Melanie
The Monday Morning Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Esther of IPA Group, bringing premier online promotion to your business.
Esther
And Melanie of STOMP Social Media Training, who empowers business owners to manage social media and marketing for themselves. And welcome back to another episode of It's a Monday Morning Marketing Podcast. Today, we're talking about safeguarding your marketing. That's a big word.
Melanie
Well, yes, for vocabulary challenged people, perhaps.
Esther
Well, that's also quite a scary It's a reward for some people. Yes. Because when you talk about safeguarding, you think that something is going to go wrong, basically. And you're trying to prevent those things from going wrong. So that's what this episode is all about, trying to prevent things going wrong in your marketing. So kick us off, Melanie. Give us an idea of one way to safeguard our marketing.
Melanie
Well, some of the most popular things that are happening when it comes to social media marketing, now we are going to be talking about all different types, is losing access to your social media platforms. And it could be those of yours or those of your clients, or normally a bit of both. So I would, first of all, encourage you, if you haven't already, to add an authenticator app and create 2FA so that you can prevent this from happening in the first place.
Esther
Agreed. Also, continuing on from that, I would also advocate fully for having more than one person as admin and/or manager on your company page, whether that be... I'm thinking meta right now. They're the ones at at the minute who seem to have the most problems of people losing access. And it's not always a matter of just you forgot the password or somebody hacked into it or whatever. There are a lot of cases that I've heard of of disgruntled former employees who have gone in and changed the password because they were the only ones that had access to it and are now using it to talk badly about companies, which obviously, slander, label, all of those things can be involved, but we don't want that to be an issue.
Melanie
Also, it's although having last pass and things like that are fabulous, and if you've got passwords galore of every different type and variation, that's fantastic. But especially when it comes to platforms like Meta, it's also worth having some of the information about your accounts not virtually held somewhere. So as an example, if you lose access to your Meta business suite and you try to contact, if you actually succeed, and get a support ticket from Meta itself, they'll say, What is your business ID? What is your personal details relating to your account? And once you've lost access to Meta Business Suite, especially your business account, you can't access that anymore. So I would highly, highly encourage you, wherever you've got IDs, data, any special code It's reference numbers, anything to do with any of your social media or traditional marketing methods, to write them down somewhere, keep them somewhere safe. Obviously, don't carry it around on your phone. That would be a bad idea.
Esther
No, but there are ways that you can screenshot the information, or you can, let's go old school, and print it off and put it in a filing cabinet under meta or social platforms.
Melanie
Or hide it under a different name. You can say menus. The easier you make it for somebody else to pick up, the worse it is. But as long as you know where to find it, that's the That's the most important thing.
Esther
Yeah. Well, that's all well and good until you get a memory like mine. I'm going, why do I have a random bunch of menus here? But I would fully advocate for not just storing it on your electronic devices because they can also get damaged or need updating, replaced, and not all the information-.
Melanie
or stolen?
Esther
Always, yeah. And not all the information always gets moved over or it's not all held in the cloud for you. And even if it is in the cloud, you still need those passwords to get in to get the information. So I'm still a big fan of pen and paper for a lot of things. Okay, so another thing for safeguarding your marketing is to have a plan when things go wrong. For example, I've seen a lot of people recently recording their being fired and putting it on social media or recording videos to say, My company didn't give me time off to be with my sick children, for example. Have a plan as to what would happen or what you would say or do in that situation? Because people are expecting a reply from the company. People are heavily invested in the drama of the whole thing. So what would you do as a business? What would you say? Because one of the companies issued an apology and didn't apologise and are now losing customers left, right and centre. So you have to have some strategy for that.
Melanie
Controlling your environment is probably the best way to do it. I appreciate that people are spread all over counties, countries, when they're trying to fire people or speak to them about particular issues. But if you can't control your environment, so if you can't bring them into your office, then you need to make a point of saying, We are recording this for ourselves. Themselves so that they have a way of providing evidence if something's taken out of context when the person is actually recording their end. It's horrible that we have to think like this, but it's happening far too often.
Esther
Yeah. And it is all part of your PR as well, of how you are perceived out there and whether you have to send in a redaction to the newsletter or send in I don't know, to any place where traditional marketing still takes place, you may need to have those things already there because time is money and time is of the essence and time waits for no man and all of those wonderful proverbs and sayings. But when it comes to social media, it's even faster. So you need to have a response already drafted, whether it's a legal response of no comment or we're not doing this at the minute, or whether it's a full on actual apology that is heartfelt and correct. Those are just a couple of ways that you can safeguard. What else can we do?
Melanie
If you have a website, which most of us will do, make sure that you are staying on top of your cookies. It is not the responsibility of your website designer or manager to be in charge of those cookies. You have to make sure that they're appropriate and accurate for your website. And make sure that the SSL cert, if you're collecting any data of any description, is kept up to date on the website as well.
Esther
Absolutely. Absolutely. And that reminds me of another one. Make sure your prices are correct, because if you authorise, in this case, your website to go live and the decimal point is in the wrong place, then you should have checked that, first of all. And that could end up costing you a lot of money if you're selling something for 100 and it ends up being one instead of 100.
Melanie
That's quite a big difference.
Esther
Because people will see it. It is quite a big difference, but people will see it and they will act.
Melanie
They'll take advantage.
Esther
I thought.
Melanie
Yeah.
Esther
Yeah, so I think it was a company in the States who was using AI, and the AI put the decimal point in the wrong place. And cars were being sold for a lot less than they should have So that's a lot bigger than one to 100. But yes, check everything. Check your social media posts before they go out, especially if you have someone like an intern or something. It can be very frustrating to be standing over everyone and watching what's going on. But it's only really until they get the hang of it. I'm thinking here, too, of larger offices and multinationals and people with a lot of things at stake or a lot more things at stake. If Heinz Beans produces an advert or replies to a comment, most people see it because of their millions of followers. If Melanie and I do something, less people will see it. So there's a lot of things that you have to bear in mind and take into consideration. But those things of, at least, like I said, getting them up and running or giving them a proper onboarding of we're allowed to do this and we're not allowed to do this. I remember Tesco's had a guy on Twitter when it was still called Twitter. And somebody received a cucumber in their online shopping, and there was a little dead worm inside the cucumber packaging. So he complained to Tesco and the guy on the other end of the messages was very sweet and considerate, but also very funny. So he says, oh, we're awfully sorry about that. When when cucumber are picked, obviously they're picked from the ground, so these things can happen. But As a note of consideration, here is a little ode that I have written to William, the worm that was found in the cucumber packages. And the guy wrote a whole poem to this dead worm. It was gold. It was brilliant. And it made the guy who had complained, obviously laugh, see the funny side of things, and keep buying from Tesco. So you can go and search it up online. I'm sure there's still somebody who screenshotted it and sent it out to other people. It was very good. But things like that help in rough situations.
Melanie
I think one of the last ways I can think of safeguarding your marketing is to try not to do everything by yourself. And I only mean this because you can get a little overwhelmed, things get delayed, the messaging isn't correct, you put it up at the wrong time. And obviously, we would always recommend you look at your analytics and make sure you monitor and everything else. But when it comes to actually safeguarding, it could also be safeguarding your time as well as your marketing. And one of the best decisions, and I know I can speak for Esther here, was when we started outsourcing some of our work. We spent more time doing stuff that we were passionate, invested, and interested in that was paying us more. And all the follow-up and the support work that was taking us the time when we weren't customer-facing with people was costing everybody money.
Esther
Yeah, definitely.
Melanie
So now we have got, both of us have got virtual assistants who help us, and I could not go back. I could never lose my virtual assistant now, frankly.
Esther
No, and it is a leap of faith. It's a leap of trust because it is one of those things where some people think, how can I hand over my baby that is my marketing or my blog writing or whatever you're to outsource. But it is such a time saver on the other end once you get them onboarded properly. So that is our advice for today. If you have any other questions about safeguarding or how to set up a two-factor authentication on your platforms or who to add to your back-end.
Melanie
Yeah.
Esther
Yeah. Admins. Then do get in touch because it's not always as simple as just adding the next person over in the office. Some of us are sole traders. Some of us only work with ourselves. Some of us have trust issues. But it is very important, even if it means setting up another meta account just to have you as the other admin. We'll talk about this more on another podcast, but that's it for today, guys. We'll be back next week with more Monday Morning Marketing. Until then. Bye bye.
Melanie
Bye have a great week.
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