AJ Wilcox

One of my favorite qualities of LinkedIn Ads is how easy it is to replicate and scale things that are working. (The same can be said for most ad platforms, as well.) I love how if I find an audience segment that is way outperforming others, I can very quickly pinpoint it and create new audiences that can capitalize on the same value. Ditto for ads and offers. My recommendation is to create campaigns that target 20,000-80,000 people on LinkedIn, (significantly fewer than what LinkedIn recommends) and break these campaigns out by a strong characteristic, like level of seniority, or industry. It makes it so much easier to spot standout characteristics that would allow you to double down and extract the most performance.

I see far too many marketers (myself included) fall into the trap of continuously testing, but never stopping to actually absorb the learnings. There is little point to running a test if you never evaluate the results and decide what you need to change in your marketing strategy.

I can't state enough how vital it is to test and optimize. Chances of you creating something incredibly viral out of the blue are extremely rare, but if you're paying attention to micro-signals of content, ads, and offers that show signs of engagement, you can quite easily capitalize on them. We have so much data from ad platforms about what's working and what's not, and from my experience, it really just takes focused time in Excel to find the results of your testing and plan a path to further optimization.

One little-known trick for outreach is to target these prospects with ads to help warm them up. Once your ads have reached the prospect for a month or two, they're a lot more likely to reply to outreach. You can do this very effectively with LinkedIn Ads by uploading a list of prospect emails as a Matched Audience, and then target those individuals with ads to warm them up.

One of the best things about being a podcast host is being able to align yourself with high-caliber professionals in a way that you might normally be in the same league with. You work hard to gain an audience that elevates you and has come to know/like/trust you, and you get to share that audience with your guest as they share their hard-earned knowledge. It's a beautiful trade that benefits both parties extremely well.

As a guest, and as a host, this has been so valuable to my brand and business. I've had times where I was a guest, and was so impressed with the host and their product/service that I became their customer. And vice versa, as a guest, I've then been brought in by the host for advertising projects. I would suggest that the goal in bringing a guest on should NOT be to sell them something, but it's excellent if it happens naturally.