How Employee Advocacy Boosts LinkedIn Lead Generation

LinkedIn isn’t just a social platform for professional networking or job searching. If you’re a B2B brand, it’s also an excellent resource for B2B lead generation.

LinkedIn B2B lead generation is the process of using LinkedIn to identify, engage with, and nurture potential clients. With effective B2B marketing on LinkedIn (and sales techniques), you can drive lead interaction to increase your sales pipeline. In fact, 82% of B2B marketers report having the greatest success in generating leads on LinkedIn when compared to other social channels.

So, why is LinkedIn so well-suited for B2B lead generation?

The platform enables you to target and reach industry professionals and decision-makers, which increases the chances of finding good-fitting, quality leads.

In this article, we’ll explain how to generate B2B leads on LinkedIn, how to incorporate lead generation into your B2B LinkedIn strategy, and discuss how employee advocacy can help drive leads via content amplification.

How To Generate Leads on Linkedin

With over 1 billion global users on LinkedIn, LinkedIn gives B2B brands access to a huge audience of decision-makers and professionals. However, don’t make the mistake of becoming focused solely on the quantity of leads. Instead, make generating quality leads your primary focus. Here’s why: quality leads are more likely to convert, leading to a better ROI.  

To get your B2B brand in front of the right eyes, we’re going to show you how to find quality B2B clients on LinkedIn.

How To Generate B2B Leads on LinkedIn

To tap into LinkedIn’s vast audience and generate quality leads, follow these 11 steps for effective B2B lead generation:

1. Identify Customers’ Pain Points. Do some research to identify your customers' pain points. This will help you create helpful content for your audience such as actionable tips, how-to guides, FAQs, etc.

2. Create Valuable Content. Creating and sharing quality content is a great way to generate more B2B leads on LinkedIn. Some types of content that do well on LinkedIn are short-form video, case studies, thought leadership, and personal stories.

3. Implement an Employee Advocacy Strategy. Content from your employees is viewed as more trustworthy and authentic. Ask your employees to share company news, product launches, and other relevant content with their LinkedIn audience, which can help generate B2B leads on LinkedIn.
   

   

   Source: Andrew Cummins

4. Create LinkedIn Lead Generation Forms. LinkedIn’s paid lead generation forms allow you to collect information from potential leads.  

5. Use LinkedIn Lead Generation Ads. These highly targeted and customizable LinkedIn ads enable you to collect leads directly on the platform through sponsored content.

6. Optimize LinkedIn Ads. Improve your LinkedIn Ad conversion rate with audience targeting, ad creative and messaging, and CTAs. LinkedIn also offers different ad features including sponsored content, message ads, dynamic ads, and text ads.

7. Send Messages With InMail. Send messages directly to other LinkedIn members with LinkedIn’s paid feature InMail. This feature works even if you’re not connected (yet).

8. Join LinkedIn Groups. Join groups that are relevant to your industry, including ones that your potential clients belong to. LinkedIn groups are a great way to engage with others, grow your network, and generate potential B2B leads.

9. Target With LinkedIn Matched Audiences. Engage potential clients who have already shown an interest in your business. LinkedIn Matched Audiences enables you to target website visitors, create contact-based audiences using email lists and CRM data, and build account-based audiences by targeting specific B2B companies.  

10. Maintain a Consistent LinkedIn Presence. Post content regularly and respond to comments in a timely manner (e.g., don’t let a week go by without a response). By communicating consistently with your potential leads, you’ll keep your brand top of mind with your target audience.

11. Audit Your Marketing Funnel. Analyze your full marketing funnel to ensure that it’s taking potential clients from problem aware to solution aware so that they will convert when they see your optimized LinkedIn ad.

In addition to these 11 steps, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is another helpful tool for B2B marketers who are looking to boost lead generation. Let’s take a look at how to generate leads through LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

How To Generate Leads Through LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a paid platform tool that’s great for social selling and creating lead lists. It offers 40+ advanced search filters to help you get the right leads. LinkedIn filters include the ability to search by industry, experience, geography, connection level, company revenue, headcount, etc. Additional features include key decision-maker alerts, Account IQ, Relationship Map, CRM integrations, and buyer intent capabilities.

The tool also provides recommendations based on your profile interactions and search history. This can help you prioritize accounts with the most relevant connections.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator offers three paid plans: Core, Advanced, and Advanced Plus.

Now let’s take a look at how a robust LinkedIn content strategy can complement your B2B lead generation efforts.

LinkedIn Content Strategy

High-value content will help you attract and grow your followers on LinkedIn. Let’s take a look at how to incorporate B2B lead generation into your LinkedIn content strategy.

Planning Your LinkedIn Content

For effective B2B content marketing on LinkedIn, you need to plan out your content. This includes your content formats, content topics, and content posting schedule.

• Content Formats: Depending on the type of content, you can use a mixture of formats including video, blogs, case studies, testimonials, infographics, etc.
• Content Topics: LinkedIn audiences gravitate towards content topics like personal stories, behind-the-scenes, thought leadership, etc.
• Content Posting Schedule: Consistent posting will depend on your brand and resources. However, if it’s a timely topic or event, try not to wait too long to post.

Once you’ve planned out your LinkedIn content, the next step is to promote it.

Promoting Your LinkedIn Content

By promoting your content for LinkedIn, you will be increasing engagement, which spurs lead generation. Easy ways to promote LinkedIn content are:

• Incorporating Relevant Hashtags. Using specific, relevant hashtags will help your post gain more visibility.
• Collaborating With Influencers. Joining forces with the right influencers can broaden your audience and generate more engagement.
  
  
• Responding to Comments. Taking the time to respond to a comment (or answer a question) will show your audience that you’re more likely to respond to future posts.
• Engaging With Other brands’ Posts. Commenting on other accounts’ posts will gain you favor with LinkedIn’s algorithm, increasing the reach of your own posts.
• Leveraging Employee Advocacy. Encouraging your employees to participate in an employee advocacy program can help you generate engagement on your LinkedIn posts.

Leveraging employee advocacy is a powerful tactic to drive lead generation, which brings us to our next section…

Employee Advocacy on LinkedIn

Effective employee advocacy on LinkedIn can boost B2B lead generation by encouraging your employees to engage and share content, which also generates higher-quality leads because your employees’ networks are warm audiences.

Employee Advocacy LinkedIn Strategy

An employee advocacy strategy is a tactic where employees engage with and share branded messages on their professional networks to increase organic impressions and reach more potential leads.

For LinkedIn, savvy sales teams will use employee advocacy as a social selling tool.

Social Selling LinkedIn

Pairing your employee advocacy LinkedIn strategy with social selling on LinkedIn can help you get even better lead generation results.

LinkedIn social selling is used by sales reps to leverage the platform to generate new leads. When you pair it with an employee advocacy program, you’ll be equipping your marketing and sales teams with curated quality content that they can use to connect with their target audience and build relationships.

LinkedIn Employer Branding

LinkedIn isn’t just for generating leads that can turn into potential clients. It’s also great for recruiting top talent through strong employer branding efforts. LinkedIn employer branding communicates your company’s values, culture, and other unique features to potential job candidates, current employees, and stakeholders.

Employee advocacy can help expand the reach of your LinkedIn employer branding. Creating a team of employee advocates who share and engage with content, particularly content that shows why your company is a great place to work for (and work with), will help to generate quality leads.

LinkedIn Employee Advocacy Tool

While LinkedIn does not have its own proprietary employee advocacy tool, that shouldn’t dissuade you from using one.

Using an employee advocacy tool like GaggleAMP can help extend your content’s reach, drive engagement, and increase social selling. By transforming your employees into brand ambassadors, they can amplify your content by sharing it with their LinkedIn professional networks.

Since the content will be coming from your employees, it will be viewed as more authentic and trustworthy. It will also help establish your employees as thought leaders, which not only will strengthen their credibility, but strengthen your brand’s credibility as well.

Boost Your LinkedIn Lead Generation With GaggleAMP

For brands looking to increase their B2B sales, knowing how to generate leads on LinkedIn will give them a competitive advantage. An employee advocacy tool like GaggleAMP can help amplify their brand’s reach and drive more leads and sales. If you’re ready to maximize your lead generation, schedule a demo today.