How to generate quality B2B leads on LinkedIn Ads

Many of our clients at Growth Room are B2B businesses looking for new ways to generate quality leads. B2B is a different field than B2C and you need to be creative in how you target, in the ads you test, in the CTAs you promote, and in the ways you use to convert visitors into leads.

It is a received idea: digital advertising (ads) does not only work with B2C. In fact, it has become the main way to generate B2B leads - 442 billion dollars in sales have been made through digital advertising, which represents 62% of total advertising sales in the world. When you are looking for a digital advertising channel to find these prospects, you will want to find one where you know that your audience will be present - and for B2B this channel is necessarily LinkedIn.

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Benefits of using LinkedIn Ads as a B2B marketing channel

It's no surprise that LinkedIn is THE channel to be on if you want to reach a Professional audience. Since the objective of this channel was originally (and still is) to connect professionals with new career and training opportunities, that's the audience you can find on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has 675 million monthly users, 40% of whom use the platform on a daily basis. That's a lot of people to reach - and above all, a lot of people Committed. If you're looking for a marketing channel that you can rely on to reach new prospects and help you with your B2B efforts, you've just found your channel.

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LinkedIn Ads audience targeting options

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Not only is the audience you're looking to reach on the platform, but LinkedIn also offers some of the best targeting options to reach professionals. Since users add tons of information to their LinkedIn profiles, such as their education, job title, company, accolades, skills, and more, you'll have access to targeting people based on these parameters.

There is a lot of practices to put in place in order to have LinkedIn Ads ads that convert, but here are some of the more useful settings:

• Business name
• Business sector of the company
• Job title
• Job function
• Seniority in employment
• Members' skills

LinkedIn also offers the possibility of targeting lists of contacts or companies if you want to reach a large number of them. Targeting business lists allows you to download a list of business names that will then be compared to the 50 million LinkedIn pages on the platform.

The platform recommends that you download a list of at least 1,000 businesses and let it match for at least 48 hours. The most important field that LinkedIn recommends that you include to ensure accurate and effective correspondence is the LinkedIn company page URL.

These targeting options will help you tailor your target exactly to the type of audience you're looking to reach. You can even break down performance by demographic once you start running your campaign to see how each function or business sector is performing.

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Lead collection via your website or via lead gen forms.

Once you've successfully targeted your audience, it's time to decide exactly how you want to collect these leads. You may want to direct this audience to your website so they can learn more and submit their information. However, to drive traffic from LinkedIn, you have to make sure that the experience is really optimized once on the site.

However, LinkedIn also offers a native lead generation function, which allows users to click on the ad and open a form where they can submit their information, while never leaving their current browser window. These forms are customizable, so you can ask for the typical information you may need to qualify a lead, such as:

• Name
• The email address
• The phone number
• The name of the company
• The job title

As most of this information is already part of the user's profile, the platform automatically fills it in the form without the user having to enter it himself, which increases the Submission rate of the form! It's also possible to include a custom field where users can select a multiple choice answer or write something if you need additional pieces of information that LinkedIn doesn't offer.

We're testing different ways to generate these leads: we can either encourage them to submit their information to learn more about the company's products or services, or we can encourage them to submit their information to gain access to a resource or other corporate content.

To personalize this feature, once a person has submitted their information through the form, they are directed to a “confirmation” portion of the form where they receive a short message and a CTA button that you can customize.

You can direct them to a landing page or your website to learn more with the “Visit the company website” or “Learn more” CTAs, or you can direct them to a piece of content with the “View Now”, “Download Now”, or “Try Now” CTAs.

To go further on the creation ofHere's our guide to a LinkedIn Ads ad that converts.

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Offer content as an incentive to gather information about prospects.

We found that when it comes to attracting prospects, theOffer of a content item in exchange for a user's information is generally effective. In the B2B space in particular, content is becoming more important than ever: 54% of decision makers spend more than 1 hour per week reading and reviewing reference material, and that same percentage buys a new product/service more frequently that they had not previously considered after reading a convincing reference document.

Whether it's an e-book, white paper, or guide, promoting content that's unique to your business will increase value of your service/product for a person who decides to fill out the form.

While this strategy is entirely possible with LinkedIn sponsored content ads, LinkedIn also launched a new product that we recently tested at Growth Room. These ads show a preview of a document (in PDF, PPT, PPTX, DOC, or DOCX formats) and ask the user to submit a form to unlock the full document. They stand out in the news feed as a piece of content, which already attracts attention, but they also do not require visiting another page or downloading the resource if the user does not want to - he can simply read the full resource directly on the platform.

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Optimizing your LinkedIn Ads ads

Once set up, you will enter a phase ofoptimizing your LinkedIn Ads ads : understand the right KPIs to measure, and above all perfect your copywriting, visual, as well as the audience.

These optimizations will allow you to approach the acquisition cost (a cost per lead/appointment) that suits you to make it a real acquisition channel in your marketing strategy.

Of all the advertising agencies, LinkedIn Ads is the most expensive per CPC (cost per click) on average, but the one that brings in the most qualified leads. Therefore, be sure to analyze the quality of prospects coming from advertising agencies specifically before concluding their relevance in your marketing strategy.

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Are you looking to generate quality leads through LinkedIn?

If looking for leads through LinkedIn is on your radar for 2023, we recommend using lead generation forms or content-based ads.

If you want to start advertising on LinkedIn or take your existing strategy to the next level, Let's talk !