Starting a new job can be a nerve-wracking process, especially when it’s your first opportunity after being at uni. Luckily, I’m here to share my experience of starting at Proctors and gaining my first real industry exposure.
Here are some of the questions I found myself asking, the challenges I faced – and some of the lessons I learnt.
What if I don’t know what I’m doing on my first day?
In any new job, a fear of failure is perfectly normal. Luckily, the Proctors people went out of their way to ensure I felt comfortable in the office, had sufficient training/inductions and the resources to get on with my projects, setting me up for success.
It’s important companies give you ample time to find your feet on your first day. So, if you don’t know what to do next, just ask how you can help. Remember, you were hired – you’ve already made it past the stressful interview part! Treat your first day as a fun celebration. Everyone is excited to meet you!
What’s it like starting in a Tech role?
Joining the Tech team at P+S straight after leaving university showed me the differences between education and real-life industry work really quickly.
In uni, I was constantly shifting my focus to find a speciality. This meant that almost each semester I would be creating a new project with a different focus and practicing a different coding language. However, at P+S I was able to focus on my strengths first, with support from seasoned (and friendly) developers, and begin specialising in the areas that I am most interested in.
Over my first few weeks, as I was introduced to all of the developers around me and all of the teams that I would be interacting with, all of the nervousness of a new role left as I settled in to my first full development role and focused on my workload.
How will I remember all these people?
Meeting everyone on your first day can be overwhelming, sometimes it can feel like you’re crashing a private party. Forming relationships takes time, and a supportive workplace recognises this.
At P+S, I was introduced to all the departments I would be working with, encouraged to reach out to anyone if I had any questions, and met with a multitude of messages from co-workers welcoming me to the company. Wednesday quiz nights and Friday night socials allowed me to meet people in a non-work environment. And as time went on more new employees joined, we all easily bonded over being new to the company.
Don’t forget, you’re not expected to remember everyone you meet immediately, but making the effort to get to know your co-workers over lunches and socials will help you feel at ease in your new job.
What do I do if I’m not busy with work all the time?
Sometimes work may be slow whilst you’re being given time to settle in, and you may feel guilty for not tapping away at the keyboard for all 8 hours of the workday. Just remember, people are giving you time to relax into the job and no one wants you to be overwhelmed. Take your time with tasks, regularly check in with co-workers to make sure you’re doing the right thing and focus on the small wins.
When working in a marketing agency, time management is incredibly important and often we are working to strict deadlines. At P+S, I was given access to a plethora of training resources for when I had a moment of downtime, to develop my industry skills.
Stay positive and believe in yourself
The most important thing to remember is to stay open-minded and treat your first job as a fresh start, a learning opportunity, and a chance to meet cool, like-minded people that can help you build an exciting career.
At P+S, we are always looking for talent to join our team across Creative, Strategy and Technology. Click here to find out more about our current vacancies or send your CV to [email protected].
Bristol Technology Festival (BTF) has unveiled a packed schedule for its tech showcase event, taking place during the week of October 11-15.
Now into its third edition, BTF is an annual celebration designed to bring together events, people and communities to share, learn and explore technology developments in the southwest region. Events will encompass a range of sectors from green and sustainable technology to legal and finance.
This year’s schedule includes a number of highly anticipated events, of which there are more than 50 spread across five packed days.
The theme which wraps around many of the events through the week is ‘changing the face of tech’, with the emphasis on taking tangible action beyond simply talking about a lack of diversity and inclusion. As well as demonstrating the best of what the area’s tech space has to offer, BTF 2021 aims to bring together like-minded organisations ready to inspire wide-reaching change.
It is not too late to get involved. For individuals and organisations interested in attending or hosting an event, there is still time to book tickets and submit proposals.
Softcat headlines busy BTF 2021
BTF 2021 would like to thank Headline Partner Softcat for its indispensable support of BTF 2021.
Looking ahead to the event, Rob Parkinson, CIO at Softcat, commented: “We are delighted to be involved in the 2021 Bristol Technology Festival. Bringing together local technology communities and shining a light on all the innovation the region has to showcase is an important way to drive collaboration and industry growth.
“The last 18 months have been tough for many industries, but technology has come through as an enabler and has made many re-think how they interact and do business. As the impact of technology continues to grow, forums like the Bristol Technology Festival have never been more important and we are pleased to be supporting it.”
Event organisers are also grateful to Deloitte for sponsoring the Bristol Technology Festival Launch Event, on Thursday October 7 which will be held at Engine Shed.
Here, the exclusive launch evening will be a chance for senior leaders and technology influencers from across the region to network, share ideas and see each other in person, with speaker contributions coming from the likes of Moneyhub, Deloitte and Softcat.
Changing the face of tech
Among the many highlights of this year’s festival is a fireside keynote chat with Antonia Forster.
Antonia is a Unity/C# games and software developer, specialising in immersive experiences such as AR, VR and XR. In 2017, her record-breaking TEDxBristol talk was delivered to a live audience of 2,000 people and has since gained over 92,000 views online.
A year later, Antonia was nominated and shortlisted for Nature’s John Maddox Prize, in recognition of her work as an LGBTQ+ speaker and activist. She has also been named one of Bristol’s Top Nine “Women to Watch” in STEM, and has appeared in numerous magazine, radio and television features.
The talk with Antonia is scheduled for Monday October 11th, 12:00-14:00, at Engine Shed.
It is expected to be one of many events held throughout the week that inspire both more women to pursue careers in the tech sector, and organisations to provide greater opportunities and promote diversity.
What else to expect at BTF 2021
Diversity is the name of the game when it comes to the group of volunteers helping to coordinate the festival.
Among them are representatives from Hargreaves Lansdown, Newicon, TechSPARK, and Engine Shed, with events throughout BTF being crowdsourced from organisations across the city of Bristol.
These include tech companies, public bodies, schools, community interest groups and charities, with events open to a huge variety of guests – from tech professionals and businesses to individuals wanting to know more about the area’s digital industries.
Between them, a huge variety of discussions and other activities will be open to attendees:
This year’s Bristol Technology Festival will also witness the launch of the Festival Community Partner initiative. Here, businesses have the opportunity to become one of 50 community partners, with all funds invested helping to secure the long-term future of the festival.
For more information and to view the schedule for BTF 2021, visit www.bristoltechfest.org
To submit an event proposal, complete the form here.
Develop your narrative skills and write rich, engaging games.
A strong story is key to engaging and retaining players in video games. Held over 7 weeks, this online course teaches the story-structure essentials that will help you craft richer and more compelling games.
This is a professional development course for anyone who works – or aspires to work – in the gaming industry as well as writers and designers seeking to develop their interactive storytelling skills.
The course has been created by the UK’s foremost expert on narrative structure John Yorke and Caroline Marchal, founder of British studio INTERIOR/NIGHT and Lead Designer for Heavy Rain.
In this training course, you’ll investigate the relationship between player and protagonist, discover how to merge story and gameplay, and find ways to use those skills in a real-world development team. Working in a small group, you’ll receive weekly one-to-one feedback from the tutor team.
By the end of the course you’ll have written an industry-standard story treatment for an original game.
On successful completion of the course, you will receive a certificate of completion evidencing your learning and study hours. You will need to set aside 4-5 hours per week to complete the assignments.
Read a review of the course on Polygon.
Exclusive 25% discount on the £1,200 published course price. Just £900 to Bristol Creative Industries members for 35 hours of intensive learning.
MORE INFORMATION HERE or email [email protected]
Good news for businesses: you no longer need to depend on high-cost, high-resource development for your digital projects. Apps, websites, and software alike can all be developed using a visual-first approach, with zero in-depth coding necessary.
Since the invention and mass production of the very first personal computers, people have wanted to take more control of their devices. But, whereas tinkering with functionality was once the domain of the ‘geek’, the low-code/no-code trend has grown to become accessible to all.
Today, these solutions have developed into such complex, adaptable systems, that you could argue there’s a decreased need for developers. No matter how amateur your digital knowledge, if you have an idea, you can make it happen with minimal code intervention, starting a business or launching an app with just a few swipes or clicks.
But before you go gung-ho and decide to handle your next digital launch in-house, there are a few caveats.
You’ll still need experience of best-practice UX, UI and user journeys to inform your design and ensure users can engage effectively with your app or website. Plus, you’ll need a knowledge of content and design hierarchy – not to mention branding expertise.
That means bringing in the experts. But low-code/no-code also means when you hire a professional agency to handle your digital build, you’ll save countless hours in back-end development time, and go to launch much faster too.
No-code digital design offers full flexibility when it comes to designing a webpage or app. In fact, a page’s layout is as simple as a simple ‘drag-and-drop’ to bring together development elements.
Low-code offers the agility to inject code into pre-developed templates, for enhanced functionality and a more customised offering.
Recently at P+S, we’ve been adopting more and more low-code/no-code digital solutions for both our clients and our own brand. Some examples include adapting TV for the digital world via a global Islamic community platform, and of course the design and relaunch of our very own Proctors website. Both are packed with stunning interactive elements and intuitive and accessible design, demonstrating just how flexible and professional these solutions can be.
Low-code/no-code solutions offer a huge return on investment, helping to develop SMEs or achieve optimisation for multi-nationals. The benefits are unlimited and inevitable, with the two stand out advantages being the creativity it can deliver, and the speed at which your project can be developed.
Put simply, you’ll have infinite scope for adaptive design when you choose a low-code/no-code solution. And the results are fully scalable across multiple platforms.
Not only can low-code/no-code save you reliance on internal developer resource, but it can also grow your knowledge of coding, providing even more exciting prospects for the future. The platforms involved often have great support systems which tend to be simple and well-resourced, helping to alleviate any worries you might have around back-end or hosting issues.
At P+S, we’ve created a team of award-winning specialists from across our Creative, Technology and Strategy divisions who are ahead of the game on all things low-code/no-code. Meaning we can provide integrated comprehensive solutions with little-to-no code intervention – but all the right design and strategy foundations.
Low-code/no-code is now part of our core offering, with our Creative team helping to pioneer this revolution with website development software like Webflow, who have arguably created one of the best low-code/no-code platforms available to date. (You can read more about some of the benefits of Webflow here.)
As a result, the time-efficient website solutions we create for you can be self-maintained and managed, kitted out with intuitive CMS and UI for quick and easy on-screen editing, and using predefined industry-focused templates that can be injected with code – so there’s no compromise on creativity.
At Proctors, we’re always trying to stay one step ahead ahead of the latest industry trends across our specialisms in Creative, Strategy and Technology. It’s one of the things that’s helped us stay at the forefront of our clients’ needs, and continue to grow our business over the years. And a low-code/no-code solution is one of those stepping stones.
We’re currently one of only two Webflow Enterprise-level Partners in the whole of Europe because of our teams’ commitment to this low-code/no-code methodology. It’s accessible, flexible and in the right hands, offers a cost-effective, future-fit web development solution for businesses of all sizes.
To find out more about building impactful, brand low-code/no-code solutions with Proctors, email us today.
If your attention span is anything like mine, it takes little more than the buzz of a phone to kickstart an afternoon-long procrastination episode.
One moment, you’re replying to a quick text. The next, you’re three hours into a doom-scrolling session that’s somehow left you four years’ deep in Gordon Ramsay’s Twitter timeline.
Of course, businesses know this about the general public. And advertisers are more than happy to capitalise on it. But in the golden age of social media, most businesses are missing the most basic trick in the book – a ‘distraction-proof’ website.
One of the dominant trends in web page building is the ‘omni page’. And it’s existed since the internet began.
Just as it sounds, ‘omni’ describes a singular webpage structure. And each page contains content.
But between relevant content, imagery, videos, copy which tries to hit certain word counts in a misguided attempt to improve SEO rankings, not to mention the input of internal business stakeholders who want to promote their own departments, websites are becoming increasingly bloated.
Often, each webpage ends up hundreds – if not thousands – of words long, and takes minutes, rather than seconds, to scan. With multiple menus, widgets and pop-ups, it all ends up proving distracting and frustrating for your visitors.
In essence, web agencies are being asked to include more and more content into every page of a website they’re building, often for the purpose of ticking certain boxes, rather than thinking of the user experience (UX). And the result is akin to building an entire website on every single webpage.
You’d think, given our doom-scrolling habits, that one long, jam-packed page of information would lend itself to today’s consumer. However, the complete opposite is true.
Research conducted by Microsoft has shown that we have an average of between 7 and 8 seconds to catch our website visitors’ attention. That’s because many – if not most people – are in the habit of scanning a page for information before reading the detail.
If you’re looking for a paper supplier for your business, and you need to know that they meet the right sustainability credentials, how long would you spend trying to find that information on a page that’s endlessly long, filled with videos, links to download a whitepaper on the merits of different paperweights, photos of the team, a social media widget and a few case studies?
My guess is, not very long.
Because, like most users, you’d probably rather visit a page that leads with the header ‘Your local sustainable paper supplier’, followed by a list of sustainability credentials.
Maybe you then see a link to ‘Our recent case studies’, which you could choose to visit and dive into more info, if you’re interested. Or perhaps you’ll explore the site’s menu to find out more about the team via the ‘About Us’ page.
But if your boss is breathing down your neck, and you’re performing a search for ‘sustainable local paper supplier’, the chances are you won’t spend more than those precious initial 7 seconds to find the right info.
Web agencies like ourselves aren’t the only ones who’ve noticed this trend of over-complicated page structures.
Google has also noted a large detrimental impact on page performance, particularly when it comes to how it the mobile device experience.
Google Page Experience is a new measurement for a webpage’s UX – specifically, how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page beyond its pure information value.
It includes Core Web Vitals – metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of a webpage – and also includes existing Search signals: mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.
What this means is if you want a webpage that’s built for SEO, it can’t be overstuffed with keywords – something we’ve talked about before. Any page you consider important for your business needs to score highly on these additional metrics and be valuable to your visitors.
In short: Don’t overstuff your pages with content. Only provide the information that’s truly useful to your customers, and you’ll gain the most value from your website.
It’s time to more thoughtfully consider what’s actually needed on each webpage. This is what will help keep your visitors focussed, engaged, and more open to valuable cross-selling and up-selling opportunities – without the opportunity for distraction.
Ready to talk more about how your website could more skilfully direct prospects through your sales pipeline? Talk to Proctors, at [email protected].
Our friends at TechSPARK are celebrating the CreaTech sector this month so we thought we’d join in and highlight five awesome businesses from the Bristol Creative Industries member community.
As outlined in this article, CreaTech is the term used to describe where creativity meets technology. The Creative Industries Council defines it as “bringing together creative skills and emerging technologies to create new ways of engaging audiences and to inspire business growth and investment”.
The CreaTech sector is strong in the UK as a recent report by Tech Nation showed. Despite a very tough year in 2020, CreaTech companies raised a record £981.8m in 2020. That puts the UK third in the world for CreaTech venture capital investment, behind only the US and China.
The sector is big news in our region too with the South West having the highest median investment between 2015 and 2020, ahead of Scotland and London.
With that in mind, we thought it was the perfect excuse to showcase five businesses from the Bristol Creative Industries member community doing amazing things. Connect with them by visiting their member profile. If you want to join the community, you can sign up here.
This company describes itself as “changing the face of cyber security education for young adults” through its CyberStart product. The platform that gamifies cyber security education has been used by over 200,000 students. Teaching cyber security to 13-18-year-olds is hard so this is a really innovative way to do it. In the game, participants take on cyber-criminals by solving puzzles and using learning techniques like code breaking and password cracking,
The company has a US version of the product and it was recently part of the National Cyber Scholarship competition with over 10,000 high school and college students taking part.
Congrats to the 70 CA HS students named National Cyber Scholars! Thank you @CyberStartUSA @NCScholarship for nurturing + empowering our next generation of #cybersecurity experts. See full list of our rising stars https://t.co/OCBYY1nwfo pic.twitter.com/HGd8RI119W
— Dept. of Technology (@CADeptTech) June 8, 2021
Visit Helical Levity’s BCI member profile
In the midst of Euro 2020 (come on England!), it seems appropriate to include this Bath-based business. Founded in 2017, StatsBomb provides football data and analytics to clubs, media and gambling companies across the world. The company has developed its own proprietary, industry-leading data collection and analytics software with a user-friendly high-vis front end.
The business started out as a team of three but now has over 150 employees based in its head office in Bath and in the US and Egypt.
Yerson Mosquera, Atlético Nacional 2020 & 2021
Wolves have become the latest club to dip into the South American market 🇨🇴
Scouting from a global database has never been more important. StatsBomb customers can shortlist players from 80+ competitions 🌎https://t.co/TY2rzzCOBN pic.twitter.com/XxJ480y2uP
— StatsBomb (@StatsBomb) June 17, 2021
Visit StatsBomb’s BCI member profile
Bristol-based Gravitywell describes itself as using “technology and creativity to guide businesses through digital transformation and help startups blossom and achieve their goals”.
The company has delivered some impressive projects including working with English Heritage and artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins to creatre an interactive illustrated web app map of English myths and legends.
In just six weeks, the team designed, built and launched the web app. They turned Clive’s analogue artwork into a digital production that brought the creatures and characters to life. The map picked up a number of awards, including best digital design at the 2919 SPARKies, TechSPARK’s annual awards celebrating the best tech in the west.
View Gravitywell’s BCI member profile
We are all craving the return of international travel and here’s a company that can help when we can finally go on our next adventures. Bristol-based TravelLocal is disrupting and bringing online the huge tailor-made holidays market and pioneering the “buy local” movement in travel.
The company’s cutting edge web software platform connects locally-owned travel companies in more than 60 countries worldwide with a global client base of travellers, to create and deliver tailor-made holidays.
TravelLocal was started in 2008 by founders Tom and Huw who felt something was missing from the travel industry. Big tour operators were dominating the market and the local experts that planned the trips were treated as a “trade secret”. They started TravelLocal to change that.
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Visit TravelLocal’s BCI member profile
This Bristol-based company believes “there’s a brilliant storyteller in everyone but sometimes you just need a little help unlocking your superpower”. Sparkol was “born out of the simple belief that everyone should be able to share their stories quickly, easily and affordably (without any special skills)”.
The company’s flagship software, VideoScribe, has been used by over two million users worldwide. It allows users to quickly create professional-looking animations.
Another service is Scribley which gets you creating engaging video experiences in minutes using a browser on desktop or tablet.
If you don’t want to do it yourself, Sparkol Studio can help by taking your wildest ideas and transforming them into ‘share-worthy’ video content, and Sparkol Academy provides training on video skills and animation.
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Visit Sparkol’s BCI member profile
We love the creativity of Bristol Creative Industries members and there are hundreds more we could have shared. Meet them all in the member directory. If you want to be featured, join as a member.
The Creative Industries Council CreaTech Ones to Watch competition is celebrating inspiring companies and consortiums from across the UK. We’d love to see some BCI members featured. You can enter here until 28 June.
The rebrand that sees the agency, originally founded in 2014, become The Co-Foundry, reflects its mission to work collaboratively with founders, bringing in specialist co-creators such as designers, photographers, animators and copywriters, according to specific project needs.
Owner, Sue Bush has developed a process that empowers client teams to be part of the strategic discovery phase, as well as the creative process. She is a firm believer in co-creation, “Ideas can come from anyone, and are not just the preserve of the design team. Brand identity design can, to a large degree, be democratic – not ‘design by committee’ but more, ‘winning ideas by group spark’.”
Having been at the helm of two agencies, Sue feels well placed to help solve the brand challenges tech and creative firms face. She co-owned a Shoreditch design agency when the internet was still in its infancy and then went on to establish her own brand design agency, Touchpoint Design, which harnessed design to the opportunities afforded by tech, “The challenge for tech and creative founders is the same, you strive to make a positive impact but are often too close to your business with too few hours in the day to find the best and most appropriate direction for your branding.”
“I set up The Co-Foundry because I believe there’s a better, more personal and inclusive way to approach branding. We work together with creative and tech founders and their teams to forge unique, purposeful brands, using co-creation and interactive discovery sessions to bring everyone in on the journey.”
The Co-Foundry sees Sue acting as an independent consultant with a team of specialists supporting her. When client needs dictate, she builds out and brings in this bigger team of co-creators to support her, creating a lean, agile and expert offer that’s especially designed to serve the creative and tech sectors.
To launch the new brand, The Co-Foundry has put together a series of short practical guides on how to start building a compelling brand, especially designed for small teams. Download the first instalment here.
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.
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