1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:01,000 There's so much you need to know about targeting by company size on LinkedIn. That's what we're talking about on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. 2 00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:02,000 Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 3 00:00:02,000 --> 00:00:03,000 Hey, hey, hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics. As he said, I'm AJ Wilcox. I'm the host of the weekly podcast, the LinkedIn Ads Show. I'm thrilled to welcome you to the show for advanced B2B marketers who want to evolve and master LinkedIn ads and of course achieve true pro status. If you really nailed me down on what targeting facet on LinkedIn is my absolute favorite, one I can't live without, it would definitely be company size or maybe seniority. I don't know, I have too many favorites. But company size is so important because about every company we've ever worked with knows what size of company they serve. And if you target enterprise size companies, you're disappointed when small companies come in as leads because you know they won't be okay with your pricing. And if you're targeting small to medium sized businesses, or as we call SMBs, or as they call it in the UK, SMEs, small to medium sized enterprises, more than likely your solution isn't going to be equipped to bring on an enterprise sized client. Company size targeting is so valuable on LinkedIn because we all want it. But LinkedIn is the very best source of truth about company sizes out there because the data is declared by the company page itself. That's why paid search is so rough in B2B. Google doesn't have great data on company sizes. And for enterprises, you usually can't tell by the keyword that someone types what size of company they are. So you get tons of traffic and tons of leads from mom and pop businesses, tire kickers, whatever you want to call small businesses who just plain and simple can't afford you. And for small to medium sized businesses, you end up competing for the same keywords that enterprises are going after. They've got bigger budgets, so that inflates your click costs. So because this is such an important targeting facet, and so many are using it wrong, because in fairness, it is really tricky. We're dedicating a whole episode to it. 4 00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:04,000 The LinkedIn ads show is proudly brought to you by B2linked.com, the LinkedIn ads experts. 5 00:00:04,000 --> 00:00:05,000 That's right. B2linked is the ad agency 100% dedicated to LinkedIn ads. And we have been ever since 2014. You know, back before it was cool. We build a custom strategy for every account we work with. And you get to work directly with me and my local team. You're not getting any sort of a cookie cutter approach or standard account template from us. Plus with the strategies that we've developed and our mastery of the platform, we save our clients more than we charge. So it's kind of like getting the best in the biz for free, right? If you'd like to explore partnering with us for your LinkedIn ads, schedule your free discovery call with me today at b2linked.com/discovery. You don't even have to go to slash discovery. You can just go to the website and fill out any form. All right, first off in the news, I'm doing something new. I get a lot of swag shirts that I've been given at conferences and stuff. I thought it'd be fun to wear a new one for each episode of the podcast. Today I'm wearing a hoodie by Swido. They're not sponsoring this or anything, but they were kind enough to send me this sweatshirt all the way from the Netherlands. If you don't know, Swido is an automated ads reporting solution and they do have a LinkedIn ads integration. So check that out if you're interested. That's S-W-Y-D-O, Swido. And if anyone wants to send me your company's swag and I can talk about you on the show, DM me on LinkedIn. We'll chat about it. All right, because it's the summer here and this is a very well-made thick sweatshirt, I'm going to take it off and switch, but then we'll be back. All right, that's so much better. I actually have to turn off my air conditioner in my office before filming just so you don't hear the background noise. So it was getting toasty in that sweatshirt. Okay. Also in the news, there's been a business manager change that you may have noticed if you manage more than one account. All right. So the way that this works is the ad accounts that you have access to are now filtered based off of whatever profile you're logged into. And this isn't your LinkedIn profile because we've always done that before, but this is actually a business manager profile. It's really similar to the way that Meta does it. So if you go to log into your LinkedIn ads account and it stops you with a page that says that you don't have access to this account, then there's a little bit of a dropdown there where you get to choose one of these profiles. Now, if you've ever been given access to a LinkedIn business manager, that means you were probably added as an employee or a partner, then that company's business manager is going to show up on this list. Now, for those accounts who are not attached to a business manager, these are called your individual ones. And if you scroll to the bottom of that list, you'll see just your name, your picture in your name. And when you select that, so that will show you access to all of the accounts that you have access to that aren't linked to a business manager. Now this is super annoying. I've talked to LinkedIn about it. They actually rolled this feature out and I posted about it because of how frustrated I was. And then they ended up rolling it back for a few months to work on it. So LinkedIn product team, thank you so much for actually taking my advice on how this should work. I ended up talking to Kevin on the LinkedIn product team. He basically mentioned like, this is something that they have to do for privacy concerns. He realizes it's not going to be awesome for all of us, but he ended up taking a whole lot of the recommendations I gave him that are going to make this a lot more usable for us as agencies. So if you are at an agency like me and you deal with multiple accounts, here's how you actually deal with it. First, if the account is actually going through a business manager, what you want to do is have them add your company's business manager as a partner. That means that when you are logged into your company's business manager, all of your client accounts will show up under that profile. So fight the urge to have them add you as an employee. And if their account isn't linked to a business manager, that's great. You can just do the normal thing, have them give you access directly to the ads account. And then all of those accounts will be accessible by just clicking on your individual profile rather than your business's business manager. Then once you get in and access the account, bookmark that page. If you do this, if you put a bookmark in your browser for every account that you want to work on, then you never have to guess again, which business manager profile am I logged into? It's definitely not a problem when you only work on one account. But if you're like me, when you're in hundreds, it's a real pain. All right. Do you have a question review or feedback for the show? Message me on LinkedIn. I would even encourage you to leave me a voice recording because I can play your voice recording right here on the show. You can also email us at podcast@B2linked.com. You can attach a link to a voice recording or just leave dumb text, whatever. I'll play them here on the show. I'd be happy to keep you anonymous if you'd like, or I can shout out your details as well. I hope you know, I want to feature you without further ado, let's hit it. Let's talk company sizes. 6 00:00:05,000 --> 00:00:06,000 First off, I have to say thank you to Daniel Manichi. He's an awesome member of the LinkedIn ads fanatics community. So come join if you haven't already, everyone else. But Daniel was actually the one who inspired this whole episode. He asked me a question. He was using company size targeting in really advanced ways. And part of my response, I was like, Oh, all the LinkedIn ads fanatics have to hear about this. All right. 7 00:00:06,000 --> 00:00:07,000 So company sizes are declared by the company page admin. And thank goodness this is a required field. So everyone who's ever set up a company page has told LinkedIn what size the company is and those company size buckets, they start from myself only, they go from two to 10 employees, 11 to 50, 51 to 200, et cetera, et cetera. So there's nine total selections for company size and LinkedIn could potentially decide what size of company you are just by counting how many members list your company as their employer. But they chose not to do that, which I think is actually a really good thing, especially in blue collar industries, where a ton of the employees don't have LinkedIn profiles, it would severely under represent them. And with company sizes, you can of course target by company size. You can also exclude by company size and you can also do both. You can simultaneously target by company size as well as exclude by company size. But if you do any of these things, it's really important for you to know what's actually happening in the background because these things are really tricky, way more tricky than I think they need to be. 8 00:00:07,000 --> 00:00:08,000 All right. Let's start with the use case of targeting. If you are targeting the company sizes with inclusion targeting, like you say, I want to target companies that are one through 10 in size, you're going to end up getting those who are listed as an employee on a company page who selected either myself only sized or two through 10. What you might not know, though, is that many on LinkedIn list multiple concurrent positions. So if their full time job is at, let's say, a thousand person company and then they list their side gig as a two person company, then you'd still be reaching them with your ads because you're including the one through 10 company sizes. That's because in LinkedIn's targeting, they only care that one of your positions fits the targeting criteria. This can be problematic sometimes when you're trying to target by company size, you end up getting a lead from a very different company size and it's just because that person has both and LinkedIn allowed them to be targeted because they fit that criteria in one of their concurrent positions. And also what happens when one of your employees types the name of your company but doesn't end up selecting the company page when it pops up as a suggestion? Well, the answer is that employee doesn't get targeted when an advertiser is targeting by company size or if they're targeting your company name, they're not actually attached to a company page at all. You can tell because if you look at their personal profile, it'll show the company name with a generic looking cartoon building next to it. They're also not going to be targeted when an advertiser is targeting by industry and LinkedIn product team, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that industry targeting targets the industry chosen by the company page and not any industry that the individual claims on their personal profile. All right, so if this person isn't linked to a company, LinkedIn doesn't know anything about what kind of company they are at. So when do they get targeted? Well, if your targeting doesn't include any company sizes, any companies by name, any industries, company growth rates, you know, those kinds of things, then that's the only way that you're reaching those who are unknowns. All right, so that's all there is about targeting. What about exclusions? This is the really tricky stuff that I see people doing wrong in their accounts all the time. You'd think that by excluding certain company size buckets that you'd be just removing that company size from your audience. Nope, it doesn't work like that. Let's say if you're excluding company sizes like one through 10, you'll of course be reaching those that are at companies who are 11 and above, which is exactly what you'd expect, but you'll also be reaching those who are not associated to a LinkedIn company page. And those who are unknowns tend to represent small companies. So in a cruel twist of irony, you're trying to exclude small companies. And by doing that, you're actually targeting the unknowns, which tend to be the smallest companies. I know, right? Isn't this crazy? 9 00:00:08,000 --> 00:00:09,000 All right. So this is problematic when you're trying to reach larger companies and you all of a sudden start getting a ton of traffic from very small companies or people not attached to a company page. You can actually use this to your advantage though. Let's say you're trying to reach small companies instead of targeting companies who are, let's say sizes one through 50. You can put an exclusion of any company size 51 and above and you'll get the company sizes one through 50 like you wanted, but you'll also get the unknowns, which are likely under 50 employees as well. And this is a big audience and they're much less competitive. So your click costs come way down, which is really nice. I said that this is a big audience. How big is this audience? You ask? Well, I went into LinkedIn and I set up a campaign targeting just the U S it shows me that there's 260 million members. Then I narrowed the targeting to company sizes and I selected all of the options. My audience size dropped to 120 million. That means that only 46% of LinkedIn members are attached to a company page. That's over half of LinkedIn's audience. Isn't targetable. If you're targeting by company size or industry or company name, whoa. And that makes them less competitive by a huge margin because so many advertisers aren't trying to reach them. Good opportunity for those who target small to medium size businesses though. Okay. So let's say that you want to be safe and you want to both include and exclude company sizes. So in this example, maybe you're targeting sizes one through 50 and then you're also excluding company sizes, 51 and above what happens then. So you're definitely going to be getting those who are attached to a company that does claim itself to be sized one through 50, but you're also excluding anyone who fits that criteria who also has another concurrent position at a company larger than 50. Think of people who work somewhere full time, but then they have a side consulting gig or someone who's an adjunct professor on the side. All of these cases would be totally left out and that's potentially throwing a lot of baby out with the bathwater. Please excuse a terrible metaphor. All right. 10 00:00:09,000 --> 00:00:10,000 So when you're targeting by company size, you then have to decide if you want to number one, target a size and mostly get the right size, but also occasionally hit people who have multiple concurrent positions or two exclude a size, get what's remaining, but also get a ton of unknowns that tend to be small or number three, you can both target and exclude those sizes only to get the exact company size you want, but you'll also exclude some legitimate people just because they have multiple concurrent positions. I tend to usually go with option one targeting just the company sizes I want, but if sales is ever complaining about we have to talk to so many people who are the wrong company size, then you could switch to option number three by including what you want and also excluding what you don't want, which would give you precisely the people that you do, but also cut out some people who could make good prospects along the way. By the way, there's also a trait that only your LinkedIn rep has access to. They can put it in your account for you and that is those who have concurrent positions. So if your sales team's ever complaining about getting people in who are outside of your targeting criteria, especially on smaller budgets, you could then ask for LinkedIn to add that as an exclusion on any campaigns. That way, you can get out the people who the multiple concurrent positions thing would end up letting them in to some targeting that you didn't want them to. One thing I love to do with company sizes is to micro segment by them. So for instance, if I wanted to target companies from like two to two hundred employees, I could break this up into three separate campaigns instead of just one. I might do one that are the very smallest, the two to tens, another one that's like 11 to 50, and then the third one could be 51 to 200. And I'm going to launch exactly the same ads that I would have launched anyway, but now I'm just launching the same ads into three campaigns instead of one. And what's so cool about this is now I'm finding out how prospects at each size of company engage with my ads. So if you think that your product should be interesting to people at large companies, but then those campaigns that are targeting larger companies have the lowest CTRs, the lowest engagement rate, well, that teaches you something and it teaches you something that you really couldn't find out any other way. I mean, maybe you could hire a market research firm and have them go out and do surveys and focus groups, but that would cost a lot of money. And I would so much rather just get this data directly from running my same LinkedIn ads budget. All right. Reach out and let me know if you're using company size targeting in any sort of interesting ways. I'd love to shout you out and feature you here on the show. All right. If you're not already a member of the LinkedIn ads fanatics community, what are you waiting for? Go get in there. You can go to fanatics.b2linked.com for one low monthly payment. You get access to all four of our courses that are designed to take you from LinkedIn ads beginner all the way to expert. Plus there's an upgraded tier where you get to hop on a weekly group calls with me every week. If this is your first episode listening, welcome. We're excited to have you here. Hit that subscribe button. But if this is not your first time, please do me the great honor of going to Apple podcasts and rating and reviewing the show. And of course, if I can figure out from your username, who you are, or you can reach out to me on my LinkedIn DMS and let me know, I will shout you out here publicly with any questions, suggestions, or corrections here on the show, reach out to us at podcast@B2linked.com. With that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in all of your LinkedIn ads initiative.