 OK, we're going to crack on. Welcome, everybody. This is the final webinar of series 2 of the Recover and Rise program. So this is the Ask the Experts panel. So this session is being recorded, and this will be circulated to the wider West Sussex business community later as well. So we're going to have an exciting panel of digital trainers, digital champions, business support people, and also businesses who are attending. I've also captured a huge amount of questions from our attendees during the course of the webinars, and some of you know our businesses on here as well. And this whole session is to kind of wrap it all up, answer some of those burning questions. You've got the experts here, and it's going to be quite an interesting session. So we've got a few introductions to do first, and then we're going to go into the panel. I'll explain exactly how everything is going to work. OK, so this is part of the West Sussex Recover and Rise digital accelerating program, all about enabling West Sussex businesses to get online, get more efficient, and grow their marketing. So this is series 2, Customs and Marketing. There's two more series in this program of works which are live on the EventBite website. So you've got Systems and Productivity, and you have Growth and Expansion. That's what's going on today. So you haven't booked onto one of those courses. I'd get on there and book on. It's all free, some amazing content and amazing webinars that have yet still to come. We're halfway now, throughout the program. So here we go. OK, so number eight in the series. OK, this is our wrap up, the marketing panel with the experts. Am I an expert, Ollie? I'm not sure. I'm going to be the host. Self-proclaimed expert. That's right. I'm good at nautical analogies. We're going to introduce all the panelists quite shortly as well, but before we just got a drop into that, we've just got a few introductions to make and just a few business support that we just want to make you aware of. So before we go into that, we're created Bloom. So we're curating this series. We're a search engine marketing agency, and we service Sussex businesses, local businesses, charities, and green businesses. OK, OK, that's our pitch. All right, so digital champions. Karen, are you with us? I am. Good morning, everybody. Or even afternoon, actually. Good morning. Good morning. OK, Karen, I've got a slide here for you. Tell us about the digital champions and what the local businesses who are going to be. Listening now and watching this later can get from this amazing resource. OK, so I'm Karen. I'm a growth relationship associate for the Coastal Capital Growth Hub. You will also meet my colleague, Nasa, later on in the networking session. And we have some of the digital champions on the call today. So for those of you that aren't aware, the Growth Hub provides fully funded business support to businesses of all sizes in the West Sussex area. Our roles as growth relationship associates are to have open and honest, frank conversations with business owners, find out what their barriers and challenges to growth are, and then go off and signpost them or provide a range of support to help them overcome those barriers. For this program here, we're delighted to have seven of our growth champions who specialize in the digital area. And as part of this program, all people that attend any of the workshops are able to access three hours, eight hours of support from a specialist who you will meet, as I say, the range of them later on. And I think that's probably all I need to say for right now, I think. Yep, absolutely great. Thank you so much. So there's some contact details we're going to post up on the end of this as well. And the digital champions who are present, you're going to be able to introduce yourself during the panel and just say what your speciality is for the coming up panel. OK, lovely. Who's next? Rhys, do we have Zoe? We do. We do. Hi, everybody. This is working. This is working. Hi, so I'm one of two, actually three, Innovation Advisors for the RISE program. Now, the RISE program is brand new. We are funded by the West Sussex County Council and ERDF. So we're we're here to support all local West Sussex businesses and some coastal capital businesses to SMEs who have got some innovation idea or innovation sort of direction that they would like to move towards. So we can provide it's all free. We can provide workshops. We can provide access to university experts at Brighton and Sussex universities and we're offering support in terms of very interesting, diverse workshops around innovation and then being able to kind of do deeper dives into particular sectors. So we've got lots of layered opportunities for support for you. It's very much RISE is really about, as you can see on the side, exploring ideas, developing your knowledge, building your capacity and unlocking the expertise so that can be about sharing expertise and therefore transferring that knowledge into your companies to then develop and grow as businesses. So we're offering up to the support packages up to seven seven thousand five hundred pounds, so it's quite a significant offer. And that can be in terms of the access to to the experts at the university that you get kind of like one to ones with. So we are our portal is is live. You can register all for free. And we look forward to welcoming businesses on board. OK, wonderful. Thank you for that. Again, another some amazing, some amazing resources available for the businesses in West Sussex. That's not the only resource available to you. Is it Gareth from Hot House Business? No, it's not Stuart. And thanks for the introduction. I think, yeah, I always look really tiny on these on these. So, yeah, I'm sorry, but anyway, thank you very much. And thanks for inviting me along to speak at this last session. And good to see everybody here. So I'm Gareth Gareth Sear. I work for the University of Chichester, but we run the Business Hot House programme where our focus is on supporting SME businesses across the coastal capital region through grants and guidance and to help them achieve growth. So we're also funded through the European Union Regional Development Fund, West Sussex, local authorities, Brighton, Hove, City Council as well. We've got six strands to our support. We run business startup boot camps. We run a productivity and growth consultancy through the Sussex Innovation Centre and we run innovation support. This is more about the next step of innovation from where RISE we're working with you on. We also do access to finance support. So if you're looking to raise funds for your digital innovation and your digital transformation in your business, we can support that. But that also supports our grant fund programme that we're delivering as well. So we've got the Invest for Grant Fund programme and we've worked with a whole number of businesses to help them with digital transformation whether that's through becoming e-commerce enabled, whether that's through getting bespoke software made, whether that's about computerising machinery that they use in their production facilities. So there's a whole range of different things that we support businesses with through our grant fund. And then lastly, we offer or will be offering from January leadership and management development. So you can access up to 12 hours of free support through the Business Hot House programme. Pretty much any stage of your business. And then we've got a grant fund programme that offers grants from 2000 all the way up to about £170,000. And here's all my contact details. Wonderful. OK, that's brilliant. Again, more amazing resources available for these West Sussex businesses and Sussex. But is it just West Sussex? Gareth, is it Sussex as well? It's West Sussex, Lewis, Spidey, the Hove City and all the way up to East Surrey Counties as well. So it's the coastal capital region. OK, yeah, much wider remit. So if you are a business, one of those areas, you need a bit of help, you need to, you know, with that then hop on, hop on there. OK, right. Let's meet the panel. OK, so I'm going to stop sharing so I can see you all. There we go. So we should all be, hopefully, you are familiar with Zoom. If you are a panelist, if you could just use for me the reaction to raise your hand and I can introduce all of you into this session. If you're a business attendee, what I'd say is if you have any questions at all, you want answering to the panel during the course of this session, pop it into the chat for me and Olly, Olly gives the wave. There we go. Olly is going to keep an eye on those and we'll make sure that, you know, as you've attended, your questions do get answered, but we do have a whole host of questions from from our attendees from the course of from this series as well. So without further ado, I'm just going to quickly introduce the panel. Rachel Dines. You'd like to just quickly introduce yourself and your speciality on this panel. Sure, thanks, Stu. Hi, everyone. I think most of you have seen me on some of this series by now, but I'm Rachel. I run Shaked Up Creative. We are a marketing agency in Worthing. We specialize in working with small businesses and our core services cover SEO, website design development, marketing campaigns, graphic design and PR. I'm also a digital champion as well. I was so a digital champion. Many hats. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. OK, Lisa. Hi, everyone. I'm Lisa from Consulting with Care. My business is strategic business advice, leadership consulting, and I'm a productivity expert in terms of digital, but looking at systems, tools, processes to make the business more efficient to communicate with customers better and to help with your team productivity. So I am one of the digital champions as well for Coast to Capital and I will be presenting session five in the next series, which is all about productivity tools. So I'll be going through them in more detail there. OK, thank you. OK, Pam, technology fell. OK, we'll move on. Oli Sloan. Hi, everyone. My name is Oli. I've been working with Studio Creative Bloom for the last five years. I like to take a more kind of psychological approach when I am dealing with SEO, UX and also on the paid advertising for Creative Bloom as well. So I kind of dip my toe in quite a few different buckets to try and, you know, as a consultant, give small businesses kind of quite a breadth of knowledge to give them the best kind of idea of what's going to help get their business found online. OK, thank you. Thank you. OK, Andrew, Kerry Beall, I can see you there. Either. Yes, I'm Andrew from Get Consultants. So I've worked with Coast to Capital, people like Karen for about the last two, three years, and I focus on IT strategy and digital marketing based in Chichester. So I help SMEs plan out an integrated digital marketing strategy and how to use technology to improve things like customer communication and project collaboration and staff productivity. And typical projects would be things like websites, web analytics, Google Analytics, that sort of thing and social media, but all designed to get your business noticed and to help you take technology to add value to your brands and services. OK, excellent. OK, Joe Brianti on our panel. Hi, everyone, I'm Joe Brianti. I'm actually based in London, but I am a data protection officer and I provide a range of support services to small businesses and sole operators in the GDPR space. So that could be just giving you advice and guidance on how you are complying or not, as the case may be, doing website reviews, helping you manage your data breach or a subject access request or just being a full data protection officer for your business on a remote basis. OK, thank you. That's wonderful. I think that's it from our panellists. OK. It's from you, mate. What do you do? Apart from me, OK. Well, I'm the host. I'm the host, so I get to be comical throughout the session. But I'm Stu Davies, head of Agency of Creative Bloom. My speciality is strategy marketing, strategy and also search engine marketing and everything that goes along with it. So there we go. That's our that's our that's our wonderful panel. OK. Now, how this is going to work, champs, is our attendees may ask some questions. I've got a whole bank of questions I'm going to answer. As a panellist, if you want to answer one of the questions, if you stick your hand up using the Zoom, using the Zoom reactions, I'll go around, I'll go around the panellists and we can get a good breadth of inputs and opinions on a particular on a particular question, quite informal session. So this is all about it's just implying our knowledge. And this is going to be recorded. It's going to be sent out by West Sussex to a lot of West Sussex businesses. So we'll start with an easy one. OK. You know, it's going to be a strategy, a strategy question. So I'm going to group these into into different areas. So first question came from came from one of our attendees for one of the early sessions. And it was how should how should I, the small business, even go about trying to get to grips with a digital strategy? So let's see some panellist hands up, please. OK, see a few up there. Got any up there yet? OK. Andrea, I can see you smiling. It's a very broad, it's a very broad question. But give us a give us a quick 30 second answer. You don't give it. It's a broad one. So I think I think where would you start? Where would I start? OK, I've got, you know, I'm busy. I'm running my business. Where do I even start with this? Exactly. And I think I think preparing to kind of introduce digital technology into a business, I mean, oddly, it's all the non-text stuff that you have to look at first. So it's things like, you know, do you have a business vision and a mission and a USP and others? Do you know where your your business is actually going? Because unless you do and you've kind of got that messaging and the business plan behind it, then it's impossible to work out how you actually are going to introduce yourself as a business then online on social media or on a website, etc. So you'll need a business plan and generally a sales and a marketing plan as well. And you'll also need a plan that actually says how are you going to communicate with your customers? And I think as Stuart introduced in one of the programmes earlier in this series, one of the key things is understanding who your customers are and segmenting them into groups. So, you know, if you're a service business, for example, you might one minute be talking to a manufacturing business and a managing director and another minute you might be talking to a recruitment manager or somebody involved in marketing. And you're going to have to change the way that you position your business and your messaging accordingly. And that, of course, goes online, you know, whether you're communicating on social media, on websites, on email or however. And I think the other thing is is taking that whiteboard that you've got sitting in the corner you probably never used as well and trying to work out what are the clear descriptions of your business? What are the things that consumers are going to want from you? You know, how you better than your competitors? What exactly do you offer that other people don't? And what is going to make people buy your products? So not just in terms of benefits and physical things, but also emotionally. So it's things like that. I think hopefully that helps answer Stuart in terms of some of that. It's that prep in the background first that I think is key then to getting yourself online, but a critical part of it. Good answer. That session is available, will be available made available on recordings for anyone who missed it. Lisa, I can see your hand up. Hi, yeah. So just adding to what Andrew said, if you're looking at internal kind of systems and processes and team collaboration, the things I would say of where to start is sit back and think so similarly to the customers. It's kind of do the brainstorming, but just think about what it is you do on a daily basis at the minute so that you can see which tools are going to be the best for you because the mistake that people hopefully won't make is you just see lots of technology out there and lots of tools that say, oh, this is going to make your day more productive. And then people go, right, let's do that one. And then let's do this one. And there are actually lots of tools that do similar things, but in slightly different ways. So I think it's that planning and just really understanding what how your business runs and what your processes are currently to see which are the right ways to go for the digital adoption and to be efficient. OK, excellent. So that leads us to another question that was asked. So, you know, and this is quite a common common issue, especially with smaller businesses is I haven't time to do much marketing. I'm the only person in my business. How do I get over this? So I know this is a much, much broader, broader question as well. But what would you say, panellists? What would you what would you help? I'm an only operated business. I'm doing everything. OK, what what things can I do? I can see Rachel Dines has got a hand up there. Well, I think all of us here that are going to small business or still do own a small business experience that. And there are there are routes to cheaper and, you know, easily available resource, basically, you know, it doesn't have to be. Yes, outsourcing is great. But obviously, there is a cost with that. So I would say pick and choose, you know, what things are imperative that they're done correctly and in a certain way and on time and pay to outsource that to professionals in their field. And then for the other areas, you can use things like the step up program at the University of Sussex, which provides some interns. You can contact the universities and see if anyone needs work experience. Some of them will actually have job boards available for those who want some work experience as part of their course. And there are other options like that, you know, apprentices, schemes and other things that you can bring people in, you know, minimal training because they want to work hard, prove themselves and get that experience. And then you can get some of those jobs done off the list. That's great. So I remember an exercise I went through when Crazy Bloom was in its infancy is I did a pie chart of I kept time sheets of all of the stuff I was doing. And I sat down with my business coach at the time and said, well, what's the most valuable use of your time and which bits of this? You know, can you can you get somebody else, somebody else to do and help? Because the most valuable part of your time of that pie chart of those segments was you working on the business and you developing the business. And it might have been some of the delivery as well. So I'd be interested to know from some of our business support programs. And I might be putting you in the spot here. Have you guys worked with any small businesses, got any case studies where you've helped them get over this time issue where I'm the business owner and I can't get through it, whether it being resource or through productivity. Any hands up? Hopefully there hopefully there is one. OK, Lisa Kerr. I am. So as an example, I worked with a business that launched quite recently, actually an art gallery in London Street Art Gallery, so far cooler than I am and my client there. And he was having exactly that problem of just having so much, excuse me, on his own head, he'd got a couple of staff involved and people helping out, but just felt like he was completely overwhelmed with all the things that needed to happen. And I think, as you said, it's the point of working with a business coach at that point and looking at either just using them to kind of dump what's in your head and usually someone looking at it from a third party perspective can instantly see where you should focus or not. And then one of the tools that we use, we use two particular tools that he found helps and has carried on to use in the business. One of them is called Monday, which is a project management board and just meant that you could get down all the actions and allocate deadlines, allocate people to them. And the other one, that's something that I find quite handy is it's like a whiteboard, Andrew, but it's a digital whiteboard, which is a tool called Mindomo, where you can do mind mapping online. And again, you can share that amongst your team and you can allocate people's names to it or just to put things into those kind of chunks that you start seeing the patterns and you start to see more clearly where you need to focus. So lots of things that you can do. And I think often just getting it out there, getting into some kind of tool helps with that clarity so that you know where to put the time. OK, thanks. Gareth, can you see your hand up? Yeah, sorry, I didn't do it a little bit early. I couldn't work out where my cursor was on the screen. But yeah, just to say, with that helping people with their productivity and digital adoption and things like that, through the Invest4 Grant fund, as I mentioned earlier, we have helped a number of people with bespoke software. And one of the ones that sort of springs to mind was a business that I think they've got some like a several million pound turnover. And they were still running everything off of Excel spreadsheets. So they needed a bespoke sort of CRM system that linked in with all their other platforms and stuff as well. So, you know, they decided that once they'd reached, you know, X million pound of turnover, that was the right point to invest in the bespoke CRM system. Why they didn't do it when they'd reached X hundred thousand turnover. I don't know. But it was, yeah, so we supported them through that. The project will be ongoing, because again, the software developed takes a while to be done to see the results. But it's just moving away from, you know, cumbersome spreadsheet manipulation into something that will be a lot more efficient for them to use in the future. OK, OK, good. So yeah, I thought it's just important that there's a whole series of productivity in tools, but it is important just in touch because we've talked a lot about marketing for all the women in the world. If you haven't got that productivity, you haven't got that time carved out. You haven't got the resources lined up to do it. You're not going to get a headspace to be able to do it. So so next. So one and one another question we asked, we were asked a lot as a small business or as a business trying to get to grips with with digital. How how how can a small business work out what digital channel to invest in? Or, you know, so digital channel, do I work on my website? Do I work on my social media? Do I work more on content? Do I need to work on search market? Do I need to work on emailing and everything else that's in there? You know, don't need to be on TikTok. You know, how how paneled do I as a small business trying to get online work this out? You know, what would what would what would give me give me some give me some hands up? OK, Andrew, I can see your hands up. Might have been from the previous question, but it's up. You're going to answer this one. Well, I think I think what's really interesting is that it's often really useful in terms of any technology if you're a business is is everybody has some form of technology already in the business, whether it's an email system or a CRM system or an account system, whatever it is. But by looking at where the business uses technology well, that actually helps you. So you can do a simple kind of swap matrix like strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats about the technique you've currently got. And then if you actually want to adapt any new tech to help you with marketing, you know, if you're thinking of getting into social media, then the easiest way is to basically say what is the route you want to get through to in terms of customers and what is the one area where you think technology could improve your business and again, put that swap together. And in a way, it's not really much fun trying to then go browsing on Google and finding out what to do. But that's really where something like the digital champions come in is to or a consultant that, you know, to help you with that process to decide is your business right for more kind of old fashioned email? Is it a new responsive website because you've got all mobile users? Is it social media? Is it TikTok? Whatever it is. And I think that's a great way of actually looking at it and just break it down into a project. I think the key thing about any technology adoption is it's a bit like if you're going to build a house. The key thing is writing down your thoughts in a clear plan and a scoping document. So if you're going to put in a CRM system, you need to spec out what it is you want from the system, which customers do you want to get to? How do you want to communicate with them? And then taking that specification and then basically farming that out to a consultant that that can maybe help you put that technology in. OK, thanks. And what this kind of leads me into another one might be for Rachel is one of the questions with us is how do I even approach social media? What what channel should I be on? What platform should I be on as a as as a local business as a small business? Sure. Well, I mean, there's lots of articles and research online that looks at the demographics behind each platform. So you can actually see, you know, the age groups and the gender bias and the other types of elements that affect where you have to find your target audience. You know, once you define to your target customer is and you've got those avatars, then you can match up the channels that go with that and social media is no exclusion. You can see whether actually Facebook's going to be worth your time. It is pretty hard to solve as a business that you might need to put money into it. You might have better success over on Instagram or one of the more visual platforms like Pinterest. So that's really where to start to figure out who you're trying to talk to and get in front of and then which platforms they're most likely to be using on a day to day. OK, Oli Sloan. And I was just going to add to what Rachel was saying, you know, I think as soon as you're jumping on a social media platform, it's really important to know what the customer wants from you in that kind of medium. So a lot of businesses we work with, you know, you start off maybe making this mistake sometimes of just promoting a lot of products or just projecting a lot of what they want to say as opposed to doing the research around what the customer wants to hear and what they're going to find most valuable from those things, whether that's your imagery video, if you're doing research or if it's just, you know, showing a bit more of your company personality. I think you it's always really important as well to really do a lot of research around the customer on those platforms and, you know, it helps identify the difference between what you're posting on maybe Facebook versus what you might post on Twitter, because they should be different. You should be, you know, appealing to the people that you're finding on those platforms. OK, good. Yeah. OK, so, you know, if I'm selling to you know, quantity surveyors, probably TikTok is not my traction channel. Who knows? Who knows? So a few more strategies we're going to move on. And so somebody asked in one of the first sessions, how important is my website, OK, as a landing point? Do I need a website? Can I use a social Facebook page or a LinkedIn page? So this will be an interesting question. Oli Sloan. OK. Yeah, so I mean, I mean, it depends massively on what set you're working in. And I think there's a few things to kind of highlight. And one is your website can be used fantastically if you're looking to be found online. So what I mean by that is if someone's typing a service or something into Google and you want your website to pop up, there are things you can do on your website to encourage that to happen in terms of improving your SEO practices and that kind of thing, getting you your search engine optimization sorted. But saying that again, knowing your customer, it, you know, are your customers the type of people who are going on to Google and searching for a specific service in a specific area? Or are you creating a brand that is the way your website ends up being more of almost like an online business card rather than something that's generating you kind of search inquiries and that kind of thing. So again, it's about kind of knowing what you what you want from your website, whether it's to generate traffic and to to appear on Google or if it's just to kind of direct people to maybe through kind of social channels or something like that. And good, good. Rachel Dines. Yeah, just to add to that, I always say in my social media training that you shouldn't be solely relying on third party platforms because they can disappear at any minute. You know, we've seen social channels come and go. New ones arriving and it's basically the next big thing. And then they don't quite make the cut. So it's always good to have something that you're in charge of, that you can put your information and your time and you can put energy into that, being your own space and your front door, so to speak. OK, we often see evolution of websites, I suppose. You know, you might start off with just something you've chucked up because you're just starting out and it's so one page yet. And then it's a business card and then it might become, oh, actually, I need something a little bit more here. I need to say what I do and then it starts to kind of evolve out. So, you know, often our website is an evolutionary thing, I think, and something to build on. I think what the important thing is to work out where you are in your business and what you need it to do for you and, you know, whether you're ready to kind of invest more for it to try and work hard for you. Andrew, I mean, this is an interesting topic, Andrew. We could probably do a whole session just on this, but what are your thoughts? Well, it's very interesting. I think that's a really good point, actually, Stuart, about the evolution. I mean, I remember back in 1998, I built my first website, not that I did it because in those days you had to get a specialist to do it in horrible code. But what's really interesting in the last five years if you take things like WordPress, Wix and Squarespace, where you can kind of ready-build, there's ready-built templates to build a website, the days of having to spend, you know, five, 10, 15,000 on a website are long gone. So, in actual fact, you could easily redevelop exactly what Rachel said, which is like just a sort of standard page that you maybe had 10 years ago into a pretty decent site that looks fantastic on all devices, fully responsive, has lots of good content and made you in it for just a couple of thousand pounds. In fact, you know, if you do it yourself in Wix and Squarespace, something like that, about 500 pounds, but there are three things about any website, though, which are really important. Content has always been absolutely critical. So somebody who can, if you're not good at writing content, who can help you write that content, get your message across succinctly. Secondly is obviously the design, but again, a lot of that has gone out of the way now because it's ready-built in templates, which is great. And the third part is media, because I think the days of just having a few pictures in a site, again, are kind of gone and you do need to use things like good, high quality images and video a lot more as well, even if it's doing your own kind of mini video blog. So refreshing your content constantly these days, even if it's a cheap site, it is absolutely key. Okay, good one. I'm just interested to know our business support organization. Is grant funding available for website projects? Anyone like Spencer? Yeah, I don't have to answer that. Yeah, we do support website projects. So through the Invest for Grant Fund, we can support revenue costs as well as capital costs. So quite a lot of our revenue projects, small businesses have applied for, have been for redevelopment of websites, marketing consultancy, branding and all those sort of associated things that go together with it all. So we have a minimum project size of 5,000 pounds. So if you're going to an agency to get a high impact website done, you could be looking at around about that sort of money anyway. So yeah, we can support web development projects through the Invest for Grant Fund. Okay, that's really good to know. It's good for us agencies to know as well. We're trying to get the word out, yeah. The people through you. Okay, so agencies, if you're on, there we go, get the money off your feet. Karen? Yeah, just to also add into what Gareth was saying, some of the local districts and boroughs and local authorities also run ad hoc grant schemes. I know that Aaron have got one running at the moment that funds going, getting online. So new websites as well as upgrading your current ones. It's always worthwhile signing up to their business email newsletters to hear what grant funding comes out as and when as soon as it's launched. That's a great tip. I mean, we always talk about the website being a bit of an elephant in the room in digital marketing. For all, we can bring all the traffic to you as we could, but the website's not quite up to scratch. Okay, so I'm gonna move on to an interesting strategy, brand. Okay, so one of the sessions we did was on brand and one of the questions that came out was, should a company have a brand? What's the value of having a brand or a mission? Do I actually need one? Isn't it just me and some colors and the logo? So it'd be interesting to get a view from one of our panelists on this. If I'm gonna see a hand up. Or our views on brand, power of brand for businesses. Rachel, I can see your hand isn't up, but I'm gonna ask you anyway. Because you've really led our brand. I didn't put my hand up. Otherwise we're gonna have 30 seconds of silence. That's fine. I didn't put my hand up because everyone's heard from me on this already. I thought someone else would like to say something. However, yes, all businesses can have a brand. We're not having to aim to be the corollas of this world. But branding is more than just a logo. It's the whole essence of the business and actually what your values are, where you want to take the business and what your internal kind of environment is like. And even down to who you hire or why you hire them and how they fit in with your business and your goals. So yes, the answer is yes. Okay, good, good. Anyone else wanna talk about brand, the importance of brand or any brand examples? They've seen a good practice recently. If not, we can move on to the next section. Okay. So, okay. Again, Olly. I was too slow. It's because I can't put my hand up as a co-host. I have to do like an applause thing. Oh, right. Okay. That's why I'm just applauding people. Oh, you're just applauding me. I was just getting an applause. The only thing I was gonna add on the end is kind of brand consistency. And that's kind of, if you're gonna put yourself out there in multiple areas, it's really important to start to establish what is your kind of brand voice? What are your guidelines? How do you want to appear? Because people, if you're gonna put yourself out there, depending on where people find you, it can be just as confusing and kind of to your detriment. If your brand is confused, your language is changing, people throughout your organization aren't all clear on how you present yourself and what you say and your language and that kind of thing. So I was just gonna add that being consistent with your brand, wherever you are out there on your website, social media, even when you're kind of, you know, quick pitch, yeah, consistency is really important. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Andrew. A very cool one actually. I was looking the other day at the very, the world's very first brand, apparently it was Pear's Soak in 1780. But it's interesting that, as Ollie says, and Rachel's also covered extensively in the course that she ran the workshop, you really obviously need to integrate your brand as well with your kind of vision and mission and key unique selling points as well, because you've got to get a consistent message across as Ollie says to your customers. So having that vision of what you want to deliver as a company, that mission you communicate to your customers, then obviously the brand and the, any slogan that goes with that has to actually match all together. So that's all consistency to key. Okay. Excellent. Excellent. Nasser. Yeah. I just think one brand that stands out in a very crowded market and they've been very successful. And it's worth having a look and even having a dialogue with them is Rich for You Wines. It is by far the most successful brand in a very crowded sparkling, English sparkling wine market space. And they, this in the next, well, over the next two weeks have captured the COP26 wine delivery. They're serving their brand of wine. Now, I think that would be a very good example and even potentially trying to get one of the guys there to speak it because they've captured that market and they make a very strong brand case. Brilliant. Okay. Great case study. And Lisa, final one on brand. We're going to move on. Thanks, it was actually a follow up to those same panel members as you're on that topic of, you mentioned about having different audiences and different kind of channels. I'm just interested in how you guys would say that works in terms of if you're using, say Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn because you're appealing to different audiences on each. How do you keep that consistency? So you've got your brand identity but your language presumably would differ between those. That's a great difficult question. Rachel Dines. Thanks. Well, actually it shouldn't be that far too different. You know, you might be using different platforms but your brand voice and the whole essence of your brand is the same wherever that's going out. And, you know, that goes back to all this comment about consistency. It's really about just adapting that to be the right kind of voice for the platforms. You know, you might be doing something differently on TikTok to LinkedIn, you know? And it doesn't mean that it's, that it's like a completely different thing. It's just, you know, an adaptation of it. So hopefully that answers your question. Okay. Okay, brilliant. Okay, so one of the sections we talked about a lot in this series was the use of technology for marketing. Okay, so what I think we've seen is certainly in the last 18 months or so, the increase of technology, you know, digital technology and other technology that we're using in marketing has skyrocketed. So, you know, a lot of businesses suddenly have, we had amazing case study from the artist Ann Bakery who went from an offline business to an online business. And now that has its own challenges in the form of security and data. And it was a little bit of the murky, murky world. Joe, I know we've got Joe, our security expert on the call. It'd just be good to, how have you seen, I guess, the differences in the last 18 months that businesses had to get their heads around, even approaching, how do I use and handle data? What is data security? What should I be doing about it? Well, I mean, it's a huge kind of mind field. So, it's getting the basics right. It's, for you as the business owner and any of your staff, your subcontractors, your freelancers, making sure they're doing the basics, are they sort of using secure passwords? Are they protecting themselves with firewalls, antivirus, malware? It's really interesting that people think there's a lot that they have to do when really it's the basics that they're missing. And I watched a program with an ethical hacker the other day and I do this stuff all the time. And some of the stuff he said, even I learn stuff from. For example, he showed a case study where somebody had looked from a room across the road and he was able to zoom in to the computer screen and look at the emails. And he actually had pictures and he said, I'm sort of a mile across the road kind of thing or half a mile or whatever. And he could really zoom in and that's called over your shoulder. Now, that sounds quite extreme, but you put that into a small business owner who's working in the cafe or working in a co-working site where you don't know people, people can look over your shoulder at any point and just see your data. So it's not always those big scary things that you need to think about. It's going back to basics and putting in some fundamental protections. Yeah, I mean, it's a difference, but you suddenly could derail your entire business and if you've worked hard to build this online presence, suddenly, you have a malware attack or a data breach or you report to the ICO, that could collapse your business. Well, it could certainly pause on it, which is why it's really important that you do absolutely notice stuff. So that starts the leaders kind of into, when we're talking about, what actually data am I starting to capture here? And one of the sessions we had was on the visitor economy and we started talking about the tools that are available to be able to capture data and why we would want to use it. And one of the things that came out and I guess we talked about is the concept of a marketing funnel and how you actually capture data at different points and then use that data to be able to market to. But as any of our panelists like to share an interesting example of technology that helps enable a business to, I guess to be able to market it more effectively into any kind of sector that helps automate what they do a bit or helps just power their marketing a little bit more. Tommy Weeds. I can happily talk about what I do. I use email marketing and I take it from a lead magnet on my website and various other things. But also don't forget that you've got your existing clients and you can continue marketing to them without the need to kind of double your efforts, double your money. They're already a fan of yours because they're buying your service. Market to them and you don't need any additional permissions. They've purchased from you. So bring them into your marketing world and keep them informed about what's going on in your business. It's, you know, one of the things that I learned very quickly and I'm not a marketer is that it costs you less in time and money to market an upsell and cross sell to your existing customers than it does in time, effort and money to chase after the new customers. And using the kind of GDPR rules you can legitimately market to your existing client base without any effort. Brilliant, that's Joe. Thanks for answering my really long question. I had everyone a little... What's he asking me? Brilliant, OK. And Ollie Sloan, you had your hand up there? Yeah, I was just... I just wanted to kind of elaborate a little bit on what Joe was saying and also just kind of hark back a little bit to anyone who came on that session, the visitor economy session where we talked about data and how, you know, as you touched on, you know, there's different points in this user journey from when people first meet you and the types of things they're typing into Google to find your service or product to when people are already engaged with you and you can ask them, you know, how they found you, you know, why they, you know, if they'd recommend you to their... You know, whenever you start kind of buying products now you're getting questions like, would you recommend us? Can you complete a short three-question survey? And what this is, is this is businesses trying to collect just that little bit more data so that over time, they're painting a really clear picture. You know, if you've been a regular customer for someone for a year, you live over time, give them loads of information which helps them better market to you because in the end, what people want is if they're receiving your marketing they want it to be targeted and they don't want to receive things they're not interested in about. So as long as obviously you're going along with, you know, GDPR guidelines of being safe with things, you can collect data and the value of it is you can increase your conversion rates and increase the number of people buying things because you're giving them much more targeted, relevant information in your emails and in your, you know, remarketing ads and that kind of thing. So it's definitely something to maybe lay it down the line really start to kind of work out how you, what you can implement in terms of your data capture. Okay, so Thomas is on the session with us. Does that mean you can message existing customers even if they didn't specifically opt into an email newsletter? This is your favourite question, Jo. The very short, very quick, dirty answer is yes. The slightly longer but less detailed answer is using the legal basis for marketing and data usage is legitimate interest. These people are your fans, they've paid for your services. So there is a legitimate interest in assuming that they'd want to know more about your business, more about your services. So yes, feel free to include them on your newsletter list. The caveat to this is I would make sure that your business terms and conditions and, you know, the kind of contracts that you have with your customers, make it clear that as part of being a customer you will include them on your marketing list and it's pretty standard now, but all email marketing tools will offer subscribers the opportunity to unsubscribe if they don't want to hear from you. So so long as that is in place and so long as you've been transparent and so long as your existing customers, when you class your existing customers, don't suddenly go back five years and decide that they are existing customers. You need to think carefully about what an existing customer is. Okay, great, thanks. Andrew, you've got a point on this question. Yeah, it's a very interesting one. It's actually down to Coaster Capital. So when the COVID pandemic first hit, which we were doing about April last year, Coaster Capital was debating internally. Given they launched a special grant to help businesses, even by things like laptops, for example, to keep going and working from home, could they actually contact their entire database about this new grant scheme? And exactly as Joe said, the conclusion was yes due to legitimate interest. So I actually did bring the Information Commission's office to check on this and they absolutely confirmed that. So because you were offering grants to businesses in distress and you have on your database, it was absolutely legitimate to say, would you like a grant, here's an application for, but it is all about then, as Joe said about opting out when you communicate, but also opting in. So if they're not on your full opt-in list, then that's also a good opportunity with that legitimate interest to say, would you like a grant? And by the way, would you like some more information from us as well? Tick the relevant boxes. So that definitely helped. We've been waiting since July, so it's been quite a journey. Okay. So that leads us a little bit into having to balance different types of customers and Sam Watkins asked on the customer's session, how should she balance? She served corporate, very corporate customers, but also she sold to individuals, business to consumer as well. How does a small bit, how does a business manage that different messaging around its messaging, around its digital assets, around the resources, the things they're putting out, on the website, around their use of social media? Have you got any tips, panelists, for Sam Watkins? I think you might need to clarify the question there. How can a small business balance, say very corporate messaging versus messaging for individuals, say B2C, with their marketing? So I can have a go at answering that. One really good way to do this is to actually kind of interview or speak to your customers and listen to the language that they use. That kind of very low level market research can reveal some amazing gems about the things that they searched for to find you, the problems that they were having before you help them, the kind of terminology that they refer to you using and all of those kinds of things to be valuable because then you can start to build up the kind of dictionary, I guess, to speak to your customers in the language that will completely resonate with them. You don't feel like you have to describe something in the way that a big corporate does. Use your own take on it and speak in a language that will resonate with your customer. Okay, good, thanks. Olly. Yeah, so, and also just falling on from what Rich was saying, with your website, for example, and even with your marketing, you can immediately segment these customers actually quite easily using different, what we call a landing page, which just means the first page someone views on your website. And you can, with your emails, you can have two different lists. So you've got your corporate clients and you've got your B2C and the B2C people go to the landing pages that are gonna be more suitable for them and vice versa. So you're immediately trying to segment these different groups of people into groups so that you'll give them a better user experience. Essentially, when they land on your website, they feel like they're in the right place. The corporate clients feel like the information is correct for them and vice versa. So it's about kind of spending a little bit of time, if we're talking about your website, really looking at the structure of it and thinking if you do have those two completely different customer lists, how can you structure the website to incorporate that, to kind of tend to both parties? Excellent. And the homepage is important. How are you split off those two audiences? The purpose of your homepage, explain what you do, who you do it for and to get, if you've got different audiences, get them off the homepage and into deeper content where you want them to take the action. Lisa. Just a small point to add and ties in with what Rachel was saying there. Thinking about the language is the difference between clients and customers. So quite often it's taught, if you're doing B to B, you talk about clients and if you're doing B to C, you talk about customers. So even just the small things and I notice you guys are doing it as well like Ollie says, corporate clients. And then you say, if you're speaking to your customers, which just tiny things like that make that difference because at the end of the day, it's the same person, your customer is your client. Whether it's someone who's buying as a customer also is the decision maker in that corporate. But I think we as individuals also have that different mindset when we're doing something on behalf of the business or when we're doing something ourselves. So we use different language about ourselves. So yeah, let's listen to how people talk and think about those distinctions and build that in. That's great, great advice. So that leads us a little bit into, into a start to think about, you know, the channels and the marketing tactics that we're going to start employing to reach our customers. And we talked about marketing funnels, okay? So, you know, and Joe touched upon this brilliantly. You know, it's much harder to win new customers than to market to your existing customers. So let's break this down a little bit. So, you know, in a kind of awareness and consideration stage, where you're trying to get noticed by customers, either get them to notice you as part of a mature market or get them to educate them on something that's new. What are the tools, what are the marketing tools and tactics, channels, anything that are available to small and local businesses to be able to get more people into that top of the funnel, into the pipe? Ollie Sloan. I mean, yeah, so, I mean, if we're starting from, you know, small businesses up, it's massive, essentially. There's so many different, you know, what we touched on earlier is you need to be where your customers are. So firstly, so it's about noticing, you know, a lot of businesses say, you know, oh, there's five social media channels, I need to be on all five, but it's not true. It's about being on the one where the customers are in. But also, this is, you know, where we start talking about things like paid advertising. People think, you know, quite quickly, oh, you know, I want to do, I want to try some paid advertising because Google sent me 75 pounds of free credit. And I've already set it up, hooked up my credit card, and now I'm spending my own money, you know. But it's, yeah, I mean, but with something like paid advertising, a lot of people want to jump on it, but it's really important to, as we say, be really targeted with what you're doing. And there are other ways that you can start setting yourself up to get awareness before you start throwing money at it. For example, if we're talking about local businesses, even typing your service in your location into Google, you start to see whatever pops up above on your website result could be an opportunity for you to get found. So we might be talking about, even like directories, even getting on review websites, even, you know, listing yourself on, you know, third party websites, and also those little, what we call local map packs. So having your Google My Business page in place and starting to build like the correct foundations and doing everything that you can do, which is free to get yourself found is really the first place to start and cover all those bases. And then you can start looking at, you know, in your reporting, if any of those are working for you, if you're starting to get any traction, which of them is, you know, is bringing you new traffic or returning traffic. And you can either do more of that, or if you're still struggling, then you might want to think about, you know, other angles, but do what you can for the free service that would stay. Okay, brilliant. Okay, Rachel. Yeah, and I think alongside that, the key thing is to actually offer value. You know, if you're trying to share your knowledge and expertise, trying to teach people things, trying to just give something extra, you know, that often will resonate with those people and bring them in your direction rather than just kind of being outward all the time. You know, that kind of giving will definitely help you earn the trust and awareness for new people. Yeah, it's not called buy my stuff media, is it? It's called social media. Clue, Clue. Two-way. Great, Zoe. Hi, yeah. I was just wanted to flag up the business IP centres. So Brighton has one and Crawley have just got one as well and they've got amazing market research resources. Some of them you can access. I think a couple of them are just online. The rest of them, they're very diverse, absolutely fantastic to be able to research, you know, businesses in the local area to you in different sectors and, you know, you can go down there in person to use those resources or some of them, as I said, are online by their portal. So I can put the link in the chat for the Brighton one. Thank you. Yeah, that's a great thing to highlight. So I'm actually one of the experts in residence for the Brighton one and they run online webinars and sessions and you can also put one-to-one online appointments as well so that it's a really valuable resource. OK, good stuff. OK, so the topic of technology came up, came up a lot in, you know, in the sessions and we just started talking about some of the channels as well. But as you start getting further down your marketing funnel, you know, we're talking about starting to capture data as we've, you know, we've got them into that first bit. Technology can really, really boost your marketing efforts and your sales and your productivity. And so what? So we talk about being able to retain customers or market to our existing customers and there's a variety of technology available to small businesses. Has anyone got a view on the technology available that that that that that businesses can use to help retain or engage with their customers and anything that they've used or anything that they would recommend? Hopefully I see a hand up. OK, Ollie Sloan. Rachel and I are probably going to be talking about the same thing. Yeah, I mean, I just just wanted to obviously, you know, talk further about we've got, you know, mailing lists, which most of us are already doing so, but trying to kind of manage your mailing lists as much as you can, so making sure that you're actually giving them if people aren't opening them, making sure you're jumping in there and have a look around. But what we talked about before was what we call remarketing, which is when someone comes to your website and then you can you can mark them afterwards. And the benefit of that is it is a paid for service, essentially. So you're paying for someone to click on your ad still. But whereas, you know, some marketing efforts are costing a few pounds a click. This is this is more in the range of like 20 pence, 30 pence per click because they're already in your marketing list and you're not essentially competing for that customer because they're already a customer of yours. And so the benefit of something like remarketing is particularly for, as an example, e-commerce companies, you know, a lot of people leaving the funnel. So if they're maybe putting something in their basket and then they see the delivery cost is a little bit more than they expect and they leave your website, you could then remarkets them with a discount for shipping and that kind of thing. So just an example of you can use remarketing quite cleverly to either increase your conversions or, you know, offer people who who maybe haven't been on your website for a while and then sent it to come back. And that's, you know, what we said again, using the people that you already have your list from that are already in your funnel as opposed to trying to pull them in the top again, which is much, much harder and much takes a lot more time. It's that darker of following people around the Internet a little bit. You might have seen it. So so for Google, that's the environment where we've we've been asked to play in by Google. And just on that, just Gareth just said, is that similar to a Facebook pixel? So Facebook pixel is for Facebook advertising and this and you would need to install something on your website for. This is for Google. I was I was I was talking about and this is where you could appear on other websites around the web. So it's a similar principle, but it's a different channel. Yeah. Yeah. So it's called remarketing. So being able to market to anonymously, we are told, Joe, I suppose you could do a whole session on the GDPR of remarketing. It is all it is all technically legit, I believe. And well, I hope it is because most UK marketers will use it. But, you know, someone who's had an interaction with one of your digital assets, if the if the opt-ins are correct and set up right on your website, Len Lydon, you can then follow someone around the Internet a little bit through their through their user journey. Is that you? Is that right, Joe? Did I get that right? And it turns out some real. Sorry, I got called. I've just had a call from the school about myself. Don't worry. Don't worry. We'll move on. We'll request it again. I'm sorry. We'll move. We'll move on. We'll move on. We could have a whole, a whole, a whole session talking about that. Lisa, I can see your hand up. Yes. So talking about tech to retain customers, as well as the marketing side of it, you can also use things like having the information. So as Rachel said, having information on your website, the kind of the how to guides about products or information that they might find useful and also using the technology and systems and processes internally, just to make sure that you keep all of that information kind of in a clear place. So if you have a current customer contact you about something that you're not thinking, oh, God, which book did I put that detail in or where on earth do I find that? So having it's not all just about the external facing, but having all your internal systems and processes running really efficiently will mean that you can provide a better service, a better after service to your customers as well. Great stuff. OK, Andrew. That fits in perfectly with what Lisa just said, an extension to that, in that everybody effectively is a salesperson on behalf of the company. And one of the things we've all found since the pandemic came in is that we've had some good examples of pretty appalling customer service where we've rung somebody up or we've contact somebody and they've no idea what's going on with our query or anything to do with an order or whatever it is. So there is some simple stuff. I mean, it's as Lisa says, really, is is having your data in one place. If you've got a CRM system, making sure it's integrated with the latest data things like Office 365, you know, everybody's got a mobile phone and for about 18 quid a month, you know, you can have all that information about your customers, your contacts, your CRM, all that at your fingertips quite easily. And basically, it just means that you always appear like you're on it at all times and it just makes you appear much better to your customers regardless of what you're doing. I think OK, excellent. So CRM, we've not scratched that itch too much in this session. So if anyone didn't know that word, customer relationship management software, all right. Good guess, Steve. That was close. So what is a CRM? How do how do how can we use it in marketing? What can it do for us? Let's see. Let's see. Let's see a panelist. I can see Lisa kind of wanting to answer this question only because she's looking at me. What's it? What's a typical CRM, Lisa? And I'd actually say probably one of the markets is the best ones to aren't drawn on the CRM. So it's a system as a little systems that keeps all the data about your customers in one place. There are various CRM, quite a lot of CRMs out there, and some have more functionality than others. You can get free ones as a pretty much all software. There's kind of free versions. And then there are more advanced versions that you pay for. But you can use a CRM to allocate tasks, for example, and you can also link them through to your email box. So every time you send an email or receive an email, that can be logged automatically through to your CRM so that it logs it against those customer records so that you're not kind of following through thinking, oh, I need to search my SMP folder. I need to search this or that. You can integrate all of that. So it keeps all of the information about your customers in one place and you can use it to create deal flows, to do your kind of prospect generation. And I believe, it's not something I do a lot of, so pass over to the marketers there, that you can also integrate them to do your direct mailings from there. That's absolutely right. I was great answer, Lisa, what are you talking about? So let's hear from one of the marketers. Oli, I did see your hand up there talking about CRMs. What would we use a CRM for marketing to customers and why? And I think I was gonna just expand a little bit on what Lisa was saying, exactly right. Essentially, what's really handy is, if you already have a lot of information about customers offline, taking it online into a CRM makes everything so much quicker to access. You're creating this customer persona, so you're starting to learn more about your customers and it's all in one place and everyone can access it really easily. But also, when we start talking about marketing, automation also becomes really relevant. And this is about starting to automate the marketing that we're doing. For example, emails, you're sending out an offer, if someone doesn't open it within three days later, it'll automate, you've already set up the following one to go out. So it's starting to take care of the process and reduce the amount of time you have to spend on it. So obviously the cost of these CRMs range massively, depending on the size of business or the size of your marketing list. So it's important to utilize one that's gonna be relevant for what you're doing. But there are a load of free ones out there, but the automation and taking your time out of it, really knowing a lot more about your customers, having everything in one place, easy to access. It's definitely something that for any business growing, something that you need to eventually move towards. And also the last thing is, a lot of those CRMs can incorporate, can pull in the information from all of your marketing channels. So it can pull in all your social media information, all the email, all the Facebook stuff, everything to do your website, your payment gateways. So you're starting to take all of the information you've got about your website and your sales. And it's all gonna be in one location and nice, easy to read dashboards. So yeah. Okay, that leads us quite nicely into the topic of measurement, okay? So, you know, we've talked a little bit around strategy, we've talked a little bit about branding this session. So I'll start talking about digital channels, but how do I know what's working? All right, so, you know, the topic of measurements. So one of the questions asked was, where's the best place for me to measure my digital marketing? Have we got, here we go, Ollie Sloan. Yeah, that was a good line though, wasn't it? Yeah, it's like we planted that one, we didn't, but. I mean, we've also, again, hopefully, some of you came on the session that Stu ran on, talking about kind of reporting in and specifically talking about Google Analytics. The reason we always shout about Google Analytics is because it's a free tool that essentially tells you what's going on on your website. And it's kind of a no-brainer for any business to start off with at least. There are a lot of tools, you know, if you have Squarespace that has its own analytics tool, there are even some you can pull in for WordPress, but essentially, knowing what, you know, being able to report, there's no point putting all this time into SEO, well, there might be, but it's much more valuable if you're gonna put time into SEO and advertising and marketing. If you can actually, after three months, after six months, look at which of those marketing efforts worked, which of those actually gave you conversions? Why did you get 10 form fills? Where, you know, which channel did they come from? Which even advert did people click on to kind of get them to that point? And only through having kind of implementing something like Google Analytics allows you to do that and actually allows you to go back and look through, you know, where people came from, demographic information, you know, the time of day, when you should be posting your emails out and your social, you get loads of information that you wouldn't otherwise have. So, you know, it's something that absolutely has to be kind of employed by everyone, yeah. And what, and Pano, what should we be measuring? You know, what do we think that, you know, we should be measuring, you know, it was one of the key questions, what do I measure? You know, what am I actually looking at? Because I think a lot of people can go into the Google Analytics or the social dashboards and what am I actually trying to measure? Rachel? It does relate to your goals. So, obviously, if we're talking about social media, you know, you want to try and avoid the vanity metrics and actually look at whether people are converting, you know, are they clicking through? Are they engaging with your content? If we're talking about, you know, perhaps lead magnets or an action that's on your website, then Analytics is the perfect place to see how people are getting to your website in the first place, how long they're spending on there, what actions they're taking and whether they complete. And if they don't complete, actually, at what stage are they dropping out of that process? You know, perhaps it's all simply down to the language on the page that's losing them at that point. You know, there are tests that can be done, A, B testing and other things that you can factor in to work out what the problem is there and improve those conversion rates. And the data will help you with that. Okay, thank you, Oli. Yeah, and I just wanted to, so Vicky was messaging me in the chat about Google Analytics, so I thought it was just relevant that I just added this onto this conversation, that essentially, you know, Analytics is a little bit of, how to install it is there's a little bit of code that you put on your website. So in Vicky's case, the developer's done this for her, so you might be getting a developer to do it. However, she doesn't want that person to have access anymore. And if you're ever in that situation, you can always just remove the code that's on there and make a new one and set up a new Analytics account. So it's, again, Analytics is just looking at what's going on. There's nothing that you can mess up. You're just kind of looking at the data, trying to get some information. But in your case, Vicky, either the person should give you access, so it should give you full administrator access. Or if they really, if you're really struggling to get them to do that, you can get someone to take their code off the website and set up a new one for you. But hopefully it should be a straightforward process for you. Okay, thank you. Good stuff. Andrew? Well, this is an interesting one. Obviously, lots of times when you're marketing, you're trying to get to thousands and thousands of people at one time to sell big products. If you're actually on the B2B world, it may be that you've got just two or three people within one company you want to get to. So there are various platforms out there, platforms, for example, like Lee Forensics, where you can send an email out to a known email address of that particular person you want to contact. There's then a piece of code within the email that links into the platform that effectively then shows you when that person actually goes onto your website and individual webpages. So we've heard before about other systems that allow you to track through when people look at things on a particular web page. This tracks that person and it's GDPR compliant because it actually matches the IP address of the device that they're using and matches that with the email. So you can also then see in the future when they go back to your web page and when they go back to your website. So you can see, for example, if your email marketing is working and then of course you can pick the right time to give them a call to potentially sell and pitch to them. So there's some quite sophisticated stuff you can do with tracking analytics as well. There's another example of how you use technology to automate your marketing and make it more effective and you have to get it all working together. Karen. Yes, I just wanted to add in to Advocate Lead Forensics actually, particularly if you're in the B2B market space. So in a previous life, I had that analytics on my website and it was really interesting to see the relationship that you built with potential clients from the very first contact that they have with your website to all the way through the sales process and hopefully when they sign up for your product or service. So we'd highly recommend that product. Okay, okay. Okay, we're going to go, we've got time for just a couple more, couple more of the attendee questions and then we are going to do a panel wrap up. Panel wrap up, I'm going to ask each of the panelists just give it a key takeaway for all of the viewers who are going to be watching this. Because your key thing that somebody should do when embarking on a marketing journey can be anything about channel or strategy. Let's kind of give you a little bit of time to prepare it on your head. So we did talk a lot around customers and the customer journey within one of our sessions. And one of the questions was someone was asking how they would get better segmenting their customers. Okay, so how would I actually go about working out how to work out who my customers are? So there's a few tips from the panel about how kind of business approach are, if they've got quite a diverse, I think Thomas said he's got quite a diverse set. How do you actually even market to them? How do you start creating those different messaging? How do we approach customer segmentation? I can put my hand up. Okay, so I would start with, you know, so you've either got an idea of who they are, okay? And what you've got to do is work out what basis of segmentation you are going to use. So am I going to segment on, you know, if it's B2B type of sector or type of individual or some kind of demograph or region or size of business, et cetera, it might be a bit of a mixture. Once you've kind of got that in your head, if you can't get to that point, just start writing down your customers, okay? Or clients and then start putting like, okay, what are the attributes to this person or this client, okay? So, you know, B2B might be the business, the sector, the region, the size of business, et cetera. You know, for B2C customers could be, you know, affluent household, insuri, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you start to be able to build that picture of your different customer segments. And from there, you can start to go, oh, okay, well, which ones are kind of similar in their needs and motivations? And you start to group them together because those are the ones who are going to respond to those sorts of marketing methods, to a particular marketing message. And that's how you can manage distinct customer segments. You know, when you start to pull that into your CRM, and this did have a link, it wasn't just a random question. When you start to pull this into your CRMs, you can segment your CRMs into those lists as well. So you say, actually, I can only, I want to market a certain, I've got my hands all over the camera, a certain marketing campaign or messaging and you can automate it through your CRMs to a certain segment which is why it's really important. So I guess my key takeaway, and I'm gonna go first, okay, is that one of the most important areas for you to spend on as a small business is your customers, okay? Spend some time segmenting it, spend some time making sure you've profiled them, you know their motivations and pain points and you've got that very clear. And then you can use that throughout the rest of your marketing. And then it's just working out what channels, what content and what's working and what's not. So that is my key takeaway for the panel. So I'm gonna go around, how is it, actually, Rachel? I need you to pick on me first. I want to, because you were smiling. You must have given me. I would say, you know, just the first thing is work out what you want to achieve. So important, you know, you can't do any of the other things, you can't work out what you're gonna use, what's working, how much money to put into it and everything else if you don't know what you want to achieve. Thank you. Okay, Ollie Sloan, what's your key takeaway from our series? My key takeaway is something I like to say a lot when businesses ask me the question, why is my website not ranking? And that is for me to say that, are you being honest with yourself in terms of whether you deserve to rank? And what I mean by that is, you know, take a look at the actual search environment, have a look at your competitors, do a bit of research and be really honest. Look, you know, go deep dive into their content. And what you might find is whether it's, you know, better categorization or people going to a lot more detail, you know, some businesses, you know, a lot of these blogs we see now in articles are so, so long because it's all about being an expert on your topic. So I would say, you know, do the research and be really honest and say, you know, do I deserve to rank? And if not, why not? And then do whatever you can, you know, use your competitors to your advantage, you'll try and employ some of the tactics that they're doing that are working. Excellent, excellent. Okay, Joe. So what would I say? Key takeaway, use marketing, but use it wisely, protect your data, and most importantly, get the basics of data protection in, because if you get the basics in, you're less likely to have a problem and you're less likely to have to phone the ICO and tell them you've got a problem. Okay, excellent, excellent. Okay, so I'll just run around as digital champions and then key takeaway call to action from them and also from our business support organization. So Andrew, key takeaway for call to action, for marketing, customers and marketing. I think the one thing that people forget is the most valuable asset to a business is its staff. So make them more productive. You can do this in lots of different ways. They've all got a smartphone. So make sure that smartphone can talk to all the other tech and business information you've got, things like Microsoft 365, they can all then do video calling, they've got that security built in, potentially links to your CRM system if you've got one and basically help them to help you improve your business and be more productive and sell more and market better. Okay, lovely. Lisa. Thanks. I'd repeat everything Andrew says about process. So won't repeat that, but my top tip on marketing actually is that I'm not a marketer. I'm all about systems and processes, but I've learned so much from all of you guys on this series and on this session from those of you who are the marketer. So my top tip for everyone is to take up the digital champion support, get in touch with these guys who are running the webinars because actually there's so much information out there and I have learned absolutely loads myself for my business through this series. There you go. Top tip. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Gareth, call to action, business hot house. Clearly my first call to action, we apply for a grant to help you with your digital transformation within your business. But yeah, absolutely, as everyone has said, the UK lags behind every other country in Europe on productivity. So look at ways of increasing that productivity. Work with the digital champions and looking at how you can achieve that. Work with our delivery partners, such as innovation and how you might be able to innovate your processes within your business. And if there's a cost for any tools or any things that you need afterwards, then look at our grant fund and how we can support you with it. Excellent. Okay, cost capital, call to action, final call to action. So yes, my call to action was exactly the same as Lisa's. So head over to our website, look at the digital champion page, choose a champion and make sure that you take advantage of your three, eight hours of support. Excellent. Okay. Zoe. Hi, so yeah, obviously if you want to innovate, we've talked about innovation, keeping agile and being resilient as businesses. So of course we've got lots of amazing workshops coming up that you can access for free. And I think, because I'm not a marketer as a customer, it's like finding out what platforms do your customers use on an everyday basis? And see if you can kind of get a sense of what the landscape is for your customers, but also thinking about potential customers, like what does the future look like? Okay, thank you very much. Okay. And so I'm just quickly going to wrap up, okay. Hang on, I've lost the, here we go, here we go. Okay, lovely. Okay, well that wraps up. That's our final session. So we are handing the baton on to series three, systems and productivity. It's had some introduction here. I would encourage you to book on to those workshops you can see here. Just head over to Recover and Rise on Eventbrite. We've also contact form for the digital support growth.hub at coast to capital, coast to capital, coast to capital.org.uk and get in touch with them and they will help you with all your needs. And we've also talked about the business hot house, low case, which is grant funding for low carbon projects and we've had rise on the call today. Okay, so final one, if you wanna get in touch about your, if you need help GDPR, Joe Buanty is your go-to. So admin at jlbbusinessconsorting.co.uk. Again, these slides will be shared afterwards. You'll be able to get in touch with Joe for any questions. I learned so much from Joe in that session. So thank you very much. Okay, lovely. Thank you very much guys. Thank you for an interesting and topical debate. Great question, great answers. Thank you very much. We'll see you in series three. Bye. See you in series three. Thanks everyone. Well done. Great.