An employee financial-wellness startup wanted to know if LinkedIn could create demand for a new category. I built a thought-leadership engine, tuned it against a tight ICP, and turned it into a highly efficient funnel that converted.
The company is building a category most buyers don't search for yet, which makes capturing existing demand the wrong first move. I ran a thought-leadership-led funnel against the core ICP, Heads of HR, Benefits, Wellness, and Total Rewards at US organizations of 50 to 2,000 employees:
The ICP engine performed. At a 7.94% click-through rate and just $0.29 per click, it pulled 1,737 engagements from 21,875 impressions on roughly $510 of spend, more than ten times the LinkedIn benchmark at a fraction of the usual cost. The offer converted too: of the 98 people who reached the landing page, 5 downloaded the paper.
The broad-targeting test didn't keep up, a 0.47% CTR against the ICP audience's 7.94%, so I paused it and moved the budget to what was working. That is the discipline a pilot is for: find the efficient path fast, then concentrate spend behind it. I tuned cost per click from $1.77 in the early read down to $0.29, and handed the board a proven engine to scale.