The LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads Framework That Acquired 150+ New Customers

LinkedIn ads have long been recognized as a valuable marketing channel for B2B brands. But promoting content from a faceless page isn't always the best approach.

Wynter found that 77% of B2B buyers engage more with LinkedIn content from individuals than companies. Another 68% of buyers have reached out to a vendor because of a personal post they saw.

LinkedIn thought leaders ads let you do this at scale. They look like an organic post in a user's feed, but have been strategically targeted to reach potential buyers with content that doesn't look like a blatant ad.

Yet just enabling this campaign type in your LinkedIn Campaign Manager and hoping for the best isn't the ideal approach. Neither is overoptimizing every minute detail. The right answer is somewhere in the middle.

I've been running LinkedIn thought leader ads for 12 months and have learned a lot along the way. I've condensed my learnings into a 5-step framework—one I've used to acquire 150+ new customers.

What are LinkedIn thought leader ads?

LinkedIn thought leader ads (TLA) are posts promoted from your personal LinkedIn account.

Unlike traditional campaigns, TLAs don't come from a company page. It's your name and your profile photo attached to the ad, making it look like another organic post in your target audience's news feed as opposed to a blatant ad.

The only difference? TLAs have a "promoted by [Brand]" tag beneath your bio. In this case, my TLA is "Promoted by Fibbler":

Exactly whose profile you use for a LinkedIn TLA depends on the goal of your campaign. It might be:

• Your own account
• Another employees'
• A happy customer who has posted a testimonial you want to promote
• An industry leader mentioning your brand

But we've found one rule to be true: you need to be the persona you're selling to for LinkedIn thought leader ads to work effectively. If you're selling to sales leaders, for example, promote content posted by a sales leader on your team.

Benefits of thought leader ads on LinkedIn

Thought leader ads are a valuable asset in any LinkedIn advertising campaign because they let you:

• Showcase your expertise: There are an estimated 200,000 SaaS companies in the world today, up from 30,000 in 2024. Your strongest lever is yourself, your network, and your expertise. LinkedIn TLAs let you pay to demonstrate this to your target audience.
• Generate revenue: TLAs can turn social followers into buyers. In fact, LinkedIn found that almost half buyers say thought leadership led them to discover and ultimately purchase from a company that was not considered to be among the leaders in a particular category.
• Open the door to partnerships: Whether it's speaking at conferences, starting a joint venture, or securing press coverage, being recognized as a LinkedIn thought leader opens more opportunities to grow your business and personal brand.

How to create a thought leader ad on LinkedIn

Before we dive into the framework, here's a step-by-step guide on how to configure this format when you advertise on LinkedIn:

1. Sign into LinkedIn Campaign Manager

The LinkedIn Campaign Manager is the platform that powers your campaigns.

Create an account (if you haven't already) and confirm that the LinkedIn Insight Tag is installed. This Javascript code collects information about people who visit your website off the back of your LinkedIn campaigns, so you can monitor the impact of them later on.

2. Choose the campaign objective

A campaign objective tells LinkedIn what the ideal result looks like for your ad. For TLAs, this must be either "Awareness" or "Engagement".

3. Set a budget and duration

How much do you want to spend on your thought leader ads? LinkedIn gives you two choices:

• Daily budget: the ideal amount you'd like to spend for each day of the campaign's duration.
• Lifetime budget: this gives LinkedIn more control over how your budget is spent. For example, you might spend more on a busy Tuesday and less on a quieter Saturday.

⚡️Pro tip: Use Fibbler's LinkedIn campaign scheduler to only pay to promote your TLAs when your target audience is online. Otherwise, you could be paying to show your campaign to B2B buyers on the weekend when they're not checking LinkedIn.

4. Define your target audience

Use LinkedIn's audience builder to define the firmographics and demographics that your ideal buyer has, such as their company industry, company size and current job title.

Pay attention to the "Forecasted results" tab on the right-hand side. The aim of a TLA is to build awareness and reach new audiences, so err on the higher side and check the segment breakdown matches your ICP.

⚡️Pro tip: Use a third-party sales intelligence tool, such asCognism, to create audiences based on more advanced firmographics (such as revenue) and technographics (like the CRM or ERP they're using). This lets you get more specific with who your LinkedIn TLAs display to.

5. Choose an organic post to promote

Next, click the "Browse existing content" button to open the LinkedIn content library.

This shows a directory of LinkedIn users who are either employees of your organization or 1st or 2nd degree connections.

You can also enter the URL of a specific organic post you want to promote.

Once you've found the post you want to convert into a TLA, click the "Request approval" button. LinkedIn will send a message to the original poster to get their consent. You'll get another notification when they've approved and your TLA campaign can go live.

The 5-step LinkedIn thought leaders ads framework

Before we dive into the LinkedIn thought leader ads framework, let's get clear on one thing: it's not high-budget or complex; nor do you need a huge budget to see results.

It's a formula to promote smart content, amplified the right way:

• Create value-driven content related to your product or service
• Promote your best-performing organic posts as TLAs
• Monitor ad performance — and cut poor performers
• Connect and engage with ad viewers
• Expand thought leader ads into other formats for retargeting

1. Create value-driven content related to your product or service

Many marketers rush into creating thought leader ads that are only seen by the target audience of your campaign. But this approach is fraught with challenges—notably the fact you're paying to test different types of content while learning what your audience responds to.

Instead, treat your actual profile as that testing ground. Create organic posts that offer value, but are still related to your product or service, and see what followers engage with.

Concerned about over promotion and turning your followers away? Break your content into weekly pillars to maintain a balance between value and promotion. For example, my main pillars are LinkedIn Ads, account-based marketing, and being a founder on the side.

Every organic post I share fits within one of those pillars, whether that's:

• Industry trends
• Company growth
• Tactics
• Unique product stories
• Other people talking about your brand

Two to three promotional posts per week is usually enough if you're keeping the rest of your posts purely value-focused.

Start by engaging directly with people who interact organically with your posts. Reply to comments and continue the conversation. High engagement can not only help you learn about your audience, but signal to LinkedIn that your post is worth displaying in other user's feeds.

Just bear in mind that this works well initially, but it only scales to a certain point since your own network is limited.

⚡️Pro tip: Use a LinkedIn content scheduling tool like Buffer to automate the posting process. You can batch produce your organic posts, so you only have to check back into LinkedIn to respond to people who engage with them.

2. Promote your best performing posts

The golden rule of LinkedIn thought leader ads? If it doesn't engage your audience organically, it won't be a winner when you promote it to other people sharing the same traits. Don't waste your money on bad actors.

Instead, review your LinkedIn Analytics to find your 2-3 best-performing posts on a monthly basis. Amplify them beyond your network through TLAs.

Here's a cheatsheet to help you pinpoint your top-performing organic posts:

• Posts with more likes than usual
• Value-first content with a subtle product tie-in
• CTRs of 10–25% depending on the audience
• Super simple formats: mostly just single images

⚡️Pro tip: Before promoting your organic post as a thought leader ad, edit the original post to include a clear CTA at the end. This way, you can measure success by landing page clicks rather than generic clicks (which include all types of engagements).

My go-to format is: "P.S. [Tool] helps you with this, this, and this. Try it free for XX days at [website link]."

3. Monitor ad performance — and cut poor performers

As your campaign progresses and you begin to collect more data, be brutal with which ads you keep on. If an ad underperforms, cut it and reassign that budget to another post that's gaining more traction.

Exactly what "good performance" looks like can depend on your post type, audience, and organic metrics.

Generally speaking, I follow these benchmarks:

• Cold audiences (people with no prior connection to my LinkedIn profile or business page): 10-20% CTR or 10-20% landing page clicks.
• Retargeting audiences: 15-25% CTR or 20-50% landing page clicks.

4. Connect and engage with ad viewers

LinkedIn is unique in the sense that it offers insight into exactly who viewed and engaged with your campaigns. Connect with interesting titles you find at the company and start conversations to keep the conversation going.

To find this insight:

• Go to LinkedIn's Company tab
• Filter for TLA campaigns
• Manually identify companies that are engaged

You can also narrow your campaign targeting to specific titles so you have a good idea of who at the company is engaging. This helps maintain relevance and makes follow-ups more effective.

Let's put this into practice and say you're a SaaS accounting software that targets small business owners. You've created a TLA that shares your story of starting a business with two young children.

Send a DM to people who've engaged with the TLA that shares:

• An observation from their profile to start a 1-to-1 conversation (e.g. "I saw you just came back from maternity leave—me too! How are you finding the transition back to work?")
• A personalized tip or tool they might find useful (e.g. "My return to work also started around tax time. I wanted to share this template I gave to my accountant to get things back up and running once I got back.")
• A case study from a similar company—but only if you've identified them as being further along the buying journey and receptive to this type of bottom-funnel content.

⚡️Pro tip: Automatically send ad engagers from your TLA campaigns to HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack, or your preferred prospecting tool using Fibbler. Then, build outreach workflows to keep the momentum going on autopilot—no need to remember who you said what to.

5. Expand thought leader ads into other formats for retargeting

Sometimes, buyers aren't confident enough to convert off the back of one promoted post. In fact, audiences who are exposed to different ad formats are 6x more likely to convert.

Use this insight to get more mileage from your campaigns by turning your top-performing TLAs into other LinkedIn ad formats.

For example, you could build a retargeting campaign to reach prospects who engaged with your initial TLA. Use a format that can capture signups/demos more effectively, such as conversation ads or single image product ads, to keep your product top of mind.

Here's what that looked like when I turned my best performing conversation ad into an equally high-performing single image ad:

Mistakes to avoid with LinkedIn thought leader ads

The framework we've shared is simple—but there's still space for things to go wrong. These are the three biggest mistakes to avoid, so you can get the most value out of your LinkedIn TLAs.

Over-designing

Bold colors, fancy fonts, annotated screenshots—best practice is to create something that stands out in your audience's feed. But in our experience, it's simple creatives that perform best.

Stick to simple design choices and use organic posts to test creatives before assigning budget to them. This lets you split-test different creatives to see what your audience responds to, before you start paying to promote them.

Leading with product

LinkedIn users aren't always using the app to buy. They're often scrolling to get a break from work, or looking for education. Lead with this in your TLAs and use your product as the solution (not the main focus).

Here's an example:

Promoting poorly performing posts

Stuck for ideas on what to post and keen to get your TLA campaign up and running? Don't make the mistake of defaulting to promoting posts that didn't perform well organically.

Remember the golden rule: If a post doesn't get much traction organically, it won't when you pay to promote it.

Fibbler: the secret trump card for profitable LinkedIn ads

LinkedIn thought leader ads are an incredibly valuable way to establish your authority, show credibility, and stand out in your target buyer's feed. Where marketers tend to fall flat, however, is over complicating the process.

The foundation of our framework is this: test the waters with organic content, connect with people who engage with your post, and convert top-performers into TLAs.

If you're serious about LinkedIn ads, there's one tool you need in your toolkit: Fibbler. See exactly who's viewed your campaigns and sync engagement data with your CRM—so you're never in the dark about your campaign performance.

LinkedIn thought leader ads FAQ

What is a LinkedIn thought leader?

A LinkedIn thought leader is someone who shares organic content that demonstrates their expertise. Most thought leaders are trusted voices—they likely have a large niche following in their industry.

How do you do a thought leader ad on LinkedIn?

The process to create a thought leader ad on LinkedIn is largely the same as any other campaign. However, the objective must be either "Awareness" or "Engagement". You'll also use the content library to find an organic post to promote, rather than creating a new creative from scratch inside the LinkedIn Campaign Manager.

How much do LinkedIn thought leader ads cost?

Research shows the average CPM for LinkedIn campaigns sits between $5.01 and $8. Expect to pay around this benchmark for thought leader ads.

When did LinkedIn launch thought leader ads?

Thought leader ads are a relatively new advertising format that were launched in 2023.