Inbound & Digital Marketing Blog

Social media is setting the tone for online marketers today. The oldest marketing rule is to “fish where the fish are”, and the fish are in social media communities. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and LinkedIn not only help people stay connected, but allow them to research, become informed and give / receive their opinion immediately. As you can imagine, this benefits business owners and marketing professionals greatly.

Social media sites, such as LinkedIn, provide an interactive platform for professionals to showcase their businesses online - and to a more targeted audience. Using social media correctly also helps establish a powerful online presence that can boost your search engine optimization. Many smart marketers also use this medium to promote brand awareness, and strengthen relationships with their customers using

LinkedIn has more than 175 million users, and is the primary social networking website for business professionals.

LinkedIn is a powerful platform that can get underutilized and oftentimes, be placed on the back burner. This social community can be extremely useful, especially when you're aware of all the little hidden tricks that don't get nearly enough exposure as they deserve. Here are 35 tips (divided into three categories) you can use to optimize your LinkedIn presence, help you with your networking and assist your marketing needs:

To optimize your LinkedIn presence you should:

1. Claim your vanity URL.
2. Create a profile badge for your personal website.
3. Make your website or blog links sexier.
4. Search engine optimize your profile.
5. Install applications.
6. Rearrange your profile.
7. Take advantage of “Saved Searches”.
8. Extend the life of your questions.
9. Quickly turn your LinkedIn profile into a resume.
10. Find a job with LinkedIn’s job board.
11. Get endorsed.

To use LinkedIn for professional networking you should:

1. Use OpenLink to send messages to people you’re not connected to.
2. Check in on “Network Updates”.
3. Be identifiable.
4. Export connections.
5. Easily find email contacts on LinkedIn.
6. Leverage the perks of LinkedIn groups.
7. Take advantage of advanced search options.
8. Share your LinkedIn status updates on Twitter.
9. Network in real life.

To use LinkedIn for business/marketing you should:

1. Optimize for the new Company Page design.
2. Post company status update and target them.
3. Track company buzz.
4. Add a video to your company page.
5. Leverage LinkedIn answers to its fullest marketing potential.
6. Use LinkedIn Today to keep track of industry news.
7. Use LinkedIn to generate leads.
8. Created targeted products and services tab variations for your company page.
9. Experiment with LinkedIn ads.
10. Use group statistics for better targeting and marketing.
11. Create an industry LinkedIn group and subgroups.
12. Email and poll that LinkedIn group.
13. Collect recommendations.
14. Recruit new talent.
15. Add the company Follow and LinkedIn share buttons to your website/content.

How are you using LinkedIn to the fullest? Please let us know if there are other tips and strategies you’re using to get the most from this excellent social community.

LinkedIn is an excellent way to reach prospects, stay in touch with your network, educate your community and promote your business online. Be sure to take advantage of the tools and resources available to you – mostly for free!

If you’re happy with the amount of traffic your site is receiving but not with the number of visitors that are being converted into customers, you’re probably wondering where you should focus your time and resources. Since you want your site to generate more sign-ups or purchases, the best thing you can do is add more landing pages. If you already have a main landing page, you’re probably wondering why you need more.

While it’s not the only reason, the most significant one is because it’s hard to speak directly to every visitor with just one landing page. Even if you have a highly targeted message, there’s still going to be a significant number of your visitors who don’t connect with it. In order to give your website a more successful conversion rate, you’ll want to create targeted landing pages for your specific audience, that is based on specific goals, such as, sales, registrations or sign ups. When you’re able to give your visitors what they are looking for in a simple and clear web page, you’ll earn their undivided attention – which will help you when trying to move the visitor through a process for a successful sale.

Since landing pages are so important to your lead generation and conversion rate, it makes sense to increase the amount of the landing pages on your website. The more landing pages you have, the more conversion opportunities you’ll gain. When you have a variety of landing pages offering different messages, various offers and call to actions that you can test – this gives you feedback that will prove to be vital to your marketing.

The goal of most landing pages is to get someone to sign-up or make a purchase. For your landing pages that fall into the latter category, when someone clicks that page’s call to action, they’re going to be taken to your site’s checkout. If you look at your analytics and notice that a significant of the people who click the call to action don’t actually complete the checkout process, it’s probably an indication that your checkout needs to be streamlined. In addition to having a reliable merchant provider, you want to ensure that this process is as painless as possible. Eliminating any unnecessary steps or form fields can significantly boost your conversion rate.

One of the reasons many businesses only have one landing page is because they assume it’s going to take a lot of time and effort to create additional ones. While that may be true for brand new sites, since yours is already established, chances are you already have a significant portion of the content you need. All that will be required of you is putting it together and formatting it in a way that properly targets that landing page’s demographic.

Below are several ways you can easily increase your number of landing pages:

• Invest in a Landing Page Creation Tool that enables you to quickly and easily create optimized landing pages
• Create more offers to go along with your landing pages that provide a variety to allow you to test feedback and responses
• Adjust your existing offers to cater to different personas by revising previous offers and customizing them based on the needs of your site visitors

To help you understand why you need more landing pages for your business website, check out this article from HubSpot entitled, “Why You (Yes, You) Need to Create More Landing Page” What other questions do you have regarding multiple landing pages? Leave your comments below, and share with our community.

More landing pages only means more opportunities for your business. It can help improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), provide you a higher conversion rate, while allowing you the chance to speak to all the different needs of your prospects and clients.

As a business owner or marketing professional, wouldn’t it be simple to send an email to a contact (or nurture them) when they view a specific page on your website? How about build a list of everyone who has seen a specific page on your website?

These automation tasks are simplified with HubSpot’s new Timeline Segmentation tool. It's a powerful new addition to the list segmentation tool that makes it possible to target even more specific groups in your database, and deliver even more targeted, relevant messages.

The subtle yet powerful change to the list segmentation tool lets users set page views and events as criteria easily. This is an added feature aside from building segments off of form submissions, list membership and properties.

With the new timeline segmentation, you can now:

• send an email to a contact when they view a specific page on your website
• automatically trigger timed emails based on form completions and downloads
• build beautiful emails that focus on different lists based on lead behavior and target them to get the best results

For easier report compilation, you can now store email, lead and marketing analytics data in the same place. Good email marketing is all about segmenting your audience and sending relevant information. Timeline segmentation also enables you to:

• build a list of everyone who has seen a specific page on your website
• track the success of your email campaigns right down to the contact
• view reports and granular contact click details
• track delivery, opens and clicks the contact has done

When a contact views your pricing page, you can now send a notification email to the lead owner in Salesforce. You can easily set custom criteria to control which leads get sent and when. HubSpot’s Salesforce connector makes it easy to leverage any of your Salesforce data to segment your database, personalize your email messages and even change the content that prospects see on your website. Help your sales team close more business by giving them easy access to valuable lead intelligence data generated by HubSpot. Information on your leads and contacts’ interests, levels of activity and marketing events is synced to Salesforce - right where your sales team can see it.

You can easily turn a lead into a marketing qualified lead when they view a product related page with the timeline segmentation. Find out which of your marketing efforts is producing high quality leads that ultimately turn into customers. Track touch points along the way, and learn what content helps move leads further down your funnel and more likely to become customers.

To understand Timeline Segmentation better, read HubSpot’s article entitled, “Timeline Segmentation: A New Way to Segment Your Database with HubSpot Enterprise” and comment below to let us know what questions you have, and how this is improving your marketing automation.

Timeline Segmentation will provide you a better marketing experience. After all, by knowing what’s working and what isn’t, you can refine your marketing process and focus on what’s moving the bottom line.