There are so many aspects to being a social and digital professional. We often analyze campaign results but how does it all get done in the first place? The answer – tools. Use them to share new ideas, create plans with your team or organize the structure of your campaign – there are endless tools for marketers to increase your productivity and effectiveness.
Most software developers or IT agile scrums will have a love for Jira for social and digital marketing campaigns. Jira works perfectly for those who operate in an agile way. The interface (albeit a little backdated) allows you to prioritize tasks that need to be done in order to deliver a social or marketing campaign.
Although it may be a bit archaic and quite often it only operates on certain browsers and devices, Jira is a great system to use to control workload, backlog and have an overview of incoming social and digital campaigns.
The systems allows you to create a team kanban (progress) board, attach an avatar to tasks you are working on. It effectively creates a record of how a social or digital campaign has been delivered and which members of your team have contributed to the campaign.
This is a simplistic version of a Kanban board. Similar to Jira, it allows you to move tasks along a board from to do in progress\” and done. It is generally more helpful for a personal workload rather than a team workload as it clearly demonstrates what you are working on at any moment in time.
This board does what it says on the tin. It has aspects of Jira and Trello and is really helpful for groups. You can prioritise tasks by colour or by where they sit in the column and assign avatars to each one.
It’s really useful for having a view of how all small tasks can come together to create a great social or digital marketing campaign.
Rather than a way of documenting tasks that are currently happening or are planned to happen, Yammer acts as a great hub to post suggestions, ideas and articles. Generally Yammer-ers post about previous social and digital campaigns that have hit the big time and how best to ‘borrow’ ideas.
Yammer is effectively a social network for your organisation. A place where bragging about social shares and time spent on your website is cool. It’s also a great way of keeping a record of cool stuff. If you’re in need of inspiration for your next campaign then look no further than your Yammer news feed. That is if your team are engaged and in the habit of looking for cool industry news.
Remember the days of MSN messenger and the phrase G2G? No? Well, let me enlighten you – MSN basically worked as a chat room for all of your friends so it was easy and simple to get as much information from as much people at any one time.
MSN’s flaw? It completely wiped your conversation once you logged out so you couldn’t refer back to what your friends had told you anyway. You’d have to log back in with the excruciating cacophony created by a combination of the dial tone and your sister attempting use the phone at the same time. All of which, just to ask the same questions you’d asked before. Slack is like MSN. Improved MSN!
Slack allows you to communicate with your team all at once -‘Who knows where the images for last month’s social posts are stored?’ – and it keeps a record! Therefore, like an email chain you can easily reference information or easily notify people with what you’re doing at any time. You can also share documents and it has an app.
Basecamp is similar to Slack but more organised. You can sort conversations by subject or project so that you can easily find documents or conversations that you are looking for.
In a nutshell, it’s an email chain on a fancy system so you can easily filter by date, person and document and in turn, be a lot more productive.
Therefore, whatever tool takes your fancy can really improve your inventiveness, efficiency, and how your team interacts. Why not try out a few and find out what’s best for you? If you’ve been using a bunch of useful tools yourself, please do share them with us!
Content is what makes up your website – content IS your website. Therefore, you have to make sure that every single piece of content that exists on your site is useful. We\’ve already explored how ‘content is king’ and how you can make it work for you on social media, but, what if you are re-vamping your entire website or creating brand new website content? Where do you start with your content marketing strategy?
The reason you need a content marketing strategy in the first place is because you want your content to be useful. If Information Architecture (the structure of your website) helps us say “where” content lives, a content marketing strategy tells us decide “when” it lives. This combination lets us know why this content exists.
Assess Your Content
If your website already exists, these are key steps you can take to see whether a content audit is necessary:
Inventory: Demonstrate magnitude and complexity of the existing content.
Best Practice Assessment: Prioritize content efforts by identifying low quality content and gaps.
Strategic Assessment: Measure content against strategic user and business goals. What needs to change? How do we get there?
5 Step Inventory Process
Identify your user and business goals.
Make a list of the pages on your site in an Excel/Google document.
Map the hierarchy of these pages using an online system like Balsamiq.
Map your user goals that are met on the hierarchy map.
Identify excessive content (pages or elements that don’t meet a goal)
Personas
How can we use personas as part of the content marketing strategy to create user driven content?
Whether you’re undergoing a content audit or creating content from scratch, personas enable us to map user goals against business goals. The user goals help us best understand what users want and need. We can then prioritize these goals and then this will take shape to create a better or a new Information Architecture.
Hold a workshop and use post it notes to write out all your goals. See which goals align with each other, can these form pages? This will help you create your content.
Cancer Research UK – New Content Creation
Content Marketing When creating a BBQ for Cancer Research UK, it was vitally important to refer to business and user goals at each step in the process. This process meant that we avoided excessive and duplicate content and that everything created for the page was completely necessary for the user.
Cancer Research UK – Content Audit Process
Sometimes re-evaluating content can be much harder than creating content from scratch. This is because they’re needs to be a thorough assessment of the content that already exists. Why is it there in the first place? What goals does it currently meet? Is it duplicated elsewhere on the site? Is the content fluffy or excessive?
At Cancer Research UK we often come across problems with old site content because it has been written by people with a publishing background. Print is very different to digital in that it cannot be as easily reiterated. Also, people who read on screen, read in a very different pattern to people reading offline.
Research proves that readers skim content online. Therefore, it is forever more important to prioritize what is important on a page and how you can highlight this to your reader. At Cancer Research UK, we use headers, bold text and bullet points to deliver effective information in a digestible way. Therefore, the challenge we often face during the audit process is breaking down reams of unnecessary content to make it useful and coherent to our audiences.
The Content Lifecycle
Content, just like the websites they inhabit, are living, changing things. When strategists seek to assess and improve the quality of a website’s content, they typically follow a four-part process. Content should be a circular process. Once created, it should be revisited and updated. Not only is this good for SEO but it ensures that your content is always the most valuable to your audience.
Whether your website is stale and in need of a content audit or you need to create content from scratch, make sure you have a good strategy behind what you’re creating.
Maintain
Once you have either audited or written your content from scratch, you shouldn’t leave it to go stale. As an editor, part of your work is to update, rework and revisit. Content is thought of as circular because it isn’t ever complete and it changes with the times. Not only will revisiting content ensure that you are always appealing to your users but it will also make sure that you’re meeting user goals and continually improving your SEO.
Start your content life-cycle today, whether it is auditing, creating or improving.
User experience design enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty by making your campaign website or social site easier and more enjoyable to use. This design allows you to gauge how consumers will react to your social and digital marketing campaigns once they are live, followed by an analysis of their behaviors.
These are main aspects of UX:
Visual Design
Visual design represents the aesthetics or look-and-feel of the front end of any user interface. Put simply; how your website looks.
The purpose of visual design is to use visual elements like colours, images, and symbols to convey a message to its audience. The design must enhance the user’s experience of your website. Bold colours must highlight priorities like call to action buttons rather than adding background images that hinder the user\’s experience.
Information Architecture
The IA is the model that structures the information of your website or social site. The IA makes the campaign content easily navigable so that users can find the most useful content for them.
Structuring, Organizing and Labelling
Structuring is reducing information to its basic building units and then relating them to each other. Organisation involve grouping these units in a distinctive and meaningful manner.
Human-Computer Interaction
Human-Computer Interaction is the main contributor to user experience design because of its emphasis on human performance rather than mere usability. User experience cannot be manufactured or designed; it has to be incorporated in the design. Understanding the user\’s emotional quotient plays a key role while designing User Experience.
Cancer Research UK and User Testing
At Cancer Research UK, we gather HCI information from User testing sessions. User testing aims to test aspects of your site that are new or need improving.
We run user testing sessions once a week to test the website with volunteers who match the correct personas. For instance, we would test a sports event campaign with volunteers and supporters with an interest in sport. A cancer information page would be tested with patients or medical professionals.
Our user testing takes place in a user testing lab. The user sits in one room with a computer or device linked up and mirrored by a computer on the other side. There is also a double sided mirror whereby the UX team can watch the user reaction to the website and how they complete the tasks which are asked of them. You may think that this sounds like a CSI investigation but it is an excellent way to gauge HCI.
Stand Up To Cancer
Last week Cancer Research UK launched Stand Up To Cancer, an excellent campaign which sees the charity collaborating with the UK’s television Channel 4. The campaign, which started in America, encourages celebrities and the world to ‘stand up’ and show their support for Cancer Research UK.
I was involved in the initial UX ideation for the campaign. It was important to see the campaign with a fresh perception, abandoning the previous non-responsive site. We wanted a way to display the campaign content in a clean design, as well as incorporating the cool, fun sub-brand that Stand Up To Cancer is.
At each stage in the design and each agile sprint, we would take the site to user testing to ensure that aspects we saw as a priority were clearly defined as most important to the customer. For instance, the key goals for us were to fundraise for the campaign and to sign up to the March on Cancer; the main collective activity. Once the user could easily and happily complete these objectives, we knew the design was looking good.
Typically the outputs from our user testing sessions are:
Site Audit (usability study of existing assets)
Flows and Navigation Maps
User Stories or Scenarios
Defined User Segmentations and Personas
Site Maps and Content Inventory
Wireframes (screen blueprints or storyboards)
Prototypes (Interactive blueprints)
Written specifications (describing the behaviour or design)
Graphic mockups (Precise visual of the expected end result)
Implementing UX For Your Brand
a) Advertise on your social networks for user testing volunteers
b) Hire a UX lab (if you can). If you can’t, simple guerrilla testing and watching whether a user complete a task can be equally as effective.
c) Create a report of your findings E.g. “The user was unable to sign up for an event because they couldn’t find the relevant page and therefore couldn’t fill in the relevant sign up form.”
d) Make informed UX decisions based on how many users found your design or content difficult to understand. E.g. “Most users were unaware that the label say something\’ means share with your social networks. Action: change to social media icons and the wording Share on social’.
Overall, UX may seem like a laborious process but it is necessary. It means that in the long term you will save money on your campaign design because you\’re appealing to the right user personas and that your website design and content compliment your company and what you’re trying to promote.
Benefits of UX:
Avoiding unnecessary features and campaign spend
Simplifying design documentation
Improving the usability of the campaign
Incorporating business and marketing goals while protecting the customerr’s freedom of choice
Introduce UX into your business. Align your social site with learnings from your website (as much as you can) for the same look and feel on all your platforms. By investing in UX, your campaigns will be more customer driven and in turn more successful.
Quit is a non-profit organization that aims to deter children from smoking so when faced with the challenge of creating a campaign for World No Tobacco Day they turned to M&C Saatchi Sydney.
M&C Saatchi wanted to communicate the dangers to Quit’s young demographic in such a way that it would be ‘cool’ to share. Often, the challenge that most health marketers face when advertising the harm of cigarettes is that this young demographic actually like a danger factor in adverts and this can work well in other campaigns.
Simplicity in Vine Videos
A pro bono online video campaign using the social network Vine. Vine is particularly driven to a younger audience meaning M & C Saatchi depending on shares to drive awareness of the dangers of smoking.
The rapidity of Vine, with its unique 6-second looping video format, is the perfect medium to communicate the fact that every 6 seconds someone in the world dies from a smoking-related illness.
Glyn McIntosh, QUIT CEO: The fact that someone dies of a smoking-related disease every 6 seconds is shocking – that means 14,400 smokers will die on World No Tobacco Day\’ alone. M&C Saatchi has dramatized it a way that will drive awareness, debate and donations. Ultimately, this highly emotive work will inspire people to quit and help us save lives.In the first five days, the three posts altogether got nearly 50,000 likes and 26,000 revines. While spreading awareness was the campaign’s main goal, some of the shares included a call to action to donate to anti-smoking causes.
Someone Dies of a Smoking-related Disease Every 6 Seconds
The videos are not over dramatic but the sobering facts that are enough to create a memorable and chilling film. Each vine portrays a model representing a different demographic group (the carefree youth, the invincible old timer and the older smoker resigned to their fate) audibly dragging on a cigarette.
Each vine closes with the line, “Before this video starts again, another smoker will die. Hard-hitting and straight to the point.
This campaign is a great example of how Vine can change initial conceptions within a matter of seconds. At first glance, the campaign’s main image, of a young, attractive woman exhaling smoke from her red-painted lips, might come across as glamorizing smoking. However, with the nature of Vine, as the videos are played over and over, the effect changes. Think about your campaigns, what wrong conception of your brand do your users have? Something you want to challenge or change? Maybe you want to challenge the idea that your brand is only for men or perhaps you want to dispel and negative outlook on your brand.
Previously, at Cancer Research UK, we have been thought of as a colder brand, a team in lab coats, which care about science rather than the people. However, our Every Moment Counts campaign and Race for Life, Cancer We\’re Coming to Get You campaign, helped demonstrate that we’re all about the people and that research is the way that we can fight cancer. Therefore, a Vine is a great medium to challenge misconceptions. However, don’t accuse the users by challenging them. You want to enlighten them. Similar to the Quit video, use interesting facts to make your video anchored and relevant.
The real challenge is portraying a powerful message in a short amount of time. Don’t get lost in the visual like you could with traditional video, focus on delivering a short and impactful message.
We spoke directly to M & C Saatchi’s Creative Director, Ant Medler, to find out more about the campaign.
Hi Ant! Could you share with us the idea behind this campaign?
We knew that, because of the peer-to-peer nature of social media, for something to work, to take off and spread, it has to be disruptive, different, compelling, engaging. It also has to have that magic ingredient that’s makes it funnier/more shocking/more original than anything else in people\’s feeds. The other essential ingredient is simplicity. Social media by its very nature is quick – from twitter to Facebook to Vine and beyond the platforms are unforgiving of complicated messages and executions. This works well for us: at M&C Saatchi our ethos is Brutal Simplicity of Thought – we believe that it’s harder to make messages simple than complicated, it takes talent and time to boil them down. But when a message is distilled to its simplest form it goes into the audience’s brains quicker and is likely to be remembered for longer.
Taking this thinking into the Every Six Seconds campaign, we believed that if we could launch the right execution at the right time, it could deliver the impact we were looking for. Fortunately we were right. We learned this blend of an engaging idea executed simply can achieve outstanding traction in social media.
Which element of this campaign would re-use in another campaign?
The infamous advertising mad man Howard Gossage once said: People don’t read ads. They read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad. I think this principle can be applied to putting marketing and public service messages into social media. Sure, you can stick your client\’s message onto the platforms, but if you don\’t deliver that message in an interesting way, it\’ll just get ignored – just as a consumer would simply turn the page on a dull press ad or tune out a boring radio ad.
QUIT has an essentially important message to get out there, facts and information which can positively impact the world. On platforms like Twitter and Vine, users are sharing their passions, passing on things that move and inspire them. So if we were doing the campaign again, we\’d use Vine again as it\’s the perfect platform for people to pick up simple, socially informed messages and pass them on. The fact that the campaign achieved over 200, 000 likes and and ReVines is proof of this. And putting Vines at the center of the campaign than spreading them across Facebook and Twitter worked very well, with high engagement across all platforms.
How did QUIT react to your team\’s creation?
Our client was over the moon with the work and the response to it. QUIT is an independent charity that has to work with minimal budgets to get their message out, engage people, drive awareness of the dangers of smoking and remind people of their important work educating kids, corporates and ethnic minorities about the dangers of smoking. Without a huge budget to carpet bomb mainstream media, it was still important to launch a campaign around the World Health Organization\’s No Tobacco Day.
To drive such phenomenal engagement on social media plus such a huge response in the mainstream media (national press and TV coverage, coverage on websites and blogs globally) is a massive win for them. Every piece about the campaign on and offline is another audience reached with their message.
This revolutionized marketing campaigns for companies, especially non-profit ones to convey that Vine can be a great medium for health messages and for summarizing a message in an effective way.
Don’t think that a medium won’t be taken seriously just because it’s new. Get vining!
Does your web content appeal to users? Does your content generate any feedback? Quite often we can be so thought focused that we fail to ask our audience whether we are producing good content.
Every day, copywriters, clients and editors publish content without much input from their stakeholders. This process can often be a waste of time. Wikipedia proves that using the web for collaboration enables people to create valuable content and it speeds the process up. We all know that content is an essential part of a website’s user experience. Without it, there’s nothing for users to consume.
Working In Pairs
One way to create high quality content, is working in pairs.
It’s proven. Agile software development introduced the concept of “pair programming” and work environments have never been the same. In pair programming, one of the programmers (the driver) writes the code while the other (the observer) reviews each line of code in real-time as it’s written (like a real-time debugger). Pair programming improves the knowledge of the team, the quality of the code, and the overall delivery time.
So, why not use an agile approach to develop content? A pair-oriented, exploratory, collaborative approach is extremely valuable for crafting content, too. Some benefits of using this method include:
The team thinks before publishing.
It forces authors and editors to stay focused.
It helps colleagues form a mutual understanding of their content.
It results in a more uniform tone.
It allows authors to share best practices in regards to writing for the web.
5 Steps To Ensure Effective Paired Content Writing
Step 1: Analyse Your Content
Make sure you know what content you’ll want to work on – for example, a product page, a news article, or customer service content. Focus your efforts on content that is visited often and that you want to improve.
Secondly, do your research. Use Google Analytics and Crazy Egg to understand how users are engaging with your most successful content and why that content is successful.
Step 2: Hold A Content Workshop
Gather all the people who need to feed into the process: product owners, marketers, and any other stakeholders. Remind them that this is a collaborative process and that nothing major is expected of any individual. Try and capture what stakeholders want to portray from this particular content.
Step 3: Work As A Pair
At Cancer Research UK, this takes place after the content workshop. The content workshop is used to capture the goals and content elements that should be present on the page and the content pairing happens where a stakeholder comes to your desk and you write the content together.
The main writer (the driver) is the editor and digital person. This will ensure that user and business goals are continually referenced. Meanwhile, the stakeholder and other person play the role of the “antagonist” (the observer). As the writer writes, the antagonist should ask critical questions like:
What is the text meant to solve for the end-user?
Is this the best angle?
Is the most important content at the top?
Who is the target audience?
What do you mean by this?
Step 4: Allow The Stakeholder To Be The Writer
Different people, be they product owners, marketers or advertisers will look at the same page differently and have a wide variety of input. This makes switching roles both fun and instructive.
Step 5: Demo Your Work
Once you as the digital writer and they as the stakeholder writer are happy with the content produced, you should demo to the stakeholders from the original workshop. Usually, because there have been two people from different sides of the business involved, there is less pushback and more happy faces.
Overall, paired writing helps tackle human error and is great to see the reaction of your partner so that you can interpret whether your users will understand it. It’s a faster and effective way of producing content.
