How to take a digital first marketing approach?

The move towards digital communications has accelerated this year with more companies working remotely from home. This piece is a summary of a project that I carried out at the start of lockdown to show how a major architectural practice could move from a communications approach that has been largely publishing / print based and face-2-face events based and steps that you can take to take a digital first approach.

Digital trends to capitalise on

The digital landscape is continually evolving and having read around the subject and watched webinars and podcasts on this area, here are some of the key trends where I think you can make an impact.

‘Real’ video and sharing content through Lives on LinkedIn and Instagram

Your people are an amazing group of professionals with personality. Making the most of Lives will give you ways to showcase them and to shine a light on the issues and projects important to you. 

Social media platforms prioritise their newest functionality and tools so LinkedIn Lives, LinkedIn Stories and Instagram Reels are all major opportunities for you to raise your visibility and engagement.

The rise of voice, audio and video

If you listen to people like Neil Patel, he talks of the rise of voice search, audio and video. Voice search tools such as Alexa and Google Echo, are having an impact on SEO for example. Plus, more audio and video content is being produced and consumed this year with major rises seen across all social media platforms see the latest platform research from Hootsuite where they reflect on their 2020 predictions and what has happened. According to Hubspot research in June 2020 “Half of Gen Z and Millennials "don't know how they'd get through life without video." With millennials nearing 40 and Gen Z starting to reach ages with more purchasing power the impact of video will be increasingly important. From November 2019 to October 2020 the number of podcasts registered on Apple doubled from 800,000 to 1.6 million Source:  My Podcast reviews

Build your own data

Social media is great for business but you are at the whim of the social media algorithms. You don’t own the data for the thousands of contacts who follow you and cannot control who gets to see your content organically. It’s also all too easy for content you publish to be missed and not shown to all the contacts who you would ideally wish to target. A way to prevent this is to limit your risk to the social media platforms algorithms. By moving towards digital publishing, building your own more comprehensive client data that is yours in-house and by developing regular communications such as emails and newsletters that use your owned channels, you will reduce your reliance on social media channels to spread your messages and ultimately have more control.  

---

Feel free to email me to discuss more of the key findings raised in this report.