I work with B2B SaaS founders that want to run LinkedIn ads and often we look for organic engagement as a signal if we should promote a post or not. Here is why that signal might not be reliable.

Majority of your LinkedIn contacts are not your potential customers.

They are ex-colleagues from your previous jobs, careers, industries. Your study buddies and friends.

So when you write something really cool and insightful about a paint point for your ICP. It might not resonate with your mate Jack from Uni days.

I was auditing ad account for a new B2B SaaS client that I am onboarding.

They’ve been running LinkedIn ads for last couple of years and invested decent chunk of change but seeing limited results. While other channels (e.g. paid search) are bringing in consistent leads.

That tells me two things. One. The client has a product-market-fit. They are already converting on other channels. Two. LinkedIn ads set up is most likely off. Time to investigate.

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I've had several calls recently with B2B SaaS founders, reaching out, trying to figure out when to start running LinkedIn ads. Most of the time the trigger and insight is dead simple. “My audience is on LinkedIn. What’s the best way to reach them?”

That is a great starting point, but having an active audience alone is not enough.

There are other pre-conditions that can make or break your LinkedIn ads.

We have a client where we are running cold layer play. We run promoted posts as well as image ads against the same company list.

Promoted posts of course get lower CPC, as it’s a founder post, not an ad. But what is fascinating is that more people actually convert on the image ads instead.

They see the post, like the story, then an image ad gets served in the mix, and they end up booking the demo from the image ad.

Key caveat. This is not retargeting play.

For context - LinkedIn released a new feature. It allows you to personalize the intro text for image ads, calling out your name, your job title or your company.

E.g. “Hey X, you need to try product Y, it’s perfect for your company Z needs.” Basically, what cold email has had for gazillion years. Now it’s finally available in one of the most popular LinkedIn ad formats, single image ads.

I don’t know what I expected, a massive boost in engagement and CTR, but also quietly hoping for a higher lead volume.

On the first point (CTR), LinkedIn delivered.

We’ve all seen the lead magnet posts. AI bros giving away their “secrets” how to create a perfect funnel and do everything on autopilot. Mostly it’s GTM, but the same thing applies to LinkedIn ads.

It’s always looking incredibly complex. 10 different tools, this, then that, then this, then that. Leading to too good to be true revenue numbers.

That is because complexity sells. If we see something complex we intuitively feel we could never do that ourselves, we need the AI bro’s, we need the flows.

You don’t.

What you need is to simplify everything and do the basics well.

When running manual bidding in LinkedIn ads, you have to set a bid that you are willing to pay. But here is the thing. You almost always pay less than your bid.

Why?

Because your bid price is just to win the auction for that specific impression. But you will be charged only 1 cent more than the second-highest bid.

LinkedIn native targeting can be hit-and-miss. Sometimes it works. But often, it pulls in too many irrelevant companies when you do industry targeting. There’s a lot of waste.

So here’s what I do instead.

Use Clay “find companies” feature. You can narrow it down much more and use keywords for more precise targeting.

Five? Thirty-five? A hundred?

We are talking about “book a demo” leads, not emails from content download or webinar signups.

The answer would be, it depends.

It depends on your budget, product-market-fit, audience, category, other channels, landing page, creative, timeline, sales follow-up etc.

Once you play around with LinkedIn ads for a while, you realise there are many hidden landmines in audience targeting.

Job supertitles pulling in many irrelevant job titles. Competitors, recruiters and jobseekers visiting your website or company page. Too large or too small companies you can't serve.

LinkedIn targeting is precise, compared to other social platforms, but it is not that precise. So for a campaign to be efficient, you have to add a lot of exclusions. People you do not want to reach.

There are about 20 different things that you have to set up, to make your ads perform reasonably well. From ad format, bidding, objective, creative etc.

But none of that matters if you get your target audience wrong. Unfortunately, most B2B brand ads fall flat on their face on the first hurdle.

By far the most common issue is that the target audience is too big for the budget.