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Show Transcript:
You got a coupon code for a $50 or $100 free advertising credit on LinkedIn. And you want to know how to maximize it. I got you.
This is the LinkedIn Ads Show.Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! We've all seen coupon codes appear from time to time for LinkedIn Ads. Today, we're going to talk about how to get them, how to use them, and then, of course, how to spend that money effectively. In the news, our agency B2Linked just turned six years old. And I'm so proud and excited. In business years, we're no longer a toddler. So that's cool. I'm so proud of our B2Linked team who will stop at nothing to ensure that our clients have success on LinkedIn ads. We also just hired four new account managers here in our Utah office. And we're excited to grow with them. No joke, we got the best and brightest. And I'm honored that they'd see the vision and would agree to join us on our mission to help companies save money on their LinkedIn Ads, and get more leads than they ever thought possible. To celebrate, I have something really cool to give away. So we're going to be doing a contest in the coming weeks. So make sure you're subscribed and pay attention. On a completely unrelated note, if any of you have an idea for a contest, that would be rad for a bunch of LinkedIn Ads fanatics, please email us with ideas. No, but seriously, I've got something really cool to give away. And I can only give away a few. So I definitely want your ideas, we're going to have an awesome contest. I also love to just share things with you that I've found during the week about LinkedIn Ads, and just geek out with you. So I hope you appreciate this. One of our clients showed us a trick this week to delete campaigns from campaign manager, and I was absolutely floored. Now, this is definitely a bug. And as soon as I get a chance to reproduce it in several accounts, and figure out when it works and when it doesn't and see if there's differences by ad formats, I'll tell you all about it. But for right now, I'll just tell you, it's possible, it's a bug, and it's super cool. This week, I also came across the first ad account where text ads were more expensive than sponsored content. Now, because text ads floor is always $2. If you've chosen the US dollar as your currency, but in less competitive markets, because the sponsored content floor is variable, it can go even lower than $2. In this case, the sponsored content floor was $1.10. And text ads were $2. So it's sad, but we ended up shutting off all the text ads, and completely invested all the budget in sponsored content. It was way weird that it worked out that way, but it totally did. I want to shout out a podcast review here. Jadin Press, who's a phenomenal social marketer, as well as developer, he said, "I've periodically found and read numerous blog posts by AJ since I started running LinkedIn ads two years ago, and have more recently been listening to the LinkedIn ads show podcast and can confirm it is fire." Jaden, I'm so glad that you've been getting the value out of this that I'm putting into it and intending. So thank you for being a listener. And I'm so stoked to see what you end up creating. And you, yes, you I want to feature you. So go and leave a review on any podcast service you can find and I would love to shout you out. With that being said, let's hit it.
3:36
Coupon Codes
Dan Gingiss, who is a friend and a speaker at many of the same conferences that I speak at. He's the host of the Experience This podcast, which is all about user experience. And he just asked me recently, "so I got an ad from LinkedIn for a free $50 in ad spend coupon and I took it because hey, it's 50 free bucks. So here's my million dollar question for the expert on LinkedIn Ads, "How should I spend the $50 to result in the greatest possibility of me wanting to invest more in LinkedIn Ads?" Dan, this is a fantastic question and I can't wait to go deep on this. For those of you who may not know, occasionally LinkedIn will send out offers or promotional codes. And of course, this isn't unique, as Google has been giving away free money for Google Ads since I think before I was born. But with LinkedIn, the challenge with these coupon codes is that because the clicks are so expensive. If you're not following the strategy I shared in episode six on bidding and budgeting, you'll only get a handful of clicks for your budget, and it really won't teach you anything. That being said, it's certainly not life changing money or anything, but money is money. And at the very least if you chase down one of these codes and apply it in your account, your boss or client will likely appreciate your interest in saving them a few bucks. So how do you get them? Well, I asked a couple friends at LinkedIn to see if there were any channels that I had missed and there are a few ways to get these coupon codes. Of course, Dan, who asked this question, he ended up seeing this in an ad. So it looks like LinkedIn is advertising to some professionals about this free coupon code. So that's one way of getting it. So the most common that I hear recently are because LinkedIn Marketing Solutions is an advertiser on a lot of podcasts. And I've heard these promotions on shows like The Tim Ferriss show, and a whole bunch of others. And as part of this promotion, they offer a coupon code for free advertising. And I would imagine with some clever Google searches, you could find mentions of this in podcast, show notes pages, and find the link in there. When you click on the promotional link, it usually goes to a web page where you enter in your email, and then shortly, LinkedIn will send you a coupon code, and then you can go and apply that in your account. LinkedIn also said that they offer a promo code in what they call global acquisition email campaigns, who are targeting prospective customers. So I think you have to ask yourself, how do you get on LinkedIn's radar as a prospective customer. A few ways I can think of and of course, I don't know this for sure. But maybe consider creating a company page for a company that isn't yet attached to an ad account. Maybe you could sign up for a webinar from the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions team, and list an email that isn't currently attached to an ads account. Maybe you could even fill out a lead form on LinkedIn somewhere, I don't know, but it certainly could be worth poking around a bit to see if you can get on one of those campaigns. And this is one I didn't know, they said that in the EMEA region or Europe, Middle East and Africa, LinkedIn reps can offer coupon codes to existing customers to incentivize them to try new features. So if you're in the EMEA region, ask your rep and see if there's anything cool coming up that you could use a coupon code for. All right, we're gonna take a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the best strategies for how to actually spend that sweet, sweet coupon cash.
7:04
The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.
If the performance of your LinkedIn ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $130 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead. We're official LinkedIn partners, and we don't have a sales team so you'll deal only with the LinkedIn Ads expert from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com, to chat about your campaigns. Or heck, just let your MLM downline know. No matter how you get in touch, we'd love to work with you.
7:45
Redeeming the Coupons
Alright, let's jump into redeeming the coupons and actually how to use them. In the past, to enter a coupon code, you had to be the billing admin of the account, but that since changed. So what you do is you log in to campaign manager, and then you click on the little gear icon in the upper right hand corner of your screen, and then click on billing center. Then about halfway down the page, you'll see three tabs. The second tab says coupons and credits. Once you select that, you'll see a button that says redeem coupons. When you click that it will pop up a box that lets you enter in a coupon code and as soon as you select it, it will then spend that money first and then it will continue spending your credit card. Now if you're already advertising on LinkedIn, of course, you're just going to keep advertising and you'll use this coupon code to just augment what you're already doing. But let's say that you're not already advertising. And you're like Dan, who just got this coupon code and wants to give LinkedIn Ads a shot. So this is the strategy I would recommend. First of all, create a new campaign that's using the website visits objective. And then when you get down to the ad formats, choose text ads as your ad format. And this is of course, because text ads have the lowest bid floor. So what you want to do is bid by max cost per click and bid all the way down to the $2 minimum floor. And what this will do is it will stretch your $50 or $100 coupon code the furthest it will go. That means with a $50 coupon code, you'll get 25 clicks out of it and $100 coupon code you'll get 50 clicks out of it. And whether this takes one day to spend that or two months, just let it ride until it finishes. Obviously with a $2 bid when you're bidding all the way at the floor, you're not bidding very competitively. So LinkedIn is not going to want to show your ads a whole ton unless they perform really well. And then as for the offer, you'll want to point these ads towards something that you know has the highest conversion rate that you own. And that will give you the highest probability of actually getting some conversions from these 25 or 50 clicks. Think about things like guides, ebooks, checklists, and go and listen to Episode 10, all about offers and calls to action, to look for some ideas. If after a few days, you find your click through rates are over .085%. That's a good clue that you could switch your bidding to CPM and it will stretch even further. If you do this, you'll see your cost per click actually drops below $2. That sounds like a win to me. And for your targeting, you'll want to make your targeting as tight around your absolute ideal target audience as possible. And this is because when you see these leads come in, it would sure be nice to see some golden prospects in there, people representing companies that you would absolutely love to work with. That could mean using an account based marketing audience where you're specifying a company list. It could be using tight targeting like job title, or even groups targeting, maybe groups with seniority. And of course, if you haven't heard it before, make sure you uncheck the box that says enable audience expansion. It's absolute poison, and you should avoid it like COVID-19. And voila, if you get two to four conversions from this $50 coupon code, and they are from your absolute ideal target audience, chances are that you'll want to put your credit card in permanently and keep going and you'll want to scale up. And just as a little insurance policy for you, you might want to set a lifetime budget of $50 or $100 on that campaign. And that way, you'll ensure that it doesn't continue spending on your credit card more until you're absolutely good and ready. So that's my suggested strategy on how to best utilize a very small amount of free ad credit. I'd love to hear how you'd use it, though. So email us at podcast@B2Linked.com and share with us your strategy. The biggest limitation of these coupon codes that we found is that most are only one use per ad account. So once you've redeemed one in your account, you won't be able to use another one later on. So of course you can be a great guy or gal and hand one of these codes to a co worker or a friend or a fellow business owner. Or you can open up a new ad account. Either way, that's how you'll want to work around those limitations. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming up. So stick around.
12:30
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.
Resources
All right, two of the episodes we mentioned during this podcast, you'll want to listen to episode six on bidding and budgeting. If you look down in the show notes, you'll see a link right to that. And then Episode 10, we mentioned all about your calls to action and offers. Those are two of our most popular episodes and if you haven't listened already, you'll definitely want to listen to those. They are not outdated. If you or anyone you're working with is actively looking to learn LinkedIn Ads, check out the link in the show notes to our course on LinkedIn Learning, all about LinkedIn advertising. It's one of the best LinkedIn Ads courses out there and the price is right. It is just a small fraction of what it would cost to hire me to come and train your team, so it's definitely worthwhile. And then when you're done, you'll get the certification to add to your LinkedIn profile, saying that you finished the course. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast. So you're hearing us in your earholes every week. And then please do look down at your podcast player and rate and leave a review for the podcast. If you review us all shout you out here on the podcast so I'd absolutely love to do that. And please tell a fellow LinkedIn Ads fanatic about the podcast, if they haven't heard about it already. Of course, I'd love for this podcast to be your secret weapon, but don't let it be too secret. Share it around. With any suggestions for topics or questions for us, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com And remember to send ideas for a contest we could run because I really want to give you guys something way cool. All right, with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.
