The world’s largest professional market has 772 million individual users and 30 million companies. Compared to other platforms, LinkedIn has limited the usage of its API by third-party applications. While this looks weird to most brands and their marketers, the approach makes some sense.
Enhanced privacy makes LinkedIn a safe platform. For instance, you can’t message someone outside your network unless a person connected to the intended contact introduces you to them. However, this makes it harder to increase your LinkedIn connections.
In case you get the connection, LinkedIn focuses on professional lives, and the decision-making demographic is strong here, thus making the site a great platform for social selling. You can still sell on this closed network using social selling tools.
Here are 10 handpicked LinkedIn Tools and tips to help you maximize them. LinkedIn itself directly offers the majority of these tools.
Dux-Soup
The LinkedIn marketing tool automatically engages with your network, searches, and attracts potential customers. That means it looks for profiles of people interested in what you’re offering to engage with and boost your own LinkedIn profile. This prompts the target to hopefully connect with you when they visit your profile upon receiving the notifications like “you’ve been found in a search, or you’ve been visited.”
Dux-Soup endorses people for skills, helps users post things on profiles, or send automated greetings. It can also interface with your CRM software when you opt for the highest tier of service.
This cost-effective LinkedIn social selling tool offers the following plans:
- A Free plan with basic features and an auto-filter to help you find prospects.
- A Professional plan that starts at $14.99 per user per month offers extra features that you need to both organize and share profile data as well as generate leads.
- The Turbo plan is the most expensive plan that starts at $55 per user per month and offers automatic follow-up features that enable you to set up several drip campaigns, workflow integrations, and performance dashboards to link your CRM.
Expandi
The LinkedIn marketing automation tool enables you to build your contact list, automate responses, work with LinkedIn chat as well as manage campaigns. Although LinkedIn has been kicking off users using various automation tools, Expandi will not get you into such problems because it was designed to work with Recruiter Premium and Sales Navigator. In other words, LinkedIn gets its cut because the tool is compatible with its premium memberships.
Further, Expandi enables its users to leverage analytics and campaign tracking. It’s rated one of the safest tools because it automatically warms up the profile, uses random delays in addition to message limits. Its campaign metrics give you key insights into the performance of your sales strategy. The only downside of using Expandi.io is that you have to handle the messaging and engagement part.
The social selling tool has a single plan that starts at $99 per user per month. This gives you access to automated sequences, unlimited campaigns, and other fantastic features. You can begin with a free seven-day trial before upgrading to the paid version.
Leadfeeder
The LinkedIn tool works with Google Analytics to help users uncover hidden sales leads. Most people don’t reveal what they’re interested in on social media and might discuss their interests without mentioning their favorite products or services. But you can leverage Google Analytics to uncover those hidden leads. Leadfeeder is a social selling tool that integrates well with Sales Navigator and various CRMs and applications.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Unless you’re already subscribed to LinkedIn premium, the platform will continuously encourage you to upgrade. LinkedIn focused more on job-seekers, recruiters, and high-level professionals for some years. It didn’t have a space for sales professionals until recently.
Sales Navigator was designed purposely for sales professionals to give them sales insights to help them make good decisions. That means the tool gives you the correct information about your target audience to help you find and save sales leads for future use.
This premium package gives you an interface with CRM software, a quota of InMail credits, and the ability to gather information from blocked profiles. You can build connections with team members linked to a sales lead as long as you have a team-level sales navigator account. This saves your InMail credits.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator has three paid plans:
- Professional starting at $79.99 per month per user
- Team starting at $134.99 per month per user
- Enterprise plan
Nimble
The tool offers users easy import options to enable them to transfer contact data from other sites to an easy-to-use CRM. You can use Nimble to gather data from different places and use it to send a personalized connection message via LinkedIn. This improves the likelihood of that contact accepting the connection.
Aside from making contact-building easier, Nimble has a contact manager that is able to work navigate around certain social media networks restrictions implemented in recent years. Therefore Nimble tracks your contacts irrespective of where you found them, thus making things easier.
Octopus CRM
The tool helps users build their sales funnel and connect with new and existing connections. Small business owners can now maintain their existing connections as well as make new connections, keep their messaging systems up to date.
It also serves as an analyst and enables users to review their marketing strategy to determine what works well with LinkedIn ads, bulk message systems, and automated messages set in place. The social selling tool has added safety features in order to eliminate the breach of passwords and contact information. These also alert account owners in the event of fraudulent activity or suspicious attempts.
Phantom Buster
Social media sites don’t allow data scraping tools. The use of a data scraper is, in fact, a breach of their terms of service. However, marketers still use them because they’re a great growth hack, although they carry some risks.
Phantom Buster is a less risky data scraping tool that works with online platforms such as LinkedIn, and that helps you get those sales leads. The tool enables users to automatically respond to social media posts, messages or accept connection requests.
Further, Phantom Buster helps you find hidden emails on LinkedIn. Actually, you can download emails for up to the third connection using this data scraping LinkedIn tool because it scans the information while searching for actionable insights about any specified member.
Shield App
The LinkedIn tool helps users use analytics and statistics that they gather on the platform to another level. The analytic tool is very specific to LinkedIn, so it uses it together with Google native analytics to gather needed data.
Actually, the application begins to gather information immediately when you link it with your LinkedIn account. A company with a business account can add several LinkedIn profiles and view them from a common dashboard. This helps them see what is working across clients and compare their performance.
Additionally, Shield helps you keep track of the categories, their content, and audience demographics, thus bolstering your social selling efforts.
Zopto
The automation tool provides a one-stop-shop for automation, lead generation, insight and data, integration with sales tools and CRM systems. It also serves as a platform for multiple users. The statistics help you review your marketing efforts and provide cloud-based systems that connect you with a professional network and allow you to use sales tools wherever you are. Zopto is the perfect tool for users struggling with organic searches or following up on their leads.
The tool improves your visibility on this platform and helps you target your audience. Marketers can use its advanced filtering features to find prospects in order to grow their network. Its host of automation tools, including high-converting templates and advanced scheduling, make campaigns more profitable.
Zopto has a Quarterly plan option that helps users save up to 20% compared to the monthly option. Alternatively, you can pay between $215 and $895 per month.
We-Connect
The social selling tool automates the messaging process. It provides different template options and helps you craft personalized messages to reach out to potential connections. We-Connect eliminates the tendency to send canned, spammy messages whenever you want to reach out to hundreds of prospects. The goal is to save time and energy as you grow your network and reach out to qualified prospects.
We-Connect is not a full lead generation software, but it’s a perfect tool for automating your LinkedIn marketing efforts. This supports organic conversation starters as opposed to automating messaging.
Takeaway
The competition is high on LinkedIn, so brands and their marketers should use the right social selling tool stack because they guarantee tremendous performance. The article has highlighted 10 LinkedIn tools to boost your marketing efforts and sales.
Instead of investing in endless tools, you can select a single social selling application with advanced features and enhanced capabilities that fits well with your budget. Let us know your favorite tool out of the ones mentioned above.
News Source: Apple Gazette
