Here's my ultimate guide to generating leads through LinkedIn in 2021.

Before we get started on my step by step lead gen strategy, I want to share some stats about LinkedIn.

As per 2020, LinkedIn has over 700M users with three professionals signing up every second with 55M Companies registered on the platform. There has been a 60% rise in content creation in 2020 and a 55% increase in peer to peer interactions.

A platform becomes powerful when it has the buyers and sellers in the right proportions, and that's what LinkedIn has become today.

Here you will learn:

● How to create your buyer persona?

● How to Create Content that works?

● How not to connect with someone?

● How to interact with the prospects?

● How to stay consistent in the process?

Let's get started.

1. Understand and Create a Buyer Persona:

Buyer Persona is a detailed description of your "perfect customer". It is the most important step of the process as it sets the base for the rest of the process. Imagine the perfect customer in your mind and list out their traits.

This will help in crafting better marketing and outreach strategies and making yourself more relatable to your target audience. Gather as much information as possible.

Please give them a name, know their interests, know the demographics, basically anything you can list out about the perfect customer, do it! Learn More about Buyer Personas.

2. Make a list of their pain points:

You created a buyer persona and understood how they behave. Now, what do you do?

List out the problems they face regularly.

List out things they can't solve by themselves.

List out things they need, but they don't know.

How do you do that?

Ask questions to real people. Interact with them and ask questions others don't (more on that later), take surveys of your target audience on social media and see how they react and identify patterns among them. See the commonalities among most of them.

3. Create Content that hits their pain points one by one.

This step will reap you the highest amount of benefits in the shortest period. Why?

Because more than 95% of people on LinkedIn are "Content consumers' ', not "Content creators'' and this is where you can stand out. Just having a profile and waiting for people to connect with you is a waste of time.

A better way to bring in the "audience you want" is to "create content that they need" aka Content that hits their pain points one by one.

Think of yourself as a professional problem solver and then list ways to solve your prospects' problems. It's so critical. If you know how to solve a problem, share it with everyone. Don't be afraid.

Why?

Because not everyone has the time to do it themselves, and this is where you will come in.

Pro Tip: Keep the process simple:

A text post with simple language and clean presentation is all you need.

4. Connect with your Target Audience:

There are many ways you can connect with your target audience. But the easiest way to do it is through LinkedIn Search.

● Find out the most used keywords among your target audience.

● Search them up on LinkedIn and connect with the top results.

● Connect with a "personalised note" (Increases acceptance rate by 4x)

Here are some mistakes people make while connecting with someone:

● Sending a random message.

E.g. Hi Ambarish, I want to connect with you.

E.g. Hi, I want you to be part of my network.

Never make this mistake. Always know why you are sending someone a connection request and make it clear to them.

● Misspelling the name of the prospect:

Do I even need to explain this?

● Copy pasting and sending the same message to everyone:

A big NO-NO. There is a reason why I said send a "personalised message" and not a "message". Personalisation makes a lot of difference. It shows that you are investing time in sending them a request and connecting with them. Talk about their latest post and what you liked and disliked about it or their achievements. Make it personal!

● Don't pitch them right away:

Build a relationship first! Never pitch your prospect in the first message itself. No one buys from an unknown.

Have a friendly chat and know more about them. Share about yourself. And then continue with the next step!

5. Build Trust by staying active and relevant:

Feed them more and more Content on their feed. Acknowledge and comment on what the prospects share on the platform to build Trust. Endorse their skills. Keep having conversations with them.

Remember, The goal here is to stay on top of their mind all the time.

All of this comes back to point three again. 95% of the people on the platform don't create Content. So it's the easiest way to stand out!

Just create more Content that touches their pain points, so you stay on top of your prospects' minds, so when they need services you provide, the first person who will come to their mind will be YOU!

Do you see the power of creating Content?

6. It's time to PITCH:

If you have applied the first five steps for a month or so, you might already get potential clients to reach out to you for your services. But if they don't, then it's time to offer your services to your prospects.

I have not pitched many prospects because most of the time, they have reached out to me for my services just on the back of my Content and my brand on LinkedIn because I implemented the first five steps for a couple of months without fail.

Conclusion:

LinkedIn is easy to crack and grow on if you know how to do it and have the time to spend on the platform. Continue this process every day for an hour for the next month and see the results first hand.