Winning Tactics for a Perfect Life Science LinkedIn Company Page
Social media presents an opportunity to marketers like you within pharmaceuticals, biotechnology or life sciences to reach and inform a range of stakeholders and your target audiences.
The risk, though, of adverse event reports and off-label usage discussions prevents many from even starting and we have all read about companies who ‘got it wrong’.
Here at Arttia Creative, we advise our clients, rather, to focus on the news, breakthroughs, case studies and stories that tell the story of their brand. This sits apart from product or device news and helps you position your organisation and the talented team you work with to a non-consumer market.
There are over 3 million company pages on LinkedIn and more than 630 million people worldwide use the platform to connect, network and keep up to date with their industry. LinkedIn is where we go for work-related news, updates and content. On average, users spend less time per month on LinkedIn than Facebook, but it is easier to build an engaged audience for your life sciences or biotechnology brand here than on any other social media platform.
LinkedIn was launched in 2003 and over the years has added a range of features and tools to make our time on the platform worthwhile.
If you have a personal profile (read our Top 5 Tips to develop your LinkedIn personal profile), it will actively help you find and connect with people relevant to you. If you develop a company page for your organisation, you can attract a following for your news, content, events, updates and vacancies.
It is free to create and manage your company page and whilst you may want to test the paid advertising tools in time, you can attract followers to your branded page quickly and easily. Indeed, your LinkedIn company page may appear on page one of Google search well before your new website - the platform is so well-optimised and indexed.
Whether you are setting up a new page for your organisation or looking to improve the performance of your LinkedIn company page, we have some ideas to help you.
Make full use of your company page features
LinkedIn pages work almost like a mini-website. Your page includes:
- Cover image - this should be ‘on brand’, say what you do clearly and who you do it for
- Tagline – this is essentially your ‘sales pitch’
- Overview – this is a summary of your organisation and can be in multiple languages (ideal if you operate in multiple geographic locations). You have 2,000 characters to describe your organisation and you can optimise this copy with keywords to aid search
- Specialities - this is the perfect place to showcase your deep or niche skills, novel technologies or research areas
Astra Zeneca’s company page is a good example of these elements works together.
Vary your page content with multi-media assets
Your LinkedIn company page can now host a variety of multi-media assets, ideal for telling your brand story and raising awareness. You can upload images, documents, pdfs, slide decks, audio and video. In fact, viewers retain 95% of a message in video format and LinkedIn is the ‘best of the best’ according to Goldie Chan, a key LinkedIn influencer.
Take a look at how Pfizer uses video in organic content and paid ads.
If you can try to create and share a variety of content, as a magazine or journal would do, you are more likely to attract and engage followers over time. This is because they may be at different stages of the buyer journey and need to develop their trust in you.
You can have ‘custom buttons’ in your page header, such as ‘learn more’, ‘contact us’, ‘register’, ‘sign up’, ‘visit website’ depending on your chosen ‘Call to Action’. It is best practice to include a CTA on all posts wherever possible. This tells the viewer what they can do next to find out more.
As the volume and variety of content grow on your page, LinkedIn provides tabs at the top of your Posts to help visitors navigate to the type of content they enjoy consuming.
Merck has a variety of content on its company page, with easy navigation to guide the viewer.
A couple of additional features that you’ll want to explore include Content Suggestions - which help you curate and share content your followers already respond to - and Analytics.
Curated content - quality content that is created by others but shared by you - is a good strategy to follow at any stage in your content journey. It will save you valuable time and money, as well as providing your page followers with interesting content from quality sources that they may not otherwise see. (Increasingly, we are served the content that algorithms anticipate we want, so we all see different search results and content.)
In your free page Analytics, you can see how your content is performing over time as well as checking to see if you are attracting the types of followers you most want.
Which target audiences do you want to attract to your LinkedIn company page?
Your target audiences are likely to include customers or clients, suppliers, potential partners, future recruits and investors. 6 million LinkedIn personal profiles contain the keywords ‘life science’, 2.5 million contain ’biotechnology’. It is a great place to research clients or customers and the people who work for them.
Through your company page you can reach:
Talent - recruit the best candidates and develop your employer (Life) brand
Investors - active on the platform and tracking content related to key opportunities and emerging markets or technologies
Customers - a marketplace for your life sciences products, devices or technologies
Media - news about your company, big wins, licensing news, new markets or breakthroughs
Research and scientific community - publications can be shared on your company page, rich in keywords and great for Search Engine Optimisation.
In the US, EU and increasingly in the UK, clinicians and health management professionals are also active on LinkedIn for its network building and knowledge sharing potential.
Winning tactics and the content that works best on LinkedIn
Here are just a few ideas of the many types of content, posts and updates that you can try on your LinkedIn company page:
- stories from company leaders to ‘humanise’ your brand
- short, ‘snackable’ content that’s easy to read or view on a mobile device
- thought-leadership pieces based on third party statistics or research
- original research, modified to appeal to the layperson as well as fellow experts
- webinar registrations using video snippets
- thoughtful questions that provoke engagement
If you can aim for a variety of content styles, formats and length it will keep your audience engaged. If you focus on creating useful content, rather than product-led content you will help your target audiences. You will also build trust in your brand, products and services.
The Takeaway.
Approach LinkedIn in the right way and you will find that social media becomes a valuable asset to your marketing team: the perfect place to build your brand awareness online.
Arttia Creative partners with clients like you to create a range of branded assets for all of your social media. Delivering all of your life science visual communication needs.
Belinda White | Creative Director
Image credits: LinkedIn
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