This book covers easy steps to help expand your LinkedIn network and move quality prospects along your sales funnel.
In this book, Martin shares:
For the best results in reaching prospects, you need to harness the power of multiple marketing channels. But simply deciding to use LinkedIn, email, Facebook, text, and other channels isn’t enough. You also need to use the right strategies.
We’ve gathered the best tips for your multichannel marketing efforts to boost your outreach. With this advice, you’ll reach more prospects and turn them into qualified leads.
Before we get into how multichannel marketing is used, you need to understand what it is. Simply put, with multichannel prospecting, you use multiple channels to reach out to prospects.
You use all of these channels simultaneously instead of taking turns using each one. This way, you can reach your prospect on the platform or channel they prefer or use most frequently. That ability to meet prospects on their preferred channel boosts response rates and conversions.
There are differing recommendations about which channels to include in your multichannel approach. Email and a campaign on LinkedIn are almost always included as essentials. If you only use three channels, consider adding cold calling to the mix.
If you can add more, add other social media platforms. Figure out which platforms your audience is on and focus on them. Finally, consider adding video or texting.
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We have already touched on one of the major benefits of multichannel marketing: reaching prospects on their preferred channel. But this multichannel method does more than that.
Your interactions or touchpoints with prospects are also increased. Every single touchpoint gives them more exposure to your brand. That, in turn, increases the chances that they will become a client.
Meet Alfred takes multichannel marketing to the next level with the ability to automate campaigns across platforms. Start with automated LinkedIn messaging, which you can follow up with an email or DM on Twitter. Then, go back to LinkedIn. Make your sequences as long as you feel necessary. Meet Alfred doesn’t limit the length of your sequences or the number of times you bounce between channels.
In addition to the biggest benefit of boosting your response rate and touchpoints, multichannel marketing also reduces your reliance on any single platform or channel. This is important because you need a backup plan if algorithms change or you make a mistake and your account on a certain channel gets banned. By spreading out your efforts across several channels, you can reduce the impact of any abrupt changes.
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Meet Alfred helps ensure your LinkedIn account doesn’t get banned by tracking all of the limits on the platform, whether LinkedIn scraping limits, LinkedIn InMail limits, or LinkedIn messaging limits. We also stay up-to-date with the latest LinkedIn algorithms and feature changes, letting you always get the most from our LinkedIn message automation tool.
To take full advantage of multichannel outreach, set these three primary goals:
Following these three main steps means that you won’t just reach out to a prospect seemingly out of the blue. By the time you reach out to them, you will hopefully have common ground. They will have seen you interacting in their online network or at least have an idea of your expertise if they click on your profile or website.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these and how they can fit into your LinkedIn campaign. Keep in mind that while most of the examples here focus on LinkedIn, you will want to follow a similar process on other social media platforms. LinkedIn is simply the go-to platform for most professionals.
Building a relationship with your audience doesn’t necessarily mean directly interacting with prospects. In this stage, you will get busy creating LinkedIn events or participating in groups rather than sending a LinkedIn connection request. You can comment on posts and be generally visible and involved where they are.
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When you are building relationships, you will need to interact with people without pushing the sale. Your goal at this stage is not a sale. Rather, your goal is to build connections and trust.
Carefully choose the groups, posts, and events that you interact with. Figure out where your target audience is so that you can go there. As you interact with people, provide value and build a professional relationship. Spark meaningful conversations so that people remember you.
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You can start thinking about leads at this point, but you don’t want to take advantage of your LinkedIn automation tools yet. This stage still requires a personal touch. You can use your LinkedIn lead automation tools to find qualified leads, but don’t start sending automated messages. Instead, manually look at their LinkedIn profiles and engagement. Comment on their posts and participate in their LinkedIn events or groups.
The key here is to provide genuine, valuable comments in your interactions. This will make your comments more memorable and enable you to spark conversations. Other potential leads may even join the conversation. In fact, this is likely to happen if you create a truly valuable and meaningful conversation on the posts. You may even find yourself the recipient of connection requests, which would speed you through to the third step.
When you get to the stage where it’s appropriate to automate LinkedIn messages, you can reference these interactions. Meet Alfred allows for plenty of personalization, making this an easy task.
At this point, the goal is that people would have already seen your participation on LinkedIn posts and groups, spurring them to learn more about you. When they click on your profile to get an idea of what you have to offer, you would want them to see you as an industry expert.
Maybe you don’t just participate in groups but run them and know the secrets of LinkedIn group management. Maybe you have a lot of LinkedIn blog posts or LinkedIn articles with unique insights into the industry. All these could boost your profile. Your LinkedIn profile management strategies mainly focus on this stage of the multichannel outreach process. After all, you want your profile to highlight your expertise.
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We already mentioned some ways to position yourself as a thought leader, such as blog posts and articles. But you can even do this with your comments on LinkedIn posts and events. The simple act of making insightful comments that show you are up-to-date on the latest industry trends subtly hints at your expertise.
As mentioned, your profile also plays a crucial role. LinkedIn account management services will always strive to highlight your expertise. Ensure you have complete information on education, jobs, and more. Highlight seminars you’ve been part of and articles you’ve written, to name a few. Any LinkedIn guide will emphasize the importance of showcasing your skills and knowledge in your profile.
But this isn’t just about the things you list on your profile. You also need to show engagement on LinkedIn, with a focus on engagement that highlights your expertise. This is when posting valuable content on LinkedIn, running groups, and hosting events come into play. All of these things will show up when someone clicks on your profile.
These initiatives also give you another opportunity to interact with people and show your industry knowledge. After all, if you are running a group or event, attendees will see you as having something to share. Provide real value, and you will have discovered one of the secrets of how to grow LinkedIn groups. Don’t forget that running a group also serves as another point of contact, helping you build relationships in the previous step.
Meet Alfred lets you take groups and events to the next level, as you can automate LinkedIn messages to group members. You can also use our LinkedIn scraper to get contact information and other details of people who are part of a group or attending an event.
If you aren’t sure what type of content to post or don’t know what group or event to run, look at your prospects’ activities. Remember that you don’t have to run your own group or event to take advantage of their ability to show you as a thought leader. Simply participating can be enough. This is especially true if you participate in a LinkedIn event. One bonus of participating in events not run by you is that you get access to the host’s audience.
Of course, you don’t want to limit your new content to LinkedIn. While you certainly want to post regularly and maybe even use a LinkedIn post scheduler, don’t forget about other channels. After all, we’re talking about a multichannel approach. Take advantage of social media post templates for other platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Also, create other types of content, such as podcasts or videos.
This final part of the outreach process involves actually reaching out to prospects. Maybe you personalize LinkedIn messaging templates to reach out on LinkedIn. Or perhaps you send a cold email to the email addresses you got with a LinkedIn email scraper.
Even if you send a cold email as part of this approach, your recipients will hopefully find you familiar by now, turning this initiative into a “warm outreach.” Your LinkedIn campaigns can mean that they would have already heard your name or seen your profile.
This is the time to take advantage of multichannel marketing automation. At this stage, you can save time when you automate LinkedIn connections and follow them up with automated messages and other types of outreach.
The best LinkedIn automation software will simplify this process with cold email templates, LinkedIn message templates, and LinkedIn connect templates. Ideally, your LinkedIn automation tool will also allow for personalization. Personalization will dramatically improve your response rate and ability to convert leads.
Meet Alfred allows for hyper-personalization. You can personalize any LinkedIn email template with basic categories like name, company, and job title. But you can also import a .csv file for even more categories and types of personalization. This hyper-personalization gives you the convenience of InMail templates on LinkedIn while still getting the higher response rates associated with customized messages.
There is not a single correct process for reaching out to your prospects. It all depends on your audience and your company. But the following tips can work well.
A good starting point is to click on the person’s profile on LinkedIn and send a LinkedIn connection message and request. Remember that a personalized LinkedIn connection request will deliver the best results. Just pay attention to how many of these requests you send, as LinkedIn limits connections.
Meet Alfred tracks your connection requests and other actions. We keep track of all of the LinkedIn daily limits for you, as well as the weekly and monthly limits. This way, you can continue with your campaign without worrying about LinkedIn limits.
After sending the connection request, consider following it up with a personalized LinkedIn message. Remember that highlighting common ground can boost the response rate. So, mention the group you are both part of or the prospect’s post that you had commented on. The good thing about LinkedIn is that you don’t have to provide much context for messages, but it is still helpful.
Next, consider sending a cold email. Your CRM sync LinkedIn tool will make it easier for you to get the prospect’s email address.
You can also make a cold call. Your LinkedIn profile scraper will have gathered your prospects’ phone numbers if listed on their profile. You can even mention in your email that the prospect should expect a call in the next few days.
Remember that Meet Alfred lets you create multichannel campaign sequences like this with as many steps as you want. That way, you can automate the entire process.
While automation can streamline most of the steps in this process, you will want to include some manual tasks occasionally. For example, you can comment on a LinkedIn post your prospect recently made. At the very least, this will show prospects that you aren’t relying solely on LinkedIn outreach automation. The fact that you include an occasional manual task communicates that the prospect is worth your time. This makes them feel valued and increases the response rate.
So, your process for multichannel prospecting could look something like this:
You’ll notice that a majority of the above process is fully automated. You will have to create your initial post, but a social media post template can make this easy.
To make the most of the above methods and sequences, keep these things in mind.
It can be tempting to go all-in at the onset, but you will get the best results if you start by mastering one channel first. Once you know how to use it fully, add another channel. This prevents you and your team from spreading yourselves too thin.
Regardless of the channel you are using, take the time to warm up your account before scaling up. The LinkedIn message limit offers a perfect example of why you must do this. You can send more messages with a warmed-up account than with a new one without having your account flagged or banned.
As you set up a sequence for LinkedIn email automation and interactions on other platforms, be sure to set delays. The ideal delay will likely be between a few days to a week. If you send messages on various platforms continuously, or even on consecutive days, you run the risk of overwhelming prospects. They will likely start to see your messages as spam and decide not to work with you.
We’ve mentioned the importance of personalization with every type of automated LinkedIn lead generation. One of the best ways to personalize is by mentioning past interactions you’ve had with the recipient. As mentioned, include references to groups, events, or posts in your initial LinkedIn messages. And you can take it even further than this.
For example, when you send a follow-up email after a LinkedIn message, reference what you said in that initial message. You can even reference their lack of response and ask the prospect if they’d rather you reach out via email in the future. This should improve the response rate and show prospects that you care about their preferences.
At any given point, you will likely be working toward converting multiple prospects, each of them at a different stage in the process. Remember that one of the first steps in reaching out to prospects is warming them up with interactions on LinkedIn or other social media pages. Since you are always in this phase for at least a few prospects, it’s smart to create a regular post schedule and follow it up. But this doesn’t mean you have to spend time daily creating and making posts.
Consider taking advantage of a LinkedIn post template to create posts quickly. Do this for dozens of posts at once, then learn how to use your software for scheduling a LinkedIn post. This will let you plan out your posts for an entire month. Once you set them up, you can sit back and let the automation post them. You can utilize similar tools for social media post scheduling on other platforms as well.
As previously mentioned, you must provide value during your interactions with prospects. This is true for posts, comments, and messages. To be specific, adding value means providing something useful for the prospect, such as industry insights or updates.
As you create your posts or craft the LinkedIn InMail messages, make sure that you can deliver on all the promises you make. For instance, you can make a post mentioning that if they reach out, your prospects get a free eBook. Making sure you deliver on this and all other commitments will boost and maintain your good reputation.
Make it a point to know how to check LinkedIn analytics and also analytics from other channels. Just like any other type of marketing, you need to know what works well and what doesn’t. Looking at analytics on LinkedIn or other channels also lets you see which channels perform best.
Meet Alfred supplements the built-in analytics LinkedIn provides. You get an intuitive yet detailed LinkedIn analytics dashboard to provide important insights for growing your business.
With a multichannel prospecting approach, you can reach prospects on their preferred channel. This increases response rates and shows prospects that you value their preferences. Multichannel marketing also reduces your reliance on a single channel, which can be useful when faced with algorithm changes and updates.
Start your multichannel approach with LinkedIn or email, and add cold calling or other social media platforms to the mix. Your goal should be to create relationships and build industry authority before you start to push sales.
Streamline the entire process of LinkedIn outreach with Meet Alfred’s automation tools. Schedule a demo or sign up for a 14-day free trial without any credit card requirement.
