How To Optimise LinkedIn Lead Generation Campaigns For Your Business
How To Optimise LinkedIn Lead Generation Campaigns For Your Business
Generating traffic and leads is one of the top challenges for SMEs today, according to Hubspot. That applies to both the quantity and quality, with B2Bs in particular struggling to reach - let alone convert - a professional audience using more traditional advertising tools.
LinkedIn generates the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2.74%, almost 3 times higher than Facebook. LinkedIn users also have 2x the buying power of the average web audience, and its tools allow you to target these users based not only on their personal demographics but professional factors too. Whether you’re a software company looking to target decision-makers in the IT sector or an accounting firm wanting to reach SMBs in the retail sector, LinkedIn makes it easy for you to pinpoint your audience's ‘sweet spot’.
Target ads: Identify and target audiences with LinkedIn ads
LinkedIn offers six different ad formats - including carousel ads, text ads and message ads - all of which allow your business to find and target your ideal customers using the tools available.
Targeting on LinkedIn is uniquely effective because members are incentivised to keep their profiles accurate and up to date for their own networking, branding and job opportunities. Another of the many key benefits of LinkedIn ad campaigns is that they allow you to target specific audiences not only by personal demographics (such as age and gender), but also by professional criteria, including education, company, industry, location, job title and more.
This is a huge advantage for B2Bs as it allows them to target particular job roles, seniority levels, and even company sizes. For instance, to target by company size, a startup that’s making accounting software designed specifically for SMBs could exclude companies with 501-1000, 1001-5000, 5001-10,000 and 10,001+ employees from its targeting to ensure only members who work for small businesses, as well as members who are on LinkedIn but work for an organisation that has yet to create a LinkedIn Page, are captured.
LinkedIn finds that using job function versus job title can result in more reach and a higher CTR. Combining the job function option with other options, such as the seniority option, makes for particularly powerful targeting. For example, a small software business wanting to reach decision-makers in the IT function could do so using LinkedIn ads by targeting the Information Technology, Engineering, and Operations functions and pairing that with a seniority targeting of Senior, Manager, Director, VP, CXO, and Owner.
In terms of audience size, start with an audience of more than 50,000 members. The amount you spend will depend on your audience size and your marketing objectives, says Sarah Hughes: “While a minimum spend can be just £8+VAT a day, the reality is a minimum ad spend of £1000+VAT per month is more likely.”
Don’t forget to consider the location and language of the members you’re trying to reach, though LinkedIn Ads are expensive compared to Facebook, they're most expensive when you're targeting the English language and the North American continent, so if your ideal audience is in other areas of the world, and speaks other languages, the costs come down considerably.
Once you’ve identified which audience to target, you can sign into LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager and scroll down to ‘Audience’ to view a detailed performance chart and demographics report (via the ‘Demographics’ tab) about who is clicking and converting.
LinkedIn also offers a range of advanced targeting tools, including Matched Audiences, which lets you reach people you already know with website, contact and account targeting.
Optimise ads: Refresh and reset based on performance insights
“Make sure you have an adequate budget to test” says Wilcox, “you'll be doing yourself a disservice to try to evaluate your performance with small data sample sizes. I recommend a £3k budget to start.”
Testing involves looking at who is (and isn’t) clicking and converting based on your performance insights in your campaign’s demographics report, and trying out adjustments to find what works for your particular audience. A few ways you can optimise your lead gen campaigns include:
Adjust your targeting
The most successful campaigns should be estimated by your Campaign Manager to reach between 60,000 and 400,000 members. Using age as a criteria can cause advertisers to miss up to 70% of their audience, for example, so try adjusting your targeting in Campaign Manager based on criteria more suited to B2B ads, such as years of experience, specific skills or job title instead. When targeting by job title, your LinkedIn Campaign Manager will also auto-suggest other relevant job titles to include which can help you to expand your ad’s reach. In some cases, you can also broaden the scale of your campaign by targeting both current and past holders of a specific job title, allowing you to target members who have changed roles but still hold the relevant skill set, interests or connections that make them valuable customers.
Refresh your creative
Using an image with more personality (i.e. featuring someone’s face), for example, saw a 160% higher click through rate (CTR) than an image that did not.
Condense your copy
Posts with fewer characters had an 18% higher engagement rate on average. For sponsored ad content, headlines should be under 150 characters and descriptive copy should be less than 70 characters for optimum performance.
For message ads, LinkedIn again recommends keeping copy short (under 500 characters) and conversational, so your ad feels more personal. For example, a company selling technology solutions may want to use message ads to target decision makers in SMBs who are looking to digitalise elements of their business. Using a message ad, they should outline what they can offer their audience, provide 2-3 bullet points on the specific key benefits of their product, and include a call to action such as ‘sign up for a demo today.’
“We look for CTRs over 0.5% for the feed ads [and] conversion rates for content downloads to be over 15%” says Wilcox. Successful LinkedIn ads should be generating at least a 4x return on your money.
For more useful insights into generating ROI on your marketing spend via social media paid advertising, listen and subscribe to our Business Class: Money Minutes podcast episode “Make Your Social Media Budget Work Harder”.
Don’t forget awareness and engagement
The greater your organic reach on Linkedin, the more it can amplify your paid efforts. It’s important to continually build and maintain a compelling organic presence and run paid LinkedIn lead generation campaigns simultaneously to increase the exposure of your content and interaction with your brand. “The reality is you generate more leads when you invest time, budget and resources in a full funnel strategy” says Hughes, “which should also include organic posts, profile optimisation and thought leadership articles.” Some more ways to increase your organic reach include:
Upload content to LinkedIn SlideShare, which reaches 70 million unique visitors a month.
Mix up your content. LinkedIn suggests the 4-1-1 rule: For every content asset you share about your brand, share an update from another source and 4 pieces of content published by others.
Encourage individuals, especially your employees, to post and share content on their personal LinkedIn profiles. On average, employees have 10 times the connections as their company has followers on LinkedIn.
Data collection and conversion: LinkedIn Lead Gen forms are a powerful tool
LinkedIn Lead Gen forms are a powerful and handy tool to help overcome the last hurdle in your business’ funnel. The average conversion rate on a LinkedIn Lead Gen Form is 13%: 5 times higher than that of landing pages. They can be integrated into your LinkedIn campaigns (including single image ads, carousel ads and video ads) to collect valuable lead data, while minimising friction and hassle for customers. For example, using lead gen forms, IR Prognosis saw a 2x increase in conversion rates and a 44% reduction in cost per lead, while software company Bynder increased leads by 400% and achieved a 20% conversion rate.
LinkedIn Lead Gen forms allow you to download lead lists easily from Campaign Manager (click on ‘Account Assets’ and ‘Download) or sync leads with the marketing automation or CRM system of your choice through LinkedIn’s partners Driftrock and Zapier. You can also send lead data directly to Marketo, Oracle Eloqua and Microsoft Dynamics 365 accounts.
Ensure your LinkedIn lead generation campaigns are optimised effectively with the American Express® Business Gold Card. Accepted on the professional networking site and many other social media platforms, the card has a payment period of up to 54 days1 allowing you to assess the performance of your lead gen campaigns and define a strategy that works best for your business. Plus, you can earn 1 Membership Rewards® points for every £1 spent.2
1. The maximum payment period on purchases is 54 calendar days and is obtained only if you spend on the first day of the new statement period and repay the balance in full on the due date.
2. Membership Rewards points are earned on every full £1 spent and charged, per transaction. Terms and conditions apply.
If you would like to discuss LinkedIn adverts or Paid Social Media you can reach out to the team here