🍝 The LinkedIn Play That Made Us $1.2M

Hey friend,

If you are counting down to 2026 (only 54 days left 🫠 ) and struggling to hit your Q4 targets, today’s newsletter is the play I recommend you run to do it. 

Last quarter, we spent $81K on LinkedIn Ads and influenced $1.2M in LTV… which is insane. Dreamdata’s 2025 benchmark report confirmed what I’ve been seeing in my dashboards all year: LinkedIn now has the highest ROAS across the big three paid channels.

The problem is most brands never get this return because they treat LinkedIn Ads like Google Ads. They use it to push generic messaging, set up vague targeting, and pay to distribute another gated eBook nobody asked for. 

If you haven’t seen ROI from LinkedIn Ads this year, run this simple, targeted Thought Leader Ads play that takes less than a day to set up 👇

Most B2B brands approach LinkedIn Ads in the worst possible way.

They run the same playbook as everyone else (single-image ads in saturated auctions) with the same looking creative. What happens next:

If you need to see ROI on this channel before 2026, focus on targeting segments you can dominate in the next 7 weeks based on audience penetration, frequency, and budget. 

Here's how to execute it this play 👇

What do prospects actually say is the reason they’re talking to you? This is the information you must start with for any effective ad campaign.

Pull together all the call transcripts from closed/won deals in Q3 and do some analysis. Take a shortcut here and get ChatGPT to do the heavy lifting. Load the transcripts into a chat with this prompt:

This will:

It takes 10 minutes and will give you the information you need to effectively position your thought leadership posts (which we will get to in a second.)

Most campaigns fail because budget is spread too thin or they target way too many people.

If your Total Addressable Market (TAM) is 140k across all segments, but your budget can only afford to reach them 5 times each with an ad, you'll barely move the needle.

Let me break that down a little further:

I used our LinkedIn Ads calculator to crunch these numbers. Plug your own CPMs and TAM numbers in to see where you are at 👇

But what if you just focus on one high-value segment within your TAM?

Here’s what to do:

Example: You identify three high-value segments inside your TAM and have $30K monthly budget left for Q4. Based on the numbers you pull from the calculator I shared above, is it possible to split that budget across each segment and saturate it? This is the quickest way to get some high-quality leads in your pipeline.

But for this to work, you need tight campaign targeting.

Targeting is the single most important lever you have on LinkedIn Ads, but the platform’s native targeting filters are complete garbage.

The workaround we use is to build third-party contact lists using tools like Primer based on exact job titles. It imports your target segment as a contact list (not job title targeting) and add seniority exclusions on top.

Here’s how it works:

Once you have this list loaded into your campaign, turn off Audience Expansion and LinkedIn Audience Network (LAN). These are set to ON by default when you create a new campaign, but turn them OFF so LinkedIn doesn’t waste your money on people who don’t fit into your target segment. Check this every single time.

CPMs will typically drop 20-40% just from tightening up targeting and you will spend budget on people who actually have buying power.

Thought Leader Ads have been the best performing LinkedIn Ads campaign we’ve ran this year. The key is to write content that organically resonates on the feed. 

For a sprint campaign like this, write six thought-leader posts for each target segment based on your customer research.

Each post should target pain points and share your solution/service differentiation. Here’s an example structure: 

Once each post is live, let it cook for 24-72 hours and monitor engagement, reach, impressions. 

These organic signals tell you if your post resonates. If it performs well, edit it, add a URL to your segment-specific landing page, then fold it into a Thought Leader Ads campaign.

If you’ve never set a Thought Leader Ads campaign up, here’s a quick walkthrough on how to do it 👇

This is how we target on-the-fence prospects to convert. Your retarget audience should focus on people who have engaged with your Thought Leader Ads and visited a high-intent page—like services, pricing or your contact page.

The quick and dirty way to run conversation ads is with:

Expect to see a 10-20% conversion rate on your conversation ads—this helps push the pipeline wins.

If your Q4 pipeline is underperforming, here is the checklist to get this play up and running quickly:

After you launch this, expect to see:

Week 1: 1-2 opps booked from retargeting campaigns
Weeks 2-4: Thought-leader posts building traction and influenced opps coming in
Month 2 onwards: Ramping to 10-20 opps per month (depending on audience size)

Remember, the above will ONLY work if you put in the foundational research work.

Analyzing calls, identifying pain points, and testing posts organically is what will make this play actually land.

There are 54 days left in Q4. Are you ready to test it out? 

Hope you've found this useful, catch ya in the next one!

🤘

Patrick

P.S. If you're spending more than $10K/month on LinkedIn Ads and your demos aren't ramping the way they should, I can help. I audit LinkedIn accounts regularly and can usually identify 2-3 quick wins that would immediately improve your ROAS. Hit me up for a quick audit!