LinkedIn Lead Generation Masterclass for Beginners: Insights with Cool Tips & Tricks

If you've ever been on LinkedIn, I think the first thing you were bombarded with are dozens of posts claiming they will teach you the ifs and buts of this social media platform. And they promise to help you become a personal branding strategist in no time.

Let's be real though, all these posts tell you how to comment, create posts, and get more followers.

But if you want to, like I do, get the most out of the platform, you're in a quite difficult situation. Why? Because getting real business done and nurturing long-lasting relationships on LinkedIn that will expedite your content marketing efforts is not that easy.

Don't worry, I have you covered.

I'll teach you the most effective LinkedIn strategies known nowadays. These have logic and make sense. And they're unlike anything you read about elsewhere.

Table of contents:

How to Ghostwrite Content for Your ICP (Learn from True Market Leaders)
How to Find Your ICPs (Ideal Customer Profiles)
How to Simplify and Personalize Connection Requests
LinkedIn Is a Money Making Machine If You Know How to Use It

How to Ghostwrite Content For Your ICP (Learn from True Market Leaders)

Notice how I said “True Market Leaders”, by that I mean people who are super successful in business and marketing (whether that's B2B, DTC, SaaS, you name it).

These people will teach you something new, and they'll share experiences that are incredibly relevant to their business and clients. Unlike people who just talk about LinkedIn to push the algorithm for likes and views.

Let's go over some examples:

This post from Shane Heath is an excellent starting point.

The post highlights the impact of a 2-hour hackathon event held during the MUD\WTR annual retreat to foster innovation and connection among remote team members.

The team not only produced exceptional first drafts that could lead to future creative projects but also built deeper connections, shared laughs, and gained a better understanding of the brand.

The activity emphasized the value of bringing diverse team members together for creative collaboration, demonstrating that constraints can indeed breed creativity. And ultimately enhance team building and innovation in a short period.

Here's another post that I really liked:

I like its transparency and how brutally honest it is.

People usually don't tell you about what really goes on in startups. What you see more of is startup content that is posted to please people rather than tell them what is morally correct and based on intuition.

So to round out all the learnings, here's what you should include in your content:

1. Illustrate actual events that happened in your life and give useful information that will help your target audience learn something valuable.
2. Don't try to fit in with fake content, and be brutally honest. Because at some point you will have to be honest with your clients. Make a habit of it right from the get-go.
3. Don't follow useless trends just because they create hype for you, stick to your guns, and most importantly be confident in communicating your solutions to your ideal customers.

How to Find Your ICPs (Ideal Customer Profiles)

Finding your ICPs through LinkedIn is a straightforward process if you know how to utilize all the right filters. Just make sure you are subscribed to LinkedIn Sales Navigator if you want to extract lead profiles in bulk.

Here are the simple steps to find lead profiles from LinkedIn directly:

1. Search Job Title (CEO, Founder, Chief Marketing Officer, CX Specialist, Sales Manager etc).
2. Now, to narrow your focus, check off Filters like Location, Industry, and Service Categories.
3. The Industry filter is probably the most important one in my opinion because that will help you identify the niche your ICP is present in (DTC, Saas, Cyber Security, etc).

How to Simplify and Personalize Connection Requests

Personalized connection requests and their acceptance rate is a subject that is highly dependent on several factors like:

1. The type of person you're connecting with.
2. Your niche.
3. The timing of your request.

Here are a few examples of personalized requests.

And here are the best practices that will pump your acceptance rate for these personalized connection requests:

1. Within the request try to be relevant about the interests, and skills of the person you're connecting with.
2. Be realistic and casual in writing down the request, because trust me these people have heard enough things like “Hey I would like to add you to my professional network, your profile seems very impressive."
3. End the request with just your first name instead of writing regards and your full name.

LinkedIn Is a Money Making Machine If You Know How to Use It

Don't get too concerned by what these mainstream LinkedIn strategists tell you because you aren't going to learn much. Apart from stuff like engaging on other peoples’ content, optimizing your profile, posting, and commenting which all sounds too cliche and not very helpful.

What you want to do instead is to make sure you deeply research your target audience. How to do it? By checking out their profile: how it is structured, what kind of content they're posting, and identifying anything that will help you craft specific pain points. Use them in your content to convince your ICP to do business with you.