LinkedIn Ads Ideal Video Ads Campaign Build on a $3k Budget | Ep 135 | The LinkedIn Ads Show
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Yo, we've got a LinkedIn Ads problem. We're going to be like Vanilla Ice and solve it. So check out my hook while my DJ revolves it. On this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.
Hey, they're LinkedIn Ads fanatics and thank you, DJ, as he said, I'm AJ Wilcox, and I'm the host of the weekly podcast, the LinkedIn Ads Show, and I'm thrilled to welcome you to the show for advanced B2B marketers who are looking to achieve true pro status and master the LinkedIn Ads platform. Today we're going to walk through the first time campaign setup from one of our listeners. He needs some guidance and wants to do it right. So we're taking this as a challenge to walk you through all the structure, the thought process, and the launch, because I know that there's a lot that you're going to be able to take away and apply, even if you're not targeting the same audience.
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Okay, first off in the news, there's a new program that LinkedIn's launching called The Wire. It was announced by Penry Price, who's the VP of marketing at LinkedIn Ads. And I went ahead and linked to the announcement down in the show notes. So check that out. And so what it looks like The Wire is, are pre roll video that you're going to be able to pay for in your LinkedIn Ads. And what's interesting, I think it's going to be both pre roll and interstitial ads, but I'm not totally certain of that, but they announced publishers like Barron's, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Forbes, LinkedIn News, Market Watch, NBC Universal, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, and Yahoo Finance, to name quite a few actually. And in the example that they shared, I can't tell, but it looks like it might actually be a pre roll ad on someone else's video ad. And I reached out to LinkedIn. And I don't think that's the case. I think these are going to be pre roll videos that you pay to have insertion on, on existing high quality videos already, basically in the news, on those providers that I talked about. But I couldn't tell. I certainly hope that this won't be paying for pre roll videos on someone else's video ad because that would be a huge deterrent to us advertisers using video ads since we really rely on our creative to grab people in the first two seconds to stop the scroll, so if it's an ad that comes before our ad, and we're reliant on them having good thumb stopping creative? I don't know that that's going to work very well. But I don't think that's the case. I think it was just the example, little animated gif they had in the article.
If it works the way I think it's going to work, I think this is really cool. They talk about being able to reach buyers who are consuming more and more digital video on the platform. And I think that's way cool. I, I think a lot of people are going to want to watch video from those high quality sources.
And if we can insert video ads into it, that's a little bit more inventory. Hopefully bringing costs down, or at least bringing us more inventory.
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All right, on to the subject at hand, let's hit it. So our question today comes from Daniel Borba. He's the CEO of SparkPortal.com, which is a video agency that helps tech companies grow with better video content. I pulled that right off his LinkedIn page. He's actually located about 30 minutes away from me, here in beautiful Salt Lake City, Utah.
Alright Daniel, take it away.
"Hey, AJ. My question for your podcast is, if I have a test budget of 3, 000 and I'm trying to target B2B marketing decision makers in the software industry, uh, the last time I did an audience research, I think there's about 20, 25, 000, depending on how, How you target them. The question is, if we had a budget of 3, 000 to run a test campaign, how many campaigns should we test? And how many objectives should we test? And also how many ads should we test? And we want to have a heavy focus on, we want to use video. And so if we want to do video, how many different ad creatives we should test inside each campaign if we have to do more than one campaign? Ideally, we would like to break the campaigns by seniority . So we could do probably marketing director, Marketing VP, CMO. So three campaigns, but then we have the different angles for each one of those campaigns. But then maybe for the budget is probably an overkill to do, you know, 15 ads or five ads on each campaign. So if you can share any insight as to how you would structure a $3,000 budget test for that audience, including number of campaigns, number of ads, or whatever you can tell us. And I guess I follow up. If we set up different campaigns, should we have retargeting campaigns? So for example, one cold layer of running those ads and then because it's video, we can probably retarget them, and so then set up a funnel, so to speak. So if we have to set up different campaigns, should we set up a cold layer and then a retargeting layer?"
Alright thanks, Daniel, for asking the question. I love these real life scenarios and I'm super happy to walk you through exactly how I'd approach it.
And I hope understanding the thought process and approach is going to be valuable to all of our listeners who are looking to launch ads, even if it's in different circumstances, different audiences, whatever, you'll at least get to hear the whole thought process.
Okay, so your first question here is about how many campaigns you'd want to have if you had a 3k budget. I would recommend four, and here's why.
For any campaign that I'm running, I like to have about a thousand dollars a month for that campaign, so that it gets enough data. I find that if a campaign spends about a thousand dollars a month, It usually generates quite a bit of data and allows us to actually tell what's working and what's not. So with a 3K budget, yeah, that's three campaigns, but you heard I said four. I would suggest three main campaigns and then one additional retargeting campaign that's going to grow in budget over time, because right here at first, it's probably not going to spend very much, because you'll actually need to rebuild those retargeting audiences so. Maybe you have three campaigns who are all going to spend, let's say, 900. And then your fourth campaign, maybe it gets a few hundred to start out.
Then you asked about the number of objectives. Like we talked about in episode 101, there are three different objectives that you can use when you're running video ads. When you want people to actually consume the video, I recommend going with video views as your objective. But when the video is just what I would call a decoration, and you really just want to get people to visit your landing page, use website visits. It's by far the cheapest way to get someone to actually click on your landing page. And then if your objective is really anywhere in between, if you want a bit of a mix, where you're gonna get some good video engagement and some good clicks, then engagement as your objective is gonna cut right through the middle and give a little bit of both.
And Daniel, just knowing that you're a video producer, I'm going to guess that your videos are absolute fire, and you'll probably be the most interested in your prospects consuming them, watching as much of the video as possible. So, I'd probably suggest exclusively going with video views as your objective.
All right, so how many ads? This is a really difficult question to answer. We covered it a little bit in episode 134 about the effect of what happens when you have lots of ads, what it does to your frequency caps, and your costs. But I would say start out with two video creatives to test against each other, unless you happen to have a ton of different creatives that you want to work through and test.
But don't be afraid to have up to four, maybe two to four creatives. If you have that much content should be great.
For your campaign breakout. I actually really like what you suggested about breaking out by seniority. I would do exactly like you suggested. I would have one campaign that's marketing job function with the director seniority. The next campaign would be the marketing job function with a VP seniority. And the third one would be marketing job function with the C level seniority, CXO, and that's going to micro segment your whole marketing decision maker audience into three separate campaigns, so you can measure very specifically how do VPs react compared to directors. And how do directors compare to CMOs? This is going to be a great way for you to monitor those audiences and control costs. And I would suggest putting the same exact ads, your same AB test, in all three of those campaigns. You could certainly come up with different ads based off of someone's role, but honestly, we've done this a lot. It's a lot of work to come up with separate creative just based off of the role, and you have no idea if it'll pay off to actually go and spend the time to customize those ads, especially if you don't have a baseline yet to compare against.
And then you asked about retargeting. Yes, you should definitely do retargeting based on the engagement of these campaigns. I'd recommend creating retargeting audiences Based off of anyone who's watched at least 50 percent of the videos that are in your cold stage campaigns And then don't forget this because everyone does, immediately go and exclude those audiences from your cold stage campaigns.
What this does is it kicks your audience members out of the audience as soon as they engage with the cold stage. So because they're not cold anymore.
Then that same retargeting audience that you just excluded from your cold campaigns, go and create a middle of funnel campaign where that becomes your exact targeting. And voila, you now have a two stage funnel setup. Repeat the same process to create a bottom of funnel campaign, if you want to end up with a three stage funnel.
And feel free to repeat the same process to create a third stage, a bottom of funnel campaign. And that'll give you a three stage funnel. You may not need all three stages at the beginning because you're still Just getting some of those retargeting audiences started. But as soon as you have enough data for that third stage, you'll be ready for it.
Alright, so the next question from the audience is going to be what kind of video content are you actually going to use in your ads and at which stage of the funnel? So Daniel, if you'd like to share your strategy there, that would be really fun to hear, and of course, we'd love to hear a bit about your results.
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