How to Generate Leads and Grow Your Business with LinkedIn

One of the biggest reasons why most businesses fail is that they are unable to generate relevant leads for their businesses.

Fortunately, however, your business doesn't have to suffer from this same problem once you know how to use LinkedIn. So read on.

In this short guide, you will discover:

• How LinkedIn is beneficial for generating leads and growing your business
• Hacks for using LinkedIn to generate leads and grow your business

Without further introduction, let’s jump in with a discussion on the ways LinkedIn benefits businesses by helping them generate leads and grow.

Top Ways LinkedIn Fosters Business Growth

Here're four of the top ways the social network for professionals fosters business growth and is beneficial for generating leads and growing your business:

I. It allows connecting and networking with other professionals

Through connecting and networking with other LinkedIn users who are professionals in their own right, you can have access to a flood of potential clients. Two simple and effective ways to grow your network is to:

• Have relevant information, and
• Be a resource to your connections

When you come off as an expert to your followers, they will contact you anytime and every time they need your service.

Since you are networking among professionals who are also interested in growing their business, it makes your efforts in growing your business easy.

II. It enables brand building and engaging audiences with LinkedIn Pages

You can increase the exposure to your business by having a LinkedIn Company Page, where you interact and engage directly with fans of your business on the platform.

When done properly, your business’ LinkedIn Page can appear in Google search and LinkedIn search.

You can appear in LinkedIn's search results by using LinkedIn's search options to focus on your target demographics.

III. It helps to build trust among prospects with Recommendations

With the "recommendations" feature, you can use LinkedIn to showcase your business projects, products and services to potential customers and funs. Thus, gaining trust among them.

You will increase your chances of generating more leads and sales when you have lots of recommendation from previous customers and clients.

Pro tip: Request for recommendations from past clients. A report by Stomphorst finds that at least 10 recommendations will boost your profile's search engine ranking.

IV. It provides a user profile you can display your achievements

A display of your business and professional achievements allows you to showcase your experience and provide potential leads with a brief summary of your services and nature of your business.

This proves to prospects that you are truly an expert in your field. Consequently, it helps you to grow your brand and business’ attractiveness.

Hacks to Generate Leads, Grow Your Business on LinkedIn

Now that you know how LinkedIn can be beneficial for generating leads and growing your business, here are four hacks for using it for that purpose:

1. Use a sponsored InMail campaign

Since you can reach the LinkedIn inboxes of targeted prospects with sponsored InMail campaigns, you are able to send rich and compelling offers to them.

Utah State used an InMail campaign to fill its graduate program with highly qualified candidates. The results? A 27.5% open rate and a 71% conversion rate on those who requested for more information.

2. Use LinkedIn pulse

According to LinkedIn's FAQ:

 

"LinkedIn's publishing platform is the quickest way to build your professional brand.

 

You can use it write about your brand's accomplishments, trends or insights in your industry and any other relevant information.

 

Since these posts will establish your brand's authority, it is important for you to write about what will establish your brand as an expert in your industry."

If you can show prospects you are an expert in your field, you will generate quality leads that will grow your business.

The user interface for LinkedIn pulse is easy to use, and you are allowed to write long-form content.

You can link to your business' website, include images and videos in your posts.

After using LinkedIn pulse to publish content about their businesses, scoop.it and great jakes saw a huge boost in traffic and leads.

One thing many people don’t know about publishing on LinkedIn's pulse is that you can repurpose blog posts from your website to publish them on LinkedIn's pulse.

3. Appear in LinkedIn's search results

Earlier on, we talked about your brand appearing in search results, here are four proven tips you can implement that to ensure that you appear in LinkedIn's search results:

• Ensure that your profile is at an 'all-star' status. It must be 100% complete

• Make sure your company's description is clear and complete. This is proof that you are truly an expert in your field

• Search for businesses related to your field, pay attention to the keywords they are using and incorporate them to your profile in a similar way

• Using an anchor text with your keywords is more useful than using an anchor text with "my blog"

4. Complement LinkedIn with plugins

Using complementing LinkedIn pluggins will make your lead generation more powerful and effective.

Here are the top three of such plugins:

i). LinmailPro

This is a Chrome extension that finds and invites every person who's viewed your profile to connect with you in an automated manner.

This gives you the opportunity to send them a personalized message.

You can even tag them so that you can sort them to a list of prospects and deliver marketing messages to them.

ii). Healinr

If your headline is not fascinating, no one will click your posts.

When no one clicks your post, you have zero traffic to your website or landing page, you can't generate any leads and your business can’t grow.

But with Headliner, you can easily and automatically generate the best headline combination using your specified keywords.

For example, you can type in "landing page hacks" into this tool and it will generate the best headlines about this topic.

iii). Rapportive

If you are a Gmail user and you browse with Chrome or Firefox, this is a very useful tool for you.

You can use to get the contacts of your target prospects from their LinkedIn profiles.

Then, you can invite them to connect with you using personalized messages.

In conclusion

You just discovered some of the most effective ways on how to use LinkedIn to grow your business.

However, a word of warning – just reading won't get you any results. The key to getting results is to take action on what you've learned.

And that’s why I encourage you to review the four proven tips and start implementing them immediately.

The sooner you do, the sooner you can begin generating more leads from LinkedIn and grow your business.