Skip to main content
search
Category

Blog

Robyn Ackerman
In Blog, E-Marketing, , Hiring, Marketing, Tips, Training

5 Reasons to Hire A Digital Marketing Consultant

You may have your own in-house team of talented marketers, or you perhaps you are on the fence about hiring a full-time employee to take on your marketing needs.  Regardless of where your company stands with it’s marketing strategies, your business can always benefit by bringing in a digital marketing consultant.

Below are 5 key reasons you should consider hiring a marketing consultant:

1. Digital Marketing Consultants stay on top of the latest trends in the marketing world.5 reasons to hire a marketing consultant

A digital marketing consultant NEEDS to know exactly what the newest and greatest strategies are in order to stay in business themselves. Consultants make sure to continuously educate themselves by attending webinars, expos, conferences and networking events. The greatest part is that the consultant does this all at his/her own expense, not on your company’s dime.

2. Digital Marketing Consultants have great insight from working with  other companies and multiple industries.

This is one of the most motivating reasons, if not- the most important reason to hire a consultant.  A successful digital marketing strategist or consultant works with an array of clients.  When a specific campaign is successful with one client, the consultant will likely implement it with all other clients where deemed appropriate. Consultants will also use his/her positive experiences with other business’s marketing platforms (pros/cons of email platforms, tracking software, lead generation systems etc.) to bring to your company as recommendations.  It is this type of constant exposure to other options that sets a consultant apart from a full time employee.

3. Digital Marketing Consultants give you what you pay for… and then    some.

Unlike a full-time employee, a consultant only gets paid for actual work produced. Great consultants work hard until the job, campaign or project is complete, which in most instances means quicker turn around time.  Consultants also have great resources of marketing experts. Need a web developer? Looking for a graphic designer? Marketing Consultants likely have a plethora of names to refer.

4. Digital Marketing Consultants have a fresh take on your company.

Let’s face it, things get stale. Even the greatest content developers hit a wall at some point.  Bringing in a consultant will also bring in fresh ideas.  Digital Marketing Consultants also often pick up on areas that can be improved that have been a part of the strategy for so long, no one else even gave it a second thought. A consultant can also work as an additional asset to your marketing team.  Many companies are confined by time and resources.  It can never hurt to bring on an expert to help loosen those restraints on the team.

5. Digital Marketing Consultants can connect you to other clients.

Building your network also builds your company. Many inbound marketing strategists/consultants will connect clients to cross-promote events, guest blog for one another, send targeted emails to segregated lists and feature each other’s products on social media.  This is a great way to expand customer reach and gain greater exposure.

To see if you business would benefit from a digital marketing consultant, contact us here.

Robyn Ackerman
In Blog, Marketing, Webinar

5 Key Reasons Your Company Should Host Webinars:

For years, webinars have been used as a source of educational training.  What you may not know is that no matter what industry your company is in, or what you sell you can absolutely and should undoubtedly be utilizing webinars as a part of your digital marketing strategy.

Below are the top 5 benefits of hosting a webinar:

Webinars Position You As Thought Leaders

  • When marketing and hosting webinars you are showing the world that you are an expert in that subject.
  • Your potential customers will now have this opportunity to learn from you and see with little commitment how much you can provide for them.
  • As a thought leader, you build trust with your audience.  When consumers are searching for information online and see your webinar positioned high on search engines and on multiple platforms, the consumer is more likely to “trust” what you are offering.

Webinars Increase Online Traffic And Brand Awareness

  • Just by hosting a webinar, you now have a reason to market your company.  This will in turn improve your brand awareness.
  • If your event pages are optimized correctly and you have a strong marketing strategy, a webinar has the potential to increase your online traffic.
  • It builds a “relationship” with your customers when they watch your webinars, as they will feel more connected to you and your brand.

Webinars are a great lead generation tool

  • In order for anyone to join or watch your webinars, they will have to give their contact information.  This provides you with the opportunity to collect emails, interests, business information and anything else you may need.
  • You will now have a great list of interested customers in that specific subject to which you can create a lead generation campaign around.
  • You can create a post-webinar survey to narrow this list even more based on answers and questions.

Webinars can be re-purposed for years

  • Recorded webinars can be placed on your site as a download.
  • You can generate revenue from the webinars by selling them on your site.
  • You can use the slides and/or questions asked from the webinar to create popular blogs.
  • Upload the presentation to Slideshare for ultimate exposure.

Webinars are convenient and affordable

  • With webinars, you are not limited to one location. You can reach anybody anywhere.
  • People do not have to leave their office of home to participate.
  • You have complete control over participation.  You choose who can see attendees, who can ask questions and even how it is moderated on your end!
  • Can be watched from PC, MAC and smart devices
  • Can be run with 1 person or 500 people attending.
  • Compared to the cost of renting a conference room, printing materials, providing refreshments and other live event expenses, a webinar is extremely cost efficient.

If you are looking for help with your webinar strategy, contact us here: Webinar Strategy Contact Form

Robyn Ackerman
In Blog, , How to, Marketing,

Why your Company Needs a Weekly Tip on Social Media | 4 How-To Guided Steps

One of the first pieces of advice I give to new clients looking to increase engagement on Social Media is to create a monthly content strategy plan.  Part of that plan involves creating a weekly tip to offer followers and fans.

The benefits of providing a weekly tip for followers include:

  • Content Manager HiringPositioning your business or brand as a thought leader.
  • Opening up dialogue for customers who may have questions about that topic.
  • Building trust with your followers and showing your expertise.
  • Learning what subjects your customers find popular through shares and likes and then turning them into blogs or e-books.
  • Increasing visibility on that subject with search engines (as they crawl and show public status updates with keywords relevant to search terms).
  • Keeping followers and fans coming back to your company page in anticipation for that weeks tip.  This will in turn increase your post updates showing up in their feed.

4 tips to sharing tips on Social Media: 

  1. Pick a day of the week when your audience is likely online.  You can see when they are online through Facebook insights, or timing + (which measures your google + fan activity).
  2. Create an editorial calendar 6 months out (which is only 24 tips).  Create a spreadsheet and include the month, date and time you plan on posting the tips.  Add fields for topic, subject and content developer (if you have multiple experts in your company that will be contributing).  Then add the field where the actual tip content belongs.  The tip itself should be 2-3 sentences at most.
  3. Hashtag your tip name. Prior to launching your tip strategy come up with a clever name that you can place at the beginning of each tip post.  Examples are “Monday Marketing Tip” or “Tuesday Tips With Jon” or “Fridays Health Tips”.  Keep it brand and industry appropriate and make sure it is relevant to what your customers would expect to see from you.  Then Hashtag it so people can eventually search for and see all the previous tips by clicking on the hashtag. Example: #SocialMediaWeeklyTip.

    Post by Pop Digital Marketing.

     

  4. Create a visual of the tip.  Hubspot launched a very successful 30 day blogging tip in which each day they provided a visual of a tip dealing with blogging.  When you post a picture on any Social Media platform you increase the likelihood of the post getting shared and liked.  You can also share the tip picture on Instagram and Pinterest!

For advice on launching or re-launching your company’s social media strategy, contact us here.

Robyn Ackerman
In Blog

5 Quick SEO Hacks

SEO, an acronym for ‘search engine optimization’ has become an absolute necessity in digital marketing.  Optimizing your site for Search Engines requires a lot of strategic planning, many spreadsheets and hours of research.  For most companies ongoing optimization requires a full-time employee or consultant dedicated to just that.   While your site may have already been and hopefully continues to be optimized with appropriate and research based Headers, Meta Descriptions and Keywords, there are still quite a few strong methods of increasing organic traffic that you need to utilize.

Here are 5 SEO Hacks You Need To Know:

SEO HACKS

1. Webmaster Tools

  • Google Webmaster Tools is a brilliant way for digital marketers to analyze and track the success of their site optimization.  Use webmaster tools to check on keyword rankings, positions and click-through rates.  You can also see if your site has been flagged for any spam or other issues preventing you from ranking higher.

2. Blog

  • Your blog is going to become your greatest asset in increasing your online authority with both search engines and customers.  Every time you create new content you are giving search engines a jolt to crawl your site.  Tip: Use the keywords you find in webmaster tools to generate new blog ideas!

3. Social Media

  • First and foremost, you need to create a Google Plus business page….now.  Secondly, make sure you are sharing your web pages and content on the platform as Google Plus posts get crawled and indexed almost instantaneously. According to The Moz Correlation Study in 2013 “After Page Authority, a URL’s number of Google +1s is more highly correlated with search rankings than any other factor. In fact, the correlation of Google +1s beat out other well known metrics including linking root domains, Facebook shares, and even keyword usage”.
  • Also, do make sure you have a presence on all the other social media platforms.  Alike Google Plus, public posts on each of the other platforms also play a role in rankings.  If a post is shared, liked or pinned- the search engines see that past/page/event/product as a true authority on that subject.
  • Make sure each and every page, post, product and event have social media sharing buttons.  You need to make the process of sharing as easy as possible for your fans.

4. Website Speed 

  • Your website speed is an important element in search rankings.  Google will measure a “page load time” and will factor those numbers in to its ranking algorithm.  Load speeds may slow down if you have many large graphics on the page or unused plugins on your site.  See your page load time statuses on Webmaster Tools.

5. Quality and Relevant Content

  • Search engines value the user experience more now than ever before.  If the content of your site is relevant to the search terms you show up for, your site will be rewarded with higher rankings.  For example, if you sell video cameras on your site, but populate your adwords or meta descriptions with keywords like “iPhone Cameras”, the search engines will stop showing your page because of a problem with relevancy.  Make sure the keywords you are using to optimize coincide with what the user will see and get from the page they land on.
  • This rule also applies to quality content.  Each page has the ability to provide visitors and users with a unique experience.  The on page content should be populated with everything the visitor wants to know about the product or service.  The quality of the content is a factor to your rankings, so make sure you have a optimization expert creating the best user experience possible!

 

Robyn Ackerman
In Blog, , How to, Marketing,

2 New Facebook Updates for Businesses and Pages

Facebook has recently made 2 updates that will shake up how you use the Social Networking platform to market your business.  And, if strategized correctly, you will see a positive outcome from both these changes!

Change #1 | Facebook Page Manager Tracking

On February 20, 2014, Facebook introduced a new feature to allow Page Administrators to see which of their page managers posted a status update.  The update shows under the company name of each post ( see visual below).  All admins of the page including moderators, advertisers and insight analysts will see the name of the poster next to the update.  It is not visible to the public.

Facebook Manager Posts

 

 

Benefits of Tracking Facebook Mangers’ Posts:

For companies that have multiple managers or content creators on their business page this will help with tracking, metrics and success measurements of each employee. 

  • You can now track whose content generates the most likes, shares or comments and provide incentives or bonuses based on performance.
  • You can utilize this information when training social media interns or entry level employees as a means of providing constructive criticism and suggestions.
  • If you outsource your social media to freelancers or a marketing company, you will gain better insight as to who is doing what and when.
  • It is an overall means of holding all your digital marketing employees accountable.


Change #2 | Tagging Another Page In A Status:

On February 25, 2014, Facebook began rolling out a new algorithm for page status updates.  Going forward, if your page writes a post and tags another page in that post, your post may been shown to the followers of that tagged page.  It is worth noting, however that Facebook will only show the posts that are relevant to followers with a history of interacting with that correlated content.

Benefits of Tagging Another Page in your Page Status Update:

  • Exposure to the followers of the tagged page, which may have thousands of more fans than yours.
  • Creating a give/take relationship with the other brands/pages that have the same target audience.  For example, when you tag another page, you are giving them exposure to your fans.  Hopefully, they will want to “give back” and promote you as well!
Robyn Ackerman
In Blog, How to, LinkedIn, Marketing, SEO,

7 Beginner Tips For LinkedIn Marketing

LinkedIn, known as the “Social Network for Businesses” has immense potential to provide users with the ability to network with-in their own industry and more importantly find and convert customers.  As opposed to Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter, where statuses lean towards the light, funny or more personal, LinkedIn offers users with a platform to encompass strictly business updates and news related statuses.

7 Beginner Tips to Marketing on LinkedIn:

  1. Update your profile, often. First, make sure your personal LinkedIn profile is completely updated.  LinkedIn even tells users how well their profile is performing (see picture below).  Your profile is the driving force behind how you will be viewed by potential customers, job seekers, employers or possible partners.  It’s also wise to spruce up your profile once every few months.  Every time you update your profile, your connections or network (depending on what your privacy settings are set to), will see it in their feed, making updating a great “exposure tool”. LinkedIn Profile Marketing
  2. Setting up a company page. LinkedIn is regularly changing the way company pages operate.  Make sure you stay on top of the trends and that you have an updated company page.  Here are some quick tips:
    1. Keep your company description written in a style that reads well to customers.
    2. Link to your website.
    3. Make sure to utilize the services and products aspects of the page.
    4. Create a strategy for the types of updates you post on the page vs. your profile.
    5. Post jobs on the company page, and share that in all your groups, resulting in driving traffic to the company page.
    6. Encourage your employees to update their profile linking to the page and to share any page or job openings.
  3. Update your status with relevant information. By providing your connections with the latest news, updates and blogs in your industry you are positioning yourself as a thought leader in your field.  As with updates on other social media platforms, keep your statuses “engage-able”. 
  4. Join groups.  There are two types of groups you may want to join on LinkedIn.
    1. Groups of professionals in your industry.  Doing so, will enable you to share ideas, network, cross refer and hopefully give you a chance to learn from one another.
    2. Groups of customers.  Ideally you have done appropriate research on who your target client is.  Find the groups that your customers are in and get your name out there!
  5. Get Recommendations.  There is something to be said about the phrase “give a little, get a lot”.  Take time to truly recommend a co-worker, employee, client or consultant.  By giving your honest positive feedback, that person will likely recommend you in return.  When a potential client comes to your public profile (and yes, they will check you out on LinkedIn before agreeing to do business) and sees you have many positive recommendations, it will compel that client to trust your expertise even more.
  6. LinkedIn ads.  If you have a specific campaign to market, and the budget to allot for it, LinkedIn ads may be beneficial for you.  LinkedIn ads allows you to sponsor updates, target demographics and even use videos.  Make sure to consult with an expert first to get the best ROI.
  7. Look at someone’s profile to get them to look at yours.  It seems borderline stalker, but it works.  If you want someone to see your profile or notice you, simply look at his/her profile.  He/she will get notification that you looked at his/her profile, and it will prompt that person to check out what’s new with you, which is why it’s important to routinely change up your profile.

 Click here to benefit from an expert’s direction on your LinkedIn strategy.

Robyn Ackerman
In Blog, , How to, Marketing,

New Trending Feature On Facebook

Facebook is rolling out a new feature titled “Trending” (currently only in a few countries and only available for certain users) on the right side of your homepage.

Trending According to Facebook: 

“Trending shows you the popular topics and hashtags that are being talked about on Facebook. You’ll see stories from people and Pages who’ve shared them with you or have shared them as Public. From the right side of your homepage, click a topic that’s trending to see what people are saying about it.”

Facebook Trending Feature

How The Trending Feature Can Increase Your Business And Brand Awareness:

Up until now, using hashtags was not something that proved to be effective for businesses.   A Social Media Examiner article from October 2013 explains:

“According to EdgeRank Checker, Facebook hashtags have done nothing to help with additional exposure for your brand. In fact the opposite is true.
The research indicates that posts with hashtags are not only less likely to go viral, but also make people less likely to engage with the content.”

Now however, Facebook is using popular hashtags, personal preferences, user engagements and user “likes” to decide what they display in that user’s trending column.  This means it is very important for your Facebook strategy to now include trendy hashtags to increase your exposure.  When a user clicks on a “trending” keyword, they will see all posts about said keyword.  You want your posts in there!

3 Tips To Using Hashtags On Your Business Page:

  1. Find an already popular industry related hashtag and use it in your post.
  2. Create an amazing hashtag unique to your business and ask your best fans to use it as well in related content posts.  As an example: ask fans a question and tell them to use the hashtag in their answer.
  3. Use a well known celebrity name, something big in the news or an upcoming popular event.  It’s already trending, the work is done all you have to do now is incorporate it into your posts!
Close Menu