Mistakes to avoid while using LinkedIn to generate leads.

Mistakes to avoid while using LinkedIn to generate leads.

Every B2B marketer looking to get leads has explored LinkedIn as a platform. Most organizations we interact with understanding that LinkedIn is a crucial platform for B2B businesses where one can find the right kind of buyers to engage with. 

While they're keen on leveraging this platform for business development and also put in effort & resources towards developing it, most of them don't get the desired results. during this article, we discuss 5 common mistakes to avoid while doing lead generation via LinkedIn.

Outsourcing your LinkedIn campaign to the marketing team or a digital marketing company.

This is the most common approach organizations take when it comes to leveraging LinkedIn as a platform. Marketing teams and digital marketing agencies then propose & set forth on a LinkedIn b2b marketing plan. it's usually a very predictable path that they use for other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. This involves creating a corporation page, posting content thereon, getting people to love and share that content, and spending some money on advertisements.

This rarely works for lead generation. If you would like to validate this, just check the ‘followers’ that your company page has or check the people that have engaged with your recent posts. More often than not you’ll see existing employees, job seekers, the odd vendor, and possibly some recruiters who have engaged together with your posts.

Relying on your sales team to generate LinkedIn B2B leads.

The other common approach that we see in slightly larger companies is that they often buy some tools (usually Sales Navigator), for his or her sales team. The LinkedIn Sales Navigator is indeed a strong tool. However, there are 3 problems that arise out of such an appointment.

Firstly, sales teams are provided little guidance on the way to use Sales Navigator. This problem is aggravated by the very fact that most salespeople in India wouldn’t have used the tool in their previous organisations. the web result is that they use it primarily to find names of decision makers within their target list and revert back to their old ways of prospecting through emails and cold calls.

Secondly, sales teams rarely have the bandwidth to dedicate time & effort to prospecting. With monthly quarterly targets looming over their head, they have a tendency to prioritize those rather than long-term prospects. LinkedIn isn't a platform for immediate closures and takes consistent effort which very few salespeople are able to manage.

Lastly, buyers on LinkedIn are averse to engaging with salespeople ( Designations as sales, business development). They immediately sense a sales talk coming their way and are likely to shut out the conversation early, especially so if the approach is being made by a frontline salesperson.

Relying on LinkedIn company pages for lead generation.

Unlike other platforms, LinkedIn company pages aren't as powerful. Hopefully, LinkedIn is brooding about how to make them more engaging and effective, but as things stand today, they're probably not helping anyone much.

LinkedIn may be a social platform for professional networking. People connect with people instead of organizations. Yet we see most companies working tirelessly to create followers and increase likes & shares on their company page. Some even get their existing employees to share, like discuss company posts. The performance of those activities is tracked through vanity metrics like a number of posts or even the number of likes/shares without understanding what kind of people are engaging with the content.

Hiring, employee engagement or sales? Using LinkedIn for everything.

This is a problem unique to LinkedIn. LinkedIn evolved as a social professional networking platform and quickly became fashionable for recruiters as a hiring tool especially for senior hires. Over time, HR professionals started using it as an engagement platform also, putting up everything from an annual company event to even birthdays and work anniversaries of employees.

This creates plenty of irrelevant content for buyers following your company. Even just in the case of individual profiles, people often share posts across the spectrum making it irrelevant for a few followers/connections. Unfortunately, the sole way out of this is to decide upfront what the objective of your LinkedIn personal or company profile is. If you would like to pursue LinkedIn as a lead generation tool, you’ll need to let go or drastically reduce the other activities on your profile.

Expecting quick results from LinkedIn lead generation.

LinkedIn lead generation may be a process that takes time in two ways. One, unlike online advertisements, it takes time to create up your profile and connection base with buyers. Secondly, leads that come from LinkedIn are within the initial stages of the purchase. counting on your product & industry, these leads take 20-30% longer then inbound enquiries.

However, these leads do tend to be far more valuable with better conversion and higher lifetime values. We’ve written about it in additional detail here. If you’re trying to find quick closures and buy ready leads, LinkedIn is perhaps not the right platform for you.