In June 2025, Chris from Value Ships, a pricing consultancy for SaaS companies targeting CFOs and CEOs, spent $391 on LinkedIn thought leadership ads. That pilot produced 12 qualified meetings. Those meetings became $40,000+ in closed deals.
Emilia Korczyńska, VP of Marketing at Userpilot, had been running ABM programs for over two years, generating more than $8M in influenced pipeline for her company. She spent months convincing Chris to run thought leadership ads. The results make a clean case for why this format works, and why most companies still underuse it.
This article covers the full playbook from her session with Extrovert.
What happened at Value Ships
Value Ships launched a pilot ABM campaign with three ad formats: thought leadership ads (TLAs), image ads, and carousel ads. The targeting was expensive: CFOs, CEOs, and senior SaaS executives in Western Europe, the US, UK, and the DACH region.
TLAs accounted for 6% of the total ad spend.
They produced the vast majority of impressions across all three formats, the lowest cost per landing page click, and the highest effective click-through rate. After the pilot, Value Ships shut down the image ads and carousels. They put everything into TLAs.
The reason is straightforward. LinkedIn is a social network. People come to follow specific people: practitioners, experts, voices they trust. Not company pages. That's why personal posts outperform company page content on organic reach by a large margin. TLAs let you combine the engagement dynamics of a personal post with the precision of paid targeting. You don't need the audience already in your network. You just need a post worth reading and a well-defined account list.
The metric LinkedIn doesn't show you
LinkedIn reports CTR as total engagements divided by impressions. Likes, "see more" clicks, shares, and comments all count. A post that goes viral but sends nobody to your landing page will show a strong CTR number.
What you actually want is eCTR: clicks to landing page divided by total impressions.
LinkedIn doesn't surface this metric. You calculate it manually: pull landing page clicks from the engagement report, divide by total impressions in the same time window.
For Value Ships, the best TLAs hit over 21% engagement rate with roughly 1% eCTR to landing page. Those numbers look small in isolation. In context, against the same audience on image ads and carousels at higher spend, the difference is significant.
The engagement rate also feeds back into cost. LinkedIn uses CTR as a quality signal for ad rank. Higher engagement means lower CPMs. Value Ships' posts engaged strongly enough to partially go viral within their target audience, which drove CPMs to levels Emilia described as "unheard of for LinkedIn."
When optimizing: run five to six ads at a time. Keep only the ones hitting 10%+ engagement. Replace the ones below that threshold with posts closer in style or content to what is performing.
What a winning TLA looks like
The highest-performing posts at Value Ships shared a set of characteristics, and none of them looked like ads.
First-person and imperfect. The partners at Value Ships wrote in their own voice: contrarian takes, funny memes, real case studies, occasional typos. The absence of polish is the point. Emilia cited Jason Lemkin and Alina Vandenberger as examples worth studying: they don't worry about capitalization. That's what makes their posts feel real.
Analogy or humor in the hook. The best-performing posts opened with something unexpected, not the product. The reader needs a reason to stay past the first line before the post earns the right to mention a solution.
Real numbers. Specific results, named clients, concrete benchmarks. Vague claims don't land with executives. Specific outcomes do.
CTA low in the post. The link to your landing page belongs near the bottom, after the reader has followed the problem and the proposed solution. Don't put the link in the comments. You can't calculate eCTR from a comment click, and TLAs don't optimize for organic reach anyway.
One practical note on timing: post organically first. Wait a few days to see if it gets traction. If it performs well, edit the post to add the link in the body, then add it to Campaign Manager as a TLA. Posts with organic engagement signal quality to the algorithm and tend to get cheaper CPMs when promoted.
Five ways to source TLAs
For most teams the bottleneck is content, not budget.
Internal stakeholder interviews. Record conversations with your founders, sales leaders, or subject-matter experts. Feed the transcript into an AI writing system trained on your best-performing posts. The raw voice is already there.
Influencer sponsorships. Platforms like Passion Fruit let you find niche influencers and pay them to write posts for you. More expensive, but influencers bring an audience that trusts them. Emilia sees the highest eCTRs from influencer TLAs.
Existing brand mentions. Search LinkedIn for your company name. Find people who already post about you. Offer a small incentive (Emilia mentioned a $50 voucher), ask if you can sponsor the post. LinkedIn lets you run any post as a TLA as long as the author gives permission. They don't have to be your employee.
Customer advocacy programs. Build a system where customers earn rewards for posting about your product. Results vary: some posts are great, some are unusable, and eCTRs from customer posts tend to be the lowest of all formats. Worth running, but don't rely on it as your primary source.
Ghostwriters. A professional writer interviews your internal team, builds a writing system, and produces posts on an ongoing basis. The most scalable option once you've validated the format.
From engagements to pipeline
Running TLAs without tracking what happens next leaves most of the value on the table.
The common mistake: export a list of companies that engaged with your ads and send it to SDRs. Don't. An engagement signal at the company level doesn't mean a specific person is ready for a sales call. Cold outreach based on ad exposure, without context, tends to come across as a surveillance event.
What works instead:
Tag campaigns by topic. If you run multiple TLA campaigns on different problems, label each one with an intent tag. Which problem did this account engage with? That's a signal about where they are in their thinking.
Push data to your CRM. Tools like Zen ABM surface company-level engagement and job titles from TLA interactions. Set a threshold — five or more engagements in 30 days, for example — mark that company as active, and push the intent tag via webhook to your sequencing tool or CRM. Value Ships ran this: Zen ABM to Clay via webhook to outreach.
Measure with view-through attribution. Look at the companies you opened deals with in the past 30 to 90 days. Which ad formats did they engage with before the deal opened? If TLAs show up consistently, they're contributing to pipeline even when "direct traffic" takes last-touch credit.
Feed warm signals into organic nurture. Once accounts start engaging with your TLAs, Extrovert lets you track those prospects on LinkedIn and stay present over the long game: comment on their posts, send context-relevant DMs based on what they're publishing, and build the relationship before the pitch. Roughly 70% of Extrovert's paid users came from long-term nurture, not the first sequence. The TLA creates the awareness; the sustained presence is what closes it.
How to set up TLAs in Campaign Manager
Don't use the native boost button on LinkedIn posts. You lose targeting options and eCTR tracking.
The correct setup:
- Open Campaign Manager and create a new campaign.
- Set the objective to Engagement. (Website visits won't work here: LinkedIn won't allow you to promote personal posts under that objective.)
- Set the ad format to Single Image Ad.
- When creating ads, skip "create new." Click Browse existing content, then open the LinkedIn members tab.
- Search for the post author by name. Find the specific post.
- Send the author a permission request through Campaign Manager.
- After they approve, go back to the campaign and manually add the post. Approval doesn't auto-add it.
LinkedIn's Campaign Manager is confusing here. It doesn't guide you through the TLA flow. This is the only path that gives you proper account targeting and the ability to calculate eCTR.
Watch the full session
Emilia covers the Value Ships ad metrics slide by slide, shows her top-performing TLA examples from Userpilot, and takes live questions on attribution, cold audience targeting, and how to test posts organically before promoting them.