By Conor Hughes @chughesvm
Last February I passed through NovaUCD’s doors for a seminar entitled How Small Businesses can Optimise Digital Marketing.
NovaUCD is an innovation and research centre dedicated to inspiring creative graduates, putting knowledge to work and growing and supporting new business in Ireland. Here's a couple of the speakers and the points they covered.
Laurynas Binderas @tunelis works in Marketing Operations in Talentevo. His speech entitled Successful Social Media Strategies for Startups and Small Businesses was an interesting overview of the current digital marketing landscape and a great introductory piece. The main message here was that using social media for brand awareness does not fully optimise online value creation. The model proposed by Laurynas was to first develop a social media strategy that will engage online influencers, learn audience behaviour, measure this influence, use it to dictate future strategies and above all – produce content.
Lee Kelly @leekelly started by addressing the often overlooked area of email marketing. Through eliciting an emotive response in the customer, email marketing can double the income return of social media. The key was finding goals which business and consumer could achieve mutually. Find something that the consumer is tired of, express an understanding of this frustration, position your business as the answer to this problem and then provide the consumer with a ‘call to action’ ie a sign up/download/purchase.
Le also covered the automation of social media. The key is consistency – not to flood the online social sphere with content at certain hours while sharing nothing at others. A valuable tool for achieving this is the Buffer app for Google Reader. This buffered content is then automatically posted at assigned intervals throughout the coming day or week.
Abhinav Chugh @abhichugh, founder and CEO of VideoCrisp and Waybiz.com
When it comes to the average time spent on a site, video increases this by over 5 minutes. In terms of converting clicks to sales, visitors who view videos are 85% more likely to buy a product. Ways to get videos include Video Production Companies, Web Design or Marketing firms or utilising some of the do-it-yourself tool such as VideoCrisp, Animoto or XtraNormal – all of which are available online.
Don’t forget to know your target audience before choosing a format, though.
Conor Hughes @chughesvm is a marketing executive at Vertical Markets which incorporates Life Science Recruitment and Capital Markets Executive Search
Thanks Conor for a really interesting post. If anyone else wants a guest spot and reach a 1,000 visitors a day please email me lob@yourasms.com All guest posts must be original, about social media and include a picture and links.
