Solved: Need Expert Help with LinkedIn Paid Ad Campaigns

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out. I saw your post about looking for some help with your paid ads and thought I could give you some initial thoughts and guidance based on my experience. It sounds like you've got a solid business providing graphic design support to marketing teams, and it's smart to think about how to get more from your advertising spend, especially on a platform like LinkedIn.

Running ads yourself is a great way to start, but you're right, bringing in a specialist can often unlock performance that's hard to achieve otherwise. Your budget of £3k a month is a decent starting point for LinkedIn, and with your service price points, there's definitely potential for a very healthy return. I'm happy to walk you through how I'd approach this. My thoughts are based on years of running campaigns for B2B clients, many of them in the software and professional services space, so there's a lot of overlap with what you're doing.

Let's get into it.

We'll need to look at your current LinkedIn strategy...

The first thing I'd want to understand is your current setup on LinkedIn. This platform is incredibly powerful for B2B, but it's also expensive. Every click costs a premium, so you can't afford to waste money on the wrong audience. The absolute foundation of any successful LinkedIn campaign is getting the targeting spot on. It's less about reaching a massive audience and more about reaching the right one, even if it's smaller.

Your target audience – marketing teams – is a great starting point, but we need to get more granular. Who within that team makes the decision to bring on a service like yours? Is it the Marketing Manager who's frustrated with design bottlenecks? Is it the Head of Marketing or CMO who's looking at the budget and sees your service as a cost-effective alternative to hiring another full-time designer or using expensive agencies? The answer is probably a bit of both, and your messaging might need to be slightly different for each.

So, the first step is to build out these ideal customer personas. We'd look at things like:

-> Job Titles: This is the most direct way to target on LinkedIn. We'd build lists including "Marketing Manager", "Head of Marketing", "Marketing Director", "Brand Manager", and maybe even "Chief Marketing Officer". We have to be careful not to go too broad, but we also don't want to miss key decision-makers.

-> Company Size: What size of company is your sweet spot? A startup with 10 employees has very different needs than a corporate with 500. It sounds like SMEs might be a good fit, so perhaps targeting companies with 50-250 employees would be a good place to start testing. This avoids the tiny companies who may not have the budget and the massive ones who likely have large in-house teams.

-> Industries: Are there spesific industries you've had success with or that you want to target? Tech/SaaS, professional services, financial services, etc. Targeting by industry helps ensure your message is relevant. A marketing team in a SaaS company has different design needs than one in a law firm.

A more advanced technique we often use is to build a target account list. You could use tools like Apollo.io or even just manual research to build a list of, say, 200 UK companies that you believe are a perfect fit for your service. We can then upload this list to LinkedIn and specifically target the relevant decision-makers within just those companies. This is called Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and it can be incredibly effective because you're focusing your entire budget on high-value, pre-qualified prospects. It's a rifle-shot approach rather than a shotgun blast.

The mistake many people make is layering too many interests or targeting options that are too broad. They might target someone with "Marketing" as a skill, but that could include a junior intern who has no purchasing power. My approach is always to start with a narrow, well-defined audience that is as close to your ideal customer as possible. We can always broaden it out later if we need more scale, but getting that core targeting right is the most important first step. Without it, the rest doesn't matter.

I'd say you need to test different ad formats and objectives...

Once we're confident about who we're targeting, the next question is how we're targeting them. What's the goal of your campaign, and what ad format is best suited to achieve it? A lot of B2B campaigns on LinkedIn just run a simple image ad to a homepage, and that's often not the most effective way to spend your budget.

First, we need to define the objective. For a service like yours, the goal isn't an immediate online sale. The goal is to start a conversation. You need to generate a lead that your sales process can then nurture and close. So, your campaign objective should almost certainly be 'Lead Generation'.

Within that, you have a big choice to make: do you use LinkedIn's built-in Lead Gen Forms, or do you send traffic to a dedicated landing page on your website? There are pros and cons to both:

-> LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms: These are pop-up forms that open directly within LinkedIn when a user clicks your ad. They're often pre-filled with the user's profile information (name, email, job title, company). The main advantage is that they are incredibly low-friction. The user doesn't have to leave the platform, and it takes just a couple of clicks to submit their details. This usually results in a much lower Cost Per Lead (CPL). The downside? The lead 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 make the effort to visit your website and read about your service in detail.

-> Landing Page: This approach involves sending the user from the LinkedIn ad to a page on your website designed specifically to convert them into a lead. The main advantage here is lead quality. Anyone who takes the time to leave LinkedIn, visit your page, read your copy, and then fill out a form is showing much higher intent. They are more pre-qualified and likely to be a better prospect. The downside is that you'll get fewer leads, and your CPL will be higher, because you're asking the user to do more work. There are more drop-off points in this funnel.

What's the right choice for you? Tbh, you need to test it. I usually start by running both approaches in a split test to see what delivers not just the cheapest leads, but the best quality leads that actually turn into customers. For a considered purchase like a £1,500/month subscription, I often find that a dedicated landing page performs better in the long run, as it filters out the tyre-kickers.

Then there's the ad creative itself. Are you testing different formats? You should be.

-> Image Ads: These are the standard. They're quick to create and can be very effective with a strong visual and a punchy headline. You could showcase some of your best design work or use a graphic that highlights a key pain point for marketing teams (e.g., "Design Requests Piling Up?").

-> Video Ads: Video can work really well to tell a more compelling story. A short, 30-60 second video could be a case study, a quick demo of how your service works, or a testimonial from a happy client. Video lets you build more trust and rapport than a static image, which can be brilliant for getting more qualified leads.

-> Carousel Ads: These allow you to use multiple images or videos in one ad. This format is perfect for you. You could use it to showcase a portfolio of different design styles, walk through your process step-by-step, or highlight multiple benefits of your service (e.g., Slide 1: Fast Turnarounds, Slide 2: Fixed Monthly Cost, Slide 3: Top UK Designers).

The key is to systematically test these formats and different messaging angles against your core audiences to see what resonates. One ad that talks about saving money might appeal to a CMO, while an ad that talks about saving time and hassle might appeal more to a Marketing Manager.

You probably should consider other platforms as well...

While LinkedIn is likely your primary channel, I'd say it's a mistake to rely on it exclusively. The best marketing strategies use multiple channels that work together. Based on your business, the other platform you absolutely should be considering is Google Search Ads.

Here's the difference in a nutshell: LinkedIn is "push" advertising. You are pushing your message in front of people you think are relevant, but they might not be actively looking for a solution right now. Google Search is "pull" advertising. You are putting your ad in front of people who are actively serching for exactly what you offer. They have a problem, and they're looking for a solution today.

Think about the journey of a potential customer. A Marketing Manager is overwhelmed. Their designer is on holiday, and they have a deadline. What do they do? They go to Google and search for things like:

• "graphic design support UK"
• "unlimited design service"
• "outsource marketing design"
• "monthly graphic design plan"
• "graphic design agency for startups"

If your ad appears at the top of the results for those searches, you are capturing a lead at the moment of highest intent. This is incredibly powerful. The cost per lead on Google might be higher or lower than on LinkedIn – it depends on the competition for those keywords – but the quality is often unmatched because the user has pre-qualified themselves with their search query.

Running Google Search ads alongside your LinkedIn campaigns creates a powerful combination. LinkedIn builds awareness and targets specific roles and companies, planting the seed. Google Search captures the demand when that seed sprouts and they start actively looking for help. We've seen this work for countless B2B clients. I remember one recruitment software client, where we combined Meta and Google Ads and managed to reduce their cost per user acquisition from £100 down to just £7 by capturing both passive and active job seekers.

The setup would involve thorough keyword research to find all the relevant terms your ideal customers are searching for. We'd also need to build a list of negative keywords (e.g., -free, -jobs, -course, -tutorial) to ensure we're not wasting money on irrelevant clicks. The ads would then point to a high-converting landing page, similar to the one we'd use for LinkedIn.

You'll need a solid website and offer...

This is probably the most important point of all, and it's something many businesses overlook. You can have the best, most perfectly targeted ads in the world, but if they send traffic to a website that doesn't convert, you're just throwing money away. Your website and your offer are the final, and most critical, pieces of the puzzle.

Tbh, before spending any more on ads, you have to be brutally honest about your website. Does it look professional? Is it persuasive? Does it build trust? Does it make it incredibly easy for a potential client to understand what you do and take the next step?

For a B2B service, trust is everything. A marketing manager isn't going to hand over £1,500 a month to a company that doesn't look credible. Here are some things I'd be looking at:

-> A Clear Value Proposition: Right at the top of your landing page, you need a single sentence that explains what you do and for whom. Something like "On-Demand Graphic Design for Ambitious Marketing Teams. Your new design partner, for a flat monthly fee."

-> Social Proof: This is non-negotiable. You need to show that other businesses, ideally other marketing teams, trust you. This means client testimonials (with names and photos if possible), logos of companies you've worked with, and detailed case studys that show the 'before' and 'after' of a project and the results you delivered.

-> A Clear Call-to-Action (CTA): What is the one thing you want a visitor to do? It's probably not "Buy Now". For your price point, they'll want to talk to someone first. Your main CTA should probably be "Book a Free Consultation" or "Get a Demo". This CTA should be prominent and repeated throughout the page.

-> Professional Copywriting: Your website copy needs to speak directly to the pain points of your target audience. Don't just list features (e.g., "We use Adobe Creative Suite"). Talk about benefits (e.g., "End design bottlenecks and get your marketing materials to market faster"). We often use specialist copywriters for our clients because it makes such a huge difference to conversion rates.

-> Your Offer: You mentioned your packages range from £699 to £1,500. This is great, but you need to think about the "funnel". For B2B, a fixed offer doesn't always work as well as it does for B2C. You might find you get better results by focusing on generating leads for an intro/sales call, where you can then understand their specific needs and propose a custom package. The goal of the ads and website is just to get them on that call.

Improving your website's conversion rate is one of the most powerful levers you have. If you can double your website's conversion rate from 1% to 2%, you have effectively halved your cost per lead without even touching the ads. It's that important.

To make this a bit more concrete, here's how some of the targeting and creative could look in practice.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

To summarise everything I've talked about, here's a table that breaks down the main advise I have for you. Think of this as a strategic roadmap for taking your paid advertising to the next level. This is the kind of structured approach a specialist would bring to the table.

I know this is a lot to take in. But you were looking for expert help, and the reality is that getting great results from paid ads, especially in a competetive B2B market, requires a comprehensive and disciplined approach. It's not just about turning on ads; it's about building a complete system where your targeting, creative, and website all work together seamlessly to turn a stranger into a customer.

Doing all of this yourself – the research, the testing, the analysis, the constant optimisation – is a full-time job. An agency or experienced freelancer can implement this kind of strategy much faster and more effectively, avoiding common pitfalls and making your £3k monthly budget work as hard as it possibly can. The goal is to build a predictable and scalable engine for generating new business for you every single month.

If you'd like to go over this in more detail, I'd be happy to offer you a free, no-obligation consultation. We could have a proper look at your current ad account and website together on a call, and I could give you some more specific pointers based on what I see. It's a great way for you to get some immediate value and see if we'd be a good fit to work together.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh