If there’s one thing most marketers can agree on when it comes to social media marketing, is that it’s a very time-consuming task and that it takes time to take your results to where you want to get them. That’s why you need to leverage tools to help you not only make the most of your time, but also so you can generate better and better results, time and time again – only, how do you know what tools to choose in this overcrowded market?

In this blog post, I’m going to talk about LinkedIn marketing and show you how to save time and boost your results with the following tools.

But first, what types of tools do you need?

Well, needs might vary from account to account, but generally, you need:

• A social media management tool to help you manage comments and respond, as well as to plan and schedule your updates, among others
• Content creation tools to help you easily create visual content to publish on your profile or Company Page
• For B2B marketers and businesses, LinkedIn is a very powerful channel for lead generation and sales, so leverage sales tools on LinkedIn to further boost your results
• As before, if you work in B2B and use LinkedIn for lead generation, then you also need another important sales tool to help: a sales prospecting tool to help you reach out to any potential customers
• Any good social media strategy requires analytics – you need to know how you’re currently performing in order to find ways to improve your strategy and keep getting better and better results

For lead generation and sales: LinkedIn Sales Navigator

We’ve talked a lot about managing your channel or Page and creating content for it, but what about actually getting results from LinkedIn? What about B2B businesses that use LinkedIn also as a social selling tool?

That’s where the LinkedIn Sales Navigator comes in – a tool built by LinkedIn to help users develop better lead generation strategies and get better results.

The tool has several useful features, including an advanced lead and company search:

Which, as you can see above, gives you a lot of targeting options; for example, select what security level you want the prospect to have as well as how many years at current company.

As the tool gets to know you – and your needs – you’ll start receiving personalized lead recommendations that might be worth reaching out to:

Plus, you also get CRM tool integration so you can easily keep track of all of these opportunities, as well as your progress. What’s more, you can organise these leads with tags and notes which can then also be synced with your CRM tool.

Once you have your generated prospecting list from Sales Navigator, you can’t really save it to your computer. However, you can use the search link URL and add it to automated outreach tools, which will then allow you to send personalized messages automatically to your Sales Navigator prospects

Oh, and you get to see a longer list of people who have viewed your profile – all of the people who checked out your profile in the last 90 days.

For visual content creation: Canva

LinkedIn is a much more visual platform than one might expect; while it may not be Instagram or Snapchat, LinkedIn users still tend to follow the same trends as other social networks (like Facebook or Twitter) in terms the content they prefer – namely, visual content.

And if there’s one rule that works across the board is this: always use images when sharing updates or links.

And it’s not just images and videos, but also presentations; so, how do you easily create all of this visual content that you need?

One of the best tools for this is Canva, which allows you to create (for free) all kinds of visual content, from simple social media images to complex infographics and presentations and to pretty much any custom design you can think of.

It’s easy to use and it has a huge library of templates and images (both free and paid); to get started, you just need to select the design you want to create (a social media image, a presentation, etc.) and start creating:

Each type of design has its own set of templates to choose from, although you can always start from scratch as well; plus, the builder and editor are very easy to use, so you’ll be able to create pretty much any visuals you need for your LinkedIn channel or Page (including LinkedIn banners!).

For sales prospecting: Lusha

Following up on the previous tool, once you find any high quality leads…well, you need to reach out to them. But for that, you need their direct contact information.

This is where Lusha comes in; once you’ve set up the browser extension, you’ll be able to use it every time you’re on LinkedIn and viewing someone’s profile:

The Lusha “head” will pop up automatically on LinkedIn, and if you’re viewing someone’s profile or Page and Lusha found their contact information, you’ll see numbers on the icon – click on it to see the exact contacts it found (emails, phone numbers).

When you click on a number or email (you can only preview parts of them), only then will you spend one credit – and you get 5 free ones each month.

Conclusion

LinkedIn marketing – and social media marketing in general – can be so much more successful (and less time-consuming) with the right tools to help.

Start by focusing on your LinkedIn objectives, build a strategy around those objectives, then leverage tools and apps to help you actually reach those objectives as quickly and as effectively as possible.  If you’d like to discover more LinkedIn insights that will drive your social growth, use a social media analytics tool like Sotrender.