How to Create a LinkedIn Lead Generation Form

Tired of directing people to a clunky landing page, only to have them drop off before filling out a form? LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms solve that by capturing contact details directly within the LinkedIn app or website, making it incredibly simple for interested professionals to connect with your business. This guide offers a comprehensive walkthrough, showing you exactly how to create a high-performing Lead Gen Form from scratch, plus tips to help you turn those new leads into loyal customers.

What Are LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms and Why Use Them?

In short, a Lead Gen Form is a native LinkedIn ad feature that attaches to your campaigns. When a user clicks your ad's call-to-action (CTA) button, instead of being whisked away to an external website, a form pops up directly on their screen. The brilliant part? It's pre-filled with information from their LinkedIn profile, like their name, email address, job title, and company.

This simple change has a massive impact. It dramatically reduces friction, which is the main reason conversion rates for these forms are often much higher than for traditional landing pages. Users can submit their information with just a couple of clicks, without ever leaving the platform.

Here are the primary advantages:

• Higher Conversion Rates: By removing extra steps and page-load times, you make it easier for people to say yes. The process is smooth and almost effortless.
• Better Lead Quality: The information is pulled directly from a user's professional profile, meaning you get accurate job titles, company names, and contact details. This is a world away from the junk data that sometimes clogs up website forms.
• Optimized for Mobile: With most social media access happening on phones, this is a big deal. LinkedIn's native forms are designed to work perfectly on mobile devices, providing a seamless user experience.

Before You Build: Crafting an Irresistible Offer

A Lead Gen Form is just a tool, its success hinges entirely on the value you offer in exchange for someone's contact information. Before you even open LinkedIn Campaign Manager, you need to have a clear, compelling offer that your target audience truly wants. This is the foundation of a successful lead generation campaign.

Ask yourself: what problem does my audience have that I can help solve? Your offer should be the answer. Some of the most effective offers for LinkedIn include:

• E-books or Whitepapers: In-depth guides that establish your expertise on a specific industry topic.
• Webinar Registrations: Access to a live or on-demand training session where you share valuable insights.
• Checklists or Templates: Practical tools that help users accomplish a specific task more efficiently.
• Case Studies: Demonstrations of how your product or service helped a client achieve tangible results.
• Free Consultations or Demos: A direct line to your sales team for prospects who are further down the buying funnel.

The key is to match the offer to the audience. If you're targeting marketing managers, a template for a content calendar might be perfect. If you're targeting C-suite executives, a high-level whitepaper on industry trends will likely perform better. Your offer dictates everything from your ad copy to the questions you'll ask on your form, so get this right first.

How to Create a LinkedIn Lead Generation Form: A Step-by-Step Guide

Once you have a fantastic offer ready to go, it's time to build the campaign. Follow these steps to get your Lead Gen Form live.

Step 1: Get into LinkedIn Campaign Manager

Your journey begins in LinkedIn Campaign Manager. To find it, click the "Advertising" button on the top right of your LinkedIn homepage. If you haven't advertised before, you'll need to create an ad account first. Once you're in the dashboard, you're ready to build.

Step 2: Create Your Campaign and Choose Your Objective

Click "Create Campaign" and start a new campaign group if you wish, or add to an existing one. On the next screen, you'll be asked to choose your campaign objective. This is the most important step in the initial setup. For this purpose, you absolutely must select Lead Generation. Selecting anything else will not give you the option to create a Lead Gen Form.

Step 3: Define Your Audience

This is where LinkedIn's deep professional dataset shines. You can narrow down your target audience with incredible precision. You can target users based on:

• Company (Size, industry, name)
• Job Experience (Job function, seniority, job title, years of experience)
• Education (Degrees, fields of study, schools)
• Demographics (Age, gender, geography)
• Interests &, Traits

Take your time here. A well-defined audience ensures your excellent offer gets in front of the right people. You can also upload lists of target companies or use lookalike audiences based on your existing customers to expand your reach.

Step 4: Pick Your Ad Format

LinkedIn offers several ad formats that support Lead Gen Forms, including Single Image Ad, Carousel Ad, and Video Ad. The best choice depends on your creative assets and your offer.
For example, a video ad works incredibly well for promoting a webinar, while a carousel ad can showcase different features of an e-book or report.

Step 5: The Fun Part: Creating the Lead Gen Form

After you've set up your audience, format, placement, and budget, you'll get to the ad creation section. At the bottom of this creative setup process, you'll see an option for a "Lead gen form." Click "Create form." This is where you actually build the form itself.

You'll be taken to the form creator interface, which is broken down into four parts:

1. Form Details

This section is for your internal use and headlines.

• Form Name: Give your form a descriptive name for your own records, like "Q3 Marketing Webinar Form" or "E-book Download Form - Tech CEOs."
• Offer Headline: This is a powerful headline shown at the top of the form (up to 60 characters). Make it count! It should clearly state the benefit of your offer. For example, "Download Your Free Social Media ROI Guide."
• Offer Details: Here, you can add a bit more context in a bulleted or paragraph format (up to 1,500 characters, but keep it brief). Reinforce the value and tell people what they're getting.
• Privacy Policy URL: This is mandatory. You must link to your company's privacy policy page. You can also add custom privacy policy text if needed.

2. Lead Details and Custom Questions

Here you choose the information you want to collect. LinkedIn lets you request up to 12 fields.

The default, pre-filled fields are what make these forms so powerful. You can request info like:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Email Address
• Job Title
• Company Name
• Profile URL

If you need more specific information, you can add custom questions. These won't be pre-filled, so use them sparingly. You can add up to three custom questions, choosing from multiple-choice or open-ended text entry. This is useful for qualifying leads, for instance, asking about "Company Size" or "Biggest Business Challenge."

3. Confirmation

This is the "Thank You" screen users see after submitting the form.

• Message: A short message (up to 300 characters) that confirms their submission was successful. Something like, "Thanks! We've sent the e-book to your inbox."
• Landing Page URL &, Call-to-Action: This is where you deliver your offer. Provide a link to your resource (like the downloadable PDF) and choose an appropriate button CTA, such as "Download Now" or "Go to Website."

Once you've configured these three sections, you can add hidden fields for tracking purposes if you wish. Then hit "Create," and your form is ready to be attached to your ad.

Best Practices for High-Converting Lead Gen Forms

Building the form is half the battle. Now let's focus on a few pointers to maximize your results.

• Less is More: Only ask for the information you absolutely need to qualify a lead. Every field you add increases the chance a person will abandon the form. Stick to the pre-filled fields as much as possible. A name, email, and job title are often more than enough.
• Compelling Copy from Start to Finish: Your ad copy, form headline, and details should all work together to create a seamless message. The headline needs to grab attention, the copy needs to promise value, and the form itself should feel like the final, easy step to get that value.
• A/B Test Everything: Don't just set it and forget it. Test different versions of your forms. Does asking for one extra custom question tank your conversion rate? Does a different headline perform better? Test your ad creative, audience targeting, and form setup to find the winning combination.
• Provide Immediate Value: Don't make people wait. When they click 'submit', deliver the promised asset instantly on the thank you page. Meeting expectations at this stage builds trust right away.

What Happens Next? Managing Your Flow of New Leads

Congratulations, your leads are coming in! But where do they go? By default, you can download a CSV file of your leads directly from Campaign Manager.

While this works, it's a manual process, and speed is everything in lead follow-up. The best practice is to connect your LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms to your CRM or email marketing platform. LinkedIn offers native integrations with many major platforms (like HubSpot and Salesforce), but you can also use a tool like Zapier to connect LinkedIn to virtually any other system you use.

Automating this flow means a new lead is instantly sent to your sales team or added to a nurture sequence, allowing for fast, systematic follow-up while the lead is still hot.

Final Thoughts

Creating a LinkedIn Lead Gen Form is a fairly direct technical process, but its ultimate success comes down to a strong strategic foundation: a valuable offer targeting the right audience, backed by compelling creative. By using native forms, you remove conversion roadblocks and make it simple for your ideal customers to connect with you on the platform where they already do business.

While paid ads are a fantastic tool for generating leads, they perform best when supported by a strong, consistent organic presence that builds trust and authority with your audience. We actually built Postbase to make managing that organic presence feel effortless. With a clear visual calendar, you can plan and schedule all your LinkedIn content and posts for other platforms at once, analyze what's working, and engage with your community, giving your ad campaigns the solid brand foundation they need to truly shine.