Earlier this week, Digital Insights ran an introduction to Facebook Marketing for about 35 Businesses in conjunction with Dublin City Enterprise Board. Always very interesting to run these workshops you get such a mix of businesses from solicitors, architects, doctors, jewellery makers, health professionals, restaurant and bar owners for example, all looking to try and figure out how to use Facebook from a business perspective (along with all the other relevant social media tools). All these small businesses, have one thing in common, that they needed to use social media to develop meaningful warmed up leads with very little dispensable budget. Great session, lots of questions looking for tangible answers. The best way for small businesses to start leveraging social media is to seriously think about who and why it is they are targetting certain prospects (as well as existing customers) and what are they going to communicate and offer these prospects through these channels. Is there any value in what they are communicating — does anyone care? There are by all accounts 37 Million Facebook Business Pages as of them filing IPO — there’s going to be a lot more as more and more businesses are jumping in. Lots of noise. And its very easy to filter that noise out on Facebook. Some businesses will do a good job marketing and communicating on Facebook — most won’t — because they dont understand the medium, how people engage on these channels, and nor do they do the basics in thinking about what it is they are trying to communicate and making sure that someone cares — but thats the opportunity for those of us who make the effort and try very hard to understand why we are using these channels and who we’re looking to communicate with.

Have a read through the presentation — its meant as an overview and introduction — during the session we went through how easy it is to set up a page and landing page using a third party app and generally a walk through of the application. Whats easy is setting up a a page, whats hard is sustaining it with good and relevant content.

DigitalStrategy

Earlier this week, Digital Insights ran an introduction to Facebook Marketing for about 35 Businesses in conjunction with Dublin City Enterprise Board. Always very interesting to run these workshops you get such a mix of businesses from solicitors, architects, doctors, jewellery makers, health professionals, restaurant and bar owners for example, all looking to try and figure out how to use Facebook from a business perspective (along with all the other relevant social media tools). All these small businesses, have one thing in common, that they needed to use social media to develop meaningful warmed up leads with very little dispensable budget. Great session, lots of questions looking for tangible answers. The best way for small businesses to start leveraging social media is to seriously think about who and why it is they are targetting certain prospects (as well as existing customers) and what are they going to communicate and offer these prospects through these channels. Is there any value in what they are communicating – does anyone care? There are by all accounts 37 Million Facebook Business Pages as of them filing IPO – there’s going to be a lot more as more and more businesses are jumping in. Lots of noise. And its very easy to filter that noise out on Facebook. Some businesses will do a good job marketing and communicating on Facebook – most won’t – because they dont understand the medium, how people engage on these channels, and nor do they do the basics in thinking about what it is they are trying to communicate and making sure that someone cares – but thats the opportunity for those of us who make the effort and try very hard to understand why we are using these channels and who we’re looking to communicate with.

Have a read through the presentation – its meant as an overview and introduction – during the session we went through how easy it is to set up a page and landing page using a third party app and generally a walk through of the application. Whats easy is setting up a a page, whats hard is sustaining it with good and relevant content.

DigitalStrategy

We deliver a lot of social media training sessions direct to businesses and as part of wider digital marketing courses. Enclosed here is a social media slidedeck that walks through the importance of planning your social media strategy — looking before you leap. In the course of the presentation, we highlight the need to know what your business objectives are, exactly who it is you are targeting, what channels you are going using to engage with these audiences, what content you are going to use to get their interest (taking a cold hard look at your content and will anyone be really interested in it),  is there customer/prospect activation points built into your content (its business after all, you need someone to take an action at some point). We go through case studies of businesses using certain platforms. Feel free to go through it or download it, and get back with comments. If you want to talk to us directly about any of the points covered, feel free to contact us.

DigitalStrategy

Digital Insights recently delivered a Digital Strategy and Planning Session for Dublin City Enterprise Board to a variety of businesses ranging from the travel industry, education sector, creative arts and retail. Embedded here is the slidedeck that we went through on the day. It goes through the key things to bear in mind when creating a digital strategy, it discusses some frameworks to conceptualise your digital strategy, and highlights the importance of  content marketing and creating a mixed-ecosystem of owned, paid and earned media. It also goes through some of the tactical means available to marketers and how best to use them along with some case studies. Feel free to download and digest. If you want to discuss any of the points, feel free to contact us.

DigitalStrategy

Digital Insights has just finished up delivering three Diploma courses in Online Marketing, Sales and Digital Strategy with Dublin Business School, Griffith College Dublin, and IBAT College Dublin. These have been a great success with many large and medium sized business partners and individuals participating on the courses. They will be all run again in October 2010 so if interested please register at the various colleges. These courses have been certified by the Institute of Commercial Management (ICM) and by the Dublin Business School.

They cover in practical terms how to create an online and digital strategy that is aligned with measurable business objectives with clearly stated goals. They demonstrate to participants how to plan and research your target audiences and understand where they coalesce online and how best to create online tactical solutions that engage with them.

The courses cover how to create inbound marketing programmes based on producing compelling valuable content for your buyers, for both a B2B and B2C environment. We look at how to create awareness and demand through your content and how best to leverage social channels as a means of connecting with your prospectives and customers. As part of the course we differentiate for participants between the differnt forms of media that are used online today – and we break these down into Owned Media, Paid Media and Earned Media, and how to create your media profile based on these segmentations.

We demonstrate to participants how to design and implement paid search campaigns, search engine optimisation programmes, keyword analysis, competitor analysis, blogging strategies, podcasts, videocasts, webinars, screencasts and, relate all of these to particular buyer cycles and sales funnel activities that can help augment site conversions. We go through how businesses can leverage social media to share content, develop community and make their content more “findable”, improve customer service, acquire new customers and retain existing ones. We also show participants how to create measurement frameworks for businesses to track ROI Key Performance Indicators. We go through using the google analytics interface and how to tie this in with site conversion tracking.

These are intense 12 week courses with the aim to provide participants with a clearly defined set of practical digital skills which can be leveraged immediately at client-side marketing teams, digital and integrated agencies, and drive strategy and tactical solutions for enterprise eCommerce businesses, B2B and B2C businesses, communications and public relations organisations, owner managed businesses, and web marketing organisations.

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