How to Use LinkedIn for Generating Leads and Closing Deals


With the emergence of the digital era, the process of lead identification, delineation, and cultivation has undergone a significant change. No more are businesses required to rely on the traditional lead generation tactics like cold calling, direct mails, or promotional texts. Instead, they can simply use a variety of internet-based lead generation mechanisms to make targeted interventions, devise cost-effective strategies and thus, enhance overall ROI.

So much so, that over 53% of marketers have now begun to allocate about half their total budget for generating credible, online leads!

However, the methods and techniques of digital lead generation are not always as simple as they sound. For most businesses, the primary challenge is to select a unique medium that harbors the potential to provide accurate data, shape-specific conversations, identify the latest trends, and host relevant content. This has to be followed by streamlining other implementation, documentation, capital acquisition, and funding issues.

Although there are many online lead generation platforms, almost 80% of B2B leads generated specifically on social media, come from a single source – LinkedIn.

With a user base of approximately 612 billion spread across 200 countries, LinkedIn is currently the most powerful tool for digital lead generation. It helps businesses expand their reach, increase their engagement, form lasting connections and thereby, drive strategic decisions. Lead generation through LinkedIn, in fact, is considered to be a highly comprehensive, focused, and specialized process which adopts a multi-dimensional and omnichannel approach.

As an organization, if you too want to know how to generate business leads from LinkedIn, here is a step-by-step guide to help you qualify more leads, trigger greater conversions and close better deals –

Profile Optimization 

The first, and probably the most underutilized step in LinkedIn lead generation is – Profile Optimization. What you include or omit from your LinkedIn profile gives your prospective leads a firm idea about where you stand as a business. It also helps set the tone for your professional connections while building up on your personal authority.

If you intend to optimize your profile for LinkedIn, you need to:

Narrow Your Niche

Begin with writing about the specific niche area that your business specializes in. If you put in a generic tagline, you might generate a lot of leads – but, they would be unqualified. A precise tagline, on the other hand, will drive legitimate conversations and thus forge, quick connections.

Build Your Profile

Next, build a profile that focuses on both your business and your customers. Give your leads a glimpse of your skills, achievements, academics, titles, and experiences, while telling them what you can offer. Make visual profile banners, provide clear contact information and render a call to action.

 Identify Specific Keywords

One of the best ways for lead generation through LinkedIn is to optimize your profile for search engines. Pick out keywords (short-tail and long-tail) that your potential clients are most likely to use and incorporate them into your profile, judiciously. This will make sure that your brand becomes visible to the leads.

Publish Relevant Content

While profile optimization will help you drive traffic towards your LinkedIn profile, publishing relevant and engaging content will establish you as an undisputed industry leader. High-quality content will give your business a competitive edge, especially in terms of reputation, craft and hold.

Outreach Messages 

Once this is done, you need to start scouting for professionals who are working in a similar business landscape as yours. This is because the likelihood of these professionals, who can understand your business in-depth, turning into qualified leads is much more than other, random prospects who might simply increase your exit/bounce rate.

In LinkedIn lead generation, an outreach should, therefore, begin with:

Joining LinkedIn Groups

First and foremost, register and join LinkedIn groups that are related to your business niche. Participate in group conversations and, at the right time, add links to your landing pages. However, make sure that your promotional content is restricted to an as-needed basis only.

Checking Individual Profiles

Go through the individual profiles of all your prospective customers and find out more about their work history, interests, hobbies, and needs. LinkedIn lead generation service is the only instrument that can provide you with such detailed information. Use this data to devise warm outreach messages.

Sending Connection Requests

After you have identified and marked potential clients, send them a LinkedIn connection request. While writing a connection message, ensure that you are not promoting your business. Instead, use an approach where you inquire more about the customer’s needs, without invading their private space.

Creating Lead Magnets

Just as the prospective lead gets back to you, engage them in a conversation. Send them a carefully designed lead magnet that can hold their interest and extract their contact details, at the same time. These magnets may include free e-books, PDF files, whitepapers or other, similar downloadable content.

Inbound Profile Traffic 

Sending outbound messages and conducting follow-up operations is just one part of the LinkedIn lead generation design. You can even go further and attract inbound traffic, right towards your LinkedIn profile! Doing so will enable you to gain greater visibility and receive qualified leads at your doorstep.

To accomplish this objective, you can:

Use Automated Tools

Every time a visitor is directed to your website, their details are registered under the ‘Profile views’ section. With automated LinkedIn lead generation, you can manage such views, respond to connection requests, seek potential leads, and send follow-up messages without wasting any time! For this purpose, a few automated LinkedIn messaging tools that you can use include – Linked Helper, LinkedIn Pulse, Dux-Soup, and Octopus CRM.

Employ Advertising Options

Apart from using the tools above, you can also employ a plethora of advertising options to take your brand message forward. LinkedIn facilitates sponsored content, which can generate 400% more leads than other advertising channels. You can utilize InMail, a facility powered by LinkedIn, to reach the e-mail inboxes of your prospects and deliver them a warm, welcoming, and personalized promotional message.

Start Cross Promotions 

A good way to direct inbound traffic towards your profile via the LinkedIn lead generation service is by promoting your business on different platforms. Such cross-promotion across various channels will permit you to reach larger audiences and gather more views. As a result, the likelihood of your prospects being led towards your business would be higher.

 

The Way Forward

According to a recent study by the ‘B2B Technology Marketing Community’, about 61% of marketers feel that generating high-quality leads is one of the greatest challenges that they have to face on a regular basis. This is because, despite the best of their efforts, irregular profiles, unsystematic follow-ups, inappropriate management, and messy conversion paths tend to create heinous problems.

Amidst such consistent and grave difficulties, the advent of LinkedIn lead generation service has indeed proved to be a breath of fresh air!

Since its inception in 2003, LinkedIn has steadily evolved from being a professional networking site to becoming a widely used tool for brand building, capital sourcing, and business development. But more than this, LinkedIn lead generation has emerged as an instrument to understand, interact, and develop a deep bond with your target audience.

Find out why BeeSeen Solutions is rated as one of the Top Social Media Marketing Agencies in New York!