Year after year, marketers point to generating leads as their top priority. (And also their biggest challenge.) Fueling the sales pipeline with high-quality opportunities that convert is ultimately one of the primary functions we are measured against. But the fundamentals of effective lead generation are changing in a transformed business environment.

The vast majority of B2B marketers consider LinkedIn an effective source for generating leads. It is the most popular social media platform for both organic and paid B2B marketing activities. This means competition for attention and mind-share can be fierce, so finding an edge can offer a key advantage.

For marketers who want to take the next step, LinkedIn Marketing Labs has a course designed expressly for that purpose. “Using LinkedIn for Lead Generation” walks you through a series of lessons that will help you harness the power of LinkedIn to elevate your lead generation game. Here are five of the biggest takeaways from the course that will get you started:

Best Five (5) Practices for Lead Generation On LinkedIn
1. Reach Relevant Audiences

One of the greatest benefits to marketing on LinkedIn is that you have access to the vast majority of potential customers right in one place, with a business-oriented mentality. With that in mind, you can:

Target the best prospects for your business. LinkedIn’s extensive targeting tools help you deliver your content and ads to members who are more likely to take action and turn into quality leads. The course shows you how to to avoid hyper-targeting, set up different campaigns and approaches, use lookalike audiences, and more.
Retarget to nurture potential customers. With this feature, you can nurture potential customers by building target audiences of existing LinkedIn members who’ve already shown interest in your products or services by visiting your website, registering for an event, viewing a video,  or filling out a Lead Gen Form.

AbdulTech Online | LinkedIn Marketing

2. Understand the Value of Your Leads – Beyond the Form Fill

In order to understand the real quality of the audience you are capturing, you should assess not only how much it costs for someone to convert, but measure the long-term value of that lead. Casting a wide net, doesn’t always guarantee quality. Ask yourself these six questions before you launch your campaign:

How does your company define a sales conversion?
How long is your sales cycle?
What does a quality lead mean to you?
Are you using marketing automation tools?
What is your sales teams’ lead response time?
How are leads nurtured?

Once you’ve launched your campaign, it’s important to have the tools to measure the quality of your leads. To help you understand the real quality of the audience, you can use LinkedIn’s Conversion Tracking. This provides you with information that will help you better understand what’s happening with your campaigns, such as:

More Complete Metrics. You’ll get access to both post-view and post-click conversions, giving you a clearer picture of the full impact of your ads.

Attribution Features. When setting up your conversions, you can select how each ad interaction is credited for a conversion across multiple campaigns. The attribution model can be set to each campaign or a single campaign.
Deeper Insights. The demographic data provides you information on the audiences that are converting, including their jobs, titles, industries, and companies. This will help you improve your campaign’s targeting and content alignment.

Through the use of these features and others that are covered in the course, you can learn how to nail down the basics and move toward optimization of lead generation practices.

3. Optimize Your Campaign

Whether you’re dealing with high engagement and low conversion rates, leads that aren’t turning into Sales Qualified Leads (SQL), or you have a demo that’s not generating leads, our Lead Generation course will show you how to overcome specific challenges, making your ad campaigns even stronger.

4. Measure and Report

You want to capture a quality audience that will provide long-term value. In order to do so, take the time to measure the success of your campaign. In addition to looking at campaign performance, look at post campaign metrics such as the number of sales conversions achieved and the value of each sale. This way, you can measure the real business value your campaign is driving.

5. Tap into LinkedIn Marketing Partners to Supercharge Your Campaigns

Not only can LinkedIn partners help you create world-class content, they can also help you reach and nurture the right audience. Using LinkedIn’s data integration partners helps you create tailored audience segments to target your ads. And lead form integration partners can help you use your own contact lists in your CRM, making it easier for you to manage your pipeline and messaging with consistency.

Start Generating Leads on LinkedIn Now

Leads are like gold to marketers. The best marketing campaigns are founded on strong lead generation strategies. By using the tools, strategies, and partners provided you can refine and enhance your lead generation campaigns to drive clear and convincing results.

The “Using LinkedIn for Lead Generation” course from LinkedIn Marketing Labs is a good place to start if you want to learn everything you need to know about LinkedIn Lead Generation.