Putting LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms To The Test

Last September many of my clients, colleagues and I attended #EduConnect18, an annual gathering of higher education digital marketing professionals sponsored by the Higher Education team at LinkedIn. Among the many strategies and techniques learned at that event were the relatively new LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms.

During one of the workshops, I heard from a peer who claimed they had improved their lead volume and quality by 3 fold over a typical Google search ad campaign for less money. Naturally after hearing that, and with a certain amount of skepticism, I put Lead Gen Forms to the test.

The results of the test were not exactly what we expected.

In fact we did not improve our lead volume and quality by three fold. Rather in some cases we improved lead quality and volume by seven fold on half the ad spend. This result has been duplicated over a 2 month period, and is showing no signs of being an aberration or accident. It's the real deal.

I'll admit that these spectacular results did not happen instantaneously. It did require a fair amount of iteration of messaging, targeting, and a big departure from our normal daily spend. Said another way, we needed to spend more than we would have for our normal test budgets, and be flexible on preconceived notions of audience targets and typical imagery and messaging. We took a leap of faith to make these changes which were expertly guided by our LinkedIn Client Solutions Manager. Thank you Felicia Mattson for your hard work and follow up! It has paid off big time.

For those who would like a little more detail on how the process worked for us, below is an executive recap.

As a higher ed marketer, we rely heavily on online forms to generate prospective student inquiries. But getting interested students to fill out a website form quickly and accurately can be a real challenge, especially on a mobile device. Sometimes just getting the interested student to click on a link and visit our website can be a challenge. That's 2 key areas where Lead Gen forms excel. The lead information is acquired while never leaving the trusted LinkedIn platform, and the form is prefilled with all of the correct information ready to go. In 2 clicks, the prospect's request for information is on its way. The first click is on an ad describing the degree offering landing the prospect on the form. The second click sends the information. Simple. Elegant. Frictionless.

Designing the form is fairly straightforward, and is available through the "Account Assets" drop down in the Campaign Manager interface. Key elements of the form include the form headline, the offer detail, a link to your privacy policy, and privacy policy text. We found that headlines emphasizing an offer such as a free download or application waiver works best. The better the offer, the more likely the user will get to the next step of submitting their contact information. Our experience with respect to the number of fields of information to gather is: 'less is more'. The fewer fields of information required to fill out, the more forms will be submitted. We reduced the required information to 3 fields including first name, last name and email address. Also, take note of the "call to action" button text. The default Lead Gen Form call to action is 'Sign Up.' We found that changing the text to 'Learn More' was most effective.

The campaign setup is also fairly typical. Lead Gen Forms can be combined with a variety of campaign types such as Sponsored Content or InMail. We have been using Sponsored Content. When you are prompted on what you want to accomplish with your campaign, select "Collect leads using Lead Gen Forms."

We got a nice tip from Naomi Fink who let us know that the images used on LinkedIn campaigns can contain more text than what you might see in a typical Facebook campaign. This gives you the opportunity to test various images, calls to action and place 'virtual buttons' within the image to enhance CTR.

The leads generated from the campaign can be downloaded manually, or we prefer to use an automated bridge program known as Zapier (another tip from Felicia). Zapier checks for leads every 15 minutes and automates the processing of the leads. In our case, and in one fell swoop, our recruiters are notified of the lead by email, a new record is created in our CRM, a new row is created on a Google Sheet, a new record is created in our email nurturing program, and the prospective student receives a rapid notification bounce back email. Within 15 minutes from entering a Lead Gen Form on LinkedIn, we are already interacting with our prospect.

Audience targeting is accomplished through the Campaign Manager as well. We found that setting up multiple campaigns for various audiences allows us to narrow down the most likely audience target who would fill out a form. This includes retargeting our website visitors on LinkedIn utilizing the Insights Tag, generating leads from people that visited our website, and did not fill out a form embedded there. It was eye-opening to think that our website visitors were interested enough to visit our site and not fill out our form, yet they would fill out a form that was 'pre-filled' on LinkedIn.

This underscores our point made in the introduction of this article. LinkedIn's Lead Gen Forms have a distinct advantage of garnering leads in the mobile environment as the forms appear on a trusted site, are prefilled, and look great on a phone.

We'll be expanding our use of this lead channel going forward.

--Gary Steel consults clients on Online Marketing and Advertising, and is Google Search, Display, Video Analytics, Yext, and Acquisio Certified. If your business could use some improved online visibility drop me a line. If you like what you've read here, I hope you will 'like' and 'share' this post, and follow me on LinkedIn. #steelview