E-Commerce is one of the world’s most lucrative industries. More than ever, businesses need to have an online presence if they want to keep their customers loyal to their products, services and brand. COVID-19 has only accelerated this need for organisations to get digital, put their product data online and offer a completely virtual service.

Of course, it’s easier said than done whether you’re a multi-national organisation or part of a smaller, specialised industry. Your main challenge is getting your product data from its source to your end user, quickly and accurately. And when your end user has the ability to interact with your product data in multiple ways, across any number of different platforms, that challenge grows in complexity.

So how do you manage this data flow? Having an effective Product Information Management tool (PIM) is key.

What is a PIM? And why do I need one?

A PIM centralises your product data information and assets, including product specification data and any associated media assets, before distributing that data to multiple sources. Put simply, a PIM ensures your data flow is as efficient as possible.

In manufacturing, for example, it’s typical for product data to originate from older, legacy systems, where it’s input at the factory during the production stage. Then, the marketing teams responsible for selling these products have the daunting task of translating this data – often manually – in order to get it online. This process then often requires manual intervention again, to keep it up to date.

Processing the data manually in this way creates a disconnect between the marketing data and the product datathey’re never in sync with one another. And that leaves room for error.

No more errors in transmission

According to Ventana Research, 46% of companies that don’t have one single source of product information, and instead, use Excel spreadsheets to manage product data.

This can be a serious problem. 47% of the above companies admit they often find product-related errors and almost 20% of those errors have a major detrimental impact on sales performance. PIM is the solution.

Your customers interact with your data on many different devices, through their desktop, mobiles, or even via their smart speaker. So, having an application with a modern Application Programming Interface (API) becomes essential in your data workflow.

By using a RESTful API your product data can be shared easily, as it’s exposed in a predictable, interactive format.

Breaking down. Rebuilding stronger.

But not all organisations can commit the time, resource or budget to completely overhaul their systems, end-to-end, all the way to the factory level. Instead, there are other options.

To alleviate problems caused by disparate, legacy data, you can break the process down into smaller, more manageable applications. This is known as having a microservices architectureMicroservices are dedicated applications which focus on one dedicated function: in this case, in consuming your legacy data, transforming it into an end-user friendly format, then injecting that data into a PIM.

This approach ensures your original base data is kept up to date, and maintains data availability even if there’s a breakdown in one part of the workflow or chain.

Using cloud services, such as AWS, we can leverage tools like SQS and Lambda to support a decoupled architecture. Not only does decoupled microservices architecture prevent potential data loss, and preserve service in the event of application breakdown, it improves performance by offloading queue management and data flow into the Cloud.

A final but essential consideration, no matter what systems and applications you use: data security.

Experimental product data can be incredibly sensitive, so keeping it secure at both the point of origin and in-transit is important, as is ensuring pre-production data doesn’t accidentally end up publicly viewable. A PIM provides protection by implementing strict workflows for your data.

Finding unique solutions for exceptional businesses

There are many applications and frameworks out there specifically designed as PIMs, and they range in price depending on the supplier and the size of your product data.

Likewise, every business has different workflows and product data structures. Once you include a legacy data issue you’re having, it’s rare that any off-the-shelf-solution will meet your requirements exactly. A custom solution is often the way forward. And this is where using a flexible framework, such as Drupal, has distinct advantages.

Drupal is an enterprise-level content framework with many applications. Traditionally it’s a content management system, but its latest version is much more than that.

Drupal has a powerful entity framework, allowing you to model almost any data. Its strong community – made up of real people struggling with the same challenges as you are – has developed countless modules and plug-ins to enhance functionality.

And what’s more, since Drupal is open source, there are no licence fees or user usage limits. So every penny of your investment goes where you need it: into solving your specific workflow and data modelling challenges.

No matter how large or technical your datasets, nor how specialised your business is, you deserve to get the most from your digital applications.

At Proctors, our team of technology experts have been solving problems for specialist businesses across the globe: from tech behemoths like Panasonic, to niche industry start-ups. When it comes to talking data, you’ll want to talk to Proctors.

We’re more than happy to put our heads together with yours and discover the best solution for your business.

Futureheads is a leading tech recruitment business working to build teams for some of the UK’s most exciting tech-led businesses. Futureheads engaged Bristol-based comms agency, Yours Sincerely, to act as their external marketing team, with the aim to take their marketing to the next level, re-engage with their existing users and bring the Futureheads brand to a whole new audience.

Working directly with the Board and Senior Leadership Team, Yours Sincerely initially worked with Futureheads to develop a detailed marketing strategy. This strategy built on their existing plans, whilst also activating new ways of working to supercharge marketing efforts. What’s more, and crucially in terms of delivery, this strategy was built specifically to deliver against the wider business’s commercial objectives.

Following this, a detailed channel plan was built and YS began delivering against this, acting as Futureheads marketing team. Tactics implemented spanned the digital spectrum, including everything from content marketing, email, paid search and social, to PR, digital events and more.

Within 12 months of working together, Yours Sincerely had:

Co-founder of Futureheads, Be Kaler Pilgrim, commented:

“We chose to work with YS as they really understand our business, our wider strategy goals, and what we are trying to achieve. Within the first three months we saw our social KPIs jump more than our total goal for the previous year, and have continued to see similar successes across a number of channels. As the business landscape has changed, they’ve adapted with us, continuing to add value and their expertise. We very much see the team at YS as part of the Futureheads team and would recommend them to anyone.”

If you are looking to supercharge your marketing strategy this year, Yours Sincerely would love to help.

Get in touch. 

Does your blog need a strategy? Yes! I write blogs for businesses, but whether you have a business blog or a personal blog, it needs a strategy.

I come from a marketing background and have worked for full-service agencies for my entire 20-year career.  I’ve worked with businesses on a complete range of communications, from feature articles in trade publications to LinkedIn profile management, from entire suites of marketing materials to direct e-mail or postal campaigns. Working across so many channels it’s vital to have a coherent communications strategy that ties everything together. Messages need to be tailored to each channel, but all channels need to be portraying the same consistent company image. The same theory applies to blogging.

Consistency is key

Business blogs need an overriding strategy to ensure the messaging throughout remains consistent and on target. That’s not to say all blogs are saying the same thing, but while they all need to work by themselves as standalone posts, they also need to work as a series, for visitors who land on your blog, like what they see and want to find out more.

Here are some of my top tips for creating a strategy for your blog:

  1. What are your key messages – what are the key points you would like to get across to readers that land on your blog? Of course, each blog will be on a slightly different topic, but there should be an overriding message through them all. For example, do you want them to know that you’re a creative, reliable marketing agency? Or a professional but friendly yoga studio? When you think about your key messages, think about what makes you different.
  2. Who are you talking to? – The next thing to consider is who your blog is aimed at. No blog post, or any other piece of writing for that matter, will appeal to everyone because all readers will have their own preconceptions, their own views and their own ideas. However, if you are trying to sell a home improvement product for example, you know your blog needs to be aimed at homeowners and depending on the product, possibly homeowners with a certain level of disposable income. You will always deal with people outside of this core, but when it comes to writing your business blog, it’s useful to imaging you are writing for your average or ideal customer.
  3. Plan, plan, plan! – You may or may not be a planner by nature, but when it comes to blogging, as with any other communications medium, it’s important to plan out your content. If you have plenty to say you might think it’s easy enough to simply sit down and write. However, consider how balanced your content will be. A good blog for example should have a mix of personal posts focussing on people, behind the scenes messages and product posts, and it’s good to mix them up to keep things interesting. The risk with simply sitting down and writing is that you’ll end up front loading your blog with product information and no personality, or perhaps the opposite, depending on where your comfort zone lies. A simple list of content ideas set out in a month by month plan, is a great way to ensure a balanced business blog.
  4. Measure – Once you have set your blog strategy and you’re happily following your planned schedule like a well-oiled machine, don’t relax too much. Once the content is rolling out, be sure to measure its success. Are some posts getting a lot more views or engagement than others? If so, is it possible to add in any more of the posts people like? Whether you do it via stats or talking to your readers on a regular basis, stay in touch with what your target blog audience want to see on your blog. After all, its them you should be writing for, not yourself.
  5. Keep an eye on the competition – I’ve put this one at the end because I’m a big believer you should always focus your efforts inwards. I have seen first-hand the difference between companies that are focussed on the competition and companies that are focussed on providing the best customer experience. The latter are often more respected in their industries and have more loyal customers. However, there is nothing wrong with keeping an eye on your competitors to see what they are up to and what they’re talking about. Perhaps they are raising an issue you should be involved with, or perhaps they have taken an angle on a subject that you need to take issue with. Either way, it’s another important way of staying on top of current issues to feed into your overall blogging strategy.

Business blogs with a clear strategy not only run more smoothly, but also garner better results. Do you already have a blogging strategy in place and if so, how closely do you stick to it blog by blog?

Blogging for business is a hugely valuable tool – here are what I consider to be the top 5 benefits. Let me know if you agree.

  1. Boosts SEO – with an increasing number of people vying for attention online as more businesses turn to online sales to survive the pandemic, it is even more important to rank highly in those internet search engines. A constant stream of fresh content on your website is more likely to get your business noticed and help it stand out from the competition.
  2. Generates leads AND conversions – a business blog generates leads by encouraging more people to visit your site on a regular basis. But it is useful in the next stage too – by offering useful advice it can encourage people to buy from you. People want to work with people they trust (read more) and if you have a whole host of useful information on your site, it builds trust and encourages people to take the next step and place an order.
  3. Generates content for social media – yes it needs to be edited to suit each channel, but blogs can help generate content for your LinkedIn profile, Instagram, Facebook and even Twitter. Often simply the headline or first couple of sentences can be quickly adapted to create content for Twitter and more often than not, you can create numerous tweets from one blog by selecting various facts and useful information and posting them as individual tweets. Generating content for social media is in itself a time-consuming task, so being able to draw on original content from another source unique to your business is a huge help.
  4. Positions your brand – a business blog should be an integral part of your overall marketing strategy. It should reflect your brand beliefs and values, just as any other part of your marketing communications does. It should let visitors to your site know what kind of company you are and how you can help them. Simply by having a blog with free tips and advice, visitors will assume a level of authority and in turn be far more likely to want to build a relationship with you.
  5. Free marketing – OK, so maintaining a business blog isn’t free, it’s either an investment in your time and/or resources, or it costs money to outsource to a dedicated blog writer. However, generating a regular blog provides an ongoing opportunity for others to share your content. Think about it, if one blog post is shared by just 5 people and they each have 100 followers, that’s 500 more people that have seen your brand than would have otherwise. Hopefully more people will share and each person that does will have more followers, so the opportunity for this additional free marketing is huge.

It’s not easy to build and maintain a business blog, it takes time and effort either from your in-house resources or external support, but with these benefits and more, it is a worthwhile investment.

 

Once you’ve taken the important step to set up a blog on your company website, it’s important to keep it up to date to maximise its benefits. But it’s not always easy to think of things to say. Here are my top tips for generating new content for your business blog.

 

  1. Talk to your customers – the more feedback you can get from your customers about their experiences, good and bad, the more food for thought you’ll have for your blog. You don’t need to name them, but for example if they tell you that all other suppliers have been slow to respond to them and your team communicates really well, you could do a blog on the importance of good communication.
  2. Subscriptions – in my experience, there is an online newsletter for just about everything these days! Whether it’s a news and current affairs update, an industry specific round-up or a bulletin about your personal hobbies, reading new content on a variety of topics can help to spark new ideas.
  3. Customer case studies – your blog should give readers a rounded overview of your company and why you’re different from your competition. They should reflect your personality as a business and what better way to do this than by giving your customers the air time to talk about their experiences of you. You can do this by letting them write their own if they have time, or by doing a 5 minute interview over the phone with them so you can write it for them. Getting their approval before it goes live, of course.
  4. Research – sometimes we have an idea of what we want to say, but we don’t have the facts to back it up. Or we want to ground our thoughts in some real statistics. A session of online research can help you gather all the information you need. Sometimes it can take a bit longer, but often you can find a useful snippet in no time and the result is a more interesting and useful blog.
  5. Guest writers – some blogs you may have seen will invite guest writers to feature on their blog. This gives your readers a slightly different experience with a fresh view and a new voice. Also, other people will always be able to think of new things to say based on their own experiences.

 

Of course, thinking of what to say is only half of the battle. Then you need to find the time to put pen to paper or more likely fingers to keys! If you know just what to say and you need help writing it, or maybe you need help coming up with some of the ideas too – maybe an external blog writer can help?

There is a lot going on in the world right now – a pandemic, Brexit, and a lot of global uncertainty, but there are also a lot of opportunities.

Global trade is rebounding far quicker than it did after the 2008 financial crisis. Shipping volumes returned to levels in half the time that took to reach post-Lehman. Central banks are continuing to steam ahead with unprecedented financial support packages, driving some global stock markets to record gains.

Most importantly, different countries will recover from this period at different speeds. Which ones will recover faster? Which markets show the opportunity most suited to your expansion plans?

Maybe you have spotted an opportunity?

You need to consider these three things when looking to expand into new markets in 2021.

1. Find the right partner: what to look for

You have been working with your agency for a couple of years. They have a solid team and presence in a few different countries. You have talked to them about moving into different markets. It was a conversation that brought you excitement. They may have even offered to hire in specific countries for you. “Great,” you thought.

Do not remain with your existing partners for multi-market growth unless you have an extremely good reason to.

Dig into their network properly – assess their depth of expertise in different markets. Do they partner? Do they have a handful of account handlers in different countries and call that ‘international’? What is their client base? Which markets do their client base operate in? Are they showing bias by leading you into new markets based on their own experience?

The key to having a successful international partner is that they genuinely demonstrate to you that they have a substantial network that they have full control over (not partnerships). They need to be focused on the ways and means of providing the agility and connectivity that powers that network.

2. Knowing your customers: getting the tone right

Customer experience has been an excellent buzzword for a few years. And yes, worry not, we have a customer journey loop we are proud of as well.

If you are looking to expand into a new market, the fundamentals should be understanding the culture and context of a new market. It is not about customer journey mapping in a conventional sense, but it is about truly getting to understand the culture, the context and how to reach customers in your new market. You can only really do this by assembling a team of people who deeply understand the markets you are moving into.

Get your context and cultural understand wrong and you have spent a lot of money and time launching into a new market badly.

3. Planning your expansion: local insights, context, data

What we have seen from clients who engaged with us throughout 2020 is that almost 100% needed help in planning their entry into new markets. The business case was there and strategically it made sense, but the substance in a business case needed building.

This comes from deep exploration into new markets. And by that, I do not mean spending time on ‘Google Market Finder’. I mean local insights – insights based on cultural understanding and a very deep level of data that is well assembled to digest and interpret.

Processing this data, at speed, is very difficult to do well across multiple markets without the right toolset and teams experienced in handling this data. Look for true added value from tools that your partner is offering or look to acquire some. Find a partner who will present you with assimilated data in ways you did not know possible to give you the context you really need.

Spend time interpreting and analyzing this data and ensure your entry into a new market is data-led and well researched, so you fully appreciate the opportunity (and pitfalls) of your strategy.

Clubhouse is the social media network that’s taking the world by storm. Despite only launching in April last year, the app had 8.5m downloads at the end of February 2021 and users including the likes of Elon Musk (@elonmusk) and Mark Zuckerberg (@zuck23).

Drew Benvie (@drewbenvie), social media expert and founder of Battenhall, joined a Bristol Creative Industries event to share tips on how entrepreneurs, marketers and other creatives can use the app to grow their profile. 

Here’s a summary of his advice. 

Why is Clubhouse causing a stir?

With 8.5m downloads compared to Facebook’s 2.8bn active users, Clubhouse “is teeny weeny as a social network”, Drew says, but due to the high profile nature of its users “it’s really starting to turn heads”.

Drew believes Clubhouse sits in a space between social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Tik Tok and audio/video platforms like YouTube, Spotify and BBC Sounds. “At first I thought this is going to change social media,” he says, “people are going to start listening to things instead of writing or reading, but actually the data suggests it’s increasing use of other social media, and it’s also not really cannibalising mainstream audio or video. It’s kind of complementing that too.”

Drew says what excites him about Clubhouse is that “anyone can rock up, it’s really them and it’s unscripted”. That includes high profile people. Drew was hosting a room (we explain what that is below) about social media and Damian Collins MP (@damiancollinsmp), the former chair of the Parliamentary committee that grills big social network bosses, showed up to listen and then asked to speak. The next day he joined again. 

How to get started on Clubhouse

Clubhouse is an app on which users host, listen to and participate in audio groups, known as rooms, where typically one or more moderators host live discussions. 

Clubhouse is currently only available on iPhones and iPads. You also need an invite to get access. Speak to someone you know who’s on Clubhouse and ask them for one.

Once you’re in, set up a bio. You can add whatever you like including links to your Twitter and Instagram accounts. You can follow people on Clubhouse but there’s no messaging functionality within the app. 

In terms of what username to pick, Drew recommends your real name as Clubhouse is all about real people having conversations. 

The Clubhouse algorithm is still “a bit ropey”, Drew says, so to find interesting people to follow select topics that you’re interested in and look for interesting people talking about those topics.

Clubhouse connects with your phone address book so it will show you your contacts already using the app. 

When you follow someone, click on the alarm bell icon in their profile and you can select to be notified always, sometimes or never when they speak on the app. 

Joining and starting a Clubhouse room

Rooms (sometimes known as events – see below) are where the conversations take place. All rooms are live and they are not recorded so you can’t replay them (although lots of people are secretly recording rooms and uploading videos to YouTube such as this one with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg). At this point in Drew’s talk, an attendee said she was in a room with Brad Pitt!

To get used to the app, join rooms that look interesting to you. A room has three tiers; a stage with the people speaking (some of whom are moderators), people being followed by the speakers and everyone else.  

Everyone not on the stage is muted and you can’t speak. If you want to speak, you can raise your hand and a moderator can invite you to the stage. Moderators can also remove people from the stage or from the room completely. 

It can be nervewracking to speak for the first time but hang out in rooms that appeal to you and when you’re ready and have something to say, raise your hand and speak succinctly.

Your followers can ‘ping’ you to join a room. Exit a room with the ‘leave quietly’ button. 

Rooms can be:

The app will show you rooms based on who you follow and the topics you’ve selected. 

If you click ‘start a room’ and select the type, it will go live instantly. 

If you want to schedule a room for the future, Clubhouse describes that as an ‘event’. Create one by clicking on the calendar icon at the top of the app. 

Joining and starting a club

Clubs are anchors for your activity on Clubhouse. They are like what Facebook business pages are to your personal profile. It allows people to follow a theme. There are thousands of clubs covering all sorts of topics including social media, artificial intelligence, movies, public speaking, comedy and start-ups. Within a club, individual rooms are created to have live conversations. When a room goes live, you’ll be notified. 

When you get on the app, click the magnifying glass icon top left and you’ll see lots of clubs to follow.

To set up your own club, click on your profile image at the top right of the app and then the + next to the icons of clubs that you are a member of. 

Growing your brand and profile on Clubhouse

When starting a room or a club, Drew recommends planning with other people to maximise exposure. When someone is co-hosting with you, make them moderators. 

Listen to rooms to pick up best practice moderator skills such as introducing the show/room/event (they are called all those things!), welcoming people to the stage and keeping the conversation flowing. 

To build momentum, it’s a good idea to host a room at the same time every day, week or month. 

Drew says speaking in a room tends to grow your following by around 10% of the room’s total participants. You’re also likely to pick up followers on other social networks if you’ve included links in your bio. 

You can’t send someone a link to your profile on Clubhouse but you can send them a link to an event you’ve planned. 

People are also using other social networks to promote events such as this Twitter account for The Good Time Show, which is part of Good Time, one of the most high profile clubs on Clubhouse. An event with Elon Musk in that club broke the app!

Building safety into your network

In Clubhouse, you’re talking to strangers and you’re listening to strange conversations. There have been reports of trolling and harassment so Drew advises being safe by not allowing random people to speak in your rooms or letting them be moderators.  

Build your brand audio strategy 

Other social networks are already taking on Clubhouse. Twitter Spaces is live and Facebook is rumoured to be building an audio product.  

“A wider brand audio strategy on audio is something I would absolutely recommend you start considering if you think Clubhouse is interesting for you,” Drew says.

Think about why your audience would want to engage using audio and harness influencers across Clubhouse. 

Clubs and people to follow on Clubhouse

Drew Benvie runs ‘Trending’ which has a room discussing the latest social media trends every Tuesday and Thursday at 11am GMT.

He also recommends ‘9am in London’ created by Abraxas Higgins (@abraxas), one of the most followed UK Clubhouse users. His club hosts a daily “no agenda” room at 9am GMT. 

You can follow Drew on Clubhouse at @drewbenvie and members of the Bristol Creative Industries team, Alli Nicholas, Dan Martin and Chris Thurling, at @allinicholas, @dan_martin and @christhurling. 

If you’re a Bristol Creative Industries member who’s on Clubhouse, let us know by following us or sending us a tweet.

Adopting the right mindset is critical to success

With less than a decade left to achieve Vision 2030, many organisations in the KSA region have successfully embarked on the journey to digital transformation. This is especially true when it comes to internal operations, streamlining workflows and taking administrative tasks online.

Some, though, will have found the task of transforming their marketing functions much more challenging.

The reason? Internal, administrative processes are fundamentally different to marketing tasks, and will require a different mindset to succeed.

Why digital marketing transformation is different

Internal processes are typically clearly defined, as are the roles of users. When it comes to digitalisation, the objective is to automate repetitive administrative tasks providing greater efficiency and transparency. For many internal operations, the IT environment is well-defined, and the success of moving away from legacy processes to new software, programs or processes relies simply on ensuring their robust, secure implementation.

In these circumstances, transformation projects can involve long development cycles and large capital budgets, and traditional IT project management frameworks are often appropriate.

But compare this with the role of marketing. Just as with other internal processes, any new technology needs to enable your team to efficiently operate at scale and to integrate securely with your CRM and ERP systems. But here the similarity ends.

Understanding marketing’s focus

Marketing technology connects your team to a constantly evolving audience with developing needs and preferences, and a fast-moving, innovative technology landscape where today’s new attractions quickly become old news.

Your marketing team’s focus is on optimising your commercial impact across all points in the customer journey. They rely on multiple digital channels, new media techniques and real-time data to connect with their audience and outpace the competition.

In short, speed and accuracy are of the essence, and your team needs to operate consistently and efficiently at scale.

You need the foundations of a good marketing automation system. But in the fast-moving world of marketing, the ability to innovate, test and learn is vital for competitive advantage.

Given these drivers, applying a traditional, large-scale IT approach to marketing digital transformation is doomed to failure. In fact, the stories of organisations who’ve tried and failed are widely publicised. For those still battling on, by the time their project is complete the media landscape and their audience will have moved on, with more nimble competitors steps ahead alongside them.

Adopting a marketing mindset

Marketing transformation can’t be viewed as a capital project with a start and end date. It requires a framework environment to enable a constant state of innovation, enabled by minimum viable products (MVPs), deployed in test-and-learn sprints.

It might sound counter-intuitive, but the framework anticipates and accepts a certain level of failure. However, it also ensures you integrate successful innovations to create an evolving, interoperable, open ecosystem over time.

So how does it work?

Every development is planned, managed and measured by its potential and actual impact on Return-On-Investment (ROI).

Mapping the mindset to the process

Discovery and planning are vital parts of the marketing transformation process. They create the vision and framework for everything you do.

While it would be a mistake to adopt small innovation sprints at the expense of thinking big, with your vision and framework in place, you can then narrow your focus down to a few key marketing processes.

By assessing the points in the customer journey that will produce the greatest commercial impact, whether through efficiency or improved customer acquisition and retention, you can create a prioritised roadmap of development sprints.

Avoiding perfectionism (the enemy of innovation)

It’s at this point that many projects falter.

Once you’ve prioritised your starting innovations, there’s no doubt you’ll come across a number of cases where your system needs full integration and complete end-to-end interoperability to work optimally.

Resist the temptation to achieve the perfect system!

Instead, you need to focus on the minimum viable product (MVP) you need to test the innovation and measure its ROI.

The MVP approach may well require additional manual processes to start with, but it will put your innovation in the hands of your users quicker, and prove (or disprove) its commercial return against a smaller investment.

Conclusion

The push for modernisation from Vision 2030 is a bold, ambitious aim. To achieve it, marketing must have a clear vision for what the ultimate customer journey looks like, and how technology can facilitate it.

Success doesn’t rely on a large capital budget to create the ultimate, perfect machine: It lies in an agile framework, enabling a constant state of ‘test-and-learn’ innovation. An attitude which champions flexibility, evolution and growth is key, as is a commitment to innovation and a focus on ROI.

This shift in mindset can often be the biggest cultural challenge for an organisation to overcome. That’s why at Proctors, we work closely with our clients across the KSA region – and the world – helping them to achieve success and avoid the pitfalls which cause stalled or failed digital marketing transformation initiatives.

Get in touch with us and let’s talk about how we can innovate your marketing strategy.

Advanced SEO techniques. SEO optimisation. How to rank where it counts. The pressure really is on businesses to prioritise SEO when it comes to their content marketing strategy or apparently risk disappearing forever into the black hole of – gasp – page 6 of Google Search results.

Don’t get me wrong, yes, SEO is an important element of any strategy and there are plenty of technical on-page steps you can and should be taking to make sure your website and online content is performing well. But to anyone who still believes that SEO just means peppering your website and blog with keywords in every other sentence, you’re forgetting something crucial. Google Search isn’t your target audience. It’s a channel to reach your target audience. If you’re a slave to the SEO keyword, you may tick a few of Google’s boxes (actually not as many as you think, more on that below) but you will undoubtedly alienate your prospective customers because your content will read so badly that they’re unlikely to then trust you with their business.

When it comes to content marketing, the not-so-secret ticket to success is quality. In today’s world of keywords, topics and featured snippets, it’s easy to forget that Google actually places far greater emphasis now than ever before on content that is well written, and rewards said content with a higher ranking in search results. In fact, unintelligible content that’s been written for an algorithm rather than a human will now actively count against you.

But don’t panic if you’re finding that your content isn’t performing as it should or not driving quite the interest that you thought it would.

Here are three tips to improve your content marketing:

1.   Quality is king. That means that your blogs, whitepapers, e-books, case studies and the like need to be well written, error-free, no typos or dodgy grammar, no keyword gibberish. But they also need to be on the right topic and engaging for the reader, and that means content which helps or educates is far more likely to perform better than a brochure which sells your product directly. It sounds like some sort of paradox, but content marketing is at its very best when it raises awareness of your business without pushing your services directly. Good content should position you as the go-to expert for your particular specialism, ensuring that you spring to mind first when the reader, a prospective customer, needs your services. It should drive loyalty which in turn drives purchase consideration. But we’ll say it until we’re blue in the face – quality, quality, quality.

2.   Keywords should be treated like seasoning – a light sprinkling of the right ones leaves a much better taste than a dredging with every word possibly associated with your business. It’s very easy to find yourself down a keyword rabbit hole when deciding what to hook your content on, particularly with so many online tools available, but I guarantee you’ll be left with more questions than answers: should I include longer tail keywords with a lower MSV, or a shorter keyword with broader reach but fierce competition? What even is a long tail keyword anyway? Keywords are important as they do after all ensure that your content will pop up when people are searching for that subject, but we really want to avoid keyword soup at all costs. We suggest you keep it simple, particularly as an SEO beginner: start by thinking about what you want to be famous for as a business – content marketing, for example – and then consider the key questions that prospective customers may have when searching for help on that subject – Should I write a company blog? How do I start an e-newsletter? What is the difference between a whitepaper and an e-book? Turning each of those questions into a blog post or how-to guide will make sure you’ve got the most important keywords covered. We’re not big-headed enough to suggest that this is the only way to work with keywords, but it will at least start you on the right track. Keep it tightly linked to the services that you offer to make sure it’s relevant (Google takes this VERY seriously), and don’t forget to link back to your website.

3.   So, you’ve written a brilliantly engaging, insightful blog post with just the right number of relevant keywords. But there’s little point in getting this far and then have the blog sit on your website with no eyes on it. The final consideration then when it comes to content marketing should be how to disseminate your content properly. Here it helps to think first about the channels that you already own, such as your social media, an e-newsletter out to your customer database or internal comms to your own employees and then out to their own networks. And then you can think about other people’s channels that you can piggyback on. Can your content sit as a guest blog on someone else’s company site? Can you do some simple PR outreach to target media and see if they’re interested in running the piece? Can you repurpose an older blog that has already run by turning it into new shorter ‘how to’ social media posts?

If you’ve made it this far and would love to know more about how to improve your existing content marketing or take the leap into content for the first time, we’re happy to chat.

www.sparrohouse.co.uk

 

We’ve re-launched!

“Creativity is the Cure

Ted Talker Anne Thistleton headlines virtual event around the power of creativity in decision-making

We’re extremely excited to announce that at Create Health we have re-launched under the banner “Creativity is the Cure ™”. Committed to injecting a dose of creativity into healthcare communications, we kicked off the re-launch with a virtual event headlined by renowned TedX talker, ex-global marketer and Mind Science practitioner, Anne Thistleton.

This re-launch comes 12 months after our management buy-out led by Ed Hudson, managing director, and Phil Blackmore, creative director. It’s been an exciting year as we also secured an investment of £500,000 from Creative Growth Finance from Creative England in October 2020.

“We firmly believe that Creativity is the Cure™ for the future of healthcare communications – it’s behind everything we do at Create Health, and we’re really excited to share this more widely. Brilliant ideas aren’t just good for business, they make a positive difference to healthcare professionals and their patients. We need to appeal to the subconscious mind, not the rational one, if we truly want to change behaviour, and our creative campaigns have shown this time and again,” comments our creative director, Phil Blackmore.

Underlining the proposition, ex-The Coca-Cola Company marketer and Mind Science expert, Anne Thistleton, took the role of Keynote Speaker at our virtual re-launch event, sharing her wealth of insights around Mind Science and how to unlock behaviour change by appealing to the subconscious mind. A massive thank you to those who attended the event as well as those who took part in the   panel discussion around the challenges of reaching the audience and the power of creativity: Anne Thistleton, Karen Hand, global marketing director of ConvaTec; Craig Wightman, chief design officer of Kinneir Dufort, and Andy Milsom, CEO, Kanjo App.

Now 14-strong, we welcomed a raft of new hires last year including Polly Buckland, strategy director, and its first in-house animator, Matt Sugrim. Carrie Fick joined us as marketing manager last month too. We’re thrilled to unveil our new branding and a refreshed website as part of the re-launch.

Ed Hudson, our managing director, added: “Marketing theory is based on the assumption that minds – especially scientific ones – think rationally and make decisions along rational lines. But that’s not true – as is underscored by Mind Science experts like Anne. We’ve seen countless times that it’s the truly creative campaigns rather than the rational ones that have the biggest impacts on brand and buying behaviour in healthcare. Decision-making is led by the sub-conscious mind, and that’s why our most creative brands, grounded in insights, are the most powerful ones.”