Writing's on the wall

Our physical Pinterest board

It's been a week of getting away from our desks and spending our time sticking things on walls!

One discussion point, which came up at a recent team meeting, was the importance of sharing best practice internally. Whether it be in person, on email or via Yammer all of us in Marcomms have something to share with each other. So, to take this a step further, I took it upon myself to create a real-life Pinterest board next to my desk!

After a little bit of whiteboard pen calligraphy it was good to go (I may have spent too long on this bit!) The idea is that the team can now pin up any great examples of Marketing, PR and Internal Communications that inspire them. It's already looking great, and has become an office talking point, with loads of fun contributions from the whole team.

On a more serious note, and to begin the discovery phase of our new website, this week I ran an away day in Solihull with colleagues from Kier construction.

The objectives for this session were to gather true internal business insight. We wanted to look at how we win and retain business and 'our perception of how we are perceived' by clients. This exercise will of course be mandated by taking the opposite approach from the outside in (i.e from a client's point of view). But by starting with our people it eased us in to collecting a great deal of useful data.

As our construction business operates very regionally we expected a nuanced view from all involved. For example, some are working on very different types of job depending on the geography. 

Representatives from each of these 7 regions were given different coloured post it notes to differentiate them. We then asked them to write on separate notes the sectors in which they operate (i.e. education). They then placed these on the wall in two separate columns labeled as 'maintain' or 'grow'. The instruction was to place them lower on the wall if the opportunity was less and higher if it was more. So if there is a low ambition to grow in that sector it should be nearer the bottom. Similarly, a high ambition to maintain in a sector means the note should be nearer the top of that column.

This allowed us to see the synergies between the targets of different regions at a glance. It also gave us an idea of how they classify each client for whom they build. We ensured we took lots of photos throughout the day so we could write up the notes later.

The next step was to create new columns on the wall for each individual sector (x-axis). For each of these we then created sub headings horizontally (y-axis). These included key clients, capabilities, unique selling points and keywords. By working through each one individually we compiled a powerful list to inform the weighting of our web content. I think that without running a 'post it notes on the wall' exercise like this you can't say you're a proper digital marketer! Perhaps I took my passion for Trello a bit far by recreating it in real life...

To finish I gave a short presentation on our current Google ranking for certain keywords versus our competitors. This highlighted missed opportunities and showed how we will use all the data we just collected.

Days like this are essential to gain a real understanding of the business. Whilst it will be the first of many it energised me into looking at this project from the point of view of how the business thinks and talks. Most importantly it will give our website users what they want in terms of the content weighting and language.

In my next post I'll discuss some desk based methods for gathering this type of intelligence which I'm currently undertaking. By the end of this process I'll be so buried in data that the formality of building the website will be easy (or not!)