EP 16 - The Ultimate LinkedIn Ads Playbook from $200M in Spend | AJ Wilcox

Surender | Hawky AI: Hello there. Welcome to yet another episode of Velocity by Hockey.ai. guest today is AJ Wilcox.

⁓ founded B2Linked in ⁓ back picking one ad channel was considered agency death wish. And ever since, has ⁓ seen than $150 million of ad spends across various LinkedIn ad and hosts a ⁓ podcast called Ad Show and also has wrote LinkedIn ads demystified. And I think by honestly, any measure, he's of the most concentrated authority with respect to single ad channel in B2B marketing space. Nobody else that kind of an account.

⁓ And ⁓ to show, AJ. ⁓ Happy to you here. AJ Wilcox: Thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me, Surrender.

Surender | Hawky AI: Sure, thanks, Ladi J. So our guests, our participants are predominantly B2C performance marketeers who are also getting started with LinkedIn as a channel and who are primarily focusing on Meta, Google, and LinkedIn, TikTok kind of channels itself, particularly in marketing. ⁓ And ⁓ think, of course, who have run LinkedIn and would want to improve their skills would have known you. But maybe for our audience, maybe a 30 second introduction about yourself in terms of what you stand for and what is something that you do.

That will be great and we'll go deep dive into the discussion. AJ Wilcox: Well, I started out in search engine optimization and I made my way into Google ads because I was tired of SEO taking six months to show my results. And then ⁓ stumbled onto LinkedIn ads when realized that it was like Google, I could get results very quickly, but I could focus my targeting on those who are my ideal absolute best customer as opposed to those who are looking for something. And...

I just instantly fell in love when my sales team came over and just said, AJ, we love your LinkedIn leads. We're cherry picking them. Keep sending them. And at a previous company, I ended up growing that to become LinkedIn's largest spending account worldwide.

went, wow, why is no one else talking about this channel? It's absolutely amazing. And so now it's been over 11 years. I've had the agency a hundred percent focused on just LinkedIn ads and it's just getting more and more exciting.

Surender | Hawky AI: Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure, Rej. have, I mean, ⁓ into some of the questions I wanted to understand about your thoughts that you have shared publicly. I ⁓ ⁓ with respect to LinkedIn ads, you have said that conversation ads are not working that great and you asked them to people to pause that immediately ⁓ and back to the message ads. ⁓ And I think ⁓ currently, I think as you mentioned, are just around 36 % fewer opens with respect to the message ads.

What's really causing this? it because of maybe a lot of tools that are coming in or the ability to create conversational ads becoming easier and so on and so forth? Is it being overused? What do you think is going on behind?

And in case anything changed in the last six months or so after you said spoke about that ⁓ let us know about that. ⁓ AJ Wilcox: Yeah, the short answer is I don't know. I've been working with LinkedIn's product team and their engineering team trying to figure out why. And so to give a little bit of background context here, we've got two different ad formats that share the same auction.

On both of them, we pay to send a message to someone's LinkedIn inbox. You have the message ads that were much simpler and only have one called action button. They, the actions that you do on them can't be retargeted. And so a couple of years ago, we totally moved over to conversation ads because every action is retargetable, which is amazing.

And then they're also a lot more flexible. We can have more than one call to action. Well, here about six months ago, we figured out that, we didn't really figure it out. We were like, why we get the open rate over about 35 %?

⁓ message ads, we used to get open rates over 55 % all the time. And so we kind of went back to the drawing board and said, let's try launching some of these message ads again. And sure enough, open rate was higher. So it doesn't seem like a big deal to have your open rate be, you know, a 20 % difference.

But what that equated to is a cost per lead that was like half of what it was from conversation ads. And we went Okay, we can't use conversation ads anymore if just can't perform. So LinkedIn, ⁓ swear there's nothing different, nothing wrong. But from our perspective, we know that if you're running both side by side, which we do, you have conversation ads and message ads, both with the same sender and identical subject line, there is no reason why they should have a difference in their open rate.

so it looks like a glitch to me right now, honestly. Eventually, we're going to go back to conversation ads when LinkedIn figures out how to fix it. But for right now, we've gone all the way back to message ads to capture that extra. It's 36 % more opens, which means 36 % more clicks, which means for the same price, 36 % more conversions.

Why wouldn't you want that? Surender | Hawky AI: More opens. Absolutely. And I think around the same time, you also spoke about thought leader ads working significantly better in terms of engagement.

So, I mean, while that's something I think most people would agree. ⁓ And but ⁓ the fact ⁓ still a lot of ⁓ or most of the ads are being run as a company page ads as default itself. So if at all thought leader ads especially in personal ads ⁓ profiles ⁓ working why wouldn't companies totally flip it out and do that and why would someone add run a lot of company page level ads? ⁓ Is there reason for that AJ?

Like what's your current take? AJ Wilcox: There is, and there's a really good reason. The good reason is these thought leader ads, they're very inexpensive, really high engagement, but the problem with them is they're very inflexible. ⁓ The only ways that we can pay, we can pay by the impression or by the engagement.

Whereas when we send traffic to a landing page that has a lead form, Surender | Hawky AI: Okay. Mm-hmm. AJ Wilcox: We wanna be able to use the website visits objective to only pay for people who are going to the landing page. Right now you pay for every single, you know, a like, a comment, a see more, all of those you're paying, it's a little bit, but that little bit all adds up.

We also, a lot of our clients use the LinkedIn lead gen forms, ⁓ native built-in lead forms, because they have such a high conversion rate, but you can't use Thought Leader ads with those. So our current strategy, Surender | Hawky AI: Mm. Right. Yeah.

Mm. Yep. Okay. AJ Wilcox: We lead to cold audiences with this personal content with these thought leader ads, and then retarget anyone who engages with them with now they're starting to see company page ads.

And that seems to be working really well, but I would love it in the future if LinkedIn lets us run thought leader ads on website visits and the lead generation objective, making them a lot more flexible. That's what I'm hoping for for Christmas this year. Surender | Hawky AI: Sure. going back to your early days ⁓ starting this agency, ⁓ why did you stop only with LinkedIn as a channel?

⁓ Why you scale? Especially now, mean, of course, Google Ads have been one of the popular channels for B2B as well. And I think even ⁓ Meta is as one of the leading channels in ⁓ B2B space as So but yeah, why did you? restrict yourself to LinkedIn and looking back, do you think that was a good decision or would you want to change that?

AJ Wilcox: Yeah, I think it was a great decision. on, my biggest fear was, if dedicate my entire company to just LinkedIn ads, when most people didn't know LinkedIn ads existed, would there be enough of a market to support my family? And that was my biggest fear. And I gave myself like a seven month runway where I said, okay, if I'm not making back my previous salary ⁓ within months, I'm just gonna go and get another job.

But... ⁓ Surender | Hawky AI: Yeah. and AJ Wilcox: My whole life, what I've focused on is what can I do that I can be the best in the world at? And so for me, it was a really easy choice.

was like, if I'm 100 % focused on this one channel that no one else is, I know I can get ahead and I know I can deeply specialize. if I were to just start just another Google Ads agency or an SEO agency, those were skills that I used really heavily in my early career. But I just, there were so many people who did that. It would have been so hard to stand out.

Surender | Hawky AI: Yeah. Yeah. AJ Wilcox: but as being the very first LinkedIn ads only agency, it was really easy for people to say, oh, AJ Wilcox, yeah, he's the LinkedIn ads guy. And it has, really helped me be able to stand out.

Surender | Hawky AI: Got it. Got it, Ajay. Now, with lot of these AI agents coming up and tools coming up, which is trying to automate some of the bidding process, some of the content process, and so on and so forth, does your specialization still hold true? Or do you want to, let's say, still specialize more into LinkedIn?

Or is there any plans in terms of diversifying as well, Ajay? AJ Wilcox: Yeah, I think I'm gonna stick to LinkedIn ads for sure. I don't know how long LinkedIn ads management will be a thing, because AI seems to be getting really, really good at what it's doing. But do think, ⁓ know, we're staying on the forefront of AI, we're paying attention to what's going on.

We're working our own tools, trying to make things more efficient internally. ⁓ So long as it's a thing, we're gonna be doing it. Surender | Hawky AI: Got it. That's great.

That's great to keep sticking on to one thing that you are doing and probably the best in the world about it. I think even if the AI wants to learn, it's going to come to you to learn. So I think that's great. That's strategy.

Now let's mean, just one practical question. So ⁓ say tomorrow, leader at MCU, maybe someone at a B SaaS stage and the 20 million ARRs. ⁓ and maybe somewhere around 300 CPL and so on. their pipeline is in converting.

So this is ⁓ of a stage that we are talking about it. Is there a set of questions or if there's any first three or four things that you sort of ask before you giving any advice or thinking through in terms of direction? AJ Wilcox: Yeah, there are a few things that we can check without even having to ask questions. I just know that most people make these mistakes on LinkedIn.

The very first is, LinkedIn has a default set when you create the targeting around an ad set. It's a box called audience expansion, and ⁓ they it by default. If you leave it on, you're gonna wonder why you're getting leads that are not ⁓ high they're not from your targeting set. Surender | Hawky AI: Okay.

AJ Wilcox: My first piece of advice is go and uncheck that box. Then a little bit lower, LinkedIn is auto checking a box called the LinkedIn Audience Network. And this sounds really good in theory. And when people leave it checked, it looks like there's good performance because they see low cost per click, high click through rates.

But when you actually analyze the traffic, a lot of it is fake. It's spam, it's fraud traffic. ⁓ And it's Surender | Hawky AI: Next book. Yeah.

Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. AJ Wilcox: one of the best things you can do is turn that off and your top end metrics will look worse, but then you'll actually see real people seeing your ads, which is a lot better.

Yeah, yeah. And then when you get down to the bidding section, LinkedIn will start you out bidding what they call maximum delivery. And that's the most expensive way to pay for traffic on LinkedIn. If you flip that to the hidden option called manual cost per click bidding and Surender | Hawky AI: it relevant, more relevant people.

Heart. AJ Wilcox: bid significantly less than what LinkedIn's recommending. You can get your, ⁓ know, but just by doing these three things, you'll get your, your costs way lower, probably half of what your competitors paying. ⁓ make sure that all of your clicks are from your ICP, your absolute ideal customer.

And, and it's traffic, it's real humans. And I think if you start with that, no matter what industry, no matter what type of company, immediately you're going to see a performance increase. Surender | Hawky AI: Mm. it.

Got it Ajay. With LinkedIn the retargeting has always been sort of a mystery right I mean it sort of at times cannibalizes your own funnel as well. what are the best practices for retargeting on ⁓ LinkedIn Ajay? AJ Wilcox: Yeah, I'm really glad you asked because LinkedIn's retargeting is some of the most powerful retargeting of any platform I've come across.

The original one, the website visits retargeting, that's the same as everyone else's. And it's reliant on a cookie staying in someone's browser. We know more than 50 % of the out there are using a browser that as soon as they leave a page, it throws the cookie away. using the website visits retargeting is kind of like trying to carry water in a leaky bucket.

It's just, you're not going to get much to where you want it, but they have this other type of retargeting called engagement retargeting. And this is amazing. This is things like, ⁓ who's visited your company page in the last 180 days, who's watched at least 25 % of one of your video ads, who's engaged with one of your documents or, ⁓ or engaged with one of your single image ads. And what's beautiful about this, Surender | Hawky AI: Mm.

Mm. AJ Wilcox: is by the time someone sees one of these ads or is this experience, they're logged in. So LinkedIn knows exactly who they are. So there's no cookie needed to remember who they are.

LinkedIn just keeps a log of like, ⁓ this person visited this page or clicked on this ad. And so I can go today, create a retargeting audience and say, anyone who has watched 25 % of my video ads in the last 180 days and LinkedIn will go back and say, ⁓ yeah, we remember who Surender | Hawky AI: ⁓ Yeah. Yeah. AJ Wilcox: you know, everyone who did that action.

So I love LinkedIn's engagement retargeting. So then we also understand like the whole point of retargeting is if we go to a cold audience and we show them an ad that says, click here to get a demo, talk to someone, buy something, get a free trial, you know, those very bottom of funnel kinds of calls to action that we could give. ⁓ We're going to see really poor performance. People I mean, they're voting.

They're saying, Surender | Hawky AI: Yeah. Sure. AJ Wilcox: Sorry, I don't know who you are yet. Like, I don't know, like, and trust you.

I'm not ready to take that step. So that's why retargeting is so valuable. We find that once someone is on their third touch with your brand, that's when they're the most likely to convert at the lowest cost. And so to get someone to where they've had three touches with your brand, obviously you need retargeting for that.

So what we do, we create a three stage funnel where the first stage, that's your cold audiences. Surender | Hawky AI: Mm. Mm. Mm.

AJ Wilcox: And use those audiences to create retargeting. So anytime someone engages with that, they get passed a second stage of the funnel. And then the same thing when they interact with something at the second stage of the funnel, they're now being retargeted in ⁓ the third So if you do that without excluding properly, you're going end up with the same person in three stages. And now your campaigns, your ad sets competing with each other.

Surender | Hawky AI: Okay. AJ Wilcox: And you're going to find that your bottom of funnel, yeah, you're not getting any traffic. So what we do is ⁓ ⁓ stage one of the funnel, our top of funnel, when it builds an audience, we immediately exclude that audience. Then at the same time, when they get to, ⁓ they engage with, when we build an audience from the second stage of the funnel, they are immediately excluded from the second stage.

So now ⁓ are being graduated from one stage of the funnel to the other. And then you don't end up with any of that cannibalization. Surender | Hawky AI: That's it. and Got it.

Got it, Ajay. And with respect to the, I think so far 150 million dollars of ad spends is pretty huge. Can you take us through one expensive mistake that you have probably personally made on any of these accounts and any learning from that, Ajay, for someone at your level would love to hear what kind of mistakes do you make? AJ Wilcox: For sure.

And I've probably made every mistake there is to make. We actually recently passed 200 million. So it's hard to keep track of all the past spend. So we don't do this study very often.

But yeah, think I can say some of the most expensive mistakes that we've made deal with some of the things I told you, like, these are our checklists of things to undo. For for a I told people don't use LinkedIn's audience network. Surender | Hawky AI: Sure. Love.

Okay. AJ Wilcox: because the traffic doesn't convert. That was my only clue. was like, if it's not converting, we probably shouldn't use it.

product team came to me and they said, AJ, we think the audience network is amazing and we to work with you. Like, let's figure out, like, we want prove to you that this traffic works great. So I said, okay, let's work together on it. And ⁓ so we a client who was willing to dedicate a large ⁓ chunk of budget.

We were going to get really good data out of it. And what we found was, you know, kind of embarrassingly, one month, 67 % of our budget went to a single Sudoku app on Android. Now, nothing gets Android. I'm a huge Android fan, but I know that one Sudoku app should not be spending all of our budget.

And what that tells me is the developer of that was committing fraud. As someone is playing the game, they're... Surender | Hawky AI: No. AJ Wilcox: behind the screen that they're serving up the ad and then creating a simulated click on it.

And I would sure hope that LinkedIn is catching stuff like this and shutting people down and saying, we never want people being able to interact with our ads again. We don't want them taking our budget. But even still, like because the fact that this happens, went, sorry, I can't recommend the audience network to anyone unless LinkedIn really fixes the traffic. ⁓ to that point, we've had really good luck.

Surender | Hawky AI: Mm. AJ Wilcox: really good success with the audience network when we apply a really strict block or allow list. So what we do is we block it. we say, we only want you seeing our ads.

If you're on the wall street journal business insider, you know, those kinds of really high quality news sites, then that's when we use it and it works well. Surender | Hawky AI: Okay. Mm-hmm. Check.

now, will still recommend to use the audience network or for anyone who is probably let's say doing from on their own, would you still recommend or not? AJ Wilcox: but with a very small portion of the budget. ⁓ I would usually say is take all of your, your budget and give it to LinkedIn. And only when you are like, wow, we have more budget.

We'd like to spend more on LinkedIn. That's when I would say, all right, let's create a version of these, these ad sets that is just for the audience network and, and that as like an expansion rather than a, you know, the first place that you deploy that budget. Surender | Hawky AI: Okay. Hmm.

Anyway. Hmm. Primarily. Got it.

Got it, Vijay. think you have been very vocal about wasted ad spends on LinkedIn. Can walk us through that a little bit in terms of more, let's say, whether it is ⁓ tactical in or targeting, bidding, creative, or something else entirely, ⁓ Vijay? AJ Wilcox: Yeah, I think it really comes down to bidding and targeting for the most part.

One thing ⁓ I'm performance focused. That's how I've been a marketer my entire career. And when I people who I audit their accounts and they're paying 20 to 40 dollars per click on average, they're I've seen paying up to ten thousand dollars CPM. ⁓ When I see them ⁓ Surender | Hawky AI: Wow, okay.

AJ Wilcox: targeting an ABM list, for instance, like a list of just specific companies, but they've left audience expansion turned on. So we're hitting people in different companies than that. When I see these things, it hurts my heart. I look at it and go, like as a marketer, we shouldn't be seeing this.

it really is LinkedIn's default options that they leave on that are causing marketers who don't know what they're doing to ⁓ so much money. So that's why I've really focused around like Surender | Hawky AI: Yeah. AJ Wilcox: Yeah, if you come to us as an agency, you're going to pay us and that's a real cost. But what are you going to get for that?

Well, generally ⁓ going to save you more than half of what you would have paid without us just because LinkedIn's options, ⁓ just we're really meticulous in the way that we adjust our bidding. We're constantly making adjustments up down to make sure we're getting our clients the very lowest costs. Surender | Hawky AI: Thanks. AJ Wilcox: That's the way we found to say, yes, we do cost money, but you're going to save more on your ads.

you know, it's kind of like getting the best in the business for free is what I tell people on the podcast. Surender | Hawky AI: Got it. Got it, Ajay. Now, I think a lot of the ad platforms, be it Meta, Google, TikTok, and so on, have moved on totally to sort of a creative-based targeting as a structure, right?

I think LinkedIn, I think targeting still works, but what is the, is our creatives becoming more important? Is creative-based targeting becoming a thing in LinkedIn yet or not? AJ Wilcox: I think LinkedIn is trying to make it a thing, but it's not yet. And I think the reason why is for your creative to do the targeting, there's a lot of AI and a lot of machine learning involved, which requires a lot of site usage.

Now LinkedIn is huge. There's nothing, you know, they're not doing anything wrong, but we also know that LinkedIn is not the platform that everyone goes and spends all day like, all day on, like they are on TikTok. So Surender | Hawky AI: Let's start. Yes, that's it.

That's it. AJ Wilcox: That means that LinkedIn is limited in the data that they have and the number of touch points they have with each person. So I think LinkedIn, that's the direction they're going. They're looking at Google and Meta and saying, you know, we're going to be like that we can, but it's going to be a little while until they get enough of those signals.

So I'm predicting probably another three to four years and then LinkedIn will probably get there. But right now, ⁓ know, we target the way that we target because it's Surender | Hawky AI: Yeah. AJ Wilcox: Yeah, there's no other platform on the planet that we can use to hit our exact ICP and it's working great. So we're going to keep doing it until LinkedIn takes that away from us.

Surender | Hawky AI: That works. Yeah. That's it. Yeah, got it.

Now, when it comes to what works well on a meta or TikTok is exactly something that doesn't work well on LinkedIn, like something like a punchy hooks or a UGC ⁓ or and so on. Is that changing? Are you seeing that changing? And also, what is your creative playbook?

So let's say, what the type of creatives that you use for? different objectives, it single images, video versus document versus thought leaders and so on. How do you rank with respect to the ROI AJ? What's your go-to format and how do you stack rank it?

AJ Wilcox: Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting because, B2B advertisers and that's the vast majority of advertisers on LinkedIn, for a long time, they've been kind of boring and I won't say kind of they've been very, very boring. We think as marketers like, when you're over on Facebook and Tik TOK, you have a personality and you think things are funny.

But as soon as you come to LinkedIn, ⁓ your tie is on and your shirt's all buttoned up and you've got a suit on. that's not how we are as humans. So I love ⁓ brands are starting to branch out and realize that humans on LinkedIn, they love comedy. They love things that are funny.

They love things that are witty. They like hooks. What don't like is ⁓ clickbait. if you're to try clickbait on LinkedIn and disappoint a user, Surender | Hawky AI: Yeah.

Yeah. AJ Wilcox: Be aware, you're probably gonna ruin that relationship with someone who is really high quality. So I wouldn't recommend that. that's what I'm thinking is like, yeah, in the past, ⁓ thought about this is the creative for LinkedIn and this is the creative for TikTok, but try blending those.

We an ⁓ experience, partnered with a video ⁓ company Video Brothers. And what they specialize in is making really witty and ⁓ funny for B2B. ⁓ And that was like, we've ran five accounts with their creative in it. And all five have been the highest performing video content we've ever seen.

Some of the lowest cost per of anything. And we love it. So that was what taught me creativity really does pay off. Even though the majority of our clients, if you asked them, I think they would say like, oh, we need to be very professional on LinkedIn.

We need to abide by all of our brand guidelines. And I try to convince them like, No, ignore that. Like ignore brand guidelines just for a test. Just see what's possible here.

Surender | Hawky AI: Are you able to convince them? AJ Wilcox: Sometimes yes, sometimes no. what the client wants, like we're going to give them. That's what they're, you know, they're the ones paying our check.

But ⁓ they'll listen, I will try to convince them of like, for if you video ads, ⁓ it's really to say all creative in the video needs to abide by company guidelines. You know, we've got, they have to be these colors and these fonts and all that. But we've found that if you have Surender | Hawky AI: Got it. AJ Wilcox: your subtitles, your captions on the video, if it's bright colors that stands out on LinkedIn, you can get twice as many people to view to the end as when you as if you your own company guidelines.

So I try to say, like, let's test going off script a little bit ⁓ see, because if you can get twice as many people to watch your video, you're to end up with half the cost per click, half the cost per conversion. That can make a huge deal. Surender | Hawky AI: Yep. That's right.

That's right. What about your thoughts about founder led ads or like where the founders appear? AJ Wilcox: Yeah, love it when we can get the executive team, the founder involved in creating video ads, because those are by far the highest performing ads. ⁓ If you don't have access to your founder, that's okay.

Like we still see really good performance from your head of product and your head of customer support and sales and marketing. But when you can get your executive team involved, people love that. That's a viewpoint that they just can't get anywhere else. And it's totally worth it.

Surender | Hawky AI: Hmm. Yeah, we got it. And if you have to maybe compare or choose one ⁓ founder led ads versus ⁓ witty and ⁓ funny ad, what be your go-to option? AJ Wilcox: I think I would say both.

If I had to choose. If I had to choose, I'd probably say witty because I think if you have a funny creative, ⁓ people will associate those good feelings with a brand, which is exactly what's so easy to do when you're associating good feelings with a person. So, yeah, I think it's more scalable to be able to do something that's funny. But ideally, you use both and get to test both.

Surender | Hawky AI: Mm-hmm. person. to be in. Got it.

And with respect to the media formats like images versus videos, document ads, short-read ads, what would be your stack rank? AJ Wilcox: awesome question. ⁓ would say at the top of the funnel, video. So in your, ⁓ call my stage one or my stage two, your first two touches, video is so powerful.

But in the third stage, ⁓ find that static is actually better. ⁓ ⁓ my stage one is going to be video thought leader ads from your executive team, from ⁓ someone internally. The second stage, Surender | Hawky AI: Mm-hmm. AJ Wilcox: probably gonna be video representing the brand if you can, and then some other static assets.

by stage three, we're gonna be all static. so gonna be looking at single image ads and also message ads. ⁓ They to perform really well when you're trying to invite someone for a demo, a call of some kind. Message ads seem to be the strongest ad format for that.

Surender | Hawky AI: Mm. Yeah. Got it. Got it.

Cool. That's great. Now with A coming into picture, right? So I mean, I think you also mentioned about probably the interaction ⁓ LinkedIn or let's say the people who are spending time on LinkedIn is small.

That also is directly correlating to the size of the that's there in LinkedIn compared to Media Meta or Google. Probably this is tiny, right? Now. Your creatives can probably get burned through within a couple of weeks or three ⁓ upon the size of the audience that you are ⁓ of targeting.

How is H changing that? In a sense like more creatives, is it being really helpful in getting a better ROI of your ad budget or not? AJ Wilcox: Good question. Surprisingly not.

And the reason for that is because LinkedIn users only come back, you know, the average user checks in like three or four times per month. So because of that, if they see the same creative a times, they don't get sick of it like they do after the 30th time they've seen it on Meta. So ⁓ what actually found is ⁓ if can't refresh your creative as often, LinkedIn is actually kinder to you, like Surender | Hawky AI: Mm. AJ Wilcox: we can usually run ads for a month, sometimes a month and a half before we start to see declining performance.

Whereas when we run stuff for ourselves on Meta, like if we don't refresh our ads ⁓ they get stale very fast. ⁓ would say it's, and LinkedIn's not very good at managing lots creatives in a single ad set. So ⁓ if we two ads, like an A-B test in an ad set, that's Surender | Hawky AI: Hmm. AJ Wilcox: generally enough, if we add, you three, four, five, seven creatives in an ad set, LinkedIn doesn't rotate them very well.

And there's no setting that you can click that will do it any better. Surender | Hawky AI: But I think they are recommending to use more than five to get the best performance, right? That's the TCR. AJ Wilcox: Yeah.

Yeah, that's what they recommend. And have reasons for recommending that that make their ⁓ more competitive. ⁓ yeah, if you put seven creatives in an ad set, just watch and see what happens as you run it. You're to have one that takes 70 % of the impressions, one that takes 25.

And then the other five creatives will all share the last 5 % of impressions and ⁓ won't run. So ⁓ hate creating creative that Surender | Hawky AI: Yes. Well, okay. Okay.

AJ Wilcox: never got enough impressions to even see if it was a good performer or not. Surender | Hawky AI: Yeah, yeah, God, it is it. And ⁓ LinkedIn algo capable of sniffing AI content? Is it something like, are you seeing any drastic difference between AI content versus original content?

Is that related to audience engagement or even with respect to the scale or the distribution? AJ Wilcox: We haven't seen LinkedIn say anything to advertisers about whether their ad content is AI created. So we've run some stuff that was AI created, some that wasn't. ⁓ what we've found is I think people are really good at telling what's AI created and what's not, at least right now.

And so we find AI created content ⁓ performing as well, at least the written content. So. ⁓ what we really like is to have AI help with the ideas around copy, but it's still a human putting the finishing, know, final touches and polish on it. And then, then the user, like they couldn't tell that it's AI.

So I think that's the right way to go. visuals, I haven't tested a whole lot of visual creative that's AI created. I'm I know it's getting better, but ⁓ I ever used a to create an image that a client said, Surender | Hawky AI: Yeah. Mm.

Mm. AJ Wilcox: ⁓ yeah, that looks good. Let's run that. Like it's never happened.

So as it gets better, I think we'll a little bit better of a feeling, but we know LinkedIn is watching for AI created content on the organic side. I just think that when you're willing to pay them ⁓ for they're like, okay, yeah, we don't care, but we'll turn your account off if you're, or we'll give you less reach if we can tell what you're doing on the organic side is AI created. Surender | Hawky AI: Goddess. Right.

Yeah. Got it, say. But yes, mean, small note about the creatives looking maybe not ⁓ original, the creatives. Maybe I think you should try hockey ones ⁓ the creatives that ⁓ extremely performance marketing optimized for these platforms.

We supported primarily on Mata and Google. They're also starting with LinkedIn. We'd love to sort of show that to you. ⁓ AJ Wilcox: Cool.

⁓ I would love to test it out. That'd be so much fun. Surender | Hawky AI: Sure. now let's say ⁓ mentioned like maybe three or four years for LinkedIn to probably completely implement creative-based targeting, right?

So they are already testing it out right now. Now with that, also coming into picture ⁓ and a lot media buying skills as well maybe are getting more efficient with the help of AI. probably the likes of you and your team who are leading the game itself might not see a lot of difference, but I think the 95 % people are already able to see media buying getting automated significantly in majority of the channels including LinkedIn. How is the skill sets importance are changing AJ?

What are the type of ⁓ Are you starting to hire for any new type of skill sets or your hiring has remained unchanged? You sort of like look for the same sort of people that you were looking for maybe three years back or four years back. AJ Wilcox: Yeah, I think we're still hiring for the same kind of person, but obviously, like, I can teach them AI skills and I can teach them other things. I just need to make sure that they are willing to learn and they're sharp and curious and ask questions.

What we find is AI is getting a lot better at the kinds of tasks that we want it to help us with. For instance, a year ago, I tried... Surender | Hawky AI: Let's start. AJ Wilcox: to see if I could get AI to create reports for me and interpret the data.

And it did a terrible job. I mean, it was just bad, bad, bad. But here, even just a month ago, I did it again. And AI, still not great at interpreting the data, but what it's really good at is understanding how to process the data.

And so the majority of our client reporting is now done through AI building a Python workflow. maybe you don't call it entirely AI, but pretty cool that the AI built that. We're seeing, you know, just like you've talked about with creative, I think that's ⁓ a brainer to test out is having the visuals and the copy at least with AI, you know, even created by to see if we can get that off of the advertisers shoulders. Then I think the next frontier is going to be the actual ads management, the Surender | Hawky AI: Yeah.

That's right. AJ Wilcox: Can we have AI go into an account and pause certain things when they perform poorly or can it launch something new, a new ad set, change targeting? I think we're gonna see that here pretty soon too. Surender | Hawky AI: inch.

Got it. Got it. Have you been ⁓ trying to implement any more augmented workflows internally to sort probably automate some of the mutant tasks? I think you mentioned about the client reporting.

But apart from that, have you started using AINative workflows internally? Do you push your team to constantly look out for such things or how is it? AJ Wilcox: Yeah, I try to get the team to always look for things like ways that they can use AI to make their workflow faster. The reporting was the easiest implementation of that.

We also process a lot of lists. Clients will send us lists of companies that we call ABM lists, or they'll send contact lists that they want to either target or exclude in their campaigns. that used be a lot of manual like paste in Excel and... and move columns around and stuff like that, AI does that great.

The challenge is that there's a lot of personally identifiable information in there. So we have used AI on a local model on my PC to do it all offline, ⁓ which been great. So I think that's like one cool that we've augmented our work with AI. And of course, we just keep looking for more.

Surender | Hawky AI: Mm. it. I think for someone is following marketing, my feed is filled with posts where it asked me to come and to get the cloud workflows or workflows and so on and so forth. What's your take on that piece of lead generation?

Is that something that you have done it? Has it worked or is it just ⁓ engagement farming like what is your take there? AJ Wilcox: Yeah, it's, it is something that I like a lot. Um, I have, when I look in my newsfeed, I see a lot of people who are pushing against it and calling that low quality.

They call it engagement farming. Um, and they say, I'll never do that. But you know, one of the most successful ways that we distributed, we came up with this new advanced guide for LinkedIn ads and we released it for free. Uh, but before we released it on the website, you know, behind a form, uh, I gave it away for free.

in a post and we had over a thousand people request it and and I know if I put that on the website behind a form and you know put a post up there's no way I would have gotten a thousand conversions out of that you know with no ad spend so it worked so well for us but I'm also really careful about people's experience with us like I never want them to feel directly sold to like I tell people on the sales call Surender | Hawky AI: Good. Okay. AJ Wilcox: You're not getting a sales pitch from me unless you ask for it.

that's the experience that we cultivate. So when they ask for an asset, we give them the asset and it's free. And hopefully it's everything that we told them that it was going to be. So think if you approach it in a quality way, I think it's probably still going to be successful.

But again, just always, always, always avoid bait and switch. ⁓ No wants to ⁓ give information for something and then feel like they were, they got bamboozled. Surender | Hawky AI: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's right.

is the, are leads who you have probably, who have commented on these posts, right? Like, are they really converting? Like, is that something, I mean, let's say if they are coming to your website and maybe reading your case studies or maybe downloading your report, then probably they have searched for and then they have landed up over there. ⁓ But this was more like a just an engaging post probably due to fear of missing out they have commented to just get it.

So, I myself have probably commented on lot of places, but I never maybe I would have read it or used maybe one or two of it maybe ⁓ out the ten posts that I have commented. On those lines, is that something is efficient with respect to the quality of the list as well as the intent of that list, Ajay? AJ Wilcox: I think if we were to just go directly to that list and try to sell them on something, I don't think we would see performance from that. The way we handled it is, I a thousand people request this guide.

has been a couple of years ago, but a thousand people requested it. ⁓ 600 of them were not my connections already, which means that we needed to be connected, which means now I'm connected to 600 new people who are all interested in LinkedIn ads that weren't before. So, or that I wasn't aware of before. So now every time I post this, there's this new 600 person audience who is going to be interested in the content and is much more likely to see it.

And so I call that a complete win. That was like build the audience with, people who are a good fit. Surender | Hawky AI: That's That's right. AJ Wilcox: And of course we pulled those profiles and then now whenever we retarget on LinkedIn, that's a default audience that we can make sure to include in our list.

So no, I'm not going to hit them with a sales pitch yet, but I do want them seeing our content. I do want them really loving our thought leadership. And what we see is if you give, give, give enough, eventually when people are in the market and they need help, they're going to come to you. And we do, we see that quite a bit.

Surender | Hawky AI: That's right. That's great. But even if those 1,000 people, I let's say you added 600 new people in your account in your profile. that's not the case that whoever is probably following you is going to see your content.

I think the content distribution is probably extremely disconnected with the followership that you have, maybe a very small chunk of your followership will even get to see your post. think the ⁓ being extremely low for certain posts show that there is not a direct correlation always. ⁓ might be correlation, but not always. How have you seen that play out for you?

Have you tried a way to figure out how to reach maximum of your ⁓ followers? AJ Wilcox: I'm always trying to work with my content and try to get viewership on it for sure. But ⁓ also not a whole lot of control that we get other than as soon as we start running them as ads, ⁓ we do occasionally for So ⁓ the thing that we've done, like ⁓ sure, a connection. They have commented on a post.

So they're sending a... Surender | Hawky AI: Right. Right. Yeah.

Sure. AJ Wilcox: signal to LinkedIn that they're interested in my content, then we're connected, then I'm sending them a message to give them the content in their personal messages. So that's three signals to LinkedIn that they are interested in my content. That increases the ability, or at least it should increase the likelihood that LinkedIn is going to show them my content in the future.

Of course, it doesn't guarantee it, but hey, I'll take any sort of increases over time I can build. Surender | Hawky AI: Yeah. That's Okay. Okay.

That's right. Yeah. Sure, got it. let's try to speak a little bit about how the future of B2B paid media is going to look like.

So I think now lot this research is happening on chat GPT, Spatial cities, Germanized of the world, than on Google at any point of time ⁓ compared to given point in time. Now, has there a direct correlation or let's say maybe ⁓ kind of behavioral change that you seen in LinkedIn ads ⁓ reaction respect how ⁓ the AI ⁓ research has as well. AJ Wilcox: I think a lot of people are doing research with AI and they're able to research so much more than they could have otherwise. And so I've seen some of these reports where I go, wow, that's a really complete strategic report.

That's great. But then the implementation of that is still very difficult. It's still time consuming, still takes a lot of human brain power and human time. I haven't seen any sort of convergence yet where everyone's starting to sound the same ⁓ because Surender | Hawky AI: Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. EW ⁓ Okay. AJ Wilcox: you we, we now have better data at our fingertips.

I don't discount the fact that that could happen, but I also know that as soon as something stops working, people abandon it pretty quickly. styles ⁓ and and tests all come into Vogue and then leave as well. ⁓ I think as as we as, as marketers, we're paying attention to like, this tactic people, it doesn't work anymore. People aren't, aren't reliant on it.

Surender | Hawky AI: end. Mm. AJ Wilcox: let's move on and let's try something new. think that's okay.

I think that's the way it's supposed to be. Surender | Hawky AI: Got it. Got it. But with a lot of these new channels popping up, I think ⁓ LinkedIn CPMs are increasing at the same time have new channels that are coming up which are able to give you more high intent leads to you, Like ⁓ BAT or chatGPT or Gemini or and so on where people are actually researching something about their work and you sort of up and you sort of let's say get a lead out of that.

So now How do you see this like when one side you have your LinkedIn ads pricing increase and on the other side you see new channels which are probably at times even more efficient are coming up. How do you see the future of LinkedIn ads especially from a pricing standpoint and CPM standpoint? AJ Wilcox: Yeah, I love the question. know, LinkedIn has always competed against the search channels.

You know, it used to be mostly organic Google and paid Google, but now we're seeing the AI models are sending a lot of intent-based traffic. And that's great. The challenge that you get with intent-based traffic is you're targeting someone by what it is that they're looking for, but not who they are. LinkedIn's exactly the opposite.

We can target someone by who they are. Like, yes, this is the exact makeup that... Surender | Hawky AI: this. Exactly.

Yeah. No. AJ Wilcox: would make the highest quality client for us, but I have no control over what it is that they're looking for right now. So absolute best is a blend of the two.

If LinkedIn could get into the search game and we could target someone by their intent, plus they fit our ICP, that would be amazing. But right now I don't see those, I think both are amazing. I would always say, yes, if you're running LinkedIn ads, you should also be running Google ads as well because Surender | Hawky AI: Hmm. Mm.

Yeah. AJ Wilcox: they hold hands, play so well together and that's great. I don't see them ever cannibalizing each other. But where LinkedIn's getting more exciting, it's always been an expensive channel.

Even from the very, the day that they launched it, they had a $2 per click minimum and you were getting Google traffic for a dollar and you were getting meta traffic for of a cent. LinkedIn always been expensive. Surender | Hawky AI: Yeah. Hmm.

Yeah. show. AJ Wilcox: But what they've done really well in the last few years is this focus on measurement. Yes, you're paying a lot for our traffic, but look how that traffic is, how it's turning into sales, how it's turning into pipeline.

And they a report called the revenue attribution report. Not everyone can get access to it because it only works with ⁓ like CRMs. But what you're able to see with it is like, hey, when a closed deal happens, Surender | Hawky AI: Hmm. Hmm.

Yeah. Okay. AJ Wilcox: how many ads, of our organic posts, how many engagements came from ⁓ at that company where you can see like, ⁓ LinkedIn didn't get credit for this deal through, you know, through direct UTM parameters, but you know, 30 paid clicks came. We know that LinkedIn had some kind of an effect ⁓ that deal.

yeah, ⁓ on the measurement on seeing actually happening because of the traffic. And I think LinkedIn is going to keep looking better. Surender | Hawky AI: Really. Hmm.

Bye. AJ Wilcox: even if the pricing goes up. Surender | Hawky AI: That's great. What do you think is going to drastically change with the competition with the AI agents coming up?

How do see LinkedIn ads changing the next four years, four five years maybe? AJ Wilcox: wish I knew. Honestly, that's such a good question. But I'm not a very good futurist myself.

⁓ What I feel like is I think every part of the ⁓ building ⁓ and account management, everything that is done right now by a human that is monotonous and non-strategic, I think we're going to see AI be able to do that in the future. But how fast it happens, how it happens, Surender | Hawky AI: Thanks. Okay. Yeah.

AJ Wilcox: ⁓ boy, I'll be the first one to be watching from the front row and to participate in it however I can. Surender | Hawky AI: Sure. I think if I'm not wrong, it's been more than a year when Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that ad management and ad creation is going to be extremely sort of easy moving forward to an extent. You just plug in your bank account and you say what your product is and everything is going to be automated.

Yeah, I mean, do you think that kind of a moment is going to come for LinkedIn? And if so, what ⁓ do you think will remaining for ⁓ brand or for a marketeer? AJ Wilcox: Yeah, I don't think this is coming for LinkedIn anytime soon. I think maybe in the next three to four years, kind of a format works really well for Meta because they have so much user data.

They understand human behavior so well. And they really can, like if you give it creative, it can say, all right, well, I'm going to test showing this to a thousand different kinds of people and learn from it. LinkedIn doesn't have the same kind of user generated data because it, you people don't spend as much time on LinkedIn. And so ⁓ Surender | Hawky AI: Hmm.

AJ Wilcox: I think LinkedIn would love to get there. I know their data scientists are top notch, but I think it's going to be a little while until they can follow suit. Surender | Hawky AI: Got it. Got it.

fast round of questions maybe ⁓ end the ⁓ I'll maybe ask around five questions for maybe ⁓ can around 30 seconds to respond on that. ⁓ So ⁓ you who reads a book or a thinker ⁓ and ⁓ have ⁓ learned marketing AJ Wilcox: through podcasts. I don't enjoy reading. It's one of those things like I hate picking up a book to read, but I love audio books and I love listening to podcasts.

⁓ would call myself more of a thinker, except any chance I get my headphones are on and ⁓ learning something from an audio book or from a podcast. So ⁓ probably say somewhere in the middle. Surender | Hawky AI: That's it. Where do you see B2B paid dollar is going right now that you wish ⁓ have come to LinkedIn ads.

AJ Wilcox: I think CTV, connected TV ads is a really exciting place for LinkedIn right now. can go to a CTV provider and buy kinds of demographics of traffic, but LinkedIn what doesn't appear be more money. I think it's about the same kinds of CPMs. We're able to use LinkedIn's targeting to reach people on their TVs, busy executives, and that's exciting.

So I think anyone who's doing a CTV outside of LinkedIn, if you're in B2B, ⁓ Surender | Hawky AI: Okay. AJ Wilcox: consider moving those dollars in the link. Surender | Hawky AI: got it. Yeah, so what's one best practice advice that you think would die soon?

AJ Wilcox: Yeah, I think for a long time, people have assumed that if your goal is to get impressions, get reach, that you should pay by the impression. And if your goal is to get traffic, you should pay by the click. And what I found for a long time on LinkedIn is that it matter what your objective is. If your objective is to get the most of what you want for the least amount of money, there are optimizations you can do.

And so a lot of times, for instance, Surender | Hawky AI: Me. So. AJ Wilcox: I won't use LinkedIn's objective that's called brand awareness. That's where they assume you go to this when you want awareness, but I actually get cheaper awareness, lower CPMs and higher engagement rates and cheaper retargeting audiences built by running some of those ads in the website visits objective.

I have to what is the bad advice that I guess... ⁓ previous advice that people held onto that are just getting discredited. I think it's use the objective that matches with what your objective is because there's better ways to do it usually. Surender | Hawky AI: Got it.

That's a great one actually. what do you think is one really, irrelevant metric that's there on LinkedIn Ads Manager right now? AJ Wilcox: This is hard to say. so frequency is the metric that I would point to here.

A of clients will point to a frequency number and they'll say, ⁓ when it's over a certain amount, we must not be successful anymore. And we probably need to change things up. And what I find is the frequency number, although we do like it, we use it, but it doesn't tell the whole story. Surender | Hawky AI: See you.

creative. AJ Wilcox: Instead like, I like looking at click through rate over time and engagement rate over time. And if you draw this on a graph, you see over time, as soon as your click through rate starts to drop off or your engagement rate starts to drop off, I don't care if your frequency says one or a thousand, that's when your ads are no longer performing and that's when you need to change things. So less reliance on ⁓ for sure.

Surender | Hawky AI: Okay. Sure. Frequency. Got it.

One advice to your 2014 self, the you started beat-aling. AJ Wilcox: ⁓ you know what? I wouldn't give myself advice at all. I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but I'm really glad I made them and because I learned things I turned out exactly where I where I wanted to turn out.

So ⁓ would let myself just keep keep working. Maybe just give myself like a like a don't worry, man. Keep keep working. Don't get discouraged.

You're going to do great. Surender | Hawky AI: You're done. Okay. Well, well.

⁓ That's great. That's lovely. question before I let you go. Can you recommend anyone to on the podcast?

Who would you think would be great to appear in this podcast ⁓ down line? ⁓ AJ Wilcox: Ooh, I have so many. tend to keep friends around who are deep specialists in what they do. One is a specialist in conversion rate optimization.

His name is Chris Daly, and I'm happy to give you his email, make an introduction, whatever. ⁓ Another is Corey Hankey, and he's a deep specialist in video advertising across all different channels, and ⁓ absolutely And if there's any... ⁓ Surender | Hawky AI: So. Okay.

Sure. Mm-hmm. Ciao. AJ Wilcox: specific niches that you'd love to have someone on, let me know.

And I'm more than happy to tell you if I know someone who's great at that. Surender | Hawky AI: Anyone in performance marketing especially on Google meta, LinkedIn would do. AJ Wilcox: Perfect. Okay.

Yeah. Let me, let me introduce you to, to Corey, Hanky ⁓ ⁓ Chris Daly. Surender | Hawky AI: Great. Shuff.

AJ Wilcox: and they're great guys. Surender | Hawky AI: That's great. Yeah, sure. mean, of course, there should be.

Thanks a lot, Thanks for your time so far. And I think the conversation came up really well. I really enjoyed the conversation. Yeah.

Thanks again, and happy to have you again later in time. AJ Wilcox: Cool. Wonderful. Well, I'm excited to see hockey and I'm excited to see what you guys are doing.

This is gonna be great. Surender | Hawky AI: Thanks a lot, Izzy. Thanks for your time. you.

Thank you. AJ Wilcox: All right. Thanks, Render. See you.