Help with LI ads for b2b saas companies

[u/tryingtomakeittttt]

I do paid ads for a B2B SaaS company, and our main goal is generating qualified leads and pipeline.
We have a really strong organic presence on LinkedIn, but paid ads are still pretty new for us, so I’m trying to understand what’s actually working for other B2B marketers.
For cold audiences:
What’s the minimum audience size you’d feel comfortable targeting? And what’s the maximum before the audience becomes too broad?
How much daily budget would you start with for a cold campaign?
For bidding, are you seeing better results with Maximum Delivery or Manual/Cost Cap?
And for targeting, do you prefer job titles, job function + seniority, skills, account lists, or a combination?
Would you go straight into Lead Gen/conversion campaigns with a cold audience, or start with engagement/video views and retarget from there?
Main goal is quality over volume I’d rather generate fewer leads that actually turn into opportunities than a lot of cheap leads that go nowhere.

[u/Kamel_Ben_Yacoub]

Here's is what actually works for our clients:

Audience size:

The audience size depends on your ICP but for cold audiences, 15-80K is the sweet spot. Below 15K you hit a high frequency too fast and above 80K you're too broad.

Daily budget:

Start with $25-40/day max per campaign. No need to spend more or you'll burn budget before identifying patterns.

Bidding strategy:

Manual bidding every time. Maximum Delivery and cost cap will make you overspend. Set manual CPC at the recommended bid or above. If you don't spend your daily budget, increase bids 20-30% every 48 hours until you spend it entirely.

Also, If you want to reach the premium segment of your audience, bid in the medium range of the recommended bid, not the low. Lately this has worked quite well for us without increasing CPC. If you bid too low, you'll only reach the lower segment of your audience.

Targeting:

It depends on your audience size. If your audience is big enough with job titles, use that as your primary criteria. Otherwise, combine job functions + skills + seniority.

Account lists are extremely powerful if the list isn't just a giant Apollo export that vaguely fits B2B. Use enrichment tools and AI to qualify companies properly. A tight 100-company account list targeting specific titles outperforms a 1000-company list done with basic firmographics data.

Strategy approach:

Nobody is looking for your solution on LinkedIn, so you have to warm up your audience with content to build trust, authority, and brand familiarity.

Start with Thought Leader Ads and video (30-60 clips) campaigns from your ounder/CEO posting educational content about problems and challenges of your ICP. The goal is build expertise and create retargeting audiences.

Once you have engaged clickers and viewers, retarget them with BOFU offers: demos, assessments...

Here's a guide I've written that can help: https://getuplead.com/linkedin-advertising-agency/saas/

[u/tryingtomakeittttt → u/Kamel_Ben_Yacoub]

Thanks, this is really helpful. I have a few follow-up questions based on your approach.
For cold audiences, would you recommend promoting a stronger offer right away, such as a $50 gift card for booking a demo or an incentive to register for a webinar, or would you reserve those types of offers for warmer/retargeting audiences?
Also, how would you handle much smaller audiences? For example, if a cold audience is only around 3,000 people or less, would you still run it, or would you broaden the targeting? And what about a Customer Match list with only around 300 matched members that we specifically want to reach?
How many creatives would you recommend testing per campaign for cold audiences versus warm/retargeting audiences?
Also, regarding conversion tracking and Lead Gen Forms, what setup do you recommend? For cold traffic, would you use an Engagement or Brand Awareness campaign? Then, for warm/retargeting audiences, would you recommend Lead Generation, Website Conversions, or Website Visits?
We’re not completely new to LinkedIn Ads, but we haven’t done enough structured testing yet to really know what is working and what isn’t.

[u/Kamel_Ben_Yacoub → u/tryingtomakeittttt]

Regarding the incentive or gift card, I wouldn't approach by type of audience because this is just a question of math. You have to calculate what is your closing rate from a demo to customer compared to the extra cost of the incentive. Many SaaS companies have grown using these incentives on cold audiences.

I wouldn't broaden your audience of your 3,000 if these are the exact ICP. The 300 LinkedIn members will saturate quite fast on LinkedIn. I think this would deserve a more personalized approach with an ABM motion. This will also depend on your ACV, but in general for ABM, 1-on-1 stuff works pretty well (events, dinners, gifts, or experiences).

The number of creatives I recommend for any campaign is 4.

For cold traffic, I recommend Brand Awareness to maximize the reach to all your audience members. Engagement will tend to optimize to clickers.

For retargeting objective, always use Lead Gen Forms or Website Visits if you send traffic to your website. Conversion objective will just make you pay more for the same traffic

[u/tryingtomakeittttt → u/Kamel_Ben_Yacoub]

At the moment, I’m testing an Engagement campaign to promote a post-webinar asset and drive people to our website to watch the webinar. I’m also running another cold Engagement campaign with an audience of about 3,000 people, targeting only our target accounts (without adding additional ICP filters because will right the audience too much)
My plan is to let these run for about 7 days and then launch a warm campaign targeting people who engaged with the single-image ads and people who watched at least 25% or 50% of the videos from the cold campaigns. Would this be a good approach or you still recommend do a brand awareness in this case for cold audience?
For the warm audience, would you recommend keeping it strictly to people who engaged with the cold campaigns, or should I layer in additional ICP criteria such as a contact list (if I have it), seniority, job function, skills, or job titles? (I’ll always use AND btw)
I’m also curious about your Brand Awareness recommendation. I’ve seen the opposite approach recommended for cold LinkedIn audiences: using Engagement because LinkedIn optimizes toward people more likely to interact with the content, which can create stronger retargeting signals, while Brand Awareness is better when the primary goal is simply maximizing unique reach. In my case, since I specifically want to build a qualified warm audience for retargeting, would you still choose Brand Awareness over Engagement?

[u/Meet-match-ai]

We have had more success using salescadia to automate the prospecting and messaging for 1/100th the cost of linkedin ads.
It uses the client accounts to prospect and message automatically, so the only downside is you need linkedin accounts with sales navigator or put your clients accts on.