LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 800 million members. With its vast reach and engaged user base, LinkedIn offers excellent opportunities for brands to generate quality leads. Here we explore the various ways in which LinkedIn can be leveraged for effective lead generation.
Targeting the Right Audience
LinkedIn allows brands to target their ideal customers based on location, job title, company, industry, interests, skills, and more. This enables laser-focused targeting to ensure your content and ads reach those who are most likely to convert into leads. Some key ways to target your audience on LinkedIn include:
- Location targeting – Target users by country, state, city, or radius around a location
- Company targeting – Target users who work at specific companies you want to reach
- Job title targeting – Target users with relevant job titles such as CEO, Director, Manager etc.
- Industry targeting – Target users who work in your relevant industry verticals
- Interest targeting – Target users based on their LinkedIn interests and groups
- Skill targeting – Target users who have specific skills, certifications, knowledge etc.
With precise audience targeting, you can ensure your LinkedIn efforts reach the users most likely to convert into qualified leads for your business.
Sponsored Content
Sponsored content allows brands to publish native ads on LinkedIn that appear directly in the feed of your target audience. This content looks and feels just like regular LinkedIn posts and enables natural discovery by your prospects.
You can publish a variety of content formats as sponsored posts including articles, videos, presentations, infographics and more. This content shows up prominently in the feed allowing you to get your brand messaging across to your audience.
The key benefits of sponsored content for lead generation are:
- Increased visibility and reach for your content
- Ability to actively engage your audience by commenting on and sharing your posts
- Lead generation via customized calls-to-action to download assets, subscribe, get quotes etc.
- Detailed analytics to optimize your posts and strategy
By leveraging sponsored content, you can share informative and relevant posts that convert casual viewers into highly qualified leads.
Sponsored InMail
Sponsored InMail allows you to directly engage your prospects by sending targeted emails to your audience on LinkedIn. These messages have open rates that are 3-4X higher compared to regular email.
With InMail you can:
- Reach users who are not already connected to you
- Personalize your messages with merge fields to improve open and response rates
- Add rich media and trackable call-to-actions to generate leads
- Follow up with leads who have previously engaged with your emails and content
InMail is ideal for outbound lead gen to proactively connect with your prospects at scale on LinkedIn. You can drive leads through product demos, content offers, event promotions and more.
LinkedIn Groups
Joining and participating in relevant LinkedIn Groups allows you to directly connect and engage with your target audience. By joining Groups related to your industry or niche, you can build relationships, demonstrate thought leadership, and eventually convert Group members into leads.
Some tips to leverage LinkedIn Groups for lead generation:
- Join Groups related to your offerings with high member counts
- Monitor Group discussions and provide value by answering member questions
- Share helpful articles, resources, and content with the Group to establish trust
- Setup Group polls and discussions to directly interact with members
- Prospect Group members and send InMail to generate leads
Actively participating in Group conversations allows you to connect with your audience and organically convert them into leads over time.
LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms
LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms allow you to generate leads directly from LinkedIn without sending them to an external landing page. These forms can be attached to your Company Page, Sponsored Content, InMail campaigns, and more.
Here are some benefits of Lead Gen Forms:
- Lead capture without expensive landing pages or PPC spend
- Higher conversion rates by keeping users on the LinkedIn platform
- Customizable forms with multiple fields to capture visitor information
- Lead notifications and alerts to follow up with prospects
The leads captured via forms will include prospect’s full LinkedIn profile data. This allows you to immediately qualify and follow up with the leads based on their profile information.
Retargeting Website Visitors
You can further amplify your lead generation efforts by retargeting your website visitors on LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s advanced tracking and pixel technology allows you to build custom audiences of site visitors and serve them targeted ads across LinkedIn as they browse the platform.
Key benefits of visitor retargeting for leads include:
- Extended reach for your content beyond just your website
- Keeps your brand top of mind with cold prospects who previously visited you
- Opportunities to retarget and convert visitors who did not convert on-site
- Cost-effective lead generation leveraging your existing web traffic
Retargeting is a proven tactic to increase your website conversion rates by following up with prospects who have shown initial interest but did not convert immediately.
Automated Nurturing with LinkedIn Matched Audiences
Matched Audiences allows you to extend your marketing automation and lead nurturing campaigns to LinkedIn. By synchronizing your email nurture lists with LinkedIn, you can automatically target and serve tailored ads to prospects as they interact with your emails.
Benefits of automating LinkedIn marketing with Matched Audiences include:
- Personalized ads based on prospect’s email engagement
- Extended reach to your email lists with LinkedIn’s scale
- Continued nurturing beyond just email to convert leads
- Retargeting of unopened and unsubscribed email lists
This capability tightens and scales your lead nurturing by engaging your prospects on LinkedIn’s feed and across their mobile devices.
Targeting Account Lists
LinkedIn now allows you to directly target the employees of specific companies through account targeting. This can be highly effective for B2B lead generation focused on select target accounts.
With account targeting you can:
- Upload a list of key target company names
- Target all employees from the listed accounts
- Show relevant messaging focused on their employer
- Personalize content with company specific messaging
This approach allows you to take an account-based approach and engage all key prospects from coveted accounts that you want to do business with.
Lead Generation Analytics
LinkedIn provides robust analytics for your lead generation campaigns. You can leverage these insights to understand campaign performance and optimize future efforts.
Key analytics for lead gen include:
- Lead volume, quality and conversion metrics
- Campaign cost and cost-per-lead metrics
- Demographic data on people converting into leads
- Content and creative performance indicators
- Visitor retargeting and nurturing metrics
Regularly monitoring your LinkedIn analytics helps refine your targeting, content, creatives and overall strategy to improve lead ROI.
Integrations with Marketing Automation Platforms
To scale LinkedIn lead generation, you can directly integrate it with your marketing automation platforms like Marketo, Eloqua, Hubspot etc.
Key functionalities enabled through integrations include:
- Capture LinkedIn campaign leads directly in your MA system
- Map LinkedIn form fields to your lead scoring criteria
- Add LinkedIn leads to automated nurture streams
- De-dupe leads captured on LinkedIn vs. website forms
- Pass LinkedIn ads data to MA for reporting
These integrations allow you seamlessly manage LinkedIn leads alongside your website and other channels within your marketing automation workflows.
Implementation Best Practices
Here are some best practices to follow when implementing LinkedIn for lead generation:
- Outline clear goals and target KPIs for your LinkedIn campaigns
- Build multi-channel nurturing paths to efficiently convert LinkedIn leads
- Test different targeting approaches and optimize based on performance
- A/B test different content formats like articles, videos, images etc.
- Personalize ad copy and content for your target personas
- Make lead generation forms short with only essential fields
- Promptly follow up on captured leads while they’re hot
- Monitor lead quality and continuously optimize targeting
- Integrate with your CRM/MA platforms to manage leads at scale
Following structured best practices is key to driving consistent and scalable results from LinkedIn lead generation.
Conclusion
With its unparalleled targeting capabilities, native ad formats, and integrations with marketing technologies, LinkedIn offers a uniquely powerful platform for B2B lead generation.
Brands can tap into LinkedIn’s highly engaged professional audience and leverage a variety of tactics from content marketing to retargeting for generating quality leads. With the right strategy, implementation and optimization, LinkedIn can drive significant volumes of inbound leads at efficient costs.
The key is approaching LinkedIn in a structured fashion with clear goals, audiences, execution tactics and measurement systems. By leveraging LinkedIn’s suite of lead generation capabilities as outlined above, B2B brands can access a lucrative source of qualified leads to power their revenue growth.