Hi! This is Moby.

Today, I want to give you my core LinkedIn ads playbook. It’s what I use for clients.

You can share this with your team, agency, or use it yourself.

What you can expect:

P.S. I presented this as a talk to 20+ founders at Red Fridge Society in Austin. If you want to watch the full video (with Q&A), check it out here. Slides and transcript are also available in the description in the video.

The first step is to build your audience. This is make-or-break, because you cannot rely on LinkedIn’s ad algorithm to find the right people.

Unlike other platforms, LinkedIn ads does not have an algorithm which matches your ads to those who are likely to be most interested. It straight up displays them to who you select as your target audience.

That makes our life harder.

If you’re not familiar, LinkedIn allows you to target:

It also lets you do so by Company Revenue, Member Age/Gender/Field of Study, Member Skills but I find those filters to be less accurate.

If you’re targeting a pretty broad category (Oil & Gas, Manufacturing, Accounting Firms), then using LinkedIn’s native Industry targeting works.

But there’s a lot of bleed. Those categories are based on the Industry the company itself selects, and it can be hit or miss.

A few years back, I was running ads for a medical testing company.

We chose to target using LinkedIn’s native filters, and did get leads.

As a test, we switched to an account list. The client spent 32 hours building and manually checking the list before pushing live.

The result was the best leads they ever got, because we only targeted the bigger companies they wanted to do business with.

It taught me this: If you want to target a very specific slice of the market, it’s usually better to invest the time into building a company list outside of LinkedIn, and uploading it.

You can do this by using tools like Apollo, Clay, ZoomInfo, or Seamless.

Once that list is uploaded on LinkedIn, you can filter down that audience using Job titles (my preferences) or Job Functions + Seniorities (sometimes, you have to target a large set of decision-makers in the audience).

Linkedin will tell you who the top 100 companies are in your audience:

It will also tell you the top 100 job titles in your audience:

Once you see that, you should:

This stops you spending money on companies/people you don’t want to get in front of.

I gave this talk at Red Fridge Society recently, and it’s available on Youtube now. You can also get the slides + transcript in the description.

Hands down, you should be spending 80% of your TOFU budget on Thought Leader ads.

I write more about them in a past edition here, and these are personal posts that are promoted as ads:

Dollar for dollar, they are the highest ROI ads you can spend your money on.

Ideally, they’re from an executive (founder / CEO / head of sales) and some salespeople.

Yes.

Showing up as a person rather than a company means:

I built out a framework for comparison 👇

A few things happen when you run Thought Leader Ads:

And with that inbound, you can tack on:

The Aha! moment for me was when we did this with a Cybersecurity founder and got a meeting with Blackrock in the first week:

So you’re getting some inbound with Thought Leader ads. Great 👍

But it’s not consistent. Not great 😔

It’s time to test different lead generation tactics with your engaged / warm audience.

This warm audience has seen your ads. They know who you are. They’ve clicked on some or watched your videos. Time to show them more ads:

1) More thought leader ads with more direct CTAs

2) Conversation ads straight to their inbox. They come from a person, not a company, so there’s familiarity there already.

3) Lead Generation Form ads to the warm audience

4) Sales-led LinkedIn outreach to most engaged accounts

5) Sales-led email outreach to the most engaged accounts

With the initial Thought Leader Ads, you’ll get some inbound. Testing the above 5 will get you consistent inbound.