Blog
Review of 2011
It’s been another amazing year at Rostrum. 2011 was the year we broke the £1m fees barrier, signed major new clients - including Legal & General, API Software and Ernst & Young - and won a B2B Marketing Award! We’d like to thank our loyal clients and suppliers for supporting our business this year – and a big thank you to the team for all the amazing work they’ve done. Rostrum’s 2011 highlights included...
B2B Marketing Awards: “PR agency of the year”
Rostrum was at the B2B Marketing Awards ceremony last week at The Honourable Artillery Company Gardens in the City of London, hosted by the stand-up comedian Jack Whitehall.
Seven steps to go about running a smooth social media strategy
- A thorough analysis of what is being said online about your organisation and your competitors is a good place to start. Once you have an idea of what perceptions already exist about you, you can then seek to change or enhance these.
- It is crucial that at the outset you have a clear sense of what your objectives are for your campaign and how you want this to benefit your business. Clearly identifying audiences will also go a long way, as well as identifying the internal subject matter experts that will be responsible for providing content and also outline the sign-off procedure for posting content.
- You will then need to decide which tactical channels you will use to implement your campaign. Blogs, microblogging (Twitter), Social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook etc) and YouTube Channels are all free to join and offer potentially huge market penetration.
- You should try and ensure you update your channels on a regular basis with focused, quality and relevant content, thus helping to establish your brand as a responsive and interactive authority in its field. Tracking conversations is also crucial to make sure you can respond quickly to any comments, positive or negative. This will well on your organisation’s customer service in a public forum.
- As well as being informative, your output also needs to be regarded as authentic and transparent. Being something you’re not will immediately come across as fake and will damage credibility. For instance, you would not expect HMRC to start using colloquialisms in its Twitter posts. Your output should try to reflect the culture of your organisation where it can.
- Although a more laid back and conversational approach is desirable to make a social media campaign work, compliance procedures must be followed in much the same way they are for other marketing or PR materials, so as to avoid any legal or reputational pitfalls.
- As with any output, business owners will be looking for tangible ways to measure the success of social media campaigns. There are a number of basic and easy metrics to measure success or failure, such as website visits, website page views, average visitor time on your site, inbound links to your website, blog visits, Facebook followers, Twitter followers, clicks on Tweets, and so on. Social media monitoring tools are also available (such as Visible Technologies) that allow you to look at more complex trends across industry subjects and to track competitor activity and trends across the entire social media in question.
Getting involved in the online conversation
The fact is that most people now research and buy from the web, which means that your online presence and third party recommendations are absolutely crucial, no matter how big or small you are as an organisation. Even a cursory glance at the popular personal finance forums or a simple search on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn shows just how much is being said online in the world of financial services alone. People talk and make recommendations in cyberspace about providers and companies they trust, or indeed, identify ones they don’t! As a result, by the time a prospect comes to you they will more than likely have already formed an opinion of your service. It’s therefore vital to get involved in these conversations in order to protect the reputation of your business and generate sales leads.
Rostrum does Movember
If you’re still calling this month ‘November’ where have you been!? A trend of growing an assortment of fetching facial hair above one’s lip has taken over Rostrum’s male staff. Never wanting to miss out on an opportunity for fun in the name of charity (and a chance for the female staff to mock the moustaches of their colleagues) we have decided to take part in our first ever Movember! As some of you may know this is all in aid of raising awareness and funds for men's health; specifically prostate and testicular cancer. An incredibly worthy cause.
Measuring the value of PR
The commonly-used word 'spin' does little to dispel the idea that PR is some kind of mysterious, shady art form that is impossible to quantify or measure.
CEOs and business decision makers tend to think in black and white, whereas PR tends to develop in varying shades of grey.
The process of measuring PR is a complicated business and can vary according to the way different companies measure success. The main problem businesses face when they embark upon a new PR campaign is that they haven’t sat down with their board (and their PR agency) and determined what it is exactly they are hoping to achieve from the campaign.
The success of a PR engagement varies from business to business. Mis-communication of goals and objectives with your PR agency in the early stages can be fatal. Once the measure of success is clearly determined, reporting the value of the PR campaign becomes less of a headache for all parties.
Whether it is measured in the quantity of increasing brand value, direct sales leads from media coverage, website traffic, raising the profile of the CEO, or possibly a combination of outcomes, there are various ways to measure this success in a clear, distinct way. This is when the marriage of straight CEO/marketing director's thinking and creative PR strategising becomes a match made in heaven. Advertising value equivalent is an old-school but popular method for many number-crunching business leaders and the growing power of social media has put likes, retweets and web traffic high on the agenda for measuring success. Adding value to a brand prior to a corporate action is another oft-ignored but very valuable aim of PR.
However you measure success, a good agency will have ways of presenting PR activity in a way that is digestible and quantifiable for all members of a board, as long as the foundations are in place to accurately measure success from the outset.
Promoting your brand at conferences and events
As a PR, attending events and industry conferences is an essential part of the job. In recent weeks, myself and my colleagues have attended Employee Benefits Live, Call Centre Expo, supply chain breakfast briefings and a client seminar on the theme of cloud computing, among others. But what relevance do events have to your wider PR and marketing campaign, and how can you get the most out of them?
RDR Ready?
If like me you are an avid reader of the financial adviser press you can’t have failed to notice the coverage that has been afforded to the Retail Distribution Review.
RDR has been the subject on the lips of advisers since it was announced and as the industry edges towards implementation not a week goes by without one provider or another warning of the potential pitfalls that lie in wait for non-compliance or speculating as to how this will change the shape of advice in the UK.
However, although many in the know may feel they are heading towards ‘RDR fatigue’ the fact is the vast majority of the general public still remain blissfully unaware of the seismic change to how they will be receiving financial advice in the future.
That is set to change though. The likes of Which? & The Daily Telegraph have already begun to make their readers aware of the regulation and what it means for them. This level of awareness can only increase as we head towards the January 2013 deadline. With so much scratching of heads and gnashing of teeth having been caused to those within the industry it is likely to still be a mystery to the man and woman on the street. It will therefore be the duty of national and consumer personal finance press as well as regulators and the industry itself to communicate these changes in a clear and responsible way. With many IFAs set to exit the market, rule changes and changes to the way advice will categorised and sold there will need to be a huge communication effort to educate consumers. Those that realise this and articulate their messages in the clearest way are going to be the best positioned to take advantage of pre and post-RDR marketplace. There is a huge PR challenge ahead of the industry - and a correspondingly huge prize for those companies that get their message right.
Nick the cricketing hero
Regular readers may know that Nick Bolshaw has had a couple of days off work this week indulging his passion for playing cricket. And it was time well spent as Nick was the saviour of his side yesterday – in the one-dayer between Hampshire Wayfarers and Shroton CC down in Dorset, Nick scored 104 (not out) batting at no.8 to win the game for Hampshire, including 10 sixes. Our intrepid hero got to 104 from 49 balls – with his team at 80-6 when Nick went in, chasing a total of 218. Well played Nick!
