There’s no better time to create or update your LinkedIn company page. With the July 31, 2013 launch of LinkedIn company page analytics, and new company page functionality launched in late 2012, you now have better tools.
Below I give you a step-by-step guide to creating a LinkedIn company page that rocks — and drives sales.
Before You Get Started
Before you consider adding a new company page, make sure that you can meet all of LinkedIn’s requirements:
- You’re a current company employee.
- Your position is listed in the Experience section on your profile.
- You have a company email address (e.g., james@yourcompanyname.com) added and confirmed on your LinkedIn account.
- Your company’s email domain is unique to the company. (Note: A domain cannot be used more than once to create a company page. Because domains like gmail.com or yahoo.com or similar generic email services are not unique to one company, those email domains cannot be used to create a company page.)
- Your profile strength must be listed as intermediate or all star.
- You must have several connections on your personal profile.
Create a Sales-Driving LinkedIn Company Page
As recommended for your personal profile in “5 Essential Elements of an Optimized and Useful LinkedIn Profile,” make sure that you complete all areas in your LinkedIn company page. The more attention you pay to detail, the better and more powerful your company page will be.
Start by filling out the company overview section.
Company Overview
- Step 1: Choose “Companies” Under the “Interests” section on the main page.
- Step 2: On the next page, choose “Add a Company” from the right-hand side of the page button.
- Step 3: On the next page, fill in your company information (company name and your email address) and check the confirmation box.
- Step 4: After receiving an email from LinkedIn confirming your page, you can go to your company page and start inputting your information.
The information you need to fill in includes company language, name, type, size, website, industry, operating status, year founded and locations. When putting your description together, make sure you include appropriate keywords. You’ll be able to describe products and services in detail in another section. The company description is critical.
According to Lana Khavinson of LinkedIn, “Google indexes company pages, which means your page becomes a tool for strengthening your company’s rank in organic search results. The results will also display the first 156 characters of your company description, so be sure to lead with the most important information.”
- Step 5: Add a banner image and logos. The banner image is what people will see first when they visit your Company Page, so make sure it’s consistent with the Company image you want to portray. Here are the image requirements, which must be either jpg, png or gif formats: Image – Minimum 646 x 220 pixels, maximum 2 MB. Logo – 100 x 60 pixels, maximum 2 MB.
After you’ve filled everything out, click “publish.” Your page will now be live.
Add Products and Services
Next, you’ll want to include information on your Products page. These can be products or services you offer.
- Step 1: Go to your Main Company page and choose “products.”
- Step 2: After clicking on “edit page” on the right-hand side, choose “add product or service” from the drop-down menu, and you’ll get to this page:
This seems pretty daunting, which is why many people don’t fill out this part.
However, you’d be missing out on incredible opportunities if you don’t. So spend a few minutes and input the information. Don’t forget to include keywords in the description, images and video if you have any.
And remember: since many people don’t bother to fill out this section, by being thorough you may gain an advantage over competitors.
- Step 3: After you’ve filled everything out, click “publish” and the page will go live on LinkedIn.
Add Product and Service Overview
- Step 1: Go to your main company page and choose “products.”
- Step 2: After clicking on “edit page” on the right-hand side, choose “edit page” in the drop-down menu, and you’ll get to a page with the following: Step 1: Create multiple variations of this page (we’ll skip this for now). Step 2: Describe what your company offers.
Call to Action
In addition to the title, you can include a summary description of your products and services. I also like to use this area to include a call to action.
If someone is spending the time to review your products and services, you don’t want him or her to leave without (hopefully) providing contact information. That way you will be able to continue to market to your prospect. In exchange for your prospect’s contact information, you should provide something in return – a free report, ebook, etc.
There are several ways to include calls to action on your products page. One is to build a link into your product banner image, similar to the “free demo” offered by Hubspot:
InSegment, a full service digital marketing agency based in Newton, MA, gained a 200% traffic increase from LinkedIn to their website. How? They added banners with a clickable “Learn More” and website URL to the top of their LinkedIn company pages:
Another way is to include a call to action in the description section of the products page. On the overview page, you can also add a YouTube video and 3 banner images.
- Step 3: Next, you can change the order of the products you show. The first one is the most important, as it will also appear on your LinkedIn company home page:
After you’ve filled everything out, click “publish” and the page will go live on LinkedIn.
Request Product and Service Recommendations
Once you’ve added your products and services, you can get recommendations for them. Recommendations are very powerful sales tools. You’ll just need to go to your product page and click on “request recommendations.” You’ll get a pre-filled out request form that you can modify — or use as is.
Careers
Is hiring and promoting job opportunities important to your company? If so, you may be interested in upgrading your company pages to be able to add the “careers” button on your company page.
Final Thoughts
For more inspiration, check out LinkedIn’s top company pages of 2012 in this Shideshare presentation:
Image: LinkedIn
Excellent article. Thank you.
Aira Bongco
That’s nice. I did not think that you’ll be able to drive some traffic let alone make some sales with LinkedIn. I am loving the banner idea. I will do that and see how it will turn out. I think that it still depends on the product or service.
Margie,
Excellent practical tips – I have several LinkedIn company pages in dire need for an update, so this article is quite timely, I think!
Love the HubSpot example and will create that big call-to-action button for my product pages.
Cheers!
Ivan: Could we have a talk about LinkedIn at some point in time? I need to look into the opportunities with setting up a LinkedIn company page.
Sure,
Just contact me via Noobpreneur.com’s contact form 🙂
Nvirimbi Charles Kalule
I would like my company to join LinkedIn network.
It is a good platform for my consultancy services.
thank you! i think having an optimized Linked in page is crucial especially when a company focuses on B2B. another thing I would recommend is to update and post on a weekly basis. Any blog posts or slide share presentation that we create we also share on Linkin.
Nvirimbi Charles Kalule
Thanks for the advise.
Martin Lindeskog
Ivan: Thanks! I will do that! 🙂
Steps which you have shown to create LinkedIn company page really great and helps lot to drive sales. Thanks for sharing steps!!!
Very informative article Margie. Thanks for posting this. If you have a minute, check out our blog page http://www.goingsocial.ca/blog/ for everything social media related.
Jessica
@igosocial
Thanks for the great overview. However, I have a question that gets into specific tactics. When you write “One is to build a link into your product banner image, similar to the “free demo” offered by Hubspot” – is that done with the file prior to upload? Or is it done within LinkedIn once the image is uploaded?
Hi Eric, the answer is – it’s done with the file prior to upload. Thanks, Margie
I did some digging around and I believe that it’s actually a prompt within LinkedIn to add a URL to the banner image. In the case of Hubspot, they made a banner that had a “Click for Demo” type of “button” in the image, but in reality the entire image is a link to the landing page. However, it’s a great idea and I like that Hubspot ensure that the creative includes a strong, actionable CTA.
Hi Eric, Sorry, I thought you meant on the “home page” of the Company Page. Yes, on the Product Page, you can add up to 3 banner images and add the URLs within LinkedIn. Thanks, Margie
Alley
If i don’t have my company domain email address how to create my linkedin company page…Plz do tell me solution..Thanks
kalhor
So great and useful to me , thanks
Ron Smith
very useful information!! i was reading about some tips on how to drive sales, then i came to this article. I must say now i know a lot about how to grow my business on social media..
Divya
Thank you very much for sharing. I’ve been working on Facebook and instagram till now. Now will start using linkedin as well. The best part of linkedin that I’ve seen other people doing is the article writing. Can you please put some light on how can we use the articles to boost our ranking on the search engines? Thanks again.