8 Ways to find clients on LinkedIn (for any industry)

LinkedIn is a powerful platform for finding clients. Unlike other social channels, it is the only one with smart search tools to find exactly the right people. Think about it, every other platform makes it difficult to find the most important people - who you can help.

In this article, we’re going to look at how to find clients on LinkedIn for any industry.

Here is the quick summary:

1. Define your offer
2. Map out your idea client
3. Optimise your profile for them
4. Check out topic focused events
5. Find them using a Boolean search
6. Join industry focused LinkedIn groups
7. Hang out with your clients influencers
8. Leverage Sales Navigator

In 2024, LinkedIn passed one billion users worldwide. LinkedIn has seen huge growth over the last 5 years as it has positioned itself as a one stop shop for recruitment, marketing, sales and thought leadership for B2B businesses.

So, let’s dive a little deeper into what you need to do to find and connect with clients on LinkedIn. I’ve also included some top tips to help you start conversations and build your reputation online.

1 - Define your offer

Before we dive into it, it’s important to understand what you are going to sell on LinkedIn. It’s pretty hard to find clients, if you haven’t bottomed out exactly what you are going to sell. Many will approach LinkedIn with the plan to talk to a lot of people and sell them what they need. 

This strategy doesn’t work so well.

Why? It’s hard to create content and write outreach messages if you aren’t clear on what you are selling. 

You’ll bamboozle yourself.

I always advise my clients to sell one thing with a clearly defined outcome.

It makes your content, targeting and messaging much easier.

2 - Map out your idea client

So, we have something to sell, now we need to map out who needs it, why do they need it and can they pay for it. You might be able to sell your offer to many different people, but they’ll all buy for different reasons. 

• Who needs your services / offer?
• Who do you enjoy working with?
• Why do they need it?

It’s also good to look at some of the key ways to find them, after all, if your ideal client is hard to find, that might put a spanner in the works.

• What are their job titles?
• What industries do they work in?
• Where are they located?
• What size of business are they?

Noting this down as a criteria is important but truly understanding their needs, pains, challenges and concerns will also help you craft more compelling content and add more value to them once you’ve found them.

Think about it, if you are a CEO and need to build your personal brand, what might your motivations be? What might the CEO face in challenges to doing that? What concerns might the CEO have?

These all form powerful content material and help you understand their position.

In my work with CEOs, I often note their main motivation is they want to promote the company more, they want to put out a strong presence for potential investors and their big concern is saying the wrong things and finding the time to do all the personal branding stuff.

Putting yourself in your ideal client's shoes will help you find them and help you engage them.

3 - Optimise your profile for them

Before you go client hunting on LinkedIn, it’s important you get your profile in order. Having worked with thousands of people, I can tell you that your profile is one of the primary education zones. Prospects dig into your profile to find out what you are all about. They click, study and research using your profile.

Make sure your profile is written with them in mind. From the header to the about section, ensure you clearly communicate who you help and why they need it.

When you send a connection request to a prospective client, they will check out your profile BEFORE they decide to accept your request.

The more relevant you are, the more friendly you look, the more likely they’ll accept.

There are some essential elements of your profile which need to be optimised. Optimising your profile is an article in itself, but for now, here are the quick tips:

• Set your branded LinkedIn Banner
• Write a targeted LinkedIn headline
• Ensure your profile picture is clear and you look friendly
• Use the free or premium custom link to drive potential clients to your landing page
• Populate your featured section with buyer education materials

4 - Check out topic focused events

LinkedIn has one of the best event features of any social media platform. There are thousands of events happening each week. 

LinkedIn events are a great way to find potential clients that are interested in specific topics, you can search them using the top bar and toggling the filters to events.

Finding clients on LinkedIn via events is a great way because you can qualify the prospects a little more. First - you know they are active because they’ve signed up for an event. Second - if you search for events which map your topic, you know they have an interest in your subject matter.

Once you sign up for an event, you can search through the attendee list to find clients easily.

There are events happening every week, so this provides an endless source of people who could be your ideal client.

5 - Find them using a Boolean search

You may have heard of Boolean search before, it’s often used in Google searches. LinkedIn also allows you to use Boolean to find your ideal clients.. It’s a simple way to use advanced filtering to find people. If you don’t have a budget for paid features, Boolean allows you to find people using keywords inside the search box. 

Here is how it works:

You can combine the search filters with Boolean to get better results. Boolean is a simple way to filter people by keywords on their profile.

In the search bar, you can add fields and create a string.

“Pensions”  - anyone with Pensions on their profile

“Pensions” OR “Retirement”  anyone with Pensions or Retirement on their profile

( “Pensions” OR “Retirement”) NOT (“Financial Adviser” OR “Accountant”) - anyone with Pensions or Retirement on their profile but doesn’t have Financial Adviser or Retirement.

Quick Tip: Boolean works best alongside LinkedIn’s main filters, especially if your target prospects are spread across different industry filters.

E.g. HR Directors in Technology companies ( they could list themselves in Human Resources and a raft of technology-based industries).

You can use AND, OR and NOT.

Boolean may seem a little unusual and tricky to get the hang of at first, but it is a powerful way to drill down beyond the basic search filters you get on LinkedIn free or premium.

6 - Join industry focused LinkedIn groups

LinkedIn groups aren’t as lively as Facebook groups but they are good for finding people with interests in topics or are in your target industry. In the next few years LinkedIn groups will get an overhaul and they will become a more lively place.

For now, they serve as a great way to find clients on LinkedIn and a simple way to distribute your content to the right people. 

Simply search in the top bar for keywords, industries or job roles and toggle the search filter to groups. LinkedIn will then show you a list of groups you can join.

Once you’ve joined and been accepted into the group, you can share content and importantly look at the membership to see who you might want to connect with or who is a potential client for you.

7 - Hang out with your clients influencers

Influencers are everywhere and they have a big crowd that follows them. They are masters of reaching and engaging people. In the past year, I’ve had more than 32m content impressions and more than a million users have engaged with my content. 

One of the well known secrets of budding influencers and those who want to find their ideal clients on LinkedIn is to hang around influencers that attract your ideal clients. They get hundreds of comments and reactions each day, many of them coming from people you’ve love to work with.

It’s really simple, engage with people who fit your ideal client in the influencers comments. Be helpful, add to the discussion and connect with those you have discussions with. It’s a simple strategy many use daily to build their network with active users who fit their perfect fit client.

8 - Leverage Sales Navigator

Finally, the ultimate way to find clients on LinkedIn is Sales Navigator. It has a suite of search tools to find exactly who you are looking for. The limitations of the other options are not present here, you can drill down in a lot of detail.

Not only can you use the standard filters we looked at earlier in the article, you can find people who are actively posting, and have recently changed jobs. You’ll find more of the right clients for you using Sales Navigator.

My favourite search fields are:

• Posted on LinkedIn
• Seniority Level
• Company Headcount
• Zip/ Post Code range search

You can combine the Boolean search alongside Sales Navigator to really thumbscrew LinkedIn’s database to find the clients you really want.

I’ll share more about Sales Navigator in future articles.

These 8 simple tips to help you find clients on LinkedIn are the best place to start.

For more tips like this, you can follow me on LinkedIn.