Times they have a changed
Times they have a changed (with apologies to Bob Dylan)
Jump turned 10 recently – yes, jelly and ice cream all round! Perhaps more importantly, we donated to Trees for Cities, enabling the charity to plant even more trees to help create green urban spaces. So not only are we helping more trees grow, we can we help your business expand too. This is the first in a series of blogs that will help explain how.
Yes, we know that you don’t really care about us turning 10; we understand that you care about how we can help your business in what are fluctuating times, to say the least. But as environmental issues have changed dramatically over those ten years, so have the ways in which we can help you communicate. Umm, that was a somewhat tortuous segway but we got there in the end!
The overarching difference from 10 years ago is (obviously) the rise and rise of the internet and with it the new tools it makes accessible to everyone. But therein lies the problem: so many people now think simply pressing a few buttons and uploading something – anything – and the job is done. Put it this way, just because you can open PhotoShop and crop an image doesn’t make you a photographer.
Using social media in a B2B environment is probably the greatest single change we’ve seen and the use in our industry – be that Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or, to a lesser extent Facebook – has grown exponentially in recent years. So why start tweeting now, you may ask. Business is good and you have leads and new customers to keep you busy. Well, be warned, your customers’ habits were already changing rapidly back in 2014, according to an Accenture report. That’s only accelerated since then.
B2B organisations continue to see a major shift in customer behaviour, marked by a steady increase in online research and browsing across multiple sources before purchasing. As that report states, overall, 94 percent of B2B buyers say that they conduct some form of online research before purchasing a business product. Fifty-five percent of B2B buyers conduct online research for at least half of their corporate purchases.
The way you present yourselves online – of course social media postings are central to this – is therefore critically important. We help our clients with their online presence in all forms and of course as you’re aware, we ain’t just talking retweets and likes!
If you’re starting from scratch or you’ve already dabbled in the social world and want to take it further – or you need to discuss how this can fit into a wider communications strategy – then get in touch.
Victoria Orford