Did you read our previous post about how to improve your LinkedIn reach and engagement? Wondering how to get more LinkedIn leads? Not sure how to do it without scaring your prospects away? Today, we’ll walk you through how to use LinkedIn to turn complete strangers into high-quality prospects – without being sales-y! Learn the powerful strategies that leverage your content, boost thought leadership, and encourage engagement to get more LinkedIn leads.
1. LinkedIn Poll Strategy
The best way to generate organic, quality leads on LinkedIn without being sales-y is by doing it via your content. And one of our favourite content types to accomplish this are industry-specific polls that address a pain point that your customer has. You want to send that poll and a direct message to targeted prospects and ask them to participate in it by voting.
First, build a list of first-degree connections that are targeted prospects. For example, technology CMOs. Then send them a very simple message that simply states, “Hi (insert name)! I posted a poll last week and would love your one-click vote on it.” Then put the URL to the poll right below that and simply end off with something like, “Thanks and hope you are doing well.”
When you approach lead generation from this methodology, you are doing a couple of things. One, you are approaching it from a non sales-y standpoint, and two, you are asking for someone’s opinion, which could be flattering to them. So it’s a very simple approach that is a lot different than just sending someone a sales-y message and telling people what you can do to help them. You’re leveraging your content, you’re boosting your thought leadership, and you’re encouraging your prospects to participate.
An idea for coming up with poll topics is to look at your customer’s pain points and look at what problems they are trying to solve. Then, ask questions in your polls related to those pain points and their problems. And so the whole goal is to get them to want to participate in the poll. If you send them a poll that doesn’t resonate with them, it’s probably not the best fit for a lead generation tactic. Your poll should be related to the products and services that you provide, but it should never be about your product or service. You wanna make sure that it’s a topic that resonates with the people that you are sending this message to, so that poll can then eventually lead to your solutions.
2. Roundup Post Strategy
Another content type that works well for lead generation is a roundup posts. The first step when creating a roundup post is to identify five to 10 prospects that you want to reach out to. You need to make sure that they are subject matter experts. Then, you are going to pose a question that you can center a post around, and send that question to them via LinkedIn messages. Toot their horn a little bit, boost their ego, and express gratitude for their content, their contributions to the industry. And then you want to simply ask them for their opinion on this question. Mention how you are working on a post and you would like to feature them in the post. This is a great way to break the ice and get them to know you a little bit better, and hopefully strike up a conversation around that topic that can then lead to you explaining about your products and solutions and how you can provide value to their company!
3. Thought-Leadership Post Strategy
Another way to generate leads through your content is via thought leadership posts, your own perspective on a particular topic. Spend some time to create this thought leadership post, make sure it gets enough engagements, and you can send this post out to your prospects via LinkedIn Messenger.
How you wanna do that is approaching it in a way that asks for their opinion. When you can tie in something that your prospect has already posted about that is similar to what you posted about, this works even better. You could say something like, “Hey, (insert name), I loved your post on X, Y, and Z. I actually just posted something similar today with a different take on it, and I would love your thoughts!” And then you can simply put the URL and then send it to them.
Again, this is a way of getting in front of them and striking a conversation. But you’re not asking for the sale, you’re not pitching, you’re simply directing them to a thought leadership piece of content that they might be interested in, and then you’re asking for their feedback on it.
Ideally, you wanna send these messages out within 24 hours of posting that thought leadership content. You have about a four to five-day window here from the time that you post to the time that you stop sending messages out to people, asking for their thoughts.
LinkedIn Mistakes to Avoid
1. Don’t send links without permission
We see this happening a lot and we don’t want you to do this! A lot of people think that it’s okay to send content without permission. They blindly start sending links to people via direct messages in LinkedIn, and that rubs people the wrong way, because A, they didn’t ask for that and B, it comes off a little sales-y. I know you think you’re helping people by providing them with free content, but it actually doesn’t work that way.
If you wanna send someone an external link to a blog post, a white paper, a video, a webinar, whatever it is, strike up a conversation first, then you can lead to that question and ask them if they would find that particular piece of content valuable. And when you do this, make sure that your content is actually valuable. Whether you’re sending people to a post on LinkedIn or you’re sending people outside of LinkedIn with their permission, you have to make it valuable content, especially when it comes to leveraging your content for lead generation.
2. Don’t send generic content
On that note, you wanna make sure the content that you’re sending people is very specific. Don’t make it too broad. Make sure that it is hyper-focused on a topic that your prospect would be exceptionally interested in, aka, it’s one of their pain points, or something they have been wanting to work on as a company.
3. Don’t be spammy
Lastly, when you are sending messages to people, you wanna make sure that you’re staying under LinkedIn’s spam filter radar. LinkedIn spam filters trigger after 250 actions are taken. Actions are sending connection requests and sending messages. When you send 50 messages a day or less, you stay under that spam filter radar.
What other great ways do you have on how to get more LinkedIn leads? Leveraging content to generate leads on LinkedIn works best with your first-degree connections. So how do you actually increase your first-degree connections? We’ll cover that strategy in detail in a later post!
