Tips to bring more business to your website with LinkedIn
Cotswold Web • May 06, 2020
What do you use LinkedIn for?
It’s great for searching for new employees or for finding yourself a new job. But if that’s all you’re using it for, you are not getting the full potential and value out of LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is unique in that it is both somewhere for conducting business and a social media site. So
it’s a great place to promote yourself, find relevant business groups and meet new people, who could become future clients or contacts.
To build your customer base and increase sales of your products and services, you need to bring more traffic to your business website. LinkedIn is a great tool for bringing the right people to your website, but it is important to hook them straightaway with a LinkedIn profile they can’t ignore.
So how do you bring in more potential customers using LinkedIn?
Check out our top tips below!
Write a brilliant profile summary - make an impression.
Your LinkedIn profile summary is one of the first things people see when they visit your profile, so it’s important to make it work for you. Some people choose not to write a summary at all on their LinkedIn profile, but they’re missing a trick.
Your profile summary creates your first impression and is the easiest way to set you apart from other LinkedIn users. There are 2,000 characters available to strengthen your profile, add some personality, tell your career story and inspire action from your connections.
Get the keywords
right in your summary
LinkedIn’s search algorithms use keywords in your profile to match you with searches, so it’s important to get them right.
Make sure you’re using the best keywords by searching other businesses like your own.
Which keywords do they use? Then search for your own company as if you were a potential client. Which keywords do you use in your search? Those are the keywords which need to be in your summary.
But don’t go too far and cram your summary full of keywords right from the start. Choose the ones which seem to work best and you can adjust them over time to make your summary more precise. The most important thing is to always be thinking of keywords when you write and update your summary, and that you are always aware of new ones which will bring you the most traffic.
Make your first sentences count
First impressions matter
and that is especially important for LinkedIn, which will only show the first two or three sentences of your summary to visitors. You have just a few lines available to help visitors decide whether they want to click and find out more, so those first sentences really need to count.
In those sentences you need to be engaging, pull people in and you need to motivate them to take action.
With limited space available, practise writing directly and without additional, unnecessary words. For example, ‘We would be happy to hear from you’ can be expressed as ‘Give us a call’. This cuts down on words, speaks more directly and is less conditional. By cutting out a few words, you have more space for keywords, which are more effective in matching your business with searches.
Make the most of your word count
Your LinkedIn profile summary has a limit of 2000 characters (letters, spaces and punctuation), which should give you about 300-350 words. It’s important to use this as effectively as possible and make sure you use every last word that you can.
The more words you include, the more keywords you can add!
But using up all of your word count doesn’t mean padding your summary out. On the contrary, it means being strict and cutting out unnecessary words so you can keep it clear and direct.
Connect, connect, connect!
LinkedIn isn’t Facebook. It isn’t just about friends and people you know in real life, it’s about connections. While real life friends and colleagues may be a good place to start, you need to connect far more widely to make a difference for your business.
When you are doing your keyword search, send an invitation to connect to everyone who comes up in your searches.
The more connections you have, the bigger audience you have for your posts.
More connections also mean you will appear in more search results, as a suggestion for people with common interests or friends. Whether you have a common interest, you are in the same industry or you are based in the same town, all of these people are useful connections. They may go on to become clients, or they may be the link you need to connect with potential clients you otherwise wouldn’t have come across.
Don’t forget to post
As a social network, LinkedIn isn’t just about setting up your profile, making connections and leaving it there. While your summary will help people to find you, being active and engaging is what keeps them interested.
To make the most of LinkedIn, you need to regularly update your status by sharing interesting posts. This could be something from your own business, something from the wider industry or a news article you think your connections would find interesting. If you are sharing content from another site, it is a good idea to add your thoughts, comments or questions as an introduction, so your connections know why you are sharing the article.
If your post is something you have written yourself, don’t forget to include a link back to your own website at the end.
Like, comment and engage
Just like you, people are posting on LinkedIn to further their career and boost their business. Everyone will appreciate a positive comment and it will make them likely to check out your profile too.
But, more importantly, LinkedIn rewards people who post engaging content and comments.
This means that your profile becomes more visible in searches.
You can give a simple like (a thumbs up, just the same as Facebook) to a post, but to improve your profile’s visibility, you need to leave meaningful comments. These will get you noticed by their author and their connections. Don’t forget to be professional, relevant and polite, and to double check your spelling and grammar. Comments aren’t the place for blatant self-promotion. If the author or their connections want to find out more about you, they can check your profile.
Use hashtags
Just like Twitter and Instagram, LinkedIn uses hashtags. When you post a status update on on LinkedIn, make sure you use relevant hashtags, especially for your keywords. This means your posts will come up in hashtag searches. When a visitor clicks an identical hashtag in someone else’s post, they will see your post alongside others with the same hashtag.
Hashtags can either be integrated in the post eg ‘Check out my new article about #InstagramHashtags and let me know what you think’ or they can be added at the end of a post.
Avoid using hashtags that are too general
– like #article or #marketing. Too many irrelevant hashtags can come across as annoying and can create a negative impression of your business.
If used correctly, LinkedIn hashtags have the potential to grow your LinkedIn connections and ultimately bring more business to your website.
By putting a bit of time and effort into LinkedIn, you can really improve your engagement with the right people, to build your customer base.
More Posts.
Heading 1 The best way to drive traffic to your website for most businesses is through search engines, so it is essential to secure a prominent position on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). The two ways to do this are through search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. The two options offer a different approach to generating leads and sales. Depending on what you are looking to achieve, either PPC or SEO might be better at reaching your business goals. With PPC, businesses bid on relevant keywords to appear as a sponsored link at the top of SERPs. When visitors search for those keywords, the ad will be displayed in the sponsored results section. A business only pays for the ad if the link is clicked. The most popular ads are Google Ads, but advertising on Facebook, LinkedIn (ADD LINK - Why you need LinkedIn paid ads for your business (cotswoldweb.co.uk)) (ADD LINK - Facebook Ads: Measure your conversions! (cotswoldweb.co.uk)) or other social media can be just as effective, depending on your own target audience. SEO is a long-term strategy to generate clicks without having to pay for them directly. It is about optimising your website content around relevant target keywords to convince a search engine that your business is a leading authority on a particular subject. Here we will discuss the pros and cons of each, and which delivers the better return on investment (ROI) for your marketing budget. One way to help you make a decision on which is the best option for your business is to check out the competition. They are targeting the same audience as you, so you can learn from their successes and their failures. If your competitors are investing heavily in PPC, it could indicate it would work well for your business too. And on the flipside, if they are ranking well in search results, investing in SEO could be the way forward.
Heading 1 LinkedIn might not be the first platform you think about for advertising your business. But if you’re looking for business-to-business (B2B) sales, you shouldn’t ignore LinkedIn’s paid ads. Most online advertising is geared towards business-to-consumer (B2C) businesses. In B2C, you can rely on mass advertising and big audiences. But B2B is all about being more focused on finding the right people. LinkedIn has an audience of 850 million professionals. They are potential customers for your B2B business. (For comparison, there are just over 3 billion Facebook users, but the demographic of Facebook is much more mixed, and its advertising is far more relevant than to a B2C audience.) While your own (or your company’s) LinkedIn profile might be active, your posts will only reach your direct connections. If direct connections comment on or share your post, it might then reach second- or third-degree connections. But it’s not going to reach even a fraction of the audience you want to target. Using paid ads on LinkedIn will take your reach way beyond your organic following. B2B buying has a much longer lead time than B2C. According to LinkedIn, the average B2B sales cycle is six to nine months. Advertising in the B2B sector is about building long-term relationships. And LinkedIn helps you to do that. LinkedIn says it helps businesses to ‘Target the professionals you care about’ and ‘Reach a qualified audience with sophisticated B2B targeting’. According to its own data: 180 million senior-level influencers are on LinkedIn Four out of five LinkedIn members drive business decisions LinkedIn audiences are six times more likely to convert LinkedIn’s audience has double the buying power of the average web audience 40% of B2B marketers see LinkedIn as the most effective channel for driving high quality leads LinkedIn has a ready-made audience of professionals, a variety of ad types and the right data to help you target your advertising to reach the right audience. LinkedIn’s audience data is what it calls ‘deep zero-party data’. In other words, the data has been provided by LinkedIn members themselves – so it is trustworthy, accurate and frequently updated. This means your ads can be targeted at a very specific audience.
Heading 1 Facebook Ads are a very effective form of advertising for many businesses. But how effective? If you don’t measure your conversions, you really can’t be sure, as you will have no idea how good your return on investment (ROI) is. How to advertise on Facebook in 2021 (cotswoldweb.co.uk) By focusing on conversions, you can ensure you are reaching the right audience and measure your ROI to ensure you’re not paying more for a conversion than you should. First things first – what is a conversion? A conversion is when an ad achieves its purpose. It is an action or event which is part of a customer journey. Different businesses will have different actions which they class as conversions. The most obvious conversion is a sale, but it could also be booking a call, filling in an enquiry form or signing up for a subscription. You can track a huge number of metrics through Facebook Ads Manager (also known as Meta Ads Manager), so it is important to focus on the ones which are most relevant to your business and what you want to achieve. If the only conversion you are interested in is purchases, there is no point in tracking any other form of conversion.
Heading 1 You can invest as much time and money as you like into Google Ads. But if you don’t measure conversions, you will have no idea how effective they are for your business and how good your return on investment (ROI) is. A conversion happens every time your ad achieves its purpose. This isn’t just a sale. In fact, for many business to business (B2B) companies, booking a call or a prospective customer filling in an enquiry form is an important conversion. As a business, you decide on what counts as a conversion depending on your own business goals. Each business will have its own higher value conversions, which won’t be the same as those of other businesses. It is essential to always measure these conversions. It is the one definitive way of checking whether your ads are leading to those meaningful actions you want potential customers to take.
Heading 1 Using your website to promote your professional services business and sell to other businesses (business to business or B2B) is different from selling services direct to consumers (B2C). The cost involved for your customers is usually a lot higher than for consumer goods and services. Buying from another business is generally a big decision made over a longer period of time and often by a number of people. To compete in a competitive B2B marketplace, you need a clear and concise, fully responsive website, which can really showcase what you have to offer. Cotswold Web has worked on the website design of a variety of B2B professional services businesses from accountants to copywriting and IT services. Web design for B2B businesses is surprisingly cost effective and can make a real difference to your bottom line. Here are some of the fully responsive professional services business websites Cotswold Web has worked on…
Cotswold Web has worked on the website design of a variety of B2B businesses from wholesalers to contract electricians and even interior design for restaurants.