Author: Sunny Kumar

Local SEO: How to Design the Perfect Digital Marketing Strategy for Your Local Small Business

Posted on by Sunny Kumar

Small businesses sometimes get the short end of the stick when it comes to digital marketing strategy. Without the size of national corporations or the capital for huge marketing campaigns, it can feel like you’re relegated to old-fashioned marketing techniques to bring in a steady trickle of clients and customers. But before you give up on digital marketing as a whole, you should know that the tactics used by larger companies can be harnessed for local SEO and applied to small businesses for huge results. Here are some of the best tactics to make sure your company gets the local exposure it needs to be successful.

Email Marketing

shutterstock_103449926According to MediaBistro, a whopping 98 percent of companies already use some type of email marketing. But while newsletters and promotions might help drive traffic to your company, they can also seem impersonal – particularly when you’re trying to grow a local audience. If you do plan on utilizing email marketing, try dividing your email contacts by national customers and those who are local. After all, some services – a nail salon, for instance—won’t make much sense on a nationwide sphere. By targeting only those who live within your service area, you spend less time clogging up email inboxes and more time extending offers to those who are most likely to patron your small business.

Social Media

If email marketing is the most broadly used type of digital marketing strategy, then social media is the friendliest. Social media gives customers the chance to get to know your business on a more casual level, and shouldn’t be skipped. Whether you start a Facebook page, a Twitter feed or have chats on your company’s LinkedIn profile, social media gives customers a chance to get to know you. Even smaller local businesses can gather “Likes” on a Facebook page that lists your business’ hours, location and even reviews all from one place. And, the bigger Web presence you have, the better chance at scoring customers and getting feedback.

Web Content

shutterstock_153218306While marketing is sometimes seen in a negative light, content marketing has changed the face of digital marketing strategy completely. Instead of advertisements being sent to prospective customers, content causes customers to actually seek out your business using articles, videos and other digital content. Whether it’s a funny video on your site or an interesting article that incorporates some of your services or products, content allows you to offer something to your customer: Information. It’s a simple way to drive local traffic to your site, particularly if your content is targeted to a local geographic area.

Optimised Search

shutterstock_119873725Of course, content marketing could be a moot point if you don’t optimise your search options. By applying local SEO strategy to your website, social media and overall brand, you help searchers find exactly what they’re looking for— you. The right keywords make all the difference in the SEO sphere, so making sure your content is location-rich and utilizes the places within your service area helps improve search results and eventually, website traffic. Small businesses can look to an SEO agency for help to choose the right type of content and best keywords for search optimization for the best results and biggest bump in traffic.

Along the lines of SEO, a carefully structured local PPC strategy will provide a low-cost alternative to help direct target customers right to your website using local keywords. These types of keywords tend to have a lower cost per click, therefore local business with moderate marketing budgets can leverage this avenue as well. In addition, PPC will also help your business understand which keywords work best to draw traffic to your website before investing time and resources into ranking for a given keyword in organic search.

While it may seem like a brave new world out there for small businesses, what may seem like a daunting menu of marketing options can actually serve up success for local companies. By detailing your marketing strategy to include content, SEO, PPC and social media accounts, you’ll gain local attention fairly quickly—and new customers.

3 Examples of How to Get Social Media Marketing Very Wrong…

Posted on by Sunny Kumar

linkedin failEver had one of those days where your time and attention was taken up by meaningless things?

We know what it’s like, for every email that matters, you get ten that don’t. And finally, to cap it all off we receive contacts like this.

This LinkedIn connection request prompted this post – to help us sharpen the mind and give you three tips to improve your social media communications. After all, I’d prefer to be at the  receiving end of good quality communications and connections.

Learning 1: Get Real in Your Social Media Connections

So, this is why this LinkedIn approach is initially amusing. First question: who is ‘Better Link Advertising’ and is Link his/her middle name, or is it a double-barrelled surname? That photo doesn’t look like a real person either and, worst of all, they have given me absolutely no reason to connect with them.

However, it’s not just for amusement. It needs to be treated more seriously than that, you need to do two further things:

  1. Consider why they are trying to connect with you: this approach, in my opinion, has much more value to them than to me. I am not connecting to anyone in particular but they are getting ‘endorsement’ from me and access to my contacts.
  2. Place a value your identity above just gaining contacts: you need to connect with people you know personally, ideally business contacts, but more than that people who you have an ‘even’ relationship with. Be very careful about connecting with those who’s interest is merely in your contacts (for example recruitment consultants and competitors)

If you’re not sure, then ask. Challenge them on why they want to connect with you.

Learning 2: Don’t Be Boring With What You Share in Your Feed

Boring LinkedIn post

Just because you can post, if you don’t have anything interesting to say, then it’s best to be quiet.

This post highlights just how bad it can get. I don’t mind your narcissism, but your post is painfully dull.

Why should I follow you when all I might get is rubbish like this? And hashtags don’t work in LinkedIn anyway so clearly this is just a tweet.

We like the quote:

“Wise men, when in doubt whether to speak or to keep quiet,
give themselves the benefit of the doubt, and remain silent.”

We prefer to have connections where quality is valued above quantity. Our feed would be less busy and more interesting and, ultimately, make our Social Media experience stronger.

Learning 3: Don’t Go On About ‘You’

boring video share on linkedinOf course it’s easy to do so, but don’t just go on about your business, your skills, your awards and your successes.

Mix up what you share, how you share it. Make it engaging, opinionated, informing and friendly.

Remember that incredibly dull person you met at a dinner party who kept on talking about themselves?

That could be you. Don’t fall into the same trap.

Ultimately there is no perfect formula for Social Media Marketing. It’s frustrating, it’s funny, it’s time-consuming and it has to be ‘you’.

Unsolicited Marketing Email and LinkedIn Spam: The Seven ‘Tells’

Posted on by Sunny Kumar

We get about three of these emails a day, they drop into our inbox and we normally delete them. It’s easy to read the ‘tells’ that give away they’re spam. However we were surprised that clients still forward to these for our comments, so thought it best to help by showing you what we do to evaluate this kind of contact.

Here’s a typical email and how we deconstruct it:

Email Spam Advice

1. Sent From a ‘Free’ Generic Email Account

Let’s start with the obvious: it’s sent from a gmail account. Anyone can get a Gmail account (or Yahoo! or Hotmail for that matter). They are free, but also they don’t tell you anything about the sender, so immediately we are on ‘amber’ alert.

2. Sent to Your ‘Catch All’ Email Account

This one was sent to info@[clientsdomainname], some try, admin@ or sales@… it doesn’t really matter, but if the email is not sent to a named email address and you’ve never heard from them before, the chances are they don’t know anything about you or your business.

3. Impersonal Greeting / Salutation

If they’re going to start telling you things about your website and get all personal, it would be nice for them to approach you by name – it would show they know (or, in this case, don’t know) who they’re talking to.

4. Kicking Off With a Bold Claim

The easiest way to get attention is to poke someone in the ribs. Therefore the first item on the list is to tell them something that they would like to improve – rankings, visibility, traffic, sales. Everyone, even the successful, could be doing better, so this is an easy ‘win’.

5. Give Them the Reasons

However out of date, however unsubstantiated, these emails are normally filled with seemingly impressive reasons and claims for findings.

6. No Evidence of Success or Skills

At the same time, the emails fail to give any evidence of the claims made, because they almost certainly have not visited the website in question and prefer not to even identify themselves.

7. Poor English

Most of these emails emanate  from outside of the UK, commonly Asia or Eastern Europe, they often reveal the hurried and chaotic approach of the sender and give you a clue as to what kind of service to expect.

What Action Should You Take?

The  next time one of these emails drops into your inbox, use these checks. If the email sent to you contains most or all of these tells just ignore and delete. Whatever you do, do not reply, or you will waste further valuable hours of your life!

LinkedIn Spam – The Approach is Closer to Home

And, here’s a new one received the other week through LinkedIn, sadly it was from an agency based in the South of England. We can apply the same logic and checks to see if we can pick out the tells in this one.

LinkedIn Spam

Firstly because it’s through LinkedIn there’s no credit to the sender for getting a name and location from a LinkedIn profile. The clumsy use of the location in my salutation actually put me off, because it’s not actually where I work, just the nearest town. I suppose it demonstrates a modicum of effort on the part of the sender, but after that it goes rapidly downhill.

The thing is here we can see two things:

  1. That the sender is pitching for new business but offering no real evidence in the email of even realising he’s sent this (probably accidentally), to another marketing agency
  2. He’s very kindly given two business names so we can take a look at his website and  judge for ourselves

If They Tell You Who They Are, then DDD: Do Due Diligence

So, how can we tackle this? The best way is to judge the various claims he’s made in the email.

  1. ‘Awesome websites’: OK, let’s have a look, his site is OK (I mean really on the moderate side of OK), the client sites listed, really un-awesome.
  2. ‘Design, eCommerce, branding, print design and everything in between’: again, sounds great, must have a whole army behind him and been in the business years. Er, no, checking his LinkedIn profile shows that this outstanding digital agency has been going less than a year – and previous jobs hardly spark excitement or give evidence to this broad range of skills.
  3. ‘SEO company’: ah, so, in less than a year all of these amazing things aren’t enough, he’s also got a SEO company. So let’s see how well optimised his current website is. He can’t even get onto page one of Google for ‘web design in [TinyTown]’ (the town his business is based in). So, if he can’t even optimise his own, what chance would a client have?

We hope this demonstrates, either way, that you can easily discover for yourself whether one of these emails is worth taking the time on. If you start from the basis of ‘probably spam but prove me wrong’ then we’re confident you’ll come up with the right answer in your investigations.

What Action Should You Take?

That’s up to you, I think this kind of approach makes a mockery of what LinkedIn should be – proper value-added networking opportunities, not unsolicited lazy spam.

So I replied to the sender and marked it as Spam in LinkedIn. And, if you’re reading this in the forum he went through in the first place, we can share the joke too.

Happy hunting!

Digital Marketing: why it pays to take a holistic approach

Posted on by Sunny Kumar

Generalists versus experts

So what’s it to be? Are we all generalists these days or does the world really belong to experts?

Do we all need to carve increasingly narrow furrows to achieve this?

It’s a debate that’s raged for years and been thrown into sharper relief by today’s business imperative for everyone to be able to ‘do more with less’.

Does that mean, therefore, that people are increasingly becoming generalists and this skill is becoming more valued? Or is the complexity of our modern, fast-paced and technologically infused business environment mean that people have to be experts in something to enable them to be able to contribute meaningfully?

A recent expert review concluded that both skills are required, but at different times and what’s really important, is demonstrating versatility and being able to interchange these skills for different situations.

And how does this question translate into the digital world? Let’s imagine you are looking to employ a digital agency to help with some specific marketing activities, for instance, search (whether organic or paid or both)? Do you go to a specialist SEO agency, PPC agency or a more ‘broad brush’ digital agency (like Ergo Digital for instance)?

The pitfalls of a narrow focus

Well, the specialist SEO agency is going to be great at SEO (you would hope so wouldn’t you!) and will improve your score on the organic ranking. Naturally, the PPC agency is likely to be good at driving the appropriate traffic to your site according to some carefully chosen keywords. However, and it is a big however, each agency is likely to ‘bang the drum’ for their particular expertise, they’d be silly not to, and invest an inordinate amount of value in what they do, even if the activity was of narrow or possibly limited utility.

The knock-on effect of this is that often businesses commit to a solution which may not be the best route to growth and performance. Certainly, unless you are 100% sure that you know that a specific method is the best means to grow your opportunity, you may be left disappointed.

In our experience, digital marketing doesn’t respond to the narrow approach – it’s more interconnected than that, and the importance of one particular tactic versus another is likely to fluctuate according to each situation you are looking at.

Every business needs to nurture and grow every opportunity

Another difficulty with putting ‘all of your eggs in one basket’ is that every business is never just a static enterprise. All businesses change and evolve with time. Some grow, others shrink, but they all, to a lesser or greater degree change. This means that your digital marketing tactics likewise should not stay static but need to change as your business evolves.

Finally, we now know that it takes a number of touchpoints with potential prospects in order for them to convert into being customers – so often a journey can start with, say, AdWords, then move on to organic, possibly then email marketing and finally social – so banging a single drum may not have the best impact.

So the picture now looks a little more complicated, doesn’t it? There seems to be more of an imperative to look more broadly when reviewing your likely digital partner. So how do you recruit the right agency?

Let’s outline the ideal characteristics of ‘the perfect’ agency and think of some of the benefits these characteristics would bring:

  • Possesses an ability to see the bigger picture (it’s important to recognise which tactics are of greatest value at this point in the company’s evolution)
  • Has the required degree of specialisation to be able to leverage successfully each digital tactic
  • Has an understanding of the full suite of digital marketing tactics and the relative strengths and weaknesses of each when applying to different situations
  • Possesses flexibility, versatility and independence – to apply tactics when they are needed rather than because ‘we do this’

Or, if you wish to keep things simple – just employ Ergo Digital. More traffic, more conversions, more business….

Why Open source is the future for SMEs

Posted on by Sunny Kumar

Do you find that paying for software licences is akin to being levied a tax on your success? Then, when you add more persons on your licence, as a result of your business growing, it increases your costs substantially. You’re not the only ones fed up with this approach.

There is a better way to engage SaaS these days, and that’s by finding a good open source solution. Open source software, as it sounds, is open and free to use, without any licensing costs – all one needs, is to adapt for your own particular circumstances and you are good to go!

You may be familiar with Open Source through well known applications like WordPress or Magento. For the software producer it’s a great way of getting the product out to the wider world quickly and allowing the market to improve, develop and add value to the product. That’s not to say that open source products are half finished – quite the opposite as most developers of open source are very fastidious about their quality control before exposing their baby to the scrutiny of their peers.

So, it’s no wonder that a lot of companies and business leaders are getting used to the advantages of Open Source and all that it offers.

Getting ‘match ready’ for the future

There’s another really important reason why Open Source software makes more sense for growing companies, and that’s to do with its transportability. Acquiring something via this route enables you to have a degree of flexibility that you wouldn’t nominally have with a licenced piece of software – because you have full ownership over your digital services and are not at the mercy of your software vendor. Open Source logo

Often, customers of licensed software, having invested so much money in developing and adapting the system to their needs over the years are really loathed to walk away, even when the advantages the system gave them initially, have dissipated.

Organisations will often justify continuing to pay money out hand over fist, even when the software is not providing an ideal solution. We call this scenario ‘The Golden Shackles’ and is akin to holding on to a large helium balloon which is taking your further and further away from the earth. At what point do you decide to let go and fall back down to earth with a bump? When do you decide that the spiraling costs and limitations aren’t worth the candle, and you are much better off going to an open source supplier?

That’s a difficult one and one that only you could possibly answer, but let us outline some of the benefits you will find from open source software which might benefit a growing and ambitious business:

  • The quality of software produced by the Open Source community sometimes exceeds that produced by purely commercial organisations
  • It is suggested by some authors that open source is more robust, more reliable, less complicated and more error free than their equivalent commercial counterparts, as they are subject to much more collaboration throughout their lifespans and are developed by developers with strong technical skills and extensive peer connections
  • With the more popular softwares, there exists an extensive community of developers creating plugins and extensions which adds automatically to the range and scope of the software

So, we’d recommend you took a closer look at Open Source for your business growth plans. We have!

Ergo Digital’s own open source software Omny Link, has already been used by a wide range of businesses to improve their marketing and performance. And, unlike a commercially funded product, it doesn’t hobble your ambitions nor tax you on your success: the price you see is what you pay from the start to the end of your licence.

We can setup a free trial for you so you can give it a go for yourselves – just call the team on 01962 605 000 to discuss in more detail.

Brand Building in the Digital age

Posted on by Sunny Kumar

Some definitions [and the good news first….]

The mechanics of developing the elements of a brand have remained constant, hooray! And it’s still fundamentally about the sweet spot between:

  • What a product/service does (its rational attributes and advantages)
  • The customer’s needs and how your product/service can satisfy them
  • An emotive charge – the values you wish to associate with your brand

So, the definition of branding as loyalty beyond reason still holds true.

But, what’s changed is pretty much everything else surrounding the brand, in other words the landscape the brand has to thrive in.

This time it’s different [sort of…]

While the core mechanics of what makes a brand a brand hasn’t really altered (your positioning is still defined as the space you occupy in the mind of your customers) what has changed is how you interact with those customers.

The digital age has fundamentally shifted the economics of marketing. That’s irrefutable.

What price loyalty?

Branding in the digital ageSo how has the landscape changed? Well for one thing consumers have so much more choice these days that they don’t have to show as much loyalty as before. Remember when you could get a customer and you had them for life (barring any screw ups obviously) – increasingly that’s not the case anymore.

Sure, there will still be some old (and in the main they tend to be old) advocates or brand aficionado who will remain loyal to you until the day they die, but that’s not the default position these days, they are merely a hangover of days past.

Today’s brand consumer is much more savvy, cynical and ultimately promiscuous. With way more choice than before. And are exposed to much more information not just about your brand, but that of your competitors. So it’s a lot harder to reach them these days.

You have to be able to cut through the clutter.

Customer interactions are now two way

And that’s not all; today’s consumers also expect to have a stake in your brand – marketers responded to this trend by customising their products (remember Burger King’s ‘have it your way?’).

In other words, they want to interact with your brands. There is a caveat of course, and this still holds true. They are looking for brands which share the same values as them. So you need to make sure that that part of your brand is as clearly communicated as possible.

This presents both opportunities and  threats. Do you also remember Nike’s customisation sweatshop PR debacle?   So you see, there can be as many challenges with a digital brand as opportunities. You have to be a lot more transparent with your brand these days.

The digital world means there is nowhere to hide.

A messy digital landscapeNumbers of Network

Another major change that the digital age has wrought is that there are so many more touch points to this interaction.

Now it’s a whole lot messier. And more iterative. With many more ways for a customer to interact with you. So how do you engage appropriately with your audience?

Today’s audience are looking for positive experiences. Not only that, they’re looking for a brand to provide content which is relevant to their lives and authentic. Transparency is key here.

So, to conclude, it’s about being creative on how you engage your audience to make it meaningful for them. Check out how Antwerp Zoo found a whole new audience by using the birth of a baby elephant to grow their visitor numbers. 

In the next blog post, we’ll give you some pointers on how you can start to engage your audience using social media.

AdID from Google – Online Tracking, All Change Please!

Posted on by Sunny Kumar

Why Google Will Have Cookies for Breakfast with AdID!

1. Because They Want to Take Control

The main reason for Google to try to stop using cookies is that they want to develop something that they ‘own’. AdID is not just a cookie replacement – it’s a Google way of doing things: if they see something the think needs replacing, they improve and replace it and make sure that they take charge.

2. Because the Cookie is Past It

Google AdID to Replace the CookieCookies were one of those things that were probably thought up over a coffee or conversation next to a water cooler when the Internet was in it’s infancy. They’re old fashioned, clumsy and basic. Their time has come!

Also, cookies are increasingly being blocked either by the user or automatically by a browser and therefore they are under fire. What better way to get a stay of execution on cookie use than by coming up with a completely different device? Our guess is that Google will devise a way which cannot be blocked by browsers, but only by setting options in Google.

3. Because They Can…

Google is just about the only business big enough globally to actually do this. They already own approximately 1/3rd of the advertising marketplace in terms of revenue, and this will not only boost those revenues, but also make sure that all advertisers using Google for tracking ‘play ball’ with Google.

Ironically, Apple have already done this, with their IDFA (which is their replacement for cookies) but in the only advertising and tracking game, Apple is a banana and Google is a gorilla.

But There are Three Red Herrings…

Red Herring 1: Cookies are ‘Dead’

Cookies are still a the critical tool used to create the Internet’s ‘memory’ of users, and are not just used for advertising (although some would have us believe that is the case).

They are used for remembering shopping baskets, logins to secure websites, return visits, personalisation and analytics… most of this is benefits the visitor or customer.

Red Herring 2: That They Did it For Us

It’s a nice thought, isn’t it? They are stating that this is to improve user privacy and anonymity, and that is true to a point, but actually, it’s to put the power into their hands. They will double their profits: firstly for the PR value of being on the consumer side, and secondly for having greater control over online advertising. Not quite ‘as described’, is it?

Red Herring 3: This Circumvents the ePrivacy ‘Cookie’ Law

The AdID does not suddenly mean that Google can dodge the Cookie Law, it doesn’t. The cookie law specifically states that any kind of tracking code which identifies the user or computer is subject to this law. However, Google does not mind, even if it is still ‘at war’ in the courts about its combined privacy policy AdID is no worse than cookies and has all the above benefits.

What This Means to You, Today

For most clients, very little, especially right now. This is something to come. The chances are in time that you may not even notice the effect of this even if you advertise a lot.

The guys who are sweating are the other advertising networks, particularly those who have sailed close to the wind when it comes to user privacy and third-party cookies. The bell was tolling for them anyway, it’s just no longer in the distance.

It also means that it is increasingly likely that future editions of Chrome will have ‘do not follow’ turned on!

The 9 Rules of Social Media Engagement (Part II) – Turn Your Audience Into Advocates

Posted on by Sunny Kumar

In the first part of this article, we covered the first four rules of social media engagement: be brand-centric, listen, the rule of thirds and talk naturally. So, here are the remaining five rules.

5. Be Easy to Find (and to Follow)

Social Media Presence

To broaden your reach and impact, you need to cultivate a larger following. Make it effortless for potential followers to discover you and demonstrate your worth through informative, engaging, and occasionally entertaining content.

Prioritize relevance over quantity. Seek a deep, relevant following rather than a broad one. Follow and interact with individuals pertinent to your business objectives.

Consistency is crucial. Slow and steady wins the race. Regularly publish valuable content to maintain audience engagement.

Once you’ve identified your target audience, how do you keep them engaged?

6. Ask questions, Start Conversations, Engage

Well, the easiest way of engaging anyone, be it on the street, bus etc, is to ask questions. Everyone likes to talk about themselves, so give them an audience – use good open questions to get the conversation started and continue the dialogue with more questions and answers just like in the real world.

But what if the conversation doesn’t go according to plan or, possibly worse still, there is some very direct criticism aimed at you?

7. Criticism can be an Opportunity

In today’s digital age, online criticism is inevitable. However, instead of fearing it, smart businesses turn it into a valuable learning tool. By listening to customer feedback, they can not only avoid reputational damage but even enhance it.

The challenge lies in not taking criticism personally. Instead, approach it objectively and assess its validity. If the complaint is justified, it’s a chance to improve.

First, acknowledge the customer’s emotions. Show empathy and consider apologizing, even if you disagree. This diffuses tension and opens communication.

Next, take action. If the complaint is valid, make amends. Take ownership, explain the solution, and offer compensation.

Learn from the best. Companies like Domino’s have mastered addressing complaints, turning them into customer satisfaction showcases.

Act quickly. Don’t let criticism fester. Address it promptly and professionally, showing a genuine desire to improve.

By embracing online criticism as a learning opportunity, you can transform it into a reputational asset. Listen, show empathy, take action, and watch your brand reputation soar.

8. Sharing is Caring (and Creates Communities)

Sharing is caring and will position you as a person of authority and influence. So put yourself in the shoes of your customers and think ‘What would they find really useful for me to share’.

Then do it – don’t be a hoarder of information – start to use the share button, the like button, retweet and repost and start to build a community of followers which are within your target audience (assuming you are playing to your strengths and sharing stuff which is within your brand or service ecosystem).

Over time, this ecosystem will come to sustain you and help to grow your business.  And the wider you share, the wider your spheres of influence.

And Finally… 9.!

If I do have a summary it’s this – be true to your brand and make sure the personality you create is as you meant it to be. Be as natural as possible, engage person to person. And don’t be afraid to make mistakes.

So what are you waiting for? Jump in – the water’s lovely!

The 9 Rules of Social Media engagement (Part I)

Posted on by Sunny Kumar

Turn your audience into advocates, and promote as naturally as breathing

Social media can either be the biggest waste of your energy and time, or one of the most rewarding experiences. And all of this depends on how you approach it. Here are some of our learnings from years of social engagement which we hope will help you set off on the right footing.

1. Be brand-centric, with serious business objectives

Whenever you are communicating online, you must be doing this through the lens of your company or the brand that you’re attempting to promote. By that I don’t mean you need to be robotic or engage solely in corporate speak, but simply that when you are developing your social media strategy, you need to be thinking about the messages you want to convey and, naturally enough, you want to think about what you are trying to achieve here.

Is it to drive traffic and leads to your website? Or is it to increase your profile and influence and to promote your brand to a wider audience? Or is it to counter some negative PR and address a reputational threat to your business?

All of these scenarios will result in very different approaches so this part of the planning stage needs to be thought through very carefully.

2. What does your audience want? Why not try listening?

“A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something.”
Wilson Mizner

Social media listening engagement

Another important factor (which should be one of your first considerations) is your target audience. What do you know of them? What are their broad demographic characteristics, their likes and dislikes, their motivations, their influencers, peers and adversaries.

So before you start to engage them, you better know more about them. And what better way than to spend some time listening to them? Online: within the channels you are planning on engaging with them in!

Consider organising a social management dashboard to gather all of your social media threads in the one place, like Hootsuite or Sprout Social. That way you can set up search filters on each channel (particularly useful for the fast moving channels like twitter which is akin to a stream of consciousness – or unconsciousness sometimes!).

Once you know what your target audience is looking for, and you understand a little of how you communicate with this audience appropriately, this will give you confidence when you start to engage with them.

3. The rule of thirds: revolutionise your social thinking

Most business owners treat social media like a loud hailer – one way and repetitive. This is the perfect strategy to alienate your customers and advocates. How you communicate is almost as important as what you communicate.

You need to be guided by the rule of thirds:

  • A third of your communication should be about sharing –  offering advice and help and tips, industry news etc from experts and influencers
  • A third of your communication should be conversing and interacting with others. So it’s about listening first and responding. It should also be possible to promote your brand/service if an opportunity presents itself but this should not be overt in any way. It needs to be subtle.
  • And a third of your communication can be active promotion of your brand or service. This doesn’t mean a free for all. The more fitting the promotion is (tonally, subject matter, useful and informative) the more likely your audience is likely to be persuaded by what you are saying.  

Which leads me to the next point:

4. Talk like… well, conversationally, as if you’re a real bona-fide person

Dialogue and conversations work best when they’re natural and free flowing yet many people engaging in social media forget to be sociable and sound like a robot.

So, be natural and treat your audience for what they are individuals and a human! Not a radical thought but an important one.

Be real…

In the next blog we’ll take a look at the the remaining 5 factors from this series. Thanks for reading.

 

 

Digital & Social Communications – ignore, adjust or optimise?

Posted on by Sunny Kumar

We are more connected than ever, yet actually reaching people has never been harder!

Digital social email sms automation methodsCertainly that’s what we see from both ours and our clients’ perspective and it was brought into sharp focus preparing for leading a session on how technology can help growth with the Worldwide Association of Girl Guides and Scouts (WAGGGS) last week.

In the session one of the main subject areas was the diversification of digital communications channels – phone, email, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook, Pinterest, Viber, Twitter, Instagram and QR codes were a handful of the 20+ methods mentioned by the audience.

I suspect if we had more time we could have looked at regional differences and also teased out the differences between what is used, and what is of use – which are, of course, completely different things.

Yet, there is little doubt in our mind that when we look at the current digital landscape, this developing complexity is a continuing trend resulting in more fragmented and complex communications.

So, given this, any business or organisation need to consider an appropriate response; we have identified three possible reactions to these developments:

1. Ignore: keep on keeping on

The first response is to keep doing what you are doing. Let’s say your preference is email – you can simply say: ‘no email means no email’. It’s the recipients’ fault for not having an email address, so be it. Clearly it is they who need to change.

Yet, this approach ignores two really important considerations. Firstly, these are not just anonymous users, they are your stakeholders – the life-blood of your organisation. Even if the win is short term, and the blame is passed on, you are distancing yourself from them. And, the medium-term result is that many will drift away and become less engaged or participatory. Hardly ‘inclusive’?

Secondly, your reach through your stakeholders to others is increasingly reliant on digital. Email tends to be the most user-friendly method, but not being a ‘social’ tool, has little ripple-effect opportunity for others to like, share or post.

2. Adjust: start pedalling…

So, the next response is to adapt to suit the range of channels – don’t just email, but also text, call, post and tweet. Make sure everyone is reached, ideally through at least one channel. Setup accounts in different social media, manage all the responses.

The problems start mounting, though. Firstly, this is reliant on the individual having the capacity to manage all these channels and, if they have other work to do, it isn’t reasonable to expect them to be spending all their waking hours managing this diversification of dialogue.

Secondly, the increasing range of channels makes this approach self-defeating. Just as they master the ten channels in front of them, another three get added. Then one changes. Then five of their recipients move from one to another.

In the context of the meeting with WAGGGS, most of the frontline staff are volunteers, and many have ‘day jobs’ and  need to focus most of their attention on preparing and managing the actual events (not just the communication of what is happening). They deal with small groups, with sometimes as few as ten recipients. Catering for all options equally and doing it all manually is not going to happen.

3. Optimise: use the modern method

So, if we know that we cannot have a one-size-fits-all approach, but we also realise that managing all these channels is going to be too onerous on those using the systems, what can we do about it? We need help, the right kind of help. Selecting the right solution is crucial to delivering the right stakeholder experience.

The answer is ‘software’ as it can not only help manage the sends, lists and channels, but should be able to make it faster to send in the first place. It could even make this ‘multi-sending’ more efficient than sending one email. However giving the answer ‘software’ is not very helpful for the purposes of meeting this specific need.

So, let’s look at the constituent parts to help identify the right solution:

  • Cloud based: the software needs to be in the Internet so that it doesn’t limit the user to a single machine or location to be managed
  • Global: the software needs to be available wherever it is needed. The company office doesn’t need to be global, but the software needs to function across boundaries without license issues
  • Versatile: the software needs to be a multi-channel communication solution. Most just do email. Some offer chat and SMS. But you need more options than that.
  • Intuitive: the interface needs to be easy to use and easy to understand. With simple e-learning the user can get to know the system and be able to start sending without the need for great technical knowledge
  • Programmable: the system should involve some kind of decision-making system where users can either programme in specific logic for sending, for escalations (i.e. if no response to email, send text) and even receiving responses. This is more than just automation – it is smart, flexible logic

Summary: the future, realised

Love your marketing channelsThe truth with most customer software is that it was built at a time when most businesses wanted solely to move from spreadsheets or paper notes to something that stored information digitally. When we were running our WAGGGS session, the name of a very well-known CRM software platform was mentioned. Although this particular business is very successful and ideal for operating business follow up, it doesn’t have the capabilities needed to truly deliver.

What is needed is something where the emotive is not replaced by the mechanical, but is facilitated by it. So that the recipients don’t think that they’re being managed by a robot, but they are being reached by their point of contact.

That’s what we did when we created Omny.Link – we wanted to develop a modern software, built with stakeholders in mind, that didn’t claim to do everything in a ever-expanding box of tricks.

It helps organisations build from the ground upwards. Connect up what you want to connect, deliver what you want to deliver and uses a decision engine to run everything as seamlessly as possible. So why not use your preferred email solutions, your preferred website CMS, your preferred reporting tools – but using APIs and our open-source solution, it all gets connected up: your way!

Which means there’s a much greater likelihood of reaching your stakeholders in the ways they want to be reached. So you see, you don’t have to sacrifice connectivity in your bid to reach people, you just need the right technology.

Omny.Link – do more with your stakeholder communications.

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