May 26, 2020
Show Resources:
LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course
Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.
Show Transcript:
The absolute lowest cost way to generate leads using LinkedIn Ads. This is it. Stay tuned.
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.
0:19
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, because of LinkedIn's higher
costs, most of our clients are interested in any performance
increases we can find. And one of the most common ways of getting
cost per lead down is by using LinkedIn lead generation form ads.
About 60% of our clients use these exclusively so there's
definitely something to them. So we're going to go into a lot of
detail about them. Let's hit it.
0:44
I wanted to highlight some of the reviews that you as listeners
have been leaving on the podcast pages, so please keep those
coming. Lucamelie, or Lucamelie in the UK says "super valuable
information. I've been following AJ on YouTube and LinkedIn for
over for a year now. He consistently provides excellent value and
I'm so pleased he's doing this podcast. AJ, if you're reading this
thanks a million for being so generous with your knowledge." Luca,
thank you. I am reading it. Thanks for leaving it. And that totally
makes my day. All right, Richie Norton in the US just simply says
"genius". You want to know who's a genius, Richie Norton. He is the
modern day Stephen Covey, call him a friend and his show is
absolutely epic. So check out his show. It's all about leadership
and life and goals. And he's got a really interesting model where
he'll do three episodes per week. One is an interview. One is kind
of like an after review and then one is a solo cast from him
talking about that particular topic and and expanding. So really,
really cool if you're into leadership. Okay, NN1292 in the US, says
the podcast "I've been waiting for. First off your podcast is
great, and I've already benefited from the information you provide
along with your insight. I look forward to listening to additional
episodes in the future. You seem to have a lot of experience and it
would be amazing if you could share some real world solutions and
strategies that have aided you in the past. As a marketer growing
in the field of this sort of content, it'd be super helpful,
especially since it's not easy to find content specific for B2B.
Again, thanks for doing the great work. And I'll definitely be
tuning again in again soon". Thanks for the glowing review, as well
as the suggestion on what we can do. I'm gleaning from this that in
the future, we should do more of applicability, more case study
type stuff. This is why we did this and this was the effect. So
definitely gonna be baking that into the future content. I'll try
to bake it in as we go as well. So I do want to feature you please
do go and leave reviews. And I'll give you a shout out as well.
2:48
Okay, so let's jump into what is the lead gen form ad to start out
with? Well, the way I describe it, this is like when someone
interacts with your ad, rather than sending them to a landing page
on your website or just off of LinkedIn, a drawer will slide down
from the ad itself containing a form, a native form from LinkedIn.
And it gives someone the opportunity to convert without even
leaving the LinkedIn experience, which is fantastic for a lot of
ways. The chief have, which is that it's the highest converting way
of getting someone because it takes away so much of the friction.
When we implement these, we see an average increase of conversion
rates of 10 to 50%. So this is literally like you could take
whatever you're doing now and get 10 to 50% more leads for exactly
the same money. That's really how it works. And quite often,
actually, we'll see double or sometimes even tripling of conversion
rates. In pretty much every type of offer every situation, using
lead gen form ads is going to be the cheapest way to capture
someone's information/ Prospects who are interacting with these
forms have a much higher level of trust because they don't have to
leave the LinkedIn experience. It's familiar to them. And plus any
information that LinkedIn knows about this individual is going to
be prefilled. So if you ask for information, like their job title,
or their industry or company size, LinkedIn will just automatically
fill that out. So all the prospect has to do especially on mobile
device where entering extra information is extra cumbersome,
LinkedIn is going to make that super easy so all someone has to do
is just hit the send button. You can use these for most of the ad
formats. So any sort of sponsored content, whether that single
image, carousel, video, maybe even if there's going to be future
versions of sponsored content, surely, the lead gen form ad is
going to be supported by it. Also, any sort of sponsored messaging,
so that includes message ads, plus the new conversation ads. Now
are these a silver bullet for advertisers? Well, they can be, but
not always. There are some limitations and there are some potential
warnings to keep in mind about them. So first complaint that you
may hear about them is that they lead to poor lead quality. Your
sales team may reach out to someone and they might say something
like, ah, I don't remember filling out a form. I don't think I
contacted you guys. Now, don't be worried this isn't fake form
fills that are happening. This is just that LinkedIn made it so
easy for someone to convert that if they waited long enough,
they're going to forget that they actually filled out the form, it
didn't make a strong enough impression on them because it was so
easy and so quick. It required less effort. And traditionally, the
more effort you require from someone, the more of their attention
you're going to get. It's also less of a special experience for the
user visually, because they're used to seeing things on LinkedIn
and they're used to seeing things move quickly like scrolling
through a feed, whereas if they land on a landing page, they will
see your brand front and center. They'll have the opportunity to
click around and read more about your team and see what you are
offer. So that's a lot of freedom that you're not going to get if
you're just going to stay within the LinkedIn experience. And
you'll hear exactly the same complaints about this from advertisers
who've used Facebook's version, what they call lead ads. And it's
exactly the same reason. It's just making it so easy that people
may not remember doing it. So make sure you are following up on
these quickly so that you get fewer people who forgot that you
exist. The next is you actually do need some additional systems in
place to make use of them. So once the lead is submitted, it goes
into the LinkedIn ads platform. And it's really cumbersome to go
in. You go into account assets. And lead generation forms. And then
you click on the lead generation form that you're using. And then
you can download a CSV. I guarantee everyone listening to this
right now is paid way too much to make this your job to go in and
download a CSV every single day. So you'll definitely want to get
these leads out with I'm sort of partner integration. So we'll go
into that here soon. But you also need to reach out to them with
email software, whether that's marketing automation, or CRM, to
actually fulfill on what you gave them. Because if someone fills
out one of these forms, and then you follow up 24 hours later and
say, "Hey, here's that piece of content you requested", chances
are, so many more of them are going to forget that they ever did
that or change their mind. So you want this to be fast, you'll want
to use an email software system to immediately follow up with them.
Another complaint that you'll hear from other advertisers is "Ah,
my sales team only likes emails that are professional, but all the
G mails and the Yahoo's those personal emails are worth less to
us". And quite honestly, I like the personal emails, because if I
get a list of personal emails, that's going to match at a really
high rate on both LinkedIn and Facebook and Google and Twitter if
I'm doing these custom audience retargeting, so from a nurture
perspective, I really like, but I realize a lot of sales teams will
kind of frown on personal emails, and you absolutely will get more
of these. You can't track lead gen form ads nearly as well as you
can track a landing page visit. So I'll illustrate this by showing
both pathways. If you send to a landing page, you can have a form
on that landing page that captures all of their UTM and tracking
parameters from the URL and passes it right into your CRM. And then
you can run reports later on, grab those parameters, and you can
marry them up with your LinkedIn reporting to get a cost per every
stage of the funnel. It's beautiful. You can tie every piece of
performance all the way back to the exact ad, the exact audience
that sent it. Now consider if you're using lead gen form ads,
someone's going to fill out the form on LinkedIn. There's no sort
of dynamic tracking available here. LinkedIn will tell you very
accurately all the way down to the time where someone fills out the
form, but they won't pass anything further. So if you wanted to go
really, really specific and track every ad all the way down to the
ad level, you would need a separate lead gen form on LinkedIn for
every single ad that you publish. And smaller accounts, you can
make this work, but larger accounts, oh, this is cumbersome to do,
and we've done it. The other big challenge here is you can't
retarget the traffic. So if you send traffic to your landing page,
you can then pick that traffic up with your Google retargeting,
your Facebook retargeting, and stay in front of these people to
stay top of mind. And it creates an awesome audience for nurture.
But because this traffic never hit your landing page and never hit
your website, LinkedIn has all of the data about them and they're
not sharing it with you. And then LinkedIn won't let you retarget
this that's as of the time of recording yet, but they are working
on engagement retargeting that I'm told should be out somewhere
between July and October of 2020. At that point we'll be able to
retarget users. So something like if someone opened the lead form
but didn't actually fill it out or didn't submit it, then we can
retarget them and show them a different offer or show them the same
offer until they do convert. So I'll be excited for engagement
retargeting to come out, so we can start retargeting these lead gen
form ads traffic.
10:23
Okay, so how do you actually create these? Well, first you go to
account assets right from your ads account and click on lead
generation forms. Then you'll create a new form right there. And
what I would recommend you do lose the super in depth tracking
here. But for every offer, I would recommend one single lead
generation form, and then send all of your ads that are going to
that offer to the same form. So you'll have maybe 15, 20, 50
different ads all leading towards or all attached to the same form.
Next, you either go to a campaign that already has the lead
generation objective or you create one. And you'll go through the
normal process of defining who your audience is and writing your
ad. But then as soon as you're done writing the ad, it will ask you
which form you want to attach it to. Now, if you haven't already
created your form through account assets, lead generation forms, it
will let you create one from right within the campaign build
itself, but certainly that's a little bit more cumbersome. Keep in
mind that these ads do require a privacy policy on your website, or
just written into the the form itself. So be prepared, make sure
you do have your privacy policy all ready. Okay, here's a quick
sponsor break, and then we'll dive into how to make the best use of
your lead gen formats.
11:44
The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com,
the LinkedIn Ads experts.
11:53
If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you
B2Linked, the agency you'll want to work with. We manage LinkedIn's
largest accounts and are the only media buying agency to become
official LinkedIn partners. And performance to your goals is our
only priority. So fill out the contact form on any page of
B2Linked.com to get in touch, and we'd love to help you absolutely
demolish your goals.
12:17
Alright, let's jump into what you do with your leads once they come
in, and what options you'll get to include. I mentioned earlier
that you'll want to make sure that you're using an integration
partner to get your leads out. There are three different ways of
doing that. The first is the manual download. Booooo, don't do it.
It's not worth anyone's time. I mean, seriously, don't even hire a
VA for this. The next though is you use one of their partner
services. So some of these partner services are things like
HubSpot, Eloqua, Marketo, Salesforce, there are quite a few, but
they also tend to be pretty enterprise level software. So if you
happen to be running a small account where maybe you don't own any
of these enterprise level softwares, then you'll want third option
here which is Zapier.com. And on their $20 a month plan, you can
get all of these leads exported to pretty much whatever you want.
So if you want these leads sent to your email and sent to a sales
rep's Google sheet that they keep actively updated and then sent
right into like a MailChimp or something, you can do that kind of
logic with the Zapier $20 per month plan. There are some very cool
strategic ways that you can use these lead gen formats. So I want
to talk about two of those first. One of my favorite ways to use
these is to actually test your landing pages. So in this case,
you're not using lead gen form ads at all. You're sending a right
to a form on your website somewhere and you know what your
conversion rate is. So let's say you're seeing a low conversion
rate, maybe you're only converting at 8%. What you can do is go and
take that exact same ad the exact same offer and Create that as a
lead gen form ad. And then you start measuring the cost per
conversion and your conversion rate, especially conversion rate.
And what you'll find is, on average, you'll see a 10 to a 50%
increase in conversion rate, so expect that. But if it's larger
than that, then this might be a good way for you to go, "oh, this
makes sense, my landing page is hindering conversion somehow". And
that can be the start of you saying, "hey, I'm going to start
testing things on my landing page". Or "I'm going to go and make a
case to my boss that we need to bring someone in to create a better
landing page experience". So this can be good data for you. If you
can find out that the same offer the same ad converts better as a
lead gen form, then that signals there's probably something wrong
with the website or at least something that can be improved. The
next cool strategic use of these lead gen formats is to test the
difference in your lead quality between your lead generation ads
and your landing pages. If you are running these in parallel long
enough, what you'll find is, yeah, sure these lead gen form ads
will increase conversion rates, but your lead quality will also on
average decrease. So if you can balance these out, if you've
gotten, let's say 50% more leads, and your lead quality only
decreased by about 30%, you still have a net increase of 20%. And
it totally makes sense to use these lead gen formats. However, if
that's reversed, if your conversion rate increases by 30%, but your
lead quality decreases by 50%, you are still much better to send to
a landing page. Now my bias is if it's even close, I mean, if I'm
getting a similar cost per qualified lead, let's say from lead gen
formats as I am from my own landing page, I want to use my own
landing page 100% of the time, because then I can track it with
Google analytics or whatever tracking I'm doing down to a very
granular level. And I can also retarget that traffic with every
network out there, LinkedIn included. So there's so much more
freedom you get by having traffic that you own on your own website.
But certainly, if it's better in your favor, you're getting a
cheaper cost per lead, or cheaper cost per sales qualified lead
from your lead gen form ads, then absolutely pursue that 100%.
Okay, option wise, the prefilled fields that LinkedIn has, they
have most that are prefilled, but some that someone will actually
have to fill in themselves. And the way it works is if LinkedIn has
it, they will pre-fill it. And if they don't have it, then they'll
leave it blank and the prospect will have to go in and write it
themselves. The standard fields that I generally recommend are
first name, last name, and email. And if you take all three of
those fields, it should convert at the highest rate. You're asking
for very little and the email address that it fills out is going to
be most likely. I mean, it's their profile email, which is most
likely a Gmail or a personal email of some kind. If you want to ask
more for that, or if you need to ask more from them, then you can
ask for their city, their country, their phone number, their zip
code, or postal code, their state province. And you can ask them
for their work email, but there's no validation to make sure that
it actually is a work email so they can just, it's a blank field so
they could just write their profile email in, you'll probably still
get quite a few of these personal emails as well. You can ask for
work phone number. Obviously, anytime you ask for a phone number,
people are expecting a phone call and it's going to scare them
away. You will see a lower conversion rate if you're using those.
You can ask for their job title, their job function, which is their
department, their level of seniority, their company name, their
industry company size, and on the education side, you can also ask
for their degree, their field of study, their graduation date,
their start date And the school that they went to or graduated
from. You can also ask for their gender, which will not be
prefilled. Because if you remember from our targeting episode,
gender is an inferred characteristic based off of their first name.
And so it's not always accurate. LinkedIn doesn't want to assume
here where the user will actually see what LinkedIn considers them
to be. There's a new addition here, though, which is one of my
favorite, you can insert their LinkedIn profile URL. The reason I
love this is it's so low friction, of course, someone filling it
out is going to say, "oh, well, my LinkedIn profile is public
anyway so I don't care". That's not a high friction kind of field.
But if you have a link to someone's LinkedIn profile, you also know
immediately what company they work at. And you can follow that to
see what size of company and what industry and you can look at. You
can find out so much that you don't have to actually ask for this
information in the field. Because if you're asking for five, seven,
eight pieces of information, you're going to scare a lot of people
away because you're asking so very much. So if I have my way with
it, I'm going to ask for first name, last name, email, and LinkedIn
profile URL. You can also include some custom questions. These can
be a single line or a multiple choice. And you can also attach a
checkbox, a custom checkbox. You can decide whether or not that is
required. Everything else is required. But this custom checkbox can
be not required. And then you do have hidden fields you can insert
if you need UTM parameters in the traffic as it comes from the lead
generation form to the thank you page or whatever experience you're
sending them to after. You can have those come through. But like we
talked about earlier, this is at the form level. And so if LinkedIn
is listening, I would absolutely love in the future if we could put
dynamic parameters in here. So if we could maybe dynamically insert
the campaign Id or the ad ID or both, or maybe some other parameter
from the campaign, the campaign name, something. This would be
super helpful. And then we wouldn't have to create an individual
form for every single ad if we wanted to track much deeper into our
CRM. Okay, stepping off my soapbox there.
20:19
Tracking these can be an issue. So let's talk through that one.
Tracking down to the cost per lead is totally flawless. You don't
have to worry about tracking pixels. You don't have to worry about
them clearing or making sure that they are associated to the
campaign. There's none of that. You just launch a lead gen form ad
and immediately you're getting conversion information. But if you
need to go deeper than cost per lead, or lead conversion rate, now
that's going to be a problem. The most sophisticated advertisers
are using this solution right now where they create one whole form
for every single ad. And that may be worth it for tracking, but boy
is that cumbersome to actually administer. And again, I think
everyone listening to this is probably, it's way below your
paygrade to do that kind of work. But it is possible if you want to
get your tracking on point. Depending on the partner you're using,
it can actually pass your campaign ID and your ad ID. So you might
be able to capture those and pass those somehow into your CRM so
that you can match the individual ad back with like a V lookup from
a LinkedIn report. So you may be able to do something like this. I
haven't fully explored it yet. I think it's possible. But you may
be stuck with the one form per ad if you don't want to do all of
that technical juggling. And then for retargeting, since the
traffic doesn't actually hit your website, you can't retarget them.
So LinkedIn, like we mentioned, is going to have engagement
retargeting sometime in Q3, but it also means if you're using
these, you can't do your retargeting with Google and Facebook,
which is such a valuable thing right now. As a quick recap,
LinkedIn lead gen formats are they cheapest way to get your ideal
prospects into your database for nurturing. They are fantastic if
you just need to show results fast, or show the value of the
channel to prove it out, you should start seeing leads come in very
quickly. And pretty much no matter what your offer is, these will
convert higher than if you sent them to your landing page. However,
if you want meaningful interactions with a very, very important VIP
kind of audience, I would still suggest sending to a landing page.
Or if you require that you have the retargeting or tracking
abilities that you would only get from sending to a landing page,
then absolutely, same deal. When you're thinking lead gen form ads
think that this is quantity over quality. So if your goal is
quality, time, and attention from a very important prospect,
definitely send to landing page. But if your goal is to get the
cheapest cost per on your ideal audience, get them into your
database for nurturing and so you can start doing some outreach
Yeah, lead gen formats are going to be by far and away the best way
to do that. Okay, I've got some episode resources for you coming
right up. So stick around.
23:15
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more?
AJ Wilcox, take it away.
23:24
If this is the first one you're listening to make sure you hit that
subscribe button in your podcast player. And definitely do a rate
and review I would love to shout you out and feature you in the
review section. So whatever podcast player you're on, go and review
there. I would love to hear, especially any feedback. But of
course, I'd love to know that this is making a difference in your
own professional careers and lives. If you're new to LinkedIn
advertising, definitely check out the LinkedIn advertising course
on LinkedIn learning, that I partnered with LinkedIn to do. It's
incredibly inexpensive and it's a great from beginning to maybe
slightly intermediate type of course, so check that out. And if
you're a LinkedIn pro subscriber, then you should have LinkedIn
Learning for free. So it should be a just totally free course. If
not, I think it's only $25, so definitely worth checking them out.
If you have any feedback for the show, or any topics you'd like to
have us cover, reach out at Podcast@B2Linked.com. I'll see you back
here next week cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads
initiatives.