The BEST LinkedIn Automation Tools for Your Business | LinkedIn Zopto Review

You know those people who connect with you on LinkedIn and then immediately send you a spammy sales message of something like, hey John, thanks for connecting! Are you open to a mutually beneficial call? (Chris White)

Or if you're like my pal Mr. Jackson - Sir, I am a professional Apple podcast promoter. I would like to promote your podcast show all the time. Sir. Do you want to promote your podcast show?

Hello Sir...

LinkedIn is one of THE most powerful tools for business right now, and recently I was approached by a company called Zopto who makes one of those LinkedIn prospecting tools which automate lots of the process of finding people, connecting with them, and yes, sending some of those automated messages.

Now I've always been someone who disagrees with these tools as I'm always a fan of doing things organically - but I'm also the kind of person who loves to automate things.

For me - my goal is to connect with as many people in the tech space as I can which in turn grows my audience. That's kinda it.

There's a story that I always remember, and I can't remember who it was about or who told me - but it was about a small company that once decided that they wanted to win the business of a much larger business.

So what they did, was learn the boss's route from his home to the office - back in the days when stalking wasn't a thing.

And they bought up billboards along their route.

So when they eventually got in touch, the owner of that larger business was just like - hey, you're the guys who are just everywhere!

When in fact, the only place they were, was strategically placed billboards on his way to work...

That's my approach.

You want to be in the same places where your prospects are hanging out. And right now, because of everyone being stuck home, that's LinkedIn, it's virtual networking events, it's supporting other businesses, webinars, and helping each other out.

So today I'm going to be testing out Zopto, by using these powers for GOOD! Perfectly balanced, as everything should be. Snap.

INTRO

First of all - hi my name is Pete, and I make videos around tech, business, and finance, so if you're looking for reviews on the latest gadgets, interested in using tech to help grow your business, or wanting to be smarter with your money - then please head over to my YouTube channel and subscribe for more!

So let's just bite into this cookie and say that most people do a horrible job at prospecting with LinkedIn.

They'll load up these automation tools, chuck in their massive list of prospects, and let the scale of numbers do its thing.

Even though the mutually beneficial call approach sounds dumb to most of us - It obviously must work, otherwise, people wouldn't do it. Spam 1,000 people with that message, and if just 1% take you up, that's 10 new leads for you. Great way to get 10 leads, yes. Also, a great way to turn off 990 potential leads!

BUT, in this post, I'm going to flip this approach completely on its head and go against what most 'marketers' will probably tell you IS the right approach, and we'll be using Zopto to do just that.

Getting Started

To get started with Zopto, first, you'll need a LinkedIn Sales Navigator account.

I haven't had one before, so just sign up for the free trial and remember to cancel it within 30 days if you don't want to spend around £50 per month on that.

I loaded up the sales navigator and looked for the niche audience that I'm searching for. I run an IT Coaching Business, so I'm going to be looking for other IT Businesses to connect with.

Once you have this, then don't go anywhere. Stay there and then we're going to fire up Zopto itself.

Now I'm not going to go through the setup process for hooking it into your accounts or anything, they actually cover that off as part of their onboarding, so to keep this video snappy and to the point - head into Campaigns, Create Campaign, Give it a name, and then here is when you want to go back to Sales Navigator.

Copy the URL of the search, and paste it into here. You can then ignore first-degree profiles, and check the automated data cleansing here but leave the others unchecked. Over on Schedule, leave it all default so this runs between 9 and 5, and then over on Modules - this is where the clever stuff happens.

I'm gonna check profile views because I want this thing to automagically view their profile first, and I'll cap that to 35 per day

I don't want to do anything on Twitter, I do want to send an invite or 'connection request' again - 35 per day. I'm not going to set a delay because I think it's only natural to view someone's profile, then connect with them immediately, or move on and don't connect. I'm going to use my 'Tech invite' which I actually set up beforehand.

Just a short and simple connection message with no personalisation because for one, I always get the impression that when they are personalised, it looks so much more automated and number 2, some people have some really weird names on LinkedIn now. Yes, I'm looking at you Jeri Williams CVA Purple Crystal Ball, Liam Gardner Microphone, and you Francis West Padlock with a key. ;)

If you use the 'Firstname Lastname' placeholders when connecting with people - these people are going to know immediately that you've used an automated bot to connect to them. Because their invite will say.

Hey Jeri Williams CVA Purple Crystal Ball!

Oops.

Moving on - I'm not going to send in emails, and I'm also NOT going to send a sequence. Though it is intelligent enough to stop sending further messages if a contact replies back. I know, Zopto will probably shoot me for not using this part - but my personal goals right now are to connect with a lot of people in the tech industry - not to sell to them, because I don't actually have anything to sell. But I just want to connect with a wider tech audience, see what are interesting things people are chatting about, and just - chat!

No selling, exactly how I like my social networks to be.

So I won't be sending a sequence BUT, with that said, what I will do is tell you about something else they gave me access to - Hyperise. This is actually, a really cool thing - I just can't think of a fun way to use it, other than send funny memes to people I connect with, which would annoy people.

But that's because my goals are to connect with people and not start an automated conversation today.

This thing here, allows you to personalise images by bringing in tags from their LinkedIn profile and then embed them in an image which you can then include within those automated prospecting messages.

Personally, for me - this opens up some incredible room for creativity with this prospecting tool. There are some absolutely genius things you could come up with here.

Connect with someone, get chatting, send some funny personalised memes that make it look like you've actually spent some time crafting that meme yourself within photoshop. Something that will really connect you with who you're talking to.

So as I said, I'm not using this today - but I'm super interested to see what people do with this.

And that is essentially it. All we do now is let the tool do its job. View profiles, connect with people and, if you choose to, send them a message sequence.

So with that said, what did this tool do for me?

Well, over the last 7 days I've added 49 new connections, out of 216 invites. So just over a 20% result - interesting.

But for me, the work only starts here - and you can of course come up with some really clever conversations using their tools within Zopto, but for me, I'd be just getting busy with my LinkedIn posts right now. Gotta show up to play right?

Lots of good stuff there - what about the bad stuff?

Well, getting my nitpick on...

I wish you could just click on the Viewed / Invites / Accepted on the dashboard to see who those people are.

Also when entering the LinkedIn credentials and Twitter credentials, you can't use a password manager, and you can't even copy and paste. Minor frustration.

Other than this, pricing-wise for Zopto it starts from $160 per month if billed quarterly which is what I imagine most people would be signing up to. Though it can scale hugely for agencies or much bigger companies where you want to control multiple LinkedIn accounts. If you use this link you'll get 25% off any plan for 3 months, which brings that price down to around $120 per month. That's about £86 per month - Not bad!

Overall - if I hadn't sold my business and I was still looking to connect with local businesses, of a certain size, or verticals, or whatever my target market was, then I think I would definitely give something like Zopto a try.

Given that we're still locked up and not allowed out of our houses here, LinkedIn is the breeding ground right now for lead generation, IF you do it well.

Zopto has features like automatic scaling so that LinkedIn sees it acting more organically than just a bot spamming messages, there's also a tonne of templates and they use their knowledge from running over 12,000 campaigns to help you get the best out of their service - which is also included too by the way. There's unlimited 1:1 email, chat, and phone calls to make sure you're getting the best out of it.

If you wanted to check it out, click this link  to get 25% off your first 3 months, and don't forget to head over to my channel; subscribe to the channel for more, and I'll see you in the next post.