Mastering LinkedIn Lead Fulfillment: Tips, Tools, and Tactics

If you’re a regular reader of our blog (and if you’re not, you should start today as we share numerous practical tips), you’re likely familiar with strategies for generating leads through email—don’t miss our comprehensive guide on building the lead fulfillment process for cold email outreach. 

Now, are you also leveraging the power of LinkedIn for your business? With over 1 billion members and 67 million companies across 200 countries, LinkedIn is an unparalleled platform for building professional relationships. But the challenge remains: how do you sift through those staggering numbers to find high-quality leads for your clients? The answer lies in targeted, data-driven outreach methods.

89% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn lead generation to help them grow (with about twice the success rate of other social platforms). So jump on that bandwagon to earn your lead-gen agency the highly effective reputation badge you want.

An optimized LinkedIn presence can generate leads and drive audience engagement and sales. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk you through the process of LinkedIn lead fulfillment, step by do-able step.

Setting the Foundation for Success

When it comes to lead generation, the first step is creating an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), whether it’s for your company or your clients.

Before we dive into tips on establishing an ideal target audience, let’s briefly cover the basics of your client’s positioning and offering. These aspects affect the what, why, and how of the whole communication strategy:

1. Core company offering — what product or service they want to promote, i.e., what they do best and sell the most of (prioritize if there’s more than one thing). Consider their competitive advantage and value proposition. We love specifics — list anything they can brag about, like results, awards, brands they’ve worked with, case studies… Have them note their average client spend, too.
2. Target audience — who they want to reach with their offer and who will profit from it.
3. Messaging style — how you will highlight the value they bring. Ask for their top five CTAs and key questions. Decide on the professional voice, e.g., fun, expert, informal, confident, or educational. Look for real-life examples of brands or individuals that inspire them and are nailing this. 

Define Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and Buyer Personas (BP)

If you want to generate high-quality leads for your clients, the last thing you should do is send out messages at random. All that does is waste time and marketing budget. In contrast, a well-defined ICP helps you focus efforts on those most likely to become your client’s customers, saving resources on ineffective tactics.

An ICP is a broad picture of the company you want to target with all the characteristics of companies producing the largest share of your client’s revenue. Buyer personas are the individuals responsible for purchases (learn more about the difference between ICP and BP here) A target customer profile considers every possible company and person who could be interested in buying from your client.

Here are some questions you can ask your client to define their ICP:

• What titles does your ideal client typically have (CEO, CMO, Founder, etc.)?
• What industries do they typically work in (finance, health, food, etc.)?
• What is their level of seniority and level of experience?
• What titles do you want to exclude (e.g., you might not want to target digital marketers)?
• What company size does your ideal customer work from (e.g., 1–10 employees vs 1,000–5,000 employees)?
• What geographic locations do you want to target (e.g., Europe or a specific country or city)?

Jot down the answers so you have a visual guide to refer to. You can recreate this template in Google Sheets to access it from anywhere.

Bonus tip: Have your client use one of their existing customers as a blueprint for an ICP. It’s as simple as checking their company’s information on LinkedIn or their official site. Consider why they fit the customer profile, and then define decision makers in these companies e.g., the CFO dispenses the money, so they would have the final say in partnering with them.

Strategic Planning

Now that you have established your specific target audience, it’s time to create campaigns that align with their goals. For example, they might want to expand to a global customer base or focus on sustainability practices.

Leverage different sources to spot ICP representatives in the wild. Qualitative data from your client’s employees who are in contact with their customers and prospects is invaluable. Use feedback surveys to gather information about the ICP’s pain points, motivations, and preferences straight from the source. A great indicator that they need your client’s services could be that they’re running LinkedIn ads to achieve a goal your client can help them reach.

Based on the information provided by your clients — consider who their clients are and define your search…Ask your client to look through their CRM or ERP data for information on purchased products and link it to KPIs. Use predictive analytics to discover behavior patterns and trends—attributes of relevant and valuable accounts. These patterns show how they react to various situations and triggers, which you can leverage in your campaigns.

Aligning campaigns with the ICP’s goals is crucial for capturing their attention, ensuring engagement, and driving conversions. To achieve this, you need to explore various approaches to see what resonates best with your client’s ICP. Identify different traits and triggers that indicate when to approach these prospects. Then, build several campaigns around these insights.

For instance, you might identify one group of prospects by their focus on sustainability, another by their efforts to expand globally, and a third by their investment in new technologies. Develop tailored messaging and steps for each group, ensuring your campaigns speak directly to their specific goals and needs.

This method of building out several campaigns based on the different traits and triggers identified in your ICP analysis allows for more precise targeting and higher conversion rates. That’s why we included space for three strategies—but feel free to add more as needed.

Feeling stuck? Head over to our other article about using ChatGPT for lead generation.

Targeted messaging

The more relevant and personalized your communication style, the better. Remember to write out A and B versions for testing the effectiveness of each stage. 

For instance, you could configure Message A to address a slightly different aspect of your client’s Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) challenge compared to Message B. 

Alternatively, test contrasting strategies such as a problem-solving versus a profit-gaining approach to see which resonates more effectively with the audience. From our experience, rigorous A/B testing provides conclusive evidence of what the target audience truly responds to. 

Here is how you could structure your messaging plan based on the scraped information:

1. Connection Request — “Can I share a piece of content about this X challenge?” or “Hey, [NAME], I saw you’re also a follower of [company or persona] on LinkedIn. I take it you’re interested in [subject]? I was wondering if you’d like to chat about [common goal].” Alternatively, a connection request without a message works fine, too. If you choose to do that, move the introductory message into the first follow-up stage.
2. Follow-Up #1 — A soft bump, delivered eight hours after accepting, something like “Hey, did you catch that?” or “Maybe there’s someone else on your team I could speak to about this?”. You could include a video, personalized GIF, or some downloadable content.
3. Follow-Up #2 — Sent one day later. 

Here are some examples:

4. Follow-Up #3 — Sent three days after the last message. Example:

5. Follow-Up #4 — Final sign-off to follow up on the CTA (three days after the previous message). Example:
   
   

Before you question the necessity of scheduled follow-ups — consider this: on average, it takes around 8 follow-up attempts to receive a reply. This statistic underscores the importance of persistence in your sales strategy to avoid premature abandonment of potential deals. 

While you’re refining your approach, also focus on your general communication strategy. Emphasize the significance of providing valuable content to establish your client’s company as a trusted authority within the industry. Additionally, consider scheduling your LinkedIn posts to streamline and automate this aspect of your engagement (more on that later). 

Data Collection and Enrichment

Data Collection Techniques

Ok, so you have the copy created and know what type of clients you want to reach out to. Now what? The ICP should act as a base for identifying quality leads and finding clients with characteristics of those who are most likely to convert. How do you get that contact info?

Here’s where you can find them:

• LinkedIn — comments or likes on posts from influencers in your client’s niche, common groups, mutual contacts, competitors’ clients, social posts, etc. (Expandi automatically scrapes leads from LinkedIn searches into a CSV file — select “Create a new search” and paste the LinkedIn link)

• Events (speakers, sponsors, and attendees)
• Webinars
• Company domains
• Thematic Facebook groups

Use Browse AI to pull lead information from various sources and export them into simple spreadsheets. This tool has become the go-to solution for scraping these days. It also seamlessly connects contact information with each person’s LinkedIn profile.

Before you launch, we advise you to go even further. At this point, you should have company and personal names, job roles, locations, emails, links… But you can dive deeper and find other indicators:

• What kind of technology do they use? (BuiltWith shows you what sites are using shopping carts or analytics and even the traffic they attract.)
• Are they currently hiring for a new role (expanding their budget)?
• Did they engage with your client’s content?
• Have they messaged your client (in the last 90 days or so)?
• Are they running ads or organizing events relating to a topic relevant to your client’s offering?

Our picks for helpful data enrichment tools are Clay or Apollo. These solutions pull information like contact names and numbers from company domains. You can simply import the connections into one of these platforms and filter the results to specifically target people who, for example, connected with your client in the past week, included specific industry keywords in their descriptions, or manage companies with over X number of people and Y revenue.

Going to these lengths for quality contact scraping has yet another value — it makes your client relevant. Let’s say you mention a post the prospect shared or an event they attended in conversation — you already know they’re interested in that matter. Speak to the prospect’s needs and tie them in with your client’s offer.

Another tactic for collecting leads is setting up sponsored content on LinkedIn. The platform’s ad format has built-in LinkedIn lead gen forms. They help to save time by letting members send their pre-filled contact information in reply to ads that interest them.

Data Enrichment and Personalization

According to a 2023 report, 62% of business leaders believe their personalization efforts enhance customer retention. This is confirmed by customer responses, as over half report being more likely to make repeat purchases after a personalized experience. Personalization proves equally crucial in B2B and B2C markets, with 73% of companies desiring a tailored experience. Those capable of delivering such customization see up to a 20% increase in sales.

Dynamic personalization with Expandi goes beyond merely using the leads’ first and last names. Our tool allows you to set message-sending times based on individual prospect profiles, adding a layer of personalization that resonates with their unique preferences.

Expandi is a safe, convenient, and super easy way to automate LinkedIn lead gen efforts. It’s a reliable, cloud-based piece of software that mimics human behavior. We even implemented a randomized delay between actions so algorithms don’t red-flag your messaging as a bot or spam. The whole structure is cloud-based, includes smart limits and an auto warm-up feature, and even has a dedicated country-based IP address. We treat safety on the same level of importance as effective personalization.

Here’s an overview of the personalized contact capabilities Expandi offers:

• Send automated, personalized invites, messages, and InMails, incorporating dynamic placeholders for custom information in each message. Utilize Clay to identify relevant details such as topics the contact recently posted about, enhancing message relevance and personal connection.
• Set up email follow-ups to your LinkedIn outreach to maintain consistent engagement.
• Use Hyperise integration to add personalized gifs and images, which have shown to increase engagement by 2.2x, or Sendspark for creating dynamic videos that can include your website or a personal touch like a genuine smile.
• Create sequences with hyper-personalization and omnichannel reach, enabling different outcomes based on your leads’ behavior. Combine up to nine actions and unlimited steps to tailor your approach precisely.
• Integrate with third-party apps and workflows to expand functionality and streamline your processes.

Now we’ll guide you through launching an automated LinkedIn lead generation campaign with Expandi.

Launching Your Campaign

Start simple. You don’t need to overcomplicate things to see great results in LinkedIn lead fulfillment. We’ll stick to this social platform for now (we’ll cover how you can extend your campaign into other channels once it’s up and running and well-optimized — in the last section).

Preparation for Launch

Based on everything we covered, you should create not one but two to four campaign strategies based on your client’s segmented audience. For example, one could be for the contacts who messaged them within the last 90 days (to engage the existing network). Another is for reaching out to CEOs and key decision-makers of companies attending an online event relevant to their niche.

For each campaign, implement A/B testing of your messaging strategies, as illustrated in our Targeted Messaging section. This strategy will be valuable for analyzing what content or communication style gets better results.

Before launching, the initial step is to ensure profile safety by configuring your Expandi account settings. This setup is crucial for maintaining a secure and efficient campaign environment. 

Once settings are configured, the next step is to upload the enriched and personalized data into Expandi. To begin:

1. Sign up and create your Expandi account. 
2. Import the personalized data into the platform. Make sure to export the enriched data as a CSV file and upload it into Expandi under the “Add New Search” section.
3. You now have the option to perform a search as a separate action or integrate it as a step in your campaign setup.
4. From here, you can establish a high-quality outreach sequence tailored to your specific needs.

Campaign Execution

Now you’re ready to launch your Expandi-assisted LinkedIn lead generation and fulfillment campaigns. Aim to initiate around three targeted campaigns, each tailored to different target groups. Implement A/B testing within your messaging strategies to identify what resonates best with your audience. It’s advantageous to run both regular and mobile campaigns from multiple accounts at a lower volume to optimize reach and performance.

Check out 11 different ​​types of campaigns in Expandi for various aims.

As you monitor the results, focus not just on outreach numbers or new contacts. Our most important KPI is the number of replies that lead to booked calls and, finally — sales or long-term partnerships.

Warm Up Your Client’s LinkedIn Account

Remember to warm up your client’s LinkedIn account in the meantime. By gradually boosting their online presence, you’re helping them blend in and connect with others, which is key to earning trust and being seen as an expert in their field. 

One crucial step in this journey is to work on improving your client’s Social Selling Index (SSI) on LinkedIn. This score reflects how well they present themselves professionally and engage with others. It not only impacts how well their marketing efforts are received but also how much exposure their content gets. Keep an eye on this important metric using Expandi to track their progress.

Try the challenge of posting daily for 100 days — it helped us organically reach 1.7M people and get 4.6K emails, all with only two promotional posts and $0 ad spend. If being active online every single day sounds daunting, take a look at how you can schedule LinkedIn posts.

Use Expandi to automate LinkedIn activity. You can easily set up connections and messaging limits, active times, inactive dates, etc. Start with very low ranges for a warm-up period until you reach the desired number of connections. Then test as you go and increase the range. 

Run a mobile connector request in parallel, which gives double the volume. Here’s an example set-up (although the numbers will vary based on your client’s current account health, number of contacts and followers, etc.).

Increase these ranges every three to seven days if you see positive reactions. Otherwise – scale down. Remember to set these outreach limits on all accounts to get the best results without breaching LinkedIn limits. You may need to look at industry benchmarks to see what volumes will get the LinkedIn lead fulfillment score your client expects. They’re also a valuable reference for analyzing the campaign performance, which brings us to the next point.

Analytics and Optimization

Analyzing Campaign Performance

Now… we wait. Come back to analyze the campaign’s performance after you reach about 300-500 contacts. We’re purposefully talking numbers, not time, since you could reach 100 or 1,000 people in one month. The first instance doesn’t give enough actionable data to act on. However, if you see drastically low acceptance rates (e.g., 1%) after about 14 days, we advise tweaking the strategy.

It’s crucial to ensure the campaign practically aligns with your client’s Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) goals, not just theoretically. Evaluate the outcomes of your campaigns by checking how many qualified leads were generated, the ratio of conversations to booked calls, and other key metrics.

Metrics to Monitor:

• Connection requests sent: Track the total number of connection requests sent, both general and mobile-specific.
• Total replies: Count how many replies were received, including replied connection messages and replied other messages.
• Interested prospects: Identify prospects who have shown interest.
• Company follows: Track how many company follow invitations are sent and how many result in actual follows.
• Emails: Monitor the volume of emails sent as part of your LinkedIn outreach.
• Endorsements: Keep tabs on the number of endorsements your client’s profile receives.
• Event invites and messages: Observe the frequency and response rate of event-related communications.
• Welcome messages: Evaluate the engagement levels of welcome messages and replied welcome messages.

Expandi can also track other interactions such as post likes, profile visits, group messages, and open InMails. Monitoring these metrics at appropriate intervals—daily for conversion tracking and weekly for new client requests—provides a comprehensive view of different aspects of your LinkedIn campaign, allowing for detailed evaluation and strategic adjustments.

Advanced Analytics Techniques

1. Tag Responses:

For a deeper analysis, you can tag responses that are positive and use filters to manually count them, providing insights into performance. This can be applied to ongoing campaigns as well. From the campaign interface, select “More”

and then “Manage tags” from the drop-down menu. 

You can configure these tags in any way that feels logical to your campaign’s goals, such as:

• Positive
• Negative
• 7-day trial
• Book a call
• Demo
• Send e-book + subscribe to newsletter

Once set, you can easily categorize each response as positive, negative, qualified, etc., which keeps your data organized and enhances Expandi’s reporting capabilities. After implementing tags throughout your campaign, you can view all the prospects who have replied or signed up for a trial directly in your dashboard.

2. Integrate Webhooks:

To further automate and refine your data analysis, consider integrating webhooks. This setup records each interaction directly into a spreadsheet, allowing you to display conversion percentages or tag counts that represent the status of contacts.

By using webhooks, you can automate the capture of interaction data from LinkedIn to your CRM or any analytic tool, providing real-time insights into campaign performance.

Optimization Strategies

To maximize the impact of your A/B testing and broader campaign strategies on LinkedIn, adopt a systematic approach to both messaging and campaign type evaluation:

• Review campaign data: Begin by examining the results from your various A/B messaging tests and identify which messages received the highest engagement rates. Also, compare the performance across different types of campaigns—such as connector campaigns, mobile builders, and others—to see which formats are most effective.
• Refine and repeat: Select the best-performing message and campaign type. For instance, if a mobile builder campaign outperformed a standard connector campaign, consider why and how you can leverage this format further. Launch a new A/B test pairing the successful campaign type with a new message variant—this will help you hone in on the most effective combination of message and delivery.

• Analyze and adjust: After conducting the refined A/B test, assess both the message and campaign type effectiveness. Analyze key metrics like click-through rates, reply rates, conversion rates, and overall engagement to understand which strategies are yielding the best results.

• Targeted improvements: If certain campaigns show higher disqualification rates, revisit your targeting criteria and campaign settings. Adjust your approach by considering different pain points, refining your client’s ICP, and potentially exploring other campaign types that may be more effective for your target audience.
• Optimize LinkedIn presence: Ensure that your client’s LinkedIn profile is optimized to complement your chosen campaign types effectively. This includes making sure that the profile acts as a robust landing page that aligns with the nuances of the most successful campaign type. Use tools like the LinkedIn Post Inspector to enhance post performance, and apply our LinkedIn post formatting guide strategies to both posts and direct messaging.
• Continuous optimization: Regularly review and adjust your strategies based on the outcomes of these tests. Schedule new tests every two weeks and conduct comprehensive strategy reviews monthly to adapt to changes and trends in audience behavior and platform algorithms.

By systematically analyzing both the messaging and the types of campaigns, you can develop a nuanced understanding of what drives success for your client’s specific audience on LinkedIn. This dual focus allows for more precise optimizations, leading to more effective engagement and higher conversion rates.

Advanced Lead Fulfillment Strategies

Multi-channel Lead Fulfillment

You can settle here using just LinkedIn for lead fulfillment. However, if you want to go a step further and get more advanced, we’d advise you to expand into other channels and retarget across:

• LinkedIn ads — we mentioned this as a lead generation method, but you can also leverage it in remarketing. Promote the top-performing content and test different formats (sponsored InMail, carousel ads, lead gen forms) to effortlessly attract more prospects or retarget existing contacts.
• Other social media platforms — market studies show they’re the top source for quality leads across industries.
• Email — retargeting via email to people who accepted an invitation but haven’t replied can be extremely valuable. We mentioned tagging contacts, and it comes in handy here again. You can reach out via different platforms to people who have qualified but haven’t booked — maybe they’re not just particularly active on LinkedIn?

Here’s some recommended reading about the lead fulfillment process using email outreach.

We only mention these additional methods at the end because having the LinkedIn processes well-optimized allows you to get the most out of campaigns on other channels without wasting time and money.

Bonus tip: You can set up retargeting scenarios on LinkedIn using Expandi’s drag-and-drop block builder and if-then scenarios.

Whatever method you choose, don’t skip retargeting. Cross-selling and upselling bring companies up to 72% of their revenue and are easier than reaching out to new leads.

Psst: If you scraped phone numbers, text ads can help you book calls, too.

Continuous Improvement

Our last tip is to effectively integrate self-serve options into your client’s campaign—such as product demos, free trials, customer stories, reviews, and chatbots. These resources empower buyers to act independently, which is crucial since over 70% of buyers prefer conducting their own research over speaking with sales representatives. 

Additionally, consider crafting offers in a way that naturally encourages action without the need for traditional sales interactions. For instance, you could offer a compelling free trial contingent on a specific action by the prospect. The key is to position these offers attractively enough to inspire action, complementing your broader LinkedIn lead fulfillment strategies for scalable, sustainable success.

Conclusion

Let’s sum up with the key steps to a (wildly) successful LinkedIn lead fulfillment strategy:

• Define your client’s ICP.
• Develop a lead generation strategy that aligns with your client’s goals and their ICP’s objectives.
• Scrape relevant contacts using recommended tools.
• Enrich and personalize the collected data.
• Launch three to four campaign versions with A/B messaging.
• Monitor metrics after reaching out to 300-500 contacts.
• Continuously monitor and adjust.
• Retarget across channels and scale up!

Trust us — this structured, data-driven approach gets the best results (or don’t — and see it for yourself). It eliminates the guesswork and hours wasted on reaching out to disinterested prospects.

Sign up to give Expandi a go for scraping LinkedIn contacts, automating personalized message sending, scheduling follow-ups, and tracking lead fulfillment success.

FAQ

What is the average cost per lead on LinkedIn?

The costs of B2B LinkedIn leads typically vary between $20 to $100.

Is LinkedIn good for generating leads?

LinkedIn is a great place to find prospects, particularly for B2B companies, as it’s the primary social media platform where professionals connect and share information.

How do I extract leads from LinkedIn?

Use the LinkedIn lead gen form and contact scraping tools for effective data capture. Pair that with Expandi for automated outreach, and you’ve got yourself a solid lead fulfillment strategy in just a couple of clicks.

What does it mean to collect leads on LinkedIn?

Lead collection is simply pulling professional info from LinkedIn profiles. You can do it manually or automatically with dedicated software. Remember to capture only the contacts that fit your client’s ICP (from people potentially interested in working with them or buying their product).