Solved: Useless LinkedIn Ads Guide (The Real Reason)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out. Your frustration is something I see all the time. People pour money into LinkedIn thinking it's a magic bullet, get rubbish results, and then conclude it "doesn't work". The truth is, it does work, but probably not in the way you've been lead to believe.

So, I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and a bit of guidance based on my experience. The first thing I'll say, and this is probably the most important bit, is to forget about finding a "guide to LinkedIn Ads in Plymouth". It’s a red herring. Your physical location has almost zero bearing on how you should be running B2B ads. The real problem, and the thing we need to get sorted, is that you're likely aiming at the wrong people with the wrong message. Let's get into it.

We'll need to look at who you're really selling to...

This is the absolute foundation of any decent advertising campaign. If you get this wrong, you're just throwing money into a furnace. I'm not talking about the generic, sterile customer profiles that most marketing agencies cook up. You know the ones: "We're targeting SMEs in the South West with 50-200 employees." That tells you absolutely nothing of any real value.

It leads to bland, generic ads that try to speak to everyone and end up persuading no one. To stop burning cash, you have to define your ideal customer not by their demographic, but by their nightmare. What is the specific, urgent, expensive, and possibly career-threatening problem that keeps them awake at 3 AM? Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state.

Let's make this real. Forget "Head of Engineering" as a job title. Instead, think about the person in that role. She's just had her third top developer hand in their notice this quarter. They're leaving out of sheer frustration with a clunky, broken development workflow that kills their productivity and morale. She's terrified because she knows she can't hit her product roadmap, the board is breathing down her neck, and her own job might be on the line. That's a nightmare. That's something you can sell a solution to.

I remember working with a legal tech SaaS client. They weren't selling 'document management software'. That's boring. Their customer's nightmare was a senior partner at a law firm missing a critical filing deadline because a document was lost in a sea of emails. The consequence? A potential multi-million-pound malpractice lawsuit that could ruin the firm's reputation. They weren't selling software; they were selling insurance against catastrophe.

You need to become an obsessive expert in your customer's specific hell. Before you spend another quid on ads, you need to answer these questions with painful clarity. I've put a little table together to help you think this through. Dont just skim it, actually try to fill it out for your own business.

Once you've done this, then you can start thinking about targeting. Where do these people hang out online? What niche podcasts do they listen to on their commute? What industry newsletters do they actually read? Are they in specific LinkedIn Groups? Who do they follow on Twitter? This intelligence is the blueprint for your entire advertising strategy. If you skip this work, you have no business spending money on ads, wether its in Plymouth or anywhere else.

I'd say you need to know what a customer is actually worth...

The next trap people fall into is obsessing over cheap leads. They see a £50 Cost Per Lead (CPL) on LinkedIn and panic, thinking it's too expensive. The real question isn't "How low can my CPL go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" To answer that, you need to understand their Lifetime Value (LTV).

This single calculation separates the businesses that scale from those that stagnate. It gives you the confidence to spend what's necessary to acquire the right customers—the ones whose nightmares you can solve.

Let's walk through a simple, but powerful, calculation. We just need three numbers:

-> Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's the average amount a customer pays you each month? Let's use an example of £500.

-> Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after deducting the direct costs of servicing that customer? Let's say it's 80%.

-> Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of your customers do you lose each month, on average? This can be a tough one to face, but you need to be honest. Let's say it's 4% (meaning the average customer stays for 25 months).

Now, we can put it all together. Here's how it looks:

In this example, every new customer you acquire is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. This number changes everything.

A healthy business often aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. With a £10,000 LTV, this means you can afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire a single new customer and still have a very profitable model. 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 £333 for a single, well-qualified lead.

Suddenly that £50, £100, or even £250 CPL from a hyper-targeted LinkedIn campaign aimed at a CTO with a specific, urgent problem doesn't seem so expensive, does it? It looks like an absolute 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 focus on acquiring customers who really matter.

You probably should rethink your offer...

Now we get to the bit where most B2B advertising falls flat on its face: the offer. I can almost guarantee your website has a "Request a Demo" button somewhere prominent. It is, without a doubt, the most arrogant and ineffective Call to Action ever conceived.

Think about it from your prospect's perspective. You've interrupted their day with an ad. Now you're asking them, a busy, important person whose nightmare you (now) understand, to book a slot in their calendar to be pitched to by a salesperson. It's a high-friction, low-value request. It screams "I want to sell you something" instead of "I want to help you". It instantly positions you as just another commodity vendor in a sea of noise.

Your offer has one job and one job only: to deliver a moment of undeniable value. An "aha!" moment that is so helpful and insightful that the prospect starts to sell themselves on your full solution. You have to solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to ask for their time and money to solve the whole thing.

If you're a SaaS company, this is your unfair advantage. A free trial (with no credit card details required) is the gold standard. Let them get their hands on the actual product. Let them experience the transformation firsthand. When the product itself proves its worth, the sale becomes a formality.

But you don't have to be a software company to do this. You just have to be creative and generous with your expertise. You need to bottle up a piece of your value and give it away. Here are some ideas:

-> For a marketing agency: Instead of "Book a call", offer a "Free, automated SEO audit that reveals your top 3 missed keyword opportunities". They put in their URL, they get an instant, valuable report.
-> For a data analytics consultancy: Offer a "Free Data Health Check" that connects to their database and flags the top 5 critical issues in their data integrity.
-> For a corporate training company: Offer a "Free 15-minute interactive video module on 'Handling Difficult Conversations' for new managers". Give them a genuine taste of your training content.
-> For us, a B2B advertising consultancy: We offer a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad accounts and give actionable advice. It's how you found me. We demonstrate our value, we dont just talk about it.

Delete the "Request a Demo" button. Replace it with an offer that gives, gives, gives before you ever think about asking. This simple shift will dramatically improve the quality and quantity of the leads you generate.

You'll need a message they can't ignore...

Once you know their nightmare and you have a genuinely valuable offer, you need to craft an ad message that connects the two. Your ad copy needs to enter the conversation already happening in your prospect's mind. It must speak directly to their pain.

For a service business, a great framework is Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS). You don't sell your service; you sell the solution to their frustration.

For a software or product business, you can use the Before-After-Bridge (BAB). You sell the transformation, the feeling of relief.

Let's look at some proper examples. Lets imagine you're a fractional CFO service in the UK.

See? It's not about "We offer fractional CFO services". It's about selling a good night's sleep. Now lets imagine a B2B SaaS product that helps manage cloud costs.

Stop talking about your features. Start talking about their problems and the future state you can deliver. This is what gets the click from the right person.

Finally, we'll need to get the targeting and campaign structure right...

Okay, with all that strategic work done, we can finally talk about pushing the buttons inside LinkedIn Ads Manager. This part is actually the easiest bit, but its where everyone starts, which is why they fail.

1. Define Your Audience (for real this time): Take your "Nightmare ICP" work from step one. Now translate that into LinkedIn's targeting options.
-> Company Targeting: Target by specific industries, company sizes (e.g., 50-200 employees), or even upload a list of specific target companies you want to work with (Account Based Marketing). This is incredibly powerful.
-> Job Title Targeting: Target the decision-makers you identified. "Head of Marketing", "Chief Technology Officer", "Financial Director". Be specific. You can also target by Job Function and Seniority if titles are too varied.

2. Choose the Right Objective & Ad Format: Your goal dictates the tools you use.
-> If you want leads directly on LinkedIn: Use a "Lead Generation" objective with Sponsored Content (an image or video ad in the feed) attached to a LinkedIn Lead Gen Form. This makes it super easy for people to convert as it pre-fills their details. The downside is lead quality can be lower because it's so frictionless. We've had great success with these, I remember one B2B software campaign where we got a CPL of just $22 using this method, but you need a solid follow-up process.
-> If you want more qualified leads: Use a "Website Conversions" objective and send traffic from your ad to your dedicated landing page with your high-value offer (the one we talked about earlier). The CPL will be higher, but the leads who take the time to go to your site and convert are usually far more serious.
-> If you want to start conversations: You could test Conversation Ads. These appear in the prospect's LinkedIn messaging inbox. It's basically paying for cold outreach. It can feel a bit intrusive if not done well, but for some high-touch sales, it might be worth a test.

I usually recommend starting with a Sponsored Content campaign, testing both image and video ads, and splitting the test between a Lead Gen Form and a dedicated landing page to see what delivers the best balance of lead cost and quality for your specific business.

A simple starting structure might look like this:

This structure allows you to test which audience and which conversion method works best, so you can double down on the winners and turn off the losers, rather than just experimenting blindly.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know this is a tonne of information, and it's a world away from a simple "guide to LinkedIn ads in Plymouth". But this is what it actually takes to get results. Tbh, the tactical button-pushing is only about 20% of the work. The other 80% is the strategic thinking you do beforehand. I've broken down the whole process into an actionable plan for you below.

As you can probably see, doing this properly is a significant amount of work. It requires a level of strategic thinking that goes way beyond just knowing how to navigate the ad platform. It's a combination of deep customer psychology, financial modelling, and direct-response marketing principles. This is why just "experimenting" without a clear framework is so often a quick way to lose money and time.

Getting this process dialled in is what separates the businesses that generate a predictable pipeline of high-quality leads from those that are stuck on the feast-or-famine rollercoaster. While you can absolutely implement this framework yourself, it can be a steep learning curve. Having an expert partner who lives and breathes this stuff every single day can often be the difference between struggling for months and seeing a tangible return on your investment within weeks.

If you've found this initial guidance helpful and you'd like to discuss how we could apply this exact process to your business, we offer a completely free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy call. We can take a look at what you've done so far and give you some more specific, actionable advice. Feel free to let me know if that's something you'd be interested in.

Hope that helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh