One of the great things about Dux-Soup is that it automates LinkedIn activity and supports all LinkedIn plans:
✅ Free LinkedIn
✅ LinkedIn Premium
✅ Sales Navigator
✅ Recruiter
But your plan will determine how you can best use automation. So it can get a little confusing.
So we ran a live webinar to cover the top 3 tactics for LinkedIn outreach that you can use with both a Free LinkedIn or Sales Navigator plan as these are the two that we get asked about the most.
You can watch the LinkedIn outreach power tactics webinar or read this blog for the highlights.
These 3 LinkedIn strategies can be used by both free and Sales Nav users:
- Building hyper-targeted lists with the Boolean search feature
- Gaining leads from LinkedIn events
- Targeting ‘in-market’ audiences with post likes
And we also introduce a bonus tactic - using Google search (it's worth reading to the bottom for).
Are you ready? Let’s begin.
Free vs Paid LinkedIn: the basics
First, let’s cover some of the key differences between free and paid LinkedIn accounts. Of particular relevance to automating outreach is the search capabilities, the ability to save lead lists, the levels of activity, and the connection message personalization. We summarize them here:
You can check out our LinkedIn Premium Plans blog, which covers the full differences between LinkedIn’s various plans.
When it comes to limits with each of the plans, here are some of the important ones to note.
Note: Your limits will depend on your individual LinkedIn profile and Social Selling Index, so these are guidelines rather than hard and fast rules.
Now you know the limits, let's explore our 3 tactics.
Power Tactic 1: Boolean Search
Boolean search can be used with any LinkedIn plan. If you’ve never heard of Boolean search, it allows you to combine keywords in the search bar with operators like AND, NOT, and OR during your search. So, in real terms, this is how you could use it:
NOT: to exclude e.g. ‘Sales NOT Marketing’
OR: to include either e.g. ‘Sales OR Marketing’
AND: to include both terms e.g. ‘Sales AND Marketing’. This function typically limits search results.
Use these terms in the search bar to allow more in-depth targeting.
For example:
(Marketing OR Sales) AND (“Vice President” OR Director) - here, the results must contain searches that fit both the first and second set of brackets. We use speech marks to combine Vice President into a single search term.
(Marketing NOT Sales) AND (“Vice President” NOT Director) will result in a very different search result from the first Boolean search.
⏩ Use Boolean searches to get your target list really tight so you can personalize your outreach better.
Power Tactic 2: Using LinkedIn Events
There are a ton of events on LinkedIn, and these can be a great source of prospects that are interested in a specific topic.
Anyone, regardless of their LinkedIn plan, can attend one of these public events, giving you access to a list of profiles that are showing interest in a topic and allowing you to be really targeted with your outreach message.
Step 1: Search for an event. Here, I type in ‘LinkedIn automation’ and then select the ‘Event’ filter and it comes up with 4 results. One of them has 65 attendees, so I’m going to register for that one.
Once registered, you’ll be able to click on the attendee list and it will pull up a list that Dux-Soup can automate outreach to.
Now I can either choose to manually enroll individual contacts into Dux-Soup Turbo/Cloud campaigns using the Dux widget on the right, or enroll the entire list in a single click from the Dux-Soup extension.
Let’s share a use case for this:
Say I want to target people that use Oracle, by typing Oracle in the search bar and finding local events, we can attend or register for those of interest to gain access to the list.
But we won’t stop here. We can now add further filters e.g. location.
PLUS we can add the Boolean search terms in the search bar and get the search really tight.
Next, by creating a Dux-Soup outreach campaign that sends a connection message leading with ‘I know that you’re attending the Oracle event………?’, you’re making your message really relevant.
You can use a similar approach with user groups and build out some powerful campaigns to engage with your ideal prospects.
⏩ Use LinkedIn events to increase your connection rates by making it more relevant.
Power Tactic 3: How to scrape posts on LinkedIn for targeting purposes.
This is great for scraping likes on competitors’ posts. Here’s how it works:
Step 1: Scrape the post likes
Go to any post from your competitor that has lots of likes. Here’s an example:
Click on the 101 likes, and the list of people who like it will open up.
You’ll notice Dux-Soup’s ‘At your service!’ box appear which means that Dux-Soup has now recognized the list and can work on it.
You can go ahead and enroll all these people into a campaign from the Dux-Soup extension, but you probably don’t want to do that. Why? Because some of them may work for a competitor, or aren’t in your target audience.
Instead of enrolling, click on the ‘Scan’ button in the Dux-Soup extension. This sets Dux-Soup to work scraping the surface data for the 101 profiles on the list. You can then download the data by clicking on the download arrow in your extension.
Step 2: Cleanse/scrub it
Once you’ve downloaded your list, you can go through it, removing any profiles you don’t want to target. You’ll be left with a list of LinkedIn URLs of people who liked a post, and who you’ve manually checked.
Although in this case we don’t know for sure that these people use Vanta, we can use the reference in our messaging.
So go to your Dux-Dash Drip Campaigns and create a new campaign.
You could create a connection message that says something like:
“Hi _FN_, wanted to connect as I saw we’re in similar industries. Out of curiosity, have you ever heard of a company called Vanta? I’d be interested on your thoughts on them.”
Or it could be something about ISO27001 that was the subject of the post they liked: “Hey _FN_, just looking at ISO27001. Is that something your company is certified in?”
Your follow-up could then be “Thanks for the connection, wondering do you use Vanta?”
Your final follow-up could be around the differences in your approach to solving a problem.
If you want to be ultra-personal, you can visit your prospect’s company page and find out what they’ve got on their corporate agenda, e.g. an event, or a social responsibility program for example, and mention that in your outreach.
For campaign techniques, watch from the 35 min mark of the webinar.
Step 3: Re-upload it into Dux-Soup to enroll into a campaign.
Once you’ve got your campaign messaging ready, and your data scrubbed, you need to get the cleansed data back into Dux-Soup. There are 2 ways to do that:
- Copy the list of LinkedIn URLs of the profiles you want to target from your spreadsheet and paste them straight into your campaign of choice by chooseing ‘enroll from clipboard’ in the Funnel Flow section of the Dux-Dash.
- Upload a csv version of your file by clicking ‘enroll from file’ on the same Funnel Flow screen.
⏩ Use LinkedIn post likes to allow more personalization, driving higher response rates.
So there you have it, 3 ways to automate your LinkedIn lead gen with both a Free LinkedIn Plan or Sales Nav, using Dux-Soup. These hacks will help you to scale your sales pipeline and save you heaps of time, like the very best growth hackers do.
Start your free Dux-Soup Trial today and follow along with this blog to get started.
Bonus: X-Ray Google Search
Did you know that you can use Dux-Soup on Google Search results also?
- Go to Google search
- Make sure your search starts with site://linkedin.com/in
- Add your Boolean search e.g. (“Marketing Director” OR “VP Marketing” OR “CMO”) AND (“manufacturing” OR “industrial engineering”)
Google will give you a list of LinkedIn profiles that match your Boolean search. And the really clever bit? Dux-Soup will say ‘At your service’ once it recognises the list and you can enroll them into your campaigns.
From a Google search straight into an automated LinkedIn campaign in just a few seconds.
Pretty neat, huh?
Watch the full webinar and listen to the questions at https://event.eu.on24.com/wcc/r/8000132215/59429046E2D6ECC81E6DAFDA8413141F
