LinkedIn Paid Advertising: Will Showcase Pages Make a Difference?

Paid advertising could get a lot more exciting in the near future with the addition of LinkedIn Showcase Pages, enabling businesses to reach consumers on a much more personal – and profitable – level.

Will paid advertising become more attractive with LinkedIn Showcase Pages?

Wait…Showcase Pages?

Last month, LinkedIn introduced Showcase Pages as a way for companies to expand their presence on the social network with separate pages for each department, branch or division of their organization. (This is optional, of course, and has to be set up by the company.)

With this feature – and a little help from LinkedIn Analytics tools – brands can now see which pages are being visited the most (read: which areas of the company are most interesting to consumers).

For example, if a financial planning firm currently has a Company Page on LinkedIn, they could opt to create Showcase Pages for each business segment: one for estate planning, one for insurance, and another for tax planning.

While followers of the main Company Page can choose to follow any or all of the company’s Showcase Pages, you don’t have to be a follower of the larger company to follow Showcase Pages.

Where does paid advertising come in?

Much like LinkedIn’s advertising program allows businesses to monitor the performance of their own Company Page, it also gives companies access to analytics on Showcase Pages.

With this information, we should see paid advertising on LinkedIn become more targeted to users’ specific interests.

For those that already invest in online advertising, Showcase Pages could pave the way toward more segmented ads and higher conversion rates.

We’ll be keeping an eye on the relationship between Showcase Pages and the evolution of LinkedIn’s advertising platform.