Our very own Daniel Christos, Founder and Managing Director of Cypha sat down with Nick McGrath, CEO of Moneytech Finance to talk about how businesses can best leverage digital and social in the current climate.

Q: What do you see as the biggest challenge at the moment for small businesses that depend on referrals/word of mouth?

1. Staying relevant and cutting through the noise rather than taking your foot off the gas, however you may not be able to do what you have always done. What can you do to your pricing model or delivery model to reduce buyer resistance and make it as easy as possible to do business with you?

2. Pivoting or adjusting your positioning if need be. What products or services or what aspects of your products or services are most relevant right now? Who are they most relevant for?

What are your audience segments and have they changed and can you tell? If everything has stopped then it makes it really difficult to tell. This is where you turn to your customers or test the market with some simple messaging and ads, review what you have done in the past and confirm if it still works today.

3. Don’t forget the experience. You can rush to pivot and make changes to meet the market, however if the customer experience is not right, then you will lose out to your competitors who have an optimal experience, making it simpler and easier to buy with the least amount of friction. Regardless of how great your product is, if the experience is not designed to make it easy for the customer to buy, then they will go somewhere else. Any activity you are doing will be wasted if the experience is a poor one, so make sure the experience is right before investing in building your audience.

Q: As a result of Covid 19, have you noticed any companies that are taking a different approach to their digital presence?

A number of brands initially stopped everything while others are gradually recognising the opportunity.
We also saw a rush with some other brands trying to get online as quickly as possible, especially those in hospitality and retail, which can be dangerous.

We do a lot of work with PetBarn, helping them build tools for their website to help drive leads and they just went through the roof during the past few months as people started spending more time at home with their pets or getting pets. The tools we developed were amplified heavily through social and were getting amazing results due to the high interest in the category, the rise of people on social and competing brands pulling back on their spend.

Q: Any hints and tips for the brokers/partners out there when looking to increase their digital & social presence?

Make sure all your customer touch points are aligned - social, web, print, branding. You are only as strong as your weakest link, no point spending money to drive traffic to your site if your site isn’t good at capturing or converting leads.

Smaller businesses are usually resource and time poor so the chances of having everything running like a well oiled marketing machine may not be feasible, so if you don’t have internal resources or an agency partner helping you do this, then focus on what you can and do that well. If your LinkedIn is solid then stick with that and make it the best it can be. Don’t try and spread yourself too thin, focus where you are getting the most traction right now and double down on that.

Also take some time to think about your strategy. If you're not sure where to start with this, then at a minimum spend some time thinking about a few questions (if you have a pen handy jot this down)

1. Who are you? What do you do really well and who do you do it for?
2. Who is your customer and what do they care about most right now?
3. What are their pain points, goals and objectives?
4. Where do they play, where are they active and what engages them?
5. Then find ways to add more value than anyone else!

From here you can begin to craft messages and content for the right channels that speak directly to your audience and their buying motivators in order to begin to engage and influence them to take some type of action, whether it's to download a fact sheet, or subscribe to an email list, follow you on social or request a quote.

Then what happens after someone contacts you or takes any of these actions? Think about the entire customer life cycle and the emotion the customer goes through on that journey and how you can help them along the way.

Test & measure
Being a small business means you can be more nimble and agile than some of your larger competitors so there is an opportunity to out maneuver some of these bigger guys in a climate like this. So test often, measure and refine any activity you do.

Q: Any Dos & Don'ts when it comes to social for SME businesses?

Be Authentic. The major thing on all social channels is to be authentic, with brokers you are your business so social is a great fit but make sure you are social and social is a 2 way street. Don’t just push one way messages, engage with your audience, build your profile, become a thought leader and a wealth of wisdom in your industry, be the go to person when the time is right.

Have a strategy for each channel, don’t just paste the same content on all channels as the way content is consumed on each channel is different, and what audiences expect on each channel is different.

Continue to measure against your strategy and don’t be afraid to change it up if its not working. Analyse the data available on these platforms as well as your own and you will be able to continue to improve over time, so driving more of the right person to the right place for less money.

Check your competitors and market leaders
What are they doing? What is working for them? See what others are doing that share your audience and don’t be afraid to borrow but make it your own.

To listen to the full interview, along with other interviews in the education series from Moneytech click here