5 Tips for Using LinkedIn to Drive Traffic to Your Website

If you’re a B2B marketer, LinkedIn is the ideal place for you to increase your reach, connect with potential customers, and drive traffic to your blog or website. It has become known as the social media channel where people can find professionally relevant information and with over 590 million users and counting, promoting content on LinkedIn makes good business sense.  

Whether you’ve never used the platform before or you’re a seasoned veteran, the following tips will help you increase your ROI, drive traffic to your website or blog, and get the most from your content marketing on LinkedIn. 

Create Your Content 

Before you can harness the power of LinkedIn to drive traffic to your website, you must first create relevant content people will want to consume. Powerful, pertinent content is the foundation of inbound marketing. According to HubSpot, content marketing brings in 3X as many leads as traditional marketing and costs 62% less. Quality content will not only attract, engage, and delight prospects and customers, it will bring new visitors to your website or blog, and generate revenue for your company.  

Your content marketing should provide free, useful information to your audience. Avoid the hard sell. Instead, compile a list of your customers’ pain points and create content that imparts information about how your products and/or services can solve their problem. Whether it’s a blog post, video, or a whitepaper, your content should give prospective customers the information they are looking for – even if they don’t know it – in a creative and engaging way.  Establishing your company as a trusted thought leader shows potential customers that you have the right solution to their problem so, when it comes time for them to invest, you’re top of mind. 

Share your Content Organically 

Posting to your LinkedIn Company page allows you to send an update to all your page followers. To maximize the number of people who will read your post, we recommend adhering to the following guidelines: 

1. Concise, descriptive caption: LinkedIn will cut off the text and insert an ellipsis if your post takes up more than three lines of space. When this happens, users must click “see more” to get the full message. Succinctness is important. Inefficient post length means the call-to-action at the end of the post is cut off, which can translate to fewer visitors coming to your website. To get the most from your company page’s organic posts, ensure your caption quickly tells your followers what the post content is about and why they should click the link to your blog or website.  
2. Share dynamic visuals: Pair your snappy caption with a stunning visual to grab the attention of your followers and prospects. Curate your visuals thoughtfully. Move beyond stock photography and, instead, choose well designed personalized imagery to separate your company page from the pack.  
3. Get creative with link sharing: Like Facebook, LinkedIn doesn’t want to display too many posts containing links to third-party sites because the LinkedIn algorithm doesn’t like to promote anything that directs users away from the platform. This can make sharing your blog post and driving traffic to your website a bit more difficult by greatly reducing the reach of your organic updates. But don’t despair! There is a workaround. Simply publish your text-only post and edit it immediately after it’s posted to add the link. A word of caution: when you add links this way, the result won’t include a preview image. If you want to include this image, you need to do it when writing the original post because LinkedIn won’t allow you to add an image to a post that’s already been published. 

Invest in LinkedIn Ads 

Marketers often overlook LinkedIn Ads in favour of ads on other social media platforms. However, for B2B marketers who want to reach their potential customers on the platform where they hang out, LinkedIn is the place to be.  

There are several different types of LinkedIn ads to choose from: 

1. Sponsored ads: Sponsored Content ads appear in the news feed and are great for getting your content in front of a larger (targeted) audience and showcasing your brand’s expertise. Use LinkedIn’s Sponsored Content ad specs to get detailed information on creating your ad. Sponsored ads can be used with LinkedIn’s Lead Gen Forms. Because users will have to complete a form in order to collect the content offer, we recommend this option for promoting your high-value content offerings like eBooks and whitepapers. You can add up to 7 fields of requested information in your form. After the form is submitted, users are directed to a Thank You Page where they can collect their content offer, and you’ll be able to download your leads from your campaign manager.  
2. LinkedIn text ads: Text ads are small ad units that appear at the top and the right of the LinkedIn news feed. They only appear to desktop users, not on mobile devices. They’re a great way to grab the attention of busy professionals browsing LinkedIn to drive traffic to your LinkedIn Company Page or website. They’re similar to Google search ads, so you create and feature a headline, description, and image. To make your text ad stand out, follow LinkedIn’s text ad tips.  
3. Sponsored InMail: Sponsored InMail is like email marketing, except that the messages go directly to users’ LinkedIn inboxes. Sponsored InMail will get to users, no matter what devices they’re using. Messages contain a custom greeting, call-to-action button, and body text where you can add a link. These messages will appear in users’ inbox just like they do for regular LinkedIn private messages. People develop trust when they feel you’re talking directly to them and with these personalized messages, users will be more likely to click the link to your blog or website. Follow LinkedIn’s Best Practices to optimize your InMail messages.  

Encourage Team Members and Colleagues to Share your Content 

Increase your company’s reach on LinkedIn by encouraging your colleagues and team members to engage with your posts and share your content their networks. Statista found that 27 percent of LinkedIn users had between 500 and 999 first degree connections on the social networking site. Multiply that by the number of employees at your company and that’s a lot of potential reach! 

At Time + Space, we send our team a bi-weekly internal content update email containing information and links to our latest content offerings. This is keeps the team up to date on the important topics we’re writing about and gives them information about how they can share it, effectively turning them into evangelists for our brand. The bottom line is that if our team doesn’t know the content exists, they can’t share it.  And if they understand the importance of sharing and what to share, they’re much more likely to do so. 

Follow Up with Engagement 

As your content marketing efforts begin to take off, the traffic on your company page will start to increase. You will see a spike in views, comments, followers, and even direct messages. Take advantage of this by engaging with visitors and nurturing future opportunities with new prospects. Answer questions and learn more about your followers’ interests and pain points so you can create more content that will attract, engage, and delight more prospects and customers.  

There are many ways you can leverage LinkedIn to promote your content and drive traffic to your website or blog. As with any social media channel, it’s imperative to ensure that your content is relevant, and you select right the tools to get your content in front of the right audience. Taking the time to understand how LinkedIn can be used for content marketing will pay off in the long run.