Advanced LinkedIn strategies for smarter B2B growth

Haydn Woods-Williams: 0:26

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Marx as the Universe Podcast. Today we have our fan favorite, Michele Raffaeli, back. Michele is one of our paid media managers here at Brew Digital. He is full of brilliant hot takes and terrible anecdotes, so I'm sure we're going to have a lot of fun. But for now, let's get on with a podcast and let's find out what Michele has to say. Tom will be leading the questions alongside myself as we talk to Mikele about advanced LinkedIn strategies and how you can make the most of LinkedIn ads in B2B. I'll leave it to Tom to introduce himself and to kind of kick off the questions. Over to you, Tom.

Tom Inniss: 1:17

Great. Thank you, Hayden. Haven't changed, unfortunately. I am still Tom Innis, the content marketing manager here at Brew Digital. It is lovely to be back talking about LinkedIn, which still continues to blow my mind, to be honest, because I remember like 10, 15 years ago thinking, why does anybody care about LinkedIn? Why has Microsoft bought LinkedIn? And now here we are talking about it as like a primary channel for B2B marketing. So we all know it, we all have opinions about it. So we're not going to talk dramatically about the sort of like fundamentals of LinkedIn. I want to talk a lot about advanced LinkedIn strategies to try and elevate our marketing game beyond the let's have some thought leadership posts. So, Mikele, before we grill you, do you want to give a quick 20-second introduction to yourself and why you are qualified to talk about this?

Michele Raffaelli : 2:14

Hello, everyone. Thank you for inviting me today. Uh my name is Michele. I work as paid media manager at Brew Digital. And um I think I'm the most qualified person because you invited me, so you must think I'm qualified. Uh apart from that, I do have um some years of experience, uh, almost five years now, in B2B specifically, uh B2B marketing, and uh more than 10 around um digital marketing overall. I want to use the experience that I made firsthand to share with uh with you and people that are listening now to try to uh improve what we do because if you're listening to this podcast, you must like something about marketing, and that's where we all meet together.

Tom Inniss: 3:06

Sounds very altruistic. So let's jump straight in. What is the single biggest and most common mistake you see experienced B2B marketers making on LinkedIn today?

Michele Raffaelli : 3:18

I had to think about it. Um there are a lot that I'd like to mention, but the most recent that I've experienced and I've seen happening um more and more is people don't give enough time to the campaigns. They run a campaign, and the day after I'll ask you, how's the campaign performing? I'm like, this is not um e-commerce. You can't have results overnight. You need to give the campaign their time. So for me, what I'm seeing recently, the most common mistake is to not have the patience to let the campaign do their job.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 4:03

How do you how do you manage that when someone's also saying, oh, we've spent X amount already, that's quite scary, there's no results. How do you allow them to have that trust to let it run?

Michele Raffaelli : 4:17

There are different KPIs that can show initial performances. Um we use we call them internally soft KPIs. Um we can show that what we are doing is tickling the right type of audience. So it shows early stage of uh positive results, but if we have to be honest, we only want conversion and leads. So telling them that people are engaging with a creative, it's not the objective of the campaign. Uh but uh the engagement that we can see uh at early stages in the first week or two weeks at least, this always is also linked to budgets. But I could only choose one mistake, so I won't talk about budgets. Um you just they decided to work with you, they need to trust you, and you have a certain amount of data that you can use to let's say gain some time until your strategy will kick off.

Tom Inniss: 5:21

How much time do you need to allow? And like, is it is does that vary between platforms? So would it be different for people who are traditionally using Google Ads? Would they expect different lead times to LinkedIn?

Michele Raffaelli : 5:35

So if you break down the strategy that you have, um in a in the most simplified way of the three-steps um journey, so the awareness, consideration, and conversion. I know there are new modern journeys that can be 17 or 47 steps, but just for the sake of the example, let's keep it to the three steps. Um, based on where you are at the awareness, consideration, or conversion um matches with different types of KPIs. So the algorithm and the best practice declared by each platform, they require at least four weeks, 30 days time running campaign with a not limited budget in the campaign. The other option to speed up this learning process would be to reach immediately up to 30 conversions. 30 conversions is the bare minimum where the algorithm of each platform that we work with can understand what's going on and then craft the um the bidding through your objective. The other requirement would be to reach a certain amount of uh users. Between 10,000 and 30,000 impressions is something that gives enough data to the algorithm to understand the people I'm reaching, they engage properly, and yes, we can build our campaign with that. So, or conversions or impressions within the 30 days with the right budget.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 7:08

I kind of want to lead on with a very similar question, some of that's okay. Of course. Um and I say this because the amount of times I've gone into an ad campaign and seen LinkedIn expansion audience network clicked when it shouldn't have been. Is there anything that you can spot immediately when you go into a new client's LinkedIn ad account that makes you go, these guys need help?

Michele Raffaelli : 7:33

There are red flags. Now, the size of the audience based on the objective that they decided. If you want, I've seen some cases where the pre-existing campaign before us were set for a conversion uh objective and they had eight million people in their audience. Now, if you consider the average cost of a cost of a CPC of a cost per click on LinkedIn, if you want to reach eight million people in in any country, um it's gonna cost you loads of money. And there's only one or two companies that have that type of budget, and uh they don't come and ask for help to digital marketing agencies.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 8:23

Yeah. If you have to ask, Am I that company who has that budget? You're not that company who has that budget.

Michele Raffaelli : 8:29

Yeah. So um align the size with your budget of the audience based on the objective you choose. That's one of the initial red flags. Then, as you mentioned, um the placement based on the recommendation from the platform, and this is is even LinkedIn who recommended um to check, you see that some of the placements that the platform uses are not performing. Um the best example I can make is with Google Ads. If you see that your ad is shown 50,000 times on Candy Crush, I can assure you that's not going to generate any conversion for you, especially if you are not selling a relevant product. If you are a game app, that's fine. But if you're selling softwares or um solutions for your B2B business, you hardly find a client on the Candy Crush app. But that placement is easy. People need ads to uh get reward, to get more life. So the the engagement rate with those ads is fantastic because people have to watch all the video and the click through it is uh the click-through rate is very good because such small placement, when you try to close them, uh you 50% of the times you click on the ads, so you will see um average spend time watching the ad, click-through rate, engagement is the best performing, but the placement uh monitoring is another thing that people underestimate.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 10:15

There's there's an ABM campaign there somewhere where you have to find out that so-and-so company has uh an internal Candy Crush league. So you geo-target around their offices only using Candy Crush. Um anyway, I'm getting sidetracked. Tom, I'm gonna let you move on to the next question.

Tom Inniss: 10:36

I mean, uh not being funny, but in a c any company that could tell you that it would be LinkedIn because both are now owned by Microsoft. How crazy is that? Um I think there's so many different directions that we could take this, but um, you wanted to talk about bidding and budgets before. Um how do you you balance optimizing for clicks versus optimizing for those high value, high-quality leads? And how do you, I suppose, stop companies using those horrible dark tactics of tiny little crosses on adverts? Because they because they can't be generating any actual value for the company, right?

Michele Raffaelli : 11:16

Um it's very hard to measure. They may do. They may do. Um there is no it's very difficult for the attribution models to understand how, even the data-driven one, how much watching or seeing one of these ads will in the long term affect your decision. What you can do is optimize your KPIs based on, again, we go back to talking about the funnel. Um, if I'm in the awareness phase, it's not necessarily click that I'm looking for. If it's in the conversion phase, having huge impressions and reach, it's not really what we want to do. So based on where we are, we need to decide which are the two maximum three KPIs that can affect the performances. Now, if we are in the conversion and we have elevated CPC, that's not necessarily bad. So we are reaching people in our selected audience that may be ready to convert. So we are not happy, but we are um we can accept paying 15 pounds, even 50 pounds for a click. When then we know that the conversion rate will cover all these um all these costs within one sale. Now it's simple, Matt. If my product or the service that I'm selling cost 50 pound and my CPC is 68, you can see how that's it's a loss. So there's not much to consider about it. You need to find a way to reduce it. Now there are different um actions you can take to bring it down, but again, these won't happen overnight. It's a series of optimization that we require time to bring it down. Um we need to consider for this also seasonality. Oh, a client said, why my CPC is so high in November? And then you made them realize, well, it's cyber month. You have absolutely everyone spending money, bidding, increasing bids in every placement possible because they want to convert for singles day. And then they raise them because uh Black Friday is coming. So the market is naturally more competitive, and that's why your CPC grows. But MB2B doesn't make any difference. It's it's an auction, every system based on an auction, and the more people at the auction, the higher the price can go. So you need to understand where you are based on uh how you analyze those those clicks. But because we are talking about advanced strategies, one thing that we also need to mention is the customer lifetime. If we keep the example of the guy that spent 68 pounds for a click selling a service that is worth 50 pounds, you would think let's pause immediately the campaign. But you need to look at the whole scheme. So the clients that acquire for the 50-pound service, actually they stay in my cycle for an average two years, and their lifetime value with us is 20,000 pounds. That's completely changed everything. If you see only the last click conversion, you would post absolutely everything. But then if you consider the sacrifice that you made on that profit on the very click, and we are talking about clicks, not conversions, then what they bring, yes, they came for the 50-pound service, but because you are excellent, then they buy something else when they are in house. And because you have good retention marketing in place, you won't spend any more digital marketing, uh more um paid media money to acquire them. You just send money mail, um, message, um, invite them to uh an event, and that's what brings them then spending more money. So it's it's a bigger vision that what we think. It's not the money I see on the platform that's the final um results. It's a bigger view.

Tom Inniss: 15:34

But like the point you touched on there about uh building that initial relationship with somebody and then having them through the life cycle is uh I think increasingly well, it's always been the case that you kind of need to have that relationship with the audience, but I think controlling first-party data is now pretty much vital, given that we are increasingly seeing that you're just renting audiences basically on these platforms and you are at their mercy. So how do you how do you start to target those? Because audience targeting is pretty critical with any sort of paid ads. Um how do you move beyond the simple title and industry targeting and start to use your first party data or ABM lists effectively?

Michele Raffaelli : 16:27

The exercise we try to do with the with the client um is the reverse journey. So what's the solution you're providing? Oh, this is what uh we do, and then uh you start from the solution you have and you match it with uh who is uh who needs that solution, and then oh, this is perfect for um uh engineers, this is perfect for um finance businesses, this is perfect for um sports interests. So that gives you the first connection, and you think, okay, we have this service that solves this solution, who are the people that may interested to use it? And that's when you start, okay, we have these people, they are active users. How does it work? Are they able to are they the final user? Are they able to see it and purchase for them? Or do they belong to a type of company that has a longer process? If that's the case, we can directly reach to them, show them that 90% of the cases, when you do this, you will need this to solve the problem. They are aware, and you hope them build their own business cases, go back to their uh upper management, request this tool, this service to improve their daily life, which goes into a board meeting that gets approved, budgets, and lots of discussion that can happen. And within six months, you may have an answer. So starting from the product size, let's say, side, and then move back. That's how we would um start understanding the audience. There are solutions where oh, we are just new, we never launch this product, we think people can be interested. In that case, you may use a more broad approach, you can just identify macro businesses, macro area. Is this perfect for um travel companies? Is this perfect for um restaurants? So you just um trim down to the industry level, get enough data to understand who's interested in this. If you see that 90% of chefs skip the tad, you understand that the solution you're providing, they're not even interested in it, they scroll immediately. So, okay, let's go a bit broader. Let's find um supplier of the restaurant industry. You start seeing CTR increasing, you see dwell time increasing, then you understand that okay, this product that we have actually it's not the chef in the restaurant that is interested, but the supplier of that market. And that's how you adjust and move until you find the right audience.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 19:26

Do you think there's value in using obviously when you're targeting the different kind of areas that you you mentioned there, the options you've got is your own data or the platform's data. Is there is one better than the other, or do you need a mixture of both?

Michele Raffaelli : 19:49

Ease would answer the question that Tom has at the beginning why Microsoft both LinkedIn? Because of the data. So everything that we can access thanks to Thanks to you. You are the one that gives all your information to the platform. I know absolutely everything. I just need to cross those data and then I can um identify exactly who you are and what to show you. Google is doing something similar. Um they now have available audiences where um, especially in the US, I can target people based on the income. I can target people that got recently engaged, moved to a new job, uh, moved house. So I have less granular power in um Google or uh Meta or TikTok or the other platforms than I have on uh LinkedIn if we are still talking about B2B. So since the announcement of the cookie apocalypse, where we thought overnight we lose all the cookies, we started applying and looking for different ways to acquire first party data. Having those and feeding them into the uh platforms um allow us to create look aliks, to um create segments, understand better what who is the person that we want to reach. It's not always uh this simple because you need big volumes. Um a client recently they are targeting um Croatia and Greece. Uh the physical amount of people, users that we can target there, it's not even comparable to what we can target when we go in the United States or in UK. But that's physical limits. So in this case, there's no data on the platform that can help you. Um what we need to do is to find a different way to reach these people, and that's where you need to use other types of um different channels. Um it can't be only paid media to reach them, so you will use more of the content team or the organic trying to engage and find out who these people are, and then combine the data. So in that case, they would become your first-party data, you would acquire them, and then you can use them for the good of your company. There are um I call them harvest company. I don't know if I invented it or if I heard it somewhere, which is companies that just spend the time harvesting data, creating poll and audiences, segmenting them, and then selling them to you. So this party of this type of third-party data acquisition, um we tested it, but we didn't see immediate benefit. It was a bit it is a bit more expensive because you are um borrowing, you are renting, you are renting these cookies and you use them for your purposes. Um but personally, in my experience with the client I used it with, it didn't bring the same results as trusting the platform data or um nothing even close to the first party one.

Tom Inniss: 23:20

Great, thank you. Just conscious of time, I'm going to push us forward to briefly talk about creative. So LinkedIn, love or hate it, it's a corporate platform. How do you get people to sort of look past that very corporate y nature and stop and actually engage with a post?

Michele Raffaelli : 23:43

You have different variations of ads that you can create. Uh LinkedIn provide and keep expanding them. Only in 2025, they released a couple of new ad types. You do have a bouquet of solutions that starts from the single ads, animated single image ads, um, GIFs. You have videos, you have document ads, you have carousels, you have message ads, you are conversational ads, you have uh article ads. So what you need to do if you don't have data telling you what works better, you need to test. So you can test the creative type against themselves. You can feed with different ad copies using the same creatives, you can use different ad types. What LinkedIn realized and changed um recently is the structure of the account. So used to call campaign groups and then campaigns and ads. Now they are going to a more um meta-Google type of structure where you will have campaign and within the campaign you can have ad groups now. This means that where before to launch one of these different types of ads and creative, you would need to create a separate campaign. So one campaign could run only static images, for example. If you wanted to run alongside video, you would have need to create a different campaign. Now, creating two campaigns means you need two types of budgets, feeding them, and not necessarily these two campaigns can share learnings. Now that we go at campaign level within the same campaign, the ad groups will work with the same budgets, and these ad groups will be able to share the information and the data and deliver the algorithm will know which type of creative delivers the best for you, and they will follow that. So to answer your question, it's a little bit of common sense, but it's mainly data. You need to see what resonates better with your audience and keep testing on the improving one. Uh, LinkedIn recommends you to add six ad variations. If you don't have a good content writer like Tom Innis, you can use their uh AI-provided solution. Um so you feed you you write your first ad, and then automatically LinkedIn says, Oh, do you want me to create five different variations with this? So you can have your sixth recommended one, and then you take this six after a week, ten days, which one is the best performing? Which is the worst? This is the worst, post the worst, get the best, duplicate it, and add a new variation. Could be text variation, could be CTA variation, could be creative variation, just keep working through the best performing one.

Tom Inniss: 26:48

If you don't have a good copywriter like myself, thank you, McKelly. Uh you can always reach out to Brew Digital and hire us rather than using AI. Shameless plug.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 27:00

Shameless plug. I love a shameless plug. Um, I think as well with with LinkedIn and paid ad strategies, is people can spot an ad a mile off, especially when we're now like people are creating very generic, pretty boring corporate ads, like you said. Look at your organic social content as well, see what's working there, use that data to inform you um on what content is going to work, because the likelihood is if it's working well organically, it's going to work well um through paid channels. Um, I think as well on top of that, is think about ways that you can present your message differently. It's really easy to just do the exact same thing that everyone else is doing, to just chuck the coffee into AI, to put it onto a creative in Canva and create really substandard ads. But if you spend a little bit more time focusing on being creative and thinking differently, I feel like you can have a big impact that if you just ignore that and just go for the easiest option, you will miss.

Tom Inniss: 28:12

So, on the subject of thinking, then, how do you feel about thought leadership, McKelle? Um, they seem to be coming a common feature on LinkedIn, but do you advise clients to use thought leadership pieces, or is it just like a vanity play?

Michele Raffaelli : 28:28

It's not a vanity play, I can assure you. Um, it can sound like this, but the thought behind that ad is absolutely pure. It's you have your leaders, your um company owner, your um bespoken person of a company, um addressing directly to you. That's something that if we go back some time, you would need uh um Steve Jobs to rent a theater and do his keynote speech before you could actually hear his voice. That's actually what's happening now. We just boost it a little, but it's the same type of message. So uh you would appreciate a Steve Jobs keynote when he's there explaining you what's I don't know, the next 12 month plan of the company, what's the next product coming up. What they are doing with these leader ads is the same. So if it's created for that purpose, it it's still original because it it's no one can write uh a leader telling them what to do. That's it it goes against the thought of a leader. They have their message, they know what uh they are doing, and they just inform people. What we do with the ad is just to um enhance the message and increase reach within people that um are aligned with the with the message that we want to share. Of course, if uh like everything else in marketing, if you don't think it, it will fail. And the problem is nowadays, when you fail, you don't just fail. You create this backlash of negativity that can come back. So if I'm talking about the I know why you asked this question, it's all these newborn leaders that they wake up 4:30 in the morning, go in the gym, run 15 miles, come back, prepare breakfast for the whole neighborhood, and then get a shower, and they are in the office by 8 o'clock before everyone arrives, clean and dust all the office, prepare the sales call, and reply all the messages, and by 9.15, they already made 2 million pounds. And uh that's every day.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 31:00

I'm on like 3.5 million by now. I think I think Mikeley's fully right, like they're so important thought leader ads at the moment. Um it is again about being authentic, though. Like we make the jokes about uh the influencers who are kind of saying they're having two million pounds in their pocket by 9 a.m. and they've been up since five and they've had an ice bath. But actually, most of the time people see through that crap. I think if you are a leader who has an authentic message um and is being helpful and being valuable to your community and your audience, you're much more likely to be impactful with thought leader ads. Um ultimately people buy from people, uh, which is a cliche thing to say, but it just enhances that face and human element of a brand that is missing a lot of the time when it comes to normal ads.

Tom Inniss: 31:55

Yeah, I mean, I'm never gonna make that money because I'm not getting up at five. I might still be up at five. I'm not getting up at five.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 32:03

There you go. I I wish I didn't have to get up at five these days. It's uh bleary eyed carrying a toddler through from um from a cart.

Tom Inniss: 32:14

Yeah, but she'll look after you in later life, Hayden. That's yeah, you've got to remember.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 32:19

Yeah, it's I'll save this podcast to make sure that she uh That's the prediction 2050.

Tom Inniss: 32:26

It's the investment in your future, Hayden. Yeah. Exactly. Um, so we're coming towards the end of this podcast, but before we wrap up, Nikala, is there anything that LinkedIn ads has launched recently that has got you like really excited? As much as well, with as much excitement as you can have over like a LinkedIn feature. Is there something that you feel is truly useful to beating new marketers?

Michele Raffaelli : 32:52

I do have lots of excitement about actions that they've taken in the back end. So um the way they restructure the account, the way that um now it's simplified duplicating ads and manipulating them, that's super exciting. I can assure you, if you work in paid media, you go wake up in the morning, and the first thing you want to do is go and play with LinkedIn because it's much, much better than used to be. I I don't know what you mean for recent. I don't know what uh happened so recently to answer your question.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 33:26

I like what I I yeah, I quite like what you said there anyway. I feel like there's also the challenge of of going into Google Ads and it it looks exactly the same as it has for the last 10 years, but they've moved things around by five centimetres and changed the name. Um, at least LinkedIn are making like proper changes um to the back end. Um and then if you talk about meta, no one can actually get into meta because of their annoying two-factor authentication. So God knows what's happening in there. Um I think one thing as well, I don't know if you've you've tried this with any of your clients, Michele, but um the revenue attribution report and and and CAPI. Have you had any thoughts on on those kind of new tools that not that new, but new-ish tools that LinkedIn are rolling out?

Michele Raffaelli : 34:15

I do, but I signed an NDA with a client and I'm not allowed to talk about it.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 34:20

But it's all good, all right? It's all good.

Michele Raffaelli : 34:23

Sorry, no, I I I don't have enough data to say it. The idea behind it is fantastic, but we don't really I I haven't really proved it, so I don't know. I know the idea is great, but I don't have enough data to say yes it's working or not. Sorry.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 34:41

No, I kind of set you up for that because I probably should have thought about that.

Michele Raffaelli : 34:44

Sorry, go ahead. I have an answer. Um not for the revenue, but one thing that they started doing recently is the um AI overview. So there is a panel of recommendations that analyze your performances, they tell you the audio penetration performances and uh um your audience um engagement, they can tell you if your CPC is within the benchmark, within your account, and with companies in the same market. Those types of insights are fairly new and they're I found them very useful. Perfect.

Tom Inniss: 35:23

Okay. So uh finally, one piece and just one of um actionable advice that you would give to a B2B marketer who feels that they've hit a performance plateau with their LinkedIn ads.

Michele Raffaelli : 35:37

Call brew.

Tom Inniss: 35:40

Within marketers of the universe, thank you so much. Come on, you can do better than that.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 35:47

Can't do better than brew, but oh yeah, no, no. Brew brew are fantastic.

Tom Inniss: 35:52

Um what is your one bit of advice that you would give to a Bs B marketer who feels like they are starting to plateau?

Michele Raffaelli : 36:02

Buy only one. Um, they may want more than one. Do you want three? No. The problem is first thing give time to your campaigns, but at the same time, be careful to give them too much time because you may be wasting money. So you need to find the right balance. Um the thing is, you talk about plateau, so reaching this stagnating phase, um, the fatigue, as they call it. So you need to find your own balance on how to um look after your campaigns. You can't over-medicate them. If you make too many changes within a day, you won't be able to understand what's working. If you wait too much to do changes, you you will waste money. It's up to you to try to find the right timing for those, but keep looking at it. And this may sound unique, but do trust your LinkedIn rep. They are actually very good and they are there to help you. So listen to the recommendation and suggestions and um call us if you want to know more.

Tom Inniss: 37:19

So that is all we have time for today. Thank you so much, McKele, for taking the time to talk to us. Uh, I think you have demonstrated why we uh view you as the expert in this area. And if you want to find some more of Mikele's thoughts on paid marketing, he has recently written some blogs for the Resource Hub as well, which you can find at brewdigital.com forward slash resources. Um, I'm gonna hand over to Hayden to read us out.

Haydn Woods-Williams: 37:47

Outro. Time for an outro. That is, as Tom has already said, uh, all we've got time for today. So thank you so much for getting this far for your listen. Uh, we hope you've found some useful snippets. There's definitely a few things that Mikele said today that I'm gonna go and you know give to some of my clients. Um, we love that you've made it this far through the listen. We love making this content, uh, and we would love it too if you could recommend the show to one friend or colleague that you think would enjoy listening. Uh, thank you as always to the brew team, Mikele and Tom today. Um for now though, that is all we've got time for. I've been Hayden, and that's Tom, and we've been the marks of the universe.