Capitalizing on the New LinkedIn Company Pages

If you haven’t already made LinkedIn a priority in your company’s social marketing and business development strategy, it might be time.

The network has proven itself to be a powerful lead generation tool for B2B marketing, but many aren’t using it to its full advantage.

The first step in a LinkedIn strategy is a solid foundation -- when’s the last time you visited your company page? Do you know if you have a company page?

If it’s been a while or you aren’t sure, don’t feel bad. It’s not all your fault. It’s also LinkedIn’s fault. The network has not been nearly as friendly and effective for companies as it has for individuals.

That is, until recently.

Following the lead of other more visually-appealing and interactive social networks, LinkedIn has been diligently adding new features to the company pages.

Here’s their complete guide and tutorial to the new features available.

And here’s our guide to the four features we find most valuable:

1. Add an image to your company page: á la the Facebook cover photo. Here’s a quick, effective way to showcase your unique brand personality. Use it to highlight products, client list, employee photos, markets served, etc.

2. Add your company’s featured products and services: For each of your core offers, include an image and short enticing description. Bonus: You can also link each offer to its corresponding landing page, place on your website, unique call-to-action. Talk about website traffic generation.

3. Request recommendations for each of your products and services: Build credibility by taking advantage of peer-to-peer referrals.

4. Post status updates: Include relevant and valuable information, news and articles. Integrate updates with your content marketing and social media distribution strategies. Stay organized and plan ahead, aiming for 3-5 posts per week. Bonus: you can now include photos, images and presentations.

For further exploration, you can see how we've incorporated some of this advice into the new Trefoil Group page. 


 

Content Marketing Makes Your Integrated Strategy More Important

Fearless prediction: In 2013, you’ll continue to hear a lot about content marketing.

And rightly so. In an age when audiences are increasingly likely to ignore your hard sell, content marketing is a way to hold their attention by informing and engaging them. (It’s an approach that also supports the longer sales cycle of many B2B companies.)

But like any other effective marketing tactic, creating content your customers and prospects care about takes a fair amount of effort. You want to make sure you make the most of it. That’s why an integrated strategy is more important than ever.

Here are three steps to get you started toward consistent, efficient, effective content marketing in 2013:

1. Involve your sales team. Ensure your content aligns with your sales initiatives and appeals to your customers’ evolving needs.
2. Spread the word across channels. Use and reuse – taking different angles with different audiences – in blogs, social media and more.
3. Create relevant landing pages. When you share free content, you can bring audiences back to properties you own to capture leads and continue the engagement.

 If you’re interested, explore these other integrated marketing ideas.