LinkedIn is hands down the best platform for B2B leads, bar none. If you are not using LinkedIn to generate hundreds of leads for your business per month you are leaving money on the table.

LinkedIn is becoming an increasingly popular platform for users to consume valuable content from high authority figures. You can use LinkedIn to see what other successful people in your niche are up to and what topics are trending in your industry today .

For lead generation agencies like Leads Incoming, LinkedIn gives us the ability to target your dream clients by industry, niche, job title, company size, activity. For instance we can target CEOs, owners or other decision maker titles that have actively posted on LinkedIn in the last 30 days.  We can then use our proprietary lead generation software to message, email, inmail or target with ads for your business services.

We can all agree LinkedIn is the platform of choice if your goal is to generate higher quality B2B leads, but not all strategies are created equal.

Here, I want to share about LinkedIn Lead Generation Strategies for Lead Gen Ads as well as organic leads, and also share a few recommended tips for you to optimize your lead flow.

1. Have An Offer They Can’t Refuse

This is probably the largest problem with most cold reach messaging I see on LinkedIn. Just being 10-15% better or cheaper doesn’t cut it these days.  Think of some free value you can give up front to get the sales meeting booked in your calendar. Just because your offer seems good to you doesn’t mean you can cram it down your prospects throat without being able to make a connection first.

For instance, a software demonstration to a cold prospect probably isn’t going to get the result you think it will unless you’ve identified the problem the prospect is dealing with and presented the software as the solution to the problem.  Can the software have a free 14 day trial period? The word free is the most important and powerful word in the language of social media and is the catalyst of an irresistible offer.

If the product or service does not solve the problems of the prospect, nobody is going to need it no matter what kind of lead generation campaign or media platform you’re using. So you must be sure you have an offer that can’t be refused and is of value to your prospects because it solves their biggest problems.

This will require you to do some research in your niche to find out what the biggest problems are for your clients or the most common issues your average client deals with and how to solve them, or preferably how your products and services solve them for the low, low investment of one phone call or lead form.

2. Export Leads to your CRM for Nurturing and Follow Up

Grant Cardone taught me “the fortune is in the follow up”.  Once the lead is in your system if you are only going to touch that lead one time typically you will not get them to take the action you want to.  Studies show you need to touch a lead approximately 11 times to get them to take action.

If your CRM is excel friendly, LinkedIn can allow you to directly export leads from your LinkedIn Sales Navigator searches or submitted lead gen ads.

We highly recommend you integrate your CRM. This way you will not have to log in and manually export leads on a regular basis. It will also be much faster to begin to nurture the leads immediately. As soon as they fill out the form they will be added to any follow-up sequence you have set up.

3. Automated LinkedIn Cold Messaging Outreach

I’m big on systems and automation in my business.  What business owner isn’t? Today with LinkedIn I can literally reach out to 1000 prospects every single month, send up to 100 messages per day with a 5 touch message campaign all on autopilot.

The average business can add 20-30 more sales appointments per month just using this one system. After all It is a numbers game. If you reach out to 1000 prospects, 300 will typically connect with you.  Of those 300 people, 20-30 will typically book a sales call with you. And depending on your close rate, on average we see 20% of our sales calls result in a sale.  But that varies based on your product or service and your price.

Compared to the average $30,000 per year income of a Facebook user, the average LinkedIn user has an income around $80,000. For this reason LinkedIn is typically better to use when your product or service is a high ticket item.

At Leads Incoming we have a “done for you” LinkedIn messaging service

4. LinkedIn Inmails

We use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to generate a list of prospects that have open LinkedIn profiles. We can then use our proprietary software similarly to how we do our messaging and send them free Inmails without using any of our Inmail credits.

This is one of our favorite ways to reach leads as Inmail typically has a higher read rate than a message.

5. LinkedIn lead gen form PPC

Use a LinkedIn Lead Gen Ad to present your irresistible offer and get the user to fill out a lead gen form. Be sure to include some engaging copyrighting and media such as a photo or video. You will want to treat the lead gen form much like you would treat a landing page for your website. Once the user gets all the way through the lead gen form they will be redirected to your website to get more information about your business.

The best way to qualify the lead is to use your lead form to ask some buying questions. We recommend 5 questions to guage their interest level, urgency, ready to buy now or just doing research.  For example a lead gen form for a mortgage lender may say “Are you currently working with a buyers agent?”  or “When are you looking to close on a property?”

At the end of the day for best success it comes back down to the offer.  The user is trying to decide if it’s worth possibly getting bombarded with calls and messages for giving you their contact information, what you’re offering better be worth it. Or you wind up paying for impressions and clicks and mediocre results.

We recommend using the “Offer Headline” and “Offer Details” portion of the form to highlight your offer and explain what the benefit if and what problems will be solved. These do have some character limits, so be brief but engaging

6. LinkedIn Profinder

LinkedIn Profinder is my favorite newer platform for professionals looking for more local clients or services.  It is only a few years young and reminds me a lot of freelancer or upwork.com but instead of hiring a foreigner from india or china, LinkedIn Profinder is just for finding professional US freelancers in the local area .

Typically, a LinkedIn professional decision maker will post on Profinder that they are looking for a Financial Advisor, or a Website / Software Developer, Photographer, Marketer, Accountant etc.  There are about 14 professional categories.

LinkedIn will then allow those freelancers registered with Profinder to submit proposals.  Now here is the catch, LinkedIn will only allow the first 5 proposals. Therefore being the first to respond to the inquiry is the most important thing for the freelancer.  Once 5 people respond before you, you missed the chance at converting that lead.

If you are in one of the 14 professional Profinder categories, our proprietary software can automatically respond to the inquiry immediately once submitted with a proposal that we hand craft for you.  This way you are always in that top 5.

Here’s the other thing we’ve noticed.  85% of Businesses will typically go with the first person that responded to their inquiry.

Implement These Strategies to Optimize Your LinkedIn lead Generation Today

Whether you intend to use LinkedIn messaging, Inmails, Profinder or lead gen ads, all can be a great way to book more sales appointments and grow your business. These tweaks will make your campaigns better for you and more efficient for your clients so both sides can benefit.

Robert Scelfo

Robert is the CEO of Leads Incoming. He has seven years of experience in lead generation and PPC through social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Google and Instagram.  Rob has year of copyrighting experience and executing messaging campaigns for both his clients and his agency. You can book a free consultation with Rob if you are seeking a “done for you” approach for your LinkedIn lead generation.