Would you love to work on exciting projects for amazing nonprofit organisations? Such as running paid search and social to raise millions for the Disasters Emergency Committee’s Ukraine appeal and supporting organisations such as Mind and Samaritans to reach people in need. We only work with socially responsible organisations doing good in the world.
If you’re keen to launch a career in digital marketing, you enjoy writing great copy and have good attention to detail, you should apply to our Digital Marketing Academy Day! You don’t have to have any previous digital marketing experience but you must be excited and eager to learn!
The Academy is a 12-month paid programme where you’ll learn new skills while working alongside mentors, leading to a full-time role.
The first step – apply to join our Digital Marketing Academy Day on Tuesday 24th May, hosted at our central Bristol office on Colston Street. Find out more and apply.
This is a great time to join Torchbox – we’re 100% employee owned and business is booming.
It’s no secret how little time you have got to grab a visitor’s attention when they land on your website. It’s a matter of seconds. It’s a lot of pressure to perform and perform quickly. Then, when you have their attention, you must try and keep it. Business blogs are a fantastic way to draw visitors in and keep them on your site for longer than perhaps even they intended.
People have less time to think these days with a constant barrage of mixed media messages bombarding them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That’s why websites need to deliver what visitors need quickly and easily. The only way to achieve this, and to keep the conversation up to date and relevant is to keep a business blog – a consistent stream of reliable facts and information.
Broaden the conversation
It’s about streamlining the process too. We all like to talk about ourselves, but unfortunately, apart from the headlines about what you offer and why you’re different, visitors are more interested in finding out about issues, best practice, advice, products, and services that directly affect them. A business blog is a great way to broaden the conversation with your audience and give them the information they want quickly and easily, in one place.
If you’re a dog trainer for example, you can offer all sorts of tips and advice about the proverbial best friend. Dog training tips is the obvious one, but you could also talk about different dog breeds, leads, collars, and toys. You could offer advice around key holidays – how to care for your dog during fireworks, or how to prepare your dog for a break from you while you go away in the summer. Or if you are a marketing agency, you could post about wider economic and social issues affecting your sector, as well as giving readers an insight into marketing techniques, pros, and cons.
Engage your audience for longer
Once you have a full and varied blog to offer, it’s useful to encourage people to land on your blog as a first stop to your company website, or at the very least have easy access to your blog from the home page. This is a fantastic way to keep their journey moving and streamlining the process for them. If you can pull them in with a recent blog offering, you can include links to other relevant blogs to keep them engaged with you for longer. You can also include links to other pages on your site, to help them get all the information they need.
Build trust with a genuinely useful resource
Ultimately, if your website can deliver what your visitor is looking for, they will stay on your site for longer and even come back later, when they need help again. Building that trust between you and your target market, is a great way to start the process for gaining inbound leads (you can read more about that here: https://blogwrite.co.uk/too-busy-for-new-business/) – after all we all want to buy products or services from people we trust.
At Varn we have had so many questions and queries related to the importance of using video as a marketing tool from our clients, we thought it would be useful to share some of the latest thinking on why video is so vital in 2022 and the powerful role video can play to optimise your SEO efforts.
We have brought in the experts from Bristol-based video agency Life Media UK to explain why video is such a key player in your marketing mix (and not just for SEO either!)…
At Life Media UK, we understand that with a strong video strategy and a high level of execution, video can achieve incredible results. The potential for video to connect you with your ideal client becomes even more powerful when you optimise it with the SEO tactics that Varn will explain to you shortly… but first…
Here’s why video is your best bet when it comes to marketing in 2022.
Fortunately for us and our clients, video shows no sign of slowing down; the average consumer now watches 19 hours of online video per week, with YouTube reaching more viewers than any TV channel on the planet. All of these video-hungry eyeballs gives you, as a business, the perfect opportunity to reach people exactly where their focus is.
While we’d all love to give each of our potential customers a face-to-face sales pitch, it’s not always possible; but video can be the next best thing. Communicating with every single one of your prospective buyers on-demand, answering their questions, delivering compelling social proof and engaging product demos can only be done through the power of a great video.
88% of people would like to see more videos from brands in 2022. Simply put, you should be marketing with video because that’s exactly how your customers want (and expect) to be marketed to.
The real value of video comes from its ability to drive sales like nothing else. We’ll let Varn explain the SEO value in a second, but in addition to turbo-charging your organic traffic, video can also boost sales from your paid campaigns by as much as 100%!
Once you’ve got users to your site, embedded video content can also increase sales by up to 144%, making conversions easier and campaigns more impactful.
Social media was built for video, and it’s now the most popular form of content by a country mile. Engagement with videos on Facebook is almost double that of text or image-based posts, and 1 in 4 Instagram users have made a purchase after seeing an Instagram story.
It’s not just your website and social media that feel the benefit of video marketing – 71% of sales professionals confirm that video emails outperforms text-based emails, as video gets your message across in a quick, succinct and engaging way.
We know how important return on investment is. With 87% of marketers who use video seeing a positive ROI, video is becoming one of the most reliable forms of marketing around, as well as the most impactful.
We know that 75% of searchers don’t scroll past page 1 of a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) so making sure you are up there in the rankings, on page 1 is really important. Without a doubt, creating video for your website can dramatically improve your ranking results on Google and positively affect your SEO efforts. We know that the search engines love video and that’s because people searching love video and are increasingly consuming more and more video.
Creating video is a fantastic tool to target keywords in the search engines. With an engaging video it is likely that people will spend more time on your website and this can increase something we call ‘dwell time’. According to Search Engine Journal dwell time is defined as
We know that increased dwell time will mean the Google bots will identify your video as valuable content and this means better rankings for your website.
There is some interesting data on the value of video from Wordstream and here are a few stand out stats for us:
We’re excited to share that we have launched a new academy, starting with positions for Junior Developers and Digital Marketing Executives.
Get hands-on experience that will drive your career forward while getting paid!
The first step is to find out more about the roles available and then apply to join an Academy Day.
Our Academy days make the interview process more inclusive, interesting, and (hopefully) fun!
Spend the day with our mentors, participate in activities with other guests, and show us why you’re a good fit for being at Torchbox.
There will be a baseline of knowledge and skills required depending on the role you’re applying for. The full criteria is included in the specification.
The Academy Days are running on the following dates:
Find out all you need to know and how to apply.
SPAR UK & NI has announced Mentor Digital’s appointment as their new digital agency partner. Following a competitive tender process Mentor was chosen as the winning bidder to design and develop the new SPAR UK & NI corporate websites, and to deliver ongoing creative, technical, and digital marketing solutions to help deliver on SPAR’s digital strategy.
SPAR is the world’s largest retail food chain and has around 2512 stores in the UK. Mentor Digital will partner with SPAR to: Build brand new websites for SPAR UK & Northern Ireland; to develop the digital application of the SPAR brand; and to provide SEO and digital marketing support.
Website technology is moving fast, and customers expect high quality, super-fast experiences across all devices. Keeping users engaged with retail brands online offerings and remaining cutting edge and relevant is an ongoing challenge. SPAR is in an excellent position having both ‘clicks and bricks’ through their stores and existing online presence, and Mentor Digital will work to provide modern web applications delivering on SPARs digital strategy that will focus on community and health and well-being.
Mentor’s MD Holland Risley said: “We are absolutely delighted to be adding SPAR to our client portfolio and it really feels like we are levelling up as an agency taking on clients of this calibre. I think this really reflects the high quality of the work that we have been producing in recent years. The design work is already looking really exciting, we are focusing on bringing depth and quality to the sites by using micro UX, emotive design and parallax effects and we are really looking forward to launching the new look SPAR websites later this year.”
SPAR shops are central to communities across the UK, and the new websites will support local communities by nurturing neighbourhoods, creating community hubs, and promoting health and wellbeing campaigns, as well as showcasing special offers and driving footfall to stores.
SPAR & Mentor Digital are carrying out an in-depth process of stakeholder engagement, design, and prototyping. Mentor Digital will create full mobile responsive prototypes as part of the project process to allow for the sites to be fully tested to ensure that all user journeys are intuitive and clear.
The new SPAR websites will be developed using the open-source Umbraco CMS platform, which provides highly secure, enterprise level, content management experiences with no ongoing licenses. Mentor Digital is an Umbraco Gold Partner and has implemented Umbraco CMS for many NHS Trusts and CCGs along with a wide range of B2B and B2C clients. The agency has won awards at the prestigious Umbraco awards in 2020 and 2021.
To see more examples of the work Mentor Digital produces you can visit the Mentor Digital website here. To find out more about SPAR click here.
When you’re just starting out and your business is growing, hiring a freelancer or an agency to own and manage your digital marketing can be a risk – financially and otherwise. To help with the overwhelming task of DIY Marketing in your first months or years of business, I’ve put together a list of resources, tools, websites and apps that I use for my clients, and my own business to help me manage marketing channels like social media, Google My Business, email marketing and blog writing. I’ve organised this list into the seven categories which make up my content creation + marketing workflow:
We have been officially recognised as a ‘Great Place to Work’ by being awarded the sought-after certification.
Great Place to Work’s mission is to “help organisations create exceptional, high performing workplaces where employees feel trusted and valued”. Through the Certification process, they capture valuable employee feedback and details about the practices that make workplaces unique.
As part of this employee feedback, we were absolutely thrilled to report a 90% overall trust index from our team.
Some of our favourite bits from our team’s ratings include:
Come on – we’re a team of research consultants! Of course we love quantitative data, but we’re obviously going to go and gather a little qual too…
Megan Simmons, UX Consultant:
“cxp is a great place to work since we practice what we preach – it’s an empathy driven workplace”
Ollie Miller, Creative Director:
“There are no egos at cxpartners. From my experience that’s very unique. It means you can be you. You can feel comfortable sharing your ideas with people who really value your thoughts and really listen.”
Lauren Howells, Marketing Manager:
“We have such a supportive culture with space for everyone to have an opinion and speak up”
Chris Edge, Account Director
“It’s such a friendly and passionate team at cx, a diverse mix of skillsets working well together to really make a massive difference to our clients”
Nicola Pritchard, Senior User Researcher:
“Flexibility, support, adult to adult relationships, everyone’s proper passion for their subject, feeling connected, feeling heard, having permission to bring my whole self to work without judgement, total kindness of all the people here.
When I stop and think, that’s an amazing list!”
Henry Bacon, UX Consultant:
“I’ve only been here for about 6 weeks, but so far I’d say the people! Everyone’s super friendly and welcoming.”
Sharon Webster, UX Consultant:
“What I love about working at cx is being empowered, having opportunities to develop my career, learn from awesome colleagues and that being people-centred is lived and breathed here. Oh and there’s some fun projects too!”
Mark Skinner, Principal UX Consultant:
“I think the best thing is that we’re not expected to be robots – we can be ourselves, and when we need support, it’s there!”
Claire Barrett, Senior UX Consultant:
“Today’s pod catch up demonstrated one (of the many!) reasons cx is a great place to work… a bunch of lovely human beings asking brilliant questions on subjects that matter and just generally having insightful chats!”
Not only are we a Great Place to Work, but we also have some pretty great benefits too, including:
We offer ‘remote-first’ working, with offices available in London and Bristol, and are currently recruiting for:
However, if you’re keen to join the team but your skillset doesn’t quite match the roles above – get in touch, we’d still love to hear from you.
With Facebook announcing the rebrand of Meta in 2021 and the push towards the metaverse many have looked to the social media platform with a fresh pair of eyes whilst newer platforms like Snapchat and TikTok have been taking the limelight.
Facebook is maturing as a business and whilst some view it as an older form of social media it still has a very large user base that spans across different platforms and message services including Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp and more.
SEO on Facebook follows similar patterns to the best practises outlined in our article on Instagram SEO and many of the same basic principles may apply as we look at ‘Metaverse SEO’ in the future. Here we share our guide to getting found on Facebook both in terms of the search feature of the site and the timeline.
As a side note, we will continue to refer to the platform as Facebook for the purposes of this article, however, we appreciate we may need to update in the future to keep up with the SEO best practice of keeping content up to date!
The Business page of your Facebook profile is essential for marketing purposes and getting the correct information on there will help you optimise the page and your profile from an SEO perspective.
Having a profile with all of the correct information around business specialisms, opening times and contact information will help your customers find you and provide the best possible user experience.
Additionally, having relevant keywords and concepts in your profile descriptions will increase the overall effectiveness of your Facebook SEO efforts.
Adding backlinks to your Facebook profile from your website and other areas will help increase the visibility of the page on other platforms and search engines. This will increase the chances of your page being viewed and potential customers getting in touch.
If you have other information you would like to share on your Facebook page then make sure you include custom tabs within your page architecture. This is a powerful tool to leverage when it comes to Facebook SEO and can be used to add sections on content, job listings and much more.
If you want to increase the awareness of your onsite blog content then adding links to the pieces from Facebook will help you to increase coverage. This can drive social visits to your site and increase the overall reach of your website and Facebook profile.
As previously mentioned using keywords on your business profile page will increase the chances of searchers finding your business when they are using the relevant keywords that you are targeting. Make sure that you are not too spammy and the keywords are relevant and organic.
One of the quick wins that you can get on your Facebook SEO is optimising your vanity URL. This will give you better brand control over your page and make it appear a whole lot more polished. To optimise this go to your page settings and change your username.
The jab, jab right hook methodology popularised by Gary Vaynerchuck is a good principle to follow when it comes to your Facebook content strategy and indeed all of your marketing communications. If your users feel they are getting something of value then this will increase the chances of them buying your product or service further down the line. Great content will also improve your Facebook SEO, so it will definitely be worth pursuing.
Get in touch with the expert SEO team at Varn to find out more about using SEO on your website and social channels, we can help if you want more guidance on getting found in a Google search.
The year-long exhibition of Mexican-American artist Octavio Medellin features a variety of works dotted across multiple sites in and around the city that inspired them.
To celebrate his life’s work Fiasco created a tactile, interactive map of Dallas, which allows visitors to explore and discover the key locations, landmarks and public artworks associated with Medellin’s career.
“We wanted to create a map of Dallas with a curious sensibility that avoids cliches of rodeos and cowboys, in favour of a playful, celebratory take on the artist’s life and legacy.” – Mike Frost, Digital Designer, Fiasco Design.
Illustrator Nicolas Burrows helped to bring the vision of Medellin’s Dallas to life by developing an abstract and figurative style of imperfect collage illustration. Playing with exaggerated mark-making techniques, the illustrations reflect the craftsmanship and philosophies that underpin Medellin’s work. The colour palette champions his use of raw materials – using pops of brighter hues to create a dream-like, more positive vision of Dallas. The overall feel echoes Medellin’s spirited, childlike love for craft.
A prominent figure in the Texan art scene, Medellin was passionate about sharing his wisdom and championing the next generation of artists. Adopting Medellin’s ethos, the website is designed to land with a broad demographic: an inclusive space for people from all walks of life to learn and be inspired.
The site is joyous for all to explore; a tactile digital experience that connects with the sculptural qualities of Medellin’s work through Burrows’ playful interpretive illustrations.
The navigation around the site helps to break up six decades of work in a digestible way for all to enjoy. Whilst the playful user interactions and bold colour palette connect this artist of huge cultural significance with a new, younger audience; keeping his work relevant to this day.
“It was a real joy to work with Dallas Museum of Art on the site for this unique exhibition of Medellin’s work. They were a fantastic partner, seeing our vision for the microsite and really getting behind it. We’re excited to see how the map is received.” – Ben Steers, Creative Director, Fiasco Design.
“Fiasco were amazing to collaborate with, and were truly innovative in their approach to our interactive map creation. They came up with amazing creative solutions, as well as providing real time brainstorming and troubleshooting along the way. We’re thrilled with the result— and the interactive museum engagement with both our members and the public!” – Lizz DeLera, Creative Director, Dallas Museum of Art.
You can view the full case study here.
Google Data Studio is a brilliant tool that helps you visualise your data with customisable dashboards and reports. We first added to our repertoire of tools back in 2016 when Google introduced it as part of the Google Analytics 360 suite, and it’s been a firm favourite ever since.
It’s one of our most useful day-to-day tools, not only for supporting our own accounts management, but also for our client reporting. So without further ado, here’s 7 reasons why you should dive into Data Studio if you’re running paid media ads.
Spend a lot of time checking dull spreadsheets? It’s time for an upgrade! One of the key benefits of Data Studio is that it’s a highly visual analysis tool, enabling your data to easily be displayed via different charts, graphs, and tables at the click of a button.
For each element, you can choose which trends to highlight, how much information to include (e.g. ad image previews or just ad names) and which parts to make interactive in order to have the most visual impact.
Data Studio dashboards are fully customisable in every respect, meaning you can add company logos, colour schemes, and brand fonts to make your reporting a little more fun! If you’re a visual learner, the numbers are likely to make a lot more sense now too.
Most of our ambitious advertisers run campaigns across many different platforms at any one time, with each one likely having its own associated budgets, benchmarks and targets.
Data Studio has an incredible 500+ (and counting!) data source connectors so it’s the perfect place for all of your data from different places to be easily combined. You can pull in your latest engagement results from Facebook and Instagram, your average Google Analytics goal completion rate, and your company forecast spreadsheet to analyse your top-level performance at a glance throughout the month, or simply display everything you’ve got running alongside each other. Whatever you want!
Data Studio can be used for simple reporting tasks, but it also has powerful analysis capabilities. This is where calculated fields come in: you can manipulate the data to directly suit your needs.
Calculated fields can extend and transform your data by allowing you to apply calculations to create new metrics and dimensions. With calculated fields, you can answer questions that existing dimensions cannot answer. For example, whether you’re outpacing your monthly budget, or the average time on site for groups of custom geographic regions – super handy stuff.
It’s highly likely you and your team members will have different requirements for your data. You may want to simply check on how much that new Pinterest campaign is spending this month to date, whereas your colleague may want an in-depth overview of performance over the last quarter compared to the previous year.
This is no problem at all. Data Studio is easily shareable via a URL that can be opened on any browser, operating system or device. Once email access has been granted, it can also be set up to allow different users to easily flick between the views and date ranges they need to see – either at the entire report level or individual graph/table/chart level.
If attribution isn’t a consideration, Google Analytics dashboards can provide a useful starting point for data visualisation, but one of the key setbacks is that there are limits on the amount of widgets and properties you can use. So you can only have 12 graph/table/charts per dashboard and no more than 20 dashboards per property.
That may sound like a lot, but in practice this would be 2.5 each for your main source/medium paths, assuming you are only running on three advertising platforms; (all traffic), Google/organic, Bing/organic, direct/none, ‘email provider’/email, Google/cpc, Facebook/cpc, Bing/cpc.
Unlike Google Analytics, Google Data Studio has no limitations at all! So if you’ve got a lot of different data points that you need to keep track of, then Data Studio becomes your best bet.
If Data Studio seems like just one more thing you need to remember to check each day, week, or month, then scheduled exports might help reduce the load.
Data Studio can send a PDF report automatically on a regular basis via email, to up to 50 recipients, along with a customisable email message and link to the live dashboard. These dashboards can also handily be embedded into websites via iframe, as well as being fully integrated with work management platforms, such as Monday.com, to ensure your data is always close to hand when you need it.
Google Data Studio packs in a ton of useful functionality – especially for a free tool! So if you’re drowning in data and unable to see the wood for the trees, we’d highly recommend getting started with some dashboards today.
Need help getting set up on Data Studio? Contact us today and we can get your business running with reports and dashboards in no time.