The Agents of Change Digital Marketing Podcast

Like any social platform out there, LinkedIn is always changing and evolving, as is its algorithm. So you've got to stay in the loop and keep your profile and content fresh to make sure you're connecting with not just a lot of people, but with the right people. We gathered some of your top LinkedIn questions – and ours – and went to the LinkedIn Expert, Viveka von Rosen-Martin, to get her answers, thoughts and advice, on everything from how many followers you should have, if hashtags make a difference in LinkedIn, 'connect' button versus 'follow' button, and so much more….(including a ninja trick to make your headline longer.)

This is a special episode of The Agents of Change Podcast. I've been getting a lot of questions around how—or even if—you should market a business during the Coronavirus (COVID-19.) As someone who owns a digital marketing agency, (and runs a podcast on digital marketing), I've been giving this a lot of thought. Here's my take on marketing and advertising during a crisis.

Once upon a time LinkedIn was a very different place than it is now. It used to be that you kept your network small and tight knit, and it was treated more as a 'connect & pitch' platform. But Gaetano DiNardi is here to tell you that LinkedIn has transformed into more of a broadcasting platform these days, where you use it to amplify your content. To use LinkedIn strategically and successfully, your end goal should be to have a personal brand that is so big and respected that when you start promoting content or putting stuff out there, you'll get the engagement and support that you need from your network that you've built. And that's why it pays off to play the long game with LinkedIn.

If you're a small to medium sized business, you're probably short on both time and money, so you've taken a DIY approach to many aspects of your business. But when it comes to SEO, this can seem like an impossibly daunting task that only an expensive professional should tackle. Well, take it from Matthew Woodward, who's been taking the DIY approach to SEO long before there was even a name for it, who guarantees you can see immediate success on your own by following a few specific strategies and utilizing the help of some great plugins.

When it comes to digital marketing, content is king. But it's also difficult and time consuming to create. So how can you create content that works well in both search and social? Melissa Sciorra, who is the Senior Manager of SEO & Content Marketing for SmarterTravel Media, shows us how your content can do double duty.

We might think we know what our customers are thinking, but we're wrong, according to revenue coach, Kristin Zhivago. And in order to really go down that journey of better customer service, you first need to toss aside any expectations of what you think your customers are going to say, and actually be willing to start talking to them. By doing this, you get to find out your company's strengths and weaknesses. You find out the things you're really good at that you want to promote, and the things that you need to fix in the background. And once you fix them, then you can promote those.

Not getting the results you want from your most recent Facebook Ads campaign? Was it the creative? The targeting? The bid? In this week's episode we unpack a wildly successful Facebook Ad to better understand what works and what doesn't. Jason Hunt, of Merged Media, was gracious enough to share some details of a marketing campaign he recently did for a small local company that was a roaring success and the lessons he learned.

To some people, Public Relations seems like this mysterious and intricate job reserved for people that have spent their careers making a lot of important and influential connections with big names in various industries and professions. And although that may be true for some in the business, even a PR expert like Dmitry Dragilev promises that you can actually do it on your own and still achieve similar success. If you have a compelling story, you can get the interest of journalists. And once you have that, there are some tried and true strategies that will help you gain access to personal contacts, backlinks, and leverage yourself as an expert.

If we've learned nothing in this digital age of social media domination, it's that businesses need to up their game when it comes to customer service because it is more front and center than ever before. And as a brand advocate and customer experience expert, Jay Baer has seen how businesses can turn an unhappy customer into a raving fan for life, if they just follow a few key rules.

How we market and sell to our clients has changed over the years. Gone are the days of sounding like a slick, pushy, and overbearing used car salesman. As Nick Usborne will attest, you need to engage in a conversation with your clients, not just talk at them. Building trust can come through in tone and word choice, so opting to use everyday simple conversational wording over tech jargon will go a long way in building relationships and making sales. Discover how to "write for the web" and engage your customers by engaging in conversational copywriting.

When you hear the term "ADA compliant", you might immediately think of buildings and how they're supposed to be handicapped accessible for people in wheelchairs. But you need to think broader in this digital age. There's more for consumers than just visiting brick and mortar shops. These days, a great deal of shopping and research is done online. So Craig Kazda would ask you, "Is your website ADA compliant?" What are you doing to ensure that people with visual, auditory, or intellectual disabilities can access and understand the same information as everyone else who visits your site? If you haven't started to consider this and make adjustments to your website, you're not only losing customers and pushing away business, but you may find you're being penalized in the Google search rankings, or even worse, being sued.

One of the best ways to create a rapport with your customers and earn their trust is through storytelling. When you learn to tell stories that customers in all points of your sales funnel can relate to, you've made your product or service that much more valuable to them. The ideal way to create your stories is to have a brand script in place, with carefully chosen words that resonate specifically with your customers. Your brand is about customer perception, so you need to be able to tell stories that substantiate and embody the challenges and experiences of your customers. Josh Cantrell helps clients create these scripts using a 7 point plan for effective storytelling.

We've all see the ham-fisted approach many people use on LinkedIn, so when I saw Thomas Libby of Diversified Sales Solutions speak on how he uses LinkedIn, I knew I wanted to have him on the show.

Regardless of the excuses you keep coming up with for not including video as part of your marketing plan, if you're serious about growing your business, you can't put it off any longer. According to Lou Bortone, thought leader and video pioneer since the launch of YouTube, video is must-have marketing. You know the saying, "a picture is worth 1,000 words"? Well, video is worth even more. It's creative, it's inexpensive, it's easy, and it's incredibly powerful when it comes to connecting with your audience in a more personal way.

You may have caught our Press Conference on Facebook Live earlier this week, but if you didn't we announced some major changes to our live events for 2020.

Looking for data-driven advice on how you should be using video to engage your audience? Want fresh approaches to standing out on YouTube and getting more views? Want to discover the latest tactics that are working for video marketing?

Taking a human-centric approach to SEO and digital marketing will go a long way to getting you in front of your most ideal audience, versus just pushing out ad impressions to the masses. That's exactly the approach that Jason White and his team at PMG are taking to help some of the biggest brands out there. The key is to use your analytics and data – combined with creativity and technology - to drive your marketing efforts on multiple channels.

Your business is more than just a commodity, so price should not necessarily be the differentiating factor between you and your competition. Brand message expert Jeff Shaw shares how to create innovative branding strategies around the specific audience you wish to target and how to speak to them in their own lingo. Integrating your customer's language into your communication will make all the difference in separating – and elevating – you from your competition.

By now we've all been told time and again about the importance of your email list when it comes to creating your marketing campaigns. But there's a bit more to it than just shooting off a few emails. Aweber's Jill Fanslau has helpful and insightful tips and strategies that you can immediately put into action when it comes to your email marketing plan, with proven success.

It is a proven fact that one of the largest influencing factors for gaining local visibility in Google is by optimizing your Google My Business listing. After all, Google My Business is essentially your nerve center for controlling how the way your business's information is displayed on Google and Google Maps during searches. If getting search engine traffic is important to your business, then Bradley Benner of Semantic Mastery has a thing or two to teach you about diving deeper into SEO to help build a solid foundation for tour business that will translate into marketing success.

We're all used to video marketing on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tik Tok…the list goes on. That's great for one to many communication and marketing. But how about leveraging the power of video—the visceral eye-to-eye, face-to-face style communication—in our emails? Our outreach emails. Our follow up emails. Our proposal emails. We speak with Ethan Beute of BombBomb on how to embed video communications in your emails to increase your open rate, click through rate, and engagement rate, and how to get metrics to know if and when people are opening your emails.

If you find the process of Facebook Ads to be overwhelming, you're certainly not alone. But besides having great content, an audience, and an ad budget, Facebook Ads expert Amanda Robinson can't stress enough the importance of building a solid foundation for your ads, and of course testing the heck out of them in a way that will definitely tell you which ads are working and which are not. Because no one wants to waste their ad dollars.

How do you market to people who don't even realize you, your business, or your industry exist? How do you best use social buttons on your website? And how many branded domains should you be renewing each year? Answers to these questions and more on this week's episode of the Agents of Change podcast!

Looking to rank higher in Local Search? Want to reach page one in the Map Pack (aka the Local Pack?) Should you focus on reviews or on Google Posts? In this interview, Local Search Marketer John Paglio answers all these questions and more as we look to help you get found for all your local searches.

One of the most important things you can do after a big event, launch, or campaign, is to review it and figure out how you can do it even better the next time.

By now we've all learned that appeasing Google's authoritative and ever changing algorithm will go a long way in helping us rank higher on the search engine. Structured data takes a technology-based approach to SEO, where it helps to better organize the data on your website so that it's more easily processed and analyzed by Google, and they can have a better idea of what your website is all about. Pioneers in this area, such as Geoff Atkinson from Huckabuy, guarantee that taking this approach will see your website ranking higher, you'll see more organic search traffic, and search engines will better index your pages for keywords more relevant to your business. Most importantly, this is a best practice that both large and small businesses should be adopting.

Thanks to Siri, Alexa and Google Home – among other devices – voice search is having a huge impact on content marketing, and will account for nearly half of all searches by 2020. Which makes sense when you think of the consumer convenience it offers with better efficiency and cool tech options. But as Courtney Cox Wakefield reminds us, optimizing your content for voice search is a totally different beast than optimizing for text. So if you want to be found in voice search, you need to make some changes to your current SEO and content marketing strategies.

One area that nearly all businesses struggle with is how to price their products and services. Add to that the pressure of knowing that how you price is a direct reflection of your brand's position and value in the marketplace. According to Paul Klein, it's not just a matter of charging more or raising your rates, but rather it's recognizing the circumstances around your products and services, and then positioning for maximum value for both you and your clients.

Podcasts are gaining in popularity. As a business owner, does that mean you should care? According to Ben Shapiro, "Absolutely!" There's no better way to tell a story and connect with your audience than through the power of a podcast. Even better, there's really no set "rules' when it comes to podcasting, and there's very little needed to get started. Imagine the power of positioning yourself as an expert in your field, all while reaching a new, targeted audience, and giving them the ability to consume your content in such a convenient way. And with so many great tools out there designed to help take the guesswork out of podcasting, you really have no excuse not to get started. So what are you waiting for?

Facebook groups offer a great way for folks to get together and rally around a product, brand, or service, as well as other related topics. Success starts with the advice of Facebook Group guru Bella Vasta, who stresses the importance of starting with a clearly defined goal for your Group. From there, your longevity and success will hinge on how well you keep it fresh, valuable, informative, - give them what they want, need and deserve - and market it so that you're not only retaining current members, but also enticing new members to join.

If you've been looking for another way to reach your clients, have you considered online courses? Once you have determined the major pain points and problems they're having and know definitively how you can help them, creating an online learning course for them is a creative way to reach them and earn revenue at the same time. Janelle Allen is here to offer her step by step guide to help you figure out how to create and market your own successful online courses.

We are living in an age of video, and it's only continuing to grow. With mobile devices making it easy and convenient to consume video content, they're aso making it easy to create and distribute it. Smart business owners are looking to experts like Monique Johnson to help them leverage this power to grow their businesses by connecting with their customers, establishing authority, and selling their products, all while using the power of live video.

You've decided to start a podcast - Congratulations! Maybe you've already figured out your platform and format, contacted possible guests, and perhaps even decided on the first few episodes. But how about your marketing strategy? According to Laura Pence Atencio, you should be starting this at least 90 days prior to your launch date. Unlike the field of dreams, if you build it, listeners won't just magically come to listen. You should be priming your prospective audience so that they're expecting and anxiously anticipating it by the time it actually launches.

Marketing a local business comes with its own unique set of challenges. Local business marketing expert Stacy Tuschl is here to remind us not to assume that people already know who we are, and also not to just copy what our competitors are doing.

With paid search advertising continuing its rapid growth, it's becoming more competitive and more difficult to generate great results. That's where Tim Jensen comes in, to help you inject innovation and creativity into your advertising to boost your ROI and lead gen. You need to understand not only your customers but also your competition – and test, test, test – so you have the right data that allows you to build powerful keyword lists and a campaign that spells success.

When considering a website redesign when you already have an established audience, the last thing you want to do is change everything on them that's going to give off not only a different look, but a different feel. Chris Dayley urges us to remember that your website is not for you, it's for your users, your customers, and your clients. And you need to keep that in mind when you're undergoing a redesign. There needs to be a strategic approach when it comes to website redesigns. That includes a great deal of testing, research, and analysis to figure out what works and what doesn't. It also helps to take advantage of tools like heat maps and customer surveys.

We've been told time and again that we need to be measuring our marketing efforts. But what exactly does that mean? Checking your Analytics is a good first step, but any measurement marketing expert, like (Chris) Mercer, will tell you that you need to go deeper and be able to turn that basic data into insight and outcomes, and use that to drive strategy for your business. Luckily, doing this has never been easier thanks to products like Google Data Studio, which allow businesses to manage data from a variety of sources and across multiple platforms. It will save you advertising dollars, increase conversions, and redirect your marketing strategies based on what the data is actually telling you.

With its convenience, ease, and variety of offerings, more and more people continue to do their shopping online. And with Google's current algorithms, good guys really do finish first. So experts like Dale Bertrand are here to teach you the importance of creating an e-commerce site that will build trust, authority, and rank high with Google. And for that to happen, you should be focusing on things link building, reputation, content, and how you're setting up your category and collection pages.

Every good brand needs three good, strong legs to stand on; verbal identity, visual identity and value identity. When one of these legs isn't aligned with the others, it can throw off the entire balance of the brand. Mike Kim has been working with top brands to help them find that balance within their marketing. Everything from the copywriting, to the design elements, to the blog posts & emails, and even the titles to your podcast episodes, all of these things need to speak one unified voice that consumers recognize as your brand so it's positioned exactly where you want it to be in their minds.

Business advice I'd give my younger self

Do you frequently find yourself wishing there were more hours in the day to get everything done? Or perhaps wish you had a way to clone yourself so you'd be better able to stay on top of things.

We've been hearing quite a lot lately about how adding video into your content marketing plan should be a vital part of your strategy. But there are still many out there that think it's only something that can be done in certain industries.

Too often, business owners think they need to be everywhere to get ahead. But in reality, it can be a real waste of time, money and resources to chase your audience where they're not even searching or hanging out. By niching down to a specific area of expertise, Jessica Stansberry found success and grew her business through video marketing, specifically, YouTube.

These days, a strong marketing campaign will also incorporate video into the mix. Video marketing experts like Amy Landino understand and appreciate the effect that video has for boosting conversion rates, increasing click-through rates, and building trust and authority for your brand.

As messaging applications have become a way for brands to reach consumers, chatbots have become increasingly more important. Carrie Gottschalk has proven that chatbots can be part of your marketing initiatives and help push your customers seamlessly through your sales funnel. Especially as they become more sophisticated and versatile. Chatbots can perform tasks that are both simple and repetitive at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone, and still provide a seamless user experience for customers.

Whether you were born with the "gift of gab" or not, there is no excuse when it comes to why you're not killing it in the sales game, according to Matthew Pollard. Regardless of your industry, if you're not prepared with stories to engage your client or prospect, and you don't know the right questions to ask, then you're not ready to make the pitch.

LinkedIn offers a unique opportunity for people and brands to communicate in a more deliberate and intentional way. Michaela Alexis has successfully helped entrepreneurs and small businesses make waves on LinkedIn that resulted in business growth as well as building a smart network of like-minded, relevant people and opportunities. LinkedIn has so much more to offer than as just a place to park your resume. The newest LinkedIn Live feature offers endless possibilities including showcasing your products or services, utilizing your personal profile and company pages to best attract the right people, host your blog, as well as a place to publish content and build a following that knows, likes and trusts you.

Video advertising is becoming the dominant force in the digital marketing space. Mobile is king, and attention spans are dwindling, so you need to be able to connect with your audience through visual content, and nurture relationships that way, all within the span of about 2.8 seconds.

Podcasting can be a powerful marketing tool for your business, regardless of which side of the microphone you're on. As a podcast expert, Matt Johnson teaches that everything comes down to the foundation of what is the clear and compelling idea of why people should listen to you. If your podcast doesn't build a sense that you're the expert, then it doesn't accomplish the mission