How to run a Company Page on LinkedIn to draw business customers, B2B marketing on LinkedIn

Why it’s worth having your company on LinkedIn

There’s a business rule that says, „wherever your clients are, you should be too.” That’s why if you are looking for new customers among other companies’ owners, managers or experts from whichever industry, LinkedIn is just the right place to find them.

LinkedIn is a perfect service when it comes to B2B marketing, whether it concerns companies or personal brands, and that’s because of a couple of reasons:

• it helps with building your brand recognition,
• it lets you reach potential clients,
• it facilitates interacting with potential clients in a meaningful way that can result in creating new business relations and entering into cooperations.

Who should use LinkedIn for self-promotion

The growing popularity of LinkedIn in Poland along with the nature of the portal itself make it a perfect place to promote a business, especially for:

• freelancers,
• micro-business owners,
• B2B-oriented enterprises,
• B2C-oriented companies targeted mainly at corporation employees or professionals of various kinds.

If you’re a freelancer or a micro-business owner – which often means being both the salesperson and the main provider of a service – it might be enough to use a personal profile for promotional activities. LinkedIn users definitely prefer interacting with other people than with profiles representing this or that brand. Often, when trying to get in touch with a company, they search through the list of that company’s employees and send a message to the decision-making staff from the department they are interested in. That’s why in the case of freelancers and micro-businesses the preferred strategy would be to use LinkedIn to build your own brand and professional image within your field of activity.

What about bigger organisations? A Company Page is almost a mandatory part of content marketing strategy for larger companies, particularly for those active in the B2B market.

We discussed the advantages of having a LinkedIn Company Page in our article How to set up a Company Page on LinkedIn 

How to create successful content for a Company Profile on LinkedIn

If your business is officially present on LinkedIn, you might want to consider the type of content you want to publish on the Company Page.

What type of client is perfect for you?

Before you start hitting that „publish” button, take a moment to determine who you are trying to reach.

Are you going after representatives of a specific brand or industry? Maybe members of a specific profession or experts in a particular field?

While creating content meant for publishing on LinkedIn, you should also bear in mind that the potential recipients will be at different phases of the buyer’s journey.

You need to remember to aim your content both at people who may not know your company or products and at people who are at the stage of comparing offers from different vendors.

That’s why posts on a Company Page should offer „something for everyone,” unless you plan on using LinkedIn for a specific sales funnel stage.

What type of content makes you visible on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn, just like any other social media platform, offers a couple of posting formats that you can use both for your personal profile and for your Company Page.

The following formats are available:

• text posts, including emoji, links, hashtags, tagging, etc. (additionally, you can add photographs or graphics);

• LinkedIn Pulse articles – here’s an example of a LinkedIn Pulse article for the locatheart translation agency;
• video posts;

• LinkedIn Live Video;
• posts with downloadable document files;
• posts with surveys.

How often should you publish on a LinkedIn Company Page?

If you want your brand on LinkedIn users’ radar, you should publish as often as possible – once a week is the bare minimum. There’s no harm in publishing every day though. But that’s just general advice. It’s best to adjust the publishing frequency on any platform, including LinkedIn, to your own business needs and the adopted strategy. If possible, spend some time on testing different patterns and experimenting with various publishing frequencies and times to find the most effective way of reaching your customers.

As you can see, LinkedIn gives you a wide range of means when it comes to the format of published content.

Without a shadow of a doubt, video is a content format that has been gaining on popularity both on LinkedIn and on other online platforms.

As many as 59% of upper-level managers prefer to watch a video than read text if both those formats are available and contain identical information. 

Videos planted in posts are played automatically so it’s worth adding subtitles to them. That way users with muted devices will also have a chance to familiarise themselves with the materials. It’s also another step towards better content availability.

An interesting option provided by LinkedIn are live streams. You can use them, for instance, to broadcast your own show – a recurrent feature about your industry, products and services will definitely make your audience grow, and help you promote your business.

The LinkedIn Live Video is not available for everyone though. You need to request it, and the streaming itself requires additional external tools, mostly paid ones. Nevertheless, it’s worth considering whether this kind of format would be suited for you.

What to talk about and what to show in your videos? What kind of content works best in this format on LinkedIn? Here are a few possibilities:

• client testimonials,
• product reviews,
• tips and tricks related to your industry or products,
• product demos,
• daily life in your company,
• event or webinar promos.

Hashtags on LinkedIn: Why are they so important?

Only between 1% and 2% of LinkedIn users are actively making use of hashtags while creating and publishing content. Hashtags allow your posts to be found by users likely to become interested in what you publish.

There is no official guide on how many hashtags can be placed in one post. What is known is that your post will pop up in every search query for each hashtag you have included.

The way LinkedIn algorithm works remains a mystery. Some say that it „takes more kindly” to posts that use three hashtags at most. Their line of reasoning is that posts like these look more professional, which is in line with the general premise of the portal. They also point out that every LinkedIn Company Page can choose up to three dedicated hashtags.

When you write posts for LinkedIn, it’s worth remembering to enrich them with both general hashtags, like #socialmedia, #linkedin, #ecommerce, and more specific ones, like #linkedintips, #ecommercetips, etc.

LinkedIn Pulse

Not so long ago LinkedIn articles could be published only in personal profiles – now that type of content can be created also on Company Pages.

A Pulse article is an interesting alternative to standard posts, as it allows you to create much longer and complex materials – their main advantage is that they are used in Google positioning and can be found by readers using both LinkedIn and Google search engines.

When you publish an article, you are asked by default to edit a post that is attached to it and that will be displayed along with the link to the article in LinkedIn users’ feed.

It’s also worth making a mental note of the fact that visibility statistics for standard posts and for articles are counted differently. A post counts as displayed every time it shows up in a user’s feed whereas an article counts as displayed when someone clicks on a link leading to that article.

Ipso facto, article display statistics represent users’ interest in your content better than post display statistics.

Content strategy for LinkedIn Company Pages

The most visually striking Company Page is the one that is not just a hotchpotch of random content but is created to support all marketing and sales endeavours of your business.

That’s why it’s good to devise a strategy for your profile and decide on the type of content that would be most effective in you industry and generate positive response from your potential audience.

After all, you have a lot of means available: from creating your own posts and sharing the content created by others (with or without your comments) to publishing videos (including live streams via LinkedIn Live Video) and LinkedIn Pulse articles.

There are many ways to make your Company Page stand out from the competition – just fill it with livestreams, articles and other materials that will resonate with your present and future clients.

If you can’t come up with an idea on how to shape your Company Page on your own, feel free to contact us, and we will help you choose the most effective content strategy.

LinkedIn publishing calendar

Once you have determined the strategy for your LinkedIn profile and decided on which type of content should land on your Company Page, it’s time to get to the planning and publishing stage.

It’s always worthwhile to prepare and plan content in advance. For that purpose, you can use tools like Buffer or Hootsuite. Just remember that they are not a perfect match for LinkedIn. Because of the limits introduced to LinkedIn API, software of that type cannot be used to tag other users of this portal, and some social media schedulers find it problematic to tag Company Pages as well.

When looking for inspirations for posts or articles to share with your page’s followers, you can use solutions like Feedly or Squid.

Employee advocacy, or how to turn employees into spokespersons for your company

The reach of company employees’ posts is eight times greater than the reach of posts published on Company Pages.

It doesn’t mean, however, that it’s not worth running a Company Page on LinkedIn, but rather that it’s worth encouraging your employees and co-workers to take on the role of a spokesperson.

The reach of all employees in your company is probably much greater than the reach of your Company Page. It would be a good idea, therefore, to inform your staff about new content in the company’s LinkedIn profile and ask them to share, react or comment.

You can also utilise a free app called Easy Advocacy, which allows you to send post suggestions to your company’s employees who, in turn, will be able to publish them in their profiles with just a few clicks.

Therefore, it’s advisable to have not only the LinkedIn Company Page covered, but also the personal profiles of the employees.

Outbound marketing and Sales Navigator – unlocking the real potential of LinkedIn

A major advantage of B2B marketing on LinkedIn is not that it allows you to be discovered by potential clients, but that it lets you reach them directly.

Thanks to LinkedIn, you can get through to customers, communicate with them or invite them to your contacts. Admittedly, these actions can only be performed via a personal profile; however, they can definitely play a major part in your marketing operations.

Before you send an invitation for a potential client to join your contacts, it’s worth writing to that person and piquing their interest, e.g., by sending them a pre-prepared e-book or some other materials concerning your enterprise.

The next tool provided by LinkedIn – a tool that can be immensely helpful in getting leads – is the Sales Navigator.

It lets you trawl through the LinkedIn user database with the help of all kinds of filters and gives you access to detailed contact data, like email addresses. With it, you are able to reach specific people who can potentially make a decision about contacting your company, and you can establish a relation between you and them directly.

LinkedIn – the perfect B2B marketing tool

As you can see, LinkedIn can be a powerful tool in the hands of someone who knows how to use it to get new valuable contacts.

Unlike in the case of other social media platforms, you won’t get as spectacular measurable results in the shape of likes, shares or other statistics of this kind. What you will get is the ability to reach very specific people making very specific decisions both in small companies and in multinational corporations.