Every business wants to appear at the top of search engine results pages. This is why so many companies place an emphasis on search engine optimization (SEO) as a part of their inbound lead generation strategy.
But, did you know that optimizing your LinkedIn business page is just as important?
That’s right—80% of B2B leads generated through social channels come from LinkedIn, so optimizing your business page can significantly impact business growth.
Throughout this blog, we’ll cover the following topics:
Why You Should Make a LinkedIn Business Page
In the professional online community, your LinkedIn business page is your company’s headquarters. It’s no longer enough to just have a website. If you want to have a great online presence, you need to also be present on all major social media platforms. And as a B2B business, LinkedIn is the platform you should care the most about.
There are many reasons why it’s important for your company to have a polished and professional LinkedIn business profile. For one, there are over 450 million users on LinkedIn, and this popular social media platform is targeted specifically at professionals. If your business is trying to grow its customer base, the customers you are looking for are on LinkedIn.
Not only is LinkedIn a centralized community for business professionals across all industries, but it’s also a multi-functional marketing tool. LinkedIn allows you to do much more than just create a company page, your business can also:
- Post relevant content to position yourself as a thought leader
- Post regular updates to engage with your connections
- Post about your latest job openings
- Optimize your page for SEO so that your LinkedIn profile appears in search engines
- Attract a following (even if you don’t generate leads right away, you can build a substantial following, giving you a place to build influence in the professional community)
- Connect with other businesses and build a good rapport with them
- Tap into your ‘natural market’ AKA the people who are friends of friends or know your company through word of mouth (if someone already knows your company name or sees that a friend of theirs works there, they’re more likely to want to partner with you)
- Run a self-service ad campaign to reach the right target audience and convert LinkedIn users into customers
It’s easy to see why any business would want to have an optimized LinkedIn business page. LinkedIn is more than just a place to house company information online, it’s a place to build influence, create a community, and generate leads.
Things to Consider Before Creating a LinkedIn Company Page
While you may just want to jump in and build your company’s LinkedIn page, it’s important that you take a step back to think about the requirements needed to create the company page in the first place.
Here are some things to consider before creating a LinkedIn page for your business:
- The age of your personal LinkedIn profile: Your personal LinkedIn profile must be at least seven days old before creating a company page. If you just built your personal LinkedIn profile and are waiting to hit that seven day mark, take this time to optimize your own page. This could include posting thought leadership content, making connections with potential customers and other industry leaders, and more.
- Your job title and company affiliation: To create a company page on LinkedIn, you must be listed as an employee at the company you want to create a page for. This reduces the risk of random LinkedIn users coming in to build a business profile, potentially damaging the reputation and brand voice you want for your business.
- How many connections you have: While there is no exact number of connections you need to build a LinkedIn company page, you must have at least multiple so it’s easier to engage your target audience and share that you built a business page. The more connections you have when creating a company profile, the stronger you can demonstrate your networking skills.
How to Set Up a LinkedIn Business Page
Once you have everything above set in stone, it’s time to build your LinkedIn company profile so you can start promoting your product or services and convert users into potential sales opportunities.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to set up your LinkedIn business page:
Step 1. After logging into your personal LinkedIn profile, click on the “Work” icon in the top right corner of the Homepage navigation bar.
Step 2. Select “Create a Company Page” from the menu that pops up from the “Work” icon.
Step 3. Since you’re creating a new company page for the first time, select “Company Page” from the three page options that appear.
Step 4. Fill in your company information when prompted. Here, you should also upload your company logo and create a company profile URL.
Step 5. Lastly, click “Create Page.”
There you have it, your LinkedIn company page is created! While it may be all set up and ready for use, this doesn’t mean that it’s ready to be used as a lead generator. Therefore, you must optimize it so you can get the best results. Let’s get into how you can optimize your LinkedIn company profile to generate more revenue.
Ways to Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Profile
Are you ready to optimize your LinkedIn business profile for greater brand visibility? These steps will help you boost your LinkedIn page so that you can become more discoverable and generate leads using this popular professional networking tool.
First Thing’s First—Complete the LinkedIn Business Page Basics
Completing the profile basics is essential so your page has a clean, professional look to it. Additionally, it also helps better optimize the page so it can be discovered by search engines (which we’ll jump into a little more later).
Here are the main components you need to complete to get your LinkedIn business profile off to a good start:
Update your profile image and banner with branded materials. Your business page won’t look complete without professional imagery, so make sure you optimize your profile by adding your company logo as your profile picture (300 x 300 pixels) and a banner image (1536 x 768 pixels).
Your logo and banner image should show off your company’s brand so users can get a feel for your business. Plus, LinkedIn users are more likely to engage with your company if they’re met with an on-brand page and images that stand out.
Here’s a glimpse of our Abstrakt’s LinkedIn business profile:
Write a strong ‘About’ section. Your LinkedIn page, for many users, will be the first thing they see about your company. For this reason and others, you’ll want to make your ‘About’ section informative, clear, and captivating. Include things like your vision, mission, values, company tagline, and the products or services you offer. Maybe even add a sentence or two about your company’s history. Don’t be afraid to add personality, but make sure to use your character count wisely. Brag about your accomplishments but also make it catchy and engaging.
Link to your website. A lot of what LinkedIn users are looking for is going to be found on your company’s website. Make it easy for them to navigate thereby adding your existing URL to your company’s LinkedIn page. This will not only make your LinkedIn page appear more professional, but it will also drive more traffic to your website.
Add other company details. The entire point of a LinkedIn business page is to help users find you and learn more about your company. In addition to images, an ‘About’ section, and a link to your website, add other company details such as company size, industry, and specialties. The more complete your profile is, the better.
Once you have the basics out of the way, the next step is to ensure that users can easily find your LinkedIn business page.
Focus on the SEO Value of Your Profile
The visual aspects of your business profile are important, but you also need to think about search engine optimization when writing any content on your profile. Having a complete profile with images and content is the first step, but also make sure that you use relevant keywords in your ‘About’ section. Incorporating keywords will help interested prospects find your LinkedIn page through organic searches. The same rules apply to LinkedIn as they do to websites: incorporate keywords naturally into your content and don’t overuse certain words or phrases.
Encourage Your Employees to Join the Conversation
LinkedIn is a community of professionals; so when prospects visit your profile, they like to see a roster of your current employees. It legitimizes your business and can help sway people in favor of your company. If someone sees that a trusted member of their network works for your business or is a mutual connection of someone at your business, they may be more inclined to want to work with you.
When your employees add to the ‘Experience’ section of their personal profile, they have the option to select your company as their current workplace. This is essentially free advertising for your business. Your employees are going to likely have hundreds of connections (friends, old co-workers, college professors, etc.). A LinkedIn user may not know anything about your business, but if they see an old friend or connection of theirs works there, they may be interested in learning more.
Share Relevant Content and Stay Active
Once you’ve completed the LinkedIn basics, optimized your profile for SEO, and most of your employees have joined, it’s time to start sharing relevant content. Your LinkedIn business page shouldn’t be something you only touch once, it’s not a static page of information. LinkedIn is a professional networking tool and a place to share what is important to you. Write articles, create a few posts a week, re-share content that you find resonates with your brand, and most importantly, stay active. Consistently staying active will help you to appear in users’ news feeds and increase your following, ultimately helping with business growth efforts.
Run Paid LinkedIn Ads
Once you feel comfortable with the amount of content you’re posting and you’re regularly being active on the platform, start experimenting with LinkedIn paid advertising opportunities. Paid ads are relatively inexpensive and offer a great opportunity to generate leads since you can aim them at your target audience and users don’t have to be following you to see them. Since LinkedIn is a widely trusted social networking site, users are likely to engage with ads as long as they’re relevant to them and their wants, needs, or interests.
Key Takeaways
As a business owner, having a personal LinkedIn page is a great way to build up your professional network, but it isn’t much help to your company as a whole. All B2B businesses need a professional, optimized LinkedIn company page. It helps you generate leads and you can also keep in touch with the clients you already have.
At Abstrakt Marketing Group, we use our LinkedIn business page to build brand awareness and present our followers with thought leadership content that presents them with insight into the latest news in lead generation. If you want more insight into how you can use LinkedIn for lead generation, read our blog here.
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