How to Generate Leads for B2B Sales with Lead Form Ads
Lead generation form ads have become essential for B2B businesses to obtain high-quality leads that convert.
By providing a simple, streamlined way for customers to engage with your company, on a platform they’re already using, B2B businesses can increase conversion rates and the quality of leads.
In this guide, we’ll look at the best practices for how to generate leads for B2B sales, and their importance in generating new business opportunities and improving overall targeting strategy.
With lead generation forms, B2B businesses can build a strong base for remarketing, with a personalised approach to lead nurturing.
Why are Lead Form Ads Essential for B2B Lead Generation?
Lead form ads are a powerful way to collect hundreds of warm leads. They allow you to connect more easily with your B2B audience and build out more successful lead-generation strategies.
This approach streamlines your lead generation efforts, saving time and increasing engagement through automated campaigns. By simplifying the lead generation process, your business increases its likelihood of attracting high-quality leads through your lead form ads.
What’s The Difference Between Traditional Lead Generation and Lead Gen Ads?
Traditional lead generation relied on a multi-step process. Typically, a user would click on an ad, visit a platform and then fill out a form on that platform. Between those steps, you lose potential leads who suffer from redirect issues, slow loading times, or those who just simply can’t be bothered with the extra clicks.
With lead gen ads, B2B businesses can ask their leads to fill out their information right there on the platform they’re already on. No leaving to go to other sites, significantly reducing the chances of losing a potential lead.
Benefits of B2B Lead Gen Ads
Two of the key benefits of the new style of B2B lead generation are:
- Mobile friendliness: Lead form ads are optimised for mobile-first, and as over 60% of B2B buyers have said mobile played a significant role in a purchase, this is crucial to receiving higher engagement rates.
- Data collection: You can customise your form to have different fields depending on which information you want to know. This can then be fed into future marketing campaigns.
Platforms That Support B2B Lead Form Ads:
Traditionally, it’s common to use social media platforms for lead gen ads, with different purposes depending on intent:
- Facebook: Despite usually being used as a B2C platform, you can utilise its advanced targeting and retargeting options to create strong B2B Facebook connections that convert into leads.
- LinkedIn: Ideal for reaching the professional audiences a B2B company targets based on their job titles and industry.
- Google Ads: People can submit their information directly from your highly tailored PPC ad.
How to Set Up Lead Form Ads for B2B Sales Success
Setting up lead form ads should be strategic and consider exactly what kind of information you’re looking for from your potential customer base. If you’re looking to build out a buyer persona with personal pain points, for example, make sure to include a relevant question within your ad.
This way, B2B lead generation ads can provide a two-pronged purpose:
- Collecting warm leads for further nurturing
- Helping build out your general customer information for future strategising.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to set up lead form ads for B2B sales success:
1. Choose Your Platform
Depending on your intent and target audience, choose whether you’re going to look at Facebook, LinkedIn or Google PPC ads. Typically, B2B businesses are drawn to LinkedIn, but Google and Facebook can be surprisingly effective if used correctly.
2. Define Your Audience
Depending on the platform, there are different targeting options to reach decision-makers and warm leads:
- On LinkedIn: Target by job title, company size, and industry.
- On Facebook: Focus on business interests and behaviours.
- On Google Ads: Examine search intent and in-market audiences as defined by other PPC campaign outcomes.
3. Create an Offer They Can’t Refuse
People don’t fill in forms for no reason. They want something in return. Popular gated content for B2B leads include:
- Whitepapers or eBooks
- Signing up for webinar’s
- In depth case studies
4. Designing your Lead Form
Keep your form concise, but capture all the pertinent information you need for nurturing your leads. You’ll need key fields like:
- Name
- E-mail address
- Company/Job Title
Then include 1-3 key questions for marketing purposes, like budgets, pain points etc. Make this as user-friendly and fast as possible with drop-down options for easy completion.
Finally, a well-crafted CTA (call to action), aligned with the user journey, will encourage leads to take the final step.
5. Set up Tracking Integration
Your form information needs to go somewhere. On some platforms, you can pull off an Excel sheet of the leads you’ve collected, but on others, you can go a step further and fully integrate the ad into your existing systems. Implement conversion tracking on the ad platform, and if possible, integrate the results within your CRM to update and file new customer information.
Best Practices for Maximising B2B Lead Quality with Lead Form Ads
Lead generation ads are about attracting high-quality leads that have a strong chance of converting. There are multiple techniques a business should employ when looking at B2B lead generation creation:
- Keep messaging clear and concise: Keep your ad direct, address pain points simply and offer a clear reason for the lead to fill in the form.
- Experiment with A/B testing: This B2B marketing strategy lets you continually test and refine your lead generation ad to see what messaging, imagery and form fields are most effective at lead gathering. Try changing elements one at a time and measuring their impact on sign-up rates.
- Follow-up ASAP: The faster and more automated your system, the higher your chance of engagement with your lead. If you’re offering gated content, for example, they should immediately receive a link once signing up. Otherwise, interest and engagement can drop quickly. You should also ensure your internal outreach system reacts quickly, with lead distribution sent to the sales team for personalised follow-up.
- Nurture leads with remarketing: Now you have their information, these leads can be fed into other different marketing campaigns and strategies. Continue to nurture the relationship through personalised email campaigns and remarketing ads to keep your brand at the forefront of their mind. By providing value, you increase the likelihood they’ll return.
- Ensure you get high-quality leads: Reduce bot or spam submissions by including a CAPTCHA option on your lead generation form, and make your extra fields mandatory to filter out lower-quality leads who are less likely to convert.
How to Measure the Success of Your Lead Form Ads
Evaluating the performance of your lead generation form ads is essential in understanding how effective they are. This includes analysing key metrics and refining your approach over time.
Key Metrics for B2B Lead Generation Form Ads
- Cost-per-lead (CPL): Divide the total ad spend by the number of leads generated. This lets you assess the ad’s budget effectiveness.
- Lead conversion rate: Determine the percentage of ad viewers who complete your lead form. A higher rate indicates more effective ad messaging and form design.
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Measure the revenue generated from your ads relative to the cost. Divide the revenue achieved by the total ad spend.
- Lead-to-sale conversion rate: See how many leads ultimately convert and become customers to assess lifetime value.
How to Track Lead Quality Over Time
Lead quality assesses how aligned the leads you’ve attracted are to your ideal buyer persona. Create a value scoring system for this by:
- Creating a lead scoring system that provides value for different informational data points like demographics, job titles, etc.
- Monitor engagement levels of leads after the initial form completion.
- Track the progression of your leads through the funnel: how many of them are converting?
Each B2B lead generation platform has its analytics platform that can help you qualify leads and make informed decisions on campaign changes.
- Facebook: Provides detailed ad performance and audience data metrics for those who engaged vs converted.
- LinkedIn: Provides specific B2B metrics including jobs and company size, providing deeper insight into the professional characteristics of leads.
- Google Ads: Provides post-click performance metrics, conversion path analysis and keyword match types for more granular information on who interacts with your ads.
This all helps provide a deeper insight into your customers and allows for campaign refinement that ultimately leads to higher conversion rates.
Real-Life Example of a Successful B2B Lead Generation with Lead Form Ads
Veolia is a B2B water treatment company that partnered with Common Ground for a complete restructuring of its Google Ads platform and lead generation.
By refocusing their PPC efforts to prioritise the quality of leads brought to the site, they were able to adjust existing campaigns and ad groups to be highly effective, without increasing overall spend. This was achieved through a highly nuanced targeting strategy, delivered based on very specific search queries and user types.
The Results of Effective B2B Lead Generation Ads
With Common Ground’s help, Veolia managed to reduce its CPA (cost-per-acquisition) by 93% while simultaneously increasing its clickthrough rates by 26%.
This was a huge difference that had a positive impact on conversion rates, allowing Veolia to nearly quadruple its number of leads.
Partnering with the Right People
It’s often impossible to do everything in-house, and it’s also often better to leave certain tasks to the experts. Agencies highly experienced in PPC ads and lead generation have tons of knowledge to draw on to executive campaigns to the highest level.
Common Ground has created tailored campaigns using multi-platform, holistic B2B marketing strategies that convert at high rates like Veolia’s.
How Common Ground Can Help You Maximise B2B Lead Generation With Lead Form Ads
We believe the key to successful B2B lead generation ads is continual analysis and refinement. This results in lower costs per lead and increased lead quality, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
Our team has a proven track record of developing lead generation strategies that convert, with no extra ad spend required, and no wasted budget.
It’s all about knowing what solutions you need, when to use them, and how to execute them well – which is where dedicated PPC specialists are invaluable.
We can support your PPC lead generation efforts, whether you’re starting from scratch, or looking for help and refinement.
Common Ground doesn’t believe in the “one and done” approach. We’re your partner in lead generation and work with you to implement tracking, and marketing changes and provide continual data analysis. SEO doesn’t stand still and neither do we.
To achieve your high-quality leads with a trusted partner of B2B businesses, get in touch with Common Ground and increase your B2B lead generation ad’s effectiveness.