Ep 110 - The LinkedIn Advertiser's Review of Inbound23 | LinkedIn Ads at Inbound
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SHOW TRANSCRIPT
AJ Wilcox
Did you miss Inbound 2023? We’re about to catch you up on everything an LinkedIn advertiser needs to know on this week’s episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.
Speaker
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show.
AJ Wilcox
Here’s your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, as of the time of this recording Inbound 2023, the biggest B2B conference that I attend every year, just wrapped up, HubSpot, the force behind the conference, they’re the ones who own Inbound and put on the conference, so obviously heavy on sales and marketing content. And I remember back before COVID, the show got up to where it was 25,000 attendees that would descend on the Boston Convention Center. It was absolutely crazy. You had to book hotel rooms and Airbnbs months and months and months in advance. It was terrible. But this year, they sold out at 13,000 tickets, I believe. And honestly, I actually really like it better being a little bit smaller of a conference. It’s still huge, still massive compared to other marketing conferences. But I really liked not standing shoulder to shoulder and being crammed in like sardines. Something really interesting this year, LinkedIn had a huge sponsorship presence and they actually presented a lot of different sessions. And they were quite large. And surprisingly, I got a lot out of the presentations they were putting on. So high quality, good info. Parker, our head consultant that you met back from Episode 104. He and I spoke, and our topic was LinkedIn Ad Strategy for the B2B CMO. We were set originally to present on Friday morning, but the session filled up really quickly, so Inbound invited us to do an encore session that afternoon, which also ended up filling up weeks before the show. It was absolutely wonderful, loved every bit of it. And as I know, not everyone who’s a listener here of the LinkedIn Ads Show, not all of you got to attend. So I wanted to share from the LinkedIn advertisers perspective, what you needed to get out of this year’s Inbound conference.
AJ Wilcox
First off in the news, LinkedIn released the ad library. So you may know we’ve been able for a long time to go into someone’s company page and click to see the ads they’re running. But there are some limitations here. You can’t search by keyword, it has to be like you’re looking at the company’s company page, and the only ads that you got to see where their sponsored content. So those were in the newsfeed that means any ad that they were actually running outside the newsfeed, meaning things like their sponsored messaging, their text ads, their dynamic ads, you couldn’t see any of that. So now LinkedIn released a proper ad library, very similar to what Meta has. And you can search by company, you can search by a keyword and see who’s running ads that contain your keyword. I will say right now the search is a little bit janky #jank, but I’m assuming that’s gonna get better. I’m just really excited to see LinkedIn come out with tools that help us as marketers. I want to quickly highlight a review, alexadf from Spain left a review that says, “A must for LinkedIn Ads lovers. I’ve been following AJ for several years during my journey with LinkedIn Ads. His show is packed with insights. And it’s quite enjoyable to listen to. I 100%. recommend it if you want to step up your LinkedIn Ads game.” Alexa, thanks so much. I wasn’t able to find you want to LinkedIn to shout out your actual name and company and all that. But if you want to hit me up on LinkedIn, I’m happy to still give you a shout out. But Alexa, I want to say thank you for leaving that specific review. This is exactly what I aim for. I’m not a really enjoyable person to listen to normally. So when I get really geeky about LinkedIn Ads. I’m so glad that that energy comes across, and you actually enjoy listening to this. Okay, now, I’ve mentioned this in the last couple episodes, but I want to try something new. I’d love for you to record an audio file and send me either privately on LinkedIn and a message or you can email us at Podcast@B2linked.com. But anything that’s like a review of the show or questions that you have that you want covered feedback for the show, whatever. And I actually want to play them here on the show. So record yourself asking a question or commenting on something from a past episode. And I’ll aim to include you right here in the show. Alright, sound good? Let’s see how this goes.
AJ Wilcox
Alright, let’s go ahead and jump right in the conversation that Parker and I had as we wrapped up Inbound 2023 Let’s hit it.
AJ Wilcox
Well, awesome! Everyone, we are here at Inbound 2023. It’s the conference put on by HubSpot. It’s very much a B2B audience. Very cool. It’s one of the biggest shows that I speak at every year. And I love how they are so into CRM and paid social so much. We have a lot of really advanced marketers here. Really cool show. I’m here with Parker Williams. Say what’s up Parker!
Parker Williams
Hey everybody excited to be here. Great time at Inbound.
AJ Wilcox
And so we’re doing this episode today to basically give you a rundown of how Inbound 2023 went from a LinkedIn advertisers perspective. There was a lot of different content content was valuable for B2B content that was valuable outside and everywhere. And then of course, LinkedIn themselves were a sponsor and had a lot of content that we had to go watch as well. So this is some great stuff there. Alright, so Parker and I are here at Inbound, it just wrapped up. So we’re recording right after the last session. Parker, what do you think of Inbound this year?
Parker Williams
It was really awesome. I was impressed with the turnout. I mean, compared to last year, I felt like this was a much better turnout. There’s way more people obviously, we’re coming off of COVID last year, or a year out from that so. The presenters were awesome, the content was great. There was a lot of practical stuff that I took home and I’m excited to implement as a sales and coach and customer service person and a marketer. So yeah, I felt like very well rounded content and my favorite, I’m diving right in and is that okay,?I think everyone probably can agree with me on this. My favorite was Andrew Huberman. I’m a huge fan of that. I love hearing it live. It’s cool.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, Andrew was interviewed by Brian Halligan, one of the cofounders, of HubSpot. And it was awesome. He just he shared his morning routine, which doesn’t sound too exciting. But coming from, from a scientist who’s interested in our human performance, a lot of what he shared was, I don’t know you and I both listened to his podcast. So it wasn’t groundbreaking to us. But I was looking around. There’s a lot of people whose minds were blown.
Parker Williams
Yeah. And it’s so dumb and simple and the comedian after like, totally made fun of him about it, but I’ve implemented the stuff he’s teaches and trains on and that scientifically has been proven to benefit your life. And I totall see a difference in my life. So as dumb and simple as it is, we fall out of that because we go to bed holding our phone at night, we wake up looking at our phone in the morning. Or we like, don’t drink enough water. Like it’s just, it’s funny. It’s simple. What were your takeaways?
AJ Wilcox
So there was the, I think it’s the second day of inbound, LinkedIn had a whole a floor that just dedicated to them. So they sponsored the whole floor, there are two sessions going on all the time. And I really liked so I’ll preface this by saying, from my life in digital marketing, a lot of times I’ve noticed that corporate presentations, presentations that are put on by employees of the platform, generally are very low quality. You don’t get very much out of them, they there aren’t very many insights, it’s all sales, pitchy. I was actually really impressed this year. With LinkedIn, I took a lot of notes. They shared a lot of like, really valuable stuff. And there was of course, the fluff. Like, there’s the stuff that you expect them talking up there, their most recent ad formats, like it’s the best thing and, and they’re trying to get usage and adoption, and trying to sell the platform. But I did, I really liked it. So I took some notes on some of the presentations. And what I took away from it. The first thing I thought was really good was this presentation that was put on by Ty Heath who’s one of the head evangelists for LinkedIn. Whe officially lists herself is working for the B2B Marketing Institute that LinkedIn owns. But she spoke with Derek and I hadn’t heard Derek before, I think you pronounce his name Yueah. They shared a full report. And it’s called the CMO scorecard. And so I can link to that below that everyone else can get access to the scorecard. But first off, they showed a slide showing what percentage of outcomes was due to certain things. So for instance, brand size is 15% of outcomes, meaning that if you’re like a large enterprise company that everyone knows, like Coca Cola, or HP or something, you’re gonna get a 15% lift on your outcomes just from your brand. But knowing that that lift is only 15% leaves a lot of room for things that smaller brands can do. Like, for instance, your creative was responsible for 47% of your outcomes. And then the rest was the media. And that was broken down by a lot of things that I don’t think we can really control. Like your reach is 22%, which you pay for. It’s not anything special. Recency makes up 5%. So the fact that we are running all the time evergreen, we’re going to catch that 5% of outcomes that we’re dependent on being top of mind for these folks. The targeting is 9%. And of course, like the targeting is your going to the do targeting the way that you do it no matter what, so it doesn’t sway a whole lot. And then 2% is context. 2% of your outcomes is where people saw your ads. And we’re obviously huge on LinkedIn Ads. So the context is always going to be a professional context for the most part. But I love that recency meaning that this is an important thing to be running evergreen, and 47% of your outcomes being due to your creative so don’t sleep on creative.
Parker Williams
Yeah, like that. They had some really cool stats this year this year that I thought was really cool. And just helpful in general. It’s like the health overall health of the platform and the number of users that are on it. I think those were insightful.
AJ Wilcox
I totally agree, I love the stats, because when they share stuff from the B2B Marketing Institute, or from LinkedIn, it’s their own platform they own, they actually have data that we couldn’t even measure. So I love this. So there’s this metric that a company came up with called short term advertising strength. And what they found is that if you had an attention grabbing ad, you could improve this short term advertising strength by 30%. It doesn’t mean a whole lot to me, because I don’t know what actually goes into this metric. But what this does tell me is that there are companies who just run ads, just to stay in front of people. Like there’s nothing special about it, they just want their logo to stay top of mind. And I think it’s always important to have creative that is attention grabbing, where you’re always providing value, you’re always giving people something that they want. So it’s worth paying attention to your ads. And I think this 30% number, although it doesn’t mean much in and of itself, I do appreciate that even if my goal was just to show my logo over and over, I would rather show my logo with providing some value, giving people a reason to actually pay attention to the ad.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of like Coca Cola. Like for the longest time when I saw a Coca Cola, billboards on the highway, it was just a big red sign with a white Coca Cola logo. But now you see Coca Cola with like, like, it’s it’s an attention grabbing billboard, like you can’t not look at it. Yes, it’s branded. Yes, it’s all about brand awareness. But it totally captures your attention now. Whereas it used to just be kind of like, there’s Coca Cola. So yeah, for B2B, like, what does that look like in LinkedIn, LinkedIn newsfeed, you know, a boring stock photo with your logo on it. That’s kind of like Coca Cola as old as like a good attention grabbing photo stack image ad maybe, with real people at the company with, like real employees, or the CEO or somebody, I feel like it’s gonna stand out a little bit more. And that’s, I don’t know if that’s like the best example. But that’s better than a stock photo, I feel like, it’s gonna stand out a little bit more.
AJ Wilcox
I totally agree. And Coca Cola as a brand, all they need to do is just remind people. They just need to remind people that they exist. But in your example, where you’re talking about, like, okay, they’re reminding people they existed by just having a picture and having a logo. But I think they realized over time, this is this evolution, that you can do something else with that space. And so it’s wishing people a Merry Christmas, it’s pointing to some other brand or something else. And it’s an excuse to just do something that gets people’s attention, but still has the logo. Maybe it’s not as applicable in B2B, but I’m sure there are B2B brands, that this is a principle that, that you need to pay attention to.
Parker Williams
Yeah, and if that’s their goal, or if that’s your goal, if you’re listening to this, and you’re thinking like, we just want to stay in front of our audience. Be creative. Don’t just put up a photo that’s boring, not attention grabbing. Utilize space for something good. Provide value.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, and you’re gonna pay the same amount to show that ad anyway, you might as well show them something that actually gets their attention and lodges within their brand rather than just something they’re going to process and then keep scrolling. I liked a quote that they shared about a movement, they said, moving images and sound if the user enables it, are typically more engaging, and better able to trigger emotions. But a video must hold attention long enough to deliver the desired impression and link it to the brand in people’s minds. So if you’re using something like video ads, sure, it’s important to grab their attention. But you also have to hold their attention for it to be effective, because otherwise people might see your ad and it got their attention. But they might attribute it to one of your competitors like it has to actually hold their attention to be effective.
AJ Wilcox
Another slide that that Ty shared here is reach and why it matters. And they found that there are three segments of a population, there was a low frequency segment, a medium frequency segment, and a high frequency segment. And what they were measuring is the number of ad impressions that were required to produce a 1% sales lift. And their takeaway here was that multiple replicable studies show that high reach and low frequency are the most effective and efficient way to generate sales. And I really wonder because we know that there’s value in having high frequency, being in front of people, because there’s some people that who won’t click on the ad until they’ve seen it, you know, 3, 5, 8 time. And then it kind of wears them down. And then there are people who are going to be annoyed by seeing the same ad over and over. So it seems like what they’re saying is, it’s actually best to, to have high reach and low frequency for sales. But that’s also really distant to measure your reach, and then how it affected sales. So I don’t know if this data can be trusted. But that was something where I went, Oh, that actually could be something they’re using to prop up the brand awareness objective, because that’s the one objective where you can try to get higher reach through it. So maybe they’re trying to say, reach broader and then that actually makes a lift in sales. So maybe I don’t trust that number. I don’t know. Well, isn’t brand awareness typically? Objective? Yeah. And the only way you can bid is through Max delivery, or CPM bidding. So if you are not over a 1%, click through rate, then you’re paying too much, even when you use it at all.
Parker Williams
Yeah. And also, if you think about that, like, I’m not trying to point fingers at LinkedIn at all, or things like that are evil or the worst or anything, but, you know, if I was wanting to make more money, then I would get the point, I’m getting people to advertise an objective that doesn’t have results that have to tie back to it. And brand awareness is that way. Like if they find measured on just engagement, or reach, reach is probably more appropriate for brand awareness. Right? And that was it like that. That’s an easy way to charge people without having really high expectations. So I could see that being an incentive to like, get people to ease up more. So. I don’t know. I don’t know where I’m going with that. But it’s more than just like an interesting thought. Like, I wonder their what is their intent for pushing?
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, yeah, it could be a slightly misaligned intent. They did share something that I absolutely loved. This was measuring the conversion lift between cold and warm audiences. So they had a big chunk of like six months of data back from 2021 to 2022, where they measured the click through rates and the lead gen form completion rates, whether someone was a cold or a warm audience, and click through rates are 71% higher on warm audiences, which totally makes sense to me. When we look at retargeting audiences, it’s very rare when the click through rate is anywhere near or lower than, than that of cold audiences. It tells us like, yeah, they’re they’re warmer, they’ve interacted with us before. 71% lift in click through rate by them just being warm. And then lead gen form completion rate between cold and warm went up by 90%. So obviously, when you’re showing a lead form to someone who is a warm audience, yet, they’re gonna convert higher for sure. Something else I’ve been noodling on for a long time. I know that when we have clients that we’re advertising for, and their sales is also doing direct outreach, we see that all of a sudden, their sales outreach improves, just because we’re advertising. I knew that there was a connection there. But I didn’t know how to quantify it. But what LinkedIn did is they ran a study where they they measured inmail acceptance rates, whether someone had been targeted with ads, or hadn’t. They also measured the lift in people accepting connection requests from their sales team, based on whether they’d seen an ad from the company or not. And this was really cool. Inmail acceptance rates were 36% higher when someone had heard of the brand before.
Parker Williams
See missed this one. I’m really bummed I missed out on this.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, I liked this one. I’ve got this slide, I may find a way to share it in the shownotes. Good slide, for sure. Oh, yeah, actually, it’s part of the report. So anyone can go through and see all these slides, too. But it is 36%. So if you think about the opportunity of anyone who is who their sales team is doing outreach, there is tremendous value in warming and what we might call seasoning that audience in preparation for someone to reach out. They’ll get to 36% at least inmail acceptance, which means, you know, if that tracks through, we’re probably talking a 30% increase in setting up appointments and all that, like should track all the way through. Yeah, there was a 24% lift in accepting connection requests. So it was like, in mail was higher. I don’t know why in mail acceptance would be higher than accepting a connection request. But I don’t know if 24%. Like, even that’s a great lift.
AJ Wilcox
Well, I mean, if you think about that, psychologically, inmail is just a message. There’s no connection there. If I get a connection request, I’m agreeing to be that person’s friend now, basically. And sometimes I get connection requests. And I’m like, I don’t have any clue who this person is. And I go back to what is in it for me, to connect with this person is selfish as that is like, some people might be still questioning like, well, what’s in it for me, this person is just gonna sell me something. But inmail, there’s like less, you’re agreeing to just have a conversation with conversation. So yeah, interesting.
AJ Wilcox
Okay, that makes sense to me. Alright. Here’s a quick sponsor break and then we’ll dive back into the conversation.
Speaker 4
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AJ Wilcox
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AJ Wilcox
The next one that I loved was by Amanda Green. I don’t think we’ve mentioned her on the podcast before but she does a lot of content on LinkedIn’s marketing team, puts on a lot of webinars, I’ve gotten to see her stuff a lot. She talked about boosting brand with content on LinkedIn. The first stat here is really shocking. B2B customers make it through 70% of the purchase process before they reach out to a company. And along the way, they consume 10 plus pieces of content. And her statement here is no matter how great the creative, a single brand touch point is not enough. There have to be more touch points than that. And it’s crazy to think 70% of that research is done before your sales team even has an email address in the CRM. She didn’t share a thought about thought leader ads that I absolutely love, because we’ve got some experience with thought leader ads, but because they’re so new, they just came out in June, we don’t have extensive experience with it. She said through their data, they found a 1.7 times higher click through rate than single image ads. I love that! Almost twice the click through rate. And of course we know the higher your click through rate goes, the lower your costs are on a per click or per impression basis. So I love that just I’m more of a fan of a thought leader ads after seeing that,
Parker Williams
Yeah, I would, I would suggest put a few filters with that data there. Because there’s a lot of companies we work with, that don’t have an influencer in the company or face like a personal face. And if you were to go run some influencer ads, like it probably wouldn’t be as good as that. They already have to have some authority in the space and have good content. The content, it’s just another medium. It’s another format. If that content of that ad is not interesting or engaging, it’s probably not going to perform as well as those stats. So I think it’s important to like, be careful, don’t just jump on something, because it’s hot new. Take some logic and time, like put some thought into that process of potentially running those ads.
AJ Wilcox
Especially because they’re so limited. There’s very little you can do when you can’t attach a lead gen form to them. We just recently got the ability to promote video and a thought leader ad. So you’re not going to dump your entire set of campaigns and your entire spend and move it all to thought leader ads. It’s almost like this is going to be an addition to the strategy you’re already running. She shared another stat about social proof. She said one in two buyers say that peer validation is a primary vehicle for increasing trust of a product. And this makes perfect sense to me. I can see an ad 10 times and not pay much attention to it, but kind of lodge that away in my mind. But then as soon as a friend says, oh, yeah, I’ve used this product, and it’s great. All of a sudden, now I’m paying attention and and I’m highly considering the product. So it really is super important to have other people talking about your brand as well.
Parker Williams
I mean, that goes to show like anytime you use social proof, and not just your typical social proof of like a testimonial, but like excuted video test that somebody outperforms, like a static image with a quote from a customer. There’s name like, it’s a real person talking about how this product has changed their life as a marketer, as a salesperson, or whatever role they’re in like, it’s very powerful.
AJ Wilcox
Oh, yeah. And I like your idea here of doing a video testimonial, because that’s something you can collect and and still promote on behalf of the company. Whereas you can’t take a non employee and launch a thought leader ad. I wish we could, but we can’t they have to be linked to your company page saying they’re one of your employees. This is something that actually came up in our session someone asked, and I actually don’t know the answer to this. They thought, hey, can we have user generated content? And maybe this influencer says that they’re with our company just long enough to promote the ad, and then they remove that? Maybe that’s possible, or maybe as soon as they remove themselves from the company, that post shuts off? Maybe it goes on pause? I don’t know.
Parker Williams
There are B2B influencers. It’s becoming more common now. And they’re becoming affiliates, or they’re some partnerships that they’ll work with because they promote certain products, the news. Like I would never have any problem with putting on my profile like, I mean LinkedIn, for example, like we promote LinkedIn all day, like we shouldn’t be in a way advisors or LinkedIn or not advisors, but advocates or brand advocates like, I could put that on my profile. I have no problem doing that if the company asked me because we promote LinkedIn all the time. And then that would open up us as an opportunity to be an employee that they could have us in thought leader ads through so I’m sure there’s a way to hack that and get around
AJ Wilcox
Totally. Just needs to be tested.
Parker Williams
Yeah
AJ Wilcox
Totally agree. I know you and I both went to the same session from Chris Lavigne, who’s the he’s one of the top media producers at Wistia. And the title of his talk was Fire Your Video Producer. And he had the theme all the way through his presentation was basically like, I’m a video producer, but I still think you should fire me. And although it sounds controversial, he’s not actually saying we should get rid of video producers. But what he’s saying is, video is so important and so impactful, you should do it at low cost before thinking that you have to invest in a full studio and you know, full time crew to come and make sure things are well lit these, like use video at low cost with all of these new cheap AI tools to build a case for and show that video works for your organization. And then when it’s working, you can build a business case for like, oh, this works really well for us, maybe we should scale up and and hire a producer and do this at higher production values.
Parker Williams
Yeah, that’s huge. And also for running ads. Because running ads is all about creating a feedback cycle. So you pick an audience, you put a message in front of them, you watch it, and you get data back immediately from that audience on whether they like your message or not. Yes, and if they don’t like your message, and you just dump 10 grand into production, that totally stinks. But if you use this process that Chris Lavigne used where you can produce video quickly fast, like you could bunch or batch work a bunch of video ads, it didn’t take a huge investment to do it. And then you can go and test and run those, those video ads and get feedback right away. You’d be able to walk away from that and say, okay, this is what we need to tweak to our video ads, like we need to in the first three seconds, we need to make sure that we capture their attention or drop off in the first five seconds is huge. So clearly, first five seconds of our video is really good. But then six seconds, something’s happening and they’re falling off. You know, to go to a video production company again, or to use your team. In some cases, we have customers where they’ve got to go back to their team, and they’re already backlogged with so many other projects takes two, three months to get an on video ad. That can totally ruin a LinkedIn Ads campaign effort. So being able to be quick and fast and produce video, I think it’s huge. I mean, that’s a game changer.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, and we don’t use the term lean very often in marketing. But lean is something that’s very often used in operations and even development. It seems like this is a very lean strategy, where like, don’t put all of your resources, maybe you have the budget for a whole media production team great, but that stuff takes time. And so many people have to sign off on it. It’s a slow process. So start out lean. Start out really low cost, but doing it, you’re doing the job 70% of the way, see if that makes a difference. And then see if it makes sense to hire someone to do it the rest of the 30%
Parker Williams
I think there’s something to note here too, is if you already have data on your messaging your audience, you have product market fit, and you have the budget to hire a video production company to produce really high level good content. I do think it’s still worth testing some of that, for example, our partner Video Brothers, we’ve seen their videos just absolutely crush it on LinkedIn, and help ad performance improve instantly. And so I do think, you know, depending on how deep your pockets are, like, you could go full production. If you’ve got small budget, this is definitely the route to go.
AJ Wilcox
Totally. And what I love about what video brothers does is they make ads that are informative and funny. And I think comedy can go a long way. What Chris was talking about, he was like start with videos like support, like they are supporting your existing customers and so not very many people see them but this is just you proving that video works. I do you think that there’s a case to be made that if you’re using this for video creative? Yeah. It can make sense to invest highly in it. As long as it’s going to be attention grabbing. It’s going to be funny, without the funny, like, I don’t think high production value is worth very much in advertising.
Parker Williams
I’ve seen that we’ve had high production videos that are not entertaining, and they perform subpart.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah. And we’ll have case studies on this one in the future. So yeah, stick around, we’ll be able to tell you a lot more about video. What I loved about what Chris talked about, is he actually showed video that he had been written script for and things side by side, like when he did it through his webcam, and or just with his iPhone, and some AI tools versus one that was professionally edited. And it’s really difficult to explain this over audio, so bear with me. But when I saw the difference, I was like, oh, yeah, you can tell there’s a production difference between those two videos, but one cost 10s of 1000s of dollars of people’s time. And the other one cost $200 in tools to create, I was blown away like now there’s a whole bunch of these tools that I want to get for our own video editing. And I think I’d be okay with doing video 70% of the way. So anyway, if this is interesting to you guys, please let me know because I may reach out to Chris and see if we can have him on the podcast. If this is a cool topic you guys want to listen to. Because we do a lot of video, it was like shockingly amazing to me. But I realized it may not be 100% relevant to LinkedIn Ads. And so maybe it doesn’t belong on the podcast. I don’t know. But I reached out to Chris because I want to be connected with him.
Parker Williams
I listen to the podcast. I want to hear more from Chris.
AJ Wilcox
Great. So those were the other presentations. Quite honestly, I went to several others where I wasn’t super impressed by the content. Some of it was branded, which I kind of expect that representatives of the brand are probably not going to do an amazing presentation. But overall, I was really pleased with Inbound this year. Like you said it was huge. It was a sellout crowd this year. I knew people who wanted to buy tickets. And by the time they went to go book, the whole conference was sold out and they held to it like they didn’t open up new tickets. It was just it got to a certain size that they could handle and they cut it off. But fantastic show this year. You mentioned the comedian, we had John Mulaney, who is a writer for SNL. And he has a whole bunch of comedy specials on Netflix. He’s hilarious. Love that. We’re actually missing Reese Witherspoon’s talk right now, which is kind of crazy. Side story, when I was in college, I ended up writing a paper in English class defending why Reese Witherspoon was the best actress in the world. So I probably couldn’t defend it in good faith at this point. But, she’s awesome. Too bad, I’m missing her. I’m sure she’s great. She’s very pretty. So and then we get to our presentation.
AJ Wilcox
So Parker, you and I were set to present on on LinkedIn Ads. We were asked to present to a CMO audience. But what’s so interesting is we had people raise their hands in both sessions we we taught the same session, we had so many people book that they created an encore session. So we did the same presentation back to back. We’re kind of exhausted at this point. But it was so interesting. There were probably I don’t know if 20% 30% of the audience said that they were CMOS, but the rest were all there to dig into like the platform. So I was kind of expecting this. I knew that from last year. And so what we did is we split the presentation up into two parts. One was more high level strategy kind of approach that a CMO would be interested in, I didn’t want to let people down because the title of the talk was, you know, LinkedIn Ads for the CMO. But then the other half was all about like digging in the more advanced tactics and tips and things to do in your accounts. And in both sessions, we left about a half an hour for q&a. And it was awesome.
Parker Williams
There are really good questions in there. One question that stood out to me was there was a lady that asked, they want to target an industry on LinkedIn, but the industry doesn’t exist and falls underneath an umbrella of an industry. So like in medical, on LinkedIn, every medical industry falls under medical, or health or something like that. And they want to target a specific medical type of industry. And I thought that was an interesting question. There’s some cool ways that you can get around that trying to think what other questions stood out to you?
AJ Wilcox
I think the questions were really detailed this year. It’s awesome. Sometimes when you leave room for q&a, the room just empties is because people don’t have any questions or they don’t know what to ask. This time, more than three quarters of the people stuck around for the whole time. And they were asking questions that were very detailed, like you could tell they are in their LinkedIn Ads account every day. And they actually cared. They ask detailed questions. They ask questions that were deeper and actually mattered. It wasn’t like the surface stuff. So I love that more and more people are getting their hands dirty with LinkedIn Ads. It definitely helped my ego a little bit that both sessions were totally full had, standby lines all the way down the hall. So cool. And many of you, I had you raise your hands during my session, who said who listens to the podcast? So many hands went up and I’m so grateful for that. and Parker, I know you are to
Parker Williams
Absolutely Rate Inbound like on a star basis like a Google star basis. Would you give it a five star? Yeah. Where would you rate Inbound 2023?
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, I’ve spoken at Inbound, I think it’s my fifth year. And it’s generally the biggest conference that I speak at. I love that it is almost all B2B. Like everyone we talked to here is B2B and B2B has not been very sexy for a long time. So that being said, I think they did such a good job of putting the conference together. And I enjoyed so many of the speakers. I would say this was probably five stars, like five out of five. There were a couple sessions that I kind of wished I didn’t go to, but I think those kinds of sessions won’t get voted high and brought back next year. I know, conferences are always trying to get higher quality stuff. But there were especially like the Chris Lavigne, the Andrew Huberman, the some of these were life changing. And I really appreciated the LinkedIn sessions where they shared stats like, this is great. It was definitely better. So yeah, five out of five stars for Inbound this year, and I’m stoked for next year.
Parker Williams
That’s awesome.
AJ Wilcox
So anyway, if you’re considering checking out Inbound in 2024, I highly recommend it. We’re not being paid or compensated to do this. It’s just it’s legitimately a conference. I’m excited to speak out every year. I’m excited to attend. They bring some of the coolest people. Yeah, that was a little bit harder for speakers like I want to make sure that my shirt stays ironed all the way up until I go on stage. But we had to drop our bags off at Hotel across the street. So that’s it. That’s our coverage of Inbound 2023 from a LinkedIn advertisers perspective. And it’s sad to leave Boston but I’m I’m headed back to Utah. Parker, where are you headed back to?
Parker Williams
Back to the Mesa, Arizona. Excited to be home with the family and kids. I’ll miss Boston, too. It’s really cool city. Cool vibe. Just overall, like the people, the marketers. I’ve been doing a lot of different conferences, and I feel like this one is just why lively, you know, excitement and enthusiasm in this space. It’s cool to be a part of.
AJ Wilcox
They get marketers who tend to be a little bit more reserved as a bunch up and dancing and moving around. And they get the energy up here for sure. So thanks for listening to our coverage of Inbound 2023. We’re excited to have you here. Alright, I’ve got the episode resources for you coming right up, so stick around
Speaker
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.
AJ Wilcox
Alright, here’s the resources from the episode. Like we mentioned, we have a link to Chris Lavigne’s LinkedIn profile. So if you want to go follow him, connect with him. He’s absolutely awesome. And I really hope he posts the content somewhere because I know Inbound didn’t record the sessions this year. But like I said, one of the best sessions that I’ve ever seen. Then there was the CMO scorecard presentation from Ty Heath at LinkedIn. I went ahead and linked right to the report. It’s like 60, or 70 pages, lots of really good visuals there. I took a bunch of screenshots of it so that I would know what to talk about here in the presentation. If you’re looking to up your LinkedIn Ads game, go check out the community that we built called LinkedIn Ads fanatics, it’s fanatics.B2Linked.com. And of course, this link is in the show notes below. And for a low monthly price, you can get access to all four of our courses taking you from absolute LinkedIn Ads beginner to bonafide expert. Plus you have access to all the community of LinkedIn Ads professionals. This is what we do for a living. It’s great. So come join in conversation come and learn a lot. There’s also an option to hop on a weekly group coaching call with me. So if you want direct access to me, ask me all your questions, go ahead and opt for that upgrade. If this is your first time listening, we’re excited to have you here. Welcome! Make sure to hit that subscribe button and whatever podcast player you listen. Now if this is not your first time listening, I would encourage you please do go and rate and review the show. I know it sounds trite. But this is by far the best way that you can say thank you for all the hours of preparation and production that goes into the show. And of course I’ll shout you out live on the show as well. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we’ll see you back here next week. And I’m cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.
