Salar Media

Sustainability has become a ubiquitous concept in recent years. Applying sustainable principles to pretty much everything from transport to tourism and fashion to food has led to serious rethinks over how, what and why we consume everything from hummus to holidays.

But what about communications? At a time of multi-channel media saturation when everyone’s attention span is stretched to breaking point, is there such a thing as too much information? Could over-sharing be counter-productive? How regularly can you post on social media while maintaining quality? Is it realistic to distribute quality content across all platforms, and should you even try?

In many ways, the current state of affairs feels unsustainable. There’s simply too much information out there and everyone is amplifying their attempts to draw attention to their agenda. Attention spans are increasingly measured in milliseconds and perhaps the ultimate irony is that when everyone is shouting, nobody can hear a thing.

This cacophony is driving audiences away from the shouty, confrontational, polarized world of social media, achieving the opposite of the extra focus and resource many organisations have dedicated to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram et al.

It feels like we’re approaching an inflection point, but who’s going to lead the movement away from the social media frenzy to the calmer, more considered spaces desired by millions of ordinary folk who just want to keep up to date with friends, family, community groups and causes that are important to them?

So what would a more sustainable approach to communications look like? For me, the concept of sustainable communications hinges upon at least two fundamental concepts:

• i) that the content is accurate, valuable, timely and useful
• ii) that those communicating it can maintain a flow of quality content and field any questions it raises without placing unreasonable stress on their employees or bankrupting their organisation.

So what would a more sustainable approach to content and communications look like and how do organisations who would like to put their comms on a more sustainable footing take the first tentative steps off the never-ending treadmill of post, like, share, repeat.

Stepping off the treadmill

The algorithms which govern what we see on our social media feeds are designed to drive engagement – they want users to keep coming back as frequently as possible so they can serve up more commercial content to them.

This means that regular posters are rewarded for the frequency rather than the quality of their posts. This works in precisely the opposite way to traditional media used to operate, where teams of experienced editors sorted the wheat from the chaff and just brought you the stuff that mattered.

Back in the day, media professionals didn’t always get it right 100 per cent of the time, but they waded through gigabytes of information to seek out the good stuff, so you didn’t have to.

In stark contrast, social media platforms encourage users to ‘doomscroll’ through the dross – interlaced with carefully targeted advertising messages – whilst creating the impression that everything is equally important.

The first step to posting higher quality content is to step off the treadmill and refocus time and resources on creating content that matters – probably for your website initially – then putting out ‘edited highlights’ on your social media channels.

Quality control

As anyone who remembers what telly used to be like when we just had the four (or even three) channels, the chances of finding something worth watching were much higher when the programming was spread less thinly.

The reality is – even with the profusion of repeats resurrected from an archive spanning more than 50 years of popular broadcasting – it’s impossible to maintain quality across the 480 free-to-air TV channels currently available in the UK. The result is we spend a higher proportion of our time searching for something to watch rather than simply watching it.

It may be hard to believe, but most professionally produced content has been through a process of quality control involving pretty stringent checks on accuracy, veracity, decency and legality.

Social media effectively encompasses billions of channels, but few are subject to any quality control and nor do the platforms or individuals posting run the risk of being sued if what they post is inaccurate, untruthful or misleading.

Giving greater care and consideration to what you post in terms of its appeal, relevance, usefulness, originality, distinctiveness, humour and creativity is likely to achieve greater ‘cut-through’ than wishing all your followers a ‘fab weekend’ or ‘happy Tuesday’.

It may seem obvious but setting the bar higher will inevitably reduce the volume of content an organisation is capable of creating while also improving the quality of that content. The social media platforms will continue to reward frequency, but genuinely engaged audiences will appreciate the improved quality of the information you share.

Social media isn’t free… and it’s likely to get more expensive

One of the explanations for the explosion in social media marketing is the widespread misconception that it’s ‘free’. Let’s just bust this myth. Social media is not free; it takes time – a lot of time – if you want to do it right.

Millions of small business owners will identify with the time- and focus-sapping churn of posting original content when concentrating on the day job would be a better use of their time.

Done properly, social media isn’t about hitting the ‘transmit’ button and posting three times a day, it’s about interacting – liking, sharing, commenting and curating your community. This eats up an enormous amount of time, which – unless you are paying someone else to do it – has the potential to put a massive dent in your productivity.

If you don’t believe me, just set a timer running every time you create, post, like, share or respond to an enquiry via social media and tot it all up at the end of the week before applying your hourly rate. The ‘bill’ at the end of the week will be an eye-opener.

In the early days of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, organic content reaching potential customers was a real bargain – as were the early iterations of paid-for advertising. Today, the reality is that your organic content is unlikely to reach all your followers, let alone a wider audience, and your paid ads will likely gatecrash the feeds of a totally disinterested and disengaged audience.

Within another year or two, as Facebook and Instagram owner Meta seeks to claw back the vast costs of creating the Metaverse and Elon Musk attempts to make Twitter profitable, paying for social media traction is likely to become the norm.

This pivot has big implications. At the moment, higher quality content is generally rewarded with more views, likes and shares – a clear indication of when you are achieving ‘cut-through’ with organic content.

In the future, paying for social media amplification will get your content in front of more people, but unless it’s high quality, this could be counter-productive. Within this context, views are not the key performance indicator – likes and shares become much more meaningful barometers.

Paid content campaigns also require a more advanced use of analytics to identify the content and messaging that is working – and the material that isn’t.

At this point, larger, better resourced organisations may become seduced by the idea of automating their digital marketing by using a proprietary platform such as Hubspot or one of the many CRM-derived marketing platforms.

As long as you have someone in-house with a detailed understanding of how to deploy these platforms and secure the ROI on the significant investment required, this could be convenient solution to maintaining a consistent social media presence.

But think about automated mailings that land in your inbox or slide into your timeline every day. How many to you open? How many do you really read? How many do you remember? How many do you act upon?

Most of these platforms are derived from Customer Relationship Management systems which are focused on generating, nurturing and harvesting leads. If your communications objectives are longer term and more strategic and don’t rely on selling people stuff, you may find these platforms don’t really deliver.

Automation simply cranks the handle to deliver the numbers. It doesn’t improve the quality or originality of the content – although it may free up your hard-pressed digital marketing team to be more creative when it comes to developing content that really cuts through.

AI isn’t the answer

In recent weeks (thanks largely to a concerted, coordinated and expensive traditional PR campaign) you may have read about an AI innovation called ChatGPT – a seemingly intelligent content creator that can write word-perfect copy on pretty much anything it’s instructed to.

Clearly, this should strike terror into the hearts of copywriters and content creators who make a living out of doing this kind of thing. I had a play with ChatGPT and it writes pretty good copy, but it’s not what I’d call original, innovative or in any way differentiated – and when it makes a mistake, it tends to be a pretty big one.

ChatGPT does what mediocre copywriters across the world do when commissioned to write an article: Google the topic, copy and paste whatever their searches turn up and weld a boiler-plate introduction onto the piece. Thankfully, this content model is almost certainly headed for the scrapheap.

Organisations who begin to rely on AI like ChatGPT to produce website content, will merely exacerbate the current situation in which people are required to wade through gigabytes of undifferentiated babble to find what they are looking for. This will make it statistically less likely that potential customers will land on their page, thus defeating the primary objective of content marketing.

Google is also likely to get extremely skilful at sifting through this morass of AI-generated information and identifying the copied and pasted content and penalising websites which rely heavily upon it in the search engine rankings.

Also, ChatGPT won’t produce and edit video content – although it could produce a basic first draft of the script – which is kind of a deal-breaker for anyone contemplating a video-first approach to content creation and distribution.

Taking back control

So if your New Year’s Resolution is to get your content, digital marketing and social media ducks in a row, what would the first steps look like?

When it comes to marketing and communications, perhaps the biggest challenge facing small businesses and organisations in the digital age is ‘mission creep’. What started as a Facebook page and quarterly newsletter has – seemingly overnight – scaled into a multi-media omni-channel digital marketing empire.

If this looks familiar, it’s unlikely that your hard-pressed comms team is doing everything really well. Dependent on their skillsets, they could be smashing it on social media, but neglecting the website and e-newsletters.

Not so very long ago, discerning readers were prepared to pay professionals to sift and filter out the waffle, blather and BS, leaving them free to focus on the important stuff. Large swathes of the modern media have abandoned that role, making it increasingly difficult for organisations with important things to say about serious issues to get a hearing.

The fragmentation of media and plunging circulations of local and regional titles has profound implications for both local and national groups operating at a grassroots level.

In the last 10 years, it has become much more difficult to ensure messages get out to local audiences because editorial teams are under pressure to crank out celebrity clickbait for their websites rather than craft well-researched and more considered content with direct relevance to their communities.

This seismic shift in the focus of local media has profound implications in terms of organisations’ ability to maintain the frequency, consistency and quality of their content output.

In a fragmented media landscape, distributing consistent communications and focused messaging has become immeasurably harder. Sending a monthly press release to your friendly local newspaper editor is no longer sufficient and the resource implications are profound.

Within this context, it’s all too easy to succumb to the temptation to use short term attention-grabbing social media tactics rather than adhere to a long-term content and communications strategy. There is a place for an agile and responsive social media approach, but this shouldn’t take precedence over a long-term communications strategy.

For me, sustainable communications is about doing less better. It’s about electing not to bombard people with more stuff, it’s about choosing not to invade people’s timelines with irrelevant messages, it’s about increasing quality, not frequency; it’s about relevance, not volume; it’s about originality and differentiation rather than copying and pasting to keep pace with the pack.

So where do you start?

First – ask yourself honestly: “Is this sustainable?” Work out how much time/money you are spending on digital marketing and ask yourself if you can comfortably continue carrying this overhead. If the answer is a resounding ‘no’ then it’s time to re-assess and re-prioritise.

Answer the following questions honestly and scrutinize any activities that don’t bring you any closer to achieving your objectives and priorities.

• What are my objectives?
• What are my priorities
• Which audience(s) am I targeting?
• Where do I find these people?
• What sort of content engages them?
• Is my messaging clear?
• What does success look like?

This process may be accompanied by a fear factor: you may fear losing the attention of some audiences, or no longer being ‘part of the conversation’. Your communications team may fear losing their jobs, but be brave: keep asking yourself what a sustainable level of communications activity looks like and prioritise accordingly.

You may need to slash the volume and complexity of messaging, reduce the frequency of social media activity and revisit captive channels like email newsletters and figure out how they can engage supporters on a deeper level. This is often a more constructive use of time and resources than randomly cranking the social media handle.

Sustainable communications remains a work in progress. Nobody really knows what it looks like or how to do it perfectly. But by adopting the principles employed in other sectors, we should be able to find our way to a more sustainable future in which values like quality, originality and relevance become more highly valued than frequency, volume and repetition.

• If this article strikes a chord, feel free to get in touch for a no obligations chat about how you might adopt a more focused, structured and sustainable approach to communications.

As protected landscapes and the rural economy re-open after lockdown, clear messaging is critical in managing visitors …and their expectations.

The last few months have provided an object lesson in how to – and how not to – execute a coherent and consistent communications strategy.

Saying the wrong thing, at the wrong time to the wrong audience is the most obvious risk, but in this era of media saturation, saying nothing can also create problems.

The risk is that in the absence of any guidance or information, people tend to draw their own conclusions: disposable barbecues haven’t actually been banned, therefore I am free to use one for my socially distanced picnic.

Perhaps the key learning is that getting it wrong can be enormously costly – in terms of reputational damage and lost credibility – but also in terms of the additional resources required to get your messaging back on track.

The landscape and environment sector is fortunate to attract extremely committed, passionate, intelligent people but it is not usually blessed with an abundance of resources – for anything – let alone delivering a communications strategy.

The focus is on delivering for the environment and the community. Media and marketing rightly take a back seat. And yet for the majority of the lay public, if they can’t see the valuable work of National Parks, AONBs, NGOs, charities and rural enterprises, they remain blissfully unaware of it. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Viewed from this perspective, many managers accept that a budget is needed for communications, but only a small one. So how do you deliver as much awareness and engagement as possible within the constraints of that pretty modest pot?

What do you prioritise? PR, newsletters, events, social media, your website? The answer – perhaps surprisingly – is: all of them.

Now this may seem like an impossible challenge, but by using a streamlined, content-led agile publishing model, all of it is possible.

The first step is committing resource to the creation of a strategic media plan with accountability for delivery integrated from the outset. Too often, organisations embark upon a comms strategy full of enthusiasm and passion and for the first couple of weeks, it’s great… and it works. Engagement levels soar; people begin to notice; you become part of the conversation; memberships, subscriptions and donations soar.

But then, the reality of crafting a dozen tweets and social media updates a week becomes a chore, the team member who championed the cause gets re-deployed to another project, you run out of news.

So what does an agile, content-led model look like? Essentially it means getting it right first time, every time. It means being able to get consistent messages out across multiple channels and platforms quickly and accurately. It means being able to respond rapidly to external events and devise crisis communications that land within hours, not weeks.

This means adopting a disciplined ‘create once – publish many times’ approach to the content to incorporate clear messaging, inspiring calls to action, vivid photography, short bursts of video and short and long form writing that is suitable for use across websites, newsletters, the internet, social media and YouTube.

The overriding aim is to create an agile, efficient publishing model that is designed to generate a constant stream of focused, useful, engaging content across multiple platforms and ensure that all this content is managed efficiently to enable rapid distribution and re-purposing.

You may be lucky enough to have people with the skillsets required to make all this happen, but it’s highly likely they will also have a ‘day job’ that involves delivering the important stuff.

Having someone in-house to initiate all this stuff is invaluable, but there will be times when this team member might be overwhelmed with other work and simply can’t keep the comms strategy on track.

It’s at this point where flexible external resources – perhaps just for a limited period – may be worth considering.

The risk is that the entire comms strategy falls over and within just a few weeks, you’re back to square one and facing a significant investment of time and resource to restart the process from scratch.

After months of disruption during lockdown, that’s where many organisations now find themselves and as core operations and demands roar back and staff return to their day jobs, the danger is that communications will again take a back seat.

During lockdown and over the coming months, the dedicated teams across the landscape and countryside sectors will be working overtime on essential habitat creation and restoration and keeping visitors safe in the face of increased footfall.

Don’t let all that hard work go unnoticed. Now is the time to shout about it. 

Get in touch for an informal, no obligations chat about how we can help.

• Article originally published in CJS Countryside.

 

How do you know your digital marketing strategy is delivering a return on investment if you can’t tell whether your customers are finding you online?

Talking to customers used to happen face-to-face or over the phone, but at least 80 per cent of the modern ‘sales funnel’ now happens online.

Many of my clients are telling me their phones have stopped ringing. And it’s worrying them.

For many experienced business owners, the level of ‘buzz’ in the office is usually a pretty accurate indicator of how the business is doing.

Twenty years ago, the volume of incoming calls would be used as a yardstick to measure whether the marketing department was doing its job.

These days, many offices are virtually silent. Orders and enquiries come in online. Quotes and proposals go out on email. So how does an engaged business owner get that ‘gut feel’ for whether their digital marketing strategy is working?

The crux of the issue is that the typical customer journey has changed beyond all recognition. Most of it – as much as 85% – now happens online.

Before widespread acceptance and trust of the Internet was established, potential customers would scour the Yellow Pages, find a few companies who looked like they knew what they were doing, ring three of them, have a chat then buy products from whoever was cheapest, quickest or supported the same footie team as them.

Today, even for big-ticket items like cars, holidays or new kitchens, most of that customer journey now happens online. It’s invisible, silent and slightly unnerving.

This is because not only is it easier to ask Google a question – but often – the response and information you get is better than from a part-time telesales agent on minimum wage in a call centre.

Complicated call management systems with endless menus have driven customers away from the telephones. Anyone who has been kept on hold listening to Enya for 22 minutes, will be the familiar with the feeling of frustration and helplessness.

Naturally, they would have a much better experience if they called one of your sales team, but the point is customers have learned from frustrating experience to have low expectations of call centres. So is it really surprising that customers don’t pick up the phone any more?

Marketing managers are responding to this challenge in lots of different ways. Some are ramping up their marketing spends to try and drum up more customer enquiries. Others spend a small fortune on Adwords every month.

The problem with this approach is that while it usually brings in more enquiries, a lot of those enquiries are likely to be irrelevant. If you run an artisan candle company, you don’t really want a load of enquiries about cutlery.

If you’re lucky enough to have a marketing department, you can get them to chase Adwords and Keywords around Google and play cat and mouse with your competitors over who’s going to bid more to secure the top sponsored search slots. But this is costly and time-consuming and an increasing number of smart consumers make a point of NOT clicking on those sponsored search boxes.

So what’s the answer? How can you satisfy yourself that your digital marketing is working?

It’s pretty simple really. Stop chasing Adwords around and pumping out dull content packed full of Keywords to try and climb the search engine rankings.

Instead, focus on putting out really high quality, original, distinctive content that you know your customers will find useful.

When people start their customer journey online, most of them are looking for answers. As long as your content provides those answers, Google’s algorithm is now clever enough to work that out.

It takes time to conceive, commission and create this content, but once you’ve produced it, it can be re-used and repurposed across multiple platforms and channels and refreshed and adapted to maintain a steady flow of relevant enquiries via your website, social media channels and even good old-fashioned print media (it still works well for certain demographics you know…)

The key is aiming for quality and consistency over Adwords, Keywords and the dark arts of mechanical SEO.

This informative article goes into more depth on why you should be creating content that answers your customers’ questions.

Find out how we create engaging content for small businesses without big agency fees here.

For a FREE consultation, get in touch here, or maybe you could even give us a call!

OPEN HOUSE!

Come along to our office at Holmes Mill in Clitheroe for an informal chat about how to get to grips with digital marketing.

 

Learn about our no-nonsense approach to digital marketing that looks after the essentials so you can get on with running your business. We’re happy to talk about any aspect of digital marketing, but we have lots of experience in the following areas:

SEO MOT
Is your website written for search engines or real people? Is the content attracting the right people by speaking their language. Does it use the right keywords? Does it raise awareness and build trust with prospective customers?

WEBSITE CONTENT AUDIT
Is the content on your website up to date? Does it clearly tell potential customers how you can help them? Could it be improved? Do you have the time to do it yourself?!

SOCIAL MEDIA
Are your posts reaching the right audience. Should you pay to reach more people? Which channel is right for your business? How can you increase conversions? How do you find the time to do social media properly?!

Genuinely FREE consultancy – we promise not to bombard you with follow-up sales calls!

WHAT: Digital marketing tips for small businesses

WHERE: Salar Media, Holmes Mill, Greenacre Street, Clitheroe

WHEN: Friday, July 14, 1pm to 5pm

Call or email now to book a FREE 30-minute slot: 01200 407120 / salarmedia@btinternet.com or complete the form below:

It’s about now that lots of small business owners start setting out objectives and priorities for the next 12 months – and a fancy new website will be near the top of a lot of wishlists.

Your sparkly new all-singing, all-dancing website will obviously need to be built in HTML 5 and be SEO-friendly, integrating social media, a blogging platform and a downloadable App.

But before you get on the blower to the techies down at the web developers, pause and ask yourself a couple of simple questions: What’s the new website for and what are you going to put on it?

Overlook this step and it will come back to haunt you once you’re up to your eyeballs in the parallel universe of web development with its bewildering lexicon of jargon and buzz-words.

Since the inception of the digital revolution, for many businesses, the whole web development journey is often a time-consuming, frustrating, not to mention expensive exercise.

After going through the rigmarole of producing technical specs, design briefs and wireframes, then sifting the quotes and tenders, six months later, if you’re lucky, you’ll have a website that pretty much works and is ready to switch on.

You’ll know you’ve reached this stage when an email a bit like this arrives in your inbox:

 

Hi Fred,

We’ve finished the UX testing, just waiting for you to send over the content now…

 Regards

Jim
ABC WebDev

 

If you’d asked the question above before instructing your web developers, there’s a chance that you’ll have a whole load of content and pictures ready to upload.

What’s more, the content and pictures should all fit nicely within the web design and the different pages and sections relate logically to one other.

If you haven’t, just when you thought you were pretty much ready to launch, a whole new world of pain will stretch out ahead of you.

Too many website development projects pan out like this: primarily driven by technological considerations, with the site’s principal raison d’etre lost in a flurry of spreadsheets and flowcharts.

It’s time this imbalance was addressed. Website architecture should reflect the content it hosts – not the other way round.

First, work out what you want the website to do and what content it needs to achieve that objective and then design the structure around those criteria. Furthermore, your web developers will have a clearer picture of how they can best build the structure for your website if you provide a content outline from the get-go.

If your new website is primarily designed to be a shop window for your goods and services and a way to talk to new and existing customers, the content is the most important aspect of the site.

This is more true now than it was when you last redesigned your site because Google is getting better at spotting content scams and technical shortcuts that may once have propelled your site up the search engine results page.

If Google’s algorithm spots any dubious ‘Black Hat’ SEO practices on a once-popular website, it’s now likely to demote that site to the 120,000^th page of results. The message Google is trying to send out is clear: on the road to search engine credibility, there are no shortcuts.

But it’s not just about Google. Online consumers are getting much more choosy about the amount of information they consume online and the technology to help them sort the wheat from the chaff is already out there.

Consumers can block the senders of irritating or irrelevant emails, use Adblockers to stop adverts appearing in their browsers and spot a mildly disguised sales pitch from 100 paces. Get the tone or style of your marketing communications wrong and chances are, it will be ignored or rejected – not only on this occasion – but at every successive attempt to contact customers who are tired of getting bombarded with spam.

Increasingly, web content aimed at drawing in customers needs to be honest, fresh, useful and relevant. What we are talking about here is Organic SEO: good quality content, pure and simple.

Think practical, how-to tutorials, informative case studies and maybe an engaging grassroots campaign rather than listicles, vanity blogs and sneezing kittens.

The good news is that finding people who can help you produce honest, fresh, useful and relevant web content is easier than you might think. Some of these people may even be already working in your business.

They might need a bit of nurturing and encouragement, but the most passionate advocates for your business are the people involved at the sharp end – delivering your services and products day in, day out.

They will probably need some time away from the coal face to write fresh content on a regular basis and put out a daily tweet, but with the right training and encouragement, they can become your most effective brand ambassadors.

The even better news is that the investment required will almost certainly be less than the fees charged by some SEO agencies.

And when it comes to producing your next brochure, mailshot or customer magazine – you’ll have loads of lovely content ready to re-use without needing to write it all from scratch.

Want to find out more? There’s more information here and here. Or get in touch for an informal chat here.

I’m not a professional photographer, but I’ve been lucky to work with some brilliant outdoor photographers over the years and I enjoy taking my own snapshots. Sometimes I get lucky and they turn out OK for publication. Here’s a gallery of some of my favourites …