Beyond its reputation as a professional networking site, LinkedIn has gained a reputation as a great site for online marketing, especially for B2B firms. Indeed, LinkedIn lead generation is nearly thrice as effective as lead generation on Facebook or X (formerly Twitter).
There are a couple of reasons for this. One is the business context that all users share: talking shop is never irrelevant on LinkedIn. Another is that LinkedIn boasts multiple features that support lead generation.
Still, even on LinkedIn, lead generation is a time-consuming process that takes diligence and patience, especially for B2B firms. And while you could handle it yourself, the tasks are routine and easily taught, making them a great choice for outsourced delegation.
With a virtual assistant spending a few hours a week on your LinkedIn lead gen, you can get remarkable results without having to stretch your own schedule to cover it.
- LinkedIn’s built-in analytics and lead capture tools make it uniquely well-suited for efficient, high-converting lead generation efforts compared to other platforms.
- VAs can handle a wide variety of LinkedIn lead generation responsibilities—from optimizing profiles to conducting outreach campaigns—freeing up your team to focus on core objectives.
- Contracting flexible virtual assistant support provides significant strategic advantages like cost savings, improved productivity, and scalability to meet changing demands.
Lead Generation on LinkedIn: How It Works
As with anywhere else, the aim of lead generation on LinkedIn is to identify prospective customers and establish preliminary connections with them. These connections can later be built upon to close sales.
Accordingly, lead generation focuses on top-of-funnel marketing tactics to get potential customers’ interest and, more importantly, their contact information for follow-ups.
That said, while lead generation focuses on initial interest, it’s still important for marketers to be precise and deliberate in the leads they seek out. It’s best to prioritize leads with a strong chance of converting into customers; otherwise, your sales team wastes time and resources nurturing dead-end leads.
Why Use LinkedIn for Lead Generation?
Getting quality leads means understanding your target market as well as the people who may become leads.
LinkedIn makes this easy with comprehensive built-in analytics, as well as robust audience targeting filters. These allow you great visibility into people who engage with you or your business, as well as the ability to easily engage them later on.
Another great feature LinkedIn has to offer is built-in lead capture forms. These built-in forms boast an average conversion rate of 13% (according to LinkedIn first-hand data), which is a significantly stronger showing than other lead capture forms.
It should be no surprise, then, that nearly 9 in 10 B2B marketers use LinkedIn for lead generation. That’s significantly wider adoption for lead gen than competing social networks.
The Role of a Virtual Assistant in LinkedIn Lead Gen Efforts
The general function of virtual assistants in business is to handle routine tasks—generally outside the business’ core focus—and carry them out at a lower cost than you’d get hiring internally for the role. They also allow quicker scaling and deployment of labor since bringing VAs on board is considerably quicker than conventional hiring.
Lead generation on LinkedIn can be fairly niche but is ultimately composed of multiple tasks that are individually easily trained. While hiring for the role or setting aside time to train a team member may be difficult, getting a VA is an ideal solution.
VAs tend to be trained for routine work and basic outreach. Due to the nature of their work, most are tech-savvy and can quickly pick up on new virtual tools. This makes them a great option for filling gaps in your LinkedIn marketing efforts.
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Tasks to Delegate to a Lead Generation Virtual Assistant
There are several aspects of LinkedIn that you can utilize to improve lead generation efforts. Here are a few things a VA can do to help you with them.
Profile Optimization
Your LinkedIn profile is the foundation of your entire presence there. Without a credible, compelling profile, any other marketing efforts won’t have a leg to stand on. So if you’re starting anywhere, start here.
There are a few basic things a VA can help you with here:
- Refining your summary and skills sections
- Updating your career information and achievements
- Creating a cover photo (using simple graphic design tools)
- Researching keywords or skills relevant to your audience
Your company page is to your business what your profile is to you. As such, it’s also important to keep this optimized. Here are a few things a VA can assist you with:
- Updating copy and images on your company page
- Creating and updating a careers page
- Creating and updating product pages
Audience Research and Targeting
Consistently getting high-quality leads is a matter of data. And to get and use data, you need research and targeting. How a VA can help you with these depends a lot on their skills and perception.
A VA with more experience and keen insight into your industry can assist in high-level research. This includes:
- Identifying the departments or roles often in charge of purchasing decisions in your niche
- Identifying decision-makers in specific target companies
- Analyzing data captured from your analytics
- Planning ad campaigns or content strategies
A less experienced VA, however, will likely be restricted to more clerical tasks. Given how time-consuming these can be, delegating them is still quite a big help. They include:
- Data entry and cleanup; getting missing details to round out databases
- Updating your CRM (or other databases) based on filtered searches
- Setting up analytics and targeting filters
Content Creation and Scheduling
As far as content goes, LinkedIn is widely seen as a thought leadership space. That may seem narrow at first glance, but thought leadership is quite a broad category—it’s much more than advice or musings.
Thought leadership can include regular updates in your industry (or some aspect of it) or analyses of new data and information. It’s defined less by its subject matter and more by its purpose: driving professional improvement, making business decisions, and offering advice or recommendations.
A VA can help you with content by:
- Editing and/or scheduling posts (they can write them too if they have a knack for it)
- Coordinating or supporting content sharing through employees’ accounts
- Staying on top of trending topics or posts and summarizing them for you
- Handling cross-posting to or from other social networks you’re active on
Outreach and Engagement
Sometimes, lead generation takes a more direct approach: contacting people directly once you’ve identified them as a good fit for your business.
Direct messages through LinkedIn’s InMail are a typical choice, and LinkedIn’s built-in database and filtering tools, like Sales Navigator, make the process a breeze. By combining the direct contact of email marketing with LinkedIn’s refined targeting, this approach turns out remarkably effective.
In addition to directly contacting potential customers, you can try engaging other users on LinkedIn for partnerships or collaborations either on the platform or in other areas of business.
Here are a few tasks you can assign to a VA:
- Researching possible leads by criteria (e.g., industry, seniority, location, etc.)
- Sending InMail to identified recipients
- Collating data for each recipient with possible common ground or touchstones
- Monitoring replies and send follow-ups
Monitoring and Reporting
Analytics and social listening are the bedrock of a data-driven marketing strategy. Understanding what makes your best leads tick means finding patterns in their traits, activities, and interactions with your business. It’s meticulous work!
A VA can help you with this by:
- Compiling reports from LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator
- Charting patterns in Conversion Tracking
- Integrating this data into your CRM system
Networking, Relationship Building, and Follow-ups
Relationships take time and effort—the same goes for you and your connections on LinkedIn. Typically, this means a lot of minor updates and interactions over time. You might find that they’ll eventually clog up your schedule or that you end up overlooking them.
Instead, consider getting a VA to take care of the following:
- Replying to other users’ comments or queries on your business page and its posts
- Leaving comments on or replying to other users’ posts
- Informing you of your peers’ milestones so you can greet them as needed
- Monitoring and moderating comments on your business’ posts
Remember, regularity in posting and interacting will make you a familiar presence on your network’s feeds. This will make it easier for you to build relationships in the long run.
Benefits of Hiring a LinkedIn Lead Generation VA
Hiring virtual assistants can drastically improve your team’s performance. Here are the main benefits VAs bring to the table.
Cost Savings
Hiring a virtual assistant cuts overhead costs for office space and equipment. Routine tasks like data entry and admin work can be delegated at lower hourly rates. This lets you and your core staff focus time on high-impact, strategic projects.
With mundane work offloaded, teams gain the capacity to fuel business growth. You and your team get more value out of the time you spend working.
Better Networking and Outreach
Frequent, purposeful interaction with leads (and possible leads) on LinkedIn helps you build familiarity and credibility. This helps strengthen your vendor-client ties, which, as LinkedIn research shows, are largely based on trust (52%) and personal relationships (45%).
Improved Productivity and Focus
Delegating routine tasks to virtual assistants lets your team focus deeply on their specializations. With duties and responsibilities aligned to each team member’s strengths, less task-switching is required.
It enables longer stretches of uninterrupted focus on complex projects that drive innovation and impact, leading to improved efficiency and better output across the organization.
Scalability and Flexibility
Activity on LinkedIn is a mix of steady, routine work and the occasional campaign, which may be intense or experimental.
Since VAs can be brought on quickly on flexible terms, you get the adaptability you need to scale according to your current efforts. This can help you meet seasonal demands, expand to new segments, or test out different tactics.
Score LinkedIn Leads with Your Own Virtual Assistants
Hiring a VA is a fairly simple process. Online gig markets like Upwork have hundreds upon hundreds of remote freelancers to choose from. You can also hire VAs through agencies, which expedite screening, recruitment, and management.
Magic can also find you a VA. Simply tell us what aspects of LinkedIn you’d like to focus on, and we’ll find the assistant with the skills you need. Schedule a call with us today to get started!
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