Most marketers have overlooked LinkedIn when generating leads because they consider it primarily an employment and recruitment platform. However, LinkedIn is more than a place to build networks, post a job, or find employment. How to use LinkedIn to generate leads is crucial for business growth; it is one of the most underrated platforms for acquiring B2B clients. According to LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, 82% of B2B markers report finding significant success on the channel. LinkedIn attracts the C-suite, which is what B2B businesses need.

Unlike the most-used social media platforms where users scroll to watch videos and like photos for entertainment, LinkedIn users are on the site for professional purposes. They are already intent on finding information to grow their businesses; therefore, it makes sense that you should be where they are. Learning how to use LinkedIn to generate leads can leverage this unique user base. LinkedIn may only have 722 million users compared to Facebook’s 2.74 billion, but it has a specific focus. LinkedIn users check the platform to see content relevant to their business space. People want to learn new ways to improve their business practices and hear new voices with new solutions to common problems, especially from industry experts. LinkedIn has seen 15 times more content impressions compared to views of job listings. This illustrates that LinkedIn has successfully transitioned from a mere recruitment hub to a thriving and influential professional network.

How to Use LinkedIn to Generate Leads and Connect with Decision-Makers

LinkedIn is a secure and convenient place to connect directly with critical decision-makers. It allows you to skip time-consuming preliminary interactions with secretaries and assistants. Understanding how to use LinkedIn to generate leads is crucial because it is more than just a recruitment platform. Professionals across various industries recognize LinkedIn for its utility in network building and business growth. Grayling and Wraith suggest that if you want to appeal to C-suites and other decision-makers, there is no better place than LinkedIn. Many marketers, however, will fail to generate leads through LinkedIn without the right strategies and insights.

How to Use LinkedIn to Generate Leads: A Strategic Approach

Seventy-six percent of executives from all Fortune 500 companies visit LinkedIn regularly. When you market on LinkedIn, you speak directly to decision-makers with purchasing power. Grayling and Wraith suggest that understanding how to use LinkedIn to generate leads allows you to make more profound and useful connections with your target audience. This makes LinkedIn the perfect vehicle for narrowly targeted marketing to a specific industry or professional group. By effectively harnessing the platform’s capabilities, you can drive significant business growth.

How to Use LinkedIn to Generate Leads by Building a Strong Presence

• Optimize your profile and build a strong LinkedIn presence.

Grayling and Wraith recommend maintaining a strong LinkedIn presence to set your business apart and position you as an authority. Routinely monitoring and updating your C-suite’s LinkedIn profiles is essential for lead generation.

Professionals like future partners, employees, customers, and competitors will investigate your leadership profiles. Ensure these profiles highlight executive roles, skills, qualifications, and accomplishments, using professional photographs to convey trustworthiness and approachability.

Incorporate SEO keywords and craft compelling insights into your executives’ professional lives. Balancing their identities with your company identity is key. Actively managing these profiles helps achieve the desired traction, impression, and engagement on LinkedIn.

• Set up a LinkedIn Page for your Business

After you have built a strong LinkedIn presence for all your executives, Grayling and Wraith suggest that you create an active page for your business as a crucial part of how to use LinkedIn to generate leads. Optimize its profile, provide the necessary information, and make it SEO-friendly. The goal is to ensure the page is dynamic and populated with original, engaging, understandable, useful, persuasive, and business-specific content. This page should not only contribute to but also help shape the discussions and conversations occurring across your business space, effectively drawing in more leads.

Content Strategy Implementation: How to Use LinkedIn to Generate Leads Through Effective Posting

• Create a content calendar and post updates regularly as a strategic part of how to use LinkedIn to generate leads. 

The goal of your content offerings is to demonstrate your business expertise and establish your executives as thought leaders in your professional environment. Consider posting different content types, from images to videos. Adding long-form business-specific content is an especially effective way to drive engagement and impression.

Grayling and Wraith suggest that you also create content that celebrates company milestones and individual accomplishments, welcomes new employees, and congratulates colleagues on important professional anniversaries. Ask employees to share and react to these posts to boost engagement. Encouraging employees to post their business-specific content is another way to increase engagement and humanize your business.

Ensure that you make regular posts to develop your company’s credibility and trust within your audience. When you position your business as a source of important information, you’ll start building a practical and powerful network among the professionals and companies within your industry. Your contacts can also lead you to new audiences by “liking” and “sharing” your posts. LinkedIn shows liked posts in the timelines, so your connections and their associated networks can find your best and most viewed content. By liking your posts, your connections vouch for your credibility and trustworthiness, thus expanding your lead generation capabilities on LinkedIn.

Engagement Through Community Interaction

• Find relevant LinkedIn groups, join, and participate as a strategic method of how to use LinkedIn to generate leads.

 LinkedIn is, first and foremost, a social media platform. Your business needs to find, join, and participate in relevant groups to learn more about your audience, build brand awareness, establish credibility, and assert your status as an authority in your business space. It is easy to identify suitable groups on LinkedIn by using keywords to locate the groups that will likely help you advance your business goals. You can also join groups where your connections are already members to nurture your established connections and cultivate new ones.

Grayling and Wraith suggest that you solicit opinions from your connections concerning specific groups. This kind of interaction helps you reinforce those relationships you already have while at the same time providing you with practical information about what groups you should join. Participate in group discussions, share pertinent links, answer questions, or post your original content and updates to encourage discussion around related topics. Avoid overpromoting your brand or business. Your goal in all your LinkedIn groups is to build relationships and establish credibility. Your potential partners and customers in the group can see your opinions on different topics and begin to recognize you as a thought leader or a useful resource.

You can also use the groups to understand more about your target audience. Discover from group discussions more of your customers’ unforeseen pain points and how you can effectively remedy them. This interaction not only fosters relationships but also directly contributes to generating leads by positioning your business as a knowledgeable and responsive entity within your industry.

Leveraging Paid LinkedIn Products: How to Use LinkedIn to Generate Leads Effectively

• Get your message across to the right audience using paid products as a strategic way to use LinkedIn to generate leads. 

Paying for ads and other products on LinkedIn makes good business sense because this platform is the leading paid and organic channel for B2B businesses. The audience on LinkedIn is therefore more valuable to B2B businesses than audiences on other platforms because these business professionals participate with both the intent to act and the power to take decisive action.

Sponsored content is a practical and persuasive way to reach professionals and build lasting relationships with them on the LinkedIn platform. Follow best practices when preparing advertisements. Grayling and Wraith suggest that you ensure that headlines are clear, concise, and engaging, that image quality is good and dimensions are correct, and that Calls-To-Action are understandable and simple to execute. Be specific with ad targeting but not so specific that you unnecessarily limit your potential audience.

Effective Strategies for Utilizing LinkedIn Ads and Paid Products

Keep abreast of the trends developing in your industry so you can provide useful insights and helpful advice. Make your content current, detailed, and specific to establish your business as a thought leader in your field. Often, you will be able to repurpose your content, so that you don’t always have to create new content. Add human interest to your brand-specific content so that you can connect with your audience on an emotional level. With paid products, you can insert your content on your LinkedIn feed to a group or audience that is already interested in what you offer.

Grayling and Wraith suggest that you will get more qualified leads by enabling Lead Gen Forms, a feature of the platform that generates LinkedIn profile data. Another useful component of the platform is the Audience Expansion feature, a function that improves brand awareness and engagement and allows you to discover new LinkedIn audiences more easily. Another constituent part that is available, the LinkedIn Audience Network feature, expands your business’s reach beyond your LinkedIn feed.

Grayling and Wraith suggest that when marketing using paid products, you perform A/B testing. Run multiple messages or versions of your ads to see which one best resonates with your audience. A/B testing is also necessary to precisely target and ultimately reach those people who are most likely to help you realize your business purposes.

Understand your audience and ensure that your marketing scheme aligns with your goals. 

The recent changes in consumer buying behavior are prompting businesses to provide educational and informative content. Customers are using social media to research products and to read reviews before committing to a purchase. Your target audience is better informed and more discerning than customers of the past. You need to provide original, engaging, and understandable information. It should be useful, persuasive, and business-specific to influence their purchasing decisions. Grayling and Wraith suggest ensuring consistency in your marketing and sales teams’ actions and messages. This consistency should be maintained across the entire customer journey. Marketing and sales teams play integral roles in discovering and securing new leads. Ensure both teams understand the entire campaign scheme and each individual’s tasks.

Tap into your current customers and clients.

Your existing customers and clients are your most important connections. Use your network to your advantage to generate leads. Find your current clients and customers on LinkedIn and connect with them. Study their connections because these networks may also be of benefit to your business goals. Ask for referrals, references, or introductions to shared connections that suit your marketing purposes. 

Since LinkedIn connects professionals, connection requests are less likely to be viewed as spam or as sales solicitation. Your potential leads can see your shared connections and inspect your business profile, both of which can vouch for your credibility and reputation. When you approach new leads in this way, you already have ideas about what interests them. This foreknowledge provides you an opportunity to offer business proposals related to their demonstrated interests. 

Stay active on the platform 

Grayling and Wraith suggest that you should not let all these LinkedIn connections and networks go to waste. Stay consistent and active on the platform. Establish a content calendar and schedule for posting and engaging with networks. Set a schedule to post to groups and take part in conversations. You can use LinkedIn analytics to learn more about your audience’s behavior and interest and the best time to post and engage.

LinkedIn is a powerful lead-generation tool

LinkedIn is more than just a recruitment platform and a place to establish partnerships; it is a practical and cost-effective tool to generate leads and promote brand awareness. You are missing a lot if you aren’t using LinkedIn to appeal to your target audience. Grayling and Wraith suggest that LinkedIn will help you build credibility and establish your business as a thought leader. Unlike major social media sites, LinkedIn is a professional platform. Its users have both the power and the intent to take action. They want to develop powerful business capabilities and forge profitable partnerships. With Grayling and Wraith as your resource, your B2B can develop a successful marketing strategy. You can take advantage of the many opportunities available on LinkedIn. 

For further insights, check out our article on Make a Memorable Impression with Marketing Video Production.