But before we dive in, let’s set the record straight… What exactly is a lead?
Believe it or not, this term is misused all the time. So let’s take some time to define and understand what the word is actually referring to.
A lead is someone who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service in some way, shape, or form. The keyword to look at here is that they’ve indicated interest.
The term lead is often confused with prospects, and used interchangeably, even though they don’t mean the same thing.
A prospect is a potential customer, someone that has been qualified as fitting certain criteria:
fits your target marketer (sole/seniority, industry, and company size),
has the means (money) to buy, and
is authorized to make buying decisions
Prospects DO NOT have to have indicated interest in your product or service. They just need to meet the criteria above.
Straight? Dope, let’s move on.
What is lead generation?
Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into someone who’s indicated interest in your company’s product or service. There are two types of lead generation: Inbound and Outbound.
Lead magnet. Awesome illustration by Gustavo Zambelli. Check it his amazing illustrations on Dribbble.
We’re going to focus our attention on Outbound Lead Generation, but let’s take a few moments and understand the differences and similarities between the two, so you can determine which approach is best for you.
Fishing or Hunting
I like analogies. So that’s what I’m use here.
Inbound Lead Generation is a lot like fishing. You’re literally putting bait on a line, casting it out, and reeling it back in when you get a bite. Bait, in this context, is any material, information, incentives, etc. (content) that your prospects can follow back towards your company.
Seriously… what are the chances.
It is a process where you, the sales hacker or marketer, find unique ways to attract people to your business. Inbound lead generation is warmer than outbound lead generation, often referred to as cold outreach, because in an inbound scenario, it’s the prospect who chooses the type and timing of the interaction.
That doesn’t mean outbound lead generation sucks. Not at all…
Outbound Lead Generation is all about the hunt, and good hunters not only shoot well, but also track well. Tracking, in this context, is the ability to identify and decide if a target is worth the shot.
The key characteristics you’ll find any skilled huntsman:
Patience. You’ve got one shot… so you’ve gotta take your time, think, and decide when the moment is right.
Empathy. Great huntsmen respect the game, and they respect the kill… oops I meant close. It’s the circle of life baby!
Note: The hunters I’m referring to are the real hunters… you know the ones that actually aim? I’m not talking about shotgun hunters, spraying slugs, and hoping they get a kill.
If you’re a “shotgun” hunter… stop, you dumb fuck. You’re giving us real huntsmen a bad rep in a game that was once highly reputable.
No, I’m not going to apologize for my choice in words. Love it, hate it… I don’t give two 💩 in a bucket. I spit #truth… and you are a dumb fuck when you think it’s a good idea to mass blast people cold… disrupting their day-to-day.
Respect the game, or don’t fucking play.
Outbound marketing has gotten a lot of negative press in the last decade or so. Punch the term into Google and you’ll a million results filled with negative language like “interruption,” “in-your-face,” and “irrelevance.” Some posts even go so far as to proclaim its death.
Outbound is not dead.
If you think it’s dead, you’re dead wrong. Stop blaming the game, and take a real hard look at yourself because the #truth of the matter is… it’s you who’s been doing outbound all wrong.
Let’s correct that… put that dang shotgun down and pick up your big boy rifle. I’m going to show you how to aim and shoot.
Lieutenant Dan here gonna show you the way. Damn straight, U.S. Army veteran reporting in from the illest fighting force known to mankind. Boom boom!
Lead generation using intent signals… let’s talk about it.
Outbound lead gen is typically colder than inbound lead gen, and is often referred to as interruption marketing as opposed to permission marketing. You’re actually more familiar with this than you probably think. You’ve experienced these growth tactics in your daily routine — messages on signs, buses, billboards, and commercials…
Marketing is a contest for people’s attention. Let me show you how to warm up your cold outreach by using intent signals to generate leads.
The majority of lead lists are generated based on your definition of an ideal customer, such as industry, company size, job title, seniority, technology used, etc.
List building using intent signals allows you to generate leads based on what’s actually happening real-time. For example:
Recently funded Internet companies with more than 50 employees in US and with min 50,000 monthly web traffic.
OR
Blockchain companies in New York that are hiring for developers & have less than 100 employees.
OR
Recently launched mobile apps based companies that are hiring for software testers in India and headquartered in the United States.
OR
Companies spending money in digital marketing in London and have more than 100 employees and use Hotjar.
Lead generation with intent signals allows you to take your targeting to the next level, enabling you to go beyond just basic search filters that everyone else is using.
This approach allows you to get hyper targeted in your outreach messages, whether that’s through Linkedin automation with Orca, traditional email prospecting techniques, or both together as one in a multi-dimensional pipeline.
It’s a new day, and sales is changing… better lead gen, better prospecting tools. That said, we’re proud to announce our partnership and integration with EasyLeads.
EasyLeadz + Orca = Growth
Our top priority at Orca is to help you do sales better the right way.
Our direct integration with EasyLeadz allows you to generate leads based on intent signals so you can warm up your cold outreach with companies who are hiring for roles, using software, etc. complementary to your products/services.
Don’t get left behind… level up your skills, huntsman.
What’s up, guys. I hope you enjoyed my last article on how to scrape LI groups.
I really enjoyed putting the last hack together and got a ton of great feedback, so I’ve decided to put double down and put another article together. This isn’t a growth hack, so let’s just call it a workflow hack.
I like coming up with social selling growth hacks, experimenting with different sales enablement and marketing tools, etc… but this week, I want to show you some quick workflow hacks to make your life easier.
That said, we’re going integrate Orca with Hubspot through Zapier. I know… It’s not the most ideal solution, but this is the best we’ve got until we finish up our direct integrations with Salesforce and Hubspot.
In this post, I’m going to show you how you can a trigger a social selling sequence on Linkedin in Orca whenever a lead is added to Hubspot CRM.
Let’s level up your Hubspot game by giving you the power to sequence Linkedin engagements in parallel, before, or after your email sequences.
Here’s are the tools we’ll be using in this workflow hack:
Orca
Zapier
Hubspot
Some enthusiasm as always
First things first…
I will assume you already have a Hubspot account. If not, it’s free, so make one! If you’re using another CRM, as long as it’s integrated with Zapier, you’ll be able to follow along.
If this is your first time using a CRM, check out this article to help you get started using Hubspot.
Next, let’s make sure you have at least one Linkedin URL in Hubspot, so we can test the Zap.
Open up Hubspot and go to Contacts.
Create a contact. I’m going to use Dan and myself as test contacts.
When you create a new contact on Hubspot, you can enter basic information like name, email address, company, etc.
You can also input other data, like Linkedin URL (you’ll need to do this if you want to trigger sequences in Linkedin).
Click on View all Properties. Find Social media information, you’ll see a space for your lead’s LinkedIn bio. Copy and paste the Linkedin url and save.
Awesome, test contacts are set in Hubspot. You’re ready for the next step.
Connect Orca with Zapier
To connect Orca with Zapier, open your dashboard and head on over to Preferences. Under Integrations, you see the Zapier integration.
Click on View integration on Zapier. A new window will open, login to accept the invite. If you don’t have a Zapier account, you’ll be prompted to create one.
Login to accept the invite. Get ready to create your first Zap with Orca.
Let’s head back to Orca and create a Zapier campaign.
Setup your sequence, publish and head back to Zapier.
Create this Zap and select Hubspot from the list.
On the next step, pick trigger. There are several different triggers, for this hack we’ll be using New contact trigger, which can trigger a sequence everytime a new contact is created in Hubspot.
IMPORTANT: Make sure when you create a contact, to always include Linkedin URL.
Next connect your Hubspot account by entering your login credentials. Test. Save and continue.
Test this step by Pulling in the samples (test contacts we created earlier).
On the next screen, you’ll see a list of your contacts, choose a contact you want to test for this setup.
When you’re ready, move on to the next step to connect Orca with Hubspot.
Choose Orca from the app list.
Then select Add Lead to Orca by Linkedin Profile URL. Save + Continue.
Select the account and campaign you’d like to push leads into.
Note: If you haven’t created a Zapier campaign in Orca, do so now. Otherwise, you won’t see anything in the drop-down menu.
Next, tell Orca where can find Linkedin URLs. In Hubspot, that would be LinkedIn bio space.
Set the CRM Record ID to contact email. Press Continue.
On the next screen, test the Zap by clicking on Send Test to Orca. If the test was successful you will see your sample lead in pending verification status in the campaign details.
On the next screen, test the Zap by clicking on Send Test to Orca. If the test was successful you will see your sample lead in pending verification status in the campaign details.
(this wasnt here few seconds ago :D)
Turn on the Zap!
(and its on!)
Once your Zap is live, you can start adding more contacts to Hubspot. Just make sure you enter their Linkedin URL to Linkedin bio section.
Now whenever new leads are added into your CRM, it will automatically push leads to a social sequence in Orca.
By default, leads will be in pending verification status until Orca verifies that the Linkedin profile URLs is formatted properly. Once leads are approved, they’ll be passed into the social selling sequence.
Whooo! There you have it…Connecting triggering a social sequence in Orca through Hubspot.
What are you waiting for? Go! Start building relationships with your leads on Linkedin. Extend your influence… build up your network of potential buyers and followers.
Since LinkedIn went live on 19 May 2011, it's become an unbelievable hub for recruitment and businesses, with over 333 million members (one in three working specialists) storing their experience and working history in one almighty database.
It's such an invaluable source for discovering information and also sales prospecting. It's claimed that on average a user will spend 16 minutes a month browsing and connecting on LinkedIn, while 26 million profiles are accessed every single day!
However, despite an already advanced premium service, there're many tools which allow you to maximize the potential of LinkedIn, beyond its basic form.
Here are eight elite tools to improve your lead generation and to prospect using LinkedIn.
Profile Hopper is a great tool which rotates around the logic that by visiting a person’s LinkedIn profile (and thus delivering notification of that), out of the original plan if nothing else, your profile will get a view back in-turn.
The benefit of this is that you can optimize your profile for direct promotion of your company through different tabs and info bars. Most importantly your bio, then work and summary.
With LinkedIn’s advanced search engine you can target exceptionally specifically precisely who you want. You can even designate the hopper to run through specific groups of which you're a member of.
It is a perfect way to spread awareness of your company. But Profile Hopper then goes beyond that by enabling you to obtain the data of those who have viewed you back into Excel form. So even if they can't become a connection, you have a further opportunity to make contact.
Profile Hopper is no longer operating. However, there're some proper alternatives which apply the same process:
Linked Helper;
Dux Soup;
Orca.
Found.ly specializes in targeting and reaching out to new possibilities and can be used alongside LinkedIn, to significant effect. A powerful and easy sales prospecting tool, bringing together the managing, finding, and closing of new leads.
Again, creating a targeted lead list on LinkedIn, you can create groups of specific possibilities and segment them with a tagging feature. From here you can control these profiles in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) with their contact details obtained including the phone number, website, and email.
You can then begin to order an email strategy towards each segmented category, customizing what they get and when its intelligence will then remove them from the order once they have responded. For those who have not yet, they'll continue to the next prepared message.
This is an excellent little chrome extension which can be very helpful. Discover.ly will allow you to gather further information quickly when using LinkedIn, and save time.
Once you're on a person’s LinkedIn profile with the connection to you, with the extension activated, a green icon will appear to show extended information on that person including Facebook mutual friends and Twitter data. This can prompt up the process of whether they're beneficial for purpose or not.
A communication coaching tool which analyses the character of a social profile to give then insight on how to approach them in your message or email. It may even imply what way is the most useful to make contact.
Using a behavioral framework, CrystalKnows will provide real-time suggestions and a similarity score letting you to know to what extent you need to change your writing style. Draft email and keyword and suggestions also appear and will aid your communication structure to achieve better results.
Attach is a simple but helpful tool which you can use on LinkedIn when sending InMail to develop your response knowledge.
The tool will give you the great understanding of your email’s journey once sent. It'll include notification of when it has been opened, time spent reading and how they then use it.
It can give great data for the progression of your messaging and email campaign in knowing what works good and what has less success in increasing your sales results.
Orca is one of the useful LinkedIn tools for lead generation.
While it's never easy to sell more, Orca enables you to automate your profile visits. You can visit tons of LinkedIn profiles with just one tap and boost your reach.
You do not have to spend hours looking for people and sending invites.
You do not even need to take notes or support your customer data manually. This fantastic LinkedIn tool does it for you. It lets you transport all your data and enables you to use it in Excel sheets or your CRM.
It helps you to create a buzz for your LinkedIn profiles and attract high-quality leads.
Generating sales is the main goal behind every marketing operations you run. If you want to drive more sales for your company, eLink Pro is the great LinkedIn tool for you.
People are more used to visit your profile if you visit theirs. The eLink Pro tool helps you to automate profile visits. You can visit 700 new Linked profiles per day using it.
However not everyone will come back to your profile, the chances are that 7-10% of them will. You can save the ones who visit and drive sales.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an excellent sales tool that helps you find and target relevant companies and people. It also makes it accessible for you to track key leads, and engage and reach with your prospective customers.
This Linked tool brings you customized lead advice to help you determine the right people faster. You can also keep these generated leads in your CRM in a single tap.
We all want to change the world, or at least do something unusual in it. Often, we get burnt out, have bouts of FOMO (fear of missing out), make excuses, or get distracted by our LinkedIn feeds. However, the reality is that to make a difference – whether it’s in the world or our lives and businesses – we need to be more productive to do it.
Starting a business isn't everybody’s cup of coffee. Trust me, entrepreneurs, project owners, business owners and can't succeed without asking the help of groups of people who have that skill and can lead them better. Without these groups of people, it becomes a challenge for small project managers & business owners to scale their business on their own.
If you are an expert, there's a high chance that you are already present on LinkedIn. A social media network with over 600 million users spanning more than 250 countries, can be a great source of a system with industry professionals and join heads with like-minded people.
For years, LinkedIn groups were regarded as a core of all self-promotional posts and the spam, but the recent changes in LinkedIn Groups allowed them to help entrepreneurs, project management professionals, and small business owners.
LinkedIn Groups are one of the most overlooked tools that the network has to offer. If you are an entrepreneur, these groups can be an invaluable and inexhaustible resource to help you improve and grow your business. Here're 10 LinkedIn groups that all entrepreneurs should consider joining.
LinkedIn Groups for Project Managers
The Project Manager Network: A group handled by Recruiter.com, a leading career website specializing in recruiting. This dynamic group comprises of 870,241 members, who discuss topics about software recommendations, project management methodologies, the dynamics of team leadership, and much more. In this group, you can find advice on how to manage your team effectively and share skills that worked for you.
Project Manager Community: Follow the # 1 Project Management Community for program, project & portfolio management. Find vacancies, raise discussions and meet others of your kind! Another large group is accommodating 371,842 members, where you can discuss anything related to project management including PMBOK PDU, PMP certification, Prince2, software development, ISO, CMMI, IEEE, Six Sigma, Scrum, Agile, ITIL & PMO. ProjectManager.com manages this group.
PMI Project, Program & Portfolio Management: An Official group of Project Management Institute, this active group boasts over 234,836 members. All group discussions center on latest PM courses, career training, and advance career tips. This's the right place to glean all the information about PMP certification.
PM Link: While it seems like high efforts to group 84,614 members in the field of project & management under one umbrella, this group achieves it to ideal. The conversations in this group are all about PM tools, PMP exam, methodologies, and tips on how to manage your team and projects efficiently. PMLink.com directs the group.
Project Management 2.0: In this group over 20,940 members, there's a huge opportunity for project managers to learn the effective methodologies, tools, and discipline needed to run an efficient team. The group is used by thinkers, innovators, and experienced projects managers who share million-dollar advice for free.
LinkedIn Groups for Entrepreneurs
Digital Marketing: A group with over 1,162,318 members is dedicated to helping digital marketers from across the world. Usually, the group contains topics ranging from social media marketing, mobile marketing, and email marketing, to industry reports. The group is an invaluable resource for all the entrepreneurs out there.
On Startups: A group of 642,162 members where entrepreneurs can discuss your issues about finance, sales, marketing, operations, and startup failures. The group was started by a group of entrepreneurs who help each other navigate through the rough seas of the initial years of a startup.
Executive Suite: A group of 327,750 people where all the high-profile executives connect and share information related to leadership, decision-making, and team management. When you become a member of the group, you'll get access to the web-series, discussion board all the practical advice you need.
A Startup Specialists Group: 284,143 members combine to form an online community aimed at helping startups and entrepreneurs find mentors and investors by pitching ideas. Here you will also find crowdfunding, best business advice, and a lot of networking.
Band of Entrepreneurs: This group of 26,753 members is lead by entrepreneurs to facilitate fellow startups and founders to support them in areas related to human resources, technology, PR, and idea generation. The concept of this group is to facilitate and accelerate the development of the entrepreneurial /startup ecosystem.
Over to you: What're your favorite LinkedIn Groups?
LinkedIn is the best channel to reach professionals who are interested in connecting with other professionals. This makes it an excellent platform for startups, project managers, and entrepreneurs to help them balance their business. In order to improve your startups, make your project manager or entrepreneurs skills even more effective, use Orca.
What're your most favorite LinkedIn Groups that have helped you with your business?
If you are a salesperson in B2B area, simplicity is your friend. You generally want to avoid complicacy, because even if a more complex system looks good in theory, putting it into practice produces too much conflict and slows you down.
That is why we love easy-to-use prospecting software that simplifies your activities.
FIND LEADS
HeadReach
The biggest obstacle in prospecting is finding quality leads. Either you spend time doing it yourself or outsource it to a lead generation company which sells you outdated and overpriced leads.
Enter Headreach. Headreach gets the emails of leads and their social media profiles for you. As an alternative to Headreach you can use Orca app. Target leads using the advanced in-app search with 12 filters and saves up to 20 minutes per search.
LeadMine
LeadMine is another online software that is designed to find your target clients and claims to find their email addresses with 96% accuracy. They have more than 250 million contacts in their database and enable you to query their database by industry, title, company, location and more.
They have got a free plan that provides you ten credits per month, and their paid plan currently starts at $50/month with 500 credits per month.
FIND ANYONE'S EMAIL ADDRESS
FindThatLead
FindThatLead is a software tool that helps B2B companies, digital agencies, and startups scale and automates their lead generation and sales outreach. You can use FindThatLead to create prospects' lists without all the scrapping sites or copy pasting.
Their ideal targets are prospectors and salespeople from SaaS and Fintech companies with a turnover of 1 million to 25 million. These're companies with 5 to 11 people in their sales team who always must be looking for more leads.
They require to have a superior database because they are pulling data from many different sources, instead of over-relying on Clearbit's API or LinkedIn like many other lead generation software.
Some of their features:
Chrome extension: use it to get emails from domains you're browsing or from Twitter and LinkedIn profiles.
Prospector: you can create highly targeted lists on any vertical in just a few minutes by choosing a few variables for your ideal customer persona.
Google Sheet add-on: use it to add a CSV with the last name, name, and domain to automatically get the emails for your list.
Bulk domain search: generate emails from whole domains in bulk, from a CSV file.
Bulk Social profile search: add a CSV file with Twitter URLs or LinkedIn, and we can give you a full list of emails.
Email verifier: paste an email, and we will tell you if it is the right one.
Lead search: find emails from a domain + name.
Domain search: paste a domain, and we will give you all the emails we can find for it.
Their Basic plan comes with 150 credits each month and is totally free. For more credits or some of the more advanced features, you will need to sign up for one of their paid plans.
FindThat.Email
Named the best tool for finding emails from Findthat, Ahrefs, lives up to the hype. Contrasted to competitors, Findthat has the highest delivery rate, finding over 89% of the email addresses searched for.
Findthat has a database of 100M verified emails and enables you to keep prospects to lists. You can also install the Chrome extension and prospect directly from your browser.
VoilaNorbert
Need to find the email address of a particular person within an organization you want to sell into? There're lots of hacks to do this, but Nobert makes it painless and quick. (Goodbye, supportive!)
It is not a good choice for bulk lookups (they limit the number of searches you can run per day), but if you are doing the kind of targeted outbound prospecting we usually recommend, it should assist you well!
FIND ALL EMAIL ADDRESSES OF A DOMAIN
AnyReach
Just put in any domain you want, and it will start finding phone numbers and email addresses associated with the domain. Works best with small sites as it is limited to crawling 50 pages per domain.
It even crawls spreadsheets, PDFs, and documents hosted on the domain, and you normally get pretty good results.
EmailHunter
Email Hunter works related to anyreach.co but is more stable. They look for email addresses for that domain in the network and list them all, including where the email address was found.
It is an excellent service, highly recommended if you want to easily and quickly discover lots of emails associated with any given domain.
GetProspect
This is a Linked lead gen tool with email finder. You install a Chrome plugin, select leads that seem most relevant, search for leads on LinkedIn, and then convey them into GetProspect—which will then find the related emails of the people selected.
Their free basic plan will enable you to find 50 emails each month, and for $29 each month, you get 1000 emails each month.
GET A QUICK BRIEFING OF PEOPLE BEFORE MEETINGS AND CALLS
CharlieApp
I have said in the past that we think you should not spend more than 6 minutes researching your prospects.
Charlie automatically researches people you have a phone call or a meeting scheduled with (it connects to your Google calendar to get that info).
Their technology filters through tons of sources (different social media profiles, etc.) and extracts valuable insights about the person and their company. Ahead of the scheduled meeting, you will find a regular one-page briefing in your inbox.
There is a potential goldmine on LinkedIn, just waiting for you to tap into its ability to locate and connect with your ideal users. This goldmine has only become more even helpful as LinkedIn has improved and updated its free search feature, making it easier to find possibilities using the LinkedIn Advanced Search function.
So just what makes LinkedIn such valuable for you to find out and connect with your potential possibilities?
Think about that at the time of writing this that LinkedIn has over half a billion global members in 230 countries. That is a huge pool for you to search for potential possibilities (this is where the updated Advanced Search comes helpful).
Today we'll learn how to search for candidates who themselves are in search for a candidate like you.
Searching for a job or the motivated people by using traditional methods can take you a lifetime, and you will be still sitting at home with that newspaper and pen in your hand. Times have changed and so have the process of finding jobs. LinkedIn is now considered the best method of searching for a job. It has around 348 million users, and we're sure that your future employer is one of them. So how do your search for them?
LinkedIn’s Advanced Search is a unique feature that will help you in finding the vacancies or the suitable people in the right places, all you need to know is how to use it to your advantage.
How to use LinkedIn’s Advanced Search Option?
When you sign in to your LinkedIn account, you'll find an Advanced option next to the search bar, tap on that option, and you will see a dialog box appear on your screen. Advanced search option on LinkedIn gives you two options :
• Searching for whose who might help you to get a vacancy.
• Searching for the vacancies directly.
Advanced People Search on LinkedIn
Searching for Recruiters
Through LinkedIn’s people search characteristic, you can search for the reps of your dream company without knowing their any details and can connect with them.
For instance, if you have a company in mind and want to connect to its HR team, you can do it through this option. Just specify the name of the company under the option of Company, and in Title, you can specify the designation (HR executive or HR manager or just HR).
Searching for people who share the same experience and education as yours.
Not sure about which company to join? Do not know which companies provide the job that you are looking for? This method will help you in connecting with people in the similar field. As an advice, take into account that by using Orca you can increase your email sequences rate. That will allow to be noticed by your leads even more faster.
Through LinkedIn, you can discover which companies hire people who have the same experience or education as yours. In the keyword field mention your experience or your degree and in location field select the location of your choice and tap on search. So if you've searched for marketing skills, you will receive a list of experts who have listed marketing as their experience. You can go through their profile and get info about the employer and can also check for a job through their company page.
Advanced Job Search on LinkedIn
The LinkedIn job search function will tell you about the jobs in a particular field. Through this function, you can exactly know if there're any vacancies in the companies that you're interested in. For example, if you want to know that about the job at Ogilvy & Mather in the Digital Marketing Department in the US, you exactly must search for the same thing. In the keywords section type Digital Marketing, in company type Ogilvy & Mather, and in location section US. You can also type the postal code if you're looking for an exact location.
You'll see the list of vacancies when you tap on search, go through them and apply for the one which you think is relevant. If you do not have any particular company in mind, then you can leave the Company field empty, and you will see the vacancies in Digital Marketing at your location.
Boolean Search on LinkedIn
If you want to search for several keywords at the same time, you can use Boolean functions which will demonstrate relevant results for all your keywords. You can use AND, OR, and NOT functions to enhance/filter your results.
AND function
When you want to search for job/people with more than one keyword, you can use the AND operator or Boolean search. For instance, if you're going to search for people with SEM, SEO, and Social Media skills listed so that you can use SEM AND SEO AND Social Media in the keywords field, and you'll see the results show the list of specialists who have all these three skills listed.
OR Function
When you want to find the job or people that consist of at least one of your diversity of keywords, then you can use the OR operator. For instance, if you want to find people that are either good at Social Media OR SEO, then you can type Social Media OR SEO in the keyword section.
NOT Function
When you want to remove something from your search, you can use NOT function. For instance, if you're searching for only SEO specialists, then you can type SEO NOT Social Media NOT SEM NOT Digital Marketing in the keyword field and you search results will show you only SEO specialists.
The best part about the Advanced Search Option on LinkedIn is that your search can be as broad as possible or as narrow as possible. If used correctly, you definitely can find your dream job via LinkedIn.
So if you haven't yet started using this advanced search feature then start today and if you've been using this then share with us how it has helped you by commenting below.
for more: https://useorca.com/
You don’t need me to tell you how popular LinkedIn has become over the last 18 months.
With 250 million active monthly users, it’s likely your ideal customers are waiting to be found.
In this in-depth guide, you’ll learn how to create the perfect LinkedIn marketing strategy. Positioning your brand as an authority, creating killer content and getting your teams on-board — it’s all here.
Let’s get stuck in.
Step 1: Defining Your Strategy & Setting Goals
You can’t execute on a strategy until you’ve defined it. And you won’t know where you’re going until you’ve set clear goals.
Which is why this is the first and most crucial step of this process.
Why?
Without setting clear goals, you’ll end up trying a whole host of tricks without any clue what you’re shooting for.
According to LinkedIn themselves, 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn:
Furthermore, 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content. Even more reason to ensure your LinkedIn marketing strategy is locked-in tight.
As a growth, marketing or salesperson, what are you trying to accomplish? Is it:
Increase lead generation?
Get more eyeballs to your content?
Drive more traffic to your website or landing pages?
Build brand awareness?
Attract and recruit the best talent?
Whatever it is, start with that metric, as it will ultimately drive your strategy.
And don’t worry, every step of this guide will include examples that contribute to each of these goals.
Now it’s time for the maths. Let’s say your goal is to generate 100 leads from LinkedIn next quarter. You need to reverse engineer the process that will get you there. Let’s say 50% is 100 new leads next quarter and your current metrics are as follows:
1,400 blog visits from LinkedIn a month
5.2% conversion rate from reader to newsletter subscriber (73 subscribers)
19.5% nurture rate from subscriber to MQL (15 leads)
Which means you’re generating 45 leads each quarter on average. Therefore, you’d need to generate an extra 55 leads next quarter to reach your goal.
Which brings us to the next set of questions:
Which content performs better than others?
Which LinkedIn marketing activity brings in the majority of those leads?
What new activity can you test to generate leads (with a positive ROI)?
The rest of this guide will aim to answer these questions. Each step will show you how to fill your strategy with the activities that will help you to reach your goals.
If you don’t yet have a defined content strategy, or are yet to truly tap into the power of LinkedIn, then there’s even more opportunity for you.
Step 2: Setup & Optimize Your Company Page
Many of the tactics and approaches taught in this guide are best practices.
Optimizing your company page is one of them.
Your company page will be looked upon by potential clients and recruits alike. It’s a chance to showcase your values, content and culture to those who are interested in working with you.
Here’s how you make your company profile as appealing to those people as possible.
Use Killer Imagery
Your profile picture and banner are the first two elements that visitors to your company page will see. Therefore, it’s important to have these as polished as possible.
Here are the dimensions and specs you should use for both:
Profile picture: 300 x 300 in .PNG format
Banner image: 1536 x 768 pixels in .PNG format
Both images should not exceed 8 MB.
For example, Drift use a simple yet high-quality version of their logo as their profile picture. They also use their banner space as an opportunity to promote their Hypergrowth conference:
for more: https://useorca.com/
Have you ever been blocked–or even locked out of LinkedIn and do not know why? About 4-5 times a week I get this email: “Help! I have been locked out of LinkedIn! What can I do about it?” If your business is serviced by your connections and activity on LinkedIn, this can be a huge headache – costing you a bit of time and money.
While there are a couple of things that can get you limited on LinkedIn (something other than your name in the last name field, specific content, duplicate accounts), it has been my experience that most people have their accounts blocked because they automated too many processes on LinkedIn.
Now do not get me wrong, I do automate some of my activities – and even recommend it. But you must work on LinkedIn’s End User Agreement, and you must be conservative in your activities!
Here are some LinkedIn automation DO NOTs and what to DO instead!
Do not automate SPAM.
By this I mean:
Do not use 3rd party apps to automate profile viewing extremely.
Do not use 3rd party apps to automate inviting people to connect extremely.
Do not use 3rd party apps to automate sending messages to your connections extremely.
LinkedIn does not want you to use any 3rd party automation tools at all – and has been actively using both the software tools and the users of many of these tools, coming down particularly hard on what it thinks “data scraping tools.” I do automate some of my LinkedIn activity, at the very least, if you overuse these automation tools, your account can be blocked or shut down completely!
Do automate repeated activities.
I do utilize a tool to automatically send messages to particular LinkedIn connections (Linked HelperChrome Extension). But I delicately curate these connections, I delicately curated the content I post them, (I never “sell” them anything in these messages) and I never do more than 100 private messages a day. My practice of thumb is: I make sure every message I send utilizing this automated process, I would have sent manually. I usually only send my delicately curated list:
A post I wrote exactly for people like them;
Or a tool I found that will support them in their LinkedIn marketing and lead gen practices;
Or a free webinar I might be doing;
Or a book I have read that I think they might like.
I utilize the tool because it saves my assistant's time and my money!
Do repetitive delegate activities.
I have my partner do some of the more repeated daily activities on LinkedIn for me. Since I get tons of invitations a week, she goes through and manually messages each would-be connection. Since I'm at my 35K connection limit, I have to choose who I accept into my network delicately.
My partner goes through every connection request, sends a different message to each person, and leaves the material and/or personalized invitations for me to respond to. He also manages my inbox alerting me to urgent posts and messages my contact as updates and (when needed) to Publisher for me.
This is a process I could fully automate, but choose not to because I think it is essential that human eyes are laid on each and every person who invited me to connect.
Do not automatically add everyone to whom you connect to your email automation list.
One method (that drives me insane) is when people connect with me on LinkedIn and then attach me to their email lists. Just because I approve to connect with you doesn't give you permission to spam me with your newsletter that I did not sign up for! I'm already signed up to all the newsletters I can handle. If you automatically add me to your newsletter I won't only unsubscribe from it – I'll also report you! (And disconnect from you on LinkedIn –another issue my assistant does for me.) If you want to use LinkedIn to drive traffic to your automated email marketing process, then ask me to opt in! Which brings me to.
Do respond to every invite with a free lead/offer magnet.
When I respond to requests and new connections, I always give them a variation of free resources. I assume that people are connecting with me because they want to learn more about LinkedIn. So, I'm happy to provide them with information! I would highly recommend building a “lead magnet,” a piece of content that your connections would find highly valuable and offering it to them for free.
I add about 60 people a week to my email list- because they OPT IN to get my information! Yes, I would be adding tons if I just shoved every unsuspecting contact into my email list – but not only is that a bad practice, it is illegal in some countries (like Canada). So I would rather have fewer people who wanted to hear from me, rather than a bigger list that could get me to shut down on LinkedIn, get my website blacklisted or get me sued!
Conclusion.
LinkedIn automation can be helpful but only done in moderation with highly curated content and connections. LinkedIn can be a great site for driving people to your automated marketing list, but only when you give them the option of opting in – otherwise you risk getting your account blocked and possibly sued! So carefully consider what, and how you'll automate on LinkedIn!
There are tons of software tools for LinkedIn, which help to automate even more accurate and prompt. As an example, you can use Orca to automate email sequences with LinkedIn profile visits, which will increase leads amount.
As the world's largest professional media marketing platforms, it’s the go-to service for anyone who wants to connect with recruits under a range of job titles from-workers to customers, among others.
In the past, we have discussed the many ways to use LinkedIn advertisements to generate sales and social selling. While this is a solid approach that can generate big-time results, there is no reason to stop there.
In this blog, we're going to review 4 of the best LinkedIn automating tools that can help you become a wisdom media marketing expert.
We will touch on the finer details of each tool, including how and when to use them. Soon enough, you will find that each one could fit nicely with your current and future media marketing and content marketing methods.
By the end of this blog, I hope that you better understand how to use LinkedIn to boost sales and social selling, along with building trust in your marketing team and your marketing plan.
Let’s explore the four tools to help you nail life as a media marketing pro.
Here is how LinkedIn describes its approach to small business:
“LinkedIn is much more than a social website. It is a community of professionals – in a business-mindset – that is waiting to hear from you.”
Through the use of LinkedIn Small Business tool and its three-step approach to social selling and being an excellent lead builder, your small business will find itself on track to increase sales, build trust, and reach a different of related purposes. The three steps include:
Build your brand presence
Connect with your target audience
Engage them with content marketing
Step number three is my fav because this is where you establish and share valuable content marketing skills with your target audience. By doing so, you're in a position to not only attract recruits and motivate them to be decision-makers but to“turn followers into brand advocates.”
There is a lot to learn upon visiting the LinkedIn Small Business center, so make sure that you take enough time to review each feature that is available to you. From text ads to sponsored content, there is sure to be a strategy that fits in with your sales goals.
Sometimes a media marketing tool gets around that is different than anything else in its area. This is unquestionably what you get when you turn to Crystal, known as the“world’s largest personality platform.”
The company explains its service as follows:
“Crystal gives you instant access to millions of personality profiles and free communication advice for anyone you meet.”
So, what does this mean for those who use LinkedIn as a social selling tool? In short, Crystal can examine a LinkedIn profile or premium account and provide feedback and insight into a person’s personality.
With this information, you will find out it easier to interact with the person in the proper manner rather than just making a cold call. From the words you apply to the way you approach the prospect, this tool will give you a high-level ofguidance.
When you contrast two LinkedIn profiles, you may see the same thing (for the most part). But, when you use Crystal, you will soon find that many subtleties can be picked up on and applied to your benefit to avoid the dreaded cold call.
If you want to develop your LinkedIn social selling, it is imperative to become a better communicator. With this tool, you do not have to do much, to make this fundamental change and swap out your cold call for stronger lead builder potential.
One of the biggest advantages of LinkedIn is also a primary challenge for many sales professionals. What is it, you ask? It is the more than 440M members.
Without the help of a prospecting tool, you could soon find yourself sinking in data with no real concept as to which direction to take.
And, this is whyLeadFuze is so attractive. It lets you to quickly create a list of leads and target accounts through a simple search.
While the lead group process is a big deal, it does not stop there, after you need to be a lead builder actively. Users of this tool also have access to contact information, including phone number and email, making it simple to begin the sales process.
If that is not enough, LeadFuze also helps you automatically send personalized emails and follow-ups.
At this time, you can dig up contact information for more than 210 million B2B professionals and premium accounts. And, with customers adding roughly 360,000 prospects each month, it is easy to see that you will always have an endless supply of leads.
LeadFuze is known as one of the head all-in-one LinkedIn lead generation tools. With the capability to automatically uncover all of the essential information, this one tool can give your media marketing strategy a big increase.
The title of this tool alone should give you an idea of what it has to offer. However, if you want to experience its power, you need to give it a chance.
For those who practice multiple sales tools to reach their goals, SalesLoft should not be overlooked.
The basic concept is that you can integrate all of your most important sales tools, ensuring that they work together in perfect harmony.
On its official website, SalesLoft Prospector discusses the integration of the following tools:
DiscoverOrg;
Owler;
Crystal;
RingLead;
InsideView;
Datanyze;
Orca;
Sigstr.
Do you currently use any of the above sales tools? If so, you can join them all together through the use of this platform.
Conclusion
Twitter and Facebook are top notches social media platforms, but they do not offer the same level of B2B networking opportunities that LinkedIn does.
With the guidance of these tools on top of your social media platforms, you can take benefit of everything LinkedIn has to offer. From better organize your contacts to managing the sales funnel, there is something out there that will work for you and help you to become a better decision maker in the world of media marketing.
for more: https://useorca.com/
Do you know that LinkedIn has already become the most powerful and valuable lead generation platform for the majority of growing companies, startups, and small businesses? And that’s not without reason.
Linkedin provides each and every user to connect with their target audience and start engaging. The whole process seems to be quite easy: you send a connection request and then, once accepted, you send follow-ups to start a conversation and turn prospects into customers.
LinkedIn automation tools: What do they do?
There're different types of LinkedIn automation software: some of them are designed to scrape contract information from everyone who visits onLinkedIn, while others are built to automate all your LinkedIn work completely.
Let’s have a look at the six most powerful and valuable LinkedIn tools in 2018:
LinkedIn SalesNavigator
If you're using LinkedIn for lead generation and sales prospecting, Sales Navigator is worth trying.
Here's why Sales Navigator is a good fit for tons of users:
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is quite expensive; however, if you use this LinkedIn’s feature daily, the results should be hopeful.
Pricing: $80 / month, 30-day free trial.
Website:https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/sales-navigator
LinMonster
LinMonster is a topmost google chrome extension, published in December 2017.
The software enables you to:
This LinkedIn add-on keeps hours and hours of time, gives you a chance to connect with premium LinkedIn accounts only (they're more likely to purchase your service or product), has a user-friendly interface and can be used on several LinkedIn accounts.
Pricing: $40/ month, 7-day free trial.
Website: https://linmonster.com/
GetProspect
GetProspect is one of the most powerful LinkedIn prospecting tools that give you an opportunity to download the list of leads with all the relevant information (company name, full name, phone number, email, ) to be used in email marketing or cold-calling.
The main advantage is that there's no demand to have a LinkedIn profile to use this service. Just log in your account on GetProspect, use filters to search for possibilities and import your leads to XLS file.
GetProspect uses LinkedIn’s API to access the required data and has an excellent pricing structure.
The only problem is that most of the LinkedIn users don't have their phone number on their profile. Therefore this software isn't the best fit for those who are planning to use the tool for cold calling.
Pricing: $100 for 10,000 leads & $300 for 50,000 leads.
Website: https://getprospect.io/
e-Link Pro
If you want to have other profile views on LinkedIn, this automation tool is what you need.
Here's how it works: you open the LinkedIn search, filter users as you wish, copy & paste the URL to e-Link Pro, click “Start,” and the software will start visiting users one by one. These users will get information on LinkedIn that you've visited their profile and some of them (around 7-10%)will view your profile in return.
The software doesn't promise to deliver excellent results and sky-rocket your business. However, you can try and add this tool in your LinkedIn marketing arsenal.
Pricing: $50 for the 1st month, after that $90 per month, 5-day free trial.
Website: https://elink-pro.com/
Orca
As an alternative to e-Link, you can use another useful automation tool for LinkedIn, Orca.
Orca complements your email sequences with Linkedin profile visits and connects to get you noticed faster by your leads.
Turn cold leads to conversations in less time and effort.
Pricing: $50 / month, 7-day free trial.
Website: https://useorca.com
LinkedIn plugins
If you're in a B2B industry, there is an excellent way to boost your website engagement and conversion rates by using LinkedIn plugins.
You obviously shouldn't use all of them. However, some of these buttons might be quite useful for your website visitors:
"Shares" can help you to show social proof, “company profile” can provide some credibility of your company, the “follow company” plugin can dramatically boost the number of subscribers, “member profile” can show your users the real face of your business, and “LinkedIn AutoFill” allows your website users to save time while filling out your lead forms.
LinkedIn provides B2B business owners with huge opportunities and an ability to generate a constant flow of high-quality leads. However, it would help if you didn't spend the majority of your time prospecting on LinkedIn since there're too many other methods to generate sales for your business including PPC (pay per click), cold calling, SEO (search engine optimization), SMM (social media marketing) and others. Smart marketing strategy can bring progress to your company. And LinkedIn automation tools should be included in this strategy to minimize the time spent on LinkedIn and let you and your team concentrate on other marketing channels.
for more: https://useorca.com/
Orca complements your email sequences with Linkedin profile visits and connects to get you noticed faster by your leads.
Turn cold leads to conversations in less time and effort.