We’re delighted to support premium cycle tyre brand Vittoria by launching Great Expectations. This series of mini-docs and social content reveals the inner thoughts of professional riders as they reflect on what cycling means to them.
We created the campaign to take a more personal approach, giving riders the freedom to express what cycling means to them as they prepared for the new season – and The Ride Ahead. It’s all part of The Ride Ahead positioning we developed with the brand’s leadership team that’s now being rolled out across Their global communications.
Filmed on location at the team training camps, Great Expectations launches with riders from XC team Santa Cruz FSA and road team DSM. The films open the door on the curiosity, optimism and courage of each rider in a series of intimate portraits as they share their hopes and ambitions.
“Visiting many places helps you to grow as a man – as a human – because you can see the world from different points of view,” says Maxime Marotte, Santa Cruz FSA, in one of the films.
“One of the nicest things in cycling is to go on a new road – that brings you to a beautiful place,” adds, Romain Bardet, Team DSM.
Firehaus worked with Italian production company Yanzi and director Marco Marcasolli along with the brand’s marketing team on the mini-docs and a range of short edits.
Vittoria CCO Ernesto Garcia Domingo said “ Great Expectations brings a new approach and fresh voices to our audience with pro riders sharing some of their personal insights and motivations. This has been a great collaboration so far under The Ride Ahead banner and we look forward to sharing more over the coming months”.
Ian Bates, Founder and Creative Partner at Firehaus said “This series of mini-docs has given us the space to produce content that is more personal and inspiring”
The Enterprise Sessions is a new content series led by Prof. Michele Barbour Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor: Enterprise and Innovation at the University of Bristol.
The series has been created to inspire entrepreneurs and help them to realise impact from their ideas. Michele interviews founders, researchers and academics from different disciplines and career stages who’ve been part of the University’s Enterprise ecosystem. Each episode is a treasure trove of information covering a range of topics from funding, licensing and IP, consultancy, contract research and business incubation.
Guests include Konstantina Psoma, Professor Wuge Briscoe, Professor Roberta Guerrina and Dr Tom Carter.
Bristol now tops the list of UK universities for the return on investment achieved by spinouts and is ranked in the top 3 for equity investment.
Prof. Michele Barbour said: “The University of Bristol has an impressive track record of enterprise and innovation and we’re keen to share that knowledge within our community as well as with a wider audience. The Enterprise Sessions is a new content series that brings to life the personal stories of spinout Founders and how our enterprise ecosystem has them.
Firehaus took our idea and created a branded content series, introducing the broadcast-style interview approach, as well as the name and look and feel. The approach has allowed me to develop rich conversations with our interviewees and showcase their experience of our ecosystem which will be of huge benefit for anyone involved in research, innovation and enterprise.”
Nick Barthram, Strategy Partner at Firehaus said: “Firehaus has worked with a range of organisations in the Research, Innovation and Enterprise space, including UKRI, Made Smarter Innovation and The University of Bristol. Consequently, we’ve developed a clear understanding and methodology to ignite opportunities at the intersection of academia and industry”.
Strategy, Concept and Art Direction: Firehaus
Film Production: JonesMillbank
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.
Good form design is a cornerstone of conversion optimisation.
Without good form design, you risk disrupting the overall user experience.
A well-designed form removes frustration, makes clear the next steps, provides a positive experience for the user and will help to increase conversions.
Earlier this year, our Conversion Optimisation team headed to Experimentation Elite in London.
A celebration of CRO and experimentation, the conference provided a platform for marketers to share and expand their knowledge.
And the conference keynote – given by Craig Sullivan – got us thinking from the off. Good form design shouldn’t be difficult, so why do so many businesses get it wrong?
In his talk, Craig listed 16 ‘crimes’ that occur within form design. But, for the sake of brevity, we’ll summarise the most important and common that we see.
The copy on forms can have a greater impact on conversions than people credit it for. If you’re hiring developers and designers, skimping on copywriters could be costing more in the long run.
When handling form errors, offering inline validation and feedback will result in an increase in conversions. Providing this feedback while the user is completing the form, rather than waiting until submission, can minimize friction and irritation on failed submission.
Password constraints and too many rules create friction in many user journeys as people are left grappling for new ideas. It is recommended here to prioritize length over complexity and avoid “negging” by offering a password strength meter.
It is recommended that forms disable autocorrect and auto-capitalize on fields that may not have answers matching a phone dictionary, such as names. Autocorrecting answers where there is no mistake can be annoying and in some cases discriminatory.
Are you suffering from Premature Error Ejaculation? Craig identified in his presentation that “PEE problems” can frustrate and discourage site users so to prevent this, form field error validations should not appear before the user has finished their input.
It’s not just form design. There are so many crimes we see every day against Conversion Optimisation generally. And, as with form design, they’re mostly avoidable with just a little thought and planning.
The Crimes Against Conversion are often so deeply rooted that they can be hard to spot. But if you can avoid them, you will save yourself a huge amount of time, budget, and a lot of unnecessary pain.
You can read more about the Crimes Against Conversion here…
Even with consistent performance marketing growth for the last decade and worldwide digital ad revenue predicted to grow by 85% by the end of 2026, performance marketers can’t afford to rest on their laurels. Customer journeys are becoming less linear, and competition can be internal as well as external – it’s adopting a performance mindset that ensures results.
Take a telecoms provider, for example. With different departments (for example, broadband sales vs phone contract sales) using performance marketing to drive towards its own goals, two internal messages are competing for the same customer attention. A performance mindset solves this problem by taking performance marketing from a strategy to an attitude – a way of thinking. Empowered by good use of first-party data, it could be the difference between a brand achieving an ROI target or not.
As marketers, we should all be adopting the key attributes of a performance mindset, including those working across different departments. These include:
Maximising efficiency across all channels
First and foremost departments should be communicating frequently and there needs to be strong channel integration. Perhaps the answer is to have one budget with one goal and then to decide across all channels what the make-up of the activity should be? A mix of these different channels and departments can work together to achieve the initial overarching objective.
Always looking at the bigger picture – never just granular detail
With so many different, smaller components to marketing, businesses can sometimes forget to focus on looking at the bigger picture and working towards a wider marketing strategy. Focusing on the macro not the micro allows everyone to be more agile, keep stronger customer connections and maintain consistent branding.
Galvanising everyone toward the same north star using first party data
Much of this comes down to galvanising everyone under one north star. Assets and learnings should be shared across teams and across the business. This is where the data comes in.
With an ever-expanding mix of channels and platforms to communicate and interact with customers through, it is even more important for agencies and marketing teams to work collaboratively. First-party data (data collected directly from customers) is a route to bringing teams together. This data can help all marketers understand how their activity nudges customers along the value chain; how it impacts results and delivers more personally relevant customer connections. And, again using first-party data and measurement, attributing performance across channels, everyone in the mix understands how they impact and deliver results.
By sharing regularly, the team can become more invested in the goals not just their part of the process or their individual objectives, but of the whole.
Performance planning – using data as a guiding light
Data ensures you can put your best foot forward. It’s a guiding light in the creative process. It shifts the focus from subjectivity to objectivity. You can involve everyone in every stage of the process – show the creatives how assets are performing so they can see what they should do more of and what they should do less of.
Testing is critical to this as it gives you your concrete impact of what happens if we try X vs Y and what should we do more or less of, to drive a better performance. By showing the impact of using data to understand, intelligently target and communicate to your audience and the increase in success metrics it brings, you can unify business and marketing goals with customer level objectives that drive better results.
Customer-first decision making – what should we be saying/asking our customer to do?
Having a performance mindset ensures alignment across channels, thinking about how to maximise each one in relation to the other, and asking ‘What do we want the customer to do?’ and ‘How can each of these channels contribute to our efforts in encouraging them to do it?’
Too often there is internal competition, and business goals, which leads only to mixed messaging and confusion around what customers are being asked to do, and ultimately impacts engagement, response and conversion.
Through the deep understanding of your base that first-party data allows, customers can be encouraged along their value journey and the brand can look to measure and optimise to the right metric for that customer. Let the data direct that at a customer level – be it the download of an app, obtaining one more visit, registering on your website, sales of a product or simply driving awareness. by optimising in the right way you can direct your customers to their next best, and most logical, action.
A performance mindset brings unity and a shared focus: it’s a relay team, not a group of individual sprinters. And by putting customer and first-party data at the heart of your decision making across teams, your performance marketing will perform even better – leading to unrivalled ROI.
The article was first published on Performance Marketing World, May 2022
Written by Andrew Terry, Head of Strategy
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.
Abode PR, the Bath-based, award-winning global B2B technology public relations and content agency, is celebrating its 5th birthday and a record 400% growth in revenue during 2021.
The agency was masterminded by Founder and Managing Director, Jessica Gillingham, a Bath native and former director of Visit Bath. It originally set out to help raise the profile of transformative technology solutions operating within the travel accommodation industry through specialist public relations.
Under the strong leadership and vision of Gillingham, the scope of Abode PR’s work branched from PR into Content Marketing. The team now comprises a team of 10 all based in the South West, with a hub in the centre of Bath.
In the last eighteen months alone, the agency won retained and project work for companies leading in their sectors and was recognised on the shortlist for ‘Agency of the Year’ at the Creative Bath Awards 2021. During this time Gillingham, who regularly is invited to speak on travel tech and female entrepreneurship panels, podcasts, and webinars, has been nominated for an award as an industry pioneer.
Jessica Gillingham commented, “It’s very unusual for a UK-based agency to have its entire client base located around the world, and a sign that we have well and truly carved out a niche for ourselves within this dynamic sector. I’m particularly proud to credit our company’s success to the talented team we have built, who all hail from within the South West and delighted to celebrate this milestone with them and our clients today.”
For more information about Abode PR, please visit abode-pr.com.
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: