With an estimated 3.6 billion people using social media worldwide, by now you’re probably aware that maintaining your brand’s presence on social media is critical if you want to compete in this ever-progressing digital landscape.
A strong social media presence not only offers new opportunities for leads and sales, but also strengthens customer loyalty, enhances your networking, and opens the door for more partnerships and customer feedback – all the while driving traffic to your website and raising awareness of your brand.
However, the steps needed to assert or improve your presence on socials may feel unclear. Many businesses assume that social media management is easy to take on at first, due to the deceptively simple user experience on most platforms. But in actual fact, it’s a very different, more intricate experience than managing a personal account, and if handled incorrectly, it can even have a detrimental impact on your brand.
So here are seven steps that any modern business can take to ensure their brand is making the most out of social media in the digital age.
By monitoring the performance data of your competitors, you can gain insights into what works and what doesn’t, for smarter decision-making and a better strategy. Researching and analysing competitor behaviour means you can stay one step ahead, and be inspired by new ideas while avoiding their mistakes – and you can outline any threats to your business and identify gaps in your strategy.
After all, why reinvent when you can circumvent?
There are a number of social competitor analysis tools you can use to do this, including FanPage Karma, Awario, Unmetric, and Iconosquare. You then need to decide which audience, engagement, and content metrics are useful to you.
Some of those metrics might be percentage of engagement per media, followers gained, follower growth, comments, likes, the most used hashtags, average posts per day and so on – it’s what’s important to your business.
If you don’t know who your audience is, how can you give them what they want? It’s important to learn your audience’s needs and motivations, as well as their behaviours. What social media platforms do they use? When do they use them? And what are they looking for? With the answers, you can tailor your content to ensure you are serving the right message, at the right time, in the right place.
Different audience demographics behave differently online. So knowing who’s on what platform aids your researching, advertising and marketing decisions, and ensures you’re providing the most relevant content to achieve your business goals.
Once you have an understanding of your audience’s needs and preferences, as well as those of your competitors, it’s time to select which social media channels are most suited to your audience and products/services.
Each social network provides unique delivery opportunities for you to entice your audience. For example, Instagram is a highly visual, creative platform. It can be a great place to showcase your products and services in a more imaginative or artistic manner. It’s also considered to be less formal than other platforms – perfect for showing off your brand personality and company culture.
Twitter, on the other hand, is most often used for consumer care. It’s an effective platform for engaging with your audience, ripe for quick feedback and offering speedy responses. Whereas, LinkedIn is arguably the most useful platform for B2B marketing or targeting a professional demographic.
Consider your channel selection carefully to ensure your messaging is broadcast in the most effective way, reaching the right prospects and generating leads.
It’s common for marketers to spread themselves too thin, so bear in mind your staff resources as part of the selection process. If you have only one team member, attempting to establish a brand presence across six different social media channels may be unrealistic.
Your presence on social media is an extension of your brand, and should, therefore, align with your other forms of brand messaging. Maintaining a consistent voice helps your brand strengthening its trust and reliability, creating a distinct personality among your competitors.
To help you adhere to this, developing brand guidelines can be a helpful tool when maintaining consistency in your Tone of Voice. Consider why your brand exists, what its values are, and how you want customers to feel when interacting with your brand.
The overuse of internet terms or trendy slang can actually damage your reputation, making you seen out of touch or ‘cheap’, and subsequently hurting engagement. In your guidelines, you may consider outlining limitations for hashtag use to avoid being penalised by certain platforms and creating an emoji palette to regulate your messaging. Without such consistency, there’s a lot of room for errors in communication between your brand and your customers.
Arguably the most important social media best practise is your willingness to engage with your audience.
Posting regularly and capitalising on customer interest is a necessity in today’s social climate if you want to keep your followers invested in your brand – and it’s crucial for the growth of your business.
No one wants to receive an automated message or talk to a robot. So, interacting with customers and responding to them quickly is essential if you want to humanise your brand, nurture relationships and increase customer loyalty.
Ensure your account looks active with real-time updates, through Instagram stories or live tweeting for example. Avoid cheesy iStock imagery, and instead opt for authentic, original content that reinforces your brand personality and culture.
In order to remain active and engage, you’ll need to monitor your channels as often as possible, at least daily, and post regularly. There are plenty of social media management tools that can help you do just this. Pre-scheduling social posts is a huge time-saver, rescuing you from posting manually at all hours of the day.
It’s also good practise to keep your ear to the ground, through social listening. Social listening is the process of monitoring social media channels for mentions of your brand, product, competitors, and more, providing the opportunity to track, analyse and respond to conversations. Understanding how people feel about your brand helps you keep your marketing and product/service development efforts on track.
Without social listening, you might be missing out on a big piece of insight about your brand or industry that people are talking about. It also allows you to outline pain points, and better your crisis management tactics by responding right away to negative posts (should there be any!). It can also help you identify social influencers, providing opportunities for partnerships and advertising.
The final step in any digital marketing campaign is measurement. As with your initial data-gathering exercises, measuring the effectiveness of your social media marketing activity will help you to optimise your approach and guarantee ongoing success. And luckily, there are a range of analytics tools you can use to gain these insights.
Social media is a vital tool that all businesses should take advantage of in order to maintain optimum brand loyalty, reach, and engagement.
If you would like to fine-tune your business’s social media activity, boost your reach and get noticed, get in touch with us today at [email protected].
Phoenix Wharf, the Bristol-based interior design and branding agency specialising in hospitality and retail, has announced the completion of a new scheme for innovative bakery business The Bristol Loaf, who, together with other local artisanal partners, has launched a new community foodie hub in Bedminster, in the south of the city.
The Bristol Loaf was initially set up in 2017 by entrepreneur Gary Derham, whose background includes working for local hospitality operator The Assemblies. The Bristol Loaf ‘s first outlet was a single-unit bakery and café in the Redfield area, before expanding into a second unit and becoming a successful, high-end, artisanal bakery products supplier to many other local businesses, with a retail and wholesale product range that includes sourdough bread and great-looking pastries. ‘The first bite is with the eyes’ remains a founding credo of the business. The retail arm of The Bristol Loaf also built a reputation for serving outstanding coffee.
The ongoing success of the Redfield site led to the expansion into additional premises, taking the opportunity to re-locate the business’s baking operations at the same time, with the original Redfield site remaining open as a café. The new venue will also host an expanded food and drink offer, sourced not only from The Bristol Loaf, but from a number of other specialist operators, effectively creating a mini foodie hub for Bristol. Located on Bedminster Parade, the café-store sits within Engine House Developments, a boutique, mixed-use development, taking up the entirety of the site’s ground floor, with 240 sq m front-of-house space and 90 sq m back-of-house.
‘The vision for the new undertaking’ Phoenix Wharf Associate Creative Director Emma Carter commented, ‘is an ethical supermarket that is accessible to all, where customers feel very welcome to spend time and relax.’
The Bristol Loaf will be retailing its own takeaway bakery produce in the space, as well as offering café customers a menu that includes coffee and pastries and a deli offer encompassing soups and sandwiches, quiches and salads, plus drinks such as smoothies and kombucha. All the produce will be locally-sourced and all dishes made from scratch on-site. Local operator Hugo’s Greengrocer is taking a 25 sq m space within the offer and there will be two other specialist producers present: The Bristol Loaf’s new sister brand, wine specialist The Bristol Vine, and local cheesemonger Two Belly.
Design Brief
The brief for the new site was to create a community foodie hub that widened The Bristol Loaf’s offer but was still visibly linked to the original venue. The business’s commitment to sustainability meant initiatives such as using heat generated by the kitchen ovens to heat the whole space, with the smell of freshly-baked bread also filling the air. A fully-digitised order system will prevent any paper wastage, whilst the timber from former baker’s tables from The Bristol Loaf’s first premises has also been sanded back to minimise signs of wear and tear before being re-constructed as tables for the new venue’s café.
‘For the interior look and feel, the client asked for planting to be a really stand-out, nature-inspired element, building on the presence of plants in the original Redfield site’, Emma Carter commented. ‘The materials palette is both rustic and tactile and includes white tiling and the extensive use of solid ash timber for shelving, corridors and even ceiling panels, alongside brick and raw, exposed concrete, ensuring the overall aesthetic is the antithesis of a slick, super-polished look.’
The café area includes 58 covers in total: 44 at the tables and 14 at perch/bar seating along the scheme’s full-height storefront glazing, with a wooden ledge counter and upcycled stools. The tables are in a variety of 2- and 4-seater arrangements, coming together easily to cater for larger groups. Bi-folding windows along the glazed wall enable the site to have evening opening presence onto the street front, whilst signage and branding is mostly hand-scripted and low key, allowing the company’s products to do the talking.
Visitor Journey
As visitors enter, they’re greeted by a floor-to-ceiling bread display, so that the bakery offer is clearly communicated. The entrance area is glazed and open with plenty of room for buggy-parking. The planting is visually-dominant from the get-go. ‘We blacked out the 4.1m high ceiling’, Emma Carter explained, ‘and created troughs almost a metre down, clad in ash timber slats and travelling the whole ceiling perimeter, housing a number of large, trailing plants. The troughs also conceal the electrical cabling, whilst criss-cross wiring creates structural support for the irrigation system.’
Immediately to the left is the Hugo’s Greengrocer store, followed by the main café counter service area, with the café itself taking up the rest of the open space. The two additional offers are The Bristol Vine, which includes a wine-tasting station, featuring all colours of wine, along with expert reviews and guidance and cheesemonger Two Belly, offering a curated selection of cheeses and suggested beers to accompany them, both of which are located against the rear wall.
The bakery area includes a takeaway sales area; a central freestanding bread display behind the counter; a pastries area for customers to help themselves en route to the till; a chiller for the display of the deli café food offer; a hot-food area under heat lamps; a 3.5m coffee station with ample space around it for collecting drinks and the till area. Care has been taken to avoid pinch points for kitchen staff, waiting staff and customers collecting coffee, whilst at the same time separately zoning out the kitchen, counter and bakers’ spaces.
Lighting over the café seating area features clustered paper lanterns to create a soft and homely feel, whilst feature lighting over the counters is in the form of reconditioned factory pendants, offering a soft, lower level glow above the service and coffee counter areas. Flooring is an existing concrete-look tiling, which, where damaged, has been additionally concrete-screeded to ensure a safe overall level. All the counters are clad in white tiling apart from the rear counter, which is made up of wooden slats.
The back of house area includes large-scale fridges, loaders, ovens, mixing areas and shaping tables and is out of sight of customers, although some areas of prep are visible front of house to provide an element of theatre, for bread shaping, for example and lunch prep.
‘The whole design process has been a joy’, Gary Derham commented. ‘Emma from Phoenix Wharf really understood our company’s ethos and has been able to turn our ideas and vision for the space into something practical and very beautiful.’
Photography credit: Franklin & Franklin
Softech firm Amdaris have won the Great British Entrepreneur Award just 6-months after securing a £6m investment from BGF.
The Bristol company has offices in the UK, Dubai, Moldova and Romania, providing software development teams in high profile industries from Oil and Gas to finance and logistics.
In 2017 the board appointed AgencyUK to help develop a brand and marketing strategy fit for global expansion. Scale has been rapid, with new offices in Dubai and Romania in 2019.
AgencyUK have continued to support Amdaris with their external advertising, internal communications and PR strategy. This award win follows a string of new customer appointments.
Change is something we are good at working with in brand experience.
As a brand experience company specialising in working with leading media and advertising agencies. We help them deliver experiential campaigns for the diverse range of clients they work for. So being geared up for change is something we are good at. One week the team could be working at a music festival. The next at a thrilling sporting spectacle. We’ve even inflated a giant cow with a butt plug on the River Thames, for a PR stunt to convey the benefits of eating less meat to the environment! For us, no two days and no campaign are the same. This develops a culture where we are up for a challenge and always prepared for the unexpected. However the last few months were definitely unexpected, as we shut our doors stayed home and hunkered down much like the rest of the country.
But now the lockdown is gradually lifting and we’re excited to re-open the doors. We know we are set to work in potentially a very different world, so it seems a good time for us to make some changes. The new production studio made ready just before lockdown, means we can now respond even more rapidly to client’s requirements. Responsiveness and speed of delivery is going to be even more important in the foreseeable. With the new studio we are now able to develop a brand experience from concept to completion, in weeks or even days. Not only can we be faster, but we are also ready to incorporate new social distancing guidelines into event builds and sampling activation so that safety comes first.
A more sustainable approach to experiential marketing and event production.
A new production process allows us to implement a ‘greener’ way of working and by embedding sustainability policies from conception. By sourcing the most environmentally materials possible, putting an emphasis on minimal waste and recycling and re-purposing, we can help our clients deliver brand experience campaigns that minimise their environmental impact.
The merging of the digital and physical worlds is accelerating even faster. Which is something we can help our clients embrace. Though we also believe human interaction has been hugely missed and people’s desire to come together again will be bigger than before. As will the experiential industry we love.
Brand experience with a power like no other medium to empower brands with emotion is here to stay. We are here to help our clients do it, better, safer and greener.
Confectionary company Cloetta UK is relaunching its popular Chewits brand across packaging, online and social channels.
The new look includes a facelift for brand ambassador Chewie the dinosaur, who first appeared in 1976.
A range of giveaways will take place on various social platforms this week, with the rebranded product available in stores.
Cloetta UK brand manager Sarah McDermott explains: “We are excited to be relaunching Chewits with a new look and upcoming products that are set to explore bold new flavour combinations and formats.”
One of the UK’s oldest and well-known brands, The Royal Mint, has appointed McCann Bristol for a two-year contract to help shape the historic brand’s future.
Considered a British institution with a 1,100-year legacy, The Royal Mint is most commonly known for making currency and its extensive range of collectable medals and commemorative coins.
Creating a brand that both treasures The Royal Mint’s important heritage and communicates its breadth is core to McCann’s brief. Adopting an integrated approach, McCann will work across core disciplines such brand strategy, creative development, digital marketing, and front-end website design to increase awareness, change perception of the organisation and drive sales.
The dynamic brand already has an extensive range of consumer products and services, including high-quality gifts and jewellery, precious metal investments, secure storage for personal items and even great days out. But its diverse offering is often overlooked.
In addition to appealing to new audiences and developing the brand, McCann will develop its online presence and introduce a new website. There will be an increased consideration for user experience to better reflect the brand proposition.
Jonathan McGregor, Chief Marketing Officer at the Royal Mint, says “Everyone knows our name. But for most, The Royal Mint conjures an image of a traditional institution, the coins and the significant commemoration we are involved with. We love this side of our business, as do many others, but it’s time for us to show off all that we do and create.
“We have many new products, services and experiences which lots of people just aren’t aware of. With the help of McCann, we want people to better understand what we do and when to consider us. We are all looking forward to what we can achieve with this plan, heading into an exciting new period for such an historic brand.”
Andy Reid, Managing Director for McCann, adds, “It is our privilege to be entrusted with The Royal Mint’s legacy and its evolving future. It forms part of the fabric of British life, we are all touched by it in a very obvious way with circulating coins, but its new product collections and experiences bring much more than this. The brand has the offering to remain a part of our lives for years to come.”
The contract cements McCann Bristol’s position as a leading integrated agency with the capability and expertise to take national and global brands into new territories and create new opportunities.
We create reach for brands with passion and purpose. In other words, we work for brands that we truly believe are making valuable positive change to the world and therefore deserve to be heard about for the benefit of not just the brand, but the people, too.
Let us introduce you to Hubba.
Hubba is the new kid on the block. With Clive and Adrian at the helm, Hubba is bringing a fresh approach to waste and recycling in three ways:
and what’s more, people are liking their style as they have just recorded the best sales growth for the past year to August 2019 – with an admirable 267% increase.
Whether you run your own office, shop, warehouse, manufacturing unit, hotel, restaurant, gym or racing track, Hubba should be your waste and recycling partner. Not only do you boost your environmental credentials (that are proven), your business avoids landfill tax too.
People are often sceptical about advertising and marketing because they believe it’s trying to ‘sell them things they don’t need’. Here at OggaDoon, we are very lucky in that we only shout about brands that we truly believe deserve the recognition we get them. Our work is purpose driven because of a genuine admiration for the clients we have the pleasure of working with.
Contact Hubba today for a free audit to identify the best cost effective solution to ethically manage your waste.
If you’re doing fantastic work that more people deserve to know about too, get in touch with us today to find out how we can help.
Digitally-centred marketing, shopper & sales promotion agency, Activation, has announced that it has appointed Claire Moyne as Client Services Director. Previously the Managing Director at Bristol-based Edo, a digital customer experience consultancy, Claire has joined to support Activation with it’s ambitious growth plans, leading and developing client relationships whilst heading the client services function within the agency as a member of the senior management team.
With 23% growth last year, and following a number of recent wins, Activation has a number of exciting brands on its books, and leading these relationships will be an area of focus for Claire. The agency also launched it’s reworked proposition in the summer, with a uniquely differentiated offering in digitally-centred brand, shopper and promotional marketing. This proposition is generating interest in the grocery sector, leading to a growing new business pipeline.
Matt Ramsay, MD of Activation comments – Claire brings with her a unique mix of skills with her experience in leadership, digital, customer and client experience and grocery brand promotions – we know Claire will be an asset to the business and we’re really looking forward to working together and introducing her to our clients, where her abilities will help us grow and improve our overall business. I’m delighted to welcome Claire to the A-Team
With this role, the agency has also embraced flexible working, with Claire also working the role around her recent purchase of a coffee shop in Bristol!
Kaleido Grafik have just launched new branding, art-direction and frontend and backend development of a new commerce website for HUSK – a Bristol based workshop who make beautifully simple custom-made fronts for IKEA cabinets. HUSK are a new company but aren’t new to this scene. Dave and Ross set up HUSK after successfully supplying bespoke furniture and joinery under Young & Norgate for over 10 years – they are a business built around quality. Now they are able to offer that quality to more when it comes to custom kitchens.
The site features a bespoke product selection tool to ensure the complex process of building your own kitchen remains as simple and intuitive as possible. In addition, there is an ajax bag and checkout flow (including the option to save your bag for later), integrated social feeds and is responsive across all devices.
Branded applications included workshop signage, environmentally conscious shipping materials and van livery.
Visit the new HUSK site here: madebyhusk.com
Founded in Zürich, Kaleido Grafik is a Bristol based branding, digital design and code studio. We’re known for our ability to develop and adapt brands specifically for digital and print applications. Our creative is lead by our Swiss principles: simplicity, beauty follows purpose, universally understood.?
“I hadn’t seen what they had done before, but what I bought into was their desire to do great work. Who doesn’t want to work with people who want to do that?”
–– David Hieatt, Founder of Hiut Denim Co
Discover more from Kaleido Grafik here: kaleidografik.com
We’re marking 10 years in business by rebranding to Loom, a name which better reflects how we integrate digital channels to help companies succeed online. Founded in Bristol in 2009 and still independent and owner-managed, we work with high-growth, entrepreneurial South West clients across a range of industry sectors. The last two years has seen our business double in size.
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