… let’s think about LinkedIn advertising.

From a social media networking perspective, LinkedIn is the premiere business-to-business (B2B) platform on the planet.

According to LinkedIn statistics, they have over 690 million members worldwide. And the United States has 169 million of those members … which is the largest amount of members of any country.

If you study LinkedIn, you may notice these three things:

1.) People Use LinkedIn for Personal Branding
The newsfeed is full of people self-promoting themselves (aka, personal branding). Some people do a good job of it, but most people don’t. Although LinkedIn has “company pages”, very few people post content on their company page.

In fact, I suspect LinkedIn’s algorithm places a priority on content posted on profile pages, rather than content posted on company pages in their newsfeed.

Based on my observation of the LinkedIn newsfeed, company pages are generally “promoted” in the newsfeed via paid advertising.

Like this Suntrust example:

2.) People Send a lot of Sales Messages on LinkedIn
LinkedIn has its own direct messaging feature whereupon you can message your 1st-degree connections. And if you’re like me, I receive some of the worst sales emails imaginable. People who do not know me, or anything about my business, will send me unsolicited spam messages.

Not only that. But if you actually take the time to read some of their messages, it’s remarkable how these people will jump all the way to the bottom of the funnel (asking for the sale), before I’ve responded or expressed any interest.

Below is an example of a salesperson who used a bot to send me unsolicited messages. Here’s a secret … the way I knew it was a bot is because they addressed me by my first name and middle initial, instead of just my first name.

Get this, … within an hour and 30-minute timeframe, the bot sent me 3 messages. Absolutely terrible. No regard for disrupting my day. Don’t be one of those LinkedIn marketers … whoever is responsible, is tarnishing their company’s reputation.

3.) It’s Hard to Notice Advertisements on LinkedIn
LinkedIn features four types of advertisements: Sponsored Content, Message Ads, Dynamic Ads, and Text Ads.

• Sponsored Content appears in the newsfeed.
• Message Ads are delivered to your LinkedIn inbox.
• Dynamic Ads appear in the right sidebar.
• And, Text Ads appear at the top of the page.

But when you observe the LinkedIn user interface, you’ll see that it’s very difficult to notice advertisements.

Seth Godin writes about a phenomenon known as, pique blindness (which is akin to banner blindness).

He writes, “it turns out that if you see something over and over again, you start to ignore it”.

In relation to LinkedIn’s user interface … I am blinded by the advertisements because of the sheer volume of content being published on the newsfeed. How about you?

ACME is a B2B software company with a relatively long sales cycle. They have a sales team of about 20 sales development representatives (SDR) and sales executives (SE).

Their target audience is large property management companies with 1,000 or more apartment units. And the target persona are the owners at those property management companies.

…  how can your sales team use LinkedIn to reach and connect with your target persona?

Any ideas?!

Well … I don’t think personal branding will work very well.

And sending unsolicited sales emails through LinkedIn messenger probably won’t work either.

And my hunch is the owners of property management companies probably don’t spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. Therefore, advertising on LinkedIn to reach them probably won’t work either.

Side note … based on our experience and research, LinkedIn advertising is relatively expensive.

They require companies to pay a $2 minimum cost-per-click (CPC). But on average, companies pay $5.26 per click and $6.59 per 1000 impressions (according to WebFX).

I thought that was worth nothing, .

Back to the subject at hand … I think LinkedIn is best used for B2B prospecting, nurturing, and outreach.

… in my opinion, the best way to use LinkedIn for B2B sales is to invest in a subscription to their Sales Navigator. It’s truly a great resource and worth every penny for B2B prospecting.

At the time of this writing, Sales Navigator offers a free 1-month trial.

After the free trial, it’s priced at $64.99 per month or $779.88 per year for a professional (individual) plan.

Once you’ve signed up for a free trial, your SDR team can use Sales Navigator to build a targeted prospect list of verified email addresses and contact information.

Since LinkedIn members create their own profile pages, their B2B data is the most accurate information available.

Now, here’s where the magic happens, …

There are some very powerful 3rd party tools that you can use to extract and download email addresses from Sales Navigator.

Skrapp is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to download 150 email addresses per month for free.

If you need more than 150 downloads, then you can upgrade to a paid plan for $34 per month and download 1,000 email addresses per month.

And you can keep upgrading to download as many as 50,000 email addresses per month.

Here’s a demo video to show you how Skrapp integrates with Sales Navigator, and how easy it is to download email addresses.

I bet you had no idea that you can automate most of your lead nurturing tasks on LinkedIn.

The things that you can do with automation on LinkedIn will blow your mind.

You can automatically:

• Send invitations and connection requests with personalized messages;
• Scape and collect profile data from your target prospects;
• Send personalized messages to your LinkedIn connections;
• Invite all your LinkedIn contacts to your LinkedIn event;
• Extract a list of people who liked a course on LinkedIn learning;
• Add comments on LinkedIn member posts and articles to get noticed;
• Endorse the skills of your LinkedIn contacts;
• And so much more…

Okay, so now you know .

But using LinkedIn automation is only the first phase of your lead nurturing strategy.

The second phase is personal branding (if you will).

In addition to the automation touchpoints that you have going on in the background … your new connections need to see and recognize you as an influencer and industry expert in their newsfeed.

So, my next piece of advice is to schedule a series of strategy and creative sessions with your marketing team.

During the working sessions, collaborate with your team to produce useful and valuable LinkedIn content that you can publish to your personal newsfeed. You want your content to inspire and influence your connections to engage.

I suggest that you create at least two weeks’ worth of content in advance of the publishing date. And keep creating content to stay ahead.

So now, … you have PhantomBuster and Buffer automation campaigns working for you on LinkedIn while you sleep.

But it’s also important to be human on LinkedIn.

You’ll want to spend an hour or so on LinkedIn yourself interacting and making sure everything is working according to plan.

If you don’t have an hour in your day, delegate it to someone on your team.

Or better yet, hire a virtual assistant for $3 per hour to manage your LinkedIn profile for 40 hours per week.

Can you imagine the value and return on investment you will produce by having a dedicated person work LinkedIn for you for $120 per week?

That covers how to use LinkedIn for B2B lead nurturing.

Now, let’s talk about outreach … and how to turn your LinkedIn connections into qualified leads, sales opportunities, and new customers.

… now it’s time to make some magic happen.

If you were to stop your LinkedIn marketing efforts at using Sales Navigator and Skrapp for LinkedIn prospecting.  And using PhantomBuster and Buffer for LinkedIn nurturing … well, then, my guess would be that you were doing better than 99% of people on LinkedIn.

But we’ve collected a lot of email addresses with Skrapp and PhantomBuster … so it would be a waste if we didn’t reach out to them and have a conversation.

And that’s where the next tool is going to come in handy. And it may be the best tool of the bunch.

It’s one of the best tools on the market for B2B personalized and automated cold emails. And best of all, they have an integration with PhantomBuster.

Instead of me going on and on about how to do it … here’s an excellent tutorial video by their CEO, Guillaume Moubeche, on how to get started.

Now, … I’ve shared a great LinkedIn marketing strategy with you.

And I’ve shared some fantastic automation tools with you.

But be smart.

Your outreach strategy, creative materials, and copywriting are going to equally as important.

Spend some time with your team and really put some brainpower into this.

Done right … you’ll be in a position to use LinkedIn to gain some serious traction and growth.

Good luck!