the mouton consulting blog

How-to Create Your LinkedIn Company Page

To start, log-in to your LinkedIn account and in the navigation bar, click on companies.





Once on the “Companies” page click “Add a Company” in the top right corner of the page.




The next page looks like this:




As I mentioned previously, you must have a valid email address with your company domain.

After you enter your information, click “continue” and begin adding and editing your company info!

Fill Out All Information

Once you have created your Company Page, start with the basics. Begin filling out all essential information, including: company name, description, your company’s website URL, specialties, products/services, industry, type, date founded, and your headquarters addresses.

SEO

Your LinkedIn Company Page is another place where use of search engine keywords and phrases is important. When filling out your description, specialties and products and services use the same keywords you use for your website. Also, make note of what keywords are being used in the competitive landscape, and change or enhance yours accordingly.

Logo & Cover Image

Your logo is already an essential element of your brand and as you need it on all other branding materials, you need it on your LinkedIn Company Page too! LinkedIn asks you to upload a standard logo and a square logo. The square one will be used as your image when you post any updates. Upload a banner or cover image. For this you can likely use an altered version of your Facebook cover image or graphic from your website. This space allows you to further communicate who you are as a company in a visual way beyond just your logo. A compelling cover image should inform, entertain and/or support the brand. Don’t forget that since your company’s description is at the bottom of the page, you should probably use the cover image space to include a message about who you are. A combination of your logo and a short message would be best.

Specialties

The Products/Services tab is very important because it’s where you can best “sell” what it is that you have to offer. Think of it as your Company Page’s very own catalog which details each product or service. Write compelling descriptions about your services that will draw customers in. What do you do and how do you help your customers? What is your unique selling proposition? Are you the only company in the industry that does what you do? Tell your audience that. Place your most important/most searched for or best selling product or service first because that’s the one that will be seen on the landing of your Company Page. You can also receive product and services recommendations for these listings (more on that later).

Careers

In the Careers tab you can add information about current job openings. You can list jobs for free, but with a paid Silver or Gold account you can add videos and images in addition to a text description. Additionally, you are able to customize a few different versions of your Careers page that will display relevant content for targeted audiences.

Employees as Brand Ambassadors

If they haven’t already done so, ask Employees to create LinkedIn accounts of their own and then link to your Company Page by listing it as their employer. By being linked to you, your employees will become your brand ambassadors. Anyone who goes to their profile will see who they work for and have the ability to check out your Company Page through them. Encourage all employees to completely fill out their profiles as well. When employees list your Company Page as their employer, their profiles will show up in the top right corner of your Company Page. It will show those who are viewing the Company Page how many employees you have and allow potential clients to essentially check out who they’ll be working with when they hire your company.

Employees as Administrators

Add all or add a select few. It depends on who you want to be able to access or edit your Company Page. Whoever has access to your other social media channels will probably need access to your LinkedIn Company Page as well.

You’re Not Quite Done Yet

When finished filling out everything you can, it’s time to begin pushing out content. In order to create a complete social media plan and reach every potential audience member, post on your LinkedIn Company Page everything you post on Facebook and Twitter. Some LinkedIn members who follow your page may be the same people following your other social media accounts, but some may only be on linkedIn! As will all content, make sure what you post on your LinkedIn Company Page is interesting, relative and shareable.

Promote More Effectively

Using Targeted Updates With LinkedIn you are able to create targeted updates. Use this feature to make some posts visible to only designated segments of your follower audience. You can filter by location, employee vs non-employee, company size, industry and function.

Promote Your New Company Page

Invite your connections on LinkedIn to follow your page. Post on Facebook, Twitter and your blog. Add a follow button on your website and blog. Include in your newsletter or just announce it in an email blast to your mailing list. You want as many of your connections as possible to come and follow your page.

Customer Reviews Are Gold

Use the products and services section to its full potential. Ask your LinkedIn connections for product and service reviews. LinkedIn members can write testimonials about your services which you can then display on your blog and other social media channels. Potential customers may judge whether or not to use your company based on reviews by others. Go a step further and in return, offer them an incentive such as 10 percent off their next service or buy one get one free of a product for their time drafting the review. People are more motivated to spend their time doing something when promised something in return!

Add LinkedIn’s Recommend button to your site to encourage visitors to give you recommendations and to interact with your Company Page.

Check Your Insights

The insights tab is visible to all administrators/employees with a company domain email. It shows the number of overall page views by tab per month and number of unique visitors per month. You can also see the number of clicks per month on each link on your products and services page and also your company’s followers per month according to industry, function and company. Be Consistent. As with anything in social media and content marketing, it takes time. You have to be very consistent in order for this valuable tool to pay off. Making your LinkedIn Company Page a part of your overall social media and content marketing plan and including it daily is the only way to use it. As with any social media tool, if you only sporadically use it, you cannot correctly judge whether or not it’s working. If you fill out your page completely and follow all steps above you can expect a valuable return from your LinkedIn Company Page in the weeks and months to come. Just remember, along with the use of relative and meaningful content, consistency is key.

1. AdWords Is Scalable

One of the trickiest challenges for any marketer is finding lead sources that scale – meaning, it doesn’t require five times the effort to get five times the leads. Google AdWords is highly scalable, which is why some business spend millions of dollars a year on AdWords advertising. If you create an AdWords campaign that is converting at a profitable rate, there is no reason to arbitrarily cap spend on that campaign. You can increase your PPC budget and your leads and profits will increase accordingly. This makes AdWords highly effective for businesses that need a lot of leads but are short on time and heads.

2. AdWords Is Measurable

Compared to traditional marketing channels like TV and magazine advertising, online marketing is highly measureable, and AdWords PPC is one of the most measurable of online channels. It’s difficult to make exact measurements in SEO because you can’t always know what actions led to increased or decreased rankings. Then there’s the whole “not provided” fiasco. Social media can be equally difficult to measure. In comparison, AdWords is more transparent, providing tons of PPC metrics that allow you to see at a granular level what works and what doesn’t. You can pretty quickly determine if your campaigns are sucking or returning ROI.

3. AdWords Is Flexible

AdWords provides tons of options so you can customize your campaigns and ads to your particular needs, hyper-targeting the audiences you most want to reach. For example, with AdWords you can:
Specify keyword match types – You can, for example, only display your ad to people who search for an exact keyword you specify, like “vegas hotels” – filtering out traffic on general terms related to Las Vegas or hotels. (SEO, on the other hand, is aspirational; you can’t define what you rank for, you can only hope for the best.)


Use ad extensions to display product images, a phone number, a mega-pack of links to your site, your physical location – you can even initiate a chat or get an email address right from the SERP.
Narrow your audience by location, time of day, language, browser or device type and more. A good portion of your SEO traffic may be worthless to you (for example, if you only need US-based leads, and half your web traffic comes from Australia), but in AdWords, you don’t have to display your ads around the world.
Access an enormous network of non-search users on properties like Gmail and YouTube and tons of partner sites.
Leverage the display network, which is great for building brand awareness and often converts at a lower cost than Google Search.

4. AdWords Is Faster Than SEO

For new businesses and websites, it can take months to see results from SEO. This perceived “penalty” used to be referred to as the Google sandbox effect – people assumed Google was intentionally filtering new websites out of the results. More likely the problem is that competition is fierce and it takes time for a website to “prove” itself and earn authority and links.

AdWords is a great workaround for new businesses because you don’t have to wait around so long to see results. While working on your site’s SEO, you can put resources into an AdWords campaign and start getting impressions and clicks immediately. Because it’s so speedy, it’s also a good way to test whether a given keyword or audience is worth pursing via organic search – if it converts well in AdWords, you can deduce that it’s worth trying to rank for in SEO and build out your content in that area. (Just one of the ways that AdWords and SEO are two great tastes that taste great together.)

5. AdWords Is (Usually) Easier Than SEO

Larry has argued in the past that SEO is much harder than PPC. His arguments were met with disagreement, but probably more because of how he said them than what he was saying. Here are WordStream, we’re seasoned practitioners of both SEO and PPC. And now that our PPC campaigns are built and in place, we find they require much less effort to maintain than our SEO efforts. Not only is our enormous beast of a website very difficult to keep up to date (which plagues me), but in order to increase organic traffic, it takes a team of 3-5 constantly churning out SEO content, working on optimization and building links. It’s fun, creative and rewarding when it works – but it’s also a relief to know that we can depend on PPC to deliver leads without all the hoops to jump through.

AdWords is also probably easier to learn because there’s less contradictory information out there. If you’re not inside the industry, it can be hard as a marketer to know which sources are honest and which are just selling proverbial snake oil. On the other hand, there isn’t a whole industry built around “gaming” AdWords. Check out our AdWords Learning Center for help getting started.

6. AdWords Is Taking Over The SERPs

AdWords is Google’s baby (it should be – it accounts for about 97% of their revenues), and over time the SERP has changed so that more and more above-the-fold real estate is given to ads rather than organic results. This can be frustrating both for SEOs and users. But if you engage in PPC, it’s not all bad! It’s an opportunity for you to get your message high up on the SERP in a highly clickable way – it’s a myth that no one clicks on AdWords ads. For queries with high commercial intent (hint: those are the ones you’d want to be advertising on), sponsored ads take up to 2 out of 3 clicks on the first page.

7. AdWords Formats Can Be More Engaging Than Organic Results

Google has rolled out lots of new ad formats in the past couple of years, such as product listing ads and in-video ads on YouTube. Google is motivated to do this because shinier, more engaging ads get more clicks and that means more revenue for Google. But higher clicks are good for the advertiser too, so take advantage of these new ad formats and extensions. Organic listings look pretty boring in comparison.

8. AdWords Traffic Might Convert Better Than Organic Traffic

Hey, organic traffic is great, we don’t knock it! But there’s some evidence that paid search traffic converts better than organic traffic – with conversion rates up to two times higher. (Conversion rates vary by industry, and as always, this may not be true for your particular business, but you won’t know until you try.) This is probably due to the fact that paid search traffic is more targeted and qualified (due to those targeting options we talked about above), and that queries that result in ad clicks are much more likely to be commercial in nature, rather than informational.

9. AdWords Complements Your Other Marketing Channels

AdWords is complementary to your other marketing efforts. Remarketing is an especially powerful way to use AdWords to target people who have shown an interest in your business. With AdWords remarketing, you can track past visitors to your website with a cookie (these people may have found you through social media, your blog, a click on a product page from a forwarded email, etc.). Your display ads will then “follow” them around the Internet, so your brand stays top of mind. For example, the Land’s End and Priceline ads below are both retargeted – I visited those websites in the past 30 days.



You can even show them the exact product that they searched for. Along with cart abandonment emails (same principle), retargeted ads have super-high ROI compared to other marketing channels.

10. Your Competitors Are Using AdWords

Finally, there’s peer pressure: The old “Everyone else is doing it, so why not you?” argument. It doesn’t work for jumping off a cliff, but it is persuasive when it comes to search engine marketing. Covario recently reported that global paid search spending increased by 33% in the third quarter of 2012, year over year. According to a study by NetElixer, which looked at data from 38 large U.S. retailers and 120 million search ad impressions, "revenue driven by paid search on Black Friday rose an impressive 31% year-over-year as advertisers invested 21% more in search ads than they did in 2011." Do a few searches on keywords you care about. Your competitors are likely there in the sponsored results at the top of the SERP. Can you afford not to be?