LinkedIn isn’t just a social media platform—it’s an effective lead generation tool that brings new leads into your sales pipeline. Many growing businesses are using B2B LinkedIn lead generation practices to help them prospect, qualify, and nurture relationships with potential customers.
If you want to generate leads on LinkedIn, it’s essential that you:
- Optimize Your LinkedIn Business Page
- Take Advantage of Your Personal LinkedIn Profile
- Reach Out to Potential Buyers in Your Target Market
- Join and Engage With Relevant LinkedIn Groups
- Share Company Website Blogs and Pages
- Invest in LinkedIn Lead Ads and Sponsored Content
Keep reading to learn how these LinkedIn B2B lead generation tactics are vital for a high-performing business growth strategy.
Optimize Your LinkedIn Business Page
A B2B company’s LinkedIn is essentially a showcase page for its product and service offerings. Like a company website, your business page should give users all the information they need to know about your company, including your location and contact info.
This LinkedIn lead generation strategy empowers growing businesses to build brand awareness and get their company in front of more potential buyers. To build brand awareness through your LinkedIn business page, it must have:
- A profile image of your company logo
- A cover image that aligns with your brand identity
- Content that highlights your company as an industry thought leader
Take Advantage of Your Personal LinkedIn Profile
Using your personal LinkedIn profile for lead generation is essential. Your LinkedIn profile adds a personal touch to your company’s identity because it shows there’s a real person behind the business.
This LinkedIn lead generation strategy can be accomplished by anyone within the organization, whether that’s a business owner or an inside influencer who already has a decent following. Whichever LinkedIn profile your company decides to use, it’s essential that the individual:
- Uploads a professional headshot as their profile image
- Uses a header image that reflects the company’s brand
- Adds a job description that reflects their role within the organization
- Highlights their expertise in the About summary of their profile
- Showcases their positive impact on your company and industry
- Shares thought leadership content that aligns with your target audience
Reach Out to Potential Buyers in Your Target Market
If you want to use LinkedIn to generate sales leads, you need to use it as a prospecting tool and as an additional platform to nurture relationships with decision-makers.
A great way to find prospects through LinkedIn is using their Sales Navigator platform. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a sales intelligence tool that helps sales reps find the best companies and right decision-makers for their sales pipelines. Through this lead generating tool, SDR teams gain full visibility into their network and gather prospect data in real time. It can also be easily integrated with your company’s CRM platform, allowing you to access new prospects from one system.
Many SDR teams nurture qualified leads by making warm calls and sending follow-up sales emails. Decision-makers are often hard to get a hold of, so it’s becoming more common to send lead nurturing information via LinkedIn messages. Sending personal LinkedIn messages to potential buyers supports top-of-mind awareness and allows SDRs to send customized content to specific decision-makers that align with their interests.
Join and Engage With Relevant LinkedIn Groups
Similar to Facebook and Reddit, LinkedIn has many relevant groups that like-minded professionals can be a part of. Joining and engaging with LinkedIn groups is an effective way to connect with potential buyers and answer any questions they may have about your industry, products, or services.
While interacting with LinkedIn groups is a great way to build brand awareness and establish yourself as a thought leader, it’s important to remember that the people in these groups are looking for specific information. They don’t want to be served sales-focused content. As with any other lead generation strategy, you need to ease yourself into the conversation. If you come off too strongly with sales-heavy jargon, you risk turning off group members from your company or even being removed from the LinkedIn group.
Share Company Website Blogs and Pages
B2B marketing teams work hard to create website content that piques users’ interest; therefore, sharing these pieces of content on your LinkedIn profiles is essential for supporting their marketing efforts and generating more inbound leads.
Sharing website content on your business and personal LinkedIn accounts drives more website traffic. If users see value in what your company provides, they can sign up for company newsletters or submit their contact information to set up a sales meeting.
Sharing these pieces of content on LinkedIn can also boost the search engine optimization (SEO) value of your company website by directing people to it. If enough people click on your website link to read what your company has to say, search engines note the page as content worth looking at, providing readers with a better user experience.
Invest in LinkedIn Lead Ads and Sponsored Content
If you’re struggling to convert followers into leads with organic social content, it may be worth investing in LinkedIn lead ads and sponsored content. LinkedIn lead ads and sponsored content are intended to target potential buyers who actively seek solutions to their pain points.
While promoting lead ads and sponsored content can maximize your LinkedIn B2B lead generation strategy, other forms of LinkedIn ad campaigns include:
- Lead gen forms: LinkedIn lead gen forms encourage people to submit their contact info without leaving the platform. Many businesses use lead gen forms to motivate users to download an exclusive guide or e-book relevant to their position or industry.
- InMail messaging: LinkedIn InMail messaging ads allow your team to directly message decision-makers and begin a conversation about your company.
- Dynamic ads: These ads appear on the right side of a user’s feed rather than in the feed itself. They often encourage users to follow your LinkedIn business page, visit a landing page, or download marketing collateral.
Key Takeaways
LinkedIn is unique from other lead generation tactics because it can be used as both an outbound sales development strategy and an inbound marketing strategy. While many businesses use it for inbound marketing, they’re missing a significant piece of their business growth efforts if they don’t use it for outbound sales development.
At Sapper Consulting, our sales development reps and inbound marketing specialists are experts at using LinkedIn for lead generation. If you need a hand with your LinkedIn lead generation strategy, contact the business growth experts at Sapper!
