Accelerate Your LinkedIn Growth with a HubSpot CRM

There is a popular saying in the business world: “what gets measured gets managed.” In order to grow an aspect of your business, you need access to sophisticated data to give you performance insights. This sort of data is readily available for marketing methods like email. But even though LinkedIn provides excellent audience segmentation data, they provide only basic engagement and performance data.

My clients have been expressing a need to be able to better track their LinkedIn traffic to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and the value of their network. So I built a LinkedIn CRM to help them obtain data that will allow them to grow their LinkedIn.

Tracking LinkedIn In HubSpot CRM

This example is a LinkedIn CRM I built for my business using HubSpot. I focused my LinkedIn CRM around key metrics for my business, but it is possible to customize the CRM to track your business’s KPIs.

The LinkedIn dashboard tracks 4 key metrics of my LinkedIn growth strategy:

1. Total effective network
2. Messages by week
3. Network growth over time
4. Connection pipeline

Total Effective Network

The Total Effective Network portion of the LinkedIn dashboard allows me to see how many people in my LinkedIn network fit my target client demographic. This allows me to create realistic goals based on the number of target clients rather than total followers. If the number is low, I can tweak my strategies to better target my ideal clients.

Messages By Week

The HubSpot LinkedIn CRM also tracks the messages I send to my LinkedIn network each week. This allows me to track the valuable contact I have with my LinkedIn network. If I wanted to, it would be easy to set up this section to track response rates as well.

If you have a social media manager or team handling your LinkedIn engagement, this LinkedIn dashboard allows you to track their effectiveness. Impressions, views, and engagement rates can tell you about the quality of the content they produce. Messages by week gives you data to track if they are building meaningful connections and providing your business with warm leads.

Network Growth

This section of the HubSpot LinkedIn CRM shows how your LinkedIn connections have grown in each quarter. You can see total new connections in each quarter and segment the growth by job title. That allows you to see how successful your content and outreach strategies have been in gaining new clients in your target job roles.

Connection Pipeline

The final metric that I track on the LinkedIn dashboard is my connection pipeline. This graph gives me a quick glimpse at the progress I have made with target connections. I can see where I am in the connection process, whether I have followed them, connected with them, sent a connection request, or if we are not connected.

I can quickly see where I stand with my current connection strategy. Once I get to 70%, I know it is time to start researching new target connections in order to fill that pipeline up again.

How Does the LinkedIn Dashboard Work?

There are 4 pieces of tech that power this LinkedIn HubSpot CRM:

• HubSpot – stores and displays data in the LinkedIn dashboard
• Apollo – finds the LinkedIn profile for new HubSpot contacts and imports contact details to HubSpot for new LinkedIn connections
• Phantom Buster – scrapes the data from LinkedIn profiles
• Zapier – automates the LinkedIn dashboard and connects all of the systems

I have also created a Google Cloud function that tracks the data for how many emails I get from LinkedIn messages. This allows me to track the conversion from my LinkedIn messages.

Store LinkedIn Data in HubSpot

The role of HubSpot in this LinkedIn dashboard is to store and display the data in a user-friendly manner. HubSpot tracks 6 contact properties for the LinkedIn dashboard:

• LinkedIn status – where this contact is in the connection pipeline
• Sales Nav profile – links the contact’s sales nav data
• LinkedIn profile – what data is on the contact’s profile
• Message thread – tracks data for messages per week
• Connection date – when we connected on LinkedIn
• Last LinkedIn profile date – when the profile data was last updated for the dashboard

Find LinkedIn Profiles with Apollo

The role of Apollo is to ensure I am maximizing my contact list. If I connect with someone on LinkedIn, Apollo will find their contact details to update HubSpot. If I find that lead elsewhere, Apollo will find their LinkedIn profile so I can connect with them there.

Pull LinkedIn Information from Phantom Buster

Phantom Buster is a lead generation scraper. It performs 3 tasks for this LinkedIn dashboard:

• LinkedIn contacts extractor – it provides the data for tracking my LinkedIn connections
• LinkedIn inbox scraping – it provides the data for tracking messages and responses to LinkedIn messages
• LinkedIn profile scraping – it updates the profile data to keep up with job changes in my contacts

Process LinkedIn Information in Zapier

Zapier takes the data from Phantom Buster and feeds it to HubSpot. It allows me to create rules to automate the process of collecting the data and updating the LinkedIn dashboard.

LinkedIn Strategy Effectiveness Tracking

Social selling, especially LinkedIn selling, forms a major part of my lead generation strategy. This LinkedIn dashboard allows me to collect the data I need to measure the effectiveness of my LinkedIn strategies and identify areas for improvement. It has been very valuable to my business to track this data, so I can see the direct impact of the investment I made in social media.

If you are a business owner who wants to improve their LinkedIn outreach strategy or you have any questions about the LinkedIn dashboard, get in touch.