Solved: Best LinkedIn Ad Format? (A Step-by-Step Fix)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your LinkedIn ads question. It's a common problem, people often get stuck on which ad format to pick, especially when there's no public data on what works in a specific area like Bristol. Tbh, you're asking the wrong question. Fixating on the ad format is like worrying about the colour of the car before you've even built the engine. The format is one of the last things you should be thinking about.

The real issue, and the reason most B2B campaigns on LinkedIn fail and burn through cash, is a complete lack of strategy before a single penny is spent. Let's break down what you actually need to get right first. If you nail these things, the right ad format becomes obvious.

We'll need to look at who you're actually targeting, not just their job title...

This is the absolute foundation. I see this all the time. A client comes to us and says "we want to target CTOs in Bristol". It's useless. That's a demographic, not a customer. You need to forget the sterile, HR-department profile and get to grips with their nightmare.

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state. What is the specific, urgent, expensive, and maybe even career-threatening nightmare that keeps your ideal Bristol-based client awake at night? Your job is to become the worlds leading expert on that specific pain.

Let's imagine you sell some kind of project management software. Your target isn't "a project manager in the construction sector in Bristol". It's 'a senior PM at a firm that just won a piece of the Temple Quarter regeneration project, who is terrified that her best architects are about to quit because they're buried in paperwork instead of doing actual design work, putting the whole project at risk of delays and penalties.' See the difference? One is a job title. The other is a story full of emotion and high stakes.

When you define your customer by their pain, everything else starts to fall into place. Your ad copy writes itself, your offer becomes compelling, and your targeting gets sharper.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, you need to figure out where this person lives online. It's not enough to know they work in Bristol.

-> What industry newsletters do they actually read on their commute into Temple Meads?
-> What niche podcasts about their industry do they listen to?
-> What SaaS tools do they already pay for? HubSpot? Salesforce? Xero?
-> Are they in any specific LinkedIn Groups?

This intelligence is the blueprint for your targeting. Targeting someone because they live in a BS postcode is lazy. Targeting them based on their company, their job title, AND the fact they follow certain industry influencers or are in specific groups... that's when it gets powerful. Do this work first, or you have no business spending money on LinkedIn ads.

You probably should stop trying to sell them something straight away...

Right, so you know their pain. The next most common point of failure is the offer. I'd bet my lunch your current plan is to send them to a landing page with a "Request a Demo" or "Book a Call" button. This is probably the most arrogant Call to Action in marketing. It presumes your prospect, a busy and important person, has nothing better to do with their day than sit through a sales pitch. Its high-friction, low-value, and instantly makes you look like every other desperate vendor in their inbox.

You have to delete that button. Your offer's only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value. An "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution before you've even spoken to them.

You are not exempt from this. You must bottle your expertise into a tool, a piece of content, or an asset that provides instant value and solves a small, real part of their nightmare for free. This is how you earn the right to solve the whole thing.

What could this look like?

-> For a marketing agency: A free, automated SEO audit that shows them their top 3 keyword opportunities their Bristol competitors are missing.
-> For a data analytics firm: A free 'Data Health Check' that flags the biggest issues in their database.
-> For a corporate training company: A free 15-minute interactive video on 'Handling Difficult Conversations with Hybrid Teams'.
-> For a fractional CFO: A free cash flow projection template that's better than anything else out there.

This isn't about being nice. It's a qualification mechanism. The people who download and use your free, valuable thing are the ones with the exact problem you solve. You're not generating 'Marketing Qualified Leads' for a sales team to chase; you're creating 'Problem Qualified Leads' who are already looking for a solution. I remember one B2B software client who saw their lead quality shoot up and their cost per qualified lead drop massively when they switched from a "Book a Demo" CTA to offering a free, downloadable industry report. The leads were better because they had already self-identified as having the problem the report addressed.

You'll need copy that actually speaks to their problems...

Now that you have your ICP's pain and a genuinely valuable offer, you can write ad copy that they can't ignore. Most B2B ads are a boring list of features. Nobody cares. You need to talk about their problems and their desired transformation. There are a couple of simple frameworks for this.

Framework 1: Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS)

You use this for a high-touch service. You dont sell "outsourced IT support"; you sell peace of mind.

Problem: Are you spending more time fixing printer issues than growing your business?
Agitate: Every minute your team waits for tech support is a minute your Bristol competitors are getting ahead.
Solve: Get instant, expert IT support for your team for a fraction of a full-time hire. Click here to get our free '5-Minute Tech Fix' checklist for common office problems.

Framework 2: Before-After-Bridge (BAB)

You use this for a product or SaaS. You don't sell a "CRM platform"; you sell an organised sales process.

Before: Your desk is covered in post-it notes, your lead data is in three different spreadsheets, and you have no idea what your sales pipeline actually looks like.
After: Imagine all your customer info in one place, automated follow-ups, and a clear view of your revenue for the next quarter.
Bridge: Our CRM is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and import your first 100 contacts in minutes.

Here's a quick demo of how you could apply this. We'll stick with the Head of Engineering in Bristol example. Their pain is losing good developers due to workflow frustrations.

This ad works because it speaks directly to a real, expensive pain. It shows empathy, provides a vision for a better future, and offers immediate, tangible value with zero risk.

Now we can finally talk about the ad formats...

See? Now that you have a strategy, choosing the ad format is simple. It's just a case of picking the right tool for the job you've already defined. The lack of "local campaign perfomance" data for Bristol doesn't matter, because the principles of matching the objective to the format are universal.

Your objective flows directly from your offer and your sales process.

If your goal is Lead Generation (with your high-value offer):

Your best bet is usually a Sponsored Content campaign. This is the standard in-feed ad. Within this, you have choices:

-> Image Ads: Great for grabbing attention quickly. A strong image with a powerful headline can be very effective for driving clicks to your landing page where people can get your free asset. Fastest way to get the message across.

-> Video Ads: Can be brilliant for telling a more complex story or demonstrating a product. You can pre-qualify viewers more effectively; someone who watches 75% of a 2-minute video is a much warmer lead than someone who just glanced at an image. For instance, for a medical job matching SaaS, we significantly reduced their cost per user acquisition from £100 to £7 using Meta Ads and Google Ads.

-> Carousel Ads: Good if you have multiple features, benefits, or testimonials to showcase in a single ad. You can walk someone through a multi-step process or story.

With these, you'll also need to test a LinkedIn Lead Gen Form versus a Landing Page. The Lead Gen Form pops up within LinkedIn and pre-fills the user's details. It's very low friction and usually gives you a lower cost per lead (CPL). The downside is that the lead quality can be lower because it's so easy to fill out. Sending traffic to a dedicated landing page on your website is higher friction, so your CPL will be higher, but the leads are often much better qualified because they've had to make more of an effort.

I remember one B2B software client where we achieved a $22 CPL targeting decision makers. We did this by running Sponsored Content with a very specific, high-value downloadable guide, sending them to a dedicated landing page. The CPL was higher than a Lead Gen Form campaign would have been, but almost every lead was a perfect fit for their sales team.

If your goal is to start conversations directly:

This is where Conversation Ads (previously called Sponsored InMail) come in. This is basically paying to slide into someone's DMs. It's more personal but can also be seen as more intrusive. This only works if you have a very, very tightly defined audience (e.g., you've uploaded a list of 50 target companies in Bristol) and a very personal, high-value message. Don't use this to spam people with a generic sales pitch.

Here's a simple breakdown:

And you really need to understand the numbers behind it all...

This is the final peice of the puzzle, and it's what separates amateurs from professionals. Most people obsess over the Cost Per Lead (CPL). They'll ask "what's a good CPL on LinkedIn?". The honest answer is: it depends. The real question you should be asking is "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a great customer?".

To answer that, you need to calculate your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This is the total profit you can expect to make from a single customer over the entire time they do business with you. If you don't know this number, you're flying blind.

The calculation is pretty simple. You need three bits of info:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's the average a customer pays you per month?
2. Gross Margin %: Your profit margin on that revenue.
3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

Here's how it works with an example:

In this example, each customer is worth £10,000 in gross margin to you. A healthy business model aims for at least a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. So, you can afford to spend up to £10,000 / 3 = ~£3,333 to acquire a single new customer.

Now, let's say your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a paying customer. That means you can afford to pay up to £3,333 / 10 = £333 for a single, qualified lead. Suddenly that £150 CPL from a hyper-targeted LinkedIn campaign doesn't look so expensive, does it? It looks like a bargain.

This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. It frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads and allows you to confidently invest in acquiring the right customers. Without this, you're just guessing.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To wrap this all up, worrying about LinkedIn ad formats in Bristol is the wrong place to start. You need to build a proper foundation first. When you do the strategic work upfront, the tactical decisions become easy.

As you can probably tell, this is a lot to take on, and getting it wrong on a platform as expensive as LinkedIn can be a very costly mistake. Running ads without this strategic framework is just gambling.

That's why we always start with a free, no-obligation strategy session. We can spend some time on a call going through this framework for your specific business, looking at your ICP, and mapping out a plan that would actually work to get you the customers you want. It's a chance for you to get some expert advice and for us to see if we can genuinely help.

If that sounds useful, feel free to get in touch to schedule one.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh