Why companies are turning to LinkedIn

A glance at some of the key figures behind LinkedIn demonstrates its breadth of coverage and some of the advantages it has over traditional digital marketing approaches:

• 1 billion+ members from 200+ countries – a figure that is constantly rising
• Nearly 50% are active on the platform
• LinkedIn post engagement is up 44% year-on-year
• Sales Navigator offers 36 lead and 16 account search criteria that allow you to build precise target lists
• An InMail open rate of 55.4% is vastly superior to regular email marketing (as one LinkedIn automation user says, ‘how can you resist clicking on the red number showing how many messages you have’?)

LinkedIn offers sales and marketing professionals a rich source of contacts that are perfect for outreach. Many users update their LinkedIn profiles after a promotion or change of job role. Often, these people are the ones who are most receptive to new ideas and new solutions, and they can be targeted precisely on LinkedIn.

Common Ways of Generating Leads on LinkedIn

You can use native tools in LinkedIn as well as third-party platforms to generate leads on LinkedIn. The three most common are listed below, along with a review of their relative merits.

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn Ads can effectively drive awareness, but often underperform when it comes to conversion and ROI. Many businesses find that while impressions increase, the click-through rate (CTR) and lead quality lag behind expectations.

However, using LinkedIn Ads as part of a wider marketing mix is still a valuable tactic, one that is ideal for brand visibility and engagement.

Personally, I find the targeting capabilities for LinkedIn Ads to be too broad compared to the 60+ filters available in LinkedIn Sales Navigator. If LinkedIn changes this, then I might have to revise my opinion!

A good content strategy

Being successful on LinkedIn requires more than sending messages. You need a good content strategy that mixes up posts on your Company page and individual profiles.

While engagement rates may vary between company and personal posts, using both together can maximise visibility. Organic posting is best used to build brand awareness, and results can be magnified when team members actively share, comment on and engage with company content.

I regularly speak to marketing professionals about the challenge involved in getting engagement support on LinkedIn from a busy sales team. The easiest way in my view to achieve this is to provide links and templated messages that can be clicked on and posted with minimal effort.

Targeted outreach

For sales teams that are measured on achieving tangible results, targeted outreach is where LinkedIn truly shines. This approach accelerates direct engagement and helps you achieve outcomes such as attending an exhibition or webinar, securing meetings or generating qualified leads.

Techniques for Successful Targeted Outreach

Outreach in this context is the process of actively reaching out to engage with your target audience with the goal of generating a response or action.

1. Understand Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

The starting point is always to understand your ICP. Review your top customers and identify any commonalities:

• Industry sector
• Geographical location
• Size of company
• Job title for the decision-makers
• Job titles of other influencers in the sales process

2. Build a good prospect list

When it comes to finding your target prospects on LinkedIn it can be useful to subscribe to LinkedIn Sales Navigator. As I touched on before, the superior filtering capability allows you to narrow your search greatly. With Sales Navigator you can create and save lead lists to monitor progress and revisit later.

Sales Navigator is not cheap. However, I do hear from companies that have bought licences for everyone in the sales team without a structured way of using them. In many cases, you only need one license, and then use a LinkedIn automation package like Dux-Soup to scan target prospect lists. You can then download the list for a different team member to target via an automated campaign.

3. Define SMART Campaign Objectives

Set clear goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely (SMART).

Each campaign may have a different outcome, e.g. book a demo, secure event sign-ups or download an asset.

Keep your eyes focused on the metrics that matter. This could be number of meetings booked and completed. This allows you to track performance and optimise future campaigns. Don’t get sidetracked by vanity measures such as number of LinkedIn connections.

4. Develop Robust Campaign Messaging

Your LinkedIn outreach campaigns can consist of multiple messages, combined with LinkedIn actions (visit profiles, send InMails, follow a profile, etc) to nurture your ideal prospects through to your desired objective. A campaign can have as few as 2-3 steps or as many as 12 with a good automation platform.

What we are trying to achieve with LinkedIn outreach is to mimic a natural conversation, e.g. you wouldn’t immediately ask someone that you had just been introduced to for a meeting. Try following these proven tips:

• Don’t be overly salesy. You’ll get the best results if you give value to prospects. Send useful and insightful content or invite them to an event. This type of content is more likely to resonate.
• Take a curiosity based approach. If you can get a response to a question, then this gives you a platform to build a relationship from, and then further down the line, you can pivot to the outcomes that you really want.

5. Keep Messaging Consistent Across the Team

Ensure everyone uses approved outreach templates; this helps prevent people from going off on a tangent.  LinkedIn automation platforms also enable you to share campaigns across teams to help maintain brand and messaging consistency.

6. Manage Data

You can avoid duplicate outreach by segregating data using lists in your CRM or by applying other list management techniques.  Again, LinkedIn automation platforms can manage this seamlessly for you by ensuring that the same prospect cannot be enrolled in more than one campaign.

7. Test, Test and Test Again

Run A/B tests with 250-500 prospects. You can test any number of variables, one at a time to see what works best, e.g. long vs short copy, message style, time delays between messages, etc.

LinkedIn automation dashboards and sales funnel tracking allow you to easily identify top-performing strategies to adopt across your campaigns.

8. Scale for Growth

You can increase your outreach without increasing sales resources simply by increasing the number of LinkedIn accounts being used for outreach.

This is where LinkedIn automation comes into its own. Once your campaigns are set up, tested and proven to generate leads, it’s easy to run automated LinkedIn outreach campaigns across more LinkedIn accounts without a huge amount of incremental effort.

If you automate manual LinkedIn activities, scale becomes second nature. Check out this amazing use case of a company running 9 profiles and generating millions of dollars in revenue.

Summary

Whilst many companies are using LinkedIn, not everyone is tapping into its potential to be the biggest lead-generating platform within the sales and marketing mix.

If you can get the targeting right, build credible, authentic messaging, then the automation platform gives you scale and LinkedIn itself gives you reach.

The result is accelerated lead generation and a faster sales cycle. This is the theme of our presentation at B2B Marketing Live 2025 at 11:00am on Thursday 20th November. Last year there was standing room only. ‘Smarter LinkedIn Outreach That Converts’ is ideal for sales and marketing leaders that want to understand how to really use LinkedIn for lead generation.

Visitors to the Dux-Soup stand B2B-E50 can claim a discount exclusively for B2B Marketing Live delegate as well as grab a free trial of Dux-Soup.