Best Linkedin Lead Generation Strategies for 2022

What is LinkedIn Lead Generation?

Lead generation, like all lead generation, describes the activities that go into identifying, cultivating, and reaching out to potential customers or prospects. Companies and B2B   professionals use a variety of platforms and strategies. When they do it on LinkedIn, it’s called LinkedIn lead generation. But why is it so important? 

Why LinkedIn Lead Generation is Important

Leads give life to your sales pipeline, and by extension, your B2B business. Some percentage of your leads are what eventually convert into sales, and hopefully, recurring sales. The goal, however, is to ensure that that percentage is high enough to give you positive ROI. Generally, more leads mean more customers, but if only a tiny fraction converts, something is wrong.  

Two major challenges for B2B in today’s LinkedIn market are a crowded marketplace and high level of competition. You must understand and employ proven strategies to get a competitive advantage that allows you to consistently generate quality leads on LinkedIn. 

This brings us to the critical subject of Linkedin lead generation strategies

Linkedin Lead Generation Strategies to Use in 2022

In all, there are 16 proven LinkedIn lead generation strategies here, but to aid easy understanding and application, we will list them under three subgroups:

1. Linkedin Marketing Strategies
2. Linkedin Prospecting Strategies
3. Linkedin Ads Strategies

Let’s dig in!

A. Linkedin Marketing Strategies

This section will cover free, proactive, and indirect LinkedIn lead generation strategies for getting quality leads and landing sales. 

1. Optimize your Linkedin profile 

Every LinkedIn lead generation strategy begins with the optimization of your LinkedIn profile for sales. This is compulsory.

The reason for this is simple. No business or professional, for example, will invest money in ads to drive traffic to a broken website. It is the same for your LinkedIn profile.

Most of your LinkedIn lead generation effort will bring people to your profile. This is your one chance to make a good first impression. Hence, your profile MUST be optimized. 

To start, make sure to first attend to the two elements that other users can see when you send a connection request:

• Upload a clear, professional PROFILE PICTURE.
• Write a clear and short HEADLINE to describe who you are and what you do. 

Once they accept your request and become your 1st-degree connection, they most likely will want to find out more about you. 

So, you also want to:

• Boldly display your value proposition on your PROFILE BANNER.
• Put your best posts on SHOWCASE. 
• In detail, write about your value proposition in your ABOUT SECTION. 
• List your relevant JOB EXPERIENCES. 

The reason for all these steps is so a prospect or any other user understands what your value proposition is as soon as they visit your profile.

2. Regularly post on Linkedin 

LinkedIn is one social media platform where it is relatively easy to grow an audience and become an influencer, unlike others, such as Twitter and Instagram. All you need to do is post quality content regularly. 

By posting on LinkedIn frequently, you expose your profile to thousands of people daily, some of which would be new leads. As a way of identifying and cultivating quality leads with high conversion potential, start conversations with people who like, comment, or maybe even share your post. 

To transform your LinkedIn profile into a reliable leads-generating machine, leverage the following post ideas: 

1. Comment for rewards

Tell people they will get a resource (eg. white paper or ebook) in exchange for a comment on your post. 

2. Celebrate progress

Create a post to celebrate your company’s milestone, people love success stories.

3. Share how-to’s 

Share a relevant tutorial with clear steps on how to achieve a particular result. 

4. Tell a story

Good storytelling will work wonders for you on LinkedIn. From time to time, describe in detail an interesting thing that has happened to you or your business. 

3. Host LinkedIn events

For once, take your event from platforms like Zoom and Google Meet, and take things to LinkedIn. Yes, LinkedIn now has a feature that lets you live stream and organize live events straight from your account. 

Host your next webinar on LinkedIn, so you can collect LinkedIn profiles of your prospects and reach out to them afterward. There’s no limit to how many sales you could land out of one event if you go about prospecting effectively. 

Want to create a LinkedIn event now? 

Go to your homepage. Scroll down and click on “+Event” on the left. 

B. Linkedin Prospecting Strategies

Now, this is a straight-to-the-point, direct prospecting approach and arguably the most important aspect of LinkedIn lead generation strategies. 

1. Find leads using LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Linkedin Sales Navigator is a must-have tool for any B2B professional who intends to take prospecting on LinkedIn seriously. 

Unlike your basic LinkedIn search, Sales Navigator’s search per month is unlimited and allows you to effectively target prospects using more than 30 advanced filters, including 

• Job title
• Demographics
• Company size

It’s a pretty easy way to generate high-quality lead lists and target the decision-makers in the right companies. Sale Navigator also lets you export contact information from LinkedIn. 

Getting emails from Linkedin

When you finish building your list from your target audience, it’s time to get it out of Linkedin Sales Navigator. Use Spylead to extract your leads list and find their email. Check out this short tutorial to see how to use Spylead. 

2. Send personalized messages

Here are the 3 common mistakes most B2B companies make and how you can avoid them: 

• They try to get a meeting immediately. No, don’t do that. Instead, start a conversation first. 
• During the conversation, don’t talk about yourself. They couldn’t care less. Instead, talk about them.
• Avoid arguments.

A good outreach structure will follow something like this:

1. Start by saying the reason for your outreach. 
2. Ask them if they have the problem you solve.
3. Back up your solution claim with concrete data. 
4. Close with a CTA, and ensure it gives them a good reason to reply. 

You may want to automate your process. This is how you do it: 

Automating your LinkedIn lead generation outreach

There are LinkedIn lead generation tools, including LaGrowthMachine, Lemlist, Waalax, Expandi, etc., that you can use to automate your outreach. They will send personalized messages for you and all you have to do is wait for the replies to roll in. Just make sure your message is compelling.  

That said, making contact is only the first step. Seeing as most recipients won’t reply to your first, what naturally follows is sending follow-ups. 

3. Send follow-up messages

Don’t make the mistake of just parroting your previous message or asking for a meeting. You have to assume they saw your first message but weren’t moved. So, every follow-up message should convey an additional value proposition. 

For instance, you can attach: 

• Links to relevant content you created.
• Invitation to a webinar. 
• Testimonials. 
• Data-driven results from working with other clients.

You can also automate this follow-up process. 

4. Increase your weekly LinkedIn connection request limit

The new limitation implemented by LinkedIn has seen connection requests go from 100 per day down to 100 per week. This is a huge dent to B2B prospecting effort as your capacity to reach your prospects has been divided by 7. 

Fortunately, there are proven ways to bypass this LinkedIn connection request limit, they include:  

• Contact Open Profiles. 
• Send invitations through emails.
• Reach out to LinkedIn event attendees and group members.  

We explained these 3 techniques and more in detail in this previous article. 

5. Use LinkedIn InMail

InMail is a paid messaging feature on LinkedIn that lets you bypass the connection request step and land directly into the inboxes of your prospects, that is to say, 1st-degree, 2nd-degree, and 3rd-degree connections.

Any one of the LinkedIn premium subscriptions (Linkedin Premium, Linkedin Sales Navigator, or Linkedin Recruiter) offers you anywhere between 10 and 150 monthly InMail credits. 

Because of the cost and how low the figure is, it’s not advisable to use InMails as your primary campaign tool. The best practice is to use InMail to reach out to prospects you can’t get via email or regular LinkedIn messages.

6. Steal your competitor’s audience

This is the way to go if you want to do the least amount of work and still good results. The great advantage here is that your competitors have already done the groundwork to build an audience that is optimized for your outreach.  

There are 3 ways you can go about it on Linkedin:

• Extract competitors’ post commenters. 
• Extract competitors’ event attendees. 
• Extract competitors’ group members. 

We have a previous article where we explained these 3 tactics in detail, read it here. 

7. Monitor your leads with Smartlinks

Sales Navigator SmartLinks enable you to create sales presentations, files, and websites, then you can easily share and track how prospects interact with them.

This LinkedIn lead generation strategy helps you: 

1. Collect the LinkedIn profiles of everyone who clicked on the link. 
2. Shorten your prospecting messages using links instead. 
3. Effectively personalized follow-up messages based on prospects’ interaction. 

C. Linkedin Ads Strategies

This is essentially using paid advertising to drive LinkedIn lead generation. They include: 

1. Run Message Ads. 

Message Ads, also known as Sponsored InMails, go directly into your prospects’ LinkedIn inboxes. 

You leverage it to:

• Promote your services or products. 
• Invite prospects to (LinkedIn) events. 
• Boost interaction with your resources. 

To ensure a high open rate, Message Ads are only delivered to only active LinkedIn targets. 

2. Run Sponsored Content Ads

Sponsored Content Ads are similar to Message Ads but instead of going straight to the inbox, it runs on LinkedIn feed on desktop and mobile.

It can be in any of 3 formats—single image, video, and carousel image.

There are two ways to go about Sponsored Content Ads. One, promote a post that you have already published on LinkedIn. Two, create a new post and promote it to a specific audience. 

3. Run Lead Gen Forms Ads

Another ad that drives LinkedIn lead generation is Gen Forms Ads. They work as add-ons added to Sponsored Content or Message Ads used to collect contact information directly from LinkedIn. All generated leads from Gen Forms Ads go straight to the campaign manager.

What really makes LinkedIn Lead Gen forms a great lead generation tool is that LinkedIn prefill the form with the target’s data,  so they only need to click or add their email to sign-up. Surely, you see how this can potentially increase your conversion rate! 

4. Run Dynamic Ads

LinkedIn Dynamic Ads appear on the sidebar of your Linkedin Profile and feed. 

Consider any of these types to drive LinkedIn lead generation:

1. Follower Ads: To increase the number of followers on your LinkedIn Page.
2. Spotlight Ads: To drive traffic to landing pages. 
3. Content Ads: To increase content downloads and interactions.

5. Run optimized Linkedin Ads with Linkedin Sales Navigator

To drive massive LinkedIn lead generation, you can create hyper-targeted LinkedIn Ads using the Sales Navigator search engine.

Since Linkedin Ads let you import CSV to create an Ad audience, you decide precisely who you want to see your LinkedIn Ads. This way, you won’t waste money showing ads to unqualified leads. 

Conclusion

This is where we bring this comprehensive, step-by-step guide on LinkedIn lead generation strategies to a close. By now, you know the 3 types of strategies for generating leads on LinkedIn—Linkedin Marketing, Linkedin Outreach, and Linkedin Ads. Use them and you can drive in those sales. Good luck!