As a Customer Success Manager at Orlo, it’s been a while since I’ve sat down to share my thoughts through the blogosphere. But, sometimes you just need to share great experiences you’ve had, right?
Well, recently, I spoke at the fantastic Creativity Lab virtual series, hosted by comms2point0 (Season 2 Episode 1 if you want to check out my on-screen debut). The episode focused on digital creativity, which can be a huge pain point internally within businesses. With a background in client relationship management in social media, I’ve had great experiences helping businesses to improve the customer experience they deliver by having brilliant conversations on their social and digital channels.
Alongside the other speakers, who provided their perspective on creativity on alternative digital channels, there was some brilliant insight shared that you might benefit from in your own social strategies. So, here are four of the tastiest tidbits from the session…
#1 All eyes on data 👀
The old term writer’s block doesn’t quite cut it in the digital world, because life isn’t just about creating great copy anymore. Now, it’s all about getting exciting pieces of content in front of the right people, at the right time, in the right way for your business. Just look at the content stats from the previous year alone…
That might make you feel like your content has a needle in a haystack vibe, but there’s a real opportunity there that every business can take advantage of. I mean, the web is the biggest marketplace that’s ever existed, and it’s accessible from a magical typing box right in front of you.Data is your friend here and is super important in getting your content in the right place – sharing that data with your teams is even more so, even if you don’t think it’s applicable. Share and share alike by democratising your data and making it accessible to everyone from customer service agents, to the marketing and sales teams! Perhaps a Copywriter wants to see the Click Through Rate from their last piece of content, or a Social Media Manager wants to deep dive into the reach of their latest post, or maybe your sales team wants to discover the engagement stats around content to help identify pain points for customers. Whatever it’s used for, data gives a great insight into how you’re performing, how you can better perform in the future, and what’s ticking the right boxes with your audience and any platform worth it’s salt should enable you to do this straight from the Analytics suite!
#2 Tidy metrics, tidy mind. 📝
If you’re feeling overwhelmed with analytics, then it’s a sure sign that you need to clear the noise a little bit. Perhaps you need to stop, drop and rewind your strategy and goal setting. If you’re starting well then you will be able to focus better on the key metrics and block out the performance indicators that aren’t relevant to your end goal… think of it like putting blinkers on a racehorse. But with so much data available, it can start to get a little overwhelming when you’re looking at impacting small campaigns. So what do you actually focus on when it comes to putting content out there?
It’s easy to become hooked on areas such as reach, but it often helps to be a little less granular and not focus on just one element. When it comes to creative success, perhaps you need to look at the bigger picture and check out your Engagement and Click-Through Rates too, to see if your content is disrupting the market and stopping people in their tracks. If you can do this, you’re on your way to finding creative success!
#3 Listen to the vibes 👂
While data shows us how campaigns are (and have been) performing, there’s another great way to give your content a better chance of future success. Keeping an ear to the ground with Social Listening tools is a great way to spark your creativity and inspire the content for your next big campaign. Listen in to the chatter surrounding your brand, especially those conversations that are happening beyond your tags and direct replies. It’s those interactions that offer the most meaningful data on the sentiment around your brand reputation, customer experience and creative impact.
It doesn’t have to be used just to drive future campaign content either. Once you’ve identified problems, you can go that extra mile and fix them at their source. Joining the conversations that matter and adding to the noise is often far better than letting it get out of control – you’ve got to be in it to win it!
And remember, negative sentiment can come from all sorts of places, not just from a bad customer service experience or a marketing campaign that didn’t quite hit the mark. Comms, marketing and customer service professionals across all sectors have dealt with a lot of negativity online throughout the pandemic – the struggle has been real! But, by keeping your ears to the ground in these times, you may have noticed that a lack of creativity had a knock-on effect within your customer base too – and that’s something that can last a lifetime. Negative sentiment can and will mirror itself through business and customers and we could sit and point fingers in a classic chicken and egg situation all day, but truthfully, it’s much better to focus on the steps we need to take to fix the problems.
#4 Fixing problems with your strengths 💪
Taking reach and engagement metrics as an example, it turns out that less can be more, and we’ve started to see that the best way to look at your social presence at the moment is that age-old mantra: quality > quantity. You need to make noise and drive engagement through the right channels, but at the same time, you need to ensure you’re not just posting for the sake of it. Nobody likes that guy that never shuts up, right?
Don’t be too hard on yourself – no matter what role you play in your team, it’s unrealistic to think that you will be an expert on every single channel. Every few years we see new social platforms take the world by storm – just take a look at the impact that TikTok has had over the past few years, especially with Generation Z! But as the new kid on the block, you can’t necessarily expect it to…
- Suit every audience in every sector
- Utilise the same tone of voice and content as channels like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
That’s not to say that TikTok doesn’t have its uses, but, unless you’ve got the appropriate content and it’s where you’ll find your target audience, driving brand awareness, engagement and reach, could prove tricky.
Unless you’ve identified new platforms as credible contributors to your brand’s goals (and have the know-how to make the best of them), let them slide and focus on what’s been successful for you so far, and how you can tweak existing wins to build on future campaigns.
On Instagram, the biggest driver of success is that your content is valuable enough to share with a wider audience, and when the audience is acting, make sure you’re reacting while you have their attention. A great way to do this is to set up automated Triggers for your inbound messages, meaning you’ll receive message alerts based on criteria, such as sentiment or keywords so that your messages are in front of the right people at the right time in your Inbox. Whether you’re driving engagement or putting out fires, you’ll be right there in an instant.
Let’s wrap it up 🌯
If you were a part of the live audience for the Creativity Lab episode, there were, hopefully, a few things you could take away from the collision of expertise on offer. But on the blog front, to wrap things up I want to remind you to always be authentic and use what you’ve got. If you’ve got a great team (fingers crossed) and you’ve got great tools available, use them to your advantage – use your data to drive creativity and decision-making, sense check with the experts in your organisation, and play to your strengths in your channel selection and strategy – your creativity will be shining in no time!
