LinkedIn is widely recognised as the world’s largest professional networking platform. For businesses looking to extend their reach and build strategic connections, it is a valuable tool to promote services, share expertise and generate leads by reaching the right audience.
While platforms such as Meta tend to be used for consumer ad campaigns, LinkedIn is designed around industry engagement and networking, making it particularly suitable for business-to-business (B2B) communications. Instead of encouraging one-time purchases, LinkedIn ads focus on building credibility and developing professional relationships over time.
This guide outlines how companies can use LinkedIn ads as part of an effective B2B marketing strategy. From choosing the right objective and audience to understanding how to adapt messaging and optimise campaigns, it provides a practical insight into advertising on LinkedIn.
At Carrington, we support businesses to grow through digital marketing and paid advertising. Our team works across platforms like LinkedIn to build strategic ad campaigns that meet your communication goals.
Choosing a strategic objective
Launching an ad campaign on LinkedIn begins with setting a campaign objective, which determines how ads are delivered and what type of results they are optimised for. There are three main categories for these objectives: awareness, consideration and conversions. Unlike business-to-consumer (B2C) advertising, where campaigns are often designed for quicker results, LinkedIn ads support a more gradual approach to B2B communications.
Because B2B marketing often involves longer timelines with multiple stakeholders, LinkedIn campaigns progress from awareness and engagement to focusing on lead generation or conversions. Choosing the right objective helps to ensure the campaign is aligned with these stages and reaches the professionals who are most likely to take action.
Awareness
Building brand awareness is often the first step in an effective B2B ad campaign. This goal focuses on maximising the visibility of ads to relevant users, helping to increase brand familiarity and recognition.
Consideration
Once awareness has been established, the next step is encouraging engagement. This objective focuses on driving actions like website visits, post interactions or video views, helping professionals learn more about your business and services.
Conversions
The final stage encourages professionals to take a measurable action, such as applying for a job or filling out an enquiry form. Many of these conversions take place directly within the platform. Conversion campaigns are most effective when awareness and consideration have been established by earlier content.
Understanding the LinkedIn ad funnel
The process of moving audiences from awareness to engagement and ultimately conversions is known as a marketing funnel. On LinkedIn, adopting a strategic approach over multiple ads or campaigns is recommended, as users typically need several interactions with a brand before taking action.
In practice, the LinkedIn funnel can begin with content like thought leadership or industry reports, with video and document ad formats often performing well. As audiences begin to interact with content, consideration campaigns build on this interest and can retarget users who have watched videos or engaged with posts.
By building familiarity and trust, the funnel approach leads to specific actions like submitting details through a lead generation form, turning early engagement into meaningful business opportunities.
Targeting the right professionals
A key advantage of LinkedIn is its ability to show ads to highly specific professional audiences. Instead of relying on interests or browsing behaviour, LinkedIn uses self-reported data such as job titles, experience, industry and company size to help advertisers reach relevant audiences.
For example, a marketing agency promoting its services to financial companies might target marketing directors or senior executives in financial services. They could refine the audience with factors like seniority level or company size. By combining targeting characteristics, advertisers can direct their content to the most appropriate users.
Using data to optimise campaigns
Since LinkedIn ads perform better with a funnel structure, performance improves gradually. Ad platforms also have a testing stage to work out which ad formats are most effective at driving engagement.
Advertisers can use key performance indicators such as impressions, clicks and conversions to monitor if their ads are producing results. To measure engagement even more accurately, businesses can use a LinkedIn insight tag to track website actions like page visits.
Optimising campaigns typically involves trying different hooks or copy options and adapting targeting factors to identify the best approach. By monitoring results and refining campaigns over time, businesses can improve engagement and generate higher-quality leads to ensure that their ads deliver value.
LinkedIn ads are a powerful tool for companies to engage with professional audiences and other businesses. By setting strategic objectives, using the right targeting methods, and structuring campaigns around the LinkedIn funnel, ads can progress from building awareness and engagement to lead generation.
At Carrington, we help to deliver ad campaigns that meet your business goals. To find out more about our PPC and advertising services, get in touch now.
