The sharpest targeting,
at the highest price.

We start with a calculation, and that calculation often decides for us. What a customer is worth to you, what percentage of your meetings convert, and therefore how much you can pay for a lead. On this channel, clicks are counted in euros and not in cents. Below a certain average deal size, the equation does not close, whatever the skill of whoever is running it.

When it does close, we build the targeting on what LinkedIn does better than the others: the role, the seniority, the size of the company, the sector. It is information declared by people themselves and kept up to date by them, which has no equivalent elsewhere.

Finally we accept that the cycle is long. A decision-maker reached today may sign in six months. A campaign judged over thirty days will be judged bad by construction.

LinkedIn’s value does not lie in its audience, which is smaller than that of the other networks. It lies in the nature of the information it holds.

Elsewhere, professional targeting rests on deductions: pages viewed, groups joined, behaviour interpreted. Here, people declare their own job, their company and their seniority, and they keep them up to date, because they have a personal interest in doing so. That is data of a quality nobody else has.

In practice, you can address the finance directors of industrial companies of fifty to two hundred people. No other channel allows that sentence.

That precision is paid for, and paid for dearly. So the reasoning must never start from the cost of the click, which will always look unreasonable next to the other platforms, but from the cost of an acquired customer. A click costing several euros that leads to a substantial annual contract is a good deal. The same click to sell a modest subscription is not.

Two ways of collecting a lead coexist on this channel and they do not produce the same result. The choice depends on what your sales team can absorb.

The built-in form

It is filled in without leaving the platform, pre-populated with profile information. The completion rate is high and the cost per lead low. The trade-off is real: the effort asked is so small that some of the leads obtained had no serious intention. Your team calls back people who do not remember filling anything in.

The landing page

It asks people to leave the platform, to read and to type. The cost per lead rises markedly. But those who get to the end have made an effort, and that effort is itself a filter.

So the choice depends on a question that is not an advertising one: are your salespeople under-loaded or overloaded. A team with time will prefer volume to sort through. An already saturated team will lose money calling back lukewarm leads, however cheap.

It is here that these rules count most, because the media budget is the heaviest line of all.

Three rules apply across the whole division. The media budget does not pass through us and we take no percentage of it: our fee is fixed. The account is created in your name, and the history as well as the audiences stay with you if we stop working together. And there is no minimum term on advertising management. The detail of those three points is on the division’s page.

It is the measurement that decides everything on this channel, and it is the one missing almost everywhere.

A cost per lead can be read in the advertising interface, immediately. It says nothing useful. Two campaigns showing the same cost per lead can have opposite returns: one brings decision-makers, the other curious interns, and nothing in the interface distinguishes them.

The only figure that allows a decision is the cost of a signed customer. It requires pushing the information back from your CRM to the campaign it came from, and waiting for the cycle to finish. That is demanding and it is slow.

Without that loop, management happens on cost per lead, therefore on the wrong indicator, and it methodically optimises towards the cheapest lead, which is very rarely the best. We put that loop in place at the start, before launching the campaigns.

We refuse to launch on LinkedIn more often than on any other channel, because the bill for a mistake is heavier there.

When the average deal size is too low

If a customer brings you a few hundred euros, the cost of acquisition on this channel will almost always exceed that sum. No setting corrects a structural gap.

When the target is very broad

The channel is made for aiming narrow. If you address all companies without distinction, you pay for the tool’s precision without using it, and a search engine will do better for less.

When nothing is ready to receive the leads

With nobody to call back within days, the channel produces nothing. That is true everywhere, but here every lead lost costs several tens of euros.

In those three cases, we say so at the first meeting. We would rather lose an engagement than start it knowing it will not hold.