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Jack Wynn

Guest Blog, Keren Lerner: Social media in business – who’s responsible?
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Social media is undeniably a key factor in business success.  In an era where prospects and supply partners will Google both company and management team before even considering any further interaction, social media content has evolved to be more than a shop window: it is the chance to display the essential voice and vision of the business – and who better to deliver this than the senior managers that define them?

Yet far too many innovative, exciting businesses now mask their true nature by opting to delegate all responsibility for social media channels away from the team’s founder, owner or leaders – often due to the mindset: “I’ll leave this to the experts, it’s not my field, and I am too busy anyway.”

Granted, experienced marketers have the skills and techniques required to create content and manage social media output, but it is the voice of the business owner or managing director that needs to be heard, and the role of the marketer to ensure responsibility isn’t abdicated entirely, but intelligently.

 

Mechanics plus vision

Most businesses that do recognise the need to embrace a dynamic and interactive approach to social media – and, unfortunately, far too many don’t – assume the entire process can be delivered by marketers, either in house or via third party agencies.

But this is not an out-of-the-box, one-size-fits-all scenario.

Marketers are fantastic at putting the right mechanics in place, ensuring social media feeds are integrated and link back to original content. But does the marketer have that essential business vision or understand what led to the creation of the company in the first place? Not unless the marketer was the founder.

It is only the owner who fully understands why the business was set up, the problems it was designed to solve or the customers it wants to help. And a failure to communicate that message is a real missed opportunity.

 

Capturing the voice

The voice of the company should have an interactive social media strategy, coupled with an engaging website, well-written blog posts and content marketing. But it is also important to gain input from across the business – so the founder and the leadership team coming together to discuss ideas in keeping with the company ‘voice’ is invaluable.

The right line of questions and facilitation can prompt new insights and make it easier for a marketer to harness the essential nature of the business.

 

And it doesn’t end there

Following an initial discussion, senior management needs to stay engaged with this key aspect of business success and identity. It doesn’t need to be onerous – a scheduled time each week or month discussing ideas, from customer issues to market change, is essential to ensure published content and messages truly reflect the nature of the organisation.

 

Conclusion

Marketers must steer senior management to re-evaluate how they approach their company’s social media presence. This is a portal to the business, a way to drive engagement with prospects and customers, suppliers and business partners – and it needs to be as compelling and engaging as possible – with real insight, real stories and real experiences.

Although it is widely thought that business leaders are typically driven, opinionated and focused – that is what underpins success. So, harness that uniqueness. Generic content completely masks the true nature of the company – make sure the critical business lens of social media channels such as Twitter and LinkedIn are a true reflection of its core beliefs, passion and expertise.

 

 

Keren Lerner is founder and managing director of London-based design and marketing agency, Top Left Design and holds regular social media workshops,  with her next event – ‘Nine things you need to do on LinkedIn for business’ – taking place at Soho House on September 23,  2016, at 1pm. Email keren@topleftdesign.com for more information.

Industry Spotlight, Apple iOS 10: What do brands need to know?
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Product marketing manager for Urban Airship Engage, Diana Laboy-Rush looks at the implications for brands following Apple’s recent iOS 10 release , with its support for Rich Notifications, where images, video, audio, GIFs and interactive buttons are embedded directly within push notifications.

For businesses, iOS 10 brings massive changes to Apple’s operating system that place better and richer app engagement front-and-centre. If past adoption rates hold steady, it won’t be long before all of your iPhone app users gain richer experiences that offer deeper insight into what they care about. Here are some key points that businesses should be aware of…

 

Reap before you sow with key improvements

iOS 10 solves existing barriers that will make current engagement efforts more effective. A Raise to Wake feature means TouchID users won’t blow past lockscreen notifications when unlocking their phones. Notifications are immediately visible as users pick up their phones. Notifications also become the default view for the Notification Center, a chronologically-ordered archive that makes messages easier to find later.

 

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then a GIF or video could be worth more

Rich Notifications can include images, GIFs, audio, video and interactive buttons embedded directly within push notifications. Grab the attention of your audience with notifications that inspire action. Recent Android data analysis found a 56 per cent higher response rate to notifications with pictures versus those without.

 

Better visibility for richer, actionable notification experiences

With iOS 10, users get visual and written cues that there’s a richer notification experience awaiting them. Lockscreen notifications arrive with rich media thumbnails and an instruction to either “Press for more” or “Slide for more” depending on whether Force Touch is available on the device.

That’s in stark contrast to previous Apple operating systems, which had businesses building these instructions into notification text to help ensure interactive buttons were discovered.

 

Mind your media, or risk ruin with too much of a good thing

Apple provides maximum file sizes for images, audio and video that would be best to undercut dramatically. Rich media will impact consumers’ data plans, ranging from barely noticeable with judicious use of images, to potential reasons to delete an app for sending files that are too large or too frequent. These files will impact your bandwidth costs too. Think about opt-in campaigns where users can get a taste and choose to receive these richer, more immersive and data-heavy experiences.

 

Don’t be a blockhead with Rich Notifications

With brands running to emojis for a quick if quirky engagement hit, it would be easy but wrong to approach Rich Notifications in the same manner. When rich media is tailored to specific users’ interests it adds immersive depth not interpretive color to messaging campaigns.

Remember also that not all users will immediately upgrade to iOS 10, so messaging should be made to work without reference to embedded rich media or sent specifically to the segment of your users that have adopted iOS 10. Some solutions will allow you to provide alternative text if the rich media successfully downloads.”

Forums vs Expos – how to maximise your precious time out of the office…
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With a majority of ‘expert’ advice on Expos being somewhat outdated or, like with many businesses, asserting too much emphasis on easy routes rather than methods that actually work, it’s no wonder people get frustrated and disconcerted when they are looking to effectively network and source new connections without it lessening quality time spent in the office.

Amplified by the dominant presence of social media quick fixes such as: setting up a LinkedIn profile; increasing your Twitter presence; scheduling a large number of email marketing campaigns; and collecting as many business cards as possible at industry events – are key solution in helping you to be astute in intelligently selecting what methods best suit you and your way of working.

Expos can also have a somewhat ‘lazy’ association to it: people picture the huge halls and countless stands as a way of picking up leads and justifying their time out of the office, but realistically a large percentage of exhibitors won’t be of necessary relevance, or the person you need to speak to has decided not to attend at the last minute.

So set aside any previous experiences you may have with networking and Expos, and garner some quality connections by attending one of our Forum Events. Our formula ensures that buyers can increase their knowledge of how, why and where to invest without hanging around waiting for the wrong supplier; as well as ensuring that all suppliers are provided with qualified leads and valuable business is made as a result.

Events relevant to you may include the Marketing Business Forum taking place on November 8, 2016. Contact the team today…

Privacy concerns hindering Allo’s chance of messaging success?
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Although reports have suggested that Google’s newly launched messaging service, Allo, is already causing some privacy concerns, the multinational technology company is defiant in ensuring users can safely navigate the app – despite its integration with Google’s new artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, which requires all messages to be sent without end-to-end encryption.

As a result, not only can Google’s Assistant access and read the messages, but Google as a whole can too; as well as national security organisations. With its developers announcing back in May that Allo would include revolutionary message retention policies unheard of among other messaging apps such as iMessage and WhatsApp, industry insiders have found that all messages are linked directly to an account and stored indefinitely – failing to keep its promise of ‘transiently’ storing chat logs and making sure all conversations are not permanently placed on Google’s servers.

A Google spokesperson said in a statement: “We’ve given users transparency and control over their data in Google Allo. And our approach is simple – your chat history is saved for you until you choose to delete it.”

“You can delete single messages or entire conversations in Allo. We also provide the option to chat in Incognito mode, where messages are end-to-end encrypted and you can set a timer to automatically delete messages for your device and the person you’re chatting with’s device at a set time.”

Nielsen Marketing Cloud and i2c collaborate to deliver ‘complete omnichannel view’…
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The Nielsen Marketing Cloud has announced an ‘insight collaboration’ with i2c – an innovative partnership between Sainsbury’s and Aimia – that concentrates on data-driven strategies and insights designed to influence shopping behaviour, build brand loyalty and enhance the shopping experience for customers.

Both parties claim that this collaboration will enable brands to acquire a ‘complete omnichannel’ view of customers across hundreds of key characteristics; as well as allowing marketers to harness the data gained in order to analyse, activate and plan their marketing campaigns across media; reliably analyse campaign results and improve the relevance of their customer messages.

Previously, the Nielsen Marketing Cloud and i2c partnered to support Carling’s national ‘Great British Moments’ campaign, which resulted in a 19 per cent sales uplift and a 4.1(X) campaign ROI attributed to this collaboration.

VP and managing director of Nielsen Marketing Cloud, Europe, Matt Bennathan, commented: “The collaboration of i2c and The Nielsen Marketing Cloud has proven the impact that data-driven programmatic audience buying can have on in-store and online sales for a brand. Our award-winning Carling campaign illustrated that.”

He continued: “The Nielsen Marketing Cloud has the richest UK data available and is a perfect partner for Nectar’s loyalty card data. We can programmatically engage digital audiences at scale and close the loop, providing strong, measurable sales results.”

 

Learn more about i2c here

lastminute.com group acquires WAYN to boost content offering and audience reach…
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The European leader in the online travel and leisure industry, lastminute.com group, has confirmed that it has acquired the largest travel social networking platform, ‘WAYN, Where Are You Now?’, in a bid to garner further traction across the group’s portfolio of travel sites.

It is thought that WAYN will be integrated with lastminute.com group’s new media business, the ‘Travel People’ to mark the next step of its ‘ambitious’ strategy to help advertisers showcase stories through powerful content – engaging a captive audience with WAYN’s 20 million registered members, as well as continuing to attract lastminute’s 43 million monthly unique visitors.

Chief audience architect of lastminute.com group, Marco Corradino, said: “WAYN is the perfect fit for lastminute.com group. The WAYN team is a group of exceptional entrepreneurs who have created a vibrant community of travellers who enjoy sharing millions of travel opinions. Its business complements and expands our offering in Europe and, with its strong social travel network platform; it will become the content hub for our entire group.”

The group’s current network of leading online brands consists of: lastminute.com, Rumbo, Volagratis, Bravofly and Jetcost.

Are Brits over-critical of online advertising?
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A recent study published by the digital marketing software provider, Adobe, has indicated that UK consumers are among the most critical when it comes to online advertising, Marketing Week reports.

It found that 27 per cent of UK-based consumers believe, within the last three years, digital ads have ‘got worse’, ahead of France (22 per cent); the US (20 per cent); and Germany (18 per cent).

Product marketing manager at Adobe, Julia Soffa, commented on how ‘cultural reasons’ could be down to the UK’s criticism of online ads: “The volume of advertising and opportunities to be targeted by a brand are higher in the UK than the US. People in the UK see more ads and there are more touchpoints so they are more likely to be critical. Generally Europeans are more sensitive than Americans to being bombarded by advertising.”

Furthermore, 54 per cent of UK consumers describe online advertising as ‘ineffective’, compared to Germany (52 per cent); France (51 per cent); and the US (43 per cent).

 

Read more on the research here

Guest Blog, Jenny Bernarde: Social media marketing to grow your business…
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We all head to Facebook or Twitter when we need a bit of downtime and businesses are no different, spending large amounts of time and money on social media every year. As such, this sector is forever changing, matching the needs of both users and businesses with their sophisticated social media marketing.

Not only are social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat evolving with technology – such as new capabilities for live or recorded video – but behind the scenes, social media channels are adapting APIs to create new methods for businesses to best reach their target audiences.

 

What makes an effective social media strategy?

A social media strategy isn’t just creating quality, engaging content anymore. Instead it also focuses on creating shareable content and using intelligent targeting to get your posts in front of the right people.

Promoted posts are available on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and now Instagram. Each platform has a variety of ways you can push your content further to the people who may engage and convert, targeting your posts to your audience’s age group, their location and their interests. Simply create and audience persona, which can involve a variety of interests, habits and hobbies, and promote your content using the relevant targeting options.

There’s plenty of opportunity to widen your audience base and grow your business through Facebook custom audience marketing. The options for targeting your content and ads on Facebook have grown significantly as Facebook has become one of the top platforms for marketing, particularly within the B2C market.

You can create custom lists using email addresses from your own database, or track those who have visited your website and deliver your ads directly to these people. There’s also the option to create a lookalike audience, in which Facebook will take the interests and other attributes from profiles of your custom audience list and match these personal qualities to other Facebook profiles within a percentage of the country.

Remember, it’s always worth testing ads to audience groups and working out the success based on audience engagement metrics.

 

What are the similarities between search and social marketing?

It’s important to consider search marketing when working on your social media campaigns, as there are some strong similarities between the two.

Paid advertising on social media can complement your Google AdWords campaigns and vice versa. If you start with a PPC campaign on Google – testing which audiences work and which do not – this data can be reflected through similar targeting on social media. Paid advertising also means you have control over how your adverts and your brand looks, instead of the appearance of organic search results that are defined by Google.

If you’re only relying on strong organic results, social media is the best place to put your products in front of the right people, instead of waiting for them to search for, and find your business. If your business suffers from seasonal peaks and troughs in organic search throughout the year, you can rely on social media marketing to drive traffic to your website all year round.

 

What are the best platforms to use?

The best platforms to use will depend on the nature of your business. If you’re a B2B business, then LinkedIn has a vast audience for B2B marketing, giving you the option of targeting specific companies, job titles and employment skills. However, it is worth trialling ads on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to discover relevant audiences away from a work environment.

For B2C companies, Facebook’s advanced marketing platform is a good place to start. Even a small amount of marketing budget can increase the reach of your posts, boost engagement and drive relevant traffic to your website.

Facebook and Twitter are continually advancing their advertising platforms, with the capability to create custom audiences and retarget ads to website visitors. Facebook’s recent purchase of Instagram means you can also create ads, or replicate your Facebook ads on Instagram, using Facebook’s advance database and clever targeting options on this channel too.

 

Jenny is the social media lead at Bozboz, a digital marketing and web design agency based in Brighton. She manages social media for a variety of clients across a range of platforms. Her specialism lies in paid social media marketing for both B2B and B2C clients.

Industry Spotlight: Instagram Insights – too late to the party?
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Last month, the platform launched Stories, last week (August 15), it launched Business Tools, and this week (August 31), it announced users can now zoom in on pictures. It seems like the platform is pushing out updates left, right and centre.

“So? These functions have been around for years on other platforms”, I hear you say. And you’d be right.

In fact, when the Business Tools and insights analysis function launched last week, I was slightly taken aback by the excitement it caused in the marketing industry. Of course, it’s great news and absolutely enables marketers to better target core audiences, but being truthful, as marketers, we should have been frustrated that it took this long – this function should have been around from the start.

With over 200,000 businesses already using Instagram for advertising, it makes me shudder wondering how these adverts managed to create relevant content for its customers, if at all.

So what exactly is Business Tools?

In amongst features such as business profiles, contact buttons and the ability to promote certain posts, Instagram’s new Business toolkit allows brands to gain insights into posts, such as which ones perform better than others and with which demographic.

This analysis is invaluable to brands. With insight, a brand’s reach, frequency rate, success of product discovery and customer loyalty can all be gathered. Knowing which posts work and using data to determine a change in direction (or not) is the critical key to a compelling, engaging and successful platform strategy. 

For Instagram, it couldn’t come soon enough

While insight analysis on Facebook and Twitter has been around for years, it’s difficult to comprehend how brands have managed to create consistent marketing strategies across social platforms until now.

Official figures released in June (2016) revealed the platform now has half a billion registered users, double the amount it had two years ago.

And with more than 300 million people using the service every day, it is vital brands get their strategies right, especially if you’re targeting the 90 per cent of users who are under 35. When stats show that 28% of users under 35 have purchased a product as a direct result of viewing it on the network in the last six months, it’s easy to understand why nailing Instagram is essential. 

In this era of purpose where visual content triumphs over written, and the need for brands to talk with consumers, rather than at them is integral, Instagram, although half a decade old, still offers a fresh approach to help brands tell visual, authentic and transportive stories.

So what’s next for the platform?

It’s taken six years for the platform to get up to speed with its competitors, namely Facebook and Twitter, with its recent introductions, and no doubt there’s stiff competition from the likes of Snapchat and, although in testing, Lifestage.

But on such a roll, and now on par on its biggest competitors, its fair game what comes next.

 

Words by Nina Sawetz, PR and communications consultant

 

As head of Editorial for Bottle, Nina leads PR strategy and comms activity for the agency’s consumer division, and has extensive experience working with brands including Goodyear, Poundland, Interflora, Golden Wonder and AXA PPP healthcare.

 

Nina also runs FuturePR.co looking at ongoing trends and the changing landscape of PR and communications.

 

Contact Nina at nina.sawetz@wearebottle.com, and via Twitter @BottleNina or @FuturePRco.

Forum Insight: 5 top tips to closing big money deals…
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There are a number of viable reasons as to why decision-makers across a broad range of sectors ultimately lose out on big money deals; many overlooking the simplest of techniques that can either make or break a business relationship. Here, we break down the fundamental tips to help you sell your services…

  1. Let the client do the talking

Inevitably, to provide the very best service for your existing and potential client base, it’s crucial to find out exactly what the client is looking for. Don’t be afraid to ask as many questions as you can to hone in on what their needs are. By asking questions, not only will this benefit your end by acquiring a better understanding; however, the client will also feel they are being productive and part of the solution.

  1. Personalisation goes a long way 

    Remember that clients say things for a reason. If they volunteer that they can’t talk right now because they are getting ready for a social event taking place on a Saturday; on your follow up call, ask them casually how the event went. Although you shouldn’t pry or send a gift, by casually asking about the event, you show that you pay attention to details. Knowing how successful the party was will prepare you on how to approach the conversation.

  1. Be enthusiastic

Your client feels passionate about what they do, and if you show that you are passionate and enthusiastic about providing them the solution they want, you’ll get the client on board. An enthusiastic attitude is sure to open many doors for you.

  1. Play it simple 

    Speak to them on their level, not yours. Keep the conversation simple and get straight to the point. If your client understands what you can do for them, they are more likely to hire you. If you try and dazzle them with industry speak, you’ll lose them, and lose the contract. You may find that if you are speaking to a perspective client on the phone, stand up. For many people, standing makes them get straight to the point. 

  2. When should we get started?

A straightforward ‘yes’ or ‘no hinges on far more than just the specific closing sentence or question, reps often struggle with wording their deal denouements. Does this sound too pushy? Too weak? Should they ask a question, or use a statement instead? But just like there’s more than one way to peel an orange, there are several strong ways to close a deal.