Is LinkedIn Good for Lead Generation?
LinkedIn can be a great platform for lead generation. LinkedIn enables you to target specific job roles, job functions and companies in various ways to ensure you can reach the right person for your marketing activities.
What is LinkedIn?
Unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn is aimed at professionals looking to use this platform to boost their career or grow their business. Just like social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn users can upload content as well as share and engage with content of others.
How can I generate Leads on LinkedIn?
There are two categories of lead generation on LinkedIn. One is organic, meaning that it is free and the other is paid.
Organic
The free approach is a process which requires time, patience and consistency. I’ve split the organic approach for lead generation into two stages, one is audience and the other is content.
Audience
You have an idea of the kind of people you want to turn into a lead, for example, you know the job title, the country and the industry of the company the person works for.
Go to the search box in LinkedIn, type in the job role you are targeting and hit enter. At the top of the results, you will see a few options such as “Jobs, People, Posts” etc. Click on people, then click on “All filters”. From there, you will be able to filter further such as company, company industries, country and even profile language. Once you have applied your filters, click “Show results”.
Now that you have the list, you can simply connect with them. You can connect with people by just clicking the connect button, however, you can also connect with people with a short connection note with the aim of increasing the chances of them accepting your connection. Since we’re aiming to generate leads on LinkedIn, you can use this as a short sales pitch, so get creative!
Test different messages and see which one gets you connections consistently.
Or… you can just hit the “send without a note” button because sometimes, maybe most of the time? People just accept anyway! See which approach is most effective and then go for it.
How to increase your chances of getting a connection
Put your LinkedIn profile in your email signature. When you’re emailing customers, leads generated from other activities and prospects, there’s a good chance they will see your email signature with your LinkedIn profile and if it was a pleasant conversation, they could send you a LinkedIn connection. You can send them one too if they have their LinkedIn in their email signature or simply search for them on LinkedIn.
Recommendations
You can ask the customers you directly worked with to leave a recommendation on your LinkedIn profile so your new connections can see you are good at what you do, this is essentially a testimonial.
About me area
In the “About me” area on your LinkedIn profile, you can give people a good overview of what you’re about.
- Focus on the problems you solve
- What your company is about
- What you do
- How you can help
Featured Section
There’s a featured section on your LinkedIn profile, you can use this section to place a few things such as:
- Recommendations
- A video that perfectly sums up what you are about and the problems you solve
- Images, either showing awards you won or a useful infographic which shows why you’re better than the competition or valuable information about the industry you’re in.
Content
Great, now you have a good pipeline through your new connections which is increasing the number of relevant people at your fingertips, now it’s time to look at the content you can use to turn these connections to leads.
LinkedIn enables you to provide your audience with various media formats you can use to generate leads with.
Here is a list of media types you can upload the moment you open the platform:
- Video
- Images
- Documents (PowerPoint and PDF)
- Polls
- Articles
Keep your content simple, relevant and straight to the point. Remember you are competing with other companies and people for your audiences attention and the more attention you get, the better your content will perform and get in front of more of your audience, especially if they engage with your content by liking, comment and sharing.
Since we’re wondering if LinkedIn is good for lead generation, the most important engagement is commenting. You can encourage your audience to leave a comment by pushing content that entices them to share their thoughts on a topic that is relevant to the product or service you eventually want to sell to them.
Once they have left a comment, you can then follow up with them by sending them a direct message and get a conversation going. Depending on how the conversation goes, you could have generated a lead!
But remember what I said earlier? Consistency! You have to keep pushing out content, preferably on a daily basis to maintain engagement and get your audience familiar with you. The more familiar they get, the more engagement you shall receive! With all these different media formats at your disposal, they will never get bored of you.
Another way you can get people to share their thoughts on a topic is polls. You can create a poll on LinkedIn. Ask a question, provide a set of answers, again, since we’re looking to answer the question “Is LinkedIn good for lead generation?” Make sure you can follow up with them and start a conversation regardless of the option they choose on your poll.
Newsletter
This is a great way to nurture your connections, you can use this to provide useful and insightful information so you don’t lose your subscribers as your newsletters provide value.
If you’ve never created and published a newsletter on LinkedIn before, all of your connections will be notified on LinkedIn and email when you publish your first newsletter. So make sure you start with a bang, provide something that will add plenty of value to your audience and use that to encourage them to subscribe to your newsletter.
If you’ve already sent one and you either forgot about it, never touched it again or your subscribers aren’t growing, use the other media formats such as images, videos, documents and articles to promote your newsletter and encourage people to subscribe.
Articles could be a great tactic because you can write a very useful article for your audience and use that article to encourage them to subscribe to your newsletter by promising them more content like this in your newsletters.
Once people are subscribed to your newsletters, they will get notified on LinkedIn and via email whenever you publish one, so it is a great way to ensure you are top of mind.
Through your newsletters, you can pitch your products or services, alongside providing valuable content. When you do pitch your products or services, you can encourage them to take action by contacting your or filling in a form and if they do take action, lead generated!
Quick Summary on organic lead generation on LinkedIn
The organic approach I suggested is like a lead funnel in its own right. Build relevant audiences through connections, then provide that audience useful and relevant content to encourage engagement, trust and action. From there, a lead is generated. To summarise all of this into a phrase, it will be “social selling”.
Implement this approach for a quarter, review the results, then ask the question “Is LinkedIn good for lead generation?”.
Let’s dive into the paid options LinkedIn has to offer…
LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Lead Generation
When connecting with people, you might notice that you can message some people and you can’t message others unless you’re connected with them. The “message” option is different from “connection note” mentioned earlier. This is the ability to send a direct message to people you’re not connected to via their LinkedIn inbox.
This is where Sales Navigator comes in. For £79.99 a month, you’re able to directly message 50 people a month without restrictions. The fun doesn’t stop there, just like the organic approach, you can filter people you are targeting but this time, you can save your filters (this is called “saved searches”) so it is readily available every time you go on LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Your saved searches will automatically populate as users fall into your filters, it will notify you when that happens.
This feature also provides you with updates concerning the company and people you are targeting. You will be notified whenever the people or company you are targeting does an activity on LinkedIn such as post something, share a post, like a post, announce their new job role/new company and even their promotion.
This gives you the opportunity to really personalise your messaging when making contact, helping you to be more effective when generating leads on LinkedIn. Since you are paying for it, it’s best to be more direct with your approach and look to get an action straightaway such as responding to you to start a conversation or filling in a form… get that lead!
You can send them more than one message, but remember, you have a limit of 50 messages a month, so don’t use it all on one person! Also, it will be spammy if you do!
When it comes to organisations you are targeting, you get notified if the organisation gets mentioned in the news.
The Sales Navigator is a useful lead generation tool because it consistently provides you relevant and useful information concerning the people and companies you are targeting to help you create a strong and relevant message to increase the chances of generating a high quality lead.
Similar to the organic approach, the Sales Navigator enables you to take “social selling” to another level on the platform, especially when you combine it with the organic approaches mentioned above.
LinkedIn Ads
Last but not least, the LinkedIn Ads. LinkedIn ads paid advertisement on LinkedIn, enabling you to get your content and messaging in front all the LinkedIn users that fit into the audience profile you are targeting.
You have a few ad formats you can choose from:
- Image
- Video
- Direct Message
- Document
If you have done paid advertising on other platforms such as Facebook (Meta) ads or Google Ads, you will notice that LinkedIn is the most expensive, but for the purpose of B2B lead generation, from experience, it’s the best because every aspect of the targeting you are able to do ensures you get in front of the right people for B2B lead generation. From company names, company industries, job titles, job functions, professional groups users are part of on LinkedIn and even their education level. You can combine all these different factors to ensure you are getting in front of the right people.
Figuring out the best ad format will be a matter of testing to see what gets you the best results. LinkedIn even gives you the option to create a “Lead Generation Form” which is a LinkedIn in based form you can create for your advertisements, so when people click on your button encouraging them to “Learn more” or “Contact” the form you create will pop up and automatically fill all their details according to their user profile. This does not take them away from LinkedIn and your audience barely has to lift a finger, the best part is that there’s a huge list of information you can ask from your audience when building the form.
Compared to the other approaches, LinkedIn Ads will be the quickest and most direct method of generating leads and requires less time and patience, but you will need to test, test and test different ideas, content types, targeting and so on until you find the approach that works.
The LinkedIn ads approach is less personal since this is going out en masse, however, ad formats such as the direct message enables you to be personal en masse, especially if you target people from the same company. There are parameters you can use in your direct message ads which automatically populates the text with the persons name, their job title, job function, company they work for and so on.
You can even make yourself the sender of the direct message ads which is great, because if you combine the information gained from Sales Navigator with the direct message ads you can really personalise your messaging to thousands of people without the limit of 50 a month and investing hours typing a personalised message on a monthly basis.
The personalisation obviously is tied to mainly their job roles, job function and the company of your audience as opposed to the Sales Navigator or the organic approach where you can congratulate a specific individual on their latest promotion or achievement, that is impossible via the LinkedIn Ads approach!
Is LinkedIn good for lead generation?
From personal experience, my aim has been to generate B2B leads so the answer is yes, especially when using LinkedIn ads combined with the LinkedIn based webforms as well as the ability to re-target people based on how they interacted with your advertisement. For example, I run video advertisements and if more than 300 people watched 97% of the videos, I can create an audience from that action, I can build a “lookalike” audience which is when LinkedIn looks at the people that watched 97% of the videos and finds other people like them and creates an audience from that. Next step is then use that audience for a more direct / personalised ad format such as direct message. But leads will have been generated from the video ads too and much more through the direct message ads.
From my experience, I found the quality of the leads to be higher because I am able to target the people that are very relevant to the company. It’s costly but effective. LinkedIn ads also enables me to report on successes and measure them much quicker compared to the other approaches even though they are effective in their own right but more time will be needed to realise the effectiveness of these approaches.
