326: Steps to Leads on LinkedIn with Anthony Blatner

https://youtu.be/UcnTlk-Zv3A Anthony Blatner, Founder and CMO of Speedwork Social and host of LinkedIn Ads Radio, is on a mission to help B2B companies turn LinkedIn into a predictable growth engine. With a background in technology and marketing, Anthony helps businesses cut through noise, leverage authentic content, and use LinkedIn ads to consistently attract and convert high-quality prospects. We explore Anthony’s LinkedIn Lead Funnel: Top of Funnel (Tips & Tricks + Case Studies), Middle Funnel (Lead Capture), and Bottom Funnel (Boost Post & Retarget)—a simple yet powerful framework for generating demand, capturing leads, and converting them into customers using a combination of organic content and paid amplification. Anthony shares why traditional tactics like cold connection requests are losing effectiveness, how AI is reshaping content creation, and why human-driven, personality-rich content still wins. He also breaks down how to structure content, budget effectively, and build a sustainable LinkedIn strategy—even with limited time. — 3 Steps to Leads on LinkedIn with Anthony Blatner Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Anthony Blatner, the Founder and CMO of the Speedwork, LinkedIn Ad Agency, helping great companies get great customers with LinkedIn ads. Anthony, welcome to the show. Hey, Steve, excited to be here and to talk to you today. It’s great to have you here. So before we dive into all things LinkedIn, I’d like to ask my favorite question on this podcast, which is, what is your personal ‘Why’, and how are you manifesting it in your business? Yeah, I’ve always been just really into business. I grew up being around a lot of business owners. My dad ran his own business, and he was in the finance world, so he worked with a lot of other business owners. So since I was a kid, I've always been around a lot of business owners, and I've always just really enjoyed business, and then I just naturally gravitated to the marketing world there because I just really enjoyed the side of the business world.Share on X So my ‘Why’ has always been around helping and growing businesses. I come from the technology space doing software development, and now I’m in the marketing space and it’s just something I’ve always loved doing and it’s a very exciting space and it’s always changing very fast. So that’s been my personal ‘Why’, and just manifesting it every day in what we do in our work on LinkedIn. So it’s just always fun to be working with growing businesses. Yeah, this LinkedIn is a fascinating platform. I’ve been on it, I don’t know, probably over 20 years now. Is this possible? Yeah. Something like that. And there were other platforms at the time like Plaxo—I think that was one competitor platform—and I was on multiple platforms. Then I quit Plaxo, and I’m glad that I actually built on the right platform. I’ve also witnessed how people are getting more and more active on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is becoming kind of non-negotiable for B2B businesses. So tell me how you see this evolution and how LinkedIn has changed over the past 10 years. Yeah, it definitely has changed a lot. Back in the day, when we were first getting started, a lot of people would ask me, “Does anybody even use LinkedIn?” Ten years ago, it wasn’t as widely used, especially on the social side. It’s always been like the digital resume. The big change happened with Covid, when everyone was had to get online more. That’s when the big shift happened. Everyone got used to using it a lot more. And then since then, people are used to using it, and it has definitely evolved into being kind of the number one social platform for professionals. So anything business-wise, business content, people are going to go on LinkedIn to share that and talk about that. So it was kind of cemented in this place there. Then they just continued rolling out additional features and things that are useful for both users on reading, connecting with your colleagues, but then also on the marketing side of things. So the advertising platform has kind of come a long way. There’s a lot of new features, a lot of new capabilities there. So it’s been very interesting to watch how it’s evolved. And I think also at the same time we kind of see how other platforms have evolved differently. I feel like these days, if I ever go on Facebook, it’s just a lot of like AI-generated garbage content. So during the workday or during the work week, I want to be reading business stuff. I want to be learning things and I’m going to apply to my job. That’s why I go on LinkedIn to read that type of content. And I know that’s why a lot of other professionals do it. So it’s kind of just grown into its place there in the ecosystem. So people are used to using it a lot more. And there’s been a lot of new features that have come out to help ...