The Beginner’s Guide to LinkedIn Outreach

Email is great for outreach! Almost everybody in the world has an email address, and there are many tools out there to find people’s email addresses and automate outreach. 

But there’s one better platform for outreach if your target audience is other businesses. It’s LinkedIn!

This is a platform where business owners hang out. If your target audience is other businesses, make sure you supplement some of your traditional email outreach methods with LinkedIn. 

Here’s a step-by-step guide to LinkedIn outreach…

Chapters

Define your customer avatar

LinkedIn outreach needs to be highly personable. The more targeted your messaging is, the more likely people are to respond. This is why, before you start doing any outreach, you need to define your customer avatar. First, decide who you want to target, then go through the profiles of your ideal target audience and look at what they write in their profiles and what topics they post about. 

This will help you figure out what they like and what their pain points are. If you want to go into more detail, I recommend that you survey and interview some of these people. You should then draw up an empathy map and use the data to make a customer persona. You can use this information to also improve your email outreach strategy. 

Optimize your LinkedIn profile

If you don’t yet have a LinkedIn profile, set up one. If you already do have one, it is time to optimize it. A basic LinkedIn profile should include an inviting profile picture (of you smiling), a header image, headline, an about section, details about the places you worked at, and your education history.

If you want to get more out of it, you should also get some recommendations from people you worked for. This will make your profile look more credible. 

Many people skip this step, and as a result, their outreach reply rate suffers. When you reach out via email, people behave very differently. They will usually click on the website link in your signature to learn more about you before replying. If a website isn’t available, they reply to you asking you to share more information. 

On LinkedIn, on the other hand, people can simply go to your profile to learn about you. If your profile is well set up, they will be more likely to respond. If it isn’t, you lose all credibility, and they don’t respond. Taking this step helps you approach outreach with a very holistic LinkedIn marketing strategy. 

Post content

Once you set up your profile, it is time to start posting content. This is another thing you need to start doing before you start doing outreach. Having some content on your profile makes you look more credible. If it is a new account, I recommend publishing at least two to three posts before doing any outreach. 

Remember the persona you made of your ideal customer – use it now to create content that addresses their pain points.

Even after you start doing your outreach, you should continue posting content at least three to four times a week, as your new connections will see your posts. Even if they don’t get back to you the first time, they will see your content and this will nurture them for the future. There are several automation tools for LinkedIn that can save time while conducting outreach. 

Start connecting with people

A lot of people falter when they start connecting with people. When you send that first connection request, your goal shouldn’t be to get them to respond or hire you or something else. On LinkedIn, your goal should be just to get them to connect back.

Most people don’t send a message while requesting a connection and when others do include a message, they ask them to hire them or buy their product. But to get the best result, you should simply tell them that you want to connect with them for a specific reason. This could be because you liked what they recently posted, you want to see more of their posts, you like the company the work at, etc. 

This will make it more likely for them to connect with you. If you send a highly promotional message at the start, they might find it too straightforward and not connect back. 

Once they connect with you can follow up with a more promotional one that asks them to buy your product or hire you for your service. They will be more likely to say yes then. 

Follow up

The response rates on LinkedIn are very similar to those with email. However, you can increase the response rates by regularly following up. I recommend that you follow up with people every three to four days until you get a positive or negative response. 

Now reach out to people

This is the step-by-step process you can follow to find people to reach out to on LinkedIn. If you want to try out more advanced strategies, you can invest in a LinkedIn premium account and take advantage of features like InMail and Sales Navigator. These help scale outreach.