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LinkedIn is, at its core, still a networking site. So it’s not surprising that people get more attention there than brands.
But it’s also still the best place for B2B brands to connect with customers.
To earn customer attention, though, you need to make your brand feel more human.
So how exactly do you advertise your offering on LinkedIn without looking like a faceless corporation that they can scroll past? Lead with real people vs. a logo!
Thankfully, LinkedIn (finally!) offers a feature called Thought Leader Ads. This is just a fancy name for sponsored posts from individual person's profile.
To help you spice up your pipeline with thought leader ads, I spoke with the account-based marketing master, Tim Davidson, who was an early adopter of thought leader ads.
In case you’ve somehow missed Tim on the internet, he’s best known for his creative video content.
He’s been in B2B marketing for 10 years, has managed and scaled $12M+ ABM budgets, and has driven over $17M in revenue in a single year with LinkedIn ads.
He’s also the founder of B2B Rizz so you know he’s full of spice.
The TL;DR from Tim: “People buy from people. Thought leader ads come from a person rather than a company logo. It’s a no-brainer.”
According to Tim, thought leader ads are, “organic posts from an employee or someone that has your company listed as a current employer that you promote or advertise to your potential buyers with the same targeting as you would any other LinkedIn ad.”
Basically, instead of putting spend behind the same old promotional content from a company page, you do more of a sneak attack.
You take someone your audience knows and trusts—an actual human being—and have them spread your message for you.
When thought leader ads pop up in the feed, they look like regular old posts from a person except for a teeny tiny “Promoted by” disclaimer.
That way your ICP sees posts in their feed about your brand without it looking like an ad.
So let’s say a company like Directive wants to attract a particular audience.
They could run their own ad. Or they could run a thought leader ad from Tim’s account because Tim is semi-famous in the B2B marketing world. (You’ve definitely seen him cutting fruit on TikTok.)
In the example above, see how big Tim’s face is and how small the “Promoted by Directive” text is? Talk about leading with people vs. a faceless company page.
They look more organic and natural in the feed than ads from a corporate logo. They’re also a great way to help position individuals at your company as thought leaders.
According to Tim, you’ll typically see higher engagement rates, lower CPC (cost per click), and lower CPMs (cost per thousand impressions).
In his experience with thought leader ads, engagement rates are over 150% higher. CPCs are 20-40x lower. These clicks include people clicking on the profile picture, see more, etc.
There aren’t benchmarks for thought leader ads (yet!), but Tim has seen the following results at three companies he’s worked with:
Cayenne Consulting 🔥
Engagement Rate: 7.9%
CPM: $279
Ghost Pepper Group 👻
Engagement Rate: 8.4%
CPM: $112
Serrano Solutions 🫑
Engagement Rate: 6.7%
CPM: $94
Note: We anonymized the company names, but these are metrics from three real companies that Tim worked with.
For comparison, the average engagement rate for a standard LinkedIn image ad is only 0.05% 🤯
The difference in performance isn’t as trackable as we’d like because they’re different formats. But the results are still pretty impressive.
1. Engagement (comments, shares, likes, etc.)
Most importantly, engagement from the right people and companies. Ideally: comments, shares, and likes from the right people and companies.
2. UTM Tracking
If you edit your organic post before launching, you can add a specific link to the website, asset, or specific CTA that has proper UTM tracking.
Note from Tim: You should 100% do this.
3. Time Stamps
What are the conversion rates of the rest of your advertising before and after the audience sees your thought leader ad?
4. Is it getting in front of the right people?
At the end of the day, thought leader ads should only be one part of your marketing, so if you know the message is right, a big win is just getting these ads in front of the right people.
To do this, while you’re running these ads, check your demographic reports within LinkedIn to see the titles and companies your ads are reaching.
Anything. Seriously.
But if you’d like a clearer starting point, Tim suggests looking at your employees’ organic posts to see what’s already doing well.
Did they post something related to your product or solution? And did that post get good engagement? Ding ding ding! That’s the one you should put money behind.
Content types Tim suggests testing:
Here are some more examples of the posts Tim has promoted (including some meta ones about thought leadership ads):
As you can see from what Tim has tried, the content you promote truly can be anything.
Ideally, though, you should be promoting something that your audience can learn from and that (loosely) ties to what your company does.
Back when I first started working at Chili Piper, our Co-Founder, Alina Vandenberghe, asked me why we couldn’t put spend behind her personal posts.
It’s safe to say that we were beyond excited when we heard that LinkedIn would lets us do this!
We’re currently experimenting with using these ads to promote our Benchmark Report on Demo Conversion Rates.
I had a hunch that people would respond better to this ad format when the poster is their peer, so I took that approach with our audience targeting.
Most of the people seeing my thought leader ad work at one of our target accounts and have a similar title to myself.
This ad from me, Tara Robertson, (hi 👋) targeted Marketing Managers and Marketing Directors. The engagement rate was 3.26% and the CPM was $42.27.
For context, when we posted the same content organically from our brand account (with 65,000+ followers), it earned 6,389 impressions, 181 clicks (2.83% CTR), and a 4.49% engagement rate.
Not bad for a post from a company account, but also not targeted to exactly the right people and accounts.
We also ran another one from Alina that targeted VPs of Marketing and CMOs (her peers).
We saw a 2.21% engagement rate and $105 CPM on this one from Alina.
In my experience, these are great results when targeting higher titles.
The results so far are much better than promoted posts from our company page.
We have a large social following and get consistent engagement from our audience, but people would still prefer to hear from a person than our company.
This step-by-step post from Anthony Blatner provides a great walk-through.
The TL;DR is: It’s right in your LinkedIn Campaign Manager and it’s fairly intuitive.
The key is that you need employees to review and approve the post you want to use as a thought leader ad.
If you’d prefer to avoid having to get manual approval for every single post, you can also send your employees an auto-approve request.
I highly recommend doing this so the approval process doesn’t become a roadblock, especially if you’re promoting posts from busy executives. (You know… most of the true thought leaders.)
It’s tough to stay on top of all the endless trends in B2B marketing.
LinkedIn thought leader ads are just the latest in a litany of levers you can pull to grow your pipeline.
Subscribe to our spicy newsletter The Sauce to get timely advice from me and the smartest marketers I know. (No spam, promise.) 🧡
LinkedIn is, at its core, still a networking site. So it’s not surprising that people get more attention there than brands.
But it’s also still the best place for B2B brands to connect with customers.
To earn customer attention, though, you need to make your brand feel more human.
So how exactly do you advertise your offering on LinkedIn without looking like a faceless corporation that they can scroll past? Lead with real people vs. a logo!
Thankfully, LinkedIn (finally!) offers a feature called Thought Leader Ads. This is just a fancy name for sponsored posts from individual person's profile.
To help you spice up your pipeline with thought leader ads, I spoke with the account-based marketing master, Tim Davidson, who was an early adopter of thought leader ads.
In case you’ve somehow missed Tim on the internet, he’s best known for his creative video content.
He’s been in B2B marketing for 10 years, has managed and scaled $12M+ ABM budgets, and has driven over $17M in revenue in a single year with LinkedIn ads.
He’s also the founder of B2B Rizz so you know he’s full of spice.
The TL;DR from Tim: “People buy from people. Thought leader ads come from a person rather than a company logo. It’s a no-brainer.”
According to Tim, thought leader ads are, “organic posts from an employee or someone that has your company listed as a current employer that you promote or advertise to your potential buyers with the same targeting as you would any other LinkedIn ad.”
Basically, instead of putting spend behind the same old promotional content from a company page, you do more of a sneak attack.
You take someone your audience knows and trusts—an actual human being—and have them spread your message for you.
When thought leader ads pop up in the feed, they look like regular old posts from a person except for a teeny tiny “Promoted by” disclaimer.
That way your ICP sees posts in their feed about your brand without it looking like an ad.
So let’s say a company like Directive wants to attract a particular audience.
They could run their own ad. Or they could run a thought leader ad from Tim’s account because Tim is semi-famous in the B2B marketing world. (You’ve definitely seen him cutting fruit on TikTok.)
In the example above, see how big Tim’s face is and how small the “Promoted by Directive” text is? Talk about leading with people vs. a faceless company page.
They look more organic and natural in the feed than ads from a corporate logo. They’re also a great way to help position individuals at your company as thought leaders.
According to Tim, you’ll typically see higher engagement rates, lower CPC (cost per click), and lower CPMs (cost per thousand impressions).
In his experience with thought leader ads, engagement rates are over 150% higher. CPCs are 20-40x lower. These clicks include people clicking on the profile picture, see more, etc.
There aren’t benchmarks for thought leader ads (yet!), but Tim has seen the following results at three companies he’s worked with:
Cayenne Consulting 🔥
Engagement Rate: 7.9%
CPM: $279
Ghost Pepper Group 👻
Engagement Rate: 8.4%
CPM: $112
Serrano Solutions 🫑
Engagement Rate: 6.7%
CPM: $94
Note: We anonymized the company names, but these are metrics from three real companies that Tim worked with.
For comparison, the average engagement rate for a standard LinkedIn image ad is only 0.05% 🤯
The difference in performance isn’t as trackable as we’d like because they’re different formats. But the results are still pretty impressive.
1. Engagement (comments, shares, likes, etc.)
Most importantly, engagement from the right people and companies. Ideally: comments, shares, and likes from the right people and companies.
2. UTM Tracking
If you edit your organic post before launching, you can add a specific link to the website, asset, or specific CTA that has proper UTM tracking.
Note from Tim: You should 100% do this.
3. Time Stamps
What are the conversion rates of the rest of your advertising before and after the audience sees your thought leader ad?
4. Is it getting in front of the right people?
At the end of the day, thought leader ads should only be one part of your marketing, so if you know the message is right, a big win is just getting these ads in front of the right people.
To do this, while you’re running these ads, check your demographic reports within LinkedIn to see the titles and companies your ads are reaching.
Anything. Seriously.
But if you’d like a clearer starting point, Tim suggests looking at your employees’ organic posts to see what’s already doing well.
Did they post something related to your product or solution? And did that post get good engagement? Ding ding ding! That’s the one you should put money behind.
Content types Tim suggests testing:
Here are some more examples of the posts Tim has promoted (including some meta ones about thought leadership ads):
As you can see from what Tim has tried, the content you promote truly can be anything.
Ideally, though, you should be promoting something that your audience can learn from and that (loosely) ties to what your company does.
Back when I first started working at Chili Piper, our Co-Founder, Alina Vandenberghe, asked me why we couldn’t put spend behind her personal posts.
It’s safe to say that we were beyond excited when we heard that LinkedIn would lets us do this!
We’re currently experimenting with using these ads to promote our Benchmark Report on Demo Conversion Rates.
I had a hunch that people would respond better to this ad format when the poster is their peer, so I took that approach with our audience targeting.
Most of the people seeing my thought leader ad work at one of our target accounts and have a similar title to myself.
This ad from me, Tara Robertson, (hi 👋) targeted Marketing Managers and Marketing Directors. The engagement rate was 3.26% and the CPM was $42.27.
For context, when we posted the same content organically from our brand account (with 65,000+ followers), it earned 6,389 impressions, 181 clicks (2.83% CTR), and a 4.49% engagement rate.
Not bad for a post from a company account, but also not targeted to exactly the right people and accounts.
We also ran another one from Alina that targeted VPs of Marketing and CMOs (her peers).
We saw a 2.21% engagement rate and $105 CPM on this one from Alina.
In my experience, these are great results when targeting higher titles.
The results so far are much better than promoted posts from our company page.
We have a large social following and get consistent engagement from our audience, but people would still prefer to hear from a person than our company.
This step-by-step post from Anthony Blatner provides a great walk-through.
The TL;DR is: It’s right in your LinkedIn Campaign Manager and it’s fairly intuitive.
The key is that you need employees to review and approve the post you want to use as a thought leader ad.
If you’d prefer to avoid having to get manual approval for every single post, you can also send your employees an auto-approve request.
I highly recommend doing this so the approval process doesn’t become a roadblock, especially if you’re promoting posts from busy executives. (You know… most of the true thought leaders.)
It’s tough to stay on top of all the endless trends in B2B marketing.
LinkedIn thought leader ads are just the latest in a litany of levers you can pull to grow your pipeline.
Subscribe to our spicy newsletter The Sauce to get timely advice from me and the smartest marketers I know. (No spam, promise.) 🧡
Tara Robertson is a B2B marketer with over 10 years experience in various marketing roles. As the Senior Manager of Demand Gen at Chili Piper, she also hosts our podcast Demand Gen Chat and writes our newsletter The Sauce. Tara is powered by pizza and negronis. Connect with Tara on LinkedIn!
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