V7.19: LinkedIn Steps Up Lead Gen Game

In today’s day and age, catering to the individual is paramount. We have to make sure each person is getting the experience they need and want. That is one of the great things about social media; it helps start and continue the conversation in a more user-focused way.

Social platforms have been creating tools meant to advertise more effectively and with a more personal touch from day one. Recently, both Facebook and LinkedIn have been refining their advertising programs, especially when it comes to lead generation.

These platforms set out to make collecting information easier for marketers and more personal experiences for the individual. LinkedIn recently introduced three new enhancements in its lead gen feature. These are designed to help reduce cost metrics and drive more quality return on investment (ROI).

Let’s break down the three new features and what they mean for us, shall we?

1. “Bid Auto-Optimization for Lead Gen Forms” This is meant to help get the most out of your marketing dollars. As we know, the LinkedIn campaign manager can be quite manual, especially compared to Facebook’s automated features. This new tool will help you auto adjust your bids to more effectively serve your content without breaking the bank. Also, the algorithm will serve to the individuals more likely to fill out the lead form, which leads to quality AND quantity.
2. “Desktop Delivery” As of right now, lead gen is a mobile-only experience. Yes, people spend way more time on mobile devices than they do on desktops, but we are missing out on valuable users if we limit ourselves in this way. Trying to get people to fill out a mobile form can be difficult, which was the initial reason for optimizing lead gen towards mobile, but now we can utilize desktop to scale our campaigns to new heights.
3. “Accessible Lead Management” All of these things are great, but would mean nothing without an efficient and easy way to manage the leads being brought in. LinkedIn has done a great job with connecting our CRM systems to more effectively capture and integrate leads. We can now send leads from LinkedIn directly to two new partners– Salesforce Sales Cloud and Microsoft Dynamics 365, thus making managing leads even more integrated.

We talk a lot about aligning sales and marketing and this is a great step to doing just that. Marketing needs to find better, more qualified leads for sales and sales needs to be able to quickly act on those leads. So take a new look at LinkedIn as with these new features, we can better unify and activate against more quality leads.