B2bLinkedIn Lead Gen Forms: How to Make the Best Use of It?

If you are a B2B company and you were to focus on only one channel for your company’s lead generation, it has to be LinkedIn. It allows you to build relationships, establish thought leadership, gain insights, generate leads, improve branding, and build communities. It is unarguably the most important social media network for B2B marketers to reach out to top buyers.

Statistics have shown that the platform isn’t just a good choice for B2B marketers — it’s undoubtedly the best. The conversion rates are top-notch and the cost per lead (CPL) is $120 (LinkedIn Ad Benchmarks 2021), which is lower compared to other advertising networks.

Lead Gen Forms is among the most popular advertising products on LinkedIn. By integrating it with your LinkedIn campaigns, you can collect valuable, accurate, and relevant lead data while reducing all the friction associated with it. In this blog post, we’ll cover everything that you can do using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms along with its limitations. We’ll also cover how integrating it with marketing intelligence platforms like SMARTe Enrich through APIs can provide marketers with the highest quality data that can be fed into lead generation campaigns.

What is LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms?

Haven’t you ever wished your marketing database was enriched with the most recent information of your prospects? So much so that when a user visits your website and click on the CTA, they will be greeted with a sign-up form, and LinkedIn will automatically pull in information from their account. Sounds good, right? Essentially, LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms add a call-to-action (CTA) to your sponsored posts on LinkedIn, further asking users to sign-up, download your e-book, or whatever buyer journey you would like to direct them to. This way, marketers can boost their conversion by converting visitors into qualified leads with just a few clicks on their ads. And the visitors do not even have to manually type in their information.

Listed below are a few advantages of using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms:

Ease of Use

You can get the data you need without reducing the conversion rates. You only need to design the right experience for completing the form. The information is pre-filled from the user’s public LinkedIn profiles. Thus, the users will not be asked to fill the forms manually.

Does not affect conversion rates

LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms make it super easy for users to convert their prospects into leads by removing unnecessary friction. The number of fields in the Lead Gen Forms is limited. All they need are a couple of clicks — one is the CTA (call to action) and the next step is to submit the information.

Massive Coverage in Mobile Users

57% of LinkedIn’s traffic is mobile users (Source: Hootsuite). This is very important in marketing today. You can tap into this huge market by using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms.

A chance at double conversion

When your prospect completes a sign-up or follows your CTA, you get the user’s email address. Furthermore, when they click your link on the ‘Thank You’ page, you can lead them to your website or any other landing page where you can upsell or cross-sell a different product of your choice.

Limitations of LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms

LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, however, has its own set of issues and limitations. We have listed some of them down here.

Inadequate data for sales outreach

Pre-filled LinkedIn profile data which is often a contact’s personal information is not very useful for sales teams. LinkedIn users do not divulge a lot of their data like business email addresses, mobile numbers, etc. on their public profile. Increasing the available form fields from 3 to 10 does not guarantee useful prospect insights needed for sales conversations. Increasing the fields will only reduce successful form-fills.

Delayed conversion and sales cycle

When such leads are captured, the post-campaign effort to manually enrich and append the required or insightful data points can be laborious, often taking days to weeks to complete! This in general delays the lead conversion cycle and further delays the sales cycle.

Bad customer recall

Bad customer recall is a nightmare for all marketers. How often have we heard from prospects, “When did I fill your form?”. The pre-filled data capturing functionality of these forms tend to become the biggest nemesis for sales development teams, as prospects hardly remember how and why they subscribed in a very crowded LinkedIn Ads ecosystem.

How Can SMARTe Enrich API Help?

What if we told you you could connect the world’s most powerful professional network to a powerful data enrichment platform like SMARTe Enrich? SMARTe Enrich is backed by a powerful contact database of 181 million contacts and 10 million companies. It can enrich 55+ unique data fields like level, job function, company location along with updated mobile numbers and email addresses. This collaboration between LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms and SMARTe Enrich through APIs can provide marketers with high-quality updated data that can be used for initiating and nurturing impacting marketing campaigns.

Sounds awesome, right? Let’s have a closer look at what it can do to help you achieve your revenue goals.

Insightful data points
SMARTe’s Enrich API is specifically developed to match and enrich contact data faster and in real-time with access to 55+ useful data fields. It would be fair to say our Enrichment API literally brings the data and data fields and the much-needed automation to break the manual process barriers and saving hundreds of man hours!

Real-Time Enrichment across CRMs and MAPs
SMARTe Enrich API works seamlessly across all the leading sales and marketing technology tools all be it Marketo, Outreach, Salesforce, etc. The days to add complex integrations are over as our API is plug-n-play and also read and write configurable to ensure there is no loss or rewriting of your CRM or MAP data.

Access to a trusted contact and company data-as-a-service platform
With our API, every incoming lead from your LinkedIn campaigns is matched before enrichment with a database of 168 Million contacts and 10 Million companies to ensure high accuracy and quality. Our match rate is superior, thus, your LinkedIn leads can be benchmarked with a live data repository to avoid any redundancies.

Premium offerings for making your data truly sales-ready
Our commitment to offering data-as-a-service goes beyond offering merely data points. SMARTe Enrich API makes your leads sales-ready by adding updating mobile Numbers with the highest global coverage and highly deliverable work emails. Besides, you are not paying extra for company enrichment as this is by default offered when your contacts are enriched.

Reach out to us
Do not let us or anyone else tell you how effective the combination of LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms and SMARTe Enrich API is. Test it out for yourselves and see what difference it can make to your lead generation campaigns. Stay tuned for more exciting announcements about the integration of LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms and SMARTe Enrich API capabilities.

Reach out to us at contactus@smarteinc.com for any clarifications. We’d be happy to help.