Tag Archive for: digital

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.

How to keep up to date with trends in the digital sector

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The digital world moves quickly. It can be a daunting prospect knowing that a strategy you are using, or the tools that you find most useful, may soon be outdated. Having been in the digital sector over a period of great change, we know this only too well. However, we also know that keeping up to date with this ever-changing world can yield huge returns.

Knowing the trends and changes coming up will put you ahead of the competition, will give you valuable credibility, and will sit you on the road to digital success.

Below are 4 ways to stay up to date.

Blogs

This is our favourite way of learning what’s new and exciting in the sector. Regularly reading a range of articles on digital will give you a sense of the direction new trends and technologies are taking. There’s a huge range of blogs out there, so it is tricky to know where to start. Here’s a small selection that covers a variety of subjects within the digital sector.

Social media group

We love Linkedin groups. They seem to be less well-known than Facebook groups, however with the more professional audiences, you can be sure they contain treasure troves of useful articles and ideas. Simply search for your area of interest, find a group that looks interesting, request to join, and get scrolling!

Email newsletters

Don’t always be perturbed by the dreaded website sign-up form or checkbox, they can be game-changers. Email newsletters are controversial. Some people love them, using them as a tool to stay up to date and informed, some people hate them, seeing them as unwelcome clutter in their mailbox. We sit somewhere in the middle. Having a small yet varied selection of newsletters coming into your mailbox each month acts as a valuable pointer to what’s coming up and what might be worth reading more into. You can make this significantly easier for yourself by setting up an automatic forward to copy these into a specific folder in your mailbox. Then, when you have time to read through, they are all in one location.

Be inquisitive

The best way to keep up to date is also the simplest – talking to people in your industry and asking the right questions to potential customers will give you a foresight into common problems and challenges. These challenges will have been faced by people across the digital world and people will have written about potential solutions. The more your research these, the more rounded a picture you will gain of your digital surroundings. The clearer the picture, the better placed you are to adapt to changes in the digital world.

The digital sector moves quickly, and it can be daunting trying to keep up to date with the latest goings on. The above suggestions are just a few ways you can stay ahead of the game, but if you would like to learn how an agency specialising in digital strategy and creativity can help your business, why not get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.

Why you need a Google My Business page

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What is a Google My Business page?

Google themselves explain it pretty well: “Google My Business is a free and easy-to-use tool for businesses and organisations to manage their online presence across Google, including search and maps.”

What does this actually mean? Well, this means that whenever you need to change business information, such as address, contact information, business hours, etc, all you need do is update your Google My Business information and it will update across all your Google touch points.

Google My Business also gives you the added bonus of a business profile on the search results page. For examples, when you search for a company, such as Air Social Marketing Agency, you will notice a business profile on the right hand side (desktop) of the Google results page. This is your Google My Business profile, looks good doesn’t it!

What are the benefits?

Visibility

  • Having a business profile appear on a search results page puts you in a significantly more prominent position than the other results (often your competition). It puts all your more key information front and centre, such as reviews, opening times, and contact details.
  • You will rank higher on search engines. Bear in mind having contrasting contact information on your different Google touch-points can cause Google to penalise your SEO score. A Google My Business page can help fix this.
  • People in the area will get location specific results, especially if you have multiple branches.

Credibility

  • In an increasingly competitive world, brand credibility is everything. A business profile appearing in search results puts you ahead of the competition. Combine this with positive reviews and a well coordinated social media presence, and new business will flock in.

Accessibility

  • Don’t have a great website? Hard to use on smaller devices? Having a Google business profile gives your potential customers a place to find essential contact information and reviews in a clear and accessible way.

How do I create a Google My Business page?

A Google My Business page is free to set up. You can find instructions on how to do this at: https://business.google.com

A Google My Business page is a must-have tool in your digital arsenal. If you need advice or help setting this up, or coordinating this with the rest of your digital strategy, why not give us a call, we’ll be happy to help.

Get in touch

WordPress Development – Tips for those just starting out

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When developing with WordPress you are often dealing with other people’s work, other people’s ideas, and other people’s code. Although inevitably this can turn up difficulties, more often than not it will open you up to new ways of working and better practices. I’ve tried to include below a handful of small tips and tricks that I’ve learned over my time in the industry; this is not an exhaustive list, however should give you some grounding in the tools I found useful when starting out in the WordPress world.

Developing Locally

Developing live on the web is a great place to start, however you will soon find its limitations. Before I discovered the wonders of developing locally I, one, had to have an internet connection to work, and two, was reliant on creating subdomains to test out changes to sites. Creating a local environment is quick and easy to do, and completely changes the way you work. Having an independent, offline copy of the sites gives you the freedom to test out changes before uploading them to the web. I recommend WAMP (Windows) and MAMP (Mac), these allow you to create a development environment on your local machine for free. Building on this, there are other tools in the pipeline that will make the world of local development even easier. Top-tip, keep your eyes peeled for ‘Local’ from Flywheel (currently in beta).

Plugins

Plugins are your friend, but use them sparsely. During development there are a few I install straight away, use to get the project running, and uninstall on the live site. Keeping your site clean of unnecessary code should always be in the forefront of your mind. Here are a few plugins I always install.

  1. For working on sites that aren’t your own, or the ones with more complex themes, ‘What The File’ is a must have. This gives you a toolbar showing the file and template-part being used on the page you are viewing; a great time-saver for those more intricate customisations.
  2. There will be times when you need to work on live sites, sometimes even taking them offline for a short period of time. Adding a styled holding page is a useful option here. ‘Coming Soon and Maintenance Mode by SeedProd’ gives you a flexible and easy to use holding page that can be instantly switch on or off.
  3. Another plugin I use with almost all sites is ‘All in One Migration’. You can use this to create a copy of your site that you can install on your local environment. It’s quick, easy to use, and flexible. Just watch out on larger sites for the 512mb upload limit!

With these few plugins you can massively improve your development process and knowledge of WordPress.

Images

Optimise your images, it’s essential. There’s nothing worse than going to a site, only to find you’re being brought back to the dark ages with images loading at snail’s pace, down the page, row by row. While there is no magic number for the maximum size of web images, there are ways to keep your images as small as possible.

For example, one trick is to look at the maximum size an image will be displayed on your site and work from there; if you have a 1200px container on your page, uploading a 3000px wide image is wasteful.

You will find that you can typically reduce jpegs of 2 -3mb down to <200kb, with an almost unnoticeable drop in quality. Similarly, using tools like Optimizilla and tinyPNG you can reduce pretty much all images to a tiny size. With each image that you optimise for web, the quicker your page will load, the better your SEO, and the better your UX.

DNS

DNS is complicated, and granted is on a slightly different skew than the rest of this article, however when understood adds a valuable tool to your arsenal. There is nothing more intimidating than finding out you need to make DNS changes, and not having a clue where to start. I’ll include the standard caveat here that messing around with DNS can have disastrous consequences. The best piece of advice I can offer is to use your hosting provider, they will have the knowledge to help. A five minute call, or an instant chat session, can save hours of trawling through videos and outdated articles. Personally, I’ve found the staff at Vidahost extremely knowledgeable and helpful.

Another trick I found useful when learning about DNS is having two domains independent of any live projects. You can play around with the DNS settings on these to get an idea of what does what. This is a great way of simulating the live DNS changes you might need to make on a production site, without the risk of breaking anything.

Some final thoughts

You can be sure that every WordPress developer has a unique way of working, and looking for the perfect method for yourself and your clients does take time. I’ve found that when I step back and get out of my bubble, when I start looking into how other people work and what’s coming up in the future, that it’s then that great little time-savers emerge.

The rise and rise of the Micro Influencer

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One of the golden rules of advertising is ‘Know Your Audience’, well how better to do that than by involving them in your marketing strategy?

One of the latest trends you may have heard banded about is ‘micro influencers’, but what exactly are they? Well, in essence, micro influencers are social media users that inhabit the intersection of civilian consumer and minor celebrity; commonly categorised as people with a following of around 1000-10,000.

The benefits of using micro influencers are numerous; they are often experts in their chosen category and have garnered a large following for this reason, yet have a following localised to their particular field. For example an artist on Instagram may have a large following of people, the majority of which will also have an interest in art; by using micro influencers you are accessing a ready-made targeted audience. Being endorsed by a micro influencer is also a solid way to build credibility into your campaign; a good Google review is always welcome but it doesn’t have the impact of a well-known expert recommending your product.

There is an argument that using micro influencers may also be more beneficial than celebrity endorsement. With fewer followers micro influencers are able to maintain a higher rate of engagement with their followers, therefore promoting discussion on their posts; on Facebook, for example, the more an individual interacts with their friends and followers on a post the higher the organic reach. Not only could micro influencers save you money on promoting posts, but they also come without the hefty price tag of celebrity endorsement.

In fact, research shows that although brand exposure would be increased by using people with huge followings, for most businesses it’s irrelevant (Takumi, 2017). This couldn’t be more true for the majority of businesses; it just doesn’t make sense for Kim Kardashian to be endorsing a deli in Brighton, however, a micro influencer from Brighton who networks online with other people in Brighton, would be an ideal person to advertise with, despite having 1/100th of the followers.

Not only can micro influencers benefit you, but you can benefit them. By offering them to sample your product you create content for both parties and can endorse each other in the process, it’s a win-win situation.

At Air Social we understand the importance of knowing your local area, creating relevant and engaging campaigns through cost effective methods. To find out more get in touch.

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.

“Man has made his match”: Artificial Intelligence in the Real World

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‘Artificial intelligence’ is here to stay, there’s no doubt about it. Now, we at Air Social are all for innovation, in fact we thrive off it. But when everyone is jumping on the artificial intelligence bandwagon, we think we need to ask: when is it appropriate? And how much is too much? I mean, we’ve all seen Blade Runner after all.

For example, there’s a lot to say for a human touch, for example, what could be better than a smiling barista taking your order before handing you a hot cup of coffee with a delicately poured pattern floating on the top?

When we think of a good customer service experience, the words friendly and helpful spring to mind, also, the ability to cater for all needs; a bespoke service if you will. So what happens when that customer service gets replaced with a faceless app on your mobile phone? Well that’s exactly what Starbucks have decided to do.

Obviously their app has its perks (I can’t count the number of times my order of dry soy cappuccino, extra chocolate on top and two shots of sugar free caramel syrup has gone awry) but it’s an odd move from the company so intent on distancing themselves from their reputation as a faceless corporation, for example their ongoing campaign to put the customer’s name on the cup. This was a really great move for Starbucks back in 2012 and has inadvertently worked as a viral campaign too; not only do people frequently share their misspelt names online but also reminds us of the humanity of the baristas; we find ourselves actually celebrating the charm of human error. The app, although useful, completely contrasts the more human brand that Starbucks had started to create. It seems that Starbucks is using the right technology but with the wrong effect.

Now take the Amazon Echo which uses the Alexa operating system, the personal assistant Siri wishes she could be; Alexa has been credited as being life-changing for people with decreased mobility or the visually impaired. For example, one can change the thermostat or book a taxi without leaving your chair – or even looking at a screen. Things as insignificant as tuning a radio seem so simple to most but are difficult when you have a visual or physical impairment. With the Echo and Alexa that issue is eliminated.

Again, the technology comes with its pitfalls: last week a San Diego TV station came under criticism after a report about a girl who ordered a dollhouse via her parents’ Amazon Echo caused Echoes in viewers’ homes to also attempt to order dollhouses.

With Google and Samsung following Alexa’s lead, this mode of artificial intelligence is undoubtedly set to be sticking around. Of course there are simply some things that can’t be faked, that includes human connection, creativity and, as Alexa proves, just a dash of common sense; but despite this we can’t wait to see what lies ahead for artificial intelligence and what that means for the digital media landscape.

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

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