How to Advertise on LinkedIn: Step-by-Step B2B Guide

You advertise on LinkedIn through the platform's self-serve ads interface, working from a company page rather than a personal profile. You pick a campaign objective, define an audience with filters like job title, industry, and company size, set a daily budget and bid, add your creative, and submit the ad for LinkedIn's review before it runs.

In short

• LinkedIn ads run from a company page, so you need one before you can spend anything.
• The platform's minimum daily budget is 10 USD and the minimum audience size is 300 people.
• LinkedIn recommends aiming for at least 50,000 people in your target audience for delivery to work well.
• Ad formats include single image, video, carousel, text, and message ads, each with its own placement.
• Every ad goes through LinkedIn's review before it appears to your audience.

What you need before you advertise on LinkedIn

You need a company page, an ads account tied to it, and a clear idea of who you are trying to reach. LinkedIn does not let you publish a campaign from a personal profile post, because campaigns belong to the page, not to you. If you have never set up a page, that is the first task, and it is also the asset your ads will link back to, so fill it out properly rather than leaving a logo and a one-line description.

The second prerequisite is access. Whoever creates the ads account controls billing and permissions, so decide early whether one person manages everything or several people need access. This matters more than it sounds: agencies and in-house teams lose days when the person who owns the account is unavailable and nobody else can change a budget.

The third prerequisite is a landing destination that matches the ad. LinkedIn traffic is expensive relative to many channels because the targeting is precise, and precise targeting is wasted if the click lands on a generic homepage. A dedicated page that speaks to the same job title you targeted converts better and tells you whether the audience or the offer is the problem.

If you are comparing channels before committing, our breakdown of advertising companies for small businesses covers the build-versus-buy decision, and the logic applies to LinkedIn as much as anywhere else.

How do you advertise on LinkedIn step by step?

The sequence is the same whether you are running your first campaign or your fiftieth: objective, audience, budget and bid, creative, review. Each step constrains the next, which is why changing your mind halfway through costs more time than thinking it through at the start.

Step 1: Choose a campaign objective

LinkedIn asks what you want the campaign to do before it asks anything else. Objectives map to the action you are paying for: awareness, website visits, engagement, lead generation, or conversions, among others. Pick the one that matches the outcome you actually need, not the one with the cheapest-looking cost. An awareness objective will not produce form fills no matter how good the creative is, and a lead-generation objective will not build reach.

This is the single most common setup mistake. Teams choose an objective, judge results against a different goal, and conclude LinkedIn does not work. Decide the success metric here and write it down.

Step 2: Build your audience

Targeting is where LinkedIn earns its reputation. You can layer filters for job title, job function, seniority, industry, company name, company size, location, skills, and group membership. Each filter you add shrinks the audience, and LinkedIn will not run a campaign if the audience falls below 300 people. The platform recommends at least 50,000 for delivery to behave well.

The practical tension is that your ideal buyer might be a few thousand people. Broadening to 50,000 means including people who are close but not exact. Broadening below that threshold means the campaign may not deliver at all. Test a few audience sizes rather than guessing once, and keep a note of which filters you changed so you can tell what moved the result.

Step 3: Set your daily budget and bid

LinkedIn's minimum daily budget is 10 USD. That is a floor, not a recommendation. What you actually need depends on your audience size, how competitive the targeting is, and how many people you want to reach per day. A narrow audience with a low budget delivers slowly, which makes it hard to learn anything in a reasonable time.

Bidding works alongside budget. You can let LinkedIn manage the bid or set your own ceiling. If you set a ceiling that is too low for your targeting, the campaign will simply not spend. If you are unsure, start with LinkedIn's automated option, watch what the platform actually pays per result, and adjust from there.

Step 4: Write the ad and add creative

The ad itself has a few moving parts: an introductory line, the headline, the destination, and the visual. Formats differ in how much of each you get. Single image ads give you one visual and a short headline. Carousel ads let you spread a story across several cards. Video ads carry motion and sound, which changes how people read them in a feed. Text ads are small and sit outside the main feed. Message ads land in a member's inbox and need a different tone entirely.

Whichever format you choose, the copy has to survive the feed. People scroll past ads that describe a product and stop at ads that describe a problem they recognize. Write the first line for someone who has never heard of you, and make the destination obvious.

Step 5: Submit for review

LinkedIn reviews every ad before it runs. The review checks the creative, the copy, and the landing page against the platform's advertising rules. Ads get rejected for claims the platform will not allow, for landing pages that do not work, and for images that break its guidelines. Build in time for a rejection and a resubmission rather than scheduling a launch the same day you submit.

Once approved, the campaign starts delivering to your audience. From that point, the useful work is reading the data: which audience segments respond, which creative holds attention, and whether the cost per result fits what a customer is worth to you.

LinkedIn ad formats and where they appear

Each format has a placement and a purpose. Choosing the wrong one is a common reason campaigns underperform, because the format shapes how much attention you get and what people can do with the ad.

The feed formats compete with organic posts from the people your audience follows, so they need to look and read like something worth stopping for. Text ads sit outside that competition and cost less, but they carry far less information and rarely carry a campaign on their own. Message ads are the most direct and the most sensitive: they interrupt someone, so the offer has to justify the interruption.

For a sense of how format choice plays out on another feed-based platform, see our guide to how to make an ad for Instagram. The creative constraints differ, but the principle that the format dictates the message holds.

How much does LinkedIn advertising cost?

LinkedIn does not publish a fixed price per click or per thousand impressions, and any number you see quoted as typical is an average across wildly different campaigns. What you pay depends on your audience, your location, your industry, the competition for the same targeting, your objective, and the quality of your creative. Narrow, senior audiences cost more to reach than broad ones because fewer people match and more advertisers want them.

The honest way to find your cost is to run a small test and read the result. Set a budget you can afford to spend without a return, run long enough to collect meaningful data, and look at cost per click and cost per result rather than cost per impression. Then decide whether the number works against what a customer is worth to you. If a lead costs more than your margin allows, the answer is a different offer or a different audience, not a bigger budget.

You can see the same logic applied to a different auction in our breakdown of Instagram advertising prices and campaign budgets, and the underlying mechanics in how Instagram advertising works.

Why is my LinkedIn audience too small to run ads?

LinkedIn blocks a campaign when your targeting reaches fewer than 300 people, and it suggests at least 50,000 for reliable delivery. If your audience is under that, the fix is to widen the filters, not to raise the budget. Remove a job title layer, expand the location, or add adjacent industries. A title like a specific senior role at a specific company size in one city will rarely clear the threshold on its own.

The exact reach you need depends on your budget and how narrow your niche is. A large budget can make a small audience work, because you are not trying to reach everyone at once. A small budget against a small audience delivers so slowly that you cannot learn from it. Test a few audience sizes and watch delivery before you commit.

Common mistakes when you run ads on LinkedIn

Most failed LinkedIn campaigns fail for reasons that were visible before launch. The objective does not match the metric being judged. The audience is either too narrow to deliver or so broad that the message lands on nobody in particular. The budget is set at the 10 USD minimum for an audience that needs more, so the campaign trickles. The creative describes the company instead of the reader's problem. The landing page does not continue the ad's argument.

There is also a structural mistake: treating LinkedIn like a volume channel. It is a precision channel. You are paying to reach a defined group of people, and the value comes from that definition being right. Campaigns that try to compensate for weak targeting with more spend tend to get more of the same weak result.

If you want the setup handled in one place across LinkedIn and other channels, how to advertise on LinkedIn is where the workflow starts.

Your next step

Before you build anything, write one sentence: who you want to reach, and what you want them to do. If you cannot write it, no targeting filter will fix the campaign. With that sentence in hand, create your company page if you do not have one, open the ads interface, and build a single campaign around that audience with a budget you can afford to learn from.