LinkedIn Ads Summer Book 2025
Jun 20, 2025
Summer Costs Fall as Temperatures Rise
Almost everyone agrees that the summer months are quiet in the B2B sector. During this period, the lead pressure in companies decreases. A similar situation applies to target audiences who are buyers. Companies focus on the projects and new plans they started at the beginning of the year. Of course, it is not always possible to reach your target audience because some of the employees are on vacation.
Summer is the beginning of a more relaxed period for almost everyone (maybe not for SaaS) - it's actually the perfect opportunity to expand your pipeline and experiment.
3 Golden Rules of Summer
1 - Increased Free Time = More Engagement
People have more free time during the summer months. This leads to an increase in engagement rates. A slower pace of business means more time for your audience to spend on your content.
2 - Low Competition = Opportunity
During the summer months, many advertisers are less active on the platform, expecting less traffic and therefore fewer leads and engagement. This gives you a golden opportunity to gain visibility.
3 - Lower Costs = More bang for your buck Increased traffic and lower competition also drives costs down. Your marketing budget can do a lot more good during the summer months.
The Other Side of the Coin
At first, it is necessary to accept some facts:
Distractions: Many people are mentally by the pool or on the beach and conversion rates tend to drop. High engagement and traffic is not reflected in conversions.
August Slowdown: Towards the end of the summer, as vacation centers take center stage for the last time, traffic slowly declines.
Many B2B marketers know this because they go through this cycle every year and use the summer months as an opportunity to focus on filling the funnel.
Autumn is Coming
Come fall, everyone goes back to work. All advertisers are back in the market. And everyone's pockets are full, because some have saved their budget by not advertising in the summer, while others want to use all their remaining budget until the end of the year.
Costs are suddenly rising across all advertising channels, and the days of discounts are approaching. By the end of the year, November, Black Friday, even many B2C companies have become your competitors in B2B advertising channels. Competition is fiercer than ever.
At this point, brands that fill the funnel during the summer start to monetize this traffic. They have an audience in their hands compared to starting from scratch. Brands that wait until the fall usually miss this window.
Advantages of Summer
Low competition: Many companies stop their campaigns.
50-70% reduction in costs (specific to Turkey)
More relaxed target audience: Decision makers under less pressure.
Opportunity to test: Time to try out new strategies.
Increased free time: Audiences with more time for content.
Funnel filling period: Time to prepare for fall.
Last Chance Warning
This is your last chance to take advantage of the slow season. After August, advertising costs only increase until the end of the year.
If you have to pause your campaigns during the summer vacation, at least don't pile the budget forward. Every year many companies do the same thing: companies try to spend 3 months of media budget in 1 month, increasing costs for everyone.
Summer is the beginning of a more relaxed period for almost everyone, but there are some exceptions. (SaaS never stops)
Strategy Change: From Lead to Awareness
Ideally, we build Awareness and Lead campaigns around a strategy that affects the entire funnel. This is what we do most of the time in normal times. In this way, while increasing brand awareness, we don't have much trouble in generating leads.
For example, we first go live with an awareness campaign and start educating our target audience and introducing ourselves. After a few months, we do an InMail campaign to the same audience and collect the ready ones. It's not that easy, of course, but this is how a simple linkedIn plan works.
Summer = Season of Awareness
I see the summer months as the awareness campaign of the whole year. Since your target audience is in a more comfortable position, turning to educational content, e-books, whitepapers that create awareness instead of direct lead-oriented campaigns will be very useful for you when the time is right.
Why Summer is Ideal for Awareness?
Relaxed Working Tempo: Your audience has time to research new products
Less Competition-Lower costs
Creating Touchpoints: You may not get meetings, but you create touchpoints to follow up later.
The Power of the 95*5 Rule
I am a partial believer in the mythical 95*5 rule that everyone knows. The summer months largely fulfill the training part of this rule.
The 95*5 Rule: At any given time, only 5% of your target audience are active buyers. The remaining 95% are potential buyers in the future. Educating and preparing this 95% is critical. Being the first company that comes to mind when the time is right is priceless.
Summer strategy: create touchpoints to educate the 95% and become the favorite for their fall buying decisions.
Content Tips
E-books: Industry guides and best practices
Whitepapers: Trend analysis and research results
Webinars: Educational content and thought leadership
Case Studies: Success stories
Audience Expansion: From Decision Makers to Influencers
In normal times, we usually try to reach out directly to the decision makers. We try to touch the people who make the purchasing decision, who will be active in the process of incorporating the product or solution into the company.
For example, let's say we are selling a data quality solution. We can target people in direct decision-making positions such as CIO, Head of Data, Data Quality Manager.
In the summer months, I try a different approach. I target people who will use the product, people who will say “we actually have just such a need”.
Continuing with the example above, marketing is one of the departments that will benefit from a good data quality process. Better quality customer data in a company means better marketing campaigns.
Scenario: Marketing teams need some filtered data for custom targeting and request it from the analytics or CRM department. If the in-house data is of poor quality and poorly structured, it may take several days for the marketing team to access it. Worse, the data is of poor quality, so the desired results may not be achieved.
The campaign is set up late, fails and everyone's time is wasted. However, with a good system, this demand can be met with quality data in a few hours.
Perhaps this company didn't even realize that it had such a need or that there was a solution for it. Now the Marketing Director and his team know that this is not fate. With every late data package, with every failed campaign attempt, they will complain to someone inside and in time an opportunity will arise. It's a long, hard process, but it works.
Low Costs
If you're still not convinced enough and are thinking of shutting down ads in the summer, the last thing you need to know is that costs are actually falling.
Stopping Campaigns = Leaving Money on the Table
Here's the truth: LinkedIn is not taking a summer vacation. Nobody's audience is on a 3-month digital detox. There may be fewer people online, but engagement is the same and costs are much lower.
During the summer months, companies big and small either shut down their advertising or cut their budgets drastically. This leads to a rare natural phenomenon:
Less competition and lower costs
LinkedIn Pricing Facts
When you go to manual pricing in LinkedIn Ads, you will see that LinkedIn gives you a price range. LinkedIn explains this as “the price range given by users who advertise to the same audience and ad type as you”. And you naturally think: I should choose an amount within this price range.
This price range system does not work properly in many locations. Turkey is one of these countries. When you enter the manual pricing section and see 4 digit CPM amounts, you will probably leave for good. If you are a persistent person, you will understand how it works over time.
Although the amounts drop suddenly in the summer months, LinkedIn does not show the price changes in the budgeting section instantly. This means you have to find the right range.
💡 Tip: If you have an ongoing campaign, take a gradual approach rather than abruptly reducing your budget. LinkedIn can react negatively to sudden drastic changes.
In high-profile markets like the US and Europe, you may not see drastic drops, but there are still enough drops to give it a try.
Critical Information: After August, advertising costs only increase until the end of the year. This is your last chance to take advantage of the slow season.
What if you need a Lead?
For some companies, the summer months are no exception. Especially for SaaS and startups, lead pressure is always there. So what can we do if we are in this situation? There are a few options I use at this point.
Playing to the General
Throughout the year, we think about which of our characteristics we will emphasize in marketing activities. We emphasize these in advertising visuals and texts. If we have enough budget, we allocate it in a way to match the benefit and the audience and make a more focused campaign.
There is actually only one reason for all this effort: To get better quality leads. We do it to reach customers who will not misunderstand the product, who will not mistake a LinkedIn InMail for a job posting, and who are likely to convert to sales.
A change of approach in the summer:
Instead of putting a product or feature in the spotlight, I put it all out there
I take a “what do you need?” approach
I use a wider target audience and more general messages
In connection with this selection, I am also changing the LinkedIn form structure and adding a custom field. You can see that all incoming leads want to get information in a different field.
Change in Target Audience Selection
During the summer months, I don't target companies with more than 500 employees in lead campaigns. I try to reach companies with fast decision-making processes and more daily life.
Why Not Target Big Companies?
Corporate Planning: They proceed on the basis of clear plans. Year-end budgeting → New year purchases
Budget Cycle: No procurement budgets in summer
Vacation Policies: Block vacation periods
Ideal Summer Target Profile
Organizations with flexible decision-making processes
Titles such as Co-founder, Owner are always included
Question: If there are more and diverse leads from this structure in the summer, wouldn't there be more in normal times?
Answer: This campaign is about playing with perceptions. The overall strategy is less likely to reach SQL. Even though there are more forms, there are not more quality leads.
Conclusion
There is still an opportunity in the summer. I liken it to the rise of Audi, a story that is a bit exaggerated but one of my favorite stories:
In the 1970s, today's powerful “German trio” consisted of just two companies. Audi was a brand in the shadow of Mercedes and BMW. It wanted to produce premium quality vehicles like them and stand next to them. But the premium target group was not interested in Audi, some of them did not even know its name.
The 1973 oil crisis had put the automotive industry in a very difficult situation. While everyone cut their marketing budgets and stopped advertising, Audi, which had aggressive marketing campaigns contrary to its competitors, changed its strategy and offered “German engineering at an affordable price” with economic models.
By the 1980s, it had overtaken BMW in sales in the US thanks to Quattro technology. When the time was right, it switched back to the premium class, leaving the economy models to the likes of Toyota, and today Mercedes, along with BMW, has become an indispensable part of the “German trio”.
Like Audi's bold move in 1973, this summer opportunity only comes once a year. While your competitors are slashing their advertising budgets, strengthen your pipeline.
After a successful summer, you'll already be one step ahead in September when others will be wondering where they went.
