Beyond LinkedIn: Why Other Social Media Platforms Still Matter in B2B Marketing
There’s no denying it – LinkedIn is one of the most effective tools for lead generation for B2B marketers. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only effective tool.
Sure, you may be thinking – other social media platforms only work well for B2C marketers. Well, let us explain how to look beyond LinkedIn and find out how Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter can work for your B2B business.
Did you know that Facebook has 16 million business pages? If your company isn’t on Facebook, you’re missing out on all those opportunities to market to millions of possible leads.
Facebook isn’t a professional platform like LinkedIn, but Medium says that “the most successful B2B companies on Facebook provide fun, interesting, and helpful posts but ensure they remain relevant to their mission statements.” This is important as many people scroll through in their timelines during down-time and engage more often than on other social media. Although LinkedIn users may be using the platform in a more professional manner, Facebook has many more eyes on their content. So, if Facebook hasn’t worked in the past, keep in mind that Facebook and LinkedIn are two different beasts – meaning they require adapted messaging.
Also, Facebook has its own advertising platform that shouldn’t go unnoticed. It garners attention from outside your follower base and can be tweaked based on your desired age range and location. Bonus: Facebook’s advertising costs a lot less than LinkedIn’s.
According to Media One Creative, 80% of Instagram users follow business platforms. Instagram has a large following at 1 billion active accounts – and although 80% may have a clear B2C focus, even 10% is 100 million users.
Now if you’re not convinced that Instagram may be the right platform for you, even with the large user base, it is an important supportive tool. The great thing about Instagram, aside from their growing popularity, is their visual content focus. This is an opportunity to support your brand by showcasing who you are and what you stand for through a visual story. Whether it be through their different styles of ads – photo, video, and carousel, it can put a relatable face to your name.
Instagram may not be the place to push sales but focusing on creating a friendly/relatable brand face or story and make all the difference between choosing to do business with two similar companies.
The majority of B2B marketers use twitter as a part of their content strategy – 87% to be exact. With 330 million active users per month, many businesses are taking advantage of this quick response platform. Are you?
Twitter is another excellent example of putting a face to your brand – but more specifically, a voice. A great example of this is Wendy’s. They have done an excellent job of putting a human voice to their brand. With consistent posting, a distinctive brand personality, and an immediacy in responses, Wendy’s is showing us how Twitter can be an effective social strategy. Granted, your brand personality may not need to be as “spicy” as Wendy’s, but working on creating a conversational tone, engaging with your followers, and even using a little humour, can make your brand feel more “real”.
The only catch with Twitter, is it is an extremely busy platform. Like in the Wendy’s example above, the business side of this platform requires any queries to be answered quickly. If you can keep up and not fall behind, Twitter can be an excellent supportive social tool for interacting with and landing future clients.
The Bottom Line
If you only leave with one takeaway from this article, let it be this: Don’t be self-serving – think of the content that your audience would like, and deliver “shareworthy” content.
If you’re not sure about this, Sprout Social says that a good way to know if you’re putting out good social media content is to ask yourself “If I didn’t work for this company, would I look at this post?”
Ultimately, LinkedIn may be the king of B2B marketing, but don’t forget that your strategy is strongest with supportive marketing on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Create or update your social strategy to include every social platform as an extra layer to strengthen your B2B marketing strategy and your brand.
How Can Blogs Expand Social Media Reach?
What is a blog?
Essentially, a blog is a piece of content written for your website that keeps users up-to-date with your products, services, or industry. It can range from a small informational piece to an interview, a news story, or a post highlighting an upcoming event. Blogs are an effective tool in expanding social media reach and should be written, posted, and shared across your social media frequently.
Crafting the perfect blog by using suitable keywords and ensuring that your blog is fully optimized is crucial. But how else can blogs work for you?
In this blog, we’ll teach you why blogs are an important part of your overall SEO marketing strategy and how they amplify your social reach.
1. Maintain Your Position as An Industry Leader
Publishing blog posts is one way for your business to maintain its position as an industry leader. It shows your followers that you’re interested in keeping up to date with the latest developments and that they can trust you as a reliable source of industry-relevant updates and insights.
You should aim to post a blog article at least once a week in order to maintain a presence. Blogs provide value to followers; sharing them across social media reminds followers of your expertise and know-how.
For example, if there’s a new update in your industry and a reader learns about the change via a blog post that was posted to your social profile, they’ll value your presence and likely follow your page to keep up-to-date.
2. Increase Social Referrals Back to Your Website
Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms are extensions of your blog. By sharing your blogs through these various channels, you’re expanding their potential reach and even reaching a new demographic of readers/potential customers or clients.
You’re also going to increase overall social referrals back to your website. Social referrals are the number of page views coming specifically from social networks and are composed of both paid and organic traffic. Posting website content like blogs across social platforms increases the likelihood of click-throughs to your website and thus leads to an increase in overall traffic.
3. Social Signals Improve Organic SEO
Social media marketing and SEO are interwoven strategies that produce outstanding results. Both are organic, inbound strategies that focus on building an identity that naturally attracts users.
A strong social media presence relies on high-quality content. Done properly, it can greatly increase your search rankings.
Using methods like social media and blog posts can continuously drive search engine traffic your way. Increasing your reputation on social media through increased engagement and high-quality content will lead to an overall increased brand presence. This will lead to an increase in branded searches on Google and an increased ranking for non-branded keywords.
4. Blogs Can be Broken Down into Pillars
Blog content can be used over and over again. That’s because blogs contain a plethora of information that can be broken down into pillar content and distributed in various ways across an assortment of social media channels.
For example, a blog post could be distributed across all basic social platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Next, the blog could be re-formatted into microcontent. Microcontent consists of short-form pieces of content that’s turned into memes, quotes, stories or graphics. These can then be distributed across pillars. You can then listen, engage and monitor insights to see what content is performing best.
Once you have a solid understanding of what’s resonating with your audience, you can apply these insights into more microcontent. The cycle is never-ending and all it takes to get started is a relevant, optimized blog.
Optimizing Your LinkedIn Company Page to Hook Leads & Drive Traffic
LinkedIn has become an incredible marketing tool, especially for businesses who know how to optimize their LinkedIn company page.
The premiere professional networking platform is a great place to scout talent, network, and nurture sales prospects. But that’s not the only way to leverage it.
LinkedIn also has powerful search engine optimization benefits. Creating a LinkedIn company page is of the fastest ways to rank for branded keywords, and it sends strong signals to Google’s ranking algorithm.
Want to quickly and effectively optimize your LinkedIn company page? Focus on these key areas.
Why LinkedIn is Worth Your Time
LinkedIn is home to over 500 million users from 200 different countries. And those users are impressively active, with over half of them visiting the site at least once a month.
Having a dedicated company page gives you direct access to customers, clients, and talent in your industry. It’s a free platform for showcasing products and services and promoting important news.
Company pages also unlock valuable engagement assets, like how many people see your posts and what they’re saying about your company.
LinkedIn’s not only popular with professionals – Google’s ranking algorithm loves it, too. LinkedIn company pages quickly climb the rankings for branded key phrases, giving companies a free and easy opportunity to get their content in front of more searchers.
Optimizing a LinkedIn Company Page
When we talk about optimizing a LinkedIn company page, we usually have three broad goals in mind:
- Increasing LinkedIn user engagement with the company page;
- Helping the company page rank for relevant queries in search engine results; and
- Helping the company page rank in LinkedIn’s native search engine results.
Each of these goals can be refined and targeted to a company’s specific key performance indicators; if the company is looking for sales leads, for example, the focus will be on user engagement at specific points in the marketing funnel.
Whether you’re focusing on organic engagement or plan to boost your LinkedIn strategy with sponsored content, optimizing a LinkedIn company page should begin with these basic steps:
- Fill out the company profile completely.
- Write a keyword-rich company description.
- Upload high-quality photos.
- Link back to the company website and other social profiles.
- Post-industry-relevant content.
- Have employees connect to the page.
1. Complete Your Company Profile
Start by filling in the blanks.
When a user first enters a company on their profile, LinkedIn generates a bare-bones page for that company to serve as a hub for employees; however, the information that automatically populates the page is far from complete and not necessarily accurate.
Enter all the information someone would need to find and identify your company: its address, phone number, website URL, etc. Make sure it matches what appears on the company’s website and Google My Business page
This step increases the page’s legitimacy in the eyes of users and search engines.
2. Write a Compelling Company Description
What does your company do? What makes it unique? Boil it down into 156 characters.
The first 156 characters of a company’s description appears as the page’s meta description, or the summary that appears below the link on both Google and LinkedIn’s the search engine results page.
It helps to think of the description as an elevator pitch: a concise summary that tells people what your company is all about and entices them to learn more.
The company description can be longer than 156 characters, of course, but it’s important to make those initial words count. Be sure to include keywords and key phrases that people use to find companies in your industry.
3. Upload High-Quality Photos
The profile picture is the first impression people have of your company on LinkedIn. It appears in the LinkedIn search results, on employees’ profile pages, and above everything your company posts.
Company pages with profile pictures also get six times as many visits as those without one.
The best profile picture for a company on LinkedIn is a clear, high-quality image of its logo. LinkedIn recommends a minimum profile image size of 400px by 400px and a max of 7680px by 4320px.
You should also personalize the page with an eye-catching header image (recommended 1584px by 396 px). It can be a simple banner, a photo collage, or an image with call-to-action text. Since it always appears alongside the profile image, the header doesn’t need to include a logo; however, it should reinforce brand recognition using relevant imagery and colours.
If your ideal logo or header image doesn’t quite fit LinkedIn’s dimensions, Sprout Social’s Landscape Resizer tool is a quickly modify it.
4. Link to Other Sites and Profiles
Social media pages are most effective when they’re interconnected.
Add links to the company’s other social profiles so LinkedIn users can easily find and follow your company across the web.
In turn, add a LinkedIn button to your company website.
5. Post-Industry-Relevant Content
LinkedIn isn’t just another company listing; it’s a platform from which companies can broadcast their best content to clients, customers and industry colleagues.
Posts are one of the most direct ways to engage with viewers and followers since posts appear both on its page and the home page of each of the company’s followers.
What to post depends on the company’s goals for the social network. LinkedIn posts can be used to:
- Showcase an awesome company culture
- Share company news and updates
- Publish original blog, video and image content
- Spread the word about timely industry issues
Always include some form of visual content – those posts get 98% more engagement than text-only posts.
6. Get Employees on Board
If your business is new to LinkedIn, but your employees aren’t, chances are they’ll have already named the company in the Experience section of their profiles.
But that doesn’t always mean they are connected to the same page.
For example, the user who entered “Company Inc.” may be linked to a different page than the one who simply put “Company.”
Ironing out these inconsistencies is an important step in increasing the company page’s reach, especially for smaller businesses. The more employees who connect, the greater your reach.
About LinkedIn Sponsored Content
Once you’ve done all the above, it’s time to consider furthering your reach with sponsored content.
Sponsoring content puts your company’s posts in people’s LinkedIn feeds, appearing almost exactly like an organic (non-sponsored) post. It’s a great way to reach clients and customers, especially for B2B businesses.
LinkedIn’s advertising tools enable highly specific targeting, allowing you to aim content at specific people, companies, or positions within a company. Insight tags help to define further your audience based on who visits your site and their actions on the page, detailed conversion tracking gives a clear understanding of the value of leads through LinkedIn.
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Blog Optimization Checklist: 10 Clear-Cut Ways to Boost SEO
When you’ve poured time and energy into a great blog post, you want it to reach as much of your audience as possible. Small changes matter when it comes to boosting blog SEO. Take a run through this blog optimization checklist before you post — it won’t take long, and it’ll help your blog get seen by the right people.
1. Keywords
Keywords are words or short phrases that encompass what the blog post is about (see our blog: What Are Keywords and Why Do They Matter?). When you use them well, keywords can help the post rank for search queries that include those words.
Why Blog Keywords Matter for SEO
Search engine algorithms use repeated words and phrases as clues to what a webpage is about. Placing relevant, natural-sounding keywords in the blog content, title, meta description, and URL can contribute to a blog post’s search engine ranking.
How to Optimize for Keywords
Incorporate your chosen keywords into the blog:
- Title
- Headings (one or more)
- First paragraph
- Meta description
- URL
2. Length
There’s no perfect word count for SEO, but the length of a blog can factor into its ranking.
Why Blog Length Matters for SEO
Search engine algorithms often deem pages with less than 300 words inadequate to rank in the search engine results. However, longer isn’t necessarily better; a 3,000-word post stuffed with irrelevant content will fare just as poorly as a short one.
Optimizing Length for SEO
Aim to write at least 500 words per blog post. Beyond that, the ideal blog length will depend on your audience. Pay attention to how your blogs perform and look for trends related to page length.
3. Readability
It’s in the writer’s interest to make a blog post as easy to read as possible. Spacing, formatting, and writing style all weigh on a blog’s readability.
Why Readability Matters for SEO
Making your content easy to digest will increase the time people spend reading it and encourage them to share it with others. It can also increase the likelihood the content will rank in Featured Snippets, which is a huge boost to blog SEO.
How to Optimize Blog Readability
- Add informative headings and subheadings to make the post easier to skim.
- Format lists or step-by-step instructions as numbered or bulleted lists.
- Break large paragraphs into shorter chunks. Single-sentence paragraphs are common in the blog world.
4. Title
The title is your chance to convince the reader to click in 50-60 characters or less. A good title:
- Is short (search engines cut off titles longer than 60 characters);
- Is compelling (but not clickbait); and
- Promises readers something of value if they click.
Why Blog Titles Matter for SEO
A great title will drive more traffic to the blog, which significantly impacts its rankings. As mentioned above, the title should also include relevant keywords.
How to Optimize Blog Titles
Craft your title around keywords and the value readers receive from the blog. Shorten it 50 characters or less and add compelling adjectives to make it pop.
5. Call to Action
The title succeeds in persuading readers to click on your blog post. What do you want them to do once they’re there? Whatever the goal, readers are more likely to do it if you guide them in the right direction with a clear call to action.
Why a Call to Action Matters for SEO
An effective call to action keeps people on your site and discourages them from bouncing back to the search engine results page (see our blog: Understanding Bounce Rate, Long Clicks and Pogo-Sticking).
How to Optimize Call to Action
Place the call to action prominently on the blog post (the best spot will vary audience-to-audience, so consider testing different placements). It should be relevant to the subject matter of the article and the user’s pain points.
6. Internal and External Links
Internal links are links to content that is within the same domain as your content: other blog posts, product pages, contact pages, and so on. External links are the opposite: they point to other websites.
Why Internal and External Linking Matters for SEO
Interlinking helps search engine algorithms to understand the website’s structure. Links to credible, authoritative external sources help build your site’s credibility within the eyes of the all-seeing search algorithm. Both are an important part of boosting blog SEO.
How to Optimize Links
Be picky about the links you include! Credible external sites will bolster your blog’s credibility, but poor sites will do the opposite. Insert internal links should in a logical way that benefits the reader.
7. Anchor Text
Anchor text refers to the clickable text of an internal or external link. On most sites, anchor text is underlined and highlighted in blue.
Why Anchor Text Matters for SEO
Search engine algorithms use anchor text another clue to what a web page is about, both regarding your blog and the page you’re linking to.
How to Optimize Anchor Text
Good anchor text is succinct, informative, and relevant to the target page. Incorporate keywords where it sounds natural to do so.
8. Images
Images are a necessity in any blog post, no matter the length or the topic. Along with their visual appeal, original images can help boost your blog’s SEO.
Why Images Are Good for SEO
Images make the blog easier to read, increasing the chance people will share it and explore the rest of your site. Keywords in image titles and file names can help give the algorithm context on your blog’s topic. Images also allow the site to rank in image searches.
Optimizing Images for SEO
Upload high-quality images with keyword-rich titles and file names. Avoid adding overly-large images, as they can bog down your site’s loading speed (see our blog: Why Page Speed Matters.
9. Meta Description
The meta description is a 160-character summary of the blog that can display below the headline on the search engine results page.
Why Meta Descriptions Matter for SEO
The meta description can be a huge factor in a reader’s decision to click through to your blog from the search engine results page. Like blog titles, meta descriptions are a chance to pique the reader’s curiosity and promise something worth clicking for.
How to Optimize Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions that exceed 160 words will be cut off, so be sure to include the good stuff in the first 160.
10. Proofreading
Spelling and grammar checkers have come a long way, but they’re still not perfect! Take time to proofread your blog before posting it.
Why Spelling and Grammar Matters for SEO
Poor spelling and grammar will stop some readers in their tracks. Few people will share an error-ridden blog with their friends, let alone peruse the rest of the site. Proofreading keeps readers on the page and preserves your credibility.First, give the blog a once-over yourself. Then, pass it to a colleague for a second look. If no one’s available to help, a free proofreading tool like Grammarly or Hemingway Editor beats no proofreading at all.
5 Reasons Why Voice Search is Relevant to Local SEO in 2018
Voice search is set to become one of the top ways people find local products and services online. ComScore predicts that by 2020, 50% of all searches will be made using voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant. With the majority of voice searches being local queries, there are tons of reasons why voice search is relevant to local SEO.
These are some of the voice search trends in 2018 we’re eager to explore:
- Use of voice search is increasing in all age groups, including seniors.
- The hospitality industry is experimenting with voice-enabled devices in hotel rooms, which is a boon to retailers and restaurants who invest in local SEO.
- Voice-enabled devices are becoming more common in college dorms, giving local businesses another route to the lucrative student market.
- All signs point to pay-by-voice as a major e-commerce force in coming years.
- New schema markup can tell Google that your website’s text is perfect for voice search queries.
Let’s look at why these rising voice search trends are relevant to local SEO and discuss how to prepare for them
1. Voice Search is Not Only for Millennials
Millennials were the first generation to adopt voice assistant tech, and they’re still the biggest age group of voice search users. But voice search is increasingly used by people across age demographics.
In 2017, 10.9% of Americans used a voice-assisted device at least once, a 128.9% increase over the number in 2016.
One of the most surprising aspects of this increase is the number of adults over 65 who are eagerly purchasing and using voice assistant technology. Seniors aren’t usually early adopters of new tech, but voice search is different: it comes onboard familiar devices like thermostats and takes barriers like small text and complicated user interfaces out of the equation.
This trend presents a novel opportunity for businesses to speak to a demographic that has historically been tough to reach online.
2. Amazon Wants Alexa in Hotel Rooms
Until recently, the hospitality industry has struggled to integrate voice assistant devices into the guest experience. Many hotels have existing automation systems that don’t interface with new crop of smart home devices, while others lacked the information infrastructure to support them.
But as voice assistants have become ubiquitous, more brands are testing out voice-enabled tech in hotel rooms. The latest experiment comes from a collaboration between Amazon and Marriot. The companies plan to place Echo devices with specialized Alexa for Hospitality software in hotels, vacation rental spaces, and other hospitality locations.
Why is this exciting for Local SEO? Because tourists spend more than natives in local categories like restaurants and retail, and 33% of local search business comes from tourists.
When visitors land in an unfamiliar place, they turn to the internet for recommendations on where to eat and where to shop. In a future where voice-enabled devices are a hotel room standard, more and more of those valuable local queries are going to arrive via voice search.
3. Voice Assistants Are Becoming a Part of College Life
Today, smart speakers are still primarily used for entertainment purposes: playing music, reading audiobooks, and so on. But there’s a huge marketing push underway to frame voice-enabled smart speakers as a tool for college and university success.
Last year, Amazon partnered with four major universities to provide free Amazon Echo Dots to students, along with funding for schools to develop Alexa-related curriculums. Other schools are experimenting with smart speakers in dorm rooms to help students transition to college life.
Regardless of whether students will actually use their devices to keep track of class schedules and due dates, voice-enabled devices on campus are good news for local businesses.
Off-campus student spending accounts for as much as $17.5 billion in local economic activity. If voice assistants become a part of college life, businesses who invest in local SEO for voice search can reap even more of those benefits.
4. You Will Soon Be Able to Pay By Voice
In 2018, just about every major payment platform is working on enabling transactions through voice commands with voice-enabled devices.
Mastercard is looking to bring its Masterpass online payment platform into Amazon and Google’s voice systems. Google recently enabled peer-to-peer transactions through voice commands to Google Assistant, and Amazon has announced plans to let users make purchases with Amazon Pay directly through Alexa.
Once people can easily pay-by-voice, businesses who claim top local listings for voice search queries could see their conversions soar. It would also make calculating the return on investment for Local SEO easier and more accurate than ever.
5. Google Has Started Looking for ‘Speakable’ Text on Websites
Google recently announced a new form of markup called Speakable, which web publishers can use to indicate bits of text that are ideal for text-to-speech conversion.
To briefly summarize, schema markup is code on a website that speaks directly to search algorithms. It’s designed to provide information that helps search engines deliver better results to searchers. Speakable is a new kind of schema code that is meant to tell the algorithm which parts of a web page (if any) might be good answers to voice searches.
Essentially, Google wants to know which parts of your site are perfect for voice queries. That’s a huge opportunity for local businesses.
Speakable is still brand-new, and Google is currently only using it for news-related searches in the US. But its relevance is likely to expand over time, and it could become an important piece of the local SEO puzzle for businesses who want to rank in voice searches.
Preparing for Voice Search in Local SEO
The rise of voice search presents a world of opportunity for businesses who invest in local SEO.
Voice search optimization is still in its infancy. As voice search trends evolve, so will the tactics for optimizing a site for voice queries. However, there are steps you can take now to prepare for rising voice search trends in 2018 and beyond:
- Optimize your site for mobile. 20% of voice search queries come from mobile devices. Many users will follow up a voice search with a trip to the site that comes up in the answer. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, it’s time to change that.
- Start paying attention to While Google is the leading search engine overall, Bing owns a huge share of the voice search market thanks to Amazon’s Alexa. Make sure your site has a complete and accurate Bing Places page and a strong presence in its rankings.
- Focus on long-tail keywords. The biggest difference between voice and text search is the tone, phrasing and words used in searches. Voice queries use natural language and a more conversational tone. They’re also usually phrased as questions. Keep this in mind when targeting long-tail keywords.
For more on voice search optimization, read our post on the key differences between voice search and text search.
Landing Page Optimization: How to Create a Landing Page that Converts
Driving traffic is only half the battle. Once people have landed on your website, it’s time to turn those curious web users into clients or customers. That’s where landing page optimization comes in.
What is a Landing Page?
A landing page is the first page people see after arriving to your site from a web ad, social media post, or search engine results page. But unlike your home page, which gives a general overview of your products or services, a landing page is tailor-made to motivate visitors into acting on a specific call to action, like:
- Signing up
- Making a purchase
- Downloading a software trial
- Filling out a form
- Sharing your content on social media
…And so on.
A landing page can serve one-time events, like weekly promotions, or “evergreen” offers designed to generate ongoing leads, like a newsletters or email lists.
In either case, the landing page is optimized to achieve a single conversion goal.
While the term ‘landing page’ may be new to you, chances are you’ve seen one before. For a visual reference, check out this landing page round-up by Hubspot — this will help you along as we cover the ins and outs of landing page optimization.
Why Create a Landing Page?
Landing pages are designed to respond to nudge curious visitors towards becoming paying clients or customers. The power of landing pages is their versatility: different landing pages can be crafted and optimized to cater to buyers at all different stages of the marketing funnel or buyer journey.
Take cold prospects who are only just learning of your business for the first time. Instead of pitching your products or services outright, you could optimize a landing page to encourage those prospects to sign up for your email newsletter; later, you can direct that person to another landing page designed to nurture warmer leads.
Beyond lead generation, landing pages can be used to gain tons of useful information about your prospective customers:
- By analyzing the performance of your landing pages, you can learn more about the types of offers most interest your customers.
- You can create separate landing pages for the same campaign and audience to A/B test different offers, images and copy.
- With a Facebook Pixel, you can retarget landing page visitors with highly relevant Facebook ad campaigns.
Landing pages are also a valuable part of the search engine optimization equation.
Relationship Between Landing Pages and SEO
Each landing page is another opportunity for your site to rank for relevant, desirable keywords. Although they may be somewhat separate from your main site, search engine crawlers will pore through landing pages the same as any other page on your site, and they have an impact on your search engine ranking.
The relationship between landing pages and SEO is another reason why it’s important to optimize your landing pages to convert; if visitors who land there are quickly closing the window or bouncing back to the search engine results page, it reflects poorly on your site as a whole.
So, how do you convince people to share, sign up, download, or buy?
Using Lead Magnets
One of the most tried-and-true landing page tactics is the lead magnet: a freebie offered to landing page visitors in exchange for their contact information. You can then utilize that contact information to build an effective, highly-targeted email marketing list.
In the words of digital marketing geek Russ Henneberry, lead magnets are designed to be an “irresistible bribe.” It’s something that makes prospective customers feel like they are getting the better end of the bargain.
What makes a lead magnet irresistible? The specifics will depend on your industry and your customers, but in most cases, successful lead magnets are:
- Highly relevant and specific, answering a specific customer need and tailored to a specific buyer persona.
- Polished, effective, and well worth giving up one’s contact information.
- Immediately useful or gratifying.
Popular items given away as lead magnets include eBooks, reports, case studies, templates, checklists, and coupons.
Landing Page Optimization: What Makes a Great Landing Page?
The purpose of landing page is to entice visitors to complete a specific conversion goal, like signing up for an email list. One of the best ways to do this is to offer something in exchange for that action. An effective landing pages are concisely and fine-tuned towards achieving that goal, with:
- Clear, action-based headline that tells visitors exactly what you want them to do.
- Subheadings that provide a bit more information to generate further interest.
- Eye-catching but minimal visual elements, like a single gorgeous photo or catchy graphic.
- Concise but keyword-rich copy that explains the lead magnet, answers potential questions and tears down any barriers that might stop customers from converting.
- Prominent, impossible-to-miss action button that completes the exchange between you and the customer.
Creating Landing Pages That Convert
There are a lot of ingredients that go into creating a landing page that works: copywriting, coding, graphic design, advertising, and more. But when it all comes together and leads start coming in, it is well worth the effort it took to plan and execute. Don’t leave landing pages as an afterthought — a well-designed and optimized landing page is an essential part of a winning digital marketing strategy.
Contact TrafficSoda to Help Optimize Your Landing Page!
Image: alfaphoto
Google is Ending the goo.gl URL Shortener to Focus on FireBase Dynamic Links — What You Should Know
URLs aren’t pretty. To be honest, they’re often awkward and unwieldy, especially when they include a UTM tracking code. That’s the great thing about Google’s URL shortener: it can turn any web address into a short, compact URL that is much easier to share on social media and print materials.
But recently, Google announced it is ending support for its goo.gl URL shortener service to focus on another product called Firebase Dynamic links.
According to a press release on its developer blog, Google has already shut out users who have never used the URL shortener before April 13, 2018. For the rest of us, the goo.gl console will close on March 30, 2019.
Will goo.gl Short Links Still Work?
If this is the first you’ve heard of it, you are probably having the same thoughts we did: what does this mean for goo.gl users?
Fortunately, Google has given assurance that all existing short links will continue to redirect to their intended destination. The change will ‘break’ your goo.gl short links.
But the other intriguing part about Google ending the goo.gl IRL shortener is the company’s emphasis on Firebase Dynamic Links — a term mostly unheard of outside the world of mobile app development.
What are Firebase Dynamic Links?
If you browse the web on your phone (and if you’re like 75% of the world, you do), you have probably encountered links that automatically open a mobile app when you click them. This known as deep linking, which are great for brands who want to promote a mobile app. For example, you can send users an email containing a deep link that will take them straight from their inbox to the feature in a single click.
Trouble is, deep links are prone to a few bugs:
* They do not always work perfectly on both iOS and Android devices.
* If the user has not installed the app or clicks it from a desktop computer, the link might behave differently (or not work at all).
* Users who do take the step of installing your app after being prompted will land on the app’s generic welcome screen. To get to the content they want to see, they’ll have to click the link again.
These are the issues Google’s Firebase Dynamic Links are meant to solve. Firebase Dynamic Links are designed to ‘survive’ the app installation process and take users directly to their destination after installing the app.
As for desktop users, Firebase links will direct them to the equivalent content on the brand’s website. The link’s destination depends on the device: one for desktop users, another for iOS users, yet another for Android users, and so on.
The continuing momentum of mobile browsing makes Firebase Links an incredible tool for marketers and companies that want to reach customers online. Check out these uses cases for examples of how you could potentially leverage dynamic links.
Alternatives to Google URL Shortener
Short URLs are great. They look cleaner, take up less space, and are easier to copy from print media without making typos. What makes the goo.gl console especially awesome is that it automatically tracks how many times the link gets clicked, which is vital in any digital marketing endeavour.
So as we prepare to bid farewell to goo.gl, it’s time to get to know the Google URL shortener alternatives out there.
Most social media scheduling software, like Hootsuite, have a built-in URL shortener tools that also track link clicks and shares. Many require a subscription, but Hootsuite’s Owly shortener is available to users with a free account as well.
As for free goo.gl alternatives, the go-to at the moment is Bitly, which has the added bonus of customizable URLs and social media titles in addition to click tracking.
Image: Unsplash
5 Reasons Why B2B Marketers Should Use Video
You know that video assets are a powerful way to connect with individuals on social media and beyond. But, what if you’re targeting businesses? While the business-to-business world has yet to embrace video to the same extent as B2C, there are strong reasons why B2B marketers should use video as well.
Research by Google shows that 70% of B2B customers watch videos on their path to purchase. Video tutorials, reviews, and advertisements have become a main source of information for researchers and stakeholders in the purchasing process. Leveraging these channels is a way of leading them towards a purchase at all different points of the B2B buyer’s journey.
Video Supports Long Sales Cycles
One of the significant differences between B2B and B2C marketing is the comparative complexity of the B2B sales cycle. In fact, a report from Marketing Sherpa suggests that over a third of B2B sales occur a full seven months after the initial customer inquiry.
Why is the B2B sales cycle so long? The most common reasons include:
- The purchase is just one of many priorities competing for the customer’s time and attention.
- The decision can affect many people within an organization, thus requiring careful thought and research.
- There are various stakeholders involved over the course of the purchasing process.
In many cases, converting B2B customers requires you to nudge them continuously towards the finish line. Closing the deal can require many more touchpoints than the typical B2C transaction.
Video marketing can support the B2B sales cycle by nurturing potential conversions at different points along the funnel. Initially, a short video can increase a customer’s interest in the product or service; longer videos can then cover the topic in greater depth.
That’s what Microsoft is doing with its new video campaign for Office 365 for Business. The featured video on their YouTube channel serves as an Office 365 elevator pitch. From there, interested customers can find video tutorials and product reviews that give them more reasons to buy in. Microsoft’s channel has something for buyers at all different points in the journey.
Video Boosts Your Other Digital Marketing Efforts
Closing a B2B sale online means hitting the customer on multiple fronts, including SEO (Search Engine Optimization), blog content, and social media. These efforts can all benefit from the addition of a video marketing campaign.
Here are just some of the ways video boosts other forms of digital marketing:
- Social media users are more likely to engage with video than any other kind of content, and on Facebook, video content reaches an average of 135% more people than photos.
- Marketing emails with the subject line “video” can increase clickthrough rate up to 300%.
- Including the word ‘video’ in a blog title can increase the number of people who click.
- Adding video to a web page can significantly increase its search engine ranking.
- Well-optimized YouTube videos can rank at the top of Google search results.
Point is, the reasons why B2B marketers should use video go beyond the returns generated by the video campaign itself. Great video content bolsters your web presence as a whole.
Personalized Videos Can Target Different Buyers
When video marketing was expensive, businesses had to target large swaths of customers at once to get the most out of their budgets. But the decreasing cost of video production gives you room to produce niche video campaigns for specific buyer personas.
Lenovo uses this strategy in the “Users Happen” campaign, which targets a number of relatable pain points in a hilarious, over-the-top way. You don’t have to be an IT manager to recognize a “power user” like Jane or a loveable dope like Chad.
Video Advertising is Growing on LinkedIn
Last year, the primary B2B social network started allowing users to upload native video files. So far, it’s been a success, with people finding expanded reach and greater engagement on LinkedIn through video. Now, LinkedIn is finally expanding the privilege to businesses with options for video ads in LinkedIn sponsored content.
LinkedIn’s deep advertising audience options will make it easier than ever to get your video content in front of your ideal customers. You can target existing email contacts on LinkedIn customers, or discover new potential customers by targeting a job title, industry, skillset, or company name.
Video Can Make Boring Stuff Shine
Face it: a lot of B2B transactions fall into the realm of what most people would deem boring. But that’s only because they haven’t seen it through the right lens. There’s a story behind every B2B transaction, and with video, you can bring those stories to life.
Take Slack, an inter-office messaging platform that means to replace such arduous tasks as ‘sending an email’ and ‘asking the person next to you if they have an iPhone charger.’ To date, this seeming-boring software has generated over a million views with its “So Yeah, We Tried Slack…” video campaign.
Another great example comes from Schneider Electric, a company that makes automated electrical systems. Not only does their imaginative “Butterfly Effect” campaign demonstrate the benefits of their product, it tells a triumphant (and hilarious) tale.
In Short: 5 Reasons Why B2B Marketers Should Use Video
- Video marketing can reach customers at all different points in the B2B sales cycle.
- Video can support your SEO, social media and blogging efforts.
- Video is cheaper than ever to product, allowing you to target niche buyer personas.
- LinkedIn lets you zero-in on specific kinds of customers with video ads.
- Video marketing can bring great stories to life, even in traditionally ‘boring’ industries.
The Gutenberg Update: What You Should Know About the WordPress Overhaul Coming in 2018
The world’s largest website management system is about to change. How will the Gutenberg update impact the 60 million websites that run on WordPress?
WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) on the web. The platform powers over 29% of the top 10 million websites, including heavyweight publishers like The New York Times, Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal.
WordPress is also the CMS of choice for millions of bloggers and small businesses worldwide — including yours truly.
The key to its popularity can be summed up in one word: flexibility. As an open-source platform, WordPress is open to extensive customization.
If you look under the hood of a well-crafted WordPress site, you’ll find an assortment of custom WordPress plugins, themes, and HTML codes. In fact, while WordPress itself is free to use, there’s an entire industry around developing premium WordPress themes and plugins for businesses.
But that’s all about to change in 2018.
Last year, the development team behind WordPress announced Gutenberg, a project in WordPress 5.0 that will transform how we build and manage WordPress sites.
While there’s no release date for Gutenberg yet, it’s time for bloggers and businesses who use WordPress to start thinking about how to adapt to Gutenberg.
What is Gutenberg for WordPress?
Gutenberg is a coming update to the WordPress post and page editing interface that replaces many of the plugins and widgets we use today with elements called Blocks. As of March 2018, the project is still in the beta phase. There is an optional Gutenberg plugin available to any WordPress developers who want to give feedback before the big launch.
Eventually, the Gutenberg editor will replace the editing interface WordPress users have come to know. The WordPress team has yet to say when this will occur, but the plan is to merge Gutenberg into WordPress 5.0 and launch by the end of 2018.
And that’s just phase one. According to the Gutenberg project page, the team also has its sights set on simplifying custom page templates and, ultimately, full WordPress site customization.
About Gutenberg’s Block System
Blocks will enable users to insert rich content like forms, social media posts, and multimedia within the WordPress post editor itself. The system resembles the editing interface on sites like Medium, which uses a similar drag-and-drop system for inserting rich content into posts.
The idea behind Gutenberg blocks is an ambitious one. Blocks are meant to simplify the patchwork of formatting elements used to build custom WordPress posts today, like plugins, widgets, and custom shortcodes.
Say you’re building a site for your business on WordPress. You want to create an ‘About Us’ page with employee bio’s. Rather than searching for a theme with a fitting template, or installing an ‘About Us’ plugin, you could ideally insert an ‘Employee Block’ that automatically embeds a photo, name, and biography.
Or, if you’re a food blogger, you could drag and drop a ‘Recipe Block’ that generates fields for ingredients, instructions, and photos into your posts.
There’s lots of potential in Gutenberg Blocks. But it also raises a big question: what will happen to all the custom WordPress sites out there today?
How Gutenberg Will Effect Your WordPress Site
“Will Gutenberg break my website?”
That’s what many developers are asking ahead of the coming change. And it’s fair for them to worry. After all, many of the custom elements they rely on are set to become obsolete.
The good news is, Gutenberg will not break the part of your website users see when they visit. The update won’t change the WordPress front-end. In other words, it should not impact your customers’ experience on your site.
The back-end is a different story. If your site relies on custom meta boxes and plugins, you may encounter issues the next time you edit a post. It will be up to the developers of your chosen plugins to bring their product up-to-speed with the changes, and if they don’t, you will have to find another solution.
One alternative is the Classic Editor plugin, which restores the classic editing interface and enables any WordPress plugins that extend it. The plugin can entirely replace the Gutenberg editor or add alternate “Edit” links that let you open a single post or page in the Classic editor, acting as a failsafe to keep the back-end of your site working as it should Gutenberg update drops.
Preparing for the Gutenberg Update
While the change has some developers wary, others are embracing the opportunity to modernize. The devs behind the incredibly popular Yoast SEO plugin are already talking about how to use Gutenberg to improve the user experience.
We’re still waiting on an official launch date, but there are things you can do in the meantime to prepare for Gutenberg:
- Download the Gutenberg plugin and test it on your site. This is the best way to see how the Gutenberg update will effect your site. The project isn’t ready for production, but it will help you predict whether you will encounter problems when it’s
- Review the Gutenberg FAQ and documentation. The official documentation answers many of the common questions people have about the Gutenberg update.
- If your site relies on plugins, follow the development process. Popular plugins with a large user base are likely to be brought up to speed by their developers, but smaller ones could go obsolete. Now is a good time to review your plugins and make sure they’re up to speed.
We’re big fans of WordPress over here at TS, so we’re keeping a close eye on Gutenberg as it develops. We’ll be sharing our ongoing insights on this through our newsletter.
Must-Know SEO Trends in 2018
Ok Google. What’s in store for SEO in 2018?
There are already clear SEO trends that will change how businesses approach digital marketing in 2018.
Voice search and mobile search are more important than ever, and the link-building strategies of yesteryear are due for an update. It’s also time to consider the growing impact of AI and machine learning on search.
Here’s what you need to know about some of the top SEO trends in 2018.
Mobile-First Index
Search has gone mobile. 57% of web traffic, including most Google searches, comes from mobile devices. But when it comes to generating search results, Google’s algorithm still looks at the desktop version of a page to decide if it’s relevant to the user.
That’s about to change.
Google has been experimenting with a mobile-first index since 2016. The mobile-first index is exactly what it sounds like: it looks primarily at the mobile version of a site’s content to understand its data and rank its pages in the results.
So, when does Google plan to deploy the mobile-first index in full? No one knows for sure, but many predict that the shift is coming in 2018.
The good news is, there’s still time to prepare for the mobile-search index. In addition to optimizing sites for mobile web browsing, businesses should start to consider how mobile search differs from the desktop.
Mobile searches are all about context; they’re usually made on-the-go, after all. That changes what kind of information searchers are looking for and how they go about finding it. Some keywords rank differently on mobile, and local SEO has a substantial impact on mobile results.
This also ties into the voice search trend, since voice queries often come from mobile devices.
Voice Search
Voice search is one the biggest SEO trends in 2018. According to Google, almost a quarter of searches made through the Google App on Android devices are voice queries, and the increasing adoption of digital home assistant devices is fuelling more voice searches every day.
Currently, most voice search queries fall into the category of ‘housekeeping’, like asking Siri or Alexa to play a voicemail, look up contact information, or set an alarm. But a growing number of voice searches relate to goods and services. The voice query app Hound found that 22% of voice searches relate to local information, like shopping and services; expect that to grow in 2018.
Voice searches are drastically different from the kinds of queries people type into a box. The phrases tend to be longer, often coming in the form of complete sentences. The tone of these queries is more conversational than a search you would type out.
Here’s an example. Say you want to know how late Starbucks is open next weekend. The typical Google search query is usually cold and efficient; something like, Starbucks Saturday hours. A voice search, on the other hand, would sound more like, Ok Google, how late is Starbucks open on Saturday?
The content of voice search is different as well. Voice searches are more likely to be about topics in-the-moment, like information about local businesses and services. On the other hand, people tend to avoid ‘sensitive subjects’, like social networking and health, when it comes to voice search.
The rise in voice search will have an enormous impact on the approach to SEO in 2018. Pages will not only need to target short keywords, but questions rich in long-tail keywords. More than ever, appealing to your audience will mean producing content that speaks their natural language.
It might seem daunting, but this trend opens a world of opportunity for local businesses to appeal to customers on-the-go.
Diverse Link-Building
Link-building is one of the pillars of powerful SEO. Search engine algorithms treat backlinks as endorsements, a thumbs-up to your relevance and quality of a site.
But not all backlinks are equal. The algorithm weighs the freshness, authority, and relevance of links, and poorly-sourced backlinks reflect back on your own site in the eyes of the search engine.
Last year, Google began looking at certain link-build strategies with greater scrutiny. Google now warns against leaning heavily on guest posts or syndicated posts for backlinks, especially those stuffed with keyword-rich links or penned by unreliable authors.
This trend emphasizes the importance of a diverse link-building strategy. Fortunately, there are more ways than ever to get your content out there.
Your backlink profile should consist of links from many different types of sites: HTML pages, blog posts, social posts, and more. Look for opportunities on Q&A sites like Quora, local news outlets, third-party review sites, and niche platforms that relate to your industry.
Think of it not only as link-building, but building relationships as well. These connections are critical to building a strong SEO strategy in 2018.
Featured Snippets
Featured snippets have only been around since 2014, but they’ve become such an integral part of Google search that it’s hard to imagine life without them. Almost 30% of results pages now display featured snippets, which pull quick bites of information from a web page relevant to the search query.
And people use them — a lot. Featured snippets have an average clickthrough rate of almost 33%.
More importantly, pages that land in the snippet box appear above the top-ranking result on the page. While the majority of snippets come from the top ten results for the query, only 30% come from page number one.
That means pages that optimize for snippets have a chance to draw traffic that would otherwise go to the top-ranking result.
So, how do pages earn a place in the featured snippet box? While sites can opt out of featured snippets, there’s no way to opt-in. The algorithm decides which pages to feature in much the same way it ranks results organically. However, it does favour content that offers quick, direct answers in language that matches the searcher’s intent. Lists, graphs, and Q&A-style content are also popular.
RankBrain AI
What is RankBrain? In short, it’s an artificial intelligence system Google uses to help sort search engine results. This AI is a part of Google’s overall search algorithm that picks through billions of web pages to find the ones that best answer a person’s search query.
RankBrain attempts to uncover the user’s intent behind their search. It looks at various signals, such as the searcher’s location, their previous searches, and what other people are searching at the time, to deliver more contextualized results.
As Google gets better at tailoring search engine results down to the individual user, businesses will have to be more aware of the steps in their audience’s buyer journey. That will determine the kind of questions they’re asking. Optimizing for RankBrain AI will mean delivering the right answers at the right time, using language that reflects the query.