Hub Blogs

Hub Blogs contains fresh contributions written by Financial Independence Hub staff or contributors that have not appeared elsewhere first, or have been modified or customized for the Hub by the original blogger. In contrast, Top Blogs shows links to the best external financial blogs around the world.

5 ways to use LinkedIn to boost your B2B Brand

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By Michael Meyer

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

Social media marketing is an incredibly lucrative way to generate leads, grow your company, and engage with your target audience. One popular way to market in the B2B space involves using LinkedIn. This platform for professionals is a top-notch spot to identify and nurture leads, simply because so many business leaders and owners spend time on the platform.

Unfortunately, getting the hang of LinkedIn can be a bit difficult if you’ve never marketed your B2B company on the platform before. Luckily, there are a ton of ways to use LinkedIn to grow your business, and we put together a list of our top tips for success.

Are you unsure of how to use LinkedIn to really start boosting and growing your B2B company? Check out our top five tips for using LinkedIn below!

These methods for using LinkedIn to improve your B2B company’s customer engagement are very helpful, and also easy to implement.

●    Use SEO to Your Advantage

Having a top-notch business profile on LinkedIn will only be beneficial to a certain point. Search engine optimization is your best friend when it comes to B2B marketing. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to implement an SEO strategy when setting up your LinkedIn profile.

Conduct keyword research for your brand and industry and insert those keywords in various areas of your business profile. Remember to avoid keyword bloating or using keywords that aren’t relevant. It’s not even necessary to engage in in-depth research when it comes to finding the right keywords for your profile. Simply list the phrases and words a customer would be most likely to use to find your business and incorporate them.

●    Use LinkedIn to Experiment with your Marketing

If you’ve only recently launched your B2B company or are just now getting into social media marketing, this is a great opportunity to experiment with your content. Once you’re at a point where you understand the ins and outs of LinkedIn’s functionality, start diversifying your content. Just as well, if you use B2B appointment setting services, you can experiment with promoting your easy-to-set appointments via LinkedIn as well to streamline your leads.

Post at various different times throughout the week and keep an eye on which posts get the most engagement. Use a variety of content in different tones and measure how much engagement they get. Keep a keen eye on your analytics. Browse through your competitors’ LinkedIn profiles to see what they are doing.

●    Take advantage of Groups

The group feature on LinkedIn isn’t just for networking or looking for employment. Rather, groups are designed to meet a wide range of interests, both work-focused and personal. Look at groups that align with your industry, solution, and work-related interests. Join as many of these groups as possible.

Once you’ve been let into a few groups, start posting your ideas or B2B-related stories. Ask and answer questions. The key here isn’t to advertise your business, but to be a credible figure in your industry. You might be surprised by the number of referrals or recommendations your company will receive from simply being involved with like-minded business professionals. Continue Reading…

Retired Money: Can retired Boomers afford to be the BOMAD to their kids?

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My latest MoneySense Retired Money column looks at the question of whether almost-retired or already-retired Baby Boomer parents should provide financial assistance to their Millennial children seeking to get their first steps on the increasingly expensive housing ladder.

That is, is it wise for parents to cut into their own Retirement savings in order to become the BOMAD: the Bank of Mum and Dad?

It’s been said that 50 to 75% of millennials expect to tap the BOMAD for help coming up with a down payment.Click on the highlighted headline to retrieve the whole column: Should you help your adult children to buy Real Estate?

A couple of the column’s sources arose after I appeared on Patrick Francey’s The Everyday Millionaire podcast.

Francey is a seasoned entrepreneur and real estate investor who is CEO of REIN of the Real Estate Investment Network (REIN). These days, most REIN members who have at least one “door” (real estate investment property above and beyond a principal residence) are almost by definition millionaires. I appeared despite the fact our family owns no investment real estate, apart from REIT ETFs in a purely electronic portfolio: “clicks instead of bricks,” as I explained on the show.

REIN’s Patrick Francey, host of The Everyday Millionaire podcast

Interestingly, while he has helped his own kids with housing, Francey does not necessarily think parents should provide financial assistance to kids trying to break into the housing market: not if it jeopardizes their own retirement, and not if it means the kids will miss out on the character-building exercise of doing it on their own.

A similar stance came from retired mortgage broker and author Calum Ross, who also recently appeared on the podcast. Ross, of Toronto-based The Mortgage Management Group, has some experience with BOMAD as it relates to his two daughters.   “As a divorced Dad, BOMAD was restructured and now runs as a privately held entity BOD [Bank of Dad.],” Ross quips.

Ross says his parenting priorities are identical to how his parents raised him: 1) I taught them to be thoughtful, 2) I raised them with a work ethic, and 3) I taught them to save money and not spend it.

Adrian Mastracci, portfolio manager with Vancouver-based Lycos Asset Management, says BOMAD may be a great deal for the kids but Mum and Dad need to first ensure they have sufficient funding to see them through their retirement years. “Ensure that they can incur all expenses, health costs, effects of inflation, rising costs of providing for in-home services, a retirement home facility and rehabilitation costs of the current home.” Continue Reading…

Canadian Financial Summit 2021 next week

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Kornel Szrejber’s Canadian Financial Summit 2021 is a virtual event that will go live next Wednesday, Sept. 22. There are dozens of financial speakers featured, including many well-known financial bloggers, including Yours Truly.

My 45-minute Zoom interview with Kornel was pretty wide-ranging but focused on Retirement Income, as opposed to Wealth Accumulation. The working title for the discussion was Semi-Retirement: the Halfway House between Employment and Full Retirement. Or as Doug Dahmer and other retirement gurus have dubbed it, the “Work Optional” phase of our working careers.

Certainly our chat was informative and entertaining: I certainly revealed a lot of how our family’s own personal finances are handled and I learned that Kornel — like Michael James and Robb Engen — has long been a “pure” indexer as opposed to a hybrid investor who mixes core ETFs with a bit of dividend investing and speculation in individual stocks.

We will reprise the full interview and supply a link once the event goes alive. In the meantime, check out Robb Engen’s preview of the event that ran on the Hub earlier today.

 

Vanguard Canada launches two actively managed global mutual funds

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Vanguard Investments Canada Inc. has announced the launch of two new globally diversified and actively managed mutual funds it describes as being “low cost”: Vanguard Global Credit Bond Fund [VIC500] and Vanguard Global Equity Fund [VIC600.] complement the firm’s current line-up of 37 ETFs and four mutual funds.

Management fees will be 0.40 and 0.55% respectively. Asked whether this means payment of trailer commissions to financial advisors, Vanguard Canada spokesperson Matthew Gierasimczuk told the Hub: “No. Vanguard doesn’t pay trailing commissions in any of our markets since we have a longstanding belief it leads to a conflict of interest for investors.” The funds are available through most wealth advisors and also on Questrade and Qtrade, he added.

In a news release issued on Sept. 13, Vanguard Investments Canada Inc. Managing Director and Head Kathy Bock said:

“Within an uncertain investing climate, Canadian investors and their advisors are looking for quality, long-term and high-performing investment products, at a low-cost … These mutual funds provide that and reflect our deep 45-year history in active management with proven portfolio manager expertise that can help investors achieve success.”

Globally, The Vanguard Group, Inc. manages over USD $8.1 trillion in assets and is one of the world’s largest active managers with USD $1.7 trillion in global actively managed assets under management.

“Since introducing our mutual funds three years ago, Canadians have embraced our differentiated approach to active management, providing investors with access to skilled global investment managers with a long-term view,” said Tim Huver, Head of Intermediary Sales, Vanguard Investments Canada Inc. “These two global funds can act as a core holiding or complement to an investor’s equity or fixed income portfolios.”

Vanguard Global Credit Bond Fund seeks to provide a moderate and sustainable level of current income by investing primarily in non-government fixed income securities of issuers located anywhere in the world. The fund will have a management fee of 0.40%. The fund will be sub-advised by The Vanguard’ Group Inc.’s Fixed Income Group, a global team of more than 185 tenured and dedicated professionals overseeing USD $2.1 trillion in total assets. For 40 years, Vanguard Fixed Income Group has been distinguished in the industry by its deep investment capabilities, disciplined security selection process, rigorous risk management techniques and strong long-term performance.

Vanguard Global Equity Fund seeks to provide long-term capital appreciation by investing primarily in equity securities of companies located anywhere around the world. The fund will be sub-advised by Baillie Gifford Overseas Limited and Marathon Asset Management Limited. These sub-advisors have worked with Vanguard for decades and collectively manage over USD $500 billion in assets under management. The maximum management fee for the fund will be 0.55%.


			

	
	


				


	

		
				

			Thinking Big on Small Caps
		

		
		

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By Steve Lipper, Senior Investment Strategist, Managing Director, Royce Investment Partners


(Sponsor Content)


Companies with small market capitalization make up one of the more overlooked parts of the global equity markets. This could be attributed to a lack of coverage of their stocks by analysts, but whatever the reasoning, being overlooked creates opportunities for those investors who know where to look among small-cap equities.


Royce Investment Partners has more than 45 years of experience in the small-cap space. Such longevity brings with it a high level of expertise, allowing the firm to build assets under management (AUM) of US$17.6 billion.1


This has been achieved through a combination of specialization in small-cap investments and a commitment to ownership among the firm’s portfolio managers. With an average tenure of 22 years, Royce’s seasoned group of PMs have substantial ownership in the strategies they manage; in fact, 89% of the firm’s assets are in funds where the portfolio manager has invested at least US$1 million themselves.2 In this respect, Royce stands apart from its competitors: 37 asset managers in the U.S. have more than US$5 billion in small-cap assets, but only Royce has more than 95% of its total AUM invested in the space.3


While developing expertise in small-cap investing is complex, the reasoning for specializing in this area is quite simple: quality small-cap companies have been proven to deliver for investors.


In fact, small-cap stocks have consistently provided meaningful outperformance compared to their large-cap counterparts over the long term. Using the MSCI ACWI Small Cap and MSCI ACWI Large Cap indices as proxies, it shows that small caps have delivered higher annual returns over most multi-year time periods (see chart below). In addition, small caps not only provide a much larger set of companies to invest in (approximately four times the amount in large caps), but with valuations that often understate their true worth. This is an important point to consider, especially given some of the pretty elevated valuations in equity markets right now.




 


The opportunities that small-cap stocks present for investors were a key factor in introducing our new strategy for the Canadian retail market, Franklin Royce Global Small Cap Premier Fund.4 Continue Reading…