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Show Description:

In this episode of The LinkedIn Ads Show, host AJ Wilcox dives into strategies for nurturing cold audiences on LinkedIn to prepare them for meaningful engagement and high-conversion offers. If you've struggled with converting cold traffic into sales-ready leads, this episode walks you through how to build a multi-stage funnel using LinkedIn Ads retargeting features.

Key Discussion Points:

1. Why Cold Audiences Need Nurturing:
   • Most cold audiences (95%) aren’t ready to engage with sales reps or bottom-of-funnel offers.
   • Nurturing involves multiple retargeting stages to move prospects down the funnel, warming them up to higher-friction calls to action.
2. Building a Multi-Stage Funnel:
   • Stage 1 (Cold Traffic): Use LinkedIn’s native audience targeting to reach cold audiences who align with your ideal customer profile.
   • Stage 2 (First Retargeting): Retarget website visitors, company page visitors, and ad engagers from Stage 1. Apply targeting "guardrails" like seniority, job function, or industry to refine the audience.
   • Stage 3 (Hot Traffic): Retarget prospects from Stage 2 who have engaged meaningfully. These are primed for bottom-of-funnel offers like demos or sales calls.
3. Best Practices for Funnel Organization:
   • Use a campaign naming convention like S01, S02, S03 to clearly identify funnel stages in your account and ensure they’re sorted alphabetically.
   • Exclude retargeting audiences from the previous stage to avoid overlap and ensure prospects graduate down the funnel.
4. Retargeting Audience Management:
   • Create retargeting audiences based on specific engagements (e.g., video views, document interactions).
   • Combine smaller audiences (e.g., website visitors + company page visitors) to ensure they hit the 300-member minimum for ads to serve.
5. Budget Considerations:
   • A multi-stage funnel works best with a monthly budget of $5,000 or more, though smaller budgets are possible with longer ramp-up times.
6. Testing and Optimization:
   • Run bottom-of-funnel offers in earlier stages as a test to gauge audience readiness.
   • If Stage 3 doesn’t yield high conversion rates, adjust ad messaging to clearly communicate value and reduce friction.
7. Recent LinkedIn Updates:
   • LinkedIn Wire Beta: Advertise as pre-roll videos on high-trust publisher content like Bloomberg and Forbes.
   • Holiday Ad Tips: Lower competition during the holidays results in reduced CPCs and CPLs, making it an opportune time to run campaigns.
8. Pro Tips:
   • Take advantage of seasonal or holiday-themed campaigns for better engagement.
   • Use organic posts from company representatives to complement paid ads, especially during events.

Call to Action: Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to expert insights, courses, and weekly group calls with AJ. Subscribe to the podcast for weekly LinkedIn Ads tips, and leave a review on Apple Podcasts to help other marketers discover the show.

Review and Connect: AJ welcomes listener questions, suggestions, and feedback via LinkedIn or email at podcast@B2Linked.com. Submit a voice recording to be featured in a future episode.

Show Transcript:

I'm sorry, but cold audiences are not ready to hop on the phone with your sales rep. We're covering the nurturing steps to prep cold traffic 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 AJ Wilcox. I'm the host of the weekly podcast, the LinkedIn Ads Show. I'm thrilled to welcome you to the show for advanced B2B marketers who want to evolve their craft, master LinkedIn Ads, and achieve true pro status. I said it in the teaser that cold audiences aren't ready to talk to your sales rep. I would say that applies to about 95% of you because we usually see about 5% of accounts that for whatever reason, it's usually extreme value that they're giving or pent up demand. Either way, there's a small percentage of companies out there who may be able to go right for the kill. They may not have to nurture quite as much, but the vast majority of you will need to nurture sometimes with several touches before you see great conversion rates for your demo focused calls to action ads or free trials or whatever bottom of the funnel kinds of ask that you're using. So if we can't have success pushing demos and sales calls right to a cold audience, what are we to do? Well, this is done through retargeting and usually like I said, multiple stages of it. LinkedIn does make it really easy to create retargeting audiences. And I will say the retargeting audiences that we can build on LinkedIn are one of the few things where LinkedIn is way ahead of meta and Google on. They've given us so many options and I hope in the future we have a lot more as well because there's so much more information that LinkedIn has. So it's easy to create these retargeting audiences, but it doesn't make it very easy to build advanced campaign structures and build multiple funnel stages and graduate those prospects down the funnel. So I'm going to walk you through in today's episode exactly how with LinkedIn ads to create a multi-stage funnel and graduate your prospects down from cold traffic to where they are red hot.

The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com. The LinkedIn Ads experts.

B2Linked is the ad agency, 100% dedicated to LinkedIn ads. And we have been back since 2014, you know, back before it was cool. We build a custom strategy for every account we work with. You get to work directly with me plus my local team. You'll never get a cookie cutter approach or a standard account template from us. No way. Plus with the strategies that we've developed and our mastery of the platform, we always save our clients more than we charge. So it's kind of like getting the best in the biz for free. If you'd like to explore partnering with us for your LinkedIn ads management, schedule your free discovery call today at B2Linked.com/discovery. First off in the news at the time of recording, I'm just about to head to Boston to speak at the marketing profs B2B forum event. This is a really cool conference. B2B doesn't get a whole lot of love in the conference circuit, but marketing profs, they're a B2B organization to the core. They totally know how to give it to us in the best way. So this episode is not going to go live until after that event is over. So I'm really hopeful that I get to meet many of you LinkedIn ads fanatics there. Then next week I'm speaking at Heroconf. It's the advanced PPC conference in San Diego, California. So if you're a listener, you hear this first, make sure to come say hi. I'd love to hang out. I do hope to get another episode out next week, but you know how it goes when you're traveling. I can't exactly take this mic with me, so I'm crossing my fingers. I can get it done in between travel. I want to call out a new upcoming feature and this is called LinkedIn wire. This was shared with me by Paula Merrick, one of my favorite LinkedIn reps. She shared with me all about the wire program. I was really excited to share it with you. We'll probably end up doing a full episode on this when it comes out or when I get some experience. But for right now, here's the scoop. LinkedIn's currently testing a program that is in beta right now that's going to allow brands to advertise on the videos of really highly trusted publishers. So imagine like Bloomberg, Business Insider, Wall Street Journal, when they have great video content in the news feed that people are watching, we'll be able to have our LinkedIn ads as a pre-roll video to these that we pay for. We'll still get our own targeting that we love LinkedIn so much for. It's going to be right in the members feeds, which is exactly where we want our sponsored content. It seems like a great program. And I do think that halo effect that you get by being featured on videos from really well-known publishers is going to make your brand look even better. Now, these aren't ads that you can purchase on a self-service basis right within campaign manager yourself. No, you actually need to go to your LinkedIn rep. Your LinkedIn rep will be able to sell publisher content packages for the wire and you're only eligible if you've been nominated. So new accounts that want to get in here, talk to your LinkedIn reps, see if they can push you through that nomination process. During the beta, they're just working with a small group of publishers. We did notice that the US postal service ran an ad there. So others like that, I'm guessing Fortune 500s or quite large enterprises. And to qualify for the wire beta right now, they want you to set aside a minimum of $50,000 per campaign for the lifetime. I mentioned a couple publishers there, but we have Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Market Watch, Barons, Business Insider, Reuters,

Forbes, Fortune, NBCU, and Yahoo Finance. Looks pretty cool. Any of you who have the budgets to participate in this, I would absolutely love to hear about the results. Around this time of year, lots of your LinkedIn reps will reach out to you asking what your plans are for the holidays. Lots of advertisers like to pause their ads during the holidays because it's like, well, if we don't have sales reps who are in the office ready to field calls or ready to do demos, why would we waste the money? This actually creates a really cool effect because since so many advertisers are pausing their accounts, what it means is costs overall for those who don't pause, they're going to get lower costs. LinkedIn last year saw a drop during the holidays. I'm going to guess that this was Christmas through New Year's in North America, but they saw a decreased cost per click by 11.6%. That drove a lower cost per lead by four and a half percent. They mentioned that there is a drop in engagement rates on average about one and a half percent, but I've actually noticed that on holidays, we actually see higher engagement, lower volume because not as many people are spending time on LinkedIn, but higher engagement because the ones who are, they're under a lot less stress, their calendars are free, and you have more of their attention. But if LinkedIn says that engagement dropped by one and a half percent, okay, I'll believe them, but I've seen the opposite. And absolutely, you can take full advantage of these performance increases, especially if you tailor your creative to speak to the holiday. Having a seasonal event or a holiday promotion, something where you can at least call out the elephant in the room that like, "Hey, you're on your phone on Christmas." These can really boost your engagement and visibility. All right, if you have a question for me to answer here on the show, if you would love to leave a review because I would love you for it, or if you want to leave feedback for the show, send a message to me on LinkedIn. My DMs are free and open. You can also email us at podcast at B2Linked.com. If you attach a link to a voice recording, I'll play you right here on the show and shout you out. Or if you want to just leave me dumb text, okay, I can read it myself. As always, I want to feature you. All right, without further ado, let's hit it. I've been getting more and more questions lately about how to do full funnel retargeting campaigns. It's actually pretty hard to do the way that LinkedIn has built their tools, which is really surprising because LinkedIn actually bought a company years ago called Bizzo, and they did exactly this. You could build campaigns that would automatically target someone at one funnel stage and move them down. And LinkedIn would keep track of everyone that they were showing these ads to, and you could show them in a specific sequence and at special stages. And it was really surprising LinkedIn actually shut Bizzo down. That was actually the announcement that tanks the price of LinkedIn stock, which allowed Microsoft to swoop in and purchase it. So you can thank shutting down of Bizzo to why LinkedIn is now a Microsoft property. Okay, but that's a conversation for another day. I want to shout out Sarah Clancy, who's in the LinkedIn ads fanatics community. She brought this question up this week and made me realize that I haven't talked much about this in a past episode. I already gave the LinkedIn ads fanatics this insight earlier. So if you are a LinkedIn ads one percenter or want to be, make sure you're a member of the LinkedIn ads fanatics community. Go to fanatics.B2Linked.com. All right, to build a multi stage funnel. First, you need to decide how to name your campaigns so that you have a nice, easy to understand organization. I used to name all of my campaigns by putting tofu, mofu, or bofu in front of them. That's tofu for top of funnel, mofu. I wish it was mofo for middle of funnel and bofu for bottom of funnel. And that would allow me to separate out all my campaigns by stages, but that convention had two major limitations. The first is that tofu, mofu, and bofu, they're not in the right order alphabetically. So I found it actually really difficult in large accounts to quickly sort and look at performance. The second big limitation is what if you want to build a funnel that has more than three stages? What was I going to call these additional stages? Like I considered adding extra Bs to the name of it. So it's B Bofu and B B Bofu. But ultimately, I didn't like that. So to solve this, I started adding S01, S02, S03 to the front of my campaign names. The S stands for stage. So we're doing stage one, stage two, and stage three. This helped me to be really organized in my campaign naming. And since they all start with the letter S and then have numbers that count up like S01, S02, when LinkedIn will naturally sort them or when Excel sorts them alphabetically, it keeps all of your stages nicely together. And plus, I get an unlimited number of stages. Problem solved. I will mention we just launched a particularly large account that has six stages. So I'm really appreciating the simplicity of this naming. Stage one is our cold stage. This is where we're relying on LinkedIn's native audience targeting to define the audiences that we just can't reach on any other channel. This is where LinkedIn shines.

Stage two, this is our first retargeting stage. This is where I target a few different groups to begin with. Number one, I target website retargeting audiences, but I won't run just the website retargeting audience on its own. I put what I call guardrails on the targeting since not all of your website visitors are going to make good potential customers. For instance, someone who is looking to be hired by you looking for a job, they're going to come visit your website. Also, salespeople who are trying to sell into your company, they're spending time on your website researching and learning more about you. So I like to apply some broad targeting that chances are they're going to make a decent customer. So I apply these broad targetings like job function, level of seniority, company size, sometimes I'll use industry. So website retargeting audiences, I push them right into stage two. Another audience that I push right into stage two, these are my LinkedIn company page visitors. I put guardrails on these for exactly the same reason as website visits retargeting. So those are two potential stage two campaigns already. Then the third campaign I like to include by default, these are those who've interacted with my stage one ads. So if I'm running thought leader ads in my stage one, it'll be either single image ad, engagers, or 50% video viewers, just depending on whether it's single image or video. If I'm running document ads in stage one, it'll be document engagers, you get the point. Basically match your retargeting type to whatever type of ads that you're running in your stage one. Now here's the trick. You're going to create these retargeting audiences before you create your stage two campaigns. Because you have to, you have to have the audience to add to your campaign. What you need to remember is to make sure you exclude these retargeting audiences that you just created from your stage one campaigns. That's because as soon as someone engages with your stage one, you no longer want them to be targeted in stage one. You want to graduate them down to your stage two. It's annoying, but trust me, just make it a habit for every time you create a new audience. Now you might be asking yourself, when do we create these retargeting audiences? Because you know that your campaign isn't eligible to run until your retargeting audience has at least 300 people in it. That's true, but it actually doesn't have to stop you from creating your stage two campaigns all at the same time that you create your stage one campaigns. The reason for this is you can create everything. You can create your stage two campaigns, you can create the retargeting audiences that are based off of stage one's engagements. You can do all of this way before the campaign set live. If you set the campaign live, it's just not going to start serving your ads actively until that audience gets right over that 300 person mark, but then it's going to immediately start serving. So I don't suggest waiting at all to create any of your funnel stages unless you're waiting on some kind of content for them. Now, if it's taking a long time to get your retargeting audiences to be large enough to actually run, you can always combine multiple retargeting audiences together. For instance, in stage two, I mentioned that I'll have website visits retargeting with guardrails and LinkedIn company page visitors with guardrails. A lot of times I'll actually smush both of those audiences together into a single retargeting campaign. And what's cool about this is the campaign is going to start serving impressions as soon as the combined audiences are over 300. So if I only have 100 people in my website visits retargeting, but 200 people have visited my LinkedIn company page when they're combined together, I hit 300 and my ads start serving. So now that I have stage two campaigns created and serving, we're going to follow exactly the same steps as before. We're going to create retargeting audiences from the meaningful interactions from those stage two campaigns. And then we're going to remember to exclude those audiences immediately from our stage two campaigns. So stage two campaign creates the audience and then immediately excludes it. Now the same audiences that you just excluded from stage two, you take those to actually target to create your stage three campaigns. It's hard to explain this verbally, but I really hope you're catching on because this is super important. Otherwise your prospects are going to continue to be targeted by both your stage two and your stage three campaigns. So they're going to be cannibalizing each other's impressions. Oftentimes I notice obviously stage one runs immediately because these are cold audiences. It may take a few days or a week to get stage two running. From my experience, stage three campaigns tend to take longer before they're large enough to run. So that means that when you're a stage three prospect, you've interacted with at least two ads before at this point, the brand has earned more of your attention. This stage three audience is who is going to be a lot more open to an offer like meeting with sales or signing up for a free trial or whatever your bottom of funnel high friction conversion is. If you present a bottom of the funnel offer to those in stage three and they still don't have a high conversion rate, that's a clue that you might need to either add additional stages of nurture or maybe your ads aren't attractive enough. And I don't mean that they're not pretty enough or eye-catching enough. What you want is when you're explaining to someone why they should meet with your sales rep, you need to tell them here is the value you're going to get out of it. Concretely explain the value, de-emphasize any sort of friction and try that first before you decide to add additional funnel stages. How much budget do you need to run a multi-stage funnel? I would suggest that you'd probably want to have about a five thousand dollar a month budget at least, but it's certainly possible with less. You might just notice that it takes a long time until your stage three campaigns are large enough to serve at any meaningful volume. Just for funsies, I like to try running bottom of the funnel offers in stage one and I also like running them in stage two on my way to building stage three. This is just a test, but if it so happens that your audience is primed and ready for a meaningful conversation with sales without having to be passed through two previous stages, then that's awesome. You can save some money right there by going right for the kill. But normally you're going to see really high conversion costs until you get them to stage three.

I mentioned before the LinkedIn ads fanatics community sign up and for one low monthly cost, you get access to all of the community of LinkedIn ads experts who are all sharing what's working for them. Plus you also get access to all four of our courses that take you from LinkedIn ads beginner to total expert. There's even an upgrade that gets you on a weekly group call with me. So if you are serious about wanting to be a LinkedIn ads one percenter, you've got to get in the community. Go to fanatics.B2Linked.com. If this is your first time listening, welcome. We're so excited to have you here. Hit that subscribe button so you hear me in your ear holes every week. But if you are a loyal listener, I salute you, my friend. Please do me the favor of going to review us on Apple podcasts so more LinkedIn ads fanatics can find out with any questions, suggestions or corrections. Reach out to us at podcast at B2Linked.com. With that being said, we'll see you back here next week, I hope, and I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn ads initiatives.