Hints and Tips – brookscomm

Ok Google, is the future really Voice Search?

Posted by michaelbrookscommon June 13, 2017August 3, 2017in UncategorisedLeave a comment

Technology is always evolving and the latest innovation, ‘Voice Search’ is gathering momentum, with the big players being Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, Ok Google and Apple’s Siri at the forefront. Ever asked Siri or Alexa what the weather is like? That’s voice search. Instead of typing and searching for a keyword or phrase, you can simply ask out loud where the nearest bar or coffee shop is. Utilising natural language processing, a computer science concerned with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, these artificial assistants can listen and respond to search queries almost like a real human.

Voice Search is one of the biggest SEO trends

Used by many consumers already, Voice Search is set to be one of the biggest SEO trends for 2017 and thus comes with many opportunities, as well as challenges to overcome. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced during his Google I/O keynote that 1/5 searches made with Google Android App is a Voice Search.

How will this affect PR and digital marketing professionals?

Not only will clients want to be discoverable on a standardised search but also in a Voice Search. It will no longer be viable to just focus on short tail keywords, but with the nature of the conversational queries asked using a Voice Search, it will become imperative to monitor and maximise long tail keywords and phrases too. Furthermore, with the bulk of Voice Search queries based on proximity of a company or product, it’s essential to ensure your business location base is optimised.

However, despite how advanced artificial assistants are, they are still a long way off being perfect. The main issue is the mismatch between what is being asked and what the AI captures, often ‘hearing’ incorrectly, producing misspelt words and thus irrelevant search results.

Voice Search is here to stay

That said, Voice Search is only going to improve, so here are our main pointers for being agile and embracing AI into your digital marketing and PR strategy:

Longer, conversational style queries including natural language and question phrases are used more.
Location optimised results are paramount.
Voice Search queries amount to higher intent, as buyers are nearer the ‘decision, purchase’ stage.

Voice Search isn’t the future. It’s happening right now, isn’t that right Siri?

At brookscomm we have over 20 years of PR & marketing expertise and a proven track record of providing an integrated, measurable PR and Digital marketing strategy. We can help you boost your business. Email michael@brookscomm.com or call us on 01483 537 890.

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The Benefits of Outsourcing Social Media

Posted by brookscommon January 20, 2017August 3, 2017in Uncategorised1 Comment

Social media isn’t just for teenagers! Whether you are a start-up company or an established brand, utilising a variety of channels to increase brand awareness and generate leads has many benefits. In fact, the possibilities are endless. Google aside, Facebook accounts for approx. 40% of website referral traffic.

Social media presents the opportunity to engage with your target audience, potential clients, easily become a thought leader in your sector and cross promote content. With 90% of businesses attributing increased brand exposure, and over half reporting improved sales just from social media, you should seriously consider optimising to reap the rewards.

Arguably, the most attractive aspect of social media is that it’s free! However, the consistency and regularity of posts is vital and an active social media presence is great for your business.

So, here’s why you should outsource your social media…

Messaging:

Although social media is a great tool for promotion, being perceived as too overtly salesy can do more damage than good. Therefore, it is imperative first and foremost to establish a genuine connection, listening and conversing with a human, empathic voice. Anyone can buy 1000 followers, but just as in real life, relationships aren’t built overnight and a loyal customer base evolves over time.

Quality, Consistency & increased ROI:

The best results are achieved by curating clever content which resonates with and benefits your target audience, in addition to joining in and responding to key trends and customer queries. A combination of commentary by a brand, mixed with agency input ensures the best of both worlds. An agency can organise and schedule PR and marketing activities to seamlessly align with social media efforts, generating an integrated campaign to achieve greater return on investment. Since content creation alone can take as much as 18.5% of the day, it’s worth outsourcing these activities, allowing more time to be spent on other areas of a business.

Paid Advertising:

Creating a social media account might appear to be free, but. in doing so the platform uses your profile and demographic information as currency. These social media platforms offer sophisticated segmentation tools enabling users to advertise, for a fee, to whoever fits the profile of their target customer. Additionally, the reporting features offer a wealth of metrics such as engagement, click-through rates etc. which provide valuable insight. Knowing how to set up advertising campaigns, how much to spend, which adverts work best and how to convert clicks into sales requires in-depth experience. When utilised correctly such strategies can be highly cost-effective in meeting sales and marketing strategies.

Efficiency:

It’s a fast-paced world, especially in social media, so it’s paramount to have a team who really know their stuff, from the latest Twitter updates to knowing which social media platform is right for your target audience. There’s no need to stress about self-teaching yourself the basics. Instead, leave it in the safe hands of an agency who can easily and effectiveness understand your goals, implement a blend of organic and scheduled tweets to grow your following, engage your audience and report back with key performance indicators.

So, what are you waiting for? Find out how you can benefit from outsourcing your social media right now.

Call us on 01483 537890 or, alternatively, email us hello@brookscomm.com and we can help you engage with your target audience successfully using Social Media.

Tips for writing the best Press Release!

Posted by brookscommon December 1, 2016August 3, 2017in How To:Leave a comment

Good press releases are worth their weight in gold and are solid components of your PR and Marketing armoury.

Professional press releases need to be concise, interesting, thought provoking, and, for best results, should adhere to certain industry guidelines. A press release is a public announcement that your company wishes to make to the media. By its very nature, it should have real news value and be of interest to people outside your organisation.

Our Co-Founder and Managing Director, Mandy Brooks, offers tips on how to write compelling professional press releases that hit the mark:

Make sure the headline is direct and to the point; just give a short description of what’s being announced. Read the headline and ask yourself – So What? If you are not convinced then try to word it differently for greater impact.

Keep the first paragraph to three or four simple sentences that answer the following questions: Who? Why? What? When? Where?

Avoid overselling the company up with meaningless phrases. Instead, try to present the whole story in one easily digestible paragraph.

The body of the release should exclude all extraneous material. In particular, any phrases that don’t mean anything shouldn’t be in there. If you’re going to describe what a product or a company does, do it without too much marketing jargon.

Always make sure that the company web site is listed, and that the names, numbers, and email addresses are given for anyone who will be handling enquiries from the press. Name two people, if possible. Add yours/the company’s twitter handle so press can use that for contact or find out more information – both the website link and the twitter link are also valuable for SEO purposes should it be distributed online, or if the press release is published online.

We offer press release & PR training on a range of subjects, from Social Media to speaking to the press.

Call us on 01483 537890 or, alternatively, email us hello@brookscomm.com and we can help you engage with your target audience successfully using Twitter!

Social Media & Digital Marketing Glossary

Posted by brookscommon November 10, 2016August 3, 2017in How To:1 Comment

Clueless on SEO, unsure of whether you should #FF or scratching your head at the prospect of writing a meta description? Fear not, as we have compiled the ultimate jargon free Social Media and Digital Marketing glossary, ensuring you have a better understanding of these rather technical terms! With Social Media & Digital Marketing becoming more useful and influential, it’s worth keeping up-to-date on these concepts!

Breadcrumbs – A navigation trail for somebody who visits your website, giving direction of how to return to the homepage from any given page, e.g. Homepage>About Us>Careers.

Direct Message (DM’s) – A method of contacting privately other Twitter users, often only achieved if there’s a mutual follow, yet, depending on privacy settings this isn’t always the case.

Embedding – incorporating an external web link into your digital platform which displays content from a different location. i.e. a video from YouTube, slides from SlideShare video or photo which is hosted outside of your publishing platform.

Engagement rate – a metric which shows the number of interactions with your digital content, i.e. visiting a webpage, clicking on a link, expanding a photo, likes, retweets, commenting: interacting in general. The higher the metric, the better the content!

Geotag – Twitter & Instagram allow people to ‘tag’ or pinpoint a location e.g. London, which involves the directional coordinates to be attached to content like a picture.

GIF – aka Graphics Interchange Format, a series of pictures or animation/clips from movies used to illustrate an emotion or even in response to a live event.

HTML – ‘Hypertext mark-up language’, programming language used to build and edit a website.

Impressions – the number of times content is viewed without it necessarily being searched or even clicked on.

Live streaming & live tweeting – delivering content over the internet in real-time, i.e. Periscope (Twitter) & Facebook Live. Tweeting, in real-time, live updates or events.

Meta description – description of your website or page which appears in the search results.

Ow.ly & bit.ly – tools that shorten the original URL of a webpage to considerably less characters. Highly beneficial to Twitter , where a maximum of 140 characters can be used in any post, which also includes analytics to determine click-through.

Promoted/sponsored content – content that is promoted and paid to appear by advertisers, in targeted publications or as the primary result from a search engine query. Often used to quickly raise the profile of a brand or product in association with a topic, keyword or service.

PPC – ‘Pay per click’, a fee is paid every time someone clicks on the advert.

Page rank – in a Google search ,it is where your page appears in relation to a relevant search query. Ranking is determined by Google’s algorithm which includes factors such as: relevance to search term, frequency of clicks, freshness of content, how long visitors spend on the page & HTML structure. Ideally, it’s best to ensure you appear on the first page of results, as 80% of searchers won’t click past the first page Page (reference?)

SEO – ‘Search engine optimisation’ is the practice of affecting the visibility of a website within search engines. Broadly speaking, methods to improve SEO can be categorised into two areas:

On-page SEO – Relevant, fresh, concise content which visitors spend time reading, and hopefully sharing, tells search engines that your page is valuable and your website is current. Seamlessly weaving keywords into well written content that loads quickly, is easy to navigate on any format, whether on a computer or mobile, helps with on-page SEO.

Search engines constantly crawl and index websites. Displaying quality content in a structured format that search engines recognise, improves ranking. So make sure page attributes such as meta descriptions, alt tags and sector titles are all present.

Off-page SEO – Simply put, this is the process of having links to your website from credible web sources. Search engines rank websites in terms of authority and relevance. This is where reviews, professional affiliations, PR, social media and customer endorsement online can be used to help boost your ranking. I.E. If you are a member of a trade organisation, have a link to and from their website.

Scheduling – using a social media platforms advanced functionality to schedule the publishing of content in advance, often used to target individuals in different time zones.

Trending topic – a list of the topics that are currently generating the most interest on social media. Clicking on the topic link reveals the most popular associated content.

We hope these explanations are helpful, if you are interested in other definitions do let us know!

At brookscomm we have over 20 years’ of PR expertise and a proven track record of success. We can aid you and your business, call us on 01483 537 890 or, alternatively, email us hello@brookscomm.com

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How to generate leads when you are short of time

Posted by michaelbrookscommon June 16, 2016July 28, 2017in How To:Leave a comment

Business leaders and sales and marketing professionals are often incredibly busy, short of time and are looking for quick ways to generate leads.

For many of our customers this is their primary business objective and knowing where to apply your time and resource when you are in this situation is difficult, especially if you have to prove a rapid return on investment.

How PR delivers leads

Lead generation is made quicker and easier when a good reputation goes before you. Effective PR communicates a positive impression of you and builds customer confidence in your business and your products and services.

Quality PR enables you to reach potential customers by non-invasive means, who will convert much faster if they are reassured of your reputation.

Here are three quick and effective PR tactics that you can quickly implement to generate leads:

Draw up a simple connection map. Put yourself in the middle and then map out around you, your top 4 best potential known future customers and your top 4 best potential vocal supporters. Make a point of contacting each one individually and personally, explaining clearly why they should buy your product or service or why they should recommend you.

Establish your business on social media. According to a recent report detailed by Forbes social media is now the number one driver of website referral traffic. Social media generates 40% of overall traffic to B2B websites. Set up your profiles, then tweet and post content which informs and educates people. Demonstrate your industry domain expertise and how your company solves customer challenges.

Draw up a media distribution list. Identify the websites, publications and newspapers that your target market are likely to read and interact with. Then, find out the authors, bloggers and journalists responsible for writing content. Follow them through your social media platforms and try to engage with them to draw their attention to your business’s unique selling proposition. Establishing relationships with these people will increase the likelihood that they will produce and publish content about your business, generating awareness and leads.

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