You’re busy! If you have interest in using LinkedIn you most likely work a full time job or are spending your time looking for a job. You don't want to waste your precious time on something ineffective. You may be asking:
The answer to all of those questions is a big YES! Your follow up question is, “Ok...but where do I even start?” The goal of this blog, and our new LinkedIn Ebook, is to answer that question. We know it seems like a lot but, the payoffs are huge for those that execute a well thought out LinkedIn strategy for their personal profile. Truthfully, you can’t afford not to be doing a great job on LinkedIn these days.
It sounds silly but using the wrong profile picture can hurt your LinkedIn growth! 70% of your profile photo should be your face. People need to be able to recognize your smiling face quickly so when you ask to connect with them they will accept right away.
Job titles are very common and don’t tell the full story. There are tons of people that have the title “Outside Sales Rep” listed just under their name but, what you do specifically is way more unique. For example, “I connect healthcare teams to software to increase profitability,” this little tweak will make your future connections much more interested in accepting your connection requests. It can also help you show up for certain keywords in LinkedIn's search feature.
Your bio should be a brief summary of who you are as a professional with some references to past work and current passions. This is an easy place to use cliches, but be sure to avoid that trap as much as possible so your true character can shine through. The goal here is to stand out and be authentic. You can even share an offer or action you'd like people to take with you. People are looking to connect with interesting people in, or adjacent, to their industry. The bio is your opportunity to show your audience what you’re all about!
LinkedIn has said that you should just focus on connecting with people that you actually know in person, but this is actually a very bad recommendation. Hardly anyone follows that guideline. Don’t be afraid to connect with professionals in your industry and adjacent to your industry that you do not know. When someone reaches out to connect with you and you don’t know them, simply check their title and location, if those are good for your network then go ahead accept. You can always disconnect from people if they end up not being the type of person you want in your network. The best practice is to give most people the benefit of the doubt. If you request that someone connect with you, it's best practice to attach that request with a short but personal message.
LinkedIn is not Facebook! It’s important to share content and engage with content in a more professional way. Your connections on LinkedIn did not connect with you so they can see pictures of your dog (at least most of them anyway). They want to keep up with your professional career and discuss things having to do with the work they're in or general business topics. So be sure to share things like new job updates, cool projects you worked on, and industry insights. It’s certainly acceptable to show your personality but it’s important to keep a healthy balance between professionalism and character.
Following the moves of your competitors on LinkedIn can help inform strategic decisions. Not everything they share will be worth analyzing but they will tip their hand occasionally. It’s always good to keep a pulse on what your competition is doing and LinkedIn is a great place to do this. You cannot only follow employees at companies but, you can actually follow company pages. There are multiple ways to use LinkedIn to track the moves your competitors are making. Don’t miss out on that opportunity!
Your LinkedIn efforts will have a positive impact on your business so setting aside time each week to execute your strategy makes a lot of sense. Consistency is key! We find that the best way to set aside time is to add it to the digital calendar you use for scheduling work meetings. When it goes on that calendar, pretend it’s a very important meeting and protect that time each week to stay consistent. It takes time to build up your network and your engagement, so once you build those up you won’t want to disappear for a couple weeks and take steps backwards. When you log on to LinkedIn, use the time to share your thoughts in original posts, comment on relevant and trending content from others, and connect with a few new people.
The people who connect with you on LinkedIn have similar motives to be on LinkedIn as you do. They are looking to learn, make connections, and grow awareness about their work. Giving your audience new insights and sharing information that helps them achieve their goals will keep your engagement high. There are many different ways to do this; you can re-share articles you like, you can share things you’ve learned in your experiences, you can tell stories, you can write your own articles, and you can share posts made by the connections in your own network to your timeline.
LinkedIn is a person to person platform. It’s difficult for business pages to gain strong and impactful followings. Your company page needs your team’s help. The best way to help is to engage with and share your company’s posts from your own profile so that your network sees the content your company would like them to see. Growing your personal network on LinkedIn is not selfish. It’s the fastest way to elevate your company page because you’ll be able to share the company content that you believe in with your audience!
An added touchpoint in your sales process can be to connect with your prospects on LinkedIn. Doing this gives you the opportunity to engage with them and their content and keep tabs on their most recent needs and interests. It works very well to make these connections just before or after you've scheduled a personal meeting with them. LinkedIn gives you another chance to stay top of mind with your prospects as well. If you are regularly active they’ll see your face pop up on their feed often. Keeping in front of your audience will keep you top of mind so that when it’s decision time, they remember you!
LinkedIn is THE digital networking space. It allows you to have one on one conversations with your target audience at scale. If you haven’t gotten started on LinkedIn there is no better time than now! If you are already on LinkedIn, it’s time to level up! If you haven’t downloaded our Ebook titled “LinkedIn Strategies Every Business Leader Needs to Know” make sure to download it today. We give you all the strategies that we are actively putting into practice for ourselves and our clients every day. We have seen our clients take huge jumps and reap great rewards from their LinkedIn efforts, and you can do the same if you apply the strategies we outlined in our ebook. If you haven't downloaded it, just click the image below!
I believe a huge part of every business' growth can be attributed to an excellent marketing strategy, though I may be a little biased. The goal of this blog is to outline some of the key marketing trends for business marketing in 2020 that will be vitally important to your success. Everyone reading this will have nuances based on their industry, but, hopefully, these 7 trends will serve as jumping off points for propelling your business forward this year! Feel free to check out these brief, easy to watch video tips. I also summarize each trend in the paragraphs below, including a few extra thoughts you may find helpful.
Today’s consumer is more different than ever! They have more options to find solutions than we ever thought possible. As marketers and business leaders, it is up to us to serve our solution in the way the audience wants it most. If you don’t, somebody else will! There are a couple simple ways to do this.
The first is by taking the content you plan to share on one channel and tweaking it to fit correctly on all other relevant channels for your brand. For example, your organization blogs, shares posts on LinkedIn, and sends a regular newsletter. Copying and pasting the same message and sharing it the exact same way on each channel is a fast way to get less engagement.
Blogs are a place to be wordy and go into detail. LinkedIn is a place to share resources and information that your network will find useful. Email newsletters serve to give regular business updates and share digestible bits of information to your audience (more on this later). All of these channels can be used to share a similar message, but each one needs different context and style to make your point stick with your audience.
This does not mean that you need to pick one single channel to share content on! The best solution for organizations is to be where their audience is. If that means one channel, great. If that means five channels, great. Keep your audience front of mind and serve them relevant content on their terms wherever you choose.
The second is combining mediums to give multiple ways to consume the information in the same place. For example, on a blog an organization could include a video paraphrasing the different points being made in that piece. This gives the audience the option to either read the blog or simply watch the video and get the information on their terms.
Another example would be transcribing the conversations had over a podcast in order to allow someone to read the information instead of having to listen to it out loud. It doesn’t always come down to how someone prefers to consume content. Most of the time it comes down to where the person is at the moment they are consuming information. Maybe your audience is in an office and they don’t have the ability to play videos out loud around everyone else in the office so they prefer to read the information out of courtesy to others around them.
You might be wondering “why do my ad costs keep going up?” Well, the competition in the digital ad space is going up. More and more organizations are seeing the potential to make money on digital ads, so they are investing in them more and more. The problem with this is the more ad space that people purchase, the less there is to go around for everyone else. Most industries’ digital ad space have become very crowded. Because of this, the cost to compete continues to climb. In most cases, digital ads serve as a temporary boost in traffic to help build the website’s domain authority. As a website’s domain authority climbs, so does its ability to rank organically for the keywords that it previously had to pay for. There is nothing wrong with paying for ads in the short term, but the goal should always be to improve the ability for the website to rank on its own without having to pay for those keywords one day.
It’s no secret that data protection is top of mind for consumers, tech giants, and the government. It’s better to be ahead of the curve on issues like this than to play catch up. The government and tech giants will be getting involved, it’s a matter of time, so preparing now will make the transition to compliance much smoother when it eventually becomes mandatory. The GDPR and the CCPA are just two examples of the measures being taken by authorities at the moment. Google, Facebook, and others will continue putting their own rules in place to show that they can be responsible without government intervention, but, in my opinion, government intervention is inevitable.
Your brand has a unique story to tell…and it’s powerful. Organizations that understand how their story can be used to differentiate themselves have an unfair advantage over their competition. In a world filled with brands telling us about the different features their products have and why their gizmo is better than everybody else's, the brands that win are the ones that use their story to draw a clear connection between their product or service and the solution the consumer is seeking. If brands can establish a meaningful connection to their audience, they become what we like to call in the marketing world “sticky”. Their audience can’t forget them, they’re the only brand that comes to mind when their problem arises!
The ability to interact with your audience in multiple different settings will position you and your team to make long term and meaningful connections. Tapping into the value that current consumers’ place on experiences is a great way to accomplish this. The best way for small businesses to accomplish this is by creating an in person event that they can then promote digitally through a campaign to a local audience. Oftentimes consumers will jump at the chance to go learn, network, and participate in an experience with a brand. This allows for the team to meet face to face with their target audience which gives them the chance to hear firsthand the pain points they are experiencing as well as what is getting them excited. This setting not only serves as a place to make connections but as a market research opportunity for your brand.
There are plenty of people who like to downplay email marketing but, the truth is, it’s here to stay! If email hasn’t worked for you in the past it’s most likely not because the platform simply isn’t a fit for your business - most of the time your strategy needs an adjustment. There is no question that the inbox of our target audiences is overflowing with bad emails that aren’t worth a dime!
Now, more than ever, businesses are pumping out ineffective emails, so it’s vital to build a well thought out, audience-centric strategy for your email list. The winners in the email space are the ones who stay agile. They test and test and test until they find something that improves their result and then they move on to testing something else! Keeping your list engaged is no small task because it's a moving target. What worked 2 months ago might not work now and if you aren’t testing, your audience could go blind to your brand (or even worse...unsubscribe!). This year, it is crucial to implement at least these three testing parameters.
Testing subject lines will give you information on what catches your lists’ attention so you know how to get people to click on your email in the future
Segmenting your email list will allow your brand to speak more directly to them. The more accurate you can be to the phase of the buyer's journey (link to download ours in new tab) they are in, the more you’ll increase engagement.
Testing out new senders to see who gets through to your audience best is a great way to improve open rates and resonate better with your audience.
Each year, consumers have moved closer to wanting to have a conversation with the brands they love. Obviously the scale of this for most businesses would be overwhelming to speak directly to them all. As time progresses, so does our access to marketing technology. This has allowed business owners to implement tools such as chatbots into their regular marketing rhythm. Chatbots act as a 24/7 support service, an outreach tool, and an opportunity to speak directly with your audience at scale. The ability to give your audience the instant gratification they crave can make a difference between a sale or a lead and a missed opportunity. Conversational marketing tactics are a great way to give your brand a personality that rises above the crowd. Consider implementing some conversational marketing techniques to grow your brand this year!
With each year comes new opportunities and 2020 is the year for boldly going where others haven’t! The solution to an oversaturated content world is not to give up! The solution is to find ways to be better than everybody else. The winner in the content world is the business who defines their target audiences’ problems the best with the most clear solution. This year will be a success for your brand if you can avoid falling into the trap of creating noise just for the sake of creating noise. Place your priority on meaningful engagements with your exact target audience instead of sharing overly general bits of information about your business. Fall in love with your target audience, so you know them well enough to speak their language clearly! Know what hurts them, know what they like, and know what keeps them up at night.
If you don't feel like you have what you need to execute on these trends, let us know if you want to chat about the support of an outsourced marketing team.
SEO, Listicles, Remarketing, Golden Ratio, Omnichannel Marketing, Hamburger Menus, Inbound Marketing, PPC...the list of marketing jargon goes on and on. There are plenty of marketing industry terms and strategies that leave non-marketing folk wondering what the heck they even mean, let alone how to utilize them.
Here at The Squad, we're all about making marketing approachable and tangible for our clients. While we can't give you the full run-down on all of those marketing terms in this post, we thought we'd start with one that gets thrown around a lot, SEO.
If video content is more your MO, then you're in luck. In the video below our VP of Business Development, Marshall Fall, sat down with one of our Directors of Partner Marketing, Alea Petersen to talk SEO and how she sees SEO strategies winning for her clients. Pop-in your headphones and get to watchin'. But if you want to take a deep-dive into the ins and outs of SEO, then keep reading!
For starters...SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is often a mystified subject that can seem overwhelming to business leaders and sales teams.
Put simply, SEO is what helps your website appear when people are searching online for topics related to your business. There are all kinds of tips and tricks business owners can take advantage of to show up on the first page and rank.
However, it should not be a business’ goal to “trick” search engines into thinking they are relevant for something when they aren’t. Ultimately, this can hurt your website’s traffic - plus misleading search engines leads to misleading customers and no one wants that.
The goal of SEO should always be to make it very clear to search engines what service or product you provide. The most effective and safest way to do this is to be open, honest, and clear about what your business does.
There are a handful of search engines out there on the web, but let's be honest, Google is the go-to search engine. So for the purpose of this post, we're going to talk about Google. But these basic SEO practices are standard across any search engine.
The best way to think about Google's search engine is to think about them as a business. As with any business, their goal is always to provide the best product they possibly can to their customers.
Google’s customers, in this instance, are the people “Google-ing” information. To best serve those people Google uses an algorithm to scan every website that can possibly show up for a search. This algorithm is designed to scan these websites and discover what they’re all about. That algorithm will then do its very best to serve the most relevant website for each search.
The goal of optimizing a website for Google is to clearly show the search engine what your growing business is all about.
The easiest way to see if your website is showing up when people search for terms and phrases related to your business is to actually go and search for those terms and phrases for yourself.
To avoid any bias, use an incognito or private browser, this will keep Google from showing you your own website simply because it knows it belongs to you.
For example, you own a store that sells fruit and your apple sales are vital to your business’ success. To quickly see how you stack up against the competition you can google the phrase “apples for sale." If your website is not on the front page then your website needs some SEO love. If it is on the front page, but it is buried at the very bottom there is still work to be done to climb to the top!
It is a common misconception that SEO is only for big businesses when in reality, SEO is vital to any business.
Running ad campaigns are great to accomplish short-term goals, but for long-term, sustainable growth SEO is your best investment. SEO will keep your website traffic growing at a consistent and exponential clip.
At first it may seem insignificant, but after 6 months to 12 months you will see the fruit of your labor if your SEO is managed properly. The best benefit of optimizing your website is the cost. SEO is designed to attract organic traffic, and organic traffic is free traffic!
Unfortunately, “SEO Guru’s” are known to overpromise. If someone ever tells you that they can make huge improvements to your SEO in a short amount of time they are not being honest.
SEO is not a quick fix, it takes time to improve your search engine optimization the right way. There are ways to “game the system," but with each new update that Google rolls out, those techniques become obsolete and websites that were using them lose all of their traffic...and online business.
With SEO it’s best to stick to the age-old principle, “If it sounds too good to be true, then it usually is."
Your website is the foundation of your marketing and you don't want to trust just anyone with it.
Here at The Squad, we take SEO seriously. As Trusted Allies and Faithful Stewards, we are dedicated to doing SEO the right way and we're in it for the long-haul. There's no smoke screens or magic hats here. Heck, we've even pulled back the curtain on our own SEO tactics and tools in a past post.
We also have a case study that demonstrates the power of concentrated SEO efforts to increase organic website traffic. The proof is in the pudding. Click here to download our "SEO: Increasing Visibility Organically" case study!
If you still have questions about SEO, we'd love to answer them! Drop us a comment below or reach out on social.
And if you're looking for someone to come alongside your growth-minded business and help you increase organic traffic and lead generation through SEO, then let's start a conversation. We think conversation goes great with coffee and we're willing to buy, just name the place!
Here at The Squad, we employ a variety of digital marketing tactics to help our clients tell their story and grow their business. Digital advertising is just one of the tactics we use to do this, and we're excited to say that we have taken our Google Ads services to the next level! Recently, we became certified Google Partners!
What does this mean for you? Well, if you are one of our clients or someone looking for help with digital marketing, then our Google Partner certification means many good things. Read on to learn more about the Google Partner Badge and why you should choose a Goole Partner certified agency.
Google awards the Google Partner badge to an agency (or individual) who meets rigorous standards for advertising and product knowledge. To become an official partner, you must pass Google Ads product certification exams and demonstrate competency in Google tools.
Being a Google Partner also means that you can take all of your Google-knowledge and "walk the talk." Our partnership is a by-product of our commitment to grow our clients’ businesses by strategically using Google.
Google audited our Google Ads manager account to determine if it met the standards of being a Google Partner. There are various Google Ad performance, spend, and certification standards that must be met before Google will even consider an agency for an audit.
The Marketing Squad always strives to provide top-quality Google Ads management for our clients. The results of Google's audit of our account reflected this dedication, which ultimately helped secure our Google Partner status.
When you choose a Google Partner to help generate leads for your business, you're choosing an agency who is dedicated to creating and managing strategic Google Ads.
Our Google Partner status also means that we are under Google's watchful eye to make sure we consistently uphold these standards. Google monitors our account and we can lose our Google Partner Badge if at any time they feel we have fallen off of our game.
Thankfully, Google works closely with its partners to provide training and tools to help us become even greater faithful stewards of our client's resources.
Now The Marketing Squad is not only held to our own standard of excellence, but Google will also review our account on a regular basis to ensure we are providing great service to our clients.
If you're interested in learning more about how The Squad utilizes Google Ads as a part of our marketing strategies for clients, let's start a conversation.
A recent study revealed that 18% of American internet users who messaged a brand’s social media page expected a response within one hour. Facebook is one of the biggest social media platforms for connecting with prospects and customers. As a marketer or business owner, it's important to know Facebook's best practices and to follow them to your best ability.
Questions people consistently have are about their Facebook page's response rate and time. Does Facebook response rate matter? How can I make my Facebook response rate better?
On Facebook for Business Pages, Facebook tracks and measures the speed and promptness of a page owner’s responses to the Business Page’s messages. While response time provides page visitors an “expectation of the amount of time it takes your Page to respond to messages” the response rate is “percentage of messages that you and other people who manage your Page respond to” according to Facebook’s Help Center.
You run a business and it’s understood that you can’t be 100% attentive to your Facebook page 24/7. Here are some things you can do to keep your messaging success at a constant high:
Follow Rate and Time Requirements
Facebook will deem your Business Page as “Very Responsive” when your response rate is at 90% or higher and your response time is within 15 minutes. Your expected response time is visible to anyone who visits your Business Page so following these general rules will help you achieve the “Very Responsive” level in no time.
Identify Frequently Asked Questions
If you notice that many of your messages receive the same questions or multiple requests for certain information, there are a few things you should do. First, you should make the information that is often requested in messenger available on your main Facebook page in the “About” section, in the form of a post on your page, or both.
You can also have a well thought-out response to your most common messages that you can easily access. This will help you save time when someone sends a message that you’ve already responded to for a different sender and gives you a chance to provide useful and thoughtful information.
Set an Away Message
Your Facebook Page gives you an option to opt-in to an away message that appears when someone messages your Page and you know ahead of time you’ll be away from your desk. You can set an away message to auto-respond for up to 12 hours making it easy to work an away message around your busy schedule. Note that away message responses do not affect your Page’s response rate or time, but will let the person reaching out know that you aren't ignoring their message.
What is Facebook chatbot? A chatbot is a program that is linked directly to your Facebook Messenger. This program can be taught how to respond to individuals who wish to interact with your business on your Facebook page. This chatbot is a 24/7 assistant that will monitor the traffic to your Facebook inbox.
Several businesses are taking advantage of automating this process and freeing up their employees’ valuable time to accomplish tasks to grow their business.
There are several ways to work the chatbot into your life and here are a few:
The beautiful thing about Facebook Messenger chatbots is the potential for future engagement with the individuals that reach out to your business. Every person that interacts with your chatbot can be sent information directly to their Facebook inbox (similar to an email blast). Currently, there is an 80% open rate for all messages sent in this way.
Chatbots are an excellent way to improve your customer service and trust us, the number of messages you get to your page will only continue to grow. If you’re not chatbotting yet, the time to get started is now. Seriously, let’s go!
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