How To Generate Leads Using LinkedIn

Times have changed a lot. Baby boomers and millennials have witnessed space travel, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the birth of the Internet! Alongside the rise of the digital web space, marketing and lead generation have undergone significant changes too.

Gone are the days of the Yellow Pages, traveling to network or spending hours on the phone cold calling one prospect after another. Modern-day marketing is about search engines, social media groups, and targeted electronic mail campaigns. LinkedIn is one of the most popular and effective channels to generate high-quality leads. Let’s take a look at how to get the most out of it.

Lead Generation

Segment & Target Your Audience

LinkedIn advertising is a cost-effective and highly successful tool for generating leads. It does take a bit of effort to get the full value, though. Marketing is only effective if the relevant audience sees it. You need to analyze your offering and your market.

If you have multiple products or services, you may need to segment them. Typically, this could be, for example, by product or service, by demographic such as age group, or by location. The message you send out to these segmented audiences must also be tailored to fit each audience.

Create and Publish Relevant and Engaging Content

Internet based marketing has evolved from email broadcasts and banner ads into a far more precise strategic process. Apart from identifying a target audience, you have to connect with them. And you have to be seen by them. Two things have come into the spotlight in this regard. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and quality content. Additionally, when someone performs a Google search you need to, come up on the first page of search results. This is the SEO part – making sure that Google finds you and likes you enough to list you. The next, equally important thing is that, once that reader visits your page, you need to have something that will hold them. Far too many people think this is only about keywords. Believe us it’s not. You need to engage the reader and invite a further action. Anywhere between 30% and 80% of people that open a web page from a search result, will leave without any further action. To engage the reader, you have to answer their search question or offer a solution to their problem. Poor quality content will not hold the visitor long enough to convert to a sale. Your content must respect the reader. And keep them interested.

Make Use of Lead Generation Forms

Lead generation forms are a very good way to attract qualified leads. The form is a template that you set up as part of an advertising campaign. When a LinkedIn member clicks on the call-to-action button in your advertisement, the form pops up. It is already filled in with all the member’s profile details and requires nothing more than a few clicks to complete and submit. These leads are of a very high quality because these members have already made some effort to request further interaction. Lead generation forms not only capture details of qualified prospects. Keeping track of the leads allows you to assess conversion rates and reach a number of conclusions relating to your campaign. Among other things, you can calculate a return on investment and you can use the profile information from the leads to fine tune your campaigns.

Optimize Your Campaign

Digital marketing is not just broadcasting a message to your selected audience. The marketplace has become very competitive and customers are spoilt for choice. Being part of the crowd is not going to get you noticed. You need to stand out and be seen first. Fortunately, a few simple tweaks to your campaign can go a long way in achieving this.

  • Research your competitors. Find out what differentiates you. Find out what their customers are saying about them. Analyze what they are doing right and wrong.
  • Create separate ads for each element of your campaign. Ads could be linked to a product or service, a geographic segment or any other relevant metric.
  • Monitor the performance of each ad and adjust your message or your audience accordingly.

LinkedIn provides some very useful tutorials on campaign optimization. Take the time to research them. The difference to your advertising success may surprise you.   

Conclusion

LinkedIn is, in its own words, the world’s largest professional network. LinkedIn marketing has a wide reach; more than 740 million members to be exact. With very affordable advertising rates and high conversion rates, every business should make LinkedIn advertising a core part of their marketing efforts.
Ali Hariri
Author Ali Hariri

Ali is our digital marketing wizard, having a bachelor’s in marketing and a minor in psychology gives him a spectactular appraoch to digital marketing.In the office, he’s always snacking on something and listening to music while writing. His favorite quote is “Manifest destiny”