How to generate leads on LinkedIn – with Bob Low | DMR #251

Full transcript:

David Bain
Digital Marketing Radio Episode 251: how to generate leads on LinkedIn

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Digital Marketing Radio with David Bain.

David Bain
I’m David Bain. And this is Digital Marketing Radio, the podcast and YouTube channel for in-house agency and entrepreneurial marketers who want to stay on top the latest tools, tactics and trends, as shared on this very show by today’s modern marketing masters. How is your LinkedIn lead generation going? Are you actively trying to generate leads on LinkedIn? Or do you just view LinkedIn as a serendipitous content sharing opportunity? My guest on episode 251 of Digital Marketing Radio, treats LinkedIn lead generation seriously, and gets serious results for him and his clients. He’s trained individuals from companies including Aronson, young, and Accenture, and he currently helps businesses generate more revenue through LinkedIn lead generation. Welcome to DMR, Bob Low.

Bob Low
Hi, David. Thanks for having me.

David Bain
Hey, Bob, great to have you on. But you can find Bob over at “BobThinks” on LinkedIn. So Bob, you don’t lead your own website. If you’re a LinkedIn consultant, it’s just LinkedIn profile. That’s the the key thing for you is that

Bob Low
yes, that’s what I tell my clients to do as well. But I, this is one of the things that I share with my clients, you don’t really need a website to generate leads on LinkedIn. I’ve been doing it for three years already. But having said that, a website is also important for other things, when it comes to digital marketing. I do have a website, but it’s somewhere on the social web, not directly linked to my LinkedIn, but I don’t, you don’t need a website to generate leads.

David Bain
Okay, because I saw there wasn’t any link directly on LinkedIn, it went to your calendly link. And we’ll get to that in a little bit as well. And I also have your email address, I had looked at a domain of your email address and went there as well. And that’s that didn’t load a website, either, as I was just gonna ask you that question initially about the website. So it’s interesting that it’s not really required for LinkedIn lead generation, but but why LinkedIn? Did you test other social platforms to begin with and actually decided that LinkedIn was was best for that?

Bob Low
I chose LinkedIn because of the nature of my business. So about three years ago, I started to do marketing consulting. And LinkedIn is a great place because you get other business owners in there, you get people who own businesses, people who are coaches, people who run agencies, people who are business leaders. So most of the business leaders, I think, in the UK, as well, are on LinkedIn. So it was the best social media platform to reach business leaders compared to like Facebook or Instagram or tik tok. So that’s why I chose LinkedIn.

David Bain
And when you’re talking about reaching, are you talking about just organic reach or paid lead generation as well? Both?

Bob Low
Both? So both are? So so your your question would be how do I reach them? Or is, Is it a boy,

David Bain
I guess what proportion of your success comes through organic versus paid? up?

Bob Low
That’s, that’s a great question. So 100%, for now is organic. So one of the greatest things about LinkedIn for now for now, is the great organic reach that your content can get. And also the the ease of connecting, like if you wanted to connect with anyone in the world, like we are connected, David, and we are, I’m in Malaysia, and in Kuala Lumpur, and even in the UK, so there are no barriers for you to connect with anyone on LinkedIn, you can connect with the top business leaders in the US in UK for free, so there’s no charge for that. And secondly, when you create content, so I just published a piece of content two hours ago, and that piece of content had organic reach without paying a single cent to New York, London as well. And it’s quite an amazing organic reach that you have on LinkedIn right now. And because of LinkedIn, without spending advertising money, so I will go into that but without spending advertising money, because there are other ways you can spend money on LinkedIn. without spending advertising money, I’m able to work with clients in different parts of the world.

David Bain
And obviously, we touched upon the fact that you use a calendly link as your call to action. So is that something that you suggest that all coaches consultants do on LinkedIn, they actually drive people towards some kind of calendar booking link as opposed to a website.

Bob Low
That is what I highly recommend, and so not All websites are very friendly. So that’s, that’s one of the things people can go to your website. And if you don’t have like a chatbot, or something that captures leads, and you go to the site and you don’t know how to navigate, you don’t know where to go. And on your LinkedIn profile itself, it has sufficient information to mirror website. So when it comes to, if you go to my LinkedIn profile, the first thing that you can see on the featured section are my client testimonial videos. So you might be able to put down a website to secondly, on a LinkedIn profile, you should be able to see the recommendations. So that’s the social proof on your website that you use to put your client testimonials. And for some of my clients as well, I encourage them to, to upload their case studies on to their feature section on LinkedIn, so you get most of the information. And in your about section and other parts of your profile, you get to list your list of services as well. Not not as comprehensive of information, you get a website, but enough information for someone to take action, and to increase the conversion from someone visiting your profile. So some people might get hundreds of views on your profile, some people get 1000s of views to optimise the conversion. So we talked about optimising the conversions. to optimise the conversions, the best way is from one click from their profile, that they get to speak to you or book a time for a call.

David Bain
And what kind of conversion from number of posts views, say, for example, is a reasonable conversion rate against? So how many people out of 100 or out of 1000? People that view your post? Would you like to book an appointment with you?

Bob Low
That is not there is no direct correlation from that. What I actually teach in my webinars is, so the reason why you have a booking link at your profile is you want to convert inbound leads. So for example, if so happens, someone is looking for help with LinkedIn or somebody is looking for help with LinkedIn content, you want to make it easy for them to reach out to you. That’s why there is a booking link on my profile. But in terms of post views, there is no the post on LinkedIn is quite similar to Facebook, where it’s people who engage with your content, people who consume your content. So what I teach as well, is there needs to be a little bit of effort to convert those people from your content into leads. There is no yeah, so two ways you can do it. One is to have a call to action. So for example, you can say, Hey, I share these and more in my sort of ultimate profile optimization guide and a comment LinkedIn before below to get the guide. Or you could say, book a call below. But rarely people do this book a call. What I also teach in my webinars is for those people that like your content, especially if your content, for example, you do a lot of podcast content, like what is the best way to create a podcast, how to get guests. So one of the best, one of the ways you can generate leads from people who engage with your content, people who like and commented on your content, is to really qualify them and to probe them is to ask them questions. Hey, thanks for engaging with my posts. So there’s a little bit of follow up. Thanks for engaging my posts. You know, What challenges do you have when it comes to let’s say, podcasting, if you’re, you’re offering podcasting, so from there, then there should be, there should be an opportunity for you to have a sales call with that person.

David Bain
So I’m just trying to get a feel for what, what level of success is possible from LinkedIn lead generation. So if you’re a moderately successful coach or consultant in terms of popularity and profile views on LinkedIn, would it be possible for instance, to get over 10 calendar bookings per week as a result of your organic activities on LinkedIn? It’s possible.

Bob Low
It’s possible it depends on the virality of your content. It depends on the amount of people that visit your posts and also your profile, but it’s definitely possible. And it’s possible but I can tell you not most people don’t get that most people don’t get that. So when it comes to lead generation, there they are. Content is part of it, but I would say content is more for thought leadership, or building yourself as an authority in the space, it’s not how to say you don’t see it as you don’t see it as like a performance marketing tool. It’s not like, Hey, you know, I create four types of content per week, and it translates directly to leads, it’s not how you how you do it, it’s not like a LinkedIn ad. What you need to do, what is more powerful when it comes to lead gen is actually connecting and sending messages having conversations with your target audience. So for example, if you’re working, you’re you’re working with a lot of agencies, a lot of agency owners, and you have like SAS marketing software, the fastest way to generate leads, of course, creating content is great for building that authority. The fastest way of guaranteeing leads is to have conversations with your target market. And LinkedIn so far has no barriers of you doing that there’s no hindrances of you getting to do that.

David Bain
And do you use automation to reach out to people giving people a standardised message to begin with, or is everything that you do on a manual basis?

Bob Low
I for now, everything I do is on a manual basis. So it really depends on the customer that you’re trying to reach out to. So, for example, if you’re trying to reach out to, let’s say, creative business owners, or agency owners in the UK, what I highly encourage is to personalise a message, because let’s say, the marketing agency owners in London, perhaps they are around 100 of them, right, maybe 120 of them may make a rough, rough estimate. Right, you don’t get 1000s of them. You need to personalise your message, and the best way to personalise your message is to either ask them a question about your content, or ask them a question about something you see on their profile. So I think you you did that similar to you did that to me as well, at the beginning of our conversation, you say you asked me about my previous experience working at a digital marketing Academy. So that’s the best way to start a conversation.

David Bain
Yeah, I think demonstrating that you’ve actually looked at their website, you’ve looked at their profile. And there can’t be any mistake that you’ve actually done that personally, and that it’s not an automated message will be much more likely to result in someone actually being more willing to reply to you and engage with you.

Bob Low
Yes, 100% the way that automation can work, and they are some Not, not myself, but there are some LinkedIn lead generation experts out there that do teach automation is where you have a larger pool of audience, for example, you’re selling like maybe a tool that can be used by most people, that automation tool might work, because then it’s something you have number one, you have a larger target audience. Number two, maybe your How to say your offering is quite generic, so then that it might sort of work but for the clients that I work with, and if they want to reach out to so so like I work with one of the outdoor media companies in Singapore, and one of the clients would be marketing directors in the region. So marketing directors in their region is less than 50 people at most 50. Right. So then you really need that to take the time to personalise each message to these key stakeholders.

David Bain
Yeah, great advice there. So I’ve also seen that you get good organic reach through your posts that you publish as well. And that you seem to have a fairly consistent formula to the posts that you publish, you have hashtags in there, you have emojis in there, you have decent lengths of posts, you do quite a few image based posts. So do you have a particular formula for success for your LinkedIn posts formula

Bob Low
for success? So depends. So David, what what do you want to achieve from the post? What How do you define success? When you ask that question?

David Bain
Well, I guess if your desire is to get people to view your profile, and then to hopefully book a calendar appointment with you, if they’re relevant for who you’re trying to aim for, then what you want to do is get good organic reach through your posts. You want to get a decent amount of engagements on your post as well and a decent amount of interaction comments on your post actually promote more organic reach.

Bob Low
Okay, so this, this is a great, great question, David. So on the first basis, this is why I teach my clients as well. I don’t I hate the word personal branding. So I really hate the word personal branding, because I don’t want my clients or people on LinkedIn to build a personal brand, but don’t have any leads. But not to say that personal branding is not important. But what you what I really want from the content is to give an aha moment to my audience, that means I want to educate. So you get four types of content, you get to give information, you get to inspire, you get to entertain, and then you get to educate. So the content that works really well for the type of work that I do as a consultant is educational. So like most of the clients that reached out to me for my content, would say, hey, Bob, I learned so much from your posts. I really like this point, I, I really love your content, I follow you for a while, I’ve had people who followed me for three years and finally decided to reach out to me. So the first premise is to really provide value to your content. And how you can do that is to break down what you do as a business. So for example, David, you do B2B podcast, right? If you broke down, like, you know, before this, we discussed the tech, what’s the right tech, you know, what is the right way to have a conversation how to get the right guests, you broke that down and educated your audience, then there will be a high chance of them reaching out to you. Secondly, when it comes to engagement, so if you create content and no one engages with it, it’s like cutting down a tree in the forest, no one knows about it. So there are certain hacks there, there are a lot of things that you can do to get engagement for the content, right? Like some people, what you can do is to tag relevant people. Now, that’s the first thing. So what I normally do so if I think you’re looking at my LinkedIn content right now, so two hours ago, I posted a content on how to decide if you want to work with a new client, and there are four piece. So when I take someone, for example, if I decided to tag you, David, I won’t just tag you for the sake of tagging for the sake of getting your attention. What I would do as well, is to tag you and ask you a content question in regards to the content. So I asked you, hey, David, which p for you is the most important. So just for reference, the piece of content that I just posted, was four piece for you to decide whether you should take on that client, its profits, personality, purpose, and portfolio. So when I tag people in the content, I would say, hey, which p for you resonates the most. So it’s not just spamming you or just trying to get your attention, that’s one. And then the second thing that I do is I distribute the content on to relevant groups as well. So I’m a part of a few groups, people call this engagement pods. There are good, there are good and bad. In engagement pods, I have my own engagement pods with my clients and connections that I’m close with. And I post that post in there to get engagement as I post. But all this is irrelevant. The the most important hack on LinkedIn to get the best engagement is relationships. So the reason why a lot of you, as you look at my posts, there are a lot of people commenting on my posts. Number one, some of them are my clients, and they really love working with me. That’s one. Number two is the relationships I’ve built. So some of these people are people that I have engaged with their posts as well and have been engaging with my content for years. So it’s an audience that I’ve built over time. And I engage with your posts as well when I see their posts and give them a lot of support. And when I post as well, they will give me

unquestionable support. So these are relationships that I’ve built throughout the years. And just to get a bit nerdy review, David, I actually have a Google Sheet that I record, every single person that leaves a comment on their posts, I put the link of my posts, the title, and I record and know every single person for the past few years who comment on my posts, and that’s how I build my audience. So at NEC the next time I post content, I know who to tag and who that I can distribute this content to. I know

David Bain
I’m part of the report. I’ve also seen a comment that you made on a recent post, you invited your recent connections to join in. So as I comment on your posts and posts, you say you list all these people, you tag them and you say, Great that we’ve connected recently, what kind of What’s your opinion? Is that something that you meticulously do for every single new connection that you make?

Bob Low
It’s one of the ways it’s actually part of the generation to answer to answer to be more clear about it. The purpose of that actually is more for lead generation. But it’s also a good way to warm up your new connections to your content. So the best way to generate leads, especially for not for most businesses, but for businesses like myself, a consultant plus, some people who run agencies or run more consultative based businesses is, like I told you, like I said, the best way to get them is when they receive value from your content. So those are the best clients that I get. So not someone who searches for me and finds me on Google. So I generate leads as well, just from organically, I’ve had people say, Hey, I searched for lead generation LinkedIn, and your profile is one of the first. So people will come to that funnel, generally are not great prospects, they are not they are just prospect by convenience. But if someone says I learned something from you, and when I work with them, especially as a consultant, because I don’t sell software, or I don’t give them a product, I worked with them. As a consultant, there’s a relationship that I need to have with them. It’s always a good relationship, especially if they are fans of my content. So the reason why I tag my new connections, is because I want them to be part of that funnel, where they also receive value from my content, so I can’t have further discussions with them.

David Bain
I love it. I love the fact that you’re focusing on building relationships. And that’s the first step to building a relationship. If you just connect with someone, and then you don’t have a conversation, and then you attempt to have a conversation and a years time or two years time, they’ll probably just turn around and go, who is this guy, I don’t know, this guy is just trying to sell me something. But if you focus on the relationship to begin with, then they might naturally gravitate towards you and actually ask you to potentially even to see if they can do business with you. So it’s a lovely way, kind of a soft selling approach towards building leads, and then eventually doing business with you. So lovely approach. But I’ll tell you what, let’s segue to part two of our discussion. So it’s now time for Bob, his thoughts on the state of digital marketing today. So starting off with SECRET SOFTWARE.

So Bob share a lesser-known martech tool that’s bringing you a lot of value at the moment and why that tool is important for you.

Bob Low
I love Uber suggests by Neil Patel. I generally work on LinkedIn, but I actually do other marketing services as well as consult clients. Like I don’t want to say a website is not important, even though I don’t have one upfront in my profile. But one of the best free tools right now, that is out there. And that is free, to a certain extent, is a freemium, I think. But the even the free version is powerful enough, is Uber suggests. And I really love using that tool for backlink research for keyword research and for website analysis as well. So it’s a great tool to use. I used

David Bain
to use that too, a long time ago. I think if I remember correctly, it was developed by another company to begin with, and Neil Patel bought it. Am I right?

Bob Low
Yes. 100%. And the tool has since been upgraded. So if you started using it this year, it’s much it’s much better to compared to two years ago.

David Bain
Moving on from something that you currently use to something that you’re going to use savannas NEXT ON THE LIST. What’s one marketing activity or tool that you haven’t tried yet, but you want to test soon?

Bob Low
I want to test spark Toro. So this is something new, I think it was launched somewhere last year by Rand Fishkin. I have not used it yet. I’ve maybe tried to look at the website for a bit. But that’s something I want to use, because I want to know what websites and what things similar interests that my audience have. Okay. And I bet you when I share a clip of you recommending spark Turo and mentioned spark Toro by Rand Fishkin, I bet you ran shares it or comments on the post, at least because Rand is greater, engaging With people online so great recommendation, I

David Bain
intend to try it out a little bit more as well. I’ve experimented with a little bit, but it seems like a wonderful way to actually really see what’s happening in your own marketplace.

Bob Low
Yep. 100%. Try it. Try Try. Try it. I think Ren is quite active on Twitter.

David Bain
Yeah. Okay, let’s move on to this or that round. So this is the quick response round 10 quick questions. Just 2 rules here. Try not to think about the answer too much. And you’re only allowed to say the word both on one occasion, so use it wisely. Are you ready?

Bob Low
Yes.

David Bain
tik tok or Twitter, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn,

Bob Low
LinkedIn,

David Bain
YouTube or podcast, YouTube, traffic or leads. leads, paid search or SEO paid search, ads or influencers? ads, Google ads or Facebook ads,

Bob Low
Google ads,

David Bain
email marketing or chat marketing,

Bob Low
email marketing,

David Bain
or tech stack or all in one platform. My next tip and one to one or scale? One to one. It was too easy. No, you said the both there. I almost expected you to say SEO when I said pizza Archer SEO but you went for the paid search. What was that?

Bob Low
Yes. That’s that’s a great question. SEO takes time. And with certain keywords, there are certain more competitive keywords, for example, the keyword SEO itself. There is no chance of ranking organic, not no chance. But it’s it’s quite an uphill task to rank on Google. Yeah. Yeah, you’re near that link? I don’t know. So paid search would be the fastest and more effective way of doing of getting leads in the short term.

David Bain
Let’s move on to the $10,000. Question. If I were to give you $10,000 and you had to spend it over the next few days in a single thing to grow your business? What would you spend on and how would you measure success?

Bob Low
This is a tough question. I would spend it on Google AdWords or YouTube ads. Okay, style of YouTube ads. Long Form video, long form video.

David Bain
Okay, yes. Would you have in views? I think they’re cold? Or would you actually? Where would you actually have your ads? Would

Bob Low
it be just prior to videos? Would it be from the YouTube homepage, the in views videos in view ads, which is which are the ads that play before YouTube videos, and I want to direct them to a website or a LinkedIn profile. So that’s that’s what I would do

David Bain
right to a LinkedIn profile. And I guess your the way that you’d measure success is to see how many leads that you’re getting through your calendly. Link? Would there be any way of measuring that directly? I’m just thinking if it’s possible to, to pass on some kind of trackable URL through LinkedIn to your calendar link, LinkedIn to my calendar link. Yeah, yeah. But obviously, if you’re paying on YouTube, and you’re driving people to your LinkedIn profile, you can’t, I don’t think pass on some trackable URL from YouTube, through to your calendly link, what you’re aiming for, you’re aiming for the number of people to actually book with you. So I’m just wondering how you’d go about really measuring the success of that. And, and whether you actually really knew whether or not the traffic came from your paid ads on YouTube,

Bob Low
I would add a question in the calendly. Link to us. How do you find out about me? Now, that’s

David Bain
a good time. Sure. I don’t think enough people do that. I think I encourage brands to ask questions, like, how did you hear of us when signing up for a particular service? Because often, I’m thinking with my podcasting hat on here, often podcasts, you don’t get a direct call to action from that. So it’s tricky sometimes to measure the value of publishing a podcast and getting the number of people listening to a podcast, but but you have to find out somehow and by asking those kind of questions in the signup process, that’s, that gives you a lot of decent marketing data. So please, yeah,

Bob Low
I don’t like to get too technical or UTM links or whatever, if you could ask a very quick multiple choice question that that’s how I would do it.

David Bain
Yeah. Yeah, good thing, because that was my initial thinking, is it possible for the UTM link to go through LinkedIn in the back to the camera link, and I didn’t think in my head that that was possible, but obviously, you won’t see the obvious solutions. That’s probably the better, better answer to give. To finish off let’s shift the focus to someone else who deserves it. So that is MAGICAL MARKETER. So who’s an up and coming marketer that you’d like to give a shout out to? What can we learn from them? And where we can Where can we find them? upcoming marketer,

Bob Low
I follow someone on LinkedIn called Eden be Danny in Israel and she’s a great copywriter. And what you can learn from her is to write copy that sells and I really love for content as well.

David Bain
This was Episode 251 of Digital Marketing Radio. We’re up Bob Lowe, B2B marketing consultant shared some great tips about LinkedIn lead generation, and including the fact that you don’t actually have to have a website and how to decide if you take on new clients, well use the four P’s portfolio, profit personality and purpose. And remember, to engage with your audience posts to gain reciprocation. We talked about lots of other great things as well. But you also shared Bob as your SECRET SOFTWARE. Uber suggests I’ve tried that way in the past, but I intend to try that again at some point in the near future. And NEXT ON THE LIST. You intend to use spark to row by Rand Fishkin, your MAGICAL MARKETER was eaten by Danny. Now everything that Bob shared in the show will be in the show notes. Listen, the poll pod podcast show notes at Digital Marketing radio.com. Bob, without some wanting to say the obvious what’s the best social platform for someone to follow you and say Hi,

Bob Low
LinkedIn. So go to LinkedIn look for Bob Lowe, that spelled VOB, l o w

David Bain
supurb. cell phone, I’ll make sure that there’s a link to that in the show notes at Digital Marketing radio.com as well. I’ve been your host David Bain. You can also find me producing podcasts and YouTube shows for B2B brands over at Casting cred.com until we meet again, stay hungry, stay foolish and stay subscribed. Aloha

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