Build Deeper Engagement with LinkedIn Showcase Pages

Build Deeper Engagement with LinkedIn Showcase Pages

Even if your business has a well-oiled mechanism in place for producing quality content, there is one channel for promoting that content that often gets overlooked. LinkedIn Showcase pages allow brands to target individual market segments with relevant information and to engage with audiences more easily.

There are some differences between Showcase Pages and a LinkedIn company page that make it a valuable promotional channel and a viable way to pick up an engaged following.

What is the Value of LinkedIn to Your Marketing Strategy?

LinkedIn is a social network for professionals. The platform began as a job listing site and has grown into a place where individuals and brands share experiences, build relationships and even gain a following.

According to LinkedIn, there are 740 million members on the platform. More importantly, LinkedIn is considered the most effective tool for lead generation, according to 80 percent of respondents to a recent survey.

Given how much traffic flows through the platform and the importance business leaders place on LinkedIn content, having your company page featured on LinkedIn is vital to the success of your business. Using this profile to promote company news or branded content has been shown to boost awareness and increase audience engagement. In fact, business blogs get 90 percent of their traffic from social media channels and LinkedIn drives half of this traffic.

However, if your business is one that serves several distinct market sectors, you could be gaining more of a following and connecting with more customers or business leads by segmenting your content promotion through LinkedIn Showcase pages.

What’s the Difference Between a LinkedIn Company Page and a LinkedIn Showcase Page?

According to LinkedIn, Showcase Pages are an extension of your company page, allowing you to spotlight individual brands, business units and initiatives. At FNBO, for example, we have two separate Showcase Pages, one for our commercial banking content and a second for our wealth management content. This gives interested followers the opportunity to access the information we publish in those sectors exclusively, without having to look through other content that we post for the most relevant insights.

How to Get Started with Your LinkedIn Showcase Page

Before getting started with a LinkedIn Showcase Page, it’s important to give some thought to your overall strategy.

First, you’ll need to determine which segments of your business warrant a LinkedIn Showcase Page.  At FNBO, we started by looking at our customer base and where we received the most engagement.

It soon became clear that we had a lot of content written for the wealth management and business audiences. Since these two segments have unique needs, we were missing opportunities to build deeper relationships by relying only on our company LinkedIn page. Building LinkedIn Showcase Pages for these segments made it possible to produce and promote content directly to these audiences.

Next, be sure to pick a descriptive name for your Showcase Pages. A good bet is to use your company name for brand recognition and a short descriptor so that followers understand the nature of the page. For example, at FNBO, we simply use commercial banking with our company name to designate our Showcase Page for businesses.

As part of your Showcase Page profile, you’ll be able to select a header image. Since images are important to brand recognition, be sure to choose one that matches the intent of your page as well as your marketing guidelines.

Last, think about how you will promote your page and ensure that interested followers find it. Your Showcase Pages will appear on your company page under “affiliated pages,” but it’s a good idea to show them a little love of their own if you want to get them in front of interested audiences.

At FNBO, we consistently post targeted content on these pages and encourage employee engagement. We also cross promote on our other social networks or boost content and use sponsored updates to help drive awareness and make the page more visible to our extended network.

LinkedIn Showcase Pages provide you with a more targeted way to meet the needs of niche audience segments and build long-term relationships by sharing relevant news and quality content.