Digital marketing has cemented its authority as the number one mode of marketing to reach their target audience and spreading the word about a brand. With that being the case, more and more businesses are leaning towards LinkedIn as their marketing platform of choice.
For businesses across different industries - especially the ones catering to the business audience - LinkedIn is a powerful platform that can propel companies to maximize their reach and get their message across to the right audience. When building a vast business network is on the agenda - be it for business or individuals - LinkedIn is the go-to platform.
But as with any other platform, there is a huge audience out there, and it is growing by the hour. Trying to connect with each user through a manual process won't just lead to awfully slow progress, but you will not be able to make as many connections as you should in a given time. Also, there are too many activities to be performed and as the stakes go up, too much data to handle. This is where the LinkedIn automation tools come in handy.
LinkedIn tools make it a far easier to auto connect with new connections than a regular, non-automated approach; which would eventually make it easier for you to pitch your products and show your content to those newly gained connections. The further benefits include increased views and messages in your LinkedIn inbox. These tools are especially useful for those with multiple LinkedIn accounts, as they can rid them of the time-consuming and repetitive tasks and focus on the more core functions.
Expandi is a cloud based platform that markets itself as the safest LinkedIn automation tool. Their USP is that none of their clients will ever get blacklisted on LinkedIn for they offer intelligent and advanced targeting. This Linkedin lead generation tool focuses on making new connections without violating LinkedIn safety practices. Some of the Expandi features are drip campaigns, lead generation, contact database, personalised campaigns etc.
Now let us check out the features of this cloud based automation software:
- Get a dedicated country based IP address for your account and increase your visibility and profile views.
- Random delays between different actions to ensure that the interaction with your Linkedin lead feels more organic and human-like.
- The auto warm-up feature ensures that there is a gradual increase in your daily campaign limit every day to make your Linkedin account look more credible. You can send 100 connection requests and 100 messages in one day.
- Create and send personalised automated messages to your target audience based on their interaction with other Linkedin posts.
- Understand your campaign better with the key insights and campaign metrics.
- Amp up your LinkedIn lead generation efforts by exporting your previously generated leads to your Expandi account in CSV file format.
Expandi Pricing: Expandi doesn't offer a free trial and offers a single plan priced at $99 per account per month.
Dux Soup is a very popular tool among businesses that want to generate leads. This tool makes it a seamless exercise to find prospects, attract them to your business and engage them for having higher chances of conversion.
Essentially, Dux Soup is a Google Chrome extension that can be installed easily and based on the plan you use; you can avail its features.
- With Dux Soup installed and activated, you can use it to visit the LinkedIn profiles of your prospects automatically. And not just that, Dux Soup can also endorse the skills of your connections, subscribe for the updates from the connection profiles and, most importantly, send personalized images that look like coming from a real person.
- Managing your prospects in a way that you are always on top of the communications sent to them is also made possible with Dux Soup. when you visit and review a profile, you can leave notes and tags, based on your observations. It not only helps in easily finding or referencing them on a later date, but you can also perform certain actions based on the references and notes you had created earlier. The best part is that you can implement this functionality for any profile - whether or not they are part of your connections. What this does basically is that it turns your LinkedIn profile into a full-fledged leads management system. Because you can find previously tagged profiles and perform a range of follow-up actions, there is a sense of structure that is lent to your lead management through LinkedIn.
- What's more, is that you can even upload a list of profiles that can then be used for targeting sales campaigns. This uploading can be done on a CRM system that you may be using or a simple spreadsheet. Dux Soup also facilitates downloading the profile details you uploaded previously. This serves as a great boon for your lead generation efforts and really helps move the needle towards the ultimate marketing and sales goals of your company.
- With Dux Soup, a user can select a custom time to go by between performing different actions. It also enables scheduled running so that you can auto connect and reach your prospects at a time they are most likely to engage with you. Dux Soup can also save you a lot of time that would have otherwise been wasted away looking at misfit profiles, as you can set certain rules. These rules serve as filters and deliver to you only the most relevant profiles for your LinkedIn marketing efforts.
- Like any other platform, LinkedIn has its own 'fair use' limits that must be adhered to at all times. In the event you are exploiting LinkedIn for your business, there are consequences to face, which may render your LinkedIn marketing efforts ineffective. In order to ensure that you do not fall for this trap, Dux Soup ensures you stay with the 'fair use' limits at all times.
- Dux soup has built a reputation for providing great support. They provide live chat support during EU and US business hours, and you can also get in touch with the support team via email.
Pricing for Dux Soup: Dux Soup comes in 3 packages - the free forever plan and 2 paid plans.
The free plan is also called the Starter plan, and it provides a host of features to the users. With this plan, you can find prospects on LinkedIn, avail support services - be it as a business user or sales navigator, but not if you are a recruiter.
You can also run campaigns for LinkedIn users you have tagged previously. You can tag at the most 100 profiles with this plan.
The Professional plan is a paid plan wherein you enjoy even more features. This plan comes at the cost of 11.25 Dollars per month and, apart from the features that the free plan contains, it also provides the facility to avail support services as a recruiter, upload your list of profiles and visit profiles based on the CSVs downloaded previously instead of visiting random and irrelevant profiles.
In addition, this plan also offers the auto-engage feature to increase engagement with connections. There is no limit on the number of profiles you tag with this plan.
To scale up your business in a big way, you can use the Turbo plan. Starting at 41.25 Dollars, the Turbo plan is truly of an enterprise scale. Using this plan, you can have all the features from the standard and professional plan, like finding prospects, support services, CSV download and upload, the difference being that the volume of data for each service goes up considerably with this plan. You can tag unlimited profiles with the Turbo plan.
As a lead generation software, LeadFuze is a name trusted by many, especially the marketing teams of businesses that sell products for business clients. LeadFuze proves to be highly instrumental in lead generation as it helps businesses engage qualified prospects that are most likely to be interested in the products being sold. And it is not just the top of the funnel prospects, but LeadFuze can also serve as a great tool to engage with the prospects in the middle of your sales funnel.
- LeadFuze can help you really get a handle on who is it that you are targeting through your marketing campaign. You can segment your LinkedIn marketing campaign through different filters, namely industry, technologies, role, double verified emails, location company news, ad budget, hiring intent, employee size, and keywords. This is a pretty well-rounded list of segmentation options that, if used correctly, should give you the best quality prospects.
- You have the option to select only the roles that you want to target for your campaign and have a cap on the number of prospects that belong to that role.
- You can also let LeadFuze perform its automation whereby it creates a list for you. The FuzeBot feature of LeadFuze is a smart, AI-powered feature that will fetch the most relevant contacts from any list - small or exhaustive. For this purpose, it scans the entire web to look for potential leads, and as and when it finds something that is of value to your business, it gets automatically added to your list.
- As discussed earlier, integration with a CRM goes a long way in organizing your contacts and keeping the ball rolling when it comes brand-consumer interaction. And LeadFuze integrates with a host of CRM solutions that include Salesforce, HubSpot, Zapier, GSuite and many more.
LeadFuze Pricing: LeadFuze comes primarily in 3 pricing packages - Starter, scaling and custom.
The starter plan comes at a cost of 132.3 Dollars per month. It can be availed by those who want to design their marketing strategy around accounts and can do without too many leads. You still get 500 lead credits per month with this plan.
The scaling plan comes at a cost of 447.3 Dollars per month. While the price tag is heavy, the features you get make sit sort of justified. This plan gives you 2500 lead credits per month, the facility to de-duplicate, and the integration options. If you have more leads or more than 5 users you can try their custom plan.
Linked Helper is a must-have tool when you want a way for your business to have endorsements. When your prospects see your LinkedIn account as something that sits on top of a lot of endorsements, it helps conversion rate go up by a good measure.
- With Linked Helper, your contacts automatically receive endorsements from your account and going by the user behavior on LinkedIn; you may get endorsements in return from a good percentage of contacts.
- With Linked Helper it becomes easier to expand your social network and continuously engage with them. There is the auto mailing system in place that keeps the communication line with your business partners open at all times.
- The autoresponder for LinkedIn feature makes the personalized interaction possible as it can send messages to the connections you have just added. You can even send messages in groups and the feature to invite your first connections to groups of your choice is also provided.
- The auto-visitor feature of Linked Helper provides an easy way to automate profile visits and thus help with lead generation. You can set a search criterion in order to execute a setting by which Linked Helper only visits certain types of profile, i.e., the profiles that are relevant to your business profiles.
Linked Helper Pricing: Linked Helper comes in various packages, depending upon whether you are paying for one month at a time or several.
If you sign up for just one month, you will need to pay 15 Dollars. If you sign up for 3 months, you will pay 13.33 Dollars per month for 3 months. For signing up with the 6-monthly plan, you will pay 10 Dollars per month for the duration of 6 months. And if you sign up for a 1-year plan, you will pay 8.25 dollars per month for 12 months, which will total to 99 Dollars.
Prospect.io has fast emerged as one of the most sought LinkedIn marketing tools in the marketplace, though its capabilities go much beyond LinkedIn. The LinkedIn functionality for Prospect.io comes through different forms; you can have a Prospect! button on profiles, clicking on which adds the account to your lists or you can activate LinkedIn feature though integration with Zapier.
- The Prospect! button makes life easy. Just a single click and the contact details of the profile get important in your chosen library. From thereon, you can have your specific marketing roles take over and try to convert the prospect the way they deem fit
- In order to connect Prospect.io with LinkedIn, you do not need to be a programmer; there is not a single piece of code involved in the integration. The entire process is very simple and possible for a non-tech savvy person. There are 10 integrations possible with this functionality, thereby enhancing your productivity by several degrees of magnitude.
- You can create different triggers based on an event happening on your account. For example, you can have triggers generated when you create a company update when a prospect is converted when a prospect replies when you share a post, when you archive a prospect, and more.
- It also offers plenty of integrations with several applications such as SalesForce, OutLook, HubSpot, Gmail, Slack, Pipedrive and several more.
A Google Chrome plugin, Leonard saves you from a lot of time-intensive tasks by automating the necessary processes for building LinkedIn connections' network.
- Using Leonard, you can send multiple connection requests in a matter of minutes, the best part being that you can personalize each connection request.
- Messaging is a powerful tool in order to give a personal touch to all your communication endeavors. Having said that, if you have built a huge list of connections, it is hassling and time-consuming to go to each connection individually and send them messages, especially in cases when you have the same message to be sent to a large number of people. With Leonard installed on your Chrome, you can send bulk messages, in a way turning your LinkedIn account into a mass email channel.
- One of the more non-pushy tactic to make people notice you is to view their profiles so that they get a notification about your visit; making it highly likely that they check you out. Leonard automates this process as well. You can use it to automatically visit other LinkedIn profiles and make them aware of your existence. If they visit back, there is a good chance that they find your page interesting enough, navigate across the different sections and then get in touch.
- Leonard also ensures that all the connections you make aren't laying out there wasted and unattended. It comes with the CRM function with which you can manage all your connections and run different LinkedIn campaigns to keep your network engaged with you. It does a great job of collecting data for you and then analysing it for you to extract useful knowledge about your connections and their engagement patterns with you.
Leonard Pricing: The Leonard plugin comes with different pricing plans, suiting different kinds of budgets. There is a free setting which can be availed to use the auto visit function for up to 200 profiles. Leonard has improvised their software and it is renamed as meetalfred.com
And then there are two primary paid plans, which Leonard calls premium plans - Annual and Monthly. The Monthly plan costs 49 Dollars per month per LinkedIn profile. If you instead opt for the Annual Plan, it proves to be half as expensive, as you will be charged as per the rate card of 25 Dollars per month per profile.
While the Premium plans have the same set of features as the standard plans, it is the scale of the features provided and how much you can achieve with them. Users also get the flexibility to cancel or modify their subscriptions at any time. You simply have to get in touch with the Leonard team, and they perform the required procedure. It also provides a 14-day free trial period without giving your credit card details.
SalesLoft has set out to revolutionize the sales industry, and as part of this endeavor, it is empowering businesses to use LinkedIn for the best possible results, apparently with a lot of success.
- You can integrate SalesLoft with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and start using the power of this integration for boosting your LinkedIn conversations and connections.
- With this integration, you get real-time insights on whatever is happening at the end of your contact and the company they are employed with. What this essentially does is that it helps you create a user persona which can then be used to design your entire marketing strategy for the users that truly matter.
- When you are planning to send a message to your prospect that is personal in nature, you got to know what ticks those emotions in them. SalesLoft highlights all the commonalities between you and your connection that serve as great icebreakers and let you start off on a great note.
- The workflows get simpler to understand and handle with SalesLoft, not to mention several times more efficient. You get the ability to get a peek into LinkedIn insights using just your sales engagement platform, so there is no question of you having to learn and perform elaborate steps that make the myriad of other tools very non-user-friendly.
An overview of all the Linkedin automation tools discussed in this post:
The exceptional results achieved through LinkedIn marketing has made LinkedIn the go-to platform for nearly all businesses. With this as an essential milestone for any business, it only makes sense that more and more B2B businesses are focussing heavily on reaching the audience that is active on LinkedIn. They are hiring more people, investing more time and money, having more meetings; all to strategize how to leverage all the opportunities that LinkedIn has to offer.
The automation tools mentioned above are for such businesses to deliver focus in their efforts but in a non-invasive and time- and effort-saving manner. These tools are empowering businesses to do things in innovative ways that were not thought of before. With marketing becoming the front and center of businesses today, it is a given fact that we are going to witness more advancements in LinkedIn automation.
