LinkedIn offers excellent prospecting and lead generation opportunities if you know how to position your company and how to use tools such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
LinkedIn lead generation helps your company stay at the forefront of people’s minds, building up a strong following of prospective clients and partners. It helps you to demonstrate leadership in your industry. You can strengthen your network and build your sales if you do this well.
- Finding qualified buyers by building strategic relationships
- Enabling qualified buyers to find you with quality inbound marketing, and
- Using your network to get sales referrals.
Using the LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator is a premium tool with a lot of potential. To make it work for you, search for leads using criteria like a specific search vertical, geographical area and job titles of interest. Highlight specific companies you want to target, and import existing contacts. And enter any relevant information about the leads you’d like to find, from industry to job roles.
From here, you can search for job titles or overarching companies. Save prospective leads with the click of a button, or save the entire search. You can also filter your searches by various factors, including company size, years of experience, or region.
A TeamLink feature lets you know if there is an existing mutual connection between you and a potential lead, opening the doors to a personalized introduction.
Email alerts will inform you of any new potential leads that match your criteria. This means that the Sales Navigator will continue searching on your behalf, freeing you up to focus your efforts elsewhere.
You can also track any new information about your saved leads, allowing you to tailor any marketing or outreach plans accordingly.
With all of this information, it is simple and straightforward to generate a regularly updated list of leads, and gather all of the insights needed to ensure that you are connecting with these people and companies in the most effective way.
How to Get Started with LinkedIn Lead Generation
Your company should define its niche, its goals, and its target audience. Whether you do this on your own or get help from a marketing agency, the result should be the same: a strong concept of who you are, what you want to do, and who you want to reach.
When you can narrow this information down, it is far easier to generate the right leads for your company. It is better to be focused than to cast a net that is too wide.
Knowing your niche and your target audience, you can lay the groundwork for lead generation; that is, making your profile perfect before you jump into the spotlight.
Optimize your profile based on your identified niche, goals, and target audience, which inform your corporate identity. Ensure that your profile is as complete as possible, paying special attention to your tagline.
Your tagline is your first introduction to clients and potential partners, so make sure that it fits in well with your niche and your aim for lead generation. This phrase needs to be engaging. It should speak directly to your ideal demographic, explain what you do, and how it will help them.
All of your profile content should build on this, adding further detail about how your services or products fit into people’s lives, in a helpful way.
When you message people to connect, remember that they see your name and photo, your tagline, and your message. These should be your priority. Your photo needs to be professional. Do not leave this field blank!
A well-crafted profile, along with high-quality content and inbound marketing planning, will bring people to you.
Reach Out to Your Network — And Beyond
To generate leads, you will need to do some work. With a great profile in place, the next step is to reach out.
The LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps you search out potential leads, targeting them with all of the information you input. You can, and should, continue the dialogue with potential leads over time.
You can thank them for their connection with you, share any relevant information or curated content that applies to their needs, and, eventually, move toward asking for a real-life connection like a phone call or meeting.
The key here is to be personable and real in every interaction. If you seem too commercial, it reads as artificial, and these carefully curated leads will simply ignore or delete your message, viewing it as an unwanted, spammy intrusion.
Find something that personalizes your services or products for your lead, and use that as common ground without overselling yourself or your company.
You can also use these tactics with your existing network. If you have not leveraged all of your connections, consider opening, or reopening the lines of communication using a similar approach. This can also help with generating referrals.
There are over 400 million users on LinkedIn, so you have a lot of potential leads to explore. It may seem like an overwhelming task, but when you break it down into individual components it should be manageable, and successful!
LinkedIn Lead Generation Recap:
- Start with a great profile, based on a well-defined and realistic niche, goals, and audience.
- Use the tools available to you to create a list of criteria for your leads, and a list of people and companies who match that criteria.
- Reach out to those people and companies, using personable, human language.
- Move beyond a simple connection request to sharing legitimately ueful content, leading to a deepened business relationship.
- Make sure that your profile and content works to help others find you.
- At the same time, nurture your connections to increase your business-to-business referrals.
Keep up your engagement with LinkedIn and continue searching out leads. Your business will thrive with a strong pool of potential clients, partners, and industry connections
