LinkedIn is the most dominating social networking platform for professionals, hands down! B2B marketers and business owners who are always on the hunt to find leads know the importance of this platform. LinkedIn has become the go-to platform to make connections, find leads, build strong business relationships and create unlimited business opportunities. Many of them have also included LinkedIn automation into their marketing strategy to speed up their lead generation process. 

But how is this helpful? In this article, we’ll discuss how you can use LinkedIn and automation tools to scale your lead generation efforts. Let us first understand why LinkedIn is ideal for lead generation?

Why is LinkedIn important for lead generation?

When it comes to lead generation, many people have this misconception that Facebook or Twitter are platforms to start with. Well, it depends. If you are hunting B2B leads, you should know that LinkedIn comes on the top. 

• It’s 67% ahead of Twitter.
• Brings 300% more leads as compared to Facebook. 

Today, businesses are much more eager to have professional conversations with the right clients and build a network of relevant prospects. And LinkedIn has become an ideal platform to fulfill their needs. With more than 760 million users, belonging to more than 148 industries, this platform provides thousands of lead generation opportunities. 

Some stats to back up our claims:

• There are 760 million+ active users on LinkedIn.
• LinkedIn is the most paid organic social platform for B2B marketers.
• 90 million senior-level influencers on LinkedIn.
• 10 million executives on LinkedIn.
• This platform makes up more than 80% of the total B2B traffic.    
• 80% of the B2B marketers use it for lead generation.

Is lead generation on LinkedIn really a piece of cake?

Well, it’s certainly not. 

No doubt this platform has unlimited lead generation and business growth opportunities, but you need to have the right strategies, approaches, LinkedIn automation tools and some handy tips from the industry leaders to win amazing leads. 

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for lead generation. To successfully generate leads on LinkedIn, first, you need to define who is your target audience? What are their current problems? What solutions can you offer to them? How to reach out to them and build strong business relationships? 

With more than 760 million users, it’s certainly challenging to find out your ideal prospects. Searching prospects and visiting their profiles one by one to gather data will definitely take hundreds of hours. 

That’s where the role of advanced LinkedIn automation tools comes in. Advanced LinkedIn automation tools come with features that automate repetitive tasks such as finding, connecting, engaging, collecting data, and sending initial messages. With these tools, users can complete these tasks in hours rather than days and save a lot of time. 

What are LinkedIn automation tools and why are they important for lead generation?

LinkedIn automation includes using software and tools to automate certain LinkedIn tasks such as finding prospects, sending them to connect requests, messages, follow-ups, and collecting data, etc. that users otherwise perform manually.  

Sure, you can do all these activities manually, but you already know how much time and energy it takes that you’re left with no time to do important business tasks. 

With the help of the latest LinkedIn automation tools, you can perform all these activities with more efficiency and less time that would otherwise take weeks or even months. 

Being a business owner, you can’t afford to waste your weeks on simple tasks that don’t even require your assistance. Today, 40% of successful marketers have acknowledged the power of LinkedIn automation for better lead generation. 

Why are businesses using LinkedIn automation for lead generation? 

A few years back, LinkedIn automation raised eyebrows among the business community. Many embraced it and started taking advantage of it while many others hesitated thinking that it’s spammy. (We’ll come to that myth later on).

In recent years, there has been a dramatic shift in the marketing landscape and businesses are using automation to streamline their workflows. Almost 40% of the small and large businesses have already included automation into their workflows one way or the other. 

Is LinkedIn Automation Spammy?

It all depends on the approach you adopt while using LinkedIn automation tools.

Even if you use the top-quality LinkedIn automation tool in the market, it won’t give you success if you use it with the wrong approach. You can’t generate leads when you try to overdo things or cross the line. 

To fully leverage the potential of this platform, you need the right strategy and some amazing tips at hand. 

Below we have mentioned some steps about how you can use advanced LinkedIn automation tools to level up your lead generation process:

• With the best LinkedIn automation tools, you can simply set up outreach and messaging campaigns. 
• You can save a lot of time, energy, and resources by automating repetitive and boring tasks that tools can perform more efficiently without any error. 
• You can add more than one LinkedIn account and run multiple parallel campaigns to gain more benefits. 
• Extract profile data easily and send messages based on what your audience wants to read.
• Advanced LinkedIn automation tools have dashboards where you can check campaign performance and analyze data to make more informed decisions. 

Here are some handy tips to help you use LinkedIn automation more effectively to strengthen your lead generation process:

1. Optimize Your Profile for Better Response

Let’s suppose you get a LinkedIn connection request, when you click on the person’s profile, it has a very low quality or unattractive profile picture. The headline is vague and the summary is absent. What would you do? You’d reject the requests right away.

The same goes the other way around. When you use LinkedIn automation tools to run campaigns, hundreds of prospects will check your profile and if it is not worthy, you’ll get rejected. 

To attract prospects like a fly is attracted to light, you need to have a polished profile. The worst you can do to your campaign is running a good campaign while having an unattractive profile. 

Here are a few tips that you can use to leave a good first impression:

• Add a professional profile picture

Use a professional profile picture that makes you look decent and trustworthy. Don’t add a low-quality picture or something with a Snapchat filter. It won’t cut you anything. 

• Headline and Summary

While writing a headline, you’ve got a few words to describe who you are and what you do. Use these words wisely; make sure you add relevant things as the headline appears right under your profile name so this really counts.

Add relevant details in your summary that you think your target audience would require. Use relevant keywords so your profile appears when someone makes relevant searches. 

2. Engage

Engaging is the key component to successfully generate leads on LinkedIn. To engage more and establish a repute, you can run outreach campaigns to visit prospects’ profiles. When they get a notification, they’ll also visit your profile, thus becoming the first step of introduction.

You can also endorse their skills and or invite them to join relevant LinkedIn groups. Like their posts or comment on them. This way, your profile and name will become familiar to them. 

3. Get Maximum Exposure & Connections

The major purpose of using LinkedIn automation is to get better exposure. The more you become relevant to your target audience, the more connections you’re going to make. 

Run LinkedIn outreach campaigns targeting the right prospects and send them well-crafted connection notes. Don’t connect with irrelevant people as it won’t bring you any benefits. 

4. Be more personalized

Personalization, unarguably, the most important factor if you really want to strengthen your lead generation game. 

You can’t win leads with templated and sales-y messages because your prospects have become smart and they reject such messages right away.

If you want to get closer to your prospects, you have to walk an extra mile to understand what their interests are and what problems they are facing right now.

When sending them messages, make sure you write what they want to read, including details about their interests or how you can help them solve their problems. 

Here, the latest LinkedIn automation tools can help you in two ways:

1. Using LinkedIn automation tools to collect details about the prospects.

2. Using LinkedIn automation tools to send highly personalized messages automatically.

There are a number of cloud based LinkedIn automation tools that come with advanced features to run highly personalized campaigns. With advanced features, users can send custom images and GIFs along with the personalized texts.
Many SaaS organizations that have used such personalization in their campaigns have seen a significant improvement in their acceptance and response rate.

Why?
It’s because prospects take interest when they see you have put some effort in connecting with them. So try to be more personalized and add relevant details to impress your prospects. 

5. Don’t Ignore Follow-Ups

When you send personalized follow ups to your potential leads, your chances to convert them into sales become 9 times higher.

If you approach your leads and don’t get any response in your first attempt, don’t give up. 

Sometimes leads don’t respond when you first approach them but a follow-up can convert them into your potential leads. 

It might sound weird to keep pressing someone when they clearly ignored you. However, sending 1 or 2 follow-ups might bring you amazing opportunities. You can simply use a LinkedIn automation tool to schedule follow-ups to be sent after regular intervals. 

Remember: Don’t annoy your prospects to death by sending them countless follow-up. They might flag your account as spam.

6. Don’t Limit Yourself to LinkedIn Only

The data you collect from the LinkedIn profiles is not only for LinkedIn, but you can use this data to create opportunities outside the platform.

For instance, you can use the email addresses or contact information collected from LinkedIn profiles to contact the prospects outside LinkedIn. You can use this data on any other platform where you think you can find more leads. 

Collect emails and use any other email marketing tool to send bulk emails to your prospects. 

Conclusion

LinkedIn automation and B2B lead generation is a magical combination but you’re going to have the right strategies with you to get results. 

The above mentioned tips are tried and tested and are parts of the marketing strategy of many successful B2B marketers and businesses.

Generating 100+ B2B leads overnight is not possible, however, if you’re willing to put effort and use the tips mentioned above, you’re definitely going to yield exceptional results and leave your competitors in the dust.