In this book, Martin shares the best LinkedIn lead generation strategies for B2B companies looking to scale.
You will learn how to:
LinkedIn can be an excellent tool for expanding your bottom line. It is especially helpful when getting new prospects and generating leads. Even manually maximizing the platform’s features can deliver great results. Once you get the hang of the features, you can use LinkedIn automation software to scale up your efforts.
While you can use LinkedIn in various ways, your primary goal is LinkedIn lead automation, where you use the platform to gather qualified leads. As a bonus, the same steps that help you generate leads will also improve your brand reputation. For example, publishing regular LinkedIn posts on industry-related topics can highlight your expertise in your field.
Whether you want to create a formal campaign on LinkedIn or just learn strategies to generate leads, the following tips will prove useful. These simple steps will grow your audience base on the platform and enable you to use a LinkedIn scraper to transfer those leads to your other software, such as email marketing.
Before you start sending LinkedIn connection requests or hosting LinkedIn events, make sure to optimize your profile. Remember that most people you reach out to or interact with will look at your profile before deciding to reply. Think of your profile as the first impression you make, and that’s all the more reason to ensure every detail is in the right place.
Start by choosing a profile picture. Don’t leave your image blank. Statistics from LinkedIn indicate that having a profile picture increases your profile views 21 times and your connections requests by nine.
As for the picture itself, use the following checklist for choosing the perfect photo:
By following the checklist above, you convey that you are a friendly professional. The smile may seem like a small detail, but it helps you potentially connect with prospects because a smile will appear more inviting.
The next item to look into is your background image. It may even be worth spending $5 or $10 on a custom image from a freelance designer. If you have the appropriate software and some skills, you can also make your own background image. The key is to ensure that your background image is unique, professional, and relates to your industry. It should convey or connect with your products or services.
Your next step is to write the perfect headline for your profile. Your headline should be engaging and accurate.
The summary on your profile should be compelling but concise. Highlight your industry expertise and skills. Be sure to include your brand identity. Try to fit keywords into the summary, but only if you can do so naturally.
Don’t forget to fill out the other parts of your LinkedIn profile as well. This includes:
As you complete all the details in your profile, include keywords whenever possible.
LinkedIn lets you claim a custom URL. Create a URL of your choice that’s easy to recall, like your business name. Using a custom URL will dramatically improve your professional image.
Before going further into your LinkedIn campaigns, make sure you know your target audience. You hopefully have this information already since it will be necessary for all of your marketing efforts. You will know your target audience through prospect personas, data on demographics, or any other form that makes sense to you.
By knowing your target audience, you can reduce wasted effort. Even when you automate LinkedIn outreach, you will still have to deal with LinkedIn connection request limits. After all, those restrictions are imposed by the platform, and trying to get past them could flag your account.
By identifying your audience, you ensure that you don’t waste your limited connection requests or messages on people that won’t convert into business prospects.
Rather than a daily limit for LinkedIn connections, there is a weekly limit of 100 per week. Assuming your account is up and running, you should try to take full advantage of this limit without exceeding it.
Outbound Pro automatically keeps you within the LinkedIn limits, so your account doesn’t get flagged. You don’t have to worry about tracking the limits, as our best LinkedIn automation software handles it for you.
While you can use templates for your connection requests, it’s not advisable to send the same template message to everyone. Instead, find a good marketing campaign template that includes personalization, which is crucial for improving the response rate.
Do not underestimate the importance of personalization. Sending messages that include relevant information about the prospect’s position makes them 71 percent more likely to respond.
Consider further personalizing the message by mentioning a connection you have with the prospect. If they interacted with your LinkedIn event post or LinkedIn group management, make mention of it. If you attended the same third-party LinkedIn event, bring that up as well. Mention common connections if you are second or third-degree connections on the platform.
Outbound Pro allows for hyper-personalized messaging while using the vast library of templates. Take advantage of various personalization tags, including industry, name, and so much more.
While you can only use LinkedIn to send 100 connection requests per week, LinkedIn can’t limit the emails you send. Use a LinkedIn email scraper to gather email addresses from LinkedIn. By utilizing emails, you can get around LinkedIn messaging limits. With the help of cold email templates, this can be as easy and personalized as your messages within LinkedIn.
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Remember that the goal of LinkedIn outreach automation isn’t just to connect with people. You also want to push them along the sales funnel. So, you will need to follow up after making your connection request. After a prospect accepts your request, you can automate LinkedIn messages to send a “thank you” message.
Then, wait four or five days to make your sales pitch. From there, you can send occasional reminders.
You can send follow-ups on other channels as well. Multi-channel marketing automation from Outbound Pro lets you set up multi-channel marketing campaigns with as many steps as you want. Start with a LinkedIn message, then follow it up with a Twitter DM or email. This lets you contact prospects on their preferred platform, increasing the response rate.
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We’ve mentioned that LinkedIn limits connections, and there are other LinkedIn daily limits to be mindful of. In addition to using multi-channel marketing, a simple way to get around these is to use multiple accounts for your LinkedIn campaigns. Each account you use multiplies your LinkedIn limits.
While you don’t want to limit efforts to just one account, you also don’t want to make fake accounts, as these will hurt your company image in the long run. Instead, the best practice is to have various members of your team create accounts. Remember that if LinkedIn suspects you of having a fake account, a government ID will be requested from you. If you can’t provide it, your account will be banned.
The idea of using your team members’ accounts is rather easy for large companies. But what about smaller companies looking for growth? If you and your team can’t create enough accounts, consider talking to other people in your network. You may be able to borrow or even rent your friends’ accounts.
No matter how many LinkedIn accounts you set up, make sure to follow the tips mentioned above regarding your profile image, summary, and other profile elements.
If you have a separate company profile on LinkedIn and a personal account, you can maximize these individually. Invite your first-degree connections to follow your company page. You can easily do this with the Page admin tools by selecting “Invite connections.”
The “My Company” tab is a relatively new feature from LinkedIn, but it can be incredibly helpful for expanding your reach. You can activate your employees and give them a voice for your brand.
In addition to making regular LinkedIn posts, you can maximize the platform by regularly posting articles. This will highlight your industry expertise and ensure you stay relevant. It will also give you more opportunities to interact with people, as you are likely to see some comments and reactions to your articles. Remember that every time you are active on your account, you show up on your connections’ feeds.
Ideally, aim for at least two to three articles per month. The key is consistency. If you are able to deliver articles more frequently, that would mean more exposure for your business.
Creating articles on LinkedIn is just another aspect of your content marketing strategy. It should go along with creating blog posts for your website and guest blogging on other websites as well.
As you create your articles, make sure that they are high-quality. They should be professional and provide value or useful information to readers. Ideally, articles boost engagement and lead to discussions. The best articles will also highlight your expertise.
If you don’t have time to write articles for LinkedIn yourself, don’t worry. You can easily outsource this task. You can hire a content writing agency or freelance writers. The idea is to generate content for LinkedIn articles just like you would blog posts for your website.
To increase your LinkedIn account’s activity, take advantage of the articles published on your blog as well. Use a LinkedIn post template for easy sharing of those articles on LinkedIn. You can also use social media post templates to do the same on other social media platforms.
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While you post articles on LinkedIn only occasionally, you should get in the habit of posting status updates every single day. This is a crucial part of keeping your profile active.
With some creativity, you never run out of ideas on what to post every day. Share industry trends, company achievements or news, or other relevant content. Remember that your social media post schedule can also include links to blog articles or references to your company from other places online.
Try to include various types of content with your free social media post scheduler. There should be links to articles or blogs. Make use of statements, images, and infographics. Keep things engaging.
As you set up your LinkedIn post scheduler, limit the sales-oriented posts to about 30 percent. While these are sales-oriented posts, they shouldn’t be overly salesy. Some good examples include:
The other 70 percent of your posts should be related to the industry as a whole. Include information on news or participate in community discussions.
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When relevant, include hashtags in your LinkedIn posts. Hashtags help you reach more people since it is common for LinkedIn users to search for relevant hashtags. Try to keep it to three to five hashtags only.
The idea of posting on LinkedIn every day may seem overwhelming for some. The good news is that scheduling a LinkedIn post is easy with the right LinkedIn automation tool. Set aside one day a week, every other week, or even once a month to plan all of your posts. Use your social media post scheduler for easy set-up of your planned posts. You can also plan and create the posts easily with social media posts templates.
Outbound Pro lets you schedule posts on LinkedIn and other social media platforms. Save time by connecting multiple accounts to publish customized posts with the content, emojis, hashtags, and visuals of your choice. Outbound Pro lets you do all of your social media post scheduling from a single tool.
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Your LinkedIn campaign is all about getting your name out there and finding more prospects. Groups are an incredibly useful way to do this. Remember that you can use groups to find potential prospects and send them connection requests or messages. But you can also use groups to find common ground with people you message. Simply being in the same industry-related LinkedIn group can be enough to encourage some people to respond to your requests.
Start by joining relevant groups. Look for groups related to your industry, profession, and interests. If your target audience is in a different industry, you can join groups related to that industry as well.
Keep in mind that joining groups is also crucial for sending personalized LinkedIn connection requests. If you are in the same group as a potential connection, you can send a connection request even if you aren’t second or third-degree connections. This means that joining groups will dramatically open up the potential scale of your LinkedIn email automation.
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Joining groups isn’t only for the purpose of sending and personalizing messages. You also want to engage in the groups you are part of. You can post and share articles. Like, comment, and engage in discussions.
The more you engage, the more visible you will be. This can help you get organic connection requests. It will also increase the chances of getting responses to your requests or messages. Estimates show that engaging in LinkedIn groups will multiply your profile views by four.
You can also create your own LinkedIn groups to get similar benefits of joining a group. Your own LinkedIn group will showcase your leadership skills and highlight your positive reputation in the community. You also get access to features like LinkedIn group messages, plus the ability to make all group-related decisions. LinkedIn group management puts you in complete control.
And once you figure out how to grow LinkedIn groups, you will notice the benefits of managing a group increase. Just be sure that you have the time to invest in managing a group before creating one. If not, stick to joining and engaging with existing groups.
Outbound Pro automates the process of getting leads from LinkedIn groups, whether or not you created them.
Just like groups, LinkedIn events are a crucial part of your strategy. Tips for using events are very similar to those used for groups. You can create your own event or join existing ones. Use your LinkedIn automation tools for automated LinkedIn messaging for connections attending the event.
If you create an event, make sure you promote and oversee all aspects of it. You can make pre-event LinkedIn posts, which will keep people engaged until the day of your actual event.
We’ve already mentioned that you can use a LinkedIn profile scraper to get email addresses from LinkedIn. But this is far from the only data you should be gathering if you want to make the most of the platform’s ability to grow your bottom line.
In addition to email addresses, you can easily scrape data such as names, companies, and industries from LinkedIn. A CRM sync LinkedIn feature makes gathering this data a breeze. Outbound Pro, for example, enables you to export phone, email, and other useful information easily.
Outbound Pro's CRM sync also uses data from your CRM program to send personalized LinkedIn messages. Outbound Pro automatically fills in the LinkedIn message templates with the data from your .csv file.
When you execute your LinkedIn marketing strategies successfully, it is crucial to gather data on those efforts. Look for a program that makes it easy to view and use your LinkedIn analytics dashboard.
Outbound Pro goes beyond the built-in LinkedIn campaign analytics, giving you real-time performance information. You can view replies, leads generated, acceptance rate, and more.
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Some of the LinkedIn marketing methods can be time-consuming. Using LinkedIn to grow your prospects, leads, and ultimately, your business will take time, but consistent effort will pay off in the long run. With a LinkedIn automation agency, your efforts will go a longer way. But even if you choose to follow our tips manually, the key is to be consistent and diligent.
While LinkedIn is an important tool for business growth, it is not the only effective tool. Successful companies use a multi-channel marketing approach. Social media platforms, email marketing, SEO, PPC, and display ads have proven effective as well. Combined efforts in using various marketing channels will improve your brand visibility and grow your business.
LinkedIn offers an incredible opportunity to reach more prospects and move them along your sales funnel. Start by setting up your profile and familiarizing yourself with the LinkedIn limit on connections. Make the most of LinkedIn events and groups while regularly creating LinkedIn posts and articles.
Though you can follow most of the above tips manually, you will save time if you can automate LinkedIn processes. Outbound Pro can do this for you, particularly automated LinkedIn lead generation.
Schedule a demo to get a better idea of all of the features you get with this LinkedIn message automation tool. Then, sign up for Outbound Pro to avail of a 7-day free trial without a credit card or other obligations.
