8 reasons why you should use LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms

LinkedIn recently launched a new solution--Lead Gen Forms--that allows you to capture quality leads using forms that are pre-filled with LinkedIn profile data. This presents new and powerful opportunities for marketers, growth hackers, and advertising experts alike.

With this solution, we’d like to break down how Lead Gen Forms works and showcase just why and how you should be using it. We’ll walk through its most powerful features and demonstrate how to layer on native built-in and external tools like Zapier to amplify the impact of your work.

Here are the eight reasons why you should be using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms.

But First, What Are LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms?

LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, available on free and paid plans, allow you to capture leads via paid ads on LinkedIn using forms that are pre-filled with member profile data. They look like this:

From the inside, the interface is nothing short of elegant. In less than a dozen clicks, you can navigate from your LinkedIn profile to the form editor and build your Lead Form in a few minutes

Check out our extensive profile of LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, which covers what it is, how to set it up, and how to create your first Lead Gen Form and LinkedIn campaign.

But what’s more important than the seamless UX of both the form creator and lead perspective is its conversion power. This brings us to the first of eight reasons for using Lead Gen Forms.

1. Be the First to an Untapped Market

If you’re reading this post and take action from it, you’ll be one of the first marketers using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms. With that novelty comes great strength.

Remember the first Facebook Ad you ever saw? Your ad blocker wasn’t set up. The image and style was fresh. You might have been curious to explore what this new image on your sidebar was.

This is the level of interest you’ll be capturing if you jump into LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms today. Avoid member fatigue and jump on it now and reap the benefits of being one of the first marketers in an untapped market.

You may see more clicks and get a leg up on the competition. The converse is to wait until your competitor creates their first LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms and then play catch-up in a competitive market.

2. Benefit from Implicit Mobile Optimization

Have you prepared for mobilegeddon?

"Mobilegeddon is actually the nickname given to Google’s most recent push to incorporate "mobile friendliness" into their search algorithm, says Impact Branding and Design. "With it, sites that are fully-optimized for mobile browsing are ranked higher than those that aren’t and have the tag 'Mobile-Friendly' added to their search result."

Mobile optimization is the name of the game. An increasing proportion of your audience is reading and interacting on their phones rather than on their laptops. It’s more important than ever for your advertising to reach a mobile audience.

In fact, EMarketer estimated that mobile advertising budgets will hit $158.55 billion by 2018 and that at this time mobile ad budgets will be more than 50% of all worldwide digital advertising.

With LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, your campaigns are automatically mobile optimized. Creating beautiful ads on your customers’ smartphones wasn’t an afterthought in this product. Rather, it’s an area where this solution shines.

3. Get More Leads With Less Time & Money With Increased Conversion Rates

What’s the most critical metric for any ad or lead gen form? Conversion rates. This is also where the impact of LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms becomes apparent.

With LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, you’re not only hitting a new market and leveraging the power of mobile advertising, you’re doing so with a tool that was specifically built to make it as simple as possible for your prospect to click on your ad and submit their information.

Because LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms prefills forms with info from their LinkedIn member profiles, your target audience can submit their information in just one click. Take a second to think about that.

Less friction means more submissions. You can drive more leads for each ad dollar you spend on LinkedIn compared to traditional form-fills.

4. Easily Implement Forms Into Your Existing Marketing Stack

Let’s be blunt. None of the above matters--new markets, conversion rates, or mobile ads--unless a tool is swift and easy for your team to implement.

Luckily, with the launch of LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms comes its integration with Zapier, allowing you to connect to over 750 other apps.

Whenever you get a new Lead Form response, you can automatically send information from that form to the other tools you and your team are already using. With this integration comes the ability to automate and streamline your marketing processes.

Whether you want to send new lead information to your marketing content management system (CMS) or sales customer relationship manager (CRM), update customer databases or push leads into a nurturing flow, you can do all of it automatically with Zapier.

Here Are a Few Ways You Can Connect Lead Gen Forms to Your Other Apps

Connect information about new leads to your marketing CMS

Create new deals in your sales CRM from new leads

Update customer databases automatically and without human error

Add new leads to a webinar funnel and rapidly convert them into paying customers

Organize Information About Your Leads for Deep Data Analysis

Create To-Do Items from New Leads

Leverage and Automate SMS Marketing

**Not seeing what you’re looking for? Explore the other 750+ apps Zapier integrates with and build custom workflows.

If you don’t already have a Zapier account, you can sign up for free here.

With integrations like the above, you’re not just automating painful tasks for your team, you’re allowing your business as a whole to iterate and scale quickly. You’re easing innovation by removing the headache of moving to a new tool or reworking your whole system.

Connect LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms & Zapier (It’s Free)

5. Get More Information About New Leads Without Decreasing Conversions

Anyone who has set up an email submission form knows there’s always a balance between asking for more information to get a better sense of who your audience is and asking as few questions as possible to make signup a breeze and keep conversion rates high.

With LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, you can escape the double-edged sword. Lead Gen Forms are prefilled with information from LinkedIn members’ profiles. Include questions about location, profession, or company without expecting people to type out additional information.

You can select up to 7 fields in Campaign Manager when creating your Lead Gen Form template

At any time, you can check out your form fill rate in LinkedIn’s native analytics page:

With Zapier, capturing additional information becomes meaningful. You can easily send these detailed responses to your data analytics tool of choice, whether it's Databox, MySQL, or a Google Sheet that you manipulate.

Find trends in your audience and tailor your marketing, messaging, and brand to your people. You canl see better metrics on everything you do.

6. Target Business Professionals

Social media marketing is hard to get right. With 24/7 content schedules, a new platform booming and dying each month and content that feels too short to take seriously, many marketers write it off as not worth the investment. However, once you find the social media that speaks to your audience, you’ll start to see the return on investment.

"The bottom line is this: LinkedIn works for B2B lead generation."

If LinkedIn is already working for B2B leads, you can bet that the Lead Gen Forms will amplify this impact, which is precisely why you should jump into this new solution if this matches your target market.

Additionally, using Zapier, you can filter leads by title, size of company or location. This allows you to hone in your marketing efforts and separate top tier leads from the rest or segment into smaller audiences with customized nurturing flows.

7. The Power of Redirecting

When someone submits their information to your Lead Gen Form, the flow doesn’t stop there. Rather, once the information is submitted, your new lead will view a thank you page and have the option to click off to a landing page where your offer, lead magnet, or other content is hosted.

Here’s where you can make the most of your money with one small tweak. Don’t just show a thank you page post sign up, redirect to another offer, bonus, or social shares.

Teachable has a great example of this:

This is an easy and supplemental way to make your ad spend do more work for you and LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms makes it easy to do.

8. Get More for Your Money

Looking at the first seven reasons to use LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, it becomes apparent that the solution is built to help you get more bang for your buck. Make the most of your ad spend with increased conversion rates, advanced targeting, and in-depth analytics.

Better conversion rates mean more leads with less money and less work setting up multiple campaigns--the ideal situation for any lead generation solution.

LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms are new and we’re looking to you to tell us what you find. Share your experiences in the comments below and give your fellow marketers a leg up.

Explore the LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms integration and what you can do with it.

Connect LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms & Zapier (It’s Free)