Learning and sharing... by Zoe Sands

10 Digital Marketing and Social Trends for 2015

It is that time of year where I review what’s happened in the past 12 months and see what trends I can see starting to emerge for the coming year. Here are my top ten trends, which I think will shape digital marketing in the coming 12 months;

Social Selling is here for B2B marketing proving returning on investment (ROI) and is my big bet for 2015. Today we see smart organisations utilising the social channels to gain customer insights, competitor insights, employee engagement, brand advocacy and even open up new revenue streams. Social selling will dominate 2015.

Personalisation – startups using individuals’ social media and digital footprints to create and develop more personalised products from photographs, text and video content created will do well particularly with pricing aimed at the midmarket level. An example from 2014 was wrap.me, we’ll see many businesses like this spring up in 2015.

Personal Branding verses Corporate Branding – this tiny contender personal branding has been around for a few years now, but it will be a serious brand contender in 2015. Those organisations that embrace individual personal brands within the enterprise structure will win, those that see the corporate brand has more power will lose. The challenge for organisations will be balancing the two.

New apps and online services for the time poor will start to appear frequently in the app stores from automating simple tasks to personal assistants on your mobile devices. Machine intelligence will be big business in 2015.

4G mainstream, 3G clogged networks. 4G will become the network of choice across the majority of the major cities throughout Europe with much of the 3G network clogged with video and data traffic. Users will flock to 4G throughout 2015, as the desire to consume and create more video content rises exponentially. Many Asian countries will continue to trial 5G in the coming year.

Internet of Things is fast becoming mainstream. More items will become connected to the internet than ever before during 2015. WIFI connections will become the normal for all things manufactured during 2015 drawing in an era of a truly connected world.

Social advertising will continue to be big hit in 2015 with new innovative formats and larger revenues generated from the major platforms during 2015.

End user, employee and brand generated video content will become the primary content pieces sort in marketing campaigns throughout 2015. A video strategy and tactics are vital for marketing success in 2015.

User generated content will continue to be a dominant player in content marketing strategies during 2015. Winners will be those you are able to integrate customer and partner content into the overall corporate content marketing calendar.

2015 is the Year of Marketing Advocacy through your employees, customers and partners. It is important for your social and online engagements to be driven by employees because they are our biggest fans and can connect the brand with networks marketing can't access with bought lists and advertising. If you aren't implementing an advocacy programme covering customers, employees and partners through social, then you’re missing a trick. Your competitors will see this and start targeting your customers and install base. Taking opportunities from you during 2015. Don’t miss out on the Year of Advocacy!

So, these are my top ten trends for 2015, which I think will affect digital and social marketing over the coming year. If you feel I’ve missed any key trends, then please share your thoughts and opinions in the comments below.

Top 50 Women in IT was My Career Highlight in 2014

I first wrote a short blog on my career highlight in 2013, thinking that nothing could top speaking on the All Marketing is Digital Marketing panel at LeWeb London 2013 with the distinguished moderator: Jeremiah Owyang (he is definitely social media royalty). Well, I have to say that my professional highlight of 2014 making the PCR’s Top 50 Women in Technology list has topped speaking at LeWeb 2013 (sorry, LeWeb I loved my experience, but making the top 50 list bumps you to second place!). It was an absolute pleasure to receive this acknowledgement and I felt very honoured to be added to the list earlier this year. I am extremely proud of this achievement and I think it is an important to highlight the other talented women who made the list too, so take a look at the others featured on the list here.

I hope that during 2015 many more women choose IT as an industry to work in, there are many different types of organisations to choose from and a variety of opportunities available. Don’t let the current gender bias put you off, we need more talented women in IT to make a difference, increase productivity, add diversity and shape the industry. So, my advice would be come to 2015 inspired, break the mould and choose a career in IT.

New tools and skills for sellers

So, if you’re not already considering social selling within your organisation for 2015, then here’s some reasons why you need to start looking at social media for selling. Gone are the days of cold calling, cold lists, random marketing mail outs, these techniques as prospecting are fatigued with over usage. Today we see smart organisations utilising the social channels to gain customer insights, competitor insights, employee engagement, brand advocacy and even open up new revenue streams. Social media for B2B organisations is not just about having a social presence, opening up a Twitter, LinkedIn and or Facebook account, but is more about bringing together sales and marketing as a combined unit and creating a social selling environment for the organisation to exist in.

How do you go about creating a social selling programme for your organisation?

We all know the marketing 4Ps (product, place, price and promotion), well there is the 4Ps of social selling that has been widely discussed in many blogs and articles that are scattered across the web, these areas should be addressed in your social selling programme:

The Four Ps of Social Selling

1.       People

People buy from people, so what better way than to upskill your sales team with social media and social selling skill training. Note that people will take up social selling at different rates, so it is important that you have an ongoing social media training programme to support novices and experts. Publish best practices and highlight achievements to encourage participation.

  2.       Policy

Document a simple social media policy linking to your orgasnisations’ code of conduct and brand values. Your employees are ultimately your brand ambassadors and the first point of contact before engaging. So it is imperative people are aware of the policy, as this is your code of conduct when it comes to representing your organisation online. I would suggest developing a small internal communications campaign including linking to your published social media policy, a short educational video and internal communication notices. We all help educate and support your social selling team.

  3.       Platform

Social selling is about people, but in order to aid or facilitate the programme you will need to look at the different social media tools that enable you to aggregate the varies social networks into one tool. You can use the tools to automatically post to your teams’ accounts or allow your team to decide what content they wish to share in their social networks. Ideally the sales team would choose the most relevant pieces content and add personal touches and opinions to the content, this will enrich and adding value to their networks and build their individual “trusted advisor” status.

  4.       Process

  For social selling to be effective and measured you need to connect sales and marketing with your CRM system, this could be as simple as adding a social selling field to your database to issuing social selling campaign tracking codes. What you decide on will depend on what systems you have in place within your organisation.

You should also agree daily tasks and content that should be shared regularly by the sales teams’ social networks. A weekly social media calendar helps stimulate regular social media usage, but you also need to think about other standard tasks you would like your team to do regularly, for example, connecting with customers and prospects.

Bring social selling to life and add that competitive edge by adding gamification to your programme. This can be simple as awarding someone social seller of the quarter with a trophy and certificate to awarding a prize to the first deal secured that quarter through social selling. Adding incentives with aid to the success of your programme.

  Final thoughts…

So developing a social selling programme for your organisation doesn’t need huge development funds. I would suggest piloting social selling within your organisation with a small team of sales people and conduct this over a period of 3 to 6 months depending on your sales cycle. You will need to invest in training, write a social media policy, create social media content for the sales team, buy a few LinkedIn sales navigator licences, trial a social media aggregation tools (Social on Demand, Hootsuite, Social Chorus, Sprout Social or Buddy Media to name a few social content distribution tools) and agree a process and measurement. Simple!

Good luck with your social selling programme in 2015 and if you’ve had any successes with your programme, then please leave me a comment below, as I would love to hear from you and share your learnings.

Many thanks!

A Love Affair with Florence, Italy #lp

I’ve been to Italy many times on holiday and a couple of times for business and each time the country has enchanted me. Recently I visited Florence on a business trip and the magic of Italy has taken hold of me again. It is hard to describe the effect this country has on me; the environment, culture, arts, food, people and language all just engulf me into a mystical fantasy and reignites that desire to stay and leave behind the humdrum of normal life behind. Maybe I’m still stuck in my very own “Eat Pray Love”, but I keep repeating and wanting to enjoy the “Eat” part of this journey, maybe my Eat Pray Love is here in Italy.

It has been eight years since I last visited Florence with my very dear friend Jacqui, we had a superb time together and I have very find memories of our Tuscan adventure. This visit was just as wonderful, but for very different reasons. I hope to return to Florence again in the not too distant future and revisit some of my favourite sights and galleries, but in the meantime here are a few of my favourite photographs I took whilst I was away on this brief visit to Florence.

Day Sixteen Island Hopping around the Balearics - Benirras to San Joan, Ibiza #LP

I had a lovely nights sleep in the pagoda at Ibiza Yoga, I initially wasn’t sure when I saw how basic it was, it is almost a kin to glamping. There’s a shared toilet and shower, so you have to time when to get ready, but other than that it has a nice comfy bed and plenty of storage. The lay in was much needed and I felt really rested.

Today we went into San Joan to have a look around what they call a “hippy market” not quite what I was expecting in fact it was very over priced with plenty of alternative looking people, but that’s the only thing that can be said was slightly hippy. If you’re into boutique shopping this will be rather disappointing for you.

The afternoon was taken up with three hours of yoga, it sounds a lot but it was broken into parts with the first hour being meditative, some theory and slow warm ups. The next 90 minutes was taken up with flows also known as vinyasas and then a nice long savasana. I had initially thought I wasn’t going to be able to complete the full session in this heat, but I did.

That evening we went to the drumming party on the beach. Every Sunday musicans from all over the island come to Benirras to hold the largest sunset beach party on the island. I thought it might be quite chaotic, but surprisingly it wasn’t, even though there’s only one road in and out of Benirras. It was interesting see, but if you're not staying in the north of the island it is certainly not worth the trouble travelling there.

I’ll update my blog more later.