While you can quickly put out posts and hope for the best, it’s likely that what you’ll manage to achieve with this style of marketing will be a lot less impactful than taking it slower, steadier, and more strategically. Results will still be there – they’ll just be less of what you can hope to see, and your marketing team might struggle to continue to meet communication objectives without the benefit of a strategy. 

There are four ways to tell whether your marketing is working for you. 

But before we get to that, there’s an underpinning principle to explore. 

How the right KPIs help you grow your business

Before you look at your marketing strategy, you need to look at what your business objectives are, and what communication goals you can set to help you achieve those business objectives.

KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are the metrics you’ll use to track whether or not you’re reaching your goals. KPIs tell you how your business and your marketing is performing in the moment: they’ll be factors such as customer satisfaction, churn, turnover, and return on investment. If it can be tracked through data, it can be monitored, and if it can be monitored, then that will influence how you move forward. 

Setting those KPIs is the first step you need to take before you start looking at progress. Your marketing team should be helping you to meet your goals; this means that they’ll need to start by looking at the KPIs you want to meet, and figuring out how best to work towards them. For example, if your ultimate goal is return on investment, the marketing team should use that as the underpinning of your marketing strategy. 

Once you’ve set KPIs that you can reach, there’s a few things you can look at to see if your marketing is working for you. 

Why are the right KPIs important?

Think of your business as a plant. 

There are plants that will grow just about anywhere, plants that need specific conditions to achieve the best environment, and plants that will be happy with just a few adjustments to the baseline. Understanding the conditions that will push that plant to thrive is part and parcel of ownership. 

Your business has a reason to exist. 

That reason can be achieved through a number of different goals. 

And those goals can be met through KPIs. 

How does a good marketing team use KPIs?

Say your primary business objective is to increase your customer satisfaction ratings. You can then focus on tasks such as increasing your net promoter score and improving your customer loyalty or addressing your brand perception. These KPIs will feed into an overall marketing strategy that looks at more than just straight-up communicating with your consumers. While it’s important to put out good content frequently, communication is not the only end goal of all marketing plans. 

In fact, communication may not serve your business goals well if the way you go about communicating with your audience is to post on your social media just for the sake of posting. 

Think about the brands you engage with; the brands you actively, and consciously, support and follow. Think about the way that those brands speak to you. 

We’re willing to bet that those brands talk to you about the stuff that matters most to you. We’re willing to bet that those brands talk to you only when they have something to say – about offers that interest you, or content you want to know about. We’re willing to bet that their posts will teach you something about the brand, or about yourself. 

Brands that have something to say are brands that know how to communicate in a way that is useful to their audiences, which is why we build connections with them easily. Brands with nothing to say  – or brands that struggle to get their message across – miss the mark in trying to connect with their audience because they don’t know what that valuable communication metric is. 

KPIs feed into a content strategy that will look at more than just communication. Your marketing team should be able to handle both the strategy that underpins your communications, and the communications itself, and to tweak one or the other depending on whether or not you’re meeting the KPI you’ve set for yourself. 

What does a good marketing team look like?

A good marketing team understands your business goals and comes up with a strategy that ultimately reaches to address those goals. A good marketing team doesn’t focus just on getting you to communicate, but on getting you to communicate with purpose. This is the benefit of a KPI-driven marketing strategy.

If you’re unsure about the performance of your marketing team, request the KPIs they’re working to and observe the way these perform over a specific time period. Your team should be assessing the performance, optimising their efforts, and creating a virtuous cycle of improvement across metrics. If you think your team could do with some support, we’re here to help.

The post How to Tell If Your Marketing is Working appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

In our experience building leads for B2B clients, we’ve found that only through a content-focused, first party data strategy can B2B businesses truly provide themselves with a passive source of leads that has a decent conversion rate. 

This strategy brings the brand to the forefront of thought leadership in the industry, and places it squarely in the minds of decision makers. Even if said decision makers are not in the market at that very moment, remaining top-of-mind through consistent, high-quality communication is what makes the difference.

It also serves to enhance the reputation of the business within the industry at large, increasing the chances of information spreading through word of mouth. Even the sales process is made easier, thanks to basic introductions being less necessary when leads are generated through this method.

First party vs Third party Data

The difference between first and third party data is simple. The former is data that you build yourself through a variety of methods, while the latter is data provided by another source – usually at a price. Vendors of said third party data will usually provide segmentation options in order to narrow down the provided audience to better suit requirements, but there will always be a significant proportion of the audience that is mismatched with your goals.

What are the benefits of First-party data in a B2B context?

Accuracy & Relevance

The main difference from a quality and relevance perspective between first and third party data is that, as long as a thoughtful first party data strategy has been used, one has a much more accurate idea of the kind of individuals that make up their database than the other. If one understands exactly how and why an individual has ended up in their database, it makes it significantly easier to create relevant and personalised content that will appeal to them specifically.

Control over data & segmentation

With most content-driven first party data strategies, individuals are added to the database from multiple sources – each journey slightly different, but normally with plenty in common. With this in mind, it is significantly easier to segment audiences and organise them in a way that allows for more even effective, personalised communication. 

One can even take things a step further, and segment audiences based on their reactions to communication, and allow them to play an active part in what content they’ll be receiving. Audiences that receive the more relevant communication tend to trust its source more readily.

Creates a truly personalised experience

All of the above leads to this – creating a B2B customer journey that does not feel like a marketing campaign, but rather a human exchange that leads to mutual benefit. Through significantly personalised communication, converting leads into business becomes easier. While overall communication is done in relative volume, because of its accuracy and relevance, branching into a personal conversation is seamless.

How do I build First-party data?

Human-focused Communication

In the B2B marketing industry, we often forget that we are still communicating to humans, despite the term ‘Business-to-Business’. While overall motivations of those who are receiving our communication are business-focused, not personal, what attracts them remains the same. Communication that they find relevant, that validates their problems and provides solutions without overtly pushy messaging, will be most effective. The key lies within a fair exchange of value. 

True Value Exchange

Building leads is essentially an exercise of asking for data directly from your audience. Very often however, many B2B marketers think that the exchange goes something like this: 

‘In exchange for your email address/attention, I will try to sell you my service.’

You’ll likely notice that this is extremely one-sided. It benefits the marketer, but there is no obvious benefit on the receiving end. Yet, unfortunately this is how a lot of business development is attempted. 

Other than the obvious, one of the problems with this is that by jumping straight into a sales pitch, it assumes that your B2B services are required in the very near future. If the sales pitch fails, communication often ceases. Oftentimes, the decision to use B2B services takes weeks, months or even years – so it is essential that communication continues into the long-term.

To that end, it should look more like this:

‘In exchange for your email address/attention, here’s something that you’ll find relevant or interesting.’

This exchange is a lot more balanced, and it is only the beginning of the relationship. It should continue as follows:

If you liked what we sent you, I’ll continue providing similar valuable information that will establish my team as experts in our field, and if you need our services, we’re right here.’

This way, those on the receiving end continue to receive high-quality, relevant information, and in exchange, the B2B business remains at the top of their audience’s mind. Once the B2B business’s services are needed, most of the trust-building has already been done.

Creating a B2B first party data strategy

Building first party data should form part of an overall strategy that takes into account:

• Your industry and market’s unique characteristics
• Your brand, your USPs, and your values
• Your target audience and their own values
• The right communication channels to reach your target audience

All of the above will culminate in a strategic, and creative way of building and distributing content that brings all of the above together to provide value, and allow for a fruitful B2B exchange to take place.

For more on B2B marketing strategy and practical tools to help you communicate more effectively to your audience, take a look at our latest B2B marketing content, or get in touch for a no-strings-attached consult.

The post First-Party Data for B2B, and its Importance appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

In our experience, it’s one of the most cost-effective methods of marketing. It does have one caveat, and that’s what usually holds brands back from pouring money into it: it offers extremely good long-term value, but it requires patience.

We’re keeping this post short, assuming that you’ve already sorted out your overall marketing plan for 2022 by the time you get to this. If you haven’t, then I strongly suggest that you start there. Before you click through, though, first you should understand the benefits of Digital PR in order to decide if it’s the right tool for you.

The benefits of Digital PR

First – the main benefits of digital PR are very similar to the main benefits of any high quality content marketing (or inbound marketing) efforts you make. With the right process in place you can land yourself in the media (for the right reasons), get journalists to talk about your efforts and about your brand, and as a side benefit gain from:

• Increased brand awareness
• Increased top of mind presence
• High quality inbound links to your resource or to your website
• A vast amount of content for your channels
• Implicit brand endorsement by the media covering your brand

What is Digital PR?

Digital PR is the process of creating a resource of value and then bringing it to the attention of journalists who would be interested in sharing it with their audiences.

Let’s break down that definition slightly though, because there are some words that make digital PR very different from begging for links. The first is “of value”. You should go out there and create, or build, something that is solving a real problem for a specific audience. 

The second key phrase there is “who would be interested” – you can’t work on digital PR as a way to go out there and beg random web owners to insert a link in an existing article. 

This is not link building. This is not an SEO exercise. Can it give you SEO benefits? Yes, it can, but digital PR should never be seen as an SEO exercise. Digital PR is a process of getting your hard work in front of interested audiences.

Let’s take an example. A few years ago we found that it was incredibly hard to find an accurate hourly rate generator. It is such an obvious problem for freelancers, however, no one seemed to be covering that specific problem. 

Beewits is a site built for freelancers, so we decided to solve that specific problem, by building a great, and free, hourly rate calculator and got in touch with well-respected journalists from sites like Creative Bloq, lifehacker and Contently who had already written about the subject in the past. Journalists all over the world picked it up, and other writers picked it up after the journalists did.

What are good examples of valuable content?

Before you start planning your Digital PR efforts for next year you need to figure out what constitutes valuable content in your area. Value is very subjective, and if you want to benefit from good coverage you should stand out in the right way for your industry and niche. 

The second factor to keep in mind is that your budget and creativity will determine how wide you can expect to shoot. If you’re running a study globally then you can go after global publications, but you need many more answers than if you ran a local study and just went to the local press.

Some examples include:

• Tools – free tools that solve problems for your niche are always gold. Excel sheets which solve specific industry problems, calculators, and so much more.
• Surveys – Everybody loves to learn about the state of their industry, whether it’s local, or by niche. By surveying peers you can come up with some rock solid findings that the press would love to report. The juicier the better, so plan this out well, because if you can ask the right questions you might find a juicy nugget.
• Lists – Time is the scarcest resource of them all, so if you can compile giant lists that help people out when trying to figure out something, then you are likely to be appreciated by people around you.
• eBooks – Or actual books, really. These tend to be spoken about if they’re well written, well presented and distributed well. There are millions of books out there, but I’m sure that you could find an interesting angle in your industry if you tried hard enough. And you don’t even need to be a writer yourself, you can work with ghost-writers – everybody does it.
• Creative Solutions or Interpretations – The number of times I’ve seen “This is what the next version of Windows should look like” and then clicked through to see that some agency had taken the time to redesign Windows, without Microsoft knowing about it. It will never be developed, but people just love seeing how their favourite toys could be reimagined.

How should I plan for Digital PR

If you’re sold on the concept, and why shouldn’t you be, then you should start figuring out how much time, effort and money you can put behind it and start planning next year’s main thrust(s). Digital PR takes time to plan, time to execute and even more time to start reaping the rewards from, however it is worth it. We still reap the benefits from the Digital PR efforts we did in 2015, and I can’t think of anything else (other than brand work) that’s given us such a good return on investment.

Put time into long-term vision for Digital PR, it’s not the kind of thing you can dip your toes into and expect to see immediate results from, so you need to plan for it in a way that will give you results that you need in the long term.

Once you know where you want to go, look at industry publications, see what they cover regularly and look for angles that you can add value to. Once you’ve identified this, the rest is relatively easy, even though it’s hard work. Build a valuable resource, find the right people to pitch it to and take the time to pitch it to them, offering them additional value if you possibly can. 

Go for it

Bottom line, don’t dilly dally. Mix Digital PR into your marketing mix next year. Most of your competition won’t have the patience for it, and you can start sowing seeds to reap long-term benefits. 

In addition you get short-term rewards because your marketing will feel much richer when you’re producing excellent content, so it’s a win-win all around.

And if you don’t know where to start from, or if you just want to brainstorm some ideas, feel free to get in touch with us.

The post Planning 2022: Digital PR – Digital Marketing’s best kept secret appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

That might seem slightly early, but marketing moves fast. By the end of September, there are no more slow periods in the industry: it’s go, go, go until January, when the next crop of marketing plans and strategies come into play. 

Waiting until 2022 to start planning what you’re going to do means starting late, and starting late means missing out. Missing out means fewer opportunities to achieve your goals. 

If you’ve read our other articles about planning your marketing for 2022, you know this already. 

But it bears repeating. 

You need to know what you’re going to do from now. You need to know where you’re going with your brand communication. You need to know what comes next.

A solid plan will also help you greatly with reacting to the unpredictable, and we all know what that looks like by now. If you have a solid base to fall back on you can rely on that to keep your channels alive while you pivot your communications.

Here are our top 5 tips for making sure your 2022 social media plan benefits you. 

1. Plan

• Outline your goals and objectives for your brand’s Social Media for the upcoming year (base them on your business goals and your wider marketing plan for 2022).
• Create a social media communication strategy for each goal. 
• Ensure that your social media plan covers all objectives.
• Create a high-level social media calendar that covers the entire the year – identify the key dates/periods for your business, plan your seasonal campaigns
• Create a more detailed plan for the first quarter (e.g. monthly calendars for the next 3 months) for each platform you want to cover.
• Plan content production and ad spend budgets

There are plenty of opportunities to plan content ahead of time – besides thinking about your key brand messages (which aren’t seasonal or reactive), there are calendar dates that are always there, every single month (doesn’t the Christmas countdown officially start in September?) – so think about those key dates and key messages that are evergreen. They can help you build a solid content calendar for your social media communication.

2. Produce in Bulk

After creating a detailed monthly social media plan, you’ll know exactly what you’ll need to produce: 

• Bulk production saves a lot of time, and time is money
• It gives you time for casting and sourcing of props
• You will save on equipment and location costs (if you’re renting) and when planned properly, on model fees too.
• You will likely save on overall costs as well, as you’ll be paying less for administrative fees if you’re outsourcing your production.
• Producing in advance ensures that you have enough time to deal with any changes as they happen without completely compromising the rest of your strategy.

3. Schedule content when possible

There are many platforms to help with this for each of the social media platforms (including Instagram Stories!), so make the most of them to save time. Posting each post on-the-day adds up to many more hours than you would spend scheduling in bulk once a month.

However, you should always be aware of what’s happening in your market and the world, and make sure to adjust your automatic schedule accordingly.

4. Follow results

When planning a brand’s social media, it is easy to fixate on particular ideas and ways of how we want things to go. However, not all ideas that sound good in the beginning are ideas that actually work out. This is where we have to follow the results.

Measuring the results of your social media efforts links directly to your strategy and goals. If the results you’re getting don’t help you achieve your goals – changes need to happen. 

Follow your campaigns to see what is working or not, what can be improved, or what needs to change completely. Don’t get stuck with things that don’t work just because you’re in love with an idea. 

5. Be ready for changes

The world of social media is in constant flux and it is essential to have some flexibility in your plans. It helps make sure that what you’re doing is always relevant and is bringing in the results you’re looking for. 

At any time, some disruption might shake up the entire world(e.g. COVID in 2019/2020) or just your business (e.g. your campaigns are not performing as expected). Meaning that you might need to change some of your initial social media plans, change the way you run your campaigns, and put some content on hold or completely replace it, etc. 

Benefits of planning your social media in advance

• It ensures that your business’ social media strategy is in-line with your overall business strategy
• With a good Social media plan you won’t need to worry about doing everything last minute
• Planning in advance allows you to produce in advance – saves time and money
• If something unexpected happens you’ll still have your bases covered
• Tracking the results helps tailoring your strategy for the maximum results

On the receiving end, social media communications might come across as very effortless and ‘right-this-minute’ but they do take much more planning than one might think. Give your business a leg-up in the new year by building a clear, yet flexible social media strategy for 2022. Still not sure where to start? Get in touch with us and we’ll be glad to help you tell your story.

The post 5 Things to Keep in Mind When Planning Social Media for 2022 appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Well, it’s marketing based on performance. Duh.

It’s basically the scientific method, but for digital advertising.

Success in performance marketing is purely measured by a tangible result, often one with a direct contribution to the bottom line. Purchases, leads, subscriptions, downloads. Essentially, it draws a direct line between an ad and one of the desired actions (or conversions) we just mentioned.

So an advertiser can see exactly what led to the conversion, and exactly how much it cost. This way, they can calculate a fairly accurate ROI on performance marketing. This is one of the main reasons for its popularity. It allows marketers to show off their success with stone-cold numbers instead of vague statistics.

Just like we did when we discussed the way we brought one of our client’s Facebook Ads ROI up by 3,300% in a month and a half. 

If you didn’t click that link, you might want to. We spilled the beans on the exact method we used to reach that astronomical number. I suggest bookmarking it for later at the very least. 

So, why doesn’t everybody use it?

The issue is that not every marketing effort can be tracked so neatly. Let’s say your goal is to sell more packets of cookies at supermarkets. You’re obviously running lots of ads about those cookies and the brand they’re part of. Unfortunately, you can’t draw that line between the ads and the desired action (cookies purchased from the supermarket) so clearly because the purchase isn’t a digital one.

With that said, the meteoric rise of eCommerce solutions introduced to the market over the past year has changed things. People buy things online that they never used to in the past. Such as cookies. 

And spending online overall has never been higher.

How can you get in on the performance marketing action?

If your business is reliant on purchases that are completed online, then congratulations, you’re ready to go. 

Well, not really. But it does help.

The next step is to make sure your technical setup is watertight. Every time someone performs a desired action (purchase, form submission, subscription, download), you need to know where that purchase is coming from. Without that information, you’re pretty much toast when it comes to performance marketing.

The process of creating that technical setup is normally a bit of a lengthy process, and depends on a number of factors. So if you don’t have it, and want to get into performance marketing in 2022, you’d better get started yesterday.

Alright, I’m all set up. Now what?

You could just start running some ads at this point and see the numbers trickle in. You’ll likely see some conversions, run your report at the end of the month, and show it to your boss. You might even be able to calculate your ROI! 

High fives all around. Right?

Here’s where I channel my inner Max Lord.

First of all, are you looking at all the right numbers? If you’re running ads promoting high-value purchases, like consumer electronics, ROI is a pretty good metric. That is, if all you’re doing is running basic ads and running a monthly report. But what about at ad level? How do you know which ads are actually performing well vs others?

This is where metrics like click-through-rate, cost-per-view, bounce rate, conversion rate, cost-per-lead, and an endless amount of other metrics come into play. These can help you identify which of your ads are actually bringing home the bacon. 

More on KPIs and goals here.

Remember when this article was about planning?

Neither do I, but this is where planning becomes important.

For performance marketing to work, you need to constantly be interpreting marketing metrics like the ones we just mentioned into tangible learnings that you can trust. 

For example, you want to know whether still images or video work better for your audience. Maybe YouTube delivers better results than Facebook Video using the same video. Or a particular tone of voice generates a higher click-through-rate, even if the visual remains the same.

All these questions can be answered. And the more you have of these learnings, the more efficient your advertising can be, and the higher your ROI will be at the end of the month. 

But getting all this done requires a proper test calendar. 

Each time you communicate, you’ll want to be testing out a theory. This means manipulating your overall communication calendar into a system that improves itself. With each test, your content gets better, your budget distribution gets better, and your knowledge of your audience’s tendencies gets better.

A few extra suggestions

Get a head start

Running this method of advertising requires plenty of thought, content creation, boss approvals, budget proposals, ad spend plans, etc. And we all know that getting things like that together can take weeks, if not months. Especially if your technical setup isn’t up to the task and needs work.

So start building your performance marketing plan as early as possible. 

Manage expectations

This sort of process doesn’t always show results instantly, and requires plenty of buy-in from both a time and financial perspective. But, if executed correctly, the knowledge generated from the tests can make future marketing communications a lot easier to generate, and a lot more efficient. 

Never stop testing

If after the first few weeks of this method you start to see that cost per conversion metric shrinking and your ROI skyrocketing, take a minute to congratulate yourself. 

Good job, buddy.

Now, go back to testing.

The thing is, what is true today is likely going to change in a few months. Human behaviour shifts quicker than Vin Diesel in a muscle car. So those learnings that you used to build your great ROI need to be retested regularly. If all this sounds great, but a little daunting, get in touch with us and let us know how we can help tell your story.

The post Planning 2022: Performance Marketing appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Short answer: No. 

Strap in for the longer answer. I’ll lead with a TL;DR for the impatient amongst you:

1. Revisit your brand fundamentals and revive the spirit of the brand with your team.
2. Do these revised underpinnings have an impact on your brand expression? Is it time to refresh identity and tone of voice?
3. Obtain a perception reading from your team and, if possible, from a sample of your audiences.
4. Assess the gap between your claimed brand values and the perceptions you’ve collected. Devise your 2022 brand strategy around narrowing this brand gap.
5. Rally your team around the brand, keep it alive, and cement its strengths.

Our brands have collectively taken a beating. We have a whole generation of young people who are coming of age in a time of global crisis. Think of two years of sixth form, or your first two years at university, during which you have been denied most of the usual social interaction.

On top of that, you’ve had a permanent narrative that’s a mixed bag of fear, dissent, conspiracy, and optimism. The ability of our audiences to form and maintain healthy relationships has been under assault – many of us have had to work harder than usual to maintain our relationship with ourselves and with others.

Faced with all this, do you really think that the relationship between an individual and your brand is a priority to them? And we have not touched the possibility of economic hardship, issues with job security, battles with one’s own health, or dealing with the loss of someone close.

That’s a bigger dose of reality than you were prepared for in a blog about brand. But take heart, it is just the context for a more optimistic look at your own brand.

Start with purpose

Your brand has a purpose. 

It’s what keeps you going through thick and thin. 

It is very likely what allowed your brand to survive or even thrive during these times and this is a moment to stop reading for a second and congratulate yourself and the team for making it this far.

If you’re responsible for your brand, you will know that you rarely stop to celebrate its achievements. You think in terms of what could dent its reputation, you do all you can to build its equity, and you strive every day for a consistency between what you say your brand is about and the way your audiences perceive it. 

Celebrate where you are today because you’ve earned it.

Now that you’re done celebrating, let’s go through a few of the steps we can all take to shore up our brand, to consolidate those little (or big) wins, and to take our next steps towards building the brand of the future.

Let’s return to purpose first. 

Why, besides commercial benefit, does your brand exist? 

Why do we do what we do and not engage in a completely different activity? If you have at some point in the history of your brand taken the time to distil this into a concise and meaningful statement, return to it. 

Dig it up and read it. 

And find a way of making sure everyone on the team has it as top-of-mind. Having your brand purpose as top-of-mind is not a passive pursuit. 

Think of an activity or some form of communication that can remind everyone around you why they get up in the morning and dedicate more waking hours to your brand than they do to friends and family. 

It is that important, and matters of this importance take active reminding.

Next up, your brand values

Let’s revisit our values. And let’s revisit these in terms of the uncomfortable context we are living. The likelihood is that our values don’t need to change, at least not fundamentally, but they can be reinterpreted to suit the realities of our time. 

We are, tortuously and sometimes imperceptibly, moving towards a society that is a little more compassionate. 

We are seeing more drive towards being considerate – with ourselves, with our social circles, with the disenfranchised, and with our planet. 

Our brand’s audiences are more likely to resonate with human, compassionate, brands. 

We are, as audiences ourselves, more in tune with the brands that have shown us empathy. 

It stands to reason that we ought to look at our values and to examine them for this genuine display of humanity.

How about Brand Expression?

The third round is our brand expression. 

You remember the downer in my first couple of paragraphs. Don’t you think that more optimistic brands should be setting the tone? Is there a way in which our brands can be beacons of cheer or hope or optimism? Would you not prefer to relate to a brand that brings a smile to your face?

If I were the betting type I’d put a couple of Satoshis on a brighter, more visually optimistic visual style and tone of voice over the months and years that mark our recovery from this crisis. There is always going to be a darker side to the narrative but we have control over our own brands and we can only do what’s in our control.

Let’s get planning

How does this fit in with our plan for 2022? 

It sounds like one of two things – either a task so monumental that we don’t have the resources to accomplish, or one that we can do so little about it might not be worth pursuing.

Think again.

Brand starts on the inside. It resides with you and your team. It is expressed as a result of the collective behaviours of everyone on board. Only then will it be experienced as a collective set of behaviours by your audiences. 

So start with the team.

Run a finger-on-the-pulse exercise with your team. It doesn’t have to be all-encompassing and minutely detailed – what we want here is a reading of the general sentiment. Is there alignment with the brand’s purpose? Is there a homogeneous knowledge of the brand’s values? 

Does the team value the importance of brand-aligned behaviour?  

If you have the time and the resources to do so, gathering a perception reading from your audiences (and desired audiences) will give you a more accurate and useful picture. This creates a snapshot. 

Do it now. 

2022 will creep up on you like a David Cronenberg monster and we have a lot to cover before the new year. Have a look at that snapshot and be brutally honest with it. 

It helps to take adjectives or phrases used by the team (and your audiences) to describe the brand and to cluster them by association so you end up with a handful of meaningful words that describe the state of your brand. Compare these to the purpose and values that you have committed to paper. 

Wherever there is an overlap, you’re golden. Where they differ lies your brand gap. 

And this should form the basis for your 2022 brand strategy.

Addressing the brand gap

Your brand strategy for 2022 ought to address the brand gap between your brand’s perceptions and your ideal place for the brand.

The gaps are usually behavioural. 

While we might be saying that “we’re the most responsive brand in the industry”, if there is no sense of urgency across the customer-facing team we have work to do. If our claim that “we’re a one stop shop for [product category]” is plagued by out-of-stock issues, it could be time to present a more specialised face or to sort out the supply chain before we make claims we can’t deliver on.

In short, the strategy needs to either bring about change within the organisation that can cause external perception to align with your claims or to readjust your brand to the set of values you can actually abide by. Insisting that you’re one thing when you’re not is what creates the swathe of blurred, insipid, or forgettable brands that are around us and that we ignore all the time.

Fun and games

Let’s move onto a couple of easy to carry out and practical sessions to have with your team. 

Brand association

Create a list of nouns from across our lives. 

Include fashion brands and a food item, vehicle type and a famous landmark, a famous person and an item of furniture, etc. 

Make sure each is associated with a deeper personal meaning. 

Then ask quick-fire questions to every member that take the following format:

If our brand were a [sport], what would it be?

If our brand were an [item of furniture], what would it be?

And so on for up to ten different questions. Analysing the results can take a while and is worth the effort. 

You’re looking at your data set in two different ways.

The first is an understanding of the internal alignment to these questions and the second is the emotional backstory for each item. If all the team mentions a sport that’s fast, exciting, and carried out by an individual – snowboarding, base jumping, sprinting, etc – you know that there is a shared understanding of what it’s like to spend a day at work. It is perceived as fast-paced but with little need for teamwork. If some mention a team sport, others go with boxing (high-impact, no teamwork) and yet others mention something like curling or fast walking, then you probably need to work on what it means to form part of your team before you can expect uniform brand-aligned behaviour.

Go into the exercise knowing exactly what each item represents. 

Your fashion brand, for instance, will help understand where your brand is positioned in the team’s mind. The brands mentioned give you an idea of how contemporary, accessible, premium, and audience-relevant your brand is.

Time travel

Pick a time that’s three to five years into the future and describe an event. 

You could pick one of the following examples or devise your own based on your brand’s activity:

• It’s the year 2024. Our brand is acquired by a major multinational. Which one is it?
• It’s [today’s date] in 2025. Our brand is the subject of a fantastic news item across all media. What’s the story about?

This will give a snapshot of what an ideal state for the brand would look like within a few years. This aspirational state is a possibility, even if everyone in the room acknowledges that there is work to be done to get there. 

Planning your 2022 brand strategy around this aspirational state that the team has already visualised is a powerful way of getting everyone on board.

For most of these, it could be useful to have the sessions facilitated by someone external to your organisation. This gives you a handful of benefits, the most important being objectivity and to diminish the likelihood of your sessions either devolving into an unstructured moan about what’s wrong with the organisation or a practical conversation about how to bring operational improvement. Both are important but beyond the scope of a brand discussion. Speak to your brand agency. They’ve done this before and will make the most of your efforts.

We are the brand. The brand is valuable.

In essence, your brand is too precious an asset to leave to chance.

We can’t afford our marketing planning to distract us from the fundamental importance of brand. Marketing will give us short-term sales but brand helps us to build long-term, value-based relationships. 

With 2022 on the horizon, we need to plan for a stronger brand. We should start by taking a look at the brand’s fundamentals, move onto obtaining a snapshot of our brand perceptions inside the team and with our audiences, and then create a strategy for 2022 that addresses any discrepancies.

In the same way as Nike tells us to just do something tiny today to make ourselves a better version than the person we were yesterday, we can do the same with our brand. 

Doing the least possible for our brand is better than neglecting it altogether. 

The great thing about it is that we are where the brand resides so most of the work is carried out inside the organization, shoring up the brand by encouraging the team to work as one.

Isn’t that what every great organization is based on?

Once again, in five sentences:

1. Revisit your brand fundamentals and revive the spirit of the brand with your team.
2. Do these revised underpinnings have an impact on your brand expression? Is it time to refresh identity and tone of voice?
3. Obtain a perception reading from your team and, if possible, from a sample of your audiences.
4. Assess the gap between your claimed brand values and the perceptions you’ve collected. Devise your 2022 brand strategy around narrowing this brand gap.
5. Rally your team around the brand, keep it alive, and cement its strengths.

The post Do you have a plan for your brand in 2022? appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

It requires commitment to a strategy. 

That strategy needs to be rock solid from the start.

Social media or display advertising campaigns are very transient. They can be set-up in a matter of minutes and can also be stopped with the click of a button. It’s all relatively immediate. 

SEO is not. 

Once you’ve committed to an SEO plan, it’s essential that you stick to it, because results reveal themselves significantly more slowly. 

And changing tacks midway through the year will slow you down. 

A lot.

However, the results can be phenomenal.

68% of all internet experiences start with a search engine. 

The effort you put into SEO is worth it. If you’re not present, you could be missing out on two-thirds of your potential audience. 

What to do before 2022

There are countless excellent guides available online that will take you through the process of getting yourself set-up with SEO. 

But sometimes they’re long. Informative, but a bit tedious. 

Before you set out on your SEO journey, we’re going to lay out the foundations that you’ll need to really get it right. Most of these have relatively little to do with the technical side of SEO, but are absolutely essential to your success on search result pages.

1. Get your KPIs sorted

If you read our most recent article in the Planning for 2022 series, we discussed goals & KPIs. There, we go into detail about how important it is to know exactly what you’re measuring and why. 

Both from a business and a technical perspective.

Depending on your business type, the ultimate goal you might want to achieve with your SEO efforts can differ wildly. eCommerce sites need sales, content sites need quality traffic, B2B sites need leads. 

So figure out the key one or two metrics that your business needs to grow and hold on to them. Make sure that every other number you measure is ultimately going to affect that golden KPI.

2. Identify core audiences

Hopefully you’ve done this already at some point during your marketing efforts, but if not, you’ll definitely need them for SEO. Understanding who your core audiences are and how they behave in relation to your business is essential. Make sure you have demographics that are primarily based on behaviour and customer journey rather than age and gender. You’ll see why in just a minute.

Once you have a shortlist of these audiences, you can move on to the next step. 

3. Keyword research

We could write several articles on the subject, but here are the basics. Go through each of your customer personas and begin writing as many possible search terms as you can. Start with broad search terms that cover as many relevant categories as possible, then get into slightly longer keywords that are a little more specific. You’ll need to make sure people actually do search these terms. For that, you’ll need a tool such as this one.

Once you’ve created your list, start filtering by volume and keyword difficulty. You should end up with a list of valuable keywords that are exactly relevant to your audience in relation to your business.

4. Work on the content plan

Take a look at which websites are already ranking at the top for the keywords you’ve chosen. What sort of content do they offer? Based on the fact that they’re at the top, that’s the sort of content that Google thinks searchers want. So you’ll basically have to do better. 

Take a good look at your own landing pages and spend your resources on making those pages that absolute best that they can be from a content perspective. Always keep in mind that Google will lift your rankings if it provides real value to those who are searching. 

5. Look at the technical side

Is your website loading fast enough? Is it up to the high standards that Google has been imposing on websites to rank well? Are your main services pages optimised with the right keywords?

 If you don’t have the individual knowledge to answer these questions, get in touch with people who do. You can have the absolute best content targeted towards the most relevant keywords, but if it takes 15 seconds for your homepage to load on mobile, you’re in deep trouble. 

Getting all of the above sorted out is no mean feat. SEO takes time, patience, and resources, but there is absolutely no doubt that it’s worth it. It’s been proven time and time again that organic search traffic is the most valuable. 

So get cracking.

The post Planning 2022: SEO appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Only we don’t fire up a cigar every time a campaign hits its goal. 

(I apologise in advance for any pop-culture references I may make in this post. As a person, I am blursed with the ability to think of a quote from tv or film for nearly every situation I find myself in.)

Often, businesses just think of marketing as a goal unto itself and go directly to putting together a communication plan of some sort. A plan is never a bad idea. To reach a hailed cigar-worthy moment, however, a plan must have a specific set of objectives to reach. Along with the appropriate metrics to measure success.

Where do you start from?

Before you can delve into the nitty gritty of specific marketing KPIs, you need to start with your overarching business goals for the time period – in this case, 2022. 

As we talked about in the introduction to this series of articles, it’s worth setting both attainable and ‘unrealistic’ goals. 

More on that here.

These goals are your pillars, and once they have been clearly defined, you can start thinking about exactly and with which tools you’re going to use to achieve them. 

Start by making a list of all your current and potential communications channels. 

Which of these channels provide you with measurable metrics that, if focused on, can contribute to the achievement of your business goals?

Let’s take a more concrete example.

Example: eCommerce Website

You may understandably guess that the best measure for an eCommerce website is how much revenue it generates during any given period.

And what do you need for more revenue? 

More traffic. 

So, just send more traffic to the website and that’s a job well done, let’s go home, right?

Sort of.

In reality, while volume revenue goals are definitely important, it doesn’t really tell us just how well the website is performing in terms of generating revenue efficiently. A wiser approach is to first analyse what further value you can get out of your already existing traffic. Rather than spending more money sending traffic to a website that might not be working efficiently. 

Just like it’s not worth pumping fuel into a thirsty old engine rather than investing in a new and more efficient electric motor. Putting money into a website that’s not working efficiently is a waste. 

Better Metrics

A metric that gives us a better idea of how well the website works is conversion rate. This number tells us what percentage of website visitors are actually converting into paying customers. If your conversion rate is currently sitting at 1%, optimising the website to improve that number to 2% literally doubles your revenue without making any changes to your outbound communication strategy. 

This said, optimising a website for better conversion rates isn’t always straightforward. It requires an in-depth analysis of current activity, a prioritised list of areas of improvement, and an actionable plan. Along with the resources to execute said plan.

This is an example of a cost-effective, long-term KPI that contributes very directly to business goals without having even touched external communications.

Optimising your website isn’t the only way to increase your conversion rate, though. Once you have a plan to increase your conversion rate, you can begin analysing which current traffic channels provide best conversion rates and highest average revenue per sale. 

You might discover that you’ve been spending 80% of your marketing budget on social media, but traffic coming from your Google Search campaign has a 3x better conversion rate. This could mean that your communication on social media might not be attracting the right audience, or that you should refocus your marketing on search engines. 

Or both.

The process

Let’s break down what we just described. 

First, we identified a business goal: eCommerce Sales

Second, we identified a KPI that directly contributes to the previously identified business goal: Conversion Rate

Finally, we found several ways to improve said KPI: website optimisation and channel resource reallocation.

This process can be repeated across every marketing channel, with several KPIs to identify for each. These KPIs will then serve as the measuring sticks for each and every piece of marketing communication that you place in your plan for 2022. 

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be going into more detail about how to plan more specifically for some of the most important marketing channels around. From B2B to social media, to performance marketing. 

Keep an eye on our feed for more. In the meantime, here’s a detailed breakdown of the most important marketing trends of 2022.

The post Planning 2022: Marketing Goals & KPIs appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

We don’t expect our clients to have a plan for the following year by June (even though some of us do), but we start nudging our clients in that direction by June, and we start thinking of the broad strokes plan for Switch at around this time, too.

Why now? Isn’t it too early to plan for something that will finish in 18 months time? Well, not really. It is not too early because our definition of a marketing plan is not as rigid as most would expect it. We don’t expect to have each and every facebook post sorted out for our clients by September (even though it would be nice to have that, and we do have some clients who like it that way).

Instead we use this time to build a loose plan with:

• the goals for the year, 
• the main activities we expect to work on with the client,
• the results we’re expecting from our efforts
• the areas we’ll be putting most focus on.

So, for the purposes of this post, the steps of the plan can be defined as the following: 

• Analyse the situation you are in and revisit your goals.
• Understand what needs to be done in light of your re-defined goals.
• Articulate a set of events in chronological order (or a set of high level actions).
• Evaluate each action and the way you will measure its performance.
• Reassess the situation and repeat.

Our plan has to feel more like plotting our way around a map with blind spots rather than a list of events with an exact sequence that we can’t deviate from.

(Analysing and) Setting Goals

We find that the most important part of a marketing plan for the year is to set our goals. If we don’t start from our goals we can’t really judge whether our efforts have been working over the past period, and we also can’t set new parameters for the upcoming year(s). The goals have to be SMART, that much is clear, but it is also critical to note at this stage that our marketing goals have to be tied to business needs. 

Unless our marketing goals match our business needs, we will never get buy-in from the entire business, and without this we can’t make any significant progress.

Start by looking back and seeing if your goals for this year are on target. Check whether you need to build on them or whether you need to start from scratch on some of them.

One of the things, I learnt this year, and which I will therefore be implementing in all of our plans going forward, is to set two goals. The attainable goal and the unreasonable, but achievable goal. The explanation of this, given to us by our Vistage chair, is one which I love:

An attainable goal is something that technically you can achieve. If you’re in the starting group at an olympics sprint, then you can aim for a placing in the medals, as long as you’re there you have a great chance of achieving it. Winning the gold medal is attainable, but it’s also unrealistic to expect that everyone in the lineup can win it, because there’s one gold medal and 8 of you. It’s unrealistic.

I’d recommend setting three top end business goals (with attainable and unrealistic numbers for each) and then working on breaking these down into the marketing efforts you’d need to support these.

One word of caution: even if a goal is unrealistic, it could become realistic in three years’ time, so keep that in mind and ensure that your progress builds towards this, don’t set goals that will see you scratching a year’s progress if you don’t achieve your goals.

The main activities for the year

Once we have our goals set, we need to take them apart and figure out which activities we should be putting our efforts in. 

If, for example, we look at the goals we set for Switch in 2020 (for 2021), they included growing our international business. We had to break this goal down into a set of activities that would contribute to this.

• We started by committing to a level of content on our site that allows us to compete with global agencies.
• We also needed ways of getting potential clients to that content, so SEO and a great LinkedIn strategy were critical for us, too.

We have other goals, but in each case we need to look at the components that will bring us closer to those goals, and we planned for those accordingly, based on our budgets and resources.

What results are we expecting?

I spoke about goals earlier, and we should be absolutely certain that we hit our targets by the end of the year. The problem with this, however, is that we can only measure these results at the end of the year. Our goals give us trailing numbers, just like the standard P&L sheet will not really help us out if we reported a loss by the time our accountants sent our yearly accounts to the auditors.

This is why we have to set a number of goals by which we’ll judge the performance of our efforts. I’m not going to delve into this in much detail today, simply because we’re going to discuss how to plan for KPI-led marketing in a separate post a few weeks down the line. 

But what I can tell you is that you should have a number of goals in mind to help you judge whether your efforts are making a difference or not, both marketing goals and business goals.

To take our earlier example into consideration, if we’re looking at growing the international business of Switch, then we should look at how many followers from outside these shores we’re attracting to our social media. We should also look at our website traffic and expect a steady increase, ideally with a split that skews more to users from outside Malta (and, ideally, from the geographies that we’re targeting).

From a business perspective we’re also measuring how many non-local leads we’re generating and figuring out how many of them are converting, where the leads are coming from, and whether they’re a match for the kind of business we’re after.

The areas we’re putting most focus on

This might sound a little like a repetition of the above, but there’s a nuance to it that sets people down a path of doing a lot of work, and of being very busy, but not getting to where they need to be. And this is because they market in a way that does not target their audience.

By focusing on content (in the broad sense of the word) that is designed to appeal to your audience you can save a lot of time and money.

To keep matters simple I’m going to use our example, once again. One of the easiest ways for us to drive traffic to our site is by focusing on content that’s technical. When we post how-tos for setting up ad sets, or other tips that help show our knowledge, we get a lot of traffic. The problem with that traffic is that we’re usually getting in marketers like us. 

Marketers like us. 

Let that sink in. 

What’s the likelihood of a person looking for an in-depth guide to setting up a Facebook campaign buying our services? Not much. If they’re implementing, chances are that they’re either employed at a level where they can’t really take a decision to choose an agency or else they’re in a position where they can, but they probably don’t have the budget for one. 

There are exceptions. 

But we don’t plan around these exceptions (unless we have a damned good reason for doing so).

Plan, but be ready to change.

Ensure that your activities for the year can be loosely planned in advance, too. We all know that unpredictability is the order of the day at the moment, but if you can: plan your efforts for a best case scenario and set up contingencies in advance. This is one of the reasons we’re starting now, not in January. 

We work on content well in advance (usually), and this allows us to put set content plans in place well enough in advance to allow us to shift them if we feel that there’s a different strategic priority at some point in the year.

The post Planning your marketing for 2022 – have you started yet? appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.