480 qualified HR director leads in 90 days using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms

The company sold workforce analytics software to HR directors and CHROs at companies with 500 or more employees. Their primary paid acquisition channel was Google Search, where they were bidding on competitive HR software keywords at $28–45 per click — and converting those clicks at under 1% on their website, producing leads at $3,200–4,500 each. LinkedIn Ads had been attempted but abandoned after 60 days due to high cost-per-click and poor website conversion rates.

The core problem wasn't LinkedIn's CPCs — it was the landing page drop-off. LinkedIn users are browsing in a professional context but not necessarily in buying mode; asking them to leave LinkedIn, load a website, fill out a 7-field form, and submit their details produces predictably poor conversion rates. The solution was to eliminate that friction entirely.

We rebuilt their LinkedIn Ads strategy around Lead Gen Forms as the exclusive conversion mechanism for cold and warm audiences. Lead Gen Forms pre-populate from the user's LinkedIn profile — name, job title, company, email — reducing the cognitive and mechanical effort of converting to a single tap. For their HR director audience, who receive dozens of prospecting emails and form-fill requests weekly, this frictionless experience produced dramatically different conversion behaviour.

Audience architecture was rebuilt around three core segments: HR directors and CHROs at companies with 500–5,000 employees in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, and Singapore; retargeting audiences of Company Page engagers and video viewers; and lookalike audiences based on their existing customer list uploaded via LinkedIn's matched audiences feature.

Creative strategy used a value-first approach: the ad offered a free Workforce Analytics Benchmarking Report (a genuine piece of research AppLabx helped them produce) rather than a product demo request. This dramatically lowered the psychological barrier to form completion — prospects were opting in for a valuable resource, not committing to a sales call.

Form completion rate came in at 13% in the first 30 days — more than 10× higher than their previous website conversion rate. Cost-per-lead was $41, compared to $3,200+ from Google Search. In 90 days, 480 qualified leads had been generated — HR directors and CHROs at companies matching their ICP criteria, verified by LinkedIn profile data pre-populated in the form.

Lead-to-demo conversion was 22% — lower than their warm inbound rate but significantly higher than cold outbound, as form completers had demonstrated intent through their engagement with the ad content. The benchmarking report follow-up sequence, which AppLabx also designed, accounted for a significant portion of those conversions.

The campaign continues to run as an ongoing engagement. Month four produced 201 leads at $38 CPL as audience learning matured and creative variants were optimised.