LinkedIn has updated its social network on mobile with features to help create quality leads. Traditionally, users have to spend a lot of time populating forms for businesses to get usable data. While it may not be too difficult on desktop, mobile phones present more of a challenge.
Lead Gen Forms aims to fill that gap. When a user clicks a sponsored post, forms will automatically fill out with data from their LinkedIn profile. This means users can submit forms almost instantly.
The Mobile Approach
While it may seem strange to focus on mobile users, LinkedIn has very good reasons to do so.
“80 percent of member engagement with Sponsored Content happens on smartphones,” explains group product manager Divye Khilnani. “We are confident that a mobile-first approach to Lead Gen Forms will offer advertisers the best results.”
The functionality lets marketers create a paid post, and then simply enable Lead Gen through the settings menu. Though the add will display in a News Feed as usual, the sign-up process for the user is much faster.
LinkedIn Lead Gen Features
Khilnani says the feature can also provide the following advantages:
- “Exceed your demand gen objectives: 90 of the 50 customers surveyed from our pilot beat their cost-per-lead goals. They also saw lower CPLs with Lead Gen Forms compared with their standard Sponsored Content campaigns.
- Measure your ROI: Our reporting tools in LinkedIn Campaign Manager track key metrics like CPL, form fill rate and other important data points to measure the value you’re getting from your ad spend. In the near future, we’ll also include demographic reports that show the exact number of leads you’re getting from specific audience segments.
- Easily manage your leads: With Lead Gen Forms, lead management is seamless. You can download lead lists from Campaign Manager or sync leads with the marketing automation or customer-relationship-management system of your choice through our partners, Driftrock and Zapier. Soon, marketers will also be able to send their lead data directly to their Marketo, Eloqua and Microsoft Dynamics accounts.”
According to customer feedback, Lead Gen has already begun to improve form fill rates. Ashley Hirschbek of LEWIS Pulse notes:
“LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms have dramatically improved our target users’ experience with amplified content, as well as our form fill rates. It’s the optimal ad unit to get the best bang for your lead-gen buck.”
You can find out more about the feature on the Lead Gen webpage.
