Traffic and conversions are some of the key indicators of success for your digital marketing campaigns. Without traffic, conversions are nearly impossible, so let’s focus on the former.g
The process of perfecting every part of your website can be exhausting. Especially if there are no visitors. Organic search was once considered the only meaningful driver of website traffic. That might have been true a few years ago, but today, we know that social media can do great things for your traffic.
Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are great at improving the number of website visitors, as you can turn your social media audience into regular visitors by being active and sharing interesting and quality content. Building a quality marketing strategy on these networks is important as they can provide a lot of traffic.
Choosing the network you will invest most of your time in depends on what you’re selling. But it’s often neglected how important your strategy on LinkedIn outreach is, particularly if you are running a B2B website.
Why? Because LinkedIn users engage in professional conversations and look for quality content. It also helps that almost all business decision-makers are using LinkedIn almost daily.
But how do you attract them to your website?
We have compiled a list of 6 ways to drive traffic to your website using LinkedIn.
1. Sharpen your profile
We are sure you already know how important first impressions are. So make a great one.
By having a complete and professional profile, you will have more credibility as an expert in the industry. This is the first step you need to take care of before even thinking about improving your website traffic through LinkedIn.
Start by creating your profile, if you haven’t already. For the sake of this article, we’ll suppose you already have.
Make sure that your titles, subtitles, and body copy are accurate, and describe you and your business. Brand it by including your logo for recognition and to grow trust within your audience. Making your profile more engaging and memorable with banner maker is also a great choice. You can customize the design as you like, edit the text to showcase your professional details and browse through the templates collection to find what better reflects your industry. Try to tell a cool and brief story about your brand history.
Humanize your profile by completing it with all your employees. This will help as people relate better to actual persons.
You can argue that this doesn’t drive traffic per se but having an unprofessional-looking profile will likely drive people away, which is the last thing you want to happen.
2. Join groups
Now, you are set to drive some people to your profile. An excellent way to do this is by joining a group, especially in your niche. These groups will help you zero in on the audience you are aiming for and drive relevant and rewarding traffic to your website.
We can all agree that self-promotion is frowned upon, so you will need a different approach. Engaging in discussions, helping others find solutions, and answering your peers’ questions will make you look like an expert in your field. This might not result in instant traffic to your site, but it will increase profile views. Profile views will likely translate into website traffic, once you build a good enough image.
Also, sharing articles or links that are relevant to these groups will ensure others recognize you. Engaging in conversations helps you build trust and relationships. Only at that point can you start sharing links to your content.
Being active in LinkedIn groups will pay off in a lot of ways. Establishing yourself as a thought leader will likely impact a rise of profile views which converts into traffic to your website. That’s great because it will also generate qualified leads. However, you don’t want to become a spammer! You will either receive a ban or be ignored by other members.
Pro tip: After you’ve made a name for yourself, don’t hesitate to create your own LinkedIn Group. This will help you create a broad network of people and a chance for even more connections. All the connection building will ultimately lead to increased website visitors.
There are a lot of perks to creating your own group, but it will take a lot of time and effort. You’ll have to engage with your members and micromanage activity daily. But that’s how LinkedIn works — you have to get down to business.
3. Build connections
LinkedIn is the perfect social network for connecting with your business peers. The more connections you have, the more people will land on your website.
Start by connecting with people you know from LinkedIn Groups or members of your Group. Also, include your email contacts and those from other social sites.
Next, you’ll want to start a personalised outreach campaign. You should use tools that speed up the process of connecting. But be aware — connecting with a lot of people daily can get you banned. There’s a thing we call “warming up your account”.
Basically, you start off with a small number of connections and increase that number slowly. LinkedIn will notice if your connections skyrocket from just a few per day, to a couple of hundreds. This is not natural behaviour and will likely get your account restricted.
Another important question is — how to send so many messages without the majority of them sounding spammy and unsympathetic?
Well, no need to worry! There are a lot of automation tools that have done the heavy lifting for you. They’ve even created and tested a lot of templates for many different outreach campaigns.
4. Generate leads for other campaigns
By building connections you will accumulate leads, so you can drive traffic with different methods. In other words — LinkedIn allows you to export contacts and re-use them for other campaigns. Once they are exported into a spreadsheet, you can target (and retarget) them in, let’s say, an effective email marketing campaign.
Use LinkedIn advanced filters so you can search by company and relationship. You should seriously consider Premium advanced search on LinkedIn, which allows you to search by function, location, seniority level, and group size, as well.
Generating leads with LinkedIn can be a clear-cut process. As already mentioned, joining or creating groups is a really good way to make connections. With the help of tools, such as Phantombuster, you can “scrape” the last 2,500 members from any group, and export them into a spreadsheet in a few minutes.
5. Create quality content
One of the best ways to become relevant on LinkedIn and get more website visits is to share interesting and engaging content. People care deeply about what content they’re consuming and they won’t waste a second on your posts if they don’t interest them.
Quality and helpful content will not only uplift you as an expert in a specific niche, but people will reach out to you for advice. Or even guidance and mentorship!
By regularly sharing smart and useful information, you might even assemble a loyal following, thirsting for more of your content. And if they repost your content — voila, you’re going viral! Even more traffic!
Creating intriguing content can be a draining process. So here are a few ideas to kickstart your content strategy:
- if you don’t have a blog, start thinking about one. A blog is a great source of content that you can easily share on LinkedIn and try to start discussions.
- Share a lot of educational and interesting posts from your blog if you want to redirect a lot of traffic from LinkedIn.
- Combine images and videos, as they tend to drive more engagement, as well as a higher clickthrough rate than plain old text. LinkedIn backs this up with a study that says that incorporating visual content, increases the comment rate by 98%!
- Sharing industry news also improves your position amongst your network and groups. Republishing content will help you stay active, and jump in when scarcity reigns over your own content.
6. Sponsor your content
Creating content that is appealing enough for professionals on LinkedIn to click isn’t easy. Despite having a large number of connections and quality content — desired outreach isn’t guaranteed.
Reach your highest potential on LinkedIn by sponsoring your most valuable content. Amplifying a great post will not only reach more people but will reach the right ones. Those that are more likely to land on your website.
Sponsored content will likely drive the most traffic to your website. With targeting based on demographics, your ads will appear on feeds of users that are in need of the exact content.
But it’s not that easy. You will need to go through some rigorous experimenting before publishing those ads and sponsoring content. Explore through different ad specs that LinkedIn offers.
Before you get started, you should know that there are different types of ads when advertising on LinkedIn. Sponsored content, video and text ads, dynamic ads, to name a few. Which one you should use depends on your goals and targeted audience.
Sponsored content calls for the use of certain practices:
- Sharing only relevant and quality content
- Use of an effective Call-To-Action
- A recommended ad size
- Short copy that is descriptive enough
That said, LinkedIn advertising offers plenty of options to market all kinds of businesses. You just need to get a grasp on what will work best for you.
Use LinkedIn — drive more traffic
LinkedIn is a dream come true for every B2B marketer. It’s used by professionals who have interests in what other professionals have to offer. With the help of all the instruments that it offers, it’s easy to drive more traffic!
Website traffic can flourish if you play your cards well. It’s all about making good impressions and connecting with the right people.
Engage in professional discussions within high-quality groups, where you actively share knowledge and information with like-minded people. Expand your reach by promoting your content, and you will be able to deliver it to users that will be most interested in what you offer.
Apply these free tips, so that your website can reach its potential to the fullest!
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About the Author
Stefan Smulders is a SaaS entrepreneur and a founder of the world’s safest software for LinkedIn automation – Expandi.io. He’s enjoying his family life in the Netherlands being a proud father of a lovely 4-year old son Steef.
