Businesses can use LinkedIn advertising to grow their customers and establish industry authority. Yet, the vast majority of businesses don’t take full advantage of the tools available. Whether you’re exploring Paid Ads on LinkedIn for the first time or seeking to refine your approach, there’s a wealth of untapped potential waiting for you. Dive deeper into our LinkedIn Advertising Guide as we provide key insights into getting started and making the most of LinkedIn’s advertising features.

Completing Your LinkedIn Business Profile

Your LinkedIn business profile offers your first opportunity to display your business to potential customers and hires.

If any of the following make your business unique or desirable, the information should be immediately visible or accessible:

• Brand identity.
• Mission statement.
• Founding story.
• Company culture.
• Charity or community service.

Consider your presentation from a user’s point of view. While you do want to explain what makes your business unique, ensure that your profile covers at least these three basics:

• Who you are.
• Your area of expertise.
• The problem your business solves.

There is much more you can do with LinkedIn, but it is important to master the basics of the platform before moving further with paid advertising. The following strategies are most effective when supported by a strong foundation.

Advertising on LinkedIn

As mentioned in our recent piece on paid search trends, when it comes to advertising on LinkedIn it is becoming increasingly important to develop an audience targeting strategy. LinkedIn offers an impressively comprehensive set of targeting features which can be effectively used to make sure your message reaches the right people.

Consider the following when Advertising on LinkedIn:

• What is your customer persona?
• What matters to your customer?
• What role will your content play in your ideal customer journey?
• How can you provide value to your customer through your content?

The LinkedIn advertising strategy, simplified, is to answer the questions above and create content for that audience. Analyze the characteristics of your organic followers (industry, position, etc.) to efficiently target similar audiences through LinkedIn’s audience targeting feature.

Polishing Your Organic Content

If you’re reading this post, you’re probably interested in developing a comprehensive LinkedIn ad strategy. However, before you start paying to run content, you need to know if your LinkedIn paid ads will be successful.

Instead of immediately splashing cash on sponsored content, save your budget by testing organic content with your followers first. Organic posts are free. They are also an opportunity to further establish your brand’s voice and industry authority. Consider the lessons learned from blogging for SEO in building your business’s credibility, as they also apply to your social media platforms.

LinkedIn can be effectively used to promote your website’s blog and organic content strategy. Post links to specific articles, with descriptions and hashtags to solidify LinkedIn as an additional source of traffic.

Per LinkedIn’s own research, this will “provide proof that your content is valuable and give insight on what type of content is likely to resonate with a broader audience.”

Making the Most of Your LinkedIn Paid Advertising Strategy

Promoted Content

You’ve created and posted content. You’re confident in its quality because of the positive response from your followers.

Now, you should promote this content to groups outside of your core followers. Pay to have your posts placed on the feeds of similar audiences as “Promoted Content”. These posts are only differentiated from organic posts by a small label.

Aside from the label, promoted content looks very similar to organic content. If users are interested, they will click on it without feeling bombarded by advertising.

Sponsored InMail

Sponsored InMail generates more conversions than any other ad format on LinkedIn. It boasts 100% deliverability and is more likely to be noticed by the user. Thus, Sponsored InMail can be very lucrative. Create a message that advocates for your business’ value and demonstrates that you genuinely want to build a relationship. Make sure you do your research ahead of time so you understand exactly who will respond to your message. You don’t want to pay to send messages that will fall on deaf ears.

Dynamic Ads

LinkedIn dynamic ads are hyper-personalized and effective in grabbing your users’ attention. Dynamic ads have up to 2x the click-through rate of traditional display ads, in part because they appear as native LinkedIn offerings that display a user’s name and profile picture.

A dynamic ad that offers a $50 credit to get started with dynamic ads.

Testing and Improving Your LinkedIn Paid Ads

Make sure you “split test” your ads. Insights from test results allow you to fine-tune your promoted content.

Split testing refers to creating multiple ads with subtle differences in order to test outcomes. For example, you can create two ads with the same image and text but with different CTAs. You could also target slightly different audiences with identical ads.

Make informed decisions based off of the results to improve your ad strategy. Testing a combination of all of the strategies above will allow for the best possible results.

Titan Growth is home to a team of talented professionals with a proven track record of using LinkedIn paid advertising to facilitate our clients’ marketing success. Contact us for a free competitive evaluation to see how we can help you grow your business.

Running effective social media is deceptively difficult. When it comes to organic social media, many businesses don’t realize how they’re hurting their own brand or turning away potential customers. Here are the 8 most common social media mistakes businesses make and what to do instead.

✖ Mistake: Having a part-time person do literally everything

What goes into running social media?

Getting the best results requires quality content creation, engaging with the community, planning, scheduling, editing, creating and then following guidelines, analyzing results, applying analysis to future content creation, promoting posts on paid social after posting them organically, analyzing those results, and the list goes on and on…

It quickly becomes a full-time job.

• As a social media manager and brand builder, Phoebe McPherson, says, “It’s just me… I can only organically engage with so many people on Twitter, create so much content, put out so many fires.” View full tweet.

Even a standalone social media manager needs support. Whether it’s people to look over copy and serve as a second set of eyes, a designer to help create visual content or even just an intern to delegate work to, your social media efforts will be much stronger with more than one person doing everything.

✔ Alternative: Support your social manager with a diverse team

✖ Mistake: Focusing on “going viral”

There’s a common misconception about how social media marketing actually works.

The real goal is to build long-term relationships and positive associations with your target market by creating and delivering content which they want to interact with. A return customer is always more valuable than a first-time customer. Developing this relationship is a steady, incremental process.

Don’t get me wrong: if you manage to luck out and go viral, then it’s possible to capitalize on it. But that’s a situation to take advantage of when it happens. Pursuing “viral” to grow your business won’t help.

First, it’s impossible to “engineer” viral content. You can output all sorts of content with the hallmarks of past viral videos or articles, but there’s absolutely no guarantee.

Second, even if your content goes viral, you’ll get an initial rush but it takes a delicate hand to invest in enough products, server bandwidth, etc. to support the rush but not overproduce. Without strong pre-existing relationships, virality is equally likely to get your hopes up than net you long-term profits.

✔ Alternative: Focus on consistent, quality content

✖ Mistake: Expecting immediate returns

By now, it shouldn’t be a surprise that organic social media is a long-term investment, not a short-term cash grab.

Like SEO, effective social media depends on incremental progress based on relevant, valuable content and continually perfecting your craft as the field shifts and changes.

More likely than not, you won’t see immediate returns on your social media efforts. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t valuable. But since your goals are to build relationships and nurture customers, there are two obstacles in your way which can only be overcome with time.

First, your target audience has to start seeing your social media posts.

Second, you need to get data to learn what your optimal posting times are, what content your audience best resonates with, and how to leverage those to make the strongest relationship.

While you’re working on these, you’re laying the groundwork for future ROI. Don’t expect the money to flow in immediately.

✔ Alternative: Be patient

✖ Mistake: Only borrowing content

When you see a great image, phrase or theme on the Internet, you might want to use it. Why would you reinvent the wheel?

There’s a way to use other people’s content and give them recognition, but here’s why you still shouldn’t rely on it.

“Borrowing” doesn’t mean “retweeting”, “sharing” or another form of sharing the content that somebody else has made. That’s just engaging with the community. The issue here is that if you retweet a cute puppy video, your content is what you say about it. Don’t make the mistake of thinking the video itself is your brand’s gift to your followers.

Sure, there are a thousand cute puppy videos out there, but making one at your doggie daycare (and showing off the facilities in the process) isn’t necessarily redundant. It actually asserts that your brand is as reputable as all the other puppy content creators. If you’ve been sharing/retweeting/etc. theirs, then they might return the favor and further establish your reputation.

When you borrow, steal, or even just conveniently remember something that another brand used, you’re imitating their voice and brand identity rather than forming your own. Of course taking inspiration is a time-honored tradition, but in order for that to be successful, you still need to apply your inspiring ideas or principles to what makes your brand unique.

The entire point of using social media for a business is to showcase your own brand identity and use that as a vehicle to form genuine relationships with potential customers. So if your identity is only a mishmash of other brands’ identities, that leaves your efforts wasted.

✔ Alternative: Use borrowed content to supplement your own content

✖ Mistake: Failing to establish your brand’s unique identity

So now you know that you’d like to make your own brand’s content. But first, before you start actually creating, let’s talk about how that looks: what your brand’s identity and style are.

If you avoid creating a brand style book, your content will be difficult to distinguish from any other brand’s. In effect, this will severely limit the value of creating content at all.

What should you include in your style book? Start by thinking about…

• Colors (What feelings do you want your brand to embody?)
• Shape & visual form (Geometric? Natural? Photographs or vector art? Filters or no filters?)
• Voice & tone (Emojis, a few emoji options, or none at all? Professional, playful, clever?)
• Hashtag use (How many? Which ones?)
• Fonts (One to two, used in distinct situations: i.e., quotes vs headlines.)

All of these elements are critical for establishing your brand’s unique identity and personality. This is critical because your customers need to see your brand differentiated from others to build brand loyalty.

✔ Alternative: Establish a brand style book

✖ Mistake: Disregarding a content calendar

Your brand has a great personality, social media manager and expectations. Are you done?

Not yet.

Now you have to plan what you’ll post, and figure out when you can get the best responses to your posts.

Populating your content calendar is actually easier than it seems, and creating content ahead of time will give you breathing room when you have a fire to put out instead.

Here’s some ideas for what you could pay attention to:

• How many times do you want to post per week?
• Which major (i.e. Easter) and not-so-major (i.e. Love Your Pet Day) holidays are significant to your brand and relevant to your target market?
• What is the news cycle for your industry? When are you expecting major developments?
• Is your company sponsoring anything interesting?
• If you have a blog, how often does it post?

A calendar can be built in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets; some companies swear by project management software or programs like Trello. Whatever you use to organize your content calendar, plan ahead and stick with it.

✔ Alternative: Create and follow a content calendar

✖ Mistake: Only promoting your business or products

A content calendar is all and well, but what do you schedule? Well, your social media is about your brand, so doesn’t it seem fair to mostly post about your upcoming sales, specials and new arrivals?

Customers respond to brands that have personality; post about great deals, but also post interesting and relatable content.

Find what your business is best positioned to see, and deliver that.

If your business sells candy to parents for holidays, try writing about the biggest trends for Halloween costumes, showing video highlights of great kids’ birthday party themes, or reviewing low-sugar or low-calorie treats for kids with restricted diets or allergies.

If your brand is a doggie daycare in a health-conscious area, try posting pictures of your puppies playing, giving recipes for healthy dog treats, or reviewing different collar styles and comfort.

There’s something unique about your business’s viewpoint and what your target market is interested in. Create content that’s relevant to your customers, and see what happens.

Engage with your target market, because quality relationships foster loyal customers.

✔ Alternative: Engage to foster relationships

✖ Mistake: Relying solely on organic social

The truth is, these days, that a strong organic social presence isn’t enough to be successful on social media. With organic page reach dropping every month, you actually need two things.

First, you need to leverage your brand identity to create compelling content.

Second, you need to leverage paid social to get that content in front of more eyes.

An integrated strategy will help make the most of both pieces. Without both organic and paid social, you may be putting out great material, but nobody will know about it. Or, you’ll waste money promoting content that just isn’t compelling.

✔ Alternative: Integrate your paid and organic efforts

If you need help with leveraging paid social to make the most of your organic social media efforts, Contact Titan Growth for a free consultation.

What’s good for your users is also good for SEO. Your users prefer not to read long blocks of text. It’s boring. It’s unattractive.

Have you noticed

How posts on LinkedIn

With the most views and shares

Are formatted like this…?

Obnoxious as that is, there is a reason for it. Today’s readers need information to be as digestible as possible. If they have to search for an answer to their question on your page, well, they won’t. They’ll bounce from site to site until the desired information jumps out at them.

Thoughtful use of headings that are properly coded (with header tags) make this a possibility.

This post will define headings and header tags for SEO, and explain how to properly use them to improve your website’s user experience and crawlability.

• Headings organize content to improve the user experience.
• Header Tags communicate to search engine spiders the meaning of your headings, and subsequently your content, so your webpage can be properly indexed in SERPs.

Headings in SEO

The Headline <h1> Tags

The headline is the title of your content. This sets your users and Google’s crawlers’ expectations for the entire page.

Headline (h1 Tag) Best Practices for SEO:

• Introduce the page’s most important keyword theme.
• Describe the page’s content accurately in no more than one sentence.
• Be similar, but not necessarily identical, to the title tag.

Your headline should always answer the following question:

What is this page about?

It may seem elementary, but unfortunately, this often gets forgotten. Website owners and admins will get caught up in keyword ideas and ranking opportunities, and end up writing a headline that does not accurately represent the page’s content.

“I know we actually sell wine, but what’s the difference? Any traffic is good traffic, right?”

Major Headings <h2> Tags

Major Headings provide the first opportunity to segment your content into digestible sections for your readers.

Your major headings should:

• Outline the most important sections of your content.
• Accurately describe what aspects of your headline this section of content focuses on.
• Introduce topics that merit discussion.

Your major headings do not need to reiterate important keywords. Don’t try to push them in when it feels unnatural.

Subheadings <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, <h6>

Subheadings can and should be used sparingly to further segment your content and facilitate user comprehension. While subheadings can be helpful, overuse can have an adverse effect if they become too obscure or irrelevant. Subheadings, like content, should always tie back into their parent heading and the main headline.

Example hierarchy:

Header Tags in SEO

How To Use Header Tags

Adding the H tags themselves is simple if you’re coding with straight HTML.

<h1>Header Here</h1> indicates the most important heading, while <h6>Header Here</h6> defines the least.

To define a heading, surround it with the H tags. For example, the headline of this post looks like: <h1> Header Tags Guide for SEO Success </h1>.

A user-friendly CMS, such as WordPress, offers a visual editor that allows you to edit content while simultaneously viewing how it appears on the actual webpage. You can toggle between the visual and HTML editor to see how your changes are expressed in HTML, and vice versa.

If you don’t like the default styling of the heading tags, they can be easily changed with your site’s CSS. But, be careful when editing your site’s CSS. Even if a headline is the right font and size, it may not be coded as an <h1>, and thus will not be recognized by Google as a headline when it crawls your site. To that end, don’t make the mistake of using multiple headlines, or using an <h2> tag for a headline because you prefer a different font size or style.

Headline/Header Tag Best Practices

Importance of Header Tags for SEO (Example)

I was asked to look at a website that was experiencing a decline in traffic, despite a wealth of quality content and an optimal user experience. It was discovered that there were no <h1> tags throughout the entire site; each heading that should have been coded as an <h1> was coded as <h2>. As a result, the topics of these pages were unclear to Google, thus nullifying their chance of ranking for the keyword themes being targeted.

Even though these webpages were well-organized and filled with insightful, scholarly content, Google was unable to properly categorize the content and reflect the site’s industry authority in the SERPs. Making these changes to your header tags can have a sizable impact on overall SEO performance.

It is important to audit your website’s header tags, because a simple coding error can easily go unnoticed and adversely affect your website’s search presence.

Writing effective headings using proper tags is one of the most straightforward pieces of an SEO strategy. If you are not sure where to go next, read more SEO tips on our blog or schedule a free consultation with Titan’s experienced strategy team.