How to advertise on LinkedIn: a guide for business-to-business sales

Who is LinkedIn advertising suitable for?

LinkedIn ads are targeted using the work information people enter in their own profiles: the company they work for, their job title, seniority, industry and skills. Because users mostly come to the platform with work on their minds, a professional offer feels more natural here. This is valuable for businesses that sell to other companies. In fields such as software, consulting, industrial products, logistics, corporate training and professional services, it is one of the clearest ways to reach decision-makers directly.

For a business selling low-priced products to consumers, however, LinkedIn is often an expensive and indirect channel. We explain the platform's role in business sales and our campaign approach on our LinkedIn platform page.

How do you start advertising on LinkedIn?

1. 1.Company page: Ads are published in the name of a LinkedIn company page. Prepare the page with a logo, description and recent posts; people who see the ad often look at the page too.
2. 2.Campaign Manager account: Open the ad account, associate it with the company page, add a payment method and give team members permissions that match their roles.
3. 3.Insight Tag: Add the LinkedIn Insight Tag to every page of the site. It is needed to retarget site visitors, measure conversions and see the company and industry breakdown of visitors.
4. 4.Conversion definition: Define actions such as form submissions, demo requests or document downloads as conversions.
5. 5.Campaign group and campaign: Group campaigns by purpose or stage, and monitor budget and schedule at group level.

How do you set up targeting on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn targeting works by combining profile data. The most commonly used criteria are:

• Company criteria: Company name, industry, company size and the country where the company is based.
• Role criteria: Job title, job function, seniority, skills and years of experience.
• Matched Audiences: Site visitors, company or contact lists you upload, people who watched your videos and people who opened your form.

Targeting by job title alone can be narrow and fragile; the same role goes by different names at different companies. Using job function and seniority together often gives a more accurate and broader audience. By uploading a target company list you can run account-based marketing. Switch Audience Expansion on or off deliberately; when it is left on, the ad can also be shown to people outside the profile you defined. Before launching the campaign, check the estimated audience size and breakdown that Campaign Manager shows.

Which LinkedIn ad format should you choose?

• Single image ad: The standard sponsored content that appears in the feed. Suitable for a clear message and a single action.
• Document ad: Lets people read documents such as guides, checklists or research page by page in the feed; a form can be required for the full document.
• Video ad: To show the product, let an expert speak or tell a customer's story.
• Message and conversation ads: Sent to the person's LinkedIn inbox. Suitable for personal, time-bound offers such as event invitations; they can feel intrusive as a general sales message.
• Thought Leader ad: Runs a post that an executive or employee shared from their own profile as an ad. A personal voice can inspire more trust than a company page.

In the creative, describe a concrete problem the target person faces at work, in their own language, rather than using generic slogans. Decision-makers stop in the feed for an insight specific to their sector or a piece of useful information more than for polished visuals.

How do you use Lead Gen Forms?

Lead Gen Forms are forms that open inside the ad, with details such as the user's name, email, company and job title filled in automatically from their profile. Because users can apply without going to the site, the effort of filling in a form drops. On the other hand, easy forms can also bring enquiries with weak intent. Rather than making the form shorter than it should be, adding a few questions that separate quality enquiries protects the sales team's time. Calling or emailing leads quickly matters at least as much as the ad itself.

How do you stage campaigns by sales cycle?

In business sales, decisions are made by several people over a long process. So instead of showing everyone the same ad, campaigns need to be split into stages:

1. 1.Awareness: Introduce yourself to the wider decision team at target companies with video, Thought Leader ads and useful content.
2. 2.Consideration: Retarget people who engaged and site visitors with document ads, case stories and webinars.
3. 3.Decision: Offer the warm audience a concrete next step such as a demo, a proposal meeting or a preliminary assessment.

Our lead generation service page covers the channels for reaching companies and shows where LinkedIn sits within that plan.

What should you watch in your first LinkedIn campaign?

• Use a single audience and a single message in each campaign. Putting different roles in the same campaign makes the report unreadable.
• Switch delivery on partner sites outside LinkedIn, the LinkedIn Audience Network, on or off deliberately; assess it separately for brand safety and measurement.
• Rather than showing many ads to the same audience at once, start with a small number of strong creatives and watch frequency.
• In the first days of delivery, open the demographics report and check that the ad is really being shown to the companies and job titles you targeted.
• Before the campaign starts, agree how and how quickly the sales team will follow up incoming leads.

Why is LinkedIn advertising seen as expensive?

Cost on LinkedIn is also formed in an auction, but a few factors set it apart from consumer platforms. The target audience is narrow and valuable: many companies wanting to reach decision-makers with the same job title compete in the same auction. Alongside the bid, the ad's relevance is taken into account; ads that get no engagement are delivered at a higher price. Audience size, the chosen objective, bidding strategy and season also affect cost. So it is more accurate to judge LinkedIn not by cost per click but by the cost of a sales opportunity or a won deal. LinkedIn changes minimum budgets and bids from time to time, so check current conditions in Campaign Manager.

Why is CRM integration necessary?

In business sales, a long time can pass between the first form and a signed contract. The number of leads in the ad dashboard does not show which campaign actually brought in sales. Connecting Lead Gen Forms to common CRM and marketing automation tools lets leads reach the sales team without being transferred by hand. Sending later stages such as qualified leads and sales opportunities back to LinkedIn through the Conversions API improves both reporting and bid optimisation.

This requires sales and marketing teams to share a common language. Which leads count as qualified, how quickly the sales team will respond to a lead and which CRM field the outcome is recorded in should all be written down from the start. Without this definition, the ad team talks about form numbers, the sales team talks about closed deals, and the teams reach different conclusions about the same campaign. In monthly reviews, compare campaigns by the cost of qualified leads and sales opportunities as well as the cost per lead.

When should you get agency support for LinkedIn advertising?

A campaign offering a single proposition to a narrow audience can be run by an in-house team. Specialist support makes a difference if you need to reach several countries, products or groups of decision-makers at once, want to connect ads with your CRM and sales process, or lack the resources to keep producing content regularly. We explain our way of working on LinkedIn, TikTok and YouTube on our service page, and our lead generation process on our lead generation service page. To assess your target audience together, you can write to us via our contact page.