Daniel Tonsen, the founder and CEO of Elite Advertising, is renowned as the top LinkedIn expert globally. Elite Advertising, being one of the initial LinkedIn Certified agencies worldwide, has earned a reputation as the most prominent LinkedIn advertising agency in Europe. Daniel is enthusiastic about utilizing growth hacking and advanced techniques on LinkedIn to scale B2B businesses. Apart from his work, Daniel enjoys playing beach volleyball, wakeboarding, paddle tennis, and skiing.
Below are highlights of the interview conducted between World’s Leaders and Daniel Tonsen:
Describe your background and what did you do before you started/joined the company?
Before Daniel started Elite Advertising, he studied pharmacy at the University of Copenhagen. He was interested in biology and medicine but also had a passion for marketing. To combine that, he started studying advanced marketing methods in his free time. That led to him helping pharmacies create marketing campaigns. From that point, he started his marketing career, but always thrived on the most advanced methods. And when he started working with B2B companies, he found a completely different customer journey.
B2B sales is such a different game. And how can marketing help B2B companies scale their sales efforts? With long customer journeys that last over several years sometimes. It is needed to have complete alignment between sales and marketing. And to tie the marketing efforts up with generated revenue (and ROI generation), it was extremely important.
Too many companies focus on price per lead instead of focusing on the core metrics of the company. Elite Advertising saw that focusing instead on metrics like price per quality lead was a complete game changer.
Tell us about the inception of the company. How did it all start?
Daniel’s deep passion for B2B marketing led to Elite Advertising being born. He tried his hand at both B2B and B2C marketing and decided to pursue the former. The B2B segment is massive with high-priced products and solutions, making the customer journey that much harder, thus demanding advanced strategies be put in place. Having studied this market, Daniel proceeded to test and analyze different social channels. While other social platforms, especially Facebook, churned out a host of leads, the conversion ratio was low compared to LinkedIn, which produced fewer but better-quality leads. Moreover, LinkedIn’s targeting options are precise compared to any other advertising platform. One can even select the industry they would like to dive into. Daniel explains, “A lot of companies are still not looking at price per quality lead, which is the key metric we need to focus on. Their chances of success were better on LinkedIn than on other online platforms. So it made sense to us to direct all our focus on LinkedIn and become better on that platform. That is why we specialize in LinkedIn advertising. That was about two years ago. From there on, we have grown and will continue to grow.”
What has made you successful? What do you value?
Before anything else, it’s the team. Find great people. People who are better than you. Those people will make the organization huge. I have a great team! They all have their own personal skills, which makes the team work better as a whole. So when recruiting, test your team. The small differences between people are what make an enormous difference in the long run as the first people grow into new roles and take on more responsibilities.
Which are the major services of the company and how do the company to get ahead in the competition? What value-added services does the company provide?
One of the first certified LinkedIn agencies in the world, Elite Advertising’s core offering, LinkedIn Advertising, comprises comprehensive management of LinkedIn ads, content creation, and account management, as well as an entire B2B marketing strategy. The team of experts at Elite Advertising takes their dedication to the next level by conducting post-implementation research with end-users concerning relevance and customer satisfaction. The company also facilitates its clients use of LinkedIn Organic. The team assists fast-growing organizations with their personal or corporate pages. The company addresses the challenge of scalability that most brands encounter through its automated LinkedIn Messaging service, helping them run innovative online campaigns that grow with them. “The organic part of LinkedIn is very scalable for the company’s decision-makers.” We are very well received in the advertising domain,” informs Daniel Tonsen, CEO and Founder of Elite Advertising. Additionally, the company perfectly understands the challenge of hiring skilled talent and offers recruitment services through LinkedIn. “We are very proficient at advertising, enabling us to do complete branding and recruiting. We usually work with fast-growing companies that generate a lot of leads and growth,” says Daniel.
What are the most important aspects of a company’s culture? What principles do you believe in and how do you build this culture?
We meditate every day. It’s important to have a clear mindset and have time to slow down the fast pace for some time every day. We have a lot of social gatherings. Every other month we don’t work for an entire day. It’s called Friday Funday, where we are having fun and team building activities. Just to spend time together and have fun. Among a few, we have tried go-karting, paintball shooting, boat riding, and a lot of other fun challenges.
What is the significance of innovative ideas in the company?
We have a wall called the “wall of ideas”. It’s where we all generate ideas and put a post-it on the wall when we have a new one.
Every quarter, we go through the ideas and talk about potential execution plans for each one of them. Then we make the changes accordingly.
Give us your opinion on; do organizations rely heavily on individual heroics or team processes?
I think it’s a combination of the two.
What are your responsibilities as the CEO & founder of the company? What is the happiest part of your daily routine?
My biggest responsibility is increasing our revenue and challenging the way we work. In contrast to a lot of people, I love having meetings. I love to talk to new people about their companies and marketing, challenge them on how they are working, open their eyes to new ideas, and test scalable strategies.
What advice would you give someone going into a leadership position for the first time?
Think of yourself as a supporter of your colleagues. You work for them. Have a lot of one-on-ones and ask them how you can improve. I find that to be the quickest way to understand your colleagues and how they want to work with you.
