Generating leads through LinkedIn starts by determining your target audience and planning the messages you want to deliver.

As with any other marketing programme, generating leads through LinkedIn starts by determining your target audience and types of relationships you want to build. Once you have established that, you can then focus on planning the messages to deliver, keywords to include, and content style you want to use.

If you work for a larger company you may already have much of this information available from your Product Marketing group. But for those of you who don't yet have this at hand, we would suggest that working out this type of collateral is best not created alone. To generate your audience buyer personas and profiles, we'd recommend that at minimum you get together with your marketing communication and product marketing teams. You could even invite the sales team to the conversation too!

When thinking about audiences you will find many potential targets already out there on LinkedIn. These might include:

• industry-specific organisations
• complementary vendors
• customers
• strategic partners

LinkedIn does generate leads

In a recent study of its customer base, HubSpot found that traffic from LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate (2.74%) of the top social networks. This was almost 3 times higher than both Twitter (.69%) and Facebook (.77%).

However, to get results, you will need to put in some effort of your own.