LinkedIn is one of the largest global career platforms with 66.8 million active users in the United States and 810 million worldwide. While many people think of the social media channel as an outlet to network and share content with like-minded professionals in similar industries, it’s also a great tool for lead generation—both outbound and inbound.
Throughout this blog, we’ll discuss what LinkedIn lead generation is, the top LinkedIn lead generation tactics to follow, and why LinkedIn for B2B sales is essential for a successful and sustainable business growth strategy.
Let’s get into it.
What Is LinkedIn Lead Generation?
LinkedIn lead generation is an inbound and outbound lead generation tactic that uses the professional social media platform to showcase your company and product and service offerings to potential buyers in your target market.
How To Generate Leads on LinkedIn
If you’re considering using LinkedIn for lead generation, here are some ways to get started:
Find Prospects With LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a LinkedIn extension where sales and marketing teams can find new prospects for their sales pipeline. This extension enhances the already existing capabilities of the platform and allows growing businesses to accelerate their lead generation process.
One of the most significant features of LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the Advanced Lead Search function, which enables sales development representatives (SDRs) and marketing specialists to enter your company’s ideal customer profile to find the most qualified leads. Additionally, this extension gives SDR and marketing teams an idea of who the key decision-maker is of a prospective business and notifies them if and when a decision-maker changes at a company.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator can be easily integrated with your company’s CRM platform for a streamlined sales and marketing process. CRM software is more than a customer relationship management program—it’s a lead generation tool that enables your SDR and marketing teams to target the right leads at the right time. Integrating Sales Navigator with your CRM allows teams to grow your sales pipeline and effectively move leads through the sales funnel.
Optimize Your Business LinkedIn Page
When using LinkedIn for B2B sales, your business LinkedIn page must be optimized for easy navigation and user engagement. Like a company website, a business LinkedIn page should showcase what you do, where you’re located, how people can contact you, and why decision-makers should trust you as their go-to product or service solution.
In addition to being a great hub for LinkedIn users to learn about your company, it’s also a crucial space to establish brand credibility. With a business LinkedIn page, social media campaign managers have the ability to:
- Share relevant content that aligns with the pain points of your target market
- Practice social selling and drive LinkedIn users to your website solutions page
- Respond to custom questions prospects or customers have about your company
- Promote new job opportunities that are available within your company
Maximize Your Personal LinkedIn Profile
While having an optimized business LinkedIn page is essential for generating leads, so is a well-developed personal LinkedIn profile. As social beings, people love putting a face with a company because it adds a personal touch to the potential relationship.
Whether it’s a business owner or an influencer within the company, an engaging and active personal profile is essential for using LinkedIn as a generating tool. Here are some ways to start maximizing your personal LinkedIn profile for lead generation:
- Upload a professional yet welcoming headshot
- Include a job title that clearly defines your role within the company
- Attach a header image that reflects your company’s brand voice
- Showcase your industry expertise in your “About” summary
- Highlight relevant marketing collateral under the “Featured” tab
- Share original and repurposed content for maximum engagement
Join Relevant LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn offers various groups for like-minded professionals to interact and engage with each other’s profiles. Joining LinkedIn groups that align with your industry and interests is a great way to spread your brand voice where you may not be able to organically through the LinkedIn feed.
However, it’s crucial you don’t come off too strong with selling-focused content when you initially join LinkedIn groups because it could likely turn off potential buyers. Like any other lead generation campaign, start each conversation with broad questions or insight into industry best practices. Once a prospect asks more specific questions about your company, you can start selling your company’s product or service offerings.
Take Advantage of LinkedIn Advertising
Lead generation LinkedIn ads are great for targeting potential buyers who are actively looking for your company’s product or service solutions. Here are the different ways B2B marketing teams can use LinkedIn for lead generation:
- Sponsored content: Like other social media ad campaigns, LinkedIn’s sponsored ad content runs on the feeds of potential buyers in your target audience. This sponsored content can include a single image, video, or carousel ad.
- InMail message ads: LinkedIn InMail messaging ads are unique compared to other social media advertising opportunities. With InMail messaging ads, you have the opportunity to directly message decision-makers to open up a conversation about your company. This strategy is considered an outbound sales development tactic.
- Lead gen forms: LinkedIn lead gen forms are a great way to generate inbound leads because they allow decision-makers to submit their information without going off-site on a landing page. Many businesses use lead gen forms to encourage top-of-funnel users to download an exclusive guide or e-book that’s relevant to their job position or industry.
- Dynamic ads: Dynamic ads appear alongside a LinkedIn user’s feed rather than in the feed itself. These lead-generation LinkedIn ads often encourage users to follow your LinkedIn business page, drive them to a landing page, or download marketing collateral.
Connect With Referrals From Clients
When you get referrals from satisfied customers, it’s essential to consider how you want to approach them in the first place. While you could call or email them, you could also connect with them on LinkedIn or send an InMail message explaining why you’re contacting them.
During the initial point of contact, it’s important to lead the conversation by saying that your mutual connection referred their company to your business. Starting the discussion by mentioning your mutual connection encourages the referral to accept your connection invite or respond to your InMail message.
Once your SDRs or marketing specialists introduce your company and how they learned about the referral, they can send the new prospect relevant information about your company with top-of-funnel pieces of marketing collateral and blog content. If they see the value in your company’s products or services, SDR teams can routinely follow up with the lead and nurture the relationship until they’re ready to purchase.
Why Use LinkedIn for Lead Generation?
LinkedIn is a great lead generation tool because it enables your business to:
- Reduce cost per lead: LinkedIn presents growing companies with more leads for less money compared to other social media or search engine ads. With LinkedIn, marketing teams can target specific industries, job titles, company sizes, and more to ensure each lead that comes their way meets your company’s qualifications.
- Connect with your target market: LinkedIn is another platform to build relationships with leads in the sales pipeline and guide them to the end of the sales funnel. Depending on the buyer personas of decision-makers in your target market, LinkedIn may be the most effective communication platform to generate leads and secure sales meetings.
- Boost top-of-mind awareness: Social media marketing is significant for boosting top-of-mind awareness with potential and ongoing customers. With LinkedIn, marketing teams have the opportunity to establish your company as a trusted thought leader in the industry and convert more LinkedIn users into inbound leads.
Key Takeaways
While many people only think of LinkedIn as a professional networking platform, it’s so much more than a social medium. Following LinkedIn lead generation tactics enables growing companies to generate inbound leads and build relationships with outbound leads.
At Abstrakt Marketing Group, our outsourced SDR teams make cold calls, send sales emails, and connect with verified decision-makers on LinkedIn to lock in sales appointments for our clients. Additionally, our inbound marketing specialists create engaging website copy and social media content for clients’ LinkedIn business pages. And we know how effective our process is for clients—it’s the same process we use to grow our own book of business.
If you need a team to help you implement the best LinkedIn lead generation tactics for business growth, contact the sales and marketing experts at Abstrakt!
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