What is the LinkedIn OutReach Plan?
LinkedIn OutReach is a targeted strategy to reach new audiences on LinkedIn who are interested in the products and services that a company can offer. Simply put, a LinkedIn OutReach Plan aims to introduce the company to a potential clientele in order to generate leads.
But why use LinkedIn?
1. The audience on LinkedIn: LinkedIn has over 750 million professionals with 4/5 of them being decision makers. As LinkedIn is a fully business channel, users visit it to network, improve their careers and keep up to date with developments around their industry. This means targeting an audience that is open to listening and interacting.
2. The platform environment: LinkedIn’s algorithm promotes interaction and wants its audience to create, communicate and be seen.
3. Tools: LinkedIn contains the right tools such as Sales Navigator and their advertising platform to help businesses: find the right potential customers, interact with them and finally convert them into customers.
Who is it for?
As mentioned above, the LinkedIn OutReach Plan for Lead Generation is for anyone who wants to find targeted leads. In order to properly and optimally run an OutReach Plan, it is important to consider the needs of your company, as well as where your potential customer base is in the conversion funnel. The actions we take are based on establishing contact and rapport with the potential customer with the ultimate goal of generating a lead.
LinkedIn OutReach Strategy:
Creating a strategy for a LinkedIn OutReach Plan for Lead Generation involves 5+1 steps.
Step1 – Identify the target audience.
Identifying your target audience is a key step in any marketing strategy, and is just as important in creating a LinkedIn OutReach Plan. Think of audience definition as a funnel, which the more attributes you add, the smaller and more specific it becomes.
Step 2 – Create or optimize your existing Linkedin Profile
To complete the OutReach Plan it is a primary goal to optimize the profile of one or more employees in order to run the specific action through their profile. The more active and optimized a profile is, the more valuable it appears to the potential customer.
Another measure of our customer’s evaluation is our Linkedin page, which should highlight the full range of services and products we want to promote. Very important at this stage is to run this action through existing person profiles rather than the company page so that we appear more direct and accessible to our potential customers.
Finally, it is important that the main employees of the company have an optimized profile that highlights their position in the company as they act as its ambassador.
Step 3 – Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator & Send Connect Request
LinkedIn Sales Navigator, allows you to search LinkedIn users based on the characteristics of the profiles of the potential customers you want to target. It allows to find audiences with specific characteristics related to the industry, company, location & experience of the potential customer.
The sending of the Connect Request must be accompanied by a personalized -as far as possible- message. Often pre-packaged messages are overlooked and considered spam because they are used too often.
By sending the Connect Request, it is good to extract and keep the personal data of the users we have approached, in order to re-approach them and pass them to our CRM database.
Step 4 – Send a message or series of messages
After the request is accepted, we can either go into personal contact with each user or, if we want to further warm up the lead, we can follow a series of automated messages.
It is important to supervise the messages and go into manual communication with the client who responds to our messages and is likely to be ready for a meeting.
Step 5 – Filtering of Leads
Filtering and separating leads is extremely important to properly manage the volume of users we want to reach.
Proposed method of separation:
1. Cold leads: The total number of people from the Sales Navigator survey
2. Follow up Leads: The total number of people who have accepted the connect request but have not replied to our messages or the total number of people who have replied that they are not currently interested.
3. Hot Leads: The total number of people who have shown interest in our products or service and want to have a meeting
Step 6 – Send Emails to Cold Leads
Although optional, our aim in this step is to re-engage with the public who have not responded to us. The reasons why they may not have responded to us vary and for this, we are moving to a second attempt, outside of Linkedin, with the goal of getting the Lead.
An OutReach Plan is much more than six steps, a frequency of messages, and a few newsletters.
For the proper implementation of an OutReach Plan you need:
1. A comprehensive Strategy to reach the right audience.
2. The use of automation tools to automate the sending of various messages, the extraction of contact details and the updating of the CRM.
3. Proper optimization of the profile and excellent knowledge of Linkedin, in order to avoid being marked as spam by the platform itself and closing the profile for good.
4. Continuous supervision to avoid automated messages to users ready for a meeting or to users who want more information.
5. Create a strategy for sending Newsletters in Cold Emails, in order to avoid being branded as spam.
Linkedin has enabled millions of companies to grow their customer base. Discover for yourself how your company can benefit from a Linkedin OutReach Plan to get new leads.
