In September, we hosted a three-part webinar series around messaging and how it can attract new business. One of these webinars looked at branding, the importance of brand consistency, establishing your brand on social media and creating video content. In this blog, we look at the questions following the webinar. If you want to download and watch the full episode that goes into much more detail, you can do so here.  Are guidelines something you would suggest changing annually, bi-annually or never? Guidelines should be reviewed every quarter because you should be auditing how effective and consistent your brand has been every three months. If your brand is young, you should do it more often. Doing it on a monthly basis is perhaps right if you’re a new brand but if you’ve been established for a while, every quarter is ideal.  From there you can identify the areas that your employees are perhaps struggling with or ‘key challenge’ areas that you need to define further and it’s then you can review those guidelines. Make sure they’re clear enough; see what else can be added into them and determine where you might have evolved, looking at where we are in 2020 with technology. It’s possible that you need to do a better job of embedding your guidelines into the organisation. A lot of times people leave their guidelines and they never touch them again, meaning you’re not maximizing your investment. You’ve spent money on your brand, so look at your guidelines quarterly and determine where you want to go from there.  It’s also important to test and measure any marketing you’re doing. Whether it’s social media, PR, or pay-per-click, test the results that you’re getting on these and look if there are elements within your brand guidelines that need to change as a result of that. How do you police your guidelines? The key thing is that you need to distribute accountability for the brand across people outside of just the managers. With every brand, you need to implement brand champions. Those should be people scattered throughout the business, across departments and across levels. Their responsibility is to make sure that people are living, breathing and using the brand effectively. Once you’ve got those people in, distribute that responsibility.  You also need to have a regular audit to look at different areas and explain to people it’s not going to be a bad thing if they get it wrong a few times, it’s about saying how could we make this more clear for you? How can we protect this because we are creating the next Virgin and we’re excited to have you on this journey and we want you to be a part of that. Get people throughout the business to help you spread that accountability and do a regular audit and refresh.  It can help to have visible guidelines and champions. Whether you have a brand, book or a PDF, at the end of that you need to add a

Have you met Google Analytics 4? Google Analytics 4 is designed to give you essential insights in order to be ready for what might be coming next. You can access the new Google Analytics experience by setting up a Google Analytics 4 property, formerly known as “App + Web” property. Key Features of new GA4 include: NEW: Insights and predications powered by artificial intelligence What this means: Insights powered by machine learning have been in analytics for a while, however GA4 is now able to highlight data trends such as increasing demand for a product or service. This technology can be used to predict outcomes, such as churn rates and the potential revenue a business could earn from a particular segment of customers. Those insights can then help you anticipate the actions your customers might take in the future. Enabling you to focus on higher-value audiences. Deeper audience integration with Google Ads What this means: You can now build and maintain audience lists in greater depth, with increased return on investment. How? If a user has qualified for you Google Ads audience list because of an action they took while browsing a webpage or app, they can be automatically removed from that remarking list once they have reached the set goal for that particular campaign. This will essentially reduce unnecessary ad spend. Customer lifecycle-framed reporting What this means: One of the most noticeable differences between Analytics 4 and Universal Analytics is how reports are organised. GA4 aims to give a complete view of how customers are engaging with your business across devices and channels. In addition, you can now allocate user with an ID, or enable Google signals to deduplicate users across devices, for better reporting and ad targeting. More granular user data controls What this means: Analytics 4 also includes options to help you comply with data regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. Analytics in a cookie-less future What this means: With the phasing out of third-party cookies, Google predicts that sparse data will become a norm. For this reason GA4 will rely on machine learning to fill in the data gaps. This will help maintain reporting accuracy for better insights. Why you should make the switch The new Google Analytics 4 property will provide you with a more complete cross-channel view of your customer lifecycle and will put that information to use with predictive marketing features. This will give you even more information as well as efficient ways to act on those insights. Google Analytics 4 will be the default option when you set up a new property. The previous system, Universal Analytics, will continue to be available. However, Google recommends that site owners set up both property types and run them in parallel. This is because all new feature developments will primarily focus on GA4. Want to find out more about setting up Google Analytics 4? Call, email or request a call back for more help and advice on GA4.  

An Introduction to E-Commerce Many people looking to get their business digitalised ask what is an e-commerce website? Well, functions differ, therefore the website design needs to differ to match the specific goals of the business. E-commerce websites are specially designed to have leading edge user experience functionality. This is to enable customers to engage and immerse in website content, which will ultimately encourage them to make a purchase. It’s important to note that these website designs can take time to perfect. This is largely down to the challenges of developing and embedding new and unique site features. In order to differentiate your brand from competitors, you need to be innovative and receptive to change. This is because every target market is different. Each segment interacts with different media types in different ways on different devices. This is why we always stress the importance of having a desktop and mobile friendly website design. Our team of in-house developers can help you perfect your responsive web design. However, do remember it’s not all about the design. You can have an amazing e-commerce website, but if you don’t know how to drive traffic to your website, you wont make any conversions. This inevitably means your online business will not be successful. Our communications team can work with you to develop SEO & PPC, PR and Social Media strategies that will enrich business success. With this said, I feel you may now be wondering what our top tips are for e-commerce success this Christmas. Especially in light of the current times of uncertainty. 1. Maximise your organic search visibility At Digital Glue, we are often asked why is organic traffic important? The term organic position refers to how and where your website ranks in comparison to your competitors. Essentially, organic traffic is free business. In other words. It does not cost you a penny to get those visitors on your site. However, it’s not all that simple. Mastering your natural listing in search engine result pages (SERPs) will require some strategic work, monitoring and maintenance. Our search engine optimisation team can help you by providing tips and insights into where and how you can improve your e-commerce website for a higher organic ranking. A website audit often highlights an array of site issues. From technical SEO problems to issues with coding. These are often easy fixes. However, if they are left unresolved they can have a negative impact on your website performance. For this reason, we recommend conducting a thorough site audit on a regular basis. This can be done as part of your ongoing SEO strategy. These reviews have many benefits. Not only will they help you keep your website up to date on current trends. They will also enable you to increase your organic search rankings for maximum visibility. The one thing to remember though, is that SEO improvements often take a number of months to have an effect. This consequently means that any changes you make to your website now

In September, we held a series of webinars focused on ‘The Power of Messaging’. We kicked off the series with the question “What is PR, and why should I care about it?”, discussing how you can reach the right target audience through carefully crafted messaging, the importance of trust, internal communications and reputation management. This blog will touch on the questions that were asked during the webinar. If you want to download and watch the full episode that goes into much more detail, you can do so here.  How do you know what is PR worthy and what to share internally and externally? Is it just a matter of messaging? This all goes back to knowing your audience, which we can’t stress the importance of enough. If you know your ideal customer and what they’re interested in, then that’s going to really help you decide what’s newsworthy and what’s actually worth talking about. Once you have those in place, ask yourself, does the story that you want to share fit with the strategic messages you’ve created?  What are the three core takeaways from your communication? This was spoken about in the webinar, and it’s something to consider before you share anything. What’s the end goal? And what are you going to get out of it? This applies both externally and internally. If you don’t have any objectives, then it’s probably not newsworthy!  With internal communications, it is always good to release the communications to your team shortly before you release it to your external audience. This ensures that your team members aren’t caught off guard. How do you measure PR, and the new business you gain from it? Some easy ways that you can measure if your PR has been successful is to check if there is an increase in site traffic. You’d expect to see a spike and through digital PR, you can also track directly where that’s coming from. So, if you’ve had some news published on a website or a blog, you can use Google Analytics to see how much traffic you’ve had and from where. Another measurement is search visibility – how many times people are searching for your business or related search terms on search engines. You should see that increase as well, because you should hope more people are talking about you and looking for you online if your PR programme has been successful. Social media engagement is another metric to monitor – as mentioned in the webinar, social media is also a valid form of PR. You should expect to see more engagement on your channels, which includes more people talking about you on social media, liking your posts, interacting with you and following you.  In terms of new business, you would expect to see an increase in leads and enquiries from your PR strategy. To measure that, you can set up goals on Google Analytics, which is talked about further in the digital marketing webinar you can download and view here. Another