Choose the channel by the buying decision
For a B2B or considered purchase, we compare what each channel tells us about the person it reaches.
| Decision | Meta | Google Search | |
|---|---|---|---|
| How you reach someone | Professional details, including job title, seniority and company type. | Audience traits and interests. | The words someone searches for. |
| What still needs checking | Whether the person has a need behind the job title. | Whether personal interest relates to a business buying decision. | Whether the search comes from a potential buyer. |
| First offer we would test | A useful resource for that role, or a discussion about a defined business problem. | A visual explanation of the problem with a useful next step. | An enquiry or demonstration matched to the search. |
| Where we would challenge the plan | Professional details do little to distinguish your buyers. | Relevance depends on a professional role the audience plan cannot establish. | The proposed searches do not describe the problem you solve. |
These are starting choices for a test. A director can read an ad without wanting a meeting. Someone searching for a service can still be researching for someone else. We choose the offer around the decision you need that person to make.
LinkedIn is available as an add-on to our paid media service. We assess its place alongside the channels you already run. If the audience description gives us no useful reason to choose LinkedIn, we recommend spending elsewhere. The proposed buyer group needs to justify that choice.
Build audiences around the buying team
The people you want to reach feel the problem, weigh up the fix or sign off the purchase. We target each of those roles. Name the roles first. We translate those responsibilities into seniority and relevant company types.
Suppose you sell stock-control software to wholesalers. An operations lead might want fewer stock discrepancies. A finance director might need to judge the investment. We would give each role a reason to pay attention, even where both influence the same purchase.
LinkedIn currently requires at least 300 member accounts to run an ad set, according to its Marketing Solutions Help. We assess the proposed group against your sales brief as well as that minimum.
We check the audience's size and its fit together. Combining every desirable detail can leave a group too small to test usefully. Broadening it without a reason creates a different problem: contacts your sales team would never pursue. We agree which details are essential and which deserve a separate test.
Before launch, you see the proposed groups and the reason to test each. We record the exclusions too. If junior operations staff respond, we ask sales whether they influence the purchase. Their answer shapes the next audience test.
Make the offer clear before making the form easy
A form submission should mean something your sales team can act on. The ad sets out an explicit exchange, including what the person receives and what happens after they supply their details. A request for a guide stays a request for a guide.
For its Lead Gen Form format, LinkedIn says the form shown after an ad click is pre-filled with the member's profile data. That saves some typing. We record a filled-in form and a ready buyer as two different things. Buying plans come out in the sales conversation.
For the stock-control example, a guide might help an operations lead assess the problem. A demonstration would ask them to consider a particular solution. We choose the offer to match the intended conversation, then make that promise clear in the ad. We do not turn a download into a meeting request because it arrived in a spreadsheet.
A landing page is another route. We would use it where the buyer needs an explanation, evidence or a clearer sense of fit before sharing details. We keep the page focused on the advertised offer, with the enquiry route in view.
Our lead generation service covers the landing page and qualification work around the campaign. We agree what counts as a relevant enquiry before building the form. Where a question would change whether sales follows up, we plan where to ask it: in the enquiry or the first conversation. For the software example, knowing how someone handles stock today could help sales prepare.
An enquiry needs a named owner
When someone fills in a LinkedIn form, the enquiry should land in your CRM (the system you use to track contacts and deals) with the offer they asked for, the campaign it came from and the name of the person who will follow up. We trace it with your team. A name and an email address leave sales guessing why someone got in touch.
Before spend starts, we typically test that handover with your team. We check the fields arrive in the right place and the owner can see them. We scope any additional connection work through AI automation, around your existing systems.
Your team sets a response target it can keep. We track how long it takes a person, not an auto-reply, to answer each enquiry. The reply should acknowledge what the person requested and make the next step clear. An automatic receipt and a sales response are different events in the report.
Sales feeds back a reason for each rejected enquiry: wrong role, unsuitable company, no current need or something else specific. A repeated wrong-role rejection, for example, sends the next review back to the audience definition. The report separates unanswered enquiries from those sales has assessed.
Follow the opportunity through to revenue
Your sales stages give the report its structure before the campaign runs. A sales-accepted lead is an enquiry your team confirms it can pursue. An opportunity needs a defined next step in the buying process. You set those definitions with us so the report uses your sales team's language.
The report connects campaign spend to accepted enquiries, meetings held, opportunities and completed sales. It keeps open pipeline value separate from revenue. The report groups enquiries by arrival date, keeping older opportunities separate from the results of a new test.
Clicks and form completions help us inspect the ads. Sales outcomes inform the spending decision. If submissions rise while sales acceptance falls, we inspect the roles and the offer before adding budget. If accepted enquiries stall before a meeting, we review the handover with your team.
We explain how each reported sale connects to the campaign. Where that connection is uncertain, the report says so. Our guide to marketing attribution explains the choices behind assigning credit. We explain the reason for the next change. Repeatedly unsuitable enquiries, for example, can justify ending spend on that audience.
