Although it may sound daunting, a social media audit isn’t as intensive as it sounds, it is basically performing a health-check for your various social media platforms. The audit will help you set realistic goals for your accounts and how to achieve them by analysing what is and isn’t working well. It will ultimately make your social media strategy more efficient and effective.
Why Would You Want to Perform a Social Media Audit?
A social media audit will help you understand your audience and where you are performing best. It can narrow in on areas that you are performing weakly, so you can make changes to your strategy and turn your followers into customers. Ideally, an audit should be performed every three months to help you keep in line with your goals.
Conduct a Social Media Audit in Seven Steps:
Make a list of all your social media accounts and identify where the analytics are, if you are not already familiar. It is a good idea to keep track of analytics on a weekly basis to understand how well your posts are performing and when your audience is most likely to be online.
Perform some basic admin by ensuring that all logos are the same across your platforms to make it easier for your audience to recognise and follow your various accounts. You may have a different style of writing and vary posts between platforms, but it is important to ensure that your brand identity is strong and consistent.
Check out each page’s engagement metrics and make a note of how your account is performing. If you are trying to grow your followers, assess your total follower count and how many followers have increased over the three month period. On the other hand, you may be focussing on increasing audience interaction with the account, so you can examine the engagement data to see the figures for this period.
Assess where and what you are performing best at and then plan to do more of it. If you are really good at making reels or videos and your engagement is highest with these kinds of posts, then focus more attention here to grow your page. At the same time, look at which type of posts aren’t performing well and assess why. It could be the type of content, or it might not be right for that particular platform.
Take a look at other platforms and see how you could use your strengths to build up an audience where you might not have considered before. If you are great at writing humorous captions on Instagram, you might be able to find some success on Twitter too. It may be that you excel at getting clicks on your posts or stories, leading customers to your website or elsewhere. If you are, you may want to look at Pinterest and see how you can adapt your content for that platform.
Check out similar social media accounts that are performing well and evaluate how often they post, what types of posts perform well and which platforms they have grown best on. Make a list of 5-10 accounts that are within your industry and use them as an inspiration. For example, if they are posting a lot of reels with high engagement rates or using their stories to update their customers, this is something that you can use as inspiration for your own account.
Set realistic goals based on what you have discovered from your audit so you can measure the success of these in three months time. The information that you have gathered from the audit will give you direction for the accounts on different platforms and the areas that need improvement.
Conclusion
A social media audit is essential for all businesses and influencers, no matter what size. By adding an audit into your schedule, you are more likely to grow your social media following and increase the engagement rate. The analytics are there to give you information about your account and your followers, so you might as well use it to make your account the best it can be.
AI is becoming more prevalent in our everyday lives. From self-driving cars to smart speakers, AI is being integrated into almost every aspect of our daily lives. With the rise of artificial intelligence, businesses are using it to improve their customer service and marketing strategies. In fact, some companies are even using AI to write content.
By making use of this new technology you can have AI:
AI that writes content for you – no need to write anything yourself
Write articles and press releases for you
Create social media posts for you
Schedule tweets and Facebook updates for you
Research topics for you
Find relevant images for you
Provide answers to questions for you
Do all this at a fraction of the cost of human writers
This is not only useful for small business owners but also for bloggers who want to automate part of their work routine. You don’t need to hire people or pay them monthly salaries to help with your blog. There are many applications that do most of the work for you.
The best thing about these tools is that they are always learning from previous tasks. They get better over time. The more data you feed them, the smarter they become. So if you want to make sure that your content is up to date, then you should keep feeding it with fresh information.
Aside from saving time and money, using AI for content writing also helps you save on writer’s block. When you’re stuck on what to write next, just ask an AI tool to generate ideas for you.
Here are 3 AI tools that will help you create great content faster than ever before:
CoSchedule has been around since 2009 and was one of the first platforms to offer AI-powered content creation. It uses machine learning algorithms to analyze your website traffic and find out which types of content perform well. Based on this analysis, it generates content recommendations for you.
You can choose between two different plans: Basic ($99/mo) and Premium ($199/mo). Both include unlimited submissions, scheduled publishing, and analytics. However, the premium plan includes additional features such as access to advanced reporting, custom domains, and mobile apps.
BuzzSumo is another platform that uses AI to provide insights on trending topics. It analyzes millions of pieces of content and finds patterns in terms of popularity, influencers, and competitors.
BuzzSumo provides three different plans: Free, Pro ($29/mo), and Enterprise (starting at $299/mo). All plans allow you to track keywords, monitor competitor rankings, and see how often users share your content. However, the enterprise plan comes with additional features like real-time alerts, competitive intelligence reports, and API integration.
frase.io is a web application that allows you to quickly create and publish content. It offers both free and paid versions. While the free version limits you to 500 words per post, the paid version gives you an unlimited word count.
The app works by analyzing the text you type and suggests related phrases based on its database of over 50 million phrases. It also lets you add multimedia files and links to support your points.
Frequently Asked Questions about AI content writing:
Q: How does AI content writing work?
A: AI programs are able to read through thousands of pages of text and find patterns within those texts. By analyzing these patterns, they come up with suggestions and recommendations for future content.
Q: What kind of content can I create with AI?
A: You can use AI to write any type of content including blog posts, product descriptions, sales letters, press releases, web copy, etc.
Q: Is there any limit to the number of words I can include when creating content with AI?
A: No! As long as the source material has enough words, you will be fine. However, the quality of the output may suffer if the source material is too short.
Q: Can I use AI to write my whole website?
A: No. It is impossible to use AI to write everything on a website. Even though you might think that you could train an AI program to write your entire site, it would take years before the program became good enough to produce high-quality content for every single page.
Q: Does AI content writing require special skills?
A: Not really. Anyone can use AI to write content.
If you still aren’t sure about AI written content and if it can pass as human written, just take a look at this blog and guess what wrote it.
Video editing can be one of the most time-consuming tasks in all content creation. This can scare a lot of people from committing to video content but with a few simple tricks, you can make it a lot easier, quicker and cheaper.
Using Premiere Pro Presets
Greenscreen any footage with Machine Learning
Automatically remove silence in clips
Find customisable templates
Using Premiere Pro Presets
If you find yourself adding the same effects to footage over and over again, setting up presets can save you a lot of time. They allow you to combine multiple effects into one simple drag and drop allowing you to immediately as many effects as you want in a single click.
To begin find a piece of footage that has all your desired effects and ctrl+click all the effects in the effects controls panel.
Right-click and select save preset. Give it a name and hit ok.
Next time you want to use the same effects, go to the Effects panel, find your preset and drag it onto your footage. You can still tweak the individual effects and their settings once you’re dragged onto a piece of footage but those initial settings will save you a bunch of time.
This one is ridiculously simple and can save you minutes every time you want to use those effects which can quickly add up to hours throughout your career. Just be sure to give your presets useful names otherwise it can get a little confusing once you have a few.
Greenscreen any footage with Machine Learning
This sounds complicated but I promise you it’s actually straightforward!
First, you need a piece of footage. For the sake of this tutorial, I’m going to use this footage of Sam our MD dancing on a company night out.
Next, you need to open a browser and head to runwayml.com.
You will need to sign up to an account to use but it’s free to export to 720p and they hardly ever send emails.
Now you simply upload your footage and drag it onto the timeline. You can do any trimming to get the exact clip you want to cut out.
Then under the magic tools, select greenscreen.
Now you simply click on the subject you want to cut out, in this case, that’s Sam. You keep adding points to include and exclude until it’s a perfect mask. Then play the clip and any find any points where the mask goes wrong, simply pause it and add more points.
Do this until the end of your clip and when you’re happy click go-to project.
Now he’s cut out you can put whatever you want behind him right in the web editor.
If you want to download the clip to use in your editing program or are happy with your creation, then click export, give it a name and select the quality you want. It’ll take a little time depending on the size of the sequence but once it’s done you can download it and edit it like any other piece of footage.
Automatically remove silence in clips
When recording anything you’re going to stumble every now and then, especially when you’re just getting started. Removing all those stumbles and gaps of awkward silence is the first task you have to do when editing and its time consuming (as well as a bit demoralising sometimes).
You can speed this up by automatically removing silences using Adobe Audition.
You want to start by dragging your clip into premiere. Look at all those gaps of silence. Manually removing all that would take a lot of time just to get to the actual edit.
Drag your clip into the timeline and select edit in Adobe Audition. This sometimes fails so if it does create a new sequence from the clip and then go to edit sequence in Audition.
Now we’re in you want to double click on your audio channel and find the diagnostic tab. If you don’t have I already go to window and add it to your workspace.
Select Mark Audio from the drop-down menu, then click Find Levels then Scan once it’s done.
Below you should now see a list of markers and you can scroll through these to check they have successfully removed the silence. If it hasn’t then tweak the silence and audio settings.
Once you’re happy you want to Mark all markers and head to the markers tab.
Select all markers using CTRL + A and right-click and select change marker types to Sub clip.
File and save as an audio file. Sadly you can directly save as a video file.
Now to get this to work as a video we need to add an empty video track to this so we’re going to open up media encoder and drag in the audio file we just saved.
We’re going to render it out as a QuickTime since they are fast to render but it doesn’t matter.
Now you need to match the resolution and frame rate to your source clip and render it out.
Drag this new file into premiere. It’s going to appear as a bunch of clips but don’t worry and right click and make offline
Then you want to link media to all these now offline clips and select your original clip.
Once this is done you simply drag into the sub-clips and add them to your sequence and all the silence should be removed. You’ll still need to remove your stumbles but it’ll be a lot faster than scrubbing through all the silence
You can also easily extend any clips where audio has been cut off to get the timing just right.
Use customisable Templates
Creating complex graphics in premiere can be a challenge especially if you don’t have a lot of experience. Even once you do it also ends up being a very time-consuming task so if you’re on a deadline it’s just not possible…that is unless you use templates.
Using sites like Envato Elements you can find many templates for everything from titles to transitions to fully animated intro sequences. Now Envato Elements does require a £14.50 subscription to use but they do have a free 7-day trial so you can give it a try before you buy and maybe just download as many as possible since once you’ve downloaded them you’re free to use them at your leisure but you didn’t hear that from us 😉
Now, these templates can come in one of 2 forms:
MOGRTs
Full Projects
Each has its advantages and disadvantages but to keep it simple we’ll explain it like this.
MOGRTs are templates that can be found in the essential graphics panel and customised from within Premiere Pro. They are essentially linked After Effects compositions so will run extremely slowly unless you render and replace them once you are happy with the settings.
The Full Projects are normally much more customizable as you can tweak every single aspect and element. This means you can get exactly what you are looking for but you’ll need to do a bit more of the heavy lifting yourself. If you’re going this route, you should probably look into the After Effects template as they can be found for the same effects, but After Effects is more built for that kind of work.
Whichever you pick, once you’re happy with whatever you’ve created, I recommend rendering them out into a format you can easily reuse should you need to. For example, make that title sequence into an MP4 so you can drag it into any video you need.
In 2020, the UK spent £3.3bn on around 330 million toys for our children. It’s a booming industry that has a profound impact on the social skills and development of all of us. So understandably, when we learnt of the one in five children that go without Christmas presents every year, and the huge numbers of parents that struggle for basic necessities we wanted to see if we could help.
Keighley Laboratories have been a fantastic client of ours since we started out. The team there are open to pretty much anything, so when we suggested crushing toys to get the message across they didn’t doubt the vision. Well…maybe they did for a second. We created the campaign: Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Donate. to raise awareness, around a key time of the year, what parents (like ourselves) should look to do as we make space for additional toys around Christmas time.
In our MD, Sam Raife’s household, he recounts his own Christmas experience.
“Our son is four-year-old this year at Christmas time, the excitement around December is reaching an unbelievable crescendo. Coupled with the guilt of grandparents not being able to attend last year, due to covid, we already have a mountain of overcompensated presents ready for Christmas day. Judging by the figures from the campaign this seems pretty normal. We know that as a family, we’ve always been the benefit of privilege, and very fortunate to be in this position, so this year, we wanted to do something different. It didn’t feel right simply recycling or selling on old toys, so we decided to look into our options.”
The research from the campaign showed the team at Brand Ambition an estimated 8.5 million brand new and 13 million perfectly good, preloved toys are sent to landfills every year and so the solution appears pretty simple. If those toys were donated to local charities that needed them, then no children would go without this year. Reaching out to their client Keighley Laboratories, a metallurgy testing and heat treatment facility in the town of Keighley probably wasn’t the obvious choice.
Sam Raife, went on to say;
“We have a fantastic working relationship with Debbie and the team at Keighley Laboratories. We also know that, like us, they are a family business at heart. So when we proposed the idea of utilising their machinery to overemphasise the statistics around waste, by crushing perfectly good pre-loved and new toys, they were happy to oblige. When Debbie and I started looking for a local charity to work with, we were overjoyed that the local baby bank in Keighley was open to donations and that it looked like our donations would actually have a fantastic impact on a number of local families.”
Local Keighley baby bank and registered charity Popi.org.uk has been running for over four years providing much-needed items for babies and children up to 5. Referrals to their service come from social workers, health visitors or family key workers supporting and working with families to understand closely what they need. Their work and the generosity of supporters means they’ve so far been able to keep up with demand, but this is growing as the charity becomes bigger.
Samantha Craven, Founder and General Manager of Popi in Keighley had this to say;
‘We are extremely grateful to Brand Ambition and Keighley Laboratories for their generous donations and the opportunity to put POPI at the forefront of their campaign. As a baby bank it’s essential we provide items such as brand new mattresses with each cot we give to families. New toys will also mean local children have a wonderful Christmas who otherwise would have gone without. Supporting a local charity means so much to us, as we see, every day, the difference even small donations can have on the development and growth of the 1,573 families we’ve supported in the last four years.This money will enable us to buy approximately 10 new mattresses keeping many more babies and young children safe. Having the support of these two businesses means the world to us.’”
A selection of the new toys and sleep suits that went to POPI
Debbie Mellor, Managing Director of Keighley Laboratries said of the campaign;
“If this joint campaign encourages just one person to donate to their local baby bank instead of throwing the toys away then it was worth it. We know how important our local community of Keighley is to us as a family, but also for the business that has been established for over 100 years. We hope to work closer with our local charities and we’re proud to donate too the team at Popi who have been doing such a great job in the Keighley and Bradford area to support families that need it.”
As part of the campaign Brand Ambition and Keighley Laboratories donated new toys, pre-loved items, new baby sleepsuits as well as £200 to be used against brand new mattresses or any other items the charity felt would benefit local families.
If you would like to contact POPI and provide a donation then please click here. To find your local baby bank, please contact your local authority or find details online.
A lot of people think you either have to build a page for a person or a search engine but…
There are two main areas that you want to focus on to ensure your page fits both of these criteria:
Wordcount
Page Structure
Wordcount
There is a myth that pages with higher word counts rank higher and, quite like the myths of the Minotaur, this is not entirely the truth.
Looking at the average word count of a Google top 10 result it comes out to around 1447 words per top-ranking page but correlation does not equal causation so let’s make like a 1972 Lancia Beta and break down why this is actually happening.
First thing’s first, the quality vs quantity question must be answered. Yes, these top ranking pages may have 1447 words but it’s not the fact there are this many words that causes them to be high ranking, it’s what exactly those words are. If you have 1447 words that are totally useless to the reader but are appealing to a search engine, you may score well on your keywords but the backlinks and engagement won’t even register and so your page will not rank very well.
However, if you write a page of equal length that provides a lot of value to the reader and also contains plenty of keywords to please a search engine, you’re going to rank higher because of a very specific chain of events.
Let’s say our page is full of content that readers absolutely love and find incredibly useful. This increases the chance that the page will receive a backlink and, as those SEO-ists among you may know, this will improve your ranking as Google loves backlinks. So using the equation below you can increase your rankings not by using a lot of words, but using the right words.
Page Structure
Another incredibly important aspect to ensure you rank highly is ensuring the structure of your page is optimal for a search engine and a user. It’s all well and good having an article that is expertly written to be engaging and interesting to read but if your page is laid out terribly, nobody is going to read it.
Using this layout will ensure your page is easy to read for both a person and a search engine meaning you have the highest possible chance of getting a high ranking (If you look at this page you may, hopefully, see some similarities between it and the structure we’ve outlined above).
Frequently Asked Questions:
Q: How long should a blog post be for SEO?
A: It is the quality of the content, not the quantity of words that matter!
Q: How to write a good blog post for SEO?
A: Write blog posts for people, not search engines. The engagement you get will push you higher than any keyword ever will.
Q: Are images good for SEO?
A: Both directly and indirectly. Directly as long as you add alt text. Indirectly as it will make your pages easier to read and more likely to receive backlinks.
Conclusions
So if you’re looking to get your pages ranking as high as possible then bear in mind these three things:
Create content that provides a lot of value
Include keywords in a way that does not detract from the content
Lay your pages out in a simple and attractive way
If you want some great examples to base your pages on then take a look at one of these four articles:
On Thursday 9 September, our Managing Director Sam and I went, in person, to a real life networking event!
After plenty of time spent networking but all via Zoom, Teams etc due to the pandemic, the we headed to The Box in Leeds City Centre to spend the evening at the All in. Leeds reboot.
The event was a bit of a refresher and restart from the group that was originally formed as a steering group and a way of bringing the agency world in Leeds together in a bid to encourage Channel 4 to move up t’ north (said with a strong Yorkshire accent) when the broadcaster was looking for a place to locate its new HQ outside of London.
It was a coming together of agencies unlike anything ever seen in the city, with companies putting aside ego and competition for the good of the city to show just how much support there was for the move and just the sheer range of talent available in Leeds.
With the group’s origins being based around bringing Channel 4 to Leeds, it felt quite appropriate that the first in-person networking event took place on the week that the new HQ for the channel was officially opened.
Since the announcement of Channel 4 coming to the city, the group has moved on to focus on a whole range of other topics and issues for the agency landscape in Leeds, and they have some pretty lofty ambitions going forward.
After listening to a number of the people behind the group talk during the evening – whether it was James Hickman welcoming us at the start of the evening – or just general conversations throughout the night, we left in no doubt that All in. Leeds will be achieving those goals.
For the actual night itself, the vibe was that of celebration. After 18+ months of not being able to see so many people face to face, the chance to chat, laugh and drink with like minded people from across agencies in Leeds felt like something of a gift. It was probably also helped by the free food and beer, kindly provided by the sponsors of the event.
It was brilliant being able to catch up with former colleagues, speak to a supplier of ours in person and learn more about other agencies and what is going on across the city. Hearing some of the great work that is being done, alongside some of the opportunities available, was a real motivator for both Sam and I.
Another highlight of the night was the shuffleboard tournament. The Box benefits from having two, full length shuffleboard tables and both were put to good use during the evening. A bottle of Moet was on offer to the winning team and despite an almost Cinderella-like run to the semi-finals, we were unfortunate to not make it to the final.
All in all, All in. Leeds Reboot was a great night and something we were proud to be a part of. We can’t wait for the next one.
For a business that prides itself on serving the local community, the location of the premises, and more importantly, customers knowing where you are based is what you rely on most for sales.
Studies have shown how consumers’ habits have changed, accelerated in part due to the Covid-19 pandemic, with more of a focus on shopping locally to support smaller businesses.
To inform their decision on where to shop, most people turn to Google to find out where to go. But what if your business isn’t appearing when the search is made?
To capitalise on this shift in shopping trends, local businesses can use their Shopify e-commerce stores to create local search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies that will push your business up the rankings on Google.
When Google identifies a website, it uses an algorithm to determine what searches it should appear under. When someone performs a local search, Google considers three main components: relevance, prominence and proximity.
These three key components will cover all the bases for the consumer. This will mean that the search results are appropriate, the business has Google’s unofficial seal of approval and can be easily discovered, standing out to the searcher.
But what are the steps that you have to take to put your business in these high-flying positions in a local search? Below are a few tips that are quick and easy to implement that will set you and your business on the way to local hero status.
1. Optimise the website.
Although the whole process of optimising a website can be a complex and time consuming one, the wide range of tasks means that there are plenty of basics that are quick and easy victories that will provide instant improvements.
Below are some tips and actions that you can do that will help optimise the site:
Update your on-page SEO.
Google recognises the structure of a website, and by conforming to what it understands will help build the prominence and authenticity of your website. For this, you have to complete some keyword research – something that will be touched on a little later on in this article.
By making sure that everything from your website header to title and meta descriptions are populated in a consistent style, with the targeted keywords, will reinforce the site.
Add name, address and phone number (NAP) to the HTML of the website.
This simple yet effective step will help hugely with your local SEO. By having consistent information across the HTML of a website, as well as on your find us page, social media channels, Google listings and any other directories.
Build relationships for local backlinks.
A huge part of optimising your website for search engines involves help from third parties. By building good relationships with local bloggers, journalists – and even other businesses – you could explore the option of building backlinks by pitching any content or interesting stories that you have. Every time a website shares a link to your website, this provides reinforcement that is recognised, further improving your status.
Create local news
Tying in with building backlinks, this is essentially arming yourself for a pitch for the local bloggers and journalists that you feel worthy of telling the local community about. To get an idea of what sort of stories will work in your area, get to know what sort of things the local journalists like. By understanding what individual people like you can tailor your pitch accordingly for them.
2. Do the relevant keyword research
When trying to rank higher on Google, one thing to remember is that you are not trying to be unique in your strategy. Look at your local competitors who are leading the way and identify what they are doing.
A good place to start is to do a search as if you are trying to find your website. Once you have done this, find websites that were in the top results and study their web pages. Identify their URL structure, titles and meta-descriptions.
There are a variety of free and paid search tools available that will give you even more insights and data on keywords.
One of the best ways of understanding what ranks best with Google is by just starting to type keywords and phrases into the search bar and noting what suggested searches are coming up.
Another important thing to remember when strategising your keyword targets, is to understand who you simply can’t compete with. Larger organisations will always have the advantage to outrank you. This means that the keywords with medium to low competition are easier to rank on.
3. Get listed on Google
This is something that all new businesses should look to do almost immediately after its formation.
Using the Google My Business application, this free service is straightforward and easy to populate, allowing you to create a listing to your company that has a link to your website, the opening hours, your location on a map and other extras.
Having this listing set up will further authenticate your online presence, by actually having a pin on the map. The resulting listing will also give the customer all the information that they need at a glance, improving their trust in you.
And furthermore, there is a wide range of other directories and websites where you can list your local business that will benefit in different ways, providing backlinks as well as having your information listed on other websites. The more you get your name out there, the more likely it is that someone is going to find your details.
4. Reviews
Everyone has experienced reading reviews and knows what their benefits are. And this is backed up by data from studies.
It found that as many as 57% of people use Google primarily to find other people’s experiences and reviews of a particular business. As the reviews can be posted by anyone through an open forum, this also improves the trust customers have towards them – much more so than if it was a business telling them how great they are.
The main problem is getting people to actually leave reviews. The best way of getting people to leave a review is to actively encourage them to. This can be done in a variety of different ways; by email, on social media or even in person.
Should you start with this strategy and struggle, you could even try and incentivize it. Could you include an offer for customers who leave a review? Are there any other exclusive products or services that you could give people priority access to?
The benefits of having good reviews on the surface are clear to see, but they can also have a positive effect on your SEO rankings.
Good reviews are recognised by Google, as it uses them as a signal as to what people think of your business. Additionally, having these positive reviews that are easy to see on Google can increase your click-through rate, build social and local engagement and improve your rankings for the targeted keywords that you have already researched.
5. Social Media Check-Ins
Although a smaller cog in the wheel, this job could be seen as a longer-term project. But by having your location set up within the accounts, will make your outreach in the local area extremely wide.
Every time that someone checks in to the location of your business, it reinforces the link between company and address. The more check-ins you have, the more authentic you become and pushes your business ratings on Google up.
Similar to leaving reviews, you are probably going to have to ask people to check-in rather than relying on them to do it without prompting.
Depending on your business, some may face a challenge to get a check-in, as it is down to customer in-store experience. However, there can be ways to incentivise this.
One way would be to offer promotional offers and products. You could even offer to donate money to charity every time a milestone number of people check-in.
All of the above fundamental tips are quick and easy to implement, but the main thing to be aware of with any SEO strategy is to constantly monitor your results.
Things may take a little bit of time before you see an impact of your changes. There are naturally going to be short and long term ‘wins’.
By actively staying on your toes and keeping an eye on local competitors will give you the sought after visibility on Google.
So we’ve successfully commissioned and completed our brand project and we’ve got a shiny new brand identity sitting on the tarmac ready to take off.
What happens next will determine whether all the blood, sweat, and tears at the design stage will actually pay dividends or not.
The last thing that anyone wants is to have an amazing brand that is either applied inconsistently or hidden in a cupboard. This stage of the brand process is commonly called the Roll-out and is probably the most important stage in the process.
To help smooth the path of the Roll-out, welcome to your new best friend – the Brand Manual.
What is a Brand Manual?
The Brand Manual is the handbook that should be supplied when every new brand is taken out of its cardboard box. Look on it as an instruction booklet which explains the thinking behind the design of the new brand, the technical specifications of the design, and appropriate guidance as to how the brand should be applied to all the collateral that a company uses on which their brand appears.
So let’s take them one at a time. A new brand should speak for itself in terms of its ability to communicate an idea or theme. However, the Brand manual will probably show the old brand and give a brief synopsis as to the thinking behind the redesign. It’s also an opportunity to explain the less obvious elements that aren’t immediately obvious to the casual viewer.
A Great Example
One of the best examples is the FedEx logo and the directional arrow in the negative space between the e and x. Believe it or not a large percentage of people just don’t see it.
Next comes, the “tech spec”. Designers are a pretty precious bunch when it comes to their creations and rightly so. Consequently, they want to make absolutely sure that the brand is faithfully reproduced when a third party, which could include suppliers of printing, signage, vehicle livery, promotional goods and a host of others get hold of it.
Advice on the appropriate resolution of image, colour specifications, safe areas and formats, should be provided to ensure that when reproduced, the design looks exactly the same as it did when it was first presented to the client.
Finally, the manual will also show examples of how the brand applies to a representative range of items that the company plans to produce. This will differ in each instance but typically the brand will be shown on stationery, signage, vehicle livery and clothing. It will also give the designer the opportunity to recommend size, positioning, background colours and additional design elements.
Many Brand Manuals don’t stop there. It’s not uncommon, especially in larger companies, for the Brand Manual to extend to other aspects not directly related to the logo itself such as style of communication, tone of voice, imagery etc. However, unless you’re Google or Amazon it’s probably best to keep it succinct.
Show the world
So we’re now armed with our Brand Manual and are prepared to inflict bodily harm on anyone who doesn’t follow its guidance to the letter. How and when do we share it with the world?
There are two schools of thought – the “Hard Launch” or the “Soft Launch”.
Going hard means that a date is set for the launch and thereafter the old brand is completely replaced with the new version. Stocks of anything with the old brand on it are disposed of and new stock is ready to go on the date of the launch. It’s “out with the old and in with the new” in one fell swoop.
This approach can prove to be quite expensive and possibly environmentally unfriendly if, for example, large stocks of brochures, stationery and other printed material need to be disposed of. The advantage is that clarity, decisiveness and a feeling of positivity can be strategically used to influence how staff feel about the new brand and the company in general. Everyone likes to work for a company that is dynamic and single-minded in its vision.
The soft launch takes the foot off the throttle. A date can be set for the brand launch but the new identity is introduced much more gradually. So when stocks of printed material run out they are replaced with new branding. When finances allow, new signage is applied and vehicle livery changed. Inevitably there will be a changeover period where the old brand may coexist with the new until it is eventually replaced.
The downside to this approach is that it may portray the company as indecisive, conservative, and a bit less dynamic. There are really no rights or wrongs and much will depend on how determined the owners or managers are to implement the new brand and whether finances are available to speed the change.
Closing Thoughts
Finally, it’s always a good idea to keep your staff onside with what’s happening. Getting their “buy-in “ can often determine the successful roll-out of the brand. Including them in research sessions at the design stage, asking opinions, and explaining in detail the logic behind the process will all help to make them feel invested in the new brand. When staff feel proud and enthused about the image of their company that positivity will be apparent to customers.
A successful Brand Identity design and Roll-out project should result in a company feeling better about itself, looking better to its customers, and poised to capitalise on these feelings of progressiveness, dynamism and aspiration in its marketplace.
Coact is a great reporting tool but does need some finesse to use well. We’ve put together seven top tips to help you get started creating easy to understand reports.
Automatically updating reports
One great thing about Coact reports is the fact that, since they are connected directly to data sources, they constantly update as new data comes in. This means that your reports no longer need to be presented as static data. This prevent
s you having to build them every month and can instead send an online link that constantly updates with new information allowing you to pretty much set it and forget it.
Different ways to display data
Data in Coact can be presented in four different ways that each fit specific purposes:
Simple numbers showing an increase or decrease compared to the previous date range.
Tables that show the value of different metrics.
Graphs that visually display data over time.
Pie charts that display the breakdown of different shares of a data set
Knowing when to use each of these methods can make your reports a lot easier to understand and also a lot more impactful.
PDF Page Breaks
This one isn’t as obvious but it’s still incredibly important. When exporting reports to PDFs from Coact you have to make sure your page breaks are in the correct place and aren’t ruining your layout. You can tell where the PDF page break is going to be by a small arrow on the left hand side of the page.
Tabs
Along the top of your reports you can see the tabs menu. Using this allows you to separate different sections of your data into totally different pages. This is useful if you want to make your reports more organised and easier to read, since all data of one kind can be found in the same place.
We use this to separate traffic and SEO data into their own tabs which means everyone can find what they are looking for.
Don’t get too technical
As the one making the report, chances are you have a decent knowledge of what each and every metric means. However it’s likely the client you’re sending the report to doesn’t have this same level of knowledge so you need to be careful not to get too technical.
One good thing to include to keep things simple are a lot of visual graphs. Everyone understands graphs going upwards – generally – means growth and increases over time so including a lot of these will go a long way towards making your reports nice and easy to understand.
Another great thing to do is add a text box underneath all of your data to explain what it means. This works better on PDF exports since your explanation will match the data at the time you write it and may not make as much sense in a month once more data comes through.
Sometimes SEO and technical data can be a bit tricky to understand so adding both of these will make your reports much easier to read and understand for a client who may not be as well versed as you are.
Remove useless or irrelevant information
A lot of tables you pull from your data sources come with far too many metrics which can make them very difficult to read and require a lot of scrolling. For some people, the more data the better and for others it’s important to get to the point as quickly as possible with excess data just not relevant. Removing a lot of these pieces of data will focus your reports and make them much easier to understand.
7. Scale your blocks appropriately
In Coact you can change the size of every block you drop into your reports meaning every single piece of content is completely customisable. While it’s always good to fill the page and be large enough to read, it’s important not to make them too large so they look spread out.
If your table only has a couple of columns then keep the size small to avoid this. If you have columns that fill the whole page then by all means stretch them the whole way out.
With these tips you’ll be able to create better reports that are easier to understand and also easier to create. Coact is a great tool we’ve been enjoying and we think that more people should be making use of it in the industry.
