Have you been struggling with generating leads on LinkedIn? 

Are you having trouble coming up with a profile that can capture your level of professionalism?

Is your current LinkedIn strategy messing you and keeps getting zero results?

Well in this article I’m going to help you navigate the whole process of LinkedIn marketing and how you can optimize your profile to attract more prospective clients.

This is a step-by-step guide from marketing to lead generation on LinkedIn. 

First of all, click here for a helpful guide on how to create and optimize your LinkedIn profile.

A Step-by-Step LinkedIn marketing Tutorial for Lead Generation.

Step #1: Defining Your Goal.

LinkedIn is a very big platform where you can do everything about business and networking.

If you don’t have clear goals from the beginning, you might find it hard to get results.

It is like this if you don’t know what you want then how are you going to get it?

You might just end up wasting time in the name of social selling but in the real sense, you are getting zero results.

The goal of this whole process is to book a meeting with your dream customer, get them on the phone and close the deal.

It simple as that, so every action you take on LinkedIn has to be helping you achieve that goal.

Before you do anything, ask yourself, is this actually helping me book a meeting or it’s just a distraction?

Does the content I post on my page convert into leads? Everything you do should be pushing you towards the goal.

To book meetings, implement the next step,

Step #2: Create Your Ideal Customer Profile.

ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) means defining who your customer is.

If you are currently working at an established company, the ICP is already established.

All you need to do is to learn how to spot that customer. 

But if you are in a company that is still new in the business and hasn’t crafted their ideal customer yet, it is okay to try crafting one.

The importance of having an ideal customer profile is to avoid trying to please everybody but focus on the target customer.

The more specific you can get on your ICP the more conversion rates will be and meetings you book with less energy put in.

Some examples of ideal customer profiles can be;

· Start-up e-commerce websites with 20 or fewer employees but raised over $5 million in funding.

· Cryptocurrency and blockchain news sites, blogs, or email newsletters with over 100,000 web traffic per month.

The trick here is to be as specific as possible depending on the product you are selling or the problems you can solve.

If your company is still not yet clear on who the ideal customer is, you can have many of them in different buckets.

For example, 

If you are selling marketing SEO services; your target start-up companies can be in the lending space, e-commerce sites, or whatever industry you can switch to.

Using different available filters on LinkedIn can help with the search for target companies.

Now that you have your ideal customer profile, you need to know how to find them.

Step #3: Build Your Prospecting List.

There are a couple of ways to do this;

You can use an excel sheet, google sheets, or a CRM to host all your data or you can use a LinkedIn sales navigator.

Having an ideal customer profile in mind, you can now try to look for companies that fit into that profile.

You can start by listing all the companies regardless of their size 

Then find the decision makers of each of those companies and add them to your list.

Your focus here is getting their email addresses, and phone numbers if you can or adding them on LinkedIn.

All these contacts should be added to your prospects list.

How you are going to approach them depends on what you are selling.

Whichever department you want to reach out to, the focus should be on the upper management level.

From the director upwards.

If you are selling things like software, you can hit up the CTO or the other technical staff.

But if you are targeting SMEs you can try talking to the founder since there might not be that many employees.

Now that you have your contact list, the next thing is coming up with an outreach strategy.

Step #4: LinkedIn Outreach Strategy.

The effectiveness of the messages that you sent at this point will depend on how you execute the other steps above.

If you don’t know your ideal customer, the end goal, or the contact address, then it can be difficult to carry out a successful outreach.

Now if you are using LinkedIn navigator for your outreach, there are limits to the number of messages you can send.

The other way to do it is to add all the people you want to connect with. 

Once they accept your connection requests, then message them freely without having to pay anything.

This method works but with time it is going to be limiting when it comes to the number of messages you can send per day.

So you don’t want to send spam connections here, remember the number reduces as you go.

The way to go with the outreach strategy is discussed in detail here where you learn how to generate leads on LinkedIn.

Step #5: LinkedIn Content Marketing.

The best way to nature your leads as a sales specialist is by content creation.

This might be perceived as something that salespeople have nothing to do with. 

But it is important to have some form of content related to your products and services.

Sharing content with your connections on LinkedIn in form of copies, PDFs, images or articles is a good way of engaging them.

The content should just reflect your experiences or what your brand is about especially the value you bring to other people.

When your connections react to your content, it’s a good signal for engaging in a conversation or asking questions about what they think about your content.

Depending on the level of engagement, it might lead to future partnerships.

The response to your messages on LinkedIn can be nurtured by how the prospect consumes your content.

Sometimes they take time to respond but when they come across your content in their feed, you might see their comments or reactions.

So content acts like your passive ambassador that displays a good impression on the prospective customer.

It makes them familiar with you plus it’s a way of cementing your brand thus increasing the chances of getting a response.

A combination of outbound strategy with nurturing your leads results in a more effective LinkedIn strategy.

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