A.J. will be speaking on LinkedIn Ads at Engage 2020 which will be taking place March 12th and 13th at the Sentinel Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
I started out in SEO in 2007, and then fell in love with LinkedIn Ads back in 2011. I had so much success with them at a previous company when I took the account and grew it to LinkedIn’s largest spending account, and saw that no one was talking about LinkedIn Ads online despite how much incredible success I was seeing come from it. I decided to start my own LinkedIn Ads-focused agency in 2014. We’re official LinkedIn partners, and manage many of LinkedIn’s largest spending accounts worldwide (as well as many of the smaller and everything in between).
2) Can you please share some important characteristics of high-performing LinkedIn Ads?
LinkedIn Ads absolutely shine at getting your message in front of the right audience, but high-performing LinkedIn Ads give that audience a reason to go out of their way to click. The most important thing you can do is have an offer that people actually care about (your ad saying “click here to talk to our sales rep” is not going to do the trick). Then once you have something irresistible to give away, you’ll want your message to 1) stand out and 2) be simple. Your image can stand out by contrasting against LinkedIn’s predominantly-blue color scheme – try oranges, reds, and greens. It should be simple because people on LinkedIn are on a mission and you’re distracting them. If you give them a wall of text, they won’t want to read it and they’ll keep scrolling. Keep it direct and short, and you’ll see metrics that exceed benchmarks by 2-3X!
3) What would you tell people who shy away from LinkedIn Ads due to their high CPC cost.
Although LinkedIn’s high CPCs are certainly something you need to keep in mind, they are certainly bearable for many companies who are sophisticated enough to look down the funnel. High CPCs lead to expensive lead cost, but when you consider that LinkedIn leads are more targeted, thus more highly qualified, it means they’ll turn into Sales Qualified Leads at a higher rate, and close at a higher rate. So don’t make your determination on the channel being a success or not, simply looking at your costs per lead. Look a step or two down, and they generally significantly outperform other paid social channels.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.