How can small businesses transform their digital presence?
In 2018 Nordic Patent Institute implemented a new marketing strategy with a primary focus on our digital presence. The main objective for this initiative was to align our services of providing high quality prior art searching for businesses and intellectual property law firms with our digital identity. An important milestone here was to welcome Nehir Durmus to be a part of our team.
Nehir is currently obtaining a master’s degree in innovation and marketing at Copenhagen Business School, which combined with her professional experience and knowledge within digital marketing, made her a valuable contribution to NPI’s renewed marketing strategy and implementation.
Now that a year has passed we decided to interview Nehir and ask her to share her top 3 insights on what small businesses can do in order to transform their digital presence.
1. Don’t engage with your customers – right away!
“I know it might sound like I’m going against a mainstream idea here, but I’d say don’t engage with your customers – right away”, Nehir starts off saying in our interview. “In today’s digital age we are constantly being bombarded with information from a wide range of online marketing channels, which I believe is both the beauty and the curse of digital marketing.”
“Digital marketers have many options, and for this exact reason, I believe we have to make deliberate choices when conveying information about our products and services. After all, every bit of information we send has to support the digital identity, we want to put forward”, Nehir continues. “I therefore want to underline the importance of adjusting your content to have a common thread, because this will add up to your digital identity”, Nehir states.
2. Create consistent value
“In order to do this, you have to know what online marketing channels your customers are on and more importantly the needs and demands of your target audience. This was one of the main KPI for our content marketing in 2018, because our customers in particular make up a clearly defined niche. They are mostly patent attorneys and other people interested in intellectual property, for which we share specific content they find of great relevance, ” Nehir continues.
“This also meant that we needed to define the online marketing channels our customers are on in order to deliver the message. Here I believe it is important to remember that companies cannot engage the same ways in existing channels”, Nehir says seriously. “Our two main channels are LinkedIn and Twitter, and we see that whereas the engagement on LinkedIn requires content sharing, Twitter yields more to engagement in the form of liking, commenting and reposting content. We also found other differences on the engagement of the platforms in our case, which we acted upon”, Nehir states, bringing us to the third and final point.
3. Test and adjust
“What makes social media and content marketing so fascinating is the fact that you don’t have to invest capital to make it work. You can test to see what type of engagement works, and either choose to do more of that or promote it through investment”, Nehir says smilingly. “This is what we did in order to deliver consistent value, and it also helped us define our end-user.”
“I really do believe we’ve come to an era, where our brands are co-created with our customers especially through brand communities. For this I’d say engage, engage and engage with your customers, but do it so it aligns with your digital identity through valuable content on their channels”, Nehir says.
I want to inspire!
Unfortunately for us, Nehir’s position at Nordic Patent Institute is temporary so we end the interview by asking her, what are her aspirations for the future. “I want to inspire – inspire to change, to make a difference. That’s also why I’m currently a voluntary Project Manager in Save the Children Youth, where we help children fight bullying.”
“In a few years, I see myself in a management position, because I want to inspire my team and be inspired, and push forward our vision, because I know that humans can do anything we set our minds to. We only need to believe and we’ll receive”, Nehir says with a big smile.
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