Best Practices for Digital Channels
Tone and voice on digital channels should always match your brand standards, but otherwise, you need to make sure that your marketing conforms to the channel when it comes to best practices. In social media and email, there are four general rules we follow for all digital channels:
Know your audience
In any digital channel you’re working on engagement, building conversation or dialogue with your target audience. You can’t have a relevant conversation without knowing who it is you’re talking to.Understand who your audience is in relation to the platform. For example, the people who subscribe to your email newsletter may all be former customers or clients, but the people that you interact with on social media might be networking contacts or industry peers. With different audiences, you're going to have a different conversation. So know who you're talking to.
Only talk to people who want to hear from you
In email, we call this permission-based marketing. People are giving you permission to send email to their inbox. Don't email them if you don't have permission to do that. You might know who they are, so you know what to say to them. But if they haven't asked to hear from you, it's a big turn off (and also illegal) to start sending email without their permission.
In social media, this concept is centered around tags or @ mentions. This is something you should be trying to do if you want to build engagement with your audience. Don't start randomly tagging name brands or celebrities, hoping that you’ll get visibility. Odds are, if you do receive any recognition from them, it won’t necessarily be bringing you visibility with your target audience (only theirs). Instead, tag people who want to hear from you, people who are your colleagues, customers (that you have permission to tag) or anyone who you regularly are working with. These are the people who want to hear from you, and they're happy to be mentioned in your post so that they can participate in that discussion with you.
Be generous
Give first, ask later. Give your knowledge freely. Give your opinions freely. Share what you know to build good community, whether it's your own community of people that you email, or people you're connecting to on social media. Be a good community contributor. Be generous with what you know and what you can offer.
This doesn't mean you have to give away your products or your services for free. But certainly, be part of a conversation.
Keep things positive
Always be polite and be respectful.There is enough negativity in the world, we’ve all seen it and we don't need more of it. When you're interacting with people, whether it's by email or social media, keep your messaging positive whenever you can. When your messages are more serious, be honest and genuine.
During the pandemic, we all had to send a lot of very unhappy emails, from shutdowns and closures to inventory shortages. And it is very hard to keep those messages positive. But the positive spin we would put on that was related to transparency and customer service. It let people know that there were people behind the companies they were hearing from, and that we were all in this tough situation together.
