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.

WECA’s Creative Scale-Up programme

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.”

Noiser

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 Trends and Topics Shaping the Future of Advertising

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

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.

Artificial Intelligence

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

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.

Context

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.

Consolidation of Adtech

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.

Working With the Right People

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.

The Decline of Linear TV

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.

What is a PIM? And why do I need one?

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 datathey’re never in sync with one another. And that leaves room for error.

No more errors in transmission

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.

Breaking down. Rebuilding stronger.

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 architectureMicroservices 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.

Finding unique solutions for exceptional businesses

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. 

Why is Clubhouse causing a stir?

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. 

How to get started on Clubhouse

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. 

Joining and starting a Clubhouse room

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. 

Joining and starting a club

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. 

Growing your brand and profile on Clubhouse

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!

Building safety into your network

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.  

Build your brand audio strategy 

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. 

Clubs and people to follow on 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.

Adopting the right mindset is critical to success

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.

Why digital marketing transformation is different

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.

Understanding marketing’s focus

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.

Adopting a marketing mindset

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).

Mapping the mindset to the process

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.

Avoiding perfectionism (the enemy of innovation)

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.

Resist the temptation to achieve the perfect system!

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.

Conclusion

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.

Dr Matthew Freeman, Reader in Multiplatform Media at Bath Spa University, has founded Immersive Promotion Design Ltd., a new marketing consultancy for the world of Extended Reality. It supports Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) businesses to better communicate with their audiences about the magic of immersive content. 

The company builds on sector-development research funded by StoryFutures Academy and Bristol+Bath Creative R+D, and brings together expertise from the BBC VR Hub, Limina Immersive, StoryCentral, Raucous, Bath Spa University and beyond. Last year the team partnered with The National Gallery, Anagram and Studio McGuire to build research-led and audience-tested promotional campaigns for live VR and AR experiences. This led to the creation of new promotional strategies, prototypes, industry bibles and teaching resources for how immersive experiences can be better marketed to today’s audiences.

Talking about Immersive Promotion Design’s success so far, Matthew said: “Many people have recognised the enormous potential of immersive technologies like virtual and augmented reality to transform the creative industries as we know them. Up until now, however, the immersive sector has struggled to reach bigger, more mainstream audiences – the kinds of people used to streaming Netflix but not yet interested in VR headsets.

“The challenge is obvious: How do you communicate the magic of being in a VR experience via social media, posters and trailers? Immersive Promotion Design Ltd. provides a step towards establishing a new promotional language for VR and AR, opening the door to a bigger, more diverse immersive audience. We are very excited to see where this journey takes us.” 

Visit www.immersivepromotion.com to find out more.

When you meet with prospective customers do they go away impressed ready to take the next step or are they underwhelmed because you’re the same as all your competitors?

If it’s the latter then clearly something needs fixing. In today’s market you cannot afford to be just another supplier and leave prospective customers cold.

In our opinion, the moment you meet with a potential customer is the most important part of the entire buyer’s journey; by this point you’ll have invested a huge amount of time, money and effort into developing products, marketing them and nurturing leads. The buyer will also have invested time and effort in researching suppliers to find the right fit. Those initial meetings between you and the customer are crucial and will determine whether you can secure their trust and win their business.

“Before making a detailed supplier evaluation 79% of buyers are already aware of at least three potential suppliers, and 86% already have a preference. B2B Marketing

When you meet with customers, you have a narrow window of opportunity to impress and in that narrow window you need to demonstrate your capabilities; the value you deliver and the opportunities you can create. You need to access any content the customer wants, instantaneously, and this all needs to be delivered through a personalised, visually compelling experience that leaves them empowered, visibly impressed and keen to move forward.

“97% of senior decision-makers said the professionalism of a potential suppliers presentation was very important or important in awarding a contract”, RSW New Business Survey 

So, how do you make sure the customer walks away impressed?

The key is to give your sales team and the customer everything they need to support their conversations and create the WOW and an interactive sales tool is the backbone of this. It acts as a window into the core of your business and brings your proposition to life.

A great sales tool needs to be built around three parties:

  1. Your customer
  2. Your sales team
  3. Your business

And, it must seamlessly connect and work for all three together

1. Your Customer

Give them a personalised sales experience
This is probably the single most important element for your customer.

Firstly, they want to feel that you’re addressing their challenges and requirements specifically, and not being presented with generic information. They want to know that what you’re presenting is specifically tailored around them, their role, their needs, their business and their industry sector.

Personalisation helps with familiarity – your customers will quickly understand your proposition if it’s presented to them within a familiar format, using terminology and visuals that they understand and that resonate.  This is all the more important if some of the decision-makers are not technical experts in your field.

A personalised experience is memorable – it will be much easier for your customer to remember the salient points of your proposition and be able to articulate and sell your proposition internally to other key decision-makers if you use visuals that are easy to recall. Nobody remembers a list of bullet points.

A flexible narrative 
You can never second guess a customer and know exactly what they are interested in or thinking, an interactive sales tool means you don’t have to adopt a linear approach and hope that you’ve covered everything needed.

Interactivity allows you to take a different route as the conversation progresses, letting the customer steer the conversation in the direction most relevant to them. It opens areas for a conversation that perhaps previously you hadn’t thought the customer would be interested in.

Simplicity  
Simplifying complex ideas and being able to articulate them clearly and simply is key to demonstrating a greater understanding of the customers’ business, challenges and where your solutions fit. It’s all too easy to think that by overcomplicating your narrative you’ll be demonstrating your deep understanding of their business.

Wrong, you don’t want to have to make your customers think hard about what it is you can do for them, that wastes time and creates risk in the customer’s mind. And equally, you want to equip them with information that they can easily relay internally to other key decision-makers within their business who you’ll need on your side to make a buying decision.

Value led not product-led 
Always focus on the value you deliver for your customer. If your conversations are purely product-led it makes it harder to differentiate yourself from a competitor and you’re not addressing the underlying reasons why a customer is interested in your product or service in the first place.

Value is a key differentiator and it directly addresses the reasons why a customer came to you in the first place. It’s also important to consider that sometimes a customer doesn’t necessarily know what the true value is that they are actually after and a good sales experience should help them to understand this. This is where the conversation becomes more consultative and helps to elevate your position beyond that of just a supplier.

Make it visual, make it memorable 
Images and graphics are far more memorable than just text – your brain can interpret visual information 50,000 times faster than text alone. So, it’s important that key information is visualised in a way that is familiar to the customer so they can easily recall and retell the key points of your value proposition.

You’ll also save considerable time in explaining complex ideas and processes if you can simply visualise them, giving your customer more time to ask the questions that are important to them.

A clear & logical narrative structure
This should be obvious but more often than not we find customer presentations are badly structured leading to confused messaging and a lack of a clear narrative progression.

Your conversations with customers have to follow a logical narrative progression so that you can address a customer’s issues, answer any concerns or push backs and provide them with clear answers as to why they should give you their business. This will also help them internally when they need to persuade other decision-makers within their business that you are the right choice. You’ll have armed them with a clear argument structure.

Create the WOW
Almost every company is proud of its R&D and likes to portray itself as an innovative and dynamic business. It’s not good enough to talk about it you need to live it and show it. Creating the WOW is not just about the message and demonstrating your capabilities it’s about leaving a lasting impression and that also means portraying a strong brand and using immersive visuals.

So, if you can demonstrate you understand your customer, their sector, business and unique challenges, you’ve helped them to understand where you can add value and how you can help their business in a clear simple and logical format this will go a long way towards building trust, and building trust is central to the whole sales process.

2. Your Sales Team

Clear narrative structure & sales guide
Every salesperson has a unique style and you don’t want to hamper that but at the same time you do want to ensure that nothing gets missed in conversations and that messaging is consistent across all your team.

The best way to do that is to have a clear narrative structure but one that is flexible enough for different presenter styles and which ensures that whoever uses it, important messages and arguments are not missed.

Flexibility of message 
A recent study by Aberdeen.com found on average sales teams spend five working days every month searching for relevant content they need to make a sale. This is wasted time.

A well-developed sales enablement tool will be able to flex and address the needs of all of your customers no matter what job role, sector, or geography.

This is where non-linear sales tools make a difference as you’re able to personalise the conversation with different customers without having to create new sales presentations each time. You’re also able to address role specific issues within one meeting – for instance, you might have representatives from Accounts, Logistics, Operations and Technical in one meeting and you have to be able to quickly and confidently address the unique challenges and perspectives each has within the business.

Access anything, instantaneously 
When a customer asks a question you have to be able to address that question then and there you don’t want to tell them you’ll have to come back to them at a later date. A digital sales enablement tool ensures that you have access to everything a customer might need whether it’s case studies, specifications, technical data, videos, PDFs etc. to cover all eventualities.

Share content instantly with your customer 
As we know customers are impatient and don’t like to wait for things, if they are interested in something you need to strike. Having the ability to send them content they’ve just been looking at such as case studies, videos, technical sheets or product details as you’re discussing it is invaluable.

Not only have they got a record of everything they were interested in but a copy can also be sent to your CRM or head office so that you have this vital data too.

Online & offline  
It’s not always possible to access online content when meeting customers and you don’t want to be accessing large video files during a meeting. Sales enablement tools are designed to run both online and offline, whether you have an internet connection or not you can still access all that valuable content.

Any device
You don’t want to have to tell your team or customers that they can only use an iPad or laptop to use your sales enablement tools. They should be able to access all of this great content no matter what device – iPads, smartphones, laptops, PCs – or operating systems, Windows, iOS etc. It’s all about making things easy for your team and the customer.

To sum up, a well thought out sales enablement tool with an intuitive user journey, simple (but not simplistic) visuals and a strong narrative will help to make the sales rep’s job a whole lot easier but not only that they’ll be spending a lot less time explaining what you do and how you do it so that they can focus more time on the customer’s specific needs.

Confidence is everything and if they can go into a meeting knowing they have absolutely everything they need to impress a customer that goes a long way towards creating a great first impression and building trust.

3. Your business 

Data & analytics 
Crucial to ongoing success and optimisation, sales enablement tools can have sophisticated tracking tools embedded which will report back on every interaction a sales rep and customer has whilst using the tool.

This isn’t about keeping tabs on what the sales team are up to but understanding exactly what the customer is interested in and what content is resonating with them. This means you can channel your efforts and budget into that content proving to be most effective

Consistency and control
An issue for Marketing is always around the consistency of message and branding. How often do your sales teams make their own presentations just before an important meeting? How can you be sure that they are on message and on brand? A well designed and constructed sales enablement tool will negate the need for them to do this as everything needed will already have been carefully built into the tool.

Single source of truth
Ensuring all your sales team have the latest documents, videos, specification sheets, case studies, whitepapers etc. can be a real challenge not to mention time-consuming.

Sales enablement tools can be connected to a central source of information, such as a CMS (Content Management System) and/or DAM (Digital Asset Management System). Any changes made in the CMS / DAM will automatically be reflected in the sales tool, both the sales and the marketing teams can be assured that only the latest, compliant information is being accessed in front of customers.

Integrations 
Within your business you’ll have numerous digital platforms to support your efforts. Key amongst those will be your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System – an invaluable sales and marketing support tool. Your sales tool can connect to your CRM so that any information shared with a customer can be recorded directly back into your CRM

Knowing that your sales team has everything they need to have a productive conversation with a customer, that the customer will have access to all the information they need, and the fact that you know both parties have the latest content will give you peace of mind and confidence.

At POP we have a single-minded focus on supporting businesses at this critical phase, it’s all we do.

We work with businesses on every stage of the process from establishing what success and the perfect sales tool will look like to how it will function and support you, your sales team and customers as well as being aligned to your wider business objectives. This is backed up by our agile design and development methodology to deliver, integrate and constantly improve on your sales tool.

Our sector expertise covers Advanced Manufacturing, Medical Devices, Pharma, Construction and The Built Environment and Technology.

If you’d like to have an initial exploratory call then you can talk to me directly on the number below or just email

Damjan Haylor
Managing Director

0117 329 1712

[email protected]

www.popcomms.com

Develop Me, working in partnership with Babbasa, are offering fully-funded tech bursaries for four young Black people living in Bristol to learn how to code and begin their career as software developers.

Develop Me’s programmes have a market leading, 95% post course hire rate into the tech industry. The bursaries aim to remove the social and economic barriers of entry for under- represented young people by providing opportunities and access to education connected to highly paid in-demand tech careers.

With 18% of tech employees from Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds; and specifically, only 2% from a Black, African, Caribbean or Black British background – a long climb to diversity remains for the industry (The Chartered Institute for IT/BCS 2020).

Al Kennedy, Director of DevelopMe, explains, “Now – more than ever – is the time to work together across the Bristol city region – to invest in local talent and to create supported high value career pathways that are accessible to everyone to become future leaders in the tech sector.”

Comprising of four fully-funded places (valued at £9,450 each) on Develop Me’s newly launched part-time 52 week Coding Fellowship Bootcamp, every student will have access to Career Coaches, full learning support, industry mentor community to help set them up for their future careers, as well as a loan of an Apple Laptop for the full duration of the course.

This initiative is co-funded partly via Develop Me’s Opportunity Fund supported by hiring partners, matched by Develop Me, plus the generous support from their mentor and alumni community. Bristol inner-city-based youth empowerment social enterprise, Babbasa, is supporting with recruitment and access to under-represented communities.

For further information head to their webpage: https://developme.tech/black-bristol-tech-pathway/

In the two and a half years since launching, Bristol-based Haio has gone from strength to strength, making their mark as one of the fastest growing local UX and development agencies in Bristol and the surrounding area.

Now the team have taken an exciting new step, relaunching the brand – including taking on a new name; Unfold.

Making the complex simple…

Making the most complex things seem simple has always been the super-power behind the Haio team – helping growing digital businesses to create world-class user-experiences and digital platforms. The team works under the belief that with the right people and tools, anything is possible.

So what do Unfold actually do? 

In short, the team build websites, web apps and digital platforms for start-up and scale-up businesses. They help entrepreneurs and business leaders develop world-class experiences by bringing expertise across four areas:

  1. Building the right thing: through a process of analysing and refining concepts, big opportunities will be discovered, reducing risk and helping build products people will actually want to use.
  2. Designing better products: take away the guesswork and design products which solve real-world problems by bringing real users into the design process.
  3. Shipping technology faster: an agile, iterative design process gets products to market faster and lets businesses start collecting real customer data sooner.
  4. Scaling businesses: optimising, understanding and improving the product to continue business growth. They also help up-skill and develop business’ in-house capabilities.

So why the change?

Working closely with fellow BCI member Sue Bush from Touchpoint Design, Haio needed a fresh platform and a clearer market positioning to continue growing alongside it’s clients scaling businesses. The team sought-out their raison d’être and in uncovering this essence, a better definition of who they are and what they do. Unfold is the culmination of this journey and sets the scene for their next exciting chapter.

So, what can you expect from Unfold?

Unfold’s mission is to empower and propel entrepreneurs and their businesses to the next level. 

They’re also making their expertise from across the team more accessible, offering free, no obligation 1 hour consultancy sessions with a product or technical lead, to help talk through some of the challenges you might be facing. You can book a call any time through their website https://bit.ly/3oHJu70.

In addition to this, they’re on a mission to share their knowledge and break down barriers in understanding regarding tech development, startup success and digital platform scaling. This is why their new website has a fantastic new Resources Hub, dedicated to entirely free articles and reports on everything in the startup ecosystem – from fundraising through to scaling your technology.

Win a free UX audit for your business

Thirdly, to celebrate the launch they’re also running a small competition – offering 5 free UX audits to UK businesses. This is a chance to have a professional UX designer review and recommend some approaches to a specific challenge you may be facing with your digital product. You can find out more about that here https://bit.ly/3pFIrWx