Sam Birkett 0:04
Hello everyone, welcome once again to Marketing Meanders with Sally and Sam, very exciting that here we are in 2023, and it's no doubt everyone's cracking on with all of their plans and things. If you listen to our episode before Christmas, about how to prepare for Christmas, looking at the new year, then hopefully you're well into the beginnings of all those exciting plans and see where you need to get to and yeah, it's well, it's an exciting time to try new things as well, isn't it really, and I think looking into different channels, perhaps that you've maybe not explored this year, I mean, obviously, depending on your, your planning cycle and one of those things mean, we do talk about this to a certain extent but a channel we quite often come to is LinkedIn and that is I suppose because I mean, well, we both use it a reasonable amount, I think especially I use it a lot with my clients and it's one of those ever-changing things, channels, and just seems to keep growing and doing really well. So perhaps there's people out there who are thinking, Oh, well, what can I do with this? And I want to find out more. So we decided today to devise a bit of a... not a quiz, but an interview from Sally to me. So... because I sort of use it LinkedIn to certain extent, and Sally thought she would ask me some questions, blind questions to see what I think about it.

Sally Green 1:20
Part of it is that I use LinkedIn much more passively than Sam, Sam does a lot of lead generation campaigns and all of that kind of thing and I use it much more... I post on it, and I read from it. But I don't necessarily do lead campaigns actively myself. Because the way my business works, I often recruit other people to do the nitty gritty bits. So I've got quite a lot of gaps in my knowledge. So I'm just going to start off with a question that I think it might be a myth, but it might not be... I might be wrong. I believe that LinkedIn advertising is expensive and tricky. Is that true Sam?

Sam Birkett 1:54
Right, well, that's a good one to start with actually, that's something that I think a lot of people say to begin with, if I talk to them about using LinkedIn, they go, ooh that's quite expensive, isn't it? And so I say, Well, what it's like with our podcasts in the past, we said it depends and it really does depend on multiple things. But I think it to begin with, it's effectively, you know, if you do your whole looking at the budget you have to spend and the audience you want to get to and then you know, typically, we're B2B standpoint, you'd be using LinkedIn. So the kinds of things you're selling, the services or products you're selling, are clearly going to be probably quite big-ticket items, and you should hopefully, have your sort of ROI worked out and understand, well, we're trying to sell this, I don't know, automatic handbag making machine which is actually worth £150,000 and therefore, you know, we've got X amount of budget to spend on getting X number of decision-makers in handbag manufacturers across the Northeast of England to possibly look at this. So I think relatively, you'd obviously need to work out your ROI and say, Well, what can we actually afford to spend on here. But there are lots of different options within LinkedIn and there are also lots of different ways of running your budgets if you're doing a paid campaign on LinkedIn. So I would say first of all, it doesn't have to be expensive. It does depend very much on the type of campaign you're running, and more importantly, to whom you're running that, to who are you actually trying to target there because, like with any of these things, like with Facebook, etc, you know, you'll have that bidding process and you know, LinkedIn will ask you in the campaign manager, how much are you willing to spend on this? Interestingly, the defaults, people probably say it's very expensive, because, yes, it can be quite expensive. If you're trying to get a very particular job title, as we say, handbag manufacturers in the Northeast of England, and we're trying to get through to the Chief Commercial Officer or something, or Engineering Officer, whoever it might be, then yeah, it could cost you £15 per click to get that person to interact. So in relation, and that's the other question was in relation to what is expensive? In relation to, yes, perhaps a paperclip CPC campaign you'd be running or perhaps a Facebook campaign or campaign? A) will you find that person there so that the value of the actual interaction you're going to get? And B) is that actually, a lot compared to your whole campaign planning and budgeting? Anyway, so that's the one thing but as I said, as well before, it's about how you want to spend that campaign because I mean, the automated feature on LinkedIn when you set up a campaign is that it'll say, oh, we'll do maximum delivery for you and we suggest you spend this much on capturing this audience and of course, that's always going to be a bit of a slight intake of breath. You go Blimey, that's a lot, isn't it? Blimey, and it'll give you this nice little estimate and then it'll give you all this helpful stuff on the right-hand side saying, if you spend this much per day, which we suggest, then you'll get this many interactions, and that'd be really good, won't it, based on what you've told us you want to achieve? And so I think we see that initially, you think, wow, that's expensive. But the thing is, when you start running the campaign, it should be that the actual costs you get charged are going to be lower than those initial estimates, but secondly, you should also, because you've got several different ways of managing it, whether you do manual bidding, this maximum reach or I'm trying to remember the other one, there's like several different options you have for saying, what are your parameters, this budget, you know, a maximum daily budget, a maximum budget overall, and then you can control how it's spent. So it doesn't have to be expensive, but it depends what you define as expensive, if that makes sense as well, I suppose.

Sally Green 5:27
With the expenditure, if you have worked out the ROI that you want, if you do what LinkedIn suggests, it's going to get you maximum reach, hopefully, your ROI is going to be better. So if you are going to get maximum reach to reach the perfect handbag machine-making buying person, then if they buy one, that's the front, the machine cost £150,000 and you've sold two by spending quite a lot of money on LinkedIn, then that's brilliant payback.

Sam Birkett 5:52
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, even if you say if you say, well, we've got 15 grand, I mean, again, depending on what your mix is for how you're going to go about getting in front of these people. But if you say, Yeah, we got 15 grand marketing budget, and you say, boldly, I'm gonna spend that all on a set of LinkedIn campaigns to target these specific job titles, and then nurture them through to then get conversations with them and try and sell this machine and you say, yeah, we've done it and it cost us I don't know, perhaps well, the whole £15,000. You go, well, there we go. We've done it. So it's always that sort of in relation to what I suppose isn't that expensive thing. But but you also mentioned in your thing about tricky and as I've probably already mentioned, there are what you could terms of slightly tricky, and I guess this is the same for any sort of campaign management system, etc, isn't it? There's always bits that kind of, they can catch you out when they update things. That's the trickiest thing. I find LinkedIn are great at, you know, innovating and improving their products and interfaces and things, but they do it reasonably regularly and then you said that, every single time I've used it, I think I've always gone Oh, what's this? I've never gone, I've never felt prepared and gone. Oh, so this, I mean, you know, you can find loads of people who have been reviewing and videos and how-to guides and you know, LinkedIn itself course will say, do you want to know how to use this? Here you go. But every time I've done this, I stumbled across something. Usually, when I'm demonstrating something to someone and go ask them, what you do is you click here and you go, that's not there anymore. Where? What? Oh, it is here, but they've added this feature and that's good, isn't it? So

Sally Green 7:19
Or they've called it something different.

Sam Birkett 7:20
Exactly, exactly and so there is that sense of yes, there are features which update and so you go, Okay. I mean, again, until you, I suppose work out what you're doing, like working out back in the old days, like how to work your VCR or something, you know, till you've actually had a fiddle with it, you don't quite know what to use. But I would say I mean, we'll probably come to this. I think it's a very powerful campaign manager tool and I really like it, because I'm pretty familiar with it now. But I would say yes, if you've used it for the first time, it will probably appear to be a bit tricky and it has its own quirks and eccentricities. But you can, again, pretty good sort of help pages, which help you understand what it is you're doing along the way.

Sally Green 8:05
Right, because I've also read things that I didn't want to... what happens... can I... suppose I'm doing a lead management campaign and I've decided I want to get the buyers of my handbag-making machines. I already have in my CRM, some leads anyway, that are that thing. Can I exclude them from my LinkedIn campaign? So they don't think why are they telling me about this again?

Sam Birkett 8:28
Exactly. Why why are they here?

Sally Green 8:30
So can I remove their email? Because on their LinkedIn profile, they will have an email address? So can I run it through my CRM and say, Yes, remove these people?

Sam Birkett 8:38
Yes, I believe you can, I think there's a few different ways of doing this. So there is a way in which you can have like, actually LinkedIn where you do an audience builder, and you can then say, where you've either go in the simple way, specify the audience you want from the world of people who are on LinkedIn to my group, or you can upload specific information in this specific leads, you say you want to target, but there is yes, there's the exclude function, so either you do a thing where I think there's an automatic thing there or sorry a pre-populated ready-to-be-hit box, which says yes, exclude my connections, for example, or exclude people from specific companies on the campaign manager, I think I don't... to be honest, I don't quite know whether you do anymore when you'd upload specific individuals and say, right, don't send it into them, them or them. It will be more don't send it to this company, this company and this company. I'm pretty sure it's that way. Or if you built a specific audience of say people who've visited your website for example, something you've uploaded that to LinkedIn, probably you can integrate this from Sales Navigator as well actually, another part of LinkedIn and then you could say this is like my restriction list. So don't ya this is my existing target this to I don't want to go to again. Don't include them. So, yes, I think there's various different ways around it to do that.

Sally Green 9:57
Right, and can I also do it so that I can say one to target people who have visited that I know have visited this webpage?

Sam Birkett 10:04
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So yeah, dependent on the cookies and everything they've agreed to, the tracking. So yes, if you have this API integration you can get with LinkedIn and your website, so actually, that can help you with this whole retargeting, basically that whole thing of coming in and saying, yeah, so Joe Bloggs has visited the, 'would you like to buy' machine page, and yeah, we'll get him to be included, populated into this audience now, I'm pretty sure they had a scale here, so that, you know, you could, you'd have to get your technical, I mean, you can do it as a sort of more layperson, but you know, if you get sort of help with a technical integration, I mean, they're quite good these days, in terms of, you know, both ends from a website point of view in LinkedIn, everyone knows that people want to do this. So they help you integrate and create these API data links. But if you did that, then I think in LinkedIn in terms of targeting, you'd need to hit a certain volume. So if you're like a small business running this and you're expecting five people to visit that page in a month, then that's not... I mean, you can switch this on and then you can build a retargeting audience over a long period of time. I can't remember off the top of my head, how big the audience would need to be to actually even run because I think I've done in the past where it's tried to build a retargeting audience. So it's getting all the data, it'll say, when if the data link is working, and when the last ping across of information came, the data arrived, and then say, how many are estimated in that audience. So you can, you know, start with just very small audiences that grow up and build up. But I am reasonably sure that you need a sort of a minimum number, and I can't remember what that number is to actually then say right, and then going to target them in a paid campaign.

Sally Green 11:52
That's interesting.

Sam Birkett 11:53
But you know, what, I think there's probably either Sales Navigator itself, which is the bit you know, where you go in and you you identify individuals who you want to connect with, and and then perhaps, you know, you want to create an audience, which you could take and then promote to, or perhaps message and try and connect with, there are other third-party data, or we'll say data softwares and things like this, which I think you can use. So perhaps you could build up that target list in that way, as well. But yes, in essence, yes, yes, you can, you know, get, other tools to input and build an audience.

Sally Green 12:29
Okay. So even for if you're small B2B, it's worth having a go at LinkedIn. So it's not don't just be put off by the price. It's definitely because it's such a huge, enormously good data source, basically with all the people you want to talk to, so you think it's wrong to be put off by the Oh, it's too expensive, it's not for me?

Sam Birkett 12:49
Yeah, I think so and I think as well, I would always start with the non-paid organic stuff first anyway, and then so you get an understanding of, I think one of the things that people haven't really used it very much, then they'll hopefully go on there and say, Oh, wow, I didn't realise all these people are on here. Gosh, that's fantastic, all these people we'd like to talk to are already using it, and oh, look what they do and so if you do that and then you build it, and particularly your really small startup, I think and you think, well, we're going to build this more on making personal connections with me and my co-founder, and then start to you know, we don't necessarily need to do outreach to campaigns to try and get people in who don't know about us. But I think you've reached that natural limit, where unless you have a fantastic organic sort of strategy, constant strategy, where you're getting lots of people to go oh wow, fantastic posts, they're sharing, and then you're building your... and that just takes a long time anyway, I mean, you could say that the paid part of it has been more short circuit. So either we're entering a new market, or just say that we need to boost our followers because there is an option in the campaign manager, because one thing I was gonna say is the great big change that happened in campaign manager a few years ago now was, when you log in, it doesn't just say, hey, just do a paid campaign. It says what sort of pay campaign do you want to do? So not just the format, but the marketing objectives of that campaign, and one of them is build followers. So if you have a page as a small company, so perhaps you start as an individual, you say, Hey, we've got the Cotswold handbag shop, and I'm a director and my co-director here, Sally is on and then we've got one of our, I don't know, our chief technician is on LinkedIn. So there's three of us on LinkedIn and here's our company. But then as soon as you set up a company page, and you start trying to get followers, and then you start trying to interact with your followers on LinkedIn, if you do that, then you've got your page which you can start building and attracting people towards so you can start to build... do some paid advertising to get to the people you want. That's the biggest thing as you say, the biggest thing I have about LinkedIn is the fact that in my sector, it's just it's so good at just cutting through the slivers of target segments, and you can just get to these people and I think I know I must get the latest stats on it. But I think the actual stats on, because it is a business network, you know, professional network, people have a greater degree of trust to a certain extent rather than other social media and they know what you're there for. I mean, there's a whole nother conversation about the busier it gets and the more stuff the more chaff that gets thrown up, perhaps it gets harder to get through to people, but that's the thing I find about it. So if you're a small business saying, well, we need to know, we're great in Oxfordshire, but we how do we get in front of B2B buyers in Gloucestershire, we just don't know anyone there. So even just you know, anybody can set up a campaign manager paid account, you don't have to pay anything you just put your details in and then you can build some audiences and then say, so you understand who you can target, you can understand how many of the people you want to target are actually even on LinkedIn and then you might go based on that, wow, okay, yeah, it's worth us trying to build something. Just spending £100 to try and then get in front of those people or not.

Sally Green 15:59
Yeah, that's really interesting, because it shows you the size of your audience. I mean, that's what's really important to you, because you might have massively underestimated how big your audience is that being there, literally 1000s of people want to have a handbag building machine, we just don't know and maybe it's something you should do as part of your business development. Actually, if you're thinking of making a handbag-buying machine, start with LinkedIn, and don't just think of it as a marketing tool, it could be a research tool.

Sam Birkett 16:24
Very much so. Funnily enough, I think there's so many other uses. I mean, I was talking to someone the other day, who's just starting out their career, and I was saying some about use LinkedIn, which I'd heard years ago, use LinkedIn as a way to do your sort of aspirational journey to find people on there who you could find very easily who are doing the kind of job that you think right now you'd like to do in 5-10 years time and then look at are there any similarities about what they've done and who they are, and where they've been, and who they work for, and qualifications they have, and networks they belong to, and all that sort of stuff and the BD, I mean, I think because I started in originally, like BD and then BD pseudo-marketing role, then I went purely into marketing, I've always had that appreciation of the BD process, and what you know, and also been working in a B2B environment as well, building those bigger, longer term relationships with certain people, and perhaps multi-relationships in a company as well. It's such a powerful tool. I mean, I know so many BD and sales, people just go on there think great. I can just, yeah, I've got a view of this company, and who's there, and I know what they're interested in and I know where they hang out and so there's just so much, in my opinion, so much useful information, you can find out about it, even from the standpoint of, you know, you find out that the Gloucestershire Handbag Makers Association who exist on LinkedIn or something, and, and you go, Oh, I had no idea that was there. Well, A) Can I join that group to then organically share and discuss things or B), I can actually target that group with some paid advertising. So I know, behaviorally, those are the people and it's an active group who are so they're active LinkedIn members and users, and they're the kind of people I know the kind of people I need to talk to. So let's target them.

Sally Green 18:02
That's interesting. So one of my other questions was going to be about groups, do you think it's valuable/ essential to join groups?

Sam Birkett 18:10
I don't think it's essential to join groups, to be honest. I think I've joined too many in the past, because I would have been doing the thing I was just talking about, trying to get... not get something for nothing but trying to do more organic stuff, you end up perhaps joining a number of groups, if you're promoting a certain service or product, and therefore, I mean, I've got historical stuff, I need to go through and clear out my groups. I've got loads of stuff that I'm not involved with at all these days. But I'm still in that group and getting updates and thinking, Well, why was I in there? Oh, yes, I was sharing that piece of content with about something or other. But yeah, I think it's very useful. I mean, again, depending on your objectives, really, if you're looking to say, well, you know, I genuinely want to be a member of this group, like a forum, like the old-fashioned forums you'd find online, to share interesting information and to find out what other people are doing, then you've got that whole... that's useful from a sort of interest group point of view. But yeah, equally, if you're, you know, again, building awareness, perhaps, or fellow entrepreneurs, networks, things like that and there's that, but the thing I would say is, there's a huge... obviously there's a huge number of evergreen collection, a number of groups out there, and some of them are geographically segmented, some of them are sector or conference or event, whatever, there's all sorts of alumni groups, and they're such a huge range of sizes, you know, you go from that five people to, 2-3 million, you know, in the, some of the groups I'm in, I think, I don't get a huge amount of work from that. But you think, well, I'm sort of in this, I don't know, sales and marketing, you know, Western Europe or something and think, Well, gosh, I'm just one of several hundred of thousands of people, you know, I mean, even if I did want to sort of share something in there and get a conversation going, it's not very likely that anyone t was gonna pick up on it and I think quite often you can find with groups of particular people there, you know, like, like a poorly-run networking session. If people are all they're trying to sell to everyone else the whole time rather than listen to each other, then you come up against that in certain groups, and you just see...

Sally Green 20:04
And talking about selling, is it seen within the groups as inappropriate to become a huge salesperson? That really you're there to discuss not to say buy this stuff, it's brilliant.

Sam Birkett 20:13
Yeah, I mean, well, I think most of the groups I see have the, you know, the ones which are managed, because there's open groups, you know, and the closed groups. So if it's a closed group, even if it's an open group as well, I think, you know, you have those like three or four rules of engagement, don't you and say, right, don't want any selling, the vast majority I see, say, no selling, please, if you are talking about something that it better be useful, which is probably why I mean, obviously, lots of other work I do is more about content and trying to create valuable, useful, interesting content for all the good reasons, you create that, but particularly with LinkedIn as well, creating valuable content that somebody actually goes, Oh, that's really interesting and you know, you're thinking about your whole customer journey and those touch points and thinking, Well, I've given something that's valuable, and on they go. So I'm rest assured, they don't need to do a big selling, hey, come and sign up to buy this product thing. So I think most of them look down on it and because again, group owners want them to be spaces where you can genuinely interact, don't they I suppose, but yeah, I think there's a number of ways people get around that and I think there's a number different ways in which people, you know, you do things you could log on, look at example, now, just say, Hey, look at this, Hey, look at this, Hey, look at this, Hey, look at this. So they're not actively selling, but they're just sort of making points.

Sally Green 21:26
Yeah, drawing our attention to.

Sam Birkett 21:28
Yes, yes, rather than engaging in a conversation, but it is interesting. I do find when there is it always the rest of my attention when there is a post by someone, usually more than someone than an organisation and it's got a lot of interactions and a lot of comments and you think, oh, right, that's really interesting. Actually, there's an interesting, genuinely interesting debates here, which 9 times out of 10, it's not going to be an abusive Twitter kind of back and forth saying ahh you said that, it's almost it's very much... that's thing I found refreshing about LinkedIn as well, the fact that it's almost invariably, you know, civilised, and even if people disagree, they have a really civilised discussion and that's not always the case. As I say, there are some times that happens. But I think groups they're getting those groups, it depends on the group again, if it's a well-run one, and if you've got good admins, who are, you know, trying to make something that's useful, but I mentioned the whole targeted groups of paid stuff, which I can come back to. But that's another way to target someone who's in a group, rather than posting directly in it, if that makes sense.

Sally Green 22:31
Right, so I can actually want to in the account in the account manager, but if I'm doing some paid advertising, I can just say I want to market to these groups?

Sam Birkett 22:39
Yes, yes and that's quite early on, because I think, I don't know, I think I was around doing the very first version of campaign manager and really, quite early on, I think I always tell the story about what I used to have to go down to, so we're running LinkedIn campaigns, but we had to run downstairs to get a piece of paper signed by a finance team member, to say, we agree for you to spend £500 on this LinkedIn campaign, and then, I don't know what I did with it, I think I ran back upstairs and then got a credit card, and then input the details. Every time we wanted to run a campaign individually. But it was hilarious, these days, you know, it's all integrated, and you just, you know, you have your budgets on there and you set it up and whatever else, an Enterprise Edition, but anyway, yes, that's what I had to do. But when I did that quite early on, I started with, you know, the targeting wasn't as sophisticated as it is now you didn't have as many options. But I would do a sort of, write this person, this job title, this geography, this company, that kind of stuff and then quite quickly, I mean, I was very interested in the behavioural stuff, rather than just purely the profile stuff, say, well, these are the kind of people I'm after. But I'd also like to make sure that they're active members, and also the, you know, active in these conversations. So I found quite early on, I did a comparison of just targeting them, in terms of this is their profile and then I did this is the profile, plus these groups, and I go out, and I do a disparate search just to find the groups which were relevant, which I thought were relevant and, you know, you can go in-depth on that if you want to, if you got time to go off and actually, you know, sometimes you can't join the groups, but you can actually, you can see some people who are your second or third-degree connections who are in them, and you can see the description and you can go, Okay, well, this looks very much like these guys are talking about the need for handbag making machines.

Sally Green 24:26
So I can actually do paid advertising to people that are active, that post X number of times or are actually engaging?

Sam Birkett 24:36
Yeah, there is an option, I think now, which they put in there. I can't quite remember the exact details, but it is about... I think it's like active members, I think. So it's one of the behavioural profile pieces that enables you to say, you know, so there's someone who has actually does interact. I think actually as well the... they were talking years ago about it, they said that they know that I mean, there's only certain other times they'll serve up your advert or your content to people over a certain period of time anyway, but you could type people who are active. But the thing was, I mean, for me, it was like, yes, they're active. But if they're in a group, they've clearly expressed interest in our... they're potentially more active in this area. So if you do target them, then of course, they've all got different sizes these groups, so it'll take the groups that got there and then take that chunk of people who fall into your other targeting and I would do multiple groups, and it depending on obviously, who you're after, but I find as many as I could, who are relevant. So yeah.

Sally Green 25:34
That's interesting. That is interesting. So they're not just something you join, you can actually use them as a marketing tool at the same time.

Sam Birkett 25:40
Yes, I mean, targeting those people. So it wouldn't be your stuff appearing in the group. It'd be appearing in the feed of the people but as you say, yeah, you... it's almost like your corralling them, like a field of sheep isn't it's like you get, you know...

Sally Green 25:53
That's exactly right.

Sam Birkett 25:56
Well, that's the end of part one of our LinkedIn interview where I'm being interviewed by Sally about why we should not be afraid of using LinkedIn and what can it do for us so join us again in part two.