B2B demand generation
Expensive clicks, bought on purpose.
LinkedIn earns its price when you need job function, seniority or a named company list and nowhere else offers them. It does not earn its price as a more costly way to reach a broad audience.
When LinkedIn is the right channel
Three situations, and outside them the budget is usually better spent elsewhere. You are selling to a role that is hard to reach any other way. You have a target account list and want to be visible to those companies specifically. Or your product is new enough that nobody is searching for it yet, so demand capture has nothing to capture.
If none of those apply, the same money on Google Search usually produces more pipeline, and we will say so rather than take the LinkedIn retainer.
Targeting that holds up
Job function plus seniority is the reliable base. It is structured data LinkedIn derives rather than free text, so it does not fragment.
Uploaded company lists are usually the single strongest input, because you know your ideal customers better than any interest category does. Match rates are good enough to build a real campaign on.
Job titles are user-entered and endlessly variable – "Head of Growth", "Growth Lead", "VP Growth" and forty other spellings. Use them to refine, never as the foundation.
Creative for a professional feed
People scroll LinkedIn in a work frame of mind, which changes what works. Specificity beats polish: a concrete claim about a concrete problem outperforms a beautifully produced brand film almost every time. Document and carousel formats earn attention because they promise something usable.
Thought-leader ads – running creative from a person's profile rather than the company page – consistently outperform on engagement, provided the person is actually involved. Ghostwritten posts under a borrowed name read exactly as what they are.
Measuring it honestly
LinkedIn's own attribution is generous to itself, and its view-through window will claim credit for pipeline that Google search closed. We report LinkedIn against pipeline created, using CRM data rather than platform-reported conversions, and we look at whether target accounts started appearing in your funnel at all – which is often the honest measure of whether the campaign worked.
Questions people actually ask
- What does LinkedIn actually cost?
- Several times a comparable Google click, and the exact figure depends on how senior and how narrow your audience is. Targeting VPs at 200 named companies costs far more per click than targeting a broad job function – which is fine, because the whole reason to be there is precision.
- What is the minimum budget worth trying?
- Around $5,000 a month for a real test. Below that you cannot run enough creative variants against a narrow enough audience to learn anything, and you spend the whole budget in the learning phase.
- Lead gen forms or landing pages?
- Lead gen forms convert at a much higher rate and produce noticeably weaker leads, because filling one takes two taps and no thought. Landing pages cost more per lead and qualify better. Which is right depends on whether your sales team is starved or overwhelmed.
- Which targeting actually works?
- Job function plus seniority, and company lists you upload yourself. Job titles are entered by users and fragment endlessly; interests and groups are loose. If you have a target account list, that is almost always the strongest input you own.
- Should we run thought-leader ads?
- They typically outperform company-page ads on engagement, because people respond to people. The constraint is that they need a real person who posts, and borrowing an executive's name for copy they did not write reads exactly as it is.
- How does this fit with Google?
- Google harvests demand that already exists; LinkedIn reaches people who fit the profile but are not searching yet. Running LinkedIn alone tends to produce awareness with no capture layer, which is why we rarely recommend it as the only channel.
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Related.
How we run the wider B2B practice, including offline conversion tracking and why cost per lead is the wrong headline number.