Top tips and upcoming trends for PR and social media

As 2021 draws to a close, it’s time to get ahead of the curve on what’s new for 2022.

If you work in marketing & PR this means thinking about what trends to be tapping into this upcoming year. To help you out, our friends over at Oggadoon are here to share their predictions for what’s next and reflect on 2021.

Brand building goes beyond just logos and colours in your marketing material. It is about influencing what your stakeholders think about your proposition and your company based on their emotional experience.

When refreshing a brand and creating an aura of trust it does not happen by accident; if done well it is part of a strategic marketing planning process planning that creates the brand voice and personality which through a well-orchestrated launch campaign, then emanates across all physical and digital customer touchpoints.

Let’s remind ourselves of the definition of a stakeholder; “A stakeholder has a vested interest in a company and can either affect or be affected by a business’ operations and performance. Typical stakeholders are investors, employees, customers, suppliers, communities, governments, press or trade associations” Investopedia.

• You may like: Guest Blog: Top Tips for Early Stage Founders

Digital Marketing and PR are the vehicles to transport messages to key stakeholders and they are essential tools to communicate the brand voice and more emotive brand personality by creating awareness and trust that your brand has the ability to solve customer problems and be accountable for its existence.

Leveraging the personalities of your leadership as extensions of the brand is a great strategy.

New customers, investors or potential employees like to know the leaders or founders behind the brand,  it creates an understanding and trust in the business as a whole.

This re-enforces the human aspect and inspirational stories behind the development, growth but also challenges around building a business. This allows for a more inclusive diverse approach to humanising a brand.

All businesses are posed with issues at some time or another and during the Covid-19 pandemic, there are other supply chain and cyber security challenges that are thrown into the threat mix.

Transparency is the foundation of trust, as it creates empathy from employees, clients and partners. Ensure that you have a good understanding of any challenging situation and share the facts as you know them – who, what, why, when and where.

Create a continuous two-way conversation as you learn the details and the plan to resolve the situation. Solve the problems first and deal with negative communication later in your wrap-up.

Regardless of the size of your business, it is always good practice to reaffirm your business priorities around retention, acquisition and positioning. From a brand building PR perspective it is an extremely practical and fruitful activity to benchmark yourself against your competitors.

A competitive PR analysis is where you take your audit to the next level by accessing the strengths, weaknesses and strategies of your competitors’ PR activities against your own metrics. You will see areas where you may need to up your promotional game (their strengths) or push for opportunities in sectors where your competitor is absent.

This then maps out areas where you may need to redefine your messaging or build better relationships with the press, event organisers or association partnerships in order to gain a competitive advantage, offering more intelligence to the plan.

Ensure all of your owned channels have consistent messaging and digital assets. Listen to trends and news that is related to what your business, brand and stakeholders care about. Start or join in the conversation with key stats, graphics and blogs linking your messaging, themes and solutions to external forces causing problems or creating opportunities.

Utilising industry or consumer data on social media or within PR copy provides science-based intelligence to complement brand storytelling. It helps to set the scene and add context and relevance for the viewer or reader.

Video is not an option anymore if you want to continue to have reach and engagement on social media. Especially the short-form videos across TikTok, Instagram Reels, Linked-In and YouTube shorts are shaping the way users consume videos across social media.

Make longer-form content work harder by distributing it into bite-sized pieces that lead back to the longer data-rich content that can be hidden behind a data capture form or paywall. Your sales team will be very happy for the leads.

Customer privacy and security is becoming a must-have for companies who want to maintain their reputation in the current highly sensitive cyber security environment. Be prepared to have a strategy in place for when, not if you have a cyber attack.

Google is changing the way it is ranking websites on search engine results pages. The websites providing relevant information that answer users’ queries as high as possible on the web page can outperform websites with a higher domain author and expertise that are not prioritising the information on the page based on user search intent.

If you would like help discovering or communicating about your business brand voice or personality then please visit oggadoon.co.uk or do get in touch with nicola@oggadoon.co.uk.