Everyone in the business world is familiar with LinkedIn. It’s the premier digital networking platform for business professionals.

But behind the carefully curated work histories and enthusiastic endorsements, the platform offers a host of benefits for businesses and entrepreneurs. LinkedIn could be a lead-generating machine for your business, but you must harness the site’s full potential.

Jimmy Coleman is the founder of LeadBaller, a first-of-its-kind LinkedIn service for B2B companies. LeadBaller has helped some of the biggest brands in the world capitalize on LinkedIn’s lead-generating capabilities, and Coleman’s strategies can be applied to any business—big or small—to achieve the same result.

Optimize your profile.

When you present yourself as the lead authority in your sphere, prospects have no other choice but to respect and trust you.

Coleman advises to not do what everyone else is doing. You’ll get lost in the shuffle. The easiest way to show authority and authenticity is through selling social proof. Most people use their LinkedIn banner image to show their logo or location, but you can do better. For example, if you’ve hosted a handful of seminars, make your LinkedIn banner a picture of you speaking to an audience. This shows to prospects that you have the experience and leadership they need. If you don’t have images to highlight your authority, go down the authenticity route and give prospects a glimpse into your personal life by showcasing your family or interests.

Target your ideal client.

LinkedIn allows businesses to create ad campaigns directly on the platform, target specific audiences, and collect data to retarget and optimize these ads. Like all other forms of marketing, you’ll want to make sure you’re not wasting valuable client-acquisition dollars on prospects you don’t want to work with anyway.

Before you begin using LinkedIn for prospecting, you’ll want to make sure you have a clearly defined audience and set goals for the quality of the leads you want to capture. According to LinkedIn’s in-house training program, LinkedIn Marketing Labs, you should ask yourself these questions before launching a targeted ad campaign on the platform:

1. How do I define a sales conversion?
2. How long is my sales cycle?
3. What does a quality lead mean to me?
4. Am I using marketing automation tools?
5. What is my sales teams’ lead response time?
6. How am I nurturing my leads?

Connect with prospects.

Your prospects’ inboxes are already flooded with messages from businesses just like yours. Spam emails and even a lack of replies could put you and your prospecting efforts in dangerous territory. Instead of directly messaging prospects, put your name and brand in front of them in other ways first.

Most LinkedIn users log on, check their notifications, and log off, so you want to make sure you are showing up in their notifications. Three of the best ways to do this are by liking posts, commenting on posts, and endorsing skills. Endorsements can be particularly lucrative because an endorsement prompts the recipient to message you back, starting a conversation without you ever messaging them first.

Don’t forget to follow up.

It’s not enough to connect with a lead once and hope they come running right to you. Follow-up is key. However, this kind of outreach needs to be tailored and thoughtful to make an impact.

Instead of this:
“Hi, my name is John. I’m a financial advisor with Main Street Community Bank. I want to help people like you feel secure in their financial future. If you ever need help with your finances, feel free to reach out.”

Try this:
“Hi [prospect’s name]. Thanks for connecting with me. I’m John, a local financial advisor and father of three. I saw your recent post about sending your son off to college. Congrats! You must be so proud. I wanted to reach out because I know the stress of putting a child through college, and if you have any questions, I’m here to help.

P.S. Love the quote in your bio. Steve Jobs is one of my biggest inspirations too.”

The difference between these two messages is palpable. One is generic, forced, and likely to be ignored. The other touches on a personal life event and an experience that unites both financial advisor and prospect. You can even opt for sending audio messages on LinkedIn as opposed to text messages, which will surely set you apart from the other messages in your prospects’ inboxes.

Take action on this: Update your LinkedIn profile with the optimization tips from this article, and create a targeted list of prospects you can connect with through LinkedIn.