so just depending on the monthly traffic depending on you know how big that group gets you know it could be 500 a thousand dollars just spent on retargeting and be well worth it [Music] hey guys so in this episode uh we're going to talk about budgets um just the initial kind of most frequently asked question which is what kind of budget should i have for linkedin ads or what's the like the minimum budget i should have to be running linkedin ads so we're going to cover that real quick and really we'll just jump right into
it it really depends on a lot of different things because the answer is different for almost anyone who asks um so first you probably need to go through some qualifying questions uh and those top questions would be are you currently running of any other paid uh traffic channels are you running google ads are you running facebook instagram do you have an email campaign um also just you know what's your overall website traffic do you have you know 500 visitors a month do you have 5 000 do you have 30 000 um and then what's your
overall marketing budget so obviously that answer would be drastically different for someone who you know they're they don't have any kind of marketing budget this is their first channel that they're trying to carve out and their question is what's the minimum i need to get started so if that's the question um i'll start there and then i'll go through i'll go through the other variations of you know if you're a midsize company and you have decent spend but you want to carve out a new channel what's that look like so for for a lot of
scrappy startups we'll start there if you don't have any other paid ad channels and you know or you're spending really really limited amount maybe google ads is working for you and you're spending a thousand or two there the bare minimum that i would say you can get started with linkedin ads would be five hundred to a thousand dollars a month um but i'm going to give you a lot of extra information about that because i think just by itself that might not be the most helpful um because you know you knowing what you're spending or
knowing what the entry fee is like you really need to know what the what the goal line is or okay well if i'm spending 500 a month what does that look like because um here's what you have to think about so linkedin adds 80 of the results come from the retargeting layer and the retargeting layer means that you run cold ads you you send them to your website or you know a landing page you track that traffic and then you get back in front of that group with retargeting ads so how quickly you get into
retargeting is affected by how much you're spending that makes sense right but people don't people don't really think through that they're like okay well if i can make it work with 500 a month you know the next month i'll up it well with 500 a month ad spend you're not gonna get into retargeting by next month so you might barely get into retargeting by month three at which point you might run out of steam and lose faith in linkedin ads but really you didn't give it a fair shot because you never gave it you know
you didn't have the mindset that okay well if i only have 500 a month to spend on linkedin ads it's gonna take me three months to build a retargeting group and then i need to actually run with that retargeting group and give that a fair shot before i know if linkedin's working for me or not so what i would advise is you know go with go with a thousand uh if you're a scrappy startup you know go with 500 go with a thousand um but have that end result in mind that i actually need to
build a retargeting group and the threshold of that is 300 so you actually have to have 300 site visitors in order to have a large enough retargeting audience to to actually use that in a marketing campaign um and then depending on your industry the initial cost per click and i've seen anywhere from you know five dollars um all the way up to 60 70 80 per click um and so the second thing you really need to think about and i'm i'm going to go into this deeper on a different episode where i talk about just
the timeline um you know how long until i start getting results that's another really frequently asked question and again it depends on your industry your offering your ad spend and also the other channels that you haven't played because linkedin linkedin ads is not just something that operates in a silo um so i'll dive into that deeper but that's that's the main premise i mean you can get started with 500 a thousand it's going to take you a little bit longer to get into retargeting depending on the cost per clicks depending on your budget um but
you need to know that that's where the the results are actually going to come from so you need to be patient give it a fair shot get into that but yeah that's enough to get you into the game so the next question is if you are a more established company you're running you know a healthy google ads campaign running facebook email you have seo going so you have decent traffic to your website um you know just something above you know we have nothing and we're starting with linkedin so um let's say your overall marketing budget
is i don't know five to ten thousand i would say let's say it's ten grand i would i would give linkedin you know twenty twenty five percent of that budget i would say two grand if your overall marketing budget is eight or is ten i would give i would give linkedin two grand um and that would almost guarantee that you're gonna get into retargeting within you know 30 45 definitely within 60 days a lot of times you can get there within 30 days with that with a couple grand budget so i think that that saves
you from getting uh you know discouraged too quickly um because you actually get into the retargeting you start to see some traction and it's and it's enough data too where you can learn and improve faster um because one of the big things like i'll talk about in the timeline is the results other than just you're not in retargeting on month one the other part is you know you're just initially collecting data like whoever's running your account is just collecting the data and linkedin itself and its algorithm is just collecting data when you start running ads
so the cost per clicks are gonna be terrible in month one um the uh the cost per lead the cost per conversion if you're lucky enough to get any will be terrible you know if you're running four five six different ads in the initial cold campaign you know ultimately it's gonna boil down to just running the top one or two so that first month or so you know that's just experimenting what what text is working best what image is working best what combination of image and text what what industry company size job roles are most
um are interacting with my ads the most there's so many different layers of how to optimize your campaign that in month one it's kind of a fact-finding mission and once you start getting those clicks once you eventually start getting conversions linkedin's algorithm is smart enough to start favoring certain ads and say hey this ad is getting you know cost per clicks at eight dollars per click and this ad is getting it at 27 per click i'm gonna start you know shuffling more of the um of the budget to this ad so they naturally start helping
you out there and the account manager if they're worth anything we'll naturally start seeing some of those patterns too and say hey i'm going to pause these three ads i'm going to run these three ads and then i'm going to process that data and say okay this image is working really well this text or this hook this call to action seems to be working really well when we go into month two and we're making new ad images creatives text you know we have a better idea of what's working what's not working what to stay away
from what to avoid and what to dive into so there's a lot of that um that you just you know basing it off the first 30 days it's just a terrible mindset um and you really need to have the long term approach you need to look at it as i'm gathering the data the intel but ultimately one of the things that i believe holds true with almost any client i've worked with is that while linkedin ads cost per click cost per you know lead is more expensive and it that cold traffic you know can be
a bit discouraging when it's not instantly converting the quality is there the quality of that traffic i believe in it i believe that that is higher quality traffic than facebook instagram email a lot of the organic you know blog readers you're getting so it's worth the investment it's worth um going out there and driving them to your website and it's worth creating those retargeting groups to stay in front of so ultimately the other the other side of the coin is you know it is scalable so it's more scalable than google ads so if you're running
you know um i'll give you our our company for example so we are running about eight or nine thousand dollars a month in google ads google ads are amazing for us so even though we're a linkedin ads agency google ads we get a ton of leads booked calls and closed deals from google ads it's hard to beat that that high intent bottom of the funnel traffic i mean we're a linkedin marketing agency and sure on on linkedin ads you can create you know compelling copying images you can put put them in front of people that
are most likely to be interested but they're not searching for you they're not asking for you they're not looking for you yet you're putting ads in front of people who are likely to have a need and then you're tracking those signs of interest when they click your click your ad and go to your website when they visit your company page when they open the legion form when they watch 50 of your video you're tracking those intent signals and then you're retargeting them staying in front of them for 90 days 180 days so it you can
see that dynamic is different whereas on google there's people that come to google and they're typing in linkedin marketing agency done for you linkedin lead generation linkedin paid ads agency so they already aware that they have a problem they're aware that a solution exists and they're typing in they're already at the bottom of the funnel they're they're typing in i need an agency to run my linkedin ads and then we pay to show up in front of that click so you can't really compare the cost per click of of google ads to you know linkedin
ads it's just a different ballgame but i would say that linkedin ads enhances those google ads so if that's a core foundational part of your your strategy is google ads you're spending eight grand like we are i spend five four to five grand on linkedin ads um because a it carves out its own channel but b it enhances the spend of my google ads and i think that's super important so when i pay for that person that click on google ads where someone says linkedin marketing agency we show up they check out our page we
then track them with linkedin insights tag as well and we retarget them and hit them with linkedin ads um and that helps shake out conversions from the google ads enhances that spend and helps linkedin stand on its own too i mean when you're leveraging retargeting from other channels and you have so that's one of the big things i would say that comes into play with budget is if you have if your budget for another paid ad channel is really high like if you're spending 20 we worked with a um a series a funded startup who
is spending 30 000 on google ads so for that company um you know 10 grand on on linkedin ads might make sense because there's a lot of paid bottom of the funnel traffic that's going to their website that is worth investing in retargeting on other platforms and then on top of that you know linkedin ads could can carve out its own channel add to that traffic um even stir up more google searches from initiating on linkedin so it really plays off you know your your overarching um marketing strategy what what other channels you have in
play what you know even just seo if people if you're driving organic traffic to your website and you just wanna start harnessing that retargeting them on linkedin you could honestly start out with a a minimum three to five hundred dollars a month uh just a retargeting budget like don't even bother carving out a cold um a cold linkedin paid ad strategy just retarget your google ads traffic or your organic traffic and just use linkedin for retargeting that could be 500 a month and it could actually shake out a lot of good conversions because it's optimizing
your other channels so i guess that's that's the other side of the point too i mean do you want to carve out a cold channel do you want to just be showing up on linkedin as a retargeting of your other traffic if so then yeah 500 would actually be good uh 10 a day is more than enough to stay in front of an audience a retargeting audience of about two to three thousand so just depending on the monthly traffic depending on you know how big that group gets you know it could be 500 a thousand
dollars just spend on retargeting and be well worth it you could really shake out a a good amount of conversions from that um so i think that is the main answer to that question um and that would be the last thing i'd add is that linkedin's insights tag on your website tracks the traffic not just of you know traffic that linkedin ad sends your website it sees all the traffic and you can chop that up segment however you want you could just retarget your google ads traffic or your facebook traffic or your organic traffic you
can make rules and say you know i don't you know if they if they came from this channel and they looked at this page or they looked at this service offers offering but not this one and you could create little campaigns based on what they did or didn't visit on your website so there's a lot you can do there but all of that kind of goes into how much you should spend short answer is bare minimum 500 or a thousand two to three thousand is a decent healthy start if you're going to give it a
fair shake but lots of well-established companies if you're spending 20 grand a month on paid ads you know linkedin could could be 25 of that budget so easily five grand um and just goes from there right i appreciate it
