How to Use LinkedIn for Lead Generation

Are you using LinkedIn for the right purpose? It’s about time to re-think whether we’re making the most out of LinkedIn or not. Apart from providing jobs to people, there are ample opportunities it offers that can do wonders for your business. Most businesses run through networks or referrals. Building connections is an indispensable part of the business, without which it becomes difficult to sustain in the market.

In case you don’t know what building new connections in a business means, let us highlight it for you! Connections in businesses mean associating with each other professionally and keeping the relationship alive through constantly being in touch. Successful networking leads to good connections. It can help you generate more revenue, meet new vendors, give suggestions and advice, and, more so, open new doors of opportunities for you. So, LinkedIn helps you meet new people and build connections with them. 

But what else? What more to expect from LinkedIn? The answer lies in the above lines. When we talk about connections and relationships, it generates ‘leads’ for us. Leads are the people interested in buying your product or service and leads play a significant role in making the most use of salesforce. Data suggests that almost 80% of the leads are sourced from LinkedIn, yet there’s no awareness about it. This is because no awareness has been made about it; therefore, people don’t know how to operate it for this purpose. Read on to fix this problem by learning how to use LinkedIn for lead generation. 

8 Ways You Can Use LinkedIn for Lead Generation

1. Create your profile for connecting.

No one wants to get connected with a dull profile. Thus, creating your profile is the foremost step to operating LinkedIn. If you want people to show interest and view your profile, add all the necessary details. 

From your educational background and achievements to your work experience, every detail should be there on your profile to grab people’s attention. People wouldn’t even view your profile if they couldn’t see where you are working. Creating a profile is one thing and maintaining your profile is another thing.

So, working on your profile to make it look attractive for people to check it out is highly crucial to increase your connections. Let’s see what details are a must-have in your profile to engage people:

• Your full name, along with the profile picture
• Current and last working company (if any)
• Qualifications along with college/university name
• Relevant certificates and achievements (if any)

2. Connect and target the decision-makers.

Have you ever seen the company’s CEO taking all the purchasing decisions? Maybe you have in some companies, but when we speak about the majority, most companies have either Marketing Mangers or Sales Managers to take the purchasing decisions. 

So, if you have to pitch your product for sale, it is best to connect with this personnel, follow them, and talk to them about the products or services you are offering. Finding the decision maker through LinkedIn is not a big deal, but convincing them can be. As far as lead is concerned, what easy way could you find to generate the lead? You got in touch with the one who will decide your fate, and no other ‘conventional’ lead-generating sources could ever do it without so much effort and hurdles. 

So, next time you want to close a sale, rather be in contact with someone with greater authority to close the deal!

3. Do NOT dismiss old leads.

Leads generated by any means are nothing less than a golden treasure for the salesforce. ‘Find new, forget old’ is not a wise practice to follow when it comes to making a sale. Data suggests that 80% of sales require five follow-ups, but 44% of people give up after one.

It is extremely important to have a proper database of the leads generated by the company in the last few years, and it is even more important to be in touch with the old leads. You may not be able to sell your product to them at once, but trying again is of no harm. They may not be interested in the product you were selling before but might have their interest in what you’re selling today. So, being connected with the leads can lead to fruitful results shortly because they can be your potential customers.

LinkedIn can help you maintain a healthy professional relationship with those people by connecting with them and following up on what they are up to!

4. Post content regularly.

Sellers reach out to potential customers, pitch their products, close the deal, and make a sale – that’s how a sale process is likely to be made. But what if you do not reach out to customers, and they come to you to enquire about your product? That’s possible with the power of content! 

LinkedIn has this “post” feature where you can upload content, and it will be visible to your connections. Many may not have understood it, but it is that golden feature that can turn the tables and help your account reach many people. That’s why it is advised to post content related to your products or services every once in a while so that the readers know what you’ve to offer.

If your content is helpful and informative, half of your job is done. You will get an inquiry from people who are genuinely interested in your product, and that’s how the lead will be generated automatically. 

5. Go Premium.

If LinkedIn is one of your most important lead generation sources, it is advisable to get a premium account by paying a certain amount. LinkedIn Premium is mainly for business owners, employers, salespeople, and recruiters. 

Let’s see what makes LinkedIn Premium different from Free LinkedIn.

• Get access to see who viewed your profile.
• You can find relevant candidates and generate leads by putting premium search filters and searching for people based on specific criteria. 
• The “InMail” feature helps you message directly to the accounts with whom you’re not even connected. This feature is of great help to those who solely use LinkedIn for generating and finding leads. You do not have to wait for your potential customer to accept your connection request so that you can message him. InMail allows you to directly message anyone, regardless of whether you’re connected with him or not.
• Another feature that is provided to the premium user is ‘LinkedIn Learning’. This feature allows you access to over 13,000 courses taught by industrial experts. 

Having a premium account to generate leads is not necessary, but having one will surely help you save time, effort, and resources.

6. Join multiple groups.

You will find different communities related to your industry on LinkedIn. These community belonging to the same industry form their own ‘shell’, also called ‘group’, to engage with each other, exchange thoughts and ideas, and discuss the latest market trends. 

Suppose you joined a LinkedIn group of Sales & Marketing heads of different companies where you exchange thoughts and ways to derive potential buyers from various sources. During this discussion, you stumbled upon a great way of finding a lead through a fellow participant. Wouldn’t it be a great result to join that group? Sure, it will be! 

Being a participant in various groups can help you resonate with like-minded people and help you reach out to multiple leads at the same time.

7. Use Ads.

Looking for leads? It’s time to start advertising! 

Data suggests that LinkedIn lead conversion rates are three times higher than other major ad platforms. It offers a wide variety of ads, but there are broadly two main types of ads: 

• Ads that direct users to a lead-capture landing page on your website, or
• Ads directing to in-platform lead generation forms, that allow users to enter their data.

The number of leads generated by your ad can be maximised by inviting users to download an e-book or by asking them to sign up for a product demo.

8. Do NOT ignore profile views.

We usually tend to ignore profile views considering they might be a random “stalker.” Well, we could be wrong in this case!

If you have built your profile well, you can get one to three profile views daily. Whenever you get such a notification, do not ignore it. Monitor your profile view because a potential buyer might bump into your profile through your interesting post, which you shared a few days ago. It is suggested to check on all the people viewing your profile, and once you’re done with it, your real work starts here. Send them a connection request, build your relationship with them, and start a conversation about why they looked you up in the first place. 

Profile viewers are the people who can be your biggest asset in the form of leads. So, make sure to be in touch with them in any possible way.

6 Ways to Build Your Brand on LinkedIn

Experts have expressed confidence in LinkedIn as a business-building platform and have enumerated several ways to help you use the platform advantageously. Foundation has revealed yet another interesting stat about LinkedIn – over 50% of all the social traffic on B2B blogs and websites comes from LinkedIn. Given below are 6 ways you can use LinkedIn for building your brand and increasing the leads for your business:-

1. Use Plugins To Your Benefit

While LinkedIn in itself can help you generate a good number of leads, using add-on plugins can help you get better results. Integrating these plugins with your business’s profile on the platform can help you get access to a bigger audience and enhance your reach. Some of the best plugins are LinMailPro, Headlinr, LinkedIn Connection Revealer, and Rapportive.

LinMailPro allows you to automatically invite all individuals who viewed your profile and implement the same action to bigger numbers without much difficulty. Headlinr can provide you with several interesting headlines according to the keywords you have entered thus improving your content marketing. LinkedIn Connection Revealer can give you an idea about the size of all the first-level connections. Rapportive gives you a list of all the other social media accounts that have been created with emails in your contact list.

2. Company Posts On Your Employees’ Profiles

Employees of a company have been observed to post relevant content about the employers or the brand that they are working for. LinkedIn’s Marketing Solutions Blog revealed that employees have a 14x higher chance of sharing content from their employers than any other forms of content on the platform. However, they may not go beyond that. There is no doubt that chances for lead generation improve with a great network.

You must therefore ask your employees to go beyond posting just about the employers, and post regular updates of your company as well. Having your company’s updates and company-approved content posted regularly on your employees’ professional profiles can help you reach out to their connections and have a diverse audience for your marketing campaigns. Expert strategists like Travis Wright have revealed that people tend to listen to their connection on social media more than the official marketing campaigns and can result in 25% more leads.

3. Use LinkedIn Pulse For Publishing Posts

Writing content related to trends, career accomplishments and writing on information relevant to your business niche can help build your brand on LinkedIn in no time. These articles help you establish your position on the platform as an expert. Regularly publishing informative and educational content and blogs can help you increase the traffic on your brand’s page as well as website.

For this purpose, you can use LinkedIn Pulse. It allows you to long-form content with rich grammar and vocabulary on an easy and user-friendly interface. HubSpot has claimed that about 15% of marketers are creating content that is specifically for LinkedIn. You can also add videos and images to your write-up and relevant links from your website to increase its access and traffic.

4. Participate In LinkedIn Groups

Another LinkedIn strategy that actually helps you in generating leads and building your brand is by participating in LinkedIn Groups. LinkedIn has innumerable groups of various niches and industries that have like-minded professionals as participants. Highlights of such groups are available and you can get an idea about when the conversations are most active.

Joining active conversations to update about ongoing trends and about your business’s activities relevant to the group’s nature can help you establish a network of professionals in the field. However, try and not post too much content that focuses on your sales and instead post more informative and helpful content as it can get better engagement as value-adding content is more appreciated by professionals.

Here’s some interesting information: Reports by Influencer Marketing Hub have revealed that LinkedIn users have 2x better buying power and the platform offers quality leads. This is because 4 out 5 members of LinkedIn are at a decision-making position in a business.

5. Leverage InMail Campaigns

SimilarWeb has revealed that LinkedIn gets 23.70% traffic form search, 69.98% direct traffic and about 99.51% traffic from organic search. InMail is a special LinkedIn feature that allows you to reach the inboxes of your target audience directly without having to filter your audience and look for people ideal for your business.

InMail does it for you already. Although it is a paid feature, it can save a lot of effort, time, and resources on your part. Leveraging the sponsored InMail feature can help you approach the professional relationships and the network you have built in a more personalized manner and you can share your services and related content and offers with the selected potential leads.

6. Utilise LinkedIn’s Dynamic Ads

Advertisements that evoke emotions and are more personalised in nature are likely to influence your target audience more than the others and help you convert more leads and establish your brand identity as it is more relevant to your prospective clients. Reports by Hootsuite and We Are Social have claimed that over 727 million people are reachable on a global level with the help of LinkedIn advertisements.

LinkedIn’s dynamic ads can help you cater to the specific marketing goals and connect with your prospects better. The Dynamic ads are more visually and aesthetically appealing as they majorly include the members of the LinkedIn community, and create a sense of genuineness and reliability. These advertisements also have additional ad copies that can help you promote your content better and upgrade your marketing efforts. Connecting such pages with personalised landing pages can potentially increase the traffic and give a better conversion rate.

Conclusion

LinkedIn is a treasure trove for recruiters, employers, and salespeople who are constantly finding the right person to close the sale, but patience is the key in such cases because LinkedIn is a broad platform, and it takes time to be aware of every inch of the app. So, learn the tools, spend maximum time on the app, seek help from seniors who’ve been using it for quite some time, share valuable content, and amplify it through effective LinkedIn marketing practices. Most businesses run on referrals and connections, so make sure to be on good terms with your fellow connections!