How to Use LinkedIn Lead Generation Forms to Get New Leads

When it comes to lead generation, LinkedIn is a fantastic platform to use. There’s no other platform on the internet that provides such a significant amount of information about people’s professional life. With such an abundance of data, you can easily find your potential customers on the platform.

LinkedIn even has a system that lets you advertise using lead generation forms. These forms allow you to directly convert the LinkedIn audience into new leads for your company. These lead generation forms are a great addition to your current online marketing campaigns and can generate a high amount of leads every single day, depending on your advertising budget.

LinkedIn lead generation forms have a wide variety of uses, meaning you can use them in the different stages of the customer journey. But you can also use the lead generation forms to recruit new potential employees for your company. 

Because of the high value that LinkedIn lead generation forms can provide, tens of thousands of companies worldwide are already tapping into its potential. By doing this, they made it one of the most used lead generation systems. But, just like any other lead generation system, you should know how to fully utilize it, when it’s useful to create campaigns and what the best practices are when launching a marketing campaign to generate more leads on LinkedIn. 

This article is fully dedicated to all those aspects, so you can learn how to get the most out of your new LinkedIn lead generation campaign. 

The different ways of using lead generation forms on LinkedIn

Lead generation forms can be used for different goals. If you want to generate leads on LinkedIn, you most likely have a specific goal. The goal can be: 

• attracting more potential employees

• getting more visitors to download your whitepapers or any other brand asset that you currently use to get new potential customers. 

Below you will find the different ways of using the lead generation forms on LinkedIn for these goals:

Benefits of Linkedin lead ads

LinkedIn lead generation ads have multiple benefits that you do not get on your website or any other social media platform. LinkedIn allows customizations in the lead generation forms and also increases the conversion rate by making it remarkably easy for LinkedIn users to engage with the ads. 

Below you will find several benefits of the LinkedIn ads for generating new leads:

• People are much more likely to register, sign up, buy or download something through your lead generation ads because they do not have to spend a lot of time submitting their personal information. LinkedIn automatically completes the forms for them if they require personal information, meaning that they only have to fill in the missing required fields and click the submit button. This saves a lot of time when applying to a job or when downloading whitepapers.

• Lead generation forms can be directly connected to your CRM. You can add these new leads into your preferred systems, such as lead nurturing campaigns or send them to your recruitment or sales team. All the information provided through the lead generation form by LinkedIn users will be saved in your database.

• Through LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager, you can easily download all the submitted forms and manage these forms in case you want to edit any information. Collecting all your newly generated leads is as easy as clicking a single button. 

• Calculating the ROI of your campaigns is straightforward because you can track where the leads are coming from and calculate the average cost of a new lead. This allows you to further optimize the campaign based on your previous results and also improve your ROI. 

• You can measure and see which target audience is using the lead generation forms because you are using the data from personal LinkedIn profiles. These profiles allow you to understand the roles of people who engage with your forms better. You can see their level within the company, the size of the company, and other personal or company-related information that you have requested in the form.

• The LinkedIn Campaign Manager allows you to download valuable reports about the performance of your campaign. They can then easily be shared with your team to track the progression of the campaign.

• Last but not least: LinkedIn allows you to personally create a specific target audience of people who will see your lead generation forms, ensuring that only the people that are most likely to engage with these lead generation forms will see them pop up on their news feed. 

How to create the perfect LinkedIn lead generation ads

When you are launching a new campaign to generate leads through LinkedIn’s ads, you want to make sure that you are sticking to the best practices that will you get the best results. 

Below we have listed a step by step plan that describes how to utilize every vital aspect of the lead generation ad campaigns that will make your ads stand out and make people more likely to engage with the forms. Just like a great LinkedIn background can really make your profile stand out, several factors make your lead generation forms be seen.

We will describe the following steps:

Start with what you’re offering

First and foremost, you want to focus on the offer displayed in the ad. If you are offering whitepaper, you will use a different ad description, image, and call to action compared to an ad with the goal of generating new potential employees. 

Your offer will make or break your lead generation forms’ success rate. So, it’s essential to pay attention to how you are structuring your ad.

Your ad description should draw people in

Just like with any other ad copy, you want to start with a sentence that will draw people in and create enough curiosity.  The text should inspire the reader to:

1. keep on reading what you’re offering

2. actually submit a form with their personal information. 

LinkedIn makes it extremely easy for its users to provide their details in a lead generation form. However, users still need the right amount of interest before they are willing to offer personal information.

You will significantly increase your success rate when using models like AIDA to draw people in. You should also pay attention to the tone of voice, as you want the ad to match the voice you use in other media as well. 

Along with that, you should make sure that people click on the ad, go to the lead generation form, and submit it. So, aside from just creating general interest and desire, you should also focus on making sure people will take action after reading your ad.

Some examples for each offer:

Your image should stand out compared to other things on LinkedIn

A generic image of a person working behind a computer is something that people will see multiple times a day when they’re on LinkedIn. You want to avoid images and pictures that do not stand out. 

If you are hosting an event, make sure to include pictures of that event. If you want to sell a product or service, use an image with text about the problem you are solving for your new potential leads. Just like with any other lead generation campaign, the image can be a massive boost to your campaign results. 

The call to action should match the campaign goal

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, you can use different types of call to actions for your ads, such as ‘apply now’ or ‘register.’ Because LinkedIn provides a wide variety of CTAs, it will be easier for you to tell people how to take action through your ads. 

But, this call to action can also significantly decrease your results when you’re not using it correctly. Pay attention to the CTA you are using and make sure it matches the ad copy and the campaign goal.

Use as little fields as possible

When it comes to generating leads online, you want to make sure it’s effortless for people to sign up. Even though LinkedIn allows users to load their information into the form directly, it is still essential to make the form as short as possible. You want to make sure you are getting the personal data required for your company to qualify it as a lead. 

Long lead generation forms are known to generate fewer leads than short forms. People are less likely to engage with a form when it looks like it will take a lot of time to fill in the required fields. By using fewer fields, filling the form will take less time, meaning the conversion rate from visitor to lead will be higher.

For example, if you are running a lead generation ad for a newsletter, you might just want the LinkedIn user’s first name and email address. But when you post a job application you want first and last name, current job, current company, address, age, and other related information that your team needs.

If you’re launching a simple whitepaper offer, you might want to limit the fields to:

1. First name

2. Last name

3. Email address

4. Company name

Narrow your target audience as much as possible

LinkedIn has a self-service advertising platform, meaning you can just create your own ads and publish them immediately. Because LinkedIn has so much information about its users, you can narrow your audience based on different company or personal details. 

For example, if you want to reach all the CEOs in the technology market in San Francisco, you can narrow your target audience based on:

1. A specific role

2. A specific market

3. A specific location

This allows you to create custom audiences who are more likely to engage with your ad because your offer is specifically targeted to these people. 

A narrow audience will ensure that your ads are performing better. People not within this target audience will never engage with your ads (as the ads will not show up on their LinkedIn feed). 

But, at the same time, a very specific audience will also be more expensive to advertise to as the competition on narrow audiences is usually higher compared to the generic ads. 

So, when it comes to your budget, you are more likely to pay a higher Cost per Click (PPC) or Cost per Lead/Acquisition (CPL/CPA) for narrow audiences than for general audiences. 

LinkedIn allows you to use the following criteria when creating a target audience for your lead generation ads:

• Job function

• Job title

• Company

• Company industry

• Job seniority

• Company size

• Location

• Country

Add a thank you page

After new leads provide their personal information and submit their lead generation form, they will be sent to a thank you page. It is also important to pay attention to the copy on your thank you page. It allows you to create further interest in the product or service you are trying to sell to your new leads. 

For example, if you are running a lead generation campaign where people can request a quote, you should mention how long it will take before they receive this quote in their inbox. 

The thank-you page allows you to provide additional information for your lead. You can write a short message for the new lead where you thank them for their interest and add information about what is going to happen next. This is also where you should tell people how you will use the information they have provided to your company. 

Below the message, you can add a link to your website where they can find more information about you and/or your company. LinkedIn allows you to choose different CTAs from a dropdown menu to forward these new leads to your website. 

A thank you page is important because it takes away the buyer’s remorse from your new leads. When people submit a form with their personal information, the buyer’s remorse often kicks in. They feel worried about sending their data to a company they might not be familiar with. So, to ensure that your new leads do not develop buyer’s remorse, you can use the text on the thank you page. 

How to find your generated leads

Now that you’ve fully optimized and launched your new LinkedIn lead generation ads, you also want to get access to these leads that you have generated. LinkedIn provides a unique Campaign Manager where you can find all the information about the leads you have generated through your ad campaigns so far. 

1. When you are in your Campaign Manager, you can click ‘Account Assets’ in the top bar

2. The bar will then show another menu in which you can click “Lead Generation Form Templates.” This link will take you to the overview page of all your lead generation forms. 

3. You can then click on your specific campaign, and LinkedIn will take you to that campaign’s page. 

4. On that page, you will find a button with “Download” on it. By clicking it, you will get a list of all the leads that your campaign has generated.

Or you can find them in your CRM

Another way to get the information from your newly generated leads is by connecting your LinkedIn lead generation forms to your own CRM. 

LinkedIn provides integration with Zapier, where you can connect its lead generation forms to your own CRM. The data from the form is submitted to Zapier and copied to CRMs such as Salesforce or HubSpot. 

You can also create a connection with a Google Spreadsheet, so leads will automatically be copied into new rows of the spreadsheet. You can also use the LinkedIn email finder to connect these emails to LinkedIn accounts, which you can turn into a good list when you’re using LinkedIn automation tools.

Outside of Zapier, LinkedIn also provides direct integrations with: 

1. Marketo

2. Oracle Eloqua

3. Microsoft Dynamics 365

How to manage and optimize your lead gen ads

Once you have launched your lead generation ads on LinkedIn, and you are getting new leads daily, it’s important to measure your results and optimize accordingly. Though LinkedIn lead generation ads might seem like a set and forget campaign, you are more likely to get better results if you know how to optimize specific elements of the lead generation ad.

The best way to optimize your lead generation ad is by A/B testing. It includes duplicating your current ad and changing specific elements within the ad, such as:

• Writing a new copy for the ad

• Changing the image 

• Picking a different call-to-action

• Experimenting with the form length

• Creating different ads for specific audiences

You can then use these experiments to see how changing specific elements in your ads will drive more conversions, such as sign-ups or job applicants. It is recommended to run these different ad campaigns at the same time to see how ads perform on the same day and in the same period. 

In the end, running A/B tests will help you to understand which copy performs best for which audience, and allow you to decrease the average cost per new lead. You can also connect the best of both worlds and use InMail to message members who are not in your immediate network. Check out our article on best LinkedIn InMail templates, examples, and samples to excel in your InMail campaigns!