Twitter is alight with #bloggerblackmail tweets today as @angesdesucre, a bakery in the UK, goes toe to toe with a food blogger following a poor review.
After reading both sides of the story, it’s clear that there were different expectations on both sides about what to expect from the review experience.
It’s an issue which has now exploded, causing the hashtag to become one of the top trending topics in the UK.
Your blog should be kept fresh, interesting and original. It may sound simple, but when you’re trying to produce regular blog posts for your business blog, it can be a struggle to continually come up with content ideas which tick all of these boxes. It’s easy to fall into the trap of churning out the same type of content over and over, or regurgitating the same tips or advice in a different way.
Yes, refreshing or repurposing your content is a great way to get more out of it, but you need to keep coming up with new ideas if your business blog is going to continue to be interesting and relevant to your readers and potential customers. But with business owners and marketers often struggling to find time to manage everything, creativity and originality can be stifled. So here’s a few tips to help you generate more content ideas for your blog.
Often, businesses delve into the world of digital marketing with little or no strategy in place. They may set up a Facebook Page, dabble in Google Adwords, or set up a blog. Maybe it’s just to try it out, maybe they feel pressured to be there because they’ve heard it’s the ‘must have thing’ for businesses these days, they’ve seen it work for their competitors, or perhaps it’s just been on the ‘to do’ list for far too long. Whatever the reason, they’ve decided to take the plunge.
They may find some success, but feel a little uncertain about what’s really working for them, and why. All to often, I’ll hear “yes, we tried Twitter / Facebook / email, etc. It didn’t work for us.” But that very platform they tried may be one which could give them a great return if they were using it correctly, and as part of an overall digital strategy.
So how do you go about developing a digital marketing strategy? You may be tempted to start by looking at the individual building blocks, such as social media, search engine optimisation, email or advertising. For me, you need to start with the foundations, and then build from there. You wouldn’t build your house without strong foundations, and likewise, you should take the time to construct the foundations for your online presence in order to ensure your digital strategy is effective and built to last.
There’s a lot of groundwork to be done when developing a strategy, but it really boils down to four key components:
The foundations must start with your customer. In fact, everything you do should be rooted in an understanding of the wants and needs of your target market. A customer-centric digital strategy is one which will stand the test of time. We’re not just talking about categorising your customers by age group, gender or location. Yes, you’ll need to know the basic demographics, but if you’re going to build an online presence which really connects with your desired customers, you’ll need to delve much deeper than this.
You need to really understand your target customers, their behaviour, what makes them tick, what matters to them, what are the purchase drivers, the influences and influencers.
Do you know what your ideal customers are doing online? A few examples of the questions you should be asking yourself are:
Your customers aren’t just numbers. They’re real people. So you should view them and treat them as such. Building a portrait of your key customers can help with this, and is another way of helping you understand them better. These pen portraits will help you to visualise and connect with your customers, as you’ll see them as real individuals with real lives, which you want to be part of.
Chris Garrett gives us a list of useful questions to help build a pen portrait in this article. You’ll notice he thinks about who your customers aren’t as well as who they are. As we’re talking about your digital strategy here, I’d add in a few questions about their online behaviour, and you should include questions which are relevant to your industry.
You’ll need to do your research to get the right answers, and once you have these, use them to build a story of who your customers are. I’d suggest combining this with a visual representation of your customer, like a mood board.
Source: http://thestyle.ie/?p=1429
Pen Portrait of the ideal customer for a craft jeweller
You’ll have different types of customers, with different needs. They’ll need to be catered for in different ways, so you need to define who they are. Categorising your customers into groups with common traits will allow you to build a strategy which looks after all of them.
For example, the Northern Ireland Tourist Board have segmented their customers in this way, and grouped them into 4 segments. They’ve built a picture of each of the segments and related this back to the industry they’re in so they can better connect with each of their target markets:
They’ve published more details about their target markets and different segments in their toolkit for the NI tourism industry.
Knowing your competitors will better position you to compete with them. Know who they are, where they are and what they’re doing.
Look at things like their pricing, service offering, press coverage, their brand positioning, their typical customers, their marketing campaigns, their online presence, etc.
Ask yourself where the gaps are, or how you can differentiate your business from those around you. Understanding your unique selling point (USP) will allow you to create campaigns and offerings which stand out in a noisy online environment. For example, are you faster, cheaper, more ethical, more convenient, more reliable? Do you have a better product, or better service?
The Chartered Institute of Marketing have published this useful example which can help to simplify the process of identifying your USP:
Source: http://www.cim.co.uk/files/usp.pdf
Just ensure that what makes you different resonates with the wants, needs and behaviour of your desired customers. Otherwise, it simply won’t work.
And remember, the internet allows you to target customers far beyond your local area. There are no geographical boundaries online. The downside of this is that you’ll have many more competitors, targeting your customers and your region. So think beyond those businesses you’ve been competing with for years in your locale.
When I mention brand to some businesses, they immediately think about their name and their logo. But a brand is so much more than this. It’s your reputation, your values, your culture, your vision, your personality…it’s who you are and what you do.
As Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said,
“Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
I like this definition because it highlights the fact that your brand is in the hands of others. You can’t dictate what people think, say or feel about you, but you can make damn sure you influence it.
To do this, you’ve got to ensure your brand isn’t just an empty promise. It’s got to be part of your business’ D.N.A.
Whatever you stand for, whatever your personality and tone, whatever your promise, this should be evident at every touch point. It should be apparent in everything you do, without the need to tell people. It should be consistent over time, and it should involve every person in your business.
This is how you’ll build a brand.
Defining what that brand is involves understanding your customers, as who you are should connect with what they need and want.
Take the time to identify your brand values and benefits, both tangible and emotional. Think about your image and personality. What are the perceptions that people have of you, and do they match what you believe your brand is, or what you want it to be? If there’s a disconnect between what people are thinking and saying about your brand, and what you want them to think and say, then you’re not fulfilling your brand promise, so you’ve got some work to do to make your brand come to life.
Your brand should have an emotional connection with your customers. Decisions are driven by, or influenced by emotional drivers. So once you know what these emotional drivers are, you’ll need to figure out how your brand can harness this. This connection should form your brand essence.
Your brand essence is defined as “the single most compelling thing we can say about the brand that differentiates it from competitor brands as perceived by the consumer. The most powerful brand essences are rooted in a fundamental consumer need.” (Brand Focus)
If you can crack this, and identify a brand essence which will differentiate you, whilst tapping into your customer’s needs, you’ll have a strong foundation to build on.
Think about some of the biggest brands in the world and how they connect emotionally with their customers…
I like the way Simon Sinek speaks about connecting your brand with your customers in his Ted Talk. Look at how he highlights Apple as an example of how to start with “why”, because
“people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”
You can have a look at the full talk here.
So, with your customer insights, competitor intelligence and brand in place, you can continually develop the right propositions for your customers. Without the right products, service offering, promotions and packages, everything else will be futile.
You now know who your target customers are, and their needs and wants. You know what drives them to buy your products, or what problems they have which you can solve.
You know what your competitors are offering, and what you can do differently.
You know who you are, and how you want to be represented. You know how to emotionally connect with your customers.
Put all of this into developing new products, offers and packages for your target customers. How can you learn from and use the insights you’ve gained, and be innovative in meeting the desires of your customers?
Building your digital marketing strategy starts with strong foundations.
In summary, these foundations are:
The truth is, these foundations are not just going to make your digital strategy more successful, but your entire business. What I’ve covered here is not exclusive to online.
With strong foundations, you can now build a more effective strategy, with the digital building blocks such as social media, SEO, online advertising and content marketing.
Without these foundations, you’ll be building on shaky ground and risking the success of all the work you do online, so take the time to get this right. If you don’t have the skills to develop your strategy in house, bring in people who do. Investing energy and resources in this area will be invaluable for your business in the long term.
Here’s an infographic summary to keep or share!
It may seem like a rural paradise, with nothing but lush green fields and stretches of stunning waterways, but if it’s good enough for the world leaders who descended on this little county for the G8 Summit, it’s good enough for Ireland’s digital marketing elite. That was certainly the case last week when Fermanagh played host to the first digital marketing conference in the North West, #DigiDayWest.
The event attracted some of the country’s most infamous digital speakers, with the Tweeting Goddess, Samantha Kelly proving to be the biggest draw. Samantha rounded off a day packed with digital marketing advice with tales of her own journey to goddess stature and a few golden nuggets of Twitter advice. Continue reading
Twitter is a notoriously unforgiving landscape for mistakes, errors of judgement, or downright stupidity – those 140 character or less faux pas we’ve come to know as the #TwitterFail. You tweet at your own risk, and when you get it wrong you better hope nobody’s watching, because when the masses latch on to a Twitter gaffe, you could be in for a bumpy ride.
It’s not just the retaliation you may face on Twitter itself; every news organisation from the BBC to CNN, the Guardian to the New York Times have run stories featuring Twitter fails, so what happens on Twitter certainly doesn’t stay on Twitter.
2014 has given us a plethora of Twitter fails to laugh at, cringe over and vent our Twitter rage. From celebrities to big brands, law enforcers to charities, small businesses to the media… here’s a look back at the best (or is that the worst?) Twitter fails of 2014.
Manchester United’s on-field woes are not the only problems they’re having at the minute. They’ve been subject to a torrent of abuse on Twitter this week, and most of it seems to be from their own fans.
The source of the abuse was a tweet comparing the United Manager, Louis Van Gaal, with the Chelsea boss, José Mourinho. Sounds like a reasonable subject to tweet about given that the teams are due to clash on the pitch this weekend. The problem was the comparison itself. It wasn’t about the pair’s managerial excellence, stats or achievements, nor about their management style, their history or even their preferred on-pitch formation. The chosen subject for comparison was Google searches. Yes, who was the most searched for of the two managers on Google?
Blogging for business is still met with quite a bit of scepticism in some circles. It can be a challenge to convince the hardline disbelievers that blogging can be a very worthwhile part of their marketing and it shouldn’t be ignored. The fact is, as with so many sceptics, people want proof. Rather than giving a few examples of individual businesses that have achieved great success from their blogging, I’ve collected data and statistics about business blogging from a host of sources, studies and research.
I’ve kept the sceptics in mind and weeded out a lot of the more generic blogging stats you find online. This post is focusing solely on the ‘money stats’. The ones I believe should convince the doubters that blogging really can work for your business. Continue reading
Dealing with criticism online can be a minefield, and it can quickly escalate into a PR nightmare if mishandled as many big brands have discovered, such as this example of a poorly handled Twitter experience by RTE.
But I recently came across an example of one business owner who took a seemingly very high risk approach to a negative review on TripAdvisor. Of course, TripAdvisor reviews can do serious damage to businesses in the hospitality industry, and many struggle to deal with negativity – whether that’s on TripAdvisor, Facebook, Twitter or anywhere else online.
Belmore Court & Motel have an excellent rating on TripAdvisor, so when they received a negative review they could have dealt with it in a number of ways – let it go and hope it’ll be buried quickly, respond at source, try to take it offline and offer a resolution…
Instead, they took action in a way you wouldn’t expect.
Twitter brings with it a wealth of opportunities for businesses to connect with their customers and potential customers, generate sales leads, network, build relationships, create awareness and ultimately drive sales. If used correctly, Twitter can be one of the most valuable additions to your business marketing armoury. Use it wrong though, and you could have the reverse effect. You can alienate the very people you want to woo, lose credibility, gain enemies rather than brand advocates, and those potential customers could be lost as prospects forever, all in 140 characters.
There’s a host of Twitter tips and advice we could cover, some of which you can find in this previous list of Twitter dos and don’ts, but this time I want to focus on just one thing. My greatest pet hate about Twitter. It’s automated, spammy tweets.
For the record, I’m not necessarily opposed to using tools to automate some of your social media updates. It can be a useful time saving method of updating your accounts when used well. My problem is quite simple. I don’t want to receive DMs and tweets which are clearly only coming my way based on the fact that I’ve followed you, or I’ve tweeted using a particular keyword. Tweets and messages that are not tailored to me, that show me you haven’t even looked at my profile or know anything about me or my business. Tweets that are just spam. And I’d bet my house that your potential customers don’t either. Continue reading
I’ve long been a silent admirer of the marketing antics of Paddy Power, the Irish bookmaker, but I feel it’s time to come out of the closet and openly declare my huge Twitter crush on @PaddyPower.
The seemingly ‘don’t give a shit’ approach is proving to be a powerful marketing strategy, but the truth is, their strategy is to give their customers and potential customers what they want – and that means they do give a shit!
They know their market, and rather than trying the hard sell approach, they have earned their fans’ loyalty. Through banter, controversy, engagement, humour, and originality, they have won the hearts of the Twitter masses. Not for the prudish or easily offended, Paddy’s tweets have pushed the boundaries and at times have received a negative backlash. Is that bad? Hell no! It’s just what they want! More attention, more controversy, more Twitter Power!
From horsemeat to Pistorius, the World Cup to the Pope – nothing is sacred.
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