5 LinkedIn marketing tactics for B2B marketers

LinkedIn made some great moves last year that I’ve seen pay off in our suite of B2B clients. Now that we’re entering 2026, focused on marketing goals for the year, I have some recommendations based on our 2025 learnings for you to review and implement in the coming months. That includes:

• Video.
• Thought Leader Ads.
• Personal creativity.
• Developing Appropriate Leads.
• Repetition of advertisements.

Let’s take a look at each zoom and explain the benefits you’ll get.

Short-form video is becoming increasingly important on LinkedIn

Although Meta and TikTok are better suited to video, LinkedIn is not immune to video traffic – especially short-form video (7-15 seconds). While having video content is an important part of your marketing strategy, the right content is just as important.

There are many ways to promote video, including new-ish placements like First Impression Ads. I recommend trying video ads in your feed first to compare performance and engagement with other in-feed ads you’ve been running.

The usual caveats apply here:

Don’t just rehash videos from other platforms. Besides its unique UI, which can affect whether video content stands out, LinkedIn also drives different behaviors among its users. Test videos that address a professional challenge your product can help solve, or highlight testimonials, tutorials, or case studies.

Make sure you have a follow-up plan for engaging users, as one video won’t convert anyone into a customer without extensive amplification.

Set up a strategy to measure the amount of video engagement, from views to specific responses that take action on a notification like “Comment X for the full guide.”

Thought Leader Ads outperform most brand ads

One of the most powerful aspects of B2B marketing is engaging potential customers on behalf of a business or enterprise. Thought Leader Ads (where companies can promote content from employee accounts) have actually been around for a few years. However, we set out to test them in 2025 and achieved much higher engagement than standard ads from business profiles.

TLAs open up some creativity, too. Humor-oriented posts, for one, are a more natural fit from a personal account.

As with other enhanced content, be careful where you invest. If the post already has an active role (and that has become more difficult in the past year as LinkedIn has moved back) and makes a good business case for working with your company, that’s a good candidate for TLA.

A few caveats here, too:

Make sure any employee with content you promote has your product as visible as possible on their profile and has creator mode enabled so users can follow them (creating long-term value for future posts).

According to LinkedIn (we’ve seen it and this is true), it’s best to repurpose content that was originally published less than 30 days before you promote the post.

Personalized LinkedIn ads significantly improve cost per lead

In the last half of 2025, we did a lot of experiments with personalized LinkedIn ads in all locations and using different campaign types.

In our global campaigns, we’ve seen an average >20% improvement in cost per lead, with high CTR and low CPC. US campaigns have been even more successful. CPLs are down 33%.

According to our LinkedIn representative, European users in particular value privacy more than US users, so it makes sense that the personalization was very effective. In any case, and even in the US campaigns, the personalized ads started to show signs of fatigue after about a month.

We responded by combining personalized and non-personalized ads into a single campaign to reduce the frequency of personalized ads – and to allow side-by-side comparisons in the same space.

Developing Qualified Leads helps LinkedIn prioritize high-quality prospects

If you’ve used the Conversions API (CAPI) and advanced conversions in Meta and Google, you’re familiar with the concept of Qualified Lead Optimization. Essentially, this is LinkedIn’s way of letting you aggregate your first-party data behind the scenes to help its algorithm find high-quality users.

Now, this is not as effective as its Meta and Google counterparts yet, but we have seen an increase in the number of qualified leads.

To test it:

Use LinkedIn’s API to sync your CRM data and provide a platform for your qualified lead definition.

Set up a CAPI conversion event for qualified leads and ensure they are transferred to the Campaign Manager.

LinkedIn’s campaign for the ad replication speed feature is launched

LinkedIn’s ad replication feature is clever, but it’s saved a lot of time on our accounts, so it’s worth making sure you’re aware of it.

In March 2025, LinkedIn introduced several updates to the campaign manager, including a new feature that makes it easy to duplicate ads across campaigns and accounts. This has greatly improved our time to launch new campaigns – nothing wrong with getting your hands on it.

LinkedIn CTV ads can be a new channel to explore

We haven’t yet tested the new capabilities of LinkedIn’s CTV, but we are looking at industry perspectives. This can be a great way to measure the messaging and positioning that works for your brand, with niche targeting options, before rolling out big screen campaigns.

In the scheme of things, LinkedIn provided enough quality updates last year to shift more client budgets there. As always, you need to set the right expectations for the platform and make sure you have a solid way to measure its value in your pipeline.

With those in place, and a solid understanding of your ICP that allows you to take full advantage of LinkedIn’s targeting tools, I bet LinkedIn can be a source of impressive growth in the coming months.

Important takeaways

• Short video ads are increasingly effective on LinkedIn.
• Considered lead ads tend to generate higher engagement than ads from company pages.
• Personal creativity can significantly improve click-through rates and cost per lead.
• Qualified Lead Development helps LinkedIn prioritize high-quality leads using CRM data.