Businesses are leveraging the potential of LinkedIn to connect with potential leads, customers, or other businesses to gather leads and generate profits. This is called LinkedIn outreach.
Your competitors are already using it! You don’t want to be the last one to connect with your potential leads, do you?
Even if you have started a new business and are wondering how to get clients or customers to make profitable sales, you have to trust the experience of millions of people who have benefited from LinkedIn outreach.
According to a survey, more than 62% of B2B marketers believe that LinkedIn successfully generates business leads.
Don’t worry, with a little push, you can match the outreach levels of your competition and even surpass them over LinkedIn.
Soon, you will have a good flow of leads and potential customers to stabilize your business growth.
You just have to be aware of the right pathway to follow.
And, we have a guide to help you understand and implement LinkedIn outreach in the best ways possible. We bring to you the necessary steps and tested strategies to take your outreach game to the next level.
Does LinkedIn Outreach Work?
As per the report by the State of B2B Marketing, more than 89% of B2B marketers make use of LinkedIn to generate leads. Now, this is not a figure that can be easily ignored.
It means that LinkedIn outreach does work.
Connecting with the right audience and generating accurate reports is of utmost importance in identifying marketing priorities. LinkedIn outreach helps you achieve them both.
If you are a budding entrepreneur and still have the question, “Why is LinkedIn accountable as a prospecting platform?”, some of its advantages will explain its potential better.
Advantages of LinkedIn for Outreach
Here are a few advantages of using LinkedIn outreach that will change your perspective on this platform. We picked these advantages from our own experience:
1. Growth in your Network
Talk to anyone who is into social media, and they will tell you how important it is to increase your social network over time.
LinkedIn is unlike any other social media platform that encourages personal connection and is specific for work colleagues and business interactions.
But, growing the network is still important for LinkedIn, just like any other social media platform. The way you use your network is an entirely different ball game.
Believe it or not, LinkedIn outreach is going to help you broaden your network over a particular course of time. You will get profitable business interactions and generate more leads in the process.
The best thing is that you will be connecting with more people in the same industry. How great is this chance to talk business with like-minded service/product seekers and providers?
2. Build Partnerships
Beyond just connecting with people, LinkedIn outreach is also about building professional partnerships and relationships with businesses in your industry.
An industry always has different business verticals. Collaborating with businesses gives you flexibility in service delivery. Thus, any business can benefit from such partnerships.
Let’s take an example.
Suppose you are a fitness coach who offers online and offline lessons on various workouts and diet plans.
LinkedIn outreach helps you connect with a company that sells protein supplements to fitness enthusiasts.
In that case, when you collaborate or become partners, you both have customers that can help one another’s business to increase sales count and profitability.
This is possible with LinkedIn outreach in terms of building partnerships.
3. Recruit Best Talents
LinkedIn outreach is not just helpful for you to bag more sales and earn more money through filtered industry-wise connections. But it also helps you find the best talents for your firm.
Most qualified and deserving candidates are looking for jobs in their relevant fields of expertise on LinkedIn.
You will have many experienced and skilled options to choose from. Recruit the best talents who can add value to the growth of your company.
These are the three core advantages of LinkedIn outreach. Beyond that, LinkedIn outreach can also help you in:
# Connecting with potential customers
# Learning more about the target market
# Generating brand, product, and service awareness
So, it is now pretty much understandable that LinkedIn outreach does work!
Best LinkedIn Outreach Tools
Using LinkedIn outreach automation tools will help you generate warm leads automatically and scale them gradually. Moreover, properly using such tools will also automate the repetitive tasks you implement for prospecting.
Here are a few popular LinkedIn outreach tools:
1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Sales Navigator adds valuable features such as free InMails, CRM integration, and advanced search to your LinkedIn platform. To enhance your outreach potential, you can set up your alerts, get lead recommendations, and add notes for prospect accounts.
2. LinkedIn Helper 2
As the name suggests, this tool helps you with your LinkedIn outreach automation. It has a lot of features to increase conversions.
It supports functions such as automatically connecting with people outside the network, auto-responding to prospect messages, and a built-in CRM.
The best thing is it has a list manager, which helps you in crafting lead-generation funnels.
3. Skrapp
Skrapp is an essential tool that helps you find emails from LinkedIn profiles or sales navigator searches.
It helps you find the emails from profiles you visit while you are prospecting. It is a chrome extension that gives you the verified email addresses of your prospects.
The tool cross-references the company name and the individual’s name with its B2B contact database to give you accurate email addresses.
4. Cleverly
Cleverly offers you a ready-to-use LinkedIn outreach service. The company has an automation platform to help you identify and connect with ideal prospects.
You have the feasibility to start your campaigns from Cleverly’s dashboard, track the reply rates and monitor the results.
You can connect it with your email-finding tool, such as Skrapp. This integration will ensure that the email addresses are sourced and directly listed to be part of the campaign.
5. Zapier
Zapier is a free LinkedIn outreach tool that links applications together to ease repetitive tasks.
You can send your data from LinkedIn to other connected apps. Beyond that, it is helpful for you to add leads to the CRM from other automation tools.
Even though it’s free, it allows you to automate your LinkedIn posting schedules.
You can always buy the paid plan to go limitless with Zapier.
What are the Different LinkedIn Outreach Techniques?
By now, we believe you have some insight into LinkedIn outreach and its potential to help your business grow.
But don’t make the mistake of believing that LinkedIn outreach is all about sending messages and connecting with leads from the target audience.
The process is not that simple. You need techniques and strategies to implement them correctly to reap benefits.
Believe it or not, there are several ways you can approach LinkedIn outreach. But to help you with a healthy start, here are a few of the popular techniques that have worked for a lot of people, including us:
1. LinkedIn InMail Technique
On LinkedIn, you don’t get to send messages to some people if you are not a connection to them.
In this way, your attempt at outreach fails drastically. But you can overcome this with the InMail technique.
This technique improves your messaging outreach on LinkedIn. It is a message feature that helps you connect with your prospects even if you are not connected on the platform.
You must have a paid LinkedIn account to use InMail without any limitations.
2. Connection Limit Technique
The number of connection requests you can send from your account depends on the age of your profile.
If you have a completely new profile, you must warm it up first.
Send ten connection requests daily for the first five days, increase it to 20 requests per day for the next five days, and keep increasing it gradually.
Soon, your account will be well-aged to be part of the global limit of 100 requests per week.
The thumb rule is to not send more than 50 connections per day if the acceptance rate is less than 60%.
To increase your acceptance rate, send maximum connection requests to people within your industry. It is the key ingredient of your LinkedIn outreach strategy.
A low acceptance rate, pending requests, or sending bulk connection requests in a single day will trigger suspicious alarms for your account. LinkedIn can block it for violating its terms.
To ensure that people accept your connection request, you must have a professional picture, an attractive headline, and a good summary.
If you are sending a note with the connection request too often, then LinkedIn might raise a weekly limitation issue.
There are certain tools, such as LaGrowthMachine, to help you bypass these limitations and invite your prospects to connect with a personalized note.
3. LinkedIn Group Engagement Technique
If you want an organic way of adding value to your LinkedIn outreach approach, this is one of your most helpful techniques.
Apart from messaging and connecting with your target audience, be part of LinkedIn groups relevant to your specific industry.
Get involved in the discussions, add value to them, and try connecting with more people in the group. Eventually, they will become your potential leads and might also match your customer profile.
4. Engagement Technique
To get more visibility for your brand and services, you must start creating content related to your industry-specific niche, which will interest your target audience.
It will enhance the engagement quotient of your potential leads with your services or products.
Following that, you must also like, comment, and share posts of your connections in your niche. Engaging with their posts will increase your visibility.
Thus, the number of clients and prospects will gradually increase.
5. LinkedIn Search Technique
The most accessible yet potent LinkedIn outreach technique is to use the search engine of the platform to find potential leads.
There is a simple way to do it effectively:
# Prefer using the ‘Advanced Search’ feature to narrow your search to find only the profiles that match your target audience.
# While you search, add keywords that are most relevant to your industry. In this way, you will have deep-filtered results.
# Look for profiles or businesses that match your prospect profile
# Add filters such as company size, job title, location, or others, to get even more relevant search results.
If you are using a Sales Navigator plan with your LinkedIn, then you get powerful search capabilities, better visibility among networks, and personalized algorithms.
If you have money to spare, you can get the best out of this technique for your LinkedIn outreach.
How to Do LinkedIn Outreach Step-by-Step?
Now that we have explained what LinkedIn outreach is and the most important tools for ensuring success in this approach, it is time to give you the steps to kickstart this process.
You cannot just hop onto the techniques. You need to set some ground rules before you can implement them. These steps will help you with that:
Step 1: Identify Your Target Audience
The most basic yet important step is determining the audience you must connect with.
No one but you can figure it out. You need to know your industry, the services you offer, target customers, and target businesses.
Once you have specified that, searching for relevant leads will be possible on LinkedIn.
Step 2: Search for Relevant Accounts to Connect With
We cannot expect everyone to have the budget for upgrading to the Premium version of LinkedIn. But without it, you don’t get access to the Sales Navigator tool.
If you have the budget, go for it because the Sales Navigator tool can help you hyper-target the right audience. You will have many highly relevant search results to connect with.
But, if you don’t have the budget, no worries. Send connection requests to relevant profiles from the primary LinkedIn search engine results.
You can also join relevant LinkedIn groups to interact with people from the same industry. Develop a rapport before you can actually connect with them and make them your potential lead.
Step 3: Connect and Collect Email Addresses
After you have sent connection requests to your prospects, wait for them to accept them. Following that, you can view their email addresses and other contact details if they have given access to them.
You will need a list of email addresses to start your marketing campaign. When you are low on budget and are starting with the LinkedIn outreach process, collect the email addresses manually.
Over time, when you have the budget, integrate an email finder tool with your account.
With such a tool, whenever you search or connect with a prospect, the email finder will automatically retrieve the verified email address (If available).
In this way, your manual efforts will be saved.
Step 4: Build a List of LinkedIn Leads
The next step is similar to collecting email addresses but has a different perspective. You must build a list of your potential leads.
If you are part of a B2B business, you must first start by listing only 100 leads. This way, you will be able to generate enough data to determine the conversion percentage.
You will have an understanding of how your target audience is responding to your services or products.
Build your lists based on behavior, demographics, business data, or other factors.
Step 5: Send a LinkedIn Message
You can send a LinkedIn message to your prospects in various ways.
First, you can send a personalized invite message to the prospects while sending a connection request to them.
Then, after they accept the connection request, you can send them direct messages to the inbox and start the interaction process.
Thirdly, you can send a message to a prospect through InMail, even if you are not connected with them. But it is a paid feature.
Engaging with prospects is an integral part of the LinkedIn outreach process. You can either do it manually or automate the process.
When you use automation tools, you don’t have to worry about manually sending messages to new connections or selecting prospects. The tool will craft a personalized message to add unique value to every connection.
You can create a proper sequence to send follow-up messages to prospects after periodic intervals.
Step 6: Monitor the Responses to LinkedIn Messages
Just sending an automated message will not do the job for you. You have to monitor the responses.
When someone responds to your automated messaging sequence, you have to take over manually and respond to your prospects in a polite, respectful, and friendly tone.
After your conversation, you must again evaluate when you should follow up with your lead and their conversion status.
Step 7: Send Cold Emails
In step 3, you collected the email addresses of your prospects and connections. It is time to use that list and outreach them through cold emails.
Now, you have to master your skills in writing cold emails or hire an employee to do that for you. If you are a start-up, there are tons of courses online to learn the right strategy for writing a perfect cold email.
LinkedIn Outreach: FAQs
1. What is Outreach Activity on LinkedIn?
Outreach Activity on LinkedIn is a section that provides a complete history of all interactions with different LinkedIn accounts.
It includes connection requests, date sent & date of acceptance, InMail activity, and message activity insight.
2. What is outreach used for?
LinkedIn outreach is used as a process on LinkedIn for connecting with potential business partners and customers. It is a proven way to connect with people within the industry, expand professional networks and connect with potential business opportunities.
LinkedIn outreach is one of the best ways to generate leads. It has helped many start-up businesses sustain their growth pace and generate good profit over time. All you need is the right approach to executing it.
3. How do I do sales outreach on LinkedIn?
You must follow some specific steps to do a sales outreach on LinkedIn. The steps include:
# Identify your target audience and prioritize the personas
# Send connection requests to industry-specific individuals or businesses
# Personalize LinkedIn messaging while sending connection requests or after acceptance
# Schedule your follow-up with the prospect
# Keep the information recorded in your integrated CRM
# Use tools to automate whenever and wherever possible
4. What is outreach marketing?
Outreach marketing is a technique that helps you reach out to your potential customers, brands, and influential individuals. Such marketing tactics help you build strong relationships with the target audience.
LinkedIn is one crucial platform that allows you to pursue outreach marketing successfully to increase your brand awareness and get a hold of potential prospects. The right pitch will help you acquire strong leads.
You can also reach out to any LinkedIn outreach agency for all-round help with your business growth strategy.
5. Does LinkedIn outreach work?
Irrespective of whether you are a B2B or B2C company, you can bring in many prospects for highly profitable conversions with the right LinkedIn outreach strategy.
The best way to connect and spread the company’s message is to combine LinkedIn outreach with email marketing tactics. With this multi-platform approach, your chances of success will increase stupendously.
You need to observe the acceptance rate of your connection requests and the reply rate of your messages to determine your LinkedIn outreach stats. This will tell whether it is working well for you.
Final Thoughts
With this, we come to the end of this insightful article about LinkedIn outreach and its potential for the success of a brand in terms of profitability and lead generation. Every section is well-researched and has been written out of self-experience.
All you have to do is understand its importance and take a leap towards adapting it with your usual marketing approach.
LinkedIn has over 849.6 million professionals on its platform as of 2022. Even if you filter them out, you will still have millions of people sharing the same industry as yours.
You have a big window to target and acquire prospects. So, don’t let this opportunity go in vain.
If you want some assistance in acquiring the best of your LinkedIn outreach approach, then Legiit can help you in the process.
We have tools, services, and courses to help you be a master of LinkedIn and use it for your brand’s success. Check out our website to learn more about what we have to offer.
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