by Monte Clarke (As seen in the June issue of APeeling)
Linkedin corporate pages have had a bad rap. Many companies have them, but few say they are worth anything. When COVID 19 Struck a couple of months ago, I decided to put corporate pages to the test.
In this article I’m going to walk you through:
Why every company needs to have a corporate page.
Why corporate pages fail.
Successful corporate page strategy.
Why Linkedin corporate pages will always outperform your website.
Some corporate page gold nuggets you may not be aware of.
Why Every Company Needs to Have a LinkedIn Page
There are many reasons why every company, big and small, should not only have a corporate page but also heavily invest in them. Many of the reasons why will be outlined in detail throughout this article, but the primary reasons include:
Ability to generate a following of your target market.
Becoming your industry thought leader.
Detailed and actionable data analytics.
Advertising
Aligning brand messaging with business development teams. Let’s stop right there and review this list. If I show up at your company as a salesman and say, “I have a product that will allow you to deliver your brand message to thousands of your target market. It will create separation from your competitors and align your brand message within your marketing and sales teams. On top of that, it will provide you with detailed analytics on your page, allowing you to make quick strategic decisions.” Would you buy it?
Of course, you would!
If I could prove it exists, you would likely pay thousands of dollars per month to have it.
Every business on Linkedin should have a corporate page and should engage it daily. What I have pointed out is absolutely true, and the best part… it’s FREE!
Why Linkedin Corporate Pages Fail
For the longest time, corporate pages failed because Linkedin itself didn’t do anything to help them. How Linkedin corporate pages came together in my mind was like a scene from Office Space. If you haven’t seen the movie, there was a character named Milton Waddams, played by Stephen Root. Milton was a particularly quiet man whom nobody paid attention to. Milton had been at the company the longest, largely because he stayed to himself, and bothered nobody. By the end of the movie after being moved around countless times, Milton found himself in a tiny closet where they kept supplies, and that was his permanent office.
Milton is the person at Linkedin, who said, “Hey, why don’t we make corporate pages?”Nobody cared.
But, they were created anyway and left in the closet next to Milton’s desk for years. Untouched, and underutilized Linkedin corporate pages quite nearly wound up next to Linkedin Groups.Now that’s an ugly debacle!
In the past, it was Linkedin’s fault for not promoting and adding value to corporate pages. They can still improve, but it’s not entirely Linkedin’s fault.
Internal marketing teams are at fault
Most companies have no clue how to use the pages and don’t take the time necessary to figure out how they can benefit from their use. In my experience, internal marketing groups tend to engage things they understand and apply strategies they feel work in other areas and assume it will work in all areas.
Of course, that’s not a good plan, but it happens none the less. What winds up happening is that the content on most Linkedin corporate pages are nothing more than website content made it’s way over to Linkedin. It’s not engaging, and it’s simple dissemination of brand messaging. In the end, nobody cares, and the business development team is left creating their own content entirely.
The third reason is companies have no plan at all and simply abandon the page.
Remember Milton? He wound up in the basement closet, clinging to his stapler, saying, “this is mine,” hoping that nobody would take it from him and boot him from the company.
Failing to Plan on LinkedIn is Planning to Fail
Many companies create their page and then simply abandon them.
They have no posts, no activity, but for some reason invite people to follow them? Doing this is actually a negative for the company image and should be avoided at all costs, even to the point of not having a page at all. Adding one post per week about what’s happening at your company would be better than no posts at all. With no direction, no strategy, we can’t blame the ineffectiveness of the product on Linkedin. For that, you need to look internally.
Finally, corporate pages fail because Leadership does not get their teams engaged.
“Linkedin is a Team Sport.”
It’s a failure on the part of leadership to not implement a plan to get the entire company involved with their corporate page. Too often, marketing teams take a controlling approach, and “nobody but marketing” can post to the corporate page or even make content suggestions.
Leadership also fails to demand analytical reports from the marketing department on the strategies and progress of the page.
Teams are shutout, and uninterested.
Successful Corporate Page Strategy. To be successful, you need to plan your method for attack. Here are some questions leadership should be asking as you begin to formulate your strategies:
How often will we post?
Who will post?
How do we get marketing, business development, AND support staff involved?
What goals do we have for our page?
How do we drive engagement?
Who will respond to comments?
How often do we need to review analytics to support our goals?
How are our competitors approaching their pages?
How much ad spend should we allocate to this process?
What problems do we solve, and is our uncommon value clear in our content?
Successful corporate page strategy begins with buy-in from the top down.
Leadership must make a concerted effort for open communication and teamwork within their teams.
Marketing teams cannot have an attitude of control. Yes, consistency in tone and brand messaging is very important. However, it doesn’t have to be controlled to the point that it discourages employee involvement. Our internal teams should be the first and largest ambassadors of our brand message.
Leadership needs to understand this and incentivize their teams into action.
Posting needs to be at least daily, and employees should be encouraged to both engage the posts with likes and comments and, in addition, share the post to their own personal profiles while adding their own comments to the post.
To build followers to the corporate page, we encourage our clients to communicate that they use their corporate page as their primary source for news and information and to follow the page. We add comments to our posts explaining that we have an active corporate page filled with valuable content and mention the corporate page to follow.
Most importantly, our content isn’t basic information you’ll find on a website. We write our content as though it’s a personal profile with the focus on getting people engaged. Our goal is to always drive value by solving a problem for our target audience. We want people talking and engaging in conversation on our daily posts.
If your audience isn’t getting any value, they won’t engage. That is the rule of Linkedin…
NO VALUE = NO ENGAGEMENT.
Value isn’t what is valuable to you; it’s what is valuable to your audience. Find out what that is and deliver it day in and day out.
Why Linkedin Pages Will Always Outperform Your Website.
I am a Search Engine Optimization specialist. One of my favorite things to do is to sit down for a conversation with a new potential client and start talking about their company website.
Me: “How many views (visits) do you get each month?”
Client: “Not sure, not that many.”
Me: “do you know who they are? Do you have their name or what industry they’re from?”
Client: “no.”
Me: “Well, hey, at least you’re blogging every day and getting a lot of engagement and people calling you from that, right?”
Client: “Not so much. We need a programmer to post even though we have Wordpress.”
The fact of the matter is, websites are now outdated, and their only value is in verification.
Companies still need to have websites, but I assure you, before long, they will be obsolete.
Even if you are selling a product, commerce is moving at lightspeed toward app delivery. Soon, you will only be purchasing products through apps like Amazon Prime. (I pray I’m wrong about this!)
Let’s now look at why your Linkedin corporate page will outperform your B2B website.
Corporate pages are more or less a duplication of your website. When you add Showcase pages to mix, you can point out different services and offers. Corporate pages are easy to update, can have multiple admins, and require NO PROGRAMMING. With the right strategy, your Linkedin corporate page will build up a following directly to your target market.
Linkedin has added significant value to corporate pages, and content is seen by more people with a much higher engagement rate and impression count than visitors to a website.
From an analytics standpoint, Linkedin corporate pages are the hands-down winner. There is so much detailed and valuable information to be attained from actively engaging; it makes corporate pages a no brainer.
If you want to improve your website’s SEO, you can point links from your Linkedin corporate page to your website As your engagement improves on your corporate site, your engagement with your website will improve as well. B2B websites are digital brochures controlled by one or two people in most companies. For the most part, there is no team or employee involvement with a corporate website. As I’ve pointed out already, Linkedin corporate pages are highly engageable by your team, and leadership should promote it.
Linkedin corporate pages create the perfect union between your marketing and business development teams. With the right strategies, the two departments will compliment one another, improve brand recognition, and shorten sales cycles. Linkedin ads are highly effective when pointed towards corporate page posts and pages. Ads will increase followers, inform of specials, services, and job openings. Create teamwork within your company, retain employees, and advertise new job openings simply and effectively with your Linkedin company page.
If you’re still not convinced that Linkedin corporate pages will outperform your company website, improve employee engagement, improve communication with your target market, and create distance between you and your competitor as you improve market share, then pretty much nothing will.
Some Linkedin Corporate Page Nuggets You May Not Be Aware Of.
This year, Linkedin took considerable steps in improving corporate pages. They will continue to improve them and become more valuable for owners and followers. Here are just a few:
Notifications – Corporate page admins will notice that Linkedin is alerting them to trending posts to comment on using your corporate page. This is another way to go add value to post and drive traffic and followers back to your corporate page.
Teammates – Adding employees to your teammates means you can alert them to your posts. Once per day, you can alert teammates so they can immediately go engage your post with likes and comments. This improves the impressions and views of your posts.
Events – This is very new, and it’s a game-changer! Webinars, announcements, open-houses, and more can now be announced throughout the platform from your corporate page. Again, the best part, it’s to your target market!
Content suggestions – looking for content ideas or valuable content that’s being engaged across the internet? Check out the content tab on your corporate page. Perform a search using advanced search capabilities and find content that you can post, curate, or get ideas from. The best part of this content is Linkedin will show you it’s engagement metrics.
Summary
Hopefully, you can now see all the reasons why you should be directing marketing budget towards your corporate page. With showcase pages, a company can all but duplicate their website and deliver more value to their target markets.
My team and I have been engaging these strategies with fantastic results for the past six weeks. It does work!
If you need help creating and implementing your own company page strategy, reach out to me, or my company - Relevant Marketing.
Monte Clarke helps businesses and people get the most out of Linkedin. Click the link to start getting more results from your LinkedIN profile.
