In a world where social media is the new word game, businesses are facing new challenges when it comes to lead generation. As such, businesses must take advantage of every opportunity to reach and engage with potential customers.
To do so, marketers can create a company page on LinkedIn and post updates that link back to the brand website. They can also use the platform to find potential leads based on job title, company, or location. But in order to leverage these opportunities for lead generation—and not just awareness—marketers need better strategies than “just posting once in a while.”
To help you get more out of your LinkedIn presence and aid your overall lead generation efforts, we’ve compiled these five best practices from some of our favorite sources. Keep reading to learn how your next marketing plan can include more effective lead generation tactics for LinkedIn as well as other social platforms.
1. Create a Company Page and Build an Audience
As with any other social channel, before you can create an effective lead generation strategy, you must first have a solid foundation. In this case, that means having a company page on LinkedIn.
There are many benefits to having a company page, including the ability to create a consistent presence for your brand. A consistent presence on LinkedIn is especially important because it’s one of the only social media channels that businesses are allowed to advertise on.
This means that there’s a higher likelihood of finding leads on this channel than on other platforms, such as Facebook or Instagram. In addition to having a consistent presence, your company page also gives you the opportunity to share your brand story and build trust and credibility.
When you create your company page, you can share a welcome post that introduces your brand and provides a preview of what you do. You can also use this as an opportunity to share a short bio, including a brief summary of the company and its mission.
Useful tip: Remember to SEO-optimize your company page to get more organic traffic to it.
2. Use Rich Lead Ads to Drive Awareness and Conversions
One of the most effective ways to use LinkedIn for lead generation purposes is to use rich lead ads. Rich lead ads are ads that allow you to include more information, such as a visual and a headline, that is not available for standard ads.
This not only allows for more engagement but also allows you to include a link to your website and drive more potential customers to your business. Rich lead ads are available for both desktop and mobile and are more likely to be clicked on since they offer more information and are more informative than standard ads.
Another great advantage to using rich lead ads is that you can select the amount of money you want to spend, and LinkedIn will only charge you when your ad is clicked on. This is a great way to drive leads and make sure you are getting the most out of your marketing budget.
3. Host LinkedIn Events to Grow Your Audience and Lead List
One of the ways to use LinkedIn to drive more leads to your company and increase brand awareness is to host events on the platform. Hosting events on LinkedIn allows you to get in front of a highly targeted audience and give them an opportunity to learn more about your brand.
It also gives you the opportunity to collect email addresses for your lead generation efforts. Because LinkedIn makes it easy to include an invitation button that connects to your event registration page, you can collect emails from interested attendees before the event even takes place.
You can host live events or virtual events on LinkedIn. Live events are great for engaging with an audience in real time, while virtual events allow you to record the event and make it accessible to others who weren’t able to make it to the live session.
4. Run Retargeting Ads to Convert Passers-By Into Leads
If you’ve ever wondered how some marketers can get so many leads from LinkedIn, the answer is retargeting ads. Retargeting ads enable you to target the people who have already visited your site but left without taking any action.
These are people that are already interested in your product or service but have not yet converted. Retargeting ads allow you to show ads to people who have already been to your site. If they visited your site and didn’t take any action, such as signing up for your email list or purchasing a product, they’re likely interested in what you have to offer.
Retargeting ads, like rich lead ads, also allow you to create individualized ads based on what someone has browsed on your website. This allows you to advertise to the people who are most likely to click on your ads and convert.
5. Use Outreach Tools to Automate the Process of Cold Outreach
Another great tool to help you take advantage of LinkedIn for lead generation is to use outreach tools. There are a number of tools that allow you to create and send personalized messages to potential leads based on their job title or company.
Tools like Expandi, Dux-Soup or Lemlist are able to use data from LinkedIn to identify the best people to target for outreach and create personalized messages that are most likely to get a response.
These tools also allow you to manage your outreach campaigns so that you don’t have to manually send the same message to all of the people you want to reach out to. Instead, you can automate the process and get more done in a shorter amount of time.
Conclusion
Lead generation is about creating a relationship with potential customers and turning them into sales leads. In order to do this, businesses must go beyond marketing strategies that only focus on the top of the funnel, like pay-per-click ads.
By leveraging the power of LinkedIn, companies can engage with leads at every stage of the funnel. From creating a company page and posting updates to hosting events and running retargeting ads, businesses can use LinkedIn to generate leads at scale. To take advantage of these opportunities, it’s important to implement these strategies and stay tuned for new ones as the platform evolves.
About the author:
Stefan Smulders is a SaaS entrepreneur and a founder of the world’s safest software for LinkedIn automation – Expandi.io. He’s enjoying his family life in the Netherlands being a proud father of a lovely son Steef.
