How to Generate Leads from LinkedIn: Strategies, Steps, Advice

Created as a social media network for professional communication, LinkedIn has already developed into a useful and powerful platform for sharing expertise through content publishing and a lead generation tool. The network boasts a wide selection of robust solutions for business promotion and analytics, yet it’s still one of the most underestimated platforms for social media marketing. However, those marketers and salespeople who are willing to invest their time and effort into the LinkedIn lead generation process are already gaining benefits. There is no “magic bullet” to generate leads from LinkedIn in a matter of minutes, but a combination of effective strategies may work magic and help you establish yourself and engage your target audience on the platform.

LinkedIn is a thriving social platform with great potential for digital marketing, for some quite obvious reasons:

• it has about 700 million regular users
• the total number of business profiles exceeds 9 million
• people from over 200 countries use it for business communication
• all Fortune 500 Executives present on LinkedIn, and over 75% check their accounts daily
• in 2019, LinkedIn was voted the most trusted network
• professionals from different fields look for professionally-geared content on the network to grow their businesses
• you can laser-target your prospects on a much deeper level than on other platforms, using geolocation, industry, work history, language, interests, education, and more.

No wonder LinkedIn generates many more leads than blogging or sharing on other social media. It has the highest conversion rate compared to other platforms, including Google Ads. In fact, over 80% of B2B leads are generated on LinkedIn. You can also connect with your prospects on LinkedIn directly, not necessarily having 1st or 2nd-degree connection. However, simple accessibility of your target audience is not enough to successfully generate leads with LinkedIn — you need to follow certain steps and guidelines to do it well. Let’s check them out.

In this article, “optimization” means tailoring and polishing your page so that it’s not only aesthetic and engaging but also SEO-optimized. Study some of the popular key- and buzzwords in your industry and make your page SEO-friendly. To do this research, consider web scraping for SERP purposes and check how your competitors rank, what keywords work best, and how you can improve your page. LinkedIn’s search algorithm works similarly to that of Google’s, so take time to optimize your content well so that it can rank high on both platforms. Please note that long-tail keywords make targeted efforts more precise and bring you higher quality traffic. Since the platform unites professionals in different spheres, it’s essential to cultivate an impressive business page and optimize your brand profile. It’s imperative to make it expert, attractive, engaging, active, and thought-provoking. Consider adding video to your content — it’s not only engaging but also ranked high on LinkedIn. Speak about your projects — it not only allows you to showcase your expertise and highlight your skill set, but also allows you to create high-quality links to your corporate website. You should carefully study your audience, determine the content that resonates with your prospects, and provide it to them. To learn from others in your industry as a means of inspiring your content, you can use various approaches, but web data scraping of your competitor sites and thematic forums can be the best and most efficient option.

While profile optimization on LinkedIn for lead generation is more like a preparatory stage, reaching out to your potential clients is actually the process. Let’s talk about it.

The first approach we’ll mention is an outreach method: first, you search for your potential clients and then connect with them. It’s important to be comfortable with such an approach and adept in the art of communication via messages. Not all people like this method, so delegate if you are one of them. A person establishing contact should know how to get someone interested in just one connection message — how to ask the right questions and keep the prospect interested. In an ideal world, you should personalize each outreach message and offer something to a reader — a newsletter shout-out, a blog mention, a quote, etc. The established contact should be then maintained through messaging, sharing useful articles or videos, etc. Thus, when a conversation has already been started, you may proceed to offer an email presentation, asking for a phone call, or even meeting face-to-face. You may be wondering how to look for prospects to contact and generate leads with on LinkedIn. Start by connecting with your current and former contacts. It’s rather safe and effective, since there is already trust between you. Look for people you’ve lost contact with and reach out to them. Make it a habit to look a person up via LinkedIn and invite them to connect as soon as you exchange business cards with somebody new. Contact your former clients. Show interest in their new project or job, and try to help somehow. Later on, you can proceed to offer your product or service. Groups can be an incredible source of information about your industry pain points and also a means of generating leads on LinkedIn. You can not only get valuable insights from such communication, but you can also see new ways to solve certain problems and help others do the same. When you engage in conversations on posts or in groups, focus on relationship-building first and then you can get to promotion. Your answers and posts in the group should be a helpful resource, not a sales pitch for your product or service. Keep in mind to check each group’s regulations as to content sharing before promoting your content or referring to your site. Check out individual profiles, discover the influencers in your industry, and follow the events they attend, the blogs they write, the forums they visit.Find the part of their audience relevant to your targeting. To gather this information quickly and hassle-free, you can use web scraping services. Then, you’ll get a verified database of your potential leads, extracted according to your parameters and requirements.

Making your page engaging is good for your current network, but it also matters for attracting new people. Targeted advertising is the best way to expand your network and draw new leads, especially on LinkedIn.

The platform offers

• both PPC (pay-per-click) and CPM (cost per impression) text ads
• sponsored content posts, standard or direct
• InMail

In all these cases, targeting is highly customizable. LinkedIn crafted its advertising platform with lead generation very much in mind.

First, you can scrape LinkedIn profiles of your prospects with a special tool or service and then segment your target audience according to multiple parameters such as age, gender, school, industry, company size, job title, shared groups, etc. LinkedIn campaign manager allows you to zone in on just about any part of the audience’s profile; thus, you can make your advertising laser-targeted and ensure to hit your ideal prospects with updates.

Such detailed targeting options for LinkedIn B2B lead generation makes you a real winner compared to the users of other platforms and networks. Even though video is one of the most popular ad types, many LinkedIn lead generation ads are centered around downloadable reports and other purely business lead magnets. You can allow your prospects to fill out a form or respond to an event immediately through your ad. This one-touch process provides you with interested leads right away. What’s more, LinkedIn differentiates sponsored content into standard and direct. While the former is an update published on a company page, the latter is a much more customized form of sponsored content that allows you to customize, personalize and test the messages sent out to your target customers. It’s vital to keep in mind that users are individuals with variable interests and intentions, so you must provide them with various content through your advertising. Some users need information to read right away. In this case, you can give them a website link or a landing page URL to click and access all the information immediately. Others may want to study information later, so offer them a brochure, a whitepaper, an industry report, or something to come back to later. However, before choosing between the two, you need to check how exactly your content will be shown: sidebars are not displayed on mobile devices, for instance, while direct sponsored content will be published in the user’s newsfeed and seems a more desirable feature than an ordinary top-page banner.

InMail is your personalized and customized way to outreach to people outside your network. This ad feature allow you to send messages directly to a target person. This LinkedIn lead generation ad type is easy-to-create due to its extremely user-friendly dashboard. Last but not least, the platform allows you to add an insight tag, an effective conversion-tracking tool integration, directly to the company’s landing page or site to track the results.

If you want to succeed in generating leads with LinkedIn, you must keep your audience in mind and share useful and expert content of high quality. Careful research and planning will help you optimize your content and add specificity to your messages to increase involvement and make an optimal impact. Pay attention to the tone, style, and format you use to hit your target demographic. White papers, tutorials, reports, webinars, and SlideShare presentations are effective at funneling; however, there is no a one-size-fits-all approach. Try to do some research, understand what your market wants, and create a fantastic solution to present to them, either in a lead gen form or in your newsfeed. Content marketing is now proving to be very effective on LinkedIn and your chances to make a big impact as well as generate leads with quality content are great. Don’t be afraid to spare a minute for a daily update — you cannot only use it to share a link to a blog post, article, or video relevant to your targets, but also to extract some ideas from prospective clients or possible partnerships about certain revenue-generating projects.

This is a piece of bonus advice for you — even though you can generate leads and then export them manually, CRM integration can simplify your life significantly. Once integrated into your CRM, your B2B generated leads can start working for you right away and become a part of your follow-up sequence. You can now email them for returning and remind them about their interest in your product or service earlier.

Lead generation with LinkedIn is not only 100% possible, but also extremely effective for businesses eager to get high conversion rates out of an already expensive audience. Certainly, you’ll need to put time and effort into accurately defining your target audience and figuring out what content and which approach works best for you. The results will surely pay off. Generating hundreds of leads a day won’t happen overnight, but DataOx can help you extract the necessary contact information about your potential leads to simplify and speed up your work. Schedule a free consultation with our expert and discuss what we can do to help you with effective B2B lead generation on LinkedIn.