A few years ago I offered $1,000 to anyone who could provide their LinkedIn campaigns were working for early-stage enterprise B2B startups. The post went semi-viral. The takes were hot, the DMs were many, the winners were none.
I’ve changed my mind. Not completely, but enough for an update.
For most early-stage enterprise B2B startups, paid digital campaigns are still a waste of time and money. Targeting US executives on LinkedIn still costs $100+ per click. Your dataset is tiny, your sales cycle is long, and by the time you have enough data to know if it’s working, your CEO has already killed the budget because you spent tens of thousands of dollars with nothing to show for it.
In 2026, I know there are exceptions:
1. You have real budget.
If you raised $6M and need to hit $1M ARR to raise your Series A, don’t spend on ads. They’ll eat your budget fast, and results take months or never show up. But if you raised $20M, $30M, $50M? LinkedIn and Google should be in your channel mix. Your blended CAC can absorb it, and your budget can sustain a real experiment.
2. Your market is hot right now.
This usually goes hand in hand with #1. If there’s real demand and buzz in your category, you don’t need to educate the market or manufacture demand. You just need to capture what’s already there. People are actively researching, paid actually works, and if you need to win the market fast, it’s one of the few channels where you can “throw money at the problem” and boost your growth quickly.
Here’s how to do paid B2B right in 20526 – and mistakes to avoid:
It’s easy to spin up a campaign and spend (lose) a lot of money fast. Getting results that actually impact the business requires expertise, specifically a combination of experienced PPC management and strong product marketing content. A campaign missing either half of that will underperform, and here the stakes are real: you’re not producing a meh blog post; you’re burning through a $500K ad budget.
Don’t outsource your judgment to AI agents just because it’s 2026. Use experts who are deploying AI tools to do their jobs better, not instead of having done them in the first place.
So yes, I changed my mind. Paid can work, but only if you have the budget to sustain it, the market conditions to justify it, and the people to execute it well. For everyone else, my original advice stands: put that money literally anywhere else.
