In today’s highly competitive business landscape, B2B lead generation has become the holy grail for companies looking to scale and succeed. 80 percent of B2B marketing leads from social media come through a single platform – LinkedIn.
That’s a humongous leap that this once small professional networking site has taken to become a platform that is single-handedly spearheading the growth of thousands of B2B companies.
However, to gain this huge advantage your B2B company needs to go beyond the traditional steps of joining LinkedIn and being active on it. It takes much more to leverage this platform better and make it a powerful B2B lead generation tool for your company.
Whether you are using LinkedIn for the first time or want to revamp your lead generation strategy, here’s all you need to know about it.
Continue reading to know more.
What is B2B Lead Generation?
The ultimate goal of any business is to optimize its profits and improve its potential to grow and develop year after year.
B2B lead generation is something that sits at the heart of these objectives and helps you achieve them. It is the process of identifying potential customers who are likely to find value in your offerings.
To put it simply, high-quality lead generation brings in high-value customers and helps you strategize your long-term growth marketing strategies.
Proper B2B lead generation helps you achieve specific objectives such as:
- Grow your following through intelligently-crafted content on social media platforms such as LinkedIn.
- You get more customer reviews, which helps in improving your products and services.
- Your business reaches other potential businesses as qualified leads, which are easier to convert. This leads to revenue growth.
- You gain more opportunities to partner with other businesses. For instance, you and a non-competing brand may agree to host a seminar together. Through this partnership, both the businesses get access to each other’s audiences.
- You can expand into new markets and diversify your product portfolio.
There are five main kinds of leads:
| Cold leads | Your ideal customer profile but has not shown any inclination to engage with your business yet. |
| Warm leads | Familiar with your business and follow your website or social media platforms. |
| Hot leads | Shown interest in your business and offerings. For instance, filling out a demo form or reaching your representatives directly. |
| Information qualified leads (IQL) | Beginning to research your business and thinking of ways to align their business with yours. Download your reports and attend your webinars actively. |
| Marketing qualified leads (MQL) | Actively looking for similar solutions offered by businesses like yours. |
| Sales Qualified leads (SQL) | Expressed active interest in paying for your business offerings and are ready for conversion. |
Why LinkedIn is a Great Platform for Generating B2B Leads
Now that you know what B2B lead generation is and how it benefits your business, it brings us to the question of where to generate qualified leads from.
You need to find a platform where most decision-makers with purchasing power are and where you can talk to them directly.
Enter LinkedIn.
If you are thinking about reasons why you should consider LinkedIn for lead generation, here are some mind blowing stats that will tell you why this ‘professional social networking site’ has a dominating niche amongst all other social media platforms.
- LinkedIn is 277% more effective for lead generation. That’s both Facebook and Twitter put together.
- This platform has a professional audience and 4 out of 5 of them drive business decisions.
- 92% of B2B marketers leverage LinkedIn over other platforms.
- B2B marketers see up to 2 times conversion rates on LinkedIn with an almost 44% reduction in cost per lead vis-à-vis other social media platforms.
- LinkedIn constantly innovates and offers dynamic marketing solutions, especially for B2B lead generation.
How to Plan a LinkedIn B2B Lead Generation Strategy
LinkedIn is where most of the active decision-making user base is. It’s a platform where you can even generate sales-qualified leads without even spending monies.
And, if you opt for LinkedIn’s paid B2B lead generation solutions, they are still much more cost-effective than similar campaigns using traditional or other social media platforms.
Another plus is that LinkedIn lets you measure your returns on investment (RoI) making it easier for B2B marketers to track their results and quantify them.
However, in order to really get these impressive benefits of LinkedIn, you need to devise your B2B lead generation strategy intelligently. Proper planning is the only key to diverting your resources strategically and optimizing your returns.
Here’s how to plan well to drive conversions on LinkedIn while establishing a strong presence for your business:
Define Your Objectives
B2B Lead generation is one of the most critical aspects that drive a business toward success. Like other factors, lead generation is also dynamic and continues to evolve, especially in terms of how marketers use it.
With the changes in technology and aspirations of businesses, lead generation is not what it used to be a few decades ago. To make the most of your B2B lead generation strategy on LinkedIn, you need to define what your short and long-term objectives are. Besides increasing your sales and revenue, you should focus on:
- Creating personalized brand awareness and driving people towards it.
- Pay attention to the reviews that people leave for your business. Using this market intelligence to research and tweak your offerings accordingly.
- Insights collected from B2B lead generation also help in knowing how customers view your business. This can be used to improve your customer service, which helps in creating positive word of mouth about your business.
Ensure that your lead generation objectives are realistic and aligned with your business ethos.
Understand Your Target Audience
Marketing strategies that don’t have a defined audience tend to fail and cost businesses dearly. This is why identifying your target audience is one of the most important aspects of planning your B2B lead generation strategy.
Conducting market research is a great way to understand where your audiences are and what are the growth trends, opportunities, and challenges in those markets.
Defining your customer profile is equally important. You need to know their buying behavior and decision-making ability.
Define Your LinkedIn Marketing Strategy
Now that you know your business objectives and have a set of defined target audiences, you need to choose your LinkedIn marketing strategies carefully. This means deciding your content strategy, frequency and timing, and the duration of the marketing campaign.
Don’t miss to look through LinkedIn’s marketing solutions, which are specially designed to fuel more leads.
Allocate The Budget
Once the LinkedIn B2B lead generation strategy is firmed up, you need to allocate resources. The best way to avoid wastage of resources and get the maximum returns on your investment, prioritize what will serve your objectives the best.
If you need to hire external resources like freelancers, software, and other tools, for handling your lead generation campaign, budget that too.
Top LinkedIn Lead Generation Strategies
There is no one strategy that will help your business attract good B2B leads on LinkedIn. Instead, our experts have rounded off a combination of strategies that are relevant to today’s business scenario and are sure to establish your presence amongst your targeted audiences.
Here are some of the top B2B lead generation strategies to generate more leads on LinkedIn:
Optimize the Profile of Your Business Page
Just like all social media platforms are about first impressions, your business’s LinkedIn page is also a critical deciding factor in whether your prospective customers will start conversations with you or not.
The best way to convert your generic LinkedIn page into a space that generates quality leads is to be intentional. Here are some ways to do it:
- Be intentional so that whatever you post leads to a conversation.
- Use product images that generate interest. Back it up with informative and engaging descriptions leading to your website.
- Create a story about your business. Simple explanations don’t work anymore, instead, work on a compelling story that sparks interest and inspires.
Post Valuable Content
The only way to connect and engage with potential leads is through a strong content strategy. It is through content that your business can demonstrate what it stands for, why are your products and offerings valuable, and why should other businesses follow you.
A good content strategy for B2B lead generation is one that:
- Is consistent and pushes out content at regular intervals. To do this, create a schedule for your content and stick to it.
- Assess the interests of its target audiences and tailor content to suit that.
- Uses multiple formats of content such as images and videos to keep prospective customers engaged.
- Includes informative content such as blogs, infographics, case studies, and articles to establish your business as a thought leader.
Your content strategy must not end with sharing high-quality content. You also need to join the conversations. Your team should proactively join the conversations and respond to queries promptly.
Join Relevant Groups
One of the most-rewarding B2B lead generation strategies for LinkedIn is to join relevant groups. LinkedIn has thousands of industry-centric groups where businesses look for collaborations, share their interest, and discuss industry insights.
For instance, if your business sells laptops, you can join groups of laptop manufacturers and service providers to expand your database and reach new business prospects.
You can establish your position in these groups by answering questions and offering resources that offer solutions.
Utilize Lead Gen Forms
LinkedIn’s Lead Gen Forms is a powerful tool to generate excellent leads at a larger scale. These are pre-filled forms that allow your potential customers to send you relevant information about themselves in just a few clicks.
Make sure to attach these forms to your content to get information from prospects when they click on them. You don’t need to ask your visitors to go to your website or any other platform. To make it more valuable for your audience, you can offer informative resources such as published case studies or white papers.
Know LinkedIn’s Other Unique B2B Marketing Solutions
LinkedIn is a powerful platform that makes it easy for businesses to reach their prospective customers through unique marketing solutions. Some of the best tools for LinkedIn marketing that we recommend are:
Sponsored Content
Sponsored content is nothing but all the business ads that you see. Linkedin ads strategy runs these ads in the feed and are targeted towards your specified groups of audiences. You can choose from video ads, image ads, or carousel image ads depending on your budget and offerings.
Sponsored InMail
Reach your business prospects directly with this feature that allows you to deliver personalized brand messages through the messenger feature on LinkedIn.
Use this feature to invite people to attend your webinar or event or encourage them to download your resources.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
This is a premium solution that helps your business prospect and finds leads. With this, you can enter the characteristics of your ideal client and find the most relevant leads.
This tool is also intuitive and makes recommendations about which businesses could be your leads. It also gives you data about who has visited your business profile in the last 90 days to give you a better idea about prospects who have currently shown interest in your business.
Matched Audience’s
This is one of the most powerful features when it comes to B2B lead generation on LinkedIn. Here is what Matched Audiences helps your business with:
- Website retargeting by displaying your business ads to people who have visited your website.
- Uploads a list of businesses that are a perfect match for you.
- Upload your contact list to market them through LinkedIn ads.
Summing Up
B2B lead generation on LinkedIn is much more than just accidentally coming across some leads. It is about cutting through the clutter and diverting your time and resources to find the appropriate people to do business with.
We are here to help you build a unique approach to maximize your visibility and divert key contacts with purchasing and decision-making power to your business.
Our teams help businesses stay updated with the constant changes in LinkedIn’s lead generation dynamics and support you with new strategies and technologies. Get in touch with us today to boost your leads.
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