The Reason Your B2B Company Needs LinkedIn Advertising

Why is LinkedIn ads great? It's because it offers a few things that you can't get anywhere else. The ability to laser target a very niche professional in a very specific type of company. Our clients are not on LinkedIn. Why are we going to spend any money on LinkedIn?

Where LinkedIn is best is when you want to target that niche professional in an industry that you know they're using. They're more digitally active. They're more using LinkedIn.

Welcome back to another episode of the Bridge the Gap podcast powered by Revenue Reimagine. Today's guest is Anthony Blitner, who is the founder and CMO of Speedwork, a LinkedIn ads agency that helps B2B companies scale using precision-driven LinkedIn advertising. We're going to talk about what that means. He's a LinkedIn certified marketing expert, and for over ten years he has been building ad campaigns that don't just deliver impressions because we know that is a vanity metric. They deliver results. We're going to talk about using LinkedIn to drive targeted, scalable sales pipelines and why LinkedIn ads should be part of your B2B customer acquisition strategy. Anthony, welcome to the show.

Hey guys, I'm excited to be here. That was a great intro, man. On no sleep. I'm telling you, this is the first one that I have messed up in three years.

You recovered well.

Yeah. If you didn't say it, no one would have announced it. We just got cut out. But listen, I am unlike some people. I choose to be honest with the audience about my faults. Albeit very few. They do have no, I'm kidding. I do have my faults. My wife reminds me of them every day.

Yeah.

Thanks for doing the show. I'm super interested in this one because I don't know a lot about LinkedIn ads or the power of LinkedIn ads. Absolutely nothing. But you talk about it as a hidden power for B2B. So, why are so many B2B companies still overlooking this platform when it comes to advertising?

Yeah, I think when a lot of people think about LinkedIn, they just think about posts that you're going to put in the news feed, and then they're going to think about all those connection requests that you get if you're on the platform. And while both of those things are true, LinkedIn has been improving the connection request spam out there and improving the user experience.

Well, yeah, they still got a little ways to go.

Okay. But it's a lot better than it was a couple years ago. So they're making steps in the right direction. But people think about social content, they think about connection requests, but not as many people are taking advantage of the ads platform on LinkedIn. It has been growing a lot, so more and more people are jumping onto it, but still kind of underutilized compared to Google ads, Meta ads. Everyone else is on those. So why is LinkedIn ads great? It's because it offers a few things that you can't get anywhere else. The ability to laser target a very niche professional in a very specific type of company, which every B2B company wants to sell to. They usually have a very specific buyer and a very specific type of company. So we can get very specific into who it is that we're targeting, what kind of company are they working at. And then that allows you to reach that audience that is hard to reach otherwise. If you're on Meta or if you're on Google, they just don't have those options unless you're bringing your own contact list. They just don't have those options to target people in that way. So that's where LinkedIn really shines is when you want to target very niche professional at a very specific type of company.

Interesting. And a little deeper, like do people think it's too expensive because it's so niche as well versus like a Facebook or like an Instagram, probably is like pennies on the dollar versus something more expensive on a LinkedIn side?

Yes, that's definitely the reputation that LinkedIn ads carries. Oh wow, these are some expensive costs that we're getting here. And at the end of the day, what you have to do is you have to sit down and compare your cost per quality across Facebook and Google and LinkedIn. Your cost per quality lead, your cost per opportunity, your cost per customer acquisition cost. What you're usually going to find is, and I've run the split test many times, is that the traffic coming in off Google, sometimes you can't target who it is. So it could be a student looking for research on a specific topic. This is what a lot of tech companies run into because they publish a lot of engineering blogs and technical data. So you get a lot of students just looking for research. On Meta, you will be reaching some off-the-wall type of people. If you've ever seen the comments on your Meta ads, it's not pretty. So using those other platforms, you're just going to be bringing in unknown traffic, and that can be skewing your demographics when you're looking at your pixel traffic or your Google Analytics demographic. So it starts to skew the traffic you're getting when you're getting that low-quality traffic. But when you run it on LinkedIn, you know exactly who you're going to be reaching, the exact type of company.

What if your ICP is not on LinkedIn, though? So let me double click on that. We have a client who I'm going through this with the reps right now. Listen, we're big believers in LinkedIn, right? Like, I don't think our business would be where it is if it wasn't for LinkedIn. It is the thing I love to hate the most. I cannot wait for the day that I don't have to post on LinkedIn every day. But LinkedIn drives our business. However, we have a client who sells into quality assurance at like Fortune 50, highly regulated companies, and the answer that I get from most of them in the marketing department is like, our clients are not on LinkedIn. Why are we going to spend any money on LinkedIn?

Yeah. So at the end of the day, it's not for everybody. There's definitely plenty of people too who, you know, they're working more in construction or in automotive and they're out there in the field. Then it's like, okay, then maybe LinkedIn's not the right platform for those type of people. And then you have to use some alternative strategies. Maybe you have to build a custom contact list and then you have to upload that to a different platform, whichever one you think is going to be the best for that audience. So then you have to go into the alternative strategies of building your own contact list, uploading to a different platform. But yeah, where LinkedIn is best is when you want to target that niche professional in an industry that you know they're using. They're more digitally active, they're more using LinkedIn. That said, I'm always surprised when I build out some of these pretty niche audiences and how big of an audience we can usually find. It then comes down to how active is that audience in general. Usually you're going to see more of the business professional, executive type of persona at a company. They're the most likely to be active on LinkedIn. So while some of those really big companies, it just all depends on that role that you're going after, but sometimes you'll find a small percentage that is active on LinkedIn. Otherwise, you have to use an alternative strategy like that.

And then what's considered like a good conversion rate?

Yeah, I wouldn't even think about conversion rate specifically. I would think more about lead generation to start. Like that's the very basic building block. Are people coming in? Are they whatever it is, whatever your stepping stone is going to be along the way? Maybe it's let's say we want to first get them on our newsletter or get them to come to a webinar or something like that. That's the first step. Social in general sits more on the brand awareness, demand generation side of things, especially the bigger and bigger you go, the more enterprise you go. You're not going to sell a 50k software package from just one click on LinkedIn. So you do have to go more on the brand awareness, demand generation side of things. But once we get into those initial stepping stones, then we can start to standardize some metrics in terms of cost per lead. And if you're doing a content download, you can usually get those somewhere between 50 to 250 range. Just depends how premium of an audience you're going after. And then if you're going for demo requests, that can be anywhere from 100 to a thousand. But that just all depends on what demo you're offering and who are you offering it to.

Sounds a lot more nuanced than just put up an ad, huh?

Yes, that's all of advertising. You think it's simple. Just put up an ad and build it and they will come. But there's more nuance to the strategy there.

I mean that's what Dale's doing right now, right Dale? Just build it and they'll show up, and you spend a lot of time building it.

So you've scaled B2B pipelines using LinkedIn ads. I'm assuming you know you sound fairly well educated on Meta ads and you know everything else. What made you decide

LinkedIn is where I want to focus versus everything else, because I have spoken with people who will swear by Google ads. I have spoken with people who will swear by posting on Instagram, and I've spoken with other people who tell you not to do anything.

I think it really comes down to who are you working with and what kind of industries are you working inside? If you're in the Meta ad space, you're probably working with e-commerce companies. If you're in the Google ad space, you're working with more standardized B-to-C industries like insurance and stuff like that. When you're working with LinkedIn, you're working with B-to-B. It's residential cleaning, I mean, yeah, it's all across the board, but lots of B-to-B.

Once you're in LinkedIn, then you're more in the tech industries, SaaS companies, and while there can still be a pretty wide range, a lot of it's tech, but you'll get a lot of professional services as well.

The reason why I decided to focus on LinkedIn is because I do come from a tech background. I've done a lot of work in the tech space. The long and short of my background is I was in software development building mobile apps. I had an agency before this one where we built mobile apps. This was the early days of the iPhone, and when you launch a mobile app, then people are like, "How do I get downloads for this mobile app?" And it's like, "All right, well, we're going to help you with marketing now." So that was the segue into the marketing world. And ever since then, I've just been focused on the B2B tech space. Even rewinding before that, I started my career at IBM, so I've always been in the enterprise tech space.

LinkedIn always was the best tool for marketing for B2B tech. Ten years ago, people would ask me, "Does anybody use LinkedIn?" And there was nobody doing ads at that time. Now since COVID and all that, everyone's on LinkedIn. They've at least set up a profile. Whether how much they use it, it's a lot more adopted these days than it was ten years ago. Obviously, it's a lot more competitive space now, but that's why I first got into LinkedIn ads because no one was doing it. My background is B2B enterprise tech, and it was a good space to be in.

That makes sense. What's one common mistake companies make when retargeting your LinkedIn ads? Walk us through some of these common mistakes people have made.

Yeah, the most common mistake—and I mean I audit accounts all day long every day—even companies that are spending a lot of money, you still sit down and look at their account and you're like, "How are you making these mistakes and you're spending this much money on ads?" It's like 20k or more, and they're still leaving all the default settings on. That's the most common mistake. They just leave the default settings on. If you go to a Google or a Meta platform, you're just going to click through the interface. Most of the default settings, you're like, "Yeah, great, I want to use those." Those are going to help my campaign. On LinkedIn, there are a handful of settings you do want to change for anybody who's not an IBM-size company.

The basic ones are: when you're setting up your campaign, audience expansions are on, and you want to turn that off because it tells LinkedIn they can go outside of the targeting, the specific targeting you just set. That's number one—turn off audience expansion.

Number two is audience network, which means LinkedIn can show ads on third-party websites. But when that's enabled, all your budget's going to go there. So you thought you were running LinkedIn ads, but really you're running display ads on some news blog website. Those are the most basic two, but those are also the most common that I see.

I'm fascinated by this because a lot of people will tell you ads don't work. You need to post and you need to send in emails. And I have very strong opinions on inmails.

And it all depends on which function you're working in.

No, don't ever—no one reads an inmail ever. Even LinkedIn flags them as spam and puts them in the other inbox, like they do it on their own product. That's saying something.

Yeah, I think they're slowly killing them off, but also they're making money on the ads platform now hand in fist. They're forcing people in that direction. So you have to go that way.

Sure. Fair enough. I can't remember the last time I looked at an inmail in any way, shape, or form.

Here's something I keep seeing with sales teams I work with: generic sequences don't work anymore. We've all gotten so good at tuning out the noise that even your own buyers are ignoring you. The problem isn't your reps. It's that your sequences are static and your signals are somewhere else entirely. That's why our clients use Nooks. And the thing that stuck with me is that their sequences actually stay fresh because the signals update them automatically. Right buyer, right moment with no manual babysitting. If your outbound feels like it's shouting into a void, go check them out at nooks.ai, that's ai backslash bridge the gap.

But at the end of the day, there has to be some core KPIs to measure success, right? You have to be able to look at it. Someone hires you just like they hire us, right? We're an agency as well. So Anthony, in 30 days, what does good look like?

Yeah, in 30 days, it all depends what kind of funnel we're building. If it's more of a demand generation funnel, you want to make sure you're reaching the right companies and the right job titles at those companies. Are we reaching the right audience that we want to be reaching? Real movement in the sales pipeline usually could take longer than 30 days. In many cases, it does take longer than 30 days. You need to build that demand, and that just comes from repeated impressions over time.

The way that we're going to track that is a few different ways. One is your basic conversion tracking. Do they go to the website? Did they submit a form? Great, or not. And then secondly, there are some new attribution tools out now. LinkedIn has their tool. It's just a one point of view system. So you connect your HubSpot or Salesforce right to LinkedIn ads, and it will tell you big picture how much impact it has. It'll pull in the Salesforce and HubSpot pipelines and tell you how many opportunities, how many leads were impacted, how many closed ones were impacted from LinkedIn.

That said, LinkedIn will only see its impact. So it's a one point of view system. It's only going to see its impact, so it's going to look like it's taking credit for everything. So that's the very least good visibility to have. It's a free tool. It's easy to set up.

The next level above that is using one of these more advanced multi-touch systems that you can plug in LinkedIn, Google, your website, email, all that, and it will build the customer journey for you to tell you the percentage of attribution for all these different tools. It'll just start to map the customer journey so you can analyze a hundred deals and see, okay, this is the common thread that they're all running through. Those tools—there are some nice new ones, but Fibler, Dream Data, Factors—those are like the most common popular ones these days.

We know Factors as well.

Okay, cool. Yeah, so tools like that that put the journey together are great. Part of this started with LinkedIn releasing some new APIs that give us visibility into this data. So now we can start to build those journeys. This is just within the last year that those APIs have come out.

Yeah, but they're a pain in the ass to get to because I've tried to connect with some of them, and like they're super hidden. They're super wonky. They don't expose much. They'll expose engagement, that kind of stuff, but it's like a lot of LinkedIn's tech stack seems like it's—

Their walled garden. They don't want their information out of their platform.

True. Yeah, 100% true. That's the valuable part is their data. And the new one specifically is called the Company Intelligence API, and it's not public. So it is a private API at the moment. At some point they're going to make it more accessible. You can apply or you can get access at some point, but right now there are like seven companies, and those seven tools can access it. Other than that, you can't access that API.

So from a dollar perspective, if someone wants to get started with LinkedIn, what should one expect to spend? I know that's a vague question, but where do you start?

Yeah, if you just want to get started and test it out, I recommend the five-thousand-dollar-a-month range is where you're going to really start getting consistent results. At the end of the day, you can start as little as ten bucks a day on a single campaign.

Campaign. That's the minimum you can set up in the platform. So ten bucks a day is the minimum, but we usually see you'll really start to see consistent results around the five K per month ad spend level. You're getting enough traffic, enough leads that's consistent, you're seeing some results there. But from there, you can kind of scale up as much or as little as you want. But usually that five K per month range.

Yeah, very interesting. I guess that would scale on the amount of ARR you're generating. Like if you're doing five K a month from a spend perspective, I'm assuming you're at the ten million ARR plus. Like what's that range for people that are listening?

Yeah, that's a good question. I haven't sat down to map out how much you should spend based on what your revenue is. I'd say that's very company dependent and kind of sales funnel dependent too. About how direct or how much demand gen you need to be doing.

Cool, cool, cool, cool. Um, so maximizing that ROI. So we were just talking about what that looks like. And you work with clients that spend millions annually on some of this stuff. How do you ensure that they get the best return on investment? I heard a little bit about like only using the default on LinkedIn, but what other tips and tactics can you provide people on? Like, if you wake up Monday morning and you listen to this episode, what would you go do?

Yeah, probably the two biggest levers that LinkedIn has is the company list targeting option. I see people having success with. At the end of the day, if you're a B2B company, you probably know or have a good idea of some of the accounts you want to be reaching. If not, go use a tool.

Well, hopefully.

Well, not all of them do, but you know, if you're a bigger company, you probably have a good idea of some list you built. Otherwise, go use a tool to build some of those. So in LinkedIn, you can upload that company list and then you can tell LinkedIn, "Hey, go find me the people with these job titles at these companies." That's one of the best approaches that you can't do anywhere else. So that's where LinkedIn is good. Go find me these people that work at these companies. And then the other one is to be syncing your open opportunities list to LinkedIn to increase your penetration, increase your coverage into these open opportunities. So, deals in your pipeline. Once a deal gets to your pipeline, then we want to make sure we're adding in the finance leader, the IT leader, whoever else can impact them. So very often we'll have an open ops campaign. It's great if you can sync that from HubSpot or Salesforce and make that a live thing. So as a deal enters or leaves your pipeline, that's automatically updating. And then you could say, "Hey, go find me these personas at these companies in my pipeline so that I make sure I'm making impact and getting those deals across the line." So those are the biggest things that LinkedIn can do that you can't get anywhere else that I find people have success with.

I'm curious about one other thing. So we were talking about spending millions of dollars. Let's flip it on its head. Like, when should you start this? Like, how big should you be when you start doing some of this stuff? Or the other way, how small should you be when we start thinking about this?

Yeah, that's a good question too. Usually you want to have a pretty good idea of who your ICP is and what your offer is and what your sales process is going to look like. Otherwise, any ad you run, you're just going to be dumping money down the sink.

Sure.

So that's when you can start leveraging ads. Know who you want to reach, know what you're promoting, and know what you're offering. And then the best ways to get started—this has actually changed in the last couple years—is LinkedIn now lets you boost posts from people. So you don't have to run it from the company page. You can run these thought leader ads for people. So best way to get started.

Does that work?

That works much better than company page ads. Yes, especially for small companies and founder-led brands and stuff like that. Consulting companies are great to use these because it's about the people. So boosting posts from people, these thought leader ads, that's the way to go. And those you can make a much bigger impact with even with less of a budget because they get much higher engagement rates. They get you cheaper costs. So you can do more with less.

How does everything that's happening with AI and machine learning and all the things that are upending sales on its head, how does that play into your world of LinkedIn ads? Like what's going to change?

And I'm just learning machine learning the last two months. So I chat with AI. Do I know machine learning? I think so. I mean, yeah, it's interesting times for sure.

I think AI is going to change a lot of things. I think it is changing a lot of things. So how is it changing? Well, there's some recent data out there. Some reports. There's a couple different trends I'll tell you about. One is, and everyone knows this, people are using chat instead of search these days. So they're going to their chatbot and asking it questions.

I find that fascinating to be honest. I would never think to go to Claude to do a basic search.

Yeah, I don't do basic. Yeah, I still... But maybe we're old school. Maybe we're the old school people now.

Maybe. I'm just thinking about the environment as my wife likes to say. Like, do I need that compute power to tell me how to drive down the street?

Yeah, true. I don't know.

Yeah, you know, it's funny though. Like if I'm going to go search something, I'll use my ChatGPT subscription. I'll just hit that. It's easier than I find and try to look it up on Google. I just speak to it and be like, "Find this," and it's like done.

I'm going to disagree, and then I don't want the eighty-seven chats on the side with the stupid questions.

Yeah. So I think it's personal.

Think of a witty comeback. Come on. I see it on the tip of your tongue.

You're just old. That's all you say. I don't know.

You're older than me.

Haven't you progressively done machine learning?

I mean, I hear these days kids—you know, the kids aren't even using Google. They're using like Instagram search or TikTok search anytime they want anything.

Yeah, a random son wants to get me Instagram. He DMs them on Instagram.

He absolutely does not. But if my kid wants to search something, he's one hundred percent like on TikTok or something. I will constantly when he asks me a question be like, "Dude, you have Google. Like go look that up. Let me Google that for you."

Um, but yes, a lot more of the journey is happening in these tools. We can't see that journey. So people, you're seeing less traffic coming to your website, but when they do get there, they're more—they have higher intent by the time they do get there. So that's one trend. And then it comes down to LLM rankings, getting yourself cited there. LinkedIn is now like competitive with Reddit with the most cited domain. It's like one and two, and it depends on which research you read right now. But it's because LinkedIn has good identity that ties to a profile. It's very authoritative. A lot of good content published there. So a lot of these LLMs are citing LinkedIn very heavily. And the new thing is articles are popping up a lot. So take your blogs, go put them on LinkedIn articles, and you'll get more LLM traffic that way. But yes, it is about now the fight for LLMs and getting ranking there. And then by the time people do make it to your website, they have a lot more information, a lot higher intent at that point. So it's more of like a PR play or more of a social play before they get there. So we're seeing that trend happen. And then we're also seeing people are moving budget from Google, or from search to social, because that is the demand creator. Search is the last touch where someone's doing a search, but what got them to do that search? Something they saw on social or heard from a friend or someone somewhere like that. But social is the demand creator that gets them to go do that search. So if you just change—if you get in front of them on social and then you get them to Google your brand instead of the industry, you're going to save a lot of money in your search ads and you're going to get a lot more direct high intent traffic. So Google's budget share was down, like, well, percent share of budget. I can't speak to overall budget, but percent share of budget for B2B.

SAS companies saw 10 to 15% movement from Google to LinkedIn last quarter.

So you're going to now build a brand new LinkedIn ad platform for B2B marketers. What's the first feature you would add into that and why is it such a challenge?

The first feature is probably just, well, so many. The first feature is a very simple one that LinkedIn should do today. We talked about thought leader ads. They're great, but you can't retarget people who went to your profile natively. That's the simplest step in the process that LinkedIn needs to enable. I hear it's coming but it's not out yet. So if I was to build an ads platform, it would enable that. If somebody goes to visit your profile, you can retarget them.

And how does that play out with these next generation marketers? Because we just talked about Gen Z, all these kids coming out. It's going to be totally different. What would you advise for these next-gen marketing people? My son's about to go to college. He's going to be a marketer. He also wants to go into marketing, so I'm just curious what would you recommend for them to stay ahead of these learning curves, maybe not just with LinkedIn but in general?

That's a good question. I feel like the world is about to change a lot in the next few years. I'd say you got to learn the AI tools. You have to play with them. You got to get used to them. Coming from a tech background, it's been fun to jump back into generating code, being able to read that code, deploy it, do something with it. But a lot of people, I ask, have you started using Claude yet? And they're like, no, I just don't know what to do with it. Come on. You just need to get used to these tools. You need to get into the more advanced stuff because it's all going to go in that direction. It's like web technologies a few years ago. You got to know how to build a WordPress site. You got to know how to do that basic stuff because those are the skills you're going to need in the future. I've been building our new website off of Claude and just trying to go through all the process and even going through it with Claude and all those sticks to the different tools that you have. There's still a lot of thought and strategic process you got to put into it. When you're chain of thought prompting and putting the information in from a marketing perspective, you still have visualization pieces, you still have the user journey. The system will never really truly understand how you want things to journey to live where it needs to live.

I do think we're going to see leaner teams. People will be kind of expected to do more in every role because you have the tools that can help you do that. So I think we'll definitely see that trend.

Yeah. I think no matter where you are, what you're doing, if you're not embracing AI and figuring out how it can help you and accelerate and also how it's going to impact what you're doing, you are way behind. If anyone thinks that LinkedIn isn't going to launch some type of AI that's going to affect LinkedIn ads, the whole algorithm is AI. Let's be real. Don't try to figure it out because the second you think you have it figured out, you don't.

All right, let's move into some rapid fire. Ten words or less is the general rule here. What is one LinkedIn ads myth that you wish would disappear?

That they're expensive. You got to calculate cost per quality.

Cool. What's the best piece of advice you received about advertising?

Best piece of advice about advertising is just, whatever is in that ad, that meaning needs to hit you instantly. Emotional connection. Yes.

What's your favorite feature of LinkedIn ads that most people overlook?

The list syncing, the CRM list syncing capability. Most people don't have that set up and it's the most impactful thing you can do.

One piece of advice for new marketers starting at LinkedIn ads today.

Switch off the defaults. Start with thought leader ads. Everything does not have to be lead gen.

Anthony, if you weren't doing LinkedIn ads, what would you be doing?

I don't know. I'd probably be back in the software development world, I imagine. With Claude, maybe very soon I will be more in that area. But where else I'd go?

Dream vacation destination.

Australia. Australia during the winter because it's summertime there.

Yep. Love it.

Awesome. Anthony, thank you so much for joining the show, sir.

Thanks for having me on, guys.