Did you know: LinkedIn accounts for over 80% of B2B social media leads? Compared to other social channels (Twitter: 12.73%) or (Facebook: 6.73%), LinkedIn presents a promising channel alternate and/or addition to include in a lead generation strategy. (source) One of the most important things when it comes to running and improving lead generation on LinkedIn is the consistent optimization of your campaigns. Here are a few helpful tips for how to optimize & improve your LinkedIn performance. (If you’re not already using LinkedIn for lead generation, but want to start, check out this helpful article to get you started.)
Get Granular With Your Audience Targeting
The first thing you need to do to really improve your lead generation game is to 1) test several different targeting combinations and 2) get granular with targeting. There are multiple ways to reach a target audience- this is why it’s important to test multiple audience combinations to ensure content is getting in front of the right people. Additionally, it’s important to refine each audience to focus on generating high quality leads. Try running three to four audiences for each campaign with ideal audience sizes of around 300k.
Tip: Some example audience combinations include: Retargeting + LaL (lookalike) Audience, Job title + Skills + Company Size, or Member Groups + Interests + Seniority.
Some optional targeting layers to add onto your combinations can be top geographic locations, top company sizes and industries. It’s important to note that targeting will always include geographic and language parameters.
Continually Improve Your Audiences
Utilizing backend performance data will help to optimize the way your campaigns are running. LinkedIn Campaign Manager for example, allows you to view the top audience segments per campaign that are driving leads. This can be things like location, job title, job seniority, company size, and more. This information can then be used to adjust audience targeting to improve performance effectiveness. Another way to monitor lead quality is to continuously download leads to proactively identify trends in location, job title, etc and use this data to adjust audience targeting.
Tip: See any inappropriate job titles? Exclude those from your targeting efforts to improve lead quality. If you can’t exclude titles, opt for removing excluding Seniority instead.
Test, Refresh, Optimize, Repeat
Lastly, testing is one of the most crucial parts of improving your lead generation efforts. LinkedIn campaigns require heavy monitoring and adjusting to identify how to best reach your target audience as well as how to continue to drive quality leads throughout the span of the campaign. A/B test as much as possible- including testing graphics, copy, CTAs, and other changeable assets to find the combination that works best. Pause any of the non-performing ads and introduce new versions of the top-performing ads. Be sure to refresh the creatives every few months to avoid content fatigue.
Tip: Run at least three to four different creative versions of an ad per campaign.
These are just a few things you can do to help optimize and improve your lead generation on LinkedIn. It’s important to play to the needs of the client and identify what types of strategies work best for them. What works in one industry may not work in another, but discovering these things comes through testing and practice.
Hear from VSSL Paid Media Manager, Kaily Smith about how to improve your Lead Generation on LinkedIn by checking out her episode of Wayfarer Wisdom on our IGTV feed.
To view the entire Wayfarer Wisdom series, click here.