By Alfie Lambert
For small and medium-sized businesses, LinkedIn can be a gold mine. The world’s largest professional network is packed with useful data, great content, and incredible people. Whether you’re looking for your next hire, prospecting for new clients, or just polishing your brand image, LinkedIn has the tools to help you get there.
If you’re already a regular user of LinkedIn, you know the importance of having a polished profile that contains current information, SEO-focused headings and descriptions, and an updated profile image. However, few businesses are doing the same for their business profiles.
This is shortsighted. Let’s go back to some of the reasons LinkedIn is so useful: hiring, prospecting, brand image. For each of these, having a well-presented business profile is important. Having potential clients and hires landing on a neglected, hastily thrown-together business profile is not good for your brand.
Luckily, with little effort you can see big improvements. The real key is thinking about your Company Page in the same way you would a landing page. Every inch of space is important, and you want to be well-presented and informative while staying concise.
You also don’t have a ton of time to get your point across, at least not at first. Think about the process by which someone arrives at your page, and then how and why they stick around. Their initial landing needs to not turn them off—this is where initial presentation is important—and then it’s all about engaging copy and perceived value.
With that said, let’s get into three steps to a better Company Page. If you follow these tips, you should have an “all star” business profile that will help your company stand out from the crowd.
1. Add a visually compelling cover image
The cover image is the most commonly overlooked area of business profiles on LinkedIn. Often, companies don’t bother to put one up at all, making their page look lazy and unprofessional. And for many of the Company Pages that do have images, they are “tired,” badly sized, or just plain boring. This is criminal. You should not be wasting prime digital real estate like this.
You don’t need to be a designer to create a good image. Use a free graphic creation tool such as Adobe Spark or Canva (the former has preset sizes for most social media platforms), add your brand colors, fonts, and logo … and voila! If you really want to maximize the space, consider adding some additional text that you update regularly: products announcements, offers, updates. It’s a huge chunk of free space (almost a third of the screen above the fold)—so use it!
If you’re looking for inspiration, head to Google and search for “Great LinkedIn Company Page Cover Photos” and follow one of the many links. Remember, your image doesn’t have to be worthy of an art gallery, it just needs to be clean and branded.
2. Grab attention with a well-crafted company description
It’s so easy clog this space with a dry explanation of the company history. Don’t do that. A potted history of your business can go in the “about me” section of your website—you don’t need it here. It isn’t going to engage anyone, at least not at first. Your company history can be useful for clients and prospective employees alike, but it’s not the messaging you want to start with. Save that kind of info for later on when they are already hooked.
My tip here is to talk directly to your target audience, engage with them, perhaps add in a call to action if that’s your goal (“Contact us for all your X needs;” “Come and join the best company culture in X industry”).
The initial wording in your description is the most important. Initially, visitors will only see the first two or so lines of your description, so after grabbing their attention with your cover image, you need to hook them in with your initial copy. Entice them to want to read more by giving them something to get excited about. If you’re struggling to come up with those initial two lines, think about how and why a visitor finds your page and then give them what they want.
It may seem like clichéd advice, but people often forget to put themselves in their targets’ shoes. If you landed on this page, in search of a job or to size up a potential supplier, what would keep you reading?
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3. Create a LinkedIn Showcase Page
LinkedIn Showcase Pages are additional pages designed to—you guessed it!—showcase something. Whether that’s a particular product or service, or perhaps an upcoming launch, Showcase Pages are a great way to frame an announcement. They’re a chance to position your business towards different targets, too. Rather than being bound by a single Company Page, you can create multiple showcases to display the depth and variety your business has to offer.
If LinkedIn is a platform that you wish to use for growth and prospecting, use these pages for B2B lead generation: create a Showcase Page that speaks directly to that target audience and prime them for conversion. And here you can be really creative. If you’re a recruiter, for example, perhaps the page could be a case study for a candidate you placed. Include some calls to action, perhaps something along the lines of “Let us help you to get there too!” If you’re chasing investors, showcase your product as you would on a crowdfunding site; strip away anything that isn’t relevant to making a conversion.
Tip: Keep the Showcase Page name short, as LinkedIn will cut off long names!
RELATED: 5 Ways to Use LinkedIn as a Powerful Marketing Tool for Your Business
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