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Carla Johnson: Turning Brand Stories into Customer Experiences

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Carla is a superstar marketer. And that’s not all, folks – she’s also a global keynote speaker, an author, storyteller and has worked with a huge amount of brands, making her one of the top 50 global female marketers. Awesome work.

Watch this and other Lately Live vids here.

Decision-making for Buyers

“The buyer’s journey is no longer a guided tour”, Carla came up with this pearl of wisdom and she believes that marketers need to get a handle on understanding what buyers do in their decision process. What happens in their world?

Businesses have to expand their relationship with buyers. There’s so much more to the buyer journey than them being aware of a product and purchasing. What’s the entire journey that you’re not involved in? You’re pretty much missing out on 2/3rds of decision making.

Buyers are complex. They don’t just go from one step to another. Some might – they could be on their phone looking for an instant purchase, but a lot of customers aren’t. Carla says you’ve got to work on understanding triggers for behavior. The journey is hardly ever linear and there are so many entry points – you can inspire but it’s not always logical.

How to get a Company to Shift how they see their Customers

Always think from customer point of view. What does your customer need? What is the day in the life of a customer? Get your marketing, sales and product people in the room – they all have different perspectives and pivot everything towards customer more.

As a business, journey mapping is super helpful. Think about your customer and how they behave. Carla used the example of a credit card company and how they can create a journey for a user. They could imagine their customer planning a vacation. Where does a customer start – how much money are they going to spend, where are they thinking of going? How are they going to get there? Where will they stay? What will they do? A company can turn their credit card from a transactional commodity into an opportunity for a loyalty experience.

This is where a business can add value to customer journey and create valuable content i.e posts about how to plan a vacation, things to do etc. Think about what your customer’s world looks like.

Marketers tend to focus on a product, but focus on customers instead.

Activating Employees

Carla looks to the Edelman Trust Barometer every year to see who customers trust. At the moment, employees are looking to their employers, because of fake news, corruption etc in politics. Employers are becoming like mum and dad, so they need to step up to the plate and become a strong, cohesive and emotionally strong status symbol.

When you have more engaged and qualified employees, you’ll have happier, more productive employees. Having a purpose at work is better for everyone as it causes less tensions. So, Carla believes that it’s a great idea to focus on work culture and this will create sustainable growth over time. When you have internal champions, you’ve got advocates for your business.

Employees will tell other people about their bad experiences at dinner parties and the like, so if you can switch that, you can attract talent. You can get people inspired when people talk about how fab their job is. It makes it easier to recruit top talent when people love their job and you can rely on existing employees giving tangible expressions of what good work culture is.

Internal values can totally be expressed in how a company functions.

Content and Storytelling

Content is your ‘stuff’, web pages, webinars and marketing collateral. Storytelling is about bringing characters into play i.e the customer and their journey and storytelling is so much better when a company is customer-focused.

Every piece of content should have a focus and a grand purpose for every piece. How do we build an audience in and win them over to a brand? Talk about your brand but grow your business with customer-focused content and value you can add to their lives. Don’t bombard people with your brand in content, as Carla says this can end up like a “bad first date” where someone’s jumping the gun before you’ve even got to know them!

Our date with Carla certainly wasn’t a bad one and her insights were fantastic and offered loads of food for thought.

Brian Moran: How Well Do You Really Know Your Brand?

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Brian Moran is a small business expert and we think he’s an absolute gem.

To mention just a smidgen of his accolades – he’s worked with entrepreneurs for years, been a 3x entrepreneur himself, an exec director of sales at the Wall Street Journal and sits on several national marketing councils. Oh and he uses Lately too, whoop whoop.

Basically, he’s a busy, busy man! So, we’re even more psyched that he sat down for a chat with Kate.

You can also watch this and other Lately Live videos here.

Trends for SMEs in 2019

Brian stresses that small businesses have to start embracing digital tech even more, with urgency! His top tip is if you’re not comfortable with digital and social worlds, then get help from someone who does. Social media is a wild west yeehaw, but you need to get in the game. Your customers and competitors are there, so jump in.

And there are tons of excuses why people don’t want to do digital. Brian thinks the biggest excuse is time management. Time is money and there are time robbers everywhere. Are you spending money wisely and learning about new trends in the market? Are you looking at new tools?

The key lesson is that the more efficiently you manage your time, the better you’ll be able to position your brand. When people say “I don’t have the time to learn social media” – they’re basically saying their business is a hobby. Everyone should have a strategic goal for the end of 2019 – whether it’s revenue, new users etc. Everything you do should be action gearing you up towards your goal.

Knowing your Brand

How customers describe your brand is what your brand is. Brian asks audiences about logos and brands at events – how do they feel about them? Everyone has an opinion, but that IS how customers see a brand. You might want to describe your brand one way, but ask your audience to use 4 words to describe it. How many of your words match up with their words?

What words didn’t you even think of? You might get negative words, but you really need to address these shortcomings. Why do they think this? This info is dynamite. Use golden nuggets of info to project the brand people you want people to see. And do it consistently.

Brian asks customers for feedback and tells them about the value they can bring. This creates that direct connection. Reinforce the brand, reach out and ask for input. When you get feedback, don’t end the conversation either, tell customers what you’re doing with their feedback – make it the start of your conversation. The social proof that a customer’s feedback has helped is really impactful.

The Power of Thanks

“Saying thanks is a lost art” according to Brian. We live in such a competitive world, it can take months to get business, but a second to lose it. Loyalty is being tested everywhere. Take instant delivery for example – how can a small business compete when it can’t do this? By being authentic, genuine and sincere.

Build relationships with clients and customers. Don’t treat customers like a number and it doesn’t cost a lot to say thanks.

“Saying thankyou is an opportunity to reinforce a decision that a customer has made and why they were right to choose you over everybody else” – we’re gonna get that on a t-shirt!

Public thanking lets you stroke someone’s ego and they’ll share it so you can get a double whammy. Brian says ‘I just sent you a DM’ when he has a problem with a company, so he can carefully and quietly resolve an issue. He’ll be more public when it’s praise. And he’ll highlight people to companies when they deserve praise, cos acknowledgement can change someone’s day and gestures can make a big difference!

When you’re authentic and genuine with everything you do, you’ll get tenfold back and we totally agree with Brian on this one.

So in true Brian style – thanks for chatting with us!

How Lately can make you a better Storyteller

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How do you tell a good story?

Answer 1: “Come friends, gather round the campfire and listen to our wondrous tales, full of folklore, magic and high-jinks…”

Okay, that’s certainly one way.

But what about using your marketing dashboard to create connections between you and your audience…without relying on Phil Collins power ballads.

This way is muccccch easier.

It’s a marketers’ job to bridge the gap from data to person-you’re-trying-to-communicate-with. This could be your customer or your boss…or maybe your incredibly intelligent genius cat – whoever it is you’re trying to deliver a convincing message to.

Dashboard data helps you to tell persuasive stories, show trends and get creative by beefing everything up with stats and sparkling insight.

Look at how Lately can lend a hand.

Data + Storytelling

When you’re crafting messaging for an audience, being able to add poppin’ data visuals to your comms makes your claims smarter and backs them up.

All while looking fabulously slick.

Lately’s Omni-Analytics tool gives you 100% visibility across 100% of your channels. You can click through to specific data-points and get suuuuuper up close and personal with times, dates and trends.

The best part is all this data you generate gets sorted into awesomely clear and simple graphs and visualizations. You can add them into ebooks, blog posts, or reports to give your messaging some intellectual clout.

Stories help connect with an audience emotionally and data taps into their intellectual side. Combine them together and it’s a match made in heaven <3

Our Report Generator is great for converting your analytics into totally boss-friendly reports too. You can customize it and add or subtract bits you do or don’t need. It’s up to you.

This way, you can show what’s working, what’s not and why – helping you to build a narrative around your business moving in a particular direction or taking specific actions. The Consistency Scanner audits whether story/narrative features (keywords, messaging, design) are effective across all your channels too.

Remember, good analysis doesn’t have to be amazingly long or complex to show a particular story, especially when it’s to communicate something super timely and relevant. It just needs to make sense and add value.

Consistent Narrative

Keeping everyone in your team on track is vital when you’re launching a new marketing campaign. Making sure that members are sticking to the same stories and helping to create a consistent overall narrative arc means your campaign looks like it’s got it’s shiz sorted…

Even if you sometimes feel like you don’t know what day it us!

Using a Key Messaging Guide and Campaign Tags and Filters gives you a smart, simple way to monitor keywords, taglines, hashtags and check writing for consistency. You can tag campaigns too with names, colors and brief descriptions, so team members can dip in and out of campaigns to access handy details about narratives and stories you’re creating for different products and services.

When team members are working on separate bits of content, they can follow the same themes and trends to help inspire them and generate new ideas.

All your content can be stored in a Content Library, so you can quickly reference back and reuse content for certain campaigns and narratives.

Which helps when you need to create social posts to push your content. The Social Post Autogenerator can take any piece of evergreen content and instantly generate dozens of pre-hashtagged and pre-shortlinked social posts.

You can easily create engaging, consistent social content that your audience recognizes for its similar theme, voice and tone.

Try Lately

Lately makes content creation, rich in quality storytelling 12,197% more simple, so you can stop staring at a blank page, wishing you knew what the heck to write.

Cut through the noise – how to get out of marketing tech stack hell

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There’s a whollllle lot of marketing tech out there and it can easily push you into a deep dark hole of stack HELL.

Trying to juggle 1,219,801 (roughly) software packages all at once to help you gather more data, analyze more data and look like you know exactly what you’re doing. There are so so so many tech solutions on the market, but are they creating more solutions…or just more problems?

Spoiler alert: buddy, it’s problems.

You can’t dedicate enough time to all the things that make your business truly unique, if you’re toggling through loads of different marketing packages all at once.

What about a marketing dashboard that can do the job of tons of packages and:

  • Reduce social media marketing costs by up to 60%
  • Cut creation and posting time by 90%
  • Boost traffic by an average of 5x
  • Supercharge reach by up to 700x

Sounds pretty awesome, right? And helps you cut through the noise of endless stack hell chatter.

Layers, layers…and more layers

There’s always some voice ready to pop up and say ‘hey, well to solve that problem, you DEFINITELY need this thing’. There are some very persuasive tech arguments out there to convince you that your business will be wayyyy better off with a new sparkling marketing plaything.

What you’re really doing is just adding more layers and more complexity into your marketing strategy.

More layers mean that you’re just getting further away from your what makes your business great, your creativity, core messaging and ultimately, your fabulous customers.

Everything starts to get a little bit muddled.

And you’re not spending time on the stuff you’re good at. Instead, you’re juggling this weird, massive tech stack.

What to do?!

Aiming for a streamlined, simple structure gives you much more control and a better view of your marketing strategy.

Count your lucky stars cos Lately does just that!

Custom Dashboard made for you

Lately saves you the slog of gathering, organizing and building a custom Marketing Dashboard made up of random software packages and automatically creates one for you.

You’ll be ready to kick some butt with core marketing tools that turn you into a swash-buckingly awesome command-center for your business or project.

Start showing off your marketing prowess and spending more time on the main elements of your business, cos you’ll be getting hours and hours of work done in less than 60 seconds.

Plenty of time to take your marketing up a notch or 5 AND look way smarter…than you do already of course 😉

Maximum Visibility

Why get a bunch of tools when you only need one?

Here’s why:

Gain 100% visibility across 100% of your channels when you unify multi-channel analytics into single, whole-picture graphs that let you click-through data points, see what caused each spike and connect workflow to results.

Nail your social media marketing by automatically generating your social posts. In an instant, you can repurpose blogs, press releases, newsletters etc by parsing them into dozens of pre-hashtagged and pre-shortlinked social posts.

Get mega consistent and coordinate content, events, calendars and tasks. Align your planning, project management and publishing schedules so nothing falls through the cracks and your whole team knows the score.

Keep your marketing resources in check by collating your entire campaign, including content, tasks, files, links, team member activity, calendar entries, graphics, associated contacts, design elements and more, into a single report.

Try Lately

Lately is a super speedy, streamlined and simple way to get loads of jobs done from one dashboard, instead of 20. It lets you take back control of your marketing and your time too!

Getting to Grips with Omni-Analytics

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You: *staring at graphs, nodding and stroking chin*

Real you: “What the heck do these metrics mean?!”

A familiar scenario, am I right?

Sometimes, the amount of metrics you have to keep an eye on feels like you’re staring at the controls of the Millennium Falcon.

When you’re trying to get a handle on social media management, can’t it all be a teeny bit easier?

With Lately, our Omni-Analytics tool means you don’t have to flip between software packages or natively check social/web channels to see what’s goin’ down and how your content’s performing.

You’ll see a single, whole-picture view, so you can quickly AND easily toggle between metrics, campaigns and channels to track social success.

Maximum visibility, baby!

Metrics, eh?

When you enter Omni-Analytics, your life will change foreverrrr…well, that and you can pull in all your social performance stats and web data about every post you publish. And you can filter it all by campaign and channel.

Everything in one place! Streamlined, in-depth knowledge at your fingertips, boom. Feeling powerful?

For starters, to toggle through your data, we group together your social impressions with your website pageviews as one metric view.

So, what are Impressions?

This is how many times your content is displayed, it doesn’t necessarily mean that someone’s seen your content, but they’ve had the chance to, as it was sent to their feed.

Impressions can be made up by people having content on their feed on different devices too or seeing a friend share the same content, so one person can cause several impressions. This is the same with website pageviews too, it can be one person visiting a lotttt.

Reach is different – this tells you how many people have actually seen your sparkling content with their bare eyes. Generating better reach means that you’re creating more awareness. Impressions will often be a lot bigger than reach.

Reach and impressions get your content in front of people, with a view to getting them to take, as our good friend Elvis would say, a lil more action.

And Engagement and Session Views?

Omni-analytics gives you real-time data on how customers interact with your social posts aka engagement stats. Session view is how long a user active on a webpage.

Is your audience engaging with your content and how do you know? Posting content is your business’ way to start a conversation and deliver something like a super useful blog post.

Each social channel has its own ways to measure engagement, so you’ve gotta dig deep and compare. Luckily, we make it so simple with omni-analytics to quickly notice patterns and click-through to data-points.

You can toggle through to a specific social channel and see how your content’s getting on.

For example – on Twitter, you can track engagement responses by looking at big factors such as likes, @mentions and retweets or use a branded hashtag and see how branded keywords performed. You can see which keywords are performing well across your content and Lately can suggest which ones to use. This can lead to co-marketing with influencers and user-generated content campaigns.

Here are a few differences between engagement metrics on big social channels:

  • Twitter: Direct Messages, Likes, Retweets, Mentions, Organic Impressions, Links Clicked, Replies
  • LinkedIn: Impressions, Clicks, Likes, Comments and Shares
  • Facebook: Organic Likes, Paid Likes, Mentions, Impressions, Post Engagements, Links Clicked, Reactions, Comments and Shares
  • Instagram: Likes, Comments, Direct Messages, Reactions to stories, Engagement per Media and Most Engaged Hashtags

Which social posts are causing spikes and why? Does certain content do much better on some channels than others – you can click through and jump into the native post and see specific engagement stats, which cuts down loads of time that you’d be spending endlessly shifting through software and channels.

Pick on individual data points and hone in on precise sources, which will give you data for individual social channels, instead of all of them.

You can also see which content is doing best and some of the engagement characteristics trends, is it text based links doing well? Attachment and text? Text and Link? And you can take a look at Day of Week and Time of Day performance to garner more insight too.

One of the coolest parts is that you can export any part of your analytics too, to share your marketing magic and wisdom with important playasss in your team.

Try Omni-analytics

Instantly see all of your analytics across all of your social media channels and your website in an awesome single, whole-picture view. Click through any data point to see the content published that day and analytic detail to go with it to help you succeed with your marketing goals.

How to Expand your Marketing team’s Capacity (without increasing headcount)

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Rushed off your feet, genuinely googling ‘how can I clone myself?!’ and wishing you had Hermione’s time-turner; sound familiar?

And that’s just on a Monday, jeez.

You and your team are badass but you’re only human (sorry office dogs!). When you’ve got a to-do-list the length of the Great Wall of China…and clients keep emailing wanting stuff ASAP, you need to do something fast. That doesn’t involve running away.

Hire someone new?

It sounds like a good idea, but you’ve barely got time to make a coffee, let alone post job ads and interview.

What are you gonna do?!

Get your Socials Sorted

What if we said that for less than $350 per month, you could hire someone to do your social media and they’d generate five times more reach and 700% more engagement.

You’d bite my hand off, probably.

Here’s the deal, Lately is a marketing dashboard that can do the hard work for you, without having to break the bank on new hires.

How does Lately work?

Lately gives you 100% visibility across all of your social platforms, so you can see what’s goin’ down and tweak when you need to.

In no time at all, it’ll do this:

  • Write all your social posts
  • Schedule them at the best times for maximum engagement on every platform
  • Track the most popular posts and report back to you, the best topics for your next blog, articles or videos
  • Transcribe audio or video files and use the transcription to create more social posts

Weeeeeks of mind-numbing work, that your client wants done NOW can be right in front of you before you can say ‘I LOVE THIS DARN THING’.

Lately even wrangles project management, calendars, analytics, reporting and more – so you get hours and hours of work done in less than 60 seconds. I mean c’mon, 60 seconds!

Back to those socials…

The Social Post AutoGenerator creates dozens of social posts in just a few clicks. It’s something that could easily take a few hours for a team member to do. But now they can get busy with other important stuff.

Sounds awesome, right?!

And there’s more, Lately can give you recommendations and pointers for better social post practice, like which times are best to post on certain platforms, using smart data and AI to tell you.

Super Clear Roles and Jobs

One of the worst things when you’re mega busy is that roles can get muddled in your team as everyone frantically runs around like headless chickens!

Who’s doing what when everything’s crazy? “Hey, have you done that super, super critical thing?”…*blank face* “erm, no…I thought you were doing it.” CHAOS ENSUES.

Lately gives you the capability to be more accountable for the work you do and the roles assigned to everyone.

Freeing up time by doing marketing tasks in seconds means that you’re instantly expanding your ability to get on with loads of other jobs instead.

And by aligning your planning, project management and publishing schedules, nothing’s gonna fall through the cracks and your entire team can easily see what needs to be done and when.

Say Goodbye to WTFs

Team members can end up spending hours toggling through loads of different software packages which isn’t fun or productive.

ZZZZZZZ

On top of that, half the time, they’re probably thinking, am I even going to get anything out of this? What am I doing?!

Cue marketing existential crisis!

Lately’s multi-channel analytics gives you social data in single, whole-picture graphs that let you click-through data points, see what caused each spike and connect workflow to results.

Everyone is moving in the same direction, based on super accurate social reports.

A dashboard completely takes the hassle out of actually employing an additional social media person, which takes lots of time and dollar.

AND the uncertainty period where a new hire is getting to grips with everything and you’re not 100% certain everyone’s pooling together the right info.

In one swoop, Lately can supercharge your social media prowess, without hiring new staff. Try it out today.