Don’t Build an App for Your Business! (Unless It’s Absolutely Necessary…)

Small businesses do not need their own smartphone or tablet apps.

This might seem strange, coming from a “digital marketing” person, but since the launch of the first iPhone in 2007, and the subsequent smartphone takeover of our culture, there has been a growing “app trend” amongst small businesses and it’s wasting their time and money.  

The worst thing about this trend is that the small businesses involved aren’t actually to blame. It’s the app building companies and developers who swoop in, promise the world and then make a swift exit upon completion and sign-off.

Whether they do this innocently and naively (unaware of the current digital marketplace) or do so knowing full well that the new app will provide little benefit isn’t for me to say. Both options reflect badly.  

The primary reason that it reflects badly is because the “build your own app” deal rarely represents the best use of time, money and other resources needed for the business involved.

Why is this?

The Crowded Marketplace

You’ve most likely already experienced it in some shape or form.

You visit a small local business (an SME in professional terms) and are either asked to download their new app or notice it via in-store or online marketing messages.

These apps usually encourage you to download with the promise of exclusive offers, more content or some other feature.

Unfortunately, very few of us ever actually care enough to download the app in question.

We might love the local business, they could be our favourite barber, café or restaurant, but our smartphones are already crammed with much bigger, more unique apps vying for our attention and phone memory/storage.

The app stores are packed with thousands of apps fighting for our downloads and gaining a critical mass of downloads (to make the project worthwhile) can be almost impossible. Especially if you’re not offering something unique or valuable.

If customers can book their stay using AirBnB, order takeaway via Just Eat, or learn more about your business on Facebook or even on your official website, then that’s most likely where they’re going to go right now. This means you’re always going to be fighting an uphill battle unless your app offers something truly unique via functionality.

Follow the Attention

So, what next?

Well, if that’s the negative the positive is that as business owners and managers you have countless options out there waiting to be properly exploited.

Whether you’re looking to attract customers online or offline the key is to follow the attention.

In a digital marketing context this means using the biggest channels currently available to us. Right now that generally means some combination of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, LinkedIN and Google Search but if you want to research this yourself do three things today:

Audit what digital apps/websites you personally use on a daily basis

Ask friends, family and colleagues what they use on a daily basis 

Check out Apple/Android’s Top Free Apps lists for a UK or global picture

After you’ve done this you can then make an informed decision on what channels to use for your business and move forward.

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Apps are brilliant. From Headspace to YouTube and Spotify to Soundcloud we can do and enjoy so many things using our smartphones and tablets but unfortunately, small businesses will rarely be able to crack this market.

If you properly research what you, your friends and family use on a daily basis you’ll quickly notice that the majority of people only use 5-10 apps ever and muscling in on that market is a huge task.

Focus your efforts on moving with public attention and go from there.

If you’ve made the first leap but aren’t sure how to use social media channels and Google Search for your business get in touch here!

Facebook Live is a Game Changer

Facebook Live was first released in August 2015 but lately, and specifically during the second half of 2016, it’s become a game changer on so many levels for businesses and brands.

Now, anyone or any business can go Live to an instant audience that would’ve been unimaginable and inaccessible just 5 or 10 years ago.

With Instagram also announcing new Live features and Snapchat constantly dabbling and improving, in the art of instant video communication, “Going Live” is going to become the norm and we’re only seeing the start of it. 

Notifications Working For You

Right now one of the major benefits of going Live on Facebook is the notification feature.

Now with the click of a button, on a smartphone, tablet or laptop, your followers will be directly notified the moment you go live. This instantly increases the chances of quickly gaining an audience for whatever you want to promote or broadcast.

This is massively different from a standard organic Facebook post that generally reaches only 5-10% of your followers.

How to Use Facebook Live for Business

What does Facebook Live mean for businesses?

As with everything it’s simply another platform, another tactic and another means to get your message out there to a wider audience than ever before.

If you’re an estate agent running a show house open day why not Facebook Live a tour around the house? Depending on the current size of your Facebook business page you could have an extra 50, 200 or 500 eyes viewing the rooms as you walk around. Not bad for one click of a button.

Boutiques could Facebook Live once per week to announce new stock arrivals and highlight best selling or on-trend pieces.

Craft makers could Live broadcast the making of a popular product or a tour around the workshop behind the scenes…

The opportunities are there and an audience is waiting, after that it’s about figuring out what works and what doesn’t, what entertains, informs or engages your audience.

The Premier League Football Problem

On a bigger level, for many brands and businesses Facebook Live, and similar features on other apps, represents a big opportunity but the Premier League may not be one of them.

Recently I’ve been able to watch full Premier League games, otherwise unavailable to a UK or Ireland television audience, via a Facebook page live streaming everything from a location most likely in Asia.

The live stream in question attained an audience of approximately 6 thousand people with almost zero promotion, simply through the organic reach of Facebook.

This represents a major issue for the Premier League going forward as Live broadcasting is only going to get bigger and it will be interesting to see how they tackle the problem.

If you feel like your business could suffer in some way my advice would be to start broadcasting and figuring out Live before the competition does. 

NFL UK Going For It

Interestingly, the NFL may be showing the Premier League a thing or two when it comes to using social media Live broadcasting.

Just this week, on Tuesday 13th December, the NFL used Facebook Live to broadcast and announce the organisation’s four upcoming International Series games to be held in London in Autumn 2017.

Despite having different broadcasting deals with Sky and the BBC respectively, NFL UK used Facebook Live to make their announcements.

The reason for this? Instant audience.

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Take some time to experiment with Facebook Live over Christmas or January; depending on when is quieter for your business.

Live broadcasting is now just a click away for everyone. 

Volunteering with Young Enterprise Northern Ireland (YENI)

Just over a week ago I volunteered with Young Enterprise Northern Ireland (YENI) and spoke to a group of 13-14 year olds at Glengormley High School.

The whole thing lasted around one hour (although the students were probably thankful my talk was only 15-20 minutes in total!) and focused mainly on the topics of digital marketing and running your own business/working for yourself.

It’s been years since I was last in a school, and back then I was wearing a uniform, so it was strange being back in an environment that felt both familiar and distant.

It was really enjoyable and I’d highly recommend anyone, who felt they could contribute, to give it a go. Likewise it also got me thinking about two important topics: uncertainty and collaboration.  

Uncertainty

One of the tasks assigned to the kids was to imagine their lives a decade from now when they’d be approaching their mid-twenties. Part of the task included imagining their future jobs; houses and family situation and that got me thinking. When it came to future jobs the student’s aspirations ranged from footballers to army nurses to computer programmers and everything in between but the crazy thing is, most of their future jobs might not even exist yet!

I haven’t a clue what I would have said ten years ago but if you think about the digital landscape today there are bloggers, digital marketers, eBay flippers, YouTube stars and more. Some of these jobs are brand new where as others are simply the digital cousins of positions from years gone by.

Looking at it from a business sense I think the key is to roll with the punches. In the last eighteen months Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook video marketing have all exploded onto the marketing scene so who knows what 2017 and beyond will bring.

In my experience the key is to experiment, learn and go from there.

Collaboration

Another interesting point was the collaboration and brainstorming between students.

If you think back to school days every class featured groups of friends huddled around tables distracting each other, working and having fun. Obviously there’s a time and a place for collaborating (and school kids generally test these limits…) but it’s so valuable when it comes to thinking of new ideas.

Over the course of 2016 I’ve met so many businesses that work in silos, or solo, and as a result, through no fault of their own, struggle to come up with ideas on how to market themselves in a digital world.

On our own we tend to be our harshest critics but together ideas start to bounce around and even terrible suggestions can result in the crucial light bulb moments we all need.

That’s got me thinking about both the people I work with and my own business so stay tuned for some fun collaboration in 2017… 

How to Add Multiple Instagram Accounts

Nowadays even the smallest business owner has multiple online channels to worry about.

Any one person or business can have an official website, Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube channel, mailing list and more, so it can get confusing from time to time!

Luckily, in the case of Instagram, if you have more than one account or need more than one, the Facebook owned social media giants have included a handy little feature.

This feature lets you add and easily switch between multiple Instagram accounts with ease.

To get started open your current Instagram account and go to the profile section. You should see a screen similar to below. 

If you only have one Instagram account click on the small Options symbol on the top right-hand side to bring up the relevant screen. Scroll down to the bottom and you should see the following where you can easily add a new account.

Alternatively, if you already have more than one account, click on the arrow (circled) beside your profile name and you should see a dropdown menu like below. Here you will be able to switch between previously added accounts or click on “+Add Account” to add a new one. 

When you’ve done that you’ll be greeted with the following screen. Enter the details if you’ve already created the account before. If not, click “Don’t Have An Account? Sign Up” and get cracking! 

Have fun!

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!

Digital Attention in Northern Ireland

Social media is everywhere nowadays. In the last ten years we have seen the rise and growth of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and countless other channels.

If you’re unsure about how this directly affects you from a business standpoint it might be worth considering Gary Vaynerchuk’s “Attention argument”.

Eyes & Ears

Vaynerchuk, in countless blogs and videos, repeatedly highlights that smart businesses market their product or service wherever mass attention exists.

For all of us in 2016, this means social media.

In just the UK alone Facebook has 30 million users, Twitter 15 million and Instagram 14 million.

If you can sell worldwide, most likely through an e-commerce site, and you want to expand this out to a global scale the numbers become even more incredible.

This is where the general public now focuses its attention and that means this is where we need to market our messages.

What to Focus on?

Another way to consider this is by using public road roundabouts as an example.

Every week I drive past roundabouts that feature a business advertisement or billboard stuck in the middle.

In some cases this could be connected to charity or local sponsorships and that is fine.

From a business point of view it makes no sense.

People fly past roundabouts and pay zero attention to this platform for a message, so why waste time and money advertising there?

Think about where you market your business nowadays; think about the general public attention connected to whichever platform you’re using and then think about if it’s really worth it.

Moving Forward

Moving forward isn’t hard.

Now that you know where the collective public attention is focused, you can begin to tailor messages about your business or product for specific channels.

Go where the attention is. Then try to engage with potential customers in a fun, original or creative way.

If you want to talk more about digital attention, 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.

Simple Local SEO in Northern Ireland

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is crucial in the digital age.

Everyone uses Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter and more to search for local products, services or information in their area. Northern Ireland is no different.

Are they finding you, or a competitor?

Local SEO is about providing the information local customers really want.

You need to make sure your information is present, correct and consistent on all of these channels.

Research has shown that up to 34% of desktop searches and 50% of local mobile searches result in a store visit within 24 hours.

Customers are looking for information that they will then act upon.

Basic Information is Key

Getting the basics right is key to local SEO success.

Think about what your customers want to know when they search for you online.

Generally, local people want to know to your address, opening hours, key products and services and contact information.

It’s that simple.

Depending on your business you could also add information regarding important upcoming events and special offers or discounts.

Google My Business

As we’ve mentioned before, in Northern Ireland, the rest of the UK and Europe, Google is king of the search world so this must be taken into consideration when looking at your local SEO.

To get the ball rolling, visit the “Google My Business” site to begin your optimisation journey.

After that it is worthwhile to revisit all of your social channels and ensure key business facts (address, opening hours etc.) are front and centre.

Want to take things a step further? Say hello.