Rik Courtney is an entrepreneur, public speaker and CEO of Be More Social, a social media marketing agency and features in the latest of Press Gazette’s Marketing Maestro interviews. This series is produced in association with Lead Monitor, New Statesman Media Group’s AI-driven marketing solution.
What media channels do you see as the most important and best value when it comes to marketing spend and activity?
Facebook advertising allows us to use tracking mechanisms that you can also integrate on your website, to track where people are going and what they are doing on the site. These tracking mechanisms allow us to identify customers that have visited the website via engaging with the ads on Facebook.
Pound for pound, Facebook is the best value when it comes to advertising. However, if you are considering which platform to use in a business-to-business reimage I would certainly use LinkedIn for outreach.
What is the best way to improve your social media output, especially when dealing with B2B marketing?
There are a lot of things that you could do with LinkedIn outreach. For example, you can attend events, not necessarily physically attending, but you can identify events that are happening that support your marketplace. By attending or, clicking that you’re going to attend an event, you’ll see a list of active LinkedIn members that are actively seeking your service or are people in support of the services that you deliver.
This means you can then engage instantly with a like-minded person that is attending the event, that you already know is interested in the services you offer.
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What for you is the key to any successful marketing campaign, what actually makes a good lead?
A good lead for us would be a telephone conversation about our services. But this is different for each individual business.
We, for example, partnered with The Federation of Small Businesses and delivered workshops with them – positioning ourselves as experts in our field. Attendees then give us contact details, allowing us to put them into a nurture campaign, which then ultimately leads to people considering us when they need our services. A direct consequence of these partnerships is that we receive numerous people following our social accounts and visiting our website, meaning again, they’re subjected to nurture marketing on our social media.
How important is technology in modern marketing?
I think it is going to become even more important than ever. Facebook announced a huge keynote not too long back. They’ve changed their name from Facebook to Meta. The way that we’re going to be using technology in the future is going to be huge. You’re going to be wearing 3D headsets to have a meeting with multiple people in the not-so distant future. The tech is already here and the tools have been used for gaming for such a long time and I think we’ve got an exciting period coming up very soon.
We’ll be able to create our own meeting rooms, and Apple Glasses are likely going to be involved in that. I think technology, hardware and software will be merging all over again. It’s going to be exciting and it’s going to change people’s lives and working practices.
What are the biggest pain points in a marketing campaign?
For me, if I’m talking from our perspective, it is customer expectation. That’s my biggest pain point because people come to me saying, right, it’s been so many weeks now, why hasn’t this worked? And I know many marketers, in-house and external agencies, experience the same issue.
In a marketing campaign, there is a process. What we have to do as digital marketers is change a buyer’s mindset. So campaigns you roll out have a beginning, middle and end. The beginning is always about awareness. The middle is about consideration, the end is about converting into sales.
And finally, if you could ask your peers for one piece of advice or help, what would it be?
How do I keep my team motivated and work-focused, whilst maintaining my team culture?
The environment I’ve created occasionally gets confused and work occasionally gets focused on culture goals rather than work goals. I worry that as we grow, the team may become more focused on culture and having fun. Whilst I want to ensure our team always has a great culture, I don’t ever want to lose the quality service we pride ourselves on. I want our culture to be all about helping our clients succeed, getting the job done, and enjoying the process as we go along. At the end of the day, we have to continue to provide a great service and produce enough work to stay in business and pay wages.
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