Optimise LinkedIn Lead Generation

While much of the focus on social media over the last few years has been on Facebook and Instagram, LinkedIn has been steadily growing its user base to more than 562 million users with 10 million active job listings and is now the top-rated social network for lead generation. LinkedIn is a professional network that allows you to build credibility, create a meaningful network, and glean insider expertise from established experts in your industry. LinkedIn marketing has become a game-changer for businesses.

Why be on LinkedIn:

• 51% of companies acquired B2C consumers through LinkedIn
• 93% of B2B marketers consider LinkedIn to be the most effective site for lead gen
• 64% of corporate website visits originate from LinkedIn
• 50% of LinkedIn members report they are more likely to buy from a company they engage with on LinkedIn

Optimise LinkedIn Lead Generation successfully is one of the key offerings of the Black Snow.

To help you use LinkedIn more effectively, our team of experts have compiled some top tips:

1 – Complete your LinkedIn company profile fully

Company pages with complete profiles receive up to 200% more visitors than those with incomplete page profiles.

Make sure your page has the following seven items filled out completely:

• Logo
• Company description
• Website URL
• Company size
• Industry
• Company type
• Location

2 – Build out your employee profiles

Ensuring that all team member’s profiles are filled out completely is a wonderfully simple way to spread awareness of your brand. If you are in a company of 50 people, that is 50 profiles with your company’s name and a quick link to your Company Page. And according to LinkedIn, it makes your company more visible in search results both on and off LinkedIn.

• Remind your employees to include their key roles and responsibilities within their profiles and emphasize their involvement in the services your company provides. The more detailed the profile, the better.
• Profiles that reflect your team member’s personalities within their bio are also more likely to draw the viewer in and entice them to work with both the individual and the company, so this is highly encouraged.
• Remind employees that they are a reflection of the company that they currently work at, so while their profiles can show their personalities to a degree, it will reflect badly on the company if their profiles include profanity or crude language regardless whether it was intended humorously. Bios and language used within them, should always stay professional.
• Encourage employees to use their company picture so that all employees have a consistent background to their profile pictures.
• Create a company specific LinkedIn banner that can be used on the company’s LinkedIn page as well as the employee’s personal LinkedIn header

3 – Position yourself as an industry leader

LinkedIn Pulse – or the LinkedIn Feed – no longer operates as a separate application. It is now integrated into members’ feeds as articles to help enhance the content-first experience. As a result, LinkedIn has experienced a 20% increase in content consumption with more than 100,000 organic articles being published weekly.

Elements to include:

• Descriptive caption: Helps to provide people with extra context around your content
• Eye-catching images: LinkedIn figures showthat posts with an image included get 98% more comments. A clean, simple aesthetic helps your content to stand out.
• Hashtags: A great way to increase the visibility of your content to new audiences
• Bonus: Add emojis, questions, and bullet points to switch up the look and feel of your content

4 – Create a consistent posting schedule

Businesses that post at least once per month have been shown to gain followers 6X faster than those that don’t. In addition, company pages with at least 150 followers typically get 5X more company page views than those with fewer followers!

5 – Engage your colleagues and employees

Colleagues and employees can boost your LinkedIn content while simultaneously increasing the visibility of your Company Page on LinkedIn. Statista found that 42% of LinkedIn users have between 300-999 connections. Multiply that by the number of employees at your company and that’s a lot of potential reach! The LinkedIn algorithm measures initial user engagement, so having employees like and engage with an article as soon as it has gone live is a great way to stimulate interaction.  You can also link to your company page in your marketing communications, email signatures, and blogs.

6 – Use LinkedIn Ads

• Sponsored content: Amplify your content to reach a wider audience than is possible organically and draw new eyeballs to your company page.
• Text Ads: These are pay-per-click or CPM ads that appear on the LinkedIn homepage, profile pages, Groups pages, search results pages, and more.
• Sponsored InMail: This operates similarly to email marketing, but within the LinkedIn ecosystem. Sponsored InMail allows you to send personalized ads to LinkedIn members’ inboxes. Messages are only delivered when members are active on LinkedIn, making them likely to be noticed.

7 – Utilise In Mail

Remember the Six Degrees of Separation trend from the 1990’s? The hypothesis was that anyone in the world could be connected to anyone else by only six people. The actual statistic is now down to 3.5 Degrees. Sometimes, all you need is one connection with a company to make inroads that lead to a sale.

The LinkedIn InMail response rate is 3x that of traditional email.

It even has built-in analytics to help you fine-tune your messages:

We recommend using LinkedIn as a complementary lead generation tool to flesh out your digital presence.

LinkedIn can support businesses in many ways, so you need to determine exactly what you want to get out of your LinkedIn business efforts. Are you trying to build a network for social selling? Establish yourself as a thought leader? Recruit top talent in your field? No matter your goal, the team at Black Snow Group have the know-how to make LinkedIn work for you.