[Fully Managed] AJ Wilcox from B2Linked Ep. 105

Introduction

Daniella (D): Hello everybody. Welcome to the Fully Managed Podcast. This is the podcast where we discuss marketing, business tips, and so many other cool tips to help assist you with your business journeys. I’m your host Daniella, and I’m Penji’s partnership coordinator, and I’m joined with a very special guest today, AJ Wilcox.

AJ Wilcox (AW): Hi Daniella. Thanks so much for having me. I’m so excited for this.

D: I’m so excited to have you as well. You’ve been a long-time friend of ours at Penji and you are also the founder of B2Linked. So for anybody who is not familiar with that, with what that is, with what you do, can you give us a little bit of a rundown of who you are?

AW: Yeah, so this happened about 14 years ago. I went into a company as a search engine optimization specialist and a Google Ads guy and ended up without any of my own choice in the matter, I kind of got thrown into advertising on LinkedIn. I didn’t know anything about it. It ended up becoming the very best marketing channel for this company. I ended up growing it to become LinkedIn’s largest spending ads account 14 years ago, and after running that account for a few years, I went, there have to be more companies than just this one that would be successful on LinkedIn ads. And so just over 10 years ago, I started B2Linked. We’re very simply an ad agency that LinkedIn ads is our deep specialty. It’s all we do. And absolutely love it. Every aspect element of LinkedIn advertising, it’s what I live and breathe.

Specializing in LinkedIn Advertising

D: Amazing. I think what’s really interesting about your specific sort of agency is that you are very niched down to LinkedIn advertising. I’ve spoken to a lot of different people who have sort of, you know, they’ll do digital marketing, SEO and I think those are a little bit more broad because there’s so much that you could do with SEO and digital marketing, like what does that actually entail? And I think LinkedIn advertising is very specific, like advertising on LinkedIn, which actually makes me wonder what brought you to this niche? Why did it become the most lucrative one? How did you end up focusing specifically on this?

AW: Well, it was so interesting. I’ve always had a little bit of an attraction to entrepreneurship. I never really thought that I would be able to take the step out on my own. Earlier on in my career, I really fell in love with search engine optimization. I would go to conferences and I would see people up on stage speaking. Rand Fishkin is the one who comes to mind. He did so great. He was speaking at every conference that I would attend and I was like, I want to be him when I grow up. The deeper I went into search engine optimization, SEO, and I started pitching conferences, I realized I wasn’t early enough into the industry. There were a hundred people who were just as deep in expertise as I was. They were the ones who were gonna get asked to speak. I realized I probably wasn’t gonna have much of a platform. I was just gonna be one voice in a sea of voices. As soon as I started seeing a lot of success using LinkedIn ads at this previous company, the light bulb went on for me and I went, oh, this is a niche that no one cares about, no one is serving, hardly anyone knows about. There’s a real opportunity that I could go and become the world’s expert at this one thing. Even if this thing is very niche, very narrow, if it could still support my family, it might be worth pursuing. And it turned out it was.

D: Amazing. I was talking to a guest in another episode about how we were talking about AI and how AI is sort of taking over jobs and stuff like that, and people’s concerns. When I asked her what do you think people should do to sort of preserve their jobs, she said, you need to become an expert on this really niche thing. And it’s literally what you just described. You were in this very, very niched down thing of LinkedIn ads. That’s so specific, but it’s true because you are the expert on something that not a lot of people know. SEO a lot of people know, search engines, a lot of people know, paid ads, but not everybody knows about how to do that on LinkedIn. So it totally makes sense.

AW: It totally worked. I agree. I’ve heard this phrase, the riches are in the niches before and it can be kind of surprising because someone would go, well, I don’t want to specialize around something that not a lot of people know about or not a lot of people use. But if I would’ve just gone and started just another SEO agency or just another digital marketing agency, it would’ve taken me so long to gain a foothold in a market and to become well-known. But as soon as I became the only one who was talking about LinkedIn ads for 10 years, it was so easy. People would go, oh, AJ Wilcox, he’s the LinkedIn ads guy. Even though the market wasn’t huge, I was able to become well-known and associated with it very quickly. I think that’s the best thing when you’re first starting a business is get people to associate you with your expertise.

D: I think as long as there is a market, even if that market might not be very obvious, you’re setting yourself up for success because people are gonna wanna know about it, right?

AW: Exactly. Even if it takes several years for this to become a big deal, if you’re really confident that your niche is gonna become a big deal, you can be creating content for years. You can be the one who’s written the book on it, the one who’s created the courses around it, the one who has a podcast on it. It gives you a lot of time to build up a defensible position where no one else can push you over.

D: That’s how a lot of these bigger things have been built, with pioneering things that at the moment didn’t make sense. Like influencer culture started with random people making YouTube videos. It evolved into a money-making machine. Or Amazon, which started as an e-commerce website for books and became huge. If you’re doing something when nobody’s doing it, it’s giving you leverage because one day it might become more popular or famous, and then you’ll be at the forefront.

AW: Amen. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Challenges of Starting and Scaling

D: Actually, I wanted to ask you about what challenges were you facing when you started doing this? I think whilst it’s great to start something that’s niche and not a lot of people are familiar with, it can also bring forth a lot of problems because a lot of people are gonna think that they don’t need it. You’re not gonna find a lot of people that are gonna help you with it. I wonder what your challenges were. How did you make this actually profitable for yourself and continue to grow it for 10 years?

AW: I think when I very first started, I knew that I wanted to start a business that helped people with LinkedIn advertising because that was my skill. What maybe didn’t make itself manifest to me was that owning a company is a lot more than just providing your service. I realized, oh, well now I have to go and be a sales guy and sell my service, and I have to be a marketer. I have to do my own accounting and finance. Then as I hire members of my team, now I have to be a manager and mentor, HR. That was one of the biggest challenges I faced. Now I have to wear seven different hats and all of these things take time. How do I balance them so I’m selling enough to get a pipeline built so that I can have enough clients? Then when one of those leaves, I have someone else to replace them. That was probably my biggest challenge.

D: I actually talk to a lot of business owners who tell me that has always been the biggest challenge, which is just learning how to balance it all. Another thing that I’ve heard is actually giving control when you start getting teams. I’ve heard people struggle with that because it’s like your baby and you don’t want to let it go. You think that, or you want to believe that you have the say-all, do-all for everything. For a lot of people, it’s really hard to sort of say, okay, no, you can make this decision.

AW: It’s true. If I’m really good at so many of the things that I do, and when I hire someone to do them, I realize they’re probably only going to be able to do it maybe 80% of the way that I would do it. That decision probably happened like a year or two into business because I held onto that baby for so long. Eventually, when I said I am okay with someone doing it 80% as well as I could have and sending that to the client, I’m okay with that. I don’t need to look at it and review it and correct it. One of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make. I made it with how we do work with our clients. I made it for handling sales in the company. I’ve done it with handing any task that I’ve ended up handing to another employee. I’ve had to give away that baby. Honestly, it’s gotten easier over time, but that first two or three times you do it, it’s a really difficult decision.

D: I guess when it’s personal to you, it’s different when it’s not your job. I guess when it’s just a job that you’re doing for someone else and it benefits you into just doing it, and then when it’s something that you have poured your heart and soul into, of course, it would be a lot harder to let go.

AW: So true.

D: I’ve also heard that scaling is really difficult. This is also something that happens in the process of scaling. I’ve talked to someone who told me they were selling a product e-commerce and the product ended up doing so well that they wanted to set up an actual store. They were scaling really big and it was super hard because they thought they had figured it out, but they had figured it out like how to sell through Instagram. They hadn’t actually taken that leap to moving it from a social media platform to an actual store. Then the store is a whole other world. I remember she told me she had to learn like she was starting from scratch because she went from one thing to this other thing and how to have these two things coexist. In your case, was that something that you had to struggle with? Were you prepared for it or do you think that it was a pretty easy, smooth ride?

AW: Oh, not smooth at all. This is one of the hardest things I’ve had to deal with. What I did when I very first started, I realized I needed help but I couldn’t afford someone full-time. I went, oh, I have a good relationship with the university I went to. What if instead of hiring one full-time person, I hire two interns that are part-time? Amazing, right? What I found was everything was fine. I now had to train two people rather than one, but it was working fine until midterm exams and final exams came up. Then that was twice per semester when my employees vanished, and I was left with everything in my own lap again, as if I didn’t have any help. That was challenge number one. Because of that, I started hiring full-time employees who I knew weren’t gonna desert me several times a year. Then I got into this, hey, having one or two people work for me and we work together, that’s working well. Let’s scale up to the point where I now have directors underneath me who are managing the account managers and they’re managing advertising accounts. As I kept scaling that direction, profit kept going down, client churn kept going up. This doesn’t make me look very good, but honestly, I’ve gotten to a point where I don’t know what to do to scale because I tried. That ended up to the point where the organization got so bloated and clients weren’t receiving the value that I ended up having to lay off about half the team and go back to where I am handling so much of the client communication. I’m now the point of contact and I have the team supporting me. I would sure love to figure that out to become a bigger agency. But for right now, I’m happy being small and just extremely profitable.

D: That’s great though. I think it’s a journey to figuring out what works for you. As long as you keep it sort of stable, that’s already a feat in and of itself. I’ve spoken to a lot of business owners and people who are aspiring business owners where their biggest concern is to make their business actually profitable. That’s the biggest thing. You see so many people who are juggling a nine to five whilst they’re trying to launch a business, and they’re not letting go of that nine to five because they’re scared that…

AW: Yep.

Balancing Stability and Side Hustles

D: They’re not gonna make ends meet, which is totally realistic. I mean, we’re living in a really difficult economy. It makes sense if you’re married, you have children, you have responsibilities, you have rents to pay and bills to pay, that you’re gonna concern yourself with stuff like that. So I think the fact that you’ve been able to do that and also just sort of reel it in is amazing because not everybody can do that. I think it’s a really big concern for aspiring business owners.

AW: Oh, and to that point, I would say I am so jealous of someone who gets to work a nine to five and then plan their side hustle and then turn it into a business and then gradually switch over. The reason I was free to start up this business is because I was part of a layoff and I didn’t have that. I had ideas of like, hey, if I ever wanted to do my own thing, this might be what it is. But so jealous of someone who is able to still handle that. I know it has its own challenges, but if you’re in that position, you’re building something up right now while you’re fully employed, I’m so proud of you. Keep that going. I’m jealous.

D: Oh my gosh, me too. I feel like I’ve tried to do side hustles with main jobs and it’s exhausting. When you’re working full time and you have a lot of stuff, you’re overwhelmed with your normal job and then you have these other things. I feel like it’s the last thing I’m gonna do at 6:00 PM when I just got out of the office is go to another job. Thinking that someone is doing that is really commendable.

AW: That’s a hustle for someone who is very young and maybe doesn’t have a fully fleshed out family yet. I can’t imagine doing it now.

D: Yeah, it’s like a hustle for someone who just has a goal in mind.

AW: Yes.

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Effectiveness of LinkedIn Ads

D: Now I also wanted to ask you more in terms of the actual advertising and what your agency is doing. LinkedIn ads are used in what industry mostly? Would you say they’re more lucrative, they’re more successful, or do you think that it really can be used in any situation and it just depends on how you do it?

AW: Such a good question. LinkedIn is unique because it lets you target your ads by who someone is professionally. This lends itself most to business-to-business companies because most B2B companies you talk to, they’ll say, oh, we make a product or a service for a very specific kind of person. We can’t buy a billboard to announce it to everyone because only half of a percent of the people who pass by that billboard are part of our target audience. That’s what makes LinkedIn so amazing. LinkedIn really has a monopoly on our business data, making it really good to target. The big challenge that we have is that LinkedIn has always been expensive for advertising. If you compare it to Google, especially if you compare it to Meta on a cost per click basis, it’s probably two to three times more expensive to advertise on LinkedIn. What I’ve decided is if you can define who your ideal target audience is by who they are professionally and there’s no other way to do it, then I think LinkedIn is great. But just realize you also want to make sure that the lifetime value of earning a customer is sizable to be able to pay for the advertising that we pay a premium for upfront. To put an actual number to that, I’ve said if you have a lifetime value of $10,000 or more from your product or service, whatever industry, then LinkedIn ads is probably a no-brainer. It’s likely gonna work if you do it right. But if you don’t have that kind of lifetime value, maybe LinkedIn ads is gonna be too expensive.

D: Pricing is always huge and I wonder, how do you feel about comparing it to other platforms, aside from things like pricing? Audience-wise, do you think that LinkedIn is better or has a more responsive audience than you would in, say, Google Ads or social media platforms? Or do you think it’s pretty much the same because LinkedIn is so different from other platforms? I think LinkedIn is very much focused on the corporate and job life, right?

AW: That is one thing that’s really nice about running LinkedIn ads. If your ad shows up on LinkedIn, you know something about that user. You know they’re probably thinking about their job and their career and it puts them in this great mindset. When they see your ad that’s telling them how to do something better in their career, they’re ready for it. All else held equal, if they see the same ad on Facebook as they do on LinkedIn, I think we’re gonna have a higher conversion rate on LinkedIn. The difference then is between social platforms, yeah, LinkedIn is gonna win. But what if you start comparing it to search platforms like Google Ads and Microsoft Ads? There’s a big difference. When someone is searching for something actively on a search engine and your ad pops up, they’ve shown by their query what it is they’re looking for, and they’re ready to take some kind of an action. On social media, we’ve flipped the script. We’re advertising to people by who they are because we know their pain points, but not what it is that they’re looking for right now. That means our lead quality should be higher from LinkedIn because we’re getting more of the right people, but their intent is lower. They’re not ready to talk to your sales rep yet. We have to do a little bit more educating through ads and the sales cycle becomes longer. That’s why I think search platforms like Google Ads and LinkedIn ads work so well together because they really specialize at different areas of the sales funnel and they work really well together.

Lead Generation and LinkedIn’s Strengths

D: Do you have businesses who use LinkedIn ads for things like lead generation? Or do you think that it’s more focused on connections and partnerships?

AW: Definitely more for lead generation. What I tell people, and I don’t know if this is gonna make sense to everyone who’s listening, the traffic from LinkedIn acts like a top of funnel. The traffic acts top of funnel, but we pay for it like it’s bottom of funnel. I like to assume that everyone who’s seeing one of my LinkedIn ads is someone who’s never heard of my brand before and I’m just introducing it to them. Then I can use all the retargeting. LinkedIn has this amazing set of features where I can define exactly, if someone has done this, now show them a different ad. They’re now in the middle of my funnel or they’re now in the bottom of my funnel, and I can change what I’m asking them for. When someone’s in the bottom of my funnel, I know that they’ve had at least two strong interactions with my brand, and it’s a lot more appropriate to show them an ad that says, hey, you look ready, hop on the phone with a sales rep and let’s talk through this.

D: I assume that headhunting, because a lot of people are on LinkedIn to look for jobs, I’m assuming that a lot of LinkedIn ads are really good for that too, right?

AW: It’s interesting. Most of the spend on LinkedIn ads goes to B2B products and services. LinkedIn was really founded on recruiting, headhunting, job searching. We find that anytime that we run ads around someone’s career, new jobs, they always perform extremely well. But I would say it’s probably like 10% recruiting, 90% B2B products and services.

D: That’s so interesting because I would’ve thought that recruiting was really big and the biggest thing. When I think of LinkedIn, that’s what I think of the most. Since I’ve been on LinkedIn, I always get recruiting ads, even if I’m not actively looking for a job, even if I haven’t searched jobs in my city or whatever. I’ll just get like, oh, we think you would like this position.

AW: Wow, this is great news. It means you’re highly, highly in demand. That’s an amazing place to be in your career.

D: Well, that’s great. I didn’t know that. Apparently, because I’m always getting these suggestions and I always felt like LinkedIn really invests in the recruiting ads. I didn’t know that B2B was so big through LinkedIn ads. That was news to me.

AW: Oh yeah. As soon as you list yourself as having a manager and above seniority at a company with more than 50 employees, chances are that’s the stuff you’re gonna get. Very targeted systems, processes, and platforms that you could use to make your job better.

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LinkedIn for SaaS and Niche Industries

D: That makes a lot of sense. I also wonder if specifically SaaS companies do really well there. For SaaS companies, there’s always a messaging or communication issue because it’s very niche. A lot of times a SaaS company is most likely gonna be used in B2B service worlds. I’m guessing LinkedIn would be really great for that specific world. I had no idea. Like you said, LinkedIn ads are so niched down that I had never really given it much thought. I just would get the recruiting ads and I’d be like, oh yeah, LinkedIn ads.

AW: Yep. I would say probably at this point 60% of our clients are SaaS software. I can tell you SaaS has its own unique challenges, but definitely it’s a great fit for LinkedIn ads.

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Real-World Example: Successful LinkedIn Ad Strategy

D: Amazing. I could totally imagine that. Now I have one last question, which is I just want to know about a real-world example where you shared or did something with a client and achieved significant results through LinkedIn ads so that anybody that’s listening can be inspired to maybe try that out.

AW: Yeah, for sure. Probably 90% of the clients that we’ve worked with historically, we’ve worked with over a thousand companies at this point, probably 90% of them have this idea of, I want to define my audiences on LinkedIn, that’s why we’re coming here, but I just want leads. I don’t want to mess with having to educate them and take all of that time and extra expense. I’m just gonna ask them directly, hey, get on a call with a sales rep. What we find is when we do that, about 99% of the time it doesn’t work. People will click on your ads because they’re curious, but as soon as you’re asking them to get on the phone with someone they don’t know, they go, oh, I’m not ready for that yet. They end up seeing really high costs.

What we did, this was a client in the healthcare space, we started setting up a three-stage funnel. We had this hypothesis that if someone is not ready to talk to our sales team yet, it means we probably are going to want several touches with them. We set up a three-stage funnel where the very first touch was just them seeing video ads. Video ads work really well here. It’s just someone from our company sharing quick value, a tip, a trick, a strategy, an industry update that you should know about. When someone has watched at least 50% of one of those videos, now we take them to the next step. The next step is something like a document or come read a blog post, or here’s more free information. Then as soon as they interact with that, they go down to an ad that says, hey, let’s talk.

What we found is that we went from having hardly any leads and it was like a $2,000 cost per lead, which was just insane, to once we worked them through three stages, their conversion rate at the bottom stage was five times higher than any other stage. Now we’re getting leads, appointments with sales reps for less than $150, which is great. They have a lifetime value of $10,000 or more. You can see how much of a return on investment they can get if their leads are $150 a piece and they’re all highly qualified because we got them directly from LinkedIn. That would be my best advice to anyone considering LinkedIn. Be prepared for a three-stage funnel. Give them multiple educational things and have a kind of soft entrance because that’s gonna win people over. In order for someone to get on a call with a sales rep, they have to know, like, and trust your brand before you even ask. Figure out what are those assets you can show people to get them to know, like, and trust you.

D: That makes sense because I think of myself, just as a person interacting with an ad, the last thing I’m gonna do is want to talk to somebody. If I’m interested in whatever I’m seeing through the advertisement, regardless of the platform, I would probably want to get on a call if I’ve really, really become interested in the service or product, then I could consider talking to someone.

AW: You’re like everyone else. You’re probably gonna do 70% of your research before ever contacting the company. You’re gonna Google them, you’re gonna look around their website, you’re gonna look at review sites. I think that’s something we need to understand as advertisers that that’s okay. There’s actually a really cool effect that we see anytime we’re running LinkedIn ads. What we tell our clients to do is on the forms on their website where people are submitting to book a sales meeting, we’ll tell them make sure to include a field there of how did you hear about us. What’s so interesting is even by running ads, they start getting leads coming from their website that say they came from Google, they say they came from Bing, but in the box they’ll say they heard about us on LinkedIn. What’s so amazing about that is our ad showed up on their screen, they went to Google, Googled the name of the website and converted there. They probably didn’t even charge us for that click. They just went around. I’m a huge fan of anytime someone is willing to convert without clicking on the ad.

D: No, and I think as consumers get smarter and more curious, that’s a lot more likely to happen.

AW: Yes.

Closing Remarks

D: AJ, it’s been great having you. Our time is up. But before we finish this, I do want to give you the space to plug anything that you want to plug or tell us. If anything that you’ve said today resonated with anyone who’s listening, if anybody’s interested in working with you, the floor is yours.

AW: Wonderful. If you go on LinkedIn, just search for my name, AJ Wilcox. You can follow me or connect with me there. I’m constantly sharing tips and tricks. That’s where I give all of my free education. Also, our website, b2linked.com. If you’re curious, you want an audit or a free quote or anything like that about what it would be like to work with us, go there, fill out the form on any of the pages, and we’ll be in touch.D: Awesome. I will be adding the links to all of this in the description of the video so that people watching the video can go and just click. And for the listeners, go to the video and you will be able to find those links. Thank you so much for doing this, AJ. And everyone else, I will see you on the next episode.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/wilcoxaj/