How a classic B2B company generated over 400 real leads via LinkedIn

Leadvolution partnered with a mid-sized engineering company (one of the global market leaders of its industry) to create a sustainable lead generation project via LinkedIn. Within just six weeks after the first workshop, the campaign was launched and has been successfully running for months and months (with occasional pauses in between to avoid lead overdelivering). Below is the brief overview of the project and results:

Campaign Information

Campaign duration: 10 months with occasional pauses  

Geographical distribution: more than 20 countries 

Media budget: 8,900 €

Impressions: 190,000 

Clicks: 2,700 

CTR: 1.41% (Global LinkedIn Benchmark: 0.35%) 

Generated Leads: more than 400 

Conversion rate: 15% (average B2B websites: 0.5-1.0%) 

Cost per lead: about 21 €

Lead quality: The sales acceptance rate was approximately 50%. Among other desired qualities, the leads contained contacts from different countries including eight of the world’s largest companies, matching the target group criteria defined by the client.  

Noted that the data above results from just one campaign, and all the currently active campaigns are generating approximately 10 leads per day. If you are interested in a similar pilot project, please contact us.  

This case study represents an average result we typically generate for our clients. It is important to point out, however, in order to achieve this kind of outcome, that the project must be done correctly from the entire setup to target group selection to appropriate conversion framework. 

If one mistake is made in the chain, it can negatively affect the result of a campaign—and sometimes there will be no result at all. To avoid such mishap, here are some of the factors you should be paying attention to.

There is a common belief across the B2B mechanical industry that the target groups are not digitally active or reachable. However, recent concrete campaign figures show the opposite is true – even older target groups on Facebook and LinkedIn provide high and attractive reach. 

For small and highly niche target groups (e.g., pharmaceutical packaging machinery, paper machinery, or CNC software) the data also confirms the same reality. Today, social media is a great place for companies to reach out to hundreds of thousands of people in the relevant positions across the world.

Unlike the more traditional digital marketing channels such as Google Ads – in which companies could only be contacted by customers who are already aware of the brands’ reputation and actively seek out for its products or services – social media ads allow companies to target a large number of prospects who may have not yet known about the business.

Therefore, it is particularly useful for selling a newly launched product. Through Facebook and LinkedIn, companies can communicate and engage directly with the customers regardless of their prior awareness of the brand in a scalable structure.

Would you like to know how big your individual audience reach is on LinkedIn and Facebook? Feel free to contact us for a free expert call. 

Many traditional companies also believe that using social media channels to reach out to potential customers sends out superficial signals, making the recipients perceive the company as untrustworthy. This is simply untrue.

Here is a quick reality check: Let’s say you find a good and legitimate solution to your business problem via LinkedIn or Facebook. Would you not want to find out more about it just because you came across the information on social media? Probably not. Nevertheless, for a company to successfully use social media to gain new customers, both the ads messages and formats must be well thought-through.

Avoid appearing as ‘funny’ is one recommendation.  Instead, addressing the customers’ problems and opportunities you are bringing as clearly and concretely as possible has proven to be successful.  

The communication approaches of most B2B companies, however, look different from this and are unfit for social media. They typically revolve around answering questions like “who are we?”, what kind of product are we offering?”, “what can they do?”, and so on.

Employing this kind of communication framework is the reason why many lead generation campaigns failed, as it requires too much mental effort from the customers to find out why the product or service being advertised is really for them. Because the average attention span of a social media user is merely between one to five seconds, they rarely step out of their comfort zone and always scroll pass any post that is seen as ‘too complicated’. 

As a result, the click through rate of most B2B companies stay within 0.5% and even lower, and they continue to struggle with lead acquisition.  

Leadvolution has created Rethink180 ™ to solve this particular problem. With this method, you can quickly create ad texts and visuals that are proven to achieve 50 to 300% higher click through rates. By applying Rethink180™ on top of the information that is relevant to the customers, you can generate sustainable interest without using intrusive tricks like click baiting that is damaging your online reputation.

While companies continue to spend a lot of money on elaborate landing pages, they are often not the most suitable destination to send people to. By redirecting the customers away from the platform that they are currently on (and comfortable with), companies are forcing them to re-orient themselves to a new interface and navigation flow – adding unnecessary pain points to the conversion funnel.

LinkedIn and Facebook provide solutions to solve this issue.  With features like Lead Ads, Canvas Ads, Chatbots Ads, etc., companies can directly request information from customers in just one click. By incorporating these tools in lead generation strategies for our clients, we were able to reach conversion rates of 5 to 20%, without having to create or modify a landing page.

These lead capturing tools present an exciting opportunity for running a pilot project. Real results can be generated within a few weeks without having to alter the current setup. 

It requires companies very little to no effort to coordinate between teams and departments to get the project up and running – another huge advantage worth highlighting during internal discussions.  Feel free to contact me on LinkedIn for a free expert talk on how such a pilot could look like for your product. 

In the daily business of our customers, a typical sale situation is usually the following: well-paid sales staff work on very few and specific requests – mostly aiming at creating an individual offer. When you inject too many leads into this setup, the sales team often do not have a way to deal with the influx and become overwhelmed by the list. As a consequence, potential successful results from lead generation campaigns then evaporate and vanish.

Due to this reason, we recommend companies to setup a so-called “pre-sales unit”, where the incoming leads are once again filtered based on their intents through series of questions. After the process, the team then only forward the real or “hot leads” to the sales department.

If you have any issue with setting up an efficient pre-sales process, we are happy to support you. Our trail and tested structure will help transform your leads into actual sales.