Online Marketing Best Practices
We know the tireless hours that go into building small businesses, and yours is no exception. We would hate for your dedication and hard work to be missed, or even worse, unnoticed entirely, because your online marketing is lackluster.
In this two-part series, we share our best practices for online marketing. From how to manage your social media platforms, to Google reviews and analytics. We hope you’ll refer to these articles often as you work to refine and perfect your well-oiled marketing machine.
Are you consistent with posting content online, working with a content calendar and social media planner, but not getting the results you want? If so, this article is for you! If you’re not yet regularly posting content, we recommend that you start with some of our previous articles that focus on the beginning stages of building your brand and your company online. Like this one on why you need a website, or this one about having a strong online presence.
Best Practices for Online Marketing
Your Brand
If your office doesn’t have multiple printed copies of coffee stained, sticky-note adorned brand style guides in every employee’s desk, you’ll want to start by creating some simple guidelines. We recommend a Google Doc. This way, everyone in your company will have easy access to the information they need when creating new materials.
So what exactly is your brand? Who are you and what does your work convey to the world? Your brand is that unique je ne sais quoi that makes your company easily identifiable to others. It should be reflected in everything that you and your team do - from emails and social media posts, to your paid advertising. A few examples? A white screen, with a brightly coloured animal walking across it - when we see this, our brains immediately think Telus. During the winter holidays, polar bears and other cute animals are hanging out as the snow falls, with magical jingling music in the background. We know that one of those furry friends is going to twist open a fizzy glass bottle of Coca-Cola Classic.
When we have quick reactions to advertising and can immediately name a company based on a few simple cues before we see a logo, this is the sign of a good, strong brand. You want your audience to immediately think of your brand as soon as they see any piece of work that you display.
A few important items to consider when building your brand:
What is your brand voice - are you funny? Very formal? Friendly and laid back? How do you want to address your audience? This should permeate every piece of content that you produce, every email you send, and every social media post that you bravely send out into the world.
Brand colours - do you have them? Are you using them or are people on your team just using something close to that pantone blue 072 C they’re supposed to be using?
Be consistent and ensure all employees are familiar with your guidelines, using the appropriate voice, fonts, and colours on all materials.
Create a shared folder that contains high resolution jpeg and png images of your logo and other brand materials in a few different sizes. This ensures employees have access to the latest, clearest logo/wordmark in the proper format.
Do you require specific spacing for your logo? Make this clear in your brand guidelines (or Google Doc) so that employees can easily produce materials without having to guess. By the time their creation hits your marketing employee’s desk, they will be met with quick approval!
If you don’t have a designated marketing employee or team, you should appoint someone to have eyes on all company pieces before they go out to ensure brand compliance.
Social Media
Simply having accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram doesn’t make a good online presence! Today, when people want to find information about a company they often start with social media to see what you’re up to. There is nothing more disappointing than finding a company’s Facebook page only to see that it has no posts, or that their Instagram account was last updated in 2012. So what does your company (and its employees) need to do to effectively manage your social media presence? We’re so glad you asked!
(Note: To manage all of this efficiently and in one place, get thee a social media scheduler! We love Buffer, Later and Hootsuite.)
As a business owner, you’re likely already on LinkedIn, with both a personal profile and a business page. If you’re cringing because these don’t exist, this is your cue to set them up! Encourage your team members to be active on LinkedIn, and make sure that everyone has up-to-date profiles that are linked to your business page. What exactly do we mean by “up-to-date”? Each team member’s profile should:
Have a recent (within the last five years) professional looking headshot.
Have a banner image that is reflective of the company brand (or at least a high quality, work-appropriate image). Leaving the default banner image makes the profile look incomplete
Highlight all completed education with detailed summaries
Include keywords that are relevant to your potential customers and business partners
List previous roles including detailed summaries
Outline top skills and interests
Be reasonably ‘active’ with original articles, and likes for other people’s posts and articles
Have a good number of professional connections (ideally over 500)
Display several recommendations given and received
If you aren’t in the habit of already, cross-posting content from your blog to your LinkedIn profile as an article should always be included in the steps taken after publishing a new blog post. To do this, simply copy the text from your blog, create a new article and paste the content into the text box. You’ll want to add a line at the top of each article that says (This post originally appeared on [your website]) and link your readers back to the original location of your blog post. Farm that web traffic, friends!
You’ll also want to make your article aesthetically pleasing by adding a branded banner image to the top. You can use the same image that you used for your original post, but you’ll want to resize it to 1500 or 1600px wide for full width. Once you’ve added the link at the top and your banner image, you’re ready to publish the article. We recommend doing this about one day after you’ve posted the article to your blog and we hope you’re consistently posting blog content!
Finally, don’t forget to share links to your blog posts to encourage connections to “read more,” as well as links to content from other people and companies within your field by using LinkedIn posts - this is where your social media scheduler comes in!
Keeping the company Twitter account chirping is important for social engagement and as a tool to garner more website traffic. Consistently sharing your blog content to Twitter with relevant hashtags that encourage your followers to “read more” on your website ensures that new posts don’t go unnoticed. Sharing links to blog posts and news updates from other websites in your field is another great way to stay consistent with posting content (don’t forget to add Twitter handles for the author and publication! Also, did we say social media scheduler yet?)
What about individual profiles? You’ll want to have your designated marketing employee decide what guidelines are appropriate for your company and its employees when it comes to best practices for personalTwitter accounts. For example:
Will you require all employees to include the company handle on their profiles?
Do you need to add a disclaimer about the opinions belonging to the user?
Will you have guidelines for the types of content and opinions that may be shared? (E.g. should employees refrain from sharing their political or religious beliefs?)
These guidelines could live in that well-loved brand guidelines document (or shared Google Doc) we talked about earlier.
To boost engagement and followers on Twitter, you could try using Twitter lists. Take note of the profiles of people working at traditional organizations who have become influencers. Engage with their posts by retweeting and liking them - another great way to ensure your Twitter account is engaging and active.
Just like you’ve done for Twitter and LinkedIn, you’ll want to ensure new blog posts are quickly shared after publishing to your Instagram account (with your… you guessed it! Social. Media. Scheduler.) to encourage your followers to read your new stuff!
You should have a pre-built template with a branded overlay for your images that is 1080px X 1080px or 640px by 640px. You can use this to properly size and brand any image you share. If you check out our Instagram account, you can see that our posts directing followers to our blog are branded with a blue overlay (I said blue but I actually meant RGB #3090c7) as well as our logo and website URL. We also have some non-branded posts to prevent everything from looking the same. You can use your judgement to decide how many branded versus non-branded images you want to appear on your instagram grid.
If you’re posting links to Instagram often (and we hope you are!) you should have an account with Link In Profile and add the link to your bio. This provides easy access for your followers to all of the links that you share directly from your Instagram account. You can check ours out here.
We’ve said it three times and we will say it again! Always ensure your new blog posts are shared with your followers directly after publishing, using that handy social media scheduler. Your LinkedIn and Facebook posts that send followers to your blog posts can be worded similarly, but Twitter and Instagram post wording should differ slightly from these, as you’ll want to add relevant hashtags and handles when posting to those accounts (while staying within Twitter’s character count).
Facebook is another place that you’ll want your designated marketing employee or contact to weigh in and decide whether to establish standards for individual team member profiles. Finally, you may want to establish rules about content sharing when the company name is mentioned on personal profiles.
Summing it up
Whether you’re paying a marketing firm or consultant, working with an in-house marketing employee or managing the marketing department yourself, it’s so important that your online presence complements the countless hours and care that have gone into building your business. Having a consistent and current online presence allows customers, prospects, and followers to stay up to date with your latest products and services. Use these online marketing practices to increase engagement, and in turn, increase your profits!