PAID MEDIA
BEST B2B TARGETING, WORST CPCS?
LinkedIn Ads that justify LinkedIn prices.
Nowhere else can you target by job title, company, and industry with this precision - and nowhere else punishes sloppy campaigns this expensively. Precision is the whole game.
LinkedIn is where our reputation was built. LinkedIn even said so - they featured our Khoros campaigns as an official customer story on their marketing solutions site.
The numbers behind it: 60% of all qualified ANZ leads from LinkedIn, lead targets beaten quarter after quarter, total spend reduced while results improved.
How we run LinkedIn
- Targeting mined from real winners: we analyse past qualified inquiries at scale: their profiles, skills, and career histories. That tells us who converts, and it sharpens audiences well beyond job titles and negative company lists.
- Creative with six years of receipts: we know what resonates because we've been testing it continuously; AI-themed content, for instance, has out-performed for our enterprise SaaS clients for six years running. Prospects decide in the first line - the copy has to land immediately.
- Mobile-first builds: decision-makers scroll LinkedIn on their phones, and the mobile-friendly ad versions consistently outperform. We design for the phone screen first, on LinkedIn and Meta alike.
- The sales loop closed: regular feedback on lead quality feeds targeting. This is the single biggest difference between accounts that compound and accounts that plateau.
- Waste actively hunted: audience expansion off, exclusion lists maintained, targeting pollution (looking at you, consulting firms) filtered out.
Localisation, since we've tested it properly
We've run LinkedIn globally, EMEA-only, and ANZ-only, so we've been able to test this rather than guess: local angles, local pain points, local language beat the global creative. Not by as much as some other adjustments - but at serious spend levels, the gain comfortably pays for the localised asset production and then some.
The strongest receipts came from an enterprise B2B client: in test phases, localised creative drove roughly 98% of leads, at a lower cost per lead. Global strategy, local execution. Most advertisers ship the same ad to Sydney and Stuttgart and wonder why one region lags.
One more thing worth knowing: LinkedIn's targeting is also available somewhere cheaper than LinkedIn. Microsoft Ads lets you bid by job function and company inside search campaigns, and we usually run the two together.
LinkedIn is a premium channel that only works with matching discipline. Most advertisers pay the premium and skip the discipline.
We've done this before
ENTERPRISE CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT SAAS, GLOBAL
Khoros
60% of qualified ANZ leads from one channel.
ENTERPRISE CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT SAAS, GLOBAL
Khoros
ABM that aligned marketing and sales in weeks.
INCIDENT RESPONSE PLATFORM, GLOBAL
PagerDuty
Local expertise, global impact. A multi-year partnership that keeps delivering.
Questions we get asked
LinkedIn CPCs terrify our finance team. How do you make the maths work?
By judging it on cost per qualified opportunity, not cost per click. LinkedIn clicks cost multiples of Facebook's - and routinely produce leads worth many multiples more. When that ratio doesn't hold for your business, we'll be the ones telling you to spend elsewhere.
Lead gen forms or landing pages?
Forms convert better and qualify worse; landing pages the reverse. We usually run both deliberately - forms for volume plays with tight downstream filtering, pages where the offer needs selling. The data decides the mix.
Does ABM on LinkedIn actually work?
Yes, when the account list is real and sales is genuinely working it. We've run ABM that reached senior decision-makers at named accounts while surfacing high-intent contacts nobody had on the list. Without sales alignment, though, it's just expensive display.
One thing to check on our account today?
Audience expansion - make sure it's off. LinkedIn turns it on without asking and it dilutes exactly the precision you're paying premium CPCs to get. Then look at whether consulting firm employees are polluting your targeting; we wrote a post on it.
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Want this handled properly?
Tell us where you're at. We'll tell you what we'd do - and what it costs.