Mastering LinkedIn Ads: Targeting, Budgeting, and Effective Strategies

About the Guest(s):

Moby Hayat is a renowned digital ad specialist with a focus on helping companies optimize their performance in digital advertising platforms, particularly LinkedIn. With a rich experience in the realm of B2B marketing, Moby excels in enhancing ad conversion, strategizing targeted ads, and leveraging first-party data to improve advertising outcomes. Moby's expertise has been acknowledged by his vast network where he frequently shares insights on digital marketing and advertising trends.

Episode Summary:

In this episode of the Talking Shizzle pod, Taylor Wilson, the founder of Creative Shizzle, invites digital ads expert Moby Hayat to talk about the ups and downs in the world of LinkedIn advertising. As someone who has attended notable marketing events and keeps a keen interest in the digital landscape, Taylor taps into Moby's expertise to explore how SMBs, high-end consultancies, and established SaaS companies can optimally use LinkedIn for their advertising needs. With Moby's recent journey to citizenship providing a personal touch that parallels his professional ethos of adaptability and growth, this conversation is rich with insights for anyone interested in enhancing their digital marketing strategies.

Throughout the episode, Taylor and Moby dissect various advertising platforms, focusing specifically on LinkedIn. They evaluate the ins and outs of budget management, audience targeting, and comparing platform efficiencies between LinkedIn, Meta, and other advertising avenues. The discussion highlights how LinkedIn's targeting capabilities are unmatched in the realm of B2B marketing but also calls attention to its higher costs, stressing the importance of understanding your business's specific needs and close processes. With actionable insights and inspirational narratives, this episode stands as a comprehensive guide for companies aiming to push their boundaries in digital advertising.

Key Takeaways:

• LinkedIn's Unique Positioning: LinkedIn offers unparalleled B2B targeting because it utilizes first-party data, making it ideal for businesses looking for specific professional demographics.
• Budget Considerations: LinkedIn can be more expensive than Meta platforms; businesses should weigh cost versus quality of leads and long-term gain.
• Testing and Optimization: The importance of testing different ad strategies across platforms to find what works best for your specific business model, such as using Meta for immediate leads and LinkedIn for brand awareness.
• Tracking and Attribution: Although tricky, utilizing correct tracking methods is crucial for understanding ad impacts and optimizing future campaigns.
• Start Small, Grow Big: Small businesses should begin with a manageable budget to refine their advertising strategies and gradually increase expenditures as they see more definitive results from campaigns.

Resources:

• Moby Hayat on LinkedIn: Moby Hayat
• Creative Shizzle Website: CreativeShizzle.com
• Metadata.io's Meta Match: A tool for B2B targeting on Facebook and Instagram (details discussed during the episode).

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Transcript

0:00:03 Taylor Wilson: Hey, hey, hey, all you lovely people out there. I know you’ve got a lot going on in your day and you have big dreams for your brand. Are you ready to talk some shizzle and learn some shizzle from entrepreneurs, leaders, change makers, and overall interesting people who like to shake things up? I’m your host, Taylor Wilson, founder of Creative Shizzle, and I’m stoked to bring you a fresh episode of Talking Shizzle today. 

0:00:33 Taylor Wilson: This show is all about helping you think differently so that you could grow your business or your cause. Check us out on the web@creativeshizzle.com now let’s get into it and talk some shizzle. What’s up? What’s up, folks? We’re on a new episode of Talking Shizzle. This is the second episode we’re recording of the year, and I’m really glad to be with you. Moby Hyatt, how’s it going today? 

0:01:01 Moby Hayat: Good. How are you? 

0:01:03 Taylor Wilson: I’m good. I’m good. You’re down in Austin. How’s the weather? My Texas relatives say it’s freezing. And I’m like, I’ll show you freezing. 

0:01:12 Moby Hayat: I mean, you know this. Like, if it’s 30 for two days, the city panics. 

0:01:18 Taylor Wilson: It’s like, oh, I know. 

0:01:20 Moby Hayat: Yeah. So it’s not bad. What’s it like over there? 

0:01:23 Taylor Wilson: We have. I have snow all over my driveway right now. In fact, this is the first day my kids finally went back to school. We had the whole first week of school. Last week was like a snow day. It was a snow week. It’s clear. It’s not like a blizzard outside anymore, so that’s good. Okay, well, I’m excited to talk to you. You are an ad specialist. Digital ads. We met at Drive last. Late last year at Exit five. 

0:01:51 Taylor Wilson: I think I commented on really liking your mustache. And then we took it from there, so. 

0:01:56 Moby Hayat: So fun note. I just learned how to make it better, like, as a. I’m trying to improve it. Yeah. 

0:02:03 Taylor Wilson: Okay. Well, it’s looking good. And I also want to congratulate you. You got your citizenship, right? Like, what, like four months ago or something? 

0:02:11 Moby Hayat: No, like, legitimately. I think late early December or late November, something like that. 

0:02:18 Taylor Wilson: That’s awesome. Well, congratulations. 

0:02:21 Moby Hayat: You were posting about it online right there. Yeah. Yeah. 

0:02:24 Taylor Wilson: That’s awesome. Well, congratulations. Yeah. So let’s talk ads. Let’s go deep. I want to get into. This is what you do. This is really. All you do is helping companies improve their digital ads, performance, conversion, everything like that. And I want to talk about LinkedIn today because LinkedIn ads, it’s one of those places, I mean, you certainly scroll LinkedIn and you see people running ads. But as someone who has run ads and I’m not the best at this, but we do it and I have done it, but it feels like one of those black holes for B2B marketers, I think when it comes to the ad space because it can feel like, oh, it’s really expensive and I’m not ever seeing results. 

0:03:10 Taylor Wilson: So how do you get results for people on LinkedIn? I want to get into that today and then maybe walk us through start to finish. And then I know you help your clients with advertising across other platforms too. So we’ll get into a little bit of like when you might choose a certain platform, like LinkedIn versus Meta versus Google and the like. How’s that sound? 

0:03:30 Moby Hayat: Let’s go. 

0:03:30 Taylor Wilson: All right, let’s go. So LinkedIn, like pitch me on why I should be running LinkedIn ads. Let’s start there. 

0:03:35 Moby Hayat: Got it. LinkedIn is the weirdest platform to run ads on because the information for targeting is legitimately the best in the world. Because instead of Facebook or YouTube or TikTok trying to figure out what you like, what are your interests, what do you do on LinkedIn? People like you and I give as much information to LinkedIn about what we do, what our skills are, everything else. So when you’re thinking of B2B targeting or very, very specific professional targeting, it is the best in the world because it is all first party data. 

0:04:11 Moby Hayat: The real draw of LinkedIn is not the people really, because other people hang out on Instagram, the same people hang out on TikTok, they’ll do other stuff. I’m on YouTube too much. But if you want to target senior demand generation people, and I’m one of them, LinkedIn is the place to be because it allows you to target like crazy. That is the big value prop of LinkedIn. 

0:04:33 Taylor Wilson: And I agree with you. So that being said, I think one of the questions that usually comes up around LinkedIn is budget, I think. And I think it’s easy to sort of understand, understand like, oh yeah, I can. You can target how. What are some of the really specific ways you feel like you can target people? Because I know there’s like company settings, there’s title settings, but like, what are some of those things? Just to give us a little bit. 

0:04:55 Moby Hayat: More specificity, My favorite top layer is either specific account list. Let’s say there’s 300 companies you want to target, 500 or even a thousand, whatever that number is. You can upload that and say, only get me in front of these people. That is one layer of targeting. You also have the option in that same layer of saying industry. So it can be very specific. Like machinery, shop owners, accounting firms, software for utilities. I don’t think that’s real. But utilities, let’s say. But you can really hone down your targeting by industry, or a lot of people go accountless. From there, it’s job title, which is very, very common, or function and seniority. So I could say, hey, I pick the industry of accounting. 

0:05:39 Moby Hayat: And it gives me all these people who work in accounting firms, not accounting functions, but accounting firms. And I can say, hey, everybody in operations and finance, give me people who are director VP, but not C Suite. And I can be that specific. And then I can have exclusions as well. But really it’s either industry or account list. And then you go job titles or job functions and seniority. There’s other ways too. But those two layers I find to be best. 

0:06:07 Taylor Wilson: They work the best. Yeah. Okay, so I like that you can get, let’s call those professional demographics. So, like, when you’re thinking about your icp, your ideal customer profile, being able to just lean into those specific professional demographics is a huge selling point for running ads on LinkedIn. But what I think is a lot of times people get caught up on the budget on LinkedIn. It’s more expensive. 

0:06:33 Taylor Wilson: So let’s talk about how is it more expensive? Like, just talk us through that. 

0:06:39 Moby Hayat: Let’s say you’re running one campaign on LinkedIn to the same people and another campaign on Facebook, the same exact people. It’s the same type of advertising campaign brand awareness, hypothetically, on Facebook. Facebook be like, okay, I’m gonna charge you six bucks, let’s say ten bucks to show your ads a thousand times, right? Six bucks. CPM. LinkedIn is going to be like, oh, and I’m just kind of making this up. But it’s like LinkedIn is going to say, oh, you have the privilege to advertise on our platform and use our data. 

0:07:12 Moby Hayat: You’re charged. You’re going after this audience. We’re going to charge you 50 bucks. So it’s just five times more expensive. It could go up and down. It could be 30, it could be 60. Today I was having a conversation with somebody. The CPM was $70 to show your ads a thousand times. But you also see some of those CPMs on Meta as well. The fact of the matter is, if you compare a campaign with the exact same settings on LinkedIn versus Facebook versus Instagram, which is the same, or TikTok or YouTube. 

0:07:43 Moby Hayat: LinkedIn is going to charge you the most because that’s what they decide to do. It’s not because they’re special or their economics works work a different way. It’s just they choose to charge us more because they’re like, oh, you can afford it. 

0:07:56 Taylor Wilson: Okay, so because it’s more B2B focused than B2C, do you think that. 

0:08:02 Moby Hayat: So hypothetically, Adobe. Let’s say I want to corner Adobe’s market and I want to target everybody in the Adobe culture. I can’t go do that on Facebook or Instagram. How many people they say work at Adobe? 100, 500 on LinkedIn, I can do that. So LinkedIn just charges more. However, there is a tool which allows you to do something similar. It’s called Meta Match. For the people listening, you can upload an account list or upload an industry list and you can have sort of B2B targeting on Facebook and it costs you 300 bucks a month. 

0:08:36 Moby Hayat: So there’s. 

0:08:36 Taylor Wilson: Wait, what? Meta Match? I’ve literally not heard of that. 

0:08:40 Moby Hayat: It’s by metadata. It’s old, it’s good. It’s not the best, but it’s really, really good if you’re targeting maybe an industry or sic code or sort of a general icp, like people at high tech companies. But I think where LinkedIn wins is it’s not just you can say to LinkedIn like, hey, show these ads to these people with these demographics. Once you start running ads, LinkedIn shows you the data about exactly who’s seeing the ads as well, which titles are seeing the ads, which titles are clicking, what job titles, what functions, what seniority levels, what companies. 

0:09:19 Moby Hayat: So you really get a sense of if you really want to target a specific group of people professionally. LinkedIn gives you as much data as you want to confirm that you’re targeting the right people and then they charge you more. 

0:09:32 Taylor Wilson: So you could justify the price by thinking about quality versus like maybe, maybe fewer. If your messaging is right, maybe fewer impressions actually still yields just as good of, if not a better response. 

0:09:50 Moby Hayat: I would say that yes, I think the you should go to LinkedIn and choose that as your option if you cannot reach them on Facebook, Instagram, if you can, great, go for that because you’re gonna get five times the impressions versus LinkedIn. But most of the time for B2B, we just can’t. We might be able to with Meta Match, but it still doesn’t give us the confidence of who is seeing these ads. 

0:10:16 Taylor Wilson: I think what I have seen personally along my career is when you are trying to sell like high end, like enterprise level, either software or services and you try to run ads on meta, you get a lot more website traffic, maybe you get a lot of email addresses on your form fills, stuff like that. But it tends to not be actual qualified buyers, you know. And so that’s where I think this is. It’s probably a conversation of like what are your goals, who are you trying to get in front of? 

0:10:51 Taylor Wilson: And quality versus quantity. More so than it is necessarily like, well, do you want to run expensive ads or cheap ads? 

0:10:58 Moby Hayat: It just comes down to the economics of the business which you don’t learn until after which is what’s your cost per lead, what’s your cost per call, what’s your cost per show and call, what’s Your close rate? 98% of businesses don’t have that. And that’s okay. You learn that over time. If you have some back of napkin math and you can decide with my close rate and a higher cost per lead, LinkedIn makes sense for me in terms of LTV and that’s. 

0:11:24 Moby Hayat: It does then fantastic. But it’s really hard to know that. And you kind of just, you tend to go towards the cheaper option because you’re like, that’s better for me. But just like you said, sometimes those leads, many times the leads are on the right one. 

0:11:36 Taylor Wilson: So let’s talk a little bit about like let’s paint a scenario. Let’s say you’re just like, like you’re a small ish SMB. Maybe you’ve got 100 people at the company. So you’re not tiny. You might have a marketing and sales department that doesn’t have a huge budget, but you want to start testing things out on LinkedIn. And I’m asking about the scenario because I run into this scenario a lot with friends in the industry, with clients. You know, not everybody has $50,000 a month ad budgets. 

0:12:03 Taylor Wilson: So the large majority of businesses that are still successful businesses, they don’t have that sort of ad budget. But they might want to start running something on LinkedIn. What do you feel like is a good starting point to be able to legitimately test things things on LinkedIn? 

0:12:20 Moby Hayat: The first question to answer is who are you? Who are you targeting and can you find those people easily on LinkedIn and not that easily on Facebook or Instagram? That’s the first question. So in this scenario, can you make up a ICP for them? And we’ll Walk through it. 

0:12:36 Taylor Wilson: Sure. Go do it for my company. Why not? No. 

0:12:40 Moby Hayat: Okay, who’s your icp? Let’s do it. 

0:12:42 Taylor Wilson: Okay. Let’s do it for Creative Shizzle. That’s the first thing that came into my mind because I’m curious about it. So we are a graphic design on subscription. We do, you know, graphic design on affordable subscriptions. Kind of like a design pickle. And we target, you know, marketing teams, I would say SMBs, startups, B2B. Tech marketers is usually a good sort of a client for us. Got it. 

0:13:10 Moby Hayat: How much do you charge a month? And you can give me a made up number for this podcast and also like lifetime value. 

0:13:15 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, we have plans that start at $599 a month all the way up to. And those are just for graphic design. And then we have plans that go up to $3,500 a month for graphic design plus copywriting support. Those are like kind of our core, our core plans. We do custom things too, but that’s our core. 

0:13:36 Moby Hayat: That’s very helpful. So the first question I would ask would actually not be a paid ads question, but a strategy question which is you mentioned tech marketers, SMB startups. Tech marketers. When I think of that, that’s on LinkedIn, you can’t really find those people on Facebook or Instagram. But the question becomes is how confident are you that you do not want to work with the people? Like how confident are you that you do not want to work with small business owners and random marketers and you want to work with tech market? 

0:14:08 Taylor Wilson: Oh, we’re, I, we work with other small business owners too. So like I won’t say that we only want to work with tech marketers. And that’s where I think this gets interesting and why I’m like, tell me what to do. Because like sometimes we have, we have small business owners who are, you know, we helped a brand last year that was an Etsy store and a one woman shop that blew up on Etsy and now she needs marketing support and design support. 

0:14:36 Taylor Wilson: You know, so those are cases where like maybe that person is on Instagram and Facebook more so than LinkedIn. Yeah, I think particularly for our business, it’s a little bit of a mix. 

0:14:47 Moby Hayat: And to buy, do people usually go through a call process? 

0:14:51 Taylor Wilson: Yes. 

0:14:52 Moby Hayat: In that case I would actually test, and I know this is going somewhere, I would actually test Facebook and Instagram first for two months, then try LinkedIn. Here’s why. So if you’re looking at that, and I’m gonna make this up, which is you’re looking at a three month time period to decide if our platform is right for you or not. The strategy that’s gonna run on Facebook versus LinkedIn might be very different. 

0:15:14 Moby Hayat: On Facebook you’re gonna do lead gen. Let’s go, let’s spend 2k a month and test that out on LinkedIn. There’s going to be some testing of lead gen versus brand awareness. So let’s take Facebook for example. What I would do is set up a data stream which allows you to measure how many clicks do you get, how many of them turn into leads so your opt in conversion rate, how many of those leads turn into a meeting, how many of those leads, how many of those meetings show up and how many of them actually turn into a sale. 

0:15:43 Moby Hayat: Hypothetically, if you have a $2,000 a month budget on Meta, you can get 30 reps of that lead off that shown appointments of no show appointments to get a bunch of data, decide is this even worth it? And from there you might see that, oh, I get a lead for 120 bucks, I get a booked appointment for 250 bucks and I get a show an appointment for 300 bucks. And depending on your close rate and honestly your ability to take a bunch of calls that might not show up, you can decide that, hey, for every, I’m just gonna make this up. For every $800 we spend on ads, we get a close customer that remains with us for four months. 

0:16:28 Moby Hayat: That’s pretty legit. And I share this not to make this up. In 2023, a founder that I started working with later on made 40 gay by themselves. And then we, I started working with them with an Ops person in 2024 and we did Meta ads. I think we haven’t spent a lot. 72k or 84. He went from 40k to 1.13 million. And the process is the exact same where they just shove leads in the process and then they measure everything. So that would be test number one. 

0:17:02 Moby Hayat: But I can go over LinkedIn as well. So I want to pause here. 

0:17:06 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, no, I think that’s good. And let’s talk about LinkedIn. And if it helps, we can even paint like a different scenario for LinkedIn so maybe like a different kind of business that you feel like like is More prime for LinkedIn because I’m with you. I actually think like for our business, testing on Meta makes more sense for right now probably at least like to test. And a lot of times I tell clients that too if they’re talking about advertising you know, and they’re just starting like, well, like use that as your testing ground. Would you kind of agree with that? In most scenarios, yeah, I think you. 

0:17:37 Moby Hayat: Lose money before you make money on ads. 

0:17:39 Taylor Wilson: Yeah. Yeah, I think so too. So let’s, let’s, let’s paint a different picture as we talk about LinkedIn and how to approach LinkedIn because I think it is a different audience and different types of businesses might want to actually advertise, spend their ad budget there. So let’s talk about a high end consultancy who is, you know, their average deal size is 100 to $150,000 and they’re only going after big time enterprise businesses to bring in whatever their consulting services. 

0:18:12 Taylor Wilson: Right. Like manage consulting. How would you approach LinkedIn for a company like that? 

0:18:17 Moby Hayat: First would be building that audience size through an account list or an industry list. And the second layer would be job titles or job functions. And I would just stress test with the leadership team. Like, are you sure? Is this the market bet for, bet on for six months. That would be first. After that I would look at what messaging should we test in multiple sprints that allows us to learn what this audience cares about. So for example, in phase one, which might be two months of ads, maybe even one month, we test three, four. I wouldn’t call it offers because at 100k you’re not making offers. I will do this. We’re talking more about value props and how you help and the problems you solve. So I would pick three messaging points and make a total of nine ads, three per messaging point. So I know who it is. 

0:19:07 Moby Hayat: And the next step is, I know what we want to test. From there we decide, okay, what kind of campaign do we want to run on LinkedIn? There’s this big debate. You’ve seen this lead gen versus demand gen. You can legitimately get leads for sub 100 bucks on LinkedIn. But the problem is always the same as it is on Facebook, which is people. The conversion from a lead to a meeting, especially a shown meeting and opportunity is way low. 

0:19:42 Moby Hayat: So you could say let me decide to test lead gen for two months or even on the side. I can do that and let me see how much I get a lead for and what it costs me to have a show in meeting. That might work, but it’s gonna be a test most likely for high end consultancy. You’re looking at brand awareness and really educating this market about what you do, the problems you solve and how you solve them. So in the case of this example, I’ll just go let’s do brand awareness, which is instead of going to LinkedIn and whenever you choose an objective, you choose lead gen, you just go brand awareness. 

0:20:17 Moby Hayat: And how that campaign works is if you have 100k audience, what lead gen will do is let’s say you spend 5k a month on that, you’ll get in front of 10,000 people and you will see if you get leads. If you do brand awareness, LinkedIn charges you a fraction of the cost. Instead of $100 CPM, it’ll be $50. So the same amount of money you’re getting in front of 20,000 people. But the campaigns aren’t optimized for clicks or leads. 

0:20:50 Moby Hayat: They’re optimized for getting in front of as many people as much as possible. And what you’re betting on is the audience that you’ve chosen, the messaging points that you’re testing and you will learn from. Once I get this in front of my audience over time they will go ahead and decide that whenever they’re in the market, my organization is the one to solve the problem. And I can keep talking about this for 17 hours. 

0:21:15 Taylor Wilson: No, I think that that makes a lot of sense, the brand awareness campaign. And I like that you called out that it’s. They actually charge different rates for that and that’s probably. It makes sense to me that that’s a better place to start. Let’s run one more scenario because this is fun. Okay, so that was the high end consultancy and then I want to go back to a thought I have about the thing we said about my business. 

0:21:37 Taylor Wilson: So we did the high end consultancy on LinkedIn. Now let’s talk about you are a SaaS like you are Gong, you know, something like that. How would you approach LinkedIn ads if you were running Gong’s LinkedIn ads? 

0:21:54 Moby Hayat: I’m thinking of another SaaS product that I did consult on and they were spending 70k, 80k a month easy. They were doing more ABM. I won’t talk about ABM because I’m not the best person for it. Sometimes I feel like I understand it, sometimes I’m like, I don’t get it, but let’s not talk about it. So what I would think about is are there multiple audiences or are there, is there one audience? For this example, I’ll say there’s two audiences, one is more C Suite. And I’m just making this up because I don’t know a ton about gong. I see them all the time, but. 

0:22:27 Taylor Wilson: I just, everywhere I know I see their name too much, you know, exactly or maybe not, maybe a lot. That’s why they’re, they’re, they’re marketing is working. 

0:22:36 Moby Hayat: It is. So they’ve got C suite and directors and managers. I will build those audiences and I would really, really have separate messaging for it if possible, interviewing some of your customers in each segment, C suite and directors, managers would be very helpful because we can then mine the transcripts for pain points and call outs that we can reasonably run ads on and measure if people vote that they resonate with their clicks or not. 

0:23:04 Moby Hayat: So if I have two audiences, I’d love to do some customer interviews if I can. But from those customer interviews or even their positioning work, write the ads. Very simple. They don’t have to be video. Write the copy. And the big thing that I’m looking for is three things. Let’s say I start running these ads. Number one, how much of the audience am I reaching and am I at the right budget? So LinkedIn has now a metric called audience penetration and it tells you out of the audience that you’ve selected, you’re reaching 10%, 20%, 25. 

0:23:34 Moby Hayat: The sweet spot that I’ve seen is 25%. If you’re consistently reaching 25% of your audience and you’re reaching them at a frequency of five a month, you’re spending the right amount. No need to spend any more. I would do that. Number two, I would look very quickly at click through rate to see, hey, what is getting more traction in terms of messaging and double down on that more and more and more every single phase. So I learned that A versus B, B wins and let me double down on B in a phase two messaging and have B1 versus B2 and repeat that. 

0:24:10 Moby Hayat: The third thing I would look at is the audience that I am I identified as who we want to target. Are we still seeing the right people? Are the right people seeing our ads? So I will look at titles, I’ll look at job functions, seniority and just fine tune them because LinkedIn will show you 100 titles and I just look at the first 50 of who’s seeing our ads. Sorry, when you’re running ads, LinkedIn shows you 30, I would look at the 30 and define if there’s any job titles I need to take out. 

0:24:38 Moby Hayat: And lastly, once I’m like, okay, things are working for brand awareness and demand gen, what’s driving conversions, if any. Sometimes you can look at your HubSpot and look at self report attribution like questions like how did you hear about us to see? Are people saying they hear about LinkedIn people don’t usually do that. But the big metric for success, I can look at two data points. Number one, am I getting any on platform conversions that people clicked on LinkedIn and they eventually converted? 

0:25:06 Moby Hayat: Number two, once I started advertising, did I see an incremental increase in leads two months down the line, three months down the line from the ISP that I’m targeting? Attribution of LinkedIn is horrible. Like, I’ve had legitimately website submissions, which are not spam, go from double in a year for a client. And when we look at attribution on LinkedIn, I’m like, I think it’s working because that’s the only thing we’ve been doing. 

0:25:36 Moby Hayat: But it’s so hard without a proper CRM like HubSpot or without really detailed targeting. So that’s how I would approach it. Who build out the messaging, test out the messaging and then look at numbers like ctr, look at the job title demographics and really trying to understand are we seeing a lift in leads over. 

0:25:56 Taylor Wilson: Time and then probably having the right like tracking codes and stuff like that in place. So you can do your best to attribute, you know, as best as you can. It’s hard, you know, everybody. I mean, like, there’s a lot you can do with marketing, reporting and tracking, a lot. But there’s also still a lot of gaps and a lot of places where it’s like, sometimes it’s just hard to know exactly why. And I also think that that happens to do with. 

0:26:24 Taylor Wilson: I think it truly does take someone many, many, many, many times of seeing you before they buy. So, you know, it’s like, if you’re doing a good job, it’s likely that people are seeing you in a lot of places. And like, at that point, who really knows, right? There’s a lot of things that I’ve bought over time. Platforms that I purchased for our company to run and seen them on Instagram and LinkedIn and you know, all over the place, I don’t really know. And then heard people talking about them at some point. Just seemed like a good idea. So I think that’s something important for marketers to keep in mind when they’re thinking about ads and reporting and everything like that. But that’s like a whole nother topic. So I kind of want to wrap it up with getting into identifying those different audiences and then different messages and how you might want to think about spreading a budget across different platforms. Because let’s go back to my example. Okay, so I’ve definitely got a B2B marketer audience, that’s one. 

0:27:29 Taylor Wilson: But I’ve got those small business owners too that are on Instagram. Maybe I should be running some YouTube ads, you know, like our, our business. I could see how testing some things across platforms could help. And there’s probably a lot of businesses like that that have sort of audiences in a few different places. So how might you go about putting together a plan for a small business like mine for digital advertising across a few channels? 

0:28:00 Moby Hayat: If I were to look at what actually drives high intent leads, not just leads, because there’s a big difference what drives high intent leads and thus sales opportunities. Opportunities and thus revenue. And I also look at, that’s more long term, like what’s the best thing we can do over a year. But also for small business, you kind of need to prove something works because you’re not gonna, a small business is not gonna spend Money on month 4 if it’s not making money before. 

0:28:28 Taylor Wilson: Right. 

0:28:28 Moby Hayat: So if I were to think of that, and let’s say I’ve got a $5,000 a month budget. Yeah, I think that’s a good average. 

0:28:35 Taylor Wilson: Size to like, let’s use that $5,000 a month because I think that’s where a lot of marketing teams probably actually sit. 

0:28:41 Moby Hayat: So I’ll actually divide that in half for very different purposes. So with 2500 and I won’t talk about Google Ads because that’s a whole different thing. But I’ll talk about Meta versus LinkedIn. On Meta, I would spend $2,500 and I would do it with the express purpose of getting leads from a broader audience and really fine tuning my lead to close process, which is really trying to figure out, out of the leads that we get, how many of them turn into meetings, how many turn into show in meetings, what’s my conversion rate, what’s my sales close rate, all of that and really stress test it. Because the great thing about Meta is you can get a lot of leads but you have to stress yourself out to find the high intent ones. But that process makes your sales process really effective if you should, if you just sold it to it. 

0:29:33 Moby Hayat: So I would spend $2,500 on Meta to get some sales and also build my robust sales process. And I would also person up portion off $2,500 on LinkedIn and say I’m going to play the long game here, which is I’m going to run brand awareness ads to an audience of 40,000 people, maybe even less. And I know that if I get a few leads, which are very high Intent because they’re you’re doing brand awareness. They have to reach out to you over time that If I spend $30,000 in a year and I get, I’m just making this number up. 

0:30:08 Moby Hayat: 6 closes I have tripled my ROI and I’m waiting on the long game because these people are ready to buy right now. It’s unlikely that they will be. So I would portion it off there one more short term. Let’s prove advertising works now let’s make some money on Facebook by going through the pain of effort and then on LinkedIn. Let’s prove advertising works over time and going through the process by paying in time versus effort. 

0:30:34 Taylor Wilson: What about YouTube? That one’s not been discussed at all. Is that you feel like that’s like Google. It’s like it’s a whole different thing. 

0:30:42 Moby Hayat: I’m not extremely familiar with YouTube to be honest. I know it works. I think it’s exceptional for brand but I think it’s the demand gen play over there too. So if you were like YouTube I would probably put 2k in Facebook, 1500 in LinkedIn and 1500 in YouTube. 

0:30:59 Taylor Wilson: Okay. 

0:30:59 Moby Hayat: I would still go Facebook pretty heavily. 

0:31:02 Taylor Wilson: Facebook heavy. Okay, I think that’s good. 

0:31:05 Moby Hayat: Yeah, it depends. 

0:31:07 Taylor Wilson: It always depends. But I think it’s nice to run these different scenarios for different types of places plays that we know are out there, you know, because I know you probably work with all different types of companies that you run ads for. And so you probably see all sorts of different, it depends scenarios. And I know I do too. And I work as a branded and creative agency. We get these types of questions all the time. 

0:31:31 Taylor Wilson: And so I really appreciate kind of like digging deep into these different, you know, scenarios different. And people always want to talk budget. They want to know budget. Especially when we’re talking about the small businesses and SMBs out there. Not, you know, not everybody has that 70K a month ad budget. Right. So most people don’t. So I like talking about topics for marketing where it’s like most people aren’t gong. 

0:31:57 Taylor Wilson: So let’s talk about how most businesses can take advantage of these platforms and really think through like what is within their purview, what is within their reach. You know. 

0:32:08 Moby Hayat: This year with the freelance client we’re looking to spend half a million in ads. Four months ago, once the program was starting to work, they asked me should we do LinkedIn? I was like no, the economics of your business do not work for LinkedIn. And sometimes that’s the case where you find and Test they’ve done TikTok, they’ve done Reddit, they’ve done Meta, they’ve done Google. I told them, don’t do LinkedIn. 

0:32:32 Moby Hayat: You really have to test or really understand the platform before making the best decision for you. And sometimes you lose some money, but you learn a lot. 

0:32:42 Taylor Wilson: There is one other thing I want to ask you about because I’ve noticed it just recently. You know how on Facebook you can go, and this has been around for a while on Facebook where you can go and you can like boost a post. I don’t think that’s the best way to set up an ad campaign on Meta, but now. But it’s highly convenient and a lot of people do that because it’s like it’s so easy to click that boost button. 

0:33:04 Taylor Wilson: So LinkedIn now has these ads where I’m noticing more of them. They look like organic content, but they’re ads. And to me, I’m just trying to connect some dots so it feels a little bit more like, oh, is that a situation on LinkedIn now where you can like boost a post? What do you see? Or do you have to go actually set it up as a separate ad campaign and just make it look like an organic post when you’re setting up the campaign? 

0:33:33 Moby Hayat: Great question. So those are top leadership ads on LinkedIn and on Instagram. You have two options now. One is you can go on your app and just decide boost this through a few options or you can even go to Ads Manager on the back end and define the whole campaign and add and then slot in your organic posts. That’s how LinkedIn how thought leadership ads work. You go on LinkedIn Ad Manager. You don’t go to your profile, you go into Ad Manager. You set up your campaign just like a normal campaign and instead of saying, I want to create my own ads, you just say, help me select ads from my profile or from profiles that have approved me to select them. 

0:34:11 Moby Hayat: So if I moby have my top 20 LinkedIn posts from last year, and I know that that’s awesome to help nurture and create awareness. With my icp, I can just slot those in and the goal really is awareness. 

0:34:28 Taylor Wilson: So would you treat those kind of similarly to those brand awareness ads? Let’s say you’re that like high level, like enterprise consultancy that might be a play that you want to do with like kind of that brand awareness, thought leadership? Yeah. Okay. I’ve just been seeing those more recently. Is that a newer thing? They’ve been around for a while, catching. 

0:34:48 Moby Hayat: Up, but it’s only, I think it was mid year. I, I don’t think it was mid year last year. It might have been mid year in 2023 maybe, but I know it’s relatively recent. 

0:34:59 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, I’ve just, I’m just more within the last several months started seeing them and be thinking that they were organic posts at first not noticing the little promoted or sponsored label and then one day saw it and was like, oh, that’s an ad, that’s different. So okay, cool. Anything you would leave our audience with kind of closing statements on running online digital ads. 

0:35:27 Moby Hayat: Last thing would be you lose money before you make money. There has not been a case and I’m looking at the most, I’m thinking about the most fast performing ad campaigns I’ve been on, on LinkedIn, on Meta. It takes two, three months and you have to grid it out because at the end of the day advertising is just telling more people what you do. And how can that not work? You just have to figure out the mechanics of it, which is the hard part. Telling more people in your target market what you do will always work. It’s just. 

0:35:57 Moby Hayat: Does it make sense for you and how much are you spending and what’s your strategy and what platform? That’s the hard part. 

0:36:03 Taylor Wilson: Is there. Let me end with one final fun question. What is the best performing ad campaign you’ve ever run on the lowest budget? 

0:36:14 Moby Hayat: Oh, that’s a good question. We were spending fifteen hundred dollars a month and that was for a sort of B2B real estate, B2B audience, like realtors. On Meta and we tested. I didn’t know much about the space, so all I did was I looked at their website and copy pasted their headings into different ads and maybe had three headings and made three more. Three variations of ads. So I had nine ads in total and I put some money on it. 

0:36:44 Moby Hayat: In two months we learned what sort of headline worked and I turned everything else off except that headline and made eight more ads into it and it started to work. And that’s the campaign we’re actually going to spend half a million dollars on this year, provided nothing breaks. And we got super lucky. But that worked out surprisingly well. And I won’t say it’s magic, it’s skill, but also luck. Right? 

0:37:11 Moby Hayat: I won’t lie about that. 

0:37:12 Taylor Wilson: Yeah. Sometimes something just hits and you don’t really know why and it just does. 

0:37:18 Moby Hayat: I still don’t know why, but we’re going to keep putting money into it. 

0:37:23 Taylor Wilson: Sounds like a good plan to me. Well, Moby, it’s been awesome. Talking to you. People want to follow you online, get in touch or maybe hire you to help them with, with their ads. What’s the best way to find you and get in touch? 

0:37:36 Moby Hayat: Yeah, this has been fantastic. Thank you for the questions. I’m on LinkedIn. Moby Hayath. H A Y A T Moby like the singer? Or like Moby Dick, if you read that book? I have not. 

0:37:46 Taylor Wilson: I haven’t either, no. But I’ve heard of the singer and I’ve heard of the book. Just never, never really listened to the musician much or read the book. 

0:37:55 Moby Hayat: So he’s not that great. 

0:37:57 Taylor Wilson: No, I, you know. Yeah, I mean, I have heard him, but yeah. Maybe it never struck me, but the book apparently is fantastic. It’s a great piece of literature. 

0:38:09 Moby Hayat: I’ve heard it’s terribly boring. Yeah. Yeah. 

0:38:13 Taylor Wilson: But maybe it’s like a book you should read just so you can be like, I’ve read that book. Well, this has been fun and thanks everyone for listening. I hope that it helps you get a little bit more knowledge if you’re thinking about running online ads or you’re already running online ads and you’re thinking about how to tweak or better optimize your stuff. And if you ever need creative work, go to creativeschizzle.com and we will see you on the next episode of Talking Shizzle. 

0:38:43 Taylor Wilson: Well, hey there, that was fun. I love how much mind blowing and mind opening Shizzle our guests bring to us with every single episode. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. Make sure to hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcast player so that you don’t miss a beat of the Talking Shizzle podcast. And if you’re listening on Apple, be sure to let us know what you thought and leave us a review. 

0:39:12 Taylor Wilson: We’d love to hear from our listeners so that we can bring you all the good juicy business growth Shizzle that you’d like to hear about. Be sure to get in touch with us and follow along@creativeschizzle.com or shoot us an email at podcast creativeschizzle.com now until next time, we hope you go get your big Shizzle done.