For many years now, digital marketers have considered lead generation as a top priority.
But it also remains their biggest challenge.
Feeding the sales pipeline with high-quality leads that convert is ultimately one of the most important tasks of any company’s marketing team. And they are primarily judged by the results they achieve in this particular area. But the fundamentals of effective lead generation are changing rapidly in an ever-changing business environment.
The vast majority of B2B marketers consider LinkedIn to be an effective source of lead generation. This is because it is the most popular social media platform for both organic and paid B2B marketing activities. This also means that competition is fierce between companies, and that being fully aware of and proficient in LinkedIn can be a key advantage for your online business.
For marketers who want to fully utilize the capabilities of the world’s best professional social networking platform, LinkedIn Marketing Labs offers a specially designed course called “Using LinkedIn for Lead Generation,” which presents a series of tips to help companies harness the power of LinkedIn to improve their lead generation.
Here’s a summary of the top five takeaways for you.
5 best practices for lead generation with LinkedIn
- Reach the right audiences for your business
One of the biggest advantages of marketing on LinkedIn is that you have access to the majority of your potential customers in one place, and they invariably have a business-oriented mindset.
This gives you the freedom to target new customers and do effective business development work by finding the best prospects for your business, but also to retarget prospects.
Target the best prospects for your business.
LinkedIn’s extensive targeting tools and capabilities help you deliver your content and ads to your connections and social network members who are most likely to be interested in your products or services, and turn them into quality leads. LinkedIn’s course shows you how to avoid hyper-targeting, and how to configure your different campaigns, use similar audiences, etc.
Retarget and “nurture” leads
With this feature, you can “nurture” your leads by creating target audiences of existing LinkedIn members who have already shown interest in your products or services by visiting your website, registering for an event, watching a video or filling out a lead generation form, called a “Lead Gen Form” at LinkedIn.
- Estimate the value of your leads beyond simple form filling
In order to understand the real quality of the audience you are capturing, you must not only evaluate the cost of converting your future customers, but also measure the long-term added value of your leads. Indeed, fishing for leads with a too large mesh net does not always guarantee the quality of the catch. On the contrary
Before launching your LinkedIn prospecting campaign, ask yourself the following six questions:
How exactly does your company define a sales conversion?
How long is your sales cycle?
What does a quality lead mean to you?
Do you use marketing automation tools?
What is the response/reaction time of your sales teams?
How are leads nurtured?
Once you’ve launched your campaign, it’s important to have the tools to measure the quality of your leads. To help you understand the actual quality of the audience, you can use LinkedIn’s conversion tracking. This can provide you with information that will help you better understand what’s happening in your campaigns, including the following details:
More comprehensive performance indicators/metrics.
For example, you’ll have access to post-view and post-click conversions, giving you a clearer picture of the overall impact of your ads.
Attribution features
When setting up your conversions, you can select how each ad interaction is attributed to a conversion across multiple campaigns. The chosen attribution model can be set for each campaign or for a single campaign.
In-depth insights
Demographics provide you with information about the prospects in your audience who convert, giving you details such as their job, position or title, industry and company name. This will greatly help you improve the targeting and content alignment of your campaign.
Through the use of these features and many others that are covered in the course offered by LinkedIn, you will be able to learn to define the basics of lead generation on the platform, and expand your skills to move towards optimizing your lead generation practices and strategies.
- Optimize your campaign
If you have high engagement rates, but low conversion rates, leads that don’t convert to sales qualified leads (SQL), or your demo isn’t generating leads, luckily there are solutions to optimize your campaigns and boost your lead generation with LinkedIn, and grow your business.
Here’s what you can do:
Join groups related to your business interests and target demographic.
This is a great way to network with other professionals in your industry and keep up with the latest happenings at the source: existing and potential customers. Start conversations or piggyback on an existing conversation. You can also start building your reputation as an expert in your field by sharing your company’s content with an audience that will appreciate it as a connoisseur.
Find contacts via LinkedIn search.
This is a great feature in general, as it allows you to be very specific in your search criteria. This is very handy when you have a company to target without any known contacts.
Once you’ve found what you’re looking for, you can contact those people with InMail, a paid feature of LinkedIn.
Easily connect with InMail.
At one time or another, you’ve probably received a direct message on LinkedIn from someone you don’t know. That’s the magic of InMail!
This tool allows you to reach out to people you are not connected to, and get leads without adding complete strangers to your network of connections.
InMail comes with LinkedIn’s Premium subscription. Depending on your subscription, you have 20 or 30 InMail credits per month to send messages to whomever you want.
Learn about other premium features.
LinkedIn offers Premium plans that address four specific goals: getting hired, hiring, growing your company’s network and finding sales opportunities. If your needs are focused on lead generation and sales, then you’ll appreciate the following features:
Unlimited profile navigation
Customized lead and account lists
Lead recommendation
CRM synchronization
In LinkedIn’s course, “Using LinkedIn for Lead Generation,” you’ll find many more methods and strategies, including sponsored content via LinkedIn Campaign Manager and the use of Lead Gen Forms.
- Measure your performance
You want to reach and capture a quality audience that can bring long-term value to your business. To do this, take the time to measure the results and eventual success of your campaigns. In addition to looking at the performance of your campaigns, look at the post-campaign statistics, such as the number of sales conversions made and the value each sale brings. This way, you can measure the real business value of each campaign.
LinkedIn provides a 6-point checklist that can help you analyze the performance of your campaigns in depth:
1- Before launching your campaign, identify your key indicators according to your marketing objective.
Increase brand awareness: impressions, clicks, click-through rate
Increase consideration level: Website visits, Clicks, Click-through rate
Generate leads/conversions: conversion rate, cost per conversion, cost per lead
2- Set up the Insight tag to take advantage of the Conversion Tracking feature
This allows you to see how your ads are generating valuable actions, including content downloads, registrations, purchases, etc.
3- Set up Lead Gen forms.
By using Lead Gen forms, you can measure bottom-of-funnel metrics such as number of leads and cost per lead.
4- Perform weekly analytics assessments.
Identify opportunities to optimize your campaigns and focus on the metrics that match your campaign goals.
Use this optimization checklist as a guide in this process.
5- Use campaign demographics to see which audiences respond best to your ads.
You can then create new targeting audiences based on your findings.
6- Use the Performance Insights feature to optimize your bids and budgets.
- Use LinkedIn marketing partners to boost your campaigns
Today, there are hundreds of partners in the LinkedIn Marketing Partner program. They offer a range of services and solutions that will help you achieve your marketing goals.
These partners leverage the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions APIs to help you develop a marketing strategy, activate and optimize your campaigns and measure their success. These partners can be divided into the following categories, based on the value they provide to your marketing efforts
Community Management
Ad Technology
Audience Management
Analytics and Measurement
Community Management
Marketing is resource and time intensive. A partner can help you streamline social activities across all channels on a single platform, reducing the time and resources needed to maintain an effective community management strategy.
Some of LinkeIn’s top community management partners include Hootsuite, Buffer, Hubspo, Salesforce Social Studio and Khoros.
