How to do TL Ads in 2025

About 12 months ago, LinkedIn launched a new Ad format that is making waves, even moving into 2025: Thought Leadership Ads.

Initially, you could only run ads from a LinkedIn company page and it would show the LinkedIn logo and the company page logo. Even now you still can run these ad formats, but it will be coming from a company page - a faceless Enterprise.

On the other hand, thought leader ads allow you to boost posts from individuals and advertise on behalf of the individual. So it allows for a much more authentic and genuine connection with your audience.

Now with thought leader ads you can boost posts from individuals and it comes right from that individual they're going to post on their profile and then you boost that so it is the post that they are making on LinkedIn that is getting boosted.

How Thought Leadership Ads Work 

First, according to LinkedIn, Thought Leadership Ads have a 1.7x click-through rate (CTR) and 1.6x engagement rate compared to other single-image ad campaigns. 

Running a LinkedIn Thought Leadership Ads is a bit straightforward:

1.Inside the LinkedIn campaign dashboard, select either Brand awareness or Engagement objective.

2.Under Step 3: Set up Ads, click ‘Browse existing content’. This will display both the company page and LinkedIn members.

3.Select the LinkedIn Member tab and search for the relevant individual you want to sponsor. Browse through their posts from the past six months. Send requests to the person for approval to use their posts as ads.

4.Once approved, select the desired posts to sponsor and launch your LinkedIn thought leader ad campaign.

TL Ads Case Studies

Engagement

As per Metadat io, here are the TL ad results;

• Engagements: 712

• Average CTR: 6.64%

• Increased in likes and comments; 24% & 27% in that order

$700, Nine meetings

From Wendy’s LinkedIn post, the TL ad had been running only for two weeks. They planned to scale this success. 

TL Ad vs Old Formats

The CEO of Directive - a performance marketing agency recently spent $1900 on thought leader ads, and below are the results compared with the traditional LinkedIn ad formats.

Here’s our initial data from launching Thought Leadership Ads for Directive over the last 30 days:

• 29,162 individual accounts reached

• $57 cost/1,000 reached accounts

• $39 CPM

Compared to traditional sponsored content campaigns:

• 20,738 individual accounts reached

• $1,632 cost/1,000 reached accounts

• $562 CPM

Thought Leadership Ad Playbooks

There are currently three main ways to scale your business using Thought Leader Ads;

• Running the ads as a demand strategy (3 frameworks)

• Collaborating for B2B Influencer marketing

• Thought Leader Ads + ABM (2 frameworks)

I have put together 25+ proven frameworks on how best you can scale with TL Ads from experts who are in the trenches daily. 

Here is the link to the Notion resource with an example of Account-based marketing (ABM).

TL Ad + Demand Gen Strategy

Thought Leader Ads Q&As

While I was researching and putting together the resource, I scrapped over 25+ discussions in the comments section as well.

Most are back & forth conversations on everything thought leader ads. Below are some questions and responses worth checking out.

Experience with LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads? - Reddit

I use TL ads for almost all of the 8 LinkedIn ads accounts I manage.

I found great success with the format on both prospecting and retargeting campaigns.

For prospecting, using videos that talk about your audiences pain points worked best for me (video view rate).

For remarketing, using text posts with case studies had the best results (click conversions to demo booking).