Whenever I introduce myself as a Fractional Chief People Officer (also called a CPO), someone usually asks what the role involves. It’s a great question, but what matters most is why this model is so valuable for creative agencies.
Fractional roles are certainly gaining in popularity – but behind the trend is a very practical shift: creative businesses increasingly need senior expertise, but not on a full-time payroll.
This article explains what a Fractional CPO does, why the model works so well, what kinds of projects we lead, and some real examples from my own work.
What does “fractional” really mean?
Think of a Fractional CPO as a highly experienced senior people leader you bring in part-time, on a contract, or retainer basis. You get strategic leadership without the commitment or cost of a full-time hire – that’s ideal when budgets and headcount are tight.
But this isn’t the same as a short-term interim. Fractional CPOs usually stay involved for several months, working as an embedded part of your leadership team and delivering outcomes that strengthen the business for the long term.
In my work, I combine hands-on HR leadership with flexible delivery, bringing C-suite experience to creative agencies that don’t yet need – or can’t justify – a permanent CPO. For growing companies, that experience can make all the difference.
Five advantages of the CPO role:
You get C-suite capability and strategic people leadership at a fraction of the salary and benefits of a permanent CPO.
Fractional CPOs focus on diagnosing issues quickly and delivering measurable improvements – not lengthy reports or unnecessary complexity.
Increase or reduce support based on what’s happening in your business: periods of fast hiring, restructuring, investment rounds, or leadership transitions.
A Fractional CPO can stabilise your people operations through periods like founder transitions, M&A, leadership gaps, or rapid growth – ensuring the business stays compliant, aligned, and well-prepared.
Many creative agencies grow fast before their people processes catch up. A fractional CPO helps build scalable systems, coach developing HR teams, and set the culture before problems take root.
How does a Fractional CPO support a creative agency?
Typical engagements focus on the people challenges that most business owners don’t have the time – or specialist expertise – to tackle on their own:
These are all areas where mistakes can be costly – but where the right fractional support can unlock real performance and stability.
Examples of my fractional CPO work
Through my consultancy, en:Rich, I’ve supported creative agencies and also SMEs across multiple sectors. A few examples include:
In conclusion
A Fractional Chief People Officer is a cost-effective way to access senior people and leadership expertise that might otherwise be out of reach. Whether you’re scaling, preparing for investment, or simply trying to stabilise your people operations, a fractional CPO provides the leadership and structure needed to support growth – without adding full-time headcount.
For many creative businesses, this model is becoming the smartest way to professionalise HR, de-risk the business, and build a culture that attracts and retains great people.
Need some outside help?
If you’d like support on a fractional, interim or part-time basis across culture, people strategy or HR leadership, you can take a look at my Fractional CPO page:
https://www.enrichpeople.co.uk/fractional-chief-people-officer-cpo
A solid content marketing strategy is the foundation for meaningful results and long-term success.
A content marketing strategy is a plan for creating and sharing content that appeals to your target audience and helps you achieve your business goals.
Whether you’re a start-up trying to make your mark or an established brand wanting to stay ahead, having a clear content marketing plan can be a game-changer. At AMBITIOUS, we’ve helped many businesses turn content into business growth by integrating it within the broader PR and digital marketing landscape.
This guide will walk business owners and marketers through the essential steps to create a content marketing strategy that drives growth and keeps your brand competitive.
We’ll cover everything from defining your goals and understanding your audience, to planning content types, mapping the buyer’s journey, setting SMART goals, and measuring results.
By the end, you’ll have a clear roadmap to build a strategy that delivers real business impact.
A content marketing strategy is a blueprint. It outlines the groundwork for the types of content you will produce, the topics it will cover, and the formats and channels you’ll deliver in.
You could think of it as a game plan for winning over potential customers and keeping them coming back for more… and that wouldn’t be incorrect. When viewed in isolation, a content strategy absolutely supports sales.
But, for the most successful brands, content marketing and content strategy do so much more than support sales. A content strategy keeps your brand fresh and your insights timely and valuable.
In short, it helps you remain relevant in a fast-changing market.
Now that we’ve covered what makes a strategy successful, let’s look at the key components that go into building one.
Building a content strategy involves several key components, each of which plays a crucial role in ensuring your efforts are effective and aligned with your business objectives.
To quote Simon Sinek, ‘Start with Why.’
Before you create a single piece of content, you need to understand why you’re doing the things you’re doing. Not just from a content perspective, but from an entire sales and operational perspective.
In his book,Start with Why, Sinek puts forward that the most successful brands put the why at the heart of everything they do. Taking a purpose-led approach allows you to approach subsequent strategies from a position of authenticity.
So rather than coming from a starting point of pure economics, put your mission and your vision at the heart of your content strategy.
You wouldn’t show up to a black-tie event in flip-flops… right?
Well the same principle applies to your content.
If you want to effect change and impact consumer decisions; you need to understand your audience, inside and out. Creating detailed buyer personas that go beyond basic demographics of age and geography can be incredibly valuable here.
What are their aspirations? What keeps them awake at night? What are the main pressures and challenges they’re facing?
Someone’s age, location, and job title isn’t going to give you great insight. By going beyond just demographics, you can establish what kind of content your audiences are engaging with the most.
With deeper, more detailed audience insights, you can create content that resonates with your audiences on a much more personal level.
You can then use existing audience insights and customer feedback to further refine your personas, curating your content to better address their needs.
You have your mission, your vision and your customer profiles.
Next, it’s time to understand the buyer’s journey.
The buyer’s journey typically includes three stages: Awareness, Consideration and Decision.
In this sense, every business is different, and as such, strategies and tactics must adapt. Content strategy and content creation aren’t a one-size-fits-all approach.
An FMCG brand will have a much shorter customer journey compared to a business that makes diagnostic machines.
A few blogs and some social posts aren’t going to make a quick conversion if your customer’s buying journey is traditionally 12 to 18 months or more. In cases like this, it’s about creating content strategies that are heavy on touchpoints and reinforcing your brand through much longer periods of awareness and consideration.
On the flip side; shorter journeys with bigger audiences – like FMCG – get to decision stage making much faster, so require content to match this cadence. It’s much faster, much more fluid and in the moment.
Creating content is all about matching audience and intent; you need to make sure that you’re putting the right content, in the right places, at the right time.
Your brand voice holds power, so use it wisely.
This is the real-world reflection of your mission, vision and brand values. Are you the wise mentor? The innovative disruptor? The friendly neighbour? Whatever your brand voice, consistency is key.
Also, people don’t just buy products; they buy into brands they can relate to. A strong brand identity, guided by clear brand guidelines, ensures consistency in both visual and tonal style across all content and marketing materials, strengthening brand recognition.
Maintaining a consistent brand voice across social media platforms is crucial for establishing and maintaining brand loyalty, which is key to amplifying your reach and engagement over time.
With a brand voice established and a firm understanding of your audiences, you can answer the question: what kind of content shall we produce?
There’s a lot of format options to choose from, including:
You don’t need it all to succeed. The key is to select the types of content that are most likely to resonate with your target audience. This will then inform the most appropriate channels upon which to activate those assets.
Generally speaking, having your own on-site content like blogs and articles is a universal must.
Whether you’re selling MRI machines or barefoot shoes, having on-site content that pulls through into search engine results pages and AI search platforms is going to be a major part of your content strategy.
So owned content has to be a foundational pillar of any content strategy.
Beyond your own channels, it’s about selecting the content types and channels that resonate with your target audience. If one of your prime audiences is NHS procurement teams, then you’re going to want to focus your efforts into channels like LinkedIn—with a mix of written thought leader content and video-led content marketing to catch their attention.
A fast-fashion brand would find more value in focusing on TikTok, with its in-built shopping API and fast-moving, trends-focused nature.
Important note: there’s a reason why we don’t classify social media platforms as ‘owned’. The reason being, that while the account itself is yours, you don’t own the channel itself. If TikTok or Instagram went under, then that channel is gone. Anything that is not 100% within your complete control, is classed as shared.
There are two more universal must-haves: video and direct-to-consumer content.
Whatever platform or channel you’re activating – whether it’s YouTube, LinkedIn, or TikTok – video content is the primary focus. So you need to account for video production in your content marketing strategy.
Then there’s direct-to-consumer content. Or in simple terms, email marketing.
Personalisation in sales and marketing is booming. With the sheer number of brands competing for attention across every channel and platform, the space has never been louder and more competitive. It’s incredibly easy for consumers to simply become overcome with brand fatigue and when that happens, they just start switching off.
But if you can successfully leverage a direct line of contact via email marketing, that can be a powerful thing.
Now that you have a sense of the key elements, let’s explore how to activate your content across multiple channels and formats for maximum impact.
The most effective and impactful content strategies take place across multiple channels, in multiple formats. By choosing the right mix, you can ensure your content reaches and resonates with the people who matter most.
To make this as effective as possible, combine owned elements, like on-site blogs and articles and your email channels, with the right mix of shared channels for your audience for maximum reach and effectiveness.
Look to ways you can repurpose content across different channels and formats.
Uou may want to conduct a piece of industry trends research. That piece of research becomes a designed whitepaper. That whitepaper can become a valuable sales asset, in both digital and print formats.
But it can be more.
It can then be broken apart, with news stories and releases created to generate earned media. Key elements of the whitepaper can then be created into shorter social assets, which can be activated across company and personal LinkedIn channels.
It can also be created into various blogs, summarising your findings and offering the whitepaper as a download. This gives you a lead magnet and a means of generating valuable consumer data.
You can activate these findings in your newsletters. You could even take it one step further and bring it into interactive formats like webinars, which can be especially effective for audience engagement. Those webinars could then be repurposed as further video content to be used on LinkedIn and even YouTube.
When taking this kind of integrated approach, the ultimate aim is to connect as many dots as possible.
When distributing your content, consider a broad mix of marketing channels from email marketing, social media accounts, video, digital and print design, even paid advertising like Google ads to create the greatest possible reach and impact.
With your content now planned and distributed, it’s essential to keep your strategy organised and on track.
A content strategy without a plan is like a road trip without a map. Chances are you’ll have fun, but you’ll most likely get lost.
This is where your marketing strategy and plan intersect with your content strategy. Through your marketing plans, create schedules and roadmaps, outlining campaigns, moments, and activations. Detail this with the outputs and assets you’ll need to create, with time-bound goals, to help keep you on track.
In the day-to-day, content calendars can keep everything on track and on schedule, particularly if you’re having to manage complex production schedules for video.
This will not only ensure consistency but also help you allocate resources, raise issues and delays effectively, and adapt to any required change. This helps ensure all team members and freelancers are on the same page, maintaining alignment and efficiency throughout the entire production and content creation process.
You want to stay on track and you don’t want to bite off more than you can chew. To manage expectations, it’s crucial to set SMART goals. These are:
SMART goals help you to achieve a few things.
Firstly, they’re built on solid foundations of goals. For example, instead of saying, “We want more website traffic,” a SMART goal would be, “We aim to increase website traffic by 20% over the next six months by publishing two blog posts per week.”
This helps join all the dots and create content production processes with firmly established timelines and completion journeys. This clarity ensures everyone on your team knows what you’re aiming for and how to get there.
They also help you outline what’s achievable, given your organisation’s current production capacities and capabilities. For example, you may not be in a position to be able to produce your own video content, either through lack of capacity or capability.
So SMART goals can also help you identify areas where you need to bring in extra resources and skills in order to achieve these goals.
These goals act as your guiding star, helping you focus your efforts and measure the success of your content marketing efforts.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the metrics that help you measure the success of your content marketing strategy.
These are ultimately showing how well your overall strategy is performing, relative to your original strategic goals and aims.
For your website, look to metrics like:
While overall impressions can give you a picture of the general reach of your site, actual on-page data is going to be much more valuable when analysing your content.
Social media platforms offer a different set of metrics. Here you’ll be looking at:
But you’ll also need to monitor sentiment on social. 1,000 comments look like a good number on a report. But if 950 of those comments are negative in sentiment, then it’s far less positive than the numbers show.
The reason why we establish KPIs isn’t to dictate any success or failure further down the line, it’s more about identifying progress, tracking what’s working, and most importantly, what isn’t.
Ongoing auditing and analysis help shape tactical, strategic, and creative decisions.
One of the biggest self-imposed flaws you can bring into your marketing strategy is to only review your activity once per year.
Ongoing auditing and analysis is a crucial step, not only in creating a content marketing strategy, but evolving it in real time.
Review your existing content to see what’s hitting the mark and what needs improvement. Determine which types of content are the most effective. Then, put plans in place to create more content which matches this.
You need to identify what isn’t working and establish why. If something doesn’t work once, try it again in a different way. But if something isn’t working over long periods of time, then continuation is likely not worth it.
By doing this, you can identify gaps in your content. Look for opportunities to repurpose content into new formats, maximise the value of your existing content, and remove anything that is low-value and surplus to requirement.
Rather than doing this once a year, do it with more focused regularity. More regular content audits provide valuable insights that inform your ongoing strategy.
With your strategy organised and performance measured, let’s look at how data can become your superpower.
We know that optimising your content for better visibility in search is crucial to ensure it reaches a wider audience, improves your rankings, and ensures your content stands out in search results.
But competing for keywords, intent, and eyeballs is more than just a challenge in creative writing.
It’s about leveraging the right data and insights and using tools like Google Analytics, SurferSEO, and SEMRush to give you the edge.
The same applies to social media platforms. Proprietary analytics, or third-party tools such as Hootsuite, let you see what’s working in real time.
But don’t just collect data… act on it.
You need to be prepared to adjust your strategy based on these insights. The best content strategies are the ones that adapt.
With data as your guide, you can confidently plan and adapt your strategy for ongoing success.
There’s no silver bullet for successful content. What makes a content strategy successful is two-fold.
Firstly, it’s about strategic planning, critical thinking, and creativity. You need to be able to hone in on audiences, demographics, messaging and narratives, and understand the buyer’s journey and how you can subtly influence it in your favour.
Great content strategy establishes these foundational elements, meaning you can have great creative outputs underpinned by strong data and insights. So before you’ve even drafted a word of copy, or shot a second of video content, you need to have this understanding.
But you also need to be able to react and adapt.
A framework is great. It gives you guardrails. But a dogmatic approach to your strategy could do more harm than good.
Things may not work as you predicted, attitudes change, behaviours adapt, trends come and go, and algorithms change the way content is delivered and consumed.
If all you’re doing is staying within the lines of your strategy, chances are you’re missing out.
By following these steps, you can build a content marketing strategy that is structured, effective, and adaptable.
Having a documented content marketing strategy is crucial to guide your efforts and ensure success.
Whether you’re looking to increase brand awareness, generate leads, improve your search ranking, surface in generative AI responses, or create personalised marketing content for your customers, a robust content marketing strategy underpins these goals and gives you the roadmap to achieving them.
But a winning content strategy isn’t just about creating more and more content. It’s about creating the right content, for the right people, and putting it in the right place at the right time.
At AMBITIOUS, we’ve seen firsthand how a content strategy can transform businesses. It’s not just about getting likes or shares; it’s about building relationships with your audience that last and deliver real results.
Get in touch to talk about how we can help you develop a strategy that’s as unique as you are.
It’s no secret that the recent US tariffs are having a major effect on the manufacturing industry.
With the additional financial pressure, many businesses will be looking for places to cut costs, and marketing is often the first to be scaled back.
We’d recommend a note of caution: marketing isn’t just a nice-to-have, and there are many cost-effective ways to ensure your manufacturing marketing boosts long-term growth, even in tough economic times.
In this guide we’ll cover:
It’s common to see businesses approach their marketing strategy as a more ‘ad hoc’ activity. In reality, this will be your roadmap when it comes to interacting with customers, growing your audience and ultimately increasing your sales.
When it comes to saving on costs, a clear strategy will help you map out exactly what you want to spend and where. If you don’t have an overarching plan and budget in place, you risk spending money on ineffective channels and losing track of how much you’re spending.
To put your plans into action, a good place to start is with your brand strategy. Once you have established exactly what your brand is, and who your audience is, you can move on to the wider marketing plan.
A good marketing plan will include:
With that established, you can move forward with confidence, knowing that all your marketing efforts will be underpinned by clear goals and a solid plan.
The manufacturing industry has traditionally relied on trade shows, print advertising, and relationship-based sales to reach customers and bring in more revenue.
While these methods still have their place, digital marketing is now an essential addition to any successful manufacturing marketing strategy in 2026.
Digital marketing can seem daunting as it encapsulates so much, but don’t feel like you need to tackle it all right away. Especially with smaller marketing teams, you need to be able to prioritise the best, most cost-effective approaches to start.
Organic SEO is the process of getting your website to appear higher up on search engines when potential customers search for terms relating to your business or industry.
Unlike paid search, organic SEO is a free marketing method that can generate more traffic to your site.
By creating content and pages that use optimised keywords, you’re telling the search engine algorithm what your content is about and the specific search terms it should rank for.
For example, if you were a packaging manufacturer and you wanted more people to find out about your shelf-ready packaging products, you would use ‘shelf-ready packaging’ as your main keyword.
This means dotting the term throughout the content on that product’s page, along with other related keywords, so you can tell the search engine that when someone looks for this service it should show your content.
The key to successful SEO is selecting keywords that have a high search volume (so plenty of people are looking for the term), and low competition (not many other businesses are ranking for it so you have a good chance of getting your page to the top!).
Google Analytics is a free platform created by Google that can show you all the data relating to your website and your website’s traffic.
It will give you information on:
And that’s just a few of the things it can do!
By looking at your website’s data you can form a much stronger marketing strategy that reaches the right people at the right time with the right content.
Social media marketing can be organic (no direct cost) or paid. The main difference here is when you put money behind your social media content, it will get put in front of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands more people.
However, organic social media marketing is still incredibly important and will help build a new audience, foster trust with your prospects, and help you become an authority in your industry.
The key with social media marketing is to find out where your typical customers spend their time. For example, B2B companies often find the majority of their audience operates on LinkedIn. Whereas a lot of B2C organisations may find their audience is more active on Meta (Facebook and Instagram).
By ensuring you’re active on the right channels, you’re increasing your chances of prospects seeing your business. You’re also saving time and resources that would be wasted on platforms which won’t give you a return.
The type of content you post really depends on your business, but some good places to start are:
And the number one rule of making the most out of your social media: stay consistent. Ideally you want to be posting at least five times per week, but if that’s too much to start with, try once every week and build up from there.
These are just a few elements of digital marketing that should make a big difference to your business with little to no budget (especially if you haven’t got these strategies in place already).
If you want to learn more, you can get in touch with us and we would be happy to help!
Email marketing is a great way of getting your message directly in front of people. Where social media can be a more general approach, email marketing is more direct and targeted.
The key to a successful email marketing campaign is to have strong audience segmentation. This means grouping all your contacts into specific areas i.e. you may have a group of decision makers, you may have a group of prospects in a specific industry, or you may have a group of contacts who have been on your website before.
The possibilities for audience segmentation are endless, especially if you have large contact lists, but you need to make sure each segment is built for a specific purpose.
For example, if you create an audience segment of people who have visited your website but didn’t make a purchase, these would be the perfect prospects to put in an email campaign with a special offer or discount. This is because they have shown intent in looking at your business and your services, but they didn’t convert.
You can also run email campaigns that are more generalised, like an email newsletter. This is a great way to remind your contacts of you and your business without being too sales driven. You can run these monthly or quarterly, and it means you can keep your audiences updated on any news, offers or new products you may have.
The cost implications of this form of marketing can vary. You can do it organically for free, but this will take more time and manual effort. The other option is using a specialised email marketing platform like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign. This costs more but means you can keep all of your contacts and emails in one place, and automate your email sequences.
As mentioned previously, companies in the manufacturing industry often still rely on print materials and trade shows to attract new business.
But with the rise in digital marketing, standing out online can be a challenge. This is where video marketing can be incredibly valuable.
According to a 2025 Wyzowl report, 93% of marketers say video marketing has given them a good return on investment (ROI).
Video marketing can serve a range of purposes; from increasing brand awareness and engagement, through to boosting bottom-line sales. And there are plenty of video types to choose from! To name a few:
Video marketing can seem daunting, but once you have a plan for your content laid out, getting started is easy! In fact, it’s often the shorter videos that perform better online in terms of engagement.
Video marketing is a key player in standing out in your market and can be the big differentiator between you and your competitors.
Now that we’ve covered some of the main marketing strategies you can use for your manufacturing business, you may be wondering which one is the best.
The key here is to understand that this isn’t a tick box exercise. It isn’t about doing each activity once and expecting the results to pour in overnight. You need to be applying each strategy consistently and in tandem with one another.
Each point has a different purpose and benefit:
But the main takeaway is that there are plenty of ways to improve your marketing approach that don’t need to break the bank.
If you would like to find out more about how we can help you with your marketing strategy, get in touch with our experts and we’d be happy to help!
We want you to get ahead in new business in 2026, and on the front-foot with the latest data and best practice insights for what winning looks like in agencies like yours.
We’re a proud partner of the ninth annual jfdi/Opinium New Business Barometer, an industry report that gives you the numbers you need to measure and benchmark your agency’s new business performance.
Why take part?
✅ First eyes on the results
Everyone who completes the survey will be invited to a preview of the results when published early in the new year. And subject to the final number of Bristol Creative Industries members taking part, we will organise a members-only event, where we’ll unveil the Barometer findings alongside actionable insights to help you win in 2026.
✅ Your personal benchmarking dashboard
You will be given the opportunity to join a beta test and gain access to a personalised dashboard, showing your agency’s new business performance compared to other agencies and highlighting where you can hone your strategies.
✅ Access to segmented reports
Subject to sample sizes, the plan is to cut additional reports by specialism and size.
You’ll get a laser-focused, drill-down view, an invaluable game-changer for driving your growth strategy in 2026.
If you want to benefit from this competitive advantage, take part in the ninth annual jfdi/Opinium New Business Barometer at https://survey.opiniumresearch.com/XMIy9Y?smpl=19
When the Chancellor delivers the Autumn Budget, creative businesses across Bristol and the South West will be tuning in for signs of support — tax incentives, training funds, digital investment, and measures to steady employer costs.
As Bristol Creative Industries’ recent article, What our members want to see in the Autumn Budget 2025, highlights, the creative community is optimistic yet pragmatic. Members are calling for clarity, consistency and targeted support but they’re also pointing to something more human: the need to nurture and retain the people who make creative businesses thrive.
Budgets may set the economic stage, but it’s our culture how we listen to, reward and develop our people that determines whether we can truly seize the opportunity.
We’re lucky in the West of England. The West of England Growth Hub offers practical support to help creative organisations scale from access to finance to leadership mentoring and business development through programmes like Create Growth and the Creative Sector Growth Programme. At the same time, the Good Employment Charter provides a clear framework for what fair, progressive employment looks like: secure work, flexible working, wellbeing, employee voice and development. Signing up (it’s free) signals to both clients and teams that you’re serious about building good jobs and great workplaces.
Both initiatives point to the same truth: creative growth doesn’t just happen through funding or innovation; it happens through people who feel heard and valued.
While we can’t dictate what the Treasury does next, every creative organisation can take practical, affordable steps to strengthen culture, attract talent and improve retention.
The question is…why it matters now? The creative economy runs on people freelancers, collaborators, studio teams. But amidst client pressures, deadlines and tech change, it’s easy to lose sight of the human infrastructure that keeps the work flowing. While the national conversation focuses on budgets, our local conversation in Bristol and local areas can focus on something even more powerful: how we build workplaces people want to stay in.
So as the Budget headlines fade, here’s a challenge for creative leaders in the region:
Because growth doesn’t start with policy it starts with people who feel seen, supported and proud to create where they belong.
🚫 “It’s great to be here.”
🚫 “Hello, I am [insert name, job title]. Today I’m going to talk about…”
🚫 “Thank you for having me”
Avoid these predictable presentation intros. These just set up your talk as nothing new.
If you want your talk to be memorable you need to hook your audience from the very beginning and give them a compelling reason to pay attention.
The graphic below from Sequoia Capital illustrates a typical attention span over 60mins and the potential to lose 90% of your audience within the first five mins…but how to remedy?
Here are three ways (and a bonus fourth😁) to help to set up your talk as unmissable:
🎬 Set the scene like a movie.
“Our industry is facing seismic challenges. That’s what I would have said – until six months ago we discovered something that changed everything. Here’s what happened..”
📊 Drop an eyebrow-raising stat.
“If women started and scaled new businesses at the same rate as men, we could create £250 billion in additional value to the UK’s economy, according to a recent review. Here’s what needs to happen…”
🔍 Use a prop or an attention-grabbing slide.
One influential presenter wordlessly put up an image of an elephant to kick off a talk where they went on to talk about tackling ‘the elephant in the room’ of their industry, while another promised a visual to capture the current state of the economy…and put up a completely black slide.
Remember: with audio only, retention of content three days later is around 10%, but with an image that increases to an incredible 65%
⭐ Or you can call us. We can to help you to be memorable in all your business interactions.
Bristol-based creative agency saintnicks has been awarded Gold at the Digital Impact Awards, recognising its work with POSCA, part of Mitsubishi Pencil Co. The win came in the ‘Best Community Development’ category, celebrating the agency’s success in growing and nurturing an engaged creative community on social media.
The Digital Impact Awards highlight excellence in digital stakeholder engagement and the power of online brand communication. saintnicks’ campaign for POSCA focused on building authentic relationships with artists and makers across the UK, showcasing their creativity while amplifying the brand’s cultural relevance in the creative community.
Fraser Bradshaw, CEO at Saintnicks, said:
“We’re incredibly proud of this recognition. It celebrates not just great creative work, but the genuine connections built between brands and the people who love them. The POSCA community embodies everything we believe in – creativity, authenticity and engagement that lasts.”
The award-winning campaign brought together art, culture and community to celebrate creative expression and inspire participation. A full case study of the work can be viewed below.
If you’d like a chat about your challenges or request a complimentary social audit, drop them an email and say hello. You can find out more about their social media and content expertise here.
Gritty Talent’s Skills Bootcamp – Inclusion Accelerator, launches on the 14th January 2026 in the South-West of England. Book early to avoid disappointment….
Engaging, practical and designed for change, the Inclusion Accelerator has been thoughtfully developed to turbo charge inclusivity in the creative industries.
The Skills Bootcamp is open to 20 leaders, hiring managers & EDI leads within creative sector organisations and companies in the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority (WEMCA) region. This dynamic, guided learning bootcamp, with the outcome of creating a company specific implementation plan, will be delivered by Gritty Talent’s own senior leaders who are creative industry professionals and EDI specialists.
What’s more it’s HEAVILY subsidised by WEMCA, who fund up to 90% of the cost for learners
For full information on funding, eligibility criteria and application details. Follow the link below.
https://www.grittytalent.tv/skills-bootcamp-inclusion-accelerator
Every autumn, the air shifts. Shadows stretch, lights glow earlier, and people start hungering for something beyond routine. They want meaning, magic, and connection…a story they can step into.
That’s why seasonal immersive events aren’t just popular; they’re unstoppable. Each year, they grow bigger, bolder, more ambitious, because they speak to something universal, our need to feel part of something shared, fleeting, and extraordinary.
And the truth is, the spaces that haven’t embraced that yet are already behind.
This isn’t about pumpkins and fairy lights. It’s about transformation and turning your existing space into a living, breathing story that people can feel in their bones.
The public appetite for immersive experiences has exploded. Seasonal events are selling out months in advance, driving new audiences, and dominating social feeds. People aren’t just attending, they’re participating. They’re hungry for connection, emotion, and atmosphere and they’re willing to travel and spend for it.
And here’s the thing: the places that already have character, story, or natural atmosphere, the ones sitting dark for half the year, are the ones that often might be the perfect venue.
Seasonal immersive programming can turn a quiet month into a sell-out. It can reframe how a space is seen, pull in new audiences, and create stories that live far beyond the season itself and build brand new audiences.
So the question isn’t should you do a seasonal immersive event. It’s why aren’t you already doing one?
Immersive design is no longer just for purpose-built attractions. It’s the future of how people experience the world around them. Every space has the potential to hold story.
Seasonal events give you a perfect excuse to unlock that, to reveal another layer of your space and make people fall in love with it all over again.
It’s not about building something new. It’s about seeing what you already have differently.
The right lighting design can make the familiar feel mythic. A single scent cue can shift memory. A piece of sound can transport a visitor before they even realise what’s happening.
This is where transformation starts, not with scale, but with imagination.
Emotion is built in.
Halloween and Christmas already carry universal feelings: fear, joy, nostalgia, hope. Immersive storytelling amplifies them.
They drive visibility. They’re PR gold, visual content magnets, and community anchors.
They make financial sense, one strong seasonal programme can sustain engagement through your quieter months.
These events are not side projects, they are cultural touchpoints, powerful, repeatable frameworks that keep audiences coming back year after year.
They create loyalty, seasonal traditions make people return.
“We do this every year” is the strongest possible brand statement there is.
Right now, the market is wide open. Audiences are ready. The appetite is proven. Technology and design tools are accessible. The question is who will seize the moment. and who will let it pass?
Spaces that act now will set the benchmark. Those that wait will be catching up.
Seasonal immersive events are no longer a luxury; they’re the smartest creative and commercial move you can make.
The best seasonal immersive events don’t rely on gimmicks or budget. They rely on intention.
They have a clear emotional journey.
They use their environment as part of the story.
They surprise people, not just entertain them.
They end on a note that lingers.
Audiences don’t remember everything they saw. They remember how it made them feel.
And that feeling, if designed well it can shape how they see your space forever!
At Immersive Ideas, we don’t do cookie-cutter Christmas lights or predictable Halloween thrills. We design experiences that transform space into story. Our work blends psychology, design, and emotion to create worlds that connect deeply, memorable, meaningful, and made for your audience.
Wondering if your space has potential? This is the moment to unlock it.
Even if you’re only exploring what might be possible, let’s start the conversation and see where it leads?
Worried about timeframe? Budget? Don’t be. Already this year our clients are testing the waters, preparing the ground work now for going big next year.
Let’s have a chat, reach out at [email protected]
Together, we can shape the kind of seasonal experience people will still be talking about long after the lights go down!
In short:
We find ourselves talking about Earned Visibility a lot at the moment, and for good reason. The new world of AI search is as seismic a shift for marketing, brands, and consumer discoverability as moving into the age of the internet was. For those who haven’t been keeping up, Earned Visibility is our approach to discoverability in the new world of AI.
But what is the difference between Earned Visibility and earned media?
The world has changed. At the time of writing, 62% of Brits are now using AI-enhanced search to find information over traditional search engines, and this trend is not slowing down.
Gone are the days of customers looking for a brand via traditional search and being presented with ten blue links. Gone are the days of customers reading multiple sources to get an answer.
Now, whether someone is looking for a complex understanding of a personal health issue or where to find the best holiday deals, instead of scouring multiple sites and running multiple searches, people are increasingly turning to AI-powered search.
The result? If your brand is not included in the answers that AI tools are showing users, then your brand is basically invisible.
In response to this tectonic shift, we have been spending a lot of time and effort working with data scientists, experts, and a variety of platforms to get ahead of things and understand exactly what brands need to do today and tomorrow to be discovered by consumers. We call this Earned Visibility.
Basically, it’s a new way of approaching the world of marketing.
The bad news? If you’re not embracing Earned Visibility and you’re not being recommended in AI answers, then your consumers won’t be finding you.
The good news? One of the upshots of this fundamental shift is that doing the right things to be included in the AI answer closely aligns with brand and marketing best practices in general. Marketing is no longer about tactical silos – it’s coalescing around the future of discoverability. This is Earned Visibility.
If you’re interested, you can find out more about this as well as discover your exact EV score here.
Whilst it may sound fairly similar, there is a huge difference between the meaning of earned media and Earned Visibility. Earned media is a term that refers to brand mentions, social media mentions, customer reviews or media coverage in channels that a brand does not own. Not to be confused with paid media or owned media!
For example, if your brand has carried out a proactive press engagement campaign that has resulted in your brand being included in The Times, The Guardian, or others, this is earned media.
Earned media has, and continues to have, inherent value. Customers are more likely to trust content that is presented to them by a known news or media title than content presented directly by a brand.
Think about it: is your opinion more likely to be swayed by an article presented by British Airways saying “we’re the best airline in the world,” or by an article on the BBC website saying BA has just been voted the best airline in the world?
Whilst earned media has a crucial role to play in the new world of AI discoverability, it is fundamentally different to Earned Visibility itself.
In short, yes! The framework of Earned Visibility includes a range of factors that any forward-thinking brand should be embracing when it comes to getting in front of customers and influencing consumer behaviour.
AI tools absolutely use media coverage as an indicator for brand quality and trust. What’s more, media coverage continues to be incredibly important in terms of influence and consumer behaviour.
In essence, earned media should be a key part of an Earned Visibility strategy.
Both are important, but you should start with Earned Visibility.
Earned visibility is an entirely new way of approaching the world of marketing. A considered Earned Visibility strategy, when implemented properly, will mean that you are doing everything you should be to get your brand included in AI answers – but also everything you should be doing more broadly in terms of reaching and engaging with your customers across the wider marketing mix.
The key here is that activity should no longer be approached in tactical silos, but seen as part of a wider whole.
A great first step is to understand how you are currently performing in terms of your brand’s Earned Visibility score. You can find your own Earned Visibility score here.
Contact the Yours Sincerely team to begin building your Earned Visibility strategy.
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