New LinkedIn Feature, Plus More 2019 Digital Marketing Strategies

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, December 19th, final episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays for 2018. This is Eric Cook and I'm with WSI Digital Marketing where we work with businesses and organizations in helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can hop online to www.poweredbywsi.com To learn more about us and all the stuff we do for our clients. This show, just as a heads up, we're gonna be about half an hour. I have another commitment at the 1:30 Eastern timeframe that I have to scoot to, but I wanted to go through a couple of things just as you think about 2019, a couple of digital marketing items. I got a couple of research reports and articles that have come across my desk recently that I wanted to share. And then I thought I would start with what I think is gradually rolling out because I've talked to people that have not seen this update on LinkedIn. So I wanted to give you a heads up on one of the new things that's happening with regards to LinkedIn's new composer, whether you're doing a post or The article pretty much has remained the same, but creating a post, you've now got a couple of new options. Those of you that are joining live, if you've got questions, comments, feedback, please feel free to use the chat function for letting us know, or I guess letting me know, because my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins, is absent again today. But if you've got the chat functionality and you're listening live and you want to ask a question, feel free to do that. that. And today's show will be recorded and posted up to freewebinarwednesdays.com and made available to you if you would like to go back and watch it again. So I've got my LinkedIn account open here, and I noticed this probably last week when I was hopping on doing a post, and the look and feel has changed. And I don't know if it's this way for everybody, but I did post an article about this, kind of talked a little bit about the changes that I saw. One of the concerns that I had was the default post settings for me were always public and my Twitter account, and when I started using the new composer, it was just changed to public, and I had to manually make sure that I selected Twitter as an option. And so I did just check it on my mobile device. The other day and Public plus Twitter was active on my mobile. So maybe it's just taking some time to learn. But there's a couple of things that I just wanted to draw your attention to for the starter post because some newer functionality. If you've not really paid much attention or played around with it much, you do have the ability to upload an image, to upload a video that you've already taken, or to attach a document. You can share a file if you would like to do so. You can get access to these 3 and one other icon when you go and you click on the Start a Post. This is a new one right here, which is called Give Kudos. And I don't know if you've even noticed what this is. It's a little ribbon. I actually gave one of my colleagues kudos when I noticed this, and he said that the kudos showed up on his timeline and one of his connections saw me give him a kudos, and that prompted them to reach back in touch with Francois, who's the gentleman that I gave kudos for, and it generated a conversation and might actually lead to some business. So he was pretty excited about that. You can still see you've got the photo, video, and file attachment here, but now the composing window actually opens up in a little light box so you can add a little bit more I guess it's a cleaner interface, if you will. Now what I also noticed, and I'm going to actually draw attention to the fact that you can post directly from here into a group. So I'm going to just click on the little image and I've got an item on my desktop that I'm going to select where I grabbed the screenshots of the post at the second step in the process. And you can see that not only do I have the ability to post to anyone on Twitter, but now I can go ahead and I can pick groups that I'm a part of. So directly from the composer, I can actually post to a group instead of me having to go into my groups, find the group that I want to post to, create a thread. I can go in and I can actually post directly. So I'm going to go and just kind of type. And so, hey, Did you all know that you can post to a group directly from the composer on your regular LinkedIn wall? See below. What do you think about this? And do you have this feature yet? So I'm going to go and I'm going to put LinkedIn new feature engagement. So just throw some hashtags in there. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on next, and then this gives me the ability where I can say anyone plus Twitter. And if I want to post this to Free Webinar Wednesdays, um, actually it looks like if I do anyone plus Twitter, looks like they're all different options. So now if I go Free Webinar Wednesdays, only the members of Free Webinar Wednesdays are going to see that. That doesn't make sense. So I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to do this. Advanced settings also gives you the ability to disable comments for a post. I don't know why you would ever want to do that because this is social networking and you kind of want the whole process to be social, but if you decided you didn't want to have comments on a post, it was just information only, or maybe you thought that people would post negatively, whatever the case is, you can turn comments off. I never do that, so advanced settings rarely ever gets clicked on unless I'm doing a demo like this. So you can see I'm gonna go ahead and share this directly to Free Webinar Wednesdays, and I'm gonna click on post, and that's gonna go ahead and process. And now you can see that it's posted directly to the Free Webinar Wednesdays group. So if you are part of the Free Webinar Wednesdays group, you You will actually get a notification that could show up in your feed. But that's an easy way to go in and actually share information directly into other groups. I think LinkedIn is making an effort to try to make groups a little bit more engaging and to try to make it easier for people to participate. Still is not going to help you with any sort of reading or any sort of other posts that have shown up. But as far as getting information into posts, and I suspect you could probably just copy and paste if there was a post that you wanted to share to multiple groups, you could go ahead and do that all from one spot and you could post to 2 or 3 different groups. If you say you belong to a digital marketing group, but maybe there's several different variations of that that you belong to, you could go in and you could share information to one group and then just paste it and share it to another and share it to another. Maybe tweak it and change it a little bit, but that's going to give you the ability to post directly. So if it's something that you've not tried before, give it a shot. Again, I think that LinkedIn is trying to make group engagement a little better and make it easier for people to get content into their groups. So let me know what you think. I'd be curious whether or not you've seen this on your end or not. Moving into some of the future trends, it is kind of end of year wrapping up. We're talking with a lot of our clients about what's going on for 2019 and beyond. Smart Insights is one of the platforms that I pay attention to, and they usually share some really good stuff. They've got some really nice templates that you can use and a ton of stuff to just in the area of digital marketing for that matter. So here's an article that they recently posted talking about what's gonna happen in the year 2020, which, you know, seems like that's so far away, but, you know, that's really just one more year once we tick over into 2019, but 2020 just sounds really cool. They've done a little bit of research and talking about where organizations organizations are likely going to be, you know, focusing their effort in technology trends. And I wasn't necessarily shocked by this, but you can see mobile devices and mobile networks certainly are going to be high on the priority list. But then personalization technologies, and a lot of times when we talk about personalization, people are thinking of ways where they can just insert the first name in an email address or an email newsletter. So, dear Eric, or dear Jeff, or dear whatever your recipient's first name is. But there's ways that you can actually personalize that information even more, whether it's on the web, whether it's through email, whether it's through digital advertising. I know one of the platforms that we use has the ability to build different personas and Let's say I have a CEO persona or a business owner persona versus a sales manager persona. When I send that email newsletter out, what I can do is I can still have it personalized with the individual's first name. But if there's a particular block of content that I want to swap out to make it a little bit more relevant to a CEO or a business owner, because maybe they're picturing, you know, higher strategy items on the radar screen, they're interested in the big strategic view, they're interested in bigger ROI numbers. That newsletter can go out, it can personalize it with the first name, but then I can take a block of content that only shows up to individuals on that newsletter list that are classified as a business owner or CEO, whereas that exact same newsletter could go out. And if somebody is classified as a sales manager, that block of content, instead of big picture strategic ROI, The sales manager block of content might talk about how sales performance can be increased. If it's a sales manager that's responsible for oversight of sales employees and staff, it can talk about how tracking is, is a powerful feature. And so you can see that that content can be tailored to the recipient to make it even more relevant. The Internet of Things— this is basically when your toaster is talking to you and connected devices. If you've got any sort of smart home intelligent hub like an Amazon Echo or a Google Home, being able to get those things tied together, automate different processes, turning on lights, thermostat adjustments. There's even a dog camera out now that you can connect to the internet that will allow you to connect remotely through your mobile device and talk to your pets while you're not at home, and you can press a little button and magically eject treats that will allow your doggies to get a little snack from you even though you're remote. So Internet of Things is one that I think is an area I'd be curious, just from a business perspective, but how that's going to roll out. Predictive analytics is another area where you're looking at consumer trends customer activity and trying to basically make a recommendation to a client before they even think that they want that, which I think also ties into big data and artificial intelligence. And then it kind of drops off a little bit into virtual and augmented reality and wearable technology. So I think those 5 really play off of one another, certainly with AI being kind of the topic du jour of, you know, acting smart in the absence of a human, whether that's through a chatbot technology or even, you know, Google's example of their bot calling the restaurant and making a reservation or a hair appointment, which was demoed at their Google I/O event earlier this year. I think artificial intelligence, making sure that it's building conveniences and efficiencies for a business, but not necessarily trying to trick individuals into thinking that it's really a human. You want to be really careful you don't cross that line. And then I guess kind of taking a look at the channels through which you expect your customers to experience your organization. So Social media is at the top and further spending time, whether that's through LinkedIn, whether that's through Facebook or Twitter conversations and other areas. And then web and mobile apps and the mobile web, I think, is also kind of carrying across. And then email. So you can see very similar to the top one, kind of the 5 up there and then drops off a little bit. Direct mail, I've been seeing some stuff on that. I think you want to just be really careful with regards to direct mail as to how it's used, and, you know, can be a little bit more expensive. But if you can use— I know in the banking space, for example, you can implement profitability technology that gives you the ability to identify profitable households based off account utilization. And then identify other households within your market area that have similar characteristics. And if you're going to be spending a little bit more money on a direct mail piece, knowing where those should actually go and having the highest likelihood of being able to generate revenue for you. Certainly the days of blanketing your entire market area with direct mail, very expensive and somewhat outdated. And then the last little graphic that they share, which I guess the biggest shift from my perspective is talking about how marketing, the impact will be measured in an organization. So revenue is certainly top of the list today, and in 2020 it's still gonna be there. The next 2, whether it's kind of brand awareness or lead gen, no real change there. I did see that the customer acquisition dropped, but then the other side of the fence is budget efficiency and return on investment, which I think ties back into revenue. So not only are you responsible, or you should be thinking about ways over the next couple of years to make sure that you understand how you're measuring the revenue impact for your digital strategy, but tying that back to your costs so that it's almost like these things are bookended, where you're looking at the revenue, but then you're also looking at the other things that go into determining the return return on that with regards to cost and expense, because a lot of the technologies that I talked about earlier are ones that are going to have some cost associated with them. So you want to make sure you take those into consideration as part of your overall ROI. Sometimes we even refer to it as ROE, or return on engagement. Any bankers in the audience will think of return equity, and that's not what I'm talking about, but return on engagement. But certainly, if you can tie back to the hard dollar investment amount and the money that you're spending, and the actual revenue that you're generating for that. Digital marketing is one of the nice, one of the nice parts about it is it's very measurable. You can set up tags and tracking and other sorts of variables within the process to give you feedback as to what's working, what's not working. It's not going to ever be a 100% attributable model, but it's certainly a whole lot easier than the old-fashioned days of putting an ad into a newspaper and hoping that it works. So this is one of the things, you know, one of the, I guess, one of the articles that I wanted to share. A couple of the other articles that I found that I've been sharing that I just wanted to talk about. This is one where it's planning your digital marketing for 2019. This one sets the stage for the amount of money that is being spent on worldwide on digital advertising, you know, $327 billion. And thinking about the key elements that revolve around that, first and foremost, they mentioned Google Ads. This goes back into the ROI calculation where you're paying Google to put your advertisements in front of people that are actively online searching for your product or your service. And under Google's program, when you pay for that placement or that positioning, they're giving you a tremendous amount of data on the back end. You can use that data not only to validate your budget and to determine what is and isn't working, but you can take that data and you can also craft the content strategy around it so that you know what keywords or key phrases people are clicking on that you're paying for. Those are ones that you probably would want to spend some time maybe optimizing a content strategy around building blog posts and other sorts of information. So that's a great place to start because you get a ton of information that you don't normally have access to, especially not just within Google Analytics, unless you're tying in some other sort of, sort of third-party analytics platform, because Google keeps most of that secure. The next area that they talk about, which I think corresponds with what I mentioned earlier as it results customization and personalization is marketing automation. When somebody clicks on an ad and they come to a landing page and they download some information, can you capture that lead? Can you score that lead? Can you classify that lead? And then can you implement a process that automatically nurtures that along where it's delivering content on a periodic basis? Marketing automation is a very, very powerful tool, and I think most of our customers are just just barely scratching the surface in what they could potentially do. I found it interesting the digital, or I guess traditional advertising supported by direct mail, it got mentioned here, which when I go back to the 2020, direct mail was also referenced. You can use this as a powerful one-two punch combining it with the digital strategy. So it was somewhat ironic that digital marketing strategies for 2019 references good old-fashioned direct mail, but they can be used together, which kind of— think about that. Geofencing, which is also somewhat of a subcomponent of your digital advertising effort, so finding specific areas within your market, fencing those off. You can even use IP-based identifiers. So we've actually done some campaigns targeted at particular universities and educational institutions presenting advertisements to faculty, staff, students, administrators. So there's ways that you can, you can do that. Video is mentioned here as well, and whether that's recorded or live streaming video, even video ads. Video is really becoming the type of content people like to see. You've got Facebook investing in their Watch program. Instagram has rolled out IGTV. YouTube with all of its custom content and the ability to go live and create your own YouTube shows. Video is definitely a very active area for a lot of businesses and one that should definitely be on your radar screen. And then the last item that they talk about in this article, at least, is a content marketing strategy where you think about sharing information that's relevant to your audience, whether that's blog posts, white papers, testimonials, case studies, really influencing the audience with all that you know and making sure that it's not, it's not just sales-related information because nobody really likes to or wants to be sold to these days. Or maybe even ever, I would say. But certainly there's a plethora of access to information out there today that didn't exist many years ago, just because of the internet. And so when you think about building a strategy and your content of what it is that your customers and your prospects have questions on, what are their pain points, what are the things that keep them up at night, that's really where you want to spend your time developing a strategy and developing content. That will also help you, and it's not mentioned here in this article, but if you're developing really good content and you can share it out through social media and other people are linking to it, that's also going to have an impact on your organic rankings, your SEO strategy. And that's really one of the important elements of an SEO strategy where you want Google to rank you and other search engines just naturally as a result of the great information that you have. Despite the fact that less than 1 in 4 small businesses are really investing in content marketing in 2018, that may jump a little bit in '19, but if you can put together a strategy to do that, I think the reason that number is so small is a lot of times the perception is it takes a lot of effort, and it's really not that difficult. But it does take time, and it's one that you have to allocate some resources for and make sure that you're prepared, whether that's just a blog a month, you know, figure out what are the top 12 questions that your customers have about your products or services or just other things that are going on in their life, and then committing to at least just putting 12 articles together as a start. certainly a good way of doing that, just to basically get the ball rolling and sharing some information that people are interested in. And then Forbes also had an article, and I'll just kind of wrap it with this. They picked 5 other digital marketing trends to watch in 2019, and I think we're gonna, we're gonna see some consistency or carryover. There's artificial intelligence, which we've already talked about, and we're getting all of the lovely little pop-ups and advertising blurbs from Forbes here, so I'm going to shut those down. So artificial intelligence, just leveraging technology to understand your customers and your visitors better and serving them, tying that into chatbots. I think chatbots— I've talked about that a number of times when we were at Social Media Marketing World earlier this year. Chatbots occupied a tremendous amount of conversation. I think 2019 will be a lot of the same. We've got a number of our banking clients that are evaluating chatbot technology to carry on conversations either directly with a human or starting with AI and being able to build a conversation, whether it's through your website, through Facebook Messenger, through WhatsApp, through text messaging, and then allowing you to then proactively push information out to them in through those channels, almost like a different variation of an email marketing campaign. Smart speakers and audio voice-based search certainly is becoming more and more popular. So as you are developing your strategy, if you have something that somebody would want to ask an Amazon or a Google device for understanding how that whole process works, do you need to develop skills within those areas? That allow for people to gather that information through those voice-based devices. Influencer marketing is really where you're, you're finding individuals within the world of social and other online channels that are well respected, that can talk about what you do. So influencers that might be participating in podcasts, video streaming, blogging, Get them to mention your brand, mention your product, mention your service, invite them in to know more about you. If you can get those folks to be advocates of yours, then that's going to help you spread the word a whole lot better. And it's, it's kind of the next generation, if you will, of word-of-mouth advertising. And then lastly, live video. Again, consistency with one of the prior articles, video. As it relates to a top strategy in the world of content marketing, but really the live component, which I know when we talk to customers freaks some people out because they don't like to be on camera. What do I say? I'm going to stumble over my words. You also need to think about the things that are accessible in a live video, or if you're in an industry like banking, which we work in quite a bit, You know, are there things that you want to make sure whoever is going to be on the live video, they avoid talking about? Because you may have certain regulatory requirements, certain legal requirements, privacy, those sorts of things. But live video is certainly a strategy that I would encourage you to put on your shortlist for 2019. Get comfortable with it, play around with it. You can see a number of the platforms that I mentioned earlier— Facebook Live, YouTube, Instagram. So lots of different venues for you determining, you know, where your customers live and then putting content out there into their world so they've got the ability to interact with you. The great part about live video is once it's done, it stays on your, on your site. It's there and it's available for you. to use on an ongoing basis. So you get kind of a double win. You get the live experience, and you also get an archive of it so it lives on for future reference. So those are some of the things that I think you need to be thinking about. Of course, as a digital strategist here at WSI, if any of those are ones that you feel that you need some assistance with, or you want to kick some ideas and thoughts around, or maybe looking for an official partner to help you get to those areas, I'd love to chat with you and see how we could help, but hopefully these are some, some items that will at least get you started for 2019 to make sure that your digital marketing initiatives are where they need to be. I'm going to wrap the show now. I want to wish everybody a very Merry Christmas, a very Happy New Year, happy holidays, whatever the appropriate seasonal greeting is. We're going to take a couple of weeks off for Christmas and New Year's, but we'll be back again the second week in January and look forward to seeing everybody at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Until then, enjoy the holidays, enjoy some hopefully time off. Make sure you get out those stretchy pants and enjoy your holiday dinners, and we'll look forward to chatting with you in 2019 and kicking off another year of webinars for everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world. So with that, take care everybody. Bye-bye.