Smarter Marketing Blog

Social Media Branding – Are You Boring People?

social-media-branding-bored-person-

Let’s be honest with each other here – most organisations / brands using social media these days are boring.

I believe this is so because when it comes to social media branding, their mind-set is stuck in the old communications  approach to advertising, media releases, sponsorship and marketing materials. An approach that tells people what you want them to hear.

The thing is, even when the social media approach is altruistic, an organisation’s tone and personality often can’t shine through. This is because the minute it comes to marketing communication – the brand personality is wrapped up in cotton wool a.k.a. brand guidelines

Now don’t get me wrong, brand guidelines are necessary, but SME owners / marketing managers really need to revisit their engagement methods with the modern day consumer. In the current whirlwind of connectivity, people want organisations to be more ‘human’.

They want to know that they can trust a brand and will only stick with those that are relevant and authentic. They want to be able to ‘message’ brands when, where and how it suits them.

[ctt template=”4″ link=”r4d18″ via=”no” ]People want to know that they can trust a brand and will only stick with those that are relevant and authentic – #oconnorandkelly[/ctt]

So why then, when brands dive into the social media pool, are they still doing the doggy-paddle and not learning new swimming strokes. In fact, the swimming strokes don’t have to be new – they only have to be interesting. Why? Because interesting, gets shared by people across their own platforms.

If you’re not interesting, therefore, you may be boring.

My own opinion of most brands on social media is that existing identity ‘style guidelines’ are curtailing natural expression. By all means, adhere to identity guidelines but hey – why not draw up separate ones for your online activity. In fact, I’m delighted to say that more and more of our clients are requesting assistance with this element of their marketing.

We can help you with your social media style guide also – if you wish, just contact us here.

Employees should be allowed to share business stories naturally. It’s a human thing. Them doing so then becomes part of the brand story. Not allowing them to do so, results in the real personality of the organisation remaining behind closed doors. That is why so many organisations appear to be boring when communicating online.

By the way, old fashioned, interruptive style advertising does not help the situation either – good article here from Brand Quarterly on this topic.

Look at it this way, it’s no coincidence that the content most shared by people is that which involves human emotion be it entertaining, informative or educational. Behind-the-scenes videos, staff profiles, subject matter experts, interviews and product stories are all ways in which people make brands come alive.

If people from any organisation are unshackled from brand guidelines and allowed to be themselves, within reason, they will become advocates of the brand. I’m saying nothing new here – business owners and marketers have always known that it is customers and staff that are the essence of a brand.

The Role of Social Media Branding.

Let’s quickly agree that branding is important for marketing. We know this because it can help provide an advantage over competitors through differentiation, help reinforce reputation and manage visibility.

It is also true to say that branding guidelines are necessary for consistency. However, that is not to say that having guidelines means there is no room for change / flexibility.

The branding may change but the brand should remain the same. So, if we take branding here to include activity on social media – then being flexible can only enhance marketing activity.

As part of modern day marketing, social media plays a role in search results. This means it can be used for not only driving traffic to your business but also to build trust and relevancy (reputation) with people online. In fact, recent surveys have shown the strong influence of social media on shopping habits:

chart-social-media-influence-on-shoppers

By creating a dialogue on social media, a brand owner (especially in a business start-up situation) can obtain genuine feedback and build authenticity. As already alluded to, however, consistency is essential – online activity must mirror a brand’s purpose just as much as a paid campaign would.

If your organisation is only starting your social media journey – here are 4 excellent tips from the guys at Social Media Examiner, to start you on your way,

Be More Likeable on Social Media – Not More Boring

We’re not going to write this blog post and pretend that gaining attention on social media is easy. It’s not. As you well know, most of your competitors are now using social media in an attempt to improve search results and customer experience. The thing is, amidst all that online noise, being genuine helps you to stand out and be more likeable.

Being genuine means being real and not just using social media as a promotional tool. By providing some value (content) you will be in a position to develop your following. Also, people will like you more if you engage by inviting both a discussion and feedback.

If you’re good enough, smart enough and tell a good story – people will like you.

Online, if you’re good enough, smart enough and tell a good story – people will like you. Would you agree?

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Before I finish on this topic, I should mention one more thing. Most marketers will agree that having a clear brand positioning is essential for long-term business growth. However, there is a danger in all of this attitudinal change to social media branding that the fundamentals of brand strategy may be neglected.

For instance, we are all too aware of ‘keeping up with the latest’ trends which have enticed a lot of brands online. The thing is – many organisations are not basing its social media usage on tangible business benefits.The risk, therefore, is that with all the focus being on social, the overall brand strategy can be overlooked. As a result, the brand message and experience gets fragmented across an increased number of platforms.

This can undermine other marketing activity and indeed the brand equity itself.

Don’t get me wrong – social media offers a great new way of engaging with connected customers it’s just that your brand strategy probably needs to be rebooted for the modern customer. A reboot might include a revisit to the purpose of the brand i.e. the role of the brand in a customer’s life; a deeper understanding of the customer (personas) and developing a simple and clear visual brand message.

What next for social media?

What’s the future for social media branding? Bearing in mind the caveat alluded to above about brand positioning and the tips below, here are some observations gleaned from around the web.

– A standardisation of various platforms i.e. biggest platforms are mimicking each other

– Video is getting close to the peak – live video is hot and circular video is growing

– Augmented Reality / Filters adoption is growing

– Increased competition amongst the big search engines

– Platforms becoming business tools and not just for social

– Tech filled glasses (spectacles) and live-streaming

– Better geo-filtering for ad targeting

– Microsoft bought LinkedIn – so watch this space

Tips for successful social media branding

We meet different organisations from various industries that have many brand variables when it comes to being smarter about their marketing online. The one bit of advice we always give them is not to waste their time on networks that don’t work for them.

Here are a few other tips that you might also consider:

  • Know your audience – many platforms offer free audience insights so use them
  • Define your goals upfront – helps motivation towards better results.
  • Have clear and consistent branding – create a visual experience for your customers.
  • Develop a clear voice – your language shows the personality behind the brand
  • Leverage influencers – they can help you reach a greater, relevant audience
  • Track and measure results – replicate the good and stop the bad

Conclusion

The likelihood that your target audience is on social media has never been higher. Statistics show that there are nearly 3.4 billion internet users worldwide. Of those, 2.3 billion have social media accounts. The challenge for organisations is to be able to use social media as an element of its overall marketing activity – in a human way.

Being human means allowing your personality to shine through, knowing your customers better and providing a mix of interesting and relevant content.

Always ask yourself – are you guessing what your audience wants and even if not, are you addressing the right issues? Get the answers to these questions right and you’ll never be boring on social media.

“Thank you for reading our blog post today” – Aidan & Jim.

 Would you like us to notify you, by email, when we publish new content? If so, just let us know by clicking here. Of course, we can always meet face-to-face, just leave your details here and we might grab a coffee, cheers. Jim – O’C&K

Social Media is a Tool for Building Online Relationships, Pure and Simple

online relationships facebook eye

More and more Aidan and I are meeting SME owners, or their marketing managers, requesting help with their brand’s online presence. The goal of a strong online presence is to build relationships that will drive revenue, eventually. The former part of this goal can be achieved using social media.

One of the challenges we find, when responding to a communications brief, is explaining to prospects that social media is mainly a tool for building online relationships and not one for driving revenue.

Unfortunately, as various social media platforms have become a household norm these days, some SMEs do see them as being ideal sales tools. They are not and the danger of this blinkered view is that while concentrating on social media activity, other real methods of lead generation might end up being ignored.

Using a social media channel for the sole purpose of getting people’s attention, and money, will not work. Think about it – would you prefer to be engaged, entertained or informed vs being interrupted by a brand talking about itself and its product features?

I’d like to mention a few other misconceptions that some organisations have. One that springs to mind is that social media provides a quick ROI. It doesn’t I’m afraid. Just like any relationship building exercise – it takes time, effort and possibly even a little money.

Another one is that social media is free. However, I do believe that most organisations are now aware that the main hidden cost of social media is, yep, you’ve guessed it – your time. And if you don’t put in the time and effort, your relationship building light will produce disappointing results.

With new clients, we concentrate initially on determining their target audience. Sometimes this will entail some formal research. It is only when you really know your customers can you be yourself and use social media to engage them.

If you don’t like the idea of networking with strangers, well don’t try and do it online either.

Oh, and by the way – you don’t have to be on every new platform either. Try and find out where the people you are interested in are hanging out and go there. Become an expert in the workings of that platform. Of course, you can use Facebook but just don’t depend on it solely.

Misguided advice will not help you build good online relationships

There is an element of this social media world that really annoys us here in O’C&K Towers. It is that there are many so-called social media gurus out there. Unfortunately, they can provide organisations with misguided advice based on little or no real marketing experience.

As a result, organisations believe that social media will deliver all their marketing needs and don’t realise that they are missing the big picture. Have a look at this list of 10 dodgy bits of advice that we have come across – do any of them ring a bell?

  1. Forget about email – being on social media is the way forward
  2. Social media is replacing SEO
  3. Auto-published updates across all platforms are perfectly fine
  4. Using #general hashtags guarantees better audience reach
  5. Your audience is only using one social media channel
  6. An intern can manage your online presence
  7. Ignore negative comments online
  8. Keep your staff away from the business’s social media
  9. Post updates as often as you can each day
  10. You can’t measure social media activity

For us, the bottom line, when building online relationships, is to be useful. With authentic positioning, you might even become indispensable. So be very clear about what you are providing for your audience, it has little to do with the technology and everything to do with effective communication.

Social Media has little to do with the technology and everything to do with effective commun­icatio­n.

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Use a hub & spoke model for building online relationships

A very strong way of building online relationships is to provide people with something that’s relevant. Whatever form this content takes it should be something your business owns. By owning I mean your website or blog and not content on someone else’s platform.

Tools are used to entice people to visit your offering. One of the best descriptions I’ve come across explaining this is likened to a hub and spoke effect. Your site / blog is the hub and social media tools are the spokes.

We’ve mentioned the Razor Social website before, on which we find Ian Cleary to be an excellent source of information on social media tools.

Before jumping into a particular social media tool, however, I would advise that you determine where your customers / prospects are participating online already. Also, have a look at which platforms your competitors are using, or not using.

Maybe prioritise your efforts on one tool first and experiment. Do you have anything unique that you could offer on a particular channel that gives you a perceived advantage e.g. visuals? Have any of your staff / colleagues an existing expertise on a particular platform that you can learn from?

Here is an interesting infographic from the people at Spin Sucks that outlines an 8 step tool-agnostic approach.

7 Tips about being human on social media

Social media can be used to show customers, and prospects, who the people behind a logo are.

  1. – Be personable – you and your colleagues are your brand.
  2. – Listening is as important is talking, find out what your customers are talking about.
  3. – Talk in the first person rather than as a brand.
  4. – Have a unique voice, for instance, if you have a sense of humour – show it.
  5. – Use people’s name when engaging with them, just as you would offline.
  6. – Get your message across any way you can by using video, cartoons, emojis etc.
  7. – To err is human. If you make a mistake, acknowledge it as soon as you can.

Conclusion

Social media is driven by technology but that’s a feature, not a benefit. It is only two-way communication that facilitates the building of online relationships. Once social media platforms are seen in this way, as a tool, conversations with targeted customers can occur. Also, a business can move closer to being truly customer focused and they might even start appearing as a human beings.

“Thank you for reading our blog post today” – Aidan & Jim.

 Would you like us to notify you, by email, when we publish new content? If so, just let us know by clicking here. Of course, we can always meet face-to-face, just leave your details here and we might grab a coffee, cheers. Jim – O’C&K

16 Reasons To Be Cheerful – Part 3 – Using Social Media To Build Customer Relationships

build-customer-relationships-social-media-buttons

In this post we continue our look at how marketing can help build customer relationships. Part 1 is here.

As a business owner, do you remember the good old days when marketing options only consisted of print advertising, cold-calling and exhibitions? Looking back now, we can see how limited these options were when trying to build customer relationships – not ineffective, just limited.

Then the great marketing saviour arrived on the scene – social media. Of course, we were thrilled with these shiny new tools but were flummoxed wondering how best to use them. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn et al. certainly drove connectivity through the roof and brands wanted in on the act.

Businesses tried to be social (kind of) and started measuring how many ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ that they could amass. However, in the early stages, social media was not providing the sales expected – not because of the tools, but because of how they were being used by brands. Purchasing power had finally moved to the people.

As a result, it is only in recent years, I believe, that brands have started to distinguish between ‘social media’ and business social media. Nowadays, a lot of businesses are including social media in their overall marketing strategies. It appears that it has finally been accepted that social media is not a passing fad but needs to be treated differently, as a marketing activity.

Finally, brands have realised that they will never be a customer’s close friend, but they can be of relevance to them.

What we like about social media for our own business is that it affords us the same opportunities that larger organisations have for brand visibility. It also allows us to listen to what our audiences are talking about as well as trying to engage them, on their terms. Finally, it not only helps to build our visibility online but can help build awareness offline also, due to networking and increased brand recognition.

Finally, brands have realised that they will never be a custom­er’s close friend, but they can be of relevance to them

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Yes, the pace of change in social media can be frightening at times. Recently, we have seen a timeline algorithm update from Instagram (similar to that of Facebook and Twitter), Snapchat 2.0 (integrating voice and video calling – without a mobile number), and Facebook is enhancing their video metrics (daily performance metrics).

The bad news is that change is constant but the good news is that the upgrades are usually better for brands to build customer relationships. A good example of social media being good for business and relevant for the customer will be the introduction of the buy button on social media sites.

Four social media marketing techniques for you to consider.

  • Use it to build your brand.

This is a long-term strategy that builds and engages with a specific audience. As mentioned in our last posting on this blog (Part 2), trust, built-up over time, leads to a brand that customers genuinely like to engage with.

  • Use it for sales and conversions.

This technique has a short term focus. It entails using platforms like Twitter or LinkedIn to identify a specific need that an individual / business may have. After connecting with them on social media a request for a meeting is initiated. Care is needed that your activity is not considered spamming and accordingly, must be based on correctly identifying a need that you can satisfy.

  • Use it as part of a multi-channel campaign.

If you are planning a short-term marketing campaign, social media can be used to create extra excitement for a large audience. You can get people’s attention with polls, competitions, hashtags, videos etc. and with a bit of luck, your video or hashtag might go viral!

  • Use bookmarking sites for reach.

Social bookmarking sites can help you to drive traffic to your site. We use Scoop.it on a daily basis which is a really good curation and distribution tool. The only downside is that these sites are not targeted per se, so they are more suitable for reach instead of sales. Here’s an oldie but goldie list of such sites from SEJ.

What’s changed for businesses trying to build relationships with customers is that they must do so using many types of platforms and strategies. As alluded to above, the pace of change is extremely fast and it is important that brands keep up to date with online developments. Sometimes it’s best to outsource this element of your business strategy.

As with all tools and techniques, there are right and wrong ways to use them. Here are four signs that you might not be using social media in the right way.

  1. You spend a lot of the time talking about your own business and its offers
  2. You have no consistency of voice across your different social media platforms
  3. Your audience isn’t growing or worse – is not engaging with you
  4. You find being on social media to be a chore so you don’t bother measuring results

When done right, social media can be a very effective element of your efforts to build customer relationships. Consider the above warning signs and change your approach if needs be.

When done right, social media can be an effective element of your efforts to build customer relationships
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Tips and Timesavers

Some businesses have considered it good practice to have documented policy and procedures for their social media activity, in-house. We would recommend that all businesses do so – there are many templates online that can be used.

There are also a few basic principles of social media marketing that should be adhered to:

  1. Respect your followers and don’t provide them with less than 100% quality content
  2. Give freely to others because what goes around comes around
  3. The customer isn’t always right but at least, move the discussion offline by way of customer service
  4. Paid for advertising on social media is acceptable, as it is targeted – spamming is not
  5. Building relationships with and using social media influencers is fine, if mutually agreed
  6. Review your analytics (usually free) weekly and learn from mistakes
  7. Be consistent of voice and be positive in attitude
  8. Don’t become a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. Pick a platform where your audience is

Conclusion

If you decide to use social media as a tactic for building customer relationships remember that it must form part of overall business objectives. It is not a good idea to be on social media because everybody else is. Determine your customers from your marketing plan and use the channels where they are, to engage with them. In this way, they are more likely to respond to your calls-to-action.

“Thank you for reading our blog post today” – Aidan & Jim.

 Would you like us to notify you, by email, when we publish new content? If so, just let us know by clicking here. Of course, we can always meet face-to-face, just leave your details here and we might grab a coffee, cheers. Jim – O’C&K

16 Reasons To Be Cheerful – Part 2 – Maintaining Your Customer Relationships Online

Coffee-customer-relationships-online

In our last blog (Part 1), we spoke about using marketing to build customer relationships. In this post, we’re going to look at ways that the customer relationship might be maintained through online activity. By the way, in Part 3, we’ll focus specifically on how we can do that, using social media.

Think about the many ways we build relationships offline. It can be through sharing a joke, a personal introduction, a warm handshake or even just a smile. Personal connections build trust. The challenge for us, as business owners, is that when we go online, it is difficult to replicate the human touch. In our online conversations, we don’t have the human signals such as the handshake, the eye contact, and the body language. These engagement opportunities are not available online. Or are they?

How might we replicate those 3 human signals online?

First of all, when a person lands on your homepage they’re thinking “is this site of interest to me? Are the owners genuinely interested in helping me?” Your website needs to answer those questions by simply stating who you are, what you do and how you can help them – all in a user-friendly way. You might consider this your personal handshake.

Secondly, you might equate the eye contact with their experience of your online presence. If they have read your blog or arrived on your site through a social media channel – are you consistent in tone, voice, and personality. Is it informative or entertaining and easy to navigate?

Thirdly, will they consider their meeting with you good enough for them to return (your body language), and start building a relationship with you. Building a relationship means building trust, which you can do by sharing relevant content, delivering what you promise and responding to their online requests for help.

Your online handshake is your website. It should be firm in information and warm in outlining benefits

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Here is a link to an article on the MasterCard Biz site that gives us three practical examples of 3 Easy Ways to Bring In-Person Customers Online.

5 other areas that should help maintain customer relationships online.

  1. Website speed. In addition to your site’s functionality, speed plays an integral part of its UX. I, for one, don’t hang around for probably more than 5 seconds if a site isn’t loading – how is your patience? Use the Google’s PageSpeed Insights to check your site’s speed.
  2. Mobile Audience. Build your website with a mobile audience in mind. The majority of people now search on mobile devices. Your content and Calls-to-Action must be accessible (and readable) on the small screen.
  3. Online Personality. Let the real you shine through the business’s online voice. People like to deal with people so forget the business-speak. Why not have some fun while you’re at it.
  4. Content Platforms. There are many platforms that you can use in addition to your blog. Visual communication is becoming the most popular method to engage customers. Think YouTube, Instagram, Periscope, Snapchat, Pinterest – use your smartphone on the fly.
  5. Influencer marketing. Build on the trust that existing influencers in your industry / niche have on, say, social media. Building an authentic relationship with them augurs well for your customer’s perception of your authority.

Tips and Timesavers for an online review

You may well be attending to all the points above but sometimes it is good to review your online relationship with your customers. Here are eight suggestions that we think might help you reconsider your customer relationship:

  1. Analyse your traffic to see when, how and why they come to your site
  2. Go out of your way to have a conversation with your customers
  3. Learn about your new customers – who they are, what they do, why they do it and what they dislike
  4. Research if, when and how your customers use a mobile device
  5. Stay up-to-date with industry trends so as to pass on benefits to your customers
  6. Check that your customers are still on the same social media channels / platforms as you are
  7. Deliver relevant content in a format that they can access easily i.e. 2 clicks
  8. Check that your customers are still engaging with your marketing messages / storytelling

Conclusion

By being available online to help customers whenever they need it, will go a long way to building a sustainable relationship. The ultimate goal for your business is to have customers trust and understand you completely. The payback for your efforts will be that they will tell everyone about the excellent brand that you are – it’s only human nature.

“Thank you for reading our blog post today” – Aidan & Jim.

 Would you like us to notify you, by email, when we publish new content? If so, just let us know by clicking here. Of course, we can always meet face-to-face, just leave your details here and we might grab a coffee, cheers. Jim – O’C&K

 

 

 

Getting Lost in the Digital World of Marketing but Staying Real

digital-world-wifi-zone

As a business owner, do you remember the first time you set up a social media account? It was probably a personal one where you exchanged jokes, ideas and pictures with friends and family.

As you grew more familiar with various platforms, you decided to start using social media for your business. Let’s face it everybody was talking about the digital world of marketing and how it enabled the measurement of marketing ROI. So why not?

Then it happened! You were consumed by the digital world and its trappings. As you started to read more and more blogs, they told you how to search for communities, build engagement figures and analyse authenticity scores, you got lost in the traffic (no pun intended).

Yep – managing your online presence became much more immersive all of a sudden. Everybody was caught up focusing on the tools and the numbers. We were all beginning to forget about people – the very people we wanted as customers.

Are you still operating in the real world or have you left us?

How do you know when you’ve become too immersed in the digital world? – score yourself out of 10, on the following scenarios:

  1. You unfollow your friends because they don’t re-post you or follow back
  2. You discuss your various online reputation scores when out socialising
  3. You curate recommendations, but don’t bother with them yourself
  4. You have been annoyed that your LinkedIn connection count stops at 500
  5. You don’t sell anything on social media because that’s not what it’s for
  6. You spend more time on redesigning your profiles than you do on advertising
  7. You spend a lot of time convincing people that they’ll miss the boat without digital
  8. You can quote most of your Google Analytic stats
  9. You love checking out new apps / tools / latest channels – and use them once
  10. You write posts about being immersed in the digital world (whoops)

How many are you guilty of? I have definitely been guilty of 5 of them in the past! However, in the last 8 months or so, we have reduced the number of digital channels we use and aligned the remaining ones with a specific function to reflect the ‘why’ of our business.

For example, we use twitter to keep abreast of all things marketing and share tips and timesavers with followers that may find them useful. Most of the curation is automated, but the sharing and follow-back is still a human decision.

You will notice that after 3 years on twitter, we still have a relatively low follower count but that is on purpose. Helping people (particularly SMEs), we believe, reflects the O’C&K values and builds our reputation. In other words, we want to be real to our clients and prospects. We have learnt that you can only be real if you are relevant, be it online or offline.

You can only be real for customers if you are relevant to them

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Entering the digital world is not the only marketing solution for every situation.

Sometimes when we’re networking at SME meet-ups, people don’t always see us as being real, especially when we start talking about an offline promotional mix (one of the four Ps – remember them?). Quite often people’s eyes become glazed over until we mention SEO, social media, content marketing, link building or growth hacking.

Of course, we have no problem with specialists per say, we use a lot of them ourselves. However, we have encountered many digital marketing gurus that don’t necessarily have a background (education or experience) in traditional marketing and communication. Their only solution is a digital one. Sometimes I just wonder if they are providing the best solution for a client, who might need more comprehensive, marketing communications advice. The ‘why in’ and not just the ‘how of’, the digital world.

Some of the same specialists argue that ‘traditional advertising is dead’, ‘inbound marketing is the only future’ or ‘social media is the only way to engage people’. Well, here’s our opinion on that – marketing hasn’t changed that much, mainly because people haven’t changed that much and the function of marketing in the future won’t change much either.

The agency (or guru) that does not provide you with a customised strategy, linked to your business objectives and supported by a range of marketing tactics – is probably just trying to sell you something. Depending on the business objective, product, brand or industry, different elements of the promotional mix will apply.

The real relationship is between marketing, communications and promotion.

Allow me to elaborate by way of background. One way of looking at marketing communications is through the prism of relationships. In marketing, the focus is on customer relations and in communications, the focus is on influencer relations, media relations, community relations and government relations.

Bear with me just a little longer – of the 4Ps (product, price, place and promotion) – promotion comprises Direct marketing; Personal selling; Sales promotion; Advertising and Publicity. In the digital world, these elements of promotion don’t change.

It’s just the tools and channels that are available right now, allow us to engage with people in a more relevant way. The challenge remains to choose which promotional tools to use, that will build the various relationships.

When using a mix of tools to engage an identified audience, professional marketing communications will ensure efficient and consistent messaging across all audiences and all channels. All that remains is to allocate different weights to each part of the promotional mix, based on business objectives.

In the digital world, marketing is still doing the same, traditional promotional activities – online.
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Ask yourself, can our audience be best reached offline or online (or a little bit of both)? Based on your answer, you can then start to decide which promotional elements to use to engage them. To finish off this segment of the post, here are some examples of combined online and offline promotional activity.

  • Direct marketing: producing brochures / online newsletters to engage prospects directly
  • Advertising: creating PPC and AdWords campaigns to support offline ads
  • Personal selling: designing presentations, webinars and podcasts
  • Sales promotion: creating coupons, landing pages, lead magnets
  • Publicity: blogging and writing guest articles or capturing a publicity stunt on video

Tips and Timesavers

As a small business owner, you wear multiple hats, some of which are a better fit than others. It’s not unusual for business owners to feel uncomfortable with marketing. The growth of digital marketing has definitely added complexity and import, but also power to small business marketing.

Succeeding in the digital world means providing content that your audience wants, where and when they want it. Here are some tips in relation to content creation and its distribution.

Content creation addresses your messaging and the best way to communicate it:

  • Blog post
  • Video
  • Email
  • Audio
  • Whitepaper
  • Infographic
  • Presentation

Content distribution determines how you are going to reach your target audience:

  • Newsletter
  • RSS subscribers
  • Social networks
  • Email campaigns
  • Community groups
  • Forums / offline meet-ups
  • Live streaming / Podcasts
  • Print / promotional items
  • Workshops

Conclusion

There are many powerful tools and channels for communicating with people and building your business. Sticking to online or offline only, however, isn’t going to get the job done. Whether it’s traditional offline marketing or the use of digital, you need to do each well and ensure you’re using them both in your promotional mix.

Marketing is a type of communication – communication is one person talking to another

“Thank you for reading our blog post today” – Aidan & Jim.

 Would you like us to notify you, by email when we publish new content? If so, just let us know by clicking here. Of course, we can always meet face-to-face, just leave your details here and we might grab a coffee, cheers. Jim – O’C&K