Essential tips from our social media marketing team on how you can optimize your ad’s performance on LinkedIn

According to Hubspot’s research, the top priority for marketers in 2020 was generating leads. On LinkedIn, lead generation forms have become one of the most popular ad products as they drive 5X higher conversion rates than landing pages. If you aren’t taking advantage of the vast advertising opportunities on LinkedIn, our social media marketing team recommends starting now. And if you already are taking advantage, let’s discuss how you can optimize your LinkedIn campaigns to achieve more leads.

 

1. Update Ad Copy & Images

The ad copy and images that you use for an ad have to attract your target audience. Make sure that your text, headline, and image share similar messaging so that it is very clear to the reader what action you want them to take and what they will receive in return. 

Write your ad copy with your target audience in mind. If you are targeting people with specific job functions, try to call them out in your ad copy. You can do the same thing with company industries that are included in your targeting. Here are a few examples our content marketing services experts recommend:

• Midsize manufacturing companies are at high risk for a ransomware attack. Prepare your business to defeat an attack in 5 steps.
• We asked HR professionals: What are the biggest challenges in managing a distributed, global team? Discover their answers and our solutions to these challenges by downloading the eBook. 

When it comes to ad images, the best practice is to test different versions to see what works with your audience. We recommend including the elements below:

• Name of the asset 
• Image of the asset if applicable (picture of guide or eBook)
• Call to action (download the eBook, watch the webinar, Request a Demo, etc)

 

2. Test Different Targeting Options

There are multiple different targeting options that you can use to reach your ideal customers. Testing a few different audiences will help you determine where you are going to get the quantity and quality of leads that you are looking for. These are the options that we recommend:

• ABM List 
  • Develop a list of 300+ companies that could be your ideal client/customer. Use this list in your targeting and layer in additional filters such as job function and seniority to narrow down who from the companies on the list you want to reach and who is most likely to interact with your ad. 
• Remarketing
  • Using the LI pixel, build an audience of visitors to your website. Use this audience in your targeting to reach people who are already familiar with your business and brand as they have already visited your website. People who are familiar with your brand are more likely to convert than people who are not. 
• Ideal Lead Audience 
  • Determine what a high-quality lead would look like for your business and create an audience based on that. Ask yourself which job titles or functions would they have, which job seniorities would they have, which company industries do they work in, and how big is their company. 

 

3. Test Bidding Options

Trying to determine the right bidding approach can be complicated, but it is key to driving efficient results. If you are not yet familiar, a bid is how much you are willing to pay for a specific action to be taken with your ads. Bid management will improve both the quantity and quality of your results, and significantly improve your ROI. With lead generation ads on LinkedIn, you have two options for bidding. 

• Automated bidding – LinkedIn uses historical campaign data and member information to automatically set the right bid for your ad. This option is supposed to get you the best results for your budget while spending your budget in full. 
• Enhanced CPC manual bidding – Bid on a CPC basis and LinkedIn will optimize your bid to those more likely to click or convert. With this option, you set the highest amount that you are willing to spend per click, which means that LinkedIn cannot go over it. 

Start your campaigns by testing enhanced CPC manual bidding so that you don’t overspend on clicks and leads. LinkedIn will advise you on what to bid based on what similar advertisers are bidding. When you first launch a campaign, you may need to change this on a daily to weekly basis, but you will eventually get a good idea of what a successful bid is for your campaign. 

 

4. Improve Your Lead Generation Forms

If you notice that you are getting significantly more lead generation form opens than you are leads, it’s time to take a look at your form to see if there is room for improvement. Follow these best practices to see improvement in your lead form completion rate:

• Keep the number of questions to a minimum
  •  Forms see the highest completion rates when they use 5 or fewer questions.  
• If using custom questions, make them easy to answer
  • Adding even one free-response custom question can lead to a 3-4% drop in the lead submission rate. 
• Keep your forms fresh
  • Refresh your Lead Gen Form creative at least once every two months to avoid the content going stale.
• Make the offer clear and match what the ad says they are going to receive
  • If your message is unclear, people are going to drop off the form 

 

5. Analyze Your Offer

The best type of offer to use in a lead generation campaign is something that is gated on your website. This could be an eBook, a report, a whitepaper, a case study, or a webinar. Be sure that the offer provides high-quality content and information that your target audience will benefit from reading or viewing. You also want to make sure that the offer makes sense for your target audience. If your offer is about how HR professionals can help their employees successfully transition to working from home, but your target audience is sales job titles/functions, then you most likely aren’t going to see as many leads as you would if the offer was relatable to sales professionals. 

If you don’t have existing content that is relatable to your target audience, it would be beneficial to work with a content creator to create a content marketing strategy that will attract high-quality leads.

 

Next Steps:

After you have made any or all of the above changes, it’s important that you consistently monitor these campaigns to track their performance. It might be beneficial to test each of the above options separately so that you have a clear idea of which optimization improved your campaign the most. The numbers that you should focus on when monitoring the campaigns are leads, cost per lead, and lead form completion rate. 

At Nowspeed, we have a team of LinkedIn advertising experts that are ready to either get your business started with LinkedIn ads or analyze and improve your already existing LinkedIn campaigns. Learn more about our social media marketing agency services and how we can optimize campaigns to increase your leads.