How to Run Ad Campaigns on LinkedIn
LinkedIn has become an important platform for B2B marketing, professional networking, recruitment, and thought leadership. While it still has a smaller user base than platforms such as Meta, LinkedIn offers unique targeting capabilities that make it especially valuable for businesses looking to reach specific decision-makers and professionals.
I’ve helped several clients manage their LinkedIn presence, including company pages, recruitment marketing through LinkedIn Recruiter and Jobs, and LinkedIn advertising campaigns. To access these features, you’ll first need to create a LinkedIn account and company page. This post provides an overview of how to get started with LinkedIn advertising, including targeting options, budgeting considerations, and ad formats.
Targeting Options
LinkedIn’s unique advantage over other platforms such as Google and Meta lies in its ability to target users based on professional attributes, including company, job title, job function, seniority, industry, skills, and education.
When creating your campaigns, start with an audience that closely matches your ideal customer profile. If delivery is limited, you can gradually expand your targeting while maintaining relevance.
For example, if your target audience is marketing decision-makers, you may create separate campaigns for CMOs, Directors of Marketing, and Marketing Managers to better understand which audience segments perform best.
You can also exclude audiences that are unlikely to convert. For example, if you’re promoting enterprise software, you may want to exclude recruiters, sales professionals, students, or other groups outside your target market.
Cost
LinkedIn ads are generally more expensive than most other social media advertising platforms. However, the platform’s ability to target specific professionals often results in higher-quality leads, making it particularly attractive for B2B advertisers.
Because costs vary significantly by industry, geography, and audience size, it’s best to focus on lead quality and business outcomes rather than benchmark CPCs alone.
When testing LinkedIn advertising for the first time, make sure your budget is large enough to generate meaningful data before evaluating performance. A testing budget that is too small may not allow the platform’s optimization algorithms to gather enough conversion data.
If your campaigns consistently spend their budget early in the day, consider adjusting bids, expanding your audience, or increasing your budget.
Ad Formats
LinkedIn offers a variety of ad formats, each suited to different objectives.
Text Ads
Text Ads appear on the desktop version of LinkedIn, typically in the right-hand sidebar. Because they receive less visibility than feed-based ad formats, click-through rates tend to be lower.
Text Ads can be useful when:
- Your budget is limited.
- Your goal is lead generation through desktop-focused landing pages.
- You do not have access to strong visual creative assets.
- You want to generate additional awareness at a relatively low cost.
Text Ads only require a small image, and many advertisers simply use their company logo.
Sponsored Content
Sponsored Content remains one of the most commonly used LinkedIn ad formats. These ads appear directly in users’ feeds and support a variety of formats, including single image ads, carousel ads, video ads, and event promotion ads.
Sponsored Content is suitable for most campaign objectives, including brand awareness, lead generation, webinar registrations, and content promotion.
If you’re offering valuable gated content such as industry reports, research studies, webinars, or whitepapers, Sponsored Content can be an effective lead generation tool.
Lead Gen Forms
Lead gen forms are one of LinkedIn’s most valuable advertising features.
Instead of directing users to an external landing page, Lead gen forms allow prospects to submit their information directly within LinkedIn using pre-filled profile data. This reduces friction and can often improve conversion rates compared to traditional landing pages.
Lead gen roms work particularly well for whitepaper downloads, webinar registrations, event signups, demo requests, and newsletter subscriptions.
Document Ads
Document Ads allow advertisers to promote PDFs and other downloadable content directly within the LinkedIn feed. This format works well for industry reports, research papers, case studies, product guides, and whitepapers. Users can preview content before deciding whether to submit their information, helping improve lead quality.
Message Ads and Conversation Ads
Message Ads (previously known as Sponsored InMail) allow advertisers to send promotional messages directly to users through LinkedIn Messaging. Conversation Ads expand on this concept by allowing users to select from multiple call-to-action buttons and navigate different message paths.
These formats work best when offering something genuinely valuable, such as invitations to exclusive events, webinar registrations, product demos, and industry research. As with email marketing, personalization and relevance are critical to success. Avoid sending overly promotional messages and focus on providing value to the recipient. It’s also important to ensure that the sender’s LinkedIn profile is complete and credible, as users are more likely to engage with messages from professionals who have fully developed profiles. Keep in mind that you cannot choose individual recipients. Message Ads and Conversation Ads still rely on audience targeting criteria similar to other LinkedIn ad formats.
If you’re conducting direct outreach to specific prospects, LinkedIn Sales Navigator may be a more suitable solution.