LinkedIn is one of the most overlooked and undervalued platforms for marketing and lead generation, especially for B2B purposes. While this platform is often overlooked by marketers, there are some misconceptions about its nature and its value as a lead-generating machine.
LinkedIn offers a large network of active, engaged users – it is no longer just a place to network and upload a resume. With 500 million users and 9 million business profiles from over 200 countries, the network teems with opportunities for those that seek highly targeted lead generation. If you’re searching for a micro-demographic and have targeted communication efforts, LinkedIn Outreach offers a good chance at high conversion rates.
On LinkedIn, you’re able to target your audience on a much deeper level — including geographic location, current company, past company, industry, profile language, non-profit interests, and school. For example, a digital marketing provider can use LinkedIn to key in on specific types of business in a small geographic area. If you’re searching for Denver businesses owners with companies of less than 500 employees, LinkedIn can be extremely useful.
Read on below for our best tips and tricks when using LinkedIn for your B2B lead generation. Remember – there’s no silver bullet for LinkedIn lead generation, oftentimes it takes one or more strategies to see results.
- Optimize your profile with SEO in mind. We know that ‘optimizing’ can mean different things, but for the purposes of LinkedIn, we mean tailoring your profile or page so that content is optimized for searches. If you’re a digital marketing in Denver, be sure to include a longer-tail keyword such as ‘digital marketing Denver’. By including that geographic designation, you’ll be included a much smaller, more specific list of businesses and pages when people seek out your services. While it may seem like a waste of time, fill out your entire profile and continue to nurture it as time goes on.
- Engage with your audience and the network at large. It’s important to keep your posts practical and inviting. You need not write new content every day or every week – you can always share interesting content. However, video creation, writing articles, creating slide-share presentations and offering white papers or ebooks will always boost engagement and with LinkedIn’s algorithms, you’re also more likely to appear in users’ feeds. Join industry groups and don’t be afraid to post or respond to conversations. Post relevant and thoughtful questions while diversifying forms of content.
- Don’t become a spammer. Manager and C-level executives on the network often report being swarmed with requests from people who just want to sell them something. As a result, many potentially valuable prospects have begun to ignore a majority of messages and interactions, only making it more difficult for you to connect and reap the benefits. Instead of reaching out to a few dozen individuals, curate a very small list of potential targets and create tailored messages and campaigns to reach them. Instead of approaching people cold, focus on relationship-building, sharing content and engaging in conversations on posts. B2B outreach means playing the long game rather than searching for instant gratification. When reaching out, mention a blog or a newsletter that led you to them. You can also discover leads on LinkedIn and then reach out on Facebook, Twitter or simply via email if possible.
- Become familiar with regular and direct sponsored content on the platform. Sponsored content publishes updates to targeted users who aren’t already established visitors or followers. While sponsored content doesn’t sound all that game-changing, LinkedIn offers very specific and detailed options for targeting compared to other popular platforms. LinkedIn takes sponsored content a step further with direct sponsored content, which we will explain further below.
- Sponsored content on LinkedIn is an update published on a company page, and can also take the form of a banner at the top of a page.
- Direct sponsored content doesn’t appear on your company’s homepage – it’s targeted right at your designated audience. It’s a much more customized and targeted form of sponsored content that enables you to personalize and test the messages you’re sending out to your target audience. Direct sponsored content most often appears in a newsfeed and also in the sidebar (mobile users will not see the sidebar content!). Direct sponsored content can be useful when you want to run variations of a campaign geared toward different audiences.
- Use Sponsored InMail for a direct, personalized message. The process for creating such personalized and highly targeted messages is simple, and LinkedIn has a user-friendly dashboard to organize various campaign efforts. When creating a sponsored InMail campaign, be sure to keep the messaging about the recipient, keep it personal, and keep it brief. Also – use hyperlinks and be sure not to ask too much of the recipient. Build trust, instead, by making it easy for them to say “yes” by offering assistance, knowledge or opportunity.
- Direct followers to your landing pages. Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn doesn’t restrict the reach of posts that lead people off of the platform. However, be sure to frame your posts and updates as being educational. Last but not least, LinkedIn’s algorithm now prioritizes video. Video is among the most shared content so this should already be part of your content strategy. When publishing a post or report, get creative by coupling that content with a quick, off-the-cuff video.
- Go Deeper with the LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Sales Navigator was designed to automate and enhance an advertiser’s ability to track and communicate with their LinkedIn leads. It can help identify decision-makers, learn more about existing leads, and even provide recommendations for new leads to scout. You can even add a Sales Navigator extension to your web browser to automatically find and display the LinkedIn profile information associated with any email address you can mouseover.
- Identify your top-performing content via LinkedIn analytics. Digging into your data is a must-do if you want to compete on LinkedIn. For example, do you know which types of posts gain the most traction? Which pieces of content score the most clicks to your lead magnets and landing pages? Just a quick glance at your numbers will clearly reveal what is working well and what kind of messaging you need to abandon. Tweaking your messaging and content on a regular basis is important if you’re serious about generating leads on LinkedIn.
- Integrate with your CRM for added simplicity. Depending on what platform you’re using, LinkedIn might allow you to directly integrate with your CRM for lead gen ads submissions. LinkedIn stores all the completed data for 90 days in Campaign Manager, then automatically deletes it. By connecting to your CRM, you can ensure that no valuable data is lost and a fast follow-up from the sales team can take place. There’s nearly no lag time between when the user fills out the form to when they’re now part of whatever follow-up sequence any other user would be after filling out the form directly on your site.
Time and time again, LinkedIn has proven extremely useful for B2B marketers. A HubSpot study found that LinkedIn had a 2.74% visitor-to-lead conversion rate, making it nearly three times more effective than its closest competitors, Facebook and Twitter. When you consider that the cost per lead is lower and that the leads are more qualified than other platforms, its a no-brainer to implement a lead generation strategy using the platform. Next, think about highly targeted lead generation.
If you want to get better results with your LinkedIn lead generation campaigns, you’re going to need a solid strategy. The tips above will not work alone – you must form a more cohesive, integrated strategy.
Please contact us today to craft a winning LinkedIn Outreach formula with us!