NOTES

• Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert.
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• Contact us with any questions, suggestions, or corrections: podcast@B2Linked.com
• How We Generated Over 1,000 Leads from 1 LinkedIn Post by Comment Gating
• Lead Magnets with Ian Nelson #1
• Lead Magnets with Ian Nelson #2

SUMMARY
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In this episode, AJ explores how gated content can help generate measurable leads, validate audience targeting, and build email lists for nurturing. But he also explains the downsides: paying for clicks from people who never submit the form, potentially creating a negative experience for your audience, and collecting leads that may never turn into sales conversations.

If you do decide to gate your content, AJ shares his recommendations for getting the best results with LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, including why they typically outperform website forms, which ad formats are working best, and how many pages to preview before asking for someone's information.

He also explains why document ads paired with Lead Gen Forms have become a particularly strong combination, shares the types of content worth gating, and discusses how ungated content can help build larger retargeting audiences and nurture potential buyers over time.

Plus, in the news, AJ celebrates B2Linked's 12th anniversary and discusses a confusing update to Sponsored Messaging reporting in LinkedIn Campaign Manager, including what he's concerned may be changing and why it could affect advertisers' reporting.
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TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to The LinkedIn Ad Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey, hey, hey there, LinkedIn ads fanatics. As he said, I'm AJ Wilcox. I'm the host of the weekly podcast, The LinkedIn Ads Show. I'm thrilled to welcome you to the show for advanced B2B marketers in their evolution of mastering LinkedIn ads and achieving true pro status. Today's topic is one I get asked about constantly, should you gate your content behind a form or give it away for free?

Both ways have legitimacy to them, so let's walk through the real pros and cons of both approaches, the best ways to gate when you do, and why I still lean towards ungating when possible when you're playing the long game. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn ads experts.

That's right, we're the ad agency 100% dedicated to LinkedIn ads, and we have been back since 2014. You know, before it was cool. With every account we work with, we build a custom strategy. You get to work directly with me and my local team, and you won't get any sort of a cookie-cutter or standard account template from us.

Plus, we've created the strategies that we've developed, and with our mastery of the platform, we always save our clients more than we charge. So it's kind of like getting the best in the biz for free. If you'd like to explore partnering with us for your LinkedIn ads management, schedule your free discovery call at b2linked.com/discovery.

All right, first off in the news, B2Linked, our company, just turned 12 years old last week. Wow, I'm so excited. You know, with me and my ADHD brain, I bounced around companies. I didn't think I would stick with anything longer than, like, two years, and here we are at 12 years. I still wake up every morning so excited to jump in and talk more about LinkedIn ads.

Thank you all for supporting us along this journey. It's been wild and exciting, and I hope more of you get to do it. Something else interesting that we've seen in Campaign Manager, over the last couple of weeks, every account I log into has this big nag banner that says, "Sponsored Messaging now reports impressions and clicks."

I've read the message. I've clicked into the Help Center article. I've studied what it says, and I still have no clue what it's actually changed or what is changing in Campaign Manager with Sponsored Messaging. I went ahead and reached out to LinkedIn Support for some clarification, but I didn't hear back before recording.

But let me walk you through what I'm afraid this means, and I really hope this is not the case. Back a year or more ago, Sponsored Messaging used to generate data where it would show impressions and clicks. It would show data in those columns. But what it was doing is it was saying every send counts as an impression, and every open counts as a click.

Now, I like to classify those as very different actions from what LinkedIn did. So whenever I had to generate reports, I would always have to subtract. I would have to do impressions minus the number of sends, gives me the actual impressions, and that way I'm not counting an impression when I just have a send, if that makes any sense.

This data was shown both in Campaign Manager as well as in the CSV exports, so it complicated my reporting calculations quite a bit. Then thankfully, that eventually went away. It's been y- probably a year or two since, and now we get the sends and the opens in their own columns, but impressions and clicks show as zero, which is exactly what I want.

I want those to be nice and clean. So I'm curious, is this going back to how it was before? Is it gonna start counting sends as being an impression again? I really hope not, 'cause if it is, well, me and AI are gonna have to go back and change all of the formulas in how we do reporting. But if you actually understand what's going on, uh, what's really changing, reach out.

I'd love to hear it. I'd love to even shout you out on the next episode, and of course, I'm gonna share what LinkedIn Support says when they clarify it for me. And as a reminder, if you've got a question, review, or feedback for the show, please message me on LinkedIn. My DMs are free and open. You can also email us at podcast@b2linked.com.

If you attach a link to a voice recording from you, I can play you right on air, and if not, if you just wanna send text, that's fine. I'll just read in my own boring voice what you're saying. I hope you know I want to feature you. All right. Without further ado, let's hit it

I wanna start with my bias right up front. In general, I prefer not to gate content, but I really wanna be fair here because a large percentage of our clients are still running gated content campaigns, and there are legitimate reasons for that. So today, I wanna run through the real pros and cons that I see from both approaches.

Let's start with the case for gating. The very biggest one, when you gate your content behind a form, your audience is literally voting with their email address how good they think that content is and how worthwhile it is. Every submission tells you two things: that content was valuable enough to trade contact info for, and the person who submitted it fits or maybe doesn't fit the audience that you're actually trying to reach.

That makes gating really a built-in targeting check. You defined who it was that you actually wanna reach on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn shows you the actual people who are being targeted and are voting with their email address, and you get to look at that and say, "Yes, these are good quality. These are the right people," and it's really an encouragement that the targeting is working the way it's supposed to.

There's also a really straightforward reason that clients ask for this. It's gonna sound really simple, but sales teams and execs oftentimes need a countable number to report up the chain. Downloads of a gated asset produce a lead count that you can actually feel confident in an ad channel. We know we're investing X in, and we're getting Y out Even if all the teams and stakeholders involved know that these leads are not sales-ready.

And sometimes that number matters more to a business for this quarter than the long-term brand play. I also understand most of our clients inherited goals and strategy that they didn't have any sort of control over. And so when I go to them and I say, "Hey, I really think we should un-gate," and they're saying, "Well, my boss is expecting X number of leads by the end of the month," of course I have to say, "All right, let's do this."

And of course, by gating, you are generating email addresses that you can then nurture over email, you can then target on, let's say, Meta and Google for cheaper. So there is value for sure in having those people in your database. All right, now let's cover my case against gating. First, every person that you are showing the possibility of your content to has clicked, and you've been charged for that.

So let's say that you've had 100 clicks on your ad that's gating content, and you have an incredible conversion rate. Let's say it's 40%. All right, so that means that you paid for 100 people to see the ad to open up the form, and 60% of them, 60 people walked away going, "Ugh, I guess I didn't want it that bad."

And only 40 people actually got to engage with your content and become nurtured by it. And if you feel a little bit burned by like, "Ugh, I don't feel like that's worth giving my information for," or, "I don't want to," you might end up actually turning someone off, giving them a bad taste in their mouth about your brand, which of course is the opposite of what you're wanting to do with all of your marketing efforts.

I mentioned this before, but gated content rarely leads directly to a sales conversation. If your sales team is reaching out to someone who downloaded a gated PDF and they just get silence, you have to ask honestly, was paying to collect that piece of contact information actually worth it? A name and an email with no future response isn't worth much unless you are actually engaging them in a nurturing workflow, which if that's part of your strategy and it's working great, I'm not hating on it for sure.

From my experience, the very best path to business is nurturing an audience with genuinely great ungated content and thought leadership until they know, like and trust your brand. Then when they actually have a project in mind, they think to come to you, and you don't have to chase them. If you share content with them that's ungated and then retarget everyone who's engaged with it, you are building a bigger and stronger retargeting audience, one that is far more likely to actually respond and result in the sales meeting that your team actually wants.

All right, so let's say that you do decide that you wanna gate your content. Here's my strategy for doing it the very best way. You have to go with LinkedIn's lead gen forms. They are by far the most efficient way to collect submissions, hands down. They usually have a conversion rate that's two to five times any landing page form on a website that I've ever seen.

And lead gen forms have the highest completion rate, I think for a couple reasons. Number one, because LinkedIn will auto-fill all the information that it knows about the member that you're asking for. So if you're asking for just first name, last name, and email address, all of those are fields that LinkedIn knows, and they're gonna auto-fill it, so someone who's on a mobile device, which is the majority, all they have to do is just hit Submit, and they're golden.

And because the form loads immediately, it doesn't distract them from their scrolling experience. They're a lot more likely to engage with it instead of click on a link that takes them to a landing page, they have to wait for that landing page to load, they wonder, "Can I trust it?" And it takes, you know, more than a second to load, they decide to bounce.

For the ad formats, this is really interesting. In the last year or so, I've actually found that document ads paired with lead gen forms are way outperforming single image ads paired with lead forms. Whereas a couple years ago, it was opposite for me. I had the most success with single image and document was harder.

We've, of course, gotten better at running document ads, so maybe I was just doing it wrong before, I don't know. But whatever's changed, it's been a vast improvement. That being said, it is harder to drive scale with document ads than it is with single image. Seems like LinkedIn is willing to serve single image ads more often than document.

Sometimes I get my bids up to, like, $20, $25 per click on document ad campaigns, and I may only need to bid, like, you know, $11, $12, $15 to get single image ads serving at even higher volume. And if you're gating a document ad, I found the sweet spot is showing usually 2-3 visible pages before it strikes up the form.

Shorter previews don't usually give people enough information to judge if the content was worth trading an email for, and of course, longer previews mean that someone has to click more before triggering the form, and every additional click you ask for, this is in all of marketing, it means fewer people are going to get there. As for the kind of content that you're gating, I recommend testing all kinds of different content because you never know what your audience is going to prize enough versus what they're just gonna say, "Oh, I don't think I need that."

One of my favorites is a webinar. No one questions why you've gated your webinar because you need to send them an invitation and instructions on how to join. But of course, guides, cheat sheets, free swipe files and databases, especially anything that contains original research reports, something that they just cannot get anywhere else because you yourself have been the ones to collect that data, oh, these are incredible.

The one rule I keep in mind, though, is that the content has to be valuable enough that someone should go out of their way to obtain it. One distinction I wanna make clear, though, gating your content in this context is not the same thing as comment gating. If you remember, comment gating is where we ask people to comment on a post in order to unlock access to something.

I wrote a blog post a couple years ago on how we used comment gating to generate over 1,000 leads in a single month. It was incredible. I highly recommend checking that out. We've also linked in the show notes two podcast episodes where I've interviewed Ian Nelson, who specializes in gated content and offers that will actually fill up your sales team's calendar.

So what's your experience been with gating content? Did I get anything wrong? Did I miss a vital part of the strategy? Please make sure to reach out and be as blunt as you'd like. I'm not easily offended. And of course, you can reach out to me at podcast@b2linked.com, or message me privately on LinkedIn.

My DMs are free and open. All right, if you are a LinkedIn Ads fanatic, and you're not already a member of our private LinkedIn Ads community, what are you waiting for? We've got four courses designed to take you from LinkedIn Ads beginner to full-on expert, plus all the top minds in LinkedIn Ads are there sharing what they're learning, and there's also an upgrade where you can get on a weekly group call with me.

I try to answer all of your questions on LinkedIn as I can. Thank you for tagging me, but I do prioritize responding in the Fanatics community. So come join us if you wanna get direct support from me reliably. If this is your first time listening, welcome. We're excited to have you here. Make sure to hit the Subscribe button.

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With any questions, suggestions, or corrections, please 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.

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