Why Most B2B Companies Waste Money on LinkedIn Ads (And How to Fix It)

Most B2B companies I talk to have tried LinkedIn Ads once, spent a few thousand dollars, got nothing back, and quietly decided the platform doesn't work for them. I brought Tom Casano, founder of Tamarind, onto Marketing by Design to find out why. Tom has managed over $50 million in LinkedIn ad spend across 3,000+ campaigns, and by the end of our conversation he'd found a targeting mistake in my own ad account that would have quietly cost me thousands of dollars if I'd left it alone.

Here's what I took away from watching an expert build a real campaign, live, mistakes included.

LinkedIn, Meta, and Google Are Not Interchangeable

The first thing Tom cleared up is that "paid social" isn't one strategy. LinkedIn, Meta, and Google Ads reward completely different information.

Meta is built for reach. The targeting is broad, the CPCs are low, sometimes fifty cents to a dollar, and the AI does most of the heavy lifting for you. Google Ads is built for intent. Someone searching "CRM software" is telling you exactly what they want, but you have no idea if that person is a solo founder with no budget or a CMO ready to buy.

LinkedIn sits in a different lane entirely. People treat their LinkedIn profile like a living resume, which means the platform has accurate, current data on job title, seniority, company size, and industry. You're not guessing who you're reaching. You're choosing them.

That precision comes at a cost. The average CPC on LinkedIn runs around $13, compared to Meta's fifty cents to a dollar. Tom's rule of thumb: if your average contract value is under $10,000, LinkedIn probably isn't the right channel. If it's over that, the math works in your favor fast.

The Default Setting That's Quietly Tripling Your Cost Per Lead

This was the part of the conversation that actually changed how I'll run my own account. LinkedIn's default bidding strategy is called Maximum Delivery, and it's recommended right there in the platform. It sounds responsible. It is not.

"That usually results in you bidding three times higher than you need to," Tom told me. Switching to a manual bid, where you set your own maximum cost per click, is one of the simplest changes a marketer can make and one of the least talked about.

Then Tom caught something in my own account. When you set targeting by job function and seniority, LinkedIn defaults to connecting them with an "or" instead of an "and." Left as-is, that means your ad reaches anyone in a marketing department, or anyone who's a VP in any department at all. Correcting that one setting dropped our audience from 37 million people down to 1.4 million. Same targeting intent. Wildly different spend.

This is the kind of thing that separates a marketer who knows the principles from an operator who's actually run the platform. It's also exactly why I talked to Brian Massey about testing over guessing a few episodes back. Assumptions cost money in paid media and on your website. The fix is almost always in the settings, not the strategy.

Thought Leader Ads: The Cheapest Clicks on the Platform

If you've been posting on LinkedIn from your own profile, you're sitting on an asset most companies pay to build from scratch.

Thought Leader Ads let you take an organic post from a real person's profile, yours or a team member's, and run it as a paid ad. It still shows up as coming from that person, not a company page, which means it reads as a real post instead of an ad. The numbers back that up. A standard LinkedIn ad runs around $13 a click. A Thought Leader Ad runs closer to $2, with click-through rates two to three times higher than a normal post.

The catch is you need real content behind it. This only works if you're already creating something worth amplifying. If you're not sure whether your organic content is actually landing with the right audience, that's a conversation worth having before you touch a campaign budget at all.

The Ad Formats Most Marketers Never Test

Thought Leader Ads get most of the attention, but Tom walked through a few other formats worth knowing before you build a campaign.

Document ads let you drop a PDF straight into the feed. Someone can flip through the first few pages right there without leaving LinkedIn, which makes them useful for building awareness with an ungated resource or generating leads with a gated one. Sponsored messaging, which shows up as an InMail-style message in someone's inbox, works best once you've already built a retargeting audience through content or document ads. Cold, it feels like spam. Warm, it converts.

The common thread across every format Tom mentioned is that paid performance follows organic proof. If a post, a document, or a message has never been tested with a real audience, you're guessing with ad budget instead of learning with free reach first. That's the same principle behind how I built MMG Design's own growth through consistent LinkedIn content and relationship building, long before I ever touched a Campaign Manager account.

Does Your LinkedIn Company Page Still Matter?

I asked Tom this directly because it's a question I get from clients constantly, and the honest answer is more nuanced than a yes or no.

Only about 2% of what shows up in a LinkedIn feed comes from a company page post. That's not a typo. A company page post might reach 200 people. A well-targeted LinkedIn ad reaches over 100,000. If you're spending real time polishing your company page banner and posting schedule expecting organic reach, that effort is misplaced. The algorithm made that decision years ago.

But the page isn't dead weight either. Tom's data shows 10 to 20% of people who click a LinkedIn ad go check out the company page afterward. They're not browsing. They're vetting. Is this a real company? Are they doing anything? Does this look abandoned? Your company page doesn't drive the click. It decides whether the click was worth trusting.

The practical takeaway: don't invest hours into company page content strategy. Don't let it sit untouched for six months either. Keep it current enough to pass the trust check, and put your real effort into personal profile content and paid targeting instead.

What Makes a Good Fit for LinkedIn Ads (And Who Should Skip It)

Tom was direct about who he turns away, which I respected. His filter for a good LinkedIn Ads client:

If your deal size is under $10,000, Tom's advice is to look at Meta or Google instead. There's no shame in matching the platform to the offer. The mistake is spending LinkedIn money on a Meta-sized deal.

The Patience Problem Nobody Budgets For

The most useful reframe from the whole conversation wasn't tactical. It was about expectations.

B2B sales cycles are long, and LinkedIn's influence on a deal is rarely the last click. Someone might see your ad, engage with your content, visit your site three times over two months, and only then book a call. If a team stops a campaign after eight weeks because there are "no results," they're often killing the exact effort that was about to pay off.

Tom's advice: have the conversation about patience with leadership before the campaign launches, not after month two when everyone starts getting nervous. Decide in advance what a reasonable runway looks like so a slow start doesn't get mistaken for a failed channel.

What This Means for Your Website

Here's the piece that doesn't get talked about enough on LinkedIn Ads podcasts: none of this matters if the page someone lands on after clicking your ad doesn't hold up.

LinkedIn traffic is expensive to earn. At $13 a click on a standard campaign, every visitor who bounces off a slow, confusing, or generic landing page is money you don't get back. If you're about to put budget behind LinkedIn Ads, it's worth auditing whether your site is actually built to convert that traffic. That's the same problem we solve with website lead generation and CRO work, and it's why I wrote about treating your website as a funnel, not a brochure, a few weeks ago.

It also matters that you can actually see who's engaging with your ads once they hit your site. Visitor identification closes the loop between LinkedIn spend and pipeline, especially for teams in healthcare and other regulated B2B spaces where the sales cycle Tom described, long, high-trust, multi-touch, is the norm rather than the exception.

If you want to hear the full breakdown, including Tom building a real campaign inside my own ad account on screen, catch the full episode of Marketing by Design or connect with Tom on LinkedIn directly. And if you're curious what a website built to actually convert paid traffic looks like, grab our Visual Swipe File for reference.

And that, is marketing by design.