An Expert's Guide To Creating Personalized Outreach Campaigns on LinkedIn
By Georgi Todorov
LinkedIn has evolved from a job-hunting platform to a full-blown outreach eco-system for businesses. It offers various growth avenues and allows businesses to forge professional connections that drive profitability in more ways than one.
When it comes to creating personalized ad campaigns on LinkedIn, you can leverage various targeting options to sift through hundreds of millions of users and reach people that matter to you.
If you are still skeptical about your campaign’s success on LinkedIn, here are a few stats that will change your perception.
- 80% of LinkedIn users are decision-makers
- LinkedIn’s user base is comprised of over 55 million organizations
- A third of B2B decision-makers make purchase decisions after doing research on LinkedIn.
One thing is clear. LinkedIn offers a favorable environment for businesses to thrive, but the success of your campaigns largely depends on your ideas and execution. And one thing that promises incredible results is personalization.
“A personalized LinkedIn campaign is bound to succeed because no matter what, people seek a sense of connection and belonging. And nothing makes them feel more valued than a personalized message that speaks to them.”, says Stefan Smulders, a SaaS Entrepreneur and founder of the world’s safest software for LinkedIn Automation Expandi.io.
Personalization is a great way to make your prospects feel valued and elicit a positive response. But it’s easier said than done.
In this article, you will learn to create personalized LinkedIn campaigns to meet your unique outreach objectives, be it securing a link on a high-DA website, getting sign-ups for your course, or lead generation.
But before we get to that, it’s important to optimize your LinkedIn profile in order to maximize the impact and build trust in case your recipients decide to check you out.
Profile Optimization
Even if you are not running a campaign, LinkedIn profile optimization is highly recommended. Optimizing your profile with the right information will make it appear for relevant search terms.
Here are the three main components of any LinkedIn profile that can play a vital role in your outreach success.
Profile Bio
Your profile bio should communicate what makes you better at what you do than your competition. And you can make your bio seem more human and personal by adding an interesting activity that you enjoy apart from your work. It may go like this: Digital marketing consultant | Adventurer & Daydreamer.
Feature Section
This is where you get to showcase your achievements and posts with maximum engagement. Tread carefully because you don’t want to come across as someone who likes to brag all the time.
Activity Section
Let your profile visitors know that you actively post on LinkedIn and engage with other people’s posts. If you don’t post or engage with others’ content on LinkedIn, you should start doing it in the lead-up to creating your campaign.
With that out of the way, here are some of the proven methods to create a personalized LinkedIn outreach campaign.
Creating a Personalized Campaign
Once your LinkedIn account is fully optimized and ripe for outreach campaigns, follow this step-by-step guide to get your prospects to say ‘yes’.
Create a Buyer Persona
You need to have clarity about who your ideal client is since all your future campaigns will be based on your buyer persona. So make sure you take every important attribute of your ideal client into account when creating a buyer persona.
Targeting the right people is crucial to your campaign’s success, and this is where LinkedIn’s search feature comes in handy. The best part is you don’t even need a premium membership to use this feature.
LinkedIn’s search feature allows you to find profiles based on their location, current employer, job profile, educational background, and other keywords that define your ideal prospects.
If that’s not enough for you, you can go premium and screen profiles based on core search filters, such as the size of their company, their recent activity on LinkedIn, and more.
Sending Connection Requests
After you create a pool of prospects, the next step is to start sending connection requests. But here’s the caveat. You can’t send all connection requests at once because that might put you under suspicion, and your account might get suspended - LinkedIn’s algorithm is quite strict in this area.
Also, when you are sending requests, don’t forget to slip in a short message to explain the purpose of reaching out. But don’t give it all away. Save some of it for later as well.
If you have ample time to write a personalized message while sending connection requests, go for it. But it doesn’t make much of a difference. You should rather create a universal template and save time because you are going to need it in the next step.
Message Template
While you wait patiently for your prospects to accept your connection request, you can work on perfecting your message in the meantime so that when it comes to striking a conversation, you are spot on with your pitch.
Most marketers make the mistake of sending out a sales pitch as their first message after hello. This might work for your email marketing campaigns, but LinkedIn is a different game altogether in the sense that people come here to socialize and gather knowledge. The last thing they want is to be sold to.
That’s why you need an entire trail of messages to ease your prospects down the sales funnel before your ultimate sales pitch arrives. However, the first message should always be unique for every prospect, based on their interests or their recent activity on LinkedIn. Personalization demands time and effort, but it will be worth it in the end.
Personalized Ads
You don’t have to solely rely on outreach to meet your objectives. LinkedIn allows users to run paid ads to reach their marketing objectives faster. And with a user base of 700 million+, using LinkedIn for sales is not at all a bad idea.
You can optimize your ads for various purposes, such as driving website traffic, increasing brand/product awareness, and lead generation.
LinkedIn has aced the game of personalization with its Dynamic Ads feature that allows users to personalize their ads for each impression, according to their objectives.
Conclusion
LinkedIn has reached a point where it keeps pushing its premium products to drive profits. Another premium product that you may find useful is LinkedIn InMail. This feature allows you to send messages to anyone on LinkedIn, whether a connection or not. This tool lets you skip the first step in your outreach campaign so that you can fast forward to working on your personalized message right away.
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