LinkedIn Lead Generation Strategies for B2B Marketing

LinkedIn is great for outreach, as marketer folks will have you believe. But is it equally effective for lead generation? To that we say, LinkedIn offers the best of both worlds. Not only does LinkedIn have 740 million active users worldwide, it is also the most used B2B social media platform.

If you’re not using LinkedIn lead generation to communicate directly with industry leaders and target market, you’re missing out on an enormous opportunity to mint money. In this guide, we look at some compelling LinkedIn lead generation strategies and tools to generate demand for your sales.

What is lead generation?

Lead generation is the process of identifying and attracting potential customers for a business's products or services. The goal is to convert these business prospects into customers. It is crucial for any business to generate revenue and increase their visiblity in the marketplace.

Why generate leads using LinkedIn?

There are three factors that make LinkedIn stand out as a B2B lead generation platform, which are:

• Professional data

• Business context

• News feed products

No other competitor checks all the boxes. At a time when connecting with your target audience and reporting accurately on leads are priorities of any B2B, LinkedIn clearly emerges at the top because:

1. Robust targeting filters

No other social platform comes close to LinkedIn’s advanced accuracy in targeting of leads. You can target potential customers using a range of search options, such as company name, email, title, job functions, interests, and previous company.

That’s right, you can locate people working at Expedia who used to work at Airbnb and went to University of Washington. It’s super granular.

2. Powerful search filters

You can even search for people who are working remotely or raising funding for their business using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, built for sales professionals who want to foster relationships with the right prospects and generate sales. The tool also recommends leads to you customized as per your needs and saves the leads you're in talks with on a CRM.

Related guide: How to Use eCommerce Marketing Automation to Get More Sales

3. Ad relevance

If you want quality leads, you’ve to select the right environment to advertise in. Going after cheaper clicks on Instagram or Facebook won’t solve your lead generation problems as you’ll have plenty of low-quality leads along with a weak pipeline that no sales team wants.

Based on Business Insider’s Digital Trust report, LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager ranks highly on ad relevance. This means that audiences are open to engaging with your ad and are less likely to find it annoying.

Related guide: A Comprehensive Guide to Social Media Lead Generation

4. High content reach

Being a content creator on LinkedIn has many benefits, including connecting with potential customers, finding business partners, and meeting like-minded people. LinkedIn users are eager for timely, useful, relevant content, and if you can deliver it using a personalized content marketing strategy, you'll be rewarded with more exposure on the platform.

5. Access to unrestricted communication

Not connected with a potential customer? No problem! LinkedIn doesn’t restrict you from messaging anyone. Just send them an InMail. According to data, InMail response rate is 3x the response rate of traditional emails. Not only that, if you send an InMail between 9 to 10 am on a weekday, the chances of you getting a response will be pretty high.

6. In-depth analytics

You can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator or Premium Business to get real-time insights on leads you should target, prospective customer preferences, and what tactics to use to nurture them. To speed up your prospecting efforts, you can even use automation and engage better with your network.

Related guide A Beginner's Guide to Lead Generation For Generating High-Quality Leads

How to improve LinkedIn lead generation ads?

LinkedIn provides you a great opportunity to take advantage of pay per click (PPC) advertising. Here’s how you can leverage it.

1. Have a valuable offer

Just because you think your offer is amazing doesn’t mean it’ll add value to your customers’ lives. Here’s a quick tip for you to create content for your LinkedIn lead generation ads.

What’s in: Industry reports. Give your customers a rundown of issues they face and tell them how you solve those problems. Research what your target audience needs and then deliver something at par with that for only the price of one lead gen form fill. Sweet deal, no?

What’s out: A demo for your software. Complete no-no, avoid at all costs. Don’t hard sell to your customers without building a connection with them.

2. Use LinkedIn’s website demographics

LinkedIn Campaign Manager has a hardly-used feature called website demographics which is a goldmine, really. You can use it to segment visitors on your website from your LinkedIn ads.

Find out the company they work at, their previous company, title, company size, geography, and more. You can also compare audiences of different ad campaigns. Using this information, personalize your ads in the future and improve your ad performance.

3. Balance quantity and volume

Should you focus on getting more lead gen form fills or getting quality leads?

Both, because what use are low quality leads to your B2B business?

Asking minimum questions, like email address and first name, to get away with calling a person a lead should be a crime. If you were to ask us, avoid all autofill questions. Get prospects to type something and have more personal questions. That way, you’ll be able to collect quality data from marketing qualified leads.

4. Integrate your CRM

Are you still exporting leads to LinkedIn manually? News flash, you can integrate your lead gen forms with any of the CRM’s listed below:

• Convertr

• Driftrock

• HubSpot

• Integrate

• Leadsbridge

• Lolagrove

• Make

• Marketo

• Microsoft Dynamics 365

• Oracle Eloqua

• Salesforce Sales Cloud

• Zapier

Not only does integrating your CRM save you time, you can also nurture customers more readily with your nurture flows. You avoid the lag time by following up with users immediately after they’ve filled out your form, thus improving your lead generation pipeline.

5. Test your ads

LinkedIn advertising comes with a variety of testing opportunities, allowing you to ensure that your advertisements are being shown to the proper individuals. You can store your audience as a template to layer on later if you want to test the efficacy of an ad against multiple audiences.

Alternatively, you can test ad variables with LinkedIn Ad Rotation which empowers you to change individual elements in your creative to test your ad performance and optimize it. We suggest testing at least three variations within one ad campaign using LinkedIn Ad Rotation or A/B testing tools.

10 LinkedIn lead generation strategies

But how do you craft an effective lead generation strategy on LinkedIn? By using these 9 B2B lead generation tips on the platform.

1. Integrate Sales Navigator with your Campaign Manager

Using Sales Navigator, marketers can target saved leads in sales reps' sales navigators.

This is an incredible opportunity for you if you’re running an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy, personalizing each campaign to engage an account based on their needs, specific attributes, and more.

Integrating the Sales Navigator with your LinkedIn Campaign Manager results in a very relevant audience, with marketing and sales working in tandem.

2. Target priority LinkedIn accounts

You can do this through 2 ways:

• Contact list upload: Find the 1,000 top high-value accounts on LinkedIn and upload a matched audience list for them during your campaign set up under the “Matched Audiences” feature. LinkedIn’s algo will identify similar people that you’ve defined in your target audience.

• Website retargeting: To retarget visitors of your website resources, like your blog page. You’ll require the Linkedin insight tag installed on your website, which is free of cost.

3. Optimize your company profile

First impressions matter, as clichè as that may sound.

To make it count, have a stellar headline, eye-catching cover image, and a captivating bio. Use storytelling to talk about your company’s origins and growth. Include testimonials and metrics to add credibility.

You’re likely to experience a lower bounce rate if you optimize your company profile as more people will want to connect with your services.

4. Post valuable content

If you create content that is relevant to your ideal audience but also broad enough to create valuable takeaways for practically anyone, there’s a higher chance of people engaging with your content.

• Write entertaining and educational LinkedIn posts. Typically, you should produce 80% educational and 20% promotional content.
• Use 3-5 hashtags to spread the word far and beyond.
• Share content written by your founder, someone from the company, potential/existing clients, and industry news using a LinkedIn scheduler.

Besides that, other content worth sharing includes:

• Company blogs

• Webinars

• Event announcements

• Product updates

• Press releases

• Customer testimonials

• Infographics

• Opinion on a latest trend

5. Write better outreach messages

There are a variety of ways to start a proactive conversation in your LinkedIn inbox. Being a spammy marketer is not one of them. When you write like a real person, potential clients are more inclined to trust you.

Here’s a case in point.

Personalize your outreach message by discovering a common interest with your prospect, keeping your pitch short, and complimenting their latest achievement, as shown above.

Related guide: How to Use a Customer Data Platform to Deliver Personalized Experiences

6. Engage in LinkedIn groups

You have the option of joining an existing group or starting your own. We suggest concentrating on smaller and moderated communities.

Each month, LinkedIn allows you to send 15 direct messages to group members. In a group, you can engage in discussions, offer support, answer questions, and share valuable resources to help your group members.

Alternatively, starting your own group will require you to get creative with a group title and profile. Create value for members by sharing exclusive content from your company and over time, they will recruit new folks and do customer acquisition for you.

7. Create showcase pages

Use LinkedIn Showcase Pages to advertise your individual business units, brand image, initiatives and events to a specific audience.

Consider them affiliate pages, where you can generate and market content tailored to a niche audience’s requirements. They can help you in segmenting your B2B leads better, for sure.

Pro tip: Look at the size and needs of your target audience to decide how you want to bucket them into categories, like Golden Phase did.

Source: LinkedIn Business

8. Avoid hyper-targeting

You want to reach out to a broad group of potential consumers about whom you don't have much information because they’re the low-hanging fruits you should target first.

Avoid eliminating audiences based on a gut feeling. Your cost per lead (CPL) will rise as a result of hyper-targeting. Select a targeted choice that is both relevant and wide, like job function and company size.

You can avoid using job titles initially because some candidates may have different job titles than what you expect. As a result, if you hyper-target job titles, some of your audience will be overlooked.

9. Create an email list on LinkedIn

You can use LinkedIn lead magnets to build an email list that offer prospects with incentives or freebies in exchange for their contact information. Give them instant access to a marketing collateral like an eBook, a checklist, a cheat sheet, a whitepaper, case studies, a roadmap presentation of your product, a quiz or a survey to help you grow your email list.

Related guide: How to Nurture Leads with Email Marketing?

10. Automate lead generation

Although LinkedIn lead generation is an excellent way to generate business, it is a heavy investment of time, resources and effort. To eliminate repetition, you can consider using automation softwares and tools that empower you to book sales and boost your visibility with a click of a button. Here are the best lead generation automation tools in business:

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator

• AeroLeads

• Expandi

• Dux-Soup

• Zopto

Related guide: How to Use B2B Marketing Automation to Convert Leads

LinkedIn lead generation cost

The cost of lead generation on the platform depends on many factors, including:

• Ad relevance score: A higher ad relevance score means lower CPC because LinkedIn prefers advertisers show users only relevant and engaging advertisements.

• Target audience: When you advertise on LinkedIn, you compete with other advertisers to get more visibility on your ad. If your ideal audience is in high demand, you can expect higher CPC because the value of that audience and the competition will be huge.

• Bid: While you won’t exceed your bid, you will be paying a portion of it, thus contributing to your LinkedIn lead generation cost.

It is estimated that the cost of LinkedIn lead gen ads is $5.26 per click and $6.59 per 1000 impressions.

Get more leads today

LinkedIn has built a reputation for itself over the years as a goldmine for lead generation. And there’s no denying it, it is the best platform to connect you with segmented leads.

But if you want to stand out, combine LinkedIn lead generation strategies with email lead generation to attract solid prospects and grow your business. Read our guide to learn how to build trust for your product or service with email marketing and generate awareness about it to attract quality leads.