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Blog posts tagged engage
How do you communicate your green credentials?
August 04, 2010
This is part two of a series of three. Part one can be read here.
According to the experts, Egg – a branding & marketing company in the States, just 7 per cent of consumers are socially responsible to the core, but 70 per cent of the population (I’m assuming they’re talking about the population of the USA) will recycle and occasionally seek out organic food. So there’s a huge market out there for offering sustainable products. But you can’t badge your company “green” and hope that your product will walk off the shelves – there simply aren’t enough consumers that care to their core to make that happen.
No, what you need to do is engage your client with your values. And that’s why I asked you what shade of green your business is. Consumers are looking for brands with values that they identify with, plus communicate with them honestly and create transparency. And that’s why you need to put your brand values at the heart of your marketing plan. And if “green” in whatever form is a part of your brand values, then you’ll find it much more authentic to market your green credentials than if it’s a periphery activity.
If I think about brands that place green at the heart of their marketing strategy, I think of Dorset Cereals, Abel & Cole and Riverford. Their marketing communications are about so much more than say, how good the oats and raisins are in the cereal. They’re about community, sustainability and the environment. Dorset Cereals, in particular have taken their brand values much wider than food, their communication is about “simple pleasures”. They build edible playgrounds for schools and they team up with like-minded businesses who share their values.
How clever is your communication? Dorset Cereals don’t continually bang the drum that “we’re green, we’re green” – it’s implied through their activities, their copy, their packaging and their design. Is your marketing strategy as sophisticated as that?
Seven top tips to integrate email with social media
July 22, 2010
Social media is the latest buzzword in the marketing industry. But social media does not work well in isolation. By integrating your social media activity with your email marketing, you can improve the effectiveness and results from both disciplines, bringing outstanding bottom-line results.
Unfortunately many marketers just aren’t taking this on board. In fact, our recent Hitting the Mark study found that only 17 per cent of email marketers from the UK’s top retailers included social media sharing links in their emails.
Here are my seven top tips to better integrate email and social media marketing:
1. Include ‘share on social network’ links in your email messages – chances are your email recipients will have many like-minded friends on social networks that could also be potential customers. Encourage them to share your email content with their friends by including ‘sharing’ links in your email newsletters.
2. Encourage social media ‘followers’ and ‘fans’ to sign-up to your email newsletters – the reverse is also true: you probably have lots of followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook that would be interested in receiving your email newsletters. Have you asked them? If not, why not!
3. Use blog posts as content for email newsletters – by using your blog posts in your email newsletters, you not only have a great source of wonderful content, you also raise the profile of your blog and encourage your recipients to check it out!
4. Add social network ‘subscribe’ buttons to your email messages – if recipients like the content in your newsletter, then they are likely to be potentially interested in following you on social networks too, so make it easy for them.
5. Ask for social media details during sign-up – you ask for a range of contact information when recipients sign-up to receive information from you. So why not ask for their social network details as well? And if they give them to you, make sure you follow them and add them to your CRM database.
6. Use metrics from email campaigns to identify most popular social networks – your email platform should be able to give you a range of metrics, allowing you to see which of your recipients added your content to which social networks. This will give you very valuable information relating to the social networks that are the most popular, helping you to focus future activity.
7. Ask for feedback – stuck for content for your next newsletter or just keen to get some reaction to your latest email? Why not ask your community on social media? Get them more involved and make them feel part of the process.
Have you tried any of these? Are there other tactics you find work well? Let us know in the comments.
This article originally appeared at the dotDigital Blog
I can’t claim that I can solve the Vuvuzela crisis, but…
June 16, 2010
The Vuvuzela can be pretty annoying. It is the noise and talk of the World Cup. The constant barrage of that atonal hum is enough to drive anyone loopy. Just imagine what it is like in the concentrated bowl of a stadium setting, amplified and focused. Everyone broadcasting into the middle with a relentless stream of trying to be louder than the Vuvuzellist next to you may make for a charged atmosphere, but at the end of the day it is all noise and no respite — remind you of anything?
Now picture this. A large number of people all wanting to be heard and throwing out their constant and near identical marketing message — all in one concentrated area or bowl, such as Twitter — just hoping that in a sea of similar noisy messages someone will listen, take interest and give you some money for your product or service.
I can’t claim that I can solve the Vuvuzela crisis, but I can certainly recommend that we all take a look at our own trumpeting.
- Consistency of message is very much different to sending out a constant message.
- Broadcasting is not this year’s model. Today we engage. Why? Because it works, is more involving and the tools we use are geared up for a two-way communication.
- If everyone makes the same noise then we are all the same. Be different and make your ‘difference’ stand out clearly.
- If the Vuvuzela had some tonal variation it would be less irritating. How can you make your message have more than one note?
Ten steps to creating a powerful Facebook page
May 18, 2010
Facebook won't suddenly transform your business into a superstar sales machine. But it can help you win friends and influence people. But like anything else in life, this is about commitment, effort and starting on the right footing.
A lot of people still get sucked into the idea of thinking "if we build, they will come". And doubly so with Facebook — just because there's a huge audience, it doesn't mean everyone is suddenly going to beat a path to your door!
So it's as well to begin with the basics — think long term, trust in your network of friends and stay focused. With that in mind, here's my ten steps to create a powerful Facebook page:
- Start by creating a page for your business. If you're a business-to-consumer company and you have a product / service, you should create a page and build a community around your brand(s). There are different options for pages, so be sure to pick the right ones. You also have the option to add things like a discussions tab, which is ideal for managing customer feedback.
- People love photos, so be sure to post pictures of you and your team both at work and play! You want to connect with your followers, and this is a great way to demonstrate you're real folk, just like everyone else. Also, don't forget to tag your friends in those photos, which will help broaden the exposure of your page.
- Quality, not quantity. It's vital that you keep in mind that this is all about attracting the right people. So it's far better to have just 10 people join your page and have five comment and / or share than have 100 people join and only have the same 5 actually interacting. Be sure to focus on people who are relevant to your business and those that may benefit from your page.
- Make use of your contacts on Facebook. When you're looking to build up some momentum ahead of a release, use your presence to create buzz with small teasers with your status updates. If each friend or colleague has, on average, 100 friends, then just ten of them joining your page and sharing something you post means you are potentially exposed to a thousand more people.
- Generate some buzz and be a tease! Just won a new client? Build on that success and let people know. Be brief and quickly outline what you'll be doing for them. Who knows, someone might pick up on your message and call for more details. And when you've got that exciting new article lined up, post a teasing message and see who bites with an enquiring comment.
- Give praise and recognition to your Facebook friends who suggest news, related articles, or who have perhaps even written articles for your company blog. Even better, in the message part, use the @ symbol and then type their name to tag them in the shared item. That way, you're giving them some added exposure. You could score some extra points by tagging a Page of theirs the same way.
- If you can't be engaging, be informative. It's not easy being engaging, especially when writing. So if you struggle, make sure you're informative and helpful. Think of the people who are following your page and share relevant content. Also, consider adding a note in the comment area and ask a question or two, to encourage discussion and debate.
- Create your own page tab. This will stretch the skills of many, but it's easily accomplished with the help of your web designer. Perhaps you have a portfolio page and you'd like to show off your work? Or maybe you want a snazzy graphic to use as the default tab people see when they come to your page? Either way, you can do all of this quite easily, without too much fuss.
- Put a link to your page on your company website, ideally on your contact page or in the footer of your blog pages. This way, when people visit your website, you're driving them towards your page and your burgeoning community.
- Get your own page URL name. If you have a page with more than 25 fans, you can get a nice URL name, like the one for Octane, which is facebook.com/octaneinteractive. Just go to the username selection page and choose your name now. Why bother? Facebook is a hugely popular website and ranks very highly on the search engines. So there's a good chance people could find your page on Facebook when they're searching for your business.
Hopefully, that all makes perfect sense and you're inspired enough to venture forth and create an amazing page for your company. And be sure to come back and tell me how you got on!
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