With 760 million+ active users belonging to 150+ industries, LinkedIn is an ultimate treasure of leads. If you want to connect with ideal prospects who hold the strings, you’ll find them on LinkedIn. No wonder 80% of B2B marketers rely on LinkedIn for lead generation.
Thus, if you haven’t tried LinkedIn yet or dipped your toe into B2B lead generation, now is the time.
A great number of B2B marketers, sales professionals, and businesses are leveraging the potential of LinkedIn for lead generation and chances are your competitors are also doing the same. You can easily catch up to or even go light years ahead of your competitors if you take the following steps to use LinkedIn the right way:
1. Tweak & Optimize Your Profile
You wouldn’t expect customers to stay at your website if your homepage is poorly laid out, right? The same goes for your LinkedIn profile. If your LinkedIn profile doesn’t fit the purpose, it doesn’t matter how many people you add, no one will be attracted to you. If you want to generate leads on LinkedIn, you need an effective and optimized LinkedIn profile that includes the following elements:
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A professional profile picture and cover photo
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A catchy headline and a compelling summary
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Relevant keywords and skills
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Endorsements
An eye-catching and attractive LinkedIn profile will add to your authenticity and more people will trust you and buy from you.
2. Find Potential Prospects
The sheer number of users on LinkedIn is a blessing – but it can be challenging when it comes to finding your ideal prospects. There are millions of prospects and finding the right ones for your business can be a very long, hectic, and time-consuming process.
Fortunately, there are many LinkedIn automation tools and some other tactics to help you reach your target audience easily and quickly. You can use sales navigator which is a LinkedIn automation tool introduced by LinkedIn itself. It comes with highly advanced filters and finds even the most difficult leads. Sales navigator finds and extracts a lists of prospects and recommends ‘prospect suggestions’ that can be useful to you.
You can also find relevant people on a post. Select a relevant LinkedIn post with good engagement and check out the profiles of the people who have liked and commented on the post. You will find good prospects there.
3. Join LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn groups are a great way to grow your reputation among members of the target audience. These groups are mini hubs where prospects of the same interest and like-minded people get together, interact with each other, and share strategies in the group.
To get closer to your target audience and establish a great reputation, start with Linkedin groups. Join relevant groups, like, and comment on posts to increase engagement. Once you have established your reputation, you can share your own posts. Make sure the content you’re sharing is relevant and interesting to the group of people. Create rich and personalized content that the members of the group will want to read. You can use it as an initiative to interact with ideal prospects.
Conclusion
As shown above, there are a number of ways to take advantage of LinkedIn to grow your network and increase your sales. Cold calling doesn’t work anymore and doesn’t generate leads. Today, social selling is the best practice and LinkedIn is, undoubtedly, the best platform for sales professionals to build strong business relationships and generate qualified leads.
Don’t rush or try any ‘game the system’ formula as it will create spam. Be genuine, share valuable and personalized content, connect with people, and you can generate a good number of leads in a short time.