In 2023, the way to build customer loyalty has evolved into a complex yet essential component of a brand’s success and can be quite challenging to maintain, even if you’re one of the trendiest out there.

With more and more brands taking risks to build and secure customer loyalty, the playing field is extremely competitive. It’s not just about repeat purchases or compelling promotions, it’s about forging a genuine and lasting connection with your customers.

At Embryo, we have a range of experts that can help build customer loyalty. If you’re interested in working with us then call us today on 0161 327 2635 or email info@embryo.com.

Knowing Your Audience Helps

Customer loyalty works in various ways, but will always be necessary to any successful business. You first want to make yourself aware that if people don’t buy into your brand, then they won’t buy your products. In 2023, it’s important to be aware that they are not just repeat buyers, but also your brand advocates and are looking to build deeper relationships with your brand. You have to be able to resonate with your audience, which is achieved by closely monitoring your audience to establish what their needs are.

A 2021 report by Cheetah Digital revealed a 71% increase in consumers looking for brands to give them something exclusive or early access. This is something that we are seeing more often. Brands like O2, for example, offer O2 priority rewards, it’s available 24/7 and shares exclusive access to gigs- no wonder it’s one of the fastest-growing loyalty programs in the UK. It just establishes how essential that brands reward long-term consumers to improve their chances of maintaining their loyalty.

Currently, in a landscape, where the cost of living is at an all-high, even long-standing customers are more aware than ever of what brands are doing to support them, meaning that they are more likely to jump ship for a brand offering a similar product if their loyalty program is better. With that being said, I think when you strip it back, it goes deeper than just affordability or what you’re doing to help customers during a financial crisis and there needs to be emphasis on your community.

Building Foundations Equals Building Customer Loyalty

In 2023, brands need to be focusing more on building the foundations with their customers, understanding what they want from you is most beneficial in increasing the likelihood of building and maintaining mutual respect to encourage a loyal customer base. Your customers need to believe in you and understand the foundations and the core values that your brand is built on and that you have them as your priority. It’s clear to see that exclusivity is a huge step in the right direction for building foundations that contribute to the retention of loyal customers.

Starbucks recently revealed their new tiered system for rewarding customer loyalty. Each membership provides different rewards, with one offering a free drink on your birthday. This allows customers to choose which one will suit their needs most, placing more control back on the customer, which is likely to make them feel more respected and valued. Again, in a competitive digital landscape, your brand needs to find a way to stand out, so by offering an app where you’re able to track your rewards, which is a quick and simple way for customers to keep customers engaged with your brand.

Loyalty schemes are something that has developed more and become extremely prevalent in the current landscape. However, understanding why this is so important from a psychological perspective, there’s less emphasis on the incentives and promotions themselves, but establishing them as a way to connect with your audience on a deeper level, fosters community building, resonating your values with your audience and building trust.

What Is Personal Branding and How Can It Help Build Customer Loyalty?

Personal branding is a great way to communicate your company’s values and missions, allowing consumers to understand what it is you’re passionate about, what your brand represents and whether or not you are something they want to support.  It allows the consumer to connect with your band on another level, thus making you seem more relatable and in turn, easier to trust and buy into. This is something health-related brands can capitalise on extremely well as it’s an emotionally charged subject.

What do you do to support your local community or the industry you work in? It’s a great question to ask yourself when looking to build loyal relationships with consumers, they want to know that you care about them and that you’re advocating for positive change within your industry. It just makes you stand out from a professional view and something that they can share with their friends, like “Did you hear XYZ, the pet brand teamed up with their local animal shelter to provide free meals and toys etc.” Identifying a way to integrate deeper into your industry can help distinguish your longevity whilst acknowledging your corporate social responsibilities.

According to a study by Edelman, two-thirds of consumers now buy on beliefs and brands are now having to up their game and become more strategic with their marketing. One way to achieve this is consistency, creating a product line or branding campaign that is consistent with the core values and overall design of the brand can help communicate the right message, thus building trust and customer loyalty.

With personal branding, comes a personal touch. What really can set a business apart from another? Whether it’s your branding itself, your website, or your social media, what makes you distinctive is something that can build your brand. Consumers are more likely to not only remember you but want to come back to you, we can compare this to when you find a funny TikTok and go back hours later to see if they have posted new content, it all works similarly.

By incorporating personal branding into your business strategy, you open up a clear pathway to communicate your brand’s mission and values. This allows customers to connect with your brand on a deeper level, which ultimately establishes trust between you and your customers, effectively building customer loyalty.

Competitor Analysis

When looking to build customer loyalty, It comes as no secret that competitor analysis can help you tailor your strategies to reach the right audience. It allows you to identify what your competitors are doing for their customers and what is most successful, which can help you to know your audience better.

Competitor analysis can often help brands distinguish customer expectations, which can help to tailor products and services to meet their needs and this can create an environment where the customer feels part of the brand, building trust.

Competitor analysis is great for helping tailor fundamental strategies, like differentiation strategies and customer retention strategies. Establishing what your competitors are doing is a great way to avoid running campaigns or releasing a product line that looks like carbon copies, it’s a great way to set you apart and demonstrate originality. It gives the unique advantage of understanding where there is a gap in the market for you to penetrate.

By spotting gaps you can help identify a need for something and provide a solution. l, which enables you to saturate a market to meet specific needs of consumers which can help build more awareness around your brand, which will ultimately lead to a more loyal customer base.

By including competitor analysis in your customer loyalty strategy, you can tailor your approach to reach the right audience by identifying what your competitors are doing successfully. This gives you understanding and helps you meet customer expectations and build trust. Competitor analysis is valuable for shaping differentiation and customer retention strategies to help avoid duplication, identifying those gaps in the market to brand awareness, and ultimately retaining more loyal customers.

In Digital PR, we conduct competitor analysis for our clients to establish the industry that they sit in, which allows us to tailor our strategy accordingly and spot the best opportunities to achieve the highest ROI for our clients.

Feedback and Improvements

Your customers are at the forefront of any successful business model, so it’s vital to listen to their needs and thoughts.

A lot of brands offer the ability to leave a review or complete a survey whilst on the platform to help improve the user experience. These are things that I’m seeing more of especially in 2023 as it’s a quick and effective way to let customers have their say. By giving them the opportunity to consumers to share their thoughts and feelings, you place them as a priority and allow them to feel heard, which improves your reputation. This can help brands connect with their customers, gaining a deeper understanding of what their customers need the most.

How to Leverage Positive Feedback

From a Digital PR perspective, leveraging positive feedback can be extremely useful to include on your website, placed in press releases and highlight what your brand is doing to become more innovative, improve customer satisfaction and increase brand visibility.

Conclusion

In the current landscape, knowing your audience and having a deeper understanding of your customers is going to be one of, if not the most important to be aware of, in establishing trust and loyalty. This goes hand in hand, with competitor analysis, which will give you all the tools to approach and implement successful tailored strategies.

If you’d like to learn how Embryo can help you build customer loyalty or any of our other digital marketing services, then give us a call on 0161 327 2635 or email info@embryo.com.

When things get more expensive businesses aren’t the only ones who think to make expenditure cutbacks. So, with consumers looking to reduce their spend they are more likely to question and weigh up their purchases. This is why the customer buyer journey is longer and more complicated, or in some cases ‘messier’. With this in mind, it’s more important than ever for businesses to continue to build a brand that consumers can discover, trust and purchase from.

So if your business needs to keep spending, how can you spend it wisely? Here we look into what marketing channels and activities you should be investing in in 2023.

Search Visibility

As the consumer buying journey gets ‘messier’ and consumers look for more information before making purchases, businesses should ensure they invest in their online search visibility. Whether they do this through paid search (PPC) or organic search (SEO, content and digital PR) or both, will depend on budgets and specific goals. However, both these channels can ensure your business is found when consumers are searching for your products and services.

Investing time, effort and budget into having a strong search strategy built around relevant keywords your target audience uses will ensure your brand is at the top of Google. Investing in content marketing can also support this as you can create content that answers the questions your target audience is asking. Then when they find your content through Google searches, you can showcase your expertise and build their trust in your brand before they make a purchase.

Email Marketing

On average people receive over 100 emails every single day. So if you want your email marketing campaigns to stand out you need to invest your time, resources and budget wisely. From creative and eye-catching subject lines to interesting content and engaging CTAs which encourage your audience to take the actions you desire, there’s more to email marketing than just sharing your latest news using a standard MailChimp template.

Before 2023 officially starts we recommend you assess your email marketing data, not only to check that it’s up-to-date and accurate but also to see if you have segmented your audience correctly. By segmenting your audience you can also segment your content and messages to ensure you generate the best results.

It’s also important to look at the content you’re sharing, if you’re sharing too much content just to fill out your template you’re likely to be watering down your important content and distracting or confusing your audience from what they should actually be engaging with.

Still don’t think you should care much for email marketing? Well, Statista found that revenue from email marketing will reach almost 11 billion by the end of next year. Now, do you want to miss out on that?

Video

Video marketing has been on the rise for years, and I’m sure when you saw this you thought ‘shock horror’. However, it’s true. Video especially in short form that can be shared on social media will continue to increase in popularity in 2023 and drive engagements and results.

The growth of platforms like TikTok which had 1.2 billion monthly users in Q4 2021, is predicted to reach 1.8 billion monthly users by the end of 2022.

This is why brands that don’t want to get left behind should be investing in video and especially that for the purpose of sharing on social media. Your videos can help demonstrate your products and quickly grab the attention of your audience as they’re scrolling through the different platforms.

Our key piece of advice though, just because you should incorporate social media video in your marketing activities doesn’t necessarily mean you can film anything and hope for the engagements to come flooding in. A lot of social videos have success thanks to trends. This is especially true for TikTok which has a trending sounds section helping creators to join the hype and get the content discovered by a wider audience.

Brand & Values

As consumers look to scrutinise their purchases more harshly and carry out more research into brands that they want to buy from. Businesses should look to invest more in brand awareness activities. However, to do this and see successful results businesses need to ensure their brand is established and truly the business they want to be. More often than not, you find businesses that think a brand just means a logo and perhaps some fonts and colours, but it’s much more than that. Your brand is your business’s identity, it should include what you believe in, your standards and everything else you want your consumers to know or think about when they interact with you.

An authentic brand that showcases what it stands for will be extremely powerful in 2023. One example that demonstrates this is Twitter. The social platform used to be one of the most popular, until Elon Musk purchased the platform and started making changes. With these changes not resonating with users, it’s not surprising that the platform has seen many deleting their accounts.

Another example is sustainability. Research from Google found that 55% of UK consumers believe it is more important for companies to behave more sustainably since Covid-19.  They also found that 72% of consumers say that having a brand’s values align with their own is a deciding factor when making a purchase. Stats like these show just how powerful your brand and its values can be for success in 2023.

So there are a few areas we believe you should be focusing your attention and budget on next year. Though if you’re still undecided as to how best to invest your marketing budget, get in touch with one of our experts who can discuss ways to improve your marketing activities and achieve the results you deserve.

Finding it hard to target users on other platforms like social or in the SERPs?

Want to improve the impact of your sales, new launches and promotional strategies?

Email marketing does all of this and more.

Email marketing is, for many businesses, a core part of their marketing strategy. The power of email marketing comes from the fact that email marketing works with some of the most engaged customers or potential customers your brand has. 

In the world of B2C marketing, things move fast and the sheer volume of messages users see flashing by every day is growing all the time, so standing out and communicating clearly and regularly with your customers is vital to ensure you’re staying at the very front of their minds.

In this guide, we’ll share our knowledge on the importance of email marketing for B2C businesses, and share some useful facts to make the case for B2C email marketing in your next strategy!

Why use B2C Email Marketing?

B2C email marketing is incredibly powerful, and brands have picked up on that! More B2C organisations than ever are using email marketing, and are using it as a core marketing tool in their overarching strategy. Essentially, if you don’t want to get left behind, email marketing is a must.

1) 33% of marketers send weekly emails and 26% send emails multiple times per month. 37% of brands are increasing their email budget according to Hubspot.

2) 77% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months.

3) Email marketing revenue is estimated to reach almost 11 billion by the end of 2023. 

4) 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach customers. 

5) 59% of respondents say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions.

Email Marketing Demographics and Usage Statistics

Thousands of your competitors are probably already using email marketing to bring in new customers, engage the ones they already have, and increase the impact of sales, and new drops, and leverage brand loyalty. 

Of course “everyone else is doing it” isn’t always the best reason to try something. However, these trends are continuing to happen on an increasingly wider scale – and that’s because email marketing works. 

Email marketing is one of, if not the largest, consumer marketing channels available to advertisers and marketing teams today. Email marketing is something that billions of people can receive, and are receptive to. 

Particularly in the EU, where GDPR laws require users to actively opt-in to receiving marketing emails, companies can feel confident that in most cases, their content is going to already-engaged audiences with awareness and loyalty to their brand, and a real interest in what they have to offer.

This, combined with the sheer number of users on email is a recipe for success that thousands of businesses can take advantage of.

6) There are 4 billion daily email users.

7) People use email often — 58% of adults check their email first thing in the morning.

8) Smartphone users prefer to receive brand communications via email (and almost 85% of the world’s population are smartphone users)]

Email Marketing Best Practices

Of course, you can’t just dump out email content simply for the sake of doing it. The best campaigns (of any kind!) are well planned, and intentional and offer genuine value to consumers.

Subscriber segmentation is the most effective email marketing campaign strategy – segmented emails receive more engagement and make more money as a result. Segmentation in email marketing can be done almost entirely automatically if set up properly, and markets can be segmented based on almost any attribute. As well as normal demographic measures like age, gender, and region, many email marketing platforms allow users to segment based on more complex criteria. Things like the date of their most recent purchase, whether they’ve opened one, more, or a specific email in the past, their birthday or birthdays of a loved one, what kind of products they’ve bought previously, or almost any other parameter you can think of!

9) A majority of marketers using email leverage mobile-friendly emails as part of their marketing strategy. 40% of people 18 years old and under will always open an email on their mobile first.

10) Spam testing your emails is vital and leads to higher ROI. 15.8% of all emails actually go missing or get picked up and filtered out by spam filters, so avoiding this wherever possible will improve your email’s effectiveness. 

11) In fact, email marketing that goes through testing can give up to 28% higher returns.

12) Emails with personalised subject lines see up to a 26% increase in open rates.

13) Why not try an abandoned cart strategy for e-commerce? 60% of shoppers returned to complete their purchase after receiving a personalised abandoned cart email.

Email marketing is a powerful, powerful tool for B2C businesses, and we’ve only scratched the surface here. To learn more about email marketing, or to see how the team at Embryo can enhance your email marketing, get in touch!

Some facts are surprising, such as the average person is exposed to around 5,000 logos per day. While some just seem bizarre, for example, the fact that ​​it is illegal to own just one guinea pig in Switzerland because they get lonely?

No matter how strange some facts may seem, they are essential for making key decisions in life. So we decided to write this blog to compose a series of fun facts about digital marketing that may influence your strategies. If you’d like more support with your digital marketing feel free to get in touch with our team on 0161 327 2635 or by emailing info@embryo.com.

Digital Marketing

• 65% of businesses have accelerated their digital marketing due to the Covid-19 pandemic. 
• 72% of the marketing budget will be spent on digital activities.
• 43% of businesses don’t have an app. 
• Over the coming year, 45 per cent of marketers plan to work on website optimisation to improve digital consumer experience.
• 70% of consumers strongly believe that the product with the greatest rating or review influences them,  while another 67% say they are seeking the best price.
• Over 77% of digital marketers invested in data to improve their digital marketing in 2021.

SEO 

• Around 64% of marketers actively invest in SEO.
• 89% of businesses rely on organic search as their most effective distribution channel.
• Google has stated that in 2022, heightened emotions are driving searches.
• Studies have shown that 94% of the world’s content gets no external links. 
• The first organic search results on Google account for 32.5% of traffic share for a search term.
• 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. 
• Only 5.7% of pages will rank in the top 10 search results within a year of being published.
• Only one or two words make up 70.87 per cent of keywords with more than 10,000 monthly searches.
• Over the last year Google searches for ‘in stock’ have grown over 700%.

Content Marketing

• The top three organic content distribution channels that B2B marketers use are social media (89%), email (87%) and their blog/website (86%). 
• Content with relevant imagery gets around 94% more views.
• Titles with 6-13 words attract the highest and most consistent amount of traffic (this blog has 7, maybe that’s why you’re here!?). 
• WordPress users produce nearly 70 million new posts each month.
• The average consumer attention span is 8 seconds so you need to make your content count!
• 85% of online content is less than 1000 words. However, long-form content (more than 1000 words) receives more shares and links. 
• B2C content is more likely to be emotionally-based, focusing on making the customer feel good about a purchase.
• 84% of consumers expect companies to produce entertaining and helpful content experiences.
• Businesses that have a blog experience twice as much email traffic as businesses that don’t.

Email Marketing

• 87% of B2B marketers include email marketing in their strategy.
• The average open rate within the retail industry is 12.6%, compared to financial services which is 24.8%. 
• Emails sent on a Friday receive a higher open and click rate than those sent on other days of the week.
• A study found that 49% of all emails are opened on a mobile device.
• 41% of millennials check their work email in bed, either before or after work.

Social and Paid Media 

• In 2021 the UK digital ad spend grew 16.8% to over £19.23 billion. 
• In early 2022, a survey of digital marketers found that they spent 15.97% of their marketing budget on social media.
• The average amount of daily time that internet users aged 16 to 64 spend using social media is 1 hour and 49 minutes. (Hootsuite)
• LinkedIn is the platform where B2B buyers are more likely to share professional content.
• Posts shared on the weekend get 27.3% more interactions than those ok weekdays. 
• TikTok is the fastest growing social media platform, with over 2 billion downloads. (Here’s more information on how powerful TikTok can be for your digital strategy). 
• There’s been a 30% increase in consumers saying that TikTok has influenced their online purchases. (Jungle Scout)
• The number of tweets shared in 2020 decreased by 10%. 
• Search ads can increase brand awareness by 80% and display advertising has proven to increase traffic to a website by 300%.
• 77% of consumers will choose a brand over a competitor after having a positive experience with a brand on social media. 
• 91% of executives predict their social media marketing budget will increase over the next three years, with the majority expecting this increase to be more than 50%.  
• The top four reasons social media users will unfollow a brand are poor quality of product or support (49%), poor customer service (49%), irrelevant content (45%) and too many ads (45%).
• Infographics are liked and shared on social media 3 times more than other forms of content

Video Marketing

• Nearly 40% of marketers say the Covid-19 pandemic impacted their plans to include video in their strategies. 
• 84% of businesses say that using video has helped them generate leads. 
• By year-end 2022 video viewers worldwide will hit 3.37 billion. 
• 78% of people say they have watched a live stream over the last 12 months. 
• Online videos will account for more than 82 per cent of all consumer internet traffic by 2022.
• Video content receives twice as many shares than any other form of content, including social media posts. 
• 67% of viewers will stop watching a video before it ends.  
• 95% of marketers say that video has helped consumers to better understand their products and/or services. 
• When asked how they’d most like to learn about a product or service, 69% of consumers said they’d prefer to watch a short video.
• In 2020, videos with #WithMe in the title gained over 2 billion views.
• According to Comscore, the amount of time individuals 55 and older spend watching YouTube videos increased by 10% between May 2020 and May 2021.

Hopefully, these facts have provided you with something to think about for the day as well as satisfied the need for new information! If any of the above has sparked some interest and you’d like to discuss any of these further with the team at Embryo then give the team a call on 0161 327 2635 or get in touch. 

BONUS FACT: Google images were created after the search engine received many searches of Jennifer Lopez’s dress at the Grammys in 2000. 

Today I’ll be looking at two examples of how data inaccuracies led to some catastrophic outcomes.

Using Excel to store too much Data

It’s a well-known fact that during the pandemic, data provided by the government and leading health organisations across the world helped us understand the spread of the virus. The general public was able to access huge swathes of data from countries all over the world and collate it into some pretty nifty-looking dashboards.

How The Uk Dealt With Dealt With New Cases

The UK Government spent a huge sum of taxpayers’ money trying to track the spread. And one step they went wrong was using Excel to store everything. All new cases were entered into one master spreadsheet. The inaccuracy in this instance? Row limits…

Excel is one of the world’s most used software packages. I was never a big fan of it at school until I learned how useful the functions, and combination of functions could be I steered clear of it. While working at another company that sounds like a rainforest I quickly learned that it struggles when trying to use vast amounts of data, which is why there is a limit in place for the total amount of rows.

While a simple CSV (Comma Separated Value) file can contain any amount of rows or columns, Excel has the ability to load 1,048,576 rows and 65,536 columns. If they seem like strange numbers it does follow a pretty basic principle.

If we look at the 14-bit row feature we can see how it quickly stacks up 2×2^20 = 1,048,576 rows to have 2 bits in each. Not so strange numbers after all.

How Did It Go Wrong Then?

All of the test centres were sending over CSV files, but many of them were saved from a format you may be familiar with .xls. This file format is the predecessor of the latest release whose file format is xlsx. and the former can only contain 65,000 rows. Any indexed on the first system past that point was simply missed when uploaded to the main spreadsheet.

There are reports that this only affected the final data outcomes when it came to reporting, which is one of the most crucial elements of the job.

Apparently, those who were infected, but left off the final sheet were still contacted by the laboratory that conducted the test.

A file extension was to blame. More precisely the people that chose the format to save it in.

Missile Defence System Get’s Timing Wrong.

In 1991 an American US base was hit by an Iraqi SCUD missile during the first Gulf War. Tragically 28 US Servicemen lost their lives and it was due to a rounding error.

The Patriot missile system had an advanced computer system on board to calculate the trajectory of incoming missiles but it needed to accurately know the time to be able to do this. Once the system had been booted up and the onboard computer started running, a small timing error rounded down every passing second. This in turn compounded over time until the error became so great that the interceptors missed their targets.

Although this is a grim depiction of data inaccuracies, rounding floating point errors appear quite a lot throughout the course of our technological advancements. Even NASA made the mistake, losing a billion-dollar probe in the process.

What Can You Do To Avoid Data Inaccuracies?

Knowing they exist is enough, I had no idea that rounding errors caused a space probe to be lost until going through University where I learned the fundamentals of data inaccuracies.

Going over the data with a fine tooth comb is always worth the time. This is why 80% of an Analysts job is the cleaning and transforming the data to make sure it’s in good shape.

Check the data types are all as they should be. If a column of numbers has been stored as a string, you can’t add them up. You’d be able to create a histogram from the occurrences of the same digits, but that is another issue.

Exploratory Data Analysis

Data visualisations can help you see if your data is correct. If dates haven’t been formatted correctly, you may see gaps in time where you know something should be happening. They don’t need to be complex works of art, you can work on that later, just a simple line chart to see if the results are what you were expecting.

Running experiments with different types of graphs can show you if something is wrong with the data. If it’s poorly formatted then you’ll more than likely run into errors.

Running simple code such as all_sales.describe() in python is an excellent way to summarise your data.

Using other short pieces of code and chaining them you can see if there’s any missing data such as all_sales.isna().sum() which shows you in total how many entities are missing. Knowing that 25 of 1,000 might not be too useful. Take it further and show it as a percentage round((all_sales.isna().sum()/all_sales.shape[0])*100,2) to get a better idea.

Data Services From Us

If you need some expert analysis and someone to find the gaps in your data or don’t want to deal with data inaccuracies then get in touch with a member of the team, you can find me on LinkedIn posting visuals and sharing some really insightful stuff back to the community. Or you could head over to our contact page and send us a message!

Check Out Some Of The Other Musings From Embryo Employees

The benefits of posting on LinkedIn daily – By Dylan Heath

Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day: Why Patience Is The Key To Content Marketing – By Charlie Meyler

But what are the benefits of posting on LinkedIn daily?

It’s helped me to develop my personal brand, expand my network, and connect with new faces to listen to and learn from.

So, what have I learned from the experience?

That’s what I’ll be taking a look at in today’s blog post.

From the good, the bad, and the downright mind-numbing, here’s everything you need to know about posting on LinkedIn daily!

Why did I decide to do it?

I’ve been a writer for 7 years, so writing content online isn’t new to me.

In fact, it’s something that I’ve probably started to avoid doing in my spare time outside of work to give myself some “rest” away from the keyboard.

The problem with this is that it leaves me only ever writing for work purposes. And that’s not a sustainable way to keep my metaphorical blade sharp – without writing content that you love, you’ll create content that’s blunt, dulled, and without much of a point.

*I hope you’re enjoying the sword metaphor as it’ll be a running theme throughout this post.*

So how do you fix that?

Well, it’s simple, dear reader – you find a way to write away from work, about topics that you enjoy, on a medium that you find easy and familiar.

Enter LinkedIn…

What I’ve enjoyed about it

I’ve always enjoyed writing and I’ve always been pretty good at it too.

Naturally, I put 2 and 2 together and became a writer by trade.

It’s been an incredible journey so far, but being a writer can be a fatiguing role. Hitting word counts, managing different target audience profiles, and remembering just how to position every one of your clients perfectly is difficult and it’s easy to let it get on top of you.

That’s why it’s been so important to find a way to practice my skills and sharpen my sword in a way that I find productive, easy to manage, and not too time-consuming.

Here’s why I think LinkedIn posting has been a great tool for me as a writer:

I’m writing for myself

When you write for a living, you’ll find that you’re creating a crazy amount of words every single day, but none of them is from your point of view.

You’re creating and creating and creating, but you never give yourself a space to create something that releases your thoughts, feelings, and energy effectively.

But with LinkedIn, you’ve got the perfect opportunity to do exactly that.

There’s a character limit of 1300 characters, which means you’ve got plenty of space to write something meaningful and thought-provoking, but not enough room to waffle on for too long.

It’s a happy medium that I’m sure you’ll find easy to use to your advantage.

You’ve probably heard that steel sharpens steel and the same is true for writing too… kind of…

As a writer you need to ensure that you’re writing the right kinds of content from the right perspective – it’s easy to churn out thousands of words on a project that you’re working on, but when you factor in your KPIs and deadlines, it’s probably not the ideal piece to use as a change to grow and improve your technique.

On LinkedIn, all the pressure is off and you’ll be able to write what you want when you want – it’s all about you, so put on your thinking cap and create something magical!

It’s made my writing leaner

I mentioned that LinkedIn has a character limit, and I think that’s been a godsend.

As a long-form content writer, I’m naturally inclined to write long pieces of content that are designed to rank effectively and position my client’s businesses in the optimum SERP positions.

Whilst this is perfect for my line of work, it does leave me with a tendency to write more words than the LinkedIn algorithm allows.

But with these confines in mind, I find the content that I create for LinkedIn to be quite freeing.

I’m not thinking about optimisation or keywords or performance, I’m just trying to put my thoughts and opinions across in a way that’s easy to digest and fun to engage with.

This character limit has also helped me to make my content much leaner – when you’re working within a limit, every word needs to earn a place in the post and everything irrelevant or boring is slashed away with my super-sharp content sword.

There’s no room for filler in a LinkedIn post and that’ll help you to learn how to get to the point and deliver the killer information that your audience needs, and Google is now also favouring this type of content too after their Helpful Content update!

It’s grown my network significantly

You’d be shocked by how much something as simple as a bit of increased activity can send your followers and connections through the roof.

As I wasn’t intending to do anything other than work on my craft, I haven’t got the statistics to show you my account growth, but what I do know is that I’ve got a timeline that’s far more active and way more engaging as a result.

And that’s what LinkedIn is all about – connecting with like-minded people who share your skills and interests.

It’s a place to share and receive guidance in equal amounts, whilst also establishing your expertise and growing your brand.

As with your website, the impact of fresh, regular content that shows people that you’re living, breathing, and active is one of the biggest positive factors that you could feel.

If you’re committed to it, you’ll see the rewards. That’s a fact.

The challenges I’ve faced

It’s not all been easy, though.

There have been a couple of hiccups and tough spots that I’ve faced that have, for one reason or another, got in the way of me posting as regularly as I’d like to.

If you’re thinking about ramping up your social activity to improve your writing or grow your brand, it’s important to account for some of the difficulties that you might end up being faced with.

Here are a couple of the things that stopped me in my tracks over the past couple of months:

Trying to think of something meaningful EVERY DAY can be tough

Some days are slow.

You head to work, you get your tasks completed, and you go home to relax.

Before you know it, you’re tucked up in bed with your book and a cup of tea.

Or maybe I’m just boring?

For the sake of this post, let’s pretend that I’m NOT boring and that there are others out there who have days that fly by without anything of note happening just like I do.

On those days, it’s hard to find what to write about, especially when you’re trying to be as authentic as possible.

LinkedIn is full of people talking utter nonsense, so you probably don’t want to add to that landfill of content by writing just for the sake of writing.

Not just that, but writing “just because” won’t help you to sharpen that sword either – it’d be like swinging your blade against the summer air, it looks great but it’s not doing anything purposeful and you look a bit silly in the process.

If you want it to work, you’ve got to be choosing something that you want to talk about and that you’ll be able to offer genuine insight into.

With that being said, the biggest takeaway from my experience is this:

If you feel like you don’t have anything meaningful or insightful to post, just don’t. 

LinkedIn is so, SO saturated

It feels like there are a trillion posts a day on LinkedIn, which makes it feel almost impossible to stand out on the timeline.

The problem here isn’t necessarily the amount of content, but the amount of bad/lacklustre content that’s posted every minute of every day just to fill space and signal activity.

And that’s without mentioning all of the cynicism that we see online these days!

So it is up to you to find ways to stand out.

Think of what makes you stop in your tracks and pay attention when you’re scrolling and it’ll likely be one of or a combination of the following:

• An image or graphic that goes beyond the norm
• Emojis that highlight key points 
• A bold opening statement
• Controversial messaging
• Phrasing that evokes emotion

Now, this isn’t me telling you to be controversial in your posts, but there’s no harm in phrasing things in a way that’ll grab attention and get people to read on.

As a writer, your job is to take the reader from one line to the next and influence their behaviour.

And if you’re not doing that, you might need to rethink the way that you’re approaching your content writing process.

What are the best SEO LinkedIn accounts to follow?

Of course, there are a couple of accounts that I love on LinkedIn – they’re insightful, they’re engaging, and they keep you wanting more.

If you’re looking to bulk up your timeline with some top-quality insights from some of the leading experts in the industry, here are our top suggestions that you NEED to follow:

• Embryo’s Friday Five
• Brad Geddes
• Jay Baer
• Brian Dean
• Marsha Collier
• Ryan Darani
• Joanna Wiebe
• Ross Hudgens
• James Laurain
• Sarena Tseng
• Andrew Holland

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to curating the perfect LinkedIn timeline, but by following these accounts, you’ll be off to a great start.

If you’re on the lookout for the best content marketing team in the business, get in touch with us today to find out how our expertly-crafted content can help you to elevate your organic success to unprecedented levels.

Don’t worry if you’ve been slacking when it comes to keeping your writing sword sharp – we’ve been sharpening our swords so you’ll never have to.

However, tens, if not hundreds, of emails drop into every user’s inbox every day of the year, so what makes some of these so much more interesting and engaging (and profitable) to users?

To be perfectly honest, there are millions of different factors that can affect the open rate of your marketing emails, but they can generally be grouped into just a few key categories:

• Lack of trust
• Lack of value
• Lack of understanding

Not to worry though! Right now we’re off to take a look at each of these key categories and a few common, easily overlooked (and easily fixed) ways to build up your email marketing strategy where it’s lacking.

Email marketing is just one part of successful marketing campaigns. To really leverage the power of email, other channels – both organic and paid – need to be incorporated. At Embryo, we can assist with all of these channels thanks to our full-service capabilities. If you’re interested in learning more, get in touch with our team by phone at 0161 327 2635, email at info@embryo.com, or alternatively, hit the contact button below.

Contact Us

Lack of Trust = Users Don’t Trust or Recognise Your Emails Enough to Open Them

With that many emails dropping into their inboxes every day, users need to do a massive amount of rapid-fire mental filtering to get the content they want, and to bin the rest mentally!

There’s a lot of talk about engaging subject lines (which are very very very very important), but in order to get through that brain filter, your emails have to be SUPER easily recognisable to your users, otherwise, all your lovely subject line work is in vain!!

Choose a familiar “from” name

If your users know you by a certain name, always use that one. For B2C brands, it’ll probably just be your company name, but “X person from X company” can also work, as long as it’s not too long and won’t get lost! If you’re a B2B company or use a model where your users have one key contact at your business, you can get away with using just that contact’s name.

At the end of the day, like all things emails, it’s all about tailoring to your audience (more on that later). The best “from” name is the one that is most familiar to them, whatever that looks like!

Use personalisation in your “to” field and subject lines

When you personalise the “to” field and subject lines with information your users have given to you, you’re immediately more trustworthy. If somewhere has their details, most people assume they have given them over willingly to a reputable company, meaning they must be safe to open.

Direct address is also more engaging – people see their own name and immediately feel like a message is meant personally for them.

Subject line, subject line, subject line

While a subject line can’t save you from all email blunders, it’s still your most valuable tool when it comes to increasing your open rate. There is far too much that goes into a subject line to talk about right now, but there are loads and loads of guides and tools out there that can help you strike that perfect balance between enticing without being spammy. A few of my favourites are MailNinja’s Subject Line Checker, MailChimp’s Best Practices, and OptInMonster’s list of 164(!!!!!) great subject lines.

Lack of Value = Users Learn There Is No Value for Them in Your Emails

It’s easy to use your emails as a newsletter platform and as a way to promote your business directly. Email marketing is great at that! 

BUT (and it’s a very big but)…

Only if there is value for the user as well.

Users don’t really care about the ins and outs of your business unless it impacts them. So hold off on the stuff that only matters to you, and ask with every send “Where is the value for the user? What benefit does opening this email have for them?”

Your emails are all about you

As a branding exercise, it’s important to talk about yourself and your business in promotional emails. I’m not saying you should cancel your newsletter and never update your users again unless its a BIG SUMMER SALE !!!!!!!!

Often, newsletters do have value – they make customers feel included and engaged with your business, build loyalty and increase transparency and trust.

 Your emails don’t add value to your customers’ lives

However, make sure a newsletter isn’t all about you. Offering advice, downloads, resources and other pieces of value will ensure you can talk about yourself, without it being all about you.

You’ve got bad design 

Badly designed emails might be full of valuable information, but can anyone find it? When it comes to email ensign, there are lots of different design considerations to be taken into account alongside your regular beautiful design principles!

An email that isn’t designed for different email clients, screen sizes or dark mode will tank your readability and conversions, even if you’re not struggling for lack of value!

Lack of Understanding = You’ve Not Understood (Or Misunderstood) Your Customer’s Wants and Needs

As we mentioned before, success in email marketing is almost entirely based on tailoring activity to your list. Best practice can only get you so far – you need to know who they are, why they are there and what it is they’re looking for.

You also need to understand their usage patterns and the ways they live their lives. This often (particularly for new lists and smaller lists) comes down to a fair bit of trial and error to begin with – that’s okay! The most important thing is building that understanding of your list so you can better serve them in the future.

You haven’t segmented your email lists

The more information, the better, and segmentation is a massive part of this. When you have lots of user information (this can be given by the user or done internally), you’re able to better tailor your offering to them. 

You can segment by almost any category – age, gender, whether they’re in a relationship, whether they have children, if they’re a student or not, the sector they work in, the job title they have, if they’ve purchased from you before if they regularly open your emails, where they signed up, the products or services they’ve bought from you in the past, the list truly is almost endless!

You’re sending too many emails

Your list is fatigued – essentially the email marketing version of the boy who cried wolf. Send too many emails that users aren’t interested in and you risk them dropping off completely, which is really the worst-case scenario, as once they’re gone, you can very rarely get them back.

This is also where segmentation comes into play – if you have a subset of users that opens every single message you send and regularly interacts or converts from your emails, then feel free to send them content more regularly! If they care about it they’ll continue to open it. However, there will be other users who just don’t care that much. They want to know about new drops and sales for example, but they don’t need much beyond that and will become fatigued if you send them content too often.

You’re not tailoring your send times

It seems like common sense, but send emails when people have time to read them  

The times that will be best for your list are (surprise surprise) unique to your list. If your target demographics are professionals, early to mid-morning tends to be best, while afternoons drop with the traditional 3 pm productivity slump. Think about your target audience and what might work for them and their lifestyles, and then test, test, and test again.

It’s Vital You Get Your Email Marketing Done Properly. So, Why Not Speak to Our Experts Today?

This is by no means an exhaustive list of reasons people aren’t opening your marketing emails. However, they’re pretty common, and even if you’re not having trouble with these specific issues, thinking about your problems in terms of trust, value and understanding can be a pretty good place to start.

Of course, the team at Embryo are always here to help you with your digital marketing, be it email marketing, SEO, social media, PPC, PR or website design & development. Get in touch and have a chat with us to see how we can help!

Contact Us

Before we get into the how, first consider what would represent a big client for your agency; are you aiming for a particular retainer value? Is it a household name – an iconic brand that your team would love to get under the bonnet of (and, let’s face it, which you can use on marketing collateral to win future business – hey there, social proof). Or perhaps you’ve identified an industry on the cusp of a massive growth curve. For the purposes of this piece, we’ve focused on the goal being working with more established organisations with a larger budget than your agency may have previously encountered.  

Don’t forget your marketing 101’s!

Working for a marketing organisation, you should (hopefully!) be au fait with many of the strategic marketing approaches used in customer acquisition, and appealing to new clients as an agency should be no different. The Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning model will help you to tease out what you should be doing to get in front of your dream client. There’s no one-size-fits all approach to list out what Brand X, Y or Z would love to see from an agency, so take a tailored approach. It might be that you already have a clear understanding of who your ideal client is, in which case top marks, and you can skip this bit. 

Segmentation: define the segments of the market; is it predominantly e-commerce businesses, or lead generation? Do they operate regionally, nationally or internationally? What turnover should they have? Do their brand values align with yours?

Targeting: consider how you’d go about reaching your segments, and how commercially viable each one would be. For example, if you’ve never had experience in marketing a niche manufacturing business, you may de-prioritise this segment. Additionally, if a segment only contains a handful of brands who fit the criteria, it may not represent a big enough prize in which to invest your resources.

Positioning: once you know which segment(s) are most important to you, work on what your value proposition is to each segment. Perhaps you’ve built a bespoke shopping feed which makes you perfectly aligned to an e-commerce brand, or have expertise in entering the SERPs for a highly competitive industry. Positioning is also where you should consider which services fit best to particular segments. Do your research into your hit-list of companies – for example, if they already have a team of internal content writers, what does your agency bring to supplement this? Being able to identify one really strong service that fills a gap in the target’s strategy will always be better than trying to shoe-horn every service, where they might not be needed.   

Know who you are

Related to the ‘positioning’ aspect above, have a crystal clear understanding of what your agency is all about. Larger, more well-known brands will have agencies throwing themselves at them left right and centre, so differentiation, or having “a thing” that you’re known for, is vital. A huge part of strategy is also knowing what NOT to do, too, so don’t nodding-dog your way into pitching a discipline which isn’t your strong point. 

This strong sense of self will make your marketing communications much more impactful, and consistent, too, so when it comes to promoting your agency on LinkedIn, or launching an industry-specific campaign, there will be no confusion about what you can offer prospects. After all, if you can’t articulate what you do, how can you expect anyone else to understand?

Additionally, if your “thing” is being a smaller agency, don’t shy away from that. Small agencies can often offer things that the big names can’t, such as a more personal service, niche expertise, and agility to make campaign changes without the red tape. 

Adjust your expectations

If you’ve been used to working with smaller clients, perhaps those without extensive internal marketing teams, or where the owner-operator is your key stakeholder, be prepared to work in a different way with a larger business. There will often be multiple layers of people to convince before a decision is made, meaning your pitch might have to appeal to varying stakeholders and their understanding of what you’re offering. The marketing manager will want to know about how you’ll work together, and might quiz your understanding of your craft, whereas the CFO wants to know what return they’ll get for the investment, or perhaps why the company should invest in marketing rather than another business unit. Again, it comes back to applying marketing first principles, and knowing your audience. 

The sales cycle may be longer than you’ve experienced previously, too. Existing contracts, multi-level signoff processes and internal power struggles can all contribute to a decision taking more time than if you’re pitching to the sole decision maker. 

Be prepared to answer questions about your own business. Larger enterprises need to complete their own due diligence before entering into a new relationship with a supplier; is the business financially stable? Are your data and information security processes compliant? What disaster recovery protocols do you have in place? These are all very standard questions as part of a request for proposals (RFP) process with a large organisation. 

Take a balanced view

As with making any decision about pivoting a go-to-market strategy, think about the potential pitfalls as well as any upsides. Would taking on a large client affect your ability to maintain service levels for your existing client base? Is your team properly resourced to take on the additional work? And also weigh-up what your revenue spread looks like; would losing the client put the whole business at risk? If you’re unsure of the answers to these questions, take some time to reconsider whether this would be the right decision for your business. 

The main takeaways from this blog should be that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to working with larger clients (or even what a ‘large’ client looks like!).  Matching your agency (e.g your product) to your target audience’s needs is the best place to start – and what could be more ‘marketing’ than that!

Most of us love writing but hate grammar. It’s a pain, and the rules – especially for English grammar – can seem random, even to experienced writers.

But if you’re writing to be understood, you’ve gotta get it right.

So we ask, ‘why is grammar important?’

Well, think of your reader’s interest (all tangible and spongy) as something that you’re entertaining.

You’re the host; they’re the guest.

Here, bad grammar is the literary equivalent of bad manners, and we don’t want that.

If your readers have shown up to the big event that is your latest blogpost, for example, and they’re then treated poorly – or simply can’t make sense of what you’re saying – you can’t expect them to hang about. It’s polite excuses and mass skedaddles all round.

And so we set the same bar for our writing. We want our readers to stick around and get comfy with what we’re saying, so we must make their stay as stress-free as possible.

How?

By writing engaging copy with as few grammatical blunders as we can manage.

33 Common Grammatical Mistakes

Understanding these common mistakes will quickly make poor grammar a thing of the past. When you know which grammar errors to look out for, it’s easier to act as your own proofreader and editor.

1. Everyday vs Every Day

‘Everyday’ (one word, no space) is an adjective that describes something that’s very common, like an everyday occurrence.

‘Every day’ (with a space) simply means each day.

A quick test to tell which is right: If you can replace the word ‘day’ with a day of the week, you should use ‘every day’.

NOPE: Here are 32 more common grammar mistakes you’re probably making everyday.

CORRECT: Here are 32 more common grammar mistakes you’re probably making every day.

2. Your vs You’re

Here’s one that autocorrect often doesn’t catch because it’s spelled right even if it’s grammatically wrong.

But be careful! ‘You’re’ is a contraction of ‘you are’, whereas ‘your’ is a possessive of ‘you’.

NOPE: Your my favourite person.

CORRECT: You’re my favourite person.

3. Time

You only need to include am or pm if you’re using standard time (1-12). If you’re using military time (00-23), it’s already clear whether you’re referencing day or night, making am and pm redundant.

NOPE: 09.34am; 22.30pm

CORRECT: 14.00; 2pm

4. That vs Who

Use ‘that’ when you’re talking about things and ‘who’ when you’re talking about people.

CORRECT: We’re actively seeking content writers who pay attention to details that matter.

5. Alot

There’s a space! It’s a lot, always.

6. The Reason Why/Because

Nitpicky but either phrase ‘The reason why is because…’ or ‘The reason is because’ is redundant. When you’re talking about a ‘reason’, you’re already implying a ‘why’ and ‘because’.

Therefore, all you need to say is ‘The reason is…’

7. Hence Why

Similar to the above, the ‘why’ here is redundant. Simply say ‘Hence….’

8. Would Of vs Would Have

This grammatical error must stem from how the contraction ‘would’ve’ sounds. This contraction is short for ‘would have’ exclusively, making ‘would of’ an error.

The same goes for ‘should of’ and ‘could of’ – both nopes.

9. i.e. vs e.g.

Many people use the terms interchangeably, but each one means something different:

i.e. means ‘that is to say’ or ‘in other words’

e.g. means ‘for example’

Also note that each is spelt using two periods, not just one.

10. There vs Their vs They’re

They do sound the same so it’s easy to see why there’s always such a mix up.

‘There’ is a location.

‘They’re’ is a contraction of ‘they are’.

‘Their’ is a possessive.

NOPE: Their going to there office over they’re.

CORRECT: They’re going to their office over there.

As with most simple errors, in-built spell checker software or tools like Grammarly (free to use) are great for flagging to you any mistakes.

Title Case: Capitalise the first letter of every word.

This Is An Example Of A Title

Sentence Case: As with a regular sentence, capitalise the first word only.

This is an example of a title

All Caps: Capitalise EVERYTHING.

THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF A TITLE

Talk to Embryo for Professional Writing

If you’re a business and need support with your content marketing, get in touch with Embryo where our team of professional writers will be happy to help.

We specialise in writing engaging copy that actually converts. Check out some of our latest and greatest success stories here.

Pagination is a system used to divide similar/ stackable content into pages and in doing so present the content in a limited state reducing the page size as well as reducing the amount any user has to scroll.

Pagination, also known as “Hard pagination” is well known in conventional books with a number at the bottom of each page making the user turn the page to access the next page of content making it easily digestible. Breaking content up into pages has a lot of benefits for the user, the first of these is that it adds value to scrolling introducing the user to how much content they have consumed while also allowing the user to pause between pages giving the chance for users to make the necessary decisions before either exiting the site or carrying on.

Hard pagination is mainly found on sites with user flows dedicated to News, Blogs and E-commerce where choices or actions are needed to digest content may that be news/ blog posts or product listings. Google is a typical example of Hard pagination, condensing content into cards with hard pagination after 10 search results allowing you to keep the page smaller and seem like a less daunting task to find what you are looking for.

Hard pagination has fallen out of use in many sites because it is not user-friendly on mobile. On mobile, users would much rather allow for a continuous scroll reducing the stop-start nature of Hard pagination and allowing for easier interactions.

What is Infinite Scroll?

Infinite Scroll is a technique that loads more content as the user reaches the bottom of the page, this way making it seem like the content is ever-lasting. This technique was developed in 2006 as a replacement for Hard pagination allowing users to scroll seamlessly through posts or articles, rather than clicking through pages, something which today has become a standard for most social media platforms.

These days most social media platforms use a version of Infinite Scroll as it has many positives for the companies when it comes to consuming content. With most social media companies focusing on ads as their main source of income having users scroll continuously allows the user to pass over many opportunities to interact with an ad and so giving the company income.

Infinite Scroll also has its negatives, mainly relating to user interaction and exit numbers. With continuous content being served to the user it allows users to be consuming without realising how much content they have already consumed.

The Infinite Scroll exploits a shortcut that many people use unconsciously, The Unit Bias. According to this theory, humans are naturally motivated to complete a unit of something before moving on to the next activity as it gains satisfaction. This action is never completed with Infinite Scroll since the amount of content offered is endless, and so users continue to browse unknowingly. Netflix, I have found is the only company to use a version of Infinite scroll to continuously load new episodes while also allowing for the pause interaction similar to Hard pagination, here 5 seconds are given between the ending of an episode and the start of the next allowing for an exit, if this is then ignored for a given time dependant on many factors (episode length, amount of episodes, end of current season or no mouse/ keyboard interaction within a given timeframe) Netflix then pauses the content to ask if the user is still watching, this both allows the user to exit, but also allows for a pause if the user has become distracted.

Another negative of Infinite Scroll is that it makes content placed underneath an Infinite Scroll irrelevant as content will load forever and no you will never access the content underneath. This normally isn’t an issue as the content placed underneath is either for SEO and ranking purposes or is a footer linking users to other areas of the site/ platform.

Which dominates in 2022?

Which technique dominates depends on the sector, but looking at trending sites/ platforms Infinite scroll is used on almost 100%. TikTok a company founded in 2016 is now one of the biggest social platforms among all ages. They use a version of Infinite Scroll allowing users to scroll to access content from their continuously growing libraries, their content format of short video allows users to view one piece of content at a time which pushes users to watch one more piece before stopping (This never stops).

In May 2020 TikTok overtook Youtube for “User’s average watch time” clocking 26 hours of content a month, this proves that Tiktok with the Infinite Scroll technique at the base of its app is holding onto its users whereas Youtube which allows for an “Autoplay” or single viewing content is slipping.

As well as TikTok, all major social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook all used a version of Infinite Scroll since their inception boosting the fact that the technique is dominant. These techniques have been refined for each, all choosing their own paths for when to load new content with it being either when they reach the bottom of the page or once they reach 90% of page length.

Hard pagination is still dominant within the Blog and Ecommerce sectors with blogs normally organised to provide a quick overview of high-ranking posts/ articles, using Hard pagination here allows for smaller pages and so quicker loading times to keep users engaged. Ecommerce on the other hand uses custom Hard pagination allowing the user to choose between defined product amounts and so customising the user flow to how they like.

If you or your company is looking for help developing your current website or are looking for a new website Embryo is the company for you! Get in touch today.