Drive more prospects to your LinkedIn company page

In our first post in our LinkedIn Strategy series, Crafting Your LinkedIn Company Page, we showed you how to make your LinkedIn company page visually compelling, on brand and focused on the needs of your ideal prospects. Now, it’s time to focus on driving the right people to it.

We’re going to show you three ways to do this:

1. Quality content is key to inbound success

The first way to attract prospective customers to your LinkedIn company page is by publishing quality content on your website on a regular basis. Share relevant information and knowledge that’s focused on the needs of your target audience. Offer solutions to their problems and engage them in conversation.

Next, promote this content on your LinkedIn company page with a compelling call to action that entices the reader to click through to your website to learn more. These inbound links will help improve the SEO of your content and will help increase time on site, a key factor that can help to improve your search engine rankings.

Another effective way to drive traffic to your LinkedIn company page is to create a themed content campaign. It should focus on a relatable, significant question in your business or industry. Map out a series of articles that will explore it in detail over a month’s time, one article per week, and promote them on your LinkedIn pages.

Why publish a series of articles on a key industry topic? Because it increases the likelihood that your prospects will engage with at least one of them. If it’s relevant to their needs, they can then explore the other articles in the series, deepening their understanding of your expertise and their trust in you.

2. Participate in LinkedIn Groups

Don’t overlook LinkedIn Groups as an element of your inbound marketing strategy. Tens of thousands of professionals use them as a tool to ask questions, get answers, share expertise and network with like-minded practitioners.

How can you use LinkedIn Groups to drive inbound traffic to your company page? Here are some tactics you ought to consider:

• Search LinkedIn for groups that are focused on the needs of the people you’re trying to influence. Request to become members of those groups.
• Monitor the conversations going on there and look for opportunities to provide answers. Be helpful. Don’t use group messages to pitch your products and services.
• If the group’s rules allow, share links to your new blog content, as long as they’re helpful and educational, not self-serving. One way to make article links more palatable is to share them in the context of answering a member’s question. Use phrasing like, “I saw your question. You may find some helpful answers in this article we published on our blog…”

Make sure that your LinkedIn personal profile and those of your salespeople are properly connected to your company page. Why? So prospects can easily click through from your post or comment to learn more about the organization you represent. Once there, they can peruse the posts on your company page and link through to your website to learn more.

3. Use your LinkedIn company page as a sales resource

As you add content to your LinkedIn company page, it will naturally rank better in LinkedIn keyword searches. But it can play another important role for your sales team: When they need to answer a prospect’s question or provide advice in a group discussion, they can use your company page as a self-service portal to quickly find and share relevant resources.

Having one-click access to a treasure trove of your best content will help them generate greater awareness for your company with the prospects they’re trying to influence. Over time, this approach will generate more targeted traffic from LinkedIn to your website, where you can engage them in a deeper relationship – via content that’s designed to nurture them along the path to a sale.

To make this work, periodically remind your salespeople of your LinkedIn “library” and what it contains. Encourage them to share your latest posts with their prospects on a regular basis. Provide them with a list of common customer questions, paired up with the URLs of the LinkedIn posts that answer those questions.

Next month: Now that you understand how to organically attract traffic on LinkedIn and to your website, it’s time to focus on the outbound side of the equation. We’ll teach you how to use LinkedIn’s tools to identify, connect and interact with the right companies and people.