LinkedIn Advertising can be a great way to get exposure for your brand and the content marketing your team generates. But what many people don’t know is that by using LinkedIn’s Sponsored Updates campaigns, you can also generate quality business leads for your sales team.
Below are the steps you can follow to build a successful lead generation campaign with LinkedIn Sponsored Updates.
Outline Your Campaign
Like on any paid advertising network, the first steps in building your campaign are important: what is the total budget for your campaign? What should you set your daily budget as? How long will this campaign run? You’ll need to set a total budget, daily budget, and bidding options (CPC or CPM). If you choose CPC you’ll also need to set minimum and maximum bids.
Once you’ve identified the total budget, you should consider what an acceptable cost per lead (CPL) may be for this campaign. Evaluate the CPL you are currently seeing with another paid search network, like Google AdWords or the Google Display Network to get a base line.
Below is an example of campaign settings in the LinkedIn ads interface:
Identify Your Target Audience(s)
The next step two steps are key to generating leads, and they go hand in hand. You should first outline the audiences you want to target while keeping in mind the content you will promote to each audience.
With Sponsored Updates on LinkedIn you can build out audiences using several different criteria. You can build an audience out based on specific companies you would like to target, job titles within an industry, job categories, and more.
Below is an example of a target audience built on LinkedIn. You can make settings by location, industry, company size, and more and LinkedIn will give you an estimate to how many members that audience holds on their network.
Generate Copy and Content to Promote
The best way to generate leads from these campaigns is to create and promote targeted copy specific to each audience you’ve built. Consider the audience – if you are targeting specific job categories – agencies for example – create or modify content using keywords and language that agencies use. This will help your conversion rate.
Then as your campaigns work through their budgets, optimize daily. Are specific pieces of content outperforming others? Are there pieces that need to be removed altogether? You can adjust the copy, the images you use with content, and landing pages to improve conversion rates.
Below is an example of a LinkedIn Sponsored Update focused on generated leads:
Evaluate Results
At the end of your first campaign it’s time to evaluate the results. Even if you have high conversion rates it’s important to evaluate the quality of the leads generated by this campaign.
Depending on your industry, here are a few questions to ask in the evaluation process: How many leads went on to make purchases? What percentage of leads was your sales team able to connect in a conversation with? How many opportunities were generated by the campaign?
In the LinkedIn ads interface you’ll be able to see the top job functions and locations your clicks are generated from, which can help you optimize settings for future campaigns:
Next you’ll want to evaluate whether or not you hit your target CPL. Divide total cost by the number of leads generated. Be sure to include leads from form submissions and leads from call conversions as well using call tracking software. If you do not include leads from call conversions, you will most likely have inaccurate CPL data.
The best way to run a paid campaign on LinkedIn is to pay attention to the details from the start (from determining budget to making sure content is audience-specific) and ensure that you are tracking the success of the campaign accurately.
To learn more about implementing call tracking for your marketing campaigns download the guide, “Tracking Phone Leads: The Missing Piece of Marketing Automation.”