With more than 500 Million users, nearly half of which use it daily – LinkedIn offers a unique reach for B2B marketers and salespeople. Because of its emphasis on career, LinkedIn attracts often hard to reach buyers. If you’re looking for a niche channel and considering adding LinkedIn Marketing to your mix, you might be wondering specifically about LinkedIn lead generation tactics. Here are 6 easy to implement LinkedIn lead generation activities to boost your B2B sales and marketing on the business social network.
Reach Out to Profile Viewers
One of my personal favorite LinkedIn lead generation tactics is reaching out to profile viewers. LinkedIn will show you who is stopping by your profile. Only a handful will actually engage and send a message.
Reach out, but make sure you aren’t doing any of these- they’ll scare away your leads!
Look for profiles of people who look like someone you want to connect with or could be a could fit for your product or service. Reach out and try to make a connection. Once every couple of weeks, I look at my profile views and may or may not reach out. Here’s a sample of the message I’ll tweak and send to attempt a connection:
Thanks for stopping by
Hi [Their First Name],
I noticed you dropped by my LinkedIn profile recently. It was probably just a casual visit but I thought I would reach out to say ‘Hi!’ ???? and to see if you’d like to arrange a quick conversation to connect. Let me know.
In the meantime, if it makes sense, I’m happy to link up. Feel free to send a connection request if you’d like to connect. I’m always interested in networking and learning about the exciting work of others.
-Ryan Ruud
CEO/Founder
Lake One
lakeonedigital.com
Reach Out to Those Who Engage with Personal and Company Content
Similar to those who drop by your personal profile, if you’re publishing or sharing content on either a personal profile or your company page, the people engaging in that content are prime for connecting.
Now it’s probably not necessary to reach everyone who likes everything you publish, but again taking note of the profiles of people who are engaging with your content will allow you to qualify them against who you’re trying to connect with.
Reaching out to those who are a good fit could be as simple as a, “Thanks for the like, I’m glad you find the content engaging!” If they drop a comment, you can take the conversation further by starting a discussion, jumping off from their feedback.
Sponsored Content
While the personal touches from pages are always great to generate leads from LinkedIn, they’re harder to scale. Leveraging LinkedIn advertising around your marketing content is another great way to get more B2B leads.
Like other paid social advertising, LinkedIn advertising can accommodate budgets of all sizes and work to help achieve your marketing goals.
What you pay for LinkedIn advertising depends on what you set as a budget and can be stopped and started as you wish. Like other online advertising, LinkedIn is an auction-based system, meaning your ads compete with other advertisers to be seen by a similar audience.
Sponsoring content can be as simple as sponsoring posts your page is already publishing to generating specific content to promote that may or may not include lead gen forms.
Sponsored InMail
A hybrid option between personal outreach and scalability is sponsored InMail. Sponsored InMail gets you into the LinkedIn inboxes of your ideal audience. Create targeted messages to those you most want to reach and provide value; we all deal with enough noise in our day today.
Recommendations from LinkedIn Sales Navigator
For outbound sales teams, the prospect list might sometimes dry up. Getting a hand from a recommendation engine can help. That’s where LinkedIn’s sales navigator comes in. With a few settings, LinkedIn Sales Navigator gets to know the kinds of prospects, at the right type of companies, and geographically where you want to prospect. Prospect list dry as the Sahara? Just click into the discover tab and a whole new crop of accounts pop up to review.
Mix and Match Strategies
The reality is that no one strategy will solve all your lead generation needs. Mix and match to find the best combo that works for your ideal buyer persona and the industry you’re targeting. What LinkedIn lead gen tactics have you found productive? We’d love to hear from you, leave us a comment below.
