Launched to mark the programme’s 10-year anniversary and reinforce the agency’s commitment to Bristol as its UK home, the Noble Deeds initiative will see one local charity secure £12,000 worth of digital performance marketing support.
Noble Performs is inviting Bristol-based charities to attend the launch event on the 6th July, when entries will open, with the winner announced in August and work beginning in September.
Started originally by Noble Performs Nevada Headquarters, the Noble Deeds programme has upskilled dozens of charities & not for profits during the past decade, and scaled as Noble’s US business has grown, now donating in excess of $200,000 a year of services to worthy causes.
Noble’s UK managing director, Kate Sikora, explains;
“Ever since we first established our Bristol base in 2018 we’ve wanted to bring our Noble Deeds programme to the city. With charities and not-for-profits struggling more than ever to secure vital donations due to the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis it felt like the right time to be trying to help charities look at how their digital marketing efforts can help crucial fundraising efforts
“One of the reasons we chose the city as our UK home is it really resonates with our ‘Be Better Every day’ philosophy. Bristol is such a melting pot of businesses and not-for-profits of all shapes and sizes but there’s a real sense of genuine community and shared responsibility around making the city a better place to live and work for everyone.”
Helping clients such as Adobe, Rolls Royce, Air Asia and Yosemite with their international digital presence, Noble’s ambition is to replicate the scale of its Nevada Noble Deeds programme in Bristol as its UK footprint grows.
To enter registered charities or not-for-profits must be Bristol-based and complete a simple application form, which will be available on the Noble Performs website on July 6th, 2022.
The Bristol-based charity that wins a place on the programme will secure a package of digital marketing support and skills training tailored to suit its specific needs, however this could include; SEO, PPC, Analytics and Paid Social.
Charities who wish to register their interest in the Noble Deeds Programme and attend the launch event at the Bristol Observatory on Wednesday 6th July (6-8 p.m.) should email kate.sikora@nobleperforms.co.uk to receive an invitation and secure their place.
To find out more about Noble Performs go to https://nobleperforms.co.uk/
We have been helping our clients to prepare to transition from Google’s Universal Analytics to their newer platform Google Analytics 4 for the past couple of years. And, as we move through summer 2022, the need to make the switch to GA4 is becoming increasingly time critical.
Google’s friendly and familiar web stats platform Universal Analytics is going to be switched off in just over a year. If you’re a digital marketeer who uses Google Analytics to track website performance, you will need to make the switch to GA4 sooner rather than later.
We recommend turning on Google Analytics 4 asap so that when Universal Analytics becomes redundant in July 2023, you will already have collected a year’s worth of data in GA4. That’s why now is the time to make the move!
We’ve put together an overview of the key dates you need to be aware of, to help you plan the transition. Not sure how to get up and running on GA4? Take a look at our guide to setting up Google Analytics 4 to get you started.
The new analytics reporting platform was announced two years ago, shortly followed by the news that Google would eventually turn off Universal Analytics completely. At this point, the team here at Varn set ourselves the challenge to learn all we could about Google Analytics 4 in preparation.
We think switching on GA4 in summer 2022 is the most logical timeframe for all businesses who rely on monitoring website traffic, conversions and user behaviour. This will mean that you will have year-on-year data available when Universal Analytics gets switched off the following summer.
Setting up Google Analytics 4 in July 2022 will mean that you can run both UA and GA4 in parallel for a year while you get trained up on how to use the new platform and move your regular reporting to GA4.
At this point, you will still be able to access historic data in your old Universal Analytics account. However, no new data will be received. So it will be essential to have GA4 fully configured, with all your necessary reporting set up by this point.
From the start of 2024, you will no longer be able to access Universal Analytics, and all historic data will be deleted. We would recommend you export all historic data from your account before this date. Not sure how to do that? With a little bit of Varn magic and technical know-how, we can help you to pull your historic web data into a useful Google Data Studio report.
It’s time to start getting to grips with GA4. The new interface can be intimidating, as there are less out-of-the-box reporting options available and more custom configuration is required. However, Google Analytics 4 is the future of website analytics, so it is important not to be caught by surprise or left behind!
Feel free to contact the Varn team for help and support setting up your account, learning how to use GA4, and creating any custom reporting solutions you need.
According to HubSpot, marketers that blog consistently are 13 times more likely to see a positive return on investment. Business blogs are a fantastic way to make your marketing spend go a long way, but the generation of content is an ongoing commitment.
Idea rich, time poor
Many small business owners and marketers for larger organisations have lots of ideas they would like to implement but little time to implement them. They have multiple balls in the air at any one time, including clients, prospects, and media outlets, so keeping the business blog up to date can be hard. Some may feel like it’s enough to post every now and then when they have time, while others want to do more but simply can’t justify prioritising it over existing and potential clients’ needs. I know how that feels. I have my own blogging business, so my blog is an important part of my portfolio, but when I have multiple client deadlines to hit, of course I am going to prioritise their needs over my own. However, that’s not to say that neglecting your business blog is a good move.
Drive traffic and build trust
Consistency in business blogging is an excellent way to drive traffic to your website and promote your brand. It also builds trust with your target audience as they continually see that you are supplying useful information to them. If blogs appear on an ad hoc basis, they don’t receive the same recognition from Google, but they also don’t create the same perception among web visitors. People buy from people they trust and a business blog is a bit like providing a window into your business, for prospects to peer through to get an idea of what it’s like inside. If there are reams of useful information that have clearly been updated regularly and recently, it paints a picture of a company that is up to date, on trend, and in touch with the market and its customers. If there is a blog with the most recent post dating back to last year, you probably wouldn’t come away with the same impression.
Hold onto the visitors you get
Additionally, a consistent business blog is a good way to keep visitors on your site because you can direct them from one article to the next, to the next, and before they know it, they have spent half an hour delving into your knowledge and expertise. This only works with a well populated blog though. If you only have a handful of posts spread over the course of a few years, visitors will soon realise that much of the information they’re reading is outdated and go elsewhere to find what they need.
Keeping visitors on your site for longer allows them to build a better picture of who you are and what you stand for. Think about the difference between meeting someone in person for 30 seconds, and spending time with them for 30 minutes. While first impressions do count, the longer you can engage with your audience, the more chance you have of selling your expertise and building trust in your brand.
Budget for blogs
Regular blogging is also better financially too. If you outsource the copywriting of your business blog as many companies do, it may feel easier to commission a blog every now and then, but it’s far better value for money if you commit to a regular program. As well as ensuring you have a consistent blog on your site, if you establish an ongoing commitment with someone, you know there is a third party who will drive the schedule on your behalf, chase for any information they need, and make it happen with minimum hassle. All for a set monthly fee that you can budget for without worrying about variable fees from one month to the next.
So, when it comes to the question of ad hoc vs regular blogging, it really is best to keep it consistent.
As part of their ‘better business’ product launches, Six has released a CX Mapping product to help businesses focus on the people who matter most: their customers.
The product
Working together with Six, businesses are guided through the process of insight gathering (both internal and external), CX mapping distillation and visualisation, and playback workshops with key stakeholders to explore the map and to determine quick-wins to longer-term priorities. Businesses are given the chance to see what their customers see – the good and not-so-good – and supported by Six to turn this human-based insight into real-world action. This programme can be completed in as little as 6 weeks.
Why invest in CX?
The line between B2B and B2C customer experience (CX) is blurring. B2B customers are now looking for more than just a good product or service – they want to buy into businesses. And they expect consistent, personalised, and human experiences when they interact with organisations.
Getting CX right is about building insight across the customer lifecycle and creating the right business ecosystem to deliver against customers’ evolving needs. Once it is known what customers feel about a business and why, changes can be identified that will seriously improve their view of a business. And where customer satisfaction leads, business growth nearly always follows.
Better business
CX Mapping is the first in a series of offerings that Six are launching. Each one will answer a specific industry need to help brands and businesses connect with their customers on a more human level. After all, whether businesses are talking to an individual or communicating with an organisation, they have one thing in common: people sit at the heart. And this is just one of many ways Six is inspiring brands and businesses to be more human.
A strategic creative partner
Over the past 28 years, Six has partnered with local and global organisations to help grow and deliver value for their clients. And they’ve been doing it in three ways:
It’s this strategic, creative capability, coupled with their CX experience with the likes of bp, Lloyds Bank and St Modwen, which makes Six the go-to agency for customer and user-focused expertise.
Ready to start your CX Mapping project? Or want to find out how Six can partner with your business? Get in touch with Ruth.Clarke@six.agency
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:You need to load content from reCAPTCHA to submit the form. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.
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