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Summary

In this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show, AJ is joined by Jack Caspino, founder of ContactLevel, to dive deep into one of the most powerful – and misunderstood – tools in your LinkedIn arsenal: data enrichment for list uploads. We break down exactly how Jack is turning 40% match rates into near-100% by enriching B2B contact lists with consumer identifiers, then syncing those hyper-accurate audiences across major platforms to reach the same people everywhere for less. You’ll hear a real-life case study from one of our clients, smart tactics for making the most of very small audiences (like duplicating campaigns to reset CPMs, using Thought Leader Ads and boosted posts, and layering in LinkedIn Audience Network and CTV strategically), plus a peek into ContactLevel’s CRM integrations, workflow automations, and upcoming roadmap. We also kick things off with important LinkedIn platform updates you need to know—recent delivery issues with manual bidding, ad personalization, multi-format campaigns, dwell time changes, and the new campaign/ad set naming. Listen to learn how to see your own enriched match rates in action.

Transcript

Data enrichment for LinkedIn list uploads is the best thing to happen to LinkedIn marketers since sliced bread. We're talking about super powering your lists on this week's episode of the LinkedIn ad show. Welcome to the LinkedIn ad show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 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 of course, achieving true pro status. I'm bringing on a guest today, Jack Caspino. He and I have been friends for years. We originally connected because he was doing some really awesome stuff with LinkedIn list uploads and he is the one I go to whenever I have questions about how to get the best match rate. Recently, he helped me enrich some contact lists and run some tests for a couple clients. The results were so awesome. I needed to share them with you. In this episode, we give real tips on ways of uploading your contact lists to get the highest match rate possible from LinkedIn. We also cover our favorite ways to get the most from very small audiences on LinkedIn. I promise you're going to love it.

The LinkedIn ad show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com. The LinkedIn ads experts.

That's right. B2Linked is the ad agency, 100% dedicated to LinkedIn ads. And we have been back since 2014, you know, 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 never get a cookie cutter approach or a standard account template from us. Plus with the strategies that we've developed in our mastery of the platform, we always save our clients way 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 today at B2Linked.com/discovery.

All right. First off in the news, I'm doing something new. I've got a lot of swag shirts that I've been given at conferences and stuff. I thought it'd be fun to wear a new one for each episode of the podcast. So those of you who are watching on YouTube, I'm wearing a Honey Grid shirt. For those of you who don't know, Honey Grid is mostly useful in business to consumer advertising where they make it really easy to micro target down to like the neighborhood. So what they do is they bring up postal codes and associate it with things like household income, home values, and then let you hyper target on Google, on Meta, all the way down to just the very specific people nearby who it makes sense to target. Really good for things like, you know, home services providers, dentists, doctors, that kind of thing. I've been trying for a long time to figure out a really cool way of using this for B2B. I haven't been able to group B2B businesses by certain things like zip codes and stuff I may in the future. So if that is interesting to any of you, check out honeygrid.com. If anyone wants to send me your company's swag, I can talk about you on the show. Feel free to DM me on LinkedIn.

So it's been a couple months since the last podcast episode and I wanted to apologize to everyone. In total transparency, we recently brought on a massive fortune 500 account from a company you've definitely heard of and it has taken all of my time and my team's time. It's been an absolute whirlwind. So in this time, we've launched 988 new campaigns for one account, over 4,000 ads, and we've analyzed millions of rows of ad performance. So don't worry. I haven't forgotten about you. Just needed all hands on deck. There's been one major issue that affected advertisers here in the last couple months and I wanted to make sure I ran you through it. So LinkedIn did a backend change on their system. I assume it was the auction environment. It happened on September 1st of 2025 and it severely hurt our delivery for advertisers who are using manual bidding. If you were using maximum delivery bidding, chances are you may have seen prices go up a little bit, but it may not have affected you so much. But if you were bidding manually and you were running ads in the newsfeed, that means single image video document, you likely experienced this. No matter how high you bid, even for audiences that have been historically low cost, easy to spend, we had tons of trouble just even getting them to spend anywhere near their daily budgets. The fix got rolled out on October 23rd of 2025, which without any sort of warning totally screwed over so many of our accounts. Because delivery was hampered for almost two months, we had two months worth of having to bid higher and higher. We got up to where we were bidding like three to four times the normal price just to get enough traffic to even make a dent in clients' budgets. Because of this, we ended up missing client goals. And then finally when the fix rolled out, all of a sudden CPCs dropped back to okay levels. But because we were bidding three to four times higher than what we really needed to, all of a sudden we're now overspending our daily budgets by 50% every day. I really hope that LinkedIn is figuring out a make good for all the accounts that they overcharge for their clicks for almost two months. So if you're looking at your ad account, wondering what's changed since October 23rd, now you know. So there have been some really noteworthy launches from LinkedIn over the last couple months that we haven't released a podcast episode. So I'll just punch through these like a hit list. Number one, we got ad personalization launched. So this is where you can dynamically insert fields like someone's first name and their company name into single image ads and video ads. It goes right in the intro. That's actually been really cool. We're doing a lot of testing with that. At the time of recording, LinkedIn's in the process of rolling out multi format campaigns. So this is where you should be able to have multiple ad formats within a single campaign. I wanted to love this so much, but the way that LinkedIn is rolling it out makes it near useless to me. So I hope it's useful to someone. I hope you all get great value out of it. For me, I'm going to have to just keep launching in a separate campaign, every new ad format. LinkedIn also did a restatement of the definition of what dwell time is and how it's calculated, which they remind me every single time I log into every single ad account, I have had to click the X on this banner so many times, countless times. All right, I'll be off my soapbox here. But basically what happened here is they were counting you as multiple impressions on a post. If you scrolled past it, went down the page and then came back, they'd be like, Oh, you're back on the page back looking at this. Let's call this another impression. And because of that, it ended up splitting up people's dwell time into smaller numbers, smaller sessions. So now they've fixed this, they've restated it. They're going to combine all the time that it was on your screen in a single session as one dwell time. So this is actually really good for you. It's a net positive. You'll see that your dwell times are higher now than they used to be. And now it's all under MRC compliance. Number three here, LinkedIn's also changing the name of their structures in campaign manager. I assume that this is going to be a gradual change just because of how confusing it would be to anyone who's not paying attention. But what's happening is everything that used to be called a campaign group. It's now going to be called a campaign. And then what used to be a campaign, which was the collection of your ad format, your objective, your targeting, and your bidding method, that's now going to be called an ad set. Your account is still called an account and your ad creatives are still called creatives. So just throwing this out there, you're going to hear me sound like an idiot for the next six months as I call things the wrong name. I apologize in advance. All right. Do you have a question, a review or feedback for the show? Message me on LinkedIn or email us at podcast@b2linked.com. Feel free to attach a link to a voice recording and I can play you live or I can just read text either way, but I'm happy to keep you anonymous or shout you out as well. I definitely want to feature you. All right. Without further ado, let's hit it.

AJ

All right. This is Jack Caspino, the founder of contactlevel.com. Jack, so excited to have you here. Tell us more about yourself.

Jack

AJ, very excited to be here. Thank you for having me on. As you said, I'm the founder of contactlevel. We do B2B advertising. Personally, I love working in data and trying to figure out how to break things and make them better.

AJ

I think you're quite good at it. It's awesome. Let's have you start like what got you into LinkedIn ads and data.

Jack

Absolutely. So I mean, it's a completely random story, but I was working in medical devices. Started to build an identity resolution tool like some of the ones you see out there today. Old call the data provider to try and buy data from them and ended up going into a venture with them, a partnership where I learned all about the data of how advertising works and how the actual targeting behind it works. So I got a really good peek behind the curtain and was able to see everything about ads. They target you, how they attract you, all these different things and really fell in love with it. Found my calling, working with data and the actual advertising supplements.

AJ

So that got you into understanding the data. Then I'm assuming you probably looked at that and said, "Okay, I have this data. Now how do I reach these people?" Right?

Jack

Exactly. So we were supplying data to all sorts of major corporations that they were using to make their advertising better. More targeted hit the right people so their budgets don't go to waste. I saw that in use in consumers, but not really being used in B2B at all. We actually had a lot of B2B inbound that we weren't able to support. So led me down the rabbit hole of figuring all this out, found how to connect the data and contact level was born. We work on every ad platform and it's been really magical. Ads are a great thing. It's a lot better than personally outbounding.

AJ

Totally. And what I find is that LinkedIn is amazing because of the ability to upload company names as ABM lists and upload individuals as contact lists. But then you run into this whole separate problem. Number one, when you actually go to get those lists into LinkedIn, it's very manual. There's a lot of work there, which can be prohibitive. The other thing is that we have these challenges with match rates where you give LinkedIn a record and if they don't think they understand it or they don't recognize it, then that person's left out of your audience. And so what I've loved about getting to work with you is you are exceptionally good at making sure that we get the highest match rates possible from data lists.

Jack

Absolutely. And that's the name of the game of what we are in, which is those high match rates. The custom audiences that LinkedIn provides are incredible. It's a great way of targeting and being able to hit your ICP. If you have 500 CEOs, you need to hit just using native filters. You're going to waste a ton of ad spend hitting the wrong people. Now, what we do is we allow you to link those B2B identifiers, like their LinkedIn URL or work email, whatever you have, to personal identifiers, personal emails, addresses, things like that that allow LinkedIn to better match. What most people don't realize is on the back end, they're linking the data you upload, such as maybe their work email, typically what you have as a B2B company, to what they signed up with, their base information. Now, nobody signs up for their Facebook account, LinkedIn account, whatever account with their work address. Mine's still on my college email from years ago. If you were to go and try to target me via my current contact level email, I wouldn't match. So we take that data that you give us, link it to consumer data, so then when we put our match rates in, we're getting 90% and above. We're getting very high match rates across the board on every platform.

AJ

What I love about this is obviously the clients want someone's business email. We ask for that from lead forms and whatever, but we also know that if we upload that data back to LinkedIn, it's going to match at a very low rate for the reasons that you just shared. If there was a way where we could have the best of both worlds of, "Yes, I want to collect their business email, but I want to be able to target them by their personal email," then that's obviously best of both worlds and burying the lead here, but that's what you do. That's what you're really good at. Really excited to have you on and talk more about this.

Jack

I appreciate it. This is what I love to talk about. Anything data, that's what we do.

AJ

Oh yeah. We're kindred spirits. You more so than me. I wish I were like you that way.

Jack

No, no. You're good at this. You're running a great agency. You know what you're doing.

AJ

Well, tell us about contact level. Tell us about the company, the product, all the background you want to share.

Jack

Absolutely. Again, we help you create targeted audiences from your B2B lists. We also have our own internal search, CRM, syncs, things like that that we can get into later. From a top level, you can upload a list of individuals that are your targets and then sync that audience to multiple platforms, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn. Now, you can hit that same person on multiple channels with a very high degree of accuracy, especially if you go off of LinkedIn. This is why LinkedIn is king. They have the filters for job titles and things like that. When you go to Facebook, it's all consumer trades. They have some titles, but nobody really updates their titles on Facebook like LinkedIn. You end up wasting a ton of money on getting the wrong people. Now, with what we do, you can target directly to that person, nobody else, reducing your waste and getting that message in front of the right person. We also allow you to track who clicked on your ad, even if they don't convert with a varying degree of confidence. We provide a confidence score. It's either direct match or it's most likely one of these couple of people. We don't use cookies, so it's much more compliant to use anywhere. We also include a cookie banner if you want to use it. We try to stay as compliant as possible for our customers. Then on top of that, we also save a session recording of what the person did on page. Say you're running an ABM campaign where your sales reps are reaching out to the same people, a person clicks. We'll also give you a recording of what they did on page. The reps have some background as to what they did, what they might have been interested, where they paused, things like that.

AJ

Oh, so cool. I love it. You're able to do so many different things. One of the things that I'm most excited about is this ability to target very specific people. We know for clients specifically, like with either ABM lists or contact lists, what they give us, we want to be able to hit and spend as much as we can. But if that list only has like a 20 to a 50% match rate, then that means that we're only able to spend 20 to 50% of what we want to. Not only do you have the ability to match more, so we're able to get more spend to those that we've handpicked, but because of your pixel, you're able to see that those people are actually coming to the site with some degree of certainty there, which I absolutely love.

Jack

Yeah, absolutely. It's very useful. We use it ourselves to get leads. We started as an agency ourselves trying to figure this out in our early days, and we're able to make all the mistakes there. I've now created it so it's really an off-to-end solution for running ads. Whether you're doing an ABM campaign or a broad campaign, you could push these ads to 50,000 people, 100,000 people with a very accurate audience. So you're not wasting and then be able to see the engagement on your end. So you can analyze the data. If you know who clicks, you can forward it over to your salespeople. Maybe they reach out. It's very useful when running campaigns.

AJ

Yeah. Just as an aside, I know you've done a lot of uploading data to LinkedIn and checking match rates. I've done quite a bit of this testing too. Have you found any tricks? Anything where you're like, "Ooh, this is the way we do it now because we see how LinkedIn deals with it?"

Jack

Oh, absolutely. So there's something called a Cartesian product where it's matching all the possibilities that you give it to each other, essentially. Say a person has multiple names they use or different titles, or you have an email address. You can create different variations of that email from the base data to explode that single record into hundreds of records to help improve that match rate. Maybe you have first name, last name domain. You could create 15 different variations. Maybe they have a couple of different locations on their LinkedIn page and take all of that data and pretty much throw it up against the wall and hope that a piece of it matches. Sometimes in custom audiences, it's less about having the perfect single record and instead having many records of that individual person and that possibilities.

AJ

I found something quite similar where I would upload one record and LinkedIn asks for their first name, last name, their title, their company, their email. So I would upload all my records and I'd look at my match rate and go, "Oh, that's not very good." So then what I started doing is uploading one record that's just first name, last name, title, and company. And then another record, just email. And I found that by actually breaking the record into different pieces, I was getting higher match rates than what LinkedIn would give me otherwise. And you've just taken that to like a whole different level.

Jack

No, no, you're hitting it on the nose. I mean, the match rates are a black box. We have no insight as to how they match on the back end. So you need to be very experimentation forward with it where you really try everything. I mean, the amount of tests that we have in our LinkedIn campaign manager is absurd. And you're right there. Sometimes just a name will throw it off. So uploading a single piece of information might match better than trying to upload their whole record. Maybe they have some sort of alias that they go under that they've filled out differently on their public profile compared to what they signed up with. It can get kind of messy at times, but you really just have to experiment over and over and over and figure out what's best and just keep hammering down on that.

AJ

Oh yeah. So I'll share a little bit about a case study that you and I worked on together. So we had a client who brought us a contact list. I want to say that by just uploading the contact list to LinkedIn, we had something stupid, like a 40% match rate. Jack, you and I worked together on it. I sent you the data. You ran it through and expanded and enriched to like, you know, up to five of their personal emails. You expanded all the ways that we've been talking about. And short story long here, we ended up with a near 100% match rate by combining the data. The client was able to spend more than twice as much against the control set as, because obviously with contact lists, you want to spend more. We were able to spend more than double. And of course, all of the performance data corroborated that these were the same people, like between both audiences, very similar click through rates, very similar conversion rates. Really all we saw was we reached more of this audience. Anyway, I don't know if you have any like words on that, but that was for a client of ours called Hill Co Global. They're kind of like the worldwide marketplace for IPV4 addresses that run the whole internet. I don't know. Did you have any like thoughts or reactions to the case study?

Jack

Absolutely. And I'm very happy on the results on that. You know, like you just said, you know, 40% match rate compared to a near 100% match rate is a huge difference. I've heard of people who get these 40% match rates and then instead of, you know, trying to improve it, they just add more people to it. And that's kind of a common way of going about it. But, you know, your list is very specific. Your salespeople are reaching out to certain people. You know, you really want to hammer down on very specific people with very specific messaging and it makes a huge difference. One thing I will say about that is, you know, y'all doubled spend on it, but it's also very good for people who aren't running a large budget. I believe it was something like 20 to 40% of ad spend goes to waste when not using an audience. You're just using the native audience target segmentation. Now with this, you don't have any waste there. So you can run lower budgets at these people and still get similar results where, you know, you can set the frequency and things like that. These people get the ads at the right time, maybe when your salespeople are reaching out or whatever. But yes, as you said, those are very good results and I'm happy with them. There's a lot of good in this for advertisers.

AJ

Yeah. One thing I'll also mention is that we ended up getting a lower cost per click and a lower cost per impression off of the enriched audience. And I didn't know quite because they're both uploaded audiences. Like I don't know how to describe what's happening there other than just to say, when you bring a larger audience to LinkedIn, there's more audience that's distributed. And so LinkedIn's able to charge you less for that. So this is kind of a play of like, you know, not only can we reach more of your audience, but you can save a little bit of money while you do it.

Jack

Absolutely. You know, on the saving money side, going to other platforms rather than LinkedIn helps a lot too. I mean, for our own campaigns and you know, anyone that's willing to speak, I'm more than happy to show you, you know, we're running on Facebook and we're getting clicks at, you know, $1 or less right now. It's absolutely ridiculous. It's like writing a cold email when you're this targeted. If your list is right, and your messaging is right, you're going to have incredible results. Definitely something on the lower CPC and CPM both in LinkedIn itself when trying to run the ads at the right people and when you go off platform.

AJ

And I love LinkedIn, don't get me wrong. But one of the biggest challenges that we have is that people don't live on LinkedIn like they do other networks. The holy grail that everyone's looking for is could I get LinkedIn's targeting on other platforms where the CPMs are cheaper, the CPCs are cheaper. And really, that's what you can do. Like you can find the people on LinkedIn with that match. And then you're also taking the same lists, uploading them into Google, meta, you know, any other platform and then getting to stay in front of them and reach them there at huge discounts.

Jack

Absolutely. And if you think about it, most people when they're going into LinkedIn, their guard is kind of up, they kind of expect to be sold to. But when they're on Instagram, Facebook, whatever platform they're on, when they're just sitting in bed scrolling, their guard is down, in my opinion, a really good place to hit them. Just because again, their guard is down. It's an easier way to sell. A lot of people buy things off of you know, the Instagram store and things like that. They're kind of expecting it there.

AJ

Well, and this would probably end up taking a whole afternoon to take these lists, go and manually upload them to all of your platforms that you care about. I'm imagining with contact level, you probably have a way to make this super streamlined for advertisers.

Jack

Oh, absolutely. You just connect your integration, you upload your list to our platform. And as soon as it's done uploading, there's a button that says sync after enrichment, and you're good to go. So building an audience itself, you know, it can take less than a couple minutes just to do. We also have our own internal search where you know, kind of like zoom info or Apollo or whatever, where they have their own lead database where you can just type in filters, buyer intent, technographics, all those things and get your list imported right there. So you know, you really don't even need a list yourself, you can use that.

AJ

Oh, killer. All right. So when we're advertising the lists, you know, especially here on LinkedIn, we're going to end up not being able to spend very much, you know, these are limited in size. Do you have any tips or tricks for us on what sort of ads that you would run? What sort of strategies that you'd employ specifically to try to get the most from a small audience?

Jack

Absolutely. Small audiences are a little bit tricky, because once you've served to that person enough times, the CPMs rise very fast, you kind of have to keep it under control with small and that's especially relevant when you're doing ABM against, you know, very broad demand generation campaigns. One thing that we've seen works is there is a duplicate button on the LinkedIn page on the campaign manager. And if you click that, it actually resets the CPMs. So you know, if it's starting to get out of control, you can always duplicate your campaign. And your CPMs go back down to zero and you're able to push that advertisement to those same people again at the base rate. So that makes it a lot more effective when pushing to small audiences.

AJ

Oh, awesome. Any other cool insights you've got on making the most of these?

Jack

Facebook is good with small audiences. You know, we push some very small audiences at times and we haven't seen the CPM go above $50, $60. So you know, going off platform again is an easy way to hit these small groups of people. Duplication is a big one that we've seen employed and does very well with preventing the, you know, overspending of your audience.

AJ

Yeah, I love that. Some things that we'll do. So we know if we have a very small audience that is very important to us, you've probably heard me advocate a lot for shutting the LinkedIn audience network off. But in this case, this is where I like to turn the LinkedIn audience network on. I forget which episode I'll link to it in the show notes, but the episode where I shared my block and allow lists that I use, I would just go ahead and turn up the LAN delivery on, but with a really strict allow list. So I'm only getting the very best publications. And this is a way of like, hey, if I have to bid up to like three or $4 a click for, you know, getting traffic from like wall street journal and New York times and stuff, I'm all for that. And that's a way of continuing to nurture that traffic, even when they're just not even on LinkedIn. I'm also really falling in love with connected TV ads. So hit those people while they're at home, you know, watching streaming services. Good. One little trick we use with that one is like, we know like you can target the executives TV that you're trying to reach like no problem. But during the workday, the executive is at work. Like you don't want to be showing ads on their TV while they're at work because otherwise you're not hitting them. So we will use scheduling. We purposely schedule our connected TV ads for end of workday. We start and then we shut them off right as soon as the next workday begins.

Jack

That's a really good idea.

AJ

Yeah,

Jack

I like that. So I you know, I haven't played around too much with the audience network. We saw a lot of bots coming in from there because sometimes, like you said, the bad publications, you know, they get the bot clicks from display banners and things like that. I'll certainly have to go back and watch that episode. That's very good point as well as CTV. We can get CTV data also, we don't have it fully employed on our solution, but a very good idea. I like that.

AJ

Yeah, I like CTV a lot. We're going to have a future episode all of a deep dive into CTV just because how cool it is. I saw the same thing with the audience network, lots of bot and spam traffic, where just by narrowing down your partners that you show on to like really reputable sites, excluding the apps, excluding the sites, you know, they have an incentive to like create fraudulent and simulated clicks and all that.

Jack

Is this through LinkedIn you push the CTV ads?

AJ

It is. Yeah, it's the newest ad format on LinkedIn.

Jack

And do you know what streaming networks it goes to?

AJ

There's a ton. It's basically everything except for Netflix and Amazon. I don't think it hits those two, but pretty much everything else.

Jack

That's really good. I like that. Something else interesting that I've seen too is Spotify podcast app. Oh, their ads manager in there, actually just having custom audience is funny enough. So our solution can work on that. I've been playing around with it. I mean, they have flat CPMs where it's something like $8 per CPM, very cheap, you can push it on podcast networks very easily. So that's something that really we really want to play around with people coming and listening to podcasts, they're listening to learn just like your viewers here are listening to learn about LinkedIn ads. You know, imagine pushing the ads to these people on these podcasts and networks who are trying to learn and you know, you can offer a solution that solves what they're trying to learn during the podcast.

AJ

Yeah. And if you think about how hard it is to put this creative together, like coming up with a 30 second or a 15 second spot for CTV, maybe even a 60 second, like there's a little bit of thought and production that goes into that.

Jack

Of course, you have to make a video.

AJ

Yeah. But coming up with like just recording audio for a podcast spot, like anyone with a microphone can do that. And that's really sexy. I love that you brought that up.

Jack

Oh, absolutely. And you know, even with all the AI tools, if you're nervous about speaking on the air, you can even use one of the AI tools to talk for you.

AJ

That's true. Yep. I like that.

Jack

Yeah.

AJ

Any other strategies you can think of for making the most from small audiences?

Jack

Absolutely. Boosting posts has been really good for us. A lot of people are just scrolling the LinkedIn feed, especially during the day when they're working, you know, they're taking a little mental break and LinkedIn is kind of work still, you know, you can boost posts there that don't exactly look like advertisements. All it says is just promoted by, you know, say contact level or something. And you can push thought leadership directly to the people in your audience. And these are much cheaper than a lot of ads that you might be pushing and get a lot of impressions, especially if, you know, people are liking the content or engaging with it, then it starts to get organic growth too. So it's a really good way to try and push your message to these people in a non-invasive way that doesn't exactly look like an ad. And most people don't even notice that it's an ad, and it gets in front of all the people that you want. And you know, you have the side benefit of if it is performing well and getting engagement, you're also going to get that organic boost too. Oh, yeah. Posts are really somewhere that you should live. We also like commenting on posts, you know, you comment on someone's posts, if you look at it, they have a good following, you'll get thousands of free impressions. Just a little trick for the small audiences there.

AJ

Oh, I love it. When we're targeting a small audience, engagement is everything. And if you run something from your company, you know, you're lucky to get over like a 1% engagement rate, you run a thought leader ad, a boosted personal post, we oftentimes see these getting 12% up to like 24% engagement rates. This is a small, tight audience you want to be in front of and get as much of their attention as possible. Oh, yeah, use personal posts sponsored those thought leader ads is one of the best things you could do.

Jack

100% I mean, at that point, they're not engaging with a company, they're engaging with a person, you know, it feels more comfortable to the person that you're advertising to, it gets a lot better engagement that way. And, you know, there's a lot of AI posts out there. At times, LinkedIn almost feels like the dead internet theory is true. You see the AI posts with the AI, you know, comments are flying on it. It's very funny at times to catch those where it's, you know, real thoughtful posts from a person, definitely stand out in the crowd when you're reading it.

AJ

Totally. I love it. I want to jump into the kinds of integrations that you've got in contact level. I know we mentioned a little bit about like CRM integrations, but go into a little bit more depth there. Tell us like how the platform connects to everything else that we might already have.

Jack

Yeah, absolutely. So right now we have bi-directional syncs to CRMs. So if you think about it, you can pull in your CRM data, and then we can also deliver events and things like that back to your CRM. So your sales reps don't have to ever leave the platform. One thing on this is there's a huge, huge issue of tool fatigue in the market right now where, you know, people just say, "I don't want another tool to log into. I don't want my sales reps to log into another tool." So we've been kind of going down the route of positioning ourselves as almost a CDP, where you just funnel the data. You set it up one time, you funnel the data in, and it funnels out automatically. So you really don't need to log into us much unless maybe you're making a new audience or just setting something up. So instead, you know, you set it up, you're good to go. And now the data syncs between all of your sources. You can also go in where we have a data studio with, you know, AI question and answer for analytics and things like that with custom dashboards. But as for the integrations, right now, we're mainly on CRMs, but we're adding all sorts of different integrations, you know, like Postgres, BigQuery, Redshift, Intercom, all sorts of things that you can think of where, you know, we're kind of your one-stop shop where you can just plug into us for your audience activation and building, and then the data just pipes everywhere else that you need to, just to make it easy. And you know, you don't have another tool to log into pretty much set and forget.

AJ

Very cool. And then what do you have coming up? I know you got a very full roadmap, things that you're looking to build. What are some of the things you're most excited about coming?

Jack

Absolutely. On the note of, you know, CRM integrations and things like that, we're working on a workflow builder. So, you know, it's kind of like an internal Zapier to connect everything and build complicated workflows. Like someone moves deal stages, it can automatically move them to a different audience. So they're getting different messaging, like messaging during when your sales are trying to reach out is completely different than when they're actually in an active field, especially if you have a long deal cycle and maybe want to hit the buyer group and things like that. So we're setting up workflows so you can build these so, you know, it's very custom to your process specifically, and helps you automate things that otherwise you would have to manually do. On the other side, list building is a very hard thing to do. Like I mentioned, you know, if the list isn't right, it's not great. We're planning on integrating with a company called Landbase who is probably the best list builder I've ever seen in my life. So we're going to have their list builder on our platform where, you know, you can just input your company, a little bit of info about it, and it will help you find your ICP, find targets and help it ever evolve.

AJ

Oh, right on. You know, this is part of the beauty of dynamic lists on LinkedIn. This ability to move people between audiences and stages dynamically. If you tried to do this manually of like, every, you know, what are you going to do every week or every month, you know, manually upload a list, wait two to three days for LinkedIn to finish processing it. The fact that all of this is done through dynamic lists that you're syncing right to LinkedIn and the other networks, you actually can move people through a process.

Jack

Exactly. And you know, if you can add and remove people in real time from that audience, so you know, add someone within 24 hours, they'll be getting your ad. It's very powerful when used right. These automations, you know, being able to just move and change that messaging and you know, the snap of the finger is very useful.

AJ

Yeah, right on. All right, so kind of breaking away from work stuff. What are you most excited about personally right now?

Jack

Right now it's all work, but coming up as the pro am in Pebble Beach and I'll be going there and I'm very excited.The tradition with me and my friends to go there. As you can see by all the golf balls right there, I'm a big, I'm a big golf fan. So very excited to go to that tournament.

AJ

You go in person.

Jack

Every year.

AJ

Do you follow one golfer around from hole to hole? Do you stay on one hole and watch all the golfers come through?

Jack

Very, very fortunately, one of my buddies from college is a house on spyglass in the backyard. So we get to sit out there and have some drinks and then just hop on and walk around the course. So it's a very fun event that we do every year as a tradition.

AJ

That's awesome.

Jack

It's a good time. As one tiger was there, we were following him around, of course, you have to.

AJ

Cool. What about professionally? Obviously, your heads down building tools. What are you most excited about right now?

Jack

Apart from our product, the data world is something that's kind of being cracked open, as you can see by tools like this. When I was working in, I guess you can call it big data or ad tech, there's so many outdated processes within those companies that are now being used in practice. If you look at identity resolution tools, like those pixels where you put on your page and then they show you the person who visits, that has been in practice in data companies since 2012, 2014, but only been broken for consumers to use as of the past couple of years. People are finally figuring this out and really making these tools into something that everyone can use. They're very useful and now they're being used for the public. Something that I'm interested in is the interest and personality data you get from these advertiser providers, where you can see what this person likes, very granular data. You can build almost a very good profile of the person. I think I've seen a couple of people doing it, but being able to see maybe what this person will respond best to or the things they like before you have on a call is very good knowledge to have. People cracking open these data processes and creating tools out of it is very interesting to me.

AJ

Oh, I love it. All right. Do you have an offer for our listeners, for LinkedIn ads fanatics out there who want to try contact level?

Jack

Absolutely. We're more than willing to get everyone who comes from here, some sort of discount off if you just give us our trial. We'll also do a match test for you for free where if you can give us a list, you can upload your own and you'll be able to see yourself how it performs and what the actual match rate is. The whole name of our game is how high that match rate can get.

AJ

Perfect. All right. How do you want people to come find you?

Jack

Yeah. You can find me on LinkedIn, Jack Caspino, or go to our website. If you book a meeting with us, I'll certainly be the one to hop on. Just put in the meeting notes that you came from the B2Linked podcast. I will personally hop on and speak with everyone. Even if you don't want to try the product, feel free to hop on and just talk with me. I love talking about data and more than happy to help anyone out with anything.

AJ

Perfect. Well, Jack, thank you so much for coming on, sharing your insights. This is awesome. I'm going to keep being a user of your tools and enrichment. Thanks for building stuff that's so cool for us LinkedIn advertisers.

Jack

Of course. Thank you, AJ. I'm excited to see where the world of advertising goes.

AJ

Absolutely. All right. We'll talk soon.

All right. Awesome announcement. The LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community had just surpassed 100 members. A huge thank you to all the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics who are making it such an awesome community. If you're not already a member, what are you waiting for? Get over to the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics to get access to all four of our courses that take you from beginner to expert. Plus, you get access to the whole community of people who are learning LinkedIn Ads and mastering it just like you. And there's even an upgrade to get on a weekly group calls with me to get direct feedback on your campaigns. If this is the first time listening, welcome. We're excited to have you here. Hit that subscribe button so you don't miss next week's. And then the very biggest favor you can pay me if you love this content is to go to Apple Podcasts and rate and review the show. And of course, I'm going to shout you out when I see your review. With any questions, suggestions, or corrections, reach out to me at podcast@b2linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. And I'm cheering you on in all of your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

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