TL;DR
LinkedIn automation allows you to automate prospecting tasks like connection requests, personalized messages, and content scheduling. Tools like LaGrowthMachine, Dux-soup, and Hootsuite can help. Key benefits include improved interaction quality, increased productivity, and better lead generation. Remember to target prospects precisely and avoid mass spamming for effective results.
LinkedIn is one of the most used platforms for B2B lead generation. With the advancement of tech and data, many marketing practices have developed on this network, including automation.
And for good reason! certain tasks in your LinkedIn prospecting routine can be 100% automated: this is known as “LinkedIn automation“. But what does automation on LinkedIn involve? What are its benefits for your business? And what are the best tools for LinkedIn automation?
In this post, we will explain everything so you can get the most value possible from these automations. By the end of this article, you will be fully ready to automate your actions on LinkedIn to take your marketing strategy to the next level!
What is LinkedIn Automation?
The manual tasks performed on LinkedIn for prospecting and branding are sometimes redundant. Implementing a LinkedIn automation process changes the game by allowing you to automate part of your actions & processes on LinkedIn.
What does this involve? The idea is to implement LinkedIn tools that will automate the manual interactions you have with your prospects.
And this applies to all types of interactions:
- Connection requests to expand your professional network;
- Sending personalized messages to new contacts;
- Following up with inactive contacts;
- Setting up marketing workflows (example: a message is sent when a contact reaches a certain stage of the buying cycle);
- Scheduled posting of content on your LinkedIn profile.
All these actions take time and are generally done manually. The human time cost can sometimes be very significant.
Fortunately, with automation, a large part of these operational tasks can be handled by a robot, freeing up time for more strategic tasks.
Don’t worry, you won’t need any technical skills! The hardest part here will be defining the actions you want to automate. For the rest, if you know how to click, that’s enough.
LINKEDIN AUTOMATIONS ON LAGROWTHMACHINEAnd good news, this is exactly what we do at LaGrowthMachine, and much more!
On this screen, you will find the LinkedIn actions that can be automated with LaGrowthMachine:
- Visit your prospect’s LinkedIn profile;
- Add them as a connection on LinkedIn;
- Send them a message / DM on LinkedIn;
- But also send them a voice message on LinkedIn!
NB: sending voice messages on LinkedIn automatically is a new feature only available at LaGrowthMachine! Voice messages allow you to stand out from other salespeople and we observe a 2x higher response rate!
To give you an idea, an interesting sequence to start your automated prospecting on this channel could be this one:
This sequence unfolds in 4 steps:
1. You add your lead as a contact on LinkedIn;
2. If they have not accepted your invitation, you send them an email (spoiler alert: LaGrowthMachine will find your prospects’ email automatically to allow you to do just that!);
3. You send them a first message (DM) on LinkedIn;
4. You send them a follow-up via a voice message along with a second text message to ensure they received it.
… And all this programmed in advance and replicable across your entire lead list!
Why Automate Your LinkedIn Actions?
If you like doing the same thing all the time, then don’t automate anything 😉 But if you’re like us, then you don’t understand the point of doing the same thing over and over again, every day… and you are therefore looking to automate what works, including your LinkedIn prospecting.
LinkedIn automation will allow you to:
- Improve the quality of interactions with prospects;
- Develop your prospecting by generating your leads;
- Better target messages based on your contacts;
- Avoid spamming;
- Gain productivity;
- Gain insight into your sales pipeline;
- Be more reactive (and therefore not miss any leads).
The actions you can automate with LinkedIn are numerous, but you need to know how to use them wisely to avoid falling into the spam trap!
Mass prospecting is not effective and will affect your professional reputation.
Indeed, it would be counterproductive to want to contact all the prospects in your database: the idea in automation is to target prospects precisely, and to send personalized messages each time.
This requires significant preparatory work at the beginning, which you can then easily scale by targeting exactly the same profiles with the same messages: the investment is largely profitable in the long term.
What Tasks Can You Automate on LinkedIn?
Thanks to tools like LaGrowthMachine, LinkedIn automation has become really simple, and you no longer need any technical skills.
The automatable actions are numerous, but we have chosen to present only 4 of them here which, in our opinion, have the strongest impact on your sales strategy.
1. Automating Connection Requests to Your Prospects
It’s simple, we’re talking about connecting with people on LinkedIn. This step is essential in your approach: if you are not connected with your prospect on LinkedIn, you cannot send them messages/DMs!
When you visit a profile you want to add to your network, you can send a connection request by clicking the “Connect” button (also available in the dropdown menu on the “More” button).
LinkedIn then offers you 2 solutions: Send the request with one click (no message) or Add a Note (a message) to the invitation.
With LaGrowthMachine, you can automate this connection request step, while removing the limit of 100 maximum invitations per week.
To do this, create a new campaign and add an “Add Relation” action (LinkedIn connection request), then choose whether or not to add an invitation note. If you have chosen to add an invitation note, a block allowing you to add text will appear.
As soon as your connection request is accepted, you can then choose to stop the campaign or continue by sending a LinkedIn DM, an email, or something else.
2. Sending Personalized Messages (DMs) to Your Contacts
We are talking here about sending messages to your contacts.
And yes, it is also possible to automate the sending of these messages!
But “With great power comes great responsibility“. We offer you the ability to contact all your contacts in a few clicks, but remember to segment your audience! There’s little chance a student will be interested in your financial products, for example. Without this particular attention to your targeting, don’t expect good results… and expect angry responses from your contacts.
To automate sending LinkedIn messages, simply drop a “Send DM” block into your campaign and add the message you want to send.
It is not uncommon for our users to chain the connection request seen in the first point with a message as soon as the invitation request is accepted.
3. Scheduling Posts on Your Profile or Company Page
It can also be interesting to automate the scheduling of posts on a company LinkedIn page or directly on your profile.
To do this, you can use a tool like Canva. The latter allows you to publish content directly on LinkedIn according to your editorial strategy. With this tool, you can schedule LinkedIn posts on your company page in advance.
4. Automate Sending Voice Messages on LinkedIn!
This feature is available from the LinkedIn mobile app.
Many of our users have reported that the performance of voice messages is excellent, and that they allow them to get up to 2X more responses!
We therefore decided to add the ability to automate the sending of voice messages from LaGrowthMachine.
Once again, LaGrowthMachine is the only tool for LinkedIn Automation capable of creating automated LinkedIn sequences including voice messages.
To add your messages, nothing could be simpler: add a “Send Voice” block (LinkedIn voice message), then record your message!
How to Do LinkedIn Automation?
As we’ve seen, automating actions on LinkedIn is a considerable time saver for your business. But how do you go about it? What are the best practices for successful LinkedIn automation?
To put it simply, there are 3 main steps to follow:
- Define the objectives of your automation campaign;
- Target the right people;
- Implement the right tools and workflows.
In this article, we will focus on the last step, namely how to implement the right tools and workflows to succeed in your LinkedIn automation.
To implement good automation, there are two main tools:
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- LaGrowthMachine.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a paid version of LinkedIn, but extremely powerful. It allows you, among other things, to perform advanced searches including very specific filters such as:
- number of years of seniority in the company
- number of employees in the company
- type of role (sales, marketing, HR..)
- and many other filters.
Sales Navigator will also allow you to send InMails to people you don’t know and who are not in your network.
LaGrowthMachine is also a paid tool, which fully leverages the advanced features of Sales Nav: the idea is to create lead lists directly in Sales Navigator, then import them directly into LaGrowthMachine, which will then enrich your leads’ data with their email, phone number and much other crucial information for your prospecting.
You can then schedule multichannel campaigns (LinkedIn, email automation …) to generate leads across multiple channels simultaneously.
Top 5 LinkedIn Automation Tools
LaGrowthMachine
As you’ve understood, LaGrowthMachine is the only LinkedIn tool Automation that allows you to
- find your contacts’ emails
- exceed LinkedIn limitations regarding weekly connection requests
- send LinkedIn voice messages
- synchronize all conversations with your CRM (hubspot, pipedrive, zapier…)
- …and much more
Our tool was designed from the start for multichannel automated prospecting.
Our clients regularly report that LaGrowthMachine has helped them achieve up to 3.5x more responses! And more responses means either more business or more time for you, you choose!
Test LaGrowthMachine for free for 14 days by signing up on the registration page! (no credit card required)
Dux-soup
The Chrome extension plugin is a tool that allows you to set up basic LinkedIn automations. Its configuration is quite simple and includes some useful integrations at the highest tier.
This prospecting solution also includes a practical export tagging system that will help you sort and manage your LinkedIn contacts more easily. There is also a team feature for sharing notes and tags about each lead.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media automation tool that allows you to manage multiple accounts on different social networks at the same time. This can be practical if you have multiple accounts to manage, for example, a professional account and a personal account.
With Hootsuite, you can, for example, schedule your entire LinkedIn posting strategy in advance.
Captain Data
Presented as a lead scoring software, Captain Data also has some integrations that should help it work with your other systems and do prospecting.
The main advantage of this tool is that it allows you to scrape LinkedIn, then extract and enrich the data present in your CRM automatically.
Linked Helper “2”
LinkedIn Helper “2” is a Chrome extension comparable to Dux-soup, which allows you to launch simple actions from your LinkedIn account. This tool will help you build a workflow with automated message sequences to respond directly to your leads. Simply put, it will detect when someone has replied to your message and respond according to your configuration.
This is version 2 because LinkedIn had banned version 1 of this tool… so be careful if you choose this tool, as it might be on LinkedIn’s radar.
It also integrates well with some other systems like Hunter.io and other CRMs. These features will be very useful for creating LinkedIn automation strategies at a low cost.
Conclusion
There are many tools that will allow you to automate your prospecting on LinkedIn. The choice of tool will depend on your budget, your needs, and your technological level. Simpler tools like Dux-soup and Linked Helper “2” will do the job if you have a limited budget, while more powerful tools like LaGrowthMachine or Captain Data will be necessary if you need advanced features.
In any case, using a LinkedIn automation tool will save you a lot of time and help you be more effective in your prospecting!