Course Content
1. The elements of communication
2. Internal communication plan
3. Metrics
4. Conclusions
Communication 4.0 represents a challenge due to the enormous speed of digital transformation. We have reviewed external communication processes with an emphasis on the digital tools needed to effectively communicate our ideas and reach our target audience, stressing the creation of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. We have also seen the need for a digital marketing strategy that allows us to define our objectives and the subjacent principles that govern any marketing proposal. On the other hand, we have seen the creation of an internal communication plan, highlighting the most remarkable features and the need for open and fluid communication between employees. We closed our module with a brief approach to social media metrics to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our communication strategies. In short, we focused on practical creation, promoting a step-by-step vision of development and implementation. We hope this module can contribute to achieving your goals and help you to lead your future communication strategy. Remember that adaptation is a fundamental competence of the creation process and, therefore, we want to encourage you to be updated on the trends of communication 4.0 and to make the most of your efforts.
Digital Marketing and how to level up your enterprise
If most people use social media every day, it makes sense to approach them through social media channels. Social media marketing -opposite to other types of marketing- interacts with its users in a digital area. The Institute of Digital Marketing (DMI) defines digital marketing as “the use of digital technology to create integrated, targeted and measurable communication that helps to acquire and retain customers in building deeper relationships with them” (C. Wymbs et al., 2011). Therefore, the application of digital marketing strategies plays an important role and, it should be considered if you want better communication with your target audience. One of the primary objectives of Marketing is to reach consumers at the moments, or touchpoints, that can influence their purchasing behavior (Saravanakumar, M., & SuganthaLakshmi, T. 2012).
We can stress several features of Digital Marketing following the results of the study ¨Impact of digital marketing development on entrepreneurship¨ Bizhanova et al., (2019)
- 1 Attracting the attention of a large target audience: through promotions, mailing lists, contextual advertising, SEO, advertising in social networks, etc.
- 2 Increase in the number of sales: most of the sales are carried out online, this is possible due to the existence of e-commerce (commerce made online). The information provided through different channels allows the user to compare different products or services instantly.
- 3 Determines the direction of competition: The Internet provides valuable information about the competitors and their strategies.
- 4 Does not require high material and financial resources: fortunately, it doesn’t require strict financial costs. In some cases, people prefer to let to professionals who are more experienced, and therefore, the investment or the financial resources required might change.
Nevertheless, we want to highlight the holistic perspective of digital marketing. It doesn’t consist merely in communicating and posting on social media, it requires an effort of planning your ideas. Commonly, digital marketing plans are left behind as they are time-consuming and difficult to keep updated.
Task: 10 min
Nevertheless, Digital Marketing is not only about social media. The following video explores the main concepts of Digital Marketing. Watch the video and answer the following questions:
1º) How many concepts does the video describe?
2º) What is SEO?
The following table describes the paradigm shift from the concept of Marketing 1.0 to Marketing 3.0. It shows the evolution and the improvements, marketing has purchased through the evolution of digitalization.
When thinking about which are the common ways of communicating externally, we have addressed, the following:
1º) Blogging: A blog is a site where a variety of articles and newsletters can be published. There are different types of software that provide comments, blog rolls, trackbacks, and subscriptions. As suggested in their study of social media marketing blogs should be conversational in tone rather than a corporate-speak press release (Saravanakumar, M., & SuganthaLakshmi, T. 2012). Blogs are efficiently a great chance to arrive at your users by generating engaging content of what are your main purposes, the activities carried out, or articles that ensure aligned objectives with yours. Thus, is the right place to include extended content about your publications.
Task: 15 min
Search and select three blogs that inspire you and reflect on these questions
1.What do they have in common?
2.Which are their key features?
3.What is missing?
2º) Microblogging: In this case, we refer primarily to Twitter as the main site for microblogging purposes. Microblogging is defined as “a form of blogging that lets you write brief text updates (usually less than 200 characters) and send them to friends and interested observers via text messaging, instant messaging (IM), email or the web”[1]. Twitter has had a great impact on how information is received among users, it mainly focuses on short text messages about different topics. We could say that Twitter is aligned with one of the biggest issues of information overload and tries to retain the attention of the users by posting short text which can call to the actions and read more information about what has been published. In addition, Twitter is fast, and incentives users to subscribe to the accounts to keep track of the publications they like most.
A hashtag looks something like this #bridgingthegap. Essentially a hashtag is a label for content, it helps others who are interested in a certain topic, quickly find content on the same topic (https://smallbiztrends.com/2013/08/what-is-a-hashtag.html).
Task: 30 min
Create an account on Twitter and get familiar with the application.
1. Explore what is hashtag and how can you use it.
2. Create your first post and add several hashtags.
Alternative: For the ones who are familiar with Twitter we recommend the following video, which focuses on how to create engaging content and attract users. Once you have watched the video, continue with the following tasks:
1. Explore other related accounts to your business idea. What are they posting?
2. Start following other similar accounts to your business idea.
3º) Social media platforms: Social media platforms are spaces of digital interaction where users interact with others, send, and receive messages, news, images, etc. All the phases of presential interaction are done in a digital form. For our objective, we will explore how some of the most popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, can increase the number of interactions with your platform and solidify your brand.
Some of the benefits of social media marketing vs traditional marketing are
- Engagement: The users are constantly in touch with your content and your brand. Therefore, you can evaluate the ¨engagement¨ based, for example, on the number of likes your publications have.
- Key performance metrics: It provides measurement and insights that might help during your strategy plan. There are different types of metric analysis that we will see in the next unit.
- Time: On average, people check their social media account more than ten times a day. Therefore, the content created should be posted frequently. A good practice for organizing the content creation is to elaborate a plan, determining how many days publications are going to be posted and the frequency of them.
- Coverage: If we compare it with traditional marketing strategies, social media platform covers a big number of users and certainly allows reaching large audiences.
We have selected three apps –Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn– for being most used among users. As we have seen in the statics from above, YouTube is highlighted as the second most used social platform in 2021. Nevertheless, YouTube requires more features and video creation skills and for this reason, we strongly recommend the following lecture as establishing a beginner’s guide to start creating videos on YouTube.
Nowadays, the interaction and creation throughout videos have increased. A good video can evoke more emotions in the users by attaching issues or interests that relate to the viewer. Videos are most engaging than texts, due to the use of different elements, such as music and different images in a continuum. Despite the time effort of design and content creation is always stressed as one of the easiest ways to become visible among your users. Therefore, we want you to be aware of the benefits of social media stressed and to try to boost and improve your skills while creating.
Task: 30 min
Create a Facebook Business Page. Use the following resource to get started. Alternative task: What is a Spike? check how you can improve your insights if you have already a Facebook Business Page.
There is always a start point, so we want to invite you to embrace the learning process and don’t be afraid of not knowing where to start. Below we have described the essential steps for creating a Facebook Business Page, Instagram page, and LinkedIn account. If you are already familiar with these tools, we have addressed alternative tasks for mastering your skills while using social media networks.
1º) Essential steps for Facebook
We have explained the essential steps to set up a Facebook Business Page that will boost your visibility and help you through the process of reaching your target audience. According to Matt Goulart, Founder of Ignite Digital:
¨Social media is about the people! Not about your business. Provide for the people and the people will provide you¨.
As we stressed before, keep your user in mind while designing, creating, and implementing your strategies.
2º) Essential steps for Instagram
Did you know that among the reasons for using social networks for digital marketing, there are social and psychological motivations for using Instagram?
We should ask ourselves what keeps people connected to social media. Are we emotionally connected to our devices? We will explore the deep motivations that maintain people using Instagram, and some of the key elements that might help us to define our content creation, brand strategy, and digital interaction with our users. Regarding Facebook, Lee et A., (2010) identify four motivations:
- To keep relationships with friends within the red.
- To meet new people.
- To be updated about events and news.
- For entertainment.
McCune & Thompson (2011) identified four motivations as well for using Instagram:
- To share images with different users.
- To save or ¨store¨ living experiences.
- The possibility to see through the eyes of others the images that users upload.
- To belong to a community i.e., to receive comments and likes from others.
- The creativity
- The motivation to promote the platform as a resource for liberating stress and expressing feelings.
A study carried out in Spain analyzed the motivations of 228 people to obtain a better view of the deeper motivations of Instagram. The study, Social and psychological Motivations for using Instagram focused primarily on the behavior of young people as being the ones more connected with Instagram. Among the results, the motivations identified are the following:
- To keep in contact with what is new, to not lose the latest news, places, or events from others, whether they are from a close circle, strangers. or celebrities.
- Store, record, and publish everything they do for others to see)
- interact with other users of the platform (getting to know and making themselves known to others through photography, creating a personal and unique space).
If we summarize the key elements from the different studies, we have:
In essence, these elements reproduce the subjacent motivations behind the use of social networks. In the next task, we will create an Instagram page following the steps described above:
Task: 30 min
Essential task: Create an Instagram account.
Alternative Task: The following lecture explores how influencers impact consumer behavior. After you have read the lecture:
1. Address three influencers that could help you spread your business idea
2. Why you have chosen them? Why do you think are important for your business?
3. Explain how you will contact them and what you have to offer in order to promote your business (E.g: gifts, special discounts our bonuses)
Once your Facebook Business page is ready, you can easily connect to Instagram and Facebook. That means, the information of the insights and basic metrics of Instagram, will appear on Facebook Business Page.
3º) Essential steps for LinkedIn
LinkedIn is well-known to serve as a professional networking site. Whereas Instagram and Facebook have wider applications, LinkedIn is not used for job seekers and employers, it is also used for brand awareness and building long-term professional relationships.
For the next task, first look at this video and reflect on the steps Natasha Vilaseca gives to improve your marketing strategy on LinkedIn.
Building your external channels should be located among one of the first steps to implementing your idea. Besides, these exercises has the purpose to help you to reflect on the following.
- What do I want to communicate?
- How do I communicate?
- Why do I need to communicate?
The first question reflects on planning and content creation, even before starting designing, ask yourself this question. There is not a single answer to this question as you probably know, although it allows categorizing your content regarding your image (brand), activities (purpose), and impact(suitability). The second question is linked with the external communication channels you have recently created, there is a space for everything but choose carefully what and where you want to post it. Some designs don’t fit accordingly the app, long paragraphs might be hideous for Instagram but appealing for your website. Finally, the last question evolves about what you have learned applying marketing strategies. Digital marketing has expanded, and the digital transformation has created an online environment where information is everything. If you want to successfully connect, share, and reach your audience you must communicate, otherwise, the possibilities of building truthful relationships with your potential target audience are compromised.
Task: 20 min
Essential task: Create a LinkedIn account.
Alternative task: For the ones who are familiar with LinkedIn. Read the following Tips and Tricks for increase the impact of your LinkedIn profile. After you have read the lecture, answer the following questions:
1. Why is important to have 1st-degree connections?
By the end of this task, you might have successfully created four different social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn).