Benefits of Using LinkedIn Lead Gen Form vs. Marketo Form

[Megan_Rublee]

Hi Community! I am working with a third party on a paid social campaign that will be using a LinkedIn Lead Gen form. From your experience, what benefits do you see to using a LinkedIn Lead Gen form over a Marketo form? I am trying to weigh out the pros and cons of both forms and don't have much experience with LinkedIn Lead Gen forms. Thanks in advance for your input!

-Megan 

[Phillip_Wild]

The advantage lies in the audience you can reach with LinkedIn Lead Gen forms. You can't deploy a Marketo form in the LinkedIn feed, so you would need to, at best, have an ad with a link that leads to a landing page with your Marketo form.

Instead, you could use LinkedIn Lead Gen forms to gather leads with a lot less friction. Leads don't need to submit anywhere near as much information (since LinkedIn has it), and they don't need to leave the site. I haven't done this myself with LinkedIn, but if it's anything like how Facebook works, it's very effective.

Disadvantage is that it's quite expensive vs running regular ads on LinkedIn, I'm guessing. So you have to weigh up whether it's cheaper to...

1. Pay $x per lead via LinkedIn Lead Gen ads (likely $10+, depending on your industry and the competition)

2. Run a regular LinkedIn ad for $y linking out to your website, then lose 50% of those clicks (or whatever the percentage is) on your landing page due to people who bounce and can't be bothered filling in the form. 

Likely you will find that #1, when integrated into Marketo, will give you more qualified leads at a cheaper cost per lead.

So the choice is not really "do I use a LinkedIn Lead Gen form or a Marketo form?" it's more.....what will give me the cheapest and most qualified lead?  

[ChristinaZuniga]

Agree with everything Phillip Wild‌ mentioned.

One thing to note, if your attribution is tied to UTM parameters at all (like mine is) you can build those in Marketo (as a flow step when they fill out the form), like putting "LinkedIn Lead Gen form = is any" and then a change data value of "lead source" or "utm source" to LinkedIn.

[Amy_Goldfine]

I don't remember the exact numbers, but our ad conversion went up like CRAZY from LinkedIn ads when we integrated the ads into Marketo. It's super-low friction for them to fill out the form on LinkedIn, vs clicking over to your site. It's not too painful to set up in Marketo, and as Christina mentioned, you can build in fields like Lead Source and UTMs on the Marketo side (I believe that LinkedIn only pushes one standard value for Lead Source down and it might not align with your strategy, so we opted not to sync it).