Are you looking to take advantage of LinkedIn’s massive user base and grow your business? With more than 560 million users, it’s no surprise that the platform is one of the top sources for finding new prospects online. But how do you go about finding and then reaching out to those potential prospects? In this article, we’ll look at some little-known ways to find new prospects on LinkedIn that you can use to augment or expand your current prospecting efforts.
What Are Your Prospecting Goals?
Before you dive into the deep end of prospecting on LinkedIn, it’s important to decide on what you plan to accomplish. Having a specific goal in mind will help to shape your approach, hone your targeting strategy, and streamline your process.
The specific goal you choose will also determine which of the following little-known methods of prospecting on LinkedIn should be included in your strategy. Some of the possible goals might include building a network of sales leads, establishing industry contacts and expanding your brand’s reach, or growing your referral network.
Using Advanced Search for Prospecting
One of the most fundamental ways to find prospects on LinkedIn is to use its advanced search feature. While most people think of LinkedIn’s search engine as a place to type in a name or a job title, it’s capable of performing far more sophisticated tasks.
For instance, you can quickly pinpoint prospects from a certain industry, region or field. You can also dive deeply into a company’s profile to find qualified job titles or roles for your specific offerings. You can even directly search for people who have a certain number of connections and those that attended a certain school or organization.
Following Companies to Identify Prospects
By following a target company on LinkedIn, you can easily stay on top of the most recent hiring and organizational changes that might point toward potential new prospects. For instance, by following a particular companies LinkedIn page, you can easily be on the lookout for newly hired executives that fit your target persona.
If you’re interested in expanding your brand’s reach and visibility, additionally, you can use the ‘Follow’ button to target individuals in larger companies who fit your ideal customer profile. By tracking their posts, you can quickly determine if they could be a potential prospect.
Using Advanced ‘People’ Filters
Aside from the general keywords in LinkedIn’s ‘People’ tab, you can also leverage powerful filters to search for potential prospects. These filters include job titles, or companies, driven by its ‘Connections of’ feature for finding professionals connected to a particular individual, school or organization.
But that’s not all; you can also filter results by current openings, group memberships, language skills, as well as keywords related to specific fields. All offers up prospects that are higher quality compared to ones you’d get by searching through the ‘People’ tab alone.
Reaching Out to Prospects on LinkedIn
Once you’ve identified potential prospects on LinkedIn, it’s important to find ways to reach out to them. The first and most simple approach is just to message them through LinkedIn’s ever-improving messaging system.
To make sure your message makes a positive impact, avoid generic templates and create unique messages tailored to the individual’s circumstances. Additionally, use LinkedIn’s analytical insights to provide valuable information and context when making the connection.
Another approach is to join or create relevant groups that your prospects might be a part of — this will make it much easier to start a conversation and begin engaging with prospects. And the final option is to use InMail to get a direct response from the prospect. With InMail, you can send a direct message to any other profile that you don’t have a connection with, for maximum impact.
Nurturing Relationships Through Content
Once you’ve established contact with your prospects, it’s important to keep them engaged and nurture the relationship. Content curation and distribution can be a powerful tool to do this.
For instance, you can curate and share blog content, videos, podcasts, or ebooks related to your industry or business. Doing this will demonstrate your expertise and keep you front of mind with potential customers and partners.
Additionally, you can use LinkedIn’s groups and post feature to update followers on the latest news and developments related to your business. This is a great way of building up an audience, growing engagement, and moving prospects further down the funnel.
Using Automation to Enhance Your Prospecting
Finally, to make your prospecting process faster and more efficient, you can use various automation tools to automate tedious and mundane tasks like searching for prospects and sorting out prospects.
These powerful tools allow you to automate several steps of the prospecting process, from reaching out to leads from your contacts, influencers or groups, to helping you automate outreach processes. Automation tools can also be used to help you find the perfect message and remain consistent in your communication.
LinkedIn is a vast network of professionals and businesses that can be leveraged to help you find and reach out to prospects. Although many marketers overlook the prospective power of the platform, using effective strategies and advanced tactics can help you accelerate your growth.
By using the advanced search function and the ‘Follow’ and ‘People’ filters, you can easily and quickly pinpoint potential prospects without having to manually scour the entire platform. After finding potential prospects, you can use a variety of tactics such as messaging, content curation and automation tools to nurture the relationship and increase your reach.
If used correctly, LinkedIn can be an invaluable tool for helping you grow your business and increase your reach. So don’t be intimidated and start exploring the different little-known ways to find potential prospects on the platform today.