Used LinkedIn's targeting capabilities to find high-value budget holders with a paid social media lead generation campaign
REQUIREMENT: Bibby Financial Services wanted to target export finance decision makers with a paid social campaign. As it is a very niche audience, Samantha and Teamspirit Group created a LinkedIn lead generation campaign using two pieces of content, an infographic and an exclusive report, based on Bibby’s researched insights into the export industry. These were then promoted in two phases to create a warm audience which could more easily be converted into leads.
Phase 1 was to inform the audience of the useful industry content Bibby has in a social first infographic format linking to the full infographic on their website. This phase 1 creative and targeting criteria reached our high expectations for impressions and clicks within our very niche target audience. Phase 2’s content was an exclusive industry report gated behind a LinkedIn lead-gen form.
This phased content journey and multiple targeting pools vs content types resulted in uncovering the best combination to identify where to find qualified leads through optimising the types of creative (carousels vs statics) and three audiences (retargeted, email list, original targeting criteria) used to find the best cost per lead.
RESULTS: The average CTR in phase 1 was 0.6% (the B2B benchmark for finance) with some audience/creative combinations going as high as 0.8% while not increasing the CPC. The CPC was able to be brought down by optimising the spend across the highest performing combinations.
The overall CPC came in on budget, clicks to the website were 10% better than predicted, and lead form opens 50% better than predicted.
The cost per lead (CPL) using LinkedIn in this way was competitive against previous lead generation strategies. We saw a 7.2% lead conversion rate overall (those who filled out the form after opening it). This landed as high as 23% for a particular audience/creative combination.
- Lead form opens 50% better than predicted
- Competitive CPL against previous lead-gen strategies
- Data on Audience and Creative insights for future campaigns
INSIGHTS: The optimising of certain audience identifiers and creative combinations can continue to bring down the CPL. As well as growing the audience reach within the niche target group based on the activity of those who engaged with the form, visited the website, and gave their email.
Phase 1: Reach our niche audience and build a warm audience. Define targeting audience with key terms in LinkedIn and create social ads to call out to this audience, driving clicks to the website.
As the client of agency Teamspirit, their studio created a specialist infographic using Bibby’s owned content. Samantha worked with the studio to create social assets from the infographic that worked as a visual cue to call out to the target audience. The audience definition was key to the campaign, both in targeting criteria within LinkedIn as well as in the copy and creative.
This first round of creative messaging was made live to our refined target audience as a consideration campaign to drive traffic to a landing page hosting the full infographic.
Phase 2: Retarget the warm audience and continue with the current targeting. Offer access to an exclusive and industry relevant insights report to drive form fills with in-platform lead generation form ads.
Step two was to build a retargeting pool of those who showed interest in the infographic while continuing to target our defined and email audiences. These key audiences would see an ad in their LinkedIn feed with an exclusive piece of export industry content gated behind an auto-fill LinkedIn lead-gen form. The best performing creative from Phase 1 was recycled with new graphics overlaid.
Here creative was split initially into carousels and static images for testing, and then across our retargeted audience, the original defined audience, and an email list to find the best cost per lead. This ended up being the email list followed by the retargeted group.
Phase 1: Creative and copy that called out to our niche target audience
Phase 2: Reusing the most successful creative and directly speaking to the retargeted audience
