Digital engagement trends for 2020 - top tips and resources to stay ahead of the game

by Stuart Banbery, director of marketing at Orlo

It’s that time of year again. 2020 has kicked off at breakneck speed and it’s like Christmas never even happened. Organisations that are set to succeed this year are already thinking ahead - setting long-term objectives, strategic plans, measurable outcomes and ring-fencing budgets. Strategy season is well and truly upon us.

One thing’s for sure, a solid digital engagement strategy is no longer a nice to have - it’s a must-have. The public are now receiving great levels of customer service from the private sector, with their ever-increasing expectations being put on to the public sector too. There are opportunities there for the taking - for both comms professionals and service users - and our round-up of the latest digital comms trends for 2020 will help you do just that.

We’ll “channel” our efforts appropriately

Organisations have a plethora of choices in terms of places to engage with their communities. And new channels are popping up all the time. In 2019, everyone became obsessed with TikTok. And rightly so. They have grown from 500 million monthly active users in June 2018, to over one billion. We could list many other emerging social media platforms, but the main networks aren’t going anywhere, so there’s only one question: how will comms managers spread their time in 2020?

Now, more than ever, you need to consider carefully which channels you focus your valuable time and resources on. And, most importantly, where your communities and target audiences are actually spending their time. Think about what they care about, where they spend their time online, and what they look for from you. What problems are you, as an organisation, solving in their lives? And how (and where) can you best deliver content that does just that?

Remember that the quantity of social content we see is staggering. If you’re going to make any sort of impression, you need to focus on what you can do well. Less is more, especially if you work on your own or in a small team. It’s best to do a great job on one or two channels than an average job on five. Ross Middleham, Social and Content Lead at the Met Office, gave an amazing talk on this subject at Orlo’s recent Future CX event, you can watch it here.

Keep it personal

Let’s face it, personalisation in digital engagement is nothing new. But recent research shows that people are twice as likely to view personalised content as important to them. But before you get started, your personalisation strategy needs excellent data – your attempts to get personal are only as good as the data you have on your community.

Think of disruptive brands such as Netflix. They are winning the personalisation game because they can tap into so many customer data points. Bruna Gill from Linkedin recently explained how the Netflix homepage is personal to each customer. But it doesn’t stop there. Netflix even customise the thumbnail they use to promote a film or series to you based on your viewing history and preferences. So, if you have a tendency for romantic comedies, the algorithm will naturally serve you a more romantic image. Now that’s personalisation! 

You really need specific content for each and every one of your customer groups. It’s clear that automation is your friend here. Now most of us can’t go as far as Netflix (even if your customers expect you to) but think as much as possible of your specific audience groups, and how you can best serve them relevant content. Get them hooked with your useful content and then you’ve earnt the right to deliver messages around your services. 

We’ll (finally) stop counting likes

I see a change coming in how we report on social media engagement. It’s well documented that Instagram is trialling the removal of public likes. Back in July of this year it was reported that they were expanding the geographic regions of the “like count ban” test. Essentially, the test hides public like counts from users. And Twitter has been testing an app called twttr that no longer displays the number of likes, retweets, and replies on reply threads. YouTube is ahead of the game, they have already simplified the way in which they display subscriber counts.

So, what does this mean for those of us required to report on social metrics? Well, a focus on quality engagement rather than sheer volume of likes is nothing new. Since the dawn of click farms and bots, many of us have looked further than the numbers. We’ve always recommended to our clients that we determine success on metrics that show quality engagement, or that truly signal success for your organisation and campaign. We get it – likes and a growing subscriber count make us feel loved. But in 2020, the smartest comms professionals will look for other genuine metrics of success - that might be email list growth, web traffic, form completions or a PDF download.

All conversations in one place

By now, customers expect that you’re able to join the dots between digital touchpoints. Whether it’s social media, live chat, or email, you need to be able to move as seamlessly across channels as the general public does. And crucially, you need to be able to tap into relevant insights about your communities wherever they are. 

So, what does that mean for brands? Once again, it’s all about data. Solutions such as Orlo can manage all of your social media, live chat, WhatsApp and SMS interactions in one place, as well as integrating with your email systems. By centralising all communications you’re able to streamline processes internally and offer a superior digital experience. Anyone in Comms or Customer Service will then be to provide faster and more informed responses as they will have complete visibility of all previous interactions with someone.  

The future is private

As well as keeping all conversations in one place, your communities are increasingly expecting brands to meet them exactly where they are. They want to talk to you using the channels most convenient and comfortable for them. And for many, that will involve private messaging – SMS and WhatsApp. 

Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014, so we’ve all been waiting for the company to shift focus to messaging. In 2019, Mark Zuckerberg indicated just that – a pivot towards “private, encrypted services” and specifically, messaging. Here at Orlo, we’re leading the way on “private”. We’ve added private messaging to our platform in the form of WhatsApp and SMS, so you can create a unified view of all digital customer interactions and manage them all in one place. 

With over 1.5 billion users on Whatsapp (and counting) and 63% of people now preferring private messaging channels to share content and recommendations, this focus makes sense for everyone. It allows for instant one-on-one customer service, and comes at a low cost to customers and brands. 

So, there you have it. A quick run-down of the hottest digital engagement topics for 2020. Wherever you are on your journey towards providing an exceptional digital experience, we hope there’s something you can take from these insights. Remember: focus your efforts and resources on what is going to move the needle, think strategically when planning your campaigns, and meet and delight the people you serve on the channels where they spend their time.

If you think you might benefit from a chat about how Orlo helps hundreds of forward thinking organisations to implement some of these trends within your own strategy, then we’re always here to help at www.orlo.tech  hello@orlo.tech @HelloOrlo

Stuart Banbery is marketing director at Orlo

The best thing you can learn about is yourself

by Sally Northeast 

Does that sound like a truism, or a rather glib pop-psych pronouncement designed to sell a self-awareness course? If so, don’t listen to your inner sceptic and stay with me for a few hundred words so I can explain. 

Some of the most impactful development I’ve done in recent years is leadership training. I’ve been fortunate to follow leadership programmes both at a county council and in my current NHS role. I now run one of the sessions on our current leadership essentials programme, covering culture, vision, values and strategy.

Without exception, the things that have stuck with me most from all those programmes are the bits about self-awareness, learning styles, working preferences and working effectively with others.

Now before you accuse me of self-indulgent navel-gazing and buying into hippy-dippy claptrap (sceptics – I feel this radiating from you!), just consider for a moment what makes the machinery of an organisation go round. It’s people. You, your team-mates, the person on reception, the chief executive. Every person in an organisation contributes to the way things are done and how it feels to work there.

So, the way we ourselves behave, the way we interact with others, the way we lead (or don’t) and the way we learn, adapt and change are all fundamental to the success of that organisation. We’re getting into the realms of organisational culture here and in the words of Peter Drucker: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Understanding yourself and how that self plays out in the workplace will help you see what – and importantly how – you need to learn. It’ll help you understand why maybe you experience tension with a particular colleague – because their style and preferences are completely different to yours, for example (I can attest to this – my manager is the complete opposite to me in Myers-Briggs and discovering that has helped us develop our relationship no end).

Understanding and leading self is covered in the first three sessions of our leadership programme at Dorset HealthCare. We start with finding out our Myers-Briggs preferences to understand things like our thinking styles, how we collaborate, how we make decisions and how we deal with conflict. There are many alternatives to Myers-Briggs – I’ve used the Skills Deployment Inventory in the past and others have recommended Insights. There’s a cost to these of course, and your organisation may already subscribe to one – ask your learning and development team what’s available. The free 16 personalities online tool is based on Myers-Briggs, which itself grew out of the theories of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung.

From there we go on a fascinating journey to look at how that type affects our behaviour and how we can recognise what might be driving behaviour in others. It’s not about pigeon-holing people, and you can certainly learn to work in different ways even if you have a particular innate preference. But it is a fantastic guide and starting point to help you identify where you need to develop.

And to bring the inevitable wellbeing slant to this, your personality profile can help you identify your trigger points and better manage your reaction and your next steps. In a recent WhatsApp chat, a friend revealed that they were worried about how angry they were getting at work. It turned out that anxiety sat underneath this, brought about by the behaviour and style of others in the workplace. Arming yourself with that self-knowledge, and recognising the effect that a different style from someone else can have on you, is a real game-changer.

It’s easy to moan about the way things are in your organisation, the behaviour of others and how stressed you are. It’s human nature, it can be really cathartic and most of us do it. A little self-reflection, though, can really help us to see our own part in those dynamics and what we can take ownership of to help things improve. As an extravert, introspection doesn’t come naturally to me, but I’ve learned to do it and it’s making a real difference. For more on this see my fridge magnet (pictured).

Sally Northeast is Deputy Director of Organisational Development, Participation and Communications and Dorset HealthCare University NHS Foundation Trust. She’s also co-creator of learning and wellbeing event Comms Unplugged and an ESFJ on Myers-Briggs.

New Year, same you? Learning in the slow lane could help build confidence

At the start of a new year, the pressure to set career development goals, when your workload is already full to bursting, can make you feel like you’re at the bottom of Ben Nevis with no chance of clambering to the summit. Try every-day, bitesize, learning instead.

by Karen Pagett

For communications professionals in 2020, there’s a never-ending need to update your knowledge and improve your skills in ways that couldn’t have been predicted at the start of the millennium. The communications world has been revolutionised by technical/digital advances and a more process-driven approach, with research and evaluation as important as creativity.

These massive shifts mean that learning and development planning for a typical communicator can be a complicated business. How does a manager decide where their training budget should be spent for the best outcomes; how does an individual know what to prioritise for career progression?

Strangely, this issue came more sharply into focus for me once I’d left a long-time job in local government (the last eight years of which were spent in a permanent period of change and re-education) to freelance and no longer had a formal learning plan to fall back on.

About a year ago I was commissioned to rewrite a company’s website and communicate the business through blogs, case studies and social media posts. But the company operates in a field about which I know very little. Online advertising is a world of pixels and programmatic, real-time bidding and reach, and seemingly endless data privacy regulations while I was a self-confessed digital dunderhead!

To overcome being stumped by the new subject matter (and to enable me to explain it to other non-experts), I found a way to learn in manageable chunks that I could incorporate into my working day. Maybe if I’d figured this out in my previous incarnation, I wouldn’t have felt so overwhelmed by all the stuff I didn’t know?

Three ways to learn bitesize

1. Use your inbox as a daily prompt

To get a feel for the unfamiliar terminology and issues of a new field, read what people in the know are talking about – even if you don’t understand half of what’s being said at first. I found setting up Google Alerts helpful. By registering a few key phrases, I get links to relevant articles in my Gmail inbox daily that keep me up to date with digital happenings.

I’ve also signed up to email newsletters from appropriate go-to experts, organisations and news providers. One of the great plusses of digital is in the generosity of those willing to do so much of the donkey work for you by rounding up news, views and insights. My favourites are daily updates from UKAuthority on the public sector digital world and the latest in politics, PR and blogging from Vuelio.

Set aside ten minutes each morning over a coffee to browse and make a note of any useful links. It doesn’t really matter if you miss a day, there’s always more tomorrow, and the next day…

2. Get happy to be an idiot

It’s part of a communicator’s skills armoury to ask questions. Get quizzical with colleagues, friends, people you meet at events, and anyone else who crosses your path with knowledge you need. My ‘old school’ reporter’s notebook is always open. I make no apologies for asking the same question several times in different ways at the risk of looking dense! If I’m going to communicate info to others, I need to unpick every bit of jargon and every complex process.

If you “hot desk” at work, you could even take your laptop and sit with a team which has expertise or skills in a field you’d like to know more about, to get a first-hand feel for their work.

3. Don’t wait for formal training – keep skills fresh online

When working in the public sector, I thought the limited number of training days available were my only chance to learn. It was always disheartening to return to work from a course only to find I wasn’t given the space to practise new skills. It felt like a tick-box exercise and a waste of time.

I’d have felt more satisfied with my progress had I undertaken more regular learning as and when it was needed to improve straight away how I did my job. And there are resources online to help. I recommend the Google Digital Garage set-up. They offer 125 online courses – the majority free – split into truly bitesize sections (some, literally, minutes long) with knowledge-reinforcing mini tests along the way.

Some of the courses are bundled together and come with certification on completion (like the course on Digital Marketing which I did), or you can just fill specific gaps in your knowledge from the basics of artificial intelligence or effective SEO through to conflict resolution or inspiring leadership. Many have been designed by universities.

The digital advertising company who inspired my bitesize learning habit when they commissioned me – CAN – is itself developing a learning resource for comms folk featuring award-winning and measurably successful campaigns, including many from comms2point0 UnAwards winners called Comms-HIVE.

The rapidity of digital and technical advances has made sure none of us will ever be at the end of the learning process. The world is permanently in the fast lane. But by taking steps to remain constantly curious in small ways without feeling overwhelmed by it all, you can figure out when something coming down the line will make your work easier, give you better results, and – importantly – keep up your self-confidence.

I’m somewhere in the middle of my steep learning curve – and always will be!

Karen Pagett is a freelance writer currently working for CAN, which delivers digital advertising – and more – for the public sector. To find out more about CAN’s work – including the Comms-HIVE learning resource – sign up to the monthly ebulletin and say hello on Twitter @counciladnet