If you’re a LinkedIn Premium member, you’ve likely already done the basic setup for Sales Navigator, but are you aware of its potential for organic lead generation? Follow these easy steps to start finding and developing prospects that will help grow your customer base in 2024.
1. Prepare your content. In order for this strategy to work, you’re going to need some compelling content to entice your prospects to learn more about you and your business. This could be an ebook, webinar, product demonstration, or even a short course that fits in with your niche or area of expertise.
2. Let Sales Navigator become your search engine. LinkedIn’s standard search engine does an okay job at finding people, but the real power is in Sales Navigator’s filtered searches. You can fine-tune your searches to find your ideal customers based on industry, location, years of experience, or even education level. This gives you an immense amount of control over tailoring the exact audience you want, and of course a more targeted list will lead to better quality results.
3. Give your prospects control. There are two steps to crafting the message you’ll be sending to your prospects. The first is to get them to qualify themselves — open with a question like “Hi [Name], would you be interested in learning more about [topic]?” This should tie in with the content you prepared, and could be any topic relevant to what your business does.
The second step is to hand the reins over to them and get them to opt in. Tell them that you have this free ebook (or webinar or whatever your prepared content is), and that if they want to check it out, all they have to do is reply with “yes” or even a thumbs-up emoji. Don’t forget to finish the message by letting them know there’s no pressure (so that they feel in control), and wish them a great day.
4. Send your messages with care. Obviously you want to send out as many of these messages as possible, but LinkedIn does have some parameters you need to be aware of, and its spam detectors are extremely strict. Don’t even think about using any automation tools to send messages out — you’ll almost certainly get caught and shut down. Instead, send messages out individually, and play by LinkedIn’s extremely fair messaging rules.
You can send 100 messages per day to your first-degree connections, and the number of second-degree and third-degree messages you can send out depends on which Premium account you have. You can even pay to buy more messaging credits, but you can also message any fellow LinkedIn group members free of charge, regardless of your connection level.
5. Follow up personally. When you start getting responses from prospects who have agreed to opt in, you can use their contact details on the landing page form for your free content. Let them know you’ve sent that to them, and then a day or two later you can follow up by telling them you can’t wait to hear what they thought of the content, and that you’d love to answer any questions or hear their feedback.
This is how you nurture those leads and help push the conversation forward!
Now that the new year is just around the corner, it’s time to start reviewing and updating your business goals. Contact us for a free consultation, and we’ll assess your current digital marketing strategy and give you personalized tips to help you level up your efforts in 2024.
COGO Interactive is an award-winning digital marketing agency specializing in online marketing strategy, web design, SEO and social media marketing. We work with clients in Virginia, Maryland, Washington, DC and across the nation.
