Use LinkedIn to Generate Quality Leads for Your Business!

LinkedIn, the popular professional networking site is a great prospecting and lead generation tool for B2B businesses when used effectively.  It’s literally built for people and businesses to find each other. It’s the best platform to gather and nurture leads and has taken its marketing solutions to the next level. It launched LinkedIn Product Pages in December 2020 as a new approach for businesses to generate high-intent leads using marketplace-like features including product highlights, calls-to-action (CTAs), and social proof.

If you ask is there any opportunity to generate business from LinkedIn worth pursuing. Let us help you know more about the world’s largest database of business professionals, by breaking it into actual numbers, so the size of the opportunity becomes clear.

According to LinkedIn |

• There are now 500 million business professionals on their network
• 100 million of those users are active daily
• 40 million users are in decision-making roles

On LinkedIn, there are 40 million prospective targets who are in positions to make business and purchasing decisions. This proves that there is a sizable audience that can be used to produce new business using the LinkedIn platform if a sensible plan is implemented.

Read more to learn how to use the following strategies to generate leads with LinkedIn.

The Golden Rule

Your business must have a well-defined NICHE.

Consider your niche as a multiplier of the results you’ll see from this strategy on LinkedIn.

In our experience, the stronger and more well-defined your businesses NICHE, the more leads and sales you’ll generate.

• A well-niched business
• A sort-of niched business
• A non-niche business
• Massive Results
• Good Results
• Mediocre Results or Failure

This is true and we’ve seen it firsthand when working with our clients.

Identify Your Niche

You may already have a clear and proven niche. If you don’t then there are many ways to go about niching and positioning your business.

Here’s a quick framework to help you identify it |

All you need to do is fill in the blanks |

“We help X do Y through Z”

X = Your Target Customer

Y = The Benefit You Bring Them Z= How You Do It

Once you’ve identified your niche we move on to the next level that has three stages Optimise, Engage, Convert. Let’s study these in detail here.

1. Optimise

This is the step to upgrade and polish your LinkedIn Profile. It’s all about building your ‘shop-front’ and foundations – properly.

2. Engage

This is about reaching out directly to your target market, getting your ideal prospects to connect with you and visit your LinkedIn profile.

3. Convert

This is about turning engagement into proper sales conversations. Getting qualified prospects into your sales process.

This is the trickiest, most sophisticated, part of the strategy but also the one that delivers the results. It’s also where most people struggle and go wrong.

1. Profile Optimisation

Before you start any campaign on LinkedIn you must optimise your LinkedIn profile for conversions within that niche. Now there are LOTS of things you could do to improve and optimise your profile. We’ll focus on just three key optimisations that will actually get your pro le 80% of the way there very quickly.

#Tagline | This little sentence is the single MOST IMPORTANT part of your entire LinkedIn profile.

Why? Because your tagline shows up everywhere on LinkedIn.

• When you post in the newsfeed
• When you send someone a LinkedIn message
• When someone views your profile
• When you show up in ‘Recommended People To Connect With
• Where most people go wrong

Make sure you have a tagline that is going to appeal to, and hook-in, your audience. Your tagline should encapsulate the benefit your customers get when they work with you. It should be a strong positioning statement that shows how you help people.

#Your Profile is Not About You |

Do not make the mistake of thinking that your LinkedIn bio should read like your CV.

No one has the time to read through huge, long bio paragraphs. Have you ever done that? No.

Instead, treat your profile more like a sales page.

The 4 Rules of a Great LinkedIn Profile |

1. Make it all about your prospect.
2. Ensure it’s clear and concise
3. It should set you up as the obvious solution to their challenge or problem
4. If you can deliver some value (i.e actually help people in your profile) then you’re on to a real winner

Use the same language and terminology that your prospects use, talk about the problems your prospects are facing and how YOU and your business can solve them.

 The Framework to Use |

Here’s the best framework that we’ve found to convey all the right information in an effective way:

1. Explain what you do in 2 sentences – focusing on the value that you provide;
2. Explain how you do it – with a SHORT overview from your customers perspective. Bene ts not features here!!
3. Tell ‘em who you work with – a clear articulation of your target market/ niche;
4. What people are saying about you – awards, testimonials, reference to review sites maybe.
5. Your background and credentials – why people should trust you;
6. Contact

#Your Photo |

This bit is easy – but overlooked by many. It’s only a small thing but in our experience, it helps you to get connections when people’s first impression is that you’re like them. The golden rule that applies to your profile photos on LinkedIn is to |

• Model your photo on the same type of pictures your prospects have.

For instance, if your ideal prospects wear suits and ties to work then wear a suit and tie in your photo. If they don’t, then don’t!

2. Engage

#Start Conversation |

This simple process generates quality leads through LinkedIn. The strategy is simple use LinkedIn to start Conversations with your community. But make sure your don’t sound salesy.

Don’t try to close a deal on LinkedIn!

Remember |

“People don’t like being sold to, but they love to buy.”

Your goal with LinkedIn is to create just enough interest and intrigue to move the conversation from LinkedIn to a phone call or meeting where you can then have the sales conversation.

Here’s how we do it |

1. You send out 20 – 40 connection requests per day to the right targeted people with a friendly and non-salesy message.
2. You then drip them friendly, casual, messages over time.

This is the magical secret that’s going to generate a massive amount of leads, calls, meetings and sales for your business.

#Find Your Market on LinkedIn |

You need to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for this outreach. This is one of LinkedIn’s premium tools that gives you a whole heap of additional search criteria to help you get highly targeted as to who you want to go after.

#The Drip Sequence |

Once you have identified a list of your ideal target customers, the next step is to send them connection request messages.

At a high level, here is the structure of the campaign.

1. Casual connection request
2. ‘Thanks for connecting’ message
3. Share a useful content/article with them 4. Ask for a meeting

At the start, you want to send around 20 connection requests per day and slowly ramp that number up to 50 max over 2-3 week period.

Messaging Principles

Here are the principles that we use in all our LinkedIn messaging |

1. Keep it real.
2. Your message needs to read like you typed it out in 2 minutes and hit send while eating a bagel in the queue at Starbucks.
3. Anything that looks remotely like web copy or a polished marketing email will see very limited responses
4. It needs to feel completely personal, believable and one-to-one and must be free of even the slightest hint of marketing hype.
5. Hyperlinks are a dead giveaway – don’t use ‘em.
6. We need to put ourselves in the mind of a busy recipient literally skim reading the text. Use their voice not ours, bullet points, rushed… hence fragmented sentences being a useful tool.

#Send a Useful Article |

If someone doesn’t respond or engage with you, then the next step is to create value.

You can do this by sending them a useful article that would be valuable to your target prospects.

Ideally, you want to use an article that both:

• Delivers value to the prospect;

AND

• Positions you and the product/service you are selling;

#Ask Questions |

Questions are the foundation of a good conversation. Every single response you send should have some sort of question you are asking the other party. You could ask about their business, their goals, mutual interests or about a specific thing you read about them online. The key is to ask a question, because that will keep a conversation going.

And eventually you ask for a phone call or to take the conversation over to email, to schedule a time to talk.

#Inbound Engagement |

You can generate more leads by sending outbound connection requests but in addition to that there’s another tactic that can produce brilliant results. It’s also very passive tactic that requires little work on your part.

The tactic is to find a software tool that can visit your prospects profiles automatically for you

It doesn’t send messages, connection requests or anything like that. The tool just visits the profiles of your target prospects.

What happens next?

Some of those prospects, once notified that you’ve visited their profile, will add you as a connection. They’ll approach you looking to connect which totally shifts the dynamic.

As a result, you can often see anywhere from 5-30 inbound connection requests per week.

#Responding to Inbound Connection Request |

The next question is

“What do I say to these people who add me as a connection?”

First, you want to take some time to research them a bit before responding so you can personalise your message. Take a look into their profile, Google their business and website for a bit of background.

Just engage in a conversation and then probe the prospect by asking a question. If you really want to see the best possible results, you should take just 2 minutes to research each prospect and craft a personal response according to what you learn about them.

3. Convert

#Converting the Leads |

The final step is to actually ask for a meeting or call. At this point, you still don’t want to give a full sales pitch. You’re not selling your product or service – just the meeting or call. So you want to ask for a meeting with a 1-2 sentence explanation on why it would be beneficial for the other person to hop on a call with you.

Don’t forget to put your tagline in every message!

#What to expect from using these strategies |

In simple terms, if you are a well niched B2B business then this is likely to generate a LOT of qualified leads for your business. But I also want to warn you that it is going to generate a lot of unqualified leads as well. Typically, we find that about 50% of the responses that come through end up being unqualified leads, people trying to sell you something, or prospects who just aren’t the right fit for your business. Even with all of the narrowing of your LinkedIn search in the Sales Navigator, non-ideal prospects will still find their way into the mix. Don’t forget, LinkedIn is a social network, not a database. That means each person gets to ‘self-classify’ their own profile.

#It Takes Time |

The final word is that Everything we described here is a lot of work. Running all of these tactics takes a lot of time and energy. If you do this all yourself, you are looking at a minimum of 90 minutes per day time investment.

Summing-up

You don’t have to look at the downside of the world getting smaller rather look at the shrinking digital world as an opportunity. With LinkedIn this small digital world brings you a pandora of lead generation opportunities so use this platform to boost your digital presence. Use our tips for LinkedIn marketing and soon you will see your lead pool start to grow. In the coming years you will see how LinkedIn becomes an even more integral part of your online lead generation strategy. If you want any assistance with this service Shergroup will be happy to help you as we love Minding Your Business. Our marketing experts have through knowledge of the subject and can guide you through a well-structured lead generation strategy for your business. Call our friendly business solutions advisors for more details.

Contact us for more information via our channels |

Phone                  | 020 3588 4240

Website              | www.shergroup.com and you can chat to us from here

Email                   | [email protected]

Facebook           | Check out Shergroup on this channel and message us | facebook.com/Shergroup

Twitter              | Check out ShergroupChat on this channel and message us twitter.com/Shergroupchat

LINKEDIN           | Check out Shergroup message us – and please FOLLOW us | linkedin.com/company/35698655/

Instagram           | Check out ShergroupChatter and message us | instagram.com/shergroupchatter/