How to set up Thought Leader ads on LinkedIn

What a Thought Leader ad actually is

A Thought Leader ad promotes a post from a person’s LinkedIn profile instead of a post from your company page. Same Campaign Manager, same targeting, same auction. The only difference is whose name and face sit at the top of the ad.

You don’t write new copy for it. You pick a post the person has already published, ask them for permission, and put budget behind it. The post keeps its original wording, the author’s headline, and whatever comments and reactions it already collected.

The author doesn’t have to be an employee. LinkedIn lets you sponsor posts from employees, industry experts, customers and creators, as long as they approve the request. In practice, most Australian businesses use their own founder or a senior specialist, because that’s the person you can ask again next month.

• Formats: single image, video and event ads. Articles and newsletter posts are supported too.
• Objectives: brand awareness, engagement and video views. That is the full list.
• What you can’t change: there is no separate headline, no intro text and no call-to-action button. The ad is the post.

Why they usually beat brand-account creative

Because people read a named person differently to a logo. A post with a face, a job title and a comment thread reads like something a peer wrote. A branded single image ad reads like an ad, because it is one, and B2B buyers scroll past those for a living.

LinkedIn pitches the format on that logic too. Worth noting what it does not do: its product page for Thought Leader ads runs on customer quotes rather than a published benchmark. You will find plenty of agency blogs quoting a precise multiple on click-through rate from the original beta. Treat those the way you would treat any number nobody will source, which is to say do not budget against them. A self-selected group of early testers who already had good posts to promote is not a benchmark, it is a sample of people who were going to do well anyway.

Be clear about what actually improves. Thought Leader ads work on the top of the funnel: cheaper attention, more engagement, more profile views for the author. They don’t fix a weak offer or a page that hides the price. If your enquiries are stuck for those reasons, the ad format is not the problem, and we worked through the wider question in are LinkedIn ads worth it.

One more thing worth saying out loud: one post is not a test. Running a single Thought Leader ad and judging the format on it is a guess with a daily budget attached. Pick three or four posts from the same person and let the auction tell you which topic and which tone people actually stop for.

The permission step you cannot skip

This is where most setups stall. You can’t sponsor somebody’s post quietly. The author gets a request, has to approve it, and can revoke that approval whenever they like, which switches the ad off on the spot.

1. 1Check access on both sides. You need super admin, content admin or Sponsored Content poster access on the company page, plus creative manager access or higher on the ad account. Without both, the option won’t appear.
2. 2Request approval from inside Campaign Manager. You search for the person or paste the post URL, then send the request.
3. 3The author gets an email and an in-app notification. They can approve that single request, or switch on automatic approval so every current and future request clears without them doing anything. LinkedIn documents both paths in its guide to managing sponsorship permissions.
4. 4They can revoke it later. Revoking deactivates the ad immediately, so it is worth explaining what that button does before somebody presses it out of curiosity.

Get automatic approval switched on for anyone you plan to promote regularly. Otherwise you will spend your week chasing an approval that is sitting unread between two recruiter messages.

How to set up Thought Leader ads in Campaign Manager

Six steps, and step one is the one people get wrong.

1. 1Start the campaign with a supported objective. Brand awareness, engagement or video views. Thought Leader ads simply don’t appear under any other objective, which is the number one reason people conclude the format is missing from their account.
2. 2Match the ad format to the post. Single image ad for a text or image post, video ad for a video, event ad for an event. Choose the wrong one and the post you want won’t show up in the picker.
3. 3At the ad step, click Browse existing content. That opens the Content Library.
4. 4Switch from your page to LinkedIn members. Search by name, or paste the post URL. The URL is faster and stops you picking the wrong post from somebody who publishes three times a week.
5. 5Select the post and click Request approval. Campaign Manager sends it and gives you a link you can message the person directly. Send it, because notifications get missed.
6. 6Wait for approval, then activate. Once permission comes through, Campaign Manager tells you and you can switch the sponsorship on. Targeting, budget, schedule and reporting all behave like any other campaign. LinkedIn’s step-by-step help article covers the screens if you get lost.

The format doesn’t change what LinkedIn charges you. Thought Leader ads compete in the same auction as everything else, so the planning in our guide to LinkedIn ads costs applies unchanged. What often moves is cost per click, because creative people genuinely want to read tends to win cheaper attention.

Which posts are worth promoting

Promote posts that already earned attention organically and that only your person could have written. Everything else wastes the format.

Sponsoring a post magnifies whatever it already is. A specific, useful post gets more useful. A post about being excited to share some thoughts gets more vague, at a higher cost per impression.

Worth promoting

• A real opinion with a reason attached. Something a competitor would hesitate to publish under their own name.
• A short walkthrough of a job. What the problem was, what you changed, what happened. Only with details the client has cleared.
• A frank answer to the question every sales call asks. Price, timelines, why the cheap option usually fails.
• A teardown or a how-to. The kind of post somebody screenshots and sends to a colleague.
• Anything that already pulled comments from the right job titles. Organic engagement is the cheapest pre-test you will ever run.

Not worth promoting

• Company announcements published from a personal profile. Readers spot it instantly, because it is a page post wearing a name badge.
• Posts that open with a hard sell. There is no call-to-action button on this format, so a post shaped like a sales page has nowhere to send anyone.
• Anything written by the marketing team and posted under an executive who has not read it. That falls apart the first time a prospect replies in the comments and the author can’t answer.

When to skip Thought Leader ads

Skip them if nobody at your company will post in their own voice. That is the catch, and it is not a small one. The format needs a real person willing to write something worth reading and then answer the comments underneath it. If your senior people won’t do that, don’t spend money making it look like they did.

If nobody will post in their own voice, this format is not for you. Money spent making a reluctant executive look like a thought leader is money you could have spent on a better offer.

A few other reasons to leave it alone for now:

• You need enquiries this quarter. No lead gen form, no call-to-action button. This format builds attention. Pair it with a conversion campaign, or run the conversion campaign first.
• Your key person is on the way out. Ads built on a departing employee age badly, and their permission leaves when they do.
• You have never run LinkedIn ads before. Get targeting and the offer working on a standard campaign first, then use this to make the good creative travel further.
• The budget is genuinely tight. LinkedIn is expensive by design, and this format is built for reach rather than for squeezing a small budget. Work out how to set a PPC budget before you decide where it goes.

When it does fit, it fits well. We run Thought Leader ads inside B2B paid ads campaigns, usually alongside a conversion campaign so the attention has somewhere to land. The setup takes an afternoon. Getting a busy executive to post consistently is the actual project, and everyone involved should agree on that before a budget gets signed off.

Frequently asked questions