78% of B2B CMOs say proving ROI has become more important over the past two years. And they’re under continued pressure to show how and where their marketing investments are paying off. Month by month.
The problem is that your prospects aren’t on the same monthly cycle as you. As we’ve discussed before, they march to the beat of their own drums, no matter how hard you push, persuade and cajole.
As an example, let’s take Dreamdata’s new LinkedIn Ads Benchmark report 2026.
In it, they say that just because your monthly LinkedIn reports don’t neatly align with your pipeline growth doesn’t mean LinkedIn is failing to deliver ROI.
In fact, it’s quite the opposite, says Dreamdata: “LinkedIn now represents 41% of paid social budget share among Dreamdata customers - up 2% year over year - and delivers a 121% return on ad spend (ROAS). At the company level, cost per company closed is 54% more efficient than last year.”
What’s changed?
In part, it’s what you measure. CTR and CPC can be misleading and superficial metrics, and not reflective of performance. The other part? The good news is it’s not all you – it’s ‘them’ (your prospects) too.
Here’s why:
Last year, 70% of your B2B prospects put in the hard research yards before they showed up in your sales pipeline. Before your sales team even spotted the opportunity.
But over the last 12 months, that number’s gone up to 81%.
So, with the average customer journey taking 272 days from first touch to becoming new business, that means that for the first 81% of their journey (that’s seven months’ worth), sales prospects are quietly observing your marketing initiatives and making plans.
They’re self-educating themselves. Letting your content percolate. Reading your messaging. Getting a feel for your people, your company, and its offerings. Heading over to your beautifully designed and written website to see what’s what – and why you stand out from the crowd (and we hope to goodness it's not because you’re yet another ‘trusted advisor’!).
While we suggest you download and read the Dreamdata report for yourself, we found it interesting that, despite the competition from other digital advertising channels (Meta, Google Search), LinkedIn has continued to deliver the highest ROAS (return on ad spend).
Now, for those too time-poor to read the entire 68-pages, here are our 5 key takeaways from Dreamdata’s report for orchestrating LinkedIn activity for sales results. But to note - we think they also apply to pretty much everything marketing, not just LinkedIn.
- Be selective and strategic: Segment your audience and tailor your messaging.
- Softly-softly: Align your creative with sales funnel stage. Don’t burn your bridges early by running sales-led messaging from the outset.
- Invest in thought leadership and video: Founder-led content and subject-matter expertise consistently outperform polished corporate ads. But you probably knew this already (you certainly do if you’re a One Little Seed customer!).
- Measure what matters: Forget those monthly surface-level CTR, CPC, and SEO metrics – instead, optimise for influenced pipeline, deal velocity, and revenue contribution.
- Stick at it: You’ve got a minimum of seven months of targeted and aligned messaging and creative to get a prospect to the stage where they reveal themselves – if they like what they see.
