Get your internal comms super good, starting with your Intranet

A good intranet can solve most of your internal communications problems. Whether your focus is to improve cross department comms, save documents in a central location, showcase news or reduce emails an intranet can really help.

So, what should/could go on your Intranet:

• People bios & organograms
• Who’s out in the company today
• Learning & development hubs
• Training manuals
• Group function pages – Marketing / BD / Accounts / HR
• Useful links
• News feeds
• Internal messaging
• Company documents & policies
• Company videos
• Staff event gallery
• Internal newsletter
• Polls, forums & suggestions
• Internal vacancies
• Project management tools

The list is endless.

The idea is to make it useful in content and easy in function. There are many companies out there that can build you a bespoke intranet or you can simply buy an off the shelf template depending on your budget.

Make sure you get key people involved in the content, design and build covering all departments; after all its for everyone so make sure you know what they require from the intranet to make it useful to them.

Lastly ensure you launch well, make the internet the first page that appears when they open a browser and update regularly with fresh content and news.

Anyone got any great intranet tips or ideas?

Email Signatures – Easy marketing tool?

How many emails does your business send out each day? Your email signature is a great way to subtly market to your contacts, keeping them updated and with little effort needed from you.

Add to your email signature and market your latest exhibition, new product launch or link to your latest blog update. Such a simple and personalised way to drive a little extra traffic to your next business move.

Always have your main contact details but ensure you have the basics covered including social media and website links. You can brand and jazz up your signature with HTML coding, worth investing in if you can.

Remember to keep it updated, the message simple and the call to action clear. Your signature should still be short and personalised to you, so don’t overdo it.

So, how can you make your company signature better?

Get social channel savvy!

We all know updating your social media channels regularly is key, but do we have enough time?

Most businesses have many social platforms, from Facebook to Blogs, and finding time to frequently update them often falls to the bottom of the to-do-list. To grow and engage with your social following you must keep on top of your posts and tweets, but don’t worry there are lots of tools to help you.

Invest in a multi posting platform, for example Hootsuite, these allow you to link all your businesses social pages in one area. You can even use the basic package for free. You can then spend a few hours a week scheduling campaigns to run on all your platforms keeping posts consistent and linking campaigns.

You can also schedule campaigns for optimum reach times throughout the day, view and respond to messages in one place, and not forgetting monitoring and reporting across all your platforms.

What’s the best multi posting platform out there? I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences.

Get Automated!

Email marketing should be an integral part of your marketing plan, and there are lots of great email marketing and sms platforms out there to help businesses.

If you’re not automating your emails yet then you’re missing out. Many email companies offer great platforms for creating campaigns that link with your database, they offer solutions to increase and monitor ROI, productivity and maximise efficiency.

You can often easily set up automations through these platforms yourself. Whether it’s a ‘Thank you for registering’ email or a ‘Happy Birthday’ one, don’t waste time individually creating everyday campaigns when there are systems out there to help. Do your research and it will pay off.

Who wouldn’t want strong, personalised, and targeted messages to be sent out with no extra time of effort spent by you. What’s more you can report quickly on your campaigns and adapt as appropriate.

Who already loves automated email systems?

Pinterest – Make it work for your business

Pinterest has been around a while now and is a great addition to the social media channels available for marketing. Surprisingly not many businesses are using it, but perhaps they just don’t know how or what to pin…

Always start by creating your own profile and following things that are of interest to you, you’ll soon get a feel for how it works and can start up your own boards and pinning.

When starting a profile up for your business think about your audience, the Pinterest platform, and what would work best for the two. For example a Financial Services company may want to show their human side with a ‘Meet the team’ board showing team outing photos and consultant backgrounds, as well as handy ‘Financial facts’ board showing key financial forms and information.

Pin your infographics, marketing materials, product pictures, staff photos, anything that is a relevant image to your audience. Don’t forget to tag your posts with hashtags so they’re easily searchable. I always link them to the relevant call to action – company website pages, social media, articles etc. This also gives you extra information to share on your other social media channels and drive traffic to your new pinterest platform.

Don’t forget to follow related industry boards, companies etc and re-pin as appropriate to share with your followers. Great for showcasing your knowledgeable in your field.

Lastly make sure you have a ‘fun’ element to your boards, perhaps adding a board of the things you like or pictures of fun times in the office!

Remember Pinterest is all about visualisation and personality so showcase yours and your businesses and pin regularly.

Happy pinning!

Quick Tips for Exhibition Success

Whether you’re attending an event or exhibiting, the key for good ROI is pre-show, at-show and post-show marketing.

Although planning should happen months in advance, remember these quick tips:

Pre-show

• Tell everyone your speaking with that you’re attending and arrange to meet.
• Ensure you send out a simple e-invite to your database with clear links for arranging to meet etc.
• Do a final push one week before the event date.

At-show

• The key to a successful event is the team you have on the ground.
• Have the best ‘people’ people at the show, give them targets and make sure they capture everyone’s details.
• Always have promotional items to hand out to everyone that passes by.
• Think of an engaging incentive for your audience – game, prize, product launch and showcase it on your stand.

Post-show

• Follow-up to all leads within a week of the show – e-shot/call/information pack.
• Ensure they are added to your database.

Simple!

Have any other tried and tested event marketing tips?

Internal Infographics

Use infographics internally too.

Infographics have really taken off over the past year. They’re a great tool for communicating data and information in a fun and visual way.

Most infographics are used externally to show information and passively sell a companies service or product. They are easily shareable and printable.

We have started to move infographics internally.

Intranets, training manuals, process etc. can be boring and are often not easy to follow. I’m investing time in revamping our internal documents to appeal to our internal teams better.

Using infographics this allows information to be displayed in a visually exciting way that’s easy to follow and understand. It also encourages you to really think about the information that matters, stripping away any bumf leaving clear facts and data images.

If your using infographics internally, what kind of information are you finding works best designed in this way?

The ”Happy Birthday” automated email

Everyone likes a Happy Birthday card on their birthday, right?

I can’t believe so few corporate companies are sending personalized birthday e-cards. We all have a database of important clients and it’s a really simple thing to set up, so whilst it’s relatively low key at the moment what a great way to build up communication and remind your clients your still thinking of them.

Part of my automation planning today was to create a simple personalized HTML birthday email – no offer, no sale, just words.

I created a non-compulsory section to our company registration form just asking for birth day and month. This data feed was easy to link to our email system and to set up the automated process.

Looking forward to monitoring our client feedback!

Anyone else already doing this? If you have any questions comment below.