Dive Brief:

• LinkedIn is making it easier for businesses to generate leads from sponsored content on mobile devices with its new Lead Gen Forms feature, as described in a blog post made available to Marketing Dive in advance of its publication.
• When someone submits a Lead Gen Form, marketers receive their name and contact info, company name, seniority, job title, location, and more, all derived from that prospect’s LinkedIn profile. Once someone submits a form, marketers can send an in-app “thank you” page with links to content or company web properties.
• Sponsored content campaigns with Lead Gen Forms will initially only be available on the mobile app, but LinkedIn will expand it to desktops campaigns in the next few months. The feature will be added to sponsored InMail campaigns later this year.

Dive Insight:

The news comes as Twitter is pulling back from its direct response ad business, killing off lead generation campaigns and considering other cutbacks. Business-to-business marketing was never fully in Twitter's wheelhouse and with its recent retreat, it is smart of LinkedIn, which is fully focused on B2B, to move quickly to boost its offerings. 

Registration forms are the typical way leads are generated online, but mobile devices — especially smartphones with very limited screen real estate — make forms clunky and difficult to the point of near uselessness. Simply asking for information via a form introduces friction into the lead gen process, but anything that either autofills form fields, or in the case of LinkedIn’s new feature just allows someone to automatically send their data, removes that friction and eliminates a key roadblock for generating mobile leads.

“Lead Gen Forms provide a frictionless way to reach out to customers. Within a matter of minutes, one can create a campaign and start generating quality leads,” said Fareed Raja, digital channel manager at Jack Welch Management Institute, a leading online education institution, in the blog post. “We've received great feedback from our admissions team as well as the prospects themselves.”

The blog post pointed out that 80% of LinkedIn member engagement with sponsored content happens on smartphones, so streamlining lead gen could improve the success of those campaigns.