How to Find Clients on LinkedIn: Proven Strategies, Expert Advice, and Trends

Are you trying to get leads on LinkedIn? While the platform may seem complex, at the end of the day, it all comes down to 1) networking, 2) building meaningful connections, and 3) creating a personal brand by sharing relevant content and engaging with others. 

For this article, I had a chat with Alex Wolf, a freelance design thinking facilitator and strategic designer. She has successfully used LinkedIn to attract customers and generously shared her top tips and strategies. Let’s dive in! 

Make a Professional Profile 

Before you start reaching out to prospects, make sure your profile looks professional and conveys your message well. Don’t forget: the way you present yourself matters not only to your potential network but also to the search engine. Including keywords in your profile will increase your searchability and, consequently, your chances of getting new clients. 

You can research other experts in your area to get inspiration from in terms of profile optimization. In today’s article, I’ll be mostly showcasing Alex’s LinkedIn profile. 

Header

Your header is an opportunity to make a good first impression on future clients. It consists of your photo, name, headline, contact information, current occupation, and educational background. 

Upload a good-quality profile picture. It should obviously be your headshot — not your pet’s photo and not a picture of your favorite cartoon character. Let your personality shine but don’t overdo it — remember, you’re still in a professional setting. 

There are different approaches to headlines depending on what you do. A headline is like a short ad for you as an expert. It can be an elevator pitch like “I help businesses turn their vision into a powerful digital presence” for a web developer or a more practical one such as “Are you looking for your next opportunity? Let’s connect!” for a recruiter. 

As for a banner, it can either be a minimalistic one like Alex’s or it can be a bolder one, communicating your message the same way your headline does. Take a look: 

Summary 

The About section is your chance to present yourself, your values, and professional experience in your own words. Many also use it to mention they are open to new opportunities or list the services they are offering. The word limit in this section is around 2,600 characters. 

Services provided 

This section is pretty self-explanatory, isn’t it? List the services you provide so that 1) your potential clients see what you offer if they stumble upon your page 2) the algorithm suggests your page to those who are searching for your particular services.

Featured

I will cover the content part later in the article. For now, let me just briefly mention this: making a Featured section can be highly beneficial for your business. Similarly to Instagram or TikTok pinned posts, Featured is your chance to showcase your work and highlight the accomplishments you’re most proud of. It can also be a great idea to include an introduction post, a lead magnet — a free product you provide in exchange for prospects’ contact details, — or a post leading to your website/calendly/etc here. 

Experience and Skills

The Experience part is where you describe what you do and why it is you the prospect should contact. Here, you should also align the skills you have with the roles you put in your Experience. 

As for the Skills section, you can add them manually in the section itself, or LinkedIn will automatically add them for you from the skills you pointed out in your Experience. 

Why is it important to have the Skills section? Once again, it helps potential customers and recruiters discover you. To get a perfect candidate, they often use advanced tools to filter by skills and keywords. 

Education and Licenses & Certifications

These two sections can be an additional proof of your qualifications, adding extra credibility to your experience and skills sections. 

If you have licenses and certifications relevant to your role, make sure to include them to your LinkedIn profile too. 

An optimized LinkedIn profile creates a professional image and helps others discover your page. Keeping it comprehensive and simple is key. Make it easy for potential connections to learn about you and for prospects to see what services you provide. 

Network and Build Connections 

When your LinkedIn profile is ready, it’s time to network. Here’s Alex’s approach to it: 

1) To find potential connections, she goes through the people she already knows and checks the More profiles for you and People you may know sections. 

2) Alex always sends connection requests with a personalized note. It could be one complimenting their work, mentioning shared interests, etc. To give you an example, here are some notes I sent on LinkedIn that successfully brought me connections: 

• Hey, [Name]! I’m Altana. I ran across your profile and thought I'd connect since we have similar backgrounds. I'm currently thinking about getting into UX and would love to follow your journey as an inspo :)
• Hey, [Name]! It's inspiring to see you share your opinions on sustainable development at The Paris Agreement on Climate Change as a Development Agenda course. I thought it would be great to connect :) 

As you can see, I used a friendly, casual tone of voice and no buzzwords, finding common ground with the potential connection. 

3) Alex makes sure to engage with the potential connection’s content beforehand to get on their radar. This includes leaving reactions to posts, writing thoughtful comments, or reposting with your comments or insights. 

4) She emphasizes the importance of starting conversations without immediately pitching, focusing on building connections first. 

If you’re building your network from scratch, I’d recommend going through professional communities aka LinkedIn groups and simply using filters in the search. On LinkedIn, you can filter by jobs, posts, groups, people, services, products, schools, courses, events, and companies. Each of these then can be filtered further by location, title, industry, etc. 

Scroll through these communities and once you spot someone you find interesting, send a personalized request. Expanding your network on LinkedIn is necessary to boost your digital presence and promote your page. Be an active contributor to the groups of interests by reacting, commenting, and posting content yourself. 

While LinkedIn is a professional platform, it is still a social media. However, don’t make the mistake of simply chasing a higher following. On LinkedIn, it is meaningful connections that matter the most — build relationships before pitching. 

Keep in touch with those who accepted your connection request by writing comments and reacting to their posts or DMing them. Just like with real-life human interactions, there should be a delicate balance — be proactive but don’t be annoying and never pitch right off the bat. 

Start Posting Content

Content creation is a huge part of service promotion and personal branding on LinkedIn these days. To stand out from the crowd, Alex ensures her content addresses prospects’ pain points and offers solutions. Your tone of voice can vary depending on your positioning. However, there are some general rules to follow. 

Alex recommends staying authentic and not using AI to create posts for you. With so many creators using ChatGPT to write posts, simply being human will make a huge difference and immediately help you catch attention. Alex also suggests using storytelling — in her experience, this format gains the most traction. 

Before you go on LinkedIn and start posting, you should recognize it can take months to get your first leads. Stay consistent and stick to posting 2-3 times a week. Engage with your audience and network throughout the week. This is how it went for Alex:

It took about a year to be honest to land my first client that I truly connected with, as the process involved a mix of networking, nurturing relationships, and consistent posting. I posted 2-3 times a week, sometimes with breaks in between. I could have been more consistent, and my content is by no means salesy. If you sell more actively, this might look different for you.

But I need to say that most also came indirectly, so people I’d meet at my workshops, through colleagues and friends, and at events, would connect with me and see my profile and find it professional and interesting. So, LinkedIn definitely supported me getting clients in different ways, though it’s not directly measurable.

{{Alex Wolf}}

If you don’t have a clear vision of your content style yet, start by playing around with different formats. According to Alex, these are the ones that perform well: 

• Case studies, such as client success stories and how you approached their case. 

• Provide tips or how-to posts in your niche to establish a professional image. Here, Alex stresses the importance of posting a PDF file instead of uploading a bunch of images: 

• Personal stories help you appear more open and authentic — being your true self sounds easy, but, from Alex’s experience, it’s one of the most challenging genres. 

• Finally, video content is becoming increasingly more in demand and supported by the LinkedIn algorithm. 

Getting Clients on LinkedIn

Sometimes your network and personal brand is all you need for client acquisition. However, it’s also worth trying paid ads, cold outreach, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator. 

Cold Outreach 

In Alex’s opinion, cold outreach can be effective if done strategically. A lot of it is similar to basic networking. Research your prospect before reaching out and personalise your message. Focus on your lead and what you can offer rather than just talking about yourself. Don’t be overly salesy or spammy — build a connection first. It also helps to have mutuals as you can refer to them and turn it into an icebreaker. 

Alex usually searches for decision-makers or those who are likely to benefit from her services via LinkedIn filters. 

Paid Ads 

Paid ads will bring you leads only if they complement your organic efforts. The main goal with paid ads is to target a specific audience. But the good news is you don’t have to do it as the LinkedIn algorithm is quite good at promoting useful content. So, if you provide value with your posts, it could be just enough. 

I haven’t used Paid ads on LinkedIn, only on Instagram. It works there because the algorithm is bad otherwise. Linkedin is very good at showing your content to many people, if it’s engaging. I always range between 2k-10k impressions per post.

{{Alex Wolf}}

Sales Navigator 

If you don’t feel like doing manual outreach, you can get a Sales Navigator subscription. This is a paid LinkedIn tool available for Premium LinkedIn members. It costs $79.99/month for the Core plan and $139.99/month for the Advanced one. 

Sales Navigator offers different perks from CRM integrations to relationship maps. One of its main advantages is that it finds leads for you, helps gain detailed insights, and makes your outreach more personalised. 

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That was it for today. If you’re just getting started, take it step by step and see how it goes. Don’t try to do everything all at once. Networking, building connections and doing outreach takes time and effort. Remember to stay authentic and sustain relationships because that’s the beauty of networking — you never know what comes out of it. Good luck! 

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