Archives: 1 September 2023

LinkedIn API

How to extract data from the LinkedIn API

Reading Time: 13 minutes

Contents

LinkedIn is one of the most popular professional networking platforms, with over 800 million users and 30m companies worldwide. It offers a range of useful data points for talent, sales, marketing, business intelligence and many more. Accessing this data via API (Application Programming Interface) allows companies to integrate this data into their own applications, creating a more seamless user experience and enabling new functionality. The issue is, accessing this data (particularly at scale) can be tricky.

There are currently two ways to extract data from LinkedIn via API:

  1. Getting approved as an official LinkedIn Partner
  2. Using an unofficial API, such as Lix’s LinkedIn API*

*View the Lix LinkedIn API Docs

This blog explains both options, along with the benefits and use cases for a LinkedIn API and the technical capabilities of Lix’s LinkedIn API along with Python examples.

It will also discuss some of the challenges and considerations that businesses should keep in mind when working with the LinkedIn API. Whether you’re a developer looking to integrate LinkedIn into your application, or a business looking to leverage LinkedIn’s data for marketing or recruitment purposes, the LinkedIn API offers a wealth of possibilities.

The LinkedIn Partner Program

LinkedIn offer four official partner programs that grant access to their API:

Approval can be slow and difficult to obtain. LinkedIn removed their API from public access back in 2015 and have (understandably) been picky about who has been granted access, since. Even with official partner status, getting the data you need at scale can still be an issue. For example, if you’re looking to export LinkedIn Profile data, you will either need permission from each individual profile owner or you will need a paid subscription to LinkedIn’s consumer solution platform. Even with a paid subscription, you may still face issues with throttling when calling large numbers of profiles.

Lix LinkedIn API: Overview

Accessing the treasure-trove of LinkedIn data via the Lix API is quick and simple. We handle Proxy rotation, account management and rate limiting for you – so all you need to do, is request the data you need! Currently, we offer LinkedIn Profile exports (Enrichment), Search, Jobs, Posts, Connections and Contact Information; with more endpoints to be released in the coming months.

The API is organized around REST. All requests should be made over SSL. All request and response bodies, including errors, are encoded in JSON.

Please take a look at our documentation, within which we have some specific language code examples to make integration easier. These include Node, Python, Go, Javascript & Java.

LinkedIn Profile API (Profile Enrichment)

Perhaps the most sought-after export, is the complete LinkedIn profile. Some of the most popular use cases include:

Talent sourcing and recruitment: Talent and recruitment firms can use the API to export LinkedIn profiles of potential job candidates to build a candidate pool, assess their skills, experience and professional network.

Market research: Companies can export LinkedIn profiles of industry professionals to analyse their experience, education, skills, and work history. This can help them identify market trends, assess competitors and make informed business decisions.

Sales prospecting: Sales teams can export LinkedIn profiles of potential customers to identify decision-makers, assess their interests, work history, and professional network. This can help them personalize their sales pitch and increase their chances of conversion.

Competitive intelligence: Companies can use the API to export LinkedIn profiles of their competitors to analyse their skills, experience, and professional network. This can help them identify areas where they need to improve and take informed decisions.

1 API credit will return 1 complete profile.

Here is an example of a Profile Enrichment API call in Python:

import requests

url = "<https://api.lix-it.com/v1/person?profile_link=https://linkedin.com/in/alfie-lambert>"

payload={}
headers = {
  'Authorization': [lixApiKey]
}

response = requests.request("GET", url, headers=headers, data=payload)

print(response.text)

This call will return JSON, structured like this:

{"fullName":"Alfie Lambert","headline":"Co-founder at Lix","summary":"Building the cybernetic sales workforce by connecting all software with verified, actionable B2B data. 🤖","location":"London, England, United Kingdom","emails":[""],"socialAccounts":{"linkedin":{"username":"alfie-lambert","url":"<https://www.linkedin.com/in/alfie-lambert"},"twitter":{"username":"AlfieLambert"}},"workExperiences":[{"organisation":{"name":"Lix","socialAccounts":{"linkedin":{},"twitter":{}}},"title":"Co-founder","description":"Lix> provides industry-leading contact intelligence technology to sales teams, marketers and business intelligence professionals around the world. Our primary goal is simple: bring Contact Intelligence into the business mainstream. \\n\\nSales teams, especially those in fast-growing b2b SaaS businesses, need an alternative to broad-brush leads lists. They need more information about the people they are selling to. They need to spend less time hunting for leads and inputting contact information. They need to spend more time doing what they do best: selling.","location":"London, England, United Kingdom","startedOn":{"year":2020,"month":11},"endedOn":{}},{"organisation":{"name":"Lambert \\u0026 Bizzle","socialAccounts":{"linkedin":{},"twitter":{}}},"title":"Growth Consultant","description":"Our speciality lies at the intersection of performance marketing and immaculate presentation. We understand what powers real growth: marrying our expertise with an intimate knowledge of your business to create tailored solutions to your most pressing problems. \\n\\nWith shared backgrounds in growth hacking, automation, graphic design, video editing and startup \\u0026 scale-up marketing we can provide a full solution for your business - or we can dip in and solve individual problems as needed.","location":"London, England, United Kingdom","startedOn":{"year":2018,"month":3},"endedOn":{"year":2020,"month":11}},{"organisation":{"name":"Strawberries \\u0026 Creem Festival","socialAccounts":{"linkedin":{},"twitter":{}}},"title":"Director of Marketing and Communications","description":"Last year saw 10,000 revellers at S\\u0026C - a 10 fold increase from when I started less than 4 years ago. We have struck 6-figure partnerships with household names, been featured in every national newspaper and radio station worth mentioning and become a mainstay of the festival scene. ","location":"Cambridge, United Kingdom","startedOn":{"year":2014,"month":7},"endedOn":{"year":2018,"month":3}},{"organisation":{"name":"Pivigo","socialAccounts":{"linkedin":{},"twitter":{}}},"title":"Growth Hacker","description":"Pivigo is passionate about what the data revolution will bring to the commercial and public sectors. Data science can, and will, impact every industry. It is only a matter of time before every company will employ data science in their business, and those that start earlier will have a strategic advantage.\\n\\nAs the data science hub, Pivigo is at the cutting edge of a flourishing industry. We provide all the tools for those looking to a career in data science, from leading training (S2DS) to resources and challenges. For business, we can help you identify what data could do for you and connect you with the skilled practitioners to deliver on that goal.","location":"London, United Kingdom","startedOn":{"year":2017,"month":2},"endedOn":{"year":2017,"month":12}},{"organisation":{"name":"CityMunch","socialAccounts":{"linkedin":{},"twitter":{}}},"title":"Chief Marketing Officer","description":"CityMunch is a two-sided marketplace looking to connect savvy consumers with eager restaurateurs. We are putting the power into their hands, helping restaurants fill their seats and customers fill their stomachs. \\n\\nFor consumers, the mobile app allows anyone with time on their hands to explore London's food scene without breaking the bank. CityMunch offers free real-time discount vouchers across 250+ restaurants in London. \\n\\nFor restaurants, a simple web-based platform helps fill spare tables during quiet periods.\\n\\nAs CMO of a new and fledgling company, all processes had to be started from scratch; immediately designing and implementing a full media and communications strategy that has continued to be the foundation of all their b2c communication. \\n\\nDuring my tenure, the user base increased by +48%!a(MISSING)nd the daily covers (our key metric) rocketed 10x: from 5 on the day that I started to 52 on the day that I left. The average daily validations grew from 6 to 40. \\n\\nDAU (Daily Average Users) increased by +315.6%!,(MISSING) Daily Engagement rose by +532%!,(MISSING) Sessions Per User +18%!,(MISSING) Daily Engagement Per User +52%!\\(MISSING)n\\nMy communications work led to CityMunch receiving a prominent specialist feature in the Daily Telegraph, as well as coverage in other major news outlets and online channels","location":"London, United Kingdom","startedOn":{"year":2016,"month":10},"endedOn":{"year":2017,"month":1}},{"organisation":{"name":"Freelance Journalism","socialAccounts":{"linkedin":{},"twitter":{}}},"title":"Freelance Journalist","description":"In addition to reading for my degree, I currently write articles and submit them on a freelance basis to a number of publications including: BRIC - A high-end glossy political publication focusing on the emerging BRIC nations. Croco - An arts and lifestyle magazine originally based in Spain; I was approached by the editor to assist in targeting UK music artists and scenes in order to help them bridge the gap into a new market. DV8 - A sneaker-based fashion magazine based in London.","location":"London, United Kingdom","startedOn":{"year":2013,"month":10},"endedOn":{"year":2016,"month":7}},{"organisation":{"name":"The Tab","socialAccounts":{"linkedin":{},"twitter":{}}},"title":"Music Editor","description":"As editor of the music section for the Cambridge Tab I chase leads, find stories and commission writers to cover all aspects of the music scene in and around the University.\\n\\nDuring my time as editor over the busy May Ball period I successfully negotiated exclusive coverage with the vast majority of Cambridge colleges for their headline act announcements - putting The Tab music way ahead of the pack of student papers in terms of hits, readership and content sharing. I am consistently within the Top 100 journalists Nationwide and often in the Top 20 / Top 10.","location":"Cambridge, United Kingdom","startedOn":{"year":2015,"month":5},"endedOn":{"year":2016,"month":1}},{"organisation":{"name":"Futurecoins","socialAccounts":{"linkedin":{},"twitter":{}}},"title":"CMO","description":"As a new start-up, Future Coins needed a fast and powerful media strategy. I arranged for Joel Moss to be interviewed, along with our product, by: CNN, Al-Jazeera, The Telegraph, Time Out, Vice and a number of industry publications. Our social media presence grew in both quality and quantity, with targeted marketing through Facebook a great success when looking to reach out to tech savvy 20-somethings in the London area. As well as building awareness for our initial installation in London, I also put together a marketing plan based on bitcoin usage data against population and sought out other areas of the UK to install our units. I successful brokered the deal with the host of our unit in Brighton, which was the first in the city attracting attention from the BBC and local press.","location":"London, United Kingdom","startedOn":{"year":2013,"month":4},"endedOn":{"year":2015,"month":1}},{"organisation":{"name":"The Guestlist Network","socialAccounts":{"linkedin":{},"twitter":{}}},"title":"Journalist \\u0026 Section editor","description":"Producing articles for both online \\u0026 a print run of 50k. I also interview artists (both written and on camera), as well as contributing to comedy sketch writing.","location":"London, United Kingdom","startedOn":{"year":2013},"endedOn":{"year":2013}}],"education":[{"schoolName":"University of Cambridge","degree":"Bachelor's degree","startedOn":{"year":2013},"endedOn":{"year":2016},"fieldsOfStudy":["Human, Social \\u0026 Political Sciences"]},{"schoolName":"City and Islington College","degree":"Access Diploma","startedOn":{"year":2012},"endedOn":{"year":2013},"fieldsOfStudy":["Mixed Media"]}]}

LinkedIn Account API

The Account API is the fastest and simplest way to export an individual’s LinkedIn Connections. This method does require the user to be logged in to LinkedIn and have their LinkedIn account connected to Lix, in order to access their connections list.

Exporting LinkedIn connections has a number of potential applications. For individuals, exporting their LinkedIn connections allows them to maintain a backup of their contacts, import that data into their CRM and potentially use that information for networking purposes outside of LinkedIn.

For companies, exporting their employees LinkedIn connections can help to build a database of potential leads or customers. This information can be used to support sales and marketing efforts, or to identify potential candidates for job openings within the organization.

1 API credit will return 10 connections.

Here is an example of an Account API call in Python:

import requests
url = "<https://api.lix-it.com/v1/connections?count=1000&start=0&viewer_id=alfie-lambert>"
payload={}
headers = {
  'Authorization': lix_api_key
}
response = requests.request("GET", url, headers=headers, data=payload)
print(response.text)

This call will return JSON, structured like this:

json { "connections_response": { "elements": [ Connection ], "paging": { "count": 10 } } }

The LinkedIn Search API endpoint allows you to export pages of search results, as you would from within the LinkedIn search. As well as People (standard LinkedIn) and Leads (Sales Navigator) search results, this is where you will find and export Posts and Jobs search data.*

*note: Jobs search results no longer contain the description, “posted by” and other data points. To export this data you will need to use the Jobs Enrichment endpoint.

For all variations of the Lix LinkedIn Search API you will need to provide the search result URL from LinkedIn:

People Search

The data available from People Search results provides less depth than the Profile API, as it will show the search result rather than the profile data. However, each API credit returns 10 results, as opposed to the Profile API which is 1 credit per profile. So if less data is needed for each individual, the People Search is a more cost-effective method.

As search results are tailored to the individual performing the search, you have the option to use the “viewer_id” parameter to view the search results as an individual. This viewer must be connected to Lix. Read more in the documentation.

Here is an example of an LinkedIn People Search API call in Python:

import requests

url = "<https://api.lix-it.com/v1/li/linkedin/search/people?viewer_id=alfie-lambert&url=https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?keywords=lix&origin=SWITCH_SEARCH_VERTICAL&sid=%40%2Co>"

payload={}
headers = {
  'Authorization': lix_api_key
}

response = requests.request("GET", url, headers=headers, data=payload)

print(response.text)

This call will return JSON, structured like this:

{
  "searchResponse": {
    "people": [ Person ],
    "paging": { "count": 25, "start": 0, "total": 1000 },
  },
}

LinkedIn Job Search API

There are some super interesting use cases for tapping into a LinkedIn API to export LinkedIn Jobs search data:

Talent Sourcing: Companies can use the LinkedIn Jobs search data to identify potential candidates who match their job requirements and target them with relevant job postings or recruitment messages.

Competitor Analysis: Companies can use LinkedIn Jobs search data to analyse the job postings of their competitors and identify their hiring trends, skills requirements, and hiring volume.

Job Market Insights: Companies can use LinkedIn Jobs search data to get insights into job market trends, such as job titles, salaries, locations, and industries, to inform their talent acquisition strategies.

Sales Prospecting: Sales teams can use LinkedIn Jobs search data to identify companies that are hiring for specific positions, which could indicate growth or expansion, and target them with relevant sales messages or solutions.

Job Board Aggregation: Job board aggregators can use LinkedIn Jobs search data to aggregate job postings from LinkedIn and other job boards, and provide users with a comprehensive job search platform.

Again, you have the option to use the “viewer_id” parameter to view the search results as an individual. This viewer must be connected to Lix. Read more in the documentation.

Each credit will return 10 results – however the data is now limited. LinkedIn displays very little data in the Jobs search results, the majority is within the job posting itself for which you will need to use the Jobs Enrichment API.

Here is an example of a Job Search API call in Python:

import requests

url = "<https://api.lix-it.com/v1/li/linkedin/search/jobs?viewer_id=alfie-lambert&url=https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/search/?currentJobId=3436671233&keywords=lix>"

payload={}
headers = {
  'Authorization': lix_api_key
}

response = requests.request("GET", url, headers=headers, data=payload)

print(response.text)

This call will return JSON, structured like this:

{
  "searchResponse": {
    "people": [ JobPosting ],
    "paging": { "count": 10, "start": 0, "total": 1000 },
  },
}

LinkedIn Posts API

The Lix LinkedIn Posts API endpoint is exciting, because it offers real-time insights into the content that LinkedIn users are posting and sharing; which have a number of applications:

Social Listening: Companies can use the LinkedIn API to monitor what people are saying about their brand on LinkedIn. This can help them to quickly identify any negative feedback and respond to it in a timely manner.

Content Marketing: By analysing posts related to a particular industry or topic, companies can identify trends and create relevant content to engage their audience.

Competitive Intelligence: Companies can use the LinkedIn API to monitor the activity of their competitors on LinkedIn. This can help them to identify their strengths and weaknesses, and develop strategies to compete more effectively.

Sales Prospecting: Sales teams can use the LinkedIn API to identify potential customers by searching for posts related to their industry or pain points. This can help them to engage with potential customers and build relationships that can lead to sales.

Once again, you have the option of using the “viewer_id” parameter & each credit returns 10 results.

Here is an example of a Post Search API call in Python:

import requests

url = "<https://api.lix-it.com/v1/li/linkedin/search/posts?viewer_id=alfie-lambert&url=https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/CONTENT/?keywords=lix&origin=SWITCH_SEARCH_VERTICAL&sid=V2J>"

payload={}
headers = {
  'Authorization': lix_api_key
}

response = requests.request("GET", url, headers=headers, data=payload)

print(response.text)

This call will return JSON, structured like this:

{
  "searchResponse": {
    "posts": [ Post ],
    "paging": { "count": 10, "start": 0, "total": 1000 },
  },
}

Sales Navigator Leads Search API

The Sales Navigator Leads Search returns more data than the standard LinkedIn ‘People’ Search results, including Past Roles and Education – information otherwise only available from the Profile Enrichment endpoint. Also, as Sales Navigator shows 25 results per page, versus 10 per page from standard LinkedIn, you will receive 25 results per credit.

Once again, you have the option of using the “viewer_id” parameter.

Here is an example of a Sales Navigator Leads Search API call in Python:

import requests

url = "<https://api.lix-it.com/v1/li/sales/search/people?viewer_id=alfie-lambert&url=https://www.linkedin.com/sales/search/people?query=(spellCorrectionEnabled%3Atrue%2CrecentSearchParam%3A(id%3A2154062338%2CdoLogHistory%3Atrue)%2Ckeywords%3Alix>)&sessionId=GumqcP8vR0aPVWr3cNR74A%3D%3D"

payload={}
headers = {
  'Authorization': lix_api_key
}

response = requests.request("GET", url, headers=headers, data=payload)

print(response.text){
  "searchResponse": {
    "people": [ Person ],
    "paging": { "count": 25, "start": 0, "total": 2500 },
  },
  "meta": {
    "sequenceId": "jAkFkdjfi19kFdf"
  }
}

This call will return JSON, structured like this:

{
  "searchResponse": {
    "posts": [ Post ],
    "paging": { "count": 10, "start": 0, "total": 1000 },
  },
}

LinkedIn Jobs Enrichment API

Much like the Profile Enrichment endpoint, Jobs Enrichment allows you to export a greater depth of data than the standard search results. Recently, LinkedIn changed the layout of Jobs search results. Whereas previously all Jobs post data was available in the search, now the deeper detail (description, posted by, etc.) is contained within the post:

The information in the green box is Jobs Search data. The information in the red box can now only be extracted via the Jobs Enrichment endpoint.

As with the Search API, the “viewer_id” parameter can be used in order to tailor the results to an individual but this individual must have their LinkedIn account connected to a Lix account.

1 API credit = 1 Enriched Jobs Post

Here is an example of a Jobs Enrichment API call in Python:

import requests

url = "<https://api.lix-it.com/v1/enrich/job?job_id=3556453411>"

payload={}
headers = {
  'Authorization': [lixApiKey]
}

response = requests.request("GET", url, headers=headers, data=payload)

print(response.text)

LinkedIn Company / Organisation Enrichment API

Organisation Enrichment allows you to export company data beyond standard search results, from within the full company profile. Much like Jobs (above), LinkedIn stripped back the amount of data available in the search. Now, companies searches only provide a few data points. To really delve into that firmographic data, you will need to enrich.

The difference between Organisation Enrichment and the other kind of enrichment, is that it’s a different kind of credit. Org Credits also work on a 1 call, 1 credit basis but credits are much cheaper in order to reflect the lower density of data available.

Here is an example of a Jobs Enrichment API call in Python:

import requests

url = "https://api.lix-it.com/v1/organisations/by-linkedin?linkedin_url=https://linkedin.com/company/linkedin"

payload={}
headers = {
  'Authorization': [lixApiKey]
}

response = requests.request("GET", url, headers=headers, data=payload)

print(response.json())

This call will return JSON, structured like this:

{
    "liOrganisation": {
        "name": "LinkedIn",
        "link": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/linkedin",
        "industry": "Computer Software",
        "website": "https://careers.linkedin.com",
        "description": "Founded in 2003, LinkedIn connects the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful. With more than 850 million members worldwide, including executives from every Fortune 500 company, LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network. The company has a diversified business model with revenue coming from Talent Solutions, Marketing Solutions, Sales Solutions and Premium Subscriptions products. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, LinkedIn has offices across the globe.",
        "headquarters": "Sunnyvale, US",
        "companyType": "Public Company",
        "liEmployeeCount": "26383",
        "size": "10001+",
        "specialities": "Online Professional Network, Jobs, People Search, Company Search, Address Book, Advertising, Professional Identity, Group Collaboration, Recruiting",
        "numberOfInvestmentRounds": "7",
        "followers": "25072627",
        "crunchbaseId": "linkedin",
        "salesNavLink": "https://www.linkedin.com/sales/accounts/insights?companyId=1337&trk=li_comp_page",
        "logoUrl": "https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/C560BAQHaVYd13rRz3A/company-logo_",
    }
}

LinkedIn Contact Information API

Looking to find the email address for anyone on LinkedIn, in real-time, connected directly to your internal applications? Look no further. The Lix LinkedIn Contact Information API endpoint allows you to find validated email addresses from LinkedIn.

This endpoint is a lead generation supercharger for any sales, marketing or talent / recruitment team. You can integrate this with your CRM to generate a valid email address for any potential lead, or find and validate emails for large leads lists. The possibilities are huge.

The command requires you to enter a LinkedIn profile URL, to return an email. These can be exported either using the Lix It tool or the LinkedIn Search API.

Unlike the other endpoints, the LinkedIn Contact Information API requires email credits as opposed to API credits. These can be added to your account in the same way as API credits.

1 Valid email credit = 1 valid email. We only charge when a valid email is found.

Here is an example of a LinkedIn Contact Information API call in Python:

import requests
url = "<https://api.lix-it.com/v1/contact/email/by-linkedin?url=https://www.linkedin.com/in/alfie-lambert>"
payload={}
headers = {
  'Authorization': lix_api_key
}
response = requests.request("GET", url, headers=headers, data=payload)
print(response.text)

This call will return JSON, structured like this:

json { "email": "*****@lix-it.com", "status": "VALID", "alternatives": ["*****@lix-it.com"] }

The Lix LinkedIn API provides a powerful solution for talent sourcing and recruitment, market research, sales prospecting, and competitive intelligence teams to access high-quality employment and firmographic data. With its real-time API, businesses can easily gather LinkedIn data and use it to their advantage. Whether it’s exporting LinkedIn profiles, job search data, company search data, or posts, the Lix LinkedIn API provides a wealth of opportunities for businesses to improve their operations and make data-driven decisions. So if you’re looking for a reliable and efficient way to access LinkedIn data, give Lix LinkedIn API a try and see how it can transform your business.


LinkedIn Influencer Marketing: The Definitive 2022 Guide

Reading Time: 13 minutes

LinkedIn influencer marketing is being under-utilised by B2B marketers. We’re on a mission to change that.

 

In recent years, influencer marketing has grown into an essential part of every B2C marketer’s toolkit. The ability to leverage a trusting audience, pre-built by an influencer, lures in marketers like a moth to a flame. For many of us though, the phrase ‘influencer marketing’ conjures images of perma-tanned reality TV stars peddling protein shakes on Instagram. While this may be true, I certainly wouldn’t advise asking the cast of Love Island to promote your B2B product or service. So, how can us B2B marketers get in on the influencer action? With LinkedIn influencer marketing.

 

Why LinkedIn Influencer Marketing?

 

LinkedIn is the largest professional social network in the world, with a whopping 690 million users and counting. The platform has been on a steady growth trajectory since their acquisition by Microsoft in 2016, for a cool $26.2 billion. Microsoft’s investment into the business has reaped dividends, with LinkedIn’s membership growing 52% in just four years. 

 

In early in 2020, as I’m sure you know, the world went into lockdown. The coronavirus pandemic led to an unprecedented wave of people working from home. In fact, you might be reading this from the comfort of your home office right now, for this very reason. The rise in home working set off an explosion in LinkedIn’s engagement rates. In fact, LinkedIn saw its largest jump in DAU (daily active users) since 2011.

 

Amongst those users, from the casual to the committed, there are the individuals that we marketers dream of getting in front of: the decision makers. According to LinkedIn’s own stats, 61 million LinkedIn users are senior-level influencers and 40 million are in decision making positions.

 

Let’s take a moment to step back and consider this. We have at our fingertips, the largest business network in history. LinkedIn is an audience of nearly 700 million people and among them, tens of millions of decision makers. This is an unprecedented opportunity for B2B marketers. One that we have of course been leveraging for some time. I would argue however, that we have not been utilising LinkedIn marketing to its full extent. As marketers we run ads, content campaigns, perhaps even cold outreach; all the while LinkedIn influencer marketing remains largely untapped…

 

LinkedIn Influencer Marketing: Teamwork

 

As marketers we seek two things: an audience to speak to, and buy-in from that audience. Influencers can give us both of those things at the drop of a hat. They have spent years cultivating a persona, engaging with their followers and establishing themselves as a source of information and inspiration. Yes, even the reality TV stars on Instagram and the dancing teens on Tik-Tok.

 

The Lure of Influencers

 

In bygone years marketers and advertisers had to create and manage long-running campaigns to build brand recognition with their audience. Hoping that their efforts along the way cultivated some kind of relationship between brand and consumer. Social media has done away with that in a relative heartbeat. We don’t need to shoehorn emotion, connection and trust into 60 second ads, spaced out and repeated over years. Audiences can feel like they know, and therefore trust, influencers within a matter of weeks. Through photographs, captions, story posts, live videos, podcasts, Q&A sessions… The opportunities to build those connections are seemingly endless.

 

There is of course another important layer to the influencer marketing cake: it is social. Although there is a huge clue in the name ‘social media’, us marketers can often forget this fact when trying to sell via social platforms. We may be there to sell, but users are not there to buy. They are scrolling through their feed, interacting with their friends and consuming media related to their interests. It’s not SEM, where there is clear intent to buy, or researching buying, a product. You are interrupting their flow with your ad or message. Do you think the user would rather have their flow interrupted by an advert from a business they don’t recognise… or a recommendation from a person they know and trust?

 

With this in mind, it’s easy to see the power of influencer marketing, and therefore LinkedIn influencer marketing. You are leveraging not only their audience, but trust and social connection. Something that would otherwise take you many years (and thousands of dollars) to build for yourself.

 

This powerful combination presents us with a massive opportunity. We have a thriving social-professional network, with millions of decision-making users and, if you know where to look, a plethora of influencers ready to promote your products.

 

LinkedIn Influencers

 


LinkedIn influencers have established themselves as thought-leaders in their field. Their written content, videos, perhaps even just witty status updates have earned them thousands of fans. Their posts reach the coveted top spots within the LinkedIn feeds of not only their followers, but also those connected to their followers.

 

LinkedIn influencer marketing is also largely untapped market. How often do you see B2B influencers pushing products on LinkedIn? It happens, but it’s not nearly as large a phenomenon as it is on Instagram and Tik-Tok. If those platforms are anything to go by, we are just a few years away from saturation. As with any new marketing trend, the time to get involved is now.

 

The early adopters will reap the most rewards. Much like the early days of Facebook pages, and the ease of follow/unfollow at the dawn of Instagram; this trend will become saturated and ROI will gradually decrease. We may reach a point where, much like Facebook, the only way to really reach an audience is pay-to-play. You don’t want to look back in three years and kick yourself for missing the boat.

 

Influencer Campaign Preparation

 

Before we delve into the specifics of tracking down influencers, we need to prepare our campaign. As a marketer or solopreneur you will already understand the importance of good prep and solid tracking.

 

Media, Location, Duration

 

Setting up a LinkedIn influencer marketing campaign is not much different to any other marketing campaign. There are a few extra things to consider, including the media used, the location of the post, duration and so on.

 

There are a number of factors that will contribute to your choice of media, including your chosen influencer’s preference.

 

Where possible, I advise opting for video.

 

A massive 84% of buyers say they were persuaded to purchase after watching a brand’s video. Since launching native video (uploaded directly to LinkedIn) back in 2017 engagement rates have rocketed.

 

Within LinkedIn there are three locations you could opt to post your content, whatever it may be:

 

  1. The Influencer’s Feed
  2. Within a Group
  3. On your Company Page

Of the three, I would generally advise the first option, so that you can really leverage the trust and audience your influencer has built up. Groups can command excellent engagement but promoted posts are generally blocked by group admin. Some marketers advise posting on your company page to build better brand recognition, but unless you have a huge following there, I wouldn’t bother.

Tracking

There is no use throwing time and money at a LinkedIn influencer marketing campaign if you cannot track what works and what doesn’t. Depending on what your desired outcome is from this campaign (clicks, email signups, conversions) there are numerous ways to track. You may wish to send users to a designated landing page, with messaging that matches the content pushed out by your influencer for a seamless customer journey. This is time consuming and perhaps not the best option for your initial test. An easy way of tracking is simply adding UTM parameters to whatever links the influencer may share – this should make it easier to separate out the clicks, visits and conversions from a specific source. You can use Google’s UTM builder for free.

LinkedIn Influencer Marketing: Metrics

With your campaign idea in mind and your method for tracking results prepped – it’s time to find those influencers!

How to Find LinkedIn Influencers

If you’re familiar with LinkedIn you will probably know that they curate their own list of influencers by invitation only. There are a few hundred of these ordained influencers, including the likes of Melinda Gates, Mike Bloomberg and the ubiquitous ‘Gary Vee’. If you have the kind of budget required to hook one of these big fish, go ahead. For those high-profile targets approaching them via LinkedIn, or even by email, is probably not going to yield results. I would be incredibly surprised if Mike Bloomberg is checking and responding to his DMs on LinkedIn. Your best bet for an upper-echelon influencer like that is to approach their publicist or agent and go from there.

“Now if you’ll excuse me Spiderman, I must go check my LinkedIn messages…”

My guess is that if you’re reading this, you’re either marketing for an SME or you’re a plucky entrepreneur at a startup looking to make your mark. In which case, your pockets likely aren’t deep enough to pay Gary Vee to speak 7000 words a minute about you in a LinkedIn influencer marketing video. Never fear. There are thousands of influencers, thought leaders and LinkedIn populists out there ready to spread your message for a fraction of the cost.

Let’s dive into how we can unearth them before moving onto how to approach.

Get Targeted

Before we can begin our search, we need to think about our selection criteria. My suggestion here is to start with the end result and work backwards.

For example if I wanted to sell LIX subscriptions, I would start by identifying a vertical. I know that LIX offers the ability to export LinkedIn Company Data, and I know that there are four primary verticals that tend to buy this tool: B2B marketers, salespeople, investors and recruiters. This time around, I’d like to target marketers.

Now we have our niche, let’s think about numbers. Begin by thinking about how many individuals you will need to reach with this campaign in order to convert your desired number. I estimate that I can convert approximately 3% of all readers / viewers (depending on the media) and I’m looking for 50 signups to test the viability of LinkedIn influencer marketing.  Therefore, I need an influencer in the marketing niche, preferably with interests and content relevant to automation services, with at least 1,500 followers.

With this kind of laser-targeting, we know exactly what we want and what kind of person can deliver on the above. Now, we search…

Find Influencers on LinkedIn

Part of what makes LinkedIn such an incredible tool is its powerful search function. With the right keywords, filters, time and perhaps a helping hand from the LIX LinkedIn Search Exporter you can find relevant profiles, export their data from LinkedIn into a spreadsheet and begin panning for influencer gold!

Continuing our example project, we’re searching digital marketing automation specialists. If we enter that into the LinkedIn search bar and select the ‘people’ filter around 669k results are returned.

LinkedIn Influencer Marketing: Search

I would advise applying some filters in order to not only bring down that number, but also hone-in on your desired influencer. For this campaign, I want to reach influencers based in the UK, so I will filter by location ‘United Kingdom’ which returns 35k results. Then, we can filter by industry. We want somebody currently in the world of marketing and advertising. When I apply that filter, it brings us to a more manageable 6.2k results.

LinkedIn Influencer Marketing: Searching

Now the real work begins. You have two options for sifting through these results: the free option, which is time consuming, but… well, free. Or, you can utilise LIX’s ability to export ‘deep’ LinkedIn profile data (there is a short ‘how-to’ for this feature within our video CV parsing on YouTube!).

Using LIX Deep Profile Extraction will allow you export up to 1k profiles per day, directly in to XLS or CSV. The tool will extract the number of followers a person has directly to your spreadsheet, making it easy to identify influencers within this niche. You can simply sort your results by ‘followers’ within Excel or Numbers and work your way along the top results to discover those who post relevant, engaging content. Voila! You have your list of targets. If your CRM supports CSV or XLS uploads, it’s a good idea to move these potential influencers over for better tracking and organisation.

If you’re opting for the manual method, the end result is the same but you will need to sort through those profiles one by one to find their follower numbers, select the best candidates and copy their details into the list-maker, spreadsheet or CRM of your choice.

When manually sifting through, head to the user’s profile and click on ‘activity’. Here you will find the number of followers, along with a list of their posted content (articles, feed posts etc.). With this information, we can make informed decisions about potential influencers.

Our example search led us to this handsome fellow, with following within our desired range and well-engaged posts. Maybe he’s right for our LinkedIn influencer marketing campaign?:

LinkedIn Influencer Marketing: Target

Groups

Another place to search is within the ever-popular LinkedIn groups. There are over 2 million groups on LinkedIn. According to Tech Crunch, more than half of all LinkedIn users are in at least one group.

Within these groups, you tend to find that there are usually a handful of regular posters. They tend receive a good response, with strong engagement on their posts. These are your influencers.  If we return to our example search, we can see that there are 289 groups that match our keywords. The largest groups should command the most engagement, therefore leading you to your potential influencers faster. My advice is to not neglect the smaller groups however – sometimes you can unearth a gem.

LinkedIn Influencer Marketing: Hone

How to Approach LinkedIn Influencers

We have targets in our crosshairs, now it’s time to get them on board. This is not as straightforward as it may seem on the surface. Just because we want to work with them, does not mean that they instantly want to work with us. Remember, these influencers have spent years cultivating an audience and presenting themselves as thought leaders within their field. They will not risk sullying their reputation and standing in the community if they feel that your brand isn’t the right fit, or the product isn’t right for their audience. In order to leverage the trust that influencers have built up with their followers, you need to build trust with the influencer.

Email vs. LinkedIn Messages?

This may seem like an easy choice. We’re already using LinkedIn, so why not just message them there? In reality, it depends on how quickly you’re looking to receive a response.

If you’re a regular LinkedIn user you will no doubt receive dozens of messages every week. Many of which are ‘spammy’ or annoying. Usually they are connected to a connection request (the only way to message a user not within your connections, unless you have a paid version of LinkedIn such as Sales Navigator).

This, I think, is the reason why people put off regularly reading their LinkedIn messages. Personally, I check my emails 10+ times a day and my LinkedIn messages perhaps 2-3 times a week.

Want your message to cut through the noise of LinkedIn and receive a faster response? Find your influencer’s email address and contact them there. If in the last step you used LIX to export data from LinkedIn, you will notice that where a person has listed their email address on their profile, their email address will have been exported onto your spreadsheet. If you’re working manually, head to Google and do your best to find it that way. Happy sleuthing.

LinkedIn Influencer Marketing: Discover

For those of you not in a hurry to receive a response, or struggling to find those emails, LinkedIn messaging is fine. My advice here is to start strong. You’ll notice in your inbox; you get a short preview of around 10 words before opening a message. Make those 10 words count.

Opening with a standard “Hi, I hope you are well” is not going to stand out in a crowded inbox. This is the exactly the kind of message I put off until I cannot stand the notifications any longer. Mainly because I have no idea what is inside. It could be anything from a cold sales pitch, a job offer, or just straight up spam.

What do you think will capture the attention of your chosen influencer?

Here are a few 10-word examples that I’ve used in the past with some success.

Paid promotion opportunity: We would like to work with you…

We’ve identified you as a LinkedIn influencer in ‘X’ field…

Excellent content, we would like to discuss a sponsored post…

These may seem a little impersonal, and they are. These openers on LinkedIn are not designed to build rapport (yet, that comes later). These are designed to grab attention in a stuffed inbox, enticing the influencer to read your message.

You can also use variations of these openers as email subject headers if you choose to contact your influencers that way!

Messaging

For some of us, contacting and building rapport with people comes naturally – for others, not so much. If you’re the kind of person who listens in to the sales team making calls and thinks “how do they do that??”, this section is for you.

You’ve already grabbed their attention and got them to open the message. All we need to establish now is who you are, what you do and whether they would be interested in learning more about this opportunity. That’s it. At this stage, don’t bog them down with a ton of details, don’t discuss fees or even what the promotion is. Those details can come after you receive your first ‘yes’. Up until the point at which they agree to talk further (your first ‘yes’) you are talking at them, not with them. We need to open up a conversation in which both parties are happy to participate.

Continuing our example, here’s a sample message I would send to our digital marketing & automation influencer:

LinkedIn Influencer Marketing: Message

It’s straightforward and to the point, without being pushy or presumptuous. Another technique that can work well here is referencing what you think makes them the perfect candidate. If they wrote a great blog about your niche, or received a ton of engagement for a post, reference it!

“I saw your blog about automation and thought it was excellent. I especially like your take on setting responsible limits….”

Influencers may put out content in order to win business, but they also like getting good feedback too! Even the least-vain influencers respond well to a little praise.

Some people like to use what is called ‘presumptive closing’. This when you push the person receiving your correspondence into agreeing to a proposition. Something like:

“We want to work with you. I’m calling influencers on Friday, what’s the best time for us to speak – 11am or 1pm?”

I tend to find, however, that influencers receive a lot of messages from a lot of salespeople and are pretty fed up with the pushy approach!

When you have their reply, hopefully saying that yes, they’re happy to discuss; you’re ready to go into details with them.

Now that you have read, absorbed and percolated this information it’s time to go forth and put it into action! LinkedIn is an untapped treasure trove of B2B influencers – get out there and tap it.

Find more blogs from LIX, here.


sales intelligence

Sales Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruption

Reading Time: 7 minutes


Sales intelligence has reached a tipping point. The sheer volume of freely available business data, combined with falling entry costs and a change-igniting global pandemic, is proving to be the trifecta of conditions necessary for what I believe is the largest leap forward in sales history.

Let me explain.

Just 33% of a salesperson’s day is spent engaging with customers, with the other 66% being taken up with prospecting, administration and research tasks. If human interaction is the key to sales, then this allocation of time and energy is completely upside down.

That’s a serious problem.

I believe that for the first time in history, we have a solution to that problem – sales intelligence. Imagine, if you will, the salesperson’s ‘second brain’: a processing powerhouse that reps can call upon to carry out these tasks for them. A partner in prospecting, freeing them up to spend more time connecting and less time administrating.

That is what sales intelligence is about to do for sales and it is time for you to make a leap forward… or get left behind.

In order for me to give context to bold claims, allow me to take you on a journey back to the dawn of advertising, a time when marketing and sales lived in technological harmony.

The History of Sales & Marketing

Almost 2,000 years ago, in 1st century CE, a gentleman named Umbricius Scaurus was the Roman Empire’s leading manufacturer of ‘garum’; a luxury fish-based sauce loved by Roman high society. We know all about Scaurus’ and his ancient fish sauce for two reasons: the preservation of Pompeii (thanks Vesuvius!) and Scaurus’ talent for sales and marketing.

During the excavation of Pompeii, archaeologists discovered mosaic advertisements for Scaurus’ garum in his family home and the local market. Advertisements that talked about the quality and pedigree of his particular fish sauce. Urns stamped with the recognisable Scaurus label have since been discovered as far away as modern France.

sales intelligence
This mosaic is in the square of corporations in the ancient Roman port of Ostia

The term ‘marketing’ first appeared in dictionaries much later, during the 16th century, referring the process of selling at market. The term came from merchants, like Scaurus, finding ways to bring new customers to their doors. Customers that could be sold to.

The marketing channels available (mosaics, urns, brass plates, painted banners…) and the point of human interaction – the merchant at their stall – were perfectly balanced. The marketing drew them in, and the merchant closed the deal. Sales and marketing existed in this person-to-person harmony for many centuries.

Until it didn’t.

Merchants and markets fell to the industrial revolution, replaced by general stores and the supermarket. The Gutenberg press gave us the newspaper and with it, print advertising. During the advertising boom of the 1920s, the terms B2B and B2C were first coined, marking a split between the two. 1955 saw the first TV ad broadcast on ITV, the world’s first commercial TV channel.

sales intelligence
The first TV ad: Gibbs S.R. toothpaste, broadcast at 8.12pm on September 22, 1955

The days of the merchant manning their stall was long gone. Consumer goods no longer needed human contact to close the deal. Advertisers could present a product, educate the consumer and convince them to purchase long before they ever stepped into a store.

Person-to-person selling was only required where costs were high and trust building was crucial: b2b and high-ticket items.

A chasm had formed, between the old ways of selling and the new.

The dawn of the internet

Web 1.0, the first iteration of the internet, widened this chasm even further. Uptake was slow, at first – new technology always takes a while to reach widespread adoption – but it was coming.

1990 saw the first (albeit limited) search engine: Archie. In 1993, clickable ad banners began appearing on websites. The digital marketing revolution had begun.

sales intelligence
Go and ‘archie it’ doesn’t have the same ring, does it?

These technological advancements allowed marketers and advertisers to do something that person-to-person selling couldn’t match – messaging at scale. The evolution of these technologies gave marketers the ability to push their message out to ever more people. To track, to ‘personalise’ and convert at a scale never before imagined.

At the click of a button, a modern marketer can reach millions of people across the globe, in a matter of minutes.

Marketing technology left sales in the dust.

It’s true that marketing tech can be leveraged to help reps, too. The same channels and tactics exist in B2B lead generation as they do in B2C marketing: PPC, SEO, content marketing, webinars… all drive inbound leads and (hopefully) sales, but if a product or service truly requires person-to-person connection to get over the line, there’s a bottleneck. Salespeople, like all of us, only have so much time in their day, much of which is taken up by admin, research and prospecting.

There’s an important point for us to remember, here. Having a ‘human in the loop’ is not about pushing prospects into a purchase, it’s about building trust and forging personal relationships in a way that marketing alone cannot.

The true magic of sales lives in connection, in those moments where the expertise and intuition of the rep helps to solve a problem for the potential buyer. Where trust is built, and loyalty is won. That is what all truly great salespeople know and strive for.

This poses a question, one that – if answered – could propel sales into a whole new era:

How do we scale personal relationships?

Scaling personal relationships

Salespeople know the bottleneck of time is a problem. Countless surveys and studies show that reps feel hamstrung by unproductive prospecting and stifled by administration. According to one such study carried out by CSO insights, salespeople on average spend just 33% of their day actually talking to prospects, 71% of reps feel they spend too much time doing data entry and 68% of businesses report struggling with lead generation.

sales intelligence

McKinsey’s comprehensive study on Automation and the future of work assessed the “automatability” of over 2,000 workplace activities in 2018 and concluded that over 40% of time spent on sales tasks could be automated.

These statistics are not anomalies. A casual Google search will reveal a multitude of blogs and papers that mirror these concerns. Salespeople (and therefore, the businesses they represent) are being held back from achieving their true potential. Their time, such a precious resource in relationship building, is being squandered on peripheral tasks.

Enter: Sales Intelligence

Sales intelligence (SI) refers to a broad range of tools and technologies designed to enable organisations to find and utilise sales-related data and insights.

In plain English, sales intelligence tools help salespeople find, extract and sort information in an instant: slashing the time required for quality prospecting, research and lead generation.

Better still, where sales intelligence meets sales productivity, these tools relieve reps of the need for monotonous data entry. Robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI), the primary drivers of SI, have the power to eradicate the time lost to such tasks.

This is it. The salesperson’s second brain. The key to scaling personal connection.

Quality lead generation becomes a source of delight, not stress. Collecting information on prospects, discovering those all-important shared interests, finding contact information, spotting buying signals… all become effortless with the right tools.

There’s a force multiplier effect, here. In freeing your reps from manual prospecting and data entry you don’t just free up the 66% of their day spent on these tasks, you free them from the power drain of even thinking about it.

Imagine a sales team laser-focused on building relationships at 3x the rate they ever could before. A team with more time to spend nurturing, educating and exciting your customers.

For some businesses, this dream is already becoming a reality.

Sales intelligence has been a category on G2 since way back in 2012. Five long years ago, Harvard Business Review told sales leaders that it was time to develop ‘Machine Intelligence’. Some business leaders listened, and those that did, prospered.

Salesforce’s State of Sales (2020) shows that high-performing sales teams are 4.1x more likely to use AI and machine learning applications than their peers. According to Deloitte, 83% of B2B AI-adopters are seeing rapid and positive changes, with 53% achieving moderate benefits, and 30% experiencing substantial benefits.

As you might imagine many of these early adopters were large firms, or rather, firms with large budgets. This is no longer the case. In accordance with Moore’s Law, as computing power increases, it decreases in relative cost at an exponential pace.

Removing cost as a barrier of entry is a key driver for the sales intelligence revolution. Sales intelligence is becoming democratised. Salespeople with a drive to achieve don’t need the financial backing of their organisation. Entrepreneurs and small business owners can now utilise the same technology as the behemoths of business. For anywhere upwards of $40 a month, they can get in on the action.

Salespeople are cottoning on to the fact that the old ways are dying, and a new world of sales technology is upon us. A world in which they can focus on the magic of human connection.

Grand View’s Sales Intelligence industry report indicates that:

“The global sales intelligence market was valued at $2.3 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach $5.6 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 10.5% from 2020 to 2027.”

These figures, published early in 2020, may even be conservative as to the potential for this sector. The Covid-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated business transformation, in many cases lighting a fire under the (usually molassic) decision making process of large corporations. We’re in an age of flux, where digital change is being implemented at a speed never before seen.

The sales intelligence revolution is upon us. We are at the dawn of a new era and you have to decide as a salesperson, entrepreneur or business leader – will you take the next leap forward, now, or let your fish sauce be forgotten?


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Export LinkedIn Contacts

Export LinkedIn Contacts – Plus Full Profiles and Email Addresses

Reading Time: 8 minutes

If you’ve ever wondered how to export LinkedIn contacts, extract emails, automate lead-finding or generally extract data from LinkedIn – look no further.

Get 1,000 rows of data and 50 valid email exports every single month for free with Lix

In the 18 years since LinkedIn was launched it has become the single largest directory of businesses and business professionals in all of history. Boasting over 722 million members and 30 million companies, it is a veritable goldmine of data. Whether you’re a salesperson digging for leads or a marketer looking for influencers you can find them on LinkedIn.

The problem for many people however, is how do we extract that information from LinkedIn? It’s all well and good having access to the connections we’ve made, but when it comes time to organise and export that data LinkedIn often falls short.

LinkedIn offers a method that is quick and free, but will only export your connection’s name and current position. Not much data. Especially if you’re looking to build out a sales campaign or scour for your next big hire.

This article will explain how to export LinkedIn contacts and, depending on your desired outcome, full profiles and even email addresses into spreadsheets, cloud-based lists and your chosen CRM. This will allow you faster, organised access to your contacts for you to network, pitch to or build closer relationships with.

Export LinkedIn Contacts

You’ve had your LinkedIn profile for years, gradually building connections and forging relationships within your industry and beyond. Your contacts are a pool of useful information, potential clients and further networking opportunities. You have put in the leg work to build an impressive contact list – let’s use it.

Exporting LinkedIn contacts can be done directly from LinkedIn for free. Without the need for an additional tool. However, the free method has its limitations. If you don’t have the budget for an external aid to help with this process, you can skip to the free method.

If you’re looking for richer data, let’s take a look at Lix’s comprehensive way to export LinkedIn contacts. Lix’s dedicated LinkedIn data extraction tool comes with multiple options and features. Each designed for you to build a more complete data package.  Lix gives you 50 free emails and 1,000 rows of search data every single month – so if you want the fastest, easiest method, sign up for a free account and get started!

Here’s our step by step guide to exporting your LinkedIn contacts, followed by a handy video!

1. Ensure you are logged in to LIX and that your LIX browser extension is enabled.

When you initially sign up for LIX we will detect which internet browser you are using and provide you with the correct guide for that browser. We currently support all major browsers, so whether you’re a Chrome wiz, Safari stalwart or Opera fanatic we have you covered!

(Psst… We’ve listed the guides here in case you didn’t find yours!)

  • Safari
  • Edge
  • Internet Explorer
  • Chrome
  • Firefox
  • Opera

    2. Click on ‘My Network’ in the top toolbar, then ‘Connections’ on the left

    This will take you through to your connection list, ready to export. You can sort the list by recently added (your most recent connections), first name or last name. You can also filter this list using the powerful LinkedIn search filters.

    First, ‘My Network’:

    Then, ‘Connections’:

    3. Click on your (now activated) LIX browser extension

    Whenever you land on a page with data that LIX can extract, you’ll notice your browser extension activate, or light’s up. That means you’re ready to hit the button and open the LIX toolbar.

    Depending on your browser, it should look like something like this:

    4. Select your options from the LIX tool

    As the LIX tool unfolds, you will notice a number of options for you to choose from.

    Left Column Options

    The options on the left determine how many results to extract, and in what format to export your LinkedIn connections. You can choose to export as Excel, or CSV depending on which you prefer to use – or which option is best supported by your chosen CRM. Most CRM systems will allow you upload contacts in either of these formats.

    If you’re using the LIX Lists feature, you can select which ‘project’ or list you want to export these results to. This is especially helpful if you’re exporting multiple searches and want to de-duplicate results.

    Lastly for the left-hand option column, we need to select the number of results. Your selection here is impacted by your selections in the right-hand column

    Right Column Options

    We delve into these options further down the page. In a nutshell, these options determine whether you want to use the Lix email-finder to generate 98% accurate validated email addresses for your contacts, if you want to extract their full profiles or whether you want to use the automated profile viewer.

    The important thing to note here is the effect these options have on the number of results you would like to export. LIX cleverly keeps your data extract limits under LinkedIn’s fair use threshold. This means your account is always safe from violating the rules.

    The threshold is 1,000 viewed pages per day. So, if you decide to export just the search results as you see them (with or without emails) you can export a whopping 10,000 contacts in a single day.

    If you opt for ‘Deep Profile’ this will extract all the data from your contact’s full LinkedIn profile, meaning you can extract up to 1,000 in a day.

    ‘Generate Emails’ will use LIX’s intelligent email finder to search the web and provide you with 98% accurate validated addresses for each contact, automatically, within minutes. This is an extremely powerful tool for outreach and lead generation!

    ‘View Profiles’ is an automated profile viewer, recommended for use in People searches rather than with your current contacts. It automatically views the profiles of people in a given list so that they get a notification letting them know you stopped by. It can be a great way to warm up potential new connections.

    Want to know more about these options? Jump to Generate Emails, Deep Profile, View Profiles.

    5. Selected your options? Now LIX IT!

    Once you’ve made a decision about what kind of data you want from your LinkedIn contact export, it’s time to hit the button and extract those results.

    As your export processes, you will notice your LinkedIn moving through the relevant pages in the background as LIX does its work. Once it’s ready, you will see a new button appear:

    Your results are ready to be downloaded! Hit the button and download your exported LinkedIn contacts in your chosen format.

    If you opted to use a project, you can head back over to lix-it.com and head to your log in area. Here you will see the ‘Projects’ tab with your list ready to be exported and sent to your email address.

    We have also put this step by step guide into a handy video if you prefer to learn audio-visually!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDUK8XzRI74

    If you’ve followed along with the steps so far, you have exported your LinkedIn contacts into a spreadsheet and are ready to get to work. Whatever your desired outcome is for the data, you should have everything in place to make that happen.

    If you’ve used LinkedIn’s free method, you will only have a list of your connections and not the added data we provide with the LIX tool. Extracting with LIX allows you to gain richer data and build a more complete picture of your contacts. Instead of simply working from their names and current positions, you have an email address, work history, education, number of followers, skills… Data you might need to build a sales campaign or locate your next hire.

    Export LinkedIn Contacts (Free Method)

    If you’re still not sold on the benefits of using LIX, or you don’t have the budget and basic data will do, LinkedIn provide a great step by step guide, here.

    In a nutshell, this is how it’s done:

    • Hit the button labelled ‘Me’ on the upper menu of the LinkedIn homepage
    • Click on ‘Settings & Privacy’ from the menu that unfolds
    • There is a tab labelled ‘Privacy’, open that tab
    • Inside the area marked ‘How LinkedIn uses your data’, click on the button that says ‘Change’
    • This will lead you to a ‘download your data’ page, here you must select ‘Connections’
    • Check the primary email address attached to your LinkedIn, a list of your connections will be sent there

    Additional LinkedIn Data Extraction

    Generate Emails

    This powerful feature is one our most popular, and it’s easy to see why! If the individual you’re exporting has their email address listed publicly on LinkedIn, we will export that for you as the simplest option. If, however, they have no email address listed (commonly this is case) our email generator will use a clever automated system to find it for you.

    This process involves scanning the web for possible email addresses, permutations and email addresses for others within that person’s organisation. When you export is complete, the data you receive will include that person’s most likely email address and a selection of other possibilities where possible. This means we can transform LinkedIn into a huge sales, marketing, events and networking outreach platform in just a few clicks!

    Profile Enrichment

    Exporting all the data from a LinkedIn profile without slow, manual copying was not possible until the LIX Deep Profile feature was launched. The Profile Enrichment tool will trawl through every profile in an exported people search, and extract their:

    • Name
    • Description
    • Location
    • Industry
    • Profile Link
    • Headline
    • Personal Website
    • Shared Connections
    • Education
    • Experience

    This is especially useful for recruiters looking to extract full CVs from a profile, but it’s also incredibly potent data for a marketer or salesperson. This deep dive into their profile gives you insight into their work background, education and possible shared connections. Data that can be used to build more complete targeted outreach campaigns, or indeed wider sales campaigns at an organisational level.

    https://youtu.be/xlo02MON9qk

    Profile Viewer

    LIX’s profile viewer is primarily for use when LIX’ing search results, rather than current contacts. If you’re a regular LinkedIn user, you’ll know that when someone views your profile LinkedIn lets you know.

    Using profile viewer, you can automate up to 1,000 profile views a day. Meaning 1,000 individuals you’ve chosen through LinkedIn’s filtered search will get that notification every single day.

    If you’re using LIX for data extraction, don’t use up your daily threshold with profile views! However on those days in which you have no searches or contacts to export, it’s a great tool to boost your outreach, even in a small way.

    A percentage of those who see you’ve viewed their profile will view yours in return (curiosity is a powerful thing!) – you can then offer to connect with them, having warmed up your introduction ever so slightly with mutual profile views.

    Export LinkedIn Search Results

    This article explored in-depth how to use LIX’s features to export LinkedIn contacts with the richest data possible. However, you can use these tools outside of your current network in conjunction with a LinkedIn search.

    Simply perform your search, filter your results, hit the LIX extension and select your options – just as we did with your connections.

    This opens up the entire LinkedIn database for extraction…. 722 million members, at your fingertips.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLHx5yBdKes

While you’re here, why not read our guide to LinkedIn Influencer Marketing?


The Pinpoint Technique: Hack Your LinkedIn Ads for Crazy ROI

Reading Time: 6 minutes

LinkedIn ads are expensive – and they deserve to be. Anyone who is anyone in business has a LinkedIn account. If you want to reach them while they’re in ‘work mode’, advertising on LinkedIn is a no-brainer. So what if there was a way to hack your ad targeting and drastically increase your ROI? The Pinpoint Technique does just that. If you’re running LinkedIn ads, jump on this method now while it’s still hot!

What if there was a way to hack your LinkedIn ads and drastically increase your ROI?

The real value of LinkedIn is in its data. Among the 800m users (and counting!) are an estimated 30 million decision makers. All of whom are neatly listed with their name, title, company and a wealth of other data points to dig into. Using the powerful LinkedIn search you can find the exact person, or group of people, you want to communicate with.

The problem is, that level of data detail hasn’t been available for use in LinkedIn ads. As you will know, LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager comes with certain restrictions. You need to create a large enough audience size to show your ads to before they will go live. The targeting options, while much improved, can still be a little loose. Many of us have found ourselves ticking boxes and selecting options that don’t exactly match our target personas, in order to reach our audience size goals.

Are you a cosmetics company looking to reach C-Suite individuals in the beauty sector? Well, you’ll be selecting a box marked ‘retail’ and showing that (very expensive) advertisement to thousands of completely irrelevant users.

That’s a big problem when we’re being prompted to bid up to $75 per click for certain keywords and audiences. No matter how big your marketing budget is, surely none of us are comfortable with burning cash like that. At least not unless we’re completely sure that the right people are clicking.

There’s been no way to harness the power of LinkedIn’s data for ads… until now

This is where things get really interesting. Finally, we can harness the power of LinkedIn’s search function, combined with the treasure trove of business data, to supercharge our LinkedIn ads.

The Pinpoint Technique enables you to search LinkedIn for your ideal personas, sort and filter the results to find the exact people you are looking for and then advertise to those people only! Combine that with some clever algorithm-gaming strategies and you’ve got the key to ultra high-performing LinkedIn ads.

Before we get into the process, really think about this for a second. Using this technique, you can personally choose the individuals that see your ads before they go live. That means not a single penny of your ad spend is wasted. Even if they don’t convert immediately, you have placed your brand in front of relevant industry professionals, rather than unrelated individuals who happen to fit into LinkedIn’s tickbox.

If you’re ready to hack your LinkedIn ads, let’s begin…

The Pinpoint Technique

The aim of the Pinpoint Technique is to build a list of hand-picked individuals that exactly match your desired personas. Then, you upload that list to your LinkedIn Campaign Manager. This can be done in two ways, one that you pay for (faster and more efficient) and one that is free (possible, but slower). You will likely recoup the costs of the paid method in your first campaign. If you’re a small business and those costs are prohibitive, take your time and use the free option.

Step 1. LinkedIn search

Search the desired personas for your campaign. There are a ton of powerful filters built into the LinkedIn search that can really help you get granular here. If you’re not au-fait with LinkedIn’s search, we wrote a whole guide on it here.

It helps at this point if you have LinkedIn Sales Navigator, as this will allow you to access more results from each search. Standard LinkedIn let’s you view the first 1,000 search results, Sales Navigator shows you the first 2,500. As we’re aiming to build a list of 10,000 individuals, Sales Navigator is a real shortcut.

Step 2. Export the results

Once you’ve found your ideal ad-viewers, it’s time to export. For this step, you will need to use a LinkedIn search export tool, like Lix. Again, there is a free option and a paid option here, depending on your budget and how quickly you want to move. Lix’s free starter plan allows you to export 1,000 search results every month. It would take a while to build your complete list, but it’s possible.

Lix’s Data Miner package costs $100 for a month, but will allow you unlimited search exports (up to 10,000 results per day!). You will almost certainly make that back in your first campaign. If you are already running LinkedIn ads, I would definitely advise that you carve that $100 out of your budget so you can hit the ground running.

One of the added benefits of using Lix for this, is Lix’s ‘lists’ feature. Instead of exporting each search into an individual CSV file, then combining and deduplicating them yourself (snore!), Lix can do this for you automatically in the cloud. You can export your searches from LinkedIn into a ‘project’, Lix will then deduplicate multiple searches for you – leaving you with one, pre-cleaned list of data ready for export.

Step 3. Contact targeting template

To upload your results ready for use in your ads, you’ll need to copy the data over into one of LinkedIn’s Contact Targeting templates:

Contact Targeting Template.

This is just a simple copy & paste job!

If for some reason you’re not using Lix lists, you can perform multiple exports and then copy the data into the template until you’ve reached the 10k goal. When that’s done, you’re almost ready to start those ads…

Step 4. Upload your list

Once you’re happy with your audience, head over to the LinkedIn Campaign Manager and select ‘Matched Audiences’ under the ‘Account Assets’ tab. Click ‘Create Audience’ and select ‘Upload Company/Contact List’.

Once you’ve uploaded your CSV you’ll need to wait up to 48 hours for LinkedIn to build your audience. Sometimes the Campaign Manager can’t match the names in your CSV to a profile, and not all of the people on your list make it through. If that’s the case, don’t panic, simply top-up your list by repeating steps 1-3.

When the green light appears next to your audience, it’s go time. You’re ready to send your LinkedIn ads out to your hand-picked list.

Bonus Content: LinkedIn Ads Tips and Tricks

The Pinpoint Technique is not the only way to improve the ROI of your LinkedIn advertising. Combine the method above with some of the following tips to supercharge your ads.

Video First

In our experience, image ads perform poorly both in click-through-rates (CTR) and conversions. Video ads consistently attract more attention, and allow you to convey more information about your offering. We recommend including text or subtitles wherever possible, particularly if your video contains sound.

This doesn’t mean you need to go out and pay for an animated explainer video, or have a crew go out and film testimonials (but if you’ve got that content, use it!). You can build a simple slideshow video, or use a stock template, in something like Canva, Lumen5 or Animoto.

Game the algorithm

The more engagement your ad gets, the less each click costs. If you’ve ever run Facebook ads before, you’ll know this as the ‘relevancy score’. If your ad gets lots of likes and comments, it is seen as being relevant to the audience and therefore less costly to run.

You can use an app like Podawaa to join LinkedIn engagement pods. Pods allow LinkedIn users to auto-engage with each other’s content. When your ad is live, simply instruct your pod to engage with it and watch your ROI increase.

Bidding

We almost always recommend bidding for clicks. You can mostly assume that if someone clicks on your CTA, they have some form of interest in your product. We can also build cohorts consisting of those who have interacted with previous campaigns for retargeting, allowing us to hone in on prospective clients.

Ignore LinkedIn’s ‘maximum delivery’ option and select manual bidding. LinkedIn’s recommended bid is always far higher than the minimum bid. If you allow the Campaign Manager to bid for you, you can be assured that it will almost always bid the maximum. LinkedIn is a business too, remember!

You can adjust your bid based on the data you get from the campaign. If you’re not getting the clicks you want, up it a little. Do this gradually to find the sweet spot. It takes a little more effort but it will make a huge difference to your ROI over time.

Retargeting

This tip is short and sweet. If you’re sending users to a landing page, make sure you have a retargeting pixel installed. This allows you to capture those that don’t convert. Maybe you didn’t catch them this time, but it doesn’t mean they’re not interested. If you can retarget them, it gives you a second bite of the apple.

Lead Gen Forms

If the capturing leads is your primary goal, then we recommend LinkedIn’s internal Lead Gen Form tool. We’ve found that the typical conversion rate with this tool is much higher than other types of LinkedIn ad. Users feel more comfortable when they don’t have to leave the page they’re on.

Unlike sending users to a landing page to capture their details, the lead gen form pre-populates their information based on their account details, allowing them to submit their interest almost instantly. They click the CTA. They click submit. They’re a lead.

If your team are comfortable prospecting via LinkedIn, you can optimise your form to include just the user’s LinkedIn Profile URL. This way, the lead is parting with as little information as possible, increasing the chance of conversion.

Plus, if you’re a Lix user, you can run a search for their profile and use our ‘Generate Email’ option to find and export their email address using our clever algorithm, allowing you to follow up via email.

Lead gen form do come with an option to acquire emails, pre-filled, but the email provided here is the email the user signed up to LinkedIn with, which is almost always a personal email. Most of the time businesses will want a business email address, therefore this feature can be fairly redundant.

There you have it, The Pinpoint Technique will supercharge your LinkedIn advertising and maximise your ROI. Combine it with our best practice tips and tricks and your campaigns will soon be the toast of the office.


LinkedIn Search: The Ultimate Guide

Reading Time: 10 minutes

 

The LinkedIn search function is a powerful tool – and it needs to be. With over 720 million users (and counting!) the ability to quickly filter, sort and categorise search results is a must. For example, searching the term ‘CEO’ will return 9,755,417 results. A few too many to sift through for a sales campaign, probably.

 

LinkedIn search is fairly intuitive, but there are a few tips and tricks that even the most seasoned user may have missed. This article is here to walk you through all the features of LinkedIn search, from the basic search right down to the individual features.

 

Jump to Section:

People

Jobs

Content

Companies, Schools, Groups & Events

 

LinkedIn Search: The Basics

 

If you’re just here to learn how to use the basic LinkedIn search, this section is for you. Even if you’re a power user looking to eke out every last drop of functionality from a LinkedIn search, this is where it all begins.

 

Regular users will be very familiar with the way it looks and works – it’s just like any other search function on any website: you type in your keyword(s) and hit enter. Job done.

 

This works well if you’re looking for someone already in your network, or a person with an unusual name. Anything beyond that, however, and you’ll begin to need to use filters!

 

 

Unless you fancy sifting through 162,322 John Smith’s to find the one you’re looking for?

 

LinkedIn Search: Categories

 

Proudly sat under the search bar are the following categories: People, Jobs, Content, Companies, Schools, Groups, Events. What these options do is fairly obvious, and if you’ve spent much time on LinkedIn you will have no doubt searched within a category before.

 

If you’re taking the time to search for someone, or something, on LinkedIn you will most likely know which category it falls into – whether it’s a person, a company, a job and so on. If however you’re just trying to get used to the search function, try them all!

 


(nb: Some people refer to these as ‘upper filters’ and the filtering within categories as ‘lower filters’ but that gets a bit confusing, so we’ve opted for the nomenclature ‘categories’)

 

This is really the first step in honing your search. If we return to our ‘John Smith’ example and select the ‘People’ category, we go from 162,322 search results to 162,000. Still plenty of work to do, then.

 

 

LinkedIn Search: People

 

Once you’ve input your search and selected a category, it’s time to start really sorting through the results. LinkedIn’s search filters are different dependent on the category you’ve chosen. Let’s go through the filters for each search type individually.

 

Looking for someone in particular? Or perhaps a group of individuals with a certain set of skills? Here’s where we can really start to dial in that people search.

 

Initially, LinkedIn offers you four tabs to choose from:

  • Connections
  • Current Companies
  • Locations
  • All Filters

 

Let’s run through the top three, before delving into the ‘All filters’ tab.

 

Connections

 

The connections tab allows you to choose from 1st, 2nd and 3rd+ from the dropdown menu. 1st degree connections are those already in your network. 2nd degree connections are people you have some link to (via a current connection): these are usually considered warmer leads for those of you looking to use LinkedIn for sales and LinkedIn networking purposes, as you have an ‘in’ with that person already. 3rd degree connections are another step away – they’re the 1st degree connections of your 2nd degree connections.

 

This filter is useful for searching out leads and finding friends of friends to make introductions for you, but there are other ways of using this tool. For example, if you wanted to find everyone in your connections list that went to a specific University, or those that have a certain skill, you can search that keyword and then filter by People > Connection.

 

If I was looking for people who are 1st degree connections with me, who have JavaScript skills, it would look something like this:

 

 

This is incredibly useful for recruiters looking for their next great candidate!

 

Current Companies

 

This option is fairly self-explanatory, it filters search results by current company / place of employment. This simple option does have a number of use cases, however. It’s a great tool for HR people looking to sort their flock from the general LinkedIn for instance.  It’s also popular with headhunters looking to poach talented individuals from a particular company.

 

Locations

 

LinkedIn is a global platform, operating in 200 countries worldwide. So, whatever your desired end result for this search, knowing an individual’s location is always important. Whether you want to sell them a product or service, recruit them for a role or invite them to an event; where they are plays a part.

 

Let’s return back to our search for one John Smith: we whittled down 162,322 search results to 162,000 by selecting ‘People’; let’s filter again by ‘United Kingdom’ as the location and see what we’re left with:

 

 

We’re down to just 30k John Smiths now! The right John Smith is getting ever closer…

 

All Filters

 

The ‘All Filters’ tab opens up into a smorgasbord of options. This is where you can really tighten up your search. Opening up the ‘All Filters’ tab should look like this:

 

 

The first few options are more in-depth versions of the filters we’ve just looked at. The most interesting of these initial options is ‘Connections of’. Using this, we can filter results by a specific connection, allowing us to build our search around a specific connection – particularly useful for leveraging existing relationships to build new ones. Location and Current Company come with a few helpful suggestions, plus we can also search by Past Companies.

 

The following filters are where we really see the additional functionality of the ‘All Filters’ tab:

 

 

Narrowing by industry, profile language, schools (which is a catch-all term for schools and colleges) and even interests and services gives us plenty of scope to find the individual we’re looking for.

 

Let’s go back to our John Smith search and see if we can use the filters to hone-in on our target. I’m looking for a John Smith who working in accounting, speaks English, and attended the London Business School.

 

 

Using LinkedIn search filters, we have narrowed down 162,322 search results to just four. We’ve gone from enough John Smith’s to fill Twickenham twice over, to just enough John Smiths to squeeze into a small car.

 

Of course, you can use this search in whatever way you like. In reality, you probably won’t be searching for the one true John Smith; it’s more likely that you will search by a particular skill, or job title etc. Hopefully with your newfound knowledge of the LinkedIn people search process, you can go forth and find whoever it is you’re looking for in no time at all.

 

LinkedIn Search: Jobs

 

The next big search category for LinkedIn is Jobs. There are three main reasons that we’ve come across for LinkedIn Job Searches. The first is the most obvious – people looking for jobs! From there we also know that recruiters use this function in order to find posted jobs and offer their own candidates. Also, we know the investors use this function to see which companies are hiring (and therefore, growing) when sizing up where to place their money.

 

For the sake of our examples, we’ll keep it simple and perform searches as if we’re on LinkedIn looking for work. Let’s bring back JavaScript as our example skill and see how many jobs match the keyword “JavaScript”:

 

 


Unlike the People search, Jobs will automatically fill in your location. In fact, you cannot leave this field blank. According to my search, there are currently 18,998 live job postings looking for JavaScript as a skill within the UK (it’s a great time to be a developer!).

 

As you can see in the screenshot above, we have a different selection of filters at hand for our search.

 

Date Posted

 

An important filter if you want to find those roles that are either fresh off the rack, or perhaps those that have lingered for a while without finding the right person. For our search, we can see that ‘date posted’ can have a huge effect on the numbers:

 

  • Past 24 hours (980)
  • Past Week (5,154)
  • Past Month (14,902)
  • Any Time (18,998)

 

Selecting ‘Past 24 hours’ filters out almost 95% of the returned results. If you want to be among the first CVs in their inbox, make sure you use this filter.

 

Experience Level

 

Knowing at what level a company is recruiting is obviously crucial for them job seeker; you don’t want to sift through internships if you’re senior level. However, this is another filter that can be used by our other potential ‘Jobs’ searchers – the recruiter and the investor. Is a startup is looking for their first CFO? They must have more money flowing through the doors that they need to keep track of…

 

For our example search, experience level breaks down the results like this:

 

  • Internship (1,208)
  • Entry level (9,832)
  • Associate (4,229)
  • Mid-Senior level (2,644)
  • Director (142)
  • Executive (53)

 

Company

 

Have a place of work in mind? Filter your search by company with this tab and immediately cut your search results down to size. This is a filter that I would wager is predominately used by our other ‘Jobs’ searchers, however!

 

Job Type

 

Full time? Part time? Contract? Select the type you want here.

 

Remote

 

In the Covid-19 era, this is a filter that is probably getting a lot more action! Filter our jobs that allow you to work remotely and never go into an office again.

 

LinkedIn Features

 

This is where the filters start to get interesting. LinkedIn have some pretty snazzy built-in features for jobs hosted on their platform. These include: Easy Apply, Under 10 Applicants and In Your Network. Easy Apply makes applying… easy (you wouldn’t have guessed, I’m sure!). In short, it uses your LinkedIn profile as a CV and allows you to one-click apply for a role without ever leaving your search. Under 10 Applicants is for you early birds who want to catch those worms; put yourself front and centre for new roles. In Your Network allows you to apply for roles where you have an ‘in’, someone in your network works there and can help make the introductions. Hey, it’s not what you know but who you know, sometimes… Which is another good reason to put time into LinkedIn networking!

 

All Filters

 

When searching in Jobs, the all filters tab opens up some new options. As with People searches, the first few options are simply more in-depth versions of the filters we just covered. Let’s skip to the bottom of the window and run through the extra parameters within. It should look something like this:

 

 

These final four options are super important if you’re looking for your dream job on LinkedIn.

 

Industry

 

You’re a JavaScript developer looking for work. Maybe you don’t have a specific company in mind, but you may have industries that you do (or don’t) want to work in. Sometimes these options can be a little loose, for example in the screenshot above one of the options is ‘Internet’. If you told a recruiter “I’m a developer and I want work in INTERNET” they would probably smile uncomfortably and shuffle you out the door.

 

Job Function

 

If your skillset can be applied to different functions, select the one(s) you most want to work in here.

 

Title

 

As above – select which option best suits your search.

 

Salary

 

For many, this is one of the most important factors when looking for a role. Salaries here operate in brackets, filtering the search results to suit your requirements.

 

Whether you’re a job seeker, recruiter or investor you can use the LinkedIn search filters to find exactly what you’re looking for. Get out there and find that perfect job!

Content

 

Content posted direct to LinkedIn picks up around 9 billion weekly impressions. There are over 3 million regular (weekly) contributors. Content on LinkedIn is a huge deal and its importance is growing every single day. Thankfully with all that content to sort through, LinkedIn has provided us with a vast array of filters.

 

We’re going to continue with the JavaScript search term. Let’s see how many articles pop up:

 

 

Unlike our previous search categories, LinkedIn doesn’t give us a total number. It does, however, give us some filters to play around with here.

 

Posted By

 

Currently there are only two options here: posted by ‘Me’ or ‘1st Connections’. You can find your own articles more easily by accessing the ‘activity’ section of your profile and clicking on ‘articles’. The ability to filter by 1st degree connections may be useful, but don’t be surprised if this is expanded up in future LinkedIn updates.

 

Date Posted

 

Here we have three options: Past 24 hours, Past Week, Past Month. Again, we have no idea of the total number of articles posted that match our search term within those timeframes. This function is probably best used in conjunction with the other filters.

 

Author Industries & Companies

 

This is a sandwiching together of the final two options, but both serve similar functions. This is also where this group of filters becomes interesting and we start to see some possible use-cases. Using this function in conjunction with our guide to LinkedIn Influencer Marketing we can really see some value in content filtering. It’s possible to search for content-types, within certain industries and then filter by recency. This would allow a savvy marketer to find outspoken influencers within their required fields. If LinkedIn added extra functionality to the ‘Posted By’ filter this could really become a powerful tool.

 

Companies, Schools, Groups & Events

 

These categories have been grouped together because (currently) they have no additional filters. In the future, this could change. There is a case to be made that filters for all the above categories could be useful. For example, if you could search companies by size (employee count) or filter events by the number of attendees, these would be useful filters. Currently however, it’s just the basic keyword search. This means that you either need to know exactly which company, school, group or event you are looking for – or you can input a blank search and have LinkedIn show you all of them.


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LinkedIn Helper Tools

LinkedIn Helper Tools: How to Growth Hack LinkedIn

Reading Time: 8 minutes

 

LinkedIn helpers are tools designed to help you eke the most out of LinkedIn. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes: some are lead and data focused (like us!), some focus on automation and outreach, others offer tools for content and engagement.

 

This guide walks you through the best LinkedIn helper tools on the market, so that you can make the choice that’s right for you, your business and the task at hand.

 

LinkedIn Helper Tools: Categories

 

My first piece of advice to you when looking for a LinkedIn helper tool – work backwards. Decide what features and tools you need most and let that guide your decision. Choosing a tool that looks good but doesn’t perform your key tasks well is going to lead to frustration and wasted time. It may also transpire that one tool doesn’t do everything you need, and a combination of tools is best.

 

To make your search a little easier, I’ve broken down the types of tool available into three overarching categories. If you know which type of tool you want, feel free to click the one that suits and jump to that section! 

 

Automation: Messages & Connections

 

Content: Scheduling & Engagement Boosters

 

Data: Finding Emails & Exporting LinkedIn Data

 

Bespoke Solutions: Purpose-built Tools

 

Automation

 

With so many millions of users and thousands of possible opportunities to be found on LinkedIn, reaching out to them manually would take an age. Thankfully, there are some powerful and reliable LinkedIn helper automation tools out there for you use.

 

Generally, people use LinkedIn automation for three things: automating connections requests, sending messages (including automatic follow ups) and viewing profiles.

 

Automating Connection Requests

 

Apart from the obvious benefit of growing your network, personalised connection requests can also be useful for LinkedIn outreach. The current version of LinkedIn moves the connection request message (the little ‘hello’ that you get with each request) directly into your main inbox.

 

A good automation tool for this purpose will allow you to personalise the connection messages you send with each request, thus turning your LinkedIn into an automated outreach machine! At the time of writing, it is possible to send up to 150 connection requests a day*. That’s a lot of automated outreach.

*Update: As of June 2021, this number is far lower. LinkedIn have introduced new connection limits, tied to acceptance %. If you’re looking to hit 150 connections a day, you will need to ensure at least 50% of those connections are accepted. No small order. We now recommend working in smaller, more targeted batches.

 

Automated Messaging

 

I can feel the confusion through the screen “didn’t we just talk about automated messaging?”. Yes… and no! A good automated LinkedIn messaging platform will go beyond simply connection request messages and into the realms of message flows, automated replies and often much more.

 

This allows you to build funnels and message flows that initiate, build and nurture relationships at the click of a button. You could start with a connection request to break the ice, send an automated follow up with a call to action and then personally reply to the responses. All within a fraction of the time needed to do the whole process manually.

 

Profile Viewing

 

When you view somebody’s profile, as long as they are not set to ‘private’, they will receive a notification to let them know you stopped by. It’s almost like a little digital tap on the shoulder. It’s not as effective as sending connection requests, but it will bring in some attention to your profile. Given that you can view up to 1,000 individual profiles a day, that’s a lot of shoulders to tap!

 

The latter, automatic profile viewing, is something we offer at LIX, but it’s not our main focus. If you’re looking for powerful LinkedIn automation as your number 1 priority, we advise that you check out one of the following companies.

 

Octopus CRM

 

Octopus position themselves as the ‘All-In-One LinkedIn Automation Software’ and to be quite honest, it’s hard to argue with that. Their tool allows you to:

 

  • Send automated (personalised) connection requests to 2nd and 3rd level connections on LinkedIn
  • Message hundreds of your 1st level connections in bulk
  • Automatically endorse up to 7 skills on profiles of your LinkedIn contacts
  • Visit hundreds of profiles automatically

 

That’s all the tools we’ve listed, plus the extra skill endorsement tool, which is another neat way to engage with your connections.

One of the great things about Octopus is that they are extremely cost effective. Even the top-level tier comes in at a very reasonable $24.99 per month. If you’re looking for the standard suite of LinkedIn automation tools at a price that won’t hurt your pockets, definitely check them out.

 

LinkedIn Helper Octopus CRM
Octopus CRM

 

MeetAlfred

 

Alfred claims to be the world’s easiest and most advanced LinkedIn and Twitter automation program, offering:

 

  • Automated Messaging Campaign Manager
  • In-Depth Analytics & Dashboard
  • Advanced Linkedin CRM
  • Email Campaign Sequences
  • Team Management
  • LinkedIn Post Scheduling (coming soon)

 

As you will have ascertained, Alfred is not just for LinkedIn but Twitter too. If you’re using both platforms this could be a great tool for you and your business.

 

With extra functionality however comes extra cost. MeetAlfred’s top tier for those operating the system themselves is $99 a month – reasonable given the amount of functionality and the fact it covers both platforms. There is also a higher tier of $199 a month in which the people over at MeetAlfred do it all for you.

 

Content

 

LinkedIn’s native content has been a big deal in the world of b2b for some time, with plenty of room for growth left. There are over 3 million regular (weekly) contributors and content posted direct to LinkedIn picks up around 9 billion weekly impressions. That’s a lot of content.

 

There are two main categories of LinkedIn helper tools related to content: schedulers and boosters.

 

Content Schedulers

 

It’s not enough to simply post a piece of content to LinkedIn, or in fact anywhere on social media. If you really want to game the algorithm and get those big engagement numbers, you need to think about timing. Posting an article targeted at CEOs that goes out at 9am on a Monday will probably get less than engagement than the same article posted at 8am, or 6pm. Why? Because those are the times that your target audience is using LinkedIn.

 

Also, think about time zones. Perhaps you can time your post for after working hours in Europe whilst hitting lunch time in the US? Staying on top of all those different post times could be stressful and you don’t want to miss your mark. That’s where content schedulers come into play.

 

Engagement Boosters

 

Engagement boosting tools are relatively new, but a very exciting prospect. As with all social media, LinkedIn is based off an engagement algorithm. The more engagement a post gets, the more people it’s then shown to. If you get lots of engagement early on, there’s a chance your post could go viral.

 

Most engagement boosting tools work via shared engagement. Essentially, you pool your account with others. They can use your account (along with everyone else in the pod) to boost their content and visa versa. That means real accounts, not clickfarms.

 

Buffer

 

This is a tried and tested tool that has been around for some time. As with most schedulers, it can also prepare and post content for other socials platforms. However, unlike others, the scheduling function is their sole purpose rather than afterthought (Hootsuite etc.). That means you get a great product without breaking the bank. As well as simple scheduling, Buffer offers:

 

  • Post Analytics
  • IG Stories Planner
  • Hashtag Planner
  • Instagram tagging
  • Custom Reports

 

The top tier for Buffer comes in at $99 for 25 social channels and up to 2,000 scheduled posts. That’s probably overkill for all but marketing agencies. Eight channels and 100 posts is just $15 and probably enough if you’re just posting to LinkedIn.

 

LinkedIn Helper Buffer
Buffer

 

Podawaa

 

Of all the engagement boosters I have tried, Podawaa is by far the best. Their service is relatively new, beginning in early 2020 but in that time they have grown massively.

 

The Podawaa tool offers:

 

  • Boosted Reactions
  • Personalised Replies
  • Multiple Languages
  • Post Scheduling

 

If you’re looking just post scheduling, I would opt for Buffer as the Podawaa post scheduler is not quite as powerful and well-equipped, but if you want a blend of both content and engagement then nothing is better.

 

Their top tier is $24.99 a month which includes unlimited posts and 2,000 engagement credits a month (cumulative).

 

Leads & Data

 

LinkedIn is a treasure trove of b2b data. In a world where ‘data is the new oil’, LinkedIn is an oil field just waiting to be drilled. At the time of writing we are close to 1 billion LinkedIn users and, due to the pandemic, the daily average usage is at an all-time high.

 

People are networking, chatting, recruiting, selling and pitching on LinkedIn like never before. The business opportunities available at your fingertips are bountiful. This is where you need to find a dedicated, LinkedIn-focused data exporter and email-finder.

Thus far we have recommended other LinkedIn helper tools where the LIX helper isn’t as strong, but when it comes to lead gen and data exporting, we have to recommend ourselves!

 

Let’s break down how LIX can help with both sides of the LinkedIn export coin…

 

Data

 

No other tool can export more LinkedIn data than LIX. As a LinkedIn-focused data export tool we are unmatched in the field. Paired with the powerful LinkedIn search function (you can find a full guide on that, here) LIX can export search results from People, Companies and Jobs searches. Plus, full LinkedIn profiles using the Deep Profile feature.

 

At time of writing, LIX exports:

 

People Search

 

  • Full Name
  • Description
  • Organization
  • Past and present jobs
  • Industry
  • Location
  • Email

 

Company Search

 

  • Business Name
  • Headquarters
  • Type of Company (Public, Private, Limited, Not for Profit etc.)
  • Year founded / Age of company
  • Stock ticker
  • Number of employees on LinkedIn
  • Industry
  • Number of Followers
  • Locations of offices

 

Job Search

 

  • Job title
  • Location
  • Company
  • Job Type (Full Time/Part Time/Contract)
  • Time Since Posted
  • Easy Apply Status

 

Deep Profile

 

  • Name
  • Description
  • Location
  • Industry
  • Profile Link
  • Headline
  • Personal Website
  • Shared Connections
  • Education
  • Experience

 

Plus, here at LIX we are constantly developing and releasing brand new tools to help export, organise and utilise this data. If you need data exported from LinkedIn, you need LIX!

 

Leads

 

The data LIX can export is part of the lead gen journey: understanding your customer, learning about the size of their business, tapping into shared connections and education can all help with making the sale. With all that in place however, how do we turn this data into a lead? That’s where LIX’s email-finding algorithm comes into play.

 

Where a particular lead doesn’t have their email address listed on their LinkedIn profile, our intelligent machine-learning algorithm will find possible email addresses for the contact based on a variety of data inputs and previous industry knowledge.

 

That allows us to provide verified email addresses for around 80% of your export. With the ability to export up to 10,000 search results a day (and stay within LinkedIn’s fair usage limits) that means you could be exporting a cool 8,000 email addresses every single day.

 

Combine their email with the wealth of data you’ve already extracted, and you have yourself a very exciting, well-researched lead.

 


Try Lix & get 50 free leads!

Supercharge your pipeline with monthly, free, targeted leads. Click here to get started.

 

Bespoke Solutions

 

If you’re looking for a particular LinkedIn helper tool that you can’t find on this list, or you want data, lead information or anything else from LinkedIn that isn’t currently listed, you can either commission a bespoke solution.

 

Don’t have the budget for bespoke? Suggest a feature for the LIX roadmap.

 

LIX have built bespoke solutions for some of the planet’s largest companies, including investment banks and world-leading Universities.

 

If you’ve got a project in mind that you’d like us to discuss with you, contact us at any time. We’d love to talk it through with you.

 

There you have it. Every possible LinkedIn helper feature and tool you could ever need to get the most out of LinkedIn. Whether you’re looking to automate, extract leads and data or just give your content the push it needs to reach a wider audience: the solution lies above! Now, get out there and conquer the mountain that is LinkedIn in 2021.


How to use LinkedIn

How to use LinkedIn: The Complete Walkthrough

Reading Time: 24 minutes

Welcome to How to use LinkedIn – a complete walkthrough to help you master the professional social platform. This guide is split into four sections, one for each of the four pillars of LinkedIn mastery: profile building, networking & connections, content and company pages. Each section is accompanied by a video. Feel free to skip to the section you need help with most or read (and watch!) all the way through for the complete guide on how to use LinkedIn.

 

Profile Building

Networking & Connections

Content

Company Pages

 

Profile

 

A strong profile is the very foundation of LinkedIn. Whether you’re using LinkedIn to look for a job, for networking or seeking potential clients you need to make sure that your profile is polished. A polished profile requires a quality avatar image, use of cover image space, tailored headlines, powerful descriptions and a focus on keywords.

 

In order to walk you through each section of the profile, we’re going to use my personal LinkedIn as an example (you can also watch this section’s *video* and follow along there).

 

When you sign into LinkedIn, you’re going to see something like this:

 

 

This is the LinkedIn feed. It’s where you see your connections (and sometimes the connections of your connections!) and their content: the information that they’ve posted, articles, video etc. This is where your content is going to show up when you post it. If you’re already au fait with LinkedIn, then you’ll know all about this. If you’re new to LinkedIn, take some time to get familiar to this view. The feed setup is very similar to other web-based social platforms such as Facebook, so it shouldn’t take too long to get used to.

 

Let’s jump right into my profile, which looks like this:

 

 

I’m going to take you each of the individual sections and explain how and why I’ve structured mine in the way that I have.

 

Profile Image

 

First and foremost, make sure that your photograph is professional. Not professional in the sense that a pro photographer took the snap (although that would be nice) but professional in the sense that you are projecting an image of yourself in a professional setting. No photos of you drinking, or smoking, or on the beach, or a party… This may seem obvious, but I see profile images like this fairly regularly and it is not a good look. You might think it makes you look cool and ‘out there’, but this is a professional networking platform, not a frat party.

 

My tip for presenting yourself professionally is to wear the clothes that you would normally wear to a networking event within your industry. If you’re in an industry that would wear black tie, or at least a tie and jacket, to a networking event then make sure you’re wearing something like that in your avatar. Remember, that’s what we’re using LinkedIn for. We are here to network in one way or another: finding a job, growing your network, looking for clients etc.

 

The avatar I use is a little more casual, because I work in startups and tech. I can have an open shirt with t shirt underneath, and that’s absolutely fine. Make a judgement call here. If you’re in doubt, opt for the smarter choice.

 

Cover Image

 

The cover image is something that a lot of people neglect, which is a real waste of valuable digital real estate! It doesn’t have to be an all-singing, all-dancing advertisement I’ve seen some that pack in way too much text) and you don’t need to sell something here, but don’t waste the space.

 

I’ve used something light-hearted and design focused for my cover image:

 

 


While it looks great, I can probably do a little bit better by making use of that space and saying something about the company that I work for, a launch we have coming up or perhaps some content we have to give away. If you’re looking for a job, you could always include something about your skills or your search here. If you feel like you have nothing to say in the cover image, don’t fret, include your company logo or a photo from a business event. Something is always better than nothing.

 

Here are some great examples of LinkedIn covers to give you some inspiration: https://bit.ly/LinkedIn-Cover-Examples

 

Another important point to consider is the recommended sizes for both the profile and the cover image; pixelated images simply will not do.

 

You can find a full guide to the sizes on Canva: https://www.canva.com/sizes/linkedin/

 

Canva is also a great tool for creating graphics easily. Follow the link, pick a size and start creating. clean and keep it looking good.

 

Summary & About

 

The summary section sits just below your images and includes your current job title, highest level of education, company and number of connections. This information is automatically populated from the details you enter in the relevant sections of your profile.

 

Here is my ‘About’ section:

 

 

You may have noticed a recurring theme with my about section and cover image – I’ve opted for style over substance! I’ve kept it lighthearted, but you can of course be much more serious than I have.

 

I’ve chosen three very simple, but I think fairly useful, points:

 

Firstly, an achievement: ‘Top 100 Growth Hackers’. I was voted as such in a study by Goodman Lantern. That’s an achievement, it sets me apart from my peers.

 

Secondly, expertise: ‘Automation expert’. Tthat’s a little bit more about me as a marketer, my skillset and background.

 

Lastly, on-brand humour: ‘Fantastic hair’. It’s funny and lighthearted, very on-brand for me, and I do have fantastic hair.

 

I have seen plenty of variations for the About section, from one-liners to rambling essays. Personally, I would shy away from writing too much here. A big block of text is going to put off any potential readers. Let your profile cover the details of your work history!

 

Featured

 

This is your chance to add media to give a little extra flavor to your profile.

 

Here’s my Featured section:

 

 

I’ve included an article written about me, talking about my skills and some of my achievements. This is really good: it shows that I have press coverage and that people are interested in what I do. If you have anything similar that celebrates your skills and achievement, be sure to include it!

 

The next along is my Goodman Lantern ‘Top 100 Growth Hackers’ nomination. The broken image on the link is a great example of why it’s important to regularly check your profile for changes. A broken image doesn’t fit with the rest of my profile, so I need to either replace it with something else or I need to speak to Goodman Lantern and get them to fix their metadata. Either way, I can’t leave a broken link on my profile!

 

There are other things you can do with this media space, in fact the possibilities are limitless. You can make a video CV where you talk about yourself, you can give a presentation on a project you’ve worked on, or something you’re interested in. This link space is an opportunity really show off who you are and what you’ve achieved.

 

Activity

 

The activity section is fairly important, although many people forget that it’s there. Let me explain why it’s worth bearing in mind…

 

 

Any engagements you make on the LinkedIn platform will show up here. Articles, shares, comments… everything! For content shares, that’s no problem – it’s great to have a second chance for people to find your content on your profile. Comments however can sometimes be an issue.

 

In the last few years, LinkedIn has become slightly more like Facebook in the sense that people will share personal and political things on the platform. That didn’t used to happen so much on LinkedIn, but it happens a lot now. Always remember, before you comment on something potentially controversial, those comments are going to show up on the activity card on your profile. You don’t want to have an argument with someone about their stance on Trump, for example, and then someone potentially offering you a job or a contract comes onto your platform, sees that you are saying things that they would find potentially unsavory and withdraws the offer. Trust me, it happens!

 


Experience

 

The most important portion of your LinkedIn profile. Here’s where you’re going to add your job titles, descriptions, the time that you worked there and any supporting media.

 

 

If you want to be found in the LinkedIn search, keep your job titles keyword friendly. Some people decide to call themselves ‘lead-gen startup guru ninja’ and while that may feel exciting, people aren’t searching for those terms. If you don’t use keyword-focused titles, you will appear in less searches, have less connections and less opportunities offered to you. If you’re not worried about those things and your primary concern is being cool and wacky, then go for it.

 

My most recent experience shows that my position is the Marketing Director for Lix and how long I’ve been here. In the description I talk a little bit about what the company does, but I don’t talk much about what I do in the company. That’s a personal choice and you can change that depending on what you’re hoping to get from LinkedIn. I’m not looking to be recruited (I’m in Lix for the long haul!) but if you are looking for a new job, use that experience section to talk about things that you’ve achieved and your responsibilities.

 

You don’t need to write too much: four or five sentences is more than enough. Think about the length of a tweet, rather than an essay. Blocks off text will put people off and they’re just not going to bother reading it.

 

Make sure that you are honest and accurate in these dates. If you’re looking for work, ensure that the dates here match up with the dates on your CV. It’s very important, because if a recruiter checks both and you’re telling fibs, then that’s not going to look good for you overall!

 

Education

 

Time to show off those grades and extracurricular activities!

 

 

You can also include formal professional qualifications if you have any, in addition to the standard school and university stuff. If you completed an extra course, or you went to a night school, completed a MOOC or anything along those lines, you can include it there. This information will be pulled through to the top of your profile remember – the summary section shows your most recent role, current role and your highest level of education, so don’t forget to input that info.

 

Also, if you did anything extra while you were studying – extracurricular activities, societies, events – include it here. For example, I ran an event while I was at my university, founded a sports team and wrote for the student newspaper. Include this extra points, it all adds up.

 

Skills and Endorsements

 

Personally, I don’t think LinkedIn skills are particularly important anymore, but it can be quite a nice thing to trade endorsements with people that you’ve worked with or people you know. I don’t think that employers, or people that you network with, look at this often. Don’t get too het up about your skill scores.

 

Recommendations

 

Recommendations, however, are important. You can get recommendations from people that you’ve worked with, or worked for, or have worked for you. It’s a really good way of building up a picture of who you are as a person when you are working.

 

 

It’s all well and good saying, “hey, I did this job and I was great at it“, but if you can get your boss, or a colleague, or someone that worked for you to say, “actually, this person was great and it was a real pleasure to work with them and they’re a nice person, they’re great achieving goals or they’re good at this or that”, that is going to stand out and mean a lot more to someone viewing your profile than just you saying it yourself. It’s social proof, it’s like a testimonial or a review on an Amazon product. We all want to see that someone else has enjoyed this product, this product today being me, or you on your profile.

 

The great thing about recommendations is they’re really easy to get because you can give one and then ask for one in return. You can follow the ‘ask for recommendation’ button and pick someone on your connections list. Write one for them and then message them to to say, “hey, I’ve written a recommendation for you, please write one for me“.

 

Accomplishments

 

 

Accomplishments are just that – accomplishments! It’s another chance to strut your stuff. Speak more than once language? Include it here. You can also link to media, qualifications and any articles and videos you didn’t include further up the page. This section is much like the extracurricular activities that you would put on your CV.

 

This is also a chance to show that you’re really engaged with your industry. If you work in a highly competitive field, it can be really good here to show off the things that help you stand out from the crow. If, for example, lots of people are going to apply for the law firm you want to work for and you’ve been writing a blog, or you’ve contributed to a legal magazine – talk about it!

 

Interests

 

Similarly to skills, I don’t think people look at interests too much but you can try to ensure that your interests align your personal brand.

 

 

Whenever you follow a person, or company, it will be shown here.

 

URL & Public Profile

 

Your public profile is what people see when they come across your profile, but they’re not a LinkedIn member – usually from a Google search or similar. It’s similar to a private profile on Instagram or Facebook. LinkedIn gives you the options to choose what is visible here, so if privacy is a concern for you then be sure to check it out.

 

You may also edit your personal URL, making it easier to find you and giving you a cleaner link to post when you share your profile. For example, mine is linkedin.com/in/alfie-lambert – if you’ve got a popular name, go and claim your ideal URL before someone else does!

 

That’s all for the profile. If you’d like to follow along with the video, you can do that here:

 

 

 

 

Connections and Networking

 

This section of the guide explains the best way to find people, how to use the LinkedIn search, connecting with people, 1st 2nd and 3rd degree connections and then personalized connection messages.

 

Once your profile is complete, polished and ready for action it’s time to delve into connections and networking and there has never been a better time to network on LinkedIn. In fact, LinkedIn saw a 55% increase in conversations between connections in 2020. That’s largely because of the pandemic – we can’t go out and network in the ways that we used to. In 2021 if you want to connect in a professional setting, LinkedIn is the very best place to do that.

 

Let me hit you with some more stats: at the time of writing there are 720m users on LinkedIn and counting. It will probably hit a billion in 2021, if not 2022. If there’s someone in business that you need to talk to, or you want to get in front of, they’re probably already on LinkedIn.

 

Incoming Connection Requests

 

 

The first thing you will see when clicking on ‘my network’ on the top menu, are the people who have invited you to connect. You’ll notice that many of these connection requests, especially those from people you don’t know, will come with personalized messages (something we will cover a little further along in this blog).

 

The number of incoming requests you will receive should increase over time and with regular use. If you’re engaging with content, networking and so on it will attract people to your profile. Job title makes a difference here too. I’m listed as a Marketing Director, which means everybody wants to sell me products, or staff, or event tickets… As you can see, I have 32 pending invites and almost all of them are trying to pitch me something!

 

Some people preach caution when accepting connection requests. Perhaps if you’re a decision maker at a company and you really don’t like being pitched to, then yes be selective. My policy is the more the merrier; the bigger my network, the more people that see my content in the feed and potentially engage with it.

 

Suggested Events

 

Just below your incoming connection requests are some suggested (currently online) events.

 

 

These events offer two benefits. The knowledge shared at the event itself, but also the opportunity to network. Attending events with people in your industry or with common interests can be a great chance to meet and connect with like-minded individuals.

 

This is true for all events, not just those suggested to you! Seek out events using the LinkedIn search function – search for your chosen topic, click the ‘events’ tab and get scrolling.

 

 

If you really want to maximise the event-based networking effect, host your own event! LinkedIn has a great onboarding guide to help you get started.

 

People you may know

 

Again, this is a really easy way to find people to connect with, people who might be working in the same industry as you. The LinkedIn algorithm is going to be piecing this together and they’re normally pretty good.

 

 

Connecting with other like-minded people in your field can be really useful for a variety of reasons. It’s particularly good for staying on top of industry news – if your connections are predominately people in your field, the content they share should be mostly relevant. This gives you even more opportunity to engage and build your network.

 

Networking

 

The easiest way to network with people within your industry is either following the suggested connections, but it can be a little bit impersonal. What is the icebreaker for people on this list? I like to give a little bit more than the standard “I’d like to connect”, especially if it’s a relationship that I want to nurture. A great way to offer more when connecting is to reference a shared interest, engagement or something the person has posted.

 

This is where LinkedIn groups can provide some great leverage. Head up into your search bar and search for relevant terms, for example I want to search for ‘marketing’, because that is the industry that I am in and want to network within. With your search term in place, head to the ‘groups’ tab.

 

 

 

LinkedIn will suggest the largest groups related to my search term ‘marketing’. If the suggested groups are too general, use a longer search and some filters to find the group that fits your goals. 

 

Once you’re in a group you can leave comments, engage with people’s topics or you can connect with them, using their comments and engagements as an icebreaker.

 

If I’m in the Connect social media group and I stumble across this post:

 

 

Perhaps I could connect with Josh Turner and say something like, “Hey Josh, I saw your post in the social media marketing group about the trust equation framework. I think that was really interesting. I’d love to connect“. This is going to give you a much better chance of getting that connection than just the generic, “hey, I’d like to connect” or even “hey, we’re in the same industry. I’d like to connect.”

 

Targeted Search

 

Sometimes stumbling across connections in groups and at events doesn’t cut it. Perhaps you want to meet CEOs because you’re a salesperson, or maybe you want to network with investors because you’re a startup and you want to get investment. When you have a specific target in mind, you can use the powerful LinkedIn search.

 

(We’ve written the ultimate guide to the LinkedIn search for more details on this!)

 

As an example, for us to follow along, let’s say I want to find someone to teach me more about marketing; someone who’s perhaps at a higher level than I am, I might search for the job title CMO (Chief Marketing Officer).

 

 

LinkedIn returns 1,250,000 results, wow! Obviously, that’s a few too many to sift through, so how can I filter them out? I can head to the connections tab and choose which degree of connections to show (more on this below). I’ll opt for 2nd degree connections – the connections of my connections – so that I have some kind of link to the people it displays.

 

 

I have 138,000 possible results. Perhaps that’s a little too broad. From here I could filter by location, current company or a host of other filters in the ‘all filters’ tab. Location isn’t so important to me, as everyone is working remotely these days anyway.

 

Let’s filter by current company. The top suggestion is Google – perfect.

 

 

That brings my number down to 216 results. Of course, not all of them are the CMO for Google (the CMO of Google is Lorraine Twohill) but they are people who are or have been CMOs, that currently or previously worked for Google.

 

The top hit from the results is Len Markidan, CMO for the online course provider Podia. He seems like the kind of person I’d like to network with and have in my feed. Let’s use Len as an example for the next section.

 

Personalized Connection Requests

 

As mentioned earlier, ideally you will have some kind of icebreaker when connecting with someone you don’t know. Let’s see if I can find an icebreaker for Len.

 

I have a few mutual connections with Len, but not any that I know well enough to use as an intro to a conversation. I’m not in any common groups with Len, so I’m going to take a look at Len’s activity to see if there’s any common ground I can find there.

 

 

My search of Len’s activity shows two things – firstly, he hasn’t posted on LinkedIn since 2018. If I was really interested in networking, I probably wouldn’t connect with Len knowing this, I’d prefer someone more active.

 

For the sake of this example though, let’s take a look at the content Len posted:

 

 

This post from Len’s company, Podia, is a perfect icebreaker for my connection request. I can reference the post in my personalized message; hopefully cutting through all the generic connection requests and sales pitches.

 

I advise keeping the messages short and sweet, firstly because there is a character limit and secondly because the preview only shows a few words along with your request, so you need to hook them in early on. For Len, I could say something like:

“Hi Len, I read your post about creating online courses and found it really interesting, would love to connect”

 

Even with the cut-off, Len will see “Hi Len, I read your post…” and that might be all I need to stand out from the sea of generic requests.

 

Looking for more tips on connection request messages? Sumo have a great guide here.

 

1st 2nd and 3rd Degree Connections

 

You may have noticed while browsing of LinkedIn that you have 1st degree connections, 2nd degree connections and 3rd degree connections.

 

Your 1st degree connections are people that you are already connected with. Your 2nd degree connections are people who are connected to your connections. Your 3rd degree connections are people who are connected to your 2nd degree connections. Anyone outside of that is outside of your network, in which case you may not be able to connect with them, depending on their privacy settings. If you land on someone’s profile and they are outside your network and their profiles displays a single name (first name or surname), that usually means that they are not open to connections from people outside of their network.

 

By now, you’ve got a great profile and you’re starting to make some connections, that network is really going to serve you well in the future. To take it to the next level, we need to throw some content into the mix.

 

 

 

Content

 

The amount of LinkedIn native content produced increased by 60% in 2020 – for the same reasons that conversations did. With lockdowns, closed offices and home working on the rise, people are absorbing more content on LinkedIn than they ever were before. There has never been a better time to start producing content native to the LinkedIn platform.

 

You can use content to build a reputation as an expert in your field, looking for jobs or land clients; whatever it is that you’re on LinkedIn to do. This section will talk you through some best practices for content creation, plus how to work with the LinkedIn algorithm to get the most engagement so that you can become a content creating master.

 

LinkedIn Posts

 

The most common type of content on LinkedIn is the humble post, here’s a recent one I shared:

 

 

As you can see, I’ve added hashtags here to help get my post in front of the right audience. These are especially useful if your post begins to get engagement, because LinkedIn will show well-engaged posts to people that follow those hashtags.

 

There a few things I could have done to boost this post further, however. LinkedIn stats show that posts that contain images get twice as much engagement. So, if you can include an image to support your post then do so!

 

From the ‘start a post box’ you can choose where your post will be seen. If you have a company page, which (our next guide section!) you can share from the company page. You can decide whether your post is going to be public, connections only or specific group members. You can share straight to your Twitter, too.

 

Simple posts are the tip of the iceberg. From this view, there are a number of options:

 

 

You can link to a document, create a poll, share that you’re hiring, celebrate an occasion, find an expert, offer help… there is so much that you can do just within this framework.

 


Articles

 

The most common type of long form content on LinkedIn is the written article. You can access this screen from the same section as posts, just click on ‘write an article’:

 

 

First thing you will notice is the huge space for an image at the top. Some people are still posting articles without header images which to me, is crazy. Once again, it’s valuable real digital real estate – it’s also something readers expect to see. As any UX expert will tell you, delivering what someone expects is key to a smooth experience. People want an image here; the blank space is jarring.  

 


For a great guide to header sizes, design and the tool to create your own amazing images, head to Canva: https://www.canva.com/linkedin-banners/templates/

Let’s take a look at one of my blogs as an example:

The last article I published was back in July 2020 (I need to get writing!) and it is about marketers ‘fishing in the same pond’. Here you see, I have made an attractive and relevant cover, using the same background color that I have in the cover image on my profile, to give me a little bit of brand uniformity. Make sure that you also include line breaks and spacing within the blog, with a peppering of images to break up large blocks of text.

B2B blog writing guidelines: https://altitudemarketing.com/blog/how-to-write-b2b-blog-post/

Video

In the past I have been known to publish and write articles on LinkedIn, however in 2021 I would probably opt for video, rather than written content. The reason for that is, if you delve into LinkedIn stats, you will see that users are 20 times more likely to share a video than a written post. That 20x boost in shares is will make a huge difference to your engagement!

Now, I know some people aren’t comfortable with producing videos. I would say if you are nervous, just start making practice videos! The more you make, the more comfortable you get. I used to hate being in a video and now I’ve produced a 40-minute video guide to using LinkedIn. It just takes practice.

A great thing you can do with video to increase its reach is use a transcription service, something like trint, that allows you to add subtitles to your footage. People use LinkedIn primarily at work and perhaps they can’t use speakers or headphones, so if you can include some subtitles, you’re going to get many more engagements. I don’t have official figures to give you, but I normally find I can add about 50% to my engagement just by using subtitles alone.

LinkedIn Live

There are some new forms of content production available on LinkedIn that people aren’t really maximizing at the moment – LinkedIn live being one of them! Despite the slow uptake, live streams on LinkedIn have increased bt 437% in the last year. It’s slowly becoming a big part of the platform and as with almost any social media, even professional social media platforms, they will promote their newest baby to its fullest extent.

For instance, Instagram has recently launched reels to compete with TikTok. An Instagram reel is going to get more engagement than a standard Instagram post, because Instagram wants people to use reels, so they will encourage it and promote it. They had the same boost with IGTV about a year or two ago. IGTV videos were getting much more engagement because Instagram was showing them more in the feed, because it wants more people to use IGTV. It is the same thing with LinkedIn. They want people to be using the live video and just video in general.


Algorithm & Engagement

LinkedIn’s feed runs on an engagement-based algorithm. The more people who engage with your posts, the more people who will be shown your posts… and then the more people who will engage with your posts… It’s a self-fulfilling cycle! This is another reason to have a good and lots of connections, because the more people that see your posts in the feed, the more likely is that they’re going to engage with it – especially if they’re relevant. If they work in the same industry, maybe they’re interested in the same topics and then when they engage and comment on your posts, people in their network will see in their feed that’s happened and then they will come into contact with your with your content. This is a really important point to consider if you want to post content on LinkedIn.

Also think about the time of day that people are on LinkedIn and engaging with content. If you post something at 11am, perhaps everybody’s busy working. Maybe 8am / 8.30am just before people start, when they’re on the way in, or lunchtime, or maybe just after work when people have the time to be browsing. Post content when more of your audience is engaged with the platform.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKi78ASfPpo

Company Pages

Now have a great profile, loads of connections and you’ve started putting out some content on LinkedIn: the next step is a company page. LinkedIn company pages aren’t just for big businesses. If you’re a small business or even a freelancer, you could set up a LinkedIn company page to showcase your work in a more professional setting. If you’re an employee and your company has a LinkedIn company page, make sure that you’re connected to it. If they don’t, maybe you can earn some brownie points with your boss by creating one..

I’m going to show you two examples of company pages, one that is better than the other. The better page is for Teleperformance. They were the number one LinkedIn company page in 2019 as voted by LinkedIn members. The other that isn’t so good is my company page for Lix, because I need spend a bit more time on it! I’m going to jump right in with Lix and I will show you some of the things that I’m missing and then we’re going to look at Teleperformance to show you why they are so good and why they are the example that you should be following for your company page.

LIX:

We only have 91 followers at the moment, but that’s something that we can work on by sharing a bit more content. In the content section we looked at the share box in the feed, and you can use it the same way here: start a post, share a photo, share a video, documents, polls and all that good stuff. Creating good content as a business, especially stuff that gets re-shared, can bring in lots of good followers.

We have a fairly good tag line “Connecting every organization with accurate, actionable Real-Time B2B data”. That’s what we do! I have a longer description in the ‘about us’ section, which is a must. We have our logo on there, which is another absolute must.

The big glaring mistake is this cover image. We are not using this space at all. Now, I do have a good excuse for that – we’re in the middle of a massive rebrand and we’re going to be producing lots of great new graphics etc. that branding is going to be added as soon as it is there, but for now, it’s just a big white space, which is not ideal.

Let’s take a look at the Teleperformance page and explore why they do it so well and how you can use these tactics for your company page.

Teleperformance are a worldwide leader in outsourced omni channel customer experience management… If that doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t worry too much! That’s not the point of why we’re here. We’re here to see what components make up this great page.

One thing we notice right off the bat is this cover image with a member of their staff. Within this image, they’ve spoken quite a lot about the ethos of their company. Their member of staff quite visibly has quite a big tattoo on his neck: he’s quite a cool-looking, well groomed and presented. This isn’t by accident, this image is there to make you think “Hey, these are a young, cool, exciting organization” that speaks to their ethos, to their brand. If that’s not your brand then this isn’t the way for you to go, but something along those lines could really work well, something that shows in a nutshell what you are all about. Their tagline is, “each interaction matters” which I quite like. Short, sweet, to the point and again, it speaks to that brand.

Teleperformance have nearly a million followers and 108,000 employees – there are a big company with lots of followers. What’s quite interesting to note is that they have 10 times the number of followers to employees, which means that the people following them aren’t just their employees. It shows there are lots of people out there who are really interested in what Teleperformance have to say.

Their ‘about’ section has plenty of detail, which explains who they are and what they do:

It gives you an overview of the company, their website, what industry they’re in, how many employees they have, where they are, when they were founded and what their specialties are. Now, all of this information you can add to your own company page quite easily, just by hitting the edit button (the little pencil icon) when you’re signed into your own company page as an admin.

They have a link to their location, showing that they are right in the middle of Paris – a lovely place to work! You can go through and look at their ‘posts’, which you can filter images, documents, videos or ads.

The ‘jobs’ tab allows you to look at any jobs posted by Teleperformance. ‘Life’ is an interesting one and not a lot of people use this tab, but this is about the lifestyle of Teleperformance and their staff:

As Teleperformance are a large company, they’re showing off the company culture and other lures around hiring, because they’re committed to attracting the best talent. This is adding a bit more flavor to Teleperformance, who they are and what they do – this isn’t just a dry description of a company and a business. It’s important to note that this is a paid feature, acquired via LinkedIn’s Career Pages – get in touch with them for pricing.

This section demonstrates their commitment to an ethos and a way of living. You can look at the pictures and say, “hey, what a great place to work”. They’ve got bean bags and hammocks and ping pong tables… Maybe this is the kind of company that you would like to be part of.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlcoJQj7lz0

Congratulations, you have completed the How to use LinkedIn complete guide – you’re an allstar, with a ton of connections, high-flying content and a polished company page. Now get out there and achieve your LinkedIn goals!


Lead Generation

Lead Generation in 2024: The Total Guide

Reading Time: 11 minutes

Welcome to the total guide to Lead Generation in 2023! In this blog, we’ll be discussing the best processes and strategies for generating leads and growing your business. The digital landscape is constantly evolving, and it can be challenging to keep up with the latest tactics and trends. But don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. We’ll be sharing proven strategies that will help you generate high-quality leads and convert them into paying customers. Whether you’re a small business owner or a marketing professional, this guide will provide valuable insights and actionable tips that you can start implementing today. So let’s dive in and discover the power of lead generation!

Contents

The Lead Generation Process

Lead Generation Strategies

Measuring and Improving Lead Generation Results

The Lead Generation Process

Before we launch into strategies and tactics, it’s important to build a solid lead gen foundation. The process begins with identifying your target audience – this step is the cornerstone for everything else in lead generation. If there is just one thing you take away from this blog, I hope it’s the importance of identifying your target customer. Without it, we cannot begin to identify the correct channels and strategies to reach them!

Identify your target audience

Lead generation is an essential part of the sales process, and it starts with identifying your target audience. Understanding who your ideal customer is and what they need, want and value, will help you create a message that resonates with them and attract the right leads. Here are some tips for identifying your target audience for effective lead generation:

First, define your buyer personas. A buyer persona is a fictionalized representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. By creating detailed buyer personas, you will have a clear understanding of the needs, goals, and challenges of your target audience.

Conduct market research to gather valuable insights about your target audience. Surveys, focus groups, and online analytics tools are all methods you can use to learn about your target audience’s demographics, interests, behaviors, and pain points.

Analyze your existing customer data. Your customer data can provide valuable insights into who your target audience is and what they are interested in. Analyze data such as customer demographics, purchase history, and website behavior to understand what resonates with your audience and how to effectively reach them.

Identify your target audience’s needs and challenges. Understanding the needs and challenges of your target audience can help you create a compelling offer and message that resonates with them. By addressing their specific pain points and offering solutions to their problems, you can effectively attract and convert leads.

Finally, define your target audience’s goals and values. Understanding the goals and values of your target audience can help you create a message that speaks to their aspirations and aligns with their beliefs. This can help you build trust and credibility with your leads and increase the likelihood of conversion.

We also have complete, in-depth guide on developing your Ideal Customer Profile!

Choose your Lead Generation Channels

Choosing the right lead generation channels is crucial for reaching your target audience and generating high-quality leads. It’s absolutely vital that you have completed step 1, without that information in place you’re shooting in the dark when it comes to choosing channels.

The most common lead generation channels include inbound marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, influencer marketing, and paid advertising. Usually, a mix of these channels is the best route – but how do you choose which ones?

The first step is to identify the channels that best reach your target audience. If you’re trying to reach CEOs in the 40-50 age range, it’s likely that Tik-Tok isn’t going to be there right channel for you. If you’ve done your research well in step 1, you will have discovered the online places that you audience tends to frequent. There is also great data out there regarding demographics for social media channels, search engines and so on.

It’s also important to consider your budget and resources. Different lead generation channels have different costs and resource requirements. If you’re time-rich but cash-poor, you may be better off snaring search engine traffic via SEO vs PPC, for example. Generating time always costs either time or money – often both!

Channel identification isn’t something that happens just once. If your product, service or outreach is new then you will need to make some educated decisions and try them for yourself. Then, you evaluate the effectiveness of each channel. Some lead generation channels will be more effective for your business than others. Consider the conversion rates and cost per lead of each channel to determine which ones are delivering the best return on investment. In order to get this right, you’ll need to be tracking your lead gen efforts – asking inbound leads how they found you, keeping note of your outbound efforts, reading your analytics reports etc. Don’t spend money or time blindly.

Create a Compelling Offer

You might think it’s odd for me to put this in the ‘Lead Generation Process’ section, but hear me out. Creating a compelling offer is one of the most important aspects of lead generation that too many people leave until the end of the process. They identify their audience, choose their channels, set their goals… and then have to come up with an offer, the content, their ad copy. This is the wrong way to approach lead gen. Start with the offer and let that inform the rest of your strategy. A compelling offer isn’t necessarily a discount, or freebie. It’s something that entices your potential customers to take action. Perhaps the offer is just the incredible product that you have for them. That’s fine, as long as you begin to build up an idea of how you will present this to your lead. The key is to make it relevant, valuable, and irresistible to your target audience.

When creating an offer, consider the following:

  1. Know your target audience: As always, understanding your audience and what their pain points & needs are is crucial. Get that information and tailor your offer to address those specific issues.
  2. Make it valuable: The offer should be valuable enough that the potential customer is willing to provide their contact information in exchange.
  3. Keep it simple: Your offer should be easy to understand and clearly explain what the potential customer will receive.
  4. Test and refine: Test different offers and refine them based on the results.

When creating an offer, it’s important to remember that it’s not just about the offer itself, but also how you present it. Use persuasive language, highlight the benefits, and make it easy for potential customers to take action. By creating a compelling offer, you can increase your chances of generating high-quality leads and growing your business.

Nurture and Qualify leads

Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with potential customers over time through targeted, personalized communication. The goal of lead nurturing is to educate, engage and qualify leads, moving them closer to a sale. It is a continuous process that starts from the moment a lead is captured, and continues until they are ready to buy.

Here are some common methods for nurturing leads:

  • Email marketing: sending targeted, personalised emails with valuable content, such as e-books, whitepapers, webinars, and case studies.
  • Marketing Automation: automating repetitive tasks, such as email campaigns, lead scoring, and lead segmentation, to make the process more efficient.
  • Lead Scoring: assigning a numeric value to leads based on their likelihood to buy and their fit with your business. It allows you to prioritize leads and allocate your resources accordingly.
  • Lead magnets: offering free resources, such as e-books, whitepapers, webinars, and case studies in exchange for contact information.
  • Social media: using social media platforms to engage with leads, provide valuable content, and build relationships.
  • Personalized landing pages: creating targeted landing pages with a clear call to action, in order to effectively nurture and qualify leads.

By using a combination of these methods, you can effectively nurture leads and move them closer to a sale. It is important to note that lead nurturing is a continuous process that requires patience, persistence and a tailored approach for each lead.

Lead scoring is a process of assigning a numeric value to leads based on their likelihood to buy and their fit with your business. It allows you to prioritize leads and allocate your resources accordingly. By assigning scores to leads, you can identify which leads are most likely to convert and which ones are less likely.

Lead scoring has several benefits. First, it helps you to focus your efforts on the most promising leads, increasing your chances of closing a sale. It also allows you to identify leads that may need more nurturing before they’re ready to buy. Additionally, lead scoring can help you to identify patterns and trends among your leads, providing valuable insights that can help you to improve your lead generation and nurturing strategies. Lead scoring can also be integrated with marketing automation tools to help you to automate and streamline the lead nurturing process. This can save you a lot of time and resources.

Lead Gen Strategies

You’ve identified your target market, crafted your offering, chosen your channels and have you lead scoring and nurturing all planned out. Now it’s time to dig into some Lead Generation strategies.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a powerful lead generation strategy that involves creating and distributing valuable and relevant content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. It can be done totally for free (although it will take a little longer to reach your audience!) and if done right, will yield results for a long time to come… I get sign-ups to Lix almost daily from blogs I wrote 3 years ago!

The first step in content marketing, is to create a content marketing plan. A content marketing plan is a roadmap that outlines your goals, target audience, and content strategy. By creating a plan, you can ensure that your content marketing efforts are aligned with your business objectives and audience needs.

Creating a variety of content formats is a good idea. By diversifying your content formats, such as blog posts, ebooks, webinars, and videos, you can appeal to different types of learners and increase the reach of your content. It will also help you to identify which of these media work for you and which don’t. Again, with good research in step one (identifying your target audience) you can cut down on the guesswork here!

For any posted content, you should be using at least the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) to improve your visibility in search results and attract qualified leads. Optimising your content for search engines is how people will find and engage with what you publish. It’s the reason you’re here, now, reading this blog! Conduct keyword research and use on-page SEO techniques to optimize your content for search engines – here’s a great blog about free SEO tools.

Lead magnets (free resources like ebooks and webinars, given in exchange for a prospect’s contact information) have fallen a little out of fashion of late but they still work! Lead magnets provide value to the prospect, allowing you to demonstrate your expertise, while giving you an opportunity to gather more information about them.

If you have the funds available, consider promoting your content to reach your target audience. Social media, email marketing, and paid advertising are all effective ways to promote your content and generate leads.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing is a powerful tool for lead generation, as it allows businesses to reach and engage with potential customers in a more personal and direct way. By creating a strong social media presence, you can attract new leads, build relationships, and increase brand awareness.

This section follows on from the last, because to do well with social media – you need content! By creating valuable and relevant content, you can attract and engage with potential customers. This can include blog posts, infographics, videos, and webinars. By providing valuable information, you are positioning yourself as an expert in your industry and establishing trust with potential customers.

Another effective strategy is to use social media advertising. Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, offer businesses the ability to target specific demographics, interests, and behaviors. This allows businesses to reach potential customers who are most likely to be interested in their products or services. By creating targeted ads, businesses can increase the chances of generating leads.

Last (but by no means least!), social media can be used to build relationships with potential customers. This is really powerful. By engaging with potential customers, answering their questions, and providing valuable information, you can establish trust and build relationships. This can lead to more leads and ultimately more sales. It is important for to be consistent with your social media presence and engagement, as it takes time to build relationships. Additionally, you should monitor their social media activity and track their performance in order to optimize your social media marketing strategy.

Cold Email

Cold emailing can be a powerful tool for lead generation, especially when you’re trying to reach out to potential customers who may not be actively looking for your products or services. However, the key to successful cold emailing is targeting the right people and providing them with a compelling message. That’s where Lix, comes in.

Lix allows you to quickly and easily export email addresses from LinkedIn. You can use LinkedIn’s search to look for the audience you need (specific job titles, industries, companies etc.) and then export the data into a spreadsheet. This makes it easy to build targeted email lists of potential customers.

Once you have your email list, it’s important to craft a personalized and compelling message. The subject line is crucial as it’s the first thing that your recipient will see. Make sure it’s attention-grabbing and relevant to their interests. In the body of the email, highlight how your products or services can help solve their specific problems or meet their needs. Keep it short and to the point, and always include a call-to-action.

Interested in cold emailing? We have a comprehensive, top-to-bottom guide for that too!

It’s also important to keep in mind that cold emailing can have a low response rate, so be prepared to send multiple follow-up emails. And always make sure to comply with the CAN-SPAM act and GDPR regulations.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is a lead generation strategy that involves partnering with individuals who have a large following and are considered experts in their industry. Here is my (simplified) step by step guide to influencer marketing for lead gen:

  1. Identify your target audience: Yes, I’m beating that drum again. It’s SUPER important to understand who your target audience is and what kinds of influencers they follow. This will help you determine which influencers to work with and what kind of content to create.
  2. Find and research potential influencers: There are many ways to find potential influencers, including using social media platforms, blogs, and online communities. Once you have identified potential influencers, research their audience and engagement levels to ensure that they are a good fit for your business.
  3. Create a campaign plan: A campaign plan is a roadmap that outlines your goals, target audience, and content strategy. By creating a plan, you can ensure that your influencer marketing efforts are aligned with your business objectives and audience needs.
  4. Collaborate with influencers: Once you have identified the right influencers for your business, reach out to them and propose a collaboration. Be clear about your goals and what you hope to achieve through the collaboration.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) to track for lead generation

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics that businesses use to measure the effectiveness of their lead generation efforts. It’s important to track the right KPIs, so you can identify areas of strength and weakness, optimise your efforts, and make informed decisions about your lead generation strategy. Here are some KPIs that businesses might track for lead generation:

  1. Number of leads: This KPI measures the total number of leads that are generated over a given period of time. Tracking the number of leads can help businesses understand the effectiveness of their lead generation efforts and identify trends over time.
  2. Lead conversion rate: This KPI measures the percentage of leads that are converted into customers. Tracking the lead conversion rate can help businesses understand how effective they are at turning leads into sales and identify areas for improvement.
  3. Cost per lead: This KPI measures the cost of acquiring each lead. Tracking the cost per lead can help businesses understand the efficiency of their lead generation efforts and identify ways to reduce costs.
  4. Lead quality: This KPI measures the quality of leads based on factors such as their fit with the business, their likelihood to buy, and their level of engagement. Tracking lead quality can help businesses prioritize the most promising leads and allocate their resources accordingly.
  5. Customer acquisition cost: This KPI measures the total cost of acquiring a customer, including the cost of lead generation and sales efforts. Tracking the customer acquisition cost can help businesses understand the efficiency of their lead generation efforts and identify ways to reduce costs.

By tracking these and other KPIs, you can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your lead generation efforts and optimize their strategy to drive long-term growth.

Improving lead generation conversion rates

Lead generation conversion rate is the percentage of leads that are converted into customers. Improving lead generation conversion rates is crucial for businesses, as it can help them generate more sales and grow their customer base. Here are some tips for improving lead generation conversion rates:

  1. Optimize your website: A well-designed and user-friendly website is essential for converting leads. Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly, has a clear call to action, and is easy to navigate.
  2. Use clear and compelling calls to action: A call to action (CTA) is a message that tells people what to do next. Make sure that your CTAs are clear and compelling, and consider using action verbs like “Sign up” or “Download now” to encourage people to take the next step.
  3. Segment your audience: By segmenting your audience based on factors such as demographics, interests, and behavior, you can create targeted and personalized messages that are more likely to convert leads.
  4. Use lead magnets: A lead magnet is a free resource that you offer in exchange for a prospect’s contact information. Lead magnets can be effective for improving conversion rates because they provide value to the prospect and give you an opportunity to gather more information about them.
  5. Use landing pages: Landing pages are standalone web pages that are designed to capture leads. By creating targeted landing pages with a clear call to action, you can effectively improve lead generation conversion rates.

If you’ve made it this far – congratulations! It’s a lot to take in, but it’s all going to help you to generate leads and win more business. Please bookmark this page and come back to it as and when you need to refresh your memory!


Spam Trigger Words

100 Spam Trigger Words to avoid in 2024

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Jump to list of Spam Trigger Words

Cold emailing can be an effective way to reach out to potential customers or clients and introduce them to your business or services. However, if you’re not careful, your emails may end up being marked as spam, which can make it difficult for you to reach your intended audience.

One of the key things to keep in mind when sending cold emails is to avoid using words and phrases that are often associated with spam. These are known as spam trigger words, and they can cause your emails to be flagged by spam filters and sent straight to the recipient’s junk folder.

Some common spam trigger words to avoid include “free,” “earn money,” “act now,” “click here,” “buy now,” “limited time offer,” “get rich quick,” “earn extra cash,” “make money fast,” “guaranteed,” “winner,” “bonus,” and “urgent.” These words are often used by spam emails to try and entice the recipient into taking some sort of action, such as clicking a link or buying a product.

In addition to avoiding spam trigger words, there are several other things you can do to improve the chances of your cold emails being delivered to the recipient’s inbox. For example, you should always include a clear and concise subject line that accurately reflects the content of your email. This will help to ensure that your email isn’t mistaken for spam by the recipient’s email provider.

Want to learn to cold email like a pro? Check out our in-depth guide.

You should also make sure to include your contact information, such as your name and email address, in the body of your email. This will help to establish your credibility and make it more likely that the recipient will trust your message.

Finally, it’s important to remember that the content of your email should be relevant and valuable to the recipient. Avoid sending generic or impersonal emails, and focus on providing useful information that will be of interest to the recipient.

In conclusion, using spam trigger words in your cold emails can greatly decrease your chances of reaching your intended audience. By avoiding these words and following best practices for cold emailing, you can increase the chances of your emails being delivered to the recipient’s inbox and help to establish trust with your potential customers or clients.

Spam Trigger Words

Act now!Apply now!Call now!
Don’t hesitate!For onlyGet started now
Limited timeGreat offerInstant
Now onlyOffer expiresOnce in a lifetime
Order nowOrder todaySpecial promotion
UrgentWhile supplies lastBonus
All newAmazingCertified
CongratulationsFantastic dealFor free
GuaranteedOutstanding valueRisk free
Satisfaction guaranteedFreeFree!
Free trialFree consultationFree gift
Free membershipFree offerFree preview
Free sampleFree quoteSign up free today
DealGiving awayNo obligation
No strings attachedOfferPrize
TrialUnlimitedWhat are you waiting for?
WinWinnerYou’re a winner! Won
You have been selected#1100% free
100% satisfied50% offOne hundred percent guaranteed
Click belowClick hereIncrease sales
Increase your salesOpt inOpen
SaleSalesSubscribe
ChanceSampleSatisfaction
SolutionSuccessCards accepted
Full refundAffordableBargain
Best priceCashCash bonus
CheapCreditDiscount
For just $Lowest priceSave big money
Why pay more?BuyAs seen on
Buy directClearanceOrder
$$$Marketing solutionsJoin millions
Name brandNo questions askedGiving it away
Best ratesCompareDrastically reduced

Talent Intelligence Data Gathering

Talent Intelligence Data Gathering: A Better Way

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Talent intelligence and analysis is increasingly becoming a critical role in ensuring the success of any business. The importance of efficient and accurate talent intelligence data gathering cannot be overstated.

When it comes to gathering data for talent intelligence, there are several methods available, but they vary greatly in terms of accuracy, speed, and cost. Manual web scraping is one of the most common methods, but it can be time-consuming and may result in incomplete or inaccurate data. On the other hand, purchasing data from third-party providers can be expensive and may not always be tailored to specific needs.

When it comes to gathering secondary data, there is now a faster and more reliable way to achieve this. With Lix’s LinkedIn API, users can access real-time data on job postings, companies, industries, and individuals with the ability to extract contact details, full LinkedIn profiles, and more. This means faster data collection and a higher level of accuracy, as the data is updated by the user and can be extracted in real time.

Using the Lix API for Talent Intelligence Data Gathering

The Lix B2B API has a wide range of use cases in talent intelligence. Companies can use the API to gather candidate data and company information for market analysis, job posting in real time, competitive intelligence gathering, and more. Here are some examples of how the API has been successfully used by other companies in the talent space:

  1. Candidate Sourcing: Companies can use the API to gather candidate data from various sources, including complete LinkedIn profiles, to create a comprehensive database of potential hires. This can help companies save time and money by automating the process of candidate data sourcing and reducing the need for manual searches.
  2. Market Analysis: The Lix LinkedIn API can provide companies with valuable insights into the job market by collecting and analysing data on job postings and candidate profiles. Companies can use this data to identify trends and patterns in the market, such as the most in-demand skills or the average salaries for certain roles.
  3. Competitive Intelligence: Companies can use the API to gather data on competitors, including company size, job postings, and employee profiles. This data can be used to gain a better understanding of the competition and inform strategic decisions, such as hiring and marketing initiatives.

Overall, the Lix B2B API provides companies with a powerful tool for talent intelligence data gathering. By automating data collection processes and providing accurate and up-to-date information, the API can help companies stay competitive and make informed decisions.

The API allows for seamless integration with existing data management systems, making it easy to incorporate this valuable data into your talent intelligence strategy. This allows for a seamless data flow between the API and your company’s internal systems, enabling real-time data updates and automatic data syncing if required.

When it comes to security and compliance, the Lix B2B API adheres to strict data protection policies and protocols, including GDPR and CCPA regulations. We only help you to access public data, as approved by the user within their LinkedIn privacy settings.

Overall, the Lix B2B API offers a powerful, efficient and flexible solution for accessing valuable talent intelligence data, while maintaining strict security and compliance standards.


LinkedIn Marketing

LinkedIn Marketing in 2024: The Unreserved Guide

Reading Time: 16 minutes

LinkedIn marketing is a topic that has been done to death. The platform itself was launched in 2003 and by early 2004 there were a tranche of blogs and articles detailing just how to market on this new and exciting platform. Back then, professional social networking was box fresh. Nobody had done it before and, as we all know, marketers love something new and shiny.

 

Over the 17 years & 740m users that followed, LinkedIn marketing guides haven’t really changed much. There have been thousands of blogs, videos and courses passing on and on the received wisdom from those early pioneers. Sure, features have changed and updated and some new channels within LinkedIn have opened up, but read any current guide on this topic (even from the big players, I’m looking at you Hubspot & Neil Patel) and the basics remain: make a company page, join some groups, start a group, run some ads…

I’m here to tell you that much of this ‘wisdom’ is, in 2022, baloney.

 

Anyone that uses LinkedIn on a regular basis, either in a marketing capacity or otherwise, will know that LinkedIn groups, for example, have been stone dead for years. This is due to a combination of algorithm changes (that prioritise high-engagement posts from individuals) and an over-saturation of promotional posts, spam and irrelevant content. Chasing engagement in LinkedIn groups in 2022 is flogging a long-dead horse.

 

 

In fact, I would go so far as to say that you can disregard any blog written post-2017 that instructs you to put time and energy into LinkedIn groups. If a writer is recommending this as a strategy in 2022, it shows they’re either not a regular LinkedIn user or marketer (in which case, they don’t know what they’re talking about), or they are reworking those same old LinkedIn marketing blogs from years past in a lazy attempt to earn your precious clicks.

 

You deserve better.

Say it with me now: “I deserve better!”

 

If you’re marketing on LinkedIn 2022 you need a guide that is honest, robust and accurate. A guide written by someone who actually markets on LinkedIn and uses the platform day in and day out.

You need this guide.

 

LinkedIn Marketing Part 1: The Basics

 

I will start this section off by saying that some of the old school methods are still useful, but these are the absolute basics. For example, having a company page is a bare minimum requirement for marketing on LinkedIn. It is not a LinkedIn marketing tool, or goal, in itself.

As a marketer in 2022 you already know that “if you build it, they will come” does not work anymore. It is not enough to simply build this page and make it pretty. In fact, it’s not even enough to build a company page and post articles on it. There are 55m+ companies on LinkedIn at the time of writing and millions of them are already doing this. Millions. If you want to cut through the noise, you need to work harder and smarter.

With all that said, lets cover those basics and give you a solid foundation from which to build.

 

Company Pages

 

Having a polished LinkedIn company page is the minimum requirement for marketing on LinkedIn. In fact, I included LinkedIn company pages in my How to use LinkedIn walkthrough earlier this year, designed for absolute beginners. You can check out the video for a more in-depth guide to company pages and the best practices therein.

 

 

Let’s take a look at the example I give in the video, to show you what a great LinkedIn company page looks like. I use the Teleperformance page as an example because it was voted best Company Page of 2019 by LinkedIn users.

 

 

As a marketer, you probably already know the ground rules for setting up a website or landing page and those rules ring true for LinkedIn company pages, too: proper branding, concise copy (in line with your brand tone) and clear calls to action.


One glance at the Teleperformance page shows that they are ticking all of those boxes. The Teleperformance logo is clear and their colours are mirrored into their cover image, a great shot of an employee in their offices. The use of a young, tattooed employee isn’t accidental either – Teleperformance a firmly planting their flag as a young, cool and modern company.

 

They’ve changed the standard CTA that comes with company page from ‘Learn more’ (my least favourite of all CTAs) to ‘Contact us’, a link that leads directly to their contact page.

 

Their ‘about’ section is maybe a little wordy, but they spell out exactly what they do. Even if “omnichannel customer experience management” means nothing to you, the more complete description that follows makes sense to anyone in or out of the industry.

 

Teleperformance also make use of all the additional Company Page tabs that are available today, including the ‘life’ tab – a chance for employers to sound off about how great their employees work life is.

 

 

For Teleperformance, this makes total sense. They’re a big company with lots of seats to fill. Their emphasis on ‘life’ and ‘jobs’ shows that this page is really there to attract the best talent, while fulfilling a secondary function of promoting the brand. As an industry leader in a recognised space, they don’t need to use this space to sell what they do, so much as how they do it.

 

If you’re not quite in that industry leading position just yet, adjust your page to wax lyrical about the benefits you bring to clients / users and maybe use some of this space for testimonials, or whitepapers or whatever it is your company uses to demonstrate their skill and expertise.

 

Take your time to ensure that this page is up to the same standard you would expect from a landing page. Whatever tactics you employ from the rest of this blog (content, lead gen, cold outreach, ads) people will be clicking through to your company page and looking for more information. Don’t let them leave without getting what they want.

 

If you’d like a guide to the mechanics of setting up a company page, LinkedIn’s own article is probably best.

 

They also have a handy guide for designing and sizing your banners and images

 

Content

 

Now you have the page, it’s a good idea to publish some content. This is also covered in more depth in my How to use LinkedIn blog ,with an accompanying video.

 

 

Publishing content on LinkedIn used to be sure-fire way of getting attention, but the market is becoming increasingly saturated. In fact, the amount of content produced on LinkedIn increased by 60% in 2020 (partially fuelled by the lockdown and corollary rise in LinkedIn usage).

 

That doesn’t mean you should skip this step, it just means you need to work a little harder to cut through the noise and produce the very best content that you can. LinkedIn content allows you to really demonstrate the breadth of your knowledge in your chosen subject or industry, it also allows potential clients to connect with you and your brand. Remember the old adage ‘people buy from people’? Creating content gives you the opportunity to show who you are and why you’re the kind of people they should be buying from.

 

If you’re a regular LinkedIn user, you will have experienced (and perhaps created) almost all forms of LinkedIn content. They are:

 

LinkedIn Posts

 

The most common type of content on LinkedIn. There are a bunch of options available when you choose to post, including the options to link to a document, create a poll, share that you’re hiring, celebrate an occasion… There are more features added fairly regularly and it doesn’t hurt to take a look at what’s available from time to time.

 

Posts with images tend to do better than simple text posts, for a number of reasons. Some people respond better to the written word, some prefer visuals – a text post with an image, contains both. Also, from a technical standpoint it’s important to remember that LinkedIn collapses long posts to only show the first few lines of text. If you add in an image, you get the same text allowance but with a big chunk of visual digital real estate along with it. This will stand out more in the feed and attract more views and engagements.

 

Here’s one from my feed today:

Without the image, the text would have perhaps been too bland to make me stop in my tracks and read the post.

 

Articles

 

LinkedIn native articles (also known as LinkedIn Pulse) are the most common long-form medium on the site.

I cannot teach you how to write long form blogs and articles, and as an experienced marketer, you probably don’t need to me to; but there are a few nuggets of wisdom that I would like to impart here.

 

Firstly, do not neglect the header image, Again, images will give you more digital real estate in the feed and they are a great chance to demonstrate your brand and capture imagination. There are plenty of free tools you can use to create these header images, including Canva and Adobe Spark. Here’s an article I wrote, with a header I created in Adobe Spark:

 

The image is fun, the colours really stand out (whilst staying on-brand) and as you can see, it attracted some good engagement.

 

If you want to learn more about b2b blog writing, here’s a great guide: https://altitudemarketing.com/blog/how-to-write-b2b-blog-post/

 

Video

 

Video is king. One more time for the people that aren’t paying full attention: video is king!

 

There are a plethora of reasons why video is so powerful. Firstly, LinkedIn users are 20 times more likely to share a video than a written post. That 20x boost in shares will make a huge difference to your engagement. Not just because more people will see the shared post, but also because a ‘share’ is thought to be a powerful indicator to the LinkedIn algorithm that this post deserves to be pushed to the top of the feed (more on the algorithm later…).

 

If you’re not comfortable making videos, get comfortable. The best way is with practice. For those of you struggling with nerves, why not create a video that you narrate rather than being in front of the camera? From experience, it won’t receive quite as much engagement (people like to see a face!) but it can ease you in to producing more videos.

 

Another great tip for video engagement is transcription. People use LinkedIn primarily at work and perhaps don’t use speakers or headphones, so if you can include some subtitles, you’re going to get many more engagements. Try something like Trint.

 

LinkedIn Live

 

LinkedIn live streaming increased by 437% in 2020. Live streaming is on the rise on all social platforms and professional-social is no different. Part of the reason for its meteoric rise on LinkedIn is that it’s a new feature and as such, it is prioritised in the feed. The logic is that the more people that see live videos, the more people that will produce live videos.

 

Live streaming is a little riskier, as there’s nowhere to hide when you make a mistake, but sometimes that helps. We’re all human and showing your fallible side in a live stream can be endearing (depending on the gaffe!).

 

Q&As can be a popular format for LinkedIn live, but of course this also carries some risk depending on how friendly your audience are…

 

Algorithm & Engagement

 

Much like Instagram and Facebook, LinkedIn’s feed runs on an engagement-based algorithm. The more engagement that you get, the more people that will see your post. Which means you’ll get more engagement. Which means more people will see it… This means it’s important to capture attention and soak up as much early engagement as you can.

 

Having lots of (relevant) connections can help. If they’re interested in your industry and your post is relevant to that industry, the likelihood is that they’ll at least watch – even if they don’t engage.

 

Use hashtags on posts, but don’t go crazy. I find that three is enough, maybe five at a push. I’ve seen posts go viral (LinkedIn viral, which is a few thousand likes) with 10 or more but that’s a rarity. Keep the hashtags relevant and try hashtag terms that correlate with the broad topics your audience follows. For example, if you’re aiming a video at marketers, you can hashtag #marketing and #digitalmarketing, don’t hashtag #marketingvideo. This will feel counter-intuitive to those of you who have used hashtags for this purpose on Instagram, where it’s best to blend broad and niche terms to game your way onto the explore page. Just remember that people on LinkedIn aren’t regularly searching for niche terms

 

My top tip for gaming the algorithm is to think about the times of day that people use LinkedIn. Posting at 8.30am just before people start, or at 1pm for the lunchtime crowd, will probably bring in more engagements than posting during the working day or late in the evening. If your primary audience are in a different time zone, factor this in too.

 

Groups

 

I touched upon this topic early on but I’m coming back to really hammer the point home. LinkedIn groups are dead. LinkedIn groups are so dead that the body isn’t even warm anymore. Following 12 full years of groups being spammed with promotional posts, algorithm changes in 2017 deprioritised group posts (they used to feature very high in the feed).

 

Another contributing factor is probably the fact that there are thousands of ‘How to Market on LinkedIn’ blogs all telling people to start their own groups. This was in order to ‘control the narrative’ and ‘build a community’ all useful things for marketers, but when everyone is trying to do the same thing it all falls apart. The explosion of groups meant that many became havens for spam and self-promotion, with lots of groups being abandoned by their owners – with no one left around to administrate and regulate them.

 

 

We’ve taken over this here group you yellow-belled varmint

 


Now, there are 20m+ groups on LinkedIn. Think about that for a second, twenty million groups. According to this blog they’re “not dead, only 99% of them are dead” – so enjoy sifting through the 1,980,000 dead ones to find the 20k that still have a pulse.

 

Sure, if you find relevant groups that you want to share your posts into then by all means do so. You might get a few views and clicks. However, I strongly advise that you do not waste time building strategy and content around LinkedIn groups. It’s like recording an album for an 8 track. That day is done.

 

Part 2: Smarketing

 

Smarketing is a term that is being used increasingly to describe the synergy between marketing and sales, especially in the world of b2b (which I assume you are in, otherwise why are you reading a guide to LinkedIn marketing?).

 

For many of us, a big part of our job is bringing in leads for our sales team to close. If you’re marketing for a startup, you might be the marketer and the salesperson all rolled into one. If either of these apply to you, congratulations – you’re a smarketer.

 

Marketing on LinkedIn puts you right at the coal face for smarketing, because you are interacting one on one with the very individuals that you and your sales team wish to close. This section covers the best in current techniques for bringing in leads, setting up meetings and turning your professional network into viable pipeline.

 

Lead Generation

 

Using the powerful LinkedIn search function (yes, I’ve written a guide for that too: LinkedIn Search) you can find thousands of potential leads. Filtering for location, language, job title, industry, current organisation etc. allows you to hone-in on your ideal prospects. This is great, but how do you turn this list of search results into a pipeline?

 

 

“How can I get the email addresses for all these John Smiths?” I hear you cry. Read on and find out.

 

With LIX! LIX is an industry-leading contact intelligence company. People use our tools and services in a number of ways, but one of the most popular is for LinkedIn lead generation. Using the LIX tool, you can turn a list of LinkedIn search results into a spreadsheet full of email addresses.

 

The best thing is, doing so is totally GDPR and CCPA compliant. Our clever algorithm matches company email formats with domain names, using publicly available information. A human could do what the LIX tool does, it would just take them much, much longer! This allows you to feed your sales team an almost never-ending supply of clean, verified email address for potential targets, filtered and sorted along your own parameters.

 

Yes, you guessed it – we’ve got a guide for that too: Export LinkedIn Contacts & Emails.


Try Lix & get 50 free leads!

Supercharge your pipeline with monthly, free, targeted leads. Click here to get started.

 

LinkedIn Messaging

 

Cold messaging on LinkedIn can get a bad rap, but that’s mainly due to bad practitioners rather than bad practice. This is another one of those issues started and propagated by lazy marketing advice from cookie cutter blogs, telling everyone to do the exact same (wrong!) thing. If you use LinkedIn regularly, this will have definitely happened to you and it will have almost definitely annoyed you.

 

Step 1: They send a connection request, explaining why you should connect with them: you’re in the same industry, there’s some synergy, they looked at your profile and liked it, they want to share information. It doesn’t matter what they say here, because it isn’t true. They just want to get to….

 

Step 2: As soon as you accept their connection request, their adoration for you evaporates and it’s straight into the cold pitch. There was no information exchanged, there is no synergy – they’ve got something to peddle, and you’re next on the list.

 

I want to pause here for a second and point out that I have no problem with people trying to sell me things, pitch ideas, invite me to webinars, whatever it is. I do it too. In fact, if you’re marketing on LinkedIn then in some capacity, you’re always pushing people towards one of these goals.

The problem I have with this method, is the same problem you have with this method if you really think about it: it’s insincere.

 

The second they hit you with that follow up pitch, you know that the first message was total rubbish. They didn’t look at your profile and decide they wanted to know more. They don’t want to share information with you. They wanted to sell you something and they used a barefaced fib to get their foot in the door. Not a great way to start a working relationship, is it?

 

 

Here’s one I received today. At the very least, the sender isn’t gushing – but one quick look at his profile shows that his job is to sell video production services to software companies (like mine). So, I accepted his request, and this is what immediately followed:

 

 

This a case study in what not to do. This bait and switch intro left a sour taste in my mouth and I will not be using his company for my upcoming video production work (which I do have a genuine need for).

 

How to do it properly

You have two options here – be honest, upfront and pitch (politely) right off the bat, or actually build a relationship with this connection over time and then naturally move towards a pitch. Of course, which of these you choose will probably hinge on the size of the potential deal. If your company closes big 6-figure deals, the long and slow approach is possibly best – although I have started then closed such deals with short and sweet cold pitches on LinkedIn, too.

 

When I send out personalised connection requests with cold pitches (of which I have sent around 4,000 over the years), I say something like this:

“Hi, I see that you work in X and I have Y product that could help with that. If you’d like to know more, let’s connect and I’ll be happy to explain in more detail.”

 

This way you are not being disingenuous and any connections that accept your request are now warm leads. They’ve seen the pitch and decided they’re happy to learn more – or perhaps they don’t want your product right now, but they’re happy to connect anyway because one day they might.

 

Yes, lots of people will choose not to connect with you, but let’s remember what you’re actually here for. This isn’t a game of ‘collect the most connections’ we’re here to nurture leads, close deals, sell subscriptions, gain webinar attendees – whatever it might be.

 

InMail

 

Some individuals on LinkedIn, especially those in positions of power (CEOs of big firms, influencers and so on) who get lots of sales pitches and messages, require you to know their email address in order to connect with them on LinkedIn. When this is the case, you can’t send a personalised connection request as you would normally.

 

In these instances, you can opt to send an InMail – these either come included as part of a LinkedIn Premium or Sales Navigator package, or you can ‘pay as you go’ with InMail credits.

 

If you’re going to pay for InMail, I wouldn’t advise using the short and sweet pitch example in the section above. Chances are, anyone that you need to InMail is a primary target for your business and as such, they deserve something of a special touch.

I like to use a technique that I stole from Hubspot (thanks Hubspot!). Sometimes a Hubspot rep will record a video of themselves on your homepage, using their own version of Loom, then email you a link to the video saying “hey, I made you a short video”.

 

This really stood out to me as a great cold outreach method and I have employed it since with great success. If you’re going to spend the time and money chasing a LinkedIn big hitter with InMails, go the extra mile and do something like this. If they’re not worth the extra time, they’re probably not worth the InMail credits.

 

Part 3: Advertising

 


Historically marketers have shied away from LinkedIn ads because… well, they weren’t very good. In truth, they’re still not great but they have improved a lot. The UI is better, the targeting is miles ahead of where it was… The problem for me is ROI. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by using Facebook ads in former b2c roles, but LinkedIn ads tend to be quite expensive for small returns.

 

Think about it – how many ads have you clicked on LinkedIn? I can tell you that in the 12 years I’ve had a profile, I’ve clicked on a grand total of ZERO ads.

 

The positioning and prominence of LinkedIn ads used to be terrible. That horrid little text bar above a search, or those little display ads on the side…

 

Has anyone ever clicked one of these?

 

Now that ads are appearing in the feed, without being too regular and overbearing, things are getting better and ROI is gradually improving.

 

If you’re a marketer at a big firm with lots of budget, the lower ROI isn’t too huge an issue for you and perhaps the branding benefits are worth it. If you’re at a startup, or running your own business I would still probably advise that you spend your money elsewhere.

If you are keen to run some LinkedIn ads, there is a great guide here.

 

There you have it. My unreserved guide to marketing on LinkedIn. If you’ve read every single of these four thousand words, then I commend you. Remember to bookmark this blog to refer back to whenever you need some inspiration or a little guidance and definitely check out our other blogs.


Competitive Intelligence Data

Competitive Intelligence Data Collection: Finding B2B Data for CI

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Competitive intelligence is a vital part of any business strategy. By gathering and analysing data about competitors, companies can gain insights into market trends, potential threats, and opportunities for growth. However, gathering this data can be a complex and time-consuming process, particularly in today’s fast-paced business environment where new information is constantly emerging.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the various methods and tools that businesses can use to gather data for competitive intelligence from modern sources like social media and web scraping. We’ll also share tips and best practices for organizing and analysing the data you gather, to ensure that you’re able to extract meaningful insights that can inform your business strategy.

Whether you’re just getting started with competitive intelligence or you’re looking to refine your existing processes, this post is for you. Let’s dive in!

  1. Primary vs. Secondary Data: Which Should You Use for Competitive Intelligence?
  2. Social Media as a Source of Competitive Intelligence Data
  3. LinkedIn for Competitive Intelligence Data Gathering
  4. Lix B2B API for Scraping CI Data from LinkedIn

Primary vs. Secondary Data

When it comes to gathering data for competitive intelligence, there are two main types to consider: primary and secondary data. Primary data is information that is collected directly from the source, often through surveys, interviews, or focus groups. Secondary data, on the other hand, is information that has already been collected by others and is readily available through various sources such as databases, reports, and articles.

While both primary and secondary data can be valuable for competitive intelligence, it’s important to understand the benefits and limitations of each type. Primary data is often considered to be more reliable and specific to the research objectives, as it’s collected directly from the source. This can provide a deeper understanding of the target market, competitors, and industry trends. However, primary data can be time-consuming and expensive to collect, especially when it requires extensive resources such as surveys or focus groups.

Secondary data, on the other hand, is often more readily available and cost-effective. It can provide a broader understanding of the industry and market trends, as well as information on competitors and their strategies. However, secondary data can also be less specific and potentially outdated, as it’s not collected specifically for the research objectives. It’s important to verify the accuracy and relevance of secondary data before using it for competitive intelligence purposes.

Ultimately, the choice between primary and secondary data will depend on the specific research objectives and available resources. A combination of both types may provide the most comprehensive understanding of the target market, competitors, and industry trends.

Social Media as a Source of Competitive Intelligence Data

Social media platforms have rapidly become one of the most valuable sources of data for competitive intelligence professionals in recent. With over 3.8 billion active social media users, there is an abundance of publicly available information that can provide insights into a company’s strategy, customers, and competition.

One of the main benefits of social media as a source of competitive intelligence data is the real-time and unfiltered nature of the content. Companies and individuals often share their opinions, experiences, and reactions on social media platforms in real-time, which can provide valuable insights into their preferences and behaviors. This type of data can be particularly useful for monitoring trends and identifying emerging issues and opportunities.

Another advantage of social media as a source of competitive intelligence data is the ability to conduct sentiment analysis. By analysing the language used in social media posts, comments, and reviews, competitive intelligence professionals can gauge the sentiment around a particular brand, product, or issue. This information can be used to identify potential risks or opportunities and inform strategic decision-making.

However, social media data comes with its own set of challenges. The sheer volume of data can be overwhelming, and it can be difficult to separate relevant information from noise. Additionally, social media data may not always be accurate or reliable, as individuals may not always provide truthful information or may have biases that affect their views.

Overall, social media can be a valuable source of competitive intelligence data if used effectively. It can provide real-time insights into consumer behavior, sentiment, and emerging trends. However, it’s important to use the right tools and techniques to manage and analyze the data, and to validate the information gathered from social media with other sources.

LinkedIn for Competitive Intelligence Data Gathering

LinkedIn has become a crucial platform for gathering competitive intelligence data. With over 800 million active users, it is a treasure trove of information about companies, industries, and individuals. Companies use LinkedIn to promote their brand, products, and services, and to engage with customers and partners. Competitive intelligence professionals can leverage LinkedIn’s features and powerful search to access a wealth of information about their competitors.

One of the primary benefits of using LinkedIn for competitive intelligence is the ability to gather information about a company’s employees, such as their job titles, work history, education, and skills. By analysing the profiles of key employees, competitive intelligence professionals can gain insights into a company’s organisational structure, its strategic goals, and its competitive positioning. LinkedIn also provides a way to track changes in a company’s leadership or workforce, which can signal shifts in strategy or focus.

LinkedIn Groups are also valuable resources for competitive intelligence professionals. Groups are online communities focused on specific topics or industries, where members can share information, ask questions, and engage in discussions. By joining relevant groups, competitive intelligence professionals can gain access to a wealth of insights and opinions from industry experts, customers, and competitors. They can also use groups to monitor trends and news in their industry, and to identify emerging topics or issues.

In addition to employee and group data, LinkedIn provides a wealth of information about companies themselves. This includes company profiles, which contain detailed information about a company’s products, services, industry, and size. Competitive intelligence professionals can also monitor a company’s activity on LinkedIn, such as updates, job postings, and engagement with other users. By analysing this data, they can gain insights into a company’s marketing and communication strategies, and track its competitive positioning over time.

Lix B2B API

Web scraping is an essential tool for any professional wanting to collect competitive intelligence data on competitors and market trends. It involves using software to automatically extract data from websites and other online sources. There are many different tools and techniques available for web scraping, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

Lix’s API provides a reliable and efficient way to scrape and gather high-quality data competitive intelligence data from LinkedIn.

One the pain points of competitive intelligence is the challenge of finding accurate and up-to-date information about your competitors. With Lix’s API, users can easily access contact data, extract full LinkedIn profiles, company data, jobs (and more!) from LinkedIn, ensuring that they have the most relevant and timely information available.

Lix’s API also streamlines the data gathering process, enabling users to gather data much more efficiently than manual methods. This saves time and resources, allowing you to focus on analysis and insights, rather than data collection.

If you want to learn more about how you could utilise the Lix API for your competitive intelligence strategy – talk to us! We’re always happy to share our knowledge and guide you towards the best solution for you. Either click on the purple live chat icon in the corner, or send us an email.

Gathering competitive intelligence data is a critical component of any successful business strategy. The information collected from various sources can provide invaluable insights into market trends, customer behavior, and competitor activities.

While there are many methods for collecting this data, using web scraping tools and techniques to extract secondary can seriously streamline the process. Lix’s B2B data API is an excellent example of such a tool, offering a vast array of data points, including contact data, LinkedIn profiles, company data, jobs, and more.

By utilizing these tools and techniques, competitive intelligence professionals can stay ahead of the curve, making informed business decisions that can propel their organisation to the top of their industry. Whether it’s through web scraping, primary research, or secondary data analysis, the key to success lies in gathering and analysing the most comprehensive and accurate information possible.


LinkedIn Profile API

LinkedIn Profile API: How to Extract Full LinkedIn Profiles

Reading Time: 5 minutes

LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, offers a wealth of data points for talent, sales, intelligence and all manner of other data-first professions. LinkedIn Profile’s are perhaps the most dense of all the potential data sources on LinkedIn. Tapping into this wealth of information via API empowers developers with the ability to integrate LinkedIn profile data into their applications and services. The issue is, getting this data from the official LinkedIn API is very difficult. However, the Lix LinkedIn API has a Profile Enrichment endpoint that makes extracting full profiles at scale, a breeze.


The Lix API enables developers to access and retrieve rich profile data from LinkedIn accounts. By integrating this API into your application, you can programmatically gather information about users’ professional experiences, education, skills, recommendations, and more. Essentially, the API acts as a bridge, allowing your application to access and leverage the wealth of professional information stored in LinkedIn profiles.


To start using the Lix LinkedIn Profile API, create a free Lix account and follow the onboarding steps. This will give you access to the Lix user area and the API dashboard. From here you can generate an API key and claim your 10 free credits (equal to 10 complete profiles!).

Here’s an example Profile Enrichment API call (Python):

import requests

url = "<https://api.lix-it.com/v1/person?profile_link=https://linkedin.com/in/alfie-lambert>"

payload={}
headers = {
  'Authorization': [lixApiKey]
}

response = requests.request("GET", url, headers=headers, data=payload)

print(response.text)

The above command returns JSON structured like this:

{"fullName":"Alfie Lambert","headline":"Co-founder at Lix","summary":"Building the cybernetic sales workforce by connecting all software with verified, actionable B2B data. ","location":"London, England, United Kingdom","emails":[""],"socialAccounts":{"linkedin":{"username":"alfie-lambert","url":"<https://www.linkedin.com/in/alfie-lambert"},"twitter":{"username":"AlfieLambert"}},"workExperiences":[{"organisation":{"name":"Lix","socialAccounts":{"linkedin":{},"twitter":{}}},"title":"Co-founder","description":"Lix> provides industry-leading contact intelligence technology to sales teams, marketers and business intelligence professionals around the world. Our primary goal is simple: bring Contact Intelligence into the business mainstream. \\n\\nSales teams, especially those in fast-growing b2b SaaS businesses, need an alternative to broad-brush leads lists. They need more information about the people they are selling to. They need to spend less time hunting for leads and inputting contact information. They need to spend more time doing what they do best: selling.","location":"London, England, United Kingdom","startedOn":{"year":2020,"month":11},"endedOn":{}},{"organisation":{"name":"Lambert \\u0026 Bizzle","socialAccounts":{"linkedin":{},"twitter":{}}},"title":"Growth Consultant","description":"Our speciality lies at the intersection of performance marketing and immaculate presentation. We understand what powers real growth: marrying our expertise with an intimate knowledge of your business to create tailored solutions to your most pressing problems. \\n\\nWith shared backgrounds in growth hacking, automation, graphic design, video editing and startup \\u0026 scale-up marketing we can provide a full solution for your business - or we can dip in and solve individual problems as needed.","location":"London, England, United Kingdom","startedOn":{"year":2018,"month":3},"endedOn":{"year":2020,"month":11}},{"organisation":{"name":"Strawberries \\u0026 Creem Festival","socialAccounts":{"linkedin":{},"twitter":{}}},"title":"Director of Marketing and Communications","description":"Last year saw 10,000 revellers at S\\u0026C - a 10 fold increase from when I started less than 4 years ago. We have struck 6-figure partnerships with household names, been featured in every national newspaper and radio station worth mentioning and become a mainstay of the festival scene. ","location":"Cambridge, United Kingdom","startedOn":{"year":2014,"month":7},"endedOn":{"year":2018,"month":3}},{"organisation":{"name":"Pivigo","socialAccounts":{"linkedin":{},"twitter":{}}},"title":"Growth Hacker","description":"Pivigo is passionate about what the data revolution will bring to the commercial and public sectors. Data science can, and will, impact every industry. It is only a matter of time before every company will employ data science in their business, and those that start earlier will have a strategic advantage.\\n\\nAs the data science hub, Pivigo is at the cutting edge of a flourishing industry. We provide all the tools for those looking to a career in data science, from leading training (S2DS) to resources and challenges. For business, we can help you identify what data could do for you and connect you with the skilled practitioners to deliver on that goal.","location":"London, United Kingdom","startedOn":{"year":2017,"month":2},"endedOn":{"year":2017,"month":12}},{"organisation":{"name":"CityMunch","socialAccounts":{"linkedin":{},"twitter":{}}},"title":"Chief Marketing Officer","description":"CityMunch is a two-sided marketplace looking to connect savvy consumers with eager restaurateurs. We are putting the power into their hands, helping restaurants fill their seats and customers fill their stomachs. \\n\\nFor consumers, the mobile app allows anyone with time on their hands to explore London's food scene without breaking the bank. CityMunch offers free real-time discount vouchers across 250+ restaurants in London. \\n\\nFor restaurants, a simple web-based platform helps fill spare tables during quiet periods.\\n\\nAs CMO of a new and fledgling company, all processes had to be started from scratch; immediately designing and implementing a full media and communications strategy that has continued to be the foundation of all their b2c communication. \\n\\nDuring my tenure, the user base increased by +48%!a(MISSING)nd the daily covers (our key metric) rocketed 10x: from 5 on the day that I started to 52 on the day that I left. The average daily validations grew from 6 to 40. \\n\\nDAU (Daily Average Users) increased by +315.6%!,(MISSING) Daily Engagement rose by +532%!,(MISSING) Sessions Per User +18%!,(MISSING) Daily Engagement Per User +52%!\\(MISSING)n\\nMy communications work led to CityMunch receiving a prominent specialist feature in the Daily Telegraph, as well as coverage in other major news outlets and online channels","location":"London, United Kingdom","startedOn":{"year":2016,"month":10},"endedOn":{"year":2017,"month":1}},{"organisation":{"name":"Freelance Journalism","socialAccounts":{"linkedin":{},"twitter":{}}},"title":"Freelance Journalist","description":"In addition to reading for my degree, I currently write articles and submit them on a freelance basis to a number of publications including: BRIC - A high-end glossy political publication focusing on the emerging BRIC nations. Croco - An arts and lifestyle magazine originally based in Spain; I was approached by the editor to assist in targeting UK music artists and scenes in order to help them bridge the gap into a new market. DV8 - A sneaker-based fashion magazine based in London.","location":"London, United Kingdom","startedOn":{"year":2013,"month":10},"endedOn":{"year":2016,"month":7}},{"organisation":{"name":"The Tab","socialAccounts":{"linkedin":{},"twitter":{}}},"title":"Music Editor","description":"As editor of the music section for the Cambridge Tab I chase leads, find stories and commission writers to cover all aspects of the music scene in and around the University.\\n\\nDuring my time as editor over the busy May Ball period I successfully negotiated exclusive coverage with the vast majority of Cambridge colleges for their headline act announcements - putting The Tab music way ahead of the pack of student papers in terms of hits, readership and content sharing. I am consistently within the Top 100 journalists Nationwide and often in the Top 20 / Top 10.","location":"Cambridge, United Kingdom","startedOn":{"year":2015,"month":5},"endedOn":{"year":2016,"month":1}},{"organisation":{"name":"Futurecoins","socialAccounts":{"linkedin":{},"twitter":{}}},"title":"CMO","description":"As a new start-up, Future Coins needed a fast and powerful media strategy. I arranged for Joel Moss to be interviewed, along with our product, by: CNN, Al-Jazeera, The Telegraph, Time Out, Vice and a number of industry publications. Our social media presence grew in both quality and quantity, with targeted marketing through Facebook a great success when looking to reach out to tech savvy 20-somethings in the London area. As well as building awareness for our initial installation in London, I also put together a marketing plan based on bitcoin usage data against population and sought out other areas of the UK to install our units. I successful brokered the deal with the host of our unit in Brighton, which was the first in the city attracting attention from the BBC and local press.","location":"London, United Kingdom","startedOn":{"year":2013,"month":4},"endedOn":{"year":2015,"month":1}},{"organisation":{"name":"The Guestlist Network","socialAccounts":{"linkedin":{},"twitter":{}}},"title":"Journalist \\u0026 Section editor","description":"Producing articles for both online \\u0026 a print run of 50k. I also interview artists (both written and on camera), as well as contributing to comedy sketch writing.","location":"London, United Kingdom","startedOn":{"year":2013},"endedOn":{"year":2013}}],"education":[{"schoolName":"University of Cambridge","degree":"Bachelor's degree","startedOn":{"year":2013},"endedOn":{"year":2016},"fieldsOfStudy":["Human, Social \\u0026 Political Sciences"]},{"schoolName":"City and Islington College","degree":"Access Diploma","startedOn":{"year":2012},"endedOn":{"year":2013},"fieldsOfStudy":["Mixed Media"]}]}

Please review the documentation, which provides detailed information on the available endpoints, authentication methods, query parameters, and response formats.


The Lix LinkedIn Profile API unlocks a world of professional opportunities by enabling developers to integrate LinkedIn profile data into their applications. By harnessing the power of this API, you can enhance the user experience, provide personalised recommendations, establish trust, and streamline onboarding. Follow the steps outlined above to get started with the Lix LinkedIn Profile API and take your application’s professional networking capabilities to new heights.


How to become a LinkedIn Influencer

How to become a LinkedIn Influencer in 2024

Reading Time: 6 minutes

If becoming a LinkedIn Influencer is one of your goals for 2023 then you have come to the right place. Before we get started, it’s important to note that this is not a quick-fix guide to turn you into an influencer overnight. It can happen: a ultra-viral video, a huge investment in your company or a popular article about in the press can all catapult you to ‘influencer’ status rapidly; but that’s not something we can optimise or plan for!

This guide is all about putting in the work to build a community and become a leader in your space. This brings me to another important point – consider your motivations for becoming a LinkedIn influencer. If this is a vanity project, the hunt for likes and comments, it’s likely that you won’t stick at it. In a game where consistency is key, that simply won’t get you where you want to go. With that said, you can still take plenty of advice from this article that will make your LinkedIn more popular and with it, those all-important engagements.

How to become a LinkedIn Influencer in 4 steps

Step 1: Be the Expert

There are two kinds of LinkedIn influencers – the “I can post about anything and everybody listens” kind, and the “I’m an expert in my field, so listen to me!” kind. For 99% of influencers, you have to start as the latter before you’re trusted enough to become the former. Even the megastar influencers (Branson, Huffington etc.) got to those lofty positions by conquering their respective fields first.

Now, being an expert is easier said than done. It takes years of work and experience. Perhaps you already are an expert in your field – if so, you can skip this next part and head straight to building your community!

Not an expert just yet? Read on.

Some influencer guides, courses and coaches will tell you that you can shortcut this by reading and regurgitating a few key books in your chosen subject. However, this is not a school project. The aim isn’t to ingest just enough information to pass a test – your goal is to build a community who trust you and what you have to stay. Starting that process by being disingenuous is, I would argue, not the right way to do that.

Instead, read those books and ingest that knowledge – and yes, post about your learnings! – but include your community in that process. The chances are that when you get started, you don’t have a huge following anyway; so who exactly are you putting a on performance for? You’ll connect with your audience better by including them in the journey. Read the books, listen to the podcasts, post about what you’re learning and ask questions of the people reading your posts. Engage with them and learn together. That way, you’re learning how to become the expert your community needs, whilst also building the foundations of your follower base.

How to become a LinkedIn Influencer
Not an expert yet? Time to get reading!

Step 2: Build your community

With any luck, you’ve been doing this already – whether you meant to or not! Connecting with people, engaging with their content and posting are all ways to build your community and if you’ve used LinkedIn at all then you should already have some experience with this.

Groups

When it’s time to get serious with community-building there are a number of ways to go about this. One of the more popular routes is to find an already established community and become a fixture within that group: sharing, engaging, forging relationships.

This method works well because the audience has been gathered for you! If you want to be an influencer in web3 and you find a great and active web3 group on LinkedIn then you’ve got a ready-formed group of people interested in your particular subject, ready to speak to.

The drawback to doing things this way is that you can become limited by the size of the group and the willingness of the group owners to let you take centre-stage.

If you’re in a niche that has a number of groups, my advice is to become active in a few – don’t spread yourself too thin and definitely don’t just copy and paste the same posts in each group. People will notice this and earmark you as a spammer! Tailor posts to groups, reply to people’s questions and provide value where you can.

Networking

Never underestimate the power of networking – both in-person and via LinkedIn itself. Send connection requests to people that would benefit from your content, and get to know them. Especially in the early days while you’re building a base, forging these relationships is crucial.

These people may go on to be your advocates, sharing your posts, commenting, engaging – all important stuff for improving your reach and overall growth. Having a team of individuals that have spoken to you and connected with you that are likely to support your content is a real boon in the early days.

Other Platforms

LinkedIn users, for the most part, are not confined to LinkedIn alone. They will often use Twitter, or Facebook / Instagram / TikTok (depending on the demographics of your target audience). My advice is not to chase all of these platforms at once, you’ll burn out and waste a lot of time. Pick one, or perhaps two others that have the audience you want and post, network and engage on those too. Make sure you link to one platform from the other (put your LinkedIn profile link on your Insta bio, for example) and allow one to help you build the other.

Step 3: Create value-driven content

So you’re an expert in your field, or you’re learning to become one, and you’re building your community – what do you share with them? My advice here is to begin with a value-driven mindset. Think about information that you can share that will provide real value to those consuming it. Here are three high-level bullet points to consider when creating content:

  • Relevant: The first question you need to ask yourself is “what does my audience want?”. You should be on the right path here already, as you’ve already chosen your niche, but dig a little deeper. What problems are your audience facing? Is anything changing in your industry? How can you provide them with content that improves their day? If you provide genuine, relevant value they will return.
  • Unique: There are a ton of other people out there vying for your audience’s attention, so be unique. That doesn’t mean you can’t cover the same topics and stories as others (but if you can find totally unique content, great) but give your unique perspective on it, or find the angle nobody else is covering. Find a way to stand out from the crowd.
  • Engaging: Hopefully if you’ve got points 1 and 2 covered you’re already halfway to engaging your audience, but the work doesn’t stop there. Great content engages, enthralls and keeps the reader or viewer on the page. This includes using effective storytelling techniques such as using anecdotes, metaphors, similes and personification when describing concepts or ideas rather than just stating facts without context or meaning behind them. In other words – entertain while you inform!
How to become a LinkedIn Influencer
Give your audience a ‘lightbulb moment’ and they’ll come back!

Step 4: Dedication & Consistency

As I said at the start, there is no magic formula or quick fix. Even a viral sensation can be lost to the background if they never hit those heights again. Becoming a LinkedIn Influencer is going to take hard work and dedication. It’ll be hard not to give up at times but if you stick with it, I promise that you will see results.

Don’t be disheartened if your early content doesn’t get much engagement, or your group posts fall flat. You need to persevere, keep posting and always analyse your content to see where you can improve. It will take time, so keep at it!

These steps above tell you how to become a LinkedIn influencer – it’s now up to you to head out there and put in there work. You’ll need to be passionate about your topic, willing to work hard at it, and have some promotional skills. You’ll also have to be willing to build a community of connections and followers who will share and promote your content for you. And lastly, you’ll have to create a lot of value in content that people want to read.

Catering yourself toward the needs of others will only further establish your credibility as an Influencer on LinkedIn.

I hope this article has encouraged you to take the plunge into becoming a LinkedIn influencer. It’s not an easy process, but it can be done with dedication and hard work. If you follow these four steps, we guarantee that your content will get noticed by other users on the platform, which will help boost your brand and authority as well!


Sales Data

Sales Data: Real-Time Insights via Lix’s LinkedIn API

Reading Time: 4 minutes

What is Sales Data?

Sales data serves as the foundational intelligence that helps drive targeted customer engagement and efficient decision-making. It’s the fuel that optimises your sales pipeline, ensuring that your sales professionals can quickly zero in on high-potential leads while also customising their outreach strategies for maximum impact. In essence, the right data sets the stage for predictable, efficient sales outcomes.

In this blog, we’ll delve into finding and leveraging B2B data for better sales, explain the different types of sales data, and provide information on how you can tap into LinkedIn’s treasure-trove of sales data and even pipe it directly to your own apps and tools via the Lix LinkedIn API.

Types of Sales Data

As salespeople, we’re already use data to inform our decisions, even if we’re not aware of it. SDRs and BDRs understand who their prospects are, what roles they perform and at which kinds of companies. Sales leaders make decisions based on market changes and customer preferences. Data underpins all of these decisions.

Demographic Sales Data

Demos means “the people,” and graphy means “writing about or recording something” — so demography literally means “writing about the people.” Demographic data then, is anything related directly to prospects. The actual human beings at the other end of your outreach! For sales, this mainly consists of geographical data, names, email addresses, locations, employment histories, and skills. This data helps to adapt offers and messaging to specific target groups, making it the basis for B2B prospecting. You can usually find and extract the most up-to-date records of demographic data via a prospect’s LinkedIn profile.

Firmographic Sales Data

Firmographic data refers to the ‘demographics of organisations’; it allows companies to be segmented into defined groups for your SDRs to target. This type of data includes company name, location, industry, number of employees and so on. Key data for figuring out messaging, price points and much more.

Chronographic Sales Data

Another interesting type of sales data, is Chronographic data. This also known as sales trigger data, and it refers to events and changes that occur over time. These changes can lead to an opening to engage with a new prospect or to revisit a prospect that went cold. Chronographic sales data includes company location moves, prospects leaving or joining a job, company acquisition, company funding, hiring trends, and company IPOs. A good source for this information is a company’s social media activity – for B2B, LinkedIn posts are a great option.

How to Find Sales Data?

If your sales team has adopted a data-driven approach, collecting reliable, high quality data in real-time is a must. Data can be collected manually from public sources such as social media profiles, websites, and online articles such as blogs. However, for efficient and reliable data, it’s best to invest in a reputable B2B data provider.

Lix’s LinkedIn API allows you to tap into LinkedIn’s unparalleled store of business data, integrating real-time LinkedIn data into your CRM systems, internal and external apps or other sales tools. Say farewell to old spreadsheets and manual updates. Instantly pull accurate data on potential leads, keeping your sales team one step ahead of the competition.

Why LinkedIn Data?

In short, because LinkedIn is the best store of up-to-date B2B data anywhere on the web. The difference between LinkedIn and any other source of data is not only its scale (over 800 million users & 30m companies) but the fact that it is updated so regularly by the users themselves. Rather than relying on company websites, that are updated as and when marketing or management teams decide, LinkedIn rewards users for providing data about themselves and their companies as events happen. Other providers of B2B data source their information from places like job boards or data lists from brokers. This information goes stale, fast. We use LinkedIn, because it has the cleanest and freshest data and that is exactly what you need to make better decisions.

High-Volume Data Export

Need a lot of data? No problem. The Lix API‘s robust high-volume data export capabilities mean you can retrieve enormous sets of valuable information from LinkedIn profiles. Send up to 10,000 requests per day with no loss of performance. Integrate this data directly into your tools to better understand your target market, tweak your sales tactics, and drive results at scale.

Laser-focused outreach with “Nearest Decision Maker”

One of our most powerful features is the “Nearest Decision Maker” tool. This enables you to identify who holds the purchasing power within a target organisation. It answers the pivotal question: who is the key decision-maker that you need to engage? By targeting your outreach towards individuals who have the authority to make purchases, you enhance efficiency and increase the chances of closing deals.

Seamless Software Integration

Whether you want to integrate with your CRM software, specialised sales analytics platforms, or even your own internal and external apps, the Lix LinkedIn API ensures smooth and straightforward incorporation. The result is a unified, efficient, and tremendously powerful sales operation that capitalises on real-time data and insights.

Benefits That Transform Sales Operations

Here’s a rundown of the game-changing advantages you’ll gain with Lix’s LinkedIn API:

  • Time-Efficiency: Automate data retrieval tasks that previously required manual labor, allowing your sales team to focus on what they do best: selling.
  • Precision Targeting: Use accurate, real-time data to identify the best leads and decision-makers, significantly improving your targeting accuracy.
  • Enhanced Analytics: Import large volumes of data seamlessly into your analytics tools, providing a richer, more accurate view of market trends and customer behaviors.
  • Direct Access to Decision-Makers: Utilise the “Nearest Decision Maker” feature to bypass gatekeepers and speak directly to those who have the authority to seal the deal.

The Lix LinkedIn API offers more than just features; it provides a comprehensive solution aimed at propelling your sales processes into the future. By employing real-time data, high-volume export capabilities, seamless integration options, and transformative tools like “Nearest Decision Maker,” you’ll be well-equipped to tackle the modern challenges of sales with a data-driven approach.


Bullhorn CRM

Eliminate Data Decay in Bullhorn CRM with LinkedIn Integration

Reading Time: 2 minutes

TLDR: We can integrate with your Bullhorn CRM to update all your contacts and eliminate stale data! Interested? Get in touch.

Recruitment is all about relationships. Forging good relationships with clients and candidates alike is what sets apart good and great recruiters. In order to maintain those relationships, it’s important to have accurate and up-to-date customer information at your fingertips.

Digital relationships still count!

That’s why we use CRMs – Customer Relationship Management! But even the best CRM system can fall short if the data it contains is stale or out-of-date. It is common for data in a CRM system to become outdated or “stale” over time, especially if the system is not being actively maintained and updated. According to the ONS, every 3 years, 27% of the workforce change jobs – whether via promotion, location or career change. That’s a big chunk on your relationships to lose touch with. Therefore it is important for businesses to regularly review and update their CRM data to ensure that it remains accurate and useful. This can help them to maintain effective communication with their clients and stay up-to-date on important changes within their organization or industry.

This is where our product comes in. Lix‘s real-time data extraction from LinkedIn integrates with you Bullhorn CRM, meaning you can avoid data decay and keep your CRM system current and relevant. This can be done periodically, updating your CRM at regular intervals, to ensure that you are not losing those valuable relationships.

Lix seamlessly integrates with your existing Bullhorn CRM system and the update process is done for you. This means that you can get your CRM to full health with minimal setup or configuration required.

If you’re interested in refreshing your CRM and bringing those stale contacts back to life – please get in touch. We’d be happy to discuss and provide you with a quote.