LinkedIn Ads
What it is
B2B advertising targeted by employer, role and seniority. No other platform lets you put an offer in front of a defined professional segment with this much certainty about who is in it.
What it’s good at
Precision on firmographics: finance leaders in Nordic manufacturing above two hundred employees is a buildable audience here and a guess everywhere else. Account-based work, where the audience is a list of named companies. Employer brand and hiring, where the professional context does half the persuasion.
What it costs to own
The cost per impression is unforgiving, so waste compounds faster than on any other channel. Creative and offer quality carry more weight per impression; a weak ad burns budget at a rate Meta would forgive. Someone must rotate concepts before frequency numbs the audience, and the offer itself needs design work, because what you ask a cold professional to do decides the outcome.
When it’s a poor fit
It fits poorly when the deal value cannot carry the CPMs. The arithmetic is average deal size, close rate and the impressions needed for one qualified lead; if it balances only on heroic conversion rates, it usually does not balance. It also fits poorly when the offer is a demo request to a market that has never heard of you; cold audiences here tend to ignore bottom-of-funnel asks, so they typically need to have seen something else first, or to be asked for something smaller.
What it sits beside
It runs beside Google Ads capturing the searches it provokes, and it needs a CRM that can trace a closed deal back to a campaign, because the payoff lands months after the click and channel ROAS reads as failure before the pipeline pays. Beside Meta, the same person costs a fraction to reach, without the certainty about job title.
My experience
LinkedIn is the most expensive audience I buy, and what I pay for is the certainty that the right job titles are seeing the ad.