The Campainless Blog
As a B2B marketer, you’re likely familiar with LinkedIn Lead Generation Ads. You’ll also know that they typically generate more leads than landing page ads, without sacrificing quality. However, you might not be aware of the many ways seasoned pros squeeze additional value out of them & as a result, may be failing to generate the results you deserve. So, what are these hidden lead gen ads methods? Let’s dig in.
After spending weeks preparing for a campaign — creating strategy, ad copy, creative, audiences and more — it’s easy to get lazy when it comes to creating the form for your lead gen ads. However, we’re here to stress that no matter how fatigued you feel, don’t stop short of the finish line!! The messaging on your form (on the headline, the description and the thank you tile) is all incredibly important in determining your lead gen form completion rate and the overall success of your campaign.
So how do you make sure this crucial step is executed as effectively as possible? A) Make sure the form copy is consistent with the offer, banner and messaging in your ads. Any friction or misalignment here can be costly. B) Ensure the value of the offer is emphasised: why should your prospect give their details to you? Make sure this is immediately clear. Hit them over the head with value. C) Call out your target persona directly – make sure the journey feels personal and customised as possible. No one likes to feel like the content they’re about to download is generic.
While the copy on your form is critical – it is ultimately useless if you’re asking too much of your prospect. No matter how valuable your offer is, if you put up a fortress in front of it, it’s unlikely very much will trickle through the cracks. That’s why you need to be as sparing as possible with the number of fields you have and what the nature of those fields are. Capture the minimum amount you can while still getting your sales reps the information you need. We would typically suggest between 3-5 fields.
Helpful tip: With lead enrichment software like Zoom.info you can pay to fill in any gaps in the data you capture.
Have you ever thought of using your thank you tile on your lead gen ads strategically to move prospects down the funnel? This is our handy third tip and it’s a good one. Say you’re using your lead gen ads to promote an in-depth mid-funnel eBook, you could use the text box and url field in the thank you tile to promote a relevant company case study, a virtual product tour or a demo of your software. While it’s unlikely everyone who downloads the eBook will click on the link in your TY tile, you’re taking advantage of another opportunity to turn them into a warmer lead. With most B2B prospects requiring 6-8 touchpoints before converting to a sale – we’d suggest you capitalise!
A conundrum many B2B marketer’s struggle with is getting the company email addresses of their prospects. Unfortunately most people sign up with LinkedIn with their personal email address, as they are likely to change jobs in their working lifespan. This means unless you put a designated work email field, which increases friction and most people don’t add anyhow, you’ll get a high proportion of personal addresses. Lucky we have a hack for you!
Simply, create a custom field, call it “Company field (this is where we will send your guide!)” and this proportion is likely to shift in your favour. We typically see that, with this approach, the percentage of company emails provided moves from 20% to 80%. While a concern might be that this will still increase friction, the brackets counteract this impact, and in our experience we haven’t seen a significant decrease in leads, but an increase in quality. Note – depending on the asset you’re promoting, replace “guide” with “whitepaper” / “brochure” / “offer details” / “infographic” / “webinar.”
The most important metric for measuring the performance of your lead gen form campaigns is the LGF completion rate. This is what you should be monitoring and optimising toward with your campaigns. You might be thinking, great I can do that, but what is a good Lead Gen Form completion rate? According to LinkedIn and seasoned pros, you should be aiming for 10-15%. If yours is lower than that and the click through rate (CTR) on your ads is decent, there is likely an issue with your form or the path between ad > form so we’d suggest you look at tweaking the fields, copy, or offer.
This is not a tactic we’d suggest in all cases, but if you have a significant amount of budget for this channel it’s worth testing a couple of different approaches to your lead gen forms to see what iteration resonates with your audience. Whether it be phone field vs no phone field > persona-specific copy vs generic you’re testing, there are many useful learnings and insights to be found from doing this. What gets you higher quality leads at scale and low volume?
Warning: make sure you don’t have too many other variables at play while this test is in progress i.e. if you have 2 forms you shouldn’t also have 2 copy variants, and 2 banner variants as well. This makes inferring conclusions very difficult and defeats the purpose of having the test in the first place.
The final tip we’ll share with you is a must-do: you need to integrate your LinkedIn leads with your marketing automation tool / CRM. And ensure this is working smoothly. What is the point of generating leads if they aren’t being fed into the right hands? And they aren’t being nurtured to their final destination? Many well-known CRMs like Hubspot, Salesforce, Marketo allow native integrations with LinkedIn so no third-party tools are required! It’s as simple as following a few simple instructions and voila – connected.
From there you can set up workflows so the right people are notified of leads as soon as they are captured in LinkedIn and they can be entered into the relevant lead nurtures etc. to coax them down the funnel. If the platform you use for this purpose doesn’t have a native integration with LinkedIn – don’t worry! That’s where the marketer’s good friend, Zapier, comes in handy. With this helpful tool you can seamlessly sync up your leads – you just have to be careful to ensure all the relevant fields are entered in and passed through correctly. Testing is a must-do!
So there you have it! All the secret, hot tips LinkedIn pros are using to elevate their lead gen activity and ramp up their results. Hungry for more channel tips and insights? With Campainless, you’ll receive daily best practice tips, campaign-specific insights and more to ensure your LinkedIn lead gen form game is always on-point.
