What do people want to see in LinkedIn?
If you look at the majority of LinkedIn profiles what do you see … a resume … packed with “historical information” – past roles, achievements education etc that never changes. Ok, there’s some merit to some of this, but think about why you’ve taken the time & effort to complete your LinkedIn profile in the first instance. For most people it’s not to “document the past”, but to stand out, look great, & BE FOUND to help success.
I love the way a past colleague describes LinkedIn as a “Flashing Digital Message board”. A digital message board is constantly changing, & providing fresh & relevant news & information to its audience. A “Stand out” linkedIn profile needs to do the same.
So, here are a few tips to make your LinkedIn profile Look Great and stand out from the crowd:
- Understand your Goals
Perhaps most importantly what is the purpose of your LinkedIn profile and the goals for being on this excellent networking tool
- Look Great
On LinkedIn, a photograph is important … Be sure to get a professional headshot for your LinkedIn profile. It’s money well spent …
- Know Your Branding
The Professional Headline area on LinkedIn (just under your name) allows for 120 characters … use them wisely to cover:
the title that best describes what you do
your brand statement
and the industries that your interested in.
This area is high in search engine optimisation …
- Be Aspirational
In your 2000 character Summary area, make sure that there are at least 50 keywords. In the Summary let people know what you desire, what your goals are and what you have accomplished.
- Summarize Achievements in the Experience Section
Don’t just copy and paste your resume into the Experience area. Look at your accomplishments and rank them based on what you want to do in the future.
- Highlight Successes
There are many new areas on LinkedIn where you can display your experience such as Volunteer, Honors and Awards, Publications, Organizations, Certifications, Courses and other sections of your profile.
- Show What you do & have done
In the “media-rich” formatting area in the LinkedIn Summary, Experience and Education sections, you can add links, videos, Presentations, PDFs or photos.
- Highlight Your Skills
The Skills and Endorsements area is important on LinkedIn.
You can add up to 50 skills. Make sure that the top 10 listed skills slots are the one’s that have the most endorsements. You can move these around by clicking ‘Manage skills’ and then clicking on the skill and dragging it to a new position.
Speak to us today if your looking to change your Digital Marketing focus to drive real growth & improvments in customer engagement.
Author Derek Findlayson
For those of you who think the pace of change has been quick in the insurance world, fasten your seat belts, as it’s about to accelerate to another level …
The end of separate “Siloed” markets?
For as long as I can remember the UK Insurance market has structured itself around how it wants to operate rather than “necessarily how customers want to operate”. Traditionally, Life, Healthcare, & General Insurance have been transacted in separate siloed businesses with at times complex processes, systems, & question sets that make the customer journey more complex than it could or should be & certainly less customer friendly than it is in some overseas territories.
Customers needs & expectations are changing & increasing
But interestingly, the worlds changing. A sizeable proportion of today’s customers, & a growing proportion of “Tomorrow’s customers” EXPECT:
- to be able to access all of their insurance needs in one place
- to access their insurance Solutions through their preferred communication channel
- a simpler & better customer journey using through using Data Smartly
Using Data smartly
The use of Big data & the Connected world creates a fantastic opportunity to enhance & reinvent the traditional insurance customer journey through:
- Reducing the question set the customer needs to complete where the information is available through another data source
- Using connected real time data to enhance dynamic pricing models
- Significantly reducing the impact of fraudulent activity in the market
and perhaps most importantly:
- Making it much more easy for customers to access all of their insurance needs at each lifecycle stage in one place …
Impact of Emerging Technologies
A final thought. New technologies are & will continue to have a significant impact on how Insurance products are, Designed, Distributed, Priced, Serviced, & delivered. Here’s a few that should be on your radar:
- Wearables will drive unique behavioural insights and help insurers design unique and personalised services
- The Internet of Things (IoT) will connect an ecosystem of devices and wearables to the Internet and allow enhanced decision making
- Drones will enable efficient claims management and processing
- Driverless cars will transform the way insurance is rated
- 3-D printing & Artificial Intelligence (AI) will help prioritise and replace things that need replacing, fast.
Those organisations, be they existing providers or new entrants, that grasp this as an opportunity will be the one’s that set themselves apart from the rest …
Author Derek Findlayson
The Benefits of Business Blogs for Marketing
If the whole world of business blogging is a mystery to you, here’s a few thoughts to hopefully demystify what it is & make the case for why you should use blogging as a very cost effective marketing tactic.
What is business blogging?
Sounds complicated but it’s not. Put simply, business blogging involves creating short form content posted to your website about a particular subject, to help you increase your “online visibility” i.e. making it easier for you to be found on the internet.
Why should you use blogging as a marketing tactic?
- It helps drive traffic to your website
If your like me, you want to find cost effective ways to drive more visitors to your website. Yes, you could rely on people typing in your name right into their browser, but typically the people that do this already know you. You could pay for traffic through purchasing email lists but often this is illegal, or by placing paid ads, but both can be quite expensive. So, how can you cost effectively drive any traffic? In short: blogging, social media, and search engines.
Keeping your website fresh & relevant can be challenging. Think about it, when did you last change, add new, or refresh your website pages? If your like most businesses it’s not an every day occurrence! Every time you write a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website, which makes it easier for you to show up in search engines and drive traffic to your website in any organic search.
Blogging also helps you get discovered via social media. Every time you write a blog post, you’re creating content that people can share on social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest — expanding your potential audience.
- It helps convert that traffic into leads
In the same way that every blog post you write is another indexed page, each post is a new opportunity to generate new leads by simply adding a lead-generating call-to-action to every blog post to things like free ebooks, free whitepapers, free fact sheets, free webinars, free trials …
- It helps establish authority & credibility
Customers are interested in content that answers their common questions. If you’re consistently creating content that’s helpful for your target customer, it’ll help establish you as an authority in their eyes.
If prospects find answers to their common questions via your blog posts they’re much more likely to:
- Come into the sales process trusting what you have to say because you’ve helped them in the past.
- Enter the sales process more educated on your place in the market, your industry, and what you have to offer.
So Blog posts also help move the sales process along more swiftly.
I hope these thoughts encourage you to either start a business blog or make this a larger part of your marketing strategy.
Author Derek Findlayson
Wouldn’t it be great if everything you did got a great big thumbs up from your employees? Then of course, we’d have nothing to complain about! The great thing about the real world of business is that your employees do push back against decisions that you make, consciously or not. Some of these aren’t always that helpful (we all have that employee who is convinced you don’t see him slink into the office at 9:07am every day with a Starbucks in hand…). The good news is some of the things that staff push back against are great warning signs.
Many of the businesses we help are in the middle of planning a business strategy, perhaps revising an existing plan, rejigging one, or looking at creating a new plan.
One massive mistake we see is that sometimes these plans are not run through the staff until they have been set in stone, shipped and delivered. There are 2 reasons why this is a bad idea.
The first one is that your staff will definitely have some clear ideas about what will and won’t work. Bearing in mind that process management, planning, KPI reporting and many other business functions are a top down initiative; getting buy in for the process is critical.Here are some oversights we have seen in businesses before:
- Duplication of effort –Multiple spread sheets, online reporting systems, email reports and meetings
- Product failures not identified – poor competitor & customer research
- Technical issues and software failings not being identified early enough
…And we could go on.
The key feature here is that asking the right employees in your business key questions before you get to the stage of signing off your latest business plan / new guidelines.
The second mistake is that staff buy in is so critical.
Even if they were ignored when they were asked about the latest initiative, the right leaders and managers in the business being consulted can produce a culture of trust which in turns leads to the initiatives having a much stronger chance of succeeding if they do need to live and breathe on the sales floor.
So – homework for you – what can you ask from your employees today that will potentially have a real effect on your processes and procedures?
We hope you get some interesting answers!
Speak to us today about changing your strategy for a business that shows real growth and development.
Author derek Findlayson
Whatever size business you are in, from a start-up or SME to a global business, you will probably have had teething problems with your strategy. Here are some of the common problems we see!
You forget to consider the importance of marketing
Once you have developed your product or service, it’s not the time to rush the marketing – it all starts with a solid plan and marketing is a fundamental piece. Marketing planning can help you understand the 4 p’s – product, price, place and promotion. This means it will include who your competition is, and how you angle your product to let the USP shine. It will help you decided where to market it (based on digital platforms, or using more traditional methods) and will help you gauge the cost of doing so.
Underestimating project timescales
Have you heard of the planning fallacy? This was proposed in 1979 and is based on the ideas that predicting the time it takes to complete a task set in the future is usually subject to an optimistic bias where we underestimate the time needed, even if knowledge gained from previous tasks suggest that the time will be longer than expected. This is rife in business and when it comes to creating a strategy, beware of the danger of filling Q1 and Q2 with project completion dates, especially if certain projects need to be completed before you can generate revenue – this will affect your whole plan.
Not creating a company mission and vision
This is the framework behind all your plans, strategies, goals and work, so don’t rely on an old vision. Your vision needs to be personal to you and something that inspires – but it also needs to be grounded in logic. You might have a grand mission statement, but ideally your vision will include details such as:
- Who your target audience is
- What your service is and does
- Why you are unique, and/or why the target audience would (and should!) choose you.
Your vision may indeed change due to competitor threats, a changing market and new technology (who had a mobile strategy 10 years ago?) so don’t drag out the same plan you had in 2003 and stick it on the wall!
Stifling creativity in your staff/ business/ service because of goals.
We all know about the danger of goals – consider the story of General Motors who decided that 29 would be their number of focus – teamed with a promise to recapture 29 percent of the American market, the share it had ebbed past in 1999. The number 29 became a corporate mantra, with lapel pins for executives to wear. The goal of reaching 29 became all encompassing, and the initiative failed as risky decisions were avoided in pursuit of the singular goal of 29% market capture. They never did order another set of lapel pins….
By having a specific goal, you may be blinding yourself to fixing issues or problems in a logical order. Ensure you have flexibility and stretch in your targets and numbers, and don’t forget to align your numbers with the ebb and flow of the seasons and other important factors in your sector.
Speak to us today about changing your strategy for a business that shows real growth and development.
Author Derek Findlayson
With an ever-changing list of strategies, from digital to print coming in and out of favour, how can you be sure if your latest change is right for you?
Here are some high profile business changes we can all learn from.
- Aviva
Offering funding for local charities Funding from £1,000 up to £25,000 was offered to 362 small and large organisations as part of a customer driven strategy. Named the Aviva Community Fund this stepped away from a product message and worked to build on their already large brand reputation. Despite having multiple brands, Aviva had previously focused on product led and micro brand campaigns, so this was a fantastic strategy pull to draw the business together. Appointing Andrew Brem as head of digital was a bold strategy for an insurance firm. Brem said of the appointment to The Drum “We’ve all seen how technology has changed the way we live our lives; from buying groceries online to controlling our heating from anywhere with an app. Now is the time to bring the digital revolution to insurance; transforming the way people can buy and use our products every day.” What we can learn: Look away from your competitors and your typical industry strategies and think bigger. See your business as a whole rather than competing departments, services or products and pull together a plan that aligns common goals, even across a wide portfolio.
- ASOS
A quick move into digital From the live feed on the Fashion Finder page that shows community users in items sold by asps and with social media manned by staff who respond with personality to each tweet, DM and message, ASOS has focused on making a personal brand that reflects its core demographics’ online habits, integrating as one with them. The ASOS Facebook page is currently one of the most popular retail brands on Facebook, with over 3.5 million fans, in comparison with other online retailers such as Boohoo’s 2.2 million and Net-a-Porter’s 1.3 million. (Source: LinkHumans) What we can learn: Experimental strategies will always have a place. Some will fail – ASOS.com’s own investment in logistics and a China start-up business caused the decline of profits of 22% – but by trying new tactics overall they are thriving.
- Debenhams
Undertaking new trends Debenhams teamed up with Buyapowa last Christmas in a move that allowed customers to engage with the brand and to encourage fans to purchase gift cards. Using the power of co-buying, the more people who commit to a purchase, the higher the value. This move into gamification was a strong one, and was perfectly timed for Christmas. Following this, Debenhams showed that online sales had grown by 46 per cent, with mobile accounting for a growth of 72 per cent. (Source: The Drum) What we can learn: Look to all areas of your business for results. A focus on gifting and gamification and mobile is not the most clear move when Christmas is typically strongly product focused in the sector, but with post January online sales increased by 11.7 per cent overall, the strategy has paid off. Speak to all your stakeholders to gather varied ideas.
- ArgosDefying Falling Profits In 2012 Argos announced that 75 branches would close so it could fully embrace a new digital strategy to fly in the face of falling profits of around 37% pre-tax. By launching smartphone and tablet ads, online sales grew to represent 42 per cent of the retailer’s total sales, with 125 per cent coming through the new digital channels. (The Drum) What we can learn: Some changes won’t be popular with your new business strategy. They might involve a decreased work force in favour of investment in other areas. Don’t be afraid to grab the moment for a real shift when you can. Whatever the size of your business, if you want to make a strategic change you have a lot to consider! 1) Functional capabilities – what changes do I need to make to supply chain, marketing, staff levels, architecture and tools, technical abilities? 2) Budget and resource allocation – how much is available, to what ROI, and when can it be released? 3) R&D – do you understand what consumers really need, what they value, and how to deliver that to them? Speak to us today about changing your strategy for a business that shows real growth and development.
Author Derek Findlayson
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