How to leverage LinkedIn for lead building

LinkedIn is one of the most popular social networks currently available. With approximately 660 million users and counting, the platform provides unique opportunities to network, build a business profile and discover new potential employees or job opportunities.

While its primary purpose is connecting professionals, companies and job seekers, LinkedIn is also a highly valuable and often underused tool for lead generation, raising brand awareness and sharing marketing content to help grow a business.

B2B sales in particular can be boosted through an effective and proactive LinkedIn digital marketing strategy. The platform features an array of specialist tools designed to help businesses connect on every level.

Increased engagement

Utilising LinkedIn for B2B marketing and lead generation can increase engagement with your brand on a platform where most users are looking for the next opportunity. Research shows that on average, the LinkedIn audience has twice the buying power of the average online audience, creating unique opportunities to generate the best quality leads. Therefore, Linkedin is a useful platform for businesses wanting to connect with their target market.

Many companies use various tools for LinkedIn automation to help speed up the process of identifying prospects. An example of a tool used is Lusha for LinkedIn which can help the B2B industry gain direct up-to-date contact details from Linkedin profiles such as email addresses and phone numbers. The contact details can be saved directly to the company CRM, creating lists of targeted leads helping to increase engagement amongst businesses.

Small businesses can ensure their efforts are being seen on LinkedIn by the demographic most likely to be interested in their products or services, zeroing in on the exact types of industry, size of company or job role that would be most likely to buy. This type of targeted marketing allows for increased engagement through the delivery of personalised content designed to appeal to the right audience.

Creating an effective profile

Taking some time to create an effective LinkedIn profile can result in a positive impact on your contact rate. This goes for both the company page and a personal profile, which introduces the authentic personality of the user as well as a career history and skillset. People primarily want to do business with other people, not a faceless corporation, so aiming for 100% completion or close on a personal profile and adding new content as appropriate can help draw new contacts in. The profile page of the organisation should provide answers to any questions potential prospects may have and opportunities to connect and discover more about the brand, as well as the people behind the brand. Updating with new, fresh content regularly can help boost engagement and strengthen relationships with the brand.

Businesses need to ensure they have a complete LinkedIn profile page to drive more lead engagement from potential customers. 

Posting quality content

Posting high quality content directly onto LinkedIn not only helps engage potential customers – it can also help establish you and your brand as a thought-leader, validating the quality of your character and of the brand. Good content will help others learn something or solve a problem for them. Posts exploring how to streamline services, become more efficient within a specific role or industry or shares new information that helps people address common challenges within their industry are more likely to attract readers. Once a post begins to gain traction on LinkedIn, the platform automatically puts a spotlight behind that post within a category, which then assures the post will gain momentum and possibly even go viral. Visual content attracts more views than plain text, so experiment with video content and other types of rich media.

Optimising for search

Just as with any other web page available online, it is possible to optimise your LinkedIn profile for search. Adding various keywords that you want you or your brand to be found for into your headlines, work experience, brand description, about tab or summary, can drive more traffic to your page, which will ultimately result in more quality leads. Good quality links are also important – linking to your profile from your website or blog will help boost your search page results as well as driving traffic.

Using popular keywords in headlines to describe your brand can help increase the traffic to your profile page.

Measuring success

Among the many tools available on LinkedIn to help B2B marketers reach a wider and more engaged audience are tracking and monitoring tools to help quantify the success rate of any targeted marketing. These include conversion tracking, which uses inbuilt analytics to extract data from website conversions created through LinkedIn ads to provide information that can help optimise future campaigns. On average, lead conversion rates on LinkedIn are three times higher than most other major advertising platforms. Other useful tools include page analytics and a campaign manager for paid ads.

Any business that relies on networking with other professionals or caters products and services to other businesses can take advantage of the unique opportunities provided by the LinkedIn social media platform to boost engagement, generate more leads and ultimately increase business revenue.