Are you looking to get more sales for your products? You should be, and quality leads are the key. But, you may have overlooked generating qualified leads through LinkedIn. This social platform is packed full of qualified leads no matter what niche or business you engage in.
LinkedIn is the best social network for lead generation and according to HubSpot, the platform generates three times more visitor-to-lead conversions than Facebook or Twitter. With more than 400 million users worldwide, it would be a grave mistake to neglect LinkedIn as a platform for boosting online visibility. It’s time you connect to opportunities for generating qualified leads for your business.
Your business can gain many benefits when you pay attention to the potential leads on LinkedIn.They drive more customers for B2B brands. Considering how exciting and profitable the network is, you may think that every business knows how to use it to source leads.
But, sadly, that’s not the case
In fact, a lot of people are struggling. They might be active members and have a solid follower base, but they can’t seem to figure out how to effectively generate and track leads. Good news! I’ll share some proven hacks in this post that will help you to acquire more leads from LinkedIn and move them into your sales funnel. With this, you can move one step closer to achieving your sales goals—or even exceeding them.
Hacks for Qualified Lead Generation through LinkedIn
Let’s start shall we? I’ll go with the simplest one first!
1) Make Your Profile Attractive to Potential Leads
To stand a chance of attracting leads, you have to “connect” with these leads on LinkedIn. This means you need to have a profile that not only attracts but also entices your potential leads to connect with you. Here’s one example of a clear, useful, and persuasive profile by Shanna Pearson:
When building your LinkedIn profile, you must ask yourself: “Will my profile coax someone to connect with me even though they’ve never met me?”
If you can’t answer this question with confidence, the chance of attracting leads is slim to none. Your profile must go beyond providing the basic details like name, title/tagline, the company you work for, description, skills, etc. Instead use these as opportunities to really sell yourself and stand out through all of the LinkedIn noise.
It’s important to upload a professional picture. Without a photo you’re unlikely to make any connections, and with an unprofessional photo you’re likely to turn off any potential leads. If done correctly, this can increase your connections and subsequently your leads as well. Having a profile without the necessary details can get you tagged as a spammer, which can damage your online reputation.
Additionally, make sure your LinkedIn profile contains an intriguing summary of your services, brand story, achievements or vision, like the one below.
There are tangible benefits to crafting a professional and useful profile: Melonie Dodaro was able to increase the sales pipeline of Lori Carr and Associates to $1.45 million in just 7 months!
This is what Melonie has to say:
“Your profile is an essential part of your personal brand. Also, LinkedIn has really powerful search rankings. So you must understand that when people Google your name, what they will often see first is your profile — so it becomes your first online impression.”
2) Exploit the use of LinkedIn Advanced Search Function
Connecting with users is an important part of the strategy. However, it’s vital that you’re connecting with the right people. Qualified leads, remember?
You want to connect with people who would need to use your product or service, or who want to consume your content. There are literally thousands of people who need your product, and LinkedIn can find them for you, especially when you use advanced search operators.
Using LinkedIn’s Advanced Search function, you can narrow your search down using the title, location and industry of potential connections.Remember when searching for connections, the title should be related to the product you’re selling. For instance, if you’re selling a marketing software, then marketing managers or sales managers are in the best position to determine whether or not their companies need to use your product.
Instead of blindly connecting with everyone, maximize your time by connecting with your ideal audience. A study by LinkedIn revealed that the advanced search will help you to find as many leads as possible, giving you a sizable number of potential leads to work with. To save time and streamline the process the search function allows you to set up email alerts for your preferred searches. This means new leads could be delivered to your inbox every single day.
3) Be Active on LinkedIn Groups
After creating an attractive profile and searching for prospects, the next step is to create a group on LinkedIn. You must make sure that the title of this group is related to your business without being too promotional. For instance, if your product is useful for content marketers, you can create a group with the name “Creative Content Marketers” or some other variation of this. Here are some groups to inspire your own group name:
Name your group in such a way that your potential leads will be encouraged to join the conversation. Often, it’s most effective to appeal to your target audiences’ self-confidence or ego. Creating a group will only work in your favor if it is an active and engaged community.
You must post relevant content in the group to encourage participation from potential leads. Just remember they should be posts that will benefit the group members. Just be mindful not to blatantly promote yourself.
If the industry you’re targeting already has a wide variety of active groups on LinkedIn, then it might be best to join those existing communities instead of starting your own. Building an engaged audience within a LinkedIn group could take months. If the audience is already primed and engaged elsewhere, why reinvent the wheel?
When you contribute to these groups with the aim of helping people, soon enough, members will begin to see you as an expert and be more inclined to do business with you. LinkedIn groups can even lead to more connections for you. Lewis Howes claims he gets 15-20 new invites every day from members of his group.
But that’s not all. American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) raised awareness of its brand and attracted 54,000 new members through LinkedIn group participation.
4) Share Valuable Content on Your Profile and on Pulse
Once you are connected to potential leads, they should start seeing value from you immediately, well before they receive a sales pitch. It’s easier for someone who has benefited from your posts to invest in your product than someone who has to endure your sales pitch every day of the week.
You can share tips on how your leads can move forward in their career and how your product can help them, but the promotion must be done carefully. You can also share links to popular posts that are of use to your connections. Jason Roell consistently shares new posts on his profile to keep his connections engaged.
Another way of getting the best out of your LinkedIn marketing is to publish detailed posts on LinkedIn Pulse. The beauty of Pulse is that in addition to reaching your current connections, you can also reach people outside your connections. This would be through search engine result pages (SERPs), when people search for related keywords.
This means you can even get leads from search engines using LinkedIn!
5) Use Sales Navigator on LinkedIn premium
LinkedIn Sales Navigator was launched in 2014. Its main function is to use LinkedIn’s large database to identify ideal prospects.
Through the Sales Navigator, you can connect with your prospects, engage them with the right messages, get instant insights and monitor the success of your efforts online.
One of the biggest challenges most businesses have is identifying qualified leads. In addition to identifying them, the Sales Navigator makes it easier for you to see their interests, their recent activities and their contacts. This gives you a wealth of information about your potential leads.
Sales Navigator also allows you to have all your leads in one place and there are 22 search filters available for your advanced search.
When you finally connect with your leads, Sales Navigator is able to track the effectiveness of your communications so you can easily see what’s working and what’s not. This, of course, helps you align your campaigns accordingly.
This tool is only available for LinkedIn premium accounts but the value far outweighs the financial investment. In fact, it’s likely that getting a single qualified lead with this tool will provide a return on your investment.
Through the use of Sales Navigator, Sacramento Kings were able to beat their in-game ticket sales goal by 50%. They also saw 6% of their overall new business come from deals sourced from LinkedIn or Sales Navigator.
Conclusion
To make the most of lead generation through LinkedIn, you must have an effective sales funnel in place, because most times, your sales will be made outside of the LinkedIn platform.
Having a perfect LinkedIn strategy without a Sales Funnel is an effort in futility. With your sales funnel in place, there is no better platform to find thousands of leads than LinkedIn. Following the hacks I have outlined in this post will give you the best result in generating leads from LinkedIn.
