LinkedIn marketing for professional services – CME Group

CME Group – LinkedIn company page

If you want to look at how other professional services companies are using social media for B2B marketing, there’s a very interesting interview with Alan Schoenberg of CME Group that gives some helpful insights on how to make LinkedIn and other online tools.

CME Group is a derivatives marketplace, with an electronic trading platform and trading facilities in New York and Chicago, and it also operates a central counterparty clearing provider.

Schoenberg says LinkedIn is the best B2B social media platform. Among other insights, he says CME is maintaining different LinkedIn groups for different segments of their market:

We now have more than 10 groups on LinkedIn and all of them are very different but with a common goal – connect our sales team and product experts to our customers. I like these groups because we keep them private in order to keep out competitors and vendors, but also to keep them small and manageable.

That makes a lot of sense – your LinkedIn groups should be client-focused communities, which means you will need different groups if you have many customers with different interests.

Schoenberg offers a couple of other tips on LinkedIn:

First, focus on finding the people internally who want to use LinkedIn and help them build their profiles. This includes sending them news stories to post and actually helping them write their posts. If you do this consistently (every week) they will better understand the resource and will become great advocates for your brand. My other tip is that you should make your company page a priority.

Again, it’s great advice. Developing a coherent continuous effort to engage colleagues inside your firm to use LinkedIn as part of a joined-up business development strategy is essential to avoid wasting time and losing focus. And yes, the company page element of LinkedIn is critical – as we said for UK law firms recently, it’s important to provide frequent updates, make good use of visual images, highlight specific services, and give useful links to your professionals and web pages.

UK law firms using LinkedIn company pages

If you search on LinkedIn for law firms in the UK, you’ll find a little under 2000 firms are listed as either law practices or legal services (some of these aren’t actually law firms but are services for law firms).

Amid that crowd, how do you stand out?

One way is by having an excellent company page, making use of LinkedIn’s tools to attract and retain interest in your brand.

What makes a good company page? The most immediate impact is simply visual – the branding of the image at the top of your page is a key element in conveying something quickly about your identity, character or offering.

Next, it’s key to have some fresh updates with information that’s relevant to whomever you want to develop relationships with – your clients, potential recruits, and other stakeholders. If you want these people to ‘follow’ your company on LinkedIn so they’ll automatically receive any updates you post on your page, you have to show them first that you’re going to deliver information and news that’s interesting and relevant to them.

Finally, if you offer distinctive services (or products) you should specify these in the products/services section, preferably including links to the relevant sections of your own web site.

I’ve made a quick  list – see it on Listly – of some of the better UK law firm company pages on LinkedIn. On the Listly page, you can voice your opinion or like/unlike a page, or send me a better example if you want me to include that instead. I’ve selected pages from some firms of different sizes, to show what’s possible at any size.