LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms: Are You Making These 2 Conversion-Killing Mistakes?
LinkedIn Advertising is a great platform for B2B marketing. It allows for precise targeting by industry, company, and job title, yet it requires no platform fee or minimum ad spend. What other ad platform can do that? (Hint: no other platform offers this.)
One of the platform’s best features is called Lead Gen Forms. We’re big fans of LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms for several reasons.
According to a LinkedIn playbook:
LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms are designed to provide maximum convenience for users and marketers. When forms are presented to a LinkedIn member, the fields are pre-populated with their profile data, drastically cutting the effort needed to fill them out, resulting in higher conversion rates.
You’ve no doubt seen these forms on LinkedIn. You may even be using them on your campaigns. Did you know that, according to that same LinkedIn playbook, LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms have a conversion rate of 13 percent, whereas landing pages garner only 2.35 percent?
Why would conversion rates be so much higher with lead gen forms than landing pages? It’s not hard to figure out. More and more people are accessing content on mobile devices nowadays. Have you ever tried filling out a landing page form on a phone? LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms eliminate that clunky step from the opt-in process.
Also, the way that the Lead Gen Form message is displayed is not unlike the cookie notices on most websites. Users tend to click “OK” just to get the notice to go away. Their urgency to move on to the ad offer is your gain. When they click OK, you get their contact information.
What you’ve read so far may not be news to you. But even if you’ve been using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms in your campaigns for a while, we have noticed that clients often use them in a way that leads to a less-than-stellar user experience. Don’t undercut your results by making the top two mistakes.
Mistake #1: Putting Prospects Through the Wringer
Imagine someone just opted in using one of your LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms. What should they see next? Many companies simply send people to the standard landing page for the eBook or white paper they offered. After all, they’ve got the landing page built, so why not reuse it?
But put yourself in the prospect’s shoes. You already expressed your interest in the asset. Why should you now need to read a page that summarizes the benefits of that asset? Even more significantly, why should you have to fill out a form after you already submitted your personal info that was automatically populated by the lead gen form?
Don’t frustrate your prospects by sending them from LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms to landing pages. Instead, send them directly to the asset they requested. Since you’ve already collected their data, you have no need to put up additional gates. Just put the asset in the Media Library on WordPress and direct your opted-in prospects to it.
Now, you may have good reasons for not wanting to send prospects directly to the asset at this point. If so, consider sending them to a page that simply thanks them for their interest and tells them they’ll be receiving an email with a link to download the asset. Or, you could provide the download link right on that thank-you page. But whatever you do, don’t ask them for redundant information or tell them things they already know.
Mistake #2: Dropping the Ball
In marketing, there’s nothing more costly than a lead that nobody follows up on. But unfortunately, many companies run LinkedIn ads, receive a steady stream of leads, and then do nothing with them because their short-staffed marketing teams are overwhelmed.
Sure, marketing teams may carefully save these leads and hope to follow up on them when headcount increases—or after the next big trade show. But as we all know, leads are best served hot. Following up six months after that initial interest isn’t much better than not following up at all, because by then, someone who was in the early stages of the purchase process may very well be happily using your top competitor’s product.
You can avoid dropping the ball by setting up automation between LinkedIn and your marketing automation system, which should then flow into your CRM system. It would be beyond the scope of this article to provide specific instructions, especially given the proliferation of marketing automation and CRM systems out there. But suffice it to say that you must eliminate human intervention—and thus, human procrastination—from the process. Set up your systems so that all prospects who complete LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms will immediately receive automated communications that offer them opportunities to engage further with your organization. And each of these prospects should live in your CRM system as a warm lead that’s likely to receive follow-up calls and messages.
Get More from Your LinkedIn Campaigns
If you’re already using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, congratulations. You’ve taken a huge step towards making the opt-in process as easy as possible for your prospects. Just make sure you’re avoiding the two conversion-killing mistakes we’ve described, and you should see healthy conversion rates from your campaigns.
We have many more insights to share about LinkedIn marketing—lessons we’ve learned from improving results across our client base. Schedule a free consultation to find out how Espresso B2B Marketing can help you get more from your LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms.
