One of the most powerful tools in your disposal is your LinkedIn profile.
It gives you access to the largest professional social network in the world where most of your leads maintain their own accounts.
In this guide, we want to take a look at the ways you can use your LinkedIn profile as a lead generation tool, and why it’s so powerful.
How Do You Use Your LinkedIn Profile for Lead Gen?
The first thing that marketers have to understand about a LinkedIn profile is its use as a landing page.
People will run into your profile via:
- The posts that you’re putting out
- Articles in LinkedIn publishing
- Outreach through InMail or organic connection building
- LinkedIn search
Once you’ve aroused their curiosity, they’ll want to get to know you more and they’ll click on your profile and check it out.
This means that your profile should market your solutions, build trust, and include a call-to-action that will get prospects to reach out directly to you.
In effect, you should consider your LinkedIn profile to be a passive lead generation tool that continuously converts for you as long as it’s up.
Related: Components of Lead-generating LinkedIn Profile Page
Optimizing Your Profile
The first step is optimizing your profile.
Now there are plenty of ways to do this, but there are a few elements that you shouldn’t miss out on.
Headline
Your headline should communicate what you do, build trust, and stand out from regular LinkedIn headlines. Instead of telling people about your position and company, you can include an achievement, your personal vision, and where you were featured. Another consideration is LinkedIn SEO, it still has to be keyword rich to make sure it’s visible in LinkedIn search.
CTA Elements
The message or connect button shouldn’t be the only things that you have to get people to convert. Adding a meeting link or your contact info to the summary, placing your social handles on your cover photo, and genuine CTAs that get people to move are always encouraged.
Trust Elements
Building trust using a static profile might seem difficult but there are a lot of techniques you can use. You can add the logos of the companies you’ve serviced via your header image to build trust by association, you can mention where you’ve been published in your summary, and you should always add one achievement in your headline as mentioned earlier.
Featured Section
This is a relatively new section on LinkedIn that allows you pick images, videos, posts, and even, links, that you can showcase to people who land on your profile. If you’re using creator mode, this will appear first to help you create a curated list of things that you want first time visitors to see.
The list of profile sections and elements that you need to optimize goes on and on, but these pointers should be enough to get any marketer started.
Related: Building Brand Awareness Through Email and Social
Connecting with People
Next up is building a following on LinkedIn. This is critical because it allows more people to see what you’re posting – helping more people land on your profile, and people with more connections and followers tend to have more implied trust.
There are three ways to do this:
- Aim to be a Thought Leader – which requires a heavy investment in content and reliance on passive leads. You also need to disable your LinkedIn connect button in favor of a “Follow” button.
- Aim to be a Power User – which means connecting with a lot of people, and launching directed outreach.
- Do a Little Bit of Both – which is relying on a lot of directed outreach while slowly establishing yourself as a thought leader.
The more followers or connections that you have, the wider your reach so marketers need to work hard in extending their network.
Related: Winning Sales Tips for Phone, Email and Social
Leverage Content
Content is king – even on LinkedIn.
Once people see that you’re releasing content that is both inspiring and valuable, they’ll have a higher tendency not only to follow or connect with you, but also to be your customers.
Valuable and actionable content are the keys to making sure you keep people occupied, it helps with both generating new leads and nurturing the ones that you already have.
You can even turn content into lead magnets by having prospects do things before they’re given access. Think infographics, worksheets, templates, guides, etc.
When people like your content, they’ll want to visit your profile, and if you’ve optimized it well, they’ll probably want to work with you.
Related: Content Marketing Tips for Technology Companies in SEA and APAC
Don’t underestimate the power of your LinkedIn profile with a little tweaking you can easily turn it into a lead generation machine that consistently brings in leads.
The beauty of LinkedIn is that everyone’s on it, and it’s time that you took advantage for the sake of your lead generation.