Digital transformation has been one of the most sought-after objectives in the last decade. Almost every business had to get involved the digital world. Whether you’re shifting to online buying through building an ecommerce website, digitising your inventory, running marketing campaigns online, or shifting to automated sales quotes and reporting – small and medium sized businesses realised that ‘digital’ is a smarter way of doing things. Although that digital transformation is empowering to employees and companies, yet it comes with challenges. Upskilling teams to keep up with those changes is now a priority.
A local company ourselves, we’ve gained our expertise in the digital field through years of practice. We love to empower our close business community with knowledge that enables them to adopt and adapt to digital transformation. In this article, we tackle how to approach digital training and the different digital areas that businesses in Belfast can benefit from.
Are You Looking for ‘Digital Training Belfast’?
ProfileTree – Expert Digital Trainers and Digital Strategists with a Local Flavour Serving Businesses in Belfast, County Antrim, Northern Ireland
We are a self-made, family run agency based in Belfast and Monaghan. We’ve established ourselves in the Northern Irish market since 2010. We’ve grown the team, collected content marketing awards, and helped local and international businesses with building top-notch websites. We’ve also helped hundreds of small and medium sized businesses with free digital training through programmes funded by Northern Ireland’s Councils over the course of three years. Investing in building digital training for your business in Belfast means making sure your new partnership is built on proven methods. Our multi-talented experts can deliver on all aspects of digital training from blogs to social media marketing to video production, SEO, and web development.
Digital Training Belfast: Types of Digital Training for Small and Medium Sized Businesses (SMEs)
Digital skills are broadly defined as the skills needed to use digital devices, communication applications, and networks to access and manage information from basic online searching and emailing to specialist programming and web development. At their core, these skills help people communicate and collaborate, develop, and share digital content, and problem solve in a work-anywhere world. For the sake of making things easier, one can label those digital skills as digital marketing, web management, navigating software tools and applications, creating design and visuals, data analysis and reports, etc. It is rare to find one person who has all those skills, for sure. But a productive, highly skilled employee will have a basic background about those skills.
Beneath those main categories, there’re many sub-skills. We’ve tackled ecommerce training and WordPress training before. Today, let’s tackle two sub-skills of digital marketing and content marketing – which are social media marketing training and video marketing training.
Digital Training Belfast: Social Media Marketing Training
Social media marketing plays a huge role in creating brand awareness for any business. It is the way to connect with your audience and keep your brand relevant and always on top of mind. Social media has also evolved from being a place to share company updates to a place where you can engage, entertain, inspire, deliver customer service, and influence buying decisions through trends. SMEs usually get derailed off social media.
Digital Training Belfast: How SMEs Approach Social Media
What usually happens is that the business owner would create business across multiple social media platforms, start posting every day, and then a couple of months later, they’re overwhelmed by the day-to-day tasks, so they drop publishing, and the page becomes inactive. Because social media is an ongoing process, someone in your company needs to be dedicated to that. It doesn’t have to be a social media expert, but they do need some social media training and consistency.
Digital Training Belfast: The Skills You Need to Run Your Social Media Successfully
Basics of Audience Segmentation
The first we always like to start with our trainees, regardless of their background, is that social media marketing is a two way conversation. It’s so much easier to run a conversation with someone you know well. You’d never run out of things to say if you know exactly who you’re talking to. As a business, you can’t be targeting everyone, even if your product or service is suitable for a wide range of people. You need to segment this wide audience into smaller groups and tailor messages for each.
Say, you sell facial shaving kits, your audience is naturally wide – but you need to divide that audience into smaller groups. You can’t possibly speak to sixty-year-old men the same way you speak to teenagers. There’re so many ways to segment your audience. Some are demographic like age, gender, income, education level, etc. Psychographic segmentation divides customers into sub-groups based on shared psychological characteristics, including subconscious or conscious beliefs, motivations, personality, lifestyle, social status, activities, interests, opinions, and attitudes. Behavioural segmentation is targeting customers based on how they interact with your business or how much they know about it. Finally, geographic segmentation is based on the location, country, or even language.
Most importantly, be as specific as possible about the needs and pain points of your audience. That’s how you can create content that they can relate to.
Content Creation
If we can only give one tip to all businesses handling the content creation of their own business accounts, it would be: don’t create content to sell. The hard sell is long dead, especially on social media. You need to create content that nurtures. To create interest for new, untapped audiences. To inspire people to adopt the lifestyle that comes with your service or product. To entertain aspirers and encourage them to engage with you. The second most important tip is consistency. One thing that helps you achieve consistency is creating a content calendar. Having a content calendar with a defined publishing frequency, objectives, content pillars, and even a visual direction allows you to publish according to a plan.
An Eye for Aesthetics
Visuals are essential on social media platforms. They build your brand image. Through your visuals, you can communicate who you are and tell your story. Visuals are powerful in attracting specific segments of your target audience. Hiring a freelance designer is a good option if you’d like a professional looking after your visuals, without the commitment of hiring someone full time. On the other hand, upskilling in-house members to create design is a great investment that can empower you to evolve with your social communication.
Using professional tools like Photoshop is not the only way to create engaging design. There’re easier tools that you can utilise to create high quality visuals – given the right training and understanding of how to create visuals. For example, Canva is a great tool that you can use to create high quality design. It has a user friendly, drag-and-drop interface. So, since it’s not only about the tools, it’s also beneficial to have an eye for aesthetics, stay informed about trendy design concept, and know how to create a unique visual identity for a brand through your designs.
Paid Ads Campaigns
Pay per click (PPC) advertising is a central part of social media marketing promotion. Since most social platforms have nearly killed organic content for brands. Sponsored posts are great for creating a bigger reach for your brand as well as driving traffic and eventually conversions to your website. Writing ad copies and creating visuals that prompt actions are vital to running PPC campaigns. However, managing the ad campaign through various platforms, for example Facebook Ad Manager, is what your team needs to be trained on. Defining the target audience, identifying ad objectives, managing and optimising ad spending, as well as assigning KPIs are part of the digital training your team can get.
Digital Training Belfast: Video Marketing Training
Video marketing has been the engagement bomb in the last few years. Almost every social platform is fighting to get a bigger share of the video creation market which is growing every day. With that growth, so many tools were built to create videos and the process is now much easier and more affordable than before.
Digital Training Belfast: An Eye for Aesthetics
Once again, an eye for aesthetics is something that will serve you well here. Understanding how to create shapes and alignment with shooting and creating videos will help you produce presentable, professional videos. Preparing a mood board, having the right props that match the brand identity and the faces of those that appear on your videos are all ingredients of creating videos for your brand.
Digital Training Belfast: Shooting and Editing
Additionally, knowing how to manage the shooting process and how to utilise the tools you have even if you’re just shooting with your mobile will make a big difference to your creative work. Editing is also another game changer. If you team learns how to edit videos and add elements that would elevate the quality of your videos. Examples of these elements are soundtracks, subtitles, creating collages, etc.
You’d be surprised that it’s not hard to create stories and reels on a daily basis for social media channels using simple tools. A camera, a tripod, and good lighting are nearly enough to shoot good material. Then, using the proper editing tools, there’s so much potential to make something out of that material. Learning how to edit your videos will also ensure that your material can be re-purposed and used for different video formats whether it’s stories, reels, Tiktoks, YouTube shorts, or even as gifs.
Digital Training Belfast: Creating a Storyboard and Writing a Script
The messages you craft for your videos and the stories you narrate are the only way to differentiate your brand from competition. People follow what feels relevant to them.
Creating a storyboard ahead of time will help you make a video clear, concise, and interesting to your audience. Once you have a topic and know your audience, create a storyboard to outline and visualise what you plan to show. That makes the shooting process much easier because you’d already know what you want your video to look like. Some people get creative and draw detailed pictures, but you don’t have to be an artist. Your storyboard can be as simple as some screenshots or basic sketching or doodling.
After the storyboard comes a script, you can learn how to write a script through proper digital training. You might find it challenging at first, especially if you’re not a naturally born writer, however, once you get the click, it will be so easy. Through the help of trainers, you can build a script template that will help you create script methodically.
Digital Training Belfast: How to Approach Digital Training?
Digital Training Belfast: ‘Expect-More’ Digital Training Approach
Why have we developed an ‘expect more’ approach to digital training in Belfast? ProfileTree started – and still is – a successful, growing digital agency focusing on advanced content and SEO expertise. We discovered, through feedback, that many training solutions weren’t backed by time-honoured, working expertise and insights. That’s how ProfileTree’s digital training became an important part of how we help our clients to grow online. By sharing the results-led knowledge we develop in our daily work, our experienced and qualified trainers deliver know-how shaped around your business with a unique commercially savvy focus.
Digital Training Belfast: Strategic Digital Training
Every time a new customer joins the ProfileTree client list, they bring a wealth of knowledge about what has – and hasn’t – worked for them in the past when they’ve invested in their digital world. A common theme? Most companies will, at some point, have been side-tracked by ‘vanity’ activity. For example, ‘we need to post more on Facebook’ or ‘we need to produce videos about our business’. These things may well be true! But without asking ‘why’ and taking time to consider ROI and business strategies, the right preparation for success hasn’t been carried out.
In short: looking good online, being on a new platform for the sake of being on a new platform and dabbling with elements of digital marketing won’t produce the best possible results. Instead, when your company comes to choose from digital marketing courses in Belfast or social media courses in Belfast, tailored training from a local, specialist company is the right approach for multiple reasons.
That’s because…
Digital Training Belfast: Well-Preparing for Your Digital Training
‘Nice to do’ isn’t enough: Making the right decisions in the digital world means doing some groundwork on ‘why’ time and money is being invested in individual elements. For example, more social media posts may look good for your business. But are they producing leads? Are they helping your existing customers to promote you to others? Are they helping towards a new segment? ProfileTree can help bring these, and many more, questions into shape before you invest in digital courses for your business.
Digital Training Belfast: Training With a Vision
The right digital services provider will want to know about your business strategies. Why? Because help with shaping your digital training, and digital marketing, to meet the needs of your company is the right starting to point to great ROI. To bring your digital world into line with where you want your business to be in the future, simply ask a company with proven experience in growing businesses online.
Digital Training Belfast: Local Digital Partnership
Partnership leads to success: For marketing courses, digital marketing courses or social media courses, any number of companies will be happy to accept your custom as a ‘transaction’. However, building a relationship with a company who’ll be passionate about feeding your business success will mean a better investment. That’s why we’d love to explain how we can help grow your Belfast-based business online.
Digital Training Belfast: How to Choose The Right Digital Training Agency?
Digital Training Belfast: Build the Foundations
Training rushed brings a risk of becoming training wasted. Why? Investing in courses or support for the wrong reasons can only mean the wrong outcomes. Too often we hear about ‘off the shelf’ digital training falling short as it hasn’t been designed around real business goals and hasn’t been tailored for an individual business.
Digital Training Belfast: Stay on Track
An old saying ‘keep the main thing, the main thing’ rings very true. Therefore, a company with – say – a primary goal of increasing sales should weave this goal into its digital strategies. This, of course, includes digital training and digital courses. To discover how to make this happen, just ask!
Digital Training Belfast: Think Team
Good ideas can come from anywhere in your business, which is why listening to the needs of every department in your company can help shape a high-performance digital strategy (including digital training). ProfileTree courses can be built around outcomes for real business success.
Digital Training Belfast: Choose Well
To create a firm footing for your digital training, work with a local company who’ll understand your business, who’ll want to grow with your company and who’ll use the very latest knowledge to grow with you. Digital training works best when your digital training partner is the right fit for your business.
Digital Training Belfast: How Much Does Digital Training Cost
Working with so many different businesses over the years taught us to work with different budgets and requirements. We have created multiple packages for each of digital marketing services. Of course, every digital training project has its own requirements but generally, we use your requirements and budget to come up with suitable digital training solutions. And we hardly ever give our clients one solution – we usually give them multiple to choose from. In other words, you set the requirements, we tailor a package within the limits of your spending.
Our digital training hourly rate starts at £65 per hour. Delivering a 90-minute session takes around 6 hours of preparation by our team. Of course, sometimes the preparation would cover two sessions instead of one, depending on the level of complexity of the material delivered. For an accurate pricing, get in touch with us.
Digital Training Belfast: Ready to Book a Free Digital Training Audit?
A digital training audit is where one of our expert team members will get on a call with you to understand what you have in mind for digital training. You’ll discuss your goals, your team’s skills, and where you see potential. Our specialist will go through your digital marketing channels and analyse your performance briefly to recommend digital training solutions. Fill the form and send us your questions, we will be happy to answer all of them. Please let us know if your business is registered in Belfast, County Antrim. Alternatively, you can book a chat with our team for free and find out how we can help you plan your digital training in Belfast, County Antrim, Northern Ireland.
More services: Social Media Marketing Belfast, SEO Belfast, Digital Marketing Belfast
