Since their introduction in 2023, I’ve run hundreds of LinkedIn thought leader ads, for my demand gen agency, Omni Lab, and for my clients in B2B SaaS.
Through my experimentation with this format, I’ve developed a list of best practices to maximize the chances of success.
I’ll be sharing all my insights below 👇
TABLE OF CONTENTS
First of all, remember that thought leader ads are not a silver bullet that will save your marketing program – they’re simply sponsored organic posts that can fit into your larger content strategy.
This isn’t to downplay the power of this format; targeting your ICP with content from your thought leaders is one of the most effective approaches to build brand awareness and mental availability.
That being said, your thought leader ads won’t be successful if you don’t have great positioning, messaging, content, or targeting.
The standard rules of marketing still apply.
If you’re putting ad dollars behind organic posts, make sure they connect back to your product in some capacity.
I don’t mean adding a demo request CTA to every post, but the content you promote should have a core dotted line back to your product.
For example, at Omni Lab, I could promote a post highlighting our unique POV and approach to Google Ads, which is one of the services we offer. If this POV resonates with my audience, they’ll most likely think of me when they’re looking for support with their Google Ad campaigns.
Personal posts, such as occasional pictures of food or selfies on the beach, are okay, but they don’t deserve to be promoted.
At best, they won’t generate significant awareness for your product, and at worst, they’ll end up confusing your audience.
If your ICP loves you but they have no idea what you do, you probably won’t be in business for long 😬
No matter how great your targeting or technical setup, you won’t get very far if you don’t have amazing content that people would be willing to pay for – this is true for ads in general, and especially true for thought leader ads.
Take some time to reflect on your offer. Are you just providing generic tips that people have heard many times? Or are you offering something unique and valuable that will pique the interest of your audience?
To give an example, for Omni Lab, I could run thought leader ads highlighting Google Ads bidding strategies. But it would be more effective to share in-depth campaign recommendations for my target accounts.
Or, if you’re a company like Navattic, you could run ads talking about interactive demos, but it would be more powerful to build out personalized interactive demos for your dream companies.
Next time you run a thought leader ad campaign, focus on increasing the perceived value of your offer, and you’ll see a massive improvement in performance.
If you’re looking to funnel people into an owned audience, such as your newsletter, consider adding a Premium CTA to your thought leader ads. This is something I do at Omni Lab, and it’s helped me generate hundreds of high quality email subscribers.
This CTA option is only available to LinkedIn Premium users: you can add CTAs such as View my newsletter, Visit my website, View my blog, etc., depending on the action you’d like your audience to take.
If you don’t have LinkedIn Premium, consider editing your post once the organic reach has died down (usually within 72 hours), adding a CTA with a link to your website.
Even though the primary goal of thought leader ads should not be to drive direct clicks and conversions, adding a CTA allows people to learn more about your company without having to go on a scavenger hunt.
After running hundreds of thought leader ads, both for Omni Lab and for my clients, I’ve found that thought leader ads from non-employees consistently outperform promoted posts from employees.
For example, at Omni Lab, we built out a media plan and campaign strategy for Navattic, and their Head of Growth and Operations (Natalie Marcotullio) made a post related to this.
We boosted this post to our target audience, and it was one of our top performing ads of all time, significantly outperforming all the thought leaders ads from me and my cofounder.
Clay is another great example of non-employee thought leadership. Members of their creator program post about how they use the software, and Clay promotes these posts to increase awareness for their company, while simultaneously expanding the reach of their creators – they’ve created a symbiotic relationship where everybody wins.
If you’re working with well-known people in your industry, consider how you might be able to partner with them: this could look like an audit, a strategy, a discount, access to exclusive features, etc. in exchange for promotion on LinkedIn.
When you’re running thought leader ads, your LinkedIn profile turns into your landing page – it’s the place where people go for more information about you and your company.
Here are a few tips to optimize your profile that I always share with my clients:
1. Make sure you have a banner image explaining what you do at a high level.
2. Make sure your profile photo is up to date, and use your primary brand color as the background.
3. Add what you do + the category you play in to your headline
4. Use the About section to explain why your company exists and how you approach things differently (bonus if you can also add a few testimonials)
5. Use the featured section to highlight your core CTA + top performing posts demonstrating your expertise
Let’s say you have all the fundamentals in place: an optimized profile, great content, solid targeting, etc.
Now, the next step is to ask yourself: What metrics should we look at to understand if our content is working?
Here’s what I recommend to my clients:
1. First of all, check your LinkedIn demographics report to make sure that you’re actually reaching your ICP.
2. Check in-platform metrics such as impressions, engagement, and CTR. If these metrics look healthy, you’ll know that your audience is finding value in your content.
3. Look at smaller microconversions, such as engaged visits on your website. Are the people reading your thought leader ads eventually navigating to your site to learn more?
4. Look at the self-reported attribution field on your demo request form. Are more people mentioning your thought leaders? If the answer is yes, you’ll know that your content is building trust with the right people.
5. Finally, you can look at more bottom of funnel metrics, such as sign ups or meetings booked, but ultimately, DO NOT obsess over these metrics. Prioritize numbers 1-4 to understand if your content is resonating – it might take a while to see a significant impact on pipeline and revenue.
Pro Tip: If you’re not sure what content to promote as thought leader ads, look for posts that had a 2-3% CTR organically. In my experience, these posts with a higher organic CTR are also the top performing ads.
Most people – and B2B buyers especially – aren’t making impulse decisions and can’t be pushed through a funnel.
As the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has highlighted, if you look at how often prospects make a purchase in your category, you’ll quickly realize how few of the people you’re targeting are actually in-market.
Even if you run the greatest ads in the world, you can’t expect people to schedule a demo if they aren’t actively looking for a solution.
And even if they do book a demo, if you have a higher ACV, you’ll probably have an extremely long sales cycle.
My point is, you can’t expect hundreds of demos or millions in revenue right away.
This is a fun exercise I like to do with my clients.
I ask: “When you see posts on LinkedIn, what actions do you usually take?”
Usually, the response is something along the lines of:
“I read and keep scrolling…” or “If I like something, I might react or leave a comment…”
Then I ask the follow-up question: “If you see a post you like from a company you’ve never heard of before, would you immediately book a demo?”
And typically the answer is “No, of course I wouldn’t.”
Our prospects aren’t that different than we are; if we wouldn’t buy immediately, they probably won’t either.
If you’re getting good engagement and starting to see other signs of life (such as engaged website visits), you’re headed in the right direction, even if you’re not seeing more demos and sign ups right away.
Think of thought leader ads as a brand awareness play, not a direct response tactic.
Like any good brand marketing, your thought leader ads should relate to key buying situations, or category entry points.
For example, if I promote posts about how we help our clients improve their lead quality, prospects may think of Omni Lab if they ever run into lead quality issues.
Or maybe I talk about how we use paid media to increase brand awareness, and prospects may think of us if they’re having a brand awareness problem.
The key to succeeding with thought leader ads is putting the right messages in front of the right people. If you do this over a long enough period of time, the pipeline and revenue will follow.
Hope you found this article helpful!
Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or Omni Lab with any questions about demand gen or paid media.
Hey there, B2B Marketer. If you don’t have a well-structured optimization workflow, managing just a handful of Google Ads accounts can be a struggle (been there, done that 😅)
In this article, I’ll walk you through the Google Ads Optimization Workflow template, the exact process I used to go from barely managing five Google Ads accounts to easily managing 30+ 🚀
Without a consistent approach, managing Google Ads can feel chaotic. You may get lost in metrics that don’t matter or, worse, miss out on key optimizations that could boost your profitability.
I developed the Google Ads Optimization Workflow Template to help me stay organized and focus on impactful daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly optimization tasks.
👉 Grab your free copy of the template in Module 2, Lesson 1 from the B2B Google Ads 102 - How To Convert Clicks Into Profit course.
If you follow this approach, you’ll find yourself in control of your accounts, not the other way around.
Now let’s dive deep into the tasks by timeframes ⏰
Daily optimizations are essential for ensuring that your accounts are running smoothly. It’s your first line of defense against overspending and wasted ad spending.
Each day, you should:
This way, you’ll ensure that you are not overspending or underspending.
You want to add any irrelevant negative keywords. So every single day, you should review your search terms report and compare your search terms to your keywords to find the irrelevant ones and add them to your negative list.
If you’re using manual bidding, make sure to adjust your bids accordingly to get visibility.
If you’re using something like maximize clicks with a bid cap, make sure that you take a look at your average cost per click in relation to your bid cap. If you notice that your average cost per click is really close to your bid cap, you could be throttling yourself.
If you’re using Target CPA bidding, ensure that the CPA amount you set is large enough to get enough deliverability. I recommend increasing it by 20% if you notice you’re not spending your budget.
Pro Tip: Setting up Google Calendar reminders can be helpful, and something that I always tell my team that manages client accounts internally at our agency is to block an hour on their calendars every single day to go through their accounts and optimize them. We call it “optimization power hour”. ⚡️
By doing that, you will be proactive, and you’re going to catch things much sooner before they become potential fires.
Weekly optimizations allow you to step back and review broader trends instead of getting caught up in the day-to-day fluctuations.
Instead of getting caught up in the day-to-day fluctuations, here you should:
Every week you should look at search impression share, search lost to rank, search lost to budget, and search top impression share.
You also want to look at how much you have spent, your cost per conversion, your cost per custom conversion, meaning the cost per SQL, converted user, or whatever that KPI is that you’re measured against.
You will also want to look at volume. How many conversions are you getting? Is it trending up? Is it trending down? These are the things to keep an eye on every week.
Another thing you can do is check the charts in Google Ads to map different metrics and quickly see the trend of search impression share with this graph 👇
🚨Important: When you’re optimizing and looking at things weekly, don’t freak out if you see changes like 25% down search impression share. But if you see it happen consistently for two or three weeks in a row, then there’s definitely something that you need to make a decision about.
Lastly, breaking down your campaigns by themes like brand, non-brand, and competitive will help you to quickly identify underperforming segments and reallocate your budget where it will be most effective.
This will make the optimization process much more manageable.
Pausing underperforming keywords is an opportunity to give more budget to the keywords with good performance.
You can quickly go to the keyword section in your account and filter by conversions to see which keywords have no conversions. Then, you can sort by cost and understand which ones are hemorrhaging the most budget and can be paused.
When you check the Search Terms report, there are certain search terms that can make sense to add to your campaign as keywords.
You can also go to the Google Ads Keyword Planner and find net new keywords that you might not be covering. This is an opportunity to expand your scope and reach, and it’s a good best practice to get into the habit.
Pausing underperforming ads is as simple as going to the ad section in your account and then pausing any ads that are not performing anymore.
So if you notice you have some underperformers, ideally anything less than a 5% click-through rate (but always compare it with your average performance), it’s time to shut off the underperforming ad and add a new ad into the mix.
This way you can continually improve your overall click-through rate performance to help boost your expected click-through rate and improve your quality score.
Monthly and quarterly tasks focus on more strategic, higher-level adjustments.
It’s crucial to ensure that your campaign settings, quality score, and budget allocation align with your overall goals and haven’t been altered unintentionally.
This is also the time to assess the impact of your Google Ads efforts on your sales pipeline and to make necessary changes.
So at the end of each month, you should:
This step is crucial if you manage multiple campaigns or accounts.
It’s important to double-check if you’re targeting the right network and don’t have display and search combined together.
You want to make sure your bids haven’t been updated by accident, or God forbid, you have the auto recommendations still turned on, and they’re automatically updating your bids without your consent. 💀
You also want to ensure that your location options are set to “presence” and that people are actually in your target location or regularly in, not people who are potentially in other areas and are interested in that location.
We’re running ads to generate revenue, and revenue comes from initially having pipeline.
So you need a dashboard to track the performance month-over-month and connect your activity to revenue.
It can be as simple as having a report on a spreadsheet where you can see the evolution of your KPIs every month. You can create one from scratch or search for a template on the internet.
Pro tip: Check out our free Building a Paid Media Program course (Module 3, Lesson 2) to learn how to build an automated dashboard for less than $200/month using Google Sheets + a connector like Dataslayer or Supermetrics.
The same analysis we discussed in the weekly optimizations above should be done on a monthly basis too.
How much are you spending per theme? What is your cost per conversion? What is your conversion rate? And what are the volumes?
Are you driving more volume in a certain theme versus another? Should you move the budget around?
These are the questions you should answer here.
How is your quality score by campaign theme? Is it increasing or decreasing month-over-month?
Ideally, you should aim for a quality score of 7 or above. If it’s lower than that, optimizing your ad relevance, expected CTR and landing page experience will improve things.
Check out this Quality Score Guide to learn the 80/20 of what you need to know about quality score to improve it.
Here you want to go ahead and see how the campaigns you’re targeting in each region are performing so you can make the necessary adjustments.
I also recommend checking the Locations report to have a granular view of how each country grouped into a region is performing.
By doing this, you can find opportunities for new campaigns targeting a single country if it has a good performance and the campaign is limited by budget, or excluding low-performing countries to free up some budget for the top performers.
In B2B, desktop usually performs better than mobile and tablet, so if you’re targeting all devices you can find opportunities to maximize conversions by breaking out the campaigns into different devices.
Are there certain keywords that are doing better for you than others? Certain match types? All of these are insights that will help you optimize your Google Ads campaigns.
How are your landing pages performing? Are you running experiments? If you're not, that's definitely an opportunity.
If you’re not testing new experiments, this is a massive opportunity to improve performance, and you can run experiments easily in Google Ads with their campaign experiments tool.
Every quarter, take time to conduct a competitor analysis and review your goals. It’s a great practice to see what new ads and keywords your competitors are using, giving you inspiration and helping you stay ahead in the market.
Pro tip: The channel ad libraries are great resources for competitor research. Check out these 10 tips for free competitor research using them.
This periodic check-in will ensure that your optimizations are aligned with your business objectives, providing a clear path for growth 🙌
If you get your free copy of our Google Ads Optimization Template, you’ll notice that we have daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly tasks discussed above on the template.
The way this template works is very simple. We have our tasks on the left, the task title, and the different timeframes. There’s also a space for you to take notes while optimizing your account.
Then you can change the status of each task, so you and your team will know if a task is done or if it’s in progress, as well as define the task owner.
There are also some formulas where, based on the timeframe, the due date will automatically update. So for example, if you set the Last Complete date of a daily task as 2/2/24, it’ll automatically say the due date for that task is 2/3/2024.
In addition, if you do the same thing for a weekly task, it will add seven days to the due date, and now it will say 2/9/2024.
Lastly, you’ll also find all the different tutorials covered in this guide linked to each task. The goal of these tutorials is to show you how to do each step so you can use this as a reference.
By implementing these daily, weekly, and monthly optimizations, you’ll stay ahead of potential issues and make data-driven adjustments that boost your account performance.
I hope this guide helps you to manage your accounts efficiently 🙌
If you have any questions, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
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Understanding the Jobs To Be Done framework developed by Tony Ulwick can be confusing and overwhelming because most of the information you’ll find is focused on product development.
In this article, I’m going to unpack the Jobs To Be Done framework from a B2B advertising perspective.
Why? Because identifying what job your customers are truly “hiring” your product or service to do will be the secret to launching a powerful ad campaign.
This article is part of our B2B learning track so if you’re serious about learning B2B advertising you’re in the right place!
Let’s dive into it 👏
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
In any industry, people don’t buy products, they invest in solutions to get a job done. It’s not just to buy another thing like your cat-hoarding grandmother. 😅🐈
For B2B marketers, Tony Ulwick’s Jobs to Be Done framework should be focused on why your customers “hire” your product or service, so you can put them and their needs at the heart of your advertising story.
This will help you to identify what pain points you’re helping your customers solve to get to the root of what motivates them because your advertising campaign should be about them — not you.
But how can you do that?
You can use the Jobs To Be Done framework when you're launching a new advertising campaign or when you want to improve the conversion rates of your existing advertising campaigns (aka your ads that aren’t converting)
The most impactful way to start is by identifying three to five recent customers who fit your target market (or Ideal Customer Profile - ICP).
If you need help identifying your ideal customer profile, check out this article: “How to Craft B2B Buyer Personas for Ad Targeting”
Select customers who either recently purchased or have the potential to represent your ideal buyer. These interviews will reveal why they chose your service and what specific pain points you helped them solve.
To make your life easier, I developed a free template called Jobs to Be Done Interview Matrix 🙌
You can find it in Module 2, Lesson 3 of my free B2B Advertising Foundations course, and it’s your roadmap for collecting insights during interviews.
In this JTBD Interview Matrix Template, you’ll be looking for five key points that highlight your customer’s journey with your brand:
The matrix helps you organize answers by each customer’s profile and offers a side-by-side comparison of their unique characteristics.
It also offers 8 helpful interview questions you can use to uncover the right golden nuggets that will make your campaign shine. ✨
Finally, understanding your customer’s personality type is like having the key to crafting messaging that lands with confidence.
Resources like Crystal can help you determine each customer’s DISC personality type (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Compliance) by scraping their LinkedIn profiles, labelling how they like and prefer to be communicated with, and their style and tone because this will ultimately influence the messaging that you can create for each of your advertising personas.
Let’s take Spotify as an example. I love Spotify, so if I were doing an interview with a Spotify customer, it would look like this:
Situation & Pain Points
I get tired of hearing the same songs on the radio. I can’t easily listen to the exact song I want to hear.
Motivation
I want to listen to specific songs when I want
Trigger
I’m in the gym, and I need a song to pump me up
Ideal Outcome
I want to listen to the music I choose, everywhere
Other Solutions/ Products Evaluated – Competitors
Radio, XM Radio, Pandora, Apple Music, Silence
Personality characteristics (DiSC type, DiSC archetype, etc)
Trailblazer - ID. Confident style, with a mix of informality and formality gets their attention.
The main takeaway is that you can make your ad campaigns even stronger when you really know what “job” your customers are “hiring” your product or service to take care of.
Use the Jobs To Be Done matrix to dig deep into what matters most to them and adjust your messaging to connect on a personal level. 🙂
I hope you found this article helpful!
Connect with me on LinkedIn, and let’s keep the conversation going.
You can also visit my website here for more valuable content.
If you’re serious about mastering B2B advertising, then you definitely need to check out my free course that will teach you the foundational knowledge to becoming a high-performing B2B marketer who knows how to use advertising to drive legit business and revenue impact without the fluff or wasting your time and money learning the ropes the hard way.
This course was designed with absolute beginners in mind.
Accelerate your learning curve and start the course today for free.
