This interview is part of a Boardroom Insight article series exploring the marketing consulting landscape from the perspective of industry executives. David Pride is the chief relationships officer of Portland, Maine-based social media marketing agency Social Impressions. He is also the founder of Hope for The Arctic, a nonprofit organization focused on fostering hope, resilience, and connection across the Arctic region.

Boardroom Insight: When should a B2B company like a consultancy start giving thought to mixing LinkedIn ads into its paid media campaigns?

David Pride: A B2B company, like a consultancy, should base its decision to add LinkedIn ads to its paid media campaigns based on its goals and objectives for its current state of business.

In general, you can count on LinkedIn Ads having a significantly higher cost than any other social network – often 4 -5x that of Facebook but the quality of the leads you’ll likely be able to attract should also be much higher. If your consultancy is in growth mode and you have a decent budget, then LinkedIn Ads could make a great addition to your overall marketing strategy. 

Keep in mind that, unlike Facebook, where you can get away with running ads for just $10 or $15 a day, on LinkedIn, that likely won’t happen. Sure, you can set your budget that low but due to the costs of LinkedIn Ads, it won’t use your budget efficiently, so you’re better off saving up the funds to be able to run an effective campaign than you are trying to make something work with a hail mary pass and a $1000 a month budget on LinkedIn.

Also, keep in mind that running an ad campaign involves than just deciding, “I’m going to run a LinkedIn Ad campaign.” It involves making sure you have the correct assets to support that campaign; things such as a good mobile-friendly website and landing page, making sure you have at least one piece of video content that you can use as an ad that is not cheesy, and that you actually have a product that there is a need for. 

I sometimes have clients who think LinkedIn Ads will save their business when what they really need to do is go back to the drawing board and fix what was broken about their entire company. LinkedIn Ads won’t fix a poorly run company.

Boardroom Insight: In a social ad campaign that includes an influencer relations component, what does the process of finding influencer partners look like from the agency’s perspective?

David Pride: Finding quality influencers involves many different aspects, and most of them revolve around your budget and goals. 

A real influencer who can actually help people make a buying decision knows their worth and won’t be interested in trading the community they’ve spent years growing for a t-shirt or a $100 Amazon Gift Card. In fact, it’s insulting to suggest that influencers who have large followings should work for free – if you’re a business owner or an entrepreneur, how many times has someone asked you to do what you do for free or for a discount because “it won’t take that much time”? So first off, avoid thinking influencer marketing is free in any way. It’s not free financially and it’s not free time-wise either.

Finding influencers can be done by using one of the various software [products] that are on the market; many of the best are quite cost-restrictive, though. Or you can try your hand at DMing the influencer, emailing the contact on their profile, or using one of the marketplaces within the app you are looking to collaborate through.

Keep an eye out for individuals who have a proven history of serving your target audience, getting real engagement, and someone who is professional. You can spot fake engagement quite easily if you notice tons of the comments are just emojis or very generic comments. 

If you don’t have $10,000 to engage with a quality Influencer, you may want to consider going the UGC route, User Generated Content. Services like Billo or JoinBrands make this easy and cost-effective. These companies connect brands with individual content creators who will create “influencer style” videos for your business, and often, it costs less than $200.

I find a lot of my influencers for my clients by looking at who my competition is using, searching trending hashtags, and also paying attention to what’s going on in the world of pop culture.

Boardroom Insight: Besides budget, what are the factors that decide whether a company should go with video ads for its social campaign or go down the standard text-and-image route? 

David Pride: Video should always be the top priority, and text and image should always be considered the second-class citizen at this point. Video is King, Queen, and Prince. Text and image are the Jester. 

Unless you have a fantastic graphic design person or a really creative take, video will almost always perform better – just remember to add captions.

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