LinkedIn Lead Generation for B2B Marketers: A Full Guide

In the B2B domain, 93% of all buying decisions start with online searches. This means leveraging all these online searches is a vital part of your online marketing strategy. Without capturing those valuable leads, you'll have less in your sales funnel to turn into final buying commitments.

This makes it very important to have good digital outreach, especially on the platforms your target audiences are on. For instance, if you're looking to attract higher-up decision-makers in companies, then a good area to focus on is LinkedIn.

In this article, we'll discuss how to improve LinkedIn lead generation for B2B marketers so you can boost your business.

Make Your Profile More Relevant by Optimizing It

You want to be relevant to the people you're reaching out to. You can do so by optimizing your profile.

For example, add a professional picture if you don't already have one. Users are less likely to respond to someone who doesn't have a picture, as it may be a spam account.

Next, you should fill out your professional headline; make sure to put your job title there so users clearly see what you do and which company you're with.

The last step is to completely fill out your LinkedIn profile. Users are more apt to trust and listen to you if they can see you're a legitimate professional.

Create Quality Content

Users love to see useful and relevant content. Make sure you give them a wide variety, as every individual has their personal tastes.

The busy CMO may not have time to read a whitepaper, so an infographic is fantastic in their case. On the other hand, other lower-level decision-makers need to collect compelling content to convince their higher-ups. So for them, longer-form content (like ebooks and whitepapers) is great.

Make sure to sprinkle content across whitepapers, ebooks, infographics, videos, and more. To save time, you can take longer-form content and create videos and infographics from information found in them. Re-purposing and recycling content is always a great idea.

Showcase Your Other Content

A crucial part of your B2B content marketing strategy should be unifying all your channels and having a cohesive plan. It's absolutely essential you create content that's relevant to your target audiences. Not only that, but you should also share it across channels.

For example, maybe you have a high-quality whitepaper you've created to put as gated content on your site. By doing so, you can capture some relevant leads when they download it.

But you can get even better outreach by creating posts on LinkedIn promoting that whitepaper. For example, you can say, "Are you having issues doing x for your business? Then this whitepaper will help you through your obstacles." And then, you should link the whitepaper landing page.

Make sure you only post once or twice per day on LinkedIn. You can always share the same content multiple times by spreading those posts out throughout the month.

Take Advantage of the LinkedIn Message Ads Feature

With most types of marketing campaigns, they approach audiences on a broader scope. What's great about LinkedIn is it allows you to tighten your approach to your target audience.

To do so, use Message Ads (formerly known as Sponsored InMail). This gives you a chance to deliver an extremely targeted and customized message to specific LinkedIn users, which in turn gives you better outreach to prospects. This is because your message lands directly into their inboxes, which they'll probably check more often than their email inboxes.

What's great about this feature is you can track conversions from these messages straight from LinkedIn. This enables you to test your messages out, measure the results, and tweak your messages to get even better results in the future.

You can also utilize its campaign optimizer by choosing your objective, which will help shape your message. Attach a LinkedIn Lead Gen Form to your messages to further collect leads from Message Ads.

When shaping your messages, make sure to put yourself in your prospects' shoes. Make them personalized; for instance, say something like "Hi Karen, I noticed you mentioned the other day you're looking for ways to increase your sales. I might be able to help you in this area."

This shows them that you're getting down to a personal level to create relevant content that they'll respond to.

Join Relevant LinkedIn Groups and Participate

If you've spent some time in marketing, then you'll know that not all of it is about "in your face" strategies. These may create ad fatigue.

LinkedIn has groups like Facebook does, but for more professional/business purposes. Consider joining a few to provide your expert thoughts and insights on key subjects.

Make sure you keep things away from a salesy tone; your audience is in these groups to seek advice. Consumers know when people are trying to sell them something. When the time is right, they'll happily listen.

You might feel like you're giving away something for free, but when you position yourself as a thought leader in your industry, people will listen and come to know and trust your brand. And when the time is finally right, they'll automatically seek you instead of your competition.

Nurture Your Leads and Don't Let Them Go Cold

One part of success is capturing leads. The other part is turning that data into actionable campaigns that nurture them.

For example, you can collect leads from your LinkedIn account through networking in your groups. You can import your leads from LinkedIn into your CRM, then nurture them so you can get them through the sales funnel.

Once they're fed into your CRM platform, you can filter them into an email nurture workflow that'll keep you top of mind. The end result should be these prospects converting into customers.

See Your LinkedIn Lead Generation Soar With Our Tips

With our LinkedIn lead generation guide, you should now hopefully have a better idea of how to leverage this platform to get higher quality leads.

Considering it's a professional networking platform, you need to be mindful of how you market on LinkedIn.

Focus on building your brand and thought leadership. If you can present your business as one people can rely on, that will naturally facilitate higher quality leads to come through your funnel without you having to seek them out.

If you'd like some professional assistance with growing your B2B company, schedule a 15-minute introductory call with us now. We'll help you explore the possibilities to achieve your growth targets.