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Throwback...Monday! Let's relive the Thought Leadership Ads Gallery night with the photos the professional photographer shared with us 😼 👉 If you want to re-watch the talks by Liam Collins & Ryan James - grab the recording here: https://lnkd.in/ePd7c5Yi 👉 + See the Gallery of Top performing Thought Leader Ads here: https://lnkd.in/dPmv_GhW What event should we put on next? 🤔

🔎 This week's best LinkedIn Ads & ABM reads 👉 🟢 1. Same targeting, same platform: $4,523 = 0 leads vs $2,930 = 9 leads 🤯 Kristof Bardos ran native targeting (68,000 people, all the "right" job titles) against a vetted company list of 875 accounts (1,300 people). The list won. By a lot. Marc Woodland explains why from the other side: companies self-select their industry on LinkedIn, so native filters leak - an uploaded list matches at ~90%. Stop guessing, target your dream accounts by name. 🟢 2. Companies that opened deals had seen the ads... 1,883 times first! 🤯 Emilia Korczynska got challenged (internally!) that her "LinkedIn-influenced" pipeline sounded too good to be true. So she plugged HubSpot's + ZenABM's MCPs into Claude and pulled every touchpoint. Verdict: the deals were real, but nobody clicked once and bought - median 754 impressions before a deal opened. If you're still judgind LinkedIn ABM on last-touch, you're judging it wrong. (ZenABM's MCP pipes your LinkedIn Ads data into Claude live - no CSV export, no reupload.) 🟢 3. $1 in, $18 of pipeline out Mathias Skov Onsby on why "LinkedIn is expensive" is the wrong take: 99% of people never click your ads, so stop making decisions on CPC. Measure offline conversions and account-level influenced pipeline + revenue - his clients see $18 pipeline and $14.50 revenue per $1. 🟢 4. Only 0.4% of target decision makers saw his organic content 4+ times in 30 days George Terry ran the analysis on his own posts, and ouch - "may as well not exist". That's the gap paid fixes. But his bigger point: benchmarks are by definition average, so don't let dashboards optimize the feeling out of your creative. 🟢 5. Do your MATH homework before you spend a cent Emilia's other post - the $100k+ of ABM lessons she'd send her younger self. ~5% of accounts in market, 50-70% reachable, 0.45% clicking through: work back from ACV to how many accounts you actually need. Bonus: she open-sourced her ABM skills (account audit, strategy + budget math, content briefs, monthly reporting) for free. Link in the comments, go grab them. 🟢 6. Audience expansion is ON by default. Check it. Twice. Tim Davidson - who tells literally everyone to never use it - left it on and found teachers and "presidents" in his demographics report. If it can happen to him, it can happen to you. 💥 P.S. ZenABM now allows you to turn off Audience Expansion & LAN for ALL your campaigns with one click - for future campaigns as well! 🚀 Try it for 37 days FREE! 🟢 7. Read your engaged company list weekly Ivars Krutainis 🦦 Krutainis mines it two ways: warm accounts → straight to the BDRs, and non-ICP companies burning budget → straight to exclusions. Weekly, not monthly. 🟢 8. Saves > likes Marc Woodland's other post: the algorithm treats saves as the strongest "this is valuable" signal. Write the thing people want to reopen on Monday morning. Links in the comments. 👇 Follow ZenABM for more weekly roundups!

Grab these 4 Claude Skills 💥 to run your entire LinkedIn ABM workflow inside Claude 🤖 - based on your LIVE LinkedIn campaign performance data (with our LinkedIn Ads MCP) - not CSV exports! 💥 From bugdet allocation & strategy planning (how many ads you can have, how much budget to allocate to each campaign), through Ad briefs & image ad design mockups, to ABM Campaign Performance audit and Monthly Reporting - ready to download as a PDF and Send to your boss - just tell Claude what you need. 👇 Here's what each skill does: 🟢 ABM Strategy Planning: Answer a few questions about your goals, budget, and ICP. Get back a full strategy doc with budget math, audience sizing, and a campaign plan built on real benchmarks. 🟢 ABM Campaign Ad Design: Takes your strategy and produces ad copy, creative briefs, and mockups you can upload straight to LinkedIn. This week, not next quarter. 🟢 ABM Audit: Reviews your last 30 days of live ads. Grades them against ZenABM 🧘♀️ B2B benchmarks. Hands you a prioritized fix list, ranked by impact. 🟢 ABM Monthly Report: Exec-ready month-end report comparing this month to last. Pipeline influenced, top-engaging companies, buying signals, clear next steps. Arrives automatically on the 1st. 📊 Use all four together to run ABM end to end, or grab just the one you need today. The skills are free, open-source, and live on GitHub. Connect to #ZenABM 🧘♀️ for FREE to get your real data, or run them standalone with built-in benchmarks. Setup takes <2 minutes. No code required. Work in Claude Cowork, Chat & Code! 🚀 See how they work and grab them from below

Hands up if you've ever accidentally left Audience Expansion or LAN on LinkedIn Campaign Manager on? 🙋♀️ We've all been there. We all agree they are complete & utter budget sinks. So we decided to end Demand Gen folk's pain and suffering once and for all - by letting you TURN OFF Audience Expansion & LAN on LinkedIn for good - for all your past & future campaigns. For you and your clients. ...Imagine never having to live through the embarrassment of forgetting to turn them off and explaining that it just wasted $2800 of their ad budget on wrong companies & job titles... 🫠 Give it a try for FREE for 37 days! P.S. Any other Budget Saving 🏦 features you'd like us to build? 👀 drop a comment 👇

$900K in pipeline in 135 days. Then 5x the budget with half the team. 🔥 Emilia Korczynska just published the full playbook on how she scaled Userpilot's LinkedIn ABM program from a scrappy experiment to a 7-figure pipeline machine, and went from a team of 7 to just 3 people running it all. Here's what changed 👇 She built four Claude skills that handle the ABM grunt work most teams drown in every week: 🟢 Strategy skill: stress-tests whether your revenue goals are even realistic given your budget, CPMs, and conversion rates 🟢 Execution skill: generates campaign outlines, ad briefs, and mockups based on your strategy 🟢 Audit skill: runs weekly diagnostics against ZenABM 🧘♀️ benchmarks, flags decaying ads, and checks if your messaging mix has drifted off-plan 🟢 Reporting skill: builds exec-ready monthly recaps with pipeline influenced, top campaigns, and format-level performance The result? Roughly $8 in pipeline for every $1 spent on LinkedIn ads. 📊 But the real insight isn't about AI replacing people. It's about making the repetitive math, the audit cycles, and the "are we still on strategy?" checks fast enough that a lean team can run a six-figure monthly ad budget without the strategy falling apart. All four skills are open source and ready to install via Claude Code or Cowork. Whether you're planning your first $5K ABM test or already past six figures, this is the most practical ABM guide we've seen this year. 💡 Read the full playbook from GTM Strategist here: https://lnkd.in/eDB-SXHK

🔎 This week's best LinkedIn Ads & #ABM reads 👉 🟢 1. Sheila Coque: 3.9x ROAS on a "too small" account 5 contracts were directly attributed to LinkedIn Ads ($60k from $15.5k spend), but 24 of the 48 deals it closed had seen the ads. Paid quietly amplifies an organic engine that already works, so don't write off small budgets. 🟢 2. Liam Collins: a 4x cost gap hidden inside one audience Splitting a 12.5M global audience into country and region splits exposed a 4x cost-per-conversion gap on identical ads. Keep narrowing to your best-customer profile and cutting churn-prone segments, and results compound every month. 🟢 3. Gabriel Ehrlich: Lead Gen Forms convert 2-3x higher than landing pages on your website, but you trade away friction, information and brand time, and that friction is part of qualifying. For demos, Thought Leader Ads now pull real hand-raisers. 🟢 4. Kristof Bardos: native targeting leaks, a company list fixes it Job function and seniority still serve ads to advisors, ex-employees and stale profiles. Build an account list in Apollo or Clay, upload only the LinkedIn Company URL column for a near-100% match, then layer targeting on top. 🟢 5. Justin Rowe Reporting that impresses leadership: pipeline, not clicks: Stop reporting impressions and show deals influenced by LinkedIn Ads, a month-over-month influence story, your most-engaged accounts (including ones not yet in the CRM), then turn the highest-intent accounts into an activation list. 🟢 + 6. LinkedIn only looks expensive if you grade it like search Search and Meta capture existing demand; LinkedIn reaches accounts before they search. Comparing its CPC to Google's judges two different jobs. 🟢 7. Linde Hasker: 95% of buyers aren't in-market yet Nobody signs a €200k contract off one carousel; they sign because the buying committee already knew the name. Build memory with the 95% who aren't buying, not just the 5% ready to convert. 🟢 8. Ryan James: ads can't rescue a missing content strategy LinkedIn Ads amplify good ideas, they don't create demand from nothing. Nail a clear POV and real expert input before asking why the ads aren't working. 🟢 9. AJ Wilcox: $200M in spend later: LinkedIn's defaults maximize spend, not results Campaign Manager's recommended settings are built to spend your budget. An 11-point 2026 setup that goes against several of them lifts performance without raising spend, e.g.: Always turn off audience expansion & LAN, choose permanent location only, don't use even ad rotation, big way below the minimum recommended big. 🟢 10. Joseph Hill 🦊: put the problem in the creative The winning concepts this week were file cabinets, emails, receipts and stat callouts. Pick visuals where the pain literally shows up, not abstract brand art. The original post links in the comments 👇 Which hit the hardest? Follow ZenABM for more weekly roundups!

5 LinkedIn Ads posts worth your time this week Every week, we post a roundup of the sharpest thinking on LinkedIn Ads & ABM - here's what stood out last week👇 🟢 Maximilian Herczeg: Put conversion creative in your cold layer The classic marketing funnel is a myth. Nobody buys in a straight line, it's back and forth, up and down, and it takes time. So don't structure campaigns as rigid funnel stages. Some people in your cold audience need your service right now → give them bottom-of-funnel content (demo calls, invites) even there. But most need nurturing first: client proof, real numbers, the faces and experts behind your company, your expertise and vision. Run conversion creative in BOTH the cold and warm layers. Then test and adapt to find what works for your audience. 🟢 Valentin Dimitrov: "Incentivized demo leads are junk"... actually, the data says no. Everyone repeats it. Almost nobody has tested it. 233 lead gen campaigns, 6 B2B accounts, 9 months. With an incentive: CPL dropped 62% ($1,497 → $565), form completions up 34%. The obvious pushback: gift cards attract freebie hunters. So one Series E AI company tracked incentivized leads through the full pipeline: 19% higher close rate, 14% bigger deals, 38% faster to close. They turned the incentive off to check. CPL jumped from $604 to $2,657. It went back on. Test it before you write it off. 🟢 Kirill Vdov: Why LinkedIn keeps showing your ads to the wrong people It's all keywords. LinkedIn can't trust self-input profile data, so it extracts keywords to assign attributes. Seniority reflects authority, not experience → "Marketing Manager" reads as Senior, and niche titles like "Chef" or "Data Scientist" get wrongly tagged Entry. Job Titles and Job Functions work the same way, grouped from keyword variations, and Functions run very broad. His fix: lean on the broader Job Function targeting so you don't miss the right people, then trim the extras with exclusions constantly. 🟢 Tim Davidson: A $120k/month audit teardown A Series C SaaS ($1.1B valuation) audit exposed the usual expensive mistakes across all three layers: BOFU: demo-only CTAs with zero nurture (a high MQL score doesn't mean they're demo-ready). Demand Gen: account list OR industries AND job titles blowing the audience wide open, plus website-conversion + max delivery bidding torching CPCs and CPMs. 1:1 ABM: custom ads with a weak 0.32% CTR because the callout wasn't prominent. Put the company name in big letters, try lo-fi and before/after concepts. Small fixes, big money. 🟢 Katya Tarapovskaia: Tracking signals isn't the hard part, acting on them is Most ABM teams track everything → intent surges, site visits, engagement, champion job moves. Then a human still has to look at it all and decide: what next, who acts, what message, is this even real? Manually. Every week. ♻️ Follow ZenABM for more LinkedIn ABM content!

No single AI ABM tool does it all. But here's what most teams get wrong: they buy one expensive platform and hope it covers eight distinct jobs. It doesn't. 🎯 We broke down every job an ABM campaign needs and reviewed the best AI tools for each one 👇 Here are the eight jobs-to-be-done in any LinkedIn-first ABM program: 🟢 Building the target account list 🟢 Reading first-party intent signals 🟢 Enriching and researching accounts 🟢 Creating ad creative 🟢 Personalizing ads and landing pages 🟢 Managing and optimizing campaign performance 🟢 Reporting and revenue attribution 🟢 Automating follow-up outreach The legacy suites (6sense, Demandbase) charge $62k to $66k a year and still leave gaps. A full AI-native stack can cover more ground for less than a single enterprise seat. 💡 One thing matters more than anything else: can a human verify the intent signal the AI is acting on? Third-party scores that say "Acme is in-market" with no proof are bets on a vendor's model. First-party signals, like Acme clicking your ad three times this week, are something your AE and your AI agent can both trust. 📊 ZenABM 🧘♀️ covers five of those eight jobs in one place, starting at $59/month. Intent signals, engagement scoring, campaign optimization, CRM sync, attribution, and an MCP server so agents can actually act on the data. 🚀 Read the full breakdown with real pricing, user reviews, and the stack we'd assemble on a real budget: https://lnkd.in/ewJsjWvk

🟢 $4M+ in ad spend and 10,167 hours of LinkedIn Ads experience packed into 30 pages. We read Kirill Vdov's Ultimate 2026 LinkedIn Targeting Guide [get it below!] and it's too good not to share 👇 Here are the biggest takeaways 👇 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗢𝗥𝗘 𝗳𝗶𝗹𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗼𝗻: 🟢 Job Titles: best starting point and the best exclusion tool 🟢 Job Function + Seniority: always pair them together 🟢 Company Size: a must with any industry targeting 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗽𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗯𝘂𝗿𝗻 𝗯𝘂𝗱𝗴𝗲𝘁: 🟢 "Supertitles" like "Marketing Specialist" secretly include Director and Head level. One title can double your audience without you noticing. 🟢 Industry tag bloat: Apple carries 14 industry tags. Without Company Size filters, a few mega enterprises can eat 40% of your budget. 🟢 Entry seniority: large, cheap, low authority. The algorithm funnels budget straight to it. Exclude it in every Function campaign. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗯𝗼 𝗺𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺𝘀 𝘀𝗹𝗲𝗲𝗽 𝗼𝗻: ICP + Desktop Preference. It cuts about two thirds of your audience, but serious business happens on desktop. Near universal lift for lead gen and direct response. 🎯 One rule stood out above everything else: exclusions beat inclusions. The best campaigns aren't built by adding more filters. They're refined by continuously removing underperformers through Demographics reporting. Get the full guide from the link below: https://payhip.com/b/k9chu And if you want to track the impact of good targeting on your pipeline - try ZenABM for free for 37 days! https://zenabm.com/

Instantly runs up to 600 TLAs at a time. Their secret? They analyzed 2,400+ TLAs to find what actually works. Here's what our TLA bootcamp uncovered 👇 ZenABM 🧘♀️ partnered with RocketSaaS, Passionfroot, and Instantly for a live TLA exhibition and bootcamp. Four speakers. One core truth: B2B buyers don't convert because they saw one ad. They convert after repeated exposure to credible people, useful ideas, and relevant proof. The biggest insights from the talks: 🟢 TLAs consumed 34% of budget in one case but drove the second-largest share of landing page clicks with a stronger effective CTR than image ads (57% vs 46%) 🟢 Top-performing TLA posts averaged 9.1 words per line and ~55 line breaks for readability 🟢 Personal story posts outperformed question posts and statement posts 🟢 Almost 70% of top TLAs placed the CTA at the bottom, not the top 🟢 Only 5% of your audience is ready to buy now. The other 95% needs education and trust first. The strategic takeaway that tied every talk together: LinkedIn Ads measurement needs to move from click-level reporting to account-level journey reporting. Campaign Manager shows you ads. ZenABM 🧘♀️ shows you accounts. Watch the full bootcamp recording and explore the TLA gallery 👇 https://lnkd.in/dta4efa4 + a virtual version of the gallery on our website! https://lnkd.in/dPmv_GhW