Insights
Let's Get Social!
We have a new Marketing Coordinator role (details here and below). If you know someone who would be a good fit, please reach out at hello@outandaboutcomm.com.
------
MARKETING COORDINATOR
Out & About Communications is seeking a talented Marketing Coordinator to assist with projects on an as needed basis. Work assignments could include but are not limited to project research, support with digital accounts, support with media campaigns, building media lists, drafting copy, and coordinating special events.
We are looking for someone who is a self-starter, has an aptitude for details, and who has a passion for marketing communications. Fluency in WordPress, Google Docs, Dropbox, and Hootsuite is a must.
If you are interested in supporting this type of work on an as needed basis, please email us your resume, cover letter, social media links, and any inquires to hello@outandaboutcomm.com.
Our Team is Growing!
We've pinned some fabulous social media and blogging tools for you to check out. Some of our favorites include...
Vector vs Raster: This graphic is a great 101 on vector vs raster files. Next time your printer asked for a vector file, you'll know what to send them. Also, this graphic is a great tool to reference when saving your images.
Media Kit Tips: Bloggers who are looking to advertise or attract media need a media kit to pitch their offerings. If you're looking for tips on how to make a great kit, check out this pin.
SEO Step by Step: SEO helps direct people to your site. Check out this guide for a 101 on how to implement basic SEO into your site. Also, if you're looking to better understand how to use blog categories vs. tags, check out this pin.
Best Days to Post: Have you ever noticed that the day and the time of day your post impacts the number of likes, clicks, and retweets you receive? Check out this graphic that outlines the best days to post.
Facebook Apps: Want to add apps to your Facebook page? You'll need to design some graphics and upload (101 on how to add apps and upload graphics here).
For more tips, check out our Social Media and Blog Buff Pinterest board here. What are your favorite social media and blog tools?
Social Media & Blog Buff
Blog by Marshele Scherrer
Most of us write a “to-do list” each day. We sit down with our cup of joe each morning and, as we read through our emails, we create a list of all of the tasks we have to do that day. When was the last time you woke up and created your “goal list”? Many do not realize the difference between setting goals and setting tasks. A quick run down…
Tasks are things that you are going to get done eventually. No matter what—going grocery shopping, for instance, will get done. You may eat out five nights in a row before you actually go to the grocery store, but at some point, you will buy groceries.
Goals are things that are not going to happen unless you make a conscious effort to achieve them. Examples of this may be running a marathon or starting your own business. Goals are what inspire and motivate you. Goals require a sense of possibility. Soren Kierkegaard says this about possibility,
“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as a possibility!”
There are three things that I want to mention about the possibility as it relates to goals.
1) Possibility allows the past to stay the past.
2) It provides ways to overcome or remove constraints.
3) Possibility comes from above the line.
More specifically, in my opinion, there is an invisible and sometimes indistinguishable line where our motives reside which can impact how successful we will be in achieving our goals. For example, if a goal is set below the line on the foundation of anger, jealousy or fear, we are less likely to achieve those goals. However, when we create goals driving above the line from a place of passion, confidence, or commitment, we empower ourselves to succeed.
My challenge to you today is to discover your “possibility.” Before setting your day-to-day tasks, make sure you take the time to set goals. You can set your goals for next week, for the next year and for the next ten years. This way your daily tasks align with bigger goals that align with your purpose.
Align Your Daily Tasks to Goals
Exciting news! We just finished designing a new website for the Harvard Kennedy School Alumni Community of San Diego! We worked with them to design a site that features their events (check out their amazing upcoming events), takes alumni membership registration, and servers as a hub for those interested in government/ political related happenings in San Diego. In the interim, we also helped them design a landing page (before the site was live) and social media sites. Congrats to HKS@SD on the launch of your new site, and thank you for all of the great things you're doing for the San Diego community!
Harvard Kennedy School Alumni Community of San Diego Website Design
Guest blog by Haney Hong
If you’re familiar with the term “strategic planning,” you may associate it with lofty goal making, lots of time spent in frustrating conversations, and money spent on glossy documents that gather dust; if not, it may just sound like an abstract exercise meant for the brainy eggheads in your company or organization. Truth be told, it’s none of the above if done right and strategic planning may be the very process that helps keep your doors open while your peers or competitors find themselves in varying stages of irrelevance.
Good strategic planning results in an imagined story of your future value to others. And while it isn’t hard to write a good story, it takes a few commitments to let your imagination run. You have to make deliberate assumptions to simplify the future. You have to tolerate risk to achieve something big. And you have to trust your gut and jump. A participant in a recent strategic planning session I facilitated said it well: “You have to place the hard bets, and you have to be willing to ante up.”
Strategic planning writes a story, and next month, I’ll want to discuss with you the process of story writing and get your thoughts about those commitments above. In future months, I’ll also want to dialogue with you on the leadership, followership, and management of change to turn that written story into real life. But before digging into either, I think it’s important to recognize why having a strategy–a story–is so important.
Having worked with organizations of varying missions and at different stages of growth, I’ve encountered some common problems:
- The day-to-day tasks of employees don’t align with business goals or “the-way-it’s-done” putters along inefficiently, lowering morale and motivation. Time–and therefore salary or payroll costs–is spent on miscellany that does not contribute to the core business, and this wasted time and money perpetuates itself.
- There are a lot of good–and bad–ideas on how to make things better, but there’s either no way to share and explore them or no ability for leaders to be secure in their decisions, including resource allocation, on those ideas.
- Work moves along every day with no real challengers (“this is the way we’ve always done it”), but the organization gets caught off guard when someone leaves for a better opportunity, a competitor swoops in and grabs market share, or a new product makes yours irrelevant.
A strategy–a story–is important because it unifies everyone behind what your business does and prevents these common problems from occurring. It motivates your employees to bring their creativity to bear, because they know why they are doing what they do. It gives your leaders an ability to decide what to do, as the story talks about how you bring value to others. It prevents strategic surprise, because the story recognizes many of the villains that will take you off track.
Your strategy is important, because it’s how you talk about your future. But when you forget your story, someone else’s story becomes what’s told.
Post originally published on hdhaa.com.
Why is “Strategy” Important?
Over the years, we've developed a list of favorite tools that can help to streamline your day-to-day and increase productivity. Check it out...
Mobile Office
- Turboscan (scanner app)
- Dropbox (save your docs in the cloud)
- Google Drive
Task Management Tools
- Remember the Milk
- OmniFocus
- Basecamp (great for groups)
Communication Tools
Free Text Messages
News Feeds
Photo Editing
Stay Connected
- Wi-Fi Finder App (searches for free and paid wi-fi near you)
- Boingo Wi-Finder App
Heading out?
What are your favorite tools to run your business from anywhere?
Tools to Run your Business from Anywhere
To have a successful working relationship, we need to put a roadmap in place. After the items below are completed, we can craft a custom marketing strategy to help you grow and scale your business.
What do you need to prepare internally to best support us if we are to partner? We’re glad you asked! Here is a checklist of information we will need from you to get started.
Goal Setting
- What are your company’s vision, mission and values?
- What are your 1-, 3- and 5-year goals? What are your long-term goals (think 10+ years)? These are goals for your company and not just marketing goals. We don’t need hyper details, but we need just enough to help us understand major priorities and focus.
Audience
- What is your current and ideal target market?
- What core problem do you solve for ideal clients?
Marketing Strategy
- What have you done in the past for marketing? What has worked and what has not?
- Who are your primary competitors?
- What is your primary competitive advantage?
Communication (please share name and contact information)
- Who is our day-to-day contact?
- Who is your administrative coordinator? This person will help with printing, event prep and other more administrative items.
- Who manages operations and has access to email list management?
Onboarding
- We will send you a checklist of files, logins and more we will need to get started
- We will get you onboarded with our project management tool, Asana
- What you can expect from us:some text
- Discovery call (1.5 hours)
- Follow-up meeting from the discovery call to go over the game plan (1 hour)
- Weekly check-in meetings
- Regular communications and project updates via Asana
Getting Started with Out & About Communications
Following the pandemic and subsequent Great Resignation, prospective employees want more in their careers than just fair compensation. Company culture, the norms, people, and values behind your brand, is quickly hiking up their priority list. Why is it influential? When a highly sought-after candidate has comparable offers from multiple firms, company culture is the clincher.
Expectations, workplace benefits, leadership style, and other factors drive productivity, performance, employee satisfaction, and turnover—in both directions. Whether calibrated or misaligned, culture ultimately affects your firm’s clientele, balance sheet, growth, and longevity. Here are three ways your firm can market its company culture to recruit and retain qualified professionals who enrich your organization.
#1 Define and Create an Authentic Culture
Company culture is more than a snazzy HR poster in your breakroom. It is ever-present and intrinsic to your firm. Only your firm can define what your culture means to you—and apply it to the people you hire, how you support one another professionally and personally, and what measures success.
Don’t have an accurate pulse on your culture? Engage your team. What better way to define values and standards and improve morale than to invite your employees to help establish them? Clarity is your firm’s accountability and is crucial, especially since new hires can easily sniff out disorganization and mistrust. Here are three employee engagement strategies to get started:
- Conduct an eNPS survey.
- You may be familiar with a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey measuring customer satisfaction. An eNPS assesses your employees based on a single question. The survey cannot provide a complete picture of your employees’ experience but is an effective and simple way to capture a baseline to compare progress in subsequent years.
- Hold group and one-on-one meetings.
- Share a pre-meeting agenda outlining the purpose, prompts, and questions you’ll cover, such as “What is your favorite part about working here?” and “How do you think we can improve?” Ensure the meeting is a collaborative, open forum that remains on track and allows each team member to express their views.
- Schedule ongoing meetings to gauge employee satisfaction, share company updates, and gain employee buy-in about the firm’s vision and direction.
- Establish core values.
- As a team or among a key group of leaders, drill down into what makes your firm and culture unique. For example, one of Uber’s core values is “Diversity makes us stronger.” Document and share the values with your team and explain expectations for how you will demonstrate and uphold them.
- Keep cultural norms top of mind by integrating core values into your processes, communications, and meetings. A simple exercise is to conclude discussions with how the team sees them in action and areas that need work.
#2 Share Your Culture Online
Prospective talent is scrolling your social media and website to gauge cultural fit. Leverage these platforms to showcase what makes your firm unique and attractive. Here are four ways to promote your culture online:
- Weave it into your social media marketing strategy. Your social feeds are highly effective in highlighting cultural aspects that make your firm a desirable place to work. Regularly integrating the following types of cultural posts in your social calendar demonstrates your firm’s ethos and commitment to longevity and team engagement:
- New hires and work anniversaries
- Peeks into a day-in-the-life or behind-the-scenes of your firm
- “Best Places to Work"-esque awards
- Team outings like happy hours and holiday gatherings
- Community involvement, including volunteering and giving back together
- Make your team page human. Don’t be afraid to add flair to your “Meet the Team” page. This part of your website is a chance for your employees to shine and reflect the fun, diversity of skills and people, and other characteristics your culture embodies. Consider the following approaches:
- Headshots that are less stuffy and show each team member’s distinct character
- Personal anecdotes, including fun facts or life mottos
- Quotes or videos that share the employee’s favorite part of working with your firm
- Liven up your job descriptions and profiles. Legal and role specifics are essential to setting up potential hires for success. However, job descriptions and company profiles on sites like LinkedIn and Indeed are other opportunities to use your company culture to win over prospects. Here’s how you can help them stand out:
- Produce a branded welcome video introducing your firm, team, and quirks.
- Avoid overused, outdated jargon and language, crafting job descriptions and company profiles with conversational, relatable messaging.
- Include a range of photos full of personality that capture happy, valued, and real employees.
- Outline benefits that resonate with the type of applicants you wish to attract, incentives such as flexible or remote hours, career path opportunities, paid parental leave, wellness perks, “take your dog to work” days, and more— anything that makes your firm enticing.
- Develop a New Hire Toolkit. A new member guide is handy for sales teams and staff out in the community to consistently represent your brand. The kit can include promotional materials, such as:
- Social media post templates that employees can share on their networks, e.g., “I'm thrilled to share that I've joined the (@FIRMNAME) team, where (FIRM TAGLINE).”
- Style-approved social media profile pictures, banners, email signatures, and logos
- Branded polos and other items your team can sport to raise firm visibility
#3 Be Consistent (Yet Open)
A thriving company culture is consistent at every touchpoint. Firms are responsible for preserving and representing their established culture, systems, and standards. For example, team members and clients should have similar experiences online, over the phone, and in person. Without order and consistency, alignment and trust may crumble.
When a firm grows, continuity becomes the cornerstone of investing in its people and long-term success. Employees value consistency and stability, knowing they can rely on standards to solve problems, advance in their careers, and communicate and gain feedback from leaders. As a result, employees have the peace of mind to perform better, which reflects in client service and loyalty.
It is equally important to ensure your culture is flexible enough to accommodate new perspectives and innovations. Prospective hires seek broad-minded workplaces that value team members’ opinions, concerns, and changing needs.
You may have already established a positive and supportive workplace culture. But top-tier talent will only notice your firm on their job hunt if you promote it strategically and intentionally. Now is the time to use these tips to showcase your unique culture and get applicants and clients excited to partner with you.
3 Ways to Win Over Top Talent with Your Company Culture