saw that there, there was a, I don't know, 30% were in the job function of sales and 70% were in the job function of marketing. It's not like I could do anything to change that campaign, other than maybe add exclusions. So what I really like to do Is break up your audience into very explicit groups were inside of this campaign is only those who have the job function of business development with seniority of a VP and above, at companies with more than 500 employees. And you'll find that if you break your audience's down into that specific of campaigns, the demographics won't tell you much, they will just tell you 100% of the people in this audience are business development and companies with more than 500 employees. But now you have something actionable based on the performance and even the conversions and the down funnel conversions of each of those campaigns. Now, you know, who interacts and you can actually tailor creative and it maybe even change your targeting to reach them better.Steffen: You know, before we jumped on the podcast, you mentioned that I think last week, LinkedIn released some new targeting options and insights. Can you talk a little bit about that?AJ: Yes. So LinkedIn just had a really cool announcement, the second week of October, they came out with three interesting releases, actually, two of them are interesting. One was kind of I didn't care. But the one that I liked the most was this audience intelligence insights. And it really works very well with what we just talked about, which is the demographics. But rather than running and spending money on LinkedIn, and then looking at the demographics, this is, as you're building your audiences, you look over to the right rail, where it's telling you your estimated audience size, directly underneath it, you'll see this drop-down, where you can start to explore your targeting how they fit with each of the different targeting types. So for instance, for the longest time, I wondered, hey, if I am targeting doctors and physicians, what level of seniority does LinkedIn think they are? Do they think that they're like a director because they're kind of a The head of solo practice, or do they think they're a C level person or owner partner because a lot of times they own their own firms like what, you know, what is a doctor in LinkedIn size?Now we know if I put in doctor and physician, I can go and break it down by seniority. And I can see that for some reason LinkedIn thinks that they are individual contributors, even though oftentimes they run their own practices. So that was really eye-opening to me. Now we get more insight into the kind of black box elements of LinkedIn targeting the things that are maybe too broad or open to interpretation. Maybe not the explicit stuff. So that was really cool. And the other release was they gave us Boolean targeting logic. So now instead of with all of the targeting, facets that you use, all being an and like, they have to be this job function and they have to be this seniority and they have to be this company size. Now you can do or targeted Where you say they have to have this job title, or they have to be a member of this group. And although I don't love it, I probably won't use it a whole lot, just because it muddies my audience a little bit. I know there are some advertisers who'd really like to simplify their account with having some of those orders. So that Boolean logic was a pretty cool release.Steffen: Nice. I will definitely help to further fine-tune complaints and get even better results. Last question for today, from your perspective. What other no knows when it comes to LinkedIn advertising? Dad will just make companies believe money when they advertise. And how can they avoid them?AJ: I love it. So the if you just start your first campaign, and you just take all of the defaults all the way down, LinkedIn will bleed you dry. It will be a terrible, terrible thing for you. So as you're going down and building the campaign, I'll just walk you through every option that the gotcha You choose your targeting and that's great. You just get as specific as you can, then you'll come across an option. It's a tick box, like a checkbox that's been ticked by default. And it's called enable audience expansion. What this is is a free license for LinkedIn to put any other people into your targeting audience, then who you originally wanted in there. So definitely untick that if you're paying high LinkedIn prices, spend all of that money on your ideal target audience. Don't let LinkedIn like muddy that audience at all. Then when you get down to the budgeting section, this is your bids your bid model and your budget. LinkedIn is going to recommend by default, you're going to be on the automated bid, change it immediately to max cost per click or max CPC. And the reason why is the whole CPC model is so good at taking the risk away from you as an advertiser, it's saying, This is the maximum, I'm willing to pay for a click. And I only want to pay when someone clicks. And so if you launch bad ad creative, the risk is off of you. LinkedIn doesn't get a click for it. And so they shut it off and you didn't have to pay anything for it. So do that.LinkedIn will also recommend that you bid really high, they tell you to like, they'll give you an exorbitant range. They'll say most advertisers are paying $14 to $29 per click, and that's total BS. And they'll give you a recommended like we recommend you are at you know, $16 range, just ignore all of that. Start with the very lowest bid you can. So LinkedIn won't tell you what the bid the bidding floor prices, you have the lowest you can go. But if you go and put like $2 in that box, LinkedIn will pop up a little red message that says, the minimum price you can bet is 475 or 525, and then you can put in whatever that bid amount is. And if you launch this campaign, let's say over the first few days, you want to be spending $50 per day on ads. If you're spending $50 a day, on the very minimum bid, you just like Congratulations, you just got the lowest cost per click possible. And that means your cost per lead will be the lowest possible. On the other hand, if you're only spending like $15 a day and you want to spend 50, you know, you have a very easy lever, which is you just go and raise your bid from that for 75 to maybe 515 or 530 or 550. You just raise it until you are spending what you actually want to but that's how you make sure that you will pay the least amount possible. Ignore LinkedIn suggestions. You will way overpay if you doSteffen: Well, thanks for those tips on how to maximize the budget and avoid the pitfalls. If people want to find out more More about you how you help companies with their LinkedIn advertising. How can they get in touch with you?AJ: This one's really easy. You just go to our website B2linked.com, that's the letter B, the number two and then the word linked.com. If you fill out the form on any of the pages, it doesn't go to a sales rep and it doesn't put you on our newsletter or anything. It just goes directly to my inbox and I am not a sales guy. So feel free to reach out ask anything you want. I respond to everything.Steffen: Great. Well, thanks everyone for listening. If you like the Performance Delivered podcast, please subscribe to us and leave us a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast application. If you want to find out more about supporting digital, you can visit us at symphonic digital.com or follow us on Twitter at symphonic HQ. Thanks again and see you next time. AJ thank you for joining me on the performance of the podcast and sharing your knowledge about LinkedIn advertising. And in our next episode, which we will be releasing next week, you and I will talk about how to grow an organic presence, for companies and individuals.AJ: Awesome. I'm looking forward to talking to you guys next week.