In recent years, LinkedIn has become instrumental for companies both large and small. Whether you’re looking for leads, ready to hire, or just want to get your name out there, having an accurate and active LinkedIn presence can have a huge impact on your small or medium-sized business (SMBs).
One of the basic rules of LinkedIn is to keep your information updated. There are a number of sections you need to fill out to have a complete LinkedIn profile:
• Logo
• Headline
• Overview
• Website
• Industry
• Company size
• Headquarters
• Type
• Founded year
• Specialties
• Locations
• Call-to-Action button
An eye-catching headline and fully realized overview can help lead customers to contact you and drive your business higher up the search results. Your headline has 120 characters, so make them count. If you operate in a service area or have an HQ or brick-and-mortar, include that location in your headline.
In your Overview section, include information about who your company is, what you do, and any differentiators. Remember that these text fields are all searchable on LinkedIn and search engines, so keep keywords in mind when writing. The Specialties section is probably the most important piece of your company overview, in terms of search optimization. This is where you can include up to 20 of your company’s core strengths. Listing these out in a scannable format provides both customers and search engine crawlers an accessible way to categorize your business.
Additionally, customizing your URL will help your business look more professional - this goes for your personal profile, too. LinkedIn’s generic URLs are generated from your profile, so if you use an abbreviation or alternate spelling, your URL might not be intuitive.
A relatively underutilized feature, Showcase pages allow you to highlight individual brands, business units, and initiatives. These act as child pages of your main company page and give you an area to post content that may get lost in the deluge of the main page. Use this to segment your audience and target content directly to the users who are most interested.
LinkedIn is well-loved by job seekers. Its UI is cleaner than many other job sites, and time-saving tools let potential candidates enter their information automatically. Posting your job on a company website alone will not bring in as many candidates as you could get with LinkedIn, unless the people you’re hiring already know you. For many SMBs, LinkedIn can connect them to a larger and more diverse pool of potential candidates. LinkedIn job postings are free, but you can also promote your post with a pay-per-click option.
Keeping your page active and engaging for your audience can seem daunting. But for many businesses, posting on LinkedIn can generate more leads and more engagement than any other platform. Companies that post weekly see a 2x lift in engagement with their content. And a lot of the content you create for sales and marketing can be easily repurposed into posts. Case studies and one-pagers are an excellent source for videos and blogs, and company news can easily be turned into quick posts. Just make sure you include an image. Images typically result in a 2x higher comment rate.
Many LinkedIn influencers have turned to video in the past few years. Dynamic, engaging personalities tell their stories to the camera, generating huge amounts of audience interaction. For companies, interviews with employees, discussions on complex projects, or exploring your process and capabilities can be turned into captivating videos for your audience. On average, video gets 5x more engagement on LinkedIn, and Live Video gets 24x more. Although producing video in 2020 has an extra layer of challenges, it can be done and done safely. (Get tips from our experts.)
Messaging, commenting, liking, hashtags, mentions - your audience likes to know that your company is responsive. Stay connected to your followers and encourage them to interact with your page by proactively reaching out to them. Customers want a genuine connection with the companies they work with, and SMBs are perfectly positioned to offer that. Using hashtags and mentions in your posts can bring in potential customers from other areas of LinkedIn as well.
There is no better platform to target ads towards professionals than LinkedIn. Over 690M active professionals are on LinkedIn, and 4 out of 5 drive business decisions. There are a multitude of formats you can create on LinkedIn, including:
• Conversation Ads
• Message Ads
• Video Ads
• Text Ads
• Single Image Ads
• Image Carousel Ads
• Dynamic Ads
And advanced options like those listed below help marketers hit the right audience with the right message at the right time:
• Conversion Tracking
• Contact List Targeting
• Re-targeting
• Lead Gen forms
For many B2B companies, display advertising success can be evasive due to the nature of Google’s targeting. And while Facebook has Job Title targeting options, LinkedIn’s options let ad creators target much more efficiently. For example, LinkedIn’s Job Function lets you target people in Accounting, IT, or Business Development functions, whereas on Facebook you would need to individually type out each job title. And if you need to type in the job titles on LinkedIn, many have been standardized to make that process quicker.
You can target by:
• Job Function
• Job Title
• Job Seniority
• Years of Experience
• Skills
• Company Name
• Company Industry
• Company Size
• College Name
• Degrees
• Field of Study
• Interests
• Groups
And this is in addition to many traditional targeting options like demographics, re-targeting, and similar audiences. While this segmentation comes at a price - the smaller your audience, the higher your cost per click - many have seen cost per conversion fall as they hit that perfect audience niche.
LinkedIn is the social platform for businesses. For SMBs, having an optimized LinkedIn page can help recruit employee prospects, influence potential customers, and connect with clients. Your LinkedIn page acts as the digital face of your business, so why not make a good impression?
Need help getting your organization’s LinkedIn profile optimized? Contact us at hello@cidesigninc.com to learn how our award-winning digital marketing team can help.
