Brett Creed – LinkedIn Ads Specialist & Co-Founder of Olivia Hudson

I pretty much live and breathe LinkedIn Ads.

I’m Brett Creed, co-founder of Olivia Hudson and a LinkedIn Ads specialist.

I’ve spent more than 10 years working across sales, marketing and B2B growth, with LinkedIn advertising becoming the area I’ve specialised in.

Over that time, I’ve worked across 500+ LinkedIn advertising accounts and more than 1,000 campaigns, helping businesses figure out how to reach the right people, generate demand and turn LinkedIn into actual pipeline.

But I didn’t start my career in marketing.

Far from it.

I started out fitting tyres.

My career wasn’t mapped out around becoming a LinkedIn Ads specialist.

I started with a three-year apprenticeship at Kwik Fit.

From there, I moved into estate agency and then recruitment.

Recruitment was where I really learned sales.

I progressed from consultant to managing consultant, then team leader and eventually Sales Director, with responsibility for a team of around 50 people.

That experience still influences how I look at marketing today.

Because I’ve never really viewed marketing as being about impressions, clicks or making things look nice.

Eventually, somebody has to buy something.

Marketing has to create an opportunity.

Sales has to convert it.

And if those two things aren’t connected, something is broken.

From sales into marketing

Over time, my role became increasingly focused on how businesses actually generated demand.

That meant learning and working across:

• Sales strategy

• Business development

• Google Ads

• Facebook advertising

• Social media

• Content

• Lead generation

• Digital marketing

• LinkedIn

I went on to work in senior sales and marketing roles, including Marketing Director and CMO-level responsibilities.

But one platform kept becoming more important to me.

LinkedIn.

Why LinkedIn?

LinkedIn gives B2B businesses something incredibly valuable.

Access to the people they actually want to sell to.

Not just an anonymous audience based on interests.

You can build campaigns around job roles, seniority, companies, industries, company size and professional characteristics that matter in B2B sales.

But LinkedIn is also incredibly easy to waste money on.

Clicks aren’t cheap.

Bad targeting gets expensive quickly.

And sending somebody who has never heard of you straight to a “Book a demo” page isn’t much of a strategy.

That’s the bit I became obsessed with.

Not simply:

How do we run LinkedIn Ads?

But:

How do we make LinkedIn actually work commercially?

Building Olivia Hudson

Rachael and I founded Olivia Hudson to focus on helping businesses grow through LinkedIn.

And rather than becoming another full-service digital agency offering everything from SEO to Facebook, Google, websites and TikTok, we eventually went the other way.

We specialised.

Today, Olivia Hudson focuses on LinkedIn.

Particularly LinkedIn Ads, but increasingly the complete picture around:

Content.

Founder-led marketing.

Outreach.

Demand generation.

Retargeting.

Lead generation.

And the strategy connecting all of it together.

Because running an advert is easy.

Building a system that actually generates business is much harder.

More than 1,000 LinkedIn campaigns later

Working across hundreds of accounts teaches you something pretty quickly:

There isn’t one magic LinkedIn Ads formula.

I’ve seen beautifully designed adverts completely fail.

I’ve seen incredibly simple adverts outperform everything else.

I’ve seen cheap clicks produce absolutely nothing.

I’ve seen more expensive campaigns generate brilliant opportunities.

I’ve seen lead magnets fly.

I’ve seen lead magnets die.

And I’ve seen businesses blame LinkedIn when the actual problem was their offer.

That’s why I’m much more interested in testing than pretending I know exactly what’s going to happen before we launch.

We create the strategy.

We use our experience to give it the best possible chance.

Then we look at what the market actually tells us.

If something works, we build on it.

If it doesn’t, we change it.

I don’t think LinkedIn Ads are right for everyone

This is probably an odd thing for someone who makes a living from LinkedIn Ads to say.

But sometimes my advice is:

Don’t run LinkedIn Ads.

If you’ve only got 15 companies you want to target, for example, spending thousands on advertising and agency fees might make absolutely no sense.

Go and speak to the 15 companies.

Do the outreach.

Start conversations.

Ads make much more sense when there’s a sufficiently large addressable audience and a commercial reason to build awareness and demand at scale.

I’d rather tell somebody not to spend the money than take it knowing I don’t think it’s the best approach.

My approach to LinkedIn Ads

I don’t think most businesses need 47 campaigns and a ridiculous 15-stage funnel.

At its simplest, I want to answer four questions:

Who are we trying to reach?

What do we want them to know?

What can we give them that they actually care about?

What happens when they engage?

From there, I generally think about LinkedIn in three broad stages.

Cold

Get in front of the right people.

Introduce the problem.

Share expertise.

Use content.

Give them something useful.

Don’t assume they want a sales call simply because they saw one advert.

Warm

Now they’ve interacted with us.

This is where we build trust.

Case studies.

Customer stories.

Educational content.

Founder videos.

Proof.

Retargeting.

Hot

Only now do we start asking for more.

A workshop.

A consultation.

A review.

A demo.

A conversation.

Right person. Right message. Right time.

That’s a much more useful way of thinking about LinkedIn than obsessing over a single CPC.

What I actually care about

I talk about CPC, CTR, CPM and CPL a lot.

They’re useful.

But none of them pays your wages.

I ultimately care about:

Did we reach the right people?

Did they engage?

Did we generate relevant leads?

Did those leads become conversations?

Did those conversations create opportunities?

Did any of it turn into revenue?

A cheap lead that’s completely irrelevant isn’t a good lead.

A cheap click that never becomes anything isn’t a good click.

Marketing metrics only matter when they connect back to commercial outcomes.

LinkedIn certifications

I’ve completed LinkedIn Marketing Solutions certifications covering areas including:

• LinkedIn Marketing Strategy

• LinkedIn Marketing Solutions Fundamentals

• LinkedIn Content and Creative Design

But certificates aren’t why I’d expect someone to trust me with their advertising.

I’d rather be judged on the campaigns, the experience, the results and whether the advice actually makes sense.

Sharing what I’ve learned

A big part of what I do now is education.

I regularly publish content explaining what we’re seeing across LinkedIn campaigns, including:

• LinkedIn Ads targeting

• CPC and bidding

• Retargeting

• Lead generation

• Campaign structure

• LinkedIn funnels

• Lead magnets

• Creative

• Thought Leader Ads

• Demand generation

• What we’re testing

• What isn’t working

• What we’d change

I don’t want to make LinkedIn Ads sound more complicated than they need to be.

I’d rather explain what I’d actually do and why.

The Olivia Hudson LinkedIn Ads knowledge centre

We’re now documenting much more of what we’ve learned from working across 500+ accounts and 1,000+ campaigns.

That includes guides covering:

LinkedIn Ads costs and benchmarks

CPC, CTR, CPL and CPM

Campaign strategy

Targeting

Retargeting

Lead generation

Creative

Document Ads

Video Ads

Thought Leader Ads

Campaign setup

Optimisation

And real campaign results

Every guide I write is designed to answer the same basic question:

What would I actually tell a client to do?

Not what sounds clever.

Not what fills 2,000 words.

What I’d actually do.

Work with me

If you’re considering LinkedIn Ads, already running them or simply want another opinion on what you’re doing, you don’t need to hire Olivia Hudson to speak to me.

Book a free 45-minute LinkedIn workshop.

We’ll look at:

• Your business

• Your audience

• Your current activity

• Your offer

• Your budget

• What you’re trying to achieve

And I’ll tell you how I’d approach it.

If I don’t think LinkedIn Ads are the right answer, I’ll tell you that too.

You’ll leave with a plan either way.

Book a free LinkedIn Ads workshop with Brett Creed.