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It’s become a cliché that the first thing a marketing leader wants to do is change the website. Well, dear readers, I’ve been that cliché… more than once.
And I’ve lived to regret it. The refreshed website looked good, but it didn’t move the rest of the funnel.
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👋 Hi, it’s Kyle and welcome to Growth Unhinged, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing startups.
In this newsletter I try to cover a wide spectrum of GTM. But there’s been a glaring gap: paid acquisition. For B2B, this increasingly means LinkedIn advertising. While far from cheap, LinkedIn ads have reach and the potential for hyper-precise targeting (as I featured previously).
Up today: a playbook for LinkedIn ads from performance marketer Bogdan Liutic. Bogdan runs CR8, a tech-forward LinkedIn ads agency, and has founded two 7-figure businesses built on performance marketing.
A senior B2B buyer takes six to eight touches before they even consider booking a call with you.
That's why ads by themselves, directing to book a demo or call, are not enough. That's why cold outreach by itself is not enough. And content by itself is not enough.
What you want is a flow. My LinkedIn ad playbook took me 14 years in growth marketing to figure out, and I’ve compressed it to 10 minutes of your time. You’ll walk away with:
Clarity on how LinkedIn ads actually work, what works, and what doesn't
A map for your own LinkedIn ad campaign
How to drop cost per lead with very specific hacks
We all know LinkedIn ads are expensive, right?
I had a call with this client, let’s call him Mark. He targets CHROs of companies with 100+ employees in regulated industries. He wants more deals.
I asked him the classic discovery question: “What you tried before?”
“Well… In the last 8 months I’ve spent $30k on Linkedin ads and got 2 leads a month. Maybe 12 leads total, and 8 or 9 of those were the wrong type of lead."
I am telling you this story to illustrate a simple message. If you don’t nail the fundamentals, no amount of tactics will save you. So, let’s do the fundamentals.
To understand when LinkedIn ads do work, I propose to do the Charlie Munger move: invert. Understand when they don't work.
First: your average contract value (ACV) or lifetime value (LTV) should be at least $10,000. Otherwise the math just doesn’t fit.
The cost per thousand impressions (CPM) on LinkedIn is $37.42 on average according to Dreamdata, roughly 3-4x Meta's $10.01. Expensive impressions are fine when one deal pays for months of them; at sub-$10k LTV, it’s tough.
Second: your total addressable market (TAM) on the decision-maker level should be at least 10,000 people. People are not sitting on LinkedIn all the time (surprise!). You need critical mass for LinkedIn ads to work at any given moment. Less than that, do direct outreach, do events.
Third, the obvious one: your ICP should actually be on LinkedIn. Selling to construction crews, cold calling is probably better. Selling to HR leaders, to C-level folks, good bet.
There's a reason LinkedIn ads are so expensive: the senior decision-makers ARE there. (And measured correctly, it's actually a cheap channel. It has the lowest cost-per-company-influenced of any social network at $76.42, and the only one with positive return-on-ad-spend; same Dreamdata 2026 report.)
Want to do a self-check-up? Use this live calculator and put in your LTV, close rate (what percentage of qualified sales conversations you actually close), show rate, and media budget.
The goal is the LTV:CAC ratio: 3+ is a green light, 2-3 is workable, below 2, walk away.
Here’s an example:
The company has a $30k LTV, 22% close rate, and 75% show-up rate.
They spend $3,000 per month on LinkedIn ads.
They can expect ~45 leads per quarter at ~$200 cost-per-lead.
These leads convert to ~15 completed meetings and ~3 deals per quarter.
The CAC is ~$3k on media spend alone, translating to ~3:1 LTV:CAC all-in once fees and sales compensation are included.
Verdict: LinkedIn ads are scalable.
One nuance: the average B2B customer journey is now 272 days from first marketing touch to closed revenue, and 81% of it happens before the sales pipeline based on a Dreamdata study of 3.5 million journeys. This includes 88 touches, 10 stakeholders, and 4 channels.
The ads help get you the sales call. There’s plenty of sales work to close the deal.