How to use LinkedIn Automation effectively
Updated June 2023
Whether you’re new to LinkedIn, dabble with it occasionally or are an active participant in group conversations with lots of connections, it’s good to keep the subject of effectiveness at the back of your mind when using this social networking platform.
LinkedIn is the most widely adopted B2B networking platform worldwide, offering you an opportunity to network with over 930 million professionals.
Harness it correctly and it can be a highly valuable source of information, recommendations and sales leads. Ignore it completely and you could find your business losing market share and brand presence to your competition.
But how can you use it most effectively and where does the balance lie?
How much time and activity should I invest in LinkedIn?
For some businesses, LinkedIn is their sole source of customer acquisition.
If you’re a good networker and willing to spend time joining in conversations, posting content and messaging your connections every day, then for a small business this can be highly rewarding.
The amount of time invested in LinkedIn is often related to the size of the business. Larger businesses may have employees dedicated to social activity to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to their website.
For many of us though, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day and LinkedIn can get neglected for other more urgent and pressing tasks. Urgent quotes, customer issues, development projects and HR/finance tasks can mean prospecting outreach falls by the wayside.
We’ve all been there.
Automating LinkedIn
The good news for those of us concerned about our lack of LinkedIn prowess is that LinkedIn Automation solves many of these concerns.
It allows business owners, sales professionals and marketers to be active on LinkedIn without the need to be there, for the most part anyway.
Think about it; the most time-consuming LinkedIn tasks are those that either don’t involve any or involve only very light interaction with your target prospects.
Building your lists, viewing profiles and attempting your first outreach - often a connection request or short message for example. These tasks can all be done without investing your valuable time, and without compromising the personalization that we all strive for when engaging with new prospects.
By automating these tasks, you can save up to 80% of your time and skip straight to the personalized engagement piece. And here’s where it gets really good. By focussing on those prospects that have been responsive to your initial outreach, guess what? Your conversion rates are going to be much higher.
Better conversion rates, less time spent? Sounds like a win-win situation, right?
That’s why Dux-Soup has gained over 80,000 users. It’s an attractive proposition and one that is low cost, quick and easy to benefit from.
How to use LinkedIn Automation
So, you could go ahead and get started right now. In fact, Dux-Soup offers a free trial so you can have a play with the tool and see the benefits of automating your LinkedIn activity.
But before you jump ahead with LinkedIn Automation, it’s important to understand what LinkedIn Automation tools have to offer, so you can determine whether they will work for you.
Watch our overview on Dux-Soup LinkedIn Automation to understand the key features of LinkedIn Automation.
Top 6 ways to use LinkedIn Automation
Although Dux-Soup (with its Starter, Professional, Turbo and Cloud editions) has many features available, we’ve highlighted the best loved and most widely used features below:
1. Viewing and Tagging LinkedIn Profiles
It’s just human nature that we’re intrigued as to who is looking at our LinkedIn profile, right?
When you view someone’s profile, the other person can see that you’ve done this, which sparks a curiosity as to why you may be viewing their profile. Chances are they may look at your profile in return, and so this becomes your first opportunity to showcase your brand/business/capabilities to them.
Therefore, it’s important to have an up-to-date profile before you start automating your LinkedIn activities. When you build target lists in LinkedIn, it often helps to tag prospects and categorize them for follow up.
It may be you want to tag them based on what information they’ve shown an interest in, or with the name of a specific campaign you are running.
By tagging LinkedIn profiles, you can segment prospects easily and follow up with more personalized content. And we all know that more personalization yields better results. Our video below shows how easy this is to tag LinkedIn profiles with Dux-Soup.
2. Sending Personalized Connection Requests
By automating your LinkedIn connection requests you’ll save a lot of time and generate plenty of leads.
Some may argue that the connection request process shouldn’t be automated as the messages look too generic. Well, the good news is that by tagging profiles with Dux-Soup and then creating really tailored campaign message sequences, you can improve connection rates and achieve up to 70% response rates!
You’ll find that your network will start to grow, and your pipeline will scale fast.
3. Sending Personalized Messages to 1st-Degree LinkedIn Connections
Use LinkedIn automation to message your first-degree connections to save time and reach more of your audience.
You can search and filter your audience to personalise your message to specific sectors or decision makers. The opportunities are endless, and the rewards high.
We love using this to send a new piece of content out, or inviting connections to webinars or events. It's a great way of keeping in communication with your LinkedIn network.
3. Nurture your business leads with LinkedIn outreach campaigns.
If you’re struggling to connect with a prospect via your usual marketing channels, LinkedIn may just be the approach that get their attention.
It is often said that people are more likely to read a LinkedIn InMail or message than respond to an email. By uploading your business or CRM contacts to Dux-Soup, you can visit these profiles and run drip campaigns to your existing database. Send them campaigns with up to 12 touch-points including relevant content, updates, marking messages or offers.
Even better, with a Turbo license you can send LinkedIn campaigns direct from your CRM system (no need to upload data lists manually). Check out our Dux-Soup integrations to see if your CRM system is a native integration, or use Zapier or Make to connect the two.
See how easy it is to create LinkedIn campaigns in this tutorial.
5. Download your LinkedIn data
When you’ve built your lists and sent connection requests, you may want to pull your lists off and market to contacts via another channel. With Dux-Soup Pro and Turbo you can download the data from LinkedIn, including email addresses and start to communicate with your prospects ‘off platform’.
(Note: If you have Turbo then you can send your LinkedIn data straight to your CRM as seen with our Hubspot integration).
6. Build your email database
Access 2nd and 3rd degree email addresses which are not normally provided by LinkedIn to build your email database. Download your lists and use them for email marketing campaigns.
So there are 6 cool LinkedIn actions you can automate. But there's plenty more you can do with Dux-Soup.
What NOT to Automate
Whilst we believe that automating SOME parts of your sales process can offer huge time savings and increased sales conversions, we don’t promote using automation for every step in the sales process.
Nothing beats personal interaction with responsive prospects, and this is where we recommend you start to take your LinkedIn activity into your own hands. So, once you’ve got a response to a message in your drip campaign then we recommend you pick up the phone or send them a message directly so that you can start to build a relationship.
Quantifying the Benefits of LinkedIn Automation
It often helps to see the return on investment before you decide whether to automate your LinkedIn activity. Our Dux-Soup results demonstrate how companies are achieving outstanding results with Dux-Soup.
Hopefully you can find something here that fits what you’re looking to achieve for your business, but if not you can always browse our website to learn more about the features of Dux-Soup LinkedIn Automation tool.
