Beyond LinkedIn: Which Paid Channels Are Actually Worth Testing for B2B?
Scott Schnaars
Beyond LinkedIn: Which Paid Channels Are Actually Worth Testing for B2B?
LinkedIn CPCs keep going up. At some point the math on your program stops working and you need options. The Exit Five community (https://www.exitfive.com/community) had a useful discussion about this.
Here is the practical guide to testing beyond LinkedIn without burning the budget.
Channels worth testing for B2B:
- Meta: CPCs run three to five times lower than LinkedIn for similar audiences. Lookalike audiences built from your customer list or CRM contacts often perform well, especially for mid-funnel retargeting. The job title targeting is less precise, but volume and cost make it worth testing for broader awareness
- Reddit: highly underrated if your buyers have active communities there. Engineers, security teams, marketing professionals, and specific verticals have engaged subreddits where relevant content earns genuine attention. Ads that match the community tone can be very cost-effective
- YouTube: bumper ads and in-stream ads for top-of-funnel enterprise awareness at significantly lower CPMs than LinkedIn. Attribution is harder, but the reach-to-cost ratio is strong
How to run a test that generates actual signal:
- Minimum test budget: ten percent of your current LinkedIn monthly spend, run for sixty to ninety days. Less than that and you do not have enough data to draw conclusions
- Establish your success metric before the test starts: cost-per-pipeline-dollar compared to your LinkedIn baseline
- Build the creative for the channel, not from your LinkedIn library. Reddit ads that look like LinkedIn ads get ignored
- When to call it: if a channel is not producing pipeline contribution by the end of the test window, that is a legitimate conclusion. Do not let sunk cost extend a test that is clearly not working
LinkedIn is not going anywhere. But having tested alternatives and knowing what they can do gives you options when platform costs keep climbing.
Yirla tracks channel performance across LinkedIn and alternatives on the same pipeline metrics so comparisons are clean. (https://www.yirla.com/integrations)
