Tag Archive for: digital marketing

A Quick Guide to Social Media Marketing

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To many of us digital natives it is difficult to imagine a world without social media. Social media has evolved from a tool that very few businesses use, to being an integral piece of every company’s marketing strategy. There should be no question as to whether or not your brand should be using social media instead you should be thinking: how can I best utilise platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn to help grow my business?

What is Social Media Marketing?

Here at Air Social, we know that social media marketing is key for generating leads, raising brand awareness and developing relationships with existing or potential customers.

When managed successfully, social media provides a platform for excellent, responsive customer service, community engagement and social selling activities that help generate interest and create relationships with customers.

The importance of Social Media Marketing

Social media is an essential component of every marketing plan. With its great potential this type of marketing can help you achieve many of your business’s marketing goals, such as:

  • Creating and building your brand identity
  • Raising brand awareness
  • Building conversions
  • Increasing your website traffic
  • Interacting with customers and developing relationships.

Once your business is ready to have an online presence, you should develop a social media strategy, ensuring you are sharing engaging content and maintaining a consistent brand image, whilst using your page to correctly promote your business.

Social media is no longer a place where you only interact and socialise with friends and family but is now a key component in promoting your business. Due to this trend, customers are now able to engage with brands whenever they please.

If you have not been using social media for your business you are really missing out! At Air Social, we place social strategy at the centre of all our marketing campaigns. We produce engaging, meaningful and targeted campaigns, reaching the right people at the right time to grow your business.

Contact us today on 01483 789 434 or email us at team@airsocial-build-com.stackstaging.com for further information on our services.

What are the benefits of a new website?

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A new website is an investment of both time and money, however you shouldn’t let this put you off. The returns from super-charging your online presence are huge, and can completely transform your brand and your business.

How does the average person use your website?

Let’s consider how the average person uses the internet:

  1. You search for the service you need using a search engine.
  2. Presented with thousands of results, you choose a selection from the first page of results.
  3. You look through each of these, making snap judgements about the quality and credibility of the business based on your first-impressions of the site.
  4. If the website reflects quality, you look for a means to get in touch, either calling directly or by filling out a web-form.

At each interaction, the user’s thought process can be boiled-down to: Does this particular interaction give me confidence that this supplier can be trusted, and that the product/service on offer will meet my expectations?

Let’s explore some of the benefits of a new website

There are many benefits to revamping your website, below I have touched on just a few. Whilst looking through, keep in mind what your current website is like, and whether you are offering a poor user experience to your visitors.

New business

Your primary touch-point with new and existing customers is your website. Whether reached through social media or search engines, a new customer visiting your site will dedicate a very short amount of time to looking to see if you offer what they need. If you don’t peak their interest straight away, you’ve lost them.

Having clear, well-written and well-presented content is vital. Structuring this in a logical way, with clear navigation and a complementary colour scheme is equally important. Get this wrong and you will fall at the first hurdle. Get this right and you will maximise the number of people that visit your site and the number of people who contact you off the back of this.

Brand credibility

In the competitive world of the internet, credibility is everything. From Google reviews to Facebook likes, having a strong and consistent online presence is vital. We see your website as the main player in your digital portfolio; it plays the decisive role in giving your brand credibility. A poor user experience, confusing navigation, or even something as simple as large bodies of text in an unattractive font can damage your brand credibility.

If you need convincing, think about how many times you have avoided using a company because its website doesn’t work well on mobile, or because you can’t find the information you need. If you aren’t confident your site is as good as it could be, it’s likely people have experienced this on your site.

Search Engines and Social Media

A new website, built with search engines and social media in mind, is a fantastic way to super-charge your online presence. Ranking highly on search engines drives new business, and does wonders for brand credibility. Making your business easy to find should be at the forefront of your digital strategy; if your current website ranks poorly, or offers a poor user experience, then a new website optimised for search engines is a must have.

A well designed website is a fantastic touch point for new and existing customers, one obvious area to help enhance this is social media. Here at Air Social, we are specialists in social media strategy and therefore know the benefits of targeting audiences through social media and driving them to your website. We equally know that a poor website can substantially reduce the impact of this type of marketing. Fancy getting the most out of vast social media audiences? Start with a website that does your brand justice.

A new website adds value to your business; it gets you noticed in a highly competitive world, and enforces your credibility as suppliers of a high-quality service. Having a scalable online presence is vital – a well-designed and developed website gives you the perfect launch pad to deploy your digital strategy.

From keeping your current clients confident, to reaching out to new areas, make sure your primary touch point doesn’t let you down. To learn more about the different website packages we offer, and how we can help your online presence, contact: team@airsocial-build-com.stackstaging.com

 

Social Media: The Goldman Sachs Story

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In 2008 the landscape of worldwide banking was not a pretty picture. In the midst of what many economists called the most serious financial crisis since the great depression, ‘banking’ had become a dirty word. Although Goldman Sachs had initially benefited from the subprime mortgage crisis in 2007, this was what ultimately triggered a worldwide financial crisis leading to the company being bailed out by the US Government; it’s safe to say that Goldman Sachs were not held in high esteem by the general public.

2008 was also the year Barack Obama won the US Presidential election; having gone from a relatively unknown Democrat to the leader of the free world in a relatively short amount of time. His success has been credited in part to the use of social media in his campaign; finally, social media marketing had truly arrived.

Understandably, due to the financial climate and their poor public image, the fairly conservative Goldman Sachs were reluctant to make the leap to social media but, after much convincing from their marketing department, leap they did.

Allegedly what changed their mind is that the firm’s marketing department searched the phrase “Goldman Sachs” on YouTube and turned up more than 34,000 videos, none of which had been posted by the firm; they realised that people would be talking about their brand regardless of their actions; there was a lesser risk in having an online presence rather than not at all. As head of brand marketing and digital strategy, Lisa Shallet puts it: “We’ve learned that we have to invest in telling our story online and protecting the Goldman Sachs brand.”

Nevertheless, the initial Goldman Sachs online output may have actually alienated people. In 2013 The Banker’s Umbrella commented on the bank’s Twitter activity: “what Goldman is doing is conducting a good old fashioned direct marketing campaign. All they are doing is giving you an advertising brochure and delivering it through social media”, they were simply drip-feeding their Twitter followers with a standard ad campaign, 140 characters at a time.

Even with the backdrop of corporate impersonality, Goldman Sachs is already particularly faceless; it has no branches so there is no customer and community interaction. Maybe this explains their initial failure online; Goldman Sachs failed to grasp was that ‘social media’ is exactly that, social. Slowly, Goldman realised that as it turns out, having no social media presence is bad, but having a bad social media presence is worse.

Luckily for Goldman Sachs they’ve had a turn around.

Now, in 2017, Goldman Sachs actually excel at producing shareable content, regularly uploading accessible videos and blogs about current events and popular culture – OK, so maybe not entirely relevant to the Goldman Sachs brand, but a step in the right direction none the less.

Last week they even tweeted their own #TBT (as pictured below); Goldman is finally taking off the corporate mask to reveal the real people who work for the bank – and it working. They now have well over half a million followers and have slowly expanded to social media channels they feel compliment their brand, engaging with consumers on LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube.

By 2015 90% of Goldman’s marketing activity was online, vital for a company with no physical high street presence, and now in 2017 that figure is undoubtedly higher. Amanda Rubin, managing director and global co-head of brand and content strategy at Goldman, has said that “from a brand’s perspective, digital platforms offer us an enormous amount of data. By using that data, we are able to know what is valuable, what is interesting, and what is imperative.” We couldn’t agree more, as recognised Facebook partners we are in the lucky position of having access to valuable census data and so experience first-hand the influence this data can have on a campaign and, moreover, the impact that carefully targeted and relevant social media can provide.

Why Bespoke Business Software is Vital for our Company

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As a company that specialises in lead generation it is vital that none of our own leads is ever dropped. We at Air Social use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application to avoid that from ever happening. However, many CRMs come ready made with a huge amount of unnecessary apps that a compact team such as ours simply doesn’t require. With such an unwieldy amount of apps a CRM designed to organise a company may actually make matters more complicated, with actions getting lost in the system.

This is where Bespoke Business Solutions come in. They allow us to mould the software we use to suit our business, rather than force us to adapt to generic software. The CRM they have provided us with precisely does what we need it to do for example to assign and reassign roles, track new and completed tasks and keep up with each other’s meetings. As we work with many clients being able to assign hours is very useful and being able to log hours spent on certain clients is absolutely essential to the way we bill clients.
This level of organisation makes sure every lead is followed up, and nothing gets forgotten. Obviously for a business with more employees it would be less relevant to have a joint calendar with everyone’s meetings in it, but for our team its perfect.

On top of these benefits, having a custom made system it means if our business changes we have the ability to call up and alter the system. It is customisable and free flowing with our own business.

It also avoids some of the main pitfalls of generic CRM applications. The system that BBS have made toes the line between an overly simple interface that will quickly be outgrown by an expanding business and cumbersome systems where you have to go through multiple screens to process transactions. With BBS there is no refreshing, no scrolling up and down, minimal transactions from screen to screen – yet it delivers the same service.

So next time you’re wondering what the secret to our success is… Well, it’s a secret. But you can be sure our fantastic CRM from Bespoke Business Software plays a big part in the smooth functioning of our company!

Find out more about Bespoke Business Software here.

This Year, Keep Your Social Media Healthy.

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At this time of year all anyone seems to be talking about is their New Year’s Resolution; the latest fitness regime or tasteless clean eating diet, but here at Air Social we are more concerned with keeping our social media profiles healthy. So here, as a belated Christmas gift to you, are some tips from the experts (us).

1. Maintenance.
There’s only one thing that looks as sloppy as a lack of internet presence and that’s an out of date, underutilised internet presence.
An unkempt social media profile is a bit like bad dental hygiene, it needs looking after, otherwise people will literally stay away from you. If a Google search were to show two similar business and one was fully up to date – and the other hadn’t posted since 2012, some may well assume the business no longer exists. Frequent posting also keeps your business in the forefront of people’s minds so next time they need the services you provide – you’ll often be the first they come to. So, like brushing your teeth, social media has to be maintained daily – and no, not just the once.

2. You get out what you put in.
What happens when you eat junk food? You may put on weight. What happens when you post spam? You will lose credibility and your potential customers will lose interest. Finding meaningful, relevant content that will keep your customer engaged can seem like an ongoing slog, but it’s worth it.

3. Stay connected.
It may seem obvious to some, but so many small businesses still fail to have a cohesive set of social media profiles. By not linking your website to your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram you make it harder for customers to keep up to date with your business developments and conversely by not making your website accessible from social media you may lose out on real business.

4. Engage.
The clue is in the name. ‘SOCIAL’. The beauty of social media is that it gives an informal platform to listen to your customers’ needs, solve their issues and answer any queries; failure to respond to your online customers will simply be viewed as bad customer service.

There are many ways in which your social media profiles may not be selling to their maximum potential, and for most people even the four things listed may be a lot to juggle on top of running a company. For more advice and information on how Air Social can help you and your business call 01483 789 434 or email alex@airsocial-build-com.stackstaging.com

The Importance of Keeping Your Google Profile Up to Date

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There has been more than a little speculation over the relevance of Google+, in fact, last year Forbes declared it dead; as a social media platform it is widely known to be redundant and you wouldn’t be foolish to think it doesn’t exist anymore (in fact Google+ pages are now managed through Google My Business). Nevertheless as a tool for business, Google couldn’t be more vital.

In the battle of the search engines, Google undeniably dominates with 81.42 percent of desktop browser traffic in the US and over 11 billion desktop searches per month. The statistics are even more astonishing if you take into account mobile usage, where a vast 92.91 percent of searches were done through Google.

This year marks the first in which mobile internet access surpassed desktop usage, and is predicted to increase even further, with estimates of mobile making up 75 percent of global search traffic next year. Google’s stronghold on the mobile market means that, if we combine this information with the fact that search engine queries ultimately generate 300 percent more traffic to content sites than social media, we can see how the curtains might not quite be drawn on Google+ yet.

By having your business on Google you too can benefit from this kind of traffic, as your SEO is improved just by having a Google+ page; as a completely free service it would therefore be foolish not to have your business represented on Google with accurate, up to date information.

Aside from increased SEO, filling your Google profile with correct information and pictures builds a level of trust with potential customers as it enhances your legitimacy.

For example, if an individual uses Google to search for “dry cleaner in Woking” and two suggestions come up – one of a dry cleaner with good Google reviews and details such as opening times and professional looking photos; and one with just a name and address – which one are they more likely to choose? With this example, we can see how minimal browsing on Google can lead to potential business, and conversely, incorrect or out of date information can lead to lost business and customer dissatisfaction, therefore anyone not taking the time to update their Google profile will almost certainly miss out.

On top of this, Google+ could potentially make a comeback having last year streamlined the concept to resemble something more akin to Pinterest or Twitter, rather than standing as a direct rival to Facebook. With their change of direction there may be a future for the platform as a whole and anyone with an established profile will already have a head start.

Whether this comeback will materialise can’t be foretold but in a world where marketing is becoming more and more holistic, it is important to have as many strings to your digital bow as possible, and Google is no exception. Even though its failure as a social network is undeniable (so far) Google is a vital platform for your business and, if nothing else, a great way to get traffic on to your other social media accounts.

If, like us, you’re serious about your business then you need to embrace all facets of social media, let us help you.

team@airsocial.co.uk
01483 789 434
Leapale House,
Leapale Lane, Guildford,
Surrey, GU1 4LY

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