Heard about LinkedIn lead generation strategy, but don’t know where to begin? You’ve come to the right place.

It hasn’t been that long since LinkedIn’s great metamorphosis, from teensy professional networking site to the world’s largest professional network. LinkedIn is the marketplace for b2b professionals to connect, which is why it’s the hottest spot in the world to find high-quality leads. Here’s three reasons why LinkedIn is where your next round of hot leads are coming in from:

 It’s made up of decision-makers

Did you know that over 20% of all LinkedIn users have buying power? That’s over 40 million decision-makers and 61 million senior-level influencers that you and your business could connect with.

LinkedIn users really use the platform

With over 500 million users total, over half use the platform actively every month! And of that half, 44% are daily users. That is a loooong list of potential prospects that you could be engaging with daily. 

It’s one of the most powerful places for lead generation

LinkedIn’s own content marketing blog looked at the numbers and found that a staggering 80% of B2B leads that were generated from social media, come through LinkedIn! Additionally, Salesforce partner found 70% of all their website form fills came directly from LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is the Mecca of lead generation, and to win big, you need to maximize your LinkedIn B2B lead generation process. There are countless strategies out there that promise to be the most effective in lead generation, but the truth is there is no secret sauce. 

LinkedIn’s rapid growth makes the platform rife with fierce competition. So, we’re about to recommend to you the best lead generation strategies. And then, dear friends, it’s on you to do some trial and error of your own and find the perfect LinkedIn lead generation strategy for you and your business. 

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The best LinkedIn lead generation strategy:

Pinpoint your decision-makers

Whilst it is true that there are millions of decision-makers floating around on LinkedIn. The best LinkedIn lead generation strategy is the one that aligns with the needs and goals of the company. Casting a wide net is not efficient and will lose you time and money, which is why you need to first develop your ideal customer profile (ICP), and then, search for decision-makers that fit your ideal customer and company. 

Once you have decided who your ICP is, it’s time to get proactive and start filtering out searches on LinkedIn to find your hot leads. 

It’s easier than you think to find decision-makers on LinkedIn. Simply type in the name of the specific role you wish to search [“VP of Marketing”] (use quotes) and/or the company [“Vidboss”]. Alternatively, search up those terms separately if you’re looking to casually browse or find other outreach candidates. 

Tip: if you’re not exactly sure who you want to target at a specific company, simply head to their company page and scroll their “People” page. There, you’ll see a list of employees and their job roles. 

If you’re looking for an even faster way to find employee lists, download Lusha Contacts Linkedin Chrome Extension. Lusha Contacts is a plug-in that works on LinkedIn and other professional websites. All you need to do is click on a person’s LinkedIn profile, and Lusha will immediately find you their personal contact details, as well as their company details, full lists of employees. Lusha is a game-changer for busy salespeople who want to find company information fast and reach out to hot leads at the right time. Export your LinkedIn contacts, create prospecting lists and sync them to your CRM. 

Perfect your profile

Get ready to update your LinkedIn profile. 

Let’s face it, people judge a book by its cover, and a professional by their LinkedIn profile. So, in order for your LinkedIn lead generation strategy to successful, you have to optimize your personal professional profile. Whether you are using your own profile or your company’s profile to post content, both need to represent the brand and be as professional as possible. 

The basics 

The more information you have filled out on your LinkedIn profile, the better. Let’s start with the basics of what you’ll need at the top of your profile:

  1. A clear, professional headshot (non-negotiable)
  2. A high-resolution cover image that shows off your company, it’s branding, or a lead magnet
  3. Your title, defining your area of expertise and your company

Optimize your LinkedIn profile for lead generation

About you

Next up, your “About” summary, where you get to show off your skills and work results, in under 2000-characters. Remember, this section isn’t a grocery list of all of your achievements and accolades (save that for later). 

Think of this section as an elevator pitch, something that will impress your lead and interest them in connecting with you. 

Tip: Leads can find your profile through an organic search, so make sure to use some keywords in your “About” summary to make yourself more discoverable. 

Below is an awesome example of an “About” section, it demonstrates Chen’s top professional skills, and shows a balance between results and passion. The idea here is to impress decision-makers and build professional trust. 

About me section of LinkedIn profile

Tip: LinkedIn introduced its “Featured” section, just under the profile photo. This is where you can pin your most impressive blogs, publications, and features.  Make sure you post material that can drive leads to specific landing pages or lead magnets. 

Featured section of LinkedIn

Experience

Next up is the “Experience” section, here’s where you list your work experience (you can leave out that time you worked at an ice cream parlour for 3 months in 2006). 

Recommendations & Skills 

Last and potentially most importantly, the recommendations and skills section. This section is basically there to prove to your leads that you’re the real deal. Please don’t be afraid to ask co-workers, colleagues, and clients to give you a boost and write a glowing recommendation for you here. 

Master LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a powerful tool that offers sales reps targeted leads, advanced search features, and real-time insights. Rather than shooting in the dark or sitting back and waiting for leads to come to you, with Sales Navigator you can create custom lead lists, get instant notifications when those leads are active on LinkedIn, and track the performance of your outreach efforts. Additionally, LinkedIn Sales Navigator features provide users with in-depth profiles of their leads, including contact details, job title, and company size. Best of all, it integrates with popular CRM platforms to help sales teams manage their entire pipeline from one place. 

Cold outreach can be a time-consuming and frustrating process. But LinkedIn provides a unique platform that can help you connect with potential customers and business partners with ease. By running a targeted search, you can effortlessly find prospects that are a good fit for what your company offers. And with LinkedIn’s InMail, you can fire off messages directly to your contacts without having to worry about spam filters. Best of all, the advanced search features allow you to target prospects by job title, company size, industry, and more. So if you’re looking for a more efficient way to connect with potential customers, LinkedIn cold outreach is the way to go.

Create quality content 

If you don’t bother with content distribution and creation, you shouldn’t really bother with a LinkedIn lead generation strategy at all (sorry). LinkedIn is hands down the best place to find leads through content creation. 

Long ago, sales were all about the valuable buyer, they had the value and we, the salespeople, just took the cash. But in reality, salespeople are thought leaders in their fields, because they have endless product and industry knowledge. This is why, as thought leaders, it is paramount that you create valuable content to share with your LinkedIn community and potential leads. The aim of the game here is to use your content to drive engagement and interest. Plus, if your marketing efforts have been solely outbound, posting great content will build an inbound strategy, where you are able to draw in leads that are interested in what you are offering. 

One of the main drivers of engagement and lead generation is “Posts”. Much like Facebook, “Posts” allow you to link an article or talk about a relevant subject, even ask questions via polls. Here’s where you can get a ton of engagement, through comments, likes, shares, and more. 

Tip: make sure that when you publish content, there is always a direct link that pushes leads to click on a landing page or another action. 

Content you should be posting on your Company LinkedIn to drive engagement:

Make your content actionable

While it’s all fine and dandy posting quality content and gaining an organic following, the end game here is LinkedIn lead generation. You may have previous experience posting content on Facebook, and found that the platform totally restricts the reach of your posts that contain external links. LinkedIn doesn’t have that same issue, so you’ll be able to promote all your latest material using external links to your company’s website.

The idea here is to post great content that drives engagement and interest. Once a lead is engaged, use an external link to funnel your lead to your website’s landing pages and lead magnets. 

Tip: when linking external links in a post, be sure to put the link in the first comment below the post, NOT in the post itself.  Why? Well, LinkedIn will be less likely to restrict your reach if it doesn’t know that you’re promoting something directly. 

Make your LinkedIn content actionable

Participate on the platform

LinkedIn isn’t just a place to drop your resume or content and run. We already know that Facebook is the world’s largest social network, well, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional social network. Participating in a discussion in “Groups may be a less obvious LinkedIn lead generation strategy, but is a great way to connect and engage with potential prospects and industry experts.

You know how everyone recommends that you post content consistently? The same goes for Group discussions. In order to get the most out of Groups, try to be an active participant and share as regularly as you can. Add it as a task into your weekly social media schedule to ensure you don’t fall behind, we recommend posting in groups every 1-2 weeks. Make sure the content and comments you post are very relevant and don’t seem spammy. The idea about posting in Groups is not to sell, but to offer value and learn from others, this will organically lead to lead generation. 

Tip: always read the Group guidelines before joining, and check what kind of content the Group allows you to post.

Ask your colleagues to show some love

It’s simple, the more people see your content, the more leads you’re going to generate. The way to do this is to generate popular posts. When LinkedIn recognizes a popular post, they boost it more so that more people can see it. I know what you might be thinking, ‘I don’t have a big enough following to create popular posts’. But what you might not realize is that you already have a community at your fingertips, your colleagues.

We recommend that you make the most of your following, and ask your fellow colleagues to like, share, and comment on all of your personal and company posts. This will give your posts the extra boost and can be a real lead magnet!

How do I get more views on my company’s LinkedIn content?

Use LinkedIn analytics

We know most salespeople see the word ‘analytics’ and run, but unfortunately, analytics are a super important component of your LinkedIn lead generation strategy. In order to create top-performing content, you need to be able to see which type of content works, and what doesn’t. 

There are some awesome lead generation tools out there to help you analyze the data, like Sprout. Sprout has some great LinkedIn management tools to manage and analyze your LinkedIn company page, see below for an example.

Using LinkedIn analytics for lead gen

Source: Sprout

What’s next?

So you’ve trialed, tested, and came up with a brilliant LinkedIn lead generation strategy. What are the next steps?’, we hear you asking, well, the next step is to actually reach out to your leads and close the deal! We mentioned it earlier, we highly recommend that you download Lusha Contacts, so that you can grab your leads personal phone number and email addresses from Linkedin in a flash.

The days of finding phony office phone numbers that only lead you to a repetitive voice mail system are over. With Lusha Contacts you’ll be able to get on the phone with your hot leads and close more deals with decision-makers.

Key Takeaways

Now that you know our favorite lead gen strategies, it’s time for you to start trying out some of these for yourself. Be sure to remember that the content you publish represents your company, and a LinkedIn lead generation strategy should always have the intent of adding value to your customers and leads.

Again, it’s not about replicating the exact strategy that we recommend above, it’s about finding one that fits for your company and it’s valued customers. Now go out and have some fun with it! Oh, and if you’d like an extra boost in the sales game, take a look at some of our previous blogs below:

 

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    This information should not be mistaken for legal advice. Please ensure that you are prospecting and selling in compliance with all applicable laws.

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