The Results: What This Strategy Actually Produces
Before I explain how any of this works, let me show you what it produces. These aren't hypotheticals — they're current accounts running this exact strategy right now.
Account 1: Launched conversation ads six weeks ago. 23 leads in 30 days. Client's response: "Good momentum, most leads are taking meetings. We have six qualified deals worth about £1.3M in pipeline." Within those first six weeks, they got leads from Meta and Microsoft.
Account 2: $60,000 in total spend. $5.9M in pipeline. 30 won deals. Some pipeline still working through stages, which means the final revenue number will be even higher.
The companies in the pipeline: Oracle (meeting booked), HubSpot (stage one), Amazon (meeting booked). These are not small logos. And they came from the same simple full-funnel structure I'm about to walk you through.
We run this for clients spending from £5K all the way up to £100K per month on LinkedIn ads. The structure is the same — the budget just determines the scale. Smaller budgets mean tighter targeting and smaller retargeting pools. Bigger budgets mean broader reach and faster pipeline velocity. But the three-layer funnel is always the foundation.
The Full Funnel Overview: Three Layers, That's It
Most LinkedIn ad accounts I audit are a complete mess. Dozens of campaigns, overlapping audiences, no clear structure, no idea what's working. The first thing I do is simplify. Every account gets the same three-layer structure:
- Top of funnel: Cold ads. The only goal is to build affordable, high-quality retargeting audiences at scale.
- Middle of funnel: 180-day retargeting. Content nurturing. Thought leader ads. Making sure your ICP knows who you are before they're ready to buy.
- Bottom of funnel: Conversion ads. Lead gen forms. Incentive conversation ads. Both cold and retargeting. Capturing the 2–5% who are in-market right now.
That's it. Unless you have completely different business segments with totally different targeting, you don't need anything more complicated than this. Most SaaS companies only need a simple setup — and within each layer, it's actually really straightforward.
Most companies only run bottom of funnel. They launch LinkedIn ads, point them at a cold audience, and try to drive demos directly. They capture the 2–5% who are in-market and completely ignore the 98% who are not ready to buy yet. Then they wonder why LinkedIn ads "don't work." The middle of funnel is where the real pipeline gets built — it's just slower to see results, which is why most people skip it.
Top of Funnel: Building Retargeting Audiences
The top of funnel has one job: build affordable, high-quality retargeting audiences at scale . That's it. We're not trying to drive demos. We're not trying to close deals. We're filling the top of the funnel so the middle and bottom have something to work with.
The ad formats I use at the top:
- Single image ads optimised for website clicks: These drive traffic to your site, which feeds your retargeting pool. Keep the creative simple — clear value proposition, strong visual, link to a relevant page.
- Video ads optimised for video views: Thought leader video content gets views, which creates a video viewer retargeting audience. This is one of the cheapest ways to build a warm audience on LinkedIn.
- Video ads optimised for website traffic: This is a recent trick that's been working really well. You optimise video ads for traffic instead of views — the video views are slightly more expensive, but you get both the video views AND the website clicks. You're effectively double-dipping: building a video viewer audience and a website visitor audience from the same spend.
- Thought leader ads (text with image): Boosted personal posts that drive engagement. Anyone who engages gets added to your engagement retargeting audience.
All of this content feeds into the retargeting pool that the middle funnel uses. The top is about volume and efficiency — get as many ICP people into your retargeting audiences as cheaply as possible.
Middle of Funnel: The Content Nurture Engine
The middle of funnel is the hardest to build out but it's where the magic happens. This is a 180-day retargeting audience , and the goal is simple: stay in front of your ICP so when they're ready to buy, you're the first company they think of.
This is where you need to think less like a performance marketer and more like a content strategist. You're not optimising for conversions here. You're nurturing the 98% of your audience who are not ready to buy right now — but might be in three months, six months, or a year.
Content goes into three buckets, and you rotate ads across all three:
Bucket 1: Social Proof
Share client wins. Get testimonials. The best social proof is getting someone outside your organisation to say something great about you publicly. If you can get three to five customers to write LinkedIn posts about their experience with your product, you turn those into thought leader ads and rotate them. When your ICP sees multiple different people — with good job titles — talking about you, that builds enormous trust.
You can also do the "disguised brag" — share your results in a way that's educational. "We achieved X results. Here's exactly how we did it." You're bragging, but you're also teaching, which makes it land better.
Bucket 2: Features and Benefits
Show what your product or service actually does. Explain benefits clearly. Do an ungated demo — just show how the product works, no form required. Show a specific feature that customers love. And share what makes you different from the ten other competitors in your space. This is where your unique selling proposition lives.
Bucket 3: Education
Teach something genuinely useful. Share tips. Solve real-life problems. Break down how things actually work. Help your ICP get smarter, faster. Educational content builds authority and trust — and it gives people a reason to pay attention to your ads instead of scrolling past them.
Package these three buckets into document ads, video ads, single image ads, thought leader video ads, and text-based thought leader ads. Rotate them with good frequency so your ICP sees you pop up over and over again across that 180-day window.
Bottom of Funnel: Capturing Demand
The bottom of funnel is where we convert. This is where we're targeting the 2–5% of the market who are in-market right now and ready to take action — book a demo, do a sales call, sign up for a trial.
One important point: bottom of funnel targets both cold AND retargeting audiences . This is different from the middle of funnel which is retargeting only. At the bottom, cold works because you're capturing people who happen to be in-market right now but haven't entered your retargeting pool yet. And retargeting works because those people have been nurtured and are ready to convert.
The ad formats at the bottom:
- Single image ads driving to a demo/book-a-call page: Simple, direct, conversion-focused. Your website does the heavy lifting here.
- Lead gen forms: Don't listen to anyone who says lead gen forms are dead — they are having a comeback. We're seeing them convert well from form completion through to booked meetings, through to pipeline, through to revenue. And LinkedIn is rolling out a native Calendly integration for lead gen forms, which means prospects can book directly into your calendar from the form. That's a game-changer for conversion rates.
- Incentive conversation ads: This is the format that's been absolutely killing it. More on this in the next section.
The Secret Weapon: Incentive Conversation Ads
This is the ad format I mentioned at the beginning — the one that's been an absolute weapon across every account we're running it on. It sounds simple. It is simple. And it works ridiculously well.
Here's the concept: you offer a $100 Amazon gift card to qualified prospects who actually get on a sales call or do a demo . You deliver this offer through a LinkedIn conversation ad, which arrives as a direct message in the prospect's inbox.
The conversation ad itself is dead simple. No complicated decision trees. No "tell me more" branching paths. Just two options:
- "I'm interested"
- "Not interested"
That's it. Don't overcomplicate it. Don't give people too many options. Two buttons. Clean and direct.
The Message Structure
The copy follows one of two templates that consistently work:
Template 1: "[Company name] used us to achieve [specific results]. Would you like me to show you how we could do that for you? Book a demo this week and get a $100 Amazon gift card. Spots limited."
Template 2: "See how [Company A], [Company B], and [Company C] got [specific results]. Book a call with us now and get a $100 Amazon gift card. Spots limited."
Lead with social proof. Make the offer clear. Create urgency with "spots limited." Two response buttons. Done.
The Results
We've now spent over $100,000 on incentive conversation ads in the past few months. Here's what the numbers look like across different accounts:
| Account | Spend | Leads | Cost per SQL |
|---|---|---|---|
| Account A | $5,000 | 53 | ~$94 |
| Account B (retargeting) | $590 | 10 | $59 |
| Account C | $25,000 | 66 | $388 |
| Account D | — | — | $154 |
| Account E | — | — | $214 |
| Account F | — | 19 | $161 |
| Account G | — | — | $177 |
The retargeting audience at $59 per SQL is exceptional. That's what happens when you layer conversation ads on top of a middle funnel that's been warming the audience for months — website visitors, company page viewers, ad engagers all getting hit with the incentive offer.
This is the objection everyone raises. We've done the analysis — across tens of thousands of dollars in spend, these leads are converting to pipeline and revenue. The big company logos we mentioned earlier (Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Oracle) — a lot of them came from incentive conversation ads. We literally had a lead this week from Microsoft, from the exact ICP, from the exact department the client needed. These are real meetings with real buyers. The gift card gets them to click. The offer and social proof get them to show up. And once they're on the call, your sales team does the rest.
The Bidding Trick
One critical detail on conversation ads: bid very high . Set your bid to $5, $10, or even $100. Here's why — LinkedIn only sends one conversation ad per member per 30 days. That means you're competing against every other advertiser targeting that same person, and only one of you gets through.
You want to be the one who gets through. So bid high. It doesn't mean you'll pay that amount — LinkedIn runs a second-price auction, so you pay just above the next highest bidder. In practice, you'll pay somewhere between $0.20 and $1.00 per send. But by bidding high, you guarantee delivery. Ignore LinkedIn's recommended bid — it's always too low.
Setup Order: How to Build This Step by Step
Here's the order I actually build this in for clients — it's not top-down:
- Bottom of funnel first. Set up your conversion campaigns (lead gen forms + incentive conversation ads) targeting both cold and retargeting audiences. This starts capturing the in-market demand immediately, even before you have a proper nurture funnel. You'll get wins from day one.
- Top of funnel second. Launch your cold awareness campaigns (single image, video, TL ads) to start building retargeting pools. This is cheap and straightforward to set up.
- Middle of funnel last. This is the hardest layer because it requires a content strategy. Slowly build out your 180-day retargeting content rotation — social proof, features and benefits, education. Add more content over time. This layer compounds the longer it runs.
The reason for this order: the bottom of funnel makes money from day one. The top of funnel starts feeding the pipeline. And the middle of funnel is what turns it from a short-term play into a compounding engine that gets better every month.
The bottom of funnel captures the 2–5% who are in-market right now. The top of funnel identifies new potential buyers. But the middle of funnel is where you nurture the 98% who aren't ready yet. That middle is the hardest to build and the slowest to show results — but it's the reason why, six months in, your pipeline starts compounding instead of plateauing. You need all three layers. Most companies only build one.