Picture the owner of a commercial cleaning company in Des Moines who has decided to try LinkedIn ads. They read the advice that is out there, and it is consistent. Build an audience of at least 50,000 people. Keep your geography wide, a whole country or a broad region. Do not narrow a campaign to one metro area, because the audience gets too small to work. We have given that last piece of advice ourselves.
Then they open Campaign Manager and type in their market. Every office manager, operations director and facilities lead at a Des Moines company big enough to need a cleaning crew comes to about 7,500 people. There is no wider region to fall back on. A company in Omaha is not going to hire a crew that lives two hours away.
Almost everything written about LinkedIn ads assumes a business that can sell to anyone in the country. This piece is for the one that can't: the commercial cleaner, the managed IT provider, the accounting practice, the commercial insurance agent, the HVAC contractor with service contracts. Your market is one city and the towns around it. That changes the rules more than most advice admits, and mostly in your favor.
Every Ops Manager in Des Moines Fits in One LinkedIn Campaign
We asked LinkedIn's own audience estimator, the same tool that shows a number in Campaign Manager as you build targeting, how big a local B2B market really is. We sized four metro areas of very different sizes, using two buyer groups a local service business typically sells to. The counts below are LinkedIn's rounded estimates, pulled in October 2026.
The first group is the people who buy operational services: anyone in operations or administration at manager level or above, at companies with 11 to 500 employees. The second is the people who sign for almost everything at a small company: owners, partners and C-level executives at companies with 2 to 200 employees.
- Des Moines. 7,500 ops and admin managers; 18,000 owners and executives.
- Tulsa. 8,800 ops and admin managers; 23,000 owners and executives.
- Columbus, Ohio. 21,000 ops and admin managers; 51,000 owners and executives.
- Dallas-Fort Worth. 80,000 ops and admin managers; 220,000 owners and executives.
Now set those next to what LinkedIn recommends. Its help page on audience size says the minimum for an ad set is 300 members, but suggests at least 50,000 "to drive results," and at least 300,000 for Sponsored Content, the ordinary feed ads most businesses run. Not one of the local audiences above reaches 300,000. Outside Dallas-Fort Worth, the operations buyers in every market fall short of even 50,000.
Read the usual advice with these numbers in front of you and the conclusion seems to be that LinkedIn is not for a local business. That is the wrong conclusion. Those recommendations exist because a national advertiser is fishing in an ocean, and a big audience gives LinkedIn room to find the people most likely to respond. You are not fishing. You can count the fish.
That reframing matters, because it changes what you do next. A national advertiser's problem is finding the right people in a crowd. Yours is staying in front of a known group of people, all year, without spending more than the work is worth.
LinkedIn Counts More People in Des Moines Than Live There
Before you build anything, settle which location to type in, because LinkedIn offers you the city and the metro area, and they are very different boxes.
Here is a number that should make you suspicious of the city box. LinkedIn's estimator puts 220,000 members in the city of Des Moines. The Census Bureau puts the city's entire population at 212,086, and that count includes every child. Columbus shows the same pattern: 1.1 million LinkedIn members against 933,263 residents.
We can't see inside LinkedIn's count, but the arithmetic is enough to show that "Des Moines" on LinkedIn is not the city limits. Two things probably inflate it. Many people who live in West Des Moines, Ankeny or Urbandale list the name everyone recognizes on their profile. And under LinkedIn's default location setting, people who were only visiting can count too. Meanwhile plenty of people who work downtown list their suburb instead.
The metro area catches both groups. In our pull, the Des Moines metro held 7,500 of the operations buyers while the city held 2,100. Target the city and you throw away more than seven in ten of the people you could serve. The same held for owners and executives: 18,000 across the metro, 5,000 in the city.
Three settings finish the job.
Use the metro area, then subtract. If your service area stops at a county line, LinkedIn lets you exclude locations as well as include them. Keep the metro and exclude the counties you will not drive to, rather than trying to assemble your market city by city.
Choose permanent location. LinkedIn gives you three options. Permanent location uses the location a member put on their profile. Recent location uses their IP address for short-term visits. Recent or permanent, the default, uses either. For a business that serves one place, you want the people who live and work there, not the regional sales manager who spent two nights at a hotel downtown. Permanent is the right choice, as it is for most B2B campaigns.
Keep it to one campaign. A metro campaign with a single location is simple to read. Resist splitting it into separate campaigns for each suburb. You do not have the audience or the budget to make that worthwhile, and you will only divide a small number of results into smaller ones.
Stacking Job Titles in One City Shrinks Your LinkedIn Audience to 990. Targeting Job Function Gets You 7,500.
Once the location is right, the instinct is to get precise about the person. A commercial cleaner sells to facilities managers and office managers, so why not target exactly those two titles?
Because in one city, precision costs you most of the market. We ran that exact audience: the job titles Facilities Manager and Office Manager, at companies with 11 to 500 employees, in the Des Moines metro. It came to 990 people. The broader version, anyone in operations or administration at manager level or above at the same companies, came to 7,500. Columbus showed the same gap, 2,800 against 21,000.
The missing 6,500 people are not the wrong buyers. They are the operations director at a 40-person firm that has no facilities manager, the owner's right hand whose title fits no list, the office administrator who actually picks the cleaning vendor. Small companies are exactly where job titles get creative, and we have written before about how LinkedIn only knows about half of the job titles you target.
Then try adding one more filter. When we added a single industry to the Des Moines operations audience, the estimate came back as zero. Not small. Zero.
So for a local business the rule turns around. Our earlier advice in your LinkedIn audience shouldn't be 300,000, and it also shouldn't be 300 warned against narrowing to one metro, and for a business that can sell nationally that still stands. When the metro is your whole market, it is not a filter you chose. It is the edge of the map. Be strict about the place, because it is fixed, and generous about the role, because it is where small companies are messiest.
Your Best Targeting Is the List of Companies You Drive Past
A national advertiser has to guess which companies are worth chasing. You probably already know. You drive past them. You have quoted some of them. Your best customers can name their neighbors.
That knowledge is a targeting asset, because LinkedIn can show your ads to the people who work at specific companies. We covered how this works in detail in LinkedIn can put your ad in front of the exact companies you want. For a local business, the list is unusually easy to build, and it is unusually good.
Start with what is already in your hands:
- Quotes you sent that did not close. Those companies needed the service once and will need it again.
- The local business journal's annual lists of the area's largest employers, fastest-growing companies and newest office buildings.
- The chamber of commerce member directory, which is a list of local businesses that pay to be seen.
- Commercial buildings you already serve. Their other tenants are a short walk from a crew that is already there.
There is one mechanical catch. A company list uploaded to LinkedIn needs at least 300 rows, and the people it matches must clear LinkedIn's 300-member floor after your location is applied. We walked through why lists shrink in you uploaded 2,000 contacts, and your audience is 1,200. A local list of 120 companies will not upload. In that case, enter the companies by name in the company targeting itself, add the same location, and check the estimate before you launch.
Run that list as its own campaign alongside the broader metro audience, not instead of it. The list is where you want to be impossible to miss. The metro campaign is how the companies you never thought of find you.
Reaching Every Buyer in Town Costs About a Thousand Dollars a Month
Here is the part that should change how a local owner thinks about LinkedIn's reputation for being expensive.
LinkedIn charges by the impression or the click, and a widely cited 2025 benchmark puts the typical US cost per thousand impressions at roughly $31 to $38. Treat that as a starting point, not a quote. Your own costs will depend on your bid, your ads and who else is targeting the same people.
Now do the arithmetic for a market you can count. Suppose you want the 7,500 operations buyers in Des Moines to see your company about four times a month. That is 30,000 impressions. At $31 to $38 per thousand, it comes to roughly $930 to $1,140 a month. For Columbus, with 21,000 buyers, the same plan is roughly $2,600 to $3,200. LinkedIn's minimum is $10 a day, so a small test can start at around $300 a month.
LinkedIn will not deliver perfectly evenly, and some people will see you more often than others. But the shape of the result holds. For roughly a thousand dollars a month in a market the size of Des Moines, a local business can keep its name in front of most of the decision makers it could ever sell to.
That also changes what can go wrong. A national campaign's risk is not reaching enough of the right people. Yours is reaching the same people so often they stop seeing you. With a fixed audience of a few thousand, an ad that runs unchanged for two months will wear out. We explained how to spot and manage that in your LinkedIn audience is small enough to wear out. The short version for a local business: keep several ads in rotation and replace them on a schedule, rather than waiting for results to sag.
The other habit worth building comes from Dominic DeJoy, speaking on Edward Sturm's podcast about how he runs LinkedIn for B2B clients: let a campaign run for a week or two, then open the demographics report and start excluding the job titles that should never have been there. In a small market that review takes ten minutes, because the list of who saw your ads is short enough to read. We showed how to read it in LinkedIn tells you exactly who clicked.
Google Catches the Few Who Are Shopping. LinkedIn Reaches the Rest.
None of this means LinkedIn should be a local B2B company's first ad dollar. Usually it should not.
Look at what Google Keyword Planner shows for the Des Moines-Ames market in October 2026. "Janitorial services" gets about 90 searches a month. "Commercial cleaning services" about 70. "Office cleaning" about 70. "Commercial cleaning" about 40. Together that is roughly 270 searches a month, and some of those are the same person searching twice.
Those few searchers are the most valuable people in the market. They are unhappy with their current cleaner, or opening a new office, and they want a quote this month. If you are not showing up when they search, fix that first.
But set 270 searches next to the 7,500 people on LinkedIn who could hire a cleaning company. The searchers are the small slice who happen to be shopping right now. Most of the rest have a cleaning contract that renews sometime in the next year, and they are not searching for anything. When they do, the name they already recognize gets the first call.
That is the division of labor. Google captures the buyers who are ready. LinkedIn makes sure that when the rest become ready, you are already familiar. We laid out how the channels fit together in you don't have to choose between LinkedIn, Google, and Meta. For a local business, the order is simple: get the search right, then add LinkedIn when you want more of the market to know your name before they need you.
Your Ad Can Name the Neighborhood Your Buyer Drives Through. A National Company's Ad Can't.
The last advantage is the one national advertisers cannot copy, and most local businesses waste it by running ads that could have come from anywhere.
Your buyer and you share a map. Use it. An ad that says "Commercial cleaning for Des Moines offices" is fine. An ad that says "We clean 14 office buildings between Jordan Creek and the East Village" is something no national franchise can say, and it tells the reader in one line that you are close, established and already trusted by their neighbors.
A few ways to put the shared map to work:
- Name the places. Neighborhoods, office parks, the road everyone commutes on. Local readers notice local words.
- Show local customers, with their permission. A logo the reader drives past every day is stronger proof than any national award.
- Put a real face on the ad. In a city, there is a fair chance your buyer has met your owner or will. A person they might shake hands with beats a stock photo of a mop.
- Offer something only a local company can. A free walkthrough of their space this week. A quote delivered in person. An ask that would cost a national company a plane ticket.
That last point matters more than it sounds. LinkedIn advice built for software companies leans on demos and downloads, an approach we picked apart in the LinkedIn playbook you're reading was written for software companies. A local service business has something better to offer: showing up.
Most of the LinkedIn advice you will read is right for someone. If your market ends at the edge of your metro, it is probably not right for you. Use the metro, be generous about the role, build your list from the companies you already know, budget to reach your whole market, and say something only a neighbor could say.
This is the kind of campaign we build and manage every week. If you would rather hand it off, our LinkedIn ads management team can run it for you. If you'd rather do it yourself, start by typing your metro area into Campaign Manager and seeing how many of your buyers are actually there.
