[Masterclass] 2 - Set Up for Success: Your LinkedIn Company Page and Profile

You're listening to LinkedIn Ads Radio, the podcast dedicated to exploring and mastering LinkedIn advertising, with your host, Anthony Blatner from Speedwork.

Hello. Hello and welcome to episode two, Setting up for Success. Your LinkedIn company page and your profile. If you're here, you already know there's a huge overlap in paid and organic strategies on LinkedIn. So today we're going to talk about making your organic stand out so your paid efforts perform even better. Because if you're paying money for ads, use these organic tips to boost and maximize your traffic. Let's dive in. First, we'll talk about your company page. So if you're running ads, people will investigate you. They will click on your company page to learn more. When you run the ad, the ad comes from your company page. So in the top left of any sponsored content ad in the newsfeed will have your company logo and name in the top left and people can click on that to learn more. Of course, start by filling out all the sections of the company page and inputs accurately and then post regularly to your company page. Now those are the basics. Let's get on to five real recommendations to help your page stand out. Recommendation number one is put keywords in your company name. People use LinkedIn to search and find vendors so you can add those to your company name to make sure that your company shows up. When people search those terms, people go onto LinkedIn and they use that search bar to search up top defined companies and products in their network. And then LinkedIn comes with its own SEO that if people are searching Google for certain terms, LinkedIn pages rank very well. So if you put those keywords in your company name, then your company page will pop up for those terms. Number two, include a lead magnet offer on your company page. You can put it in your banner, your sub headline or your about section. For us, we have a LinkedIn ads checklist that we offer and we tell people where to go to download it. Having a lead magnet gives people a reason to take that next step and visit your website to learn more. So as people visit your company page, show them where to go next, give them an offer, give them a reason to go to your website to learn more and maximize that traffic that's visiting your company page. Number three is if you're a software company, you can create a product page. This is a relatively new feature on LinkedIn and it's like a subpage on your company page where you will create the subpage for your product. And when you do that, you can add more information about the product and then you can list notable customers that you have for your software product. And these are visible right at the top of the page. And it's some of the best social proof you can put on LinkedIn on your company page. Number four is invite prospects to follow your company. This is the easiest and fastest way to build followers and grow organic engagement on your page is just by inviting them directly. So this is an easy task that you can give an admin assistant or a VA to do regularly. Your credits replenish monthly. You get about 100 to 200 per month that you can use. So start using them. You can start with your customers and your active prospects. Anybody who's an admin on the page can invite people. So maybe you have your salespeople be admins and they can invite people prospects that they're actively talking to to follow your page. And then once they follow your page, they'll get updates and continue to see more from your company, which is useful for nurturing that relationship. And then finally, number five is don't use a logo with a mostly white background. These are hard to see on LinkedIn's light background. And when you're running ads in the newsfeed, that'll kind of get, you know, it'll blend into the background and kind of get lost. So I suggest using a color inverse if needed if your logo is mostly white. Next, let's talk about profiles. So jumping over individual profiles don't get talked about much when it comes to ads, but that's about to change as the new LinkedIn Thought Leader ads roll out and gain adoption. These will allow you to boost posts from a person at your company. We'll definitely talk a lot more about thought leader ads in a later episode. Anyways, when you run ads, people will click on your company page to learn more and then they will research employees, especially the owner or founder and executive leadership. So again, getting into your personal profile, make sure you have everything filled out correctly and then follow these top three tips. Tip number one is blending the company branding into the leadership profiles. People will go and investigate senior leadership at a company and it always looks impressive and cohesive to have a designer create a header template that can be used for anyone in the company. Leadership will get their own viewers who visit their profile and it's useful to then have that header of them. People can view and see what company they're at and then click to learn more. The profile should be about the employee and it's great when an employee can provide a personal picture Maybe them giving a presentation to the company and then that banner blends in to the company branding. This creates cohesion and makes it very clear that this person is at the company and visually creates that link. Number two is that profiles have a new link at the top which you can customize with text and a URL. This is another great spot to put a Learn More link or another lead magnet offer or give people a reason to visit your website. Number three is set your featured posts. I see this gets missed often by most people when they're setting up their profile. The best two things to feature are links to your offers or product pages, or viral posts if you have any. It's often talked about to have your LinkedIn profile seem like a landing page for you and your company. So I always think about this featured section as a place where you can specifically choose what you want to show up there. Next we'll talk about some tips for using your company page and profile when you're running your ad campaigns. Now there's endless info out there on LinkedIn organic, so here we'll focus on how to use these. On the paid side of things, Number one is about the content. Just like any medium, organic content that blends into the medium often performs well in ads. Just like newspapers back in the day. When your ads look like the rest of the newspaper articles, then you won't scare people away because they know it's an ad. One tactic that we often see work well is taking screenshots of posts from people and putting them right into ads. These get very high engagement. These may be people posting about wins with your company case studies or even those that encourage comments. You've probably seen lots of people post with the CTA comment to receive this new guide or lead magnet. I just put together or people saying ask me anything and then there's a lot of comments down there with questions people want answered. This is a good way to showcase thought, leadership and expertise. So you may link these case study posts to your company website, but another tactic is also linking these ads right to that organic post to drive people there to continue engaging with that person. So this is a great way to amplify reach on already viral posts. Number two is comments. So when you run ads, viewers of those ads can leave comments on your ads. Make sure that someone at your company has notifications on so they can review and respond to comments appropriately as they come in. Many companies have a social media manager or VA assigned to doing this who keep eyes on that and get notifications when comments are made and then they can jump in to take action if needed. So you can turn on notifications inside LinkedIn Campaign Manager by clicking on the bell icon in the top right now, watch out for people or competitors who try to promote themselves on your ads by leaving a comment with a link to their company. I see this every once in a while and I'm always shocked by the brass that some people have. That always gets me. But you know, you don't want to be paying for ads that someone has commented with a link to their website instead, and then you're losing traffic that way because people are seeing that and going there. Also, LinkedIn commentary does tend to be pretty professional, but occasionally someone leaves an inappropriate comment page. Admins can delete inappropriate comments by clicking the three dots and then clicking delete. On this tangent, if I ever notice a strong performing ad drop in performance, suddenly the comment section is one of the first places I check. Maybe someone left a negative comment that is turning others away. One more thing on comments, you can also comment on your own ads to spark the conversation. Maybe you want to add some more information, another link, or just have the founder pop in to say hi and share some more information. It could be a good way to stir up the conversation on your ads, which then continue to boost engagement. All right, so let's recap and summarize. Let's lock in these takeaways. Today we covered company pages and personal profiles as they relate to LinkedIn ads. If you're going to remember anything, it's about creating the connection between your company page, your profile and your website using links and offers in the right places so that you can maximize the traffic that you're going to get from LinkedIn. The second part here we talked about comments. LinkedIn is a social network and ads have a comment section to work with as well. So make sure you use that. That's it. We'll see you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening to LinkedIn ads radio. That's it for this episode. Stay tuned for more.