According to a study by Hubspot earlier this year, LinkedIn is 277% more efficient at converting site visitors to leads. The conversion rate is still just 2.74% overall, yet LinkedIn has proven to be a great platform for business-to-business (B2B) companies. The site rolled out company pages over a year ago to help companies attract talent, promote their products and services, and run targeted advertising.
Building Your Company’s LinkedIn Page
LinkedIn provides a guide on how to create your company page. During the process you will give basic company information, setup the information to be displayed, and choose the administrators who can edit the page (don’t forget this step). The page has 3 public facing sections: Overview, Career, and Product and Services. The Page Statistics section is viewable to the page’s administrators.
- Overview: Enter a company description, locations, specialties, etc.
Tip: Share what your company’s purpose is and list any associated brand names. Think of the specialties area as keywords for search such as mobile barcodes, inbound marketing, direct mail, etc. - Career: The options here depend on the level of service purchased. Any company can post a job with prices varying by geographic location and duration of the listing.
Tip: The more company “likes” you gather, the more personalized the ads become. - Products and Services: Create categories and sub-categories of what your company has to offer. Again, LinkedIn provides a guide to customizing this section.
Tip: Instead of organizing by product (Magic Fly Reel 5000), organize by your buyer personas (Fly Fishermen).
Build a Following
LinkedIn offers several plug-ins to add to your website. At minimum, consider adding the Share On LinkedIn (press releases, newsletters, etc.), Recommend on LinkedIn (product pages), and Follow Company (homepage, e-mail, newsletters, etc.).
Buying Ads
A banner or text ad unit can be created on LinkedIn and then targeted by location, company, and title. You could create an ad targeting Real Estate sales professionals in North America. The ads are sold at a cost per 1,000 impressions which would cost somewhere between $50-$100 according to the posted general ad rates.
Creating your company page and purchasing your first, trial ad can be done quickly. The more time consuming task to increase leads and engagement would be to create a valuable LinkedIn Group.
