The truth is that Linkedin ads have a lot of potential. It’s a place where you can market your product and services and you can really benefit from it if used properly. You can get more if you would just follow the best practices of advertising on this site.
Linkedin is good for lead generation and there are a number of techniques to help you outscore your competitors with Linkedin marketing. You can use these techniques to take advantage of the Power and influence of this social networking platform.
If you want to capture leads and network with professionals, you’ll need a professional place to do it—and Linkedin is the perfect solution. In this blog post, we’ll explain how it is good for lead generation. If you were to focus on only one channel for your company’s lead generation, it should be LinkedIn.
The numbers show that the platform isn’t just a good choice for B2B marketers – it’s the best. The conversion rates are higher and the cost per lead is lower compared to other advertising networks. Plus, there are plenty of ways to find leads for free, and a couple of tools that make the process easy.This guide will dig into the benefits, the paid and free strategies, and the tools that help streamline LinkedIn lead generation. By the end, you’ll have a method for generating more leads for less on the platform.
The Benefits of Using LinkedIn Lead Generation
Why bother with LinkedIn? Why not focus on generating leads with search engine advertising, email tracking pixel, display networks, or more high-traffic social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter?
Simply put, LinkedIn is where professionals go to level up in business. The average user might log on to stay informed about what’s happening in their industry, look for new employees to add to their team, or seek out tools that can optimize their team’s workflows.
If your business offers a solution to their needs, LinkedIn is the best environment for attracting their attention.
There are a few other reasons why LinkedIn is the best place to generate leads for B2B companies:
It’s made up of professionals with purchasing power
Over 20% of LinkedIn users can make buying decisions for their companies. That’s at least 61 million senior-level influencers and 40 million decision makers that your business could be connecting with. It’s also the most-used social media platform amongst Fortune 500 companies, so there’s a good chance your target audience is already on the site.
Its users are extremely active
LinkedIn has over 500 million total users, and over half of them (260 million, to be exact) actively use the platform every month. Of those 260 million users, 44% log on daily. That means a lot of potential leads to engage with on a regular basis.
LinkedIn lead generation is one of the most effective
Those 100+ million decision making users are proven to take action. The site’s own content marketing blog ran the numbers and found that 80% of B2B leads generated through social media come from LinkedIn.
There are plenty of case studies to back up the claim, too. Simplus, a Salesforce partner, says that 70% of their website form fills have come directly from LinkedIn. NetBrain Technologies Inc. doubled their click-through-rate with LinkedIn ads and saw 94% of leads generated accepted by sales.
LinkedIn lead generation converts more leads for less
There are ways to do LinkedIn lead generation for free, but even if you go with a paid strategy, you could save big compared to running a similar ad campaign on a search engine or another social media platform.
HubSpot aggregated all of their customer’s results with LinkedIn Sponsored Content and found that while the ads have a higher cost-per-click than Google Ads, they also have double the conversion rate.
With a $1,000 ad budget, you could generate 11 conversions for only $90 each on LinkedIn, while the same budget with Google Ads would generate 8 conversions for $125 each.
Its targeting audiences are tailor-made for B2B lead generation
LinkedIn Ads allow marketers to get extremely granular about the audiences they want to target. These are just a few of the many targeting options:
- Company industry, size and name
- Job title, function and seniority
While competitors like Facebook Ads also allow marketers to target users by employer and job title, workplace networking is not the primary purpose of the platform. It’s possible that some users may not be listing their employment info at all, making this a less than ideal channel for reaching target audiences.
LinkedIn lead generation: the go-to choice for B2B marketers
According to the Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn, 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content. This means that either a lot of B2B marketers are wrong, or a lot of people are on to something.
In either case, you’d be remiss to pass up on what 94% of your competitors are already taking advantage of.
5 Best Practices for LinkedIn Lead Generation
1. Reach Relevant Audiences
One of the greatest benefits to marketing on LinkedIn is that you have access to the vast majority of potential customers right in one place, with a business-oriented mentality. With that in mind, you can:
- Target the best prospects for your business. LinkedIn’s extensive targeting tools help you deliver your content and ads to members who are more likely to take action and turn into quality leads. The course shows you how to to avoid hyper-targeting, set up different campaigns and approaches, use lookalike audiences, and more.
- Retarget to nurture potential customers. With this feature, you can nurture potential customers by building target audiences of existing LinkedIn members who’ve already shown interest in your products or services by visiting your website, registering for an event, viewing a video, or filling out a Lead Gen Form.
2. Understand the Value of Your Leads – Beyond the Form Fill
In order to understand the real quality of the audience you are capturing, you should assess not only how much it costs for someone to convert, but measure the long-term value of that lead. Casting a wide net, doesn’t always guarantee quality. Ask yourself these six questions before you launch your campaign:
- How does your company define a sales conversion?
- How long is your sales cycle?
- What does a quality lead mean to you?
- Are you using marketing automation tools?
- What is your sales teams’ lead response time?
- How are leads nurtured?
Once you’ve launched your campaign, it’s important to have the tools to measure the quality of your leads. To help you understand the real quality of the audience, you can use LinkedIn’s Conversion Tracking. This provides you with information that will help you better understand what’s happening with your campaigns, such as:
- More Complete Metrics. You’ll get access to both post-view and post-click conversions, giving you a clearer picture of the full impact of your ads.
- Attribution Features. When setting up your conversions, you can select how each ad interaction is credited for a conversion across multiple campaigns. The attribution model can be set to each campaign or a single campaign.
- Deeper Insights. The demographic data provides you information on the audiences that are converting, including their jobs, titles, industries, and companies. This will help you improve your campaign’s targeting and content alignment.
Through the use of these features and others that are covered in the course, you can learn how to nail down the basics and move toward optimization of lead generation practices.
3. Optimize Your Campaign
Whether you’re dealing with high engagement and low conversion rates, leads that aren’t turning into Sales Qualified Leads (SQL), or you have a demo that’s not generating leads, our Lead Generation course will show you how to overcome specific challenges, making your ad campaigns even stronger.
4. Measure and Report
You want to capture a quality audience that will provide long-term value. In order to do so, take the time to measure the success of your campaign. In addition to looking at campaign performance, look at post campaign metrics such as the number of sales conversions achieved and the value of each sale. This way, you can measure the real business value your campaign is driving.
5. Tap into LinkedIn Marketing Partners to Supercharge Your Campaigns
Not only can LinkedIn partners help you create world-class content, they can also help you reach and nurture the right audience. Using LinkedIn’s data integration partners helps you create tailored audience segments to target your ads. And lead form integration partners can help you use your own contact lists in your CRM, making it easier for you to manage your pipeline and messaging with consistency.
Start Generating Leads on LinkedIn Now
Leads are like gold to marketers. The best marketing campaigns are founded on strong lead generation strategies. By using the tools, strategies, and partners provided you can refine and enhance your lead generation campaigns to drive clear and convincing results.
Conclusion
For businesses in the past, lead generation was mainly a sales-oriented process. The main methods of generating leads involved knocking on the doors of prospective clients, cold calling and emailing them their products.
Behind every great sales team stands a great set of leads. Your marketing team should aim to develop qualified leads that can further be nurtured into prospective customers and eventually into customers. Ultimately, generating leads on LinkedIn is one of the best strategies you can employ while in search of your next customer base.