How to Generate Leads from LinkedIn?

💻 SaaS

Rishabh Rathi

May 18, 2021 — 7 min read

For many B2B SaaS businesses, LinkedIn is the place to be. If your product is used by enterprises, mid-market companies or even entrepreneurs or consultants, it’s very likely that your ideal customer is a regular user of LinkedIn. LinkedIn generates over 80% of B2B leads on social media. Moreover, 91% of executives consider LinkedIn a top platform for relevant and quality content as well as for B2B marketing and B2B sales opportunities.

The reason LinkedIn works so well for B2B SaaS companies is because you’re not guessing who’s on the other end seeing your ads. The ability to see the industries, companies, and job titles of your audience is a huge advantage in the B2B space. At times you might be paying triple the price, but you’re also likely to be much more confident that the right person is seeing your ad.

What is key for generating your B2B leads on social media is to be active. Spending the time to create a LinkedIn profile for your company, and simply letting it stand there on its lonesome, well, is simply time that you have wasted. You need to be active on your social media outlets, or potential leads will be instead noticing your active competitors.

Few Tips to be Active on LinkedIn, and Generate More Leads
Where B2B SaaS Companies go Wrong with LinkedIn Ads
SaaS Companies Need to Keep in Mind with LinkedIn Ads
How to Start a Pay-per-Click campaign on LinkedIn

Few Tips to be Active on LinkedIn, and Generate More Leads

You know how you log in and you are notified on how many people have viewed your profile? Click on theirs. They will be notified that you have noticed them. Interest begets interest.
Send a message after viewing their profile. It could be as brief as “Hello, let’s talk about how we can help you.” Whatever you send, you’ve engaged with this potential customer, and thus turned them into a qualified lead.
Use your own personal profile and take advantage of LinkedIn Publishing Platform.

Write content that reflects your awareness and experiences in the B2B industry, and what has made your company successful. Writing tips and tricks for others to apply for their own success is also marketing your company to potential customers.
Using your own personal profile lends a face to your company’s name, and people are much more willing to buy from a person rather than a faceless brand.

Where B2B SaaS Companies go Wrong with LinkedIn Ads

Budgeting: They don’t give LinkedIn ads enough of a budget to be successful.
Targeting: They set up targeting that’s too specific (e.g. targeting a single job title).
Content: They deliver content that doesn’t fit the mindset of their target customers when they’re using LinkedIn.

“The costs of advertising on LinkedIn are too high to make it worth it.”
This is a common misconception that companies make from a lack of testing. If you’re in the B2B space and you don’t at least test LinkedIn ads, you can’t know for sure that you’re using the optimal channel to drive leads. You might be missing out on a significant opportunity if LinkedIn is actually a good fit, but you simply don’t know because you’ve made the assumption that it won’t generate a return.

SaaS Companies Need to Keep in Mind with LinkedIn Ads

Budgeting

LinkedIn requires more budget than other platforms to be successful. If you give it the same budget as your Google ads campaigns, you aren’t likely to see the equivalent amount of leads—but don’t assume that this means LinkedIn won’t work for you.
When you look at the “bigger picture” of things, you may be getting fewer leads, but they’re generally better-quality leads. Your cost per acquisition at the end of the day can be the same, if not better. This is why evaluating lead quality (not just quantity) is an important factor with LinkedIn advertising.

Targeting

The common mistake with targeting is that companies get too specific. For example, if you decide you want to target landscape designers, you might tell LinkedIn to only show your ad to people with that job title. But what about “landscape architects”? Or “landscaping consultants”? There are so many cases where there is a wide variety of potential job titles that could fall into the category of your target customer.

To cast a wide net, you should give LinkedIn a broad title to work with. This causes LinkedIn to show your ads to a range of job titles or levels of job seniority in a given space. You want to give LinkedIn a direction and a guardrail and see what results come in. Then you can see the job titles, industries, and company names of the LinkedIn users who are actually clicking and converting, and use that data to refine your targeting as you move forward.

Content

The piece of content in your ad needs to match the mindset of your target customers when they’re using LinkedIn, who are mostly in a browsing or networking mindset (not a purchasing mindset). B2B marketers who get this wrong fall into the trap of thinking that because this is a professional social media network and people are on there for a business-related purpose, they can get “straight to business” by offering a trial or demo of their SaaS up front.

If your SaaS requires a relatively small investment and you offer a free trial with no credit card, this approach of going straight for the offer can work. But in many cases, especially when your goal is demos and your SaaS require significant investment from a customer, a softer trust-building approach works better.

How to Start a Pay-per-Click campaign on LinkedIn

An excellent way to use LinkedIn ads is to promote your landing pages. By creating targeted ads around the pain points your content solves, you can generate many leads with paid LinkedIn ads, cost effectively. Setting up a LinkedIn advertising campaign is pretty simple. LinkedIn give you tips as you go along, and hold your hand throughout the process.

It helps to be able to write great copy, and it's a great idea to be constantly experimenting with new ad text, different target personas and images to see what works best. Start with a low budget, and increase it as you begin to generate results.

Generally, it's fairly under used. For high ticket B2B sales, LinkedIn ads should be able to deliver an excellent return on investment. LinkedIn has over 70 million registered users worldwide, of which 50% are business decision makers in their company.

Recommendations to get your Targeting Right

Create content that offers value and messaging that meets the target customer where they’re at (on LinkedIn)
Design and develop a landing page funnel
Set up follow up email automation
Upload current customer data
Upload target account list
Monitoring LinkedIn ad performance and remarketing
Target people who are most likely to use your product (or, in our case, initiate using it in the company).
Add a short-personalized note to each invitation to improve your chances for success.
Ask for a permission to send a link to the survey (or any other favor you want them to do) before you actually do it.
Be ready to do your leads a favor in return (be it testing their product or helping them connect with some of your valuable contacts).
Don’t forget about your existing connections. Start with your established network on LinkedIn before you go looking for new contacts — it usually requires less effort, yet results in a much higher conversion rate.

Conclusion

All in all, LinkedIn has been a very valuable resource in terms of lead generation. Moreover, connecting and communicating with people on LinkedIn not only expands your network and provides you with quite a few leads, but it also gives you priceless feedback that is crucial at the beta stage.
So, get on LinkedIn now and start expanding your reach and let us know your experiences in the comments section below.

FAQs

What is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a social network that focuses on professional networking and career development. You can use LinkedIn to display your resume, search for jobs, and enhance your professional reputation by posting updates and interacting with other people.

How to convert leads on LinkedIn?

Turn your company page into a lead generation page
Create a Showcase page
Use Advanced Search
Save searches
Search Groups
Start groups
Publish content

How to get business leads on LinkedIn?

Optimize your profile for connecting
Target the decision makers
Follow up with old leads before targeting new ones
Put lead generation on autopilot with content marketing
Stop harvesting cold leads
Craft a convincing opening message
Go premium

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