Lead Generation through LinkedIn: What’s it good for?
Want to check out our success ratios right now? Scroll down to find them!
Today’s customers have a wealth of information at their fingertips — blogs, review sites, social media, and so much more. Thanks to this information, most customers know what they want, who they want it from, and what they want to pay before they buy.
Growing your business means reaching potential customers before they’ve made up their minds. The key to reaching them is lead generation (or lead gen, for short).
According to the sixth State of Marketing report from Salesforce, 32% of marketers own lead generation and 65% contribute to it. Marketing leads, sales effectiveness, and customer acquisition costs are the most important metrics for measuring lead generation success.
Let’s take a closer look at how B2B lead generation through LinkedIn works, and how the right B2B lead generation strategy can help you grow your business. To make the end results more tangible for you, we’ve included one of our best campaigns, so you can see it for yourself!
What is lead generation?
Leads are people who are potentially interested in buying your products or services. Lead generation lets you reach potential customers early in their buyer’s journey, so you can earn their trust, build a relationship, and be by their side until they’re ready to make a purchase.
So where do you find those leads?
Leads can be found through many different methods. Social media, paid ads, a landing page. You can even buy leads in bulk! What makes LinkedIn such an interesting place for B2B lead generation, is that you almost know for sure your target audience is there! LinkedIn is the biggest professional network, which especially for B2B businesses is a great place to be when it comes to doing business and finding new prospects.
In this article, we will just focus on B2B lead generation through LinkedIn. Want to learn more about other forms of lead generation? Check out our blog about that here.
Find the right target group
LinkedIn is a great place to find your prospects when doing B2B lead generation. In order for you to reach the right people, it’s important to know who your target group is. We will take one of our campaigns as an example.
The most interesting B2B lead generation campaign is to find a LinkedIn group where you will find this target group in which they discuss topics that are 100% relevant to the theme of your outreach. In our case, we were looking for people working in sales and marketing who might be interested in generating some new leads. There are a couple of sales LinkedIn groups that have senior sales representatives as members and where they discuss topics within the realm of sales or sales and marketing, so we chose to run a campaign on these groups.
Scrapers are your best friend
You start off with .. data! Running a successful B2B lead generation campaign using LinkedIn involves a lot of data and data scraping. We use two types of data here: company data and contact data. The difference? Company data is information surrounding a company’s qualities and behaviors, such as internal customer relations data, firmographic data, technographic data, and intent data. You can scrape this information through LinkedIn or get those from third party data providers. Contact data includes all data related to your customer such as address, email and mobile data. This type of data usually always comes from LinkedIn and is GDPR proof. Once you have all the data of people in a specific LinkedIn group, you add metadata such as company information and other extra ‘requirements’ your target group should have. With this, you’ll filter out the ‘unqualified’ people within this group.
At Leadblocks, our focus is on the mid-sized to larger companies. That’s why we would filter out small companies or multinationals. We’re also not looking for deputy managers, as they probably will not make any big decisions when it comes to new partnerships, so we filter those out too.
Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites.
Never put two personas in one campaign! For instance, we don’t put marketeers in the same group as sales reps. Same as we don’t put business owners in the same group as general managers, and so on.
Prep your messaging
When it comes to messaging those prospects, make sure your messages sound human! Even if they are being sent with an automation tool, you want to make it personal and don’t come off as a bad salesperson or worse, a robot. You also want to make sure you think about the messaging flow: what happens if someone responds? Does a sales rep take over? And what if someone accepts but doesn’t respond? What do you want to send them next? And how do you label your messages so you can keep track of messaging flow and results?
Create a messaging flow here where you divide automated and manually written messages. There will be a time in your chat where automated messages can’t be used, and one of your sales reps has to take over and manually respond to your prospects. Those messages are always human!
Make it human: a typo in a message works generally well for certain personas. So well, that typo campaigns usually have a higher success rate!
Here’s an example of a messaging flow for automated messages:
Hi [person’s first name], I saw you’re a member of the LinkedIn Group [LinkedIn group name]. Let’s connect!
Did they answer? Great! Now you can respond by yourself and start the conversation! No answer yet? You can shoot another message!
Thanks for connecting [first name]. We share the same interest seeing you are also a member of [LinkedIn group name]. Would you like to see our best B2B lead generation practices?
Make sure whenever you send out messages it is not too pushy. Don’t send out messages too quickly and put a limit on how many messages you want to send out in case someone doesn’t respond.
Need help with building your own message flow? Shoot us a message!
Input VS output
As a business owner, general manager or any other position where you are (partially) responsible for success, the ROI of any campaign or project must be one of the most important -if not the most important of all.
To show you what lead generation through LinkedIn can do for you, we’re sharing our campaign results. Yes, we’re actually doing that. Full transparency, so you know what we can achieve together.
Campaign: Leadblocks LI Sales Groups
Target group: sales managers/sales reps in senior roles
Connection rate: 67%
Reply rate: 46,5%
As you can see in the statistics, we connected with 67% of 419 of our connection requests. Achieving a high connection rate comes down to one thing: strong messaging. A message can either break or make the connection, and get the conversation going.
We chatted with 131 people and warmed them up for a discovery call with us. That’s 131 warm leads.
Even with a limited budget, B2B lead generation through LinkedIn is an effective method to gain high quality, warm leads. And the beauty of everything is: you don’t have to do a thing! Except planning and executing your discovery calls. Everything before that? That’s on us! We just deliver you warm leads to seal the deal on.
Curious what B2B lead generation can do for your business? Plan a discovery call with our CEO.
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