The standard B2B media plan buys LinkedIn because that is where the job titles live, pays five to ten times consumer CPMs for the privilege, and treats Meta as the place its buyers go to stop being buyers. That last belief is the expensive one. The procurement director does not dissolve at 5 p.m. She is the same person on the couch, scrolling the same feed as everyone else, and Meta reaches her there for a fraction of what her job title costs on LinkedIn.
I have run the comparison for enough clients to state it plainly: B2B works on Meta, it usually works cheaper, and the advertisers doing it well are quiet about it because the arbitrage is the strategy. Run the numbers on a typical mid-market SaaS plan. LinkedIn CPMs for a decent-sized decision-maker audience routinely land between $50 and $120. The same humans on Meta cost $8 to $20 to reach. Even if Meta's targeting wastes half its impressions on the wrong people, and done properly it wastes far less, the effective cost of reaching the right person is still a third of the LinkedIn price. Arbitrage that wide does not usually survive publicity, which tells you something about how few B2B buyers have actually run the math.
Why the LinkedIn playbook fails when you port it
The mechanics are different, and the teams that fail port their LinkedIn playbook over unchanged. On LinkedIn you buy the audience and the creative can coast, because the targeting did the qualifying. On Meta you cannot buy the job title, so the creative has to do the qualifying, exactly the dynamic I described when broad targeting won. Open with the problem only your buyer has. Use the vocabulary of the role, the acronym only a revenue operations lead would recognize, the compliance deadline only a controller is tracking. Let everyone else scroll past; their thumb is your audience filter, and unlike LinkedIn's filter, it works for free.
The second port failure is audience construction. Interest categories on Meta are weak proxies for professional identity, so the accounts that work are built on first-party spine: customer lists, CRM segments, webinar registrants, site visitors, seeded into lookalikes. Retargeting and customer-list seeds carry more weight here than any interest category, and a clean first-party list is worth more on Meta than on any other platform, because it is the only professional signal the platform will ever have. B2B advertisers with poor CRM hygiene should fix that before spending a dollar here; the channel amplifies whatever data discipline you bring to it.
Adult expectations about measurement
Nobody signs a six-figure contract from a Wednesday-night impression, so judge the channel on qualified pipeline over quarters, not on last-click form fills, or CPL will march you straight into the wrong optimization. The pattern I see over and over in closed-won analysis: Meta shows up mid-funnel in the deals that close, a touch between the first LinkedIn exposure and the eventual branded search, invisible to anyone grading channels on the last touch. Self-reported attribution, the how-did-you-hear-about-us field, catches more of it than any pixel does, which is a sentence that offends analytics teams and matches the data every time I run the comparison.
Here is the part the case studies leave out: the arbitrage has a expiration behavior, and you can watch for it. Every quarter more B2B money discovers Meta, and in narrow verticals, cybersecurity being the loudest current example, the couch is starting to get crowded and the CPM gap is narrowing. The window is not closing across B2B broadly, the price difference is too structural for that, but in your specific vertical the best time to establish the channel, build the audiences, and learn the creative language was before your competitors did. The second-best time is before the next one does.
LinkedIn still earns its place for precision and for reaching committees you can name; when the buying group is forty identifiable people at twelve accounts, pay the toll. But paying luxury prices for every impression of a person you could also reach at commodity prices is not rigor. It is habit with a rate card, and your CFO would call it that if anyone showed them both numbers on one page.