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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of the highly recognised awards in our industry are the annual UK Search Awards.
We were nominated a few years ago we felt a little overwhelmed when we sat in a room of well known brands competing to win.
At the end of 2020 we were quietly confident that our results for selling holidays in a Pandemic with our client, Aria Resorts would be a pretty strong entry in the Best Use of Search category.
And, well we did and…. [drum roll] Won Best Use of Search! Well done Launch Online.
“The results from Launch Online have been nothing short of staggering – Launch has exceeded our already high targets, and helped us deliver record breaking results. These results were achieved during unprecedented times, but they are what the team strives to deliver every day.” Aria Resorts
Dr Matthew Freeman, Reader in Multiplatform Media at Bath Spa University, has founded Immersive Promotion Design Ltd., a new marketing consultancy for the world of Extended Reality. It supports Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) businesses to better communicate with their audiences about the magic of immersive content.
The company builds on sector-development research funded by StoryFutures Academy and Bristol+Bath Creative R+D, and brings together expertise from the BBC VR Hub, Limina Immersive, StoryCentral, Raucous, Bath Spa University and beyond. Last year the team partnered with The National Gallery, Anagram and Studio McGuire to build research-led and audience-tested promotional campaigns for live VR and AR experiences. This led to the creation of new promotional strategies, prototypes, industry bibles and teaching resources for how immersive experiences can be better marketed to today’s audiences.
Talking about Immersive Promotion Design’s success so far, Matthew said: “Many people have recognised the enormous potential of immersive technologies like virtual and augmented reality to transform the creative industries as we know them. Up until now, however, the immersive sector has struggled to reach bigger, more mainstream audiences – the kinds of people used to streaming Netflix but not yet interested in VR headsets.
“The challenge is obvious: How do you communicate the magic of being in a VR experience via social media, posters and trailers? Immersive Promotion Design Ltd. provides a step towards establishing a new promotional language for VR and AR, opening the door to a bigger, more diverse immersive audience. We are very excited to see where this journey takes us.”
Visit www.immersivepromotion.com to find out more.
When you meet with prospective customers do they go away impressed ready to take the next step or are they underwhelmed because you’re the same as all your competitors?
If it’s the latter then clearly something needs fixing. In today’s market you cannot afford to be just another supplier and leave prospective customers cold.
In our opinion, the moment you meet with a potential customer is the most important part of the entire buyer’s journey; by this point you’ll have invested a huge amount of time, money and effort into developing products, marketing them and nurturing leads. The buyer will also have invested time and effort in researching suppliers to find the right fit. Those initial meetings between you and the customer are crucial and will determine whether you can secure their trust and win their business.
“Before making a detailed supplier evaluation 79% of buyers are already aware of at least three potential suppliers, and 86% already have a preference.“ B2B Marketing
When you meet with customers, you have a narrow window of opportunity to impress and in that narrow window you need to demonstrate your capabilities; the value you deliver and the opportunities you can create. You need to access any content the customer wants, instantaneously, and this all needs to be delivered through a personalised, visually compelling experience that leaves them empowered, visibly impressed and keen to move forward.
“97% of senior decision-makers said the professionalism of a potential suppliers presentation was very important or important in awarding a contract”, RSW New Business Survey
So, how do you make sure the customer walks away impressed?
The key is to give your sales team and the customer everything they need to support their conversations and create the WOW and an interactive sales tool is the backbone of this. It acts as a window into the core of your business and brings your proposition to life.
A great sales tool needs to be built around three parties:
And, it must seamlessly connect and work for all three together
1. Your Customer
Give them a personalised sales experience
This is probably the single most important element for your customer.
Firstly, they want to feel that you’re addressing their challenges and requirements specifically, and not being presented with generic information. They want to know that what you’re presenting is specifically tailored around them, their role, their needs, their business and their industry sector.
Personalisation helps with familiarity – your customers will quickly understand your proposition if it’s presented to them within a familiar format, using terminology and visuals that they understand and that resonate. This is all the more important if some of the decision-makers are not technical experts in your field.
A personalised experience is memorable – it will be much easier for your customer to remember the salient points of your proposition and be able to articulate and sell your proposition internally to other key decision-makers if you use visuals that are easy to recall. Nobody remembers a list of bullet points.
A flexible narrative
You can never second guess a customer and know exactly what they are interested in or thinking, an interactive sales tool means you don’t have to adopt a linear approach and hope that you’ve covered everything needed.
Interactivity allows you to take a different route as the conversation progresses, letting the customer steer the conversation in the direction most relevant to them. It opens areas for a conversation that perhaps previously you hadn’t thought the customer would be interested in.
Simplicity
Simplifying complex ideas and being able to articulate them clearly and simply is key to demonstrating a greater understanding of the customers’ business, challenges and where your solutions fit. It’s all too easy to think that by overcomplicating your narrative you’ll be demonstrating your deep understanding of their business.
Wrong, you don’t want to have to make your customers think hard about what it is you can do for them, that wastes time and creates risk in the customer’s mind. And equally, you want to equip them with information that they can easily relay internally to other key decision-makers within their business who you’ll need on your side to make a buying decision.
Value led not product-led
Always focus on the value you deliver for your customer. If your conversations are purely product-led it makes it harder to differentiate yourself from a competitor and you’re not addressing the underlying reasons why a customer is interested in your product or service in the first place.
Value is a key differentiator and it directly addresses the reasons why a customer came to you in the first place. It’s also important to consider that sometimes a customer doesn’t necessarily know what the true value is that they are actually after and a good sales experience should help them to understand this. This is where the conversation becomes more consultative and helps to elevate your position beyond that of just a supplier.
Make it visual, make it memorable
Images and graphics are far more memorable than just text – your brain can interpret visual information 50,000 times faster than text alone. So, it’s important that key information is visualised in a way that is familiar to the customer so they can easily recall and retell the key points of your value proposition.
You’ll also save considerable time in explaining complex ideas and processes if you can simply visualise them, giving your customer more time to ask the questions that are important to them.
A clear & logical narrative structure
This should be obvious but more often than not we find customer presentations are badly structured leading to confused messaging and a lack of a clear narrative progression.
Your conversations with customers have to follow a logical narrative progression so that you can address a customer’s issues, answer any concerns or push backs and provide them with clear answers as to why they should give you their business. This will also help them internally when they need to persuade other decision-makers within their business that you are the right choice. You’ll have armed them with a clear argument structure.
Create the WOW
Almost every company is proud of its R&D and likes to portray itself as an innovative and dynamic business. It’s not good enough to talk about it you need to live it and show it. Creating the WOW is not just about the message and demonstrating your capabilities it’s about leaving a lasting impression and that also means portraying a strong brand and using immersive visuals.
So, if you can demonstrate you understand your customer, their sector, business and unique challenges, you’ve helped them to understand where you can add value and how you can help their business in a clear simple and logical format this will go a long way towards building trust, and building trust is central to the whole sales process.
2. Your Sales Team
Clear narrative structure & sales guide
Every salesperson has a unique style and you don’t want to hamper that but at the same time you do want to ensure that nothing gets missed in conversations and that messaging is consistent across all your team.
The best way to do that is to have a clear narrative structure but one that is flexible enough for different presenter styles and which ensures that whoever uses it, important messages and arguments are not missed.
Flexibility of message
A recent study by Aberdeen.com found on average sales teams spend five working days every month searching for relevant content they need to make a sale. This is wasted time.
A well-developed sales enablement tool will be able to flex and address the needs of all of your customers no matter what job role, sector, or geography.
This is where non-linear sales tools make a difference as you’re able to personalise the conversation with different customers without having to create new sales presentations each time. You’re also able to address role specific issues within one meeting – for instance, you might have representatives from Accounts, Logistics, Operations and Technical in one meeting and you have to be able to quickly and confidently address the unique challenges and perspectives each has within the business.
Access anything, instantaneously
When a customer asks a question you have to be able to address that question then and there you don’t want to tell them you’ll have to come back to them at a later date. A digital sales enablement tool ensures that you have access to everything a customer might need whether it’s case studies, specifications, technical data, videos, PDFs etc. to cover all eventualities.
Share content instantly with your customer
As we know customers are impatient and don’t like to wait for things, if they are interested in something you need to strike. Having the ability to send them content they’ve just been looking at such as case studies, videos, technical sheets or product details as you’re discussing it is invaluable.
Not only have they got a record of everything they were interested in but a copy can also be sent to your CRM or head office so that you have this vital data too.
Online & offline
It’s not always possible to access online content when meeting customers and you don’t want to be accessing large video files during a meeting. Sales enablement tools are designed to run both online and offline, whether you have an internet connection or not you can still access all that valuable content.
Any device
You don’t want to have to tell your team or customers that they can only use an iPad or laptop to use your sales enablement tools. They should be able to access all of this great content no matter what device – iPads, smartphones, laptops, PCs – or operating systems, Windows, iOS etc. It’s all about making things easy for your team and the customer.
To sum up, a well thought out sales enablement tool with an intuitive user journey, simple (but not simplistic) visuals and a strong narrative will help to make the sales rep’s job a whole lot easier but not only that they’ll be spending a lot less time explaining what you do and how you do it so that they can focus more time on the customer’s specific needs.
Confidence is everything and if they can go into a meeting knowing they have absolutely everything they need to impress a customer that goes a long way towards creating a great first impression and building trust.
3. Your business
Data & analytics
Crucial to ongoing success and optimisation, sales enablement tools can have sophisticated tracking tools embedded which will report back on every interaction a sales rep and customer has whilst using the tool.
This isn’t about keeping tabs on what the sales team are up to but understanding exactly what the customer is interested in and what content is resonating with them. This means you can channel your efforts and budget into that content proving to be most effective
Consistency and control
An issue for Marketing is always around the consistency of message and branding. How often do your sales teams make their own presentations just before an important meeting? How can you be sure that they are on message and on brand? A well designed and constructed sales enablement tool will negate the need for them to do this as everything needed will already have been carefully built into the tool.
Single source of truth
Ensuring all your sales team have the latest documents, videos, specification sheets, case studies, whitepapers etc. can be a real challenge not to mention time-consuming.
Sales enablement tools can be connected to a central source of information, such as a CMS (Content Management System) and/or DAM (Digital Asset Management System). Any changes made in the CMS / DAM will automatically be reflected in the sales tool, both the sales and the marketing teams can be assured that only the latest, compliant information is being accessed in front of customers.
Integrations
Within your business you’ll have numerous digital platforms to support your efforts. Key amongst those will be your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System – an invaluable sales and marketing support tool. Your sales tool can connect to your CRM so that any information shared with a customer can be recorded directly back into your CRM
Knowing that your sales team has everything they need to have a productive conversation with a customer, that the customer will have access to all the information they need, and the fact that you know both parties have the latest content will give you peace of mind and confidence.
At POP we have a single-minded focus on supporting businesses at this critical phase, it’s all we do.
We work with businesses on every stage of the process from establishing what success and the perfect sales tool will look like to how it will function and support you, your sales team and customers as well as being aligned to your wider business objectives. This is backed up by our agile design and development methodology to deliver, integrate and constantly improve on your sales tool.
Our sector expertise covers Advanced Manufacturing, Medical Devices, Pharma, Construction and The Built Environment and Technology.
If you’d like to have an initial exploratory call then you can talk to me directly on the number below or just email
Develop Me, working in partnership with Babbasa, are offering fully-funded tech bursaries for four young Black people living in Bristol to learn how to code and begin their career as software developers.
Develop Me’s programmes have a market leading, 95% post course hire rate into the tech industry. The bursaries aim to remove the social and economic barriers of entry for under- represented young people by providing opportunities and access to education connected to highly paid in-demand tech careers.
With 18% of tech employees from Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds; and specifically, only 2% from a Black, African, Caribbean or Black British background – a long climb to diversity remains for the industry (The Chartered Institute for IT/BCS 2020).
Al Kennedy, Director of DevelopMe, explains, “Now – more than ever – is the time to work together across the Bristol city region – to invest in local talent and to create supported high value career pathways that are accessible to everyone to become future leaders in the tech sector.”
Comprising of four fully-funded places (valued at £9,450 each) on Develop Me’s newly launched part-time 52 week Coding Fellowship Bootcamp, every student will have access to Career Coaches, full learning support, industry mentor community to help set them up for their future careers, as well as a loan of an Apple Laptop for the full duration of the course.
This initiative is co-funded partly via Develop Me’s Opportunity Fund supported by hiring partners, matched by Develop Me, plus the generous support from their mentor and alumni community. Bristol inner-city-based youth empowerment social enterprise, Babbasa, is supporting with recruitment and access to under-represented communities.
For further information head to their webpage: https://developme.tech/black-bristol-tech-pathway/
In the two and a half years since launching, Bristol-based Haio has gone from strength to strength, making their mark as one of the fastest growing local UX and development agencies in Bristol and the surrounding area.
Now the team have taken an exciting new step, relaunching the brand – including taking on a new name; Unfold.
Making the complex simple…
Making the most complex things seem simple has always been the super-power behind the Haio team – helping growing digital businesses to create world-class user-experiences and digital platforms. The team works under the belief that with the right people and tools, anything is possible.
So what do Unfold actually do?
In short, the team build websites, web apps and digital platforms for start-up and scale-up businesses. They help entrepreneurs and business leaders develop world-class experiences by bringing expertise across four areas:
So why the change?
Working closely with fellow BCI member Sue Bush from Touchpoint Design, Haio needed a fresh platform and a clearer market positioning to continue growing alongside it’s clients scaling businesses. The team sought-out their raison d’être and in uncovering this essence, a better definition of who they are and what they do. Unfold is the culmination of this journey and sets the scene for their next exciting chapter.
So, what can you expect from Unfold?
Unfold’s mission is to empower and propel entrepreneurs and their businesses to the next level.
They’re also making their expertise from across the team more accessible, offering free, no obligation 1 hour consultancy sessions with a product or technical lead, to help talk through some of the challenges you might be facing. You can book a call any time through their website https://bit.ly/3oHJu70.
In addition to this, they’re on a mission to share their knowledge and break down barriers in understanding regarding tech development, startup success and digital platform scaling. This is why their new website has a fantastic new Resources Hub, dedicated to entirely free articles and reports on everything in the startup ecosystem – from fundraising through to scaling your technology.
Win a free UX audit for your business
Thirdly, to celebrate the launch they’re also running a small competition – offering 5 free UX audits to UK businesses. This is a chance to have a professional UX designer review and recommend some approaches to a specific challenge you may be facing with your digital product. You can find out more about that here https://bit.ly/3pFIrWx
Back in the day (and by the day, I only mean a few years ago), your email address used to be the passport to the internet; now it’s your mobile number, your mobile and apps that unlock everything. The average global Android user spent 27% of waking hours on mobile in April 2020, up from 20% in 2019 (App Annie).
A mobile is in peoples’ hands every day – in lockdown we’re carrying it into every room! It’s actually harder to keep people off mobile than driving them to it. Therefore, we need to ensure we’re making the most of the various ecosystems that brings with it. Brands need to start thinking of mobile as a way of life, not just a device or a screen size.
CRM is at the core of apps
Customer relationship management (CRM) is at the core of apps – a good app becomes a customer’s focal point for interaction with a brand. For example, apps like Amazon and Sainsbury’s Nectar etc used to be an evolution of a website. Now they are the default destination for looking up anything to do with your history with the brands, as well as the easiest way to use their services.
In today’s day and age, it’s the easiest way to start and build personalised conversations, so brands can use it for rewards; changing behaviour; keeping users sticky; building trust; and getting a good understanding of the user’s needs and order history. I say easiest. You can’t just bosh out an app and assume some Field of Dreams magic will happen. You still have to prove the value to your audience; you have to put their needs ahead of your own gains.
And those gains are plentiful! As well as making your customers more sticky, more likely to keep using your service over others, you will start unlocking insight into their spending patterns, their hard transactional data and their behaviour and preferences.
Prove your app deserves space on their phone
Customers are so much more likely to use an app if it’s good. If it’s seen as a bit rubbish, they won’t want to interact with it or share it. Same with a mobile website – don’t immediately force people to get your app or ram it down their throats. Deliver them a great experience on the site first, prove your app deserves the space on their phone and that it will be useable. The worst thing you can do is put more barriers between your users and the content they want.
The key is to make sure you’re understanding the user’s ecosystem. Align your needs with customers and don’t put any barriers in the way. People want a frictionless experience – sending you from an email to an app where passwords are already stored and customers can use single sign on, etc. Customers expect the mobile experience to be seamless and relevant. It’s your job to facilitate that. Helping them is ultimately going to help you. A good customer experience means your customers will spend more. According to a research from PWC, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.
Don’t do it just because you can
We do a lot of cool stuff with mobile, in email particularly. People on their mobiles are more likely to be able to see all the interactive innovative coding. That being said, we make sure to never do it just because we can. Time and again I see people using ‘in-email’ technology because it’s available, not because it improves the user journey. It’s about the fundamentals of the next course of action for a user, and if that’s using mobile then great. Every interaction a customer has with your brand will inform their experience, regardless of which channel this interaction occurs on.
It’s also easy when thinking about mobile experiences to ignore or forget about the journey for desktop users. People want to be able to have the experienced tailored to them wherever they are. In email that means not scrimping on designing a less interactive experience; play to the strengths that a bigger screen has. For web-based journey’s, make sure the right tools are in place for people to effectively complete that journey outside of the app you’ve spent so much time developing. Whether that’s making sure the login process is as smooth and frictionless as possible or that the service you are offering is just as easy and exciting, don’t keep forcing people down the channel you’ve chosen.
Mobile devices and apps have quickly become a huge part of our everyday lives. It’s a wonderful opportunity for businesses to strengthen brand loyalty, recognition and streamline the customer experience. Just remember, while mobile is an exciting and worthwhile avenue, as with everything, you need to do it well.
Put the customer experience first, prove that you have something to offer and remember to prioritise those personalised conversations.
POPcomms recently completed work on developing an entirely new interactive sales tool for Bacardi Martini to be used by the reps across the UK when meeting with customers.
The challenge
Bacardi own 62 spirit brands and is the world’s largest privately-owned spirits company.
Sales reps for Bacardi will regularly meet with a diverse customer base from bars, pubs and clubs to restaurants and hotels and within those establishments, they may be meeting with bartenders, managers and business owners, all with different requirements and understanding of Bacardi and its brands.
Meetings might involve introducing the customer to a new brand they haven’t stocked, giving advice on how to upsell premium brands through to in-venue activations, sponsorship, branding and best practices as well as the latest market research and data.
For each Bacardi brand they have a wealth of valuable content from tasting notes, heritage, brand videos and guidelines, associated cocktails, social media assets, as well as business case information.
In the short time a rep has with a customer they often struggle to have more meaningful conversations around any challenges Bacardi can help them with and introducing them to new brands, activations and market research that they can profit from.
Finding the right content at the right time depending on a customer’s needs and the conversation was very difficult.
How we helped
The result
From our workshops with Bacardi and their sales reps we mapped out a customer narrative and created an interactive sales tool that let reps personalise the conversation no matter who they were talking to.
The tool gave them access to valuable content, important to the customer, within a couple of taps.
This meant reps could quickly access what mattered to the customer such as market research, best selling cocktails, up-selling best practice, latest brand activations etc. within seconds saving precious time meaning more time for the customer.
Sales reps now have exactly what they need, precisely when they need it.