Some industries have great coverage on LinkedIn. For example, many people in the tech industry will keep their LinkedIn profile up to date and they embrace LinkedIn the way some people embrace Facebook.
People are on LinkedIn to gain visibility and to further develop their professional brand.
However, there are many industries that could care less about LinkedIn or social media or computers in general.
Consider one industry that I am working on for a client — the golf course industry
On occasion, you can find people from the golf course industry on LinkedIn, but not very often.
In the state of Washington, for example, there are apparently over 250 golf courses.
I would assume that I could find at least 250 course superintendents on LinkedIn.
Not true.
Even when I use a very popular lead generation service that goes out and skims all this information off of different websites, I can only find 12 golf course superintendents.
That’s a very miserable percentage — somewhere between six to 10%.
So if you are looking for industries and you’re not able to find a great deal of success in using a lead generation service, chances are pretty good that you’re going to need to lead to build that list by hand.