3 Steps to Powerful LinkedIn Page Optimisation

One of the most powerful tools for marketing your business is a LinkedIn page, but what do you know about optimising your page? It’s an art, not a science. Here are three ways you can better optimise your LinkedIn business page and drive more traffic to your website.

1. Share updates often – Some people say to post updates to your LinkedIn page just once a day. Some people say do it more than once a day. It doesn’t matter how often you do it, but you should do it often. At a minimum, you should update your LinkedIn page at least once a day. Keep the content relevant and post it often. If you don’t, you’ll fade into obscurity.
2. Add visual elements – You can add banners, images of your products, or even videos to your LinkedIn page. I’d say to do all three – as often as you can. Making your LinkedIn page more visible will go a long way to driving up engagement and sending more visitors to your website.
3. Link to a landing page – You can create a landing page just for your LinkedIn page to give visitors a special offer, or you can create specific landing pages for your products and link to different ones from your LinkedIn page as you discuss those products. Pick a strategy, but it needs to make sense for your brand and your visitors. Instead of linking to your home page, link to a powerful landing page with a strong call to action.

How to write an optimised blog.

What is Inbound Marketing? You’ve heard the term thrown around but you’re not 100% what it means. We’re dedicating a series of posts to helping you understand what inbound marketing is and how you can improve your efforts.

Your company blog should be posting at least three days a week – but you already knew that, right? We’re part of an impatient society that texts and tweets, so how can you get your point across without boring people to death? Harsh, but true! You really need to appeal to your audience and keep them interested in your content – don’t let me freak you out though, you’re halfway there.

A Punchy Headline

You have maybe three seconds to convince someone to read your post. Piece of cake! RIGHT??? It can be a piece of cake, you just have to get creative. I could have named this post “3 Tips for a Perfect Blog Post” or “3 Things Every Blog Needs” but then it would look like every other post with advice for your business blog – and Twitter is so saturated with the same recycled blog titles. It’ll be nice to stand out – trust us. Think of a title that isn’t super long and gets the point across – mathematically a title should be under 70 characters total so your audience doesn’t zone out mid-headline.

Take Gizmodo for example, their headline “25+ Famous People’s First Tweets That’ll Make You Feel Better About Yours” could have been “25+ Underwhelming Tweets From Celebrities” - BUT THAT’S A TERRIBLE HEADLINE! The great thing about their headline is that they are making their audience think about their tweets and wonder just how awful some celebrities’ tweets could be. SOLD! CLICKABLE! For the full scoop on how to write a fabulous headline check out HubSpot’sA Simple Formula for Writing Kick-Ass Titles.

Awesome Visuals

I would never make anyone suffer through a post without at least one photo, and hello! You can embed Vines! Tweets! YouTube tutorials about the correct method of shaving a llama! Maybe! I haven’t checked. You know why BuzzFeed articles are everywhere you look, and I enjoy them too but most of their posts are about 20 pictures and people love it. Two of my current blog obsessions are Peak Design andEat24 because they both have a sense of humor and clear, interesting visuals – and not just of their product. Gifs or fun memes to break up the text. Really, you should be doing quite simply is keep your readers interested with bullet points, lists and visuals. It’s as easy as that.

Sorry. Also, the internet loves cats. But you already knew that.

Smart SEO

When you write a blog post you should already have a keyword in mind, and for those that don’t know about long-tail keywords, do read up on them because they’re so necessary for your posts to rank on Google, so people can find your blog posts, then blog, then website and look at all of your products and BOOM! You’re a millionaire! You need your keyword to be strewn across your blog – intelligently, of course, because there’s nothing more depressing than blatant keyword placement. 

What's missing in your marketing strategy?

We have reached a point where the barrier between “marketing” and “digital marketing” is almost nonexistent. And every year that line separating the two grows thinner and thinner.

So what values determine whether a marketing campaign succeeds or fails?

It is not really any one thing, but a combination of smaller factors that makes the real difference. Every company knows that they need to interact with customers on social media channels, put out thought-leading blogs to appear in relevant content searches, create a great website design, use keywords, etc.

Here are all those little extras that many companies miss when developing a strategy:

Create Measurable Goals

It is impossible to mark your company’s successes and shortcomings without setting numbers for the team to strive for. Take time to plan ahead on this point. Consider your budget and financial goals before deciding what marketing strategy can get you there. If you want to achieve, say, 10 new sales, then you would need 500 new leads, and for that you will need 50,000 new visitors to your site in the designated timeframe.

Now that you know the numbers you can begin to hash out a marketing strategy that makes sense for your business that will also achieve your desired results. It you are looking to increase your sales, all other numbers, including time and resources dedicated to marketing efforts, must be raised at a respective rate. You can’t improve one without the other.

Integrated Marketing Strategy

This point comes down to everything in your entire marketing scheme working together toward your company’s end goal. This is also where preparation is key. You cannot dive into a marketing campaign without planning it out from every angle.

1. Consistent Branding: Crossover between all types of shoppers, such as a customer who searches your product on their smartphone app but goes to the computer version of the site to make a purchase or vice versa, is becoming increasingly common these days. As such, every platform must be delivering the same message and brand image consistently.

2. Personality and Voice: Along with your brand’s message being clear and consistent through all channels, it must also have its own personality. The tone of voice that you create is what makes your brand unique, and what gives customers a character to identify with your company. Don’t just act on content marketing’s capabilities when you aren’t making your numbers; it should be a constant interaction with your audience to show them your voice.

3. Schedule: Create a calendar for everything that is included in your campaign. Blog schedule, social media updates, new ebooks, upcoming events or webinars, special offers, email campaigns, and one that contains a little bit of all of these should all be set before the campaign begins. Think ahead and make a realistic editorial calendar for any campaign you create.

Device Readiness

Most people will abandon a sale or download if the device they are working with is moving slowly or not working properly. That is why, if you deal in digital, which we all do these days, you have to invest in a high-quality site with responsive website design.

Along with that, take mobile optimization into account as well. This can be used in various ways, so find the one that works for your company to stay ahead of the competition without alienating your leads.

While mobile devices are becoming the norm, don’t forget to have a system that easily works on tablets, which are more common for online purchases than smartphones. You can’t ignore any form of technology if it may lead to new leads and new sales.

Visual Engagement

I’ve said this before and I will say it again, visuals attract the customer’s attention the way text never can. If you have a product to offer, show it being used. If it is an event, show photos and videos from previous events so they can see what to expect.  

A great way to kill two birds is to include calls to action, or CTAs, within your web pages, blogs, emails, etc.The perfect CTA will be visually appealing while also offering your site’s visitors somewhere else to go within your site. That special product or event that your company has going on should be made abundantly clear through your site’s CTAs.

Takeaway

A unified, consistent strategy with measurable goals is exactly what you need to make a successful marketing campaign. But those extras, such as the visuals, CTAs, high-tech gadgetry, well-planned calendars, brand personality and consistency, etc. are what take a marketing strategy great.

Without considering all of these factors beforeembarking on a new marketing campaign, or improving on an old one, you will be going in blindly with a chaotic plan of attack. Take the time to schedule every aspect of your campaign so you don't miss any vital pieces!

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Social media for business

A host of PR and marketing strategies exist for building customer awareness, but one area often overlooked is social media

For many small businesses, expensive advertising campaigns or big, splashy PR stunts simply aren't an option. This means that in the initial phases, business owners are faced with a challenge: how to build the brand awareness your company needs while keeping costs down?

There are a number of efficient PR and marketing strategies that companies can implement to build awareness among their target customers, but one area that is often overlooked by small businesses, or executed poorly, is social media. Social media, when used strategically, can give you direct engagement with many of your target audiences. Twitter now has grown to 241 million monthly active users, while Facebook has 1.2 billion members. Obviously, for those companies starting out, these channels give access to vast numbers of people, whether it's to raise awareness, create engagement or drive revenues.

The possibilities presented by social media channels are endless, but how can businesses ensure that they use them in the right way, to support their business objectives, rather than wasting time and resources to no end? It is all too easy to think "we need to be on social media" and not get any further than that. Unsurprisingly, however, a successful social media platform needs a strong strategy behind it, if it's going to generate results.

Like much communication, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, but there are some basic questions that companies can ask themselves about creating relevant and engaging strategies.

Who am I trying to reach?

This might sound obvious, but too many businesses launch into social media without thinking about what they want to get out of it. Unsurprisingly, this rarely yields results. Instead, companies need to think about what they are trying to achieve, and work out their strategy from there. A key part of this is understanding your audience. Are you a business-to-business brand trying to reach CEOs, or are you a consumer brand whose main customers will be mothers? Do you have secondary audiences such as regulators, journalists or NGOs? Establish clearly who your primary and secondary audiences are.

What channels are most appropriate to reach these people?

It's important to think carefully about what channels are most appropriate for your key audiences. If you're a B2B brand, for instance, you may find that you have limited success using Facebook. Equally if teenagers are your target audience, LinkedIn might not be the most appropriate channel. So often when considering social media, people just assume that they need to be on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, but even though these are the most common channels they may not be the most relevant. Also, remember that if you have niche audiences, other appropriate platforms may prove more fruitful.

What kind of content will they care about?

It's a rare consumer who loves being constantly bombarded with marketing content, yet when you look at many corporate channels, this is exactly what you find. Think about the kind of people you're trying to reach and what interests them. Will they be more interested in visual content? News articles? Fun facts? Have a look at companies that have been successful in engaging similar audiences and see what has worked for them. Also make sure that you get the balance right between content that talks about your company and content that engages on a broader basis.

How much time do I want to dedicate to this?

Real social media marketing takes dedication, time and resources, and there is no point having channels if you don't use them. Radio silence probably won't lose you followers, fans or viewers, but it won't gain you any either, and it won't achieve your objectives. In order to make social media work, you need to make sure that its value and importance is communicated internally and that time each day is set aside for your channels. Think about who is responsible as well. Will it be you doing the tweeting, or will it be someone else's responsibility? If the answer is someone else's, you need to make sure that it sits within their core objectives, rather than being seen as an additional pull on their time, which can drop off the priority list when people get busy.

How can I track success?

In order to establish whether your new social media strategy is successful, it's important to define what success looks like. It's often helpful to look beyond statistics such as follower and fan numbers, to more sophisticated metrics like engagement. Many social media channels have in-built methods to help with this evaluation, but also consider online tools such as bit.ly which can track how many people click on your links andGoogle Analytics which can track where traffic to your website is coming from.

Organisations that answer these five questions when formulating their strategies will be in a much better position to reach their audiences in a manner that generates positive business results. For every company the style and channels used for social media outreach will be different, but by following these steps businesses should be able to build awareness and reputation among their key audiences, while keeping costs to a minimum. Most of all though, companies need to remember to be engaging, human and relevant, rather than just using their "owned" channels to push out free corporate marketing messages.

Sara Benwell is a senior consultant at Sermelo. You can follow her on Twitter@sarabenwell