AMA Recap: Leveraging LinkedIn in Marketing

All right, we are officially live. I’m excited today to talk about LinkedIn in marketing, in advertising, in organic outreach, in sales. LinkedIn and all things go to market. And I’m excited to have Anthony, a LinkedIn expert, to chat with today. Anthony, do you mind giving the quick background on how you became a LinkedIn specialist?

Sure. So the short and long of it is I never expected to be a LinkedIn expert. My background starts in the tech world. I moved to Austin to work for IBM. Did that for a couple of years. Spun off to start my own mobile app development company. And I realized when you build an app, then you have to go market it after that, or else it just sits in the app store and no one downloads it. So that pulled me into the marketing world a number of years ago.

And with my background being tech and enterprise at IBM and stuff like that, just LinkedIn was the best for all those types of companies. So I’ve been working on LinkedIn primarily for the last five plus years now, five to seven years. And I’ve just really focused on this platform. And that’s where I spend most of my time. So I’ve done everything, start to finish in the ads, sales navigator, organic side of things. And I love what I do.

Awesome. Then let’s dive in. We have a bunch of pre- submitted questions that we’re going to start working through. But feel free, those watching, to drop questions into the chat and we will bring them up. So first up, let’s talk basics. How can you target LinkedIn ads?

Yeah. So this is like LinkedIn’s bread and butter. Where it shines is it’s targeting. And it has a lot of the information that most other platforms don’t have. And it has a lot of these facets that you can’t find anywhere else. So anytime you want to target a professional, that’s where LinkedIn is going to be the best. So here are some of the basic categories here is job titles. You can type in actual job titles that people have. And LinkedIn, you can select those specific job titles that you want to target. You can even do like current job titles.

You can do past job titles. So you can kind of target someone’s career path in a way too, which is interesting. And then you have company industries. LinkedIn got a whole, they just expanded this last summer. So now there’s like 400 plus industries. You can get very specific. And next is the contact and company lists. So just like any other platform, you can upload a contact list and target those specific individuals. What LinkedIn has that no one else has is being able to upload account lists. And those are company lists.

So you could take a list of companies and then you can overlay LinkedIn’s filters on that list of companies. So you could say like, I want these specific job titles. I want this specific job title. So you can say like, I want these specific job titles. Maybe I want like owner CEOs or I want certain job titles across all these companies. You can do that using LinkedIn’s uploaded company list and then job title filters and then company size. So based on the headcount of how many people are at that company, you can target like company size there that way.

So there’s actually a few more, several more kind of basic filters, but these are the most common ones here. So there’s skills and interests. So what are the skills that someone has on their profile? Interests are how do they interact on LinkedIn? What type of content do they interact with? And this is like LinkedIn’s algorithm starting to form, who is this person and what are they interested in? This is like how you can find, maybe it’s not just the person, but what are they interested in?

Are they interested in growing or are they interested in like cost efficiencies? Like there’s different ways you can take it that way. Another interesting one is group targeting. So there’s lots of groups on LinkedIn. Overall, LinkedIn groups are okay. They’re not as used as much as like Facebook groups and I hope LinkedIn continues to improve them, but there’s still a large number of groups and this is another way to kind of get interest based targeting on them.

If someone is joining a group about sales, you can assume that there’s something about sales that they’re interested in. Maybe they’re looking to learn sales or develop their sales program with their company more. So group targeting and then dynamic lists are a great way to be able to integrate other platforms into LinkedIn. The best use case is like, for example, HubSpot’s got a great LinkedIn integration.

So what I can do is take the list of active deals in the pipeline and then sync that list to LinkedIn and then I can overlay, maybe say all executives at these companies and I want to show ads to all those executives at those companies as a way to build brand awareness with companies who are active deals in my pipeline. So LinkedIn’s got a lot of good dynamic integrations and dynamic lists that can be built for stuff like that that you kind of can’t do anywhere else.

So syncing your active deals in there is a good way to have an always on campaign that you just build an awareness with people who are actively in talks with your company.

Awesome. So we had a question, and this is one that I share, around highly targeted audiences.

So, can you name specific people that you want to market to and can you pull them out of Sales Navigator or are Sales Navigator and Campaign Manager separate?

They’re weirdly separate. They’re weirdly separate that you can’t like just… Like, it seems like you should just be able to push a button and push a list from like Sales Nav to ads, but unfortunately you can’t. I think that’s coming on the horizon. I was actually just at LinkedIn. LinkedIn had a little conference last week in New York City that I was at and they talked a bit about roadmap and stuff down the pipeline.

One thing that they did mention was for better integration between their sales and marketing tools and that’s something that like just hasn’t been talked about in the past and it’s like it seems like so obvious. And there was like some graphics they shared and there was an arrow from Sales Nav to ads, so I hope it’s coming, but at the moment you cannot directly just push a list. I think it’ll hopefully in the future.

In the meantime, what you can do is there’s lots of third- party tools out there to scrape lists out of Sales Navigator and then you can kind of build a list that way. There’s also like lots of third- party tools you can use too, but there’s some that can scrape Sales Navigator to build a certain list and then you would export that, upload that to ads, and then that’s how you can then like retarget those companies in the ads.

Cool. Another question along these lines, a specific one. When should I create match audience lists to target cold leads? So this idea of match audience lists, can you talk a little bit about those and when you might use them?

Yeah. So as I read this question, I think they’re comparing like a target account list versus like just LinkedIn’s built- in targeting and like when would I want to use one or another. So for an ABM approach, like anytime you have like a target company list, you know, it’s kind of like start there. If you already know the companies you want to target, just I’d say start there, go after them. I’d say a lot of companies that we work with often have like, they’ll be split testing that. They’ll have their target account list and that will be running.

Maybe that gets updated quarterly based on the priorities or like their sales feedback and then they’ll be split testing that with like LinkedIn’s built- in targeting. You know, the pros and cons they’re asking about is, you know, with an ABM strategy, ABM is great because if you already know the companies you want to target, kind of don’t leave that variable out there, just go after those companies.

And if your sales team is going to be reaching out, if you’re doing other efforts out to them, that’s just going to be a benefit to target them with ads or sales nav as well. The downside is that you might, you know, exhaust those companies. So you might hit those people, they might be getting outreach other places.

So you know, you might get to the end of your list pretty quickly and that’s where you might want to have another set of targeting running to say, you know, depending on how performance goes, you can kind of shift budget back and forth between LinkedIn’s built- in targeting. So you can see like as this starts to fatigue or kind of get saturated, maybe then I shift more budget to the matched audiences. Awesome.

So moving on to sort of the next logical category, what does it cost? Do you have to get different types of ads and the ranges for each?

Yeah. So LinkedIn’s known to have like some of the most expensive ad prices out there or a lot more expensive than if you compare it to like Facebook, say. Facebook’s obviously a lot cheaper, but LinkedIn, you know, it kind of comes to the quality that you’re going to get out of LinkedIn. So if you sell business to business and if you have a high LTV, that’s where LinkedIn’s going to make the most sense for you because it is a more expensive ad platform to use.

And at the end of the day, you know, kind of measure your funnel and keep track of your stats on like what is that ROI of the sale that you make? You know, if you can push a lot of traffic cheaply on Facebook, but none of it ever converts, then, you know, there’s no value in that cheap traffic. So if you’re going to pay more on LinkedIn, but then that actually turns into more business for you, then that’s kind of what you want to keep track of.

But in terms of CPCs, so in the US for kind of like that average mid- level professional, it does range to be about six to 12 bucks for a click. There’s a lot of factors that go into that in terms of like company size and then like, you know, seniority and other things involved with that. But for an average mid- level manager, about six to 12 bucks. If you, you know, if you want to go after like CEOs of the biggest companies, then of course those are going to be more expensive clicks.

And then if you’re going after younger people, example here’s a college graduate, you know, college students or stuff like that, you know, those are going to be a lot cheaper types of clicks to go after. So that’s on a click basis. Some averages in terms of like if you’re doing lead generation, if you’re using like a LinkedIn built- in lead forums and you’re running lead magnets, which are kind of like a content download, you know, opt in here to get this guide or something. Those are good for like cold, you know, cold audiences.

Maybe somebody doesn’t know much about you. You can usually get those to be about 50 to a hundred bucks per lead. And then if you’re trying to go for more direct offers, those can tend to be more like a hundred to 300 per lead based on those CPCs and average conversion rates that we usually see. And then if you’re running brand awareness ads, CPMs on LinkedIn, again, it can range a lot depending on who you’re targeting, but average brand awareness campaign probably is going to be between 25 to a hundred bucks per 1, 000 impressions.

Awesome. And so, question, when should you use click- based versus lead- based? When is it worth paying up the $ 100 to $ 300 for these lead- based ads?

Yeah, so that’s a good question. And there’s kind of a lot of pros and cons to both sides here. So click- based ads, that’s when I’m thinking like we’re either just trying to build brand awareness or we’re trying to drive somebody to a website to complete some action. With lead- based ads, that’s where you have the form that lives on LinkedIn. Somebody clicks on that ad, opens up the form, they can submit it right there. It’s kind of like a nice, easy, quick process.

The pros and cons are, the pros of it, it’s typically you have much higher conversion rates for the LinkedIn forms because somebody stays on platform, that you don’t have to wait for a website page to load, it’ll auto- fill with their profile info. So you usually have a lot higher conversion rate, a lot lower, a lot cheaper cost per lead you’ll see from those. But the downside is because it is so easy, there’s like less friction there, there’s almost like less intent. Somebody doesn’t have to like give that much effort to opt in.

So you might see that person… It’s almost too easy to submit sometimes. So you might get a lot of leads, but then those might be lower intent leads.

So usually we see that those work best for something that’s more of a top of funnel or higher funnel type of offer. Again, like those lead magnets, or if you’re doing something like a newsletter, subscribe, those kind of good ways to get people on your newsletter, and then they’ll kind of continue to receive updates from you in the future. Those higher funnel offers, those tend to work better as LinkedIn lead forms, or you’re going to get better cost per leads out of those.

But then if you’re driving for like demos or consultations or something like that, that’s where you kind of want somebody to have to put in that effort to go sign up for it. And that’s also to make sure that they’re going to be more likely to show up to that call when that call does happen.

Because what you might see is if you use the LinkedIn lead form for demo offers, it’s just lower intent. So maybe those people don’t show up, maybe they weren’t really that interested.

So making them go to your website to fill out that form there kind of forces them to have that more intent. Awesome.

So exciting news this week, last week, are these new Thought Leader ads. I know very little about them. Can you kind of just give the background on what are Thought Leader ads?

Yeah. So Thought Leader ads, just like last week, these rolled out and all accounts should have them now.

I think earlier this week, I saw that there was like one account that didn’t. So it’s possible there’s still some accounts that are going to receive them soon. But for the most part, most accounts do have access to this now. So previously, before this came out, you could only boost posts from a company page on LinkedIn and all ads, you know, as you ran an ad, it always looked like it came from a company page where the logo would be there, the company name would be there. That’s how ads and boosting posts would always work.

And so, you… ads just allow you to now take a post from a person and boost that into a campaign. So super kind of excited for this because people are always going to get more engagement than companies.

And it kind of opens up a lot of new opportunities and ways to use LinkedIn ads, kind of like any announcements, you know, those are great to make from a person.

And these are great to like as ways to like highlight those different Thought Leaders maybe like your CEO’s posts or whoever are like those subject matter experts in your field. It’s a great way to be able to like get more reach out of their content and promote their content.

So just released and now you can go through Campaign Manager.

You can… A couple of caveats are like it has to be somebody who lists your company on their profile and then you can search through your employees and then you can find that post and boost it. So right now it’s just posts that have an image in it or plain text and then you can have like a link in the body copy but these don’t currently support video posts or like those document posts. So right now it’s just image posts and then you can put like a link in the body copy.

And so thinking back to our previous slide, are these going to be like a CPM kind of basis or a click basis?

Yeah.

So the two options are in terms of campaign objectives, you can either put into a brand awareness objective campaign and that’s going to be a CPM basis or you could do a engagement campaign and that can be either a CPM or a CPC basis.

Got it. Cool. Yeah. And then a related question, Ashley’s interested in hearing about best practices for employee engagement with company content and ads and that probably folds into this. So I guess what were best practices before last week and what are best practices now?

Yeah. So kind of starter is like anytime you post from your company page, there’s a button on there to say like notify employees and that just gives them a little notification on LinkedIn and then they’ll see that and then they can go engage with that post. It’s kind of like an easy thing to do.

And then I know a lot of companies have like a Slack channel and then they’ll either have like a social media manager will just post, you know, put a message in Slack when a new post has come out or you can even automate that to say anytime the company page post just dump it into Slack and then everyone in the company will see that and have the opportunity to engage with it.

So that’s typically like the recommended things.

And then on the ad side, so ads kind of run separately in a way where they’re going to be running through campaigns and targeting your target audience. Number one, you’ll want to have like a social media manager who’s at least monitoring comments on those.

You know, there’s all, for the most part, LinkedIn comments are pretty buttoned up, but every once in a while you’ll get the off the wall comment that you should maybe jump on and reply to or even delete. But just have somebody keep an eye on that.

And then once that, what you actually can do is you can go through campaign manager, find all your ads, and sometimes you can even start the conversation on an ad.

Kind of depends on what your ads are driving for and what you’re talking about there. But it is a good practice to even leave your own comments, maybe some starter comments on your own ads. Number one, when that ad shows up in the feed, if it already has comments on it, it’s going to take up more space. People will see that. So those can be good things to do. But you might want to use that for ads that are more brand awareness focused or content focused rather than like a conversion focused ad.

You’re kind of like distracting from that conversion action that you want somebody to take when you do that. So maybe a more brand awareness ad for that. And then other best practice for thought leader ads. This is kind of starting to work with, you know, who is the leadership and your subject matter experts at your company. Maybe working with them to craft the post that, you know, work together with them to craft certain posts that you’re like, you know, we’ll post these and then we’ll know we’ll boost that.

And then in general, boosting posts is a good way to like always have like an always on campaign and you’re just kind of continuing to boost maybe the top posts that your employees or your company has made just as a way to kind of keep that content in front of your target audience.

Awesome. Another question, a technical one. What is the insight tag? When do you use it? What is it for? Yeah.

So LinkedIn insight tag is like their version of like the Google and the Facebook tags. It’s a little piece of code that you put on your website and it’ll start tracking visitors to your website. There’s a few things you can do with that.

Number one is it will then allow you to track some conversions based on you can set a goal URLs. So if somebody makes it to a specific URL, you can count that as conversion. Maybe it’s like your post demo opt- in page, like your demo thank you page. If somebody makes it there, you count that as a conversion. So if you put the insight tag across your whole website, it makes it nice and easy to set those up. So that’s one for tracking conversions.

A little bit further on that is LinkedIn is continuing to build on this functionality.

If you’ve used Facebook ads, Facebook ads kind of has this handy tool that says like I want to like manually set up conversions and they have like this tool that will show your website. And then you could say if somebody clicks on this button, do something, some action. So LinkedIn is building this functionality into their insight tag. And it will track backwards. So it’s a good thing just to put the insight tag onto your website so that you can, you know, if you’re preparing to run ads, put the insight tag on your website now.

It’ll start building an audience for stuff like that. And then when that insight tag is on your website, you can then retarget people who have visited your website and you can do specific pages that they’ve been to. And then that could be your retargeting audience that you then, you know, retarget with ads on the ads platform. The last part here is like visitor demographics.

So they give you some interesting data in terms of like who is visiting your website. And you don’t even need to be running ads actively or paying for ads. This is kind of a free feature. Create an ad account, get your insight tag, put it on your website, and then you can read these reports on a campaign manager.

And it’ll tell you, you know, average demographics for your top visitors. It can break it down by job title, seniority, industry, location.

But then even it’ll tell you like companies.

So it’ll tell you like the top 20, 25 companies that have visited your site over some time period.

And that’s always like a super interesting thing to keep an eye on.

And you know, we always recommend like have a salesperson kind of monitor that. So you can get some signals in terms of like, is this one company starting to visit my site a lot more? Maybe that’s a buying intent signal that I can then like go jump on or have that salesperson reach out.

That is, that’s a cool freebie. Before we continue with our regular program stuff, a question that I missed. What about LinkedIn newsletters? Are they worth the effort? So kind of thinking back to the thought leadership side.

Yeah. So LinkedIn newsletters, they’re pretty good. They’ll show up in the newsfeed.

It’s kind of a way that somebody can click an easy subscribe button.

So if you’re running a regular newsletter, kind of no reason not to repurpose it and post it on LinkedIn.

You know, kind of the same with like LinkedIn’s article formats. Like they don’t get a ton of traction or ton of engagement, but you know, maybe that incremental lift there’s not much reason not to do it. So you’ll get a little bit out of it, but it’s not anything huge typically, but it’s usually a pretty easy way to repurpose things on the LinkedIn.

Should you do it from your company or from like a founder?

Kind of depends on the case.

case there, you can do it from both. You have the option to do it from either. So if you want to start a company newsletter, different company page. But if it’s something that’s more of like from the founder, then you can have them do it. In general, when we’re comparing company and personal stuff, people almost always get more engagement than companies, just for the nature of that. And then also, company pages tend to have less followers than an individual has. Well, it depends on the size of the company.

With the smaller, mid- sized companies, people often have more connections than a company has followers. And LinkedIn prefers posts from people, so people get a lot more engagement. That said, if you’re like an IBM, you probably have a ton of followers for your company page, so maybe you do it from there. Cool.

So the next piece we wanted to talk about is how you use LinkedIn ads throughout your funnel. So can you talk a little bit about top of funnel, mid funnel, bottom of funnel, and how LinkedIn plays at those different points?

Yeah, so there’s a lot of this graphic. Don’t feel the need to read through everything here, but this is kind of to illustrate what an average, what a LinkedIn funnel could look like. So what we like to do is start very targeted at the top with who is that specific person that you want to reach. Because LinkedIn is a more expensive platform, the way we think about it is usually try to reduce any irrelevant clicks, or reduce wasted clicks, by targeting very tightly on who your ICP is.

Often I’ll see people who seem like they’re importing a Facebook campaign into LinkedIn, and they have a huge audience. And on Facebook, you rely on the algorithm to go find the right people. On LinkedIn, don’t waste your money on people who aren’t a good fit. Just target them very tightly, and then that’s going to make sure you’re bringing just good traffic into the rest of your funnel. You’re not bringing unwanted people in your funnel. You’re not paying for that. So target very tightly on the top on who your different personas are.

And then this kind of just shows the flow of, you can choose what the content is going to be on the front end of your funnel. Maybe you go very direct with things. Maybe you go more content- based with things. Depends on where your company and awareness stand in the market. And then as people engage, you can start to build these retargeting audiences. And that’s how you can continue to build more awareness with them as they work through your funnel. So on the top end, maybe you have a direct offer. Maybe it’s just brand awareness.

And then as people watch your videos, they visit your website, that’s where you start adding these different levels of retargeting in. And some of these items at the bottom there is sharing your case studies, and building social proof, and sharing your differentiators. What we often think about is, what are all those things that someone needs to know to really make a purchasing decision? You can just start with that brand awareness play, but then if someone’s comparing you with other vendors, what makes you better?

Why don’t you just put that into an ad and make sure that they’re going to receive that message? And then thinking about all those other things in terms of how do you showcase urgency? Is there a special offer you’re making? Is it a seasonality thing in terms of, is this the buying season for your industry? Share awards, share different thought leadership things, and then share other offers, bounce them around other media.

This is where your retargeting campaigns often have a lot more content in them because you want to convey all those different aspects to somebody. And then that’s how they’re going to learn more about you, know, like, and trust you more, and then be willing to choose you and take this up forward to buy from you versus one of your competitors.

And so are you running different campaigns for top of funnel, middle of funnel? Different people, different content, like totally different campaigns for these different levels?

Yeah, definitely. And there can be quite a high number of campaigns as we get into it, where usually top of funnel it might be just a fewer, maybe just a couple campaigns where you might have just however many personas you want to target, and then you might just have one campaign for each of those. And then as those people engage from those top of funnel campaigns, they’re then entered in different retargeting audiences.

So you could have simple on platform engagement retargeting audiences, and that’s kind of more maybe top of funnel, middle of funnel, where if someone’s watching a video, if someone’s clicking on an ad, that shows one level of intent. But then if somebody makes it to my website or even my company page, that’s kind of another step of level of intent. If somebody, and then we can get pretty granular with these where you might even have, thinking about those dynamic lists, that could be syncing. You could have identified accounts that have shown interest.

Maybe they’ve just scheduled a demo, and you might not call it an opportunity yet, but maybe it’s like you have your engaged accounts. And then after that, you might have your open opportunities to have those conversations. So that’s another way to… granular with your audience. are

for the reasons of I want to showcase different pieces of content to those people. And then also I want to adjust my budget in different ways for those people so that I can maximize, you know, often it’s like maximizing those open opportunities to make sure I’m converting those, and then, you know, adjusting my budget accordingly for the rest of them.

Very cool. So another question, if you’ve got probably more top of funnel ads, how often are targets seeing those ads while you’re running the campaign?

Yeah, so with all sponsored content ads on LinkedIn, so LinkedIn doesn’t have like an explicit or like a option for like frequency capping like Google Ads does. On Google Ads, you can say like I want to limit one or 10 impressions per month or whatever the time frame is. On LinkedIn, the way it’s done is on an account basis, but if I have a campaign targeting somebody and that campaign just has one ad in it, I’m limited to one impression per 72 hours. If that campaign has up to seven ads, then I can get up to seven impressions per 72 hours.

So it kind of depends on the number of ads you have in your campaign and then per person. And then that window resets every 72 hours for sponsored content ads. The other cap is for messaging ads. And I think it’s like one, they can get one sponsored message ad every 30 days. Got it. Cool.

So continuing on, let’s get into Sales Navigator. So what are the different ways you can use Sales Navigator and what are some of the different tools you can use to automate Sales Navigator?

Yeah, so Sales Navigator is a great tool. There’s a lot of databases out there, a lot of data tools that basically just scrape from Sales Navigator. So I like to just go to Sales Navigator to get my data and build my list there. So Sales Nav, LinkedIn Sales tool, and it offers, it almost offers like a different view into the platform. When you’re running ads, you’re building these audiences and it’s kind of like a black box in terms of like I have this whole audience pool, but I don’t really know, you know, I can’t see into that.

Sales Nav is cool because I can put almost the same targeting option into Sales Nav and like see the actual individual people. So whenever we’re running ads, a lot of times we’ll kind of inspect audiences by go using Sales Nav, typing that same targeting and be like, okay, let me go check out some of these people and then verify like, is this who I want to target or at least communicate to the client about that. So Sales Nav is great.

It lets you build the lists and then you can share those lists internally with your sales team or just kind of, you can maintain your list that way. And Sales Nav, once you build your list, you can start reaching out to those people. You can send connection requests, you can send in- mail messages. And it is like kind of, you know, the set, the one- to- one sales approach where you’re just going to reach out to one person, you’re going to connect with them, you’re going to send them a message and then take it from there.

And then if you use, there’s lots of tools out there, always kind of the caveat to be careful. Anytime you use automation, LinkedIn doesn’t love when people use automation on the platform. So be careful. But, you know, I think these two are well- regarded ones, Meet Alfred and Expandy, where they’ll put some limits on it. So you’re not kind of going over like the maximum limits or making LinkedIn angry.

I think both of these automation tools do other things like email as well. But what’s best practice for combining outreach? So you’ve got LinkedIn outreach, email outreach, conference outreach. How do you combine those different outreach channels at the same target?

Yeah. So kind of back to the target accounts list thing or anytime you have a target contact list or target accounts list, kind of pairing these different channels together is always a good approach. If you have the specific individuals you want to go after, then, you know, you can be emailing them. But a lot of times we see an even higher response rate from using LinkedIn because someone gets a notification in the app. They can put a name to the face, a face in the name. They can go see your profile, learn more about you.

It’s just a higher quality interaction where on email you can hit spam filters. People don’t know much about you and stuff like that. So LinkedIn is great because you can pair it with those other efforts. And if you are doing email, you know, consider adding LinkedIn outreach to that. If you’re going to a conference, a lot of people will use that to try to set up meetings beforehand or, you know, connect with people afterwards. And then also combining both like the sales nav outreach with ads.

You know, it’s always beneficial to kind of add more touch points there so that people know more about you.

And so another question, there are a lot of aggressive, there are a lot of connection requests followed by aggressive responses out there. What actually works in cold outreach versus, I know I do start filtering out a lot of stuff that comes in from LinkedIn.

Yeah. So if you’ve used LinkedIn at all, you’ve probably received lots of bad ones of these. And that’s always something to watch out for. And, you know, I like to kind of just, often it starts with like people not having a well- targeted list and you’re sending the message to the wrong person and you’re like, eh, I’m not interested in hiring a developer.

I still get developer ones, even though I haven’t worked for IBM for a long time, or in the tech industry, for software development a long time. So I still get those outreaches. And I’m like, yeah, you definitely haven’t read my profile. So a lot of it comes from bad targeting. So it can start with having a good targeted list, a very tightly targeted list, so that you know that the people that you’re reaching out to are the ones who are going to be more receptive to your messaging. And then, yeah, avoid the connect and pitch right away.

I’d like to use, what I find success with is like little conversation starters. Just think about like if you’re at a networking event, or, you know, what we all think about is like, how can I script the sequence to be as natural as possible? You know, a lot of people just pitch right away, and then you kind of just delete it or you scroll away because you’re like, I know this guy’s gonna pitch me or, you know, I’m not interested.

So I like to start with like very simple questions and those ideally to lead in the right direction for what I want to be talking about. You know, maybe asking them what projects they’re currently working on, or have they ever tried a tool like this or something like that. Just a simple question, conversation starter to start the conversation in the right direction.

Cool. So we’re going to open it up to broader questions on any topic. Feel free to put more questions in the chat, but we’ll kick things off with a question on sales cycle. So how does the length of the sales cycle impact the strategy for marketing? And then separately cross border operations, but let’s start with sales cycle length.

Yeah. So often that’ll kind of start to define like your retargeting windows. And sometimes I think about like seasonality and stuff like that. If you know that often you have like a short sales cycle, like it’s a pretty quick decision, you know, people are either going to buy or they’re not, they’re going to be interested or not, then you might have a shorter retargeting window on your campaigns versus if you know, like, you know, you’re kind of a seasonal, people are going to buy seasonally and you’re either in season or you’re not.

And then that’s going to define your target window. Like I know like some HR software, people usually buy it in Q4 before to get ready for the next year. That’s kind of the only time they’ll buy those certain pieces of software. So if you’re outside of Q4, you might have wide retargeting windows because you know, you want to retarget those people until they get to the seasonal time. So often that’ll kind of start to define your retargeting windows.

And then as you kind of measure and analyze your campaigns, you’ll just kind of need to know like if we average like a 200 day sales cycle, then I need to kind of like let these campaigns run for longer than that so I can start to analyze the effectiveness.

Awesome.

So that’s sales cycle for cross- border. I guess I’m not, maybe I would need some more clarification on what specifically they’re asking about.

I’m assuming they’ve got international customers. I guess, how does LinkedIn work for international customers?

Yeah. Kind of the first things I think about is like in the US, the US is like the most active country on LinkedIn. That’s where the most users are. As you start to go international, there’s fewer users, there’s less activity there, but it is starting to increase. So there is still a lot of value outside the US. And it’s also typically a lot cheaper to advertise outside the US just because the US is the most competitive. That’s where most people are trying to advertise to.

So as you advertise outside the US, costs go down quite a bit typically, depending on where you’re choosing. So kind of opens up some additional audiences, tend to be some cheaper costs there. The other, you know, caveat that I can think about is that the EU has some restrictions on you can’t use message ads there. So there’s some restrictions on like ad formats.

One of the things that we teased that we would talk about in our description of this event was AI and LinkedIn. And so there was definitely some interest in that. How are you seeing AI used in LinkedIn ads and co- outreach?

I think it’s pretty early to like really say, but I don’t know, like everyone’s talking about AI these days. I think it’s from what I’ve seen and like, yeah, I’ve used it a bit myself for marketing creative, for script writing, for ad creation. Chat GPT is great for like creating ideas or creating like your first version and then you can pick and choose elements out of that. So I think on the creation side, it’ll be using these tools or like integrating these tools into the platform more.

I think I heard even like LinkedIn’s planning to do like an integration on the ad creation side to have Chat GPT write some ads for you or Microsoft’s, you know, because LinkedIn’s owned by Microsoft and Microsoft’s got a big investment in open AI. So there’s some connection there that they’ll make that Chat GPT can write ads for you. But you know, of course, always like reread those first before you like actually post it or like actually run that ad. So I think we’ll continue to see more integrations into the platforms.

I think it’s still like really early. I think on the cold outreach side is where I’m sure these tools are going to continue to get better, even better of like, you know, even right now I’ve received several and like I’m like, you know, I can tell that that’s probably a bot. It’s just picking off like maybe a recent post that I made or a recent connection I made or a recent recommendation I received. I think that’s like the most common one I’ve seen is like, oh, that person gave you a recommendation. That’s cool.

And you can just kind of tell it’s like a bot now, but I’m sure they’ll continue to get even better and then pick out certain elements and have like a little personalized message. So I think it’ll continue to get better and I’m interested to kind of see what direction it goes in. I think right now, it’s still just a little too early to like really say.

Awesome. So John Eric has a question around, how do I know if LinkedIn is good for my target persona? So if they’re not engaging with organic stuff, how do you know if it’s worth investing in ads or finding the people who would engage if you started spending money there?

Yeah. So that’s a good question. So always before we run a campaign, we’ll kind of size up the audience and like, what does that size of the audience look like? You can either size it up in SalesNav or you can size it up in the ads platform. It depends on what you’re going to be using. But number one, I think about how digitally active is this industry, how low level or high level are these people that I want to be targeting? In general, more like blue collar industries, like say construction, are obviously they work offline.

So they’re less on LinkedIn versus like marketers like us, like we’re very online. So part of it starts with like thinking about your audience and who you’re going to be targeting. This mentions IT leaders here. IT is notorious for being one of the hardest to break into, especially on LinkedIn, because number one, it’s a very competitive industry. There’s lots of solutions out there. It is kind of a high value industry where like all of these solutions cost a lot.

So these companies have a lot of money to throw into marketing and they know they need to throw a lot into marketing. So it is a very competitive ad side of things. So IT is probably one of the most expensive industries to reach. It does make up a large chunk of the LinkedIn audience. So there are a ton of IT people on LinkedIn, but it is competitive to reach them. And you’re kind of knowing that a lot of other IT companies are reaching out to them too. So you’re kind of competing in that space.

And then I think kind of the average person in IT is just more savvy and they just don’t engage as much because they’ve seen a lot of the tactics online and they’re receiving messages from everyone else. So IT is like very notorious for like being difficult to break into, but there are a lot of IT people on LinkedIn.

Another international one. What if you’re trying to do campaigns in multiple languages? Do you set up two different campaigns? How do you differentiate by language?