Transcription
For the next 7 days, I'm going to be testing LinkedIn ads to see if it's actually worth it. The results of this campaign will actually shock you.
It all started on a Saturday. The first day, I was just looking at every single video on YouTube about how to do LinkedIn ads, also doing research on Reddit, Google, and wherever else I could find any information on how to run these LinkedIn ads.
I personally haven't really run ads myself over the last two years because my ad account on Facebook got banned for absolutely no reason, so I'm pretty rusty at running ads myself. But the other day, I just got a message on LinkedIn, and it started with "What's up, dog?" That really caught my attention because on LinkedIn, everyone tries to be as professional as they possibly can, and no one really even tries to sound a little human, you know?
So, if I created an ad that was very unprofessional, very down-to-earth, and very human, would I get better responses? That's what I want to test this week. Can we actually get better results by just sounding like a real person?
Now, what's really interesting about LinkedIn ads, which is different from every other platform, is that you can actually pay just to send a message to somebody. You can pay for conversation ads, which is just a message in their inbox as a sponsored post. This is really interesting; you can't do that on Facebook or Instagram or almost any other platform.
Now, on Google, you can kind of do that, but it's not really an option. If you could upload a list of targeted leads that you wanted to send an email to, and you had a Google ad that could run to them directly, and the first email in their inbox was your email, obviously a ton of people would pay for that. I would be paying for that right now, but Google doesn't add that as an option, which is really annoying.
But LinkedIn does have that as an option, so that's why I think this is really appealing. After watching a ton of videos and listening to people on Reddit, a lot of people were saying that this wasn't a very profitable campaign for them and that they wasted a lot of money on LinkedIn ads. So, I really don't know what the outcome of this strategy is going to be.
I started creating my first campaign, and it was very easy to set up. If you've ever run ads on any other platform, it was pretty easy. Since it was just a conversation ad, we just had to create a message, which is also cool. We don't have to create a video for a reel or whatever, or have to upload fancy photos as part of the advertisement. It's just a conversation happening on LinkedIn.
The only downside I found was that the LinkedIn platform doesn't allow you to just have a conversation with them. You have to send them a link to something, right? They have to click on a button, and it'll send them to some other landing page. You can't just have them respond back and forth to your message directly. You can also have them fill out a form or whatever, but they can't just respond back to your message and get it into your inbox.
So, I know that's going to get me way less conversions because, knowing how people respond, if you just send a message and get them to respond back, it's much easier to get them to respond rather than actually clicking a link and booking a call. I know the conversions are going to be less, so I don't really know how well this is going to work just having them directly book a call with me.
I just put the booking page as my landing page, and here's the message that I sent:
"What's up, dog?" (I spelled "what's" wrong; apparently, I don't even know if I meant to do that, but here we go.)
"Hey [First Name], sorry for the random message. I know this is an ad, but I'm a real person, LOL. I'm just looking to do some market research with people in the advertising/marketing industry. I've been trying to see what their pains and problems are, see what they want more of, and just trying to come up with a better offer myself. I help agencies get 120 appointments per month through direct outreach, but I'm just trying to nail down my offer and what agencies are looking for. Would love to chat with you if you're open to it and hop on a call. I'll send you a gift card or something, LOL. Let me know."
There are two options here: "Sure" or "I'm not interested." If they click "Sure," it'll send them directly to my booking page, and hopefully, they book from there.
As you can see, as part of the strategy, we're not directly asking for a sale or even a sales call or consulting call. We're actually just doing market research. I've used this strategy for other clients. You can say, "Hey, I want to do more market research," or "I want to interview you for an article I'm writing," or "I'm trying to make a podcast; I want to see if you want to be on one of my podcast episodes." Anything like that, and naturally, the conversation will lean towards what your offer is.
You just start with, "Hey, what do you do? How does it work? What's your pain and problems?" Then you can kind of give them advice on what you would do if you were them and help guide them on what they should be doing. Now you're kind of positioned as the expert, and you can say at the end of the call, "Hey, if you want, I can actually help you with some of these things. I have a system that's working really well for me to get appointments on the door. Would you be open to that?"
As you can see in the message, I put in there what my offer is and what I do, so it kind of will entice people, hopefully, to actually book a call with me because of that reason on how to get more appointments in the door.
I set up the campaign to go out Monday. It will spend $100 per day for the next 5 days, so $500 total. The targeting for the campaign was kind of interesting. It does give you a few options; it's not as in-depth as I want it to be. You can target based on job title, what company they work for, or what industry they're in. You also have some sort of interest-based targeting. It's not the greatest; you can target people that are interested in travel or something like that, so some interest-based targeting, but mostly just based on their job or where they currently work.
I feel like I could get more targeted lists just doing it directly through LinkedIn Sales Navigator search, which I believe also lets you upload. I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think there was an option where you could upload a CSV file of a whole bunch of LinkedIn links, and they'll basically upload those as a custom audience. You can scrape from Sales Navigator or scrape from a LinkedIn search and upload people that are already in your industry, which I thought was a really good idea.
I've got a whole free course on how to actually get clients through LinkedIn, how to scrape LinkedIn, how to use automation tools on LinkedIn, and a whole bunch of different other platforms as well. So, if you're interested in getting more appointments and more sales calls, you can check that out in the description below.
Now, my strategies are usually meant for marketing agencies or B2B companies, so I made my target audience the people that are in the marketing and advertising industry and people that have less than 6 years of experience. I wanted people that were maybe a little newer and didn't have a huge pipeline of customers in the past that they could pull from, so maybe they need help actually getting more appointments themselves. That was the idea behind why I did that targeting.
Anyways, the campaign was set up and ready to go. I don't even know if there was an approval process; I just kind of clicked "go," and it started running.
On Monday, it started hitting the ground running. The first day, obviously, it spent almost $100—about $89—by 6:00 PM that day. I got one sales call booked on Monday, and that was again around 6:30. But then, you know, I was going to bed, and I think another call came in while I was in bed, so it was two calls for $100. Right now, we're at about $50 cost per call, which I think isn't bad so far.
Then on Tuesday, the second day, I didn't change anything and let the campaign run. Here's what happened:
"Yo, what's up? It is day two of testing this campaign, and so far we have gotten about four sales calls. I have spent almost exactly $200, so I have gotten about a $50 cost per call so far. I haven't run ads for myself for about two years, so I don't even know what's good anymore. I'm not even tracking conversions, but you know, four sales calls divided by $200 is about $50 per call.
I did talk to one person. I've been trying to email or text everyone that has booked a call so far. I only texted two and emailed one guy. Then I texted one guy; he had a phone number similar to one where my dad lived, so I said, "Hey, I notice you're in the local area." Whatever. He actually said that he's been watching some of my YouTube videos.
That was not what I was looking for. Obviously, it's kind of annoying being a public figure and everything. You know, I'm just so famous. The only problem with having an audience is that people actually watch the videos, and so when I reach out to them, they're like, "Oh, I already know who you are," which obviously is a good thing on my part, but it's not good for you.
So, obviously, I'm trying to test as if I have never sent any messages before or if no one knows who I am, just to be in a position that you guys would be in. That call, obviously, he already knows who I am. I don't know about all the other calls; they haven't really responded to my messages yet, but we will see on the calls tomorrow.
So, on day three, we actually had our first calls coming in. Here's how that went:
At the end of day three, I've officially finally done one call so far with this campaign. It was a call with a guy named Jesse. The only issue is he already kind of knew who I was; he had already watched my videos, so I don't want to count that as a call because we're trying to find people that don't really know me. That's the whole goal with this.
So far, we have spent $333, which is a little weird. It's not even at the end of the day, and it spent a little over $130 today. I'm not sure why; it's supposed to spend only $100 per day. So far, we have booked five calls total. I was supposed to have two calls today; one guy rescheduled for another day, but I don't really like when people reschedule, so I just canceled his call.
Now we only have four calls, but we'll still count it as we had five calls total. That means the cost per call right now is about $66.66. I've also sent about 1,102 messages, according to the LinkedIn ads platform, and about 521 people have opened my message, which is pretty insane. About half the people that saw my message actually opened it.
I don't really know what the average is; I think how unique my message is or the subject line is just "What's up, dog?" So, I think that actually helps in my favor, which is really good. Right now, the cost per message sent is about 30 cents, which is honestly pretty good.
I thought—I don't really know the numbers in terms of, again, I'm just doing this brand new. I'm like a very beginner when it comes to LinkedIn ads, obviously. But 30 cents per message is actually a lot cheaper than I thought it was going to be. I'm not sure how much I thought it was going to be, but for 30 cents, I mean, I know a lot of people that what they do is they try to create 30 LinkedIn accounts. They try to verify all these LinkedIn accounts, they try to buy Sales Navigator in all the accounts, and they try to do all this stuff and host all these accounts. They spend thousands of dollars trying to do all this stuff, and it's against LinkedIn's policies.
The platform really doesn't like when you do that stuff, and so they try to constantly shut you down, right? This is a strategy where we're going with LinkedIn. LinkedIn wants us to do this strategy, and it's actually still pretty cheap. So, this is so much easier than having to create 10 LinkedIn accounts. I'm like, why haven't people done this before?
Now, all the videos I've seen so far on LinkedIn ads are just like, "Hey, this doesn't really work; it's not really worth it," other than people that are trying to sell you, "Hey, I'll help you do LinkedIn ads." You know, everyone else is just like, "Oh, this is not the most effective strategy," or "We can get calls per call much cheaper on other platforms," which might be true. But 30 cents per message, to me, I think that's pretty good, honestly.
So, about 500 people have opened the message out of the 1,100 or so, and about 4% have actually clicked on the link. We have three calls booked so far with potential prospects. Hopefully, we get to talk to a few of them, see how it goes, and see if it's actually worth it.
Now, on day four, we had three calls. The first guy showed up; he was pretty good, pretty qualified. He had some clients already coming in the door but had a really hard time fulfilling. I was giving him some advice on how to fulfill for them, but it was kind of a problem.
What I hate about doing those calls is that, you know, I'll just give them a whole bunch of advice, tell them what I would do, and then they just kind of take it and run with it, which obviously is probably a problem on my part. I probably shouldn't be giving them that much advice.
Also, these people have really no clue who I am; only the first guy knew who I was. So, I haven't really warmed them up to who I am, and they have to kind of learn about what I do, whatever. Now, obviously, we can still get clients with cold outreach or just a first touch point, but obviously, it's just slightly harder doing that.
The second call didn't show up to the meeting, so that was a no-show. The third call was with a girl named Katie. She was great; she worked for an agency before and was trying to build out her own new agency, but she didn't really have any clients and didn't really know what she was doing. I gave her some advice as well, telling her what she should do. I didn't really pitch her an offer because she was just starting out and didn't really have the money to invest in a system like what I provide.
So then, on day five, we spent the last of our money—the $500 total—and we got a few more booked calls in the door. Here is a review of the entire campaign and everything that happened.
Before I do that, please subscribe if you're an agency or someone that's just in the B2B industry and you're trying to get more clients in the door. I make videos every single week on how to get more clients, so again, subscribe. I love you all!
As a grand total, we have gotten seven calls so far. I've had four calls that I've actually done that were pretty good. We have a few more calls next week, and I guess we'll see how those go. The call quality was pretty good; everybody was in my niche, but I think I just screwed up on the targeting itself.
I think the people that I was talking to just had less experience because I specifically said I don't want people with more than 6 years of experience in my targeting when doing the ads, so that was my fault. We sent a total of 2,250 messages, and out of those 2,250, about 1,097 people actually opened the message. So, there was about a 49% open rate, which I think is pretty good based on the fact that I had "What's up, dog?" as the subject line.
I think that helped me. We'll compare this to the average results of other campaigns that people on Reddit have run. If we compare them side by side, the open-to-click-through rate was about 2.89%. I think what that means is that if they actually open the message, here's the click-through rate of the people that opened. Of the 1,097 people that opened, 2.89% of those actually clicked the link, which I believe was about 31 people who clicked the link.
I calculated it out; the average cost per message being sent was about 22 cents per message, which I think is very good. You know, compared to the fact that people tried to create 10 LinkedIn accounts, as I said earlier, and tried to set up all this stuff, they spent a lot of money trying to do that, and it's very hard to do.
This is a lot easier, and 22 cents per message was actually pretty good. Now, that fluctuated; it will go up and down depending on how large your audience size is. I think my audience size was pretty small, so the actual cost per message was probably a little higher for me.
It was about 46 cents per opened message, so about double the cost because obviously only half of the people actually opened the message. The cost per click doesn't sound very good; I heard on Facebook it's like 85 cents cost per click. I'm not 100% sure; I haven't run Facebook ads in a long time.
But also, the cost per call was around $714. Now, looking through Reddit, it looks like a lot of people also had a cost per click of $15, so I'm guessing I'm just on par with everybody else. I think the cost per click was the same as everybody else, but their cost per lead was $150 to $300, just depending on the campaign.
A lot of people were saying $200 to $400 as a cost per lead that they got, and I think my cost per lead is a lot lower at $70 per call or $71 per call. I would like it to lean more towards the $50 per call. I think if I widened the audience a little more and got more people, and I just did people that were in the marketing industry—owner, founder, CEO—I think I probably would get a lot more people interested and get a lower cost per call.
So, obviously, that would help in my favor.
So, that's it. Is it worth it for you? Probably. I think, you know, for the average person that is trying to get a ton of calls and wanting to scale long-term, I think this is a long-term scalable strategy if you have the money to spend, right?
It's worth testing and getting off the ground, and it's not very hard to learn. You probably don't have to hire an ads person to run it for you because it's not really hard. I mean, me, you know, not having run ads in years, writing some decent copy and sending them to a landing page—obviously, if I can do it, I think you can do it too.
Now, if you want a system to consistently get 120 sales calls per month, and you want me to help you directly get sales calls in the door, you can book a call directly with me within the first link in the description below.
If you want, you can watch my next video on how I actually book calls through DMs. I've got a step-by-step framework for Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn on how to actually book calls through those platforms. It's a very good video.
Thank you for watching! Can we please get McDonald's on the way home?