Tips and Strategies for Generating Traffic on LinkedIn

It's important to note: LinkedIn is a powerful source of traffic. The platform offers excellent targeting options and provides the most accurate results when trying to reach a specific audience.

Let's discuss six top strategies and tips that will help you attract potential clients through advertising on LinkedIn.

Set Your Expectations Right

This is the first thing to take care of when starting to advertise on LinkedIn. Often, people who find LinkedIn ineffective for advertising simply used calls to action that didn't align with how the LinkedIn platform operates.

While other marketing channels like search ads or Facebook ads might convert users at the bottom of the funnel, LinkedIn does this rarely. Demos and promotional offers usually don't work on LinkedIn unless the audience consists of actively engaged users who have already been introduced to the product/service and warmed up through other channels.

In LinkedIn, your most effective calls to action are likely to be in the top and middle of the funnel. Think about brand awareness or product/service interest stimulation. The best offers are usually related to a piece of content that tells more about your industry or company offerings rather than attempting to immediately fill out a feedback form.

There are plenty of different calls to action that can fit these campaigns. Here's a brief list to spark your creativity:

• Industry report
• Infographic
• Webinar
• Cost calculator
• Lottery
• Newsletter subscription
• Event information

Regardless of what you ultimately try to sell to them, to succeed, you'll likely have to offer your potential clients something much less expensive at the initial touchpoints on LinkedIn.

Don't Neglect Your Remarketing

Since we're not focusing on bottom-of-the-funnel calls to action, we need to make sure we care for the users we attract with our deeper funnel campaigns.

LinkedIn platform offers various ways to retarget users based on how they interact with you. There are website lists, interaction audiences based on ad formats that you can use from your CRM to manage customer relationships, preparing individual users or companies for targeting based on individual user accounts.

Regardless of the audience, you'll likely be able to reach them through advertising on LinkedIn.

But on the flip side, LinkedIn is quite an expensive advertising platform, so consider redirecting these users elsewhere. Users visiting your website from LinkedIn may also be searching on Google, subscribing to their friends and family on Facebook or Instagram, and possibly watching videos on YouTube. Why not reach out to these highly valuable LinkedIn users on other platforms?

All you need to do is create remarketing lists that either exclusively include your LinkedIn visitors or them along with other users, and you'll be on the right track to warm them up at the next stages of the funnel.

Target Multiple Buyer Personas

On LinkedIn, we need to appeal to people with different social and professional statuses, actively target and interact with multiple individuals within target companies (i.e., both bosses and their subordinates).

When selling, for example, software, you'll likely want to target the end user of that platform. But what about the boss of this person? What benefit will they get from purchasing your software for their team? And what about the finance department or management? How can you influence them to at least be open to making changes in their company?

Identify all interested parties in the company who influence the decision to collaborate with you, create personas for each, then develop campaigns and calls to action that will appeal to each and help create a coherent and compelling case for your business.

Test Different Lead Generation Forms

None of these options is better or worse than the other, but depending on your industry and the target clients you engage with, you might be doing yourself a disservice by not testing forms for generating leads on LinkedIn.

Many companies prefer to direct users to their target pages for various reasons, and these reasons shouldn't be ignored. Some prefer this method because it can provide more context and better motivate users to convert. Others like to create website remarketing lists. On the other hand, some companies need to include more targeted questions in their forms or have a higher-quality check on their website than what they can get from LinkedIn lead generation forms.

But if you follow the first piece of advice and refrain from bottom-of-the-funnel calls to action and focus more on the middle and top of the funnel, lead generation forms on LinkedIn should work just fine.

Get Creative with Advertising Formats

LinkedIn offers several cool advertising formats, even beyond lead generation forms, which we just mentioned, and most people seem reluctant to test them. Here are a few great ways to attract potential clients on LinkedIn.

Document Ads

With LinkedIn Document Ads, you can offer a specific document as a call to action and even provide a preview in users' feeds before they download it. These ads resemble teaser presentations.

Conversation Ads

Instead of just sending someone a cold email, why not start a conversation where they can choose their response, and then you can tailor your message to that user based on that response?

Conversation Ads are a great way to engage your users, get to know them at the sales funnel stage, and help them qualify so you know how to nurture them further.

Text Ads

Many people dislike text ads because their CTR is incredibly low, and they don't generate a lot of volume. Nevertheless, every sale counts. So why not use this very cheap ad format on one of the most expensive advertising platforms to attract an audience that, as you know, is very relevant? Text ads are a great solution for remarketing on LinkedIn if you want to do it directly on the platform.

Don't Start with Automatic Bidding

While automatic bidding for LinkedIn ad campaigns may be the default for any new campaign, it simply isn't effective for the vast majority of advertisers. The cost per click (CPC) you'll see is much higher than if you took a bit of time and effort to start manually and then gradually increase your competitiveness over time.

Instead, we strongly recommend using manual bidding and starting with bidding at the lowest price LinkedIn allows you to offer. This ensures that you still reach the same users but see the lowest click prices you'll get on the platform. When you see success or need to increase volume, you can gradually start raising your bid to become more competitive. Over time, you'll likely find a sweet spot where you generate the desired volume (and ideally performance) while paying only a fraction of what you would using the maximum performance option.

Conclusion

LinkedIn is a great advertising channel for reaching anything related to business. Its targeting simply can't be compared to other platforms, but it requires you to step out of your comfort zone and look at things from a different perspective. The uniqueness of targeting combines with the uniqueness of best practices. Hopefully, these tips will help you rethink your advertising strategies on LinkedIn and achieve the desired results.