We’re excited to show off our latest website redesign for BJA Partners, based in San Diego!
The new BJA Partners website was recently launched in long-page format with a San Diego skyline graphic creating a local, modern feel that is easy to navigate. The site is mobile-responsive, clean and concise, and provides a one-stop resource for potential and current clients.
BJA Partners also utilizes our social media marketing solution which includes posting relevant blogs on industry topics, creating and managing social media company pages on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and publishing personalized content from company outreach initiatives!
Contact us to learn more about custom website design, SEO optimization, email marketing and social media solutions!
Almost every business today is on social media. Whether you’ve opted for a Facebook or LinkedIn company page, are active on Twitter or even post videos on YouTube, you’ve most likely bought into the need to have an online presence.
But have you considered how a social media strategy that includes online employee advocacy can drastically impact your brand?
Research shows that employees are the most powerful advocates a company has, and should be invited into the process of raising brand awareness. Let’s look at L’Oreal as a recent case study. Their digital marketing team implemented the use of the hashtag #LifeatLoreal in an effort to familiarize corporate with local level employees by documenting interesting or humorous happenings at the office.
The benefits went beyond expectation – employees generated interest among their personal networks in employment with the company and along with another similar hashtag campaign, it increased L’Oreal’s unique Instagram impressions to 200,000.
Other examples of companies doing social media employee advocacy programs well are Starbucks, who brought in $180,000 in direct sales in less than a month with their Tweet-a-Coffee campaign, and Zappos, who offer special social media training to their employees and have a leaderboard to show which employees have the most followers.
Create an Engaging Company Culture Employees need to believe in what they’re selling. Social media advocacy programs should be voluntary, and to attract the most possible employee brand ambassadors, you need to create a culture of trust and authenticity. Be real with your employees about why you need them and how their advocacy makes an impact on achieving important sales or marketing objectives. If employees enjoy where they work, feel appreciated and understand their value, they will willingly share your content with their personal following.
Develop a Social Media Policy and Explain How It Works Too often companies resort to the negative when implementing social media policies at work. Instead of focusing so much on what can’t be said on social media, highlight the positive ways sharing appropriate content can have an invaluable impact on growing and engaging new audiences. Help employees who aren’t tech-saavy by outlining liking, sharing and commenting etiquette and if necessary, provide periodic, pre-drafted copy for them to include when sharing. Of course the best shares are organic as employees get excited about a new service, special campaign or company outreach event. Give them the freedom to share their own content as well as what you make available.
Start Small With Sharing Implementing a social media advocacy program doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Start small with your initiatives. If you already post regular content on your blog and to your company social media channels, ask employees to share these on their personal accounts. For special campaigns, consider creating some extra Tweet copy and emailing these to your staff as options for sharing. Make it fun! Send email reminders when new blogs are posted and or create a hashtag specifically for your next company event or retreat that employees can use when they share photos.
Set Goals and Track Your Results As an employer or manager, you need to know what’s working and what isn’t. Set reasonable goals. What do you want to get out of an employee advocacy initiative? Do you want to promote a certain product or service? Are you looking to expand brand awareness and turn leads into new clients from a previously untapped audience? Understand what you want employees to share about first. Then, identify key metrics that you will use to track the results. Examples of top metrics to follow are traffic driven to the website from social media, increased post reach, increase in sales, employee conversions from passive to brand advocate, a change in your customer base’s perception of your brand and any demographic change in customers.
Share Your Success Finally, share your success with the people who made it happen! Did you meet a sales goal because of increased employee advocacy? Did you hit record high website traffic? Tell your employees. It’s important that employees see the impact of their advocacy, understand their role and contribution to the brand and that they also understand what works and what doesn’t. Top influencers should also be rewarded. Always recognize the people who are doing an awesome job at representing your company in front of their peers. Not only does this inspire further action, it brings you full circle by contributing to an engaging company culture.
As employee benefit agencies, we know it can be hard to figure out the best way to leverage social media for your company, so we’ve made it easy. Follow these four steps to get more out of LinkedIn today!
Does your About page grab potential clients’ attention or does it leave them yawning? We’re sharing tips on tone, content and format for creating an engaging About page that will make people want to work with your agency today!
Tone
When a potential client reads your About page they should feel like they are meeting you face-to-face for the first time. You have the chance to make a good impression by adopting a conversational and human tone while still communicating what makes your services unique and superior. An easy way to do this is embrace the use of “I” and “we” rather than writing from a formal, third person perspective. Your tone should be authentic and relatable while remaining professional.
Content
What should you talk about? Focus on telling your story with simplicity rather than filling an About page with industry jargon or fluffy descriptions. People want to know where you came from, what you can do for them and why you are a credible choice. Show that you understand your potential client’s challenges and use examples of things you’ve done in the past to let them know you can solve their problems.
Finally, always include a call to action. What do you want them to do next? Your goal with your About page should be to motivate potential clients to contact you about your services. Place contact information visibly on the page. Include several ways to get in touch including a contact form, email, phone number and physical address.
Format
Your About page offers a glimpse into who you are as a company – your history, the principles by which you do business and the people who make up your team. It is your first chance to establish trust with a client by showing who the people behind the brand are. Don’t be afraid to move away from the traditional corporate About page format and get a little creative with what makes your company unique. Include images of your team that put a face to the name. We like what Brio Benefits has done to showcase their team by incorporating a corporate portrait and a funny, personable candid photo along with each employee bio. To view their About page, click here.
Think your About page needs a revamp? Contact us today and we’ll get you started!
LinkedIn is fast proving to be the foremost social media site for B2B marketing. Employee benefit agencies that rely on cultivating relationships in order to market a product or service may find utilizing more fast-moving social platforms like Twitter or Instagram challenging, but LinkedIn provides a space for professionals to interact with one another, share original industry content and create brand awareness for their company that results in leads and network growth. We’ve put together a list of five simple ways you can start optimizing LinkedIn for your business today:
Create a Personal Profile
Even if you don’t plan on doing much posting of your own on a personal profile, this step is imperative because right now LinkedIn requires that you have a personal account in order to make a company page. Your profile should contain a professional photo of yourself, your name, job title and ideally your work and educational experience as well as any relevant accomplishments or projects.
Set Up a Company Page
Now that you’ve created your personal page, you are able to set up a page that specifically provides information about your company to LinkedIn users. This page should contain your company name, logo, a link to your website, and a short description of your business that includes relevant keywords that are specific to what you do. Keywords can be in the form of phrases such as “Maryland insurance broker” but should shy away from staying as vague as “insurance company.” This helps your page receive a higher ranking in search engine results. Finally, ask employees who have personal LinkedIn profiles to list your company in their work experience, helping ensure that you can be found easily when people search for your business.
Share Quality Content
Sharing content ensures more opportunity for people to visit your company page and then hopefully website to follow up! Posts can be a mix of your original content and outside articles, videos or podcasts that are relevant to your industry. Recent studies show that the best time to post on LinkedIn is Tuesday through Thursday between 7-9am, noon and between 5-6pm. In addition, data revealed that posts made on Tuesday between 10-11am have the most clicks and shares. For best engagement results, companies should make it a priority to post on their LinkedIn page once a week, but no more than once a day.
Join or Create a Group
LinkedIn Groups provide a place for professionals to connect with peers working in their field or with similar interests where they can share helpful content, reviews, ask questions, post job openings and make new connections. You are able to either search for groups to join or create your own group based on your topic of choice where you can invite people to become members. These groups are useful for connecting with prospects and establishing your company as an industry expert.
Make Personal Connections
By utilizing not only your company page but also your personal profile, you can enrich your business’s success by connecting with prospects and clients. Start slow by inviting 3-5 people to connect with you per week. Follow up with a thank you message and a quick introduction when they accept your invitation. Did you write a blog for your company or on an industry topic? Post it to you profile. As you continue to share content, consider submitting it to LinkedIn Pulse’s editors to have your blog post featured. This translates to much more visibility for your company! Finally, don’t be afraid to engage with others. If you see content you like, write a comment or send a quick message to the author. Other LinkedIn members are interested in the same thing you are – building mutually beneficial relationships!
Generating brand awareness for your company on social media is becoming more and more important in our highly digitalized economy. LinkedIn offers the perfect space for your company using a B2B marketing model that is based largely on relationships to thrive and establish yourself as an industry expert while expanding your network of prospects and future business connections.
Writing a blog post -like all other writing- is a skill. In order to keep your reader interested, you should think about structuring your text and writing in an appealing style. You should help your readers to grasp the main idea of your post by providing headings, subheadings and clear paragraphs. If people understand and like your text, they are much more likely to share, like, tweet and link to your post. And that will increase your rankings! So, in order to improve your ranking in Google, you should definitely try to maximize your writing skills!
For some, writing for SEO purposes and writing to attract and keep attracting your audience could appear as two contradictory goals. However, I totally disagree. Indeed, if you not only want a good but also an SEO-friendly blog post, your text should be written in such a way that the words you want to be found for have a very prominent place. And, using your keywords too often severely damages the readability of your text. So, you definitely should not do that!
In this post, I would like to give some tips on writing blog posts that are both very readable as well as SEO-friendly. I genuinely think those two goals should (and can easily!) go hand in hand!
Elementary writing tips for good blog posts
Before anything, your blog post just has to be a good piece of writing! A lot of bloggers just begin to write after creating a new blog post. They just type what comes to mind. For some, this may be sufficient, because they are natural writing talents. Others may need some help. I always follow the next set of ‘rules’ myself.
1. Think before you write!
Think hard about the message of your text. What do you want to tell your readers? And what is the purpose of your text? What do you want you readers to do at the end of the page? Write down the answers to these questions before you begin writing.
2. Write down the structure of your blog post.
Every post should have some sort of introduction (in which you introduce your topic), a body (in which the main message is written) and a conclusion (which should summarize the most important ideas or deduce some new idea). Write down what you want to write in all these three sections. You now have some sort of summary of your post. The real writing can begin!
3. Use paragraphs.
Everybody uses paragraphs, but make sure to use paragraphs that make sense. Do not start a new sentence on a new line, just because it looks nice. There should be a reason for making a new paragraph. Every paragraph should have a main idea or a main subject. Ask yourself what the main idea of each paragraph is. You should be able to grasp that main idea in only one sentence. If you need more sentences, you simply need more paragraphs!
4. Use Headings.
If you want people to find their way in your articles, you should use subheadings. Subheadings will lead people, help them scan your page, and make the structure of your articles that much clearer.
5. Use signal words.
Signal words help people to scan through your text and help people to grasp your main idea. If you, for instance, have three reasons for wanting to sell a product, you should use signal words as: First of all, Secondly and Finally. Also, words as Nevertheless, Surely and Indeed also give a clear signal to your readers. Readers will instantly get that a conclusion will follow after words as Thus, So or Therefore. Signal words are thus very important to structure your text.
6. Let other people read your post.
Before publishing your post, let someone else read your post first. Ask him/her whether or not he understands the main idea of your post. Correct typo’s and sentences that are not formulated correctly.
