Enjoying more popularity than ever before amongst professionals and businesses alike, LinkedIn has become the premier professional resource among many industries! But getting there didn’t just happen one day – it took many years of listening and responding to the needs of professionals to get it where it is today. LinkedIn has come a long way in the last 12 years, and if the recent changes to other social media platforms like Facebook and Pinterest tell us anything, it’s that there will be a lot more changes in store for LinkedIn as well. But where is LinkedIn heading? Clearly we’re not in any position to say definitively what’s coming but this may be what the future will end up holding for LinkedIn:
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When it comes to web design whitespace is a really important concept, but it’s also a concept that’s lost on many marketers. Marketers tend to see open space and immediately want to fill it with another call-to-action, value proposition, or offer. Part of this desire to occupy every possible space comes from an internal motivation to want as many opportunities for testing as possible and the rest of this desire is often imposed on marketers by their superiors to prove ROI across multiple goals. But whitespace can actually help marketers succeed by doing the following crucial things:
Universities across the nation have started back up, which means that collegiate marketing courses are in full swing. When I look back at my own business education at Bentley University I definitely learned a lot of important things that I took with me; however, when I think specifically about my marketing courses I feel like they missed a few critical things. So I’d like to take the time to impart some wisdom on future marketing majors:
Sometimes potential clients will ask us if we offer remarketing ads (also known as retargeting ads). For those of you who don’t know much about paid search ads (also known as PPC, SEM, and AdWords ads), remarketing ads are a specific type of paid search ads. Remarketing ads are those image and text ads that follow you online after you’ve visited a webpage – displaying on subsequent pages that you visit. The simplest remarketing ads just advertise the business that you visited, reiterating brand messaging. On the other hand, the most sophisticated remarketing ads have use a tracking script to advertise the specific products that you viewed/added to the cart and offer you customized promotions.
So to get back to the initial questions, “Does LionShark offer remarketing ads?” The short answer is that we do not. The long answer is that we don’t for the following reasons: As a PPC specialist with many years under my belt, I’ve run paid search ads for basically every conceivable industry. I’m accustomed to working with clients to plan a tailored approach for various audiences and testing my efforts as I go. I’ve found a lot of success using these best practices and was starting to think I might not really see anything new when it came to client ad performance. Then it happened – I was stumped. Let me explain…
Normally when you’re advertising functional products with low margins the audience tends to be fairly price sensitive. Sure, they want good customer service and reasonable shipping options, but ultimately they want to save money wherever possible on their product purchases. So I had client that fit this bill and I was running PPC ads for his company with a lot of success. All was right with the world. Then he decided to step up his email marketing game and offer regular promotions to his email subscribers. I heard this and instantly recognized the opportunity to integrate these promotions into his PPC ads. I was pumped to have this cross-marketing opportunity and he was really optimistic that these promotions would bring in a lot of new customers and lure former customers back. So once a week I excitedly integrated that week’s promotion into the ad and monitored the results. Then something odd happened. I feel like every day I see at least one article or post offering advice on when you should tweet this or email that and they all seem to be contradictory. Some say it’s better to post earlier in the day on a particular platform, while others will advocate later in the day for that same platform. Some say you should post just before the hour, others will say just after or mid-hour is better. Some studies swear by late-night and weekend posting to get people during their down-time while others say you should stick to business hours. If you tried to follow all of this advice you’d probably end up spending innumerable hours posting all day every day and annoying the crap out of your audience!
So what’s the right advice when it comes to social media management? Well, all of it! The reality is that for each business, the “right” time to send emails, publish content, and push social media posts is completely unique. This is why it’s so important to test everything that you do to see what your audience responds best to over time. Here are some really important things to keep in mind when planning when to send various marketing messages: Scarcity is a powerful motivator, which also makes it an effective marketing strategy. The reason scarcity works so well is because we live in a culture where everyone has a fear of missing out. This is why social media usage is so prevalent – people are afraid that if they don’t check social sites, they’ll miss out on exciting updates or information from their friends. This fear is amplified even more when it comes to making purchases because no one wants to miss out on the hottest products or best deals.
So when it comes to your digital marketing, how can you incorporate scarcity into your strategy? Here are four tips to help you ride the scarcity wave: What makes a great football tailgate? Great food, nice weather, entertainment, and excitement about the upcoming game are always a winning combination! (A dominant season always helps too, but that’s beside the point.) So how do you replicate the same success with your PPC? Focus on these all-important 4 PPC elements:
One of my friends mentioned recently that she thought LinkedIn was pretty pointless unless you have a regular office job. She’s in theater and contended that in the arts no one uses LinkedIn to find employment. And while that might be true, I think a LinkedIn profile can be beneficial professionally even if it doesn’t actually land you a job for the following reasons:
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