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3 Science-Backed Reasons You Need to Post on LinkedIn

The image that most professionals have about posting on social media isn’t too positive. In fact, it’s usually downright horrible. When you picture “posting on social media,” what image comes up? Teenagers sprawled on their beds and posting Instagram selfies on their phone? The hipster taking a picture of their food at a restaurant for Facebook? Your friend who can’t seem to stop posting their every thought to Twitter? If that’s how you view social media engagement, it’s easy to blow it off. It doesn’t seem connected to the goal of winning more business. But what if I told you that there was actually science behind why you should be online? There are very specific professional outcomes that you can support through regular and consistent engagement on social media. And for your professional goals, there’s still no better place to spend that time than on LinkedIn. Unconsciously (and Powerfully) Influence Your Prospects Through LinkedIn If you want to build your credibility, influence, and reach, there are no tools as efficient, scalable, and accessible as social media platforms. Social selling advocates tend to focus on using digital platforms for research, pipeline-building, and information-gathering, and rightly so. There are also powerful ways that all professionals can use it for building a stronger brand among your network. You can use it to make your presence known and actively influence your connections. And your connections might not even know that it’s happening, because much of what influences us isn’t being processed at a conscious level. We can see this by looking at the ideas and writing of researchers like Dan Ariely, Daniel Kahneman, and Sheena Iyenga. Central to their research are the cognitive biases and unconscious heuristics that influence [...]

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How to do a content marketing audit in 8-steps (plus, best practices for fixing your content)

It’s the 80/20 rule of content marketing: 80% of results come from 20% of content. This is true for every website and for every content marketing audit I’ve ever done. A handful of articles pull in the largest percentage of traffic and conversions. Just look at your own data. A report of your top posts by traffic probably looks something like this. A few posts bring in a lot of traffic, while most articles drive little or no traffic.   If you calculate the conversion rate for each piece of content, you’ll see a similar curve. A few articles convert visitors at a high rate, while most articles convert few or no visitors.   A Content Audit for Finding the Top Performers If it’s true that 20% of articles create 80% of the results, then why aren’t we focused more on these performers? The problem is that we usually don’t know which articles are the real heroes. To find out, we need to do an audit. Here’s our content audit checklist. Use the links below to skip to the sections you want. ✪ Advanced Readers: Skip down to section seven for the deeper analysis. FINDING TRAFFIC CHAMPIONS 1. SEO: Content that attracts visitors from search 2. SEO: Content with declining search traffic 3. SEO: Content that has search ranking potential 4. Email: Campaigns that attract visitors 5. Email: Measuring the engagement of visitors from email campaigns 6. Social: Content that gets the shared the most FINDING CONVERSION CHAMPIONS 7. Content that converts visitors into leads at the greatest rate ACTIONS 8. What to do now that you know the strengths and weaknesses of each piece of content. This is a step-by-step guide for auditing content marketing [...]

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Time to Retire the Digital Jedi

Long after the Web evolved into a marketing tool that could be used by brands, agencies scrambled to hire executives that knew digital. Advertising became so obsessed with the idea of digital that they felt the need to change the way they did business to keep up with the rhetoric. Digital Jedis and other strange roles were created to ensure clients knew that the agency could do digital. But what has the role of digital really changed? And is it necessary to differentiate agency executives with traditional and digital nomenclatures? We are winding down in the shiny-object stage of the digital invasion, and, luckily, saner heads are prevailing. Like print and broadcast, digital is simply a medium — it is not a strategy. Like all mediums, it comes with its own set of etiquettes and rules, but in the end, good brand strategy should be driving how agencies guide their clients. Because digital is so ubiquitous, there isn’t a person in an agency today that shouldn’t be taking digital into account with every client decision they make. Digital isn’t just a way to access information or entertainment. Digital has become an overlay that touches nearly every aspect of daily life. Even if you are using traditional media to drive a message, there is (or should be) a digital play or connection within that process. The collision of these two moments, agencies becoming more mature in terms of their digital jedi chops and consumers weaving digital technology into every aspect of their lives, is forcing agencies to rethink how they position their digital skills. Fortunately, we’ve moved away from silo departments to a more holistic core-competency model that permeates throughout an entire agency. Agencies need to [...]

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The Key to Cultivating Digital Talent Is a Great Digital Teacher

So you’ve just hired a recent college graduate to handle your agency’s social media accounts. Congrats. Your Twitter account might get a few more followers, but you want more than that, right?  The truth is that it takes more than hiring digital natives to make your agency digitally savvy. Don’t get me wrong — hiring fresh, young (and less expensive) employees can add tremendous value to your team. But a lot of agencies only have one or two people managing the company’s entire digital presence; many times, those employees are younger and not fully up to speed on your overarching strategy. Your agency’s veteran staffers are the ones who understand the core business and how to think strategically. To reap the full benefits of digital tools, you need to make sure everyone in your shop is comfortable in the ever-evolving digital landscape. Not sure you can get your more experienced employees to work alongside the young digital natives on your staff? That’s where a talented teacher might come in handy. What a Digital Teacher Can Do for You Hiring a qualified teacher to make sure all of your employees understand online platforms is a great way to get everyone on board. The 35-year veteran who hates the idea of Facebook can hardly argue with learning new digital strategies if everyone else (including the boss) is getting that same training, can he? Great teachers will, of course, have their own methods, but here are a few things they should do: Develop individualized plans for each employee to identify gaps in his knowledge base and provide training to fill those gaps. Partner junior employees with veteran mentors so younger employees can become more familiar with the nuances [...]

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Marketers: Take Digital Out of Your Vocabulary

“Going digital” isn’t a passing trend. Companies are learning — and proving — that building a flexible, integrated agency with a digital emphasis is essential. And that lesson is still being learned the hard way, even at the world’s most prestigious organizations. BuzzFeed leaked an internal report from The New York Times this week, providing an intimate look into how one of the world’s leading journalistic institutions is struggling with the exact same problem most agencies are: integrating digital into its existing company structure. So, what can this teach the rest of the world? It shows that combining traditional and online media isn’t easy for any company, and even the most prestigious of organizations make common mistakes, including treating it as something that’s separate — and often secondary — from the rest of operations. Digital Dividing Lines Although many companies have employees who specifically focus on online media, all employees need to think about it. Whether they’re focused on strategy, creative, or media, they need to know the landscape inside and out. Why? Because digital isn’t a department; it’s a way of thinking. When digital was new, it was used as a buzzword to set innovative agencies apart from those that weren’t savvy. That’s not true anymore. Today, it’s a given. When you tell a client your marketing firm does digital, it’s like telling them that newspapers have writers on staff. Duh. Most clients now realize that a mix of channels and strategies — including digital — is the most effective way to communicate with customers. They know that most potential customers don’t just wander into a store to shop. Instead, consumers start their search online. Digital helps your clients snag customers earlier in the sales cycle. But there’s [...]

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