What’s the minimum budget for LinkedIn ads? Can you still get enough leads with a small ad spend? If you’re starting out with LinkedIn ads or you want to figure out how to spend less while converting enough leads, this is for you.
In this article, we dive into what the minimum LinkedIn ad spend is, different strategies for different budget ranges, and the ideal timelines for you to see good ROI for your ads.
Minimum Budget for LinkedIn Ads
Your ideal minimum budget would be $500 – $1,000, but the absolute minimum would be a daily budget of $10 a day, or about $300 a month.
However, before you start seeing any results or conversions, you should already have these in place:
- Traffic going to your website
- Experimental data on which audiences resonate with your ads more
- Gotten some feedback on your ads to see the best-performing ones
If you’re launching your first campaign and your budget is $500 a month, your best chances of success are making it a retargeting campaign.
With a cold campaign, your ideal budget would be much higher because you haven’t completely defined your audience, who you’re targeting, or your ads funnel.
Strategies for Different Budget Ranges
We’ll dive into three different scenarios and budget ranges for your ads in the next section.
1. Small Budget for Research and Traffic
A low budget of around $300 per month (about $10 a day for 30 days) can be used for testing and researching a broader range of industries, company sizes, and some different geographies so that you know what resonates with your audience best. If you don’t have a lot of traffic, you can do retargeting or cold ads, or both.
You can do this by running video or image campaigns to test different pain points you solve or the results you get for clients. We’ve covered the best practices for video ads in 2023 in this article.
In 30-90 days, you will have some meaningful insights. Run the campaigns with pauses so you can properly analyze their performance.
2. Budget for Retargeting and Conversions
For retargeting campaigns aimed at conversions, a budget of $500 – $1,000 is ideal. Focus on engaging warm audiences, building trust, and positioning your business as an expert in your industry.
Your warm audience consists of people who have already visited your website or your company page and who are aware of who you are and what you do. That’s the audience you should start with, with such a small budget. You can also qualify them further based on their seniority level, location, or company size, for example.
You want to have at least a thousand people so that your budget has a frequency of at least 10. For example, at least 600 people in your audience see 10 of your ads. I also recommend single-image retargeting or video retargeting, and I would focus on promoting ads that position you as an expert in your space. That can look like awards you’ve gotten, interviews that you’ve done on notable podcasts or client results.
3. Larger Budget for Comprehensive Campaign:
The conversation shifts to budgets ranging from $3,000 to $5,000 per month, which would involve a more comprehensive strategy. This includes structuring cold campaigns, leveraging data from cold interactions, and creating a robust retargeting ecosystem over a span of several months.
For a higher budget that’s between $3,000 to $5,000 a month, you’d need a more comprehensive strategy over several months. This involves building a cold campaign to get in front of prospects using LinkedIn’s native filters.
The next step is leveraging the data that you’re getting from cold interactions. Finally, you’ll create a robust retargeting system. Add any additional company page or website visitors into retargeting campaigns, and then layer on single image retargeting over the course of at least six months to nurture and convert those prospects.
The idea is to target specific prospects and get on their radar, so once you have signals of intent or they show interest, you focus on building trust and credibility. Show them who you are, what you do, who you serve, and how you work. If your SEO is already established, your retargeting ads don’t have to do much work because you’d have more quality traffic coming in.
Timeframe for Results
1. Research and Traffic (Small Budget)
For running research and traffic-focused campaigns, I recommend 30-90 days to gather meaningful data and insights, even on a $300-per-month budget. If your goal is research, it’s best to stick with 30 days so that you have time to analyze your data. If you’re not getting meaningful insight after the first 30 or 60 days, you’d need 90 days to restructure your campaigns and test creative or ad copy variations to start seeing results.
2. Retargeting and Conversions (Mid-Sized and Large Budgets)
Results from retargeting campaigns targeting warm audiences are expected to be seen within 30-45 days. Conversions and positive ROI may take up to 3-6 months, depending on the campaign’s complexity and other factors.
For retargeting campaigns targeting warm audiences, you should start seeing results within 30-45 days. You should already have quality traffic to your website for this to work. If you don’t, you can set up a LinkedIn retargeting campaign to qualify and retarget and convert prospects.
If there isn’t a single conversion within 60 days, then something’s wrong. Your budget isn’t big enough to saturate your audience, or your audience needs to be reduced and constricted so that the current budget can better saturate it. Many times, the audience isn’t saturated enough.
To illustrate, if you set a $10 per day budget into a 10,000-size retargeting audience, you’ve wasted money because you’re just not penetrating that group deep enough to do anything.
Getting conversions and positive ROI can take between 3-6 months. Your cost per conversion will become higher within 90 days, but that’s a good sign. The amount you convert should increase, and the cost per conversion should slowly reduce as the account learns from each campaign you produce.
Final Thoughts
With a LinkedIn ads budget as small as $300 or as big as $5,000, you can expect to see results within 30 days, depending on your goal. Whatever budget you choose, experiment with your ads, gain insights from each campaign, and be patient with your results.
