In this recap of a recent Dubb Support video, we are going to take a deep dive into generating leads through LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a fantastic platform to not only find your next job or hire, but to find new prospects for your business or organization. Combined with the power of video, you can build strong relationships with your LinkedIn connections and even generate a few sales. If you would like to view the entire discussion, go ahead and click on the play button above. Enjoy!
LinkedIn is one of the world’s most important social networks. What started as a small social network in 2002 has turned into an outstanding platform to further your career. Whether you are looking for a new opportunity, want to find an outstanding, A-list hire for your organization, or simply want to share your thoughts on occurrences in your sector or industry, LinkedIn is the platform for you.
Along with these things, LinkedIn is a fantastic platform to find new prospects for your organization. Whether you are a solopreneur who just started your own startup or a sales leader at a much larger organization, you can use LinkedIn to identify warm prospects and increase your conversion rate. That’s not all. Combining the power of LinkedIn with the power of video makes your job so much easier. By creating valuable videos and sharing them with your LinkedIn community, you can more seamlessly find more leads and reach your sales goals.
Because this combination of LinkedIn and video is so popular, I want to spend some time discussing how you can leverage both tools together. To do so, we are also going to be speaking about Dubb. If you already have a Dubb account, you are good to go. If you haven’t yet signed up for Dubb, however, you can do so by clicking here. New users get a free 14-day trial for our premium plans, so I encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity today.
Why Video Is So Powerful
To kick off this conversation, I want to speak about why video is so powerful. If you are reading this article, you probably know why LinkedIn is such a game-changer. The platform has hundreds of millions of users for a reason. At the same time, there are plenty of sales and marketing professionals who may be exclusively relying on phone calls and text-based communication for their prospecting work. While you can certainly get sales that way, I believe that video offers several key advantages over text.
For starters, video helps you tell better stories. As humans, we are wired to hear stories. Ever since we were hunters and gatherers seated around a campfire, we came to explore the meaning of life through stories. While you can tell stories through text, there is something different about telling stories through video. Most prominently, we are naturally biased toward video. In fact, one study has shown that humans process images 60,000 times faster than text. What better way to leverage that than telling compelling stories through the power of video? Ultimately, it leaves an impression and makes it more likely that your audience will actually remember your story.
Along with this, video builds trust. This is especially critical in the sales context, as it’s nearly impossible to generate a sale without having your prospect trust you. With video, your viewer can obviously see and hear you speak to the camera. They can not only hear your words, but can listen to your tone of voice and view your body language. These signals may be subtle, but they are critical to building a strong relationship with your prospect. You simply don’t get the chance to broadcast these signals when leveraging text-based communication. In fact, with text-based communication, it can sometimes be more difficult to communicate. Things get lost in translation and probable sales can be lost through just one word. You can dramatically minimize this risk by communicating with your prospects via video.
Finally, video can help you generate more sales. As sales and marketing professionals, this is obviously our goal. While we want to develop long-term relationships with our prospects and audiences, our businesses are based on numbers. If we don’t hit our sales goals, we are going to find it hard to stay in business. Armed with a tool like video, however, you can make your job much easier. Speaking for Dubb, it was built from the ground up for sales and marketing professionals like you. Using tools like call to action buttons, playlists, and screen recordings, you can put yourself in an excellent position to increase your conversion rates and hit your sales goals.
I could go on and on about the power of video. Video has certainly changed our lives at Dubb and it has changed so many of our users’ lives. The best way to see its power, however, is to try it out for yourself. Even if you create a simple selfie video and share it with one of your prospects, you will see how it can build a much closer relationship with the viewer. In fact, you may even get a sale out of that video. By putting yourself out there, you open the door to some amazing results.
Leveraging Video on LinkedIn
With this understanding in mind, let’s move on and speak about how you can use video for generating leads through LinkedIn. As mentioned, in this article, we are going to do so by leveraging Dubb. You are also going to need to download the Dubb Chrome extension. You can do so by clicking here. The Chrome extension is free and can help you more easily incorporate video into your sales work on LinkedIn.
But let’s back up for one second. When you are thinking about using video on LinkedIn, there are basically two different strategies here. They all come down to volume. The first strategy is a higher volume, lower ticket sized approach. The second strategy is more of a customized, lower volume approach.
The Volume Approach
If you are relying on the volume approach, this typically means that you create two different videos. The first video is more centered on the connection request. When you are submitting a connection request to a prospect, you will first want to press the “Connect” button. Once you do this, LinkedIn will give you the option to add a note to your connection request. Go ahead and click on that button. Upon doing that, you will quickly see something interesting. Sure, you can add a personal message to your connection request through text. In fact, this is what many people do. However, once you have downloaded the Dubb Chrome extension, you will see a small Dubb icon. Go ahead and click on that icon.
By doing this, you can use Dubb to drop a video into your connection request. We’ll get more into the Dubb Chrome extension in a bit. At this point, however, it’s important to point out something important. Depending on the vertical that you are targeting, you are maybe looking at 30% to 40% of people who don’t actually read the connection request. Depending on their mood or preferences, they may just hit the accept or deny button. In some circumstances, it may be because your video or message isn’t resonating. In other cases, it may be because the LinkedIn member simply doesn’t want to connect with someone that they just met on the platform. Whatever the case is, all you can do is create a compelling connection request video and send it to them.
Ultimately, the connection request video is a soft introduction. It is basically you saying this is my name, I saw some connections that we had in common, and I would love to connect. Critically, you aren’t trying to sell your product or service in the connection request. You aren’t trying to pitch this new person. Rather than that, you are reaching out to the person on a human-to-human level. You are breaking the ice and warming up the lead.
So what is the secondary video here? Here, you are submitting your video in your LinkedIn direct messages. This can be a longer video and you can provide more value here. Here, there is a better opportunity to pitch your product, service, or company. With these types of videos, you want to keep brevity in mind. You don’t want to tell your entire life story or every single feature that your company offers. Instead, talk to your prospect like a person and make sure that you are adding value.
This strategy works best if you are approaching specific verticals. It can even be a specific city. For instance, if you live in the metro Phoenix area, you can share that commonality in your first or second LinkedIn video. If you can segment based on locations, you can actually have the same video going to prospects in that specific city. This is a way to both personalize your videos and save you time. In other words, you are trying to leverage personalization at scale here. While sharing some common features like a city may not seem like much, in the long run, it will help you stand out.
So with the volume approach, you are creating two specific videos for a particular vertical or job title. Because this is the volume approach, you are including some level of personalization here, but not nearly to the extent that you would with the other strategy. The benefit, however, is that you can reach more people. If you have a list of prospects that you want to target on LinkedIn, you can use this strategy to get your videos in front of them more quickly. Then, from there, you can gauge their engagement and follow up as necessary.
The More Customized, Lower Volume Approach
Beyond the volume approach, let’s talk about the more customized, lower volume approach. While you are reaching out to fewer people with this strategy, the potential ticket size is much greater.
This approach works by creating customized videos for each prospect. While it takes more time, you put yourself in a greater position to get a sale from that particular LinkedIn user. To do this with Dubb, you will want to click on the Dubb Chrome extension to create a video. From there, you will want to create your video using something very pertinent and personalized to the particular prospect. As an example, what you can do is pull up the prospect’s LinkedIn profile on your computer. Then, you can create a screen recording using the Dubb Chrome extension. With their profile page as the background, you can speak to the camera and introduce yourself. Your webcam image will appear in the corner of your screen, meaning that the viewer can both see your face and the fact that you chose their LinkedIn profile page as the video background.
When you are creating a Dubb screen recording, you can also use the annotation tool. Basically, this is a tool that lets you draw on your screen as you are making screen recording videos. Let’s say that you are talking to the camera and notice that you and the prospect went to the same college. In that case, you can click on the annotation tool, underline or circle the name of the college, and mention that you have that in common. In the end, the annotation tool is yet another way to help you bring your screen recording (and LinkedIn) videos to life.
In these types of screen recording videos, you can also provide some personalized feedback. Let’s assume that you have a coaching or consulting business and you are trying to help your clients get the most out of their LinkedIn profiles. If you are targeting a new prospect, you can go to their LinkedIn profile and say, “Hey, I really like what you have done with your profile page. I just have a few ideas on how you can make it even better and accomplish your sales goals.” You can then offer the advice or tips that you have in mind. While this is a very simple example, it goes to show what you can do with these types of videos on LinkedIn. Delivering this type of feedback shows the prospect that you understand their background, their company, and even their goals.
With these types of videos, practice makes perfect. If you get the reps in, you can get very good at taking the information that you have on a particular prospect and making a common connection video for them. Granted, it takes some time to do this. It is a much slower approach than the volume approach because these videos are hyper-personalized. At the same time, you can get fantastic results with this strategy.
Dubb Video Landing Pages
At this point, we have spoken about the two different types of strategies to connect with prospects on LinkedIn. Using the Dubb Chrome extension, we can send already-recorded videos to our prospects or record videos within the extension and then send them off. Whatever you decide to do, you can be confident that Dubb will make the creation and distribution process extremely easy.
This is just one part of the conversation, however. A natural question is what happens when your LinkedIn prospect clicks on your video. If you are trying to connect with a new prospect or trying to follow up with a warm prospect, they will see a preview of your video and then decide whether or not to move forward and watch it. When they click on your video, they will be taken to a Dubb video landing page.
The bottom line? Dubb video landing pages are extremely powerful. You can think of them as the central hub for that specific video. They contain not only your video, but a whole host of features that can help you add value to the viewer and generate more sales. We started Dubb to be laser-focused on helping sales and marketing professionals leverage the power of video, and you can see this focus by looking at your Dubb video landing pages.
Whenever you upload an already-existing video to Dubb or record a video on Dubb, you automatically get a video landing page for free. Now, if you are on Dubb’s free plan, you will see that there is some Dubb branding on each of your Dubb video landing pages. If you are on a paid plan, however, you have the power to customize your video landing pages however you’d like. For instance, you can include your company’s logo and colors. You can choose the backgrounds for your landing pages. You can even customize the video player. Once you have customized your video landing page, you can create a template. When you use this template on your future Dubb videos, you can be confident that your video landing pages will look exactly the way that you want them to look. Instead of customizing each video landing page, you can spend your valuable time on other pressing matters.
On your Dubb video landing pages, you will see your video prominently displayed on the top center of the page. Below that video, you have the option of including your contact information. Essentially, this is like an email signature and can include a profile picture, your name, email address, and phone number. This is a quick and easy way for your viewers to learn more about you and, if they’d like, get in touch with you.
While this displayed contact information is powerful, I want to talk about two specific features that can help you get even more value from Dubb video landing pages. They are the playlist feature and call to action buttons.
The playlist feature is powerful because it lets you combine both personalized outreach and longer-form video content that you may already have in your library. For instance, let’s return to the hypothetical that we discussed in the more customized, lower volume approach. If you are targeting a prospect for your coaching business, you may create a hyper-personalized LinkedIn video with their profile in the background. That is your primary video. Once the prospect goes to your video landing page and watches the video, you can include one (or more) videos that automatically play after that first video concludes. Taking this one step further, you may decide to include a five-minute video about your coaching business and how you provide value to clients. Or you may decide to include a compilation video of satisfied clients who have already gotten value from your company.
[start] Whatever you choose to do, having these types of videos can help your prospect stay engaged. Yes, your initial LinkedIn video may be enough to convince a prospect to get in touch with you. They may be so intrigued by your personalized greeting that they want to contact you right now. However, if that isn’t the case, adding some videos to the playlist can put the odds in your favor. You can more easily nurture your prospect, even if you aren’t in the same room with them. Whether you have created a quick screen recording that explains your product or have one or two testimonials from satisfied clients, go ahead and include them on your Dubb video landing pages. You may be pleasantly surprised with the results.
Now, let’s talk about call to action buttons. If I had to choose which parts of Dubb video landing pages are so valuable, I would probably pick call to action buttons. If you haven’t yet heard of calls to action, they are essentially ways to get your prospects to do something. Essentially, calls to action lead your prospects from point A to point B. In the sales context, they are almost always used to help your prospects travel down your sales funnels and increase your conversion rates.
On your Dubb video landing pages, you have the ability to add one (or more) call to action buttons below your video. To put it simply, this is a fantastic way to help your viewer take some action after watching your video. Instead of wondering what to do, they can simply click on one of the call to action buttons and go from there.
So what are some of the call to action options that you can choose? Some of my favorites include the following:
- Schedule a call on your calendar: This is a fantastic call to action option if you are communicating with a lead that is toward the bottom of your sales funnel. What happens is that a lead can watch your video, click on this call to action button, and find a time on your calendar for a follow-up meeting. Dubb integrates with most of the popular calendar booking services out there (like Calendly, Acuity, and Book Like a Boss), so you can easily plug and play with Dubb. With this call to action, you can be booking calls 24/7/365. Even when you are sleeping, you can have a whole slate of prospects looking to talk to you the next day. Pretty great, right?
- Download a white paper or eBook: As you can tell, we love video at Dubb. At the same time, you may have some written resource that describes your product, service, or company in detail. This can be a white paper, eBook, or something like this. Because you want to get the most value out of this resource, what you can do is link to this resource through a call to action button. While this call to action option is probably best for LinkedIn leads that are just hearing about you, it can also provide value to those who are in the middle and toward the end of your specific sales funnel. However you choose to use it, it can be an excellent way to educate your prospects and leads.
- Visit a customer testimonial page: I briefly touched on the power of customer testimonials above. Basically, what they do is let you borrow the social credibility of others. Testimonials help you build trust with your audience, thereby making it more likely that they will purchase your product or service from you. With this call to action button, you can link to a showcase page that shows all of your customer testimonials (if you don’t have this page already, stay tuned for more). Then, once your viewer clicks on this call to action button, they can see how your company has created immense value in your customers’ lives.
- Reply with video: The reply with video call to action is one of our favorite options. This is for two specific reasons. First, this call to action makes it extremely easy for your prospect to respond to your video. Instead of typing out a lengthy email response to your video, they can simply press this button, speak to the camera, and then have their video sent to you. Along with simple ease of use, the reply with video call to action helps you collect video testimonials. If you don’t yet have a showcase page containing all of your video testimonials, you can start collecting them through this call to action. Even if you don’t want to create a showcase page, you can collect video testimonials and then share them with any of your interested prospects. It’s up to you.
- Link to any other page: Finally, this call to action is more of a catchall. You can program a call to action button to move your prospect to any website. This can be things like your company’s about page, your company’s blog, an update on a recent product or service, or even a purchase page.
- Frequently asked questions: This can be a helpful call to action if you are noticing that your company is repeatedly receiving objections about your product or service. For instance, there may be a competitor that often gets brought up in your sales conversations. Or you may find that prospects often have questions about a certain element of your product or about pricing. Whatever the case may be, you can include a link to an FAQ page, where those questions can be quickly addressed.
Again, these are just some of our favorite call to action options. You can choose to include some (or all) of them below your videos. No matter what you choose, I highly encourage you to use at least one call to action.
What you can also do is use different call to action buttons for different types of Dubb video landing pages. If you are able to segment your social proof (for instance, case studies or testimonials from different verticals), you can link to those specific pieces of social proof for different video pages. As just one example, let’s say that you have gathered several video testimonials from clients in the gaming industry. You’ll naturally want to link to those through a call to action button if you are prospecting clients in that same industry. The idea is simple, but the payoff is substantial. If you can invest some time into streamlining your Dubb video landing page templates and the assets that you currently have, you will be in a great position.
Some Other Best Practices for Using Video for LinkedIn Prospecting
As you can see, this combination of both LinkedIn and video can take you to some exciting places. Using the power of video, you can introduce yourself to a prospect, lead them down your sales funnel through a call to action, and put your company in a much better place to generate a sale. Whether you work for a small company or a Fortune 500 company, you can use these principles to help you reach your sales goals.
With all of that said, I want to spend the last part of this article sharing some other best practices when relying on video for generating leads through LinkedIn. I encourage you to keep these in mind as you are both creating video content and sharing it with your LinkedIn connections and prospects. By doing so, you can avoid some unnecessary mistakes and minimize wasted time.
Be Yourself When Appearing on Camera
This is a crucial part of creating any type of sales or marketing video. When we talk about creating sales videos, for instance, it is all too easy to think that the videos must be “professional” or “buttoned-up.” It is easy to think about the thousands of dollars that companies spend on hiring actors, wrestling over scripts, investing in expensive equipment, and spending weeks editing the raw footage.
The great news is that we’re living in an era where the cost of producing videos has come significantly down. Now, all you need is your smartphone and some pieces of software to create stunning sales videos. When you are creating content this way, it is best to be yourself. While the word “authentic” may sound awkward in a business setting, it truly is important to show your true self when you are speaking to the camera. Granted, there are nuances to this conversation. You don’t want to look like you just rolled out of bed. There are certain minimum standards that need to be met. At the same time, you don’t need to wear a suit and be stilted on camera.
Your audience wants to see your authentic self. They don’t want to see someone who is putting up some kind of “front” in order to maximize their chances of a sale. So when you are speaking to the camera, take a deep breath and relax. Be your true self when speaking, and if you don’t feel like it is coming across, delete the recording and start again. Keeping this focus on authenticity will drastically help you create a sales video that truly resonates with the LinkedIn user.
Post Organic Video Content to Your LinkedIn Page
When we are talking about prospecting on LinkedIn, it is all too easy to focus on the sales videos that you are going to create for specific LinkedIn users. We spent a significant part of this article leveraging this strategy. We spent time on it because it can absolutely help you create stronger relationships and generate more sales.
That being said, there is another way to find prospects on LinkedIn. It is more of an inbound marketing approach than an outbound marketing approach. What you can do is create valuable and entertaining video content and post it to your and your company’s LinkedIn page. That content can pretty much be anything. You can create a regular show (like we do with RevShow) that covers interesting topics or subjects in your industry. You can create a behind-the-scenes vlog that shows viewers what life is like inside your company. You can even create a video podcast series and interview fascinating people in your sector. Whatever it is that you’d like, you can record that type of video and post it to your LinkedIn page. If you are creating valuable content, you will notice that interested prospects will be knocking on your door. Most likely, they will be prospects that you didn’t even know existed. Creating video content unlocks the power of serendipity, and you can absolutely leverage that serendipity here.
Critically, however, if you are posting video content to your LinkedIn page, you must be consistent. This is especially true if you are creating a specific video show (like we do at RevShow). If you aren’t consistent, your audience is absolutely going to notice. It is going to make it much tougher to leverage the serendipitous nature that video provides. Keep this in mind as you are creating content and posting it to LinkedIn.
Follow the Data
Finally, I want to speak about data and analytics. Whenever you are creating video and distributing it online, you are going to want to track how it performs. This performance data is invaluable and can help you discover what your audience truly wants to see and hear.
Granted, almost every social media platform offers some form of tracking and analytics. On YouTube, for instance, you can see how many people watched your video and how many likes you received. With Dubb, however, you get extremely specific activity reporting so that you can better engage with your prospects and audience members. Not only can you see who actually watched your video, but you can see how much of the video they watched, whether they clicked on any of your call to action buttons, and even whether they left an emoji response. Dubb provides this granular level of detail so that you can better engage with prospects and generate more sales.
There is one specific scenario that you will want to monitor here. What you may want to do is look at the individuals who viewed the entirety of the video and did not click on one of your call to action buttons. You will need to follow up with these viewers. You can do so with a very simple copy-and-paste message. It can be something like, “Hey, I noticed that you watched 100% of my video. Just out of curiosity: what prevented you from jumping on a call with our company or clicking on one of the call to action buttons?” Again, you will need to clean up and vary this script based on your needs.
Ultimately, this is a soft approach that can help you get some feedback on what those people’s objections or hesitations are. Then, you can incorporate that feedback into the language of your next video. You can ask some questions and the audience member could provide more feedback. This is a conversation that can help you build the relationship and help you overcome any objections that the viewer might have.
Capitalizing on the Power of Video
Video and LinkedIn were made for each other. It lets you tell compelling stories and build authentic relationships on the world’s professional social network. If you were wondering how to use video for generating leads through LinkedIn, I hope that this article has given you some inspiration. You can see that it is possible to use LinkedIn to reach your sales and marketing goals. While it does take some work, the road is open to you.
So go ahead and create your first LinkedIn video on Dubb. Download the Dubb Chrome extension and share your video with a new LinkedIn connection. Then, don’t hesitate to analyze the data and see how you can improve the engagement (whether through different call to action buttons or something else). The future is there for the taking.
At Dubb, we always enjoy thinking about and discussing topics like how to use video for generating leads through LinkedIn. If you have any comments or questions related to the ideas discussed above, you can get in touch with our team by clicking here. You can also click here to learn more about Dubb and click here to get a free 14-day trial of our premium plans.
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