As the primary B2B social networking platform for B2B, LinkedIn is a powerful tool used by sales teams to uncover new business growth opportunities. Its journey from its beginnings as a recruitment solution to an all-inclusive social networking platform, and success at building its user base to over 1 billion makes it an important place for professionals to be.
LinkedIn facts
- 1billion+ users
- 200+ countries
- 16.2% of users are active daily, 48.5% are active monthly (Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/194459/frequency-with-which-registered-us-linkedin-users-update-profile/)
- The average LinkedIn post engagement rate has increased by 44% YoY (Source: https://www.socialinsider.io/blog/linkedin-engagement-rate/). Now 3.4%
- Sales Navigator offers 40+ filters for you to create profile and account lists for targeted outreach. Including people who have recently changed job, posted on LinkedIn or posted content.
- InMail 55.4% Open Rate vs Email open rate 21.6% Open Rate
- Sponsored InMail - average 3.6% CTR vs Cold email - average 2.6% CTR
With an active global network, LinkedIn offers sales teams the largest, most up-to-date database of prospects—a place to fish limitlessly for your next customer.
Ways to generate leads on LinkedIn
Let’s explore the different ways to use LinkedIn, review the engagement statistics of the different methods and highlight how sales teams can best harness each approach.
Organic Posting:
An engagement rate of 1-3.5% is considered a good statistic when posting organically to LinkedIn. But let’s explore how LinkedIn measures that. In this example here, it is the number of engagements (20) / number of impressions (397).
There are two ways to post - to your profile page and to your company page.
Company Page
Here we see a post engagement rate of 5.04%. Which on paper sounds good, right?
But the problem is, LinkedIn only showed our post 397 times. So the challenge with organic posting is increasing the impressions, and in LinkedIn’s eyes, they’re not too keen on this. Why? Because they make more money from showing paid ads if our feeds, leaving little space for posts from people and companies that we actively follow.
Consider that with 1,600+ followers, most of our company organic posts get around 100 impressions. This means that on average LinkedIn is only showing our posts to 6% of our followers.
Personal profile
We can start to amplify our organic post reach by using personal profiles in addition to company pages for posting. Here’s an example of a post that performed well. It was personal and focused on complimenting someone else on a job.
From a profile with 2596 followers, post impressions totalled 4,658 (from 2,989 people). So impressions were higher, but with 80 engagements, the engagement rate of 1.7% is lower than in our previous example.
Yes, the content achieved a much wider reach, but it got less engagement. Still, it reached people outside of the profile’s network, and this offers a lot of power to brands looking to raise awareness.
Now let’s directly compare profile vs company posts. Below we see exactly the same content but shared to the company page, where it received a fraction of the impressions, but an impressive 21.51% engagement rate.
Top Tip for Sales Teams: Organic posting on LinkedIn may not build the lead pipeline that your sales teams needs, but it does act as a brand awareness tool. To gain visibility beyond your existing network, make sure that you post your content across as many profiles within the business as possible.
Ads:
An alternative way to generate leads is by using LinkedIn ads. However, when it comes to the success of ads, the jury’s out. Speaking to many companies that have tested LinkedIn ads, the ROI just doesn’t seem to be there.
Ads certainly raise the impressions, but the CTRs and conversion rate to leads is where the vast majority struggle. And in this case, the leads that LinkedIn recorded didn’t track through to genuine leads via the website.
Top Tip for Sales Teams: LinkedIn Ads are best used as a step in the sales journey, rather than to generate leads in our experience. Often they form part of the marketing mix as they work well at driving awareness and engagement, rather than generating leads.
Targeted outreach:
A more direct way, targeted outreach is all about generating outcomes. For sales teams, this could be meetings, event attendees, content and lead form submissions or collaborations.
Regardless of your objective, when driving leads, targeted outreach on LinkedIn has proven to lead to the most sustainable impact on your sales pipeline. Let’s delve into the successful techniques:
What do we mean by targeted outreach?
Targeted = identifying the prospects you’d like to work with/win business from. You should have an understanding of your ideal customer profile/s.
Outreach = actively reaching out to engage with your targets and elicit an action.
Successful techniques for targeted outreach
1. Research/Understand your Ideal Customer Profile
There are many ways to research your ideal customer profile (ICP). The best place to start is to work through your top customers and identify:
- Industry sector
- Geographical location
- Size of company
- Decision maker title
- Key influencer titles
Plus any other demographics that may help, like gender, age etc. This will give your sales team an understanding of your ICP.
You can also look at your audience demographics using your website and social platforms to understand who your content resonates with. Your LinkedIn newsletter subscribers, website visitors and Facebook page followers are just some examples.
2. Finding and sharing target prospect lists
When it comes to finding your target prospects, we recommend Sales Navigator. Its superior filtering capability allows you to narrow your search down to hyper-targeted prospects. With Sales Nav you can save lead lists to monitor progress and revisit them later.
And if you’re worried about the cost of Sales Navigator for all of your team, we have a great tip. If one of you has a license, you can use Dux-Soup to scan target prospect lists, allowing you to download the list for a team member to upload and target with automated campaign outreach. This is going to save you $$$.
If you’ve never heard of Boolean Searches or Regex, then our LinkedIn search and filter masterclass will help you come up with your ideal prospect list.
You can compare LinkedIn’s Premium Plans to understand what they offer in terms of their LinkedIn search capability.
LinkedIn search lists can be shared among sales team members by using the same URLs, or your can agree in advance to use different filters on your search.
It doesn’t matter if you duplicate contacts with team members in your search results. We’re going to show you how to avoid duplicating your outreach to the same prospect in technique number 7.
3. Define your campaign objectives
Of course, we all want to grow our business, but this is quite a broad objective. It helps to break the sales process down and decide on what your sales team’s objective from LinkedIn is. Is it to book meetings? Give away free trials? Arrange demos? Or generate event or webinar attendees.
Your team may have a single objective, or you may have many.
Note these down, in order of importance, so that you can ensure that your campaign messaging drives your prospects towards completing your objectives.
4. Agree on your measure of success
What does success from your LinkedIn outreach look like? If you are going to invest time or money into your LinkedIn activity, what would you expect to see in return?
When planning any campaign, it is useful to define a measure of success. This could be as simple as the total number of new connections, or it could be the traffic to your website, the number of webinar registrations secured, or meetings booked.
You can then measure individual campaign and team member results against this to continually improve your outreach success.
5. Create your campaign messaging
Your LinkedIn outreach campaigns can consist of multiple messages, combined with LinkedIn actions to nurture your ideal prospects through to the agreed objective. We know that it takes 7 touches on average to secure a lead, so let’s apply that theory here and build out campaigns with 7 touches.
Visiting, following or endorsing a profile counts as a touch, and gets you noticed whilst being considered a compliment.
At the early stage of your campaign, you’ll need to invite a prospect to connect. Here’s what you need to know about connection messages:
- If you have a free LinkedIn account, you’ll now only be able to send 5 personalized connection invitations each month. Therefore, your connection message should just be left blank.
- If you have a Premium LinkedIn plan, you can personalize your connection message to make it more relevant. We’ve seen acceptance rates as high as 96% with small-batch, targeted campaigns.
Once a prospect has accepted your connection invitation, you can send them messages for free.
Here are some tips for your direct messages:
- Don’t be overly salesy. You’ll get the best results if you give value to prospects. Send them some useful content, invite them to an event, share how a competitor of theirs is achieving results. This type of content resonates.
- Engage by asking questions. If you can get a response to a question, then this gives you a platform to build a relationship from.
You can use our LinkedIn campaign message guide to help with this.
6. Achieving brand consistency within a team
When you’re performing outreach on behalf of your company, how can you ensure that your content is consistent with your brand and that your team is all in sync?
If your sales team is working towards the same goal, a consistent approach helps. Once you’ve discovered a campaign message or outreach strategy that really works, you’ll want your whole team to benefit.
Achieving brand consistency can take time to achieve. If everyone is testing new workflows, then changes start to appear and before you know it you’re sending out different content and taking your eyes off a unified end goal.
But there are tools that can help. Dux-Soup for example, allows your campaign messaging to be instantly shared between team members, so that winning campaigns can appear in everyone’s outreach campaign list. Campaign workflows can be automated to run without error on your list of profiles, ensuring that everyone in your team is using the best campaign content for their outreach. It’s a pretty powerful solution for consistency. And for results.
7. Enrolling your target profiles into campaigns
When enrolling prospects into your outreach campaigns, you should think about how you’re going to manage your target lists. Consider that your campaign messaging is consistent across your team, but what happens if two team members contact the same person with the same message? It can look unprofessional, right?
So you need to ensure that your target lists don’t cross by maintaining CRM lists or spreadsheets. Or use a LinkedIn automation tool like Dux-Soup that won’t allow you to enroll the same contact into the same campaign twice.
If you can share your best campaigns and enroll profiles into your campaign without duplication, then you’re starting to look pretty slick.
8. Identifying winning campaign messaging
All good marketing is fuelled by A/B testing. It’s all about improving your campaign elements to achieve the best results possible from your outreach.
This is where the top growth hackers make their mark. Under controlled conditions, implementing changes to content, time delays, actions etc, then measuring the results, and implementing the winning options until you can’t really optimize any more.
In order to use this technique, you’re going to need a LinkedIn automation tool, which will allow you to monitor:
- Connection acceptance rates
- Responses to messages
- Number of qualified leads generated as a result
We recommend with every change, you test it to a sample size of 250-500 prospects and analyze results with something like the Funnel Flow in the Dux-Dash. Here you can monitor performance by campaign and by team member to see what’s working best and identify winning campaign strategies to implement moving forwards.
9. The art of scaling
Scaling means to grow without adding significant additional resource. When it comes to LinkedIn outreach, here’s how we recommend scaling your results:
- Increase the number of LinkedIn accounts being used for outreach. If every LinkedIn account can send 100 connection invitations a week, by using 10 LinkedIn accounts, you’ll get 10x the results.
- Use LinkedIn automation. Once your campaigns are set up, tested and proven to generate leads, it’s easy to run LinkedIn automated LinkedIn outreach campaigns across more LinkedIn accounts. By taking away the ongoing manual LinkedIn activities, you’ll be able to reach a lot of prospects without heavy time investment.
Scaling with automation offers much better ROI than growing your sales function by hiring additional resource by keeping your costs down.
10. The power of the group
When posting content to your company page, newsletter or personal profile for business benefits, ask your team to engage with the content. By gaining instant traction, LinkedIn’s algorithms will kick in and show your content in more feeds.
Having a central team channel where you post links to your LinkedIn content helps everyone to engage with it quickly.
And our final tip? Consider newsletters, as they notify your subscribers via LinkedIn notifications and email when you post a new edition.
Summary
LinkedIn outreach is the most successful channel for driving growth for many B2B companies.
Sales teams have huge potential to scale their growth exponentially, but a collaborative strategy is required to scale successfully.
The strategies here cover how to:
- Align a sales team in their approach to identifying target prospects
- Creating brand consistent campaigns that gain the best results
- Scaling results from LinkedIn outreach
