By Michelle Quickfall
Taking a planned approach to managing your digital profile or monitoring the impression of brands online can help support your business objectives. The benefits of building your digital profile are broad but situations where it is particularly relevant include: if you are trying to attract new talent; creating or raising your professional or company profile; wanting to empower your employees to become advocates of your business or needing to build your brand presence in the digital world.
In this context what you write is critical as it will be processed by search engines and delivered back to people searching for information, advice, recommendations and everything in between. Therefore, a basic consideration is to define what you want people to know and remember about you. Due to the technology involved, spending time defining this and the keywords around these topics for your business and/ or yourself will be critical to building a successful online presence.
Plan before you Post!
The digital opportunities for businesses and individuals to widely communicate are easily accessible however, this opportunity also comes with risk. It is very easy for your efforts to reach your target audiences to be in vain or even to switch off potential customers or employers if you have not clearly planned your posts.
As with any marketing communications you should plan any kind of digital profile activity but incase you feel tempted to act in the moment consider the following 7 questions before you post anything online:
1. Who is going to be able to see this?
2. Is what I’m writing clear or could it be mis-understood?
3. How is what I’m posting reflecting company or brand values?
4. Am I just using this medium because I’m angry or need to rant about a topic or issue?
5. Could I potentially offend someone?
6. Am I giving away too much (professional/personal) information?
7. Is this reflecting my personality, skills or capabilities?
7 easy steps to help with planning your digital profile activity:
1. Know your target & objectives
It is really important to answer these two questions as you build your plan for your digital profile and to think about what it is you want to achieve.
2. Be distinctive
Consider how to make your post ownable and reflect the values of your brand and your point of difference. Think about whether you are trying to inform your audience or evoke a feeling or emotive response.
3. Be relevant
Use words or phrases which are appropriate for your target audience. Choose back links and hashtags which will enhance the digital interaction for the reader in a relevant way.
4. Be consistent
Your posts should complement any other marketing communications in other channels and reinforce your key messages.
5. Choose your channel
Follow the test & learn principle so that you can adapt your activity as you build your knowledge of the channels and how they work for your brand. Your online presence could comprise of short posts or snippets (ideal for Twitter), photography or images (useful for Instagram & Facebook) and longer content which is more topic based (Linked In).
6. Define what success looks like
There are many ways to define what success looks like as you build your digital profile, they should be connected to your activity objectives and could include things like: website visitors; applications for a job, etc.
7. Manage engagement
If you are going to put your brand online then you also need to be ready to respond to feedback in the form of comments and enquiries. Having a system defined and in place will also help to transform those initial interactions into customer relationship.
If you would like to explore this topic further then our new Digital Footprint workshop could be for you. Rimu Marketing have collaborated with a HR consultant and Branding Specialist to develop a half-day workshop which will help satisfy your digital training needs. Through this workshop we will consider the digital landscape, its impact on your business and how to create the right digital footprint to build your business profile and attract the right talent. In addition, we will look at how individual employees can become advocates to drive business success and optimise their own professional profiles.
If you are interested to find out more details about this workshop or any of our other marketing workshops, then please get in touch.
