If you're looking to generate more B2B leads and book more appointments through LinkedIn, you're far from alone.
But as digital marketing expert Ariel Levin points out, while 99% of people want to leverage LinkedIn for lead generation, only about 1% really know how to do it effectively.
In a recent webinar, the CEO and founder of AI-powered lead generation agency SDR Labs shared his cutting-edge techniques for using artificial intelligence to drastically improve the quality and quantity of LinkedIn outreach.
Here are some of the key takeaways.
Understand Your Prospects' Pain Points with ChatGPT
One of the biggest challenges in B2B outreach is truly understanding the pain points and challenges of your target audience. This is where generative AI tools like ChatGPT can be a game-changer.
By providing ChatGPT with some basic context about your ideal customer profile, such as their job title or industry, you can prompt it to generate insights about the likely obstacles and priorities those prospects are dealing with.
Armed with this knowledge, you can craft far more relevant and compelling outreach messages.
Personalize LinkedIn Connection Requests at Scale
We all know that personalization is key to grabbing a prospect's attention. But manually customizing each LinkedIn connection request simply isn't feasible at any real scale.
Ariel's solution? Use ChatGPT in tandem with Google Sheets to rapidly generate personalized connection requests based on prospects' LinkedIn profile data.
It's as simple as setting up a spreadsheet with a column of profile links and a column with the ChatGPT prompt you want to use (e.g. "Write a 2-sentence connection request with an icebreaker, mentioning something interesting from the 'About' section of this profile.")
Then with the help of a simple macro, ChatGPT can work its way down the sheet, outputting unique connection request text for each and every prospect in a matter of seconds. It's an incredibly efficient way to create the impression of thoughtful personalization.
Provide Upfront Value with AI-Generated Resources
To really captivate prospects, Ariel recommends going a step further by providing them with valuable, relevant content right off the bat. But creating original resources for each campaign is often prohibitively time-consuming.
His workaround?
Find existing high-quality content relevant to your audience (e.g. a report or long-form blog post) and feed it into an AI-powered summarization tool.
The condensed version can then be repurposed and reformatted by ChatGPT into an enticing lead magnet to offer your prospects, with minimal manual effort required.
The True Power of Prompt Engineering
Throughout his demonstrations, Ariel emphasized that the real skill in using ChatGPT lies in crafting effective prompts.
The outputs you get are only as good as the instructions you provide. He shared several examples of well-structured, detailed prompts that consistently produce high-quality results.
While there are various AI writing assistant tools out there specifically for generating sales and marketing copy, Ariel prefers the greater customization and control that ChatGPT offers through prompt engineering.
He did note, however, that Microsoft's integration of ChatGPT into its products may soon provide a more user-friendly interface for these applications.
Putting It All Together for Incredible Results
By combining all these AI-powered techniques into a cohesive LinkedIn outreach system, Ariel has seen reply rates skyrocket from around 1% to 4% or more. The drastic reduction in manual work required also means an astonishing return on time invested.
While there are some limitations to be aware of in terms of number of API requests and profiles processed at once, the potential for efficiency gains is truly remarkable. If you're serious about taking your LinkedIn prospecting to the next level, generative AI may just be the secret weapon you've been looking for.