How to use LinkedIn for Effective Marketing and Lead Generation? LinkedIn is a perfect source for B2B leads as it is a direct way to communicate with your target market on a medium they use well. As the largest social network for entrepreneurs and business owners, there is a ton of opportunity to get in front of your perfect target market and turn them into conversations and generating leads. Everybody uses LinkedIn to showcase their professional qualifications and experience, and if you can establish yourself as an authority in your field and develop a large following, posting and blogging on LinkedIn can serve as a very effective marketing tool. Here are a few significant tips recommended by experts, in order to captivate good ratio of engagement and lead generation from LinkedIn. Table of Content 1. Plan a Strategy 2. Post relevant updates 3. Optimize LinkedIn Headline and Profile funnel 4. Establish Connections 5. Avoid Spamming 6. LinkedIn ads 7. Reach beyond your network 8. Publish articles 9. Share your Accomplishments 10. Utilize Sales Navigator 11. Send message 12. Join groups 13. Perform LinkedIn campaign 14. Post links to landing pages 15. Interact with Clients 16. Import Contacts 17. Connect with Profile Visitors 18. Infographics Plan a Strategy “Much like many other social media platforms, there isn’t just a single way to produce leads on LinkedIn, but the main agreement of how to do this is to be present. By simply interacting with people, accounts, posts, etc. you increase your chances of being noticed and therefore your chances of building leads. Create a plan in terms of how often you want to post, what kind of content you want to post and how you plan to interact with other people and brands. If you have a goal and a set plan, you will have a better approach to LinkedIn and will be more likely to succeed in lead generation.” - Carla Diaz, Cofounder at Broadband Search Read More: Effective marketing strategies during pandemic for software companies Post relevant updates “LinkedIn is comprehended of business people in a diversity of industries with a variety of titles. Try to post information related to your area of expertise regularly, not just information you've created, but also information that you've curated through other reputable sources. This is a best way to inaugurate yourself as someone who stakes up to date on news/trends that are of fascination to your audience.” - Linda Pophal, Content marketer & Marketing consultant at Strategic Communications LLC “LinkedIn is like Facebook for professionals. It has users all over the world that might help your business grow. Different strategies per platform to have an effective content that can generate leads. Post an update regularly. Make content that is relevant to your prospective clients. Your post is usually displayed in the feed of your connections that might result in higher customer engagement.” - Scot Chrisman, CEO at The Media House “I’ve been using LinkedIn for my own marketing and lead generation as the leader of my digital marketing firm. One tip I have for your readers is to make sure they are consistently using LinkedIn for organic opportunities, sharing articles, blogs, commenting/liking others’ posts and growing your network before you begin advertising. This goes for any social media platform where you want to advertise. Prospects and potential customers will be more interested in following you, engaging with you, and potentially buying from you if you’ve got a great base of organic content first. If you’re just posting ads over and over, it gets old quickly and makes it look like you’re not really a person/company, you’re just an ad “bot.” Organic content will get them interested in you or your brand first then slowly start advertising after you build up a strong base of content and followers. “ - Aalap Shah, Founder at 1o8 Agency “You can utilize LinkedIn to originate more sales leads by ordinarily offering your network with useful updates and by interrelating with posts by other users. This is a natural way you can provide value to LinkedIn users without seeming overly aggressive. “ - Kevin Miller, Founder & CEO at The Word Counter “One of the most admired tricks of generating leads on LinkedIn is by sharing original content, collaborations, interesting articles, and engaging with other users/companies. By showing personability and relatability, and taking the time to have a conversation with other users/companies, it shows your ability to engage, pay attention, and be top of mind.” - Ashley Sterling, Director of Operations at The Loop Marketing Optimize LinkedIn Headline and Profile funnel “The best way to get leads on LinkedIn is to create an offer that solves the main pain points of your target market, and reach out to them via Sales Navigator and present your opportunity. At the same time, you're going to want to build out your LinkedIn profile in a way that shows your expertise and teases your opportunity. You can do that by creating what's known as a LinkedIn Profile Funnel. Using the available text space in your profile and your header banner, you can offer visitors to your profile page additional information if they click through to links that you provide in your profile information area. You can create a lead magnet, an offer for a consultation, an offer for an audit, or anything that you think your specific target market would find super valuable. Once you have your profile funnel in place and your outreach working on autopilot, traffic will start to filter to your LinkedIn page and a certain percentage will convert into your funnel. At the same time leads will begin to respond to your outreach messaging and turn into conversations and appointments.” - Sam Rexford, Head of Content at Chillreptile “Perfectly optimized LinkedIn profile can generate leads itself. Integrate your SEO strategy over into your LinkedIn Profile, optimizing your headline, about section, and job descriptions for the keywords your prospects are searching for. What I like about this strategy is that is requires minimal maintenance and ongoing effort. If I find that I stop getting leads over a few months, I will then re-evaluate my strategy, changing my profile up with different keywords.” - Marisa Sanfilippo, Director of Marketing & Strategy at Priority Payments Local “Once you've upgraded your headline, simply interact and engage with people on LinkedIn. This is the snippet of text that appears next to your name when you post a comment or create a LinkedIn post. It's essentially a free mini-advertisement that shows up in people's feeds, and you can edit to say whatever you want. Think of it as your 5-word elevator pitch. Comment on peoples' posts and create new posts with interesting tips, advice, or insights that provide a bit of value for your connections.” - Jayson Demers, CEO at Email Analytics “Before initiating anything, you need to improve your profile to make sure it is as productive as possible once you have audience visit it. Create a unique headline that isn’t just your job title. Include something unique, engaging, and something that appears to be more than just a robot. Do the same for your short bio. Continue to set up a feature photo that includes info about your job, your experience, and the work you have done. Your portfolio can be the most effective part of your profile (if done right). To really make your profile stand out, you should produce regular content and share interesting pieces. Make it look like you take the time to use LinkedIn for all of its features. Next, you can begin outreaching to potential clients, collaborators, and like-minded people!” - Bernie Wong, Founder & Owner at Social Stand Limited Searching for Reliable Angular Development Company? Contact Now. See here Establish Connections “One of the strategies I use LinkedIn very effectively is to connect with people who I think might need my services. I’m always very upfront about why I’m connecting with them once we are engaged in a conversation and established a connection. I don’t lead with the value proposition; it’s my second message. This turns some people off, which I’ve learned is OK because I follow the golden rule. I would so much rather someone be friendly and also direct about the purpose of their connection with me. I don’t like it when people passively engage me in a conversation to bait me into a pitch later. I can feel that coming when people communicate that way and it feels like a prolonged false interest in me as a human. We’re all on LinkedIn to do business so I do my best to apply similar principles as I would to a cold call: yes, I want to connect in a genuine way but I’m not calling you just to chat. Why pretend? I like to establish a connection and alignment, then find out if what I have to offer will add value to their business. And if not, there’s a friendly thank you and well wishes. If there is interest and alignment, setting up a discovery phone call is always my goal.” - Kerri Feazell, CEO at Concurrent Productions “In terms of using LinkedIn for marketing and lead generation, we make sure to pay attention to the people that we reach out to. We are extremely careful that we are connecting with the right people who we think would have an interest in what we are sharing and offering. Once the connection has been made we share relevant details about our company and make sure that these details can also add value to those whom we are sending it to. Building a notable impression through a professional connection with a personal touch can go a long way with building a mutually beneficial relationship via LinkedIn.” - Alex Shute, Co-Founder at Upward Exits “LinkedIn is all about adding connections to your network. I would recommend giving a few minutes daily to add on the connections from different industries and talk to them to know each other and build relationships. On the other hand, be very careful in adding people to your network. The diversity is good and beneficial, but a lot of the profiles are a scam, so make sure you have checked the profile thoroughly before sending them the request or accepting their invitation for connecting. The more people you add, the more broaden your network is, and the more leads you will get. Besides adding people to your LinkedIn network, keep updating your business through your daily posts so people could know what you are up to and what is of their benefit. If they have any queries, make them feel comfortable to connect with you. However, make sure you are not selling through your updates but add value and share expertise instead.” - CJ Xia, VP of Marketing & Sales at Boster Biological Technology “The most effective use of LinkedIn to generate leads or market services is to use the power of its networking ability itself. Make connections, reach out to people, find out what they do, pass on other connections and opportunities that might be of interest to them, instigate and take part in collaborations, and encourage the people in your network to do the same for you.” - Polly Kay, Senior Marketing Manager at English Blinds “LinkedIn is a great platform to find your target audience, build a relationship with them and then convert them into a client. It all stems from understanding who exactly your target market is. We use Boolean searches to create the best searches of finding our target audience and then we create connection messages. Once they accept your connection request, you have to make sure you are also posting contents that resonates with that market place. This has to be a consistent process. If you are not building your connections, posting and engaging with your timeline every day, you will not see the complete value in LinkedIn.“ - Kelly Andersen, Marketing Director at Wealth Continuum Group Avoid Spamming “Don’t do spam, if you add someone don't send your same pitch within the same hour, never mind the same day. If you do that it won't matter how tailored your pitch is or how awesome your product/service might be, it will just be ignored due to the nefarious nature of the connection. Too soon is too spammy. Take a few days to pitch once you have liked or commented on a few of their posts. With insightful comments, not generic stuff like nice post, I agree, well said etc” - Ethan Taub, CEO at Goalry LinkedIn ads “If you want to reach a large, targeted group and your company page doesn't have many followers you can leverage LinkedIn ads. They have a fairly high cost-per-click (CPC) but you can set up lead generation forms directly tied to your CRM. Set up content offers, free consults, or some other form of value-add that prospects can sign up for. LinkedIn ads can be set to only show up for certain business leaders by geographic location, size of business, role in the company, and many other qualifying conditions. You can also use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for a monthly fee to connect with users outside of your network and determine who the decision-makers are in specific companies.” - Colton DeVos, Marketing & Communications Specialist at Resolute Technology Solutions Inc. “We often use LinkedIn as the first step of securing partnerships. It's a common touchstone for many professionals and companies, so it's easy for us to reach out. That and as a professional space, we already have a platform when it comes to arranging business deals. Occasionally we'll create advertisements meant to target professionals in the tech and lifestyle sector. These obviously help bring prospects to us, but right now the ads themselves are quite costly for the return.” - Rex Freiberger, CEO at Gadget Review “LinkedIn advertising campaigns are a great way to reach decision-makers at scale. You can use the rich company and job targeting options to put your message in front of a professional audience. LinkedIn advertising campaigns allow you to collect lead information or direct prospects to your website to learn more. LinkedIn ads has several different ad formats which are effective. First is Sponsored Content, ads that show up in the viewer's news feed with an image or video. Sponsored InMail sends an advertisement through the LinkedIn messaging platform.” - Anthony Blatner, CMO at Modern Media “In recent months, LinkedIn has become a valuable lead generation tool for us. This has been achieved through a combination of organic reach and paid LinkedIn ads. The organic reach was achieved through encouraging signups to a series of webinars, linking to a landing page where our audience could get more info. This was complimented by a number of ads which offered webinar and eBook downloads, using either carousel or video format in the ads. The audience targeting options on LinkedIn are precise enough for us to accurately reach our buyer personas.” - Ben Culpin, Content Marketer at WakeupData Read More: Useful youtube marketing tips for software companies Reach beyond your network “We use a variety of tactics to get our content beyond our network including hashtags, 'boosting' posts as sponsored ads, and linking key people for which our posts are relevant. All of these together help expand the reach of everything we publish beyond even our extensive networks.” - Mike Jones, CEO at Resound Creative Publish articles “LinkedIn allows you to write an article and share it with your audience. Make sure you include a link back to your website or landing page* to capture the lead. As your article on LinkedIn gets more and more engagement, your landing page conversions will also increase. Well, it’s not mandatory to create new content on LinkedIn. Repurposing your existing website content will still work.” - Nirmal Kumar, a blogger & SEO Expert at PayUOC Share your Accomplishments “Being more specific, we recommend sharing any accomplishments you, your company’s employee, and your company in general is a best way to capture people’s attention. Use data and real-life examples of what you have done for others to turn people’s heads when scrolling through LinkedIn. The stronger you can make your post about your successes, the better the chance you have at having someone inquire about your services.” - Angelo Sorbello, Founder at Astrogrowth “It is important to talk about the achievements and highlights of your business regularly while posting on your LinkedIn account. Your profile too needs to have crisp details about your business and how it can be of value to future customers.” - Sandy Vyjay, Co-founder at Voyager Utilize Sales Navigator “LinkedIn is my favourite platform to find potential leads, especially with their Sales Navigator tool. By connecting with brands' leaders, it creates a more personal connection. I often search by industry or job title to help narrow my search. Additionally, it's important to engage with your LinkedIn connections by reading their posts, commenting, sharing, etc.” - Diandra Lammens, Business Development Manager at Avex Designs Send message “After submitting a connection request, we wait to see who accepts those requests. Waiting for our goals to work prevents spamming to anyone who is not interested in interacting with us. When someone accepts our connection request, we send them a message. This message should thank you for connecting and introducing the idea of setting up a time to talk. These messages should not be excessively advantageous, but simply seek to start a conversation and continue to grow the relationship with your goal.” - Oliver Andrews, Owner at OA Design Services “We use LinkedIn for marketing quite a lot, both our personal profiles and our company profile. We do send outreach messages to people who have shown interest for our app, always personalizing them to the best of our extent. We’ve actually had great results this way and we managed to get quite a few demo signups just by reaching out on LinkedIn with the right message.” - Petra Odak, Chief marketing officer at Better Proposals “Since LinkedIn uses a personal connection and suggestion-based model, you can get the benefit of expanding your professional network. It's much easier to generate leads by personal outreach on LinkedIn due to this unwritten trust amongst personal LinkedIn connections. I think this method using LinkedIn is the most successful for generating leads since it's personalized, not-spammy, and always targeted to business contacts in your industry.” - Tom Winter, Co-Founder at DevSkiller Join groups “Groups are like an instant answer to your search for people with like minds or businesses. When you join a group, you expose yourself to people with the same interests as you, so you are more than likely to get clients from there.” - John Howard, CEO at Coupon Lawn Perform LinkedIn campaign “LinkedIn campaign can be useful in order to increase your brand awareness and, eventually, onboard more clients. Your posts contained short messages about your own insights and tips surrounding SEO and CRO for e-commerce businesses, as well as relevant content from other sources. Our aim of the posts was to portray us as experts in our field and showcase the knowledge and experience we possess. These organic posts were also supported by a number of sponsored posts, helping us to reach our target audiences. After just one week of the campaign, we saw a huge rise in engagement, with an increase in unique impressions and visits to our LinkedIn page.” - Steve Pritchard, Managing Director at It Works Media “We actually sell a LinkedIn automation tool so it’s a great opportunity to use our own product. Basically, we start a campaign by giving it a name and selecting a bigger audience. For example, we want to target marketing professionals that work in SaaS companies. We then create different types of actions for each audience subset. For example, we’ll send a direct message to CMOs, we’ll add marketing managers as contacts, we’ll set up the app to visit content marketers’ profiles, etc. Basically, the app takes care of the most tedious work on our behalf, which is why we made it in the first place.” - Stefan Smulders, CEO at Expandi Post links to landing pages “LinkedIn's algorithm doesn't like it when you try to divert traffic from their platform within your post. That is why whenever you are trying to get sign-ups for something, you should always put the link to the form in the comments. - If you do post a link to a landing page, delete that post before posting again - This will give you a better chance of getting more impressions because LinkedIn's algorithm won't mark it as something that has already been posted.” - Richie Pusateri, Marketing Associate at Postal Interact with Clients “LinkedIn is a community where discussion is rampant and clients would ask questions about a specific topic. You can take your time by answering these questions and try to answer questions that you are an expert with. You can also respond to questions with someone whom you want to do business with and answer their queries precisely as it will impress them which can help you generate leads.” - Sonya Schwartz, Founder at Her Norm “Introduce yourself as a business and sharing vital information that might be interesting to the reader. This is a creative way to make sure that your business and the LinkedIn user are on the same page. Hence, be consistent in posting relevant articles. When you are constantly sharing articles with your network, you might be making your presence visible to the network. This way you can start sharing your brand or your business.” - Adeel Shabir, Outreach Manager at Smith Thompson Import Contacts “When you get a new company card from somebody you know, use LinkedIn to look up them and invite them to communicate with you. If you only start as a member of LinkedIn, you can import your contacts from Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo! This is, or AOL. Make sure to also include your distinct URL in your email address, in your typical curriculum vitae, on your profile, on your homepage, and on your business card so people can easily link to you.” - Carolyn Cairns, Marketing manager at Creation Business Consultants Connect with Profile Visitors “My lead generation on LinkedIn comes from me checking to see who views my profile. These are often people who are not 1st level connections. Something drew them to my profile, yet for whatever reason they didn't send me a connection invite. This provides me an excuse to check their profiles. If they seem to be ideal individuals to add to my network, I send them a personalized invite and reference how I appreciated them taking time to review my profile.” - Clarene Mitchell, Owner at TCM Communications Infographics