What do freelancers, young agencies and budding entrepreneurs have in common? It is the endless search and struggles to find quality leads and convert them into customers.
Cold emailing and cold messaging aren’t so effective in today’s digital world. So what’s the way out? You can get your answer by directing your focus on LinkedIn. It’s a great platform for sourcing job opportunities and connecting with experts.
Leveraging LinkedIn to its utmost potential helps with B2B marketing and branding solutions, generating qualified leads. One of the topmost reasons for establishing connections and extending business relations is trust.
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With the trust factor playing a crucial role, marketers often focus on building brand perception to create meaningful relationships with consumers. This results in consumer confidence.
According to Insider Intelligence’s “US Digital Trust Survey,” LinkedIn ranks first in digital security, making it the most trusted platform. It gets easier for marketers to promote their services through LinkedIn and facilitate buyer-customer relations.
The bar graph lists the reasons buyers have to connect better with sellers.
Source: LinkedIn
What does it mean to generate leads on LinkedIn?
Social media marketing has an expansive list of channels at its fingertips. LinkedIn is sadly not on the top of the list. Many do not know how to use this platform as a tool to cultivate their businesses and their reputation with potential customers.
So what does it mean to generate leads on LinkedIn? It’s quite simple. You use it like any other social media platform. However, the only difference is that it is a bit more professional than its cousins.
Like any other platform, any activity done here will build a reputation to attract new customers. This means presenting your story most authentically, engaging your audience, and being updated with all the relevant information needed for a new customer to skim through.
Here’s why LinkedIn is the place for finding leads and establishing stronger connections:
- LinkedIn is where more than 55 million businesses from around 200 countries convene.
- As of 2022, LinkedIn has more than 849.6 million users, with a majority of them looking for relevant industry-related interests.
- Nearly 75% of LinkedIn users generated an income of $50,000 in 2018, shows a study by Pew Research Centre. You can imagine their turnovers today!
- Almost all executives from Fortune 500 companies are active on LinkedIn.
- More than 76% of business executives check their LinkedIn accounts on daily basis.
Source: LinkedIn
With the points above, you can see the immense amount of opportunity and potential LinkedIn presents. Generating quality leads requires some trial and error approach from your side to figure out what works for your business.
When you think about marketing your product or services, LinkedIn might have been your last choice so far. It’s often seen as a platform that can only be used to connect and network with individuals in the same industry. But the platform has a lot of unexplored potential for lead generation.
Besides being a place to market your product, LinkedIn is a hotspot for you to connect and pitch to relevant clients in a personalized manner. Leads are just like precious gems to marketers.
Insightful tactics with a strong strategy can help you enhance and refine your lead generation campaigns to get convincing results. On the side, your website or blog could also receive a lot of new visitors by chalking out an effective marketing plan for your company through LinkedIn.
However, reality can look scary. Active users spend just around 17 minutes on average every month on LinkedIn. This is a short window for you to grab their attention.
On top of this, the volume of content shared on LinkedIn increased by 60% between 2019 and 2020. In such a scenario, how can you nail the LinkedIn game for lead generation? Here’s a quick guide to help you get started.
7 effective ways to generate leads on LinkedIn
1. Improve your profile
Optimizing your profile can help you generate your leads effectively just like SEO works for Google. It’s not only researching the relevant keywords related to your niche but also enhancing your profile in a way that can appeal to users who visit you.
A well-thought-out page with only relevant information about your business can create a great first impression on a potential customer or client. However, don’t ramble on.
Choose a crisp title that describes who you are and add relevant hashtags in your posts. Have a visible feature image and banner. Conduct research on keywords related to your domain. These will help drive potential customers.
2. Create thought leadership content
Salesy content does not perform well on LinkedIn. A proven approach has been to address people’s challenges and how they can improve on their pain points and progress in their careers. And that is why thought leadership content is the most powerful way to resonate with the audience.
The content you post should not just be related to your niche but also include something that is intriguing and piques the interest of users. Catchphrases and write-ups that will spark curiosity have a higher chance of grabbing a user’s attention.
In a world where people have limited time on their hands, people are more likely to look for an expert’s perspective on current affairs and trends. On the organizational side, leaders can talk about what they stand up for, company ethos and vision while addressing real-world challenges.
On the product side, content on the journey of founders and posts centered around the product, i.e., product-led content being the best solution piques the audience’s interest.
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3. Go beyond form fill and understand your leads
Reaching out to a massive number of followers and casting a wide net does not always fetch quality. To gauge the actual quality of your target audience, only measuring the conversion cost is not enough. Assess the value of the lead in the longer run.
Ask yourself the following questions before launching a lead generation campaign:
- What do you mean by quality lead?
- How are you currently treating your leads?
- As a company, how do you define conversion?
- What is the response time of your sales team?
- How long is your sales cycle?
- Are you using marketing automation tools?
- What is your status on marketing so far?
Once you have answers to these points, use LinkedIn Conversion Tracking. It helps you measure the real quality of your leads, get more complete metrics, attribution features and deeper insights into how your campaign is performing.
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4. Use ads to your advantage
If you have the budget to invest in advertising campaigns, then use it to generate leads for your business. You don’t even need to brainstorm too much over advertising. LinkedIn offers a variety of options that can help you reach out to a larger customer base. Back your thought-provoking content with sponsored posts to double up the effects.
Whether you want to seize on potential clients through the newsfeed or sponsored messages, it’s effective to generate more leads. The content of your ad and what it’s offering matter as to how people are going to respond.
Source: LinkedIn
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5. Foster relationships in your niche
Building a healthy relationship in your niche is an important element. It brings together the community and builds trust and rapport, which are essential for a strong client base.
Optimizing your profile is a step that can help you kickstart when building relationships on this platform. You can strike up a conversation with them based on relevant interests. This goes a long way in strengthening your reputation. You can drive the conversations eventually into the direction of your sales pitch.
Since you are making connections in your niche, there are high chances of you reaching out to a wide base of stakeholders in the same community, ranging from a newbie to a seasoned professional to an influencer. Eventually, this is what will strengthen your credibility in the industry.
6. Engage in relevant groups
Join relevant groups pertaining to your niche. Users are likely to join industry-specific groups, and your becoming a part of it can help establish your presence. It’s an instrumental tool for engaging in conversations with experts and professionals from the industry.
7. Post performance
Creating content is not the end of it. You need to make sure that you keep a tab on how your content is performing. Taking a deep dive into the analytics will give you a lot of insight into planning your content marketing strategies.
Besides providing insights into clicks, impressions, shares and social action, analytics also provide engagement and clickthrough rates. With the help of this information, you can work around your posts, engage your audience better and identify what’s not working.
Source: Buffer
The bottom line
There’s more to LinkedIn than just making a beautiful profile. Understanding your audience and the value of your leads is key to grabbing the attention of potential customers.
While this might involve tremendous research, planning and experimentation, when its tools are leveraged correctly, the platform can help you achieve the success you are looking for.
After all, Rome was not built in a day!
