Tag Archive for: Digital marketing tips

The Right Social Media Image Sizes In 2020

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With the world searching more and more online during the COVID-19 crisis, it’s important your brand and social image is professional and polished. Using images which aren’t the correct size for each platform’s requirements can impact your brand perception. Low quality and pixelated visuals make you look unprofessional or not up to date. Are you not sure if you’re using the correct image sizes? Use our image size guide to see the key image requirements for all the major social platforms.

Facebook

  • Your profile photo is representative of your brand. We recommend that is a consistent logo among all of your social media accounts. This image must be 180 x 180 pixels.
  • Cover photos are the banner behind your profile picture, and this should also be consistent across social platforms that allow for an image in this location. Cover photos should be 820 x 312 pixels, if it’s anything smaller than this your image will be stretched and distorted.
  • Images that are shared in a post, for example a blog post news update, have a recommended size of 1,200 x 630 pixels.

Twitter

  • Twitter profile pictures have a recommended size of a 400 x 400 pixel square. Keep in mind that the actual Twitter profile picture appears as a circle, so we advise you to have the proper spacing around your logo so nothing is cut off.
  • Twitter also has a cover photo, which should be about 1500 x 1500 pixels for an image size. Pick an image that compliments your profile picture and make sure it is consistent across all platforms as well.
  • Photos in tweets, when expanded, appear at a maximum of 1024 x 512 pixels and a minimum of 440 x 220 pixels. Keep in mind that on mobile, the app collapses photos which could make for an awkward crop situation. Make sure your content is always centered horizontally to avoid odd cropping.

Instagram

  • Instagram profile pictures are small but powerful. These show any time you have a new story, in direct messages, and of course at the top of your profile page. The image size is recommended to be 110 x 110 pixels.
  • Your thumbnails for photos, or often referred to as your photo grid, will appear as 161 x 161 pixels. If you’re going for a certain aesthetic, the thumbnail size is an important one to keep in mind. Individual image uploads can be square or rectangular. Square photos image size is 1080 x 1080 pixels and rectangular images should use a 4:5 ratio.
  • Instagram stories are a must for your brand to remain relevant on the platform and also where you will have the most visibility. The recommended resolution for stories is 1080 x 1920 pixels or an aspect ratio of 9:16.

YouTube

  • Your profile image for YouTube should be the same consistent branding as your other social channels as mentioned above. The image size for YouTube profile picture is 800 x 800 pixels.
  • Attractive and engaging thumbnail images are crucial to success of your videos. For YouTube, make sure your thumbnail image size is 1,2080 x 720 pixels.
  • YouTube also allows for a cover image photo in addition to your profile image. The recommended image size here is 2,560 x 1,440 pixels.

Pinterest

  • On the Pinterest homepage, profile picture image sizes are 165 x 165 pixels.
  • It is recommended to use an image aspect ratio of 2:3 for pins.
  • Pins that are on the homepage or in a board will appear at 236 pixels wide. Once a pin is expanded, it has a minimum width of 600 pixels and the height of the image will scale proportionally.

LinkedIn

  • Your company logo is very important when it comes to the identification of your brand, of course. Make sure it’s visible with the image size of 300 x 300 pixels.
  • The company background image is similar to the cover photos on other platforms, where it takes up the entire top portion of your page. The recommended image size for your LinkedIn background image is 1,536 x 768 pixels.
  • Images in your content posts have a recommended size of 1,200 x 630 pixels. Keep in mind that LinkedIn is a professional social network platform with a large focus on building relationships with industry leaders. Make sure your posts are appropriate for this kind of audience and focus less on driving sales or website traffic.

*Data from Social Media Today

More From Onimod Global

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

Social Media Marketing: Should Your Business be on TikTok?

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TikTok is the fastest growing social media network in the world right now, with the app having been downloaded over 1.5 billion times in the App Store and Google Play. If you’re not already there, you’re probably wondering, should my business be on TikTok? We’re going to help you answer that question. Let’s discuss the app, its audience, and what kind of business can benefit from adding TikTok to their social media marketing strategy. 

What is TikTok? 

For those unfamiliar, TikTok is an app that allows users to create and post videos within a news feed. Users are allowed to create clips 3-15 seconds long and compile clips into a video up to a minute in length. Users can add music or sounds to the videos that are available within the app. Most of the content is comedic or dance oriented, but the variety of content is growing. For example, we are starting to see videos featuring creators using or reviewing their favorite products. 

Who is on TikTok?

Just a few years ago, the majority of TikTok users were around the age of 13. Today, 60% of the app’s monthly active users in the U.S. are 16-24 year old. Another notable demographic is that 55.6% of users are male and 44.4% are female. This is an appreciable difference compared to other social platforms that show a female-favorable user base, such as Instagram with a 65%-35% sway. It’s also worth noting that 43% of users are in India. No one is certain why this is, but 40% of new downloads are based out of India. All in all, the largest number of users come out of the U.S, India, and Douyin, China. 

How Can Brands Use TikTok? 

There are four main ways brands can utilize TikTok:

  1. Directly: You can create your own channel and upload relevant videos through the channel.
  2. Influencers: Influencer marketing is growing in popularity on TikTok. Major brands like Google, Coca-Cola, Universal Pictures, and Sony have worked with popular users to raise brand awareness and extend reach of their recent promotions. 
  3. Paid Advertisements: There are three main types of paid ads brands have to choose from on TikTok as of now: 
    1. Launch Screen Ads: These appear when a user initially opens the app. Users can tap on the ad to get sent to an external webpage or participate in a hashtag challenge. 
    2. Video Ads: In-feed videos are also offered as a native way to advertise content on the app. You can pay to have your content promoted on the “For You” page.  
    3. Branded AR: Brands also have the ability to create branded lenses, filters, and stickers, which are similar to Snapchat. 
  4. Hashtag Challenge Plus: While this is still a paid feature, it is strictly e-commerce focused. Brands can sponsor a hashtag or a theme that creates a challenge for users to create videos participating in the challenge. Users can then browse products associated with the brand. 

Is it Right for Your Business? 

To answer this question, you need to ask yourself as a marketer or business owner a number of other questions. Will you be able to create original content that promotes your brand? Do you understand the style of content on TikTok? And most importantly, what is your target audience? If you’re looking to target Gen Z or Millennials, TikTok is a great way to gain mass exposure. Additionally, it’s a great way for brands that have a corporate tone to create a more youthful and fun feel for themselves. If your brand strictly targets an older demographic, it may not be worth the investment just yet, but it may be in the near future. 

More from Onimod Global 

At Onimod Global we are experts in social media marketing. We know which platforms are best for brands, and create visibility for brands where customers are searching, interacting, and ultimately converting. Find out more about what we do, or contact us today!

 

5 Steps to Creating a High Converting Landing Page

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Customers arrive on a landing page through social media posts, paid advertisements, and various other content. If your landing page is ineffective, all the ad dollars and resources put towards getting these customers there was essentially a waste.

A quality landing page has the potential to increase leads, sales, and gain valuable information on potential customers. Creating highly effective landing pages can seem like a difficult task, as there’s no one-size-fits-all template, but there are a variety of landing page best practices. These combined with understanding your target audience and dedicated effort, building a high converting landing page will be much easier. 

 

1. Focus on Responsive, Mobile-Friendly Designs 

In 2018, 52.2 percent of all website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile phones. No matter the industry, it’s smart to make mobile design a priority. This means using: optimized images, shorter sentences, bullet points, headings, and subheadings. Mobile-optimized landing pages include a lot of white space and can be easy to read at a quick glance. Performance is also important, as conversions won’t be likely if page speed is low or chew up data. 

Mobile-optimization also forces conciseness and high design focus. Screen space can’t be wasted on extra unimportant content or fluff. The message should be focused on the action you want the customer to take. The less-is-more design approach results in a more concise and engaging final project. 

 

2. Have One Clear Call-To-Action 

The call-to-action is the number one, most important element that should be included on every landing page, as it’s what turns visitors into real customers. 

What should be focused on first is the text. Powerful, direct, and urgent language is key. What makes you unique and would create an emotional drive in customers? If possible try to communicate one or more of the following: they are getting something for free, they are getting something exclusive, you are solving their problem, or they have limited time to act. 

Some other elements that increase the effectiveness of call-to-actions are contrasting colors, buttons instead of links, and ensuring its visibility. Most companies and sites have a set color scheme, which is great, but you don’t want your CTA to blend in. Make it stand out by using contrasting, yet visually appealing colors. It also doesn’t need to be at the bottom of the page. It should be placed where the user’s eye naturally goes. This is something that may require A/B testing. 

 

3. Use Visuals 

The brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text. Meaning that visitors are immediately affected by the images on the landing page. As pictures are selected and placed, remember that they should be relevant to products and services, and high quality. 

If you’re selling a physical product, a high quality image should be displayed on the landing page. If you’re selling a service, the primary purpose of the image is to grab users’ attention and demonstrate relevance to them. 

And since the images are the first thing the user processes, you want that impression to be a good one. It has the potential to shape the visitor’s impression of your brand before they even make it to the ad copy. Which is why this isn’t a great place to use stock photos or quick photoshop jobs. Marketers have the opportunity to give potential customers a visual understanding of what they stand to gain with their product or service, and set themselves apart from the competition.

 

4. Have User and Search Engine Friendly Formatting 

Along with a mobile-friendly design and quality content, the page also needs to be formatted well, starting with a solid headline. It should compelling, something that will keep visitors reading. Touch on a main point that’s relevant to readers and hints that you have a solution to their problem. It’s also beneficial to use emotional power words. The most effective emotions to appeal to are anger, greed, and fear. “Stop getting ripped off!” “Free exclusive gift!” “Only 24 hours left!” are all possible headers appealing to these emotions. 

After you’ve established a heading that meets all the criteria, break the rest of the content of the landing page into segments. Each segment should have a subheading of its own that makes sense. This way if a reader is skimming the page they can skip to the section they’re looking for or read what is most relevant for them. Not only are headings and subheadings helpful for visitors, it helps search engines as well. Landing pages can be more easily indexed by Google and other search engines when they’re logically structured. 

 

5. Show You’re Reliable 

High converting landing pages always contain an element of trust. Include various pieces of evidence that show you can be trusted and are a reliable company, since you’re most likely asking visitors to give up some kind of sensitive information. There are five types of evidence best used to show trustworthiness.

The first is high quality landing page copy. There should be absolutely no spelling or grammatical errors. This makes visitors wary because it seems unprofessional, gives the sense that the website was thrown together, and thus unreliable. There are many tools that can help with spelling, grammar, and guides for clear landing page copy.

Proof of expertise and experience is also essential for reliability. Things such as: established in 1995, over 50,000 satisfied customers, licensed in 50 states, officially certified, member of the local Chamber of Commerce, etc, all communicate an important message. It reassures potential customers that your company is experienced, qualified, and have taken the prerequisites to earn and deserve your trust. 

Social proof, direct and indirect, is great evidence. Indirect includes social media follows, number of subscribers, likes, and shares. The more social engagement you have, the more trust you can earn. Indirect social proof can also be things like reported revenue, employee size, and other factors that bring your business clout. Direct social includes positive reviews, testimonials, and positive quotes from customers or influencers in your niche. It’s one person telling others “I had a good experience,” The simple truth is, trust begets trust.

Personal connection is next. Earn visitors trust by letting them get to know you and your business. This could be things such as a personal story, video, company bio, history, photos, etc. It helps when customers can put a name and face with who they’re doing business with. 

Lastly, evidence of security is very important. Most IT and security software vendors will give badges to their customers. You should place those on landing pages to indicate to customers that you have taken steps to ensure they’re information is protected, especially when it comes to personal or financial data. 

 

Contact Onimod Global 

Struggling to make your landing page convert or just need some digital marketing advice? Contact us! We are experts in all things digital marketing including SEM, Web Dev, Automation, Analytics, and much more. Learn more about what we do here, or keep up to date with all things digital marketing on our news page. 

 

 

3 Tactics For Marketers Promoting St. Patrick’s Day

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Successfully marketing any brand or business requires creative strategy, careful execution, patience, and sometimes, a little luck. This is especially the case during any holiday season when business everywhere is trying to bring in the most traffic. Holiday activities and flood of marketing messages can make it difficult to capture customers’ attention. Experts at Onimod Global are here to help your business stand out from the rest with these unique marketing tactics.

 

  1. Create One Focused Offer

    Make sure whatever you’re offering has a specific focus. Whether it be retail, a food and drink, or service deal, it’s important that all your marketing initiatives and brand messaging tie back to one focused activity for maximum results. Many businesses often promote a variety of deals and specials, however the lack of cohesiveness between these promotions is distracting and makes it difficult to drive action.

  2.  Match Holiday and Theme

    Discounts are one of the more common promotions, mix it up and go with a trend of the holiday! Be creative with your prize — find something that your target audience would value, and make that the reward. If discounts are typically more successful for your business, go with a green-themed discount. Try offering a discount to customers wearing green, or run a sale on all your green items (colored or environmentally friendly).

  3. Campaigning Prior to St. Patrick’s Day

    Similar to choosing one promotional offer, it’s very important that your marketing campaign is cohesive throughout. Starting with social, create custom visuals and videos to share across your social platforms. Tweets with images are retweeted 150-percent more than text-only tweets. By using media in your posts, you’ll increase social engagement which in turn will increase day-of foot traffic to your business. Some of the basic changes you might want to make include restyling your logo using green, updating your social headers to highlight your special offer, and pining your promotional post to the top of your page.

 

More From Onimod Global

We would love to work with you and help you optimize your digital marketing strategy. To contact our experts or request a quote, please click here. We can’t wait to hear from you!

4 Tips To Success For Your Brand’s SEO Strategy

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As the online environment becomes increasingly competitive for businesses and brands, SEO is more important now than ever. Just how important is it? According to Marketing Land, over one-third of U.S. consumers started their online purchases with Google or another search tool in 2018. Paid search can only take you so far, we find that success lies in organic search results. Before you can take your SEO to the next level, you need to know where you are now and what to do next. Check out these 4 tips from Onimod Global that will give your brand the biggest competitive advantage in organic search results and make your SEO strategy a success.

 

Crawlability

The first step is making your site visible to search engine crawlers. A crawler is a program that visits Web sites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index. In order to show your site crawlers your site structure for better indexing, you may need to update and expand your sitemap or build one from scratch. Updating your site’s robot.txt file with instructions will tell crawlers which pages you want indexed and which you don’t. After this step is complete, submit it to Google and other search engines so they can re-crawl your site as soon as possible.

 

Content Optimization 

After you resolve your engine crawler issues, the next thing you’ll want to focus on is content optimization and leveraging your existing assets. Doing this will improve ranking with specific keywords you want your brand to be associated with. There are a variety of tools to develop a list of keywords, the best one being Google Keyword Planner which develops a list of target keywords based on volume and ROI. From there, you can use this list to enhance meta tags and content you add to your site. This tip is very important in improving your SEO so your brand is shown to the right audience at the right time.

 

Build Links and Engagement

This tip is an offsite strategy, and the more complete content-optimization process is, the more SEO benefits you’ll see from your link-building and influencer efforts. We recommend researching link building and reviewing Google’s link-building ethics and best practices before you begin. Marketing Land also shares that a 10 to 15 percent response rate is good for link-building campaigns — so don’t get discouraged by what may seem a small response to your outreach efforts.

Influencer marketing is a strategy that is taking off and getting bigger every year. In order for this to be successful, you have to know your product and audience. From there, you can identify the social media user that has built a specific following specific to your industry or product. It is also important to recognize that large social influencers may not get you the best ROI, and it may be better to go the micro-influencer route. These are people who may only have tens of thousands of followers, but they’ve earned a high level of trust and authority within that group you are targeting.

 

Content Creation 

Your content is by far one of the biggest pieces of the puzzle to success for your brand. If your company is mature in its SEO program, you can focus on content creation at a whole new level. By this we mean your content should go beyond answering the basic questions of your products or services to answering questions that relate to what you sell. For example, if you are a company that sells bar shelves B2B, you can create content on how to effectively sell liquor in certain seasons by the lighting in your club.

It’s important to recognize these tips go in order and allow your brand to build level by level. Establish a solid foundation with crawlability and optimize your existing content — before you know it you’ll be creating unique content and your brand will see significant growth in your organic search traffic.

 

How Onimod Global Can Help

Are you on the hunt for someone to help you create an SEO strategy and increase your organic search traffic? We have you covered at Onimod Global! We would love to help you and your company succeed, request a quote or contact us here. We can’t wait to here from you!

 

Is Your LinkedIn Account Reaching Its Full Digital Marketing Potential?

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Whether we’re talking about a personal account or a company page, there are several different ways to utilize LinkedIn as a powerful digital marketing platform. LinkedIn is reported as the most effective social platform in 2017 by MarketingProfs. So, you definitely need to be asking yourself, how does your LinkedIn account compare to the competition?

Recent LinkedIn Update

Just a few weeks ago, LinkedIn introduced the “LinkedIn Audience Network”. With uncanny similarity to the Facebook Audience Network, this new product is meant to assist marketers by allowing them to reach users on apps and websites that are not currently managed by LinkedIn itself.

In short, marketers can get their LinkedIn ads in front of more people. The goal of this wider audience capability is to increase impressions, engagements, and ultimately increase conversions. AdAge released an article that includes testing results of this new LinkedIn product, which boasted an impressive 3-13% increase in unique impressions.

Helpful Hints

LinkedIn is not foolproof. There are many ways that you may be unknowingly sabotaging your digital marketing efforts through this popular platform. Christopher Heine of Adweek compiled a list of 20 LinkedIn Do’s and Don’ts, which includes first hand recommendations from highly successful digital marketers.

We here at Onimod Global decided to create a shortlist from this Adweek article of the tips that we found to be the most useful.

Do:

  • Make it Personalized: No one likes getting spammed with random messages through their LinkedIn inbox. In order to make yourself stand out and get attention, you have to give the recipient a reason to keep reading. Brittany Simpson from Site Strategics suggests, “Don’t immediately approach with an ‘ask,’ but approach with a ‘give’ of some sort.”
  • Analyze Your Target Audience: Now that LinkedIn has added more people to its audience, use it! If you already know who your target market is, great. If not, do some preliminary testing to try and narrow it down. As you move forward, Kirsten Chiala of Cisco recommends, “From that research, take it a step further and develop personas so you can customize your content to that target audience.”

Don’t:

  • Stalk Your Connections: Everyone has been in a situation where they continually ignore or delete requests from other users on social media. Take the hint, and move on. Do not waste your time chasing after connections who clearly do not want to hear what you have to say. Try to focus on generating new leads instead. If you continue down this path you will only spin your wheels, and as Rick Smith of Exos put it, “Plus … it’s kinda creepy.”
  • Treat LinkedIn Like Facebook: These platforms may be similar, but they are incredibly different from a digital marketing perspective. While you want to continually try to engage with your connections by posting content on your page, you also don’t want to take it too far and annoy them. Appearing as a pest may cause others to ignore you, or even delete you from their network. If you must post, make sure it is relevant and actually useful.

Top 3 Digital Marketing Tips to Earn More Traffic to Your Website

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We’ve all heard the statistics and reports on how search engine optimization (SEO) is a critical focus point for businesses on the internet. Setting a perfect stage for customers to come in and patronize your business in the form of a great website design is not just enough to make your business successful. You need several customer attraction points that can deliver not only the right quantity of referrals to your business but will also direct targeted, ready-to-buy customers to your business.

Social media may take the lead in website traffic referral for business on the internet, but what is undeniable is that search is still the leading source of the most targeted customers on the internet.

While this fact is known to most digital marketers, many are unable to recommend the right steps needed to attract qualified leads to their clients’ businesses.

This article will explore methods your business can use to make better gains through the search engine and improve sales.

Get on Google My Business

With Google’s increasing advancement in listing businesses along relevant search results, digital marketers and business owners are seeing better opportunities to get listed and be showcased directly to their customers.

Google My Business offers businesses with a brick-and-mortar presence the ability to get their business’ opening hour, phone number and location displayed to customers in search results and on Google Maps.

What’s more impressive is the “view office” feature that allows potential customers to take a virtual tour of your office without leaving Google or their seat. This will offer businesses several benefits which include increased trust and confidence in customers that have taken the virtual tour.

Use the instructions on Google My Business by Google to get started on setting your business up for the listing.

Encourage User Review

A lot of reports have shown that users who read reviews on your website, whether the customer reviews are negative or positive, will be highly likely to consider making a purchase from your website. Even leading digital marketing experts agree that using customer reviews on your website can enhance trust and transparency in your business.

The best performing businesses have customers leave reviews on their websites so that potential buyers understand that they are dealing with trusted entities.

There are several ways to encourage your customers to leave a review on your website. Being creative and open about the process will make them feel more comfortable to share their experience doing business with you and thus encourage others to come aboard.

Take Advantage of Off-Page Optimization

Off-page SEO is an important aspect of search optimization that businesses can take advantage of and get increased presence on top search results. While most businesses concentrate most of their resources on on-page efforts, signals like links, citations, and references on other websites are very credible ranking signals that Google considers.

In a comprehensive list that tries to share most of Google’s ranking factors, Brian Dean places the off-page optimizations efforts among the signals that Google’s algorithm considers when ranking a website.

Search engines have always been a very important aspect of digital marketing. This makes it critical for businesses to get search engine optimization right.

Onimod Global offers large agency services with boutique client interaction. Let us evaluate your companies digital efforts at no extra cost. Contact us today for a complimentary evaluation of your business.

Ref: Huffington Post. Google Business. Onimod Global.