Microsoft designs a new prospect journey on LinkedIn

For Microsoft Middle East and Africa, engaging legal & compliance professionals at enterprise businesses with its digital transformation services involved a trade-off. The business distributed whitepapers to help legal and compliance teams educate themselves about digital compliance - but found engagement dropping off due to a complex customer journey involving multiple landing pages. Working with LinkedIn to develop a new experience for its specialist audience transformed engagement - and dramatically reduced cost per lead (CPL).

The Challenge

Fixing the consideration journey first

The Microsoft team had created whitepapers to showcase how Microsoft's cloud services could help enterprises' legal & compliance teams cope with the compliance demands of digital transformation. This was in-depth content with a crucial role in educating prospects and driving consideration. The problem was that the series of landing pages that audiences had to navigate before downloading the whitepapers acted as a barrier to engagement.

"Once a user arrived on the landing page, they had to select the correct market, then the relevant industry they were in, before they got the opportunity to download anything," explains Hisham Othman, Social Command Centre Lead at Microsoft Middle East & Africa's creative agency Wunderman. "People on LinkedIn are looking for value and time saving process, which the campaign customer journey was not offering in an efficient way."

Aware that the user experience was frustrating audiences and driving up cost-per-lead (CPL), Microsoft worked closely with LinkedIn on using Lead Gen Forms to remove friction from the journey. "We monitored performance closely, and when we saw the campaign wasn't working, we moved to Lead Gen Forms," says Mohamed Salah, Digital & Social Media Marketing Manager for Microsoft Middle East & Africa. "The LinkedIn team was extremely collaborative in helping to make this happen. We have a lot of privacy requirements and they were really proactive in coming up with a solution that could meet those requirements."

Innovative targeting and creative optimisation to drive down CPL

Optimising the campaign to take full advantage of LinkedIn involved more than just simplifying the customer journey, however, Hisham and Mohamed also worked with the platform on developing new targeting approaches that could reach their target audience at scale - and reduce CPL.

"At first we were only targeting specific job titles in specific industries and this resulted in a really high cost per click as the available audience meeting these criteria was so small," says Hisham. "Working with LinkedIn, we tried different ways of reaching a relevant audience: combining industry and skills, using a custom list of target accounts, and then creating look-alike audience segments based on these approaches. This really helped to reduce our CPL and find the audience we need at scale."

Trialling different approaches to creative also played a key roles in optimising the campaign, with the team discovering that localised imagery drove greater engagement. Over three months these changes in approach has a dramatic impact on campaign effectiveness. Microsoft was able to treble the volume of leads generated from LinkedIn, while reducing CPL by 85% and securing earned media value of 65% through increased engagement with content. "The collaborative approach that we've developed with LinkedIn makes this a partnership that goes beyond just one campaign," says Mohamed. "We'll be applying the lessons we're learning to several other campaigns as well."

Results