Thought Leader Ads for B2B
The expert your audience thinks of first
Your knowledge is already there. It just doesn't reach the people who are preparing a decision right now. The Expert Funnel changes that: your strongest posts run as Thought Leader Ads aimed at exactly those decision-makers, until calls land in your calendar.
Book a free intro call →- Three months of collaboration
- From €1,499 a month
- Guided or fully done for you
€1,000,000
in ad spend managed on LinkedIn
100+
B2B companies coached
7
years of experience with LinkedIn Ads
Why great content fizzles out
A strong post is not a pipeline yet
Most B2B companies don't have a knowledge problem. They have a distribution problem. The CEO knows exactly why projects fail in her industry. The subject-matter expert has answers other consultancies charge day rates for. The problem is, nobody preparing a purchase decision right now is reading it.
- A post lives for about 48 hours. After that it's practically unfindable in the feed, no matter how good it was.
- The algorithm serves your network, not your market. Your best-fit customers don't follow you yet, so they never see you either.
- Reach is not a metric. A hundred likes from colleagues and competitors haven't started a single conversation.
- And the most common reason it never happens at all: the person who'd have something to say doesn't have time to write.
In B2B, most of the decision is made before you're ever in a call. Buyers research on their own, compare quietly, and only reach out once they're nearly through. If you start building trust in the sales call, you're already too late.
How it works
The Expert Funnel in four stages
Posting organically is the base, not the lever. The lever kicks in when the content you're producing anyway works longer and lands in front of exactly the right people.
-
01
One person, one problem, one solution
No grab-bag of topics. It starts with four decisions, and they don't get renegotiated afterward: who your expert speaks for, which problem they own, what offer sits behind it at the end, and what their profile shows in the first three seconds. Only then does the writing start, covering that one topic from changing angles: real projects, customer stories, common objections, uncomfortable opinions. That way one clear picture sticks instead of twenty scattered topics.
-
02
Thought Leader Ads instead of a reach lottery
Whatever works organically becomes a Thought Leader Ad: the same personal post, just paid to run further. In the feed it doesn't look like an ad, because it isn't one, and that's exactly why it gets read instead of scrolled past. From about €30 a day it reaches exactly your audience: industry, company size, job title, region. No good post disappears after two days anymore, it keeps running in front of the right people for weeks.
-
03
Readers turn into an audience
Anyone who reads regularly, watches a video to the end, or visits the profile lands in a retargeting audience. That list is the real asset: people who already know you before you ever reach out to them for the first time.
-
04
The warm audience turns into booked calls
Now comes the clear call to action, on two tracks at once. Through ads: Message Ads straight to the inbox and Single Image Ads in the feed, both aimed only at the warm audience, both with the same goal, the booked call. And by hand: connection requests to decision-makers in your target audience, including ones who haven't seen an ad yet. Anyone who accepts sees a profile full of expert posts, then gets a personal message following a fixed framework, no pitch, just a question and something useful. That's where the booked calls come from.
The difference from classic ghostwriting sits in stages 2 through 4. Plenty of people can write posts. What decides whether they turn into booked calls is the funnel behind them. For how Thought Leader Ads work technically, see our guide to Thought Leader Ads.
Your expert should become the number one name in your audience's mind on their topic. The name that comes up the moment someone on the buying committee raises the subject. Whoever describes a problem best is also trusted to have the solution, and trusted first. That means you don't end up as one of several lines in an offer comparison, you become the provider people wanted to talk to anyway. That's the difference between a price negotiation and a premium price.
Two paths, three months
You write it yourself, or we write it for you
Both paths run for three months and build the same funnel. The price is per month. The only difference is how much of the work stays with you.
Guided
For teams who want to write it themselves and need someone who knows the channel.
€1,499 per month
3-month term, net
- Positioning, content plan, and profile: audience, the problem you own, and the offer nailed down, plus a profile that shows what your expert stands for in three seconds
- Writing templates and post structures your team can turn into a finished post in under an hour
- We build campaigns and audiences together with you, in your ad account, explained step by step: Thought Leader Ads, retargeting, message ads
- The messaging framework with ready-made templates: who to message from the audience, when the connection request goes out, and what the first message says so it turns into a call
- One call a month plus ongoing chat support in between
- Reporting at month end: what got read, what led to conversations, what's next
You write. We make sure it lands.
Done for you
For companies where time is the bottleneck, not the knowledge.
€2,799 per month
3-month term, net
- Everything from Path 1, plus full execution
- Two posts a week, written from your expert's point of view, in their voice
- One hour a month of your time: an interview or a few voice notes, we build the content from that
- We set and manage the campaigns, including budget allocation across whichever posts are running
- Connection requests to your audience, one hour a week from the expert's profile, selected by industry, size, and role
- We handle the direct messages, following our framework, including follow-up
- Booked calls land straight in your calendar, all you do is take the call
You give the green light. We do the rest.
On top of that comes ad spend on LinkedIn, from about €500 a month. You pay that directly to LinkedIn, not to us. Without that budget, stage 2 of the funnel stays empty and the whole build depends on luck.
The three months are a minimum term, because trust doesn't build in four weeks. Billed monthly, all prices net plus VAT.
Three months
What happens in which month
No course, no community, no video library to work through. Three months of collaboration on your actual case, in an order that builds on itself.
-
Month 1
Foundation
Your expert's positioning and content plan are set. The profile becomes a landing page: a headline built from the terms your audience actually searches for, a clean featured section, a background image that gives people a reason to follow. The first posts go live. In parallel we set up the ad account, tracking, and audiences, and define what everything ultimately points toward: the booked call in the calendar.
-
Month 2
Amplification
This is where you see which posts carry organically. Exactly those go out as Thought Leader Ads to your exact audience, three to five running in parallel, with budget continuously shifting to the winners. Alongside that, minimum-bid text ads pointing at the profile. The retargeting audiences fill up with people who read you on their own.
-
Month 3
Harvest
The warm audience gets its own campaign: Message Ads to the inbox and Single Image Ads in the feed, both aimed at the booked call. In parallel, active outreach ramps up: connection requests to decision-makers in your audience, and once accepted, the personal message following our framework. This is where the first booked calls come from. What you're left with at the end isn't a finished project, it's a funnel that keeps running.
What three months gets you: a running system, a visible profile, and the first conversations. What it doesn't get you: a full pipeline after four weeks. In B2B, months often pass between first contact and a booked call. That's exactly why we start with trust, not with the pitch.
Who's behind this
Hey, we're Janis and Cedric
Together we've managed around a million euros in LinkedIn ad spend, coached over a hundred B2B companies, and looked inside more than fifty ad accounts. Most of that was classic lead generation, and that's exactly where we noticed the pattern: campaigns from companies whose face your audience already knows just perform better. Same ad, same budget, different result.
The Expert Funnel is the consequence of that. It isn't a content offer that happens to touch ads, it's an ads offer that starts with trust first. We build this together with you, so that by the end you understand why it works instead of having to keep buying it in.
References
What clients say about working with us
The teams we work with say it better than we can.
itmXPerspix.aiIPG Automotiveand other B2B teams
Their reviews, the cases with real numbers, and the video with itmX, all on one page.
See all references →Our answers to your questions
Frequently asked questions
Isn't this just ghostwriting?
Writing is part of it, but the smaller part. Posts alone only reach the people who already follow you. The difference is the paid amplification and the funnel behind it: Thought Leader Ads aimed at exactly your target audience, retargeting audiences built from your readers, and only at the end a campaign with a clear goal. We come from LinkedIn Ads, not from content marketing.
Why three months and not shorter?
Because trust takes time. Month one builds the foundation, month two ramps up paid amplification, month three is when the warm audience gets approached about a call for the first time. Anyone who stops after four weeks pays for the setup and never harvests the result.
Isn't this just cold outreach through direct messages in the end?
No, the difference is the order. We never write into an empty inbox. Either the person has been reading your posts for weeks already, or they just accepted a connection request from your expert and saw their profile in the process: topic, expert posts, face. Only then comes the message, sent from that profile and not the company page, with no pitch, just a question and something useful. We do not send mass outreach with sales copy, that burns exactly the trust the buildup created.
How much ad spend do we need on top?
Around €500 a month to start, paid directly to LinkedIn, not to us. That is enough to run a post to a tightly defined audience over several weeks. More budget speeds things up, significantly less makes the amplification pointless.
Will the posts still sound like us?
Yes, because the content comes from your expert. We work from interviews and voice notes: you tell us a story, we turn it into the post. Nothing goes out without your approval. After the first few weeks the tone usually lands without a revision round.
Who should become visible for us?
The person your audience trusts to have the solution. Often that is the founder or CEO, just as often the subject-matter expert who lives in the projects every day. What matters is not the title, but that the person has something to say and is willing to take a position.
We already post regularly. Does this still help?
Then you're ahead of most and the build goes faster. In that case we first look at which of your existing posts already carried organically, and amplify exactly those. That's the fastest route to first data, because you've already done the groundwork.
What happens after the three months?
The funnel keeps running, with or without us. Many extend, because the content rhythm otherwise breaks off. Anyone who keeps going alone has positioning, a content plan, campaign structure, and audiences sitting in their own ad account. That's the point: it's meant to belong to you.
Do you have results for this specific offer?
Not for the Expert Funnel as a package yet, it's new. We've been running the individual building blocks in client projects for years, and you'll find numbers and voices on our references page. We'd rather say that openly than make up results.
Not sure if Thought Leader Ads are right for you?
Then the intro call is exactly the right next step. You don't need to know beforehand who'll become the visible face or what the campaign looks like in detail. We'll look at your audience, who could be the face of it, and what's realistic in three months. Not a sales call, an honest read.
For how the format works technically, read the free guide to Thought Leader Ads. If you'd rather build the whole funnel yourself, you'll find the path there in the course (German only for now) or in Coaching.
- 30 minutes
- Even if you're still on the fence
- We'll tell you honestly if it's a fit