LinkedIn Ads: How to Advertise on LinkedIn (A B2B Guide)

LinkedIn ads put your brand in front of people at work. Decision-makers. Founders, marketing heads, the person who signs the deal. You run them through LinkedIn Campaign Manager: pick an objective, build an audience by job title or company, choose a format, then pay per click or per 1,000 views. It is the best paid channel for reaching B2B buyers, because LinkedIn reports over 1.15 billion members worldwide and around 14 million in South Africa. It is also one of the priciest, with clicks running roughly $5 to $12, about R85 to R200. This guide shows how LinkedIn ads work, what they cost, and how to make them profit, from V8 Media, the team behind R2+ billion in client sales.

The full episode of our Marketing Fix show sits above. It is Part 2 of our LinkedIn deep dive with LinkedIn ads specialist Anthea Chittenden. Below it is the playbook: the durable lessons from the show, pulled out and turned into moves you can make this week.

What this episode of Marketing Fix covers

This is the second half of our LinkedIn chat with Anthea Chittenden.

Part 1 was the big picture of LinkedIn marketing. This part goes straight into the paid side. The ads. The money.

Anthea walks through every LinkedIn ad objective, the ad formats, the bidding, the tracking pixel, Lead Gen Forms, and message ads.

It is a lot. So we have laid it out in order below, in plain words, with the Rand numbers South African brands actually care about.

If you missed it, start with Part 1: all you need to know about LinkedIn marketing. Then come back here for the paid playbook.

What are LinkedIn ads, in plain words?

LinkedIn ads are paid posts and messages that show up while people are using LinkedIn for work.

Think about who is on the platform. Not people killing time. People in work mode. Founders, marketing heads, procurement managers, the person who actually signs off the deal.

That is the whole pitch. You are not buying eyeballs. You are buying job titles.

You run them through LinkedIn Campaign Manager, the free dashboard LinkedIn gives every advertiser.

The flow is always the same. Pick an objective. Build an audience. Choose a format. Set a budget and a bid. Launch.

Then you pay one of three ways: per click, per 1,000 views, or per message sent. More on that below.

It is the same idea as Meta or Google ads. The difference is the audience. LinkedIn knows where people work, what they do, and how senior they are. No other platform targets a job title like LinkedIn does.

Why advertise on LinkedIn at all?

Because that is where the business buyers are.

LinkedIn reports over 1.15 billion members across more than 200 countries, according to DataReportal's January 2025 figures. South Africa alone sits near 14 million members, per NapoleonCat's 2024 data.

One word makes it work for B2B. Context.

Someone scrolling Instagram is looking at their mate's braai photos. Someone on LinkedIn is in work headspace, open to a business pitch. Different mindset entirely.

So if you sell to other businesses, sell software, sell a high-ticket service, or hire skilled staff, LinkedIn puts you in front of the exact person who decides.

Here is the catch. That precision is not cheap. We get to the real numbers further down. For now, know that LinkedIn is the premium aisle. You go there for quality, not for cheap reach.

If your customer is a consumer buying a product on their phone, LinkedIn is the wrong shop. Meta ads will be cheaper and better for you. LinkedIn earns its price tag when your buyer is a professional.

LinkedIn ad objectives: pick the right job first

This is the part everyone rushes. Do not.

Your objective is the foundation of the whole campaign. As Anthea put it in the episode, define it clearly and know how you want to measure it before you do anything else.

Why it matters: your objective tells LinkedIn's algorithm what to optimise for. Pick the wrong one and you pay for the wrong outcome.

Run a brand awareness campaign when what you actually want is leads, and you will get reach with nothing to show for it. Reach is not revenue.

LinkedIn groups its objectives across the funnel. Here is what each one is really for.

There is a little question-mark button next to each objective in Campaign Manager. Click it. It tells you exactly what that objective measures and how the algorithm behaves. Free guidance, hiding in plain sight.

Your objective also has to match your budget. A tiny budget chasing mass brand awareness is money down the drain. Be honest about what you can spend, then pick the job that fits.

One warning from the episode. Once a LinkedIn campaign is live, you cannot just flip a switch and change its objective. You have to rebuild it. So get the foundation right the first time.

The LinkedIn ad formats, explained simply

LinkedIn is not one ad. It is a small menu of formats. Here is what each does and who it suits.

A note on video. The specs for a paid video are not the same as an organic post. So do not just boost your normal upload. Anthea's advice: post video natively for organic reach, and build to paid specs when you run it as an ad.

Follower and dynamic ads are an underused win. They appear on desktop and look like LinkedIn suggesting your page. Great for squeezing more out of an audience that already knows you.

LinkedIn Live and Events are also pulling strong results. You can invite a large audience to a webinar or event without anyone needing a separate app. A cheap way to fill a room.

How much do LinkedIn ads cost?

More than you expect. Brace yourself.

LinkedIn runs on an auction. You and other advertisers chasing the same audience bid against each other. It is a second-price auction, so the winner pays just above the next-highest bid. That keeps it fair, but the professional audience pushes prices up.

The floor is low. LinkedIn lets you start with a minimum bid of about $10 a day, roughly R170 at about R17 to the dollar. So the door is cheap to walk through.

The clicks are not. Here are the benchmarks from WebFX and Zapier's 2026 cost data.

For scale: LinkedIn's CPM of $30 to $60 dwarfs Facebook's $7 to $15, per WebFX. You pay more because the audience is worth more. C-suite targeting can push a click well past $15, about R255.

What does a real budget look like? Most brands need $1,000 to $5,000 a month, roughly R17,000 to R85,000, to gather enough data to optimise properly. Below that you are guessing.

You can let LinkedIn auto-bid, which usually performs best, or set bids manually. Bid too low and your ad crawls out slowly with poor delivery. Your real cost always comes back to your objective and how hard you are competing.

The lesson: do not treat LinkedIn like cheap Facebook reach. Treat every click like it cost you R150, because it might. That mindset forces you to send those clicks somewhere that converts.

How LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms work

This is the format most B2B brands should care about most.

A Lead Gen Form pops up inside LinkedIn when someone clicks your ad. It pre-fills their details from their profile. Less typing means more leads.

It captures four core fields: name, surname, email and contact number. You also get space for one custom question.

Handy, but there are rules. Anthea flagged a few you must know before you run them.

• The data is only stored for 90 days if you are not actively using it. Pull your leads out and follow up fast.
• The collected data is encrypted, and the submit button is built so people do not click it by accident. That protects the lead and keeps you compliant.
• If your form has an error, you have to rebuild it. You cannot edit a form people have already agreed to, because you must honour the exact agreement they signed up under.
• You must tell people what their data will be used for. Skip this and you are breaking the rules.

That last point matters more in South Africa than people think. We have POPIA, the Protection of Personal Information Act, our own version of the data-protection law, enforced by the Information Regulator. Telling people what you will do with their details is not optional here. It is the law.

One more option. Instead of the on-platform form, you can drive people to a form on your own site. If you do, make the form the first thing they see. Do not make a busy professional scroll to find it. They will not. They will bounce.

And the golden rule with any lead: get them on the phone fast. In our experience, a fresh LinkedIn lead can go cold within a day. Speed wins deals. We dig into why in why 95% of your leads don't convert.

The LinkedIn Insight Tag: the pixel most people set up wrong

Running traffic ads without tracking is like driving blind. The fix is the LinkedIn Insight Tag.

It is a small piece of code, a pixel, that watches what people do on your site after they click. Here is where most people get it wrong.

Your web person must put the tag in the global header and footer of the whole site. Every page.

Put it on your homepage only, and you go blind the moment someone clicks deeper. You will not see which pages they visited or where they dropped off.

Once it is firing site-wide, build a website audience inside Campaign Manager so the system knows what to track.

Use a clear naming convention while you are at it: homepage, contact page, pricing, and so on. Then you can see exactly which pages a person cared about, and retarget them with the right message.

You also need that tag firing to measure conversions properly. No tag, no proof your spend worked. Get this set up before you spend a cent on traffic ads.

Message ads and InMail: the one-to-one play

Message ads, sometimes called conversation ads or InMail, land straight in someone's LinkedIn inbox. They are not feed posts. They are personal.

They work on a cost-per-send budget. The audience is smaller, but the contact is direct.

Here is the clever bit. An InMail ad can only be served to a person once every 30 days. So when someone opens yours, you own that inbox space. No competitor can message them for 30 days.

These work best coming from a real person. A founder. A well-known face in the business. A thought-leader, not a faceless brand.

They are copy-rich, so you can say more. You can attach multiple links, downloadable content, and a lead gen form. That makes them strong for the lower part of your funnel, where someone already knows you.

One honest catch. Your message gets labelled as a sponsored ad. They know it is not their mate reaching out. So the only way to win is a subject line that makes them click anyway, and an offer they actually want. No value, no reply.

How to make LinkedIn ads actually profitable

Most LinkedIn budgets get wasted. Here is how to stay on the right side.

LinkedIn is not a quick-win machine. Do not go in expecting leads in week two. Anthea said it plainly: commit to three months, test properly, then optimise. Walk in without that commitment and you are just burning R150 clicks for nothing.

Test audiences. Test formats. Test bid strategies. Your gut has no idea what LinkedIn's algorithm will reward for your specific offer. Your numbers do. Run the test, read the data, then trust it.

Match the objective to the goal, every time. Want leads? Run lead gen, not brand awareness. Want your video watched? Run video views. Stop paying for the wrong outcome.

Watch the cost per lead like a hawk. At R150 a click, a sloppy funnel bleeds money fast. Know your numbers. Our guide on which lead gen metrics to measure shows the exact ones to track.

Then do the boring part most brands skip. Work out what a customer is actually worth to you, and what you can afford to pay to get one. If a client is worth R50,000 over their lifetime, a R2,000 cost per lead is a steal. If they are worth R800, it is a disaster. Same number, opposite verdict.

This is the V8 way. We do not chase cheap clicks or vanity reach. We chase profit per Rand spent. The whole point of an expensive channel like LinkedIn is to send those costly clicks into a system built to convert them, which is exactly what our AI lead generation system does.

LinkedIn ads vs Meta ads: which should you run?

This is the question every SA business owner asks. The honest answer is: it depends who you sell to.

Rule of thumb: if your customer signs off business decisions, LinkedIn earns its price. If your customer is a consumer with a card out, Meta wins on cost.

Plenty of SA brands run both. LinkedIn to reach the decision-maker by job title. Meta to scale reach cheaply and stay front of mind. And Google Ads to catch the people already searching for what you sell.

The mistake is forcing LinkedIn when your buyer is not a professional. Wrong shop. Wrong price.

How V8 Media puts this to work

We do not run ads to look busy. We run them to make profit. Here is what that looks like.

First we ask the only question that matters: is your buyer a professional? If yes, LinkedIn is on the table. If not, we save your money and put it on a cheaper channel.

Then we get the foundation right. The correct objective, a tight audience by job title and company, and the Insight Tag firing across the whole site before a cent is spent.

We build the lead engine behind the ad, because an expensive click is wasted if the follow-up is slow. Lead Gen Forms, fast phone follow-up, retargeting the people who showed intent.

Then we count the true cost per lead and the true value of each customer, so budget flows to what makes money, not what looks impressive in a reach report.

R2+ billion in client sales since 2018. Much of it for South African businesses chasing better leads, exactly like yours. See how we build the whole lead machine with our AI lead generation system.

Read these next: the biggest lead generation mistakes costing you thousands, and how to increase lead quality on Meta.

Frequently asked questions

How do I advertise on LinkedIn?

Go to LinkedIn Campaign Manager. It is free. Pick your objective first, like lead generation or website visits. Then build your audience by job title, company or seniority. Then choose a format such as Sponsored Content or a Lead Gen Form. Set your budget and bid, then launch. You pay per click, per 1,000 views, or per message sent, depending on the format. Get the objective wrong and you rebuild the whole campaign from scratch, because you cannot change it once it is live.

How much do LinkedIn ads cost?

LinkedIn ads cost roughly $5 to $12 per click for Sponsored Content, about R85 to R200 at around R17 to the dollar, according to WebFX and Zapier's 2026 benchmarks. Cost per 1,000 views runs $30 to $60, far higher than Facebook's $7 to $15, because the professional audience is worth more. The minimum daily budget is about $10, around R170, but most brands need $1,000 to $5,000 a month, roughly R17,000 to R85,000, to gather enough data to optimise. Targeting senior decision-makers like C-suite can push a single click past $15.

Are LinkedIn ads worth it for South African businesses?

Yes, if you sell to other businesses or to professionals. LinkedIn has around 14 million South African members, per NapoleonCat's 2024 data, and no other platform lets you target people by job title, company and seniority. That precision makes it the best channel for B2B, high-ticket and professional services. It is not worth it if your customer is a consumer buying a product, because clicks are far pricier than Meta. The deciding question is simple: does your buyer sign off business decisions? If yes, LinkedIn earns its premium price.

What is the best LinkedIn ad objective for leads?

The lead generation objective is best when your goal is collecting contact details, because it optimises for form fills and uses LinkedIn's Lead Gen Forms that pre-fill a person's details from their profile. Running a brand awareness objective when you actually want leads is the most common and costly mistake, because the algorithm will chase reach instead of leads. Your objective is the foundation of the campaign, so define it clearly and match it to your budget before you launch. Remember you cannot change an objective once live without rebuilding the campaign.

How do LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms work?

Someone clicks your ad and a form pops up inside LinkedIn, already filled in from their profile. They barely have to type, which is why these forms often convert better than a form on your own site. They capture four core fields, name, surname, email and contact number, plus space for one custom question. The data is encrypted and only stored for 90 days if you are not actively using it, so export and follow up fast. You cannot edit a form people have already submitted, you must rebuild it, and you must tell people what their data will be used for, which also keeps you compliant with South Africa's POPIA law.

What is the LinkedIn Insight Tag?

The LinkedIn Insight Tag is a piece of tracking code, a pixel, that you install on your website to measure what people do after clicking your ad and to build retargeting audiences. The key is to place it in the global header and footer of your entire site, not just the homepage, otherwise you cannot see which pages visitors viewed or where they dropped off. Once it is firing site-wide, you build a website audience in Campaign Manager so the system knows what to track. You need the tag working to measure conversions and prove your ad spend actually drove results.

LinkedIn ads or Meta ads: which is better?

It depends entirely on who you sell to. LinkedIn ads are better for B2B, high-ticket and professional services, because you can target by job title, company and seniority and reach buyers in work mode. Meta ads are better for B2C, products and local services, because clicks are a fraction of LinkedIn's cost and the audience is far larger. If your customer signs off business decisions, LinkedIn's premium price is justified. If your customer is a consumer with a card out, Meta wins on cost. Many South African brands run both, using each for the job it does best.