Hey friend,
Here's something that'll probably surprise most marketers reading this: Our thought leadership ad campaigns get the biggest chunk of our LinkedIn budget.
Not our "high-intent" campaigns. Not retargeting. Awareness campaigns.
Our LinkedIn Campaign Manager dashboard showing spend from July. Thought leadership campaigns easily get the most budget!
Awareness campaigns are delivering huge right now in the form of thought leadership ads plays that give:
↳ Reasonably low CPMs for LinkedIn
↳ Massive qualified reach and targeted awareness plays
↳ Actual ROI that beats everything else right now
A recent post had 67 comments and 200+ engagements 👇
But what you can’t see is that same post turned into 3 closed deals.
When you stop treating organic reach as the end game and start using it as the qualification signal for your paid strategy, everything changes 👇
Your Target Market’s Mental Availability Problem
Most B2B thought leadership plays fail because they don’t pass a basic marketing psychology sniff test.
Your "hot take on AI" might get 1000 likes. But if it doesn't connect your brand to a painful problem you solve, those likes are just expensive ego boosts.
Every promoted post needs three things:
Legit organic performance (high reach + engagement)
Clear value proposition (solves a real problem)
Business connection (ties your service/product to their pain)
Most brands nail #1. But they ignore #2 and completely forget #3.
The problem is, 95% of your target audience is out-market right now, so if you run thought leader ads that ignore #2 and #3, there isn’t a way to build association with your brand. Byron Sharp calls this "mental availability", which is your ability to come to mind when buyers do enter the market.
The goal with these campaigns is to hit as many people as possible with enough frequency that they remember us.
Thought leadership campaigns solve the problem of how to squeeze great organic content when the algorithm decides the audience has had enough of it. Even if organic thought leadership posts perform well initially, they reach 5-10% of your target audience before the algo buries them.
These ads simply put $$$ behind posts your audience already loves to reach more of ‘em. Despite all the crazy algorithm changes this year, thought leadership ads have been a consistent, low-cost / high-ROI channel for and our clients:
Brand awareness objectives are our lowest CPC play on LinkedIn. The average is just $1.75 across our portfolio of 200+ clients
For our own campaigns, average CTRs hover around 5% and CPCs are under a buck!
CPMs have dropped hugely since the start of the year (avg. is now under $22)
Thought leadership ads with brand awareness objectives are the most cost-efficient ad play across our entire client portfolio right now.
The process to set these up isn’t a simple one, so I’m going to share my entire process with you to make it easier.
The KB LinkedIn Thought Leadership Ads Recipe
Part 1. The Strategic Layering Framework
Before you launch a thought leadership campaign, use organic performance as a qualification system for paid promotion. It's like having your audience vote on what deserves ad spend 👇
↳ Step 1: Post organic thought leadership content normally
↳ Step 2: Wait 24-72 hours to see what resonates (use reach + engagement as your baseline metrics)
↳ Step 3: Promote high-performing posts to your ENTIRE target audience
↳ Step 4: Optimize for maximum audience penetration and frequency
This creates a compound effect and increases mental availability across your total addressable market.
When someone moves from out-market to in-market, they will remember the one they’ve seen solving their exact problems multiple times.
Part 2. Fix Your LinkedIn Ads Targeting
LinkedIn thought leadership ads (and the ads on the platform in general) have a fundamental problem that burns through most budgets: targeting.
You can target geos and job titles, but most campaigns don’t go deeper than that.
Let’s say your ICP is something like: Marketers at SaaS companies with $10m/ARR. If you plug that into Campaign Manager, it’ll also serve ads up to:
Brand marketers
Marketing apprentices
Product marketing managers
Marketing developer
This is a huge budget waste when the person you really want to hit also controls the purse strings: likely the marketing director, VP or CMO.
Crap targeting is super time consuming and annoying to clean up, but we found a workaround: We import our job title audiences through a third-party platform called Primer which lets us:
Build job title audiences with proper seniority filtering (a.k.a those who actually control a budget)
Include marketing, demand gen, revenue - anyone in these roles working at companies that also match our ICP’s target ARR
Exclude entry-level/training roles along with other roles where the target won’t be in charge of buying decisions. We also exclude our competitors and other edge cases (like self-employed people)
We also add "reverse ICP exclusions”, which is a contact list of companies that don’t match our ICP for an extra layer of targeting refinement.
After this is set up correctly, zero audience cleanup is required and it’s time to build the actual campaigns out.
Tomorrow, I'll show you the exact campaign setup we use to turn thought leadership ads into our cheapest acquisition channel. It has some real tactical secrets that most agencies charge $$$ for!
Patrick
🤘