Today, the LinkedIn company page has become commonplace. Companies have added it to their digital strategy without understanding its value. The company page can be a real lever to support a social selling strategy and convince your prospects.
How to use your LinkedIn company page?
We wrote 3 articles to help you maximize your LinkedIn Company page effectiveness, this is the first one. With these 3 articles we will show you how to proceed step by step to get the most from your LinkedIn business page. 💪
LINKS
Part 2: How to create and manage a linkedin company page
Part 3: How to use your linkedin company page statistics
The goal of this first article is to understand what the company page on LinkedIn is all about, how it fits within your sales process and your digital marketing strategy.
LinkedIn a social networking site like no other
Adapting to the right mindset for LinkedIn
Using social networks is not always easy, they are all different and so are the people that use them. You need to adapt to your audience to get the best results.
LinkedIn is exclusively dedicated to professionals, it has its own codes and have a different community than other social networks. Let's be honest: if you are on LinkedIn you are there to "do business". LinkedIn is all about Networking, Recruiting & Social Selling.
We are a Sales & Marketing organization, so for us the main value is to get in touch with potential prospects. Therefore, the tone to use on this social media differs than the tone we would use on Facebook or Twitter.
Everything you publish on your company page (and on your personal account as well) must be professional and contribute to demonstrating your expertise.
This brings us to the second point of this sub-section.⬇️
Leverage an Inbound Marketing Strategy
Today's users are looking for content that makes sense and meets their needs. Nowadays you have to leverage an Inbound Marketing Strategy!
Inbound marketing is a marketing approach based on a content strategy that attracts visitors and converts them into leads and then into customers by accompanying them throughout their Buyer’s Journey.
Inbound is a “pull” strategy, you are attracting prospects that find you organically. The opposite of Inbound marketing is Outbound marketing, which relies on "outbound" campaigns such as cold emailing, advertising, etc... Outbound is a "push" strategy.You are pushing your content to the audience of your choice.
The goal of this article is not to discuss Inbound Marketing as a whole, so if you want to learn more about Inbound marketing, you should read this great article by Marketo, explaining in details what Inbound Marketing is and why it is so important today.
Adopting an inbound marketing mentality forces you to create quality and useful content for your audience.
You need to approach communication differently on LinkedIn, you should avoid promoting your company & products/services. Instead your LinkedIn company page must bring value to your audience and help your prospects solve their daily (business) problems.
When someone visits your company page, they are curious and want to know who you are and what you do. They will scroll your company page to find out what information is on it. If at a glance this person realizes that you have nothing interesting to offer them, i.e. no value, they will leave your page.
The more relevant your content will be to your target audience, the more attention you will attract and the more your know-how will convey itself. All the subtleties of inbound marketing are to be found in this approach. 😏
To do this, I refer you to the article: “how to create good content for your content marketing strategy”. You will find all the necessary tips and examples to create good content and understand the inbound marketing mindset and its content component.
The goals of a LinkedIn Company Page
What is a LinkedIn Company page for?
Social networks have a predominant place in our daily lives. As a result, we no longer ask ourselves what a company page is initially used for. Generally we stop at the simple fact of "being present" on social networks. Concretely, what is the purpose of your LinkedIn company page?
Its primary purpose is to allow LinkedIn members to learn more about your company, your brand, your products and your services. It has another (often forgotten) function: selling.
Although the company page on LinkedIn belongs to the communication tools, the purpose of its use remains commercial. In communication, the actions carried out are always aimed at visibility, creating traffic on your company website, brand image... Communicators often tend to forget the commercial function of company pages when paid advertising is not practiced.
More than a simple showcase page, you should see this page as a landing page whose call to action is to continue to discover your offer on your website for example.
This is the point of adopting an inbound marketing approach in your actions and using LinkedIn as a relay for this strategy.
How to turn your LinkedIn Company Page into a sales tool?
If you read the article I mentioned earlier “What is Inbound Marketing” by Marketo, you should have a better understanding how how inbound marketing fits in within you sales process.
To sum up, this is what Inbound Marketing is about:
To achieve these goals you will have to define sub goals such as those related to visibility, traffic, retrieving email addresses... When setting goals, think about how to achieve them by asking yourself the right questions.
For example: how do I attract prospects to my business page? By sharing quality content, by dealing with issues that concern them...
Setting up such a process can seem daunting but make no mistake, if you don't do it you are doomed to disappear.
The LinkedIn company page VS the LinkedIn personal profile
Now that you see the usefulness of a company page, let's look at the differences and synergies between a personal profile and a company page.
Two different marketing tools
The LinkedIn company page
It allows you to learn more about your company, your brand, your services and your products. Unlike a personal profile, the company page speaks on behalf of an entity and not as a person.
It is therefore passive in relation to a personal profile because it does not allow you to develop relationships and send private messages to prospects.
You can only collect subscribers on your page in order to create a community and share your know-how and your entity always with the aim of selling. The passivity of this page forces you to provide quality content and dedicated to your target. This content must necessarily meet a need if you want it to be more efficient and get results. We will discuss this point in more detail in the second part of this guide.
The personal profile
The personal profile is yours and speaks for you. A personal account offers you many more possibilities than a company page because you will be able to create a direct link with your network.
Unlike the company page, you can send messages directly to prospects and connect directly with other professionals in your sector. The personal account is nowadays used for prospecting, (mostly B2B); it's better known as social selling.
The LinkedIn company page and your personal profile complement each other
It is important to know that the natural reach of personal pages is more important. That is to say that LinkedIn offers them greater visibility than the corporate page. This means that in order to increase your impact you need to involve your collaborators and guests in relaying its content.
Let's take the example where you are the CEO of a company.
You share your expertise, you talk about your company via publications from your personal profile because you do not have a company page on LinkedIn.
Several people in your relationships are interested in what you do and want to know more about your company. They go to your profile and see a visible grey box corresponding to your company in your professional experiences. These people were potential inbound leads who needed at that moment to know more about your business.
As a result, they are frustrated because they have not met their need to "know more about you". In addition, you lose several opportunities and credibility with them.
And this is true for all your employees. They represent your company, so give them the means to do it well 😉.
The absence of certain features on the company page is compensated by the personal profiles of your teams. By carrying out actions from their personal account for your activity they will become ambassadors.
You need to leverage both to generate opportunities for your business.
In part 2 of our guide available here: LINK
We will discuss in more detail the best way to manage and animate this page.
What you need to remember :
👉 Take into account what LinkedIn and its community is all about
👉 Use inbound marketing to animate your page.
👉 The goal of a LinkedIn Company Page is to help you sell. This is not the same thing as self-promotion.
👉 Personal profiles do not replace a company page, they must work together.
