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.
In this article, we’ll walk you through the steps you must take to ensure that your company page is fully optimized so that it can become an essential component of your lead generation strategy.
Why Your Company Needs a LinkedIn 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.
Pro Tip: In some cases, your business will already have a company page before you even create one. If this is the case, you’ll need to claim your LinkedIn company page. LinkedIn automatically creates Listing Pages to help members and customers have a better experience across the platform. These pages have a banner indicating that it was a page created by LinkedIn, not the company itself.
Some business owners will receive a notification to claim a Listing Page if it’s listed in their profile somewhere. You can claim the page if you’re eligible to become an Admin; or, if another member of your organization already claimed the page, you can request Admin access. Claiming an existing auto-generated LinkedIn page is better than creating an entirely new page because it prevents the issues caused by having duplicate pages on a social media platform (this could prevent you from getting some opportunities; if you’re active on one page but a user happens to find the one you’re not active on, all your work was for nothing). Be sure to check if you already have a Listing Page before creating a brand new business profile.
How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Business Page
Are you ready to optimize your LinkedIn business profile for 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.
Step #1: Create An Account and Complete the LinkedIn Profile Basics
If you don’t have a LinkedIn business page (or even if you do), the first step is to get your account set up. This means completing the profile basics so that your page has a clean, professional look to it. It also means optimizing your page for search engines, we’ll talk more about how to do that later.
Here are the basics steps involved in setting up your LinkedIn business profile:
- Update your profile image and banner. 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 show off your company’s brand; plus, LinkedIn users are more likely to engage with your company if they’re met with an on-brand page and images that pop.
As seen below, the pencil on the right-hand side of your page allows you to edit your logo and banner image.
- 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 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. Check out Abstrakt Marketing Group’s LinkedIn page for an example of a comprehensive business profile.
Once you have the basics out of the way, the next step is to ensure that users can easily find your LinkedIn business page.
Step #2: Focus On SEO and Incorporate Keywords Into 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.
Step #3: Encourage Your Employees to Join
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. For example, say you’re an LED lighting company and you’re connected with employees at a retail company who is a past client of yours. This retail company is partnered with other organizations (a cleaning company, food distributors, etc.). If one of these companies is researching LED lighting companies for their own facility and sees that you are a connection of one of their partners, they may feel more inclined 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/connection of theirs works there, they may be interested in learning more.
Step #4: 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 B2B lead generation.
Step #5: Run Paid Ads and Encourage Employees to Utilize InMail Messaging
Once you feel comfortable with the amount of content you’re posting and you’re regularly being active on the platform, start experimenting with paid ads and InMail messaging. 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 click on/engage with ads as long as they’re relevant.
InMail messaging is another great way to generate leads using LinkedIn. With LinkedIn Premium, your B2B sales reps can utilize LinkedIn InMail messaging. This essentially allows you to directly message anyone on LinkedIn, even people who you aren’t connected with. This is great for B2B sales reps because so many business professionals are active across LinkedIn; and unlike with email, all it takes is one click for a prospect to learn more about you or your company. It’s a great way to build relationships and increase revenue with B2B selling.
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, our social media marketing professionals can build you a professional, optimized business profile. Plus, we use proven strategies to grow your network and generate leads using LinkedIn.
To get started with your very own social media lead generation solution, contact us today.
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