Lead Generation Expert
Without a doubt, lead generation is one of the biggest challenges faced by most entrepreneurs and business owners. Trying to generate quality leads that can be converted into loyal customers is not easy for most of them. With the advent of the internet and digital marketing, there have also been many changes in lead generation techniques.
Gone are the days when people have to rely solely on cold calling and promotional SMS to win leads to their business. Business owners now focus on using different social platforms for lead generation. And LinkedIn is performing well in that context. The platform has slowly evolved to become a go-to platform for brand building and lead generation.
But even as promising as LinkedIn is for lead generation, you can’t get the most of the platform if you are not doing it right. You need to master different techniques that will make you become an expert in lead generation. So, in this post, we will be discussing various ways you can hone your lead generation with LinkedIn and become an expert in it.
Lead Generation Prep Work: Before You Begin Any LinkedIn Lead Generation Activities
Yes, it’s understandable you want to move straight into utilizing every strategy you can learn about using LinkedIn for lead generation. But before you begin any LinkedIn lead generation activities, there are some prep works you need to do. You want to make sure your approach proved effective after all. So, you just have to pay attention to the following:
- Optimize your profile: Well, this might seem like an obvious thing to do, but it’s surprising how powerful it can be to your lead generation strategies. Many of your ideal clients and decision-makers will choose if they should accept to connect with you only after seeing your profile. So, take your time to set up your LinkedIn profile properly – whether personal or company’s and make sure it is well optimized. Include relevant keywords that will make it easy for people to find you.
- Define your target audience: Understanding your ideal audience type will go a long way to help you determine what demographic markers to target in your campaigns.
- Identify your unique selling point (USP): Set yourself apart from everyone else by first identifying your products or services’ unique selling point – that is what makes you different from others.
- Set campaign goals: Don’t just run campaigns for the sake. You need to have preset goals for your campaigns. Know what metrics you are looking to track and what your current baseline starting points are. How long do you expect to achieve your goals, and how much are you likely to spend to achieve them?
- Use the right tool: Lead generation could be time-consuming when done manually or using the wrong tools. However, a tool we’ll always recommend is our very own LiProspect. Liprospect is the most advanced Linkedin lead generation and automation tool in the world. Liprospect helps marketing and sales professionals avoid cold calling, leaving behind the ineffective manual ways of prospecting for business opportunities. It’s web-based ‘intelligent’ ATS with a humanized algorithm will give professionals an edge over their competition by being able to reach more top decision-makers than ever before.
Practical Ways to Use LinkedIn for Effective Lead Generation
Generating leads for your business should be a top priority. Without new leads, your business can’t grow. So, finding smart ways to generate leads is vital to the success of your business. LinkedIn is an extremely effective platform for generating leads. The key is knowing how to use LinkedIn wisely. The tips below will help you do just that.
Begin By Finding the Right People on the Platform
This is the first step of mastering lead generation on LinkedIn. It’s time to go past the phase of sitting and waiting for your ideal clients and customers to find you. You will need to make the effort of reaching out first. So, use LinkedIn’s advanced search as a tool to find the right people for your brand and business. Even with the free version of LinkedIn, the search tool can be a great tool to leverage to find potential customers.
So, begin your search by going to the search bar and typing in the keywords that are relevant to your customers and clients. From there, you can then begin filtering your search by various criteria, such as by locations, titles, industries, companies, and schools of your potential leads.
You can even take this a step further by subscribing to Sales Navigator. This will allow you access to even advanced search functionality. The tool is designed to help you reach a more but targeted list of potential clients who match your criteria.
Connect With the Targeted Prospects
The next step on your LinkedIn led generation journey is to connect with those people you have found in your search. That was the reason for looking for them in the first place. But there is a way to do this right.
Instead of just finding and clicking the connect button to connect with them, try to personalize your connection request before sending it to them. That way, your prospects don’t see your request as just another blast request with no purpose.
When writing your connection request, write with only one goal in mind – that is to get your potential client to accept the request. That’s just what you need to focus on. However, to do that, you need to put yourself in prospects’ shoes and answer the question, why does this person want to connect with me?
So, in your request, answer the question. Remember to keep it simple and talk less about yourself but more about them. If you make the request to talk too much about yourself, you may get your prospect to lose interest in you, because really, they don’t care about who you are. That way, you already lost them.
To help you understand how to personalize your connection request message, here are some tips to bear in mind:
- Mention something they can relate with: Do you have anything you share with your prospects? Mention those things. That could be school, the same neighborhood, or the same organization. When they see that you have something in common, you will have a higher chance of getting them to accept your request. If you belong to the same alumni group, please, don’t hesitate to mention that – if possible, mention that first.
- Show interest in them: Identify something you think your prospect is passionate about and highlight it in your request message. This could be their business or hobby. You will find a clue to this if you take your time to go through the posts they make on the platform.
- Give some references: Consider referencing something about them or their company.
- Professional compliment: Everyone likes to hear good things about them, and your prospects are not in any way different. So get their attention and increase your chance of getting them to accept your request by giving appropriate professional compliments in your message.
In conclusion, don’t forget that the focus should always be on your prospects and not you. That way, it will be easier to get them to click Accept!
Engage With Your Leads
Once you are able to get your prospects to accept your connection request, the next thing is to begin engaging with them. Get to know what they want by starting a friendly rapport with them. This is not the time to think of a way to sell to them. Calm down and first understand them. Therefore, you will need to ask them some questions to better know them and what their needs are.
However, your question should not be too long. Instead, keep it simple and straightforward. Any question you will be asking should be one they can answer in under 30 seconds. Your question can be about anything that lets you have a good rapport with them and know what they need. It could be about a post they made on LinkedIn, something they included in their profile, or about their company.
Just focus on keeping the discussion light and simple. Don’t push your lead at all.
Build Relationship with Them
The last step should give you the right foot into building a relationship with your potential leads. You need to start creating and nurturing a good relationship with your connection. Start by giving them value. Offer them valuable resources and information – one they can’t get anywhere else.
However, make sure any valuable resources you are sharing with them are tailored to your connections. If you are making a post, make sure the post is short and very relevant to your connections.
In the later section of this post, we will speak more on how to build relationships with your connection by providing them with relevant and valuable resources.
Work On Converting Your Potential Leads
Now that you are able to connect with your prospect, have been able to establish a rapport with them, and added value to them, the next thing is to schedule a conversation with them and convert them into a valid lead. Here, you want to politely ask your prospect for a conversation – whether that means scheduling a video chat, call, or meeting in person.
However, this is not the time to do a sales pitch. Your focus is to make your message simple and captivating enough that your prospect won’t be able to turn down the offer to have a conversation. You need to be careful here. Let your prospect know the benefits they stand to gain when they accept to have a conversation with you, and not just send the regular, “Can we schedule a call?” message.
When you are able to converse with your prospect, you can know how best to sell to them. It will allow you to know their specific needs. That way, converting them to a buying lead won’t be a problem.
Other Tips to Help You Become a Lead Gen Expert on LinkedIn
In addition to the 5 primary steps we have highlighted above, here are some more tips to help you master the art of generating leads with LinkedIn.
#1: Be authentic and look for a way to give value
It is easier to convert a potential lead to a loyal buyer or client when you let them see that you care more about them. So, always lookout for a way to help others on the platform. Sooner or later, the favor will come back to you. This will help you stand out on the platform because not many people do this – everyone is looking out for themselves first.
#2: Give more than you receive
This is more like the first tip. Always give more than you receive. Lead with value and serve others first. This should be the solid foundation on which every other lead generation tactic and strategy be built.
#3: Publish engaging content
Increase your chances of being discovered on LinkedIn by optimizing your profile and company page using relevant keywords. However, that is not enough. To keep your audience and connections engaged, you need to publish high-quality, original, and relevant content regularly. This is very important because people tend to stick around a brand that adds value to them.
Also, when you publish quality content on the platform, you will be positioning yourself as an authority figure in your niche or industry. This, on the other hand, will go a long way to strengthen your reputation on the platform and make lead generation super easy for you.
#4: Post links to articles
Make your post more engaging by varying your type of post. Once in a while, mix in links in your posts. That could be linked to your former post on the platform, posts on your website or blog, or links to the articles of other influencers in your industry or niche.
You can also tag others to let them know you are helping them share their stuff. However, don’t be too ‘salesy’ about this. Don’t focus first on selling your products or service. Instead, focus on giving away your expertise to draw in people, then selling can come later.
#5: Utilize LinkedIn Pulse for lead generation
Not everyone realizes how powerful a tool LinkedIn Pulse could be when it comes to generating quality leads on LinkedIn. There is a reason LinkedIn added this feature – and really, it is doing well to fulfill the purpose – giving an added platform to engage people.
With LinkedIn Pulse, you can reach a much larger audience with your articles than you would with your own blog. LinkedIn already has a large pool of audience for you, and leveraging LinkedIn Pulse articles will help you reach the right people with your message – and at the right time.
Here are some tips to help you achieve the best results with LinkedIn Pulse for lead generation:
- Optimize your headline: This is the first thing your readers see about your article, and it’s what helps them decide if they should read it or not. So make your headline as captivating as possible. Make it short, catchy, and very relevant.
- Add links to your website: Take advantage of the huge audience base of LinkedIn to generate quality leads for your business. Always add your website links to all your LinkedIn Pulse articles.
- Use visuals: Don’t neglect the role of visuals when it comes to making your posts more attractive and engaging. When you make your posts all-texts, they get boring and discouraging to your readers. And so, it won’t fulfill the purpose for which you created it.
- Cross-promote your posts on other platforms: Since you are using your LinkedIn Pulse articles to generate leads for your business, then you will want more people to read the articles. That is why promoting your articles outside the platform makes a lot of sense. It will help enhance the reach of your content and get enough people to read and like them. Also, the more views your posts are able to generate, the more chance they get to be displayed to more people on LinkedIn.
- Research keywords before writing your posts: This is also very important. Before you write your LinkedIn Pulse articles, make sure you conduct comprehensive keyword research to know the right keywords to include in the post. Then use the keyword in your headline and also in the body of the post.
#6: Connect with people looking at your profile
So many people using LinkedIn as a lead generation tool often miss out on this. But it can be a good place to look when you are trying to generate leads on LinkedIn. This is especially true if you use a paid version of LinkedIn; you can see people taking coming to view your profile.
So, take your time to review these people and see if any of them looks like a prospect. Then, take the lead and reach out to them. Find out how you can help them and be ready to provide them with the content they need to solve their challenges. Don’t forget to give value first, and then selling can come later.
#7: Join relevant LinkedIn groups
Like Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups also present you with an opportunity to reach a smaller, niche audience that is better targeted for your products or services. So, look for relevant groups on the platform and join.
Regularly contribute meaningfully to conversations on the groups and add value to members of the group. Then you can think of a way to introduce your products or services later down the line. This could include adding your website link in your posts or content you share on the groups.
#8: Leverage LinkedIn advertising options
Get your content to reach more targeted people on LinkedIn by exploring the platform’s various advertising options. Look for the most valuable and engaging content you have on the platform and promote it. This will make the same content reach more targeted individuals.
According to research, LinkedIn sponsored content can help generate about 400% more leads compared to other lead generation channels.
So, if you are looking to generate qualified traffic to your website, consider creating SEO-friendly LinkedIn ads with a compelling CTA and personalized messaging in ads.
#9: Utilize LinkedIn Lead Gen form
Use the LinkedIn lead gen form to capture the contact details of people that interact with your LinkedIn ads. With this form, they can provide you with all the information you need to follow them up directly, including their name, phone number, email, etc. Plus, all these can happen right on the LinkedIn platform.
#10: Import your lead gen into your CRM and nurture
This is a very important thing to do when it comes to lead generation. You need to appropriately nurture your leads. So, check if your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform allows you to integrate your LinkedIn profile. Most CRM tools will allow this. That way, you will be able to manually or automatically import your leads into your CRM. From there, you can then begin to nurture them.
But how do you nurture your leads? By periodically sending them targeted emails. So, create different segmented lists on your CRM tool and let each segment consist of people with the same needs. That way, you will be able to send them emails that are tailored to their needs.
Jumpstart Your LinkedIn Lead Generation Now
These are all that you need to turbocharge your LinkedIn lead generation. But in all that you do, don’t forget to close deals. It can be easy to get lost in the fog with these different lead generation activities. But take time to qualify your leads – convert the leads that have shown interest in what your brand has to offer (MQLs) to leads ready to buy (SQLs). Then work on the SQLs to increase conversion and give your sales an extra boost!
