With keynote speaker Wes Finley, Coca-Cola’s Global Digital Operations Lead and Social Connections expert.
As an Internet marketing specialist in Geelong, we keep up with what’s happening in the world of online. We follow social media trends, new platforms, strategies and techniques to boost engagement with your audience. This morning we attended a Melbourne breakfast which featured special guest and keynote speaker from America, Wes Finley, who heads up the giant Internet marketing team at Coca-Cola.
The seminar had some great tips relevant to big and small businesses alike. We’ve summarised some of the key pieces of advice we’ve taken away from the seminar, relevant to our business and audience.
Engage in ‘social listening’
Listen to your customers! We often reassure clients that staying off social media doesn’t protect you from negativity, such as bad reviews, it just means you’re not in the space and available to respond, potentially turning a disaster into a positive outcome. This sprang to mind when Wes was talking about Coca-Cola’s centre of social listening! Not every business can afford to pay people to read everything your customers say online 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but you can certainly make time to monitor and read what your audience wants, what else they’re liking and commenting on, what they’re saying about your brand… Long story short – don’t just focus on pushing out great content to garner engagement, make time to listen to your audience so you can tweak your content to suit it. This can be applied to your products and services too! Social listening is most definitely a thing, and all social media managers/directors of marketing/business owners need to do more of it.
Make use of user-generated content (UGC)
As Wes aptly put it, creating content to engage your audience is expensive, and even if you don’t hire someone to produce content for a fee, time is still money for every business owner. Make better use of UGC! User-generated content can be text, images, videos or otherwise, posted by your customers and re-posted by you. This shows love towards your existing customers, like ‘Hey! We love what you’re doing with our product, keep doing it!’ while tempting potential customers, ‘Hey! Look what you’re missing out on… people who use our products are *insert relevant emotion/activity here*, i.e. having so much fun/are so smart/look stylish/etc.’.
There was an interesting question brought up about copyright – are brands allowed to use their customers’ photos? This wasn’t 100 per cent resolved, but what we would advise is designating a hash-tag for your customers who want to be re-posted by you, or save UGC for competitions, and put it in your competition’s terms and conditions that any UGC submitted will be re-posted at your discretion during *insert relevant time period*. There’s always a way…
Engage your creative!
We really love the idea of bringing your ‘creative’ person into your Internet marketing team to help produce cohesive and visually compelling content. Why not actively engage the graphic designer/illustrator/other creative in your marketing discussions and plans? Marketers, business owners, managers and other people producing content online generally focus on getting the text right, portraying their message in the right tone, using the right hash-tags, using the right tools and posting at the relevant times – graphics and images are all-too-often an afterthought for content creators! But it shouldn’t be – engaging a graphics person in your social media efforts will truly help take things to the next level. Marry the message with graphics and visually compel your audience to take a desired action!
Have a strategy, but be prepared to post ad-hoc based on topical events
We constantly bang on about HAVING AN INTERNET MARKETING STRATEGY… sorry, didn’t mean to yell, we’re just really passionate about having a plan. Almost every business we work with has a core to their business, be it products, services or a combination. Obviously things crop up throughout the year, many of which you couldn’t possibly plan for! However, nurture the core of your business by planning for it, promoting it, informing about it and just generally ensuring the core of your business gets the love it needs to flourish online. As things happen which are relevant to your business and audience, don’t hold back! What’s the worst thing that’s going to happen if you deviate from the oh-so important plan – you post five things in a day and get heaps of engagement? Even if you get no engagement, there’s a lesson in that, too.
Thanks to Interactive Minds for hosting this event and to Wes Finley for making the long-haul trip to Aus to present to us, we’re glad you did! If you have any questions about Internet marketing in Geelong or anywhere in Australia, give us a call. We’d love to talk to you about how to start out online or take it to the next level.
P.S. We Periscope’d a snippet of the event, make sure you follow us on Twitter for live streaming from marketing events and more!