How marketers are using LinkedIn to gain more than a new job!

LinkedIn

 

Marketers are using LinkedIn not just for job seeking but also to grow their business. Yes they are using LinkedIn for generating new customers, creating brand awareness and also to establish partnerships. According to Business News Daily, LinkedIn is a valuable tool for your digital marketing strategy.

Generating Sales Leads

Generating Sales Leads

 

Marketers are using LinkedIn in a number of different ways such as generating sales leads for e.g. according to The Tennessean, marketers can use LinkedIn to find connections to people they want to meet, in order to generate new customers. A study conducted by HubSpot, it was found that coming from LinkedIn generated the highest visitor conversion rate (2.74%) almost three times higher than Twitter and Facebook. According to HubSpot to get the most out of generating sales leads, promote and share links to your landing page in your companies status updates.

More Targeted advertising

According to The Social Media Examiner you should use sponsored updates as it allows you to put your content in front of key decision makers and key influencers and expose yourself to people that are not already part of your network. Businesses can target the exact industry, company size and the job role of the people that they know would buy their product or service. For example if your are selling customer support software to small business in Ireland, you can set the advertising campaign to only show to businesses that are under 100 employees, based in Ireland and within that grouping only to executives at those companies with a customer-support title. With the ability to limit the audience for the update, it allows you to make the best use of the investment. You are also able to see how effective these paid adverts are with the help of the analytics tool provided by LinkedIn.

Staying top of the customers mind

By posting daily or weekly updates on LinkedIn blog posts, to keep the company’s name in the mind of the customer. Also by sharing new product or service information and offers such as inviting people to a webinar, to create brand awareness.

Becoming an industry expert

Industry Expert

 

In order to become an industry expert in your field, you need to provide quality content. The goal of providing high quality content, that provide value to potential customers is to establish yourself as a though leader so when it comes time to purchase, potential customers will think of you first and will also remember that your company knows how to solve their problem. It’s about offering them real value and in turn will get results. According to HubSpot, in order to get a better idea of the type of content that’s most popular on LinkedIn in your industry, you can use LinkedIn’s Trending Content Tool. It shows the most popular content being shared on LinkedIn for numerous audiences and topic segments. Also monitoring this would be a good idea to see what your company should be doing to create more engagement.

As you can see from the above, LinkedIn is more than just a job hunting network, there’s a whole host of things you can use it for such as creating relationships with potential buyers by giving free useful information that they value, generating sales leads, more targeted advertising and being the first company customers think of when experiencing a problem or just in the intention phase of the purchase buyer behaviour. However it is important to note that LinkedIn is mainly used for business to business advertising and it’s not to be used as a hard selling tool as this is frowned upon on LinkedIn.

Watch this quick video on some additional LinkedIn marketing tips, also check out The Social Media Examiner Facebook page for some great social media marketing topics including LinkedIn

Top 10 Tips For Using Twitter To Market Your Irish SME

Twitter has grown at an increasing rate; it has become a key tool for Irish SMEs as it allows them to get up close and personal with their current and potential customers. However with so much noise on Twitter it is easy to get lost or forget about what you’re trying to achieve. Here are 10 Twitter tips for Irish SMEs to market their business successfully.

Define Your Objectives

1) Know your objective      

Before setting up a Twitter account, you need to have a clear objective in mind of what you’re going to be posting and what you are trying to achieve. According to Writing my Destiny this sounds easy enough but without clear goals and objectives you will always be wondering what to Tweet about next.

2) Build your profile Your profile defines your brand and what your company is all about. Update your profile picture as it is next to every tweet you send out and according to The Social Media Examiner it is an opportunity to associate an image with your company in the minds of people that are following you.          The background image should also reflect your company’s products and services. Also make sure to fill in all the information as according to The Marketing Donut you only have about three seconds when people check you out so make you do it well.

3) Who to follow

It is important for Irish SMEs that you will need to go after people to follow at the start to get your companies name out there. It’s all about following people relevant to your business sector such as your existing customers and the customers of your competitors. Also you should follow the most influential people in your sector and engage with them to create brand awareness.

The Twitter List

4) Organise whom you follow into lists

Once you’ve grown your followers, so does the noise and according to The Social Media Examiner it becomes even harder to see the important messages. So what can you do? Well it’s very simply by grouping different groups of important people and putting them into lists.

 

5) Content is King

Content is King

You need to post information that people will find interesting and engaging. According to Writing my Destiny you first need  to take a look at your competitors that have the most success rate and see what they’re doing. You need to curate good content by sharing links to other articles/videos that your target audience find interesting.

 

 

6) Use Twitter to solve your business problems If you know there’s certain days that your business is quiet you could offer a Twitter only special for that day/night. E.g. if you’re a restaurant and you know every Wednesday night it is like a ghost town you could offer something like buy one get one free.

Follow Me

 7) Advertise your Twitter profile

To create brand awareness for you Twitter profile and your company, you should add your Twitter profile name on all printed material. You also would need to add it to your other online marketing activities and ask others to follow you.

8) Be polite Thank new followers and anyone that ‘retweets’ the page or your posts.

9) Track Everything You need to track your Twitter profile to ensure that it’s actually making a benefit for your business. You can do this using a third party app such as unfollowers.me to see how many people are unfollowing you or you can use the Twitter search bar to see what people are saying about your brand.  

10) Be Consistent in your Tweets Try to retweet at least once a day so people don’t think your page is inactive.

Watch this quick video on 12 Twitter Marketing Tips For Small Businesses

Facebook – Playing by Their Rules Matters

Facebook Playing By Their Rules

Marketers need to learn to play by Facebook’s rules if they want their brand to be seen by their followers and also so that they do not become banned from using Facebook.

Organic Traffic Reduced Dramatically

Facebook Rules

 

Since Facebook changed its algorithm in December to determine what users see in their newsfeed, more and more companies have seen an intensive drop in organic traffic. According to Social@Ogilvy, organic reached dropped from 16% of followers engaging with a brand in 2012 to just 6% in February 2104, a huge decline of 49%. It also warned managers to expect organic reach to approach zero by the end of the year. This means that brands that have spent time and money in building up their followers and cutting spending on traditional advertising, suddenly now are receiving less customer contact that attracted them to Facebook in the first place. According to Mashable this move has underlined a frustrating reality for marketers and there is little they can do but adapt to these changes and pay for their advertising in order to still receive coverage on Facebook. It’s no different than the way Google changes their algorithm; marketers just need to rethink on how they are going to manage their marketing communications.

 

Facebook Contest Mistakes

Running a contest outside a Facebook app

Most companies are unaware that until recently you could not run a contest without using a third party app. You were unable to allow people to like or comment on a post to enter your competition. Now Facebook have come out and changed this and according to The Social Media Examiner you still can’t allow people to share a post or photo or require someone to post something on their own timeline or require someone to tag themselves in a photo or post. What this means for companies is that it decreases the visibility of companies pages as friends of friends will not see or hear of the competition. Also according to HubSpot you cannot notify winners of the contest through Facebook. Facebook can ban your company’s page if seen to be using any of these techniques to host a contest, which can let customers forgetting about your brand. This means it is in marketer’s interest to play by Facebook rules in order to build brand awareness and not waste the time and effort that went into making that page in the first place.

Check out Mashable – Social Media Facebook page to get all the latest news on social media

Watch this quick video on Facebook new promotion policies

The Future of Social Media Marketing is Mobile

Social Media

When we think of online marketing we can no longer just think about people assessing websites through a PC. We need to think about multiple devices and how our sites appear on these sites.

Increase of People Using Mobile To Access Social Media

There is an increase of people accessing social media apps such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Tumblr through mobile devices. People are spending more time on these sites than they are using a desktop. According to the Social Media Examiner Pinterest users are 92%, Twitter users are 86%, Facebook is 68%, and Tumblr is 46% mobile. According to these numbers, it is important companies recognise this when creating social media message so that it caters for the mobile users.

Social Is Mobile

New Ways To Interact With The Customer

There is also new evidence coming in everyday suggesting that consumers are moving to mobile. According to Gartner by 2017, mobile apps will be downloaded more than 260 billion times, making apps the most popular computing tools. To put this in context by 2017, every women, man and child will have downloaded 37 mobile apps. This means by 2017, mobile apps will be gone completely mainstream, giving companies a new way to interact and connect with their current and potential customers. This will give them a vast global reach to target new customers and allowing them to enter new markets that once might not have seen possible.

More Personalised Approach

Gartner also predicts that mobile users will provide personalised data streams to more than 100 apps and services every day. This will lead to more personalised information of customers to clearly target them on a personal basis. In this way mobile apps will drive the future of marketing. Research shows that in 2013 U.S consumers spent an average of 2 hours and 38 minutes per day on smartphone and tablets. 80% was spent on apps, whereas the other 20% was spent on the mobile web.

LinkedIn is responding to this change by having released a new mobile app SlideShare’s iOS app. LinkedIn now have seven standalone mobile apps and the company expects in the near future that more than half of their traffic comes from mobile.

Spreading The Word Socially

Companies Using Mobile Apps as a Differentiation Mechanism

Companies are using these trends to their advantage by creating mobile apps to enhance or simplify customers experience with the brand for e.g. Permanent TSB have a mobile app where you can do your banking online, check your account balance and transfer money to different accounts. It’s about being one step before the competitors, by creating a more personal relationship and making thing easier for the customer. Social media marketing and mobile marketing go hand in hand as consumers now expect companies to provide relevant online content and resources that inform and entertain us, or resolve a need or a want.

Check out Hot In Social Media Twitter account for some great digital marketing tips

Watch this quick video on why the future of social media marketing is mobile

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