Paid Media & Performance
LinkedIn ads for B2B
The most precise targeting in advertising and the most expensive — run with account lists, qualified lead forms and enough budget per test to mean something.
- From
- $500–$3,500/mo
- Typical time
- ongoing
- Usually bought by
- B2B, SaaS
What this actually solves
In business-to-business marketing, the expensive problem is not persuasion. It is finding the right person at all. Your buyer holds a particular job, in a particular kind of company, of a particular size — and on every other platform you reach them only by accident, wrapped in an audience that will never buy. LinkedIn is the only place where you can name them directly, by job title, function, seniority, industry and headcount, and where you can upload a list of the specific companies you intend to win.
That precision is why buyers come here, and the price of it is the second half of the story. Clicks are expensive because the audience is small and there is no cheap inventory alongside it to average the cost down. Nothing here is forgiving. A campaign left misconfigured over a weekend is not a small annoyance, it is a meaningful sum gone, and the same carelessness that would barely register on a Search account burns real money here. That is the real reason this engagement carries the highest management rate in paid media — not extra buttons, but the cost of every hour the account is not being watched carefully.
The arithmetic that decides whether any of it makes sense is simple and it comes before the advertising. If a closed contract is worth two hundred thousand, a three hundred dollar lead is cheap and this channel is close to unbeatable. If it is worth four thousand and takes six months to close, the numbers usually do not work and the sensible answer is to spend the budget where intent is already present.
What we do, and in what order
- Define who can actually buy, and who must be kept out. The ideal customer profile translated into the exact fields Campaign Manager offers — real job titles rather than invented ones, functions, seniority, industry and company size — and, just as important, the exclusions that stop the audience filling with organisations too small to afford you. Where an account list exists or can be built, this is also where it is assembled. Two to four days.
- Install the Insight Tag and connect the CRM. Tracking on the site, and lead routing from the platform into your CRM through the native integration or Zapier, so that a submission reaches a salesperson the same day and can later be traced to closed revenue. Without that connection you can measure leads but never learn which ads produced money. Two to three days.
- Build the offer before building the ads. Something a busy senior person will actually trade their details for — a report, a benchmark, a webinar — matched to a real problem they have. Then the ads themselves, with intro text kept under about 150 characters before the See more truncation and headlines under about 70. Three to five days.
- Build the lead gen form with a qualifying question in it. Pre-filled fields make completion easy, which is the point and also the danger. One question that a poorly matched prospect will not trouble to answer removes far more waste than any amount of audience tinkering. One day.
- Launch with a floor budget per test and leave it alone. Roughly 50 to 100 dollars a day per ad set, held for two to three weeks before any judgement is made, with strict account-level spend limits. Then monthly reporting against qualified opportunities and pipeline rather than raw lead volume. Two to three weeks per test, then ongoing.
Tools used — LinkedIn Campaign Manager, the LinkedIn Insight Tag, native or Zapier CRM integration, and whatever your sales team already uses to record opportunity stages, since that is where the real result is measured.
What moves the price
The engagement runs $500–$3,500/mo and is ongoing.
The budget under management and the cost of a mistake. A larger spend here concentrates risk rather than simply increasing volume. More frequent checking, tighter spend limits and more careful change control are part of what the fee buys.
Whether we build the account list. Advertising to an industry is configuration. Assembling and maintaining a target account list, keeping it accurate as people change jobs and companies restructure, is ongoing research work and it is priced separately in the proposal.
Whether the content is included. A campaign needs something worth downloading. If the report, benchmark or webinar has to be produced as well as promoted, that is a separate project rather than a line inside a management fee.
What usually goes wrong
LinkedIn is run with Facebook habits. Small budgets, a dozen simultaneous tests, changes made every morning. At the cost per click this platform charges, that produces a set of ad sets which each spent too little to say anything, edited too often to have settled. The discipline that works here is the opposite — fewer tests, funded properly, left running for two to three weeks before anyone forms an opinion.
The lead form is made so easy that nobody thinks. Pre-filled fields and two taps produce an impressive number in the dashboard and a sales team that stops returning your calls. The leads are real people who never intended to buy. A single qualifying question, plus exclusions that keep out company sizes you cannot serve, costs some volume and saves the relationship.
Success is measured in leads. Cost per lead is the wrong headline number in a market where deals take months and involve several decision-makers. An account can halve its cost per lead while producing less revenue, simply by attracting easier and less serious people. Reporting has to follow the lead into the CRM and out the other side, which is why the CRM connection is built before the campaign rather than promised for later.
See where the site stands before you brief anyone.
If the site is already live, start from what it scores rather than from a guess. The audit reports what it checked, what it found, and — the part most tools leave out — what it could not check, and why.
Questions people ask before they commit.
- Why is LinkedIn so much more expensive than Google?
- Because you are paying for precision. The audience is narrow and every other advertiser selling into it is bidding on the same job titles, so a click is priced by that competition rather than by traffic volume. That is the cost of being able to say software companies with 200 to 500 employees, HR directors, United Kingdom instead of a broad audience that happens to contain them. It is only worth paying when the deal at the end is large enough to absorb it. Where a closed contract is worth tens of thousands, a three hundred dollar lead can be an excellent purchase. Where it is worth two thousand, this is the wrong platform.
- Our budget is 500 dollars a month. Can you make LinkedIn work?
- Honestly, no, and we would rather say it now. A single ad set needs roughly 50 to 100 dollars a day and two to three weeks before its results mean anything. A monthly budget at that level cannot fund one credible test, let alone a comparison. We will tell you which channel your budget can actually support instead — usually Search or a well-targeted content programme — and we would rather have that conversation than take a retainer for a campaign that was never going to have a chance.
- Are lead gen forms better than sending people to a landing page?
- For volume, almost always — the form is pre-filled from the person's profile and they never leave the feed, so completion rates are far higher. That is also the risk. Frictionless forms collect people who tapped without thinking. We add a qualifying question that the wrong prospect will not bother answering, and we route submissions straight into your CRM so sales sees them while they are still warm.
- How quickly should we expect deals?
- Slower than any other paid channel, and that is the nature of B2B rather than a fault in the campaign. Several people inside the buying organisation have to agree, a budget has to be approved, and the cycle regularly runs into months. We report on qualified opportunities and pipeline rather than raw lead count, because lead count is the metric that makes a campaign look successful right up until sales tells you none of them were real.
- Can you target a specific list of companies?
- Yes, and in most B2B markets it is the better approach. If only a few hundred organisations in the world can realistically buy what you sell, spreading budget across an industry is waste. Uploading the account list and advertising only to the right people inside those companies concentrates the spend where a deal is actually possible. We will need the list, or the criteria to build one.
- Should the first ad ask for a demo?
- Rarely. A cold prospect who has never heard of you is not booking a call, and asking produces a low volume of poor-quality bookings at a high cost per click. A sequence works better — something genuinely useful first, then the demo to the people who engaged with it. That is more work to build, which is one reason it is skipped so often.
Often taken together.
Start with the brief, not the invoice.
Send what you are trying to achieve. You get a written scope, a price and a date — or an honest “this is not the right service for that”.
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