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We’ve just stepped into the whole new year. Perhaps, most of us just want to forget the sad 2020 and hope 2021 comes with the potential of economic recovery. Every year, businesses need to look back on what they’ve done and evaluate their performance to set goals for the next year. Business goals support firms to orientate their way clearly to avoid inertia. Goal setting is very crucial and necessary for the growth of your business. To help you get started with your business goals this year, we’ve put together a list of goals that have the potential to improve your business. Reduce ongoing business expenses Most businesses want to optimize the cost for their operations. When it comes to reducing the expense for your business, ensure to make it clear and specific how you want to do. For instance, reduce cost on human resources by using more technology, ditch your landline or go paperless. Improve your customer service Have you ever measured your customer satisfaction with your support service? Set a goal on improving your customer service for your customer better experience. Specifically, it can be understanding your customer deeper, diversifying the ways of communication or you can build an online community with phpFox to connect and engage with your customer. phpFox is a leading social network platform that helps you build your dream online community with a big collection of features and services.  Use social media marketing in your business Social networks are one of the most important topics for all those who have their own businesses to advertise their products on the Internet. This leads to a great opportunity for businesses to raise their brand awareness. Therefore, you should integrate social media into your marketing strategy. It’s never too early to start learning and applying this powerful tool. Boost traffic to your website Increasing traffic to your website and attracting more new audiences are things to focus on this year. You can start to begin with a plan to enrich your marketing content to get more footfalls into your websites. Try to create more visual artistic material to catch the attention of the audiences who come to your online presence. Do more networking  Try to do more networking this year as a target to achieve. Plan to get in front of more people and expand your network. This really helps you to build your reputation. You can go to more conferences or build your online presence on LinkedIn to connect with more people. Moreover, being a speaker to share your knowledge and experience at business events also a great idea. In conclusion, goal setting is a valuable activity for everyone, but particularly for the founders: without targets, startups and teams will only float along. Set your own goals to steer your team and leverage your business.

If you are running an online community, you need to know how to manage your community successfully. Making your community a success helps you to improve your customer loyalty, boosting your revenue, and increasing your brand awareness. However, building a thriving community is not just a thing that can be done overnight. It requires a lot of effort from community managers. They need to set metrics to measure and monitor all the community activities. Besides, all the data collected needs to be organized and analyzed to get insight to improve the community better. Below are what you need to know if you’re new to community management. Determine the purpose Before starting to build a community, identify the purpose which will be the cornerstone of your community-building and growing. Remember to stick to the purpose while making all the members deeply understand it; therefore, they will provide valuable contributions to your community. Set metrics to measure results Traffic: Check the traffic to your community to understand the effectiveness of your promotion effort to adjust it. Through the traffic, you can see if your community grows over time and what brings the audience to your community. Thereby, you will have more insight on where to target more customers. Engagement: How many people are there in your community versus actually engaging? Which discussion topics they engage most? What makes them excited to participate and what not? Deeply understand these things may give you more ideas on how to create better content for your community. The number of members: How many people are currently joining your community? And, is it increasing or decreasing every month?  Creare thrilling discussion Your community members are strangers that makes them rarely talk amongst one another. So, this is your responsibility as a community manager to create thrilling discussions. Great topics attract members to talk, discuss, and engage more. Moreover, you should collect data and analyze it to know when to create a topic and which topic is suitable for a different time. Host more “Live Streaming”  This is a world of technology, but somehow, people still ask for real interaction. Live Streaming allows you to interact and engage in real-time with your community members. No matter where you are, live streaming helps you easily connect with your audience. Live streaming not only humanizes you but also supports you to build trust loyalty effectively. Ban polluters Your community should have clear guidelines and policies for the members to join. If there’s anyone who ignores the rule, kick them out immediately. This makes the users provide valuable contributions to your community and increase the quality of the community content. Quality over quantity! Building a community is hard; however, managing, and growing it is even harder. But, the benefits a successful community brings are worth it. If you are planning to build your online community, or want to grow it more effectively, phpFox can help. We are a leading social network platform with a big collection of interesting features. Along with free consultancy, we offer an optimal package while setting up and other services for your ideal online community. Do not hesitate to contact us for further discussion or drop us a message at hello@phpfox.com Source: https://www.phpfox.com/blog/2021/how-to-manage-and-grow-an-online-community/

The last six months have been incredibly challenging for businesses as the world tried to cope with the COVID-19 coronavirus. A global pandemic resulting in a complete or partial lockdown of the economy is a scenario that no CMO playbook could have planned for. Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels As organizations try to conserve cash and scale down expenses, marketing budgets have been the first to be trimmed. Marketers are also struggling not to sound out of sync with the times, a task made more difficult as different geographies are going through different phases of the pandemic. Marketing technology investments have been postponed even as businesses have tried to pivot their models and go online. Advice aimed at CMOs ranges from ‘stick to your brand message’ to ‘this is not the time for your brand message’ depending on who you ask or what an algorithm decides for you. I took on the role of CMO for a healthcare organization in April, just as the pandemic was shutting down the world. Operating in a new industry under new constraints, these are the things that I learned over the last six months. 1. Edit the marketing program ruthlessly Every CMO knows that their marketing program could do with editing. This is the best time to trim those excesses. Edit the program down to the absolute essentials — something that is impossible to do during the normal course of business as there will be a lot of internal resistance to letting go of things that ‘we-have-always-done’. This includes renegotiating existing contracts, adding new partners, changing the media mix, changing budget allocations, dropping some big legacy projects, and re-prioritizing campaigns. Cutting budgets does not mean that marketing comes to a stop; smart allocation of budgets can ensure that the brand remains connected to the core customer. Marketing is accustomed to a yearly calendar — this is the time to change that. Plan quarterly, monthly, or even fortnightly. For large organizations, it is an opportunity to be nimble — to evaluate campaigns on a weekly basis and make changes. Optimize for spends, channels, and creatives — all things that you have wanted to do, but never had the time or space to. 2. Focus on owned channels Traditionally, marketing has focussed most of its attention on paid media management. Owned channels are never looked at as effective media options in their own right. But we can now renew our focus on owned or organic channels and using internal resources better. For eg: Google My Business listings and other directory listings Websites and micro sites Local WhatsApp groups Facebook conversations Customer forums It is quite likely that these channels were used only for ‘feedback’ or ‘customer research’, but they are all potential business drivers. By treating these channels as active sources of revenue, we can apply the same rigorous tracking and attribution that we do with paid channels. 3. Plug the data leaks No matter how well integrated the information systems are within an organization, there are ‘data leaks’. In many cases, data exists in silos that don’t easily talk to each other. In the post-pandemic world, it is critical to align the organization around first-party-data and good data management. The first step in this journey is collecting clean, accurate data. Even in organizations where data collection is an integral part of the customer journey, it is often incomplete and inaccurate. This lean period in business can be utilized to put in place a rigorous process to ensure clean, accurate data. It will be easier to organize training and build alignment during this period. The second step is to orient sales & operations around campaign and customer data. Almost every organization believes that they are data-driven in decision making. But this is usually based on ‘convenient data’ — data that is easy, available, and familiar. Though CMOs are talking performance marketing, other departments still consider marketing to be vague and subjective when it comes to ROI. This is the best time to introduce tracking and attribution — especially for offline campaigns. Custom SMS codes, tracking codes, and virtual numbers give us the opportunity to embed performance orientation into every single creative. Re-orienting marketing spends to support lead generation and lead qualification will help the sales & operations team deploy their resources better. The third step is to ensure that ‘no-lead-is-left-behind’. In happier times, we were all content with respectable conversion ratios. Now, we need to ensure that every phone call and every lead form is tracked right through the funnel. By following the journey of a lead — SMS/WhatsApp/Email/Call/Form fill — through the system, one can spot a number of ‘leakage’ points that are easily plugged. Taking these steps to ensure that sales teams are supported with adequate leads will also make it easier for the marketing team to insist that the leads are followed up and updated. 4. Go local With each city and neighborhood responding to the pandemic differently, the messaging needs to reflect the local context. Use the organization’s physical reach to help augment your digital presence. By using your local team to record a message in the regional language for social media, you are going one step further: communicating in a voice that is familiar to the customer. Use in-house resources to create content — FAQs / How-to Videos / What-to-expect Guides etc. This is also a good way to ensure that available resources are deployed well and engaged in meaningful work (Zoom calls from 9–7 PM for ‘up-skilling’ do not always count as meaningful work). 5. Test. Test. Test. Without the luxury of big budgets or extended timelines, every element in the marketing program should work — from creatives to audience definition to channels Agility in an organizational context is often looked at only through the dimension of speed. But agility is speed with direction. Testing with small budgets and a controlled audience helps immensely to ensure that the direction is right. Start with small steps, stick to the testing plan and you can build a robust testing culture in the marketing organization. Most organizations are postponing large investments in tech-stacks or digital transformation projects. This is the time to embrace small pilots. The good news is that most software and implementation partners are now open to doing smaller pilots or POC projects. By working with a small, focused team you can roll out a pilot project, evaluate the hypotheses, and be ready with the roll-out plan for a large-scale program whenever things improve. And the data from the pilot will make your discussions with the CFO far easier. 6. Communicate and engage with all stakeholders This is perhaps the most important part of the playbook. Different departments are responding to the pandemic in different ways. Keep up an active communication with your counterparts in supply chain and finance. Understand how they are looking at cash flows and revenues so that marketing can play an active role in helping the business. Negotiations led by supply chain could help you pass on a pricing benefit to the customer. In case there are any anticipated disruptions in supplies, this can be built into the marketing plan. Similarly, you can plan spends based on the cash flow projections by the finance team. These small steps in building alignment will go a long way in ensuring organization-wide support to the marketing initiatives as and when they roll out.

By Karen O’Brien, Trufan CMO To say that 2020 has been an interesting year would be an understatement. So much has happened this year it’s hard to keep track of it all. Of course, we have the global pandemic, the protests for racial equality, and the election to name a few. These events and many more have impacted marketing this year and will continue to impact us well into 2021. With this year nearing its end, I wanted to take a look at some predictions for social media marketing in 2021. 1. Diversified Social Channels and Ad Spend In July of this year, many companies participated in a boycott of Facebook, pausing all spending on the platform in order to pressure the social media giant to better manage hate speech and misinformation on their platform. This wasn’t just small companies either, we saw many large companies stop advertising on Facebook including Verizon, Unilever, and Starbucks just to name a few. A lot of the big brands that boycotted are back on the platform but spending far less. According to Fortune, prior to July — Microsoft was one of Facebook’s largest advertisers and cut their budget to “nearly nothing” during the third quarter. What could brands pulling ad spend from Facebook mean? We’ve already started to see marketers diversify their social media buying strategy and increase their marketing budgets on platforms like Pinterest, Snap, YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok and I predict this trend will only get stronger in 2021. As brands experiment with new strategies on these social platforms and see positive returns they will continue to reach their audiences on new platforms. 2. Paid Media Coming In House When the coronavirus spread across the globe we saw companies around the world find ways to cut marketing costs to save money during these uncertain times. Paid media budgets were slashed, influencer marketing spending rolled back, unfortunately, layoffs in some cases, and many more ways of reducing costs. While a lot of advertising budgets have returned to where they were (if not higher for digital) — brands are still looking for ways to cut costs. An obvious one to me? Bringing media planning and strategy in-house and working with small, boutique agency partners on execution. The days of brands working with large media agencies and having less transparency into their media spend are behind us. Over the past few years, some brands have been experimenting with building paid media in house or hybrid models. With many companies going remote, the talent pool just increased exponentially and brands can find some of the best media talent around the globe, pay them well, have a dedicated team working in-house, and work with focused smaller specialized agency partners. In the process, brands will build increased transparency of performance and have more control over making shifts in spend or allocation as needed. 3. A Focus on First-Party Data For a long time, brands have been collecting their data from a variety of advertising and digital sources. However, I think brands will grow weary of having limited data from walled gardens and seek more transparency with the data they collect and focus on gathering their own first-party audience data. Not only is first-party audience data the most reliable data available to you, but it is also the least expensive to collect and allows you to gain unique audience insights and it’s actionable in endless ways. On top of that, with rising privacy concerns, platforms have become increasingly strict on the data they are willing to share therefore making it harder and harder to come by second and third party data. With access to outside data decreasing and the desire for a more holistic view of their marketing (and not from a single point of truth), marketers will start to prioritize the collection of first-party audience data more than they ever have in 2021. Trufan’s CEO Swish Goswami wrote a great piece on the importance of first-party data, you can read it here. 4. The Rise of the Social Media Manager I’ve been working in social media since the early 2000s, I’ve watched it change and evolve for many years and one thing that has not changed is an under-appreciation for social media managers, community managers, and social teams. There’s a misconception that social media managers just get “paid to tweet” and I assure you that could not be farther from the truth. Social media managers have an extremely stressful job and unlike most people, they don’t really get the opportunity to log off. They are the face of your brand, the feedback loop to marketing, sales, and product, and are expected to prioritize, engage and respond to thousands of customers, publish content, monitor advertising, and report on it — often across multiple platforms and increasingly in multiple languages. Search “social media manager” on Twitter and you’ll see that Twitter is a place for group support for social media managers. No article has summarized it better than “What Your Social Media Manager/Team Wants You to Know” by Chelsea Bradley. In 2021 I predict that brands are going to see the Social Media Managers rise up and they will need to start giving the social media team a seat at the table, the respect they deserve or deal with the rising angst and frustration from the team responsible for the most direct line of communication between your customers and your business. 5. Virtual Influencers To some, virtual influencers may seem ridiculous. “People follow an animated person on social media? Why don’t they just follow real people instead?” While I can understand that point of view, virtual influencers are not only here to stay but they’re going to become more and more prominent. According to a Hype Auditor report “virtual Influencers have almost three times more engagement than real influencers. That means that customers are more engaged with virtual influencers content.” On top of getting more engagement, you are in complete control of your virtual influencers. You never have to worry about them burning out or going on hiatus, they will never get into a controversy, and you can customize them perfectly to your target audience. If you can understand the interests of your targeted demographic, you can create the perfect “human” for that audience which can lend itself to the fact that virtual influencers get higher engagement, can virtual influencers create authentic yet on-brand content? That remains to be seen. We’ve seen some people create virtual influencers independently and we’ve also seen brands themselves launch virtual influencers such as KFC launching a chic Colonel Sanders on their Instagram.