Ep 125 - LinkedIn Ads $10/day Strategy | Effective LinkedIn Advertising for Low Costs

I’ve heard so many of you say that LinkedIn Ads are too expensive. They definitely don’t have to be though. I’m sharing the $10 per day strategy on this week’s episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here’s your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey, Hey, Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. As he said, I’m A. J. Wilcox. I’m the host of the weekly podcast, the LinkedIn Ads Show and I’m thrilled to welcome you to the show for advanced B2B marketers to master LinkedIn Ads and achieve true pro status. Yeah, I want to make you a rock star.

Many of you may know Dennis Yu. He’s a great friend of mine, and he’s one of the most well known experts on meta ads and beyond. He’s famous for a strategy that he’s used for years, and it’s called the dollar a day strategy. I’ve linked to information about his strategy in the show notes and in the transcript. So go check that out if you’re curious, but the concept is that the minimum budget that you can spend on meta is $1 per day. So he’s taught marketers for years about how to make big results happen at the very minimum amount of costs. And he’s done tons of case studies where very small amounts of spend moved proverbial mountains. Dennis and I were talking recently and it gave me the idea, could this concept apply on LinkedIn as well? Well, you can see where I’m going with this.

First in the news, Anthony Blattner had a post a few weeks ago, talking about how the LinkedIn Ads library now includes Message Ads. This one kind of blew past me because I don’t live in the LinkedIn Ad library very often, but it’s very cool now that we can see message ads in there, . It’s basically more effective to spy on our competitors. I like it.

We’ve also seen a new banner appear at the top of Campaign Manager. It says, Starting 2024, we’re updating how reach and frequency metrics are measured, improving their accuracy. You may see some fluctuation in your campaign’s reach relative to previous campaign performance. With this update, your historical reach and frequency data all the way back from January 1st, 2022 to the present will also be updated.

So I’ve got a lot of questions about this, because for the last year, maybe two years, I’ve kind of lost track here. Frequency and reach kind of got de anonymized. They got bucketed into averages. And so I’ve never known how much to actually trust these metrics anyway. And I don’t know if these new changes have made it so I can trust them more or trust them less. I don’t know. So I’ve reached out to LinkedIn. I hope to have some good information for you about the nuts and bolts of how frequency and reach are created. So we can decide how much stock we want to put in.

I also just heard that the European economic areas, I’m guessing this is anyone who uses the Euro. And Switzerland just rolled out new privacy laws called the Digital Markets Act. So starting February of 2024, LinkedIn’s going to start asking those members for permission to connect their LinkedIn experience to many of the top features that we use here on LinkedIn. Things like jobs, like ads, like LinkedIn Learning, etc. Now, if they don’t give consent, we’re going to lose the ability to target them by things like age, gender, interests, traits, and we’ll even lose the on platform retargeting, like, have they visited your company page? Did they watch 25 percent of one of your videos, etc?

Now, this is definitely not something I’m a fan of, but hey, it’s a, it’s a law we have to comply. So not fun, but especially because in Europe, we oftentimes battle with these small audiences that are either too small to advertise to or not enough scale to run our campaigns on. This isn’t great since we oftentimes deal with very small audiences in Europe anyway, and, but you know, you have to comply. It’s a law. So LinkedIn’s doing the very best it can to. Help abide by the, the new laws there.

LinkedIn recommends making targeting adjustments to your European campaigns as soon as possible, because LinkedIn’s warning that you might see higher fluctuations in performance.

I don’t know if that means your performance is going to decrease or all of a sudden your audiences are going to go way broad. I don’t know. , I do want to dig deeper into that, but just a heads up. If you advertise heavily in Europe. You may want to go and watch those campaigns as soon as you hear this.

Hey, do you have a question, a review or feedback for the show? Message me on LinkedIn or email us at podcast@B2Linked.com and attach a link to a voice recording file from you. You can record right on your phone. And if you can send that to me, I’ll play it right here on the show. I’m happy to keep you anonymous or share your details and shout you out. So go ahead and record yourself. Ask a question, comment on something from a past episode, correct me if you think I’m wrong on something. And I’ll aim to include you right here in the show.

Our first example of this comes from one of our super fanatics in the fanatics community, Ava Yakub.

AJ’s podcast is easily one of the best podcasts I’ve listened to. Every episode is packed with actionable takeaways that you can implement right away. His episodes have the perfect amount of information that will leave you feeling excited to test new strategies, hacks, or whatever he’s talking about, but not too much that you feel overwhelmed. His podcast is for beginners and experts and everyone in between. You can tell AJ puts a lot of time and thought into every episode and all the content he creates. He’s always happy and willing to share new things that have worked for him and is genuinely excited to hear other’s wins and challenges. If you haven’t already, subscribe to his podcast because you’re not going to want to miss a single episode, and then go sign up for his fanatics community. Thanks, AJ!

All right, Ava. Thanks so much for the kind words and for the review, really appreciate you going out of your way to do that. And now to everyone else, I would love to feature you in the same way. So shoot me your recording files and I’d love to include them.

Okay. Before we hop into the meat of the episode, this podcast is brought to you by B2Linked.com. We’re the ad agency 100 percent dedicated to LinkedIn Ads, and we have been since 2014, you know, back before it was cool. We’ve mastered the platform. We’ve figured out how to get the very best traffic at the very lowest costs, which on a platform that charges a premium, it’s by far the best way we’ve found to increase your ROI.

Bragging a little bit, we’ve built internal reporting capabilities that even LinkedIn themselves can’t provide to their customers, so we give our clients the very best insights. If that sounds cool to you and you’d like to explore working together, schedule your free discovery call at b2linked.com/discovery.

Okay. Now let’s jump into the meat of it. Let’s hit it.

So like we talked about Dennis, you has the dollar a day strategy for pretty much every other platform except for LinkedIn. So I came up with the 10 per day strategy on LinkedIn Ads. And this concept is simple. $10 per day is the minimum budget that you can set for a campaign on LinkedIn. So I’m going to share exactly how I would set it up on LinkedIn to get the very best exposure, the best effects at the lowest costs. Plus you’ll want to stick around to the end. Cause I’m going to share use cases where these strategies would actually be ideal for you. And just so you know, I always save the best tips for the very end. So I hope you’re not leaving the podcast early.

Okay, here are six strategies where you can effectively use $10 per day on LinkedIn. Obviously, if you want to try them all, it’ll very quickly become a $60 per day strategy so you’ll want to understand each one, the nuances, and decide which one or ones you’d actually want to implement.

Okay, very first off is probably the most boring one. This is single image sponsored content. So what you can do, you can bid actually lower than the floor. So LinkedIn has a floor bid. for sponsored content, but they stopped enforcing it here a year or two ago. So, now, you could create a single image sponsored content ad, give it a $10 per day budget, but bid it down to something super low, like $5. This should allow you to get two clicks per day out of this campaign. And so you could be really tight with your audience, get really specific about who’s going to see this message and make sure it’s tailored to them, and you can get two clicks a day. Or if that tends to get really, really good click through rates, like I’m thinking over 1%, you could switch that to maximum delivery and maybe get three clicks per day, who knows.

$10 per day strategy number two is using video views campaigns. So, what you can do, set your $10 per day budget on a video views campaign, that means you’re using the video views objective, run some video creative, and then bid the very lowest that it will let you bid per video view. Maybe it’s like five cents, maybe it’s eight cents, something like that. But if you bid the very minimum, you’re going to get the most number of views from your target audience as LinkedIn can do for staying under $10. It might go a little over $10 because LinkedIn does allow itself to overspend your budget by up to 50%.

On some of these, you might end up paying $15 a day. Be aware of that. Just watch it closely. Well you might be asking, what kind of video ads should I do? I would recommend keep them under 30 seconds if you can, especially if they’re going to cold audiences. And don’t do like, Hey, we’ve got some corporate video here. What you do is if you’re the founder or the head of sales or someone who’s a thought leader in the organization, you take your phone and you record yourself for, you know, under 30 seconds. Talking and sharing some insights, something that’s going to be, helpful, beneficial, help your prospects do their job better and help them get to know you. I would recommend recording this in a place where your background can be interesting. It’s not just the background of your office. Which if you do videos often, can people just think it’s the same video over and over again. So make sure your background can change a little bit if you have that ability. And I would also recommend make sure you’re using animated subtitles. We talked about this in episode 122 where Chandler Quinton was talking about a really high performing video creative on LinkedIn. So if you haven’t listened to that episode, stop this one right now, go listen to it, because that was by far one of the best interviews and episodes that we’ve ever had. I’m saying that now, like, way better than some of the other stuff that we’ve done. But on that episode, I talked a little bit about animated subtitles. How we saw our completion rate doubled as soon as we were using animated subtitles. So, totally worth it. There are a couple of AI tools out there that will do these animated subtitles for very inexpensive or free. So I’ll throw them down in the show notes as well, so you can get access to them. I highly, highly recommend when you run video ads, use the animated subtitles, get twice as many people to stick around all the way to the end.

Okay, $10 per day strategy number three is Text Ads. With Text Ads, you can bid all the way down to $2 per click, and this is going to allow your audience to be much larger, because Text Ads have a much lower click through rate. So, if you’re actually going to spend $10 per day, you’re either going to want a lot of these, or a very large audience to start out with, and then having copy that people actually want to click on.

I have found that at this low of a bid, it can be hard to get LinkedIn to really even spend it. It’s a great addition to any other campaigns you’re running. It is superb for top of mind awareness to have your prospects seeing your ads on every page that they navigate to on LinkedIn. Super cool.

Okay, $10 per day strategy number four is using Sponsored Messaging. That includes either Message Ads or Conversation Ads. These go right into your inbox. What’s so cool about these is, because the cost to send them is so low, we see on average like, 35 to 65 cents per person you send it to. If you have a budget of $10 a day, you can actually send quite a few of these every single day. We’ve found them to perform extremely well for warm audiences. So if you have warm, like, retargeting audiences, these are absolutely fantastic. But we have seen them perform well with cold audiences as well. Totally up for testing for you. So again, set your budget of $10 per day, let LinkedIn send as many of these things as it can to your audience and watch what happens.

One cool thing about the Sponsored Messaging is because you deliver it and then these LinkedIn members can open, click and convert at a later time. Like when they come back to check their messaging, two, three days later, then you’ll see your results will not stay the same. You’ll say like, Oh, results don’t look very good. I paid this much and I got this many clicks, but you come back the next day and the next day and the next day. And they just progressively keep getting better.

Ok $10 per day strategy number five is using Document Ads. Now, because Document Ads have such high click through rates on average, I highly recommend starting with your bidding on max delivery. So you can set your budget to $10 per day, put a Document Ad up, and let LinkedIn show that as many times as it can for that $10.

Now when I say Document Ad, you might be thinking, hey, I’m going to take my e book and upload it directly. Don’t do that. We haven’t found those to perform well. Instead, what you do is you create a whole separate document that is meant to be punchy, value prone, awesome. So if you have a 10 page e book, I might find, like, the top 5 stats, or value points, or interesting thoughts. And turn those into their own slide, their own document. I like to keep these documents in a square format, because then they’re going to show up great on both mobile and desktop. This can be as simple as just opening up Canva, and putting different words on different color background, and you upload it as a PDF. You can totally do that.

$10 a day strategy number 6, this is the one I’m actually the most excited about. Back on episode 119, it was all about Thought Leader Ads. We had Taina Palumbo Price from LinkedIn come talk to us about Thought Leader Ads. We got to hear about how they were working, and they’re working so well for everyone else. We’ve done a bunch of testing ourselves. We definitely feel like this is the crown jewel of LinkedIn Ads right now. What I would encourage you to do, go find your best performing organic posts. And in order to do that, that means you have to be posting regularly, which is something you should be doing anyway. Go take the highest performers. Launch them as thought leader ads with this $10 per day budget, and launch these on maximum delivery. I’d recommend doing this on the engagement objective. I tend to avoid brand awareness whenever possible. And if you launch with max delivery, because you expect that these are already going to have a much higher engagement rate than normal, you can probably get quite a few clicks, interactions, all that for your $10 per day

now, these can be used for a lot of different purposes. You can link to a specific resource. You can do what we’ve done before, which is comment gating, like comment below if you want access to this resource. And then as they comment, it’s helping the post go viral and more people are seeing it. That’s a cool way to do it. It’s also going to naturally gain more followers and get more connection requests for whoever’s posts you’re sponsoring. So this could be really good for if you’re trying to get more people to follow the CEO of the company or some thought leader within the company. These are a great way to boost their profile and make sure that when they share in the future, it gets more and more of your ideal eyeballs on it.

That person’s also going to gain some notoriety. So if someone in your organization ever comes to you and asks for permission to promote one of your posts, absolutely take them up on it. It’s always flattering when someone wants to take their dollars and put it behind your profile.

Now, for several of these strategies, you’ve heard me say, we’re going to bid really low or bid to the floor. One of the risks that you come across when you do this is that LinkedIn might look at your bid and say, Oh, based off of your performance, it’s actually more beneficial to us. We make more money if we show your competitors ads instead. So you might notice with some of these strategies that over time you stop receiving impressions. Just because of our bid.

Now, most of the time this can be fixed by just making sure that your ads really are like rockstar posts. If any of these are anywhere near the average click through rate, then chances are when you bid so low, LinkedIn’s just not going to show you may not spend your budget, or if you do spend it, it may not spend efficiently. So super important that these are your greatest hits.

Now, Dennis Yu actually talks about this in his program. Talking about going out and finding your greatest hits. It’s important to make sure that any ad that you’re going to be putting together in these strategies. They do perform very well. They should have click through rates that are much higher than the average. They should be rockstar posts, because if not, you might find that you’re not bidding high enough. You’ve got to bid higher. And that totally shoots you in the foot for the $10 per day strategy that we’re talking about.

You might find in situations that you might have to bid up. You might have to bid higher. to make sure you’re actually spending your $10 per day. So be open and ready for that. You may also find that if you’re bidding by manual cost per click, you can’t get LinkedIn to serve your ads enough, to actually get people to click.

So you might find that changing your bid to a cost per thousand impressions, a CPM bid, gets your ads shown more reliably than if you were bidding CPC. Now, there are two different ways to bid by CPM. The old way is kind of a pain. It’s a manual CPM bid. So you have to figure out like, what is that amount that I want to bid and key that in?

And then LinkedIn just bids that. But the more modern, the easier to use version of this is just bidding maximum delivery.

In episode 122, Chandler Quinton even mentioned that he was having under a certain objective, his ads just kind of stopped showing. And as soon as he launched that same ad to the exact same audience, but just changed the objective, all of a sudden it gave it a whole new life, and it was able to just keep showing.

So it might be worthwhile to look at possibly changing objectives just in case anything you’re doing ever stalls out.

Okay, like I promised, here are the use cases where we’ve found this $10 a day strategy to actually do great things for you. This is in no particular order. As I’m listing these off, I want you thinking of your own, and please let me know, shoot me a, a note on LinkedIn, shoot me a voice recording, let me know, like, hey, here are the different areas that we think a 10 a day strategy would work really well as well, and I’d love to feature you.

Okay, like I said, no certain order here. The very first off is being able to target journalists and media who might be able to bring extra publicity to you. So if you have a list of, let’s say journalists in your industry, you could upload that right into LinkedIn, or you could target like, you know, journalists as a title in media industries, that kind of thing.

But you can show ads specifically like showcasing how cool and interesting your product is. In hopes that as they’re surfing around, looking for ideas of things to write about, that they could consider you, and it becomes kind of a PR activity.

Another one we’ve found to work really well, let’s say you have seed funding, and maybe a series A raise, and you’re looking to raise a series B, what if you were to target just decision makers, venture capital, and private equity firms? And show them ads about your company. That way, when it comes across their desk, where they might consider investing, this is kind of hard to track and see like. Impact your LinkedIn Ads had on it, but you better believe if they’ve heard of the company before, they’re going to pay a little bit more attention.

Another great use case here is if you take your ideal customers as an ABM list, let’s say it’s, you know, the top 10 or 20 companies that you would absolutely love to work with. Well, 10 to 20 companies, it’s not going to spend that much, and it’s going to be hard to achieve any sort of volume with it. But if this is just a steady drip over time and any leads that it does generate turn into the deals that you would absolutely love, it can be worth it.

What about if you’re creating content like podcast episodes or blog posts or live streams and you just want a steady drip of people being notified about this new content that’s come out? You can do that. You can steadily drip your podcast episodes, your replays of webinars. This week’s blog post, drip it out to this could even be your followers or people you want to be your followers. This can be great for getting, updated, fresh information in front of their eyes all the time.

And then if you’re going to be publishing from your company page often, and from your personal profile often, wouldn’t you want to get more followers who are your ideal target audience to be following both of those entities so that you don’t have to spend money on ads in the future? You just post and this ideal audience sees it. This is something you can totally do by running Follower Ads. There’s two different kinds of ads that will get you followers on LinkedIn. The first is my favorite. It’s a dynamic ad called a Follower Ad. The main call to action is follow us. And when they click it, they’re immediately following you.

But any sort of news feed ad, we call it Sponsored Content that is in the engagement objective, it’s naturally going to have a call to action in the upper right that says follow for the company page. And so you could run both of these ad formats on this $10 a day strategy to try to get more followers from the audience that you’re choosing.

Another great one here. What if you have a special announcement or a humble brag, you just won an award or your company just. Anything that you want to get people’s attention on. These can make great Thought Leader Ads. It’s a great excuse to throw in an ad that looks very organic right up in your ideal target audience’s news feeds and stay top of mind with them. Remind them how amazing you are.

We work with a lot of tech companies and tech companies kind of have this attitude a lot of times that we’re always hiring. If there’s great talent, we’re always ready for it. Something you can do here is constantly drip out a job post for positions that you might want to be gathering resumes for. That could include like engineering talent or other hard to find talent. And as you just drip this out day after day, month after month, you’re going to accumulate some of these that you can Take as it’s as they come to you without having to post a big post and then, you know, gather a whole bunch of resumes and make a big decision right then. This can be a drawn out over time.

Lots of times in B2B, we’re targeting the person who is feeling the pain, who wants our solution to solve it. But we may not be targeting the whole buyers committee. So if someone is, let’s say they’ve gotten a proposal and you know they’re considering making a purchase from you? This could be a good time to turn on your $10 a day strategy to target the buyers committee. This might be someone in finance, maybe it’s the CFO at smaller companies, maybe it’s the CEO, at smaller companies as well. If it’s larger companies, maybe it’s managers or directors or VPs, but whoever it is, you can drip steady messaging about your company in front of them to stay top of mind, so that when that deal crosses their desk, they’re a lot more likely to go, oh, I’ve heard of this company, they must be legit. And then they’re going to be a lot more likely to actually sign that deal and help push it through.

And finally, retargeting. If you’re not already retargeting your website visitors on LinkedIn, what are you doing? You got to go set that up right now. But this could be a great usage for your $10 a day strategy, if you’re not doing it already. What you do is you take your retargeting audience of anyone who’s visited your website. And you go to target them, but you can also, because it’s LinkedIn, we can layer on other really interesting facets here, things like they have to be of a certain company size, or they have to be of a certain level of seniority, or be in a certain industry, because you don’t want to waste money on people who aren’t your ideal, If they came from like an organic source or something. So now we can be really specific about who in that retargeting audience is worth going after.

All right. So that was my list of nine awesome use cases for this $10 a day strategy. But I would love to hear from you. Did you have any that came to mind that you’re like, Ooh, AJ, you missed that? I would love to be corrected here. So hit me up.

So like we talked about in the episode, I’ve got a link in the transcript in the show notes below, so you don’t even have to take notes. There’s a link to Dennis Yu’s dollar a day strategy. There’s a link to the episode that we had on Thought Leader Ads, as well as the episode about, with Chandler Quinton, about getting incredible video performance.

So, make sure you go listen to those. There’s a link if you’re interested about the European privacy changes. There’s a link right to LinkedIn’s help page that’s talking about that, and what the implications might be. You’ll also see links to Descript and Video.ai, which are my preferred solutions for adding animated subtitles.

All right. So if you are not already a member of the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community, what are you waiting for? For ultra low cost, you get access to the whole community of all of these LinkedIn Ads experts who are all sharing what’s working for them and getting ideas. But then you also get access to all four of our courses that take you from absolute beginner to total LinkedIn Ads pro.

Plus there’s even an upgrade option where you can hop on a weekly group calls with me to go over any of the ideas that you’re wrestling with or learn how to do things in your account that you can’t find anywhere else. To get into the community, go to fanatics.b2linked.com. Now, if this is your first time listening, we welcome you. Hit that subscribe button if you want to hear more about LinkedIn Ads to make you a LinkedIn Ads hero every week.

But if this is not your first time listening, if you’re a fan, the best thing that you can do is go and leave a review on Apple Podcasts for us and let us know what you love about the show.

Now, I do want to hear from you. So if you have any questions, suggestions, or corrections on anything that I’ve talked about, reach out to us at the email address Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we’ll see you back here next week. I’m cheering you on and your LinkedIn Ads

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