LinkedIn Ads for B2B brands can generate quality leads and conversions when you harness precise targeting options, personalized messaging, valuable document ads, and the platform’s B2B decision makers.

LinkedIn Ads for B2B businesses are a match made in heaven, just like Shopping Ads and ecommerce.

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

For expert insights, we chatted with Jordan Flask, HawkSEM’s paid social manager. She shares insider strategies and tips that have helped her deliver an average of 4.5X ROI to our B2B client base.

Why should you use LinkedIn for B2B Marketing?

B2B marketers target the representatives or decision-makers of an organization. This is different from selling to the individual consumers of a B2C business because the B2B buyer needs more time to liaise with their colleagues before hitting “purchase.”

That’s why a strong, professional presence online is paramount to encourage trust from the get-go.

“B2B content often requires a more in-depth learning period for users to understand the business before taking action (like signing up for a free trial or demo request),” Flask explains.

“It typically includes industry-specific material such as white papers, case studies, and webinars, while B2C messaging tends to be more casual and focused on individual benefits.

Recent trends show many B2B marketers have full-funnel strategies on LinkedIn. The proof is in the data:

Of course, we’re talking about LinkedIn as a whole. However, both organic and paid strategies on this professional platform work in tandem to convert your B2B prospects.

Thought leadership content builds your brand credibility over time, and once you launch an effective LinkedIn Ads strategy, you could see a 33% increase in purchase intent from your audiences.

Flask says centering campaigns around brand awareness helps audience’s get to know your brand on a deeper level.

“This is best done with video or carousel ads, as they have a higher storytelling capability than a single-image ad would,” she says.

“The next step would be to bring the people that engage at the brand awareness level lower down the marketing funnel since they should have an understanding of who and what the company is.”

5 steps to execute an effective B2B LinkedIn Ads strategy

While your PPC expertise on Google Ads might be top-notch, LinkedIn Ads calls for a special approach. You can’t stop at a pretty visual and punchy headline, though those all help.

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. Research your audience with A/B testing
  2. Track your customer journey with conversion tracking
  3. Harness detailed targeting parameters
  4. Assess paid and organic performance with the Company Engagement Report
  5. Leverage storytelling with Carousel Ads

1. Research your audience with A/B testing

You wouldn’t go to a job interview without researching your employer, right? Same goes for B2B marketing (except you won’t have the opportunity for an interview or pitch without first doing audience research), so let’s start there.

Flask always starts with a competitor report:

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

Sure, your existing customers are valuable, but why limit yourself to your existing network? There could be untapped audiences willing to spend even more on your offerings that you have yet to discover.

The LinkedIn pool is wide, so don’t limit yourself to the shallow end.

Luckily, the A/B testing features on LinkedIn help you compare ad performance across even the most nuanced targeting parameters.

You can compare clicks and conversions for different job titles, seniority, years of experience, education, industries, and unique combinations of all of those.

Once you have data showing which LinkedIn users interact most with your ads, you can focus your ad spend on audiences most likely to convert.

Another secret weapon for performance data?

Our unique performance analytics system, ConversionIQ. We use it to visualize performance across your entire marketing suite, including LinkedIn Ads, Google Ads, social media strategies and more.

Plus, it can attribute revenue to even more specific items, like pieces of ad copy on LinkedIn.

2. Track your customer journey with conversion tracking

Imagine your own customer journey the last time you bought something on Amazon (B2C, ecommerce).

Maybe you needed a vacuum cleaner or humidifier. You hit up Google to research a few products, checked out some reviews, and made your purchase a day or so later.

Will your B2B audience take the same quick journey to a purchase? Not quite. B2B audiences take much longer to convert.

Generally, it’s not a solo decision but a team effort involving pitching and approval. They also aren’t just looking at customer testimonials and features on your website for credibility.

They’ll check out your expertise and credibility, including knowledge bases, industry event attendance or activity, webinars, and more.

There’s not always a linear path to conversion for professional audiences, especially B2B ones. Luckily, LinkedIn Ads lets you identify multiple touchpoints to find your ideal customers at every stage of the funnel.

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)

And if you notice any of your campaign metrics are struggling each week or month, Flask has some advice:

“Look for opportunities to improve the audience you are targeting (home in on certain demographics, add additional job titles or interests), creatives (is there an opportunity to test new backgrounds, images, or formats?), or messaging (try to test what would resonate best with who you are targeting) to help obtain better results.”

3. Harness detailed targeting parameters

Targeting options vary across PPC channels, with many identifying audiences based on location, language, and web activity. These are all great parameters to capture your target audience.

But if you know most of your customers share certain professional attributes like job titles or industries, then LinkedIn offers the most relevant and precise targeting features across all PPC channels.

You can 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

From here, you can combine some of the above criteria, along with remarketing information to customize targeting to reach a conversion-ready audience.

While all the above parameters might feel overwhelming to use at first, LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager can guide you through audience targeting criteria with a bit more insight.

This feature even suggests ad formats that it calculates will be most effective for those LinkedIn users (more on formats later). This is one of the most valuable elements of LinkedIn Ads for B2B marketers.

For example, one company highlighted on LinkedIn’s website, Spredfast, saw a 500% increase in lead generation and 4X the clickthrough rate (CTR) after leveraging LinkedIn’s specific targeting.

4. Assess paid and organic performance with the Company Engagement Report

  • Leverage the AND/OR feature to include multiple audiences
  • Use Audience Expansion to identify similar segments to your existing target audience.
  • Upload your current contacts from your contact management platform for personalized targeting

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

We mentioned that LinkedIn for B2B businesses calls for a blend of both paid ads and organic content for best results. But how do you assess and evaluate the cohesion of those tactics?

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.

5. Leverage storytelling with Carousel Ads

Carousel Ads are a series of Sponsored Content posts that allow you to tell a sequential, multi-faceted story about your product or industry. Unlike text ads, they enable you to display up to ten images with their own links in a single ad.

When you consider that43% of B2B marketers see storytelling as a key skill for their team, Carousel Ads provide the perfect medium to craft unique narratives around your brand.

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.

3 best LinkedIn Ads formats and best practices for B2B businesses

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
  2. Message Ads
  3. Event Ads

1. Document Ads

In the PPC landscape, ads are often seen as a marketing strategy to convert purchase-ready customers; whereas organic content marketing is better to build brand awareness and credibility in your field.

Our take? LinkedIn’s document ad format lets you do both.

Here’s the thing: B2B audiences are a discerning bunch. These cautious spenders won’t always rush to convert with a quick, flashy ad. It takes trust and credibility to win over these buyers.

Document ads are another type of sponsored content, like case studies or reports, that appear directly on your audience’s LinkedIn feeds.

While they don’t directly sell your product, this ad format is perfect for generating high-quality leads, since you can collect business emails to share resources.

Here are some content ideas to promote in LinkedIn document ads:

  • 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 B2B audience the social proof they crave with success stories from your most satisfied clients.
  • Ebooks: The convenience and accessibility of ebooks continues 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:

Talone.One document ad

(Image: Talon.One ad)

After you click “download,” a screen appears to collect information and generate leads, in this case an email address:
D-ID API message ad
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 slip your brand into your audience’s direct messages on LinkedIn. They appear as sponsored or promoted content, and can be personalized with a one-of-a-kind pitch that invites recipients to your offerings.

But Flask says B2B professionals are busy, so keep it short and direct, and be sure to highlight your value proposition and expectations quickly.

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

“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:

Talon.One lead form

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

LinkedIn recently found that 60% of B2B marketing leaders plan to use in-person events (like career fairs, training sessions, and expos) to reach their target audiences.

The payoff? Quicker sales and richer connections. While B2B sales often take time, face-to-face interactions can fast-track the process, fostering trust and rapport that speeds up conversions.

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 for B2B businesses offer all the tools you need to achieve exponential growth. That’s thanks to its detailed job-related targeting, diverse conversion tracking, personalized messaging, and network of ready-to-buy professionals.

When it comes to the most effective channels for B2B marketing campaigns, LinkedIn Ads is a clear champion. That said, we know it comes with high demands, like endless research, testing, and tracking.

HawkSEM is an award-winning LinkedIn marketing agency with decades of experience converting B2B and SaaS audiences into loyal, revenue-driving customers for our extensive client roster.

When you partner with us, you receive unwavering attention and a dedicated account manager to navigate all the complexities.

Ready to ditch the learning curve and zoom right to more qualified B2B leads and higher ROI? We’ll help you reach your marketing goals and surpass them.

Christina Lyon

Christina Lyon

Christina Lyon is an entrepreneur and writer from sunny SoCal. She leads Lyon Content, a tight-knit team of bold creatives, and crafts engaging written content that helps brands sparkle and scale.