LinkedIn Marketing Rules for Outbound | Acceler8now

Used well, LinkedIn marketing tools are an effective way to take your business to the next level. Unlike Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, LinkedIn is a social media platform designed to help you establish and nurture your business and professional relationships.

Among the marketing advantages for businesses actively using LinkedIn marketing strategies:

• It’s a platform that can be used to build brand awareness and relationships with potential clients in a cost-effective, some might even say cheap, way.
• LinkedIn is pandemic-proof: where traditional sales and marketing tactics may have failed in the pandemic, LinkedIn can get through to people where they are if they’re not in an office.
• By posting engaging, relevant content and participating in industry discussions, businesses can establish bona fides and build credibility.
• Business owners can use the platform for outbound marketing strategy to grow their email lists leveraging their professional network.

As with any social network, LinkedIn poses some challenges, in fact, there is one hot topic for those businesses leveraging LinkedIn ads and posts for outreach.

In 2021, LinkedIn tested an initiative to reduce the number of connections you can make in a week. This means that the platform is now limiting connection requests to 100 per week when it used to be 60 a day. While this affects everyone, it particularly threatens small- and medium-sized businesses that rely on LinkedIn as a cost-effective outbound marketing tool.

The pain point here is obvious: A limit on sending messages means a limit on business opportunities. LinkedIn is receiving a lot of negative feedback, especially from sales and business development reps who count the platform’s functionality to conduct manual and automated outreach.;

Solutions to Harsher Restrictions

The general feeling from some LinkedIn experts is that these restrictions won’t last. But can we really count on anyone’s predictions? No one knows how long these restrictions may last — or, worse, if these measures will get more restrictive. 

Rest assured — there are solutions. Among them are two powerful automation tools that can help manage the issue: Kennected and Dux-Soup.

• Dux–Soup helps boost the professionalism of your LinkedIn page by automatically viewing your LinkedIn prospect profiles, endorsing their skills, following their LinkedIn activity, and sending personalized messages on your behalf. The program also allows you to set up automated LinkedIn drip campaigns for your prospects, which can stop automatically when a prospect responds.
• Kennected does the heavy lifting of LinkedIn marketing for you – automating connection requests and follow-up messaging – so you can focus on developing your business. 

Kennected Lets You Connect Smarter

An additional advantage to using Kennected is that it helps businesses deal with the challenge of LinkedIn’s account restrictions. The software helps ensure you keep your account in good standing by initiating a cool-down period.

While this action may seem counterintuitive, it does play to your advantage. It’s a safety measure that Kennected implements automatically to prevent LinkedIn from restricting your account. 

The alternative is running your outreach sequences like email until LinkedIn shuts down your account permanently for violating their terms of service.

To avoid a Kennected cool-down period, watch out for the three leading causes:

• You have too many pending invitations to connect
• Too many people are marking your account as “I do not know this person” 
• Your LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI score) is under 65

Kennected functionality also includes a warm-up feature to help get your account back to full capacity, by gradually increasing the number of connection requests and messages over time.

What is an SSI Score?

LinkedIn’s SSI score measures your effectiveness on the platform. It ranges from 0 to 100. A score below 50 is considered poor and a score of about 65 is considered good to great. You can access your score on LinkedIn.

The score is based on four factors that LinkedIn believes are essential for businesses trying to fully leverage the platform for selling products and services. 

The four factors account for 25 points each:

• How well you’ve established your professional brand
• How you find the right people on LinkedIn
• How you build relationships
• How you engage with insights gathered on the platform

Your score is important for your ability to engage in LinkedIn marketing strategies because it impacts your visibility, lead flow and reach. LinkedIn rewards activity it perceives as effective, aggressive LinkedIn behavior, network expansion and, naturally, having a Sales Navigator subscription. 

Sales Navigator is the platform’s paid service, which includes a powerful set of search capabilities, improved visibility into extended networks, and customized algorithms to help you reach the right stakeholders.

Get Professional Support for LinkedIn Marketing

Paying attention to the important hot issues of the day on LinkedIn — like tightening outbound marketing restrictions and your SSI score — can be a lot to handle, especially while wearing multiple hats as you manage the day-to-day operations of your business. 

That’s where the professionals at Acceler8now come in. We can handle all of this for you — so you can avoid any restrictions and continue generating new business from today’s leading business-building platform. In other words, you can gain all the advantages of LinkedIn marketing strategies while we handle the challenges for you.