B2B Marketing
14 Proven ways to generate Quality B2B leads on LinkedIn
LinkedIn has been a go-to platform for B2B marketers, but many businesses have been struggling with lead generation on the platform.
Some marketers are using it as an inbound marketing platform where they try to attract potential customers via organic posts and paid ads. Others are just sending connection requests and bombarding everyone with cold messages.
In the previous article, I’ve already discussed the best LinkedIn marketing strategies for B2B brands that you must checkout. And in this article, I will share tried and tested strategies that you can use to generate quality B2B leads on LinkedIn.
If you’re ready, let’s get started.
1. Optimize your company Page
First thing first, you need to make sure your LinkedIn company page is compelling and ready to generate leads for your business.
Just creating a company page & putting the logo won’t attract people to your page. You need to optimize it to boost its search visibility on LinkedIn & when someone lands on your page, they should have all the information to know more about your company.
I’ve already published an article on simple steps to optimize a LinkedIn company page, read it and make the changes alongside.
2. Optimize your personal LinkedIn profile
You can share note-worthy content like blogs, creative carousel posts, videos, and other interesting things on your company page. But honestly speaking, the organic reach of LinkedIn company pages is nearly negligible.
You cannot completely rely on your company page to engage your target audience and generate leads for your business. You need to push the versatility and strength of your company by using your LinkedIn personal profile.
It is your personal profile that attracts people and motivates them to follow your company page. So update your LinkedIn profile with the latest accomplishments and achievements such that it attracts more professional connections.
Besides optimizing your personal profile, you should also encourage your teammates to improvise their profiles and share thought-provoking content related to company culture, products, and services. This builds credibility and trust among your target audience.
3. Grow Your LinkedIn Connections
Once your company page & personal profile is ready to face the target audience, you need to start building your connections.
It is extremely important to keep one key fact in your mind. It’s easy to build hundreds of connections by randomly sending requests to peer members. But I bet you that this method will not bring genuine followers/prospects, and your engagement levels will definitely not increase.
You need a lot of relevant connections who engage in your posts. The more relevant your connections are, the more likely they are to share your content & engage with it that will help you reach their connections as well.
This way, you’ll be able to grow your organic presence & possibly generate leads as well.
So your end goal must be focusing on the ‘quality’ of connections you can build on the platforms rather than the ‘quantity’ of followers to showcase.
4. Share Industry-relevant content.
To establish a strong presence for your brand on LinkedIn, you need to be consistent with posting and sharing meaningful content that adds value to your target audience.
This helps in creating a powerful authority of your brand in the industry, and you’ll get registered in the minds of your target audience as a credible source of information and expert at what your company offers.
LinkedIn allows you to create posts with images, documents, and videos, allowing you to be creative and share information in every possible way.
Above all, you can also publish case-studies, research reports, and insights related to your products and services in the form of SEO-friendly articles. These articles rank well on search engines which is an added advantage to attract new audiences and generate leads.
5. Share video posts on LinkedIn company pages
As I said, LinkedIn company page posts don’t have much organic reach, but it gives a special highlight to video posts on your company page.
For example, if you visit Microsoft’s LinkedIn page, you’ll see a “Recently posted videos” section on top of the page feed.
Visitors can click on the “See all videos” to see all the videos shared on the page.
And you know how much people love videos, right? People prefer videos more than images and carousel posts, and you can leverage this feature to educate audiences about your products and services.
I won’t say that sharing short videos on the platform will bring in new leads right away, but it will definitely allow you to provide more information & engage the audience once they land on your company page
6. Pin a post on top of the feed
This is probably one of the most underrated techniques when it comes to optimizing the LinkedIn company page for lead generation.
Though it is not as powerful as other strategies (about which we will discuss later), pinning a relevant post on top of your company page can drive more traffic to your site and thus generate leads for your business.
To pin a post, just click on the three dots above a post. Select the ‘Pin to top’ option, and it will be immediately moved to the top of all the existing posts.
Since this is the first post people will see on your page feed, you can pin a post with a link to lead magnet like case studies, ebook, or resources on your site.
You can also pin the video post with customer testimonials or product demos to engage and encourage visitors to check out your website for more information.
And once a visitor lands on your site, there are multiple ways to convert them into leads – just keep reading to know more.
7. Retarget your website visitors on LinkedIn
So far we have been discussing the best ways to create organic presence for your brand so that when a visitor finds about your brand, you can convert them easily.
From now on, we will focus keenly on the strategies to reach out to a broader audience via paid ads.
And when it comes to paid advertising, one of my favorite strategies is to retarget your website visitors with relevant content based on their interaction on the site.
The idea behind this strategy is that the visitors who already found your website and visited product/service-related pages could be your potential customer. So, it’s better to reach them out with more information and convert them into customers rather than focusing on reaching out to random users on the platform.
Like Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads also tracks your website visitors using their tracking code and lets you retarget them via paid campaigns.
To run a retargeting campaign, log into your company’s campaign manager account on LinkedIn and select the ‘Insight Tag’ from the Account Assets menu.
Now, click the ‘Install my Insight tag’ button to view your tracking code.
Finally, copy the code and install it on your site via Google Tag Manager or just paste it on every page of your site.
Once the tag starts receiving signals for your site, you can create website audiences based on page visits using page rules, as shown below.
After creating audiences, you can now start marketing campaigns targeting these audiences with relevant messaging based on the page they interacted with on your site.
Remember, the goal of this strategy is to reach out to your potential website visitors with relevant information to drive them backs & stay on top of their minds till they make their purchase decisions.
8. Retarget contacts using Matched Audiences
Apart from retargeting your website visitors, LinkedIn also allows you to retarget your prospects based on name, email, industry, company names, and other attributes.
If you have collected contact details of your prospects or you have a repository of the target companies, LinkedIn makes it easy for you to reach out to them via retargeting campaigns.
You just have to create an audience by uploading the list of companies or contacts. LinkedIn will match the data with the profiles available on the platforms, and once you have enough matched audience, you can run targeted marketing campaigns.
This strategy aims to provide something relevant to the contacts on LinkedIn and make them aware of your offering and how it can solve their problems. So, use irresistible lead magnets to grab their attention and get them into your mailing list.
9. Find new prospects using Lookalike Audiences
This is another cool way to reach out to find new prospects based on the existing contacts you have in the matched audiences.
Lookalike audiences are a fresh set of audiences who may be interested in your product but never interacted or heard about your brand. LinkedIn creates such audiences by identifying people with similar characteristics to the selected audiences.
LinkedIn allows you to create lookalike audiences by extracting data from matched audiences. You can create a lookalike of your website visitors, existing clients, and other contacts available in your contact database.
This is a powerful way to find new leads without spending a lot of money targeting a random audience who might not be your ideal customer.
10. Use lead forms in paid campaigns
LinkedIn allows you to run lead generation campaigns in which you can use lead forms enabling users to share their contact details without leaving the platform.
In order to use lead forms in your campaign, you will need to select “Lead generation” as your campaign objective. And your ads will appear to the users who are most likely to fill up the lead generation form.
Using LinkedIn lead generation form is an effective way to use LinkedIn Ads because with it you don’t have to worry about creating a landing page. You just have to create an Ad copy offering what your target audience desires, and you are good to go.
Still, I recommend directing the users to a landing page after the form submission to learn more about your offerings. It builds interest in the user and can relate to your follow-up calls and emails.
For the lead generation campaign, here are a few of my ideas for you to get started:-
- Offer case-studies to download
- Offer free consultation
- Run the “Request a quote” campaign.
11. Turn most popular posts into sponsored posts
LinkedIn allows you to promote existing posts on the company page, and you can leverage this feature to boost the reach of your existing popular post among your target audiences.
You can promote all types of posts, including video, link, and carousel posts.
The objective of this strategy is to use the content that people already loved on your company page and make it reach more people and grab more attention toward your company page.
12. Run LinkedIn Display Ads strategically
LinkedIn PPC campaigns or display Ads can be the most expensive ones among other platforms, but it doesn’t have to be draining your marketing budget with low ROI. You just have to use it in a strategic manner!
Instead of using LinkedIn Ads to target users with a common customer persona, you can leverage it to target the most profitable prospects.
For example, if your company sells marketing CRM to small businesses, startups & enterprise brands, you can choose to target the enterprise prospects via LinkedIn Display Ads because the deal value would also be high and thus better ROI on the campaign investment.
The idea behind this strategy is to use your budget efficiently and target the most engaging and profitable users on the platform for better conversion. To get an in-depth understanding of LinkedIn Ads, you should check out my complete guide on how to run LinkedIn Ad Campaigns.
13. Create events on your LinkedIn page
Do you host webinars or any form of live events for your lead generation? If not, you should check out my guide to using webinars for B2B lead generation to learn and start adapting it into your marketing strategy.
If you’re already doing it, create events on your LinkedIn company page to reach your target audience and get more registration.
Unlike regular posts on the company page, LinkedIn boosts the events to relevant audiences, and thus you can generate quality leads from the platforms and also grab more eyeballs toward your company page.
14. Use LinkedIn to find contact details of prospects
Besides, if you don’t like to invest time and capital in LinkedIn Marketing, it is also a great platform to find contact details of your prospects.
Many users have made their contact details public, and you can easily find their email and mobile number on their profile. You just need to open his/her LinkedIn profile and click on “Contact info” like this –
However, you may find that most of your prospects have made their contact details private. This is where you will need an email finder tool that can reveal the email address of the profile holder using their profile details like name, company name, company website, etc.,
This way, you can create an email list of your prospects and retarget them with relevant marketing messaging on LinkedIn and other platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
And if your company follows account-based marketing, you can use this strategy to find the email address of the key personnel for your target companies.
Wrapping Up: Generate B2B leads on LinkedIn
LinkedIn being a professional networking platform, is truly a dedicated platform for generating high-quality B2B leads.
With millions of members being active on the platform, if you can execute the above lead generation strategies strategically, you’ll definitely see growth in the number of leads for your business.
I hope this article will help you generate a significant number of leads from LinkedIn. If so, do not forget to share with your fellow marketers and entrepreneurs via social media.
As we wrap up this article, here are few hand-picked items for you to improve B2B lead generation –
