LinkedIn is the king of business-driven content and lead generation, which makes it a dream platform for any marketer. But have you tried performing outreach campaigns on LinkedIn?
To give you an idea, the InMail response rate is 3x higher than regular email, according to LinkedIn's Editors.
A strong LinkedIn outreach strategy will generate more leads and improve the results of other marketing efforts, such as promotions, discounts, and content marketing.
In this article, you'll learn why LinkedIn outreach should be a core pillar of your general marketing strategy and how marketers can take full advantage of this tactic.
What Are the Benefits of LinkedIn Outreach for Marketing Teams?
A LinkedIn outreach campaign aims to strengthen your brand's reputation and support sales. Here are some of the benefits of a solid outreach campaign:
#1. Boost Lead Generation
Some of your target audience might have yet to learn who you are but could be using a competitive product. It's a good idea to introduce them to what you offer.
If you have a good product or service that can solve a problem for the people you contact, chances are they'll take you up on your offer.
A good proposal pitched to the right audience will always bring new clients.
#2. Develop Brand Awareness
Get in touch with other people in your industry.
A great collaboration can introduce you to a new audience, and these relationships will start at a higher level of trust.
Partner with brands with shared values and a loyal client base. Their audience might just try your product, especially if both products have complementary purposes.
#3. Create Relationships within Your Industry
Networking and developing relationships with other industry experts on LinkedIn is as important as doing it in real life, at conferences and events. With the bonus that you get some one-on-one time with people.
You could exchange notes, experiences, and advice or find practical ways of working together in the future on mutually beneficial projects.
#4. Support Your Content Marketing Efforts
A big part of your content marketing and SEO strategy involves a lot of link building. In today's digital context, classic email outreach is not enough to reach those top industry publications.
Expanding your outreach to LinkedIn will improve your chances of reaching those top prospects (whose email inboxes are likely overflowing) on a less competitive platform.
7 Successful LinkedIn Outreach Strategies for Marketers
Now that you've gone through some of your outreach goals, here are a few ways to achieve them. We gathered 7 campaign strategies that will bring results.
#1. Promote Content
You've got a portfolio of great content on your company blog, but you need more eyes on it. An outreach campaign can increase traffic and conversions.
97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for content marketing, studies show. On top of simply posting a link on LinkedIn, you can also share your content directly with reputable experts and publishers.
If your information is valuable and enticing, they'll likely use it in their articles and quote you as a source or even invite you to write a guest post for them.
The outcome? Valuable links from authoritative sources for your SEO strategy, introduction to new audiences, increased traffic, and brand awareness.
#2. Promote Your Product or New Product Features
You've spent weeks or even months developing a new product or a great new feature. Now people need to hear about it.
However, the key is not to sell the product itself but its benefits for your potential clients. The golden rule is to help first and sell later.
On this note, create a few outreach campaigns dedicated to existing clients, potential clients, and industry publishers in which you explain what problem your product will solve.
#3. Find Co-Marketing Partners
Co-marketing is a great strategy when you want to expand your audience reach.
It implies partnering with another brand with similar values, a similar target audience, and a related product or service to release a special project together.
When working together, you outline the project details and divide the tasks between the two teams based on each side's strong suits.
The greatest advantage? While the audience of your project doubles, the workload gets cut down to half.
#4. Find Influencers for Your Campaigns
Influencer marketing is no longer a throw-away strategy, deciding if and when "we have any marketing budget left over.”
This tactic has proven its worth, with more and more B2B and B2C companies adopting influencer campaigns and getting good results.
But while B2C companies can find their influencers on all social platforms, B2B brands tend to have more success on LinkedIn.
Industry leaders, experts, and even successful entrepreneurs will be easy to find on LinkedIn with just a simple search.
All you need to do is follow what they post and find the person that could use your product in their work but also has the audience to match.
#5. Nurture Client Relationships
Client loyalty is more important than ever. If you regularly use emails to offer updates and news to your clients, why not do the same on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn can help you create and nurture relationships with your existing clients by delivering information about their specific needs.
During an outreach to existing clients, you can personalize your message to mimic the one-on-one experience.
There's also something to be said about the intimacy of a private LinkedIn message rather than a cold mass email.
#6. Gather Data for Studies
Polls are an effective way to measure the success of certain marketing efforts, uncover industry needs that you might have overlooked, or even test out responses to different products.
And there's no better focus group than your connections. Simply create an outreach campaign in which you ask people to answer your polls and offer insights.
You can then use that data to outline answers that help optimize your strategy or even create studies that can benefit your entire industry.
#7. Promote Giveaways and Discounts
Outreach can also be very effective in supporting more general marketing activations.
If you're already developing discount or giveaway campaigns, you can add outreach to your promotion strategy and let your connections know about the benefits.
But be mindful of what you choose to promote.
Only focus on offers that are beneficial to your prospects, and be selective of the number of times you send these offers. Otherwise, you run the risk of being spammy.
5 LinkedIn Outreach Strategy Mistakes You Must Avoid
Cold outreach is a long and painstaking process, but there are just some things you can’t skimp on without sacrificing results and responses.
Here are 5 strategy mistakes people typically make during a LinkedIn cold outreach. 👇
#1. Lacking a Strategy
An outreach strategy is a specific set of steps and actions meant to attract new leads. The nature of those distinct tactics is based on information gathered through audience research and your overall plan.
So a solid outreach strategy is essential to favorable results. You shouldn’t reach out to people without a goal or a plan, just for the sake of it, or write messages without a clear direction.
You’ll most likely end up with no reply or acceptance notifications. Crickets.
But an outreach strategy is not a one-size-fits-all. Before you ever contact a single person, you’ll need to clarify a few things:
Your goal. What is the reason for reaching out: are you planning on selling anything, or are you promoting something? Each campaign has to have one clear purpose.
Your audience. Who could be interested in your offer and why? Are your prospects even in decision-making roles?
Your campaign outline. How many messages should you send, when should you send them, and what would your pitch look like for each stage?
Your projected results. This is a guesstimate, but it will still motivate you to reach your desired results and even surpass them.
Once you have definitive answers to all of the above, you can start taking action.
#2. Mis-Targeting Your Audience
To be efficient, your messages should reach exactly the people who could benefit from what you're offering. It’s not enough to just look for companies you’d love to have as a client.
Dig deeper and find the right person at the company who is interested in what you have to say. Make a plan by defining precisely the profile of the people you’ll want to connect with.
You wouldn’t contact a marketing executive instead of a CFO to sell your finance app, would you? Even if they both work at the same company.
Demographics and professional roles have a big role to play.
Are you targeting women, men, or both?
What age ranges are your ideal customers?
Are your targeted locations matching your targeted markets?
What industry do your prospects work in?
Is your product or service relevant to that industry?
Are they decision-makers for their department?
What are their job titles?
What skills do they have?
LinkedIn has the amazing advantage of offering a large list of filters, search options, and filters that can make pinpointing your target audience easy, especially through their paid services. Use them wisely.
#3. Rushing Through Prospecting
Prospecting is perhaps the lengthiest stage of the entire process. That’s because you need to sort through thousands of options to identify the people with the most reasons to reply.
This can’t be rushed by creating random lists of people. Quality leads trump quantity.
From going through your existing connections to finding new potential connections through the free search bar option, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or LinkedIn Recruiter, your chances increase if you cover all your bases.
To be efficient, don’t just box in prospecting as an isolated step of one campaign. Instead, make prospecting part of your everyday tasks and divide your finding into separate prospecting lists to use later on.
Research your target audience consistently, check LinkedIn profiles to decide if they’re good matches, and always keep valuable prospects in your pipeline.
#4. Ignoring LinkedIn Groups When Prospecting
Speaking of covering your bases, LinkedIn professional groups are often overlooked as pools of prospects.
People use groups for advice and help fixing certain issues they encounter in their profession. This makes it easier to identify some people who would benefit from the solutions you have to present.
For example, if we see someone writing about LinkedIn’s 100 invite limit, that’s clearly someone we’ll want to talk to about different outreach tactics they might find helpful.
Follow a few industry-relevant LinkedIn groups and keep an eye out for posts and questions that match your offer.
At Icereach, we added a feature that can scan through group posts and create a prospecting list in mere moments. Your list will include all of the people who write about your topics of interest, contact details included.
#5. Sending Vague and Generic Messages
You might get tempted to fast-track your outreach campaigns and just press ‘send’ on all those LinkedIn messages already, but unfortunately, your reply rates won’t be satisfying.
72% of consumers now say they only engage with messages tailored to their interests, according to Smarter HQ.
Tailored is the key term here. Personalized outreach through targeted messaging focused on individual needs and solutions is the only way to turn a cold prospect into a client.
Your product or services may tailor to an array of issues, so you’ll want to be specific in your messaging to each individual.
To speed up the process, you can create LinkedIn message templates that accommodate personalized terms and phrases.
Wrapping Up
In this blog post, we offered some best practices for crafting an effective LinkedIn outreach strategy. From promoting your content to gathering data for case studies. This advice will help you make the most of your LinkedIn outreach efforts. Whether you are looking to generate leads, build partnerships, or increase your visibility on the platform, these tips will give you the guidance you need to succeed. By implementing the outreach strategy and avoiding the mistakes we pointed out, you can increase the value you get from LinkedIn and grow your business network.
