There are 17 million thought leaders on LinkedIn.

You will be one of them and turn your posts into sales with a well-defined LinkedIn lead generation strategy.

What is LinkedIn lead generation?

LinkedIn lead generation is the process of finding and collecting leads from LinkedIn.

With LinkedIn, you can gather inbound and outbound leads. Therefore, reaching a larger audience.

Some key features of LinkedIn lead generation include:

  • Profile optimization
  • Sharing valuable content
  • Engaging with your leads and building your network
  • Direct outreach in the platform
  • Advanced search filters
  • Groups and communities

How to create your strategy

There are many different LinkedIn strategies out there, however, we know you know it’s not just about picking a random strategy and seeing what happens.

With 4 simple steps, you’ll be ready to decide on your strategy:

  • Step 1: Ask yourself what kind of person you’re going to be on LinkedIn

Define your style beforehand and tweak it slightly from there, adjusting what works and what doesn’t once you start to post on LinkedIn.

Do you want to be funny, to the point, a storyteller? Do you want to use images? Do you want to set a particular color scheme for your profile? (Yes, this works)

  • Step 2: Make sure your topics, niche, and point of view are clear from the start.

If your readers aren’t able to decide what stance you’re taking when reading different posts, you won’t seem like a reliable source.

Instead, you’ll seem like someone who only posts according to trends, ignoring their own ideas and opinions. Definitely not what you look for in a thought leader.

  • Step 3: Decide the format of your posts.

Are you a listicle kind of person? Do you prefer carousels? Or long descriptive posts?

Although there is really no wrong answer here, you want to make sure you decide on your primary format.

We say “primary format” because it’s a good idea to mix in a different format occasionally to keep things interesting and avoid monotony. Too much of the same format together could stagger your progress.

Plan out when you’ll publish longer in-depth posts, personal stories, short facts, debates, carousels…

  • Step 4: Include a link to your product/service or a sign-up link to your newsletter.

Although this step could fall into your “profile optimization” step, make sure you take the time to think about this carefully.

The entire goal of having a LinkedIn lead generation strategy is to eventually move more leads through the sales funnel, so you should have a permanent CTA for your leads to access at any given time.

9 LinkedIn lead generation strategies

Although we are aware that profile optimization is usually considered a strategy on its own, in this article we don’t really want to waste your time including it as a separate strategy, since it is essentially the first step in every strategy.

If you need some guidance in order to optimize your LinkedIn profile, we’ll leave you with How to Improve Your LinkedIn SEO.

Before we get into the more specific strategies, we’ll leave you with a basic 9 step LinkedIn strategy that is guaranteed to get you followers:

Let’s get down to specifics.

1. Engage

This one is simple and effective.

LinkedIn is a wonderful place to engage with leads, colleagues, industry experts, etc.

However, it’s unreasonable to presume that everyone will be open to commenting on your posts if they don’t know who you are.

However, if you’re active, and you comment, react, and repost other people’s posts, and reply to those who comment on your posts, you’ll be reaching a much larger audience that will, in return, be willing to read and know about you and your business. Additionally, you will be establishing yourself as a thought leader to a larger audience!

And it’s not just leads who think this. LinkedIn’s algorithm will also be happy to stand by your side.

With this video, you’ll learn how to save valuable time in engaging with your leads!

2. Unify your strategy with your team

It goes without saying, but when posting about your business (whether you’re the CEO, in Sales or Marketing, etc) you need to be cohesive with the brand voice.

In most businesses, there are different departments with totally different jobs, but each one of them has the same end goal. Make sales.

Inevitably, most employees will have their own LinkedIn profiles with their own audience, meaning your business will multiply its audience with a unified LinkedIn strategy.

Buyers will typically go over 5-7 pieces of content before making their decision, so you want to guide them towards conversion, rather than confusing them along the way to the point where they don’t really know what they would be buying or the type of attention they would be receiving.

A unified team results in a strong team.

How can you write your posts as a team?

  • Create a document with new releases
  • Provide examples of narratives
  • Include templates your teammates can copy-paste
  • Provide negative examples too so your team knows what narratives to avoid

3. Schedule your posts in advance

This will give you a larger overview of how your LinkedIn profile will look like in a determined period of time (1 month, for example).

The main benefit of this strategy is that you will be able to tweak and perfect your cohesion among several different posts.

By scheduling in advance, you’ll ensure that your posts aren’t all over the place.

You can schedule posts directly from LinkedIn, by clicking on the 🕑 icon on the bottom right once you’ve written it.

However, this system can be time-consuming.

By using a tool like Taplio you can schedule many posts easily. Additionally, with Taplio, you won’t have to spend countless hours thinking about your posts, as you can generate them with the tool’s powerful AI.

4. Invest in paid ads

With LinkedIn’s paid ads, you’re guaranteed to reach your target audience more efficiently.

You can choose several different formats and targeting options to make sure you gather the most valuable leads for your business:

  • LinkedIn sponsored content

This type of content works like a lead magnet. Your content is featured, and you can offer your resources in exchange for engagement.

  • LinkedIn lead generation forms

Lead Gen Forms allow you to collect lead data directly within LinkedIn without requiring users to leave the platform.

When users click on your ad’s CTA, a pre-filled form with their LinkedIn profile information opens, and they only need to submit it.

  • Sponsored InMail

Send personalized messages directly to LinkedIn users’ inboxes.

This is a great option for you to promote upcoming webinars, or to offer demos.

  • Text Ads

LinkedIn Text Ads are a simpler ad format that appears in the sidebar of LinkedIn’s desktop view. These ads consist of a short text, a small image, and a CTA.

  • Dynamic Ads

Dynamic Ads use LinkedIn’s targeting features to personalize the creative by dynamically inserting elements like the user’s profile photo, company logo, and other data.

5. Research your competitors and industry trends

This strategy will help you stay on top of what your leads or your targeted audience want or need.

By researching your competitors, you can get ideas on what to post, and what you think works and what doesn’t.

You can also gain insight into industry trends such as:

  • Pain points
  • Solutions
  • Hot topics
  • Popular groups
  • Well-known influencers

6. Lead magnets

This strategy is probably one of the best ways to get increased engagement on your posts.

Essentially, you will be offering a valuable resource in exchange for a comment, a message, or a follow. Dealer’s choice.

This system works similarly to a lead capture form but on LinkedIn.

As with lead capture, you can’t simply ask for comments without giving anything in return, so your posts must add value and prove you are an expert in your field, and your resource should live up to the promise.

See how Tal used lead magnets on his posts:

7. Invest in LinkedIn lead generation tools

More than a strategy, this is a must.

LinkedIn lead generation tools will help you automate your strategy from start to finish and help you focus your energy and resources on actually closing your deals.

With Taplio, you can focus on building your personal brand, some features the tool offers are:

  • AI-generated content
  • Content suggestions based on your industry
  • Post scheduler
  • Statistics
  • Automated engagement

With lemlist, you can use the Chrome extension to scrap your leads from LinkedIn and push them to outreach campaigns so you can move them down the sales funnel.

Key takeaways

In short, LinkedIn is one of the best lead databases there is out there, and knowing how to use it efficiently is going to define whether you find quality leads or not.

By implementing any of these strategies (or combining them), you will be able to:

  • Establish yourself as a thought leader
  • Add social proof to your outreach campaigns
  • Reach more leads
  • Become a relevant industry leader
  • Grow your network.