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Digital Marketing Strategy, PR and Messaging

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Social Listening Is Key To Engagement, Long-Term Business Growth

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ALT="Soulati Media blog post image on social listening with 2 toddlers talking on a string phone"

Social listening has risen to the top of the ladder as a critical component in program strategy for every business affected by COVID-19. Where before, you surfed social media and merely brushed against key conversations in your stream. Now, deeper dives into conversation provide the pulse of the conversation that not only builds awareness but also opportunity.

What Is Social Listening

What does social listening mean to you?

As social media engagement tightens up into niche groups and smaller streams, these “virtual dinner chats” provide meaningful conversation with a lot of emotion and feelings bared in more comfortable channels.

Perhaps you invite 10 people to join you in a video conference on Zoom, Skype, Whereby, Calendly, or other really cool app. You ask two questions, “So, how is everyone coping?” And “What are you putting in place to ensure you don’t collapse from stress?”

And, the floodgates open widely as people isolated in their self-quarantine want to share with others and feel the strength of community. During these conversations, your job as host is to find the pulse of the conversation. To help, you don your PR strategist hat, you determine how to address the problems with solutions.

Solving the issues surrounding COVID-19 seems particularly impossible. Therefore, building relationship and community solve the immediate issue of isolation. Within that relationship building, you invite everyone to chat about their business. What do they do on a normal business day? Ask about products and services they offer others on a normal business day? What tips can everyone offer that others can adopt?

Social Media Does Offer A Solution During Isolation

Social media, in my book, has always, always been about engagement and NEVER a one-way street. Frequently, many peeps lazily post on channels and rarely respond or share one-to-one. Connectivity with true humans softens the chaos and jagged edges of our own psyche.

And, if you don’t mind me asking, how is yours? Psychologically, COVID-19 wreaks great havoc on the psyche. Mine is suffering greatly with enormous stress as a self-employed business owner. I worry for my daughter working in a grocery store as a cashier. My thoughts go daily to my 80-year-old mother hoping she copes well through quarantine. Even more, shuttered businesses I used to frequent for my livelihood and clients with closed doors due to the pandemic contribute to my stress. That means I worry for the health of my business and ability to pay my bills and mortgage.

In conclusion, I am turning to social listening to see that I’m not alone in this global crisis. I am reaching out to connect with old friends and business peers. I am blogging more frequently and having fun designing Instagram posts on Canva for the first time. Will this help me bring in money to my dying business? Perhaps or perhaps not, but, no one said Rome was built in a day, right?

28 Ways To Approach Marketing Your Business In A Crisis Economy

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ALT="woman wearing face mask and caption, 28 Ways to Approach Marketing Your Business in a Crisis Economy via Soulati Media"

In business crisis communications planning is essential. Having an expert public relations professional on board (ahem) also helps. Your business ought to have a crisis plan on the shelf collecting dust, or rather, on a hard drive easily accessible.

Here’s the rub: no PR professional ever developed a crisis communications plan for a business to manage a global pandemic viral mutation that inhibits the function of the entire world. As a result of this near global shutdown, many businesses are slowing and shuttering temporarily.

Has your business implemented a remote workforce? Maybe employees equipped and ready to work at home will be productive, but guess what? The companies sending moms and dads home to work will see disrupted parents managing children also sent home from closed schools. That means disrupted childcare, more toilet paper (uhm, yes, empty store shelves of paper products!), more soup and grilled cheese lunches, more spats among the kids or the need to transport the kids to the playground all while trying to work and be present and positive during meetings.

Look, all is not lost. The COVID-19 virus, will flat line one day and is temporary. While the U.S. may not know the extent of the virus’s health in communities, there’s a good chance that it will wane within a time frame yet to be determined (how’s that for running around the mulberry bush?).

28 Ways Business Can Focus During A Crisis

There are things businesses can do during an economic crisis of this magnitude. Here are 28 ideas businesses can take advantage of time and put it to good use right now:

  1. Do NOT reduce your marketing budget during a crisis. This is an opportune time to initiate customer campaigns oriented to education and relationship-building.
  2. Strategize about public relations campaigns during a time frame about six-to-eight months ahead.
  3. Look at the conference and trade show schedule in your vertical market and plan to attend. Purchase a booth; run a customer prospecting campaign to meet people in person (once social distancing is no longer the norm).
  4. At that trade show in #3, ask your CEO or other thought leader to speak in a break-out session or sponsor a session for attendees (that you pay for).
  5. For the trade show in #3 (and other conferences you may attend), pull your exhibit booth out of the closet, dust it off and take a look at what needs refreshing. How are the colors, is the logo prominent, and what about the message?
  6. Hire a facilitator to do a Message Map with your leadership team. This is always an important exercise to bring the leadership team together to discuss the 5 Ws about your company. Focus especially on the Why of your existence. (Want to know more about message mapping? Give Soulati Media a shout, and we will share more.)
  7. Revisit your Mission, Vision, Values statements and ensure that your company is on track, working against each of these important foundational items your company follows.
  8. Going one step further, explore your business purpose. What drives you beyond revenue generation? What purpose do you have for being in existence? This is not something to answer in 10 minutes. Take some time to meet with the leadership team and mull it over.
  9. Your website needs TLC. When we’re busy, websites hit the back seat. If your company is feeling a pinch during this economic downturn with fewer customers then take a look at every single page of your website to see if you approve.
  10. While you’re at it, click on every link on each page and ensure it’s not broken.
  11. Check all images on your site for the proper ALT code. If you don’t know how to do any of those items, then call for assistance. There’s always something you can do to freshen your website during a down tick.
  12. Do you use landing pages for campaigns you’re running? How many? How are they functioning for you? Again, this is a very good time to review all digital assets to ensure proper function, content, images, and success metrics.
  13. B2B companies do very well with newsletters to customers and prospects. When a business slows, that’s when marketing upticks. There’s no time like the present to launch a newsletter or refresh an existing newsletter and communicate en masse to your customers.
  14. Don’t want to do a newsletter? Then let’s go with more email marketing! You can create a new campaign to celebrate the end of virus fears with a promotion to get customers back in sync with your business.
  15. Hire a photographer (and support the economy). Here’s why: you can retake all the head shots of the leadership team in your company; you can take high-resolution images of your company in action (and use these on social media and your website), and the images can be used in communications with customers.
  16. Do you have a high-performing video marketing program with a YouTube, Vimeo or Twitch channel? During a downtime develop one! The whole point of this is “there’s no time like the present” to focus on things you neglected because of a time crunch. Video is the future, and the data are staggering about just how many videos exist on each social media channel. Don’t get left in the cold!
  17. Develop your digital marketing strategy. Look at all the ways you can live stream, bring people into a community, do virtual meetings and conferences, bring all your assets to the web, open an e-commerce site, and so much more.
  18. Plan a webinar series. In #B2B marketing, webinars are a wonderful way to communicate with customers. It’s smart to have a series of webinars with three topics scheduled over the course of six weeks. One of the webinars can be your product team speaking about something new alongside the CEO talking about the vision for the future. The other two can be with customers on a panel speaking about a product or service. When you invite others to attend, you collect emails and use those emails to develop your list for email marketing and newsletters.
  19. Focus on business development. As everyone is in the same boat with the current business climate, now is an excellent time to revisit your strategy to earn more customers. This is where your entire marketing team needs to meet and discuss ways to earn new business.
  20. Go on a retreat. No business schedules a retreat when everyone is chaotically working. Now? What a perfect time to bring the leadership team and directors together to revisit #7 and #8 and also look at new growth opportunities in the future.
  21. Continue your efforts with social media, do not go on hiatus just because your business has gone virtual. As everyone stays closer to home, they will spend more time on the Interwebz surfing. There’s no question you can maintain conversation and engagement with your audience.
  22. Survey your employees. A downtime is excellent for a word from your employees. Building a Survey Monkey provides a perfect vehicle to gauge what employees think about the state of the business. Offer a gift card to the employee with a novel idea that you implement.
  23. Build a customer loyalty program. For frequent buyers of your products, implement a customer loyalty program with incentives that bring them back over and over again.
  24. Talk with your customers. When was the last time you picked up the phone and had a no-pressure conversation with a customer? This would not be a sales call but a call to deepen and strengthen relationship.
  25. Meet with a non-profit. Do you have a volunteer day where your employees leave work and volunteer for a day to work for a non-profit? What about adopting a non-profit every two months so that some of your company’s efforts, like pro bono work, go to a charity?
  26. Review all of the subscriptions your business pays for whether it’s periodicals, newspapers, apps, photography and turn off automatic renewals. How many automatic renewals exist at your business? Then only after they renew, you remember you signed up.
  27. Develop a new product or service. You can make a new product or service as an e-book or online course for prospects and even current customers to remind them that your services go deeper than just one layer.
  28. Clean your email box(!) and clean your desk, your closets and reduce, recycle, reuse!

I’m sure that after reviewing this list, you’ll think of many other things you can do during a downtime. While this situation is hugely unfortunate, consider it an opportunity. No one takes time under “normal” circumstances to do most of the above, so why not now?

Your Business Toolkit Needs A Public Relations Strategist

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ALT="Question about what's your plan to add PR to business toolkit"A business toolkit needs more than tools; it needs people with skills to make the tools work.

I am a message mapping expert in the world of public relations that has become so blended with marketing. To become an expert in anything, you move from the tactical to the strategic, or you are a strategist who loves the tactical. There are both: public relations strategists and public relations tacticians.

In a business toolkit, I’m likely to fit into both: strategist and tactician.Who’s in your business toolkit? You better have a digital marketing specialist, a content marketer, a social media marketer, and a copywriter, too. It’s wonderful when you have a web designer and developer in your back pocket because every business needs one.

When there isn’t enough bandwidth to have all of the above, then hire a really good public relations strategist. Someone like me earns that moniker over time and experience. There’s no hiding it! I’ve been at this for more than 30 years earning expertise every day. [Read more…]

In A Quinnipiac Poll Of My 10 BFFs

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ALT="Soulati Media, Future and Past"A survey and a poll from either the leading university (who the hell has ever heard of Quinnipiac University , why is it the bell weather of presidential elections and where on God’s green earth is it?) or politically imbalanced media outlet are dictating how Americans will cast their vote today.

Those polls show that Hilz has lost her lead after a feel-good convention while the Donald is creeping up and running into her backside with numbers that make him cocky and confident.

Who has ever been polled by these organizations in a presidential election? Tell me now, and tell me why these polls can influence and effect the outcome of a presidential election occurring in 50-some days.

Do you allow polling data to influence how you cast your vote or express your opinion? Do you follow a media outlet and hang on every word of their punditry and allow them to make your opinion for you? Do you let your own BFF dictate your vote? Tell me why you’re voting for your candidate with solid support, and I’ll tell you, “Amen, Sistah.”

We rely too much on the effects of the survey and poll to tell us how to react, how to vote, how to feel, how to take action, and basically how to follow the leader.

And, then, there’s Russia. The country that has so brazenly hacked into the livelihood of the totality of the United States from political organizations and celebrities to figureheads and Olympians’ medical records.

Our country has enemies; many of them. In fact, our country has enemies within its borders who are born of these United States. Our Congress has enemies of enemies that sit across the aisles from one another with an obstructionist bent to ensure that POTUS does not succeed or a bill doesn’t pass.

A survey and a poll of my 10 BFFs will tell you that we live in a hateful era where BB guns that look like police-issued weapons and are carried by 13-year-olds cause loss of life in Columbus, Ohio. We hear about Chicago as the gun capital of the world instead of Aleppo, the region in Syria that the green party candidate didn’t know about.

Achh.

There is too much strife in our world to comprehend; there is too much pain amongst us to consider. Certainly, a survey and a poll can tell us what we already know – that the world is doomed if this strife and unrest continues. Our children will grow up negative; our families will suffer without hope; and, guns and insects will rule the world.

There’s Always Hope

While I’m bludgeoned by the intensity of the hatred and divisiveness in which we live today in our neighborhoods, communities, schools, cities, states, countries, and continents, I have hope.

  • I have hope that my child will be a stand-up citizen and benefit from all the attention I’ve devoted to raise her with conviction.
  • I have hope that the turmoil in the U.S.A. government will subside and that political parties can reduce the barriers and join forces for the good of the American people.
  • I have hope that gun violence and mental illness will wane and families will not lose their loved ones to senseless crimes.
  • I have hope that love will prevail because it has to.
  • I have hope that you will watch over the elderly neighbor next door who needs you to be a beacon of support.
  • I have hope that those who wish that hatred prevail can find peace in their heart to love instead.

Sometimes it’s overwhelming to be an adult who knows too much and who has lived through times unlike these. As a marketer and public relations professional, it’s my job to peruse current events while subconsciously absorbing emotion evoked by the news I read and the strife I feel.

If I immerse too much, I cry. The wonder and ponder I have for my child’s future and her children’s future give me pause. There’s ALWAYS hope with love to envelop it, and I can’t forget. You see, a survey and a poll will never influence my choice; I will make that choice myself with confidence.

IDG Uses Brand Ambassadors To Align Culture To Brand

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ALT="brand ambassadors, IDG story, Soulati Media"IDG is a HUUUUGE company; in fact, it states on its website that it is the world’s largest media tech company. That’s nothing to sneeze at, and you know what else? IDG also had a brand culture problem. It was so big that the individual business units were silos. We’ve heard about silos before, right? Apparently, IDG had never hired a chief marketing officer which is highly interesting for such a massive global corporation.

The company decided to relaunch the brand to better inform customers about what else was available throughout the company, and in order to do so, it had to align its brand culture with all internal stakeholders.

The very first step taken by IDG was to research. This is ALWAYS the first step to take to find all of the problems and to then apply strategy to solve them.

Brand Ambassadors Are Employees

[Read more…]