Solved: Need Assistance with LinkedIn Ads for Target Audience

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I saw your post looking for some help with your LinkedIn campaigns. It's a platform we've got a lot of experience with, especially for B2B clients, so I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on how you might be able to make it work better for you. It can be a bit of a beast to tame, but when you get it right, it's incredibly effective.

Below are my thoughts on how I'd approach it, based on what we've seen work for other companies.

I'd say you need to nail down your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) first...

Before you even think about touching the campaign manager, this is the absolute first thing you have to get right. Honestly, everything else you do—your ad copy, your offer, your campaign objectives—it all flows from this. If you get your targeting wrong on LinkedIn, you're just throwing money away. The costs are too high to be vague.

So, the first question is, who are you actually trying to sell to? I mean really sell to. Not just "businesses", but the specific types of companies and the specific people within them who feel the pain your service solves. You need to get incredibly granular here.

Think about a few things:

Company Characteristics: What does your ideal client's company look like?
-> What industry are they in? (e.g., Software, Financial Services, Business Services)
-> How big are they? (e.g., 50-200 employees, 500+ employees). This is important because a 50-person company has very different problems and decision-making processes than a 5,000-person one.
-> Where are they located? (e.g., UK, North America)

Decision-Maker Personas: Who is the person inside that company that actually signs the cheque or, at the very least, champions your solution internally? It's almost never a generic "info@" email address. You need to target the human.
-> What's their job title? (e.g., Chief Marketing Officer, Head of Sales, IT Director, Founder). Be specific.
-> What are their responsibilities? What keeps them up at night? Your service should solve a problem that falls squarely on their plate.
-> What is their seniority? Are you targeting C-level, VPs, Directors, or Managers?

For example, I remember a campaign we worked on for a B2B software company that did contact data enrichment. Their ICP wasn't just "companies that need data". It was much more specific:

-> Primary Companies: SMEs with 50-200 employees in sectors like marketing and advertising, software, and financial services.
-> Decision Makers: We didn't just target 'sales'. We went for Head of Sales, Sales Directors, CMOs, and Head of Marketing. We knew these were the people who had the authority and the budget to make a decision.

Getting this level of detail means you can use LinkedIn's targeting to its full potential. You can layer these attributes—company size, industry, job title, seniority—to create a highly specific audience that is much more likely to be interested in what you have to say. It's the difference between shouting into a crowded stadium and having a quiet, direct conversation with the exact person you need to talk to.

Another tactic you should definitly consider is building a target account list. You can use tools like Apollo.io or ZoomInfo to build a list of, say, the top 500 companies you'd love to have as clients. Then you can upload that list to LinkedIn and tell it to only show your ads to the decision-makers (based on the job titles you identified) at those specific companies. This is an incredibly powerful approach for B2B as it's so focused. It takes more work up front, but the quality of the leads is usually much, much higher.

Without this foundational work, you're basically guessing. And guessing on LinkedIn gets expensive very quickly.

We'll need to look at your campaign objectives...

Once you know who you're talking to, the next question is what do you want them to do? LinkedIn, like other platforms, forces you to pick a campaign objective. This choice tells the algorithm what result to optimise for, and it has a massive impact on your costs and results. A lot of people get this wrong, they pick 'Brand Awareness' when they want leads, or 'Website Traffic' when they want conversions. You have to align the objective with your actual business goal.

For B2B services, you're typically looking at two main paths:

1. Lead Generation: This is probably the most common for B2B. The goal is to get the contact details of a potential client so your sales team (or you) can follow up. Here, you've got another choice to make:

-> LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms: These are the forms that pop up directly within LinkedIn after someone clicks your ad. They're pre-filled with the user's profile information (name, email, company, job title). The big advantage is that it's super easy for the user—a couple of clicks and they're done. This means you'll generally get a lower Cost Per Lead (CPL). The downside? The quality can be lower. Because it's so easy, you can get people who are only mildly curious, not seriously looking. They haven't had to put in much effort, so their intent might not be that high. We ran a campaign for a B2B software client using these and got leads for around $22 each, which was great for them, but they had a solid process for qualifying those leads afterwards. You need to be prepared for that follow-up work.

-> Sending Traffic to a Landing Page: This involves sending the user away from LinkedIn to a dedicated page on your website where they have to fill out a form manually. The friction is much higher. They have to leave the platform, wait for your page to load, and type in their details. A lot of people will drop off. This means your Cost Per Lead will almost certainly be higher. However, the people who actually take the time to do all that are usually much more serious. They are more qualified and have higher intent. You get fewer leads, but they're often better. This is where having persuasive copy and a really well-optimised landing page is critical.

Which one should you choose? You'd want to test it. I'd usually run them as seperate ad sets in the same campaign and see which one delivers not just the cheapest leads, but the leads that actually turn into conversations and customers.

2. Conversation Ads: This is a different beast entirely. Think of it as a paid, targeted InMail. You're not asking for a form fill; you're trying to start a direct one-to-one conversation in their LinkedIn inbox. This can be very effective for high-ticket, consultative services where a form fill feels too transactional. It's a way to open a dialogue. However, it can feel a bit like a paid cold message, so your copy has to be spot on—it must be helpful and conversational, not a hard sales pitch. You're aiming to start a relationship, not close a deal in the first message. The goal here is 'replies', and you'll need a solid plan for how you handle those replies to move the conversation forward.

Choosing the right objective is about understanding your sales process. Do you need a high volume of leads for an SDR team to sift through, or do you need a smaller number of high-quality conversations for a senior salesperson? Your answer dictates your campaign objective.

You'll need a solid ad creative and format strategy...

The next piece of the puzzle is the ad itself—what people will actually see in their feed. Your creative and format need to work together to grab the attention of your very specific ICP and convince them to take the action you want them to take. LinkedIn feeds are busy and full of professional content, so you have to be sharp and to the point.

Here are the main formats and my thoughts on how to use them:

-> Image Ads (Sponsored Content): This is the bread and butter of LinkedIn ads. A strong image, a headline, and some text. They are great for driving traffic and getting a clear, concise message across quickly. The image needs to be professional and eye-catching, but it doesn't need to be a stock photo of business people shaking hands. Sometimes a simple graphic with a bold statement or a question works best. The goal is to stop the scroll. Your copy needs to speak directly to the pain point of your ICP that you identified earlier. Don't talk about yourself; talk about them and their problems.

-> Video Ads: Video can be incredibly powerful for qualifying leads. If someone watches a 60-second video explaining your service before they click, they're going to be a much more informed and qualified lead than someone who just clicked an image. You don't need a Hollywood production. A well-lit, clear video of you or a team member talking to the camera can work really well. It builds trust and humanises your business. We've seen UGC-style (User-Generated Content) videos work wonders for some of our SaaS clients on other platforms, and the same principles apply here. Keep it short, add subtitles (most people watch with the sound off), and have a clear call to action at the end. Video is great for explaining a more complex service.

-> Carousel Ads: These are good if you have multiple points to make, different features to highlight, or maybe a step-by-step process to explain. Each card in the carousel can have its own image, headline, and link. It's more interactive and can be a good way to relay more information without cluttering a single image ad. For instance, you could showcase different service packages or highlight three key benefits of working with you.

-> Text Ads: These are the little ads that appear on the side or at the top of the LinkedIn page. They are very simple—just a headline and a few lines of text. To be honest, their performance can be hit or miss. CTRs are often low. But they can be a cheap way to get your name in front of your target audience. I wouldn't make them the core of my strategy, but they can be worth testing with a small budget, especially if you want to start conversations.

The key here is to test. Don't just create one ad and hope for the best. I'd recomend creating at least two or three different versions of your ad for each campaign. Test a video against an image. Test a short, punchy headline against a longer, more descriptive one. Test different ad copy. The data will tell you what your audience responds to. And remember, for B2B markering, especially high-ticket, a hard sell rarely works. Your creative should be about offering value, providing insight, or starting a helpful conversation. You're not selling a product; you're selling expertise and a solution to a serious business problem.

You probably should structure your campaigns for testing...

Right, this is where it gets a bit more technical, but it's what seperates campaigns that work from campaigns that just burn cash. You need a logical structure that allows you to test variables systematically and understand what's actually driving results. Don't just lump everything into one giant campaign.

Here's a simplified way I'd think about structuring things:

Campaign Level: A campaign should be based on a single objective. So, you'd have one campaign for "Lead Generation" and a completely seperate one for "Website Traffic" or "Conversations". This is because the algorithm optimises differently for each, and you want to keep the data clean.

Ad Set Level (or 'Campaign Group' on LinkedIn): This is where you define your audience and budget. Inside your "Lead Generation" campaign, you should create multiple ad sets to test different targeting approaches against each other. For example:

-> Ad Set 1: ICP - Job Titles. Target people with the specific job titles you identified (e.g., Head of Sales, CMO) layered with company size and industry.
-> Ad Set 2: ICP - Skills & Groups. Target people who have listed certain skills on their profile (e.g., 'SaaS Sales', 'Demand Generation') or are members of relevant industry groups. This can be a good way to find your audience from a different angle.
-> Ad Set 3: ICP - Target Account List. This is where you upload your list of dream client companies and target the decision-makers within them.

By splitting them out like this, you can allocate budget to each and see clearly which audience is performing best. After a few days or a week, you'll be able to see if your 'Job Titles' audience is delivering leads at a much lower cost than your 'Skills' audience. Then you can make an informed decision to turn off the underperforming ad set and move its budget to the winner. This continuous process of testing and optimising is how you improve performance over time.

Ad Level: Within each ad set, you should be testing your creatives. As I mentioned before, have at least 2-3 different ad variations. Test an image vs a video. Test different messaging. LinkedIn will automatically show the better-performing ad more often, but having multiple options gives the algorithm more to work with and increases your chances of finding a winner.

Here's a very basic table showing what this might look like:

This structure isn't overly complicated, but it gives you a framework to learn and improve. You'll quicky learn which audiences and which messages resonate the most, allowing you to refine your strategy and scale what works. Don't be afraid to turn things off if they aren't working. You have to be ruthless with your budget and only feed the parts of the campaign that are giving you a return.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

This is a lot to take in, I know. Getting paid ads on LinkedIn to work isn't about finding one 'magic bullet'. It's about getting a series of things right, from strategy to execution, and then constantly testing and refining. It's a process. For high-ticket B2B offers, a direct sales funnel often doesn't perform well anyway. The goal isn't usually an instant sale; it's to start a valuable conversation that leads to a sale down the line. That's why your entire process, from the ad to the landing page to your sales follow-up, needs to be seamless.

Here is a summary of the main advice I have for you:

As you can see, there are quite a few moving parts. Getting this all set up correctly and managing it effectively takes a significant amount of time and, more importantly, expertise. You can certainly go it alone, but there's a steep learning curve and it can be a costly process of trial and error. We've seen it many times.

Working with an agency or a consultant who has been down this road before can help you skip a lot of the painful (and expensive) learning phase. As I mentioned, we ran a campaign for a B2B software client using LinkedIn lead gen forms and got leads for around $22 each. We handle everything from the initial strategy and ICP definition to the campaign build, ad creation, and ongoing management and optimisation.

If you'd like to have a chat and go through your current setup in more detail, we offer a free initial consultation. We can take a look at what you've been doing and give you some more specific, actionable advice on what to do next. There's no obligation at all, of course.

Hope this detailed breakdown has been helpful for you either way!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh