Ever wonder how salespeople constantly manage to reach out to you on LinkedIn and even follow up with personalized messages repeatedly? It turns out there's an entire industry dedicated to automating this process. I had a fascinating time exploring these companies, as they operate in a gray zone—possibly violating LinkedIn's terms of service—yet still seem to “make bank.”
The numbers ($2-4 billions)
There are 40-60 services focused on LinkedIn automation, including some that also integrate with other social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram.
The current annual market revenue is estimated to be around $2-4 billion.
Perspective: Zoom's annual revenue is about $4 billion.
The customers
LinkedIn automation tools are used by a diverse range of customers, including:
Recruiters: Goal is to expand their networks and reach out to candidates.
Founders: Goal is to find beta customers to achieve product-market fit, as well as to connect with investors or potential clients.
Sales Teams: Goal is to discover and connect with new prospects.
The problem (to solve)
LinkedIn automation tools address the challenge of efficiently managing repetitive tasks like sending connection requests, messaging, and lead generation.
The Solution
There are two main features that solves the problem.
Lead Extraction
Lead extraction is done in several ways, but the main idea is to define search criteria, and the tool extracts contacts based on that. Some tools even enrich these contacts with third-party data, such as email addresses, for “multichannel outreach”—a fancy term for sending an email if there’s no reply on LinkedIn.
While all leads originate from LinkedIn, there are multiple methods for extraction. Some services only work with a Sales Navigator search, which requires a Sales Navigator subscription on LinkedIn, while others work with basic LinkedIn searches.
Here’s a typical flow:
Go to LinkedIn and create a search, e.g., “People working as CMO.”
Copy the URL from that search into the tool.
Wait a few minutes for the extraction to complete.
All leads from that search are now available in a list.
The leads are then loaded into different “campaigns”.
Outreach Campaigns
Outreach is the process of actually contacting someone on LinkedIn. This can be tedious, time-consuming, and prone to error. To streamline this, services offer "campaigns" where you can automate the entire outreach process while keeping it personalized and “human.” Some services even let you automate actions before performing the actual outreach, such as liking a post or endorsing a skill.
Here’s an example of using personalization tags:
“Hey %firstName%, I see we both went to %university% and you also work in %industry%.
Let’s connect!”
Each campaign flow can be customized with events, follow-ups, delays, and conditional actions.
Other Features
Additional features like A/B testing for campaigns, team management, integrations, inbox/CRM, blacklist management, and lead scoring are available in various forms across most tools.
The Providers
I’ve handpicked a few services on the market that I believe represent the current range. These services also rank highly in Google search results for “LinkedIn automation,” indicating a mature market presence.
Estimated Number of Employees
The industry seems to be dominated by SMBs, with a long “tail” of small startups that don’t really occupy much space in the market.
Perspective: Dropbox has 3,800 employees, Hootsuite has 1,600 employees.
Monthly Traffic
Perspective: Dropbox has 167 million visits per month, Hootsuite has 4.7 million visitors per month.
Monthly Brand Keyword Searches
Perspective: Dropbox has 4.9 million brand searches per month, Hootsuite has 184.2 thousand brand searches per month.
Starting Price
*These are the cheapest plans available for each service.
Perspective: Salesforce Starter Suite is $25 per month, Hootsuite Professional Plan is $99 per month.
Estimated Number of Customers
*Phantombuster also offers automation on other social networks.
Perspective: Hootsuite has 22 million users, Dropbox has 18.2 million paying users.
Estimated MRR
*I have used the lowest pricing point for these calculations, so the actual figures are likely higher.
Technical Threshold
There are several technical challenges if you're considering launching a fully-fledged LinkedIn automation tool.
Protection & Compliance
LinkedIn is not keen on automated bots reaching out to their users, so they will try to block or ban you. That’s why most services offer various security measures, such as dedicated IPs per account, proxy rotation, headless browsers, account warm-ups, and scripts to mimic human behavior.
Infrastructure
Running numerous headless browsers in cloud containers on dedicated machines, combined with mimicking human behavior, requires a complex and costly infrastructure.
Scraping
The main issue with scraping is that it depends on a third-party source for data. If they change their HTML structure, your entire operation could stop. For example, if LinkedIn replaces pagination in its search results with an infinite scroll, you would have to reconfigure your crawlers. Some of these challenges could be mitigated with AI scrapers, but they come with their own complexities and costs.
Campaign Builder
The campaign builder is quite complex, as it essentially serves as a marketing automation tool embedded within your service. Both the support for personalization and conditional logic, as well as the GUI presented to users for building flows, can become highly complicated.
Risks
Violation of TOS
There’s always a risk that LinkedIn will start cracking down on bots more aggressively, which could render your entire service useless—or worse, get your clients' accounts banned.
Legal Complications
There is also a risk of legal issues.
Complexity
Due to the complexity of the service, it might not be very MVP-friendly. It also makes it challenging to estimate the development timeline and associated costs.
The Opportunities
Customer Feedback
Most of the complaints seem to focus on ease of use and UI. After trying most of these tools myself, I have to agree. They are often difficult to understand and navigate, with their own confusing jargon that doesn't help users at all.
This, of course, presents an opportunity for new players to enter the market.
Google Search Result
MKW (main-keyword) refers to the keyword that best represents a business's core offering. I have added MKWs for other businesses for comparison.
The search volume is low but sweet in the US for Linkedin Automation. Confirming that it is an micro market with high potential.
This is a pretty interesting find, especially when you look at it with the graphs above and below. The competitive density is just as high as in bigger markets, but the search volume and CPC are both lower.
Like I mentioned earlier, the competition for advertising on Google doesn’t quite line up with the keyword difficulty for organic ranking. This could be a good opportunity if you’re looking to use ads as part of your marketing strategy.
Here are some sub-keywords that might not convert as well as the main ones, but they present an opportunity because their keyword difficulty is much lower.
Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create (ERRC)
The ERRC Framework—Eliminate, Reduce, Raise, Create—is a strategic tool used to identify opportunities for differentiation within a market. It helps businesses decide what factors to:
Eliminate: Remove aspects of the market that are taken for granted but add little value.
Reduce: Scale back on elements that are overserved, focusing resources more efficiently.
Raise: Enhance areas where the market is underserved, providing greater value.
Create: Introduce entirely new factors that the market hasn’t yet addressed, paving the way for innovation.
By using the ERRC framework, companies can carve out a unique position in the market, optimizing resources and delivering exceptional value to customers.
The spider graph above visualizes the market opportunities by showcasing the minimum (MIN) and maximum (MAX) scores across key attributes such as ease of use, automation depth, personalization, and more.
Understanding the Graph
MAX (Outer Layer): Represents the highest performance levels that any company has achieved in each attribute. This is the benchmark for success in the current market.
MIN (Inner Layer): Shows the lowest performance levels, indicating where companies are underperforming. These areas present clear opportunities for improvement.
Opportunity Gaps: The larger the gap between MIN and MAX, the greater the potential for companies to differentiate themselves by improving or innovating in these areas.
Innovation Beyond MAX: To push beyond the current MAX values, companies need to innovate—redefining what’s possible in the market and setting new standards.
By applying the ERRC framework alongside the insights from this graph, you can identify where they should focus their efforts to stand out and lead in the market.
Reduce: Automation, Personalization, Price
You could position your LinkedIn automation tool as a complementary add-on to existing marketing automation software by seamlessly passing leads and data directly to them, eliminating the need for built-in campaign features.
AI Sales Agent
A fully developed AI sales agent using a dedicated account, separate from your client's service, could solve several challenges. First, it eliminates the need for stringent compliance and safety measures. Second, it could indirectly lower costs since clients wouldn't need to hire as many salespeople. Third, it enhances automation depth, requiring clients to provide only basic instructions and training for the AI agents.
Complementary Services
Another way to find opportunities is by complementing existing tools in the market. The most critical step in LinkedIn automation is the outreach—the actual message sent to prospects. If you can develop a solution that significantly increases the success rate of these messages, you’ve struck gold.
Summary
The LinkedIn automation tool market is a micro market with plenty of opportunities, even though it’s crowded. Most tools compete directly with each other instead of focusing on innovation. The technology behind these tools is quite complex, risky, and expensive to run. However, there is significant potential for complementary services and for simplifying current solutions by leveraging third-party integrations, like marketing automation tools.
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