LinkedIn Ads Toolkit: The Best Way to Train a New Advertiser - Ep 68

LinkedIn Ads Show

Show Resources

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Google and Facebook

Bidding/Budgeting

Lead Gen Forms

Testing Strategy

NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox

Contact us at [e-mail] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.

Show Transcript

So you're hiring a new LinkedIn advertising manager and you want to train them right? We're talking about proper training around LinkedIn Ads on this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. We face pretty significant challenges when we're trying to hire someone who's responsible for LinkedIn Ads. And this is especially compared with all the other major ad channels, because most digital marketers come into the marketing industry with some sort of experience in either Google or Facebook Ads. So when you're like us, and you're specifically trying to hire for experience in LinkedIn Ads, you'll likely find that it's hard to hire someone with any sort of solid experience. And if you can't find someone with existing experience, you probably need to end up training them yourself. So this episode is all about how to get someone up to speed with LinkedIn Ads quickly and with very little drama. And as you might guess, this is the same process that we actually use when training internally as well. In the news, I have to apologize, because it's been about a month since the last episode, but I have good reason for that. I got to engaged. And my life has been a little bit of a whirlwind around that happening with all the planning for and now wedding planning. And we're currently planning for a wedding on September 23, of this year of 2022. So I couldn't be more thrilled. Thanks, everyone, for letting me share this little experience. I also wanted to share a review that was recently left, the username is choerauf. And they said, "Amazing resource. I have years of experience in digital marketing and paid ads. But when my new job was heavy on LinkedIn advertising, I knew I needed a resource to get myself up to speed on how best to use LinkedIn. This show has been everything I needed and more." Thanks so much for leaving that I really appreciate that. It's this kind of feedback that keeps me running the show, I do want to ask a special favor of everyone out there who's listening. If you have gotten any value out of this show, please go leave a review. It takes a lot of work to put these episodes together. And leaving a review is how you can say thanks if you've gotten any sort of benefit out of it. So please take this as a serious ask and favorite that you can do for me and go leave a review. All right. With that being said, let's get on to the topic. Let's hit it.

So if you yourself are the one who was training, I think there are some things that you as a trainer should know. And first on that list is just realize that whoever you're training, no matter how experienced they are in digital marketing, sometimes they may be more experienced than you in number of years. Or maybe they're far less. Just realize they don't know what you do plan on going all the way back to the basics. And don't assume that they know something that you think is simple. In digital marketing, we use a lot of acronyms. People will call it alphabet soup. And it happens a lot where we just say things that are meaningful to us. But if others don't know what we're talking about, they are immediately alienated and tend to zone out very quickly. And you definitely don't want someone to zone out because we already have to repeat things in training lots of times. For my experience and training, normally, people retain about 10% of what they're being taught. And of course, every time you learn something, you're going to gain a little bit larger a base of what's going on. So your learning will be exponential. Remember that LinkedIn ads is a very complex platform. And it can feel like they're trying to take a drink from a firehose. So much coming at them all at once. And it's going to be hard to retain. So make sure that you as the trainer are being extremely patient, you're willing to repeat things as often as they need to be, and you're doing your very best to break down very complex topics, and elements of the platform and concepts into just the very, very basics. I like to separate roles into those that are more strategic versus those that are more tactical. So generally, if I'm going to be training someone on how to take on LinkedIn Ads, I'm going to train them at the very tactical things, things like how to write ads, how to manage bids and budgets in the platform, how to launch a new ad, how to create a new campaign, those types of things. And then me myself as the trainer, I'm going to take on myself, the more strategic types of tasks, that would be things like determining budgets ongoing and ensuring that we're not overspending a budget, determining which offers to run, you get the idea. And that means that you should know and you should be up to date on the latest trends, the changes, the new strategies that are and aren't working with LinkedIn Ads. You can't expect your new hire to pick up on those things. They're still trying to understand the basics of the platform. You still will need to exhibit quite a bit of oversight. It can help to make a list of all of the things that you think your trainee ought to know about LinkedIn Ads by the end of the training. You have a big bulleted list here, make sure that your training is aimed at knocking down every one of those points. And it's a really good idea to follow up with exercises, or maybe even your own quiz questions that you could ask them to make sure that they are paying attention and are absorbing what it is you're teaching. So now let's go on to the types of things that you might want to be training your new trainee on. Depending on where they come from, and how much marketing experience they have, you may want to zoom out and talk about just the differences between business to business versus business to consumer. How business to consumer are usually lower budget, and impulse purchase decisions. While B2B purchase decisions are usually done with higher budgets over longer periods of time and made by a committee. You'll likely want to talk about the differences between Facebook and LinkedIn because even though both of them use a lot of the same terminology, the platforms are vastly different, and really should be treated differently. And that's talking about two different social platforms. When you start comparing to things like search, like Google Ads versus LinkedIn, it's even that much more different. Make sure you go back to episodes eight and nine of this podcast, because those talk all about the differences between Facebook and LinkedIn and Google and LinkedIn. In order to help your trainee understand and absorb more of what's being taught, it's a really good idea to let them know what this is actually doing for them and doing for their career. Because if they perceive this as being an investment in themselves and their career, they're going to pay a lot closer attention. So talk to them about why they would want to learn LinkedIn, as opposed to other channels, or when they would use it. I tell you for certain that there's a market outlook for those who know LinkedIn ads. Well, people reach out to me all the time asking, Hey, do you know of anyone who has LinkedIn ads experience and is looking, it's a highly sought after skill, you may not see it all the time in job postings out there, but realize that it is a skill that if you're in B2B, it's going to be highly sought after. Now, once they're convinced that LinkedIn is the right ad channel for them, there are some resources that they can very quickly get caught up on. The first is that LinkedIn Learning course that I talked about, at the end of every episode. Make sure to send them that way because it's a very quick way to get caught up on all the basics of LinkedIn Ads for very inexpensive and it's not long. The course is like an hour and a half and that's it. And you may already have a subscription to LinkedIn Learning. But if you don't buying that course, individually is is like 15 bucks or something like that. It's extremely inexpensive, especially for the quality of the course. The second resource here is actually this podcast. So if you're listening to this right now, chances are you already get the value here. But this is something that you could assign to your training to make sure that they start listening to the back catalogue of episodes. And that can be a great way to turn them into a very advanced advertiser very quickly. The third resource is the B2Linked newsletter and blog. And I feel like a little bit of a shill when I'm talking to you about all of the B2Linkked resources. But honestly, I haven't found very many good LinkedIn Ads specific resources out there. So if I knew of anything good that I really approved of, and I liked the content, I would definitely share it. But I just don't see anything out there like that yet. If you have the trainee go to B2Linked.com. Just look around for the newsletter link. And they can get signed up for there. But another good tip that you can use is to tell them to come and follow me on LinkedIn, because I'm constantly sharing everything that I'm learning about LinkedIn Ads, and constantly sharing great stuff. So if they just follow me or even send a connection request, I'd love to be connected to them. And we are in the process of coming out with more advanced and further courses past just what you could find in the LinkedIn Learning course. So watch for those as they come available. Now let's go over some of the types of things that you may want to train on. And again, remember that repetition is going to be key here. You can't expect someone, unless they have photographic memory, to just immediately internalize everything you're sharing. So plan on repeating yourself, just like I have on this particular point. Now, these things to train on aren't necessarily in any particular order.

9:17 The first here is to train on all the different targeting criteria that LinkedIn has and what's available. This can be as simple as going into campaign manager, creating a new dummy campaign, and then just clicking through all the different options that you see there for targeting. Just let them spend some time and look at what LinkedIn allows you to target by I also recommend having your training practice by building campaigns from scratch using different criteria that you might give. So you might say hey, here are five campaigns that I want created. One of them I want to be targeting marketers in higher seniorities. One I want to be targeting IT folks of lower seniorities. One I might want to target these two specific job titles, you get the idea. And then give them practice putting together campaigns that utilize all these different targeting criteria. So as they get this experience, trainees can better nail down all that LinkedIn has to offer. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break.

The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

We as marketers want to be where our customers are. If you're a B2B company, chances are LinkedIn is the channel you want to be on. But this is a platform that's both expensive and cumbersome by nature. It takes an expert to tame the beast that is LinkedIn Ads. We've learned the ins and outs of LinkedIn Ads for the past 11 years. We spent over $150 million on the platform. We are official LinkedIn partners and so you'll only be working with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Apply to work with us on the contact page of B2Linked.com. We'd absolutely love to work with you.

Alright, let's jump back into it. One of the biggest challenges to advertisers is understanding the bidding and budgeting strategies around LinkedIn. Help them understand the difference between bids and budgets, and all the different types of bidding, whether maximum delivery, or manual bidding, and how all of these help control costs. And if you're not up to speed yourself, go check out episode six of this podcast that's all dedicated to bidding and budgeting. It is by far one of the table stakes for making sure that you know what you're doing on LinkedIn Ads. Once they have experienced creating campaigns, I would have them practice manually creating and launching ads. And even if you have another way of launching ads, for example, we internally we have our own bulk tool that we can vote create ads, we still have all of our trainees build them from scratch manually in the platform, just to get comfortable with what's available to you inside of campaign manager. It's also helpful just in case your tool ever breaks that they know a second way of doing it. Have them practice putting together different types of ads. So for instance, putting together a conversation ad, it's a lot more complicated than a text ad. And of course, single image ads are a little bit more complex than a text ad, but not too much. Give them practice creating and managing lead gen forms, just in case you're running any lead gen form campaigns, this will be helpful. A lot of it's just understanding how the leads flow into LinkedIn, and then how they flow to whatever CRM you're using. And episode 16 of this podcast is all about LinkedIn lead gen forms, so that can be a good resource for you to brush up on, and even assign that as required listening. You'll also want to have them practice creating conversions, in case you're doing conversion tracking on your website. And so much of what your advertising is doing is trying to convey an idea. It's trying to compel people to take whatever action you're asking. And there's a lot of psychology behind that, obviously. But the way that that rubber actually meets the road is through ad copy. So spend some time training them on how to write good ad copy. If you don't have a designer on the team, train them to use basic graphic design tools, like Canva, or even something a little bit more advanced like Photoshop, if you have access to that we find Canva is usually plenty for creating a basic ad, like a single image ad. And even if it doesn't actually end up being in use, it's a good idea just to have them create copies, so they know how it all works. You'll want to teach them organization and account structure, train them on ad performance and data analysis. That's looking at the performance of your different campaigns of your different ads and trying to understand what works and what doesn't. You'll want them to understand both natively in LinkedIn, how to assess performance, as well as exporting that performance out into Excel and doing spreadsheet based reporting. You want to establish with them a testing strategy and a cadence. How often are you testing things? How do you know when a test is finished? Episode 57 of the podcast goes all over a testing strategy. So that would be a good one to review yourself, as well as assigned to your training. You also know what good performance looks like in your own account. So train them on what the optimization process looks like, what benchmarks to compare against, and what they should be looking for, for good performance and where they should be looking for bad performance to turn it around. So figure out what do you yourself care about when you look at it inside the account? And how do you spot those things? Teach them how to scroll through in campaign manager and find dips in performance or optimization opportunities. Make a list of what changes you tend to make in an account. Are you mostly refreshing ad creative? Are you testing new ads? Are you constantly testing new offers? These are great things to train your account manager on. As someone who's done a lot of training, I highly recommend that you come back every so often, and quiz them as to what you're talking about, just so that they can't just nod their heads and say that they're getting it, but they're not actually getting it. Because it's not in their best interest to just glaze over and miss what you're teaching. And it's certainly not in your best interest either. So make sure you're quizzing them along the way. And also realize you don't want to train too heavily. You want to take breaks and give time and exercise patience. Because this may seem really simple to you, because you've been doing this for a while. But for someone brand new. Like we've said, this can be like trying to take a drink out of a fully blown firehose. Give them time to ask questions, give them time to talk through theory, and then take mental breaks. So some of these concepts can sink in, then there are some things that I highly recommend as your training you're going to hammer in. So make sure that they really understand budget control, because the biggest risk that you have, if you're an agency is overspending a client's budget. And the biggest risk you have internally is also overspending your budget. In both cases, it's not a good look. Most new marketers aren't really ready for the theory yet. They're still dwelling mostly in the tactical. So don't be afraid to teach them the tactical, but give them the overall theory and teach them and clue them in as you see opportunities because that's eventually where you want them to get is understanding the theoretical and the strategic of LinkedIn Ads, so that they understand how each of those tactics that you're teaching them fit in and when they're useful. Expect that unless they're super experienced marketers, they probably won't see the whole picture yet. So coach them and try to teach them the whole picture. What I found is as your teaching tactics, it tends to be a little bit like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. But as soon as they start to understand the theory of what's going on, they'll start to get it and they'll understand and create their own tactics. But you will need lots of repetitive training and having them do basic building and basic tactics before you can really unleash more theory on that. Okay, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up so stick around.

Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

17:34 Okay, like we talked about during the episode, if you go back to episodes eight and nine, they talked about the differences between Google and LinkedIn, and Facebook, and LinkedIn. And they're great fundamental episodes. Also, Episode six is all about bidding and budgeting. You'll see that here listed in the show notes. Episode 17 is all about lead generation forms. And episode 57 is all about testing strategy. These are all great ones for both you and your training. Check the link in the show notes below for the LinkedIn Learning course that I did for LinkedIn. It's all about the basics of LinkedIn Ads. And it's a great way to get someone started on the right foot. Plus, it's extremely inexpensive, and really, really high quality. Make sure to subscribe on whatever player you're listening to. If this is your first time, welcome, welcome. We sure love having you here. And if this is not your first time, please do consider any sort of value that we've given you in the podcast. And please leave us a review on your favorite podcasting platform. It really helps. It's not just something we say. With any suggestions, questions, or even corrections about the show, reach out to us at [e-mail]. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.