When it comes to running ad campaigns on social media, two giants dominate the conversation: Meta and LinkedIn. Both promise reach, targeting, and leads, but they’re built for very different worlds.
For businesses, especially in the B2B space, the choice often comes down to a fundamental question: Do you want more leads, or better leads?
Meta has long been seen as the cheaper option, offering lower costs per click and access to vast, consumer-driven audience pools across Facebook and Instagram. It’s designed for scale, brand awareness, and capturing attention in a broad sense, which is great if you’re selling products that appeal to the masses or want to build wide visibility quickly. But with that breadth often comes less precision, and for B2B marketers, that can mean paying for leads that look good on paper but don’t move the needle in reality.
LinkedIn advertising, by contrast, has carved out its space as the go-to platform for B2B. Its strength lies in its advanced targeting capabilities—job titles, industries, company size, seniority—making it possible to put your ads directly in front of the people who actually make the buying decisions. Instead of chasing volume, LinkedIn allows businesses to zero in on quality, connecting campaigns with prospects who are far more likely to progress through the sales funnel.
Yes, LinkedIn ads are more expensive; there is no sugar coating it, but what you’re really paying for is precision. Every click, every lead, and every conversation has a far higher chance of being relevant to your business.
But, Meta remains very popular, with millions of active advertisers and the largest share of social media ad spend worldwide. For many businesses, its lower costs and broad reach are too tempting to ignore, and it continues to dominate B2C campaigns where volume matters more than tight qualification.
So, this begs the question: when it comes to B2B, does Meta’s popularity actually translate into results—or does LinkedIn still hold the crown?
Putting Meta and LinkedIn to the Test
To cut through the noise, we ran a head-to-head experiment. Same lead magnet, same budget, same timeframe. A 7-day test that put Meta Ads against LinkedIn Ads to see which platform really delivers when it comes to not just leads, but qualified prospects that match our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
An ICP is more than a vague idea of “the type of customer we’d like to have.” It’s a clearly defined profile of the businesses and decision-makers who are the best possible fit for your product or service. An ICP typically includes factors such as:
- Industry – Which sectors benefit most from what you offer
- Company size – From small, agile teams to large enterprises
- Job roles and seniority – The people with real decision-making authority
- Location – Markets you can effectively serve
- Pain points – The challenges that your solution directly addresses
Why is this so important? Because not all leads are created equal. A contact might download your asset, click on your ad, or sign up for your newsletter, but if they don’t resemble your ICP, the chance of them converting into a paying customer is very slim. That’s the difference between a funnel full of noise and a pipeline filled with real opportunities.
We went in anticipating a close battle. We already knew the strength of LinkedIn Ads in generating high-quality B2B leads; we’ve relied on them successfully for both our clients and our own campaigns, but Meta’s lower costs and popularity among advertisers made it a worthy challenger. With so many businesses choosing Facebook and Instagram campaigns—even for B2B purposes—we wanted to understand the reasons behind this decision. Is it purely budget-driven, or does Meta genuinely perform for business audiences?
The Budget and the Asset
Each campaign was given £8 per day over 7 days.
Now, £8/day is hardly a massive spend—but that was exactly the point. On LinkedIn, £8 is literally the platform’s minimum daily ad spend, so we chose to test both platforms at the lowest common denominator. By doing this, we created what we like to call a “stress test” environment:
- Could Meta prove its reputation for cheap clicks and broad visibility?
- Could LinkedIn demonstrate that quality trumps quantity, even at the lowest spend?
This setup forced both platforms to show what they could really do without the cushioning of a larger budget. If Meta’s edge lies in affordability, then £8/day should, in theory, stretch further in terms of clicks and impressions. But if LinkedIn’s advantage is precision, then even the bare minimum should still yield high-value prospects who actually match our ICP.
To keep the test fair, both campaigns were built around the same content asset: our Outbound Playbook. This wasn’t just any downloadable guide. It’s proven to be one of our most valuable and time-tested resources, packed with practical frameworks and proven approaches for effective lead generation on LinkedIn.
Here is a more detailed breakdown as to why we chose this particular asset:
- Proven track record – The playbook has already been battle-tested organically, generating strong engagement and uptake from our target audience. We knew it resonated, which made it the perfect candidate for paid promotion.
- Practical, actionable value – Rather than vague insights, it offers real-world strategies and step-by-step approaches that directly appeal to decision-makers looking to sharpen their outbound sales performance.
- A controlled variable – By using one consistent lead magnet across both platforms, we ensured that any difference in performance could be attributed to the platforms themselves—not the creative.
- Years of expertise distilled – The playbook contains 6 years of hard-earned strategy in high-performance LinkedIn lead generation. It’s not fluff—it’s a serious piece of value that could make a genuine impact on our audience (and, yes, we’re very proud of it).
In advertising tests like this, the creative can be one of the biggest swing factors. A weak asset might fail regardless of platform, while an overly flashy one could mask weaknesses in targeting. By holding the creative constant and choosing one we knew carried weight with our ICP, we eliminated a major variable. That meant the results would give us a much clearer answer to the core question:
Was it Meta or LinkedIn that delivered the leads worth having?
Our Outbound Playbook is packed with practical tips and frameworks that have helped us (and our clients) generate consistent results on LinkedIn. If you’d like to explore the playbook yourself, it’s available to download anytime.
Why Targeting Makes All the Difference
Here’s where the differences really started to show.
On LinkedIn:
- Location: United Kingdom
- Company Size: 11–1,000 employees
- Job Titles: Directors of Marketing, Sales, and Business Development
- Exclusions: Direct competitors (we didn’t want to hand them our playbook) and industries outside our B2B focus or have historically underperformed on LinkedIn
This setup gave us the ability to be laser-focused. Instead of casting a wide net, we went directly after the people we most wanted to speak to: business leaders with buying authority in the right-sized companies. These were the people who could realistically use our services, benefit from our playbook, and ultimately progress into meaningful conversations.
On Meta:
- Location: United Kingdom
- Demographics: All genders, ages 25–65+
- Additional targeting: Job titles (same as LinkedIn: Marketing, Sales, and Business Development Directors) and interests in LinkedIn, Digital Marketing, and Business-to-Business
At first glance, this seems fairly close. But Meta’s targeting is surface-level at best. While you can select job titles and interests, you don’t get the same professional accuracy as LinkedIn, so while we could still plug in job titles and interests, there’s no guarantee of accuracy or recency. A user could have “Director of Marketing” in their profile because of a side project, for example, or have liked a post about digital marketing five years ago and now be lumped into the audience pool.
In other words, Meta creates a much broader audience with diluted relevance, while LinkedIn keeps the focus on a clearly defined ICP.
The difference in targeting precision is more than a technical distinction. It directly impacts lead quality:
- LinkedIn leads: Each click felt like a genuine opportunity. They came from professionals who looked and behaved like our ICP—decision-makers at companies that matched the size, industry, and seniority we were targeting. In other words, they were people we could realistically see ourselves booking meetings with.
- Meta leads: The funnel filled faster, but the quality was inconsistent. Some leads were decent, but others were miles away from being qualified. For example, small business owners with no growth plans, freelancers exploring marketing tips, or even people outside of B2B entirely who just happened to fall into the audience pool.
Both technically count as “leads,” but only one has real commercial potential.
This clash between volume and relevance is at the heart of the debate. Meta can flood your funnel at a lower cost, but that doesn’t always mean more revenue. LinkedIn, meanwhile, may deliver fewer leads, but the ones that come through are closer to the bullseye.
When budgets are tight, this trade-off becomes critical. Do you want to spend less per click and sift through a pile of unqualified contacts, or pay more per click and get directly to the decision-makers who matter?
The Results
Now for the part you’ve been waiting for—the numbers that really matter.
At first glance, Meta seemed like the clear winner. It delivered more leads, and it did so at a lower cost per lead. On the surface, that looks like efficiency. But as any marketer knows, a higher lead count doesn’t necessarily mean those leads have real business value. Once we peeled back the first layer, the picture changed dramatically.
What Meta Really Delivered
Meta flooded the funnel quickly, but when we measured those leads against our ICP, the cracks became clear. In fact, 51% of the leads from Meta were completely outside our ICP. Many came from industries or company sizes we would never target, while others carried job titles that looked relevant on paper but had no real buying authority behind them.
More than half of the budget spent on Meta went to people who could never become customers. And while those names technically counted as “leads,” they created real problems in practice. Time and money were wasted chasing contacts with no potential, while our sales team was forced to sift through the noise before reaching genuine opportunities. The funnel itself became clogged, making it harder to prioritise the prospects that actually mattered.
The truth is, cheap leads might look impressive in an ad dashboard, but the reality is that they often turn into expensive distractions that drag down both efficiency and ROI.
LinkedIn Delivered and Then Some
LinkedIn told a very different story. Thanks to its precision targeting, the platform generated leads that were far closer to our ICP. In fact, 83% of LinkedIn leads were a strong match, and the majority made it all the way through to the sales team as genuine opportunities.
Yes, the cost per click was higher, but the difference in quality translated into a far stronger return on investment. Instead of chasing vanity numbers, LinkedIn put us in front of real decision-makers at businesses we could genuinely help. That’s where the real value lies—as clichéd as it might sound, quality over quantity.
Were there a handful of leads that didn’t fit? Of course, but they were rare. In most cases, it came down to people mislabelling their job titles, an issue no platform can fully eliminate. But compared to Meta’s widespread irrelevance problem, these were small outliers rather than a systemic weakness.
The Final Takeaway
When you strip it back, Meta’s “cheaper” leads ended up costing more in the long run because they drained resources without moving the needle. LinkedIn, on the other hand, delivered fewer leads but with far higher commercial potential.
The takeaway is clear:
- If your goal is volume, Meta can deliver.
- If your goal is revenue-driving opportunities, LinkedIn is the smarter bet, even if it comes at a higher upfront costs.
In B2B marketing, the prize doesn’t go to the platform that fills your funnel fastest. It goes to the one who fills it with the right people. And in this experiment, LinkedIn proved why it continues to be the gold standard for B2B lead generation.
Ready to Get Better Leads with LinkedIn? StraightIn Can Help
This experiment confirmed what we’ve known for years: in B2B marketing, it’s not about the number of leads you collect. It’s about connecting with the right people. Meta might fill the funnel quickly, but LinkedIn fills it with decision-makers who can actually move the needle for your business.
At StraightIn, we specialise in helping B2B companies cut through the noise and turn LinkedIn into their most powerful lead generation channel. From precision-targeted ad campaigns to outbound strategies, content marketing, and personal branding, we know how to put you in front of the people who matter most.
We’ve used the same approach to generate consistent, high-quality leads for our clients and for ourselves. Whether you want to build a pipeline, book more meetings with decision-makers, or increase revenue opportunities, we can help you achieve your goals.
Want to make LinkedIn your most effective lead generation channel? Get in touch with us today. Call 0161 518 4740 or email grow@straight-in.co.uk.
