LinkedIn Isn’t For Direct Sales: Here’s What It’s Actually Good For

If you’re running paid campaigns on LinkedIn and the results are leaving you frustrated, confused, and broke, you’re not alone.

As our Sr. Director, Paid Media, Susan Wenograd, noted in a recent pitch to a prospect, “To be honest, I think LinkedIn is the hardest nut for everybody to crack.” Why? Because it’s expensive, people are afraid to test too much, and they go into it with the wrong expectations.

It’s an entirely natural trap to fall into. When you allocate a substantial portion of your budget to any paid media platform, your brain immediately defaults to a conversion mindset. You expect to put money in and get sales, or at least highly qualified leads, out. You create shiny ad copy, point your users to a form or a demo request page, and then wait for the MQLs to flood in. But they don’t. The cost per lead is eye-watering.

The problem isn’t your ad copy, your creative, or your landing page. The problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of what LinkedIn’s paid platform is designed to do well.

Here is the truth, in Susan Wenograd’s own words: “I always tell people, you have to kind of approach it like it’s a content amplification platform. That’s what it does very, very, very well.”

This single reframing is the key to unlocking its massive potential and saving you a ton of money and frustration.

The Conversion Mindset: A Recipe for Expense and Disappointment

When marketers treat LinkedIn like Google Ads or a bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) retargeting platform, they are constantly fighting an uphill battle. This is the definition of inefficient paid media.

As Susan explains, the high cost of the platform naturally pushes people toward the wrong objective: “But because it’s a paid media platform, understandably, people go into it with the conversion mindset.”

Here’s why that conversion-first approach fails on LinkedIn:

1. Low Conversion Efficiency: Despite the platform’s ability to precisely target the right professional, the user is in a passive browsing mode, looking for industry news, not actively shopping for your product. A hard-sell conversion ad disrupts their flow, leading to low conversion rates and an astronomical Cost Per Lead (CPL). As Susan succinctly puts it: “I’m always like, it’s actually not that great at conversion.”
2. Fear of Testing: Because the costs are high, marketers are reluctant to try out different types of content or creative, leading to stagnant campaigns and missed opportunities. Susan notes that because it’s so expensive, “people are afraid to test too much.“ This lack of testing prevents campaigns from finding the engaging content needed for the amplification strategy to work.

When you go into LinkedIn with a “conversion-first” strategy, you’re trying to force the platform to do something it’s simply not optimized for. You are guaranteed to burn your budget quickly and conclude, incorrectly, that the platform “doesn’t work” for you.

The Content Amplification Mindset: The Path to Influence and Authority

So, if LinkedIn isn’t for conversions, what is it for?

It’s for getting the right people to pay attention to you.

Susan is clear that the platform’s superpower lies in its ability to reach specific, high-value individuals: “but it’s amazing for getting the right people to pay attention to you.”

Think of the paid side of LinkedIn not as a sales floor, but as a megaphone pointed directly at the ears of the C-suite, decision-makers, and key influencers in your target accounts. No other platform offers the precision of targeting by title, company, industry, and function that LinkedIn does.

The content amplification mindset leverages this superpower to achieve a more subtle, but ultimately more powerful, goal: building authority and mindshare with your ideal customer profile (ICP).

Strategy 1: The ‘Dark Post’ Content Engine

Stop running ads that point to a hard-conversion landing page. Instead, focus on using paid media to amplify high-value, ungated content that lives right on LinkedIn, what are often called “dark posts.”

This is content that educates, provides insight, or addresses a critical pain point relevant to the targeted professionals. The goal isn’t the lead form; the goal is the engagement – the click, the read, the comment, the share.

Why this works: When a high-value prospect sees your company consistently providing actionable insight in their feed, they begin to associate your brand with expertise and trust. You are building an undeniable authority signal.

Strategy 2: Nurturing Through Retargeting

This is where the magic of the two-step strategy comes in. Once you’ve paid to get the right people to engage with your content, you’ve created a highly valuable audience:

• People who viewed your video content.
• People who clicked through to your blog post.
• People who engaged with your dark posts.

These are no longer cold prospects; they are warm, informed, and aware of your expertise.

Now, and only now, does the conversion mindset become useful. You can now use LinkedIn’s robust retargeting features to serve a bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) offer like a demo request, a consultation, a lead magnet, specifically to this warmed-up audience. Because they’ve already consumed your value, they are far more likely to convert, dramatically dropping your effective Cost Per Qualified Lead (CPQL).

The Ultimate Opportunity

The takeaway from Susan’s analysis is not just a tactical shift, but a financial and emotional one. By adopting the amplification mindset, she promises, “you’re going to save a lot of money and a ton of frustration.”

This is the path to achieving the core B2B goal on the platform. If you can approach your strategy from the amplification perspective, you unlock the platform’s potential for specific audience reach: “There’s definitely a lot of opportunity for you guys there, no doubt. And it’s a good way for you guys to reach all those different titles that you’re trying to get in front of.”

By using the platform’s strengths – its targeting and its ability to act as a megaphone for your best content – you stop competing on cost-per-lead and start winning on brand authority and influence.

Embrace the shift. Stop selling, and start amplifying. The conversions will follow.