LinkedIn advertising is on the rise, but it can still be difficult to know if it is the right choice for your business. Well, according to Josh Turner of LinkedSelling, it is if you are a B2B company.
Josh talks to us about using LinkedIn ads for B2B marketing. He explains how to use LinkedIn ads if you don’t have a big budget, examples of his successful LinkedIn ad campaigns, and the future of LinkedIn advertising.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
- Why LinkedIn is a better marketing platform for B2B than Facebook
- How to use the Insights tool on LinkedIn to get data on the users visiting your website
- An example of a marketing funnel Josh runs
- How to measure for cost-per-appointment (CPA)
- Why Josh doesn’t spend more than $3,000 to acquire a client
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
LinkedSelling
Josh’s LinkedIn Ads Playbook
Josh on LinkedIn
Episode 19: AJ Wilcox, Founder @ B2Linked on When to Use LinkedIn Ads vs Facebook Ads
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Darren Clark: This is Digital Marketer. This week it’s Josh Tuner. Hello, and welcome to the Digital Marketer podcast. Today Garret is talking with Josh Turner, the founder LinkedSelling. Josh is gonna be talking about ways you can use the LinkedIn platform to benefit your business. In the episode you’ll hear about the insights tag, which is LinkedIn’s pixel, how to use sponsored in mail, and Josh is going to share some case studies the highlight how to use the LinkedIn ads platform successfully.
Garrett Holmes: Josh, thank you so much for joining us here in Austin, Texas as DM HQ. How you doing man?
Josh Turner: Great to be here man. Doing great.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah, well good, well good. Before you started LinkedSelling and Linked University, you were a finance guy. Could you kind of take us back a ways and share how you went from CFO to CEO and founder of a completely different company?
Josh Turner: Yeah. The company I was working for before starting out company today, was a construction and manufacturing firm that got hit really hard by the downturn in ’08 and ’09.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah, yeah.
Josh Turner: They shut their doors in 2009, late 2009, and I really just decided, “You know what? I don’t wanna go to work for somebody else. I wanna start my own thing. This is the kick in the pants I need to make it happen.”
Garrett Holmes: Yeah.
Josh Turner: Been itching to do my own thing for a while. That was kind of the push I needed, I guess. At first I started working as a freelancer or outsourced CFO for small businesses …
Garrett Holmes: Okay.
Josh Turner: … in the St. Louis area. The thing that was working best for me to get clients, was LinkedIn. At the time, there was really very few, if any people that really understood how to use LinkedIn for business development, and really at getting bonafide sales appointments, not just the fluffy vanity stuff. I kind of developed this process for my own business, and then I had a couple of my finance clients ask me if I thought that it would work for them too. I kind of showed ’em how I would do if it were in their shoes.
Josh Turner: One of ’em said, “Why don’t you just do it for us.” Long story short, I did. That was our first client. That went really well. I thought, “If it can work for them, it’d work for my business. I bet there’s a lot more people out there that could use this kind of service. I [crosstalk 00:02:17] don’t see anybody doing it right.”
Garrett Holmes: Yeah. This was what, nine years ago?
Josh Turner: Late 2011.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah.
Josh Turner: Early 2012.
Garrett Holmes: Okay, okay.
Josh Turner: Yeah. Yeah, at the time, there was just nobody doing it.
Garrett Holmes: Right.
Josh Turner: I threw up LinkedSelling.com and built a really simple site myself, just to see maybe if this was a real business with legs and it really took off. Pretty quickly in 2012, I started winding down the outsourced CFO business …
Garrett Holmes: Okay.
Josh Turner: … and just went all in on helping businesses grow using LinkedIn. Primarily it was an agency model, where companies pay us to take over their LinkedIn accounts, campaigns, pages and such and run them using our methods. Pretty quickly on I realized that there’s a lot of people out there who aren’t in a place yet, or for many reasons, even if they can’t afford it, having us do it for them, just wasn’t the right option. In 2012, we started building out our training programs.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah, yeah.
Josh Turner: Much lower priced kinds of things.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah, you can do it yourself.
Josh Turner: Yeah, for that market it was really good and then that’s been a huge catalyst for our business as well. It helped the agency side. Today it’s … We’re somewhere in the neighborhood of 50/50 in terms of where our revenue comes from, from smaller businesses that are buying our training programs and doing it themselves, and implementing it and then the rest of it are companies hiring us to do it all for ’em.
Garrett Holmes: Why LinkedIn? I mean, what’s so special, what’s so unique about LinkedIn, compared to the plethora of other advertising platforms that really just, you know, peaked your interest and really made you wanna dive straight into LinkedIn.
Josh Turner: When I was using it for my business at the very beginning, it was because it was the only place that I knew of that I could go research the prospects who looked like the right people for me to try and introduce myself to, to try and convert them into clients.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah.
Josh Turner: You know, you can’t really do that with Facebook. You can’t go on there and search for people based on their title and then connect with them. It’s just not … Facebook doesn’t work that way. LinkedIn does. If you know the right way to approach people, you can get a good percentage of them to connect with you there and then develop a relationship with them and try, and move it offline into a real world conversation. That’s really why I did it.
Josh Turner: LinkedIn just … If you’re in B2B, which of course I was at the time and still am today, if you’re selling to other businesses or people that work in businesses, there’s really nowhere else that is quite as powerful. Facebook’s come a long way in terms of business targeting as well. We’re huge proponents of Facebook and do a lot with Facebook for our own business and for our clients too.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah.
Josh Turner: For B2B, LinkedIn is definitely where it’s at. The other great thing about LinkedIn is that … I have a real soft spot in my heart for startups and small businesses, cause that’s the background I come from. My dad was a small business owner. I run a small business today. LinkedIn is a great thing for people, like me, people who are … When I was just starting, I was working out of my house.
Josh Turner: A lot of people just need a way to get in front of more prospects and get more at bat. If you’re willing to just put in a little elbow grease … You don’t have to have money to spend on ads and you don’t have to have any complicated funnels, and all that stuff. For a lot of people who are just getting their businesses up and running that’s a pretty attractive thing for them.
Garrett Holmes: No doubt.
Josh Turner: The biggest changes though to our business over the last couple years has been helping more people with some of, the more advanced things, and people that do have budgets for ads, because LinkedIn advertising has really come a long way over the last couple years.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah.
Josh Turner: That’s been a huge, huge focus for us over the last couple years. As businesses grow and evolve and for anybody that’s running webinars or has a sales team that they need appointments for, has a funnel that’s working Facebook or somewhere else and is looking for more traffic, LinkedIn often times is … It’s becoming more and more effective and lot more people are looking at it.
Garrett Holmes: No doubt. I mean, you mentioned, the ad side of it. Organic is a really good play for people to make those connections and do that development as well.
Josh Turner: Yeah. Well, that’s usually where most people are gonna start out.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah.
Josh Turner: Smaller businesses and … You know, a lot of folks in our training programs, they’re using the organic side of LinkedIn to go out, use their personal LinkedIn profile and connect with prospects.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah.
Josh Turner: Yeah. It’s a little, bit larger businesses, or folks who are doing some more sophisticated digital marketing, who are tapping into that side.
Garrett Holmes: Okay, makes sense. Would you say that LinkedIn’s only for B2B or do you think that there’s a market for B2C for advertising on LinkedIn?
Josh Turner: Yeah, I the B2C market is there. There’s different, applications. You know, bigger B2C brands that have a big budget and can spend money on things like brand awareness could use LinkedIn advertising to just get their message out in front of people …
Garrett Holmes: Right, right.
Josh Turner: … and not worry about immediate ROI or anything of that kind of stuff. Aside from that, for anybody that’s like, “Well, I do care about ROI and I can’t just spend money for brand awareness,” if you’re in a B2C business, you’re probably not gonna go on LinkedIn and try, and sell a dog collar to somebody, but you could use LinkedIn to get in front of wholesalers or buyers or people in the media that might wanna do a write up about you, things like that.
Josh Turner: There’s a lot of the kind [crosstalk 00:07:43] back office stuff that makes sense for B2C, as well as building relationships with people in the press, that make a lot of sense and joint venture stuff and things like that. Some of our best affiliate partners or joint venture partners that we have, are people who we initially reached out to on LinkedIn. Even if you’re selling a widget, building relationships with the people who can introduce you to lots of their customers is a great way to use LinkedIn too.
Garrett Holmes: Totally. You know, we hear a lot that, “I’m scare,” or “I don’t wanna dive into LinkedIn ads, because it’s so expensive.” It is.
Josh Turner: Sure.
Garrett Holmes: It isn’t a cheap avenue to advertise. How do you encourage people to start dabbling and get their feet wet with LinkedIn ads, if they don’t have really a massive budget, to kind of test the waters out?
Josh Turner: Well, one of the very first things that I think anybody should do is, LinkedIn’s got something called, an insights tag …
Garrett Holmes: Okay.
Josh Turner: … which is like their version of the Facebook pixel. You get the code, you put it on your website and then it allows you to then build these audiences of people who have visited your website that you can potentially then re-target in different ways.
Garrett Holmes: Gotcha.
Josh Turner: As a very first step, even if you’re not planning on even spending any money on it, it’s a great thing to do, because the other thing it gives you, is a lot of data on who are the people that are visiting your website.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah.
Josh Turner: It’ll show you, anybody that’s hit your website, what their job titles are, et cetera, et cetera. Now, you don’t get the exact profiles.
Garrett Holmes: Right, right.
Josh Turner: It gives you the broad brush of [crosstalk 00:09:12], okay, 60% of the people visiting your website have the title CEO and on and on and one.
Garrett Holmes: That’s cool.
Josh Turner: That’s really good stuff to have.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah. Helps you build those personas, those avatars of who your actual customers are.
Josh Turner: Yeah, there’s a lot of value you can get from that. Aside from that first step, really just comes down to, I think understanding, you know, what the ROI model is for whatever it is you’re trying to see. LinkedIn on the surface is going to be higher cost per click, most of the time, than Facebook.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah.
Josh Turner: What we find, is that if your audience is on LinkedIn, if you’re B2B, if you’re selling to people in businesses, then your people are gonna be on LinkedIn. Often times, we will end up seeing that, yeah, the cost for a click is higher, but then we’re getting sometimes the higher opt-in rate for promoting a book, or a webinar or something like that or straight to a sales appointment or whatever it might be. When you look at the entire lifecycle of the funnel, we’re often times seeing a higher conversion rate, so higher dollar ROI, compared to some other places.
Garrett Holmes: Interesting.
Josh Turner: You really have to look at it like, not just what’s it gonna cost me for a click.
Garrett Holmes: Right.
Josh Turner: What’s the quality of the clicks and how is that gonna compare and how’s that all gonna flow through.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah.
Josh Turner: Everybody’s business is different though.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah, totally.
Josh Turner: I think that, generally speaking, we’re usually, if we’re running a campaign to get people to sign up for a webinar on LinkedIn, I’m gonna expect, I’m gonna be paying 15 to 20 dollars to get somebody on a webinar.
Garrett Holmes: Okay.
Josh Turner: Maybe for the same webinar on Facebook, it costs me eight to 10. That’s some of, the numbers that we’ve seen in our business for example.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah.
Josh Turner: We see from LinkedIn, really, really quality traffic.
Garrett Holmes: Okay.
Josh Turner: And so, then when you look at upsells, and the full lifetime value of a lead, you know, we’re fine paying more for it.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. One thing that I really wanna dive into is, kind of some case studies and just some examples of some campaigns that you’ve worked on, or ran for your business, that could serve as a great example for people out there who wanna start running LinkedIn ads, or improve their LinkedIn ads.
Josh Turner: Yeah. Absolutely. LinkedIn recently, we partnered with them. They released a case study about one of the campaigns that we’ve had a lot of success with, that is targeting both cold and warm audience and driving them straight to a sales appointment with our sales team.
Garrett Holmes: Okay.
Josh Turner: The exact campaign that they dug into for this case study, was one where we spent … It was roughly 8:1 ROI, the revenue to ad spent. We spent about 10,000 dollars on ad spend and generated about 80,000 in sales from it. That’s for a high ticket offer that’s average roughly 20,000 dollar, you know, contract price.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah.
Josh Turner: Basically what we’re doing is a combination of a few things. We’re using … I mentioned that insights tag earlier. We’re building these LinkedIn calls on matched audiences, just similar to Facebook custom audiences.
Garrett Holmes: Okay.
Josh Turner: We’re able to re-target that traffic with sponsored content in the main home page feed on LinkedIn. And then, we’re doing two things there. One is, we have a couple different videos we use. One’s an animated explainer video and one is a talking head with me, essentially talking about the value of what we do and what we do in a 60 second soundbite, and then encouraging them to sign up for a call to chat with someone on our team to see if it’s a fit.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah.
Josh Turner: We’ll have that running, which is just … I mean, literally pitching the appointment in their newsfeed, not asking ’em to opt-in to get something.
Garrett Holmes: Right.
Josh Turner: That is working in some cases really well. At the same time with that same campaign, we also had running a free report download, pretty straightforward strategy there. Download the free report. Then, on the thank you page, pitch to get on the phone and then an email campaign on the back of that to drive people into that phone call as well.
Garrett Holmes: Okay.
Josh Turner: And then, the third component of that is sponsored in mail. Sponsored in mail is messages that you can send to almost anybody on LinkedIn really. You don’t hand select the people, but you use criteria to say, “I wanna a message to hit the inbox of anybody that fits this profile.”
Garrett Holmes: Yeah. Believe it or not, that’s how I was hired here.
Josh Turner: Oh yeah?
Garrett Holmes: Yeah.
Josh Turner: Cool.
Garrett Holmes: Yep.
Josh Turner: Nice. It’s really effective.
Garrett Holmes: It is.
Josh Turner: LinkedIn, to their credit, I believe … They may have updated the rules since I last dug into this, but I think that they won’t allow any user to receive more than one of those a month.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah.
Josh Turner: They’re not gonna let it turn into a spam fest of marketers blasting people’s inboxes.
Garrett Holmes: Cause it would.
Josh Turner: Yeah, yeah. Right now, not that many people are using it or really understand how powerful it can be. One of the key things we do with it, is that we re-target people that visit our website with a sponsored in mail, inviting them to sign up for a phone call. Somebody hits our website, looks into our company to some extent, there’s a good chance that over the next few weeks, they’re gonna get a message from us in their LinkedIn inbox, talking a little, bit about what we do and inviting ’em to a phone call. That’s just crushing it right now.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah. That’s cool.
Josh Turner: It’s kind of, a combination of those three things, that’s really driving the results for us. For our internal campaigns right now, right now we’re spending about 20K a month on LinkedIn ads for campaigns that are all about getting appointments on our calendars for the sales team.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah.
Josh Turner: I wouldn’t say on that 20K in total, it’s always 8:1. Some months are pretty darn close to that. Some months are a little more. I think the lowest one that I’ve seen was a month where maybe it was 2 1/2:1 or something like that.
Garrett Holmes: Still pretty good.
Josh Turner: Yeah. Those are sales right on the front end too. There’s a lot more leads in longterm more [crosstalk 00:15:14] of that business will close.
Garrett Holmes: Oh yeah.
Josh Turner: If we go back and look at those number a year from now, it could significantly greater than that.
Garrett Holmes: No doubt. No doubt.
Josh Turner: That’s one that we’re real excited about.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah. Absolutely. You actually … I was peaking at your deck. We’re updating the paid acquisition cert here and you’re doing the LinkedIn section. I peaked at your deck and you have cost per appointment. Is that something that you kind of coined?
Josh Turner: Yeah, I don’t know who coined it, or [crosstalk 00:15:40] maybe we did, but it’s a number that we pay a lot of attention to of … Any campaign we’re running, how much are we paying per appointment.
Garrett Holmes: Right.
Josh Turner: I kind of know in the back of my head that I really don’t wanna spend much more than two or 3,000 dollars to acquire a client. We have a few different things that we do in our business. That’s for our agency services.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah.
Josh Turner: We don’t wanna spend more than two or 3,000 dollars to acquire a client. If I can kind of know, in the back of my head roughly how our sales team is converting, and then I can know that, “Hey. We don’t really wanna be over 250 dollars per appointment for example.” That’s why we keep really close tabs on that number. That way it’s kind of like a really quick back in the napkin method for me.
Josh Turner: I just don’t have the time in the day to be digging into numbers and analytics on every campaign we’re running and every ad set and this and that. Not only within LinkedIn but Facebook and the other places that we’re advertising and marketing. I can really quickly just see if anything that we’re doing, how much are we paying for an appointment on average from this and then I can just know, “Okay, well I feel good about that and I don’t have to dig into the rest of it.”
Garrett Holmes: Yeah. Okay. That sounds great. Well, LinkedIn seems like it’s kind of just getting started almost with its, ad platform. I was curious if you kind of had some insights or if you could kind of look into your crystal ball a little, bit and share what you think is kind of on the horizon and beyond for LinkedIn as a platform.
Josh Turner: You know, I haven’t given that too much thought. We’re just really seeing that the greatest opportunity here in the short term is just maximizing all this new stuff that they’ve rolled out that I’ve been talking about today. My hope are that they just continue to improve on this like they have done over the last year or so. I think that they will. They seem to be really trying to create something that is as good as Facebook. Facebook’s ad platform and campaign manager and whatever you call the whole thing, is pretty darn robust.
Garrett Holmes: It is.
Josh Turner: Yeah. LinkedIn is not quite at that level yet. They’re trying to catch up.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah. It’s come a long way.
Josh Turner: They have come a long way. At the same time too, there’s something to be said for simplicity. LinkedIn is a little, bit more intuitive than Facebook ads are in some ways. I just think I think the thing to be excited about is that they’re obviously investing a lot in the development of it, and continuing to grow it, and doing a lot of things to get people to spend more time on LinkedIn, and reinvesting and changing a lot of things related to LinkedIn groups. I think there’s gonna be some cool stuff coming out on that in the future too. LinkedIn’s owned by Microsoft now, right. I would think that they’ve got some people there a lot smarter than me. I’m just gonna sit back and wait and see what they do.
Garrett Holmes: There you do. Well, we’ve got a lot of business owners who listen to this podcast, and appreciate hearing, kind of some of, the stories of fellow business owners. Are there some big challenges that you faced growing your business, or starting your business, that you had to overcome, that you’d like to share?
Josh Turner: Well, I think that … You know, we’ve grown significantly. We’ve been on the Inc. 5000 … We were on the Inc. 500 list couple years in a row and 5,000 the year after that. I mean, we’ve done really well. It’s hard for me to look back and say, “Boy, if we would have done this, we could have grown even that much more.”
Garrett Holmes: Yeah.
Josh Turner: At the same time, there’s other people that have been in businesses in our space for the same amount of time as us and who are much further ahead than us and doing really cool things. I really think that it’s not getting caught up in what other people are doing. I’ve learned that the hard way. Over the last couple years, we’ve gotten a lot better at staying in our lane, whereas prior to that, we were doing a lot of things, because we saw other people in our industry doing them and thought that, well that’s a good revenue opportunity and if other people are doing this, we could do that too. We had a few different programs that we launched. One of ’em turned into a seven figure program. Another one was doing a half a million a year in revenue. They weren’t flops or anything.
Garrett Holmes: Right.
Josh Turner: What happened for us was that, we realized that we can’t do it all. We need to focus on the things that we can be really, really excellent at and go back to our main core programs. Doing that over the last couple years, has made our business more profitable, and a better place to work for our team.
Garrett Holmes: Totally.
Josh Turner: You can’t do it all. When you have a marketing team that’s a certain size, or sales team that’s a certain size, and if you put too many initiatives and too many responsibilities and too many priorities on their plate, then it just becomes unrealistic, and people are constantly running around with their hair on fire.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah.
Josh Turner: Trimming back a little, bit and refocusing on our core programs has been I would say a good learning lesson for us.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah. No doubt. I mean, we talk about the idea of niching down and it’s so important for your business, but it’s almost like niching within your niche. Finding those things that are the main focus of your business, and just going all in.
Josh Turner: Sure.
Garrett Holmes: I love that. Well, we ask everyone who comes on the show this question. It’s definitely my favorite of the day. If you could go back in time and knowing what you know now, talk to your 25 year old self, what advice would you give to him, or what would you tell him?
Josh Turner: I would tell him to build a sales team sooner than I did.
Garrett Holmes: Okay.
Josh Turner: Yeah. There’s nothing that’s going to grow a business more so than figuring out how to get sales team performing at even an average level.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah.
Josh Turner: You don’t even have to have the highest performing, highest converting badass sales team. You know, I think starting the business, I felt like I needed to be further along, before I started putting those kinds of people in place and did the sales myself for too long. Once I got out on my way in that regard, you know, we’ve really taken off.
Garrett Holmes: Totally. Well, Josh, thank you so much for joining us today. This was great to learn a little, bit more about LinkedIn and what you guys are doing over there. Where can people find out more about you and what you’ve got going on?
Josh Turner: Cool man. Thank you so much for having me. The best thing that I could offer for folks is that we’ve got a LinkedIn ads playbook that has a lot of swipes, copies of ads, lots of text copy edit, lots of screen shots from behind the scenes of how everything I walked you through with those three different types of campaigns that are generating appointments for our sales team, as well as some other campaigns that are really working, we’ve got all of that stuff templated with a complete swipe file. Anybody who wants to get their hands on that can go to Linkedselling.com/DM, as in digital marketer.
Garrett Holmes: Yeah, yeah.
Josh Turner: Not BM. Linkedselling.com/DM. It’s a pretty significant stack of swipes in there for anybody that wants to take a look at that stuff.
Garrett Holmes: Awesome. Thanks for offering that up. That’s linkedselling.com/DM. All right man. Thanks so much. I hope to have you back here soon. You’ll be at Trafficking Conversion Summit this year, which will be a lot of fun. Yeah, thanks again for stopping by.
Josh Turner: Thanks for having me man.
Garrett Holmes: Absolutely.
Darren Clark: You’ve been listening to the Digital Marketer Podcast. For more information and show notes, go to digitalmarketer.com/podcast. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.
(NOTE: Need a helping hand with your digital marketing efforts? Or maybe you just want proven, actionable marketing tools, tactics, and templates to implement in your business? Check out the latest deal from DigitalMarketer, and you will be on your way to helping your business grow.)
