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Definitive Guide To Building Your Brand Presence on LinkedIn

Definitive Guide To Building Your Brand Presence on LinkedIn

A strong LinkedIn presence is essential for every company—not just those involved in B2B marketing. To build an effective brand presence on LinkedIn, consider the following LinkedIn assets:

LinkedIn Company Profile Page

Your company profile page (like the Evernote sample below) is where a user lands when he or she searches for your company or clicks on its logo from another user’s profile. Company profile pages are a free LinkedIn service that provide business owners a venue to showcase his or her brand.

Because this is your company’s primary landing page on LinkedIn, it’s very important to insure the images and messages you choose properly represent your brand.

LinkedIn Page Logo

The logo informs users about your company in a small thumbnail, which is attached to almost any action that you make across the platform—from posting a job opening to sharing a corporate news announcement.

LinkedIn Header Image

Larger than the logo, the header sits at the top of your company profile page and offers companies more real estate to showcase creatively. Your header image can include brand messaging, campaign promotions, product images, or your staff (as the above image from Luxottica demonstrates), and it can also be frequently changed to reflect exciting and seasonally relevant company updates.

About Us Section

The about section beneath the header is your opportunity to describe your company, providing other LinkedIn users and potential clients insight into your company’s products and mission. Consider Microsoft’s Company Page below:

Microsoft’s profile details the company’s goal (to empower other people and organizations with technology), how that goal is currently achieved (through collaborative ideas), and what the company provides to potential employees (an outlet to answer curiosity, passion, and ambition with quality tools, a resourceful community, and flexibility).

If you can provide detailed answers about your company to potential clients, then those clients will know exactly what your company does and how it can help them achieve their personal and professional goals.

Posting On LinkedIn

Like Twitter, Facebook, and other social platforms, LinkedIn allows your company the ability to share posts. Posting on LinkedIn is a key way to build followers and fuel your paid advertising efforts. These posts can include text, images, links, non-native videos and slide decks.

The image below demonstrates L’Oreal’s social prowess; the company links to content on flipboard.com and Youtube.com within its LinkedIn posts.

Because LinkedIn is seen as a professional network, your content mix and tone should be professional and engaging. Additionally, we have found that educational posts perform very well on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Growth Opportunities

Most active companies post frequently on the Company Page, and here are a few content tips that will make a critical difference in your company’s posting success:

Leverage Employees

30% of engagement on LinkedIn for a company comes from its employees. Consider your employees as a primary audience for content when deciding what to post, and use the “notify employees” feature occasionally to notify them about new posts from your page.

Video

We expect to see tremendous growth in video usage on LinkedIn in 2022. According to a recent study, 68% of video marketers say they will include LinkedIn in their 2022 strategy, a 5% increase from 2021.

Tagging

Tagging members on LinkedIn and using hashtags in your posts on LinkedIn can increase reach, engagement, and website traffic. Posts with links performs 45% better than posts with no links.

Ready to enhance your company’s LinkedIn presence? Contact us today to increase your sales, customer base, and more!

If you need help amplifying your website content via social media, contact Braveheart Digital Marketing. We’re a social media agency in Manchester NH that can help you reach your target audience and achieve your marketing goals. Contact us today to learn more!

How To Improve The Performance Of Your Facebook Business Page

A recent article by Neil Patel on quicksprout.com titled How to Steal Your Competitor’s Facebook Fans highlighted one of my favorite Facebook analytics tools, Fan Page Karma .

Fan Page Karma allows you to analyze any Facebook business page as well as compare any two Facebook business pages head-to-head. The software offers tremendous insight into what is working and what is not working with a company’s social media marketing strategy.

When we first meet with clients to talk about their current Facebook business social media strategy they usually have two main concerns:

The first step in analyzing the performance of a Facebook business page is to compare it to a competitor’s. When we do that with Fan Page Karma, this is the type of data that we get:

What I like about the data from Fan Page Karma is that it gives me a high level view about what is working and what is not. What is the growth rate of the fans? Are they engaged with the content? Is the company interactive with fans or are the interactions one-way?

From those results, I can dive further into a more in-depth review. For example, one of the things we analyze is the type of posts that clients make on Facebook?

For example, the data tells me that the client (bottom right) mainly posts pictures on Facebook, while its competitors post a lot more links and status updates.

So what type of content is right? To answer that question you need to know what type of content has the highest level of engagement.

This is a familiar four-section quadrant with the upper right quadrant being the most desirable one. From looking at the engagement level it is clear that pictures (red) do provide the highest engagement levels while video (green) and links (yellow) have the lowest level of fan engagement. Based on this data, one of the recommendations to our client was to continue posting pictures and to cut back on posting videos and links as their fans were not as engaged with that content. To find out more about how you can produce more engaging content on Facebook, contact us today.

Definitive Guide To Building Your Brand Presence on Twitter

For many businesses, Twitter is an underutilized asset. Companies lacking strategic, lead-generating plans for Twitter miss the opportunity to access a huge user base and to showcase themselves in a socially savvy and relevant way.

Users who elect to follow your company on Twitter demonstrate an active interest in your brand, what your company does, has to say, and what it will continue to do. To retain this high level of user engagement, it’s necessary to maintain an active brand presence on Twitter with:

The Appropriate Twitter Handle

The Twitter handle is the name that users will use to address and talk about your company. When a user directly tweets your company, they attach your handle to an “@” symbol and send it your way. Encourage users to contact you more frequently and talk more about your company with a short handle that doesn’t use too much of the capped 140 characters of a tweet.

A Succinct and Informative Bio

In 160 characters, succinctly describe your company, its products and services, and its relevance. Would a potential client find your company’s bio interesting, informative, or purely self-promotional? As an example, Virgin America uses its bio to link to its blog and website and provides a link to fliers who want to complain about services (potentially avoiding publicly tweeted complaints):

An Evocative Photo

This image shows Twitter followers who you are. For brands this is often a logo. This image sits next to your tweets so other users can visually identify you as the source. Profile Picture Size: Recommended dimensions are 400×400 pixels. See Oreo below.

Header Image

This is a background photo that sits behind your profile photo. Most images are resized to automatically fit the dimensions, but Twitter also offers the image parameters on their website. This is the opportunity for you to be creative and share an image that expresses your brand, campaign, or any other relevant visuals in a larger format.

The Patagonia header for example is publicizing a campaign they currently have running. Note the use of the hashtag #KeepJumboWild in the header. Profile Header Size: recommended dimensions are 1500×500 pixels

Build Your Following

Building your following on Twitter is one of the key activities to driving success on this social network. There are a variety of techniques marketers can use to build their following, and here are 7 tips to make your tweets more searchable, shareable, and readable on Twitter:

Use Hashtags (#)

These symbols have become synonymous with Twitter and are used to tag tweets by topic.

The hashtag allows you to follow the discussion and easily participate in it. For example, Gary Vaynerchuck (@garyvee) built a whole campaign in 2015 around the hashtag #AskGaryVee:

Use @Mentions

@mentions are a way for you to engage other Twitter users in your tweet. If you’re posting a tweet that you think is relevant to specific followers or thought leaders, tag them at the end of your tweet with a @mention as this will call their attention to your tweet and possibly the attention of their followers.

For example, Zack Wenger put together this video that featured Mark Cuban. Wenger only has 1,000 followers, but by mentioning @mcuban in his tweet, he brought it to Cuban’s attention. Cuban retweeted it, making his own 4.3m followers aware of it, not just Wenger’s 1,000.

Your social presence should help connect you with your target audience in a thoughtful and meaningful way—i.e. share content and craft messages of value, like Darren Rowse’s post below:

When leveraging Twitter to update the marketplace on company news and disseminate brand messaging, your social presence could be negatively impacted if used only as an advertising tool.

Quality, Not Quantity

When it comes to followers, companies often get caught up in the numbers game. But it’s important to remember that the quality of followers is just as—if not more—important as quantity.

Columbia Business School Professor Olivier Toubia sums this point up nicely in a conversation with Business News Daily:

“You could have a company with 10,000 followers, but half of them are not even real or not even relevant to your company. This will make your CEO feel good because they feel they have a big footprint on social media, but there isn’t really a lot of impact because they either aren’t real people or they are people who don’t care about your company.”

Professor Olivier Toubia

Columbia Business School

This is especially relevant for B2B companies offering niche services to a specific subset of clientele.

Repurpose

Twitter is a perfect medium to re-share content. As Danny Sullivan, founding editor of Marketingland said:

Twitter is the “live TV of social media…which means that if you’re not tuned in to catch a particular tweet live, then you’ve missed it.”

Danny Sullivan

Let’s say you share an article on a Monday morning. Consider sharing it again on Tuesday afternoon prefacing the new tweet with a qualifier like, “in case you missed it.”

What are you missing on Twitter? Do you have a large following truly interested in your posts? Are you succinctly expressing relevant and engaging text? And is the platform connecting you with your fans and connecting them with your goals?

Let us help you use Twitter to your advantage. Contact us today to effectively tweet for more quality followers, greater sales, and greater visibility!

The BEST Way To Generate Leads In 90% Of Industries

A new report from Bizible analyzed more than 480,000 leads through its Salesforce marketing analytics platform and the data showed that Search does a better job of generating leads than any other marketing channel.

A Hubspot report last season showed that SEO provides the best ROI of any inbound marketing channel, and the Bizible study reinforced that data. There is a subtle difference between the two reports as the Hubspot report was able to track both SEO and PPC separately. In the Bizible study they combined both organic and PPC under the single search umbrella.

The Bizible data showed that when looking at first touch, Search drove 56% of leads generated. When looking just at last touch, Search accounted for 41% of the leads generated.

Not a surprise then that the combination of Search first touch and Search last touch was the most productive channel for lead generation, accounting for 37% of all leads from first/last touch combinations.

For those marketers who believe that search will not work in their market, Bizible refuted that. The data showed that Search was the leading channel for 9 out of 10 of the industries measured for generating leads by first touch. The software/SaaS sector was the only sector in which search did not drive the majority of first touch leads.

Don’t Overlook Social In Lead Generation Process

Social is a market that has really matured into a valuable inbound marketing channel in the last year of so. When Bizible looked at the percentage of closed deals that were won by first touch in each channel, social impressively came in third with a 30% win rate, despite driving just 5% of leads. Social impact on lead generation is a not widespread yet because the social leads were concentrated among two industries; Education and Finance.

Note that Direct and Search had the two highest closed rates at 56% and 40% respectively with Display having the worst at only 12%.

Social shortens the length of the marketing cycle. When Social was the first touch, the marketing cycle was 30% shorter than average.

Takeaways

Search is the most popular first touch channel for lead generation accounting for 56% of all leads acquired. Search, especially organic SEO, has to be a part of your company’s inbound marketing strategy. Whether your market is B2B or B2C, Search generates more leads, more cost-effectively. The Bizible report shows that the last touch severely undervalues the top of the marketing funnel and does not account for the buyer’s decision journey. Companies need an inbound marketing analytics program that allows for Multitouch attribution. You can’t ignore Social in B2B marketing; it has a 30% shorter marketing cycle than the average inbound channel. Social is not just for posting statuses anymore. It is also a valuable lead generation channel. The full paper “Multi-touch Attribution for Companies with Sales Teams” is available for download here.

SEO Provides The Best ROI Of Any Inbound Marketing Channel

I built my first web site in 1996. In those days I just needed to update a meta keyword tag in order to have a site rank highly in the search engines. Today’s search engine algorithms are very sophisticated and you’ve got to have deep knowledge and well-honed skills to win at SEO. SEO is still the most productive and economical way to generate qualified leads and customers. It’s also the one that Marketers say is the hardest to execute. As a result, more and more companies are letting their marketing budgets get eaten up by PPC and switching their attention away from SEO to the latest shiny toys like Instagram. SnapChat or TikTok. Despite the appeal of all these new social channels, one thing remains consistent: SEO ROI provides the best return of any inbound marketing channel.

SEO on average is 12% of a typical marketing budget, but generates 14% of leads. PPC, on the other hand, is generating only 6% of leads, despite having 8% of the marketing budget. If you are spending more of your marketing budget on PPC than SEO then your lead generation program is likely upside down.

It’s not just the number of leads generated from SEO that makes it such an important inbound tactic it is the QUALITY of those leads.

In the same study, Hubspot asked marketers for the average percentage of leads converted to sales by marketing channel. SEO leads inbound marketing conversion rates, netting 15% above the average conversion rates.

SEO continues to deliver the best ROI of any inbound marketing channel. It’s worth more attention from marketers. Don’t let the idea that SEO is hard keep you from winning the online game. The right resources will make it easy for you. Has your organic search traffic has fallen over the last couple of years? If it has then a technical site audit will uncover why the search engines are not ranking you as highly as they used to. Contact us today and learn how you can increase the ROI of your SEO campaigns.

Definitive Guide To Building Your Brand Presence on LinkedIn

LinkedIn Company Profile Page

LinkedIn Page Logo

LinkedIn Header Image

About Us Section

Posting On LinkedIn

LinkedIn Growth Opportunities

Leverage Employees

Video

Tagging

Recent Posts

How To Improve The Performance Of Your Facebook Business Page

Recent Posts

Definitive Guide To Building Your Brand Presence on Twitter

The Appropriate Twitter Handle

A Succinct and Informative Bio

An Evocative Photo

Header Image

Build Your Following

Use Hashtags (#)

Use @Mentions

Quality, Not Quantity

Repurpose

Recent Posts

The BEST Way To Generate Leads In 90% Of Industries

Don’t Overlook Social In Lead Generation Process

Takeaways

Recent Posts

SEO Provides The Best ROI Of Any Inbound Marketing Channel

Recent Posts

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