Why LinkedIn is where most ABM campaigns begin, and where many go wrong
For most account based marketing campaigns, LinkedIn is the natural starting point. It is the only major advertising platform that lets you target your account list with real precision. But it is also the platform where the most expensive mistakes get made, usually because of a few persistent misunderstandings about what LinkedIn is good at and what it’s not.
This article is about how we actually use LinkedIn within an ABM programme: which formats work, what a realistic budget looks like, where the platform helps, and where it leaves you stranded. Including the things about LinkedIn that almost nobody talks about. If you have read our article on ABM techniques and tactics, this goes a level deeper on the one channel that does most of the heavy lifting in the early phases.
Organic posting and advertising are not the same thing
Let us clear up the most common confusion first. When we talk about ABM on LinkedIn, plenty of people immediately think of posting on their company page. Conceptually they understand the difference between organic and paid perfectly well, but in practice the two get tangled up all the time.
Here is the distinction that matters. Organic posting on your company page is part of your marketing foundation. It is a hygiene factor, something the market simply expects of you. And the reason it matters is straightforward: when someone discovers your company through a campaign, they often click through to your LinkedIn profile to see what kind of company you are. At that moment, there needs to be relevant, interesting content waiting for them.
But within an ABM approach, you deliberately select accounts on your Target Account List that you are not yet in touch with, where no relationship exists yet. The chance that these people follow you on LinkedIn is small. So, for that group, organic posting does little.
That is why, within ABM, we always talk about LinkedIn Advertising. We develop the ad creative, the assets your audience can download or read such as whitepapers and articles, the landing page they arrive on, and so on. These assets exist primarily to take accounts that do not know you yet and gradually warm them up towards a medium or high intent touchpoint, and eventually towards becoming sales qualified. The nice thing is that those same assets often work beautifully in your organic content calendar as well. So the two are not in conflict; they just play very different roles.
How to set up a LinkedIn ABM campaign, step by step
Before getting into formats and budgets, here is the practical sequence we follow to get a LinkedIn ABM campaign live. If you have read our article on ABM strategy, you will recognise the early steps; here we focus on how they translate to LinkedIn specifically.
Step 1: Start from your Target Account List, not an email list
Most guides tell you to upload a list of contacts to LinkedIn as a Matched Audience. That works if you have one. But here is a problem we run into constantly with SME+ companies: they do not have a complete list of relevant email addresses for the contacts they want to reach. Building a campaign around a contact list you do not have is a non-starter.
The good news is that with a cluster approach, you do not need one. Instead of uploading individual contacts, you upload the companies on your Target Account List as a Matched Audience. LinkedIn then targets employees at those companies. You are reaching the right accounts without needing a single email address up front.
Step 2: Refine within the accounts
Once your TAL is loaded as the audience, you narrow down using the targeting tools LinkedIn provides: job function, seniority, member skills and other attributes. This is how you make sure your budget goes to the people who actually play a role in the buying process, rather than everyone who happens to work at a target company. The account list defines which companies you target; the refinement defines the roles within them you pay to reach.
Step 3: Set objective and budget
Choose your campaign objective (for most, this should be brand awareness) and set a budget grounded in current benchmarks rather than old assumptions. More on what those benchmarks look like below.
Step 4: Develop the creative and the landing experience
Build the ad creative and the assets behind it: the whitepaper or article people can read, the landing page they arrive on. These exist to warm up accounts that do not know you yet. Make sure that this creative talks about topics that are highly relevant and current for your TAL.
Step 5: Launch, measure and refine
Get the campaign live, then read the data. Which accounts respond, which themes land, which creatives earn the click. Count on roughly two weeks from start to a properly running campaign, and treat the first weeks as your benchmark-building phase.
This is the basic approach to ABM on LinkedIn. The rest of this article is about doing each step well, and about the things the standard guides leave out.
Which form of ABM fits SME+: one-to-one, one-to-few or one-to-cluster
Almost every guide on ABM describes the same three classic forms, and it is worth knowing them, because they shape how you use LinkedIn.
One-to-one. You treat a single large account as a market of one and build a fully bespoke campaign for it. Highly involved, reserved for a handful of accounts where the potential is enormous. This is enterprise territory.
One-to-few (ABM Lite). You group a small number of similar accounts and tailor messaging to that small set. More scalable, but still resource-intensive.
One-to-many (programmatic). You target a large number of accounts with broader, lightly personalised campaigns. Scalable, but the personalisation thins out fast.
Most guides then tell you to sort your accounts into Tier 1 (one-to-one), Tier 2 (one-to-few) and Tier 3 (one-to-many) and run different approaches per tier. For an enterprise with a large team, that makes sense. For an SME+ company, it usually does not. You do not have the capacity to run a bespoke one-to-one programme alongside a programmatic one, and splitting your limited budget across three tiers spreads it too thin to be effective anywhere.
This is why Sqrl works with a one-to-cluster model. We group accounts that share a dominant characteristic (the same market, the same challenge, the same type of buying process) into one cluster, and run a campaign that is relevant to that whole group. It gives you the relevance of one-to-few without the unaffordable overhead, and the scale of one-to-many without the thin, generic messaging.
Tiering still matters in our approach, but we handle it earlier. In the run-up to building the Target Account List, we already select on tier. In most cases our TAL consists purely of Tier 1 accounts: the companies that genuinely fit. In some cases we add Tier 2 accounts to reach an audience large enough to run an effective campaign on. So by the time the LinkedIn campaign goes live, the tiering work is already done, baked into the account list rather than bolted on as three parallel campaigns.
Which LinkedIn ad formats work for ABM
LinkedIn keeps adding advertising formats, each one designed to give companies another tool to convert people. Not all of them are equally useful for ABM. Here is how we think about the main ones.
Video: stopping power first
In the always-on campaign, we often use video during the first brand awareness phase to introduce the brand. Video works well here because it has more stopping power: people stop scrolling sooner, which lifts the return on your campaign. The benchmark data backs this up. The median video view rate rose to 37.6% in 2025, meaning more than one in three people who see a video ad actually watch it. That is a strong signal of genuine engagement, which is exactly what you want when an audience does not know you yet.
One caveat worth knowing: video has lost its old cost advantage. In 2024 it was the cheapest format to buy reach with; by 2025 its median CPM had climbed to around €90, broadly in line with lead generation. It is still worth it for the engagement, but not because it is cheap any more.
Single image: the practical workhorse
Single image is a fixed element in nearly every campaign, simply because it is so practical. The image determines whether people stop and consider, so you can test many different visuals to arrive at the one with the highest click-through rate. It is easy to produce, easy to vary and easy to optimise. For most ABM campaigns it is the staple you keep running while you test everything else around it.
Document ads and carousels: hit or miss
Document ads and carousels are, in our experience, hit or miss. In certain campaigns and with certain audiences they perform extremely well; in others they miss the mark entirely. They are also harder to optimise, because what the audience sees is so much more extensive: did they drop off at slide three or slide seven? You cannot easily tell.
LinkedIn recently added a new format that shows a few pages of a document and then asks people to convert if they want to read the rest. That one is easier to optimise and you can clearly see whether the asset is working, so we would deploy this format sooner when a campaign has progressed past a certain point.
A note on conversion formats
Many of these newer formats are heavily focused on conversion: turning someone into a marketing qualified lead through a form fill. The thing is, we can do that in a more accessible way through the Sqrl software. A LinkedIn conversion is usually quite expensive. A cost of €207 per lead is normal at the median, and €125 per conversion does not surprise us at all. It all depends on the target audience and their worth to advertisers. Are you targeting only CEO’s? Prepare to pay up.
Meanwhile, we can measure intent at the account level using single image brand awareness ads, and often that is actually easier because the volume is so much higher. Brand awareness has the lowest CPM of all objectives, and LinkedIn serves far more brand awareness impressions, so you can simply buy more of them. That is why we prefer to keep the more conversion-focused formats in reserve, and use them only when there is a specific reason. For example, when privacy considerations, ethical reasons or other factors make it preferable not to target individuals within the audience directly.
From account to contact: a gradual path
The path from account to individual contact is one of gradual steps, not a single leap. An initial brand awareness campaign puts the brand on the map. After seeing three ads, someone might go and have a look at what kind of company you actually are. Given a little more time, they receive some more in-depth information and perhaps fill in a form. And then, a week later, they get a LinkedIn connection request from a salesperson at your company.
Before they accept, they will probably glance at the profile of the person inviting them to connect. Of course they will. And this is where the personal profile has to be relevant and inviting. If it is overtly salesy or transactional, there is a good chance the request gets declined. But if it is a profile that clearly shows the salesperson focuses on the market the account operates in, shares relevant knowledge and looks like a decent person to do business with, the request is far more likely to be accepted.
This is also where thought leader ads come up. Honestly, for most SME+ companies we do not see them as a valid option. Few SME+ businesses have genuine thought leaders on the payroll who are actually recognised as such by the market. They have the knowledge, but not the position. If they do have someone like that, wonderful, it certainly helps. But it is rarely the case.
Reaching the whole buying committee
One thing the standard LinkedIn guides get right: a deal at a target account is rarely decided by one person. Multiple roles influence it, and reaching only the most senior name is not enough. Within each account there is a buying committee, and the people in it have different concerns, different questions and different reasons to care. Your campaign has to speak to the group, not just the figurehead. We break this down into buying groups and buying personas, and it shapes which messages we put in front of whom. We have written about how we map and address the decision making unit in detail in our article on the buying committee and the DMU.
What does LinkedIn advertising actually cost?
LinkedIn has a reputation for being expensive, and the numbers have indeed risen sharply. In 2025 the median CPM across all campaign types was €73.83, up 185% from €25.92 two years earlier. Brand awareness campaign costs nearly tripled. The same budget now buys roughly half the impressions it did in 2023/24.
But here is what makes the CPM discussion so interesting, and it is the part most people miss. People say “LinkedIn has a high CPM,” while LinkedIn simultaneously offers the best targeting available anywhere. So yes, the CPM may be higher, but your waste on irrelevant profiles is many times lower. On a broad channel you pay to reach a large audience and hope the right companies are in it. On LinkedIn you can exclude everyone who does not belong on your list. In our experience, the effective CPM on LinkedIn, the cost of reaching the people who actually matter, is highly competitive.
There is a structural reason ABM campaigns sit at the expensive end. The most contested audiences on the entire platform are senior decision-makers at specific accounts, exactly who ABM targets. Small audiences cost more too: campaigns targeting fewer than 1,000 people paid a median CPM of €107.85, against €61.18 for audiences above 10,000. So when you run a tight ABM campaign aimed at senior people, a CPM of €100 to €250 or more is not a sign something is broken. It is expensive by design, because you are competing for the most sought-after audience on the platform.
The practical takeaway: budget against current benchmarks, not the numbers you remember from a few years ago. Use a range of roughly €65 to €90 as your median planning CPM, and expect more for senior, niche or small audiences. And remember that the headline CPM is only half the story. The other half is how little of it you waste.
LinkedIn hates external links (and what that means)
There is a second cost shift that matters just as much, and it is one almost nobody plans for. The click-through rate for website visits campaigns has collapsed, dropping 61% from a median of 0.69% to 0.27% between 2023/24 and 2025. Combined with the doubled CPM, that pushes the cost of a single click to your website to roughly €29, nearly five times what it was two years earlier.
This is not a creative problem you can optimise your way out of. It is a platform decision. LinkedIn wants to keep users on LinkedIn, so it suppresses posts with external links organically and, it is reasonable to assume, applies the same logic to advertising. The platform charges more to reach the same people and simultaneously nudges those people away from leaving.
For ABM this has a clear consequence. Driving people to an external landing page is more expensive and less efficient than it used to be, which means your brand awareness campaign has to do more of the funnel work: building enough recognition and trust before you ask for a click. And where you do want a direct response, LinkedIn’s native lead forms hold up better than landing pages, because they keep the user on the platform. But, as covered above, within our approach we often do not need that conversion at all, because we measure intent at account level through the software instead.
The frustration nobody mentions: you never reach your whole audience
Here is the part of LinkedIn that almost never gets discussed, and it is one of the biggest practical frustrations. You never reach your entire target audience through LinkedIn. That sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but in practice people do not realise what it means.
Suppose we can reach 60% of your target audience through LinkedIn. That leaves 40% we cannot. How do you reach that 40%? That is often a serious challenge that SME+ companies cannot solve on their own. First you have to work out who those people even are, and LinkedIn does not help you there. Then you have to run campaigns that reach them through other channels. And those are usually not neat advertising platforms, but highly targeted campaigns through other media that are harder for SME+ companies to navigate.
The contrast is what makes it so frustrating. LinkedIn makes that first 60% relatively easy, but the remaining 40% can cause real headaches. The gap between the two is enormous. This is precisely where the Sqrl approach helps, because we already have a whole playbook of tactics and strategies to work your audience as a whole, not just the part that happens to be reachable on LinkedIn, and to extract as many SQLs from it as possible.
The hardest transition: from account to person
LinkedIn is quite mindful of its users’ privacy. Well, somewhat. It will not show you when a company clicks your ad once; it only reveals them after several interactions. It does this to stop you from shaping an audience so narrow that a single click becomes traceable to an individual. That traceability is exactly what you want, and LinkedIn knows it, which is why they prevent it.
This creates one of the biggest challenges in LinkedIn advertising: making the move from working at the account level to working at the person level. When do you make that shift? When the data shows it is the right moment. And which people specifically? LinkedIn is not much help there.
The Sqrl approach does make that transition. We measure intent and touchpoints not only on LinkedIn, but also across other channels and through your website. That gives you a far more complete picture of an account’s intent, so you know better which accounts are ready to follow up: your focus accounts. It is also why, with Sqrl, we often do not use LinkedIn Advertising to follow up individuals at all. LinkedIn is a perfect tool for brand awareness and thought leadership, and in certain campaigns we benefit from its conversion and lead generation options. But when we move into genuinely nurturing contacts and building relationships, we usually do that off LinkedIn Advertising.
Why we do not de-anonymise, and why that matters
A whole category of ABM tools has emerged that promises to de-anonymise your LinkedIn ad engagement: to tell you exactly which individual clicked, using a technical workaround, so you can go and approach them. We deliberately stand on the opposite side of this.
The de-anonymising tools reverse the natural order. They identify people first, then approach them, whether or not that person has shown the slightest genuine interest. The logic is “we know who you are, so we will contact you.” That is not how we see it, and we think it is the wrong way round.
The Sqrl approach is the opposite: we want people to show interest, real buying intent, before anyone follows up personally. We use LinkedIn as the engine of the always-on campaign, but the campaign as a whole is built to bring people to the point where they identify themselves: by filling in a form, downloading something, registering for an event, or taking some other action that lets us connect a signal to real contact details. That is not a technical trick. It is the whole point of the campaign: to generate intent, buying intent. A completed contact form, a download, an event registration, that is intent made visible.
Much of the journey is anonymous, and that is fine. Throughout it, we keep inviting people to get in touch or leave their details. We attach as many actions as possible to individual people, but in the early stages that happens purely at account level. Only when someone shows genuine interest do we move to personal follow-up. That respects the buying journey, and it is simply more effective: following up on demonstrated intent is far warmer than cold-contacting someone because a tool unmasked their click. Identifying people who never asked to be identified is the inverse of what good ABM should do.
Do you need Sales Navigator for ABM?
A common question. In principle, Sales Navigator is not necessary alongside the Sqrl software, because the software already shows all the contacts at your focus accounts. Sales Navigator does add some extra search and filtering options, and of course it lets you message people you are not connected to. So it has its advantages if your team already uses it. But it is not a must.
The biggest misconception about ABM on LinkedIn
There are not really any major misconceptions about ABM on LinkedIn specifically. But there is one thing we hear often: companies assume you can buy ads without limit, as though their audience is on LinkedIn every day and clicking on ads while they are at it. In reality, attention and especially action are scarce. Earning them takes real effort over a sustained period.
The strange thing is that companies know this perfectly well. In B2B, buying decisions are never made overnight. But the moment they start advertising on LinkedIn, it is as if they throw that knowledge overboard, as though everything becomes fleeting the instant it is online or on social media. It does not. LinkedIn, and certainly LinkedIn used for ABM, works exactly the same as doing business in the “real” world.
In fact, the audience on LinkedIn is arguably even more critical, because they can dismiss something without a second thought. Where at a trade show someone might politely listen to your story for a few minutes out of courtesy, on LinkedIn they scroll past within two seconds. Yes, impressions are cheap to buy and you can reach a lot of people quickly. But actually getting results from them is hard work, and it asks a lot of your team, of the assets you deploy, and of yourself.
How LinkedIn fits into the bigger picture
LinkedIn is where most ABM campaigns begin, and for good reason. The targeting is unmatched, the brand awareness formats are efficient at building recognition, and it is the natural home for the always-on campaign that makes intent visible in the first place. But it is a starting point, not the whole game.
The companies that get the most from LinkedIn are the ones that understand its limits: that organic and paid do different jobs, that the high CPM buys low waste, that the platform fights you on external clicks, that you will never reach everyone there, and that nurturing real relationships usually happens elsewhere. Use LinkedIn for what it is genuinely excellent at, measure intent properly so you know when to act, and have a plan for everything LinkedIn cannot do. That is what turns a LinkedIn advertising budget into an account based marketing programme that actually delivers.
In our article on the Sqrl ABM software, we show how we measure intent across LinkedIn, other channels and your website to build the complete picture that LinkedIn alone cannot give you.
