Campaigns aimed at generating potential customers is one of the increasingly popular advertising targets in social networks. Standard forms on the website in many cases turn out to be much more expensive than lead gen campaigns. The main reason why people choose contacts from social media platforms is the ease of filling them out. Automatically collected data made available on websites shorten the time of filling in forms, which makes them more pleasant and easier to receive.

However, campaigns with this goal are not without flaws. By keeping clicking to a minimum, in many cases the quality of the leads obtained significantly decreases.

Do you operate in the B2B industry and are you looking for new customers on Facebook? Anyone “own boss” and the nobility who do not work can also become one, and you will pay for it in the Advertising Manager. This is where LinkedIn comes in handy – a clear leader among lead generators.

How much does a Linkedin campaign cost on average?

If you use other advertising channels and start your adventure with advertising on LinkedIn, it may turn out that the budget you set is too small to effectively carry out your first campaign. The minimum daily budget that can be set for one campaign is $ 10.

Of course, you might find your first choice of target, audience, and placement a bull’s eye, but you will need to increase your budget to test other options and setups. Even though the advertising efforts on LinkedIn require a larger investment to start with, you’ll quickly find out that this is probably the best platform for generating leads for you.

LinkedIn forms

If it is relatively difficult to find the contact form on your website or the website is easy to use, it does not allow you to add additional functions, for example, to download materials by the interested person, or you simply want to shorten the customer path and without having to do it after clicking on the advertisement on the website website, you want him to download a given material or contact you – this ad in the form of a lead generation form is for you.

What does the form on Linkedin look like?

Forms on Linkedin allow you to get the most important contact information of potentially interested people in our product or service. They can also be used in campaigns with a more educational purpose, in which we offer something in return for each contact, e.g. a guide, newsletter, report or catalog, etc.

What data can we collect via the Linkedin lead generation form?

There are many possibilities. Starting from personal data, to company contact details, and non-standard questions aimed at collecting specific information about subscribers and their classification in the lead collecting system.

The form also gives us the opportunity to select the necessary conditions to submit the form (e.g. acceptance of the regulations or privacy policy).

Nevertheless, when creating a form, it is always worth bearing in mind good practices taking into account UX, i.e. limit the mandatory fields to be completed to a maximum of 3. The great advantage of Linkedin forms is their automatic filling, thanks to which the user interested in the material can easily and quickly receive interesting content, without having to fill in the fields yourself. Of course, some fields can be reserved as necessary to be entered or unchecked by the user and thus pre-verify the quality of leads and their level of interest in a given material.

The process of creating an ad and the Linkedin campaign

As with any LinkedIn Ads campaign, you start by choosing the goal that best describes what you need. Your goal is to get new leads, which means that you choose the ‘Lead Generation’ target in the conversion group. To run a Lead Generation Campaign, you need to associate your Advertising Account with a LinkedIn Company Page.

The process of creating a campaign is no different from other goals. We start, of course, by identifying the audience. Despite the much smaller possibilities of targeting audiences than in the Facebook Ads Manager, it is much more likely that you can reach a specific target group that is actually built mostly of the audience the advertiser is looking for.

Ad formats in the lead campaign on Linkedin

The ad formats available for creating a customer acquisition campaign are the standard single photo, carousel, video ad, and two types of campaigns with ad placement in audience inboxes. Which format you choose is entirely up to you, there are no suggested formats that work best for your industry. For this reason, it is so important to test different ad placements. Some LinkedIn ad campaigns will perform much better than a mostly text-based Sponsored Message campaign with an attention-grabbing banner, and vice versa.

Advertising creations available in the lead campaign on Linkedin

The next step is to prepare the ad creative and set the detailed content of the ad, which, depending on the format you choose, has different options to complete and select. However, all goals are united by creating a leads form.

Privacy policy in lead campaigns on Linkedin

The form has standard settings and content to be completed. It is very important to have the content of the validation policy on the same domain as the page. You can choose from many data options that you need to obtain from potential clients. Creating the form ends with a confirmation window for sending contact details with a thank you.

Campaign on LinkedIn – case study

Due to the pandemic at the turn of February and March, many companies were forced to introduce radical changes in their activities, for some of them a new path was opened to reach their recipients. One of our clients dynamically used the current situation and predicted that cooperation in the field of advertising activities on the LinkedIn platform may bring tangible benefits. The main goal of our client was to reach the departments of specialists and HR leaders in order to promote the webinar on best practices in the coming period. We took a campaign to the fore with the goal of generating leads in the form of sponsored messages that go straight to your LinkedIn inboxes.

In the first week, the campaign started with great intensity and it was possible to acquire the assumed number of potential customers very quickly. By the end of the first month, the initial cost of acquiring a client had dropped by 18%. Ultimately, after 3 months of advertising activities, the campaign was completed with a cost-per-result 22% lower than in the initial period.

We were also positively surprised by the CTR (Sponsored Message Openings Rate) of over 70% during the entire campaign. The key here was the first “meeting” of the recipient with the ad in their inbox, which is influenced by the appropriate headline of the ad.

First of all, we tried not to attack potential customers with another advertisement, but to encourage them to read the entire message in a friendly way.

One of the first tests we did in the campaign was based on bid changes. LinkedIn suggests the suggested bid value at the level of creating a campaign group. This value is influenced by your chosen goals, placements, and audience selection. The starting bid of $ 0.15 turned out to be much worse than our optimization bid, which was $ 0.30, which we eventually held for most of the campaign.

Customer support for the advertising campaign on Linkedin

The client obtained support from us also at the level of advertising texts. The goal was to encourage LinkedIn users to leave personal information in exchange for invaluable knowledge and guidance. The client shared his experience in his industry with us, after all, he knows his potential recipients best, and based on the knowledge obtained from many other campaigns, we added the best strategies that we learn through testing in campaigns. Thus, several versions of messages reaching the recipients were created, which we analyzed and finally chose those whose results were in the lead.

In the meantime, we conducted a few more advertising campaigns for this client, which, thanks to the correlation, had a positive impact not only on building brand awareness, but also on a noticeable gradual reduction in costs for results.

Linkedin lead campaign – Summary

We know from our own experience that the costs of running advertising campaigns on LinkedIn can initially be a deterrent. If you operate in the B2B industry, however, you should know that it is currently the best platform for acquiring valuable customers. However, the lead-generating campaign is the final stage of the sales funnel and it is worth supporting these activities through advertisements building brand awareness, as well as through other advertising channels.

Of course, we make a reservation that not every type of business is suitable for advertising on Linkedin. It is worth conducting a preliminary analysis to check whether our clients are on Linkedin and whether they spend their time there looking for content / services or products that our company offers. It often happens that our clients are really there, so we start the campaign, but after a given period of time, we notice that the campaign does not achieve the intended results. This is often caused by the lack of a preliminary analysis of the Purpose for which our target group uses Linkedin. It may turn out that he is looking for more business solutions here, and he leaves lifestyle options for Facebook, Instagram or simply uses the Google search engine.