LinkedIn has more potential than most people realize.
Whether it is their publishing platform, its ability to build your influence, or most commonly, to make connections, LinkedIn is the leader in business social media.
Another way to reach your business goals through LinkedIn is Lead Ads.
What Are LinkedIn Lead Ads?
Whenever you collect email addresses in order to build your marketing funnel, you are faced with possible places that you can lose that lead.
For example:
- The contact types the email wrong
- They give you a fake email address
- The email address is real, but it is only one they use for junk
- Entries are not real people, but bots instead
- The person gets frustrated entering their information and gives up
- Their mobile device makes it too hard to enter the form information
LinkedIn Lead Ads were created to address these very issues. Rather than relying on people to fill in the ad once they click on it, the response is prefilled with the name and email address that they have marked primary on their LinkedIn account.
This makes it as seamless as possible for the potential client to give you their information. And it is much more likely to be correct information!
Related Post: LinkedIn 101
Getting Started with LinkedIn Lead Ads
First, you need to start a new Lead Generation Form.
Counterintuitively, it is not under “Create a Campaign,” but instead under the “Account Assets” section of the LinkedIn Campaign Manager.
Next, you need to fill out each section of the form. The picture will automatically be your profile picture and header.
- Create a form name. This is for your own reference only, and so that you can keep track of that ad.
- Write an offer headline. This has to be 40 characters or less, so you want to make sure that you make every word count!
- Write offer details. You have 160 characters or less to explain to them why they should bother signing up. While a full 160 characters are permitted, only the first 75 characters or so will show, and then the form will display a “see more” message.
- Provide a privacy policy. Your website should always have a privacy policy on your site. If it doesn’t, this is a great excuse to go update that right now! Once it does, you can include this URL on your form. Alternatively, you can write text for the privacy policy, but that will make your form long and may be a disincentive for people to register.
- Choose the lead info you want to collect. You can choose a maximum of 7 categories, including the obvious ones like name and email. You can also ask for various location information, job title and company information, and levels of education among other things. This is one of the areas that LinkedIn Lead Ads shine. While typically you want to ask for as little information as possible to make it easy for people to fill it out since it prefills the answers directly from their profile you don’t have to worry about that aspect. You only need to consider what information the person wants to or does not want to share. You can also ask for gender, but that is not prefilled.
- Design your thank you message. This is where you can simply say thank you, or redirect them to a website URL where they can download a free gift, or complete some other task.
Now that you have your lead form created, you will be able to connect this to any of your ad campaigns.
It is not a standalone product, rather, it is an integrated tool that will allow you to get direct leads rather than relying on click-through rates.
You will have to have a company ad page sit up in order to use this, as these ads do not work from a personal account.
You will be able to download a CSV file of your leads generated in this way at any time.
Then you can upload them into your email service provider, CRM, or another tool. A handful of programs, including Zapier and Marketo, integrate directly with LinkedIn Lead Ads.
Ideas for How to Use LinkedIn Lead Ads
LinkedIn Lead ads are perfect for getting people to take immediate action on your ads. You still have to create an appealing ad though.
Try to think from the potential lead’s perspective about what will get them excited to click. Some possible options include:
- Free consultations. If your business offers a free initial consultation, an ad offering that can collect your leads for you to follow up with.
- Webinars. Do you do digital events or webinars as a lead capture for potential clients? Make sure you include the date and time, but you can use the lead generation Ad to give them a one click option for signup. Depending on what webinar system you use, you may have to manually enter the contacts, which could be the only downside!
- Free ebooks or digital offers. Have you created a guide, ebook, or worksheet that you offer people on your website? You can skip the step of sending them to your website, and instead use a Lead Ad. Then have it redirect to the delivery page instead of the squeeze page on the thank you step.
Will You Use Lead Ads?
Are you already using LinkedIn Ads? Do you think you could get better results by adding a Lead Form to your ad? Let us know in the comments!
