LinkedIn is the largest business-oriented social network. In fact, it has evolved to become much more than a network; it’s a complete professional platform with invaluable capabilities.
If you’re a B2B professional, LinkedIn is the ideal place for you to connect with your target audience, develop relationships, and drive traffic back to your blog. With over 500 million professional members, LinkedIn makes it a great opportunity to generate traffic and new leads for consultants, coaches, and B2B service providers.
LinkedIn traffic compared to Facebook traffic
Why choose LinkedIn over Facebook if you’re looking to increase traffic? Everybody is on Facebook, right?
Well, the atmosphere and the intention are different between the two networks. LinkedIn is a professional community, so when people are around they’re talking business. On Facebook, however, people tend to be more relaxed, look for fun stuff and catch up with their friends and family.
Also, LinkedIn can be a better source of targeted traffic, because it has a set of powerful tools for generating leads, enhancing the overall online presence for your brand, gaining new customers, and building brand awareness.
Finally, LinkedIn allows you to see extensive information on users, while on Facebook, profiles are most of the time incomplete and sometimes even fake.
If you’re a consultant, coach, a course creator, an agency or any sort of business service provider, LinkedIn is where you can connect with your market.
To put it in real-world terms, what LinkedIn essentially does is bring business networking online. To connect with high-paying clients for your coaching or consulting business, you’d be attending conferences and business networking events.
LinkedIn traffic for consultants, coaches, and B2B service businesses
Likewise, when online, you’d be using LinkedIn Groups, Sales Navigator, Articles and other amazing features that we’ll discuss in this post.
1. Company page
To increase brand awareness and drive more LinkedIn traffic to your B2B website, your professional profile is not enough; You need to build a company page too. Your page will give you space to define your brand and showcase your products or services. Designing a company page can boost traffic back to your coaching or consulting website, and enhance user engagement.
Setting up a company page is easy to do. Visit this link to learn more about it.
It’s important to add a detailed description and overview to your page.
Also, keep in mind that you need to optimize for search. Company pages are SEO-friendly. They appear in Google search results and on search within the LinkedIn platform. Make sure that your description leads with powerful, keyword-rich copy of fewer than 160 words. That would be the part which will appear in Google search results.
Add your logo, banner and product images for a stunning visual result.
Current employees
To attract your ideal customer avatar to your page you first need to create traction. Begin with your company’s staff and have them add your LinkedIn page and company details to their LinkedIn profile. Motivate them to like, comment and share future business updates to increase your brand reach.
Post timely and relevant updates
Just like other social networks, it is adviced that you post company page and profile status updates consistently. Updates work as a reminder of your brand and help strengthen relationships with your network of professionals. Aim at publishing meaningful, relevant, and unique content.
Regular updates can directly boost your potential audience reach and end up being viral. Viral posts will bring more traffic to your coaching or consulting practice. You can also share third-party news and articles if you feel they contribute to your brand message. Your updates will appear on the company feed page and your connections’ homepage.
Advanced tools for traffic
Moving away from a basic presence like a Company Page, LinkedIn has a pool of awesome marketing tools that are hard to find on any other platform. Out of all the features that LinkedIn has to offer to consultants, coaches and B2B service providers who want to generate traffic, we are going to focus on the following:
- Ads
- Groups
- Articles
- Sales Navigator, and
- SlideShare
Before you get started with these advanced features, as with any marketing strategy, you need to first define your audience, goals and marketing funnel.
Define your customer avatar
LinkedIn profiles are a rich source of information. Before initiating an outreach campaign for your coaching or consulting practice, you need to know who your potential customers are.
Define your ideal customer avatar using their location, industry, name, position, age, gender, skills, experience etc.
A great idea is to use Scriptly’s wizard to create your ideal customer avatar.
Scripty has a lot of value-packed features, but when it comes to buyer personas, it gives you an easy-to-use tool that helps you define your ideal customer avatar in minutes not hours.
Create landing pages
After determining your prospect profile, you must decide on how you’re going to market the services of your consulting or coaching business. To do that you need a sales funnel in place.
A sales funnel is comprised of a set of pages and tools for capturing your leads and communicating with them.
Scripty does an amazing job in helping you design landing pages fast even if you are a complete beginner.
Landing pages need to be audience and service-specific and to demonstrate the benefits for people who will take you up on your offer. Usually, the entry point for a funnel is a squeeze page where you offer your leads a freebie in exchange for their email address.
Promote your squeeze page by sharing the URL on your profile, company page or LinkedIn groups. You can also run paid campaigns to attract a well-defined audience to your lead magnet.
2. LinkedIn Ads
This point brings us to Ads as an effective traffic source for the small business owner, coaches, consultants and entrepreneurs.
LinkedIn Ads are an excellent marketing tool for B2B service providers, like coaches or consultants. You can engage in precision targeting by using demographics such as location, job title, function, company size, industry, or seniority, among others. There are different types of campaigns you can create. You can use:
- Sponsored Content, which essentially boosts your posts,
- Sponsored InMail, which is all about contacting professionals directly through LinkedIn Messenger,
- Text Ads -these are the typical pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) ads
- or a mix of all three.
As with all advertising channels, there’s no one best option for your ad format. What campaign type you choose depends on your goals, budget and target audience. For example, you can use sponsored updates to raise brand awareness and build strong relationships with potential customers, while at the same time you might want to bid for text ads to reach out to an extended pool of leads and drive quality traffic to your coaching or consulting business.
Try different advertising mixes to find what works best for you. No matter what type of LinkedIn promotion you choose, it will help drive more traffic and subscribers to your coaching, consulting or other service business.
To create a LinkedIn Ads campaign, go to www.linkedin.com/ads, and click on the “Create Ad” button.
3. LinkedIn Groups
Groups are one of the most powerful networking and marketing tools for consultants, coaches, and entrepreneurs on LinkedIn. They’re also completely free to create or join.
A single LinkedIn group can help you get your message across thousands of highly-interested people, and build an entire business. Groups are perfect for you, if you intend to market B2B services, sell tickets to paid events, and be established as an authority in your chosen niche.
You can create your own groups or join interest-based groups of professionals by visiting this page www.linkedin.com/groups.
Choose the group name carefully, since it’s an important aspect that can help attract the right audience. When deciding on a group name, consider the different keywords that people are likely to search. Do some research yourself to discover other competing groups that exist on LinkedIn and see how they use relevant keywords in their title.
When you join groups that were created by other professionals, be sure to contribute to discussions. Be active by commenting and answering questions, or start your own discussion to boost awareness of your brand or survey potential customers for your consulting or coaching B2B services. Keep interacting with others and provide as much value as you can to present yourself as an expert in your field.
To facilitate quality and reduce spam, LinkedIn has implemented some limitations. Here’s more information about group limits.
4. LinkedIn Articles
LinkedIn became a powerful publishing platform when they introduced Articles a couple of years ago. With LinkedIn Articles, influencers and professionals, like owners of service-based businesses, can clearly demonstrate expertise and establish authority in their community.
The ability to publish articles is not available in all geographic locations, but once you’re given publishing capabilities, you’ll have access to Articles from your LinkedIn homepage.
When you publish an original article, your content is displayed in the Articles section of your professional profile. Your current and future connections will be able to see it. Also, your article is visible to your followers in their news feeds, and sometimes through notifications.
Members who aren’t already connected with you can start following you from your article, which in turn helps you expand your reach. Your next article will appear in more people’s feeds.
Accordingly, your article should be optimized for SEO, since it is discoverable both on and off LinkedIn, depending on your settings. Having your public profile visibility set to “everyone” will allow your articles to be crawled by the search engines.
5. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Now, let’s talk about another powerful tool that service businesses use to discover new leads and close sales. It’s called LinkedIn Sales Navigator and it makes prospecting easier than ever. It is part of LinkedIn’s premium plans which are outlined in more detail on this page.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps you discover the right B2B prospects fast. With LinkedIn’s sophisticated algorithm, this prospecting and sales tool gives you the ability to use filters and narrow down searches in a tailored way.
You can easily save leads, and contact them with direct InMail messages to warm them up. With Sales Navigator, you also get access to insights on your accounts, like job changes, company growth, and more.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is basically designed for sales professionals. Having said that, every solopreneur is required to be involved in sales, right? Even if you don’t like sales and cold calling, LinkedIn Sales Navigator makes it easy for you to find new targeted leads for your service business and contact them on the spot. That way you can build lasting relationships with a broad network of professionals.
The more customized your initial message is the better response rate you will get. Instead of trying to sell something from the first contact, aim at building a relationship by providing valuable content.
Why not send your prospects a link to an interesting piece of content that you’ve published on your site? Not only will that action increase traffic, but also your connections will appreciate the information and will want to learn more about how you can help them.
It’s common knowledge that the sales cycle for coaching and consulting services can be long; make sure you nurture your relationships and be there when the prospects are actually ready to purchase.
6. SlideShare presentations
Last but not least, there’s one more traffic tool in LinkedIn’s arsenal that you can start using right now. It’s called SlideShare. SlideShare is a standalone service which was acquired by LinkedIn back in 2012.
LinkedIn SlideShare is today a global hub for professional content. It’s one of the top most-visited websites in the world, with over 80 million users and 18 million uploads. On SlideShare, you can view and upload:
- Slide decks
- Infographics
- Other document formats, and
- Videos
If you’re looking to increase traffic to your consulting or coaching website, SlideShare should be one of your top picks.
Presentations are one of the basic ways through which service businesses demonstrate authority and trustworthiness. Coupled with a popular search-engine-optimized site like SlideShare, you get a huge source of free, high-quality traffic for your small business.
SlideShare presentations also enable small business owners, like coaches, agencies or management consultants, to seek and discover new connections with experts, gain the insights they need to become more productive and successful in what they do. This is why SlideShare aligns perfectly with LinkedIn’s mission to provide professional networking tools.
On the side of the publisher, individuals and businesses all over the world use SlideShare to:
- Reach a large audience,
- share insights,
- attract new leads and
- drive traffic to their site.
Most importantly, with SlideShare you can reach a laser-targeted audience because most of your SlideShare viewers will come from the search engines, which means they’re actively searching for information on your subject matter.
With SlideShare you also create powerful backlinks, SEO-wise, which will boost your site authority and search-engine visibility.
LinkedIn: A powerful toolset for coaches, consultants and service businesses to generate traffic
So, that was it! Let’s wrap up! If you’re selling any kind of B2B services, LinkedIn is the place to look for high-quality leads. LinkedIn is the largest professional network, and a comprehensive platform for traffic and lead generation.
Also, LinkedIn provides a handful of professional tools you can use to increase traffic and grow your consulting or coaching business. These tools are basically ideal for any type of service-based business that wants to grow their LinkedIn traffic and lead generation process.
The basic traffic-generating tools that you get access on LinkedIn are:
- Profiles
- Company Pages
- LinkedIn Ads
- Groups
- LinkedIn Articles
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and
- SlideShare
A basic membership for LinkedIn is free but if you want to get access to advanced features, like the Sales Navigator, or you want to create advertising campaigns, you need to invest a monthly budget.