SHOW RESOURCES

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Follow Andrew Harder on LinkedIn

Awesome viral post about LinkedIn document ads from Andrew

Another excellent viral post from Andrew about this video strategy

Certified Marketing Experts Certification

Follow AJ on LinkedIn

NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox

Youtube Channel

Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you’d like AJ to cover.

A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

AJ Wilcox
Are you interested to hear how LinkedIn Video Ads drive actual opportunities, not just leads? Well, you’ll love this case study with Cisco on this week’s episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

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

AJ Wilcox
Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics! I get asked so often about video ads on LinkedIn. And the truth is that it’s so hard to answer what works and what doesn’t with video, because it’s so very different from static. There are infinite ways to deliver a message through video. It sure makes it difficult to narrow down and find a set of best practices that we can then present to other marketers as a recipe for success. When a friend reached out and told me that he’d had extreme success with video ads, I was listening. Then he shared how video ads weren’t just getting high click through rates or low cost per view, but they’re getting him low costs per opportunity. Well, he then had my full attention. He’s got gold to share. And of course, I wanted to share that gold with you LinkedIn Ads fanatics. Andrew Harder, and I have crossed paths lots of times in the past. He started out his career at Hanapin Marketing, the agency that puts on the advanced PPC conference called Heroconf, and also do the blog, PPCHero. I absolutely love this conference in this blog and I’ve been blessed to speak at hero comp for the last like six years. It’s by far one of my favorite shows that I attend every year. I’ve also been blessed to be named one of PPC Heroes, top 25 PPC professionals for lots of years running. And Andrew wasn’t behind any of those decisions. So don’t worry, this is not a conflict of interest. But Hanapin got acquired by Brain Labs and they’re a mega agency. He moved on and now he works for Cisco under WebEx events. I’m really excited to interview Andrew about his results at Cisco. So we’ll dive into the interview.

AJ Wilcox
But first in the news, one cool feature. So one of our loyal listeners, Joshua Stout, from the Impactable agency, who consequently I actually got to meet last night when he and his team were in town for a team building exercise, and we got to go to dinner. But he posted this week that he got access to a new feature on one of his accounts and it’s called Website Actions. If you remember from the B2Believe event, this was one of the features that was announced would be coming, but didn’t let us know when it would be coming. So I was so excited to see it out in the wild. To check to see if you have it in your account, navigate in the left hand navigation bar, under analyze, and then look and see if you have a heading there for website actions. I have to tell you, this feature is going to be so cool. And the reason why, I have to ask you, have you ever tried to set up a conversion action as an event, not just as a thank you page that people land on and it triggers the conversion? To do it as an event, you have to put a bit of JavaScript on the button that you want to track. And if you’re like me, you don’t happen to know JavaScript, it’s a whole lot of troubleshooting, and wasted time, and no way to tell whether it’s implemented correctly. What this feature does is it scans your landing pages to find buttons on the page, and then allows you to create any of those buttons as a conversion event just by selecting it. It works by having your insight tag installed on the page. There’s no custom JavaScript, no wondering if it’s set up properly, you just click an action and call it a conversion. This is one of those rare acts of brilliance by LinkedIn. I love the concept of this feature. I’m excited to get to use it. And it’s also one of those features that I totally would have expected someone like Meta or Google to come up with. And yet we have it here on LinkedIn. Hurray. Justin Rowe from Impactable suggested that this feature may have been a result of the marketing analytics company called Oribi that LinkedIn acquired back in February of 2022. And that sounds totally plausible to me. Another awesome listener, Jay Rathell mentioned that he thought this was part of a beta so it might not actually be out yet. Your rep may have had to register you in the beta to get access. And I’m not sure what the truth is there. So just watch out in your accounts for when you get it. I wanted to give a shout out to Dig Altamiranda. Dig left us a review here on the podcast that says, “Best LinkedIn paid podcast ever. I love how AJ is unbiased and unguarded when sharing his expertise, the performance of my campaigns has definitely seen a boost since I started listening. And I will be a fan of the podcast for a very long time, a must listen. Dig, thanks so much for sharing that you’ve been able to take the things that you’ve learned from this show, and then use them to boost your campaigns and your performance. Well done. And of course, thank you for the kind words. It means a lot to me and the whole team who support me in the creation of these episodes. As a reminder, if this is not your first time listening to the show, please do leave a review and I want feature and shout you out as well. All right. Without further ado, let’s jump into the interview with Andrew Harder. Let’s hit it.

AJ Wilcox
I’m so excited to have Andrew Harder here. He’s the senior paid media manager at WebEx events. It’s a Cisco company. He lives in the Bloomington Indiana area. Andrew, I’m super excited to have you here.

Andrew Harder
Thanks, AJ been really looking forward to this thing. Thank you for having me.

AJ Wilcox
Oh, of course. First of all, tell us a little bit about yourself. Like give us the whole background.

Andrew Harder
Yeah. So have been in the PPC paid media world going on six years now. I had a few jobs post college, it was a little bit late getting into my current marketing career arc now. But I started at Hanapin, a small agency that’s located here. That was actually how I first heard about you, AJ. So it’s fun being on your podcast today. It’s what little I knew about B2B at the time, like you were always the guy that we went to for resources. So yeah, I was there for about three and a half years. And then in the spring of 2021, I joined Socio, an event software company. And we were then shortly after acquired by Cisco, so hence the rebrand to WebEx events. But we’re still a standalone software that’s a part of the larger WebEx suite now, but I joined just to really run like their paid media. And it was just kind of search at first, but we’ve expanded a ton into paid social, especially LinkedIn, which is I know what we’re gonna be chatting about today. So looking forward to diving in deeper with you.

AJ Wilcox
Awesome. Well, my roots with Hanapin go really deep. They’re the ones who put on the Hero Conference. I’ve spoken there for years and years. 2023 is actually got cancelled this year, which, you know, just telling everyone else, which is so sad, because it’s the first time we haven’t had Hero Conference in a long time. I always look forward to that one. Hanapin was purchased by Brain Labs, like you were just telling me how many acquisitions they’ve gone through. They’ve been really growing a bunch of stuff, which is super cool for the digital marketing, but exciting background. So tell us about when you went to WebEx events? What kind of shape was the LinkedIn Ads account or the LinkedIn Ads initiatives before you got there? And what did you I guess, set up and start to do?

Andrew Harder
Yeah, so I mean, there technically was a few things that were just getting launched, like the month I started, but it was very bare bones, there have been a few like small tests here. And just kind of top of funnel content, and some like event promotions, like webinar promotions, but really, it was kind of a blank slate. So it was super fun. I mean, for most B2B brands, like searches, you know, priority in terms of driving MQLs and pipeline and revenue. So that was what I spent most my time with at first, but I was also only the fourth marketer hired on the team. So we didn’t really have any content. There was another content marketer that started with me, but we’re a team of four. And then because of the Cisco acquisition, we were able to grow really fast, and you know, just have a lot more budget. So our team then grew to a team of 20. So we had a content team, events team, it really took a while like having to think now. It was probably the first year I was there, it was just kind of adding in some more top of funnel content, promoting some things of course, like with the rebrand needed a lot of brand awareness around that, but there wasn’t nearly the same level of like strategy as we have now. So we do have a lot more into video, but it was just kind of your traditional, like gated lead gen with some brand awareness.

AJ Wilcox
Very cool. Alright, so obviously, we have you on the show, because you’ve really knocked it out of the park in a lot of ways. I’m curious, what kinds of initiatives did you take on? After you came in you saw where it was at? You mentioned that you start some video, tell us how that all really progressed.

Andrew Harder
Yeah. So I mean, first thing, we hired another person to work with me because our budget and channels have gotten so large, so I was managing all like search and social and programmatic channels. And so we hired the amazing Krystal Marquez to work with me. And so she was a huge part of this transformation because like I said, we were just running just a lot of lead gen. There wasn’t a ton of pressure for us to generate down funnel results. But we could do a lot more if we really started honing in on our audience on LinkedIn because, you know, for us, like we do have a few different ICPs but primarily like event marketing managers, field marketing, you know, a lot of those folks are on LinkedIn. And so at the same time, our events team was producing just amazing virtual events that we could use as like cut down. So I’m getting a bit head I think, but we started to put on paper, hey, we’re gonna spend a lot of time analyzing our CRM, see what job titles were missing, and also, instead of having like, just like this large ICP audience, we’re gonna segment that. So that was like kind of step one of like, audience segmentation. And then we also really want to talk to some of our customers, which is, like kind of a small step that’s easy to gloss over in this process. But I think it was a huge part for us was, we wanted to actually talk to you. And we were able to talk to you like four different ideal, like customer profiles and different job levels. And really ask them frank questions about like the buying process, how they heard about us what channels are on, because we wanted to validate some of the things that we were going to do from a channel perspective, but also the type of content. And then we spent a ton of time cutting down these videos writing really like in depth ads. So it’s not just, you know, slap a couple lines, hey, watch this video, like we really were taking the time of what’s breakout, like, what are these nuggets that we can share with our audience. And so we spent a lot of time doing that. So that was a three month process really, of doing that. But before that, there was a lot of internal discussions about how we’re going to change our strategy, and also took some work kind of convincing our bosses to to like, hey, we’re going to take some of our lead gen budget, and we’re going to start doing a lot of video where you don’t get direct results from.

AJ Wilcox
Oh, yeah, so there’s a lot of different areas. I want to dive in here. The first let’s talk about this, what sounds like customer focus group or really market research. We just recently had an episode by the time this one comes out about market research. So this is something that’s very top of mind for me. Did you go out and hire a market research firm to conduct this? Did you just grassroots say, hey, let’s just start sending emails to our customers. How did you go about doing this

Andrew Harder
Super simple process, I’ll break down that. Literally anyone can do, especially you’re in paid media, you don’t typically think of paid media folks doing this. But if you have, you know, whether you slack or whatever, internal comms, you need slack, you need Google docs. And that’s literally all you need is an email. So like there’s no hiring a firm or anything like that, it was I sent a message to our customer team, just asking for a list in for contacts of customers that would be willing to speak with us, and I prefaced it with hey, like, we’re marketing. So they might think, Oh, they just want more case studies and things like that, which we do. And a lot of our customers are happy to do that. But I was framing it as hey, we literally just want to get some feedback for some things that we’re gonna be testing out on social. And I got a list and I can’t remember how many I was given, but we ended up being able to conduct 10 interviews over the course of like a month. And when I say 10, you might think, well, who cares? Like that’s like nothing is a small sample size. I would say we have so much data like you know, we’re marketers, we always want to be data driven, you can get that in the platform’s, but really like spending half hour to an hour, with 10 different customers upwards of 10 hours of like, really in depth, going back and forth, you can discover so much more information. And also like we got a lot of ideas to from different types of creative that you want to test on LinkedIn and the types of content that we could go back to our content team and event team and say, hey, like people are talking about XYZ, are there plans for that? Do we already have some of that? And so it was super helpful, I would recommend that exercise to anyone. And also you’ll be surprised if you have a great product you have for sure customers that are going to be happy to talk about it, especially if it helps them do their job better. Or for us like event software, a lot of event managers like have just horror stories of like, you know, event apps that didn’t work or took super long time to get things set up. And so, you know, when they experience something that’s a lot easier to use, or they’re able to like justify ROI from their sponsorship, just like different things like that. They’re pumped to talk about that, just like how I am as a marketer with different tools that we use in our everyday. So yeah, I would say do it.

AJ Wilcox
Did you have to offer them anything for their participation? Like a gift card or discount or anything like that?

Andrew Harder
Yeah, good question. So we didn’t like have to I don’t think. We offered, there’s a WebEx merch store that actually does have a lot of cool stuff on it, so we offered like, I think it was like a $50 voucher to that. So it was just kind of like a thank you. But I honestly I would say probably all of those people would have done it without anything. But yeah, because we also do for anyone that’s in B2B SaaS, like, we do a lot of reviews, too. Like we do gift cards, and like those reviews are great, but like, doing these actual like in person, or like through virtual, like those interviews, like it’s so different than just, you know, filling out a few questions on G2.

AJ Wilcox
Yes. And what I want all the LinkedIn Ads fanatics out there to understand is, I don’t want you to hear this and say, Well, of course, Cisco has the budget, to go out and hire market research firms and go and do all this, but I’m just a lowly paid marketer. That’s not my job. I don’t want you to let yourself off that easily. This is what Andrew did. He started this program as a paid marketing manager and did it by himself without a significant budget. And you heard him say he didn’t even have to offer them anything for their participation. They would have been stoked to chat. But of course, it’s always nice if he can offer something. So very insightful, like thanks for sharing us with us about the program. You also mentioned that you were cutting out video and that video was an initiative that you wanted to take on. First of all, what was spurred you to decide that you wanted to go all in on video? And how did you go about that?

Andrew Harder
Yeah, so I guess starting with kind of like the bigger picture reason why we did have a lot of I would say good solid image assets and different things that we were running like, it wasn’t like we didn’t have quality. But we knew, especially on LinkedIn, again, if your audience is engaged on it every day, multiple times, like, people do stop, at least I’m talking from personal experience, if there are videos, it doesn’t have to be video necessarily, but for the sake of this conversation, like there are certainly that is about like other paid media, marketers talking about things that they do, or different tools, like I certainly, like, stop and watch those things. I don’t like it. I don’t like do anything to like, give LinkedIn, some feedback. So they get that, but a lot of times, you know, I send a Slack message to my team and say, hey, like, what do you think about this? And so one of the reasons why we really wanted to video was, we knew that we wanted to start, people use the term like creating demand, it might be a bit generous for what we were doing. But I do think we were really trying to like speak to just pain points and different like, ways that we could educate, who we were trying to bring in whether you know, they come in six months from now through a PPC click, or they come in through a different means or like, do they start falling on LinkedIn page, and then, you know, they click on us, you know, three, four months from now. We weren’t so obsessed with like getting like this direct response from that it was really about taking these like 30 seconds, even upwards of like, two and a half, three minute clips of hey, there’s a ton of virtual events, event marketer, and we’re talking to you, how do you increase like virtual engagement awareness? How do you measure that? That’s just one small example. But we were cutting this down. So we had that like focusing on like the virtual aspect, because our platform is virtual and person and hybrid speaking to, we have a lot of higher ed companies, a lot of member based organizations that their business or their event, like programs really run on sponsorships. And so like, we talked a lot about how to prove ROI from your event sponsorships how to, like get better at partnering with different sponsors, things like that, that were just very specific like one message. And this goes back to like the audience targeting we’d split this out. So instead of like this one large, like, okay, we want all these people, we knew that, you know, people that work at universities are very different than and they have very different event needs than someone who works at a fortune 500 company, doing a big internal event, or doing like, you know, their big summit, whatever they use cases. So we were showing these ads to all these audiences, because we had each event, we were probably cutting down like three to six different ads. And so we could see who was engaging with what so we’re looking at all those engagement metrics, view metrics, and then this really allowed us to build a quality remarketing pool of people who were watched, like 50% of our videos, and we started so in the more and then we get some more like the product videos that were more like down funnel, and we saw a huge lift. And like we had like an overview video of our platform, when we just show that to a cold audience. Now surprised like, there’s not a very good watch time. I don’t have the numbers in front of me. But when we showed that maybe two, three, like remarketing sequences down the funnel, it was like 2 or 3x, higher, this small things like that. I’m just trying to give some examples of like what we were seeing. So as you can tell, there’s a lot of stuff that goes into it.

AJ Wilcox
I love that. So you’re talking about multiple step sequences. How did you set that up in campaign manager?

Andrew Harder
Yes, I guess preface this, we use metadata to run all of our paid social. So you can do all this natively. But what we were doing in campaign manager, you can, you know, create those remarketing audiences. So we could capture anyone that saw 50% or more of these videos. And then you know, it took a while when we first started, because some of these prospecting audiences we were targeting were not like super large. Also, we started with a lower budget. And when we started seeing good results, we started increasing that so we could get a larger pool. And then we’d create these campaigns. So we’re only targeting people that you know, saw this specific video, we’ve combined some of them. But again, because we service a lot of different ICPs. We also have a big difference, like virtual events very different instant in person. So we could show specific mobile like event ads to people that maybe saw one of our like event cut downs that we’re talking about how to get the most out of your event app, just like specific things like that. I mean, you can do, it’s pretty easy to set that stuff up in your audiences. And then when you’re creating your campaign, just selecting those remarketing audiences.

AJ Wilcox
So obviously, we can put together video programs. And if you can’t actually tell something’s working, it can be hard to convince, you know, upper leadership to give you more budget or hang on a little bit longer. What was the effect that you actually saw on your lead gen programs as this video strategy went on?

Andrew Harder
It changed a lot and for several reasons. One, we were starting to invest more in video and less in our lead gen. Because we started like I mentioned this earlier, but what I was able to get as a test budget for this was 20% of our paid social budget, which was a decent size. It was plenty for us to get going but that started to creep up to like 30% and like four already percent after a few months. And so we were seeing a drop in our leads, but because of our increased efforts in like targeting more refined audiences, and I would also say like, I don’t have data to prove this necessarily, but I think, you know, running this alongside all of the video ads that we were doing that we’re not like super pushy, or even, like, just kind of generic B2B stuff that no one really cares about, like it was educational. And like, you could take stuff away from that, we saw huge drops in our CPL, like we saw, like over a 60% drop in our CPL. But the other thing was, we had a budget reduction, like, you know, a lot of SaaS companies, we’re starting to see throughout 2022, so we had more of that hit. But what I did was I measured this, after the first three months of doing this, I measured that against the spring when we had a much larger budget. And we were doing just pretty much all lead gen. And we had 28% fewer leads, but we had a 63% drop in our cpl. So it was like a massive, like we should have had really way less leads. But we were seeing the audience targeting I think even just like the quality, and there’s a lot of things that go into this. So I know I’m oversimplifying a bit, because we were testing a few different offers. It wasn’t apples to apples, but overall, like for paid social for LinkedIn, our budget was like 70%, less from like this comparison period. But to answer your question, we were still running a lot of the same type of lead gen, but we don’t do any hard direct response, like demo request. But even so we saw saw a huge lift and the opportunities that we were producing both from like, kind of a first touch triggering standpoint, but also just like influencing, we can see these metrics because our serums integrated with metadata, kind of like, you know, the headline numbers was like, we spent like 70% last, but we had like 60% more pipeline that our sales team had generated. So again, like a lot of stuff goes into this. But I mean, that was like a pretty astounding difference, especially with the budget difference. And also 70%, less budget, but also like we were spending roughly half of that at this point on video. So like we were spending significantly less on lead gen. So it’s a combination of a lot of things like we changed our audience targeting, we had all that video creative, we were running. Yes. And you could also say, well, all that stuff, you’re doing the springton that influenced the fall? Yes, of course, it totally did. So it’s not like a clear cut, you know, like AB comparison. But it was such a stark difference. We really had a stark stop, like in September when we started this, like, Okay, we’re gonna really change our strategy. And we started like increasing that investment. So for anyone that says, like, oh, you can’t get demos looked at our quality from LinkedIn, you definitely can like there’s different ways to do it. I know there’s some brands still do run some of that direct response or conversation ads, and that does drive pipeline. But like for us, like we try that it doesn’t work at all. I mean, I see this all the time. I go into our CRM, I see our HubSpot reports, and I see, oh, we’ve had some more paid social meetings booked. And I’m like, oh, is that from this month? Did they come through this month? And a lot of times, it’s no, they actually like downloaded one of our guides maybe like three or four months ago. And then they came back through search or like email alerts or different things like that. And now like they’re either ready to buy, or like they weren’t in market at all. And now they are and like we’ve been top of mind for them. We’ve been educating them, not like harassing them to like book a demo. And they came to us. And I think I’ve heard this before. And I love this way of like measuring is it working? Like you can tell if your marketing is working, if more people are like coming to your sales team to ask to talk versus how much are you going out and like asking them? I just love kind of like that idea and way to quantify it. So yeah, the very long winded answer to your question, but but certainly has changed.

AJ Wilcox
And I think marketers, myself included in this, we feel like once we’ve warmed a top of funnel well enough that eventually you’ve earned the right to ask for a demo. And in this case, you’re seeing demos come in naturally, like you’re not even having to ask for them. But even if you do run demo ads, you still don’t feel like you’re getting a great response from them. It’s almost like people are perceiving us as being too pushy when we’re asking but if we leave them alone, they’ll naturally do it.

Andrew Harder
Yeah, absolutely. And I would even say to like one way how I justified testing 20% of our budget for video was I crunched the numbers on Okay, of all these leads, like yeah, you can show low CPMs especially on LinkedIn. Like it’s good because a lot of times you call them like ICP leads depending on like title or company but what I did was actually measure that down to the full funnel different getting through the sales cycles and like close one and I’m not a huge fan of just focusing on like first touch like okay, did this trigger from like, I love looking at influence metrics and things like that, because obviously there’s so many different touch points. And there’s some great marketing tech out there now that can help with this, but it was like a no brainer to be like oh yeah, you can test 20% because like it’s not like we were producing millions of dollars in revenue from this. It’s like Okay, we have some great content to produce also, like kind of an added bonus. And this is kind of a caveat leftfield thing. If you’re running virtual events or in person events, and you have that footage, you have to, like, repurpose that and run that on LinkedIn especially. And I would say, don’t just do an organic channel so that all your employees and your family like it, put some paid budget behind it, target the audience that you know, is your target persona. And use that content, like you’re gonna get much more out of that. And also, it’s like a win win for like the content team, the events team or whoever is doing this. Or if you’re a solo marketer, or a small team, like you can just get so much more out of that. So I would say even from just a, I don’t know, like marketing team ROI standpoint, like it just makes a ton of sense.

AJ Wilcox
Alright, here’s a quick sponsor break, and then we’ll dive back into the interview with Andrew Harder.

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

AJ Wilcox
If you’re a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn ads are for you. But the platform isn’t easy to use and can be painfully expensive on the front end. At B2linked, we’ve cracked the code to maximizing your ROI while minimizing platform costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ad strategies that are customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way that your B2B consumers buy today. Over the last 12 years, we’ve worked with some of LinkedIn’s largest advertisers in the world, we’ve spent over $150 million on the platform, and we’re official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities from your ideal prospects, book a discovery call at B2Linked.com/apply. And we’d absolutely love the chance to get to work with you.

AJ Wilcox
All right, let’s jump back into the interview. I want to dive in a little bit deeper on video because we talked about the customer research, and anyone can do that. But now as we start veering over into video, now, the production value is getting a little bit higher. And you actually have to start dedicating some budget unless you happen to be a videographer by trade and can throw things together. How did you attack video specifically? How did you deal with the overhead of the cost of video? Also, how did you decide what types of videos to film and actors or employees or customers? How did that all line up?

Andrew Harder
Yeah, so I mean, this answer might be a bit strange, but I think it might give some people some more confidence to test this, like we Krystal and I, like knew the type of strategy we wanted to test. And we didn’t have net new budget or things to do, or money to play with to create that new stuff. So we went and looked at okay, what do we have? And you also might be thinking, well, he works for any event company, like they have event software, they are like doing these things. Yes, huge advantage. I will say that for sure, but a lot of marketing teams still have some, you know, own first party events. And to kind of speak to one thing you were saying like, I would actually say you don’t need super high production, I would actually advocate it’s better to have more just authentic real video, especially on LinkedIn, because you know, you’re seeing your network and then all of a sudden, you see like this really stocky photo, video type stuff doesn’t really kind of penetrate your mind, you don’t really care about that. So I would say like, you don’t necessarily need the super high budget, you don’t to go out and like, you know, spend 100 grand on some agency. We do have like a freelancer they used to help with, like some of these cut downs, but there’s a lot of freelancers out there, they’re gonna like break your marketing budget. I mean, Krystal stepped up big time, she spent a lot of time cutting down these videos, so huge props to her for I mean, she’s a paid media marketer, just like myself, but she was like, well, I can like cut down some of this stuff. And over time, like when we started doing this more, our team started seeing like how much of an impact this was having our events team and content team are getting more proactive and like, oh, we’re gonna plan this event that’s upcoming, we know that the paid team is going to use this giving us timestamps, and in that to our freelancers, but to say more concisely, like, you don’t need a ton of budget for an agency. Yes, we use our event software, but you don’t need that, like you can use something which should say WebEx first or zoom. Like you can use something like that, and record that. That’s just fine. I mean, you can see you can look at the engagement metrics and I would actually say if you already have some video that’s super high production value or something like compare that against something that’s more just raw. And I would even say to there are some larger brands out there SaaS brands that do this and I think it works well. Caveat to is if you do work for a large brand, like there are brand standards and I get that because I worked for Cisco so like there are certain things we have to abide by, but like at the end of the day, you can definitely do this. I would say it’s not as easy as what I made it sound like for the customer interviews like that’s super easy. Like it is a different thing, but I think anyone can do that.

AJ Wilcox
And how did you plan what type of video content you’d show? At what stage in the buyers journey?

Andrew Harder
Yeah, great question, I think also super important thing that we learned as we went on, because we really started with just kind of more. I don’t like the term thought leadership, because I think it’s more than that, how we were kind of framing it was like, Is this educational? Like if I wasn’t, and we would even ask, like our events team, like, would you interact with this? And a lot of times, it was them saying, so it’s like, yeah, of course they would. But like, the questions I would kind of ask myself is like, is this going to help someone that’s running events do their job? Is this differentiated enough from just kind of like the generic advice out there, and all the events we’re doing, like, very well thought out, and so we do have the benefit of that. So like, that’s where we started off with was like that content that’s really going to hit a pain point, or just give some value. But then from there, we’d get a bit deeper, like I was saying earlier, you’re talking about hybrid events, like the value of that go a bit deeper and say specifically, like, you really need to hone in on like event sponsorships, or you really need to make sure you have the right event technology. And like you could say, well, that’s kind of like a hard sell, we actually have a lot of content from our team that’s saying, like, you need something and then like, oh, yeah, of course, like, we can provide you with that technology. But it’s kind of educating to like, there’s, this is specific to the event industry. But like, there’s been so many changes, as you can imagine, with like COVID coming up on like, three years, and like it went in and out from in person to virtual. But now like, there’s just a huge range, and like what hybrid even means. And so we would take people on these journeys, if anyone is familiar with like YouTube sequence ads, it’s kind of similar, like, you can just set this up to then go a bit deeper into that. And then really, the best kind of journeys we had was, okay, we have like this educational video to show, then we have another layer of that, speaking to something more specific, maybe we had one or two of those, and then layer in like a more specific like this, how our product can do that. And so it’s a bit easier to explain when I have like a spreadsheet to show, but hopefully that helps the audience a little bit.

AJ Wilcox
Very much. So let’s say smaller marketing teams that don’t have a budget for maybe something like metadata. Maybe they’re working with a basic CRM, what’s some advice that you’d give them on ensuring that they could take cold prospects, educate them through video, and actually ended up with close deals?

Andrew Harder
That is a great question. I hope I can give a great enough answer to that because I think there’s so many factors that do come into this, because I would say we had a lot of things going for us with the video content we already had to play with. And then we were able to expand that. But if you are a smaller team, you don’t have as much budget for tech or video, things like that. This is kind of obvious advice. But just like start small, even before that I would challenge like, look at what you’re doing right now. And really challenge yourself and ask yourself the questions like if I am my, like target audience, if I am this, you know, X persona, do I actually care about this? Like, is this giving some value? Or am I just noise in this person’s LinkedIn feed? I think you’ll find a lot of your stuff is either stale, or it’s really just kind of about you the company versus like, how can you first like give value and not ask for anything in return. But then from there, like if you have products that are fairly easy to record, like some tutorials to like, you might have a subject matter expert on your team. So that I would say that’s kind of a hard gap to fill. But you can use free tools out there to just record either yourself or someone on your team, walking through the benefits of what you get from XYZ, like whatever your product is, or service is. And so yeah, I feel like I didn’t meet my expectations for answering that question. But hopefully, I would like to starting with, like really challenging, like what’s working. And then if you have content, like reuse that content, and you can go from there and get learnings and segment your audience so you can see who’s engaging with what.

AJ Wilcox
I love it. Yeah, I think that’s perfectly fine. Great answer. Well, the one question I like to ask everyone I interview, what are you both personally and professionally most excited about coming up? Either in 2023 or in the following months?

Andrew Harder
Yeah, love that question. I’ll start professionally. I think I’m excited. So we are really early days and testing out a true like plg like free motion. It’s new for us because we’ve been very like enterprise software. Like you can’t really use the product without talking to us. I’m really excited for us to test that just from a marketing standpoint. But also how it’s gonna play into our paid campaigns, especially like with LinkedIn, too. I see so much opportunity and I follow some other brands that do this so well and really just showing people like how easy it is to get started. I think you can apply this to anything in life. Everyone wants to like, you know, be in better shape or read more books or do things like that, but it’s like just getting started. That’s the hardest and I think cuz there’s so much potential for us. There’s not too many competitors that we have. There’s a lot that have like that motion, but their software isn’t as powerful. And I think just being able to learn as a marketer how to do that it’s gonna be really fun. And I think getting more into being a quote unquote, content creator on LinkedIn, I’m very inconsistent still, but it’s been fun just to put myself out there more. I mean, it’s really how it’s opened up opportunities like this to speak with you. And I think I’m just looking forward to meeting more marketers that I can learn from share some of my experiences, beginning of this, like I didn’t set out to have a career in marketing, I didn’t even know what PPC was. And I think it’s really, really fun to speak to younger marketers. And so I’m, I’m hoping for more opportunities like that. And then personally, I have two young kids, my daughter is about to be three next month, which is crazy. And my son is just over eight months. So last year, couldn’t do a whole lot because had a young baby. And so I’m excited for we have some fun trips planned. So I’m originally from Minnesota. I have a cousin getting married so getting out there and seeing some family. My younger sister’s getting married this summer as well. So excited for that. And for my kids to hopefully have some memorable flower girl type moments, you know, that’ll be super fun. And we have some friends in Wisconsin that we go up to see, looking forward to that. My wife and I love to travel and just with young kids don’t get to do it as much. And this year, we have more plans. So excited for that. And yeah, especially on a day like today when it’s like I don’t know, like it was in the teens this morning maybe it’s in the 20s now, but so cold, and I’m already looking forward to summer. So yeah, that’s kind of what’s on my mind.

AJ Wilcox
Awesome. Well, you’re doing a great job of creating content on LinkedIn, for sure. I’m going to put down on the show notes. I want to invite everyone to come follow Andrew there on his LinkedIn profile. Also, I don’t know if you have a minute if you can share with us. Maybe some insight into the posts that really caught my attention you posted, it was kind of like a mini case study about using video ads on LinkedIn. Can you tell us like was that he most popular thing you’ve posted on LinkedIn? What sort of engagement did you get from that? Does that inspire you to do more?

Andrew Harder
Yeah, so it was actually the second most because the first most was also another kind of LinkedIn case study is about document ads. I don’t know if I was one of the first first but I was early into testing that. And it really if for all the people that love the gated versus on gated conversations, like we really put that to the test. The ungraded document did fantastic for us. And like that got a ton of engagement. Like I said, I’m still early. So I’m trying to kind of find what stuff I want to talk about, hoping to talk more about personal stuff, too. But yeah, it did get a ton of engagement. I mean, I was thrilled when I shared it with you. And you said you shared it with your team. I was like, okay, that’s why I know it’s good, then if Aj is sharing that. So yeah. And I honestly, like that’s probably an easier thing to go to that post. And it really breaks down the process that we did, and some of the results that I shared today. But it really makes it pretty simple. I think a lot of times, it’s easy to get just like oh man, I can’t revolutionize my strategy or something, you know, just sounds so big when you break it down into like these bite size steps. So I think that’s maybe why it got so much engagement. Of course, yeah, the results do catch people’s eye, but a lot of marketers found it helpful. So yeah, definitely connect with me. I’m only active on LinkedIn. I’m not really a social media person, ironically, being that I advertise on it. But yeah, please connect with me on LinkedIn. I appreciate you sharing that AJ.

AJ Wilcox
All right, I’ve got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around.

Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

AJ Wilcox
All right, like we mentioned during the interview, I’ve got some great resources for you. First of all, you’ll see in the show notes below Andrew Harder’s link to his LinkedIn profile, go follow him or even connect with him. You’ll also see what we mentioned the post that he posted about his LinkedIn video ads strategy. And that one got a ton of attention, which is so cool. It’s actually the reason why he’s here on the show. He also had another viral post about LinkedIn document ads that actually went more than double the amount of virality is that one so definitely check that one out. Both links are in the show notes. If you or anyone you know is looking for a course on LinkedIn Ads, check out the one that I did on LinkedIn Learning. You’ll see the link in the show notes. But it is by far the most succinct, the highest quality, and the lowest cost of any LinkedIn Ads course out there. Also, if this is your first episode you’ve listened to make sure to hit the subscribe button. But if this is not the first time you’re listening, please do go and leave us a review. It is a terrific zero cost way of supporting the podcast and I would be eternally grateful to you with Any questions, suggestions or corrections, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we’ll see you back here next week. And I’m cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

‍