K atie c ouric

Expenses
The attention, level of access, and specificity of targeting you achieve on
LinkedIn does come at a high cost, however. Wilcox explains that LinkedIn
has one of the most expensive ad platforms out there. On average he sees
clicks on LinkedIn cost anywhere between six and nine dollars. Because
you’re paying a higher amount up front, you need to have a large deal on
the back end to make up for the costs.
Before we dive into the ad platform further, I want to say that you can
close a lot of business without using the ad platform. Ads are not the only
way. For example, I personally closed deals with Disney, Xbox, and Fox,
which generated more than $15 million in business simply by messaging
the right people with the right message (it cost me nothing). And a good
friend of mine closed more than $90 million in business by using the same
technique. We actually traded secrets about which messages were
performing the best.
Want to know our secret? It’s simple—we just try to put ourselves in the
other person’s shoes and think, “What will make this person’s life easier?”
Or “What is going to make this guy look like a rock star to his boss?”
However, if you do want to use the ad platform, be sure to pay attention
to the list below, since Wilcox gives you the best strategies for how to use
the system to your advantage.

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Who Should Use the LinkedIn Ad Platform?
There are a few qualifications for the type of people that will benefit most
from using the LinkedIn ad platform:
1. Those who have a large deal, meaning they can make $15,000 or
more from a deal, a customer, or throughout the lifetime of a client.
2. Those who know the exact type of people who will buy their
product. If you think your buyer could be anyone, LinkedIn isn’t the
best ad platform for you. It only makes sense when the audience
you’re targeting is specific and clear—when this is the only place
you can reach your customers at scale.
3. White-collar recruiters of almost any type. If your business is trying
to hire a sales manager, you can show ads to people in your geo-
location whose job title is currently “sales manager” and then every
résumé you get will be from a qualified person.
4. Higher education institutions. If you’re an MBA school trying to
recruit people who have bachelor’s degrees but no advanced
degrees, and who studied journalism or English, you can hyper
target those qualifications to find people who meet those criteria.
LinkedIn is the only place where you can do that level of scholastic-
related targeting, which makes it great for universities or schools
trying to reach new applicants. This is because LinkedIn is one of
the only social media platforms where people actually list all their
education information. And higher education schools meet the large
deal rule because if a school gets even only one candidate from an
ad, that person is going to spend a lot of money at their school.