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Summary

In this powerhouse episode of the The LinkedIn Ad Show, host AJ Wilcox sits down with Ruby James to unpack the explosive rise of executive thought leadership — and why it’s now one of the most powerful drivers of B2B pipeline on LinkedIn. Backed by brand-new data from LinkedIn’s latest Founder-Led Sales & Marketing playbook, Ruby reveals that startups with founders who post just 10 times per year generate 33% more leads — and that deals influenced by executive engagement can see up to a 120% increase in deal size. Together, they dive deep into practical strategies for mobilizing busy executives, creating authentic content that builds trust (not just noise), and amplifying it all with Thought Leader Ads for measurable ROI. If you’re a B2B marketer looking to connect brand, leadership, and paid strategy into one high-performing growth engine, this episode delivers the data, tactics, and real-world examples to make it happen.

Transcript

AJ
It finally feels like marketers have caught the vision of thought leadership on LinkedIn ads. Me and a guest are about to blow your mind on this week's episode of the LinkedIn ad show.

Announcer
Welcome to the LinkedIn ad show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

AJ
Hey, hey, hey there, LinkedIn ads fanatics. As he said, I'm AJ Wilcox. I'm the host of the weekly podcast, the LinkedIn ad show. I'm thrilled to welcome you to the show for advanced B2B marketers in their evolution of mastering LinkedIn ads and achieving true pro status. A few years ago, when LinkedIn first released thought leader ads, it felt like pulling teeth to try to get marketers to adopt them. Now they're part of every one of our LinkedIn ad strategies and we're finding all kinds of awesome ways of leveraging them. That's why I brought this guest on. You know her from episode 157. Ruby James is coming back to teach us all the best ways to leverage our executive teams for thought leadership that actually drives measurable ROI.

Announcer
The LinkedIn ads show is proudly brought to you by B2linked.com. The LinkedIn ads experts.

AJ
That's right. B2linked is the ad agency, 100% dedicated to LinkedIn ads. And we have been 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 and my local team and you'll never get a cookie cutter approach or a standard account template from us. No, sorry. Plus with the strategies we've developed in 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, schedule your free discovery call at B2linked.com/discovery. All right. I know it's been a minute since the last episode I published. So my apologies, but I'm excited to share that we're bringing on a key hire that I can't wait to tell you more about. They're going to be freeing me up more so I can get back to publishing these episodes every week, or at least on a more regular cadence. So stand by for that. All right. If you have a question, a review or feedback for the show, my DMS are free and open on LinkedIn. Message me on LinkedIn. Send me a voice recording if you've got it. And I can play it right here on the show or just send me text. Also, if you want to mail me some of your company gear, I'd love to wear it on the show and talk about your company. All right. Without further ado, let's hit it. I'm super excited to introduce you again to Ruby James. She leads the startups program at LinkedIn out of San Francisco.

AJ
All right, Ruby, I'm so excited to have you here. I mentioned in the intro, you were with us on episode 157, where you walked us through the sales benchmarks report that you so lovingly crafted. We're excited to have you back here talking about another report. First of all, just love to have you introduce yourself.

Ruby
Yeah, first just want to say thanks for having me back. It's so great to see you again. And always great to hear your perspective on thought leadership and resources that we're creating here at LinkedIn. So just a little bit about me for those that either listened last time or didn't have a chance to listen. My name is Ruby. I lead our startups program here at LinkedIn on the LinkedIn marketing side of our business. For context on our team, the LinkedIn marketing for startups team was created about seven years ago. I was one of the founding members and our goal was to help startups speed time to ROI on LinkedIn through our specialized support. So we know startups have aggressive growth goals, unique needs. They need to really see more from LinkedIn to see the efficiencies in ROI that they need to see from our platform against their growth goals. And so this team was created with that in mind. We provide specialized support on the LinkedIn marketing side, but we also provide important advisory on growth lovers that also drive strong pipeline and ROI and revenue, I should say, like sales and marketing alignment, measurement, the latest go to market insights, board rate reporting, all with the focus as well on really just again, helping our startup customers see the most they can see against their pipeline and revenue goals. Part of my role in addition to that is partnering with VCs to ensure they're aware of the best practices that enable startups in their portfolio to maximize the valuation on LinkedIn. So wearing a lot of different hats, but all with the goal of again, ensuring our B2B startup customers are seeing as much value as possible from our platform.

AJ
Amazing. We are so excited to have you back. Thank you for being willing to join us again. Today, we're going to be talking a lot about executive thought leadership and just to level the playing field here for everyone. Can you talk to us a little bit about what executive thought leadership is and why it's valuable?

Ruby
Yes. So yeah, taking a step back and kind of how we got here. So a core and really my favorite part of my role is meeting with as many startup customers as we can, checking in monthly with our VC partners, as well as really keeping a pulse on what's being talked about on LinkedIn. And that helps us identify what are the core themes and trends and asks that are emerging in the B2B startup landscape and what additional resources and research and insight can we be providing to again, ultimately help our customers unlock deeper success on LinkedIn with what we're seeing work. So last year that was the B2B benchmark report that you and I chatted about on episode 157. I remember that number, great number. And this year a key theme emerged, which is startups who are having their executives lean into thought leaderships. That's defined as posting on LinkedIn, getting out there in the industry, speaking at events, really again, putting executives behind the core messages of a startup or brand are seeing stronger ROI, stronger overall pipeline and revenue than startups that are not.

Ruby
So I pause and I want to repeat that like it's really wild because I feel like a year ago or even a few, I should say a few years ago, if we were to talk about brand with some of our startup customers, we'd get kind of laughed out of the room. And now we're at this place where when we think about executive thought leadership, which is again, these executives at a startup really being the face of that startup and sharing thought leadership about trends, challenges that their ICP might be facing, how their solution solves for those challenges. These startups are truly able now to connect that back to stronger and real ROI. So it's this really wild kind of new data point. And we'll get into more of the key stats, I hope so soon, where we can actually validate that this executive thought leadership strategy as part of your broader marketing strategy is really driving outsized results for our customers.

AJ
And I love that this is a topic you're looking into, because we see exactly the same thing. We have many clients who say, Oh, no, our executive team, they're several layers away from me, I could never get any of their time. And then we end up just over and over and over trying different ads and just not having nearly as much success as other clients where their executive team is willing to create content, because that content just performs better. We even have one client who this week, they were at an event, and you know, we're having pretty decent success with their ads. But they came home from this event and they said, Wow, this is amazing. We didn't know we were doing so well. But so many people stopped us and said, Hey, I recognize you from LinkedIn. And that was like a huge nod to the success he's had from just being willing to record himself on video. You know, he's the founder. And so anyway, I'm a huge fan and believer of exactly what you're talking about.

Ruby
Yes, and great to hear first, and I'm really eager to hear your thoughts and some of the research that we'll walk through. And just to what you're saying, like over the last year plus of us kind of doing this research, listening and meeting with customers, VCs, like thought leaders in this area in the space, we were able to again, first pick up on some qualitative feedback, like what you just said, where, you know, founders that are starting to get the ball rolling and starting to see momentum from their, their exec thought leadership strategy, really start to be able to tie that to revenue outcomes. But now we also have some quantitative data to support that as well. But for those of you that are just listening in on audio, I'll explain. I just started sharing my screen to actually highlight an example of a founder that we featured Gal Aga in the report or in the playbook. And so for those that are, again, listening, I'll read the post and read the quote. But what he shared is LinkedIn isn't just a social channel. It's an all in one growth engine. A year ago, I'd have laughed out loud. If you told me 700,000 would read what I have to say every week and LinkedIn drive 65% of Alliance leads. I was so wrong. So this is just like one of many examples to what you just said, AJ founders starting to actually, you know, be able to tie this back to revenue outcomes, which is just so exciting.

AJ
Oh, I love it. All right. So talk to us about the report. I guess we understand a little bit about where it came from, but what's been your methodology? How did you approach it? What's inside? Give us like all the dirty backstory.

Ruby
Yes. So, so glad you asked. Obviously kind of just walked you through how we landed in this place where we started to really see this key theme with startups that again are driving the strongest ROI and results on LinkedIn. We're really seeing this exec thought leadership strategy tied to their overall paid marketing strategy. And they're thinking about all this holistically. So the natural next step as we started to see this qualitative feedback was very much for us to identify like what would be most helpful for our customers to learn about in this topic. And kind of in response to all of this, we created our new playbook called founder led sales and marketing never ends. We actually co-authored it with scale venture partners who are experts in helping startups evolve from just founder led sales to a scalable go to market strategy. And in again, meeting with our customers, meeting with the thought leaders in the space, really what the ask was, was what are the best practices? Like what are setting companies apart in how they approach an exec thought leadership strategy, both with the founder with executives as the company grows. And so this playbook very much highlights both the why and how it's been a game changer for these startups that are doing it particularly well on LinkedIn, as well as really tactical best practices for how you can help your founders, your execs go viral on LinkedIn and start to create this pipeline engine with an executive thought leadership strategy. So we spoke to so many amazing thought leaders. I know I mentioned we co-authored this with scale venture partners, but another, I should say the few key thought leaders featured in this report. I know you've met with Kacie Jenkins before. She's the former SCP of marketing at Sendoso. She's now at an anthropic. I mentioned scale venture partners. Craig Rosenberg is the chief partner officer there. And so him and I worked really closely together on the research. He also advises, as I mentioned, scale venture partners, founders, and also just broader in, you know, the industry and other VCs. He'll come in and advise them on the founder brand. We also featured Alec Paul. He's the founder of sales brand. And I always joke if you see a founder that's gone viral on LinkedIn, he's often behind them. And so a lot of his best practices for how he's done that is codified in the report. And then we also featured Scott Albero, who actually co-founded Topo with Craig. So he's someone that's also advising on founder brand, as well as John Burke Becker, who I believe you also know, the founder of roasted. So a lot of incredible thought leaders. We also feature Alison Coleman, who's leading kind of in quarterbacking all of Glean's executive thought leadership strategy there, which I can share some best practices. But really the thought was, how do we take the best of the best of all of those that are doing this particularly well from those that are, again, a smaller startup, maybe just a founder. And again, in the spirit of the report, founder, led sales and marketing never ends. The concept is, how do we take the founder and, you know, have them still be really the face as they scale, but also as you start to bring on marketing and sales, how do you think about exact led thought leadership and tie that all together?

AJ
Oh, perfect. All right. So anytime that we're being intellectually honest, when we're trying to answer a question, I find that as we dive into data, sometimes we get surprised. Sometimes we find something we weren't expecting. Are there any stats? Are there any findings from your report where that just hit you like a ton of bricks?

Ruby
Totally. So I appreciate that question because I feel like in the beginning of the research, again, I think people make the joke like, oh, we're just going to make decisions on vibes. I never liked to make decisions on vibe. I like real data. But I think in the beginning, you know, as you said, in regards to kind of the founders that you've heard say that this can be a big pipeline driver, they're all saying it qualitatively, but I'm really interested to actually know like on average, what is it really driving? So excited to share some surprising and just interesting stats that we came across to really validate that not only is this qualitatively happening, but we know that it's meaningfully happening across the customers that are seeing success.  

The first part of the research that we did was we looked at startups who had founders that were active on LinkedIn. And we wanted to understand of the startups that had active founders, and that's defined as at least posting 10 times per year. So really, that's around once a month. Did we see any downstream strong outcomes in actual paid direct source lead gen performance? And as you can see here, we were able to conclude that founders who post at least 10 times per year on LinkedIn, generate 33% more leads than founders who don't. I'm curious from your perspective, AJ, I have another stat that I want to share, but I think this was the first kind of aha, we were honestly blown away that we could actually correlate founder posting to real downstream lead outcomes.

AJ
Yeah, I'm a data guy. And this is the kind of data I wish I had any sort of methodology to be able to pull, and you pulled it. So congratulations, that's exactly what I'd expect.

Ruby
Another piece that we were able to dive deeper into and thanks to our work and Kacie, the former SVP of marketing at Sendoso's contribution to the playbook. So for context, Kacie grew her following from zero to about 11,000 followers very quickly. And then she started to activate or kind of play a quarterbacking role across Sendoso's executive team to start to get them posting as well. For context, Sendoso's ICP is going to be very much like go to market decision makers. So marketers, sales, and founders as well. And so Kacie being the SVP of marketing, she very much could play a role as a thought leader to their ICP being that their marketers as well, she understands their challenges. We'll talk more kind of about the tactics of how to think about activating execs and how you can approach it in a way similar to what Kacie did so successfully. But I know this is a lot to look at, so I'm going to walk everyone through it. We were able to look at Sendoso's executive engagement on LinkedIn and understand if there's any direct impact to like the value and overall like size of deals that they were bringing in. And so I'll walk us through baseline. When we look at any of Sendoso's deals, so active opportunities that did not engage with a company executive, we then looked at active opportunities where someone in the buying committee that is associated with the opportunity commented or liked a company executives post.

Ruby
And then we also looked at opportunities where a person in the buying committee at those open opportunities or companies followed a company executive. And so, as you can see here, we saw a 24% lift in deal size, so increase in deal size, and then 120% increase in deal size when a member of the buying committee of that open opportunity followed a company executive on LinkedIn. So I'll pause here. I know this was a lot to look at, but the overarching takeaway is that when a prospect or someone in your buying committee is following or engaging with a company executive post, you will have an increased likelihood of deal size with that opportunity.

AJ
And I would also imagine those deals probably close faster if there's enough data around like sales cycles, because I find that when you do things in a personal kind of way, it breaks down barriers of trust. And those barriers are so often what keep us from actually closing the deal immediately or in quick time.

Ruby
Definitely. It was that increased element of, again, having an executive build trust with those decision makers results in the ability to, again, increase value from those companies or opportunities faster, and then where relevant, speeding the sales cycle as well. Obviously, a larger deal size is going to slow things down, so there's a balance of that, but you're totally spot on. That was definitely something we saw as well.

AJ
If I heard right, she is both involved on LinkedIn, posting, publishing, and then she got her team to do it as well. Do you have any tips, tricks for us on how we can mobilize our own staff to do the same kind of thing?

Ruby
Yeah. So again, I know you've had Kacie on this podcast. I would definitely recommend having her back. She's so great at all of this. And at a high level, the way that Kacie spoke to getting her executives engaged on LinkedIn, number one, I think helping them understand that longer term, like this is going to allow you to drive pipeline and like contribute to pipeline. Something she likes to say, and kind of to quote her is like, what is more important as an executive than driving growth for your startup? What's more important than getting out into the market and talking to your customers?

Ruby
And so helping them see that this is very much that, but in a way that again, is going to ultimately help you drive more results for your business and connecting those dots has been a really effective way to help get executives more excited and really seeing the impact of what this is going to drive for them.

AJ
That's awesome. A lot of times when I talk to execs about this, they'll give different excuses. They'll say something like, Oh, I'm busy or I'm not great on video on camera. And I have to try to convince them of this. That's like, no, by actually giving your time and dedicating it and investing it here, you can create more pipeline than your team is able to create without you. It really is worth your time. Do you have any recommendations for how we can convince busy executives to help us with this kind of initiative?

Ruby
Yeah, definitely. And I would say this is very much common. Like, and I'd be curious your thoughts with the customers that you work with that kind of talk to you about this. And obviously you have such an incredible following yourself. So I'd be curious from your own experience. But I would say like what Kacie and I found, and as we've been interviewing and doing more research with all of these different thought leaders, especially with Alec Paul, whose job it is, is to help get a founder from, you know, starting at never posting to just starting to see some initial traction momentum. This really only I find to be a, or we all find to be a problem when you're just getting started. Because again, you're like, I don't have any followers. I'm not getting any feedback. Like how do I know it's working? How can I kind of like get over that hump? And then I have found, and we've talked to a lot of founders that we featured in the playbook, that once they actually start seeing the feedback and they get that first salesperson saying, Oh, you know, I talked to this person on a sales call and they actually mentioned seeing your post, or they start to like get that feedback. Again, we start to kind of see that snowball effect and that flywheel being built. But I would say the two things that have helped these busy execs kind of get over that hump is number one, authenticity, always over polish. I think the biggest common misperception is that execs think that there has to be this like very manicured, robust, like time intensive, big holistic strategy. And in reality, the best and most viral and top performing posts that reach your right audience and really get engagement are the ones that are authentic and natural and founders and execs just sharing quick thoughts and insights and themes from their day to day. Alec Paul has a good way of looking at this where he really just pushes his clients and the founders that he works with to think of their day through the lens of a journalist. You know, we always say execs are sitting on such incredible insights that can so easily just be converted into what are some of the trends you're seeing across the customers you spoke to today or, you know, what are the biggest challenges in the industry? Like you are obviously the one that has the perspective and insights into that in your day to day work. What themes are coming up from customers? I know I mentioned that, you know, how are you evolving your product and why? You know, in the playbook, we have a lot of great prompts just like those that can help a busy exec get started. But I think soon as they start to do that exercise and just think of their day like a journalist would, it becomes pretty clear that there's like one to two pieces of gold at least that they're sitting on every day.

AJ
Oh, so true. I love those prompts. This is genius. I mean, I take these to my own client meetings. What would you say to someone who says, Oh, I'm not good on video or I'm not a good writer? Do you still encourage that executive to get involved in thought leadership? Or do you say, Oh, yeah, let's find someone else?

Ruby
Yeah. So first of all, you want to start with like any format you feel good with. If you're not great on written, if you're not great with video, like whatever works better for you, like don't force it. So we have some, you know, founders and execs who really just like to record themselves in selfie format as they're walking. Like it can just be super casual. And again, we see that work really well as authentic and in the moment as you can be. We also see others, you know, definitely don't want to do video. They don't like that. And they'd rather just post. And that's equally as impactful. It really just comes down to the what you're sharing. It doesn't matter as much the format. We obviously see posts and video both perform really well. And I have perspectives on that too, that we can talk about tactically. But if that's really going to be the thing that is holding them up, we always just want them to get started with what they feel most comfortable in. The other thing I'll say, and this is the other piece to kind of help a busy exec get started is leverage AI. And Alec Paul will speak to this in the playbook, like you need to have your own unique perspective. AI is not going to be able to like draft a post for you. And I think we all now with so much AI happening everywhere, like we can tell what's real and what isn't. And so the posts that perform the best are the ones that are authentic and written by you. But if you had, let's say, a few meetings that day, can you upload your meetings and have them summarize the key insights and then take that to a post? Or we feature Alison Coleman, as you get to be a more mature startup, can you bring someone on or quarterback this with your marketing team? We have a lot of founders that really don't want to do any of this. And so their marketing team will actually just interview them for an hour and then use it to kind of cut up some posts and then send it to the founder to just make some final tweaks to make sure it feels authentic to them. But there's a lot of different ways you can use your team. And if you don't have a team or you do like AI to really speed time to value with what you're creating.

AJ
I totally agree with that. I find the more I play with AI, it's really good when there's a consensus out there. It's good at surfacing that consensus. But it's really, really bad at thought leadership because it can't regurgitate something that hasn't been created yet. So if AI can create it for you, I wouldn't call it thought leadership. But boy, it's good at organizing thoughts, summarizing, super powering you as a deliverer.

Ruby
Exactly. It's a great way to get started. It cannot be the only solution. As you said, it's not great at creating authentic thought leadership. So use it as that starting point. We feature in the report, as I mentioned, Alison Coleman is really the quarterback of exec thought leadership at Glean. And she actually uses their tool, Glean, to upload her founder and CEO's past speaking engagements. And then she'll also upload meetings that he had to help, again, help start to create like, okay, can you learn his voice and some of the key themes coming out of these meetings and help me organize those so that she can just send it to him to make some final tweaks to again, make sure that it's authentically from him. But again, it's a really great way for you to cut down the time that you're spending with still driving strong impact.

AJ
Oh, I love it. Okay. So what sort of thought leadership do you recommend creating? Or have you seen pushing outsized returns?

Ruby
Yes. So this is a big question and something that we really wanted to make sure we covered in the playbook. And one of the biggest kind of takeaways, and I actually think this makes the act of leaning into and starting to create your own thought leadership easier, hopefully, is we see true thought leadership that focuses on informing or teaching the audience that you want to engage instead of pitching your product is going to be what really moves the needle with your audience starts to build trust and really sets your sales team up longer term for success. So there's definitely a place for solution type content, I would say balance it out anywhere from 80% should be really true thought leadership, again, focusing on audience pain points, industry trends and insights, leadership lessons learned, but you can start to speak to and you'll see some of our featured examples, execs might share, you know, instead of pitching their product, they'll share like what they learned building their product or how they made product decisions. That's much more interesting to your audience than just talking about how amazing your product is. And that's going to be really what builds trust and followership. So we're not asking execs to get out there and just like sell, we're really just asking you to share the unique insights you have that really got you to where you are as an exec and got your company to where you know, your startup is product and solution wise as well.

AJ
I love that concept of, you know, talking through what it took to build your product, the decisions you made, because you're still talking about your product, it can be kind of a veiled sales pitch where if you can share something that's interesting, but all the while letting them know this is the product we have and this is what it's good at, it can be a good converter, just informing them while you're teaching them. So I love that concept. I'm going to use that.

Ruby
Exactly. Another nugget that we put in the playbook and learn from all our thought leaders is that many of them or what we should be thinking of it as is a conversation, not a post. So making sure in your post, you're asking thoughtful questions, you're responding to comments, many will treat the comment section as an extension of their post, and they'll use comments to test out future posts. So if you think of it more as again, this conversation with your customers or target audience, that's really how you're going to be seeing outsized returns with your posting and your thought leadership that you prioritize. But as I mentioned, AJ, you have such a strong following yourself on LinkedIn, you have an incredible presence. And so I'm curious what types of posts and approaches you're seeing drive the most impact.

AJ
Oh, I'm so boring. It's funny. I want to recommend to clients to build their businesses the same way that I built mine. But if I'm being really honest, the way I've built my business has been over the last 11 years, just sharing everything I know for free and really geeking out about it and going really deep. And that takes time. It's taken a lot of time for that followership to happen. But it's built my business in a really solid way where I could really let things fall to crap. And we'd still get tons of leads every day. We'd still have tons of sales conversations. So very much look at it from a long term play, organic, just like you don't even have to be good. Just teach what you know and share what you love. And I think the geekiness is going to come out and people are going to appreciate it.

Ruby
And that's 1000% of what we talk about in the playbook. And like you, you know, in your to your point, it definitely is a long play. I think with the development of LinkedIn over the last couple years, it has evolved where there's a lot more engagement. And so I'm hopeful that founders can start to see impact when they're doing it again, the right way and following best practices faster.

AJ
Perfect. All right, so you bring up ads. And this is so exciting, because just in the last, I think it's probably been what two and a half years, LinkedIn has released thought leader ads. And they have now become such a huge part of our ad stable and what we recommend to all clients. Talk us through like, how do you recommend integrating the executive thought leadership strategies along with your LinkedIn ad strategy?

Ruby
Yeah, definitely. So I'm going to share my screen again, for those that are watching, and then I'll speak to what I'm sharing for those that are on audio. And I'm also very curious to hear your perspective here as well. But as I mentioned, our research revealed higher ROI for startups who incorporate execs into their paid marketing strategies on LinkedIn. I know you're a big fan of thought leadership ads, given the outsized ROI that you've shared that you see, and we've aggregated some data to support this. But for those that are unfamiliar, and AJ, I feel like I should maybe start by explaining what thought leadership ads are. Yeah, go for it. Okay, so they are now one of our top performing top of funnel ad products. And they're really driving real lift in source pipeline and revenue. And they essentially allow brands to now promote posts directly from execs. So this is just an example that I am sharing visually. On the left hand side, you can see an example of a thought leadership posts, it looks just like an organic post, but it just says promoted by that specific company. And so what we're seeing is higher lift in both direct source and influence pipeline, when thinking about your paid strategy or incorporating execs into your paid strategy. And so what startups that are seeing the strongest success with exec thought leadership and tying it to paid, they are first promoting their execs posts via thought leadership ads, then they're retargeting those that have engaged with thought leadership ads with bottom funnel messaging, typically through the form of sponsored messaging or conversation ads, which we see drive incredibly strong ROAS, and overall, the strongest volume in direct source demo volume and sales meeting.

AJ
This is really awesome, because we have exactly the same strategy. We both settled on it completely separately, you and I haven't talked, but that's exactly what I was prepared to come and share is like, thought leader ads are so good at getting attention, and building really cheap, but very engaged retargeting audiences in ways that we just, we could never before we had thought leader ads, I used to recommend conversation ads, I've now moved back to message ads, being the strongest converters, the age old debate between the two. Oh, yeah, yeah, we can talk offline. Yes, got some cool data. But what we find is, because both of these ad formats are so intensely personal, you can have a thought leader post go out. So someone's interacting with the individual. And then with message ads, you can have that person then reaching out personally, it creates such a strong cohesion there. So I love that you brought that example up. We're doing this every day.

Ruby
I love it 100%. And that's really the kind of winning tactic is tying that first organic exec post to the thought leadership ad there. Obviously, we're promoting that they're the face of that. And then to your point, keeping that cohesive face of your startup of your brand as you start to send out sponsored messaging. I don't know if everyone's familiar with sponsored messaging, I can share a quick explainer of what it is. Yeah, please. Okay, so sponsored messaging and I know AJ, you alluded to convo ads versus in mail. But there's two forms of sponsored messaging. But the overarching value really of this solution is we see it drive the strongest direct demo volume, as I mentioned in sales meeting volume. And really what it allows you to do is is message your target audience in a scaled way, but still very personalized, you get more real estate to actually speak to your brand value prop. And we're seeing again, when you connect the exact that you promoted the thought leadership ad to and nurture them with that, while also following up with sponsored messaging, a convo ad or in mail, we see overall, we've looked at audiences that first saw thought leadership ad and then received a sponsored message, and audiences that only received a sponsored message. And we see a six X increase in conversion when a member was warmed with thought leadership ads, just as you mentioned, AJ, it really helps build that trust and drive more sales ready leads. So cool.

AJ
What about any other cool ads integrations or ads hacks that you kind of surfaced in your research?

Ruby
Yeah, so this is actually a hot off the press kind of new tactic we're seeing. I was just talking to actually a few founders and marketing leaders on how to get more and more creative with thought leadership ads and what's really moving the needle. Thinking about that leadership ads, as you mentioned, as a top of funnel play, but I don't know if you've chatted with recently or follow the founder of Fibbler. Oh, yeah. And CEO Adam. Yeah, he's great. So he recently posted a Fibbler like LinkedIn playbook. And he's actually getting super creative and running sequential thought leadership strategy to his target audience. So he's starting with higher, you know, top of funnel educational content. And then he's actually retargeting those with thought leadership ads where he's saying set up a meeting with me. And so he's earlier stage, you know, he can get more specific with his posts. And I know I said, again, like we don't want to overdo it on the product side, we want a balance of education and solutioning. But I thought that was a really like kind of hot off the press sequential messaging creative way that many are seeing now success with with thought leadership ads.

AJ
I love that because that really is difficult. If you think about how you actually execute this in campaign manager, let's say you have four messages you want to show sequentially, like you actually have to really think and spend some time building that flow with retargeting and exclusions, but you can do it. And if you understand like how creative and how much this stands out, it's worth doing this kind of thing. So I love that. Thanks for sharing such a cool hack.

Ruby
Yeah. And then another hack I would share, and I know we talked about third party measurement partners last year, but I would say the startups that are leveraging a third party measurement tool, like a dream data, a factors, a rev sure, a hockey stack. First, we're seeing that become more and more table stakes. So more of our customers are onboarding and adopting these tools, which is amazing for us because we obviously want an unbiased third party to help us understand the larger holistic picture that LinkedIn is contributing to, but also in a cross channel way, because we believe our channels symbiotic with the others. And it helps us surface what are the campaigns that are actually driving the strongest row as. And so in doing or leveraging a state third party tools, we're actually able to better understand what parts of an exec thought leadership strategy and how you're tying it to paid are working the best. And what should we be optimizing towards? So in a lot of the work that we did with our customers that are again, tying in thought leadership ads to then convo ads or in mail or sponsored messaging in general, we're seeing in general, a 20 to 30% lift when you are doing exec thought leadership and tying that to paid in the right way. And then we're actually able to double click into what are the campaigns and tactics within their execs, you know, paid thought leadership strategy that's working the best. So really making sure that you have the right tools in place to measure all of this makes a big difference in both continuing to motivate your executives to keep posting, because we can actually now tie what they're doing and what we're promoting to revenue. And also we can then double down and optimize for what we're seeing work the best.

AJ
Perfect. That actually partially answers a question that I wanted to ask you, which is like, what is your strategy that you've found to be the most successful? You found others talking about where you can actually measure a contribution to pipeline and measure these things. Is it purely third party or do you have any other like approaches?

Ruby
Yeah. So we do have a suite of like internal LinkedIn measurement tools. So the revenue attribution report will allow you to see dynamically which campaigns are influencing open pipeline and close one revenue. We also have the conversions API, which allows you to see downstream conversions that are coming from, you know, your thought leadership ads or any part of your strategy. So there are some really strong LinkedIn first party tools that many of our customers tap into. I would say like a best in class measurement strategy is going to be LinkedIn tools, but then also bringing on a third party partner, because that will ensure that you're, you know, not over weighting towards LinkedIn. And you're really seeing the full picture of LinkedIn's impact. For example, we actually did an analysis, you can do it with any of these third party partners. But for example, with dream data, one of our customers wanted to see they ran a thought leadership campaign for the first time. And they actually saw an uptick in Google conversions, which makes sense because you're educating, you're nurturing your audience, and then they're going to go search for you. And so we actually were able to use a third party tool to look at leads and sales meetings that are attributed to Google. What of those attributed Google sales meetings and leads actually first saw a LinkedIn thought leadership ad and are those leads that converted essentially again attributed to Google, but we know that they first engaged without leadership ads, are they converting at a higher rate through the funnel than leads that came in through search that didn't and we were able to determine as I mentioned, like that 20 to 30% lift on other channel performance as well. So again, I am a big believer of third party measurement partners because it really gives marketers the full picture. And it also helps us understand what's happening across the entire buyer's journey, not just on LinkedIn.

AJ
Okay. So obviously you've shared some really good stuff here before we leave. Was there any other findings, anything that you got super excited about you wanted to make sure you could share with us?

Ruby
Yeah. So one other, I know you were asking just in general about like recommendations or like just hot off the press things and things that we're seeing. And I would say since we launched this playbook, we've seen a growing number of startups incorporate also like B2B creators and influencers into their strategies. So not just leveraging again, this concept of founder led sales and marketing never ends like the founder, your executives, they should be active on LinkedIn. They should be posting again, we should be tying that into your paid LinkedIn strategy. We see an overall lift in ROI when startups are doing that, but we're also starting to see startups, not just leverage execs, but go beyond their execs and start to engage trusted creators and influencers and those that have strong followings and expertise in their industry as well. And also customers. So I think going back to your original question, like, what if you have a really busy executive still, we still want to get them engaged, but there are so many other people at your organization that we can tap into to enhance the strategy as well. It doesn't just have to be them kind of carrying the team on their back. It can be a lot of different thought leaders that you can feature in addition to your executives.

AJ
Oh, that's amazing. We have one client right now where they launched their own thought leader ads from their own employees. And then they reached out to customers. And we're finding that over and over customer posts keep outperforming their own. And this makes sense to me like, you know, who is more popular, the person who walks around and just says, I'm popular or the person that six other people have all said, oh yeah, they're popular. And that's what it's like having someone who's an unbiased third party saying like, yes, I use this tool. It seems to be so much more powerful than just the company just tooting their own horn.

Ruby
A thousand percent. I would say like, again, if we think about this in like crawl, walk, run, or just like phases, like you still very much obviously want your executives active because that builds a level of trust because, you know, they're saying I'm willing to put my name, my face behind, you know, this company in front of this company, I should say. And then that next step is like, can you promote all the amazing testimonials that you have? Do you have customers that have strong followings that we could be tapping into? And that just takes your trust, credibility and impact to the next level.

AJ
Oh yeah. I don't even think most of the time that them having their own following is the most important thing. Well, with thought leader ads, we could take someone who has no following and still put their content in front of exactly the right people. But certainly from an organic perspective, it helps to have an existing audience ready to react.

Ruby
A thousand percent. And yeah, I completely agree. You don't need a following to get started because that's very much how many executives start to build momentum is making sure that if they are promoting their thought leadership posts, you're able to start building a following and finding the right audience. Cause that's kind of how you start to find the right audience and get your content in front of the people that are going to find it most valuable.

AJ
Well, and to that point, I wondered like if I go out and try to find influencers to say, you know, can we boost this post of yours? I thought for sure. I would get this thing that's like, well, how much are you going to pay me? And what we find over and over is like, when we're supplying the money to promote someone's thought leadership and their profile, most of the time they're just really excited to have someone else promoting their stuff and they're not requesting payment, which is great. I think that's a very symbiotic relationship.

Ruby
Yeah, definitely. And I have less experience on the B2C influencer side, but that's what I think makes B2B influencing and that whole kind of new space being in creators that's starting is it's very hard to find someone that has the credibility to speak on your solution because obviously it's easier to find someone on the B2C side that's like tried your drink. Like it's different if you're having them try, you know, your enterprise product. So to your point, I think it's more common to find like the center of the Venn diagram and find people that are really willing to just speak as your customer, as you know, someone in the space that really respects what you're doing. So I do think to your point, there is that amazing kind of symbiotic relationship that exists a little differently on the B2B side.

AJ
Totally. Okay. So you've got me super sold here. I can't wait to dive into the report that you created. Where can we find it? How do all of us get access?

Ruby
Yes. So I will drop the link in the chat here for everyone.

AJ
Perfect.

Ruby
We have two versions of the playbook. We have the kind of version that's shorter. It's a higher level summary and we kind of frame it more for founders. If you're just trying to get started, what are some like really fast, almost like growth hack best practices that you could be doing to start to make traction on LinkedIn. And then we have a longer version actually for mainly marketers and those that are going to be really quarterbacking this exec thought leadership strategy with their executives. So I will share this in the chat and feel free to leverage whichever version makes sense for where you are in your journey as a startup. And then you'll also see a quick kind of TLDR one pager that really outlines the key insights we reviewed today, as well as like a 30, 60, 90 getting started guide for how to really start to build momentum and how to measure that.

AJ
Oh, I love it. Thank you so much for sharing. All right, Ruby, one question I have for everyone who comes on as a guest is what are you most excited about this year coming up?

Ruby
Yes, I'm so glad you asked. So we launched the playbook late last year. And we're actually going to be hosting early March, a LinkedIn live with all of the thought leaders that we featured in the playbook. So I'll be sharing more and we can maybe share the link to register if you're interested in attending, but we'll be kind of having a whole event around this. And you'll get to hear directly from all the amazing thought leaders that I referenced today and some of the best practices. And we're really going to get into the nitty gritty and what we're seeing across the many customers and those in the space that have brought a lot of these best practices to life.

AJ
Oh, awesome. Okay, I would encourage all fanatics, please go sign up for the event. If you're listening to this in time. Amazing.

Ruby
And sorry, I should say it's a virtual event. I don't know if I made that clear. Oh, yeah. I guess the LinkedIn live.

AJ
And that means if you miss it, you can always go back and watch. So please do go back and watch if you're past this. Yeah. I would love to have everyone who has feedback or if you're looking for any feedback from people or have questions for voice of customer stuff, how can people get in touch with you? How do you want people to interact with you?

Ruby
Yes. Find me on LinkedIn, Ruby James. You can connect with me. You can message me. I'd love feedback on the playbook. Any additional questions, learnings, wins as you start to apply some of the insights and best practices. But yeah, definitely find me on LinkedIn.

AJ
Perfect. All right, Ruby, thank you so much for coming on and sharing the gold. Little spoiler alert here. I actually did read both of the guides and they were so great. I had to have you on, but yeah, thank you so much for sharing. This is awesome content and I think it's super valuable for every brand. So I'll share links to the content, a link to you on LinkedIn. But yes, fanatics, please reach out to Ruby. Let her know how grateful that you are for the content.

Ruby
Awesome. Thank you so much, AJ.

AJ
All right. If you're not already a member of our LinkedIn ads fanatics community, what are you waiting for? Get in there for one low monthly fee, you get access to the whole community plus all four courses that have been recently updated that are meant to take you from beginner to expert in LinkedIn ads. There's even an upgrade to get you on a weekly group calls with me to check it out. Go to fanatics.b2linked.com. If this is your first time listening, welcome. We're so excited to have you here. Make sure to hit that subscribe button. So you get to hear me in your ear holes every week. And if this is not your first time listening, welcome back. And please do me the biggest favor and go in rate and review the podcast on Apple podcasts. It's the best way to share your love of the show with others 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 or maybe the week after, and I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn ads initiatives.

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