If you’re in B2B business, dealing with B2B customers, chances are you’re already leveraging LinkedIn as a top lead acquisition channel. Indeed, stats show that LinkedIn has become #1 acquisition channel for B2B sellers. Just imagine: 61 million LinkedIn users are senior level influencers and 40 million are in decision-making positions. It means LinkedIn is still priceless for lead generation. There is no other platform that can that easily become a B2B lead goldmine. The most crucial question is how to hook those LinkedIn buyers in, among the sea of look-alike pitchy messages, connection requests, content, and with such a high level of informational noise, penetrating every “corner” of this platform.
Presented in this article are some hot lead generation tactics for your consideration. Feel free to steal them and adopt for your product.
2023 is the year to bloom! Let’s go 😉
How to Find Leads on LinkedIn
The first question that arises when it comes to using LinkedIn for lead generation, is where to find leads. However, let’s hit the brakes over here for a moment.
It’s crucial that you have designed a bright, catchy profile that transmits your product’s values through concise & charming summary, along with brand visuals that also reflect your product’s values, so you can be sure your leads won’t get lost in disconnected, fragmented information once they get in touch with you and your brand. It’s very important that your brand image and messaging are aligned across all acquisition channels.
Your powerful LinkedIn profile & brand image stem from correct brand positioning. And brand positioning comes from a very good market research. It’s a distillation of your company’s values as they can be seen by your target audience, in comparison to your competitors.
Old good theory to get acquainted with (yes, it’s 2023, ad-hoc tactics are all over the place, but there in no way to win the big game against competitors, without thorough researches, fundamental approach to marketing, and strategic vision). Don’t get fooled by thinking that only jumping on the bandwagon will drive success. Were it a working approach, we’d be doomed, because there would be no worthwhile companies able to deliver quality products and services. In the end, people buy from people, by developing trust and being driven by emotional connection with brands. Your approach to marketing, your attention to details and strategic vision reflect the quality of your product. Bad products are usually accompanied by poor marketing, and vice versa. Savvy tech teams always invest in marketing.
Ok, without too much of dragging around here: to establish a solid lead flow-in and turn leads into retain customers, you need to set a strategic vision (and to cultivate it inside your organization as well).
It’s very important that you’ve thoroughly explored you target market through competitor research, if possible, conducted surveys or got a grasp of your audience’s needs on review websites, defined main competitors, and compiled your target audience’s ideal customer profile. Those are major important steps that every business needs to take prior to starting LinkedIn lead search.
This may help in your journey. 🕺👇
- How to compile an ideal customer profile of your target audience: full guide. In it you’ll find how to do audience segmentation and create an ICP.
- How to design your LinkedIn profile to make your profile speak clearly to your target audience through compelling words & visuals
Keep in mind that designing your profile and defining your target audience are two steps that go hand-in-hand. Your brand’s positioning is the most crucial cog in this whole mechanism. It defines your brand’s tone-of-voice, its image that will set its place in your target audience’s minds. It must be reflected in your profile, in your brand’s LinkedIn page, in your banners, Youtube thumbnails, website, and throughout your whole digital presence. By aligning messages that speak right to your target audience, articulating the needed pain points and solutions to them, you unify their experiences and become memorable for them. Now you can use LinkedIn as top of the funnel, pushing leads down the funnel easily.
When someone asks me “Is this really that necessary?”, and then adds “It’s B2B! Our audience doesn’t care about the appearance of the brand”, I always recall Rachel Green’s line from Friends that goes: “But they’re still people.. with eyes”.
So, yes, people love to see beautiful things with their eyes, love when things simplify their life, and surely love to get pleasant emotional experiences, EVEN in B2B. Believe me, I hold master’s degree in marketing, I’ve been in B2B marketing for 4 years now (and before, in B2C for 3 years), and I’ve tried to put this whole strategic approach on the back burner, in favor of “catering to my audience’s preferences, because it seems they don’t care about the brand image”. And it doesn’t work. Your brand image and the whole “positioning hassle” are always worth the efforts you put in. If you want to strike your long-term business goals, of course.
So, these fundamental steps are paramount. Once everything is set up, you can start searching for your leads.
Below are some places where you can start your journey from.
How to find leads on LinkedIn: 1) your competitors’ audience
Your competitors probably already have your audience engaged in their posts and joined their communities.
- Review popular posts on their pages and take note of the individuals who have engaged with them.
- Type names of competitors in the LinkedIn search field, and choose “posts”.
By doing this, you can find all relevant niche posts your target audience probably engaged with.
3. Use Closely to scrape leads from comments
You can manually comb through posts and find the decision maker that can bring you high-dollar check, or you can go down another route, and scrape all audiences from niche-related posts. Closely is the way to do this.
When building an outreach campaign, targeting your audience, click on “Post engagement” and provide the link to one of the posts you’ve found.
Closely will scrape the post’s commenters and build a lead list for your outreach campaign.
How to find leads on LinkedIn: 2) scour niche groups & get in touch with influencers
As we indicated earlier, LinkedIn is full of places where your target audience may be hanging out. Here is another idea.
Compile a list of keywords, related to your brand or niche and type them into the search field.
For instance,
Audience-related keywords
- B2B sales
- Sales reps
- Growth Marketers
- BizDevs
- SaaS founders
- B2B founders
- B2B CEOs
- B2B sales reps
- SDR
Niche-related keywords
- B2B sales hacks
- B2B sales strategies
- Growth marketing
- B2B Marketing
- Lead generation
Audience + location-related keywords
- SDR Kyiv
- Sales reps Ukraine
- Sales reps Georgia
- CEOs Georgia
- CEOs B2B Poland
- SDR Bulgaria
Now you can scrape people from the groups you’ve found, reach out to them or simply add them to your lead lists.
Use Closely to scrape group members and build personalized outreach campaigns.
Do the same trick with events. Join event > copy the URL > paste it to Closely when building your outreach campaign.
Type any keyword from your list in the search field and choose filtering “by people”.
Find a person with the biggest content engagement on their pages and reach out to them, offering to collaborate by creating content together or any other form of collaboration.
As you can see from the screenshot, you can use Closely Surfer to export the results of your search in a CSV file, that you can further use to build LinkedIn or Email campaigns. By utilizing Closely, you can build and launch an automated LinkedIn campaign, targeting influencers that you need, in bulk, with your messages.
You can also comb through their pages and select the post that gained the biggest engagement. Do the same trick from the previous point: use Closely to scrape commenters of that post and reach out to them with an automated outreach campaign.
How to find leads on LinkedIn: 3) employ Sales Navigator & go for advanced filters
Sales Navigator, is, of course, a must-have, if you want to entice high-dollar audiences on LinkedIn. It offers numerous filtering criteria to dig up new audiences, so you’ll never run out of leads.
You can perform your search in Sales Navigator, and then paste the link from search results in Closely, at the step of building your outreach campaign.
How to find leads on LinkedIn: 4) use a third-party tool
Numerous lead generation platforms will provide you with the needed contact data of your target audience. For instance, in Closely you can apply various filters to drill down your target audience, and get to the narrow segment of prospects. You can find and export your audience’s emails, phone numbers, LinkedIn profiles, Facebook profiles, company info, etc.
How to find leads on LinkedIn: 4) invest in your page promotion
Don’t forget that outbound sales are efficient, as long as you don’t forget to hone your LinkedIn profile from time to time, and of course, if you do content marketing, that is still on the table.
Here are things you need to do regularly:
- Post consistently
- Join niche groups and register to niche webinars
- Comment on posts of top influencers
- Spark a discussion by asking a question in group or by offering a hot topic for discussion
- Stay up-to-date: post relevant, useful content, aligned with the agenda
- Post only the hacks that you’ve tested yourself
- Video content is not simply advisable, it’s a must. Try to film Youtube video, presenting the hottest niche-related topics, and see what will happen (I bet it will work way better then article, unless you’re filming with old Samsung camera and in too dim lighting).
- Use Gary Vaynerchuk’s old but gold GaryVee content distribution model (you create a long-form piece of content, then single out the most important piece of information out of it, and distribute it in shorter forms across other channels).
Ok, those were the most common places to find your audiences in. What about lead generation strategies?
LinkedIn Lead Generation Strategy: highway to success 🦉
Okay! Since you’re already armed up with sources of your leads, let’s see what to do with them.
1. Build lead lists
You can opt for creating lists in Closely — it’s much faster than doing this manually.
2. Build a personalized campaign for each segment of prospects
Go to “LinkedIn campaigns”. Click on “Create new campaign”.
3. Name your campaign and choose a LinkedIn account to use in this campaign
Select the LinkedIn account that will be used to run your campaigns.
4. Paste the link from LinkedIn regular or Sales Navigator search result
You can also paste the link to the niche post you’ve found, group or event with your potential high-quality audience.
5. Create personalized messages and add other automated steps
Use variables to personalize your messages.
Adding “profile views” and “post likes” steps to your campaign will increase the likelihood of getting more connection requests accepted.
If you feel like inspo has slipped from you and you need assistance with creating messages — no problem at all. Use built-in Closely templates or go to the template page to get access to 50+ best-performing templates of Closely team, sorted out by conversion goal and personalization types.
These templates can also come in handy.
6. Launch your campaign
Launch your outreach campaign and get ready to see the first leads flowing to your Inbox. 🕺⚜️🥁💃
Remarketing campaigns
There will be leads who will get interested in what you have to offer, and those who will ignore your messages (for different reasons).
In your user space, you’ll be able to monitor the results of your campaign’s performance.
There is an option to download results in CSV file.
Upon downloading, you’ll be able to sort out those leads who replied to your messages, those who accepted your connection request but never replied, and those who didn’t accept a connection request.
Renew, clean and sort your lead lists
Never forget that leads can be silent for different reasons, so it will never hurt to reach out to those silent people through other channels. Single out those leads who never replied to your follow-ups in your exported file with report, and reach out to them via email.
Here is also a full guide to how to use LinkedIn as a remarking channel.
Usually, you divide your leads into groups as following:
- Bought your product
- Refused to buy, firmly
- Still communicating
- Newly arrived leads
And then you work with each of these groups, respectively, by reaching out to them through various other channels.
In Closely, you can pump out email campaigns as well. So, no need to get those silent leads off the table. Put them into a separate file and reach out to them via email. Enjoy timely analytics on your email campaigns.
Some additional pieces of advice
Thank you for your attention. Things that we’ve listed in this article — are quite enough to begin your LinkedIn outreach in 2023, and get set up for success.
Here are also things to consider on top:
- Don’t forget to fill out the “about” section on your profile & add a background image
- Always use personalized sales copy templates. If possible, write a tailored message to each unique recipient
- Refresh your lead base regularly
- Use CRM to keep tabs on your interactions with leads. Opt for HubSpot, as an option. Btw, your LinkedIn network will be synced with Closely automatically, so you will be able to run your connections as in lightweight CRM.
Conclusion
All good things come to an end, and as does our guide. Tell us whether this was helpful at all.
To conclude: in order to succeed in LinkedIn lead generation in 2023, you’ll need: to
- perform a thorough market & competitor analysis
- define your target audience through market segmentation & create an ICP
- align your brand image and brand messages across all channels
- create a list of keywords
- scour LinkedIn groups, events and posts for leads
- post content regularly
- get in touch with top influencers & collaborate on creating content together
- dip your toes in video content creation
- build lead lists, reach out to different segment of prospects automatically, keep an eye on reporting
- build remarketing campaigns
- keep your lead lists updated
That’s it. Tell us how to improve our content for your better gainings, and we will do.
See you around 🙂
