How to use LinkedIn groups to generate leads with Linked Helper

When you grow brand presence through social media, remember that besides the standard adding to contacts, there are also groups. This social network has 2.9 million groups, including industry and interest communities, which means that your potential partners are likely to follow these groups. Also, it’s essential to use them when practicing influencer marketing on LinkedIn.

All you need to do is find them and start interacting with the participants. Group members can be potential leads already sorted in the list. With Linked Helper, you can automatically perform important strategic tasks that allow you to generate qualified leads from a group and use LinkedIn for social media marketing.

What can you do?

• Download the list of members to the CRM. If you use this promotion method regularly, then you may have been busy for many hours – looking through the lists of participants, selecting the relevant ones, and sending them contact requests. Instead you can save a group of participants in the memory of the CRM and then extract this list in an Excel spreadsheet. There you will have at hand all the text fields from the profiles of these people and also their emails.
• Set up further auto-interaction with leads from the group. Once downloaded, you can start the actions via the tool – all you need according to your funnel. For example, send invite requests to the members of the list, like their posts, write them messages, or invite them to an event or to an organization page.

This can be done by inviting them to your network so that they become 1st degree contacts – this will make it possible to invite them to the group. Or using “Message to group members” (auto-action in Linked Helper) you can send them a link to your group.

Almost all actions for social media marketing with any LinkedIn profile can be automated.

• Automatic invitations to your group. You can expand the members of your professional group or boost followers on the organization page. To do this, people must be among your contacts (you can first send them a connection request). Or you can try the automatic “Message to group members” to send them a link to your group. 

Using LinkedIn groups for B2B marketing and lead generation can be fully managed without your online presence. You can entrust the tool that will work strictly according to your instructions.

Marketing in the group environment will help you collect leads, expand your business pages, look for partners, look for content ideas. Yes, random spam groups where people mostly post promotional messages can be a challenge – but with targeted selection, you can collect at least 10 worthwhile communities. Below you will find the list of 5 marketing influencers on LinkedIn, where you can explore trending communities and buzz topics.

LinkedIn groups marketing – strategy with the automated tool

When offline conferences were held more often, for businessmen and sales reps, these were important events for finding customers. People gathered based on interests and this helped to grow the business. This happens in 2022, but most of the interactions have gone online. Salespeople and marketers consider LinkedIn as a social media marketing tool for growing online.

Groups on LinkedIn can become your very conferences where you can share insights, ask questions, look for employees, and share useful materials. But as in such an offline event, you need to set up a high-quality communication scheme in groups.

Make it easier on yourself – now automatic tools have come to the aid of the marketer. There’s no need to perform routine actions, or type messages manually to dozens of people – Linked Helper will do everything for you.

#1 – Select groups in your industry

First of all, conduct research of groups and make a list of those communities where:

• Your leads are present.
• Active and lively communication is going on.
• Little or no spam is left.

Join these groups right now. To participate in some groups, you may need to go through an admin verification process.

You may see niche discussions that you won’t find on Google. Even if the group is not active, you can use the member list to build communication.

For example, if you need to write to all the CEOs of marketing agencies, find a group of these professionals. Then you can easily save this selection of users in the Linked Helper CRM.

#2 – How to download a list of group members via Linked Helper

It’s very simple. You can try to download the free tool and test its features for 14 days. After that, go to your account and start searching for a group.

• Start a People search campaign.

• As a source for collecting profiles, select the page of one of your groups.

• Add a list of people to the Visit and Extract campaign. To do this, on the left side of the menu when you open the group page, click on Collect from the current page.

After that, all members of the group will be transferred to the Queue list of this action.

• Start a campaign. If you aim to visit the profiles of all these people, then start a campaign. You can also assign other actions based on these group members.

If you want to generate a lead database and download an Excel file with emails, then the Find Profile Emails action can help you out. In this case, LH will not spend the daily action limit on visits, but will search for emails for these people from the database. Thus, you can start using LinkedIn not just for social media marketing but also for cold email campaigns.

Next, you can download a ready-made CSV file with detailed data about the leads from the group.

Imagine how long it would take if you did all of this by hand?

#3 – Start interactions with group members

Depending on the goal of your campaign, you can assign targeted actions in the Linked Helper toolbar. The list of actions will allow you to implement any tasks at each stage of the funnel. Explore top ways to start a LinkedIn conversation in 2022.

Start with welcome likes and comments.

Before you text to everyone and offer your products, show interest and encourage visits to your page. By the way, before doing that, make sure all the important information about your company is in your profile. In the Summary and work experience sections, pay attention to your unique offer and advantage over competitors.

This may be enough to fine-tune social media marketing for LinkedIn organic growth and get people to write to you themselves, or at least find out about your services.

After a personalized comment from you where you include the person’s name, they will probably want to know who you are. In Linked Helper you can schedule auto-comments with lines where the data from this person’s page will be put.

Invite to your business page or an event.

If your goal is to grow followers, you can add the automated invite action. Thus, in a couple of clicks, you can turn leads from a community into followers of an organization page (but first they must become your 1st degree contacts – or you can send a link to the organization’s page in private messages).

Set up a message thread.

In the final step, after preparation and visits, you can start to connect with people in private messages. To do this, you will not need to go separately to each member of the group.

There are two ways to communicate:

• Invite group members. Then filter those who accepted the invitation, and send a message to them.
• Using “Message to group members,” send private messages without the need to invite all profiles to connect first, including 2nd and 3rd degreel contacts.

The Linked Helper will sort out users who accepted your contact request – that is, a potentially hot customer. They will appear in the Successful list.

From this list, you can assign auto-messages with a mini presentation of your services, because these people have already looked at your profile. Further, it will be convenient for you to make automatic follow-ups based on this list of leads.

Thanks to tags, you can sort leads from different campaigns, mark active ones, leave notes and statuses right in the CRM. None of this can realistically be done directly on the social network – you would need to be online for dozens of hours.

By social media marketing through groups, you can reach exactly the target audience that will become your customers or partners. Using LinkedIn automation will speed up this process.

#4 – Analyze results

Thanks to correspondence through the CRM, it will be easier for you to analyze the leads’ responses. In Linked Helper you can export replies and message history – all data stored in the tool is available for download.

This will help you get an Excel spreadsheet with their text communication. In this case, it is much easier and faster to analyze correspondence than scrolling through chats in the LinkedIn messenger. After all, you can write to hundreds of people a day – you can’t do this analysis without an additional tool.

This way you will uncover the main difficult questions and the reasons for refusals, which will help you work out objections and improve your pitch texts in the next stages of outreach.

LinkedIn pages to follow – top marketing influencers on LinkedIn

LinkedIn can work for your growth like an influencer agency. From influencers’ pages you can research important communities. To do this, view their activities and interests. What groups do these people belong to? What do they post there? Target the top people in your niche and you’ll get recognition and lots of ideas to promote through LinkedIn.

#1 – Sujan Patel

This is an expert and influencer in marketing, whom you should subscribe to if you need up-to-date news about content marketing and promotion of SaaS Companies. Sujan is a business manager and co-founder, so you can learn a lot about marketing from his practices.

You can learn how to use data for marketing companies, and how to implement strategies to increase brand awareness online and increase online sales.

Here are some groups he is a member of:

• The Advanced Selling Podcast 12K members
• AskMen 17K followers
• Marketing Automation Network 3К members

If you are looking for trust groups to promote and find real leads, monitor groups of such influencers.

#2 – Megan Berry

From this influencer’s profile, you can find a constant source of information on IT product management. Since Megan is representing an automation data collection company for FB and Shopify. You can also get valuable content on managing huge teams.

She is a blogger for business and marketing publications, so LinkedIn content will be your timely refresher feed.

If leadership, management, and marketing are your professional interests, we advise you to subscribe. Here are the groups Megan is a member of:

• Mashable 898K followers
• Marketing Over Coffee 7К members
• Andreessen Horowitz 217K followers
• Engadget 625K followers

#3 – Sean Gardner

Sean Gardner works in digital marketing, IT, digital media. He is a speaker at NATO, Google and Harvard University conferences. Therefore, following the reports, discoveries, and posts of this person on LinkedIn, you can upgrade your knowledge, be in the marketing trend, and use connections to promote your ideas and product.

Forbes recognized him as the best marketer. You can also learn a lot about AI, cryptocurrencies, and blockchain from his work.

• Ultimate Software 88,110 followers
• Ben & Jerry’s 42,939 followers

#4 Jeff Bullas

In the profile of this influencer you will find everything about online marketing, he became popular thanks to a blog that is read by more than 5 million users. Therefore, this page can be a valuable source for marketers and those looking for leads in the marketing field.

Please note that on the influencers page you can find not only groups, but also hashtags – which are necessary for promoting on LinkedIn. Pay attention to the tags of such influencers, and copy them for further use in posts.

He also writes a lot about marketing automation, social media promotion, blockchain, and investments. He is a consultant on a crypto banking site, which will help you keep abreast of all the trends. Also, he has a course that teaches how to attract customers through a blog.

Communities he is a part of:

• Content Marketing Hub – 6К members
• BigCommerce – 48K followers
• B2B Marketing Leader Roundtable – 5К members

#5 – Michael Stelzer

You know this influencer for sure if you have ever visited the Social Media Examiner site – he is its founder. You may also listen to this person in podcasts about marketing. So following Michael on LinkedIn will help you promote your product and keep up to date with marketing news. All activities can be observed in the feed.

If you’re more of a listener than a reader, you can listen to marketing talk shows as a podcast. This is a great way to listen to experts and learn about current online growth trends without stopping your work.

Communities that might be worth a look:

• Social Media Marketing Group by Connect365.io
• Social Media Examiner
• Content Marketing Institute

Thus, your process of actions for finding cool pages where your leads live might look like this:

• Find the top influencers in your niche. You can do it manually, use Google search, or LinkedIn’s internal search.

Hack: When you search for people through Linked Helper, you can follow them automatically. After collecting profiles from LinkedIn pages, you can add the “Follow profiles” action to your campaign. Then you follow people without performing manual actions, and their data will be saved when the tool visits them. Plus, the list of people will be stored in the memory of the tool, which will make your work easier. That is, when searching for bloggers through the tool, you can assign the action, ”Send a subscription request.” This will help to avoid thousands of routine button clicks.

• Become a member of selected communities. Start testing pages with different reach. For example, a community with 2K members can have higher engagement than one with 100K followers. So experiment with various sizes.
• Download the list of group members. Linked Helper can automatically save profiles in the CRM when collecting from the list of group members.
• Assign targeted actions for promotion. Based on your marketing goals, continue with this list of leads obtained from communities.

To sum up, you can install Linked Helper free now for maximizing LinkedIn for sales and social media marketing and test all the automation perks for 2 weeks.