LinkedIn is often seen as the boring older sibling of more dynamic social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Your company has a LinkedIn business profile that hasn’t been updated in ages, and your account doesn’t see much engagement. If you’re looking to grow your business, why would you waste resources on a social media network that’s traditionally been used for job seekers?
LinkedIn is indeed a leading tool for recruitment, but it also has huge potential for lead generation. The professional network recently announced it has reached 500 million members, and it estimates that a single connection represents 400 new people and 100 new companies with whom you could be building relationships. There’s a person behind every new lead that comes your way, and LinkedIn provides an opportunity to get on their radar.
LinkedIn lead generation could become one of your company’s go-to strategies for connecting with potential clients on social media. Take a look at these 6 tips to learn how.
6 Smart Tips for B2B LinkedIn Lead Generation
1. Update Your Company Profile
If you can’t remember the last time your company profile was updated, it’s time for a change. Your company profile is a marketing tool that shows potential clients exactly how you can bring value to them—it’s also a tool people use to legitimize (or, de-legitimize!) the organizations they’re choosing to engage with.
Kissmetrics recommends choosing an attention-grabbing image and avoiding a boring company description. Instead, use your “About Us” to share the specific results you can bring your clients and the unique tactics and strategies you use to make it happen.
2. Show off Your Employees’ Portfolios
Potential clients are using LinkedIn as a vetting tool for agency partners. Expect them to view your company profile and your employees’ profiles before making purchasing decisions. They’ll want to see how long your employees have been with the company, what skills they bring to the table, and whether or not their personal portfolios live up to expectations.
Encourage your employees to keep their portfolios updated with recent accomplishments and high-quality work. Including relevant job titles and keywords within their profiles helps potential leads understand how your team can benefit their bottom line.
3. Share Relevant Content
Creating high-quality content through inbound marketing not only increases your brand equity, it also gives you the opportunity to push that content to potential leads through social media. Statistics from Inside Sales show that social media is the least effective method for lead generation—with the exception of LinkedIn. LinkedIn actually led the way in attracting new clients, providing more than 80 percent of all leads generated through social media.
You could be missing out on high-quality leads if you still think LinkedIn is just for recruiting new employees.
LinkedIn automatically notifies your followers when you share a new update, making this a useful feature for keeping your company top of mind for potential clients. Use LinkedIn to share blog content, infographics, webinars, and white papers that answer the questions your target audience is asking. Your company be positioned as an industry leader, and you’ll be using the most effective social media network to drive website traffic.
4. Publish Content Directly to LinkedIn
LinkedIn’s publishing feature allows you to post content directly to its platform rather than linking from your blog. This may seem like a disadvantage at first glance. Won’t you be losing traffic to your website and risking reprisal from search engines for publishing duplicate content?
Not necessarily. Your LinkedIn profile will benefit from extra traffic if you take the time to publish high-quality, unique content, and you can still include a call to action that directs readers back to your website. LinkedIn’s publishing platform also comes with a unique benefit: the opportunity to be featured in LinkedIn Pulse. This news aggregation feature shares a roundup of the best content from industry experts directly in users’ news feeds, even if they don’t follow you. Landing a feature like this could introduce your brand to thousands of new leads without any extra effort.
5. Promote Sponsored Content
You already know you can turn to Facebook or Google AdWords to promote sponsored content, but LinkedIn might deliver more bang for your buck. An Insights case study found that every $1 spent on LinkedIn sponsored posts earned the company $17.60 in revenue. What’s more? Leads they acquired through LinkedIn were 50 percent more valuable than those acquired via AdWords.
LinkedIn offers robust conversion tracking to make sure your ROI is where you need it to be. You can also take advantage of sponsored content with LinkedIn’s built-in lead generation tools.
6. Collect Leads through LinkedIn
LinkedIn regularly rolls out new tools to help companies achieve business goals like lead generation. One of its latest endeavors, LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, was designed specifically to help organizations in this endeavor.
Lead Gen Forms allows you to optimize your sponsored content on LinkedIn by directly capturing a lead’s contact and business information. The social media network has optimistic numbers to back up this business tool—in fact, LinkedIn reported that nearly 90 percent of its pilot users exceeded their cost-per-lead goals. Customers also said that the leads they collected through LinkedIn were more likely to convert than those acquired elsewhere.
LinkedIn Lead Generation: a B2B Strategy that Works
You could be missing out on high-quality leads if you still think LinkedIn is just for recruiting new employees and cross-checking work history. Put simply, LinkedIn is becoming a robust lead gen platform that is proven to drive performance.
Social media engagement is just one piece of a strong inbound marketing strategy. Get all the stats on how inbound marketing can boost your company’s performance with these 9 nuggets you might have missed from Hubspot’s “State of Inbound 2017” report.
