In this episode of Do This, Not That, host Jay Schwedelson interviews AJ Wilcox, a LinkedIn ads expert and founder of B2Linked.com. They dive into the world of LinkedIn advertising, debunking myths, exploring strategies, and offering actionable insights for marketers aiming to leverage the platform effectively.

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Best Moments:

(00:40) Introduction of AJ Wilcox as a LinkedIn expert

(01:56) AJ's journey to becoming a LinkedIn ads specialist

(03:40) Dispelling myths about LinkedIn ads and their effectiveness

(04:56) Advice on how to start with LinkedIn ads and budget allocation

(07:15) Discussion on LinkedIn's new "predictive audiences" feature

(08:37) Insights on LinkedIn InMail effectiveness and best practices

(09:33) Addressing the challenge of obtaining business email addresses from LinkedIn leads

(10:54) Views on automation tools for LinkedIn outreach

(12:22) Tips for improving organic reach on LinkedIn

(13:48) The growing importance of video content on LinkedIn

(14:20) AJ's hypothetical plans if LinkedIn were to disappear

(15:21) Information on how to follow AJ Wilcox and his podcast

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Guest Bio:

AJ Wilcox is the founder of B2Linked.com, an agency specializing in LinkedIn ads. With over a decade of experience, AJ is recognized as one of the foremost experts in LinkedIn advertising. He also hosts the LinkedIn Ad Show podcast, sharing in-depth strategies and insights on leveraging LinkedIn for marketing success. AJ’s expertise stems from managing one of LinkedIn’s largest spending accounts globally and working closely with LinkedIn’s product team.

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Foreign.

Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins.

And pitfalls to avoid.

We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that.

We are back for do this, not that podcast presented by Marigold. And sometimes I say we have experts on this show, but half the time, I'm full of it. This time, we legit have an expert. Who do we got? We got A.J.

wilcox. He is the smartest dude when it comes to LinkedIn. Out of anybody I know that I've met. It's not even close.

First of all, he has one of the best podcasts on the planet called the LinkedIn ad show. You need to stop listening right now and go listen to that. That's a much better use of your time. The dude is a LinkedIn fanatic.

He has an agency called B2Linked. That's be the number2Linked.com, and he actually taught courses for LinkedIn. Okay. He knows what he's talking about. AJ welcome to the show, man.

Dude, Jay, that was the most amazing intro I've ever gotten. Thank you. I'm turning bright red. And I want to say I'm a fan of yours, too. I've been listening to your podcast.

This is an absolute dream to be on here. So thank you for the invite.

Oh, that's very kind, man. But you need to branch out and find much better content than mine.

But all right, before we get into, we're going to be talking about LinkedIn ads today. And for anybody that's never run a LinkedIn ad, this is the perfect episode for you.

And if you've tried LinkedIn ads and they didn't work, this is the perfect episode for you. But before we get into that, AJ, how did you wind up being Mr. LinkedIn? Like, how did this all happen?

Yeah, I started my career in. In SEO, and I got into Google Ads because I was tired of SEO taking so long to get results. I ended up going into a company.

This is the last company I worked for, like, 14 years ago. And I went in to talk to my boss, the new cmo, and laid out all of my strategies and everything I wanted to do. She was like, yeah, sounds great.

By the way, we just started a pilot using LinkedIn ads, so. So see what you can do. And I saluted and said, yes, ma' am. Not wanting to look stupid to my new boss, but I'd never heard of LinkedIn ads before.

I didn't know what they were, how they worked. And so I. I jumped in and just. I basically used the same strategies that I was used to on Google Ads over on LinkedIn.

And within about two weeks, the sales team came up and said, hey, A.J. we're fighting over your LinkedIn leads. Keep it up, bro. And I was like, whoa, what's going on?

So, long story short, over the next two and a half years, I grew that to become LinkedIn's largest spending account in the world. I had LinkedIn's product team on speed dial. They cared about what I thought. They were using my feedback. And I was like, this platform's amazing.

I'm killing it. Like, other companies need this, too. That's when I started about 10 years ago. B2Linked. We're an ad agency that just does LinkedIn ads.

Dude, that is wild. That's so cool that, like, your salespeople.

Come to you and they're happy, because.

That doesn't happen to marketing.

Very rare.

You're like a unicorn. Um, okay, let's. Let's get into it. All right? I want you to dispel myths about LinkedIn ads.

I want you to get people to believe that they could test it and try it. So when someone comes to you and say, hey, Listen, I've heard LinkedIn ads don't work, or, I tested them and they stink, how do you combat that?

And then how do you get started?

Yeah, so the very basics about the platform, what you need to know, number one, it has the best business targeting of any platform out there. Uh, LinkedIn basically has a monopoly on business data. So you can target people by their job title, their.

Their seniorities, their skills, groups, company size, even by company name. Tons of retargeting. Amazing for. For especially B2B. But the downside is they've always been expensive.

The average cost per click on LinkedIn in North America is like 10 to $16 per click, not per conversion. So anyone who's tried it out, they're probably attracted by, like, yeah, I'm B2B. I want to be able to target these business professionals.

But then if you don't know what you're doing, you're paying a lot of money. And what's worse, LinkedIn actually makes it. They give you bad advice.

When you're setting up campaigns, there are terrible things that are set as the defaults. And so I would say most advertisers who don't know what they're doing, they go in and all of a sudden they're paying 20 to $40 per click.

And, and of course you're not going to see performance. Of course LinkedIn ads aren't going to work if you're overpaying by four times.

Okay, so now I come to you say, okay, sounds like you're saying I should test it. I got, you know, 10,000 bucks. What should I do? Should I, should I boost a post? Should I do an event? Should I try to get a guide downloaded?

Should I do in mail what is the best use of my money?

I think this is hard because, you know, the marketer's answer is always, it depends. I think it really depends on the strategy of what you want to do.

If you're just testing the platform to see if, like this ideal target audience of ours, what is engaging to them, can I get them to respond? Then I think the very best thing you can do is run LinkedIn's new thought leader ads. So this is where as an individual you put a post together.

This could be the founder of the company or an internal thought leader of some kind, and then you boost that post to your ideal target audiences. And they're very engaging because it's people, not companies. And that works really well.

But unless you have an overall strategy, like most people want to take LinkedIn ads and take these cold ideal audiences and turn them into sales ready leads and that for that you need a strategy. You need to realize that no one in your cold audience is ever going to. Well, not ever, but it's very rare.

They're not going to go right from I saw an ad to I'm going to book a call with your sales rep. It takes many steps of nurture.

And so for that you have to figure out, what do I show at stage one, what do I show at stage two before I finally get to ask them at stage three, like, you look like you're ready, like, let's talk to someone. So before you drop that 10k, figure out what it is that you're actually trying to do and set up what's requisite for that.

All right, I have a hot take question I want to ask you from my own experience and I want you to tell me if I'm right, wrong or whatever. I have found that when I, when we boost posts or we do any type of target on LinkedIn, we do really well.

If we upload a list and target to people that are on that list, we do really Bad. When we try to do a lookalike audience, we upload a list. We say, build out a lookalike audience on this list and market to that.

We get completely the wrong people. So we always stay in our lane with only the people that we uploaded do we market to. Is that bizarre or what?

Not bizarre at all. LinkedIn has actually seen exactly the same thing. It's actually why this last year, they shut down look alikes. You can't even build them anymore.

But they replaced them with something else that is cool. It's called predictive audiences. And rather than being a lookalike, it's an act alike.

And what's so crazy about it is, you know, I'm always really skeptical of when an ad platform says, we've got AI that goes and figures out what people are willing to do. Like, yeah, okay, I'll believe it when I see it. But predictive audiences on LinkedIn from a contact list are amazing.

We, we have not yet found an instance where our conversion rates and our engagement rates weren't higher on the predictive audience than they were on the original seed list.

Wow. Predictive audience. So when I go in there, is that based on the list that you're uploading or is that based on just.

Okay, so you upload a list and then there's a button that says predictive audience. That's how it works.

That's it. You go into plan audiences and. And then you say, I want to build a predictive audience.

And then it asks you, what do you want to build this predictive audience from? Is it a list you've uploaded? Is it a retargeting audience that you've been creating? Is it a list of companies?

Is it, you know, people who've converted? There's all kinds of different seed data you could build it from.

Okay, I got another hot take question. I, I don't, and I don't know if the, the format still exists, but we tested a bunch of times and it was horrible. I think inmails stink.

That's kind of like the targeted email version on LinkedIn where you could send a message right to somebody's, you know, LinkedIn inbox. I think they're horrendous. Am I wrong?

You're not wrong at all. They are LinkedIn's most expensive ad format. And it's kind of crazy because LinkedIn has never pitched it that way.

But you're going to pay on average. I'll just run through the math. You pay on average, like 35 to 80 cents per person you send it to.

And then if it's a cold audience who's never heard of you before, only half of the people will open that message, and Then only about 3% will actually click on it once they're in it. So if you do that math, you're like, crap, that's like a 28 to $55 cost per click. Where this flips is if it's warm audiences, if these are.

If you're sending these messages to retargeting audiences, they open at much higher rates because they recognize you. Uh, they click at much higher rates because they already, you know, like and trust you.

And you can get cost per click less than with other ad formats, too.

So, okay, that's a good hack. I never really actually thought about that. I'm embarrassed I haven't thought about that. So I'm going to test that. Um, all right.

Another one that I come across a lot, and I don't have a very good answer is B2B company. They want to, let's say, run an event on LinkedIn or whatever, or generate, you know, leads right, from LinkedIn and the output.

So when you, when you do that, somebody says, yes, download this guide. And then you get the list off of LinkedIn of people that have opted into your stuff. You're not getting the business contact information.

You're getting them at Gmail or Yahoo.com or whatever. You're not getting their corporate domains. And then a lot of these enterprise organizations, they can't take in data that's at a consumer domain.

Do you run into that kind of obstacle a lot? Is there anything to overcome that?

There is. Thank goodness it's fairly new. This has been the major complaint from enterprises for the last, like, three years.

Finally this year, LinkedIn patched it. They gave us a field called work email, which we've always had.

So you insert work email in there, but before then, someone could have just retyped their Gmail. But now there's a little checkbox that says, validate work email.

And so now if they try to type in a Gmail, it says, sorry, you can't submit until you put in your corporate email. That's fixed everything for us. Adds a little bit of friction.

Working, though. Is it working? Are people actually putting it in?

Yep, yep, it works.

Wow, this is amazing. I need to, like, undo everything in my brain. All right. I'm curious about this. I'm asking, like, everything that I always want to know.

So I'm very anti these automation tools that you can run off of LinkedIn to automate your sending of connection requests. Automate messages to your first degree connections. I'm very anti them and I think that's why we're all flooded with garbage.

And I also think it destroys your own personal circulation of your post posts and stuff. Where do you land on automated tools for LinkedIn?

I 100 agree. The types of automations that I like on LinkedIn would be like scraping and data collection. Like let me get data out so I can do something with it.

Usually so I can upload it back into the ads platform and say these are the people I want to target. But anytime that you automate a relationship and a conversation I think it just, it, it's a bad look.

I can't tell you how many tone deaf messages I get from people I'm already connected to.

I know them and then you have a message that comes through acting like they don't know me and it sounds cold and robotic and, and I'm like oh, I have less, less trust for you now. You just tried to automate our relationship so.

Yes.

Yeah, I try to avoid that whenever possible.

Okay, good, good. Now I feel better. All right, so I'm curious and I don't know the answer to this for you.

You are the ads expert on LinkedIn but do you also like, are you like a secret sauce dude on just organic LinkedIn or you only like when, when people are doing ads?

Oh, I. So I don't charge anything for it. I don't have a service to offer people around the organic side.

But I'm a student of it and I love it and I will happily geek out anytime about it.

All right, hit me, hit me with some stuff like don't include a link in your post or edit your post after 10 minutes or hit me with some like weird stuff tactics that people don't realize they should or should not be doing to increase their organic reach.

I think variety is a big one that people don't think about. When you're coming up with content to post and this is from your personal profile, we could talk about company profiles a different time.

But from a personal profile, if you do the same kind of post all the time, let's say it's text only or it's single image, people are going to like, they're going to see it and immediately they're their first thought is oh, I've seen this before, not realizing it's a new post and then they end up scrolling past and not engaging. So what I would recommend is come up with a Few different.

Maybe you do like, like a document kind of post and the documents can be really easy to create with a PowerPoint or something. Do some text only, mix in some personal video where you just record, you know, right. Your face as you're talking and giving a quick tip.

Mix that up a little bit so that your followers, they, every time you post something, they're always paying attention because it looks new to them.

Yeah, I got to do that. I'm doing too much video. I'm doing too much video because they're, you know, circling video so much. I mean, is that the vibe?

Is it like, is it becoming a video first platform?

I think so. I mean, they're testing this, what everyone else is calling the TikTok style video feed.

And uh, I'm, I'm actually going really heavy on video right now too. I recorded like 20 videos and released them and scheduled them. Cause I want to see what does it take to get included in that video feed.

And none of my posts that I've seen so far have made it in there. But I may keep testing too.

Yeah, it's pretty wild. All right, so last question I have for you. So wake you wake up tomorrow morning, all of a sudden, like, it's like TikTok, like LinkedIn is gone.

LinkedIn no longer exists on planet Earth. What is AJ Wilcox doing? Is he moving over and becoming like the Instagram expert? I know, like, like you're so in it. Like, what would happen?

Oh, it's really interesting. I'm a big fan of niching down so that you can really understand something to the core. And if LinkedIn disappeared, like this is.

These are the thoughts that I had when I was first creating this. Like, at any time LinkedIn could shut this thing down. I think I might go deep dive into another platform.

Right.

Right now Reddit ads is, is kind of exciting to me.

Um, I might go TikTok for B2B, but realistically, like, I know so much about B2B and I would probably end up pivoting my agency to, to just like whatever you're doing in B2B, we're going to find the right channels. I love B2B.

There it is. It's going to be b2bluesky.com for AJ soon or something. Who knows? Listen, before we wrap up, how does everybody follow you?

Tell them about your show, tell them about your company. Everybody's got to get involved with you.

Awesome. So if you come follow me on LinkedIn, I try to post two or three times a week, you know, something of value for anyone who follows.

So come follow me there. Or if you want to connect, just make sure you add a little customized message of like say you heard me on Jay's show and I'm happy to accept it.

Otherwise, you're already a podcast listener, so come listen to the LinkedIn ads show podcast. Every week I go deep dive into some really geeky area of LinkedIn ads that's going to help boost your performance.

That's my goal and we are going to put this all in the show. Notes I cannot emphasize enough. Go check out the LinkedIn ad show. It is fantastic. AJ, thanks for being here man. Really appreciate it.

Anytime. Have you back for around two?

Absolutely. All right.

You did it. You made it to the end. Nice, but the party's not over.

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