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Top 10 Ways to Maximize LinkedIn for Lead Generation

With conversion numbers on LinkedIn 3x higher than other social platforms, LinkedIn can be a powerful lead generation tool — if correctly optimized. We have clients sourcing over 80 leads per month in their target audience (without breaking the bank) by utilizing a series of advertising best practices on LinkedIn. See below for top ten ways you can optimize your LinkedIn for lead generation.

1. Relevant, useful content: As far a lead generation goes, content is the driving force behind the success of your ads and the number of leads they’ll garner. Relevant, useful content for your audience will generate the most leads, as they’ll want to input their information in exchange for the value add content. As a best practice, using sales-oriented language or content does not generate leads through the platform. Instead of using a sell-sheet, create a white paper or infographic on the trends in your industry. This will pique the interest of your audience and generate credibility for your brand. 

2. Strong calls-to-action: LinkedIn makes it easy to make your ads actionable for users. With clickable buttons, you can add onto your ads with calls-to-action like “download,” “sign up,” and more. If you want to control the style of your button, you can also include it directly in your ad creative and forego LinkedIn’s button option. The main tip: always have a button so audiences know the desired action you’re looking for them to take. 

3. Simple, but eye-catching graphics: When designing graphics, many immediately try to do too much. Graphics on a LinkedIn feed are small, so keep any text easy to read and in bold colors that contrast well with the background. Graphics can be artistic or real images, but the idea is to keep it simple and relevant to the text or content. Creatives can be branded or not, depending on the look you’re going for; since the ads are coming from the company page, they inherently have your company’s logo associated with them.

4. Narrow your audience: While there are many different opinions out there on ideal audience numbers, keeping the audience targeted can help keep costs down and optimize ads for those who are most likely to convert. We keep audiences to between 20,000 to 80,000 users as a best practice, though this can be expanded if you think your budget can accommodate the audience increase.

5. Utilize suppression lists: Have a large contact base who are already clients, or know of an industry segment who isn’t a target for your services? Use suppression lists to weed out audiences who wouldn’t be a fit for your ads. This will ensure you’re not wasting impressions on uninterested individuals, and are serving ads to audiences who are more likely to convert.

6. Set an appropriate budget: This fully depends on your campaign’s goals, number of audiences, number of ads, and more. However, LinkedIn Ads requires you to allocate at least $10 as the daily budget per audience. If you have one campaign running, that’s a monthly budget of $310, with the option of LinkedIn to spend 20% more. To be safe, you can plan to spend roughly $375 monthly using the lowest budget options as LinkedIn Ads often caps with the 20% higher budget amount. 

7. Simplify your forms: With LinkedIn already having a pre-filled form available, the platform already makes the forms easy; you can simplify it even more based on the number of fields you require. Depending on the fields you need for your future lead targeting, best practice is to limit the forms fields to five maximum. Typically, advertisers will require email, first name, last name, company, and phone number. 

8. Add remarketing to your audience mix: By adding the LinkedIn Insight Tag into the footer code on your website, you can easily start serving ads to users who have landed on your website. Known as remarketing, once a user accesses your website, they will be added to your remarketing audience and be served your ads for a specified window of time. Automatically, the time window is set to 30 days, but you can lengthen that to as long as 90 days to maximize your remarketing efforts and boost your audience numbers.

9. Cap your ad numbers: Scaled toyour match set budget and audience size, the optimal number of ads can change based on the account. Typically, it’s best to keep ads numbers at 3-5 ads per audience, swapping in new creatives every month and pausing lower performing ads to keep content fresh. When swapping in new ads, keep in mind that it can take a week or two for the platform to optimize it’s algorithm for the new creatives, so don’t gauge or write-off performance too soon. Keep an ad running for at least 3 weeks to see how it performs before tweaking or rotating another ad in.

10. Use A/B testing: To get a sense of what ad creatives and content are resonating the most with your audience, utilize A/B testing when setting up campaigns. Create two identical campaigns, and then change just one variable – edit the post copy, the call-to-action button, or the ad creative. This way, you’ll begin honing in on what your audience prefers, and you can slowly optimize all ads accordingly.