How to connect with people in groups even if you are not part of them
*Please note that you will need to have a LinkedIn Sales Navigator account for this to work.
When searching for new people to connect with on LinkedIn, the aim is to try and find the most appropriate target market. This can be achieved through filtering searches by industry, location, job roles and a mix of other categories.
(For a recap of how to use LinkedIn searches have a quick read of our previous blog)
Usually a good search is enough to find 1000s of people who fit your criteria. However, I often want to try and connect with people who have a certain interest in specific areas and this can be much more difficult. For example, if you are searching for someone who is interested in property development, outdoor events or interested in buying Bitcoin, these interests will probably not be listed on their LinkedIn Profile.
However, lots of people will join a LinkedIn Group where they can share some common interests. Therefore, if you can find LinkedIn Groups that are relevant to your target market, the likelihood is that the people in these groups are going to be the perfect target audience for you to connect with.
(For a recap on how to join LinkedIn groups and use Dux-Soup check out this blog)
This approach works incredibly well if you can find the most relevant LinkedIn groups be accepted into them. However, I have received a lot of feedback from the Dux-Soup community members that they are finding it difficult to join all the groups that they want to be part of.
DON’T WORRY! YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE ACCEPTED INTO A GROUP TO SCRAPE ALL THE USERS OF THAT GROUP!
That’s right, by using this LinkedIn hack, you can find your perfect target audience from groups without even trying to join them. Excited?
Step 1: Prepare settings on Sales Navigator
*Just to remind you, this hack only works with Sales Navigator and not basic Linkedin account.
Let’s get started! Go to Sales Navigator:
and create a new search for ‘leads’. Once you have clicked on search for leads you will see a popup box to input all the criteria you are looking for:
Input all the search criteria to find your target market. In this example I am going to use:
Industry: Apparel and Fashion
Geography: United Kingdom
Title: Founder / Owner / Co Founder / Director
Your search should now look like this:
Although this shows 20,107 results, it is not very specific for what I am looking for. In the context of this example, I want to search for all companies who have an interest in footwear only. Therefore, the best way is to search all the groups whose members are part of other groups related to footwear.
Step 2: Add Group search to Sales Navigator settings
On the same search you are going to apply the group search. Simply scroll down the page and you should see a section called ‘other filters’:
You may not know the exact names of the Groups and so just type in anything related to shoes for this example and you see a dropdown of all groups:
Add any groups that you think could be relevant to you and it will look like this:
If you scroll back up to the top of the page, you will see that the search criteria will have changed and narrowed down to a smaller number:
Final step is to click ‘search’ and then will show you the list of people that match your results
The number is very small, is this broken????
The answer is no, this small but very accurate number is perfect!
Remember, your goal on LinkedIn is not to connect with everyone (connecting with irrelevant people might lead to them marking you as ‘I don’t know this person’ which can result in your account being flagged).
The goal is to connect with highly relevant people who would be interested in speaking to you. Therefore, in this example 83 business owners who have an interest in shoes is much better for me to target than 20,107 people who have no interest in shoes.
Next step: let’s connect!
Now that you have the list of potential leads, here where Dux-Soup comes in. Instead of manually clicking on each profile and sending the connection message, Dux-Soup will do the job for you.
To accomplish this, activate "Expert Mode" under the User tab in the Options.
To set up auto-visiting, click on Dux-Soup icon and go to Options. You should end up on Automated Actions section.
Make sure that the box is ticked (refer to the example above), enable the action and include your personalised message in an empty box.
Pro tip: read our blog post Dux-Soup: sending personalised connection request messages and learn how to write effective connection messages.
Once that’s ready, close the Options window and go back to your search on LinkedIn. All you have to do is start “Visit & Connect” and here you go — Dux-Soup starts visiting each profile in the list and sending you personalised message.
I hope this hack helps you find your perfect target audience and get in touch with me at anytime if you have any questions on live chat or via info@dux-soup.com
