8 Best Tips to Generate More B2B Leads from LinkedIn

The world of marketing constantly evolves and adapts to newer techniques to meet its core objective i.e. to create a better pull towards brands. From time to time some or the other technique arrives with a promise to elevate the game of marketing. Some create their mark so others simply lose their shine after some time. 

However, one thing has created an impressive footprint in the arena of marketing like never before. It gigantically changed the marketing landscape, and forced marketers to reinvent their marketing strategies to a whole 360* in order to stay relevant in the game. 

Any guesses, what is it? 

It is the arrival, influence, and growing popularity of social media platforms, where half of the world is already present and many others are in the queue to join. 

Social media platforms thus have become a great place for marketers to advertise their products in a very cost-effective and targeted manner to drive greater business demand. LinkedIn is one of the stars in this segment that tops the chart when it comes to B2B lead generation for a variety of good reasons.

1. A network of 61 million senior executives and 40 million key decision makers makes it a goldmine for B2B lead generation campaigns.
2. 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn.
3. LinkedIn generates 3X more conversions for B2B than Twitter and Facebook.

All these stats reveal the effectiveness of LinkedIn marketing and its impact in generating more B2B leads. However, reaping the benefits through it requires marketers to use this platform effectively and embrace time-tested and proven B2B lead generation strategies to attain maximum gain. 

Here in this blog, we covered the most popular techniques to help you up your game in the field of LinkedIn B2B lead generation. 

It is often said that your first impression is the last impression. Therefore, it must be a killer one to open a new door of opportunities. When it comes to generating leads in the B2B business segment, this analogy holds an identical meaning in terms of your LinkedIn page. As your LinkedIn page is the first touchpoint that your prospects experience even before thinking about you or purchasing your services. It thus must have all the vital elements to generate more interest about your brand and grab the attention of your prospects. A few of the things that can help you create a distinct LinkedIn page are:

• Use an alluring banner with a catchy tagline that reflects the soul of what you do/offer. As it is one of the first things that any visitor sees while landing on to any LinkedIn page, therefore, it must be very fascinating.  
• ‘About Us’ should be very short, precise, and easy to understand without any big technical jargons. Messaging focussed on what benefits your services offer to prospects’ businesses and why they should pick you over your peers drives more engagement than anything else.
• Take care of SEO, write effective Meta Descriptions, and use necessary keywords related to your business while curating content as LinkedIn uses such information to generate search results. 
• A clean and nice photo/logo gives a professional touch to the profile.
• Always include the short bio in the profile and keep it precise and connected to your core services or USPs.
• A link to your website or required business web portal is a must to boost conversion. 
• Keep it refreshed and make necessary changes as per new changes or industry trends from time to time (both in content and design).

Once you are done with making an effective LinkedIn page, the second important aspect to increase your LinkedIn leads is to build a solid professional network of people who will help you grow your business. Carefully segmenting your prospects and adding them into your network rather than sending connection requests to random people will surely not lead you anywhere. 

But how can you find the right people amongst the millions of professionals/enterprises? 

This question arises in the minds of B2B marketers. 

Well, you need not to worry anymore. LinkedIn has solved this concern with its ‘Advanced Search’ feature, where you can identify, search, and target the exact type of people that your business needs. Based on various key factors like location, company, industry, past company, school, language, interests, etc., you can create an advanced search and add the right people to your network. Remember, the bigger and better your professional network, the greater will be the chances to earn more LinkedIn leads and boost brand recognition in an organic way.

The audience here on LinkedIn is quite unique and premium as compared to other platforms. Here professionals come and invest time to gain something of value. Knowledge retrieval about the latest industry trend/happening is one of the biggest factors that pull professionals towards LinkedIn. As everyone wants to remain updated about their industry and ready to invest time in consuming quality information, presenting them this thing in terms of quality content can help you gain the interests of prospects. 

Preparing a content strategy and posting quality content of different types on a frequent basis will act as a magnet to pull more prospects towards your brand. It will help you to engage your audience better, develop an interest in your services, and generate and nurture quality leads. If done properly, content marketing can give you tremendous outcomes in terms of B2B lead generation. Researchers say that content marketing has B2B lead generation stats 3X greater than traditional marketing and 98% of B2B marketers believe that content marketing performance justifies its cost. Therefore, do not ignore the power it brings and implement it effectively. 

• Post a variety of content as not everyone is interested in consuming content in the form of text. Therefore, apart from Blogs, Press Releases, Articles, White Papers, E-book, etc, make and publish videos, podcasts, real images, creatives, polls, and a variety of other content as well to engage the audience. One more benefit of incorporating different forms of content is that every piece of content works differently in terms of engagement. For example, videos draw way more attention as compared to normal text-based posts. Therefore, include as diverse forms of content as possible. 
• Make a monthly content calendar and strictly follow it to publish frequent posts. Inconsistency in frequency can deter the performance of your LinkedIn marketing campaign. 
• Don’t give away all the key marketing collateral for free. Instead, smartly use the LinkedIn form feature to encourage visitors to provide their basic information before accessing the documents like White Paper, Case Study, Email Newsletter, etc. This will help you to gain quality B2B data easily to nurture leads in the future. 
• Make sure your content is unique, trendy, engaging, and error-free. 
• Your content should be customized as per your targeted industry and audience. 
• Take care of SEO while doing anything related to your content.

We humans often explore, research, and study extensively to implement great B2B lead generation strategies but often forget to pick the low-hanging fruits that can make our day. Not utilizing the connections of our existing and previous employees over LinkedIn to boost our network is one such thing. Our employees can become our brand advocates and help us spread our marketing mantras through the LinkedIn network to reach the right people. 

Every professional over LinkedIn usually has hundreds of connections, therefore, bringing the workforce under your LinkedIn marketing net can help you boost your brand awareness significantly. Encouraging your employees to follow your page and participate there actively can drive great business results. 

Moreover, LinkedIn also provides one feature to ‘Notify Employees’, to help employees know whenever you upload a new post. Use this feature effectively to create a better pull towards your brand. 

A few facts that reveal the impressive benefits of implementing “Employee Advocacy Program”

• 65% of enterprises reported increased brand recognition after the roll-out of the ‘Employee Brand Advocacy’ program. 
• Content shared by employees receives 8X more engagement than content shared by brand channels.
• Employee Advocacy costs 1/10 as compared to paid marketing.

Data is the most crucial aspect in any B2B lead generation process. And if there could be an additional way to analyze and manage data efficiently then what else more a B2B marketer would demand. Your customer relationship management (CRM) tool or any lead scoring software consists of tons of data about your prospects. By integrating such tools with LinkedIn can help you refine and customize your sales funnel quite efficiently and enable you to close sales deals faster. 

Most of the good CRM tools enable two-way communication so whenever you need to search for people over LinkedIn based on your already sorted targeted parameters, you do not need to do it again. Moreover, it collects data from LinkedIn as well, therefore, it can insert vital data as well into your CRM system to save your time and efforts.

Search for groups that are credible, popular, and contain a significant proportion of your targeted audience. Join such groups and engage in conversations by actively presenting your unique thoughts while connecting them with your company’s core services. Professionals always like to hear new things about their industry or useful services. By presenting and putting thoughts in a professional, informative, and engaging manner, you can grab the attention of many and pull them up towards your brand. 

This is one of the best time-tested LinkedIn B2B lead generation strategies that won’t cost a penny but can help boost B2B leads effectively. Surely, nothing happens immediately in this approach as it takes time and patience to build credibility in such groups. But when it reaps benefits, it helps a lot.

The world of B2B lead generation works only when you have enough brand reach amongst your target audience. Unless you grow your network, unless more people are constantly able to see your posts, no amount of content will prove beneficial to generate more leads. You must broaden the reach of your marketing activities outside your follower zone efficiently to attain optimal B2B lead generation outputs. 

One of the effective ways to attain this goal is to conduct online and offline activities and subsequent posting of such things online over LinkedIn and other social media platforms. 

Various enterprises across the globe conduct webinars, employee engagement programs, meetups, health talks, career talks, etc., and promote such things over LinkedIn while tagging the participants. This helps in expanding the reach of your posts. As by tagging the people who are directly involved in such activities, chances of expressing some kind of engagement rise significantly as compared to other posts. 

Their engagement broadens the scope of reaching to more audiences outside your network and promises to provide a great boost to your brand awareness campaign. 

• InMail: This powerful paid conversational medium allows you to send personalized emails to people who are important for your business but currently are not in your direct network. It helps you to initiate sales communication with your prospects in a professional way. Its effectiveness can be gauged from the fact that InMail usually generates a higher response rate as compared to cold email. According to LinkedIn, the average open rate for InMail is about 45% but it can go higher as well depending upon various demographic factors like industry, etc.
• Dynamic Ads: Each target is different and so thus their requirements and likings. Static Ads won’t suffice in all circumstances, therefore, dynamic Ads come into the picture. It allows you to gain the attention of each of the targets uniquely. As it empowers you to create customized Ads as per their available profile information like photo, company name, job title, etc. It helps enterprises to create a memorable experience and better bond with their prospects which ultimately helps in generating more B2B leads through LinkedIn. 
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator: This powerful feature enables you to target the right prospects, helps you understand what their needs are, empowers you to boost brand awareness, shortens your sales cycles, and provides you an exhaustive list of quality leads along with frequent notifications about new matches. LinkedIn itself states that enterprises get 42% larger deals with over 17% higher win rates when using Sales Navigator to contact key decision-makers.

Although this list enlists most of the best techniques to boost your LinkedIn lead generation campaigns, there is much space to explore further. Study, research, and consult before making a final lead generation strategy while imparting the above ones to meet great results. Remember that LinkedIn is the most popular tool amongst B2B marketers and if used properly, it can help you achieve phenomenal sales outcomes in a very targeted and cost-effective manner as compared to outbound marketing channels. So, log in to this popular social media platform, experience its characteristics, and start a new journey with great synergy to drive maximum throughput for your organization in near future.