LinkedIn calls itself a network of professionals and businesses. But I prefer to call it a treasure trove of leads. Businesses of all sizes can use LinkedIn to reach out to potential customers and influencers, and it provides great opportunities for B2B marketing.  Research as part of the LinkedIn Content Marketing Tactical Plan reveals that 80% of B2B leads originate from LinkedIn.

With more than a million unique publishers generating posts each week, and over 400 million professionals around, LinkedIn is one of those really important social networks your business needs to get involved in.

It is the place for B2B marketing. Period.

If you haven’t been developing your LinkedIn marketing strategy for your business, it’s time to bring about a change. There could be a lot of potential out there you’re probably missing out on.

So let’s get you familiar with 5 lead generation tactics that can help your business drive targeted leads on LinkedIn.

Optimizing Your Profile

Let’s start with the basics. On a scale of 1 to 10, how much would you rate your LinkedIn profile?

What’s in a profile, you ask? A completed and attractive profile means everything for your brand and identity.

  • First, ensure your profile is complete. An updated profile is essential to build credibility for your business.
  • You should personalize your profile to give it as professional an appearance and feel as possible. Start by adding a very professional image that represents your business well. In fact, the profile image is the single most important element by which prospective leads who land on your profile judge you.
  • Then go ahead and add a killer cover image. There are two types of cover images that work really well:

Those with an industry influencer

Those with a local landmark

  • Then, you need to get your URL personalized. LinkedIn provides you the option to change the URL extension of your public profile into your preferred string. Rather than select a URL randomly, make sure you have your business, brand, exact name or a relevant keyword in it.
  • Have a killer tag line that clearly communicates your professional goals and the value you can offer. Here’s an example:

While these are the basic elements that could help you optimize your LinkedIn profile, you need to delve deeper to make your LinkedIn social media efforts deliver more performance.

Efficient Content Marketing

You need to create and put up Linkedin Pulse posts having quality content. The content should lend value and be actionable. That’s how you engage people.

And when you consistently produce high value content, your readers trust you and you begin to build a reputation and following.

More importantly, you must be able to fulfill the needs of your target audience. Ensure that you don’t place a conventional sales pitch since that’ll backfire, making you lose followers which will in turn result in loss of engagement and sales.

Ensure your content is authentic, so be sure you write about what you do know which will establish you as an authority or expertise. It’s more efficient to maintain a publishing schedule for your blog posts which you should stick to.

Make sure the content you post stands out from the content people usually find on the topic on LinkedIn or elsewhere. For content that stands apart:

  • You need to include a headline that’s intriguing and a header that’s visually appealing.
  • Don’t use any spamming practices or clickbait headlines. Always remember that you’re trying to target businesses.
  • Break up your content into sections so that they make for easy reading. Besides, here a little-known Linkedin engagement tip: The more time users spend on your posts- the more views you’ll get from the Linkedin news feed.

Once you’ve shared your content on LinkedIn, you must monitor any interaction surrounding it. That will give you an idea about the sentiment being driven by your brand.

Secondly, monitor and record conversations taking place around content you share on LinkedIn. This will give you an idea of how to respond to inquiries by users better. Ultimately, this will contribute to greater sales.

LinkedIn helps you publish content, and that’s a great way to generate leads since you can target influencers in the industry and potential customers. Of course, these features come with the Premium account and it’s worth upgrading.

  • The kinds of content and their destinations that could take your LinkedIn content marketing to a successful level are white papers, eBooks, how-to articles, case studies, etc.
  • Get your content in the showcase and company pages of LinkedIn.
  • Company presentations and videos, industry news, research and LinkedIn sponsored content are all effective to generate leads and make the most of this social network.

Pro tip:

While those are proven ways to drive inbound B2B leads on Linkedin, there is yet another way that you can use to drive massive engagement and traffic. Have you come across and of the trendy personal stories on Linkedin:

And here’s another example:

This is the new way of sharing on Linkedin. By sharing your personal struggles and challenges, and increasing number of marketers are being able to connect with audiences in a more original way.

LinkedIn Groups

It is important to join groups where your customers would usually hang out. Here you can:

  • Observe the group’s activities
  • Study the content shared in the group as well as the comments
  • Respond to the comments intelligently, and
  • Network better

You can also find out who your potential customers are. This builds your reputation as well.

But here’s the best part:

Remember me talking about publishing stellar content on Linkedin pulse? Well the Linkedin algorithm favours content that gets a lot of traction immediately after publishing.

And LinkedIn Groups are great places to drive that initial engagement from. And such practices drive leads to your business too!

Lead Generation

Lead Generation is an optional feature of LinkedIn Ads. It helps you directly collect leads from ad campaigns on LinkedIn. Visitors clicking on your LinkedIn Ads will head to a landing page with a contact form.

Now that’s the traditional route. Wanna know how I do it?

By visiting profiles.

Yes- that’s right! I simply visit the profiles of at least a 100 ideal customers a day. Simply doing this gets me a lot of targeted leads.

And guess why?

Whenever I visit a profile on LinkedIn, they get a notification about it. And guess what, my attractive motto/tagline and profile image is shown with the notification. If the tagline and photo are intriguing enough, they’ll check out your profile and connect with you.

Exporting Contacts

Our fifth method for lead generation is exporting email addresses and other contacts from LinkedIn.

All you need to do is select the My Network icon from your LinkedIn home page’s top menu.

Then select Your Connections on the left of the page.

Select Manage Synced and Imported Contacts on the top left portion of the screen.

Then click Export Contacts which you’ll find under Advanced Actions

Then select Request Archive

After this, you’ll get an email to the primary email address you’ve given. This contains the link to download your connections.

If you’ve done this right, you should have a list with a large number of contact details, which you can then use for cold emailing or retargeting.

With these steps, you can expect to get more targeted leads to your business from LinkedIn. Obviously, this will pave the way for more revenue and traction.

And the best part:

For up and coming niches like blockchain technology or cryptocurrencies, Linkedin is one the best places to network and gain traction.

B2B engagement can take you a long way- and they’re important for any kind of business, bet it SaaS, service or even dropshipping ecommerce businesses.

Have any great LinkedIn lead generation hacks? Let’s talk in the comments below!

About the Author: Catalin is the founder of Ecommerce Platforms and Inspired Mag. He loves matcha, blockchain technology and travel.