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LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads: what they are, and why they keep getting cut
What they are, how they fit a B2B demand gen system, and what 98 accounts showed. Live tomorrow at Full Circle. ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
IMPACTABLE |
LINKEDIN ADS FIELD GUIDE |
LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads aren't failing. Your scorecard is.What they are, how they fit a B2B demand gen system, and what 98 accounts and $4.52M in LinkedIn ad spend showed. |
Hey there, This one is about a specific LinkedIn Ads format called Thought Leader Ads. In our accounts they're one of the most efficient ways to get in front of B2B buyers, and they're also the format I see cut most often. If you've never run them (or never heard the name), no problem. I'll start with what they are and how they fit into a B2B demand gen system, then show you what we found when we pulled the data, and what to measure so they don't get cut. |
01 · THE BASICS What are LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads?Most LinkedIn ads run from your company page. They show your logo, your company name and a "Promoted" label. People can tell it's an ad before they read a word. Thought Leader Ads work differently. You take a post from a real person's LinkedIn profile (your founder, an executive, a subject matter expert on your team) and put ad budget behind it. It shows up in the feed under that person's name and photo, looking like a normal post, with a small "Promoted" label.
COMPANY PAGE AD
Reads like an ad. A brand talking about itself. |
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THOUGHT LEADER AD
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A real person CEO at Your Company · Promoted |
Reads like a post. A person sharing what they know. |
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You still choose exactly who sees it, using normal LinkedIn targeting: job titles, seniority, industries, a list of target companies, or your retargeting audiences (people who visited your website, watched your videos or engaged with your ads before). Why it works is simple. People engage with people. Buyers scroll past logos, but they stop for someone with a point of view. |
02 · WHERE THEY FIT The B2B demand gen system, in four stepsMost of the companies you want to sell to aren't shopping today. So the job isn't only to catch the few who are. It's to make sure that when they are ready, they already know you, trust you and think of you first. That's the demand gen approach we run on LinkedIn:
STEP 1 · REACH Get in front of the right companies. Target the accounts and job titles that match your best customers. Thought Leader Ads work here. |
STEP 2 · WARM UP Stay in front of the people who engaged. Retarget website visitors, video viewers and engagers with more expertise, so they remember you. Thought Leader Ads do their best work here. |
STEP 3 · CONVERT Give the warm audience a reason to raise their hand. A useful offer, like a document ad with a lead form, a benchmark or an assessment. |
STEP 4 · ACT ON SIGNALS See which accounts are heating up and hand them to sales. Match company-level ad engagement and website visits to your CRM, so sales follows up with the right accounts at the right time. |
Here's why this matters. Thought Leader Ads earn their keep in steps 1 and 2. Most teams judge them on step 3 numbers (leads, cost per lead), decide they "don't work," and cut the part of the system that was filling everything after it. |
03 · THE DATA Same format, same objective. The person wins.I've been pushing Thought Leader Ads for a while, so I wanted receipts, not just my opinion. We pulled 98 B2B LinkedIn ad accounts and $4.52M in spend through DemandSense and compared like with like: single image ads, engagement objective, median account.
Thought Leader Ads Company page ads Engagement rate (higher is better)
Cost per engagement (lower is better)
CPM (lower is better)
Medians across 33 accounts running Thought Leader Ads and 21 running company page ads. |
8 of 10 accounts that ran both formats got a higher engagement rate and a lower cost per engagement from Thought Leader Ads.
Same company, same audiences, same budget owner. The difference was whose face was on the post. |
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04 · THE HONEST PART They won't fix lead gen. They're not supposed to.Accounts running Thought Leader Ads had about the same form completion as accounts that weren't. What moved conversion was the format of the ask. Attention and conversion are two different jobs:
LAYER 1 · ATTENTION Thought Leader Ads put your experts in front of your warm audience. Cheap, efficient engagement from the right people. |
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THE BRIDGE Your retargeting audience grows. That's the number that tells you layer 1 is working. |
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LAYER 2 · CONVERSION Document ads with a lead gen form. 24% median form completion vs 4% for single image. 0 of 32 document ad form campaigns produced zero leads, vs 7 of 27 single image. |
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05 · HOW TO RUN THEM Five moves
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Put them in the warm layer. Your 90-day retargeting audience should see your experts, not just your logo. |
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Start with posts that already worked. Your best ads are usually sitting on your leadership team's profiles. |
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Text and image for reach, video for intent. Video builds viewer audiences you can retarget by how much they watched. |
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Pair them with a document ad offer. Something useful behind the form, not a generic ebook. |
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Change the scorecard. Judge them on engagement rate, cost per engagement and warm audience growth. Not cost per lead. |
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06 · THE $3,000 TEST Same budget. Very different warm audience.
COMPANY PAGE ADS ~370 engagements for $3,000 at $8.07 each |
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THOUGHT LEADER ADS ~1,695 engagements for $3,000 at $1.77 each |
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Even at half that efficiency, you're putting roughly 2x more of the right people into your retargeting audience for the same spend. |
07 · WHERE PIPELINE SHOWS UP Look at accounts, not clicks.Our own LinkedIn ads are a good example. From August to October our ad clicks fell 45% (205 to 112). Judged on clicks, we'd have cut the budget. Over the same months, the number of target accounts that saw our ads 30+ times in a month went up 12% (1,199 to 1,341). That's exposure, not attribution. It proves reach, not pipeline. The pipeline proof comes when you match those accounts to your CRM:
ENGAGED WITH YOUR ADS |
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NO DEAL IN THE CRM |
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HIDDEN PIPELINE |
Accounts your ads are already warming that nobody on sales knows about. Campaign Manager can't show them. Your CRM doesn't know they're warm. It's the most useful list you can hand sales every week. |
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WORKSHOP AT FULL CIRCLE · WED NOV 4 · 11:30AM ET Build Your Own AI Analyst for LinkedIn AdsTomorrow I'm showing exactly how I find these accounts every week. In 45 minutes I'll connect AI to live LinkedIn, CRM and website visitor data, and run the routine that reports what leadership actually reads: ✓ Named accounts that moved ✓ Pipeline those accounts influenced ✓ Hidden pipeline: engaged, no deal yet
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The same day, DemandSense launches The B2B AI Standard for LinkedIn Ads: open rules, skills and scenarios for running LinkedIn Ads with AI, written by people who run LinkedIn budgets every week, including AJ Wilcox, Joshua Stout, Moby Hayat and Rob from Tuned Social. One of its rules is the whole point of this email: judge cold ads by the warm audience they build. Thought Leader Ads don't fail. Their scorecard does. Fix the scorecard. Justin
P.S. Can't make it live? Reply "Standard" and I'll send you the Standard the day it drops. |
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