168. Unlocking LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads: Boost Your Brand Visibility with Anthony Blatner
Imagine posting an ad that doesn’t scream “I’m an ad!”
With LinkedIn’s new ‘Thought Leader Ads’ for the first time you can turn any of your posts from your profile into an ad that will show up in the regular feed
and it’ll end up looking pretty much like a normal post.
These ads will let you (or anyone on your team) showcase posts from your personal profile in front of the right audience that’s perfect for you.
And by amplifying the voices of your team members (or your own):
- you can set your business apart from all the rest,
- you can provide your unique perspective
- and you can establish your team as leaders in your field.
If that peaks your curiosity, then listen up because LinkedIn Ads superstar, Anthony Blatner came on to break down exactly who Thought Leader Ads are for – and how you can start running successful ad campaigns that showcase you and your team & make sure your message is getting to the right people that you want to reach.
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Transcript
Anthony Blatner:
The advantage of video is that’s additional face time that you’re getting with both prospects and maybe potential future customers. It can be hard to get face time with people and I just think that’s like gold in the sales process because they’re probably seeing lots of posts from lots of other people and when you get more face time with people, they really get to know you, they feel like they trust you more. So there’s just a lot of like relationship building, that, a lot of benefits that come with that. But if they get to see you, they get to hear what you say, see you speak to the camera, see your personality a little bit they really get to get to know you better as a person. I think there’s a lot of a lot of advantages of that.
Brad Powell:
Welcome to the Standout Business Show, where it’s all about making a bigger difference by doing business differently. I’m Brad Powell, your Standout Business Coach, and today we’re talking about how to boost your personal brand with LinkedIn Thought Leader ads. So imagine posting an ad that doesn’t scream I’m an ad. Imagine posting an ad that doesn’t scream I’m an ad.
Brad Powell:
With LinkedIn’s new Thought Leader ads, for the first time, you can turn any of your posts from your profile into an ad that will show up in your regular feed and it’ll end up looking pretty much like a normal post.
Brad Powell:
These ads will let you or anyone on your team showcase posts from your personal profile in front of the right audience. That’s perfect for you, and by amplifying the voices of your team members, or your own voice, you can set your business apart from all the rest. You can provide your unique perspective and you can establish your team apart from all the rest. You can provide your unique perspective and you can establish your team as leaders in your field. So if this is piquing your curiosity, then stay tuned, because today I’m joined by LinkedIn ads superstar, anthony Blattner, who’s coming on to break down exactly who thought leader ads are for and how you can start running successful ad campaigns that showcase you and your team and make sure your message is getting to the right people that you want to reach. And with that let’s start the show. All right, anthony, welcome to the show.
Anthony Blatner:
Hey, brad, glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Brad Powell:
So, as we open up this conversation, I think there’s kind of a big question mark in most people’s minds If they’ve even heard of LinkedIn thought leader ads. This is a relatively new ad type relatively new ad type and it’s really different and distinctive from the ordinary way that you are restricted to posting turning ads only from a business page and they ended up being posted and looking like sponsored by this company and so it’s much more businessy, corporate and looking like an ad kind of thing, and this is a different approach that actually is much simpler and kind of opens the door for a number of people who are thinking well, I want to grow my brand. I want to especially grow my personal brand and get my face out there, and I’ve been doing all this organic stuff and that has a limited amount of reach and this is a way to expand that exponentially if you get really good at it. So talk a little bit about just some defining what thought leader ads are for and what they’re like.
Anthony Blatner:
Yeah, so they sound very official when you say thought leader ads and everyone’s like, oh, I have to be, I have to be a thought leader. I got to like make sure I’m posting like really good stuff, um and and simply, thought leader ads are allowing you to boost posts from people. Previously you had to run ads from a company page and it would always have like the company name, the logo and it’s very clearly an ad when you saw that in your feed. Versus now you can boost posts from people and this is really taking organic posts that people are posting on LinkedIn and then being able to boost those and almost run it like a normal ad. You get to pick and choose your audience and then continue to run that post, that boosted post.
Anthony Blatner:
So thought leader ads are really just a boosted post from a person, but there’s so many advantages that come with that that it’s a more direct way of advertising where you’re just directly boosting what someone’s posting on LinkedIn to a specific audience. It lets you get a lot more shelf life out of your posts, because organic is great and why people come to LinkedIn to scroll the newsfeed is to learn from other people and hear from them, but it can be a lot of work to keep up the posting regularly. So thought leader ads you can be boosting those posts, you can pick and choose who that post is going to be shown to, and then allows you to extend the shelf life of your posts a lot longer than like just just posting organically.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, and so my understanding is that the way this works is that you can go through your feed and you can pick any of the posts that you’ve already done sometime in the past and turn that into one of these thought leader type of ads. So when someone’s thinking about doing this, what are the criteria that they should be thinking about in terms of what kind of posts should they be picking?
Anthony Blatner:
Yep, that’s a good question. So first a couple, a couple items on the, on the items you can shoot or the posts you can choose. So kind of just simple technical things is you can boost single image posts. So if you just have a single image in your post, you can boost that. You cannot boost multiple images. So if you sometimes you’ll see people upload like three or four images to a post, it has to be a single image or it can be text only. So if you don’t have any creative attached to it, they can boost that as text only. And then you can also do video posts. So those formats you can’t boost reposts. So a post that someone has posted on their feed, those are the ones you can boost. So that’s kind of just technical side of things. And then, as far as, like, the content itself, you know you can look at what posts of mine are already doing well, which ones are already getting a lot of reactions and comments. Those can make for good candidates of like okay, this one’s already done well organically. That’s a good initial test. That’s a sign that this will probably do well.
Anthony Blatner:
Boosted is also boosted, and then it allows you to like kind of keep building on that. So if you have a post that gets a lot of engagement or gets a lot of comments, then you can keep building on that by boosting it and then, you know, get even more engagement on it. So a lot of you to keep boosting it that way and then it’s like you know what, what content is going to serve your business and your sales process the best. So I have I have a diagram that I posted on LinkedIn before and it’s it’s called the thought leader ad funnel and it’s kind of a whole new. You know, before, when it was all company posts, you know you would run kind of standard company ads, but now with thought leader ads, you can essentially create your own funnel using all boosted posts. So this has been a kind of effective new format and kind of opens up a new funnel strategy for people who are, you know, for people based businesses do especially well with this.
Anthony Blatner:
You know a lot of service businesses or people oriented businesses where you’re really you know your product might be your people. A lot of consulting firms or people-oriented businesses where your product might be your people. A lot of consulting firms, coaches and stuff like that are in this bucket so you can build a whole thought leader ad funnel now and the couple elements that I like to choose there. This can vary a lot business to business, depending on what you’re selling and who you’re selling to, but I like to lead with a really strong case study post showcasing the results that you help somebody achieve, maybe explaining the process you went through in a post there. So leading with that is a very strong leading post because other people who want that same result are going to be interested in what you are talking about and then that gets people to engage and then you can start to build a retargeting audience of people who are clicking on that post, maybe watching that video if it’s a video, and then from there you can retarget them with additional content.
Anthony Blatner:
So now, once somebody is in your funnel by engaging with that initial case study post, then you can use lots of other different types of content and then you start to think about the big picture of what are all the things that someone needs to know or helps to know when they’re considering our service.
Anthony Blatner:
It might be other case studies, it might be seeing some of your podcast clips, it might be reading some of your other thought leader posts which could be like maybe you talking about certain things in your industry, sharing your thoughts, really positioning yourself as a thought leader that’s the whole kind of the middle of the funnel there to get somebody to get to know more about you, your thoughts and your views.
Anthony Blatner:
And then, once someone’s engaged with that second layer, then you can retarget them again and maybe that’s where you put your offer post. Maybe your offer is hey, get a free consultation, get a free assessment, or click here to schedule a call with me. And those posts are great to boost because whenever you do use a link in organic posts, any algorithm, all the social platforms limit the reach of those posts when they have a link in it, because you’re taking people off the platform. So they want people to stay on platform. So whenever you include a link in the post organically, that’s going to get less reach. So those are also good candidates to be boosting because by itself it’s not going to get a lot of reach. So that’s a good kind of boost and make sure that your offer is getting out there to your audience.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, okay, so let me make sure I get this right. So in the beginning, I can choose a post like a really good case study, or maybe I can do two posts that are two different case studies, and that’s just helping people from an awareness point of view, going, oh, this is interesting, and then retarget those folks who engage with that particular ad and then do some more actual thought leadership where I’m going hey, this is my point of view and this is what I think about the industry and this is what I think you need to know in order to get ready to come and work with us. And I’ll do that with that group. And then that group that’s been interacting with that content I’ll retarget them again with an ad that basically makes an offer or sends them to a lead magnet or something else, so that they’re now coming into my closer domain. Am I getting that right?
Anthony Blatner:
Exactly.
Brad Powell:
Yes, you got it down All right. Well, okay. So a couple of questions in terms of a little bit of the wiring of the inside of the ad platform. I know that, as I’ve fooled around with it a little bit myself. One of the things that LinkedIn recommends when you’re posting an ad like this is they’ll say choose five and as a group. And this is their recommendation, and the idea being that you’ll have five different things, and so the audience that may be seeing things on repeat, this new audience that you’re reaching, won’t see the same thing again and again and again, because it’ll rotate through these five choices. What do you think about that recommendation?
Anthony Blatner:
Yes, so it’s definitely good to split test different pieces of yes. So it’s definitely good to split test different pieces of content. So that original funnel I mentioned kind of was just like a simplistic like choose one here, choose one here, choose one there. But you could split test in each of those phases. So maybe you’re split testing different case studies for the top of funnel offer or for the top of funnel case study post and then inside your middle funnel maybe you’re split testing different pieces of content there and seeing how those are going to perform and then same with your bottom of funnel. You’re going to split test different, different offers you might be making. Maybe it’s like a free consultation versus a free assessment versus a free something else to get started. So definitely highly recommend testing.
Anthony Blatner:
That said, don’t don’t force yourself to get up to those five posts if you don’t have other good ones to add in there.
Anthony Blatner:
Don’t just boost a post for the sake of boosting and then do monitor your ads as they’re running, your boosted posts as they’re running, because you don’t want the scenario where often the algorithm is going to optimize towards whichever posts are getting the most engagement because they want to be serving good content that the audience is engaging with. But it’s also easy to have a post maybe that’s less spot on to your services and maybe that one just ends up getting more engagement. But it’s not the best case study or it’s not the best lead in for your funnel. So you want to be careful that the algorithm isn’t picking and choosing a post that you don’t really intend to use. You’re just trying to hit that five posts. So monitor your metrics as the campaign runs and make sure you’re getting equal distribution there and then monitoring your down funnel metrics. So having conversion tracking set up so that you can see are people making it to your website, are they scheduling a call? And then comparing those different ads so you can see which ads really did lead to those actions.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, okay, yeah, okay. Well, another thing that I’m really interested in, because my work is all about video and helping people do video marketing, particularly with short form things that actually’ve co-created together, and so it’s really easy for them to immediately start looking at some of the best performing video ads or videos that they’ve posted and turn them into this kind of ad. And so my question is are you seeing any radical difference between what a video ad will do over a text ad or a picture type of ad?
Anthony Blatner:
So, as far as format goes, I think it really depends on the content. There’s a lot of variables there. I think it depends on the content, it depends on the person posting, it depends on the audience. You know how likely are they to watch video. How much is your content you’re talking about lend itself to image versus video? So I think both have a place and, if anything, I think they’re both good to work into your funnel. There you have some video posts, you have some image posts, but I will definitely say the advantage of video is especially like you’ll see a lot of people posting like selfie videos or them talking to the camera.
Anthony Blatner:
The way I see that is like that’s additional FaceTime that you’re getting with both prospects and maybe potential future customers.
Anthony Blatner:
And really it can be hard to get FaceTime with people and I just think that’s like gold in the sales process. They get to know you because you know they’re probably seeing lots of posts from lots of other people, and when you get more FaceTime with people, they really get to know you. They feel like they trust you more. So there’s just a lot of like relationship building, that, a lot of benefits that come with that. So I am a big fan of using video and especially like selfie video, because, yeah, if you are just posting images and people are just seeing your little profile picture, then you’re just that’s, that’s all they get to experience of you. But if they get to see you, they get to hear what you say, you know, see, see you speak to the camera, see your personality a little bit. They really get to get to know you better as a person and I think that’s I think there’s a lot, of, a lot of advantages of that in our such a in our digital world today.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, I I big believer in that. I think, especially for B2B service based businesses, there’s nothing like people actually getting some sense of who you are as a human and like what’s your personality and what are the little quirks that you have and are you making a video, you know, with your son or daughter or something like all these things. Just the more personalized you can be, especially in this world of ai produced text content, the better that’s.
Anthony Blatner:
The other thing is that, yeah, like so much of like like images these days and like your content. You’re writing like sometimes you’re like reading posts and you’re like I think this is AI generated, for whatever reason like that is a little off-putting, almost where you’re like this person didn’t actually write this, this is AI generated, for whatever reason. I think right now, people just generally find that a little off-putting. So, you know, when you read just text content or you see images, sometimes you’re like I think that’s an AI generated image. But you know, when they see you on video and they hear you, while some people are starting to create some AI videos that are getting pretty good, it is much harder to fake and to do an AI video or you can very clearly tell when it is somebody actually speaking to the camera. So I think there’s a lot of advantage of that, you know, especially in this AI digital world.
Brad Powell:
Right, All right. Well, now let’s talk a little bit about budget and how much people can be thinking about spending. So when someone is wanting to dabble, I’m going to stick my toe in the water and try this out and I want to set up. It’d be easy to set up a series like put out one or two, maybe you’re split testing a couple of case studies in the beginning and then from there do follow-ups, retargeting, with a series like we described. What would be a good thing to start with budget-wise, in terms of getting enough critical mass of exposure so that you’re really getting a good test out of the experiment.
Anthony Blatner:
Yeah. So as far as dabbling, you can get started with as little as 10 bucks a day. That’s LinkedIn’s minimum that you can set a campaign to. So I usually recommend to start by building your funnel backwards. So start by building your retargeting audiences. Put the LinkedIn insight tag on your website and start to. You know if you’re doing any kind of marketing or any business out there, people are probably already visiting you on LinkedIn. They’re probably already visiting your website. So take and leverage those audiences you do already have and then make sure you’re keeping your boosted posts in front of those people.
Anthony Blatner:
Start with retargeting. That’s the best place to start. Again, people are probably already researching you, so those are the warmest ones to stay in front of. You can retarget people that visit your LinkedIn company page. You can retarget people that visit your website. Weirdly, you can’t retarget your own personal profile yet. I’m hoping that feature is coming soon. But what you can do is you can export your connections from LinkedIn and then upload those to the ads platform so that you can make sure all your connections are getting retargeted as well. And then, of course, you can overlay LinkedIn’s built-in targeting with all these, so you can say hey, anyone who’s visiting my company page and website who matches you know VP, and up seniority and works in marketing at these midsize companies. You know, picking, choosing those company sizes, um, it lets you get very targeted with it. So you know, while you might have a lot of different people visiting your website, you might have people looking for jobs, you might have people doing research and kind of just kicking the tires. You want to say, hey, I just want people who match my ICP fit, who are already visiting my website and company page. Those are the people I want to make sure I’m retargeting. And then that’s where you can start your retargeting campaign and then start boosting your post to those people. 10 bucks a day is like the simplest you can start with and then from there you can start adding in your additional layers of your campaigns, so that 10 bucks a day for retargeting probably your best investment to make.
Anthony Blatner:
And then from there maybe your next step is your cold campaigns. So while we talked about retargeting there, maybe the other step is just putting your ICP targeting not necessarily retargeting, but go target cold people who haven’t heard about you before. Let the campaigns boost your posts, maybe like a case study or something like that, to this audience. That’s a great way to get yourself introduced to that audience. They’re going to read your post, they’re going to click on it, they’re going to go visit your website. Maybe they follow you, maybe they send you a connection request. So that kind of just starts the introduction and then once they do engage with your post or they go to your website, then boom, they’re entered into the retargeting campaign and then you know, they get to see your, your additional post from there. So really you could start start both of those 10 bucks a day each, and then that can be your, your starting budget and then from there, as you’re seeing results, you can crank it up or crank it down.
Anthony Blatner:
However you want to go from there.
Anthony Blatner:
Um, but that’s the minimum um, I’d say to kind of like hit critical mass really just depends on the size of the audience and how many results you’re looking to drive, because part of the benefit of being able to boost posts and retarget people is being able to deliver lots of content to them. If you have a very big retargeting audience and you’re only spending 10 bucks a day to them, maybe they’re only seeing one post from you a week or a month, which is probably not enough to move the needle and get them over the line. So if your audience is very big, you probably have to spend a little bit more to make sure you’re reaching all those people, or you need to tighten your targeting down to make sure that you’re reaching that warm set even more often. So usually I see people hitting more results as you get closer to the $50 a day level. But really you can start as low as like 10 to 20 bucks a day on that retargeting and cold campaign and then kind of just crank it up there as you’re comfortable.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, okay. Well, one question about retargeting. So it seems like anyone who’s got a fairly significant following already on LinkedIn and you can take those connections and upload them and make them into an audience, what’s the minimum number of audience size that actually functions Like? If I only have 600 people, that probably isn’t big enough.
Anthony Blatner:
Yeah, good question. Minimum audience size on LinkedIn to run a campaign is 300 people and that’s 300 matched people. So if you’re getting a list from anywhere else and you upload it to LinkedIn, just make sure that that list is going to be big enough. You need 300 matched people, so that’s the minimum. Typically you want to be a little bit bigger than that, typically because when you have just 300 people you worry about, are they all matching? If a couple of people don’t match, then maybe I’m too small and I can’t run my campaign. And then also you think about how often people are checking LinkedIn. So usually you want to have a little bit bigger of an audience so that there’s enough people over there to really make sure that you’re reaching them regularly. But then it just depends on how active your audience is. So, yeah, 300 is the minimum.
Brad Powell:
All right, cool, awesome. Well, that seems like a great place to start. Now I have one detailed question that has to do with video type of advertising, and now I’ve noticed on the platform, when you’re doing a thought leader ad no-transcript, uh behavior that’s going to happen with the ad. You can either go for awareness or you can go for engagement, and the recommendation is do engagement. That’s what I’ve heard and what I’ve noticed is that when you do that and you have a video ad, for example, anything that someone does in response to that post whether they’re clicking see more on the text description, or they’re liking it or whatever, and or, you know, hitting play and watching the video all of that counts in terms of this is what you’re getting charged for, and so you can run up your ad costs simply because people want to click see more and read your text and they may not actually watch the video.
Brad Powell:
For example, as opposed to going back to the regular type of ad, like if you do a regular ad from your business page, there you can choose video as an ad type and go for video views as the thing that you want to have happen, and in a little bit of experimenting that I’ve run, I found that I’m spending a lot less money on a video view than I am on an engagement. So compare those two. So what are your thoughts on that? As sort of the two examples Should, if, for instance, like me and what I’m going to be saying to my clients, yeah, you should be doing something with your videos, but maybe not put them up as thought leader ads and doing them as the regular kind of thing. So you’re getting video views and that’ll be a better better for your budget costs.
Anthony Blatner:
Yes, that is a good question. So it’s something to split test. You do have to do a little bit more manual calculations because of the things that you just mentioned is you’re only limited to either engagement objective or the awareness objective, so got to do a little more manual calculation. And then there’s like different factors involved. If your ad is getting a very high engagement rate, then you might be better served with an awareness objective where you’re paying per the impressions, because if you’re getting a really high engagement rate and you’re paying per engagement, then maybe you’re better buying as impressions and then you’ll get cheaper cost per engagement that way. So definitely something to split test.
Anthony Blatner:
I will call out like the benefit of using engagement objective is it does include then the follow button on that post. So I do think this is a big benefit of thought leader ads is when you boost it in the engagement campaign, you’ll have the follow button in the top right and that allows people to follow you and you to build your following using these boosted posts. So all the benefits that we already talked about and then also building your followers I think is a is a great little addition there and then you can start to see you know which which posts of mine are people following me the most on, and that’s a good little engage like lead in metric of oh, this one’s getting me the most followers. Is this also leading to website visits and form submits? But that’s a nice little initial metric to kind of track.
Anthony Blatner:
Is am I getting followers from this? That’s a sign people want to hear more from you, they’re interested to learn more from you. So as far as objective something to split test, usually start with engagement and then, if you are getting a very high engagement rate, then you can test awareness objective. And it also depends on the size of your audience too. The other advantage of the awareness objective is it can help optimize towards a reach. So if you do have a very large audience and you want to make sure that your post is getting pushed out to as many people as possible, then you might opt for that awareness objective.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, cool, all right, that’s interesting. Well, we’re getting pretty darn close to the end of our time today. This is super fascinating. So, as people are thinking about, well, okay, I’m going to give this a try, and there’s something we haven’t quite touched on why should they go ahead and jump in and say, okay, just check it out, see what happens. It might be a good thing for you.
Anthony Blatner:
It’s like hard to find a reason not to. These ads get so much higher engagement rates that you often can get cheaper ad costs on the platform. It’s also a much more direct form of advertising. You just put the people directly out there with the prospects that are going to be engaging with your content. So set up a split test, why not? It does depend on the business a little bit.
Anthony Blatner:
If your business has thought leaders or if you’re like if you are a solopreneur or a founder led business, those are some of the best ones to be doing this with. But even big enterprise companies you probably have a lot of SMEs at your company that would be great to boost their posts, get their voices out there more, Especially for big companies. There’s other people that are watching your company and maybe you boost an engineering person’s post to engineers, Maybe you boost marketing posts to marketers and you can really line up your content that way. So number one, just purely performance Engagement rates and costs are much higher. It’s a much more direct form of advertising and there’s just so many benefits that come with it. So why Just go set up a split test and see the results for yourself?
Brad Powell:
All right, that’s great advice. Okay, well, this has been terrific. If people want to reach out to you and learn more about your work and your agency, what would be the best way for them to do that?
Anthony Blatner:
Well, I’m on LinkedIn. I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, so you can find me there, um, and then, yeah, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, send me a connection request, feel free to DM me. And then we also have lots of videos on YouTube with various like tips and tricks and stuff like that for LinkedIn ads, so feel free to follow those too. And also we have a we have a podcast, linkedin ads radio, where we have a lot of good episodes, more tips.
Brad Powell:
Okay, cool. Well, I’ll make sure it links to all your stuff. Your LinkedIn page, your YouTube channel and your podcast are in the show notes. And, anthony, thanks so much for coming on today. This has been great.
Anthony Blatner:
Awesome, it was fun. Brad, thanks for having me.
