How to Set Up a LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms Campaign

Every marketer knows that quality leads are an essential part of the business. Their utility can be explained by looking at the marketing funnel. The top of the funnel marks the start of a marketing campaign – raising awareness and helping users on a search for information. Awareness should encourage a user to be interested and learn about products. After this, they typically consider the product by reading reviews and comparing products; they then put products in a cart, evaluate the cart, and check out. If you look at the marketing funnel, all sales start with a simple search for information, and it is at this stage that the best companies will offer easy-to-access information to their users in a way that generates leads.

One way that enterprising companies try to capture interest from a search for information at the top of the funnel is to offer information in an easy and accessible package. This might be a webinar, a PDF, or an infographic – the possibilities are broad. If a business offers satisfying information, it can leverage the value of that information to consumers by requiring that the user enters their email address or other information in their lead form to receive it. This represents a fair exchange, and if the information is important enough to the user, they will be happy to oblige, as it evokes the norm of reciprocity. This norm is one of the most powerful in marketing, according to Cialdini, and is a basic human instinct: if you’re given something, you feel you should give something in return.

When a user trades their email address for some information, you are not just getting the opportunity to add them to your mailing list. You are getting information that they are interested in the niche your company occupies, and you are also getting a route to communication and effective sales follow-ups with what is now a potential customer, where you can nurture them as a lead, evoke deeper interest, and prompt consideration of your products. This can take place over a long period of time and works best when combined with alternative and targeted forms of advertising and marketing.

The marketing funnel works for both B2C and B2B companies, but B2B companies often find it more difficult, as purchases are typically for much more money than in a B2C model. Their lead generation will, on average, involve fewer leads than for B2C companies, so, as this is the case, they want to capture leads as effectively as possible as early in the funnel as possible. The obvious place for B2B interaction is the world’s biggest business-oriented social network. So, does LinkedIn facilitate its users to capture leads smoothly in a mutually beneficial exchange?

It’s easy and frictionless to create a Lead Gen Forms account and start a campaign. Login to your LinkedIn homepage and navigate to the ‘Advertise’ button in the top right-hand side of your toolbar. Click ‘Create Campaign’ and choose ‘sponsored content’ to start creating your campaign. You should get a message saying ‘Great Choice! Before we get started, what language do you want to run your campaign in?’ Choose a name for your campaign, choose a language, and then choose ‘Collect Leads Using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms.’

Now, click on ‘Create New Sponsored Content.’ This will take you to the form creator. If you want to, access the form creator before you create your campaign, so you can set up everything while you strategize. From your LinkedIn account, click ‘Advertise’ in the top right-hand side of the toolbar, choose ‘Advertising,’ and then click on ‘Campaign Manager.’ Once you’re redirected to the Campaign Manager, you will be shown your existing campaign if you followed the previous steps or if you’ve already got a different campaign on the go. To create your first Lead Gen Form, click ‘Create new form template.’

You should be taken to the same screen you’d be taken to if you navigated through the Campaign Creator: the Lead Gen form creator. You should see a screen that asks you to describe the offer you’re promoting with a deadline and detail, insert a privacy policy URL, and then select the questions you include in your form. You’re allowed a maximum of seven questions and you can choose from:

• First name,
• last name,
• email address,
• phone number,
• city,
• state/province,
• country,
• postal/zip code,
• work email,
• work phone number,
• job title,
• job function,
• seniority,
• company name,
• company size,
• company industry,
• degree,
• field of study,
• university/school,
• education start date,
• education graduation date,
• gender.

These options give you a highly flexible choice of different data that you wish to obtain. Your choice of data should be in line with your lead generation strategy. Why do you want this information and what will you do with it? Do you want emails so you can engage in retargeting? That’s not a bad idea. Do you want to know state/provinces so you get information about which prospective customers will be suited to your offering and which prospective customers you can eliminate from targeting? Even when it comes to seemingly innocuous data, there is a lot you can do with it, so think very carefully about how to maximize the value you obtain from it before you proceed.

You then get the option to customize the message that members will see after they submit the form. Although this is optional, as a brand, you should take every opportunity to reinforce and express your brand’s values. Every bit of information that you share with a customer will have some impact on how they view your company and your brand, so use it to your advantage. Is your brand looking for lighthearted, playful individuals to identify with them? If so, show them a message that will encourage them to view your brand in a similar light. The same goes for brands that want to appear as professional as possible.

Once you have finished your creation, watch your preview develop. Check out your confirmation copy, double-check everything, and then click save. Congratulations, you have successfully created your Lead Gen form!

LinkedIn offers some tips for users looking to optimize their campaign for results.

For the ad itself, you should make sure that images and copy are relevant throughout. As a member clicks throughout the process, make sure that your messaging is consistent and that you make it easy for them to understand how they will receive your offering. Make sure you have the system in place to instantly send them a link to your offering as soon as they reach the confirmation page, or put a link to the offering directly on their confirmation page (why not? You already have their email).

You should be as direct as possible, making sure that all your messaging matches your call to action. Be completely upfront about the value that the member is getting in exchange for their information. Although many won’t realize the marketing value that they give you by providing their personal information, regulations like the GDPR law have made people very aware that their data is valuable. Don’t try to downplay this; instead, stress the value of your offering in a way that is consistent with your branding.

For the Lead Gen Form, less is more. Although LinkedIn enables you to choose seven fields of data, they warn that more than three or four can dissuade users. This is, again, linked to privacy concerns, as if they view seven data submissions as unusual, this may erode the trustworthiness of your brand and they might decide your offering isn’t worth it. A key indication that you have too many fields is if opens are high but your leads are low, as people don’t follow through with agreeing to the form conditions.

Additionally, although LinkedIn gives you the option to include fields that might require manual input, like phone number and gender, it doesn’t recommend it, as it may require the member to manually type their information before they submit it. This creates friction and stops the process from being quite so smooth and easy, so try to include fields that you think will be automatically filled in with information that the majority of your leads have already put on their profiles. This will help to keep conversion rates high.

Now you need to tell LinkedIn which audience you want to target. You should have a very good idea of this already, as your messaging and offer should be tailored to your target audience. You might want to consider microtargeting, where you target an audience from a niche group of people or companies on LinkedIn – your audience will be smaller but your campaign will be able to be targeted to them much more effectively. Choose whichever audience you feel suits your campaign, but make sure you save it so you can test whether its the right audience for you at a later date if your campaign isn’t as successful as you had hoped.

When you have targeted successfully, you need to decide how much money you want to spend on your campaign. This is called setting a bid. Many businesses struggle with finding the right budget to dedicate to their campaigns – too small, and your campaign risks not delivering results; too large, and you risk wasting money even if your campaign is successful (you can only handle so many leads). Some recommend you start with a budget of at least $50 a day when you’re testing whether your campaign is a good idea. LinkedIn will give you a suggested bid, but you should set the bid about a dollar higher than the suggestion when you’re starting out, as you can always lower the bid if your performance improves (which will cause your suggested bid to drop).

Once you have done this, you can schedule your campaign. You can choose to keep your campaign going indefinitely (until your budget runs out), or you can choose a start and end date, which is more suitable if you have a structured campaign testing program. Once you have scheduled when you want your campaign to start, review your campaign details and make sure to double check every piece of copy. Once you’re happy with that, launch your ad campaign and watch it go live!

You should have a keen interest in the performance of your campaign, and LinkedIn gives you some good features to help you measure results in its Campaign Manager. To monitor your campaign, navigate there and open the Campaign Performance tab. You should be able to see all your active campaigns alongside key performance indicators.

Normally, the exact KPIs that you look for vary depending on your campaign goals, but as a Lead Gen form campaign is looking to generate solid leads, you should be looking at cost per click, click-through-rate, and, of course, monitor the leads that you are actually generating.

You can view advanced analytics by navigating to the Tools section of the Campaign Manager and then going to Lead Gen forms. You will get a dashboard that will show you your spend, your impressions, your clicks, social actions relating to your campaign, and your leads. You should be able to view a performance graph that shows you how your clicks are performing over time, as well as monitor your ad status, which should show you how many leads you have per ad, your lead form opens, your lead form completion rate, your cost per lead, and your total spend so far. You’ll be able to monitor your audience and change your bid and budget, too.

Your next steps should be optimizing your campaign with testing so you increase the numbers of leads you receive for your budget (and thus decrease your cost per lead), and then, of course, following through on your leads. If you’re only getting a small number of leads, you can do this manually, but if you are running a large campaign, LinkedIn offers a way for you to integrate your leads with an existing marketing or CRM solution.

LinkedIn mentions that you can manage your leads with help from its two partners, Driftrock and Zapier. These third-party platforms are designed to save time down the line by automating certain processes.

Zapier offers a free integration up to a certain usage, enabling you to pay for the process only once you are already getting value from it. You need to create an account with Zapier and then choose a trigger to start a ‘Zap.’ When you are prompted to create your first Zap, choose one with LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms. You will be asked to choose your trigger, which will be a new form response. You will then need to authenticate your LinkedIn Lead Gen Form account with Zapier, which involves a redirect to LinkedIn’s site – you need to sign into LinkedIn and allow Zapier to access your Lead Gen forms info and your profile overview. You can then choose your LinkedIn account back on Zapier and choose the Lead Gen form that you have already created from the dropdown menu. Test the step by clicking ‘Fetch and Continue’ – if it’s successful, you can continue. You are then free to connect to any CRM or marketing management app of the 750 apps that Zapier allows you to connect with. Once you do this, any form entry that is completed gets sent to the marketing solution of your choosing.