🍝 How We Cracked LinkedIn (Part 2)

Hey friend,

Yesterday, I walked you through the first part of our highest-performing LinkedIn Ads recipe this year: Thought Leadership Ads. 

The first part of the recipe was all about tweaking ad targeting to maximize budget:

Let’s get stuck into the second half of this recipe—the exact campaign setup we use to turn Thought Leader Ads into our cheapest acquisition channel 👇

Box 1: Organic Performance Signals

Engagement, reach, impressions. These organic signals are signs your post is resonating with your audience. I also look out for strong dwell time on a post, as it indicates people actually took the time to read it (even if they didn’t engage with it.)

We let posts cook for 24-72 hours before evaluating whether or not they are a good fit for spend. To be honest, this is enough time to build momentum and get decent reach if the audience on LinkedIn found it valuable. 

Box 2: Clear Value Prop

Every post with spend behind it must solve a real problem your audience has. Keep it simple and hit two marks:

Box 3: Business Tie Back

No matter how well a post performs, only add it to a Thought Leader campaign if it ties back to your business. I don’t like to anger the algo, so I retroactively edit a post once it has shown strong organic signals and add a CTA like: 

"Struggling to get your LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads to generate revenue? DM me for a free marketing plan. We will put together a strategy that shows you exactly how to do it."

This works because when someone reads my post about LinkedIn strategy, the mental association is immediate: 

If your post doesn't check everything on this list—don’t post it. 

When we audit new accounts at KlientBoost, there is one mistake we always spot in low-performing Thought Leader campaigns: They aren’t optimized for reach.

Brand Awareness is the ONLY LinkedIn objective with a built-in mechanism to maximize audience penetration, but you must set it up correctly. Here are the exact levers we pull:  

The last one is very important. 

Single image format lets you promote text-only posts. You can't do this with company page posts, but you CAN with posts from individuals. 

The final part of the recipe is to measure which ads work so you make the right budget decisions. I’ve found the best way to justify LinkedIn Ad spend is to track leading and lagging indicators across campaigns:

Leading indicators will show up quickly:

↳ Audience penetration (we're aiming for 50%+ of our 180K audience)
↳ Frequency (shoot for 10+, we're hitting about 8 right now)
↳ Engagement rate + dwell time (if these are low, you need a content refresh)

Lagging indicators (usually metrics tied to KPIs and pipeline) can show up weeks, months or even years later:

↳ MQLs and SQLs with LinkedIn touchpoints
↳ Pipeline influence
↳ Closed deals over 6+ month periods

I recently wrote about how I tie these indicators together and defend my LinkedIn Ad spend to the CEO if you want to check it out 👇

If you run Thought Leader campaigns that don’t drive pipeline, it’s usually down to:

Want to run a revenue-generating Thought Leader campaign like the ones I’ve talked about?

Grab a free marketing plan below and we will help build high-performing campaigns for your business. We'll map out your targeting strategy, identify your content angles, and give you the whole playbook.

Hope you’ve found this useful and I’ll catch ya in the next one!

🤘

Patrick