Most website searches have a simple job: match the words entered by a visitor with the words appearing on a page. That works really well when someone knows exactly what they’re looking for. But it’s less useful when they ask a detailed question, use different terminology from your website, or want information spread across several pages.
RAG offers a different approach.
RAG stands for Retrieval-Augmented Generation and combines two processes:
Instead of returning a list of pages containing matching keywords, a RAG-powered search tool can understand the meaning behind a visitor’s question, find the most relevant information within your website and use a large language model (LLM) to produce a useful, conversational answer.
More importantly, it can be built as a standalone service.
That means the RAG/search system can be kept separate from the website. If the website is rebuilt, moved to a different CMS or replaced with another technology, you only need to change the process that takes the website’s content and puts it into the search system.
Traditional website search relies heavily on keywords. So, if someone searches for “support for an existing website”, they may get poor results if your website uses phrases such as “ongoing maintenance”, “technical consultancy” or “managed digital services”.
The visitor may be asking the right question. Your website just isn’t using the same words.
Semantic search looks beyond exact wording. It considers the meaning behind a query, helping connect related terms and information.
This can be particularly useful for websites with large amounts of content, complex services, specialist terminology or information spread across multiple pages.
A RAG-powered search system can retrieve relevant information from several pages, combine that context and provide a concise response, with links back to the original content.
One of the most useful things about RAG is that the search system doesn’t have to be tightly coupled to your website.
At Proctors, we approach RAG search as a standalone service. The website simply needs an interface that can send a question to the search service and display the response.
That means the underlying search capability can remain in place even if the website is redesigned, migrated or moved to a different CMS.
Instead of rebuilding your search every time your website changes, you can adapt the process that feeds your website’s content into the search system.
This makes RAG more than just another website feature. It can become a reusable digital capability that grows with your organisation.
A well-designed RAG system can do more than help people find pages.
The same approach could eventually support more specialised search experiences for product documentation, technical resources, case studies, customer support or internal knowledge.
Of course, RAG isn’t a magic solution. The quality of its answers depends on the quality of the content it can access. Content needs to be kept up to date, retrieval needs to be configured carefully and appropriate security controls need to be in place.
But when it’s designed properly, RAG can make large and complex websites significantly easier to navigate.
Your website already contains a huge amount of knowledge about your organisation, services and expertise. The challenge is making that information easy for people to discover.
RAG provides a way to make website search more useful without throwing away the website you already have.
Our Senior Web Developer, Mark Hearton, has explored how this works in more detail – including the architecture, technology stack and how we approach building a standalone RAG search service.
The zero-click era has transformed consumer behaviour. As AI engines become the new interface for discovery, brands need to do more than just consider keywords and rankings. You need to be cited, trusted, and recommended by the machines themselves.
Our Helpful Guide to AI Visibility is designed to help you to move beyond the noise of AI hype and provides some practical tips and checklists that we use at Varn to build measurable visibility for brands, in the generative age.
Discovery itself is shifting. Users are moving from searching for links to asking for answers, and they’re searching everywhere: if your brand isn’t in the AI’s answer, you don’t exist in that part of the journey. That makes reputation and authority the new SEO: AI systems treat the entire web as a proxy for trust, so visibility is now as much a brand and PR priority as a technical one. Winning that trust means activating what we call the “authority loop” (making sure your internal expertise is consistently mirrored and reinforced across the wider digital ecosystem until it becomes a verified fact for AI systems, rather than just a claim on your own website). And because the AI knowledge base is being built right now, there’s a real first-mover advantage on offer: the brands that secure their place as the source of truth today will be the hardest to displace tomorrow.
AI authority roadmap template: A structured way to move from reactive SEO activity to a prioritised, impact-led authority strategy, starting with an audit across technical clarity, content understanding and external validation, then splitting actions into quick wins and longer-term strategic moves.
AI citation gap analysis guide: A four-step methodology for finding out where competitors are being mentioned, cited and trusted by AI platforms more than you are, so you can turn those gaps into a prioritised action plan.
How to write AI-ready content: Practical guidance on structuring content so it’s built to be lifted into an AI answer as well as read by a person, from question-led headers and concise summaries to external citations and clear author credentials.
7 Day AI visibility action plan: A day-by-day plan for building and publishing a data-led asset, turning your key pages into answer-ready content with schema and FAQs, tracking engagement, and promoting the work to press and on LinkedIn.
The Helpful Guide to AI Visibility walks through the business case, the AI authority roadmap template, the citation gap analysis method, guidance on writing AI-ready content, and the full 7-day action plan in detail.
Search marketing is no longer about optimising for individual channels (and it hasn’t been for many, many years!), it’s more about ensuring your marketing mix is across all of the channels, effectively, where your potential customers are browsing.
TikTok isn’t likely to be the only solution to your marketing needs, but it’s certainly something to consider as part of your wider marketing efforts. If you’re not on TikTok already, or if you’re not optimising for it, your competitors could be taking that share of the market away from you.
In this article, we’ll cover the fundamentals of SEO for TikTok, as well as some of the hidden benefits such as cross-channel visibility.
In simple terms, TikTok is a short-form video platform driven by an incredibly sophisticated, interest-based algorithm. Rather than relying purely on who a user follows, TikTok serves content based on direct user behaviour and explicit interests.
While it built its reputation on viral dance crazes, it has matured into a worldwide app for entertainment, education, and product discovery – the latter being hugely important for most marketers.
TikTok SEO is the process of optimising your video content so that it ranks at the top of search results when users type specific queries into the platform’s search bar, effectively trying to cater for TikTok’s SEO algorithm.
By optimising for users searching on TikTok, you capture high-intent users who are actively looking for solutions, inspiration, or products – rather than those who are just passively scrolling through their main feed.
Not every business is right for using TikTok, it depends on the demographics of your typical audience. However, the demographic data has shifted over the last few years, and the narrative that “TikTok is just for kids” is now pretty outdated.
The global average user age on TikTok has climbed to 26.5 years old – in fact, over 38% of TikTok’s entire audience is now over the age of 30.
Furthermore, data shows that nearly 49% of consumers use TikTok as a “search engine”, to find real-time recommendations, reviews, and ideas. If your audience is there and you aren’t, you are effectively handing visibility to your competitors without putting up a fight.
Traditional search engines like Google, for example, heavily index TikTok content depending on the intent behind the search query. If the query is more informational, like asking a question or looking for inspiration, Google is more likely to show a video result. So, optimising for TikTok is not an isolated strategy; it can feed into your broader digital marketing mix.
When users search for experiential phrases, tutorial queries, or trend-heavy topics on Google, the traditional Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) often display dedicated video carousels featuring TikTok (and Youtube, Instagram and other social media platforms) clips. By optimising your videos for TikTok, you can also be opening a backdoor to Google’s front page.
TikTok SEO doesn’t bypass traditional SEO – it amplifies it. If searches in your niche often serve videos in the SERPs, then TikTok is almost certainly something you should be getting involved with, to capture as much of that SERP as is possible. If you don’t, your competitors will.
People turn to TikTok because they want immediate, visual, and human-verified answers. Traditional search engines excel at deep research and documentation, whereas TikTok thrives on idea generation and inspiration. Whether someone is searching for a “minimalist home office setup,” “easy 15-minute dinners,” or “honest skincare reviews,” they want to see the reality from someone actually doing it, rather than reading a 2,000-word blog.
Google vs TikTok
The two platforms serve entirely distinct phases of consumer search intent and really aren’t comparable at all. They are totally different ways of searching, but generally speaking:
In most cases, TikTok is exceptional at creating demand and inspiring, while Google is exceptional at capturing it and converting.
To rank your videos, you must understand how the platform reads and classifies your content. TikTok’s algorithm relies heavily on specific data inputs to determine relevance, as well as engagement metrics to ensure it’s serving quality content to watchers.
Use of Metadata
Understanding the Content
TikTok’s algorithm analyses your videos across four core components to determine exactly what your content is about, and therefore what search terms would be most suitable for it:
Engagement Metrics
Relevance gets your video into the search pool, but performance dictates how high it ranks. TikTok relies heavily on engagement metrics for ranking performance: likes, comments, shares, saves, and most importantly: completion rates. If viewers routinely drop off in the first two seconds, the algorithm flags the content as low quality. Focus on powerful hooks to keep viewers watching until the very end.
Personalising to the User
The algorithm constantly matches optimised and similar content with historical user behaviour. If a consumer routinely searches for and interacts with videos on a certain topic, TikTok will deliberately serve them optimised videos from that niche – even if the videos are published by a new or a relatively unknown account.
You cannot optimise without data. Finding the right keywords on TikTok requires a slightly different approach than traditional keyword research, focusing more on casual, conversational phrases – but the methods of data collection are very similar to keyword research for traditional SEO:
Use of all of the above can help you to better understand the ways in which people search on TikTok, and therefore the types of phrasing you should be using when creating (and optimising) your video content on the platform.
Achieving sustainable organic traffic on the platform, and consistently ranking highly in search results requires consistency and strict adherence to best practices.
If you are an e-commerce brand, TikTok Shop can be a great additional revenue driver. It allows brands to showcase and sell products directly within the app, creating an incredibly frictionless path from discovery to purchase.
TikTok Shop can be an entire blog post in itself, so we’ll keep it light here – but optimising your videos for search while linking directly to your TikTok Shop products creates a seamless experience from discovery to conversion. A user searches for a solution, finds your optimised video, and checks out entirely within the app without ever having to navigate away to an external browser. If you’re an ecommerce brand and you’re not using TikTok Shop, it would be wise to investigate it.
The short answer is yes, provided your target demographic aligns with the platform’s maturing user base. For B2C brands, lifestyle services, e-commerce, and modern B2B businesses looking to build real brand authority, it can be an exceptionally powerful channel.
However, a successful TikTok SEO strategy requires realistic expectations and commitment:
TikTok is not a low-budget, quick-win project. It requires dedicated (quality!) video investment, creative resources, and a long-term approach to content production.
It is not a replacement for your core marketing. It serves as a vital part of a holistic, multi-channel search strategy.
At Varn, we specialise in helping businesses navigate the complexities of search strategy, data analysis, and online visibility across the multitude of ways that people search nowadays. Whether you want to refine your traditional SEO approach, or build a ‘search everywhere’ strategy across multiple channels, we can help you turn search data into tangible business growth. Get in touch with the team at Varn today to discuss how we can elevate your overall search marketing strategy.
The traditional e-commerce model relies on a simple assumption: to buy something, a human must visit a website, browse a catalogue, and click through a checkout flow. Today, that architecture is fragmenting. Digital commerce is splitting into two distinct landscapes: the traditional world of human clicks, and the new world of autonomous AI agents. In this video, Varn Search & Innovation director Andy Mollison explores the mechanics of Agentic Shopping — a seismic shift in consumer behaviour defined by reliance on AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, or custom shopping bots to research, filter, and execute purchases on their behalf.
When an AI agent shops, the consumer journey happens entirely behind the scenes. The agent queries the web, verifies real-time stock, compares pricing tiers, and evaluates reviews to construct a single, optimised recommendation for the user.
If an e-commerce site is optimised exclusively for human eyes, relying heavily on visual design over machine-readable data, it becomes functionally invisible to these crawlers. The brand gets filtered out of the selection pool before a human ever knows it existed.
This isn’t a distant projection. Data from a survey of 2,000 consumers highlights how quickly behaviour is changing, with 44% of shoppers state they are open to letting an AI agent manage their entire end-to-end shopping workflow. Buyers are increasingly bypassing the traditional process of opening multiple browser tabs and manually vetting search engine links.
Transitioning a store from human-centric optimization to agent-ready infrastructure requires addressing three core operational layers:
Large Language Models (LLMs) require highly structured data to comprehend an inventory catalog. If product specifications, real-time pricing, and stock levels aren’t explicitly formatted for machine ingestion, an LLM cannot dynamically recommend them.
For a website to speak natively with an AI assistant, it must implement standardized technical protocols. This is where the modern technical language of the internet comes into play:
Model Context Protocol (MCP): Learn how this standard connects AI models to secure data sources in our deep dive, What is WebMCP?
Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP): Discover how this open-source standard streamlines retail data exchange by reading our complete guide on the UCP Protocol.
Standard checkout sequences are intentionally designed with friction to validate human identity—think CAPTCHAs, pop-up offers, and complex multi-step identity fields. Preparing for agentic commerce means establishing secure, low-friction programmatic endpoints so authorized shopping bots can complete a transaction instantly without hitting software blocks.
It’s exciting! SEO had been a bit ‘stale’ for a number of years with not much having changed and Google being so dominant. As an industry, we’re so used to change and innovation, that while it hadn’t become boring, it had become a bit predictable.
So, it’s nice to have something new to build towards. Being curious and wanting to figure out why things work is what makes good SEOs, so this is a great time in the industry for curious SEOs to shine through.
That being said, while AI search is the new shiny thing for most people, it doesn’t change a huge amount in terms of best practices and strategic guidance. The same rules apply in terms of creating great experiences for your users – if you’re not doing that, you were already behind, it’s just been amplified by AI search now.
With the way AI collects information and presents it to users, and all of the ways there are to search for information nowadays, we’re finding ourselves using the phrase ‘Search Everywhere’ much more often.
Whether that be on Google, TikTok or ChatGPT, the same rules apply: making your brand as visible as possible as a true authority, at the right part of the journey. Search is now about owning the entire discovery journey, not just the Google part of it.
I think the biggest search myth at the moment is that there’s a one-size-fits-all approach to AI search. There’s not!
There’s no getting away from the fact that good marketing is still (and always has been) good marketing. There’s no cheat sheet, there’s no quick win to being successful, you have to earn it.
While there are some basics to follow to make sure you’re being included in AI search, actually being successful requires hard work and good strategy.
The team at Varn are such data experts that we’re so well positioned to make the most of this changing market. With such expertise is analysing big datasets, now more than ever, this skillset is so valuable.
I love being challenged and working with a driven and determined team, so being able to work with such like-minded ‘ideas’ people makes it such an exciting team to lead.
It’s so rare to find a team that cares so much about the ‘why’ as well as the ‘how’; we’re so intrigued by the change in the industry, and that’s exactly what clients need in this chaotic and everchanging market.
Measuring your performance in AI search is fundamentally very different to measuring performance in SEO, so there’s definitely some considerations to be made there.
While, yes, you are probably going to see less clicks to your website (especially for informational queries), the benefit is that users are going to land on your website further down the funnel, more well educated and ready to buy.
So, it’s really important that you’re measuring your market share (and sentiment) at that awareness stage to know how well positioned your brand is when your customers are doing that entry-level research.
We do this with our AI Visibility Framework and with AI tracking in general, to better understand the topics where our clients are performing, and where they need to do better. By breaking it down into topics we can help to identify opportunities and minimise threat from competitors.
Getting the AI search journey right means capitalising on those topics where users are already invested and already educated, and are much further down the sales funnel, and that’s ultimately a massive win for your conversion metrics.
Different industries and different target audiences have totally different footprints when it comes to the ways they search and the platforms they use. It’s all about being seen in the right place at the right time, and that’s where we can help.
It might not be that you need to create video content for every service or product for example, but there will likely be a part of your audience where being present on TikTok or YouTube is really important towards making a conversion.
At Varn, we’re so well positioned as data experts to understand exactly where you need to be visible in order to gain market dominance – and that’s going to be really important in this ‘Search Everywhere’ world – to have that insight about truly where your users are searching, and how and why, will really benefit creating the best marketing strategy for your business going forwards.
I think if you’re looking at how you invest in your search marketing budget, your key areas are going to be influencing the things that you can control.
For example, you can control the messaging on your own website, the content that you put out and the words that you write. You need to know what you should be writing about, though, and therefore you need a good content strategy behind you. That’s nothing new and has been a backbone of good search marketing for many years.
However, what’s gone under the radar for a while and probably not been prioritised enough by most businesses in terms of search marketing, is Digital PR and off-page marketing.
Now that we have AI search effectively regurgitating the information it reads online, you need to make sure your online off-site presence is better than ever. This means ensuring your product or brand is positively placed in all of the crucial places that your customers could be researching. It’s not just customers researching now, it’s AI platforms gathering that data and using it for answers when a would-be customer is doing their research in an AI search engine.
You can control this, and with our data and digital PR teams, we can help to support you to understand where your presence is poor – and, how to fix it.
The way users are interacting with AI search in particular means that we’re frequently seeing users visit a website with so much more knowledge than they ever had previously. They are so much more well educated with all of the research they can do before even visiting a website.
This means the user journey has changed; no longer will users necessarily read all of the information on your website, they might already know it. As such, it’s more likely than ever before that the ‘awareness stage’ content on your site might just not be part of the journey anymore – from a tracking perspective anyway. But, this doesn’t mean that information wasn’t hugely valuable for informing a customer before they even visited your site..!
Additionally, we’re seeing a mix-up of traffic sources too. “Zero click” is absolutely a thing, whereby users are getting so much information from AI search that they simply don’t need to visit a website to answer their questions anymore. Again, this doesn’t mean that organic search isn’t hugely valuable for your user journey!
Get used to reporting on overall website performance (conversions, revenue), rather than attributing to specific traffic sources. Organic search is going to be down on traffic if you’re comparing it to pre-AI search, that’s just a fact. All of your marketing needs to be working together towards the same goals, so “don’t judge a book by its cover”, and start getting more granular with your reporting.
You can use visibility metrics to understand how well you’re performing in AI search, to know if you’re truly being seen in the right places, before the user decides on which product or which service to choose. We use API scrapers to pull in this data for our clients, allowing us to expose where opportunities can be found, and also just to monitor if our clients are under threat for any specific topics.
If we don’t innovate, we’ll get left behind, and so it’s such a crucial time in the industry for us to demonstrate our expertise.
As such, we’ve already made great work on numerous AI Visibility Framework projects for various clients. We’ve learned a lot already to be able to refine our process to be even more insightful and rewarding for clients. If you’re looking to truly understand where your brand is visible in AI search, and where it’s not, then this is a product that can really unearth some great findings.
We’ve also on the road to creating an Agentic Search Usability Audit to test how well websites perform with agentic AI users in mind – something that we see being adopted by several AI platforms in the not too distant future – ensuring your website can allow an AI to take a proper user journey all the way through to making a purchase or making a booking is going to be huge for e-commerce sites in particular, so we see this as being quite a priority for us to get right.
We’re also seeing a lot of clients with data issues, in particular following cookie consent changes. If your data isn’t accurate, measuring success becomes impossible. This has led to us investing in Server Side Tracking and Big Query products – reliable tracking of data is so crucial in today’s ‘search everywhere’ world, we can’t make assumptions and get away with it.We’re constantly keeping an eye on what’s developing in the world of AI search, and have our own Innovation team shaping the future of what’s considered gold-standard in terms of AI audits. If you have any ideas of data or audits you’d like to see us look into, please do get in touch.
Do get in touch with Andy at [email protected] if you have any questions about helping you show up exactly where your audience is looking and if you are ready to future-proof your search strategy you can also contact our expert team.
Every month, our research programme reads more than 3,200 UK company websites the way an AI system does, scores what it finds, and publishes the results. It covers 19 industry benchmarks, from the FTSE 100 and ecommerce to law, travel, property, healthcare and manufacturing. We built it in Bristol, it is free to read, and I want to explain what it measures and why a business anywhere in the South West should care.
Why measure AI readability at all
Buyers have started asking AI assistants for recommendations and receiving written answers instead of lists of links. Those answers are assembled from websites the AI systems could actually fetch, parse and trust. Which meant a question nobody could answer when we started: how readable are British company websites to the machines now doing the recommending? Opinion was everywhere. Measurement was nowhere. So we built the instrument.
What The Crane Index actually measures
Each site gets three machine reads. Retrieval asks whether an AI system can fetch the site and extract its meaning: the facts in the code, the structured data, the clarity of what this business is. Execution asks how the site behaves when automated agents call: whether they are served, throttled or turned away at the door. Representation asks whether the machine’s picture of the business matches reality across the open web: consistent identity, verifiable credentials, links that hold up. The three reads combine into a composite score, and each industry’s table is published with every figure measured on a stated date.
The rules we hold ourselves to
Nothing is estimated. If a read could not be completed, it is reported as unmeasured rather than guessed, and no composite is published for it. Equal scores are published as joint standings rather than split by a tiebreak. And the whole programme re-runs monthly, so a standing is a dated fact rather than a permanent badge. Sites move up when they improve and down when they decay, which is precisely what makes the record worth watching. A subscription cannot alter a public score; the research is editorially independent of anything we sell.
What it means for a business in Bristol or Bath
The companies in the benchmarks are household names, but the findings transfer directly to any business. The characteristics that make a FTSE 100 site readable to AI are the same ones that decide whether a Bristol firm gets cited when someone asks an assistant for a recommendation: facts in the code, doors open to agents, an identity that checks out. None of them require a famous brand. Most of them are fixable in weeks, and because the reads are measurements rather than opinions, you can prove the fix landed.
Where to look first
The full tables are free at our research library, industry by industry. If you want the same three reads run on your own site, the scanner is free too and takes about a minute. And I write up what the measurements are teaching us each week in The Crane Standard, published every Tuesday morning. British businesses spent twenty years learning to be visible to Google. The next few years are about being legible to the systems that answer on Google’s behalf, and the ones treating that as a measurement problem are already pulling ahead.
Nic Crane is the founder of The Crane Consultancy, the Bristol built practice behind The Crane Index, working with businesses across the South West on AI search, paid media and technical SEO.
On August 1st, it was World Wide Web Day. To mark the occasion, our Director of Technology, Steve King, looks back at how the web has evolved in the past 29 years (since his first HTML upload!) and shares some of his thoughts and memories from along the way in the article below.
I wrote my first HTML page in 1997 and uploaded it to the web. It was a liberating experience.
I’d spent almost a decade in creative, advertising and publishing. Getting work into print was exciting, but also nerve-racking. Once something was printed, mistakes were expensive, and sometimes impossible, to fix. The web changed that. Content could be updated and improved almost instantly, although the responsibility to create a great experience for visitors remained.
In those early days, creative freedom online was limited. We relied on basic CSS, tables and plenty of complicated code to recreate the brand experiences we could deliver in print. The challenge was balancing creativity with performance, because every extra image and line of code affected page load times.
As CSS evolved and web standards matured, we gained more freedom to create sophisticated experiences while maintaining consistency and quality. Progress was exciting, even if there were still plenty of constraints.
Then came the browser wars. A page that worked perfectly in one browser might break completely in another, particularly Internet Explorer. Designers and developers spent countless hours finding workarounds and compromises.
Web 2.0 was another major shift. For the first time, people could publish content without writing HTML or running their own server. Platforms such as Blogger made publishing accessible to everyone and introduced a new challenge: designing experiences around user-generated content.
Content management systems quickly followed. My first CMS was Mambo, although I’ve used many since. They enabled marketing teams to manage content independently while developers created reusable templates and frameworks behind the scenes.
As websites became connected to CRM and ERP platforms, projects evolved from largely creative exercises into complex software engineering initiatives. The teams involved in building digital experiences grew, along with the responsibilities.
The arrival of the iPhone, iPad and Ethan Marcotte’s concept of responsive web design brought another transformation. I still remember building separate desktop and mobile websites. Responsive design finally allowed us to create a single experience that adapted across devices, while adding accessibility and SEO to an already growing list of considerations.
Later, SaaS website platforms made it possible for almost anyone to build polished websites using templates. More recently, tools such as Framer and Webflow have returned greater creative control to designers, enabling them to build rich digital experiences without extensive development support.
And now we have generative AI.
This may prove to be the biggest change yet, fundamentally reshaping how we create, discover and interact with digital experiences. We’re only at the beginning.
Looking back, one thing has remained constant throughout my career: change. The web has demanded continuous learning, adaptation and curiosity. Fortunately, that’s exactly what makes it so rewarding.
Happy World Wide Web Day.
We all know motion graphics are a highly effective form of communication and at P+S we’ve been shouting about this for a while. But handled badly, video content can end up muddling your brand and confusing your customers. Luckily, there’s a simple trick to getting it right: motion graphics guidelines.
We’ll get to them in a minute but first, let’s do a quick refresher on why video is something you should really embrace for your business.
Video continues to be one of the fastest growing methods of communication. And with 96% of people turning to video to learn more about a product or a service it’s pretty hard not to agree that it should be part of your business strategy.
Not sure of the benefits? Here’s your at-a-glance guide:
Well, all the above sounds great, right? However, even though the benefits of motion graphics are well established, decision makers will still often turn down video projects. Let’s look at why.
A recent report found that 19% of people lack the time, 10% of people don’t know where to start and 24% of people feel video is too expensive.
This is understandable. Creating a video can be a lengthy process. (Have you ever looked over the shoulder of an animator doing their thing? It’s a snore fest.) And you know, time equals money. Truly great creative comes at a cost but, at the time of writing, AI tools haven’t evolved to a place where they can churn out stunning, effective and on-brand motion graphics at the click of a button. Probably next week though, amiright?
As for knowing where to start, this becomes a big issue without real guidance in place onhow to communicate your brand. A lack of clear vision around your motion output ultimately creates a lack of consistency and can reduce your brand integrity. Think about it… creating unique, different interpretations of your brand for every video is like starting from scratch every time. You wouldn’t ask 10 different designers to create social posts without brand guidelines, one of them will probably select comic sans and word art to work up their masterpiece!
OK, so those are some pretty hefty considerations. What’s the solution? We gave this away at the top, but you guessed it! Brand motion guidelines. Up until now, they’ve been something of an afterthought, the final page in a brand guidelines PDF that talks about using 1080p and brand compliant subtitles, but it’s so much more than that now.
Motion is embedded across every touchpoint of your brand
It’s everywhere from logo animations to transitions, text animations, graphic language, social templates and even in the minute detail of how UI bits animate. If you want to create a wide array of video assets, guidelines form the robust design system that streamlines the whole process and ensures a strong brand presence.
To keep track, you need guidelines that:
As our collective attention span gets shorter, it’s vital that your visual communication looks and feels instantly recognisable, even in a few seconds. Think about how you feel when you see an Apple ad or your favourite football team walking on to the pitch: you may not know what’s about to happen but your brain will link together past experiences with that brand/team by association, informing how you feel and how excited you are for what comes next.
Motion guidelines are essentially a kit of parts, and they shift depending on your brand and what you want to achieve. But as a rough guide those parts include:
Once guidelines have been worked up and agreed, you can roll them out to private or public-facing online digital guidelines which display all the best practice for each element, along with updatable templates (that we call ‘video toolkits’) for designers to use – having one source of truth for all things motion. And we’ve created a little animated explainer that breaks down what a P+S video toolkit is.
The EAA is reshaping expectations for how digital content including video is produced and delivered. While compliance is a legal requirement across the EU, it’s also fast becoming a marker of brand credibility and modern practice worldwide.
Ensuring your video content is accessible (with captions, audio descriptions, and inclusive design) not only future-proofs your output but demonstrates a genuine commitment to reaching, and respecting, all audiences. In a global market that values inclusion, accessibility isn’t just about regulation, it’s about reputation.
One of the best ways to improve your compliance is through your motion guidelines. By having one central store of rules, templates and toolkits you can make sure future content will always be in line with EAA requirements.
If you fancy finding out more about how video could work for your brand, or need some help putting together your own guidelines, then drop us a line at [email protected].
Bath and Bristol-based PPC and paid media agency Floresco has helped Bath Christmas Market – named Best UK Christmas Market 2024 by European Best Destinations – reach a national audience and grow its influence over who visits the city each festive season.
In the market’s most recent independent visitor survey, 45% of attendees said marketing had shaped their decision to come, up from 34% the year before and 19% the year before that.
Most paid media campaigns live and die by real-time data: clicks, conversions, return on ad spend. As a free-to-attend event, Bath Christmas Market offered none of that; there is no way to trace an individual ad back to a visitor perusing the stalls.
Instead, success would be judged once a year, through the market’s independent January visitor survey – and on a limited budget. And the goal was clear: reach people beyond the local area, and encourage the kind of visitors who stay longer, come midweek, and spend more across the city’s hotels, restaurants and shops.
Floresco ran the paid media and paid social campaign across Google and Meta, targeting audiences further afield and testing creative to learn what actually moved people to make the trip. London – targeted for the first time in 2024 and expanded in 2025 – was a particular focus, and has since become one of the market’s main visitor locations.
“Floresco Media has been a fantastic partner for Bath Christmas Market. Lisa and Harriet took the time to really understand our event and what we wanted to achieve, bringing smart, data-led strategy alongside creative ideas that helped us reach the right audience at the right time.
“Their Google and Meta campaigns played a big part in driving footfall and awareness throughout our festive season, and their support made a real difference to our small team. They’re proactive, easy to work with, and always deliver strong results. We’d happily recommend them to any organisation looking for a reliable and friendly paid media partner.”
– Hannah Batey, Digital Marketing Manager, Bath Christmas Market
When the January results came, the picture was pretty unambiguous. Marketing’s influence had climbed to 45% of all visitors, representing a steady, year-on-year rise from 19% two years earlier.
The effect was strongest among newcomers. Six in ten first-time visitors said they’d decided to attend after seeing marketing, and social media advertising proved as persuasive as a personal recommendation.
“This is exactly the kind of brief we love—a brilliant and renowned event with a real commercial goal, and the discipline to measure success even when it’s tricky. This proves again that intelligently delivered paid media with robust targeting can drive increased footfall.”
Lisa Sargent, Account Manager, Floresco
The foundation is now set for the market to go further. This year’s plan – 2026 – will focus the London targeting to suburb level, broaden the audience to dual-income households, and continue the creative testing that revealed what works.
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