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Wednesday 31 August 2016

Why Should Marketers Consider Dynamic Ads On LinkedIn?

Why Should Marketers Consider Dynamic Ads On LinkedIn?
Are you a B2B marketer?
Want to deliver personalized messages to engage with your audience?
LinkedIn provides a great solution with its Dynamic Ads feature. In this article, let us see why marketers should consider Dynamic Ads for their B2B marketing.

There Are 4 Steps Leading To Success In Digital Marketing:

  1. Define your goal
  2. Target the right people
  3. Engage them with content
  4. Optimize your impact
Targeting and engaging with the right people are the steps that a marketer should concentrate more on. Because it is a well-known fact that message relevancy is the key factor, when it is about connecting with targeted users. The success or failure of a digital marketer is decided by the relevancy of their message. If marketers are not reaching the relevant users, they cannot make what they want.
Nowadays, the online user behavior cannot be predicted with a manual effort. On the other hand, the competition is increasing. You have to compete with many other marketers who also try to grab the attention of the users.
60% of the marketers say that reaching the right audience with a right message is their top priority in digital marketing. But many marketers are struggling with creating an engagement with their targeted users. Among the 433 million users in the community, it is a bit difficult to target the right people.

Dynamic Ads

To help its marketing users, LinkedIn has rolled out Dynamic Ads feature and now it makes some changes to this beautiful feature. With these new updates, marketers can have a new feel and they can place their calls-to-action and images prominently. So that, they can drive the engagement with the right users.
LinkedIn Dynamic Ads

Why LinkedIn Dynamic Ads?

There are three main things that you can do with the help of LinkedIn Dynamic Ads. They are
  1. Target the Right Audience Who Matter Your Business

LinkedIn gives you a form where you can select your targeted audiences. This contains a wide range of criteria for targeting. That includes company, skills, interests, location etc.
  1. Performance Measurement

Measuring performance is needed for any campaign. Unless you know the performance of the campaign, you cannot take a decision further. LinkedIn gives you precise metrics of your performance.
  1. Increase Your Follower Count

You can place calls-to-action like “Follow Company” which can get you new followers. So, you can easily increase your follower count on LinkedIn.
Place calls-to-action like “Follow Company” which increases your followers on LinkedIn
To know how better the results of LinkedIn Dynamic Ads would be, here we are giving you a success story of CA Technologies on LinkedIn. Take a look.

CA Technologies

CA technologies, a leading software solutions enterprise, wants to drive leads. It has developed a great content that is downloadable, targeting the high-level decision makers in the IT sector. Their challenge lies in getting clicks from these high-quality leads.
ca-technologies-linkedin-page
To drive leads for its enterprise software solutions, CA Technologies developed relevant, downloadable content targeted to high-level IT decision-makers. The challenge was getting these high-quality leads to convert from clicks.

What Did They Do?

They used the best in their marketing strategy. They used LinkedIn’s dynamic ads for their advertising. Dynamic ads link the member’s profile picture with the name and message of a brand. As per the Digital Marketing Head of the company, LinkedIn’s Dynamic ads are eye-catching and visually appealing. With the dynamic ads, they could promote their content in a better way as they were able to add more ad copy.
Linkedin-dynamic-ads3

What Was The Result?

CA Technologies got outstanding results for its dynamic ad campaign. The campaign has resulted in a conversion rate of 11.3%. The cost per lead was 68% less when compared to other social media platforms. On this great success, the digital marketing head of CAT says that they were pretty sure their content reached the right audience, resulting great conversion rates. And also said that they shifted their marketing budget to LinkedIn from other social platforms, owing to the great results.
Why Should Marketers Consider Dynamic Ads On LinkedIn?
If you are new to advertising on LinkedIn, dynamic ads can be helpful for you in delivering personalized content to your targeted users with creative ads. To create customized templates, marketers are using the native ad format. These templates can be populated dynamically with relevant content like skills, interests etc and profile images of the user who are viewing the ad. Depending on the contextual elements of what the user is viewing, the content can be optimized. 
Dynamic ads can achieve a variety of ad objectives such as driving conversions, getting new followers for your LinkedIn company or showcase page and display job notifications. 

Conclusion

Reaching the relevant users with relevant content is the main advantage that you can get with LinkedIn’s dynamic ads. You might be using the general ad features of LinkedIn. Though they help you in reaching a large number of users, we are not sure how many of them matter for your business. But with dynamic ads, you reach only the users who matter the most for you.
This is the thing that separates the dynamic ads from other ad features of LinkedIn.

Wednesday 24 August 2016

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Monday 22 August 2016

Top 10 Profile Photo and Portrait Hacks Based on Science

girl with pearl earring - two views
Are you planning to shoot a new profile photo or publicity headshot? Or, are you trying to choose the best image from a group of possible shots? There’s some surprising science to help you plan your shoot and pick a winner.
The best thing about these tips is that their effect is almost always non-conscious. The viewer won’t consciously realize that your photo appears more trustworthy or more attractive because of the content or composition. And, your photographer probably doesn’t know most of them.

1. Profile Photo Lessons from da Vinci

Unless you are obsessive about art and portraiture, you probably never noticed that for centuries artists have preferred to show the left side of their subjects’ faces. 
One compilation of studies showed that for female subjects the bias ran as high as 78%. Male portraits were less skewed, but still showed at least a 56% bias toward the left side.
mona lisa the original profile photo
Scientists at Wake Forest University conducted a series of experiments that showed both conscious and non-conscious preference for images showing the left side of the subject’s face. The left-side preference was true both for verbal statements of preference as well as unconscious pupil dilation.
What’s going on? Our faces and expressions aren’t perfectly symmetrical, and part of the reason is that our right and left brain hemispheres don’t have identical functions. The right hemisphere controls the left side of our body and is also associated more with emotion. The conclusion of most scientists who have looked at the preference for left-side images is that the left side of our faces expresses more emotion.
left-right faces
One reason artists have chosen to portray men from the right side more often than women is that the less emotional right side may perceived as higher in dominance and self-control. Another study looked specifically at drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and found that subjects portrayed by right-side images were considered more “potent” and “active.”
Recommendation. Unless you feel a need to project self-control and power, use an image that emphasizes the left side of your face. It will make you slightly more attractive and, perhaps, approachable.
Study: one side of your face makes you look better. #Neuromarketing pic.twitter.com/6pAgM0X9qr CLICK TO TWEET

2. Keep Your Eye On Your Eyes

Want to be more attractive and trustworthy, at least in your profile photo? An image with larger pupils will do the trick. 
eyes - pupils
Subjects were asked to rate a video image of a person for trust. Unbeknownst to the subjects, the researchers digitally modified the size of the pupils of the person on the screen. Not only did the subjects rate that person as more trustworthy when that person’s pupils were larger, the subjects’ own pupils dilated to match the screen image.
Photo shoot lighting is often working against you from a pupil-size standpoint, as bright lights cause your pupils to shrink. So do pre-flashes for red-eye prevention.
Recommendation. When it comes to pupils, bigger is better. To increase trust, bump up the size of your pupils in your profile photo. Your photographer may be able to reduce the tiny pupil effect with low level modeling lights. Or, do what the scientists did – enlarge the pupils with digital editing tools.
Top 10 ways to hack your profile photo, based on science. #Neuromarketing pic.twitter.com/6pAgM0X9qr CLICK TO TWEET

3. What’s a Limbal Ring?

If you aren’t an opthamalogist or Jeopardy champion, you may not know what the limbal ring is. In fact, it’s the dark edge around the perimeter of your eye’s iris that forms the border with the white surrounding area. Another set of experiments (also described in Eyes Are The Door to Trust. Attractiveness, Too), showed that a thicker limbal ring made people more attractive to viewers of the opposite gender. The scientists postulated that a thicker limbal ring is a marker for youth and health.
limbal ring comparison
Recommendation.While you’ve got Photoshop open to tweak your pupil sizes, consider enhancing your limbal ring. It might make your profile photo bit more attractive. 

4. Can You Say Cheese?

Should you smile for your profile photo? Would a serious expression be better?
Obviously, this decision depends in part on the conscious image you want to portray. A candidate for a senior judicial position probably doesn’t want the photo to catch her in the middle of a huge guffaw. But, science can weigh in here, too.
One study by Brian Knutson looked at how the expression of the person in a photo affected perception of “dominance” and “affiliation.” These are two metrics used by psychologists interested in social organization. Affiliation is a positive characteristic, indicating factors like friendliness, openness, and a need to interact with others.
knutson emotio expression
Smiling images ranked high for both dominance and affiliation. That’s likely the quadrant most of us want to be in when viewed by potential customers, business partners, and so on. Images in which the subject showed anger or disgust also scored high for dominance but were low on affiliation. While such obvious displays of negative emotion aren’t common in headshots or social media images, a very stern/serious image would likely show similar characteristics.
Most of us wouldn’t choose a profile picture showing sadness or fear. Knutson’s work shows why: images with these emotions scored low both on dominance and affiliation.
Recommendation. Include a confident smile in your profile photo. By increasing your dominance and affiliation levels, you will seem like the kind of person others should connect to.

5. Trust Me, I’m Smiling

Smiling profile images are also good for trust. As I described in Unconscious Trust Formed in Milliseconds, a face with smiling mouth and slightly surprised eyebrows was found to be more trustworthy than neutral or scowling faces.
trust and faces
That post also references research on first impressions. While we form them in milliseconds, they can be surprisingly slow to change once formed.
Recommendation. If building trust is your goal, a small smile on your profile photo may be more effective than a big one. And, check your eyebrows. A look of slight surprise will curve them a bit to further maximize trust.
Research: smiling increases attractiveness and trust. #Neuromarketing pic.twitter.com/fsnaCAXBAD CLICK TO TWEET

6. Get Smart

Being seen as smart is usually desirable, and it turns out you can influence your perceived intelligence with your profile picture too. Once again, the answer is smiling. A 2014 study found,
Faces that are perceived as highly intelligent are rather prolonged with a broader distance between the eyes, a larger nose, a slight upturn to the corners of the mouth, and a sharper, pointing, less rounded chin.
small smile means smart
While some of these facial characteristics are out of your control, a small smile is easily achieved. 
One odd finding of this study was that viewers could actually predict the intelligence of male subjects from their photos, while for female subjects there was no correlation between predicted intelligence and actual IQ.
Recommendation. A small smile might make you seem smarter (and, as noted above, more trustworthy), while a bigger smile might boost your dominance and friendliness. Dial your smile up or down depending on the impression you are trying to make.

7. When Guys Shouldn’t Smile

There’s one domain where smiles work for women, but not for men – sexual attraction. One study, amusingly titled Happy Guys Finish Last, had subjects of one gender view photos of the other gender. The photos displayed different emotions. The subjects then rated how attractive the pictured people were. 
While happiness was the most attractive emotion for photos of women being viewed by men, it was one of the least attractive for men being viewed by women. Oddly, perhaps, shame and pride were almost equally attractive male emotions.
emotions and your profile photo
Recommendation. While smiles are almost always a positive for profile photos, men whose interests include dating should tone down the happy smile. Better yet, save the open smile for professional sites like LinkedIn and experiment with less happy imagery on dating sites. Women can smile regardless of their professional or personal objectives.

8. Look at Me!

Have you ever had a photographer tell you to look at something other than the camera? Her hand, perhaps, or a distant object? This may make for an artistic photo, but might not be your best profile picture choice. Scientists in the UK and Australia found that a direct gaze was most attractive.
Viewers preferred photos in which the subject looked directly at the camera and rated those subjects as more attractive. This bias for direct vs. averted gaze photos held both for attractive subjects and less attractive subjects. (I’m imagining an ad in the campus newspaper that said, “Unattractive people needed for psychology experiment. Apply with photo.”)
Gaze direction
The researchers attributed the direct gaze as a social cue indicating a desire to connect with the viewer.
Where should your eyes be looking in your profile photo? Science tells you. CLICK TO TWEET
Recommendation. Unless you’ve got a good reason to be gazing in another direction, look into the camera. You’ll be more attractive, regardless of how gorgeous/handsome you are. Or aren’t.

9. Cocktail Hour Photo Shoot?

This study result may surprise you. Researchers took photographs of subjects under three conditions of alcohol consumption: none at all, a low dose, and a high dose. (To be clear, it was the subjects consuming the alcohol, not the researchers. As far as we know.) The scientists then had other subjects evaluate the photos and rate the individual portrayed for attractiveness. 
Surprisingly, the subjects who consumed a modest amount of alcohol received the highest attractiveness ratings. The high dose alcohol subjects were the least attractive.
alcohol can make you attractive
Why does having a drink make you more attractive? The researchers speculated that the subjects might be slightly more relaxed, or that a facial flush added a bit of robust color to their image.
The right dose is an important factor, obviously, and depends on the weight of the individual. For more discussion, see Want to Be More Attractive? Science Says Have a Drink.
Recommendation. If you don’t have a problem with an occasional adult beverage, consider a “low dose” before your next photo shoot. Don’t overdo it, of course – check the chart below to get your optimal amount, and read my original post for more details.
optimum alcohol chart

10. Don’t be an Idiot

Science gives, and it takes away. Now that you have permission to savor that glass of pinot noir before your next photo shoot, I’m going to give you the negative side of alcohol as it relates to your profile pic. 
Your are likely a fun-loving person who lives life to the fullest. So, why not show that you aren’t 24/7 business by toasting your profile viewers with a nice glass of wine? In fact, you are better off drinking that beverage than using it in a profile photo. 
In my Forbes piece, Proof: Alcohol Makes You (Look) Dumb, I describe a study showed that subjects who viewed identical photos of people with and without alcohol rated the former as lower in intelligence.
wine-coke-none
The authors of the original study termed this phenomenon as the “Imbibing Idiot Bias.” They think that viewers associate alcohol with cognitive impairment. Even in the absence of any impaired behavior or even consumption, the cognitive damage contained in the glass transfers to its hapless holder.
Save the image of you enjoying a margarita in an amazing oceanfront cafe for your Facebook friends. Keep your profile pictures alcohol-free, unless you are a professional sommelier, micro-brewery founder, or have a similar reason to display your adult beverage savvy.

Bonus! 11. Model the Emotion You Want to Generate

We’ve already heard about the advantages of smiling. But, perhaps you want your viewers to experience a particular emotion. Maybe you want to make them angry, as many politicians strive to do with voters. In that case, a photo with that same emotion can have that effect.
angry woman
study in Sweden exposed subjects to very brief images of face icons with different expressions – happy, neutral, and angry. The images were shown for only 30 milliseconds, too slow to be consciously processed by the subjects. Nevertheless, the facial muscles of the subjects contracted to mimic the emotion they saw.
We know from work by Ekman and others that our facial muscles can change our emotional state to match, so getting a viewer’s face to scrunch in anger will tend to make them more angry than before.
The study also shows the surprising power of non-conscious image processing.
Recommendation. If you are trying to create a particular emotion in your viewers, wear a matching expression in your own photo to invoke the facial mimicry effect.
Top 10 ways to hack your profile photo, based on science. #Neuromarketing pic.twitter.com/6pAgM0X9qr CLICK TO TWEET
Your social profile photo or publicity headshot makes a bigger difference than you might expect. Take the time to optimize the details, and you’ll impress your viewers in the way you want and your business needs.

Wednesday 17 August 2016

Developing a Conversion Funnel to Increase Sales


If you want a solid marketing campaign that generates positive sales, you should consider using a conversion funnel. This is a tool that is often used by successful internet marketers. By learning how to build a conversion funnel, you’ll be able to create a structured campaign that actually converts.
Here is a simple guide for developing a conversion funnel for your next marketing campaign.
What is a Conversion Funnel?
First off, what is a conversion funnel? It’s a structured outline of your method for acquiring new customers and completing a sale. You’re funnelling your potential customers through a planned campaign, starting with the acquisition and ending with a sale or inquiry.
The reason for the funnel shape is that the number of prospective customers drops off the further along you go. You can then determine where the largest drop-off occurs and come up with solutions for fixing the leak in the funnel.
For example, you may get 1,000 visitors to reach your landing page. Half of those visitors may follow through with the next action, such as subscribing to your email list. Half of those subscribers may follow the link in your next email. The number trickles down until you reach your final conversion rate.
The standard conversion funnel can be broken down as follows:
  • Attraction
  • Interest
  • Desire
  • Action
You first need to attract potential customers. This is done through your standard marketing channels, such as PPC ads, press releases, social media marketing, and search engine optimization. From there, you need to capture their interest, such as with a landing page.
You then use desire in your calls to action to get them to move to the next step – completing an action. The intended action is usually a purchase or contacting you to learn more about your offer.
Attracting the Right Customers
The first part of the funnel is attracting potential customers. You need to attract the right customers to boost your conversion rates and make your funnel more effective. There are multiple solutions for this. You can perform market research to learn more about the interests of your prospective customers.
You could also focus on the copy used in your advertisements and marketing. Use long-tail keywords to narrow the focus of your advertisements. Targeting a niche category within your industry is always a good method for attracting the right customers.
Build Interest and Desire
Building interest and desire gets accomplished through landing pages and emails. Your landing pages should build interest in the solution that you’re providing. Your goal should be to gain subscribers. You can include a call to action on your landing page to complete a sale, but include an opt-in form for subscribing.
Some of your visitors may not be interested in making a purchase right away. But, you could still end up getting their email address. This is an essential part of the funnel. You’ll need to create an email marketing campaign for targeting visitors that left without making a purchase.
Send a Follow Up Email
You can attempt to plug the leak in your funnel by sending follow up emails. The opt-in form that you include on your landing page should be separate from your other subscriber lists. Create a follow-up email that you can send to these visitors.
Your follow-up email should build the desire to come back to your website and complete a purchase. You could include an additional offer, discount, or promotional code to entice the visitor back to your website.
Create an Effective Call to Action
The final part of increasing sales through a conversion funnel is to create a killer call to action. Your call to action needs to convert. If you need help creating an effective call to action, use split testing to fine-tune your final message.
Conversion funnels are incredibly effective at increasing the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. It makes it easier to keep your campaign structured and maximise your conversion rates.
You can easily look at each stage of your conversion funnel – advertisement, landing page, email, and sale, to determine which area needs to be optimised. Focus on the areas where your potential customers start to drop-off and then come up with a solution to plug the leak and improve your funnel.
You can develop your own conversion funnel now or for additional internet marketing tips – click on the following link and learn more about my done-for-you system.

Wednesday 10 August 2016

Email Marketing Tips: Successful Email Marketing

6 tips to create a winning email marketing strategy 
Email Marketing TipsIf you’re looking for affordable, effective marketing ideas for small business, email should definitely top the list. Email marketing offers some definite advantages that can make it one of the most valuable forms of online marketing that small businesses can pursue. It can be easily personalized to rev up its appeal, is extremely affordable, and gives you the opportunity to market your business directly to your customers without having to wait until they stop by your website or social media pages. Simply sending out emails and hoping for the best isn’t going to get you very far, though. Just like with the rest of your online marketing strategies, there are certain guidelines you should follow to get the best return for your emails.  To help you on your way, here are our top 6 email marketing tips to ensure your email marketing efforts succeed.
Tip #1: Make your emails mobile-ready 
The majority of customers now access their email using a smartphone or other mobile device, and Litmus reports that a whopping 71% of these on-the-go subscribers will delete an email if it isn’t mobile-friendly.  Choose a responsive email design to ensure your emails perform perfectly no matter how they’re accessed – there are a number of free templates available online to show you how.
 Tip #2: Create winning subject linesA killer subject line is the key to successful email marketing. Create interesting subject lines using these tips will help entice recipients to open your emails:
  • Keep it short – 28-39 characters is optimum
  • Make sure your subject lines are directly relevant to the contents of your emails – “bait and switch” tactics are just going to annoy your readers
  • Motivate recipients by including a call to action
  • Create a sense of urgency
  • Include a specific offer or discount
 Tip #3: Provide meaningful calls to action
Crafting meaningful calls to action is the best way to boost the click-through rates on your emails, according to Ascend2’s benchmark email marketing trends report. Make your CTA stand out on your email by using contrasting colors and bold, clear language. Motivate your customers with dynamic CTAs that urge them to directly take action such as “Join the conversation”
 Tip #4: Choose a simple, clear layout
You only have a small window of opportunity to grab your recipients’ attention with email marketing. Don’t overwhelm them with a cluttered layout design that features so many graphics, flashing gifs, and decorative fonts that your message gets lost. Trust in the strength of your message and go with a simple, clean layout with information divided into two or three sections. That will offer just enough visual stimulation to provide interest and capture your readers’ attention without distracting them from your message.
Tip #5: Use short, succinct wording
Don’t make the mistake of overloading recipients with so much text that it puts them off from reading your email. The purpose of your email is to get readers to click through, so present information in a few easy to scan sections that readers can take in at a glance. Positioning CTAs strategically throughout text will entice recipients into taking a desired action to discover more information.
Tip #6: Choose your graphics carefully
It can be tempting to use big, showy graphics to catch readers’ attention, but loading down your email with too many images or ones that are too big can cause your messages to load slowly or appear distorted in email. Some email clients even gray out images, leaving only broken-link symbols. Recipients aren’t going to wait for your email to load; they’re going to trash it unread and move on. Consider sending out emails that are primarily text-based, using contrasting colors and just a few well-chosen images to enhance the message. This approach will help your message to come through clearly and quickly, which can help increase your open and click through rates