Skills Every Digital Marketing Agency Should Excel in

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A great digital marketing agency should have the ability to learn your brand quickly and be ready to act as your in-house digital experts.  Since the digital industry is so diverse, how do you know if a digital marketing agency is really as great as they claim to be?  

Looking for a new digital marketing agency but have no clue where to begin? Working with a good digital agency that specializes in quality marketing strategies is an obvious starting line. Knowing how to choose a digital marketing agency is essential in your search to find the right agency fit for your brand.

Spending money on digital marketing is a big deal, and you want to find an agency that makes the most of your money and works with your business goals. If you’re tired of being burned by agencies that make big promises but deliver no results, check out our three must-have skills (and top red flags) to watch out for. 

1. SEO & SEM

Across the board, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important skills you can have in this field. Knowing how SEO and content optimization work is essential for running a successful campaign. A good marketing agency should have an up-to-date website. If they’re practicing their SEO successfully you can easily find them doing a simple google search. 

Both SEO and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) form your entire digital strategy on a data and content level. At the end of the day, a great website should have all the key elements of an effective inbound marketing strategy:

  • An active blog.
  • Responsive design.
  • Intuitive navigation.
  • Effective conversion strategy with calls to action.

2. A Solid Team

A great agency should have a team that is equipped with versatility and expertise. Building a team that has experts in their respective fields i.e. design, development, SEO, content strategy, social media and brand development, will only make your agency more sought after and stronger as a whole.

Content is perhaps the core of digital marketing. Content marketing will continue to be a crucial part of the game no matter what happens. After you’ve created your all-star team you should then be able to create high quality, SEO-friendly content for various channels. By understanding how to create an effective content strategy you’ll be able to easily engage and convert to various audiences.

Things can be a little challenging when it comes to creating different content formats. From video to social media, emails, web content, blogs, e-books, videos, and white papers, it can be tough to create content that translates to these different formats. Working together as a team is the best way to face the beast that is, content marketing.

3. Tools and How to Utilize Them

Due to the marketing industry being so technology-driven, you need a good grasp on technology as well as be able to learn it quickly. It is immensely beneficial for a marketing agency to have a solid understanding of marketing tools as well as the technical skills that go along with them. For example, a CMS like WordPress – used by a third of websites – can be tweaked to boost SEO. 

Project management tools are important and its always good to ask what platform your desired marketing agency is using.  Nowadays there are many tools you can use to get the job done, for example Google Analytics, Hubspot, Salesforce, the list goes on. The bottom line is, any agency should be comfortable and familiar with all of these tools.

Now that we’ve covered the 3 top things to have as an agency, lets discuss the 3 Red Flags to watch out for.

Red Flag #1 – You Don’t have an Account Manager

A solid agency will pair you with a marketing strategist or account manager who oversees your business’s marketing success.

Something to look out for is talking to a new person every time you call. When you’re looking for an agency, make sure to ask who will handle your account. If it’s one person, that’s great. If they’re running a call center, look elsewhere.

Red Flag #2 – You Can’t Access Your Marketing Data

If the agency refuses to give you access to analytics, you should find an agency that will let you track your marketing success with them. There’s no reason for a digital marketing provider to be dishonest or hoard a business’s data.

The right digital marketing agency will allow you to see your data, and they’ll talk to you about the analytics as they work to improve your marketing performance.

Red Flag #3 – False Promises

If an agency is promising you that your business will be at the top of search results by working with them in a matter of weeks – it’s a bad sign. It’s always important to ask how if they’re promising you things they cant keep. If they’re talking about paid advertising, then rest assured you have nothing to worry about.

Its always best to find an agency that has realistic goals for you to improve your local search results.

Last Thoughts

Digital marketing is fast-paced and demanding. Understanding an agencies top 3 must haves and top 3 red flags to look out for will have you off to the races. At Onimod Global, our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

From SEO to social media, content marketing and strategy, We can help you gain up-to-date and relevant knowledge that will help you become an awesome digital marketer. Got questions about Facebook advertising or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

Social Media Strategies That Boost Awareness and ROI

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Social media marketing is absolutely necessary for brands and businesses in order for them to stay relevant. By having a social media strategy in place, it helps businesses engage and influence their target audience. 

There are so many campaigns across social media that have gone viral by simply having a strategy in place.

The average amount of time that people spend on social media is 2.27 hours. Considering the increase in popularity with apps like TikTok it has people spending more time scrolling throughout the day. Here’s a look at the benefits of having a social media strategy in place that can drive both brand awareness and ROI.

Benefits of Having A Social Media Strategy

A social media strategy is a plan that outlines your social media goals, the tactics used to achieve them and metrics tracked to measure performance. A strategy doesn’t need to be over-thought and difficult. The best way you can go about creating a strategy is by having a simple yet specific plan with meaningful measurable. 

This will help you clearly identify whether or not the tactics you’re implementing are successful or not. Ultimately, your social media strategy should drive brand awareness and engagement across social media channels for your target audience/s. 

One of the hardest things about social media marketing is consistency. It can be tough to try and recreate a campaign and hope for the same results. By having a social media strategy you can provide your business with the following benefits:

  • Increase Your Brand Awareness
  • Increase Your Web Traffic
  • Generate Quality Leads
  • Quality Data you can analyze and measure

There are so many benefits to social media and having a strategy in place will only strengthen your ability to achieve your business goals.

Steps to Building a Successful Social Media Strategy

Now that we have covered the basics of a social media strategy, let’s get into a couple specific steps you can take to create one. Here’s a couple tips on how you can implement a successful social media strategy:

Set Goals for Your Business

Spending some time in this step will help you understand and define what your social media goals are. This will ultimately determine the rest of your strategy.

Think about what your business wants to achieve from social media and understand that marketing and business goals are different. For example, are you trying to draw brand awareness in the marketplace, or expand your following or generate more leads? You may want to achieve these goals, but it’s crucial to note each one of them as they will involve different tactics on social media.

When you set your goals, define your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to understand which social media metrics are important. To be successful on social media, set metrics for each channel you use. Over and above basic metrics you can dig deeper and track audience growth rate. There are many metrics you can use to track success, so narrow them down to what matters to your business.

Research Your Audience & Your Competitors 

Your audience and your competitors go hand in hand. In order to create personalized messaging and content, you need to understand who your audience is and what they want. The best way to achieve that is to do market research. You can do this through online surveys, interviews with your customers or by setting up a focus group.

Once you’ve done this, you will get a better look at your buyer personas which in turn help you create a better understanding of what your ideal customer is. Then you can begin catering to that demographic.

Competitor research helps you understand what your competitors are doing online such as what platforms they use and campaigns they run. You can also see what their messaging is like, as well as their content and how frequently they post. By understanding how they engage with customers and the success of that engagement you can either emulate it or take another direction to capture customers’ attention.

Social Media Platforms

Choosing the best channels for your business can be confusing at the beginning. There are a lot of platforms out there to choose from. Depending on the type of business you are, you may be making a mistake by not being present on all of the platforms. 

Facebook: Is one of the biggest social media platforms and the oldest around. Facebook offers a targeted way to engage with prospects and customers. 

Instagram: Is a great visual platform. Instagram continues to be one of the most popular amongst younger audiences and has seen huge growth over the past few years. It’s a great platform to showcase products and connect with influencers to grow your customer base. Plus with in-app shopping coming to Instagram soon through shoppable posts, customers will be able to purchase on the platform. 

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the place to be for B2B businesses and provides opportunities for B2C too. It provides businesses with a way to connect in the B2B space both organically and through paid advertising. Content that works well on this platform are blogs, white-papers, eBooks, and industry-related content. 

Twitter: Twitter is a real-time platform which means your content should be timely and relevant. It can be a great customer service channel for brands as it allows quick replies and its hashtags help discover new and trending content. 

TikTok: As one of the fastest-growing social media channels, TikTok is a great place for video content. Known for its short-form and quirky videos, it’s developing rapidly as a platform and can be used effectively for marketing. TikTok is a great place for influencer collaborations. 

Planning Your Content

When you plan your content, you’re creating a tone for your pages. It’s a way for you to figure out if you engage with your audience in a formal or informal voice. It’s how you showcase your brand’s personality. The best way to plan your content is by creating a content calendar. That way you can create posts and schedule them regularly on social networks.

You can measure your posts by monitoring their performance, tracking your KPIs, and lastly, testing out new content to see which keywords resonate with your audience.

Final Thoughts

Doing content marketing without a content strategy is a disaster waiting to happen.

The more you know about how social media works, the better your strategy will be. It’s important to understand the fundamentals of social media marketing along with the intricacies of each platform so you can target the right audience.  

At Onimod Global, our data-driven content strategies align your content marketing efforts to real business results. Our content strategy services make it easy to understand your audience’s needs, where your competition is winning, and areas where you have an opportunity to lead your industry.

As a Chicago-based, in-house marketing team, we are your partner experts for specific marketing verticals or some nice balance in between. We excel in customer service and will teach you the most relevant and up-to-date digital marketing skills. 

Have questions about creating your online presence and need help strategizing? Contact us here today.

4 Ways to Boost Your WordPress SEO

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Yes WordPress is SEO-friendly, but simply launching a WordPress website isn’t enough to rank at the top of the search engines.

WordPress has been around since 2003, and has certainly come a long way to help define itself as a powerful marketing tool. Over a third of all websites are using WordPress, simply for its publishing platform and well-designed SEO.

However, if you want your site to rank higher than your competitors’ sites, you still need to do some work yourself. Here’s a couple ways Onimod Global can help you improve your WordPress site’s SEO.

Carry Out Keyword Research

Without keyword research, you are not going to know which search terms you should be optimizing your site’s content for. Keyword research should come at the start of any SEO project and be used to plan your site content and on-page optimization.

You can use our Keyword Overview tool to identify the keywords you should be using and optimizing for. Whether you are starting to optimize your site from scratch or are creating new content, knowing the keywords you are trying to rank the page for is essential.

Craft Unique Optimized Title Tags & Meta Descriptions

Your page’s title tag tells users and search engines what your page is about and is commonly regarded as being an important ranking factor. It is what feeds the clickable page title you see on Google search results.

Yoast automatically sets your page’s title tag using your page heading. What’s nice about Yoast is that you also have the ability to overwrite this and improve it in order to work in variations of keywords that you might not include in your page’s heading. Here are a couple things you can do to optimize your title tags and Meta descriptions:

  • You can either use snippet variables, add custom text as your title tag, or use a mix of both.
  • Meta descriptions indirectly impact your site’s organic performance due to Click-through- rate. It is worth spending time to write enticing descriptions. 

Use Internal Linking

You need to use internal linking within your content to help establish topical relevance between different pages on your site, to pass authority earned from external links, and to help users efficiently navigate.

Adding in internal links to other pages in WordPress is really simple. All you need to do is highlight the text which you want to link (this will be your link’s anchor text) and click the ‘link’ button on the toolbar, which will then allow you to either paste a URL or search for pages within your site.

Mark Up Your Pages with Schema

Schema markup can help to enhance your SEO efforts by adding context to your content and data. It helps Google to understand your content, present it in different and useful ways, which enhances a searcher’s experience.

By adding context to your pages, you are making it more likely that you not only rank higher but also get clicks when your page receives impressions. Since Yoast 11.0, a full structured data graph is built for every post or page on your site, but there are instances where you will want to mark up specific blocks within WordPress.  

Last Thoughts

WordPress is one of the most SEO-friendly CMS’ out there, and that is one of the reasons why it is so popular. It is user-friendly and easy to implement a whole host of SEO tactics using just a small number of fantastic plugins. By following the steps above, you are putting yourself in a great position to outrank your competitors.

Onimod Global is your Chicago-based, in-house marketing team, your partner experts for specific marketing verticals or some nice balance in between. We excel in customer service and will teach you the most relevant and up-to-date digital marketing skills. From social media to SEO and paid search, you will have the tools to ensure your business succeeds online.  

Have questions about creating your online presence and need help strategizing? Contact us here today.

3 Ways To Boost Your Digital Presence

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These days, a strong digital presence is required for any business that wants to bring in or engage with new and existing customers. But what is a digital presence? And what elements are needed for a strong digital presence?  

In short, Digital Presence is essentially what people find about your business when doing an online search, including everything from your website to social media, customer reviews, and more. Oftentimes, in today’s digital age, digital presence gets overlooked. Digital Presence allows businesses to showcase themselves online. It’s crucial to have a digital presence implemented within your marketing strategy for many reasons. The main one being, people searching for your business online.

A recent survey done by Bright Local found that 93% of consumers used the internet to search for and find a local business and 87% read online reviews for local businesses. What consumers find when doing these online searches will impact how and where they spend their money. When you do a quick online search for your business or industry, what results appear? Do any reviews or consumer recommendations come up? Is your website in the #1 spot?

Generating a digital presence can be simple with the help of resources like a website, social media platforms, business directory listing, customer reviews and other online sources. Here’s a look at 3 simple ways you can boost your digital presence.

1. Boost Your Site’s Search Engine Optimization Strategy

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process that increases your website traffic and improves your brand’s recognition and online presence. This strategy helps potential customers have a better chance of finding your website when they search for terms related to your brand. Mastering SEO can also boost your rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs).

To rank higher, business sites must incorporate two categories of SEO: on-site and off-site SEO.

On-site SEO is the practice of optimizing the elements of a web page to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic from search engines. 

  • Good on-site SEO helps search engines understand what humans see and the value they would receive when they visit a page. To master on-site SEO, business owners should ensure their HTML source code is well-formed, and all elements of the site need to be optimized for speed.

Off-site SEO refers to actions taken outside your website that affect your rankings in SERPs. Optimizing off-site rankings involves improving a search engine and user perception of a business site’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority.

  • Improve your off-site SEO by encouraging other relevant pages, sites, and people to link to and promote your website. This step vouches for the quality of the web content that you produce.

2. Expand To New Social Media Platforms

Technology has grown tremendously and it affects the way we communicate. Social media’s growth in the US is comparable in speed to that of most modern communication-enabling technologies, such as our phones and computers. The percentage of US adults who use social media increased from 5% in 2005 to 79% in 2019.

If you haven’t jumped on the social media train by now, you should definitely take advantage of it. Nowadays, almost everyone has a Facebook profile set up for their business, but other social media outlets can be great ways to connect with different audiences. Instagram and TikTok can be ideal places to display new products and upload video content snippets. It’s also a great platform to share photo content. For a while now, Twitter has been considered the go-to place for breaking news updates.

Start by determining where your target customers spend their time using social media and try to cultivate followings on a new platform in 2022. Spend some time expanding on customer profiles and determine which social media platforms are most likely to appeal to them. 

3. Increase Your Brand’s Authority

Brand authority builds as you connect more deeply with your audience. For example, does your audience know they can trust you for the latest industry news? When you consistently provide your audience with relevant content and prove you know what you’re talking about, and that they can trust you, you essentially build authority.

With a strong brand, you are able to do the following:

  1. Retain a loyal customer base that seeks you out first before turning to your competitors.
  2. Attract the attention of influencers within your industry, who can then use their authority to promote your brand.

Your brand authority has a significant impact on your SEO performance. A great way to work on the two is to look for opportunities to prove your place as an industry leader. For example, if you publish content to your blog and simply list your contributing authors as “staff” without creating fleshed-out author bios for them, this is a big missed opportunity to build your authority and earn some easy SEO points under the new EAT update.

Final Thoughts

Consumer tastes and behaviors are always changing, and it can be hard to keep up with the rapidly changing rules of SEO and the shifting demands of your market. By planning ahead and strategizing the next moves can help you stay ahead of the curve and create a more flexible, adaptable SEO strategy for 2022 and beyond.

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, expanding your social presence and digital marketing. Got questions about how to develop a digital marketing strategy for 2022 or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

7 Social Media Graphic Design Tips

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No matter what you’re sharing on social media, it always performs best when paired with striking visuals. So here are some social media design tip best practices to help your content stand out amongst the crowd. 

1. Determine Your Goal 

Usually, the main goal when using social media is to grab user’s attention and get them to engage in some way. No piece of content will ever cater to all social media users, so the most important factor is figuring out what works for your audience. Here are some questions to get you started when determining the goal of your social media graphic: 

  • Who is my target audience? 
  • Which platforms are they using the most?
  • Which devices are they on most frequently? 
  • What is the message I want to spread?
  • What emotion am I trying to invoke? 
  • What action do I want my audience to take after seeing this graphic? 

2. Be Consistent 

You want to maintain consistency across all design elements and branded materials so that your target audience can clearly recognize who it’s coming from. Whatever graphics you create and share should essentially be an extension of the same brand they see on your website. Be sure to incorporate your brand’s colors and fonts into your designs and avoid anything content that doesn’t accurately reflect your brand. 

3. Tell Your Message Visually 

Majority of people scroll through social media slightly distracted and only for a few minutes at a time. Try to use visuals with minimal text to capture attention and get your message across as quickly as possible. Statistics have shown that people can recall information about 55% more efficiently when it’s paired with a relevant graphic. That’s why you want to choose visuals that evoke a specific emotion you want your audience to feel. Possibly a visual representation of a pain point you know your target audience is experiencing, or that pain point being solved or relieved. 

4. Avoid Color Discord 

Make sure you’re choosing colors that complement each other, avoiding color discord. Combine contrasting colors to make your graphic a scroll-stopper. The most eye-catching color combinations are those that oppose each other on the color wheel. You also want to avoid using colors that might clash with your own branding, as well as the branding of the social platform you’re using. For example, Facebook’s signature blue. When you’re already competing for attention with the color schemes of other ads, you don’t want to compete with the colors of the site itself. 

5. Establish a Visual Hierarchy 

It’s important to establish some sort of visual hierarchy throughout your design. A visual hierarchy is the use of size and color to emphasize one item over another to draw the viewer’s eye to a certain item above others. Basically, you want to give visual clues to what’s most important in the graphic. Emphasize your message by focusing on the most significant phrases. The title text should have the largest font size, then subtitles, body copy and so on. You should also highlight any sort of CTA that might be included as well. 

6. Be Sure to Use Correct Sizing 

Every social platform requires images with different sizes, specifications and image types. When creating your design you need to identify which platform(s) you’ll be sharing it on. You will most likely have to resize the graphic to fit the specific dimensions of every platform you’re planning on sharing it. This can seem like a tedious task, but this is important for optimization and to ensure important elements of your graphic aren’t cropped or distorted. 

7. Keep it Simple 

Because social gives designers a much smaller canvas to work with, overcrowding can happen fast. You want to avoid overcrowding because it hinders user experience and can make it difficult to get your message across. You can avoid this by: 

  • Using large illustrations 
  • Limiting typeface to 2 fonts 
  • Sticking with 2-3 colors 
  • Utilizing white space to contrast the main bold, colorful element 

More from Onimod Global 

Needing assistance with graphic design, branding or social media? We offer high-end design and branding for your business.

Visual identity and marketing materials are our specialty. Bring an in-house graphic design team to your business with Onimod Global. Learn more about who we are or contact us to bring your digital marketing strategy to the next level today. 

4 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Choosing Content Topics

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When choosing content topics, most digital marketers try to write about things they believe is relevant to their audience. While relevance is important, alone it’s not enough. Furthermore, some seemingly relevant content topics may not be a good fit for your brand. 

So, how do you determine which topics are a good fit for your brand and engaging for your audience? Here are 4 questions to ask yourself when choosing the right content topics for you.

1. Is there a need? 

A topic should address an audience’s pain points and provide a solution. One way to identify your audience’s needs are through creating a buyer persona, or your ideal customer. This may require some research, but you want to identify the following: 

Source: https://buffer.com/resources/discover-content-ideas/

Your buyer persona will give you a better sense of challenges and goals your audience has. Knowing your audience’s problems will allow you to come up with content topics that solve those problems. 

You can also use search engines and social platforms for discovering users’ needs. Utilize Google trends to gauge if a topic is growing or on the decline. You can use social the same way. Most platforms have analytical tools to show you how popular a certain keyword or set of keywords are. If you have a social listening tool, this would be the perfect way to incorporate that as well. Once you have a good grasp on what your audience is talking about, you can insert yourself in the conversation where appropriate. 

2. Do you have the credibility? 

If you publish content you don’t have the authority to speak on, you risk ruining the credibility of your brand. You want to use content marketing to strengthen your trust and credibility, not weaken it. So, how can you determine if you’re equipped to speak on a matter? There are generally two main criteria for credibility. Ask yourself: 

  • Am I an expert? Can you or someone else from your company confidently create and cite original sources? Or is the information based strictly on opinion? 
  • Is there data to back it up? If there is data, is it outdated? If there isn’t any recent data, you further risk losing your credibility. 

Find topics where you have genuine interest, as well as a good knowledge base. Content is about taking data and incorporating your own voice into it. But if you’re writing about something you aren’t very knowledgeable on, you won’t have the expertise to go deeper and differentiate your own opinions. 

3. What is the goal of the piece of content?  

You want each piece of content you create to have an end goal for your audience, but you also want it to align with your overall organizational goals. Content marketing is really about producing an action from a potential customer. Do your topic ideas connect with that overall marketing objective? Do they move your reader further along the customer journey? For each content topic you decide on, evaluate it and see how it aligns with your organizational goals.

Doing this will also help you when selecting KPIs (key performance indicators). If your current goal is to generate leads, your content should be focused on moving customers further through the sales funnel. If your current goal is to produce more sales, your content should be aimed at moving the sales needle. This means content isn’t just informative, it also builds trust.

It can be easy to rely on viral topics and expect that to carry your content to success. But if those topics don’t align with your overall business strategy, it’s a waste.

4. Can the message be shared across multiple mediums?  

Content should communicate how and why your perspectives, products and services stand apart from others in your industry. Content marketing takes a good balance of storytelling, educating, convincing and should include a call-to-action. Once you’ve landed on a strong topic, it’s equally important to ensure you’re able to create multi-purpose content out of it. You want to choose topics that you’re an expert on, but you don’t want it to be too niche. This may cause a shortage of material and of those actually interested in reading it. Not only that, but it might also be difficult to share that content across multiple mediums and platforms. 

You want to find the sweet spot between broad and niche. Ideally, you will find content pieces that can be featured in a number of ways. For example how-to content could be created as: 

  • A YouTube video 
  • An infographic 
  • A blog post

You want to be able to then share these pieces of content across social platforms. Having flexible content ensures that all members of your audience will be able to find something they best relate to and be able to find it in multiple places. This also creates less work for you, as you can successfully reuse and share topics. 

Final Thoughts 

Mapping out and choosing the right topics for content marketing takes strategic planning. Learning what content performs best among your audience takes time and experimenting. Continually measure and track your strategy and make changes when necessary. Choosing the right topics is essential to developing and driving an effective coverall content marketing strategy. 

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. If you’re looking for assistance with your content marketing or any other areas of digital marketing, contact us today! 

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.

4 Tips To Maintain Customer Loyalty And Trust

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Customer loyalty and optimism is at the top of most companies’ list of things to be concerned about during COVID-19. The way companies react to the current crisis and publicly treat their customers will significantly alter their reputation for years to come. By putting your customers’ interests first, this can be a time for your company’s brand to lead. Make sure your customers know that they matter with these 4 tips on customer relationship management.

Communicate to customers.

Sometimes it can be be as simple as letting your customers know you care—even if they aren’t buying as much product or services from you at the moment. Remember that your voice can also carry, and many of your customers may have customers as well. Your audience can reach much farther just by being in touch and creating customer loyalty.

Develop new ways to work with your customer.

Travel and in-person meetings are naturally the first problem many companies face when it comes to social distancing. In this case, educating your employees who need to travel on the ways to mitigate the spread of the virus is first and foremost. This is just the beginning of how the world we continue to operate. The effects of COVID-19 on the philosophy and operation of work. As remote work becomes more common, look to the departments in your company that work efficiently with remote teams.

Team up with local business.

We are, quite literally, all in this together. There isn’t one person or company not affected by the COVID-19 crisis. Team up with your local community stores to support small business and demonstrate an empathy towards your community. For example, a group of restaurants forced to close by government could combine kitchens and develop a group online service.

Be true to your brand and purpose.

This is an opportunity for you to show current and potential customers what your brand is really all about. What is your brand? What is your purpose? People are paying very close attention to how the crisis is handled, and companies with a purpose also showing empathy will most likely emerge as market leaders. For example, airlines have always had filters removing virus and bacteria with a 99.9 percent efficiency. This current crisis gave them the perfect opportunity to educate customers about sanitation procedures that have always been in place building trust and confidence in their brand. Your solutions largely depend on your product or service, and this is also a time to get creative. A never-before experienced situation leaves a lot of room for innovation in the solution.

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How to Develop a Social Media Content Calendar

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Many marketers swear by the use of monthly content calendars. While there are real benefits of using content calendars, they still have their pitfalls. They require a lot of time and effort, and sometimes those things can’t easily be spared. Not only that, but working strictly off a set calendar isn’t always the solution for everyone. 

Whether or not you need a content calendar depends on a variety of factors, but if you discover a way to develop one that allows for flexibility and creativity, the benefits can be endless. 

The Pros of Using Content Calendars

Consisting Posting 

Planning your posts ahead of time ensures new content gets pushed out regularly. Having your topics picked out ahead of time saves time and allows for more than one person to manage social platforms. Regular content dispersion is important because it means you avoid the typical ups and downs in traffic and audience that come from inconsistent posting. Through a content schedule, you spread out your content throughout the month, setting yourself up as a resource to be trusted.

Diverse Content 

When you come up with content topics everyday, it’s only a matter of time before they get repetitive. You’ll most likely revert to the same topics and posting style when you’re struggling to come up with something. When you lay all content out for a month, you’ll be able to better spread out certain topics, preventing you from becoming predictable and boring. 

Better Teamwork 

If more than one person works on a blog or controls a social media account, having a content schedule is key. Assigning topics will become much easier, and you’ll be able to do it much further in advance. It will also prevent any overlap in content and make sure everyone’s on the same page. 

The Cons of Using Content Calendars

Can Restrict Creativity and Flexibility

While careful planning and deadlines are what makes content calendars work, too many restrictions can stifle creativity and eliminate flexibility. Sometimes planning your blog content ahead of time can turn out to be counterproductive when your company’s goals change, roles shift, or strategies get re-imagined. It can discourage your team to think outside of the box. It may also prevent from responding to timely or relevant topics, which can make your brand seem out-of-the-loop. 

Can Seem Disingenuous 

Along with the inability to respond to relevant topics, scheduled content may also come across as disingenuous. For example, you might have scheduled a tweet about nice weather, just as a natural disaster hits your community. So while automated posts save time, they can come across as stale because they’re written days or weeks before it’s actually published. 

More Demanding 

Content calendars are only successful if the whole marketing team is on board and uses it. All the time you spend carefully planning out when, where and what to post ends up being a waste of time, if no one is actually sticking to the schedule. A way to combat this is by making sure that the calendar is easily accessible to all team members and easy to use. Also make adhering to the calendar a priority for your marketing team and hold people accountable for the content they are responsible for.

As we said before, content calendars are not for everyone. If you have a small team or don’t publish content that often, they may be more work than they’re worth. However, they can be very beneficial to many marketing teams. 

Creating content calendars can seem daunting, but they don’t have to be. If you’ve established that this is something that would be helpful for your business, here is a process that allows you to quickly and effectively produce weekly content, that allows for flexibility and creativity. 

How to Develop a Content Calendar that Allows for Creativity

(via Marketing Land)

Identify Key Audiences 

Think of four different customers that serve as examples of types of customers that serve as examples of the types of customers you’d like to land for your company moving forward. Pinpoint each customer’s unique challenges, emotions and values, as you’ll want the content to speak to those needs.

Identify Solutions

After identifying four key audiences, think of three solutions your business can offer to these four audiences. This could include different services, products, or value propositions. Then match up each of your three solutions with each of your four audiences. 

  • Solution A for Audience 1
  • Solution B for Audience 1
  • Solution C for Audience 1
  • Solution A for Audience 2
  • And so on until you have twelve broad topics to explore

Identify Categories 

The final step is to come up with a list of four content strategies that will allow you to approach each solution/customer pairing from a variety of perspectives. Some examples include:

  • Expert Q&As
  • Step-by-step Guides
  • Industry News
  • Listicles
  • Case Studies

Combine this list of categories with your 12 solutions pairings to generate 48 unique topics for a full year of content. The first example could be: Expert Q&A that addresses Audience 1’s challenges from the perspective of what Solution A offers. Try to address each audience in one post per month. That way, each month, you will address and provide content for all four audiences. 

Marketing Land advises to keep in mind that content isn’t just supposed to be brand promotions. Your content is supposed to provide value to readers. 

Final Thoughts 

Today, almost all businesses release some form of digital content. While calendars may not be worth it for everyone, they can be very beneficial for those that need them. If you think your company could benefit from a content calendar, but don’t know where to start, consider outsourcing a digital marketing company.

At Onimod Global we create monthly content calendars for our clients. As experts in social media marketing we know how to create visibility for companies in places their customers are searching, interacting, and engaging. . Take a look at how we’ve helped others, and learn more about what we can do for you.

How To Create Loyal Customers With Social Media Transparency

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Customer loyalty is a priority and goal for all companies in existence. How to create those loyal customers is much easier than you may think, and it all has to do with transparency. According to the social media company, Sprout Social, 86% of surveyed U.S. consumers think it is more important than ever for businesses to be transparent.

 

Customers are much more willing to show loyalty to companies that are consistent with being clear in communication, open, and honest. For example, an 89 percent of U.S. customers are willing to give a transparent brand a second chance after a bad experience, and 85 percent are willing to stick with them through a crisis. These astonishing numbers prove that transparency is key to business success.

 

Gaining Trust and Sales From Transparency

Customer loyalty will come with your ability to communicate the message of transparency in the most effective manner. Customers that also purchase from you only on occasion poses an opportunity to convert them into being a loyal customer.

Typically, organic brands are very transparent because that information in their ingredient lists is crucial to their brand message. If you take a look at Horizon, the organic milk brand, you can locate any of their organic farms on their website as well as seeing their manufacturing processes, stories about the farmers and shipment processes. This is all given directly on their website with 100% transparency, making them an elite brand that does millions of dollars in sales each year.

 

The Role Of Social Media

In this same report, 81 percent of the group consumers say that businesses must be transparent on social media. This is more than they expect out of politicians (79 percent), friends and family (66 percent) and even themselves (71 percent). This adds a significant amount of pressure to a brand’s plate making sure they are proactive with mistakes and responding to customers at all times.

 

Here is an example of the makeup brand rising in popularity daily, Morphe, disclosing a mistake in production via Twitter to all 526,000 of their followers. It is statements like this, in addition to publicly addressing customer concerns, that consumers expect from businesses.

 

As relationships are continuously built through social media channels between brands and consumers, people want business to be more open and honest than ever, especially in public settings. Marketing teams that accept this expectation and do their best to treat transparency as a mandatory business practice are the most likely to retain customers and increase sales in doing so. Long-term, transparency is a differentiating factor that will motivate consumers to stick with your brand through a difficult times and to remain loyal over time.

 

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We would love to work with you and help you optimize your social media strategy for any event your company is hosting. To contact our experts or request a quote, please click here. We can’t wait to hear from you!