Every single day we receive notifications from relevant and irrelevant people visiting our website.
The 29th of October 2018 was one of those days.
At exactly 5.16 pm, we received this notification in our Slack from Albacross (I’ll show you exactly how to set this up later in this guide).
This is a notification from a company based in my country, Belgium.
This is how we went from a simple slack notification from an undefined lead to building report with a high potential lead, and we will show you how to do the exact same thing.
From unknown to high potential
Since the content on our website is mostly tailored towards B2B Marketers and Founders, our guess was that it was one of these profiles visiting our website.
It was time to reach out.
I decided to connect with their Sales and Marketing Manager on LinkedIn.
If you don’t speak Dutch, it’s important to know that the message I sent below wasn’t automated.
It’s me spending 1 minute of my time to find something interesting about their profile to make sure they know I actually spend time observing it.
Why?
Here is where it gets interesting (if I may say so).
There is one golden rule -or tip- I always keep in mind, and like to share.
People are curious creatures.
If somebody wants to connect with us, or is posting relevant stuff on LinkedIn, we want to know more about them.
The truth is that the person I reached out to, didn’t accept my invite straight away. Which is fairly normal.
But suddenly, this happened.
We got a notification or a ‘whoop whoop’ as we like to call it.
The same person I had reached out to, downloaded our growth process ebook.
The person who still didn’t accept my invite. Just yet.
But it didn’t stop there.
Right after that, I got notified that the same person wanted to join our B2B Marketers and Founders Facebook group.
We asked him what he would consider to be his biggest challenge, and got the following as a response:
“Setting up a new corporate company for a 1,8 bn company in Belgium. I could use some help to do this”.
Talk about a match made in heaven for a B2B marketing consultant.
Here is the best part.
Each time a member answers the 3 questions to join our Facebook Group, we use our own in-house scraper called Socialtribes to shoot that data right into our google sheet.
A google sheet we can use to increase the data we know about our leads and what content we should be producing.
His reply to ‘where did you hear about us?’.
“A guy (which would be me) asked me to connect on LinkedIn and I started surfing around.”
2 minutes later, my LinkedIn invite was accepted.
Talk about validating the point of humans being curious creatures.
This is exactly how we went from an undefined lurker on our website to a high-potential lead from which we have gathered the following data from:
- His monthly marketing spends (we ask while signing up for our ebook).
- His biggest challenge.
- What he wants to achieve in our community.
- How he found us.
- What website URLs he was spending the most time on.
- ….
Not a bad start for a first conversation on LinkedIn to build rapport.
The best part?
He is not in one, but two nurturing funnels.
- The first one is obvious. It’s our email funnel we created when he downloaded our ebook.
- The second one might be less obvious for most people. It’s the LinkedIn content marketing funnel where we share relevant B2B tips on my profile. From now on, he gets to see these on his newsfeed.
A powerful way to stay top of the mind without being pushy.
I will show you how to achieve this, and also how I would start with LinkedIn content marketing if I were to start all over again.
How to get real-time notifications from your leads in your communication channel (Slack)
By connecting Albacross with your CRM or Slack, you are able to notify anybody in the team when a valuable lead is on your website.
This is a way to identify potentials leads, without them having to leave any contact details.
And this is how we did it.
Keep in mind that this is a pro feature. If you are on the free plan, change your settings to receiving the lead information details daily.
This is how to set up your notifications in your Slack.
- Create a free Zapier account
- Head over to your integration page and click on ‘click me’
- Scroll down a little and accept the invite, start by creating your first zap
- Choose Albacross and pick the 3rd option ‘New lead’
- Connect your account by using your API key, which you can find right here
- Test your account and continue
- If you haven’t applied filters yet to your data, you can leave it blank for now (this is an advanced option where you can pull in data that is from only your country for example)
- Pick out a sample and continue
- Create your next Action Step zap
- Connect with your Slack (or other communication tools where you want to receive the updates)
- Pick the option ‘send channel message’
- Test (or connect) your account and continue
- Pick a channel (in our case, it’s called ‘leads’) or create a new one for your Albacross leads
- Set up the message you want to receive (time to get creative), here is one way to do it:
This is what it looks like in Zapier:
- Continue and press ‘test your step’. If everything goes well, you should now have a lovely message on your slack channel
- Name it and switch it on. Good job!
You are all set up to start receiving those first leads into your slack.
Now you know how to get notified when a valuable lead drops by. Let’s start by getting the right people to visit your website.
The best way to start with LinkedIn Content Marketing.
When I started out using LinkedIn for lead generation, I had no idea what I was doing.
The first thing I figured out was that I could automate my LinkedIn outreach.
And a few moments later, that’s exactly what I was doing.
I started out with sending messages to people with gated content.
People that didn’t even knew, liked or trusted me.
The result?
Not a single reply.
Not a single sign up.
Not a single relationship build.
I had to find another way to build relationships and trust, preferably at scale.
After spending hours digging through the possibilities, I decided to go all-in to acquire B2B leads with LinkedIn content marketing.
I perfected a unique blend between sharing my personal story and sharing my expertise to get my content in front of the right people, and eventually get them to visit my website.
Content, like my LinkedIn Content Marketing ebook, people are still sharing today.
I know that you won’t get there by posting just one post on LinkedIn.
However, on the 16th of October 2018, LinkedIn announced a change in their Algorithm.
A change in favor of the ‘little guys’ just starting out.
One of these changes is that you’ll see a lot more comments and likes from people within your network.
Learn More On The Topic
- Convert Prospects Into Customers: The Definitive Guide (2020)
- 3 Sales Strategies to Double Down On in 2020
- How to Create the Ideal Customer Profile
- Ultimate Guide to B2B Email Marketing
- Lead Nurturing: The Definitive Guide (2020)
- A guide to using Google Ads for B2B lead generation
- Converting Website Visitors To Leads: A Marketers 8-Step Action Plan
- How to Use Albacross’ Tracking Tool to Find Your Hottest Leads
- 7 Most Common Mistakes in a B2B Lead Generation Process
So, if I were start all over again, this is how I would approach it:
- Read the free LinkedIn Content Marketing ebook
- Scroll through your feed and find a question or topic your target audience has on LinkedIn
- Give it your best answer and be confident in doing so, you are after all the expert in your field
- Save that content in a Google Drive or Evernote until you are fully prepared to start sharing it with the world in a structured way
In fact, all the stuff you are reading above wasn’t specifically written for this blog post, but it is rather an accumulation of various previous comments or answers that I had already provided on LinkedIn
Comments my target audience sees, which helps to establish credibility in what I do.
Time to make those potential leads curious enough to visit your website.
You know how to take it from there.
Ricardo Ghekiere
Growth Marketing Consultant
I’m an entrepreneurial growth marketing consultant passionate about growing ambitious B2B companies in a processed and proven way, with a deep-channel expertise of LinkedIn. I share my passion for growth teams and processes, data analytics, and side project marketing to grow companies in a sustainable way on my actionable personal blog. If you are looking to learn more from B2B Marketers and Founders, join the community here.