FIGARODIGITAL.CO.UK
Q & A
Howard Scott is Head of Digital at the National Trust, as well as an Executive Director of BIMA and a visiting lecturer on digital marketing at Southampton University. He explains how the National Trust approaches its online community
core strategy. What we’re striving for are real relationships with people.
Now that most brands have moved on from simply pursuing
HOWARD SCOTT, HEAD OF DIGITAL AT THE NATIONAL TRUST
How important is the National Trust’s online community?
It’s immensely important. As a member organisation we have a special relationship with all our supporters, whether they’re members or not, and social media is a core way of talking to people. The way we engage and how people engage with us is the key driver of all our community-based interactions. Of late we’re probably less concerned with the pure numbers we reach through social. I’d almost call that a slightly old fashioned metric. But engagement is key to what we’re doing.
What specifi c steps have you taken to extend that
community? There’s no one specifi c step I’d point to. But we’ve really switched from focusing on the quantity of outbound broadcast content to the quality. We’ve actually reduced the amount of content we post on channels like Facebook, and paid more attention to what our community have been responding to. We’re really listening to their desires and concerns. By posting less, we’re actually doing a lot more with them as the right content at the right time encourages much stronger engagement levels. That’s part of our
STORYTELLING, DEVICES AND RELEVANCE HOLD UP EVERYTHING WE DO”
‘Likes’, follows etc., what constitutes quality engagement or interaction? Real-world conversations. If we post content on social media, quality engagement means people respond by posting their own pictures or talking to us directly. Just having people click the ‘Like’ button doesn’t mean very much. We want people to truly engage. Even telling us they’re not happy with something is a really valuable way to start a dialogue. In the last six months we’ve invested in our social media team. We can now get involved in more conversations and we also have a proactive outreach programme which helps us introduce the National Trust to new audiences.
How do you recommend
measuring a community’s value? For us it’s based
around how people engage with us, their propensity to visit and whether they recommend us to friends. What we don’t tend to focus on is a basic spend-versus- number-of-people-engaged metric. That’s not the ROI model we subscribe to. In the future, the place we’re heading to is a much deeper integration of social stats with our other analytics platforms. We see social not just as one of the channels we work in, but as a key channel. It plays a huge role.
If you had any tips for brands who want to develop deeper
relationships with their communities, what would they be? I’m loathe to say ‘content is king’ because it’s such a terrible cliché, but you do need to understand the role content has in two fi elds. First, what does your audience want to hear from you? Secondly, how does it communicate your business objectives? Content requires an audience-led approach but still needs to communicate those business objectives. Think about how you bring those stories to life, how they convey your purpose and then respond to your audience in the best way. Understanding the importance of
different channels and devices at different stages of our customer journey is also very important. One size does not fi t all. Lastly, there are three words I’ve been using a lot at the National Trust recently: storytelling, devices and relevance. Those are really the three pillars that hold up everything we do.
Howard Scott will be among the speakers at the Figaro Digital Marketing Conference in London on 17 July.
SAVE THE DATE The Figaro Digital Marketing
Conference takes place at The Royal College of Physicians in London on Thursday 17 July. Find out more and register for your place at:
fi
garodigital.co.uk/Conferences.aspx
42 issue 21 july 2014
INTERVIEW BY JON FORTGANG
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