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Success Through Strategy!
Strategy Matters delivers news, tips and strategies for effective communications through traditional and social media.
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How Small Businesses Can Get More Out of Their LinkedIn Accounts
LinkedIn can be a great tool for lead generation. Establishing and developing a strong profile (which contains key words and phrases designed to draw leads to your profile) and building up your list of connections and followers are the primary ways LinkedIn can be used for lead generation.
In an article for Entrepreneur.com titled How You Should Be Using LinkedIn - But Probably Aren't, Toddi Gutner writes, "Much of your ability to be found through searches will rest in the keywords you use in your profile and company pages. To ensure you're using the right search terms, make sure you include some of the recommended LinkedIn skills that automatically populate when you indicate your professional category. The benefit of using these particular words is that LinkedIn actually changes them based on what's trending in the industry."
It takes time and focus to develop a strong profile, which is why clearly establishing your audience and goals is so important. Everything you do, then, needs to be directed at attracting that audience to your profile. You might think of LinkedIn almost as an online Chamber meeting. You're out there networking with potential leads, so you want to convey a strong, professional image that is supportive of your desired brand identity. You want to be helpful, supportive and responsive; and, while you obviously want to let others know about what you have to offer, you definitely don't want to come across as overtly self-promotional.
Finally, LinkedIn is a great tool to engage in qualitative market research. The groups are probably one of the best tools for this. There are more than 2.2 million groups on LinkedIn, representing a variety of professional interests. Engaging in those groups that include your target audience can be a great way to gather input and insights from those you wish to better understand. You can do this both by reading through the posts and threads that are already out there and by asking your own questions of the group members. Starting your own group also can be a good way to build an online research panel. And, in addition to the market research value, having your own group can be a good brand-building tool.
If you're a B2B marketer and you're not on LinkedIn, what are you waiting for?
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The Impact of Technology on Storytelling
Marketers often like to talk about brand storytelling and, for many, a marketing strategy isn't complete unless the brand is telling a compelling story. Brand storytelling represents the complete narrative you create for your audience-beyond your individual commercials, print media or website banner ads. As The Story of Telling notes on their website, "It's about building something that people care about and want to buy into. It's about framing your scarcity and dictating your value."
The concept of brand storytelling certainly isn't new. In a Forbes article from 2013, Susan Gunelius points out that a big advance in brand storytelling started as more companies incorporated traditional elements of fiction writing into their campaigns.
"Today's strongest marketing team will have room for new roles like the data architect and the brand creative content director," says Gunelius. "While the former position focuses on all that big data has to offer, the latter focuses on increasing consumer emotional involvement in the brand through social media and content marketing stories as well as on weaving the brand storyline into offline brand experiences and marketing initiatives."
We would add that increases in technology have strongly complemented these improvements in the art of storytelling. There are two key impacts of technology on brand storytelling. The first is the ability to move beyond "brochureware" to incorporate sight, sound, movement and interaction to engage consumers. Long gone are the days when these elements were confined to television commercials. Action-packed multimedia can reach consumers through their computers, via their phones, through in-store displays, etc.
The second key impact of technology on brand storytelling-closely related to the first-is the opportunity for two-way engagement with the audience. This represents both opportunities and challenges for marketers. The opportunities include the ability to make a greater impact with your messaging; the challenges are that others have the same opportunity, so marketers must be continually-and increasingly-looking for ways to break out from the clutter. Additionally, the ability for consumers to engage directly raises concerns about potential negative comments.
We believe, though, that the opportunities far outweigh the potential negatives, and many successful marketers are proving this to be the case. How are you leveraging technology to boost your brand's storytelling power?
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Should Rank-and-File Employees Be Speaking on Behalf of Brands?
The question of whether front-line, everyday employees should be speaking on behalf of a company and its brand has been in the minds of business owners and executives for years. On the one hand, harnessing the full weight of a company's workforce can put a lot of bodies into the marketing effort. At the same time, companies often fear the potential negative, counter-productive impact of "rogue" or un-coached employees.
Think of the employee complaining about her job on her Facebook page, or the insider who gives friends and neighbors the "real story" about his company at a backyard BBQ. Yet not only are such fears largely overblown, to the extent they exist, they typically represent a failure of management to cultivate the rank-and-file employees as brand ambassadors and to mold and control the message those employees project to the outside world. As William Arruda writes for Forbes, "Regardless of which industry you're in, building a strong brand requires that all employees feel connected to the corporate brand and understand their role in turning brand aspirations into reality. If you're not inspiring your talent to be brand ambassadors, you're missing out." Consider Nokia's approach to utilizing employees as brand managers. In an interview for Link Humans, Nokia Social Media Manager and Global Marketing Talent Acquisition Manager Becky Gloyne says, "A key reason why Nokia is so visible and approachable across social media platforms comes down to an important business decision - every Nokia employee can speak freely online across social media networks. Of course we do have social guidelines and guidance in place, but every employee can make full use of their personal opinion online." Employees should absolutely be empowered to speak on behalf of their employers-not in a formal or approved way, but in a "grounded in realism" way. Employees are going to speak on behalf of their employers, whether sanctioned or not. What does that mean for employers-and their PR pros? It means an ongoing need to hire, train, coach, communicate and engage with employees in such a way that, when they share, they do so positively. There really is no other option.
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Volume: 7 - Issue: 11
November 2015 |
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Research Matters
Some recent news and research you may be interested in--we were!
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