How to Use LinkedIn to Generate More Leads

January 27, 2016 0 comments

As online business people, we use so many different social media websites. Some of the popular ones are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. However, no matter what, out of all these social media websites, LinkedIn continues to be the best business-to-business lead-generation platform.

Don’t get me wrong, though. Facebook and Twitter can also generate a lot of targeted leads for you, but none comes close to LinkedIn. As a matter of fact, for B2B businesses LinkedIn drives the most customers and leads.

This post will tell you a few useful tips and tricks on how to use LinkedIn to generate more leads for your business.

Let’s get started.

1. Optimise Your Profile for New Connections

You can’t do anything if you do not have the right kind of LinkedIn profile in place.

Unlike Facebook or Twitter — which are more focused on the type of contents you share — LinkedIn is a lot more dependent on your profile. The first impression is often the last impression on LinkedIn, so make sure that you have an impressive profile in place.

Here is an excellent example.

The key here is to describe what you do as clearly as possible. This tagline will attract other targeted connections that will potentially lead you to more customers.

2. Contribute to Relevant Groups

LinkedIn is very different than Facebook or Twitter. It is exclusively geared towards professionals and professional networks. You won’t find many “funny cat gifs” here, and that’s great news for you.

Because of the fact that LinkedIn is almost junk free, you can then use and leverage professional groups to generate more leads. It works something like this.

Suppose you are an online marketer looking for new clients and leads. The best way would be then to join a few relevant groups. Here are a few examples of relevant groups an online marketer should join.

Now, once you have joined these groups, you should also be very active in them. Use your expertise to solve other people’s problems and stamp your authority in the online marketing niche.

Not all of those answers would lead to new clients, but eventually some of them will. As soon as you become an authority — a well-known figure or an expert — in these groups, you will see a surge of new targeted leads.

3. Create Your Own Group

Creating your own LinkedIn group can be a very time-consuming task in the beginning. But having said that it can also lead to some great new professional connections and more opportunities to generate new business leads.

Your group should target your potential clients. Build new connections and invite people to your group. Moreover, you will also have to regularly post new contents in the group to keep it active. Use BuzzSumo to find the most popular and awesome contents from the relevant niche and share it in your group. It’s perhaps the easiest way to populate the group with useful and relevant content — especially in the beginning.

It will get easier to maintain the group once it gets going and other users start participating without your intervention. But until then, you will have to do all the legwork.

4. Shortlist Targeted Leads

Shortlist all the leads you find and try to get their personal information. You may find these leads from sending new invites for connection, contribution to other popular groups in your industry, or by creating your own LinkedIn group. It does not really matter how you get connected with them.

What matters, however, is that you identify and shortlist the people that you may possibly work with in future. Stay in touch with them and keep sharing tips, tricks, news, and information that might be useful for them.

Build a solid connection over a couple of months and try to get their personal information. You will need it for our next step.

5. Move to a Sales Funnel

While LinkedIn is great for developing new contacts and finding potential leads, it is not the right platform for finalising a sale. It just does not have the right environment for that.

This is why my advice is to always move the interested leads to a proper sales funnel, e.g., a phone call, a formal meeting, or email.

Final Words

LinkedIn is, by far, the best lead-generation website for B2B business. Generating leads from LinkedIn may take some time and a lot of handwork, but it is worth it. When compared with other social media websites, such as Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter, LinkedIn will always come on top for B2B businesses.