When it comes to B2B advertising, LinkedIn is unrivalled. With over 930 million users, the platform provides access to a massive pool of potential customers and clients.
But if you want to make the most of LinkedIn ads, you need to know how to use them effectively. Especially considering the average Cost Per Click (CPC) on Linkedin comes in at over $11, which is more than double the average Meta benchmark, which sits at $5 for B2B brands.
The advantage of LinkedIn is that those clicks are typically more likely to convert to leads, provided you’ve got the right overarching strategy in place. With that in mind, we’ve pulled together 60 tried and tested LinkedIn ads tips to help you generate more revenue from your investment in the platform.
For ease of navigation the tips are organised into 5 main categories:
Simply skip to the sections most relevant to you and start taking actionable steps to reach the right audiences, boost lead quality, and maximise ROAS on LinkedIn.
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B2B Strategy
How can you use LinkedIn for your brand the right way? What tips and tricks can give you an advantage over your competitors? And what activities should you devote most time and energy on? The tips below help document overarching techniques you can use to enhance your returns from your investment in LinkedIn ads.
When promoting a post or boosting a post on Linkedin, you should capture and enrich any interactions with that post (likes, comments, reposts) to make sure these contacts receive a follow up or are added to your campaign follow up.
Check a company’s page for active ads by clicking on the “Posts” section and then the “Ads” button. No need for paid spying tools!
Tap into your organic social media when planning your paid social. By amplifying top-performing organic content through engagement campaigns, you’ll maximise audience engagement, and inform your paid strategies for optimal results. Also, look into communities where your Ideal Customer Profile thrives. This presents incredible insights and a chance for fruitful paid partnerships. Leverage the authority of community admins and offer valuable lead magnets. You’ll exponentially boost brand awareness, foster authentic connections, and generate additional leads within your target audience.
It’s crucial for businesses to optimise their LinkedIn pages and align them with lead generation activities. One compelling reason to prioritise an optimised business page on LinkedIn is the fact that up to 70% of people tend to search for a brand when they encounter an advertisement. This means that when users come across an ad from your company, a substantial portion of them will actively search for your brand on LinkedIn. Having a well-optimised business page ensures that you make a positive impression and provide the necessary information for potential customers or clients.
The most important advice was to adhere to your expertise. If, in the desire for greater reach, you start writing and commenting on things that are not necessarily related to the achievement of your business goals, you are working against yourself. Shape and communicate the message in such a way that it clearly reflects your actions. Anything else is a waste of time.
By engaging with a LinkedIn Sales Development Representative (SDR), you can unlock additional options such as specifying company size requirements. It’s important to keep up with feature developments, so regularly consult with platform experts and stay informed. Make the most of all available tools and resources to gain an advantage and exceed your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) goals. Remember to leverage expert knowledge and stay proactive in utilising LinkedIn’s features effectively.
Business owners don’t really care where that lead comes from. Ultimately they want to drive the most amount of leads at the lowest cost. If you can drop the CPC and keep the CTR high, and drive up conversions, while lowering costs, you’re hitting your goals. Advertising should be a good ROI. If it is, clients will renew and increase their investment.
Maximize your paid social by focusing on human-to-human connections. Don’t just promote – interact. Respond to comments, engage in conversations. This not only boosts your algorithm score, but also builds trust and loyalty. Remember, behind every click is a person. Make them feel valued.
The key to achieving success in paid LinkedIn advertising lies in the mastery of storytelling. Captivate professionals by crafting compelling narratives that strike a chord with their aspirations, challenges, and objectives. Share genuine stories that exemplify real-world impact, empowering your audience to envision themselves as integral parts of the narrative. Utilise the power of storytelling to foster trust, ignite action, and establish meaningful connections with professionals in the LinkedIn community.
Make sure ads are nested in the overall content strategy for channel and brand so the audience gets ample opportunity to engage with you post ad exposure. B2B decision making is long and requires extensive convincing backed up by available content, such as success stories, additional resources and relevant guides. If the sponsored piece does not comply with a strategy that features all of these items, the ad will not drive business regardless of the engagement rates, impressions, etc.
LinkedIn is on average 8x higher CPC than other forms of paid social. Ensure your budget is set up capture as many clicks as your originally set out. And ensure you set your objectives correctly to optimise your budget,
Linkedin has a super-easy interface for advertising. You can only manage what you understand, so don’t take an agency’s word for it – dive into Campaign Manager and review the data for yourself. Encourage your team to make use of your Linkedin rep and ask them to walk you through the tool – or use Linkedin Marketing Labs to do some e-learning & get your free certification. You’ll learn much more and have much greater autonomy over your advertising!
Marketing is only as successful as their alignment is with Sales. That being said, working closely with sales and sales leadership to understand pain points of your ICP will help you craft messaging and build target account lists/custom audiences that convert more easily, reduces CPM and CPC and creates a higher ROAS.
If you’re in the SaaS/B2B industry, Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is your best strategy. In 2023, I’m fully leveraging ABM’s potential to precisely target accounts with tailored messages and content. LinkedIn Ads is the go-to platform for ABM, particularly when combined with Sales Navigator. This combination amplifies the ability to target decision-makers. To optimise the budget, try dynamically creating subsegments of accounts based on their engagement levels. By running separate campaigns with customised content, you’ll achieve higher interactions and better results.
Audience Targeting
LinkedIn is a brilliant and extensive platform for being as specific as possibly when it comes to reaching a precise group of users to ensure your campaign is successful. So taking the time to be sure of your campaign’s goals, as well as the right targeting options per your campaign, will help you to harness the information you need to directly target the most conversion-likely leads.
Refine your LinkedIn ads targeting by identifying your target industries and companies then break down your campaigns based on your goals and utilise your micro and primary conversion. Afterward, keep monitoring and adjusting your campaigns based on the indicated results.
Many marketers misunderstand job title targeting in LinkedIn ads. By using creativity, you can expand your reach. For instance, instead of directly targeting the job title “CFO” in the USA, you can opt for a broader approach. Targeting the job function of “finance” with a seniority level of C-level would allow you to reach the same audience. This approach reaches 100% of the audience compared to only a few with the job title targeting. It’s less competitive and costs are lower.
Instead of focusing purely on expensive lead generation in B2B services marketing, boost your visibility around your Strategic Account List. For example, if your team is attending an event, target attendees from companies that have confirmed their presence. Don’t just rely on firmographics for targeting – at the end of campaign, focus on the exact place of the event. This allows for more personalized outreach, creating valuable touchpoints with key stakeholders in those companies, and enhancing potential partnership opportunities.
Use LinkedIn to better target ads to specific points in your customer journey using your own data and audiences. Tie your CRM or marketing automation data in though matched account or matched contact targeting and then you can tailor your ads to their stage, and better nurture prospects through the buying decision. Always meet your prospects where they are in their journey.
When creating your audience on Linkedin, always exclude all the segments you are not targeting to improve performance (e.g. if you are targeting companies from 11 to 50 employees, add as an exclusion all the other employees range).
Measure the indirect impact of your cold audience campaigns. Why? Because a lot of people are ‘non-feed-clickers’. It underrates your campaigns. Therefore, apart from the in-feed engagement, track the interest by new website visits from the targeted audience. How?
1) Create page-view conversion.
(E.g., visiting any of your website, homepage, high-intent pages. etc)
2) Set “last touch last campaign” attribution.
3) Add only to cold campaigns (no remarketing).
4) Add a “view conversions” column.
5) Analyse data.
Utilise the exclusion options within LinkedIn Ad targeting. Remove any users who won’t convert or aren’t right for your campaigns. This includes your current clients or users and partners. They already know who you and what you do, they won’t convert from an ad.
In B2B, be relentless in defining your ideal customer profile (ICP). Any friction between sales and marketing must be treated like the Berlin Wall in ‘89 and destroyed. Who knew the performance blame game did not drive revenue growth? With a perfected ICP, LinkedIn Ads can do their thing. Enrichment providers like Apollo, Clearbit, and ZoomInfo can validate that you’re getting engagement from your ICP and finally send trustworthy audiences and conversion events to the ads platforms (Meta & TikTok in particular).
A common problem that marketers face when using paid channels is poor audience targeting. LinkedIn can be very expensive. We must get the audience right, so we don’t waste any dollars. Some example audiences to start with: website retargeting (90-day lookback), target A accounts, open opportunities, closed/lost accounts (9-month lookback), event lists (90-day lookback), and accounts showing high intent. Layer on your ideal customer profile, job titles/functions and you will be executing a masterful LinkedIn advertising strategy.
Targeting a qualified audience is key when advertising for B2B products if you don’t want to burn your PPC budget. Something I do very often is segmenting my company lists uploads by high engagement levels. That means, I make a selection of the companies that engage most with my website (or company linkedin profile) and only target those for MOFU and BOFU ads.
LinkedIn is amazing, but it gets even more powerful when you get hyper-detailed on your exclusion lists. Create lists for customers, competitors, different sales stages, etc., and filter them out of ads depending on their place in the buyer journey. Your cold prospecting layer shouldn’t be getting “request demo,” just like your already converted prospects shouldn’t get the same ad that originally drove them to conversion. Keep it unique and fresh for each stage with extensive exclusion lists.
In the B2B space, success begins with clear and consistent messaging. Success is to stick to simple things for a long enough time. It requires a lot of patience especially while spending Ad budgets. As a tactical tip, I found it better recently to target broader audiences than only Job titles. It’s cheaper and people consume the content more. And always leverage retargeting to remind your brand.
Get the most from LinkedIn support or your LinkedIn rep. Unlock “custom segment” targeting options through your LinkedIn rep, or LinkedIn support. These custom segments are only unlocked when requested, and open up new combinations of profession and behaviour-based targeting, not readily available within the platform. Combine this with an engager / website-based retargeting audience to cover a broad audience for a single campaign on LinkedIn.
Leverage Members Groups targeting in LinkedIn Ads. I have observed improved CTR and CR when targeting audiences built from groups that align with the desired topic and narrowed down by specific job titles or skills, as compared to audiences created solely based on job titles and skills. Additionally, LinkedIn Ads may not display all available groups for certain keywords. To discover additional groups for targeting, search for them directly in LinkedIn’s Groups section.
Don’t sleep on your zero-party and first-party data. Tapping into these data gems allow you to get deeper insights into your audience’s preferences and interests, and enable you to reach specific segments of your audience that may not be fully captured by Linkedin’s native targeting options. Leveraging these alongside Linkedin’s targeting capabilities will enable you to create truly targeted campaigns, with messaging and offers that resonate on a deeper level, helping you build stronger connections with your audience, and maximising the effectiveness of your advertising efforts.
Target your B2B audience precisely on LinkedIn. Utilise the platform’s advanced filters to zero in on your ideal prospects based on industry, job title, and company size. Additionally, make sure you exclude irrelevant audiences (by job titles, seniority, company size, and even company names) to refine your targeting further and make sure you do reach the decision-makers.
My number one tip for advertising on LinkedIn would be to utilise LinkedIn’s audience builder. Make sure to set up retargeting audiences within LinkedIn Ads based on your web visitors, create custom audience lists (ex: engaged prospects) and create customised campaigns that help push audiences further down the funnel.
Ad Creative
Any marketer worth their salt also knows a good concept needs to be adjusted to each execution and ad platform. So how do you adapt your ad creatives specifically to LinkedIn in a way that grabs attention and drives results? Check out the tips below for inspiration.
When targeting technical buyers (e.g. engineers), leverage conversational ads coming from an internal SME with a similar tech title to increase the user trust in the ad and the likelihood that they’ll view the offering as legitimate. We see dramatically different conversion rates when personalizing outreach for events, DLC, and product offerings by sending these tech buyers ad copy from one of their “peers” vs. pushing it out on a more obvious ad placement or via BDR outreach.
Create ads that are interactive, thought provoking, and sharable. People come to social platforms for inspiration and brands that are able to tap into human motivation see the biggest impact. And be ready to engage with your audience, as that will improve your organic reach as well!
Stellar LinkedIn ad copy answers the question: What’s in it for me? Reduce unqualified lead clicks by answering this question in the first 150 characters above the fold, in a clear and concise way.
Think about your paid social campaign as a platform for connection, not just transaction. It’s time to harness the power of user-generated content. Why? Because it’s genuine, it’s real, and it resonates. Your customers are not just consumers, they are creators, narrators of their own stories. Use these authentic stories in your ads. Remember, we trust those we feel connected to. When your campaign reflects these real-life connections, that’s when it becomes more than just an ad. It becomes a story worth sharing.
For better engagement and results of your Linkedin ads, mention your target persona in your creatives and ad copy. This way, they immediately see that the ad has a benefit specifically for them. Another benefit is that people outside your target will ignore the ad, and later when more data is available in the insights, you can exclude the unengaged job functions from your ads for even better results. Another important tip, always use an active voice in your ads.
Your Linkedin ads may not be delivered to your audience if your ad quality score is low. While LinkedIn doesn’t display these scores on the front end, these scores can be accessed by exporting ‘Campaign Performance – All Columns’ and they get updated every week. LinkedIn’s quality scoring method remains vague but according to my observation; maintaining five ads per campaign, a minimum audience of 50k, using CTA in ads, and combining daily and lifetime budgets are now crucial.
Most people are weary of ads. If your ad doesn’t grab attention within the first 3 seconds, you risk losing your audience. Follow the ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’ (KISS) principle. Test various 3-second hooks until you find the successful formula. Be prepared to rapidly test new strategies to discover the most effective approach.
Know your audience – really understand your target audience and what makes them tick. Do as much research as possible and make sure this is front of mind when writing copy, designing creative, refining targeting criteria and putting together a landing page. Consider the journey in their shoes; how can you simplify the process for them and give them something valuable or something that will resonate with them, making them want to click your ad? This will make you stand out!
Videos do really well on LinkedIn paid ads – keep the copy fun, conversational, and real. We’ve also been experimenting with vertical ads. It’s important to AB test and see what does well and double down on that.
I find the best ads are those that don’t look ads. They don’t necessarily have all the smart design, on-brand, etc. The arrival of thought leadership ads is now a game change that you can promote the great content that your employees share will add more weight to this practice.
Always be contributing. Whatever creative you are sharing, it must add value to your prospect’s life. On LinkedIn, we’ve found that short eBooks with valuable content containing data or findings exclusive to our organisation drive leads. It also helps to have a healthy mix of content for each stage of the buyer’s journey so you’re meeting prospects where they are. Lastly, try to get a third-party subject matter expert to endorse or contribute a portion of the eBook.
70% of the success of an ad is dependent on the creative. However, a large part of the time and budget of marketers goes into ad placement and budgeting. For any creative to be effective, it should be memorable, should engage the audience, evoke emotion, and compel them to take action. If a creative is effective on these four parameters, the budget invested in the ad will lead to a positive impact on the ad goal.
Always start with a pain point that your potential audiences have today. Address their pain point in your messaging, creative and copy, then tell them how your brand can help them solve that problem. The better you understand about their challenges, the more resonating messaging you will be able to convey. It’s all about ‘how we can solve their problems’?
A/B Testing
Always be methodical when A/B testing. Understand why you’re doing the test in the first place, plan ahead, only change one variable at a time, and be ready to roll out any conversion-increasing tweaks across your other ad campaigns.
Test, test, test! It’s always optimal to test different components of your campaign (ad image, above ad text, headline, CTA, etc.) to understand what works and what doesn’t with your audience. Try to avoid testing multiple components at once—for example, to understand what messaging is resonating with your audience, use the same ad image with different accompanying copy. And always let the test run at least 2 weeks so you’ve gathered enough data to understand performance.
LinkedIn being the go-to channel for B2B advertisers, it’s crucial to A/B test your audiences. This can easily be accomplished by running two symmetrical campaigns, each targeting two separate sets of audience parameters. For example; Comparing Job Titles vs Job Function, Skills vs Interests, and so on. Over time, you’ll be able to recognize which audiences are most engaged with your business, which should be excluded due to low performance, and which align to your overall marketing goals.
When testing Linkedin ads, I recommend testing only one element at a time. You can test different images, headlines, descriptions and even ad dimensions, just make sure you are testing only one of these at a time so you can get significant results and then optimize with enough data. I recommend having 3-4 ads max in each campaign. Pause the 2-3 underperforming ads and then create 2-3 more ads testing a different variable.
Campaign Type & Campaign Structure
There’s a variety of LinkedIn ad types that you’re able to leverage within the platform. Several of these ad types offer different creative formats to choose from. And the all have their own unique pros and cons. The tips below will help you choose the ones most likely to help you reach your B2B goals.
Boost your LinkedIn engagement with LinkedIn “Conversation Ads.” They’re interactive and personalised (using macros), creating a one-to-one dialogue with your target audience. Better yet, the open rates on these messages tend to be high — an average of 58% in my experience, 3x higher than the typical email open rate. The open rates are so high because LinkedIn caps each member to one conversation ad delivered to their inbox from an advertiser in 30 days. They cut through the noise.
For LinkedIn lead gen campaigns based on different content pieces, monitoring your ads’ performance is crucial. If the campaign fails to generate significant traction within the first 3-5 days or until it reaches 10,000 impressions, it’s unlikely to gain momentum later. While I understand LinkedIn’s system needs at least 7-10 days of data before optimising toward your objective, the first 3-5 days serve as a strong indicator of your campaign’s future performance.
Stop pouring all your ad budget on lead gen campaigns on LinkedIn. Spend some of that budget on brand awareness ads to warm up your audience. Only then should you retarget them with a lead gen campaign. Why? An audience that is problem aware and solution aware is more likely to convert than a cold audience that has never heard of your brand and doesn’t think they need your solution.
You have to retarget. Don’t waste your clicks or engagement. Set up retargeting that empowers your prospects to move further down the funnel and ultimately to purchase.
You need to take LinkedIn prospects on a strategic journey. Start with 3 campaigns. An ‘Awareness’ campaign to reach users; share thought-leadership insights like infographics, and videos. A ‘Consideration’ campaign; retargeting your recent LinkedIn page visitors, with ungated website content like ebooks, blogs, and videos. And a ‘Conversion’ campaign; retargeting those who engaged with the Consideration website pages. Use testimonials, case studies, or trial/demo offers here. This LinkedIn strategy concentrates your audience down to those who are genuinely interested.
Prioritize brand awareness before launching performance marketing. Promote your top company page posts to your target accounts, using relevant job titles or skills as targeting criteria. This cost-effective strategy keeps your business top of mind for ideal customers and primes them for more valuable actions in the future.
Use demand generation – free content – from the first moment in the funnel. Define buyer personas and create a need in your target audience and be the expert they turn to. Create Matched Audiences for retargeting and be the expert from top to bottom of the funnel, always having the right answer with the right creative. A/B test regularly and of course: Have proper conversion tracking to measure your success.
LinkedIn carousel ads really work well when the objective is to drive traffic. But keeping in mind each slide should have a clear and concise call-to-action (CTA) that aligns with the campaign objective. Direct viewers to take specific actions such as “Learn More,” “Request a Demo,” “Download Now,” or “Follow Us.”
Thought leader ads are underutilised and a hidden gem for engaging with your audience. By harnessing the power of executives or employees in your company, you can establish credibility, build trust, and effectively communicate your brand message while giving it a human touch. These ads are still not used that often and if done right you not only expand your reach but also drive valuable conversations that enhance your brand’s reputation.
We’ve been strategically targeting our ICP using LinkedIn company lists. However, not all accounts are warm, which raises the question: How can we get more hand-raisers while making the most of our budget? The solution came with dynamic segments, as we’re able to filter out highly engaged accounts and kickstart conversations using “Click to Message” ads. The best part? It’s a set it and forget it solution, allowing us to grow the pipeline on autopilot!
One mistake we often see in B2B lead generation on LinkedIn is relying too heavily on document ads with lead gen forms that promote top of funnel resources. They have a higher conversion rate, but the leads are cold and not yet brand aware which produces low response rates to sales outreach. We recommend a balanced full-funnel strategy that includes other ad types, audiences and messaging that resonates with your potential customers.
If your paid social content is not diversified and limited to gated pieces, that typically impacts your down-funnel situation — only a small portion of your leads progress to pipeline. So it’s important to take a more balanced and full-funnel approach where you consider the informational needs of your audiences and how they like to receive and process various types of content — from more traditional guides and reports to videos (clips from events and webinars, customer success stories, solution walkthroughs, etc).
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