LinkedIn organic and ads
On LinkedIn, people buy from people, not from company pages.
Company pages have become a compliance exercise. The reach, the comments and the enquiries all happen on personal profiles, because that’s who buyers are deciding whether to trust.
LinkedIn is a search engine too. Buyers look you up before they get in touch, and more of them ask an AI tool first, which reads the same profiles and posts.
So there are two halves to this. The organic side builds the person buyers are checking out. The ads side reaches the people who haven’t found you yet.
Organic
Four parts, in order. Each one builds on the last.
This is the LinkedIn Growth Program I run for clients. It’s built around your own profile, with the company page brought into line behind it.
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01PositionProfile and positioning
Your profile rebuilt against a 14-point standard, so anyone who lands on it understands what you do straight away. Headline, About and experience written for how buyers actually search. A recommendations campaign, and the company page brought into line.
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02PublishContent in your voice
One recorded conversation a month becomes that month’s content. Written in your voice and approved by you, three to five posts a week, daily engagement, and a monthly newsletter that lands in inboxes, not just feeds.
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03ConnectNetwork
An audit of who is actually in your network, then steady, targeted growth. Warm follow-up written and sent by hand. No mass automation, ever.
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04CompoundSearch and AI
Built to be found in Google and in AI search at the same time, so the work keeps paying back long after a post has left the feed.
Ads
LinkedIn gets expensive when you use it like a prospecting list.
Almost every underperforming LinkedIn account I open looks the same. Demo ads pointed at people who’ve never heard of the company, audiences built from job titles and nothing else, and a cost per lead high enough that someone eventually stops funding it without ever quite saying so.
It works when you treat it as two jobs. Something genuinely useful for the people who aren’t ready, and a short, low-friction path for the few who are. Those need different creative and different targets, and running them as one campaign is what makes the whole account look expensive.
The rest is the audience. Build it from data the business already owns rather than job titles alone, and the numbers stop looking like LinkedIn numbers.
What the ads side usually involves
This suits businesses selling a considered service to a defined professional audience, where a single client is worth more than the entire campaign.
- First-party CRM data as seed audiences, rather than job titles alone
- LinkedIn Predictive Audiences layered with job function and seniority
- Resource-led and thought leadership creative for the top of the funnel
- Native lead gen forms, to take the friction out of the last step
- Manual bidding rather than max delivery, and structured testing
- Tracking that can tell a lead from a download
Proof
Sydney Accounting Firm & Gobal FP&A SaaS
In my agency role I ran a LinkedIn webinar program for a mid-tier accounting and advisory firm that had always grown on referrals. It was aimed at school CFOs and senior professionals approaching retirement, seeded with their own CRM data, layered with Predictive Audiences and job function filters, and run through native lead gen forms.
Looking to rebuild your LinkedIn GTM motion? I rebuilt Board International’s LinkedIn account around webinars, native lead gen forms, manual bidding and first-party account data.