Nick Baggott's CRM and Digital Marketing Blog

How has brand content evolved since COVID? Key themes used by brands...

Have you communicated differently since the onset of Corona Virus? Have you become more empathetic? more customer focused? More service focused? More willing to share your brand purpose? If you haven't changed, then why not? The world has changed, customer behaviours have changed, surely your customer insights must have changed too. Branded content must continually adapt to reflect the markets and people that we serve. If you haven't changed, then you are probably in the minority.

But don't just take my word for it (although I feel I am in a good place to comment as a digital marketing consultant and trainer that probably speaks directly to over 50 marketers a week, from different countries, industries and brands). I have worked in over 50 countries and in pretty much every market sector. So, what does the data tell us?

Discover.ai has complied a fascinating report, analysing how the messages and themes communicated by brands have evolved since lockdown. This free report is entitled "100 projects since lockdown". In the report, discover.ai analyse the key messages conveyed across these campaigns and summarise the key themes and approaches taken. I would advise you to take a look for yourself. That link will take you to a page where you can register to request a free copy. As a teaser, here are some of the key findings and a sample of the ideas contained within it. 

This shows the communication themes that have increased and decreased in usage since Lockdown. You can see that brands have been keen to portray themselves as empathetic and reflect how people are feeling. 

We can then see what keywords match to these themes, to help us understand what each theme represents:

Then discover.ai has analysed each of these in more detail and clustered the messaging into 7 key themes. These themes are:

• Wanting more texture from life
• Voicing a renewed purpose
• Gaining in poise
• Peering over into the wild other
• Grasping after possibility
• Finding their spiritual home
• Riding on the waves of solidarity

For each of the themes, they have outlined what the key messages are, with examples of brands articulating them. I recommend you download the report here to understand what each one means in more detail.

From my own personal experience, working with my client contacts, I have noticed a greater emphasis on two of these in particular. That is "Voicing a renewed purpose" and "waves of solidarity". An example of waves of solidarity, could be a brand like Japanine Games, who have offered to give bricks and mortar retailers 50% of the revenue when someone buys on their brand eCommerce store, even though they are fulfilling the order directly, because they realise how important it is to their customers to have physical stores that they can visit to meet friends and discover new products, once lockdown finishes. To give you a flavour of what is in the report, here is an example:

I have been reassured at how most brands have listened and reacted to the changing needs of their audiences and adapted their messaging. This report is an excellent piece of evidence, which underlines the importance of customer insight and agility in marketing.

I would love to know how your messaging has evolved and the reaction that it has had from your audience. Please share examples in the comments section. 

Content Marketing Institute advice on influencing influencers

I have just read an excellent article from the Content Marketing Institute entitled "No celebrities allowed".

The article outlines their advice on how to build an influencer marketing programme and is full of good tips.

Here are some highlights: (I have paraphrased their excellent article)

1. Do the preliminary work - make sure you have clear objectives and how will they be measured
2. Build a timeline - treat the activity like any strategic plan that you build, set deadlines, assign ownership etc
3. Select your influencers - more on this later....
4. Invite influencers - think about what is in it for them before you contact them eg association or exposure
5. Provide assets to make amplification easier - make it as simple as possible for the influencers to share your content by providing creative assets that they can use e.g. videos, case studies or an infographic
6. Measure your results

What interested me most is their advice on selecting influencers. Their excellent check list was:

• Are they known in the industry? You need some big hitters to gain reach and credibility
• Do they have a network outside of yours? Do they reach people that you don't e.g. in another country or industry?
• Will they share your excitement? Will they be thrilled to be part of the programme and therefore more likely to share your content?
• Do they represent your audience? Will your customers respect them?
• Have you had success with that influencer? Have they participated in a positive way with your brand in the past?

I would add to that:

• Do they share your brand values? Are they a good fit with your image?
• Are they associated with your competitors? Can you build an exclusive partnership with them?
• Are they trusted? Do they do what they say they will do and not get involved in anything that may cause issues for your brand? Do they declare when a post is sponsored or in partnership with a brand?
• Do they influence other influencers? Could their involvement start a viral reaction?

Influencer marketing is crucial to social media success. Influencers can massively increase reach and credibility. You need to be sure what you want from them and what you can offer in return. If you want to know where to find influencers, a good tool to help you is followerwonk. This tool allows you to see who the most influential people are that are following your twitter account. You can actually use it for any Twitter account, so why not see who the influencer influences before you start by putting potential influencers into the tool too?

I am always open to suggestions to partnerships, so if you would like to be an influencer for me, or if you would like me to be an influencer for you, please get in touch. You can reply to this post or check me out and look up my contact details at my Navigate Consulting web site. 

Practical SEO Advice

I have just read an excellent article on SEO by SEMrush 

It provides practical and detailed advice on SEO. It is simple to understand,technical where needed and clear. SEMrush have some excellent tools to help you to analyse how your web site (or a competitor's site) is performing. This can be really useful as Google Analytics will only work on your own site and you need your technical team to insert the GA codes on pages. 

I have cut and pasted the below infographic from SEMrush's excellent article. 

For me, I always start by getting my clients to think about Keyword Strategy first. Google Trends and the Google Adword Keyword tool are great free resources to get you started with planning a keyword strategy. Think about whether you are focusing on topical v evergreen content, as evergreen may work better over the long term, but topical content gets you media coverage and social media shares. This is an example of evergreen content (although SEO ranking factors do change from time to time). Also, have a think about whether a long tail strategy is best for you, focusing on those keywords that have lower search volumes, but convert more effectively (for example rather than a generic term like "Training courses", a long tail phrase could be "SEO training for pharmaceutical industry marketers".

I also advise clients to look closely at the internal links on your site (matching them to your keyword strategy, rather than using navigational phrases like "click here" or "download now". There is often a pay off between your SEO and User Experience strategy and the use of internal links is a great example of that. 

 

Setting objectives for Content Marketing and Social Media

I have recently been reading an excellent blog post from Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute. 

The article is entitled B2C Marketers need to give Content Marketing Time.

In the article, it outlines some of the key challenges of content marketing, in particular that it can take a year or so for a content strategy to bare fruit. You may not have the luxury of time in the constant pursuit of fast results and quarterly planning, but if you have the opportunity to plan longer term, then a content strategy is absolutely recommended by me. In B2B marketing we normally talk about the need to create thought leadership content and also to use content and social media to keep the potential customer informed and the lead warm throughout the often longer purchase process.

In B2C we may focus less on thought leadership and more on customer experience. Whether you are B2B or B2C it is crucial that you don't start to develop a plan until you have identified and segmented your target audience and of course set clear objectives for each group. I must have seen at least 5 different studies over the years where marketers have been asked to articulate what their key objectives are for social media, content marketing or digital comms and each one has been consistent. Those objectives can be broken down into 3 groups:

1) Sales related objectives

2) Customer engagement objectives

3) brand perception objectives (sometimes we combine these with the engagement objectives)

Here is a chart from the CMI article that shows from their research what the key objectives are for B2C content marketing:

You can see how this research fits into my 3 categories:

Lead generation and sales fit into the sales related objectives, brand awareness fits into brand and engagement and building an audience fit into engagement. Loyalty is a complex objective - is it about repeat purchase (sales) or advocacy (engagement)? 

I like to keep objectives simple and typically focus on these 3 groups of objectives.

To measure engagement, you need a model to track against. I use the 4 stages from my engagement model - acquire, participate, engage and share. Some models like RACE (Reach, act, convert, engage) include a sales element (convert in this case), but I prefer to keep the sales measurement separate, so that you can isolate campaigns or customers who are engaged but not buying or buying your product but not engaged with your marketing comms. 

So, to use my engagement model, you simply need to track the behaviours of your audience against the 4 steps:

Acquire their attention - effectively a measure of reach - how many people have seen the content

Participate - effectively how many people who saw it responded and visited your owned media e.g your web site

Engage - how many people have given you permission to engage e.g. opted in to receive your emails or chose to follow you on Twitter, as well as then measuring how many people went on to open the email or interact with your tweets.

Share - how many people shared your content with others e.g. how many retweets or emails forwarded on (and if you can what was the reach of this sharing. If your strategy is working, this act of sharing becomes part of the acquire process as new users are able to find your content through influential readers sharing your content with their networks.

So, what objectives do you set for content marketing, and how do you measure against them?

How to improve your Influencer Marketing

Influencing the Influencers - probably the most important phrase in digital marketing.

Whether you are a small business trying to influence the one or two key influencers in a niche business (journalists, bloggers, advisers) or whether you are a global brand trying to reach a huge audience through celebrities or a new category of celebrities - YouTubers, then this should be a key part of your digital strategy.

Search Engine Watch have written an excellent article on How Influencer Marketing benefits your SEO strategy. This article outlines how influencer marketing will help to develop links to your web site, which drives SEO as well as how it builds visibility, engagement and keeps content updated and fresh. I would 100% agree with their views on this. The chart below is from that article and outlines the power of story telling as part of your content strategy.

Story telling is crucial. People will remember and empathise so much more if you can tell a compelling story in your content. How can you humanise the message. Google Fibre wanted to emphasise the speed of their cabling. Nick's First Pitch is the dramatic story of how Google revolutionized Nick Le Grand's life through technology. 

Once you have your message, now you need to focus on finding influencers. I use a free tool called Followerwonk to help me to find influencers. Try putting your Twitter account into the tool to see who is the most influential follower you have. What I love about the tool is that you can put any Twitter account into it (even if it is not your account) to see who their influential followers are. You have to pay if the account your analysing is large. Remember, that is you are influencing a younger, more digitally savvy audience, then the key influencers will be YouTubers, Bloggers and Gamers. They may well not be traditional media celebrities. 

Finally, think about how to approach the influencers. What is in it for them? They are getting more media savvy and more commercially minded all the time. Do you need to pay them? Can you help them to reach a wider audience? Can you provide them with credibility or unique content? Remember, they are trying hard to develop unique content that their audience wants to engage with too. 

And let your desire for control of the message go a little too. Influencers will write their content in their style. The more editorial control you want, the less desirable your news is for them to share. The more corporate the feel, the less engaging and trustworthy it will be to the audience too. 

If you have any great stories of influencer marketing, I'd love to hear them...

Dealing with Negative Social Media Comments and Posts

Reputation risk is a common barrier for brands who are considering building their social media plan. These are the questions that clients often ask me:

- Will engaging in social media encourage people to say negative things about me?

- How will I respond to negative comments?

- How long do I have to respond?

- What happens if I ignore them?

In this post, I'll summarize the advice I typically give to clients who are worried about their online reputation. Whilst I was planning this post, I also had a look around for external references and would recommend reading the excellent www.reputationmanagement.com if you want further advice. Useful articles include:

• How to remove content from Google
• SEO for Reputation Management

So, here are my top tips for dealing with comments in social media:

1) Make sure that you have a social media policy. Have a clear policy on use of social media by your staff and make sure that it is in your employment contracts. Typically, organisations state whether employees can use personal devices at work and whether they can look at social media sites when they are  working, but, your policy needs to go further than that. Clearly state what they can and cannot say about their work in their personal social accounts. Your confidentiality clauses will cover you against them giving away company secrets and they are also governed by laws on libel and slander. Make sure you make it clear if you have any other restrictions.

2) Allow your staff to use social media at work! It is hard to police anyway, but don't stop them using social media. You should encourage them. Only by regular use will they get used to the conventions and nuances of social media use. The best way to learn is to expose yourself to what others are doing. Encourage your team to follow industry experts, journalists, competitors and customers on social media (particularly Twitter) as there is no better way of them staying up to date with what is happening in your industry.

3) Build a social media response policy for your social media teams. Who is allowed to respond to what type of comment or post? When do they escalate up to more senior management? How quickly are they expected to respond? What happens when they see a tweet late at night and feel like they should respond? The answers to these questions make up my next tips!

4) Have a defined list of approved social media responders. They should be trained and briefed on your policies. The day to day management can be done by a social media executive in your comms team or a customer services manager, but make sure they know who they refer issues up to if they are more serious. You also need an approved list of social media creators / authors too, for your pro-active posts.

5) To help your social media team decide when to escalate an issue to more senior management, have a process for identifying different levels of incident. Here is an example of a 5 step incident level categorization. Your social media team can deal with levels 1 & 2, but they may need to refer incidents from level 3 up to a more senior member of the team.

6) If you do receive a negative comment, then here are some simple steps to help you to decide how to respond:

• Respond by acknowledging the incident straight away, but don't admit blame 
• Investigate whether their complaint is true and genuine
• Try to take all conversations off line. Do not have a debate in a public forum, use private messaging on Twitter or Facebook Messenger to discuss comments with individuals and / or encourage them to call or email you.
• Once the issue is resolved, then if you feel it is necessary, put a public response onto the comment, so others can see it has been dealt with e.g. "Thank you for your comment, I hope that you are satisfied now that we have spoken to you directly". Hopefully, they will reply and say thank you, which will make you look caring and professional to other followers.
• Don't be afraid to invite negative posters to make suggestions on how the problem could be solved or how service could be improved, but do this in a private channel and share their ideas if you think they are helpful to others.
• Respond as quickly as possible as waiting will invite further negative comments, but do not respond until you have a solution or can help. Most accounts are manned during office hours, so say on your user profile which hours comments will be responded to and don't try to respond late at night when you are away from work.
• Ignoring negative comments is not a good idea. It tends to make the poster more determined to get their point across and escalate it in other forums, so try to respond to everyone as quickly as you can within working hours. 

7) Invest in a social media sentiment tracking tool - there are some free tools like www.socialmention.com and some better premium services like Sysomos and Radian6. Reputation Management have their tools too. If you have the budget for the premium tools, you will get more accurate sentiment analysis, but beware, they are certainly not perfect at the sentiment analysis, so you'll need some manual checking too.

I hope this has been helpful. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts too. Or if you'd like me to talk to your business about developing your policy or training your staff, then i'd be delighted to help.

Good article about blogging and visual content

I have just read a well written blog post entitled "How to make complete strangers fall in love with your blog" from Jeff Bullas where he provides some great tips for writing blogs. 

The article is actually written by a guest writer - Jawad Khan

He talks about the importance of making a strong first impression, offering free downloads and social proof. But the graphic that struck me as most interesting was this chart about the importance of visual content:

So, in the spirit of the post. I have included Jawad's graphic above.

Why do we share in social media? What are our motivations?

Gerry Moran (@GerryMoran) shared this research from 12,000 adults in USA, UK, France, Japan and Australia where people were asked "When you share content, what are your motivations". There are many reasons listed, but I guess they can be grouped into some wider motivations:

• To entertain
• To inform
• To help
• To boost my reputation
• To get advice

This is of course, claimed data, which has its limitations. I would love to see a study analyzing what people have actually shared on say Facebook, Twitter and Linked In to see how it differs. If anyone has seen this type of research, please let me know!

From my perspective, I share to entertain, help others and build my personal reputation. I use Facebook for non-business personal interests, so are more likely to share content from charities or my sporting hobbies, whereas I use Linked In and especially Twitter for business, so tend to share helpful business content that will boost my reputation as an expert thought leader. I have however, realized that a little personal sharing on Twitter does help my personal business brand (e.g. sharing pictures of places I travel to through work or famous people I meet as i travel).

Do you have any rules or guidelines on what you share and in which channel?

 

Instagram Engagement stats from Hootsuite

I have just read a really interesting blog post from @Hootsuite, where they have discussed a long list of Instagram stats.

Here are some edited highlights, click on the link above to go to the full article:

- Posts with images get 38% more likes (so I have used their image below!)

- Ad recall on Instagram is  2.9 x higher than Nielsen’s online advertising average

- Posts tagged with a location get 79% more engagement

- Posts that mention another user’s handle get 56% more engagement

- Posts with # get 12.6% more engagement

The screen shot below is a tweet from Gloucester Rugby. See how they have tagged the Barbarians official account and also used two hash tags (one for their club #cherry&whites and one for the match #GLOSvBaas).

 

It is not rocket science but these types of tactics work. They make it easier to share and find posts.

 

 

ROPO - How we research online before we buy

I saw two different tweets this week, each with statistics showing how important an integrated content plan is to the way we communicate:

The first is from @gerrymoran

This shows how important it is to create content that our colleagues and independent analysts will value and share. It shows how we trust this shared content more than vendors' web sites and why pull campaigns tend to work better than old style pull campaigns. Rather than advertising to try to drive new prospects to your web site, focus on creating content that people will share, which will reach buyers when they are considering what and when to buy.

The second is from Simply Measured 

This shows the power of pull marketing too and how integration is key. Bloggers realise that if they want traffic, then integrating with social is key (you may notice that I tweeted a link to this blog post!) @njbaggott. Also, it shows the importance of SEO. AS Google's algorithms change, content is becoming more important, but particularly the social sharing elements that generate external links. 

So in summary, create valuable content that people will want to share (you can share this by clicking on any of the icons at the end of the post), promote it in your social channels and optimise for SEO.