In our Marketing Trends to Watch Out for in 2022 blog post I talked about the importance of setting up automations for prospecting. I want to dive deeper into the LinkedIn Lead Generation service and how that can help your business.
For the last 18 months, we’ve helped more than a dozen clients increase their LinkedIn connections. While doing this, we’ve helped to generate hundreds of conversations with decision makers in the industries we are targeting. So – how do we do it?
How LinkedIn Lead Generation Works
Complete a Questionnaire and Build Your Audience
It starts with a questionnaire. We need to understand your business and who you want to reach and what your end goal is. Once we know those three basic questions we can move forward with building an audience and tailoring messaging towards them. We start with LinkedIn Sales Navigator – this nifty tool allows us to pull 2nd and 3rd degree connections across your targeted geographic regions (meaning you only want to talk to people in Arkansas – not a problem! Want to talk to people all across the country – you got it!). We start with your geographic reach and then we specify industries and job titles of the people you want to connect with. We find at least 1,000 potential connections to get our campaign started.
Tailor Messaging to Your Prospects
Following the search for new connections we tailor messaging that we will send out to these prospects. The messaging is meant to be a very soft sell – we aren’t trying to sell them the moon, we want to start an engaging conversation. This means asking about what pain points they are seeing in their business, what trends have been prevalent, and especially over the last 24 months – how has COVID affected their business. These questions are meant to be thought provoking and start conversations between you and your potential new client. We also don’t constantly send them messages harassing them, that will turn people off quickly. We use a schedule that has proven to be effective after much trial and error. A total of four messages are sent over the course of 21 days. Following the fourth message, our automation stops.
Respond to Your New Connections
If at any time a person responds to one of our automated messages, we stop sending the next messages in the sequence and we let you take over the conversation. This lets you respond to their questions with your industry expertise and start a dialogue that you can hopefully take offline and turn into a client.
Components of a Successful B2B Lead Generation Campaign
So, what does a successful campaign look like? It’s obviously different for each account that we work with, but the ultimate goal is to find new connections to grow your network and hopefully grow your bottom line. We have seen that the average connection rate is just over 15% and from that a 20% reply rate is considered a success.
Return Messages Quickly to Capitalize on Your Connections
It’s also imperative that you do the work to make this campaign successful, the automation is great, but if you aren’t returning messages in a timely manner then all the work could be for naught. We want to make sure you are capitalizing on the connections you are making – this means engaging with them when they respond to you, not in three days.
Practice Authenticity
Authenticity is also extremely important. People will see through canned responses, so make sure you inflect your voice when reviewing your automated messages, but also when responding to a message from one of your new connections. Included with authenticity is sharing with your network what’s important to you in regards to your business and the businesses you do business with. We’ve found that people who are actively updating their LinkedIn account see a better ROI because they are seen as thought leaders in their industry. You are showing you are an active participant in the community you serve and not just a person mining for new business.
How Lead Generation on LinkedIn Can Help Your Business Grow
Adam Marsh, CEO of Ledge, Inc. who has been using the service since January of 2021 has found it a great benefit to growing his company, stating: “The Lead Generation tool has been an excellent addition to our marketing plan. It allows us to reach directly into our target markets by area, industry and company size. We have had an excellent response rate (35% connections and 45% reply) and have more than doubled the size of my LinkedIn network.”
We all know that business growth is the key to a successful future, so we take the guesswork out of it and do the heavy-lifting for you. This service can help you grow at a pace you’re comfortable with, while expanding your network of potential clients.
Ready to use LinkedIn Lead Generation to grow your business?
