LinkedIn has a reputation for being unaffordable. Clicks routinely cost several times what the same click costs on Meta, and the minimum viable budget is genuinely higher.
Both things are true, and neither makes it the wrong channel. If you sell something where the buyer's job title matters more than their interests, LinkedIn is the only platform that lets you reach exactly that person. The question is not whether it is expensive. It is whether the person is worth it.
Do the arithmetic before you start
Work out what one customer is worth over the life of the relationship. Divide by ten. If that number is comfortably above a few hundred pounds, LinkedIn can work. If it is not, spend the money elsewhere and come back when your average deal is bigger.
This is a genuinely disqualifying test, and we would rather you applied it before spending than after.
Target narrow, then narrower
The instinct with an expensive channel is to widen the audience so the budget lasts. It is exactly backwards.
Start with the smallest audience you can honestly describe: a job function, a seniority, a company size band, and one region. If that audience is twenty or thirty thousand people, that is not too small — that is targeted. A tiny audience seeing a relevant message beats a large one seeing a general one, and on LinkedIn you are paying for every impression either way.
Avoid stacking interests on top of job titles in the first month. You will not know which of the two is doing the work.
The offer has to be worth a work email
People guard their work address more carefully than their personal one. A generic "get in touch" will not earn it.
What works, roughly in order:
- Something genuinely useful and specific to their role — a benchmark, a template, a short assessment
- An invitation to something with a date on it
- A straightforward demo request, if the product is well understood
What does not work is a whitepaper that is obviously a brochure, or a newsletter signup. The exchange has to feel fair from their side.
Use the native form, then move fast
LinkedIn's lead forms convert substantially better than sending traffic to a landing page, because the fields are pre-filled and nobody has to type on a phone.
The catch is that a pre-filled form is a low-effort action, so the lead is cooler than one that came from a website. That is manageable, but only if you follow up quickly. A lead-gen form submission that sits for two days is close to worthless. Route it to a person the moment it arrives.
Budget for learning, not for results
The first four to six weeks are diagnostic. You are finding out which audience responds and which message lands. Set the budget at a level you can sustain for that period rather than a level that feels aggressive for two weeks.
Running a large budget for a fortnight and stopping teaches you nothing and costs more than running a modest one for six weeks.
Where Snapchat fits instead
Snapchat is the mirror image, and it comes up often enough to be worth addressing here.
It is inexpensive, the audience skews significantly younger, and the format rewards video that looks native rather than produced. For B2B it is almost never right. For consumer categories with a young buyer — retail, food, events, some property in the right markets — it can deliver reach at a fraction of what the same reach costs elsewhere.
The mistake is running the same creative on both. A polished LinkedIn asset will be scrolled past on Snapchat, and a Snapchat-native video will look unserious to a procurement director. Different channel, different piece of work.
A reasonable first test
If you want a structure to start from: one narrow audience, two offers, three creative variations each, run for six weeks with a budget you can repeat monthly. Measure cost per qualified lead, not cost per lead — on LinkedIn the gap between the two is usually large.
At the end of six weeks you will know whether the channel works for your economics. That is worth the cost of finding out, and it is a much better basis for a decision than an opinion about whether LinkedIn is expensive.
