Many B2B marketers and brands are using LinkedIn intensively as a channel to market, building awareness and interest in your offering.
LinkedIn is NOT EFFECTIVE a direct marketing channel – it’s for brand marketing.
Today I have a challenge for you. Followers.
Follower Count on LinkedIn.
Who follows you?
Go to your LinkedIn page and log in. Then navigate to your followers page. The link is the same for everyone.
Following – these are your connections. [Note: it’s not who YOU are following – a bit confusing]
Followers – people who follow your updates. This includes all your connections.
Below each person’s profile and job title is a check box showing if you are following then or not; and the number of people who are following them.
This makes it easy to filter. And one click to follow them back.
Check boxes to show if you’re following people on LinkedIn
What to do about LinkedIn Followers
Three things to do:
Browse the list for people who you’d like to connect with and who are following you
Decide on your criteria for following people – everyone, only those with key attributes, people who could be clients; people with high/low followers themselves etc
Make a diary log to check back regularly for new followers
LinkedIn works best as a business development platform if you have a clear client persona; have a clear content writing strategy [topics, frequency, audience]. Targeting the right audience with good content, regularly.
Unlike Twitter, LinkedIn does not have a ratio of following to followers throttle. And remember, following someone is a great way to get their insights, to become acquainted with their perspectives as a precursor to connecting.
Famous people have lots of followers. If you are trying to break into a marketplace and build a solid profile, my recommendation is this.
Follow people whose follower count is low-to-medium. Their news feed won’t be too cluttered and your content stands a better chance of getting noticed and commented.
A
website’s success is often dependent on its design flow, cohesiveness and
content. This is the reason as to why a lot of User Experience experts (UX) are
also adept in graphic design. One of the best ways to create a good user
experience is by having a clear grasp of design principles.
Here’s
some key website creation tips you can learn just by attending a graphic design
course.
Value The Fundamentals
The
key to developing a higher understanding of any topic is by understanding its
fundamental principles. Nowadays, creating a cool looking graphic is as easy as
tapping a couple of buttons on your smartphone. While that may sound simple,
these design tools are only part of the process. The more significant piece is
understanding what’s visually appealing and what distracts people from your
message.
Image credit: Shutterstock
Here’s
a list of basic design principles you should know about:
Color – Sticking to your favorite color may not always be the
best strategy. When appropriate colors are used on a website, it can help
dictate the mood of the audience. For instance, using a Green color correlates
to the environment and make people think about charity, while the Red color
induces a strong emotion.
Typography – This is an art form that arranges type to make it
readable. Choosing the right font will help convey your message better, it
helps show feelings even in written form. If you want to learn more about
typography, this graphic design course
by HubSpot
does the job well.
Composition – More than choosing what color and font to use, you should
also know how to compose a visually appealing graphic design. Design
composition pertains to the alignment of each element, ensuring proper contrast
levels, and grouping related elements together.
Leverage The Fold
The
term “above the fold” was initially used in graphic design and later on used on
web design as well. Above the fold pertains to the topmost area of your webpage
that users see without scrolling. There’s still a debate whether this area is
still relevant nowadays, but whatever the case is the fact remains the same —
80% of users spend their time above the fold. You need to maximize the use of
this space and hook your visitors. Here are some ways on how you can do that:
Image credit: Shutterstock
Clear and concise headline – Once a visitor opens your
website, they should be able to know what it’s all about. The proper use of
typography will help communicate your message better.
Call to action – Make sure you design a clear and visible call to action
(CTA) button. Increase your chances
of conversion by placing your CTA above the fold.
Leverage media – Use images, video, and even audios to support your
headline and improve CTA click-through rate.
The
way you design this area will contribute to how well you communicate your value
proposition to your target audience.
Create Your Own Graphics and Images
About
65% of the population are visual learners which means that a lot of people rely
on visual cues to help them understand better. When you apply this kind of
mindset into website creation, you can expect more people to find your website
worthwhile.
Take,
for example, infographics. People pay attention when you show them data and
statistics backed by research. However, not everyone can digest a 20-page
research paper. Through the use of infographics, complex information can be
communicated easier. A graphic design course can teach you how to create your
graphics, select thought-provoking images, and repurpose old content.
Put Importance On Branding
If
you’re wondering why a lot of websites spend time and money on branding, it’s
because a properly thought out brand shows a unified business. Graphic design
courses should teach you the importance of creating a brand guideline and how
to properly implement it not just on your website but in your overall business
as well. Here are some of the reason why consistent branding is essential:
Value – When website visitors see that you have an organized and
visually appealing branding they’ll have a good impression about your business.
It helps build your credibility, sets you apart from the competition and
establishes your brand value.
Recognition – When you use your branding consistently all across
platforms and not just on your website, it helps with brand awareness and
recognition. While establishing a recognizable brand takes time, strict
adherence to branding guidelines can make the hasten the process.
Perception – You can control how people perceive your business through
branding. Each time you communicate with your customers, business partners and
even investors make sure you follow your branding guidelines.
Conclusion
Take
time to increase your skills by enrolling in a graphic design course. The
lessons you learn from these courses will help you create a website that’s not
only user-friendly but also appealing. You don’t need a lot of money to learn
how to design. You just need an infinite amount of resources and the
inspiration to push you forward.
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Technology has become a big part of everyday life. Right now, you’re reading this on a computer, tablet or smart phone. That alone shows how technology is intricately woven into many aspects of modern life. While some innovations could have been predicted, like automation or virtual reality, others have been the opposite. Here are three technologies that consumers could have never known where coming into their lives.
The Internet
Before the internet, data transmission was pretty basic. Telephone, radio and morse code were the only ways to send a data transmission until the advent of satellites in the 1950s. Still, consumers never could have known that one day electronic transmissions, like email and text messages, would become such a big part of their lives. In fact, the internet is so pervasive that it’s hard to imagine life without it. For generations born during the internet age, it might be even harder to imagine.
E-Cigarettes
People have been smoking tobacco for hundreds of years, but no one could have predicted that smoking would go digital. E-cigarettes, as they exist today, were invented in China in 2003, but tobacco companies have been trying to develop something similar to them since the 1960s. However, the invention was first thought of as early as the late 1920s by Joseph Robinson. Today, you can find a vape shop in every town, but it’s hard to say whether Robinson could have foreseen the invention’s popularity.
The Microwave
The post-WWII era saw a lot of developments in the home appliance market. One invention, however, really surprised and delighted consumers: the microwave. Before the microwave became a part of the modern kitchen, there was no way to speed up food preparation. Defrosting meat, for example, would take hours rather than minutes since there was no way to thaw the meat without cooking it. So, when microwaves hit the market, they were lauded as the latest futuristic innovation that would revolutionise how people prepared food. Interestingly, they were right. By the 1970s, 10% of households had a microwave. Today, you can find a microwave in 90% of households.
Everyday Innovations
These inventions could be considered everyday innovations because they impact our daily lives. However, most people couldn’t have anticipated how these technologies would alter everyday life. It makes you wonder what other developments are just on the horizon that could change the course of human history.
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https://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/leon-seibert-2m71l9fA6mg-unsplash-scaled.jpg17072560Rebecca Caroehttps://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CAS_Logo_1line_RGB.jpgRebecca Caroe2019-02-19 12:36:572022-12-19 13:51:233 Technologies Consumers Couldn't Have Predicted
This past week has seen a “Sweeper Wave” of coinciding reading and researches which tell me one new thing – podcasting for business content marketing is now going mainstream.
First let me explain the sweeper waves – I was on holiday on the Coromandel Coast and a sea swell off the west coast caused occasionally huge waves to come right up the beach nearly to the high tide mark – even when the tide was half out. These had large volumes of water inside them and so had great forward momentum and a strong undertow when they receded. While I watched, people paddling knee deep got caught off guard and swept off their feet and the wave also soaked their clothes higher up the beach – one lady broke her hip being tumbled by the wave and the air ambulance was called out.
I reflected on the sweeper waves and see them as a metaphor for change in marketing and business.
Hemingway’s insight into change (or bankruptcy) is that it happens slowly and then all at once. They key is knowing whether what you are seeing is at the early-adopter or just-going-mainstream stage. I have followed the rise of electric vehicles assiduously since watching Tony Seba’s illustration of Fifth Avenue, New York. These two photos are taken 13 years apart. What happened in between? Change. Disruption.
[Side note, Tony is an investor in New Zealand startups]
Like a sweeper wave, some people get caught unawares. My attempt to avoid this is to watch out for “recurring themes” in tech, marketing, and business. The rest of this article is about my recent finds. Some connect, others are remarkable for different reasons.
I’ve been podcasting since 2013 and during the latter part of 2018 I saw major brands using the medium for their content marketing – McKinsey, The Economist Intelligence Unit and CapGemini. This tells me that content marketing is expanding into the audio medium. There are advantages and disadvantages to this. Few brands have enough to say that doesn’t involve their competitors (which they are probably unwilling to discuss in public forum) compared to independent commentators who can speak more freely. And this fact alone will deter many brands from podcasting. There are other opportunities for content marketing using audio which are less ’traditional’ than a weekly radio show which brands can usefully use.
My podcast interview with Bob Weir author of “Why Businesses Fail” was published by Access Granted NZ. His book is a must-read for founders, investors and board members for the insights into the human psyche and how it contributes to business. Business failures are usually preceded by identifiable problems. Analysing problems at the macro level was an observation which led to me writing Problem Solving for Marketing. The insight connecting these is that correctly identifying the type of problem first, aides finding the right solution. Is your business situation a “mess”; a “problem”; or a “puzzle”?
If you use email marketing and CRM in your business, here is a very nicely written summary of how one startup uses funnels, lead nurturing, and incorporating Net Promotor Score too. I don’t know the team but they are a young venture and so starting from scratch has advantages. A word of warning; anecdotally, Active Campaign is said to be less user-friendly than other comparable software. [If you want to compare software user views, always check out Trust Radius run by Vinay Baghat – it’s independent and user-led.]
And although this case study looks amazing, very few brands that I meet use automation, business process flows or sales funnels to this extent. How does this reflect on the adoption curve for CRM, which I was working on with Peppers and Rogers back in 1997? Maybe some firms will never use marketing automation or sales lead scoring.
Writing a presentation for the Penrose Business Association brought me to confront my lack of skill using traditional presentation software. I have found two alternatives Beautiful and Stun, one American and the other Kiwi.
Finally – the joke’s on you for the Mars Rover whose batteries may have died after 15 years – Brendan Boughan’s Cartoons by Jim captures it perfectly. and flashes back to 1997 when we first got Mars fever and the creatives at HP had a similar vibe going. One of my favourite laugh-out-loud adverts of the time.
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March 1-2 – she’s hosting a table talk on podcasting and blogging for business.
This is a fantastic opportunity to invest in your business and for your own professional development. The conference is for Small business to corporates, from beginners to advanced. Imagine the connections you can make?
What will I learn?
There are 25 Speakers for #SMCNZ19 and topics cover everything Social Media.
Some topics include : Facebook advertising, Communities, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Content Strategy, Content Marketing, Branding, Campaigns, Video Marketing and of course Podcasting (with Rebecca).
The two International Speakers are ell worth the ROI alone if you take action on their talks.
If you get a group together, you can get further savings on groups of 4 and 8.
You can book here: https://events.toba.org.nz/events/social-media-conference-2019/
Podcasting is the new Content Marketing
Yes this is true. Like so many other forms of social that I’ve personally used (Blogging, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, G+, WhatsApp, Tumblr, Pinterest, WeChat, Telegram, Vero – yes, I have profiles on ALL these), they start getting used by individuals and then brands get on board.
Podcasts are being started by brands and businesses – I knew they were going mainstream when in 2018 I saw the Economist Intelligence Unit, CapGemini and McKinsey had launched podcasts. I’ve been podcasting since 2013 on RowingChat.
And so if you are doing content marketing and want to learn the 5 pre-requisites for brand podcasting to be successful, come to SMCNZ19.
See you there!
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Solving marketing problems is difficult. I don’t like doing it – unless I know a solution or have a good, educated guess about what could work.
A client situation emerged which serves to illustrate the challenge. We reached an impasse. I had offered advice, our progress was smooth until we got to the point of marketing to new customers who don’t yet know the brand. And one of the client team was deeply opposed to the tactic I proposed. I’ll explain how we got through this later.
Solving marketing problems
One of my podcasts summarised three types of problem – messes, problems and puzzles. These are ‘complex’ problems – ones with multiple factors affecting the situation. Modern marketing gets more of these – because with omni-channel promotions it’s increasingly hard to isolate a single input-output signal to explain an outcome.
The author paraphrases Gerald Ashley as he describes the different approach needed for each type of problem
Messes are ill-defined in form and structure and so are most like real life.
Problems have a defined structure with potential solutions, but none are absolutely clear and right.
Puzzles are well defined and have specific solutions that can be worked out.
Marketing problems are frequently perceived to be puzzles, but in actual fact are probably messes. The big insight is in this quote:
Most of us crave certainty and as much control as possible. Politicians and business leaders are just the same and perhaps even more so. ‘Bring me facts and experts. I want a solution now!’ By implication, those in positions of authority tend to treat most issues as puzzles, sometimes problems and never messes. As a result they tend to seek shortcuts to answers that are probably wrong. The biggest mistake is to carve out part of a mess, treat it as a problem and then solve it as a puzzle. This can lead to very bad decisions.
Back to my client ‘problem’
We reviewed the situation and whether it was a complex problem or not. It was.
It wasn’t a puzzle because the structure of marketing activity was reasonably clear-cut.
It wasn’t a mess because there was structure, there was a framework of activity and the desired output was prospects who hadn’t previously known about the brand. And so we decided this was an actual problem.
I thought hard about what to do. This was the series of steps
I asked the client what they did when they were advising someone and had disagreement
I reviewed the steps we’d taken thus far and gained agreement around the success of the process, method and outcomes to date
I narrowed the discussion to the point where the “leap of faith” sat. What were the inputs we had prepared (there were 2) and these were acknowledged
Then I walked away and left the client team to discuss.
They have not specifically told me what they discussed or what they decided. But it’s clear we are still working together. And so I am presuming the first (tentative) step towards the leap of faith activity has been taken and I’ll hear what the outcomes are in due course.
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I was checking the analytics on a client site and saw a referral from a website I did not recognise. And so I investigated it.
New referral site turns out to be spam
After typing in the reach-publisheral website address manually (I always do this in a new browser window), an automatic redirect came into effect and I ended up on Pingl.net [no, don’t follow that link please].
Black Hat SEO tactics
In the SEO world there are goodies and baddies…. and it’s a game of tension between the unscrupulous on one side and those who follow search engine websites’ guidelines on the other – refereed by Google and Bing.
Black Hat is the term given to tactics that are underhand and try to cheat the system.
White Hat is the opposite – those who work within the framework set by search engines.
Updates to search engine algorithms are usually driven by their desire to undermine black hat tactics.
After a quick search I found several other commentators had found referrals in their analytics also coming from Pingl. This rings alarm bells.
Who is Pingl?
A set of clever Black-Hatters masquerading as authentic “growth hacking” tacticians.
They use a technique called notification referrer service which is basically a spam referral to your website. By masking their site identity they make the link “appear” to come from another site – reach-publishinglo in my case (but others report variants on Ali Baba). This domain is setup with the sole purpose of sending you to pingl’s home page – it refers you directly to them.
Although you may be getting a lot of referrals from the masked page, it is not real traffic, and it can ruin your SEO – notably your bounce rate.
How to overcome referrer spam
Create filters in your Analytics to remove this traffic from your results in two ways
Campaign Source Filter – will stop all traffic from the source (pingl) site
Campaign Referral Path Filter – will stop single web pages
Languages Setting Filter – stops traffic from named languages (was useful for Russian spam in 2017)
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Happy new year everyone. I’m loving being on summer break – but it doesn’t stop me researching and finding top new tools and ideas for digital marketing success.
Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords
Found this great site which can help you identify LSI keywords for your website SEO.
LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords are words that are commonly found together within a single topic and are semantically related to each other.
So they help you understand the connections and correlations between groups of words and phrases – so you can select good ones to use on your natural website SEO.
Testing LSI Keywords
I did a quick test for a client and found a list of over 10,000 [seriously, who needs that many?] to download. The site asks you to list up to 10 “seed” words before it runs the analysis.
Latent Semantic Keywords
And then I reviewed the listings and found a lot of non-relevant words – so I refined the seed words to improve the outcome, downloaded and got my list.
Next step – back to the Google Analytics query to assess the current search results and revise / review and improve.
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Market automation is a technological process that streamlines as well as provides visibility into the marketing activities of a business. It is an assortment of tools, processes, and workflows, where the tools are used to automate the commonly repetitive tasks. While marketing automation is highly important in producing and nurturing new leads, for long-term business engagement it can be costly for your business without initial proper implementation. It is considered an excellent practice for your market automation to be infused into the sales and marketing processes to optimize a buyer’s journey from potential customers to loyal clients.
A study projects that the market for market automation will grow by 3.3 billion USD to 6.4 billion USD in 2024. The driving force for this growth is the increase in demand for personalized advertising, the urge to keep clients for the long term, and the use of predictive analytics techniques to understand customer behavior.
To help you understand how to market automation could be a lifesaver for your business, below are seven key points:
1.Time-Saving
Marketing automation helps shift your business focus to only the most essential aspects. For instance, once you create content for marketing campaigns, the technology takes care of all the other activities automatically. The burden of grappling with social media posts from one platform to another is eased, so you can easily schedule posts to be published to these social media sites based on need.
2.Customer Loyalty
With the ever-changing needs of the customer, everyone wants to be ahead of the game by obtaining customer loyalty. Achieving customer loyalty in the long term is a grueling task unless you can leverage analytics to understand customer dynamics, such as predicting their new likely interests. Automation makes businesses smarter in retaining customers, as most small companies are always on the lookout for new customers while continually losing existing ones. Once you understand the purchasing behavior of customers, it will be easy to align your marketing strategies with their respective interests.
Below are ways you can increase customer loyalty:
Sharing Company Content – You can share company content from your company sites such as blog posts and videos. When done on time, it enhances chances of customer retention, for instance, by helping them have optimum use of their purchases through user guides and new product features.
Request Feedback – One other way that market automation maintains customer loyalty is by requesting feedback. However, it is essential to note that feedback should only be required when appropriate to do so to reduce the chances of being a bother to the client.
3.Tracking and Monitoring Results
Market automation has an embedded metric for understanding marketing efforts, and this helps you continuously measure success through market optimization. Insightful analytics from marketing data streams will help you perceive the performance of your marketing campaigns. Once you can clearly understand the nature of engagements, you can further follow up on new customer streams, as well as fine tune the marketing campaign to align with changing client needs. Tracking will help you make better-informed choices on what should be improved and what should be discarded.
4.Lead Generation
Market automation, when optimally implemented, will help you increase sales through new leads generation. These leads mostly come from website visitors, new engagements, and exciting insights from predictive analytic tools. It is therefore prudent to capitalize on such insights to achieve a long-term return on investment (ROI).
5.Aligning Marketing and Sales
Another critical factor that will enable marketing automation to achieve long-term business goals is that you can align your sales and marketing activities. An enhanced collaboration where marketers—in their effort to provide a personalized market experience—also presents valuable information to the sales team, helping them craft important communication for sales closure. This kind of collaboration will lead to a much-shortened sales cycle, based on proper profiling of potential clients and working towards fulfilling their buying anticipations.
6.Marketing ROI
Marketing automation provides visibility into your marketing activities and an environment that enables you to track engagement and optimize campaigns. You will ultimately reduce your marketing cycles, which later transforms into increased revenue for your company.
7.Reduced Costs
Any automated process reduces the cost of manual labor in terms of staff or contractors for the same tasks. What this means to your organization is the availability of a pool of funds that can be plowed back to improve front-end business processes.
Conclusion
Marketing automation is worth the financial investment as it will help your business achieve your long-term goals in the long run. With improved visibility into your marketing activities, you can realize high sales turnover through the faster decision making and proper planning. Finally, you will be among the few companies setting the pace for the rest to follow.
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