A LinkedIn Showcase Page is an extension of a company’s or an individual’s LinkedIn page, which helps cater to a specific audience with distinctive buyer traits. The page helps your brand showcase another side of it to its target group. If you sell an array of products or your business caters to a diverse set of buyers, creating a LinkedIn Showcase Page is basic.
To create a Showcase Page on LinkedIn:
To truly cater to your target audience online, creating a Showcase Page is just the starting point. Read on to learn more about a LinkedIn Showcase Page, how to use it, optimizing the page to attract followers, and lots more.
A business usually begins its journey selling goods or services in a particular category. After getting a footing in their chosen space, most businesses diversify or choose to take up other endeavors. For instance, a jewelry business could venture into luxury watches at a later point if it senses an opportunity and believes in its ability to deliver.
Similarly, suppose you started a company selling men’s garments, catering primarily to men. If you venture into women’s clothing at a later point and enjoy relative success, your target audience will be no more just men. And because women are now your customers, too, you will have to rethink your marketing plans to reach out specifically to the other demographic.
If LinkedIn is a part of your marketing strategy, it’s not advisable to use the same company page to reach out to your men’s fashion and women’s clothing buyers. Because you started as a men’s brand, your existing LinkedIn followers are likely to be mostly men. Unsurprisingly, they won’t be interested in what you have to offer for the ladies.
To address this clear split and ensure you reach out to the right buyer group and cater to them well, create a LinkedIn Showcase Page specifically for your female buyers.
A Showcase Page is your primary page’s extension or offshoot. It’s a mini page of sorts that lets you promote specific offerings that appeal only to a particular segment of your audience. The mini pages are usually listed on the main page’s right column, under the “Affiliated Pages” heading.
Several major companies have their Showcase Pages on LinkedIn. Cisco, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce, etc. Cisco, Adobe, and Intel were among the first major companies to get on the Showcase Page train and are still riding it.
Showcase Pages are not totally unique, but they are distinct enough to justify their existence. A showcase page:
Showcase Pages offer the same analytics and posting options as your standard LinkedIn page. The “super admins” have access to sponsor updates, analytics, and can engage with followers.
LinkedIn Showcase Page lets you promote or highlight a sub-brand or completely different product line. Even if you are not selling anything per se and just doling out valuable content, a Showcase Page can help you reach out to readers with specific interests.
As alluded to above, not all of your employees will have admin access to your Showcase Pages. Generally, subject-matter experts such as your product marketer, social media manager, vertical sales partner, etc., must be provided administrative powers to the page(s).
Most importantly, Showcase Pages must not be employed for short-term goals or as a promotional tool for a transient offering or some marketing event. Do not use your Showcase Page as some website landing page. The objective must be to build a long-term association with your existing and potential buyers.
Though the showcase page is a separate entity, it cannot be created in a vacuum or set up without a parent page. If you don’t have a primary page on LinkedIn yet, create one first. Next, choose a name. The then natural step in the process is creating the showcase page itself:
Once the page is created, you’ll be taken to the “Admin View” section, where you could fill in the other details of your Showcase Page or edit existing information.
LinkedIn lets you create up to 10 Showcase Pages. But you need not create as many – let alone hitting that threshold. A maximum of five is ideal and easy to manage. If you feel the need to create more than five, you may want to go over your buyer categorization parameters. EY has a page set up for women employees. LinkedIn Social Impact page showcases social projects.
Showcase Page creation only marks the beginning of the process. If you want to attract visitors to the page or increase its traction, you need to make efforts to make it easy to discover and identify.
As mentioned above, your company’s showcase page needs a relatively unique name. If your company has strong brand recognition, the brand name must feature in the name so that people who know about your business can relate the showcase page with your firm instantaneously.
IBM Watson, IBM with MSPs, IBM Security, IBM Social Business, etc., are examples of showcase pages that the company’s buyers will have no problem determining which organization those pages belong to.
If there are SEO keywords to target, take them into account as well. The name you choose also affords you a unique LinkedIn URL. It’s, therefore, vital not to rush through the naming process.
However, it’s not uncommon for Showcase Page names to be unique, particularly if those other businesses are brands by themselves. Gap, for instance, has LinkedIn Showcase Pages for the Banana Republic and Old Navy, with no mention of “Gap” in the titles.
That said, a good thumb rule for a showcase page name is always your company name and a brief signifier after it. Google Cloud, Google Partners, Adobe Creative Cloud, Cisco Data Center and Cloud, etc., are a few examples.
LinkedIn has solid domain authority, and the likelihood of your Showcase Page getting ranked quickly is high. But you must still put in efforts from your side to boost your page’s search engine rankings and increase its traction. If a web page is not correctly optimized, even LinkedIn pages can be hard to trace.
Include target keywords in your page’s name and also its meta description. The description or tagline must communicate what users can expect to see on the page. Use the maximum 120-character limit to describe the page’s objective and the kind of content you intend to share there.
Offer all details about your page and its purpose. As obvious as it may sound, some users or page admins leave out some of the information, making the page look incomplete and unprofessional. Not to mention, a page with all its fields completed would generate more views.
People who already follow your page may not be aware you’ve built a Showcase Page. Let them know by sending them invitations through your LinkedIn page. On your main page, encourage followers to check out your Showcase Page(s) and follow you there as well.
Before that, make sure you commit to updating the page on a proper schedule – posting relevant content at least once a week. The content you post should be unique to the page and not a repost from your main page or some other page.
The Showcase Page exists to exhibit another side of your brand or stand out from the rest of the company. Your content strategy for the page should echo that. Posting the same content across various LinkedIn pages will come across as spammy to people who follow you or your business on more than one page.
For any business, having a presence on LinkedIn is vital.
Setting up a LinkedIn page makes much more sense for companies than creating Facebook and Twitter accounts, as the Microsoft company caters to businesses and working professionals. And if your enterprise is into multiple product categories or industries, setting LinkedIn Showcase page(s) is the next natural step. As illustrated above, building Showcase Pages is pretty straightforward. Hopefully, this article also enlightened you on the need to set up one.
In short, if you want to reach out to and serve the right set of buyers for your varied product offerings through LinkedIn, Showcase Pages are pretty much standard.
