Since my earliest years, I’ve been a fan of athletics. Long-distance running in particular. I’ve watched it on TV. Chatted about it with friends. Followed its greatest exponents with fascination and even become something of an (armchair) expert on the subject.
But until a year or two ago, I’d never taken the plunge and given it a go myself. It felt like something reserved for others. Something that you needed to prepare for meticulously, before ever getting out there and hitting the pavements for yourself. It just seemed altogether too difficult to try.
Then something changed. I was persuaded by a friend to join them on the journey from ‘couch to 5K’. And, at the risk of being that annoying running evangelist, I’ve never looked back.
For many in the marketing world, account-based marketing holds the same appeal – and presents equally erroneous perceived obstacles. It looks great. It seems to work brilliantly for others. But it can also appear prohibitively complicated and quite possibly hideously expensive.
Happily, if you get account-based marketing right, those negative perceptions are some way wide of the mark. And in this article, I’ll explain why it’s an approach you can’t afford to ignore.
There are websites, books, research papers, even degree courses devoted to an explanation of account-based marketing. But for our purposes today, I’m going to keep things straightforward. At Proctor + Stevenson, we view ABM as marketing that identifies high-value companies within defined sectors, and focuses on generating quality sales leads through targeted strategy and pinpoint messaging.
It’s an approach we’ve employed to great effect over the past few years, helping clients including Panasonic outperform campaign goals by as much as 100%. And we’re not alone: Forrester research reports that 62% of marketers have reported a positive impact on their marketing performance since adopting ABM.
It comes with strong credentials then. But if that isn’t enough to help you persuade your colleagues that account-based marketing is the way forward, here are those five key reasons that should really turn the argument in your favour…
The pandemic has taught us that certain sales and marketing approaches are affected by external conditions and factors beyond our control. Exhibitions and events being an obvious one. Account-based marketing remains impervious to those irresistible forces, replacing sales meetings and product demonstrations with digital outreach and online communication. It also has the flexibility to incorporate more ‘traditional’ tactics (personalised direct mail, for example) when the time and targeting is right, making it the marketing strategy for all seasons.
The beauty of ABM lies in its focus. Unlike other broad-brush strategies that make marketing a numbers game, account-based marketing is lean and keen, ensuring that your financial resources are allocated only where they’re going to have maximum, direct impact. Even in those longer B2B buying cycles, there’s no wastage. Communications and marketing collateral are sent to those prospects you’ve identified as interested, via the channels they use, carrying messages you know will resonate with them.
Most ABM strategies are built with digital communication at their core. So you can account for every penny or euro you spend, and attribute every click, reply, meeting booking, expression of interest or sales opportunity you elicit directly back to the activity you’ve instigated. And there’s little that will make your board-level colleagues happier than that.
Ah, the old sales vs marketing conundrum. Should be best of friends, very rarely are. In this respect, you can think of account-based marketing as the United Nations. Employed properly, an ABM strategy achieves that holy grail – a harmonious collaboration in which marketing and sales work in tandem, generating interest, qualifying leads and nurturing prospects until they’re ready to hit ‘buy’ (and beyond, if your ABM strategy is far-sighted enough).
As I mentioned a little earlier, our clients have enjoyed great success with account-based marketing over the past year or two. Working with them, we’ve doubled projected lead targets, improved ROI, achieved better conversion rates, even generated six-figure sales pipeline. And all within the parameters of tight marketing budgets.
The final advantage of ABM that I’ll mention here is that it isn’t an all-or-nothing strategy. It looks different for every business. And we can help you take those first steps towards making it work for yours. So if you’d like to know more, don’t sit on the side lines any longer. Lace up your shoes, get in touch and let’s see where account-based marketing can take you.
On June 16th, Adapt is hosting a webinar in conversation with Head of Ad Tech at IAB UK, Tina Lakhani, about how businesses can start preparing for life after third-party cookies. Register here…
Third-party cookies are soon to be a thing of the past.
This – we hope – shouldn’t be brand new information, as Google announced in February 2020 they were going to begin phasing out third-party cookies on Chrome next year.
What’s caused a stir more recently is Google’s further announcement that they are not going to create “alternative identifiers” to track users and will not use these in their products.
And that was not the way many marketers wanted the third-party cookie to crumble.
For marketers, these trackers were our bread and butter – they allowed us to not only track our website users, but we used them to improve user experience and, most importantly, to ‘collect data that helped us target ads to the right audiences’.
It’s obvious that we need to go, at least partly, back to the drawing board and properly prepare for life after third-party cookies. But a lot of us don’t know where to start, despite the fact many of the points below are, arguably, best practice already.
To help you better prepare for life after third-party cookies, we’ve put together a list of the 11 ways we think you should be readying your business for the incoming data gap.
This again is one which we hope you have begun exploring. If you haven’t then now is the time to start.
Google’s customer match is a very nifty tool. You can use information that your customers have shared with you to create targeted ads across search, the shopping tab, Gmail and YouTube. It will also help target new customers who have similar interests to your existing users.
Another great tool to have in your wheelhouse is Facebook’s custom audiences. With this, you can opt for your chosen ad to target your desired audience among Facebook users. It also allows you to utilize Facebook’s customer lists and website traffic to develop a tailored audience of users who have engaged with your brand.
Now is the perfect time to get creative and come up with new ways that will encourage users to share data with you. Here are three ways you could grow your database:
This shouldn’t be a new concept for you since GDPR came into effect.
Be sure to check the data you already have in order to gain a clear insight into what data you’ve got, and then update your privacy policy to shed light on how you are using this data.
Permission management tools should be on your radar, and you can add these to your website so users can take control of their consent and data.
As we are now losing valuable data, we need to start thinking beyond the usage of cookies. We can do this by optimizing our usage of the data we still have.
Now is the perfect time to experiment with various management strategies to see which ones are most effective. Once you have found which strategies work best you should make these bulletproof for the future.
Many industry-leading tech companies are developing new ways to harness first-party data, so it’s worth taking an active role in as many tests as possible.
Google is encouraging businesses to lean into using privacy-focused solutions, and one they are championing in particular is the use of ‘value-based bidding’, as well as a new first-party cookie solution to assist with conversion tracking.
Contextual targeting is often overlooked, but it’s a great strategy to use as it doesn’t use third-party cookies.
While it does involve dedicating a great deal of time to figuring out where best to place your ads on certain platforms, it is certainly worth the effort.
Your targeted audience is more likely to respond to these ads as they won’t feel as though their privacy has been breached. Once you have gained the trust of your customers, you will be able to build strong lasting relationships.
These relationships can help you further as you will soon be able to spot patterns and user behavior within specific groups, which will provide you with vital data you can track.
MartechSeries defines people-based marketing as “a means to create a customer-centric, cohesive marketing system that revolves around customers and their real-time behavioral data”.
When you combine this data with your first-party data you will be able to target your desired audience in real-time across a variety of channels. People-based marketing is a great solution as it does not rely on third-party cookies and it also allows you to engage with users directly at a time that suits them.
According to BounceX, a successful people-based marketing strategy has three key elements:
GA4 will be an excellent tool to use as it is being developed with stronger cloud-based, machine-learning modeling and will pair nicely with server-side tracking.
While GA4 won’t be a replacement for the current iteration of GA, having both these analytics tools at your disposal will have a considerable impact on your data tracking.
Or you can use other systems like Google Tag Manager that focus on site-wide first-party tagging. These are designed to drastically increase the volume of the conversion data you already have.
To put it simply, you really should be using these, as these ad platform tools have been created to help optimize these conversions.
With this amount of data, you will be able to distinguish in more detail what campaigns are proving effective, and which need to be restructured.
It’s not just about quantity when it comes to collecting data, it’s also about quality. So rather than worrying about what data you don’t have, work with the data that you have now.
Focus your energy on hiring the right people who will be able to go through your data with a fine-tooth comb and optimize your business models.
We also recommend giving your contact lists a refresh on a regular basis to ensure you don’t have irrelevant contacts. You could make this automatic by creating a system that deletes contacts who haven’t reacted to your messages for a pre-determined period of time.
Allowing your users to have the power to opt in or out of their subscriptions is another great way to maintain the quality of your database. Those that leave are contacts you do not need, and this opt-in system shows users you comply with the data protection legislation.
If you want to get ahead in a cookie-less world, you need to understand what identifiers your business is using, and with this information you can begin to profile your visits.
Create ‘collection points’ throughout your website and then you can use this collected data to understand your audience in a more detailed light.
CookiePro, for instance, is talking about two types of User IDs that could be used in the future. And while we’re not confident enough to make the same claim ourselves, they do offer an interesting glimpse at the types of solutions that are incoming.
The first is Probabilistic ID, which is a type of ID used to reap the rewards of anonymous data points. You can use this type of data to find behavioral parallels between these anonymous users and your known users.
Deterministic ID is basically a form of identifiable data. Examples of this type of ID are log-in data, offline data, or information the user has agreed to share with you.
The departure of third-party cookies is something that we can’t ignore – it’s going to drastically change the digital marketing landscape as we know it.
But we still have time to re-think and re-model our marketing strategies, and the earlier we start to implement these changes, the more prepared we will be when third-party cookies have gone stale.
As of March 2021, P+S are now an official Amazon Web Services (AWS) Select Consulting Partner. Hurray! Exciting news for us – but why should anyone else care?
Don’t worry. This isn’t your typical self-congratulatory post.
What this means is we can help clients to grow and scale their businesses on AWS. So you could get a cost saving, industry-leading and super secure application.
To achieve our AWS Select Tier status, we had to demonstrate a whole lot of team knowledge and prove the strength of our experience too. So, over the past 4 months, we’ve delivered High Availability architecture for clients like Osborne Clarke and the UK Hydrographic Office.
So, we’ve written this blog to tell you just why you should take note about what AWS has to offer, and answer a few of the questions you might have.
Because they’re the industry’s leading cloud provider.
AWS offers a huge list of services and a robust global infrastructure that we knew could serve our clients around the world. If it’s good enough for 90% of the world’s Fortune 100 companies and the majority of Fortune 500 companies, it’s good enough for us.
And now our partnership status is testament to our experience and knowledge when it comes to designing and implementing cloud architecture.
As an application implementation, development and infrastructure partner, we can achieve a very close link between your applications’ functionality and its environment, ensuring you always get the very best performance.
We can save you time and money.
It’s likely you already know on-premise infrastructure can be hugely expensive. Or you might be using cloud computing, but finding it’s still costing you a fortune. With the right cloud architecture in place, not only can you gain a huge price advantage, you could also save countless hours of time, too.
Commissioning just one new server can take several days and thousands of pounds of hardware investment. But in the cloud, the same process takes just a few seconds. Plus, you can spin servers up and remove them again easily, and without having to worry about hardware.
Our use cases are normally centred around creating web architecture, where this flexibility is useful for creating cost effective solutions. A traditional web architecture might consist of several web servers behind a load balancer, where traffic is distributed across the instances according to some rules.
The problem with this traditional set up is that during lulls in user activity, e.g., overnight or over the weekend, you end up with more servers than you need – you’re just haemorrhaging money.
Conversely, during traffic spikes, you might not have enough capacity to meet demand, putting your application’s performance at risk.
Auto-scaling prevents this by automatically adding more servers to the group if demand requires it. When the demand drops, these servers are removed.
Because in the words of Werner Vogels, “Everything fails, all the time”.
All technological solutions – no matter how perfect we might like them to be – will have points of failure and downtime. In fact, even cloud solutions within AWS are subject to the same risks.
By creating an infrastructure that anticipates this failure, we can overcome the risks and mitigate the impact before a failure ever happens.
For example, the AWS network consists of several geographical regions based around the world. These regions are further divided into Availability Zones. An Availability Zone is made up of separate physical data centres that are connected within a region.
You can then split your services across Availability Zones, so should one develop a problem, you’ll hardly notice – your application will still be up and running.
At P+S we follow the AWS principals for High Availability across all of our clients’ architecture to ensure there are no single points of failure, and recovery is automatic wherever possible.
Yes. In fact, at AWS, they have a saying: Security is Priority Zero.
This is for good reason, given the critical nature of data security and harsh penalties for businesses who breach regulations.
There are multiple features in AWS’ tools and services ensuring every design meets stringent compliance requirements, with our own architecture including many of these features as standard.
For example, we deploy AWS CloudFront as a CDN as standard in front of all our sites, together with AWS Web Application Firewall and AWS Shield to protect your site against web vulnerabilities and attack vectors, including the OWASP Top 10 – globally recognised by developers as the top 10 risks to application security – and Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks (DDoS), which you may have seen recently taking a number of the Belgium government’s websites offline. It also ensures you’re compliant with Data Protection standards such as ISO 27001.
AWS also provides the ability to create entire virtual networks and subnets within the cloud, with complete control over data and user access and flow. This gives you the ability to lock down access to subnets, instances, and services to only authorised sources. For example, you can block physical access to web application servers, ensuring access can only be gained from the load balancer or approved IPs.
No. One of our favourite methodologies in cloud infrastructure is ‘server-less architecture’.
Server-less architecture means the servers or machine resources used to run a particular task are handled by the cloud provider. So you don’t have to worry about provisioning a server or maintaining it. This saves a lot of time and money; we can simply spin up a database or run code.
This methodology is extremely useful when working on prototypes, for example, allowing us to quicker develop and verify our ideas. It’s also useful for running Continuous Integration workloads to speed up deployments (useful for Autoscaling groups) and helping you manage repetitive tasks or queues.
For example, we successfully offloaded some database queue processing from the application into AWS Lambda. This meant we could configure a smaller database instance than would otherwise have been necessary.
Our summary
At P+S, we believe every business should be able to offer an excellent digital service to their customers. That means creating flexible digital architecture that grows as you – and your customers – need it to. It’s faster, more adaptable, and because it’s flexible, you won’t waste money on servers you don’t need.
Your application shouldn’t go offline unexpectedly. And we don’t believe you should have to pay more for a secure website, so we’ll ensure both your data and your customers’ info is protected at all times.
And our newly earned AWS Select Consulting Partner badge proves that commitment.
Want to find out more? Talk to [email protected] for a no-obligation chat.
During our Digital Marketing Futures series earlier this year, we gave a conceptual view of the marketing trends those in our industry need to keep their eyes firmly trained upon.
Following on from this, we’ve picked out seven specific trends that we’ve seen change or accelerate during the recent lockdown, and that we think you should watch out for over the next 12-24 months. So here’s our list of seven post-pandemic trends to look out for in 2021 – and beyond.
This trend is easy to predict and is one that – hopefully – you have already begun implementing in your campaigns. It’s reported that by 2022, 82% of global internet traffic will come from video streaming and downloads. What’s more, 72% of businesses have reported that video increased their conversion rates.
Video covers such a huge range of mediums, including live streaming, one-to-one videos, long format, short format – the list goes on.
In lockdown, we’ve seen huge gains in people using over-the-top media. The most mainstream example of this is YouTube, but it also encompasses all the paid searches such as Netflix, Amazon, Disney+ and HBO.
It’s no surprise this has increased over lockdown, however what is surprising is why people are doing it. More than half of 13-39 year-olds planned to watch TV series and films on these streaming services as a way to maintain their mental health in lockdown.
Now even TV remotes have buttons installed for Netflix and other streaming services. We can now programmatically get at users with video on these connected TVs through different over-the-top media outlets – and this is pushing forwards the decline we are seeing in linear TV.
This again isn’t a trend that’s new to us, but it’s something that has become much more mainstream. Nowadays, 62% of gen Z and millennial consumers want visual search more than any other technology.
We are fundamentally getting much lazier in how we do day-to-day activities, and users now are choosing to search for information through pictures. Google, Pinterest and Microsoft are all leading the way with their various technology features that allow you to find similar products based on things that you upload.
These days, it’s not uncommon for you to take a photo of clothing, furniture or kitchenware at home and then use available systems to find similar products that are available to purchase. Or you can use your camera to take a picture of a barcode and then use a system to find that product online and where you can buy it from.
It’s going to grow as consumers become more familiar with these systems post-lockdown, and it will likely be used by many on a daily basis. You will need to start thinking about how this will play into your marketing strategy over the coming months. To start with you should ensure your structured data is sound and you have high-quality imagery, and make sure your site is optimized for speed.
This is a trend that has crept up on us; it’s really everywhere now and demand for it is going to accelerate beyond lockdown. Research shows people are now more comfortable chatting away to Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa or Cortana. Predictions now are suggesting that 50% of searches are expected to be carried out through voice activation over the next few years.
Voice commerce is also expected to drastically increase as these types of sales are expected to hit the $45bn mark by 2022 in the UK and US. Another recently-released survey from YouGov showed that one in four Britons reported owning some sort of smart speaker.
When implementing voice search into your strategy, you need to consider the types of searches that are most common among users – for example, ‘near me’-type searches are huge. In this instance, you should make sure that you’re a local entity and you’ve used localized keywords in your web copy.
From a technical perspective, over 50% of these searches are going to be on mobile, so your mobile site needs to be up to date. With the Core Web Vitals update just around the corner, they become much more important.
AI has gone from being a buzzword to very much a reality, and marketers’ use of AI soared to 190% between 2018 and 2020. With the likes of Microsoft Azure’s cognitive services, it’s very much now something that’s within reach of every website and every developer.
The API is there and designed to make it accessible, and from a pure marketing perspective AI is baked into the platforms that we’re using. It’s used to collect data, generate insights and anticipate customer trends and moves.
Until now, we’ve taken this kind of automation for granted. Bidding strategies and responsive ads all use forms of AI and machine learning to adapt to the signals that are coming in to improve results in real-time.
One of the other interesting areas where AI will play a huge part is how it’s currently being explored as an alternative to cookies and other third-party trackers as we transition into this cookie-less world over the coming years.
The IAB is expected to release some guidelines and best practices for the use of machine learning at all the different levels of digital advertising production. In a post-pandemic world, leveraging AI becomes even more important as we see these trends shifting all the time as lockdowns come and go. It’s about them being able to react to those changes in real-time.
The need to lean into AI more means this sector will continue to grow to the point where we’re not talking about AI because it’s something we all expect.
Conversational marketing is a way of moving buyers or customers through a marketing or sales funnel by using real-time conversations. It’s about fast, real-time interactions, and a lot of businesses are now turning to chatbots.
Over 50% of customer queries may be managed today via AI chatbots. These bots are not necessarily new, but the uptake has accelerated the technology behind them and it’s helping marketers to establish and maintain relationships during the pandemic.
More and more brands are turning to chatbots and conversational marketing to do some of the heavy lifting exercises around support inquiries or sales, and a great example of this is Facebook’s Messenger bots.
However, these bots can be used for more than just support inquiries. Lidl’s wine bot called Margot informs you of the different types of grapes that are used in their wine and will give you wine pairings based on what you are planning to eat. You’re invited to have fun with these chatbots and use it all the way through the funnel, from sales activation to more of a brand-building exercise. We will soon get to the point where it’s hard to determine whether or not you’re talking to a chatbot.
This may be a new term to you, but it’s actually an umbrella term for three immersive technologies that you certainly know. Those terms are:
This is a trend that’s growing at lightning speed, as the global market size of extended reality is estimated to increase 7772% to over $3.7bn by 2025.
These may not seem applicable to the marketing world, but in reality it’s a technology that has been thrust forward in the past 12 months by the reduction in the hardware costs, the availability of them, and the increased demand from people trapped at home looking for some alternative ways of engaging.
It’s not just big, heavy headsets now. It’s using YouTube’s 360-degree videos or the augmented reality filters that come with Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok, all the way through to DIY VR equipment. These are changing the conception of this immersive experience so that it is available to all.
Marketers need to meet this demand quickly by upping their game in terms of engagement, interactive content and the personal experiences they produce. Users can now connect with a brand with the kind of intensity and emotional response that hasn’t been possible with one-way traditional media.
For those who are unfamiliar with this term, neuromarketing is a strategy that analyzes and measures people’s brain activity and reactions from their nervous systems to determine which types of content they find engaging.
Essentially, you’re checking when a user has an emotional response to something. Thanks to the advances in tech over the last few years, it’s becoming much more of a reality that these types of tests can be accessible to all.
A good example of this is eye-tracking. This is where you use technology to track eye movements to understand where someone fixates on a particular point of a website, or to count the number of blinks that are occurring, which can be an indicator of how much attention someone is paying to your ad. You can also use emotional response analysis, which is where you use technology to identify whether there has been an emotional response to an ad.
A successful neuromarketing campaign that used emotional response analysis was created by Always in 2014. The brand took the phrase ‘like a girl’, flipped it on its head and turned an insult into a movement of confidence. This brought the emotional response that you would expect, it generated revenue and popularity and even won the Brandon Emmy for their campaign.
Advances mean that this kind of marketing has gone from being a more sci-fi way of marketing to something that’s very much mainstream.
If you’re looking to get ahead of your competitors in 2021 and beyond, then you should definitely consider implementing these trends into your marketing campaigns where possible.
While these trends have emerged as the ones to watch in recent months, we do have to bear in mind the circumstances in which they have appeared.
One of the key things we will have to do over the next 12 months is to identify which of these trends are actual trends and which are just passing fads born out of necessity from lockdown.
The West of England has a strong legacy as a creative industries hub attracting major broadcasters, film companies and digital industries alike to our vibrant towns and cities. Like all industries, however, COVID-19 has hit creative companies hard and the West of England Combined Authority (WECA) has been here to support the creative industries as they work to get through the impact of the pandemic.
To support this, WECA has launched a new business support programme for businesses and individuals working in the creative industries, as part of its Regional Recovery Plan. The programme is aimed at small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) working in the creative industries, including creative freelancers, and is designed to build resilience and support change in response to COVID-19.
There is also a grant fund for creative freelancers that will give self-employed people the opportunity to become more resilient by developing their own creative product, practice or service, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Grants for creative businesses will fund creative projects that support recovery and resilience, employ freelance creatives, engage local communities and advance diversity and inclusion.
The business support programme has been designed in consultation with members of the creative and cultural sector. The programme also fits with WECA’s ambitions to establish a West of England Cultural Compact, an initiative jointly funded with Arts Council England. This will involve the creation of a new strategic cultural partnership which will lead on the development of a Cultural Strategy and new activities to help increase investment across the creative and cultural sectors in the region.
WECA recently announced a £11.8m investment to boost creative jobs with the expansion of Bottle Yard Studios, which plays host to a wide range of productions, including drama, children’s TV, feature films, gameshows and commercials. Bottle Yard’s growth will also help to support other businesses across the region which rely on film and TV production opportunities.
Almost 60 companies from a range of creative industries across the region have also benefitted from WECA’s Creative Scale-Up programme. This two-year pilot helps creative businesses access finance and peer mentoring through an intensive six-month minimum sustainable growth support programme. WECA has opened applications for the fourth cohort of the programme
Here’s a snapshot of some of the businesses that have benefitted from the programme:
Since joining the Creative Scale Up programme in January 2020, Bristol-based independent development studio and games consultancy Auroch Digital has secured a new publishing deal and taken on 15 new members of staff.
“The Creative Scale Up programme, particularly the mentoring process, was great – we were able to pick mentors targeting specific needs we have. We got direct support with business questions as they arose and that helped us deal with them and move forward.
“As a result, we’ve been able to advance some key areas of the company. We’ve landed one big publishing deal for a new IP game and are circling a second big project, and that mentoring advice has been part of the mix of positives getting us there. Information provided by the Creative Scale Up team also led us to a UWE Digital Innovation Fund grant.” Dr Tomas Rawlings, chief executive, Auroch Digital
Noiser, which specialises in history and drama storytelling with immersive sound design, used the WECA Creative Scale Up £2,000 business grant to develop a sales team and define a clear strategy to drive sales.
“For Noiser, we are not looking for generic business support; I liked how the scheme’s supervisors made us aware that we could find our own mentors and they were able to help connect us with pertinent professionals they were in touch with. This was crucially important.”
Stornaway.io accessed grant funding to re-invest in the creative development of the business.
Having identified a gap in the market for a collaborative web application that lets media producers write, test and publish interactive films easily and affordably without coding, the team was, understandably, wary about how to effectively promote and launch a new product in lockdown.
To showcase the product’s capabilities, Stornaway.io used grant funding to commission and produce a short film called “A Little Hungover”, which would premiere as part of the Immersive Encounters Festival. In order to help futureproof the business, the team at Stornaway.io also made great use of the peer mentoring aspects of the Creative Scale Up programme.
“Launching this new product in the middle of lockdown, the Creative Scale-Up peer mentoring programme was an invaluable community of practice. It was fantastic to meet and develop connections with the leaders of such a wide range of creative businesses in the South West. We have developed a number of ongoing relationships with our peers which we hope will continue to be mutually beneficial.” Kate Dimbleby, co-founder, Stornaway.io
Creative scale-up support includes a £6,000 grant to spend on mentoring support, a dedicated Peer Support Network and sector specific business development training. Businesses are also supported to consider their future finance options and are supported to learn about investment and engage with investors.
Creative businesses wanting to find out more about the new business support programme, grant funds and the Creative Scale Up programme should visit WECA’s Growth Hub page.
The West of England Business Support Guide can also help you navigate the range of support available via the combined authority’s dedicated business support service, the Growth Hub, which provides tailored one-to-one advice and access to finance, support and expert guidance.
Advertising in 2030 will be fundamentally different to how it has been for the past 10 years.
Of course, we accept that for the most part, the same tried and tested methods will continue to work for a while yet – entrenched approaches don’t change overnight.
But individuals and organizations that fail to adapt over time will gradually fade out of relevance. They will slowly become less equipped to support and grow their employees, to help them in their careers and, therefore, the business they are part of.
As customers increasingly embrace digital platforms, the challenge is on.
The challenge is on for business owners to embrace the changes in advertising over the coming years. Doing so enables us to remain relevant and able to foster enduring relationships with customers in cost-efficient ways.
“All failure is failure to adapt, all success is successful adaptation” – Max McKeown
The one thing I will say before I get into these trends is that they are exactly that…
It is critical we monitor how advertising evolves, but a lot of these topics are fueled by folklore.
These topics change as the facts become clearer. We are in danger, as an industry, of creating that folklore through loud herd debate, which then becomes misunderstood fact.
It is our job as an agency to monitor these topics, contribute positively to the conversation, establish our own stance through investments and ensure we can support our clients as the future becomes clearer.
But be in no doubt – these trends and topics are driving the future of advertising and we need to embrace the conversation.
Marketing clouds will become indispensable elements in the advertising processes of the future. They control the creation and management of marketing relationships with your customers and manage campaigns.
This is already best practice, but it will become standard to integrate solutions for customer journey management, email, mobile, social, web personalization, advertising, content handling and analytics.
AI is ubiquitous in the advertising space. It supports our decision-making and analyzes consumer behaviour.
Enriched with data about how consumers interact with advertising, it substantially optimizes campaigns to perform better. Implemented consistently and to its full extent, AI understands consumers better than they do themselves.
This is very clearly tied to the performance improvements that we have seen in recent years by increasing our adoption of AI within campaigns.
The large tech vendors will continue to embrace artificial intelligence because of the opportunity to scale and, in the future, perform better than humans.
As an agency, we will spend less time in the future on the implementation of administration (eg search query reports) and more time on strategic conversations with our clients to support their business growth.
Programmatic will be standard for digital advertising. It is also the future of more traditional advertising methods.
Think first-party data collected through radio stations (like Sonos radio) and how that could be used over time for programmatic purchasing of audio.
It’s already used for TV and outdoor. Expect to see this more.
Digital advertising is predominantly contextual. This will grow – cohort advertising, for example, is still contextual.
Ads will be selected and placed by automated systems, based on ever more detailed user-profiles and the content displayed. There will be a continued increase in mobile and location-based advertising, which will strengthen this trend.
The fragmented supplier landscape within adtech will consolidate. Large adtech players will acquire almost all their smaller but highly specialized competitors that manage to evolve.
Alternatively – and more likely in my view – is that these smaller vendors will be rendered redundant through policy and legislation evolution.
The desire for improved services, additional scale and more first-party data will be the main driver behind any M&A activity.
The agency model is changing and the type of people we need in our agency will change over time too. Client-side, supplier-side, agency-side – everyone will be competing for the same kind of job profiles.
It will create a battle for the best talent and create a requirement to deliver the best training.
Employers will compete for experts with scarce, specialized skill sets.
As is the case now, agencies and vendors will be breeding grounds for some of the best talent and we have a responsibility to embrace that change and train people in their careers to create the best outcome for clients, but also the best opportunities for our colleagues in the future.
Demand for data scientists, analytics experts and creative minds is huge at present and will remain high or become more competitive in the future.
After print, traditional linear TV will lose its importance.
Large digital platform companies generate similar reach through video-on-demand, social or messaging functionalities.
This reach combined with first-party data and artificial intelligence will create incredibly efficient opportunities to reach audiences at scale through digital platforms.
Writer Marie Shear famously defined feminism as “The radical notion that women are people.” What’s so striking about this statement is that it’s completely indisputable. And yet women, who (unsurprisingly) make up around 50% of the population, are still massively underrepresented when it comes to the ‘people’ who work in tech.
That’s why we’ve officially joined the BBC, Channel 4, Sky, Lloyds Banking Group and about 300 other companies in pledging to address inequality in the UK technology sector and to drive inclusivity in a practical, measurable way.
Tech Talent Charter is most definitely not just about ticking a box for us – it really does mean a lot. In fact, we created the TTC’s annual Diversity in Tech report last year, as part of our ongoing support for this hugely important cause.
Office Politics
According to the TTC, the proportion of women working in tech in the UK registers at just 16% – and it’s vital for us to redress the balance.
So, we’ve committed to creating a safe environment where Sixers can become curious about tech, embrace digital mindsets and feel inspired to take these learnings into their work and beyond.
Not only that, we’ve submitted our data for the 2020 annual report and we’ll be benchmarking ourselves against other signatories to see how we shape up. We’re also looking at how we can shine a light on diversity both internally and externally.
Taking care of business
Research published by McKinsey.com shows that more diverse teams tend not only to be more productive but also more profitable1. And First Round Capital found that, over 10 years, teams with at least one female co-founder performed 63% better than male-only teams2. This obviously makes perfect sense, as they benefit from varied points of view, allowing them to make smarter decisions when it comes to addressing a naturally-diverse market.
We strongly believe that the glass ceiling women have been hitting for years is now more like a mirror being held up to society and that it’s our duty to ensure all talent is fully represented in the digital realm. Why? Because it’s undeniably the right thing to do.
By targeting the younger generation, educators and tech companies are creating a new, dynamic workforce of successful techies that will help change the perception of the industry. These new role models will smash stereotypes and encourage others to consider tech career opportunities from a younger age. This means a shake-up for the industry, where successful women will play a much larger role in advancing the industry.
We seriously look forward to this time, when the TTC’s existence is no longer even necessary, but until then, we will keep working hard to cultivate change and improve diversity. If you’re a business owner that has tech roles within your organisation and you want to make the same commitment, join us and sign up to the Tech Talent Charter today to help ensure a future where diversity, inclusion and equality aren’t such radical notions after all.
E-Commerce is one of the world’s most lucrative industries. More than ever, businesses need to have an online presence if they want to keep their customers loyal to their products, services and brand. COVID-19 has only accelerated this need for organisations to get digital, put their product data online and offer a completely virtual service.
Of course, it’s easier said than done whether you’re a multi-national organisation or part of a smaller, specialised industry. Your main challenge is getting your product data from its source to your end user, quickly and accurately. And when your end user has the ability to interact with your product data in multiple ways, across any number of different platforms, that challenge grows in complexity.
So how do you manage this data flow? Having an effective Product Information Management tool (PIM) is key.
A PIM centralises your product data information and assets, including product specification data and any associated media assets, before distributing that data to multiple sources. Put simply, a PIM ensures your data flow is as efficient as possible.
In manufacturing, for example, it’s typical for product data to originate from older, legacy systems, where it’s input at the factory during the production stage. Then, the marketing teams responsible for selling these products have the daunting task of translating this data – often manually – in order to get it online. This process then often requires manual intervention again, to keep it up to date.
Processing the data manually in this way creates a disconnect between the marketing data and the product data: they’re never in sync with one another. And that leaves room for error.
According to Ventana Research, 46% of companies that don’t have one single source of product information, and instead, use Excel spreadsheets to manage product data.
This can be a serious problem. 47% of the above companies admit they often find product-related errors and almost 20% of those errors have a major detrimental impact on sales performance. PIM is the solution.
Your customers interact with your data on many different devices, through their desktop, mobiles, or even via their smart speaker. So, having an application with a modern Application Programming Interface (API) becomes essential in your data workflow.
By using a RESTful API your product data can be shared easily, as it’s exposed in a predictable, interactive format.
But not all organisations can commit the time, resource or budget to completely overhaul their systems, end-to-end, all the way to the factory level. Instead, there are other options.
To alleviate problems caused by disparate, legacy data, you can break the process down into smaller, more manageable applications. This is known as having a microservices architecture. Microservices are dedicated applications which focus on one dedicated function: in this case, in consuming your legacy data, transforming it into an end-user friendly format, then injecting that data into a PIM.
This approach ensures your original base data is kept up to date, and maintains data availability even if there’s a breakdown in one part of the workflow or chain.
Using cloud services, such as AWS, we can leverage tools like SQS and Lambda to support a decoupled architecture. Not only does decoupled microservices architecture prevent potential data loss, and preserve service in the event of application breakdown, it improves performance by offloading queue management and data flow into the Cloud.
A final but essential consideration, no matter what systems and applications you use: data security.
Experimental product data can be incredibly sensitive, so keeping it secure at both the point of origin and in-transit is important, as is ensuring pre-production data doesn’t accidentally end up publicly viewable. A PIM provides protection by implementing strict workflows for your data.
There are many applications and frameworks out there specifically designed as PIMs, and they range in price depending on the supplier and the size of your product data.
Likewise, every business has different workflows and product data structures. Once you include a legacy data issue you’re having, it’s rare that any off-the-shelf-solution will meet your requirements exactly. A custom solution is often the way forward. And this is where using a flexible framework, such as Drupal, has distinct advantages.
Drupal is an enterprise-level content framework with many applications. Traditionally it’s a content management system, but its latest version is much more than that.
Drupal has a powerful entity framework, allowing you to model almost any data. Its strong community – made up of real people struggling with the same challenges as you are – has developed countless modules and plug-ins to enhance functionality.
And what’s more, since Drupal is open source, there are no licence fees or user usage limits. So every penny of your investment goes where you need it: into solving your specific workflow and data modelling challenges.
No matter how large or technical your datasets, nor how specialised your business is, you deserve to get the most from your digital applications.
At Proctors, our team of technology experts have been solving problems for specialist businesses across the globe: from tech behemoths like Panasonic, to niche industry start-ups. When it comes to talking data, you’ll want to talk to Proctors.
We’re more than happy to put our heads together with yours and discover the best solution for your business.
Clubhouse is the social media network that’s taking the world by storm. Despite only launching in April last year, the app had 8.5m downloads at the end of February 2021 and users including the likes of Elon Musk (@elonmusk) and Mark Zuckerberg (@zuck23).
Drew Benvie (@drewbenvie), social media expert and founder of Battenhall, joined a Bristol Creative Industries event to share tips on how entrepreneurs, marketers and other creatives can use the app to grow their profile.
Here’s a summary of his advice.
With 8.5m downloads compared to Facebook’s 2.8bn active users, Clubhouse “is teeny weeny as a social network”, Drew says, but due to the high profile nature of its users “it’s really starting to turn heads”.
Drew believes Clubhouse sits in a space between social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Tik Tok and audio/video platforms like YouTube, Spotify and BBC Sounds. “At first I thought this is going to change social media,” he says, “people are going to start listening to things instead of writing or reading, but actually the data suggests it’s increasing use of other social media, and it’s also not really cannibalising mainstream audio or video. It’s kind of complementing that too.”
Drew says what excites him about Clubhouse is that “anyone can rock up, it’s really them and it’s unscripted”. That includes high profile people. Drew was hosting a room (we explain what that is below) about social media and Damian Collins MP (@damiancollinsmp), the former chair of the Parliamentary committee that grills big social network bosses, showed up to listen and then asked to speak. The next day he joined again.
Clubhouse is an app on which users host, listen to and participate in audio groups, known as rooms, where typically one or more moderators host live discussions.
Clubhouse is currently only available on iPhones and iPads. You also need an invite to get access. Speak to someone you know who’s on Clubhouse and ask them for one.
Once you’re in, set up a bio. You can add whatever you like including links to your Twitter and Instagram accounts. You can follow people on Clubhouse but there’s no messaging functionality within the app.
In terms of what username to pick, Drew recommends your real name as Clubhouse is all about real people having conversations.
The Clubhouse algorithm is still “a bit ropey”, Drew says, so to find interesting people to follow select topics that you’re interested in and look for interesting people talking about those topics.
Clubhouse connects with your phone address book so it will show you your contacts already using the app.
When you follow someone, click on the alarm bell icon in their profile and you can select to be notified always, sometimes or never when they speak on the app.
Rooms (sometimes known as events – see below) are where the conversations take place. All rooms are live and they are not recorded so you can’t replay them (although lots of people are secretly recording rooms and uploading videos to YouTube such as this one with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg). At this point in Drew’s talk, an attendee said she was in a room with Brad Pitt!
To get used to the app, join rooms that look interesting to you. A room has three tiers; a stage with the people speaking (some of whom are moderators), people being followed by the speakers and everyone else.
Everyone not on the stage is muted and you can’t speak. If you want to speak, you can raise your hand and a moderator can invite you to the stage. Moderators can also remove people from the stage or from the room completely.
It can be nervewracking to speak for the first time but hang out in rooms that appeal to you and when you’re ready and have something to say, raise your hand and speak succinctly.
Your followers can ‘ping’ you to join a room. Exit a room with the ‘leave quietly’ button.
Rooms can be:
The app will show you rooms based on who you follow and the topics you’ve selected.
If you click ‘start a room’ and select the type, it will go live instantly.
If you want to schedule a room for the future, Clubhouse describes that as an ‘event’. Create one by clicking on the calendar icon at the top of the app.
Clubs are anchors for your activity on Clubhouse. They are like what Facebook business pages are to your personal profile. It allows people to follow a theme. There are thousands of clubs covering all sorts of topics including social media, artificial intelligence, movies, public speaking, comedy and start-ups. Within a club, individual rooms are created to have live conversations. When a room goes live, you’ll be notified.
When you get on the app, click the magnifying glass icon top left and you’ll see lots of clubs to follow.
To set up your own club, click on your profile image at the top right of the app and then the + next to the icons of clubs that you are a member of.
When starting a room or a club, Drew recommends planning with other people to maximise exposure. When someone is co-hosting with you, make them moderators.
Listen to rooms to pick up best practice moderator skills such as introducing the show/room/event (they are called all those things!), welcoming people to the stage and keeping the conversation flowing.
To build momentum, it’s a good idea to host a room at the same time every day, week or month.
Drew says speaking in a room tends to grow your following by around 10% of the room’s total participants. You’re also likely to pick up followers on other social networks if you’ve included links in your bio.
You can’t send someone a link to your profile on Clubhouse but you can send them a link to an event you’ve planned.
People are also using other social networks to promote events such as this Twitter account for The Good Time Show, which is part of Good Time, one of the most high profile clubs on Clubhouse. An event with Elon Musk in that club broke the app!
In Clubhouse, you’re talking to strangers and you’re listening to strange conversations. There have been reports of trolling and harassment so Drew advises being safe by not allowing random people to speak in your rooms or letting them be moderators.
Other social networks are already taking on Clubhouse. Twitter Spaces is live and Facebook is rumoured to be building an audio product.
“A wider brand audio strategy on audio is something I would absolutely recommend you start considering if you think Clubhouse is interesting for you,” Drew says.
Think about why your audience would want to engage using audio and harness influencers across Clubhouse.
Drew Benvie runs ‘Trending’ which has a room discussing the latest social media trends every Tuesday and Thursday at 11am GMT.
He also recommends ‘9am in London’ created by Abraxas Higgins (@abraxas), one of the most followed UK Clubhouse users. His club hosts a daily “no agenda” room at 9am GMT.
You can follow Drew on Clubhouse at @drewbenvie and members of the Bristol Creative Industries team, Alli Nicholas, Dan Martin and Chris Thurling, at @allinicholas, @dan_martin and @christhurling.
If you’re a Bristol Creative Industries member who’s on Clubhouse, let us know by following us or sending us a tweet.
With less than a decade left to achieve Vision 2030, many organisations in the KSA region have successfully embarked on the journey to digital transformation. This is especially true when it comes to internal operations, streamlining workflows and taking administrative tasks online.
Some, though, will have found the task of transforming their marketing functions much more challenging.
The reason? Internal, administrative processes are fundamentally different to marketing tasks, and will require a different mindset to succeed.
Internal processes are typically clearly defined, as are the roles of users. When it comes to digitalisation, the objective is to automate repetitive administrative tasks providing greater efficiency and transparency. For many internal operations, the IT environment is well-defined, and the success of moving away from legacy processes to new software, programs or processes relies simply on ensuring their robust, secure implementation.
In these circumstances, transformation projects can involve long development cycles and large capital budgets, and traditional IT project management frameworks are often appropriate.
But compare this with the role of marketing. Just as with other internal processes, any new technology needs to enable your team to efficiently operate at scale and to integrate securely with your CRM and ERP systems. But here the similarity ends.
Marketing technology connects your team to a constantly evolving audience with developing needs and preferences, and a fast-moving, innovative technology landscape where today’s new attractions quickly become old news.
Your marketing team’s focus is on optimising your commercial impact across all points in the customer journey. They rely on multiple digital channels, new media techniques and real-time data to connect with their audience and outpace the competition.
In short, speed and accuracy are of the essence, and your team needs to operate consistently and efficiently at scale.
You need the foundations of a good marketing automation system. But in the fast-moving world of marketing, the ability to innovate, test and learn is vital for competitive advantage.
Given these drivers, applying a traditional, large-scale IT approach to marketing digital transformation is doomed to failure. In fact, the stories of organisations who’ve tried and failed are widely publicised. For those still battling on, by the time their project is complete the media landscape and their audience will have moved on, with more nimble competitors steps ahead alongside them.
Marketing transformation can’t be viewed as a capital project with a start and end date. It requires a framework environment to enable a constant state of innovation, enabled by minimum viable products (MVPs), deployed in test-and-learn sprints.
It might sound counter-intuitive, but the framework anticipates and accepts a certain level of failure. However, it also ensures you integrate successful innovations to create an evolving, interoperable, open ecosystem over time.
So how does it work?
Every development is planned, managed and measured by its potential and actual impact on Return-On-Investment (ROI).
Discovery and planning are vital parts of the marketing transformation process. They create the vision and framework for everything you do.
While it would be a mistake to adopt small innovation sprints at the expense of thinking big, with your vision and framework in place, you can then narrow your focus down to a few key marketing processes.
By assessing the points in the customer journey that will produce the greatest commercial impact, whether through efficiency or improved customer acquisition and retention, you can create a prioritised roadmap of development sprints.
It’s at this point that many projects falter.
Once you’ve prioritised your starting innovations, there’s no doubt you’ll come across a number of cases where your system needs full integration and complete end-to-end interoperability to work optimally.
Instead, you need to focus on the minimum viable product (MVP) you need to test the innovation and measure its ROI.
The MVP approach may well require additional manual processes to start with, but it will put your innovation in the hands of your users quicker, and prove (or disprove) its commercial return against a smaller investment.
The push for modernisation from Vision 2030 is a bold, ambitious aim. To achieve it, marketing must have a clear vision for what the ultimate customer journey looks like, and how technology can facilitate it.
Success doesn’t rely on a large capital budget to create the ultimate, perfect machine: It lies in an agile framework, enabling a constant state of ‘test-and-learn’ innovation. An attitude which champions flexibility, evolution and growth is key, as is a commitment to innovation and a focus on ROI.
This shift in mindset can often be the biggest cultural challenge for an organisation to overcome. That’s why at Proctors, we work closely with our clients across the KSA region – and the world – helping them to achieve success and avoid the pitfalls which cause stalled or failed digital marketing transformation initiatives.
Get in touch with us and let’s talk about how we can innovate your marketing strategy.