Treat your LinkedIn lead generation strategy like any venture you would enter. You should come in prepared with a checklist that should ensure the success of your plan.
But where to start?
To give you some idea, here’s a list of your basic must-haves when it comes to building your LinkedIn Lead Generation strategy:
1. Audit your marketing plan
Today’s consumers are savvier when it comes to purchasing decisions. This is all thanks to the abundance of information they can gather online.
That’s why it’s important that you first look into your marketing collateral. Are all of them aligned with your goals? Do they have the same voice? Do they provide consistent messaging across all the platforms your business is in?
Once you get a clear picture of your business’s marketing strategy then you can start building your lead generation plan. This will make the process smoother and faster.
2. Optimise your profile
It is important that you work on your profile pages since this is the first thing a person sees about you. What they see and read on your personal and business page will be their first impression of you and your company.
For an in-depth look on how to do this, here’s two of our previous blog on them:
3. Identify your target audience
You can’t just talk to everyone or anyone. To ensure a successful lead generation campaign, you have to know who you are reaching out to.
You can’t exactly reach out to a vegan eater when you’re selling beef.
Create a persona of your target audience. This is done through research and some educated guessing. This can include age, gender, industry, position, location, etc.
4. Consider signing up for LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator
While LinkedIn’s basic membership works. Getting a Sales Navigator licence would elevate your lead prospecting process. It provides a user with 22 filter categories such as keywords, relationships, industry, geography, job title, company, etc. Thus, giving you the ability to further refine your target list.
5. Determine what makes you different
It is important to stand out among the crowd whatever your business may be. There’s always someone who offers the same thing as you.
For example, you’re offering digital marketing services.
You’re not the only one who is offering digital marketing services.
What is your business’s unique characteristics that make it stand out among your competitors?
What about being a digital marketing agency that provides businesses with an all-in-one platform that covers their social media, CRM, billing, and project management?
6. Launch Your Campaign
You won’t know if it will work if you don’t begin anything. You can also launch a campaign with us.
7. Fine-tune your messaging
Now that you’ve launched your campaign. It is important to start working on fine-tuning your messaging. You can’t expect to close a deal with just one connection request or InMail message.
In order to close a deal, you have to be persistent and consistent in reaching out to your clients. You have to be agile with your messaging. Make sure that you fine-tune your messaging with your target audience so you don’t sound spammy or robotic.
8. Post relevant and well thought out content
We all know that content is king.
So make sure that you take full advantage of LinkedIn’s content features. Create a good post. Leverage it by providing a link to your website or landing page.
One of the rising key features of LinkedIn these past few years is posting articles on the platform.
People love reading long-form articles. In fact, content that has more than 1,900 words performs well on LinkedIn. 45% of its readers are people who are decision-makers in companies and organizations.
You can use this as a means to increase your credibility and level of expertise with every post.
So make sure to include this on your content marketing calendar.
You might want to explore Linkedin’s video streaming capabilities as well. The previous year has seen exponential growth when it comes to livestreaming.
9. Interact. Comment. Join Groups.
Socialize.
This is one of the things that many forget to do when they’re building their strategy and applying them.
They’ll take the time to build a good strategy. But they fail to interact more and just do minimal interaction with their audience.
Accepting your connection requests and exhausting all your message sequences shouldn’t be a hindrance or a stop. Even if they said “NO” to you, it is important to keep rapport with them.
Comment on the post they share. Answer questions when they ask.
You can also build your own group or join other LinkedIn groups. This will give you more chances to be visible and reach out to more people without having to connect.
LinkedIn is a social networking site. Take full advantage of its networking features instead of just waiting for someone to reply or sign-up.
Remember, you have to build your own doors and windows of opportunity.
10. Consider using paid ads
If you want to reach out to more people you might want to consider using paid ads. It is said that a LinkedIn paid ad can reach at least 13% of the world population. A basic text ad can be seen by 60k – 400k people.
11. Don’t forget about your first-degree connections
One of the things that people tend to forget when generating leads on LinkedIn is their first-degree connections.
They fail to leverage these ready-made existing connections that can enrich one’s business. Since they are likely to fit the customer profiles and industry you’re looking for.
Reach out to them that provide value to them such as webinars, ebooks, whitepapers, or courses.
12. A/B Testing
Make sure that you’re not just using one messaging or one platform. By having different tactics you can see what works for your business. Test which of your messaging styles work and what doesn’t.
There’s no one size fits all approach when it comes to lead generation. That’s why it’s highly recommended that you do A/B testing with some of your tactics and messaging.
13. Analyze your results
You’re now running your campaigns for a few days, a couple of weeks or for a month. So it’s time to determine what are the key metrics you’d like to see to determine your lead generation success.
As a reminder, refrain from doing hope and pray marketing, you did all of these and then you stopped.
Hoping, waiting, and praying that the leads start coming in doesn’t yield results. Working and struggling do. Being consistent yields results.
The process doesn’t stop just because you set all of these up. It is something that you need to spend some time perfecting. You have to make mistakes first before getting the hang of things. A battle isn’t won overnight.
Check what works and what doesn’t for you and your business.
For an in-depth look, you may watch this free webinar.