Building and exploiting your GDPR-compliant data

Building and exploiting your GDPR-compliant data is often one of the weak points of SMEs. Indeed, SMEs frequently do not have an updated database to create marketing campaigns. This is what we are going to look at in this post. The presentation originally comes from a webinar in Spanish by the Valencian Chamber of Commerce. I hope you will find its translation helpful.

Building and exploiting data

In this blog post, we will go through the following agenda points:

  • Key aspects
  • GDPR
  • How to build a database
  • How to exploit a database with campaign examples
  • Programmes: CRM, email, and automation.

1. Key Aspects Building and exploiting data: key aspects

2. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

As you probably know, you can’t store data nor use data that is unnecessary for the purpose of your campaign. For example, if you are a children’s clothes shop, you will need to target parents who have children and their children’s ages. You should only ask for these two pieces of information, and nothing more.

If you would like to know a bit more about data privacy law rules in the EU, UK, and the USA, I recommend you to read this blog.

Privacy policy

You must communicate your privacy policy to your customers, which should be the answers to the questions below:

  • Which information to collect about your clients and users
  • Which people have access to the information
  • Who is responsible for the data processing
  • The period during which you are going to store data and the users’ possibility to exercise the ARCO rights (Access, Rectification, Cancellation, and Opposition).

Building and exploiting data: privacy policy

A) Example of a promotion registration form

Building and exploiting data: Promotion registration form

B) Plugin GDPR

Building and exploiting data: GDPR plugin for WordPress

3. How to build a database

Building a database - how to build it

A) IN-PERSON RAFFLE TO GET A DATA BITE

Building a database: raffle

B) GOOGLE FORMS

You can use Google Forms to create questionnaires. Google Forms will create a link to the form, which can be used for webinars and newsletters.

Building a database: Google Forms

C) easy promos

Building a database: easy promos

D) FACEBOOK PROSPECTS REGISTRATION FORM

The purpose of social media advertising is to generate revenue through selling your products and getting prospects to sign up for your newsletter. To entice them to do so, it is recommended to offer discounts and a have call-to-action button such as ‘sign up’.

Building a database: Facebook Ad

 

E) WEB REGISTRATION FORMS

Building a database: web registration forms

F) WhatsApp

Building a database: whatsapp

4. How to exploit a database with campaign examples

All marketing campaigns must be measurable. For example, when it comes to email campaigns, you should check the opening rate of emails.

A) WhatsApp CAMPAIGNS

Mailing-list in WhatsApp: Only the contacts that have your phone number saved in their contacts will receive your broadcast messages.

B) SMS CAMPAIGNS

Exploiting a database: Bulk SMS service

C) SOCIAL MEDIA AD CAMPAIGNS

Exploiting a database: Facebook campaign ad manager

C) EMAIL CAMPAIGNS

Exploiting a database: mailchimp Exploiting a database: mailchimp step 1 Exploiting a database: mailchimp step 2 Exploiting a database: mailchimp step 3 Exploiting a database: mailchimp step 4 Exploiting a database: mailchimp step 5

5. CRM PROGRAMMES –  AUTOMATION

The automation purpose is to retrieve purchases, lost shopping carts.

a) LOYALTY CARD

CRM Automation: Loyalty Card

B) CRM -ERP

CRM ERP Automation: Odoo

C) AUTOMATION PROCESS

Automation process step 1 Automation process step 2

D) AUTOMATION SOFTWARE

Automation software: Active Campaign

Automation software: Hubspot

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How to digitalise your market research in 2020-2021?

The company Up Biz – Commercial Agitated Pack gives you commercial training on how to digitalise your market research in 2020-2021.

In this webinar, they  talk about :

  • What is market research?
  • What’s the meaning of it?
  • Which tools can you use?

Although door-to-door selling still works, depending on what you do, what you sell, and who you are visiting. However, in times of the corona crisis, digital market research has the upper-hand.

1- DIGITAL MARKET RESEARCH

When we talk about digital market research, we mean :

Digital market research: Inbound and Outbound Marketing

a) INBOUND MARKETING (ENTRANT)

Digital Marketing, also called Inbound Marketing (in French: prospection entrante).

Inbound marketing is how your leads (French : prospects) know you and how you draw them to you to get contact opportunities.

The basis for marketing is your website, which you will connect to Google. Google is the motorway, where everyone researches information. Your website must be well indexed on Google to allow good visibility but also be connected to the existing social networks (eg LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram).

In Marketing, we use 3 foundations :

  • SEO : Search Engine Optimisation (in French: référencement naturel). This is how you will write relevant web content to be ranked on Google when someone is looking for your company.
  • SEA : Search Engine Ads (in French: référencement payant). It refers to Google ads on the Internet. When people will look for you, you will be in the first results shown called “ad”. This allows you to be visible.

Both SEO and SEA are important. Be careful, however, one takes longer to get results than the other one. SEO takes between 6 and 12 months to be effective by following a real content strategy.

SEA is much quicker. In general, you pay Google and you are visible within the next following days. So, it allows you to generate quickly website traffic and convert this traffic into leads.

Both are complementary. SEO is a long-term time investment but doesn’t cost anything, whereas SEA works in the short-term since once you stop paying Google, it’s finished for you. It is recommended to mix both.

  • SMO : Social Media Optimisation –(in French : Optimisation des Réseaux Sociaux) allows you to create a community to get your website known what you sell (products or services), in order to generate traffic to your website, convert it into leads or even customers.

Contrarily to what some digital agencies will tell you, the Inbound marketing isn’t a one-solution-fits-all-situations. Outbound marketing (in French : prospection sortante) is still necessary. You will have to market research hard. Outbound marketing still has a big weight.

B) OUTBOUND MARKETING (SORTANT)

When one talks about outbound marketing (in French: prospection sortante), they mean contacting leads either by phone or by email. Although these are more traditional/classic market research techniques, if you do not carry them out, you will cut yourself out of a big market research part. Outbound marketing allows you to connect straight away what you sell to your target market. Furthermore, it’s not because it’s a traditional market research technique, that you will do it the old-fashioned way. Today, we use many digital products to create qualitative research. It is on this that I’m going to delve into and introduce you to different digital products I use.

Note as well that in 2019, 80% of companies in France achieved more than 80 % of their turnover thanks to outbound marketing.

2- GOAL: CREATION OF QUALITY DATABASE

You must create a good database that stands up.

Digital market research: Sales Navigator and Phantom Buster

You can do in-depth research on your ideal client profiles with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Sales Navigator is a paying tool but it does better-targeted research than LinkedIn premium. LinkedIn Premium doesn’t allow a huge amount of data scraping. You can use filters such as :

  • Job position
  • Job field
  • Years of experience
  • Turnover
  • Workforce
  • Comments/Post shares…

You can also scrape data from LinkedIn and automate this process through Phantom Buster.

Phantom Buster will pretend to be You with your LinkedIn profile. To do this, you will need to copy and paste the link to your Sales Navigator/LinkedIn research. It will scrape data from each lead profile and convert it into an Excel spreadsheet table.

Digital market research: Phantom Buster tool case example

Then, you can also use other tools to find the phone numbers and email addresses of your leads. There are many options. Zoho is a free tool, but the downside is that it’s not interacting with any other tools.

Other tools they recommend you use:

  • Dropcontact
  • Hunter.

Digital market research: Dropcontact and HunterThese tools allow you to find the information you require and qualify your prospects while respecting the current General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

There is also ProspectIn, but you can’t export the data. Everything is integrated into the tool.

Anyway, what you need to remember is that these tools allow you to sort out market research information.

3- DATABASE CONSOLIDATION AND PROCESSING

Once you have this data, you will need to populate it in a tool, that will allow you to capitalise on the information you just gathered.

The unavoidable tool to do that is the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database. Without a CRM, a salesperson is nothing today! The CRM will allow you to keep in touch with your clients and keep track of all actions done or required. In other terms, it will allow you to follow-up with your leads or clients.

Digital market research: HubSpot and Pipedrive

You have several options for CRM software like:

  • HubSpot (free of charge)
  • Pipedrive (€12 per month).

In your CRM tool, you can add tasks such as dates for follow-up calls. You can also add details on the follow-up call results such as:

  • Not interested in – do not call back.
  • Follow-up call in X days…

If a lead answers you that they are not interested in, you can just answer; ‘I take into account…I am available…’. Most importantly, do not re-contact someone who replied they didn’t want to hear back from you.

You can also use Buffer to schedule your social media post, which will also allow you to do a follow-up.

Email campaign: Lemlist

Afraid of cold calling? And why not start by cold emailing? Before start sending any emails, of course, do your research to find out the best approach to use to tailor your emails to your leads. For your research, you need to answer questions such as :

  • What are the issues your leads are facing?
  • Why?
  • Is it relevant to exchange on the topic? (it is also a question you can ask your lead)
  • What do they post, talk about?

For cold emailing, they recommend you to use Lemlist, in order to create campaigns.

Lemlist will tell you the success of your campaign by giving you data like :

  • Open rate
  • Answers
  • Clicks
  • Bouncebacks…

Lemlist tool case example

You can also add your email pictures.

Before starting reaching out, make sure to find out what problems your target market is facing, in order to customise better your campaign. Then, schedule on a monthly basis follow-up calls with a targeted lead list. If there are customers that aren’t online in your target market, you can connect with them through business networks and associations.

Finally, they recommend you to dedicate 1 to 2 hours to market research every day and count roughly €100-160 per month for all comprehensive market research tools, as these will replace a good few of your car trips to visit customers.

If you wish to get in touch with the UP BIZ, you can contact David Julien by email at david.julien@upbiz.fr. He is based in Rouen, Normandy in France.

Harness the Power of Marketing Campaign Orchestration

This presentation is from Timo Kohlberg and Doan Than. You will learn here how to harness the power of marketing campaign orchestration by:

  • creating orchestrated experiences with great content
  • driving hyper-personalisation across touchpoints
  • leveraging real-time insights along the entire customer journey.

Harness the Power of Marketing Campaign Orchestration

Hi, my name is Timo Kohlberg. I would like to get you thinking about your favourite coffee shop brand. Why do you go there? Is it about the product itself?

Well, of course, the product needs to be good. But it’s really more about other factors like the atmosphere in the coffee shop. How do I pay? How to order? For example, here in the USA at Starbucks, you can order your coffee and pay right away with an app. Then you can pick it up without waiting in line. Today, it’s more about the experience than the product.

Harness the Power of Marketing Campaign Orchestration

We, at Adobe, identified 5 key pillars for customer experiences.

5 pillars of customer experience management

Content Velocity: Content creation is crucial in a world of so many devices and channels.

There is actually the role of Adobe campaign within Adobe Experience Cloud, being the orchestration engine sitting right in the middle.

Adobe Experience Platform

Adobe Experience Platform lets you handle about everything from:

  • advertising
  • customer acquisition
  • converting customers into turning them into context on your website with analytics cloud
  • to personalise each and every experience you have with them within the magento commerce cloud.

Again, Adobe sits right in the middle as an orchestration and personalisation engine.

3 key pillars to achieve cross-channel orchestration success

3 key pillars to achieve cross-channel orchestration success

1. Orchestrated Experiences

First of all, experiences need to be consistent and optimised for each device and each channel. It’s not enough to deliver stand-out email or mobile experiences, while have other experiences falling short on other touchpoints and channels.

2. Hyper-Personalisation

Think about customer data on steroids. Obviously, brands and accounts need to add transactional data to that. Think about the buyer behaviour on your website and then integrate other data sources like a propensity score for example.

3. Real-Time Insights and Journeys

More and more real-time insights, journeys, and information identify where customers are in their journeys, powered by the context you can deliver.

1. Orchestrated experiences start with great content

Marketers should not only think in the context of beautiful images, and channel optimisation, but also about the content process.

I like to call it the content supply chain. From creating beautiful content to managing that content, optimising, and delivering that content.

a) Content is the fuel of orchestrated experiences

a) Content is fuel of orchestrated experiences

  • Take a look at sourcing and creating the best possible content. You should obviously have beautiful brand content from your agencies or internal designers. However, think also about integrating music-generated content into your communications.
  • Streamlining the content management process with digital assets management. Use a content creation platform, where you can manage, optimise and deliver that content through solutions like Adobe Target and Adobe Campaign.
  • Optimisation here is crucial. So, optimise delivery for all the important channels for you and your customers. Everything that relates to digital like website, mobile apps and any other interactions you have with your customers. If you are a retailer, you have a point-of-sale or a commerce/webshop you want to integrate. Basically, everything really should go towards one-to-one interactions through personalisation of content across channels like email, mobile, offline, and even the Internet of Things.

I’m going to show you a quick example of how our customers transformed the way they deliver their content.

b) A Content Transformation from single interactions

So, here is an example of Virgin Holidays, a well-known UK travel company.

b) A Content Transformation from single interactions

So, above you see how they communicated with customers before choosing Adobe and Adobe Campaign.

This is a representation of a journey from someone booking travel. You can see how the situation was before (from a booking, and a payment reminder to an online checking). All this information from a data perspective was stored in different solutions, siloed, and not really available to all of the marketers.

From a visual perspective, there were also different systems delivering those messages and emails.

So, what I want to show you now, is the situation of the first campaign they ran.

C) To beautiful and consistent conversations

c) To beautiful and consistent conversations

So, they had a content transformation to beautiful and consistent conversations with their customers by personalising content. Sometimes it’s as easy as including a booking code in all this information to reduce calls to the call center, for example. Besides, it is something that affects the bottom line.

2. Hyper-Personalisation is powered by data

2- Hyper-Personalisation is powered by data

Now, it’s time to talk about the usage of that data, its relevancy through hyper-personalisation, together with the content we just talked about.

a) Hyper-personalisation with the integrated customer profile

a) Hyper-personalisation with the integrated customer profile

Obviously, think about the data you have in-house over the course of an individual customer journey.

You can actually build that single accessible view by combining information from channel preferences with online and offline channels. Then, bring that into a consistent campaign history. We will actually see that in the live demo, how it looks.

Here is an example from one of our retail customers.

b) Integrated Customer Profile – DNA for Campaign Management

b) Integrated Customer Profile – DNA for Campaign Management

We have two main data dimensions:

  • Enterprise data: it is still the predominant data source for most of our customers (80 %).
  • Digital Interactions encounter 20 % of data coming from those digital interactions and campaign data.

Above, you see different metrics you can track and combine in the integrated customer profile.

It’s really much more than just standard demographic data. Try to use all the customer data in-house as well as captured data based on what you actually do and what they prefer.

c) When Data meets Content

Again, in this section, I want to show you two examples of our customers.

  • Travelocity, US travel brand, part of Expedia – Hyper-personalisation at scale.

c) When Data meets Content

In this case, it means they use all the information they have to create and send their newsletter.

For example, at the top, you see the mobile information they have on someone. If they know that a segment or a specific contact in their database hasn’t yet downloaded the app, they would push automatically that as the first content in the email.

Travelocity sends billions of emails to its customers. So, it’s very clear they couldn’t handle that manually anymore. They need a solution like Adobe Campaign, which can automate that personalisation process.

d) User Preferences and Customer Feedback

Secondly, in terms of data acquisition, the third dimension underestimated by many brands is ‘preferences’ from your customers.

Screenshot(12)

So, in this instance, Travelocity has what they call a ‘travel profile’. In the preferences’ section, customers can choose what kind of deals they want to receive.

Based on this information, all the personalisation done through email and website is tailored to the needs and preferences of their customers.

3. Real-Time Insights and Journeys are driven by Content and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Real-Time Insights and Journeys are driven by Content and Artificial Intelligence

For the last section, it’s crucial to integrate real-time information (behaviour). Marketers must know as well the context of where the customers actually are in terms of their buying journey phase. More and more of that is powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

So, again, 3 other examples to provide you with.

a) Connecting email to web

Connecting email to web

What you see above is a contextualised content and offers based on the search history of someone on the website.

So, someone just searched for holidays in the Bahamas. On the next day, they would receive a tailored deal based on their search history and how they interacted on the website. If they don’t want to book right away, they had the option to save it to their deal allows them to get more information about the destination and offers in the future.

On average, they have a much higher open rate and click-through rate.

b) Content needs to BE contextual and orchestrated

The second example from one of our travel brands in Europe is Heathrow airport.

b) Content needs to contextual and orchestrated

On the left-hand side, you see how they use and contextualise all the information from the integrated profile.

I am just highlighting 3 things here:

  • Product based on previous transactions:

You see at the top, it’s actually offers pushed based on previous transactions. In this case, someone has already parked at Heathrow airport; Consequently, they can actually push an offer for parking for the next flight.

  • Exclude known users:

It’s important to incorporate mobile information not just in a mobile message, but also in other channels like email. So, exclude known users from offers, like downloading the app.

  • Tailored brands/offers to segment:

If you are at the airport, they want to drive you to specific shops and brands. They are the right ones for the specific segment.

Think about going into the terminal area for the security check at the airport. If you have downloaded the app ‘Heathrow airport’, you may receive personalised push notifications for discounts or loyalty points in restaurants.

It’s working really well and they can tailor those messages and offers based on where you are in a specific terminal. But they also use more and more beacon technology to send you messages when you walk by a restaurant. This is a great example of orchestrated experiences with digital as well as also at the physical location (airport).

c) Email experiences powered by AI/ML

As a last example for this section, I want to show you an example of Adobe Sensei, our AI machine learning framework.

Email experiences powered by AI/ML

We have a feature here called ‘predictive subject line optimisation’, where you can test your subject line before you send out your newsletter.

So, think about the case you have to send out a newsletter on Thursday and do not have time to do an A/B test for your subject line. With this feature, you will be able to test your subject line based on the previous sent-out. It will actually predict open rates for that subject line. It will give you the feeling of whether it’s too long or too short and also find some optimisation with different categories.

d) An orchestrated Omni-Channel Experience

d) An orchestrated Omni-Channel Experience

To sum up, the integrated customer profile consists of enterprise data, but also more and more digital interactions.

Then, bring that together with Content through the Content Supply Chain, to manage and deliver across different optimised channels.

Through this representation of a customer journey across many channels, we can learn more about the customer based on the data. So, you might start with the channel that activates customers to download the app, by sending a push notification.

In some instances, you might want to:

  • send a direct mail or a catalogue
  • integrate the call center into the website
  • send a re-marketing email like we’ve seen with Velocity.

This strategy is focused on all relevant and meaningful experiences.

Perfect, so, I want to hand it over to Doan to take a live look at a demo of Adobe Campaign.

4. Adobe Campaign Live

Adobe Campaign Live

Let’s start the demonstration by having a look at the data powering the Adobe Campaign Platform that is giving you an internal 360° view of the customer.

Adobe Campaign Platform

Here, we can view a profile I kept within the Adobe Campaign.

Adobe Campaign Profile View

Adobe Campaign has an internally customisable relational database, which can be extended and modified for your specific business needs. We’ll have a look at what a profile looks like in Adobe Campaigns.

Adobe Campaign relational database

Above it is Kevin Blake and we can store all marketing data related to Kevin such as:

  • name
  • location
  • aggregate scoring inside the platform, which can be used to trigger and power message sets from Adobe Campaign.

Please note that no two databases inside Adobe Campaign are the same. They are tailored and customised towards your business requirements.

Adobe Campaign business tabs

On the top, we have all relevant business tabs related to Kevin as well as tracking logs.

Adobe Campaign tracking logs

These tracking logs:

  • keep track of all messages you send out
  • show you how customers interact with them.

On ‘orders’ tab, you can keep track of orders that came in:

Adobe Campaign orders' tab

Data can be used to trigger personal communications as required by your business.

This is not only linked to orders, this could be ‘mortgages’. Just depends on what your business needs are in terms of campaign management.

Adobe Campaign Orders' Tab

If we move to the workflow end, we’ll have a look at Adobe Campaign powerful and customisable workflow engine.

Adobe Campaign Workflow Engine

So, here on your right (see the below screenshot), we have a canvas, where you can drag and drop different parts of your customer journey.

This customer journey can be digitalised on this canvas. You can see where your customers are in each step of the customer journey that they are on with your brand.

On the left (see the below screenshot), we have ‘Union’, which we can drag and drop on the canvas to query for and deliver many channel messages to your contacts.

One particular note, we have many channels, which you can set up with Adobe Campaign, it’s not just emailed.

Adobe Campaign Cross-Channels

You can set up (as shown below):

  • push notifications
  • direct mail
  • in-app messages
  • SMS.

Adobe Campaign Cross-Channels

This will allow your users to create a schedule in multiple different ways. You can send it through multiple mediums. It will be based on your customer journey phase, their experiences, and preferences.

You can also do some basic data management notes (see below), where you can:

  • enrich customer journey
  • update data or save data into different tables or platforms.

Adobe Campaign Data Management

All these below notes combined to create a rich contextual customer experience for your contacts, as they go on your brand journey.

Adobe Campaign Notes

Let’s have a look at how we can create a relevant and personalised email within Adobe Campaign.

So, inside the Adobe Campaign, there is an in-built drag-and-drop HTML render. This allows you to easily and seamlessly create professional and customisable emails, that can be delivered under the build I showed you earlier.

Adobe Campaign In-Built HTML Render

The fragments can be dragged on the email canvas, adaptable without a single amount of code.

Adobe Campaign comes from Adobe Sensei, which is an AI machine-learning engine. It enables to use of Adobe Sensei to make better sense of the data and create predictive sales analytics.

So, here we have a subject line optimisation:

Abode Campain Subject Line Optimization

We can see below how customers in the past have interacted with email. We also receive different suggestions on how to make this subject line better. Adobe Campaign Sensei will give you a better view of how these emails might perform in terms of ‘opened’.

So, Adobe Campaign is not just about creating a workflow and laying a run-out. It runs a report and continues to be innovative in these features.

Adobe Campaign Report

With Adobe Campaign, it’s easy, flexible, and customisable with data points collected in real time. The preview report will show you the value of quickly getting a sense of different views. This allows you to get a better understanding of your marketing performance. Furthermore, it gives you a better idea of how attractive you are as a business.

Metrics such as ‘dimensions’ can be dragged and dropped to points. Points are accessible, interactive and all interconnected to devices.

Adobe Campaign Dimensions

Adobe Campaign Dimensions Table

Visualisation is simple, responsive, and re-sizeable.

Adobe Campaign Data Visualisation Adobe Campaign Data Visualisation Adobe Campaign Data Visualisation

With Adobe Campaign, you can set dates and apply different metrics depending on these dates.

Adobe Campaign Calendar

These reports will automatically update to see what you are doing and tracking the past 6 days. On the left (below screenshot), you can drag different devices and see how your email campaign is doing in this regard.

Screenshot(39)

Finally, we want to make sure that our customers actually make the most of their investments with the Adobe Experience Cloud, called ‘Experience League’.

Adobe Experience League

At last, we also recommend you these two free whitepapers downloadable from our site:

  • Mobile for the win
  • Get out of your email marketing rut.

Adobe Downloadable Whitepapers

Business Tips on how to use Video and Networking

I listened to two business tips’ presentations at the Local Enterprise Dublin City Women in Business Network on:

  • ‘How to use Video in Digital Marketing’ with Niamh Guckian from Go Motion Academy
  • ‘How to network’ with Melissa Curley from Social Bee

Gaining the edge in business: Tips for using Video and Networking

FirSt OF ALL, Let me start with Niamh Guckian’s presentation about developing a video strategy that works.

1. Videos create engagement

When doing an email campaign, research shows that an email with a video has a 96% increase in Click-Through Rate. Furthermore, videos up to 2 minutes get the most engagement. Additionally, 92% of mobile video viewers share videos with others.

2. Other considerations to think about with video marketing

However, when you plan your video marketing campaign, you must remember to start in the funnel by following the customer journey. Next, you need to drill down with video content and think about which type of video content would suit your business most. Do not ever do videos for the sake of it!

3. The customer journey

Indeed, when doing video marketing, take into consideration the different stages of the customer journey:

  • Awareness – your product/service is unknown to your targeted audience
  • Consideration – your audience has found your product/service
  • Conversion – your audience is ready to buy your product/service. It’s the sale stage
  • Retention – your audience is ready/open to come back and buy your product/service again.

4. Who is your audience?

This is the key question you need to ask yourself.

  • Where are your potential customers?

Insider Business Tips: Statistics show that 88% of Business-to-Business (B2B) videos are viewed on a desktop. Consider as well if Social Media would a good platform for your video. Note that YouTube is very competitive.

  • What do they want?
  • And you, what do you want from them?
  • What are the others doing in the business?
  • Do you need a disposable content (punctual events) or an evergreen content (tutorials/explainers)?
  • Is your content relatable (not over-emotional)?
  • What is the story (curve)?
  • Is your content useful/educational?

5. Choose a video genre

Once you have identified your audience and what content to go for, choose a genre:

Gaining the edge in business: Tips for using Video and Networking

  • Ask Me Anything – responding to questions, providing an engaging expertise
  • Vlog
  • Video tour
  • Event highlights
  • Review
  • Tutorial
  • Explainer
  • Demo
  • Interview
  • Live Streaming

At the end of your video, remember to add a strong Call-to-Action by asking your audience to do something. Your call-to-action must be specific (not just ‘subscribe’) and get people talking/guessing.

6. Video genre and the customer journey

Gaining the edge in business: Tips for using Video and Networking
Incontestably, each video genre corresponds to a specific stage in the customer journey.

  • Awareness stage: A video tour or a vlog
  • Consideration stage: Ask Me Anything, demo or explainer video
  • Conversion stage: Event highlights or tutorial video
  • Retention stage: Review, interview or live streaming video.

7. Video marketing campaign CALENDAR

In that regard, you need to know if your video will be episodic (occasional events) or if you want to stay in your audience’s mind (evergreen content).

Consequently, if you want your audience to follow you through, you will need to create between 6 and 12 videos. In other terms, you must remain consistent in your posting and sharing of videos. If you are short with time, you can start your campaign by sharing one video a week.

8. Other BUSINESS tips

Finally, if you are going for an explainer video, you must ensure it is animated and engaging enough. Other genres can be used for a more personal and authentic delivery.

Budgetwise, if you want to hire an agency to do it for you on an episodic basis, forecast a budget between 800 and 2000 Euros for several videos.

Otherwise, you can make your own videos with the following sites:

Then, let’s move on to the second and last presentation of the evening by Melissa Curley about small talk for big gains.

Gaining the edge in business: Tips for using Video and Networking

1. Why is networking a key marketing tool for business growth and success?

Foremost, we need to be interested in and curious about one another.

Why? What matters about networking?

  • The creation of Like/Trust/Respect
  • The importance of conversation.

In other words, networking allows you to grow your social capital before you ever need them. It’s like a social currency. To be good at it, try to have fun at it!

2. What is a conversation about?

Most importantly, a conversation is a two-way listening and talking. Therefore, you need to focus on listening to understand, not just on saying something. So, to be a good networker, you need to understand emotions and feelings about words.

3. Tips to improve your listening

Undeniably, listening means:

  • Receiving
  • Appreciating
  • Summarising
  • Asking.

4. Preparation for a networking event

Still, if you are introvert and uncomfortable with networking, don’t worry.  Remember this!  Extroverts don’t always make the best networkers, as they aren’t always good at listening and connecting with the others.

Business Tips: before you go to a networking event, ask for the attendees’ list. This way, you can organise, who you want to connect with. This will make you more focused and efficient.

5. 10 pointers to a better conversation

Now, let me share with you a few tips on how to be a better conversationalist.

Gaining the edge in business: Tips for using Video and Networking

  • Be present
  • Enter every conversation assuming you have something to learn
  • Ask open-ended questions
  • Go with the flow
  • Have courage
  • Avoid engaging in conversational narcissism
  • Refrain from repeating yourself
  • Don’t get tangled up in small details
  • Listen
  • Be succinct.

6. Networking budget

On the other hand, 50 -60% of your budget should go into your networking. Likewise, concentrate on building mutually beneficial relationships.

Gaining the edge in business: Tips for using Video and Networking

7. What networking is and isn’t

Thus, it’s good to be aware of behaviours to avoid or adopt when networking.

Gaining the edge in business: Tips for using Video and Networking

AS A MATTER OF FACT, Networking isn’t:
  • Salesy/Pushy
  • Fake/Insincere
  • About shameless self-promotion
  • Only extroverts are good at it.
CONTRARILY, Networking is ABOUT:
  • Making connections
  • Gaining knowledge
  • Adding value before you extract it.

8. How to create an effective network

IN summary, follow these last business tips:

  • Do research about people’s businesses and follow-up
  • Keep in touch, nurture contacts through social media and face-to-face meetings.

Gaining the edge in business: Tips for using Video and Networking

All in all, did you find this blog post helpful? Do you have further business tips or tricks to share?

 

 

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