How to Land 6-Figure Deals with LinkedIn Thought Leadership Ads

If you’re still using LinkedIn ads to chase clicks and impressions, you’re leaving revenue on the table.

The typical playbook – boosting company posts or running generic lead gen campaigns – might fill your CRM with names. But it doesn’t build the kind of trust required to win deals worth five or six figures.

What does? Thought leadership ads. Specifically, LinkedIn thought leadership ads—where real insights from real people are distributed to the right audience in a way that drives actual business.

At The B2B Playbook, we’ve used these ads to generate high-value inbounds for both our business and our clients. From small consultancies to software firms, we’ve seen first hand how this strategy helps you warm up future buyers, build authority, and close with confidence.

Want proof that it works? Here’s an email I received last year from a client of ours.

In this article, I’ll share our complete framework. You’ll learn how to structure your content, target the right people, track performance, and avoid the costly mistakes most marketers make with these campaigns.

Whether you’re trying to land your next $10K/month retainer or just get seen by the right buyers, this guide will give you a strategic, scalable way to make LinkedIn thought leadership ads work for you.

Keep reading, and you’ll have everything you need to turn content into revenue.

Listen To The Episode

Watch The Episode

What Are LinkedIn Thought Leadership Ads?

LinkedIn thought leadership ads give B2B marketers a way to amplify their best content without losing the personal tone that builds trust. Unlike traditional LinkedIn ads that come from the company page, these are boosted posts from an individual’s profile—usually someone within the business who has authority and credibility. With their consent, you can push these organic posts to a highly defined audience.

That subtle difference makes a big impact. As I shared in the episode, I regularly promote my own posts about demand generation directly to demand gen marketers. It’s the same message I’d share publicly, but now it reaches exactly who I want, consistently.

And again, the results speak for themselves. It drives a large portion of our pipeline for our demand generation course, The B2B Incubator. And I’ve shared a recent email from a client that said, “George, just closed my biggest ever retainer at 10k per month… The marketing director was a direct inbound from the ads”.

That wasn’t a one-off. It was the product of consistent, strategic distribution of content that was helpful, relevant, and came from a real person—not a logo.

Why Most LinkedIn Thought Leadership Ads Fail

Most marketers don’t fail with LinkedIn thought leadership ads because the format doesn’t work. They fail because there’s no strategy behind what they’re boosting.

Too often, I see businesses take the posts that performed best organically and throw budget behind them, without asking if the post actually serves their audience or supports the buying journey. Just because a post about AI went viral doesn’t mean it helps your ideal customer understand why they should work with you. It’s content for content’s sake.

If the post doesn’t educate your ICP or build trust, it’s just noise. The best-performing campaigns aren’t the flashiest. They’re the ones that speak to the real pain points of your future customers—and show up consistently.

The Framework That Wins Six-Figure Deals

If you want to consistently win high-value deals with LinkedIn thought leadership ads, you can’t skip the foundational work. That means defining your ideal customer profile, aligning your positioning and messaging, and understanding your buyer’s journey better than they do. At The B2B Playbook, we won’t run LinkedIn Ads for clients unless this work is in place.

Once that’s done, you need to map your content to the five stages of awareness: unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, and most aware. This is the engine behind our framework. We use it to guide both what gets created and how it gets distributed. If you want someone to trust you enough to buy from you, you need to help them connect the dots—stage by stage. You can read more about the 5 stages of awareness here.

We plan our thought leadership ads so cold audiences see early-stage content that raises awareness and frames the problem. For warm audiences, we go broader—serving all five stages—because B2B buying isn’t linear. People bounce around. Our job is to meet them where they are with the information they need to move forward.

How to Set Up LinkedIn Thought Leadership Ads

Getting the setup right is what turns these ads from a brand play into a pipeline driver. We start by uploading company lists and layering in job titles – not just relying on contact lists. That way, we know we’re targeting the right buyers, even if we don’t have their direct details. Your budget should dictate your list size and how aggressively you want to scale.

For frequency, we aim for 7–10 impressions per user over 30 days in the warm layer. It sounds like a lot, but there’s a good chance that some of those impressions aren’t registering.

Especially when you’re delivering helpful, context-rich posts—not salesy stuff—it’s safe to stay top-of-mind without burning out your audience.

One of the tricks we’ve been using is linking between awareness stages inside the actual LinkedIn posts. For example, at the end of a problem-aware post, we’ll link directly to a solution-aware post. No landing page. Just another piece of in-platform content.

This kind of helps you get ‘free clicks’, and allows the user at the end of your thought leadership post to guide themselves to the next most useful piece of content – which is also a LinkedIn post. It’s working incredibly well for us. It keeps the experience native, frictionless, and more importantly—it builds momentum through the buying journey.

Tips & Tricks to Boost Performance

Once the basics are in place, there are a few lesser-known tricks that’ll help you squeeze more performance from your thought leadership ads.

First, while LinkedIn doesn’t offer native frequency capping, we’ve built our own workaround. By creating a dynamic exclusion list of companies who’ve received over 130 impressions in a 30-day window, we can automatically stop wasting spend on overexposed accounts. It’s not perfect, but it works—and if you want something more robust, a tool like Fibbler can take it further.

Another lever is using customer posts as paid content. When someone shares a win or result tied to your product, that’s gold. Boosting those posts gives you a double hit—reach into their network and built-in credibility.

“It’s a great form of social proof… without it coming directly from you”. The trick is making your customers the hero. We do it all the time for people who complete our demand generation course, The B2B Incubator. They post their certification on LinkedIn, and then we boost their achievement to other demand generation marketers.

Give them a reason to brag—send them an award, celebrate their progress, or publicly shout out their success. People want to be seen as top performers on LinkedIn. Give them the excuse.

And don’t treat ads as the finish line. Pair them with sales. If a company is engaging repeatedly, don’t just keep feeding them content – have your sales team use that signal. When a threshold is hit, it’s time to start a conversation. We plug this straight into our outbound system using Adem Manderovic’s cataloging method from CRO School. It’s a seamless way to turn engagement into pipeline.

How to Measure Success

Measuring the success of thought leadership ads isn’t about leads in the CRM. It’s about signals that you’re building real trust with the right audience.

Start with the leading indicators. Dive into LinkedIn’s engagement reports to see which companies are interacting with your content, how long they’re spending on each post, and your click-through rates. A strong CTR for these ads is 4–5%, far above the 0.5% you’d expect from traditional company page ads.

You can see in our custom reports not only which companies are engaging with your business, but of your total targets, how those companies are engaging with your Thought Leadership Ads.

We also track how people move from one piece of content to the next. By linking between posts within the platform, we can measure how many users are continuing down the funnel—without even visiting our website. These are high-signal actions that cost nothing extra.

Then there are the lagging indicators—conversations started, demos booked, and opportunities created. Ultimately, we’re looking for high-intent signals that can be handed to sales. And yes, revenue attribution is part of this too, but it often lags months behind. We could probably spend a whole episode just on that, but the point is to balance early feedback with long-term outcomes.

The most important thing? Know what success looks like before you run your first ad. Otherwise, you’ll be guessing—and worse, optimising for the wrong things.

Take Your Thought Leadership To The Next Level

LinkedIn thought leadership ads aren’t a quick win tactic. They’re a strategic play that, when done right, helps you build credibility at scale, educate your market, and open doors to high-value opportunities.

This strategy works because it’s not about blasting generic messages. It’s about getting the right insight, from the right person, in front of the right people—consistently. As we’ve seen with clients and our own business, the results can be game-changing. But it only works when you’ve laid the groundwork: tight ICP, mapped buying journey, content matched to awareness stages, and clear measurement in place.

If you’re serious about implementing this, here’s where to start:

• Audit your ICP, positioning and messaging. Get alignment.
• Build content for each of the five stages of awareness.
• Promote that content using thought leadership ads—not company posts.
• Target strategically and layer in job titles.
• Use signals from engagement to trigger sales outreach.
• Track leading and lagging indicators—CTR, dwell time, demos, and deals.

It takes time to see results. But if you stick with it, stay strategic, and back it up with good content, you’ll see returns that other paid channels can’t match.

If you need help getting the fundamentals in place, check out The B2B Incubator – it’s the same program we use to get our clients demand gen-ready before we run these campaigns. Or, if you’ve already done the groundwork and want help running the ads, schedule a free consultation on our LinkedIn Ads services page.

Either way, don’t sit on the sidelines. The earlier you start building trust, the sooner the pipeline follows.