Can a Business Use Memes for Marketing?

When you think about it, the Internet is a seriously strange place and since the birth and boom of social media we’ve seen an amplification of all that weirdness out there.

Take a minute and think about the most common things you see on a platform like Facebook. If you’re like most Facebook users you’ll probably see your fair share of cat videos, local town drama (via friends or family), content from businesses and brands and finally memes.

Hold on… What the hell is a “meme”?

What is a Meme?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary a meme is –

“An element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means.”

Urban Dictionary define it as-

“in blogspeak, an idea that is spread from blog to blog”

Essentially it’s a small piece of content, usually an image or GIF, influenced by or referencing something in pop culture that then gains virality.

If you’re still not sure, take a look at the images below and chances are you’ve seen a few memes during your time Internet browsing over the last few years.

Can a Business Use Memes?

So, why the hell are we talking about memes in the first place?

Well, as social media marketing is about joining the conversation and gaining as much exposure for your business as possible, memes, in the right circumstances, represent a great marketing opportunity.

The opportunity is twofold:

• So many businesses out there struggle to constantly generate the fresh and creative ideas needed in a fast-moving social media focused world.
• Memes by their definition are (more) shareable pieces of content so if you time it right and use the right meme with the right audience you could increase your reach way beyond normal results.

Are Businesses Actually Doing This?

As with every tactic some audiences will be more responsive than others but plenty of businesses out there use memes to increase exposure and engagement on social media channels.

Cool FM is a great example here in Northern Ireland and just this month Nintendo used the “Roll Safe” meme for a funny piece of shareable content. If you’re not familiar, the Roll Safe meme, which gained popularity in January 2017, originally comes from a BBC3 comedy and features logically sound but absurd advice.

See an original example alongside the Nintendo version below.

So What Next?

This isn’t about thinking memes are crucial to digital marketing (or even viable for some businesses and audiences) it just about highlighting that sometimes ideas are right there in front of you in your newsfeeds.

Keep an eye out for memes from now on in your personal social newsfeeds, see if you can spot businesses using them and, if you’re brave enough, give it a go yourself!

How to Improve Your Email Marketing

Social media might the major player in the digital marketing world nowadays but businesses should be wary of forgetting about the importance of email marketing.

A tightly constructed customer email list, created with a clear purpose in mind, can be vital as part of your digital marketing mix and the next step is using that list in a way that works for your business.

Below, you’ll find a few key touch points to consider when creating your next email campaign.

Keep It Simple

At its core marketing is a simple process. You, as a business, have a message you want to tell people. That’s it.

After that, it’s about choosing the right channel, conveying your message in the right way and cutting through all the noise.

Email marketing is simple an extension of the above and keeping it simple and straightforward will pay dividends.

Don’t bombard your mailing list with too many messages in one campaign. Pick one or two key messages; focus on them and save your other messages for the next campaign.

Give Your Audience What They Want

Recently when studying Mailchimp insights, when working with a client, we noticed after the first campaign, that the majority of their current mailing list came from countries like the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. 

As a result we tailored our next campaign to relate more with this international audience.

We asked ourselves “what do they specifically want to hear?”

The results were positive. We boosted open rates by 2.5% to achieve 30% overall and almost doubled click-through rates from 2.7% to 4.3%.

This is tangible proof that planning ahead and focusing on the customer works and we hope to see further growth with the next campaign!

Test Test Test

If you take anything from this blog, please, don’t repeat the same things in email marketing over and over and over…

Use each new campaign to experiment with different actions and tactics. Test different subject lines, campaign messages and text and imagery.

If possible, test everything!

After 5 or 6 campaigns of active testing you will start to see trends on what works and what doesn’t. This will strengthen your email marketing moving forward and your business will benefit as a result.

Good luck!

Great Halloween Marketing Campaigns

Marketing is a constant, year round, process but a holiday like Halloween offers some great opportunities to have a bit more fun than usual.

Consumers will generally accept something slightly different if it fits in with the overall theme of Halloween so why not try something new?

To get the cogs turning we took a look at what some of the biggest brands have done over the last few years.

Pop Culture Vulture!

In 2013 Tide, the American detergent brand, decided to release a series of Vine clips spoofing new and classic Halloween films. In the first of the series we see a Tide bottle slowly being drenched in blood at prom in a direct reference to Carrie.

It might seem strange but it’s just a bit of fun and the takeaway here could be to use classic Halloween movies with your own business.

Since Vine is nowhere near as popular now, why not create some Snapchat stories in a similar vain?

Tell Me Why?

A few years ago Topshop launched a “Trick or Tweet” campaign to promote a new Halloween fashion collection.

The campaign allowed customers to tweet Topshop their best Halloween outfits and the best tweet each day won a gift card worth £100! Not bad for just a tweet or two!

Not every business can afford to giveaway £100 per day during even the smallest of campaigns but have a think about what’s in it for your customer to engage with you on social media.

Why would or should they get in touch?

Giving Value

Tesco’s 2015 Halloween “Spookermarket” campaign was a good example of keeping things light-hearted and fun at this time of year. The main video highlights the power of video content whilst the others show just how useful it can be to provide useful tips in your industry or sector.

What tips and tricks can you offer in your industry? If they don’t match up perfectly with Halloween why not open it up to the entire Autumn season?

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Let us know what you come up with this Halloween!

Getting Started and How to Write Title Tags and Meta Descriptions for SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO for short) can seem like a minefield for small or medium sized businesses without proper resource but with just a few changes you can set your website on the right path.

Title tags and meta descriptions refer to the information you assign to each page on your site that then appears on a Google search results page. In the below image you’ll see the title tag as purple clickable text (normally blue before clicking) and the meta description as light grey text.

Both page elements are important for two key reasons. First, they indicate to Google, via keywords, what exactly each page is about and secondly, if they’re interesting enough, they’ll encourage Google searchers to click on your page rather than someone else’s.

Title Tags

Title tags are one of the most important on-page SEO elements for your website because search engines actively crawl them and because online searchers will see them in results pages.

As a result you can find thousands of blogs out there on how to craft the best possible tags but we’re going to keep things simple in a bid to get you moving.

When writing unique title tags for each of your web pages push your most important keywords to the front (i.e. first word and on), make it relevant and readable and try to stick to under 60 characters.

There is constant debate, particularly this year, on optimum character length so if you really want to squeeze as much as possible out of Google our recommendation would be to test various lengths.

Meta Descriptions

The importance of great meta descriptions is slightly more debatable.

According to Google, although they could be lying, meta descriptions aren’t crawled which means search engines won’t actively penalize you for having rubbish descriptions.

However, because meta descriptions are so prominent in search results (look at the image above) some SEOs claim they are extremely important because great descriptions could encourage more clicks, traffic to your site and so on.

Our advice, as always, would be to test things and see what works for your site.

When writing your descriptions try to aim for a character length between 100-160 and think of it, quite literally, as a tiny description of that unique page. Start with the most important information and work your way onwards from there.

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SEO can seem extremely complicated, and with massive websites it definitely can be, but if you’re a smaller sized business wondering how to get started hopefully this will help.

Give it a go, get stuck in and learn from your mistakes!

Why Your Business Needs Analytics

Digital marketing is full of numbers, data and insights and for some businesses this can be confusing but it shouldn’t be the case.

The clamour for numbers is probably the result of a combination of factors.

For years businesses had very little data available when using traditional media and advertising (print, radio etc.) in the decades that preceded online marketing. Add this to the new fancy bells and whistles of social media and budgets that are constantly being tightened and you’ll soon realise why businesses now want to measure everything.

Measuring tactics and performance can only be a good thing but, if you’re new to this, ease yourself in to the process by changing your thinking first.

Inform Decision Making

To really understand the benefit of all these numbers you need to realise that they are primarily there to inform your decision-making.

Every time you run a campaign and measure the results you take a step closer to better performance in the future with the right thinking.

With Facebook advertising insights you can test which sex, age-group or location gets better results amongst countless other options.

Email marketing figures give you the chance to gauge what type of content and message your mailing list audience actually wants to see and Google Analytics can help you understand your website user behaviour in a bid to increase conversions and more.

Start Now

If this all sounds new and complicated don’t worry. Start to collect data and measure your online performance from today.

If you have a Facebook business page check out the insights.

If you use an email marketing platform take a look at your open rates, click through rates and other factors and if you haven’t got Google Analytics set-up on your website do it now with the help of our handy guide here.

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Good luck and get measuring!

What is an Infographic?

A few years ago infographics were all the rage in the digital marketing world. Everybody wanted to jump on the bandwagon although that trend has slowed down with the massive rise of video content.

Despite that infographics can still be a handy little piece of content to get your message across so if you’re wondering what exactly they are, you’re in the right place!

What is an Infographic?

Essentially an infographic does what it says on the tin – it’s a graphic that represents data (with a massive focus on numbers) via images. It’s that simple!

Keep your own business in mind when looking at the examples below.

What story could you tell with a great infographic?

Focus on Design

IDV Solutions, a software company, provide a perfectly designed overview of UFO signings in the USA. It might seem like a strange topic but we appreciate the depth of this content and the cool colour scheme.

Making a Point

Heng-Chun Liow, a graphic designer, keeps things simple and start with this “Make your choices. It is your life” campaign.

This could be perfect inspiration for a public health body, an organic food producer or anyone else trying to encourage definitive messages.

Jumping on the Bandwagon

We’re no strangers to Game of Thrones here in Northern Ireland so everyone should be able to appreciate The Washington Post’s classic attempt to jump on the bandwagon with this “Valar Morghulis” infographic – a graphical representation of every death in the show.

This was released just as season six started and generated great traffic for The Post. Even the big boys tie in to pop culture for quick wins so why shouldn’t we?

If you do decide to use an infographic for your marketing try to make it unique, interesting and as creative as possible!

Effective Digital Marketing at Ballymena Chamber

Recently I was asked to speak on Effective Digital Marketing at the Ballymena Chamber of Commerce.

It was a fun morning hosted by Jackie Logan of Naked PR and also featured brief talks by Diamond Recruitment Group and Q Radio Network.

It was great to get a chance to actually discuss digital marketing with local businesses and hear what they really thought about the challenges of 2016 and beyond.

Signposts to Success

The key theme of my talk was how to proactively direct people or customers to your website.

The reality is that the digital market place is saturated. Reports vary but it’s estimated that there are around 1 billion websites online now.

This is an unfathomable number and competition is everywhere so how do you direct people to your site specifically?

With Counter Digital I focus on providing digital signposts back to client websites.

These signposts come in all shapes and sizes but I focus primarily on social media, email marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO).

As discussed with the chamber, everything is designed to direct people back to a website where the real magic happens.

Your website is where you have complete control over your brand but building it is just the first step.

Think about your signposts and ask yourself – how will people get to my site?

Speak to Me

With the digital landscape constantly shifting and evolving sometimes it’s worthwhile thinking about a talk or workshop to recap and refocus.

If you’re interested in hosting a workshop or talk focused on digital marketing and would like me to speak, get in touch.

Connecting Online and Offline Marketing in Northern Ireland

The rapid evolution of digital (online) marketing can make it daunting but the reality is that the goal remains the same – getting a message out there and in front of customers.

In some cases this can only happen after successfully connecting your online and offline marketing.

The two should never exist as separate entities.

Real World to Digital

I recently worked with a Northern Ireland gym and they had one key aim – increase footfall and class participation.

We started to make members more aware of upcoming classes and timetables.

We filtered this message through various social channels but we had to connect with our offline marketing to really achieve results.

We did this by collecting the email addresses of customers who entered the gym every day.

Every customer was asked two things:

What was their email address?

What did they most want to know about their gym?

We were then able to use the growing list of email addresses and customer feedback comments to create online email marketing campaigns that really worked and added value for both the gym and their members.

Digital in Real-Time

Similar to a gym, a hotel is the perfect place to showcase the connection between online and offline marketing.

There are opportunities everywhere in a hotel to collect the information that’s all around you.

We successfully did this, via opinion cards in the bar and restaurant, and then used the data collected to inform and direct our new digital marketing campaigns.

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It won’t be as easy in every sector but connecting the dots between online and offline can really benefit your digital marketing here in Northern Ireland.

Digital in Northern Ireland: From Top to Bottom

Recently I attended the Deloitte TMT Predictions 2016 at James Street South in Belfast and then a week later spoke at a Journey to Market event in Coleraine.

On one side we had high-level research, predictions and discussions concerning the evolution of digital and on the other, traders simply wanting to use whatever channel works best for them in the here and now.

Deloitte TMT Predictions

It was interesting going from top to bottom in Northern Ireland digital marketing and Deloitte produced an incredible report, for the fifteenth year in a row, with countless predictions but there were a few that stood out.

One notable point was that we are quickly entering the dawn of the gigabit Internet age. This means lighting fast internet (faster than fiber optic) will soon be widely available.

Another interesting point was the rise in people owning smartphones but never actually using the device to make calls. This group is known as “data exclusive” and is primarily composed of younger generations.

A final point, specifically on marketing and advertising, was that brands and businesses should focus more efforts on search engines as they are now and will continue to be the modern day equivalent of the Yellow Pages.

Interesting stuff – but is it of any use?

Journey to Market

Real world execution is the only way the research becomes valuable and that’s why I was delighted to be asked to speak at the recent Journey to Market workshop held by Causeway Coast and Glens council.

This was a chance to talk to traders about their digital needs whilst also remembering the points from the week before.

The traders, focusing on consumers, want to get their product or service out there and in front of eyes and ears as quickly as possible.

 With the growth of ultra-fast Internet it is clear that our attention (eyes and ears) will focus more and more on digital channels and right now traders should primarily focus on Facebook and Google.

Also, if we think back to the “data exclusive” group and the gigabit Internet age, traders need to ensure their websites are fully responsive and optimised for mobile use. 

Bringing a Farm Online

Last summer we had the pleasure of working with Valdale Farm as they embarked on a new venture – producing natural raw milk.

Valdale Farm is a local Northern Ireland diary farm based just outside of Ballymena in County Antrim.

While they have produced pasteurised diary products for decades they recently decided to enter the natural market and needed some help spreading this message online.

Route to Market

There were various aims and targets set out at the beginning of this project with a massive focus placed on providing interested customers with the correct information and the right message.

Also, for a variety of reasons Valdale decided against exploring a social media route to market so ranking highly on Google (and Bing) was our key priority.

The product can only be purchased on site at the farm so it was extremely important that potential customers knew exactly where they could purchase raw milk in Northern Ireland.

Customer Focused Content

With very  clear aims we set to work and viewed search engines as answer machines and considered what sort of questions potential Valdale Farm customers might ask.

Where can I buy raw milk in Northern Ireland?

Is raw milk safe?

Why drink raw milk?

With this customer focused approach we set about creating relevant content that would both help customers and boost search engine rankings.

Amongst other actions we also ensured that title tags, descriptions, headings and image tags were all optimised for the best results possible.

Ranking on Google in Northern Ireland

With this organised approach we achieved the results wanted.

Valdale Farm now ranks on the first search page for “Northern Ireland raw milk” and “Raw milk in Northern Ireland” on both Google and Bing.

This means that Valdale Farm are now getting their message in front of customers actively seeking out their product!

If you want to know how this could apply to your business get in touch.