Be able to find your specific target audience within LinkedIn.
Work around the 100 connection requests per week limit.
Use automation safely to have a steady influx of leads coming in without you doing in.
Keep your account safe.
Know how to make data-driven business decisions
Be able to reach out with more touch points to warm up the prospect.
And more.

Not so simple, is it?

If you’re tired of reading the same, old guides on how LinkedIn is the best lead-generation channel with no actionable info, you’ve come to the right place.

In this guide, we’ll be approaching LinkedIn growth with very practical and actionable step-by-step directions. We’ll also be revealing the latest growth secrets agencies are using to generate real marketing-qualified leads from LinkedIn with Expandi.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

7 Proven lead generation growth secrets and methods to grow your agency
13 Reasons why LinkedIn outreach and growth agencies are using Expandi to generate leads on autopilot

But before we give away the growth secrets, there’s one other thing you need to know about…

And that’s our private Facebook group: The LinkedIn Outreach Family. In it, we’re constantly revealing the latest LinkedIn techniques and outreach campaigns that work. Down to the exact templates used so that you can replicate our success. You’ll also find other marketing agencies you can network with inside!

Now, let’s get started!

7 Lead Generation Agency Growth Secrets To Skyrocket Your Business

Some of the best LinkedIn marketing agencies are growing their and their client’s businesses using LinkedIn.

With a mix of automation and omnichannel outreach campaigns, LinkedIn is constantly changing.

It’s important you don’t get left behind following outdated best practices if you want to truly skyrocket your business.

To help you get the most out of generating leads on LinkedIn, here are the growth secrets we’ll be focusing on below:

Defining your ideal customer persona and buyer persona
Your specialization and agency positioning to find your competitive advantage
Strong project management skills to build your operations
Learning how to hire slow and fire fast
Building relationships with clients and how to get new referrals
Adopting a culture of transparency within your agency
Using the right tools that work for you specifically

Now, let’s take a look at each growth strategy in detail so you can also grow your business with LinkedIn.

1. Defining your target audience and finding them on LinkedIn

Knowing your target audience well is one of the best ways you can prepare for a lead-generation campaign.

But most people only ever have a vague understanding of who their target audience actually is.

Usually something along the lines of:

CEO or COO.
Based in the US.

Under 50 employees.

SaaS business.

But if you want to get the most out of LinkedIn (or your marketing in general), you should also:

Analyze your existing customers.
Choose one market segment.
Select 10 key customers.
Focus on discovering patterns.
Interview your current customers.
And only then, document your ideal customer profile and buyer persona.

If you’re looking for a more detailed, step-by-step breakdown of this, see our full guide on ideal customer profile vs buyer persona.

Once you’ve identified the characteristics of your target audience, you should create a detailed document that will serve as guidelines for your sales and marketing teams.

Remember, having more buyer personas for every ideal customer profile is normal.

You can start broad by documenting your ideal customer profile or the type of company that makes your ideal customer.

Then, over time, these documents will probably change. Though, that doesn’t mean your ideal customer profile has changed. Rather, you’ve gained more information and insights that help you understand your personas better.

From there, you should know how and where to find your target audience within LinkedIn.

There are 2 main ways to approach this:

Using boolean operators with the free, default LinkedIn search to filter out target audience segments. See our guide to LinkedIn X-Ray search to learn how to get more precise search results when looking for your target audience on LinkedIn.
Or using LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find zoom in and find laser-specific leads.

2. Focus on your specialization and find your competitive advantage

This is another essential step in defining your identity as an agency.

There are many marketing agencies out there. Probably many of them focus on the same thing as you, such as LinkedIn lead generation and outreach campaigns.

So, if two or more LinkedIn marketing agencies offer the same growth services, how does a consumer decide on which one to partner up with?

Even in our LinkedIn marketing agencies article, we outlined 15+ agencies all focusing on LinkedIn growth and outreach.

Yet, they’re all fundamentally different in that they help different target audiences in different ways.

For example, some may focus on outreach campaigns exclusively, while others also provide LinkedIn content marketing to get more clients. Alternatively, they may use a different mechanism (i.e. the “secret” that makes your claims work).

Here’s what you need to take into consideration when defining your agency specialization or positioning.

Market sophistication refers to a level of buyer awareness in the marketplace. It’s used to check whether anyone’s marketed similar products or services before.

Think of it as how much experience customers have with a product or service.

If the market sophistication is low (i.e. less competition and few services like yours), it’s going to be easier for you to stand out. If it’s high, however, it’s going to be more difficult to compete, but the rewards are well worth it.

The 5 levels of awareness are typically as follows:

Unaware – Audience is not aware of the need to solve the problem.
Problem aware – Know have a problem to solve, but not aware of solutions.

Solution aware – Know there is a solution but don’t know any specific products or services to solve it.

Product aware – Know the solution exists, but not completely convinced.

Most aware – Know product or service exists, but haven’t purchased yet.

Depending on what your agency offers (e.g. what kind of LinkedIn growth), you might have to brand and position yourself differently. Also taking into consideration your competition and what they’re doing.

Then, you should be able to define your specialization or competitive advantage by realizing your competition isn’t capitalizing on that!

3. Strong project management

The backbone of any agency’s operations is strong project management.

If you don’t have this step outlined for your agency, everything else will fall apart.

For example, large organizations usually use the “pod sales structure model” for their marketing and sales operations. Which looks something like this:

For more info on this model in particular, see our guide on sales roles in outbound sales.

To get the most out of their SDRs, businesses first set up a strategical overview picture and then place all the pieces in place as needed.

Otherwise, if they were to hire a sales development representative without strong project management in place, both the business and SDR would lose time trying to figure out how to navigate through their tasks.

On that point, you should also have well-documented standard operating procedures and certain KPIs to measure the success of your operations.

For example, 2 main KPIs for SDRs might include:

Lead to SQL (sales-qualified lead conversion).
SQL to SAO (sales-accepted opportunity).

Then, you should be able to measure and keep track of these data through your marketing tools (like Expandi) or project management tools (like Asana). We’ll also cover using the right tools below, so, keep on reading!

4. Learn how to hire and fire at the right time

This will largely depend on the size of your agency and operations.

But for the sake of an example, let’s continue with the above case about sales.

If your sales manager is spending a lot of time nurturing leads on their own and sometimes forgets to communicate with warmer leads, chances are, you could use an extra hand in the form of an SDR.

The same concept applies to your entire organization.

If you are:

Doing time-consuming tasks manually.
Not able to focus on more important work.
Spending a lot of time managing your calendar and following up with your clients.
Doing everything on your own and not delegating.
Creating sales infrastructure that doesn’t cover 70% of daily routine tasks such as creating reports or automatically following up.
And otherwise spending a lot of time on tasks outside your main responsibilities…

Then you should strongly consider hiring a new employee. Whether it’s a full-time worker or an outsourced freelancer.

On the other side of the coin, you should also not be afraid to fire fast.

A lot of startups hire fast and fire slow. In reality, it should be the other way around: hire slow and fire fast.

It’s simply not compassionate to keep one person but make the whole team struggle as a result.

If that concept sounds harsh, consider how harsh it is to allow a whole team to be undermined because of someone who should not have been hired in the first place.

In short, adopt a culture of transparency (more on this below), set specific KPIs to measure how well your employees are performing, and when making a business decision, see how it’ll affect other people in your team.

For example, your sales manager can monitor the performance of all campaigns, find the right audience, and then make sure the leads are qualified. After that, they can track the results and share them with the person who was responsible.

Similarly, they can report these exact results to the clients at the same time (more on this below).

5. Build relationships with clients and focus on referrals

This growth secret is probably one of the fastest ways to get more clients.

According to MentionMe, on average, referred customers have lifetime value twice as high as non-referred customers. While they also cost little to nothing to acquire.

Essentially, the idea is to ask your current client base to find qualified leads who may be facing similar challenges or needs.

However, when doing so, make sure you ask your “best client” for a referral. That is to say, someone you have a good relationship with, achieved real results (ideally even a case study), and you’re sending it at the right time (i.e. project going well).

This growth secret is very straightforward, but it’s important that your “ask” feels natural.

Keep things simple and:

Have a reason to contact the client.
Personalize your message.
Don’t go overboard and explain how your referral program works (so it’s a win-win).

If you don’t have a referral program, try to frame the “ask” around how you’re helping the client solve specific challenges. And if they also know someone else going through similar challenges who you can help.

6. Adopt a culture of transparency

A culture of transparency within a marketing agency is one where employees are granted meaningful insights that create trust with their seniors. Creating an environment with honest and direct feedback.

There are many benefits to a transparent work environment. A transparent work culture largely helps team members track their progress and goals better, and thus, increases employee engagement and motivation.

With a transparent culture, employees feel seen and heard.

They can voice feedback, criticism, and ideas without being kept in the dark. And they also have a better idea of how the company is performing.

For example, if an SDR knows how many meetings they’ve booked, they’re more likely to enjoy their work and improve. Alternatively, if an outreach template an SDR wrote generated a 68% open rate and they have access to that data, they become empowered by knowing what worked and what didn’t.

Similarly, you can create detailed reports based on these results for your clients.

With Expandi, you get results in a dashboard graph that’s understandable at a glance that tells you everything you need to know about your outreach campaigns. Down to how many messages were sent and how many prospects replied, without you having to calculate everything manually.

Many agency owners keep the campaign performance data at the top. If there’s no communication top-to-bottom, employees might become frustrated.

To adopt a culture of transparency within your agency, consider:

Inviting honest feedback without criticism.
Ensure consistent communication.
Offer an anonymous suggestion form.
Give your employees a chance to share their experiences.
Sharing feedback with your team based on constructive challenges, positive outcomes, and potential issues you want to fix.

Done right, transparent culture is a win-win for the agency owner, the clients, as well as the employees.

To help with this, users in Expandi can generate detailed reports for their campaigns and measure the performance of each of their clients. This makes it easier to create client reports without manually creating graphs in Powerpoint or Canva.

7. Use the right tools that work for you

Before we wrap up this section, the final growth secret is that you should use tools that work specifically for you.

What I mean is that for every single function, you can find million different marketing tools that essentially do the same thing. And as a result, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

To overcome this choice of paradox, you should pick one tool, give the free trial a chance, and if you feel it’s not right for you, try something else.

You’ll have to experiment until you find something that works for you best.

Otherwise, it’s easy to end up in the same starting place not making a decision.

If you’re not sure where to start, you’ll find many listicles online for any tools. For example, our list of the best 10+ LinkedIn automation tools.

Depending on your industry, the options might be overwhelming or more straightforward.

For example, for most people, Zapier is the go-to automation and integration tool for many people. Or Integromat for more advanced users in need of a customizable approach.

For sales teams and LinkedIn growth agencies, it’s Expandi.

And that’s not just a shameless plug. We’re going to explore why in detail below.

But when it comes to sales outreach, chances are, you’ll want to create highly-personalized outreach campaigns on LinkedIn and email.

For growth agencies looking to skyrocket their business, Expandi does it all, while keeping your LinkedIn account safe and sound.

Let’s take a look at why Expandi stands out for LinkedIn growth agencies.

13 Reasons Why Lead Generation Agencies Choose Expandi

For growth agencies, an ideal LinkedIn automation tool should:

Keep your LinkedIn account safe and minimize chances of it getting restricted.
Have clear data management processes for convenient project management.
Provide free admin seats.
Provide detailed reports you can make data-driven decisions from.
Integrate with your existing tools or custom-made webhooks.
Automate LinkedIn outreach and manual tasks.
Be able to send multi-touch point, omnichannel campaigns.
Have a global inbox for multiple accounts.
Provide advanced personalization via Hyperise.
Have quick implementation of a white-label solution to get your agency up and running fast.
Have a specialized customer support team for agencies.
Help you go over the 100 connection requests per week limit.
Have a detailed overview and access to best practices.

And just so happens, Expandi checks all the boxes.

Though, if you’re looking for an overview of some other tools, see how Expandi compares with:

Now, let’s take a look at each benefit in detail to see what it means for your growth agency.

1. Security and LinkedIn account safety

LinkedIn outreach safety is one of the biggest priorities for agencies doing LinkedIn outreach.

Obviously, you want to make sure your LinkedIn account doesn’t get restricted for overusing automation.

And one of the best ways to do this is by using cloud-based tools and following the best safety practices (see below).

There are 2 types of LinkedIn prospecting tools:

Cloud-based – Lives on the web and harder to detect. Allows for more customization and mimics human behavior. So, LinkedIn is less likely to suspend this kind of activity.
Browser extension – Takes over your browser because it’s an extension. Since this works from the front-end, LinkedIn is more likely to detect this and suspend your account.

Expandi is a cloud-based tool which already makes it safer than many other tools. But that’s not all, it also comes jam-packed with safety features to minimize the chances of your LinkedIn account getting suspended.

2. User roles and permission settings

This also helps if you’re managing multiple accounts and clients within LinkedIn.

If that’s the case, you can give them certain roles and permissions so that they have their own version of Expandi.

Permissions are simply the tasks a specific role is allowed to do.

Expnadi allows you to set up 3 different roles in LinkedIn account management:

End-users (can manage just one account and should not be able to see each other’s profiles)
Co-workers (can manage all accounts under the agency and can see each other’s profiles)
Company managers (can manage all accounts under a specific company without an agency)

Expandi also has 60 new permissions available now, which makes 111 permissions in total to choose from!

All permissions are grouped into categories like Campaigns, Webhooks, Searches, LinkedIn accounts, etc.

Moreover, you can create your own permission templates

Sounds great! Isn’t it?

You can learn more about the different account management scenarios:

This is also fully customizable and helps if you want to implement “safeguards” within your operations.

Our roles, permissions, and templates will enable agencies to sell different tiers of services (e.g. upper tiers including additional types of campaigns or searches).

3. Free admin seats

Expandi doesn’t charge for users, only for connected LinkedIn accounts.

This is a huge advantage for teams that have many managers or supervisors. This way, you can add as many managers as you want.

For more info on this, check out the Expandi pricing to see what you’re getting.

4. Detailed reports

With Expandi, you get day-to-day, detailed reports of how your outreach campaigns are performing.

As such, you can track social selling metrics and view instant reports on:

How many people accepted your connection requests.
How many people replied to your follow-ups.
Your weekly social selling index.
Which of your campaigns performed better based on A/B testing.
How many meetings you’ve booked (if you integrate Expandi with Calendly).
How many of your prospects end up as leads in your CRM (if you integrate your CRM with LinkedIn)
And more.

All this, you can view with instant dashboards within your account and make data-driven decisions accordingly.

For example, if you view your outreach campaign has only a 20% connection request acceptance rate, that means you need to switch up your outreach template.

With instant dashboard reports in Expandi, you can view that data and generate detailed reports of activities related to contacts on LinkedIn with just a click.

Then, you can share reports of activities related to contacts with your clients as needed.

5. Integrations with existing or custom-made webhooks

Already using other marketing and sales tools as part of your operations?

You can easily integrate Expandi into your tech stack to save time, strengthen customer relationships, and optimize sales processes.

Expandi is fully compatible with Zapier to integrate with any existing or custom-made webhook you use. This means you can enable custom automation (e.g. managing replies) in your external tools as needed.

You can also:

6. Automated LinkedIn outreach

Above, we mentioned that you can automate outreach actions such as:

Sending connection requests.
Follow-ups.
Email follow-ups for omnichannel outreach.
And so on.

But that’s only surface-level automation at this point.

To skyrocket your agency growth, Expandi also allows you to scrape:

LinkedIn searches.
Facebook group members.
Twitter followers.
People who engaged with a viral LinkedIn post.
LinkedIn events.
And more.

With ultra-specific outreach campaigns, we’ve managed to reach connection acceptance rates of up to 80%.

If you have something in common with the target audience (e.g. commented under the same post, in the same Facebook group), they’re more likely to connect with you with less personalization!

But if that’s not the case, one other agency growth secret has to do with advanced personalization which we’ll cover below.

7. Multi-touch point, omnichannel outreach

Even if your outreach connection request or sales pitch is perfect, there’s no guarantee your sales prospect will still read them or reply.

That’s because, chances are, their LinkedIn inbox is full of sales pitches and thousands of follow-ups from other sales reps!

So, to overcome this issue, your best solution is to engage your prospect with multiple touch points, across different channels. Such as:

LinkedIn connection requests.
InMail follow-ups.
Email follow-ups.

Now, that might seem like a lot of work if you were to do everything manually.

Fortunately, though, you can send omnichannel outreach campaigns directly from Expandi!

That includes LinkedIn connection requests, InMails, as well as emails.

Then, to take this a step further, you can also include dynamic images and GIFs to make sure your messages don’t fall through the cracks.

To learn how to do that, see our full guide on hyper-personalized LinkedIn outreach.

8. Global LinkedIn inbox

If you’re managing multiple client LinkedIn accounts, a global inbox is one of the most convenient ways to save time.

A global inbox is exactly what it sounds like – one section you can manage, read, and reply to all of your LinkedIn messages, across multiple accounts.

The problem with the default, built-in inbox you see from LinkedIn’s system is that it’s incredibly easy to miss messages. Or if you’re managing multiple accounts, you’d have to log in and out each time you want to access the messages.

Fortunately, with Expandi’s smart inbox management, you can instantly see unread chats, who replied, set filters, and get a bird’s eye view of all of your messages.

Similarly, you can switch accounts with the click of a button and gain campaign insights across different accounts – all in one place.

9. Advanced personalization via Hyperise

Using personalization in outreach is nothing new.

But most people stop at {first_name} or {company_name}.

While including a {first_name} personalization tag in your email subject line might boost your open rates, when it comes to LinkedIn, you need something more advanced.

Something like dynamic images and GIFs that use your prospect’s profile picture, company logo, website landing page, or something else inside your visuals.

Here’s an example:

How does this work?

Essentially, by using Hyperise, you can include dynamic visuals in images or GIFs. This includes:

Dynamic text.
Profile images.
Business logos.
Website screenshots.
Pinned map locations.
Personalized QR codes.
And much more.

With this kind of advanced personalization, we managed to skyrocket our reply rate to 55%+.

See how in this hyper-personalized automated outreach guide.

You might have also noticed that some people have different variations or formatting for their names on LinkedIn. With Expandi, you can also ignore name titles (e.g. Dr, PhD, etc.) to make your outreach more natural!

10. White-label solution for agencies managing multiple LinkedIn accounts

If you’re managing multiple LinkedIn accounts, this part is important.

Expandi agency users can set up a custom dashboard for personalized onboarding of their clients.

White-label is just one aspect you can use as an agency to offload the heavy lifting of campaign management for your clients or other agencies.

If you’re managing more than a few LinkedIn accounts, you can:

Manage everything from one place.
Avoid logging in and out of multiple accounts.
Create instant reports for each clients.
Warm up all Linkedin accounts.
And more – all from one place.

This way, you can “borrow” the Expandi platform and make it truly yours for your clients.

For more info on this, see our agency white label page.

11. Specialized customer support team for agencies

Agencies using Expandi receive military-grade customer support ready to help them 24/7.

Additionally, our dedicated support team can help you with every step of your onboarding to sharpen your social selling skills.

To get started, you can request a live demo, sign up with a free 7-day trial, or if you have any questions, join our private Facebook group.

12. Advanced LinkedIn outreach to go over the weekly limits

As you might be aware by now, typically, you can send only around 100 connection requests per week.

To go over that number, before, you could upload a spreadsheet file full of your leads to LinkedIn to connect with them without a connection request.

However, since then, LinkedIn has patched that as well…

Until Expandi came up with another solution! Using the Mobile Connector Campaign you can send more than 100 connection requests per week. LinkedIn allows users to send more connection requests when they use LinkedIn via mobile. So Expandi simulates sending connection requests from mobile devices without leaving its interface.

From there, all you have to do is follow the 10 simple steps in our full LinkedIn connections limit guide.

13. Free access to best LinkedIn practices

Finally, one last thing that really differentiates Expandi from other LinkedIn software agencies are using is that we’re constantly sharing the latest best practices, growth hacks, and LinkedIn growth strategies to help you grow.

Including LinkedIn user growth strategies and secrets we’ve tested ourselves.

Since the LinkedIn algorithm is constantly changing, so is what’s working on the platform.

And we’re glad to say that everything we’ve written about on our blog includes things we’ve tested ourselves.

Guides such as:

How to increase engagement on LinkedIn.
3 growth hacks to get more connections on LinkedIn.
Best growth secrets to generate more leads on LinkedIn.
And so much more.

Conclusion

Hopefully, these 15 agency growth secrets can now help you skyrocket your lead generation efforts.

As a cherry on top, you can launch most of the growth strategies covered above in under an hour. With the outreach sequence steps and templates provided on our blog, you can truly get the most out of the free 7-day trial this way.

Or, if you need more help on how to scale your LinkedIn agency or proven growth strategies to generate leads, be sure to join The LinkedIn Outreach Family where you can ask any questions!

Only the best strategies will bring the best results

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Agency Growth Secrets: 13 Reasons Why LinkedIn Outreach Agencies Choose Expandi

7 Lead Generation Agency Growth Secrets To Skyrocket Your Business

1. Defining your target audience and finding them on LinkedIn