Leading online projects is much more than simply managing a brand’s social networks. It is a bigger challenge that involves great responsibility: you need to involve more people in this task, not robots who do as you say, look down and don’t ask questions, just receive orders. No, I’m talking about passionate people who are engaged, committed and enthusiastic. It is your duty to inject them with this enthusiasm at all times.
Running Online Projects
Once you face the challenge of leading, developing and running online projects, you must consider a series of concepts related with some of the areas required to carry out this type of job:
– Social Web Strategy: Develop, feed, maintain, optimise, grow and lead the online ecosystems.
– Web site/blog: optimise our strong points, focusing on improving “shareability,” usability and navigation.
– Community engagement: build the foundations for participation, emotional bonding and passion by interacting, answering and sharing with fans, friends and followers. Create an interconnected community that increases the online scope, passion, strength and feeling.
– Content generated by the user: seek this type of content in a way that can be shared in order to strengthen affinity with the community.
– Newsletters: create dynamic newsletters that are effective and can be shared: indispensable to complete a good online marketing programme. This is a valid tactic to increase leads. Depending on how fresh you content is, how interesting your product/service is and how innovative or creative your strategy is, you can programme your issues on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis.
– Databases: every day that goes by, your database should more or less increase and should continue to increase. That is what we live and die for in marketing. This much hasn’t changed even if the game has changed.
– e-shop / ticket system: think about becoming your own online distribution channel, managing your distribution, sales, customer services, middlemen and salespersons. How? Setting up your own online store or ticket service or whatever your product/service is.
To this end, you need an e-commerce platform, excellent and efficient logistics (try to deliver your product or service in less than 24 hours and see what happens…). I’m not talking about the quality of your product/service as we’re taking that for granted. Otherwise, forget everything I’m talking about here and make sure that your company delivers a product based on excellence and a value that will change whoever purchases it. Once you achieve this, get started with the marketing and social media side of things!
– Mobile commerce: think about how to sell through mobile technology, create an App that encourages the interaction between consumers and the company, an interaction that simplifies any transactions that might take place. This can happen through a direct sales platform through the App, QR codes, “print at home”, etc. There are new systems that implement all of these improvements and others such as analytics, real-time results, SMS or email support, services like “entradas a tu alcance” which, furthermore, adapt perfectly to mobile devices.
– Online monitoring and branding: monitoring the brand in the online world, in such a way that you’re able to see what happens around it. Whether you like it or not, there are conversations going on about your brand out there. Some of them will be positive and others will be negative; both are equally important and, yes, you should be taking part in them!
– Online support: offer support to your audience and brands in terms of customer services, post-sales, pre-sales or guidance in the purchase process.
– Marketing actions and campaigns: the idea behind this will vary according to the objectives and the strategy to reach them. It could be creating a database, reaching a new segment in the audience, creating brand perception and awareness, product penetration, market testing and the list goes on. Whatever the action, make sure it has a launch, execution and end dates, a budget, team/resources and monitoring/results.
– Inter-department collaboration: collaborate constantly with the press, design, production or management departments, for instance.
– Online promotion programme: develop and launch programmes aimed at promoting our service/product using the online media. The idea behind this is to boost sales.
– Corporate social responsibility campaigns: design and launch this type of campaigns which aim to contribute to society in one way or another. Discover new talent, courses or training for the unemployed.
How do you carry out your online projects? How do you face this challenge? What other areas am I missing?
Photo credit: katrina_30.