How to Generate Leads Using LinkedIn Groups [Customer Story]
The following is a guest post by Sarah Papachristos, an Inbound Marketing fanatic who lives and breathes all things HubSpot. She is the social media manager at Great Island Technologies, a full service marketing agency and HubSpot partner.
"We HubSpot because it keeps our customers ahead of their competition."
One of our newest clients was excited to start using social media to generate leads.
Votility, an online advocacy software, has fully optimized their social media platforms and already had a long list of blog articles scheduled to go out. As they anxiously waited for some type of feedback or social conversation, they were faced with silence. There was an underwhelming amount of comments, engagement, and traffic coming from social media.
But HubSpot had just announced a new feature in the social media tool -- the ability to post to LinkedIn groups -- and Votility decided to give it a try.
The result: Votility increased their social media leads 650% in two weeks just by posting to LinkedIn groups.
Here is how they did it:
Step 1: Create and Send a LinkedIn Message Using HubSpot’s Social Media Publisher
Posting to LinkedIn groups is a more targeted approach of providing educational content to potential customers. Votility chose which blog posts to promote based on the group they were posting to; basically a sibjective judgement of the blog article's expected relevance to its members. Using the social media publisher tool, they selected a blog article to promote, chose which LinkedIn groups to share the article with, and then scheduled the post to go out (shown below).
They try to encourage conversations in the groups by replacing the auto-populated message field with a question. For example, they replaced the blog title and URL with “Does your organization struggle with member engagement?”
Learn more about promoting content with HubSpot’s social media publisher
Step 2: Find Relevant Social Media Conversations to Join Using HubSpot’s Social Media Prospect Tool
After Votility scheduled their LinkedIn messages, they designated 15-30 minutes each day to be on the lookout for more opportunities to build relationships and generate leads using the social media prospect tool. With this tool, they were able to filter through their social networks, to only focus on LinkedIn, and to search for conversations using key terms relevant to their industry.
Join the conversation with HubSpot’s social media prospect tool
Step 3: Analyze Your Social Media Success with HubSpot’s Social Engagement Tool
Once Votility started the conversation, it was important for them to keep it going. The HubSpot social media tool shows you all forms of engagement with your content on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. If you are looking to give your mind a rest from remembering all of those social media logins, this is the tool for you. They were able to follow the conversation on LinkedIn and comment back from directly within the tool (shown below).
To increase their social media leads by 650%, Votility relied on the social media publisher, the social media prospect tool, and the social engagement tool.
Any good campaign ends with a review and analysis. When looking at Votility’s Sources we can see that not only have visits & leads increased considerably since launching the LinkedIn campaign, but the visit-to-lead conversion rate is now hovering at 9.2%. Nearly 1 out of every 10 visitors that come from LinkedIn become a lead.
Great Island Technologies is a certified full services inbound marketing agency and devoted HubSpot certified partner located in Portsmouth, NH. They help their clients get found online, build their brand or service’s audience, convert more qualified leads, and produce more sales. They’ve been #HubSpotting since July 2011.
