It’s no secret that LinkedIn is a super effective channel for any brand wishing to generate more leads and increase the number of closed deals. But how do you take advantage of those amazing opportunities that LinkedIn brings to the table? In this port, we review the top lead generation methods in 2023, so that you know how to approach the lead generation on LinkedIn in the right way.

Lead generation is a key tool in the arsenal of any B2B enterprise that positions itself as a serious brand and wants to attract revenue on a regular basis. It goes without saying that it’s the cornerstone of any business. If you are a B2B expert who makes use of LinkedIn for networking and sales, you understand how essential LinkedIn lead generation might be. Taking this into account, we will be breaking down this topic.

In this post, you will: 

• Refresh your knowledge of the lead generation on LinkedIn and why it’s so significant for your B2B communication strategy 
• Discover 16 cutting-edge, productive methods for generating leads on LinkedIn, how they can be used in your workflow to boost your company’s revenue    

If you are ready to learn more about this topic, let’s go!

What Exactly is Lead Generation on LinkedIn

Lead generation on LinkedIn, like all types of lead generation on other platforms, means the steps and methods that include detection, nurture, and maintenance of good relationships with potential customers and clients. Businesses and B2B experts usually use a wide range of tools, services, and approaches to assist with their efforts. And so, when they do it on LinkedIn, it’s called with the term — the LinkedIn lead generation. But why is this crucial in your sales campaign? 

Why You Need Lead Generation on LinkedIn

Leads enrich and empower your sales pipeline, thus making your business thrive. Some of these leads will eventually become your customers, and, hopefully, loyal repeat customers. The aim of the lead generation process, however, is to make sure that the conversion rate is big enough to provide you with the solid Return on Investment. Basically, the more leads you capture the better — this means you’re getting more sales. But if only a small percentage of attracted leads converts, there must be a flaw in your marketing strategy…

Two significant obstacles for brands working on the modern LinkedIn market are extremely high competitiveness and an overcrowded marketplace. That’s why you need to make use of effective strategies to gain a competitive edge that will make you stand out in the crowd and pull in quality leads from LinkedIn on a regular basis. 

Lead Generation Strategies for LinkedIn in 2023

In total, there are dozens of time-tested LinkedIn lead generation strategies out there. However, to make them easier to analyze and put into action, we will sum them up into 2 categories:

• Strategies for Marketing 
• Strategies for Prospecting 

Let’s review each one in detail!

LinkedIn Marketing

This category focuses on the indirect, yet powerful LinkedIn lead generation strategies for getting quality leads free of charge. 

1. Update your LinkedIn Profile 

It’s no secret that before launching a marketing campaign, the first thing you should do is to make sure your brand looks good to the public, which includes the social media pages. LinkedIn is no exception. It’s good to know that the lead generation strategy on LinkedIn should start with the optimization of your company account. This is the step that shouldn’t be underestimated. Looks do matter, after all.

No business will ever invest money in advertising to bring traffic to a buggy, empty website. The same works for the LinkedIn account. If done correctly, your LinkedIn lead generation efforts will drive a lot of people to your profile. And, as they say, you never get a second chance to make the first impression, especially when it comes to trust.

To begin with, take care of the TWO essential moments that your visitors will necessarily pay attention to when you send a friend request:

• Professional profile picture where your face is clearly visible. A picture is worth a thousand words
• Short and informative description of what you do and what you offer. Think of the best words to describe the value you bring to the people

When the person you target accepts your request and enters your circle of connections, they might want to learn more information about you. So, it’s a good idea to:

• Create a profile banner where you put forward your value proposition tagline
• Publish the details about your value proposition in the About section
• Highlight your best posts that point out your expertise in the field 
• Describe your relevant job experience and success stories

The reason for all these steps is to help your leads understand your value as soon as possible.

2. Actively Contribute to Your LinkedIn Feed

LinkedIn is one of those exceptional social networks where it is not that hard to build an audience and become an influencer, in comparison to Instagram or Twitter. You just need to keep in mind that posts should offer quality content and be published regularly.

By being an active contributor on LinkedIn, you become visible to thousands of potential customers daily, and some of them may be turned into paying clients. As a way of nurturing your leads, you may want to start chatting with people who react to your publications — they can like, comment, and share your content. 

To turn your LinkedIn account into a lead-generating powerhouse, we recommend that you take into account these ideas:

Offer rewards for commenting

Invite people to comment on your publications for a nice bonus, such as a discount, white paper, e-book, or some other valuable thingy. 

Celebrate your success

Write a post dedicated to a special occasion/milestone for your brand, as success stories build trust.

Publish step-by-step guides 

Offer your audience valuable content in the form of guides, how-to’s, tutorials and other help materials explaining the route to achieve a certain result in your field of expertise. 

Share your story

Storytelling will work like a charm for building your image on LinkedIn. Every now and again, post sneak peeks and behind-the-scene pictures of the events your company is engaged in. Keep your potential and existing customers involved and entertained!

3. Organize a Meeting on LinkedIn 

For a change, forget about services like Skype, Google Meet and Zoom and host an online event on LinkedIn. If you didn’t know, LinkedIn offers a cool feature that allows organizing live events and streaming them to the broad audience. The event can be in different formats: Q&A session, conference, webinar, workshop, seminar, even a concert, you name it!

When people sign up for your event, they will leave their contact details, so you will have access to their LinkedIn profiles and contact them afterward. This is a great opportunity for lead generation, as there’s no limitation to the number of people you can get acquainted with there and convert into paying customers.

Want to give a try to LinkedIn events? 

This is not as hard as it may seem. Visit the page with instructions and simply follow the steps: https://www.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/linkedin-events/getting-started. It’s not rocket science! We were able to do this, so will you.

Strategies for Prospecting on LinkedIn

In this section of the post, we offer you straightforward prospecting techniques for direct lead generation.

1. Take Advantage of LinkedIn Sales Navigator

The native Sales Navigator provided by LinkedIn is an indispensable feature for any business and sales expert who approach prospecting on LinkedIn in a serious way. 

In comparison to the basic search tool, the Sales Navigator has no restrictions in terms of the number of searches you can make and allows successful targeting of prospects using a wide variety of filters, such as:

• Skills
• Relevant work experience
• Company details
• Role in the company, and more

Using the advanced filter criteria, it’s a piece of cake to find the right people and build the high-quality database with leads. On top of the powerful search, the Sale Navigator lets you download the collected information from LinkedIn and export it to the lead accounting system, for example, an Excel spreadsheet or a CRM. 

2. Personal Messages

An individual approach is essential when it comes to sending messages to your potential customers. Here are a few tips to make your strategy more productive: 

• Don’t try to schedule a meeting immediately. Begin with a meaningful conversation first. 
• During your talk with a customer, try to focus your attention on the vis-à-vis. Don’t concentrate on yourself. Skirt contentious issues. 

An effective outreach strategy can be used in the following way:

• Begin with pointing out the reasons why you contact the person 
• Ask the person if they have the pain points you can solve 
• Prove your solution will be effective for them, use real cases and facts 
• End your conversation with an enticing call to action, and make sure your potential customer has a good reason to reply

Additionally, you may want to automate this lead outreach workflow with automation tools.

3. Don’t Forget to Follow-Up

After making the initial outreach, your goal would be to follow people up with consecutive messages. It’s a good idea not just duplicate your first message in the follow-up, but come up with something new. You have to understand that they read your first message but weren’t interested enough. Thus, each subsequent message should offer an extra attractive feature. 

For example, you may want to add to the message: 

• White papers
• Valuable industry research
• Upcoming special offers
• Secret sales
• Invitation to an online event 
• Customer reviews
• Case study
• Success story with your client

Tip: The follow-up process can also be automated.

4. Bypass LinkedIn Limits

Recently, LinkedIn has reduced the limits for sending connection requests by 7! 

So, instead of the customary 100 requests PER DAY, now you can send only 100 requests PER WEEK…Not that uplifting, isn’t it? But, luckily, there are some workarounds to make up for this loss. 

Here are some examples of techniques you may want to take advantage of:

• Reach out to people with open profiles 
• Use emails to send invites
• Connect people who attend LinkedIn events and join LinkedIn themed groups

5. Make Use of LinkedIn InMails

InMail is a paid option for contacting people on LinkedIn allowing you to skip the stage of sending connection requests and deliver your message directly into inboxes of your target audience. As far as the limits for this feature go, holders of the LinkedIn premium subscriptions (Linkedin Premium, Linkedin Sales Navigator, or Linkedin Recruiter) have access to approximately 10-150 InMails per month depending on your subscription restrictions. 

Taking into account the high cost and relatively moderate amount of available InMails, we recommend that you use this premium feature as the final tool to reach out to the most hard-to-get prospects that you failed to contact using regular messages.

6. Borrow Audience from Your Competitors

This is so-called the “principle of least effort”: if you want to chill and still achieve good results. The super benefit of this method is that your competitors have already done the job for you: they researched the market, found the best people in the field, and built the audience. 

There are 3 ways to have it all handed to you in a pretty box:

Visit competitors’ live events and reach out to their attendees

Join your competitors’ groups and contact their members

Analyze competitors’ posts to see who likes, shares, and comments them

Final Thoughts

So, now you’re fully equipped with the effective strategies for marketing and prospecting on LinkedIn. Try them out to capture those coveted leads and turn them into sales. We wish you good luck in your endeavors. Don’t forget to share your results in the comments!