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 Trending & Innovation |
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| | Also in this section: [Brand Value Mapping] [Digital Marketing for Business] [Digital Marketing Training] [Strategic Review] [Trending & Innovation] |
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 Market leaders need to stay ahead, set trends and lead innovation. To retain market leader position or attain a leading role, innovation is essential.
Want to know what’s around the corner before you get there?
We don’t have a crystal ball, but we do have IdeaSwish™ to help your business stay ahead with trending and innovation. We explore changes taking place in the market and let you know how the future may look in your sector.
What is the service?
We can deliver a one off review into a specific sector or a watching brief over a period of time. A watching brief is useful if you’re launching new products or services or if a new competitor has just entered the market.
What should I do now?
Contact Annmarie Hanlon on 01543 258522 or email her to discuss your business and where it wants to go.
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| | Related Links | | | |
Quick Win Marketing
Quick Win Marketing Book - Answers to your top 100 Marketing Questions by Annmarie Hanlon
Formats available
Paperback book
iPhone App
Subscription website
Designed for start-ups, growing business or companies that need a boost. Quick Win Marketing is an easy to use reference book you can use for many years.
There are four sections to Quick Win Marketing:
Marketing essentials: An introduction to marketing and a great place for people looking at starting a business.
Launching new services / products: Practical advice on how to identify opportunities, value the market and protect the idea.
Growing your business: Ways to grow a business, using online and offline tactics.
Revitalising your business: Aimed at companies needing a kick-start with lots of tools and templates.
Reviews
“This book is a quick read; a resource in itself, supported by a website and worth your time and effort.”
Irish Veterinary Journal
“Particularly strong on internet uses, explaining blogs, podcasting, webinars. Some of the answers maybe those you might have overlooked.” Books Ireland
“Want quick straight-to-the-point answers that will win you business? Here's how to find answers to your top 100 marketing questions.” RSVP Business
“Aimed at entrepreneurs and business managers wanting to start, grow or revive a business. Provides ideas on marketing.” Accountancy Ireland
“Easy-to-read compendium of marketing tips. Offers advice on a whole range of topics, from management to pricing, research to sales.” Western People
"Quick Win Marketing. It does exactly as it says on the cover — gives you the Answers to your top 100 Marketing Questions. Think of it as your marketing mentor. We already have our copy sticky-noted up. Expect to get advice on when you should advertise; where and how, how to win awards, podcast, write press releases, revamp your website and how to generate more business from existing customers." Women Mean Business
"I have to say if I were starting a business, Quick Win Marketing is a book I'd like to have by my side. Why? Well, first of all, it's really easy to read and concise. This, I imagine, is of great importance to a burgeoning entrepreneur who probably doesn’t have the time to read a 500-page tome in detail when trying to get a new start-up off the ground. Recommended. bizstartup.ie
"This book is my little marketing consultant sitting beside me - i love the fact that i can find simple, effective tips to my marketing questions quickly and easily. When things are busy and I need results, out comes the book. I can highly recommend this book to anyone in business and understands the importance of getting things right first time - the tips are easy to follow and the author has kept things nice and clear."
"I wish I had this book when I first started in business. A fantastic, easy to use, logical Book. Annmarie takes 100 top marketing questions and answers them in a straight forward no nonsence manner. Each answer is accompanied by a useful hint or tip that the author has seen in practice and knows will work. If you want a successful marketing plan then this is the book to read."
"I highly recommend this book, if you need some inspiration and some guidance on achieving rapid results, Quick Win Marketing is the book for you - buy it, read it, action it!"
"What a fantastic publication! This book is written very clearly and concisely and in such a way that it can be consulted by specific questions or themes (very useful if you are busy). I particularly liked the way that while the book assumes no previous knowledge its just as useful to an established business like my own. I have various books on this subject but i can see myself consulting this one again and again. I plan to send these out as client gifts this xmas. Thanks Annmarie, whoever you are!" | | Twitter for businesses: 10 Quick Wins to create your Twitter strategy
Twitter is about answering the question ‘what are you doing’ in less than 140 characters. That’s about 12 words. In this article I suggest 10 quick wins to get you started in Twitter or to review your current approach. I hope these wins work for you whether you’re a business or personal tweeter or both.
Before we get to my 10 quick wins, here’s a quick refresher of some of the Twitter commands since I find that many small and medium businesses are still picking up on Twitter.
Twitter jargon buster
Tweet – a post, message or update on Twitter
@username + message – an open tweet that can be seen by your followers and by @username’s followers
DM username – a private tweet that can only be seen by username
#hashtag - a Twitter keyword. Adding # makes the word searchable.
RT – repeating a Tweet, known as a ReTweet
Ten Quick Wins to create a Twitter strategy
1 – Decide your objectives
Twitter can become time consuming and many people initially didn’t get the point. There are many companies now using Twitter successfully and their common denominator is that they have clear objectives.
Starting your Twitter journey or if you are already using Twitter but don’t feel it’s working, decide what you want out of it. Here are some ideas to consider:
Promote key messages
Build brand awareness
Drive traffic to your website
Promote special offers
Respond to customer queries
Provide advice and tips
Share news
Build community
Raise funds
Generate sponsorship
Customer services
Product demos
Recruit new staff
Research your market
Once you have decided your objectives, you can then plan how this will be achieved.
2 – Agree your identity
Business or personal? If your objective is to generate business, it’s better to adopt a business identity. If you have several people inside your company who will tweet, a common format needs to be agreed, such as Evonomie_Jo or Evonomie_Am. This enables followers to know that this is a company tweet, but the individual is identifiable. Alternatively, adopt the company name and in the biography (see below) identify the tweeters.
One of the challenges with Twitter is that user names are limited to 15 characters. If your company name is longer, you may need to think carefully about how to present your brand. Once you have agreed your Twitter identity, don’t change it as you could lose and confuse followers.
3 – Protect your brand
Twitter and other social media requires a square logo. If you have a rectangular logo and upload this to Twitter, it will crop the sides, damaging your visual identity.
Get your designer to prepare ‘social media ready’ logos that are sized for Twitter at 700k.
Once your brand is established, don’t change the visual identity or your photo without good reason!
If you don’t add a photo you will retain the default Twitter bird as your visual identity which will not distinguish any of your tweets from other users of Twitter.
If someone else is using your brand name you can apply to Twitter to get the account suspended and eventually transferred. This does take a long time, so register new brands early.
4 – Prepare your bio
Your bio or biography is 160 characters about you or your company. A short sentence about what you do. It is searchable and important to focus on a few essential keywords as a bio is the first place potential followers review. Bizarrely, many people don’t complete their bio at all!
Your bio can be read by followers and non followers alike so ensure that it reflects your Twitter objectives. If the identity is for a company make sure this follows your normal brand rules. If it’s a personal bio, check that it doesn’t infringe any company brand guidelines.
5 – Agree update responsibility
There are 90 million Twitter accounts but only 18 million are active. If you are going to register a Twitter profile, make sure that the account is updated, in line with your objectives. This may be once a day or twice a week, or every hour, but to retain a Twitter account, build followers and achieve your objectives it needs some activity.
Twitter considers an account as inactive if it hasn’t been logged into or updated in over 6 months. These accounts may be automatically removed from Twitter.
6 – Decide Twitter management
Updating Twitter is best done in house. If you need external help, Twitter may not be right for your company. Twitter is often given to junior staff, which is fine, as long as they are given clear guidelines on the company’s brand values and ‘tone of voice’. For example in November an airline was tweeting about a ‘scary competition’ they meant Halloween, but airlines should never use the word ‘scary’ in their marketing communications!
If you are a professional or business user and use LinkedIn, you can simply add Twitter to your LinkedIn account and when adding a ‘status update’ in LinkedIn, you can check the box to automatically tweet at the same time.
7 – Organise landing pages
Your bio includes a web page link. Instead of sending all traffic to your home page, organise a separate page for your Twitter followers. This will enable
Easier analysis of how visitors found your site and the actions they took [Editor's note: Like this - hadn't thought of it = DFA, Design for Analytics]
Your twitter followers to get all the information they need about you, in more than 160 characters, in one place.
8 – Use free software
Twitter.com is the most basic way to use Twitter. It doesn’t spell-check, allow you to schedule posts or to group your favourites.
There are many great free software tools including:
Application
What it does
HootSuite
Schedule Tweets over a period of time.
Mr Tweet
Makes recommendations on who to follow.
TweetBeep
Track who is mentioning you.
Tweetburner
URL shortening service for Twitter.
Tweetdeck
Makes Twitter easy to use.
TweetMeme
Finds stories from Twitter for you to retweet.
Twitter Grader
See how you rank on Twitter.
Twittonary
Twitter Dictionary.
We use Tweetdeck and Hootsuite for the PC and iPhone. We also have Echofon on the iPhone which is a cut down version of Twittter online.
9 – Share the news
Once you have started tweeting, make sure your existing customers are aware. This helps to grow your follower base and to keep you ‘front of mind’. Make sure the Twitter logo and your @username are on your
Website
Emails
Business cards
Blogs
LinkedIn profile
10 – Get Interactive
To make Twitter work and to achieve your objectives you need to invest some time to tweet.
Re-purpose (re-use) existing content
ReTweet interesting Tweets
Recommend interesting Tweeters – ‘Follow Friday’ #FF is set up to do this
Tweet about useful and interesting information, sharing your breakfast menu is not that fascinating – unless you own a Bed & Breakfast establishment!
Tweet on a regular basis – this could be daily or weekly, but a Twitter account with few tweets won’t attract many followers.
And finally, set up alerts via www.google.com/alerts and tweetbeep.com to monitor your brand online and measure the impact of Twitter.
I’ve adapted this post from my book Quick Win Digital Marketing. For answers to digital marketing questions see Quick Win Digital Marketing by Annmarie Hanlon and Joanna Akins (Book available from Oak Tree Press and App available from iTunes store). | |
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