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Streamlining B2B Marketing Effectiveness: A guide for senior marketers

Streamlining B2B Marketing Effectiveness: A guide for senior marketers

In the fast-paced world of B2B marketing, staying ahead means being agile and focused. At Bright, we understand the challenges you face, from making the most of your martech & data to managing resources wisely. Our approach is about being smart with your strategy, how your teams work and making the most of your resources, ensuring you’re always driving towards measurable success.

For senior marketers navigating the complex terrain of B2B marketing, understanding the delicate balance between strategic alignment, collaboration, and customer lifecycle management is pivotal. The long sales cycles, high customer lifetime values, and the cumulative impact of brand investments necessitate a thoughtful approach to marketing strategy.

We’ve put together this guide as your roadmap to a more effective marketing strategy, crafted with agile marketing at its core.

Considerations before you start

Before diving into the actionable steps, it’s crucial to address the foundational elements that underpin marketing effectiveness in the B2B landscape:

Strategic alignment: Ensuring marketing strategies are directly linked to business goals is key (and obvious!). This alignment drives more focused and impactful marketing efforts but it’s easy for marketing teams to get bogged down in BAU so take a look at where your team is focusing it’s efforts.

Collaboration across revenue-generating functions: Marketing, sales, alliances and customer success teams must work in harmony, leveraging each other’s insights and collective KPIs and strategies to drive growth. Start with sales – this is a key stakeholder for making sure your marketing really achieves it’s potential.

Balancing Marketing priorities: Given B2B’s inherent long sales cycles and the significant value of customer relationships, it’s essential to appropriately distribute focus across acquisition, retention, and expansion.

Brand investment: Investing in your brand is vital for long-term success. However, may be hard to convince your CFO or CRO who is looking at much shorter time horizons in most cases. Investments bolster not just your market position, but they will improve the effectiveness of your demand generation activity. You’ll need to find measures (such as increased Lifetime value/ARR/Retention) that show impact on sales cycle, conversion rate etc over time so key stakeholders feel confident and can see how brand supports both immediate and future revenue streams.

With these considerations in mind, let’s explore practical steps to enhance your marketing effectiveness, starting with quick wins and evolving into comprehensive, long-term strategies.

Enhancing Marketing Effectiveness: Practical steps

Quick Wins for immediate impact

Refine your personas and messaging: Quickly audit your personas and make and adjust your messaging to ensure it’s resonating with your target audience. Clear, compelling messaging can significantly boost engagement and conversions

Optimise digital assets: Review your website and social media profiles for quick improvements. Simple updates can enhance user experience and SEO, driving more traffic and engagement

Reuse, repurpose and shatter content: Review and reuse your content – shatter into new derivatives and reuse across channels.

Leverage data insights: Use existing data to gain quick insights into customer behaviour and preferences, allowing for immediate adjustments to campaigns and strategies.

Strategic Initiatives for sustained growth

Develop agile marketing toolkits and playbooks: Create guides and resources based on successful strategies and tactics. These toolkits should be agile, allowing for quick adaptation as market conditions change. Consider how AI tools could help you here – creating or using marketing or persona based GPTs.

Invest in customer journey mapping: Deeply understand the paths your customers take. This investment helps in tailoring your marketing efforts for better acquisition, retention, and expansion outcomes.

Strengthen cross-functional collaboration: Establish regular touchpoints between marketing, sales, and customer success teams. Shared goals and insights lead to more effective and cohesive strategies. Consider how RevOps principals could help bring alignment and accelerate success.

Measure and adapt brand strategies: Continuously evaluate the impact of your brand investment, balancing short-term gains with long-term objectives. This approach ensures your brand remains a powerful asset in achieving business goals and amplifies your demand generation efforts.

It’s an infinite game

For senior B2B marketers, the path to enhanced marketing effectiveness is multi-faceted, requiring a balance of strategic foresight, agile execution, and continuous adaptation. Backed up with a growth culture and a focus on test and learn to enable innovation to flourish and support your goals. By focusing on both quick wins and strategic, long-term initiatives, you can ensure your marketing efforts contribute significantly to your business’s growth and success.

To further explore strategic alignment, collaborative strategies, or agile marketing methodologies, contact the Bright team for more in-depth guidance and support.

 

 

March 14, 2024 Alaina Roberts
Alaina RobertsStreamlining B2B Marketing Effectiveness: A guide for senior marketers
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How to maximise your marketing effectiveness

How to maximise your marketing effectiveness
Marketing leaders are faced with an ongoing barrage of challenges from fast-evolving AI to the pressure of achieving better results with fewer resources, as well as getting the most from your CDP investment and needing to balance short term KPIs with long term goals. We understand that marketing leadership is a tough job right now!
In our webinar on ‘How to maximise your marketing effectiveness’, our panel of B2B marketing experts address some of these key challenges, and share insights and practical solutions to address these issues – we’ll cover people, process, data and tech.

Listen to the podcast

Download your Marketing effectiveness reframe cards

Reframe Cards enable you and your team to have a different kind of conversation, re-think strategies or tactics and highlight learnings that you can take forward to optimise and generate better outcomes.

These Reframe Cards are focused on having conversations to help improve your marketing effectiveness, and empower your team to challenge their thinking. By changing their frame of mind to continually learn and grow, you can yield real business results and make a positive impact on your businesses bottom line.

Marketing Effectiveness: Recommended reads

Check out our suggested reading list of articles, reports and videos to help take your marketing effectiveness to the next level

On-demand video on Maximising your marketing effectiveness

Watch to learn how to improve the impact of your marketing machine, including:
  • People: Improving ways of working, determining future skills and developing a growth culture
  • Process: Optimising your operating model to improve revenue and customer centricity.
  • Data: Achieving optimal RevOps and KPI setting
  • Tech: Maximising the value from your existing martech stack and optimising GenAI opportunities
You’ll also hear examples of how you can find hidden value within your existing marketing and how to prioritise your efforts for the biggest impact.
Our panel includes:
  • Emily Nicols, Group Marketing Director, Informa Markets
  • Sian Heaphy, Certified Agile Trainer and Director, Bright
  • Zoe Merchant, Managing Director, Bright

Meet the speakers

Emily Nicols

Group Marketing Director, Informa Markets

Emily Nicols is a seasoned marketing professional with a passion for driving growth and creating impactful campaigns. As Group Marketing Director at Informa Markets, Emily has successfully implemented comprehensive marketing plans that have consistently delivered measurable results. 

Sian Heaphy

Accredited Agile Marketing Trainer and Director

Sian uses agile methods to encourage creativity, curiosity, and data-driven decisions in marketing. She works with teams to design experiments, gain insights, and achieve business goals. Sian promotes continuous improvement through experimentation and learning.

Zoë Merchant

Managing Director, Bright

Zoë is an agile marketing aficionado — a passionate believer in staying ahead of the competition with resilience, adaptability, and pace. After 20 years of delivering B2B marketing strategies. Using agile marketing to test, learn and build on success. Zoë leads the team in delivering results through continual and focused improvements to support clients’ business goals.

February 28, 2024 Alaina Roberts
Alaina RobertsHow to maximise your marketing effectiveness
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The power of Kanban boards in marketing: a project-level view

The power of Kanban boards in marketing: a project-level view

Marketing’s remit is forever expanding, requiring a blend of creativity, strategy, and effective project management. One tool that has increasingly become central to effective marketing is the Kanban board. As with any tool, the effectiveness of Kanban boards lies in how they are used and managed.  

A key tool in the application of agile marketing, Kanban boards have crossed over from many other industries due to their ease of visualising workflow, managing tasks, and fostering collaboration. Marketing, with its multiple tasks and objectives, can particularly benefit from this approach.  

However, a common question arises when everything in Marketing is connected: should we maintain a project-level Kanban board or a tactical one? 

Project-level boards vs tactical boards 

The project-level board provides a broader view of the whole project, including the diverse tasks needed to achieve a marketing campaign’s goal. It tracks the project’s progress from start to finish, showing the status of all tasks at a glance: what’s been completed, what’s in progress, and what’s yet to be started. It’s like looking at a map of a journey from a bird’s eye view.  

On the other hand, a tactical board is more focused. It manages individual or interrelated tasks that make up a project. While this micro-level view can be handy in managing the intricacies of tasks, it might not show how these tasks fit into the overall project, and it can lead to losing sight of the big picture and end up increasing the siloes rather than removing them. 

In marketing, where campaigns often involve interlinked activities (content creation, social media promotion, email campaigns, etc.), it becomes more advantageous to opt for a project-level board. This broad outlook ensures that all elements are interconnected and moving in harmony towards the campaign’s overall goal. 

Managing your Kanban board 

Regardless of the type of board you use, its efficiency boils down to proper management. Here are some tips to guide you:  

  1. Regularly update: Ensure the board is frequently updated with the status of tasks. It should be an accurate reflection of the project’s state.
  1. Prioritise tasks: Use a system (like color-coding and tagging) to signify task importance or urgency. It helps to focus the team’s efforts on what matters most.
  1. Limit WIP (Work-In-Progress): Kanban encourages completing tasks before taking on new ones. Set a WIP limit to prevent the team from being overwhelmed and to enhance productivity.
  1. Feedback and improvement: Have regular reviews and retrospectives. Use feedback from these sessions to streamline processes and improve the board’s functionality.

While tactical Kanban boards can be useful for managing detailed tasks, the interconnected nature of marketing activities makes the project-level board a more effective choice.  

Team benefits of Kanban boards 

As previously mentioned, Kanban boards contribute to maximise project management efficiency but how do we see the benefits play out within our teams?   

Accountability: Teams can prioritise tasks based on the appropriate coding system ensuring high priority tasks are not missed as well as enabling teams to have full autonomy through clear accountability and ownership of tasks. 

Simplicity: Kanban boards can be replicated, changed and adapted resulting in a simple, intuitive and swift adoption practice within teams.  

Remote collaboration: Whilst we are all still trying to adapt to new ways of working – especially across different verticals, industries and geographical locations – Kanban boards allow cross-functional teams to collaborate without missing key updates – wherever they are in the world! 

Well managed, a Kanban board can be a game-changer, promoting transparency, increasing, improving and maximising efficiency, and ultimately, driving your marketing campaign towards success. 

If you are looking to improve your ways of working to enhance your team’s agility and effectiveness, our Agile Marketing one-day training bootcamp is a good place to start.

Run by our team of accredited B2B agile marketing trainers and practitioners. Quickly empower your team to:  

  • Work smarter – make the most of your people, budget, tools and time  
  • Implement experimentation to drive continual improvement 
  • Use data & insights to inform decision making 
  • Demonstrate results and ROI at pace 
  • Pivot or persevere – easily adapt to market forces 

Contact us to find out more about our one-day Introduction to Agile Marketing bootcamp 

Resources/reading list:

January 16, 2024 Alaina Roberts ,
Alaina RobertsThe power of Kanban boards in marketing: a project-level view
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Discover new possibilities with Reframe Cards!

Discover new possibilities with Reframe Cards!

Download your cards to re–frame conversations and spark fresh perspectives. 

The Reframe Cards are designed to bring creativity and agile thinking into your team’s communication. 

By offering specific prompts, these cards encourage team members to share their thoughts, ideas, and opinions more openly, fostering a culture of transparency and collaboration.

Each Reframe Card aims to stimulate problem-solving discussions, driving the team towards actionable, goal-focused solutions.

Reframe your thinking

Ready to reframe your mindset and your conversations? Download your Reframe Cards today! 

Great to use in team meetings or to kick-start internal workshops, these cards cover the following areas:

 ⭐️ Design thinking – Challenge conventional strategies, embrace a fresh perspective and find innovative solutions to complex problems. 

 ⭐️ Activating agile – Unlock agile methodologies to enable adaptability, perform efficiently and drive a results-focused approach.

 ⭐️ Experimentation – Experiment with new ideas and strategies, encouraging a culture of continuous improvement and learning 

 ⭐️ Growth mindset – Re-think your current practices, iterate towards exciting outcomes and deliver exceptional results through continuous learning. 

 ⭐️ Change enablement – Say goodbye to outdated approaches and enable your team to embrace change to stay ahead of the competition. 

Here are some additional resources you may find useful:

December 14, 2023 Alaina Roberts , ,
Alaina RobertsDiscover new possibilities with Reframe Cards!
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Journey through time: A curated reading list for the retrospective of 2023

Journey through time: A curated reading list for the retrospective of 2023

Welcome to a curated collection of thought-provoking reads and podcasts as a retrospective of 2023. Embark on a journey through the realms of AI, agile marketing, design thinking, and growth mindset with our carefully selected recommendations.

AI Insights for content marketers

Articles:

Podcast:

Activating agile marketing

Book:

  • Agile Marketing” by Neil Perkin – Explore adaptive marketing principles and practices, offering guidelines to redesign marketing structures fit for today’s changeable environment.

Design thinking unveiled

Books:

Podcast:

Embracing a growth mindset

Books:

Podcasts:

Dive into these resources to prepare yourself for 2024. Each recommendation is carefully chosen to enhance your understanding and inspire insightful discussions.

December 13, 2023 Alaina Roberts ,
Alaina RobertsJourney through time: A curated reading list for the retrospective of 2023
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The power of inclusive design: Crafting creative experiences for all

The power of inclusive design: Crafting creative experiences for all

When it comes to engaging with your audience, you could have the most exciting, innovative product or piece of content, but if it’s not accessible then it won’t deliver the results you’re looking for. The concept of accessibility in design has reshaped the way we create products, experiences, websites, apps, and digital platforms, requiring designers to be even more creative in our approach to consider and deliver for all audiences and ultimately leading to increasingly innovative and inclusive design.

Understanding accessibility in design

Good design can connect with people around the world and across different cultures to create equity and accessibility, helping to foster an inclusive and socially responsible community. Embracing accessibility isn’t just a trend, but a commitment to designing with empathy and foresight to have a positive impact on people’s lives. It’s important to not think of accessibility requirements as a restriction, but instead an ignition to creativity, to innovate past basic delivery and offer different design layers.

Accessibility in design is about creating products and services that can be easily accessed, understood, and used by people, regardless of their physical or cognitive abilities. It is a key component of inclusive design, which puts accommodating diverse users’ needs and preferences at the core of a project.

Where to start with inclusive design

When you begin to consider how you can apply inclusive design thinking to your projects, it can be overwhelming to know where to start. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are international standards that help creatives develop accessible web content. While guiding structures around design can feel limiting, these guidelines set a platform for diving deeper into the creative process and encourage an innovative approach to deliver for all, not just the majority.

These guidelines are built on four guiding principles that fit under the acronym POUR:

The Inclusive design principles: perceivable, operable, understandable and robust

Example infographic using inclusive design principles

Infographic using inclusive design principles

Creating an accessible design involves incorporating features and considerations that enable people with disabilities to use a product, website, or environment effectively. Here are some essential elements that make the examples below more accessible:

  • Consistent navigation and layout
  • Plain language and easy-to-understand content
  • Contrast and colour choices
  • Readable fonts and typography
  • Digestible content in sufficient time

Promoting inclusive design

So, how can we deliver content and experiences for our audiences across different platforms that are digestible for everyone without sacrificing creativity? We put together some practical tips to help promote inclusive engagement whilst also ensuring creativity.

Test alternatives for visual content

Whether you are producing for a website or another digital product, descriptive alternative text (alt text) for images and graphics allows you to get creative with your visual design, while ensuring users with visual impairments can interpret what you’re communicating. Include descriptive text for the mood, story or artistic intent behind the image, not just the practical explanation, to enhance the experience for everyone.

Business reports and data visualisation

Clear reporting and data presentations are crucial to bringing your audience on your journey and building confidence in your strategic direction. To make these documents accessible, formatting is everything. Accessible PDFs or data tables used alongside visually engaging charts and graphs will give you extra opportunities to represent your data in an effective and creative way, whilst ensuring you’re being inclusive of a broader audience.

Experiential event design

When you think of an event experience, your first considerations are sight and sound. However, by incorporating other sensory elements such as touch, smell or taste into a tactile exhibit, you allow further opportunities for your audience to engage with your brand. You’ll find your full audience benefits from this well-rounded and memorable approach to event design.

Captioning and transcripts for multimedia

Turning on subtitles is becoming more popular across different audiences for TV shows and movies regardless of ability. If your project involves multimedia content like videos or podcasts, tools such as closed captions, transcripts, and audio descriptions help ensure you will reach a wider audience. Within inclusive design, these additions don’t just make your content more accessible for users with hearing or visual impairments, but also open opportunities for creative storytelling through synchronised captions or tailored transcripts that can capture nuances in spoken content. In the same way that a script has stage directions for actors, you can create a more valuable experience for your audience with further direction on how they can interpret the content.

Inclusive design is a journey that not only aligns with our social and ethical responsibility as creatives, but also expands the potential for innovation in design. It means designing with diversity in mind from the very beginning, rather than as an afterthought.

Whether we’re working on web projects, product packaging, or experiential events, inclusive design isn’t about compromise; it’s about expanding our horizons and reimagining the creative process. By thinking inclusively about our diverse user needs and providing alternative ways for people to engage, design can play an important role in making the world a more inclusive place. We encourage you to imagine and innovate without boundaries and explore how you can supercharge your creative design for your entire audience.

Resources/reading list:

October 20, 2023 Alaina Roberts
Alaina RobertsThe power of inclusive design: Crafting creative experiences for all
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AI in marketing: Unpacking the opportunities and challenges

AI in marketing: Unpacking the opportunities and challenges

Elevate your marketing strategies and dive into the world of generative AI at our latest Smarter Marketer panel event. Whether you’re grappling with how to harness the potential of AI to drive business growth or seeking actionable tips on how to integrate AI into your marketing efforts, our event covers it all.

Our exclusive panel discussion simplifies the complexities of AI’s challenges and guides you towards pragmatic solutions that work for your organisation. Witness first-hand the positive impact generative AI is already having on marketing strategies and outputs.

Our Smarter Marketer panel event delves into:

  1. Generative AI tools unveiled: How AI is revolutionising content creation strategies.
  2. AI in action: Implementing AI for maximum effectiveness.
  3. Testing and adoption incubation: Implementing and testing AI tools.
  4. Operational excellence: Vital considerations for governance in your marketing operations.
  5. Risk management: Identifying, assessing and mitigating risks.

Missed the session, watch it on demand!

Unlock the AI advantage – activating AI

Ready to embark on your AI journey? Our tools and use cases for marketers resource is a great place to start – download yours today.

Meet the speakers

Mark Breslin

Chief Product & Technology Officer, Informa Tech

Mark is responsible for leading the Product & Technology at Informa Tech. This team focuses on working with the leadership teams across the business to shape and create product strategies and roadmaps for new and existing products and services.

Kate Cox

CMO, Bright Bid

Kate is an experienced CMO with a focus on marketing for the digital age and is a native AI marketer in her current role at Bright Bid, an adtech company using AI and human expertise to improve the effectiveness of paid digital activity

Zoe Merchant

Zoë is an agile marketing aficionado — a passionate believer in staying ahead of the competition with resilience, adaptability, and pace. After 20 years of delivering B2B marketing strategies, Zoë founded Bright to help tech, engineering and consulting firms get the most from their marketing investment. Using agile marketing to test, learn and build on success. Zoë leads the team in delivering results through continual and focused improvements to support clients’ business goals.

Interested in reading more about the capabilities of AI in marketing?

Check out our reading list here – Ignite your knowledge: The ultimate AI adventure begins

September 25, 2023 Paul Keegan , ,
Paul KeeganAI in marketing: Unpacking the opportunities and challenges
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Ignite your knowledge: The ultimate AI adventure begins

Ignite your knowledge: The ultimate AI adventure begins

As the days grow shorter and the nights get cozier, there’s no better time to embark on a journey into the world of AI. To kickstart your adventure, we’ve curated a list of unmissable reads and listens that will light up your path to AI enlightenment.

For the bookworms:

Rewired – The McKinsey & Company guide to outcompeting in the age of digital and AI.

MIT study: Experimental Evidence on the Productivity Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence – Examining the productivity impact of the assistive chatbot ChatGPT.

AI-powered marketing and sales reach new heights with generative AI – McKinsey & Company discuss how AI technology, particularly generative AI is transforming the fields of marketing and sales, impacting both B2B and B2C players.

10 Ways PPC Automation and AI Can Improve Your Campaigns – A look at AI and Automation in PPC campaigns from BrightBid.

Black Mirror meets marketing: the ethical implications of AI – A look at the privacy and ethical concerns around AI from Informa Tech.

Seven ChatGPT experiments content marketers should test now – Ideas from InformaTech on how to experiment with ChatGPT to create compelling content and improve market research and analysis.

For those always on the go:

The future of search in B2B marketing– Podcast with Kate Cox, CMO at BrightBid, which examines how AI will change Search Engine Marketing for B2B customers and B2B marketing.

AI will save the world with Marc Andreessen and Martin Casado – Co-founder of a16z, dives into the world of AI, aiming to quell concerns about its impact on humanity.

Which tool to start with?

With so many AI tools out there, here are a few sites that can help you decide which tools to get started with:

There’s an AI for that: https://theresanaiforthat.com

Futurepedia: https://www.futurepedia.io

TopAI.tools: https://topai.tools

And finally here’s a site which lists all the comparison sites!

Interested in hearing more about the capabilities of AI in marketing? Check out our panel discussion “AI in marketing: Unpacking the opportunities and challenges” for more insight, as well as helpful AI resources.

Happy reading from the Bright Team.

September 21, 2023 Paul Keegan ,
Paul KeeganIgnite your knowledge: The ultimate AI adventure begins
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Developing a strategy for your website continuous improvement

Developing a strategy for your website continuous improvement

What does Continuous Improvement mean to you?

Identify, plan, execute, review. Continuous improvement is a well-known process in the world of supply chain and business operations, but its benefits in marketing activity and website management are often overlooked.

It’s a common misconception that once a website is launched, the hard work is done, and we move into the ‘set and forget’ phase. In reality ongoing maintenance and continual improvement of the site and its assets is crucial to performance and success.

The role of your website in achieving business goals

Technology updates and trends move so quickly that it’s easy to fill up your task list with changes and reworks. However, a website is often the greatest go to market tool a company has, and a comprehensive website strategy helps to give your work purpose, map a path to reach your overall goals and informs how you measure results. Here are five things to consider when building out your continuous improvement strategy for your website.

1.     Identify your current state

There are different considerations to make depending on the status of your website – have you just launched a new site? Are you aiming to drive new visitors or diversify and expand your offering? Understanding your priorities will help guide you towards your plan.

As soon as people begin visiting your site, behaviour data starts to build – what pages they’re visiting, whether they are on their phone or computer, what they like (and don’t!). This data helps you understand your current website and where potential gaps are.

Undertake a full evaluation of your current content. Having an aim to regularly update and refresh your content will ensure your website flexes and develops alongside your business. By analysing your content and identifying your strong and weak spots, your content plan will begin to develop.

2.     Map your goals and objectives

So now you know where you are, but how does this align with where you want to be? Your website is an important tool for your sales, business development, and customer engagement teams. Aligning your digital goals with your overall company vision and purpose will help you unlock the potential of your platform and ensure the work you are putting in will be delivering for the organisation in the long run.

As your website continuous improvement and content development has no real end-date, it’s easy to get disheartened and feel overwhelmed, but by outlining clear KPIs for the short, medium, and long term, you’ll be able to celebrate those successes along the way to keep energy levels up and stay focused on optimisation.

4.     Focus on your audience

There can sometimes be a gap between what your company thinks the audience wants and what your audience actually needs. To continue to build improvements into your platform, you need to think as the customer. Is it easy for your users to work out where they need to go to find the information they need? Optimise your navigation, page load times, and test different design elements and ways of using content.

5.     Create your content

Keep watch for opportunities to create fresh content and ensure you are getting the maximum value from it by implementing SEO best practices and technology updates. In the same way that a Google Bot will trawl your content and learn to adjust its own algorithms, you can keep your SEO practices up to date to stay ahead of any changes.

When in doubt, use targeted survey questions and feedback forms to get a direct line to your audience and make changes based on their feedback.

Bonus consideration: Experimentation

Experimentation is a great way to drive your continuous improvement. Improving understanding of your audiences, user design, conversion and doing it quickly. Using clear, time bound experiments to increase the effectiveness of your website. When experimenting with your website think about:

  • Your experimentation shouldn’t be about vanity metrics – it needs to focus on where you can drive the most business impact. So, places to start are:
    • Pages, sections or areas that have the highest impact
    • Starting at the end of the funnel
  • Don’t just focus on A/B testing – think about big radical ideas that drastically improve the user experience. This is where you’ll see the biggest improvements

Remember to be agile – when it comes to continuous improvement it should be about spending your time where you can drive the best possible results – for your audiences and for your business goals. Test, learn and build on your findings.

Your continuous improvement journey

While website development and maintenance is a never-ending cycle, the benefit it can bring your business is tangible. By being purposeful and consistent in your continuous improvement strategy, you’ll drive better engagement with your customers and ensure you are well positioned to adapt quickly to an ever-changing digital environment.

September 15, 2023 Sian Heaphy ,
Sian HeaphyDeveloping a strategy for your website continuous improvement
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The power of an engaged social community

The power of an engaged social community

Building connections that drive success

Social media has become a cornerstone of communication, connection, and business growth. We’ve seen its growth in e-commerce, as a search engine and its use a channel to reach target audiences.

Gone are the days when your follower count would suffice. The quality of engagement matters just as much as the quantity of followers. But an engaged community isn’t just a mere collection of likes and comments either, it’s a vibrant ecosystem where authentic connections flourish – where members actively participate, share insights and initiate conversations.

What’s the magic of an engaged social community?

Build brand loyalty and trust

An engaged community can transform passive followers into brand advocates. Not only will they support your products or services but will likely promote them willingly.

Enhancing customer support

This is something you see a lot with B2C brands as well as SaaS firms and an engaged community can serve as a real-time customer support hub.

Own content amplification

An engaged community will actively amplify content you generate, increasing reach, visibility, and brand awareness.

Driving user generated content

We know content is king, but content from your users about your products and services? Gold dust. The challenge is getting it. An engaged community makes that process a lot simpler and they’ll show genuine enthusiasm for the brand.

Fostering social engagement

Here are some of the things to think about when focusing on increasing engagement from your audiences.

Creating valuable content

Engagement starts with content that resonates with your target audience. Invest time in developing personas and understanding their buyer journey to understand their interests, pain points and preference. Use these insights to craft content that educates, entertains, or inspires to encourage interaction.

Encourage two-way conversations

Engagement is a two-way street. Responding to comments, questions and messages demonstrates you value your community’s input, drives connection and belonging.

Blend the physical and the virtual

When focusing on engagement, it’s important not to look at virtual and physical in isolation. They should work together to increase your reach, drive engagement, and foster your community. Physical events like exhibitions, roundtables, and meetups alongside interactive events like contests, polls, online Q&A sessions, and live interviews inject an element of excitement into your community. These events encourage participation and provide an opportunity for followers to actively contribute.

Showcase user generated content

Peers like to hear from their peers so promoting, sharing, and celebrating user generated content is a great way to encourage contribution.

Don’t focus just on the brand

Your company pages and profiles are a great starting point to driving engagement, but building your community shouldn’t stop there. What can you do as individuals to foster the community? What subject matter experts and industry leaders are within your business that you can use to fuel your community building activity?

Measuring the success of your activity

Good engagement can be tricky to measure. It’s not just about the number of likes, comments, shares or engagement rate. That’s only part of the equation. The other parts of the equation are who is liking and engaging, are they in your ICP? And finally what’s the impact you’re seeing of that engagement? This could be increased conversion of unknowns to knowns, improved engagement and marketing audiences, brand sentiment and even increased revenue.

The future of engagement holds exciting possibilities. Virtual and augmented reality, and AI-driven interactions promise to create even more immersive and interactive experiences. As technology evolves, engagement strategies will evolve with them, redefining the way communities connect and thrive.

An engaged social media community is more than just a digital gathering—it’s a powerful catalyst for success. As the digital and social landscape continues to evolve, nurturing an engaged community will remain a cornerstone of successful social media strategies. Continue to research, use your social media data and audience data to develop strategies that not only increase your reach, but forge meaningful connections.

August 18, 2023 Sian Heaphy ,
Sian HeaphyThe power of an engaged social community
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