Agency owner
Managing Director, B2B growth agency
2 of 5
new retainers sourced from LinkedIn
first 6 months
Illustrative
Pipeline
LinkedIn Advertising Agency for B2B Companies, Led by Thought Leader Ads
We're a LinkedIn advertising agency that leads with Thought Leader Ads: paid promotion of your founders' and executives' own posts, from their profiles, to a precisely targeted buyer list. The creative problem that sinks most B2B LinkedIn ads accounts is already solved, because the post exists and it already proved itself organically.
- Thought Leader Ads built on posts that already performed, not new creative nobody has tested
- Targeting down to named accounts, job function and seniority
- One report that separates cost per click from cost per real conversation
Book your free audit call30 min · Free · No pitch deck
You approve every post we promote, and you keep ownership of the ad account. If we're not a fit, we'll say so on the call.
Or start with the free LinkedIn profile audit
Management is priced separately from ad spend.
Could be anyone
We lost our best engineer because I scheduled standup for 7am.
She told me in the exit interview. Not the pay. Not the roadmap. The standup. She had a school drop-off at 7.40 and she'd spent five months quietly failing at both jobs rather than ask me to move a meeting.
I'd copied the 7am standup from a blog post about high-performing teams.
We moved it to 10. Nobody has left since.
Most of what you call culture is a list of things you copied from someone else and never questioned.
Last updated:
Founders and executives in
- B2B SaaS
- Fintech
- Healthcare & MedTech
- Legal
- Consulting
- Real estate
- Manufacturing
- Hospitality
What buyers say · market research
- of B2B decision-makers trust thought leadership more than marketing materials to judge a company's capabilities
- 73%1
- of decision-makers are more receptive to outreach from a company that consistently publishes high-quality thought leadership
- 90%1
- of decision-makers say good thought leadership makes them willing to pay a premium
- 60%1
What a B2B LinkedIn advertising agency should actually be solving
LinkedIn is the most expensive major ad platform in B2B, and most accounts waste the premium on the wrong problem. They optimise bids, audiences and landing pages, while the creative stays a company-branded ad that nobody in the feed wants to read.
Targeting on LinkedIn is genuinely excellent. Job title, function, seniority, company size, named account lists. You can put a message in front of exactly the 4,000 people who could buy from you. That precision is what you’re paying the premium for, and it’s wasted the moment the thing you put in front of them looks like an ad.
So the real problem is creative, and it’s the one problem a thought leadership agency is unusually well placed to solve. We already write your founders’ posts. We already know which ones your buyers stopped on. Promoting a post that earned attention for free is a different proposition from inventing an ad and hoping.
Thought Leader Ads: promote your founder's best posts
Thought Leader Ads are LinkedIn's format for sponsoring a person's post rather than a company's. The post stays on the individual's profile, with their name and face on it, and your company pays to put it in front of a targeted audience. It carries a “Promoted” label, as all paid placements do.
Why they outperform company ads in B2B
- They don’t look like ads. A founder talking about a problem reads as a post, because it is one. The buyer’s defences don’t go up in the first half-second, which is where most B2B creative dies.
- Trust sits with people, not logos. Your buyers already behave this way. They follow individuals, they screenshot individuals, they forward individuals. A brand account saying the same sentence carries less weight, and everyone involved knows it.
- The creative is pre-tested. This is the part that matters commercially. We pick posts with organic proof: strong saves, comments from the right job titles, high dwell. You’re not guessing whether the message works. You’re buying more distribution for a message that already worked.
- The engagement is real. Comments, replies and DMs land on the founder’s post and stay there, so the ad keeps accumulating social proof while it runs. A company ad’s comments section is usually a liability.
How we run them
- Select. Each month we review the organic performance of your executives’ posts and shortlist the ones worth spend. Organic winners first, always.
- Permission. The post’s author grants your company page permission to promote it, inside LinkedIn. Nothing can be sponsored without the individual’s explicit consent, which is a good guardrail for everyone.
- Audience. Named account lists, job function and seniority layered against your ICP, with your customers and current pipeline excluded where it makes sense.
- Run and read. Small test budgets across three to five posts, then concentrate spend on the one or two that work.
- Feed it back. Which promoted posts produced replies tells us what to write organically next month. Paid becomes a research instrument as well as a channel.
One honest limit. Thought Leader Ads support a narrower set of objectives and calls to action than standard Sponsored Content. They are excellent at putting a credible human message in front of the right people, and they are not a direct-response machine. If you need gated form fills at volume, they run alongside Sponsored Content rather than replacing it.
Book your free audit call30 min · Free · No pitch deck
Sponsored Content and lead gen forms
Thought Leader Ads lead, and they don't do everything. The rest of the account covers the jobs they can't.
Sponsored Content from your managed company page for the things a company should say: a report launch, a product announcement, a customer result with permission, a webinar. Written to be read rather than to be approved internally.
Lead Gen Forms for gated assets, where LinkedIn pre-fills the form from the member’s profile. They convert much better than a landing page because there’s almost nothing to type, and they produce lower-intent leads for the same reason. We use them for genuinely valuable assets, usually the ones built as lead magnets, and we report lead quality by job title rather than lead count.
Document Ads for the frameworks and reports worth reading in the feed.
Retargeting on the people who engaged with a Thought Leader Ad, visited your site, or watched most of a video. This is where the sequence earns its keep: a founder’s post earns attention, and the follow-up asks for something.
Conversation and Message Ads where they fit. These need care, because an unwanted sponsored message does real brand damage in a professional inbox.
Targeting and budgets
Targeting, in the order we build it
- Named accounts. Your target account list uploaded and matched. The highest-precision audience on the platform, and the one to start with.
- Function plus seniority. Job function and seniority rather than job title, which is far more reliable than title matching across companies.
- Company size and industry, as a filter on the above rather than as the audience itself.
- Engagement audiences. People who interacted with your organic or promoted posts.
- Exclusions. Current customers, live opportunities, your own employees, competitors, and agencies and recruiters, who will otherwise consume a meaningful share of your spend.
We avoid audiences under roughly 20,000 members for a cold campaign, because delivery becomes unstable and frequency climbs until you’ve annoyed the exact people you were trying to impress.
Budgets, honestly
LinkedIn is expensive. B2B clicks commonly cost several dollars each and can run well into double figures in competitive categories, and a lead from a form can cost one to several hundred. Anyone quoting you a confident number before seeing your category is guessing.
What that means practically: a test needs enough spend to produce a readable result, usually across three to five creatives over four to six weeks. Below a certain monthly budget you’d be better off putting the money into organic content, and we’ll tell you if that’s where you are.
Management fee from 15% of ad spend, with a recommended minimum spend of USD 3,000 a month.
Spend and fees are separate. Management is billed separately from the media.
Ad spend is billed to your own LinkedIn ad account.
Organic and paid together
Running these as one system is the whole argument for buying both from the same team.
Organic tells paid what to say. Every promoted post was an organic post first, with real performance data attached. You stop guessing at creative.
Paid tells organic who’s listening. Campaign data shows which job functions and seniorities responded to which message. That goes straight back into next month’s content plan.
Paid fixes organic’s reach ceiling. A founder with 4,000 followers can only reach so far on merit. Spend puts the same post in front of 40,000 of the right people, without changing what the post says.
Organic makes paid cheaper to believe. A buyer who sees a promoted post, clicks the profile, and finds 60 posts arguing the same thing consistently is a different buyer from one who finds an empty profile. The profile is the landing page for every Thought Leader Ad, and most accounts never think about it.
The sequence we recommend: publish for a quarter, find out what works, then spend. Advertising a founder who hasn’t established a position is paying to accelerate a message that hasn’t been tested.
How we measure
Click metrics are the easiest thing to make look good and the least useful. The report has four layers.
- Baseline, screenshotted before launch. Current organic reach, current cost per lead from other channels if you have it, and the last 90 days of pipeline source data.
- Delivery. Spend, impressions, frequency and audience saturation. Frequency matters more than most agencies admit; past a point you’re buying irritation.
- Engagement quality. Click-through rate, but also comments and DMs from inside your ICP, which is the signal a company ad almost never produces.
- Cost per outcome, stacked. Cost per click, cost per engaged ICP member, cost per conversation, cost per meeting. The further down that list a number is, the more it means.
- Pipeline. Opportunities your team attributes to the channel, with the usual honest caveat: LinkedIn’s attribution and your CRM will disagree, and we reconcile both rather than quoting the flattering one.
- Creative learnings. Which post, which audience, which hook. Fed into the organic plan.
Flat months are reported as flat months. If spend isn’t working in your category, we’d rather say so than optimise forever.
Results
Prospects now arrive having read three of my posts. The first call starts at the second conversation.
Agency owner
Managing Director, B2B growth agency
Items marked Sample are anonymised, illustrative examples written to typical industry ranges. They are not client results.
Read the LinkedIn personal branding case studies for the full write-ups.
Us vs a LinkedIn ads specialist vs in-house vs DIY
| Factor | Us | Ads-only specialist | In-house marketer | DIY |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Creative source | Your founders' posts, with organic proof | New ad creative, usually from a brief | Whatever the team can produce | Boosted posts |
| Thought Leader Ads | The lead format | Supported, usually secondary | Depends on skill | Possible, rarely used well |
| Media buying depth | Solid, and not our only trade | Deepest | Variable | Shallow |
| Organic feedback loop | Built in: we write the posts | None, unless you supply it | Possible | None |
| Typical fee | — | $1,500–$6,000/mo plus spend | Salary plus tools | Your time |
| Best when | You have founders worth promoting | You need aggressive performance media at scale | Ads are a permanent, high-volume function | Spend is under a few thousand a month |
If you want maximum performance-media sophistication and have strong creative already, hire an ads specialist. If your constraint is that nobody is producing creative worth promoting, start here.
Industries we advertise for
SaaS & Software
Category posts promoted into named accounts.
Fintech
Paid reach that stays inside compliance review.
E-commerce & DTC
Founder content aimed at retail partners and investors.
All ten on the industries hub.
What it costs
Two separate numbers: our management fee and your media spend. We never bundle them into one figure, because that hides whether the money is buying work or buying reach.
Management fee from 15% of ad spend, with a recommended minimum spend of USD 3,000 a month. Ad spend is billed to your own LinkedIn ad account.
3-month minimum, then month to month with 30 days' notice. Prices exclude VAT (5% for UAE-based clients).
For the organic content that makes the ads worth running, see our packages or contact us to scope a paid program.
LinkedIn advertising FAQs
Two numbers. Our management fee, and your media spend, which depends entirely on your category. B2B clicks on LinkedIn commonly cost several dollars and can reach double figures in competitive markets, so a meaningful test needs real budget over four to six weeks. Management fee from 15% of ad spend, with a recommended minimum spend of USD 3,000 a month. Ad spend is billed to your own LinkedIn ad account.
No. Spend is separate from the management fee, and we'd be suspicious of anyone who bundled them, because it hides how much of your money is reaching buyers. Ad spend is billed to your own LinkedIn ad account.
Management fee from 15% of ad spend, with a recommended minimum spend of USD 3,000 a month. LinkedIn itself allows small daily budgets, which is misleading, because a tiny budget can't produce a readable test across several creatives. If you're below the level where spend can teach you anything, we'll tell you to put the money into organic content instead.
They're paid promotion of a person's existing LinkedIn post, running from your company's ad account while the post stays on the individual's profile with their name and face. And yes, permission is required: the author has to explicitly grant your company page the right to sponsor that post, inside LinkedIn. Nobody's post can be promoted without their consent.
Yours. Ad spend is billed to your own LinkedIn ad account. You own the ad account, the Business Manager and the data. Agencies come and go; your campaign history, audiences and conversion data should not leave with them.
Post selection from your executives' organic performance, permission routing, campaign build, audience and exclusion management, budget pacing, creative iteration, and one report that stacks cost per click through to cost per conversation.
About 30 minutes a month beyond the content work: approving which posts get promoted and reviewing the report. Executives need a few minutes once to grant promotion permission.
They are your posts. That’s the point of leading with Thought Leader Ads. For Sponsored Content from the company page, we write to the same voice guidance described on the company page management page.
Yes. You approve which posts are promoted, the audiences, the budgets, and any new creative. Executives separately approve promotion of their own posts inside LinkedIn.
Delivery data is immediate. A readable creative result takes four to six weeks across three to five posts. Knowing your true cost per conversation takes a full quarter, because the conversations take time to become meetings. Anything faster than that is noise being read as signal.
For audience research, performance analysis and reporting. Not for writing the posts we promote, which come from recorded interviews with your executives.
Yes. 3-month minimum, then month to month with 30 days' notice. Practically, paid needs a full quarter before the numbers mean anything, and we'd rather set that expectation now.
Thirty minutes, and a straight answer
We look at your executives' organic performance before the call. If there are posts worth promoting, you'll hear which ones. If there aren't yet, you'll hear that instead of a proposal.
We read your profile first.
Your headline, your About section and your last twenty posts, before we speak. You don't need to prepare anything.
You do most of the talking.
What you sell, who you need in the room, what you've already tried and why it stopped.
You leave with a plan, or a straight no.
If we're not the right fit, we'll tell you on the call and point you somewhere better. We'd rather lose the retainer than take an account we can't make work.
Book your free audit call30 min · Free · No pitch deck
hello@thoughtleaders.aeWe reply within one working dayMon–Fri, 9:00–18:00 GST
If we're not the right fit, we'll tell you on the call.