Generating a consistent source of leads on LinkedIn can be unbelievably difficult, in part because the time you spend on the process has to come from somewhere. You might be sacrificing time you could have been using to follow up on leads and secure sales.

Fortunately, finding ideal customers for your brand doesn’t have to take that long if you know a few insider tricks. LinkedIn has grown to support more than 675 million accounts registered in 24 different languages. While it might be a little difficult to find them, the perfect customers for your brand are certainly on the site.

Bursting onto the LinkedIn scene

Approximately 80 percent of all online B2B leads come from LinkedIn as opposed to only 7 percent on Facebook, so it might be best to concentrate your efforts on the single platform as opposed to spreading yourself thin by desperately trying to market on multiple ones simultaneously.

You should still have multiple social accounts, but focus on LinkedIn for generating B2B leads. If you have a little extra time to dedicate to a single marketing activity, then you should optimise your profile before doing anything else.

Sales personnel should be using their company profile as opposed to an individual personal one. Make sure that all of the basic information fields are correctly filled out. Though it might seem like a waste of time, you’ll want to complete LinkedIn’s About Us section and all of the associated text boxes next to it. Potential customers may not read this information, but search engines certainly will.

Add a profile and background photo that immediately reflects your brand. You’re going to want to ensure that your logo, brand colours and your company’s specific tagline are all completely visible. Most people are going to have enough space in the selling points box to do a little keyword optimisation, but there’s no reason to get carried away and start stuffing possible search terms into it.

Find an Internet marketing best practices guide for your specific industry. There’s a good chance that search engines will latch onto the right kind of marketing copy, which in turn will bring people to your LinkedIn page. As soon as you have people coming in, you’re going to need to find a way to target and convert them.

Targeting potential consumers on LinkedIn

More than likely, your team already has a key demographic in mind as well as a detailed customer profile. Nevertheless, LinkedIn has a number of filters that give you the freedom to drill things down even further.

Specify your audience attributes in terms of job experience, industry sector, interests and region. You might be interested in targeting the entire UK or just one of the constituents. International marketers that want to cast an even wider net are encouraged to use the SMART criteria, which stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Assignable
• Realistic
• Time-related

This system ensures that you target a specific area or segment and give yourself some way of gauging success once you spot some movement in the market. Managers will need to spell out exactly who in their organisation will have to perform different tasks and ensure that reasonable goals are met. Give yourself an equally reasonable time frame. After all, your business isn’t going to drastically reinvent itself overnight.

LinkedIn comes with a Campaign Manager tool that allows you to create targeted messages and only send them out to those who fit the right kind of profile. Assuming you understand your own target demographic, you should be able to use this kind of technology quite well.

The platform’s integrated Direct Mail system provides an even bigger opportunity.

DM marketing with linkedIn

Sales representatives in good standing can post sponsored messages to relevant recipients on a regular basis. By registering for the InMail system, you’ll even be able to send out targeted mail messages automatically.

Keep in mind that LinkedIn’s dev team doesn’t take kindly to spammers, so you shouldn’t ever abuse this privilege. Those who aren’t yet sure of what kind of people they want to target will need to decide whether they simply need to increase brand awareness or want to genuinely generate new leads.

Armed with this information, you can perform research using Campaign Manager’s built-in tools. You may find that many people who would potentially be interested in your message are outside of your initial scope.

Don’t worry if that’s the case. Get conversations flowing with potential leads by sending them a valuable piece of content that’s going to genuinely interest them. You might offer them an e-book, a demo version of your product or a free service.

Converting our leads on linkedIn

Add further value as the conversation goes on. Your aim should always be to get them to arrange a call or meeting after your second or third messages. Most marketers feel that this process should take maybe two or three weeks at the most.

Don’t use too much jargon and don’t send out unsolicited links. Respect your clients’ boundaries and soon enough you should have more business than you’ll know what to do with.