Welcome to BMTV business, the show where we look at how to work on your business rather than in your business.
This week we are lucky to be joined by Guy Wilcox, a social media marketing guru from ICE Creative. Guy has been working in the business for the last 15 years, building thousands of websites, designing apps and creating digital marketing strategies for businesses small and large.

Websites

Guys tells us that websites are hugely important to every business. They are no longer just a shop window but a place to publish all your content. Even window cleaners would benefit from online presence!

For us, half of our traffic is now on mobile devices and this is the statistic that is being reported across the board in multiple businesses. If you trade mainly business to business, you may find that there is a larger percentage of desktop users than mobile users using your website. Any simple service that can be Googled quickly will be very mobile heavy, and you will benefit from having a mobile-friendly website like a responsive site.
A responsive site will resize and change layout depending on the screen size or device you are viewing it on. This makes them great for desktops, but also suitable for a wide range of mobile devices which all have different screen sizes and resolutions. This is generally the preferred way of making websites these days, and you’ve probably seen them out in the wild many times. The modern outlook on building websites is that you actually build a website first for mobile devices and adapt it for desktops later. This just goes to show how the priority has changed over the years.

Social media

There are a variety of social websites that you can be on, and it can be confusing as to which strategy you need to take for your business. People always say “you have to be on social media”, but Guy says that that’s not always 100% true. For the balloon industry, being on Facebook is a good idea as parties and celebrations are regularly talked about on Facebook anyway. However, if you sell for example high-end audio equipment for boardrooms, you’ll bore a lot of people talking about it on Facebook, which is not the right platform for you. Instead you would be best choosing a discussion network like LinkedIn.

It’s easy to get lost in the world of social media so measure the time you spend on it. Understand that social media is part of a bigger spectrum of how websites get ranked in terms of their worth on google. Have a balanced content and engagement strategy, and work on things like a blog on your website. Any content that comes from your web address will be associated with your website, so a blog is a good place to publish everything from and build up an online presence.

Facebook ads

The difference between just being on Facebook and advertising on Facebook is that there is a more traditional one-way conversation. Facebook builds a database of your audience, and you can directly target them to get your advert in front of the right people. This can be a great cost-effective method for some businesses and you can even get ads that remarket to your audience and follow them around the internet!

Snapchat

Snapchat is the new big platform. If you don’t know, it is an app that you can take pictures with and send them to people but they are deleted after a few seconds. This has the very attractive proposition of privacy and quick communication all in one package. Snapchat has recently branched out into facial recognition technology that allows you to change your face to look like a dog or a unicorn among other things, but Guy thinks this is the start of something big for advertising. He says that although it is just being used for silly purposes at the moment, this technology will be used in the future to tell how you react to adverts and can act accordingly based on your reaction. If you smile it could offer you similar content, for example.

Finally, we’ll finish with to quick and fun questions about Guy.

Ultimate dinner party

Guy’s a big basketball fan so he would definitley invite Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James. Tom hardy is one of his favourite actors so he would be there, alongside Gandhi and Malcolm X! Quite a diverse group!

Favourite film

Shawshank redemption, Guy says it’s so powerful it blew him away. He says that you can never get bored of it.

Favourite social platform

Because Guy’s a businessman, LinkedIn is hugely powerful for him, “it’s the boardroom of social media” he says.

Quick fire questions:

Dog or cat?	Cat
Rugby or football?	Rugby
Books or films?	Films
Sweet or savoury?	Sweet
Active or relaxing holiday?	Active
Beer or Wine?	Wine
Friends or Big Bang?	Big Bang

Rob

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