How LinkedIn Lead Generation Works

ApréSapio Media’s team of Alpha Appointment Setters generate leads on LinkedIn by building authority on the platform, developing personal relationships with decision makers, and influencing them to take an action like signing up for a newsletter or accepting a discovery call. There’s a variety of strategies we can employ.

Here’s how you can use LinkedIn to successfully generate leads:

• Build an Optimized Profile: Create a personal, professional profile that paints you as a credible and helpful member of your industry. 

• Build Authority on the Platform: Post insightful LinkedIn updates and publish content onto the newsfeed to start building a reputation as an expert with your target audience. 

• Create an Enticing Offer: For salespeople, this is typically a live product demo or short call that will help the lead learn more about your business. However, marketers might also create and offer content like ebooks or webinars. 

Make Your Offer to Ideal Leads: Pitch the offer over direct message to individual leads or post them in industry groups. 

• Boost Your Efforts With Paid Strategies: Businesses can run different types of LinkedIn ads to expand their reach or use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to supercharge their overall LinkedIn lead generation strategy. 

• LinkedIn lead generation is powerful as a standalone strategy, but it's even more successful when part of a larger, more diversified lead generation approach. For example, many businesses will use it in tandem with cold email outreach so that each lead is encountering the salesperson and brand frequently and from multiple angles. The same applies if it's one of many networks you’re using in your social media lead gen strategy.

• The reason LinkedIn lead generation is so effective for B2B salespeople is that it enables them to form intimate connections with decision makers through a personal profile rather than a business page as you’d find in several other types of social media lead generation. Leads can see your face, scan your accolades, and read through the industry-related content and posts you share. In doing so, leads come to trust you as an expert and a peer and are therefore primed to accept an offer.

Who Should Use LinkedIn Lead Generation

LinkedIn lead generation is most effective for B2B salespeople wanting to make connections with other business professionals. Within the B2B sphere, there are many different use cases, but they can be boiled down to two overarching uses — sellers doing direct outreach/social selling and marketers running ads. Both are trying to engage and convert quality leads.

Let’s look at some more specific Linkedin lead generation use cases:

• Salespeople Wanting to Make Personal B2B Connections

• Salespeople Trying to Book B2B Meetings

• Businesses Needing to Generate Professional Email Sign Ups

• Businesses Wanting to Drive B2B Traffic to a Website or Landing Page

1. Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

First and foremost, create a LinkedIn profile that convinces potential leads of their expertise in the industry. This profile will be the first place leads on the platform go if they want to learn more about you, whether that interest in you is prompted by a post you shared or a message you sent them. Below we’ll tell you how to paint yourself as an informed professional and also how to make the profile speak to the needs of your ideal customers who’ll be visiting it.

2. Study Your Target Audience

First, look over your ideal customer profile (ICP) and make sure you understand the type of lead you're trying to attract. Learn about their needs, pain points, interests, and more. Reviewing this information will help you craft messaging on your LinkedIn profile that speaks directly to your target audience. If you lack an ICP, build one or, for the time being, find commonalities between your current customers by jotting down their demographics and stated reasons for buying.

3. Study Quality Profiles in Your Niche

To gain inspiration for your LinkedIn profile, study the profiles of other successful sellers in your niche. Note the LinkedIn headlines, summaries, and banners that strike you as strategically savvy. And don’t be afraid to borrow the underlying principles of their messaging. For instance, if you like the structure of a peer’s summary, use it and tailor it to fit your own needs.

4. Use an Attractive Profile Picture

"Attractive" depends on what your ideal customers want to see from their vendors. If you’re selling to a new, casual startup, you can make your profile picture more informal. If you’re selling to Fortune 500 or corporate companies, you might want to skew to formal attire with a plain backdrop. Regardless, look presentable, friendly (smiling still works), and trustworthy.

5. Write a Headline That Hooks Your Target Buyer

Craft a LinkedIn headline that is short and to the point. It should make it easy for your potential leads to quickly understand who you are and who you help when they come to your page or see your headline in the messenger app.

When a potential buyer finds that they fit the description of the people you help, they will be more open to having a conversation with you.

6. Here are a few effective LinkedIn headline formulas:

• I Help X Accomplish Y Through Z: Explain who your target customer is, the main benefit you provide to them, and how your product or service helps you do that. 

• Job Title | Service 1 | Service 2: An example is "freelance B2B writer | long-form blog posts | ebooks." This tells the decision makers what you offer right off the bat, and can also help your profile appear in LinkedIn searches, passively generating inbound leads. 

• Your Unique Selling Proposition: A business owner might write “double your client base in 2 months with my Facebook ad strategy.” This makes people curious to find out how you provide such amazing benefits. 

• Your LinkedIn headline is a great opportunity to get people interested in you and your business. Ensure that it speaks to their needs, desires, or pain points for the best results.

• It is important that we use the about section of your profile to write a customer-focused story that demonstrates how you can help your clients succeed.

• This way, when a potential lead reads your summary, they’ll have a firm grasp on the value you offer. With this context, they should be more open to accepting your offer in step six, or, better yet, they may even reach out to you first. 

Below is the process and structure for writing a sales-oriented LinkedIn summary: 

Mention Your Target Customer: Start your first sentence with the title or company type of your ideal customers. Name Pain Points Your Customers Face: Next, list a few issues your average customer has, along with a cost of letting these problems fester. 

Introduce Your Solution: Segue into how these customers, including a few top brands, come to your company for help. Write the company name and its main product or service that helps solve the aforementioned pain points. 

To List a Few Benefits:

• Build desire by talking about the positive results your clients often experience when working with you or purchasing your product.

• End With a Call-to-Action: Tell the potential customer what action you want them to take. Usually, this is asking them to call or email you to learn about your business.  

• Give Your Contact Information: Lastly, write your phone number and email address so that leads can reach you.

We Post Updates Your Audience Will Enjoy

Now that you have a professional profile, start getting your name out there and engaging with your audience by posting insightful updates to the LinkedIn newsfeed once a day. This expands your network because the LinkedIn algorithm will place your posts on the pages of non-connections. Often, these are ideal leads who might then follow you. From then on they’ll receive all of your posts. Down the line, you can make your offer to them in a direct message. 

Publish Articles Relevant to Your Niche

• Your LinkedIn posts can be any of the following: Your Thoughts on Relevant Industry News or Trends. For example, after a new law is passed, a commercial real estate salesperson might connect it to a historical example and draw a conclusion about how the law might affect its clients. 

• An Update About Your Business: Perhaps you’re launching a new feature. In that case, quickly explain its benefits and give links to videos or articles so people can learn more. Your Industry Advice and Insights: For instance, a salesperson at a B2B fintech company might share ways small businesses can reduce operating costs this year. 

• By posting regularly, you’re essentially making yourself a go-to resource for your audience. Decision makers in the industry will look forward to your posts, and perhaps even comment on them, thereby giving you another avenue for building relationships — simply reply to the comments when appropriate. This not only makes potential leads feel more comfortable with you, but it also helps the LinkedIn algorithm, which expands the post’s reach.

Connect & Reach Out to Prospects Directly

As you’re publishing articles and posts to LinkedIn, you should also be connecting with and direct messaging people who seem like quality leads. These could be people from a prospecting list or someone you found during your authority-building activities, perhaps in a LinkedIn group. Through InMail, start to form an even more personal relationship with these people, and after sending a few value-providing messages and starting a conversation, make your offer. 

Direct message these types of potential LinkedIn leads: 

• Users on Your Off-Platform Prospecting List: If you have a list of leads in your CRM or a document, check if they have LinkedIn profiles and message them. This is a perfect addition to cold emailing or cold calling cadences. 

• Decision Makers in Related LinkedIn Industry Groups: Reach out to people in industry groups who fit your ideal customer profile. Consider also adding them to any off-platform prospecting list. 

• Potential Leads Engaging With Your Posts/Articles: Message people who fit your buyer persona and have commented on, liked, or interacted with your content. The more often they have, the likelier they are to respond positively to the message. 

• To engage these potential leads over direct message, ask them to connect with a short message describing why this connection is mutually beneficial. When they accept, thank them for connecting. A week later, send another piece of content they might find helpful. 

Finally, after you've built enough rapport, pitch your offer, explaining why you think it will be valuable to them. 

Keep in mind that while these potential leads are going through this direct messaging cadence, they’re also likely seeing your posts on the network, interacting with a few, and becoming more and more familiar with you and your brand. This is the magic of LinkedIn lead generation. People are much more likely to say yes to your request for a call if they feel they know you. 

To bypass LinkedIn's messaging limits and improve outreach, salespeople often pay for Sales Navigator, which allows for longer connection messages, or sponsored InMail, which sends messages to many people at once.