For B2B businesses, LinkedIn is the #1 place to discover—and nurture—leads. Over 58 million companies actively build brand communities on the popular networking platform. Among Fortune 500 companies, 97% are active LinkedIn clients.
More than any other virtual space, LinkedIn is built to help entrepreneurs grow and thrive. Yet, the sheer popularity of the platform can make LinkedIn marketing daunting. How can a sales agent sort through the millions of users to find potential clients?
Fortunately, nobody has to tackle this formidable challenge alone. Agents can streamline all aspects of B2B lead generation with LinkedIn automation.
Read on to learn exactly what LinkedIn automation is. Then, discover 12 tips to make it work for your brand.
What is LinkedIn Automation?
LinkedIn automation is an umbrella term for a wide range of practices.
Despite the variety, all of these practices have one thing in common: they offload rote, tedious tasks inherent to networked lead generation onto tools. Some automated LinkedIn lead generation tools are complex, AI-driven applications. Others are as low-tech as a template.
When you need to generate leads on LinkedIn, automation will save you time. For many entrepreneurs, automation saves so much time they generate exponentially more leads. This increase fuels a sustainable customer acquisition funnel—a vital part of scaling your business.
What Does “Scale Your Business” Mean?
Scaling your business is the act of establishing a support structure for sustainable growth. Scalable businesses are ready to handle an increase in demand.
Scaling happens when revenue increases at a rate that surpasses increased costs. To scale a business effectively, an entrepreneur typically needs:
- Scalable technology
- Adaptable production processes
- Staff
- Systems and resources for customer support
- Sustainable workflow
Learning how to scale your business effectively is key if you want to net a high valuation. Automated lead generation tools that facilitate LinkedIn messaging can help you scale your online business—particularly if you run a B2B brand.
12 Lead Generation Tips: How to Scale Your Business Quickly With LinkedIn Automation
Do you know the phrase, “work smarter, not harder”? Automation is the smarter way to grow and scale your business.
The good news is, there are plenty of ways to approach automating lead generation. Which one’s right for you?
1. Hone Your LinkedIn Presence (Make a Killer Profile)
No matter what lead generation strategy you use, it’ll fall flat if your profile is bland. Your company’s LinkedIn profile is the face of your brand in the virtual world. Before you do anything else, make your profile a lead magnet.
There are plenty of systems to optimize your profile. First, make sure it’s complete, that your photos and logos are professional-quality, and that your contact information is easy-to-find. Beyond that, it’s worthwhile to optimize with more strategy.
You can utilize branding concepts, SEO keyword research, and strategic choice and placement of your digital assets to elevate your page. Innovators have developed automated tools that can streamline any of these tasks.
For instance, Brandkit.io automates branding, then adapts and formats your brand to all relevant social media profiles—including LinkedIn. If you aim to automate SEO research, keep reading.
2. Automate Market Research: Who Is Your Dream Client?
Market research is critical to lead generation on any platform. It’s how you develop profiles of potential leads.
On LinkedIn, market research involves cultivating a list of potential businesses to target. Then scrape CRM data, and discover who’s the right person at a company to connect with.
You can automate many tasks in this research phase. In 2021, Forbes declared that “smart people” use LinkedIn automation tools for B2B prospecting. Tools like hunter.io and Expendi automatically execute critical tasks like identifying leads, finding contact information, and scraping relevant CRM data.
3. Streamline Targeted Advertising on LinkedIn
Targeted advertising is another useful lead generation strategy.
LinkedIn offers extensive targeting tools, so you can pinpoint the companies most likely to respond to your service. Many of those tools incorporate automated functions.
The tools give analytics data from the initial ads you run. Explore it, then use that to adapt your messaging. You can even experiment with a limited A/B test.
LinkedIn also enables re-targeting. This is useful in the lead nurturing stage of lead generation.
4. Accelerate SEO, Search Term Research
SEO and keyword research lets you create content that garners a high rank in search results. For LinkedIn, that’s your profile, any articles you write, and any social engagement activity. Effective SEO means when a potential lead is looking for someone who does what you do, they’ll find you—not your competitor.
Effective SEO requires checking off a lot of tedious tasks. Fortunately, most of those tasks can be automated. Today, you can get software that:
- Analyzes SERPs to determine popular, relevant keywords
- Determine keyword competition
- Recommend keywords tied to a specific campaign
- Suggest new keyword integration options
After you’ve automated SEO research, it’s time to build your campaign.
5. Develop LinkedIn-Based Marketing Campaign, Plan Sequences
Inbound lead generation is an excellent basis for a LinkedIn-driven marketing campaign. While it sounds elaborate, automation makes creating a marketing campaign easier than ever.
LinkedIn also enables some unique strategies. Some automated programs, like SalesFlow, utilize your existing network and contacts to turbo-charge your campaign. While your connections may not be your target clients, the program encourages camaraderie that facilitates introductions. You can run these message sequences concurrently with drip marketing targeted at potential clients.
SalesFlow also automates creating and sending invitations—to connect, to events, and even to branded groups. All aspects of targeted communication can be streamlined in a LinkedIn marketing campaign.
6. Automate Lead-Generating LinkedIn Content Planning
Thought leadership content can be a pillar of a strong lead-generated strategy on LinkedIn. High-quality LinkedIn content develops your brand’s reputation as innovative, thoughtful, and trustworthy. These mental impressions of your brand linger long after a campaign is over—which can make evergreen content useful.
Today, you can take advantage of software programs that automate content planning. LinkedIn itself encourages businesses to make a “tactical plan” for content. The template LinkedIn offers is a good one.
Even with that, there’s room to automate topic generation. The best topics readily engage your target audience, naturally, incorporate key terms, and build your brand. Idea aggregation, scheduling, and workflow management can all be outsourced to software.
7. Streamline Content Creation With Automation
Once you have a content plan, you create the content. You can’t get away from creating media. But, you can automate several content creation processes, including:
- Copywriting (natural language generation)
- Design (templates, automatic resizing)
- Editing
- Readability checking
- Search engine optimization
Some applications go even further.
The A.I. Surfer, for instance, offers real-time content edits that encourage best practices. Other popular programs automatically fill in meta tags, URLs, and image descriptions. Some can scan and alert you to broken links.
Automated content creation helps you get the volume you need without sacrificing quality.
8. Automate Engagement: Targeted Post, Group Interaction
It’s not wise to automate engagement on LinkedIn. When you talk to others, you want to be yourself.
But, automated tools can streamline your search for relevant profiles and groups. They can also integrate engagement into your workflow.
Remember: interacting with posts is a non-optional part of lead generation on LinkedIn. The platform’s algorithm elevates profiles that interact with others. People who only “talk” (post) but never “listen” (respond) get no boost.
9. LinkedIn Outreach: Automate Messaging
Sending messages directly is a useful tactic in a lead-generation strategy. However: LinkedIn penalizes spam. If the platform believes you’re spamming other companies—or violating its Terms and Conditions—it can suspend you.
The best way to avoid spamming is to think. Instead of focusing on what you want from a message, try to imagine what the recipient will get out of it. To do that well, you need to write compelling messages first, then personalize them.
You can streamline the first task with many of the tools mentioned earlier. Choose templates and generative tools that help you create compelling copy and design quickly. Consider automatically adapting content you’ve previously created as branding into a message.
10. LinkedIn Messages: Automate Personalization
Then, you can automate personalizing your messages. Salesflow can interface with your CRM database to streamline personalization. It can also automate and adapt your message’s information, tone, and length to better engage the recipient. Any potential client data you can load into a spreadsheet, you can use to personalize your messages.
11. Automatically Qualify, Filter Leads
It’s a popular strategy to qualify and filter leads concurrently with executing message sequences. You could create a rubric and try to score each lead by hand. That’s one way to try to figure out where to spend your sales efforts.
But it might be wiser to automate filtering with applications. Programs that incorporate analytics can help you choose the most relevant metrics to qualify leads. They can also easily pull in CRM data you scraped previously.
Other applications can automatically identify relevant terms and characteristics that make a lead a greater potential client.
12. Streamline Lead Nurturing With One Click
Most entrepreneurs nurture leads through messages and, later, sales calls. Automation can get you to the call faster.
In 2019, SalesFlow optimized one agency’s LinkedIn strategy to generate leads most likely to book meetings. The nurturing focus of the campaign paid off. With SalesFlow’s structured, scalable strategy, the agency’s LinkedIn campaign generated 3-4X more bookings than previous strategies.
Scalable B2B Lead Generation, Right on LinkedIn
Lead generation doesn’t have to be stressful. With SalesFlow, it’s easy to generate on-brand messages, each precision-targeted to potential future clients. Scale your B2B outreach today with our premium LinkedIn automation app.
If you need more time in your workday, give us a call. We’ll set up a demo with one of our experts at your convenience.