You Published A Blog! Now What?

29Jun

We are here at the end of our blogging for business series and you should be ready to post some great content on your new blog! After you hit that publish button, thousands of fans are guaranteed to visit your site in just hours, right? Not so true. While SEO is an important tool in promoting a blog, you will need a little more help getting noticed in the overly crowded internet landscape.

Your blog is not meant to replace your social media marketing. Quite the opposite, actually. Both of these internet-based tools are meant to work symbiotically together. You should be proud of your new blog post and as such, you will want to promote it on every social media account you have! On your website, where your blog hopefully lives via a link on the menu, you should have the links to your social media pages. All of this is your material and as such it should complement itself through internal promotion.

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You can also publish your newly-crafted article on Facebook Notes and LinkedIn to share with your followers. LinkedIn is particularly effective at this as it has the ability to share your writing with fifty groups. Talk about publicity!

You will also be able to use your blog article’s copy in your newsletters and email blasts. Original material is precious so you should take advantage of the writing you now own and broadcast it through all avenues.

We hope you enjoyed our series about blogging for business. Now let’s see what kind of awesome blog posts you come up with! If you ever have any questions about blogging or social media marketing in general, please feel free to contact The Go! Agency team!

Do you have any thoughts on how to share your blog? Comment below!

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Seasonal Success with Instagram: 5 Things You Need to Do Now

By Christopher Tompkins

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1Nov

Instagram, Uncategorized

There is no doubt that the holiday season is a highly visual time of year. The turkey on the Thanksgiving table. The Christmas Tree. The twinkling lights on the Menorah. The decorated, snow covered houses. It can actually be said that the holiday season is a full on assault to your senses: from sights, sounds, to smells, and beyond.

One thing that all of these senses deliver when it comes to the holidays: emotion.

Emotion is one of the key things that marketers far and wide want to evoke in their target audience of consumers. Emotion helps fuel the buying decision substantially.

In the ever growing visual landscape, Instagram has really planted its flag as a viable marketing channel for businesses to tell their visual story. And if you want to start telling YOUR company’s visual story, the holidays are one of the best times to do it, or to start doing it!

Why?

To be honest, there is a lower barrier to entry in terms of coming up with ideas. Seasonal imagery and ideas can be very simple to come by, especially due to the “over-the-top” nature of our social landscape. You can’t turn around without being assaulted with holiday imagery, songs, products, and services, right?

But why aren’t you in this fray? Why are you not trying to expand your holiday sales?

I want you to try out Instagram this holiday season and see how you can enhance your holiday business returns! Here are my five tips that will help you enhance your exposure, website traffic, and leads via Instagram:

1. Get Special: When doing any holiday marketing, it is good to have something exclusive or “special” to offer your audience that you can deadline to create urgency. Make sure the special is attractive to your audience (basically, it is something that they want) and also be able to tie it into the holiday season in a straight-forward way. Make sure this special is linked to all of your posts.

2. Formulate Your Schedule and Timeline: There is nothing worse than a random, unorganized plan of action. Decide how many posts that you are going to be sharing per week, and when the best time is to share them (in order to get the most engagement and views). Make sure all of these posts (pictures and video) have the holiday angle. Make them fun, punchy and SHAREABLE!

3. Themed Posts: Make sure your content strategy supports your holiday package…but make it fun! Run contests, post funny quotes, run quizzes on holiday song lyrics – just get your audience interested in engaging with your special content. Remember, posts on Instagram can enjoy up to 15% or more engagement over a Facebook Page post – so the more the merrier, so to speak.

4. Use Video: Instagram video is lots of fun and is a firm user favorite – so use it! Social media video is always an engagement winner, enjoying over 65% more engagement than a written post. Make sure to showcase your special, tie your contests into the video, and have some seasonal fun!

5. Use Specific Hashtags: You can definitely come up with a hashtag for your special (the best is to use your coupon code if you have one), but also use hashtags that are well used in your niche to promote holiday deals, sales, or offers. Do a little digging and come up with a list of approved hashtags that can be used on all of your posts. This will help enhance your exposure.

My last tip? Get started today and have fun! Instagram is a creative outlet for your company and really allows you to tell a whole different side to your company’s story. The visual storytelling ability on Instagram will benefit your business to no end, so why not get started today and enjoy more engagement, leads, and sales during the holiday season!

The 6 Step Facebook Advertising Formula: The Fast Track to Facebook Engagement

By Christopher Tompkins

8Sep

Facebook, Social Media, Uncategorized

Facebook Advertising has really exploded over the past few months in terms of visibility. Now it seems that you can’t even make a post to your Facebook Page without being asked if you would like to “Boost” it or promote it in some way, shape, or fashion using Facebook Advertising.

While you may be thinking – enough Facebook – what I would suggest is that you overcome this adverse reaction to advertising on social media and begin to embrace it. Once you are able to just understand the hard fact that advertising is something that is a crucial aspect of your overall campaign, the more successful you will become on Facebook.

One of the biggest barriers to entry for any online advertising model is the ease of use. Once we veer off the usual path (profiles and timelines) and go into the weird wild world of Facebook Advertising many people instantly get a bit scattered. I understand. But this is part of the learning curve.

This curve has recently been flattened a bit as Facebook has made their advertising interface VERY friendly and easy to use. So if you are interested in advertising on Facebook, here is the 6 Step Formula that you need to follow to quickly and effectively setup your ads.

Step 1: Choose Your Objective
I’ve written about Facebook Advertising Objectives before. There are 10 choices that offer you different paths down the advertising setup model. Which ever you choose, you will still have to complete the following steps. In this step, decide what you want your Facebook Advertisement to do!

Step 2: Who Do You Want Your Ads to Reach?
Now let’s get down to demographics. WOW is all I have to say. Facebook allows you to go as niche or as broad as you would like to. But to move through this step quickly you will need to know the following:
*Geographic location you want to target
*Age
*Gender
*Languages
*Interests of your target audience for the advertisement
*Behaviors of your target audience for the advertisement
*FB Connections you would like to include/exclude

Step 3: Budget
Now you need to setup how much you want to spend. If this is your first add I always suggest a Lifetime Budget of $50 for a 2 week or 1 month period. This way you can monitor your success closely in a more manageable way.

Step 4: Scheduling
When do you want your ads to run? All the time? Perhaps you have done research and found when your target audience is on Facebook the most. Then you can customize your ad schedule so that your ads only run at those times.

Step 5: Visuals
Facebook gives you the opportunity of adding 6 different pictures to your advertisement. I would suggest having these ready to go before even starting your Facebook Advertising journey. Just remember that images with text that takes up more than 20% of the image may not be approved. So be careful with text in your ad!

Step 6: Adding Text
This is where you can add your call to action for your Facebook Advertisement. Depending on what your target is, you get the opportunity to say more or less. At the low end you have to make your impact in around 90 characters or so, thus you need to be crafty in creating your ad copy.

And there you go! You click “Place Order” and your ad will be sent to the Facebook Advertising review board who will then approve or deny your ad. If denied, you will be notified why and given an opportunity to go in and make edits, not start all over (which is handy).

My tip here is that the more in-tune you are with your marketing strategy and your target audience, the easier this whole process will be. Otherwise there will be lots of guess work for you to complete. So look at the list above and come up with your ideas for each point and THEN log into Facebook and start setting up your brand new Facebook Advertisement!

How to Create Your Own Custom LinkedIn Group

By Christopher Tompkins

24May

LinkedIn, Marketing, Social Media, Uncategorized

When you are marketing your business (or yourself) on LinkedIn, there are numerous outlets for you to utilize: your profile, your updates, your connections and your groups to name a few.

I’ve written before about the power of LinkedIn Groups to enhance your credibility and visibility on LinkedIn. They truly are powerhouses for not only getting hits to your website, but also for you to directly connect with influential people and potential customers.

But you don’t have to simply join someone else’s group – you can start your own!

If you have opened and completed your LinkedIn profile, you have the ability to create your own membership group, branded to your niche with you in the driver’s seat.

Where do you start and how do you do it?

Here are some straight-forward tips on how to create the perfect LinkedIn Group for your business, quickly and efficiently:

1. Your Group and Your Purpose. You should create your LinkedIn Group around the subject matter of your business and topics your target consumer would be interested in. For example, we have The Go! Healthcare Marketing Insider (you can join here). One of the sectors we service at The Go! Agency is the healthcare market. So we created the group to interest healthcare organizations by sharing discussions related directly to using marketing to build their business online.

2. Create a Name and Logo. All LinkedIn Groups have a name and logo, so you will need to create one. There are many free logo services available, just Google them. Make sure your logo has the same look and feel as your company logo and the Group name reflects both your company and the Group itself. Make sure not to use your own company name as the name of the Group as it will confuse people. They may think this a company related membership Group?

3. Register Your Group. Go into LinkedIn and click on the Groups tab. On the next screen you will see a link to “Create a Group”. Click on this and fill out the form supplied. Make sure to fill it in completely and use as many keywords as you can. This will enable you to be found when someone is searching for a group with your subject matter.

4. Post Discussions. To get the ball rolling, post three or four discussions. Get your other co-workers to start a few as well. The more content that you add to your Group initially will enhance the amount of conversion once you begin to invite people to join.

5. Start Inviting! When you click on your Group, click next on the “Manage” tab. On the left hand side you will see “Send Invitations”. This will enable you to send invitations in batches to your LinkedIn connections. Want to promote via Facebook, Twitter or the main LinkedIn feed? Click the “Share” button on the top right of your group at any time.

And you are off! Now you have your own LinkedIn membership Group which will enable you to market in many new ways. In the next post I’ll explain how you can effectively market and manage your group for the best results possible!