Top Tips to Improve Your LinkedIn Engagement

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Do you share content on LinkedIn? Wondering how to publish LinkedIn content that gets more clicks and engagement?  Here are some tips to help you get more LinkedIn engagement and clicks.

#1: Research Engaging Content Ideas for LinkedIn

Before you create content for LinkedIn, you need to find topics that will engage your audience on the platform.  You can use sites like Quora, Haro and Reddit to help you gauge interest in different topics.

#2: Publish Longer LinkedIn Posts to Activate the See More Feature

Write longer posts with no links outside of LinkedIn and no images of any kind. The key is to get the See More link to appear at the bottom of your post, encouraging people to read your entire piece. This counts as a click, which tells LinkedIn your content is engaging

#3: Post 6+ Photos at Once

This is the visual version of See More, where your LinkedIn post shows five photos and a “+1,” “+2,” and so on for more photos to be seen if the user clicks. Each click gives LinkedIn more feedback that your post is engaging and pushes the post to more people.

#4: Share Valuable PDFs on LinkedIn

It’s possible to post PDFs to LinkedIn from the desktop. PDFs are click-generating goldmines because each page gives the user a fresh piece of content to click on. (Source: Social Media Examiner)

 

What do you think? Will you try any of these techniques to get better results from your LinkedIn content? Shoot me an email and let me know!

Optimize Your Marketing Plan

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Want to be sure your next marketing plan is optimized for the future? Looking for a framework to follow? Here is a four-step process to help you audit and adjust your next marketing plan.

#1: Evaluate Your Branding and Online Footprint to Ensure Consistency

First, you need to address brand health. Does your brand need some dusting off? Now’s the time to evaluate the past year. Look over all of your brand properties, logo, packaging, website, online stores, marketing materials, and digital marketing channels. What needs to be modified?

#2: Define Your Marketing Goals for the Year

Take a look at your marketing efforts from past years and analyze your performance. You might find that your company has grown or may need a change of direction. Review your products and services to determine any modifications you need to make for effective results.

#3: Organize and Prioritize Your Marketing Initiatives

Now that you’ve defined your goals, you’re ready for the more creative part of your yearly planning. Set a date to achieve all of your goals and objectives so you can start your course of action. Break the year into quarters.

#4: Plan Your Social Media Marketing Campaigns for the Coming Year

Planning your budget is the most important piece of the marketing mix. Don’t let this intimidate you. The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends that you spend about 8% of your gross revenue on marketing and advertising.

Now’s the time to preview the year ahead and make the necessary adjustments for the best performance of your marketing initiatives.  (Source: Social Media Examiner)

 

 

Don’t have time to do it all yourself? The experts at Advantage Marketing can help. We’ll work with you to develop strategies to help your brand stand out, attract your ideal clients, and develop a road map to success in 2020. Learn more and schedule an initial consultation.

 

 

Photo by: William Iven

Enhance the Customer Journey with Social Media

Enhance the Customer Journey with Social Media

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In our last blog post we shared the first 3 stages of the customer journey and ways to incorporate social media. Yes, it really is possible to do it without resorting to sales-y posts or spammy messages! Here are the next 4 stages of the customer journey and tips for tackling them.

Try

This is where you make your first offer to prospects. In the try phase, you reveal your offer and present content designed to move them towards a decision.Posts and ads with targeted calls to action are the way to go here!

Buy

Once you’ve gotten your prospects to take advantage of your trial offer, and you’ve dazzled them with a peek at your killer product or service, they’ll be ready to take the plunge and make their first real purchase.Social media can help coax them towards this conversion. Step up your customer engagement here.

Repeat

Once you’ve convinced your prospect to become a first-time customer, you have to continue to delight them! Maintain your outreach efforts whenever customers engage on your social media page. If you get private messages from customers through social media, make it a priority to respond quickly.

Refer

The final step in the customer journey is to win referrals. Social media comes in handy here because it’s an inherently—well, social—place!

If you want to get people talking about your brand with their friends, create content that is shareable.

Social media is as much a part of guiding the customer journey as any other marketing tactic. We hope that you enjoyed these tips and put some of them into practice with your social media!

(Source: Duct Tape Marketing)

Need help with your marketing?

Get the Advantage Marketing Total Online Presence audit today!

Social Media and the Customer Journey

Social Media and the Customer Journey

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Your social media marketing can sometimes feel separate from your other marketing efforts. The fact of the matter is that all of your marketing efforts should be shaped around the customer journey, and that includes social media. Here’s how you can incorporate social media in the first 3 stages of the customer journey:

Know

Social media is a great place to introduce your business to new people. The first stage of the customer journey is all about exposing your target audience to your branded content.

The first step to setting yourself up to meet new people on social is making sure you establish a profile with all of your information that clearly incorporates your branding and logos.

Like 

Once you’ve gotten the attention of new fans, it’s time to get on their good side. In the like phase, you want to educate them on their problems. This is the time to show that you understand their pain, and that your business offers the perfect solution to whatever ails them.

Continue to share content, but whatever you do, make sure it’s meaningful!

Trust

By now, you’ve convinced your audience that you know your field and understand the problem that you solve. Now’s the time to reinforce that trust in your business and drive initial engagement.

You can take an organic approach by sharing links that drive back to an initial offer on your website or use paid posts with targeted calls to action.

In our next blog post we will share 4 more stages where you can fit meaningful social media into the customer experience.

(Source: Duct Tape Marketing)

Need help with your marketing?

Get the Advantage Marketing Total Online Presence audit today!

LinkedIn marketing

LinkedIn Performance Boosting Tips

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Just setting up a LinkedIn profile isn’t enough.  Engagement is key and posting content isn’t that difficult. There are three types of content you can create directly on LinkedIn:

  • Posts – this is short content, such as status updates and quick shares
  • Videos – you can directly upload video files to LinkedIn
  • Articles – LinkedIn Publisher enables you to publish long-form articles

Posts on LinkedIn don’t work the same as other social media sites – while visuals rule on most platforms, it’s not the case here. Text-only posts, according to research, tend to outperform all other options.

You have up to 1300 characters for each post, but the first 2–3 lines are critical, because everything after this is hidden unless the viewer clicks ‘…see more.’

Formatting is important. Use shorter sentences, spacing, and emojis to break up the post. No one wants to read a wall of text.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is sharing links to external articles or websites. Instead of including a link in your post, put it in the first comment.

We hope these tips will help boost your LinkedIn performance!

Source: Social Media Today

Contact us for a Total Online Presence Audit

We can assess your current social media and website strategy and recommend powerful tactics to build your online presence. Learn more about TOP audits.

4 Tips for SEO Optimized Images

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Images are crucial to ensuring that your content is more accessible, attractive, and engaging to users, but they’re equally important for SEO.  Here are some tips for optimizing them.

1. Resize your images
Image size and file size are not the same thing. Image size refers to the dimensions of an image (e.g., 1024 by 680 pixels). File size is the amount of space needed to store it on the server (e.g., 350 kilobytes). Be sure to choose the right compression rate, file format and test optimization for speed.  Also be sure the size fits the social media platform to which you’re posting.

2. Optimize image file names
Choosing the right file name is important for page SEO and for ranking in image search results. Before uploading any image, name the file with relevant, descriptive keywords to get the most SEO power.
Include target keywords at the beginning and separate them with hyphens.

3. Use alt tags
Viewers may understand what a picture is about, but search engine spiders still need clues. Without alternative text, it’s impossible for search engines to accurately index your image content. A good alt tag provides context and helps visually impaired users too.

4. Optimize the image title
If you use WordPress, the image title is usually taken from the name of the file so you can sometimes leave it as it is. If you don’t use WordPress or the title doesn’t explain the image, rename it with the appropriate keywords in the same way as file names.

If you haven’t been using these tips for optimizing images, be sure to give them a try. Look for even more tips for optimizing images for SEO in our next newsletter!

Contact us for a Total Online Presence Audit

We can assess your current social media and website strategy and recommend powerful tactics to build your online presence. Learn more about TOP audits.

How to Run a Twitter Audit

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With 275 million monthly active users, Twitter is an undeniably good tool for engaging with an audience and expanding your brand’s online reach.

But it can be tricky to know whether you’re truly successful on the site — which is when a Twitter audit comes in handy. It helps you analyze the performance of your Twitter account by looking at your audience, analytics, content types, posting times, and consistency, as well as overall sentiment.

A Twitter audit should answer the following questions:

  • Who is our audience?
  • What types of content are we posting?
  • What types of content does our audience enjoy?
  • Is our posting consistent?
  • When are our followers active?
  • Are we seeing a Return on Investment (ROI)?
  • What can we do to improve our presence?
  • Who has access to our account?

Regular audits are extremely helpful in outlining your overall strategy and goals. Try setting a quarterly audit goal to make sure you’re keeping in tune with your audience.

(Source: Hubspot) Read the full article HERE.

Need help with your marketing?

Get the Advantage Marketing Total Online Presence audit today!

 

social media marketing

3 Tips for Successful Social Media Marketing

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You can drive traffic to your business via the web and social media, but you must have some knowledge of how to do so.  Try these three fundamental tips for effective online marketing:

1. Include structure, a theme and timeline for your posts.
Don’t make the mistake of posting items you think are interesting and splattering them on your social media outlets without having a plan of execution.

2. Understand that not all social media is the same.
Each social media outlet has its own strengths and weaknesses. Each platform also has its own formula for success, and often each carries a very different type of audience.

3. Post original content.
Social media reflects you and your company’s personality. The content that is posted should be original, and what will make it interesting is having it reflect your company’s culture.

The bottom line is that you shouldn’t expect customers to come running toward your website or retail shop if you don’t have an effective digital marketing plan.

(Source: Forbes.com)

Contact us for a Total Online Presence Audit

We can assess your current social media and website strategy and recommend powerful tactics to build your online presence. Learn more about TOP audits.