March 3, 2023
0 min read
Generate Content, Create Leads: How to Book A LOT More Meetings with LinkedIn
by Kristina Haidai
LinkedIn-lead-generation-campaign-and-content-creation-b2b

Project Summary

Quality outbound is never about isolating your tactics to capture the target audience and grow lead lists that don’t convert. At least, it’s what our team has seen over the years of lead generation campaigns. 

Quality outbound marketing is about pooling the efforts to build long-term relationships with a client. And to achieve it, you need to gain trust. Through learning your customer’s pain points, through educating your audience, and through building a brand your customer will want to trust. 

And that’s exactly the challenge our client faced: finding the right client with little brand recognition, a product infused with public regulations, and no clearly defined ideal customer profile. Together with our team, a 7-month lead generation campaign resulted in dozens of hot leads, high demand, and a steady flow of LinkedIn followers. 

And now we’re ready to pull back the curtains and share the details of the campaign. 

Client

Verdana is a Blockchain SaaS platform designed for carbon footprint management. Found in 2022, the platform is set to bring credibility to the carbon trade. 

Understanding the relevance of carbon offset tracking and management in a global business context, the Verdana team pursued the goal of providing their clients with a transparent, secure, easily accessible, and versatile tool that helps businesses safely monitor, manage, and aggregate data on any device, from anywhere in the world.

An innovative approach to the issue faced by many entrepreneurs, low market saturation, solid software. What could possibly be the challenge to melt the hearts of prospects through quality cold outreach? 

Specific Challenge 

For the target audience to engage with a product and show genuine interest, they need to know the answer to a range of questions:

  • What’s in it for them? 
  • What value does the solution bring? 
  • Is software worth the investment in the long run? 
  • Isn’t it all just too complex? 

And that’s exactly where the challenge begins: You can’t expect high conversion rates for a product people know nothing about. 

One of the pioneers in the market, Verdana knew what value they brought to the table. But they were yet to find an audience that matched their Unique Selling Proposition (USP) just right.

The team was determined to do whatever it took to launch an effective LinkedIn Lead Generation campaign, and our task was to create a clear outreach roadmap that would simultaneously increase brand awareness and drive high-value leads to the client’s pipeline. 

Solution

Focusing on the quality of leads we present to our clients rather than the lead volume, our solution was to take enough time to increase awareness for the solution and test as many target categories as possible to help Verdana find their buyer match. 

What exactly was our strategy?

linkedin-lead-generation-solution

Together with Verdana, we decided to combine “cold” LinkedIn Lead Generation with quality content creation from both personal and corporate LinkedIn profiles. 

The inbound part of the campaign focused on delivering:  

  • The business value solutions like Verdana bring
  • The current state of carbon management regulations for businesses
  • The advantages of Verdana compared to other existing approaches
  • The specifics of SaaS implementation in the client’s workplace. 

The outbound, on the other hand, was focused on: 

  • LinkedIn outreach 
  • Custom messaging
  • Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) testing

Sounds like a lot to cover in one outreach campaign. So let’s dwell on how we implemented this strategy step by step. 

Market Research & Content Guidelines

While Blockchain SaaS carbon offsetting is a new market with opportunities waiting for you around the corner, the industry has already had a number of big players to pay attention to. 

And that’s exactly what we did. 

Our content team researched the messaging, USP, and communication tactics of major competitors. We were looking for the type of content they produced, the effort they brought into brand building, and the target audience they were approaching. 

And just like that, the opportunity has risen.

Other market players were building a strategy around clients already considering a sustainability tracking solution. We, on the other hand, took a slightly different approach and looked at the accounts that felt the pressure of adopting a sustainability solution yet had little knowledge (or were even prejudiced) regarding its profitability and effect on operations. 

With a core objective in place, we developed content guidelines that would fit the niche & hit the prospect’s pain points just right. Along with raising brand awareness through company-based content and growing corporate presence on LinkedIn, we curated a set of recurring themes for one of the employee’s personal profiles:  

  • The challenges and opportunities of adopting asset health monitoring and carbon offset tracking for a business 
  • The economic advantage of early carbon offset pledges 
  • Why ESG compliance is no longer a “nice-to-have” if you want your investors’ appeal 

Once the content plan was ready, the next step was to optimize the LinkedIn accounts and make them more relevant & alluring for the prospects. 

LinkedIn Profile Branding

You can’t understand the full potential of your LinkedIn profile for both inbound and outbound marketing tactics until you’ve properly optimized it. 

Prior to launching our campaign, we wanted to: 

  • Increase the profile’s search ranking
  • Add credibility to the profile
  • Make the client’s profile a one-stop page for all the necessary information and links 
  • Increase the Social Selling Index (SSI) of the profile 

Given that social selling leaders create 45% more opportunities than peers with lower SSI, our task was to make sure that the client’s profile was both ranked higher in search results for the industry and had enough information for the prospects to learn about Verdana. 

If you don’t know what SSI is or how you need help with setting up your profile for LinkedIn Lead Generation, take a look at our article about the do’s and don’ts of LLG. 

Having something to recognize you by is important. But knowing what audience you want to impress is critical. 

And that was the next stage of our strategy. 

Target Audience Research and Segmentation 

Before launching the campaign, our LinkedIn lead generation managers conducted a thorough analysis of the target audience segments that could respond well to the client’s USP. We believe that choosing the right audience isn’t about simply closing a deal. It’s also about learning how: 

  • customers describe their challenges and pain points 
  • these challenges impact the client’s objectives 
  • these problems could be identified 

In such a way, we think of all the possible clients interested in the solution instead of putting all the LLG efforts in one basket. 

The segmentation criteria we use for our campaigns include: 

  • Industry
  • Headcount
  • Location 
  • Title
  • Relevant keywords 

In this case, we’ve outlined six major target audience samples, including Data Centres, Oil & Gas, Renewables & Environment, Technology, Manufacturing, and Real Estate. Once the headcount, titles, and location for each segment were figured out, the next task was to create a messaging framework that would cater to each type of prospect. 

Messaging 

If you want your prospect to reply to your message, you should prioritize value over the formal introduction and “Hey, NAME, I just came across your profile” messages. 

messaging-strategy-for-linkedin-lead-generation

With Verdana, our task was to grab the attention of different types of prospects who knew nothing about the product and the benefits it brings. That’s why we decided to define common pain points all those prospects faced: 

  • Lack of proper data infrastructure to track and, most importantly, reduce their carbon footprint
  • The complexity of adopting a proper solution 
  • Cost risks associated with sustainability & ESG compliance 

For this campaign, we decided to create a custom script that would appeal to all segments we cover. While we are always trying to create a personal approach to each audience type, it was not the case. 

Creating separate scripts for every small segment we covered didn’t provide us with enough data to define the best-performing messaging tactic. 

A general approach, on the other hand, would allow us to see the industries that resonate best with the client’s USP and see the advantage of Verdana’s solution. 

To get the most out of our strategy, we implemented A/B testing on each of the communication stages. Trying out more than one approach to get our message across helped us find the wording and value positioning that resonated the most with each industry and engagement type. 

Fully prepared for the campaign, we moved on to the most exciting part of the process: campaign execution. 

ICP Testing & Outreach

During the first four months of the campaign, our primary objective was to test all the target audience segments and gradually analyze their responses and overall interest in the topic of transparent carbon footprint management. 

For each month of the campaign, we identified several target audiences to make sure at least one of them yielded the necessary results. At the same time, we wanted to make sure that interested prospects from each segment were engaged systemically. 

In such a way, we discovered that industries such as Real Estate, Oil & Energy,, and Manufacturing had some of the highest engagement rates. 

Where Inbound and Outbound Come Together: Content Marketing in Outreach 

While the outreach campaign itself showed promising results, we needed to make Verdana’s brand more visible to: 

  • Connect the brand to its value proposition 
  • Educate the audience on the USP of the solution 
  • Raise the prospects’ awareness about the relevance of the solution
  • Eventually, increase the outreach performance

To achieve it, we implemented a content strategy that combined company-based and industry-based updates. 

Company-based updates were focused on sharing company news and educating the audience on the solution, contributing to brand building and awareness. 

On the other hand, industry-based updates were shared from our client’s profile to increase engagement with the audience, build a personal brand, and address the target audience’s pain points. 

Together, these updates contributed to the bigger objective of the campaign: increasing the audience’s commitment to the sustainability issue and finding the right buyer who would benefit from the product. 

So, while our client had little recognition in the market, and the topic of sustainability had some biased subtext to it, we were ready to take our time with the first results. 

But it turned out we didn’t need to wait at all.  

Results

Since our client’s priority was to find a perfect client match to adopt their solution, let’s talk about the LLG results first. 

Even though we took our time with testing different audiences, the reply rates for each segment didn’t drop 27.5% below, while the industry average is somewhere between 20-25%. 

acceptance-reply-rates-of-linkedin-lead-generation-campaign

But it wasn’t until we tested all the industries that we found our gold mine: Manufacturing. The reply rates for this industry stayed above 30% at all times. 

While the campaign itself provided Verdana with 20+ hot leads and at least 5 confirmed demo calls, more than 50% of the hot leads and 80% of calls came from leads in the Chemical & Renewable Manufacturing industries:

distribution-of-leads-by-industry-lead-generation-campaign-results

At the end of the campaign, the demand for Verdana’s solution became so high the company needed to take their time to sort out the communication process with potential customers and settle on the deals that bring most value to the team, once again proving that marketing isn’t about begging the client to choose you.

So, how exactly did we achieve such results? 

By giving credibility. 

The biggest share of the campaign’s success rightfully belongs to our commitment to building a community around the client by: 

  • expanding the networks with people and thought leaders who can benefit from the connection
  • growing relationships with the existing network through regular interaction 
  • sharing attention-grabbing insights and professional updates with the network

The latter turned out more than great. Some of the industry-based updates we shared had a 6.85% engagement rate (with a 0,54% average for users with 1-4K followers) and 1,577 views. In a nutshell, both the LinkedIn algorithm and our client’s network believed the content to be unique and scroll-stopping. 

The same applies to Verdana’s corporate page. Over the several months of the campaign, the page has gained several hundred followers. And it’s great considering the novelty of the profile itself and users’ general interaction with corporate content on LinkedIn. 

It would be fair to say that the campaign was a success. But the real question here is: What makes this campaign a success, and how do we get the most from lead generation in the buyer-focused B2B marketing world? 

Lessons We’ve Learned

Any marketing is hard. But B2B marketing is even harder because we put ourselves in the “professional” frame, thinking with data, business-related communication, and immediate results. 

But when you’re a new company trying to prove your worth to the customer, it’s always a great idea to start with them. By showing that you know their concerns. By educating. By giving your customer space to think. And by being there for them once they’re ready to talk. 

This case is an example of how outbound for a company can be flexible and interconnected with inbound tactics like brand building and content marketing. 

At the end of the day, it’s your ability to hear the customer that matters the most. And that’s exactly what we did to get results. 

If you think about building relationships that scale, we’re here to help. Just say a word, and we’ll figure out the rest. Together. 

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