LinkedIn Masterclass: AJ Wilcox's 3-Stage Funnel That 5Xed Conversions

Episode Description

Are LinkedIn Ads worth it in 2025? In this conversation, Frederick Vallaeys chats with AJ Wilcox, the world’s top LinkedIn Ads expert and a top PPC influencer, about why LinkedIn is becoming the most powerful platform for B2B marketers.

They dive into:

• Why Google Ads alone won’t cut it anymore
• AJ’s 3-stage funnel strategy that boosted conversion rates 5X
• How to effectively use video and thought leader ads on LinkedIn
• The real cost of LinkedIn ads (and how to pay less!)
• How AI is (and isn’t) transforming agencies
• The secret to building influence and engagement on LinkedIn

Episode Takeaways

As one of the most influential people in PPC, AJ shares his tried and tested insights that have helped his clients achieve remarkable results.

Whether you’re already investing in LinkedIn or considering adding it to your marketing mix, AJ explains why the platform has become essential for B2B companies and how to navigate its unique dynamics.

1. Why Google ads alone won’t cut it anymore

AJ explains that there is a clear distinction between Google Ads and LinkedIn and B2B companies need both in their marketing mix. Google Ads captures people actively searching for solutions (intent-based), while LinkedIn allows you to reach specific professionals based on who they are (identity-based).

“I love Google Ads for the reason that it’s very simple and the traffic that comes is very bottom of funnel. They’re showing intent by typing the keyword that you’re bidding on and then you show them an ad.

That’s what they’re looking for and then they convert. Social is very different. We’re able to target people by who they are professionally, which is amazing, which you can’t do on search, but we lose that intent factor.” shares AJ.

The major differentiation is in the fact that Google Ads can only reach people who already know what they’re looking for. LinkedIn, however, lets you educate potential clients who might not even realize your solution exists: Both platforms serve their purpose at different stages of the user journey.

2. AJ’s 3-Stage Funnel Strategy That Boosted Conversion Rates 5X

AJ Wilcox transformed LinkedIn ads by using a three-step funnel instead of one-step conversions. After testing $90,000 across accounts, his team found each stage boosted conversion rates 5X over the last.

“We’ve gone all in on a three-stage funnel. What we found from two recent tests we ran, there were like, $90,000 in ad spend across two different accounts. We found we created a stage one, stage two, and stage three funnel where to get into stage three, you had to have interacted with both a stage one ad and a stage two ad.

And what we found is showing the same kind of conversion call to action, stage three had a five times higher conversion rate than stage two and stage two had a five times higher conversion rate than stage one. And it persisted across multiple accounts.” explains AJ.

AJ’s strategy moves prospects through three clear stages:

1. Grab attention with awareness content
2. Provide value through education, and
3. Invite conversion only after they’ve engaged

This mirrors real B2B buying behavior. Building trust step by step instead of pushing cold leads or gating content too early. Each interaction warms up the audience, making them far more likely to convert.

If you’re looking to mimic this strategy, patience and proper audience segmentation is key.

3. How to effectively use video and thought leader ads on LinkedIn

During the discussion, AJ elaborated on a fundamental social media psychology: people connect with people, not logos. LinkedIn’s thought leader ads capitalize on this human tendency by allowing companies to promote content from individual professionals rather than brand accounts.

“LinkedIn have launched thought leader ads and these are by far the highest performing ad on LinkedIn. And the reason why is because this is we are now able to promote an individual’s post rather than a company’s post.” said AJ.

AJ notes that engagement rates are 5X higher because users naturally engage with faces over logos.

The best format combines thought leader content with 30–40 second “talking head” videos using big animated captions, like TikTok. They grab attention even without sound. AJ used to think LinkedIn video ads were too pricey, but this approach proved both effective and budget-friendly.

4. The real cost of LinkedIn ads

According to AJ, LinkedIn’s maximum delivery bidding settings are quietly draining your advertising budget. This default setting gives LinkedIn the permission to charge premium rates, often $20-40 per click, while hiding the more cost-efficient “max CPC bid” option behind an additional click in the interface.

“The default bidding method that LinkedIn gives you in a campaign is called maximum delivery. This is the most expensive way to pay for your traffic on LinkedIn. There are very few situations where this is actually in your favor.

And LinkedIn takes it a step further by hiding the cheapest option. The cheapest option is called max bid, max CPC bid, and you actually have to click a button that says, ‘Show me more options before that one option appears.’” says AJ.

He provides an example where he bid $7 per click despite LinkedIn suggesting $16-66, yet still spent his entire budget. Had he followed LinkedIn’s recommendation, he would have received only 14-17% of the traffic for the same spend.

5. How AI is and isn’t transforming agencies

AJ also shares his experiences with experimenting with AI for creating assets. He explains using AI for creative work only to find that AI-generated imagery doesn’t really resonate well with real audiences. Similarly, AI-written copy also tends to sound very drab and has some telltale signs that it is AI generated.

But one thing AI has done is improve his personal productivity. Agencies should use AI to solve specific workflow problems, not overhaul everything. The best use of AI boosts human performance in clear tasks, while people still lead on creative and strategic work

6. The secret to building influence and engagement on LinkedIn

With so much AI content on LinkedIn, AJ Wilcox sees real value in authentic human writing. He says AI posts are easy to spot, which gives an edge to marketers who write in a real, unique voice that stands out as genuine.

“When I see a lot of AI written content, posts, comments, I can spot them pretty easily. Those who are using AI to post, I go, I’m not going to engage with your content because that’s not really you and I could just go ask chat GPT.

So, I think it’s a huge opportunity for good marketers who are willing to go out and write things specifically that AI would not write. And I think it’s just going to help us stand out even more.” said AJ.

Another important thing AJ recommends is to build your network even before you create content. Start by connecting with people you already know then grow toward industry contacts who could become customers or partners.

If you want more engagement, remember to take a more authentic approach when commenting or posting on LinkedIn. This boosts the algorithm without risking penalties or turning off your audience.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Frederick Vallaeys. I’m your host and also CEO and co-founder at Optmyzr, a PPC management software. For today’s episode, we decided to look at the list of top 50 most influential people in the PPC world and start going down that list to bring you interesting guests. Top of that list is AJ Wilcox, ranked right behind myself. So today you’ve got number one and number two talking.

What’s really amazing is that the number two guy in PPC is a LinkedIn guy. A couple of years ago that wouldn’t have happened. Are we looking here at a revolution where social media is becoming more important than Google? That’s a really interesting question. Regardless, LinkedIn is an amazing platform, AJ is an amazing expert, and he shares really good stuff at conferences. I’m really happy he’s my guest, so let’s dive in and learn how to get the most out of marketing on LinkedIn.

AJ, welcome back to the show. It’s good to see you again.

AJ Wilcox: Thank you, Frederick. I am absolutely thrilled to be here. I’m super flattered that you would have me on. I was very flattered at where I made it on the list for the reason that you just said - I’m a LinkedIn guy. I don’t necessarily deserve to be number two on a list, but I’m so grateful.

Frederick Vallaeys: You deserve to be number one in many things. But I agree, it was surprising that in a list historically dominated by Google Ads people, someone who’s really focused on LinkedIn and is known as the LinkedIn guy made it to number two. But I think it speaks to your influence and also to the broader picture that if you want to have influence, you don’t really build that on Google, right? You build that on social media, and LinkedIn is exactly that.

Let me start with an anecdote. I was at a conference, Hero, which is a very specific PPC conference owned at the time by Daniel Gilbert and Brain Labs. He was giving one of the keynotes and got up on stage saying, “Hey, welcome to this PPC event, but you’re all in the wrong business. You should all be doing social media and influencer marketing.”

It was shocking because these were people who had signed up to learn about PPC and Google ads, celebrating that industry, and here he was saying he was shifting his own agency more towards influencer marketing and social media. So how do you see things changing? You’ve been in the industry a long time and chose LinkedIn, but you’ve seen Google ads and know how it all fits together.

AJ Wilcox: I love Google Ads because it’s very simple and the traffic is very bottom of funnel. They’re showing intent by typing the keyword you’re bidding on, then you show them an ad, that’s what they’re looking for, and they convert. When someone talks to me who started with Google Ads, they ask, “What’s the average cost per lead on LinkedIn?” And I have to stop them and say, “That’s Google Ads talking.”

Social is very different. We’re able to target people by who they are professionally, which is amazing and something you can’t do on search, but we lose that intent factor. We’re interrupting people. We’re putting our ads in front of the right people, but now we have to get their attention and educate them and nurture them.

So we go from a one-step process of getting you right to the bottom of the funnel to what we treat as a three-stage funnel where we get your attention, give you value, and keep nurturing you until we finally say, “You look interested, we should talk.” Because you have to work people through three stages and multiple touches, it’s going to cost more. LinkedIn CPCs are at a premium compared to Meta and other social platforms.

They’re very different, but I love comparing LinkedIn and Google because every B2B company needs both. Google is amazing at the bottom of the funnel when someone’s ready. LinkedIn lets us educate people who didn’t even know that this keyword existed or where there isn’t a keyword yet that describes your industry, so they wouldn’t have searched for you on Google anyway. We’re reaching people in a disruptive way.

Frederick Vallaeys: That makes total sense. It’s different stages of the consumer journey. Specifically for LinkedIn, it’s really applicable to B2B. How have you seen LinkedIn grow? Are there different types of people? One stat I saw is that content on LinkedIn is doubling in length over the past couple of years. What is that doing to engagement and the types of people using it?

AJ Wilcox: I’ve been advertising for 14 years now. Back when I first started, CPCs were $2, and I’ve watched them climb over time. As an agency, our clients are paying about $7-9 per click. If you talk to others who may not know how to get better at bidding, I audit accounts spending $16-25 per click. The growth has become exponential in the last few years.

For the first seven years of me being in business, I was the only LinkedIn ads agency. Then in the last two or three years, I actually have competition - friendly competition - but I’m seeing other agencies wholly focused on LinkedIn, and we’re all surviving with enough clients and growing. We’re definitely seeing platform growth that translates to people saying, “We need to be doing LinkedIn ads. Let’s get help.” So the ads raise in cost as more people become interested.

Frederick Vallaeys: As the platform becomes more valuable and competitive, prices go up, partly because more advertisers are competing for the same potential sales. There’s also a question around generative AI. Nowadays it’s much easier for someone to post frequently because GPT will write it for you. Even for non-English speakers, it opens up the platform because they can communicate in English in a very polished manner, even if they input their thoughts in French, Spanish, or German.

It makes it more possible to post frequently and incentivizes longer posts because as a user, there’s no difference in saying, “Write me a post that’s one paragraph or five paragraphs.” How do you see that shifting the platform? Is the value still there, or is it becoming inundated with AI content? What does that do for advertisers?

AJ Wilcox: It is becoming a little inundated with AI, not going to lie, but I think that’s a huge opportunity for good marketers. When other people are zigging, you zag, because marketing is all about standing out. When I see AI-written content, posts, comments, I can spot them pretty easily - probably 95% of them. Those using AI to post, I’m not going to engage with their content because that’s not really them, and I could just ask ChatGPT.

I think it’s a huge opportunity for good marketers willing to write things specifically that AI would not write. We write in a way that stands out so everyone can tell it’s authentic, and I think it’s just going to help us stand out even more.

Frederick Vallaeys: Both of us have spoken at many conferences, and what audiences find valuable is not theoretical examples but “I’ve tried this, this is what worked specifically, these were the nuances, these were the settings we had to deploy.” Even if your presentation remains high-level, you can have a Q&A session where the audience asks specifics, and you have answers because you’ve lived that experience. That’s what makes it unique and should shine through in what you post on social media.

How do you help people producing content or advertising on LinkedIn? Is that purely CPC ads, or do you also think about organic work and boosting that? Do you see them as separate things?

AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn treats organic and paid as two very separate entities, but we’re starting to see some crossover. I’m making more recommendations to clients about what they should do organically as well.

In the past when we advertised, the only thing about someone’s company page that would show up in ads was the number of followers. All I had to worry about with clients was ensuring their company page had at least a thousand followers so they wouldn’t look like a small fly-by-night organization or a scammer - just some organic proof.

But now in the last couple years, LinkedIn has launched thought leader ads, which are by far the highest performing ads on LinkedIn. We can now promote an individual’s post rather than a company’s post. If you’re scrolling and see a post from a company you’ve never heard of, you’ll likely keep scrolling. But if you see a face, you’ll stop and think, “Do I know this person? Should I know this person? What are they saying? Is it interesting?”

We’re seeing engagement rates that are 5-10 times higher from this. Thought leader ads are so important - they’re cheaper with higher engagement and really good at creating retargeting audiences. Now I’m coaching clients on what they should be posting organically from their personal profiles so we can then boost it.

Frederick Vallaeys: People buy from people ultimately. When you’re coaching clients to produce organic posts that can be boosted as thought leader ads, how do you think about that in organizations? If I understand correctly, as a company, you can boost anyone’s content so long as you have permission. That could be people from within your company but also outside experts. LinkedIn should probably be boosting some of the things you say because it helps their ecosystem of advertisers. How should a company foster that community of credible experts who they can boost through thought leader ads?

AJ Wilcox: We’re doing this in lots of ways. For the first year of thought leader ads, we could only boost an employee’s post. About a year ago, LinkedIn released the ability to boost anyone’s post - we just need their permission. This opened it up to influencers, customers, and really anything.

I don’t know of companies doing really good social listening on LinkedIn, but this seems like a great opportunity for brands to search content, find customers posting about loving their product or service, and reach out to see if they’d be okay with boosting their post.

We have a higher education client who reached out to 20 of their successful alumni and said, “We’d love for you to share your MBA experience as a LinkedIn post, and we’d love to put some dollars behind it.” None of those 20 asked to be paid - they see the intrinsic value of getting their posts shown to a wider audience, gaining followers, attention, and name recognition.

It’s a real win for influencer marketing without costing much right now.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s fascinating because when my kids say they want to be influencers, they all see it - they want to be on YouTube and get likes. Recently there was a Wall Street Journal article about how it’s now possible to be a business-to-business influencer. Instagram hasn’t been for that, but you see that happening now on LinkedIn where you could potentially make a living from the things you know and do. Have you been approached by anyone as the number two influencer in the space? Is anyone paying you?

AJ Wilcox: I’ve worked on a couple of influencer deals that have been really interesting. I’ve been approached by several where I declined because I’m not a believer in their product yet. But for products I believe in, Zapier has brought me in for a couple of influencer campaigns, and LinkedIn themselves have brought me in three times now.

I love it, but I make sure these are still authentic - I’m telling my actual experience with their product so the authenticity comes through. It’s not adding much to my income. I think most people on LinkedIn already have a solid income, so I wondered what influencer marketing would look like in B2B when everyone already has money. But I’m seeing it happen, and it’s fun to participate in.

Frederick Vallaeys: Maybe this is just the beginning. We’ve seen how far it’s come on other platforms, so maybe we’ll get there too. Maybe you won’t need an agency soon.

Speaking of running an agency, Sam Altman has said that 95% of marketers will lose their jobs due to generative AI. How has generative AI shifted your agency life?

AJ Wilcox: I wanted it to shift my life so much. I’ve played with generative AI in every way I can think of. My initial idea was to use Midjourney or ChatGPT’s Dall-E to create imagery, but it has a style that doesn’t pull very well in our tests.

Then I thought about having it write ad copy, but it creates copy that sounds very drab with lots of em dashes that people can tell is AI, and without extensive coaching and prompting, it’s not giving me great content. I’d rather just spend that time writing ad copy myself.

I also considered using it for data analysis, but after many hours with ChatGPT and the data analysis plugin, I realized it’s called a large language model, not a large math model. It’s not great for helping with reporting and data analysis.

Right now, I love it as a technology. I use it for things like Excel formulas or Google Sheets formulas, but it hasn’t changed my agency much. I hope it does in the future - I want it to - but not much success yet.

Frederick Vallaeys: We’ve seen some great examples of my marketing team doing more technical things, like producing a quiz that would have involved JavaScript and programming, but now they can do that through Claude. I’ve built Chrome extensions that help me take something from deep research on GPT and polish it up for a Google doc.

It’s almost to the point where if something will take me 45 minutes manually, it’s faster to talk to one of the large language models and have it generate code. Even if I only use that code once, it’s still faster than the manual labor.

As CEO, I play with a lot of stuff that isn’t production-level perfect, but I often hand it off to my team to get it that last mile. I can see how in an agency it’s not quite delivering yet. People have been talking about the promise of generative AI for two years. Now we have to actually instrument these things - how to bring the data into it, incorporate company perspective and brand guidelines. But every day gets better.

AJ Wilcox: On the personal side, AI has totally changed things for me. I use a notetaker called Ask Elephant in all my meetings. It immediately generates a transcript and stores it. I can select multiple meetings with a client, pull in the last five conversations, and ask questions like “What were my action items from the last call?” or “What audience were we talking about? What timestamp was that at?” It has revolutionized meeting and note-taking.

I also have an integration on my phone where whatever I record automatically goes through the Whisper API, gets transcribed, gives me a summary, and costs 40 cents per hour. I’m loving AI and want to see it continue to make my life easier. I just haven’t seen where it’s helping me with clients yet, but we’ll get there.

Frederick Vallaeys: Even if it’s just handling the summarization of client meetings so you come to the next meeting better prepared, you’ve become a more efficient partner thanks to AI freeing up your cycles and brain.

Do you have one of these yet? The B computer?

AJ Wilcox: No, I don’t.

Frederick Vallaeys: It’s constantly listening, though it does have an off toggle to mute it. It’s like the transcriber for Zoom meetings but for your whole life. I don’t need to pull out my phone to record. It’s constantly listening and gives me a summary at the end of my day. I can also interact with it, asking things like, “Last week I was talking to someone on my marketing team and can’t remember the action items. Can you remind me?” It’s amazing - like my memory now.

AJ Wilcox: Can it tell when there are different speakers? If you were having a conversation, would it know this is someone else speaking?

Frederick Vallaeys: Yes, it recognizes my voice. Other voices need to be trained, so it often just says “another speaker” without identifying who it is. In our example now, because I introduced you at the beginning of the call, it would know this was a conversation with you, and I could reference that by asking, “What did I talk to AJ about?”

Where it goes off the rails is if I’m listening to music - some sad song about relationship problems. At the end of the day, it might say, “Looks like you’re having trouble with your relationships,” and I have to clarify that was not me.

We recently did an episode where we asked Andrew Lolk and Julie Friedman Bacchini about things they would stop doing, start doing, and do more of in 2025. You’ve given amazing presentations with the playbook for B2B on LinkedIn. What are you most excited about and doubling down on first?

AJ Wilcox: The progression of B2B marketing on LinkedIn has evolved. When I first started, everyone would go right for the kill - target a cold audience with an ad saying “Get a demo, talk to someone in sales.” That worked for a while, but people got sick of it.

Then marketers moved to gated content: “Let me offer a free guide or checklist, and then my sales team will follow up to see if you want a sales call after downloading.” In the last 3-4 years, we’ve found this doesn’t work well at driving sales.

We’ve gone all-in on a three-stage funnel. From two recent tests across $90,000 in ad spend across two accounts, we created stage one, stage two, and stage three funnels. To get into stage three, you had to interact with both stage one and stage two ads. We found that showing the same conversion call to action, stage three had a 5x higher conversion rate than stage two, and stage two had a 5x higher conversion rate than stage one. This persisted across multiple accounts.

This means we need a three-stage funnel for all clients because every additional stage increases conversion rates significantly. It’s proof that every additional touch gets someone to know, like, and trust you better. That’s what I’m going all-in on in 2025, along with video.

Frederick Vallaeys: So look at your SQLs and MQLs - those are the metrics that matter. Don’t care about vanity metrics, because it’s great if you have a thousand people liking your content, but ultimately you want them to go through these three stages of qualifying themselves. That helps your sales team focus where the potential is high rather than wasting time with someone who barely showed interest.

We often download white papers because we want to read the content, not because we’re actually in market, and then the sales team wastes effort. Let’s talk about video, which you’re also excited about.

AJ Wilcox: Three years ago, if you’d asked me about LinkedIn video ads, I would have said, “Too expensive, don’t worry about them, they don’t work.” I was educated by seeing what was in my own feed organically. I started seeing videos that caught my attention - talking head videos where a thought leader keeps it short (30-40 seconds) with big animated TikTok-style captions.

We started trying those as LinkedIn video ads, and even better, making them thought leader ads from the individual who created the video. These are amazing - very inexpensive, much less than a single image ad leading to your landing page. They’re highly engaging; people actually watch them, especially when you provide good value.

I create retargeting audiences from anyone who watched at least 50% of these videos. Many people will stick around and watch, so we’re creating retargeted audiences for 9 cents per individual. Compare that to clicks to a landing page for retargeting, which might be $9 per retargeted individual. I love video and am going all-in on it, especially for stage one.

Frederick Vallaeys: It’s cheap to get the ads or promotion and also cheap to produce because all it takes is a phone or webcam. But often a sticking point is getting the expert, the person with interesting insight, to actually sit down and record it.

AJ Wilcox: That is the hardest part. If I’m talking to a marketer at a large company and suggest getting their founder or CEO to record a video, they don’t know how to approach it. We started using a platform called VideoSpan. It’s a video platform where you can enter a prompt, send an invitation, and the recipient opens it on their phone or laptop. It simply says, “Here’s the prompt. Speak about this for one minute. Hit record.”

We make the process so easy that we’re actually getting internal thought leaders and busy people to record content we can use in ads.

Frederick Vallaeys: So what should people finally give up on in 2025?

AJ Wilcox: I’ve been saying this for a long time, but the default bidding method LinkedIn gives you in a campaign is called “maximum delivery.” This is the most expensive way to pay for traffic on LinkedIn, with very few situations where it works in your favor.

LinkedIn takes it further by hiding the cheapest option - max CPC bid - where you have to click “Show me more options” before it appears. I’ve been telling people for years to stop using max delivery bidding. It causes you to pay $20-40 per click when you don’t have to pay that much.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s another point I’ve heard you make about LinkedIn costs. They provide guidelines for how much you should expect to pay and what your minimum should be, but your stance is that’s just a guideline - you can still be successful with a lower bid.

AJ Wilcox: How much you pay for traffic is nearly 100% dependent on your ad performance, yet the benchmarks LinkedIn gives you don’t take your performance into account. They’re giving recommendations without knowing your actual results. If they knew my ads had a click-through rate three times the benchmark, they would suggest much lower bids.

Yesterday I had a campaign suggesting $16-66 cost per click, and I bid $7 and spent the entire budget. If I had bid their recommendation, I would have gotten one-sixth or one-seventh the traffic for the same budget. That’s insane. If I show my boss or the company owner that for this big budget we only got 200 clicks and one conversion, they’d be disappointed. But multiplying that by seven because you’re bidding properly means you’ll likely get larger budgets allocated because they can be spent more efficiently.

We shouldn’t listen to LinkedIn’s advice. I wish they would give better advice, but for now, ignore what your rep says.

Frederick Vallaeys: There’s an underlying point that you know how to drive high engagement with ads. If you came in with a bland ad nobody wanted to engage with, maybe it does cost that much to get results. It’s much like Google’s quality score - you can either bid a lot of money or make relevant ads people find interesting and want to click on. Either approach impacts your ad rank.

AJ Wilcox: Exactly the same on LinkedIn. In fact, the LinkedIn bidding algorithm was built by ex-Googlers. They call it relevancy score, but it’s really just the old quality score from Google.

Frederick Vallaeys: Speaking of algorithms, let’s talk about the post algorithm. There are tools that create pods of people who like each other’s content because that tells the algorithm there’s engagement so it should boost that. I’ve also heard people say you should post directly through the platform instead of using third-party tools. What factors should a LinkedIn novice consider to build visibility? There’s the fear of investing time in writing or making a video but having very few people see it.

AJ Wilcox: If I were starting with no connections, I wouldn’t want to waste time creating content for zero viewers. The first thing I’d suggest is sending connection requests to people you already know - current and past co-workers, family members, everyone who knows you. Get your follower count up with people who already know, like, and trust you.

Then move to people in your industry who might make good potential customers or partners, but initially you’re just looking to make connections and grow followers so you have an audience when you post.

When you have enough of an audience to start posting, LinkedIn looks for interactions to decide how widely to spread your post. The most powerful interaction is a comment. That’s why these “pod” organizations work - they like and comment on each other’s content. LinkedIn sees a post getting comments in the first hour and thinks, “This is hot, let’s show it to more people” - not just your followers but second and third-level connections.

I would be cautious about pods because they’re trying to engineer engagement, and even I can tell when it’s artificially generated. I don’t pay attention to it, and the algorithms probably notice too. But the principle is solid. If you want to post something tomorrow, reach out to 5-10 industry connections and say, “I’m posting this at 8 am tomorrow. I’d love if you would comment and like it.” You’re doing the same thing as a pod, but in a non-engineered, authentic way.

As soon as you start to engineer it, you risk people ignoring you or LinkedIn not liking what you’re doing and potentially banning your account.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s also why we mention people in posts, saying “Here’s another expert who might have a take on this,” so they get the notification and are incentivized to engage.

Ultimately, it’s about real connections. We see posts saying, “I’ve got a script that does amazing things - comment with the word ‘script’ and I’ll send it to you,” getting hundreds or thousands of comments. But is that driving value or just engineering engagement?

AJ Wilcox: I call that “comment gating,” and I probably do it once or twice a year with a big asset. What I love about it is when people comment, your post goes viral as more people see it. But then you need to deliver the asset. I say, “I’m sending you a connection request. Accept it and I’ll send the asset via message.”

The last time I did this with an advanced LinkedIn ads guide, over a thousand people requested it. After spending two weeks sending messages and managing comments, I ended up with 1,500-2,000 more followers and connections. It was worthwhile. If overused, it might look inauthentic, but it’s a viable way to share something you’ve worked hard on.

Frederick Vallaeys: Maybe you’ve changed my mind a bit. My take was this isn’t really useful - you’re just engineering engagement. But I see the value in building your followership to create a bigger platform. Maybe I’m sold on doing this once or twice a year.

AJ Wilcox: Be aware that when you do it, you either automate it with a tool (which risks your account since LinkedIn doesn’t want you using automation) or do what I did - set aside two weeks to respond to messages and send content. It’s a lot of work if a post goes viral, but I think it’s worthwhile.

Frederick Vallaeys: Speaking of tools, one frustration advertisers have had with LinkedIn is that their capabilities lag behind Google’s. The tools are clunkier, and there haven’t been as many third-party solutions. Optmyzr now has a rule engine for some automation, but is the situation improving? You mentioned LinkedIn doesn’t like tools, but for advertising, tools should be fine. What’s out there? What are you using? Have you built anything lately?

AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn has always disliked tools of all kinds - they’re very much a walled garden. When I started, there were only four ad partners with API access, and it stayed that way for about five years before they added me, making it five total. Then someone who understood partnerships changed their policy and opened it up, though still through an application process.

They started letting in bigger players like HubSpot and Zapier, and now the application process is relatively simple. More people are creating tools as the ads platform grows in popularity, creating a user base to buy these tools. I’m excited to see what people are building.

For organic content, LinkedIn still doesn’t like tools. They’re owned by Microsoft with a stake in OpenAI, so they’re integrating AI everywhere. When posting, they’ll suggest using AI to write it. But if they catch you using automation tools like Chrome extensions or Phantom Buster, they’ll suspend your account, and it’s difficult to regain access.

Regarding our tools, I’ve used Optmyzr’s rule engine, and it’s awesome. We’ve built our own tools that we’ve had for years but haven’t offered publicly. We created something like the Google Ads Editor but for LinkedIn, allowing us to bulk create campaigns and ads from spreadsheets and make account-wide adjustments. That’s been our secret weapon for efficiently managing large accounts. I don’t know if we’ll turn it into SaaS software to sell, but for now, we use it internally.

There are probably 10 tools I’m currently testing for LinkedIn advertisers, evaluating what’s good and worth using.

Frederick Vallaeys: You mentioned a partnership with Zapier that came from loving the platform. How do you use it? Any novel applications?

AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn was very late to implement a conversions API. Google has had it for a long time, Meta came out with it, and LinkedIn only added it in the last year. I tried implementing it through Google Tag Manager, but it was so complex that I needed help despite not being a developer.

Zapier created a way to connect website conversions to the LinkedIn conversions API that’s incredibly easy - I’m talking five-minute setup. Even HubSpot’s direct integration takes 15-20 minutes and is missing a key feature (passing the unique user identifier).

I love Zapier for this, and they’ve made it free. The beauty of the conversions API, which isn’t news to you but might be to others, is that normal conversion tracking requires a cookie on your browser from impression to conversion. We know cookies are under fire and becoming less reliable. The conversions API sends the conversion to LinkedIn without relying on cookies. Everyone should set up the conversions API, and Zapier does it for free.

Frederick Vallaeys: You’ve shared so much great advice. If people want to connect with you, LinkedIn is probably a good place. Connect with AJ Wilcox, and b2linked.com is his website. Any upcoming speaking events you want to mention?

AJ Wilcox: If you’re going to Content Marketing World, I’m speaking there. I haven’t confirmed yet, but probably Inbound, B2B Forum from Marketing Profs, and Hero Conf. If you’re attending any of these, I’d love to meet you in person. Let’s be social face-to-face.

Frederick Vallaeys: AJ, it’s always a pleasure having you on. I hope people reach out to you. If you’ve enjoyed this episode and want to see future ones, make sure to subscribe. We produce these roughly every two weeks. Thank you for watching, and we’ll see you next time.