In this article, I will share how we managed to generate amazing B2B leads for our clients- in various fields of activity, targeting the US and EU markets. The data presented here is not theoretical, it comes from actual work and experience that we accumulated. I will share all the details from strategy to hands-on campaign creation and expose all the secrets. well, almost everything… 🙂 

When I started working with B2B companies a few years ago, the most effective way to generate leads on LinkedIn was using the Inmail campaign, personal sponsored messages that reached your mailbox on LinkedIn with interesting and relevant offers.

But lately, I’ve noticed that this method wasn’t as effective as before. I have a few guesses as to why. First, it took some time but people started noticing the difference between organic and sponsored messages and got used to ignoring ad messages. Second, people started getting huge amounts of contact suggestions, grew their connections, and became less responsive to people they don’t know.

The last thing I discovered is that there are industries in which a personal sponsored message is considered less professional and overly pushy.I still use Inmail messages for warm audiences and when I have a very specific and relevant offer for my audiences, but many times that is not the case.

Realizing this I had to search for other ways to generate leads and the next thing I tried was Website Conversions, which means sending people to a landing page hoping they will complete the lead form. I tried many landing pages, ads, and audiences, but that didn’t produce the results that I was expecting So I went back to the drawing board, which led me back to lead generation, this time using good old-fashioned feed ads.

Lead generation through feed ads

I’ve tried lead gen ads on LinkedIn with their internal lead form before but felt there were too many lead deniers (You all know what I mean by that right?) and that it was very unexpected, some fields of activity generated a lot of leads and some none at all.

However, I decided to give it another try and with a little help from LinkedIn (Thanks Elad for your great tips!) and managed to build a smart simple system that works.

Similarly to every campaign on any platform, it requires a few basic things-
1/ Deep understanding of the products or services you are advertising
2/ Great understanding of your target audience
3/ Amazing copy and creatives
4/ Sufficient budget for your goals and industry

How to build your audience

We chose the right objective and now we need to build our audiences. When running on cold audiences I try to build an audience of 100k- 200k with one of these combinations-

Location + Job titles + Industry
Location + Skills + Industry + Seniority
Location + Company name (add names one by one or use lists) + Job titles

If the audience is too big, downsize with company size. If you have lists or retargeting audiences you can base on, make sure the audience is large enough and always A/B test it in comparison to the audiences mentioned above. 

Important Tip #1: make sure your audience includes various seniority levels and not just VP and C levels. Running with an audience that is too high-level management can create very expensive impressions and the campaign will get stuck.

Setting your budget

Yes, Linkedin is an expensive platform and leads can cost (up to) thousands of dollars, so before you start generating leads you better know how much you are willing to spend on a good lead and what it’s worth for your client.

LinkedIn’s representatives claim that for lead generation you need a minimum of $150 per day. That means a minimum of $4500 a month, more if you want to run campaigns on two or more audiences. They recommend at least $10K a month for lead gen and they are right. In my experience, this is a budget that can generate a good amount of relevant leads (20-60 leads per month).

You can run with a lower budget but I don’t recommend spending less than $100 a day. There just won’t be enough data to optimize and you will get spam leads or none at all.

Creating ads and lead forms

This is not an article about content writing, so I won’t get too deep into how to write good ads, but there are a few guidelines to follow here:
– You have to give people a very good reason to leave you their details. Offer them valuable information, a solution to their most urgent problems, a way to get an advantage over their competitors, etc.
– Keep your messages short and clear- make sure people understand your offer.
– Make sure your ad text and your design copy complement one another and do not repeat the same messages.
– Try at least three different ads
– Use a great CTA that is motivating and appealing.

When creating the lead form, make sure you have a privacy policy on your website. without it, you can’t create a lead form. Use the form headline to explain to your audience why they should leave the details, and make sure you provide them with the promised outcome.

The great advantage of the LinkedIn form is that it fills in the details automatically, but that also can be a problem. I will never understand how people send lead forms without noticing, but nonetheless, it happens time after time. To reduce this, I try to add at least one question that people need to fill in manually in the lead form.  

Optimizing your campaigns

Optimizing your ads is easy, if one ad performs better than others, close the others and make one or two duplicates that have a different copy or creative.

For optimizing your audiences choose Chart and then Demographic and it will lead you to discover who is watching and clicking your ads. This will enable you to exclude irrelevant audiences. 

Important Tip #2: If you have high CTR and low impressions-  this is an unused potential audience that you need to explore better. 

Important Tip #3: You will get days with no leads at all, that happens sometimes so don’t panic and make changes too early. 

Good luck!

And remember we have over 10 years’ experience in B2B marketing and we are always here to answer any questions that you may have!