Ricky F.

This sounds cool. If your focus is LinkedIn, you're going to want Sales Navigator for the advanced search features, list building, network visibility, etc. I did a quick and dirty search for leads with "content" in their title and "ai content" as the query, which shows ~1K potential leads. You'd want to spend more time refining your searches and iteratively building your list, but from there, you'd be able to reach out via InMail. Yeah, lean into these folks' role as AI trailblazers, be prepared to address likely objections (probably about publishing control/security), and make it clear that you're asking them to share their experience (which will also help them position themselves as trailblazers). I'm optimistic for you.

To add to others' points here, it's important to clarify your goal with the campaign. An ad can build awareness and provide messaging air cover. And you can drive direct response. But an ad that lacks this clarity of purpose, or tries to accomplish everything all at once, tends to underperform. Since advertising is a iterative contact sport, and because LinkedIn is $$, you might also try to maximize your budget by getting the right audience to your site via LI to build your remarketing audience and stay in front of them.

Bear in mind, if you're going to post the price, you've got to be darn sure the prospect understands the potential value they're receiving. In most cases, you might have to educate them. And you've got to be prepared to prove it.

My recommendation would be to make a big ask, like a full-blown case study, and offer the testimonial/review as the easier backup option.

As you know, the challenge with enterprise-scale customers is that they're more likely to have policies regarding employees providing testimonials/reviews, regardless of incentives. It helps if your POC is more senior-level, in which case, they might be more inclined towards the klout of Gartner vs. G2...

As long as it doesn't require them to perform calculations/configuration, I say do it! Nothing says "it's going to be expensive" like having to contact someone to find out you can't afford their offering. IMO it's worse to spend time chasing unqualified leads than potentially turning away those that are price sensitive.

In my experience, 9/10 times it's an audience/targeting issue. To be clear, there may be other areas of improvement, but when I hear about an issue, the first place I look is the audience definitions/performance.

Wow, what an amazing impact you've no doubt made! How are you building on such a meaningful career these days?