An HR Tech Platform Tripled Pipeline From LinkedIn Without Increasing Budget
A mid-market HR software company was spending steadily on LinkedIn ads with flat results. Switching from broad job-title targeting to account-based targeting changed the trajectory within six weeks.
A year of steady LinkedIn spend with flat pipeline growth is a specific kind of frustrating: nothing is obviously broken, but nothing is working either.
The targeting was too wide to ever concentrate results
Broad job-title targeting across all industries and company sizes meant budget was spread thin across accounts that would never buy, alongside the accounts that would. Nobody could tell which impressions were reaching a real opportunity and which were noise, because the targeting itself didn’t distinguish between them.
Building the account list first
Before writing a single new ad, we worked with sales to define exactly what a good-fit account looked like, using two years of closed-won data. That became a defined list of 400 target companies, and only then did job-title targeting get layered back in, now scoped to just those accounts.
Results
Pipeline sourced from LinkedIn tripled over two quarters without any increase in monthly spend, and the deals that did close were larger on average, since the accounts being reached now were the ones the product was actually built for.
How was the 400-account target list built?
We worked with the sales team to pull firmographic data from their best closed-won accounts of the past two years, then matched that profile against a broader account universe using LinkedIn's company targeting and a data enrichment tool the client already had access to.
Why did average deal size increase along with pipeline volume?
Broad job-title targeting had been reaching HR Directors at companies too small to need the platform's mid-market feature set, generating leads that either didn't close or closed small. Account-based targeting concentrated spend on companies that actually matched the product's real value.
Did the creative testing follow the same hypothesis-first process as other channels?
Yes. Each creative variant was tied to a specific hypothesis about which outcome message would resonate with which account tier, tested for two to three weeks, and either scaled or killed based on cost per pipeline dollar, not click-through rate alone.