#136 Unmissable to the right people — without the content treadmill with Kristian Downer

August 12, 2026

Everyone wants more reach. Almost no one has decided who they're reaching — or what they'd say once they got there.

Here's what I want you to hear in this one. Kristian Downer can do something remarkable: put your face in front of a named list of the exact people you want to work with — by company, by job title, by seniority — for a fraction of what LinkedIn ads used to cost. But listen to what he keeps circling back to. Not once does the targeting come first. Every single time it's who are you for, what's the pain you solve, what's the one message worth carrying — and only then, the tactic. The ad is the last mile, never the first move. That's architecture before action, and this episode is a masterclass in it — taught, unusually, by the person whose whole craft is the action.

What You'll Walk Away With

How to be seen by the exact people who could buy from you — without shouting into the void
Why "post more, post faster" is almost never the answer, and what to build instead
The four-to-six-week on-ramp that turns your best organic posts into targeted reach
What "not generic" actually means when you define an audience — and why it's the whole game
The follow-through most people skip — and why the ad only opens the door, it doesn't close the deal
Where a tactic like this sits inside the whole: architecture first, action second

In This Episode

I've watched people chase visibility for years — more posts, more platforms, more noise — hoping reach alone will do the work. It won't. The reason this conversation lands is that Kristian, who could sell you the tactic all day, keeps handing the credit back to the thing underneath it. He walks through Thought Leadership Ads — the ones that run from your personal profile, your face and your voice, not the company page — and shows how a modest, tightly targeted spend can put you in front of the right people again and again until you're the obvious choice.

The proof is concrete. He describes a campaign built to reach the people inside one single company — the eight thousand who work at Network Rail — with one clear set of work-winning messages, so that by the time the meeting came around, the room already knew them. He talks about cutting his own network from eleven thousand connections down to five, because a tight audience beats a big one. He's honest about the part nobody sells you: the human follow-through after the ad does its job. As he puts it, "it's not about reach. It's about impact."

And that's the whole architecture-before-action point, spoken by someone standing inside the action. The tool will carry your message to exactly who you choose. It can't choose for you. That part is already yours to build — and once it's built, a tactic like this stops being noise and starts being leverage. This one's for listening the whole way through. Press play.

Chapters

00:00 — "We see you everywhere" — the goal in one line

01:04 — When "Auntie Nellie and Uncle Joe" run out

03:06 — What actually drew Kristian to LinkedIn

06:00 — Why LinkedIn — and the end of vanity metrics

08:53 — Why small businesses stayed away — and what changed

09:43 — The profile baseline that makes you findable

11:03 — Why he cut 5,000 connections

12:45 — The connection request nobody follows up

16:30 — Thought Leader Ads: the £250 door that used to cost £5k

18:31 — Getting specific enough to make it pay

21:51 — Better content, not more content

22:56 — What happens next: the follow-through most people skip

25:31 — The Network Rail campaign

26:52 — If you started today: the four-to-six-week on-ramp

29:33 — What "not generic" actually means

34:26 — The one thing to walk away with

About the Guest

Kristian Downer is a LinkedIn strategist and LinkedIn Ads specialist, and the founder of DowSocial. He began as a generalist social media consultant and has spent years — the bulk of his work now in B2B — helping organisations from small consultancies to multi-billion-pound companies reach niche professional audiences on LinkedIn. He's especially known for making Thought Leader Ads work for smaller businesses, not just enterprise budgets.

Get his LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads Framework — a free, step-by-step download: https://www.dowsocial.com/linkedin-thought-leader-ads-framework/

DowSocial: https://www.dowsocial.com/

Connect with Kristian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristian-downer/

About Finola

I'm Finola Howard — host of Your Truth Shared and founder of How Great Marketing Works. I help purpose-led entrepreneurs build success as they define it, by connecting the parts of their business — their marketing, their business, and themselves — into one whole they can finally see. Subscribe to the show and never miss the episode that connects it for you.

Subscribe to Your Truth Shared and hear the truth behind success — made whole, every week.

Episode Transcript

Kristian Downer 0:00
So, essentially, the campaign was to target anyone that worked for Network Rail in the UK with videos and driving them to case study pages about the work-winning messages that that construction company uses to win tenders. And so, over three months between the start of that process and the end of that process, running these with the goal that if you work for Network Rail, you'd see the ad. And the goal was to go into that meeting and have someone go, "We see you everywhere, because that's the goal, right? I think we get we we really overcomplicate marketing sometimes. The real goal of marketing is to put the right message in front of the right people. Everything else will figure itself out, and that was the goal with that campaign: was just those work-winning messages in front of the of the right audience. And yeah, there's 8000 and something people that work for Network Rail, so you can go really quite quite niche and just target that one company, and and it worked really well.

Finola Howard 1:04
When I went looking for someone who really understood LinkedIn, like how to grow your reach beyond the people you already know, I asked around, and one name kept coming up: Christians. So here's what I want you to listen for, because it's the whole thing. Not once does the targeting come first. Every single time, it's who you are for, what's the pain you solve, what's the one message worth putting in front of them, and only then the tactic. That's architecture before action, proven live. Thought leadership ads on LinkedIn will put you in front of exactly who you choose, they can't tell who you're for. That part is already yours to build. Welcome back to Your Truth Shared, and in this episode, I kind of want to touch on the subject of visibility, and visibility from the perspective of, you know, after you've exhausted every Auntie Nellie and Uncle Joe to actually buy your services, you actually have to go outside of your network and move beyond what you currently know and move into a wider space to expand your business, because you can't keep dipping into the same pot to get sales for your business. And one of the ways that we can do that is through social media and through ads, and one of the channels that we would use, especially from a professional perspective, from a business-to-business perspective, is LinkedIn. So I wanted to talk to somebody who really understood LinkedIn and how that can grow your reach, grow your audience. So I asked around, and one name kept coming up, and that person was Christian Downs, so Christian Downer. Apologies, and welcome, Christian.

Kristian Downer 2:48
Thanks for having me.

Finola Howard 2:49
Yeah, delighted to have you. What made you get enamored with LinkedIn and LinkedIn ads? Because you you describe yourself as a strategist and LinkedIn ads expert. What talk to me about what drew you to LinkedIn, or what are you seeing there?

Kristian Downer 3:06
Yeah, so I started out as kind of a generalist social media consultant working with B 2b and B 2c companies, but over time I've kind of narrowed into providing probably 80% of the work we do is with business to business organizations, particularly those for really niche audiences. And what I've always loved about LinkedIn is the fact that that is where your B 2b professional audience is and and hangs out. And traditionally, it's been amazing because it didn't matter who you were if you could build an audience of kind of targeted followers and connections, you could kind of speak to them, get high levels of of organic reach, and it's been brilliant. And there are still plenty of ways, organically and through kind of traditional kind of sales outreach, not those icky kind of automated DMs, but just by having conversations with people. You could still use LinkedIn to do that. But what I noticed and kind of as I got more familiar and was running LinkedIn campaigns for some of the, from kind of small business coaches and consultants all the way up to large kind of multi-billion pound companies, is that LinkedIn is gradually taking away the that that reach. It's now reaching that kind of value extraction phase of the platform, where it kind of feels like it's getting worse, and we have to pay for more and more things. And part of that is is reach. But but what LinkedIn does to compensate us for that is it allows us to target people in a way with ads that no other platform allows us to do. We can target people by the job title, industry, and even company that they work for. And so, whilst we can't target individual individuals, individual individuals, but I can't target people individually, we can target their companies and their job roles, and we can we can make sure that we give ourselves a pretty good shot of putting our audience. Ourselves in front of our audience consistently, and so what we work with a lot of companies doing now is we kind of have a free, a free campaign funnel system which follows the traditional marketing funnel, so kind of top of funnel awareness, which often is now I think we'll talk about a lot today, thought leader ads. So kind of running ads from personal profiles to kind of really bring the personal aspect to it, but then having another level, which is your kind of traditional lead magnet, webinar, event funnel, that's going to drive people to enter your marketing funnel and have their email address, contact information, be able to kind of talk to them traditional way, and then having your retargeting, where we can kind of leverage all of our platforms together, because I never recommend you just use one platform for for your marketing. And more and more, it's that messy middle of lots of different places. We can use LinkedIn to retarget the people that are on our website and are engaging with our organic content in a natural way. Do you think

Finola Howard 6:00
that people get overwhelmed by this whole idea of this multi-touchpoint thing. This because you started, you know, having that multi-touchpoint thing by being a social media person who is now focused on LinkedIn. I really wanted to know what made you pick LinkedIn more than anything else. What drew you to that in particular? Is it the fact that you can drill down to that level of expertise, or did you just find yourself narrowly drawn, like more drawn to that platform? Because there has been a shift. Like Instagram was really popular for those professionals and coaches. For Instagram was really popular for a while, and I think it's dawning on people that actually no professional business is in LinkedIn, and we need to be in LinkedIn.

Kristian Downer 6:44
Yeah, I've been training people on LinkedIn for probably seven or eight years, so it's it's been something I've always been quite interested in and passionate about, and that's because it is where this sounds odd for someone who's worked in social media for more than a decade, but the the kind of the vanity social media, the the kind of posting for posting's sake has never really appealed to me. I'm always about well, how do we tie that to outcome? And LinkedIn is a place where you've been able to build and be sure you're talking to the right people, and you can talk to them about business. Again, if somebody was to like your Facebook page post, it probably would feel a bit weird to reach out to them and send them a DM on Facebook. I know people might do that, but for me, it would feel uncomfortable. Whereas I wouldn't hesitate for a second on a very siloed platform like Dim, where this is where we talk about business. Yes, we bring other parts of our personality in, but it's it's specifically a business platform. I don't feel as guilty jumping on that and having that, so I was very drawn to it because it's of that specificity of it and being able to section out the other parts of my life away from it, which is harder with platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and and and even platforms like TikTok. And for the ad side of it, I'm drawn to it because I always like to joke I'm a lazy marketer. I don't want to. If I can, if I can find a way to reach the right people every time, that interests me, and I can prove that on LinkedIn. I can't prove that anywhere else. Whereas, you know, you get 100,000 impressions on a Instagram post. How many of them are target audience? You you just don't know, right?

Finola Howard 8:22
And talk to me about how LinkedIn has changed of late, or even why were people so loath or so scared to move into the LinkedIn space for? And I'm talking about small business. I'm not talking about large business. Large business who were who understood funnels, who understood about doing business, they were comfortable in LinkedIn anyway. They didn't want to be in the other social media channels. But for so often, for so long, smaller businesses, smaller solopreneurs were kind of reticent to move into the LinkedIn space.

Kristian Downer 8:53
Yeah, I think it was two two main reasons for that. One of which I think is LinkedIn's taking a bit time to shake that. It's just where I put my CV,

Finola Howard 9:01
yes,

Kristian Downer 9:02
and that's where I get a job, and and that that's changed for quite a while now, but it's still taking a bit of time for that message to to permeate through. And the other one is because it's got that professional image, is just maybe almost a snobbiness of like, oh, or a fear that it's gonna they're gonna be judged or looked down on for kind of taking a more natural Instagram type approach to to LinkedIn and going well, what if you know these this is professional? Will I get judged? And I I think that they're the two main reasons for me is just just a misinterpretation of what the platform is and what good good looks like on that platform, and how much effort it will be

Finola Howard 9:43
as a baseline. Before we kind of talk about ads, I'd like to talk about a baseline of say someone as a small business, say they're a solopreneur, and they're in a professional space. What do you think the baseline foundation they have to have in place for their. Profile to to stand out.

Kristian Downer 10:02
Yeah, I think the first thing is they need to treat their profile almost like a personal portfolio. It needs to be a personal thing, not not written in the first person about the problem that they solve for their audience, and it needs to be focused around this idea that I could look at your profile, know exactly what you do, the problem you solve, and who you solve it for, and then have the supporting evidence and and kind of you know the featured content, the the consistency of posting, and so on. It just supports that as we go. So that profile, making sure that that communicates those core three elements, and and building a network to support that of people that you think are going to be the right people for you, and being a little bit not too picky, but at least when proactively finding new people to connect with, making sure they they align with your kind of ideal client profile, rather than just as you mentioned beginning connecting with their friends or or people that that they like.

Finola Howard 11:03
How would you would you ever recommend cleaning out your database, your LinkedIn connections?

Kristian Downer 11:09
Yeah, 100% So just from my perspective, last year I I about three months ago even I deleted about 5000 connections.

Finola Howard 11:17
Okay, like one by one. How did you

Kristian Downer 11:19
1000 down to 5000.

Finola Howard 11:21
How are you cleaning? How did you clean 5000 out that fast, or was it a labor of love?

Kristian Downer 11:28
It was a labor of love. It wasn't fast because, again, I'm I'm loath to ever recommend anyone uses automation tools on on LinkedIn because they're against terms and conditions and and it takes away the the human element that makes it so important, but it's literally just sat with the app open, mask watching, say something on TV, and just having a few basic filters of going. Because I've had a bit of a portfolio career, even within my business, like the sectors we've targeted or the people we've worked with. The last proper job I had was in the pharmaceutical industry, so I could remove all of the people in the kind of project delivery roles there because they weren't going to be the people I wanted to speak to. It could be people that you know I've done I've done some work in sports journalism and I could remove some of those a large tranche of those people because they're not relevant to what I'm trying to achieve now. I think with just some people you know the the flow of life. Sadly, some people have passed away. Sadly, some people were had retired or were in in a different industry or just just not relevant. So, I'm not saying everyone needs to sit down and start being ridiculously aggressive with it. There's a definite value to keeping that network as tight as you can to the people you want to influence.

Finola Howard 12:45
You know when we get those emails or those messages of someone wanting to connect, and you kind of get caught it, and you go, "Okay, yeah, yeah, I'll I'll accept that connection, you know, because that might widen my my world a little bit, just because I want to poke around in here. And then, as soon as you've connected, they're DMing you and trying to contact you to sell you something. What's your practice? Do you get rid of them immediately, or what's your practice?

Kristian Downer 13:11
Yeah, I'm pretty ruthless on that, and it's. I'd like to say I never snap back, but generally I just delete them and and and move forwards. But of course, because I'm in a a marketing and kind of role where we help people generate more sales, there's a little part of me that will often just message back, going, "Sounds like you need to connect with the right people on LinkedIn. That's not me, but if if if you need help with that,

Finola Howard 13:35
they

Kristian Downer 13:37
never they never come back. But like I I sometimes like I'll even make a joke out and be like, "Great, let's have a pitch off. Here's my pitch, and just just make a bit of fun with it and have some fun. I like that

Finola Howard 13:48
idea that you pitch them back. I

Kristian Downer 13:51
would add a bit of it. It's like you've had your turn. Now it's mine. You know,

Speaker 1 13:55
like

Kristian Downer 13:56
just just have a bit of fun with it. Have a I have a a note that just has that standard response in it, I just copy and paste it in. But realistically, when I think about accepting connection requests, I get asked all the time, "Who should we accept? And I'm like, "If you click accept for me, you should be the one that's messaging them first because they've just said they want to come into your world. What better opportunity than now to have a conversation and go, ah, thanks for connecting. I think mine at the moment goes, thanks for connecting. Just as a bit of an intro, this is what I do. How does that overlap with what you're doing? Is there something specific you've got in mind? And it just opens it up. And if you just accept and leave it, there's there's no value there. Why not without pitching, just have a gentle kind of?

Finola Howard 14:47
That's when you're accepted when they've reached out to you. That's your okay. I like that.

Kristian Downer 14:52
I would rather be proactive because if you're if you're like oh well, there's no point, then why would you have them in your network? It's that kind of thing of. You know, even if it is just, oh, we worked with a similar similar people, or you know, did you know this person or do you know that person? You know, just just take control of that conversation and and have that that conversation. Now, if you get an automated message straight afterwards, then yeah, you can delete them or or move on or or whatever. But if someone's showing an interest in you, I would show an interest in them.

Finola Howard 15:23
I like that, but I also like that take control of the conversation. Yeah, because I think we're often too passive in all of these interactions with people, and they could be turned into something really great. Yeah, amazing. Talk to me about so traditionally we would think of LinkedIn ads as being the most expensive ads available to us if we want to expand our reach. And about 18 months ago or thereabouts, LinkedIn introduced something new, and it's this idea of thought leadership ads, and it changes the game from spending something like I think what you shared with me. You could be spending a minimum of between three and 5000 a month, versus something like maybe 300 a month. That makes it a lot more accessible to people now, particularly as they become that they use LinkedIn more to actually position themselves better. This is more accessible now and is possibly a better place to be than than than the other traditional ad places we spend money. Tell us what a thought leadership ad is and how perhaps that we could use that in our businesses.

Kristian Downer 16:30
Yes, the thought leader ads are essentially taking the posts that you put on personal profiles and promoting them using your company's ad account. So I have thought leadership ads running at or thought leader ads running for my business at the moment. It's pitch. It's a ironically a video of me talking about thought leader ads, how they work, and and and why organic reach alone isn't going to help you grow your B 2b your niche B 2b business. And I'm spending. I think I spent 700 pounds on that this month. Although you can spend more or less, and that's actually generated a number of people sign up for the webinar that I've I've got coming up. But it's also helped me generate meetings with companies, you know, that are turning over more than 2 billion pounds in the UK with their head of paid marketing, which for me, in what I do, that's that's the goal, right? Is to have conversations with these with these decision makers, but they're not lead generation tools. They are not. It's not like running a Google ad or a Facebook ad to kind of generate an immediate response. What you're doing is you're trying to communicate to your audience that's really dialed into the job titles, companies, and so on, and talk about a pain point they might have and a problem they might have with no pitch, which really confute really hurts my performance marketers out there. No pitch, because what we're trying to do is get people to like, comment, and engage. Maybe if you you can if you've got premium, you can see if they view your profile, and so that lead I talked about was someone that followed me off the back of me doing that. I saw they fit my target audience again about taking control of the situation. I sent them a connection request. I then sent them a note personalized to them because we we come we have similar backgrounds and kind of referencing that, and then I went into the intro and whether it was worth you know whether they overlapped with what they were working on.

Finola Howard 18:31
This is where I think so many small businesses like falter. One, they don't profile their customer deeply enough, and they don't get specific enough. Like, can you help people with that to get their heads around that? Like, it's it's daunting for people because I would say that you you've dialed in really really deeply about exactly who it is with a high value ticket over their head as well. So it's not it's not just a low ticket offer here. You are talking about a high ticket offer, aren't you? Really?

Speaker 2 19:01
Yeah.

Finola Howard 19:01
Help them understand how specific they need to get to get a return on that kind of because 700 a month for a small business is a lot when they're out of their depth. Do you know what I mean? So if you give them a starting point that makes it less daunting to move into this space,

Kristian Downer 19:21
so your minimum ad spend is eight pounds a day, which is 240 to 250 pounds a month as the bare minimum. And you would start off maybe having so what you do is you so my thought leader ads framework is essentially post organically for four to six weeks across the main content pillars or pain points that your audience has. Find the posts organically that get the most engagement, and then take that paid spend a minimum of I said of 240. Create a little bucket of of those posts that you're going to promote. Run the ads, and then. What you're looking for is the engagement. So we're gonna, if you've done a video or something like that, we can or we can retarget the people that engage with those down the line. But for the moment, we're just looking for people to view your profile, like or comment or repost the the thing, and we're going to be looking at those people and going, are you my ideal customer? And if you are, you're going to get a connection request, and you're no longer a cold lead because you've engaged with something I've done. You've seen my face, you've you've commented, you liked, you've you've viewed my profile, so I can talk about that. And I think you've got to be fairly dialed in, not necessarily to the companies, but to the type of people and the size of the business, to To do that, and that at a base level just acts as a if you're going to do organic, do it properly, and then make sure that you're getting that base level of kind of visibility that's going to to the right people, and then build on the engagement that that gets. So that means instead of thinking, oh, to to beat the algorithm, I need to post you know 345, times a week, I can post once a week, or twice a month, or even monthly, and I can still get the reach to the right people, rather than having to waste that time, effort, money, and focus on that thing. So the main pain point you're going to have is getting it set up. Once it's set up, you could let that. You can just keep layering that new content on top and out. So you actually think

Finola Howard 21:26
if you if you build the ad campaign, if it's enshrined within your whole kind of practice of how you do business, of how you become visible in to your target market, that it means that you can do less to have as much of an impact if you're using it cleverly.

Kristian Downer 21:45
Exactly, because most of the business owners I speak to, they find their biggest challenge is creating consistent content.

Finola Howard 21:51
So instead of creating lots of content, you can do better content.

Kristian Downer 21:56
Better content. Focus on the the core pain of your audience, create content. You might create 10 posts, and that might be enough to last you six months. Now that means you you can post to do it the most effectively. You'd post more than that, and you'd pick the winners to to put in this campaign. But if you just like, look, I just need these people to to see my face on a regular basis and to engage with the pain point that we're talking about. You can do that for 250 pounds a month, and you know that you'll get 1000s of impressions on that post. Rather than you know, if you've only got a small number of followers, you're not posting very often. You know, growing organically is it's a big effort. And you asked at the beginning, kind of how I got here. I'm a big. You've got a choice. You either you either invest time or you invest money. Now you kind of always have to invest a little bit of both, but with this strategy, we're investing a a little bit of money so that we can save a ton of time and get bigger impact.

Finola Howard 22:56
And I think the other thing is is that I often find that the thought is not going into of what the next step is, so like it's it's not enough to think of I just need reach and I need visibility. It's what are you going to do with that visibility? Can you share a little bit about your thoughts about that?

Kristian Downer 23:13
Yeah, exactly. You've got to think of well, as you said, what do we want that person to do next? Now, for most of the people where LinkedIn fits, it's probably a conversation, ideally a call or some kind of, you know, event, or it's going to be something where there's a personal interaction with the people you're targeting. If you were to come to me and say, "Chris, I want to run LinkedIn ads to promote a product, and we're just going to run them to a product page, and they're going to buy straight away. I'm going to be like, that's going to be tricky. That's going to be tricky because of the mindset that people are in with there. So you've got to be thinking: once I've got them engaged, what is it we want them to do, and what, and how are we going to communicate to them that we can solve that problem? And a lot of this is qualifying. And like that little question I put at the end of the DMs to people that that follow or connect with me is like, how does this overlap with your current role? Does this problem I have overlap with you? And some people are like, no. Some people just ignore you, and others will be like, yeah, it kind of is. You know, it's it's something we're thinking about. And then, well, for me, my next step is, well, look, why don't we jump on a call for 20 minutes? I'll lay out how it all works, and and then of course I get the email address. They can go in the in the email marketing, and we can we can just start building that. And and again, it's not a short term play. This is something you need to be thinking: 1218, 24 months. I'm going to do this over a period of time, and it's going to pay off because you know I had a sales meeting this afternoon with someone that attended a webinar I held three years ago, and that's the only time we've had that conversation. But then I get a contact form filled out. I met them today, and they were like, "Oh yeah, I've been to a couple of your webinars. In fact, it was more than that during the pandemic, so it's kind of that far out. And there's they. Not had a thing for me, but because I've been on my mailing list and on my socials, and we've had that consistent layer of targeting towards them, when the time was right, they reached out, and that that could be a yeah, that's that's a that's a five figure opportunity. So

Finola Howard 25:16
fantastic! Can you give us an example? You when we spoke last, you gave me an example of a project that you were working on. I think it was in the rail industry. Just if you were okay to share what a campaign could look like.

Kristian Downer 25:31
Yeah. So this specific one, without naming any any specifics, is a company in the construction industry that wants to work on more rail projects, and basically they were going through tender processes with the main company in the UK that that handles this, which is Network Rail. So, essentially, the campaign was to target anyone that worked for Network Rail in the UK with videos and driving them to case study pages about the work-winning messages that that construction company uses to win tenders, and so over three months between the start of that process and the end of that process, running these with the goal that if you work for Network Rail, you'd see the ad, and the goal was to go into that meeting and have someone go, "We see you everywhere, because that's the goal, right? I think we get we we really overcomplicate marketing sometimes. The real goal of marketing is to put the right message in front of the right people. Everything else will figure itself out, and that was the goal with that campaign. Was just those work-winning messages in front of the of the right audience, and yeah, there's 8000 and something people that work for Network Rail, so you can go really quite, quite niche and just target that one company, and and it worked really well.

Finola Howard 26:52
Fantastic. If someone was to get started today, right, with LinkedIn ads, what would you have them do? So, say for example, let's kind of pick. They're in a. Let's say that they're a coach, or yeah, a coach that wants to target speaking at corporate events. What would you do?

Kristian Downer 27:14
So, coach at corporate events. I'd be thinking, well, for the next week or two weeks, probably when I'm having conversations about corporate speaking and and what I do, every time I get asked a question, write it down. We're going classic Marcus Sheridan. They ask you answer every time you get a question, write it down, look for the patterns, and then when you get two or three that maybe fit the most and show either a confusion or a pain point or something a problem that you solve, do a video about it with a post about each of those. Post those organically, see how they do. If they do okay, then we've got we've got the basis of our first thought leader ad campaign.

Finola Howard 27:57
And when you're doing that thought leader ad campaign, you're not using the information from the organic post to create a new post to attach ads to. You're using that post.

Kristian Downer 28:08
Exactly. I'm using that post, and we're going to get a wealth of kind of information that you don't get from traditional LinkedIn ads. Such as, as I said, if you've got LinkedIn Premium, you can see people that then click your profile off the back of it, so see the post, do a bit of research. You can see the people that like, people that comment, and down the line you can run ads to the people that watch more than 2550, or 75% of your videos. So you you're getting all this data you can use as part of a long term strategy. Um, as I said, the one thing I would say is you came to me and say, "Why? When wouldn't you run these thought leader ads as a niche with, even if you've got that niche B 2b audiences, I wouldn't run them if you have an overly generic audience. I wouldn't run them if you need a result tomorrow. You know, if if you if you need to be able to say, Chris, I'm going to spend 10 pounds and get 40 back by the end of the month. I'm going to be like, you need to be looking at other other platforms. But if you're like, how can I put together a system that's going to give me consistent reach to the right people and create impact, trust, and revenue? This is this is the way I would go about it.

Finola Howard 29:19
So, for clarification for people listening, when they when we as marketers talk to them about not being a generic audience, say tell us how specific and how how is it not generic?

Kristian Downer 29:33
So a typical audience we might build for someone is going to layer in a number of different factors using the the the kind of back end of the the LinkedIn platform. So I'm going to be looking at industries. I'm looking at job titles and companies. I can also layer in if I've got a hit list of say 100 companies I want to work with. I can layer that in. I can even layer in my marketing consent email marketing database. Target people working for those companies, or for those, or or people on that list, and I can use something called Boolean search, which is basically and or. So I want people that have this, this, this, or this, or this, and they might need to be at a certain level of seniority. So I might say I want to work. I want to target people that either say I'm trying to target that professional speaking one. I want to target people that work within business, you know, business bodies like you know the institution of civil engineers or or those kind of pick out those those kind of companies, people in these industries that have, or they have this job title, and they have to be director level or above. So we can kind of layer across using or or and to kind of get a nice specific audience to to go to, and it's all about sweet spots because I know that the natural question to ask me next is, well, what's a good audience size? A good audience size depends on how niche your product is, but generally we say try and aim for at least 10,000 people in an audience. It gets very expensive otherwise, but we don't want to be too generic. So, you know, I wouldn't go more than a million people in an audience because if you're bigger than in the UK, that is. Because if you're bigger than that, it's probably too generic. So, just as an example, for me, I have a kind of a retargeting, more layered audience of about 40,000 people. I run ads to, but I also have a more wider audience of about a million, which is for me people working in certain industries with marketing job titles or or management like director level job titles in in those specific industries and the idea is that people come from that big audience and I then put them in the smaller audience if they've watched a certain amount of my video or done that so I'm almost using a bit of retargeting and funnel within my within the way I create my audiences,

Finola Howard 32:02
so you're actually using this. I mean, you're drinking your own Kool Aid. You know what I mean? That's

Kristian Downer 32:07
very much so. Very much so. Yeah.

Finola Howard 32:09
And and how long before you before you took that leap? Because often people work in, you know, doing ads, but they don't actually do them for themselves. And because and the reason I'm asking you this is because you said to me when we spoke, you said I'd never do it any other way. Now,

Kristian Downer 32:25
really, I kind of made this leap maybe six months ago, and it's partly because I felt that like thought leader ads, as you said, have been around for for a long time. But I I knew there was something more there, and it's very much been you know bit of experimenting and and finding this isn't something that just I just ran one day and it just worked off the off the bat. It's it's just been experimenting, playing around with different audiences, the the that layering, the the the CTA or the call to action, what we want them to do, and and realistically, that in the last 12 months, LinkedIn organic reach has fallen off a cliff. So there's been a more pressing need to make sure I'm I'm reaching the right people,

Finola Howard 33:10
and it's working.

Kristian Downer 33:12
Yeah, it's working. As I said, you know, just this week we've booked calls with companies that I could never get into, just posting organically or just kind of hoping for the best, you know. I could I could ring their office every single day and never speak to someone of value, but once you get them to engage on your content, they're not cold anymore, and that's that's the value of this. Is it's we're still essentially working in the outreach space, but it's not cold anymore because we've they've thrown up a hand and gone. Well, this kind of fits for me. The

Finola Howard 33:45
other thing that I liked that you mentioned that you said to me the last time as well was not to forget what happens next. That softer, that human side, that follow up, that follow through. It's not just kind of looking at oh my ads. It's about what will I do now as a result of these ads,

Kristian Downer 34:01
exactly, and it's and it's. I'm not going to soften this. It's still quite a labor-intensive thing because we're dealing with humans and we're trying to have conversations. This isn't just a run an ad, stick them in an automation, and then pop the the you know the revenue comes. It's a I've opened. I've I've wedged open the door. Now I have to, I have to push it open with consistent effort.

Finola Howard 34:26
What would you leave people with today? What would you like them to walk away with from this conversation?

Kristian Downer 34:31
If you have a a niche B 2b audience, and they don't see your content and they don't know who you are, they can never buy from you. So, whether it's this or any other kind of marketing that you do, you need to be thinking: How do I make sure that I am unmissable to the people I want to do business with? It's not about reach. It's not about impressions. It's about impact. And who do you want to impact? And how do.

Finola Howard 35:00
I love it. Thank you so much.

Kristian Downer 35:03
Thanks so much. It's great. Thanks for having me.

Finola Howard 35:06
So here's what I want you to take from Christian today. What he showed you, thought leadership ads on LinkedIn, is genuinely clever. For a fraction of what LinkedIn ads used to cost, you can put a face, your face, your voice, your actual thinking in front of a named list of the exact people you want to work with, again and again, until they see you everywhere. But every bit of it only works because something was decided first: who you're for, what pain you solve, the one message worth carrying. The targeting is the last mile, never the first move. So build the architecture, and the action finally has something to carry. Skip it, and you're paying to amplify the fog. Christian, thank you. That was generous and clear, and exactly the thinking I wanted in everyone's ears. He's put the whole thing into a framework, his LinkedIn thought leadership ads framework, and you'll find it linked in the show notes with a free download. Go and get them. Tell them you heard it here. And if this connects to something for you, that's the whole reason this show exists-to help you see how the parts of your business finally fit together. So follow your truth shared wherever you're listening. And I'll see you next week. I'm Finola. Thanks for being here.