The Business Fairy Founder and CEO Aisling Hurley Took Care Of Business
The Business Fairy Founder and CEO Aisling Hurley Took Care Of Business on Midlands 103 talk show ‘Taking Care Of Business with Ronan Berry’ on Tuesday 4th September for the shows one year anniversary. Aisling is no stranger to Midlands 103 radio station, being a regular business commentator on issues such as the gender pay gap and the GDPR update that came into effect earlier this year. You can listen to the GDPR podcast here. But back to Tuesday night.
As Ronan stated every-time Aisling is on the show she tries to highlight the latest digital marketing trends, or provide practical tips to businesses. She tries to focus on business tech today for tomorrow. Ronan then went on to ask Aisling about how businesses can “keep up to speed with the latest trends on what’s popular” and whether “business owners feel that these latest trends are a mechanism for big marketing companies to make money, or is there merit behind it?” Aisling talked about 2 trends including personalization of mass digital marketing communications. The 2nd trend is the growth of voice-activated searches by consumers. Here’s her response.
So What Should Businesses Be Doing At The Moment To Grow
Apart from using systems like MailChimp and Constant Contact to personalize emails, other ways in which you can personalize mass communications across platforms are:
A. Chatbots
- Facebook has its own chatbot. This is the Autoresponder application on Facebook. Not many people seem to be aware of Autoresponder, which is located under your settings on your business page when you log in. Basically when you turn chatbot on you can interact with your customers on your page without having to be online 24/7.
- Chatbot allows you use a reply already set up as well as being able to personalize a reply. For example, if someone visits your page, you can have a message automatically pop up saying “Hi, ‘Frank’ how can we help you?” Facebook also has a pre-developed code set up which you can use to personalize your reply and pump it into Autoresponder.
- You can also build your own chatbot system with the help of the Chatbot magazine. You can make it as personal as you wish to. You can add a button to your website for example, which will allow you to use the first name of the customer messaging you for example, “Hi John, sorry the page isn’t manned 24/7 but we will come back to you as soon as we can. Please leave any questions or if it is urgent you can contact us on (contact number here).
- Another tool that can be used to build your own chatbot is Chatbot Nation. The key to this is to develop out a framework first. This is a type of map of any possible conversations which could occur between your customer and you. If the customer asked ‘A’ then the Chatbot replies with the appropriate answer. This is where you really need to know your customers and what they want from your business or service.
- If you use one of these on your website, you get notifications when someone is trying to interact with your business, allowing you time get back to them whilst the Chatbot replies with the use of pre-programmed questions and answers.
B. Voice Searching
Did you know that 20% of mobile queries on Google are voice searches, 25% on Bing and 10% on Baidu (Chinese Search Engine)? According to statistics by 2020, it is believed that 50% of online searches will be voice-activated searches. This will be a huge change in as little as 18 months from now. It is believed that this change is coming from people talking into their mobiles via Google, Amazon and Apple systems.
Recently Amazon Alexa app topped the app store charts, with the Google Home app coming in second. The growth of the Internet of Things and mobile usage is driving this change. Simultaneously, Google’s mobile-first index is rolling out too and will soon be applied to all sites.
To future-proof your business, you really need to start looking at your website now. Google has created a whole range of search guidelines for these new changes. With the Google are going, you as a business can either get on board with the changes or else your business will probably fall by the wayside (online).
Using the correct terminology is becoming incredibly important, particularly when it comes to voice-activated searches. By using the correct terminology will result in you getting top ranking on Google, for example:
Q: how tall was Charles Darwin?
A: Charles Darwin stood about 5 feet, 11 ½ inches tall.
This reply fully answers the users query.
Compared to another example:
Q: what will the weather be like this weekend?
A: It will be 69 degrees and cloudy.
This reply contains useless information where the query seeks weather forecast for the weekend and in the reply given weekend not mentioned. So this will rate low on rankings.
For a business to receive top rankings using the voice searches, they need to understand what their customers look for, their search intent and the context in which they are searching (for example location, the last search performed related to this action etc.).
SME’s Getting Ready
To help you get your business ready, there are some tools you can use.
- Schema markup: is a Google tool that creates a structured data markup schema which is supported by major search engines. On-page markup helps search engines understand the information on your web pages and provide richer search results. By adding it to your website you can actually alert search engines to elements on your site such as events, people, places and things happening on your site.
- XML sitemaps- having a clear structure sitemap that is easy to navigate by people and search engines will increase the likelihood that your information can be sourced quickly.
- Carry out a mobile-friendly test on Google.
The possible implications for non-optimised sites with Google Voice Search
Some smaller companies don’t realise when they get a website done that it isn’t optimised. It is only when it does not come up in search rankings that the business realises something isn’t right. Aisling’s tip on how to make sure your site is optimised is “ Always check that you’re getting your site optimised when you go to get a website quote”. If your site is properly optimised then to a certain degree, going forward your site is future proofed, but it is up to the business to continue to future proof it on a regular basis,
To hear Aisling’s radio interview with Ronan Berry listen here.
