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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! Some tasks in your prospecting routine on LinkedIn can be 100% automated: this is called “LinkedIn automation. But what is automation on LinkedIn? What are the benefits for your company? And what are the best tools to do LinkedIn automation?
In this post, we will explain everything so that you can get the most value out of these automations. By the end of this article, you’ll be 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 the social platform for prospecting and branding are sometimes redundant. LinkedIn automation is a game changer that allows you to automate some of your actions and processes on LinkedIn.
What does it consist of? The idea is to set up tools that will automate the manual interactions you have with your prospects
And it concerns any type of interaction:
- Requesting contact to expand your pro network;
- Sending personalized messages to new contacts;
- Reminders to inactive contacts;
- Setting up marketing workflows (example: a message is sent when a connection reaches a certain stage of the buying cycle);
- Scheduled publication of content on your LinkedIn profile.
All these actions take time and are usually done manually. The cost in human time can sometimes be very important
Fortunately, with automation, a large part of these operational tasks can be done 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 to define the actions you want to automate. For the rest, if you know how to click, it will be enough 🥳
And good news, that’s exactly what we do at LaGrowthMachine, and much more!
On this screen, you’ll find the LinkedIn actions that can be automated with LaGrowthMachine:
- Visit your prospect’s LinkedIn profile
- Add them to your LinkedIn relationship
- 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! If you have never tested it, you should🤘: voice messages boost your response rate considerably!
To give you an idea, an interesting sequence to start your automated prospecting on this channel could be this :
This sequence has 4 steps:
1. You add your lead in contact on LinkedIn;
2. If they haven’t accepted your invitation, you send them an email (spoiler alert: LaGrowthMachine will find the email of your prospects automatically to allow you to do just that!)
3. You send them a first LinkedIn message (DM);
4. You send them a follow-up via a voice message with a second text message to make sure they received it.
… And all this is programmed in advance and can be replicated on your entire list of leads!
Why automate your actions on LinkedIn?
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 value of doing the same thing over and over again, every day…and so you look to automate what works, including your LinkedIn prospecting.
LinkedIn automation will allow you to:
- Improve the quality of your interactions with prospects ;
- Expand your business prospecting by generating B2B leads;
- Better target your messages to your contacts;
- Avoid spamming;
- To gain in productivity;
- Gain insight into your sales pipeline;
- Be more reactive (and therefore not miss any leads).
There are many actions you can automate with LinkedIn, but you must know how to use them wisely to avoid falling into the trap of spamming!
Indeed, it would be counterproductive to try to contact all the prospects in your database: The idea behind automation is to target your prospects in a refined way and to send personalized messages each time.
This requires a lot of preparatory work at the beginning, which you can easily scale up afterward by targeting exactly the same profiles with the same messages: the investment is largely profitable in the long run.
Quick Tip💡
At LaGrowthMachine, we always like to remind our clients that 50% of the work is in your targeting. If you take the time to target your leads accurately, your messages will be much easier to write, and also more relevant to a homogeneous audience. You will then generate a lot more responses, and therefore more meetings!
For the experts: we have written a very detailed article on the subject.
What tasks can you automate on LinkedIn?
Thanks to tools like LaGrowthMachine, automation on LinkedIn has become really simple, and you don’t need technical skills at all.
There are many actions that can be automated, but we have chosen to present here only 4 of them that we believe have the strongest impact on your business strategy.
1. Automating Contact Requests to your prospects
It’s simple, we’re talking about getting in touch with people on LinkedIn. This step is essential in your approach: if you are not in contact with your prospect on LinkedIn, you will not be able to send them messages / DM!
When you visit a profile that you want to add to your network, you can request a contact by clicking on the“Connect” button (also available in the drop-down menu on the “More” button).
LinkedIn will then offer you 2 solutions: Request a contact in one click (without a message) or Add a Note (a message) invitation.
With LaGrowthMachine, you will be able to automate this contact request step, while removing this limit of 100 maximum invitations per week
To do this, create a new campaign and add an action of type “Add Relation” (contact request), then choose or not to add an invitation note. If you have chosen to add an invitation note, a block allowing you to add a text will appear.
Once your contact 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 (DM) to your Contacts
We are talking about sending messages to your contacts
And yes, it is also possible to automate the sending of these messages 🤘
But “With great power, great responsibility“. We give you the ability to contact all your contacts with a few clicks, but consider segmenting your audience! Not much chance that a student will be interested in your financial products for example. Without this special attention to your targeting, don’t expect good results…and expect angry responses from your contacts.
To automate the sending of LinkedIn messages, you just have to put a“Send DM” block in your campaign and add the message you want to send.
You’ll be able to use the variables available on your leads to customize the message.
For example, Hello {{firstname}} will be replaced for each person in your audience by their first name, e.g. “Hello Brice” or “Hello Jean Louis” etc.
It is not uncommon for our users to follow up the contact request seen in the first point with a message as soon as the request is received
3. Scheduling publications on your profile or on a LinkedIn company page
It can also be interesting to automate the scheduling of publications on LinkedIn business pages or directly on your profile.
For this, you can use a tool such as Canva. This tool allows you to publish content directly on LinkedIn according to your editorial strategy. With this tool, you have the possibility to schedule LinkedIn posts on your company page in advance.
4. Automate the sending of Voice Messages on LinkedIn!
This feature is available from the LinkedIn mobile app.
Many of our users have told us that the performance of voice messages is excellent and that they get up to 30% more responses!
So we decided to add the ability to automate the sending of voice messages from LaGrowthMachine.
Again, LaGrowthMachine is the only LinkedIn Automation tool that can create automated LinkedIn sequences including voice messages.
To add your messages, nothing could be easier: add a “Send Voice” brick, then record your message!
How to do LinkedIn Automation?
As we have seen, automating actions on LinkedIn is a great time saver for your company. But how do you go about it? What are the best practices for successful LinkedIn automation?
Simply put, there are 3 main steps to follow:
- Define the goals 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 set up the right tools and workflows to succeed in your LinkedIn automation.
To set up a good automation sequence, there are two main tools:
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- LaGrowthMachine.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a paid version of LinkedIn but is extremely powerful. It allows you to do advanced searches including filters as sharp 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 takes full advantage of the advanced features of Sales Nav: the idea is to create lists of leads directly in Sales Navigator, then import them directly into LaGrowthMachine, which will then enrich the data of your leads with their email, their phone number, and much other crucial information in your prospecting.
You can then program multi-channel campaigns (LinkedIn, email…) to generate leads on several channels simultaneously.
Workflow Example
- I want to make my offer to all marketing managers working in the textile sector in Montpellier.
- I do my targeting via Sales Navigator.
- I import my lead list into LaGrowthMachine. LaGrowthMachine finds all the professional and personal emails of my leads.
- I set up my campaign by sending messages to my leads both on LinkedIn and via email using a drag & drop system, and the messages will be sent automatically!
Top 5 LinkedIn Automation tools
LaGrowthMachine
As you can see, LaGrowthMachine is the only LinkedIn Automation tool that allows you to
- find the emails of your contacts
- exceed the LinkedIn limitations in terms of weekly contact requests
- send LinkedIn voice messages
- synchronize all conversations with your CRM (Hubspot, Pipedrive, Zapier, etc.)
- …and much more
Our tool was designed from the start for automated multi-channel prospecting
Our clients regularly tell us that LaGrowthMachine has helped them get up to 3.5x more responses! And more responses mean either more business or more time for you, you choose 😎
To learn more and discover all the features, visit https://lagrowthmachine.com. To test the tool for free and without a credit card, go directly to the registration page!
Dux-soup
The chrome extension plugin is a lead management tool that allows you to set up basic LinkedIn automations. Its configuration is quite simple and has some valuable integrations at the highest level
This prospecting solution also features a handy export tag management system that will help you sort and manage your contacts on LinkedIn more simply. There is also a team feature to share 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 once. This can be handy if you have several accounts to manage, for example, a business account and a personal account.
Thanks to Hootsuite, you can for example schedule in advance your whole Linkedin posts strategy.
Captain Data
Presented as a lead scoring software, Captain Data also has some integrations that should help it to work with your other systems and to do prospecting.
The main interest of this tool is that it allows you to scrape on LinkedIn, then extract and enrich the data present in your CRM in an automated way.
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 live to your leads. To put it simply, it will detect when someone has replied to your message and respond based on your configuration.
This is version 2 because LinkedIn had banned version 1 of this tool… so be careful if you choose this tool, which may be in the crosshairs of LinkedIn.
It also integrates well with some other systems like Hunter.io and other CRMs. These features will be very useful to create low-cost LinkedIn automation strategies.
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 level of technology. The simplest 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.
Either way, using a LinkedIn automation tool will save you a lot of time and help you be more efficient in your prospecting!
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