LinkedIn Ads for B2B Marketing: 6 Steps to Scale

LinkedIn ads help B2B companies target the decision-makers most likely to convert. But the superior targeting options of ads tailored for B2Bs come with a higher cost. Discover if the returns would be worth the investment for your business.

B2B marketers everywhere leverage LinkedIn Ads to scale businesses.

That’s because LinkedIn delivers your message straight to company decision-makers, with double the buying power of the average customer.

Here, HawkSEM’s paid social media manager Jordan Flask shares insider expert strategies that help deliver an average 4.5X ROI to her B2B client base.

Why use LinkedIn for B2B marketing?

LinkedIn ads offer powerful targeting opportunities, a large professional audience, and higher-quality leads.

That’s probably why 44% of B2B professionals ranked LinkedIn as the most important social media platform available.

With LinkedIn ad campaigns, advertisers can target representatives or decision-makers of an organization using precise details such as:

• Company size, name, or industry
• Job title, seniority, or function
• Skills or groups
• Education or degrees

This advertising platform is ideal for B2B companies with a solid business structure set up to scale — including a sales team that can respond to leads in a timely manner and a high customer lifetime value.

Types of LinkedIn ads

LinkedIn ads offer:

1. Sponsored content
2. Sponsored messaging
3. Text ads
4. Dynamic ads
5. LinkedIn audience network ads

1. Sponsored content

Sponsored content ads display on the LinkedIn feed of your target professionals and include:

• Single image ads: A single image with text
• Video ads: Videos to tell your brand story or promote products
• Carousel ads: Multiple images that LinkedIn users can swipe through
• Event ads: Promote live events
• Document ads: Share downloadable content like whitepapers and ebooks
• Thought leader ads: Promoted thought leadership content

Bonus: Sponsored content and messaging ads offer lead generation forms, pre-filled with users’ LinkedIn data that can help capture leads directly within the platform.

2. Sponsored messaging

Sponsored messaging ads appear in the LinkedIn Messaging inbox and include:

• Message ads: Direct messages
• Conversation ads: Interactive chatting experience offering multiple call-to-action (CTA) paths

3. Text ads

Text ads are more traditional pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) ads that appear on the sidebar or top of the page.

These ads usually include a headline, text, and an optional logo or image.

4. Dynamic ads

Dynamic ads are personalized to the user by leveraging their LinkedIn profile data, including:

• Follower ads: Promoting your LinkedIn page
• Spotlight ads: Promoting a landing page, product, or service
• Content ads: Promoting downloadable content

5. LinkedIn audience network ads

LinkedIn audience network ads give your sponsored content more reach, appearing in third-party apps and websites within LinkedIn’s partner network.

How much do LinkedIn ads cost?

Data shows the average cost per click (CPC) for LinkedIn ads is around $5-$10.

And while there’s no way to know exactly how much you’ll spend on the platform, you do have some control over your costs with budget strategies and high-quality content.

Overall, LinkedIn ads are more expensive than other PPC platforms like Google Ads or Facebook because of their hyper-specific targeting abilities. And with the right marketing strategy, the returns are worth the investment.

6 LinkedIn ads best practices

To see success on LinkedIn, it’s important to refine your targeting parameters, personalize your content, and build trust with audiences at every turn.

Here’s how:

1. Use A/B testing to refine your audience
2. Choose the right offer
3. Track your customer journey with conversion tracking
4. Harness detailed targeting parameters
5. Assess paid and organic performance with the Company Engagement Report
6. Leverage storytelling with Carousel ads

1. Use A/B testing to refine your audience

LinkedIn’s built-in A/B testing tools let you compare performance across nuanced targeting variables — like job title, seniority, industry, education, and more.

Use this information to get a better understanding of who responds to your ads.

Once you know which audiences engage the most, you can focus your budget on those most likely to deliver results.

Pro tip: Don’t stop at LinkedIn’s native data. Flask begins this process with a competitor report to evaluate the broader ad landscape.

“This gives me a better sense of what type of ads we’re up against and makes me think about how we can creatively improve what competitors are doing,” she says.

2. Choose the right offer

Like most platforms, it’s important to craft a compelling offer with ad copy and creative to capture your audience.

What makes LinkedIn ads shine, however, is their ability to nurture leads at every stage of the B2B funnel.

Top funnel ad offers

For the top of the funnel, warm up cold leads with free, high-value content such as:

• Checklists
• Calculators
• Templates
• Industry reports
• Webinars
• Guides or ebooks

Middle funnel ad offers

For people more familiar with your business, promote free content that helps decision-makers better evaluate your product or service, like:

• Case studies

• Product comparison guides
• In-depth whitepapers
• Email courses
• Demos

Bottom funnel ad offers

Nudge users to try your product or service with more direct offers like:

• Free trials or demos
• Free consultation or audit
• Limited-time discounts for a retargeted audience

3. Track your customer journey with conversion tracking

The platform’s robust conversion tracking options give you a full picture of your customer journey, including:

• Website tag conversions: Track clicks and downloads on your website
• Imported conversions: Share conversion data with LinkedIn from an imported CSV or your customer relationship management (CRM) platform
• Event-specific conversions: Keep tabs on specific online actions on LinkedIn, like page visits, ad clicks, and lead gen forms
• Page/URL conversions: Attribute conversions to page visits (most often a purchase or “thank you” page)

With this data, “look for opportunities to improve the audience you are targeting, your ad creatives, and your messaging,” says Flask.

“Home in on certain demographics or add additional job titles or interests. Is there an opportunity to test new backgrounds, images, or formats?

Try to test what would resonate best with who you are targeting to help obtain better results.”

4. Harness detailed targeting parameters

LinkedIn ads allow advertisers to target the right audience based on:

• Job title: Managerial or director roles to indicate decision-making authority, such as directors and C-level officers
• Job function: Departmental categories, like Admin or Finance
• Education: Target graduates of specific university programs like Software Engineering majors, or look for audiences that attended specific universities or colleges, like Harvard University
• Company Name: Any lead with their company name on their profile is fair game here, like employees from Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot, etc.
• Years of experience: LinkedIn calculates years of experience from all the tenures listed on a person’s profile
• Demographics: Age ranges like 18-24, 25-34, 35-54, just keep in mind that LinkedIn advises targeting by age can drastically narrow reach
• Industry: Customer relationship SaaS, AI creative software, etc.
• Company size: Bigger companies tend to have heftier budgets, but you can also target smaller startups if that’s your most common customer; for example, target size ranges of 1-10, 11-50, or 50-100 employees
• Skills: LinkedIn course completions, endorsements, or self-declared skills (like QuickBooks or Photoshop)
• Groups: Membership of industry groups (like “Executive Suite” or “Restaurant Spaces”)
• Interests: Look for B2B advertising or fintechs. For example, LinkedIn assesses interest based on group memberships and online activity

Customizing targeting

LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager can guide you through audience targeting criteria — even suggesting ad formats that it calculates will be most effective. This is one of the most valuable elements of LinkedIn ads for B2B marketers.

For example, Spredfast saw a 500% increase in lead generation and a 400% higher clickthrough rate (CTR) after leveraging LinkedIn’s specific targeting.

5. Use the Company Engagement Report to assess organic and paid campaign performance

LinkedIn’s Company Engagement Report helps you analyze both organic and ad engagement from your targeted B2B companies.

With this report, you can calculate engagement levels (the sum of website visits, organic engagement, and ad impressions) compared to competitors in your industry.

These benchmarks help you strategize your LinkedIn ads and decide whether to optimize with higher budgets or lower bids, or identify potentially receptive audiences for Message ads.

You can also use LinkedIn Analytics to assess cost, lead, and revenue metrics like:

• Cost per lead (CPL): How much you pay for each lead generated, which might look like a lead form submission or email newsletter signup.
• Cost per click (CPC): How much you pay every time a potential customer clicks on your ad.
• Clickthrough rate (CTR): The percentage of audiences that click on your ads compared to how often they keep scrolling.
• Conversion rates: The percentage of your audience that completes a purchase or other action, like downloading a free trial or becoming a repeat customer with an additional purchase.

6. Leverage storytelling with carousel ads

A carousel ad allows you to tell a sequential story about your product or service using up to ten images, each with its own link.

At HawkSEM, we find them especially useful for B2B SaaS brands. Carousel ads let us transform a suite of features into a cohesive tale highlighting the benefits and value a tool can offer its audience.

For instance, you could speak to your customer’s pain points on one slide, unveil software solutions on the next, and deliver a knockout punch with social proof and success stories on the final slide.

Pro tip: Always use high-quality visuals for your carousel ads. A single image could turn your audience away if they feel it’s not relevant or aesthetically pleasing.

Top LinkedIn ad formats (+ examples and tips)

You have plenty of different ad formats to choose from on LinkedIn, but our experience has shown us three that consistently deliver exceptional results for our B2B clients:

1. Document ads

Document ads are perfect for generating high-quality leads, since you can collect business emails to share resources using downloadable documents such as:

• Whitepapers: Haven’t produced any whitepapers yet? Check out this roundup of inspo from Search Engine Journal, including survey results, industry predictions, and opinion pieces from a C-suite member.
• Case studies: Give your target audience the social proof they crave with success stories from your most satisfied clients.
• Ebooks: The convenience and accessibility of ebooks continue to grow, and they’re expected to reach over 1 billion readers by 2027. You can offer free downloads in exchange for information or generate extra revenue by putting your ebooks behind a paywall.
• Data reports: Set your brand apart from competitors by serving up value with unique, never-seen data from your internal research.

Check out this example from Talon.One, a customer loyalty software based in Berlin:

(Image: Talon.One ad)

After you click “download,” a screen appears to collect information and generate leads — in this case, an email address:

And just like that, Talon.One has an additional, direct communication channel to continue nurturing B2B leads.

Document ads best practices:

• Offer exclusive data and expert opinions that audiences can’t find elsewhere.
• Keep the first pages of your document ultra-engaging, with lots of visuals and bullet points to ensure continued interest.
• Use evergreen links and URLs that aren’t likely to become outdated anytime soon.

2. Message ads

Message ads can be personalized with a one-of-a-kind pitch — but keep it short and highlight your value proposition quickly.

“Messages that are too long will receive lower open rates than messages that are a short read,” says Flask.

“Make sure the CTA is clear in the message as well. Do you want them to complete a download? Sign up for something? You want that to be the main focus and super clear.”

Here’s how AI text-to-video platform D-ID API leverages message ads for a wider reach:

Notice the personalized greeting? You can automate message ads to appear in the inboxes of people who have seen your content, visited your website, or otherwise interacted with your LinkedIn profile.

Message ads best practices:

• Send message ads on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, the most optimal days according to LinkedIn.
• Keep subject lines descriptive yet concise and attention-grabbing.
• Use message ads for retargeting and create specific lists to narrow down an audience most ripe for conversion (e.g., those who recently attended an in-person event or viewed a webinar).
• Make sure your messages come from an actual person at your organization, not a general company LinkedIn page.

3. Event ads

With LinkedIn advertising, you can promote your in-person events and drive both networking and sales. Include a seamless registration form, captivating images, a strong CTA, and a direct link to your event landing page.

Event ads best practices:

• Recommend similar events to attendees and anyone who shows interest or engagement with your ad (retargeting).
• Always include a registration form to collect lead generation details.

Don’t stop at ads for event promotion; continue promoting events via messages, social media, and email marketing efforts.

The takeaway

LinkedIn ads offer all the tools B2Bs need to achieve exponential growth thanks to their detailed job-related targeting, diverse conversion tracking, personalized messaging, and network of ready-to-buy professionals.

Ready to ditch the learning curve and zoom right to more qualified B2B leads and higher ROI? The right LinkedIn marketing agency can help.

Reach your digital marketing goals and surpass them with HawkSEM’s team of experts. Contact us today.

This article has been updated and was originally published in September 2024.