Get On Your Phone!

You know the difference between you and your customers when it comes to your business’ digital footprint?

You experience it on a big screen - they experience it on a phone.

Think about it - when it’s time for you to “do marketing” you’re at your desk using your office computer or a laptop.

Social Is Mobile

We all have Facebook pages, most of us have Twitter and Instagram accounts.  We have them in order to increase the reach of our messaging.

Having run several rounds of Facebook ads for different clients I can tell you that the vast majority of social traffic that comes through to your website is overwhelmingly mobile - in some cases over 90%.

Design For Mobile First

We just changed the landing page for a current Facebook campaign when we discovered that the average time on page for mobile visitors was less than half that of desktop visitors. 

Turned out that the beautiful layout that worked perfectly on a large screen became way too text heavy and complex on a mobile screen.  It was a simple fix, but with nine times as much mobile traffic as desktop - we should have started with the mobile design first.

Get Off Your Desktop

The next time you “do marketing” spend some of that time on your phone, you might be surprised at how different you look.

Find yourself procrastinating and avoiding your work? Listen to this, it really helps you get things done

Image Credit: Smartphone Abstraction by Jonas Smith on Flickr

A Beauty Tip For Your Digital Footprint

I know it’s only February but here in LA the tree’s think it’s Spring!

Time for Spring cleaning then - here’s an easy one:

Go back through your Twitter, Facebook and Instagram feed and get rid of all the stuff that didn’t work.

Why?

Think about how a potential customer interacts with your digital presence for the first time.  They arrive on your Twitter feed or Facebook page and if they’re interested scroll down to see what you have to say.

If the majority of your posts don’t resonate with anyone and barely get shared or re-tweeted you’re going to look pretty lame.

If however - you prune your feed and only leave the successful ones, first time visitors will think you’re amazing!

Score!

Written while listening to: Andy the Barman by music2work2

Image credit: The Wisteria in my garden by Andrew McCluskey

Listening For links

I love this shot.  

It says everything you need to know about listening.

Look at the body posture, the size of the eyes - she’s laser locked and her entire attention is focused.

When done right, listening is an all encompassing behavior.

Good Listening Equals Links

The way to get people to notice your content is to interact with them in the digital world.  

• Interact with the wrong people and nothing happens as they don’t care about your content.
• Interact poorly with the right people and still nothing happens because now they don’t care about you.
• Interact well with the right people and your content gets shared.

The trick to identifying the right people AND finding the right way to interact,  is to be a great listener.

You Know How To Do This

Here’s the screen-cast from January:

4 minutes on how to listen strategically.

In the ideal world you would spend as much time listening as you spend on content creation and publishing.  

Imagine If You:

• Allocated time every day to listen
• Added “Hours spent listening” to your KPIs
• Set a quarterly target for listening

How much further would your content reach?

Quick Caveat

This approach only works if:

• Your digital footprint is in order
• You have a regular content production cycle
• What you create is actually good

Written while listening to: The Bench 173 Bpm Flow - Session 1 | 1014 by music2work2

Image Credit: Listening by fs999 on Flickr

What I learned by focusing on my music business

After a challenging few months I’ve started creating again.  These are some of the things I’ve been playing with to drive visibility:

Periscope

• Yes I’m excited about it
• Great for live performances but also great for “Ask the Expert” type videos
• Immediate feedback and interaction makes it addictive
• Massive reusable content, a single “scope” delivers:
  • 1 Periscope video, 1 Katch video, 1 YouTube video, 1 native Facebook video, 3 Tweets, 1 Pin, 1 G+ post and you could even take a screenshot and send it to Instagram too!
• It’s the wild west out there - watch out for cowboys and snake oil
• It’s not for everybody

Hashtags

• Gaining in importance as content production tools proliferate and the sheer weight of content requires organization
• Super popular on Instagram and likely to become similar on Periscope
• Worth investigating what hashtags are relevant to your business - there are tools that help you do this for free
• Periscope / Twitter integration becomes challenging re amount of hashtags required

Twitter and Narrow.io

• Twitter’s purchase of Periscope was a genius move
• Narrow.io is a smart automated system that grows your followers based on deep keyword analysis
• Early indications look good re quality of new follows
• $7 a month and totally worth it for music2work2

Takeaway for you guys

No amount of digital marketing is going to grow your business if what you’re sharing and promoting is lame.  There is no doubt however that the more you produce, the easier it becomes to promote and the faster you learn what works and what doesn’t.

If you feel you’ve got a content spurt coming on - let me know!

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Written while listening to: The Bench Development - 163 bpm - Periscope by music2work2

Image Credit: music2work2

Lessons From My Dad

That’s me and my Dad.

He died a few weeks ago and I’ve been in Scotland with family.  

Although he was a retired surgeon, he was fascinated by business and how technology was changing everything. He read the newsletter every week and I would often get the odd inquiring reply or word of encouragement.

To publish or not to publish

I haven’t published for three weeks because frankly, I didn’t feel like writing. I’m sure there’s some social media guru out there who would tell me that this was a mistake, that the only way to retain readership and clients is to publish regularly, to keep them conditioned, Pavlovian style.

Of course, the answer to publishing when you don’t feel like writing is to either recycle something old or to end up half-assing it and producing something that is less than great.

There is something deeply wrong to me about that.

Be Honorable

One word stood out when people talked about my dad - Honor.  

One of the lessons I take from him is that if we’re going to be honorable in our lives and honorable in our businesses, then let’s be honorable in our marketing.  Let’s not pretend to be something we’re not or present ourselves as bigger than we actually are.  Let’s not dress up our language in hyperbole and superlatives in the hope we’ll trick someone into buying from us.

The maturation of social media means that the truth about your business practices will come out - eventually.  If there’s a discrepancy between what you offer and what you deliver it’s going to hurt you in the long run.

Be Professional

This is not to say you have to be too honest!!!  Remember that all of this digital marketing is about growing your business, selling product and winning clients - when people come into contact with your marketing content it should be a positive experience for them.

What I am saying is - if you don’t feel like publishing today because you don’t have it in you to produce something great, then that’s OK, your readership will appreciate your respect for their time.

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Written while listening to: These things Shall Be by music2work2

Social Media: What If We've Got It All Wrong?

It’s ridiculously hard to penetrate the *blabbosphere and have people share your stuff - it’s practically become a science!

The idea that a brick and mortar owner can grok and execute on this while still running their business is kinda like telling your kid they can become President - yes it’s possible but is it likely?

What if…

What if you gave up on the holy grail of social media acting as a message amplifier?

What if instead you used social media as predominantly a validation play?

What if you viewed your social channels as dynamic extensions of your website’s about page?

How would that feel?

Do this

Double down on social channels but make damn sure everything you put up there is a fair and true reflection of who you are and what you stand for.

Revisit your website and actively promote the social channels you use.  Look at the design of your about page - would a visitor know that you’re hysterically funny on YouTube, that you’re an Instagram genius or that you share interesting and relevant links on Twitter?

Couple of caveats

Yes there are still huge SEO benefits to social and yes, if your business involves the distribution of non geo specific information you’re still going to need amplification. 

What I’m suggesting is that for most owners on this list it is unlikely that you’ll have thousands of followers on your social channels - and that’s OK.  Your digital footprint exists to help prospective clients and customers, the more dynamic information you can provide, the easier you make it for them to trust you.

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* "Blabbosphere" - Courtesy of Lauren Associates

Written while listening to: 191 BPM Playlist by music2work2

Image credit: You are doing it wrong by Duncan Rawlinson on Flickr