There are almost sixty million companies now operating on LinkedIn, contactable by anyone on the site. With this kind of reach, you might start to wonder if there is a better way that you can leverage such an online platform. Well, were you aware that you can automate many of the interactions that you have with others on LinkedIn?
Below we discuss several of the reasons why LinkedIn automation is a successful way to boost your sales opportunities. As you read through, you should be able to learn many new ways to generate leads with minimal effort. So, what are you waiting for?
What Is LinkedIn Automation?
LinkedIn automation software allows you to perform many of the tasks that you would usually enact as a sales rep without input. Most of the things such software allows you to do includes:
- Searching LinkedIn for possible leads based on several factors
- Sending connection requests to discovered leads
- Posting of content on a schedule
- Engaging with external accounts if they fit specific criteria
- Running and analyzing a social media post campaign
- Messaging leads’ accounts based on an automated script
- Receiving data on how a campaign is running
This can be very useful in many industries because it allows contact with leads to happen reliably and without mistake. Some of the other benefits include the following examples.
Save Time
By automating the lead generation process, this part of the sales team’s role can complete much faster. This allows the team to then either focus on other areas of their role, or find other ways to contact extra clients moving forward.
On top of this, it might not always be good to send messages or connection requests when the team is in the office. Using automation software, they can set messages to send when they are away from their desk. They will no longer need to log into their computer or account while at home, saving on overtime pay.
Save Money
Time is money. Should you gain the tools to engage with more people, faster and without human interaction, you will not need to spend as much on lead generation.
On top of that, another option without automated LinkedIn messaging would be to hire someone whose sole job would be to find leads. This is no longer necessary with automated searching tools such software provides.
Increase Your Reach
A LinkedIn automation tool can also often engage with social media outside of LinkedIn itself. Look for software that can post on many different accounts at once. This keeps your message the same across many different locations but increases the number of people who see the post.
Target Your Efforts Better
Even when using LinkedIn automation for messages, you will not want to send out messages that are a waste of resources. As such, it is important to refine your engagement to the most-likely people to take you up on offers for connection.
Automation tools can make a search using predefined limitations that you set. This can return large groups of people who match your needs, who you can then contact using the same automation tools. You can complete the whole process with very little oversight, freeing up the sales team for other work.
Gain Valuable Insight
After engaging with a campaign to gain more leads or conversions, it is important to be able to retrospect on how such a campaign went. A fully-functional piece of LinkedIn automation software can retrieve and store this data for you.
The software should also have the capability to display it in ways that are useful for fast consumption or communication. This allows you to pass on data faster to others in your organization and lets them process it in a shorter space of time.
Much of this data would otherwise be unobtainable or too difficult to collate and parse. Using automation tools lets you do this near-instantly.
Create Better Strategies
Once you have data related to your lead generation efforts, it is important to use it moving forward to plan your next steps. It may be that you want to retrospect on the data and make incremental changes, or you might be looking to find out why a plan failed.
Either way, with the ability to scrutinize data from your messaging, such as how often people responded, you can begin to make decisions. It may turn out that your niche target was not focused the right way, or people may not have received something in your messaging quite how you intended. Either way, you can take that knowledge and make changes that will allow you to have a boosted uptake of connections from then on.
Automate Your Social Media Posts
A great way to generate leads is to create a social media outreach campaign. When you run it, you do not want to have to go online yourself and post each social media message. This is especially true if it means you will need to be online outside of working hours, necessitating overtime.
Instead, you could use a system that has LinkedIn automation for messaging. This way, you can upload your messages and it will then post them at specific times itself. This can happen many times over a day, week, or even months.
Automate Other Online Interactions
It is not only new full social media posts that you can automate with such a system. Also, you can use a LinkedIn automation system to engage with your social media accounts in other ways.
By liking posts based on keywords, commenting on posts, and other activities you can make your organization seem active. This will enhance your visibility as it makes you appear relevant to the ongoing conversations in your industry.
When people then respond to these interactions, you can start to switch over to a human response. Although, if it does not need it, then you will be able to keep an active account even without any input from anyone.
Extract Data for Discussion
Any LinkedIn automation tool should be able to pull data from interactions that you have. This may be archiving group posts, saving comments, or noting reactions. You do not have to do this in detail, but it might just be data of the fact that such an interaction occurred.
By doing this, you can add further fidelity to the stats that you are tracking. You can compare and contrast certain kinds of data. For example, what you get from your direct communication with how your social media engagement is progressing.
Track Communications
By using an automation tool, you can often have an ongoing view of communications that goes back and forth with potential clients. You can summarise this succinctly in a single dashboard screen to allow a user to view and process each interaction. You are then able to pass specific leads or clients on to users they match with, to help with ongoing communication where necessary.
Integrate With CRM
If you need to push a user in the direction of Customer Relations, you want to know that CRM’s efforts are working alongside your own. You could use a cloud-based system with strong integrations with CRM systems. This way, your customer service team can track all their tickets without issue.
The tickets will then link to the individual client’s account and provide both a context as well as historical data for any CRM issue that may arise.
By doing this, the sales team and customer relations can have the assurance that they are simpatico when dealing with specific issues.
Overcome LinkedIn Connection Limits
On LinkedIn, if you send out too many connection requests then your account will be flagged as a source of spam. If this happens, LinkedIn may ban the account on a temporary or permanent basis. As this is something you want to avoid, it is important to have good information on what the limits are before you go over them.
Automation tools help you by preventing you from going over these limits. They can send automatic connection requests or messages every day, up to what they understand the expected limits to be. Then they will stop sending more until the next safe period.
Keep in Step With Everyone Else
One of the biggest benefits of automation is a simple fact that everyone else is already using it. By refusing to move into the 21st Century, you will fall behind. Stubbornness will cost you money, time, and employees as they lose faith in your ability to grow.
Instead, you can keep up with the “Joneses” and make use of tools that can increase all your capabilities. There is no good reason not to.
What Should You Do Next?
Now that you understand the benefits of LinkedIn automation tools, you should be able to start incorporating them into your flow. Still, there is a lot more to learn about LinkedIn automation and how it can benefit your sales teams.
Lucky for you, our specialists are ready to talk you through exactly what our software can do to help you. So, what are you waiting for? Send us a message to request a demonstration of our services today.