How to Turn LinkedIn into a B2B Lead Machine – Anthony Blatner Explains

John Jantsch (00:00.924)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Anthony Blatner. He is the founder of Speedwork Social, a leading LinkedIn ads agency that helps B2B companies generate high quality leads, close enterprise deals and scale revenue using advanced paid media strategies. With a background in software and enterprise sales, Anthony has helped hundreds of businesses from SaaS startups to Fortune 500s, leverage, link.

ends robust targeting and analytics for measurable results. So Anthony, welcome to the show.

Anthony Blatner (00:35.564)

Hey, John, thanks for having me. Excited to be here and talk about LinkedIn marketing.

John Jantsch (00:37.382)

So you bet. let’s just start the basics. mean, what makes LinkedIn ads uniquely valuable? You mentioned B2B specifically for B2B markers compared to other social ad platforms.

Anthony Blatner (00:50.764)

Yeah, the biggest thing about LinkedIn is the audience. Number one, who visits LinkedIn compared to who visits other platforms. It’s definitely the professional audience. Everyone starts by creating their LinkedIn usually when they’re entering the job market. So that’s where it starts. Some people never updated after that, but a lot of people do along their career path. And it’s also evolved into more of a social platform now.

on the business, a lot of it on the business professional side. So number one’s audience. And then number two is just pure how you can target people because people start with using it as their resume, their job titles, their companies, those company pages are all, that data is there. It’s all filled out pretty up to date. So having those ways of target people based on job title, company, industry, company size, those options like don’t exist on.

almost any other platform. it’s a great way to be able to target those types of professionals. So if you’re a B2B company looking to target a niche professional, then LinkedIn usually has the best options for you.

John Jantsch (01:53.712)

Are there industries or types of offers that do particularly well on LinkedIn that you’ve seen?

Anthony Blatner (01:59.852)

Yeah, there’s a wide variety. I’d say overall it’s like who visits LinkedIn the most and it is mostly like the tech oriented industries, the more digitally active industries. Those are the most active. So tech software SaaS is like the biggest one. After that, it’s a lot of the marketers out there. So the marketing industry is big and active on LinkedIn. And then past that, a lot of it’s…

John Jantsch (02:02.076)

Yeah.

Anthony Blatner (02:25.484)

Like the recruiting industry, HR is very big on LinkedIn because they’re doing a lot of that recruiting. A lot of those people, you know, spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. so then you get into industries like that. and that said these days, it’s always like interesting when we have a very niche audience and we build it out and size it up, how many people we can find. and then on LinkedIn, but then pass that just depends on the activity level of that audience.

industries that tend to be more of like working in the field industries. They might not be as active. So definitely the tech software and then the marketing folks.

John Jantsch (02:59.25)

So I’ll be honest, I have a lot of people that come to me and say, I’ve tried LinkedIn, I can’t make it work. And it’s really expensive. I’m guessing they’re probably just going on there and just doing whatever the easy button is to set up an ad or something. Are you finding that there’s a campaign structure or type that delivers consistently and maybe without spending too much time, we ought to identify kind of the various options on LinkedIn. But are you finding like right now today, this campaign structure really works?

Anthony Blatner (03:29.388)

Yes. So there’s kind of two, two ones that are the main ones, the winning ones right now that I recommended most people to start with. but before I get into that, you’re definitely right. People get onto LinkedIn, they try the ads platform and they will see much higher CPMs and CPCs than other platforms. So when you compare it with like Facebook or other advertising platforms, like your costs are going to look a lot higher.

John Jantsch (03:54.182)

Mm-hmm.

Anthony Blatner (03:54.23)

And then the challenge is most people will just, you know, if they’re not familiar with the platform, they’re just going to set it up, use the default settings, click launch, just like they would on Facebook or Google. But a lot of those default settings aren’t great for your small to medium sized business. They’re more built for enterprise businesses. So you might.

John Jantsch (04:12.498)

Or for LinkedIn to make a lot of money.

Anthony Blatner (04:15.283)

Yes, yes. know, ad platforms are in the business of them, you know, making money themselves. So a lot of those default settings aren’t, aren’t serving, you know, the small to medium sized business. So we usually recommend changing a lot of those initial settings because somebody might set up a campaign, click launch, and then you then find out your budget didn’t reach who you really wanted it to reach due to audience expansion options. And then it didn’t serve exactly where you wanted it to. It served more on third party websites, part of the ad network.

of LinkedIn because of the default option. So you spent your money, you didn’t reach who you wanted, you didn’t serve your ads where you wanted. So of course you didn’t get any good results out of it. So that’s the most common scenario of what, when we review accounts. So when you use the right settings, you can reach the right professionals and, you know, drive some results. And the main two things right now, the main two things in general that work, the first one is kind of more the traditional one, B2B.

sales takes a long time. So it’s not going to be like selling widgets on Facebook, be an e-commerce store. Someone’s probably not going to click and buy right away. So you kind of have to plan for the long game. You might to start that.

interaction, you might offer what we call a lead magnet, which is like a guide or report. You might get somebody to sign up for a webinar, sign up for a newsletter. What’s that stepping stone to start it on the way to making a purchase? And you might then retarget them to then offer them a demo or a consultation afterwards. first one is lead with value. Lead magnets and lead generation campaigns are always a good way to do that. Those are always, you know, it’s kind of a traditional tactic.

The newer one is what we call thought leader ads. And this is just the boosting of posts of people on LinkedIn. So you’ll post on LinkedIn from your profile. And as of maybe about a year ago, now you can boost posts from people. So we just see that these perform so much better than a traditional company ad because people are on LinkedIn to hear from other people, not to read ads from companies. They’re there to hear from other people. So those do…

John Jantsch (06:20.178)

So walk me through that a little bit. that similar to, would you actually have some sort of arrangement with that thought leader to where they would write a post that’s maybe favorable to something you’re trying to push, almost like an influencer would, you know, in other platforms?

Anthony Blatner (06:36.245)

Yes. Yeah. And you can set up like, you know, external influencers, but probably step one is you yourself or people in your company or your CEO and founder. that’s, that’s usually the, it’s just called thought leader ads is the name of what the ad unit is. So most companies are going to start with their founder, CEO or themselves. And then.

John Jantsch (06:46.031)

I see.

John Jantsch (06:50.063)

Okay, okay.

Anthony Blatner (06:56.363)

I mean, nowadays, yes, lots of people are setting up arrangements with third party influencers and doing those kind of, you know, sponsored deals. yeah, stuff one is like your CEO, founder. And then like, you know, there’s a lot of content. You think about it a little bit differently where it’s like, what is somebody going to post that somebody wants, that their prospect wants to read and then starts that interaction. So what we see work very well.

across the board, like different industries have different things that are going to work in different companies, but across the board, it’s like a really good case study is a great way to kind of start that because people are on LinkedIn to learn from others and learn how they can do better at their job or in their company. So often they want to read successful case studies by similar companies, similar people. So that’s a great content format to start with. So if you have really strong case studies, write that as a

John Jantsch (07:32.018)

Mm-hmm.

Anthony Blatner (07:51.382)

as a post and you do have to write it up like, hey, I’m going to teach you something, read this. And then if you are interested in what we did, you can contact me, you can click here to learn more, and then you can kind of continue the journey from there. we just see that those get so much higher engagement rates and LinkedIn reports on dwell time, which means people are, and we get those stats so we can see people are sitting there and reading that content two to three times longer than a traditional company ad. So it just shows like people are reading this content, they’re absorbing it and like that’s what we want out of marketing.

John Jantsch (08:21.222)

Yeah. So is there any secret sauce to targeting? You know, you’ve got all the selects that they give you seniority, company size, job title, all those kinds of things. But I still feel like that doesn’t get narrow enough. know, are you, are there targeting mistakes that you commonly see or are there, I guess I’m asking this two ways. How do people make mistakes and then like, how do people succeed? What’s the secret sauce?

Anthony Blatner (08:45.163)

Yes, there’s a lot of sauces and lots of flavors on LinkedIn. But it starts with number one is that what I told you earlier of like, don’t use the default settings because default it says audience expansion and like even Facebook and Google try to do the same thing. I think there’s might be a little more clear sometimes, but you know, on LinkedIn, when you’re selling B2B, you usually want to target a very specific professional at a very specific type of company. So when you have, when you allow the algorithm to go find similar people, suddenly you’ve made a couple hops in our

not in the industry and job you want to be reaching. So that’s number one. From there, secret sauces are, we usually start with like audience research. Give me a few of your best customers or a few of your target customers. Let’s go download their, you know, look at their profiles. What, how do they categorize themselves? What are the job titles? What are the industry’s company sizes? And then we’ll build a demographic profile from that of who we want to target.

John Jantsch (09:16.144)

Yeah. Yeah.

Anthony Blatner (09:41.014)

And then the way to kind of take that a step further is to get more niche into what are the skills or interests or groups on top of that. When you do Facebook and Google advertising, often you give it a very big audience and you let the algorithm go find the right person for you. Lincoln’s algorithm, you know, isn’t as advanced as these other platforms, but we also don’t need it to be. just, we don’t want the algorithm to do any work for us. We want to

We want to have the campaigns reach exactly who we want. So don’t give it very broad, very big audiences, give it very small and niche audiences of exactly who you want to reach. And then past that, kind of the most advanced thing that we often recommend is to build your own company lists when appropriate, when you can do that. There’s a lot of third party data platforms out there that can be useful, but also if you’re, you know, if you’re

If you know your industry, you can sit down and often like write that list yourself or have a BDR salesperson write that list. And then can upload that to LinkedIn and make sure you’re going after the exact companies you want. Because not always, there isn’t always a LinkedIn industry definition for the exact industry you want to reach. And sometimes you have to make your own list.

So, what am I saying?

John Jantsch (11:00.786)

So how do you, okay, no, no, no. think just, you know, we’re obviously we’ve got 20 minutes. We’re not gonna teach everybody all the ins and outs, but I think just what you’ve said at a high level certainly ought to at least put people on notice about how they need to be thinking. So let’s talk a little bit about budgets. I’m sure you have some clients that, you know, have been used to paying, you know, $1.17 for a click on Facebook and all of a sudden see $6 on LinkedIn. Obviously it all comes down to ROI.

Does that $6 produce better than the $1.17? How do you make the economics work? How do you do the reporting so that you can make a case for saying, this is money well spent?

Anthony Blatner (11:44.876)

Yeah. So number one, does start with having higher costs as a platform. Just, you do have to have a high enough LTV for that ROI to make sense in the end. So you’re probably not going to be selling kind of small widgets or very cheap services. If you do, you would just stick to the organic side of the platform. You probably wouldn’t spend too much on ads or maybe your ads are just retargeting people who are already visiting your website. So you use stuff like that.

But yeah, you need to have a high enough LTV for that ROI to make sense. So usually we say you want to have at least 15K of your LTV. So this is more enterprise level software, more, you know, bigger ongoing services. So if you know like, Hey, you know, maybe I do client services and on average, your client sticks with us for a year and we make 20K from that client. Great. You’re a good fit.

John Jantsch (12:26.81)

Mm-hmm.

Anthony Blatner (12:38.381)

If you’re 10K or lower, 15K or lower, then you just want to be a little more careful of making sure your stats are working out and that you are keeping clients or retaining clients. So that’s usually what we say to people. That line I’d say is moving a little bit with the new Thought Leader ads. The other advantage is they get so much higher engagement rate and people sit there and read it to all time like I talked about, which then allows you to get cheaper costs on your ads.

Like every other ad platform, they want to be delivering content that the user, their user wants to engage with that keeps them on the platform. So if your content is getting very high engagement rate, that’s a good sign for the platform. They give you a discount on your ad costs. Inversely, if your content does not get much engagement, not many clicks and stuff, then they charge you a premium. So it’s all playing that game. So with Thought Leader Ads, does allow you to get higher engagement rates, get cheaper costs, and then

You know, your, your LTV could be lower than if you’re having good thought leader campaign running because Hey, maybe you are getting cause like to give you some benchmarks is you said six bucks, but I’d say the average LinkedIn click is like 10 to 15 bucks for a standard company page ad. So that’s expensive. Um, so yeah, you just need to make sure your ROI is, is going to work out there with the thought leader ad. If you are getting very high engagement, we see thought leader ads get one to $2.

John Jantsch (13:38.226)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (13:46.875)

Okay.

Anthony Blatner (14:00.749)

per click and then you are comparable with a Facebook ad and maybe even better than a Facebook ad. Some of the best ones we’re running right now are below a dollar per click and are just crushing the Facebook results that they’re getting on Facebook because we have the targeting we want on LinkedIn. So kind of all comes down to this.

John Jantsch (14:00.914)

Okay.

John Jantsch (14:18.126)

You mentioned something I want to circle back to you, retargeting. Can you, do they have the similar pixel idea that you can actually put on your website and then you, can you run only retargeting ads? So somebody’s come to your website, now they hopped over to LinkedIn, now they’re going to see your ad. Yeah.

Anthony Blatner (14:33.355)

Yeah, definitely. The two things are most common is website retargeting. yeah, same pixel, very similar to like Metis pixel. It’ll track who visits your website and then retarget those people. And then also people who visit your company page. You can retarget those people as well. Company pages rank very well in Google. So often we’ll see, you already have a good amount of traffic to your company page. People are already visiting. Let’s start by retargeting.

John Jantsch (14:40.476)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (14:58.172)

So one of the things that it seems like almost all the social platforms are doing, you used to run an ad and you’d drive people to a landing page, but now they’ve all come up with their own sort of lead capture form and they seem to be encouraging people to use their forms. Do you see that to be true or do you have something that you recommend one way or the other?

Anthony Blatner (15:19.239)

Yeah. So I still, there’s still cases for both. We, I do often recommend the LinkedIn forms because you’re just, your CPLs are going to be better, much better than having somebody click off to a website, submit a form there. And when you’re already paying LinkedIn’s higher prices, you just, need that math to make better sense for you. So you do use LinkedIn’s forms a lot. You know, your average executive might not spend too much time.

John Jantsch (15:29.904)

Yeah.

Anthony Blatner (15:46.062)

clicking off to a website, reading a bunch, finding the form, submitting it. So let’s just make that an easy process. But with the Thought Leader ads, you can’t use the native form. So we do still use landing pages a lot with Thought Leader ads. But then again, the benefit of those, you get cheaper cost per clicks. So you can get cheaper cost per clicks to your landing page.

John Jantsch (16:08.434)

How do you handle ad creative and copy? You know, it’s not quite the same as, you’re not gonna have a reel or a video or something in an ad, I suspect. is there, have you kind of cracked what? And again, having said this, answer, whatever you answer, I know that like it’s two months from now, might be a different answer. But what are you finding that’s working right now from a creative and copy standpoint?

Anthony Blatner (16:28.982)

Right.

Anthony Blatner (16:33.611)

Yeah. And it’s interesting, like LinkedIn continues to evolve and in a way we see it getting closer to like a, to a Facebook and the style of creative people are using. I think just as it matures as a social platform, the more people use it, you know, we see what, what we see, gets human attention on Metta and human attention is on LinkedIn too. So it works on LinkedIn. So we’re seeing more of that style start to bleed into LinkedIn. That’s also to say like B2B

John Jantsch (16:37.127)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:57.382)

Yeah.

Anthony Blatner (17:01.951)

Creative could always use like some spicing up. So we don’t mind some of that You know the the creative style a couple things I usually recommend number one is You don’t want to go too far into the Facebook side of things where like Facebook marketing tends to be very flashy get someone’s attention draw them in get the click on LinkedIn you want to be more clear and direct who is this for and what are you offering because Even with Lincoln’s good targeting, you know

John Jantsch (17:05.362)

Yeah

Anthony Blatner (17:30.161)

You still will have an audience and not everyone in that audience is a perfect fit So you want to you want to reduce the unintentional? Untargeted clicks again back to those expensive prices if somebody isn’t a perfect fit You don’t want to just grab their attention to get them to click on something that’s not relevant And then you paid 15 bucks for that click. So you want to make sure you’re getting targeted clicks. We do keep creative a little more Clear and direct under who who are we talking to? What are we offering so that we get the most clear?

John Jantsch (17:40.945)

Mm-hmm.

Anthony Blatner (17:58.628)

get the most targeted traffic that does come through.

John Jantsch (18:01.83)

Yeah, it is interesting. You’re seeing the culture, if you will, change a little on LinkedIn. I mean, it used to be people would actually give people crap for posting personal stuff on LinkedIn, you know, and, now it’s like, no, it’s, it’s definitely become a more, I mean, it is a lot of business stuff there, but you definitely see people posting, you know, more personal types of things there as well, don’t you?

Anthony Blatner (18:09.929)

Yeah.

Anthony Blatner (18:21.141)

Yeah. And I think, I think there’s like a benefit to that too. You know, it doesn’t need to be all just business. It’s nice to get to know people a little bit. so I do appreciate that type of.

John Jantsch (18:24.006)

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m curious how is, AI has impacted every industry. I’m curious how it’s impacting what you’re doing for folks on LinkedIn.

Anthony Blatner (18:38.893)

Yeah. AI on social is a whole can of worms. I’d say like right now, the thing that LinkedIn does need to figure out is the, there are a lot of AI comments that get left on things. And like, can just, most of the time you can tell like that’s an AI comment. That’s an AI comment. I know they’re taking steps in the right direction. It’s a hard problem to solve because, you know, sometimes it’s hard to tell when someone’s really commenting. Thanks versus AI. Thanks.

John Jantsch (18:55.762)

100%.

Anthony Blatner (19:08.683)

But, you know, think they’re, I think they’re taking steps in right direction. They just, that needs to be figured out because there is some fluff and spam with that. And not to say it’s any better on Facebook, like if anything is worse on Facebook. So there’s like the authenticity aspect. And I think, you know, when you’re buying something for your business, when you’re spending more money, people are going to critique it, analyze it more before they make that purchase. So I don’t know, you know,

John Jantsch (19:18.203)

Okay.

Anthony Blatner (19:38.463)

Right now, like AI generated videos aren’t super useful or effective because there’s no authenticity to that. People don’t trust that content. So it doesn’t, doesn’t work. So it’ll, it’s interesting, you know, we’ll see what happens. Sure. AI copy that’s helpful for marketers. It’s helpful for everyone to create content. Sometimes you’re in niche industries and it’s hard to, you know, it takes a lot of time to learn that industry. So you’ll use AI to help you write that content or

John Jantsch (19:46.406)

Yeah.

Anthony Blatner (20:06.583)

Ticker content, that’s all beneficial. So very early days, we’ll see what what happens with it.

John Jantsch (20:12.518)

I certainly like it for testing. If you’re trying to run 27 versions of an ad to figure out what’s going to work, it’s pretty good at doing that type of work. So, Antony, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there somewhere you’d invite people to learn about your work and connect with you?

Anthony Blatner (20:33.773)

You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m the only Anthony Blattner on LinkedIn. And I try to talk a lot about LinkedIn ads, LinkedIn marketing, always sharing best practices. So that’s the number one place just on LinkedIn. And then past that, we have a podcast, LinkedIn ads radio that we share all LinkedIn best practices. And then our website speedworksocial.com if you want help with your LinkedIn.

John Jantsch (20:57.306)

Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Anthony Blatner (21:02.754)

Sounds good, thanks for having me.

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