Month: April 2022

Nowadays in order to gain more visibility on Google, local businesses create a Business profile also known as a ‘Google Business listing’. To Utilize your Google Business Profile, you need management and editing capabilities to work as an effective lead generation and Search Engine Optimization tool.

So how to manage your Google Business Profile?

You need to create a separate Google My Business profile to manage your Google Business profile.

Setting up a Google Business Profile is by far the easiest way for people to find a local business on Google search and Google Maps. 

With a Google Business profile, you can interact with your customers through messages, showcase your products and services, build customer trust through reviews, understand how your customers find your business, and even specify what health and safety measures you have put in place to protect them.

Formally known as Google My Business, your Google Business profile can be managed and updated directly on the Google search either from your computer or if you are always on the go, using your smartphone makes it easy to make your business information accurate at all times.

Any business, small-scale, mid-scale, or large-scale is eligible for a Google Business profile. The good news is – 

• It’s easy to setup
• Takes minutes
• Doesn’t require any particular computer skills 

And I almost forgot… it’s also totally FREE!

Having a well-optimized Google Business Profile in 2022 is going to be more important than ever before for every local business.

Let us first understand what Google My Business is.

 

What is Google My Business? 

 

Google Business profile or Google My Business is a free Business listing from Google. It helps local businesses to manage their online presence across Google search and Google Maps. It allows customers to find your business online. You can verify and update your business information on your Google My Business profile. 

For example, if you run a business like a restaurant, a medical store, or a retail shop that serves customers at a particular location, your Google Business profile can help them find you. A verified business is considered reputable on Google.

Google My Business profile helps you to claim ownership of your Business profile and also provides you the rights of management. It allows you to utilize its free features to gain visibility on Google.

Now that you know Google My Business, let me tell you about Bing business place which will also help you gain visibility for your business.

 

Why “Bing Business Place” is important for local businesses?

Bing business place is a FREE service that allows you to manage your business listing on Bing Search results and Bing Maps. 

• • Bing Business Place helps local businesses stand out from their competitors by updating business information like store time, latest pictures of storefront and interiors, etc.
  • To ensure that your users always see the accurate and latest information about your business, you might want to add your business listing on Bing search and maps. It allows you to edit the Business name, address, map location, contact details, website, etc.
  • It provides tips on how to make your business listing more visible.

 

As a local business owner, you should take advantage of both services. Google remains a dominant search engine, but the search behavior of users is constantly evolving and millions of internet users turn to Bing to help them navigate. Bing commands billions of people and high-intent searches per month.

 

How to optimize your Google My Business profile? 

Google Business profile optimization is the key to getting found in local search. An optimized Business profile can improve the engagement of customers, boost the local ranking to provide more visibility with your business and convert more leads.

Here are the ideas to turn your Google business profile into a 24*7 lead-generating tool for your business.

1. Set up a Google My Business account

Firstly, understand that the Google business profile and Google My Business account are separate entities. In order to optimize your Business profile, you need to create a Google My Business account and later connect it with your Google Business profile. 

To create a Google My Business account 

• • Search for Google.com/business
  • Sign in with the Gmail account you use for business

Once you create your business profile, don’t forget to claim your Google business listing on Google maps. It helps your local business to get found. 

2. Fill in every section 

Completeness of your Business profile helps Google to rank you higher in local searches. You can provide the latest and updated business information to gain trust and build a reputation.

Some of the important aspects of your business profile that need to be filled right away are:

• • Business name
  • Address
  • Phone
  • Website 
  • Opening hours/ working hours 
  • Products and services
  • Posts and reviews
  • Questions and answers 
  • “From the business” description

 

3. Verify your business 

Once the profile is created, get your Business verified. To verify your business head to Google.com/business and click on “Start Now”. Verification makes sure that the information in your Google Business listing is correct. 

The information includes your business name, address, phone number, website URL, and store time.

Google will send you a verification code which you will have to enter on the website. You can get the verification code by postcard or a phone call, further instructions will be provided after you create your business profile.

4. Include high-resolution photos

Google likes visual content, so utilize plenty of good quality photos of your business inside and outside.

 To add photos to your Google My Business profile, select the photo tab, click “add photos” and choose the photos you want to upload.

Points to remember:

• • Add a high-quality cover photo that will represent your brand.
  • Showcase different aspects of your business such as products, services, and storefront.
  • The standard photo size is 800×600 pixels (Photos smaller than 800×600 will be enlarged to fit the screen and larger images will be cropped to fit the space)

 

5. Use keywords in your profile

Use of the relevant keywords in your Google business profile is one of the important optimization tips. This will help customers to find local businesses like yours while they are searching on search engines. Include keywords that are most relevant to your business such as services and products you offer or the location of your store.

There are two areas where the use of keywords plays a vital role in getting your business found 

• • “Name” field:  Name field is important because it serves as a link to your business profile.
  • “Description” field: Adding keywords in the description field helps your profile show up for related searches. The description area is the place that potential customers will see when they find you in search results.

 

6. Enable messaging

This feature allows customers to directly send a text message through your Google Business profile.

This is a great opportunity for consumers to get in touch with you.

7. Performance measurement 

Monitoring your Google My Business profile on a regular basis is very important. You can set up alerts via Google My Business account. If someone leaves a review you will get a notification on your phone or desktop. 

Check how things are working, how many views or clicks you are getting, and whether the visibility is increasing or decreasing. By checking GMB listings you can make required changes in your business plan.

8. Get customer reviews 

Reviews from your customer play an important role to show your business higher in search results. If you get a list of search results for a restaurant, which one would you choose? The one with a 5 yellow star rating or the one with a 1-star rating with no reviews at all?

Reviews influence customer choice, so this is the key ranking factor in Google’s algorithm.

Keep in mind – 

• • Always have Good ratings and customer reviews
  • While asking for reviews from customers, keep it polite.
  • Thank your customers who post a review, whether the reviews are good or bad.

 

9. Ask and answer questions

Google offers a feature “Questions & Answers” on your Google Business profiles. Answering the questions in this section will give potential customers confidence that you are a credible business.

You can do this simply by logging in to your Google My Business Profile and going to your “Questions & Answers” section.

 

Conclusion

This guide will help you to know how to make your Google My Business listing accurate and complete. Follow the above steps and you will reap its benefits. It will help you to improve your ranking in local search results.

Have you tried optimizing your Google Business profile? Share your tips in the comment section below.

Today, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions provides a convenient and unique way to target members by Company, Industry, Skills, Titles, Categories, and more; but what if you want to reach the people you already know? If you want to generate or nurture warm leads, customizing your ad targeting can help in your lead generation process which allows you to reach people who matter most to your business. Lead generation is an expensive process whether you run ad campaigns on social media platforms or buy lead data from third-party companies.

LinkedIn’s Matched Audience provides a set of target options to combine your business data with LinkedIn’s professional data. It helps you to convert hard-to-get and highly-valued leads into customers, which you may not have reached otherwise.

For many people, the matched audience on LinkedIn is a completely new topic so, in this article, we’re going to explain everything you need to learn about LinkedIn lead generation strategies.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• • What are LinkedIn matched audiences?
  • What are the types of LinkedIn matched audiences?
  • Best ad targeting practices for strong lead generation
  • How to analyze your campaign performance?

 

What is LinkedIn Matched Audience?

Matched audiences on LinkedIn are the same as the custom audiences on Facebook. It finds out people who are already interested in your products or services. Matched audience allows more specific reach to the users. It is a set of tools used to connect businesses with their target audiences by leveraging the potential of their contacts in the database. It helps you to re-impact users who have interacted with your business earlier and provides better lead generation. 

Lead generation is essential for B2B businesses, but it is not just a number game. To get better results you need to focus on getting the right quality of leads. Quantity with no desired outcome is of no use.

To get started with matched audiences keep your conversion tracking enabled. It will allow you to measure the actions of the users who are coming to your website through LinkedIn ads or campaigns. The key actions can be a content download, page views, signing up through a lead gen form, etc.

Matched Audiences helps you to retarget website visitors, upload a list of accounts (companies), or email contacts to your target business. With this offering, LinkedIn becomes an ideally advanced lead generation strategy for always-on campaigns. It helps you to build a richer lead generation marketing plan to increase ROI and business revenue.

 

What are the types of LinkedIn matched audiences?

LinkedIn’s matched audience concept helps businesses to reach website visitors and retarget them by utilizing LinkedIn ads as they browse the internet. Matched audiences include parameters such as retargeting, Contact targeting, Company or Account targeting, and Lookalike targeting. With these parameters, businesses can perform 10 times better than usual.

Let us see how this works…

• Retargeting

Retargeting or Website retargeting helps you to deliver relevant ad content to the audiences based on visits to your website page or action taken by the users with your LinkedIn ads. 

Now let me simplify this to make it more understandable for newbies. 

 

How does retargeting work on LinkedIn? 

It is a simple 7-step process:

1. People see LinkedIn ads in their LinkedIn feed.
2. They click on that ad.
3. They land on your website page.
4. They interact in some way, perhaps by downloading content or submitting a lead gen form, viewing video ads, or just by visiting your website page.
5. They become a lead in your system.
6. Their history is stored in your cookies and the data is delivered to LinkedIn.
7. Retargeting ads are shown to these users.

With all these efforts you can hope for the potential 8th step where the leads take a step forward to become your customers.

Now, the next question popping up is …

How to set up a retargeting campaign on LinkedIn?

It is simple…

If you are retargeting visitors to your company website, LinkedIn Insight Tags (javascript code) can be used to track conversions, retarget, and find real-time insights on the content preferences of your website. You need to incorporate LinkedIn Insight Tags on your website’s page to enable this feature.

Create an audience to retarget by website, video ads, Lead Gen Forms, or a LinkedIn event. (Each type of matched audience needs to generate at least 300 people before ads can be delivered to that audience)

Share a copy of your matched audiences across any of your ad accounts.

Let your audience build, which will take nearly 48 hours. Your audience will continue to grow as more LinkedIn members engage with your ads. Once the audience is built, you can add it to a campaign using ad format.

View the status of audiences synced from your data management platform.

Utilize the A/B test to check the performance of your LinkedIn ad campaigns to discover which ad campaign is performing better and which is not.

• Contact targeting

It helps you to market to prospective customers and known contacts by securely uploading your very own list of email addresses to match against LinkedIn members.

You can get started by a CSV upload or by the data integration process. 

The LinkedIn algorithm will scan the list of email addresses and search within its own database to see if any email address coincides. If at all any email coincides then that user has used the exact same email to register on your website as well as on the LinkedIn account. Only in such cases, LinkedIn can find a match and you can re-impact those users on social media channels. 

Here are some pointers to keep in mind when it comes to contact targeting.

• • Deliver highly relevant ads to the leads.
  • Consider uploading a larger list of contacts for better results.
  • When selecting your contacts target top influencers.
  • Divide your contacts into customized audience segments such as current clients, prospects (members regarded as potential customers), and churned customers (customers which stopped using the company’s services)

 

There are two ways to get started with contacts targeting:

• • • Contact targeting by uploading emails 

1. 1. 1. Upload a list of contacts as per LinkedIn guidelines
      2. In the campaign manager find the account assets menu and click ‘matched audience’ from the drop-down list.
      3. Create an audience and then upload the list
      4. Finish the setup process by adding your file of matched audiences to a new or existing campaign.

• • • Contact targeting by data integrations 

1. 1. 1. To get started you need to have access to the creative manager on your campaign manager account to integrate with a data integration provider.
      2. Select your data integration partner for LinkedIn ads. The next step is completed within your data integration partners’ system.
      3. Your list will automatically populate on the ‘uploaded lists’ page of the matched audience tab.

This is how you upload or integrate your contact lists and add them to an existing or a new campaign.

• Account targeting

 Account targeting is also known as company targeting helps you to target specific companies that are on your target list. It allows you to reach decision-makers to your target accounts (companies), by adding target company names to your campaign.

It runs Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns by matching your target companies against 13 million LinkedIn pages on LinkedIn. 

LinkedIn account targeting provides 7 options to target your audiences by company name, company industry, company size, company connections, company followers, company growth rate, and company category. 

For example, you can upload a CSV file of the company (names/size/industry/category/growth rate) you want to target. LinkedIn will match your list with nearly 1300 company names in its database. If LinkedIn finds a match then you can target that company rather than targeting an individual. It provides you wider net to deepen engagement.

Here are a few tips for using account targeting:

• • Reach out to the top influencers who make buying decisions at your target accounts.
  • Drive more conversions by guiding decision-makers along their buying journey and generating more qualified leads.
  • Upload a list of at least 1000 companies for better match rates.
  • Avoid Hyper Targeting which can limit the delivery of the campaign.

 

Step-by-step set-up process for account targeting:

1. Firstly, create an account list as a single column. One account per row inserting company names, industry, website, company country, etc. Save this list as a CSV file.
2. Next, set up company or account targeting for LinkedIn ads 
3. On the audience creation page in the campaign manager, click on the create an audience tab, choose a match based on a list of accounts, upload your file and click the next button.

The matched audience list will become available after 48 hours for targeting.

• Lookalike targeting

Lookalike audiences allow you to reach new professional audiences similar to your existing customers, website visitors, and target accounts.

Here are a few tips for using Lookalike audiences:

• • Perform tests to check the type of audience. For example, test the website with your CSV list of uploaded contacts and discover what works best.
  • Review campaign demographics to discover the top engaging list & create a lookalike audience using the best performing list.

This is how LinkedIn Matched Audiences helps you to Generate and Retrieve quality leads.

 

Best ad targeting practices for generating leads 

Now that you know about the LinkedIn matched audience concept, it is important to find out the best practices for quality lead generation. Even if you are an experienced digital marketing strategist LinkedIn works differently than other social media platforms. 

So, read on to find out best practices from LinkedIn’s professional ad targeting capabilities for generating leads.

1. Location

Firstly, identify where you would like to reach LinkedIn users. Location is a mandatory targeting field. You can specify a city, metropolitan area, state, or country.

        This facet is based on the location a LinkedIn member has used in his profile or their IP address.

2.  Build your audience

       Select your audiences based on company, demographics, education, job experience, and interests.

3. Use audience template

 Utilizing an audience template can help you save time during the campaign setup process.

It helps you to create key audiences such as event planners, recent graduates, doctors, millennials, and more without manually selecting the right mix of targeting options.

   4. Avoid hyper-targeting

At the beginning of the campaign, a limited scale may hurt the results. We suggest you start with a target audience of over 50,000 for sponsored content. This allows you to cast a wider net and find out which lead generation strategy works best for your business.

• • Perform A/B test – Testing two similar campaigns with different targeting criteria, you can find out which campaign is most effective. For A/B testing you need to duplicate a campaign and make slight changes in the targeting parameters.
  • Use custom targeting options – Custom targeting on LinkedIn allows you to find additional audiences similar to your target audience also known as a lookalike audience.
  • Tailor your content to your audience – Share content that is more relevant to your audience’s interests. 
  • Gain insight with campaign demographics – Once your ad campaign has gathered enough data, check the demographics tab in the campaign manager and find out which professionals visited your ad and converted it into customers.

 

How to analyze campaign performance?

To measure the performance of a LinkedIn ad campaign, utilize a wide range of metrics that the campaign manager reports for every campaign you run. 

• Choose your goals

Firstly, identify what is your goal. Is it building brand awareness (the upper funnel) or driving engagement (mid-funnel) or lead generation (bottom-funnel)?

Select an objective from the funnels. Strong lead generation relies on a full-funnel content strategy.

• Set up conversion tracking and lead gen form

Conversion tracking will help you to measure the performance based on conversions, conversion rate, and cost per conversion.

Lead gen forms allow you to measure the leads and cost per lead.

• Optimize with performance insight

By accessing campaign insights you can find out how your ads are performing. It will help you to make changes in budgets.

 

Final thoughts

LinkedIn is a potential B2B marketing giant especially if it is used to convert targeted leads. The matched audience is one of the best features provided by LinkedIn marketing solutions to nurture leads that are generated from LinkedIn ads.

Will you try LinkedIn-matched audiences for generating leads? 

Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.

If you have any questions regarding LinkedIn ads or you want to take your business to the next level, connect with us below and let’s get to work.

Do you want to run a Facebook ad for your client? Are you worried about the safety of access to your client’s account? In this post, I will guide you on how to connect your Business manager account to your client’s account and share that access with your team safely and securely. 

Firstly, understand exactly what is a Business Manager, anyway? 

 

What is Facebook Business Manager?

A Facebook business manager is a place where all the Facebook marketing tools live. You can manage all your Facebook advertising and marketing activities here.  It helps to keep your business organized and safe. If you are using Facebook marketing strategies to grow your business, then you should be a business Facebook Business Manager. 

The business manager is like your hub. So, this is where you are putting all of your people, your Instagram account, Facebook pages, ads account, and your pixels.  And, this is also where you can determine who’s in charge of what and what they are able to do in each of these assets. In other words, it is a one-stop shop to manage business tools and marketing efforts in one place and share access to business assets across their team members, vendors, and partner agencies.  

 

What can you do with the Facebook Business Manager tool?

1. Create and manage multiple assets

FB business manager helps you to keep your business and personal profile separate from each other. But, let me tell you that it does not allow you to create a fake Facebook personal account just to run your ads. You need to connect your ads manager, business manager, and business suite to your actual personal Facebook profile. It can manage multiple assets like Facebook accounts, Instagram accounts, or product catalogs, all in one place.  

2. Track Facebook Ads

It is a control center where you can track your  Facebook ads more efficiently with easy overviews. It provides a centralized dashboard that allows you to check account performance to analyze and further frame marketing strategies. 

3. Controls user access

It helps you to control user access and permissions for everyone who works on your ad accounts, pages, and apps. The main goal is to bring all of your assets together to your business manager so that you can disperse permission from your team members, employees,  partners, contractors, etc.

The Facebook business manager is a powerful tool that makes Facebook marketing more effective and convenient. But, the catch is – This tool is not easy.  It takes time for new users to understand and get used to the many features it provides.  

Here we would like to overview the benefits of the Facebook Business Manager to promote your small business on Facebook.  

 

Benefits of Facebook Business Manager at  a glance

Facebook Business Manager tool is one of the most powerful tools to achieve a  competitive advantage over other agencies. If you don’t know about the benefits of the Facebook Business Manager tool, then you are surely lagging behind your competitors. 

Here are some benefits of the Facebook Business Manager tool, which make it  essential for every agency to rely upon: 

1. Integrity

FBM manages your business from a centralized dashboard. The dashboard helps you to access and organize multiple Facebook accounts,  pages, assets, etc.  

It removes the hassle of using several tools for business management. The centralized dashboard streamlines workflow and responsibilities. It also helps in saving production time.

2. Scalability

FBM tool can be easily scaled. It can be utilized by small-scale,  mid-scale, or even large-scale businesses for Facebook marketing. 

It helps to create and manage pages, and accounts along with the ownership maintained for different assets.

3. Accountable

You get the authority to assign access to your team members based on the requirements without any security issues. If you want to perform work on behalf of someone else’s company on their pages or ad accounts, then you need to request access to that ad account as you don’t own them. 

If your staff resigns, you can remove their access with a click from your administration account and track any changes they made in the past. Thus, it is easy to determine who has the access to which data and who has permission to modify it. 

4. Security

Facebook business manager tool provides secure access to other people like vendors, clients, team members, and partners as it uses two-factor authentication. It is easy to prepare business reports with FBM as they provide customized options that are user-friendly.

5. Collaboration

With the visibility and powerful platform that this tool offers, you can create collaboration opportunities within your team. It provides an increased level of transparency for your organization as it shows a complete picture of business operations and objectives. 

With all these benefits you can push forward your business graph online.  

Now that you know why you should use Facebook business manager, let’s get you set up. 

 

How to Create a Facebook Business Manager for Agencies?

The setup process is very simple. The first step is to create a Facebook Business  Manager. If your client does not have a Facebook Manager account, then they should, because that is the preferred way of running Facebook ads. If your client already has a Business Manager then you’ll need to get connected to their  Business Manager.  

There are two ways to get connected to someone’s Business Manager: 

1. With a personal account

You are added to their personal account and given the employee access. 

2. Through partners

In this case, clients add you to their Business Manager account and provide you access to their assets such as Facebook accounts,  pages, and so on. This way is preferred to run ads for clients. 

Client’s ads should be run on their Business Manager. But, why so? 

There are three main reasons why you should run your client’s ads from their  Business Manager and not your own. 

• • Retain pixel data

    Pixel data is a piece of code for your website that enables you to organize the audiences for your ad campaign. The client will retain Facebook pixel data, and it won’t get confused with any other pixel data that is already there, on your personal account.

• • Single billing method

The Business Manager allows a single billing method for a single ad account, so your client will have their own billing methods attached to their ad account.

• • Minimize risk

    Running multiple ad campaigns on your personal ad account is not a good idea. Because, if that ad account gets shut down, then you are putting all your client’s ads at risk.

 

Businesses and agencies follow different setup processes to create a Business  Manager account.

Let’s understand the Business Manager setup process from an agency perspective. 

 

Following are the steps to connect to your client’s Business Manager as a  partner:

Step 1  Go to the https://business.facebook.com/settings/ link. 

Step 2  Get your Business Manager ID from the Business Info section and share your ID with your client.

Step 3  Have your client go into their Business Manager Settings https://business.facebook.com/setting/  link (same link). 

Step 4  Ask them to click Partners under the Users menu in the left sidebar. 

Step 5  Next, ask them to click the blue “Add” button menu and select “Give a  partner access to your assets”.

Step 6  In the popup menu, they need to add your Business Manager ID into the  “Add a new partner” pop up and click next. 

Step 7  Then you will get access to their pages, ad accounts, and possibly  Instagram accounts, Facebook pixel, and catalog. 

Step 8  Finally, in your Business Manager, you need to grant access permission for assets to yourself and your team members in order to work on those assets. 

Your clients can grant you any level of access to their assets on their own Business  Manager by adding your agency partner ID. By giving access to your team members also, you allow them to act on behalf of your client’s business to provide better control of their assets and information. 

Let us dive in little deeper into each of the above steps.

When you go to the Business manager setting link, and you see many business manager accounts, that means you created more than one business manager account or you have been added to the business manager accounts as your personal profile. 

Click on the “Business Manager” for your agency 

Let’s say that the name of our Business Manager is Ecsion Inc. It is always on the top of the screen in the left-hand corner.  

Scroll down and click on the “Business info”. 

In the Business information, you can find your Business Manager ID right at the top. 

Copy that Business Manager ID and send it to your clients. Ask your clients to run steps 3 and step 7 in the above list. 

Firstly, have your clients go to their business manager settings and then click on  “Partners” under the “Users”. 

Next, click on the “Add” button and “Give a partner access to your assets”. 

The client needs to type your (agency) Business manager ID into the “Add a new partner” popup and click on the Next button. 

Now, they need to select the asset type and give you access to Facebook pages and Facebook ad accounts, etc. 

The clients can choose each of the assets and then configure them before saving the changes. Once they have all the required assets assigned, click the blue “Save  Changes” button.  

When all of that is done you should receive a mail inviting you to your client’s  Business Manager Account. 

Grant Access permission

Now that you connected your Clients’ Business Manager account to your own  Business Manager Account, grant permission to people in your Business manager to work on that asset. Don’t forget to give permission to track the performance. 

As an agent firstly, you need to go into your Business Manager settings, Select  “pages” on the left side under the “accounts” section. Find the page you have been given access to and then select “Add People”. In the dropdown menu, you can give access to yourself and your team members to create ads on that page. 

Repeat the same procedure for the “ad accounts” on the left side. Select people to manage campaigns and Click the “assign” button.

Navigate between client accounts

When the assets are assigned, you can go into your ads manager and use the dropdown menu to navigate between different client accounts. If the client forgets to name their ads account then you will just see a long string of numbers.  But, if you utilize the dropdown menu then you will always be able to see the  Business Manager name there. 

Share ads manager reports 

Now that you as an agency get connected with your client’s ad campaigns, they might want to check the results. You can share the report link from the ads  Manager reporting area.  

FBM allows you to customize the columns to show your clients the data they wish to see. When that is done, you can share that link from the report’s dropdown menu with your clients. 

 

Conclusion

Facebook Business Manager tool is for entrepreneurs who want to make a mark on their businesses. This tool provides a 360-degree view of the business process on a centralized dashboard to allow transparency in workflow between the client and the agency.  

It supports your digital marketing strategies and business goals. 

Are you running an ad campaign for a client or you would like to be? For any queries and doubts write to us in the comment section below.