Perhaps you’ve heard of Terry Kniess. He’s the guy who went on The Price is Right and guessed the exact price for his showcase on the Showcase Showdown finale. For those of you not familiar with the show, the Showcase Showdown features two contestants vying for two different sets of “fabulous” prizes by trying to guess closest to the actual price. But guessing the price exactly had never been accomplished before. How did he do it? He knew his market, of course.
How well do you know your market? Just as the Showcase Showdown features an array of prizes for different interests, LinkedIn’s Showcase Pages for businesses can match your products and services to the people most interested in your specific brands.
Broadening Your Reach
A Showcase Page is an offshoot of your Company Page on LinkedIn. While your company page gives an overview of all your products and markets, the Showcase Page allows you to get into specifics with people interested in a particular product. You no longer have to throw every update onto a single page. The Showcase Page gives you the ability to talk directly to the people interested in one particular product. Think of it like a dentist featuring his practice on the Company Page, and highlighting his teeth whitening products on one Showcase Page, and dental implants on another.
Many of the largest companies have Showcase Pages to feature their individual products. Microsoft has over a dozen Showcase Pages for their different products and market segments. For instance, their Microsoft Office Showcase Page attracts a different crowd than the IT-focused Microsoft Learning page.
Is it Right for You?
You don’t have to be a mega-corporation to take advantage of the benefits of Showcase Pages. If you can segment your customers, adding Showcase Pages can complement your Company Page and give you greater visibility on LinkedIn itself, and across the Internet as a whole. The Showcase Page allows you to place a large “hero image” across the banner at the top of the page to give your product instant visibility. The posts can be about product-specific updates, upcoming seminars or events and links to other content and blogs.
Let’s look at an example to give you an idea of how you can use Showcase Pages to your advantage. If you’re a realtor, you deal with different types of customers all the time. So, you could create separate Showcase Pages for your commercial and residential customers. You could also feature pages dedicated to vacant land and rental properties. And if you’re like some of my clients who are also best-selling authors®, you would definitely want to create a Showcase Page to highlight yourself.
The best part of Showcase Pages is they’re free. LinkedIn allows you to create up to 10 Showcase Pages at no cost. The question is, do you really need 10 pages? Showcase Pages should be part of your overall social media strategy. Each page should be updated regularly with engaging and timely content. I’m a big fan of “do it right, or don’t do it at all.” Consider whether you have the time and manpower to keep your Showcase Pages fresh. It’s better to have fewer Showcase Pages, and update them regularly, than to have 10 pages sitting idle.
I don’t think of adding Showcase Pages as adding more work, though. There’s a lot you can do with Showcase Pages to make them worth the effort. I find them to be an efficient way to declutter the Company Page. I mean, why overwhelm all of your followers with all your posts, when they’re only interested in 10 percent of them. Showcase Pages create happy followers who like hearing what you have to say about only the products of yours they care about.
Getting the Word Out
Highlighting individual products on LinkedIn gives you one more touchpoint on the Internet to help you get noticed. That raises the question: how do you get the word out on your new Showcase Page? You’ve created this page especially for the people most interested in a particular product. You don’t want it to be the Internet’s best-kept secret.
Your social media strategy should be one big, interconnected web, where you can grab people’s attention from any angle. Fresh content on a Showcase Page can get you in the search results for LinkedIn. Not only that, your postings can make you more visible to Google and other search engines. Highlighting a customer testimonial on your page can garner an inbound link from the customer. Adding a follow button on your website can send visitors directly to your Showcase Page. Your blogs can be posted across all your relevant sites. All that interconnectivity can be a powerful way to boost your search engine optimization and get you more followers.
If you’re not attracting an audience fast enough to suit your needs, another option is to create sponsored updates to advertise your Showcase Pages. Sponsored updates allow you to reach beyond your followers to attract like-minded individuals. It’s a great way to give your organic results a kick in the pants.
Find Out Who’s Visiting
As with Product Pages, your Showcase Pages offer a full range of analytics to help you drill down to see who your pages are attracting. LinkedIn’s analytics allow you to see who you’re attracting to your site, and to each individual post. By evaluating the popularity of posts, you can better tailor your messages to feed their interests. The analytics can also give you a snapshot of how your pages stack up against your competitors’ pages.
Divide and Conquer
Your products are as unique as the people who use them. LinkedIn’s Showcase Pages are just one more tool in your social media belt. They’re an effective way to not only pull in more customers interested in your products, but to keep them coming back for more.