Over the past several months, we’ve noticed that almost everyone we work with has a personal LinkedIn profile, but many smaller businesses do not have LinkedIn Company Pages. If you fall into the category of people whose company isn’t active on LinkedIn, you could be missing out on some serious digital marketing opportunities.

There are three main benefits of creating a Company Page for your business on LinkedIn:

1. It increases your business’ exposure, both on LinkedIn and in organic search.

2. It provides a platform to promote your company’s news, along with measurable statistics to show the effectiveness of your updates.

3. It is an excellent advertising platform.

Let’s dive deeper into each of these.

How LinkedIn Company Pages Increase Your Brand Exposure

When you create a LinkedIn Company Page, each employee of your company can update his or her personal profile to link it to the business’ page. Your brand’s name and logo will show up at the top of their profiles, and further down in their Work Experience sections.

This means your brand is seen every time one of your employee’s connections visits his or her LinkedIn page. It also means that with just a click of the mouse, that connection will be brought to your company page to learn about your business - your website, your mission, recent updates, and whatever else you choose to share on the page.

The simple step of ensuring each employee’s profile is correctly linked to your LinkedIn page increases your potential for exposure exponentially.

Further, your Company Page can boost your company’s search presence. If someone Googles your company name or an employee’s name, your LinkedIn page will likely appear in results.

Increase your opportunities for non-branded search by applying the same principles for your website’s SEO to your LinkedIn Company Page:

• Include relevant keywords and phrases in your company description.

• Create inbound links to your LinkedIn Company page by including it on your website and other social profiles.

• Share relevant content your target audience will find helpful and interesting.

Promote, Measure, Repeat

Your LinkedIn Company page can be a great vehicle for promoting your company’s news, updates, blog articles, videos, and any other content pieces you’ve created.

The best part about it? LinkedIn will provide you with hard data letting you know how each post performs, so you can easily test to see what works best with your audience. You’ll see the number of impressions each update makes (how many times it appears on people’s feeds), the number of clicks on the post (both clicks to the URL featured in the post and clicks to your Company Page), and the number of total interactions (likes, comments, shares).

Testing is one of the most important keys to developing a strong marketing plan, so use your company page to promote your business while testing to find your best tone, content types and design.

Some items you could test are:

• Does your audience prefer video or audio content?

• Does your audience respond better to blog articles on your website or articles published directly to LinkedIn?

• Is there a particular call-to-action color that is more effective than another?

• Is there a tone that resonates with your audience?

Once you see what works best, you can craft company updates designed specifically for your audience.  

Harnessing The Power of LinkedIn Ads

Once your company has set up its LinkedIn Company Page, you’ll have access to the platform’s advertising resources. LinkedIn users provide so much information about themselves on their profiles - their employers, work experience, roles, educational background, professional memberships, etc. - and, luckily for marketers, we can use all of that information to create highly targeted ads.

Interested in targeting a specific company? You can create an ad for that.

Want to target people will a particular job title? You can create an ad for that.

Trying to target all employees of a particular industry in a given geographic region? You can create an ad for that.

The possibilities are endless.

There are three main types of LinkedIn ads:

1. Sponsored updates (promoting your content)

2. Ads to drive traffic to your website

3. Messages sent to your target audience

Once you decide on the type of ad you want to create, you set the content and audience. From there, you set your budget. LinkedIn ads can run for as little as $2 per day, but (as with any advertising) more money = more exposure. The low threshold, however, makes it easy for any company to at least dip their toes into the world of advertising on LinkedIn.

As with your company’s non-promoted content, you can expect to see very detailed analytics and reporting on the effectiveness of your ads. Plus, you can continue refining them even after an advertising campaign has started to push forward the ones that are performing better than others.

It only takes a few minutes to set up a LinkedIn company page, and its effects can be so far-reaching - greater brand exposure, SEO benefits, strong reporting and analytics, and powerful advertising capabilities. So, what’s stopping you from creating one today?