Strategic Planning
The Explainer: Porter’s Five Forces
The competitive forces that shape strategy — in under two minutes. For more, read “Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy.”
People make it happen
People watch it happen
People who wonder what happened
Strategic planning is an organization’s process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy. It may also extend to control mechanisms for guiding the implementation of the strategy. Strategic planning became prominent in corporations during the 1960s and remains an important aspect of strategic management. It is executed by strategic planners or strategists, who involve many parties and research sources in their analysis of the organization and its relationship to the environment in which it competes
Owners mindset
-prepared to trust others
Michael Porter wrote in 1980 that formulation of competitive strategy includes consideration of four key elements:
- Company strengths and weaknesses;
- Personal values of the key implementers (i.e., management and the board);
- Industry opportunities and threats; and
- Broader societal expectations.
You can not do strategic planning on your own, unless you are the only person in the business.
TOOLS
A variety of analytical tools and techniques are used in strategic planning.[1] These were developed by companies and management consulting firms to help provide a framework for strategic planning. Such tools include:
- PEST analysis, which covers the remote external environment elements such as political, economic, social and technological (PESTLE adds legal/regulatory and ecological/environmental);
- Scenario planning, which was originally used in the military and recently used by large corporations to analyze future scenarios. The flowchart to the right provides a process for classifying a phenomenon as a scenario in the intuitive logics tradition.[6]
- Porter five forces analysis, which addresses industry attractiveness and rivalry through the bargaining power of buyers and suppliers and the threat of substitute products and new market entrants;
- SWOT analysis, which addresses internal strengths and weaknesses relative to the external opportunities and threats;
- Growth-share matrix, which involves portfolio decisions about which businesses to retain or divest; and
- Balanced Scorecards and strategy maps, which creates a systematic framework for measuring and controlling strategy.
- Responsive Evaluation, which uses a constructivist evaluation approach to identify the outcomes of objectives, which then supports future strategic planning exercises.
Currently there are 4 people in employment for 1 unemployed now
There will be 2 people in employment for 1 unemployed by 2050
What will be work life balance, pension age etc then?
Unless we build a different society now
COMMON ISSUES IN STARTUPS
- Cash flow
- Regular custom
- Limited resources
- Time constraints
- Single skillset
- Time management
- Consistent processes
COMMON ISSUES – SCALE UPS
- Financial management
- Restrictive structure
- Time constraints
- Single skillset
- Time management
- Consistent processes and systems
- Plan (medium-long)
- Resource planning
- Targets
- Identify help needed
COMMON ISSUES – MATURE BUSINESS
- Scalability
- Branding
- Competition
- Structure
- Control
- Skills
Avg size of business in the UK 8-9 people
Backbone of the economy
ISSUES – EXITING
- Hand-overs
- MBOs
- A management buyout (MBO) is a transaction where a company’s management team purchases the assets and operations of the business they manage. A management buyout is appealing to professional managers because of the greater potential rewards and control from being owners of the business rather than employees.
- 3rd party sale
- Consultancy – succession
- Future income stream
- Maximize sale value
ISSUES – WHEN IT GOES WRONG
- Look in the mirror
- People
- Communication
- Processes
- Money
- Markets
- Brand
- Infrastructure
- Product / service
WHAT IS STRATEGIC PLANNING
- Where are we now?
- Thorough assessment
- You can do a workaround at times. Then this workaround becomes a formal process. Then it is in the blind spot.
- Where do we want to get to?
- 5-10 years time scale
- How do we get there?
- Actions and timescales
- How do we know if we’re on track
- Monitoring
- On going process
Strategic plan is your conveyor belt, taking you to strategic objectives
Business plans are shorter term plans
Importance of staff knowing your strategic plan
APPROACH TO STRATEGIC PLANNING
- Planned environment
- Resource led
- Competitive advantage
- Organic (learning/adaptive)
- Pick the right things to monitor
WHY DO I NEED A STRATEGIC PLAN
- Clear direction
- Route-map to get there
- Clear investment plans
- Customers and employees know
- What the business will provide
- How the business will provide it
- Build emotional attachment
- Involvement
WHAT IF I DON’T HAVE ONE
- Static business
- Always firefighting, everything short notice and short term
- Drifting away from core customers, more special offers
- Managers and employees have different aims and expectations
- Employees and customers feel no affection for the business
- No development programme, employees keen to move on
- No risk assessment
- Cash flow
- Customer service
- Not prepared for anything
HOW DO WE CREATE OUR STRATEGIC PLAN
- Strategic analysis
- Internal strengths, weaknesses, structure, scale, ambition, resources
- External opportunities, threats, competition, markets, environment
- Strategy choice
- Produce half a dozen strategies and select the one best fits
- Aims, identify options, evaluate, select (suitable, feasible, acceptable)
- Strategy Implementation
- Changes, resources, culture, funding, timescales
- Performance & Delivery Management
- Responsibility, monitoring, reviews
If you are stuck in the middle, you won’t go anywhere
Value proposition canvas
FURTHER READING
Value chains
Force field analysis
Ansaf
Instructor, Keith
https://www.mistral-associates.co.uk
Product Photography Tips
Who is the buyer?
Target them. Even the photo does not have to be pretty. It needs to be interesting to the audience first.
Eg. Linkedin – it needs to be relevant to your audience
Build your audience according to who you could sell to.
You can use typography in your visuals given that it is consistent –
Use same text, same font, same color, same layout.
You might need to give credit for photographers.
Put in contract that you can use the photos anywhere, anyway you like.
On Instagram, your images need to be beautiful / pretty.
Typography on images is not welcome in Instagram.
People should feel better when you look to your content / images. Be positive all the time.
Emails – you need offer people something.
Just plain information is never interesting.
Images on your website should not be named IMG-5232 .
It should be named like someone put that keyword on Google.
Pinterest is used about how to stuff.
Aperture
In optics, an aperture is a hole or an opening through which light travels. More specifically, the aperture and focal length of an optical system determine the cone angle of a bundle of rays that come to a focus in the image plane.
Shutter Speed
In photography, shutter speed or exposure time is the length of time when the film or digital sensor inside the camera is exposed to light, also when a camera’s shutter is open when taking a photograph.[1] The amount of light that reaches the film or image sensor is proportional to the exposure time. 1⁄500 of a second will let half as much light in as 1⁄250.
ISO
White Balance
A white paper should look white in a correct white balance settings.
Camera Presets
Use 300 dpi for print images, this is dots per inch
72 dpi – dots per inch for web
Websites images needs to be the size that they need to be. No need for uploading massive hires images.
Work with RAW formats. You can downsize a RAW format but you can not upsize a lower quality.
If you are using it in only social media etc you don’t have to work with RAW
16:9 vs 4:3
For Instagram you might want to use 4:3, a more square feel
16:9 is more suitable for desktop / TV type of screens.
CMYK vs RGB
Get a proof of paint in the post
Printed material shows colors differently
Exposure
Look for texture.
Parts of the photo should not be all white (over exposed) or all black (under exposed)
You can correct some shooting errors to a degree in Photoshop
Rule of Thirds
Professionals do not take flat photos
Amateurs take flat photos
Pros want something to be in focus and rest out of focus
Depth of Field
Be Consistent
Use same background, colors, layout etc for branding
Uniform the styles
Close up
Copyright
You automatically have copyright of the material / documents / photos that you created.
You can search with usage rights on Google Images
Pixabay License
Free for commercial use
No attribution required
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted “work”.[note 1] A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that he or she (that author) has created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, he or she might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of a given work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author’s work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.
Royalty free does not mean free
It means you don’t have to pay commission every time the photo / video is used
Advertising standards
Shooting photos of people
They need to sign if they wanted their photo taken
To edit
To be shared on eg website
To be shared on social media
Separately
If you are shooting in a crowded place, make sure other people are out of focus and non-recognizable
Talent Release Form
If under 18, no one can sign for them. So you need parents signatures.
Editing Software
Video Marketing
A visual could be worth 1000 words. Video can be 1 million. It is a moving picture.
Within the next 4 years Facebook could be “All video”
- Nicola, VP for FB EMEA
YOUTUBE
YouTube is ranked as the UK’s second most popular social media channel with almost as many users as Facebook.
Last year, it was reported by Flint that 37.1 million adults are using the platform in the UK. Although there are no up to date statistics, we can see that YouTube and Facebook regularly battle it out for the most visited social media platform every month.
Globally, the average viewing session is 40 minutes, up 50% from last year according to Omicore. Many brands are now using YouTube as it’s a great place to host longer form content. Unlike other social networks, where users scroll passively through newsfeeds, Youtube users are intentionally searching on the platform for videos to watch.
https://www.avocadosocial.com/latest-social-media-statistics-and-demographics-for-the-uk-in-2019/
Types of Youtube videos
Talking head
indoors, lightning to be considered
Zoella
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWRV5AVOlKJR1Flvgt310Cw
On screen demonstration
People don’t have access to good teachers can still access
people don’t appear on videos
How to use website videos
Shopping cart, show people how to use it
Might not have use on youtube, but you can include it on your website
Hand video
FunToys Collector Disney Toys Review
https://www.youtube.com/user/DisneyCollectorBR/about
Ryan ToysReview
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChGJGhZ9SOOHvBB0Y4DOO_w/about
Eye contact is important in videos
Youtube quality content about 10 mins
Longer videos live in Youtube, shorter videos are more suitable for Facebook
Attention span
of about 7 seconds
You need to cut / edit
Can get multiple shots that can be used together
Get ahead and schedule on your video production
Preferably post 1 video every week
Largest Youtube channel
https://www.youtube.com/user/PewDiePie/about
Things to watch out for video quality
Sound is vital. You need external mic
Shot framing is key.
If talking head, center, or side, bring something (graphics etc) to the side
Half a million Royalty free music that you can use on your Youtube videos
But not anywhere else
Avoid music license issues
Sunlight is very good if you have it
Youtube Business Benefits
- Free video hosting platform, very fast
- You need to use it as a Social Media, eg. comment on other videos etc
- Powerful advertising tools
- Second largest search engine
People looking for reviews, tend to be ready to buy those products
Product showcase
Will it blend
Actor is their CEO
https://www.youtube.com/user/Blendtec/about
Don’t wait to be forget, then you will never be able to start
Brand sponsored channel
Mum’s eye view
Powered by Asda
https://www.youtube.com/user/MumsEyeView/about
Finding Youtubbers
Influencer Marketing Made Easy
Have Control Over The Content Your Customers See
With FameBit you can launch a campaign for free, receive proposals from interested influencers and easily track the metrics that matter all in one place.
Viewability
Youtube is almost viewable everywhere (eg on Twitter, it is embeddable)
Facebook as a video platform
It is not a good idea to post YT video on FB because FB limits the amount of its reach. Because FB is promoting its own video platform
Shareability –
FB video is very unlikely to be seen outside of FB. Walled garden.
If I am on TW, I might not want to leave TW and go to FB to just a video.
Vimeo, 1/10 of the size of YT. Videographers, Web developers
YT includes all kinds of people, low quality comments etc
Vimeo community feels a bit more professional, quality of the videos are much better.
Provides you with a ad-free embed option
Dailymotion – EU equivalent of YT
Stuff with copyright
Wistia – embed your videos on your website
You can consider SEO benefits because your websites are ranking better
I’m not a YouTube partner, so why am I seeing ads next to my videos?
Ads may appear next to your uploaded videos even if you haven’t monetized the videos yourself.
If your video contains content to which you don’t own all necessary rights, the rights holder may have identified his/her content in your video and chosen to place ads on it. Ads may be displayed on your videos if they contain soundtracks from the AudioSwap library or if the content in your video has been identified by Content ID.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2475463?hl=en
Sprout video
Vzaar
Payment gateways –
Youtube channel art
https://www.canva.com/templates/web-banners/youtube-channel-art/
YouTube recommends uploading channel art at 2560 x 1440
Channel Trailer
Playlists
are crucial to enable people to watch more than one video
35% drop in viewership if you start your video with a logo
Start immediately adding value.
After 10-15 seconds in, you can mention branding
Unlisted videos
Does not physically show up on your channel
But still, link is shareable.
You can embed it
No notification goes to your subscribers.
It is good to repeat the title of the video on the first sentence in description. You can change it slightly though.
You can use these in your titles:
Type of video – what it is about – who it is for
Add every single one of your videos into a playlist.
Thumbnail
People see it on search
If you embed it, people will see it before playing
Custom thumbnail – and they don’t have to show in the video
Pick a style you stick to it
You can do it on canva
Keywords on websites are not effective or even spammy in terms of SEO
But keywords on youtube is still relevant (tags)
Editing a video is possible in Youtube (beta)
CTA Cards – Call to action
Watch another video
Promote another channel
Poll
Approved website link
Captions – transcribe the video
Facebook video
You can tag products
Include cost, description, image and link back to website
Promoting your videos
Live streaming
Focus on content
Quality might be lower but that’s the point
You can go live in a Facebook group.
Twitch – screen broadcast not just games
Connection speed
It should not look too staged
Start when you are going live, don’t waste time at the start
Product Demonstration
Product review
Hyperlapse
https://hyperlapse.instagram.com/
Boomerang
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/boomerang-from-instagram/id1041596399?mt=8
Youtube advertising
Trueview watch: 30 sec – TrueView: Views: The number of times your ad has been viewed. For TrueView in-stream, this is the number of times a viewer watches for 30 seconds of your video (or the duration if it’s shorter than 30 seconds) or engages with your video (in-stream), whichever comes first.
https://support.google.com/displayvideo/answer/6298774?hl=en
You can get YT views for 1-2p per 30 seconds
Intro to Google Analytics
WordPress – MonsterInsights plugin can be used
GA code is better in the head so that more users can be tracked. If at the end, and user closes the tab, it might not track those users. Also GA code loads in the background.
GA Chrome Extension to see what percentage of people click on your links.
Search Console setup – link to Google Analytics
Google Ads data opt-out
https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated
You might need to link to this page if you are using remarketing or ads features of GA
Cross Device Tracking
Google Signals
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7532985?hl=en
Under GDPR you only can keep user information as long as you need it
You need to be able to explain whether if you need it or not
IP Anonymisation
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en
If you don’t have this code in your code, you might be breaking GDPR
Goals – What you want your visitors to do on your website
Sign Up to an emailing list, add to cart
Without goals, you don’t know how well your website is working
It tells you where the value lies
Google Analytics for Power Users course
Excluding your own visits
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034840?hl=en
Keep in mind of seasonality
User details
Demographics overview
Interests
New visitors is almost certain that is over reported
Because people might have cleared cache, moved to different devices etc
See your Facebook Ads cost & ROI in Google Analytics reports
https://supermetrics.com/blog/see-facebook-ads-cost-roi-google-analytics-reports
Social Plug-ins
You can track social shares on your websites but you need to add a bit of code
Or use integrated services like add this
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1316556
URL UTM Tracking
https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/
Event tracking
(email address clicks, downloads etc)
Live chats need to fire events as well
Monster Insights can track events as well
https://www.monsterinsights.com/your-ultimate-guide-to-monsterinsights-dashboard-reports/
Advanced Filters
Bounce rates more than 60%
Sessions more than 100
Priority pages to be optimised
Digital Growth
David from Google Digital Garage
Digital Garage Online
https://learndigital.withgoogle.com/digitalgarage
Google Analytics
- How visitors found you
- What have they done after founding you
- Who are your visitors
- What demographics they have
There is a misconception that the internet is a mass communication channel. If you can focus on a specific customer audience online, then you can make an impact.
People don’t like typing on mobile phones. They have shorter time spans. They experience content in a different way. You need to have content spread out to be easily clickable on mobile.
B2B customers tend to use desktop over mobile. But they still still find you on mobile as well.
People with short customer journey, buying something smaller are buying on mobile phone.
People looking for a car, house or travel, tend to look it up on the desktop. Long decision journeys. People can still find out about you on mobile as well.
You can make important business decisions based on Google Analytics data. Explore potential markets etc.
If there are obvious assumptions about your potential markets, it is good to prove yourself wrong in Google Analytics. Because then you know and your competitors don’t.
eCommerce experience in real life:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Sk7cOqB9Dk
SEO in 2019
Basics still apply
- Title tag
- Meta description
Search Console
https://search.google.com/search-console/about
Page speed insight
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Lazy loading
https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/lazy-loading-guidance/images-and-video/
Google Medic Update
https://yoast.com/googles-medic-update/
YMYL – your money your life
https://www.semrush.com/blog/eat-and-ymyl-new-google-search-guidelines-acronyms-of-quality-content/
E-A-T: Expertise, Authority, Trust
Write more content
Make sure stuff is up to date
Proof you have expertise
Citations
Like a Linkedin profile that has certifications etc
Links are still very important
- https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/fighting-disinformation-across-our-products/
- Quality over quantity
- Use content to get links
- Avoid spammy links
Reviews on 3rd party websites – how you are perceived on these review sites
Google is well aware of the reviews on these websites
Online reputation
What is the sentiment what people write about your brand
Use HTTPS
Natural Language Processing
https://wordlift.io/blog/en/advanced-seo-natural-language-processing/
Neural matching
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-neural-matching/271125/
Content Quality
- Get rid of low quality pages
- Duplicate pages
- If you can not get rid of them, exclude them on the Google Index
- Mostly similar content
Practical Application
- Connect questions to answers
- 1 or 2 sentence answer you’d expect from a voice assistant
- (entity) is (answer) uses the question in the answer
- Identify units, classifications and adjectives
- Use expected units, be specific
- 200 degrees Celsius not 200 degrees
Keep it simple
- Reduce dependency hops
- https://www.briggsby.com/on-page-seo-for-nlp
- Google Cloud Natural Language
- https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/
Avoid unclear antecedents
- The cat was often in the tree but now it’s dead
- Whats dead, the cat or the tree?
Being correct requires clarity
- Specific, short answer
- Answer boxes in the Google
- 2-3x click through rate
Related searches
- Found at the bottom of the search results
- Auto completes
Facebook Groups
Paid Media
20-25% of ads in UK going to social. But 5-10% of website traffic is only from social.
Digital marketing is bigger than 51% since 2017 in the UK.
51% of digital spending was search in 2017 in the UK.
The 2018 Omni-Channel Retail Report: Generational Consumer Shopping Behavior Comes Into Focus
https://www.bigcommerce.co.uk/blog/omni-channel-retail/
AI
How marketing fits in?
- Search
- SEO
- Can we show up on voice searches?
- Email
- Provider choice
- Email marketing tools
- Ecommerce
- Platform selection
- 3rd party AI integration
- Product recommendations
- Mass personalised ads
AI for Robotic Process Automation
- Data entry
- Workflows
- Data translation
- Data transportation (routing)
- Reporting and analysis
- Integrations
Chatbots become CaaS
- Chatbots mature
- Move from procedural to more conversational bots
- Decision trees and NLP – machine learning
Voice Search
- NLP – Natural Language Processing
- You get a voice answer, not a results page
- It is like talking to humans
Content Marketing
Youtube video ideas
- Questions and answers
- Product demonstrations
- Collaborations
- Drive traffic to the website
Social media groups
Worldwide, there are over 2.32 billion monthly active users (MAU) as of December 31, 2018. This is a 9 percent increase in Facebook MAUs year over year.
https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/
Planning a Website
Purpose of a website
- Provide information:
- Company, product, service, expert info
- Sell online
- Subscription service, products via ecommerce
- Marketing material
- Landing pages, videos, brochures and whitepapers
- Provide a digital product or service
- As a service model
- IT
- Integrate with other internal systems
- Customer support
- Help desk, knowledgebase
- Operations
- Reduce costs by streamlining a process
- HR and Recruitment
- Advertise jobs, communicate culture etc
Planning your website
- Review your current site
- Benchmarking
- Define goals and objectives
- Develop personas
- Use personas to develop user journeys
- UX and site design
- Choose a build option
- Technical considerations
- Build your site
- Test
- Measure against your goals
- Continually review
Website benchmarking
- Understand how your current website is being used
- Use Google Analytics to understand your users and their current activity profile
- Understand who is using your current website
- Use google analytics to understand demographic information about your current users ie age, sex, location, how they find your site etc
- Understand current goals and how they are being met
- Customers interviews
- Online surveys
Website goals statement
- SMART
- Specific (simple, sensible, significant).
- Measurable (meaningful, motivating).
- Achievable (agreed, attainable).
- Relevant (reasonable, realistic and resourced, results-based).
- Time bound (time-based, time limited, time/cost limited, timely, time-sensitive).
Example website goals statement
- Generate more sales
- Increase monthly bookings by 15% within 6 months
- Increase sales conversion rate
- Increase the website sales conversion rate by 5% over the next 12 months
- Improve sales support
- Improve sales support on the website through inclusion of knowledgebase articles,
- Increase avg review rating to 4.5+ within 3 months
USER JOURNEY
What is a user journey?
- Series of descriptive steps
- Typically between 4 and 12
- Represent i real world scenario
- Demonstrate how a user currently does something
- How they could do something in a new and improved website
Why should we use user journeys?
- Demonstrating the vision for the project
- Understand user behaviour
- Identify possible functionality at a high level
- Define your taxonomy and interface
- Highlight similar journeys
How do I create a user journey?
- User’s goals
- Their motivations
- Their current pain points
- Their overall character
- The main tasks they want to achieve
What should a user journey include?
- Context
- Where is the user? What is around them? Are there any external factors which may be distracting them?
- Progression
- How does each step enable them to get to the next?
- Devices
- What device are they using? Are they a novice or expert? What features does the device have?
- Functionality
- What type of functionality are they expecting? Is it achievable?
- Emotion
- What is their emotional state in each step? Are they engaged, bored or annoyed?
Create a user journey
- Remember to consider
- Your user’s goals
- Their motivations
- Their current pain points
- Their overall character
- The main tasks they want to achieve
- Don’t forget to include
- Context
- Progression
- Devices
- Functionality
- Emotion
- You can have different feature boxes for different personas, addressing their needs
- You can utilize different color codes for these different user journeys
USER EXPERIENCE
Why does User Experience matter?
- Good design sells
- Strong consumer trust
- Perception of your product or server
- User-friendly content
- Good first impression
- Sets you apart from competitors
- Consistency = quality
- Motivate people to take action
What is UX (User Experience)?
- Human interaction
- Design / aesthetics
- Utility
- Usability
- Performance
- Ergonomics
- User Experience
How to do UX yourself
- User journeys
- Look at the entire process
- Prototype / wireframes
- Challenge the status quo
- Try new ideas
- Don’t just focus on aesthetics
- Simple is usually best
- Test with real users
- Prototypes first
- Once built
- Use date
- A/B testing
- Once live use analytics
- https://www.hotjar.com/
Digital Agency
- Offer full range of services
- Designers
- Developers
- UX experts
- SEO experts
- Project managers
- Things to consider when hiring a digital agency
- Do they work with similar companies to yours
- What project apprıach do they take – agile or waterfall
- How easily could you move from them if you wanted to
- Are they selling you their own website product or a known CMS
- What are their ongoing support and maintenance costs
- 4-6k standard website
- 10-15k custom website
- 10-30k ecommerce website
Freelancer
- Technically skilled
- Cheaper than an agency and may well have agency experience
- Flexible
- Usually a faster turn around than an agency
- Might work with other freelancers for design, SEO, PPC etc
- Things to consider when hiring a freelancer:
- Make sure you own the code / IP
- Be aware that they might not be available if they are with another customer
- Be mindful that they need to be paid on time
- They might work strange hours
WEBSITE FEATURES AND FUNCTIONALITY
Standard Features of a website
- Navigation
- Homepage
- Content pages
- Footer
- Contact form
- Newsletter signup
- Blog
- Carousel controls
- Video content
- Social links and widgets
- Custom features
Navigation
- Main navigation
- Footer navigation
- In-page navigation
- Internal links
- Off-page links
- Think about information architecture
- Categorising of information
- Meaningful ways for users to find and move between information
- List pages
- Paging controls
- Descriptive links
Homepage
- This is where you make your first impression
- Communicate your businesses personality
- Give visitors the information they need
- Provide options for routes into your content
Content pages
- Publish information about your business, product or service
- Standard layouts – maybe 2 or 3 page templates
- Concise and relevant copy
- Use images (ideally real images of your offering not stock images)
- Make sure content includes links to other relevant content on your site
- Consider SEO
- Include call to action (CTA)
Footer
- Contact details
- Address
- Phone numbers
- Legal links
- Terms and conditions
- Privacy policy
- Cookie policy
- Newsletter sign-up
- Social links
- About us paragraph
- Copyright
- Company number and or VAT no
Blog
- Communicate with your audience in an informal tone
- Publish domain expertise
- Present you organisations personality
- Build trust with your customers
- Attract inbound links
- Increase search rankings
- If you have a blog, make sure you post to it regularly
- Integrated or stand-alone?
Social widgets and plugins
- Great if you are active on social media
- Remember that your posts will be seen on your website so be mindful of what you post
- Some plugins and widgets are easy to add others require a developer
Choosing a domain name
- Choose a domain name that represents your business
- Avoid hyphens or numbers if you can
- Think about domain suffixes
- Com
- Co.uk
- Org
- Uk
- Since 2015 there are hundreds of new domain suffixes
- .london
- .name
- .agency
- .shop
Buying a domain name
- There are lots of places that will sell you a domain name
- Ultimately all domains are registered on a central register
- Make sure the domain is registered in your company name, not the company you are purchasing it via
- 123-reg.co.uk
- Costs range from 1-100 GBP
Hosting
- Your own server
- Located at your business
- Limited resilience / failover
- Requires IT to take responsibility for security and updates
- Dedicated server
- Locate in data centre
- Shared responsibility for security and updates
- Can be expensive
- Virtual server
- Located in a data centre
- One of many virtual servers on one physical server
- Often includes automatic security updates
- Cloud hosting
- On demand resource provision
- Very scalable and can be cheap at the entry level
Hosting and website builders
- Hosting is included
- SaaS model means you are in effect subscribing to a hosting package
- Check terms for usage limits
- Once your site is built and hosted with a service such as wix.com you can not move it another hosting provider
- Some builders such as wordpress do offer an export / backup restore feature meaning you can move it to another hosting provider
- This can be time consuming and might cause issues
Cross-browser testing (F12 key)
- Web browsers render HTML as web pages
- Each browser has a slightly different rendering engine
- Make sure your site looks the same in all browsers / devices
- Most website builders will have cross-browser compatibility covered
- Most frameworks ie Twitter bootstrap have it covered
- Most modern themes and templates will also have it covered
WordPress Plugin Recommendations
- Yoast
- Smush
- WP-cache
Developing Content for the Web
CONTENT MARKETING
You can use fragments to move users to a place in that same post. Similar to an outline.
Get the right context and focus on every single post.
Authority, you know what you are talking about. So make sure you reflect this.
It’s all about the content
- At the end of every link is content
- There are lots of content type
- Information
- Meaning
- Context
- Authority
- Credibility
- Content that will drive traffic that will convert
Why is content important?
- Content communicates your message
- Brand
- Product
- Service
- PR message
- Builds a community of loyal customers
- Helps make your brand an authority
- Get to know your customers better
- Improve SEO
- Adds value
Effectiveness: The degree to which objectives are achieved and the extent to which targeted problems are solved.
Setting content goals
- Goals give us something to measure against
- Clearly defined success criteria
- Understand how effective we have been
- Modify goals based on data insights
- Set new goals once a goal has been met
Content goals statement
- Increase brand awareness
- Double the number of social shares within 3 months
- Drive more traffic to your website or blog
- Increase the number of unique visits to my blog by 20% within a month
- Hit 10% returning customers in 12 months
- Generate sales leads
- Generate at least 5 new sales leads per product video published
- Convert more leads into customers
- Increase conversion rate to 15% on landing pages published in the next 6 months
- Improve retention and drive upsell
- Increase revenue from “Customer also bought” feature by 8% over the next 4 weeks
What is content?
- Company info
- Sales info
- Customer service content
- Event content
- Employee generated content
- Marketing content
- Campaign content
- Advertising content
- Customer generated content
Content marketing is a strategic marketing apprıach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
What is content marketing?
- Attracting an audience to an experience or destination you own
- Linked to a marketing objective or business goal
- Not overtly selling a product or service
- Make your buyer more intelligent
- Consistency
- Value driven
- Expertise
- Knowledge
- Part of the team / club
CONTENT TYPES
- Website content page
- Clear descriptive heading
- Short but descriptive summary
- Section headings
- Links to other relevant content
- May have a CTA
- News article / press release
- Headline
- Summary
- Body content
- Image
- Publish date
- Author
- Blog
- Title
- Summary
- Body content
- Images
- Lists
- Links
- Quotes
- Comments
- Category
- Tag
- Parts
- Quality over quantity: Generate more quality content with the same amount of time and energy.
- Analyse, use data, make research, expert opinion
- Use visual breaks in the blog posts to rest people’s eyes and minds
- https://buffer.com/resources/
- Storytelling, enough words
- Good content, helping people with their problems
6 RESOURCES
- Social
- Employees can link business related posts on their personal linkedin
- Images
- Format
- Size
- Resolution
- Colour
- Style / filters
- Alt text
- Usage rights
- Videos
- Professionally produced
- Produced on mobile
- Hosted
- Youtube
- Vimeo
- Embedded
- Shared
- Meta info
- Comments
- Web forms
- Gather info
- Simple
- Multipart
- Surveys
- Questionnaires
- Dynamic
- Embedded
- Secure
- Autofill
- Rich controls
- Make sure it is working
- Infographics
- Visual representation of information / data
- Diagram
- Chart
- Dataflows
- High design values
- https://www.canva.com/
- Podcasts
- Digital audio file
- Series of episodes
- Downloadable
- Subscription
- Free usually
- Can be consumed while doing something else (eg while driving)
- Accessed via apps, itunes, google play
- Utilize another podcast that has already have a following
- Whitepapers
- Heavy weight content
- Domain expertise
- Technical knowledge
- Pretty valuable
- Designed as a print or pdf
- Formal language
- Includes images, charts, figures and stats
- Sometimes paid for content
- or require email or other info before download (gather leads)
- Comments
- User generated content
- Moderated and edited
- Onsite ie blog posts – probably no one will comment on your blog
- Easier to get comments on social
- Testimonials
- Provided by customers
- Short form – quote
- Long form – more descriptive
- Versatile content type
- Customer trust
- Credibility
Who creates your content
- Marketing department
- Technical experts
- Products owners / specialists
- Suppliers
- Customers
- Industry experts
- Not recommended but can be tested, relevant freelancers
Created by your business
- How regularly will you create content
- How will you ensure the tone is correct
- What media items will you need to include
- Who will check content before it is published (it should not be the author)
- What extra support do non-marketing team members require
- What feedback will provide
- You can record meetings or internal talks and transcribe them into blog posts
Created by others
- What value does their content bring
- How can you make sure it fits your guidelines
- Provide guidelines
- Edit once submitted
- Does it even matter?
- What about deadlines?
- Can you offer to create content for them?
Ingredients of effective content (for humans)
- Information
- Attraction
- Being different
- Engagement
- Being funny is a way of doing it
- Strong message
- Memorable
- Be developed with an audience in mind
- Consistent
Ingredients of effective content (for search engines)
- Well written, natural content (like humans like to read)
- Semantically well formed
- Descriptive content
- Inbound links
- Good use of images (don’t forget alt tags here)
- Design
- Well UX really
- Bounce rates are a good indication of the quality of your user experience
- SEO for beginners by Moz
Audience
- Understanding who you are developing content for is very important
- Style
- Tone
- Language
- Attention span
- Level on knowledge
- Propensity to share
- Appetite
Content Marketing Infographics
https://www.pinterest.com/michaelschmitz/content-marketing-infographics/
DESIGN AND LAYOUT
Why Design Matters?
- Good design sells
- Strong consumer trust
- Perception of your product or service
- User-friendly content
- Good first impression
- Sets you apart from competitors
- Consistency = quality
- People get attracted to design.
- But they do get attracted to different things, different designs
- Motivate people to take action
- Design is more than how it looks, it is how it works, too. (User experience)
Designing effective web content
- Ensure your html is correctly formed
- Ensure all relevant tags and attributes are included
- Meta tags
- Image alt tags
- Clearly defined section headings
- Short concise paragraphs
- Responsive content
- Whitespace is important
- Lightweight
- Performance
- Device
- Connections
- Consistency
LANDING PAGES AND CTA’S
- Usually a standalone web page
- Communicates a single message
- A promotion
- A product launch
- A whitepaper download
- A newsletter signup
Before you start for the landing page
- What is the goal
- Buy something
- Fill out a contact form
- Signup for a newsletter
- Define the conversion
- Who is my audience
- Who are you hoping to attract and convert?
- We’ll do more on personas later
- How did they get to my landing page?
Anatomy of a landing page
- clean , uncluttered and short is key
- Impeccable grammar – you can’t afford to lose trust due to a silly mistake
- High quality content
- Single idea
- Testimonials are great – trust indicator
- Buttons and CTAs should stand out – make it really easy to convert
- Make sure the design is really good – you only have a moment to impress
- Limit your links – do not distract users
- Use images and videos that relate to the copy – strong imagery
- Shorter to conversion, the better
What is the call to action (CTA)
- CTA is an element on a webpage that invites a user to commit an aciton
- CTA is a priority item on a page
- Every page ideally have a single CTA
Content strategy steps
- Define customer personas
- Create a keyword list
- Identify which types of content you are going to create
- Develop an attractive personality and style
- Determine a frequency problem
- Decide how you are going to promote your content
What is a persona
- Represent a major user group for your website
- Express and focus on the major needs and expectations of each user group
- Give a clear picture of the user’s expectations
- Describe how users are likely to use your site
- Help to uncover universal features and functionality
- Describe real people with backgrounds, goals and values
How to create a persona
- Describe the user
- Age,gender
- Highest level of education / expertise
- Profession
- Professional background
- Motivation
- What is your person motivated by?
- What are they looking for?
- What is your person looking to do?
- What are their needs?
B2D Persona
- Lara, 40 years old, has 2 kids, employed
- Does most of the household shopping
- Tech-savvy, uses mobile for ecommerce
- Value seeker, bargain hunter
- Searching for air travel, new house and car so higher end of value seeker
- Interested in cooking, travel, celebrity news
- Motivated by the needs of her family and looking for ways to add value (find a bargain)
- Don’t really have much time, quite busy with all the housework, kids and work.
- They want a good deal, trusted seller, frictionless ecommerce experience.
Keyword Research
Choosing Content Types
- What content do your customers currently engage with
- What are they asking for – do you get asked the same questions a lot
- What do your competitors do
- Do you have the skills
- Does the content type fit with your overall goals
- Can you calculate a ROI
- What tools are out there that I can use
Personality and style
- Conversational
- Formal
- Technical
- Funny
- B2B
- Consumer
- Adult
- Teen
- Children
- High design values
- Quick and dirty
Content Promotion
- What channels are you going to target
- How will you promote?
- Organic SEO
- Social shares
- Paid advertising
- Are there specific channels for different content types
- How can you use your community
- Promotion calendar / schedule
Sharing your content
- Social media
- Email marketing
- Direct email (B2B)
- Industry websites / publications
- 3rd party websites
Scheduling
- What time is best
- What platforms are best
- Cumulative campaigns
- Re-scheduling
Social media scheduling tools
- Buffer
- Hootsuite
- Sprout social
- Viralheat
- Socialoomph
- Tweetdeck
- Sprinklr
- Watch out: Algorithms are demoting content posted by these tools
Testing your content
- Content goals statement
- Measuring success
- Improving our content
- Repeating what works
- Stop doing what doesn’t work
- Our Facebook page appears busier
- Instead, double the number of shares in 3 months
- Data is key
A/B Testing
- Also known as split testing
- Compare 2 versions of a web page
- Discover which performs better
- Experiment with 2 or more variants
- Variants shown at random to users
- Statistical analysis
- Results based on predefined goals
Issues with A/B Testing
- Usually tests small variations
- Small changes often regress back to the mean
- Small changes = small results
Google Optimize
- This is better than traditional A/B testing
- You can create loads of variations and test with AI
- https://optimize.google.com/optimize/home/
Selling to China via eCommerce
What is your China strategy?
- Online vs offline opportunities, which should come first?
- Is your competitors there?
- Is there a demand at that price?
- Partner or your own?
- Who is your consumer
- Where, how old?
- Different regions, different characteristics in China
- Resources available internally?
- Are you ready to invest time in it?
- Importance of insights / data
China growth is slowing down but still it grew 6% last year
Chinese consumer
- Government policies to promote domestic consumption
- Domestic consumption is the main source of growth
- Ratio online – total retail overtook UK with 23%
- Large population with increasing spending power
- Becoming more sophisticated – needs and desires changing
- 2015 high and upper middle disposable income 10%
- 2030 it will increase to 35%
- People are moving up the scale of disposable income
Routes to market
- Retail
- Daigou: Chinese tourists purchasing from abroad and selling back in China
- Tourists: Chinese tourists spend considerably more than most other tourists
- Distributor
- Hard to find a distributor but easy afterwards
- You don’t control the sales process or how your brand is presented etc
- Cross border e-commerce platforms
- .com website
- Historically Chinese people are emarketplace focused
- People who have been successful on their .com sales, have bit of brand awareness
- Google is nothing in Chinese, SEO does not matter in China
- Native Chinese platforms are much better
- Chinese marketplace + 3rd party or trade partner
- .com website
Routes to market
- General import
- Product registration
- Import permit
- General import
- Distribution retailing
- Consumers
- Cross borders ecommerce
- Customers order online
- Ecommerce / postal clearance
- Consumers
Books or other products that might need to go through content checks, might not be suitable for ecommerce.
VAT in China was 16% and now going down to 13%
Huge distrust in locally manufactured brands and goods in China, especially in mother and kid products. High quality and healthy perception.
Diversification
- Intense competition
- Consumers are using a greater variety of ecommerce platforms
- 1 app users were 48% in 2016 , then it is 29% in 2017
- 5 app users were 5% but now 14%
- Don’t use different distributors for different ecommerce platforms – price cuts can be problematic
- Ecommerce app users
- Taobao most popular
- Pinduoduo
- Cross border ecommerce market (B2C) competitive landscape
- Tmaill
- Kaola
- Jd global
- VIP
- Amazon
Website performance
- Range of payment options
- Alipay, wechat
- Great firewall of china
- Not only censorship but slows downs everything from outside of the country
- Good website performance is important
- Fast delivery to mainland china
Top influencers when chinese consumers buying through cross border online
- 50% Word of mouth from friends
- 32% social media comments
- 25% seo search results . that is baidu
Is it for me?
- There are many routes to market
- Doing it alone is expensive
- Being British / European & Foreign is not enough
- It can be a relatively easier route to market, but is still a complex and time consuming process
- A key challenge is that many chinese buyers are risk averse and brand conscious
- Models are shifting – e-marketplaces introducing e-taling into their models, social commerce is on the rise
- Building brand awareness in an increasingly crowded market takes, patience, ingenuity, deep pockets and often luck
- But… if you have the right product or brand, there can be a real opportunity
You should register your trademark in China before pitching it.
It will cost you about 1000 GBP
It can take a long time 18 months. But you are OK to trade if your application is in.
https://www.regroup-media.co.uk/
China digital landscape
Market size
- Biggest online market in the world – 800M online, 1/5 of the World’s internet users
- 80% internet is through mobile in CN
- 50% mobile in UK and US
- China now counts as 40% of all online transactions
Digital channels
- No google, ebay, facebook, Twitter, paypal
- Yes Linkedin and Amazon
English language
- Fluent English 1%
Seasonality
- Digital trends are very seasonal
- Paid advertising can exploit these peaks via special promotions
Channels
- Web presence
- More for brand awareness than selling
- Localised web presence does reaffirm a desire to engage with a China audience
- Partly protection, partly reach
- Host the site locally in China to make it open faster, an ICP licence is required or use a CDN
- What works design-wise in the West doesn’t necessarily work in China
- Search engine landscape
- Baidu dominates the landscape
- Little less sophisticated than Google
- Organic and paid similar to Google
- Baidu dominates the landscape
- Social
- Weibo – shorter posts, facebook and twitter like
- Sophisticated advertising like FB
- Younger audience
- Cheaper cost per ad
- Brand awareness
- Wechat
- Many things, 1 billion+ users,
- 5st biggest social media channel in the world
- Biggest in China
- Way more than whatsapp
- More like an ecosystem
- Calls, messaging, ecommerce, payment gateway, games
- Social media, bookings, pictures (like IG)
- 900M users are based in CN, 100M are outside of CN
- 86% users between 18-36
- High skewed on urban, professional
- Highly engaged
- 50% of users use for 90 mins
- 30% of all time spent on mobile in CN is on Wechat
- Lengthier posts, more like blog posts
- Mini programs
- 200M people use them
- Smaller and more streamlined than traditional apps
- No download for individuals
- Load faster, hosted in Tencent servers
- 20% of the cost for 80% of functionality
- Ecommerce, flash sales,
- Wechat ads
- Influencer marketing (KOL)
- In later stages, where the brand is already established
- Wechat pay
- 600M users. Biggest along with Alipay which these 2 dominate
- Wechat 0.6%, banks get 1.5% to get money to UK
- Weibo – shorter posts, facebook and twitter like
Summary
- Wechat is a good place to start, for proof of concept
- Cross border model
- When a shopper sells directly to CN from UK
- Distributor model
- Spike in orders
- Visibility issues
- Distributors dont tell you who they are selling, how they are selling
- Product pages needs to be longer, more details
- Royal mail tmall
Cyber Security Measures
BURAK ACTIONS
- Mandatory 2 step authentication
- Check Abdul’s personal email security
- Firefox sync uninstall
- Lastpass
- Check g suite backups
- Phishing tests
- https://www.knowbe4.com/
Cyber Attack Stats
- 54% of UK companies hit by cyber attack
- Average cost of CA is 3k-36k
- 96% of companies not confident can protect themselves
- Most common attacks by fraudulent email, impersonation and ransomware
- 76% of K adults don’t know what ransomware is
- 56% of organisations hit by Ransomware paid ransom
- Global attack map: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWXIJSiagBY
Ransomware
- A variant of malware
- Malware is malicious software
- Many different variants
- Cryptolocker, cryptowall, locky
- Multiple delivery methods
- Email, compromised websites, software vulnerabilities
Phishing
- Phishing is the attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details
- These attacks are untargeted and generally sent out to a huge number of recipients at one time
- Often directs users to enter personal information at a fake website
CEO Fraud / Whaling
- Impersonating a senior officer, bosses etc to order a fraudulent bank transfer
What is social engineering?
- A type of confidence trick for the purpose of information gathering, fraud or system access
- It is often one of many steps in a more complex fraud scheme
- Targets employees, not IT systems
- Employees often do not see themselves as part of the organization information security effort
How to stay protected
- Risk management regime
- Develop an appropriate risk management regime
- Ensure this is supported by the board and senior managers
- Clearly communicated approach
- Secure configurations
- Identify core business technology
- Develop strategy to remove old technology and services
- Introduce a patching policy
- This will reduce the risk of compromised systems
- Network security
- Protect your networks from attack
- Filter internet access
- Update default passwords on your network devices
- Consider your data location and how you (or attackers) can access it
- Managing user privileges
- Develop a process of granting access to data
- Review current access levels
- Does everyone have access to everything?
- Monitor user’s activity on the network and key systems
- Audit the logs of your network and key systems
- User education and awareness
- Review staff’s current cyber security awareness levels
- Introduce cyber security awareness training
- Both for new and existing staff
- Develop a security conscious culture
- Incident management
- Establish an incident response and DR capability
- Test your backups and DR plan
- Review your current downtime and decide if this is appropriate for your business
- Report criminal incidents to law enforcement (police / action fraud)
- Malware prevention
- Establish malware protection across your network
- Ensure this is on all your devices
- Ensure this is regularly updated and regular scans performed
- Malware prevention
- Establish malware protection across your network
- Ensure this is on all your devices
- Ensure this is regularly updated and regular scans performed
- Make sure access scan is activated (antivirus scans files accessed)
- Monitoring
- Continuously monitor all systems and networks
- Analyse logs for unusual activity that could indicate an attack
- Establish a monitoring strategy and produce supporting policies
- BURAK: There are software that uses AI to define normal traffic, then alerts you irregularities (if someone accesses other folders than sales and marketing they usually do)
- Removable media controls
- Produce a policy to control all access to removable media
- Limit media types and use
- Scan all media for malware before importing onto the system
- BURAK: No usbs would be used
- BURAK: Autoplay needs to be turned off
- Home and mobile working
- Develop a mobile working policy and train staff to adhere to it
- Apply the secure baseline and build to all devices
- Protect data both in transit and at rest – encryption is an option for this
- BURAK: Consider VPN
- BURAK: Are company laptops have antivirus on them?
Small Business Cyber Security Steps
- From the national cyber security centre
- Focused on SMEs
- This advice will significantly increase your protection
Backing up your data
- Tip 1: Identify what data you need to backup
- Tip 2: Keep your backup separate from your computer
- Tip 3: Consider the cloud
- Tip 4: Make backing up part of your everyday business
Protecting your organisation from malware
- Install and turn on antivirus
- Prevent staff from downloading dodgy apps
- Keep all your IT equipment up to date – patching
- Control how USB drives (and memory cards) can be used
- Switch on your firewall
BURAK: G Suite backups – backup of cloud
Onedrive, dropbox, 365
Storage craft – channel only IT companies
https://www.backupify.com/gsuite-backup
https://www.getapp.com/it-management-software/a/backupify/pricing/
Keeping your smartphones and tablets safe
- Switch on password protection
- Make sure lost or stolen devices can be tracked, locked or wiped
- Keep your device up to date
- Keep your apps up to date
- Don’t connect to unknown wifi hotspots, or at least use VPN
- Smaller wifis like coffee shops etc are not secure
Faster, safer, and smarter browsing
Ghostery helps you browse smarter by giving you control over ads and tracking technologies to speed up page loads, eliminate clutter, and protect your data.
Using passwords to protect your data
- Make sure you switch on password protection
- Use two factor authentication for important accounts
- Avoid using predictable passwords
- Help your staff cope with password overload
- Change all default passwords
Mobile device management
Corporate container
EMM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_mobility_management
Use landline from mobile app
People calling landline will be directed to mobile phone
Or you can call from mobile and customer will see your landline
Domain password criteria
Must contain this amount of letters numbers etc
Use password managers
https://www.lastpass.com/multifactor-authentication
Backup and disaster recovery
- Ensure you have a robust backup and DR strategy
- Test your backup on a schedule
- Recommended testing backups for file recovery monthly
- Recommended testing DR every six months
- Review RTO and RPO for your backup system
RTO and RPO?
- RPO: Recovery point objective
- RPO: how long can you afford to go back in time to restore a backup?
- RTO: Recovery time objective
- RTO: How long can you afford to be down in your business?
- Both are important, separately measured and unique to each business.
If security is tedious or difficult, people will not use it. It needs to be convenient
Password Manager
- They give you huge advantages in a world where there’s far too many passwords for anyone to remember.
- They make it easy for you to use long, complex, unique, passwords across different sites and services with no memory burden
- They are better than humans at spotting fake websites, so they can help prevent you falling for phishing attacks
- They can generate new passwords when you need them and automatically paste them into the right places
- They can sync your passwords across all your devices, so you’ll have them with you whether you’re on your laptop, phone or tablets
Sites that support 2 step authentication
Cyber essentials
https://www.cyberessentials.ncsc.gov.uk/
- Secure configurations
- Close accounts which are not used
- Remove software you don’t need
- Change all default admin pwd to a strong pwd
- Disable autorun features
- Boundary firewalls and internet gateways
- Needed on office devices
- Needed on home office devices
- Change default pwd to a strong one
- Access control and admin privilege management
- Do not use admin account day to day
- Use strong admin pwd
- Do you have a list of admin privileges
- Patch management
- Correct licenses for your software
- Set to update auto
- Receiving security patches
- Malware protection
IASME Governance
https://www.iasme.co.uk/the-iasme-standard/
Cyber Essentials
https://www.cyberessentials.ncsc.gov.uk/