Marketing your business on linked in

Marketing Your Business on

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With more than 187 million members, 2.6 million Company Pages, and a million Groups, LinkedIn is the largest professional social network in the world. Its first goal has been to help members find job opportunities and network with other professionals. Companies have also found great success using LinkedIn to find new employees in a cost efficient way. More recently, like-minded professionals have started to engage in insightful conversations around various industries, products, and services. And now new enhancements to the social network are creating unprecedented marketing opportunities for brands.

LinkedIn revolutionized the way professionals interact with their networks. With the newly redesigned Company Pages, brands now have a way to interact and engage with LinkedIn members. LinkedIn has created a central hub where brands can highlight their unique identity, promote content and events, create awareness around products, and aggregate employment opportunities. These features are enabling companies to create a brand presence on LinkedIn where they can market to and engage with their audience in a new and powerful way.

LinkedIn’s focus on expanding company engagement opportunities now allows brands to manage their marketing presence in an integrated way using Company Pages, Targeted Status Updates, and Ads. Digital marketing teams can now fully incorporate LinkedIn into their multichannel, social media marketing strategy. And with the largest professional network in the world now integrating marketing opportunities for companies, the ability to reach, connect, and engage with key professionals and social customers is greater than ever before.

It’s now time to turn your LinkedIn presence into something that represents your brand and engages your audience. There are key steps you can take to help make LinkedIn an effective marketing channel starting today. This paper outlines four ways to make LinkedIn a powerful marketing channel for your company. In the next pages, you’ll learn concrete ways to:

1. Create a strong company page

2. Grow your LinkedIn audience

3. Reach more members with LinkedIn Ads

4. Engage your LinkedIn community

The world’s largest professional network has matured past the days when brands focused on recruiting and networking opportunities. Now companies can combine the techniques outlined below to leverage the unique marketing opportunity newly introduced by LinkedIn.

The Importance of Your Company Page

Prior to the updated Company Pages, many brands created and maintained multiple Groups to segment and engage with their audience. With Company Pages, visitors now have a central location to learn who your company is and what solutions they offer. Groups can go back to serving their primary use case of bringing professionals together to discuss similar business challenges, experiences, and ideas for the purpose of collaboration and networking. These conversations between brands and Groups are still very important and can generate valuable engagement. But when a brand’s marketing team wants to talk about the company, their own products, their events, and their promotions, its Company Page is the best place for them to showcase this information.

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1. Creating Your Company PageYour Company Page is now the center of your LinkedIn universe where you can market your company. It is a designated space where you can market your products, demonstrate your value, and show off your creative identity to the greater LinkedIn community. There are four main section tabs: Home, Careers, Products & Services, and Insights.

HomeThe Home tab is the first thing a visitor sees when visiting your Company Page. The top of this section features a 640 x 220 customizable banner. Directly below the banner, visitors can see all of company’s recent Status Updates, which give them an idea of the type of content they will see if they decide to follow your company.

CareersCompany Pages and added capabilities for brand engagement don’t change the fact that LinkedIn is still the premier social network for engaging both passive and active job seekers. Now, when your company posts a job on LinkedIn, it automatically posts on your company’s Career tab. When members visit this section of your Company Page, the postings will be prioritized by relevance to that user, taking into account their experience and background. The tab also displays employees of the company that are already in the visitor’s network. Various types of rich content including videos, photos, and customizable modules can give potential recruits a good idea of what it’s like to be a member of your team. Keep in mind that portions of the Career tab require a paid subscription. Visit linkedin.com/jobs/post, to learn more.

Products & ServicesThe Products & Services section of your LinkedIn Company Page provides a number of opportunities to share information about your brand. The first step is to create a compelling introduction that encompasses your identity and your brand’s products and services. The LinkedIn Company Page edit tool will then allow you to create a section for each of the products and services you want to feature. The more thorough and complete you can be in describing your offerings, the more awareness and understanding you will be able to build over time. Adding in photos, videos, your website URL, and other rich media will help increase your SEO and give visitors a complete understanding of what you can offer them.

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After creating your various Products and Services, you can do a few things to increase the likelihood that the right LinkedIn member will see the appropriate product or service. For example, reach out to your existing network and ask them to recommend your products. These recommendations will be featured when members visit your page.

Additionally, you can choose to segment your LinkedIn audience by creating up to 30 distinct audience segments. For each segment, you can specify the order of your products and services, allowing you to highlight relevent offerings. When segmented members visit the Products and Services section of your Company Page, they will see your offerings in the order you specified.

Insights

The Insights tab on your Company Page is automatically populated with various facts about your company. It highlights the employees that have new titles, recent departures, employees with the most recommendations, and other companies that shared visitors viewed. While you can’t add or change information in this section, it helps provide viewers with a more complete overview of your company.

2. Growing Your CommunityOnce your LinkedIn Company Page is published and personalized, it is time to start growing your community to help amplify company communication and engagement with followers. Increasing your Company Page’s followers in turn increases the organic reach across the LinkedIn members who see posts from your company on a regular basis

To jumpstart your following on LinkedIn, take advantage of the built-in network that you already have. PowerFormula.net found that 57% of LinkedIn users have between 100 and 300 first-degree connections. This vast, extended audience is incredibly valuable to your company, so turn them into followers by asking your employees to follow your company and share your content with their network. Along the same lines, ask your employees to embed a “Follow Company” button or a LinkedIn page URL on their outbound email signature. These tactics should help activate your extended network.

As a marketing organization, there are many options to promote your LinkedIn presence and grow your followers. Start by including “Follow Company” buttons on all websites and landing pages that are relevant. By cross-promoting LinkedIn content on Facebook, Twitter, and other social channels, you can also start engaging those audiences. An email announcement and introduction to your updated LinkedIn Company page is another way to connect your existing community to a new location they can connect and engage with relevant content and activities. For organizations that need to increase their community quickly, LinkedIn allows brands to purchase followers from their target audience. This services is available through the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions team. Visit http://marketing.linkedin.com, for more information.

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3. Reaching More Members with LinkedIn AdsOrganic community growth tactics will help grow your LinkedIn audience with existing communities and audiences, but LinkedIn also offers paid opportunities to target and connect with members in entirely new market segments. Imagine the possibilities if you could get your marketing message or company presence in front of the members that fit your target market best, based on company size, industry, function, seniority, or geography. LinkedIn offers a variety of ads and options for companies to do just that. Moreover, you do not need a large budget to get started, as these ads can be very cost effective.

There are two main types of ads within LinkedIn. While their configuration and targeting options are similar, they have two distinct goals: building your community through brand awareness and lead generation.

LinkedIn Ads to Grow Your Community Ads can help accelerate the growth of your community. LinkedIn allows you to target ad locations on different tabs within your LinkedIn Company page. To grow followers, brands have many options as to where to direct engagement. For example, some brands choose to point visitors to their Home page with a brand identity message where others use a product related message in the text and direct ads to the Products & Services page.

LinkedIn Ads to Generate LeadsLinkedIn Ads are effective for all types of companies, but they are especially effective for Business-to-Business (B2B) companies. One of the perpetual challenges for B2B marketers is: how do you market to the people behind the businesses, not to the company itself? This can be very difficult to do on the web, but it can be especially trying on social networks where the professional and personal lines are blurred. For B2B marketers, it’s likely that the majority of their audience is on LinkedIn for professional reasons, therefore ads are more effective here than on most social sites.

When creating ads, LinkedIn gives you the option to point to a 3rd party website or landing page in order to capture lead information. Ad content can range from a 30-second video to images and assets relating to your brand. There’s also a feature called “collect lead” that allows LinkedIn members to flag your company and ask for more information. When flagged, the LinkedIn Ad administrator receives an email with that person’s LinkedIn profile notifying they requested more information.

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Planning Your AdsWhen your company is ready to start running LinkedIn ads, it is important to strategically plan out what type of campaign you want to run. Is your goal brand awareness or lead generation? Which assets, websites, videos, or landing pages will support your goal? Those answers will determine how you create your ads. Notice you can also create different variations of the same ad. This allows you to test the creative assets and text of an ad to see what content is most effective at engaging your audience.

After determining the text and creative for your ad campaign, the audience can be more precisely targeted. LinkedIn allows you to target ads according to location, company, job title, school, skills, Group, gender, or age. Targeting by Group may also be helpful if there are popular LinkedIn Groups within your industry.

The last step is to set your daily budget (minimum of $10 daily) and select whether you’d like to pay by CPC (cost-per-click) or CPM (cost-per-thousand-impressions). LinkedIn suggests CPC and gives you a suggested bid range. You can select a specific end date for your campaign, or choose to keep it running continuously.

Measuring Ad SuccessOnce your campaigns have started running, it is important to analyze their efficacy. LinkedIn provides metrics to measure success including clicks, impressions, leads, and CTR. You can view these results by individual campaign, or in aggregate. The graph below shows combined results for a customized date range and a series of metrics (clicks, amount spent, impressions, etc.). Determining goals and success metrics before running campaigns will help make analyzing the results more efficient.

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4. Engaging Your CommunityIn addition to growing your audience, generating leads, and promoting campaigns, engaging your existing LinkedIn community should be an ongoing opportunity and priority. Because LinkedIn serves a business community, brands can focus on quality over quantity. To start, plan two or three posts weekly that will be engaging, relevant, and timely for your audience. These posts might include relevant content such as company news, marketing assets, or 3rd party articles. Like on other networks, aiming to include links and thumbnail images helps increase engagement.

Brands with a larger follower base and specific messages relevant to particular audience segments should consider targeting their Status Updates whenever possible. Status updates can be targeted to followers based on attributes like title and industry. While your targeted updates will reach a subset of your total audience, content that caters to them can increase the likelihood that members will interact with it. Targeted followers tend to like, share, or comment on updates more often. Whether you choose to target your posts or stick with broadcasting, it’s important to keep an eye on your base of followers as audiences can change and shift over time.

Measuring EngagementLinkedIn provides a variety of reports out of the box for Company Page administrators. As you plan your LinkedIn content, sometimes weeks in advance, it is important to know who your audience is. If you are posting Status Updates to your entire follower base, select content that may resonate with a large portion of your followers based on their industry, their titles, and their education. Alternatively, if you are targeting updates, you will want to target content for your most important segments. For example the report below shows that 30% of followers have a “Senior” title and 19% of their followers are in the Marketing and Advertising industry. When creating content, it will be important that this company doesn’t focus solely on the Marketing and Advertising industry since the Computer Software and Information Technology industries also account for a large part of their follower base.

The same analysis can be done when looking at Company Page visitor statistics. Here, page visitors are distributed differently than their followers, with more than 25% of their visitors coming from the Computer Software industry. This insight helps guide decisions around what content and information is resonating with which audiences, and can be helpful in determining what can be done to attract new segments.

Follower Demographics for The Company

Page Visitor Demographics for The Company

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LinkedIn for Brands – The Next Marketing OpportunityTwo things distinguish LinkedIn from other social networks:

1. 187 million members, 2.6 million Company Pages, and one million Groups make it the world’s largest professional network.

2. Many studies and statistics have shown it to be the most effective social lead generation platform for B2B companies.

The sheer size and utility of LinkedIn, combined with recent enhancements for brands, have raised the visibility of the network as the next big marketing opportunity for social brands to leverage. Although there is no single formula for success on LinkedIn, there are foundational best practices every company should consider:

▻ Invest time in making your Company Page a good representation of your brand.

▻ Segment your audience so that visitors can see information that is most relevant to them.

▻ Ask your employees to engage with your Company Page and the content you publish.

▻ Engage strategically with your audience. Plan content for segments of your audience to increase your odds of quality engagement.

▻ Create an ad strategy that will attract more Followers.

▻ Analyze your performance in each of these areas on a regular basis so that you can refine your strategies over time.

Using these tips to build a company presence – creating a compelling Company Page, growing your brand followers, building momentum with ads and engaging community members - will help your company add marketing to the benefits it receives from participating in the LinkedIn community.

About SpredfastBased in Austin, Texas, Spredfast provides social media management software that allows organizations to manage, monitor, and measure their social media programs at scale. Spredfast enables more people, in more places, to engage in more conversations from a single platform on supported social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare, and popular blogging platforms. Some of the enterprise and agency adopters on board with Spredfast include AT&T, Jason’s Deli, Warner Brothers, Whole Foods Market, AARP, AGAIN Interactive, Coty Beauty, HomeAway and WCG. For more information, visit www.spredfast.com.

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