In this episode of Interesting B2B Marketers, Steve is joined by AJ Wilcox, founder of B2Linked, a company that specializes in LinkedIn ads. AJ discusses an intriguing case study where his company aided a client to scale recruitment efforts by segmenting the audience into micro categories and tailoring messaging for each. AJ and Steve delve into the early days of LinkedIn advertising, the importance of audience targeting, and the need for cohesion between sales and marketing teams.
The conversation further explores useful tips for enterprise-level professionals seeking to leverage LinkedIn more effectively and the delicate equilibrium between sales-driven content and brand messaging. This insightful episode with AJ Wilcox is one not to miss.
Key takeaways from this episode include:
Connect with AJ and Steve on LinkedIn.
With 25+ years of marketing experience, Steve Goldhaber is a former head of global digital marketing for two Fortune 500 companies and the current CEO of 26 Characters, a content marketing agency in Chicago.
Connect with Steve on LinkedIn.
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Steve: Hey everybody. Welcome back to interesting B2B marketers, and welcome back to Studio 26. Excited for today's show because we are joined by AJ Wilcox. Aj, welcome to the show.
AJ: Steve, I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for the invite.
Steve: All right. I'm, I've been looking forward to having you on because. I live and breathe LinkedIn, but not as much as I think you, you've got a wealth of information about the platform. It's the platform that people like to love and hate at the same time, right? It's like the most powerful thing yet people are like, why, why, why? So anyway, before we jump into cases, give us the 60 second background of who you are and what you've been up to.
AJ: Sure thing. So I live in the great state of Utah in the United States. I fell in love with LinkedIn ads about 11 years ago. I was working for a brand that, you know, I went in as the first digital marketer before they went public, and I had skills in Google Ads and SEO, so I went in and started trying to implement those kinds of strategies. And my boss comes to me and my new boss on the first day of work and, and she's the CMO and she says we just started a pilot with LinkedIn ads, so see what you can do. And of course I said, yes, ma'am, absolutely. And walked out of her office. And I jumped onto the platform just cuz I didn't wanna look stupid. And about two weeks later, one of my sales reps came up and said, Hey AJ, we don't know what you're doing, but we're fighting over your leads. Keep it up and so I went to go. That's awesome. Being a curious marketer, I went to log into the CRM and look at these leads and without fail, everyone that he had mentioned were sourced from LinkedIn ads. So it was at that point I realized there's more here than I thought. Over the next two and a half years, I ended up growing that to become LinkedIn's largest spending account Ad account. And then after two and a half years of running the biggest account, I went, okay, there's gotta be more companies than that that need help. And so I founded B2, LinkedIn. We're an ad agency that literally LinkedIn ads is all we do. We're one trick ponies
Steve:. Yep. And what's your how many years you've been doing marketing?
AJ: Been marketing since 2007, so yeah. However long that's been.
Steve: Yep. All right, cool. So I wanna jump into the case studies. We're gonna be talking about the first one, which has to do with an enterprise recruiting client. And it really gets into like the no-brainer in terms of marketing 101 is segmentation, right? Like you've gotta figure out who the different verticals are, who the different niches are that you're going to talk to. So I'm excited about this case study. Take it away.
AJ: Yeah. So what's so cool about this is when the client came to us I had already spent a great deal of money on LinkedIn. So by this point, they were essentially experts on the platform, but they were up against this wall. They couldn't figure out how to scale effectively. They had more budget if they could make it work. But every time they tried to scale the platform, LinkedIn ads would just get more and more expensive, but they wouldn't get more out of it. So what we did, it was a lot of work, but we went in and took their entire audience, which were mostly developed. And we broke them up into these micro segments where we can now message them differently. So if you are a sequel expert, I can talk to you about SQL versus someone who's a Python expert. I can give you different messaging. So because we were able to custom message these candidates, we were able to scale very easily. And also because we had all of these little micro segments, we could learn and figure. Who was more susceptible to the message, who needed us more, who was more engaged, and then we could shift budget towards those who cared more and shift budget away from the people who cared less. It was, yeah, it, it ended up being great. I mean, we sixed their budget over the first year of working together, and we worked together for almost five years.
Steve: Yep. And they're primarily just looking, they're, they're sourcing, right? So they're trying to just say, Hey, we've got X jobs open. We need 300 candidates to raise their hand. Is that what their goal is?
AJ: Yeah, exactly. And okay. LinkedIn ads are so good at both the recruiting aspect, and of course the next case study we'll talk about is, in business to business you know, prospecting. But yeah, because it works so well in both cases we want to talk about both cases.
Steve: Yeah. So how many segments, you know, once you've, once you've figured out that like, no, you've gotta break all these different groups up. How many segments did you guys end up having?
AJ: We ended up with over 6,000 campaigns. So that explains a little bit about how, how big of a spender they were. But yeah, I would say most of you listening, you don't have to break your audiences up into that many segments, but we had it broken up by type of developer and by region and by type of targeting and by an ad. So we had lots of ways to break people up across, we actually broke LinkedIn several times by having too many campaigns in an account. So in the end we had like, like eight different accounts all running at the same time.
Steve: Yeah. Okay. So I gotta, that's where I was gonna go cuz I hear 6,000 campaigns and I think of someone doing this work manually in their tool and I, and they're crying still from doing this years ago. Right. But I assume you've got software that you're using to help manage that. Tell us what the operational side of all those campaigns looks like.
AJ: Well, it's funny, when we very first started, we had somewhere around, we built somewhere around 800 campaigns. But even that, and that was done by hand cuz they, there weren't any tools out. And that was very difficult to manage as you'd imagine. And so we actually got the idea for our first tool, because on LinkedIn your ads will tend to saturate and fatigue after around 30 days. So what would happen if I'd have this small army of part-time people who would go and just copy, paste from a spreadsheet into the tool, create an ad, and then move on to the next one. We got down to about 30 seconds per ad. By the time this small army was done, refreshing and creative, that was like tired the next morning they would've to start again and, and do it again. So we came up with our concept to build a bulk ad publishing tool. So this was years ago, but it allowed us to, to publish up to 6,000 ads in five minutes rather than it taking all to do. Eventually we built more tools to help us build campaigns in bulk and change campaign targeting in bulk. So now we've got a whole suite of tools, but it started out with just publishing ads.
Steve: That's interesting. So did that when you built that tool, is that LinkedIn opens the door via you know, an API or how do you guys get that to work?
AJ: Yeah, we were very lucky very early on we were invited to become an official LinkedIn partner. But that was something that they only give to technology partners, people that they give API access to and not just cuz you're an ad agency that specializes in it but we were kind of an exception. We kind of snuck through and so by the time I decided I wanted to create a tool, I just went to 'em and said, Hey, we're already partners, but we don't have access to LinkedIn's api. And they just said, oh, okay. And they turned it on and then we can start building.
Steve: Nice. Yeah, that's amazing. That's the automation that you achieve there, is pretty impressive. And that's sometimes the grunt work of LinkedIn. I mean, it's some things you can scale, like what you just described as a tool that scales. And then when you look at like business development salespeople, it's kind of like, there's the bad way to scale, which is add on applications that are automating and spamming. But like sometimes with LinkedIn, you just have to hammer it out. You have to say, you know what, this can be two, three hours today and I gotta do it the right way. I gotta do customized messages for outreach and things like that. Exactly. So how, when you help this client, like where, where are they at today? Like, have they pivoted? Are they using it more just for sourcing candidates?
AJ: Yeah, they're actually. I think they've probably scaled back a little bit since the beginning of Covid, but they're still a great spender on LinkedIn. They ended up actually getting acquired which exits are always great. Yes. Maybe always, almost always great. They were acquired. They're, they're still a great spender. They're still doing great work on LinkedIn using a lot of the same principles that we set up for 'em years ago. So, yep, it's been great.
Steve: So tell me about, like, I'm gonna get super tactical here. So you're doing these campaigns, they're all split by the different types of candidates they're recruiting. There's gotta be a, you know, a test and learn element here. And you know, if you look at the traditional ways to do tests and learn, you've got creative, you've got an audience, you've got an offer, what are the things that you've played around with where you're kind of like, this is, this is really on LinkedIn as a platform. This is where you can have the most impact in terms of moving the.
AJ: Yeah, so Steve is, I know you know this, the more money that you're spending, the more testing you can do because each test requires a certain amount of you know, usually clicks or conversions of some kind. And so we were able to do a lot of testing because of the segmentation that we did at the very beginning, and we ended up just continually building out more segments, getting up to that like, you know, thousands and thousands. As we were doing this, we'd effectively built out as many audiences as we'd ever need. This was everyone possible in our ideal client profile. So we weren't doing a whole lot of audience testing per se. So what that opened us up to was testing a lot more offers. And for us in this case, it was kind of the same offer the whole time. So we were testing a lot of different landing page experiences and doing a lot of conversion optimization. Also because we have to have refreshed messaging every 30 days, we need a lot of messaging, testing, different hooks, like, calling out to the developers like, Hey, Python developers versus like other developers like, you are getting value out of this. So we have to test our motivations and all that.
Steve: Yeah, lots of fun. Yeah, I've, I've had similar experiences. What I've done ads on LinkedIn is, and it's, it almost, this is kind of funny, like as a marketer, I'm always looking for like, well, what's an, what's an interesting way to say this? And I've just tested so many times to realize if you just talk about that person by name, assuming that you're doing, you know, really rich targeting, that usually wins over any other creative thing because all, you know, the goal of the adage just for them to go, oh, that's me. They're talking to me now. I'm in.
AJ: Yeah, we've actually done quite a bit of testing that way, where we find out that sometimes when you call out to, to someone by a segment, they don't identify themselves by that segment. So for instance, if I was targeting senior level marketers, I could say, Hey marketers. Or I could say, Hey directors, or hey VPs of marketing and, and it's funny, like people don't identify themselves by their seniority nearly as much as they identify themselves by their. We had a lot more success. Okay. Calling out to like, hey, senior marketers versus calling out their seniority.
Steve: Yep. Gotcha. All right. Another question about connecting the front end ad platform metrics. So you know, your engagement metrics the traffic that you're generating to a landing page. You've got all this stuff and then you've, you're transitioning into like, you know what happens post click. On the landing page or further that into like if it's being fed into a CRM, what for this client, like how do they connect the front end and the backend? Because that's, for me, even though engagement metrics I think are really interesting to look at. I always caution myself to say, don't be fooled by engagement metrics. It's, it's about the backend. Impact. So like when I've done tests, Hey, this, this test is doing really well. It's a great clickthrough rate, but the drop off on a landing page is not good. Or the metrics on the landing page look good, but when you try to convert someone, you're like, this just, they're really good at engaging, but they're never gonna convert. What, what do you do for this client to kind of connect the front and the back?
AJ: All right, so I'll get to that. The, I just wanna back up what you just said. At my last employer when I was spending so much on LinkedIn ads for the first little while, we didn't have data cuz LinkedIn didn't have conversion tracking. And we were having a difficult time getting conversion data out of our analytics platform. And out of our CRM system. And so what for the, what I did for probably the first year was make all of my optimizations based off of clickthrough rates. So I'd say, well, I don't know how these are turning out as leads, but I do know this ad is getting a higher clickthrough rate than that one. So let's use that one. And then it was funny, after about a year, we implemented all the systems that we needed to, to start tying that, that front end performance to the back. And I found that there was a zero correlation between which ad was getting a higher clickthrough rate and which one was getting a higher conversion rate. And so I feel like, just backing up what you said, but the same thing applies all the way through the funnel. Just because something results in a lower cost per MQL doesn't mean that that same thing is going to be getting a lower cost per SQL or a lower cost per proposal. So every stage of the funnel, If we get a little bit closer. Yeah, there is correlation. But anyway, just back it up what you said there in this case, yeah.
Steve: Oh yeah, yeah, go ahead.
AJ: But in this case, what we did is we had every single ad had its own unique UTM parameters or URL parameters on the ads, which allowed us to, once that got into the CRM, we could tell the exact difference of each. Which is very powerful. I still recommend it if you're spending enough and if you have enough leads coming through, tracking to that level of granularity. But the way it worked is the form on the website would capture the URL and it would segment out each of the UTM parameters or URL parameters we were using, and it would store it in a system called Looker. And I know Google bought Looker, so they're probably gonna be doing more with that. Then what we would do is we'd query Looker and find out how many marketing qualified leads, how many sales qualified leads, how many proposals, how many closed deals all came from each ads. We used the UTM content parameter as the unique parameter for every ad, and then we'd go, yep, marry that up in Excel. It's very simple for every ad that had that UTM parameter, and then we could tell what the results were for the cost of that.
Steve: Yeah. Now I, it's interesting to see that when marketers connect the front and the backend, it's so powerful. I had a client once where I worked, this was a big company, right? And they were obsessed with media efficiency. So they had all their CPA metrics and they're like, we can't be above here. And we were testing some new sites that were more expensive. And this was for a, this was for a financial company. So like their goal they wanted to drive a deposit. And we urged them to start connecting front media metrics into the backend business metrics. And what's really funny is they would have a site, it was a network of sites, really premium media, right? So they were like, this is really expensive. I don't think we should be doing it. But what we noticed is that inevitably, if you were to spend 10 or $15,000 a month for this site, They would have what I called whales, right? So in like Vegas terminology, it was someone who was just a high roller. They saw the ad, they clicked on it and they were like, oh, this isn't interesting. Like, here I'll deposit a hundred thousand dollars. It was, it was just like they sneezed a hundred thousand dollars out of them, right? But that was such a big moment for us because we were able to say, look, it's not just about how cheap the media is, it's about what that can do for you. So that was a great moment. And when, when marketers go through, Mindset shifts like, stop. Just thinking like a media person. You have to understand the business side of it. And a lot of marketers just have that big like, oh my God. Like I don't have to just say Buy cheap. Buy cheap.
AJ: Yes. And especially when we're talking about LinkedIn ads where the costs have never been cheap. We are paying a significant premium. Yep. To get in front of premium audiences. It really is important to have the tracking in place.
Steve: Yep. Alright. Let's go into case study number two. So this one has to do with the SaaS company enterprise. And it's all about content. So I'm a, my company does content. So I'm interested in this one to figure out the role of not just the advertising of the, hey, notice us, but connectivity to, here's some, here's some content, download it, read it, things like that. So take it away.
AJ: Okay, so SaaS software, like you said they dealt with software in the HR space, so we were targeting senior level HR people at enterprise companies. And it was so interesting, we'd worked with them up to this point for about three months, and their goal was targeting more of their mid-funnel, where they had guides and eBooks. And when they first gave it to us, I thought, oh, this is in the bag. They gave us four different guides and eBooks to test. And so being studious and scientific marketers, we would test systematically through each one. And no matter what we did, we could not get our cost per download under like $126. And this was several years back, so maybe the equivalent today might be like a $200 cost per download. I thought for sure they were gonna fire us, cuz those are not good results to get someone to download a document. So here I am preparing to lose this client. And then overnight with no sort of preparation, they say, Hey, by the way, we just came out with this new document, it's called The Ultimate Guide to Onboarding, and I didn't think anything of it. We launched very similar kinds of messaging, very similar kinds of imagery that we had used before. And overnight, our cost per download dropped down to $27. So from 127 down to 27, we were shocked. And what was so cool about this document, it was so much in demand as we would advertise it, that it, we talked about needing to refresh our ad creative as it STAs over time. This one, no matter what we launched in its place, even six months or a year later, we couldn't unseat this offer as the winner. Wow. And it just, I think it goes to show the power of the offer itself.
Steve: Yeah, that's fascinating cuz that it, if I understand it right too, like people aren't reading the content, right. So they don't know how good it is. They're just seeing the picture in front of it. So it's fascinating to me that it's just a different name. Would drive that significant media cost. That's interesting. Any theories on, was it just really like they just hit a rich topic and people saw the title and was like, oh my God, that's what I need?
AJ: Well, I think that's the main part of it cuz none of their other content dealt with onboarding. But this is probably 2016, 2017 and a lot of people were talking about the pains of onboarding new. And you get this wrong and you lose these employees that you just spent so much to, to, to get. Yeah. So it was, I think number one, a hot topic. It was something people were craving information about. So that helped. I think it also helped that they called this the Ultimate guide. Or maybe it was even the definitive guide. They've come up with other things since. But using terminology like that, if this isn't just a little update, like this is your resource. This is the only resource you need. That intrinsically helped quite a bit. The other thing I wanna point out is that people aren't surfing around on LinkedIn or around the web going, man, I wish I had another white paper to read. Like the goal is not like, Hey, here's a piece of content. The goal is you have a pinpoint this content is going to solve it. And whether that pain point or whether that solution is coming in the in. Form of a webinar or an eBook or a guide or a checklist. It doesn't matter what kind of asset it is, what kind of media, what matters is the pain point that you're solving. So I think that's what I keep coming back to. Yeah, they hit and they stumbled onto a really strong pain point.
Steve: Yeah, that's, that's pretty interesting. Now, in doing the ebook download, were they using, I don't know if at the time the lead cards were available where like you're capturing that information within LinkedIn or was this the classic go to the landing page and give us your information there.
AJ: Excellent question. So this was before LinkedIn came out with their lead generation form ads. So we were sending to landing pages, but as soon as they came out with the lead gen form ads, we started using them and again, got an even bigger boost. Those tend to have a conversion rate that is like, like twice as high as, a good performing landing page. But if your landing page isn't tested, oftentimes they can perform 3, 4, 5 times better than a landing. Yeah.
Steve: And then anything else on this one? I know we've been talking about the content and the download. What about the targeting side? Like tell us about segmentation or other things that may affect who you were going after.
AJ: Yeah. Segmentation helped a lot because before we came into this account, they were targeting basically just the job function of HR and seniority of manager and above. And I, they probably had like a company size filter on top of that to make sure. It was an enterprise, but when we came in, we broke it up. This is characteristic of us. We broke it up by levels of seniority. We broke it up by geography, by ad type, by you know, whatever else made sense by type of targeting. And then we were able to find that, like, oh, in this case, oh, when we target by skill, that cost per, or it was a cost per qualified lead was higher than when we targeted by job title. Let's go bid lower on our skills campaigns and try to get that more in alignment. We wanted the volume, the scale that comes with skill targeting, but if it was costing too much, we'd just go and bid it down a little bit and control our, our costs all the way across.
Steve: Yep. Yeah. So that kind of triggers my next thought and I advertise this for my business on LinkedIn. So I know the, I know the platform reasonably well. One thing that can drive me nuts on it, I'll get the automatic message every now and then where they're like, Steve, we've noticed that you are doing a lot of targeting parameters, and we don't, we don't think you should be doing that. Let more people see your ad. And it drives me absolutely nuts because I. No, that's the whole point. I need to be very specific. Yes. So I'm gonna set my judgment aside for a second. Should I be paying attention to that, to that message that I always get?
AJ: No. The fact of the matter is LinkedIn has started putting a whole lot of these call outs in there. Like, if your audience size gets down to less than 50,000 people, it'll give you a message saying you'll have more success if you enable this. The LinkedIn audience box, they will have auto checked and this essentially gives them license to show your ad to anyone outside of who it is that you're paying a premium to target, which I don't think makes sense. Yeah, they'll have a little call out. Anyway, long story short, LinkedIn gives you a lot of advice that is not in your favor. And yeah, I suppose you could make an argument that it's better for newer advertisers. But I, I still don't think so, but I, I definitely think for a seasoned advertiser like yourself, like we should be ignoring those. There's a reason we're doing what we're doing, and those callouts aren't helping.
Steve: Yeah. And so I get, I think I spend enough money where I get, I'm probably on their lowest here of like, you can, you can meet with us, you know, a couple times a year. We'll put you into this big, you know, group of people. And I've asked that question. And they've just kind of like, oh, that's a good question. They like, they don't wanna address it cuz they, I think the trainers know like, you don't always follow that. But I do think if you're, like, if you need to learn very fast, I do agree. Like okay to open the floodgates if you're just looking to get, you know engagement dates or data. Here's another question I've got something on the targeting side too. Like one philosophy is use all. The I'm trying to think of the best way to describe it. Use all the different features in the advertising tool, right? So there you could probably have like a hundred, 200 different things that you could play with. Another school of thought has to do with custom audiences, right? If you know that you've got email addresses for a, you know, 500, 5,000, another school of thought says like, well just harvest those, because if you actually know the individuals that you're talking to, There's value on that. So for, for this client or other clients, when do you, when do you say, let's just go by LinkedIn versus know, we know who these actual people are, let's just upload them in LinkedIn's tool.
AJ: Oh, Steve, great question. I think this all comes down to budget. So if I have an audience of people I've already identified who I know are perfect for us, why wouldn't I spend my entire budget on them? If I, if, if I could, if it made sense. In a lot of cases, maybe you have a $10,000 a month budget, but you could only feasibly spend 2000 on, on your custom audiences, your, your matched audiences. At that point, I go, cool. We've maxed out what seems to be the highest effectiveness here. We, already have their email address, so we can hit these people multiple ways. We can email them, we can upload this into meta, we can upload it to Google. Cora Twitter, we can be in front of these people everywhere. Great. Max that out. Then with whatever you have left over, I think then it makes sense to start going with LinkedIn's native targeting attributes of like, Hey, maybe there are some companies out there in the same company size bracket in the same industry that we don't have identified. Let's see if we can spend the rest on them to flesh them.
Steve: That makes sense. Alright, thanks for sharing the two cases. We're jumping into Q and A now and my first question, you may have alluded to this answer in the intro, but tell me about your first job in marketing.
AJ: First job, so this is funny. I was working a technology job in college and I was making $13 an hour troubleshooting internet connections and networking and servers and I really loved what I did. I loved technology. But I was also in school for marketing and I knew I was gonna need to at some point leave technology and go into marketing. And as a college student, I was really scared of this. It was my junior year and I was like, who in the world is ever gonna hire me in marketing if all I know is technology And you and I are both laugh at this right now cuz we know marketing is so much about technology. Yeah. But it wasn't back. And so I had a guest speaker come in and, and talk in one of my marketing classes about search engine optimization. And as he was talking, I was like, he is perfectly blending technology plus marketing. This is what I want to do Yeah. For the rest of my life. So I went up after class and begged this poor man for an internship. He brought me on and it was an ad agency that did SEO and Google ads plus website building. So I got a lot of experience with HTML and CSPP which are still fun for me. But then after that it was like the, the Google ads experience, the SEO experience in a very small agency was, it was the start of my career and it launched me into the marketing field.
Steve: Yeah, interesting. I remember the, the early days of SEO, I remember having someone to sit me down and be like, I don't understand what organic, natural paid, like what, what is this world? But I remember those early years of just like, You know, and media was a lot cheaper on Google back then, and it just was like, it was so new. Like that's, I mean, and I guess that's in general, things are so new, people don't understand the value yet, so the ch they tend to be cheap. But yeah, it was cool that you got to work in the, in the earlier days of the SEO.
AJ: Yeah, and I love that. When I very first got into Google, Google had just increased their minimum bid. So it used to be that you could get traffic for 5 cents per click. They had just doubled it to 10 cents. That was when I first got into it. So now you talk to any attorney who's paying $400 a click, and they'll, they'll remember the good old days.
Steve: Yeah, I remember every so often I see this report where it's like highest, you know, PPC words broken up by state, and I think you're saying like attorneys in California. For the term dui. It's like that is just, you will spend 400 some dollars on that term, which is just, it is just kind of crazy. A little bit insane, A little sad too, but like, it, it is interesting how the auction mindset with Google really, I, I mean that probably grew their business faster than anything else. It's like, why? Just, why just fix the price. Let's just go to auction.
AJ: Well, and LinkedIn's the same way. LinkedIn built off of the same auction. It was ex Googlers who came into LinkedIn and built. When I very first got started with LinkedIn ads, the average cost per click was the floor. It was $2 per click, and now in North America, we're averaging eight to $14 per click. On the platform. And it's gonna keep going up as more and more marketers come in and find success and continue to scale. So we're, we get to see the Oxygen Environment Pad, LinkedIn's pockets as well as Googles
Steve: Yeah. Interesting. All right. What, what do y'all see? Like tech, it, it's interesting. So you had a good tech grounding before. Really started working in marketing. What are, what are some other things as it relates to tech that you are, you know, saying, well, this is, this is mature now, right? Like the, the, the auction style system on LinkedIn or Google. Like, that's gonna kind of be there. Anything else that you're seeing changing as far as like this is a new frontier. Obviously AI is on everyone's minds. So maybe let's stay away from AI, cuz then I'm gonna have to rebrand the, the, the podcast ai Interesting marketers. But what else have you seen out there on a, on a technology front that continues to be pretty dynamic?
AJ: Ultimately, I think technology and marketing makes us so much better marketers. I remember back at, at the university, I had a class on Excel and I was like, oh, this is just kind of a throwaway class. In this class I learned about pivot table. I kid you not, there has not been a day in my life. I have not used pivot tables or Excel. And this might be a slight exaggeration, but you know, ever since, so pivot tables are one of the strongest things, and I keep telling people, you know, if I could go back and do it again, I would've gotten my degree in information systems. And then gone to learn marketing on my own because marketing is free to learn. Like, I mean, the fact that we're giving this away for free right now to teach other marketers, yeah, it's evidence in the fact that you can learn marketing for free. I didn't need my degree in that. I wish I would've done a lot more with sequel a l a lot more with building tools. Being able to interpret. Being able to predict, and I think that's a lot of where we need to go is these predictive analytics. Especially as we start moving towards ai, AI's gonna help us with that, but not, not on its own. We're gonna need to fuel it’
Steve: Yeah, I do think that the more I deep dive into tech, I've, I've always been a better marketer and what's really interesting is people will, will tell me, oh my God, you're so good with tech Steve. Like you understand all this stuff. And I'm like, I know enough to ask questions and poke around a little bit. I'm like, I don't know, tech, I cannot get into most things. I mean, we are, we are going to very much a code free environment with so many platforms. So like that stuff's easy to play in, but the really powerful stuff I'm just like, I just know how it works. I have no idea how to do it. But it is interesting cuz it's almost like, you know, I wonder in like the colleges who have their traditional marketing program, How much is tech taking that over? And it, and I say that in a good way, right? Like you should have a marketing degree now saying, yeah, I spent, you know, two semesters deep into, into knowing tech. I wonder if the colleges will evolve there or if it's, if the professors are all older folks who are, who are like, well, I'm just teaching what I knew.
AJ: Well, unfortunately, when I left my university I jumped right into digital marketing and their marketing program was still very much focused on traditional, and it was probably five or six years later when finally they had like a digital marketing, more of an emphasis they were building like classes of digital marketing. So I do think it takes the education industry quite a bit longer to get caught up. Yeah. Unfortunately, but this is exactly like what you're describing is the way I see it for them. Yeah, especially practitioners like us end up going into academia and changing.
Steve: I remember so I graduated from Purdue in 1996 and had an advertising or communications degree with the advertising specialization. I remember for my advertising senior project, we had to create this ad campaign, which was, I really liked the project. But I asked the professor, I said, wait a second. I go, so much of what advertising people do was work with writers and designers. Why can't we partner up with like the design school? And we would collaborate. Like they would, they would bring this stuff to life and we would talk about like the marketing strategy behind it. And I remember him being like, but that's the school of design. We don't, we don't talk to them. So it was just funny even back then, how, you know, it was, it almost mirrored. What so many corporations were like years ago, maybe sometimes today. But it, it's the like, no, that's not my lane. I don't go there. We can't play together. And that, that to me is like, the companies who really get it have not built the silos. It's all just this really ugly pool of different mindsets and different specializations. And if, if you can't break down the silos, then. I don't think it can work, or if it does work, it's gonna take you a year or two to accomplish something that another organizational design may do in a month. You know, it's just the, the speed is so critical these days.
AJ: Yeah, we gotta break down the walls. So much of what I'm seeing happening in marketing is exciting because now sales and marketing, they're starting to break those boundaries down. And some of the best improvements in performance we've ever had have been going to the sales team and finding out like, Hey, tell us who are our prospects we're going after? What are the pain points that they're feeling? What are they expressing? What are the, [00:35:00] you know, the challenges they're. Like their standard objections and then we go and build content around. That's been some of the best stuff we've done. So, break down every wall.
Steve: I agree. I, I think once you start talking to the salespeople, and to me it, it usually gets down to the culture of the company. And does the CMO talk to the head of sales and what is their relationship like? Like yes, you can, you can kind of organically work with sales if you're a, you know, a mid-level marketer. But I've always seen it. It's really the, the number one marketer, the number one salesperson. Do they talk? Are they in a relationship? And if so, then the rest of the organizations can start to work together. But I think that that's also where gets exciting as a marketer, because when you start hearing these things from salespeople, they're way more actionable than the default mode of marketers, which tends to be like, let's be innovative. Let's do a campaign, let's, you know, and it's, it's gonna be all brand driven. I do think that the marketers who are really successful understand how to partner with sales, but then figure out a way to then kind of reverse engineer it so that there is a brand message, right? Like you can't just listen to your sales force and become order takers because they might be doing the right thing for what they need, but then that doesn't ladder up to any, any brand experience, so that it's this, it's this really delicate thing to balance both of those worlds.
AJ: Yes. Brilliant. I could not agree.
Steve: What are some I'll ask a couple questions before we wrap up on on LinkedIn platform. Since you're, you know, you're so deep into that. What are, what are some things, you know, for, for maybe focusing on enterprise people who are listening, if they're not really into the LinkedIn game, what are some things that they should be considering as they think about, like, planning for next year? How do they get into it?
AJ: Specifically how do they get into the platform or, well,
Steve: I was gonna, I was gonna say like, how do they wrap their heads around, Hey, should we set aside a hundred thousand dollars in media spend for LinkedIn targeting? So they're very comfortable saying like, well, I can buy some, some media and trade publications, or let's do an event. Like, those are all the safe things, but when, when, when should they really start to consider, should I be investing in more media on linked.
AJ: Well, if you have other ways of reaching your audience, like absolutely keep doing them. Like don't take all of that spend and move it to LinkedIn. But the value of LinkedIn is really in the targeting, this precise ability to get in front of your exact target audience and stay in front of them. And so much of this in B2B is like, we have to make someone aware. We have to get them to. Keep us top of mind and we have to be there. We have to stay top of mind all the way until they have a, a pain point, strong enough to think, to reach out to us. And this takes time. And we have to hit the whole buyer's committee, which again, we can do wonderfully through LinkedIn ads. So I would just say like, think about, you know, if you buy a billboard, you can get a cost per impression so much less than you could from really any digital marketing platform. But think of it like. On LinkedIn, yeah, you're gonna pay, call it eight to $14 per click to, to be in front of the right people, but you can make sure that you are ever present in front of exactly the right people who are gonna make the biggest difference to your company. So I think it's, it's an awareness play. I think it's like being able to stay top of mind in a way that you just, you can't on any other channel the same way.
Steve: Yep. All right. So this is, I'm gonna invent a new part of the podcast. I'm gonna call this part dear LinkedIn. And this will, this will be you describing, what would you like to see them do, whether it's on the advertising side or the experience, you know, content consumption, newsfeed side. What are some things that you'd love to have them change about the platform?
AJ: I mean, definitely on the ad side. I would love the ability to, to be able to target by device. Right now they don't let us target by device. So [00:39:00] when we show a newsfeed ad, we know 80% of the traffic's gonna go mobile and 20% to desktop. We just can't control. The other thing is that the whole platform is built off of UTCs time zone. So when I have a budget that gets hit during the day, it turns back on at midnight UTC. But for me here in the Western United States it's 6:00 PM for me when my campaigns turn on with full force, within a whole new day's budget. And it's totally possible if I have small. Like, I could spend my entire day's budget before midnight, like before the day even starts, let alone when people start getting into work. So I'd love it if we had the ability to report by the hour of the day would be huge. We built internal tools to be able to do that, but be able to like have our reporting all done in our current time zone so we're not wasting our budgets.
Steve: Yeah, I like that idea. I mean, I've played around with that sometimes in the, in this theory of you know, if you, if you target someone during the day, at their, at their desktop, you know, like to your point about like splitting out mobile and desktop, if they're, if you can find them at their desktop, I've always thought those are more interesting buyers because they're probably sitting out at work as opposed to like on the go with their phone. But it's fascinating to think about the mindset of how you target someone. If they could say, hey, would you like to target someone at 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM at night? Knowing that hopefully most people who are on LinkedIn at that time are more open to messaging or like, all right, fine. You know, I've, I'm winding down in the evening. Yeah, I'll, I'll go ahead and read something for 15, 20 minutes. So yeah, I think time of day is really fascinating for them to get their heads.
AJ: Yeah, especially cuz LinkedIn has such defined traffic patterns. It's not like Facebook where people are gonna be on the platform all day long for various reasons. Like LinkedIn very much revolves around work and there are standard times of like seven to 9:00 PM where people are gonna act very differently than they acted at 9:00 AM.
Steve: Yep. All right. Awesome. Anything else you wanna share with us, AJ, before we wrap it up as it relates to, you know, LinkedIn or your business?
AJ: Oh man. Trying to think of anything. I'm kind of scrambling, but I don't think so. I think we covered great stuff, but if anyone is interested in. Going deeper into the LinkedIn ads platform. I have a whole bunch of resources that are free. I host the LinkedIn Ads Show podcast and that's a really geeky way of getting, of learning everything about the LinkedIn ads platform that I've been able to teach. So if you just go search for LinkedIn ads in your podcast player, it's probably gonna be the only show. Shows that, let's be honest.
Steve: But it's a good one. Nice. All right. Well, thank you AJ for joining us. Thanks for all the listeners for tuning into another episode of interesting B2B marketers. Until next time, have a wonderful day, everyone. Take care. Bye-bye.