Leverage Your LinkedIn Company Page to Generate Demand

Have you ever wondered about the purpose of having a LinkedIn company page? For sales reps, it is a place to research prospects. For marketing professionals, it is another platform to build brand awareness. For HR types, it can be a job posting board. But for sales leaders, CEOs, and business owners, it can be a missed revenue opportunity. In this article, we’ll explore how to transform your LinkedIn company page from a boring, static content platform into a revenue asset on par with your website. Think this sounds like hyperbole? Keep reading, and let me know what you think after you complete this article.

The Basics

Why don’t LinkedIn company pages generate revenue? It could be the fact they were created by someone who never generated a penny of revenue in their career. There was likely a company meeting one day, and someone was assigned the task of setting up the company page. This person likely left the meeting and immediately Googled, “Best Practices for LinkedIn Company Page Set Up.” At which point, they found over 100 million search results, all of which outline how to create, optimize, curate content, grow an audience, and build brand awareness. This explains why 99 percent of the 58 million company pages all look and feel similar.

This article is not about creating or optimizing your LinkedIn company page. We will assume you’ve covered the basics. You read this far because you know your LinkedIn company page should generate revenue, rather than the occasional likes or comments.

Turn LinkedIn Followers Into Valuable Leads

Yes, you can generate valuable leads directly from your LinkedIn company page, but you have to turn on the Lead Gen Form. The good news, if you’re still reading, is that this is a new and free feature. The better news is that 99 percent of the 58 million people who originally set up their company page thought their LinkedIn company page set up was “set it and forget it.” This means, if you turn on the Lead Gen form, you can become part of the 1% and start generating revenue directly from your LinkedIn company page.

This lead gen form can be used to give your followers the option to either Contact Sales, Request a Free Demo, Start Free Trial, or Get Started. These are highly valuable actions that can generate demand directly from your LinkedIn Company Page.

The new LinkedIn lead gen form is free, so why not use it? When someone clicks the call to action, the lead form is automatically populated with the follower’s information. It’s not salesy and very easy to execute upon. Imagine if the new lead gen form only generates a dozen leads over the course of a year of which only one turns into a new client relationship. That is one more deal than you would have had without the offer.

To create your lead generation form, follow these steps:

1. Login as admin.
2. Click Edit Page below the Banner.
3. Click the Lead Gen Form on the left side of the box.
4. Click Lead Gen Form button to on.
5. Click the collect leads icon.
6. Create the lead form.
7. Select a call to action
8. Enter your privacy policy URL.
9. Click Save

Align Incentive With Revenue Goal

Charles Munger, Vice Chairman of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, said, “Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” It amazes me that I see solo-entrepreneurs doing a better job with their LinkedIn company page than highly profitable public enterprises. The only answer I can think of is the above quote from Charles Munger about incentives and outcomes. The solo-entrepreneur is deeply incentivized to generate revenue from their LinkedIn company page, while the profitable enterprise has assigned company page management as a daily task for a junior marketing person.

I believe salespeople are better at anticipating customers’ wants and needs than anyone else. Marketing may have data and create campaigns, but salespeople close the accounts to generate the data. Therefore, would it be a ridiculous idea to allow sales the opportunity to create content for the LinkedIn company page? This is not an argument that salespeople should be managing the page entirely but allowing a senior sales rep or sales manager 20 percent of the posts would add diversity to the LinkedIn company feed.

For example, a sales rep could write one post a week around a client win, a problem solved for a client, or a question a prospect asked that was answered in a positive way. This would be real-world, timely content, not content created for content’s sake six months ago and placed in the content queue. The logic is when one prospect finds a solution valuable, or an answer to their question, other prospects are likely to experience similar challenges. To create buy-in by the sales rep to create this timely content, you could develop an incentive that aligns with the goal of generating more leads from the company page. 

Grow Your Company Page Followers with High Value Connections

Without followers, you could post the best content on the planet but very few eyeballs would see it. There’s a lot of generic advice on how to grow your followers, like posting only high-quality content, posting consistently, and my favorite, being authentic. As if a low-quality, random, fake post, would help growing followers. That advice is true, but it’s also painfully obvious.

Below are three not-so-obvious tactics to grow your LinkedIn company page followers with high-value connections.

1.) When people at your company post to their personal LinkedIn feed, they could end the post with “Want more {industry you serve} insights? Follow us @CompanyPageName.” This will allow your staff’s current followers to easily click and follow your company page.

2.) Provide admin access to more than one person. The reason this would be beneficial is that LinkedIn allows admins to invite a maximum of 100 personal connections to follow your company page per month. This threshold was implemented to prevent spamming contacts. If you have more than one admin, each admin will have their monthly 100 invite allotment. Using this method, it’s wise to only invite your ideal customer profiles to follow your page. You can expect about a 25-30 percent acceptance rate. 

3.) Run paid ads to promote your best content and have your audience follow your page. The key to this is to have content that is already working organically. Sponsored content can be a cost-effective approach to lead generation. It is also a way to establish credibility and give the sales force an audience to target. For example, a brand-new company with zero pipeline could create a warm outreach campaign to connections who liked, commented on, or recently followed the company page. This would be an alternative to purchasing contact data and starting a cold outreach to build a pipeline.

In Conclusion

LinkedIn has become a valuable, but also a highly competitive platform for your prospect’s attention. Sticking with the boilerplate LinkedIn basics will continue to produce minimal revenue. With a well-executed strategy, a LinkedIn company page can be a valuable asset for generating revenue and not just sharing content, a job board, or brand building. If you find this information valuable, here is one final tip: Information is worthless until acted upon. If you have questions on the best place to start, contact us here and we can help. 

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