AJ Wilcox
Yeah, yeah. So in general, anytime that I’m building ads for LinkedIn, I keep in mind the acronym a mo, Mo, and it stands for your audience, your message and your offer. So those are the three things that every social campaign needs. And so we go to LinkedIn, and we define who our audience is. And I would say at first, let’s be as specific as we can you narrow down on the exact people who feel the pain that you solve, then you kind of flip over to the to the offer, this is what you’re actually asking people to do. It’s your call to action. There are what I would call very, like low friction, low touch kinds of offers, like come and read this blog post. There are very high friction offers, like buy something now or talk to our sales rep. And there are things in between, what we find is the very low friction and the very high friction, the extremes don’t work very well on LinkedIn. Of course, We can get people to, to click to come and read a blog post. But blog posts don’t convert. And so you’re paying this, you know, eight to $11 every time someone clicks to come and read a blog post that won’t convert, and so you won’t be happy with your cost per lead. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you’re saying, Come and buy something or come and talk to a sales rep. And these are things that are very high infraction, friction, they’re very scary to a cold audience, and they won’t click, they won’t convert. And so you end up with again, like really high costs per lead. So what you really want to shoot for is an offer that’s in the middle gated content, lead magnets, something that’s a little bit softer, where you are asking for their personal information, but you’re also giving them something that they value, something that’s going to solve a pain point, or satisfy a curiosity for them.
Jeremy Weisz
What’s another big mistake a big mistake would be too high friction or even too low friction because that doesn’t convert What’s another big mistake people make with LinkedIn ads,
AJ Wilcox
I think the one of the big mistakes, maybe you’re avoiding the extremes just right. So you’re going, let’s do some gated content. But you didn’t come up with gated content that actually solves a problem for people. If you’re just saying, like, Oh, we need something to put behind it. Let’s
Jeremy Weisz
throw something up.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah. How about a product brochure? No, no one is willing to give you their information for a product brochure that they know, they could just find on your website anyway. So I think it’s making sure that you are in touch with the customer in touch with what their needs are. So that you can actually say, here’s a report, here’s a guide, here’s a free checklist or cheat sheet that you are actually going to find valuable enough to put in your information.
Jeremy Weisz
Let’s talk about BambooHR. You know, funny thing. You mentioned that because I was looking at their site the other day for us. So I’d love to hear what their opt in is because I’ll probably opt in for it. But what did BambooHR do?
AJ Wilcox
Well, this was a few years ago, but it was a really interesting case. Steady for us. They gave us four ebooks to try to pitch they understood you stay away from the extremes. And so they gave us these four ebooks. And our team went to this rapid iterative testing of images and ad copy a different motivations. We tried everything we could. And all four of these. These ebooks, we couldn’t get a download for under $127. Or, and I went, oh man, we’ve been, you know, we’ve been working together for three months at this point. I was sure they were going to fire us because, you know, no one’s willing to pay $127 for well downloading.
Jeremy Weisz
I mean, if they get a conversion out of it.
AJ Wilcox
Well, yeah. But overnight, our rep or not a rep, our contact there within the company send over a new piece of content, and it was called The Ultimate Guide to onboarding. And we did exactly the same thing. We didn’t do anything different. We wrote our copy of the same way. Use the same kind of imagery and Overnight, our conversion rates tripled. And our click through rates doubled, when costs dropped significantly, we ended up getting a cost per lead that was under $27. And we’ve got this this issue anytime you do social advertising of saturation, where people have seen the same thing over and over, and they they stopped wanting to click and convert this same asset, oh, man, it lived for like, eight, nine months straight before they found another piece of content that would outperform it. So it doesn’t reflect on us terribly well, like we didn’t do anything to cause that. But it does punctuate the importance of having an offer that really does solve a pain point.
Jeremy Weisz
Yeah, that’s the funny thing AJ with this is you get blamed if it doesn’t work, even though it’s kind of not your fault that they give you an asset. And then you can’t take credit because they came up with that asset. So I don’t lose either way, but I figure we’ll break this down a little bit, right? And maybe just have you say what you like what you don’t like. And we’re not claiming These are your ads or anything like that. So I’m just have you take a look at some of these on LinkedIn? And let me know what do you like, what do you not like and I have Microsoft up here, this is just in the feed, right? And there’s all of you talk a little about, there’s some new features out whenever someone’s listening to this that you should pay attention to. But there’s also different kinds of ads. So this is, what do you call this like in feed out or?
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, these ones the ones that appear in your newsfeed, which is the default experience, whether you’re mobile on the app or on desktop, like we are, and they call them sponsored content. There’s a whole bunch of different flavors. They can be static image like this one is or video or carousel, like multiple tiles. But this is just kind of a standard. And it’s actually what I what I recommend starting with so this is an example. They also show up in your feed about every five slots. So we’ll talk About this Microsoft one, then when you get it, we’ll scroll down. Yeah, just scroll scroll down. Yeah, see another. Um, so Microsoft, obviously, everyone who’s listening here has heard of Microsoft. So this is we’re not necessarily cold audiences here. And it gives them a little bit of license that they can push basically directly to a hard offer this one saying dynamics 365 is good for you. Click here to check it out. So that’s what I would consider a hard sale. But because Microsoft is such a brand for all of us, they’re probably getting people who are willing to click through on that app. Yeah, they’ve done a really good job of having the intro, which is the text up above, keeping it short, because people on LinkedIn don’t have a whole lot of time to mess around. And so they’re just going to very quickly scan through so you don’t want a big block of text there. And down below that headline says, create remote shopping experiences with dynamics dynamics 365. That’s pretty straight to the point and letting people know, here’s what you can expect. And their imagery, it’s obviously very stock photo II. So I think they could do better that way. It’s very clean. And just reading that font and seeing that color. I know that that’s a Microsoft color. So I think they’ve done a really good job branding wise,
Jeremy Weisz
what changes would you make? So you’d maybe change the picture a little bit? Anything else you would change with this?
AJ Wilcox
Uh, yeah, I think pictures probably the only thing I change on this one, there’s a lot we can do. That kind of front loads the value when someone is offering value first, but because this isn’t really a value first ad, they’ve done a good job of writing the copy. I mean, it’s short enough, it’s not going to get cut off. I think the image is probably really the only thing that I would adjust here.
Jeremy Weisz
Got it. Alright, let’s go down a little bit. Shout out to James Thompson. Love James and BuyBox Experts. Let’s see here. Where’s the next Oh, I know Tatango Yeah, I know Derek actually I interviewed him. He’s been on the show.
AJ Wilcox
Nice. Okay, cool. So we’re gonna rip apart of past guests that this is interesting. So this
Jeremy Weisz
hill appreciate this AJ I’m sure
AJ Wilcox
it’s free advice, whether anyone take it or not.
So I, I haven’t heard of Tatango before, but they have 743 followers, which isn’t a ton, but it’s also not something that I would expect from a fly by night. So immediately, they’ve got the social proof that that I feel comfortable interacting with their ad. It’s there’s action going because he’s walking with his selfie stick. And in the first few seconds of video, it’s really important to grab someone’s attention with motion. So that does that really well. Um, the headline there, what’s the biggest mistake SMS markets are making? And that might be I don’t know if that’s for marketers or if it’s actually Like SMS markets, but I would want you’re not
Jeremy Weisz
sure who he’s targeting.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah. And I would want a little bit more information I’d want to know like, why are you talking to me? Because, you know, this video on LinkedIn, it’s just like Facebook, it plays muted, and he doesn’t have subtitles on here. So if I want to know Do I want to go in like get my headphones and turn this? Yeah, here with this guy. So
Jeremy Weisz
have subtitles for sure.
AJ Wilcox
Yes. Yep. Subtitles super important. Having a little bit more in the intro. Like, what’s the biggest mistake SMS marketers are making? Watch this video, like some kind of call to action here. Watch this video and we’ll tell you so you can avoid those mistakes. I think that would add a lot here. And down below that headline, the contact Tatango To learn more, is it I mean, it’s pretty straightforward.
Jeremy Weisz
He needs to have a call that he did have some kind of guide like we were talking about, like, you know, the three biggest mistakes we’ve seen Or some some kind of guide of some sort like an optic a gated content?
AJ Wilcox
Yes. Yep, I think that would add a lot to it. And he’s done a really good job with the video. I mean, we know that there’s action right up front, there’s movement, that’s good. And it’s also 46 seconds long. Some of the best performing content we’ve seen has been like 15 to 45 seconds. So he’s he’s right there keeping it short. not expecting someone to watch a 10 minute long video. So yeah, that’s my feedback on that one.
Jeremy Weisz
Okay, we’re gonna start with Derek tag. I’m Derek cool. Listening. Let’s do one more if your game
AJ Wilcox
perfect. Zenefits, Zenefits Okay, cool. And these guys, I’ve consulted for them. It’s a sharp team. So I’m hoping I can’t pick apart too much.
Jeremy Weisz
Like the interest is my ad. This is the best thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Now.
AJ Wilcox
These guys are facing because they want more business with them. So more than 15 Hr templates for a safe reopening, including email templates, signage, templates and checklist templates. I mean, this is good there. They haven’t pressed on a pain point. But if you read that and go, ooh, HR templates to for a safe reopening, that’s for me, then they’ve done their job. And I think that’s probably the case. Yeah, um, they went a little bit long. So you can see there’s that similar that you’d have to click to read the rest of their ad. So I try to keep things short enough that
Jeremy Weisz
Yeah, and read because most people aren’t going to do that. Most people yeah.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah. But obviously this is leading very much value first, like here are these templates you can use which sounds very easy. Down below the headline, download the Coronavirus combat kit. Very powerful. That one’s excellent. Image wise, there’s a little bit of work I would do here. So this is very much a very blue kind of image. And LinkedIn is very blue, gray and white. I mean, that’s kind of their colors. And what we find with images, the job is not to get someone to click or convert, the job of the image is just to get someone to stop. Pick out exactly just so they’ll read your ad copy the ad copy is going to tell them what they want to know. So this image, I would love it if they maybe switch the brand colors here. They went background more orange and then have the button be blue. So we’re just heavily saturating an orange, which, yeah, opposite of blue on the color wheel. That would be a good move. Yeah. The other thing is, this is a beautiful image, but I can’t read everything on there. It looks like a wall of text. And so I try to follow the same billboard rule. That’s like seven words or fewer on an image if you can, and they can be huge. They can take up the whole thing, but
Jeremy Weisz
I wanted the most important checkmarks like make them big. Exactly.
AJ Wilcox
And, I mean, that text looks blurry to me. I don’t know if it’s just like on your screen if
Jeremy Weisz
it looks pretty tiny. It looks fine. It’s small, though. Okay, cool.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, I think that’s the biggest challenge I’d have with that. One is kind of fix the image, simplify it, maybe simplify the intro a little bit. Yeah. And I think this is a near perfect ad.
Jeremy Weisz
Cool. Yeah. And we’ll talk about other types of ads. And then we’ll give a shot. There is a Derek talking about text message marketing, that puts butts in the seats. So you could check out that from the Tango, but, um, there’s other ads here. So those are, you know, I see the promoted stuff here. I also see this ad at the top. I don’t know if you have any opinions on one of the other ad options that people have.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah. So if you look over on the right side of your screen right now that that promoted section, those are called text ads, and they are LinkedIn cheapest ads, which is fantastic. You know, I told you, you’ll pay eight to $11 every time someone clicks in the feed, but if you click one of those promoted, they’re oftentimes between about three to $5. So great value, but They are obviously an ad. So very few people look over there, we’re kind of blind to them. And yet they have a very, very low click through rate. Which means you’d have to have a pretty large audience to even spend much money at all there. And you mentioned the the link at the very top. Yeah. That used to be called, there’s a whole story here. But that used to be called a one by one that you’d have to buy directly from LinkedIn sales team, you couldn’t buy it on the ad platform. And they kind of did away with that. Now it’s basically if you bid high enough to be the highest text link and promoted they also push you to the top so you can see that the same headline fine but this expensive
Jeremy Weisz
one, I imagine because you’re at the top of I don’t think that’s rotated since we’ve been on here or anything like that. Yeah, it’s
AJ Wilcox
a to get the top slot. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re, they’re bidding like eight plus dollars for that click. So that click probably cost just as much as an infeed. Okay, like to rank second or third in there to
Jeremy Weisz
know keep costs low. What else? I know there is I mean, I’ve gotten some inmail ads. I don’t know you want to talk about that?
AJ Wilcox
Yeah. So there is an ad format. All the other ones that we’ve talked about so far, you there’s very low risk, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. So they’re showing some kind of level of intent where, you know, sponsored in mail is different than they actually call it sponsored messaging now, but you on these ones, you pay percent, so you’ll pay, let’s call it 20 to 45 cents to send it to someone, but then you have no guarantee that they’ll see that they got it, or open it or click on your offer inside. So it puts you three orders of magnitude away from the act. Yeah, we’re paying for before.
Jeremy Weisz
And what do you think about those? What’s your opinion on those?
AJ Wilcox
So we run the largest in mail account in the world? Yeah, LinkedIn. So we obviously have a lot of success with them, but we also find a lot of failure. With them with our other clients. And so when it comes down to you really need a very special kind of offer so that they don’t come across spammy, or something like, because of who you are in the industry, we want to give you an early access or sneak peek at something we’re working on. We want to invite you as a VIP to this event we’re putting on with your peers, those types of things feel very special. And if you’ve got them as a cold email from someone, you might actually be excited about it. Hmm, versus if it’s just download my white paper, talk to my sales. People are just gonna ignore them. And those will be the most expensive cost per click you’ve ever seen.
Jeremy Weisz
What are some of the most aggressive or BEST OFFERS you’ve either help someone with or you’ve seen? It could be it could be in the email or it could be just offering in one of the one of the ads.
Unknown Speaker
So
Jeremy Weisz
like aggressive meaning like in a good way, like it was so generous. Like if I said I sent in maybe Not even believable but like, Hey, I have two front row you know courtside seats the Utah Jazz for you, AJ they’re on me because of XYZ that may be like an aggressive offer. They also may not be believable. But you know, I’m curious of what you’ve seen work really well that is super aggressive like generous.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, we’ve we’ve seen, giveaways work really well. So I would say my first inclination was a client who came to us and said, We want to give offer a gift card to CEOs for taking a demo or hopping on the phone with us. I’m like, the CEOs of big companies. They’re rich, they are not care about a 25 or 50 or $100 gift card. But sure enough, it converts like really, these people they’re just like, just like the rest of us apparently. So we’ve seen gift cards to inset homes a phone call work well,
Jeremy Weisz
anything else any other like monetary or gift offers that you’ve seen? Well,
AJ Wilcox
we’ve seen book giveaways work really well as them. So if we know the free plus shipping offers are really popular on Facebook right now. But we had a client who just straight would say, Hey, we will, we will pay for shipping and we will send you this book does clean. They know that if you read the first 10 pages of their book, you’re going to be sold and nice to work with them. So get it in their hands so that they’re
Jeremy Weisz
completely free. So people will say, I’ll pay we’ll pay for the shipping. We’ll pay for the book. We’ll send it to you and that works.
Unknown Speaker
Yes,
Jeremy Weisz
yep. Nice. You mentioned a couple of features, new features. You want to talk about those?
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, a video ads on LinkedIn have been kind of challenging for a while. You know, we saw this with with Derek’s ad. You know, he’s paying a pretty penny for that. You’ll probably pay between, let’s call it 15 and 25 cents per person who watches at least two seconds. Oh, really.
Jeremy Weisz
Yeah, and on Facebook, so he’s got to put subtitles in those AJ
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Jeremy Weisz
you’re like so nice about it. I’m like, I’m gonna text message, you can be getting more conversions there, put some subtitles.
AJ Wilcox
But what we find is, you know, getting someone to watch at least three seconds of your Facebook video, you’re paying like one to two cents. So one to two cents versus 15 to 25 is a big difference. And so for a long time I just said, Hey, if you want to bring video creative to LinkedIn, make sure you’ve tested it on Facebook or YouTube first and bring your best stuff. But just a couple weeks ago, LinkedIn released video retargeting. And now we can create audiences where we say if you’ve watched at least 50% of this video. Now I want to the next time you come back, I want to show you the next one in the sequence. And this is it’s a lot more powerful. You can also do the same thing. They have a form product that rather than having someone click on your Your sponsored content ad, or your in mail ad and send them to a landing page. Now it’s just a you interact with the ad and a little drawer will slide down with a form within it. And same kind of thing I was like, Well, I’d rather get the traffic to my website where I can retarget them with my Google and my Facebook ads that are incredibly inexpensive and very good. Now, they they released this ability to retarget by whether you opened the form or whether you filled the form out. So those are the new excitement that we have on LinkedIn.
Jeremy Weisz
Very cool. Um, I want to talk about organic reach for a second and what’s the importance of I mean, maybe some Microsoft movie doesn’t play a role but but um, like Derek, of optimizing the the actual LinkedIn profile itself, if you’re doing ads, so I pulled yours up here. So I don’t know. What’s what should people think about doing to optimize their actual profile and does that even play Rolling, the ads are not really.
AJ Wilcox
Alright, so so there’s good news and bad news here, depending on on how you think of it. LinkedIn ads will only work for a company’s page, not a personal profile. And we have a lot of clients who are concerned with this. Like, before we launch ads, do I need to go and work on my personal profile? And the answer’s no. Someone can click on your ad to go to your company page. And they won’t ever make it to your personal profile. So don’t worry about trying to spruce it up. But it does mean that your company profile you should be maybe not proud of it, but at least don’t be ashamed of it. But there’s not a whole lot you can do to your company page. Yeah, it’s like you put
Jeremy Weisz
a logo so I click here. What I do Yeah,
Unknown Speaker
well, yeah.
AJ Wilcox
And so you can see our I’m not especially proud of our page, but I’m not ashamed of it either. Like 793 followers. Not a ton but you know, it’s enough that people know that we’re not a fly by night. Yeah. The about sections filled out There’s a little bit of content that’s been posted. So I think that’s something you want to make sure. You know, you’ve actually shared stuff here. People, you can tell people like, the lights are on in someone’s home.
Jeremy Weisz
So I just pulled up and go, yeah,
AJ Wilcox
yeah, they filled out quite a bit more like this. I would look at this and it immediately inspires more confidence than mine does.
Jeremy Weisz
So they should spruce up their, their company page, for sure.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, and if you click on that ads tab down there, this is kind of cool. You can do this for any competitor of yours. If you click on the ads tab, you can actually see right here six months. Oh, yep, that’s the one. You can actually see the last six months of ads they’ve run. So top one, that’s an example of a carousel ad where you can actually like scroll through on mobile, you swipe here on desktop, you just click that arrow. Yeah. So you can see how they’re showing you different experiences.
Jeremy Weisz
app that’s Interesting.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah. So it looks like they’re doing a lot of testing on those carousel versions. And the next one is the one that we actually saw in your feed, which is kind of cool.
Jeremy Weisz
So why did why does LinkedIn do that?
AJ Wilcox
Why do they allow?
Jeremy Weisz
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
AJ Wilcox
It’s all because Facebook was drugged in front of Congress. When Mark Zuckerberg had to go and testify in front of Congress, like about the transparency and the issues with Russian voting. Lincoln was like, we don’t want to have to testify to Congress. So they, they, they gave full visibility on ads. People are running. Companies are running have it before then. Oh, wow. That’s pretty interesting. Yeah, that is they are Yeah, they’re protecting you a little bit. As an advertiser. You can see you can’t tell the social proof on those ads. They don’t show you how many likes or how many comedy? Yeah, they’re not showing you the comments.
Jeremy Weisz
It’ll show you how successful they’re
AJ Wilcox
exactly. So you can see the creative but you have to guess was that good or bad? Huh.
Jeremy Weisz
Thanks for sharing. That’s that’s pretty amazing. Actually, they’re doing quite a bit of testing here. You could see
AJ Wilcox
Oh, yeah. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the video ad that you received was part of retargeting. So if you went to tango site, because you’re preparing for the interview, I wouldn’t be surprised if you get that ad because you’re part of a retargeting audience. And he knows he’s showing this ad to a to a warmer audience. So maybe subtitles and a strong call to action name, maybe aren’t all that important.
Jeremy Weisz
That makes sense. Um, any suggestions on outreach, like the organic reach because I know when when I mentioned you have run a lot of ads, but you also have helped with organic reach in I don’t know if you call it on LinkedIn SEO, but what suggestions you have for organic reach? And on that end,
AJ Wilcox
yeah, so first of all, I should preface this by saying LinkedIn is such an exciting channel organically right now. Because the organic reach is massive. It’s The easiest network in the world to go viral on right now. Hmm. To give an example, I’ve, I’ve got something like, like, you know, 14,000 followers or something. It’s really pretty standard for me to post things that get 50,000 60,000 views. Wow. And you go, Whoa, I mean, who’s seeing this? The fact of the matter is only about 4% of people on LinkedIn will publish content. I don’t know if they’re scared or whatever, or they just don’t think too, but only 4% of people are creating, but 100% need a full feed full of stuff when they log in. So what they’re doing is they’re saying, hey, if someone if someone you’re connected to likes, comments, or reshares, one of your posts, then it’s then eligible to go to some of their connections. Hmm. So even hitting like is is akin to a retweet on Twitter. Really? Yeah, and maybe not fully, only get Access to maybe call it five or 10% of their audience. But this is how stuff goes viral. If you create people that if you create posts personally, that people want to interact with, they want to hit like they want to comment, then it’s going to go to their followers, some from their likes or comments, and it goes to their followers and just keeps going.
Jeremy Weisz
Hmm. What do you suggest as far as manual best practices for manual outreach? To
AJ Wilcox
I would say, Yeah, I love that you’re asking this because I feel like spam on LinkedIn like this mass connection. Spam is a huge issue. And and I know quite a few agencies who just perpetuate this. My best advice for you in doing outreach is do research. Like, don’t just send out 100 connection requests with copy paste messaging, because it’s easy to hit a whole bunch of people spend a few minutes on their profile, look through the types of things that they have comment on the types of things that they share, and then things on their profile, and then really customize
Jeremy Weisz
the messaging. I mean, you want to customize it.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah. If you’re just reaching out to me saying, Hey, I see we share some connections, or we’re in the same city, we should connect. Totally, that’s not a good enough reason for me to want to connect with you. I have a very busy inbox, and I want to guard that. Yeah. So make sure you’ve done your research. And they can tell you’re reaching out to them, because of them, and not because they’re just a number to you.
Jeremy Weisz
And us, you’re reaching out other certain elements that I must include in the actual profile. You know, for the ads, it’s more the company profile for me reaches a personal profile. What are the must haves or maybe big mistakes you see people making with optimizing their actual personal profile?
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, I think I have what I call the Pareto principle for profiles, probably just because the alliterations cool all those peas, but this is it’s the 8020 rule. So it’s the 20% of changes you can make to your profile that make 80% of the difference. So the things that are included here are like number one, your picture. So the porthole for your face. It’s round because they want a face in there. And so you don’t want to have like you and you and Mark Zuckerberg or something or Oprah
Jeremy Weisz
cuts to half their head off or something Exactly, yeah.
AJ Wilcox
Or even squeezing you both in there. It’s like well, we don’t know. We don’t know which ones who so you do you want it close enough. My guide is if I’m going to go and meet someone in a Starbucks for the first time ever, and they’ve got me my profile open on their their mobile device. I want them to be able to recognize me so close enough that if I walk in, they’ll see a Chevy ginger, but far enough away that it’s not like whoa, bro back up like you’re in my face.
Jeremy Weisz
Right?
AJ Wilcox
And you want to look pretty inviting, like don’t have a scowl on your face make it you know, professional and inviting. The next piece is down below where you see LinkedIn ads expert host of LinkedIn ads. This is called your headline. And this used to be where people would just put like VP of whatever at yes company. But that doesn’t tell people anything unless that’s like a fortune 500 company that everyone would recognize. Sure, that’s impressive. But if you’re not, this is where you get to share. Here’s the value
Jeremy Weisz
ever, like, I have no idea what you do. Exactly,
AJ Wilcox
yes. You want to say like, imagine someone is reading this and they’re wondering what’s in it for me? Like, why should I want to be connected to you or have a conversation with you? That’s what your headline does, and it answers that question. The next piece is that where you see my geography Salt Lake City metropolitan area, I’m actually in a city called Lehi that’s about 30 minutes south of Salt Lake. If you’re from Utah, you know that this is the tech epicenter of Utah. This is where all the b2b tech companies are. And that’s kind of cool. But outside of Utah, Lehigh just sounds like a made up word. So, what I like to, you know, we do business with people all over the country and all over the world. And so I’m gonna claim my nearest metro area so that it’s much more likely that people are going to look at me and say, Oh, he’s he’s legit. He’s in a city.
Jeremy Weisz
Yep. Yep.
AJ Wilcox
And And really, that’s it. I mean, it’s just about section down below where you get to two lines. And then I see Mr. This is where you can kind of, like, tease this looks good. Interested? Yeah. And you can do more here you can insert emojis and that kind of thing to break it up. But, but the first two lines are really what’s going to convince someone whether or not they want to connect with you, or read more. And so if you do those four things, that’s that’s the 20% that make 80% of the difference.
Jeremy Weisz
Love it. I love preto principle. I love 8020. So thanks for sharing. AJ, first of all, I want to thank you. I have a couple last questions, but I just want to encourage people to check out your site. Here it is B2Linked.com check it out. He’s got I love it, he’s got a video, if you check out all his pages, he’s got a video, or it’s not a video, but an audio that you can listen to that is specific to each of those pages. So I may have listened to 80% of them, I don’t know, but about that, but they’re really they’re really informative in so check it out if you’re thinking of doing LinkedIn ads, which if you have a high life client lifetime value, you should be thinking about LinkedIn ads. Um, you know, AJ, the one of the things I thought was interesting from your background is you went on a mission to Ukraine, and, um, I would love to hear how that has maybe influence you or what your learnings are from going on a mission going into a foreign country and not knowing anyone how it influences you, personally and in business. So what was what was the mission? Tell me you
AJ Wilcox
So I served a mission for my church. I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, you may have heard of the Mormons, that’s us. And at the age of 19, I went to go serve a mission. And I paid for it myself and my parents helped. But, you know, I paid for myself to go two years in a place that I didn’t choose. I received what they call a mission call. And it just said, you will be speaking Russian and you will be serving in Ukraine and
Unknown Speaker
Wow, cool.
AJ Wilcox
What I learned from they
Jeremy Weisz
just pick you out of a How do they actually assign you
AJ Wilcox
that they, they essentially have they pray about each person each applicant and and go with where they feel like is best for that person got it, and so so that it’s divine for them? For me, I definitely felt that I was, you know, I studied Spanish all through high school and I really wanted to go to South America somewhere, but I’m so glad I went to Ukraine so glad I learned Russian that would just did amazing thing. So
Jeremy Weisz
you actually learn Russian Yes. Seems like it’s a hard language to learn.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, it’s super hard, totally different alphabet all that. What’s really cool about Russian though, is the word order in a sentence doesn’t matter. You can say the last word in the sentence, you can say the first word in the sentence and alternate in. And the sentence has the same meaning. Every word, whether it’s an adjective, a noun or a verb, it gets what are called declinations, where you change it based off of the gender and how you’re using it. So for me, I love math. And for me speaking Russian is kind of like solving equations all the time. You’re always wondering like, oh, if I know I’m going to use this noun, what do I have to do to the verb or what do I have to do? anyway? That was one of my big takeaways was in learning Russian. I got this insatiable love for just taking in new information. I always want to be studying something and learning something more because it was such a hard language and I got used to every morning of studying.
Jeremy Weisz
What was one of your favorite experiences going to the Ukraine? Oh, uh,
AJ Wilcox
I mean, there were, there was one experience where I went to go contact a lady, and you’re on a mission on a religious mission, you’re essentially knocking on doors and out talking to people all the time just trying to see, you know, who wants to learn about Jesus Christ. Which, you know, we’ve talked about, like, offers that are asking too much like, you get turned down a lot.
Jeremy Weisz
He viewed a briefcase full of cash and like, why are you on my doorstep? Get off, you know, like, even if you have something they want. It’s it’s, you know, it’s tough. It’s a tough crowd.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah, totally. I had one lady, I knocked on her door, and it she was an older lady. And she opened the door and just went and we started talking and she was just kind of exasperated, and she told us later, she’s like, I had a dream about you last night. And in this dream, you came and brought me a book and taught me about Jesus. Wow, I don’t have control over like what goes in people’s dreams. But that was pretty, pretty shocking and pretty cool for me.
Jeremy Weisz
AJ, what’s the, you know, you’re an ads person, right? The conversion rate, what was the conversion rate of someone actually, you going up knocking on the door and they’d actually talked to you?
AJ Wilcox
Oh man, I would say we would go and probably knock on, I would say 40 to 50 doors at a time. And we’d probably get three people who invited us back over to come and teach them. So not a great conversion rate.
Jeremy Weisz
10% ish conversion rate. What would you say when you walk up? Like,
AJ Wilcox
I’d usually say like, Hi, my name is blank.
Jeremy Weisz
In Russian. Oh, you’re saying in Russian? No, I’m not asking to say but you were you were actually saying it in Russian at the time. I want English. Okay. Yeah,
AJ Wilcox
yeah, I’d say I’m a I’m a representative of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I would love to talk to you about Jesus Christ. With or you know, we try different opening lines like, do you believe in Jesus Christ? Or what do you know about him? To try to start conversation?
Jeremy Weisz
What would work best with opening lines? I’m fascinated by door to door anything. It’s like, it’s got to be some of the most the some of the toughest thing someone can do you know, dealing with rejection.
AJ Wilcox
Yeah. Yeah, I think the best, the best conversation starter we had was Do you believe in Jesus Christ? Because they came from the Soviet bloc era where it was actually mandated the government forced everyone to be atheists. And so you’d have a lot of people who live through that. They wouldn’t claim to the government, they were atheists, but inwardly they would they would believe and so when you ask them, Do you believe in Jesus Christ, they would say like, Yeah, I do. I believe for a long time. They’re eager to talk about him and then we can start a conversation.
Jeremy Weisz
Love it. You didn’t know we were gonna go that route. But I think I mean, if you talk to anyone who’s been on a mission is not on doors, there are some of the most successful people I know because they can just deal with, you know, a door literally shutting on you slamming in their face. So I wanted to say thank you, AJ, thank you for sharing your knowledge expertise everyone, check out B2Linked.com and check them out. Thanks, AJ.
AJ Wilcox
Thanks so much. And if any of you are interested in LinkedIn ads, check out the podcast. We go really deep. So you probably won’t want to listen if you don’t want to go really deep on LinkedIn ads, but the LinkedIn ads show.
Jeremy Weisz
Very cool. Thank you.
AJ Wilcox
Thanks Jeremy.
