How To Set Up LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms [The Most Powerful Type Of Ad You Can Run]

Marketing can be challenging to get right. Sales cycles are longer, and as consumer behavior continues to evolve (especially online), it’s difficult to know where to start with B2B and B2C marketing.

A major problem that businesses face is how to find the most effective way to generate more leads. That’s where LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms come in.

When it comes to B2B marketing, LinkedIn is a gold mine. In fact, 82% of B2B marketers achieve their greatest success in business with LinkedIn.

LinkedIn’s lead generation forms are distinguished from other lead gen tactics by the fact that they auto-populate with accurate lead information. That throws the common problems of low conversion rates and inaccurate information out the window.

How do you create a winning LinkedIn lead generation form? In this article, we’ll break down each step of the LinkedIn lead gen forms setup in a digestible and actionable way. Let’s get started.

Why LinkedIn is the best platform for Lead Generation

Why is LinkedIn such a popular marketing channel for B2B marketing? Because LinkedIn isn’t just another social media platform, it has been created for people to forge professional relationships, make deals, and build careers. 

This is why 96% of B2B marketers leverage LinkedIn to get their message across to their audience, which makes them six times more likely to convert.

Have You Tried The LinkedIn Platform for Advertising? 

On other social media platforms, B2B marketing can sometimes feel like shouting into the void. It’s hard to get seen in the sea of entertainment, as so many people are on social media without the direct intention of making business connections.

In contrast, your brand’s voice gets heard by influential decision-makers by leveraging LinkedIn ads. Among 875 million LinkedIn members, 80% have an impact on business decisions. These people are movers and shakers with twice the buying power of the usual online audience.

LinkedIn is where you can catch big fish. And as a B2B marketer, it’s a no-brainer to invest time and energy into LinkedIn lead gen for higher conversion rates and building relationships that will guarantee your brand’s long-term success.

What are LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms?

LinkedIn lead forms are a type of ad available on the platform, allowing marketers to integrate a form into their lead generation campaign. They are pre-populated with the audience’s information from their LinkedIn profiles.

With LinkedIn lead gen forms, your audience has a better user experience by drastically decreasing the number of fields they would have to fill out manually. The user won’t have to be redirected to your website. Instead, they’ll stay on LinkedIn, which is more convenient for people who entered LinkedIn and want to stay there.

With LinkedIn lead forms, you can:

  • Integrate the form with your sponsored content campaigns
  • Use the forms on new ad campaigns
  • Add the forms to the already set-up campaigns

These forms work well with the other ad types available on LinkedIn and are accessible on mobile and desktop.

Why Use LinkedIn Lead Gen Form Ads?

  • In most cases, the biggest obstacle to getting the lead information is your landing page. Users today live in a world of hyper-convenience; they don’t want to put in the effort when they don’t have to. Filling out all those form fields on your landing page can be a pain point for your users. 

For instance, if you are browsing through your LinkedIn feed and are shown an ad that you might be genuinely interested in, it takes you to the advertiser’s landing page. There you have to manually fill out a long form. How likely would you fill out that form despite being genuinely interested in the ad? 

The same is the case with your users; they either don’t have the time or the attention span for a longer engagement. As a B2B advertiser, you need to remove this obstacle, and with the help of LinkedIn lead gen ads, you’ll be able to do just that. All your users will need to do is a few clicks: one to open the ad, another for the call to action, and the last one for submitting the information. 

  • With LinkedIn lead forms, you’ll be able to get a double conversion. After you have the required information and your lead has followed your call to action (CTA), they’ll be directed to your “Thank You” page. You can lead them to your landing page, where you can target them further with another offer.

Are LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms Ads the best on the LinkedIn Platform?

LinkedIn lead gen forms ads are the best at doing what they are designed for; generating leads. If getting your audience’s information is your goal, then there isn’t any other ad format better.

Note: If your goal is to make a strong impression on your audience with your personal brand, you could consider sending them to your landing page. Suppose your audience is a high-value prospect for you, and you want to ensure that you do business with them in the future and build a strong relationship with them. In that case, other ad types would send them to your landing page instead, where you’ll be able to better pitch your brand’s message.

Advantages of Using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms

LinkedIn is a Social Media Platform for Professionals

LinkedIn is the only mainstream social media platform that is dedicated to professionals. Using LinkedIn lead gen forms, you can engage with professionals by targeting them by their skills, job experience, education, company, etc.

Seamless User Experience

LinkedIn ad forms are displayed just like the normal LinkedIn-sponsored content. These ads don’t break your audience’s browsing experience and don’t redirect them to a third-party landing page if users are interested in them.

As a result, the lead has enough trust to give out their information, and the whole process is more seamless and accelerated.

Versatility

As a B2B marketer, you can use lead gen forms on LinkedIn to create a campaign with multiple objectives in mind. You can use these ads to entice your leads to sign up for events, webinars, newsletters, or demos. You can also leverage them to grant your audience access to your gated content, offer discounts, or encourage them in some other way to fill in the required data.

In short, when it comes to LinkedIn lead gen forms, the only limitation is your imagination!

Measure The Impact of Your Lead Generation Campaigns

Manually calculating the return on investment (ROI) isn’t the most efficient use of a marketer’s time. The LinkedIn lead generation forms come with integrated metrics that make it very easy to measure your campaigns’ effectiveness.

These useful metrics include cost per lead, form fill rates, conversion rates, etc. You can find them on LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager and use these readily available figures for reporting the ROI.

Target Your Audience with Surgical Precision

LinkedIn’s targeting features let you target members by multiple demographic factors. These factors include location, the company they work for, etc. However, the most important marker is targeting them by their job title.

LinkedIn users proudly share their real job titles on their profiles, unlike any other social media platform.

Say you have a technological solution that you want to sell to a company. In such a case, you would want to reach out to the Chief Technology Officers (CTOs). It’s more likely that you’d be able to target them on LinkedIn than on any other social media platform.

Easy To Create

The LinkedIn lead gen forms setup is super easy – only a few clicks are required to launch them. You don’t have to embed any codes in a website or add tracking tags. All you have to do is select a few parameters, write some copy, upload an image, and you’re done.

We’ll discuss how to set up the LinkedIn lead gen forms campaign in detail later in this article.

Access Your Leads in Campaign Manager or Your Preferred Third-party Tools

These LinkedIn forms are a great way to collect the members’ information. That said, if you were to manually process all of this data, you’d have to spend a lot of time and resources on that.The campaign manager has made it convenient to access your leads rather than manually processing data. You can also integrate it with your third-party marketing automation or CRM tool.

How to A Set Up LinkedIn Lead Gen Form That Converts

To create a LinkedIn lead gen form, first, you need to identify your ideal customer (your target audience), and you need something you’ll offer your target audience in exchange for their data (your lead magnet). 

Once you’ve done that, you can now set up your lead gen form ad. That involves narrowing down your target audience, creating the form fields, setting up a sponsored ad campaign or InMail message, and creating a thank-you message.

We’ll break down these steps below to create an ad that converts.

1. Create Your Ad Account

You need an ad account to create a LinkedIn lead gen form. Head over to the Campaign Manager (LinkedIn’s ad platform). If you don’t have an account already, you’ll need to create one.

You’ll need to fill in your preferred account name, select your currency, and, if you’d like to associate a LinkedIn page with your account, you can. Click on “Agree & Create Account.”

Create Ad account on linkedin

2. Create LinkedIn Gen Forms Campaign

Once you’ve created an ad account, you’ll be directed to your dashboard. Here you’ll see three tabs named “Campaign Groups,” “Campaigns,” and “Ads.”

You’ll need to select “Campaigns” and then the “Campaign Groups” tab, and select the campaign group you’d like to use for the LinkedIn form by checking the box right next to it.

Create LinkedIn Gen Forms Campaign

Go back to the “Campaigns” tab and click “Create” and then “Campaign,” which will enable you to create the ad to which the Lead Gen Form will be attached.

2. Create LinkedIn Gen Forms Campaign

Then you can change “Untitled Campaign” at the top of your screen to your preferred title and click “Next.”

Add preferred title to Linkedin campaign

3. Choose Your Lead Gen Form Objective

Once you’ve clicked “Next,” the Campaign Manager will take you to the next page, where you’ll be asked to choose your objective. Select “Lead Generation.”

Choose Your Lead Gen Form Objective

4. Select Target Audience 

When it comes to B2B marketing, targeting your ideal audience is where LinkedIn outshines any other social media platform. You can target your audience by their company, demographics, education, job experience, and interests.

Plus, you can target your audience by their member groups, and LinkedIn is the only platform that allows you to target people inside specific LinkedIn community groups. Even Facebook doesn’t allow you to do that.

First, you need to identify where your audience lives and works and select that location for them to see your ad. Type in the countries under the “Locations” tab and select that specific area. Plus, you can prevent people in particular areas from seeing the ad by clicking “Exclude” and choosing those certain locations.

select target audience linkedin

Scroll down and see the “Who is your target audience?” section. Under that section, you’ll find a panel with two primary categories, i.e., “Audiences” and “Audience Attributes.” You can narrow down your audience to the people you want to see your ad here.

If you already have a contacts database and want them to see your ad, you can click “Audiences,” and then select the options according to your advertising goals.

If you want to discover a new audience for your brand’s voice, select “Audience Attributes“, then choose the attributes that are more in line with your target audience and your advertising goals.

attribute target audience linkedin
select target audience linkedin

To exclude people in your contacts or with certain attributes, you can click “Exclude,” and a similar panel will show up. Follow the same procedure as above, but with people you want to avoid seeing your ad in mind.

select target audience linkedin

To target the audience according to their companies, skills, job titles, or groups that they are members of on LinkedIn, you’ll need to check the “Enable Audience Expansion” box.

enable audience expansion  linkedin

5. Choose Your Ad Format

After you are done narrowing down your audience to the people you want to target, scroll down to the “Ad Format” section. Here you’ll see options like “Single image ad,” “Carousel image ad,” “Video ad,” “Message ad,” and “Conversation ad.”

The first three belong to the sponsored content ad category, while conversation and message ads belong to the InMail ad family.

choose linkedin ad format linkedin

6. Set Budget & Schedule

Choose the period of your ad and your daily and/or lifetime budget limit (how much you’d like to spend per day and/or throughout the lifetime of your campaign).

Also, you’ll need to set your schedule, which will specify when your ad starts and ends. And you bid automatically at maximum delivery, which will use your full budget. You can also bid yourself through manual bidding.

set linkedin ad budget and schedule linkedin

If you’ve chosen the message ad format as opposed to the image ad format, you’ll find the “Budget & Schedule” section to be the same until the bidding part. In such a case, the bidding portion will only include one option, i.e., manual bidding. Enter the amount you want to bid per ad sent.

select linkedin ad budget linkedin

Once you are done with the “Budget & Schedule” section, you’ll need to click “Next” and then “Save.”

7. Create Your LinkedIn Lead Gen Form Ad

Click the “Create new ad” option on the top right of the next page.

create linkedin lead gen  form ad linkedin

You’ll find the “Create new ad” option on the top right of the next page.

We’ll start with the first section, named “Ad.” Type in the ad’s introductory text (this text will show up above the ad image), URL, image, headline, and description. Remember that your ad image needs to be appealing enough to stop LinkedIn users from scrolling.

You need to grab their attention, make them understand your offering, and engage with your ad; the ad image plays a vital role. In the same way, your headline and description should be concise yet enticing. Here’s an example:

LinkedIn lead ad introductory text linkedin

In the second section, “Form details,” you’ll need to choose a call-to-action (CTA) and select “Create a New Form” in the Form dropdown. Enter a form name, language, offer headline, offer details, and privacy policy URL.

LinkedIn ad options linkedin

In the third section, “Lead details & custom questions,” you’ll enter the data you want to collect from your leads leveraging your LinkedIn lead gen form. You are allowed to create 12 fields. Note that LinkedIn recommends only using 3–4 fields, so you need to ask them for the key information to help you follow up with leads.

Also, if you want explicit consent from the members, you must set up custom checkboxes at the bottom of your lead generation form. We recommend you not to add custom questions, as it would defeat the advantage of the LinkedIn lead gen form being quick and convenient, and leads would have to manually type in their information.

LinkedIn ad custom questions linkedin

Move on to the last section, “Confirmation,” and write down your thank-you message and the link to your landing page. You need to be clear about when and how the lead should expect you to approach them. Include instructions in the thank-you note on how to head over to the landing page by clicking the URL and receiving the lead magnet.

Once satisfied with your ad, click “Create” at the bottom right side of your screen.

LinkedIn  ad confirmation message

8. Launch Your Campaign

Click “Manage” next to the ad you’ve just created; you’ll find it under “Ads in this campaign.” When you feel satisfied with your ad and want it to go live, click “Next” in the lower right-hand corner. Click “Launch Campaign,” and VOILA! You’ve just launched your first LinkedIn lead gen form ad!

launch LinkedIn ad campaign

Create LinkedIn Gen Forms: FAQs

How much do LinkedIn lead gen forms cost?

LinkedIn lead gen forms are attached to other ads, so you’ll only be paying what you have to pay for those ads. As for the cost of advertising on LinkedIn, you can expect to pay about $5 per click or $6 for every 1,000 impressions you get on your ad. 

The cost to advertise on LinkedIn depends on factors like your target audience, objective, bidding strategy, and ad relevance. If you are already advertising on LinkedIn, consider attaching the lead gen form to the ads; you won’t have to pay anything extra.

Is the LinkedIn lead gen form free?

To run a LinkedIn lead gen campaign, you’ll need to attach the lead generation form to the ads on the platform. Attaching a form to an ad is free. However, you do have to pay for that ad.

How do I get the lead information I gather from LinkedIn lead gen forms?

You can retrieve leads that you have gathered in two ways. You can log in to your ad account, choose the form type from which you want to download the lead data, and then click “Download Leads.” You’ll get a CSV file of your lead information. You can also integrate the Campaign Manager with your third-party marketing automation or CRM tool. That way, you’ll be able to transfer the leads directly into your CRM platform.

The Bottom Line: Lead Gen Form LinkedIn

LinkedIn lead gen forms solve one of the most significant problems in B2B marketing: getting information out of your audience once they click your ad.

LinkedIn delivers one of the highest conversion rates for lead generation among all social media platforms. To succeed with such a powerful lead-generation tool, you need to have available funds for trial and error and optimize your ad campaigns to achieve higher conversion and engagement rates.

If you want to continue to grow your business, you already know the impact on having a great client acquisition strategy. That’s what we do here at Scaling With Systems. We help build profitable client acquisition systems to help B2B business get closer to their high-level goals. Want to know more? Book a free consultation call with one of our advisors today. 

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