Hunting Leads is a private newsletter for B2B founders and marketers. If this was forwarded to you, you can subscribe here.

Hi! This is Moby.

We’re covering both LinkedIn Ads and LinkedIn Organic today.

What you can expect today:

  • Are Lead Gen forms worth running in your LinkedIn Ads?

  • What’s working for personal brands on LinkedIn right now?

  • Personal roundup: SXSW, Spryng, and AI

Enjoy!

P.S. If this email was useful to you, please consider forwarding it to someone who might find this helpful as well.

#1 Should You Be Running Lead Gen Form Ads?

I saw this post by Gabriel, agency owner and friend, about Lead Gen Forms ads:

If you're not familiar with lead gen forms, that's basically when you click an ad on LinkedIn and it opens up a form like this:

(LinkedIn pre-fills information from the users profile)

A lot of LinkedIn ad programs use them for:

  • Driving content downloads and passing those form submissions to sales

  • Making offers to an audience and having them submit a form

Lead Gen Forms = Hit or Miss?

For me, lead gen forms have always been unpredictable and unreliable.

Most of the time, they deliver form submissions but don’t bring many meetings.

Sometimes, the market is super responsive and they crush.

They’re a hit when:

  • You’re using them to add subscribers to an email list

  • You’re using them for lead gen to a warm audience

  • You’re using them for lead gen to a cold audience AND you have a great sales follow-up system

They’re a miss when:

  • You’re using them for lead gen to a cold audience

  • Or you have poor sales processes

  • You start LinkedIn ads imagining that Lead Gen Form ads will be the core lead gen lever

My Recommendation = Test Lead Gen Forms in BOF, But Manage Your Expectations

They’re 100% worth the test for BOF, but I would:

  • Plan your LinkedIn strategy assuming they are not the core driver of leads (here’s how to get started with LinkedIn ads, btw)

  • Expect form fills, but know you will have to work them hard to turn into meetings

  • Consider low-friction content offers to a warm high-LTV audience and then nurture them over email

If you are looking to get more leads from your LInkedIn ads program, I break it down in detail here: How to Get More Booked Meetings in 2026 from LinkedIn Ads

And here it is visualized 👇

#2 What Is Actually Working for LinkedIn Organic?

Me and a couple of B2B founders got together to discuss what’s working on LinkedIn organic, and it was a way for us to share what we see working (or not).

This will be relevant to you if you’re building your own brand, or helping build the brands of your executive team (which does boost pipeline).

Video reach isn’t there on LinkedIn yet, but might be in the future. Despite LinkedIn claiming you’ll get more reach with video, no one experiences that. Text and image posts have more consistent reach than video (and yes, your reach on LinkedIn is down)

Tagging too many people is NOT the move. If you tag 20 people and they don’t comment, LinkedIn will treat your tagging as spam.

The room was split on the use of LinkedIn newsletters as a distribution channel. I personally don’t see many in my feed, but I can see it as a place to repurpose existing blog posts for more distribution.

Personal outreach is NOT dead. I do it for my newsletters, others do it for theirs. You cannot discount the value of founders or sales reaching out to prospects directly.

Commenting amplifies reach. If you’re managing a personal brand (for the exec team or yourself) as a marketer, you can get more engagement by commenting for 5-15 minutes before you post.

Faces in posts = memorability. As much as we all claim to hate selfies, we really don’t. Humans want to see humans in their feed (but not too much).

P.S. Here’s my personal LinkedIn strategy visualized 👇 and in detail here

#3 Personal Roundup

Spryng by Wynter was awesome, as always

200+ B2B SaaS marketers got together for 2.5 days of sessions, roundtables, and just hanging out in Austin. It’s hands-down one of the best events I go to every single year.

Elliot Roazen and I talking about how we’re all f***** because of the Iran War

Emceed SXSW Founders Meetup

Josh Chernikoff and John Gamba invited me to MC their Edu Founders event for the second year running. I used Nick Gray's 2-hour cocktail party format to run the event, and it was, as always, a great time.

AI AI AI AI AI AI

Christine McDannell is now hosting a regular AI implementors sprint, getting together ~15 people every sunday to build stuff together. If you want to check it out, here’s her newsletter link.

See you next time!

- Moby | Austin, TX

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