You may have heard the old adage, “Those that can’t do, teach.” Well, if you have been challenged with the task of promoting training courses online, then you know that statement is almost totally false.

There are plenty of things to “do” when you are trying to support a training course with promotion online.

Organizations around the globe invest over $360 billion annually to level up their workforce in areas such as:

• Alignment
• Analytics and Measurement (click this link to learn more about our Google Analytics services)
• Automation and Robotics
• Compliance
• Content Development
• Employee Safety
• Engineering
• IT and Technical Training
• Leadership
• Performance Management
• Sales
• Strategic Planning

Developments in high-speed internet connectivity worldwide in recent years have also provided training companies with the ability to move their teachings online. Now, in addition to building a connection with people in real life, training courses can be consumed (and re-consumed) by students on demand.

Whether your company is creating a new training course or training is what you’ve done for decades, there has never been a better time to get involved in the knowledge sharing economy.

Below, I’ve compiled 20 digital marketing ideas that are both actionable and effective for you to start promoting training courses.

1. Auditing Templates

There are many ways a company might realize their need for your training solutions. Few of those ways are more effective than by giving them a template to conduct a self-audit. Creating auditing templates for prospective clients in Google Drive, Microsoft Office, or PDF format is an excellent way to:

• Help them discover their pain points
• Introduce your methodology to alleviating those pain points
• Provide natural conversation starters for your business development team

Bonus tip: For promoting training courses, you should be willing to provide these templates at no charge to potential clients. But at the same time, you should also gate these templates behind a registration form to aid your demand generation efforts.

2. Best Practice Guides and Tutorials

Employing content marketing—such as best practice guides or in-depth tutorials—allows you to showcase your organization as a thought leader.

Your potential clients likely have continuing education requirements or newly placed industry standards for which they need certification. A decision maker in HR or some other management role may not be up to speed on the new requirements.

The act of creating content serves as an educational opportunity for these people. To help them get the information they need to keep their people at the top of their craft.

Bonus tip: Embed a lot of share buttons on content like this so it can easily be bookmarked, emailed, exported, printed, or shared on enterprise communication platforms like Slack.

Are you launching a training course but also a provider of a software solution? Need more leads? We’ve got you covered with 14 more ideas just like the one above in this post… 15 Actionable Lead Generation Ideas For Software Companies

3. Blogging As A Tactic For Promoting Training Courses

Companies interested in growing their brand awareness through search engines should be creating at least one new piece of blog content per week. And yes, this applies to any company, regardless of industry.

Companies in the training industry are no different. In fact, regular blogging might be even more critical in the training industry. A higher amount of knowledge sharing should mean a more significant percentage of thought leadership.

Bonus tip: No matter your preferred communication medium, plan on creating a blog post that is at least 300 words in length once every five business days.

4. Case Studies To Promote Training Courses

Whether you provide training services to individuals or groups, what you do has an impact on the people you help level up. Let the results of your work speak for themselves by creating case studies to showcase your greatest successes.

In both personal and corporate training, people want to get the sense that you, specifically, can help them in their “unique situation.” Training companies should focus their case studies around the types of people and companies they want to attract to their business.

Are you a personal development company that wants more married businessmen as clients? Make a case study featuring one!

Do you have a leadership training course for the financial sector? Build a case study featuring employees from any of the “Big 5” accounting firms.

Bonus tip: Want to acquire visits from keyword searches to your case studies? Optimize the title tag, URL slug, and case study title in the following manner. Check out this example data set for this case study from OppenheimerFunds.

• Title: Oppenheimer Training Program: Custom Training To Identify Growth Companies
• URL: /case-studies/oppenheimerfunds/
• Case Study Title: OppenheimerFunds Improves Growth Company Identification By 80% After Training

5. Checklists and Worksheets

Checklists and worksheets are effective marketing assets to create. When they are optimized through SEO or supported through digital advertising, they can also be a high ROI item to drive sales leads into your pipeline.

One thing to remember about creating checklists and worksheets is that they can become outdated over time. This is especially true in industries where standards or regulations evolve over time. Training companies in education, government, healthcare, IT and legal will want to be mindful of this.

Bonus Tip: Create an interactive document that can be bookmarked in a browser and regularly revisited by your users. Is interactivity not possible? Host your checklist or worksheet as a branded Google Sheet for users to copy to their own Google Drive accounts.

6. Competitor Awareness

Whether you want to go toe-to-toe with an industry leader or you want to solidify your brand’s dominance, consider creating content about your competition. This is a high-value SEO and content marketing strategy for your brand if it classifies itself as a “challenger” in your industry.

Create pages of content on your site that either:

• Directly compare your training courses to the market leader and niche brands
• Identify a shortcoming of the services provided by your market leader/niche brands
• Offer an influencer the opportunity to compare you against your competitor as a guest post

Then proceed to highlight the strengths and unique value your training courses offer compared to your competition.

Bonus Tip: To promote training courses, pages like this allow your site to rank organically in keyword searches. You can also run digital advertising campaigns for keywords towards the end of the buyer’s journey like “Dale Carnegie alternatives” and “skillsoft vs mindgym.”

7. Digital Market Development Funds

“Integration and usage of technology in our day-to-day lives is at an all-time high, as we continue to shift to a ubiquitously digital world,” said Brian Fourman of Cooperate Marketing, a marketing agency in Chicago that solves complex problems for OEM’s and major service providers.

Some of the latest research by Nielsen, ComScore and other indicates that Americans spend close to 11 hours a day consuming media and nearly four hours of that consists of some form of digital across any number of platforms.

For marketers that have access to digital Market Development Funds (MDF’s), adopting a digital-first strategy can prove to be highly beneficial. Not only is a portion of your digital campaign already paid for with MDF’s, but when implemented correctly you can hyper-target your intended audience to convey the right message, at the right place, at the right time in a truly engaging and often personalized fashion. Plus, the cost of entry is significantly less than traditional media in which one is often forced to purchase the entire market (DMA).

Digital first strategy allows you to run any number of campaigns simultaneously to fulfill key marketing objectives at each level of the purchase funnel, whether to build brand awareness, familiarity, consideration, and/or to generate leads and convert them into sales. In addition, digital media allows for easy-to-implement message testing (A/B) that can be modified on the fly.

Copious amounts of readily available data further support your customized endeavor and provide quantifiable results that can easily be tracked. By knowing how to interpret and use this data, you can optimize current/future campaign creative to provide truly impactful results that guarantee the greatest ROI.”

8. Email Newsletter Sponsorship

Sponsoring email newsletters is a great way to infiltrate the inboxes of a significant number of highly targeted readers without the need to be CAN-SPAM compliant.

That doesn’t mean this tactic lacks strategic thinking. When you select an email newsletter to sponsor, here are three things to keep in mind:

1. Target professional organizations or networking groups of the industries you help train.
2. Have those organizations prove how engaged their readers are with data. You don’t want to just buy a list!
3. Create an exclusive offer to maximize engagement and conversions with your ad.

Bonus Tip: Support your exclusive offer or sponsorship of an email newsletter by creating a specific landing page for it. Extend the reach of your offer by applying SEO best practices and adding retargeting codes to the page for Bing, Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

9. Expert Roundups

You might be tired of reading “expert roundups”—but your target clients can’t get enough of them. Long list articles of helpful hacks, hints, tips, and tricks exist on nearly every business strategy out there.

Expert roundups—whether published on your site or elsewhere on the web—are a great way to improve the personal brand of your training team members. Additional benefits include:

• Increased thought leadership opportunities for your brand
• Increased visibility for your content on social networks
• Increased traffic and backlinks for expanding your SEO efforts

Bonus Tip: Need to find expert sources for your first roundup besides your own training team? Signup for a journalist/blogger account on Help A Reporter Out (HARO). HARO is a 3x per day newsletter sent to over 800K sources looking for opportunities to get media coverage.

10. Giveaways and Sweepstakes

Who doesn’t like getting something for free?!

When promoting training courses, letting potential students “try before they buy” can be an irresistible way to draw them in. Simply give them access to one session, program, or class at no cost.

Sweepstakes work in a similar fashion. However, instead of giving away your intellectual property, you will be packaging something together to entice future students to give you their contact information.

One disadvantage of this strategy is that you risk receiving a large number of registrants that may not result in quality sales opportunities.

Bonus Tip: Promote your giveaway or sweepstakes in a press release or by providing exclusive demos to bloggers and other online publishers. Don’t forget you can also shamelessly promote training courses in your outreach, too! You can tap into their follower counts and subscribers for leads while also earning high-quality backlinks to your domain.

11. Historical Optimization

Over the last few years, historical optimization has become an incredibly valuable SEO strategy for companies with a large archive of content.

To briefly summarize this tactic, find an old blog post (published six or more months ago) on your site that either:

• Generates a lot of traffic (good idea), or
• Converts (better idea)

Then refresh the content and re-publish it with a more recent date.

Establishing your trainers as thought leaders are critical to your success in promoting training courses. Historical optimization is a great way to get long term value out of content you published long ago.

Bonus tip: Have trainers who used to blog for your organization that are no longer there? Create a general author account on your blog using your company name, like “(Company Name) Team.” Change the author of a post if they are no longer a part of your team to that author.

Historical Optimization helped Corporate Visions improve their lead generation by 37% from SEO.
Learn more here.

12. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has had a ton of hype over the last year, as well as a lot of unwanted attention. Despite that surplus of hype floating around, a dedicated influencer campaign has a lot of potential.

If your company can partner with influencers on social media to increase awareness amongst a large fan base, the CPM can be very effective compared to traditional media buying. Just make sure that any influencer you invest in actually motivates their followers and fans to act.

Creating an exclusive offer for any influencer will be vital to seeing success with a campaign of this type.

Bonus Tip: Check out this comprehensive beginner’s guide to influencer marketing if you want to learn more about how to leverage this for your organization.

13. Infographics To Promote Training Courses

Infographics still have a place in the world of digital marketing, especially since most people still do not enjoy reading online.

If your company conducts its own original research or surveys, share your best statistic or a quotable statement in this visually appealing format. Engagement with your content and the likelihood that your target students remember what you wrote will undoubtedly improve.

Bonus Tip: Create a high-resolution copy of your infographic for companies that want your content as posters for their walls. You could sell them to take advantage of a non-traditional revenue stream or offer the high-res version as a piece of gated content.

14. LinkedIn Advertising

Don’t let LinkedIn Learning’s existence (formerly Lynda.com) scare you from the possibility of leveraging the most extensive professional social network to promote your training courses.

According to a case study from LinkedIn, e-learning solution provider, CrossKnowledge launched display ads, InMail, and sponsored updates for a campaign titled “Bye Bye Boss” in 2015.

The results?

“Benchmark-beating” click-through rates and over 50 leads generated on the campaign microsite.

Bonus Tip: No matter what platform you use for your landing pages, take advantage of LinkedIn AutoFill for your form fields. With the click of a button, visitors can become leads by populating your form with their LinkedIn profile information.

15. Microsite Development

“The use of microsites provides the perfect launchpad for new services,” says Denise DeSimone, Chairperson of C-Leveled, a full-service branding strategy and marketing agency.

Update: On April 21, 2022,
we announced our
acquisition of C-Leveled.

“Microsites are quick and easy to build, so they give you the ability to target particular audiences quickly. In some cases, microsites can be as much as five times more effective in generating leads than traditional campaigns.”

Bonus Tip: Optimize your main site and microsite for similar keywords, and support each site by targeting those keywords in a PPC campaign. Doing this allows presents an opportunity to occupy a minimum of 25% of a search engine results page.

16. Podcast Interviews To Promote Training Courses

Participating in podcast interviews is another opportunity for your talent and training staff to showcase their thought leadership.

But have you ever thought about hosting your own podcast? Podcasts have low production costs and listenership is rising. Plus, podcast listeners have over four times better brand recall on ads than traditional display campaigns.

Bonus Tip: If you host your own show, invite guests on your show who could be potential sales leads. In the training industry, consider hosting executives in HR or with specialization in companies you want as clients.

17. Quora Promoted Answers

Quora Promoted Answers are a relatively new advertising option on this quickly emerging platform.

You can reach a broad group of people on Quora who are researching questions and answers related to your area of expertise with a Promoted Answer.

For training companies who are already familiar with answering questions on Quora, you might not notice anything different in how you find places to share your insights.

What changes in a Promoted Answer? Two things:

1. The label next to the answer (Promoted By).
2. The name of the person and the business promoting the answer.

Bonus Tip: Has someone unaffiliated with your company answered a question on Quora that helps in promoting training courses offered by your company? Promote that answer instead of yours to get it shown to more people in any feed.

Interested in leveraging Quora for your SEO efforts? Find out if Quora can help your SEO efforts here.

18. Research and Surveys

If you want to make the case for your training solutions to potential clients, there may not be a better way to do that than by conducting research or surveys.

Do your clients have a common pain point they need addressing when they hire you? They probably are not alone.

Survey executives in your industry related to the common pain point your clients have. Then publish the results of your survey in a whitepaper or other type of report.

Then, do a press release about your research (and promoting training courses) and share it with the trade publication media in your industry for increased visibility.

Bonus Tip: Don’t forget to send the report you create to everyone who submits an answer to your survey.

19. Retargeting To Promote Training Courses

It doesn’t matter what you call this—remarketing, cyberstalking—it’s a crawesome (creepy + awesome) marketing tool.

Reach the 99% of visitors to your website that didn’t convert by retargeting them with display ads. You can use this strategy in search engines, display ads, social networks, and mobile apps.

Talk about creepy and awesome!

Bonus tip: If your training solutions require a long sales cycle, make sure you have your audience list set to as long a time period as possible prior to the start of promoting training courses.

20. Webinars To Promote Training Courses

If you are in the training business, then you likely have some comfort with public speaking. Leveraging live, web-based video conferences will be different than being in person with your clients, for sure. But it is a great way to connect with your target audience at scale, at any time they want to consume your training.

Best of all, if you host a webinar, your message can reach an audience of viewers and listeners from all over the world.

Bonus tip: It’s okay to put your webinars behind a gated form, but make sure the video content can be made available on demand. In today’s competitive business climate, you don’t want to make people wait to hear your training when there are others out there.

Key Takeaways on How to Market Training Courses Online

Develop Auditing Templates

Providing self-assessment tools helps potential clients identify their own paint points and training needs, which you are then in prime position to offer to address with your course.

Publish Best Practice Guides and Tutorials

Sharing in-depth content establishes your authority and educates your audience; this also makes them more likely to invest in your training programs.​

Maintain an Active Blog

Blogging regularly is critical in the training industry to improve search engine visibility and to keep your audience engaged with topics that you cover in your courses.​

Create Detailed Case Studies

Showcasing success stories from past clients demonstrates the tangible benefits of your training.

Host Webinars

Webinars enable you to reach people across the globe—plus, they give people a concrete sample of what your training is like.

Final Thoughts On Promoting Training Courses Online

Like many lucrative industries that are both knowledge and skills-based, promoting training courses effectively in today’s marketplace requires agility, consistency, and a little bit of luck.

This is true whether you are looking to go to market with a new training course, or you are part of an established training company looking to elevate your status.

Luckily, no matter what actionable digital marketing strategy you choose to promote your training course, they all can help you accomplish the following:

• Disrupt the market leader who is slow to take action
• Generate leads for your programs and direct sales
• Improve your company’s authority and thought leadership positions in your industry
• Increase awareness of your brand and programs through more web traffic
• Provide instant and long-term value to your most coveted buyers

You already know now is the time to increase your market share of the $360 billion training industry. If you need help from an online marketing agency to decide which strategy is the best to start snagging your share, just contact us.

This article was updated to add additional information on April 14th, 2025.

The post 20 Actionable Digital Marketing Ideas for Promoting Training Courses (Updated 2025) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Simply put, social commerce is the use of social media to drive sales.

It can be accomplished in a number of ways, including creating product pages on social networks, running ads with social media links, or even just including carousels to products on your posts. No matter how it’s done, the goal is always the same:

To get people to buy what you’re selling directly through your social media channels.

So does social commerce matter in the B2B world? The answer is a resounding yes! In fact, social commerce is becoming increasingly important for B2B companies as buyers become more reliant on social media to influence their purchasing decisions. Similar to writing in-depth blog content for your audience to bookmark or starting a digital marketing course for startups in your target industries, social commerce is another way to reach your customers on their time instead of in a place that is most convenient for you.

Here are a few examples of how social commerce can be used in B2B.

B2B Social Commerce Example 1: Create Product Pages

If you sell products that can be purchased online, creating product pages on social networks like Facebook and Instagram can help increase sales. By making it easy for potential customers to find your products and learn more about them, you can encourage more people to buy what you’re selling.

Creating product pages on sites like Facebook are just one way you can keep the train moving and carry your sales momentum online forward. Check out a few more of our best eCommerce tips for 2022.

B2B Use Case IRL: BulkBookstore

BulkBookstore.com is – you guessed it – an online retailer of bulk book orders to organizations like Duke University, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Hyatt Hotels. They keep a focus on serving the business community by not accepting orders from resellers, retailers, or individuals (unless you’re a teacher).

Their Facebook Shop is the third link across the navigation of their Facebook page. Their Facebook Shop functions almost exactly the same as the product listings on their website, featuring a product title, pricing, and description. To purchase an item, all their 10,300+ followers need to do is click the “view on website” button to be taken right to the product page on their website.

This is a high engagement platform for them to seriously boost the visibility of each new product on their site.

B2B Social Commerce Example 2: Run Ads With “Sign Up” Or “Buy” Buttons

Ads are a great way to promote your products or services on social media, and including links to your website or online store can help increase sales.

B2B Use Case IRL: Grade.us

Grade.us is a SaaS platform for online review management that was started in 2013. Today, it’s part of the Traject platform of digital marketing tools.

This may seem like a pretty standard practice today, but normally on platforms like LinkedIn you will find companies pointing the links in their ads to “Learn More” landing pages for gated resources, or to sign up for an upcoming webinar.

This tactic goes against the grain of what we would normally recommend on LinkedIn, but we are always interested in testing out new approaches to increasing free trial starts and driving down cost per acquisition.

This approach appears to do both.

Running LinkedIn Ads already? Thinking this might be a great way to get a performance boost? Before you go to “sign up” or “buy” ads, check out these 3 ways to boost your LinkedIn campaign performance.

B2B Social Commerce Example 3: Facebook Product Carousels

If you’re not ready to create product pages on social networks just yet, you can still use posts on Facebook to drive sales by creating carousels with links to your products. This makes it easy for potential customers to purchase what you’re selling with a simple click away from their social media feed.

Before you press publish on your first carousel though, make sure you know the best time to post it to Facebook.

B2B Use Case IRL: Quill’s “Fun Friday Finds”

Quill has been providing reliable service to its customers since 1956. We assume they haven’t been online that entire time. Over the past two years, they have been voted America’s Best Customer Service provider in the Office Supply Category by Newsweek and Statista.

As you can see, there are a number of ways that social commerce can be used in B2B. And as social media becomes increasingly important in the purchasing decisions of buyers, it’s only going to become more important for companies to start using social commerce. This carousel links to 9 different pages on their website – 8 products, and one to their Free Shipping page.

Over the past month, their social media team has been publishing carousels like this weekly. Prior to that, they had been creating about 1 carousel per month over the course of three months.

We don’t have an inside source at Quill to verify this was successful, but based on their increased usage, we’re willing to bet it was successful for them.

Ready To Start Trying Social Commerce For Your B2B Brand?

What do you think? Is social commerce something you’re going to start using in your B2B marketing?

Hopefully these examples were enough to get the brainstorming underway for you and your team.

Are you considering social commerce as a strategy to improve (or start) your digital marketing efforts? Unsure about whether to handle the campaigns in house or by working with an agency? Determine which marketing solution is right for you by checking out our In-House vs. Agency Partner webinar before learning more about our social media advertising services.

The post What is Social Commerce? Does It Matter In B2B? appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

A Versatile Whole

So modularizing your content can mean taking a single piece and presenting it in many places in its entirety. It’s moveable, portable, and whole.

Strategically presenting subdivisions is another modular flavor. 

Repackageable Parts
Modular content can also refer to a lengthy, robust piece that you chop into many smaller, self-contained pieces—modules—that you then present in various venues.

The idea is to create content that works as a whole or in its parts. You want to structure your content such that internally coherent chunks can be separated from the whole and used on their own.  

Let’s say we have a ten-gallon bucket of ice cream and a house filled with hyperactive toddlers (or adult creatives, same difference). 

We need to use that bucket of ice cream to get all those toddlers into the living room for nap time, but they’re toddlers (or, again, adult creatives), and they’re very particular about how they consume frozen sugary treats. 

One modular approach to this problem would be to take bits of that ice cream to create ice cream bowls, ice cream cones, and blended cups of ice cream smoothies. 

Each repurposing of the core ice cream content will attract different audiences. By utilizing all of them, we can gather all the little rascals into the room and … (ice cream drumstickroll, please!) … mission accomplished. 

Of course, now they’re all hopped up on sugar, but that’s a different problem. 

Modular content can also work in the opposite way. Using the same example, we can put together a couple of treat trays from various little pieces of candy and snacks from around the house. So, you can build a variety of content from smaller, granular content. 

The important thing is that modular content can, with a little creative application, appeal to different audiences. 

Here’s How You Can Use It

Your ace content writer has just created a definitive 2,700-word blog that relates maverick marketing techniques to how Tom Cruise’s character in the 80s blockbuster hit movie Top Gun managed to pull off a negative-4G inverted dive in an F-14 Tomcat. 

It’s a brilliantly written blog. It hits all the SEO checkmarks. It’s long, it’s informative, it makes great use of keywords, headers, and subheaders. The problem is that it’s a blog in a sea of blogs on your site, and you want it to pull more weight for you. 

Well, no problem. Let’s see how we can make it work for you elsewhere.

“This is what I call a target-rich environment.”

Before you start creating your modular content, you’ll want to identify your target audiences. 

Your LinkedIn audience is definitely looking to your company as a thought leader in the world of marketing, so their attention is a must. 

Then there are the social media platforms. You think your Instagram account has a little bit of reach, and a support Tweet couldn’t hurt either. Both audiences will also probably be more excited about the Top Gun spin. 

You wonder if maybe you couldn’t go for a more visual audience as well. Could YouTube work for you somehow? Absolutely. Jet fighters and video content work like peanut butter and chocolate.  

Targets locked. Fire away.

For the LinkedIn content, pulling a particularly interesting passage from the blog and making a post out of it will draw interest from the professionals in the audience. The blurb should contain information that gives it value on its own, but also entice people to follow a link to the full blog. 

Now, in consideration of our audiences on the other platforms, we might want to jump ahead to YouTube content. 

If you think of the blog more as a script, suddenly you have the foundation for a video. Cut together stills from the movie along with free-use jet fighter footage, add a narrator over it, and now you have a video. Optimize the description for best results, and don’t be afraid to add in some explosions for extra punch. 

When you’ve got your video uploaded to YouTube, it’s time to talk about it on Twitter and Instagram. Link the video on both platforms along with a clever line like “Here’s why buzzing the tower can pay off in your marketing strategies.”

Remember, it’s important that all your modular content drive the audience back to your site. 

You Probably Already Know This, But…

The thing about modular content creation is that you’ve probably already been practicing it to some degree. Any marketing strategy worth its salt is going to involve reaching as many audiences as possible with content. 

The real strategy is in identifying those audiences you want to reach and then piecing out the modular content in an appropriate manner to reach those audiences. 

Content Creator’s Takeaway

Modular content helps you work smarter, not harder. Creating content that you can repackage (in whole or in parts) to best fit the destination marketing channel means more people will see your content, and it means you don’t have to start from scratch and design a piece for each platform. 

CMO’s Takeaway
Modular content helps maintain brand identity. Communicating a strong, consistent message is key to establishing and maintaining your brand. Modular content ensures that the tone and substance of your publications is unified.

At DOM, we’re experts in reaching audiences. If you’re looking for help with your modular content strategy, be sure to get in touch and find out what we can do for you. 

The post How Can I Use Modular Content in My Digital Marketing? appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

FACEBOOK

How to Create a Facebook Business Page

Consider this: 2.5 billion people log on to Facebook each month. Over 140 billion businesses have a Facebook business page. If you haven’t joined the competition, now is the time to better reach your audience.

Facebook Page vs. Facebook Profile: What is the Difference?

Don’t make the mistake of confusing your customers when they come across your Facebook page intended to be a business page when in reality is set up as a personal page. There are many differences between the two, including the ability to obtain page likes and run paid ads.

How to Set Up Facebook Ads Manager

Facebook Ads Manager makes creating engaging content for your audience much easier and streamlines the process into one place. First, you need to have a business page. See how to set up Ads Manager for your business.

How to Create a Facebook Shop for Your Business

If your brand sells products, you should consider making a Facebook Shop part of your sales and marketing strategy. This allows consumers to buy your products directly through Facebook, which has the potential to increase sales and provide added convenience for your customers.

How to Use Facebook Business Manager

Facebook Business Manager is a one-stop-shop for your business to access all Facebook marketing activities for your page. You can also assign other employees to access to manage the page, such as responding to messages and viewing ad performance.

How Does Facebook Business Manager Work?

Think of Facebook Business Manager as a centralized place to find all of your ads, posts, messages, and comments. You can also create and preview Instagram ads here, too. Make sure to take advantage of this feature to make life easier.

TWITTER

How to Use Twitter Hashtags Effectively for Business

Hashtags are a great tool for categorizing your brand’s content on Twitter. By incorporating the right hashtags, more users can find you when searching for the same topic. Learn how to use this effectively.

How to Promote a Tweet

You might be creating paid social advertisements on other platforms, but do you have a paid strategy for Twitter? With no cap on budget limitations, Twitter is an interesting place to promote the content you want your audience to see.

How to Use Twitter Effectively for Business

Twitter can be a lead generating powerhouse. Often seen as just another social media platform, your brand might be missing the mark on reach your audience on Twitter. Learn new tips on how to best strategize for this platform.

How to Change Your Twitter Account to a Business Account

In an effort to keep your already established followers, if your Twitter account is not already set up as a business account, there’s a way to do so. Follow this guide to find out how and start taking advantage of Twitter for Business.

LINKEDIN

How to Use Hashtags on LinkedIn for Business Growth

You might not think of LinkedIn when you think of hashtags, but the platform officially introduced them in 2018. This is a great way to help others find your content through the search feature.

How to Use LinkedIn for Personal Branding

In many ways, you are your brand. And if you’re in a leadership position, it’s important to make a name for yourself in association with your business. LinkedIn is a tool for positioning yourself as a thought leader and utilizing your personal network to promote your brand.

How to Find Clients on LinkedIn

LinkedIn features many useful tools for finding leads. For instance, you can search companies and individuals by industry, geography, and more.

INSTAGRAM

How to Create a Poll on Instagram Stories

Instagram stories are a great way to really engage with your followers. There are many fun and interactive features to choose from, including polls. Here’s how to run a poll to ask your customers a question, like their thoughts on a new potential product.

How to Get More Followers on Instagram for Your Business

Obtaining new followers is no easy feat, but there are ways to increase your success. The more followers you have, the more likely you are to see more sales and increase brand awareness.

How to Choose Hashtags for Instagram

With so many hashtags floating around Instagram, it’s important for your brand to be strategic in choosing which ones to use. Picking relevant hashtags can help up your Instagram game immensely.

How to Create Branded Instagram Stickers for Stories

Instagram has many fun features that are engaging for users. One of those features is “stickers” that can be placed on Instagram stories. Brands can create their own unique stickers that anyone can use.

TIKTOK

TikTok for Business: Is It Right for Yours?

The demographics of people who watch TikTok may surprise you. It’s not just teens who are on the platform. Find out if taking advantage of TikTok is a surprisingly smart move for your business.

How to Use TikTok for Business

TikTok isn’t just a place for lip-syncing and dance challenges. It can actually serve as a very educational platform. Learn how to create relevant content on behalf of your brand that resonates with your audience.

How to Come Up With Content Ideas for TikTok

We get it, TikTok is pretty new to everyone and entirely different from other social media platforms. If you don’t know where to begin, we’ve got your back on coming up with content ideas.

How to Create a Business Account on TikTok

There’s a difference between a personal account and a business account on TikTok. Before your brand joins the platform, make sure to read this guide to setting up the right type of account.

SNAPCHAT

How to Use Snapchat for Business Growth

There are many useful features for businesses to take advantage of on Snapchat. From paid advertisements to custom filters, it’s a great place to engage with potential customers and increase brand awareness.

How to Develop a Snapchat Branding Strategy

There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to Snapchat. From partnering with influencers to learning all of the available features on the platform, learn how to best strategize for Snapchat.

PINTEREST

How to Make Pinterest Work for Your Business

Your brand doesn’t have to be crafty to be on Pinterest. There’s a place for more types of businesses than you may think. Learn how to effectively use Pinterest for your unique business and industry.

How to Use Pinterest to Sell Products

Pinterest is a great avenue for selling products to potential customers. Catch their eye with high-quality photography and link directly to your website. Learn how.

MAXIMIZE YOUR SUCCESS ON SOCIAL

How to Add Social Media Profiles to Google My Business

Combing the power of Google and your social media presence can make a huge difference in finding your brand online. Add your social media profiles to Google My Business for increased visibility. Learn how!

How to Create Social Media Images that Support Your Brand

The right messaging is important, but the visuals are just as vital for drawing in your audience and leaving a lasting impression. Make sure the images you’re using on social media are high quality and aligned with your marketing strategy.

How to Monitor Your Brand on Social Media

When you choose to have a presence on social media, you also add more responsibility to your plate. It’s important to designate someone to monitor each platform in order to respond to customers in a timely fashion and catch any errors posted to the page.

Our team of experts is here to lighten your workload when it comes to all things social. Reach out if you’re feeling overwhelmed or simply want a second opinion. We can come up with a strategy to help your brand get results, faster, or take care of the posting for you. We will also measure the results of your posts to ensure you’re putting out the right types of content to reach your target audience. Reach out!

Build Brand Awareness On Social Media

Utilizing social media is a great way to build brand awareness, and theses C-leveled e-books break down how and why you should do it. Take advantage of these free platforms to reach millions of customers and let us guide you through social media best practices.

Download The Ebook

The post Social Media Guide: How to Use Social Media to Grow Your Business appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

You are at risk of losing any of your historical performance data in 2023 if you don’t set up and properly configure Google Analytics 4. Learn how the two platforms compare to each other in this blog post – Google Analytics 4 vs Universal Analytics.

If you have been using Google Analytics or any web analytics tool for any length of time, you’ve probably come to experience that your data isn’t always 100% reliable.

There are countless variables which can impact the quality of your data, and sometimes, it can be challenging to gauge what is skewing your data or why it isn’t there at all.

The reason why you want to diagnose and resolve any issues with your Google Analytics data is because there is no telling if it’s a temporary concern or if it’s causing a blind spot. Traffic data is vital to judging performance on any website, so it’s best to try and figure out what’s happening.

From time to time, our team makes some unusual discoveries. Recently, we uncovered an issue with LinkedIn referral traffic that is probably more widespread across the web than most folks realize.

If you have a suspicion that you’re missing referral traffic data from LinkedIn, there’s a good chance that you might be right.

What’s Happening – Huge Spikes in Direct Traffic

Imagine this — let’s say that you just launched a new website promoting your brand new B2B focused business blog. After only a few months, you’ve built a small but devoted audience and grown your social following.

Because your blog’s content is geared towards B2B businesses, your readers tend to spend a lot of time connecting with other professionals and consuming content on LinkedIn. After experimenting with LinkedIn’s publishing platform, you began to notice a highly positive response to your LinkedIn posts.

Despite a shift to content creation directly in LinkedIn and receiving lots of views, you begin to observe that LinkedIn isn’t getting you very much traffic.

After a while, traffic starts to pick up at a pretty consistent pace across all channels, except one in particular — direct traffic. You may get a nice ego boost at first, but the truth is that such a huge difference in traffic totals doesn’t quite add up.

As we found out for ourselves, this is happening to a ton of different websites, and we wanted to get to the bottom of it.

What We Were Noticing

The issue that we were running into was pretty consistent. Companies who are very active on social media were experiencing considerable increases in direct traffic according to Google Analytics.

At first, we thought it was just the latest round of referral spam — meaning it was just spammy bot traffic.

We then noticed a few other typical pieces of data:

• A bulk of the direct traffic was either to blog posts or home pages
• When we added “network domain” as a secondary dimension we were seeing unknow.unknown (first sign that this could be bot traffic)
• When we added service provider as a secondary dimension we were seeing Microsoft as the highest provider (the second sign that it may be bot traffic)

As our team sat down and began to dig in to the matter, we had realized that Google Analytics wasn’t reporting as much traffic from LinkedIn as we thought it would. Coupled with the fact that Microsoft owns LinkedIn, we started to wonder if there was some connection.

We analyzed every possible angle until eventually, we had an idea for a test. In real-time, we opened a LinkedIn post with links to a website we manage and Google Analytics side-by-side.

And at that moment, we had our proof. Nearly every link click was reported as a direct visit.

Why was this happening?

As it turns out, we also noticed that every link click being reported as a direct visit was pointing to an unsecured (non-HTTPS) URL. After that, it all started to make sense as we soon realized that this had something to do with encrypted URLs.

HTTPS Refresher

For those of you who don’t know or need a refresher on the subject, HTTPS is a particular web encryption which protects the privacy of websites and visitors so malicious third-parties can’t have access to potentially sensitive data. HTTPS is becoming widely adopted across the web and has been available to websites for many years, but this wasn’t always the case.

Many years ago, global Internet speeds were not what they are today, meaning that websites with an HTTPS encryption had extremely long load times. Along with the extra cost of obtaining an SSL certificate, the HTTP — minus the “secure” bit — was the standard for a very long time.

As user data privacy becomes a growing concern and Google has said it favors HTTPS over HTTP in search, and for Google Chrome users, more and more websites are making a move to HTTPS.

This is where LinkedIn comes in and how traffic data is getting misreported

Sharing Links on LinkedIn

As users share links on social media, it’s important to understand how HTTPS plays a role.

If someone posts a link from an HTTPS secure website like LinkedIn to a non-HTTPS site, all data from the session is removed to prevent a hacker from reading the data intended to be protected.

However, if a link from secure site links out to another HTTPS site, then the encryption is never broken. Since the encryption is never broken, the referral data of where the session came from is kept intact.

Most social media networks configure their server redirects in a way that always keeps referral data intact regardless of SSL encryption. But for some reason, this is not the case with LinkedIn. Throughout their platform, we noticed that links within profile bios, profile summaries (which open in a lightbox), or LinkedIn articles were showing up as direct visits if the link was non-HTTPS. Interestingly enough, we also noticed that URL shorteners such as Bit.ly don’t keep referral data intact either, isolated to just LinkedIn.

In most cases, websites will have a domain-wide redirect which guides users from non-secure versions of URLs to the HTTPS versions. The issue may persist for websites without an SSL encryption— but we have a few solutions.

How to Fix LinkedIn Referral Traffic Data

No one likes an incomplete picture, and there’s no reason why you should settle for insufficient data. Here a couple ways you can go about correcting this issue with LinkedIn referral traffic to give your data a bit more reliability.

For HTTPS Site Owners

For websites with an HTTPS configuration, your solution is simple — remember always to share the right versions of your links.

Going beyond LinkedIn, it’s a general SEO best practice to be consistent when posting your links anywhere on the web. If your URLs have an HTTPS configuration, make sure all external backlinks have the ‘s’ part of it. So if you’re sharing on LinkedIn, never forget to share links with HTTPS in the full URL.

This —>  https://example.com

Not —> http://example.com

For Non-Secure Site Owners

For websites without an SSL encryption, there are two options, but we highly recommend you take the first:

1)      Make the jump to HTTPS: It may be costly and feel time-consuming, but it will be worth it. Not only will you do your part to ensure visitors to your site don’t have their privacy compromised by fraudsters, but you are also sending an important signal to search engines for SEO purposes. HTTPS is becoming the standard and prolonging the inevitable will never help you in the long-run.

2)      Add UTM parameters: This is a bit more complicated than simply making the switch to HTTPS, but this is an option as well. UTM parameters will help your Google Analytics track visits from LinkedIn more accurately when sharing tagged links with ‘source=linkedin.’ Just remember to be consistent with title casing in your UTM tagging. Otherwise, this will change how the data is reported.

Conclusion

No matter how you use social media, you always want to have the most accurate, reliable set of data possible. To ensure its accuracy, it’s critical that you always ask questions and be proactive in finding explanations for unusual changes in Google Analytics or any other analytics tools.

In the case of LinkedIn referral traffic becoming distorted, the best thing you can do for both your website’s SEO and traffic data is to consider making a move to HTTPS. But before you take the dive, keep in mind that going secure isn’t a simple process and requires a bit of strategy before implementation.

If you’re interested in learning how you can drive better results with search engine marketing, schedule a digital marketing consultation. Or, to get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as Google Partners before you reach out.

The post Why LinkedIn Is Messing Up Your Analytics Traffic Data (and How to Fix It) [Updated 2020] appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Why do they turn away? For a couple of reasons:

1. The pipeline has a long buying cycle and extended time is needed to propose, close, and fulfill new sales
2. The direction of their time is shifted away from lead generation to oversight of new product development or service implementation
3. The interest in building up a second lead generation channel from the ground up, in an effort to diversify sources

While many of the reasons listed above may sound like a great problem for your company to have, each reason can cause you to turn away from lead generation. This can quickly result in a dried up pipeline, the archnemesis of a marketing manager for a growing software company.

Because of this situation, you need to stay focused on lead generation and find several consistent sources for marketing and sales-qualified leads. Below, I’ve compiled 15 lead generation ideas that are both actionable and effective.

1. Best Practice Guides & Problem-Solving Tutorials

This is a very commonly used tactic by nearly every B2B solution provider on the Internet – whether they are a software company or not.

Your potential customers have to upgrade their legacy systems to stay competitive or get in line with newly placed industry standards. They may not know what they need to do, or they may only know what problems they experience with their existing solutions. You need to create content that serves as an educational opportunity for them and their team members.

Added bonus: Include buttons on this page that makes your guide easy to bookmark, print, PDF, email, or share on an office messaging platform like Slack or Yammer.  

2. Chatbots

There once was a time I installed a chat plugin on a website and generated a lead for a tech company the very first night! While this can definitely work to generate more leads for your business, consider having an established policy for how to handle support requests that come in through online chat.

When it comes to utilizing chatbots, there are a ton of options and things to consider. For instance, if you already have a customer support platform, there are multiple integration options for Zendesk chatbots and the like. If you don’t want to muddy the waters between your sales team and support team, then limit the use of your chat application on certain pages that existing customers are less likely to visit.

There’s a lot of content out there on the different types of chatbots and the many benefits they can bring to your company. Before making a decision on the best chatbot solution for your company, we suggest you check out some of the following resources:

• Creating Chatbots and Virtual Assistants That Really Work
• What’s The Difference Between Conversational Chatbots and AI?

Added bonus: Some chat apps can even force popup on pages that you specify, like service landing pages, FAQ, or pricing pages. While this may turn away some visitors, interesting prospects are likely to engage you if they are that far along in their process. 

3. Software Marketing Ideas Including Checklists, Worksheets, and Templates

Resources like this are comparable to best practice guides and tutorials, with the difference that they should be living, breathing resources that a prospective lead can interact with to chart their progress or repurpose in their daily work routines. If interactivity is not an option on your website, at least make this resource downloadable as a spreadsheet or text file.

Added bonus: If an interactive document is not possible on your own website, consider hosting a spreadsheet in Google Drive for users to copy to their own Drive folders. If you allow this, however, try to find a way to brand the file to avoid having another company re-brand a resource you created.

4. Software Marketing Ideas Including Co-marketing

This is a commonly used tactic with channel program providers in both the computer hardware and software marketing verticals. In most cases, your company can probably use this as a tactic online and offline and generate a variety of leads with limited out of pocket costs. In many cases, the partner will assist in helping you cover the marketing costs and also aide in cross-promotion of the event to their marketing list.

Added bonus: As long as your lead generation idea will also result in sales opportunities for the co-marketing partner, don’t shy away from requesting their support for a solution where you only white label their product. For instance, if a campaign you want to run results in sales that will require you to increase server space, API calls, or application installations of the partner solutions, tell them that when you apply for the marketing funds.

5. Custom Option Contact Us For Software Marketing Ideas

If you target customers are medium-sized businesses or larger, then your software is likely going to be implemented within the framework of a legacy system. If your software isn’t going to be implemented as a solution, it will still likely require some amount of customization in order to be a viable solution. Make sure you give potential customers like these the opportunity to contact you directly with an RFP or fill out a quick form to discuss their needs. Otherwise, you may miss out on a game-changing opportunity.

Added bonus: Businesses of all sizes will review your pricing pages. Make sure you give clients that don’t fit one of your primary pricing models the opportunity to contact you with a clear call-to-action for custom projects on these pages.

6. Email Courses

While this strategy takes a lot of work to set up on the front end, it can be very effective for generating leads when software marketing ideas require a high amount of education and supporting documentation to create a sales opportunity. Email marketing empowers companies to cash in on leads.

Added bonus: Nearly all major email marketing solutions have drip campaign functionality included in them. The cost to utilize this strategy has decreased dramatically in recent years.

7. Gated Content

Yes, it is 2019… and yes, gated content still absolutely works if your company needs software marketing ideas that need to improve the quality of your lead generation!

I know gating content is generally considered to be a no-no – especially in the tech world. But no matter what Spiceworks tells you in their reports, my own lead generation testing (and success) indicates that tech professionals will not only provide you the information in exchange for gated content – they will even do so for your own sales literature!

The process is pretty simple – do a survey of something, develop a whitepaper or case study, create an infographic that relates to the challenges of your target customers… and then put it behind a form in exchange for a newsletter signup or basic contact information.

This strategy works well because providing content as a download in exchange for contact information can be leveraged on multiple advertising platforms. In addition to generating organic traffic from search and social media, putting a few dollars behind these pieces of content on AdWords, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can help turn those platforms into lead generation opportunities, also.

Added bonus: The less “valuable” the information you are providing to your target customer, the fewer form fields you should require them to fill out to receive the information. For an ebook or whitepaper, asking them to fill out detailed company information should be okay. For your sales brochure? Limit it to no more than first name and email.

8. Giveaway Your Product For Great Software Marketing Ideas

Of course, this should work to generate more leads for your company… after all, who doesn’t like getting something for free?! One disadvantage to this strategy, however, is that you risk receiving a quantity of leads that may not result in quality sales opportunities.

To help combat the quantity over the quality challenge, make sure you require the downloader or person requesting your giveaway to provide some type of personally identifiable information about themselves in exchange. You can also consider requiring them to signup for your newsletter or share your link on a social network in exchange.

Added bonus: To use your free download offer as a benefit to your SEO efforts, send an exclusive free trial to bloggers and other social media influencers to review prior to public launch. Not only can you tap into their follower counts and subscribers for potential leads, but you are also likely to earn some high-quality links back to your domain in the process.

9. Helpful Videos

I know, I know… your software is already industry-leading in terms of user-friendliness, and you provide industry-leading, AI powered customer service.

But guess what? You haven’t tapped into 100% of your market, so there are still people out there who don’t know how great your software can be for their business. Instead of focusing on creating customer supporting videos, create helpful video content for the percentage of your customers that use other software solutions. Highlight the benefits of your software over your competitor’s and show them how it will make their lives/jobs easier.

Added bonus: Share your video clips on YouTube and optimize the titles and descriptions of each clip for product comparison keyword phrases, like “Firefox vs. Chrome” or “Mac vs. PC”.

10. Newsjacking Major Industry Events

Even if it doesn’t directly affect you – good news and bad news happens in your industry on a regular basis.

Market leaders host conventions. Startups in your niche raise capital. Major platform providers get breached, hacked, or experience significant downtime. Competitors make customer service gaffes that impact a large percentage of their customer base.

Are you prepared to take advantage of the opportunities these events can provide to your business?

If you have a blog, the answer is most definitely yes! Create content around these events, and provide your own unique insights into each event, and how it relates to your target customers.

Added bonus: Depending on how aggressive you want to be with generating leads around this tactic, running AdWords campaigns on relevant keywords for these events (like “dreamforce 2017”, “bluehost hosting outage”, or “snap IPO”), can have a major positive impact on your lead tallies.

11. Pricing Pages

There are a lot of software companies – particularly SaaS companies that sell monthly package plans – that include pricing pages as part of their site structure. But on the other side of the fence, many B2B software sellers still often oppose publishing their pricing online.

Why? Because they want as many visitors as possible to request further information, schedule a demo, or take some other action… and fear they will lose sales opportunities if they are transparent with their pricing.

Well, those companies are right about one thing – they will likely lose leads by including pricing on their websites. However, my experience can also confirm that pricing pages eliminate a large percentage of leads that shop only with price as a deciding factor. Show your pricing, and save your sales team some time dealing with leads that “just want to know the price”.

Added bonus: if your software has variable pricing, list all of your rates as “Starting At” prices, include all of your available options, and use a “Submit RFQ” as your CTA at the bottom of the form instead of “Add To Cart” or “Sign Up Now”.

12. Product Comparison Vs. Top Competitors

Product comparison content is a great way to show how your software is different (and in most cases, better!) than your competition. Depending on how you choose to present your product comparison content, this can be done in a way that potential customers should easily be able to evaluate. If SEO strategies are a top driver of leads for your company, then product comparisons should be an essential part of your digital marketing plan if you are looking to expand your opportunities.

Has a company in your niche leveraged this strategy against your brand? Take action with this post breaking down PPC and SEO ideas to use when you find a competitor using your company name as a keyword.

Added bonus: Having pages like this built on your site will also allow you to rank and run advertising campaigns for keywords centered around alternatives to your competitor (like “Hotjar alternatives” and “alternatives to Salesforce”) and take top positions for searches that include the word “versus” in their query (like “apache vs cloudera” or “WooCommerce vs Magento”).

13. Quizzes

Think about how many of your potential customers spend their spare time on Facebook trying to figure out which Kardashian they most closely resemble, and guess what quotes were said by either a presidential candidate or Larry The Cable Guy.

If they are willing to invest time into quizzing and educating themselves about these frivolous questions, do you think they would be interested in investing a few minutes discovering if their department or company are fully prepared to handle the challenges your software can solve? For the sake of humanity, I sure hope the answer is yes!

Added bonus: Instead of asking these quiz takers for their contact information before they get started, or after they see the results, suggest some of your gated content as further reading once they complete the quiz!

14. Resource Guides and Expert Roundups

There’s a lot of content that can be bundled under this category – everything from a roundup of industry experts offering tips on a topic, to listicles that rank, rate, or review the best/worst of anything that is important to your audience.

You might be tired of reading “expert roundups”—but your target clients can’t get enough of them. Long list articles like what we are suggesting here exist on nearly every business strategy out there.

Whether you decide to publish these blog posts on your site or elsewhere on the web — they are a great way to improve the brand reputation of your company, as well as the personal brands of your team members. Additional benefits include:

• Increased thought leadership opportunities for your brand
• Increased visibility for your content on social networks
• Increased traffic and backlinks for expanding your SEO efforts

Added bonus: We do this very well on our own site. Please check out our online marketing terms glossary or our International SEO Tips blog post with over 20 industry experts for examples of this marketing strategy at work. You can also signup for a journalist/blogger account on Help A Reporter Out (HARO) to find expert sources to contribute to your roundup. HARO is a 3x per day newsletter sent to over 800K sources looking for opportunities to get media coverage.

15. Test Something With Your Software

Are you making a bold claim in your sales and marketing material, like that your software is successful in its tasks 100% of the time? Is it the only solution on the market that performs a certain task? Does it respond consistently under extreme conditions? Prove it by putting your software to the test with the help of an unbiased third party, and share the results publicly.

Just make sure to inform your marketing reps and copywriters beforehand, because after you publish the results they may need to adjust some verbiage depending on the outcome of the tests.

Added bonus: Make sure whoever you trust to do the tests don’t break your only demo version of your software. I’m not saying, I’m just sayin…

16. Site Retargeting On Top Of The Funnel Informational Content

In today’s world of search engine optimization services, comprehensive content is the king of ranking at the top of the results pages for short tail/high search volume keyword phrases.

So often times, you will find blog or article content on websites that answer questions you suspect everyone researching a company would already know, like “what is VOIP?” or “what is training data?”

Why do other software companies do this? We can think of a few reasons:

1. For the brand awareness and exposure of ranking on the first page for a keyword potential leads search for at the very beginning of their information gathering process.
2. To have content considered linkworthy to nearly any website owner around the web.
3. So that they can leverage site retargeting strategies through the entire buyer’s journey of a potential lead

Option 3 is the key strategy for publishing top of the funnel content for lead generation – you get the added bonus of adding retargeting to the page and building a list of visitors at the beginning of their search for a solution provider.

It doesn’t matter what you call this 1-2 lead generation punch, it’s going to have crawesome (creepy + awesome) results.

Stalk the 99% of visitors to your website that read an informational article they found from keyword search, but are no where near ready to become a lead, by retargeting them with display ads. You can use this strategy in search engines, display ads, social networks, and mobile apps.

Bonus tip: If your software solution requires a long sales cycle, make sure you have your audience list set in retargeting to the longest time period possible.

Final Thoughts On How To Generate Leads With Your Software Marketing Ideas

As documented above, there are a lot of ways your software company can generate leads online. No matter what tactics you choose, each strategy requires testing, a varying degree of manpower to get implemented, and a few tweaks or customizations to fit the needs of your customers and help you achieve your goals.

No matter what tactics you try to help your pipeline grow, always be testing and regularly evaluate the results to maximize performance.

If you’re interested in learning how you can drive better results with search engine marketing, schedule a digital marketing consultation.

The post 16 Actionable Lead Generation Ideas For Software Companies (Updated November 2019) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Yet many of us don’t take the time to optimize our LinkedIn pages. This is because while many people realize that the social platform benefits job seekers, many fail to realize that knowing how to optimize LinkedIn can help build new clients. While it’s clear that this social/professional platform benefits job seekers, what’s less understood is that a properly optimized LinkedIn can help businesses connect with new clients.

That’s right, just like optimizing for Google search, optimizing your LinkedIn profile helps to increase views and awareness for your services. If you are a salesperson, your LinkedIn profile needs to be tightly optimized. An optimized LinkedIn profile helps increase business opportunities effortlessly.

In other words, if you can’t be found, increasing sales become a more difficult journey.

So let’s make things easier. Let’s learn how to optimize your LinkedIn profile and turn you into an automated networking monster who attracts inbound leads.

The Importance of a LinkedIn Optimization Sales Funnel

For the most part, we can agree that the “sales funnel” is overused. It’s a buzzword. But it’s the best word we have to describe strategically processing inbound leads.

You should present your best work on LinkedIn. This is one of the quickest and easiest ways that a prospect can learn about you and your work. When browsing LinkedIn, prospects delve into your achievements. And Reputation. Plus when a personal connection is flanked by a work portfolio, a prospect trusts you more.

And business professionals are flooding LinkedIn more than ever before. In 2009, 37 million business professionals used LinkedIn. In 2016, that number reached a stunning 467 million, according to Statista Research.

Find more statistics at Statista.

Today, LinkedIn boasts 645 million people.

Make no mistake about it, if you pass on LinkedIn SEO optimization, you pass on opportunity to grow your company.

LinkedIn Optimization Steps

Let’s break down simple and effective ways to optimize your LinkedIn profile.

Make Your Profile Photo Professional

To use LinkedIn as a tool to help build company leads, you need a professional profile photo. Unlike Facebook, your cat’s cute photo won’t work. LinkedIn is about building trust. If people search for “digital marketing professionals” on LinkedIn, they aren’t clicking on a cat photo. Moreover, a picture of you bonging a beer isn’t a good idea, either.

You should upload a professional headshot to your LinkedIn profile. Many photographers offer business professional photoshoots for affordable pricing. However, if you don’t want to shell out any cash for a headshot, ask your cool friend that digs photography. Do anything but upload a blurry photo of yourself.

Your LinkedIn profile photo is the first thing prospects see when they search LinkedIn for services. Don’t ruin this vital opportunity by neglecting your headshot.

Banner Image (maybe)

Like Facebook, LinkedIn allows you to update both your profile picture and banner image. It’s best practice to update both if you can. But also, the banner image isn’t as important as the profile image. You can be a little more creative on the banner image, but you should remain somewhat business professional.

Here’s where you optimize both of your LinkedIn profile images:

If you can’t come up with a good idea for the banner, just leave it the default blue strobes. No harm, no foul.

You might already be using the banner to promote your company’s latest offer. (Aren’t you a smart cookie!) Just be careful not to allow your profile to look like a billboard ad. That will turn people off.

Optimize Your LinkedIn Summary Space

If you’re an SEO professional, you understand how imperative it is to work keywords into your text. It stands to reason that your LinkedIn summary should be treated in the same way.

Most people describe themselves in their LinkedIn summary. That’s a great start. It’s even better to optimize that text by strategically deploying keywords.

So what’s the next step?

First, write the finest LinkedIn summary you can. If need be, get help from a copywriter. Get feedback from other business professionals you trust; they can help you gauge whether the message you are trying to send is being received. Keep your writing to the point; avoid long summaries like the plague. You need to make it clear who you are and what you do in a concise, friendly, professional manner. This isn’t about length. It’s about substance.

Once you’ve refined your LinkedIn summary, it’s time to optimize it.

First, establish which keywords you want to show up for when business prospects are searching. For example, if you run a digital agency that provides PPC services, you will want to include “PPC agency” as a keyword. However, find just a few powerful keywords to sprinkle through your summary. Don’t include too many, lest you appear to be brazenly keyword stuffing. Plus, an overabundance of keywords can convolute your bio.

Once you’ve identified the LinkedIn optimization keywords that matter most to you, weave them carefully into your summary.

Stay Current

No one trusts a stale LinkedIn profile. Everyone still wants to know, “What have you done for me lately?”

Here are two ways to keep your LinkedIn profile active:

1) Keep the info current. If you discontinue a service, change positions, or rebrand your company, make sure you update that throughout your LinkedIn profile. You’d be surprised how often people fail to keep their profile up to date. This not only appears unprofessional, but it limits your LinkedIn SEO potential: prospects can’t find you for keywords you haven’t added.

2) Sharing is caring. Make sure you share content. But don’t just share that content, give some professional commentary. This will give prospects a more intimate look into how you think strategically. It will show you as active in a relevant industry space. That said, don’t turn your profile into political activism unless that’s your business model. You seek to be seen as professional, intelligent, and hardworking, not divisive. No matter what your opinion on politics may be, some prospect somewhere will not share your sentiment.

Seek Out Endorsements and Recommendations

In modern business, nothing moves products and services more than consumer validation. When clients sing your praises, prospects feel more confident in choosing you.

To garner more endorsements, you should proactively endorse others. Think about good working relationships you’ve had and endorse those people for the skills they exhibited. They’ll likely return the favor. Additionally, make sure you keep your skills section updated so that you have the most opportunities to get endorsements.

Here’s where you can do that.

Direct Online Marketing’s Director of Growth and Analysis, Adam Roth, does a good job with his LinkedIn endorsements. And see how much more robust your skills look when other people are vouching for them. You’re not just tooting your own horn.

Adam’s profile showcases the brain trust available at Direct Online Marketing (DOM) to help clients achieve goals, especially SEO goals in his case. Adam does an excellent job optimizing his LinkedIn as one of DOM’s champions.

Network, Network, Network

One of the most powerful LinkedIn optimization tactics is the heart of the platform’s goal…

Networking.

The more you network, the more relevant your profile becomes to LinkedIn search. By increasing your exposure in your network vertical, you establish trust and relevance.

It’s important to leverage LinkedIn to keep your professional network growing. You do this by being vigilant about adding new contacts to your LinkedIn. And you do this by logging in daily and checking out notifications and responding where appropriate.

Schedule Daily LinkedIn Maintenance Time

All of this probably sounds like a lot of work. At least, more work than you probably expected to be advised to spend on a social platform. But optimizing your LinkedIn profile doesn’t have to be overwhelming.

Instead, set aside a small amount of time each day for LinkedIn. This time should include the following:

• Stay active, share some content; be a thought leader.
• Add or accept networking requests.
• Make sure skills, bio, picture are up to date.
• Reply to comments on your shared content.
• Comment on interesting content shared by friends.

It could just be 5 minutes a day. Start chipping away and see what you can accomplish. That’s really it. LinkedIn optimization isn’t tough if you simply schedule a little time for it.

LinkedIn Ads

While much of this post focuses on the organic optimization of LinkedIn, it’s important to note that LinkedIn ads help both small and large companies produce leads. At Direct Online Marketing, our team of Digital Advertising specialists frequently help companies build leads through LinkedIn advertising campaigns. Don’t hesitate to contact us personally.

The post How To Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile To Attract Prospects appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

At the beginning of a new year, now is the time to take a look back and see how we got here. We think about our successes, our triumphs, and the challenges we had to overcome.

But for you, we’ve put together our most popular marketing blog posts of 2018!

In case you missed them before, check out these gems chosen by our readers:

#10 – 3 Amazing Excel Tricks for Digital Marketers

Analyzing lots of data can be a big component of the job for most digital marketers. Any seasoned, data-driven marketing pro will rely on their trusty Swiss Army knife for data—Microsoft Excel.

Most marketers will have their favorite go-to formulas and methods for analyzing data, but there’s always room for better efficiency.

Over the years, we’ve compiled a few Excel tricks that belong in everyone’s arsenal. See our three advanced solutions to common Excel problems any marketer can use.

#9 – Facebook Pages vs. Facebook Groups: A Guide for Businesses

When using Facebook as a tool for engaging audiences, organic posting is certainly not what it once was.  

Always on the lookout for new ways to connect with Facebook users, marketers and businesses may be curious about leveraging Facebook Groups.

If you want to explore a new method of reaching your target audience through Facebook Groups, then this post is a must-read.

#8 – 8 Marketing Strategies for Rehabs Now That SAMHSA Occupies 44K Top Rankings

Even if you’re not involved in the addiction treatment industry, we went deep on this one.

Back in March 2018, Google began favoring the National Helpline page provided by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) as one of the top three search results for high volume keywords like:

• “AA meetings near me” — 90,500 monthly searches
• “Xanax withdrawal” — 12,100 monthly searches
• “drug rehab” — 9,900 monthly searches

Similar to the “Your Money, Your Life” (YMYL) Google update in August which impacted personal finance and health-focused websites, addiction treatment centers were left to figure out how to move forward. In this comprehensive post, our own Jonathan Bentz dives into what these facilities can do to regain much of that lost traffic.

#7 – The CMO’s PPC Score Card Cheat Sheet

One of the perks of using pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is that Google and other search platforms provide loads of different metrics to help marketers maximize their PPC campaigns.

With so many metrics, it can get overwhelming if you don’t spend most of your day on these platforms.

To help CMOs increase their understanding of search advertising, check out our handy infographic where we break down six high priority PPC metrics.

#6 – Why LinkedIn is Messing Up Your Analytics Traffic Data (And How to Fix It)

Few things are as aggravating as when your traffic in Google Analytics becomes unreliable.

You want to resolve any issues with your Google Analytics data. There is no telling if it’s temporary or if something bigger is afoot. Traffic data is vital to judging performance on any website, so it’s best to try and figure out what’s happening.

In this post by Stephanie Mahnken, we look at one reason why your data might be messed up—LinkedIn.

#5 – Facebook Algorithm Change 2018: What This Means for Brands

Nearly a year ago, Facebook announced yet another change to its proprietary News Feed algorithm.

With growing distrust from users and governing bodies around the world, Facebook’s latest algorithm update aims to combat the rise of fake news and “engagement bait.”

To learn more about the changes to Facebook’s News Feed, be sure to check out this post.

#4 – How to Respond When a Competitor Targets Your Brand Name in Search

Branded search engine ranking positions (aka SERPs) can make or break your online presence within your market and your customers’ minds.

Targeting competitor brand names have become an increasingly common tactic in digital marketing. Your competitors can essentially poach potential customers by leveraging a brand you’ve taken years to build.

If competitors are capitalizing on your branded searches, we’ve put together a guide on how to respond to take back what’s yours.

#3 – Image SEO: Does Alt Text Still Matter?

Optimizing images to drive traffic has been on the mind of savvy marketers ever since image search results debuted in 2001.

If it’s been a while since you brushed up on your search engine optimization (SEO) ranking factors, you may be asking yourself:

“Does alt text still matter?”

Spoiler alert—they certainly do!

Here’s a look at the how to approach alt text, the history of Google Image Search, and how a green Versace dress was the genesis for all of the above.

#2 – How to Protect Your Brand & Save Money on Google’s Display Network

With more than a million websites across the globe, the Google Display Network huge. Its size is one of the main reasons why display and retargeting campaigns are such strong marketing tools.

However, there are thousands of websites which brands will just not want to use for their display ads.

Seasoned digital marketers may know how to exclude these irrelevant or low-quality sites. Most even have their preferred list of websites on which to block ad placements. For those with less Google Ads experience, creating an exclusion list can be a manual and painstaking process.

That is until we put together the web’s most comprehensive list of website exclusions! If you leverage the Google Display Network, this post is for you.

#1 – How to Track Users Across Subdomains (Without Going Insane)

And in the number one spot as our most popular blog post from 2018, team member Adam Roth put together an awesome guide to tracking users across subdomains.  

It’s no surprise why so many of our readers enjoyed this post. Subdomain tracking in Google Analytics is both complicated and a major pain to set up.

Even Google offers little insights on how to correctly implement subdomain tracking. You’ll want to bookmark this one, so check out our post if you want to learn more.

Here’s to an Amazing 2019!

We published some of our best content to date in 2018. As for this year, we plan to do more of the same.

If you haven’t already, we encourage you to sign-up for our email newsletter where every month you’ll get a digest of our best posts—straight to your inbox.

What were some of your favorite digital marketing blog posts from 2018?

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Partner Agency before you reach out.

The post Our Top 10 Most Popular Digital Marketing Posts of 2018 appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

If you’re anything like me, you discovered this fact while working in LinkedIn Campaign Manager and immediately announced it to the office like you just won the lottery. (To be fair, being able to see conversions in the LinkedIn advertising platform is a pretty big win, right?)

LinkedIn has been pretty hush-hush about this new feature and as of this posting has not made any major announcement about the new feature.

Good thing I’m here to break the news and help you get started. Yay!

Editor’s Note: After an online chat with a LinkedIn rep, (yes, they have online chat support now, too) I learned that conversion tracking may not currently be available on all accounts, but is slowly becoming active across all LinkedIn accounts.

Step 1:

Open LinkedIn Campaign Manager and go to your advertising account. If you see Conversion Tracking in the upper right corner, you’re ready to go!

Step 2:

Click on Conversion Tracking in the upper right corner to set up the small section of code that you’ll need to add to your website.

Simply enter your website on the next page.

Step 3:

Copy the Insight Tag that is created and add it to every page of your website before the end <body> tag.

Step 4:

Next you’ll create your first conversion. This is a lot like Google Analytics goal creation. You need to create a name for your goal, select a conversion type (download, lead, sign-up, etc.), and then enter the destination page you want to count as a conversion—this is usually a “thank you” page.

Important Note: You need to enter the full URL of the destination page. For example, if “www” appears in your URL when someone comes to the page, you need to include that in the URL box. However, you do not need to include “http” or “https.”

Step 5:

Click Finish and you’re done with setup! The next time you visit the Conversion Tracking page, you will see your conversion and its status. Active means your setup is complete and conversions will track. If your conversion status says Unverified, you may want to double check that the code is on your website correctly.

Step 6:

The last important step is to link your conversion to a campaign.

When you create a new campaign, Conversions is now on the first screen. You simply click “Select conversions” and you will see all of the available conversions on your account.

Want to add a conversion to a campaign that is currently running?

Open the campaign and click the gear icon next to your campaign name at the top of the page. Select conversion will be the last option in the dropdown.

There you have it!

LinkedIn conversion tracking is real, and it’s fairly easy to implement. Now you’ll be able to better understand the ads and audiences that are generating leads from within the LinkedIn platform. If you are still confused or have any related questions, feel free to contact us by submitting our website contact form. We offer free consultations and full implementations through our social media advertising services.

The post LinkedIn Conversion Tracking appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Whether it’s in our personal or professional lives, doing the bare minimum rarely cuts it. In the early days of social media, marketers and brands considered such platforms to be an added bonus or an avenue that took far less priority than their other marketing tactics. Nowadays, the majority of businesses view social media as a vital part of a comprehensive marketing strategy.

One of the most underappreciated traits that any successful person or business should possess to tap into their full potential is self-awareness. Anyone with an honest understanding of their strengths and weaknesses will leverage this knowledge to work with other folks to fill in their collective gaps.

There’s no doubt that social media is tough and requires a thought out plan of attack in order to execute with any efficiency. And although social media is not necessarily a silver bullet solution for businesses of every size, it’s still important to have an understanding of how people use social media and how it can help your marketing efforts.

You don’t need to be an expert on social media, but there’s no reason why you can’t look to the experts for inspiration. Headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, Yum! Brands collectively has 3 of the largest fast food brands in the world. Here are some of the best social media lessons learned from a powerhouse in the fast casual dining industry.

1. Kentucky Fried Chicken — Put the audience first and think outside of the box (or bucket).

When we think about fast food, we most often will first think of standard burger fare like McDonalds, Burger King, or even In ‘N Out Burger. But when we think of branding and imagery associated with fast food, is there any person more synonymous with fast food than Colonel Sanders?

(As it happens, our team is quite obsessed with the Colonel as evidenced below.)

Born on September 9, 1890, Harland D. Sanders had a varied resume before eventually turning his patented fried chicken recipe into a global empire. Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) became a household name soon after Sanders began to grow the number of franchises after closing his Corbin, Kentucky restaurant in 1952.

With such a large name in fast food and locations all over the world, KFC has its set of challenges in an industry that is steeped with a wide array of competitors. To stay relevant and continue to amplify their brand messaging, KFC has used social media in such a way that anyone can learn and apply.

Example 1 — User-Generated Content in India

One tactic that many brands have used on social media is promoting content that encourages users and followers to participate in the fun. KFC India wanted to support the launch of their in-store radio station, Radio KFC, and wanted to leverage community involvement to make it a success.

Image via Blink

So in 2012, they launched the Radio KFC RJ Hunt campaign where through a Facebook application, users could submit their audition to become one the radio’s new Radio Jockeys (RJs). With over 3,000 auditions submitted from over 30 cities in India, the campaign helped the KFC India Facebook page acquire 170,000 new fans.

Example 2 — Colonel Sanders’ LinkedIn Account  

More recently, KFC launched a new campaign that centers around their beloved mascot, Colonel Sanders. While you might think that only some social platforms may work for certain brands, KFC really went outside of the box and decided to try something different on a platform that is typically underutilized by B2C brands.

Known for its use among working professionals, KFC created a new profile for the Colonel on LinkedIn to tap into a whole new market of opportunity. With a hint of creativity and humor, KFC remains to be the only brand to leverage a mascot’s likeness on such a popular social media platform.

Lessons Learned from KFC  

These are drastically different approaches to social media and not everyone can pull it off as easily as KFC, but there are a couple of important things to take away here.

The first is that social media is supposed to be social—do what you can to involve your audience as much as possible. This will go a long way to creating a positive perception of your brand and increased engagement.

The second thing to learn from KFC’s previous social media efforts is to use creative thinking as much as possible. Don’t rely on what everyone else is doing and try to think of fresh ways to engage your audience.

2. Taco Bell — Be willing to experiment, never stop moving, understand the future.

There are few brands that should be regarded as the “gold standard” when it comes to social media.

As it happens, Taco Bell is one of those brands.

The biggest thing that can be learned about Taco Bell is that they truly understand their audience, which is why they’re so successful as a fast food brand. If you examine a few of their social media properties (Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram), you’ll probably notice that messaging is the same, but the tone is adjusted for each one. What works on Snapchat may not on Facebook, and what may not work on Instagram is a grand slam on Twitter.

Each platform is unique in its own way, and Taco Bell knows how to talk to their communities on each one. But the biggest thing to learn from Taco Bell is how they’ve embraced the power of Snapchat.

Example 1 — Early Adoption of Snapchat

As each new social platform emerges, there’s a fair number of folks who share a high level of skepticism about how successful they’ll become long-term. With such dubious beginnings as a way for teens to share lewd imagery with one another, Snapchat was no exception and had quite a few critics.

Then as the platform began to grow among high school and college kids, the rest of the world soon caught on to the potential of this exciting messaging platform. 2016 has been huge for Snapchat with millions of daily active users competing with the likes of Facebook and Instagram. But in those early days where brands couldn’t see the value of Snapchat, Taco Bell was one of the few who saw the potential and got in early.

Now, Taco Bell is considered to be one of the top brands on the hottest new social platform. Since they could see the potential of Snapchat, they took full advantage in 2016.

Example 2 — Taco Snapchat Filter

In the weeks leading up to Cinco de Mayo, Taco Bell saw an opportunity to capitalize on something they’d been thinking about for some time. Teaming up directly with Snapchat, Taco Bell created a filter that users could apply and turn their face into a taco.

Image via AdWeek

Creepy nightmares aside, the lens was a massive hit and broke the record for sponsored content on Snapchat. The Taco Bell-themed filter was viewed 224-million times in a single day.

Lessons Learned from Taco Bell

Sure, Taco Bell probably has a much larger marketing budget to experiment and try out things that eventually may not pan out. But that’s the single biggest thing to learn about Taco Bell’s approach to social media.

To understand the nuances of each platform means a deeper understanding of your audience. Adjusting your message to fit the platform is something everyone can do, but more importantly, you should never be afraid to step out of your comfort zone. If you never try something new and scary, you just might find yourself always racing to keep up.

3. Pizza Hut — Listening > Broad Messaging

When it comes to pizza, it’s a tough uphill climb to become the top dog. You have to be vigilant, ready to pounce, and execute at a higher rate than your competitors. But there’s one reason in particular that speaks to why Pizza Hut is the top pizza brand on social media.

Brands can get caught up in their own messaging without considering what they’re audience is talking about. What’s worse is when brands make mistakes in their attempt to stay relevant and miss the mark entirely. The best example of such a social media blunder is when DiGiorno’s made light of domestic abuse when trying to leverage a trending hashtag on Twitter.

Image via Flickr

For brands who want to go deeper beyond paid campaigns for awareness, Pizza Hut routinely uses social listening to promote their brand.

Example — Hypixel & Poutine Pizza

Pizza Hut wants to be the pizza of choice that is synonymous with home entertainment. Ideally, if you were ramping up to a night of Netflix viewing, Pizza Hut wants you to consider them the place to get your pizza to go along with your binge session.

The popularity of gaming YouTube channels have exploded in the last year or so, and Pizza Hut saw a perfect opportunity to leverage this fact. Using their team and social listening tools, they were able to pick up on a conversation YouTuber Hypixel was having with his followers on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/Hypixel/status/679524216081756161

He had asked his followers about french fries on pizza, so Pizza Hut decided to jump in and mention their poutine pizza, complete with french fries. This conversation resulted in 1,000 mentions and driving awareness within a community they wanted to tap into.

Lessons Learned from Pizza Hut

Going beyond mentions of your brand can really help you tap into entirely new markets and opportunities. Again, understanding your audience and what they’re talking about will help you be an authentic part of social media and improve how they feel about your brand.

So don’t just think about your brand.

Conclusion

Having 3 brands in the top 10 quick service restaurants in the world speaks volumes about the people that run these brands. Although these brands under the Yum! Brands family are strictly B2C, there are tons of lessons you can apply to your social media strategy.

All in all, your customer comes first. Know them, understand them, speak their language, they’ll always come back.

The post Top 3 Social Media Lessons From Yum! Brands appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.