Welcome to the visual marketing podcast brought to you by C i Marketing, where we explore how to show up consistently, be more visible, and connect with the right people through your marketing. I'm your host, Liz. Today on the Visual Marketing Podcast, I am so excited to introduce you to my guest who is all the way from Peterborough in the UK. We have Kristian Downer. He is from his own agency, Dow Social. He specialises in B2B LinkedIn ads. And I am so excited to go through this podcast today. There are so many amazing things that we're going to be talking about. So welcome, Kristian. Hi Liz. It's really nice to be be with you and hopefully share some of some of my thoughts on on LinkedIn. Yeah, absolutely. And it's a topic that actually I'm not afraid to admit scares me a little bit. I'm quite comfortable on all the other social platforms, but for me LinkedIn is pretty scary one. So I'm hoping you can, by the end of this podcast, help me feel less scared about LinkedIn. Do reckon that's a deal? I will try my very best. I love it. Hey, tell me a little bit about what you do. Like how did your agency come about? Where did you start from? Yeah, so ~ basically my journey in digital marketing was a side hustle. So about thirteen years ago, fourteen years ago I started a business, would you believe it, running Twitter management for some of my friends who ran businesses. ~ and that was all I did. I had the ~ very old school tacky little green business card with a little at symbol on it. And basically over time I realised that, you know, I could offer more than just that and started Getting into the strategy and understanding the marketing of their and moved on to being more general social media, working with companies like Meta Training Entrepreneurs and then working with Google on their some of their training programs again for kind of the smaller businesses around me. And about Two and a half, three years ago basically started leaning in more to the B2B side as I think that's where the the greatest kind of low-hanging fruit is for ~ marketing because so many businesses are being built by technicians that aren't necessarily sure the marketing side should look like. They're great at the thing they do, and until they scale and start building teams, it it leaves this sort of hole where marketing should sit. And a lot of what I was doing was working with them on their strategy. And and about a year and a half ago, a coach said, look, you're providing all these different things from factional CMO to Meta ads to LinkedIn ads. Just focus on the thing you can th think can make the biggest difference and it's going to be growing the most in the next sort of two to three years and really focus in on that. So when I first met you, I was kind of in that transition and now I'm I'm 100% there and we're working with companies from from small ~ micro consultancies all the way up to some of the the biggest companies in the in the UK and Europe around, just making sure they've got consistent visibility using LinkedIn ads. Yeah, that's quite the story. And I really love hearing where people have come from and where they are now. You mentioned that~ your coach asked you pick something that you think is going to be the most up and coming, the most sort of, you know, the new exciting thing. What made you choose LinkedIn? Because that wouldn't have been my choice. Yeah, it's a it's a great question. So basically we we had this conversation. I kind of listed off the the things I was currently charging clients money for. And it was quite a a diverse list of of different things from AI training to Meta ads to marketing management. So basically anything in that kind of B2B marketing sphere, I I had my fingers in it somewhere. And they just kind of when I said LinkedIn ads, they were well, we don't know anyone else that does that. Is this a big part of your business? And I was like, it's it it's growing and I think it's gonna get bigger. And they were like, do that because the the thing that really cut through with me was they said at the moment, we know you're good at what you do, but we couldn't refer you to anyone because we wouldn't know what to refer you So kind of pick that one thing that you can kind of stick your flag in and say that's That's me. And ironically, the more I've done that, the more approaches we've had for the other work, not just for the LinkedIn ads, as it kinda acts as that that way of starting a conversation. And are you actually doing the other things as well? I'm desperately trying not to, but I do love a side quest. So ~ I do bits and pieces but again much more on my terms now where it kinda energizes and fits the overall bit. But generally try not to take on any work where at least ads aren't part of that conversation. Yeah, love that. I really love it when people stick to a niche and that is their thing. And you become an expert in that area. Speaking of being an expert in area, do you have a particular industry or type of business that you really prefer working with or is it sort of right across the board? generally I still haven't quite got my head quite into that full on niche down of having that industry as well. But the the industries where LinkedIn ads work really well are obviously B2B and it's professional services and construction, particularly construction and related fields, so where there's lots of opportunity because lots of companies are active in those spaces or are trying to be more active, but It's a bit more of a blue ocean than some other fields where it can be a lot more competitive for your for your ad spends. So it's a it's it can work across a number of fields, but typically professional services and construction are are are places where I've kind of built a a semi niche around construction because of of the experience and the the work that we've been doing for clients. Yeah, that's really neat. It's actually two of the areas we specialise in as well. So I completely understand where you're coming from. Not that we're competitors, but it's nice to be able to share stories across the globe. You mentioned that people beat brands on LinkedIn. I want to explore that further. As somebody who is in the process of essentially putting myself out there a lot more as well and getting my own personal brand out there.~ It's a pretty crazy kind of a place to be, like actually getting out from hiding behind a brand, becoming ~ somebody that people know your name and know your face and know you for who you are. ~ Tell me why you think people beat brands on LinkedIn. Yeah, for me it's a it's a kind of a confluence of a couple of big ideas that are all and industry trends that are all kind of coming together at once that are are fueling this. So the the first one is the emergence of AI. And whilst many people are seeing that and I've I've seen your podcast where you've talked to people about AI and I think I saw one where you were getting someone to kind of analyze some text and identify the elements of which were were AI. And I think that people are becoming more skeptical about the communication they receive and they want to communicate with other humans. They don't want to necessarily communicate with a machine. And there's this risk that if we just all delegate our marketing to AI, it's just one AI talking to another AI and no one's actually communicating. No no work, no No emotion is being created and no work is being done because we're not able to cut through and and make that. So I think people are looking in their feed and they're looking for people telling stories, they're looking for people with case studies.~ I think we've seen a a kind of a move beyond kind of purely just building on emotion, but people want to see, and you know, it's it's the oldest marketing phrase in the book, no like and trust the people they're gonna work with. And if we build that into kind of the overall B2B market space. It tends to be longer buying cycles. You get to know people. And I saw a stat from the Harvard Business Review that 84% of buying decisions are made by people that already know the companies that they're going to work with. So they 84% of people are going into that buying decision knowing the company they want to work with or a collection of companies they want to work with. And that's based on longer term the relationships they've built. And the third part of this is that LinkedIn itself gives you better if you post on a personal profile than if you do on a company page. So whilst everybody is telling me, and I see it ~ empirically as well, that reach is going down, it's going down much faster on company pages than it is on personal side because people LinkedIn is rewarding comments, connection, and People talking about specific topics and interests and giving them the reach and engagement in a smaller pool. And the company pages are not getting as much as they're rewarding and encouraging people to spend money on ads, hence the trend of why I wanted to move into I moved into this space. So those three things combined mean that if you can find people within your that are willing to be your kind of front of house and and visible and storytelling. So obviously founder works well, but we see particularly in construction it can be subject matter or technical expert in a certain area that can speak to an audience about a specific problem. Or it could even be your clients. If you look at the thought leader ads, which are the kind of the promoted personal posts, when LinkedIn run those, yes, occasionally they use their kind of their their C suite, but often it will be stories being told by other people. From their from those people's profiles with that promoted by LinkedIn at the top, because they know how powerful that story is. So if you had a client that was in a say for example, say we work together and we're in similar fields but not competing, if I did a testimonial for you on my LinkedIn page and then you promoted it, you would win because you're putting a great testimonial about you onto to your target audience, and I would win because your target audience that we share is also going to see my content at the same time. So you can create these really ~ collaborative and self supporting~ infrastructures and and systems that that work well and and nothing works than someone else telling your story, right?~ absolutely. And I'm just touching on what we were talking about at the beginning of that section as well as something that I'm very passionate about. And that is at the end of the day, I think people are just doing business with people and you've really clicked into that. know, it's yes, you're doing business with a brand, but there's a person behind that brand. And I think too often these days, people are actually hiding behind their brains and becoming faceless. And I just don't think that works. That's in my experience, which has been. 20 odd years of marketing, I just don't think the faceless concept behind a brand works. 84 % of people do business with brands that they already know, that is insane. I am mind blown by that stat, but at the same time, yet not, because it does make sense and you have to put in that hard work about brand awareness, but also getting that human connection behind that brand as well. You mentioned thought leader ads. I would love to know more about what thought leader ads are. Absolutely. So thought Leader Ads is essentially posting on a personal profile and then promoting it. Now in Meta, you may have hear kind of referred to as like boosting, but I prefer promoted or paid distribution because boosted just suggests you're just just giving it a little kick. Whereas when I think about thought Leader ads, what we're doing is we're taking our best organic content on our personal profiles or people in our team or in our clients or whoever,~ we're taking the content that really resonates and we're putting paid to the people that really matter. So we can go and say, look, this post has done quite well. I just built one yesterday for someone in the insurance industry or targeting the insurance industry. So we were able to build that audience and go, look, anyone who is in the insurance or Equatorial industries that is at kind of director or above level,~ a company with at least 50 employees is going to see our post, and so therefore, we're taking that and we're making sure that we're going to show up to those people over and over and over again, and that does a number of different things that are entirely different than traditional advertising, the kind of Meta funnel-based approach. These are posts that sit right at the top of the funnel. You can only run them as engagement or reach-based posts. I always recommend engagement. So your sole goal is to get people to like, comment, or view the content and engage with that content that you're doing. And it gives you a set of success metrics, which in other platforms we might call vanity metrics, such as likes, comments, follows, or profile views. But for me they're little hand raises that go,~ this is slightly interesting. And if someone who does that is in that target audience, when you you have a great excuse now to contact them, thank them for that engagement, ask a question, and you're no longer doing cold outreach, you're doing lukewarm or or slightly warmer outreach to them. And you can start conversations and we've helped our clients and even within our own business, get conversations with decision makers at, you know, billion dollar ~ FTSE 100 companies. just by having a more personal approach and taking them through from engaging with our content or our clients' content and coming through. And what's incredible about this as well is we can actually, when you run an ad normally, you go, well, I'm getting impressions, but we don't know if they're the right people. LinkedIn has a dashboard and it's the ad analytics called Professional and you can see the job titles and companies that are viewing your ads. So as an agency it's great because I can go look, Here's the people that are seeing your ad. Are those people useful to you? If not, we can tweak the audience, but they are, we can double down. And so we've got that side, the engagement and the kind of development side of that. The other side of it is you then build retargeting audiences. So someone watches a certain amount of a video or they engage with the post. You can then down the line run a retargeting campaign to them to then go to the other thing that you might want, whether that be a messaging ad. Whether that be to a webinar or to something like that. So my my approach for our marketing is fairly easy, fairly transparent. Three to five posts that have about thought Leader ads. We run those for about a month. And then we'll run a a two and a half week retargeting traditional LinkedIn ad campaign to get people to to sign up based on that engagement. And we may then just pepper in a few companies that we know we really want to kind of come as well. And that's our whole engine and obviously the more money you have to invest the more you can you can the more fuel you have for that engine but this is rather than traditional linkedin ads which if you were to come to me and say look I want a full funnel linkedin ads campaign I'm gonna be like well you're gonna need customer lifetime value of between ten and fifteen thousand pounds and you're going to ~ need to yeah you're gonna need to run that and it's it's it's it's gonna be expensive on a customer lead basis where here I don't know the ~ so I keep talking in pounds, but I don't know the That's okay, we can do the maths. yeah, I don't know the the New Zealand ~ dollar translation rate. but basically it's eight pounds a day minimum ~ for for this and we've got people running campaigns of sort of three hundred pounds a month and they're getting enough engagement to go look, we're getting these incredible people here and they're seeing it as paid distribution. If we're gonna create the content, let's get it seen as our minimum. And then stack up as we see the benefits and and build a a more repeatable system based on the people in our company. Yeah, I mean, I would say that's not far off what you would spend on the likes of Meta ~ and possibly even cheaper than Google.~ So to me, that sounds like a no brainer.~ There are a lot of people out there who have a LinkedIn profile, but it's maybe about 15 to 20 years out of date. What kind of advice do you have for people who have a LinkedIn profile, they haven't updated it, they need to get it into a situation where it's ready to go out with these types of thought leader ads, or at the very least they can start interacting and building an audience and building people that they connect with. What kind of advice do you have to them and what they should do first on their profiles? Yeah, so I think first of all we have to recognise the power of a LinkedIn profile and also a LinkedIn company page. So unless you have a very common name like Matt Smith or something like that, if if you were to to Google my name, one of the first results that's gonna come up is gonna be my LinkedIn profile. And that's common for everyone. The the SEO power of LinkedIn and its AEO power now is is massive. So you want to treat your LinkedIn profile as a landing page that is SEO optimised and is also written for your target audience to the pain point they have with a goal to tell your story and convert from having a headline that says what you do and the gut and the benefit of doing that rather than just CEO or or director at company name to an about section that as you said would have originally been built in the kind of the The Liz is a hardworking professional with expertise in XYZ in that third person, too. I work with travel and tourism businesses in New Zealand that are looking for a specific problem to be solved. So it's I'm writing that all the way through, using the featured sections to act as mini case studies and and having soft calls to action that tell people where to go next and what to do. So thinking about your LinkedIn profile. As a landing page and optimizing it in that in that way. Now, exactly how you do that, there's lots of great experts out there that will give you advice on that, and the advice is kind of in flux and changes all the time depending on who you listen to. But if you take that general principle of when someone sees my profile, what do I want them to know about me and what do I want them to do next? Yeah, and I think you've touched on something really important there is the SEO and the AEO. And for those who don't know what those two things mean, SEO is search engine optimisation. So that's for the likes of Google and the other search engines. When you're searching for somebody or something, a particular topic, ~ all of the things that feed into those search results and then AEO being the AI search results essentially, which could pop up actually within Google itself now, or it could be ~ in any of the ~ other AI.~ platforms that everybody's using, won't list them all, there are many and vast these days.~ But both are equally important and the more places you can put the correct wording around you and your business, obviously the more ~ consistent your message is coming across to people who are looking for what it is that you offer. The other thing I'm really interested to know is, do you have any thoughts around what people should have on their banner across the top of their LinkedIn profile? Again it's it's kind of thinking, well, what do I want people to see? And I think there's you want a nice clean simple thing that that hits those core thing of what you do. So nicely branded, fitting in with what you do, and just giving that that two or three core things that that fit there. ~ I see lots of very jumbled banners, but because you've got to remember it's getting seen on mobile, it's getting seen on desktop. Keep it simple and make sure that yeah, it just it it doesn't I think people overthink what that has to do. It just has to support the overall profile and fit in with that. Now I've seen some great banners, I see some terrible banners, but just something that again hits on that audience and what you're trying to do. So it could just be a very simple background with, you know, that that promise or that that mission, you know, supporting New Zealand trade businesses ~ or travel. industry that kind of thing could be enough to do that. And again, if you ask five LinkedIn experts, you'll get five different answers. But I think you've got to gotta keep it relatively simple. And what I would do whenever I give advice like this is go onto your own LinkedIn, look at twenty profiles of people you resp you respect and know ~ efficient at this, look at the biggest players in your in your industry or in the digital marketing industry and and look at what they're doing and Look at what you like and what you don't like and and find that that middle ground in there. Yeah, I was gonna suggest exactly the same thing. That makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, we do basically try and steal ideas from other people. We call it borrowing here in New Zealand. I don't know what your thoughts are on those terms and, Inspired by know, that's much better. I'm using that from now on. Thank you. I like that a lot. Be inspired by people that you admire on LinkedIn. Hey, ~ LinkedIn... I think sometimes feels like a place for ~ famous people, famous business people, for big businesses. I deal with a lot, especially here, with a lot of smaller businesses. They might be owner operated, they might be family run. Is LinkedIn a place for small businesses as well as big businesses? LinkedIn is a place where small businesses can compete with big businesses in ways they can't even in other digital marketing spaces. If you think about it, you know, and once the kind of yellow pages, I don't know if that's a a thing or was a thing in the It was in my childhood. Actually, I'm not sure if it's still around now. I'm showing my age. So that was company names, but essentially LinkedIn, particularly in the UK, and I know it's also similar in New Zealand and Australia, is basically if you're a professional, you're probably gonna have your your your profile there. How often you use it may be different, but you know, there's there's I think thirty million active users on LinkedIn in in the UK, which means your target audience is most likely going to be there and they do what they don't do on any other social channel which is they self update and keep you in the loop of what they're doing. When they change job, they might not do it on Meta or their Instagram, they might not put that in there, but moment they get that job on LinkedIn they change it. So you have this database of people and the the challenge is making sure that you can find a way to get visible to those people, relevant to those people and engage them in a way which isn't just connecting with them and going, Hi, can you can you buy my stuff?'cause that we all get that, right? We all get that connect and pitch over excitement of like, I found someone who could work with me and then like going up to someone at a party and just talking their ear off for the next ten minutes to the point where they tell you they have to go get a drink and they never come back. We have seen that actually. We have been to a couple of conferences together and we have seen that play out. That's a whole other podcast episode that we won't go into today. I digress. That's that's this podcast after dark, right? That's a different that's a different thing. It's a different audience, it's a whole different brand. Yeah, no, that's really awesome to hear that people can play on there no matter what size their business and that makes so much sense. You're literally getting an entire database essentially at no cost~ initially and then you can utilise that in the best way that actually suits your audience when it comes to ads. Can you talk me through a recent campaign that you've had with one of your clients that's maybe of interest and was really successful? Yeah, so we started working with this consultancy in the construction space what they do is they basically work with some of the biggest names in the construction industry and help them in the sort of planning and consents and and all the kind of stuff you see in the background of one of these big infrastructure projects that the public never see, but it's important to make sure that everybody knows what's happening, that everyone kind of the public knows and is engaged and and all those kind of things. And They'd been posting on LinkedIn, but they were finding it really hard. And this was actually on a company page, finding it really hard to get engagement and to know if it was working. So the first thing we did was analyze their post, use our favorite AI tool to take what they had and analyze it and tell us what was working and what wasn't. And what was working is consistent across the construction industry that we see, which is case studies, human. stories about a specific aspect of construction and personal milestones and updates. So we kind of said, look, well there's no point promoting personal milestones and updates. So we're going to really hone in on case studies,~ LinkedIn newsletters and content that really focuses on those key things. And this did two things. One, we're like instead of feeling like you need to post three times a week, commit to me to have one high quality post a week. And if we do that for three months, commit to one high quality post every two weeks. Cause by then we'll have built our content engine and essentially that's what we did for I think five hundred pounds a month in in advertising spend. Really honed in on these really high level consultancies, tier one, ~ contractors, the infrastructure people like the people that run the railways in the UK, the water and all that kind of thing. Running these campaigns. And I knew they were doing well, but we were having a a review meeting at the end of the month and I kind of looked into it and so they were going through it and it's like director of infrastructure at tier one, contractor, associate director of different company. And so basically you just looked at the engagement, the likes and the comments, and they were all third-party connections at these big companies, which tells us two things. One, they'd not interacted with the key people within the business before, and two, they were in the right target audience That created the most important part of this, which is we had to make sure they had an engagement strategy for those people. Because it's whilst it's great for long-term visibility, we want to make sure that key people within that organization are reaching out and connecting with them, having conversations, not selling them anything, literally just being, thanks so much, liking the comment. We post more content like this, you know, or if ever you have any questions, just just let us know. So just really low, low-key. Engagement to start with. You know, if they can find a common thing like, I see you worked on this project, so did we, or if you can find a common ground, it could even be, ~ we grew up or you you live where I grew up. Is that pub down the road still open? You'd be amazed how good a response you get to that question. If you can be like, if you can find a local pub in the UK and be like, is that pub still open? I I haven't been to that one in years, or I used to go there all the time. I'm gonna jump in and digress for one second, because I had someone do this to me and I don't think they did a very good job of it. It annoyed me, but I did reply, so maybe they did a good job. But basically what they did was they reached out to me and they said, hey, I noticed that we went to the same university. We probably like crossed paths at like the bar or something. Firstly, I didn't drink at university because my uni was an hour away from where I lived. So I drove there every day. So that was a bit of a fail.~ and then secondly, I looked at his age and when he was there and it was like a good 10, 12 years difference in the time that we were actually both attending. I'm like, dude, do your research. Like surely you have to actually be a bit more logical about the way that you're reaching out. It can't just be generic every single time You can't just go through a list of all the people that went to the same school as you and go, Hey, we went to the same school. I might have seen you in the hall. Like actually use some common sense, Yeah, you've got to definitely right? definitely it's a balancing act. You can't be like, ~ you're from planet Earth, I'm from Planet Earth, like maybe you Yeah. know, maybe we should be friends. It's it's so it's it's a word that I think gets overused in marketing,~ but it's it's true. Authenticity. If you can find a genuine connection or reason to to to find that thing, put it in. If you can't, don't because you're right. It it kind of if people feel like you're trying to be too friendly or overtly friendly, then it can it can skew the skew the other way. And we all we particularly as marketers, we're all highly sensitive now to to sales patter.~ you know, you get that. ~ I'm just looking to add my network or I'm looking to connect with fellow professionals. You just know the next message is a is a pitch. So yeah, you've got to you've got to find that that that gut feel that's right for you. But it gives you that opportunity when you get that engagement to to do that and obviously you can retarget them down the line but with this company familiarity is key and when we're running these kind of campaigns the ROI again is different than a traditional advertising campaign. For me, the best kind of thing you can get is they go to a conference and someone goes, I see you on LinkedIn everywhere. Yeah. That's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for their their target audience to see them at a conference and go, I know you. ~ I see your content. And it's weird. I don't know if it's ever happened to you, but if if you go to a conference or something and you're connected with on LinkedIn and maybe you've not actually met, and then they come up to you and they refer to you by your first name and they maybe ask a question about something you posted online or they ask you how your kids are or something, and it that's that can be quite disconcerting the first time, but it's because you Even if they've not engaged in it, you've got your lurkers that, you know, are sitting there and looking through it. And I don't know if it's happened to you, but it it that's what you're looking for is being present in people's lives without being it feeds without kind of needing to be overtly pushy and salesy with. Interesting that you mentioned people know about Interesting that you people not been like your kids and your personal life. How personal do you think people should get on LinkedIn? Is there a rule?~ it's all down to comfort levels and I feel I don't talk too much about my personal life. I think I may have ~ when the twins were born I may have put a picture up of the twins or or something like that. And of course I still get people mention that because it's ~ it's it's definitely something where they they kinda almost check it in to make sure that me and the me and the wife were okay when we had the That's kinda sweet. the three under two. ~ but Again you get people that would go, I've got twins as well, or that gives them that piece of familiarity. But it's what you're comfortable with. I I really don't talk about my personal life, because again, you you don't want to push it that you're trying to be too familiar with people, you or you're trying too hard. You know, I think there are definitely some oversharers on on LinkedIn, even more so if you go to platforms like Meta or or Instagram. But it's for me what you post is what do you want to be known for? Do you want to be known for your hobbies or your family or your politics? And I don't. I want to be known for the impact I can have in the marketing space for B2B companies. So that's primarily what I talk about. And I think that it's a the algorithm which has changed since this became the thing to do. used to reward the clickbait, the rage bait, the politics, the human, the kind of the selfie, that kind of thing. And people are still kind of in that space of thinking attention, all attention is created equal and it's not. Attention by the right people for the right things is gold. Attention for attention's sake in the space that I operate in doesn't pay the So it's not something I'm looking to pursue. Yeah, that is incredibly good advice. Yeah, and ~ incredibly good. And I think ~ a lot of people will get a lot out of that one line that you just mentioned, to be honest. ~ I think I actually took you away from finishing your story about your campaign that you ran with the business. What I'm interested to know is, was this campaign actually run through the business page or was it a combination including their people as well? So it's actually a combination ~ because the challenge we had with this was that there wasn't necessarily a person immediately that wanted to kind of step in and and be the face. So we're gradually easing one person into that role.~ I've worked on a a different campaign that's similar where we've actually had the country manager for for the UK, they're a European company looking to build in the UK and the the campaign is literally built on that funnel I mentioned, just turned up to a higher level where they're spending much more than ~ the kind of minimum amounts we mentioned earlier. And that's essentially they're running a for each audience that they have and they have five or six kind of core products or core audiences. So we'll do each quarter we're doing two months of that quarter are video thought leader ads around that country manager who's then getting profile views, comments, likes and engagements. And then the second half of that month Well the last ~ month, sorry, of that quarter, we kick into webinar and particularly in the last two weeks, we're running retargeting ads and account list focused ads where we'll identify people, certain companies where they they may haven't engaged, but we know they want to see them. So we'll layer the retargeting and that campaign based or account based marketing together and run it that way to get attendees to to a webinar. And and that's really just that kind of thought leader ads combined with the retargeting ~ at its kind of zen sort of peak of exactly how that should should be playing. So depending on your resource budget, you can start small and build. But if you were a bigger brand looking to invest and get results and and do this, you'd be looking to pile heavily into your thought leader ads with a motivated person that can engage and and build those relationships, retargeting into a webinar where the kind of the marketing funnel, the traditional stuff that we've all been taught for for twenty years comes back into play. And for those who haven't been taught it before and are maybe operating business and all of this stuff is new and all these words are a little bit foreign to them, a funnel when we're referring to a funnel, basically that is the concept of, it's essentially a funnel. The top part of the funnel is where we put the most people in. So that's the beginning of the leads. that's basically we're building brand awareness so people get to know who we are and who our business is and what we do. And then as they sort of... It goes down to the more narrow part essentially. People are dropping out the ones that aren't interested and we're moving them through to consideration. So they're thinking about working with you or utilising your services or your products and then they're popping down to the bottom and if they come out the bottom they are essentially converting to actually spending some money with you. So that's basically what a funnel is for those who are unsure.~ I have heard of this thing called the insight tag on LinkedIn and I reckon you might know a little bit about it. Could you tell me what that is and why we should be using it? Yeah, so if you're if you've marked it on other channels, the insight tag is if essentially LinkedIn's terminology because they all have different terminology just to confuse us for everything. Insight tag is the equivalent of the MetaPixel and the Insight Tag also has like Meta does a a conversions API, which is a more ingrained version of that. So basically it's a bit of code or a a bit of software into your into your ads and into your website that basically allows you to track who's visiting. So when I mention retargeting, you can retarget on LinkedIn based on people that view the your video and more than a certain amount and run ads to them. You can actually upload your email list and run ads to those people. Or you can upload a list of companies you'd like to work with and run ads just to those people. Or people that have been on your website or even specific parts of your website, you can then run ads to them. So as a minimum If you're thinking LinkedIn ads, I'd be like, if you've got if you're running other channels like Google or Meta to your website and or SEO as a minimum, I'd run a small retargeting campaign to your key message. Just just keep on top of just another little touch point poke to go, we exist. Why don't you come and buy our why don't you come and learn more about Why don't you come learn more about us? and that would be your baseline campaign of going, look, if I'm not gonna go and learn all this stuff that Kristian talked about, I don't want a person in my business to kind of do this, but we've got Google ads that are running hot. We've got great SEO and we're generating lots of, you know, we're generating hundreds or thousands or or more views of our website every month. Well, why don't I create a retargeting campaign that goes, well, if you've been on our website or a certain part of our website, we'll show you a LinkedIn ad that will point you back to a case study or point you back to a a a part of that the middle or consideration piece, maybe a lead magnet, so a a PDF they can download or the next webinar you have and and do that. So if you are unsure if you have the insight tag on your website, you can go into LinkedIn and go to the the~ assets or the data tab and go to the signals manager, which is a bit technical. There is also a Chrome plugin.~ called Insight Tag Checker that will allow you which is actually a great piece of marketing itself because it's actually developed by a different LinkedIn ads agency than myself, but it's a great you tool that everyone, you know, it's got their branding on it on the top. But it will you go onto that and it will tell you if a website you're going on, yours or a competitor's, has a ~ a insight tag installed. Yeah, interesting. So the insight tags when you're going So the it's a temple. into LinkedIn to find your insight tag, just to clarify, is that on your company page or is that on your personal page? so that would be in your ad account.~ so it would be in your in your ad account and that would and you add a count, cool. That's where we find it. be yeah. ~ the other thing I wanted to talk about on kind of technical settings or things to do when it comes to LinkedIn ads would be just like Meta, LinkedIn has an ads library. So if you want to see what your competitors are you can search their name or you can search keywords and you can and your country and you can see what ads they've run in the past. So it can Doesn't tell you how good those ads were or how successful those ads were, but it does give you a feel for the messaging they were going for, the style, and as we talked about earlier, it's a great source of inspiration. Absolutely. ~ Speaking about technical things,~ should people be paying for premium on their personal page on LinkedIn? What are your thoughts on that? that's a question. ~ so I do ~ because I'm running so one of the things you get with LinkedIn Premium that makes it worth it is that you get to see who's viewed your profile. And I think that's an underrated metric for even people not running ads. But if I'm running ads, one of the things you'll get is people viewing your p thought leader ads that says people viewing your profile. And if someone views my profile, that's a great excuse to start a conversation, even if they're a first level connection and we've known them. even if I've worked with them before, the amount of people that we know that we think, well, we know them. If they want to work with us, they'll work with us. But then you go and speak to them networking and they're they're working with someone else. And you go, well I could have helped you with that. And it's like, well I didn't know that. So they view your profile. That's a great reason to go, hey, how are you doing? Like, was there something specific or you just you just being nosy or checking in, depending on the vibe and and and where you're at, you know, it's kind of you don't want to be Do you admit to them that you know that they've been looking at your profile or do you kind of just like creepily a hundred percent. sort of slide in and be like, hey, I was just thinking about you. no, a hundred of percent. If I know them well enough, I may just send them the eyes emoji and a message. And ~ obviously I don't do that for for people that maybe I don't know so well, but ~ you know, if we're if we're looking at a prospect and I've I've been struggling to get them across the line, I may just do the eyes emoji and the smiley face.~ and just, you know, again, you've got to play that with context. That is not marketing advice. Kristian told you to do this. This is a quirk of my personality, which I embed into my brand and what I do. Yeah, again, that word authenticity, don't try and force these kind of things in. But yeah, other things you're gonna get with premium is they're now starting to launch other factors. So ~ there's a phrase that I don't think Rory s ~ Sutherland came out of it, but he certainly uses it in some of his videos, which is this concept of inshitification, the idea Okay. that Software products over time they get really good to get you in, and then they get slowly start taking away services and get slightly worse to increase revenue, more subscription elements. And now LinkedIn was one of the last platforms to really embrace this concept, reducing reach, making certain things that were free paid for. But now you can only view a certain amount of profiles if on the free version you can't see the profile views. And they're actually adding other benefits to being premium, like there's now like a mid-tier that gives you a certain amount of ad credit to put onto thought Leader ads each month. I think that's rolling out across the world at the moment. So for me, I think if you're gonna if you're serious about using LinkedIn to grow your business, you would be premium so that you can you can get the most out of the platform. If you were really serious, you'd have something like sales navigator, but that's someone who's in a sales role and is using it every day. to look for insights about the people they're trying to work with and trying to build, you know, it's using using it really as a sales based platform rather than just a marketing based platform. Yeah, that makes complete sense. I actually went to a really interesting talk by someone who works in alcohol marketing and they they were what they were doing, their whole talk was about this trend of celebrities not just endorsing but owning Alcohol brands. So some you may have heard of, so kind of like Ryan Reynolds and Aviation Gin. But he was like, there's more than 300 brands in America or alcohol brands that are owned by celebrities and promoted by celebrities in the US now. It's a bit smaller in the UK, but it was actually when you think about it, it's now it's because people are buying into that, those people, and they're not just thinking about the drink, they're thinking about that. And we're seeing that across all aspects of kind of business, whether it be, you know, the classic example being Prime and, you know, KSI and Logan Paul and and and kind of using their brand to promote those products. But people are are much more are using, looking for that connection when they're making decisions, not just in the B2B but in the business to consumer space. So life's gone beyond the mascot. We're now seeing companies really bringing in whether that be spokespeople or, you know, it's not just product placement anymore. It's like these people are living the brand and speaking for the brand and the ambassadors for the the brand in ways that maybe we didn't we didn't get before. And I think that's that's really a a really emphasizes the fact that people are looking for connection in in what is increasingly an automated in cold world. So the more we deliver that to them. I think the more likely to connect and the more likely to convert we are. Yeah, and I think having that combo of obviously the bigger brands having the budget to have somebody maybe who's a bit famous, but actually like you mentioned earlier as well, talking about even having like your clients endorse your brand or even a colleague who ~ maybe works in a similar industry that you work, you you chat with and you work alongside and you bump into at a conference or an event, actually having those connections of people both within your but also outside of your business. Something that I think people are maybe a little bit nervous of is asking their staff perhaps to endorse their business or to be their ambassadors, especially visually on LinkedIn. Do you have any advice to business owners on how they can go about helping their staff feel more comfortable doing that or what they can do to help encourage them be involved in that? Yeah, and I think it's it's a an area that requires a serious amount of thought and consideration for a number of factors. One is obviously picking the right person based on personality. I wouldn't ~ I would want to kind of think carefully about who I pick so they're comfortable with it, that we can even if they need some coaching or some training, maybe some speaker support or some on camera training. But we also want people right that we trust and know are in for the long haul the business because, you know, the the tricky thing is gonna be if you make someone your kind of main face of your business and then three months later they they leave or a year later they leave,~ that can be really tricky for for you. So you wanna make sure they're people that you're relatively comfortable that they're gonna be around for for a while and typically that that's why they're gonna trend more senior,'cause they're maybe gonna be more invested, maybe they are shareholders, maybe they are kind of senior leadership for that for that reason. And also you've got to remember that what they do reflects on you. So you've got to you you've got to pick the stable the the stable, more kind of media aware people. You don't want someone, you know, if you've got someone that I said as I said, everyone's entitled if they really want to share their political opinions or their their their life view on on LinkedIn, that's perfectly within their rights. But you have to go, what risk does this open me up to if they're gonna talk about these things? What is that? How are they gonna their overall brand of that personal brand gonna help or hinder our our perception? So one, you've got to find people that wanna do it and they're gonna get on board. And two, you've got to make sure those people are in engaged and invested in the company's success as much as much as possible. And you've got to make it easy for them. That's the other bit. Yeah. And I think on the flip side as well, because all of that maybe sounds a little bit scary and a little bit too hard, but is incredibly valid and incredibly important. You also might have people in your team who actually would really love the opportunity to do something like that. Maybe they do a job that is a little bit repetitive and actually being able to step outside their sort of day-to-day activities and jump on their phone and record something or, ~ you know, become that spokesperson for you ~ might actually be something that's incredibly exciting and a great thing to add to their job description. And so what's the harm in actually asking the question? Bring it up at a team meeting and say, is anybody actually, do you have an interest in this? Does anybody want to give us a hand? And maybe don't explicitly say, I want you to be the face of my business because it might be something you work up to, but perhaps they can do a few posts here and there or help with crafting. the posts that the CEO or the boss is going to be involved in, get them involved at a small scale and bring them up and then see how they go. Yeah, exactly. don't want to be walking into a team meeting and congratulations to Colin from Accounts. We've decided you will now be our entire content creation team.~ haha please pick up your DJI Mini and report to report to the conference room. That's yeah, you you need people invested, ideally volunteering. ~ you you need them as e at least energised or at least open to to exploring what this could look like for them. Yeah, definitely. I feel like we could do like some kind of a skit or a role play on all the things not Yeah. to do. I think that would be a great episode. I think we'd be quite good at it too actually. You can be Colin from Accounts. I reckon you'd play that role pretty well. I was born for that role. You were No, I th I think we've covered the core idea and the core thing that I have, Okay. if you're gonna create content on a platform like LinkedIn, pay for the distribution to the right people. Stop hoping that the algorithm's gonna serve you to the right people and keep them coming back. If you know, there's this fallacy that because it doesn't necessarily cost anything to record a video or write a post, that it doesn't cost anything to create content and it does whether your time, effort, and opportunity costs. If you're gonna put that in to posting on a regular basis and building content on a platform, invest in putting it to the right people. And that as I've said and laid out, that doesn't you don't have to go from zero to a hundred miles an hour straight away. Start small, scale it up. And if you do that like everything, you do that consistently for three to six months. you will see a massive difference in the quality of people connected with you, following you, and engaging with your content that will only benefit you in the the long run. And ads aren't a cheat code, but as someone that always jokes, you know, you want to be ideally be you know, what's it, Bill Gates, do you want to find the lazy person? You want to hire them because they'll find the way to achieve the goal with less steps. Paid distribution of your content is achieving your goal in less steps. So I would definitely consider that for a B2B strategy for for any business that's looking to grow in twenty twenty six and beyond. I think that is incredibly sound advice. Kristian, thank you so much for your time today. It has been such a pleasure, as always, to catch up with you and have a chat.~ where can people find out more about you? Let me guess, LinkedIn? You got it. You got it. LinkedIn is is my it's the place I live. It's my my favorite social media platform.~ Kristian Downer, Kristian with a K, just to make it harder to find me, on on LinkedIn. Obviously we have a website, dowsocial.com. But if you want to find out more about me,~ yeah, come connect with me on LinkedIn, mention you found me on this podcast, because then we'll have a reason, we'll have a connection that we can just talk about and ~ and and have that natural way of ~ of communicating. and maybe put the eyes emoji in there and then you'll know exactly that that's how they found you. Then I'll know they've watched the podcast, that's for sure, yeah. Exactly, exactly. Hey, we'll put all of your contact details in the show notes. So if you do want to get in touch with Kristian, please do so. He is such a wealth of knowledge and also a genuinely amazingly person. So touch base with Kristian. It is well worth it. Kristian, thank you so much for your time today. I have learned so much. I'm sure everybody else has as well. And I can't wait to catch up with you in person in about eight months time over in LA again. So it's going to be awesome. Amazing. I'll sure I'll speak to you before then, but if not, I will see you then. See you then, cheers. Thanks so much for joining the Visual Marketing podcast, brought to you by CI Marketing. I'm your host Liz, and I can't wait to share more episodes with you.