Interesting
Form As imperative as your logo is to branding, it’s not the only element that makes a brand identity strong. Your product(s), the packaging, or the way you present your services all need to play a part in your brand identity. Visually representing your business in everything you do will create consistency and help create a familiarity with your consumers. Take McDonald’s golden arches for example. They used an interesting form to create the iconic “M,” which is now recognizable all over the world.

Colour & Type
Creating a colour palette is a way to enhance your identity. It provides you with variety so you can create unique designs for your business while remaining faithful to the brand identity.

Type can also be a double-edged sword if not utilized properly. Although “mix and match” type design has become quite the trend, that doesn’t mean mixing a handful of fonts is necessarily a good idea for your business. In your logo, on your website, and on any documents that your business creates (print and digital), there should be consistent use of typography. If you take a look at Nike’s website and its ads, it keeps the same typeface and type style throughout all aspects of the business — and it works wonders for them.

Templates
You probably send out emails, type up letters, or hand out business cards to potential customers on a daily basis. Creating templates (even for a detail as minute as email signatures) will give your business a more unified, credible, and professional look and feel.

Consistency As mentioned in nearly every step already (I can’t stress it enough), consistency is what can make or break a brand identity. Use the aforementioned templates and follow the design choices you’ve decided upon for your brand throughout all areas of your business to create a harmonious brand identity.

Flexibility
Yes, consistency is crucial — but remaining flexible in a society that is always looking for the next best thing is just as important. Flexibility allows for adjustments in ad campaigns, taglines, and even some modernizing to your overall brand identity so you can continuously keep your audience interested. The key is keeping any changes you make consistent throughout your entire brand (e.g., don’t change the design of your business cards and nothing else).

If you need help help developing your logo – we’re here to help! Drop us a line, we’d love to chat.

1. Make a commitment to social media
The first thing that you can do to find success is make a commitment to social media. Like any other form of marketing, social media for businesses can be a real challenge. It’s hard to grow an audience, create great content, and increase engagement. All too often we see brands giving up on social media after just a few months. We’ve found that it takes eight months to one year to really get the hang of social. Not only to get a consistent content stream going, but to figure out what your audience resonates with and what they don’t.

It all starts with planning. Create a social media strategy and write it down in order to hold your business accountable. Your strategy should include a basic company mission statement, content plan and goals. And most importantly, a powerful statement on “why” people would follow you on social media, what kind of content you plan on creating and posting, and what you hope to achieve.

2. Show off your personality
The second social media tip is to always (authentically) be you on social media. Take a second to think about the brands that you follow on social media…. What makes them special? What makes you follow them? Chances are that there is something special about the content they post or the way in which they post it.

Creating a great social media presence isn’t only about showing the value of your product or service to your audience. It’s about connection and experiences. The best brands out there share a common point of view with their fans. Success on social isn’t about showing off your product. It’s about connection and experiences.

3. Listen to customers rather than promote
Tip #3 is that great social media programs are built around listening to customers, not promoting to them. The way we like to think about it is that social media offers an incredible, open-ended platform that businesses can use to communicate and engage with customers. That’s why we recommend using it that way! Social media is becoming a customer service platform and people are coming to expect it. The tricky part is, the better you get at social the more engagement you’ll get, and in turn, the more comments. The other side is that your customers are the best source of inspiration for content. Lots of businesses are sitting on a never-ending gold mine of content ideas by simply looking at their frequently asked questions, or what people are asking on social media. If you’re stuck on what to post, look to your customers first for ideas before anything else. You can also listen to competitor’s customers as well, as funny as that sounds. Tools like Twitter Lists, BuzzSumo, Facebook Pages to Watch, Google Keyword Planner, and YouTube are all great places to find what’s working in your industry. Great social media programs are built around listening to customers, not promoting to them.

4. Focus your efforts on a select network
It may seem counterintuitive, but focusing all your efforts on the two to three platforms which give you the best return on investment. Crafting content unique to each platform is critical. For example, let’s say we write a blog post about social media marketing. Writing the copy that will get attention and clicks on LinkedIn is much different than what works on Facebook, which is dramatically different than what works on Instagram, Snapchat, or Twitter. It’s an obsession-like focus on a particular platform that allows you to hone in on successful tactics.

5. Remember that success follows passion
Remember that passion helps generate truly great and memorable content. Success on social media is a long road. As we mentioned before, it takes us minimum eight months of hard work to get to a point where we felt good about our social program. Imagine if those 8 months were filled with posting content that we didn’t care about! The only way to ensure long term commitment and that social media doesn’t become a burden is to follow your passion. The nice thing about social media is that your content doesn’t have to be directly related to your brand or industry. Meaning it doesn’t have to be what everyone else is doing. We suggest that as business owners you pick a topic that they love and are truly passionate about.

6. Experiment with video marketing
Content Ideas: Video marketing is one of the most talked about topics in social media right now and so we’d love to share a few strategies that you can use to create awesome video content. Many businesses tell us that they struggle with “what” to create video about. The best solution we have for you when it comes to “what” is to start with what works. Sort your blog content in order of most traffic and create videos around those topics. Again, use Facebook Pages to Watch to figure out what kinds of videos your competitors are making and generate topic ideas based off of that. Use your customers as resources. Look outside of your specific industry to your favourite brands. The key is to start with what works and gain some confidence.

In terms of video best-practices, there are some scientific factors that people are more likely to interact with. One is video length. On Facebook, for example, the highest engaging videos are between 60-90 seconds. The second highest are between 30-60 seconds. So keep your videos short and to the point. If you’re going to feature a person (or group of people) in your video, you’ll need a good lavalier microphone, natural light from a window, and a tripod. Sound, lighting, and camera stability are key in creating a quality video. If animated or text-only video are more your style all you’ll need is great resource for stock video, quality background music, and a video editor.

7. Get the most out of your content
One of the most key aspects in social media marketing mastery is to get the most out of your content.

You can create a series of Instagram Stories to help promote the post. Or you might try creating a short video for Facebook summarising the post (or even a more in-depth YouTube video!) Every piece of content you create should have at least 2-3 other pieces of shareable content to accompany it. That way if the link doesn’t resonate then the video might. Or if the video falls short, maybe it makes for good Instagram Stories.

8. Boost organic content to a targeted audience
What’s great about social media for businesses is that you don’t have to be an expert in order to see success with advertising. The way we like to think about it is that organic social media posting (traditional posting) is the perfect testing ground for paid ads and boosted posts. In other words, you’re using organic reach to determine what posts you should put money behind. The best part is that you can target specific users within many of the social platform ad managers. For example, let’s say your goal is traffic to your website and you’ve identified a top performing post. You can create an audience that is most likely to also enjoy that post. That could be a Lookalike Audience that is similar to your website visitors. Or maybe it’s an audience who has shown interest in your competitors. It also could be an audience based on demographics like location, age, or mobile device type.

If you need help with your social media, drop us a line to see what we can do for you. 

1. Post industry trends, how-tos, and thought-leadership content
One of the first questions in your mind when it comes to LinkedIn marketing might be: What should I post on LinkedIn? Like any social network, it’s great to customise your message for your specific audience because what works on other platforms will not always work on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn in particular, there is some great advice on what types of content do well: Industry trends and how-tos. BuzzSumo analysed the headlines of 10 million articles shared on LinkedIn to find out the topics that resonate with people on LinkedIn. They looked at the top phrases used in the headline of the most shared articles, and two types of content stood out: Industry trends and how-to articles. Industry trends and news: “the future of”, “in the world”, and “of the year” How-to articles: “X ways to”, “how to get”, and “how to make” This suggests that people on LinkedIn are generally interested in informative and educational content, which seems fitting for a professional social network. Thought-leadership content.

Let’s take a look at what LinkedIn themselves recommend. In their guide to using LinkedIn for marketing, they recommend being helpful… Because people invest time on LinkedIn, a proven approach is to help your audience perform their jobs better, answer questions, and help address pain points. … and avoid being salesy. While it can be tempting to sell your audience on the benefits of your product or service, “salesy” content doesn’t generally perform well on LinkedIn. They also shared that “publishing thought leadership content on your Company Page is one of the most powerful ways to grow your LinkedIn audience“. Here are the three types of thought leadership that LinkedIn suggests: Industry thought leadership: Your perspective on news and trends Organisational thought leadership: Embodied in the vision and ethos of your company. Product thought leadership: centred on being the best solution for your customers

2. Make use of the analytics
Besides measuring your LinkedIn marketing performance, your Company Page analytics is a great tool for understanding what content your followers like. Here are two ways to make good use of the analytics: Understand what content does well on your Company Page In the “Updates” section of your analytics, you get a wealth of information about your recent LinkedIn posts (or “updates”). Besides providing data such as the impressions, clicks, and social actions, it also calculates each post’s clickthrough rate (CTR) and engagement rate. LinkedIn analytics: Updates To find out what content your followers like, go through the table and look for posts with an above-average CTR or engagement rate. Then, experiment with similar types of content and see if they perform just as well. Learn about your followers and visitors This tip works great if you have had your Company Page around for a while and have gained a sizeable following. Under the “Followers” section of your analytics, you get information about the demographics of your followers. For example, here are the top five job functions of our followers: LinkedIn analytics: Follower demographics Using this information, we can tailor our posts to their interests by sharing content that is relevant to their job functions. This could include content on marketing (which we write a lot about), startups, and technology. Besides the top job functions, you can also see the industries your followers are in, their seniority, their locations, and more. LinkedIn analytics: Follower demographics options You also get similar information about the people who visit your Company Page but aren’t following you yet, under the “Visitors” section of your analytics.

3. Use images and videos
Once you know what to post on LinkedIn, here’s a tip to help you drive engagement to your LinkedIn posts. According to LinkedIn, one of the best practices for running a LinkedIn Company Page is to use rich media like images and videos. They found that images lead to a 98 percent higher comment rate while links to YouTube videos can result in a 75 percent higher share rate. Increase in comment rate for post with image If you are looking for the ideal image sizes for sharing to LinkedIn, we have them here for you.

Now that you can upload videos onto LinkedIn directly, I would recommend doing that, instead of posting a link to your YouTube video. When quintly studied over six million Facebook posts, they discovered that videos uploaded onto Facebook have, on average, a 110 percent higher interaction rate and a 478 percent higher share rate than YouTube videos on Facebook. It’s likely that LinkedIn, like Facebook, would prioritize LinkedIn videos over YouTube videos on the feed.

4. Use data insights to find your best time to post
So now you know what to post, how about the best time to post? LinkedIn has found that updates posted in the morning usually earn the highest engagement, with a slight bump occurring again after business hours” but also added that you should experiment to see what works best for your company.” At JAM, we now believe that there isn’t a universal best time to post on social media. With LinkedIn’s algorithmic feed, the concept of “a universal best posting time” is now less relevant. Instead, it’s better to focus on your brand’s best time to post. Here are two methods of finding your brand’s best time to post: Using LinkedIn analytics

Here’s how to find your best time to post to LinkedIn, with LinkedIn analytics: Experiment with different posting times and record those times. Go to the “Updates” section of your LinkedIn Company Page analytics Identify the few top posts with the highest CTR or engagement rate, depending on your goals Compare those posts with their posting times Is there a trend? If you could identify certain times that do better than the rest, you could continue to post at those times. Otherwise, experiment with a few new posting times. As LinkedIn doesn’t provide the published time of each post, you might find this method is a little tedious.

5. Schedule 1 post per weekday
When you know what to post and when to post, you might want to know how often to post. LinkedIn has found that 20 posts per month can help you reach 60 percent of your unique audience. Audience reach for one LinkedIn post More posts will naturally lead to a larger percentage of reach, but there will come a point of diminishing returns. A certain percentage of your audience will always be impossible to reach—because they never log on—so you’re really looking to hit those who log on and scroll their top updates.

Start with 20 quality posts per month and scale up if you see that a fuller schedule comes with more benefits. As it turns out, if you post once a day for four weeks and skip the weekends, you’ll hit 20 posts on the dot — perfect.

6. Study other Company Pages
Facebook Pages to Watch is one of our favourite Facebook marketing tools, which has helped us improve our Facebook marketing. Just like Facebook, LinkedIn has a feature called Companies to track. I believe it’s as useful in helping you with your LinkedIn marketing. You can find this table at the bottom of the “Followers” section of your analytics. LinkedIn analytics: Companies to track Here, LinkedIn shows you the companies that are similar to yours and a few key metrics, such as total followers, follower growth, and social engagement. Using this information, you could benchmark your LinkedIn Company Page performance with theirs. For example, here are some of the analyses you could do: Is my Company Page growing as fast as other Company Pages that have roughly the same number of followers? How do my number of updates and social engagement compare with similar Company Pages? What types of content are doing well for them? (You can click on their name to visit their Company Page.) Ultimately, it’ll be great to study similar Company Pages, learn what’s working well for them, and experiment those ideas on your own Company Page. A good starting point is to look for Company Pages that have a similar follower size as you but a higher follower growth or average engagement (i.e. dividing social engagement by the number of updates).

7. Optimise your Company Page for search
A well-optimised LinkedIn Company Page allows your target audience to easily find you on and off LinkedIn (e.g. Google). To optimise your Company Page for search, LinkedIn offers these suggestions: Insert keywords. Be sure to incorporate keywords into the company profile information, clearly representing who you are and what you do. If you’re not sure which keywords to use, think about it this way: What words or phrases would a potential customer use when searching for your product or service? There are two places on your profile where you can insert keywords: your company description and specialties. LinkedIn Company Page – keywords You can find this by navigating to your Company Page > Manage Page > Overview. Link to your Company Page. Creating links to your Company Page is essential for boosting your ranking in search. An easy win here is to link to your Company Page from your website, blog, and other marketing materials. Another easy win is to make sure the LinkedIn profiles of employees and colleagues are up to date. When they add your company to their work experience, a link is created back to your Company Page. Share relevant content.

One of the best ways to improve your rankings and search results is to share relevant content regularly. When you publish updates from your Company Page they also appear on your public page, allowing your content to be indexed by Google. The more frequently you share content your followers engage with, the higher your Company Page will appear in search results.

8. Help your colleagues help you
One of the best groups of people that can help you with your LinkedIn marketing is your colleagues. They can help you boost your posts and increase the visibility of your company on LinkedIn. So help them help you. Here’s how: Encourage them to engage with your posts Engagement on your posts will help spread your posts to more LinkedIn users, and it turns out that your colleagues could be the greatest asset to building this engagement. LinkedIn previously found that employees are 70 percent more likely to click, share, and comment on an update than a typical LinkedIn user. You can take advantage of this by making it easy for your colleagues to engage with the content. Send them links every time you post or when particularly important updates go live. Asking for engagement is sometimes all it takes to get your colleagues involved. Encourage them to fill out their LinkedIn profiles LinkedIn offers a lovely explanation of how your individual LinkedIn profiles influence your brand: Your LinkedIn profile – and the profiles of everyone else at the company – are the peaks that come together to form the mountain range that is your brand. Besides that, it’s just a wonderfully simple way to spread awareness of your brand. If you are in a company of 50 people, that’s 50 profiles with your company’s name with a quick link to your Company Page. And according to LinkedIn, it makes your company more visible in search results both on and off LinkedIn. If you are looking for a resource you can share with your colleagues, Social Media Today has a great infographic with 27 tips on creating a great LinkedIn profile.

If you need help with building your LinkedIn presence or a content strategy to engage your audience, drop us a line – we’d love to chat!