LinkedIn ads The only platform that knows their job.
Everywhere else you buy an interest and hope a buyer is inside it. Here you buy a role, a seniority and a named organisation. That is why the clicks cost more, and why cost per click is the wrong number to judge it on.
250+ active client engagements · Australian council, cultural-institution and enterprise work · Public-sector clients named by sector and jurisdiction only
Seven ways B2B
budget vanishes.
LinkedIn punishes the same mistakes as every other platform, only they cost more here. These are the ones we find in almost every account we open.
Consumer tactics on a professional platform
A discount, an urgency line and a bright arrow. The person reading it has a procurement process, a budget cycle and three colleagues who also have to agree. Nothing about that responds to a countdown.
Targeting a job title and nothing else
“CFO” on its own is a title held in a two-person firm and in a listed company. Without company size, industry and seniority layered over it, half the audience could never buy what you sell.
An audience too small to deliver
LinkedIn will not run a campaign under a few hundred members, and it barely learns much above that. Stacking five filters until the audience is a thousand people feels precise and quietly stops the campaign working.
Lead Gen Forms asking for everything
The form allows up to a dozen fields, so people use a dozen. Every field past the fourth costs completions, and the ones that cost most are the ones LinkedIn cannot pre-fill.
Leads that go into a spreadsheet
A B2B lead has a shelf life measured in hours, not days. If the form submission is not landing in the CRM with the campaign attached, sales cannot follow up and marketing cannot prove anything.
Judging LinkedIn on cost per click
Clicks cost more here than anywhere else and always will, because of who is on the other end. The number that matters is cost per qualified opportunity, and most accounts have never calculated it.
Reporting that stops at the lead
In a market with a six-month buying cycle, a report that ends at form submissions cannot tell you whether any of it turned into revenue. Without pipeline written back, you are optimising toward a proxy.
One paragraph, read at work.
Between an industry announcement and a colleague's promotion. The reader is in work mode, moving quickly, and entirely willing to engage with a business problem — as long as it is theirs.
The opening line has to survive a feed of industry news read at speed. So it names the problem, not the product.
Then one clear next step, and nothing else.
The problem your buyer already has a budget line for.
The problem your buyer already has a budget line for.
So the first line names the problem, not the product.
The intro cuts off around 150 characters, which is one sentence written properly. It has to be the sentence that makes somebody with a budget line recognise their own situation — before any mention of what you sell.
Then the proof: a standard met, a comparison run, a number from a real engagement. In enterprise and government the person reading is rarely the person deciding, so the ad's real job is to give them something worth forwarding.
150
characters of intro text
Roughly where the feed cuts to “…see more”. Name the problem before that point or the ad is a logo with a link on it.
70
characters in the headline
The bold line under the image. Long headlines truncate, and a truncated headline is a sentence the reader has to finish themselves.
12
fields in a Lead Gen Form
The ceiling, not the target. Three or four LinkedIn can pre-fill is what gets completed; the rest is a landing page in disguise.
300
members, minimum audience
Below this LinkedIn will not deliver at all — and just above it, it barely learns. Precision has a floor.
300K
companies in one account list
The ceiling on an uploaded matched-audience list. Account-based targeting stops being a niche tactic at that scale.
30
days, default conversion window
Post-click, by default. In a market with a six-month buying cycle, that window is a reporting decision worth making on purpose.
LinkedIn product limits and platform defaults, not performance claims.
National cultural institution
A$634K
Of media kept working
From a A$750K annual budget, across always-on, surge and test
That engagement's agency fee
15.5%
Fee on annual media
Against a typical 18–22% holdco rate
SoudCoh · all channels
250+
Active client engagements
Google, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok and organic, run by one team
Figures trace to live engagements and are dated in the engagement record they come from. Public-sector and cultural clients are identified by sector and jurisdiction only, never by name and never by tender reference. None of it is a forecast for your account.
Ten things happen on a LinkedIn account. Here they are, in order.
This is the part most agency pages keep vague, and it is the only part that decides whether the money works. So it is written down.
Define the buyer before the audience
Industry, company size, the function that owns the budget, the title that signs and the titles that can veto. On LinkedIn that definition is a targeting setting rather than a slide, which is exactly why it has to be right.
Install the Insight Tag and a conversions API
Browser tracking alone loses conversions to privacy settings, and a long buying cycle makes that loss compound. Server-side conversions go in at the same time, with the events named for your pipeline rather than for the platform.
Layer the targeting instead of stacking it
Title plus seniority plus company size plus industry, checked against the audience size LinkedIn reports before anything launches. Too narrow does not deliver; too broad pays enterprise prices for people who cannot buy.
Upload the account list where one exists
Named-account targeting is the closest thing paid media has to a sales territory. If your team already has a target list, it becomes an audience, and the ads only reach people inside those organisations.
Write to the problem, not to the product
Professional audiences read in work mode, quickly, between industry updates. The opening line names something they already have a budget line for, and the proof is a case, a number or a standard rather than an adjective.
Give the committee something to forward
In enterprise and government, one reader rarely decides. Document ads, case studies and comparison pieces exist so the person who liked it has something to put in front of the four people who have to agree.
Keep Lead Gen Forms short
Name, work email, company and job title, pre-filled from the profile. Every extra field costs completions, and the qualifying questions belong in the follow-up call rather than in the ad unit.
Route leads to a person, in minutes
Straight into the CRM with the campaign, the audience and the creative attached, and an alert to whoever is calling. A B2B lead that waits two days has already spoken to somebody else.
Write pipeline back against the campaign
Opportunity created, opportunity value and closed revenue mapped to the campaign that produced them. That is the only way a cost per click that looks expensive can be shown to be cheap.
Report on the cycle the business actually runs
A fixed cadence, plus a quarterly read that matches how long your sales process really takes. Judging a six-month buying cycle on a thirty-day window is how good B2B campaigns get switched off early.
The first ninety days, honestly.
- Week 0
The audit and the first call
What you sell, who signs for it, what an opportunity is worth and how long the cycle takes. Then we open whatever exists — the ad account, the CRM, the Insight Tag — and write down what is missing.
- Week 1
Tracking and CRM routing
Insight Tag, server-side conversions, event definitions that match your pipeline stages, and lead delivery straight into the CRM. On a long cycle this is the difference between attribution and anecdote.
- Weeks 1–2
The build
Audience layers checked against reported sizes, account lists uploaded, campaign structure, ad copy, Lead Gen Forms and any document assets. A second person checks all of it. Nothing is live and nothing has spent.
- Day one
You press go
Campaigns are created paused so you and, where it applies, your procurement or communications team can read the whole build first. You activate when you are ready, not when we are.
- Weeks 2–8
Quality before volume
Early leads are checked with your sales team by name, not by count. Audiences that produce people who cannot buy are cut, and the ones producing real conversations get the budget.
- From there
Rhythm
Weekly optimisation, a monthly report, and a quarterly pipeline read that matches how long your sales cycle actually is. Creative is refreshed on a schedule so the same audience is not shown the same ad for a quarter.
Campaigns are created paused, every time. You read the build before a dollar moves — which also means your communications or procurement team can, where that matters.
B2B accounts live or die at the two ends of the six stages.
Compound is how our team works on any account — six stages every change passes through. On LinkedIn the first and the fourth carry the weight.
Mandate
You set the number before we spend the money.
LinkedIn clicks cost more than anywhere else, and they are supposed to. Agreeing what a qualified opportunity is worth — before launch, in writing — is what keeps the channel being judged on pipeline instead of on cost per click.
Countersign
Nothing reaches a live account with one name on it.
Enterprise and government audiences are small and unforgiving, and a careless targeting change can put your ad in front of a procurement panel mid-process. Every change is checked by a second person before it is pushed.
Enterprise and public sector, on the record.
Public-sector and cultural clients are described by sector and jurisdiction only — that is the confidentiality standard we hold, and we hold it whether or not it would be useful to name them here.
- Local government · Victoria100%compliance, 194 requirements14 weeks build to UAT · 34% lower ten-year cost than the SaaS comparatorMajor Victorian council
- Local government · Victoria5 of 5IAP2 engagement levelsA$33K five-year saving · 12,000+ forecast first-year participantsMetropolitan Victorian council
- Media buying · AustraliaA$634Kof media kept workingFrom a A$750K annual budget, at a 15.5% agency fee against a typical 18–22%National cultural institution
- All channels · five countries250+active client engagementsGoogle, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok and organic, run by one teamSoudCoh
Before you ask us anything
Here is what everybody asks first.
LinkedIn ads, answered.
Cost, timing, contracts, who owns the account, reporting, account-based targeting, and how public-sector work is handled.
The first call is free and there is no deck.
Talk to us about your adsLinkedIn carries higher click and impression costs than any other social platform, and it should — you are paying to reach a named role at a named company rather than an interest group. Two separate numbers apply. Your ad spend goes to LinkedIn, and the smallest companies we work with invest a minimum of A$3,000 a month, with our largest clients running multiple eight figures a month across paid channels. Our management fee is separate and scales with the work. The right budget depends on your audience size and your sales cycle, which is what the first call is for.
Lead Gen Form submissions can start within the first week, because the form pre-fills and takes seconds. Judging the channel takes longer than that, though: in B2B the honest read is at the end of a full sales cycle, not at the end of a month. We report leads weekly, lead quality with your sales team as it happens, and pipeline on a quarterly cadence that matches how your business actually buys.
No long-term lock-in. We would rather keep the work because it is producing than because a contract says you have to stay. What we do ask for is enough runway to be fair to the channel — LinkedIn judged over four weeks in a market with a six-month buying cycle is being judged before the first opportunity has had time to close. The terms are put in front of you in plain English before anything is signed.
Your LinkedIn company page stays yours throughout, and so does any account list you provide. We own and run the ad account itself, because the build is proprietary methodology refined across 250+ engagements — audience architecture, account-based targeting logic, creative testing frameworks and conversion tracking. You get full-visibility reporting on performance and spend at all times, and on long-term marketing agreements ownership and handover options are available to discuss.
We tell you, in the report, in plain English, and we change what we are doing. On LinkedIn that usually means the audience definition before the creative, because the wrong audience here is expensive in a way it is not elsewhere. If the honest answer is that your buyer is not reachable on this platform at a price that makes sense, we would rather move the budget to Google or to outbound support than keep billing you for it.
Cost per qualified opportunity and pipeline contribution, not cost per click. LinkedIn's conversion tracking connects to major CRMs, so leads carry the campaign, audience and creative that produced them all the way through to a closed deal. That link is what lets an expensive-looking click be shown to be cheap — and it is the piece missing from most of the accounts we take over.
Yes. LinkedIn's matched audiences accept an uploaded list of companies — up to 300,000 of them — and we layer job title, function and seniority over the top so the ads only reach decision-makers inside those organisations. If your sales team already works a target account list, that list becomes the audience, which is the closest paid media gets to supporting a defined territory.
Anything that makes the reader better at their job or helps them make a case internally. Industry insight, comparison pieces, standards and compliance explainers, and case studies with real numbers in them. Document ads work particularly well because the reader can preview the pages before downloading, and because the person who liked it now has something to forward to the four other people who have to agree.
Sponsored Content as single image, carousel or video in the feed; Message Ads delivered to the inbox when someone is active; Lead Gen Forms that pre-fill from the profile; and Document Ads for whitepapers, case studies and slide decks, gated or ungated depending on the goal. Most accounts run two or three together — one format to be found, one to be forwarded, and one to capture the person who is ready now.
Yes, and it is a meaningful part of what we do — including media buying and platform work for Australian councils and cultural institutions. Those engagements are described here by sector and jurisdiction only, because that is the confidentiality standard we hold ourselves to. Practically, public-sector work changes how a campaign is run: procurement timelines are fixed, messaging goes through approvals, accessibility standards apply to the landing pages, and every change is checked by a second person before it goes live.
That is one of the strongest things LinkedIn does. We take your target account list, layer the roles that matter inside each organisation, and run sequenced messaging so the account sees a problem piece, then proof, then an invitation — rather than the same ad forty times. Reporting is by account as well as by campaign, so your sales team can see which organisations are engaging before anybody picks up the phone.
It depends on the value of a customer and the length of the decision. Professional services, finance, construction, recruitment, healthcare, logistics and property all work well here, because the buyer is identifiable by role. If your average deal is small and the decision is made by one person on impulse, Meta will almost always be cheaper — and we will tell you that on the first call rather than after a quarter of spend.
LinkedIn is one of five ways we buy attention.
In B2B it is rarely the only one. The pattern that works most often is LinkedIn to be found by the right role, and Google to be there when that role starts researching.
- Facebook adsCheaper reach and broader audiences. Useful in B2B for retargeting and for recruitment, weaker for reaching a named role.
- Instagram adsWhere a professional services or property brand can show work rather than describe it. The same Meta account as Facebook.
- TikTok adsRarely the first choice for enterprise, but it reaches younger professionals and is the cheapest place to test a message.
- Where a briefed procurement lead goes nextWhere a procurement lead goes once they have been briefed. Search catches the demand LinkedIn creates, and most B2B accounts need both.
- The tag that makes any of this measurableInstalled once, it gives you conversion reporting, retargeting audiences and the company-level data LinkedIn will not show otherwise.
- How LinkedIn compares to the other channelsThe hub above this page. Worth reading before committing to the most expensive click in Australian advertising.
- Proving a six-month pipeline started hereHow a form submission becomes a pipeline number. On a six-month buying cycle nothing on this page can be proven without it.
Two briefings bear directly on business-to-business targeting: where first-party data clean rooms are stalling, and why dirty CRM data wastes the most expensive clicks you buy.
Get the B2B audit
We size the audience your buyer actually sits in, read what your account has been spending on, check whether leads reach your CRM with the campaign attached, and price what it would take to reach your target accounts. Yours to keep either way.
No pitch deck. No upsell. A real conversation and a written list of leaks.
