By Rebecca Bennett

AUDIENCE:

• Followers of Leadership
• Job Seekers
• Recruiters
• Partner Seekers
• Vendor Seekers
• Client Seekers
• Professors

INTERESTS:

• Research on company, team, services, products, culture, and history
• Latest industry trends/news company is dealing with
• Career development
• Job
• Job candidates
• Competition
• Marketplace
• Validating reasons to do business together
• Association
• Support

SETUP:

1) Create a Profile Page

• Add Logo – This will be a small image to visually ID your company.
• Add Header Image – This acts as your backdrop and is one of the first things a visitor will see, so it should be creative and catchy. This could be brand messaging, a campaign promotion you want to feature, or a product image. This can be changed out to what is relevant in the moment.
• Fill in your About section.

o   Keep it short. Users aren’t looking for a full history at this point.

o   Highlight the main value you provide to your audience, instead of what you sell.

For example: Company: CityFitLA Fitness Training

Bad: We sell personal training sessions.

Good: We provide easy fitness solu

tions to get your body back.

2) Create a Company Career Page

• An offering by LinkedIn’s “Talent Solutions” that gives you a page to showcase your company’s culture and careers. If talent recruitment is one of your main objectives, it is worth paying for this additional page that will be a tab next to your main page. This will generally be an HR initiative, in which they will collaborate with your marketing team, to create the best presentation. This is great platform to feature in-house talent and their career success in a department you are looking to recruit to.

Opportunities to Customize

• Header Image – This should take into consideration your job seeking audience and display/highlight your company culture, such as a team photo, two team members collaborating, a career development class, or speaker presentation you provided for your employees.
• Posts–This is a great opportunity to share daily highlights of work-life, team activities, company/team milestones achieved, employee testimonials, company perks, etc. Keep in mind that posts from your main page will auto-populate here.
• Roles – Feature opening here.

3) Create a Group(s)

• If you have a broad page audience, consider segmenting them out into groups. You can create a group based on industry, title, interest, etc. in order to feed them hyper-relevant content. Groups allow you to form a community where users can contribute their advice, post jobs, share articles, etc. You have the ability to control what gets posted to maintain good PR and support only those posts that add value. You also have the ability to make your group public or private.

4) Create a Showcase Page

• A showcase page is an opportunity to feature a specific solution, especially is you offer many solutions geared toward different audience segments. This is a good page to invite your audience to “Join Group” of a segmented group you created.

ADD CONTENT:

Remember, your audience is professional. Content should be professional and educational. In fact, educational posts perform very well. Here are the types of content you can add:

•  Posts

o   Use to promote/supplement your ads and thought leadership

o   Post announcements, promotions, links to articles, links to other social media pages, picture stories, funny comics, text, pics, non-native video (You Tube link) and slide decks.

o   Don’t over post. To post 1-2x a day is suggestive, more than that is pushy and annoying. One time if your daily feeds are short (1-2 scrolls); 2 times is ok if you have larger daily feeds.

o   Keep messages short and catchy. One liners work best, especially phrased as a question or “Did you know…” statement.

• Ads

o   Good news. Ads are charged on a pay-per-click basis.

o   You can exclude certain audience members in order to target a specific segment

o   Attractive visuals tend to receive higher click-through rates.

o   It’s ok not to sell your product on the first ad view. If it’s relevant, then you will get the right users clicking into your ad to see your item on the second view.

Marketer’s Ad Choices:

o   Self-Serve

• Display text
• Sponsored updates – post across your LinkedIn network in the news feed
• Dark posts – Good for A/B testing if you don’t want to post multiple versions on your site before posting the winning one on your site.

o   LinkedIn Ad Partner Solution

• Premium display
• Sponsored In-Mail
• Follow Company
• Join Group

• Thought leadership with LinkedIn Pulse

o   This is a great place to publish your company’s or employee’s thought leadership. Once you obtain a wide enough readership, LinkedIn will share your content across their network. So if you cultivate a thought leadership culture, your posting leverage increases.

OPTIMIZE:

•                      A/B Test with Dark Posts

o   Test variations of these to find what works best for your audience segments:

• Ad type
• Content
• Headlines

•                Run Multiple Campaigns To Reach Every Segment

o   LinkedIn offers demographic targeting and exclusion targeting

•               Add Content Daily and Change Themes Weekly

o   Keep users engaged with fresh content

•               Provide (Non-) Gated Content Mix

o   Offering gated content where users have to fill out a form will segregate out the stronger leads, which you can segment out in later promotions. Offering non-gated content as well will engage users further up the sales funnel.