LinkedIn is expensive, so only run it where nothing else can reach

LinkedIn is expensive, so only run it where nothing else can reach

The first decision is not which ad format to use. It is whether you should be on LinkedIn at all. The platform charges a premium that no other channel comes close to, often three to five times the cost per click of paid search or Meta. That price only makes sense for one reason, and you have to be honest about whether that reason applies to you.

The reason is targeting nobody else can match. LinkedIn knows people's job titles, seniority, company, company size, and industry, declared by the users themselves and kept current because their careers depend on it. If your buyer is a CFO at a manufacturing company with more than five hundred employees, no other platform can put your message in front of that exact person with that precision. That is what you are paying for, and it is worth a lot when your deal sizes are large.

So the rule is simple. Run LinkedIn ads when your buyer is precisely defined by who they are at work, and when a single closed deal is worth enough to absorb a high cost per acquisition. If you sell a ninety-pound-a-year tool to anyone with a credit card, LinkedIn will quietly drain your budget while cheaper channels do the job. If you sell a hundred-thousand-pound platform to heads of procurement, LinkedIn is the only place that finds them at scale.

Do the maths before you spend a penny. Take your average deal value, your typical close rate from a marketing lead, and work backwards to what you can afford to pay per click and per lead. On LinkedIn those numbers are uncomfortable, a click can cost six to twelve pounds and a qualified lead can cost well over a hundred. If your unit economics break at those numbers, the channel is wrong for you, and no clever targeting fixes broken maths.

This is the discipline most people skip, and it is why most LinkedIn ad accounts fail. They treat it as another channel to switch on, rather than a premium tool that earns its price only in narrow, high-value cases. Decide it deliberately, and you walk in with realistic expectations instead of a burned budget and a bad opinion of the platform.

INTERVIEW EWOUD: What deal size or buyer profile is your own line for "LinkedIn ads are worth it"? Have you ever talked a client out of LinkedIn because the maths did not work, and what did you point them to instead? INTERVIEW EWOUD: What is a realistic cost per qualified lead you have actually seen on LinkedIn for a B2B offer, and how did it compare to the other channels you ran alongside it?