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 700 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?
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 all mean that prospecting outreach falls by the wayside.
We’ve all been there.
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 personalisation 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 personalised 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 nearly 70,000 users. It’s an attractive proposition and one that is low cost, quick and easy to benefit from.
So, you could go ahead and get started right now. In fact Dux-Soup has a free Starter LinkedIn Automation Tool that you can download in 2 minutes and start using. That’s free forever (no 14 or 30-day trials).
But before you jump ahead with LinkedIn Automation, it’s important to understand what LinkedIn Automation tools 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.
Although Dux-Soup (with its Starter, Professional and Turbo editions) has many features available, we’ve highlighted the best loved and most widely used features below:
1. Viewing and Tagging LinkedIn Profiles (Free Edition) 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 categorise them for follow up. It may be you want to tag them based on what information they’ve shown an interest in, or if they fit into a specific campaign you are running. By tagging prospects you can segment them easily and follow up with more personalised content. And we all know that more personalisation yields better results. Our video below shows how easy this is to do.
2. Personalised Connection Requests and Drip Campaigns sequences (Dux-Soup Turbo). By automating your connection requests as part of a 12-touch drip campaign sequence, 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. Personalised Messaging to your First-Degree 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.
4. Target your existing contacts via LinkedIn (Dux-Soup Professional). 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 than respond to an email. By uploading your contacts to Dux-Soup, you can set it to automatically message your existing database with relevant content, updates, marking messages or offers.
5. Download your LinkedIn data (Dux-Soup Professional). 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 Professional you can download the data from LinkedIn, including email addresses and start to communicate with your prospects ‘off platform’.
6. Build your email database (In-app purchase). 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.
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.
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.
Handle your entire sales pipeline, track your performances, and in the end, close more deals.
