Linkedin is the premier platform where sales professionals can boost and build their network to find better opportunities and grow their businesses with paying customers.
And because most users are inclined to build trusted relationships with other professionals, it makes perfect sense for companies and marketers to use LinkedIn to enhance B2B lead generation efforts.
Leveraging LinkedIn as a B2b lead generation tool enables you to use your account as a powerful marketing tool to promote and attract recruits and sales; creating warm leads into resources, to convert cold buyers into more sales you can also target the right job seekers for a position in their companies!
To do these things effectively and efficiently, below are steps and ways business owners such as yourself must take heed up so you can unleash the full power of LinkedIn for lead generation.
Develop a Sales Funnel
To ensure the success of your LinkedIn lead generation campaign, you need to set up a well-defined sales funnel.
From the different stages of the funnel, you need to determine how you plan to use LinkedIn to convert contacts into business leads, customers, and sales.
Here’s an example of a funnel that allows you to unleash the power of this social media platform and maximize your ability to generate revenue:
- Awareness – Informational online content that introduces your brand to your audience and increase organic reach.
- Consideration – Share customer testimonials and user reviews about your products and services to show their effectiveness.
- Decision – Publish case studies, white papers, and webinars to provide information on how your company can help them.
At this point, refer to the funnel to create focused marketing strategies that will fuel and push your LinkedIn lead generation strategy.
Optimize Your Company Page
At the very core of your LinkedIn marketing efforts is your company profile. This serves as the first impression potential leads will have about your business.
However, there’s more to optimizing your company page than just filling out all the blanks in your profile because everybody is doing that as well. It’s a matter of standing out and showing something on your profile guaranteed to encourage prospective leads into becoming customers.
Below are ways you can do this:
- Personalize your LinkedIn page – Make sure you have all the basic information including your job title, a great profile picture, tagline, and logo this will help you leverage your brand name and brand awareness to establish consistency across all platforms. Don’t forget your positioning statement in the description, the website address, location, industry, company size and services (Linkedin calls these specialties and they are absolutely essential). Last but not least, personalize your Linkedin page URL.
- Optimize your images – Scale your cover image (1128 x 191) and company logo (300 x 300) to their correct sizes and dimensions.
- Build Showcase Pages – Focus on the higher quality facets of your brand, such as recent accomplishments, accounts, and employee spotlight. Showcase Pages put a personal touch to your LinkedIn profile page about your business and build credibility to your audience. make sure to make the pages descriptive by entering more information about each.
- Join LinkedIn groups as a company – Search for relevant groups to reply to existing discussions or create new ones. By being active in these communities, you receive more visitors to your company profile.
Taking a proactive approach using your LinkedIn company page increases your visibility on LinkedIn, thus providing you with more opportunities to generate leads and revenue moving forward.
Share Text-Based Posts More Frequently with LinkedIn Users
It’s been proven that posts without links to posts have greater reach and than those with links.
The best way to maximize your marketing reach for potential leads is all-text content without links
LinkedIn doesn’t want users to leave the platform by clicking on the links. Therefore, it rewards posts that don’t contain links by showing them to more people.
At the same time, you need to create high-quality content to make the most out of this opportunity. People won’t bat an eye at them unless they’re engaging content.
For some ideas to help you write personalized content on LinkedIn that generates engagement, here are some of the best practices:
- Provide solutions to a problem that the majority of your target audience has
- Write a summarized version of the text for skimmers
- Share actual experiences you have regarding the topic so they can relate to your story
- Use hashtags to increase post reach and visibility
- Offer something for free, i.e., ebooks, guides, etc.!
Publish Relevant Content on LinkedIn Pulse
Pulse is LinkedIn’s answer to blogging. Instead of writing articles about trends and the latest news on a separate blog, you can just publish them on LinkedIn.
Aside from the ease of publishing posts on Pulse, you have a built-in audience ready to read your content and engage with it!
You can then view the audience insights of each post to help you and your sales reps determine the kind of posts your potential clients enjoy reading and reacting to.
And by doubling down on writing content that fuels discussions, you can establish yourself as an authority thought leader in your industry, thus opening the doors for you to garner prospects that you’ll turn into clients or employees!
Even if you have written articles on your company website, you can republish them on Pulse by copying and pasting them as a new post. Just make sure to link back to the original post within the article to let readers and search engines know that the post has been originally published elsewhere.
Build Your Professional Network with Your LinkedIn Profile
Once you’ve furnished your profile page with unique content, it’s time to reach out to the right prospects and potential clients via networking.
You can import your email contacts and send them an invite to connect with you via LinkedIn, for starters. The fact that you have existing engagement with these people means they will accept your connection requests more often than not.
Over time, you will see LinkedIn users who viewed your product. Of course, you won’t see all of them unless you sign up for one of LinkedIn’s paid plans. But for those that you can see, add them as a contact if you share the same industry and goals based on their profile pages. In addition, since they viewed your profile, they might be more than willing to engage with you by accepting your invitation.
Finally, you can search for more people to add using Linkedin’s advanced search features. You can filter the search results by company size, companies (past and present), prospect’s business, prospects’ interests, locations, and others to help you zero in on the decision-makers you want to include in your network.
Acquire More Leads Using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms
For those running Sponsored Content and Conversation Ads for audience-specific landing pages on LinkedIn, consider using its Lead Generation Forms feature.
With just a single click, LinkedIn allows users to sign up for your ad campaign. Depending on what fields you plan on selecting during signup, the form will take the contact information supplied by the user on his or her profile.
This beats having to type in their details manually to download e-books, join your webinar, or whatever your CTA may be.
This tactic is ideal if you want to convert people in the consideration stage of your funnel down to the decision stage.
Use Sales Navigator to Supercharge Your LinkedIn Lead Generation Strategy
If you’ve exhausted your business options, it’s time to subscribe to LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator tool. It saves time!
Using its Lead Builder feature, you can track and engage with your LinkedIn leads so you can find not only prospects for the different stages of your funnel but also the decision maker who makes purchasing decisions so you can cut to the chase and go straight to closing sales!
After saving the Linkedin leads you found, InMail lets you send direct messages to them without the use of third-party tools. However, keep in mind that you have a limited number of InMails to send out monthly, so choose leads to whom you’ll send out the messages.
Finally, there’s a CRM integration that lets you connect your LinkedIn with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. This eliminates the need to go back and forth with your CRM tool since all data is consolidated on either platform.
Using this sales prospecting tool allows B2B marketers to simplify their lead generation process and save time. Instead of using different tools to organize your leads and perform your outreach campaign, you can do everything using the available features.
Manage Job Posts with LinkedIn Recruiter
Recruiters looking to fill out vacancies in their company will find lots to enjoy with this feature.
After posting your job offer, LinkedIn will match you with the most qualified candidates that meet your requirements based on skills and value.
Using this feature in LinkedIn helps you cut down the time searching for prospects. All you need to do is review the interested applicants by looking at their profiles and messaging them straight to their inboxes.
More info on Linkedin recruiter vs Linkedin advertising
Frequently Asked Questions...
How do you leverage sales on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn gives you the advantage to tap into millions of Linkedin premium members or anyone with a free account looking to build professional connections. From here, your goal is to get them to notice your LinkedIn profile using the tips and advice shared above.
How do B2B sales work on LinkedIn?
B2B marketers and the sales team can build a network of connections and engage with them through their posts and articles. You can also join LinkedIn groups relevant to your industry and foster discussion about the latest trends with other members. Finally, you can use LinkedIn’s paid services to narrow down your search to decision-makers and pitch to them straight from the platform.
How do I generate B2B leads on LinkedIn?
You need to have a strong and detailed LinkedIn company page that contains Showcase Pages, each of which caters to specific segments of your target audience. You also build connections with relevant people in your industry to engage with your products and services.
How do you generate leads for B2B sales?
There are many ways to generate B2B leads. Some of the most common methods include launching strategies for email marketing, SEO (search engine optimization), and social media campaigns on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others.
The Wrap Up
If you want to keep getting new leads to your business, you should know that your LinkedIn presence matters.
LinkedIn offers you a wealth of features where you can amass leads ready to become clients and employees of your organization.
And with the tips mentioned above, you owe your business to use LinkedIn by crafting a digital marketing campaign to find leads.
