LinkedIn has long been the prime focus of every B2B marketer, and rightly so. Of all the social media platforms, 97% of B2B business leads depend on LinkedIn. And it comes with a conversion rate 3 times higher than any other channel.
The social media mammoth is the ‘it’ thing for generating high-quality leads and growing a business network. That leads us to the undeniable fact — investing in LinkedIn marketing tools can take your business growth to an all-time high!
What tools, you ask? Up next, we’ve compiled a list of pretty useful marketing tools to aid your LinkedIn strategy.
But first…
Let’s not forget the powerful in-built prospecting tool that LinkedIn provides —
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Sales Navigator is the ultimate LinkedIn lead generation and qualification tool for B2B businesses. It’s a paid service by LinkedIn that helps you reach ideal customers, build your contact list, and achieve crazy conversion rates. All of this simply by:
Tapping the enormous user base of ≥740 million
Filtering results with powerful search queries and algorithms
Providing you with actionable insights for your target buyer profiles
And know what? You can automate the complete process using Phantombuster's “Sales Navigator Search Export” to extract search results directly into a CSV file.
LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI)
Social Selling Index (SSI) is a metric that portrays the strength of your professional brand on LinkedIn. It gauges your LinkedIn profile on 4 components (refer to the image), giving you a broad idea about what you need to change for a successful LinkedIn growth strategy. The higher your SSI, the more likely you are to be found and to generate leads.
Analyse your SSI for free through this link.
Youssef's SSI score on April 16, 2021
Top 10 LinkedIn Tools in 2021
1. Photo Feeler
Free (with paid plans)
PhotoFeeler is a business and social profile picture testing tool that gives you objective feedback to improve your profile photo on several parameters such as likeability, influence, competency, background, clarity, etc.
Why It Helps
Uses both human voters and AI-assisted algorithms to test your LinkedIn profile photo.
Gives you measurable objective feedback in the form of scores, data, and notes.
Helps you pick a LinkedIn profile picture that stands out and makes a great first impression on prospects.
Remember: A good profile picture creates a subconscious bias for you in the minds of your connections. You always remember that guy/girl with a friendly, reliable face!
How to Use
Sign up on the Photofeeler website with your LinkedIn account.
Import your LinkedIn profile photo to test.
Chose the test level (Karma, Rough, Standard, Precise, or Very Precise)
Wait for the test results as the algorithm takes feedback from several people. It might take a few days to a few weeks.
Note: In order to earn votes on your profile picture, you’ll need to either vote on others’ or buy voting credits.
2. Shield Analytics
Paid (with 10-day free trial)
Shield is an all-in-one LinkedIn Analytics tool that gives you measurable insights related to engagement on your profile on metrics like profile views, post comments, follower growth, etc.
Why It Helps
Displays who engages with your content, their demographics, and other data-points
Gives a comprehensive view with scannable dashboards comparing your LinkedIn growth.
Tells you what works and what doesn’t on LinkedIn for engagement.
Specially built for large teams and agencies to track multiple accounts simultaneously.
3. Publer
Free (with paid upgrades)
Publer is a free LinkedIn account management tool that helps you schedule posts and comments on your profile for consistent engagement.
Why It Helps
Saves time and efforts required for regularly posting content on your profile.
Schedule bulk posts and comments for multiple accounts and platforms at once.
Has built-in editing tools to enhance, customize, and watermark all your posts.
Provides you with a calendar view of all your content to help you plan ahead.
Increases the LinkedIn profile authority because of timely and consistent post updates.
4. Snov.io
Free
Snov.io is a CRM platform that helps you in generating leads on LinkedIn and streamlining your sales funnel with multi-channel integrations.
Why It Helps
Facilitates cold outreach by providing you with contact information of 2nd and 3rd level connections.
Finds and verifies email addresses individually as well as in bulk.
Designs and executes drip email campaigns by directly integrating LinkedIn leads with your Gmail account.
Offers 2000+ integrations with productivity tools to make your sales funnel efficient.
5. Crystal
Free Trial (10 free views)
Crystal is a personality assessment tool that gives you highly specific behavioral data on your prospects to understand them better.
Why It Helps
Tells you what your prospects are like, how they behave, and their decision-making style.
Good for designing personalized content and outreach emails that sync well with your prospect’s personality.
Enables you to build meaningful relationships with customers by using a persuasive communication style tailored for them.
You can also view a person’s complete profile, preferences, style, and even personalized pitch templates for sales, hiring, etc. Or if you’re in for something more detailed, compare various profiles.
P.S. — Most of the time, its analysis is spot on! So, do give it a try and you’d be surprised!
6. ResumeWorded
Free (with Paid upgrades)
ResumeWorded is an AI-powered tool that gives you free Linkedin profile reviews. Amp it up by uploading your job resume and it’ll give you objective points to improve 🙂
Why It Helps
Rates all sections of your profile (headline, summary, experience, etc) on several parameters like impact, brevity, styles, etc.
Gives you actionable tips to optimize your LinkedIn profile and attract the right people.
Drives 5 times more leads and business opportunities to your profile with tailored feedback.
7. Preview Panda
Free
PreviewPanda is one of the coolest tools to supercharge your LinkedIn outreach messages by personalizing them with creative previews. It’s the best tool you can use for hyper-personalization and standing out from the crowd! 😎
Why It Helps
Creates previews of prospect’s websites or LinkedIn profile with an overlay image of you pointing at it.
Messages with PandaPreview instantly grab the attention of the prospect and make you stand out.
PreviewPanda can increase the reply rate for cold messages by up to 4 times.
8. ProTop
Paid (with free trial)
ProTop is a super-useful chrome extension that helps you auto-visit LinkedIn profiles of prospects to drive engagement.
Why It Helps
Finds and auto-visits profiles in bulk based on the search input provided by you.
People see who they visited their LinkedIn profile and about 8% of them return to check your services.
Good for increasing engagement with the prospect’s profile and making yourself visible.
9. Discover.ly
Free
Discover.ly is a chrome extension that provides you information on other social media channels your LinkedIn connections are using.
Why It Helps
Enriches your lead generation process with additional information on the prospect’s digital presence
Facilitates multi-channel cold outreach on Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
Indirectly helps you fetch more objective and behavioral data of your leads.
10. Zopto
Paid
Zopto is a premium LinkedIn automation tool that facilitates lead generation by designing and executing personalized campaigns.
Why It Helps
Automates the lead generation process with personalized message sequences, free inmails, connection invites, and Twitter engagement.
Offers advanced filtering on 100s of criteria to further qualify leads
Increases your visibility in extended professional networks to attract prospects.
Summing Up…
In addition to useful productivity tools, form a strong branding and outreach strategy to rank/grow on LinkedIn. One major ranking hack is the concept called Profile Reverse Engineering.
LinkedIn gives you relevant search results for every query. Even for completely irrelevant queries like ‘Apple Creampie’!
PROFILE REVERSE ENGINEERING
See, certain profiles show up on top for all your targeted keywords (based on service, work, industry, location, etc).
Reverse Engineering a profile by seeing who is ranking in your industry with the help of various tools (Snov.io / ProTop).
Test these profiles on different parameters (Crystal / Discover.ly) to see what works for them.
Optimize your profile according to the feedback to outrank your competitors.
Backed by the right strategy, these tools will unfold tremendous network growth and out-of-the-roof conversion rates through LinkedIn. One of the recipes for scaling a business to success!
Over to you, Scaler!
Team The Scalelab