👋 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.

ICYMI: 2026 State of GTM survey | Growth Unhinged LIVE | Member Library 

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:

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:

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.

The conventional idea of an ad campaign looks something like this: go to Campaign Manager, see what filters are available, run some ads to the website, and expect people to book a call.

Results are… meh. You stop the ads, move somewhere else.

We already covered why one touch doesn't progress anything. But the other problem is the audience itself. Several examples of filters inside LinkedIn Ads that look cool but are trash:

LinkedIn has a lot of important business information, and you should use it. But it doesn't have all of it, and more often than not it doesn't have the most important kind. This is what we call signals.

Signals answer the question: what behavior, directly or indirectly, proves a company is in the buying window or about to be? If ideal customer profile (ICP) definitions and filters answer the question who, signals answer the question when.

For collecting signals you need a data source. But what makes a good one? Five criteria are needed for it to be usable (you can find industry-specific examples here):

To make it more concrete, consider an HR tech company. We noticed an ICP-fit company posts a new job for their first-ever People Operations hire across three job boards. “Workday implementation” is inside the job description. All of these are signals that the prospect is buying HR tech right now or about to, on top of the conventional targeting of industry, company size, geo, and role.

I recommend getting signal data with an agentic flow:

No stack? No problem! Open your 30 target accounts' careers pages every Friday, spreadsheet, flag repeats. Ugly, but works.

Here's the prompt skeleton for the reading step:

Backtest it against your last 15 closed-won accounts before trusting it.

Then the list-building exercise: Apollo, BetterContact or similar to find the right decision-makers, their LinkedIn, their emails. Upload the list to LinkedIn as a matched audience.

Match rate matters: if yours is under roughly 70%, there are tools built for exactly this like Clay Ads and ContactLevel (industry average company match runs 29–62%, per Dreamdata). Matching takes about 48 hours.

Matching templates: LinkedIn_Ads_Company_Match_Template.csv, LinkedIn_Ads_Contact_Match_Template.csv

Now, to get to 6-8 touchpoints without being annoying, what you want is to create the feeling in the client that they discovered you. They found you by themselves. Actually, it is an engineered process on your side.

Bombarding just with “BOOK A DEMO” in 20 variants on the cold audience doesn't work. You will get Mark's results, and conclude "LinkedIn doesn't work." This quarter I scanned 350 HR tech ads and ~95% do exactly this.

Therefore we build campaigns in three tiers: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. This is a standard marketing structure, and exactly the classification LinkedIn's own best practices propose (surprise!).

Everyone in the matched audience sees tiers one and two in parallel. Conversion is different: only people who engaged with Awareness or Consideration, downloaded something, or visited the site. Nobody gets the ask before they've touched the warm-up. Engagement is what moves an account down a tier.

Let me get concrete about what you actually run in each tier, format by format.

The strongest approach by far is thought leader ads: your CEO or leadership as the face, promoting their best content, created from their own stories and opinions. Faces, not logos.

Two formats work well here: single image plus text, and video plus text.

The single image version is usually your face plus a story: first sentence is the hook that calls out the audience and their pain ("yesterday I had a call with a Head of HR at an IT company, close to burnout..."), the story leads to a conclusion, and it closes with a PS carrying the call to action and the link.

Why it works: humans want to talk to humans, not brands, especially on the first touch.

Video works the same way: vertical selfie format, subtitles always (most of the feed watches on mute). And a truth about production value: it matters less than you think for conversion, and more than you think for positioning.

A 2026 note: LinkedIn downrates AI-generated imagery now (have you seen that small ugly CR badge on AI images?). Use real photos.

Focus then shifts deeper in the funnel to case studies, gated content, and traffic to the site. This is soft conversion rather than pushing for a demo.

Your options on LinkedIn:

My own scar in this tier: the first offer I ran for that ESG client was "Free ESG Consultation".

It looked reasonable. But cost-per-lead (CPL) crept toward the $154 category benchmark and the leads were window-shoppers. We killed it and rebuilt the offer around the thing those buyers actually lost sleep over, public tenders, and shipped the "Tender Readiness Score" instead. Same audience, same budget: $52 CPL.

Don’t know where to start with the ad creatives? I got you, my friend. Here are eight main ad creative angles we use when creating campaigns – free, ungated, plug-and-play. Have fun.

This is now retargeting those who’ve previously engaged with the idea of direct conversion: the call or the demo. It lives here and nowhere else. (Cheap retargeting-only formats like message ads and text ads fall in this conversion tier, too.)

The Conversion tier needs a matched audience of ~300 minimum, so the first weeks are Awareness and Consideration filling the pool.

There are two lead capture routes: (1) send them to a booking form on your website or (2) use LinkedIn's native lead gen form.

The lead gen form on average converts up to five times better than the average website form, in my experience. If Meta lead forms burned you with junk leads, this is different: you're only targeting people inside your ICP here, so bad leads are structurally harder to get.

Social proof created by your ICP beats proof created by the brand.

Now, what is the minimum reasonable budget to test?

My blunt take is at least $3,000 per month. The average software company can expect to see about 15-25 leads (10-15 for a senior ICP)

$3,000 buys the minimum number of conversions to see a signal. Can you go lower? Sure, but you don't want to spend the budget and not get the full answer. That's worse than a negative one, because you learned nothing AND spent money. SAD!

I recommend approaching your budget differently depending on whether you’re testing or scaling paid ads. For testing, I’d weigh budget toward Conversion (80/20) to get proof fast. For running long-term, I’d weigh 40/35/25 across Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion.

All of that is good and nice, it builds awareness, people know about you, but it's STILL not enough to make them convert at scale (I know, how much do they need, right??)

You'll convert the percentage who are ready to be talked to. Real senior folks don't get dragged in on an inbound form. So let’s engineer the connection.

Now, here's the thing about warm audiences: some people will convert natively through the forms, but that's the small percentage. The biggest group does everything except the last five percent of the action: they engage with your ads, read your posts, click to your website, and never fill the form. This is the moment to capture them, and buyers leave fingerprints in three places.

The stack I run looks like this. The total cost runs roughly $250 to $450 per month based on entry pricing tiers.

When warm leads land in your system, you have two options.

I prefer the human written approach, especially in the beginning. You already paid real money, time, and attention to earn these high-value leads. Losing them because the message feels AI-written, and they do feel it, is the most expensive way to save twenty minutes. So automate the research, automate the routing, and keep the one part that sells, the message itself, human.

Best practice is five-minute contact time. The notification side you can automate: Slack, HubSpot, an auto-dial. The rest is how fast your sales team actually moves.

The rough funnel looks something like this: From 1,000 engagers, our rates say roughly 30-45 conversations, 8-15 calls, 2-4 deals at $0 incremental media cost.

When you’re DM-ing a warm lead on LinkedIn, my rules are to (a) make it short, (b) no AI, (c) address why it’s relevant, and (d) ask one simple human question (funny I have to write this at all).

That's it. I personally like to make it lowercase (just to make it feel like I write it from my phone), but it's not necessary.

Here is an example:

Cold outreach could live in parallel to the ad campaigns, triggered at 7+ days after the first ad impression (although this is an optional step). The effectiveness is naturally lower than for warm outreach since these prospects don’t already know who you are.

In the end, what you want is the loop. Calls and sales logged in your CRM, review conversations with closed-won deals to define which signals you track next. This is how the list gets smarter each time. Let’s goo!

Only because you are Kyle’s audience and such nice readers.

What came before has far more leverage in it. But there are always the one-setting stories, very LinkedIn-specific:

Now, if you already launched the campaign and the numbers are not great, here are quick pivots that lifted conversion quality mid-flight in our campaigns:

BONUS: For advanced readers and VPs of growth. If you are already on the level where you are scaling and experimenting, the last thing you want is your learnings from the tests to be lost. Happens all the time, costs a lot more than you think. We created this Notion setup for ourselves - kinda like a cockpit and internal playbook of what works for your company. A little thank-you for reading this far.