In the new world of online marketing, we see many people starting to ask the right questions. How can I use LinkedIn for lead generation? How do I use LinkedIn professionally? What are the best ways of using LinkedIn to generate leads? Etc. So let’s run through some of the very best ways of using Linkedin for lead generation.
First, the elephant in the room, all you need for your LinkedIn profile is a professional headline that displays who you work with and what you do for them – in short, the problems you solve for them and the benefits they get.
Then expand your headline in your summary and give some evidence on what you mentioned above with testimonials, facts, and figures and then have a clear call-to-action on how people can contact you or go to your website.
When that is out of the way, the key to getting leads on Linkedin is proactive action, and there are four main strategies for doing that.
Linkedin Lead Generation Strategy 1: “Connect and Nurture”
This is the primary strategy individuals use because it is that the most simple one. It’s the “connect and nurture” strategy. Merely search on Linkedin for potential customers. Send them a tailored message, ideally mentioning some commonality between you or some reason you’d need to urge connected. Once you’ve connected, nurture the connection through Linkedin – by sending them a link to a helpful article or a video. Get a conversation going, raise them some queries that will transition to a call or email or perhaps meeting face-to-face.
There are three reasons you may use this strategy.
The primary is that your product/service is high-value, so potential purchasers require you’re personal nurturing.
If you sell low price services or merchandise, then a costly exercise to spend 3 hours nurturing a relationship with somebody if all they’ll pay is you $200.
The second criterion is industries like law and accounting that also revolve primarily around personal relationships. They’re going to try to meet new individuals, build a network of individuals that may eventually find themselves referring and doing business with one another, etc.
The third criteria is that you simply “up for it” . You have got to master the art of getting conversations via electronic communication – asking the right question’s to mature the relationship.
Linkedin Lead Generation Method 2: Referrals Rolodex
The second method you can use on Linkedin is to use it for referrals.
So what you’re doing here is you’re essentially using Linkedin like a big Rolodex of potential contacts you can get introductions to and so what you’ve got to do is make sure you’re connected on Linkedin to the people you feel confident will give you strong referrals – maybe clients and ex-clients and contacts if you’ve done great work for so you know they would be comfortable referring you.
And then you just do a Linkedin search to try and identify second-order connections – contacts of contacts who would be great potential clients. You use the right criteria to identify those potential clients, and then when it shows you the list of them, it will highlight who your standard contacts are, and if some of those are the people who you know will give you a good referral, then you simply ask for that referral.
So it’s an alternative to the traditional referral approach of going to someone to ask for referrals and kind of saying, “well do you know anyone who works for a small manufacturing firm?” That kind of thing where you’re making them do all the hard work of trying to think of the person. If you use Linkedin, then you can say, “oh, I spotted on Linkedin you’re connected to John Smith of Smith & Company. If you were me, how do you go about getting in touch with them?”
And you know nine times out if they would be willing to give you a referral and they do really know John Smith, then they’ll say “I’ll introduce you,” etc., etc. So you use Linkedin as a source of information for referrals. But when you ask for the referral itself, you do it in person, you do it over the telephone or over email – you don’t use Linkedin for that aspect of it.
Linkedin Lead Generation Method 3: Linkedin Content Marketing
The third method of using Linkedin is for content marketing. The way many people use Linkedin has really changed in the last year or so with many usability improvements. It used to be people almost always just went onto Linkedin to maybe make a connection or respond to a message etc.
But nowadays, a lot of people are getting on Linkedin, and they are looking at their newsfeed. They may not go there primarily for it, but they’re spending time on their newsfeed scrolling through articles to see if there’s anything interesting there and what that means is content marketing on Linkedin is now proving to be very useful and because not a lot of people are doing it and not a lot of people are doing it well you can make a significant impact.
So if you scroll through your newsfeed, what you’ll notice is there are many posts on there, and mainly they are the kind of images and links to external articles and stuff like that, and they’ve got one comment and two likes at most. But eventually, you’ll hit one that’s got 50 comments and 47 likes, and behind the scenes, it’s getting thousands and thousands of views. So, in other words, the person who wrote that article is getting front of mind with thousands of people who are looking at that article and reading it.
Now the Linkedin algorithm changes all the time but right now, it is favoring pure text-only posts. So if you look down your newsfeed, you’ll find most of the standings with loads of comments and likes are primarily just text only, or they are short native videos – so not a YouTube video but a video uploaded to Linkedin. Linkedin does not want people to leave the Linkedin platform – it kind of penalizes if there’s a link in the actual article itself and you send them off Linkedin because Linkedin wants to keep people on Linkedin. After all, that’s where it makes its money: from people being on Linkedin.
So if you can write a good post in that 1,300 words, especially one where you capture people’s attention with something kind of emotionally compelling in the first few words because usually the first couple of lines appear before people have to expand it. If you tell a little story in there – a little parable with a meaning at the end and you do something that people can comment on that stir some emotion – because people feel empathy with it and they want to comment on it, or you ask a question.
Similarly, in your video, if you ask a question if you get people to comment…if people start engaging with your content on Linkedin early on in the first couple of hours, then Linkedin sees that as a sign that it’s the kind of thing people want to see. It starts spreading it more a more, and you can get a type of mini-viral effect. Now that’s also dependent on you being connected to the right people, so in parallel with doing content on Linkedin, you’ll want to communicate with your potential clients or other people who are connected to them, so you’ve got a big network of potential clients who are seeing that content.
That’s content marketing on Linkedin – a lot more to be said about that, and I’m sure I’ll come back to that another day.
Linkedin Lead Generation Method 4: Linkedin Advertising
The final method is Linkedin advertising – another big topic. Linkedin advertising is a bit of a clunky platform. Nowhere near as advanced as the Facebook advertising platform, and it’s much more expensive per click. But if the targeting criteria on Linkedin are primarily based on demographics and firmographics (who someone works for, their job title, their level of seniority, the number of people in the company, etc.)… if you can find your target clients really well through those criteria, you can do well with Linkedin advertising. I positively tested on a couple of occasions. The last time I tried it, it was something like a four hundred percent ROI within a couple of weeks for me in terms of people then going to a sign-up page signing up and a number of them then signing up for my paid programs Linkedin advertising can work well.
So those are your effective four methods for Linkedin Lead Generation. It’s the straightforward one of “connect and nurture”. It’s using Linkedin as a Rolodex to find people you can get referrals to. It’s doing content marketing on Linkedin, and it’s using Linkedin advertising.
All four could work, but they work well in different circumstances. So if you have a lot of high-value potential clients, you may want to go down the connect and nurture route or maybe referrals. If you have online courses or other products where you need a larger number of people, you might want to go down the content marketing or the advertising route.
