Reflecting on
2018

Community management in-house

Increasingly we’re pushing clients to do their own community management in-house while we focus on the content. Not only is it more cost effective for the brand but it’s better for the audience too. It also has the added benefit of bringing us closer to our clients as we collaborate more directly on a day to day basis across community and content.

More moving image

No surprise here as both FB & Insta encourage the use of moving imagery above static. We’ve changed our model to bring more creative skills in-house, including animation and more varied post-production effects as well as creating multi-layered themed shoots. This has been led partly by client needs but is also aligned with our vision for ourselves as an agile, multi-disciplinary creative agency.

Live the mission

Our purpose-led clients increasingly want to find interesting ways to bring their mission to life. This type of emotional content has an entirely different challenge as the story is inevitably more nuanced and creatively harder to tell but needs to be made simple and effective. Turning this into integrated campaign work is another exciting change we’re seeing – the storydoing is not just serving a tactical aim, it’s a key part of brand strategy.

The rise of paid

The algorithm changes to Facebook and Instagram mean it’s pay to play time now and and end to the level of organic growth that was common in 2017 and before. We’ve had to educate some clients on moving into paid to help drive both sales and user growth and at the same time help them optimise the use of social content to drive online sales. This is only going to increase so we expect to see more work coming from paid social this year.

Integrated campaigning

All these changes we’re talking about here means that we’re seeing increasing need for socially originated brand campaigns particularly with clients whose marketing heartland is digital. For us it’s an exciting challenge as we get to lead campaigns while exploring new mediums for their delivery with brand partnerships and influencers being too big areas for 2019.

Keeping costs down

Finally but obviously, all these changes mean that clients want us to deliver more varied work but keep the costs manageable. Great work at a great price. Some things never change whatever the year.