LinkedIn Ads for B2B: A Complete Guide to Paid Campaigns

Why LinkedIn Is the Premier Paid Channel for B2B

If you sell to businesses, LinkedIn is the single most valuable paid advertising platform available to you. No other channel gives you the ability to target by job title, company size, industry, seniority, and specific skills with the same precision. For B2B marketers, this is unmatched.

LinkedIn has over 1 billion members globally, with more than 65 million decision makers active on the platform. Unlike other social platforms where users are scrolling for entertainment, LinkedIn users are in a professional mindset. They are thinking about work, researching solutions, and engaging with industry content. This context makes LinkedIn advertising uniquely effective for reaching B2B buyers.

However, LinkedIn ads come with a higher cost per click than most other platforms. CPCs typically range from five to fifteen pounds depending on your audience and industry. This means you cannot afford to waste budget on poorly targeted campaigns or weak creative. Every element of your LinkedIn advertising strategy needs to be deliberate and optimised.

This guide covers everything you need to know about running LinkedIn ads for B2B, from campaign structure and targeting through to creative best practices and measurement. Whether you are running your first campaign or looking to improve performance on an existing programme, this will give you a practical framework that works.

1. Choosing the Right Campaign Objective and Ad Format

LinkedIn Campaign Manager offers several campaign objectives, and choosing the right one is critical because it determines how the algorithm optimises your ad delivery.

For B2B companies, these are the objectives that matter most:

• Brand awareness: Best for top of funnel campaigns where your goal is to get your brand in front of a specific audience. Use this when you are entering a new market or building familiarity with a target account list. You pay per impression (CPM).
• Website visits: Drives traffic to a specific landing page or piece of content. Useful for promoting blog posts, guides, or event registrations. You pay per click (CPC).
• Engagement: Optimises for likes, comments, shares, and follows. Best used for thought leadership content and organic reach amplification. Less directly tied to pipeline but valuable for building audience trust over time.
• Lead generation: Uses LinkedIn's native lead gen forms, which auto populate with the user's profile data. This removes the friction of clicking through to a landing page and typically delivers significantly higher conversion rates. More on this below.
• Website conversions: Optimises for specific actions on your website such as form submissions or demo requests. Requires the LinkedIn Insight Tag installed on your site and conversion events configured. This is the objective to use when you want to drive bottom of funnel actions.

Now, the ad formats. LinkedIn offers several, and each serves a different purpose:

• Single image ads: The most common format. A single image with accompanying text and a headline. Works well for promoting content, events, and direct offers. Keep images clean and text minimal. Avoid stock photography that looks generic.
• Carousel ads: Multiple swipeable cards, each with its own image, headline, and link. Excellent for telling a story, walking through a framework, or showcasing multiple case studies. Carousels tend to drive higher engagement because they invite interaction.
• Video ads: Video consistently outperforms static content on LinkedIn in terms of engagement. Keep videos under 90 seconds for top of funnel content. Use captions because most LinkedIn users watch without sound. Video ads are powerful for building brand familiarity and trust.
• Document ads: Share a PDF directly in the feed that users can scroll through without leaving LinkedIn. Ideal for sharing short guides, frameworks, or data reports. These feel native to the platform and often generate strong engagement.
• Message ads (InMail): Delivered directly to a user's LinkedIn inbox. Use these sparingly and only with highly relevant, personalised messaging. The format works best for high value offers like executive events or personalised consultations. Overuse damages brand perception.
• Lead gen forms: Not a standalone format but a layer that sits on top of other ad types. When a user clicks your CTA, a form pre filled with their LinkedIn profile data appears. This dramatically reduces friction and typically improves conversion rates by 2x to 5x compared to landing pages.

2. Targeting: The Real Power of LinkedIn Advertising

Targeting is where LinkedIn advertising truly separates itself from every other paid channel. The depth and accuracy of LinkedIn's professional data allows you to reach exactly the right people with surgical precision.

Here are the targeting dimensions that matter most for B2B campaigns:

• Job title: Target specific titles like "VP of Marketing" or "Head of Sales." Be aware that job titles vary across companies, so use a combination of titles to capture your full audience.
• Job function: Broader than job title. Targets everyone within a function like Marketing, Sales, IT, or Finance regardless of their specific title. Useful for reaching a wider audience within a department.
• Seniority: Target by level: Director, VP, CXO, Manager, and so on. This is especially useful when you want to reach senior decision makers without restricting to specific titles.
• Company size: Filter by employee count ranges (1 to 10, 11 to 50, 51 to 200, 201 to 500, and so on). Critical for ensuring your ads reach companies that fit your ideal customer profile.
• Industry: Target by LinkedIn's industry taxonomy. Combine with other filters for precision. "Director of Marketing at SaaS companies with 200 to 500 employees" is a very different audience from "Director of Marketing at all companies."
• Company name: Upload a list of target accounts and serve ads exclusively to employees at those companies. This is the foundation of account based marketing (ABM) on LinkedIn and one of the most powerful B2B advertising tactics available anywhere.
• Skills and interests: Target users based on skills listed on their profiles or content they engage with. Useful as a secondary filter to refine an audience further.

A critical best practice: keep your audience size between 20,000 and 80,000 for most campaigns. Too small and the algorithm cannot optimise delivery effectively. Too large and you dilute relevance. Layer two or three targeting dimensions to hit the right balance.

For account based campaigns, upload your target account list directly. Combined with seniority and function filters, this gives you precise control over exactly who sees your ads. Our demand generation service frequently uses this approach to run ABM programmes for our clients.

3. Creating Ads That Stop the Scroll

LinkedIn is a competitive feed environment. Your ads compete not just with other advertisers but with organic content from connections, influencers, and company pages. To earn attention, your creative must be genuinely compelling.

Here are the creative principles that drive performance on LinkedIn:

• Lead with value, not with your logo: Nobody cares about your brand in their feed. They care about insights, ideas, and solutions to their problems. Open with a bold statement, a surprising data point, or a question that resonates with your audience.
• Use clear, benefit driven headlines: Your headline should tell the viewer exactly what they get. "The B2B Demand Gen Playbook" is clearer and more compelling than "Download Our Latest Resource." Be specific about the value.
• Design for mobile: Over 60 percent of LinkedIn usage happens on mobile devices. Use large, readable text in images. Keep copy concise. Ensure your landing page is fully mobile optimised.
• Use real photography over stock images: Images of real team members, real clients (with permission), or real work environments consistently outperform generic stock photography. Authenticity matters on a professional platform.
• Test bold colours and high contrast: The LinkedIn feed is predominantly blue, white, and grey. Ads that use strong colours and high contrast stand out. At ORRJO, we find that distinctive brand colours (like our pink) consistently drive higher click through rates.
• Keep ad copy under 150 characters for the introductory text: Longer copy gets truncated with a "see more" link. Front load the most important information into the first two lines. You can use longer copy for retargeting audiences who already know your brand.

Always run at least two to three creative variants per campaign. Test different images, headlines, and copy angles. Let the data tell you what resonates. Refresh creative every four to six weeks to combat ad fatigue.

4. Budgeting and Bidding Strategy

LinkedIn advertising is not cheap. But when measured on a cost per qualified lead or cost per pipeline basis, it often delivers the best ROI of any paid B2B channel. The key is spending wisely.

Here is how to approach budgeting:

• Start with a test budget: Allocate a minimum of two to three thousand pounds per month for a meaningful test. Below this level, you will not generate enough data to optimise effectively. Run your test for at least four to six weeks before drawing conclusions.
• Scale based on results: Once you identify winning audiences, formats, and creative combinations, gradually increase spend. Do not scale everything at once. Increase budget by 20 to 30 percent per week to maintain performance while the algorithm adjusts.
• Allocate across the funnel: A common mistake is putting all budget into bottom of funnel conversion campaigns. Allocate roughly 30 to 40 percent to awareness and engagement campaigns (top of funnel), 30 to 40 percent to consideration and content distribution (mid funnel), and 20 to 30 percent to conversion and retargeting (bottom of funnel).

For bidding, LinkedIn offers three options:

• Maximum delivery (automated): LinkedIn automatically sets bids to get the most results within your budget. Best for campaigns where you are optimising for volume and trust the algorithm.
• Cost cap: You set a maximum cost per result and LinkedIn optimises delivery within that constraint. Useful when you have a clear target cost per lead and want to control efficiency.
• Manual bidding: You set the exact bid for each click or impression. Gives you maximum control but requires more active management. Use this when you have enough historical data to know your target CPCs.

We recommend starting with maximum delivery for new campaigns, then moving to cost cap once you have baseline performance data. Review your investment options to understand how LinkedIn ads fit within a broader growth budget.

5. The LinkedIn Lead Gen Form Advantage

LinkedIn lead gen forms deserve their own section because they are one of the most effective tools in the B2B marketer's toolkit and still underused by many companies.

Here is how they work: instead of clicking through to a landing page, the user clicks your CTA and a form appears directly within LinkedIn. The form is pre populated with data from their LinkedIn profile, including name, email, job title, company, and more. All the user has to do is confirm and submit.

Why this matters:

• Dramatically higher conversion rates: Removing the friction of loading a new page and manually filling in form fields typically increases conversion rates by 2x to 5x. We have seen lead gen form conversion rates above 15 percent in well targeted campaigns.
• Higher data accuracy: Because the data comes directly from LinkedIn profiles, you get accurate job titles, company names, and professional email addresses. No more junk entries or personal email addresses.
• Mobile friendly by default: Lead gen forms are designed for the mobile experience. On a platform where the majority of usage is mobile, this matters enormously.

Best practices for lead gen forms:

• Keep forms short. Three to four fields maximum for top of funnel offers. Name, email, job title, and company size is usually sufficient.
• Add one to two custom questions for mid and bottom of funnel campaigns. A qualifying question like "What is your biggest marketing challenge?" helps you prioritise follow up.
• Set up automated lead delivery to your CRM via LinkedIn's native integrations or tools like Zapier. Speed of follow up is critical. Leads should be in your system and assigned within minutes, not days.
• Create a strong thank you message that sets expectations. Tell the lead what happens next and when they will hear from you.

6. Measuring Success and Optimising for Pipeline

The metrics you track determine whether LinkedIn advertising becomes a long term growth channel or a short term experiment. Too many B2B marketers focus on CPCs and CTRs without connecting those metrics to pipeline and revenue.

Here is the measurement framework we use with our clients:

• Platform metrics (monitor weekly): Impressions, click through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), and frequency. These tell you whether your ads are reaching the right audience and earning attention. Benchmark CTRs for LinkedIn are 0.4 to 0.7 percent for sponsored content.
• Lead metrics (monitor weekly): Cost per lead (CPL), lead volume, and lead quality score. Not all leads are equal. A VP at a target account who downloads your guide is worth far more than a student who clicked out of curiosity. Build a lead scoring system that reflects this.
• Pipeline metrics (monitor monthly): Cost per qualified opportunity, pipeline value generated, and time from lead to opportunity. These are the metrics that prove whether LinkedIn ads are genuinely contributing to business growth.
• Revenue metrics (monitor quarterly): Closed won revenue influenced by LinkedIn campaigns, customer acquisition cost (CAC) from LinkedIn, and return on ad spend (ROAS). This closes the loop and justifies continued or increased investment.

Install the LinkedIn Insight Tag on your website to enable conversion tracking, retargeting, and website demographics reporting. This is non negotiable for any serious LinkedIn advertising programme.

Optimisation should be a weekly habit. Pause underperforming creative variants. Narrow or adjust targeting based on which audiences convert at the best rates. Shift budget toward campaigns that generate the highest quality leads, not just the cheapest ones.

Getting Started With LinkedIn Ads the Right Way

LinkedIn advertising is one of the most powerful tools available to B2B marketers, but it demands a strategic approach. The cost per click is too high to wing it.

Here is a quick launch checklist:

• Define your ICP and map it to LinkedIn's targeting options
• Install the LinkedIn Insight Tag and configure conversion events
• Start with a single campaign objective and two to three ad variants
• Use lead gen forms for any gated content or offer
• Set a test budget of at least two to three thousand pounds per month
• Connect lead delivery to your CRM for immediate follow up
• Review performance weekly and optimise based on pipeline data, not just clicks

If you want expert help setting up and managing LinkedIn advertising campaigns that deliver qualified pipeline, ORRJO can help. Our lead generation and demand generation teams run LinkedIn programmes for B2B companies across the UK, Europe, and the US. Get in touch to discuss your goals.