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How did the project start?
As a new business our online presence had to achieve a number of objectives.
1) We needed visibility quickly, the best way to achieve this was to develop as big a digital footprint as possible.
2) We needed a platform on which to pitch our business. We are active users of social media, we advise our clients on developing listening strategies to best integrate social media tool into their communication strategy and therefore wanted to demonstrate a social media strategy in action by making our website a case study.
3) In a competitive marketplace differentiation is key. We believe in breaking down the corporate wall , being human and letting the personalities of the individuals in the company talk for us. Our social media tools facilitate this.
What options did you consider?
We focused on the tools we actively use and promote to our audience.
Twitter helps us develop our social groups and position our people and our business. We follow friends, peers, competitors and industry commentators sharing fun, observations, news, technology developments, marketing ideas, articles we've written and presentations we've delivered . At the human end of the scale we talk about our favourite pot noodle, socialising, and football. At the business end of the scale we use twitter to share good practice, insights and links to blog post we think our audience will appreciate.
Our Facebook group is a destination page and repository for all things 'Better'. It links our Facebook friends to our business and guides people to other resources, marketing material, fun stuff, images and videos relating to us and industry topics we want to inform people about.
Linkedin serves two purposes. It is the CV of both the company and the individuals in it as well as positions us in the region and industry by the quality of the connections we have.
Flickr is a gallery of images taken by our team. It's all about personality, we like to have fun together and have many interests outside of the industry. This facilitates this fantastically and updates both our corporate website and Facebook page automatically by RSS.
The Better YouTube channel exists to help position our business by providing a home to video of industry speakers we like, events we've attended and topics of interest to both us and our audience.
www.betterbrandagency.com is built on the Wordpress blog platform. The platform fits our needs as a business perfectly. The technology platform itself is free, saving us a huge amount of time and cost developing our own bespoke CMS driven website. It's functionality is specifically designed to optimise content for search engines. We are able to create categories that link related content and tag content with key words again to help promote individual pages on search engines.
We've managed, in a very short period of time, to index a large number of pages on the first page of Google for a number of search terms importantly without sacrificing design and style.
What help and expertise did you receive?
Support from our network of digital peers. We are active members of a number of regional based technology groups that use social media (primarily Twitter, Blogs and FaceBook) to share ideas, overcome issues and stay connected.
When designing our social media presence we talked to our peers to map the right tools for our business and help join circle up, linking content, categories, topics and ideas.
Staying connected is important to us as individuals and as a business in the marketplace. We use our social media tools extensively to keep in the regional digital loop and to inform our friends and audience of how our business is growing and developing it's service offering.
Did you face and challenges or learn any lessons?
We never stop learning lessons that help us improve our digital presence. We live what we talk about, spending our evenings and weekends, using all of our social media tools.
It's important we continually evolve our digital presence, sharing ideas and content with our peers and audience. Our most important challenge is to stay true to our brand. The opportunity to dilute content relevance by wandering off topic is something we all watch for and guard against.
Social media isn't finite or limited to a number of tools. It's embryonic as a channel, and evolving as we find new uses for it. We need to stay abreast of new developments as they happen and help our audience decide which tools best suit their customers now and in the future. We spend a great deal of time filtering the good from the bad, the relevant from the irrelevant and relating marketing strategy to good tools that deliver value.
What are the outcomes and how has it improved your business?
Our business and the people in it have benefited massively from our social media presence.
We've developed new skills using, integrating and managing our social media channels. Skills we've been able to sell to our audience and create opportunities in sectors we wouldn't have moved into so quickly, specifically visitor attractions, fashion retail and food and drink. All of whom need to keep their audience close and informed in difficult economic times.
We're being asked to partner traditional marketing and event companies who want to introduce social media to their audience broadening our target market instantly at no cost to us at all.
We've gained recognition in our industry as a company and as individuals who understand what social media is and importantly what it isn't. There is a great deal of positioning in the PR sector to 'own' social media as a channel, used primarily to push PR content. This is a very traditional and wholly incorrect view.
Our peers have recognised we haven't jumped on a band wagon we're leading the conversation, developing best practice and making social media relevant to a business and it's audience.
Statistically, our online presence has been hugely successful. We are increasing web traffic daily and our digital footprint is growing fast. Over 30% of our website traffic comes from our social media profiles, and we see increasing numbers of users moving between these spaces and our company website.
In regard to search engine presence we have in a short period of time have a large number of web pages indexed within Google which is impacting on our web traffic. Through our online networking we are also increasing our relevant links network around our website improving our visibility on a number of search engines.
What are your plans for the future?
We will continue to grow our digital footprint with relevant content and case studies of best practice.
We're gearing up to go on the road with our knowledge and present to groups across the North East and North Yorkshire. We're contact business organisations and groups to present social media as a topic, identify good and bad practice and show companies how social media can integrate into their marketing strategy, provide real cost savings, and dramatically improve how companies communicate and serve their customers.
We'll be looking to develop streaming video (vodcasting) of seminars and presentations as an additional channel for our business, again to push our business and the people in it to a wider as yet untapped audience.
We're looking at social media metric and evaluation tools right now to help define our services offering.
A number of tools are being developed to help plot social media usage against customer demographics that we are assessing. Using these tools and other tools being developed to measure a brand, product or service across social media spaces will significantly improve our services and help us inform our audience as to the conversations about their brands happening across the social media space.
