The Bada** Guide to LinkedIn Automation Tools for 2021

The Bada** Guide to LinkedIn Automation Tools for 2021

written by Houston Golden
Founder & CEO, BAMF Media
December 17th, 2020
Share This

Listen.

Your time is valuable.

And, if you’re still doing repetitive tasks over and over again, you’re just wasting more of it.

It’s the only commodity that you can’t make more of.

How many hours a day do you spend on repetitive tasks? This is time you could spend with clients, innovating, or even just relaxing after heavy days of growth hacking.

Today we’re going to give you a list of LinkedIn automation tools that you can leverage to amp your growth and get you more time.

Let’s not waste any more time, and get right down to it.

The Downside to Automation

We want to start you off with a small piece of advice.

Automation might be great, but don’t try to automate everything.

There are some things that you can’t automate such as nurturing high-value clients, and creative content creation.

You might be able to use tools that will enhance the process, but you can’t automate its entirety.

Also, there is a risk of heavily relying on automation that could cause your campaigns to look unnatural.

Your prospects can tell if it’s heavily automated.

They don’t like that.

Instead of having campaigns that are personalized, they might appear spammy.

You want to achieve the perfect balance of the human touch and enough automation to relieve you of the monotonous heavy lifting.

Here’s the rule:

If you need to be creative, use a person.

If you need to be repetitive, use a computer.

I, and the team at BAMF Media and it’s subsidiaries do not condone the use of scraping tools. Scraping can get you banned on most social media platforms, LinkedIn or otherwise, the information provided in this post is for educational purposes only.

Houston Golden

Expandi

We personally love Expandi because it’s one of the most powerful LinkedIn automation apps that you can get out there. It has all the bells and whistles that you will ever need to get your LinkedIn lead generation campaign up and running.

The team from Expandi says that their product is one of the safest out there – meaning, it won’t get banned. But, beyond the claim, we like Expandi because it’s an all-in-one solution for growth hackers who do a lot of lead generation.

What we like the most about it are the dashboard and smart messaging feature.

linkedin automation tools, The Bada** Guide to LinkedIn Automation Tools for 2021

You can fully customize your messages and even add pictures and graphics, making it easier to use techniques such as ABM on larger lists of contacts.

With Expandi, you can turn normal lead generation into highly-personalized outreach. This is the reason why we like the messaging feature so much.

A lot of the tools available on the market today just allow you to customize text and keep these options to the bare minimum.

Plus, it converts your LinkedIn inbox into a “smart” one, so you have more options to tag and make notes on your prospects. This helps keep your growth team organized and prevents cross-communication and redundancies

And, it provides you with metrics so you know if you’re hitting your KPIs consistently.

You can even create a multi-step campaign if you’re lead nurturing and connect this all to your CRM for a seamless experience. This is useful for longer sales cycles that rely on careful nurturing.

Now the tool isn’t cheap and it does cost $99 per account per month. But, it’s a small price to pay if you’re a power user.

GrowthLead

GrowthLead is another powerful tool that’s kind of secretive about its powers when you first visit their website.

However, it provides users with a complete suite of messaging and outreach tools that you can use to scale up your organization in no time.

linkedin automation tools, The Bada** Guide to LinkedIn Automation Tools for 2021

A quick look under the hood shows you their customized and automated invite system to grow your network. It automatically integrates that with a good messaging tool that offers you the usual feature-set

Follow-ups are also easily managed using their follow-up tool, and this has some AI built-in to help you make detect replies and filter and tag to help keep your growth team organized.

However, GrowthLead is more than just a tool, they also offer lead generation and consultancy services to their clients.

So, if you’re after outsourcing your lead generation they’re the guys to call.

Phantombuster

Phantombuster has several miniaturized automation tools that anyone can use at their disposal. You can use it to send a bunch of messages to certain contacts, discover emails with its integrations with third-party apps, or simply pull a list of people from a group.

linkedin automation tools, The Bada** Guide to LinkedIn Automation Tools for 2021

We’ve used Phantombuster a lot in the past because of the way it can easily help with lead generation.

It’s pretty straightforward to use and offers a lot of customization.

linkedin automation tools, The Bada** Guide to LinkedIn Automation Tools for 2021

It’s got an automated network booster, message sender, and even a profile scraper that sends results straight to your spreadsheet.

linkedin automation tools, The Bada** Guide to LinkedIn Automation Tools for 2021

Apart from the aforementioned tools, it’s even got some nifty Phantoms such as a chat extractor and an auto endorser that you can use.

It comes with a free trial with a more powerful paid version, plus it also covers other online applications as well.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Since it’s LinkedIn, you can choose to stay on the platform with its own tool.

Enter LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Now, there aren’t fancy features available to their in-house tool, but what makes Sales Navigator so powerful is its advanced search features.

The tool is naturally integrated into their database so it makes looking for new leads a breeze.

You can easily save time for client hunting if you choose to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Instead of fumbling about looking for prospects that fit your segmentation, you can just take advantage of their search features.

linkedin automation tools, The Bada** Guide to LinkedIn Automation Tools for 2021

They have filters for:

  • Custom lists – to filter within lists that you’ve already made
  • Company – even includes features to search for past and present companies
  • Industry
  • Company headcount
  • Function
  • Title
  • Seniority level
  • Relationship

You can also integrate LinkedIn Sales Navigator with your CRM of choice.

It might not be the most feature-packed option available, but it’s pretty powerful in its own regard.

Their cheapest package is about $65. They’ve also got more advanced packages that cost more.

LeadFuze

Don’t want to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, then hit up LeadFuze.

linkedin automation tools, The Bada** Guide to LinkedIn Automation Tools for 2021

Think of LeadFuze as a souped-up version of LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Instead of drawing data only from one source, it draws it from everywhere.

You’ve got advanced search functionality and a lot of nifty AI features integrated into the LeadFuze platform.

Teams can even go as far as to look for leads based on the technology that they are using. This is exceptionally helpful for SaaS and B2B providers who want to compete.

It’s a great addition to your LinkedIn automation tools because of the sheer power that you get with lead generation.

There are a lot of features in the app including:

  • a feature to prevent you from adding leads that team members are already working on
  • data cleansing abilities
  • and, the ability to allow the app to build lists for your lead generation team

We highly recommend the application to any growth hacker who wants a search engine, but for leads.

Pricing starts at around $132 per month.

Lead Connect

Looking for a simple interface with a forever-free version? Then, it’s worth taking a look at Lead Connect.

linkedin automation tools, The Bada** Guide to LinkedIn Automation Tools for 2021

The application is fairly simple and it uses a good old-fashioned Google Chrome extension to boot.

All you have to do is to define your audience – you also have the option to upload a CSV, set up your messages and follow up, then throw everything into your CRM.

It doesn’t have the most advanced features out there, but it’s easy enough to use and includes reply detection so that you can break a chain once a prospect replies.

They have a free version but that’s only limited to five invites a day.

That’s not so bad if you’re running a really small campaign on auto-pilot.

SocialPilot

No LinkedIn automation tools list would be complete without the addition of a toolkit to manage your LinkedIn posts.

At BAMF, we’re all about maximizing engagement and one of the best ways to do this is to make sure that you have a great tool to facilitate the process.

This is where SocialPilot comes in.

linkedin automation tools, The Bada** Guide to LinkedIn Automation Tools for 2021

SocialPilot is useful because it can help you schedule posts on LinkedIn. It integrates URL shortening and even allows you to upload up to 500 posts at a time so that it will be ready to schedule them out.

We also like the insight that it can provide so that you can make sure that you are hitting your KPIs.

It allows you access to manage Facebook and Twitter as well, so it can be useful as an all-in-one toolkit.

However, there are also other choices for social media management out there.

Octopus CRM

Octopus CRM is another one of those all-in-one solutions for LinkedIn automation tools.

The tool is marketed as a LinkedIn prospecting platform with several tools that you can use to make your life easier.

linkedin automation tools, The Bada** Guide to LinkedIn Automation Tools for 2021

You’ve got options to build funnels, auto-endorse, auto-connect, and it’s got the ability to create messaging workflows.

Say you want to connect with someone, it will automatically create a process where it will message, follow up with the prospect, and even check up on them if they don’t reply.

Like its competitors, you can send personalized connection messages.

Their most expensive package can go for around $25 if you grab their annual subscription.

Zapier

No automation list would be complete without Zapier.

Zapier is an app that allows seamless integration between two or more apps and allows tasks to be automated once a trigger has been hit.

Although it’s not strictly a LinkedIn tool, it’s got great functions for sharing stuff that you posted on LinkedIn to other networks, or triggering other types of events when you’ve posted content.

linkedin automation tools, The Bada** Guide to LinkedIn Automation Tools for 2021

Say you want to unify your company Twitter account with your LinkedIn company page, you can easily trigger new posts on your LinkedIn company page by just simply tweeting.

It can also work in reverse by posting things to other social media platforms when you post something on LinkedIn, and then triggering other actions to happen in other apps.

However, the main reason to put Zapier on this list is because of the integrations that it can do behind the scenes for the other processes in your organization.

You can create chains to work from a variety of applications such as Slack, Google Drive, Mailchimp, just to name a few.

We’ve included Zapier because of its flexibility in different applications.

They’re probably the standard for the “Swiss Army Knife” of integrations.

LinkedHelper 2

This is another tool that has been around for a while now.

Now it’s called LinkedHelper 2. If you’ve been growth hacking for quite some time, you might be familiar with their first version that was an extension that lived on your browser.

Now it’s a fully downloadable CRM tool that lives on your computer.

It’s got new features and it’s another tool that claims to be safe.

What we like about is the ability to connect with 2nd and 3rd-degree contacts, and its smart action limits. The new application seems to be designed with expanding your network base and we must admit that it does it quite well.

linkedin automation tools, The Bada** Guide to LinkedIn Automation Tools for 2021

Oh and it’s relatively cheap as well, you can snag a plan for as low as $8.25 if you purchase one of their annual subscriptions.

Zopto

Do you want a fully automated LinkedIn lead generation tool? Then, you can hit up Zopto.

This particular tool works by integrating with your LinkedIn Premium or LinkedIn Sales Navigator account.

Once you fill up their quick parameters for your search it will auto-pilot your lead generation efforts.

linkedin automation tools, The Bada** Guide to LinkedIn Automation Tools for 2021

You’ll have access to regular features that are common with tools like this such as: auto-view profiles and sequential messaging.

There’s also an option to connect with people on Twitter if you want a more layered campaign and you’ve got templates and options for A/B testing.

It doesn’t come cheap though, their most basic package will set you back an eye-watering $165 (for annual plans) with agency packages at $895 (monthly). That doesn’t include the price of maintaining a LinkedIn Sales Navigator account or a premium profile.

Dux-Soup

Dux-Soup markets itself as a LinkedIn sales automation tool and it’s one of the bigger names in the industry.

linkedin automation tools, The Bada** Guide to LinkedIn Automation Tools for 2021

You can use it to interact with prospect profiles by endorsing their skills and connecting with them, then it hits them up at scale with personalized messages.

It also touts the ability to use the app to only engage with “warmer” leads AKA responsive prospects.

You can even connect it to your CRM of choice, but that’s only available for the higher-tier package.

It’s got the ability to:

  • tag and segment prospects
  • upload specific prospect lists
  • custom message for you
  • annotate and share lead information with teammates – useful for larger marketing campaigns and organizations
  • randomize waiting times in between actions – which help keep the fair use policy of LinkedIn

And, here’s one more great feature of Dux-Soup.

It’s a Chrome extension so you have easy access to all its feature with a simple click!

They offer a free trial and their basic package should set you back about $11.25 a month.

Attach

Attach is a specialty tool that can help you out with tracking documents on LinkedIn after you’ve sent them.

linkedin automation tools, The Bada** Guide to LinkedIn Automation Tools for 2021

We find this feature helpful if you regularly give out lead magnets on LinkedIn and want a convenient way of tracking all of them.

But, that’s not all.

It’s got a lot of features that truly make it remarkable for the organization that sends out a lot of files.

You get to:

  • Restrict access after some time
  • Track where a prospect on the document i.e. what page are they on
  • Find out if they’ve forwarded the material to someone else
  • Check insights
  • Have an extension that you can use directly with Gmail

You can use it for lead magnet giveaways even away from the LinkedIn platform. This is great if you want to track progress or see if your lead magnet is actually making a difference.

Stop guessing or asking if your prospects have checked out your email or lead magnet, find out if they did live.

You can integrate it with Salesforce CRM and they’ve got a cool 14-day trial you can take advantage of.

Takeaways

Tools are critical if you want to save time, maximize efficiency, minimize human error, and free up your team’s mental and creative load to focus on things that actually matter for the organization.

You see, time is important.

You need to make good use of it.

Now, there are a lot more of these tools out there.

So much, that we can’t possibly cover all of them with a quick guide.

But, remember a tool is only good as the person using the tool.

Don’t buy tools that you can’t use for the sake of having some form of “automation”. Make sure you purchase ones that make the most sense for your business.

Start automating so that you’ll have more time to start growing.

You’ll thank us when you do. 🙂

About the Author

The name's Houston Golden. I'm the Founder & CEO of BAMF — a company I've grown from $0 (yes, really) to well over $5M+ in revenue over a span of 5 years.

How did I do it? Well, it's quite simple, really. I've helped hundreds of business owners and executives get major traction (because when they win, we win), I tell all on this blog.

Growth hacking is a state of mind. Follow along as I explore and expose the unknown growth strategies and tactics that will change the way you think about marketing.
Connect with MeJoin the Facebook GroupFollow Me On Instagram

Leave a Reply

2 comments

Leave your comment