LinkedIn, once a platform for building and maintaining professional networks, has now become a powerful tool for marketing.
While building connections still remains crucial, professionals and businesses are now utilizing the platform for market research, content promotion, and brand awareness.
However, despite LinkedIn’s evolution, one question persists: how would YOU take your LinkedIn marketing to the next level in this tightly competitive market?
The answer is to use advanced tools to boost the user’s marketing efficiency on LinkedIn and reduce time consumption!
We have curated a list of top tools for enhancing your presence on LinkedIn. Let’s dive deeper into the topic, know what exactly they offer, and which tool is the best for you.
How we analyze & select LinkedIn Marketing Tools:
Through rigorous research and practical assessment, we have developed this list of elite tools. The factors we considered for evaluation included the tool’s user interface, G2 ratings, and reviews, pricing, and scalability. We also assessed the capabilities of these tools in automation, content generation, visualization, analytics, and collaboration. We have invested resources in compiling this list to ensure that marketers are empowered with crucial knowledge to select the optimal tools and amplify their businesses.
Best for:
Creators, agencies, social media managers, and growing businesses
About Later
Started as an Instagram scheduler, Later has turned into a strong LinkedIn Marketing tool. With an all-in-one intuitive dashboard, Later allows its users to plan the entire lifecycle of their LinkedIn content from start to finish. The simple UI design has earned the impression of being a user-friendly tool that checks multiple aspects of user preferences.
Pricing:
Later provides a 14-day free account with all features unlocked. After that, its services are offered from $16 to $133 a month.
Key Features:
- Later Scheduler: Streamline your social media content planning, creation, and management in one convenient location.
- Social Inbox: Easily consolidate incoming comments, messages, and brand mentions from multiple channels to boost engagement and response effectiveness.
- Analytics: Gain deep insights into extensive data on engagement rates, impressions, follower growth, and click-throughs across your diverse social profiles.
- Collaboration: Onboard and work in tandem with your whole team and even involve clients for a smoother workflow.
- AI Caption Writer: Leverage Later’s AI-powered assistance for quick and effective social media caption creation with just a few clicks.
- Later Mobile App: The Later mobile app allows you to effortlessly strategize content, revamp your feed, or manage your social media calendar on the go.
Pros
- Well-suited professional content: Later’s scheduling and content library is focused on managing professional content typical of LinkedIn posts.
- Integrations: Later’s integration with popular design and marketing tools makes it a seamless process for users who utilize multiple tools for marketing.
- For every user: This tool’s user interface is considered easy to operate for marketers at any level of expertise.
Kat W.
I like the easy layout. It’s simple to upload content and resize it depending on where it needs to go. You can lay out your weekly plan with ease; it’s bright, easy to use, and makes great suggestions.
Cons
- Lack of lead generation: Later doesn’t offer capturing leads directly through your LinkedIn content or managing lead nurturing campaigns. This feature is present in some other counterparts.
- Limited competitor analysis: Adding features like industry trend tracking or competitor activity analysis within the same pricing would have brought more value to the tool than its competitors.
- Limited free version: The free version allows basic scheduling, reducing the user’s experience. The inability to explore Later’s full potential can leave a question mark for the user when it’s time to pay!
Kate B.
The analytics section could be better, particularly for linkedInbio – it gives you total CTR and button clicks. Still, it doesn’t allow you to jump into specific buttons to determine which is best-performing.
Best for:
Creators, agencies, social media managers, and enterprise-level businesses
About Hootsuite
Adopted by thousands of users for their various social media needs, Hootsuite comes across as a versatile tool for LinkedIn marketing. It centralizes all the activities related to social media management for a business into one single dashboard.
Hootsuit can function as an entire LinkedIn marketing team by streamlining marketers’ efforts. Its ability to integrate in-app and collaborate on bigger scales makes it a better choice for larger teams.
Pricing:
It offers a 30-day free trial and 3 paid plans ranging from $149 to $399. A custom-made plan according to the user’s requirements is also available.
Key Features:
- Scheduling and Publishing: The tool lets you plan, create, and schedule social media posts to be automatically published at the designated date and time.
- Engage Customers: A unified social inbox that helps monitor, respond, engage with followers, and automate replies with AI chatbots.
- Analytics: View the analytics data from connected profiles from multiple platforms in one centralized dashboard.
- Team Collaboration: Work with your team and involve clients with well-defined roles for seamless collaboration.
- AI Writer: The tool helps create social media post captions more easily and quickly using AI assistance.
Pros
- All-in-one dashboard: You can simplify your workflow by managing your Linkedin presence alongside all your other social media platforms.
- Content collaboration: Shared calenders, approved workflows, and collaborative drafting are the features offered by Hootsuite to increased collaboration and productivity.
- Monitoring analytics: You can track trends, brand mentions and hashtags to measure the success of your marketing efforts.
Janis B.
I enjoy the ease of making posts for our agency each week- sometimes, I am short of time to make organic posts, so I can always rely on the stock posts for our company to schedule and plan for the week ahead. It is easy to implement our seasonal message, and the customer support is fabulous/ I use Hootsuite weekly and sometimes daily- the number of features I can use to personalize my message is endless. I have not had a problem even after one year of integrating our company message during different campaigns.
Cons
- Potential for repetitive content: It’s important to pre-schedule your content carefully, as sometimes, scheduling in bulk can unintentionally lead to the posting of repetitive content and occasional glitches.
- Need time to get used to it: Using the tool for the first time can be a bit of a learning curve, and getting used to it and its features can consume some time.
- The price: There isn’t a doubt about Hootsuite being a good LinkedIn scheduler; one can’t unsee the hefty price at which the marketing features are offered.
Lulu S.
To set up some of the features, you need the pro version. I find it already costly for the personal plan, but not having access to the Instagram features seems unfair. Most freelance professionals in my circle have not signed because it’s a little above the price they would go for.
Best for:
Businesses, Publishers, Non-profits, Mid-stage startup teams, Solopreneurs, E-commerce, and Sports teams.
About Sprout Social
Listed among the top LinkedIn marketing tools, Sprout Social provides LinkedIn integration for marketing and offers a wide range of features for businesses to manage their publishing. With features like analytics, engagement, and listening tools, you can track brand mentions and insights on reach, clicks, and follower growth, allowing you to gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Pricing:
Sprout Social has a 30-day free trial period along with four distinctive plans. Starting from $199 for the standard plan to the custom-built enterprise plan.
Key Features:
- Content Collaboration: Draft content together as a team, include visuals, and ensure brand consistency across all your LinkedIn Company Pages.
- Multi-Profile Publishing: Effortlessly publish content to multiple LinkedIn Pages from one dashboard, saving you valuable time.
- LinkedIn Analytics: Gain insights into key metrics like engagement, reach, clicks, and follower growth on your LinkedIn Pages.
- Customizable Reporting: Generate reports tailored to your specific needs and track the success of your LinkedIn marketing campaigns.
- Benchmarking: Compare your LinkedIn performance against industry averages or your own historical data to identify areas for improvement.
Pros
- The dashboard is easy to use, intuitive, and provides all the macro requirements a marketing team needs to fulfill their business needs.
- Powerful reporting: Sprout Social provides in-depth analytics that can be used to track progress and improve social media and marketing strategies.
Haley N.
With simple scheduling, in-depth analytics, and social listening, it’s everything I need. I also really like the learning material and webinars they offer for users. Very helpful and informative!
Cons
- Expensive for Agencies: The cost can become significant when managing a large number of social media accounts (25+) for clients, especially from a marketing agency perspective.
- Users have raised concerns about the accounts getting disconnected when the number of connected accounts increases.
Tolulope A.
When compared to other social media management solutions, Sprout Social’s pricing is a little bit more expensive, which makes it less affordable for individuals or small enterprises. Since my company is new, I had to persuade them by justifying the required payment when we recently needed to renew our subscription. In addition, there have occasionally been software faults or glitches (downtimes) that typically detract from the overall user experience.
Crystal is known as the world’s largest personality assessment platform that helps you understand the personality differences of you, your colleagues, and your customers. Social selling is all about personalization and meaningful interaction, and this LinkedIn marketing tool helps you leverage this by giving you access to several personality profiles. You can utilize these for targeting specific audience sets effectively.
Pros
- It helps you strike communication that resonates with your prospects.
- You can also use the tool to assess your professional strengths.
Lisa T.
I love the insights before a meeting, and on the prospects we are working with.
Cons
- You don’t get to know where the personality details have come from, and the results aren’t always accurate.
- The pricing can be high if you consider the fact that you’d have to use other tools for LinkedIn marketing besides this if you really want great results.
Reece W.
Accuracy seems pretty hit or miss. A lot of the people I reach out to are in sales and are OVERWHELMINGLY said to be “D” personalities on Crystal but tend to be a lot more varied on live connects.
IFTTT stands for ‘If This Then That.’ This LinkedIn marketing tool allows you to automate specific tasks via third-party apps. IFTTT actually has predefined recipes which can be used for LinkedIn automation. With these particular commands or recipes, you can automate your LinkedIn posts to the exact hour, share your post on Facebook with a specific hashtag, share a tweet every time you publish a post, and so on.
Pros
- It saves time by automating your processes and integrating multiple software solutions and platforms.
- This is one of those tools that have existing automation flows set into the system so that a new user can easily understand the tool and explore different possibilities.
- It has a big community where you can learn things and implement strategies that have worked well for others.
Elaine F.
The user interface and the app are easy to understand and use. Integrating services is as easy as signing in with the click of a button.
Cons
- Sometimes, the automated processes stop running after some time, and it becomes really tiresome for the user to start over again.
- It’s easy to get started with the tool, but you may need to know a bit of coding to create complex recipes with multiple tasks and triggers.
- It is meant more for personal than business use. Most of the applets focus on connecting social media accounts and various in-home automated devices. You’d have to look for another tool if you want to automate business processes that have a robust offering of integrations other than Gmail or to-do lists.
Gilles De Clerck
I’ve set up multiple automation flows with IFTTT over the last few years, but none of them have run more than a couple of weeks for the simple reason that they didn’t work consistently. You can’t count on it, and the whole idea kind of comes crumbling down. It’s only as valuable as its reliability, and that is just not good enough with IFTTT.
Aeroleads is LinkedIn marketing tool that brings you a step closer to your leads. Get access to business email ids and phone numbers to connect with your prospects straight away. Automate your lead generation process itself with Aeroleads. Customize your messages to make them even more impactful. It also integrates with top CRM solutions, websites like Crunchbase, Angelist, and marketing tools like sales navigator.
Pros
- All email ids are relevant and updated
- You can export all data to CSV files
- You can easily set up its Chrome extension
Tom P
Their free plan offers valuable tools at a low cost. The ability to acquire additional credits while on the free plan is great and overall low effort. For someone to gain value using this tool, they should be a very consistent LinkedIn user as well.
Cons
- Though the integration is seamless, it does cause lag in LinkedIn.
- The UI isn’t intuitive and feels outdated.
- You might run out of credits for leads that don’t convert.
Amanda Schneider
AeroLeads finds only business emails and phone numbers – the phone number sometimes will be the corporate phone number of the company and not the office desk phone number of that prospect.
SalesLoft integrates with a lot many sales tools and can be used by both beginners and professionals.It integrates with different data types across multiple channels, streamlines your workflow, and helps you understand your audience for better targeting. This LinkedIn marketing tool enables you to personalize your sales strategy and provides data-driven results to tell you where your sales strategy should be going.
Pros
- You can use this LinkedIn tool to keep track of your sales prospects. It can make calls, send text messages, track emails, and automate outreach efforts.
- It helps put all the sales info in one pane.
- The interface of the product is easy and intuitive.
Sam D.
It’s not perfect, but I use it all the time. Overall it makes my life easier.
Cons
- Sometimes users find that the program runs into issues and doesn’t function properly. It also leads people to uninstall and reinstall the extension, making the process very tiresome and time-consuming.
- Operating the task manager part of the platform is very cumbersome as you have to go to each cadence individually to track due tasks.
- Email tracking is a good feature, but sometimes it gives false alerts if the prospect is opening their email with Outlook, leading to confusion.
Eric A.
I’d say Salesloft runs great 75% of the time. The other 25% of the time, my co-workers and I frequently run into issues where the system doesn’t function properly. I’ve had calls that were never logged and also calls where it took over a day to show up.
Dux-soup is one of the most popular LinkedIn lead generation tools. With this tool, you can automate your prospecting work by having the tool view your prospect’s profiles, follow their activity, send them personalized messages, and endorse their skills. You can also add customized notes and tags to jot down your observations on specific prospects.
Pros
- This LinkedIn marketing tool helps you to download your prospects’ and leads’ profile details and upload them to your CRM tool.
- You can scan through thousands of LinkedIn profiles quickly, which helps you get their LinkedIn URLs. You can get emails for those contacts using the software again.
- Follow-up campaigns are also easy with the help of Dux-Soup.
Jenny S.
I like that Dux-Soup just takes care of a lot of the manual work that doesn’t need my attention.
Cons
- Its UI isn’t appealing and intuitive, so users take some time to figure out how to use it properly.
- You might encounter minor errors and technical issues.
- You have to pay extra for particular add-on features, which can make the tool pretty expensive.
Collin M.
At times it slows down my browser and overall makes Linkedin run slower. Their support team could be a bit more involved and not charge for simple calls!
Leadfeeder is a website traffic tracking tool that allows you to see which companies or individuals visit your website and what they’re interested in. You can link it to your CRM, Analytics tools, and email marketing for enhanced data-gathering and reporting. It can help in easy conversions as you target those leads that are actually looking for you.
Pros
- Integrating Leadfeeder data with CRM helps you streamline and automate communication with potential customers.
- It shows who you’re connected to on LinkedIn at the visiting company so that you can easily start a conversation.
- It offers many integrations and API keys to customize services.
Richard L.
Great insights. It helps us better understand our customers and prospects. I really love the open architecture, which allows us to integrate with relevant 3rd party marketing apps.
Cons
- Setting up filters could be a little challenging. For example, if you want to filter out all international results, you’d have to manually set up a filter for each country which would be very time-consuming.
- It doesn’t provide you in-depth results. For example, you can only see which company visited. You can’t know about the specific person or the title, so tailoring a campaign around what’s most important to the prospect’s role could be tough.
- The price is very high and could put a strain on your resources, especially for smaller companies that get a lot of visitors but are only concerned with a few of them.
Gayla
All it tells me is the company that visited. It would be helpful if there were other firmographic and behavioral data included about the visitor: job title, how long they stayed on the site, pages visited, etc
eLink Pro is another tool for LinkedIn marketing that takes a different approach to marketing than conventional tools. The tool is built on the idea of you visiting LinkedIn profiles of other individuals and they will be likely to return the favor and visit your profile.
While it is an impossible feat to regularly check out hundreds of profiles manually, eLink Pro automates this task and helps you visit hundreds of profiles. This tool suggests capping your profile visits to 800/day.
After doing this, there is a good chance that 5 to 10% will check your profile.
Pros
- Helps you generate market leads.
- Easily automate the lead generation and business connection part.
Misha W.
This is a wonderful tool for generating market leads on LinkedIn. It is great for the automation of generating leads and business connections while freeing the user to concentrate on other tasks at hand.
Cons
- Works only on Google Chrome.
- No ability to extract the full text of articles to be embedded.
- Slightly overpriced as compared to others
Virendra S.
I do not feel any disadvantage of this software except its price $49 per month. It is a little bit expensive for small businesses or for those who just started.
Conclusion
With the ever-increasing competition, you need to rely on the right tool stack, as they are directly responsible for bringing a tremendous change to your business altogether.
Instead of buying endless tools, choose a single robust tool capable of meeting all your social media requirements, fitting well into your budget. That’s why we recommend using SocialPilot. It is the most effective LinkedIn marketing tool for your social media management team. Activate your 14-day free trial now to optimize your efforts right
Frequently Asked Questions
Why use LinkedIn as your marketing tool?
LinkedIn is a great platform to build your brand because of the following reasons:
- LinkedIn has 772 million users and 30 million companies, giving you access to the world’s largest professional market, making it an excellent platform for lead generation.
- Sponsored InMail has, on average, a 52% open rate as opposed to 21.3% for email campaigns.
- The cost per lead on LinkedIn is 28% lower as compared to that of Google AdWords.
- LinkedIn had 90 million senior-level influencers, decision-makers at 63 million, and opinion leaders at 17 million, which means your business has the power to reach the right person.
What are the best LinkedIn marketing tools?
The top LinkedIn marketing tools for boosting sales are:
- SocialPilot
- Crystal
- IFTTT
- Aeroleads
- SalesLoft
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- Dux-Soup
- LeadFeeder
- eLink Pro
How effective is LinkedIn marketing?
LinkedIn is quite effective for marketing. In fact, studies claim that 80% of social media leads for B2B are from LinkedIn alone. LinkedIn is the right platform for reaching out to your prospects with higher chances of converting them into your customers.
How do I find LinkedIn prospects?
You can manually dig in LinkedIn prospects by using several filters on the platform. But it is a tiring and time-consuming process. It would be best if you utilized LinkedIn marketing tools to garner targeted leads that might instantly convert.
What is the best time to post on LinkedIn?
The best time to post on LinkedIn varies from niche to niche. However, posting between 10 am-12 pm on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays show better results.
How many times a week should I post on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn isn’t a demanding platform as such. But it is advisable to post 2-5 times a week on LinkedIn for maximum reach.
About the Author
1. SocialPilot
$30
SocialPilot is designed to streamline and automate the process of LinkedIn marketing. Built with a focus on simplicity and effectiveness, SocialPilot executes the entire LinkedIn marketing process, right from ideation to publishing. This comprehensive approach ensures you can create, schedule, and analyze your LinkedIn content all in one place.
With over 13,000 happy users, including professionals, teams, and businesses around the world, SocialPilot is one of the best tools for LinkedIn marketing. But how did SocialPilot reach where it is? With its best-in-class features and empathetic customer support team.
Imagine a tool that offers state-of-the-art marketing features, saves you time (a lot of it), and has a team that stands ready whenever you need assistance—sounds like a complete package? Sounds like SocialPilot!
Best for:
Marketing Agencies, SMBs, Multi-Location Brands & Professionals
Marketing and Collaboration features of SocialPilot
Multi-Account Publishing
Schedule and Post on multiple LinkedIn accounts SocialPilot.
Analytics & Reporting
Analyze and share PDF reports directly to the clients and peers.
Ultimate Inbox
Engage with your audience right from SocialPilot tool.
Peak Collaboration
Loop in your team and your client for collaboration and updates.
Key Features:
Explore more of SocialPilot’s key features.
SocialPilot Pricing
SocialPilot offers a 14-day free trial and access to all premium features (no credit card required & cancel any time). Choose a plan that fits your needs.
$170.00/mo
$85.00/mo
$42.50/mo
$25.50/mo
What People Say About Us
Cindy C.
What I like most about SocialPilot software is that it saves me time! I have connected my Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn social media accounts to SocialPilot, and I manage my accounts directly from the dashboard! This software is smart and easy to use. It is designed in such a fantastic way that anybody can learn to use it.
Luis Ignacio Cárdenas
Carrying the social networks of several companies at the same time, without the perfect tool, is a task that can end in a complete disaster. That is why, after using SocialPilot, I can say with confidence that it is the best option for small entrepreneurs and for consolidated work teams that seek to offer a better service.