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The Only LinkedIn Outreach Video You’ll Ever Need
Let’s be honest — if your LinkedIn outreach results basically suck and they’re not where you want them to be, you’re not alone. Most people are doing it completely wrong. But in this post, I’m going to break down exactly how I’m getting a 61% connection acceptance rate and an 85% message reply rate on my campaigns, and how by putting in just a couple of hours of manual work, I had two meetings booked in my schedule.
The Three Pillars of a Successful LinkedIn Campaign
First off, how do you make a campaign that actually runs? It comes down to three main things: targeting, offer, and message. Get these right, and you’ll transform your LinkedIn outreach game completely.
1. Targeting: The Foundation of Everything
Who you target really has a massive impact on how well your campaign performs. Now, what a lot of people do is they’ll use a tool like Sales Navigator to build a list and then they’ll use another tool to export that list of Sales Navigator leads.
Actually, HeyReach has a really cool feature for this. If you go to leads, it’s quite hidden, but if you click add leads, you can then click on Sales Navigator, click continue, and then you can paste in your Sales Navigator search URL and click start importing. That’s going to actually pull that list into HeyReach.
But here’s where most people go wrong: they just use that list raw as it is. And a lot of those people in that list, no matter how strictly you apply search parameters in Sales Navigator, they’re not going to be on spec. They’re not going to be the right leads for your business.
Interest-Based Targeting: The Secret Weapon
So you need a way to qualify them further. That requires doing some enrichments to get their website, analyzing their website, understanding their full profile of what they do, what they have done. Are they a competitor? Are they your exact perfect fit? Do they have decision maker status and buying power? Do they have the exact problem that your business solves?
The reason why my connection acceptance rate is so sky-high and my message reply rate is so sky-high is because of the way that I’m targeting these people. I’m not pulling a Sales Navigator list and exporting it using HeyReach or any other tool. And I’m not even running that through a workflow.
Here’s what I do instead: I start with my list of competitors. These are people that post on LinkedIn all the time about relevant content to what I do, which is lead generation. And they get tons of engagement on their posts.
All those people engaging with their posts are literally just raising their hands in public and saying, “Yes, I’m interested in this stuff.” And they are commenting on it, which gives you even more insight into what they’re thinking about it. Or they’re just reacting to it and clicking the like button, which takes a lot less effort from them, but it still shows that they have interest in that topic.
Of course, tons of them are my competitors. They need to be filtered out. But if you run every one of those engagers through a series of enrichments where we get more data about each lead and then we run a series of checks to make sure they’re in the right geography, they’re a decision maker, they’re in the right industry, they’re not a competitor, they have the actual problem that you solve — then these people are not only qualified by that process, but they’re also showing interest in solving the exact problem that you have right now, not a month ago, but right now in the last 24 hours.
This is basically what I call interest-based targeting, and it’s the reason why Facebook ads became so insanely powerful over the last 10 years. They allowed you to target people that are showing interest in specific topics, and this is how you apply it to B2B outbound using LinkedIn as the channel.
2. The Message: Less Is More
When it comes to the messaging and offer, this is very contradictory to what most people do where they’ll basically pitch something or they’ll ask a question.
The way I’m doing this? My message literally just says: “Hi, [first name].”
Full stop. That’s it.
It says “Hi, [first name].” And that is so kind of shocking to someone — they accept your connection request and then they get a message from you that just says “Hi, [first name].”
The reason why this works so well is a couple of reasons. Firstly, I then get a notification that they’ve messaged me back and I can look at their profile and see, are they a really strong fit for me and are they someone I want to reach out to or should I just not bother?
And sometimes I actually just don’t bother and no harm has been done because what did they get from me? They didn’t get some pitch about my services or some questions trying to get them to say, “Yeah, I’m interested in your services.” All they got was a friendly “Hi [first name],” which is a natural thing for a human to say when you’re reaching out to a new connection to start building relationships.
3. The Video Follow-Up: Where the Magic Happens
But people that are a really strong fit after they reply back to me — they’ll often say like, “Hey, Luke, what’s up?” And at that point, when I’ve reviewed their profile and I see that they’re a really good fit for me, they’re someone I would love to work with, I basically send them a video.
I don’t use Loom. I use Tella. There’s a link right here if you want to check that tool out. It’s basically like Loom but on steroids. You can split the screen in different ways, do layouts. It’s actually how I record most of my videos.
Anyway, the point is I analyze their profile and I record a video where the left half of the screen is their profile that they’ll see in the thumbnail and the right half of the screen is me waving at them. So then they basically just see this thumbnail that gets embedded in their LinkedIn message and it immediately piques their curiosity because they see their own LinkedIn profile on half the screen and my face waving at them.
In my video I basically just say hey, looks like you’re doing some great stuff here. I can see that you’ve done this and this, and then I explain why that’s relevant to what I do. And then I just say I do this. Let me know if you want some more information about it.
So it’s a really soft CTA. Sometimes I say let me know if you want a quick video explaining how that works. And I’m not pushing for a meeting. I’m just trying to uncover a need. I’m saying, you know, how is your pipeline right now? How are you generating leads? Would love to know more about that.
Why This Approach Works So Well
It’s so personalized, this little video — well, it’s actually like a 30 second to 1 minute video, but it takes me like a few minutes to record it and send it to them — that I get tons of people replying back positively. Over half of the people that receive their video reply back.
Sometimes they say, you know, “I’m not interested in automation.” And I’m like, “Yeah, no worries.” But a lot of them are interested and it starts a very live two-way conversation where all of their objections get uncovered and they’re asking questions and then they decide, “Yeah, okay, let’s have a meeting.”
And by the time they come on the call, they’re so much warmer because they’ve seen how I talk. They’ve seen my face, and they’re just warmed up. They’re ready. They understand what it is that I do, what results they can expect.
And it’s so much better than if you just get on a call with someone and they don’t know you from Adam or Eve and all they’ve seen from you is your cold email. Those people often get on a call and they’re just like, “Why are we having this call? What’s this call about?” And then you have to start from ground zero building up the trust and authority and all that stuff.
The Follow-Up Strategy
So you definitely want to use your content as much as possible. And if you have multiple lead magnets, then if they don’t reply to that first one, you can follow up and say, “Hey, I have this other lead magnet. Check it out. Have this other video, have this other document, thought you’d be interested in it.”
And eventually when they’re ready or when it piques their interest enough, they’re going to come back and say, “Yeah, cool. Let’s have a chat.”
The Bottom Line
That’s basically the whole way that I do LinkedIn outbound these days. Does it take a little bit of manual effort? Yes. But the calls are so much higher quality because of this.
The combination of interest-based targeting, a simple non-pushy opening message, and personalized video follow-ups is what separates campaigns that get ignored from campaigns that book meetings with qualified prospects who are actually excited to talk to you.
If you’re still blasting generic connection requests with pitchy messages to cold lists from Sales Navigator, you’re leaving money on the table. This approach takes more time upfront, but the results speak for themselves: 61% acceptance rates, 85% reply rates, and meetings with people who actually want to be there.
Want help automating your lead generation? Book a call
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