B2B buyers don't live on LinkedIn

Most B2B media plans I see lean too heavily on LinkedIn. Not entirely, but close enough that the rest of the plan is an afterthought. It has become the reflex: B2B budget goes to LinkedIn because LinkedIn is where the job titles are, and everything else gets treated as a nice-to-have if there is money left over. I understand the logic. I also think it is steadily costing a lot of programmes their reach, their efficiency and, in more cases than people admit, the deal.

Part of why this happens is a blind spot worth naming up front. As B2B marketers and sellers, we spend a huge amount of our own working lives on LinkedIn, so it is easy to assume everyone else does too. A lot of B2B audiences simply do not use it the way we do. Plenty of the people on a buying committee log in rarely, scroll passively, or never really engage with content at all. Having a profile is not the same as being active, and a job title in the targeting is not the same as attention. If we plan as though our audience shares our own habits, we build for ourselves rather than for them.

So let me make the argument for building the plan the other way round.

Why LinkedIn became the default

LinkedIn earns a place in almost every plan, and I am not about to tell you to drop it. It is precise. You can target by role, seniority, company and function, and for reaching a named buying committee at work, nothing else is quite as clean. That precision is real and it is valuable.

The problem is that precision became an excuse to stop thinking. LinkedIn is the channel that is easiest to justify to a board, so the plan defaults to it, and the harder question never gets asked. A plan that is ninety per cent LinkedIn reaches your buyers in exactly one context, in work mode, at a premium price, and ignores every other moment that actually shapes a considered decision. You are paying the most to reach people in the setting where they are least receptive to being sold to.

Buyers are people, and people have a whole day

The org chart makes this easy to forget. The CFO, the technical evaluator and the end user on your buying committee are people. They commute. They scroll at home in the evening. They are out and about at the weekend. They research problems on Reddit at 11pm because they cannot sleep for thinking about the thing you sell. Almost none of that happens on LinkedIn, and a lot of it is where the real influence on a B2B decision builds.

If you only show up in the working part of someone's day, you are absent for most of the moments that move them. Worse, you are absent in exactly the contexts where they have their guard down and are actually open to a new idea.

Start with where the audience sits, not the channel

The way we build a paid social plan is to start with the buying committee and work outwards, not to start with a channel and pour budget into it.

First, where does each part of the committee actually sit? A CFO and a platform engineer do not spend their attention in the same places, so we map where each genuinely is rather than assuming one network covers them all. Then, what will resonate in each of those places? The same person reacts completely differently to a message on a work feed, on a commute, on Reddit mid-research, or at home in the evening. The context is not a detail, it is half the message. And finally, which channels influence across the journey? Different channels do different jobs at different stages, from early awareness through to in-market intent, so the mix should move a decision along rather than chase one metric.

That thinking almost always takes you well beyond LinkedIn.

The channels the default plan skips

Meta, across Facebook and Instagram, reaches the same buyers at home and during downtime, with lower CPMs and creative formats that carry a message in the moments LinkedIn never sees. Dismissing it as consumer-only is a habit, not an analysis. Your buyers are on it, off the clock, with their attention less contested.

Reddit is more of an open question, and I would rather be straight about that than oversell it. Some B2B teams have had genuine success there, because it is where technical and specialist buyers research, compare and trust peer opinion over vendor claims. But it is a hard platform to build real trust on. The communities are wary of anything that looks like marketing, and I am not convinced paid ads escape being scrolled past or tuned out. It is worth testing where your audience actually gathers, as long as you go in knowing the bar for earning attention is high and a paid placement may not clear it.

Then there is video, YouTube and the placements that fit your specific audience, for the commute-and-evening attention where category demand and education actually land.

None of this is a case for spraying budget across every platform. It is a case for planning against real behaviour instead of a template.

This is not spray and pray, it ties back to the account

The obvious objection is that broadening the channel mix means losing the account focus that makes B2B media efficient. It does not, if you build it properly. Every channel in the plan should be aligned to your named target accounts, so Meta, Reddit and the rest are reaching the buying committees at the companies you actually want, not a broad lookalike the algorithm found cheap. The point is not more reach for its own sake. It is reaching the same named accounts in more of the moments that matter, rather than paying a premium to reach them in only one.

That is the discipline that separates a considered paid social programme from a scattergun one. The accounts stay the anchor. What changes is how many of their real-world moments you are actually present for.

The question worth asking

So the question I would put to any B2B team looking at their media plan is not "how much LinkedIn." It is "where is this buying committee, across their whole day, and what will land with them in each place they are." Answer that honestly and the plan that comes out looks very different from the one most people are running. It usually reaches more of the right people, in better moments, for less money, and it still ties every pound back to the accounts you are trying to win.

LinkedIn keeps its place. It just stops being the whole plan.